Joe shook his head. “He’s a saint.”
The sheriff smiled and nodded in agreement. “While I was relieving my concerns over your safety—”
“Concerns for my safety?”
“Yes. While I was relieving my concerns,” he smiled again, “I found your clothes hanging in the bathroom.”
“They were wet,” Joe said. “I only have two suits. When one gets wet, I hang it up to dry.”
“Yes. I figured so.” He nodded and added as though they were buddies talking about the weather, “I’ve had to change my clothes every day for the past few weeks, it’s been so wet. You too?”
“Yes,” Joe said, uncomfortable with the false intimacy.
“I see. So you changed since yesterday. Those were your clothes you wore last night?”
“Yes,” Joe said, hesitantly.
“I see.” He nodded. “Well Snyder, here,” he motioned toward the uniform standing next to Joe. “Snyder notices this dark spot on your pants. He and I looked at it pretty damn close and, by God, it sure looked like blood. Now where did you happen to get blood on you last night?”
Joe felt tired and small, small and tired enough to hang his feet over the side of a thin dime. He scratched his chin and frowned as though he did not understand how a collection of trifles could build into something important. The whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.
The sheriff did not wait for Joe’s answer. He stepped closer to Joe and said, “You keep showing up in my sights, Joe. I don’t like it, but there you are. I don’t know why you might have killed Gresham. His inheritance?” He shrugged. “The oldest motive in the world. Where the Frenchies might fit in, I don’t know that either. That relationship is what I need, and maybe this here list will help provide that. I still hope that what I’m thinking is bunk, but I keep inching closer to charging you. I need all them ducks in a row before I pull the trigger. So to speak.”
“So to speak,” Joe echoed.
The pit Joe had fallen into kept collapsing around him. His mind flashed suddenly on an English trench he had waded through during one of his first days on the Western Front. The mud and excrement had clung to his pants and shoes. As he had felt then, he again felt wrapped inside the paranoia of having wandered into his own grave.
“Why would I kill my best friend?”
The deputy, Snyder, snorted sarcastically.
“Why does anyone kill anyone?” asked Jackson.
Joe sighed. He couldn’t argue with that. “You’re looking in the wrong bucket. You should look a little more closely at the Frenchmen in that accident and the names on that list.” However, he could not shake the feeling that all he was doing was circling the drain.
The sheriff nodded his head and moved the wad of tobacco from cheek to cheek. “I didn’t say they weren’t involved. They were. In their automobile, I found a box that held a bunch of papers.”
“They had Gresham’s manuscript?”
Joe saw the sudden flash in the sheriff’s eyes, the wattage turn up as he put two and two together and came up with MOTIVE—another piece Jackson thought he needed to complete his puzzle. Joe watched those eyes move and brighten. There are times in one’s life when you just want to knock your head against the wall, hard. This was one of those times.
“What about this manuscript?” the sheriff asked, leaning forward toward Joe. “What I found might be something Gresham was writing, but it got all wet and muddy. I only got me a few pages with good writing on them.”
And Joe remembered Jackson spilling the paper contents of a box in the snow and rain and mud. That would be at the top of his stir list.
The uniform said, “That’s what he went back to the house for, to find that manuscript.” He stabbed at Joe with his finger.
“What about it, Joe?” Jackson asked.
Joe wiped his brow. “I don’t know that much about it,” he said, his words flat. “Gresham had mentioned it to me but never really talked about it. I believe it was about a battle that he was in, the Champagne.”
He looked at the sheriff and then at Snyder, the uniform, and met blank stares from each. The empty eyes of the ignorant. Anyone who was there, even if not in the battle itself, would know. Anyone in western Europe would know. Separated by four thousand miles of water from France, however, Americans didn’t have the visceral attachment to the war that those in Europe had, especially with a president whose campaign had rested on a plank of forgetting—putting the war in the past, forgetting it like it was just a child’s bad dream.
