The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  Ed Dieterle tossed his overnight bag into the hatchback of his little one-lung Japanese model, the best the rental agency could do on such short notice. He hoped no one he knew saw him at the wheel; he would have preferred to drive the LTD up from Dallas, but there wasn’t time. Gunther’s granddaughter Tricia had phoned around noon, right after she’d heard, and he’d thrown a couple of changes of clothes into his bag and headed straight for the airport.

  The rain in Wichita had delayed the flight’s takeoff and arrival, and he’d be too late to interview anyone at Lake Vista today. He sent Gunther occasional letters and postcards there, and Gunther usually wrote back, too, his letters seemingly lucid but with only a vague apprehension of recent events. He knew Ed had retired, for example, but each letter expressed fresh surprise at his relocation to Dallas. Sometimes he still sent his love to Daisy.

  Heading east in the feeble remnants of what must have been a real gullywasher, he listened to the news on the radio. Wichita in summertime was as lush and green as it had ever been, but it had changed physically in disorienting ways. New commercial developments had appeared up and down both sides of Kellogg, leaving the occasional familiar landmark intact but surrounded by empty space or strange new buildings and robbed of its context. He felt as though he’d been gone for decades.

  Lake Vista was far to the east, practically at the city limits, in an area that had been mostly undeveloped when he’d left town. Slightly farther east and across the freeway was the Highlander 7 Motel, new to him but with a marquee offering a free continental breakfast and cable TV for only $24.95, with the promise underneath of an even better AARP rate, and he swung across the freeway and through the nearly empty parking lot into the carport next to the office.

  Loretta pulled the Caddy into the detached garage, preoccupied with Gunther; she should have offered to come back and get him after his haircut. She didn’t even know if he had a place to stay, but her gut instinct was that he didn’t.

  She ducked under the garage door as it lowered and cautiously crossed the slick cement to the house. The rain had all but stopped, just a few stray drops splashing her face as she opened the back door, and the sky was so much lighter now it felt earlier in the day than it had when she’d dropped Gunther off.

  Inside the kitchen she grabbed the phone book from the shelf above her desk and looked up Harry’s Barber Shop. Harry answered testily after ten rings. “I’m closed. Open tomorrow at nine.”

  She licked her lips. “Uh . . . Harry?” Her throat was dry and scratchy.

  “That’s me. Who’s this?”

  “My name’s Loretta Gandy. I dropped off a friend there a while ago, and I just wondered if he was still around.”

  “You talking about Gunther?”

  Her spirits rose for a moment. “Yes. Can I talk to him?”

  “Nope. He left in a cab about half an hour ago.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No, he didn’t, and my dinner’s waiting for me at home getting cold. Good night, miss.”

  He hung up on her. At least she knew Gunther had the two hundred dollars; maybe he’d call when it ran out.

  The red light was blinking on the answering machine and she pressed the play button. After the beep came the fuzzy, indistinct sound of Eric’s voice raised over the white noise of a crowded barroom, and even on a Thursday she knew what he was going to say before he was three words into it.

  “It’s me, I’m working late. Gonna grab a bite at Ruby’s with Blake and the guys.”

  “Fine with me,” she said aloud. The knowledge that he was probably on a date bothered her very little, and scanning the fridge for dinner she remembered she had one last load of laundry to dry. Before work that morning she’d put in a full two hours of cleaning; not enough to stay ahead of it, really, just enough that she didn’t have to come home to a messy kitchen.

  She poured herself a glass of white wine, drained it, poured another, and took it downstairs to the basement. She clicked on the light in the big room and could barely stand to look around as she passed through, appalled as ever at the expense of finishing it when Tate and Michelle were both on the verge of going off to school. Now they were out of the house and Eric, as she’d predicted, never used it. The massive, grotesquely expensive pool table he’d insisted on buying sat untouched, like the wet bar he’d installed with the dubious and unappealing claim that it would keep him home nights. She resented the pissed-away money all the more for the fact that despite earning a substantial portion of it she still seemed to have no say in its disbursement.

