by John Dunning
So this was Laura’s story of Lennie’s sorry death. When he went back up to the house to get the kids that day, he had found Jerry in the bedroom with the twins, shivering and clutching a sketchpad. It never occurred to Lennie to look at what Jerry had drawn. He found it much later, under the backseat of his police car. Jerry had drawn two pictures of the shooting: Bobby in his last living moment, his face showing realization and sudden terror…and the killing itself…
“Me shooting Bobby,” she said.
But Lennie wasn’t happy with his ten thousand. “He took my money and then said, ‘Oh, hey, didn’t I tell you, that was just the down payment.’ If I wanted what he had to sell, I had to ante up a lot more money. So fuck it, I killed him and took my money back. You should’ve seen his face when he knew what was coming. What a surprise. He begged and whined for his miserable life, he said the pictures were out in the truck. So we went out there and guess what, no pictures. And I shot him just like Bobby, on the spur of the moment.”
She coughed. “Tell me he’s gonna take Jerry.”
I heard her moving again. She had come closer and now she faded back. I could see her melting into the inky woodwork.
“Erin?…Talk to me…where’ve you gone?
“Where’ve you gone?
“Where are you? Damn, I need you now more than ever. Say something.”
What happened next was almost unbearable. The room melted into nothingness and for ten thousand years there was only the sound of the wind. I felt Erin trembling under my coat and I drew her as tight as I could. Laura made no more moves, no sound until the last minute, when she cracked wide open.
“Erin?
“Say something. Say something. Talk to me.
“Erin…
“Talk to me.
“Talk to me!
“Erin?…Erin! God damn you, Erin, you fucking TALK TO ME!
“You better talk to me. If you know what’s good for you…
“What makes you so fine? What makes you better than me? You’ve always thought you were better than me.
“Say something!
“SAY SOMETHING!
“YOU TALK TO ME RIGHT NOW!”
Suddenly the lights went on: she had reached the wall and the room flashed yellow-white like dynamite had gone off in her hand. She was standing about five feet away. I saw the gun for perhaps three seconds. She said, “I’ll always love you, Erin,” and, “Good-bye,” and I remember thinking in that moment, She’s going to kill herself. But when she brought up the gun, it wasn’t herself she shot. I heard the explosion and felt the incredible violence as the slug ripped into me. It flattened me against the wall and took my breath away. I knew right away it was a bad one, it had gone through most of me and hit my spine, I could feel the sensation going out of my hands and feet, and in the same half second she fired again and I felt Erin jerk over backward with the pain; she groaned out three words, “My God, Cliff,” and rolled out of my arms. Laura took three giant steps and loomed over us; I heard her gun click and at last then I shot her, knocking her backward across the room, into the glass door, shattering it in the gale of blowing snow.
45
I saw red. I opened my eyes and the flashing red lights told me we were heading down the hill in an ambulance.
When I opened them again, I was in a white room, and the doctor standing over me looked grave. I heard him say I had lost all my blood, every drop of it had leaked out in the snow. But that had to be a dream because nobody can live any time at all without at least some blood.
A young nurse peered over my bed and said hello.
“Where am I?”
“You are in intensive care at CU Medical Center in Denver.”
I didn’t ask how I’d gotten there. I flexed my fingers…moved my toes, then my head. “It’s all there,” the nurse said. “A little stiff but all apparently in working order.”
“Where’s Erin?”
“Lie still,” said the nurse.
“What about the woman who was with me?”
“She’s here too.”
Again I said Erin’s name and the nurse went for a doctor, who came in a few minutes later. “You’re a lucky man. A fraction of an inch to the left and you’d be paralyzed.”
“How’s Erin?”
“Your friend is doing as well as can be expected.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Doctor…”
There was a moment when I thought the worst. He’s not answering my question because he doesn’t want me to know the truth, I thought. I gripped the sides of the bed and tried to pull myself up.
“He’s getting upset,” the nurse said. “Maybe we should…”
“Should what?” I said. “All you people need to do is just be straight with me.”
The doctor leaned over my bed. “Lie down there and listen to me. Your friend is in grave condition. We almost lost her twice last night. She is very serious.”
She had been shot above the left breast. The shot had missed her heart by the same thin whisker, almost exactly the margin as the one that had missed my spine. Two blood transfusions had temporarily improved her outlook, but she was still critical. “We are doing everything we can for her,” the doctor said.
I asked if I could see her. “Maybe in a while,” the doctor said. “We’d have to roll your bed down the hall, and right now she’s unconscious; she wouldn’t know you’re there anyway.”
I couldn’t help thinking of Hemingway and his death scene in A Farewell to Arms. This was going to be like that. She was dying and there was nothing I could do for her. I had used up all my luck that other time with Trish, and now there was none to call up for Erin. I looked over at the window and it was raining like that scene in the book. Rain, the symbol of all things bad.
“I’m going in to see her,” I said.
“You can’t yet.”
“I’m going. You can either help me or get out of my way.”
The doctor called an orderly and they decided not to restrain me. They wheeled my bed down the hall and into her room.
