Michael Lister - Soldier 01 - The Big Goodbye

by Michael Lister

Before she could answer, I spoke up.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I was right-handed before it got blown off, but I’ll arm wrestle you for her.”

  “Sure, soldier, I’ll take your girl,” he said.

  I turned around and took a few steps so I could put my left arm on the bar and move away from our drinks some. He strutted around, placed his hat on the stool next to him and his elbow on the bar.

  “Don’t go nowhere doll,” he said to Ruth Ann. “This’ll only take a second.”

  The moment he finished speaking, as he was still looking at her, I reached up and grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face down into the bar. His nose and forehead smacked the marble bar top but good and it knocked him out cold. He fell to the floor face up and didn’t move.

  I moved back down beside Ruth Ann and took a long pull on my bottle of Schlitz, eyeing the other sailors in the mirror. I didn’t think this guy was with them, and I must’ve been right because they continued their game without more than a passing interest in their fallen comrade.

  “You not worried about being so … What’s the word I’m looking for? … eager … to make with the mauling?”

  “I didn’t maul him,” I said.

  “I was talking about the guy earlier today,” she said. “Jeez you’re dropping guys all over town.”

  I started to say something, but she cut me off. “You should talk to someone.”

  “I do.”

  “A professional.”

  “She is.”

  She turned and looked at me, her big blue eyes wide. “Really?”

  “That so surprising?”

  “Jimmy Riley talking to a shrink?” she said. “Well, heck yeah.”

  “The force sent me to her when I got shot. When I left the force I just kept going.”

  “Just keep the surprises coming, soldier, I don’t mind,” she said. “But have you considered maybe it ain’t workin’ so good?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t kill either of ’em.”

  Chapter 3

  “Lauren Lewis is here to see you,” July said.

  My quickening pulse began to pound inside my constricting throat.

  I had just returned from the small library around the block with a bag of books when July had eased into my office and closed the door behind her. She waited in front of my desk, as she always did, while I finished the sentence I was reading, and when I looked up, I caught her casting an eyeball over the novels and philosophy and psychology texts with only a mild interest.

  “Really?”

  Suddenly, the hairline at the top of my forehead was moist, my mouth dry.

  “She asked for you, but I could take her in to see Ray.”

  “Show her in,” I said.

  “But—”

  “Show her in.”

  Dropping the book on the scarred wooden desk with the others, I jumped up and looked out my second-story window, across downtown Panama City. The traffic on Harrison was light, the sidewalks mostly empty. The unseen morning sun behind me cast a warm glow on the sleepy streets, but I found no peace or strength in any of it, so I sat back down.

  July didn’t usher Lauren in so much as stand aside and allow her to enter, and I couldn’t help but think that the way she stood, leaning against my door and arching her back to accentuate her nearly flawless figure, was the female equivalent of a man flexing for another man.

  When Lauren had walked in, she glanced around, noting—I could tell because I knew how she thought—that in the year that had passed, the old walls had remained bare.

  Unlike the first time July had shown Lauren into my office, she didn’t take her coat, offer her coffee, or close the door.

  I resisted the urge to stand, and I forced myself to look right into her dark eyes as if for the first time.

  Swallowing hard to ensure my voice wouldn’t break, I attempted a casual, “Lauren.”

  “Are you following me?” she asked.

  For a moment I couldn’t speak, guilt gripping my vocal cords.

  “What?” I asked, my voice filled with a surprise as brittle as my attempt at casualness had been.

  I tried to laugh it off as inane or absurd, but images of a desperate man hiding in the shadows undermined my attempt. Nearly a year had passed, and I didn’t recognize that man any longer, but I still hated his helplessness, loathed his lack of self-control. His existence had been a brief and solitary one. Lauren never knew of it. As far as I knew, only my counselor did.

  “I remember one time you said if you ever wanted to follow me I’d never know it, but …”

  “I’m not following you,” I said as if I never had, my voice filled with the wounded pride of an innocent man.

  She collapsed back in her chair and the familiar scent of Paris perfume drifted across my desk.

  Beneath her dark brown hair, combed smooth across the top and hanging in soft curls above her shoulders, her flawless skin seemed nearly too perfect, the almond eyes beneath the razor sharp eyebrows nearly too dark, too deep, too … Nearly, but not too.

  From my inside right coat pocket, the only inside pocket I was able to use, I pulled out a pack of Pall Malls, shook out two, put them in my mouth, and returned the pack to my pocket. I then fished in my left outside pocket for a lighter. This all took a while and she waited patiently. Once I had them both lit, I took one out and held it out to her. She stood and accepted my offering, placing what had just been in my mouth between her Revlon-red lips. She then took a long drag from the cigarette, held it a moment, and lifted her head to blow it out slowly.

  “How are you doing with … ,” she asked, nodding toward where my right arm should be.

  I had been injured the day she left me—as a result of her leaving me, but she didn’t know that—and we hadn’t really spoken since then. I was still on the force, but moonlighting for Ray when I took her case. I was wounded in the line of duty, called a hero, awarded citations, but if I hadn’t been working with Ray, if I hadn’t taken her case, if I had never met her, it would have never happened.

