Flesh Wounds

by Stephen Greenleaf

  I shook my head. “He’s dead, Jeff.”

  “What?”

  “He’s dead. Mabel, too. They had a fight and killed each other. I’m about to call the police.”

  His eyes clouded and his voice broke. “Is this a joke or what?”

  “You can go back and look, but I don’t recommend it.”

  Before I could stop him, he dashed down the path toward the shed. I left him to his impulse and got in my car and drove off to find a phone. It took quite a while, and a while longer to get hold of Molson. A half-hour had passed by the time I got back to Crowder’s place.

  The Z was gone; the house and grounds were deserted. I walked back to the shed. The bodies were where they had been, but the inside of the shed had been stripped bare of any trace of Nina. When the cops showed up to perform their forensic ritual, I forgot to mention it had ever been otherwise.

  As I was leaving, I took the little stone arrowhead out of my pocket and tossed it into the weeds as far from the house as I could heave it. Dale Crowder had failed at just about everything since his wife had thrown him out, so it stood to reason that he hadn’t been successful at framing Ted Evans for murder.

  CHAPTER 30

  She will love him, in time; she is certain of it. He is good and kind and talented, and he risked everything to rescue her. What more could she ask of a man? When she has asked more than that in the past, it has ended in disaster.

  And she will respect poor Ted again. Eventually. And honor his marriage and bond with his wife. When he stops panting after her like a love-struck adolescent, when he quits arranging special evenings and sending special gifts. When he focuses his attentions where they ought to be instead of on his daughter.

  And she will stop putting herself on exhibit. There are lots of things she can do besides pose for pictures. Things people don’t misunderstand or find shameful; things that don’t put her in contact with men like Gary Richter and Jensen Lattimore; things that don’t come from depths and desires she would prefer not to think about any longer.

  Lots of things. She is certain of it.

  She knocked on my door at nine sharp, prompt as always, stylish as always, somber and stoic and splendid as almost always.

  “Ted walking the dog?” I said as she came in the room and doffed her coat. For a moment I thought she was going to kiss me and for a moment she did, too.

  She checked my mood, then nodded. “Ted’s very structured.”

  “That’s supposed to be good.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Have a seat.”

  She took the only chair in the room and I sat on the edge of the bed. I offered some scotch from my bottle or a soft drink from the machine down the hall, but she said she was fine. I was as tense as the bomb squad and Peggy looked close to it.

  “Have you seen Nina?” I asked when her purpose seemed to falter and she found something on the carpet that interested her.

  She nodded. “She came by an hour ago. She and the Wellington boy. She seems fine, considering. It must have been quite an ordeal. That Lattimore man sounds like a maniac.”

  “Just a guy who couldn’t get a date in high school.”

  “High school.” The phrase resonated like a death sentence.

  “High school is God’s way of keeping us interested in an afterlife,” I said.

  Her laugh was cordial and distracted. “How are you, Marsh?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sounds like you had a wild evening.”

  “Not as wild as the night you stabbed Tomkins.”

  Peggy blushed, then clasped her hands on her lap near the hem of her thin sweater, as though the appearance of rectitude would create the thing itself. “At least Nina is safe,” she murmured. “That’s the important thing.”

  “Right.”

  “All’s well that ends well, I guess.”

  “Provided it’s ended.”

  Her brow lifted. “Is there some sort of message in there?”

  I thought about Ted Evans, a man lonely enough to go to parties with sexy dancers, a man vulnerable enough to lust after his sexy stepdaughter, a man strong enough to control his urges. I thought about what else I knew that Peggy didn’t, and about what I thought it all meant.

  I shook my head. “The only thing in there is nervous chatter. When’s the wedding?”

  Her hands unlocked. “A month from Sunday. Can you come?”

  “Charley and I are going fishing that weekend.”

  “You hate to fish.”

  “Not a month from Sunday, I won’t.”

  She closed her eyes and lowered her head. There were things I should have said, I suppose, but they weren’t defined enough to say them.

  She looked up and smiled. “It would be nice to have you there, but I understand why it might be difficult.”

  “I’m glad one of us does.”

  Peggy stood up and went to the window and looked out for a long time, even though there was nothing out there to look at except brick and concrete. “Are you still mad at me, Marsh?” Her voice was swallowed by the air conditioner.

  “I was never mad at you.”

  “Yes you were.”

  “For what?”

  “For leaving you.”

  “At this point I’m just happy you were around for as long as you were.”

  “So it’s as simple as that?” she asked the world outside the window.

  “Of course it isn’t. But I think we should try to make it be.”

  She turned and faced me, head raised, spirits high, the grip of the past clearly unfastened. “Ted and I want to thank you for what you did for us.”

  “You and Ted are welcome. Jeff was a big help, by the way. You’re inheriting a nice family.”

  “Thanks.” She searched for a smile and found one in the rag bin, tattered but still serviceable. “You’re a hell of a detective, Marsh Tanner.”

  “You couldn’t tell it from my bank balance.”

  “So what? You’d be the most miserable person in the world if you were rich.”

  “Maybe, but I could always get unrich if it got to be a problem.”

