Murder in the Wings

by Ed Gorman

  About a mile from Reeves's place, there was a Hardee's. We had some dinner. We sat in the car and the food smells filled the air. The sky was bruised. Skies like that always made me think of Good Friday. The air must have been similar, the black clouds low and roiling, the air chill and ominous. We had our usual argument—for some reason I didn't want to defer—about Top Forty versus jazz and negotiated a settlement by turning the radio off altogether except for a newscast that said nothing new about Wade. Then we just sat back and watched teenagers haul their acne around in trucks with big wheels and cars with big mufflers. Finally, I put the car in gear and we went over to Reeves's.

  "Excuse me," I said, "but I wonder if we could talk a minute?"

  "You pushing Watchtower?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "Then what do you want?"

  I showed her my American Security ID. I showed it to her fast, because any kind of scrutiny would show it to be the ringer it was.

  She was eighteen and looked like a farm girl who'd moved to the big city. Her flannel shirt and OshKosh jeans said that about her. So did the pop country station in the background.

  "We've been retained to do some further investigation into the murder the other night," I went on.

  She looked at me as if she didn't know what I was talking about, and there was every possibility that she didn't. I started to explain further—seeing that I was getting nowhere—when Donna stepped in.

  "Hi," she said.

  "Hi." The girl seemed a little surprised.

  "We just need to ask you about the other night. Is that okay?"

  The girl shrugged. She was pretty in a plain sort of way. "Sure. I guess."

  "Were you home that night?"

  "Yes. Studying. I work downtown during the day and at night I go to the community college."

  "Did you hear anything?"

  The girl shook her head. "No. The police asked me that already. I didn't hear anything at all."

  "Did you see anybody?"

  The girl grinned with embarrassment, as if she'd been stumped on a quiz show. "Not really, no. Just like I told the police."

  "Did Michael Reeves get a lot of visitors?"

  "I guess. I mean, I didn't pay all that much attention to him. He was actually kind of a snob. I mean, he gave you the impression that he was much better than you."

  Donna smiled. "Yeah, I've known a lot of guys like that."

  The girl beamed. Obviously she had a friend in Donna.

  "How about earlier in the day? Did he have any visitors then?"

  The girl started to automatically say no, but then she stopped. "I guess the police didn't ask me about that."

  "Then you did see somebody?"

  "Let me think." She leaned her auburn head against the door frame. "I guess so. Yes, I did."

  "What time was this?"

  "Oh, between six and seven, I guess. I got home from work just before six because Dan Rather still had a few news stories to go, and then I took the first load of laundry down to the basement. That's when I saw the first one going into Michael's apartment." She shuddered. "God, when I called my folks and told them what happened, they wanted me to move out right away. But like I told them, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen. Right?"

  "Right. Do you remember what this person at Michael's door looked like?"

  "Oh, sure. His name was Lockhart. I'd seen him around before. He was one of the convicts. He told me that himself one day down in the laundry room."

  "Lockhart hung around here?"

  "Sometimes, sure."

  "Did you hear Lockhart leave?"

  "I saw him leave."

  "When was this?"

  "Oh, maybe a quarter to seven. 'The Price Is Right' was on. Boy, that's really a dumb show."

  Donna looked at me. I could see the smile playing on her lips. She wasn't going to lord all this over me. She wouldn't have to. I was going to lord it over myself.

  "You said there was a second person," Donna said.

  "Right."

  "Did you know that person?"

  "I saw her one other time. She came to Michael's and Michael made Lockhart leave for a while so Lockhart came down to my apartment."

  "When was this?"

  "Oh, a few weeks ago."

  "Do you remember anything about the woman?"

  "Just that she was very upset."

  "How so?"

  "Well, right in the doorway she slapped Michael's face. Real hard, too."

  "This was a few weeks ago?"

  "Yes."

  "And she was here again the night of the murder?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Did you get a look at her?"

  "I'm not sure what you mean."

  "Did she seem upset or anything?"

  "Not . . . upset. I don't know how I'd describe it. Off in another world, kinda. Yeah. Off in another world."

  I saw my chance and I was petty enough to take it. "Donna, why don't you ask her to describe the woman?"

