The Skelly Man

by David Daniel

  “Sixty-seven,” I said. “Wasn’t that the Summer of Love?”

  I dug more change from my pocket. In the directory I found the number for the Lowell campus and called and asked for the theater department. When someone finally answered, I asked to be connected with Professor Westrake’s office. There was no answer. I got back inside in time to find Morrie polishing off my dessert.

  23

  THE DINNER PARTY broke up early. Tomorrow night the city would turn out for the launch of The New Gong Show, and I had to admit, Lowell was going a little loony with excitement. Local talk shows were doing ticket giveaways, and banners had been slung across downtown streets to announce the event, which would be carried live at 8:00 P.M. At the hotel, as if determined not to be alone with me, Chelsea kept herself surrounded with members of the crew, her clipboard ever in hand. Gripaldi and I coordinated plans for tomorrow, agreeing to meet at the hotel at noon. I got back to my apartment feeling a little ragged.

  I hadn’t run for more days than I liked. I got as far as putting on my running shoes, but I didn’t have the will tonight. I didn’t have the makings for a good drink, either, which irked me, so I determined to walk to the liquor store in the shopping plaza, about a mile away. It was a nice mild night. I liked the logic of taking a constitutional to get a bottle of booze; it spoke of a balanced life.

  In front of the supermarket in the plaza there was a display of pumpkins, and on an impulse I bought one for the office. Why not? Rasmussen gets festive. Carrying it by its stem, a fifth of Gilbey’s in the other hand, I set off for home, whistling. It was just about 10:00 P.M., closing time. The plaza was mostly deserted already, the sodium lamps flaring in the mist like vaporous moons, throwing weak light on the asphalt. To my left, at one end of the big parking lot, a teenager in an orange vest was retrieving shopping carts. At the other end, their diesels purring companionably, several eighteen-wheelers were hunkered down for the night. The autumn moon was near the full.

  I was halfway across the lot when I heard a yelp of rubber. Turning, I saw a car. It was two hundred yards away, lights off, moving fast. The driver hit second, and the car swerved with the torque. A little puff of smoke went up from the tires. In that instant of quickening heart, I knew it was coming at me.

  There were no curbs or parked cars near, only a lone shopping cart, and beyond that a light stanchion a hundred feet to my left, with its lonely oasis of light. I dropped the pumpkin. I set off with the bottle in its brown paper bag tucked under my arm, like Steve Grogan on a bootleg.

  I was running well, but I was no kid anymore, as everyone kept reminding me. Even with adrenaline, I’d lost steps. When I heard the pumpkin pop under fat tires, I knew I was next. The car was almost there, its motor roaring with all the fury of Detroit scorned. I wasn’t thinking, just reacting. I faked left, then cut hard in my sneakers, grabbed the shopping cart, drew it to me, and shoved. Its action threw me backward, the cart forward.

  The car came in low, a pale sleek speckled shape that never slowed. It hit the stainless-steel cart as I was rolling away and launched it over the windshield and roof. I heard music—just a muffled snatch of weird noise as the car passed—then the mangled shopping cart crashed to the pavement a yard from where I was sprawled, bounced, and clipped my right foot. I rolled and came up in pain.

  Tires screaming, the car swung in a big smoking el toro turn and came snorting back, the driver working up through the tranny hard and fast and none too skillfully. Metal grated. The light stanchion was thirty feet away, but my run was no more than a hobble now, my right foot afire with pain.

  The car was too near. I lurched to a stop and spun around, bracing for a sidewise dive. Panic pushed an idea into my head. I yanked the Gilbey’s out of the sack, drew it back like a dinner bell, and threw.

  I saw the driver’s arm go up instinctively as the bottle hit the windshield dead center and exploded.

  He locked the brakes, sending the car into skid, burning more rubber as he tried to recover. The motor stalled.

  I shouted and started toward him in a crippled run. He got the mill going, gunning it till blue smoke poured out, then screeched off. I tried to read the plate in the flicker as it passed under lights, but I couldn’t get it all. I heard the weird music again though, and got a glimpse of the person at the wheel.

