While I Disappear

by Edward Wright

  “Guess I am,” Horn said. “Going to see Rose tonight.”

  Mad Crow brightened visibly. “Well, that’s real nice. You say hi for me.” His expression shifted as a thought struck him. “Maybe you can ask her if she, uh, needs a job,” he said slowly.

  “You thinking of firing Cassie? Don’t you think Rose is a little old to wait on tables here? And she’s….” The rest remained unspoken: And she’s a drunk

  “I guess she is. But if she needs work, I could ask around, maybe help her find something, you know? See if she’s interested.”

  * * *

  Horn’s watch showed a few minutes after seven when he parked near Rook House. It had rained in the late afternoon, a winter shower too brief to cleanse the air or the streets. The old rooming house stood huddled in the cold, the dampness only adding to its bedraggled look, the way a dog seems to lose some of its pride when wetted down by the rain. A faint smell of engine oil rose off the newly slick street.

  He had a plan. He was going to take Rose out for a good dinner. He would buy her a few drinks if necessary, and then make her tell him what he wanted to know. It would not be easy, but he would not stop pushing until he knew what had happened to her, what had made her give up.

  He would have found it hard to explain why he was there. The drive for self-knowledge did not come naturally to him. But two years in prison and the collapse of his career and his marriage had forced him into a grudging examination of what had gone wrong, and Horn now knew that he carried within him great flaws—anger, suspicion, resentment—that had laid him low and that could destroy him if he allowed them to take over again.

  He had fallen. So had Rose. And her fall had been much more profound and hopeless. Seeing her and what she had become made him uncomfortably aware of the parallels in his own life. It was like seeing his own distorted image in a funhouse mirror and being unable to look away.

  It wasn’t exactly charity that brought him back to Rook House. If he could lift her up just a little, maybe he could do the same for himself.

  He went inside and climbed the two flights of uneven stairs to her room, then knocked and waited. No answer. He knocked again, louder. “Rose, it’s John Ray.” He retraced his steps down to the first floor, where he knocked on the manager’s door. Again, no answer.

  Undecided, he stood there for a moment. Then he began to recall something from his talk with Madge, the little woman on the porch swing, the day before. What was it she had said? She lives right over me.

  Up on the second floor, he knocked on the door of the south front room. After a few seconds, Madge opened it. She wore a thin, limp robe, one hand holding it tightly closed around her neck. Standing, she looked even smaller.

  “Evening, Madge,” he said. “Remember me?”

  She looked him over quickly, her eyes moving over his clothing and features with tiny, abrupt motions. “Sure I do,” she said, with a trace of irritation. “On the porch yesterday.” She waited.

  “Well, I found Rose, and I want to thank you for the directions,” he went on. “I just can’t seem to find her tonight. She knew I was coming….” He paused, recalling that Rose had been clearly drunk when they spoke; she might have simply forgotten. “But I got no answer at her door. Or the manager’s either. Any idea where she might be?”

  Madge stood there a moment, appraising him.“She usually goes out at night,” she said.

  “I don’t think she would have gone out tonight. She was expecting me.”

  “Well….” She seemed about to close the door.

  “Can you help me?”

  “Oh, shoot. I don’t know what I can do.” But she went for her slippers and, cinching the sash of her robe about her waist, led him up the stairs. “She naps sometimes,” Madge explained on the way. “Air raid siren wouldn’t wake her. Maybe you knocked, but you’re too polite. I know how to rouse her.” Reaching Rose’s door, she made a tight little fist and banged loudly on the door several times. “Rosie! You got a visitor!” She banged again, then stopped. “You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “That music.”

  From inside the room, Horn could hear a faint melody. “Radio’s on,” he said. “Maybe she was—”

  He stopped when he saw Madge’s face. She looked suddenly pale and fearful. “I been hearing music all day long,” she said. “All last night too. Didn’t know where it was coming from. Wait a minute.” She bit her lip. “We give each other keys,” she said. “Just in case, you know? One time I got chest pains, and she…. Anyway, I’ll go get it.”