  We had a feminist rally going here. They both looked at me as if I'd just handed them a sack of doggie-do.

  The girl scowled at me and then brought her attention back to Donna. "She was probably really beautiful when she was younger. Dark and very fine-featured with huge brown eyes."

  I could tell from the way Donna's body gave a little shudder that she had recognized Michael's visitor, too. "How long did she stay the other night?"

  "I'm not sure, but I think she was up there quite a while."

  "Did you see her come down?"

  "Not really. But I heard her. She came down pretty fast."

  "In a hurry?"

  "Coulda been, yes." The girl looked at us. "I guess I should've told this to the police but they really only asked about later in the evening. You know, around the time when it happened. Then I didn't see anybody except that actor."

  "Stephen Wade?"

  "Yeah, him. Boy, I watched him on the tube all the time I was growing up. That's a really weird experience, identifying somebody like that to the police, I mean."

  "That's all you can remember?"

  She leaned her head against the door frame again. "I guess so. Sorry I haven't been more help."

  "You've been a lot of help." Donna smiled. "Tell you what. We'll leave our card. If you think of anything else, you can call us, all right?"

  "Sure."

  "Why don't you give her a card, Dwyer?" Donna said sweetly.

  "Gee, I'm glad I get to be a help," I said.

  Donna took the card from me and handed it over to the girl. "I ran out of cards and need to get some printed," she said.

  The girl looked at it. "God, you're really an investigator?"

  "Yes," Donna said.

  "I'll have to ask my counselor about that. About investigation, I mean. It's a field I should look into. I mean, you do really good at it."

  "Thank you."

  I nodded good night to the girl and she said to me, "You're really lucky to have her for a boss. She seems really nice."

  "Lucky isn't the word for it," I said.

  Ten minutes later we stood in the back yard, in the shadows by the garage, in the gloom and rain, and Donna said, "So what's wrong with using the steps and just walking right in?"

  "Gee, you'd think the boss would know better than that."

  "I'm sorry if it hurt your ego, Dwyer, but it was probably very good for that girl to see. A positive role model and all."

  "Well, once you get out of Detection 101, boss lady, you'll realize that we can't just walk right in there because that young girl will remember us just the way she remembered everybody else—and if the police ask her, they'll charge us with forcible entry. Among other things."

  "So what're we going to do?"

  "The fire escape."

  "Are you kidding? We'll make too much noise."

  "Not if we take our shoes off."

  "Are you kidding?"

  But I wasn't kidding, of course, so five minutes later we were climbing up t
he cold hard metal rungs of the ladder that stretched from the third floor to the ground. The rungs were so rusty that, with the rain, they felt as if they were covered with moss. By now we were hopelessly soaked, so the rain didn't bother us much, but the cold had gotten merciless. Donna had to stop a couple times to put one hand and then the other in her pockets. Gripping the hard edge of the cold rungs had numbed them. But then we went on, up into the black night. The third floor was completely dark, and we finally came to a window. It only took me a day or two to get the damn thing open. Once or twice I glanced behind me. It was obvious that Donna wanted to complain—she looked miserable, all wet and cold—but she didn't complain, nary a peep. So I was almost ready to forgive her her brilliance back there conducting the interview with the young girl.

  Finally, I got the window open. I threw one leg over into the warm darkness on the other side, and then an arm, and then my head. Donna pushed up against my buttocks. "Are you stuck or what?"

  The cold hard rain had taken its toll.

  All we did for the first five minutes was stand inside next to a radiator and rub ourselves and hop up and down. We took off our socks, and Donna got us some towels. We dried our hair and then I took off my poplin jacket and wrung it out, and then Donna took off her sweater and blouse and kind of wrung those out. "That woman the girl was describing," she said. "It was Sylvia Ashton, wasn't it?"

  "Yeah."

  "If she was the last person to come up here, maybe she killed Reeves."

  "That's what I was thinking. Especially with her background."

  "What background?"

  "Breakdown. I'll need to know more about it. We should check that tonight."

  "I thought we were going to see Stephen Wade tonight."

  "We are. We can check on Sylvia afterward."

