"David Haskins was the witness?"
"David Haskins was the witness."
I drained half my shell and set it down and watched white foam slide down into the yellow beer. I liked taverns, hearing the crack of cards as men played pinochle, and the clatter of pool and the sound of workingmen loud at the end of a workday. At four I used to sit in union taverns and eat salted hard-boiled eggs and sip my old man's beer and learn all the reasons why you should never trust Republicans.
"Killed himself," I said. "Killed himself."
"I take it you don't believe that."
I looked right at him and said, "No, Malley, I don't. Not in the least damn bit at all."
Chapter 20
Mrs. Haskins was reluctant to tell me where her husband was employed. "If you're a friend of his, then you should know where he works," she said on the other end of the phone.
"I didn't say I was a friend, exactly, Mrs. Haskins. I said I was a classmate."
"Oh. I see. At the university?"
"No. High school."
"Oh."
"I really would like to speak with him."
"It's urgent or something?"
Years of police work had taught me that politeness is almost always more effective than belligerence. "I'm trying to locate someone, Mrs. Haskins. It's not a big deal, but I believe David could help me. "
"You don't know him very well, do you?"
"Ma'am?"
"He's 'Dave.' He hates David. That's what his father always called him, and to be honest, he never cared much for his father."
"I see."
She sighed. "I suppose I sound terribly unfriendly, don't
I?"
"Not at all. You're protective of your husband. That's an admirable trait."
"Yes, I suppose so, especially with the divorce rate these days." She paused and then said, as if with some effort, "He works at Smythe and Brothers. It's a brokerage downtown."
"Thank you, Mrs. Haskins."
"I just hope I've done the right thing."
"Thanks again."
I called Smythe and Brothers. An icy female voice told me that Mr. Haskins was out and would not be back until three-thirty. I thanked her, then phoned the tavern where Chuck Lane worked. He was out, too, I was informed, and wasn't expected back until probably six or so, when he started working. From him I'd wanted some more discussion on the subject of Karen's senior summer. Then I phoned Dr. Glendon Evans' office and was told he was with a patient and would I mind sharing with her (that's what she said, the verbal equivalent of earth tones, sharing with her), but I just said no, I'd call back. I'd do my sharing alone.
I sat in the Toyota flush with the pull-up phone listening to a radio report live from the Cubs training camp. Oh, it could be one hell of a year, the third-base coach allowed, that is, if the X-rays on their leading pitcher's arm came out okay, and if their best base stealer didn't take advantage of his free-agent potential and go play for the Dodgers, and if those unfortunate drug charges against their leading hitter got dropped. Oh, it could be one hell of a year.
I dropped in another quarter. The number I wanted was busy. I wasn't that far away. I decided, keeping the window down and the radio up, to drive out there, the summer-like seventy degrees making me feel younger than I had any right to.
This time there weren't any sheets blowing on the clothesline like sails on racing sloops. In fact, the small tract home looked battened down, garage door closed, curtains drawn. I parked in the drive and went up to the door and knocked and got exactly the response I'd figured on. Nothing.
I stood looking at the scruffy brown lawn and then at the endless row of similar houses stretching to the vanishing point. This was the step up from our fathers we'd been promised. All it showed was how far down our fathers had been in the first place. Uselessly, I knocked again.
Then the door opened abruptly and there stood Susan Roberts pretty as always. She wore a man's blue work shirt and jeans and her hair was pulled back in a soft chignon whose luster could be seen even in the shadows of the doorway. She had been crying, and very recently and very hard.
"Hello, Jack," she said.
"I'm sorry. I seem to have come at a bad time."
"No . . . it's just . . . you know, the thing with Karen and all."
"That's what I wanted to talk to you about."
She seemed surprised. "Karen?"
"If you wouldn't mind."
"Did something new happen?"
"I'm not sure."
She smiled a bit. "You always did like being mysterious. Come on in."
Five minutes later we sat at a Formica-topped kitchen table and looked out on a brown backyard and at the redwood veranda of the house on the opposite end of the backyard.
She had made us instant coffee in a small microwave. She set down gray pewter mugs and then sat down across from me. She sipped her coffee and I watched the beautiful life in her hazel eyes, the intelligence of them, the compassion of them. Then she said, "I'm just being selfish."
"How so?"
"I'm not really thinking of Karen. I mean, that's not why I was crying when you came to the door."
"Oh?"
"There's an old Irish saying that the person you really mourn at a funeral is yourself. That's what I was doing. Mourning myself." She had some more coffee and said, "Do you think about dying very often?"
"To the point of being morbid."
"Me, too." She sighed, knitted hands chafed from work but still long and beautiful in form. "Our kids are in high school. Gary still hasn't ever finished a novel. And every day I look in the mirror, I see this odd old lady taking my place there." She stared out the window again. "Karen wasn't so hard to understand, really. She just wanted to be young and beautiful forever." The lopsided smile again, the warm tears still on her perfect cheeks. "Is that too much for a woman to ask?"
I said, "Did you ever know her to hang around anybody named Sonny?"
"Sure. Sonny Howard."
