McKain's Dilemma

by Williamson, Chet

  Back on the street, the magic of the cathedral diminished considerably, and I decided that perhaps I would not become a Catholic after all. This is what my mind was like at that time. I fairly flew from one attitude to the next, searching for that mystic state of mind that would let me, if not escape the fate determined for me, at least accept it with equanimity. I never found it.

  I did, however, find something else that I had been looking for on a more practical level. When I returned to the hotel just before noon, there was a message from Eddie. I called him, and he told me that he had examined the evidence list, drawing suspicious glares from the detective in charge of the case. He told the man he had some interest in it because his sister lived in the neighborhood, a transparent lie if there ever was one. But it got the job done. He went over a list of things from memory, none of which made any impression until he mentioned the cigarette lighter.

  "Whoa," I told Eddie as he rattled off the list. I think he got his job from his ability to memorize license numbers. "The lighter."

  "What about it?"

  "Just what I was going to ask."

  "Oh. Let me think . . . gold, had an initial on it."

  "What letter?"

  "C, I think. Yeah, sure it was. C. For Christopher, I guess, huh?"

  "Any prints on the lighter?"

  "No. Kind of strange, isn't it? You'd think Townes's prints'd be on his own lighter, wouldn't you?"

  "You would."

  "Lawrence had the lighter checkmarked—along with some other things. Guess he must've thought it was strange too."

  "I guess." He went through the rest of the things, but there was nothing that rang a bell. That was all right. The lighter had been enough. I thanked Eddie.

  "This turns into anything, let me know, huh?"

  I promised him I would, then got my bag packed and checked out.

  As I drove back to Lancaster County, I thought about—along with dying and how I didn't want to—that cigarette lighter. It was obvious that it belonged to Carlton Runnells. I had seen him using it at Ravenwood. Oh, it was possible, of course, that Christopher Townes had a similar one, but Christopher Townes didn't smoke. In all the pictures Runnells had shown me, and on the videotape, not once had Townes had a cigarette in his hand. And these were social occasions, so I felt sure that if Townes had been a smoker, he would have been puffing away or holding in at least one shot.

  Since he wasn't, that meant that Runnells had been in Townes's hideaway the night he was killed, or that somebody had planted the lighter there to make it look as though he was, which was the only way I could account for the lack of fingerprints.

  At any rate, I knew that Runnells was more deeply involved than he was telling me, and the only way to find out the truth was to confront him with his lie.

  I was unbearably tired by the time I got home, and gratefully accepted the supper Ev cooked for me. Then, exhausted, I slept the first good sleep I'd had for several days. In the morning, Ev started asking me where I'd been, what I'd been doing, when I was going to go back to the hospital, but I told her nothing, and she grew angry. I couldn't blame her, for I'd always confided in her concerning my cases. But still, I wouldn't tell her.

  I called Carlton Runnells after Ev left for school, and told him that I had to see him, that I had found out something about Christopher Townes's death that I thought he might be interested in. Understatement.

  He suggested that I come out to Ravenwood, but I told him that I wanted to meet in a public place. He paused then. "A public place, Mr. McKain? Is anything wrong?"

  "Maybe. Can you be here in Lancaster in an hour? Musser Park, the entrance on Chestnut and Shippen."

  "Musser Park. May Michael come as well?"

  "I don't care. But I want to talk to you alone. Leave Michael in the car. Or across the street. I don't care."

  "All right, Mr. McKain. An hour. Musser Park." He hung up.

  It took me only fifteen minutes to get to Musser Park. It's a little park a block square with some lawn, some walks, some benches, and a bunch of playground equipment at the end opposite from where Runnells and I would meet. The day was sunny, and the trees were covered with leaves. I wondered if I'd be around to see next spring. School was still in session, so there were no children playing, but now and then a mother with a toddler would walk by, and two benches up from where I sat a pair of retirees were reading Louis L'Amour paperbacks, the books as bent and dog-eared as the men themselves, growing old together.

  Growing old. You bet.

