John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  Student loans go out the window. Like with Bob Jones University."

  "You're trying to tell me something, Rick."

  "Jobs are still tight. This thing develops a lot of employment.

  ECB Enterprises, the Mall, Lakemore Construction, Meadows Settlements, Meadows Development. With more big things coming, they say. Geriatric medical center and hospital."

  "What good is it?" Erskine asked loudly.

  "Even without any push from anybody, he's going to come apart. He can't handle it. Where are you trying to go with this?"

  "You're a member of the Church too."

  "I know. I tithe, you tithe. All God's chill en gotta tithe."

  "I wouldn't want you should get smartass, Erskine. The Church has come to mean a lot to me. I told you that before.

  And it means even more to Martha than it does to me. It is not going to come tumbling all the way down. Nothing with eighty something affiliate preachers and their little churches involved is going to lie down and die. But it would really cripple it for a long time, I think. I didn't know God was offering me eternal life until I found it here. Maybe I owe the Church some kind of sacrifice."

  "Sacrifice?"

  "The sudden death of Walter Macy."

  "I didn't hear you say that."

  "The sudden natural death of Walter Macy."

  Erskine turned quickly and walked away, past the well house, out to where an old woodpile rotted away in the weeds.

  He kicked one of the rotten logs, and then he walked slowly back.

  "I don't know how to say this. Yes, that would be neat. That would quiet the whole thing. And not hard to do. Lots of easy ways. Sap him with a sock full of dry sand, and run a sharpened piano wire between his ribs into the heart, poke it around a few times. But what I am is a cop. An officer of the law. Maybe that's my religion. I can't take life. I don't even hunt."

  "We're employees of an enterprise more private than public, agreed?"

  "Of course."

  "We took our oaths a long time ago to different entities.

  Official oaths about official duties."

  "Right."

  "As paid security officers, we are, on the average, civilians, Elly. We can think as civilians, and we have the right to take any risks we think should be taken. As civilians."

  "In spite of all that, I can't have any part of it, no matter how it neat ens things up, and no matter what kind of monster Macy is. Maybe he's dumped dozens of women down wells. It's against what I am, or maybe what I think I am. It is so impossible for me I can't even let you do it."

  Liddy stood up and brushed the seat of his pants. He smiled and shook his head.

  "I knew that's how you'd jump. I had to try. Maybe, if I guessed wrong about you, I would have tried to go through with it. I don't know. I don't think I want to know.

  So there's only one thing I am going to ask you. Let's you and me not be the ones to give him the little push, okay?"

  "Concealing the knowledge of a crime?"

  "Tell me this, Mr. Clean. Are you absolutely positively certain that he killed that woman?"

  "I guess not. Pretty sure, but not certain."

  "Then you can go along with my suggestion that you leave it the hell alone?"

  "On one condition, Rick. If they start to manufacture any evidence to tie Moses into it, I'm going to steer Coombs toward Macy."

  "If that happens, we'll both do the steering."

  "I appreciate that. I really do."

  "Be my guest."

  As they strolled back toward the car, Erskine said, almost laughing, "I can't believe we've been talking about what we've been talking about. I come off as some kind of priss cop, obeying every rule. I used to hate working with one of those as a partner. Everything by the book. I always took shortcuts here and there."

  "You come off as a man, Elly."

  For a very brief time after the rains the humidity had been low but now it was back up again, very high, in the usual August range of ninety-five to a hundred, in a heat that silenced the birds and brought out ten thousand cicadas and tree toads, sounding like faraway picnics and road races.

  Molly Wintergarten left the club at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon and did not make as good time as usual driving south to the next exit, due to the places where shallow water still flowed onto the Interstate to be whacked into fine spray by the speeding sixteen-wheelers. So she fully expected John Tinker Meadows to be there waiting for her at the double-wide trailer. After she had relatched the big cattle gate behind her, she drove down the winding muddy trace toward the trailer and the pond, looking ahead for the sheen of his blue Ford van in the shade of the trees. She was uncomfortably sweaty because something had gone wrong with the air-conditioning unit in the little convertible Rabbit. She had the top closed and the windows closed, but the huff of air from the vents seemed but faintly chilled, certainly not enough for a day like this.

  She was so busy looking for his car she did not notice the trailer until she was fifty feet away from it, and then wondered why she hadn't seen it sooner. Burden Pond extended all the way to the steps and underneath, and she could see, by the mud line along the length of the trailer, the water had come much higher and had, in fact, floated or pushed it off the foundation blocks. The back right corner was canted down, the front left corner lifted high. She undid the padlock and climbed up into it. It was a sodden ruin inside, stinking of mud and mildew. She backed out and shut the door and hurried back to her car. The bugs had begun to find her. She ran the motor for the sake of the faint chill from the vents until the warning light went on, indicating it was overheating. She turned the motor off and rolled the windows down a few inches and sat fanning herself with an old Time magazine she found under the front seat. But the bugs were coming in, whining in her ears, and the sweat was running down her face and down between her breasts and down from her armpits, soaking her pink top and the waistband of her white tennis skirt.

