Elimination

by Ed Gorman

  I locked the car and walked to the porch. The wood beneath me was weak with age.

  The colored lights of a TV screen played on the taped window. From what I could gather it was a crime show of some kind. The music was the tip-off.

  I knocked. No responding sound. The TV volume stayed the same, no footsteps on the floor inside and no voice acknowledging the knock.

  This time I knocked much harder – three times.

  When I didn’t get any response, I stepped up to the window and peeked in.

  The order and neatness of the living room triumphed over the worn and threadbare furnishings. Framed faded photographs lined the wall above the couch with the flowery slipcovers. I counted twelve, thirteen, fourteen framed photos of the same woman at various ages. I was sure there would be others throughout the house.

  Lying in front of the swaybacked couch was Frank Grimes. Somebody using something had struck him in the forehead. He now lay face-up with a massive purple wound above his left eye.

  ‘Who’re you?’

  A female voice from behind me. Because of the shadowy streetlight I couldn’t see much of her. Long blonde hair, an angular face, a slender, tall body in a Levi’s jacket, white blouse and jeans. Oh – and a handgun.

  ‘Did you hear me? I asked who you are.’

  I took a chance. ‘I’m the guy you’ve been calling. Dev Conrad.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ She seemed to forget she was the one holding the gun. But any authority the gun had given had faded when I told her my name. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I found Frank, and that led me to you. And speaking of Frank, he’s not in very good shape right now. He’s lying on the floor in there with a bad wound on his forehead.’

  ‘What? Oh, God, poor Granddad!’

  She ran straight up the steps, brushing past me to get to the door. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘hold this,’ and jammed the gun into my hand. It was the latest version of a single-action, semi-automatic Browning that had been used in all our wars, starting with WWI.

  She dropped the house key and had to scramble for it in the dark. In the meantime, she yelled, ‘Granddad! Granddad!’

  She was so disturbed I had to find the key for her. She got it in the lock, slammed the door inward and went straight to him. The way she checked his vitals indicated that she’d had at least minimal medical training of some kind.

  ‘Please help me get him on the couch. He has terrible heart problems. He’s lucky to be alive.’

  He was heavier than I would have thought. Just before we laid him carefully on the cheap, ruined couch his eyes opened and he groaned.

  Once we got his body lying flat and straight she plucked a throw pillow from a nearby tattered armchair and set it under his head.

  ‘Watch him. I’ll be right back.’

  He was hurt, no doubt about it, but not hurt enough to be civil. ‘What the hell are you doin’ here?’

  ‘You know who did this to you?’

  He moved his head faster than was wise and paid for it. His face cramped with pain. He grumbled and then cursed. ‘You son of a bitch. I asked you a question. What the hell’re you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘Well, don’t. You’re a stupid bastard.’ A cringe; he’d moved his head abruptly again. ‘You’re getting into something you don’t understand and you’re going to get somebody killed.’

  Cindy was back with an official-looking white first-aid kit. ‘I’m a nurse.’ She said this as she brushed me aside. She was getting good at it. First on the porch and now as I stood by the couch. Apparently I was a piece of human furniture.

  As she hunched down to begin her examination, she glanced up at me with a freckled Midwestern-girl face that was a little too spare to be pretty but had a friendly, intelligent appeal to the dark eyes and full mouth.

  I got the job of holding the flashlight and beaming it at the wound while she examined it.

  ‘Do you have a headache?’

  ‘Do I have a headache? Of course I have a headache, honey.’

  She had brought along a cup of hot water and a clean cloth. She cleaned the wound – a deep horizontal gash about the length of his eyebrow – and examined his eyes for signs of a concussion. Then she used an antiseptic on the trauma area.

  ‘We’ll need to get this stitched up.’

  ‘Oh, no, honey, you’re not getting me in any hospital.’

  ‘He’s terrified of hospitals, Mr Conrad.’

  ‘I had too many friends die in them after Nam.’

  ‘That’s because they’d been seriously wounded, Granddad. We’ll just go to the ER.’

  ‘The ER is the hospital.’

  ‘It’s part of the hospital but for a few stitches they won’t admit you. Now be quiet and let me finish my work.’

  She made him take two aspirin, which he objected to. And she took his temperature for a second time, which he also objected to.

  ‘You’re a terrible patient, Granddad.’

  ‘Aw, honey, you know I love you and I appreciate all your concern. It’s just all this medical stuff scares me. You know that.’ The tenderness in his voice came as a shock.

  ‘Now we have to sit up and go to the hospital.’

  ‘I have a big car,’ I said. ‘You can sit in the backseat with him while I drive.’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t want nothin’ to do with him and you shouldn’t either, honey. He just wants to get you alone so he can ask you a bunch of questions.’

  ‘I need to know who hit you and you know why he hit you. You’re holding back and I don’t know why. I’m trying to help you.’

  ‘See what I’m saying?’ he shouted.

  She was standing now and looking at me. ‘Well, I think I do owe him some sort of explanation, Granddad. So c’mon, let’s let him give us a ride to the ER.’

