The Wrong Case Page 8

  After the inquest, which attributed Raymond Duffy’s death to a misadventure with drugs, she flew the body back to Iowa for burial. Dick went with her on the next plane. Whatever he told Marsha, she accepted it more gracefully than I did. Simon fell hard into the bottle again, going on a binge that put him back in the hospital. Muffin went to the Coast for a few days and drove a rented truck back loaded with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of hot stereo gear and televisions. Fat Freddy was on his way to the hospital to harass Simon when he was mugged by two kids. They flattened him with a piece of pipe for four bucks and change. Freddy ended up in the bed next to Simon in the charity ward, and Simon recovered immediately.

  Freddy’s mugging was only one in a rash of petty street crime that began to plague Meriwether. Our mayor, who was running hard for Congress, attributed the crime wave to the heat wave, which had socked Meriwether in a frenzy of 100-degree heat and blinding smog. He began orating about the long, hot summer of Meriwether, finding urban problems and previously invisible ghettos primed for a riot, by which he meant the local Indians, freaks and winos. Perhaps he had visions of them attacking City Hall to demand free whiskey, cheap dope and a thirty-day party. The mayor might have been a fool, but this new street crime had made the citizens edgy. The streets emptied at night. Except for Indians, freaks and winos. The mayor made speeches about Meriwether making the transition from town to city—with a city’s problems, a city’s pride to solve them.

  He was an ass and an idiot, but only corrupted by ambition. And he had a point. Meriwether had problems, problems that had existed even when it was smaller. Perhaps it was the hard, long winters, months of Canadian fronts falling upon the valley like wolves, howling winds sharp with ice and snow; or maybe the sort of rootless people who drifted into the valley from the urban East or Great Plains, looking for paradise and mad as hell when they didn’t find it; or perhaps it was Meriwether’s vision of itself as still part of the wild and woolly West, the last, lawless frontier. Whatever the cause, Meriwether had divorce, suicide and alcoholism rates that embarrassed the national average. And the dope, which for years had just been another way to get high, had become serious. The kids had moved away from marijuana and had begun to kill themselves with pills and speed. After four eighth-graders died from horse tranquilizers, the police shook down the junior high lockers and found a wealth of pills, speed and needles. Grass wasn’t very profitable to deal anymore, so dealers turned to other, more profitable drugs. Even the police department became involved when two officers lifted twelve thousand ten-grain dextroamphetamine whites out of the evidence locker, then dealt them to a wholesaler right in Meriwether. They were fired but never indicted.

  Some of the people who had either been raised in Meriwether or had lived there for years were beginning to drift on, seeking that place they remembered, trying to find it again in British Columbia or Alaska or Australia. I wished them well but stayed on, sitting in my office a few hours each afternoon, enjoying what I could see of the view through the smog, but not answering the telephone, watching my prospects become dimmer. And it seemed a fine way to live. Until Dick and Helen came back from Iowa after two long weeks.

  They found me in the other office, stoned out of my mind and sharing the last of my smoked whitefish with the lady with the fuzzy hair and the pointed breasts. We had come to terms the night before, both of us showing up late on Saturday night, both being sober and bored by the party drunks. The next morning we got stoned again and attacked the whitefish. Somebody had been pounding on the office door for what seemed like hours, long enough to convince me that Leo had given my position away, so I answered it.

  “What the hell you want?” I shouted through the door.

  “It’s me, goddammit!” Dick shouted back. “Open the goddamned door! It’s freezing out here!”

  “Go get your own girl,” I said as I opened the door, grinning because Dick had maintained that the girl was too mean to bed. “Oh, you’ve got one,” I added, then tried to act as if I’d spent most of my life naked in front of Helen Duffy. She blushed, glanced over my shoulder, then excused herself.

  Dick wasn’t amused; guilt and love had driven the amusement right out of his life.

  “What’s happening, man?” I asked, cheerfully blasted but not amused either.

  “Don’t you have any decency at all?”

  His face flushed with anger when I laughed. I stopped to ask him what he wanted.

  “Business,” he said curtly.

  “Go find somebody decent to do business with.”

  “She wanted you. For some reason,” Dick said.

  “Fine. Tell her I have a business office.”

  “What do you call this?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Sure,” he said, leaving. He came back before I could close the door, and muttered unhappily, “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Today?”

  “Today.”

  “All right.”

  “How long will it take you to straighten up?” he asked.

  “There must be forty wisecracks in that answer,” I said.

  “Try to resist them, old buddy, if you can,” he said bluntly.

  “Don’t hard-ass me,” I said, feeling very foolishly naked.

  “How long, old buddy?”

  “Couple of hours. In my office.”

  He nodded, then left again. Friendship hadn’t survived love. I went back to the table and the nude lady, who was carefully licking her greasy fingers with the happy greed of a child.

  “Who was it?” she asked, as if she didn’t really care.

  “Adulterers. Fornicators. Lovers. Fools.”

  “Jesus, what a crowd.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d they want?”