  “But they never do, do they? Get unrich.”

  “Not on purpose.”

  She smiled. “Speaking of bank balances, be sure to send me a bill.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean it, Marsh.”

  “I know you do, Peggy.”

  She avoided my grin by glancing at her watch. “I don’t think I’ll have time to give you that tour.”

  “No problem.”

  “Maybe next time you’re in town.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a date. Well …”

  “Well …”

  “I guess I’d better be going.”

  “Back to the structure.”

  “You make it sound like a prison.”

  “I meant it to sound like a castle.”

  “It isn’t that. It’s just … stable.”

  “And safe.”

  “And safe. Safe’s not a bad thing to be at my age.”

  “At any age, probably.”

  She marched over to me and extended her hand. I stood up to shake it, feeling like the loser at a chess match, then feeling a lot worse than that.

  When she reached my side she retracted her hand and bent to kiss me on the cheek. “It was wonderful to see you.”

  “You, too.”

  “You look good. You don’t seem deliriously happy, of course, but then you never did.”

  “Delirium costs too much,” I said, without knowing what it meant, only knowing what I wanted it to mean.

  Peggy started to cry, not in heaving convulsions but in a trickle of simple tears. “I can’t believe I’m going to live the rest of my life without you, sometimes. I don’t even want to live the rest of my life without you, sometimes.”

  I gave her another kiss and patted her on the back. “Try it. You’ll like it.”

  She wiped her cheek and smiled. “I h
ope so, or else I’m the biggest fool the world has ever known. Goodbye, Marsh.”

  “Goodbye, Peggy.”

  “I hope you’ll keep in touch.”

  “I will. And happy wedding, or whatever I’m supposed to say.”

  She went to the door, then turned back. “Marsh?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t learn anything about Ted that I should know, did you? Anything that says I shouldn’t marry him?”

  I knew she was going to ask it, and I’d rehearsed a hundred answers of all shapes and sizes and consequences, and I gave the only one I deemed appropriate: “No. I didn’t learn anything like that at all.”

  I’m not sure she believed me, but she nodded. “Then at least we have a chance. I’ll see you, Marsh.” Her smile contained all the dazzle she could muster and all the pain she couldn’t suppress.

  “See you, Peggy.”

  Only her perfume stayed behind, her perfume and a decade and a half of history that I would carry with me forever.

  At the airport I bought my daughter Eleanor a tiny blue flight suit in the Boeing gift shop—her mother told me she liked it. A week later I mailed Peggy a wedding present: a case of Mondavi cabernet along with a card signed by me and Charley Sleet. A month after that I got a thank-you note with a postmark from Aruba. And that was the last I heard from her.

  But yesterday I got a picture in the mail, an artful nude, framed and matted, complete with an affectionate inscription—not from Nina; from Fiona. I hung it on the office wall next to the painting by Paul Klee that was given to me by a client and which has become the second most important thing in my life now that Peggy no longer wants to be.

  They soothe me, somehow, those curves and swells and pristine surfaces; that practically perfect body makes me think of beauty and bravery and the wonder that is all of us.

  Maybe Nina had a point.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the John Marshall Tanner Mysteries

  CHAPTER ONE

  They call it exsanguination.

  That’s when you lose so much blood that your body stops functioning—the brain ceases to process, the heart arrests, the lungs quit pumping, and at some point they pronounce you dead. By the time they got me to the hospital, exsanguination was a distinct possibility—I’d lost nine pints of blood, almost half the allotment for a man my size. Another point or two down on the dipstick and I’d be in a coffin down in Colma. They told me later that if I’d been Roman Catholic they would have administered Last Rites.

  As it was, they tried to save me with some slightly less exalted emissaries who go by the name of surgeons. I was alive because I’d had the good fortune to be shot on the side of Potrero Hill just opposite San Francisco General Hospital, which is where the ambulance took me, which put me in the hands of one of the great trauma teams in the country. They would never claim that they were the only ones in the world who could have saved me that night, but that was probably close to the truth.

  The reason I was bleeding was a gunshot. The bullet had taken out a chunk of my spleen and kidney and had nicked the renal artery on its way through as well. All of them are gorged with blood and all of them leak like a sieve when you cut them. Hence exsanguination.

  Most of my blood lay puddled on the ground in a scruffy vacant lot on Twentieth Street east of Illinois Street down by the bay. The lot was next to an abandoned powerhouse that served as the de facto headquarters for a group of rogue cops who called themselves the Triad. There was a lot of Triad blood in that lot as well, but the cops who died that night didn’t bleed to death, they died far more expeditiously, courtesy of a bullet in the back of the head.

  The person who shot the cops and also shot me was a man named Charley Sleet, who’d spent most of his life as a detective lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department. Charley didn’t shoot me because he wanted to kill me, he shot me because he wanted me to kill him. The reason I didn’t want to kill him was that Charley was my best friend. As it turned out, I shot him anyway, partly accidentally and partly on purpose, but not before Charley shot the two ringleaders of the Triad in cold blood. The bottom line was, I survived but Charley didn’t. That was the way Charley had wanted to end it, for reasons having to do with courage and honor and friendship and essential things like that, but for me it was the beginning of what would surely be a lifelong nightmare.

