Dearly Departed

by David Housewright

  Other deputies offered to help, but we ignored them. Orman came to the car and said he was sorry I was hurt. We ignored him, too. The bleeding had stopped, but I couldn’t say whether it was because of Loushine’s efforts or because I had simply run out of blood—my clothes were soaked through.

  When Loushine pronounced me ready for travel, he slid behind the steering wheel. I excused myself first, walked a few feet into the woods, and threw up. I was trembling again, and I had a difficult time getting back to the car. The deputies turned away, averting their eyes, apparently embarrassed by my show of weakness. Screw ’em. I sat in the back of the cruiser. Loushine buckled me in and shut the door because I couldn’t. It was a swell ride to the hospital.

  twenty-eight

  “You chipped the hell out of your collarbone,” the woman doctor told me. She seemed happy about it.

  “Will I live?”

  “Not if you keep going on like this. You have a lot of scars, my friend.”

  She was right about that. And I was well past thinking of them as trophies: Say, did I ever show you my dueling scar? I’ve risked my life many times, certainly more times than I should have, and after each episode I was left with the same nagging question: Do I have more past than future?

  The morning light was streaming through the half-closed blinds. I had slept some the night before after the doctor had attended my wound, but I could’ve used a lot more. I thanked the doctor for her consideration and settled in for a long nap. But she wasn’t inclined to leave. She replaced my chart in the plastic tray attached to the door and sat next to me.

  “Michael Bettich is dead,” she said.

  The news hit me so hard, I thought I had been shot again.

  “Dead?”

  “Four forty-two this morning. Duluth-General said respiratory failure, of all things.”

  I heard her words, but I didn’t know what they meant.

  “There were so many other things that could have killed her,” she added.

  I still didn’t understand, and my face probably showed it.

  “They said there was nothing that could be done.”

  That last part got through. Only I didn’t know how to respond. My emotions concerning Alison were all ajumble. I knew too much of her history and not enough about her. So I stared blankly at the doctor, hoping she would tell me how to act.

  “I told the sheriff. He didn’t take it very well. I guess he was in love with her.”

  But I wasn’t. I didn’t love her. I was infatuated with the image I had created for her, that was all. And the image was incorrect, anyway. I didn’t really know Alison. We had spoken only a few words to each other.

  “What will make you go away?”

  “Tell me why, that’s all. Tell me why you went to all the trouble.”

  “It’s a long story, and quite frankly, I see no reason to share it with you.”

  “Who was she really?” I wondered aloud.

  “Michael?” asked the doctor.

  “Her name was Alison,” I told her.

  “Who are you talking about?” the doctor asked, laying the palm of her hand against my forehead, determining if I was suddenly feverish.

  “I guess it doesn’t really matter.”

  I was woken by the light that fell across my face when the hospital room door was opened. “Are you sleeping?” a voice asked. The voice belonged to Gretchen.

  “No,” I told her.

  She came in, limping on crutches, letting the door close behind her.

  “Turn on a light,” I told her.

  “No lights,” she said.

  We sat in the dark without speaking for—I don’t know—it seemed like a long time. In the dark a minute can be an eternity. Finally I said, “I’m sorry about Alison.” I didn’t know what else to say. I still hadn’t been able to sort it out.

  “We buried her this afternoon.”

  “So soon?” It was only yesterday that I’d heard she had died.

  “There wasn’t any reason to put it off.”

  “Her parents?”

  “We buried her under the name Michael Bettich. That’s the way she wanted it.”

  “I see.”

  We went a few more minutes without speaking until Gretchen announced, “Sheriff Orman resigned. He’s moving to Duluth. He said he was quitting to paint full time.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?” Gretchen asked in reply.

  We fell silent again. I liked Gretchen in spite of everything. But not so much that I was willing to conduct long conversations with her in the dark.

  “Christ, Alison,” she said after a couple of minutes, her voice filled with pain and tears. “I don’t need this, I really don’t.”

  Then the door was open and she was gone.

  I was dressing in new blue jeans, white shirt, and gray sports jacket. They were gifts from Acting Sheriff Gary Loushine. It was the least he could do, he said.

  “In my profession, you have to be smart or tough or lucky. Preferably all three,” I told him. “Lately I have been none of those.”

  “Well, if you decide to quit the PI business and get a real job, you could always work for me.”

  “No, thanks,” I told him. He was sitting on my bed, paging through People magazine. “How’s the investigation progressing?”

  “What investigation?” he asked absentmindedly while glancing at a photo of Nicole Kidman.

  I was amazed.

  “The investigation into the murder of Michael Bettich!”

  Loushine shrugged. “Case closed.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The UZI we took off Johannson: It fired the bullet we found in Bettich. And Thilgen. We have Johannson’s fingerprints. What more do you want?”

  “How ’bout why,” I answered.

  “Thilgen made a lot of threats against Michael. Thilgen had paid Johannson to do his dirty work in the past; he paid him for this job, too.”

  “Why would Johannson then shoot Thilgen?”

  “He was afraid Mr. Chips would give him up.”