He continued, “If the Frenchmen had taken it, it must have been important. Whatever’s in it might tell you who killed him.”
“I think we know that already,” Snyder said under his breath.
“Maybe I can make something of those pages you saved, and maybe we should go back and see if any of the other pages are still readable.”
The sheriff rocked back on his heels as though he might actually consider Joe’s idea. He pulled a loose piece of tobacco from his upper lip and rolled it between finger and thumb, and he squinted at Joe, his jaw working at the wad in his cheek and greasing the rusty wheels of his mind to make all the cogs mesh.
After a moment of silence filled with the whispers of others in the room, the surrounding gallery of newsmen, Snyder offered his views, stretching over the sheriff’s shoulder to look down on Joe. He spoke quickly, as though he feared he might lose the words before they reached his lips. “Is that why you was driving out to meet the Frenchies after they killed Gresham? You hired them to murder him because you couldn’t do it yourself, and they were supposed to meet you out on the road and exchange the papers for money? Them being Frenchies, though, they don’t drive so good and your whole plan goes to hell.”
Joe withheld the impulse to show Snyder exactly how shallow violence remained beneath his surface and said to the sheriff, “I told you that I never saw the manuscript. I don’t know what was in it, but those Frenchmen obviously did.”
“I see,” said the sheriff, “and how do I know you never saw this manuscript?”
“Because I’m telling the truth.”
Another snort from Snyder.
“I see,” the sheriff said, nodding and pulling at his chin. He cocked an eyebrow and smiled. “Only thing, though, a man who’d kill someone certainly wouldn’t shy from a little lie, now would he?”
“Shit,” said Snyder with a grunt. “You as much as did it yourself.”
Joe ignored him, a big man with a little-man problem.
“We talked with Willie,” the sheriff added, working himself into Snyder’s groove. “He said that when you left, you said you were headed home to sleep.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Shit,” said Snyder again. “He changed his mind. I think you was laying down an alibi.” He added derisively, “Gee, Sheriff, I was home asleep. Just go ask Willie and he’ll tell ya’.” He offered a staccato laugh.
The sheriff waved his hand for Snyder to calm down. “Like I said, Joe, when I do finally figure this whole mess out, I hope it’s not what it looks like. Either way, though, you and I will talk more. Until then, I don’t want to see your vehicle heading out of town. Understand?”
Joe did not respond.
The sheriff walked away, followed closely by his small entourage. In their wake a void quickly filled with the tale-bearing babble of men whose lives were spent observing other people’s worlds.
After the door closed behind them and the sound of their heels faded, Joe continued to listen. The room felt as though it had turned alien to him. He remained sitting on the edge of the desk, his nerves risen with the room’s noise and his ears shaking from the unforgotten din of distant cannonades. He felt as though he had once again been let down in a wasteland. He had not felt that way in years, not since the war, but the feeling was as raw as the previous night.
He pushed himself from the desk onto unsteady legs. Under his coat, the back of his shirt felt cold and damp. He flexed his mu
scles involuntarily. How good a whiskey would taste, how good any liquid would taste but especially a double whiskey, flashed through his brain. His mouth had dried completely. He could not work any moisture into it and he considered going to Willie’s for a snort or ten. He decided to postpone that surrender until the evening.
He stood in the light from the window but the light no longer held any warmth. Clouds had veiled the sun, dropping a flat gray through the room, the reflected gray like that of water-filled shell holes echoing a bleak and hollow sky, the gray of empty and pitted helmets lost in the avid mud, the gray of a dead man’s face.
He sat in his chair with his back to the hum of the newsroom. The envelope lay on his desk. He fingered it open. A first-class ticket on a Cunard liner to Cherbourg leaving New York on Monday, the next day. Joe rubbed the ticket between his fingers as though testing its validity. He again checked the date against a wall calendar and exhaled a long breath as he sat heavily in the wooden chair.