  "Dwyer, I hate to be a party pooper, but I'm afraid I'm going to need to sleep. Really."

  "We'll get some sleep. Don't worry."

  "Right."

  I picked up my jacket from the floor. The playbill featuring David Ashton had fallen out. I pulled my jacket back on and stuffed the playbill back inside.

  We searched for ten minutes before we turned anything up, and halfway through I would have bet against finding anything, because the police had probably taken everything that would have been of even remote interest.

  But there it was, right on the desk, right in plain sight, so much so that the police must not have realized its significance.

  "You find something?" Donna asked.

  "I'll explain later."

  "Boy, aren't we mysterious?"

  If there'd been time I would have shown her the envelope I'd just picked up, the one with the peculiar but familiar logo on it, the one that explained a whole other side to Mrs. Bridges, and also where Lockhart probably fit into all this.

  "I just want to wrap things up and get out of here."

  "You're right, Dwyer. I just can't wait to get back outside in that cold and rain."

  "Just keep looking."

  But there was nothing else to be found, and a few minutes later we were heading down the fire escape.

  "This has a very good effect on my cramps," Donna said.

  "How's that?"

  "I've got such a fucking head cold coming on, I hardly notice them."

  I knew better than to laugh.

  Chapter 14

  While Donna was taking a shower, I sat in her living room feeling a growing sense of betrayal. I was getting the distinct impression that old Mrs. Bridges had set me up. What I'd found in Michael Reeves's apartment was an envelope bearing the Bridges' personal logo, which meant that she and Reeves had been in some kind of contact. That meant that she had not told me the truth, probably about much of anything.

  Donna came out with a towel wrapped around her head. I tried hard not to notice her body in the green silk robe. "Your turn," she said, sniffling. Then she bent over the couch and looked at the envelope I'd set on the coffee table to study. "What's that?"

  I told her.

  "So you think she lied to you?"

  "I'm sure she did. This letter is addressed to Reeves, and it's obviously written by a woman in her older years, and it's her family logo."

  "Why would she write Reeves?"

  "I don't know. But after we meet Wade, I'm going to find out."

  "You want some tea?"

  "Sure."

  She put the kettle on to boil and came back and gave me a hug. She smelled of perfumed soap and wet hair. She smelled wonderful. "I'll have the tea ready for you when you get out of the shower."

  "Is that a hint?"

  "No sense in both of us catching cold."

  In the shower I kept wondering about Mrs. Bridges and why she'd write Michael Reeves, and I kept remembering Anne Stewart and her husband in the cabin. What had they been after? And why had Sylvia Ashton visited Michael Reeves the night of the murder? I put on some fresh clothes from the end of the closet Donna had allotted me and went back to the living room.

  Donna hadn't put any clothes on yet. She sat in an armchair in front of the TV. MTV was on: Stevie Nicks working a little too hard at being ethereal. I should have kept my mind on Mrs. Bridges and Reeves and Anne Stewart and her husband and what Evelyn had been doing with Keech in her car, but I didn't. The thunder made me skitter across the floor like a scared animal. Donna must have been feeling the same way, because when I got there she put her arms out and drew me in. Our first few kisses were very tender—we were giving each other some inexplicable kind of reassurance—and then they were something other than tender. I pulled her up, and the way we stood we might have been dancing, she in her green silk robe, me in jeans and a T-shirt. I suppose we were dancing in a way, all the way over to the couch, where I eased her gently back. She said, "Wouldn't the bed be better?" but for some reason the couch had great appeal at that moment. Then all she said was, "I just put in a Tampax." I said, "I'll buy you another one," and she went off to the bathroom, where she spent what seemed like four or five hours. When she came back I turned out the light, and we made a slow sort of protective love with the rain and the violence unable to touch us as long as we were in each other's arms.

  "I thought we were going to meet Wade," she said. This was half an hour later in my car. It was still pouring.

  "We've still got an hour."

  "So where're we going?"

  "Over to the recreation center where Reeves held his acting classes for the ex-convicts."

  "Why?"

  "Well, first of all because that board at the halfway house said that Anne Stewart teaches tonight. Second, maybe some of the men there will know where Lockhart might be. I still want to know what he wanted in Reeves's office yesterday."