  She scurried down the stairs. As he waited, Horn idly tried the knob, and the door opened.

  The sound of the radio came up. It was Tex Beneke’s band doing Give Me Five Minutes More, and the lightweight tune seemed oddly buoyant and out of place in this tired building.

  He wasn’t sure how he knew there was death in the room. Maybe it was the radio playing all night and day, with no one to turn it off. Maybe it was the faint ammoniac smell that struck him suddenly, making him think at first of someone wiping down Mad Crow’s bar. But this was earthier and more sour, a smell that took him back to a young German soldier sitting under a tree somewhere in southern Italy. He was dead only minutes, a neat American-made bullet hole in his throat, and his winter-issue wool trousers were sodden down to his knees. Happens a lot when they die, Horn’s sergeant said, hustling his men along.

  As the door swung fully open, he saw her on the bed. He had encountered death many times, both in the war and later, but this was different. He had never seen anyone dead by strangulation, never seen that particular violence done to a person.

  Rose seemed to be resting after great exertion, her arms and legs still frozen in the effort of trying to escape the thing around her throat. As he drew nearer, he saw that it was a thin pull-cord of the sort used for curtains. It was tied once around her neck, buried until nearly invisible in the discolored skin, and the remaining cord was looped around some of the upright posts of the bed’s headboard, with the trailing end lying on the floor. She was fully dressed except for her shoes, which lay by the bed.

  He looked once at her face, swollen and nearly purple, and then did not look at it again.

  He heard quick footsteps, then a hiss of breath from behind him. He swung on Madge as she entered the room, moved to block her view, took her by the shoulders more roughly than he intended. “Don’t look at her,” he said sharply.

  Madge swallowed audibly. “Is Rosie dead?” the small voice asked.

  “That’s right. She’s dead. Someone…. It wasn’t an accident. There’s nothing we can do for her. Listen….” He bent close to her. “You’re going to need to call the police. Go down to the phone and do that, will you? And Madge—” He tilted her chin up until she looked directly at him. “Don’t tell them I was here. Can you remember that? I wasn’t here.”

  “You weren’t here,” she almost whispered, and then left.

  He closed the door and looked urgently around the room. The radio made it hard for him to think clearly, so he turned the volume down. If the police found him here, they would see him as a perfect suspect, a felon, a man of violence. He might even go back to prison; things sometimes worked that way.

  But he was reluctant to leave the room where she lay. Without quite knowing why, he wanted to take a mental photograph of the place. She had lived here. She had once been important to him. It was no more complicated than that.

  He began to look around. The cord, he soon found, had been yanked from one of the tattered curtains that framed the two windows. Whoever killed Rose had cleverly arranged the rope so that when he pulled on it, her head and neck were forced up against the headboard until they could go no farther. He kept pulling, and she died.

  The place was a single furnished room, the bath apparently down the hall. The bed took up a third of the room. In one corner was a crude sink and counter top with a coffee pot and hot plate. Over the sink, behind a flimsy curtain, were shelves of glasses, dish
es, and canned goods. By the window was a small kitchen table with two chairs, where Rose may have taken her meals. On the table were an almost empty bottle of Scotch and two glasses with small amounts of liquor. Had Rose’s killer had a drink with her first?

  Rose’s purse lay against the baseboard, as if discarded hastily. It was empty. He found no money, no documents, cards or other papers—only an old wartime sugar ration stamp that had been wedged in a seam.

  There was something wrong with the room. No pictures, no mementos, nothing to suggest a life, a history, friends, family. He looked quickly through the dresser drawers and found nothing but clothes. Then, digging deeper in the top drawer, he brought out a hard object that had been wrapped in a wool muffler. It was a small, framed photo of a young woman. The picture was oval-shaped and expertly hand-tinted, the way photographers had once added color to a black-and-white portrait before color film became readily available.