  Fortunately, I didn't have to ponder on the vagaries of fate overlong, for Runnells arrived early. Michael dropped him off at the corner—they were in the Porsche today—gave me what I assume he thought was a dirty look, and gunned the car around the corner to honor some unsuspecting parking place with its presence.

  Runnells was dressed more casually than I'd ever seen him. He was wearing a pair of loose sweatpants and a zippered sweatshirt with hood, a red T-shirt beneath. Slumming, I thought. As he got nearer, I could see that his face had changed considerably in the few weeks since I had seen him. He looked pale, even sallow, and his cheeks had sunk so far that they looked hollow. He raised a hand weakly, and I shook it. The flesh was clammy. It was like shaking hands with a fish.

  "Mr. McKain," he said feebly, nodding at me.

  "Mr. Runnells." We sat down. "You look ill."

  He smiled self-deprecatingly. "I've been . . . a little sick."

  I grunted something that might have been sympathy, but wasn't. Then I reached into my shirt pocket, took out a pack of cigarettes I'd bought for the occasion, and put one in my mouth. "Have you got a light?"

  He reached into the waist pocket of the sweatshirt and handed me a lighter. It was made of onyx, black and sleek. I had to smile. "Where's your other lighter?"

  "Other lighter?" His response was quiet, seemingly unconcerned.

  "Yes. The gold one. With your initial."

  Now he began to look a bit concerned. "A gold one?"

  "Yes. The one you left in Christopher Townes's hideaway the night he was killed."

  He just broke down then. That sickly face paled even further, and trembled like a wet sponge. When he began to cry, I started to think that I had never seen anything more pitiful, not even myself in the mirror. I let him go for a while, and watched the old men reading their westerns. They were glancing up now and again, looking at each other uncomfortably, wondering if they should move, not knowing what was going to happen with these two strange men on the nearest bench, one weeping, the other stone-faced. I knew how they felt. I didn't know what was going to happen either.

  "It was your lighter. Wasn't it?"

  He couldn't speak at first. His nose and throat were too clogged with phlegm. Finally he blew his nose on a tattered tissue, sniffed several times, and nodded. "I could lie," he said, "but you'd know I was lying. I could tell you that someone stole it from me and planted it there to make it look like I killed Chris, but you'd know that was a lie. Why would anyone do that?" He choked for a moment, cleared his throat roughly, and laughed a hacking laugh. "I even wiped it. That's the absurd part, I remember wiping it with my handkerchief, wiping off the fingerprints because it was there on the coffee table and I remembered I had touched it, and I did it automatically, damn it, goddammit it, I wiped the thing and instead of putting it in my pocket, putting my own cigarette lighter in my goddam pocket, I set it back down. Just set it back down like I wanted somebody to find it." He looked at me, and his eyes were yellow and rheumy. "And somebody did, didn't they?"

  "Yes." I took a deep breath. "That's not uncommon. You did exactly the kind of thing that a lot of people do in a crisis. Something stupid, something . . . totally unimaginable. It happens more times than not."

  Runnells smiled thinly. "And it happened when the one man who would recognize the clue for what it was found out about it." He shook his head. "How did you?"

  "It was too coincidental," I said. "I shouldn't have found out about the murder,
but I did. And when I did, it didn't feel right. So I did some checking, and found out about the lighter. That's all."

  "That's all," he repeated. "Just like that." He turned and looked at the two old men. Their heads were buried in their books again. "Now what?"

  "That's up to you."

  "You mean turn myself in?"

  "Either you do it or I do."

  "What would you say, Mr. McKain, if I were to tell you that my confession would serve no purpose at all?"

  "I'd say the next thing I'd expect to hear would be a bribe."

  "No. No bribe." His eyes were still on the old men. "I'll never be like those men, Mr. McKain."

  I didn't know what he meant, so I said nothing. "I'll never be old."

  The thought was the same I'd had not ten minutes before. It startled me. "What do you mean?"

  Runnells laughed again, only this time it was a little laugh, a rueful one, but not without humor. "Chris Townes took care of that for me. I'm dying, Mr. McKain."