  “I manage,” I said. “Ladies like a wounded war hero. They think some Jap bastard blew it off. I straighten them out … eventually.”

  I wondered if she could tell I was lying. I hadn’t been with a woman since her, couldn’t if I wanted to. Could she tell? Was she still able to see through me?

  “I was so sorry to hear it had happened,” she said. “But I was very proud of you, too. You were so brave. That woman and her child owe you their lives.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t been brave so much as numb. If I hadn’t been, I would have waited for backup. I didn’t care if I died. In fact, I wanted to. I wasn’t brave. I was suicidal—and it cost me far more than my right arm, but she’d never know that.

  When she sat down again, we were quiet a moment longer.

  Her silhouette style black dress emphasized her trim waist and narrow hips and grew broad above her breasts. The war had made stockings mostly a thing of the past, but her dress showed plenty of pale leg beneath black silk stockings, the backs of which had seams running down them. The rest of the girls had to go bare-legged and draw seams down the back of their legs with black eyeliner to give the illusion of stockings, but not Mrs. Harry Lewis. She wore them to help conceal the burn scars on her legs, but her exemption from even the smallest wartime sacrifice made me angry.

  Her two-tone, thick high heels brought together the black of her dress, its white collar and highlights, and the white of her gauntlet gloves and clutch bag.

  “Someone’s following me,” she said, her voice ragged and weary. “I thought it might be you.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Of course it’s not,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “—so you can mark my name off the list,” I continued, “and move on to whoever came after me … or before—depending on how you’re working your way through us.”

  Only the slightest twinge of pain showed on the fi
ne features of her delicate, but tense face. There was nothing I could say that would shock her. She had long since grown to expect my cruelty.

  Resolutely, she stood. “Sorry to … I mean … I shouldn’t’ve come here.”

  “Someone’s tailing you?”

  She paused to consider me, her eyes searching mine.

  “Yeah,” she said, slowly drifting back into her seat, “I think so.”

  “How long’s it been going on?”

  “A while,” she said. “I don’t know—a month at least. At first I thought it was my imagination. Then, for a while, I just dropped out of sight so he couldn’t follow me. But now … now I can’t and it’s happening again.”

  “Obviously you haven’t gotten a good look at him or you wouldn’t’ve thought it was me,” I said. “What—”

  “I haven’t seen him at all.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “Whatta you mean?”

  “To let you know he’s there,” I said. “He hasn’t done anything? Not to your car, your cat, your—”

  “You know I don’t have a cat,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you have now,” I said. “Or who. I assume you still have a husband.”

  “Yes,” she said, gathering her purse again.

  “So he hasn’t done anything to you or your property?” I asked.

  We aren’t each other’s property, I suddenly remembered her saying near the end. No one ever owns another person. No one ever can.

  I hadn’t remembered that until now. What else had I forgotten? What other shards of memory were buried so deep they could be felt but not recalled and would come unbidden, triggered by a word, a smell, a taste?

  “No,” she said.

  I thought about that.

  She looked around some more—perhaps searching for clues to my condition or any evidence that she had ever been a part of my life—and while she did, I stole glances at her. She still wore her long dark hair down over the right side of her face to conceal the burns, very little makeup, and too many clothes.

  Her eyes drifted across the various stacks of books scattered around the floor, over the dusty boxing gloves to the stack of files atop the old metal filing cabinet, past the framed pictures on the floor leaning against the wall, beyond the chess board still awaiting my next move as it was the last time she was here, and came to rest on the records full of sad songs stacked on my Motorola Spinet.

  What does all this tell you about the condition you left me in? What are you thinking? Feeling? Do you feel anything for me? Did you ever?

  “Creeps usually do something to let you know they’re there,” I said. “It’s their idea of a swell time. If this guy hasn’t done anything …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We fell silent again and I could hear July talking on her phone out in the hallway. From her serious tone and cryptic conversation I knew it was Ray.

  Gracefully, Lauren crossed her long, shapely legs and straightened out her skirt. Her movements were as smooth and elegant as the silk stockings gripping her gams. As usual, they were dark, but you could still make out the burns down her right leg if you knew where to look.

  Her eyes grew wide when she saw the bullet hole in the wall above my filing cabinet. “Is that a—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Are you sure someone’s following you?”

  She shrugged. “It’s more a feeling than anything else, but yeah, I’m sure.”

  “It’s probably either an ex-lover, your husband, or a PI hired by one of them. Or both,” I said. “So—”

  “My only ex-lover is a PI.”

  I may have been her only ex-lover who was a private detective. I was not her only ex-lover. She’d tried to make it sound like the latter instead of the former.

  “—you’re probably not in any danger, but I’ll find out who’s doing it and—”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t come here to hire you. I just wanted to—”

  She stopped abruptly as the phone on my desk began to ring.

  “Sorry,” I said as I snatched up the receiver.

  “Don’t agree to take her case or do anything for her before you talk to me,” Ray whispered.

