“I guess I am. And I’m sorry to hear about it, Mr. Gladbrook, but what exactly is it you want from me?”
Gladbrook pushed back his chair. “We want that farm of yours, Marsh. Want to see something go in there that will put people to work, lots of people, something that will mean money paid out here in Chaldea will stay here. We want you to save this town, Marsh. It’s as simple as that.”
I fidgeted under the heat of his stare. “It’s a tall order, Mr. Gladbrook. I’m not sure I can fill it.”
“Your daddy gave a damn about this town, Marsh. We hope you’ll give a damn, too. Folks around here were pretty good to you when you were young.”
“I know that. And I’ll give what you say some serious consideration. But I can’t promise anything. I can just tell you that I do care about the town, Mr. Gladbrook. But there are three other people involved in this, too. I’m only one vote.”
“Way I hear it, you’ll make the difference.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But just so I’m clear, what you want mostly is long-term employment. Something in there that will create jobs.”
“Right. That’s exactly right.”
“You got any project in particular in mind?”
“What I got in mind is flexibility, Marsh. Which means you folks selling to the city and letting us play it the best way for everyone.”
“But you’re not willing to pay top dollar.”
“Can’t.”
“So we just pass up a big chunk of profit out of the goodness of our hearts?”
“We can structure it so you can get a nice tax break.”
“I’ve got as much use for a tax break as I do for a valet, Mr. Gladbrook.”
“Well, we could extend the payout, then. Maybe plug you into a portion of the rents when we lease it out.”
“If there are any rents.”
“Well, yes. Or maybe a joint venture? Something tricky like that?”
“I’ll think about it. That’s all I can say.” I looked at my watch. “Time for the funeral,” I said, and stood up.
Norm Gladbrook’s face was as dark as the dregs in his cup. “If something don’t happen around here soon, you can bury this whole town alongside Billy,” he said. “And that’s a fact.” I left him with his Sanka and his crumbs.
I had time to put in a call to my office in San Francisco before it was time to pick up Starbright. When Peggy answered I asked her how she was.
“Pretty good, Marsh. Spent the weekend at Stinson with friends. Got enough tan to get me through the winter, I think. So how about you? Romping through the cornfields and skipping rocks in ponds and all that rural stuff?”
“Not quite. My nephew died the other day. Kind of complicated matters.”
“I’m sorry, Marsh. How old was he?”
“Thirty or so. Never quite grew up, though, it seems. Or maybe he grew up too much. Had a tough time in the war and never got over it.”
“When will you be back? You sound so down.”
“I don’t know. Not long, I hope. Funeral’s today, so maybe I can get out of here tomorrow.”
“Did you sell your farm?”
“Not yet. There’s something you can do for me along that line, though. Call Clay Oerter, the stockbroker, and ask him to dig up some data on Black Diamond Coal Company and also on Cosmos Petroleum. Just if they’re legitimate enterprises, how they look financially, that kind of thing. Tell him I’ll call tonight and see what he has.”
“Anything else?”
“Not on this end. How about you? Any problems at the office?”
“Nothing that your checkbook and I can’t handle.”
“New clients?”
“Not unless you call someone who wants you to track down the man who sold her sixty-five different aluminum cooking pans a client.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Marsh, I’m really sorry about your nephew. What was it, a traffic accident?”
“I’m trying real hard to avoid it, Peggy, but I think the only sensible answer is that it was murder.”
“There?”
“Here.”
We talked some more and said good-bye.
I was splashing water on my face and wondering if I could wear a plaid sports shirt to the cemetery when the phone rang again. “Mr. Tanner?”
“Yes?”
“Mary Martha Gormley speaking. Editor and publisher of the Chaldean. Like to interview you today. About the Tanner plot.”
“I saw your article,” I said, her officious assault filling my ear like a cork.
“Good. Norm Gladbrook, president of the Chamber, was supposed to see you.”
“I just left him.”
“Excellent. So you know the situation.”
“I know yours; do you know mine?”
“How’s that?”
“They’re burying my nephew in half an hour, Ms. Gormley. I intend to be there.”
“I see. This evening then?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you call me?”
“I’ve been calling you, Mr. Tanner. You don’t seem to get my messages.”
“I get them.”
“I see. You seem quite reticent, Mr. Tanner.”
“I am.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because a member of my family’s just been murdered. Maybe it’s because of all the ridiculous plans you people seem to have for our farm.”
“Murder, Mr. Tanner?” For the first time she sounded like something other than a drill sergeant. “I’ve heard nothing about a murder.”
“You haven’t been talking to the right people, Ms. Gormley.”
“Whom should I talk to?”
“Me, for one. His wife, for another.”
“Wife?”
“Starbright is her name. She’s at least Billy’s common-law spouse and maybe more. These days it doesn’t make that much difference.”
“I see. Perhaps this does bear some investigation. Sheriff Eason seems to have been holding something back.”
“Sheriff Eason seems like a cautious man. Not a bad thing in a sheriff.”
“Perhaps at most times.”
