The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  “Who handles your account?”

  Dot snorted. “You mean who’s my favorite teller?”

  “I mean who handles all that money Gunther got hold of?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ten years ago Gunther gave Sidney twelve grand for a down payment on that club.”

  She’d lost a little steam. “You’re out of your goddamn mind.”

  “You’re going to tell me who I need to talk to or I’m going to take it to Lester Howells, and old Lester might just find that money more interesting than I do. He might want to look into where it came from.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with finding Gunther,” she said, her voice rising, and she slapped her palm down on the tabletop.

  “You’re wrong about that. Now are you going to tell me the man’s name or not?”

  16

  GUNTHER FAHNSTIEL

  June 20,1952

  It had been a busy summer night of bar fights and wife beatings, and I hadn’t had a chance to go and talk to Sally. When I got off duty I went home and slept for three hours, then drove over to her house. The sunrise was pretty and birds were chirping and the drive over was nice, even though I knew I was going to catch hell when I got there.

  Sally was in the kitchen drinking coffee, getting ready to leave for her shift. She wasn’t happy to see me but I didn’t care. It wasn’t a social call. Her little girl Loretta was there, eating breakfast, and I teased her for a minute about how tall she was getting. Then her baby-sitter came in the front door and the girl ran into the living room to see her.

  “So what do you want, Gunther? I’m running late.” Even dressed in pants and a plain blouse and flat, crepe-soled shoes for work, with her hair pulled up in a bun and her big brown eyes cold and angry, she was still about the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I hadn’t been laid in a month and right then I felt like the stupidest man in the state for not picking her up right then and carrying her back into the bedroom and doing what she wanted me to.

  “Wayne’s in town.”

  “Wayne? My husband Wayne?”

  “Ed spotted him at the hospital. Somebody cracked his head open outside a roadhouse.”

  “Ed doesn’t know him. He’s made a mistake.”

  “He still sending you half his pay?”

  “Not for a while now. I don’t give a goddamn anymore. I’m making plenty.”

  “Might be a good idea to give the boys a rain check for this weekend.”

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Because Ed mistook some other guy for my lying shitheel husband?” she said, a little too loud, and she glanced over at the door. She always took care not to bad-mouth Wayne in front of the little girl.

  “Ed’s not mistaken. He’s checked in at the Bellingham downtown under another name.”

  “And why would Wayne be using a fake name?”

  “I don’t know. I just think it’d be smart to be on guard.”

  “Rain check. You know what that’d cost me? For one thing I’d have to set things up on one of my very few free weekends. And the girls’d have to be paid for an extra week.”

  “Not if they’re not working this weekend.”

  “If I cancel on short notice I pay the girls anyway, that’s the deal. I’d pay you, too, if that makes you feel better. The answer is no.”

  “All right, then. You want me to stick around and watch the place tonight?”

  “You mean here?” She shook her head. “If you’re not sticking around for me I don’t want you sticking around. Ed’s wrong, that’s all.”

  “No, he’s not. There’s going to be trouble. Otherwise Wayne would have let you know he was coming.”

  She closed her eyes and the tendons in her neck stood out a little, but her voice was even. “It’s not Wayne, and I don’t have time to worry about it anyway. I gotta go.”

  Outside a horn honked, and we went through the living room where Loretta was reading a book out loud to her baby-sitter. She jumped up and ran to Sally. “Bye, Mama. See you tonight.” She kissed her mother’s cheek and then mine, yelling “Bye, Gunther,” as she raced back to her book. The baby-sitter, a plump old woman whose name I didn’t remember, gave her a sweet smile in a way Sally almost never did.

  In Sally’s driveway Frieda sat behind the wheel of a brand-new Cadillac convertible wearing sunglasses and a bright red scarf over her hair. Her lips were the same red and with a cigarette holder she would have looked a little bit like a homely movie star. Her cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth, though, and it flapped up and down comically when she talked.

  “Well, Gunther, imagine meeting you here at six-thirty in the morning. You two got anything to tell me about?”