Gresham had planned a trip to France. Joe’s first thought was to open the window, to call down to the sheriff, ask him to come back up, and then show him the ticket. Joe’s second thought, however, was that the sheriff was peering through blinders. Anything that did not point toward Joe in a noose would be bent in such a way that it would. He sat back, his finger rubbing a trail along the ticket as though divining truths. He wondered why Gresham would so suddenly want to explore his past, a past that for Joe, at least, was still raw in its wounds.
Gresham’s trip may have been a simple return to the land where he and Joe and so many other young men had lost their innocence and youth. Joe had read of others returning to France’s growing expatriate population, American soldiers whose lives had been formed in the furnal fires of the war and who had returned to find what had been removed from them in that dark time. Like him, they had gone to war in support of the hollow words of the last century only to find an obscenity in those words. Now they returned in search of something to fill their resulting voids—jazz and drink and sex. However, Joe doubted any such thing in Gresham’s visit, for Gresham had been a man who held concrete reasons for the things he did. Joe knew that Gresham would not have returned to France on an errant desire for recapturing a lost youth.
Holding the ticket in the fingertips of both hands, rubbing the coarse and heavy paper, he could not shake the feeling that Gresham had planned his trip for a very specific reason and that reason had gotten him killed.
The man’s secrets may have killed him and Joe wondered whether the intended dinner the night before, had it occurred, would have pulled Joe into the swirl of murder, a swirl he had been pulled into anyway. Gresham had wanted to talk about his manuscript, a book about the war, and Joe had supposed that it was another in a long line of journalist rehashes of what had been gained and what had been lost in a war that meant nothing other than a great deal of death. Sitting across from Gresham’s empty chair, Joe knew he had been wrong.
He wondered where copies of the manuscript might have ended up. The dead Frenchmen had one copy, which left at least one more and probably two for Gresham would have carboned copies somewhere. He knew two things for certain: If he had the manuscript he might be able to find the real killer, and, second, he had only guesses as to where another copy might exist.
Joe closed his eyes and conjured the piece of paper that had been clipped to the envelope. Champagne and the date. A name—Paul something. He concentrated. Something like Dullard. Dillard. A place, maybe an address. Paris. Place André des Arts No numbers, no address numbers. He wrote it all down on the envelope.
Before leaving the newsroom, Joe pocketed the enveloped ticket safe inside its folds. It was his now.
If I am to be a fool, he thought, I am to be my own fool.
A small puddle from the morning’s rain had formed around the base of the coat rack, having fallen in drips from his overcoat. He stepped to avoid the water as he lifted his coat from the rack to walk swiftly from the room.
Just before the door, he turned to look once more at the desk with the sense that he had overlooked something telling. As though a broken light shined on it, he saw the typewriter with its triple pages rolled and waiting for the next beat of metal keys.
Early in Gresham’s mentoring of him, Gresham had told him always to carbon his pages, always make a copy of everything he wrote. He closed his eyes. Joe could think of only three places Gresham might have left a copy of his manuscript—in his desk at home, in his desk at work, in his box at the bank. That left two places for Joe to look.
He pulled the watch from his pocket and checked the time—9:56. Noon would be the best time to search Gresham’s bank box, for only the newest and least experienced bank workers would be at their desks. That, at least, would provide two hours to find the appropriate keys. Those would be somewhere in Gresham’s home.
The gray day became a cold drizzle of snow as Joe pulled his Hudson across lanes and headed out of town. He checked his mirror and watched as another vehicle, a black Ford like every other black Ford in America, fell in behind him, keeping a discreet distance but turning when he turned and slowing when he slowed.
Joe changed his plans.
At the next intersection, he turned north, away from Gresham’s house and parked in front of the National Bank, a brick building three stories high with sandstone framing the windows and a large double door.
