Black Widower

by Thomas Laird

  “I don’t know why she picked you to fix things, Leonard. You’re a lot of things, but crusader or savior or hand of justice? Isn’t that a little too much to ask of a stranger? You’re no blood or relation to her at all. I think it’s just unfair.”

  She takes a scoop of potatoes onto her plate, but she leaves it untouched and looks back up at him.

  “We had a guy in our bunch in the Seals who used to be one of those evangelical preachers. He didn’t try to convert any of us or anything, though. I think he said he was fallen away from the faith. He said God wasn’t going to stop the commies, so he figured it was his job. Anyway, he kept talking about a piece from the Book. Something about ‘am I not my brother’s keeper?’ Jesus said it or somebody said it, but I don’t remember who.”

  “You’re her brother? How’d that happen?”

  He smiles at his pregnant wife.

  “We’re all supposed to be brothers and sisters. One big extended family. We sure as shit don’t act that way in this world, which is why Jesus’d likely get himself stuck in a looney bin if he ever came back the way he said he would.”

  “For a non-religious, non-church-goin’ man, Leonard, you sound like you actually believe in all that Sunday stuff.”

  “I didn’t always believe, Joellen, but there were times when we were in deep shit in the jungle that I tried to. I didn’t know who else to ask to come save my sorry ass.”

  Leonard shovels some food on his plate. Suddenly he feels ravenous.

  “Be nice not to have to go toe to toe with those slimy bastards in the bayou for a living, anymore. And the baby could have the good stuff, and maybe college. But I just can’t stop thinkin’…”

  “Thinkin’ about what, Leonard?”

  “You know what. Her. I get all this happiness heaped on me all at once, and she’s stuck out there, with nothing and nobody to give a damn about her.”

  Joellen poured some gravy on her mashed potatoes, but she let the food sit and get cold while she watched him pack away his food.

  *

  The writer showed up on the button, that next Wednesday. He brought Leonard to the Holiday Inn on the highway outside Plank, and the two talked for three hours without a break.

  But before he got Leonard’s story onto his tape recorder, he presented the check to Tare, and then he gave him his copy of the contract to be signed.

  Carter was a tall, lean man, deeply tanned as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. He was in his mid-forties, Leonard guessed, and he was bald with a beard that was neatly shaved, close to his face and chin. He looked the famous author, and Tare could picture him on his dust jacket photo. The man looked like a college professor, and he told Leonard he worked at The University of Rhode Island when he wasn’t writing books. He taught history, Carter explained.

  Leonard gave him his story, from high school to the Seals to the jungles in Southeast Asia. Carter explained he’d need a few days to complete his interview, and later they could do some more talking over the phone. He told Tare that he was free to consult an attorney about the contract before he signed it, but Leonard got the pen from him and inked in his name right away. He thought if he waited, he’d wake up from a dream and the check and George Carter would disappear.

  They were wrapping up the first session in George’s suite at the Holiday when Leonard asked him a question out of nowhere.

  “You believe in ghosts, George?”

  “I’m a Catholic. The Holy Ghost, yeah.”

  “I don’t mean Jesus. I mean other people coming back from the dead.”

  “I suppose I’m skeptical.”

  “You a late-night kind of guy?” Leonard smiled.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m a night owl.”

  “Want to see something interesting?” Leonard proposed.

  *

  Leonard picked up the writer at 11:30 P.M. that same night. While he drove, he gave him the tale about slitting open the gator’s belly only to find a human head in its innards. Then he told him about the cops from Chicago who came down to visit and about the real topic of the story—Jennifer.

  “You’re saying she’s out on that dock at night?”

  Leonard nodded as they entered his property by the shack. They got out of the pickup and headed right to the decrepit dwelling with the new air conditioner and roof. The new shingles looked out of place for what lay beneath them, Carter thought, but it was hard to see clearly in the darkness of midnight. There was only the glow from the half-moon above.

  They went in the shack, and Leonard retrieved the double-barreled sawed off shotgun.