  Slowly she began to realize that John Tinker had really meant it this time. She had used their phone signal three times during the morning, and he hadn't called back from a pay phone until after eleven.

  "How about like three o'clock, lover?" she asked him.

  "Sorry."

  "Sewed up with something again?"

  "Didn't you hear me last time, Molly? This has been loads of fun and thank you very much, and I'll never forget you, and so forth, but this little game is over. I told you that."

  "Bull! You don't get to say when it's finished."

  "I'm saying it."

  "You listen to me, Tink. Listen very carefully. I am going down there and you are going down there. Today. And you are going to be affectionate and loving, and you are not going to talk crap to me about this being over. It isn't over. You are going to be there because if you are not, I am going to make you the sorriest preacher in the state and the nation. I'll geld you at the entrance to your stupid Tabernacle, pet. Or I'll hand Rolf the knife. Let me see. How does that work? I cry and cry and cry and finally tell him that you've been making me sleep with you because if I didn't he was going to be fired. Rolf will believe everything I tell him. I am yanking on your leash, Tink.

  So heel, goddamn you! See you at three-thirty." She had hung up as he had started to say something, and when the phone rang again moments later, she did not answer it.

  And now she was totally miserable in the heat, itching and angry. She looked at her watch and said she would give him until quarter after four and then that was it. And he was going to pay a very heavy price for every single minute of her discomfort. Worst of all, she had awakened this morning wanting him, awakened from a dream about him. There'd been, by her own careful count in erotic reverie, sixteen men, beginning when she was fifteen, but never one who'd been able to satisfy her as completely as Tink.

  She started the car and went fishtailing up the muddy track.

  When she got to the crest she put the top down so as to cool herself in the rush of air, and blow the bugs
out at the same time. She started to slow down as she reached the gate, then clamped her jaw tightly and stepped on the gas. Big splinters of board flew up in the air and fell behind her, and she heard in the impact the thin tinkle of the glass from her broken headlights, and thought for a moment of the various ways it could have happened, and selected the most plausible one to tell Rolf.

  A few miles later an air horn blared at her as she moved from the access strip to the traffic lanes on the Interstate and a tanker went by her at a speed that twitched the steering wheel in her hands. She put the pedal to the floor and within a few miles she went by him at better than eighty-five. The wind snapped her hair against her forehead and ears. The speed climbed slowly.

  She saw a sheen of water across the two lanes a hundred yards ahead and held the wheel more firmly. She was in the passing lane. Just as she reached the water, the great air horn roared again, and in the rearview mirror she saw that same tanker tailgating her, the cab with two figures in it high above her. So you win, she thought, and twisted the wheel to move over to the right lane. But the water was causing the front wheels, at that speed, to hydroplane, and when there was no effect, she turned the wheel further clockwise. Beyond the water was dry pavement. When the cramped tires snubbed sidelong against the dry concrete, the little car tripped over, throwing her out high and to the left toward the median strip, breaking her legs against the steering wheel as she was catapulted out.

  There was the great shock, the jar, and a slow wonderment in her mind. The sky and the road and the green fields were circling around her, and in one glimpse she saw her beloved little yellow car bounding and whirling itself to death, bits flying off it. The grass swarmed close then, and she went down into a green thud, a great flash of white light and nothingness.

  The cars began to slow and stop, and the trucks began to call in on Channel 9.

  At four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, Carolyn Pennymark waited for her flight in the Pan Am Clipper Club at the city airport an hour from Lakemore. Her flight was delayed in Tampa. Her giant purse which served as carry-on, suitcase, toilet case and camera bag was on the seat beside her. She had changed to a wrinkled white blouse and a sharply creased pair of pale blue polyester trousers too big for her, with the cuffs turned up. The blue denim work hat was squashed down on her springy hair, and her lavender lenses sat slightly askew.

  From time to time, as she talked, she dipped quickly to take a salted peanut from the bowl on the low coffee table in front of her, or take a quick sip from her bourbon on the rocks.

  While she talked one part of her mind was busy trying to remember the last name of the man she was sitting next to and talking to. The first name was Sam. He was with one of the networks, but not in front of the camera. She hadn't seen him in perhaps three years and there he was, smiling at her and beckoning to her when she turned away from the desk after clearing her business-class ticket and her membership card with the Clipper Club woman.