  “Me to straighten up.”

  “What an outa-sight idea. Where’d they get it?”

  “Who the hell knows?” I said.

  Now that I wasn’t stoned anymore, the girl had nice breasts and a splatter of freckles across her shoulders, but her feet were dirty and her hair smelled of smoke.

  —

  Two hours later, which I spent alternating between the steam room and the sauna at the Elks Club, with occasional forays into the whirlpool and the bar, I made it to the office, slightly tipsy but functional, red as a boiled lobster. The dark glasses I’d borrowed from the Elks Club bartender felt silly. I left them on my desk, then wandered down the hall to harass my cousin the dentist for a heavy vitamin shot. He wasn’t there. That’s how I found out it was Sunday. I was back in the office, hitting the bottle when Helen came in the open door.

  “Lady, I get double-time on Sundays and national holidays,” I said, “and it started forty-five minutes ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly, “I was—was occupied.” She shut the door and came over and sat down without turning over the chair.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “Dick went home. I think.”

  Except for her muted gray suit and her hands, which looked as if she had been forming concrete for the past two weeks, she didn’t seem to show any signs of heavy grief. Her slim neck might have been a bit loose on her shoulders, and she shifted uneasily in the chair when I stared at her, but I thought the cause was guilt, not grief.

  I switched on the recorder without asking her permission, and asked her what she wanted. After a long pause, she answered in a slow, measured voice.

  “I would like to engage your services—employ you to look into the details of my brother’s death.”

  “Why?”

  “Is that important?”

  “This time I’ll decide what’s important.”

  “I see,” she said, watching her hands. Then she folded them, sat up straight in the chair, saying, “I’m not satisfied with the coroner’s verdict. I suspect something must have happened.”

  “You or your parents?”

  “My father doesn’t know how Raymond died. He hasn’t been well for some time.” />
  “What does your mother think?”

  “Oh, she agrees with me.”

  “Or you with her?” I asked, thinking that the grief-stricken mother had sent Helen back out West.

  “I suppose you could say that,” she answered slowly.

  “And what is it you and your mother suspect?”

  “Some sort of—foul play.” The old-fashioned phrase seemed proper in her mouth.

  “Murder?”

  “Something—like that.”

  “What does Dick think?” I asked.

  “Does it matter what he thinks?”

  “He knows you better than I do,” I said, “and he’s a pretty bright guy. I’d like to know what he thinks. If you don’t mind.”

  “You’re awfully sarcastic today.”

  “I don’t feel well. What’s he think?”

  “He thinks I’m a fool,” she said calmly. “What do you think?”

  After a moment’s stammering, I managed to sound fairly sincere when I answered, “I would guess that you’re a fairly sensible young woman, but between your grief and certain sorts of family pressures, you didn’t have any choice but to come back. But then, I’m not paid to think.”

  “And I’m not so young, either,” she said, smiling pertly. “Will you look into his death?”

  “I don’t know that I should,” I answered. “I’d like to help, but right now I’m not too popular with the police. Your brother died in the county, but he lived in town, and that’s where I’d have to ask questions. They might not like that.”

  “Aren’t you an ex-policeman?”

  “Ex-deputy. But that doesn’t buy me anything. I don’t have any sort of working arrangement or good buddies on the force. There are a lot of guys over there who don’t care for me, and a few who hate my guts. So there may not be much I can do. Why not try to get them to open the case?”

  “I tried,” she said, trying not to smile, “but they refused. The state police and the sheriff’s department too. Everybody refused.”

  “And I’m your last resort?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, letting the smile come.

  “It’s nice to be in demand,” I said, the anger gone now, my face distorted in a goddamned boyish grin. “I’m not busy now, so if you want me to poke around for a few days, I will. But you should know up front that I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing.”

  “I understand,” she said, staring over my shoulder.

  “Better than nothing, huh?”

  “What? Oh, I wouldn’t have said that.”

  “Thanks. What do you see out there?”

  “I’m not sure. I thought I saw lightning in the mountains, but the smog…”

  “Let’s hope not,” I said, “I’ve got some property up there. How long do you want me to look into this?”

  “As long as necessary.”

  “Lady, I charge a hundred a day. Plus expenses. That can cost.”

  “I remembered your fee; I can afford it.”

  “It’s your money. I’ll look until I dead-end, okay?”

  “That will be fine. I’ll trust your judgment.”

  “Okay, but this time you answer all my questions.”

  That was harder than the money, and her answer didn’t come so quickly.

  “I’ll try,” she said, bowing her head.

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “All right,” she said, “but please understand that—that sometimes it’s difficult—painful…” She settled herself into the chair as if I were about to extract her wisdom teeth. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I guess that will have to do. I suppose Dick mentioned your little brother’s living arrangements prior to moving to the Great Northern?”

  “Yes,” she answered, sighing so deeply that I thought she might faint.

  “You knew he was a homosexual?”

  “It wasn’t—his fault.”

  “You knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I suspected it for some time, then found out for sure when he was a senior in college.”

