Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  I paced up and down the kitchen, unable to put my finger on what was bothering me. It had started when I walked in the house, and wouldn’t let me go.

  “Did Mr. King leave the house much at night? To go out to a nightclub or eat or anything?”

  “No sir. Particularly not lately, since his car has been in the shop.”

  I turned to him. He looked like an old man in the steeply filtered light of the afternoon. “You mean he had no car the night of the murder?”

  A look of anguish came over the man’s face. “No sir. I wanted to stay with him, but he said he would be all right. I wish I had stayed anyway. I feel as if...”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” I said. “There’s nothing you could have done.” Suddenly I wanted to go to the study. I couldn’t explain it, but the hunch was strong, and was reason enough in itself “I need to go upstairs. Is that all right?”

  Chico nodded. “Of course. You are a friend of Mr. Winslow’s. Please make yourself at home.”

  Everything was just the same as it had been the day before. The chalk outline of the body stared up at me from the carpet. I walked around the room, reading the titles of books off the shelves, then came back to the desk. I opened the book of photos and paged through them from the beginning. There were school pictures, through high school, and in several of these and later ones I saw a younger version of Marion King. In two of them there was another man. Once picture didn’t have Jason in it at all.

  Marion and the man were posed in front of a fountain. They had their arms around each other, laughing. I felt instinctively that Jason had taken the picture himself, and they were laughing at something he’d said. I stared at the man’s face. I tried to visualize it older, with wrinkles. Then I tried to see it with various combinations of facial hair. Finally I tried to see it heavier, with jowls, or bloated with fat.

  Then I had it.

  I called the sheriff’s department. A voice told me Winslow was out, but I didn’t try to force the issue. I asked for McCarthy and got him.

  “I understand I’m not too popular down there,” I said.

  “Not very, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Thanks, Ed. Listen, you got a teletype from Washington with the file on a GI named Singleton, Ernie Singleton. You think you could find it for me? It just came in today.”

  “I’ll check. Hold on.”

  After a moment I heard a sound of pages rustling on McCarthy’s end. “Got it.” he said.

  “I need his war record. See if it lists who his commanding officer was at the time he was wounded.” There was more rattling of paper. Then the sound stopped and there was a long pause.

  “Did Sam see this?” McCarthy asked.

  “I don’t think he paid much attention to it. C’mon, let’s have it.”

  “I think you know.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Wounded 13 May 1953. Commanding officer Lt. J. King.”

  8.

  The jail was twilight dark, dismal, eternal. The kind of light that things and people disappear in. A ragged light came on in the ceiling as they let me into her cell.

  I didn’t waste my time. If Marion King had murdered her husband, I had spent a long day for nothing. I had to find out.

  “Ernie’s dead, Mrs. King. You can stop covering up for him now.”

  She whirled on me with fiery eyes. “How do you know about that?”

  “I fished him out of Lake Travis yesterday. It looked to me like he’d been murdered, but it was none of my business at the time. As to your relationship to him, what I know is just from legwork. I want you to tell me the rest of it. I don’t want to threaten you, but if the DA finds out about Ernie it could be bad for you.”

  I’d pumped the anger right out of her. She sat down on the hard cot. “How far back?”

  “All the way. If you tell me something I already know, I can stand it.”

  “All right.” She took a breath. “Ernie and Jason and I were a threesome. Jason and Ernie were best friends. They both loved me. This was in the early fifties. Jason was in ROTC in high school and he went to Korea when he graduated. So did Ernie, as a private. When they got back, I was to have decided who I was going to marry. I don’t know which I would have chosen, but I didn’t have to decide. Ernie didn’t come back.” Her voice stayed level, but the tears were starting in her eyes. I didn’t interrupt her.

  “The first I knew he was alive was when he called me two days ago. I nearly fainted. He told me he had something important to tell Jason and me, and he sounded like he was in trouble. We set up a time to meet at Jason’s house. He didn’t show up.”

  “Ernie was missing a leg, Mrs. King. He lost it in Korea, under your husband’s command. Given the circumstances, I think he might have been bitter toward your husband, even blamed him for the injury.”

  She was hiding her face, and her shoulders trembled a little. “Jason confessed to me that night, before he was killed. He left Ernie to die. It was the only evil thing he ever did in his life, and he’s suffered for it ever since, inside.

  “I don’t know why Ernie waited so long to come back, but yes, Ernie had plenty of cause to hate my husband. Do you think he killed Jason?”

  I shook my head. “It just doesn’t work out. If it was murder and suicide, how did Ernie get to the house? The police checked the cab companies, and they were all negative. He couldn’t have gotten very far without a crutch, but none was found anywhere near the body.” I shook my head again. “You don’t get a lump like that falling through thirty feet of water. You’re just not moving fast enough. Unless he hit himself over the head, he was murdered.”

  “By my husband?”

  “No. Same reasons. How would your husband have brought him there? His car is in the shop. Likewise Ernie’s crutch, his clothes, any other personal effects. Your husband had no way to get rid of them. And it doesn’t make sense that he’d kill Ernie at the foot of his own driveway. It’s too obvious.”