  EIGHTEEN

  No wives or girlfriends beaten badly, no drunks injured in tavern fights, no victims of car or motorcycle accidents. These would appear later. It was not quite eight-thirty and the patients in the ER ran to kids with broken fingers, arms and ankles, and elderly patients suffering from age.

  The large white room with as many as twenty-five colored plastic chairs for patients had an empty feeling, in fact. No crying babies, no sobbing wives, no drunks escorted by police officers.

  After the paperwork was finished Frank Grimes was immediately taken to a room down the hall. So we sat there among the antiseptic smells and the constant ringing of phones and the techs who brought patients back to their loved ones, and for the first time Cindy told me about herself and her situation.

  Her husband’s name was Dave Fletcher. He’d dropped out of the local community college – he’d planned to have his own landscaping business – after a friend of his convinced him to join the army and head to the Middle East. She said that she’d always resented the influence his best friends had on him. She’d been so angry about his dropping out of community college and willingly putting himself in war that she’d packed up and left two weeks before he was shipped overseas. He’d called or emailed every chance he got from boot camp. She’d answer him but didn’t forgive him.

  During his second tour she’d divorced him and lived with a young doctor from the hospital where she worked. She’d never agree to marry him and so he finally started dating another nurse. It was in the first month of Dave’s third tour that he was shot in the head in a firefight. He was in a coma for months and not expected to live. But he did live and returned – against all odds – to reasonably good physical health. His mental health was another matter.

  He’d lived with his folks; depression and suicidal impulses kept him seeing his VA shrink three times a month. Eventually she called him and they’d ended up talking for almost two hours. She’d realized that she still loved him and probably always would. They had remarried less than two months after their long phone call.

  Despite some incidents with Dave’s former psychological problems, she’d loved being w
ith him again. And for the first time they’d begun talking about having a kid or two.

  Dave had a friend on the Danton police force. He’d introduced him to Police Chief Showalter and Showalter liked Dave enough that he waived Dave’s psychological problems and put him in uniform and on the street. Cindy said that while there were some good cops in a river town where the casino was a major employer you got the kind of cops you might expect.

  Unfortunately, Dave had gotten involved with three or four cops who shared the racist and anti-government opinions he’d picked up in the military. The only thing she could compare it to was a religious conversion. He’d fixed up their basement as a kind of headquarters, the walls covered with ugly racist and anti-government posters. He’d started buying expensive guns.

  Not even her announcement that she was pregnant had excited him the way group meetings did.

  The ones who came to the house were always talking about ‘the revolution’ and ‘when we start shooting.’ At first she’d thought they were just living out a fantasy. All dressed up in military gear sometimes, always ready with violent threats against the government. Almost as bad, she said, was the cop bar where Dave spent way too much time. ‘Batter Up,’ it was called.

  She’d lost the baby five months in. She’d been having vaginal bleeding and abdominal cramping and then suddenly she hadn’t been able to feel the baby moving inside her anymore. Following the loss of the child, Dave had surprised her by being the man she’d married. He’d been tender, attentive, even lying on the bed one night and holding her. Even crying himself as they’d talked about what might have been.

  But their closeness had faded as he’d drifted back into the group again. He’d told her that wives and girlfriends also participated, but she’d liked nothing about his friends.

  She noted that he’d been having stress headaches and fits of anger and depression in the last three weeks. Obviously something was going on but he wouldn’t talk about it.

  And then, the night before last, he’d called and said he had to leave town. He’d sounded clinically insane to her. Agitated and fearful. He’d started crying.

  ‘He said he’d done something he shouldn’t have. Something big. And then he said that he’d made a recording on this little digital recorder he always carried. It fits right in his pocket.’

  ‘What kind of recording?’

  ‘Something that would expose everything about the things his group had done. I tried to keep him on the phone because I was so worried about him. But he hung up and I couldn’t stop him. I was terrified.’

  After she learned about Jess being fired on she wondered if Dave had had anything to do with it. As did her granddad. She’d seen me interviewed on TV as Jess’s campaign manager. She called all the hotels to find out where I was staying. She went to my hotel but then got scared and ran off. She wondered if she’d find Dave at the Skylight, a local hangout, which is why she went there. She set up the meeting with me at the boat dock but when her granddad heard about it he’d insisted on checking me out.

  ‘So who do you think hit him tonight?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘It could’ve been Dave.’

  ‘He wouldn’t hurt my granddad. He knows how much I love him.’

  ‘You said yourself that Dave sounded insane.’

  ‘No, no it couldn’t have been him.’ Then, ‘Granddad’s so lonely. He never got over my grandmother’s death. He’s got all those photos of her all over the house and now he’s a big-time Catholic again. He goes to Mass three times a week.’

  A nurse brought Grimes over to us. He had a long, narrow piece of white plastic over the wound.

  ‘We checked him carefully. We don’t see any problem except for the wound. And that will heal itself. But if you notice anything else, Cindy—’ The nurse smiled. ‘Well, you know the drill.’

  ‘Thanks, Louise.’

  Louise turned around and headed back to the examination rooms.

  ‘You have any idea how long I was back there?’ Grimes was back to his squawking again.

  ‘Long enough for me to tell Dev a story he probably found very dull.’

