by Ed Gorman
“Three times in one week. Wanting to get together.”
“So that’s what you meant by it wasn’t an accident?”
“He has a terrible temper. She told me that much. I could see him killing her and David.”
I pictured him in his tennis whites. I guessed I could see him killing them, too.
“He was completely obsessed with her,” she said. “Say, you wouldn’t write a paper for me, would you?”
“Too busy.”
“A hundred dollars?”
“Too busy.”
A smirk. “A hundred dollars and an hour with me in the back seat.”
I decided to surprise her. “You know something?”
“What?”
“I like you.”
“Sure you do.”
“I do. You’re as insecure as I am but you don’t handle it well at all. You need to relax. The bitch acts gets old fast.”
“I got you going, didn’t I? With that story about my mom and my uncle?”
“Yes, you did. I felt sorry for you. I could actually see you as a little girl walking into that bedroom. What you mst’ve seen and how you mst’ve felt.” I reached out and shook her hand. “Thanks for the lead on Jack Coyle. It may come in handy.”
After finishing our handshake, I started toward my car.
She said, to my back, “McCain?”
“Yeah?” I kept on moving.
“What I told you about walking in on my mom was true.”
“I kind of figured it was.” And
I had.
“That’s why they got a divorce. But she wasn’t with my uncle.” Beat for maximum dramatic effect: “She was with my aunt.”
Eighteen
Mike Carlyle made it easy for me. He stood in the entrance to his lumberyard talking to a customer. He glanced at my ragtop as I drove by but didn’t seem to find it interesting enough to glance for long.
As I drove out to his place, I noticed all the early spooks appearing all over town, jack o’lanterns and cardboard witches in windows, and a few scarecrows on front lawns.
Halloween. With the smoky scent of autumn on the air, it made you want to be a kid again when the most frightening thing you had to face was boogeymen you could buy at Woolworth’s. I thought of Linda.
A cancer ward was about as scary a thing as I could imagine.
The Carlyle house was one of those new ranch styles that sprawled over half an acre in a valley. The wine-colored house was surrounded by jack pines that hid it almost completely when you approached, as I did, from the west. A long metal rail ran in front of the place up on the roadside to keep cars from sailing off the asphalt and smashing into the house below.
I found a small park a quarter mile away and walked back. I didn’t want to advertise I was coming so she’d have time to hide.
The sun was just beginning to set. A yellow school bus roared past, scattering dust and gravel. The air was brisk and clean. I always told big city people that I liked living in a small city because I was so close to the outdoors.
But I didn’t get outdoors all that much.
The drive was a long slope of gravel leading to a two-stall garage with one car in it and a huge water tank. I went past them and on to the house.
No dog. Out here, on the edge of town and on every farm, there’s a dog. There are just enough prison breaks, just enough roaming intruders to make a dog a good investment. But there was no dog.
I knocked on a screen door that ricocheted each time I struck it. Nothing. But the car in the garage told me she was in there.
I walked around the house peeking in windows. The furnishings were new but not expensive or noteworthy. Just good solid stuff. There was a cuckoo clock somewhere that celebrated the half hour. Four-thirty.
I went back to the screen door. Tried the front door behind it. Unlocked. I pushed in and called her name several times. There was an interior silence that bothered me, and as I looked around at the furniture, the silence became more pronounced.
I tried to put the size and ferocity of Mike Carlyle out of my mind. Cute little tricks-kicking guys in the balls chief among them-cd buy you a few cheap victories from time to time. But not with men like Carlyle. You’d never get close enough to kick him.
I decided an inspection was required and I decided that it was best if I could pull it off in less than. 0000038 seconds.
I went room to room and found nothing other than the same good solid unremarkable furnishings I’d found in the living room. The bedroom wall was interesting. Several framed photos of Brenda in various bikinis over a span of several years. Kind of a grotto to one sexy body.
She’d put on weight at about midpoint in the span of pictures but it was the kind of weight that somehow only enhanced her sexuality. I got a pleasant little ache in my groin looking at the later ones. Mike was nowhere to be found in the photos.
I found her in the john and even though she was naked I didn’t get any little ache in my groin, pleasant or otherwise.
She’d been taking a bath when somebody had struck her on the side of the skull, much as Sara Griffin had been struck. The bath water was filthy with her blood and the pink-tiled bathroom stank of her dying and her death. Her left hand, resting on the edge of the bathtub’s side, was crabbed into a claw. Her green eyes glared up at me. A tiny trickle of blood had wormed its way from her nostril to her upper lip.
You could see the wide swaths of dried soap and water on the sink, walls, doorknob. The place had been wiped down thoroughly.
I haven’t seen that many corpses in my young life but I’ll tell you one thing, that old Irish maxim is true. When you see a dead person, one of your first thoughts is how you’ll look when you’re dead. There’s your mortality staring right up at you.
After that moment passed, I realized two things.
I needed a cigarette and I needed to get out of this house.
As I got to the end of the hall, a heavy vehicle popped gravel and came to a rumbling stop somewhere near the front door. Mike and the big Chevrolet pickup he drove for the lumberyard. I was sure of it. I went to the curtained front window, peeked out. He had just left the truck, toting a large cardboard box in both hands.
