The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  “Looking for a retired police officer who walked away from a nursing home a couple of days ago.”

  The driver nodded slightly. “I saw that on TV. They didn’t find him yet?” He paused. “Carswell’s. Isn’t that where they used to have those wild parties? With all the whores?”

  “That’s the place.”

  “I remember that from when I was a kid. That was all over the paper. We called it Whore’s Quarry, we used to go out there sometimes on weekends, hoping there’d still be a few of ’em around.” He chortled so hard he started to cough. “Never did find any, though, just a burned-down shack and a stinky old pond. What’s the old man supposed to be doing way out there?”

  “Just a hunch his wife had.”

  The older cop got out with a map in his hand and beckoned Dieterle over as he unfolded it on the hood of the squad car.

  “What wild parties was he talking about?” Sidney asked Dieterle as they drove away toward what they hoped was the right road.

  “Back in the fifties whores used to use the place weekends.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “You don’t really think about that kind of stuff happening back then.”

  “Maybe you don’t. I remember it real plain.”

  The moon was low enough in the sky to be seen pacing the car through the side window above the blur of the treetops, its bright face fading slowly into the canopy as the sky began to lighten at the horizon, the darker lunar seas and valleys already matching the delicate indigo of the surrounding air by the time they arrived at the turnoff. The first barbed-wire gate leading onto the dirt road hung open and limp to the side of the road, and they stopped. Ed got out and examined the tracks leading in.

  He got back in. “Looks like a couple cars to me, since after the rain.”

  The low part of the sky was faintly orange and the landscape around them a dim gray as they entered the clearing. To Dieterle the place looked about the same as it had twenty-seven years earlier, despite the cabin’s absence and the presence of myriad little flags, markers, and strings marking the property up. If anything it was more lush than before, with three decades of growth on all the trees, most of which he figured were slated for cutting if the stakes meant what he thought they did. Not far from where the cabin had been were a Pontiac and a European sedan.

  “Either of those look familiar to you?”

  “Nope.” Sidney parked and they got out. The grass was damp, the morning already warm.

  “You head right, I’ll head left,” Dieterle said quietly.

  “Should we yell for him?”

  “No. Don’t want to scare him.”

  Ed walked up to the Volvo and peered in. He saw a shovel and nothing else of interest. The front door was unlocked, and he dug through the glove compartment until he found the registration. The owner was an Eric Gandy, whose name meant nothing to him.

  “Ed!” Sidney hissed from the Pontiac. “There’s a guy sleeping in this one, got a bunch of empty beer cans on the floor.”

  He nodded, put a finger to his lips to signal him to pipe down. He stepped over the spot where it seemed to him the cabin had been, but the years had obliterated any visible physical trace of it. He remembered the night he and Gunther had burned it down, after Sally and the others had been arrested, the flames sparking up into the hot summer night.

  It came to him that Gunther used to set up camp in the trees at the top of the rise, and he was about to head that way when he saw Sidney already making the climb.

  Tricia was asleep on the couch in the living room, Dot having finally gone to sleep around three. The violent sound of snoring from the bedroom woke Tricia up, and she lay there for a while listening to it, watching the leisurely waltz of the dust motes in the first shafts of daylight poking through the slats of the venetian blinds. She’d slept two or three hours at the most, and she knew she wouldn’t be getting back to sleep this morning. The air-conditioning was already running, and under the thin blanket she still had on her shorts and T-shirt from the day before.

  She got up and padded into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, then stepped outside and scooped the Eagle-Beacon off the driveway. The fresh warm air was pleasant on her face; standing there with the screen door propped outward with her shoulder, she opened the paper, calmed by the burbling sound of the coffee brewing in the other room. She sat on the porch step and rested the paper on her knees, fascinated at the number of tiny arthropods on the dewy grass this time of day, aphids leaping and spiders crawling, gnats flitting around the taller blades of grass.

  The coffeepot’s gurgling ceased and she listened to the birds’ morning calls for a minute before taking the paper into the kitchen, failing to notice that the snoring from Dot’s room had ceased.