  ‘It was very helpful, Cindy.’

  ‘So you told him everything, huh?’ He said this loudly and bitterly enough to attract the attention of half the ER people.

  She slid her arm through his. ‘C’mon now, Granddad. Let’s get you home.’

  NINETEEN

  I can’t say they were happy to see me walk into Batter Up.

  Some of them were too deep in conversation, too deep in bumper pool and too deep in a ball game on TV to pay any attention. They would have been just as unhappy as the others if they’d noticed me.

  Outwardly I was like a good number of them. White, fortyish, clean-cut. But in places like this that wasn’t enough. No, it certainly was not.

  This was Danton’s one and only police bar.

  Housed in an elderly brick building, windows painted black, the interior narrow with a long bar running half the length of the west wall and the rest of the space divided up into six red leathered booths and four tiny tables, the place was worn but scrupulously clean. The east walls were covered with a large American flag and posters for the Chicago Bears and the University of Illinois football and basketball teams. Set off on their own were large framed photos of officers who’d died in the line of duty, and as a final touch, as if to annoy me especially, a huge campaign poster of Dorsey.

  There were three or four couples here and they all sat at tables. The women were young and sexual and looked to be having a good time, at least if their high, happy laughter was any indication. They were girlfriends and maybe cop groupies. The exception was an older couple, who sat in silence and stared at each other. He looked angry and she looked sunk in gray despair. Maybe they were splitting up after years of marriage; maybe one of their kids had become a problem. Given the merry human noise and the country-western noise on the jukebox, they didn’t belong here.

  The bartender was short and wide, maybe fifty, and muscular in a way his short-sleeved red shirt only emphasized. A convict who worked out every day for three years would have envied him. He also had a pair of eyes that could spit their contempt at you.

  ‘I get the feeling you don’t belong here, which means I don’t want you here.’ Short, blunt fingers on his left hand touched the swollen bicep on his right arm.

  ‘I’m looking for Dave Fletcher.’

  ‘I bet he’s not looking for you.’

  ‘Mind if I ask around?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As I said, I’m looking for him. Personal reason.’

  Over the years I’d been in maybe a dozen cop bars. They weren’t always happy to have civilian visitors, but this kind of contempt and mistrust was new for me. I didn’t like to admit that it was intimidating, but I didn’t have much choice.

  The bartender had a unique way of communicating with his customers. He took out a ball bat and banged it on the bar. He had to do this a couple of times before he got the amount of attention he wanted. He had some kind of long black remote in his free hand. He used it to mute the jukebox.

  ‘Guy here is looking for Dave Fletcher.’

  Somebody shouted: ‘You know who he is?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘Saw his picture in the paper the other day. He’s some kind of mucky-muck in the Bradshaw campaign.’

  Somebody laughed. ‘Dude, you picked the wrong place.’

  He got the response he wanted. Hilarity ensued.

  I was now not so much a villain as a feckless clown. The bartender poked me in the back. Baseball bats are good for multitasking.

  ‘Think you better get the hell out of here, buddy.’

  I took a last shot. ‘So none of you have seen him?’

  This time the bat didn’t poke me. It slammed against my spine. ‘Get out of here, asshole. And right now.’

  Even the older woman in despair looked appreciative for the distraction. She watched with gre
at fascination. Unfortunately I’d left my Rambo kit at home.

  I just started walking to the front door.

  ‘Maybe you didn’t notice, jerk-off. We’re all voting for Dorsey.’

  Another wag got another collective laugh but by then I was at the door and pushing into the smoky-smelling chill of the autumn night. I’d had to park on the next long block. The bar had only a tiny parking lot so most customers had to use the curb.

  The voice was friendly enough. I didn’t worry about one of the bar denizens wanting to fight me. I heard it when I was just a few feet from my car. This neighborhood had been deserted for some time. Dirty words on walls and windows were so obvious you couldn’t even dignify them with the term graffiti. Graffiti could be clever, even artful, at times.

  I did take the precaution of turning around and setting myself for a fight. And if it did come – if I had misinterpreted the tenor of that voice – then I was going to start throwing punches with maniacal fury. The embarrassment of the cop bar scene still stung.

  He was running in the dark. When he reached me he was bathed in the dirty streetlight of this dirty, half-deserted neighborhood.

  ‘Hey, man, I’m sorry about Henry. He’s an asshole. I hate the bastard. I took my brother there one night and he treated him like hell.’ All this came out between gasps.

  I recognized him as one of the young ones along the bar. Curly dark hair, slim, dark V-neck sweater, jeans and white running shoes. Right now he was out of breath. He might be young and slender but he wasn’t in great shape.

  ‘Just give me a second, OK?’

  I relaxed for the first time since I’d pushed open the door to the cop bar.

  ‘I—’ He waved me off and then began taking deep breaths. ‘My name’s Andy Bromfield. I saw Dave last night. He was—’ One more deep breath. ‘I just saw him for a couple of minutes at this convenience store. We live in the same neighborhood. He was pretty messed up. Scared and kind of babbling. He was like that when he first got back from Afghanistan. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. We were high-school buddies. I tried to call Cindy but I didn’t get any answer. I was worried about him.’