  “Is that necessary?” Carter asked his guide.

  “There are big fellas out in that swamp. They like to come up at you before you have time to pass gas. This is our equalizer. Don’t worry, though. We won’t go out to the end of the dock. That’s where it usually stands, but they can’t hurt her anymore. No one can.”

  Carter’s face betrayed a bit of trepidation.

  “Don’t worry, George. You’re with a Seal and a Medal of Honor winner. Gators won’t get you.”

  The writer laughed nervously, but he followed very closely behind Tare as they walked out toward the dock.

  The figure was forming as they stepped on the land’s side of the pier.

  “She’ll take a minute.”

  “What in the hell is that?” Carter sputtered.

  “Swamp gas, probably. Don’t you think?”

  Leonard laughed, but George Carter didn’t find the situation amusing.

  “She won’t harm you. And you haven’t got any hair left on your head, George.”

  “The hair on the back of my neck is standing up all by itself.”

  “She has that effect on people.”

  Carter blinked, and then he stared at Leonard.

  “Did you put something in my drink?”

  “We haven’t had a chance to be drinking, have we?”

  The figure had now become very familiar to Leonard.

  The mist turned on its axis.

  “Does…Does it say anything?” the writer whispered.

  “You don’t have to talk in a hush. I believe it can hear us. But no, it never says a goddam word.”

  “How can you be certain it’s this woman, Jennifer. Maybe it’s just swamp gas, like you said.”

  “No, George. It’s like knowing someone you love’s with you. It’s more about feeling her presence than seeing what we’re looking at right now. I know who she is, and she’s picked me to haunt because she thinks maybe I can help her.

  “Nuts, right? But you tell me what you see. Give me a better explanation. There’s a billion or two people on this planet who accept that Jesus Christ flipped open his tomb and came back from wherever the dead go when they die. Who the hell says he’s the only one who can pull that parlor trick?”

  Carter’s mouth literally hung open.

  “You’ll catch mosquitoes that way.”

  The writer closed his opened maw.

  The white presence on the dock began to return to vapor, now, and then the mist drifted out onto the swamp water. There was a loud grunting noise, and Leonard Tare lifted up the sawed-off.

  “We better get before we entertain visitors. Sons of bitches are much quicker than you’d think they would be, George.”

  They turned on their heels and went back to the truck. Leonard started it up and headed them back to the Holiday Inn.

  “I can’t write that part of your story. It’d be like reporting a UFO. They’d laugh me out of New York, Leonard.”

  They were sitting at the bar that stayed open until three, at the Holiday. Tare had a beer. He told Carter that he’d have to leave soon because Tare didn’t like leaving Joellen alone late at night. She was still uncomfortable about his occasional night fishing and gator hunts.

  “I hope this doesn’t screw up the book you’re doing about me. It’s still on, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. We have a contract. But I can’t write about this thing tonight, even tho
ugh I saw it with my own eyes. My God, I still have trouble processing any of this.”

  “I took you out there because it’s part of me, whatever that is. She’s inside me, just like those goddamned jungles were. She’s got her spot in me, and she’s never going away.”

  Carter took a belt of his Manhattan.

  “I think I need a priest,” he said and then turned to Leonard and smiled.

  “She don’t need a priest. She needs someone to make it right. And I feel powerless. I feel all slack inside because I can’t help her, myself. I’ve got a wife and she’s pregnant, and I can’t go up north and do the right thing for her. That cop, Parisi, up in Chicago, he wants to get the husband. He’s the one they think did this to her. But the husband was a cop, too, and he knows the system. He knows what they need in court to put him away. And he must be a real sly hombre because he’s still running around loose, the last I heard.”

  “Thanks for the drink, Leonard. Go home and kiss your wife. Get some sleep. I’ll come get you around one. Dinner for you and Joellen is on me, tomorrow night.”

  Tare finishes his beer and places his right hand on the writer’s arm.