  In the tiny laundry room she pulled a handful of damp panties, a lingerie bag full of panty hose, and a couple of bras from the washing machine, threw them into the dryer, and after a long, satisfying pull from her glass of wine turned it on and went back upstairs.

  She ate a turkey pot pie in the living room while she watched the last fifteen minutes of an old movie with Clark Gable and William Powell and that woman who always played his wife, whose name she couldn’t quite summon at the moment. Gable died in the chair in the end, which came as a surprise to Loretta, and as the credits rolled she picked up the phone to call her mother and tell her about running into Gunther.

  Gunther’s plans on leaving the nursing home that morning hadn’t evolved far enough to include thoughts of where he’d sleep if he didn’t reach his goal before nightfall. If it hadn’t been raining, he might have slept under the stars. But it was still coming down in sheets when Harry had asked him where he lived and made him realize he was going to have to find a bed for the night. Without the two hundred extra dollars, he would almost certainly have gone looking for one of the old welfare hotels west of Union Station, having forgotten that they’d all been shut down over the course of the last decade or so, replaced by men’s shelters and the sidewalks. With the options the unexpected windfall presented he decided to treat himself to a taxi ride and a good night’s sleep in a real motel, not one of the fancy places out by the highway but one of the nicer cheap ones south of downtown. By the time he’d left Harry’s the rain was tapering off and the sky to the south and west had cleared to a bright yellow-white above the trees and beneath the thunderheads, which had stopped rumbling and whose undersides had become wispy and light gray against the dark main mass of cloud.

  When the cab let him out twenty minutes later in front of the All-American Inn the rain had stopped. As he paid and stepped across the crunchy wet gravel of the motel’s parking lot he saw a very thin, greasy-haired young woman in a black and yellow halter top with STRYPER written across its front approaching him with a lewd smile. “You looking for a date, Grandpa?”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, startled at her brazenness. “You’re a hooker,” he added helpfully.

  She was unfazed by his lack of discretion. “You a policeman?”

  “Used to be. Not anymore.”

  “In that case I sure am a hooker. Are you a customer?”

  “I’m a customer of the goddamn motel is what I am. I’m just looking for a good night’s sleep.” Mercifully, his censoring mechanism kicked in just in time and he didn’t add that he’d sooner lay down with a yellow dog. She was among the most bedraggled prostitutes he’d ever seen, even for a streetwalker. Their lids caked blue with eye shadow, her eyes looked like they never closed; below them, generous amounts of flesh-toned makeup failed to conceal the dark lines flaring from the bridge of her nose toward her ears.

  “A customer of this motel here?” She cracked a couple of knuckles on her left hand, then rubbed her palms together nervously.

  “Just looking for a place to lay my head for the night.”

  “You know, what you want in that case, then, is probably the Stars and Stripes a couple doors down. This one don’t really specialize in long-term rentals, like overnight.”

  He nodded. “Thanks. If I run into anybody looking for a date I’ll be sure and send ’em your way.”

  She turned her attention back to the passing cars. As h
e walked to the Stars and Stripes he turned to look at her once again, something nagging at his consciousness. Why had he been surprised to see a hooker here? South Broadway had been the city’s principal redlight district for twenty years or more, a major trouble spot since well before his retirement. When he’d started out as a patrolman in ’39, the streetwalkers had all been north of downtown and in the old tenderloin, and when development and do-gooders chased them away they’d settled here.

  The man at the desk of the Stars and Stripes was younger than Gunther but not by much, and spoke with a mellifluous foreign accent which Gunther took to be Indian. He had on a big pair of plastic-framed eyeglasses and a bright yellow cardigan despite the heat.

  “Can a fella get a room for overnight on this street anymore?”

  “Certainly, sir. Just fill this out.” He handed Gunther a form, which Gunther examined with a puzzled look. “Print your name and permanent address, and the license plate for your car.”

  Gunther continued to scowl at the form, baffled.

  “It’s a state law, sir. You must fill out your name and so forth.” Just as the man was starting to wonder if anything was wrong with Gunther, something seemed to kick in and he began to fill in the blanks.