  “How?”

  “Raymond was a dormitory counselor at Buena Vista, and he and another boy were caught smoking marijuana in a dorm room. During the interrogation, the younger boy claimed that Raymond had seduced him.”

  “What happened?”

  “The other boy was expelled. Raymond was allowed to graduate in absentia. As a personal favor to my father and me.”

  “Your father teaches there too?”

  “He did. For nearly twenty years. Until his accident—”

  “Accident?”

  “I suppose you’d call it that. He was beaten and robbed in New York City some years ago, as he was returning to his hotel after reading a paper at a conference of English professors. Two young men, drug addicts probably, beat him rather severely, then left him in the gutter. He lay there for some time in the cold and snow, and the people who walked past him must have assumed he was drunk. He’s absent-minded about some things, like clothes. Mother packed his good suit, but he forgot to wear it, so he was dressed rather shabbily. Anyone who looked carefully would have realized that he wasn’t a drunken bum. But no one cared. Not even the police. His identification was gone, he was incoherent and smelled of the single drink he had with an old friend after he read his Twain paper…

  “So the police threw him into a drunk tank, where he was beaten again, where he stayed without assistance until he began to vomit blood the next afternoon. He never mentioned it, but I think he was also—molested somehow—sexually…Oh, this is so sordid…I’m sorry—I can’t seem to stop…”

  She cried quietly for a few minutes. I let her, remembering how badly I’d comforted her the night Raymond died. Then she stopped, saying, “I told you it would—would be hard.”

  “There’s no other way.”

  “I guess not. After he got out of the hospital, my mother sued the City of New York. They settled out of court for a rather large sum of money, but by then it didn’t matter. My father never recovered. After all that had happened, this was just too much. I had to quit graduate school to go home, and the college hired me to replace him. I suppose I’ve been replacing ever since—”

  “You said ‘after all that had happened’?”

  “Oh,” she sighed. “From the outside, on the surface, we look like such an ordinary middle-class family, but so much has happened…We had no luck…” Her fingers were scrambling at each other now, and she was gazing out the window. “We were happy—once, but we had no luck…”

  The tears came back, flooding out of her open eyes and coursing down her cheeks. I handed her the box of tissues I kept in the desk for despondent wives, and she grabbed them and fled into my bathroom.

  I didn’t follow her. I did the necessary things. Erased the tape, switched off the recorder. Had a drink. Thought about families and luck.

  When I lived in a family in the big house with overgrown grounds, we hadn’t had much luck either. My father had blown his head off with a shotgun, but nobody ever discovered if it was an accident or a suicide or bad luck. He and my mother had been drunk, fighting as usual, breaking things to show their disgust for each other and their lives. Since I seemed somehow the center of their anger, I tried to listen, usually, but that night, had fallen to sleep. The two springer spaniels woke me, barking excitedly downstairs, as if they were ready for the hunt. When I walked to my window to see if it was near dawn, the night sky was black, except for a slice of moon. In the verdant spring air, I smelled a skunk, then heard the shotgun go off downstairs.

  My mother never told me why he was going for the shotgun. Her or the skunk or himself. Perhaps she really didn’t know. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. When he reached into the hall closet and pulled out the shotgun, the trigger caught on the open bolt of a Remington .30–06 rifle, and the full choke barrel discharged a load of number four shot just under his chin.

  I remember
the stink of the skunk, the dogs yapping in circles, my mother still shouting at the body, his heels rattling on the hardwood floor. I was ten.

  When I was twenty, during the long and stupid truce in Korea, the Red Cross informed me that my mother had died in a fancy alcoholic retreat in Arizona and her body had already been shipped back East to her family for burial. They offered me a leave, but I didn’t need it. After the war, I found out that she had hanged herself with a nylon hose, but by then it was too late to feel anything, to do anything except curse the bad luck.

  —

  Helen came back from the bathroom, the made-up scheme of her face washed away, her skin pale and eroded with sorrow. She apologized quickly, then continued: “We moved to Storm Lake when—”

  “Let’s skip the family history, okay? Concentrate on Raymond.”

  I had confused her again.

  “But—but how can you understand about Raymond, that he couldn’t have—caused his own death?”

  “Wouldn’t it be better for me to have an open mind about it?”

  “I’m not sure. You don’t believe me either, do you?”

  “You’re not paying me to believe you,” I said, “you’re paying me to find out what happened. Right?”

  “I guess so,” she said, her mind working at it. She seemed to be having her first doubts, to begin to consider that perhaps her little brother had died by his own hand, either accidentally or on purpose. But the concept was too hard. She shook her head like a dog with a mouthful of porcupine quills, then spit the idea out. “He couldn’t have killed himself!”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” I said, not asking her why not suicide.

  That seemed more repugnant. She continued to shake her head, a silent no falling from her lips each time her face reached the apex of its denials.

  “Look, you want me to find out what happened? Or console you with lies?”

  “Find out what happened, of course,” she said primly, but neither of us believed her.