  I took the magazine from Loushine’s hands and set it on the bed. Once I had his full attention, I told him, “When I was at St. Mark’s Elementary School, Sister Agnes told us a cautionary tale: Two cars loaded with teenagers were on the highway driving toward each other at high speed. The first car had its high beams on. The driver of the second car flicked his lights to warn the first driver to dim them. The first driver didn’t. So the second driver said, ‘I’ll show him,’ and turned on his high beams, too. The drivers blinded each other, they hit head on, and everyone in both cars was killed.”

  “What’s your point?” Loushine asked impatiently.

  “If there were no survivors, how did Sister Agnes know what really happened?”

  Loushine patted my shoulder and smiled.

  “Taylor, do me a favor. Get out of town.”

  Hunter Truman was in the lobby of the Saginau Medical Center, arguing over my bill. He paid it, but not before he threatened the cashier with litigation.

  We left together. I drove off in my car, and he followed in his. We stopped at the Field of Hope Cemetery not far from The Harbor. It was a lonely place, little more than clearing among the trees, partially hidden from the county road. We found Alison’s grave near a stand of maples. She was buried under a marble stone that read BETTICH and nothing more. The flowers had already withered.

  “Dammit, Taylor,” Truman said. “I told you to make sure that they knew it was Alison. Now I’ll need to have the body exhumed.”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I strolled to a small bench, the kind you normally find next to a tee on a golf course. Truman joined me.

  “I blame myself for everything that’s happened,” he said, trying mightily to sound conciliatory.

  “So do I,” I told him.

  “You do?” He acted surprised by my callousness.

  �
��It worked out exactly the way you had planned, didn’t it?” I added.

  “The way I planned?” Truman asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “It would clinch things if it was you who defended Jimmy Johannson on an assault charge in Minneapolis last year.”

  “Who?”

  “It’ll be public record and easy enough to check,” I warned him.

  Truman spoke slowly, cautiously.

  “What if I did?” he asked.

  “I expect he was very grateful. Let me guess. After the verdict he pumped your hand and said, ‘Anything, you need, anything at all, you call ol’ Jimmy.’ Am I right?”

  Truman didn’t say if I was or I wasn’t.

  “You were Dr. Bob Holyfield’s divorce lawyer, too, weren’t you?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Truman asked.

  “Nothing that can be proved,” I admitted.

  And then Truman smiled. “That’s right.”

  “It was the money,” I continued. “Everything could be explained somehow except for the money.”

  Truman eyed me carefully.

  “The fucking money,” I said. “I gave it a lot of thought while in the hospital. Let’s see if I finally have the facts straight: Dr. Bob wanted to divorce his wife and take up with his mistress, Alison. But he was afraid his wife would leave him a pauper. So he devised a way to secretly transfer all his liquid assets to Alison—with your help, I have no doubt. At least a quarter of a million dollars. I don’t know how he did it, but it’s been done before.

  “Only Alison had no intention of hooking up with Dr. Bob once his divorce was final. Tie herself to that arrogant creep? Not a chance. She decided to take the money and run.

  “So she very deliberately created a new life for herself while just as deliberately ending the old one. She framed Raymond for her murder. I don’t believe she had anything against Raymond, she just needed to fake her own death so no one would come looking for her, and Raymond, with his record, was the perfect fall guy. And you have to admit, she did a helluva job. The blood was an inspired touch. And the snowstorm? Manna from heaven. As a result, the authorities were convinced Alison was buried in a shallow grave somewhere.

  “Except you didn’t buy it, did you?” I continued. “You and Dr. Bob. That’s because you knew about the money. But you couldn’t say anything, not without revealing your own fraud. So you hired me. And when I convinced myself that Irene Brown killed Alison, you put the note on my windshield to make me think otherwise, to keep me looking—you knew where I was having lunch that day. Damn! I should have seen it then.

  “But I didn’t. So I kept looking for Alison. I kept looking until I found her. Only the money was gone by then, spent on The Harbor, with no way for you and Dr. Bob to recover it. But you anticipated that, too, didn’t you? That’s why you brought Stephen Emerton into it. How much did you offer him? A third? He hated his wife so much, I bet he settled for less.”

  Truman didn’t answer.

  “You brought Stephen into it because even if Alison was pretending to be Michael Bettich, she was still legally married to him; if she was killed, all her assets would go to him. That’s why Stephen was willing to risk casting suspicion on himself by admitting that Alison had had an affair with a doctor she had previously worked with; that’s why he dropped a hint that she could still be alive—so he could claim a piece of the action later. He was much smarter than he had pretended.

  “After that the three of you just sat back and waited until I found her, knowing that I wouldn’t quit until I did. And when I did find her, you discovered that there was a trigger in the neighborhood already primed to do your killing. How lucky for you.”

  “Interesting theory,” Truman told me.

  “You’ll never get away with it,” I warned him.

  “If what you say is true—and I most emphatically deny that it is—we already did get away with it, Mr. Taylor. And since you are without a shred of evidence to support these outrageous allegations, I strongly suggest you keep your fucking mouth shut or I’ll slap your ass with an injunction and sue your brains out. By the time I get done, you’ll be taking your meals with the other derelicts at the Dorothy Day Center.”