  The young woman was not Rose. She had dark hair in spit curls that had long since gone out of fashion. She wore a blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and she was lovely.

  Horn turned over the frame and saw on the back a faded sticker bearing the name of a photo studio in Oklahoma City. He slipped the frame in his jacket pocket and looked quickly around the room once more. Then he crossed to the bed, bent over and, averting his eyes once again from Rose’s face, touched her leg lightly. Her nylons were wrinkled from her struggling, and along a seam he saw the remains of an old split and the shiny spot where she had repaired it with clear fingernail polish.

  He knew that when someone died, you were supposed to say words. But he could think of none. He patted the leg once again, then left.

  As he descended to the first floor, he heard Madge talking to the police on the phone under the stairs. Her voice quavered, but she spoke slowly and distinctly. She’s handling this allright, he thought. He went out the door without looking back.

  Horn sat in his darkened car for a long time. He saw the police arrive, followed by a black coroner’s wagon. He watched them trundle Rose’s body out under a sheet, and noted lights going on in some of the windows as detectives moved around the building talking to residents.

  Finally, the old building was dark and quiet again, and still Horn sat there, unwilling to leave. He tried to roll a smoke but found himself unable to control the paper and tobacco. He felt a rage building in him. But it had no focus, and instead of strengthening him to lash out at something, it left him feeling breathless and weak.

  He became aware of a repetitive, high-pitched sound. Over on the front porch of Rook House sat a small figure, swathed in a heavy coat, rocking in the swing, the rusty chain making a plaintive squeak in the night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was after midnight when he started the engine and pulled away from Rook House. But sleep seemed impossible, so he drove aimlessly through the city. Broadway with its towering movie marquees now dark, MacArthur Park and its palm-ringed lake full of secrets, the giant Ambassador Hotel, the whimsical Brown Derby restaurant. Then back north, and up to the hills and shabby houses of Chavez Ravine, where he parked above the lights of downtown and listened to the whispers and giggles of couples in cars parked nearby.

  After a couple of hours he found himself at an all-night diner in the warehouse district not far from Alameda and the railroad tracks. He went in for a cup of coffee and a couple of doughnuts. He watched the night people come and go—a cabby on a break, a tired hooker wrapped in a pathetic feather boa, an unshaven guy with an Army knapsack who looked as if he had just rolled out of a boxcar. All of them perched wearily on stools at the counter for a while and then moved on.

  Her face materialized before him among the cracks on the linoleum countertop, the earliest one first: I’m Rose. Never done a Western, but I’m willing to learn….Then, years later: You don’t remember me, do you, John Ray? For the moment, the picture of her face in death was put away in one of the drawers of his mind. But those drawers, he knew, never stayed closed.

  Wanting to stay in motion, he drove south through downtown to Central Avenue, the dark-skinned thoroughfare that never closed, the place of lights and jazz and food and drink. He found a “blind pig,” an unlicensed, after-hours bar, where he stood at a counter made of three wooden packing crates laid end to end and ordered a bourbon. Horn’s was one of the few white faces in the bar, and the bartender looked at him hard, smelling cop, but then took in the weary look, unpressed suit, and prison-made belt buckle, and poured the drink.

  Waste, Horn thought, taking his first swig. It was all waste. A decent woman dead. A foolish woman, true, one who had been broken by life and chosen to hide behind the bottle. Foolish enough to live in a mean and dangerous neighborhood, to invite men to her room. But a decent woman nonetheless. Horn wondered if he would ever know who had killed her and for what trivial reason.

  The bartender, who resembled Jersey Joe Walcott with the addition of a belly and a perpetual scowl, moved around sluggishly, refilling glasses. At a table in one corner of the room sat several men with instrument cases, apparently musicians who had finished their gig at one of Central Avenue’s many jazz clubs. One of them blew idly into a tenor saxophone, and Horn recognized a few bars of Lily Marlene—an odd choice for this place, but no one seemed to mind.

