The Skelly Man

by David Daniel

  I pulled from a paper bag the bottle of George Dickel I had purchased en route. “I was going to wait till Christmas, but it sounds like it might be in order now. Unless the doctor says—”

  He took the bottle. He set it on the workbench that ran along one side of the garage, then hunted in a straw picnic hamper and came up with two plastic tumblers printed with watermelon slices. He blew the dust out and poured a couple fingers in each. He didn’t ask me if it was too early. Plastic doesn’t clink the way glass does. I took a hit and grunted approval. He just drank.

  “Remember,” I said, “only one of us will be getting a beribboned something under his tree this year. Doesn’t have to be big, as long as it’s expensive.”

  We drank. Then I said, “Have you talked to the Murphy woman in the hospital yet?”

  He resumed his search, gazing up at the bare pine joists. I looked up, too, at a deep-sea fishing rod, a set of studded snow tires, a dented aluminum thermos cooler and Stein Eriksen’s first pair of skis. No leaf rake.

  “Any special cause for the high spirits, or is it just autumnal?” I asked.

  “You a visiting nurse?”

  I sat on a stool at the workbench while he poured two more.

  “You should stick to finding bad guys,” I said.

  His stubbled cheeks puffed out with a sigh. “It’s not anything you can see. I don’t know. I was analyzing it. Katy phoned, said she’s not coming for Thanksgiving, might not even make Christmas. She’s on call, this new program she’s in.”

  Katy was Ed and Leona St. Onge’s older daughter, a nursing student in Albuquerque.

  “But it’s not that,” he went on, avoiding my eyes. “It’s … nothing.”

  “And everything?”

  His gaze came up for just a second. “Couple weeks back, when we had that bad weather, we were up at the mall. Leona was in shopping; I stayed in the car. The air was full of sleety rain, and I thought, ‘OK, this is it. Winter’s coming.’ Then this sound starts to come to me, you know, slowly, but building, and finally I realize what it is. I open the door and look up, and moving through the crud there’s this long, jagged V of Canada geese. I felt this clean rush of … I don’t know, joy. I got out. I wanted to just feel that with other people, to know we all still share something. The parking lot’s full—they’re loading crying kids into safety seats, futzing packages into hatchbacks—but no one’s aware. I wanted to shout. There’re these birds moving through the murk up there, intent on a purpose, maybe telling us something. And no one’s aware.”

  “Except you,” I said.

  He tossed back the bourbon. “I’m wondering maybe it’s time to take an early out—the pension’s still decent—and head for the Sunbelt. Katy says New Mexico is great. I liked golfing the two times I tried it.”

  “It’s something to think about,” I said.

  “Drink to it,” he said and poured more bourbon and we did. I didn’t talk. He wasn’t looking for a therapist, only a listener. He said, “Yeah, I spoke with the woman who got mugged. She’s got some memory loss. Doesn’t recall the attack, or why she was there. It may come back. But she brought up a name I’m starting to trip over.”

  “She and Corbin were classmates,” I said.

  “And she was on that quiz team as an alternate. She helped drill Corbin and the others. She says she got the idea the coach might’ve had the questions in advance.”

  “Professor Westrake?”

  “I guess that’s the one.”

  “She thinks it was rigged?”

  “It’s possible. Mean anything?”

  I studied the tread on the snow tires: still good, but studs were forbidden on Massachusetts roads. I met his gaze. “All right, you leveled with me and you’re looking for something back. Only I don’t know what it is yet. On my side of the street, there’s no pension, no golden parachute, which is why I have to keep flapping my arms and not my lips. I did tell Corbin I can’t do what you people can. I’ll keep working on him to talk to you. That’s all I can say right now.”

  St. Onge’s gaze didn’t waver. I said, “For the record, I like Canada geese, too. And I hear what they say. If they’re heading south already, you better forget about leaf rakes and look for your long johns. You going to be okay?”

  “You were.”

  “Me?”

  “After you lost your shield, and when Lauren left. I saw you go pretty deep there, but you bottomed out, and you came back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We manage,” he said.