  “How are you going to get a court order to exhume Michael’s body without my testimony?” I wondered. “How are you going to prove it actually is Alison buried down there to claim her property?”

  “I have your written reports,” Truman reminded me. “They should be sufficient for our needs. Unless you testify that they’re phony, of course—and lose your license in the process. Are you willing to do that?” Truman was smiling triumphantly. “I didn’t think so.”

  He stood up. “Good-bye, asshole. Don’t forget to send me a bill.”

  He started toward his car and was halfway there when he stopped and looked back at me.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he called. “Hiding Dr. Holyfield’s assets from his wife? That was Alison’s idea. I just thought you should know.”

  I should have hated him, but I didn’t. I should have hated Dr. Holyfield and Stephen Emerton, too, but they didn’t seem worth the effort. Instead, I convinced myself that sooner or later they would all get what they deserved. Life would settle with them, just as it had with Alison. It was something I needed to believe.

  I gazed at the bright, cloudless sky as I returned to my car, realizing for the first time that I had not heard the sound of a jet engine for over a week, hadn’t seen any planes at all. The realization depressed me, although I couldn’t tell you why.

  After seating myself behind the steering wheel, I took Alison’s photograph out of its envelope. When she had been just a voice on a cassette, a face in a photograph taken years earlier, I found her fascinating. And Cynthia and Bobby Orman were right: I had fallen a little in love with her. But now I was surprised by how ordinary she had become. A common thief with just a dash of uncommon flair.

  I tore the photograph into pieces too small to reassemble and littered them on the ground.

  twenty-nine

  I watched Cynthia stretch, pushing against the edge of my redwood picnic table, first one finely chiseled leg, then the other extended behind her. Watching Cynthia move, especially in jogging shorts and tank top, was like an ice cold beer on a sweltering summer day: always a pleasure.

  She had asked me to go jogging with her, but I had declined, using my still tender shoulder as an excuse—although it certainly hadn’t bothered me when Cynthia and I were together the night before. But it was such a beautiful day, why ruin it by getting all sweaty and out of breath? Instead, I wished her well, sprawled out in my hammock, and read my Sporting News. It was hard going. I kept thinking of Alison. And the men who had killed her.

  I told Anne Scalasi and Chief Teeters what had happened in Deer Lake. They didn’t take it well. Teeters threatened to arrest me for obstruction. Anne just wanted me to go away for a while. But at least Teeters wouldn’t be haunted by the one that got away. And Scalasi would be able to replace the red tab in her murder book with a blue one.

  “There’s not a damn thing you can do about them,” Cynthia said after I told her the story. “You have no evidence, nothing that’s admissible.”

  “I could kill them.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “No, I won’t,” I agreed. “Alison was dirty. That’s why she was hiding. She knew what she was getting into. It’s just that—”

  “You want justice for her.”

  “I don’t know from justice,” I admitted. “What the hell is justice, anyway? If you have a working definition, I’d like to hear it. I just want … I don’t know what I want. A happy ending, I guess.”

  “Oh, Taylor, you of all people should know better. Not every story has a happy ending. Some of them just end.”

  She was right, of course. The world is what it is, not something else. That’s one reason why I have so little patience with peace demonstrators. But I didn’t feel any better about it.

  I ha
dn’t read more than a dozen pages of the Sporting News when Cynthia, mopping her forehead with a towel, returned to my backyard, carrying my mail.

  “This ought to improve your mood,” she said guardedly and handed me an envelope with Hunter Truman’s return address. It contained a check for $12,800—thirty-two days’ work, counting my time in the hospital, one of the longest cases I’ve ever investigated. However, Truman had decided to ignore my $1,982 expense invoice, and I debated suing him before finally deciding against it. It would probably give him too much pleasure.

  “Who’s Rosalind?” Cynthia asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Rosalind Colletti,” she repeated, handing me a postcard.

  A jolt of adrenalin electrified my body at the sound of the name. I sat up, my legs straddling the hammock, and snapped the postcard from Cynthia’s fingers. On one side was a spectacular photograph of the Split Rock Lighthouse overlooking Lake Superior just north of Duluth. The other side had my address, a Duluth, Minnesota, postmark, and this message written in long hand:

  Dearest Taylor,

  I’ve been told your first aid saved my life, and for that I will be eternally grateful. But you know, despite what Oscar Wilde had to say on the subject, living well is not always the best revenge. Sometimes dying is.

  Rosalind

  “Who’s Rosalind?” Cynthia repeated after I had read the postcard for the fourth time.

  She’d done it again! I’ll be damned, she’d done it again! Sheriff Orman must have helped her … managed to get to someone in the hospital.… And when Truman and Emerton and Dr. Bob exhumed her body only to find that there was no body …

  “Is it a secret?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Who’s Rosalind?”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Just the girlfriend of a painter I used to know.”

  “She says you saved her life?”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  And then I started to laugh. I laughed long and heartily until Cynthia was compelled to join in even though she didn’t get the joke.