  “She’ll be out there until someone gets off his ass. I feel responsible. I know I shouldn’t. But there it is, George. There it is.”

  *

  The writer finished his recordings on that Friday night, and then he took his Mercedes and headed back north and east, to New York, to the Lower East Side where he kept a cat in his apartment. Carter’d been divorced for three years, he’d told Tare.

  Leonard heard from the State Police on that same Friday afternoon. He had been accepted into the State Police Academy, and he was to report there on the following Monday morning at 8:00 A.M. sharp.

  “Looks like I got a job, honey,” he told his wife after he put down the receiver. “I think you’re going to start being a stay at home momma, as of Monday. You better tell Tony.”

  Joellen grabbed hold of her old man and squeezed the breath out of him.

  “How’d we ever get so lucky, Leonard?”

  “I don’t know, sweet lady, but I ain’t looking back over my shoulder to see what’s coming up on us.”

  Joellen shot him a quizzical stare, but he smiled and kissed the look of doubt off her face.

  *

  She was out there the next night, as usual, on time, right at midnight. Leonard Tare stood on his end of the dock with the accompanying weapon in his left hand.

  “They won’t let you talk, right?”

  There was no answer. There never was.

  “That man was a big shot writer in New York, but he won’t be writing about you. He damn well saw you, but he thinks they’d hoot him out of the business if he ever wrote what he saw, last night.

  “You sure made a bad choice of who to haunt, Jennifer. You should’ve picked a man who could help you out, instead of me. I got a wife and a child to come, and I already told you I can’t leave.

  “Doesn’t make you feel better, I know. I’ve had my wings clipped, Jennifer. When it was just me alone, who knows?

  “Pretty soon I won’t be coming down here anymore. I got a job with the State Police and I’ll be working. Then this man is writing a whole book about me, and we came into some serious money over it, and Joellen and I might buy a new house, I don’t know where. But I’ll likely sell this land, and the dock with it, and the shack, and I don’t plan on coming back.

  “I hope you understand. I hope somebody will set you free. I just wish it had been me.

  “Forgive me, Jennifer, because I can’t forgive myself.”

  Then Tare turned away and left the billowing fog hovering over the pier, all by itself.

  Chapter 15

  I’ve been watching for signs of her return. I go by the apartment building at least once a day, and I vary my times to see if she’s come back to collect her belongings, and on the fourth day in early May, here she is.

  And unescorted, as well. Carrie has an order of protection against me, but she’s been gone almost a month, and the cops in Chicago can’t keep an eye on her all the time. Now she’s home. I was lucky. She could have easily evaded me, and my next move was to camp out in her apartment and wait for her to open that door, and now she’s saved me the breaking and entering.

  I get out of the car, and when I go inside where the buzzers and the mailboxes are, I open the downstairs entrance with my key. The landlord was too cheap and lazy to replace this lock, and I’m betting he didn’t put a new deadbolt in at her apartment door, either. When I slip the key into the entrance on our old floor, the lock slides open without a sound.

  She must be in the bedroom because no one’s in the living room. She’s left two suitcases in here—I presume she’s going to load them with her vast collection of clothes and underwear and assorted shit.

  I hear someone rustling about in the bedroom, and I make my way there quietly.

  When I enter, she spins about, but before she can cry out, I have my hand on her mouth and I’m shoving her back onto the queen sized bed, and before she can bite me, I stun her with a straight right, directly to her left cheek. It stops her, but it doesn’t knock her out. Carrie’s dazed and paralyzed by the blow to her face, and I take the duct tape out of the gym bag I brought with me, and I bind her mouth and then I tape her hands and feet to the four posters at each corner of the rectangular bed.

  She comes to, groggily. She’s wearing blue jeans and a tee shirt.

  Carrie’s trying to tell me to stop, but the duct tape muffles her thoroughly. All it’s doing is exciting me more.