  I’d know him anywhere.

  It was the Skelly Man.

  I stood in the returning silence, amid the fumes of gin and burnt fluorocarbons, repeating to myself the numbers and letters I’d seen, feeling my heart pound, and aware of something else … an image I couldn’t quite get my mind around. At the sound of footsteps, I turned. A man about fifty, in work clothes and a Mack Trucks cap, came hustling over, followed by a woman driving an Escort, and the supermarket kid in the orange vest.

  “God almighty!” the trucker said. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Crazy damn sonofabitch. That pumpkin coulda been your head.”

  “Yeah.”

  “About the time he missed you his first pass, I was on the CB to the smokies. Any luck, they’ll nail him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Adrenaline makes me witty.

  The kid in the vest pointed. “It was a Camaro, if that’s any help. I seen it when he turned.”

  “Halloween used to be a fun time,” the woman said from the open window of her Escort. “But there’s no treats anymore. It’s all tricks now.”

  “Crazy damn driver,” said the trucker.

  They hung around getting into it—no respect for authority, gangs in the street, too much sex on TV—commiserating. I tried to retrieve the phantom thought that had passed through my head, but the more you try, the less you get. A cruiser did show up. The officer was a young woman with an orange tint to her dark hair, which was short and combed in a ducktail. She was maybe twenty-three, five-four in her thick-soled boots, so the big rubber-gripped 9mm on her belt was out of scale; but she looked like she knew what she was about. Her name tag said she was Officer Aquilina. Some cops would have stayed in the cozy car, licking the point of a pencil and filling out paper, but this one was restless. She wanted to do what she had put the badge on to do. She asked her questions with swift efficiency.

  “I can call in the routine if it’ll save time,” I told her. “I’m friends with Ed St. Onge.” Hyperbole has its uses.

  “You don’t mind?” she asked. “I’d like to see what I can find.”

  I’d given her the car make and what I had seen of the plate. There was disagreement about the color; the mist and sodium lights were deceptive. The supermarket kid said it had gone up on Route 495 heading south. The cruiser took off in a swirl of dry leaves, no siren or party lights.

  The gathering broke up. The kid went to punch out, and the trucker headed back to his rig. The woman in the Escort rolled up her window and drove off. The pain in my foot was easing. I walked home on shaky legs.

  * * *

  All tricks, the woman in the Escort had said. A Halloween prank. My gut told me otherwise.

  “Who says cops are never there when you need them?” I said to Ed St. Onge when he answered his phone at police headquarters.

  “I do,” he growled. “What?”

  I filled him in, including a good word for the young cop in the cruiser. The moment of silence wasn’t in my honor. “Got a motive?”

  “Someone doesn’t like me,” I said.

  “Too common.”

  “I need an owner. Late-model Camaro, Massachusetts plate 348, first two letters either PK or PR.”

  “The registry’s closed. Check me tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I need it now.”

  “Because someone in a fright mask broke your pumpkin? Some detective. You home?”

  He called back ten minutes later. 348 PRG. Yellow 1991 IROC Camaro. It had been stolen five days ago from a parking lot in Cambridge. I thanked him.

  And then my memory netted what it had been after. Pale yellow with primer spots. I had
parked behind the same car over at the university four days ago, the morning someone had tried to strangle Florence Murphy, née Flo Ryan, old classmate of Jerry Corbin and student of Alfred Westrake, found by Chelsea Nash.

  I wished I hadn’t broken the bottle of gin, though taken all in all, it was a fair loss. I wouldn’t have had any ice for a drink, anyhow; it was all in a pan, with my foot in it, and I sat there in the kitchen thinking about things in no special order. Westrake had been a professor at Harvard before coming to Lowell. He would have been what, in his mid-thirties then? So why, on the strength of having been at Harvard, hadn’t he gone on to a big university, or a plummy little rich-kid college tucked into the Berkshires? Why a state school whose best chops were in science and engineering? As an academic career move, it didn’t make sense. Unless … what? Unless something had gone bad. Maybe he hadn’t published enough minutiae in obscure scholarly journals and had missed tenure. Still, would that have ruled him out elsewhere? I didn’t think so—not after Harvard. No, it would have to have been something else. But what? Had he planked the dean’s daughter—or propositioned his son? Been caught pilfering from the Needy Professors’ Home fund? Maybe he’d danced naked on his balcony in January, or murdered someone. I had no answers, only the residual tiredness of the day and a sore foot.