  The sounds of Tricia clomping around in the living room and the kitchen had awakened her, but she didn’t feel like company. She sat up and took a book from the night table, 1001 Helping Thoughts for Daily Living, the kind of thing she couldn’t have had lying around when Gunther was still there. They did help her, usually, but now when she opened to a random page she found:

  IN THE WHOLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

  GOD NEVER MADE ANOTHER YOU.

  What crap. She closed the book again and wondered whether Gunther was sleeping right then. He’d never cared about sleeping regularly; as a cop he was used to being up for thirty hours and sleeping twelve afterward, and no amount of nagging on her part later could convince him that it wasn’t good for him. She remembered going to bed one night with Gunther in the living room working on a jigsaw puzzle and waking up at six the next morning to find him still bent over the card table with about twenty-five pieces left of a fivehundred-piece puzzle, a picture of a bunch of dalmatians.

  They’d met at four-thirty or five one morning in September of 1942, when she was still working in the Emergency Ward. He came in bleeding profusely from a long cut along the inside of his upper arm courtesy of a drunk with a carving knife; the other cop had done a good job of first aid but the wound ended up needing twenty stitches, and his aplomb had impressed her.

  Fred McCallum had been called up six months earlier, and the longer the son of a bitch was gone the nicer her life got, despite the privations of the war. For a year or so she and Gunther had a real good time and when she felt especially bad about it she went to church. Usually, though, just thinking about Fred was enough to keep any guilt feelings at bay; before long she decided that she’d look into an annulment when he got back so she could marry Gunther.

  A shortage of police officers had prevented him from enlisting or being drafted until then, the result of the drain of able-bodied men into the armed forces; most of the department’s applicants since Pearl Harbor had been kept out of the services for good reason. In early ’43, when recruitment was going a little better for the department, they let him go, against Dot’s vehement objections. She was so mad at him for going she didn’t tell him why she needed him to stay in the first place; he would have stayed then, she knew, but she didn’t want him that way. In retrospect it seemed like the stupidest mistake she ever made in her life, stupider than having married Fred McCallum in the first place. Maybe not as stupid as taking him back, though.

  She’d nearly been fired for slugging another on-duty nurse a week after VJ day; the woman had called Sidney a bastard, and in fighting the official action the woman had taken against her at the hospital she realized two things: that certain people would see him as such and treat him badly for it, and that she couldn’t raise him alone.

  So when Fred came back in ’46, forgave her, and offered to raise the boy as his own, she took him up on it. She was still mad at Gunther for leaving, and couldn’t risk him turning his back on her when he found out; when he got back shortly thereafter she wouldn’t even take his calls at first, or let him see the boy, and they were apart for twenty-five years after that.

  She swung her feet around and stood up. She could hear Tricia turning the pages of
the paper, and she might as well be reading Ann Landers as sitting there on the bed trying to second-guess decisions she’d made forty-five years ago.

  Sidney, who had not stayed awake for twenty-four hours in a row in a very long time, first attributed what he saw at the top of the ridge to a lack of sleep, wondering even if he might be asleep and dreaming. His own head, old and gray and smiling contentedly, seemed to be sticking out of a cheap sleeping bag on the ground, asleep. It was the serene smile that for a good thirty seconds kept him from identifying the head as Gunther’s. He watched him sleep for another minute or two, examining the face from different angles and finding that only from the first, upside-down point of view did Gunther’s smile resemble his own. The resemblance was unsettling nonetheless, and he walked back to the edge of the trees and looked down. Dieterle was leaning into the Pontiac where the drunk lay, sleeping it off.

  “He’s up here!” Sidney yelled.

  He turned back as Gunther sat up, squinting at him, then pulled himself out of the sleeping bag and walked over to where his clothes hung from a tree. He fingered them and turned away without putting them on.

  “Got your clothes wet?” Sidney asked.

