Midnight Haul

by Max Allan Collins

  On the right was an old-fashioned soda fountain, with a mirror wall behind it upon which magic marker menus were written; on the left, a “penny candy” showcase—the penny candy starting at a nickel—and an oak cabinet displaying everything from sunglasses to aspirin. There was a high, white sculpted ceiling and walls that were dark wood and mirrors, with booths on either side of the long, narrow room, with porcelain counter tops and reddish brown leather seats.

  Behind the soda fountain was a man about seventy with white hair and a white coat and wire-frame glasses who was probably called “Pop.” Crane felt like Andy Hardy.

  “Help you?” the man in white said, his voice high-pitched and forty or fifty years younger than him.

  “Can I still get breakfast?”

  “Sure. Take a booth and the girl will be with you.”

  None of the five seats at the counter was taken, but several of the booths were; there was a cop in one of them, drinking coffee and looking at a paper, a guy in his mid-twenties, thin, dark. Crane took a booth.

  The person “Pop” had referred to as the “girl” turned out to be a friendly heavy-set woman about fifty. Did this make “Pop” sexist? It was a mystery to Crane. He ordered eggs and bacon and juice and got it quickly, ate it quickly.

  Then he went over to the booth where the cop was sitting. The cop looked up from his paper and coffee with a smile, then realized he didn’t know Crane and his expression turned neutral.

  “My name’s Crane. I’m from out of state.”

  The smile came back, tentatively. “Sit down, Crane. I bet I know who you are.”

  The cop had the first real New Jersey accent Crane had run into in Greenwood.

  “You do?” Crane sat.

  “Mary Beth’s boyfriend. Here for the funeral.”

  “You knew Mary Beth?”

  “Just to say hello to. My younger brother was in school with her. Beautiful girl. What a waste. I’m really very sorry, Crane.”

  Crane glanced at the front of the cop’s uniform to see if his name was there.

  The cop picked up on it, smiled again, said, “Name’s Ray Turner.”

  They half rose in the booth and shook hands.

  “I wonder if you could give me some information, Officer Turner.”

  “Ray. Sure, if I can.”

  “I’d like to talk with the officer who was called to the scene when Mary Beth’s… when Mary Beth was found by her family.”

  “You are talking to him.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s right. I handled that.”

  “I didn’t expect to stop the first cop I saw and…”

  “No big coincidence. We only have three full-time people on the force, Chief included. Plus a few part-timers.”

  “Must have your hands full.”

  “Not really,” Turner said, sipping his coffee, smiling again. “We don’t have a highway running through town, you know, so we don’t use a radar car. What’s the point of a speed trap, if you’re off the beaten path? We do have schools to look after, morning, noon, afternoon. Run regular patrols at night, checking buildings and such. And accidents happen, now and then; we cover some of them out on the highway, if we’re closer to it than the state patrol. Otherwise it’s real quiet around here.”

  “So a suicide must be pretty unusual.”

  “Not really. We’ve had our crimes here. Bank was robbed, a year ago. We’ve had our murders. A few months ago a guy shot his wife and two kids and himself.” Turner gazed into his coffee, distractedly. “ ‘They’ killed his wife.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. Something the guy said before he blew his brains out.”

  “He said, what? That somebody else killed his wife?”

  “He killed her, and his kids, too. Poor sad sorry son of a bitch. There was only one gun in the house and that’s the one he used. ‘They’ were going to kill him, too. Typical paranoid nut.”

  “I see.”

  “That kind of thing doesn’t happen everyday, Crane. I won’t lie to you. This is a pretty soft job.”

  “Tell me about Mary Beth.”

  “I really didn’t know her. Just to speak to.”

  “No. That morning. Tell me about that morning.”

  “Oh. Her mother called the station. That’s over in the basement of City Hall. The Chief got the call. He called a local doctor, and the County Examiner. Informed the state patrol. Then we went over there. She’d cut her wrists, that you know. It was a little messy. The mother and sister were upset, so I asked them their minister’s name and they told me and I called him and he came over. The County Examiner was there within forty-five minutes. He pronounced her dead, of self-inflicted wounds, wrote it up in his book, and turned the body over to the family. I called the funeral home for ’em. They were upset, like I said.”

  “Right. So then there was no investigation?”

  “Of what?”

  “Her death!”

  “I just told you. It was clear-cut. There’s no doubt with a thing like that.”

  “I suppose you see suicides every day.”

  “Not every day,” he said, smiling, without humor. “I been working here a year and a half and there’s been four, five, including the guy I told you about. People get depressed. Life’s a bitch, ain’t you heard?”

  “I heard. Look, I don’t mean to be insulting, Officer Turner. Ray. But if you Greenwood cops act mostly as crossing guards and ride around checking buildings after dark, how can you be sure you’re up to investigating what could be murder?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Mary Beth’s death. How do you know it wasn’t just supposed to look like a suicide?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s just… nobody really looked into it. It could’ve been something else, other than the way it looked. Can you deny that?”