  "Right. I forgot about that. I wonder what he was doing with Evelyn Ashton this afternoon, back at the cabin, I mean."

  "Exactly."

  "Boy, this is starting to be fun again, Dwyer."

  The Stanley Recreation Center shows the scars of being located in what passes for a ghetto in this city. It's a small brick building that used to be a school, but you wouldn't know it the way graffiti covers its walls and hundreds of yards of tape cover the cracks in its windows. Even in the rain there were teenagers out prowling, white and black alike, their eyes filled with fear and hunger. I read a book once about juvenile delinquency in the original thirteen colonies. I read it while I was in jail the weekend of my sixteenth birthday for going on a joyride in a stolen car. I wasn't driving but I knew it was stolen. Anyway, things changed after that weekend. The book taught me that there was nothing unique or special about being a punk, and forty-eight hours in the county lockup taught me that there were guys far more terrifying than I'd ever imagined and that I didn't want to be like them at all. That night, in the gloom and the downpour, I glimpsed kids as angry as I'd been and prayed they'd have the same kind of luck I'd had.

  We parked next to a new tan Saab and got out. "Anne's car."

  "Well, so far so good."

  "Yeah,
and remember that the next time you question what I do."

  She goosed me hard enough that I gave out an unmanly yelp and jerked away from her. She's good at tickling, but she's twice as good at goosing.

  The interior of the place changed our playful mood abruptly. The institutional green walls were lit by naked bulbs hanging from an exposed electric cable. Unused desks were piled along the walls, which were swollen with moisture. A tidy pile of petrified dog crap had been pushed off to the side of a door, and the graffiti alluded to virtually every part of the human anatomy. Down the corridor was a small gym where two young black men took turns taking devastating shots from past the free-throw line. Next to this was a smaller room where a group of elderly women listened to a public health nurse talk about Medicare benefits, or what was left of them now that the boys in Washington had decided to turn the country into an arsenal. A hand-lettered sign said ACTING CLASS and an arrow pointed upstairs. The deeper into the place we went the more it smelled like the schools of my memory—the aromas of floor wax and chalk dust, window panes cold with rain, steam heat, and the most ineffable smell of all, wood aging over the decades, a smell peculiar to old schools and old garages. Just before we entered the classroom, I thought I heard a noise at the opposite end of the corridor in the deep shadow. I waited thirty seconds but heard nothing else, so I followed Donna up to the threshold.

  There were half a dozen of them, all but one seated in ancient cane chairs. They were watching a tall guy in the center of the big empty room as he put his face in his hands, apparently trying to come into some sort of mystical contact with himself. He reminded me of a coke junkie on the downside. Over in a corner, near a barren steam-heat register, sat Anne Stewart and Keech watching the man in the center of the room. They seemed as fascinated as the ex-cons by whatever process was going on.

  Abruptly, the tall guy threw his head back and screamed. For the first time I saw his face full on. His black hair needed cutting and his lantern jaw needed a shave, but what he seemed to need most right then was some kind of medical help to calm him down. His scream lingered in the damp, dusty air. It wasn't a theatrical scream, not at all. There was real frenzy and horror in it, as he proved by grabbing one of the empty cane chairs and smashing it against the register near where Anne and Keech stood. There was something orgiastic about the way he beat the chair into splinters. His dark eyes looked psychotic. Rheumy spittle shone on the edges of his mouth. He grunted in rhythm to his violence, and his grunts were far more obscene than any words he could utter. Donna put her face into my arm to hide her eyes. The poor bastard was coming undone. I looked around the room. In their way, the audience was just as spooky as the guy. They watched him with glazed fascination. They seemed to be in the same sort of psychosis that he was. One guy writhed in his chair. He appeared to be caught up in some kind of sexual rhythm. I glanced over at Anne and Keech. Their spell seemed broken now. Anne was putting out a hand to the crazy guy, muttering reassurances. Keech just looked scared. But the guy had found a new way to dazzle himself. He started pounding his fists against the register. He didn't seem to notice the blood that smeared his knuckles almost immediately or the bones that made cracking sounds like dry twigs snapping.