  Gunther nodded and smiled again, more on the left side than the right. Dieterle appeared at the top of the rise, breathing heavily, and stopped cold at the sight of Gunther. “Oh, Jesus.” He went and yanked the pants and shorts off the branch and handed them to him. “How about putting these on before I puke.”

  Gunther picked the clothes up off the ground and slapped Dieterle on the shoulder, then Sidney, the lopsided half-smile still playing on his face. Then he grunted and laboriously began putting the shorts on, followed by the pants.

  “Judging by that shit-eating grin I’d say he’s maybe had a stroke,” Dieterle said under his breath to Sidney. “We’re gonna have to take him to the hospital. Also the guy in the Grand Am.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Somebody, I can’t imagine who,” he said, indicating Gunther with his thumb, “pasted him a good one and hogtied him on the front seat. Head’s been bleeding some and I can’t wake him up.”

  Sidney looked at Gunther, who sat cross-legged with his damp trousers on, gazing down on the quarry and the three cars.

  “We better go right now, I don’t know how bad off this guy is.”

  “Ready to go, Gunther?” he said to no response. “Come on, Mom’s waiting for you.”

  At that Gunther nodded, rose to his feet and, favoring his right leg slightly, started down the rise toward the car. Sidney and Dieterle followed, and Gunther gave Dieterle a little wave as he got into Sidney’s car. Ed took the wheel of the Pontiac and the two cars began to crawl away toward the county road.

  “You sure been keeping me busy, Gunther,” Sidney said, surprised to find all his anger toward the old man evaporated. “What the hell were you doing out here, anyway?”

  Gunther didn’t answer, just stared out the window at the passing woods, staked out like the rest of the property and soon to be replaced by rows of more or less identical houses. He started to say something, then stopped.

  “What?”

  He shook his head.

  “You started to say something. Come on.”

  He tried again, stopped in apparent frustration and turned back to the window. After a second he turned back to Sidney and spoke, slowly.

  “Mir ist letzte Nacht deine Oma begegnet.” He smiled again, a few gnarled teeth showing this time.

  “I don’t speak German, Gunther,” Sidney said. “Didn’t know you did either.”

  Gunther nodded, surprised by the admission of ignorance or maybe by the fact that he’d been speaking German. He tried again, with somewhat more difficulty:

  “To me, last night . . .” He stopped and started over. “Last night I seen your Oma.”

  “My what?”

  “Your . . .” He frowned, struggling to find the word. “Your grandma.”

  “Oh.” Gunther hadn’t known either of Sidney’s grandmothers, both of them dead since the fifties. “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine.” He nodded to himself, still looking contented.

  Great, now the old woman’s going to have to learn German, Sidney thought as they passed through the last gate on the way to Pullwell. Maybe Tricia can give her lessons.

  22

  ED DIETERLE

  June 22, 1952

  I stood there in the cabin watching Gunther stand over Wayne Ogden’s body with a surprised look on his face and blood and brain tissue on his pants legs. After a minute he looked up at me, water dripping from his scalp onto his face. “Am I under arrest?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Sally stayed calm, considering what she’d just witnessed. Once we had her nosebleed under control she went to get the other woman at the Cadillac, trying hard to convince her to come back into the cabin, that the danger was over.

  “Let’s take care of this, I guess,” I said finally. After removing the handcuffs we wrapped Ogden up in some sheets from the cabin and tossed him into the trunk of his car, where we found another police issue service revolver, a piece of rebar stuck into a coffee can and weighted down with concrete, a small case full of narcotics paraphernalia, and a small packet containing what I assumed was the long-denied dose of heroin for Ogden’s junkie pal, who’d slipped my mind entirely. We went back up the hill and found the poor bastard hurting bad, still cuffed to the tree, his hair plastered to his head.

  “Your buddy sure caused a lot of trouble tonight,” I said.

  “He ain’t my buddy. He shoot somebody down there?”

  “If he’s not your buddy what are you doing traipsing around with him on private property in the middle of the goddamn night?”