  I lifted the plastic tumbler. “A testament to the indomitable human spirit. I say man will ‘not merely endure but…’” I put the glass down on the workbench. St. Onge stared at me. “I’ve got someplace I need to be,” I said.

  * * *

  The someplace probably wasn’t absolutely essential. I pretty much had the gist of what I wanted, but I was relying on years-old memory from a college lit class. I took a spot marked RESERVED FOR BUILDING INSPECTOR near City Hall and went into the public library. On a table I laid out copies of the notes Jerry Corbin had received. The first note, which Justin Ross had brought the night he’d hired me in the Copper Kettle, concluded with the line: hear the Gong of Doom. The third note said: W.F.’s Stockholm address—you won’t even hear it.

  The Viking Portable Faulkner had the text of the speech, delivered in 1950 when Bill accepted his Nobel prize in Sweden. It wasn’t exactly the way I’d scatted it in St. Onge’s garage, but close. In it Faulkner said, “… when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening,… even then there will still be one more sound.…”

  As it had when I’d first read it long ago, the speech sent a shiver along my backbone—but now for a wholly different reason.

  17

  I TELEPHONED THE alumni office at Harvard from a phone booth in front of City Hall and asked for Judy Bishop. I gave her my name, and she said, “The film-noir guy.”

  “I’m thinking of a boxing film from the late forties,” I said. “The Set-Up. Got a star?”

  “That’s easy. Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter. Ryan was an Ivy Leaguer—did you know that? Dartmouth, class of thirty-one.”

  “You’re good, Ms. Bishop.”

  “I could show you how good, Alex Rasmussen.” She gave her throaty laugh. “How are you?”

  “Not quick enough, but still curious. Those four people I asked about before—any of them have kids or grandkids at Harvard now?”

  She didn’t think the folders had been refiled yet. I held while she checked. No music this time. She came back two minutes later. “One had a daughter who graduated from Radcliffe ten years ago. Another had a son here, but he left last spring before finishing his third year.”

  The daughter was living and working in China. The kid last spring was a Paul Chapman. Son of Tom Chapman, who had drowned. There was no current address. “Helpful?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Do you happen to know if Tom Chapman’s body was recovered?”

  “Hmm, I don’t. I’ll see if I can find out.”

  “One other thing when you get a chance? I’ll owe you.” I gave her Alfred Westrake’s name.

  She said she would try. Her office was beginning its fall canvass that evening, telephoning alums to get pledges. “I’ll be out straight the next few days, but after that my nights are my own. I noticed that Laura is showing next week at the Brattle, on a double bill with The Dark Corner.”

  “Check that info for me,” I said, “and I’ll buy the popcorn, too.”

  * * *

  I grabbed coffee and a sandwich at Arthur’s Diner, then drove over to the university and watched the rehearsal for a while. I thought my line of work was routine. Corbin was smooth up there, going through the material time after time, perfecting it with each pass, enjoying himself. But some of the talent needed help; I wished I had a gong handy. At 3:00 the director called a break, and Corbin, accompanied by Chelsea Nash and
Phil Gripaldi, disappeared backstage. Justin Ross came over.

  “You discovered anything?” he asked. I filled him in up to my visit to the library, leaving out St. Onge. Ross didn’t seem impressed with my literary acumen. “It isn’t much,” he said skeptically.

  “You had to be there.”

  “Are you armed, at least?”

  I patted the breast of my jacket. “Eberhard Faber, fine point.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not packing,” I said. “I believe in winning hearts and minds.”

  “Jesus Christ, Rasmussen, this isn’t a joke. How can you call yourself a professional and not carry a gun?”

  “It’s rough. I’m like a surgeon without a pogo stick. When there’s someone to point it at, I’ll have a gun.”

  He might have said more, but Jerry Corbin came over so Ross settled for cinching up his bolo tie. Chelsea came too, clutching her clipboard. She had on a white mohair sweater and black jeans bloused into black cowgirl boots; I hoped she wasn’t catching what Ross had. Gripaldi cruised the area, as unobtrusive as a stagecoach. Jerry asked my opinion of the show, and I kept it to a neutral “interesting”; I wasn’t being paid as a TV critic. I ran through my list of nonachievements for him. He was more gracious than Ross had been, but he said he didn’t see how the quiz bowl had any link with the notes being sent to him. In fact, he was starting to believe that the whole episode with the notes had run its course. There hadn’t been a new one for a while.

