If I was going to pursue this logically, then I had to think logically. And it seemed to me that whoever killed the girl had known about the car. I couldn’t believe she would have talked to anyone else — I suspected she only spoke to me because I was in uniform. And if I made that assumption, then the only other people who would have known about her, about the car, about the entire business were the people who worked the station.
“Who was working that night?” I asked.
“Mr. Flaherty,” he said.
Mr. Flaherty. Mac Flaherty, whom I’d known since I was a boy. He was a hard decent man who expected work out of his employees, payment from his customers, and good money for a job well done. I’d seen Mac Flaherty in his station, at church, and at school getting his son, and I couldn’t believe he had killed someone.
But then, I had. I had killed a lot of boys overseas, and I would have killed more if Hitler hadn’t proved he was a coward and did the world a favor by dying by his own hand.
And the Mac Flaherty who ran the station now wasn’t the same man as the one I’d known. I’d learned that much in my few short days in McCardle.
A shiver ran down my back. Then I headed inside, looking for Mac Flaherty, and finding him.
***
Mac Flaherty was drunk. Not falling down, noticeable drunk, but his daily drunk, the kind that made a man a bit blurry around the edges, kept him from feeling the pain of day-to-day living, and kept him working a job he no longer liked.
Once Flaherty’d loved his work. It had been obvious in the booming way he’d greet new customers, in the smile he wore every day whether going or coming from work.
But then he left for the war, like I did, only he came back in ’43 minus three fingers on his left hand to find his wife did shacking up with the local undertaker, and a half-sibling for his son baking in the oven. The wife, not him, took advantage of the McCardle’s divorce laws, and Flaherty was never the same. She and the undertaker left that week, and apparently, Flaherty never saw his kid again.
I went inside the service station’s main area, and the smell of beer mixed with the stench of gasoline. Flaherty was clutching a can, staring at me.
“You harassing the kid?” he asked.
“No,” I said, even though I felt that wasn’t entirely true. “I was just curious about the woman who died.”
“She something to you?” Flaherty asked.
“Only met her the once,” I said.
“Then what’s the interest?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and we both seemed surprised by my honesty. “Your boy says he left her sitting outside. That true?”
Flaherty shrugged. “I never saw her. Not when I locked up.”
“What about her car?”
“Her car,” he repeated dully. “Her car. I had it towed.”
“At night?”
“That morning,” he said. “When it became clear she skipped out on me.”
“Towed where?” I asked.
“My place,” he said. “For parts.”
And those parts had probably already been taken, along with anything incriminating. I didn’t say that aloud, though.
“You have any idea who killed her?” I asked.
“What do you care?” he asked, gaze suddenly back on me, and sharper than I would have expected.
I thought of Jed then, Jed as I’d seen him that day, staring at me, that flat look on his face. “If Jed killed her —”
“I didn’t see Jed touch nobody,” Flaherty said. “And I wouldn’t say if I did.”
I froze. “Why not?”
Flaherty frowned, his eyes small and bloodshot. “He’s the best mechanic I got.”
“But if he killed someone —”
“He didn’t kill no one.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“What happened, happened,” Flaherty said. “Let’s not go wrecking more lives.” Then he grabbed the bottle of beer he’d been nursing, and took a sip, his crippled hand looking unbalanced in the grimy afternoon light.
***
By the time I got back with the sheriff, Jed was gone. Not that it mattered. The case went down on the books as unsolved. What else could it have been with the other kid denying he’d even talked to me, and Mac Flaherty swearing that the girl’d been fine when he drove by at midnight, fine and unwilling to leave her post near the Coke machine. He’d winked at the sheriff when he’d told that story, and the sheriff seemed to accept it all.
I went to Jed’s apartment, and found the door open, all his clothes missing, and a neighbor who said that Jed had run in, not even bothering to change, and packed a bag, took some money from a jam jar he’d had under his bed, and disappeared down the highway, never to be seen again.
He’d been driving one of Flaherty’s rebuilds.
When I found out, I told the sheriff, and the sheriff’d been unimpressed. “Man can leave town if’n he wants,” the sheriff said. “Don’t mean he killed nobody.”
No, I suppose it didn’t. But it seemed like a huge coincidence to me, the girl getting beaten to death, Jed watching us talk, and then, when he knew I’d left for the law, disappearing like he did.
It was just the sheriff saw no percentage in pursing the case. It’d been interesting when he could come after me because of my family, because of the power we had, but it soon lost its appeal when the girl’s family took her away. Took her away, and pointed the finger at a good local boy, a mechanic who could down some beers and tell great jokes, who’d gone off to serve his country same as the rest of us. Jed had had worth to the sheriff; the girl had had none.