She looked dead to me. Her face was pale and she had tubes running everywhere. Her eyes were shut tightly, her breathing…
“She’s not breathing,” I said. “Do something, for Christ’s sake, she’s not breathing.”
“She’s very weak,” the doctor said.
“She’s not breathing.”
“This is why I didn’t want you to come in yet. The fact is, we don’t know what’s going to happen with her. We’re doing everything we can.”
“Can you save her?”
“I don’t know. I wish I could tell you that but I can’t.”
They’ve got to save her, I thought. They’ve got to.
They will save her.
But the Hemingway illusion would not go away. I kept seeing that rain falling on the window and I couldn’t shake the notion that I had used up all my luck that night years ago with Trish.
“You should go back to your room now,” the doctor said.
“No, I want to be here.”
I had a good grip on the foot of Erin’s bed. He couldn’t make me let go so they left me there and I watched over her till she died.
I jerked out of the dream. Across the way her eyes blinked open…just slits…enough to know I was there and who I was. I raised my finger in a Hi there motion and she saw it and she knew.
The next face I saw was Parley’s. He sat and we talked for a few minutes.
They had found Bobby’s autograph books—hundreds of dealer catalogs with vivid facsimiles—but no one ever found the money Laura claimed to be hiding.
“This was the most screwed-up case anybody could imagine,” he said. “I feel like it was my fault as much as anybody’s. I was the one she snookered.”
“So was I.”
“But I was the one that led to all the others. Then mistakes were made and made again on every level. I don’t think we ever could’ve resolved this in a courtroom.”
It was Erin who h
ad called him that night from the house…Erin who had saved us. All I could do was roll over and play dead, but somehow, through some massive gut-check and a deep well of strength, she had crawled over and got the phone off the hook. “I thought you were both goners when I got up there with the doctor,” Parley said.
But I have tough genes and so, apparently, does she.
Evening came and she was hanging tough. I ate my chicken soup stuff in her room and Parley sat with me, talking. I could feel myself gaining strength almost by the hour.
The sheriff had found Laura in a snowdrift behind the house. She had crawled down the back steps and died there, her hand sticking grotesquely out of the snow, still clutching the gun.
Laura is my cross to bear and I carry it alone.
At the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Book Fair the following summer a dealer from Kansas came up with the novel Laura, so scarce it might almost legitimately be called rare. The book was hardly a perfect copy, but at twelve hundred it was a steal. I knew I could blow it out of my shop in a few hours. I stared at the jacket, and in the heroine’s face I saw what I could not have seen in Burbank. She looks almost like the real Laura, I thought: the hair is different, the mouth, the eyes…all different. Everything was different, and yet there was something about that pulpy dust jacket that reminded me of what I’d rather forget. The Laura of the book was heroic; I knew with one phone call I could double my money on her. But I didn’t want her in my store, not even for a little while.
I felt an arm on my shoulder. Erin said, “Is that a good one?”
“No.”
“Must be at least pretty good at that price.”
She didn’t say anything more about it, but she did touch the paper where the title was, and in her fingers I sensed a wave of feeling. Too many people she had cared about had betrayed her, and all I could do was make sure that I would never be one of them. The dealer saw us looking at the book and he drifted over and asked if we could use it. “I could do a little better,” he said, but I thanked him and moved on.
I saw a signed Cormac McCarthy, priced right and thus scarce. The reclusive McCarthy signs little and his early books get a premium, but I passed on that as well. I have a different feeling about signed books now, and I have quit dealing in them unless I know the dealer well or witness the signature myself.
That afternoon I ran a slow mile and vowed to burn a candle until I could do it again, double-time, without pain. That night Erin and I went out for our long-delayed dinner at The Broker.
The days and weeks passed.
Time is our mortal enemy but it’s also the great healer. We never talk about Laura, never mention her name, though we do keep tabs on the kids. They are now in good foster homes and the twins are being adopted. Jerry remains an enigma even to the experts. He had combinations of abilities that none of them had ever seen in a single subject, and later that year, with diligent encouragement and coaching from a young teacher, he began to talk. He has a good, rich voice, but almost as soon as he said his first words, his savant skills went into a slow fade. This is what sometimes happens when a mute savant learns to talk. So I read. So they say.
Don’t ask why. Might as well ask why they are in the first place. One door swings open; another closes forever.
Today Jerry can talk but he can’t draw a straight line or write his own name.
The mysteries of the human mind are far beyond my comprehension.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Dunning, winner of the Nero Wolfe Award, is the author of three Cliff Janeway Bookman novels: Booked to Die, which instantly became a hotly sought collectible; The Bookman’s Wake, a New York Times Notable Book of 1995; and the New York Times bestseller The Bookman’s Promise. Dunning was for many years host of the weekly Denver radio show Old Time Radio, and has written extensively about radio, including a novel, Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime, and a nonfiction book, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. Dunning also owned and operated the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver and now does his bookselling online. He and his wife, Helen, live in Denver, Colorado. Visit his website at www.oldalgonquin.com.