  “So who killed my husband? Who killed Ernie?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  9.

  It had become time for a drink, a little past it, in fact. I sat in a rocking chair on my front porch with a glass of straight rye and thought about luck. Some people had it, some didn’t. I had gotten close, built up a good, solid case. But unless I could produce the real killer or killers, I had wasted my time. The State could turn Ernie Singleton into a whole new motive and put Marion King away despite all my beautiful logic.

  The only clues I had left might not have been clues at all. The bond election, which might or might not have made an enemy for Jason King. The steel book which might or might not have been used to discover a piece of shaky engineering. The words “Green Chevy” and a phone number, which might refer to a new car to replace the one in the shop.

  Frustration was eating up my gut. I could say goodbye to a night’s sleep unless I did something.

  I went into the living room and got out a piece of paper. I sat by the phone and wrote out two numbers. One of them belonged to Jenny Shaw. The other I had memorized from the pad on the dead man’s desk. I tore the sheet in half and folded the numbers, then mixed them up on the desk.

  If Jenny Shaw’s number came up, I was going to take her out and buy her a drink, or maybe several, if she would have me. If the other number came up I would at least exhaust my remaining clue. I closed my eyes and picked one.

  It was the number from King’s desk. My stomach was heaving worse, now, and I wondered if I weren’t making a mistake. Almost certainly there would be no answer at all, at worst an irate stranger that I’d pulled away from his TV: But that was not what I was afraid of. I was afraid that a murderer would answer the phone and I had no idea what I was going to say to him.

  I dialed the number. My hand shook and I loused it up the first time. So I dialed it again.

  The phone rang once, twice, three times. It took an eternity. I was starting to breathe easier when I heard a
sharp click.

  “Hello,” said a deep, booming voice. My stomach lurched and my mouth dried up. I recognized the voice, and I started adding things up that should have been obvious long before.

  “Is this Hoyt Crabtree?” I said, forcing my voice low.

  “Of course it is. What do you want?”

  I took a shot at it. “Bonds. I want to talk to you about some county bonds.” My brain spun while I waited for his answer. If he bit, then Crabtree was in it up to his gills. If not, then I was at another dead end.

  “Maybe you’d better come over here,” he said at last. “I think we need to talk.”

  “Maybe I’d better. What’s the address?” I wrote it down, my pulse hammering in my ears. “I’ll be right over,” I said.

  10.

  He lived over the river, west of town. I parked in his driveway, behind a green Chevy, and walked up to his door. For a moment I wished for a gun, but I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. In any situation where I needed it I probably wouldn’t get the chance.

  I was right. A big cowboy answered the door, let me in, then threw me at a wall. I leaned against it, stunned, and fought back the reaction that started to come over me. I concentrated on the man’s hands as he searched me in the clumsy, embarrassed manner that country people have when they have to touch another man. When he was done I turned and looked at him, seeing limp blonde hair, a western shirt, jeans. I might have hit him, but at that moment I noticed Crabtree.

  He sat casually in an armchair, and there was another big cowboy to his right. There was a dull look to Crabtree’s face, and a big .38 in his hand. “Sit down,” he said, and I sat on the couch behind me. My head felt soft and pulpy.

  “So you’re the private eye. Yes, I know who you are. I checked you out after you came snooping around the office. I’m amazed at your persistence.” There was malice in his eyes and the shaggy white hair brought out the red in them.

  “While you were checking that out,” I asked, “you didn’t happen to mention anything to the sheriff about a nice quick conviction for Mrs. King, did you?” The man by the door reacted to Crabtree’s expression and slapped me across the face. He carried a lot of weight, and my head almost went into the wall again.

  Crabtree’s gun barrel came to rest in line with my stomach. “You won’t need to hit him again,” he said. “He’s going to tell us all he knows.”

  I didn’t like his attitude. “I know a lot of things,” I said. “Two and two are four, Lincoln is the capital of Nebraska...”

  The hammer of the gun clicked back. It was cheap drama but effective.

  “You may have to help me a little,” I said slowly. “But I think I have most of it now. Jason King caught you taking kickbacks on road contracts. He knew enough about the business to know your contractors were cutting corners. So you scared up a sex scandal to get him out of the way.

  “Then he got something on you. Not the scandal, obviously. You wouldn’t kill somebody as important as King over a little thing like that. But you would kill somebody you thought might not be missed. Like Ernie Singleton. That’s what Jason King found out, and that’s why you had to kill him.”

  Crabtree laughed. “Who’s Ernie Singleton?”

  “He’s the boy who really had the goods on King. He showed up at Charlene’s, for some reason, and offered to throw in with her. He left a lighter behind that had an insignia of the outfit that he and King were in. I don’t know what he offered her, but she was afraid to handle it herself. That was when she made her mistake and called you in.

  “That tipped Ernie off that something was phony, and I’m sure it didn’t take him long to find out what it was. But he knew about your connection, so he had to go. You dumped him in the lake because it was as good a place as any, and because if the body did show up it would only be something else for Jason King to explain. Only our local sheriff didn’t make the connection, and by then it was too late anyway.