"Right. Sonny Howard. Can you tell me anything about him?"
She narrowed her eyes. "Why bring up Sonny Howard after all these years?"
"It could be important."
"Why?"
"Maybe Karen didn't die of an accidental overdose after all."
"I knew it."
"You did."
"Sure." She snapped her fingers. "That's exactly what I told Gary."
"That she didn't kill herself?"
"Yes. She really didn't have it in her. I mean she tried that once and—"
"What?"
"Yes. Didn't you know that?"
"No."
"It was the summer she hung around with Sonny Howard, as a matter of fact."
"Did you ever know why?"
"Not exactly."
"She didn't give you any hint?"
"Just something happened. In July I went away for a week's vacation with my folks. When I left she was fine. But when I came back she'd gotten into these terrible crying jags. I thought maybe it was over Sonny. She'd been hanging around him a few months, but then I remembered her telling me he was just a friend, so . . ." She sighed. "None of it ever made much sense to me."
"Do you ever remember her saying anything about Ted Forester or Larry Price or David Haskins?"
"Just that she was afraid of them."
"You mean physically?"
She shrugged. "I'm not sure. One time we were at a party and they came in and she ran out the back door. Literally ran. But that was the strange thing, too."
"What was strange?"
"I can still remember their faces when they came in and saw her there at the party."
"What about it?"
"They looked just as afraid of her as she was of them."
"Where did Sonny fit in all this?"
"He hung around with Forester and the others. He was just here for summer school. Actually he went to St. Matthew's, but they didn't offer the courses he needed, so he came over here. He was just their friend, I guess."
"But she wasn't afraid of Sonny?"
"She never said so." She shook her head. "Doesn't it all seem so long ago, like some old movie?"
I finished my coffee. "I wonder if you'd do me a favor."
"Sure, Jack."
"Let me see the room downstairs where she stayed."
"Of course."
"Thanks."
The basement, like the rest of the house, was furnished in odds and ends, styles and colors that should have clashed, but that Susan's hand had brought together in an uneasy harmony. The basement was five degrees cooler than upstairs. It had red-and-white-tiled flooring, imitation knotty-pine walls, a low white ceiling. There was a furnace to the left, a small bathroom whose open door revealed sink-shower-stool, an overstuffed couch facing a massive relic of other days—a Buddha-like black-and-white 21-inch Motorola console—and finally a new but unpainted door that creaked back to show me a room with a severe little single bed, a bureau covered with expensive perfumes and bottles and jars and vials and vessels of makeup, and then a sturdy piece of rope used as a hanger for more clothes than most department stores would have to offer. The clothes—fawns and pinks and soft blues and yellows, silk and linen and organza and Lamé and velvet—did not belong in the chill rough basement of a working-class family. There was a sense of violation here, a beast holding trapped a fragile beauty.
On the bed lay an old hardback copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's. I went over and picked it up, its burnt-orange cover bright even after all these years, the pen-and-ink sketch of Capote on the back just as calculated now as it was then. I opened the front cover: Karen Lane's name was written in perfect penmanship, but when I flipped to the back I saw that it was a library book checked out the last time on May 3, 1959.
Susan laughed. "I think it was the only book she ever read. She loved it. She'd never give it back."
"Really?"
"They'd send her notices all the time. Virtually threaten her. But she wanted to keep the copy she'd first read. No other copy would do. Finally, she just paid them for it and kept it."
"Mind if I take it?"
"Be my guest."
I looked around. "She was here one month?"
"Just about. But actually she'd been staying overnight here for the past six months." Her mouth tightened. "I suppose if I raise any question about Dr. Evans, I'll sound like a bigot."
"Not to me, you won't."
"Well, I met him twice at lunch with Karen. He has this very calm, polished exterior, but he also has a terrible temper. She came here several times with bruises he'd given her."
I planned to see Dr. Evans tonight. I was fascinated by how easy it would be for a shrink to "accidentally" overdose somebody he lived with.
I studied the front of the book again, as if it were going to tell me something.
She said, "So did I miss anything the other night? I really wish I could have gone."
"You know how you feel about looking in the mirror and seeing this strange old lady there? That's how I felt at the reunion. We're getting to be geezers, Susan. Geezers."
She poked me on the arm girlishly and said, "Speak for yourself, Jack."
Then she walked me up and we exchanged a chaste kiss and I liked the hell out of her all over again the way I had back there in grade school.
Chapter 21
The receptionist wore a gray suit with wide lapels and a frilly white blouse. Her nails appeared to be her pride, they were as red as manicuring and lacquering could make them. Perhaps they were compensation for the fact that she was one of those women who are almost attractive but not quite, a bit too fleshy, a bit too inexplicably sour, a bit too self-conscious that all the time you're watching her you're saying to yourself that she is not quite attractive. She gave the impression that clothes probably interested her more than people. She touched at long hair that had been carefully tipped with a color not unlike silver.
"David Haskins," I said, going up to her desk.
Smythe and Brothers occupied its own floor in a new and grotesquely designed downtown office building. It was all leather and wood and forest-green flocked wallpaper. It exuded the aura of a men's club where the average member is over age seventy-five.