  “Neighborhood sure has changed.”

  “Yes sir. It’s getting better.”

  “Better? You call this better? Jesus, I remember when these motels used to cater to traveling salesmen and families on vacation.”

  “Ah, I see what you mean. But it is changing back, bit by bit. Just one year ago, when my nephews bought the Stars and Stripes, it was called the Bide-A-Wee, and the rooms that weren’t being rented by the hour to the ladies of the street were occupied by drug addicts and dealers, all of whom had to be evicted with great difficulty. Now look—a perfectly nice family motel.”

  “The Bide-A-Wee, huh? That rings a bell.”

  “I’m sure you remember it from its happier times, before the decay of the neighborhood.”

  “No, I used to be a policeman. I’m sure it was something bad, whatever it was.” He took his key and left the lobby.

  As he filed the form, the man happened to glance at the address, and was mildly interested to note that it was a local one: 1763 Armacost Street. He had no reason to suspect that this was a house Gunther had owned and inhabited with his third and least favorite wife from 1946 to 1950, after which it had belonged to her. If he had turned on the lobby television to the news, as he sometimes did in the early evening, he would have seen Gunther’s picture staring back at him; instead, he sat down to look at a magazine.

  Sidney sat looking up at a picture of Jesus on the wall next to his office manager’s desk, swiveling and tapping his fingers on a crude flyer he’d drawn up with Magic Marker. He had planned to print up a few hundred of them on the copier, but after finishing the lettering he remembered he’d given the police the photo of Gunther he’d intended to use.

  Now he was trying hard to remember the married names of Gunther’s daughters. One was a nurse in Minneapolis and the other a housewife in Florida, and unless their financial situations had changed since he’d last heard, it didn’t seem likely that they were the source of the extra money.

  He opened an enormous Rolodex, a relic from an earlier incarnation of the business, when it had consisted of a single strip club in midtown called the Sweet Cage. Half the cards in it were useless; interspersed with entries for his own friends, family, and associates were cards for those of the previous owner, dead ten years now, and Janice had been trying to get him to weed out the outdated cards since her first week on the job. He shrugged and started with a card for Brennigan Vending Machine Service, which had once serviced the jukeboxes for the Sweet Cage and its sister club, the Tease-o-Rama, both now equipped with expensive, deejay-operated PA systems.

  He tossed the card into the trash; eventually he’d stumble across Gunther’s daughters this way, trimming part of the Rolodex and making his office manager happy in the process. After Brennigan was Bristol, Janice, herself; then Castle Beverage Distributors; and then a card that made his stomach muscles clench: Cavanaugh, Victor. One suburban address out west was crossed out and another, this one in Forest Hills, scribbled beneath it in his dead boss’s odd, square foreign handwriting. He plucked it from the Rolodex, crumpled it and flung it into the wastebasket, then flipped ahead to see if there was an entry for Bill Gerard, Cavanaugh’s boss. There was, with business and home phone numbers and the notation EMERG. ONLY next to the latter in block printing he also recognized as Renata’s. The day after Christmas, Sidney had opened up the Sweet Cage to find Bill Gerard lying dead on the office floor; several hours later the police found Renata dead on her hall carpet. Vic Cavanaugh, widely presumed to be the killer, was long gone, and now Sidney knew why he hadn’t ever gotten around to editing the Rolodex.

  Three days after Renata’s death Sidney was on the couch of his old house on Twenty-third looking without much hope through the Eagle-Beacon ’s classified section for a bartending job. He answered a knock at the door and found Gunther standing alone, gloveless hands in his pockets against the cold. Gunther had never come over without Dot before that he could remember, and he surprised Sidney by saying that if he didn’t make an offer on the club he was a fool. After the old man left, Sidney phoned Mitch Cherkas, a bank officer whose sole interest outside of banking seemed to be a series of painful, unrequited crushes on strippers. Mitch thought it was a great idea, and they set about raising the down payment. When he told Gunther this two days later, Gunther surprised him again by handing him a cashier’s check for twelve thousand dollars, almost the exact sum they needed to raise. Thus, at the age of thirty-six, Sidney McCallum—bartender, bouncer, part-time cabdriver, and occasional holder of illicit goods—had been reborn as a businessman. Within three years they’d expanded into flea markets and car shows, bought up a rival strip club outside the city limits, and started promoting oldies concerts with a local radio station, and Sidney found himself making more money than it had ever occurred to him to hope for.