  The first thought that struck me was that it was not fair, not right for him to be treating me in this way, to be mocking my illness. But then, of course, I thought, How would he know? and realized that he wouldn't.

  "He gave me AIDS. It must have happened last year, when I first met him."

  I couldn't speak. I could only sit there, and listen to him, and watch him. What he said struck me between the eyes like a sledge, and after a moment had passed I thought that he must be lying, that he could not have known the only way in which to approach me. And yet, I suppose, I wanted it to be true. I wanted not to have to be alone. I listened to him.

  "I started having symptoms just after Christmas. Severe bouts of diarrhea, when I knew I hadn't eaten anything that would have caused it. I didn't go to the doctor right away . . . I'm scared of doctors, always have been. I thought it would just go away. But it didn't. Then bruises started showing up on my legs, big black and blue marks, and the inside of my mouth started to turn white . . . I was scared, Mr. McKain. I was more scared of what was happening to me than I was scared of a doctor. So I went to one. And he told me what I had.

  "At first I didn't believe him, and he asked if I was gay. I told him I was, but that I was not promiscuous, that I practically lived the life of a monk, for God's sake, and that I had had one partner—just one—in the past year.

  "That one was enough, he told me, and I realized then that I had to have picked it up from Chris." Runnells shook his head. "I could scarcely believe it. He just didn't seem the type, you know? It all seemed . . . seems so unfair somehow." He turned and looked at me, his eyes begging for sympathy. "Can you understand how I felt? Can you see it at all?"

  I looked away from him, up into the branches of a tree, where some kind of woodpecker was tapping at ants. I could understand all right.

  "I was angry and frightened and half a hundred other things as well. I hated Chris, yet at the same time I thought that it might not be his fault, that he might not even know he was a carrier. I tried to contact him, but I couldn't. I wanted to talk to him and tell him what he'd done to me, but I couldn't get through. It was as though he'd vanished off the face of the earth. That was when I called you.

  "And you found him for me."

  His voice had sunk very low, and he was staring at his hands. "Why did you kill him?" I asked.

  "I didn't mean to. I didn't want to. That wasn't why I went to see him. You've got to understand. This was someone I still loved—that much wasn't a lie—and at the same time he was someone who was killing me, literally. But I didn't go there to kill him in return. I just wanted to tell him what had happened, tell him that he had to get treatment himself, and fast. I wanted to tell him that he mustn't have sex with anyone else." Runnells paused.

  "And did you tell him? Did you tell him all that?"

  "Yes. I did."

  "And what did he say?"

  "He laughed. He just sat there and laughed at me. He knew, you see. He knew. Last summer he knew when we made love. And he did it anyway. He didn't care at all. And that's what shocked me the most, that he didn't care. I begged him, Mr. McKain, I begged him to get help, and he said he had, and that it hadn't done any good. So I told him that he had to stop coming into contact with people, and he just looked at me and said, 'The hell with you, the hell with all of them.' And he told me he was going to spread it around. Those were the words he used—spread it around—and they made it . . . made my whole life . . . sound filthy.

  "It was like someone pulled a red curtain over me then. I saw red, literally, and I leaped across the floor at him and hit him in the face as hard as I could. He went backward, fell down, and I went right after him, jumping on top of him, still hitting him. He tried to stop me, tried to shove me aside, to keep me from hitting him, but he couldn't, and I just kept hitting him until he wasn't fighting back anymore, and I kept hitting him even after that, I don't know for how long. I don't even know when he died."

  Runnells sat back on the bench, sighed, and looked up at the sky. "I think," he said slowly, "that even if I'd been able to control myself, even if I'd had time to think about it, that I still would have killed him. Because then at least I'd save those others." He turned and looked at me again. "You don't get better from AIDS, Mr. McKain. It doesn't go away."

  How long, I began to say, but something caught in my throat and I cleared it. "How long do you have?"