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain when she leaves. I have relevant information.”

  When I hung up she said, “I’ll let you go. I know you’re busy.”

  Though the stack of books on my desk belied my busyness, I didn’t contradict her.

  “Okay,” I said, “but don’t worry about whoever’s following you, I’ll take care of him.”

  “No,” she said, standing to leave. “I’m not going to hire someone to follow me because I think someone’s following me. I just—”

  “You’re not hiring me,” I said, my voice angry and hurt.

  “You’re right I’m not,” she said, walking over to the door, “so don’t follow me.”

  “Don’t worry after me, sister, I won’t be there,” I said, as if I really wouldn’t.

  After Lauren left, I sat there for a moment, stunned, and thought back to the first time she had come into my office and disarmed me with her disconcerting honesty, unconventional beauty, and her complete lack of pretense and illusion.

  My desire for her had been instant and incomprehensible.

  “Of the infidelity cases you investigate how many of the people turn out to be cheating?” she had asked.

  “Nearly all.”

  “Really?”

  “Most people don’t come to us the first time they have suspicions.”

  “So what percentage?”

  I shrugged.

  “How many? I want to know.”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “A few years,” I said.

  It was evening. I had been moonlighting with Ray for a while, but not a few years. I was sick of swimming in the cesspool of city politics and corruption and was getting ready to leave the force. My plan had been to start working for Ray full-time when I came back from the war.

  “So, of the cases you’ve worked, how many were guilty of cheating?”

  “All of them,” I said.

  Her eyes widened. She then exhaled heavily and fell back into her chair, the expression on her face a curious one, as if I had just shared a strange good news.

  “So the fact that I’m here almost guarantees that my husband is cheating.”

  “Do you love your husband?”

  “Very much.”

  “If he is cheating, are you going to leave him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then don’t do this.”

  “I’ve got to,” she said.

  “Why? Why do you want to know?”

  “I love my husband, Mr. Riley.”

  “So don’t—”

  “Like a father,” she said. “I’m not in love with him—not like a wife. I care about him a great deal. I owe him … well, everything. But if I knew he had someone …”

  She trailed off, but seemed to need to say more, so I waited.

  “It would be a great comfort to me.”

  Chapter 4

  One of the advantages of tailing someone you know intimately is you can often anticipate where she’s going and get there before she does. When Lauren turned onto Beck in the direction of St. Andrews, I knew she was headed to Mattie’s Tavern to meet her husband for lunch. When she pulled into the parking lot, I was waiting for her.

  Located at the corner of 12th Street and Beck Avenue in St. Andrews, Mattie’s Tavern was famous for its fried chicken, steaks, seafood, and hush puppies, but it wasn’t the food the Lewises came for as much as all the potential voters in such close proximity.

  As she made her way through the parking lot, I ducked behind a big brown Pontiac Streamline Station Wagon. When she went inside, I waited a few moments, then followed, coming up behind her in time to see the hostess ushering her past those waiting in line and e
scorting her to a table near the window where her husband, Harry, was already eating a salad.

  Backing behind the bar, I became aware of a fluttering sensation in my chest. It took me a moment to realize it was something like happiness—a feeling I had grown unaccustomed to. I was happy just to be back in the shadows of her life again, and as much as I hated myself for that, I hated her even more.

  The sound of Peggy Lee singing “The Way You Look Tonight” was coming from a juke box next to an empty dance floor.

  Since Harry Lewis had announced his bid to be mayor, he and Lauren had taken every opportunity to be seen together in public. Side by side they smiled, shook hands, and spoke briefly but intimately to every one of their thousands of best friends.

  With an unsettling sense of déjà vu, I recalled watching Harry before, the extravagance of his banker’s lifestyle, the leisure of his banker’s schedule, and the way his groveling underlings catered to his every whim—including his mistress, Martha, a bookkeeper twice as old and half as attractive Lauren.

  Martha provided Lauren and I with the justification we needed to nurture our budding attraction—which we did with the wounded intensity of the wronged and the righteous indignation of the innocent, without the slightest sense of irony or hypocrisy.

  With a bittersweet smile, I remembered how I had been so happy to discover her that I sent Martha flowers the day after I first caught she and Harry together.

  What began as revenge, became a profound love and an intoxicating passion. Soon, Harry wasn’t part of our equation any longer, and eventually, what Lauren was doing had nothing to do with him and everything to do with me—or so she had led me to believe at the time.

  Standing there watching them together, I realized I was supposed to be scanning the joint for a lowlife. As I turned, a small waitress was looking up at me through large glasses.

  “Can I help you, mister?” she asked.

  “Where’s the restroom?”

  She pointed toward it, her eyebrows raised, even as her eyes narrowed. I had to walk right past it to get where I was now.

  “Must’ve missed it when I came in.”

  “Must’ve,” she said, then waited ’til I walked away.

  Splashing some water on my face, I avoided the small mirror above the sink. I didn’t need it to know that joining the dark circles and fine lines, the old desperation had returned. I could feel it. The last thing I wanted to do was see it.