  I undo her blue jeans and pull them and her panties down below her thighs. Then I take the switchblade out of the gym bag and I cut her left leg loose from the bed poster. I move that leg next to her right, and then I pull the left leg of the pants free. Then I yank her left foot back to where it was bound, and I re-strap the foot.

  I stand next to her at the side of the bed, and I undo my pants and drop my underwear, and I take off my shirt. I remove the ankle holster last and leave everything on the floor.

  By now her eyes are wide, and I can see the terror in them.

  The stuff I injected her with leaves her woozy but ambulatory, and I walk her out to my car in broad daylight. I scan the street up and down, but I can see no signs of surveillance. I have my arm beneath her right armpit, and if anyone were on the street, they might think Carrie was drunk and that I’m just helping her to the car. Her face is blank because this is a very strong cocktail I got from a junkie in Old Town. Carrie never knew what hit her.

  I manage to get her in the car, and I’ve timed it perfectly because the sun is headed down, and by the time we get to my house, it’ll be full dark. I enjoyed her several times in her apartment before I shot her up. I wouldn’t want to inject a woman with this stuff if I were going to do her. It’d be like doing a dead body.

  But that same pusher gave me a syringe loaded with the drug I’ve been looking for all this time.

  Curare. Very exotic shit. Very expensive. And I told the junkman I’d kill him if he ever ratted me on the purchase of those two pharmaceuticals. He doesn’t talk to cops, ever, he told me. So I gave him two, hundred-dollar bills, along with paying him the tab for the shots.

  When I arrive at my place, my haunted castle, I help her out again because this junk lasts for several hours. The old man next door must be out because there’s no light in his windows.

  I get her into the bedroom, and then I just heave her onto the mattress. I won’t have to strap her down for a while, yet. I undress her and throw her things in the corner on the floor. I put clean sheets on in preparation for her homecoming.

  When I’m finished, she’s regaining consciousness. I know I can’t stay in this house for very long because eventually someone will figure out that she’s missing in action, and they’ll call the gendarmes and I’ll be the first name on the list as possibilities. It’s kidnapping if they catch me with her. I can’t have that. I can’t do jail time. C
ops in the shithouse don’t do well, and I don’t need any cellmates who I may have busted in a previous life.

  So we have to be on the road late tonight, no later than midnight, I figure. Carrie’s father might well be calling his little girl to see that she’s all right, and if she doesn’t answer after a few calls, he’ll be calling the cops.

  I’ll kill her here if they show up looking for her, and then I won’t let them take me alive. Might sound dramatic, but like I said, no way am I going inside, at Joliet or Menard or some other state shithole.

  I’ll miss her body, but there are plenty of women. I might even be in her will, unless she’s had time to change it. When we’ve visited Plank, Louisiana, for a second tour, there won’t be a body to find. I’m still wagering they won’t be looking in the swamps for a second corpse. It’s too obvious.

  If I haven’t outsmarted myself.

  But that’s the plan and I’m sticking to it.

  *

  About 11:00 P.M. she begins to come out of it. Her mouth is still duct-taped, and she’s still pretty groggy, so I release her four limbs and re-dress her for our little ride south. I’ll need the tape to help prop her up in the passenger’s seat because she’ll be like a dead fish when she gets the second injection of curare. Carrie will be incapable of movement but she will be conscious and alert. She won’t be able to speak or move, however.

  So I stick her with the curare.

  I don’t have seatbelts in the car, so the tape will have to keep her sitting up for the dozen hours of the straight-through drive. There’s a dumpy little motel about three miles out of Plank that offers a four hour ‘nap,’ but we’ll stay there until midnight or so, and then I’ll drive her out to the bayou where I dumped Jennifer. Soon as I feed her to the night-time wildlife out there, I’ll be on my way back to Chicago.

  She sits still, like a good girl. I’m sure by now the whole police force is looking for her, and probably for me, and they’ll put out an APB for my car.

  So I’ll have to ditch this vehicle in Louisiana and buy another car for the trip home. So I won’t be able to drive right back, after all.