  “It was suicide.”

  “Why didn’t the state patrol investigate it? What qualifies a glorified security guard to…”

  “Hold it. Right there. First, we did call the state patrol, I told you that. We’re supposed to do that, it’s the procedure. If we think they should come in on it, or if they think they should come in on it, they come in on it. But any cop worth a damn knows a clear-cut open-shut suicide when he sees it. Second, this wasn’t my first job, pal. I worked in Newark for two years and got my fill of real police work. I didn’t like it. So I came back to my hometown here and took this candy-ass job. But I been there. I seen murders. I seen suicides. This wasn’t murder. It was suicide. I know what I’m talking about, here. I know what I’m doing.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t.”

  “Sure you did. Glorified security guard my ass. You think we didn’t talk to the family, the mother, the sister, to see if she had been depressed lately or not? They said she had. Why didn’t you know that? You’re the boyfriend. Didn’t she write you or anything?”

  “Nothing she wrote me or said on the phone indicated her state of mind was so…” He swallowed. “Look. Both Mary Beth’s sister and mother were asleep when she died, which was in the middle of the night. Who’s to say somebody didn’t sneak in, maybe… what, chloroform Mary Beth and cut her wrists for her and… it sounds far-fetched, but couldn’t it have been that way? Shouldn’t you have checked to see if it happened like that?”

  Turner looked at him for what seemed like a long time. “I know how you feel. What you’re going through. You’re looking for reasons, answers, and there aren’t any. Life gets to people, sometimes. And sometimes they do something about it.”

  “I guess.”

  “Your girl killed herself. It begins and ends there. Let it go. Go home. Bury it.”

  Crane nodded, got up from the booth.

  Walking out, he didn’t feel much like Andy Hardy, anymore. Behind him he heard Turner call out to the “girl” for more coffee.

  He walked back to the motel, stopping for a few seconds to look at B
oone’s house. Some of the trees in her yard looked dead.

  He packed.

  He had one thing to do, before he left. Then he’d leave it behind him, like the cop had said. Leave it buried.

  Chapter Seven

  There were no cars in front of Mary Beth’s mother’s house, now, just a several-year-old Buick in the drive. The relatives, the mourners, had faded back into their own lives. Mary Beth’s mother, her sister Laurie and little Brucie would be alone, now.

  Laurie was coming out the front door as he was coming up the walk; she was digging her car keys out of a jacket pocket, and smiled when she saw Crane.

  “Crane. How are you today?”

  “I don’t know. Okay, I guess. You?”

  “Better. Not feeling so blue. You don’t have to worry about me, if you were.”

  “Well it did seem like the strain had got to you a bit. But you’ll do fine, Laurie. You and your kid’ll do fine.”

  “I’m just going to get some groceries. There’s plenty of cake and cookies and garbage left from yesterday, but no food. You can ride along, if you want to talk.”

  “Actually, I kind of wanted to chat with your mom. I haven’t really had a chance to, yet. How is she?”

  “Not bad. Existing. She hasn’t said much, but it’s her nature to be on the quiet side. Doctor has given her some mild sedatives, too.”

  “Would it be all right if I went in and talked with her?”

  “I’m sure the company would do her good. She and Brucie are in the living room. Just go on in.”

  “Thanks, Laurie.”

  “I’ll see you later, then.”

  “Well. Maybe not.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be leaving this afternoon. That’s why I wanted to make this call on your mom, actually.”

  She gave him a long look and smiled as she did; it was a very good-natured, and very sad, smile. Her plumpness and wide face did not diminish the strong resemblance to Mary Beth. It made him want to be around her and at the same time not.

  She kissed his cheek.

  “Good-bye, Crane,” she said, and turned and walked to the Buick.

  Laurie had said to go on in, but he knocked anyway, and a soft, childlike voice from within said, “Come in, please.”

  He went in.

  Mary Beth’s mother was sitting on the couch, just as she had the day before, after the funeral, when she’d sat framed by relatives. It was as though she hadn’t moved since. Brucie was nearby, where she could watch, her hand on the edge of his playpen, barely moving, a photorealistic sculpture.

  Her head turned slowly on her neck as she looked at Crane; her movements reflected the sedation she was on—she moved like Lincoln at Disneyland: vaguely human, but not terribly convincing.

  But she did manage a slow, small smile, recognizing Crane immediately this time.

  “Nice to see you, young man,” she said. It was a voice you could barely hear.

  He went over and sat beside her.

  “I’m going to be leaving this afternoon,” he said. “And I wanted to stop by and say good-bye.”

  “Kind of you,” she said. She was still smiling; the smile hung there on an otherwise blank face.

  “I wish you and I could have gotten to know each other better.”

  “Yes,” she said, but there was confusion in her face, now, and in her voice; she really had no idea why Crane wished he could have known her better.