  “I got home from work and that cocksucker’d stoled my fucking junk, then he pulled a gun on me and made me come out here. Said he’d give me what I wanted when we was done with his business, and I don’t know what that was.” He sounded like my old Uncle Merle from Arkansas. He weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds and looked like he was eighty years old.

  “You ever seen this joker before he showed up at your house?”

  “I seen him a couple times out at the Hitching Post. He took a liking to my wife and a disliking to me. Reckon he woulda kilt me once we was done with whatever he wanted me to do.”

  “And you don’t know what that was.”

  He was looking at Gunther’s bloody trouser cuffs. “Look here, I didn’t see nothing you all did this morning, I just want to go home and have my medicine. You take me there then you’ll know where I live. You know I ain’t gonna turn you in for nothing, knowing what you know about me.”

  I looked at Gunther and he shrugged.

  We marched him down to the Plymouth and told him we were taking him home. He was relieved but not overjoyed until I told him he’d be getting his drugs back when we got there, upon which he began thanking me profusely. The effort involved seemed huge and I told him to pipe down. Gunther followed in his Ford. The ladies headed for a doctor they knew in town for Sally’s nose, which looked to be broken, and we told the farmer to clean the place up.

  On the drive back to Wichita the junkie didn’t say a word, just sat there shivering and whimpering. When I stopped to let him out he took his paraphernalia case and the little envelopes in with him, hunching over to shield them from the rain, happy to be free, and went into his little house to do his business.

  Then Gunther followed me to the Comanche, where I parked Ogden’s Plymouth in the middle of the lot as though it had been there all night, the last remaining vehicle from the previous night’s throng. Gunther parked around the corner and walked over to help me pull Ogden from the trunk. The sun was already up but because of the rain it was dark, and we threw the body out onto the lot and then unrolled the sheet. No one was really going to think he was shot here; most of the back of his head was back at the cabin. We balled the gory sheet up, shoved it into Gunthe
r’s trunk and drove away. We’d have to wait until the blood dried to burn it.

  Neither of us said anything for a long time as he drove to my house. The thunder had started, or started again, and we listened to that instead.

  “Another joint army-navy fuckup,” I said finally, and if he didn’t exactly laugh he did give a little grunt.

  A week after I reported Ogden’s death to the army I got a cable from the Criminal Investigations Division in Japan requesting details. The man who sent it was Lieutenant Thomas McCowan, and my requests for clarification went unanswered, despite my prompt response to the CID’s cable.

  Then McCowan showed up one day, expecting all of us to bend over and grab our ankles. I turned over Ogden’s duffel bag and its contents and those of the hotel safe, including the cash, to him. Gunther had given Ogden’s letters to Sally, so officially I had no knowledge of them. McCowan also got copies of all the official reports on the crime. I sadly informed him that we had few leads and little hope of ever breaking the case unless we got lucky with an informant. Someone had shot Sergeant Wayne Ogden at an unknown location, and then moved his vehicle and his body to the parking lot of the Comanche Club in a clumsy attempt to make that look like the crime scene. Lieutenant McCowan of the Criminal Investigations Division of the United States Army didn’t think much of my skills or attitude, but he seemed satisfied that his man was indeed dead, and he left town without thanking me.

  Sally wouldn’t quit. She said she at least had to give the two fellows Gunther had chased away the rest of their weekend. Then she said if Wayne Ogden was dead and unable to spill, why stop? Gunther told her he’d have no part of it, though, and a month later I told Dan Hardyway from Vice that it was time to shut them down. He said he’d pass the word on to her, and I believe he did. I know for a fact Gunther told her; she still wouldn’t quit it.

  We arrested the bunch of them at Collins on a Wednesday, the day the lots were drawn. Frank Elting and a photographer were there, and we staged it early enough in the morning for it to make the paper that afternoon. I hated to do that to Sally but the trade-off was that the Beacon never once suggested that the murder of her husband had anything to do with the lottery, in fact never mentioned that the ringleader of the notorious Collins Sex Lottery was also the widow of the Slain War Hero from a couple of months before. The more genteel morning Eagle shied away as much as possible from both stories.