  If Sally needed another reason to be surly that sure was it. She got in and didn’t say anything, just looked straight ahead.

  “Nice car, Frieda,” I said.

  “Thanks. I keep telling this one she should spend a little bit of all that dough she’s raking in, but she won’t.”

  “Can we go, please?” Sally said, and Frieda waved at me and pulled away. I watched them go to the end of the street and turn, feeling mean for being so glad I didn’t love Sally the way she loved me.

  I went over to the King’s X and had some bacon and eggs, then around eight I went over to Glenn and Sonya Bockner’s house. Sonya was up but still wearing her dressing gown.

  “Come on in. Glenn’s not here. You want some coffee or something?”

  Glenn was the one I needed to talk to, and I would have said no but I could smell it perking. “Sure,” I said, and I followed her inside.

  When she put my cup down on the kitchen table she leaned forward enough so I could see her right nipple. She was a pretty girl when you weren’t looking at her standing right next to Sally. Her hair wasn’t done up, but without my seeing it she’d put on some lipstick in the two or three minutes since I’d walked in the door. She smelled nice, too. Now that I thought about it, the last time I’d seen Sonya she’d slipped me a scrap of paper with her number and the words “CALL me.”

  “To what do I owe the honor?” she asked, hands on her hips.

  “I wonder if Glenn might be free for a security job this weekend.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not on this weekend. You knew that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You think there’s gonna be trouble? Who won the raffle this week, anyway?”

  “It’s not them I’m worried about, it’s another fellow. Better if there’s two of us.”

  Glenn was a big fellow and he wasn’t afraid of a fight. In fact he seemed to like them. He liked to hang around when Sonya was working, and once he’d come in handy when both fellows decided they wanted Sally instead of Sonya. One of them already had a bloody nose when we pulled them apart, and if I’d been on my own I might have had to draw my weapon.

  I never understood why it didn’t bother him to have Sonya working for Sally the way she did, but from what she said it got him excited, thinking about other guys screwing her. Sometimes he’d have her bring guys home and he’d hide in the closet and watch.

  “Write your number down and I’ll tell him to call you when he gets home from work. In the meantime, you got half an hour, forty-five minutes free?”

  “I guess,” I said, not thinking about what she was asking, and I just about spit out a mouthful of hot coffee when she hiked up her robe and sat down on me. The robe fell to the floor, and Sonya was stark naked.

  “You didn’t really come to talk to Glenn, did you? You knew perfectly goddamn well he’s on first shift again.” She leaned her face forward and kissed me, and I kissed her back. Through the coffee and the cigarettes her mouth tasted like she’d just brushed her teeth.

  I shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. I was already stiff as a hound dog and against my better judgment I was pretty sure I was just going to let things happen. Then I got a picture in my head of her getting screwed by
Amos Culligan, and then one of her sucking old Lester Carswell’s dick. Even that didn’t manage to soften my pecker, but it sure did make me think a little clearer. I grabbed her under the arms and gently hoisted her off of me, poor old John Henry throbbing along to my heartbeat. I stood up.

  “Sorry,” I said. “That’s just gonna make trouble later on.”

  “Come on, Gunther, bend me over the kitchen table and give it to me good.”

  Damned if the way she was talking wasn’t about to change my mind. I thought about the clap, about mercury treatments and sulfa drugs, and still I was about to go ahead and do it.

  “Come on, Sally doesn’t have to know.”

  That was it. “How about Glenn?” I asked. “How soon’s he gonna know?” The look on her face gave me the feeling that he might be there somewhere, watching and beating his meat. Or maybe she was just going to tell him about it later. Anyway, I was leaving. “Just have him give me a call, okay?”

  Ed answered the doorbell looking surprised. “What do you know. Come on in,” he said, and he opened the door up wide. Daisy was in the kitchen, and Ed had been playing with Jeff on the floor, making a large castle out of wooden blocks. Jeff got up when he saw me and ran to me. “Gumfa!” he yelled. I picked him up and was surprised at how heavy he was now. I hadn’t been around in six months or more, which is a long time when you’re three.