  I hadn’t been in bed five minutes when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to Chelsea Nash standing there in her leather coat and jeans, the dim hallway light spilling off her glasses. I backed up to let her in.

  She glanced around my apartment, distracted. “I took a chance driving over here,” she said.

  “Well, it’s cheap but it’s cozy,” I said. I reached toward a table lamp, but she stayed my arm.

  “I meant driving like this,” she said. She opened the coat and shrugged it off.

  My eyes hadn’t lost any steps. She had no blouse or bra on underneath. Her breasts hung full and free. When I got my breath, I started to speak, but she burrowed against me. I held her, full of questions, my nostrils awake with the spicy night-scent of her and the faint smell of cigarette smoke in her hair. Then her mouth was on mine, and she was pulling at my pajama top.

  My hundred questions became one question, which I promptly forgot.

  We managed the ten feet to my bed, the path marked with my pajamas and her shoes and jeans and underpants. I don’t know where her glasses ended up. The schoolgirl look was surface. Her body was grown woman, superheated now and shining in the bars of moonlight through the blinds. She was all hunger and need, kindling the same in me as she moved against me with frantic insistence. We clung, twisted free, clung again, shifting on the bed like wrestlers in a tiny ring. And finally, when I gripped her, wanting to slow us down, to find some small clear space in my head, she broke free, arching back, eyes closed, and drove her hips against me until there was no chance for anything else and I just held on as she gave vent to one long, emptying cry.

  The telephone ringing dragged me from a doze. I rolled to a sitting position and sent a groggy look at the bedside clock. After 1:00 A.M.

  There is a sleep mechanism set up in the system: keep the male there after mating to increase chances of forming a bond, building a family, ensuring the future of the race. But what about keeping the female there? The other side of my bed was empty. Chelsea and her clothes were gone.

  I picked up the phone and croaked into it. It took me a moment to identify the voice over the twang of guitars, but it was a voice you didn’t mistake. “The man wants to see you,” it said.

  24

  THE NEON SIGN at the Silverado Lounge was dead. What I could see of the parking lot as I drew in front and stopped was empty. The main entrance was locked. Some time in the past few hours light rain had fallen, making the pavement shine, but the clouds had gone and a nearly full moon was melting on the horizon. Favoring my sore foot, I walked around to the side door and found it open. I went in.

  Except for the exit signs over the doors and the LEDs on equipment behind the bar, the place was dark. The air hung with the stale aromas of tobacco smoke and sweat. There was no sign of Kid Sligo, who had telephoned me. I heard no shuffling footsteps. Somewhere, music was playing softly. It wasn’t country rock, it was jazz piano; Erroll Garner, if I was guessing. It was coming from behind the partition wall beyond the bar.

  I went around the wall to the office, whose door was open, and looked in. A cigarette tip glowed in the dark. “From the way you’re moving, I’d guess you’re limping, or Kid put out the light,” Matty Silver said from behind the cigarette.

  “Both,” I said.

  “Rasmussen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Switch by the door.”

  I’d been in the dark too much tonight; I flipped the switch. A desk lamp came on. Silver was at the desk. The music was a tape, playing on a cassette recorder nearby. With slow, sure motions, Silver laid his hands on an empty glass and a bottle of Seagram’s 7 and poured some and pushed the glass across the desktop. He had a glass of his own. “In the old days, the last set would just be starting,” he said. “Sit down.”

  Three hours ago, I was in the mood for this; not now. I felt empty, bewildered and depressed. The smoke—and having been wakened twice—was making my eyes gritty. Silver said, “There’s a photo there. See it?”