I had some alternatives. I could hide, I could run, or I could confront him.
Just as the front door was shoved inward, I thought of a fourth alternative. There was a black telephone sitting on a dry bar. I picked up the receiver and dialed the police station.
Mike Carlyle saw me just as Mooney, the asthmatic man who answers the phone in the daytime, wheezed, “Police station.”
“Mooney, this is Sam McCain. Tell the chief that I just found Brenda Carlyle dead in her bathtub. He’d better get out here fast.”
Carlyle dropped the heavy box on the floor and made a sound deep in his throat that combined shock and rage and loss. The noise paralyzed me, forced me for the first time to see him as a human being, the eloquence of his stunned pain.
Then he came rushing at me.
Part III
Nineteen
His shoulder collided with mine. He was big enough and crazed enough to knock me several feet across the living room without even being conscious of it.
He was on his way to the bathroom and to his wife. I’d expected violence from him, verbal and physical. What was I doing here? Had I been sleeping with her? Why had I killed her?
He didn’t walk out of the bathroom. He exploded at me, this gigantic crazed animal ducking his head as if he were going to attack me the way a bull attacks a matador. “You killed her and now I’m gonna kill you!”
“I didn’t kill her, Mike. I didn’t have any reason to. Now calm down.”
I grabbed a fifth of whiskey from the bar and got ready for him. I figured he wouldn’t calm down. When he got about two feet from me, I smashed it into the side of his head and stepped aside. And then I decided we were in a Warner Brothers cartoon where the good guy, the extremely psychotic sadist Bugs Bunny, slams somebody over the head wi
th an anvil, only to see the bad guy shrug it off and keep right on charging.
Which is just what happened.
While he grabbed me by the throat, I had time to swipe a fifth of scotch from the bar top. And then he was running with me right back into the wall.
There is nothing good to say about strangling.
Somebody can knock you out and do you a favor. You don’t have to be awake while they stomp you. But strangling folks takes a relatively long time and you’re awake until near the very end.
He’d clamped his hands on me so tight I forgot everything except trying to breathe.
Instinctively, though, I knew enough to hold on to the fifth of scotch.
I dangled about two feet off the carpet.
He alternated between choking me and slamming my head into the wall. It was hard to tell which I enjoyed more. I kept kicking him in the shins because that’s where my toes were. He’d curse when I’d get him a good one but his hands never let up on their pressure.
“You killed her, you bastard. You killed her.”
I wasn’t in any position to argue, much as I wanted to. Hell, I was a lawyer. I could argue my case.
I don’t know how long it was before I started losing consciousness. Couple minutes, maybe.
But suddenly I was hot and cold-shivering cold -and I started losing strength and I kept trying to gasp down some air and-And then I did it. I gathered enough strength and intelligence to raise the scotch bottle and smash the neck of it against the wall behind me.
If he heard the smashing glass, he didn’t let on. He just kept pressing my larynx harder. He knew he was almost home.
I stabbed him in the head.
Not all that deep but enough so that there was a lot of blood immediately. Enough so that the pain forced him to drop me and to fall away. Enough so that he tripped backward over the coffee table and sprawled face up on the couch.
“Now listen to me, you big stupid ape,” I said, advancing toward him with the smashed bottle.
The jagged parts ran with his blood. “I didn’t kill your wife. I didn’t know your wife. I talked to her once. That’s all. And that’s all we did was talk. You understand?”
I don’t know what I expected. But whatever I expected, it wasn’t this awful stretching silence with him looking up at me like a sad lost child. Just this awful stretching silence broken finally by a single sob.
“You really didn’t kill her?”
“No, Mike, I really didn’t kill her.”
“I’m not any big stupid ape.”
“No, I don’t guess you are.”
“There’re a lot of smart football players.”
He didn’t want to think about his dead wife so he led us off the trail. A little diversion.
“There was this fullback who had a doctorate in-”
“Mike.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“Sit up. I’ll get you a drink.”
“I think you broke all the bottles.”
“Just two. Now sit up on the couch and I’ll get you a drink.”
I got him his drink and he said, “You see her in there?” I set the bottle of sour mash on the coffee table in front of him.
“Yeah. That’s why I called the police station.”
He finished off the second drink and helped himself to a third. “She was sleeping around on me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I never even hit her when I found out.” He got up clumsily and stalked over to the drapes and yanked on a cord. A rose-colored, dusk sky filled the room with more melancholy than it could rightly tolerate. “She promised me she’d never fall in love with any of them. And she kept her word.”
He put his drink down on the top of the Tv cabinet. He put his head in his big hands. He wept.
A couple of times he sounded as if he were going to vomit. A couple of times I had the sense that he was going to let go and start smashing things. A couple of times I forgot myself and felt sorry for him. It’s hard to hate somebody when you see that they’re not any stronger than you are, and break just as easily.