  Daisy came out of the kitchen. “Jeffrey, come with Mommy, I’m going to make you something.” She didn’t look at me. I used to be her favorite of all Ed’s friends, once.

  “Jeff wants to see Gunther, Daze,” Ed said, and she gave him a sharp look but kept her mouth shut. If this was the reception I got, I wondered how she would have welcomed Sally. She stood there for a minute, then turned and went back into the kitchen. I hadn’t ever seen Daisy and Ed act like that; in front of other people they always seemed like newlyweds, and I was sorry to be the cause of the friction just then. I suspected it came more often these days, though, with her having gotten religion and a whole new set of rules for Ed to live by.

  “Who’s a big boy?” I asked the little boy in the crook of my elbow.

  “Me,” Jeff said. “Look, I’m making Fort Apache,” he said, and he dropped down to his blocks. I got down and helped for five or ten minutes, and we didn’t say much. When we were done we’d built a wall around the fort.

  “All right, now, go see your mother,” Ed said. “Gunther and I need to talk about something.”

  “Okay,” he yelled, and he ran into the kitchen, clomping with his cowboy boots.

  “So what’s on your mind?” he asked.

  I didn’t get up. “She won’t cancel or give the fellows a rain check. She says you’re wrong about him being back.”

  “The hell I am.”

  “I asked Glenn Bockner to come out and give me a hand but who knows if he will.”

  “Maybe we should get Tommy and Rory to keep an eye on him over the weekend, starting tomorrow night. Keep him away from the quarry anyway.”

  “On city time?”

  “Unless you want to pay ’em out of your own pocket, yeah. They’ll only have to step in if it looks like he’s going to get violent.”

  That sure came as a surprise to me from my straight-arrow friend, but I was glad to hear him suggest it. “Sounds okay to me.”

  “But you know what, Gunther? This is the last time I help you out on this. It’s about goddamn time you made it clear to Sally she’s got to close up shop.”

  “And she’ll say screw you, I pay Dan Hardyway every month to keep the cops out of my hair. When you come up with an answer for that one, you’re on.”

  Still we parted friendlier than we’d been in months, and between the two of us I thought we had things under control. Tommy and Rory might get out of hand with this shithead the way they sometimes did, but I guessed I could live with that.

  17

  A mong Sally’s clippings was an item from the Eagle about Loretta getting a real estate award. It mentioned that her husband was Eric Gandy, the prominent local developer, though Gandy was not evident in the accompanying photo. There was a drawing of a hot rod by a boy named Tate Gandy on the kid’s page, and a brief mention in the Neighbors column that Michelle Gandy had been selected for the National Honor Society. A whole obituary page turned out to include Donald’s, and Gunther wondered if he and Donald hadn’t known each other as children, being three years or so apart in a town as small as Cottonwood.

  Digging a little deeper he hauled out some whole newspaper sections, quite a bit older than the clippings. The first was an old afternoon Beacon . On the front page below the fold was an article written by Frank Elting, accompanied by an early-morning photo of a parking lot crawling with cops, including Gunther, and in the midst of them a sheet covering a body. The sheet had been heavily retouched so that its contours would show up in the rotogravure, and in his mind’s eye he clearly saw old Gus Linderman standing there in the parking lot holding his Speed Graphic with the flash bar on the side, trying to stay out of everybody’s way and be at the center of everything at the same time.