“Maybe I’ll see you around then, Ms. Gormley. I’ll be doing a little investigating myself.”
“Do you feel you’re qualified?”
“Both personally and professionally.”
She considered my boast. “We must definitely speak again, Mr. Tanner. In the meantime, I hope you won’t do anything rash. A murder scare would not be good for us. The city fathers are in the middle of sensitive negotiations with a major East Coast business. If they bear fruit, it will be a substantial boon for Chaldea. It could all fall apart if they receive the impression, false though it may be, that this is a violent community. I hope you understand.”
“I do. But my nephew’s been hung. I intend to learn who did it and why. I hope you understand that.”
“I do. But I warn you. If you make rash accusations, I can’t be responsible for what might happen.”
“A threat, Ms. Gormley?”
She ignored the question. “I’ll be talking to you again, Mr. Tanner. We haven’t gotten to the purpose of my call.”
“Which was?”
“To learn what you intend to do with your farm.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve told a thousand others, Ms. Gormley. I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Good day, Mr. Tanner.”
“Not so far,” I said.
Sixteen
By the time Starbright came out of the WILD bungalow and climbed into the car we were running late. She was silent, stiff, and scared. I told her to relax.
“Can I stay with you the whole time?” she asked.
“If you want to.”
“I won’t have to say anything, will I? Scriptures or anything? I don’t remember much of that.”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t. I said what I wanted to say while he was alive. That was one good t
hing about his sickness. He knew how I felt.”
“Lots of people never seem to get that done. Say what should be said.” Me included.
“They’ll hassle me, won’t they?” Starbright said a few blocks later.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Billy and I weren’t married. Not in the way they mean.”
“Happens a lot these days,” I said.
“Not in this town,” Starbright said simply. “Not after the parents get wind of it.”
“Maybe Billy’s death will make people more tolerant.”
“What if it makes them worse?”
I had no answer because I had no real sense of the girl. I didn’t know whether she lived on the outside because she chose to or because she had been forced out there, exiled by minds who saw diversity as threat. I drove awhile, longer, then asked Starbright a question. “The night Billy died, he was gone the whole evening, is that right?”
“Right.”
“You hadn’t seen him since that morning?”
“No.”
“Did you make love before he left?”
“What? Why do you need to know that?”
“Just curious.”
“My old man was curious like that. Always wanted to know what I did with boys. All the details. What a pervert.”
I could sense her eyes on my face, probing my own perversion. “I guess this is different,” she said finally. “No, we didn’t screw that morning. We weren’t doing that much anymore.”
“Where was Billy going when he left you?”
Starbright shrugged. “He was just going. He came and went all the time. I never asked where or why. If he wanted me to know he’d tell me.”
“What about the man he was going to meet? Who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was Billy doing that morning? Anything special?”
She shrugged. “He spent some time out in the garden. Came back all dirty. Then he was fiddling with some wires inside the house. Rigging something, I don’t know what. Billy was real handy that way. Then he went outside for a while, and then he ran back in and said he had to see some guy, and kissed me on my stomach and ran off up the hill.”
“You mean it happened all of a sudden? Like he’d just remembered the appointment or something?”
“Sort of. Yeah.”
“Did he seem frightened at all?”
“Billy? No. Intense, though, you know? Like he had something real important to do.”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t think so. He seemed kind of spaced, you know. Wild, I mean. But he was like that a lot,” she added, making sure I knew her Billy.
“Did he do a lot of drugs?”
“Yeah. Sometimes.”
“What kind?”
“Grass, mostly. Speed a lot, to keep him up. He didn’t sleep for days, sometimes. Said it hurt too much.”
“The sickness, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’d he get the drugs?”
Her eyes hardened. “Around,” she said.
“I’d like to talk to Tamara about Billy,” I said.
“What for?”
“Just to see what she thought about him.”
“She thought he was crazy,” Starbright blurted, suddenly fierce. “That’s why she got off on him. Tamara’s crazy, too.”
“When do you think I could see her?” I asked.
“Anytime, I suppose.”
“I mean without Zedda around.”
“I don’t know,” Starbright said petulantly. “At the Laundromat maybe. She does the wash on Fridays. That’s tomorrow, isn’t it?”
“That’s tomorrow,” I agreed, marveling at her displaced sense of time, wishing mine were as neglected. “Which Laundromat does she use?”
“The place next to the DX station. You know where that is?”
“Near the lumberyard. I pumped gas there one summer.”
Starbright wasn’t interested in my past. I was starting to be less interested in it myself.
Just ahead of us the gates to the cemetery were open wide and I entered them, not for the first time, to see a member of my family interred within the enclosure. My parents were there, and one set of grandparents, and now a nephew, the reaper skipping my generation for the moment but not for long.
Two high slopes rose out of a winding creek bed, their tops sprinkled with pine trees, their edges fringed by forsythia and laced by a white rock road, their sides lined with graves and grass. The sky was mostly clear, though lightly sugared with clouds. A warm harvest breeze blew out of the southwest, rustling the flowers and evergreens atop the graves. It was almost lovely enough to make me wish I was dead myself.