  I picked it up and found myself looking at a young woman. The picture was matted in a pewter frame with an art deco look.

  “Describe her,” Silver said.

  I angled the picture in the lamplight. It was black-and-white, less a portrait than a candid shot, never mind the fancy frame. “She’s maybe eighteen,” I said, “dark eyes and hair that could be auburn, pulled back, high cheekbones. Pretty.” I looked at him.

  “Go on.”

  “She’s wearing a pale blouse and a jacket with padded shoulders, a strand of pearls. Behind her there’s a man who’s older, nice-looking suit, hat shading his eyes.” He reminded me of someone. From the movies? Nothing more in the picture was in focus.

  “Keep looking,” Silver said.

  I went back to the young woman. Had I said she was wearing a corsage? I did now. “I’m going to guess this is the 1950s, maybe a little after. So who is she?”

  “You’ve got a daytime job, right?” Silver said. “Besides playing gumshoe?”

  “Look, you’ll forgive me—I’ve had a weird night. Normal people are home asleep at this hour.”

  “Where they belong. We’re here.”

  I let that one go.

  “Who she is,” Silver went on, “is Betty Crown.”

  That woke me fully. I looked at her again. If it’s possible to like someone solely on the basis of a photograph, I did. She had a vague familiarity, too, like the older man in the suit and hat had. “Where’d you dig it up?”

  “Your friend brought it when she fell by.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Few hours ago.”

  Chelsea? It would have had to have been before she came to my apartment. She hadn’t mentioned being here—or having the photograph. My memory brought back the faint tobacco-smoke scent in her hair. “She knew who it was?”

  “I don’t think she was sure. Once she described it, I knew. I told her.”

  “So why did you need me? Why now?” More than just exhausted, I was angry. I’d been left out of things. Not just once, repeatedly.

  Silver screwed his cigarette into the ashtray. I could identify with the butt. He said, “I had an earlier visitor today. A blast from the past.”

  “Who would that be? Betty Crown?”

  He picked up his lighter and sparked another Chesterfield. “He was asking me about Betty Crown.”

  That startled me. “Jerry Corbin? Asking what?”

  “This squares us, right?” Silver said. “For long ago?”

  I looked at him. His dark glasses spilled lamplight and I felt the dead eyes facing me behind them. Old accounts had to be balanced. “Square,” I said.

  “Corbin asked if I’d ever seen
her again. Since the old days. Was she still around? Still singing? I told him she’d disappeared a long time ago. Did I remember exactly when? Had she been married? Stuff like that. Oh, yeah, and was she pregnant when she left? Like I’m supposed to remember from thirty-odd years ago.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-two. And yeah again. She was pregs.”

  With piano music playing softly, I looked at the photo once more. This time I knew why the young woman seemed familiar, but I didn’t speak. It would have sounded crazy to say I had just been in bed with her.

  25

  I WOKE IN daylight and for an instant I thought I had overslept, but no, it was early, barely 7:00 A.M. I thought about Chelsea having been there in my bed. And then, while I slept, she had gone. My foot was stiff, my body ached, and what had seemed like satiety last night had left me with jangled nerves. I felt an emptiness and—with thoughts of my visit to the Silverado Lounge—a growing fear. As I got out of bed it came to me: today was Halloween.

  A shower and a jolt of strong coffee took some of the sand out of my head, but I was looking over my shoulder this morning, checking the rearview as I drove downtown, standing with my back wedged into the corner of the elevator while I rode to the top floor of the Riverfront Plaza. Beginning with that weird phone call two nights ago, things had started to turn. In the flurry of events leading to my conversation with Matty Silver, I had forgotten about the skeleton driver in the parking lot. It came back to me now. I tried to erase an image of a shattered pumpkin.

  I knocked on the door of Chelsea’s room. There was a long moment before the door opened. She stared out at me. “Alex.”

  She was in a white terry robe, and her hair was wet. Hanging behind her on a chair was her blue tank suit. “What is it?” she asked.