  Charley was dead because I’d shot him in the heart, not because I was a great marksman, but because his heart was such a big target. Impossible to miss, really, because Charley Sleet was the best man I’d ever known, the bravest and kindest, the most energetic and altruistic person on the planet or at least the portion of it that was familiar to me. It’s certain I will never know his equal and will never find solace for the fact that I’d killed him, even though he wanted me to, even though he was already dying from a disease that would have felled him eventually anyway. The best I can hope for is to find a way to live with it. Which was what I’d been doing for the past six weeks, when I wasn’t busy trying to stay alive.

  I’d been in surgery for nine hours, in Intensive Care for ten days, and was into my seventh week of recovery in a semiprivate room on the third floor of the west wing of the giant hospital. There’d been the initial wound and then there had been complications—some sepsis and some staph—so I was laced with a variety of medications, plenty of everything except for the pain. The pain filled me like water fills balloons, occupied me, expanded me, and warped me to the point that it was all I could think of, all I could remember or project, all that I prayed to be delivered from—I went from being afraid I would die to praying I would die quickly to being terrified that I would have to live with such towering waves of pain forever. I made so many bargains with a God whose existence I seldom admit to in normal times that my conversations with Him sounded like a shopping trip to the Casbah, haggling over a hand-loomed rug.

  A bargain had finally been struck, on terms that would presumably not be fully known till Judgment Day—the pain had subsided and the sepsis and staph had vanished as inexplicably as when they first appeared. Now for the first time I was going to be allowed visitors. I had on clean jammies; an aide had trimmed my hair and shaved me and helped me take a shower, then changed my limp sheets. Such as I was, I was prepared to receive my public.

  The first person to come calling was Ruthie Spring, one of my oldest friends, widow of the detective who’d first schooled me in the trade almost twenty years ago. Ruthie is a former combat nurse and sheriff’s deputy who is now a private investigator herself as the heiress to her husband’s agency. As usual, she arrived in a hail of curses.

  “Damn it all, Marsh, I thought those white-coated faggots’d never let me in here. They act like you’re a frigging rock star coming off a smack habit and I’m in hire to the Enquirer.”

  I laughed at Ruthie’s outfit as much as at her outrage. She was dripping with a variety of silver jewelry in the shape of stirrups and lassos and horseshoes and such and was wearing a suede suit cut like a barrel racer’s. After her first husband, Harry, was murdered, Ruthie had married money in the form of a guy named Conrad. Conrad thinks Ruthie likes horses. Ruthie can’t seem to get it through his head that she regards horses the way she regards telemarketers.

  “The only thing I’ve got in common with rock stars is I’m pierced in too many places,” I said.

  She regarded my IV and my oxygen tube and nodded. “Heard it was bad. Which figures, given it was Sleet who drilled you. Looks like you been rode hard and put up wet.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Ruthie reddened at the possibility that she’d insulted me. “But you look real good, Sugar Bear. Losing a pound or two won’t hurt you a bit. Going to come through this just fine, long as he didn’t shoot off your pecker.”

  “Still intact in that department.”

  Ruthie swooped toward a chair, dragged it to the bedside, and sat down and crossed her legs. Her boots were made out of some species that was probably endanger
ed; her suede pants were flared at the bottom the way mine had been in the seventies. Ruthie was one of a kind.

  She glanced at the door to make sure it was all the way shut, then thrust a hand into the depths of her massive handbag of hand-tooled pink leather. “Got some twenty-year-old unblended in here, Sugar Bear. How about I pour you a stiff shot?”

  “Too early for that, I’m afraid.”

  “Hell, it’s almost three o’clock. Most of Texas has been drunk for two hours.”

  “I meant in my recovery. Some of my holes are still holes—wouldn’t want it to leak all over the floor.”

  Ruthie shrugged and walked to the closet. “It’ll be in here when you need it.”

  “Thanks.”

  She fished in her bag again. “How about some Oreos?”

  Ruthie had come armed with my primary nutritional passions. “I think I’d better stick to hospital food awhile longer.”

  She looked at me as though I’d gone mad. “Must not be as bad as they say.”

  “The food? It’s worse.”

  Ruthie regarded me with skepticism. “You’re going to be back to normal at the end of this, aren’t you, Sugar Bear?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “No permanent damage?”

  “Not that they know of.”

  “So you’ll get back whatever it was Sleet took out of you.”

  I resisted the temptation to ask what Ruthie thought that was. “So they say.”

  Something in my face must have told her I was running down in terms of social voltage. “Well, I’ll be toddling off. Just wanted to let you know me and Conrad are thinking of you.”

  “Appreciate it, Ruthie. You guys are still good, right?”

  “Hell, yeah. Take more than a frisky husband to bring me down. Long as they keep making lubricants, I’ll be the best little wife in Pacific Heights.”

  I laughed. “How old are you anyway, Ruthie?”

  “Sixty-three come next month.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Tempus seems to fucking fugit whether you give it permission or not.”

  I looked around my cheerless room. “I sure as hell hope so,” I said.