  So he told her: “I loved Mary Beth. Very much. We’d have been married soon.”

  “I know,” the mother nodded, with her blank smile.

  “And we’d have been family, you and me. I’m sorry that didn’t happen.”

  Somewhere beneath the sedation, what Crane was saying began to sink in. The smile became less mechanical. Mary Beth’s eyes looked out of her mother’s face at him.

  Then he was crying, and she was comforting him. Holding him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away gently. “Sorry.”

  “I know,” she said. “Can I ask you something, young man?”

  “Anything.”

  “Why?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Why did my little girl die?”

  The question surprised him: he had no answer.

  She said, “You knew her so well. Can you tell me why?”

  “I can’t,” he said, finally. “I hoped I might find the answer here in Greenwood. But I don’t think I can. I hoped your daughter Laurie might’ve been able to tell me, but she couldn’t.”

  “You hoped I might tell you, too, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, confessing to her and to himself, without saying so, that he’d come here today not to say good-bye really, but for one last try at finding the answer to the question that Mary Beth’s mother was now asking him.

  “You lived with her this summer,” Crane said, looking into the sedated face and hoping to keep the person behind it in touch with him. “Did you know Mary Beth was depressed? Troubled? Laurie says there were some indications she was.”

  The mother thought about that for a few moments. “She seemed a little down,” she said, gazing at the floor. “She talked about her father a lot. She said, two of her best friends in town, their fathers died of cancer, too. She said that more than once.”

  “I see.”

  The woman looked over toward Brucie and gestured slowly. “She was upset about Brucie’s problem. That made her unhappy. Sometimes she cried about it.”

  “She never told me,” Crane said. “We spoke on the phone every week, exchanged our letters, but not a word about any of this.”

  “I can tell you one thing,” the mother said, touching Crane’s arm, her smile anything but mechanical now, “she was never down after your phone calls. She was never down after your letters. She loved you.”

  Crane held the tears back. “It’s hard to understand how she could love me and take away the one thing that was most precious to me: her.”

  She touched his face. “She was sick. Like her father was sick. Just a different kind of sick.”

  He hugged her. She hugged back. She was soft. He could’ve stayed in her arms forever; it was as close to Mary Beth as he could get, now.

  He rose. Smiled, said, “I’d like to keep in touch.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “I have your address. Do you have mine?”

  “Yes. Send a card at Christmas.”

  “I will. You, too.”

  “Would you like to hold Brucie before you go?”

  “Uh, no. I wouldn’t want to disturb him.”

  “He isn’t sleeping. Hold him for a while.”

  She got up, moving like a film slowed just slightly down, and gave the bundled baby to Crane. He held Brucie. Looked at him. He was a beautiful baby. Happy. Look Ma. No hands.

  He handed Brucie back to her and she took him in her arms and rocked him.

  “Well,” Crane said. “I better say good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, son.”

  Back in the motel room, he sat on the bed and called to find out about the bus and the plane he’d be connecting with. Then he called his friend Roger Beatty, back in Iowa City, to let him know he was coming home.

  “I’ll be waiting at the airport for you,” Roger said. “It’ll be good to have you back. There’s nobody here to go to lousy movies with me.”

  He and Roger often went to the Bijou, which was a theater within the Student Union where old films were shown.

  “I’ll be glad to be back,” Crane admitted. “This hasn’t been pleasant.”

  “I can imagine. How’s her family? It’s just her mom and her sister, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. They’re doing pretty good, considering.”

  “And how are you doing? Pretty good, considering?”

  “I guess. I… well, I hoped to come away from here feeling I understood why this happened. But I don’t, really.”

  “You’re going to drive yourself crazy looking for a reason,
Crane. You know what Judy said?”

  Judy was Roger’s girlfriend, a science major, Ph.D. candidate.

  “No. What did Judy say?”

  “She said one theory, which is I guess widely accepted these days, is depression comes not just from events in your life that get to you, but a biochemical breakdown in brain function.”

  “Jesus that’s comforting, Roger.”

  “No. I’m just saying that you want an answer. You want to find out, what? That she found out from her doctor that she had a month to live, so she killed herself. That’s the movies, Crane. I’m saying that, according to Judy at least, depression is a physical thing, not just a reaction to shitty things happening around you.”

  “I see your point. Look, this is costing me more money than my ticket back. I better get off the phone.”

  “Okay. But you don’t sound so good.”

  “Well, fuck, what do you expect?”

  “Get your butt home, Crane. Get home and forget about all this.”

  “I will, but it’s just… there’s this girl. Woman.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Give me a break, Roger. Her name is Boone. She was a friend of Mary Beth’s. She’s a fruitcake, is what she is.”

  “What about her?”

  “She told me something crazy.”

  “Which was?”

  “She told me Mary Beth was murdered.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. She’s one of these leftist conspiracy nuts who thinks that the chemical plant everybody around here works for was behind Mary Beth’s death.”