  "I'm not sure. As short as a few months, as long as a year, maybe a little more. It all depends on what germs decide to inhabit my body. I can't fight them off anymore." He reached down to the cuff of his sweatpants and started to slide the loose elastic upward. I caught a glimpse of ragged, red flesh before I looked away. "Look," he said.

  "No. I don't need to." Though I hadn't actually read the articles, I'd seen the color photographs in Newsweek or Time. I didn't need to see the real thing.

  I could slowly feel myself drawn toward Runnells, his plight the same as mine, his reaction the same as mine might have been had there been a sole person responsible, and criminally so, for my leukemia. Christ, I would have battered the person to a pulp, until every last quivering, guilty cell was shattered. I would have killed and laughed to have done it.

  And yet, due to circumstances, he was a murderer and I was not. I was still an investigator, and I still felt a need to keep the distance. "Why was he hiding? Townes."

  Runnells shrugged as though it hurt him. "I don't know. Maybe other people were trying to find him too. Other people he might have . . . infected."

  "One more question." He looked at me honestly, openly, sadly. "After I called you and told you Townes was killed, why did you and Eshleman drive to New York and visit Ben Arkassian?"

  He was surprised, and there was still enough of the investigator in me to take some pride and pleasure in that. "You . . . followed me?"

  I nodded.

  "I went to tell him, to warn him that he might be infected himself."

  "You didn't tell him that you killed Townes?"

  "No. No, of course not. I only told him that I'd read about the . . . the death in the papers, and that I felt he must know."

  "Why didn't you call him?"

  "It wasn't the type of thing I could talk about over the phone. I thought about it, but it seemed too cold somehow. And, too, he might not have believed me, might have dismissed it as a crank call."

  "What was his reaction?"

  Runnells's lip curled. "He knew. He'd known for months, and hadn't had contact with Chris ever since he found out."

  "Then why did Townes give you that stuff about Arkassian being jealous?"

  "I don't know. Maybe he wanted it to be true." He swallowed heavily. "I don't know."

  The bench felt hard and unfriendly. "Can you walk?" I asked him.

  He looked at me trustingly. "Yes."

  We stood up and started to walk in silence around the asphalt path that ringed the park. I was thinking about what to do, with Runnells, with myself. He was the first to speak.

&
nbsp; "Do you have to . . ." He paused, and began again. "I'll be dead soon. Townes would have died too. He might have taken others with him."

  I didn't say anything, just kept walking. A skinny, yellow cat trotted across the path in front of us. "I'd be dead before it would come to trial."

  Me too, pal. Me too.

  "What purpose would it serve?"

  I should have said the purpose of justice. But I didn't. I didn't say anything.

  We walked some more, and soon we were almost back to where we'd started. "Please," he said, "try to understand how I . . ."

  "Be quiet. Just be quiet." I looked at him then. I looked into his eyes and could see only myself reflected there.

  "Go home," I said.

  ". . . but . . ."

  "Go home," I said again, softer but with no less intensity.

  He stood there a moment longer, then turned and walked toward the street, where Michael Eshleman stood waiting. He put a hand on Eshleman's shoulder, and together they walked away, out of my sight.

  I went home too.

  Chapter 8

  The following Monday I went into chemotherapy. It was a time in my life that I don't want to remember, that I don't want to repeat. If I have to go through it again, I am not sure that I won't kill myself. It would not be too strong an epithet to call me a coward. Every side effect, every negative reaction that I was warned against, battered me. I spent the latter part of May and most of June in the hospital, getting huge doses of chemicals one day and recovering from them for several more. I was nauseous whenever the drugs hit, and felt sick long after. Most of my hair vanished, and I looked like shit, which was only fitting, since that was precisely what I felt like.

  Ev spent as much time with me as she could, but I'm afraid I was rather incommunicative. I would not let Carlie visit me at all, despite Ev's protests. I simply didn't want her to see me in my present state. We had phone conversations every other day or so, and she kept me up-to-date on what was happening in her swim team. It was impossible for me to read, so the television was on constantly, from the time I woke up in the morning to the time I was finally able to close my eyes and fall asleep.