  "Anyway," she said, 'where I am now, doing what I do, what chance do I get to have to look at dead bodies? I mean, you take something like Out Front, you don't go yelling for anybody to stop the presses, not that anybody ever did except in old movies. The thing I feel ashamed of is where I put the knock on Lindy Rooney talking to that PR bitch with all the teeth because I guess there was something about her that bent me the wrong way. In all honesty maybe every big lively beautiful blonde bends dark dim ladies like me the wrong way and we resent hell out of it. But who do you blame for genetics? Like I always say, we're lucky to be here at all, right? But it wasn't fair painting that picture of Lindy, because she wasn't all that bad. I mean, she had the makings of a pretty good tiger, but she'd never had the newsroom background to teach her the moves. When we worked together, it was okay, really. And I told that cute little husband of hers with the big mustache that Lindy was okay loyal when she was out of town. What did that cost me? Because she was, but I knew something about her I didn't want to tell him. One night in a motel God knows where Lindy and I got sloshed pretty good on the grape, a- bottle apiece and a third one to split, and it got to be confession time and she said, not right out, but sort of crosswise, that she and the little guy with the mustache didn't make it too good except once in a while because he was, she called it, unresponsive. He didn't ever seem to pick up on the clues she'd give him when she was really ready and willing, and always seemed to want to 2-55 make it at the wrong time. I tell you, Sam, he was just cute enough I was tempted to hang around and give it my best shot, which isn't a whole hell of a lot, but the best I got, but the way it looked to me, the lady owns half the motel with her brother was already pounding in the stakes and stringing the bob wire.

  Kind of cute in a monkey-face kind of way, she is. You know the type, and I would say maybe getting a little bit long in the tooth if it wasn't I've got the same problem myself. She moves young, though, you know what I mean? Like quick-slim.

  Anyway just about the worst move I made in this whole thing, I went through all my little routines until I finally got a look at a little stack of eight-by-ten glossy black and whites of during the autopsy, and believe me, Sam, you never want to see anybody you have ever known looking like that. It is worse than any kind of picture you can get in your head from reading Steve King. It shook me, pal. That experience was a bitch. You know what I mean. We've seen bodies in worse shape, like when they pull them out of the Potomac after a long winter, but always nobody you knew, you've laughed with, walked with, worked with. I told Marty on the phone that it was my feeling they weren't ever going to make anybody for killing her, and the place was so crawling with media it wasn't worth me hanging around for the magazine. I should have stayed, I guess. I know I could have dug up some stuff, some of it pretty raunchy to be going on in the middle of the Bible lessons, but to tell the truth I was beginning to feel pretty strange about that whole operation. It made me begin to feel like a little kid again, and it made me feel as if doing my digging and prying was kind of like when you were little and they shushed you for making too much noise in church. I got the feeling that if I unmasked some of the kinky ones and we did a big story on sin and corruption in paradise, what I would be doing is hurting the Eternal Church of the Believer, and somehow I didn't want to do that. I'm not hooked on it, but a lot of people are. You see what I mean, Sam? It's the whole world to them, and heaven too, and it keeps them going in hard times, making them feel like this world is just a passing phase and sooner or later, off you go, with golden trumpets and all that. Funny, I've got no scruples about knocking institutions every chance I get. Conglomerates, banks, movie studios, government bureaus, political committees. I know they've got rotten spots and I can dig z56 until I come to one and then open it up to daylight and let the people take a look. You probably read how those right-wing bastards tried to car-bomb me out of Guatemala City, but all they got was the chauffeur and the guard assigned to me. It went off when I was coming down the steps from seeing the minister of something or other, and it knocked me back up the steps on my ass, but I got some shots they used of the car burning and the guard there face down beside it with his uniform burning in back. Maybe what it is about that place, Sam, there has to be things people believe in, good or bad, and Sister Mary Margaret Meadows, she really does believe and she's doing her best while everything seems to be kind of falling down around her lately. That's what we do with what they give us, right? We take our best shot. Sam, how about you go over and get more peanuts in the bowl, and while you're at it, a real weak little bourbon on the rocks, about this high ? Thanks, love."

  The Southern Memorial Hospital occupied four blocks on the west side of downtown, twelve miles from the airport. At the time Carrie Pennymark's flight was loading, Rolf Wintergarten waited in a small room down the corridor from Intensive Care for them to give him his once-an-hour installment of five minutes with Molly. Down in the basement, behind a labeled drawer front with a stainless-steel handle, reposed the refrigerated remains of Linda Rooney Owen, awaiting final repo
rts on the laboratory tests of the tissue samples taken by Drs Ludeker and Johnson. If no further tests and samples were recommended, then the body could be released to the immediate family for disposition.

  Wintergarten flipped through tattered travel magazines with color photographs of canals in France, villages in Crete, beaches on Pacific islands. He wondered vaguely who had decided that the waiting rooms for Intensive Care should be stocked with travel magazines. Get away from it all. Stop thinking about it all. Sure.

  He wondered when his sister would arrive, if she would look for him at the airport, if she could find him on her own. A little old man shared the small waiting room with him. He was bald and cadaverous, in a suit too big for him. He had a thick book on his lap and he was bending over it to read, moving his lips, 2-57 taking a long time between pages. Wintergarten wondered if the book would last the man the rest of his life.