"You have an appointment?"
She knew by looking at my blue windbreaker and open white button-down shirt and faded jeans that it was unlikely I had an appointment.
"I'm afraid I don't."
"May I ask what this is about?"
"Personal matter."
She assessed me once more. She was not impressed. "May I have your name, please?"
"Jack Dwyer."
She stood up. She was taller than I'd thought and her extra pounds were surprisingly attractive. But she wasn't any nicer. She pointed like a grumpy eighth-grade teacher to a leather couch the size of a life raft and said, "Would you take a seat, please?"
So I took a seat and proceeded to look through a stack of magazines, each reverential in different ways about the subject of money.
He came out fifteen minutes later and he didn't look so good. He didn't come all the way over to me. He sort of let her lead the way and he sort of stood behind her and peeked out around the padded shoulders of her jacket.
"Hello," he said, leaning out.
He was maybe five seven and twenty pounds overweight and wearing one of those double-breasted suits only Adolphe Menjou could get away with. He was losing his auburn hair so fast you could almost hear the follicles falling off. He was also slick with sweat and gulping. He gulped, and I mean big comic gulps, as if he could not get enough air, every few seconds.
"Hello," I said.
"How may I help you?"
"Do you remember me?"
"Uh, sure."
"Jack Dwyer."
"Of course." He looked at the receptionist the way a very young boy looks at his mother. For help.
"I saw you at the reunion dance the other night, Dave."
"Right."
She said, "He's very busy."
He said, "She's right, Jack, I am." He gulped. "Very busy."
So I decided to jackpot. I wasn't going to get past his receptionist here if I didn't roll some dice. "I was wondering if you'd tell me why Ted Forester and Larry Price were pushing you into the car the other night."
"What?"
"You seemed to be having a fight with them. I wondered why."
This time his glance at the receptionist was desperate. This time he looked as if he were going to faint. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Aw, Dave." I decided maybe a little folksiness would help.
"Please, Jack, I'm—"
"He's very busy," the receptionist said. She took him by the shoulders and turned him back in the direction of his office. The corridor was lined with stern black-and-white photographs of dour men who'd devoted their lives to money. They'd probably grown up reading Scrooge McDuck comic books and taking them literally.
Then she gave him a shove, as if pushing a boat out to sea on choppy waters.
"Nice to see you, Dave," I called after him.
She snapped her not unappealing body around and said, "Exactly what the hell do you think you're doing?"
"What I was supposed to be doing was talking to Dave Haskins. But you wouldn't let me."
"Get out of here."
"You must get paid a lot of money."
"You heard me."
"You like working around all this money?"
"Get out."
I got out.
I didn't go far. I went down in the parking lot and found a drive-up phone where I could keep watch on the parking-ramp exit where I hoped Dave Haskins would be appearing soon.
I decided to call Dr. Glendon Evans. But first I prepared myself. I'd done Cuckoo's Nest in dinner theater, so I tried to get back in that character—I had played one of the garden-variety loonies—and I did a good enough job that by the time I actually dialed his number, I sounded as if I were standing on a bridge and about to jump off. The nurse
put me right through to Dr. Evans.
"Yes?" he said, concern tightening his deep voice.
"It's Dwyer."
"What?" He went from concern to anger. "I just stepped out of session because my nurse told me—"
"Forget what your nurse told you. You and I need to talk."
"I'm sorry for what happened to Karen."
"Not good enough."
"Exactly what does that mean, Mr. Dwyer?"
"It means that she died of an overdose of Librium."
"And so?"
"And so I'll bet you have a lot of Librium on hand."
"You're implying that I killed Karen?"
"It's a possibility."
"I loved Karen."
"That doesn't mean you wouldn't kill her."
"People don't ordinarily kill people they love, Mr. Dwyer."
"Of course they do. Spend a week in a squad car. You see it all the time."
"I didn't kill her."
"Did you ever treat Karen as a patient?"
"No.
"Be very careful here, Doctor."
"Are you threatening me?"
"Yes. Because if I think you're lying to me, I'm going to call the police and tell them I think I've put it all together. At the very least, the publicity won't do your practice a lot of good."
He sighed. "I'm not sure what you mean by 'treat.' "
"Psychoanalyzed her."
"That's an occupational hazard, Mr. Dwyer."
"Don't be coy, Doctor. You know what I mean."
A pause. "We were both lovers and friends, Mr. Dwyer. It was only natural that she tell me things about herself and her past."
"Did you ever give her any kind of medication that might loosen her inhibitions?"
"I don't know if I want to answer that question."
"I assume, then, that that means yes."
"I was trying to help her. As her friend."
What a powerful grip psychiatrists can have on people. Particularly people they might love. In the name of helping them, they can enslave them through deceit and manipulation and drugs forever.
"You knew you couldn't keep her otherwise, didn't you?"
"That's very damned insulting. Both professionally and personally."
"I'm going to be at your condo at six. I expect you to be there and I expect you to talk. I'm going to ask you some questions, and if I'm not happy with the answers, I'm going straight to the police."
The Autumn Dead Page 11