  As he stood there, Horn went over the mental snapshot of Rose’s room again. His eyes focused on the bartender’s hands, and something in the fuzzy mental image of the room stood out, so suddenly and unexpectedly that he put down his drink, quickly laid a half dollar on the bar, and left.

  He arrived at Mad Crow’s ranch house not long after first light. The sun would be up soon, but house and trees were still gray and indistinct in the early light. When he got out of the car, his breath showed lightly on the air, and his shoes made tracks in the dew-wet grass.

  He knew the layout of the house and carefully counted the windows in the rear until he found the one he wanted. He tapped a few times on the glass with his fingernail. He waited, and the curtain parted and Cassie lifted the window a few inches. She squinted at him in the pale light.

  “I need to talk to you, Cassie,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t want to wake anyone else. You can either come out or let me in the front door. But be quiet.”

  A question crossed her face and she started to ask it, but she changed her mind and lowered the window. A minute later she opened the front door and let him in.

  The living room was big and high-ceilinged and finished in rough-cut wood. Years earlier, Mad Crow had gotten to know William S. Hart and had liked the rugged western look of the retired actor’s hilltop home out in Newhall. This room was full of Indian rugs, mounted buffalo horns, antique weapons, paintings with Indian motifs, and one-sheet posters from some of the films he and Horn had made.

  They sat across a table in big leather chairs. Cassie was barefoot, wearing rolled-up dungarees and an oversize plaid shirt. The bruise had mostly faded from her jaw. She had once again worked the braids out of her shoulder-length hair. Even free of makeup and with the sleep still clouding her slightly sullen face, she was striking.

  “Sorry if I woke you up,” he began, keeping his voice low. “I just need to find out where you were night before last.”

  She yawned exaggeratedly. “Is it any of your business?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.” She looked around the room, feigning boredom. “You doing some kind of errand for my uncle? If that’s it, he can ask me himself.”

  “You don’t like him very much, do you?”

  “He called my father white trash,” she said, her face now hard in the half-light of the unlit room. “I know, because my mother told me. I’ve seen the way he looks at my father. He looks at me the same way.”

  “I bet you’re wrong about that,” Horn said carefully. “Joseph doesn’t judge people.”

  She laughed. “He judges white people,” she said. “You think he likes you?”

  “I know he does.”


  “Maybe it’s just because you’re such a good errand boy.”

  He decided to let the insult pass. “Things aren’t as simple as you think. I’m sure your father—”

  “And if you’re going to stand up for him, don’t bother,” she said heatedly. “He is trash. Why do you suppose I left?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Because I was tired of watching him get drunk and hit my mother. Even worse, I was tired of hearing her make excuses for him. Not long ago he hit her again, and I stuck him with a kitchen knife. I swore if he did it again, I’d cut his throat. Next thing I knew, she’d packed me off to this place.”

  He sighed. He had come here with a clear intent, only to find her leading him down this side road. “All right. I’m sorry it’s like that. But I need to talk to you about something else.”

  “I know. Where I was night before last. Maybe I’m not in the mood to talk.”

  He studied her, trying to equate this angry young woman with the shy youngster he had once met on a visit to Mad Crow’s home ground in South Dakota. He had sensed that her mixed blood assigned her a questionable status in the extended family. But he had warmed to her right away, and soon was able to coax her into showing him some of her favorite places. They spent hours together roaming the fields and fishing the streams.

  “I can’t quite figure out why you don’t like me very much,” he said.

  She shrugged. “You’re just a white guy, like all the others. You used to boss my uncle around—”

  “I never did that.”

  “Well, look at these.” She indicated two posters bracketing one of the windows. “You’re the big hero, and he’s the loyal Indian somewhere in the background.”

  “It was a job, Cassie. For both of us. It was also the Depression, and we were glad to have the work.”

  “And now you’re hard up,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard him, “so you come around looking for a handout.”