  “Because Jason King had been watching for Ernie, and he saw your car. A green Chevy. I saw it just now, outside. He recognized it and called you up.”

  “I like your imagination,” Crabtree said.

  “Not imagination. King doodled while he talked on the phone, and it’s all on paper. When you came over, he pulled a gun and threatened to call the police. But he didn’t have the heart to use it, and you took it away from him, shot him carefully in the back of the head, and ran. What could you lose? Mrs. King was perfect to take the rap.”

  I noticed that I was trembling, and the adrenalin in my system was reaching a critical level. Crabtree said, “I don’t think anybody will believe that.”

  “Sure they will.” My voice sounded like it was coming from the other side of a waterfall. “Not the murders alone, or the scandal. But throw in the bond deals, the pressure on the sheriff’s office—it’s clear as a bell. Your name is the one thing that ties everything together.”

  Crabtree seemed to think it over. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  I got to my feet. I could feel the oppressive heat in the room as if it were a jungle, and my nose was full of that sickly sweet Asian smell that I’d never been able to wash away. I was shaking with the tension of it.

  Charlene Desmond burst into the room. Her face was puffy and red, and she was staggering. “Hoyt, you lied to me,” she shrilled. “You killed that soldier, and you promised there wouldn’t be anything like that! And Mr. King! You...” I saw her move through the air at him, fists bunched up in little girl style.

  “Look out, you idiot!” Crabtree yelled, but he was too late .

  She had deflected the gun and I had lost control.

  I had gone icy cold and everything was moving in slow motion. I hadn’t wanted it to happen, but the Marine Corps’ instincts had taken over and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My stiffened hand took Crabtree’s wrist, and I felt the bones shatter under it. I kicked the gun in the corner and planted my foot in the closest of the cowboys. He went down and the other one swung at me. I slipped under his arm easily and started punching, short hard throws of the fists with snap at the end. He sank to the floor.

  I turned to Crabtree, breathing hard and looking for something to kill. I stood in front of him, blood lust racking my body and my hands shaking with it. I fought for control, got it back, lost it, got it back again. My eyes cleared and my head pounded like a jackhammer. Then my knees got soft and I was all right again.

  “Call the police,” I said to Charlene, and watched her until she did it. The room was quiet, and Crabtree’s eyes, full of hatred, followed me as I sat in a chair. I remembered the pistol, finally, and picked it up out of the corner.

  When she finished on the phone Charlene sat on the couch across from me. “He still loved her,” she said, her voice drunkenly sentimental. “He stayed away because he loved her. He only came back because he thought her husband had betrayed her.”

  I realized she was talking about Ernie Singleton. “He didn’t want to hurt Mr. King, I know he didn’t. He was just angry. I don’t think he would have done it. He just loved her, that was all. Isn’t it sweet?” She looked up at me with wet red eyes. “Isn’t it just too sweet?”

  Eventually the police arrived.

  11.

  At six in the morning Winslow had let me go. Crabtree was behind bars and Marion King was out. It was over.

  “You’ve still got your license,” Winslow had said to me, “but then it wasn’t my decision.” I looked for a trace of the friendship that we’d still had only two days before, but it was gone. A hundred things came to mind, but none of them would have made any difference if I’d said them. I’d made everybody look bad, and stepped out of line time after time. People didn’t forget things like that easily. Maybe after a few months we’d all be friends again. I’d go back to Winslow’s house for dinner and we’d get drunk on beer and laugh it all off. But I thought not. We’d learned too much about each other in the last two days for things to ever be the same aga
in.

  Jeff King was waiting for me when I came down the steps. He must have been there for hours, He gave me a check for five hundred dollars and an anemic smile. “God bless you,” he said to me. I shook his hand and drove away.

  I was too full of coffee, too hypertense, too frightened by the Viet Nam flashback to get any sleep. So I drove out to Lake Travis and watched the sun come up over the water. I changed into a bathing suit and swam out into the chilly waters of the lake. It was going to be another beautiful, clear, broiling hot day. There would be more days like it, and suddenly it was going to be fall, and Austin would have tricked us out of another year.

  That was when I hated the city, the times when it fooled you into thinking the days would never end, that time itself did not exist. It had fooled Jason King, and he had let that ugly part of his past slide away, and believed it could not touch him. But time was there, deep as a lake, without pity or sorrow or love. A man could drown in it.

  I swam back to the shore and fell asleep under the neutral, staring eye of the sun.

  The Circle

  For six years they’d been meeting on Halloween night, here at Walter’s cabin, and reading ghost stories to each other. Some of the faces varied from year to year, but Lesley had never missed one of the readings.

  She’d come alone this year, and as she parked her Datsun at the edge of the graveled road she couldn’t help but think of Rob. She’d brought him to the reading the year before, and that night they’d slept together for the first time. It had been nearly two months now since she’d heard from him, and the thought of him left her wavering between guilt and sadness.

  Her shoes crunched on pine needles as she dodged the water droplets dripping from the trees overhead. The night was colder than she had expected, the chill seeping quickly through her light jacket.