On the far hill a small group of people had gathered beneath a canvas tent, beside a freshly dug grave. I drove across the wooden bridge that spanned the creek, its planks rumbling beneath my wheels like dice in a velvet cup, then followed the narrow road up the other side, surrounded by obelisks and crosses, doves and angels, urns and scrolls, all crafted of stone and faith.
The dates on the graves reached back to early in the previous century. Many were majestic, some were ludicrous, all were tended, even the precise row of short pine boards that marked the home of paupers, perhaps the most hallowed ground of all. I drove as close to the tent as I could, then parked and helped Starbright out of the car. We crossed to the tent, stepping carefully as though to avoid disturbing a dead man or a god, and joined the others. Ribs were nudged, whispers exchanged, and soon all knew we had arrived. Before us were a black-suited minister and a flag-draped coffin and a six-foot hole flanked by heavy chunks of moist red clay.
No one greeted us with words, but many eyes swept quickly over our faces, then less quickly over Starbright’s patchwork skirt and the swollen belly that was under it. A murmur swelled, then died. I looked at Curt and nodded. He looked through me at something else, perhaps at Starbright, perhaps at a friendless future.
The only smile I saw was on the face of the minister. He was short and blond and seemed too young to know much about life and anything at all about death. I took Starbright’s hand and squeezed it. The closest I had come to what she was going through was one afternoon I had spent with Sally’s father, just the two of us in the house, watching a baseball game on television, enduring three hours of unuttered disapproval.
Starbright squeezed back, then refused to release my hand. Beyond the casket and the grave I saw two gravediggers, swathed in layers of heavy comic clothes, shod in rubber boots, leaning on hoes and rakes, sucking impatient puffs of smoke from stubby cigars. Anything can be a job. Sex. Death. God.
The mourners grew quiet, the minister said a prayer and read a psalm, and we were floating toward the predictable end of the rite when the minister turned a page in his Bible and began another psalm, this one not predictable or even, given what Billy had been, particularly comforting to those of us that heard it. Suddenly it seemed that the speaker was not the young blond minister, or even the biblical David, but Billy himself, casting one last shadow upon us all:
“Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am in trouble; mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly. For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing; my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed. I was a reproach among all mine enemies, but especially among my neighbours, and a fear to mine acquaintance; they that did see me without fled from me. I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind; I am like a broken vessel. For I have heard the slander of many; fear was on every side; while they took counsel together against me, they devised to take away my life. But I trusted in thee, O Lord; I said, Thou art my God. My times are in thy hand; deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me. Make thy face to shine upon thy servant; save me for thy mercies’ sake. Let me not be ashamed, O Lord; for I have called upon thee; let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave.”
There was a new sil
ence under the awning, a stilling of the nervous shuffling that had rustled before the psalm was read. The crowd had absorbed the words in spite of itself, applying them to Billy and then to themselves, wondering. It was one of those times when religion is not the worst there is, but rather better than anything else, more consoling and revealing than you thought it ever could be. I looked again at the blond minister. He seemed to have aged during the scripture, to have become infinitely wiser and more aware. I wondered if he’d known Billy, wondered if he had any idea how close the psalm came to being what Billy was or, perhaps, to what he wanted to be.
The closing prayer was brief and hopeful, a sail for Billy’s spirit, and in the quiet that followed I looked at faces. The family was there, down in front. Curt and Laurel were rigid, afraid that movement would bring tears and shame. Tom and Gail clasped hands. Matt stood alone, his striking Pilar somewhere else, too variously programmed for rural grief. Gladbrook was there, too, along with some other men I’d seen in the coffee shop the day before, including Arnie Keene. And other faces I knew but couldn’t match with names.
And then I saw Carol Hasburg. She stood alone at the rear of the group, separated from the other mourners by both distance and the depth of her emotion. She was wearing a gray suit and hat and clutching a handkerchief to her cheek as though bandaging a wound. The dark glasses over her eyes were an inadequate mask, for her body was shuddering visibly beneath her tears. I was about to walk to her when I heard the unmistakable clatter of rifle rounds being quickly chambered.
They were somewhere behind us, and their volleys seemed to rearrange the ground we stood on. A military funeral had doubtlessly been Curt’s idea, and as doubtlessly Billy was raging against it, wherever and whatever he was.
The third volley rang out and then, from the hill on the other side of the wandering creek, came the hollow bugle tones of taps. As the balloons of sound crossed slowly to us, I wondered which kid they had hauled out of school to play it; in my day I’d been the one, summoned by men with stiff hats and expressions, driven to a secret place where I would hide behind a tree or stone, rub my mouthpiece and flex my lips, and hope and pray that I would play it through without sounding a clinker that would mar the day for good. As the final note drifted away from the dead and toward the town behind us, two American Legionnaires folded the flag that draped the coffin and handed the triangular result to Laurel. She clutched it to her bosom like a suckling babe.
Fatal Obsession Page 13