***
I don’t know why he killed her. We’ll never know now. Jed disappeared but good, and wasn’t heard from until five years ago, when what was left of his family got an obituary mailed to them from somewhere in Canada. He’d died not saying a word —
***
Sorry. Got interrupted there. Was going to come back to it this afternoon, but things changed this morning.
About nine a.m., I walked into my front room, buttoning one of my best shirts in preparation for yet another meeting with that pretty doctor down at the glass-and-chrome White Elephant, when I saw Sarah sitting in my best chair, feet on the footstool my granny hand-stitched, and all forty hand-written pages of this memory in her hands. She was reading raptly which I found flattering for the half second it took to realize what she was doing. I didn’t want any one to read this stuff until I was dead, and here was my granddaughter staring at the pages as if they were something outta Stephen King.
She looked up at me, her heart-shaped face so like Sally Anne’s at that age that it made my breath catch, and said, “So you think you’re some bad guy for failing this woman.”
I shook my head, but the movement didn’t stop her.
“You,” she says, “who’ve done more for people — black, white or purple — than anyone else in this town. You, who went opened that civil rights law practice back east, who fought every racist law and every racist politician you could find. For godssake, Gramps, you marched with Dr. King, and you were a presidential advisor on Civil Rights. You’re the kinda man who shows the rest of us how to live our lives, and you’re feeling like this? You’re being silly.”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“Damn straight,” she said, and I winced, as I always do, at the sailor language she uses. “You shouldn’t be mulling over this any more. You did what you could, and more, it seems, than anyone else.”
“And even that wasn’t enough.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “that happens, Gramps. You know that. Hell, you taught it to me.”
Seems I did. But that wasn’t the point either, and I didn’t know how to tell her. So I didn’t. I took the papers from her, put them back on my desk where they belonged, and let her drive me to the doctor so that they both could feel useful.
And all the way there and all the way back, I thought about how to make my point so that girls like her w
ould understand. You see, the world is so different now, and yet it’s still the same. Just the faces change, and a few of the rules.
These days, Jed would’ve been arrested, or the sheriff would’ve been bounced out of office, or the press’d make some huge scandal over the whole thing.
But it wouldn’t be that simple, because pretty women don’t approach strange men any more, especially if the strange men are in uniform, and pretty women certainly don’t wait alone in gas stations while their cars are being repaired.
But they’re still dying, because they’re women or because they’re black or because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there’s so damn many of them we just shrug and move on, shaking our heads as we go.
But that isn’t my point. My point is this:
I wouldn’t have marched with Dr. King if it weren’t for that poor girl, and I wouldn’t have made it my life’s work to stamp out all the things that cause the condition I found myself in that hot afternoon, the condition that would have led me to ignore a girl if I’d noticed the true color of her skin.
Because I think I know why she died that day. I think she died because she’d flirted with me.
And that just wasn’t done between girls like her and men like me.
Jed wouldn’t have taken her to the desert if she were white. He would’ve thought she had family, she had someone who missed her. He might have roughed her up for talking to me. He might have had a few words with me.
But he didn’t. I did something unspeakable to people of our generation, and he saw a way to get back at me. If I’d talked to her, then I’d want to do what was probably done to her before she died. And if she’d fought, then I’d have bashed her. That’s what the sheriff was thinking. That’s what Jed wanted him to think.
And all because of who she was, and who I was, and who Jed was.
The sad irony is that if I’d kept my place, she’d be alive, and because I didn’t, she was dead. That had bothered me then, and bothers me now. Seems a man — any man — should be able to talk to whomever he wants. But bothered me worse was that fact that when I learned, on the same morning, that she was black and that she was dead, it bothered me more that she was black and that I had talked to her.
It just wasn’t done.
And I was more worried about my own blindness than I was about one woman’s life.
Since that day, hers is the face I see every morning when I wake up, and every night when I doze. And, if God gave me the chance to relive any day in my life, it’d be that one, not, strangely, the day I enlisted or the day I deliberately misunderstood that German kid asking for clemency, but the day I inadvertently led a pretty girl to her death.
White liberal guilt maybe.
Or maybe it was the last straw, somehow.
Or maybe it was the fact that I had so much trouble learning her name.
Learning her name was harder than learning the identity of the man who killed her. It took me three more weeks and a bribe to the 12-year-old son of the owner of the funeral home.
Not that her name really mattered. To me or to anyone else.
But it mattered to her, and to that man in uniform with the red, red eyes. Because it was the only bit of her that couldn’t be sold for parts. The only bit she could call completely hers.
Lucille Johnson.
Not quite as exotic as I would have thought, or as fitting to a woman as beautiful as she was. But it was hers. And in the end, it was all she had.
It was a detail.
An important detail.
And one I’ll never forget.
“Details” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1998.
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