  When the director called everyone back to the set, Corbin said, “Chelsea, honey, it’s too nice out to be cooped up in here. Why don’t you go back to the hotel and take a swim?”

  “I’d prefer to stay,” she said.

  “You wanted to see Lowell. We’re going to be tied up indefinitely. Rasmussen, take her hay riding or pumpkin carving or whatever the hell they do here this time of year.”

  “Elect cronies to public office,” I said and shrugged. “Yeah, it’s okay with me.”

  “Gripaldi will be here. I’m fine. You two go ahead.”

  Looking less-than-thrilled, Chelsea took her bag and clopped up the auditorium aisle in her boots, with me behind. I snapped my fingers. “You know what would sound great with those?” I said. “Spurs.”

  * * *

  We were riding west along the river before Chelsea realized I wasn’t headed downtown. She made a brief protest, then sank back. I kept driving. Corbin had been right: it was too beautiful an afternoon to be indoors. The trees were ablaze, and the river was spangled with floating leaves and the reflections of big white clouds. When we were in the Nashoba Valley, a few miles out of the city, I said, “Ever been apple picking?”

  “Is this another joke?”

  “We’ve got the best McIntosh apples anywhere. We can get a peck or a half-bushel, maybe split it, Macs and Cortlands.”

  “Great. And what am I going to do with a sack of apples?”

  “Eat them. Have the hotel chef bake a cobbler, or apple crisp. Or there’s deep-dish pie, apple spice cake, applesauce.”

  Chelsea was smiling skeptically now. “Rasmussen’s one hundred things to do with apples?”

  “Thousand,” I said. “Put them in a big tub of water and bob for them on Halloween. Dip them in caramel, hang them on strings. Or throw them at the so-called talent on Jerry’s new show.”

  Her amusement vanished. She didn’t waste energy asking if the Bobcat had a car phone. At her insistence, I pulled over to the next booth we came to, at a farm stand in Westford, and she used it. When she came back, I said, “Rehearsal came to a grating halt. There’s an all-points bulletin out for you.”

  “I just wanted to be sure everything’s okay.”

  I couldn’t tell whether or not she was disappointed. Emotional camouflage was a skill that the members of the Corbin troupe had down cold. Since we were there, I said, why didn’t we check out the farm stand? Her shrug wanted for enthusiasm.

  We made our way along aisles of pumpkins, squashes, corn, fresh honey, maple syrup, cranberry products, and apples—lots of them. In back, facing the orchards, there were picnic tables and chairs. I bought two cups of fresh-pressed cider, and we went out.

  “Is baby-sitting part of what a P.I. does?” Chelsea asked.

  “It’s a change from shooting people, which is what Justin seems to want me to do.”

  “He’s just edgy. We all are.”

  “Not Jerry, apparently.”

  “He’s putting on a brave front for the rest of us.”

  “One big edgy family,” I said.

  We sipped cider and watched a tractor pull a hay cart full of small kids past, some of them in costumes. Chelsea said, “When I was about three, I saw a picture of a skeleton in a magazine. My mother explained what it was, and I thought she said the ‘skelly man.’ The image frightened me for years, so one time my father got me a costume—one of those hokey black pajama things with the painted bones. They thought it would get me over the fear.”

  “Did it work?”

  Her smile was tentative. “Not entirely. Fears grow up, too.”

  “Are your folks still alive?”

  “My father died when I was in high school. Mother died a year ago.”

  I nodded.

  “I was married, too,” she said. There was a soft, confessional note in her voice. I looked at her but kept quiet. “His name was Drift. Drift Kirkwood. He was going to be a movie star, and he thought it had the right sound. He sure had the looks. We met at the beach.”

  “That really happens in California, huh?”