  He had no idea, then or now, how Gunther could have afforded to loan him twelve thousand dollars, but when he’d tried to pay it back Gunther actually denied having given it to him in the first place. He thought about that for a minute, then picked up the phone and dialed Mitch’s number.

  “Cherkas residence, Mrs. Mitchell Cherkas speaking.”

  “Francie, I need to talk to Mitch.”

  “Hi, Sidney. Just a sec.”

  While he waited Sidney scribbled on a sheet of scratch paper. He had doodled an entire dog by the time Mitch got to the phone. “Hello? Sidney?”

  “Mitch. I need six grand right now.”

  “Six grand? From me?”

  “I’m gonna put up a reward for Gunther, goose people a little. Six each.”

  “In cash?”

  “We owe him and you know it. I want twelve grand in the bank tomorrow.”

  “Can I send you a check?”

  “Bring it in person.”

  Sidney hung up on him and started going through the Rolodex again. He was up to Trusty Bail Bonds and the Rolodex was twenty cards lighter when the phone rang.

  “McCallum Theatrical Enterprises. Sidney speaking.”

  “Daddy? I called Moomaw and she said Gunther ran away?”

  “Hey. Amy. I’m glad you called. What’s Ginger’s last name?”

  “It’s Fox.”

  He thumbed his way backward. “Fox. Got it. Thanks, honey. I gotta call her now, she doesn’t know about this yet.”

  “Call me when you know something, okay?” she asked, disappointed, and he felt guilty for rushing her off the phone. His eagerness to get hold of Gunther’s daughters was only part of it; Amy was in college in Wyoming majoring in Women’s Studies, and their conversations tended lately to center on the exploitative economics of his business. The last time it had come up he’d testily reminded her that nude dancing, whether she approved of it or not, was paying for her courses in G
ynEconomics and Herstory, and of course he felt like an asshole the moment he said it. The worst part was that she’d halfway convinced him she was right.

  “Don’t worry, he’s gonna be fine.” He hung up and dialed Ginger Fox’s number. What a great name for a stripper, he thought, and the mental image of sturdy, short, serious Ginger onstage and stripping brought forth a laugh and a small shudder. On the fourth ring a machine picked up.

  “This is Sidney McCallum calling. We have kind of an emergency here. Call any time, as soon as you get this.” He left his number and decided it was best not to get more specific. He hoped he could get Ginger to call her more volatile sister Trudy with the news. Both sisters loved the old man to excess, just like the grandchildren did, both Gunther’s own and Dot’s, and like Dot for that matter. How, he wondered as he locked the office up for the night, did a man as tight-lipped and glum as Gunther inspire so much devotion from women and children?

  The main room at Ruby’s was an atrium overlooked on all four sides by offices on the third and fourth floors of the former Hammerschmidt hotel downtown. The building dated back to the 1870s, and it was believed that its original owner lay beneath the cement floor of the basement, murdered by his very young second wife and her lover in 1887, shortly before the start of the renovations that occasioned the laying of the new floor. Even on slow nights the room’s acoustics made everything loud, and Eric Gandy had to raise his voice to be heard over the easy listening pseudojazz as well as over all the other voices trying to be heard. It was a few minutes before ten o’clock and Eric was flirting with a woman fifteen years his junior, a reporter from one of the local TV stations. She hadn’t invited him to sit down yet, but she had allowed him to buy her a vodka tonic, and a Stoly at that.

  “You know, Lucy, we ought to pull on out of here and head over to the Brass Candle and get some prime rib.”

  “You’re married, aren’t you, Eric?” she asked, though she didn’t sound as if the answer meant much to her one way or the other.