Even though he knew the answer, Joe asked the receptionist for directions to the bank’s box vault, setting the hook for when his tails asked. She pointed him to the stairs at the rear of the building. Instead of walking down the stairs to the basement, however, he went up one flight and waited for two policemen, Snyder and another uniform, to follow his lead. He watched from the railing above as they descended before he walked back down and back through the bank’s lobby and out the front.
He drove past their black Ford, which was parked a block down the street and had the city’s insignia painted on its doors in white paint. He double parked in the road. Ignoring the horns of others on their way to or from work, he used his pocket knife to loosen the valve stem in one of the front Firestones before driving off, watching his mirrors the entire distance but seeing no other cars following him.
A wet and heavy snow began to fall in earnest, coming down in sheets and again sending alley cats inside to chase basement rats. Joe wondered whether he was the chasing cat or the fleeing rat.
Gresham’s home was drenched in a pall. The morning had been pulled down around the house to lay soggy on the structures and ground. Water dripped from the corners of the roof. The driveway was still muddy from the previous rains and was beginning to be layered in white. The air was colder than in town, offering a promise of a full winter’s snow.
Joe saw no new tracks in the mud of the long driveway and parked out of sight behind the brick garage, hoping the snow would turn full enough to erase his own tire tracks. With his overcoat wrapped around his shoulders, he pulled his fedora down tight and ran from the garage to the overhang of the front porch.
The front door was closed but not locked. Joe felt the unpleasantly familiar feeling of having been there before. Not just the previous night. The sudden vision of death the night before mixed in kaleidoscope quickness with deaths from a further past.
The first step into Gresham’s foyer echoed in the silence of the house as well as memory. The hush of death. The rain dripping outside, the mantel clock ticking down, the haunted sounds of emptiness. Joe listened to the absence of life sounds, his ears warm as though from a low-grade fever, until he felt certain that he was alone. He walked through the foyer and into the room where Gresham had been killed, draping his wet overcoat on the back of a chair.
A faint light of day from behind drawn curtains was all that lit the room. Joe stood for a moment before he pushed the wall button to turn on the ceiling light. The room appeared much as he had last seen it. Small stains of blood had dried on the sofa and wood floor. The sofa, however, had been pulled farther f
rom the wall as the sheriff’s deputies had been searching for something behind it. An imprint of death remained in the cushions of the sofa as though a ghost still lay there. Everything else in order. Joe thought that there should be something, some marker, some monument to signal the death of a good man. But the room was empty and it left him feeling hollow.
The desk drawer which had been open the night before had been closed. He opened it and found a lidless cigar box of pencils, stacks of writing paper and carbon paper. Beneath that was a single letter with a French postmark. He pocketed the letter without opening or reading it. An empty space in the drawer the size of a ream of paper signaled the absence of something. Gresham’s manuscript. The original had been taken from there, that he was certain of. The Frenchmen had lifted the manuscript from the desk drawer and left without closing it.
Joe rubbed his mouth, thinking how he had become so familiar with death that he would even notice whether an assassin should stop to close a desk drawer after murdering a man. During the war, he had known men who ate meals in between sniper shots, killing a man then having a spoonful of weak stew, and he knew one man who had sung lullabies during the pitch of battle, killing other men while he sang “The Land of Nod.” The infinities and incongruities of violence had cauterized the world’s emotions.
The other drawers held books from the public library in Greenwich about the Great War, a war fought to end all wars except those still fought in the spectral memories of young men.
Folded pieces of paper marked pages in several of the books, all noted pages concerned with the same battle in Northern France at the Champagne in which Gresham had participated. That was where Gresham had watched as so many of his comrades charged to their death in a day that had netted no land. Joe had heard rumors of incompetence and of treason surrounding that battle, but he had heard that about many battles, along with the tales of angels in the trenches and ghost spies and cannibal traitors and vampires who populated the cratered no-man’s land between the trench lines. Since the war, he had paid little attention to any of the rumors, knowing that the true cannibals were the old men in politician’s suits who had sent young men to their deaths.
Death of a Century Page 5