  “It did for us. Things started so … romantically. Soon though it got pretty clear he was never going to earn a living. He was in love with the idea of being an actor, but certainly not the work of the craft. He preferred to lie around the pool at the apartment complex waiting for calls. At night he wanted to be out cruising the clubs. Visibility was the key to being discovered, he used to say. I’d be exhausted from working all day as a production assistant over at Warner. In those days I was full of the idea that I wanted to direct.” Another wistful smile. “Still, I’d go, just to be with him. He was that handsome.” Then her smile was gone. “He was a drainer, though. He used other people’s energy. And, it turned out, a hitter.”

  “He hit you?”

  “Not often, only when he felt really pressured.”

  “Once is too often,” I said.

  “It’s an old story. He’d beg, I’d stay. It was the whole sad, bitter dance of a couple in trouble. I’ve got scars, mostly emotional. The vision in this eye isn’t quite right.” It was the eye that tipped outward slightly. “Finally I left. He tracked me down, and when I refused to take him back, he got mean, said he wouldn’t let me go … not unless I gave him everything. Half, I’d been willing to, but not everything. I’d worked too hard. Plus, my mother got sick then, up in Seattle. So much of my energy had been going into Drift, I’d lost touch with my own mother. Finally I knew that since he wasn’t going to let go, I had to find a bar to pry him loose with.”

  “Is that when you hired the investigators?”

  She shut her eyes and nodded. “I didn’t like having to. It seemed sneaky. They trailed him around on his night adventures awhile, and they found something I could use.”

  I entertained a notion of what I’d like to have used on Kirkwood to knock him on his lazy ass. After a moment, Chelsea said, “I confronted him with the proof that I knew. He was smart enough to see that it would ruin his dream of a career, so he backed off. I gave him a few thousand dollars, and that’s the last I saw of him. I got the job with Jerry soon after and brought my mother back to Los Angeles for the last months of her life. I’ve been with Jerry a year and a half now. He’s like a father to me, and the work is involving.”

  I grinned. “That’s like saying a tiger shark has a good appetite.”

  She drank some cider. “Aren’t you going to ask what the investigators found out about Drift?”

  “Not unless it was sending menacing
notes to people.”

  “You mean to Jerry?” She shook her head. “Drift is incapable of taking that much initiative. Anyway, the last I heard of him, he’d found another pliable little wife.” She smiled. “So, what about you?”

  “Putting the squeeze on Jerry?”

  Her eyes had got some of their sparkle back. “Is there anyone home baking apple cobbler whom you ought to be phoning to say you’re doing charity work?”

  “Nope. And when there was, we split the cooking fifty-fifty. Her half just tasted better. She’s in Florida now, making a new life.”

  “Do you have her picture?”

  “No, but I still know what she looks like. And I know if a chance came to get her back, I’d jump at it. But that’s not going to happen.”

  I kicked the topic around a bit, more than I’d done with anyone in the slow march of time since Lauren had left. Chelsea was a good listener, which made me an okay talker, up to a point. Then it was getting late. The afternoon had faded around us, the air cooling and bringing the smells of harvest and dying leaves. It would be dark when we got back to the city.

  While Chelsea used the bathroom at the farm stand, I called my office and punched in the code to access my machine. There was one message. Chelsea came out as I hung up. “I’ll drop you at your hotel,” I said.

  She looked at me. “Was that about Jerry?”

  “It might be. I’m going to find out.”

  If she had hesitated, I might not have agreed; but she didn’t. She said, “Take me with you.”

  18

  ON THE RIDE back to Lowell, I told Chelsea about my arrangement with Vito, the historian from Kappa Tau, Jerry’s old college fraternity. I omitted the graffiti that claimed Big J had planked Betty Crown; it seemed needlessly coarse. Vito’s half of the forty bucks was apparently getting lonely. His message on my tape said he had a lead. There was a Betty Crown who used to be a singer, he said, at a place called the Canal Club, but he didn’t know where it was, or when. That was okay. He was just a student. He couldn’t be expected to know little details about the city’s past: like where or what the Canal Club had been all those incarnations ago, before it became Matt’s Silver Dollar, and a few other things.