The sirens sounded lonely in the early nightfall. Most people would be sitting down to the evening meal, Dad home from the factory or the store, Mom serving the food, and the kids ready to bolt as soon as their stomachs were full. Mom and Dad would watch Tv and a couple of times during the course of the evening they’d remember why they married each other, those sweet pure remembrances that buttress good marriages, and for those moments they wouldn’t be old married folks, they’d be the kids they’d once been, all full of hope and excitement and each other.
I wondered if Mike had ever had nights like that with Brenda. I somehow doubted it. They’d always been reckless people-he loved to fight, to play high-stakes poker, to tell you how much better-looking his wife was than yours-and he’d liked to parade her in front of other men, almost daring them to approach her.
And this is where it all came to an end. You always wonder where and when your own life will end, I guess. But you don’t wonder where and when the life of the woman you love will end. Now he knew.
I left him there and went out and heated up the half pot of coffee that was still on the stove.
I was just pouring a cup when the reenactment of World War Ii began. It sounded that way, anyway. Later on, I counted the emergency vehicles. Six of them. Including Cliffie on his Harley. The way he backed off his pipes I wondered if he was literally trying to wake the dead.
Cliffie allowed the two men who actually knew what they were doing to take over. Their biggest problem was keeping Cliffie from spoiling evidence.
Because Mike was a well-known former jock, we got Tv people as well as newspaper and radio ones. Cliffie called one of his press conferences and proceeded to say all sorts of stupid and unprofessional things into several microphones.
But he had his khaki uniform and his badge on his person and images of Glenn Ford dancing in his mind, so he was off and flying. If the county attorney, who would have to prosecute this case, was hearing Cliffie he was probably considering suicide.
The crowd came soon after. There must be people who drive around at night looking for accidents and tragedies. They’re just there, suddenly, vampires who live not on blood but on the misery of others. This was a remote area and yet here they were. They know enough to speak discreetly, they know enough not to interfere with the police activities, and they know enough to move here or there when the officials ask them. They don’t want to jeopardize their feeding.
I saw a doctor give Mike an injection that I assume was a sedative; I saw Mike’s lawyer walk through the front door; and I saw a man from the county attorney’s office trying not to smirk while Cliffie shouted various theories at him. They were standing out on the front lawn, off to the side, isolated from the vampires and the press.
I was just about to leave when Cliffie roped me into the conversation with Jim McGuire, a very lowly lawyer in the county attorney’s little fiefdom.
McGuire was scrawny and dressed himself as I often did in suits from the Paris Men’s Shop available only at Sears Roebuck.
He had blue eyes, red lips, and pipe-smoker yellow teeth.
Cliffie said, “Here’s a guy who can back me up. Tell him, Counselor. You know, about how she slept around.”
I said, “She slept around.”
“A lot of women sleep around,” McGuire said.
“In this town?” Cliffie sounded shocked.
“Yes,” McGuire said, winking at me, “in this very town, Chief.”
But Cliffie was always good on his feet.
“Yeah, well, maybe so, but how many of them got themselves murdered this afternoon?”
“With a mind like that, Chief,” McGuire said, “you should’ve been a trial lawyer.”
Cliffie caught the sarcasm. “Sure, and let killers go free the way McCain here does?” Then, “You know anybody she was sleeping with, McCain?”
“I don’t know this
for a fact. But I think David Egan was one of them. I know for sure he spent time with her. I can’t say positively that he slept with her.”
“He slept with everybody,” Cliffie said.
“But he’s dead, so we can eliminate him for this.”
“Good point,” McGuire said. “Being dead is about the best alibi you can have.”
“I’m gonna tell your boss what a wise guy you are,” Cliffie said. “So knock it off.”
McGuire knew that he’d reached Cliffie’s invisible line in the sand. He said, “This is my first murder, Chief. I’m just trying to sound tough by making jokes. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Cliffie slid his arm around McGuire’s shoulder. “See how nice he talks when he wants to, Counselor? Maybe you could take lessons from him.”
“How much you charge an hour for lessons, McGuire?” I said.
But he knew better than to join in the fun.
“I think I’ll go see how the investigation is going. Thanks, Chief.”
We watched him go and Cliffie said, “I’ve got Mike’s ass nailed on this one. Too bad, too, because he’s one hell of a nice guy.”
“Mike didn’t do it.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was here before he got home.”
“Maybe he came here earlier, killed her, went back to work and then drove back here and pretended to be out of his mind when he found her. You were here so he put on a little show for you.”
“Whoever killed Sara Griffin and Egan killed Brenda.”
He made a face. “That sounds like the judge talking.”
“That’s me talking. First of all, Mike’ll have an alibi. He was at work all afternoon. And second of all, she was with Egan the night you had him killing Sara Griffin.”
“That was the alibi he wouldn’t tell us about?
Brenda?”
“That’s right.”
“Hell, no wonder he wouldn’t talk.
Mike would’ve killed him.” He shrugged. “So Mike found out about Egan and he killed her.
Simple as that, Counselor. It all ties together-Sara Griffin causes Egan to commit suicide; Mike finds out Brenda was shacking up with Egan and he kills her. A dope could figure that one out.”