  Underneath was another edition of the Beacon, and when he saw the headline over Elting’s story the question he had wanted to ask Sally in his dream bubbled up to the surface. This was the kind of story the Eagle never would have printed, let alone the headline:

  DA TO FILE CHARGES IN COLLINS PLANT SEX LOTTERY

  There was no picture accompanying the article, but some of the names in it he remembered well: Lynn Furness, Sonya Bockner, Frieda Singer, Amos Culligan. Sally Ogden. He skimmed the rest of the article and dipped down into the box, and he pulled out another Beacon from around the same time:

  LOVE WAS PRIZE IN COLLINS RAFFLE

  Beneath that was the next day’s paper:

  NAB COLLINS SEX RING OPERATORS

  The photo showed the five of them being led away by police, hiding their faces with their hands and in Culligan’s case his hat. The unpleasant time the photo evoked notwithstanding, it was good to see the faces of the arresting officers, Lou Preston and Albert Vance, both of them dead for years and years now, the two of them grinning at the photographer like it was the funniest goddamn arrest they ever made. Gunther read down to the end of the column, then carefully opened up the section like an enormous, brittle butterfly to page 3, section A, where it continued. There, buried in the middle of the article, was a description of the cabin and a vague reference to its location: an abandoned gravel quarry twenty-seven miles southwest of town, outside of Pullwell.

  With that the first part of the route opened up before him in his brain as though he were driving it at that very moment: the turnpike down to Pullwell, old state highway 129 to the turnoff, and then what? Maybe if he got that far the rest would come back to him.

  He left the newspapers on the cement floor of the garage and returned to the living room, where he stood on the couch looking at Sally’s painting and contemplating his transportation options. He was startled out of his reverie by the sound of the back door opening, and he tiptoed into the bedroom hallway.

  “Sally? You home?” The voice was familiar. “It’s Eric.” He heard keys being dropped onto a hard surface.

  Eric entered the living room as Gunther slipped quietly into the kitchen, where a set of keys sat on the table. He walked out the backdoor with them to find the Volvo sitting in the driveway like a gift, and he took its wheel in something not unlike a state of grace. He was sorry about not staying to say hello to Sally, but they wouldn’t have had much to say anyway; there hadn’t been much left the day he drove her from Wichita to Cottonwood in his old Ford.

  It took him a few blocks to quit pawing around with his foot for the nonexistent clutch, but he soon had the hang of it again, moving through the darkness past neighborhoods as strange and new as Sally’s. He began to wonder whether the street he was on reached the turnpike or not, and when he got to a cross street leading downtown he took it, thinking the more recognizable streets would take h
im where he needed to go.

  “Mr. Brown? I’m Ed Dieterle, I think Dorothy Fahnstiel called and told you I was coming.”

  “She sure did. Come on in.” They passed through a dark living room and into a home office, and Brown pointed him to a chair. In the distance kids could be heard fighting, followed by the sound of their mother intervening and telling them to pipe down.

  “Sorry I couldn’t wait for business hours.”

  “That’s okay. I was just watching some TV when Mrs. Fahnstiel called. Now I can’t tell you everything I could tell the trustee, but I can tell you everything I’m allowed to tell Mrs. Fahnstiel.”

  “She’s the beneficiary but not the trustee?”

  Brown leaned back with his hands behind his head. “One of the beneficiaries. The trustee was Mr. Fahnstiel, until he became incapacitated. Then the Trust Department took over.”

  “The account was established when?”

  “Nineteen eighty, I think. Might have been eighty-one.”

  “And it was a big cash deposit?”

  The banker’s swivel chair squeaked as he leaned forward. “Mr. Fahnstiel had a large sum of cash he’d been saving for quite a long time, and he’d suddenly become aware of the need to protect it. You see that from time to time with clients of his generation. Your generation. People who’ve been through the Depression and don’t trust the banks, they suddenly get nervous about having all that cash around.”

  “So he just had this money tucked away in a mattress before?”

  “Not really a mattress as such. But I believe he kept it in his house.”

  “And how much money was this?”

  “A little more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  Ed asked him to repeat the sum, and he did. “And you don’t think that’s a lot for a policeman and a nurse to have squirreled away?”

  Brown shrugged. “That was none of my business.”

  “And the money’s running out.”

  He nodded. “Dwindling, let’s say. Mrs. Fahnstiel came to me just last week to see what we could do about putting her in there with Mr. Fahnstiel, and that’s what got me sitting down to do the numbers.”