Bury Me Deep (20 page)

But her head was a dust bowl.

Somewhere in her, she was building armies to prepare herself, to fortify herself because she knew it was time. She was nearly ready, nearly ready to tell everything because she felt her guilt and shame more purely than ever and knew what must be done.

But her thoughts were scattered and she worried about Dr. Seeley and her words jumbled in her mouth and she could not hold on to them. She began to doubt the soundness of her own mind.

Joe Lanigan, did you even exist? Did you live to ravish me and then disappear into thin air but to stand behind doors, voice rattling through telephones, creeping under floors, whispering commands, puppet string twisted around your heavy hands as you lift your fingers and everyone dances, dances for you?

They spoke sternly, the edges in their voices sharpening. Even that nice Officer Morley,
Detective
Morley, grew impatient—he told her she knew more, and he was asking about packing slips and train tickets, and wasn’t it funny that a woman perfectly matching her description had taken that train herself to Los Angeles? Had left the Southern Pacific Station in Los Angeles with those trunks? Could she explain who this woman was if not she?

For a moment, the picture of Sheriff Healy, in full uniform and tin star, twirling Ginny around in the girls’ living room, stuttered into her head.

“Sheriff Healy, is he—”

“Don’t even bother,” said the long-necked one, Tolliver. “Don’t even bother. The sheriff knows all about you. Knows the kinds of things you girls had going on there. It went bad between you three, did it?” He zippered his fingers in the air, a perfect triangle.

Marion looked up at them and said nothing.

You must see that now that I will make sure my name is not brought into this,
Joe Lanigan had said to her.
I will not let it happen and it won’t happen because of what I am in this town. There are levers and switches and keys and I know which way they all go.

And they kept talking and talking, about witnesses at both train stations, at the soda fountain on Hussel Street, everywhere. She had been seen everywhere. Everyone saw her and identified her and there was no hiding. Even people who could not have seen her said they saw her. Lever, switch, key.

“It was you, Mrs. Seeley, wasn’t it?” said Morley. “It was you on that train and it was you who came to claim those trunks? And if you didn’t know what was in them, why did you tell the station agent that the trunks contained game meat? It was you, Mrs. Seeley, and you knew those trunks held the remains, the butchered remains, of your friends, did you not?”

…and finally

Did you murder those two girls, Mrs. Seeley?

And she stuttered and started and finally gathered herself, gathered herself and summoned Louise’s stalwart hauteur. She thought of Louise and she brought Louise to herself and rose tall in her chair and said, keenly, “Do I look to you, do I look to you gentlemen like the kind of person who could murder two women and do the things you’ve said, that you keep saying, who could cut her girlfriends to pieces and pack them in boxes and perform untold horrors upon their bodies?”

They peered down at her, these two tall men looming and hanging over her.

“And I don’t think I will talk anymore. I don’t think I will. I can’t talk anymore now and I believe I will have a lawyer.”

She was placed in the holding cell.

J
OE
L
ANIGAN.
Joe Lanigan. Would you really nail me to the cross?

I believe, Joe Lanigan, you would.

She sitting here behind a crossbar and what of Joe Lanigan, sprawling bedwise with his nurse-whore?

Prescription slips, tales of dirty deeds, broken-faced dope peddlers pointing shaking fingers—what did any of that matter? Who would believe her now? Who would believe this dirty thing, wasted and unclean, with drug-addicted husband, this dirty thing a monster in waiting? Who would believe her?

She would mount those gallows steps. She would.

B
Y THE TIME
the detectives reclaimed her, not two hours later, she had toiled herself into some state.

“Where is my lawyer? Where is he?” she asked. She could not keep still. She could not stop her hands wringing. Her head was so full. Her head was so full she could scarce hold it up.

“You’re not under arrest, Mrs. Seeley,” Tolliver said, looming, it seemed, two feet higher than two hours before. “What would you need a lawyer for?”

“You’ll have your lawyer,” Morley said. “But right now, we’ll have some more answers first.”

She looked at Morley, and then at Tolliver. They had some bounce in them, some light in their eyes. They seemed more confident, sprightly. She felt they were circling in, circling in.

“I’d like to know where Mr. Joseph Lanigan is,” she blurted before any sense or thought could stop her. But why should it stop her? Wasn’t this the end of the line? Wasn’t it? Grab any rope, grab and hold on. “Have you brought him in for all these questions?”

“Why would we do that, Mrs. Seeley?” Morley said, looking over at Tolliver and back at her.

“He was friends with the girls, now, wasn’t he? He was friends
and spent as many evenings with them as I. He’s there behind everyone you mention. He’s behind them all, lurking. He’s behind Mr. Worth who goes to the papers and says I had a fiery temper and the girls were prone to drinking and wild antics, and all these so-called witnesses and all this. He’s behind them all.”

She felt her face grow stiff. Had she gone too far for nothing? Had she only ensnared herself? She stopped. She put her hand to her mouth and bit it. She bit it like an animal and her skin broke fast and blood swelled across her lips, the salt tingling. She didn’t know what she was doing. She started to laugh and the sound of it was terrifying.

“Mrs. Seeley,” Morley said, face turning white. “Mrs. Seeley…”

They bent down toward her. The way they were looking at her, like they realized suddenly they had captured a tigress, a madwoman, right there before their eyes.

S
HE SAT
in the holding cell. It might have been many hours, she couldn’t be sure. She knew it was all over. She did.

There was a guard with a harelip and a rolling gait who kept coming in and talking to her. He told her there were reporters all the way from Los Angeles, even New York City, outside. He told her that they were trying to take pictures through the bar windows, had she seen them? He had made them stop, wasn’t she glad? He waved one of the daily papers in front of her and told her that the first four pages were all about her, and wasn’t that something. He said he wasn’t supposed to show her, but did she want a peek? The headlines flashed before her: “SUSPECTED MURDERESS’ DEATH TRUNKS HORRIFIED HOTEL STAFF” and “THE WEIRD ‘SISTERS’: Did Fatal Kiss Spark Blonde’s Jealous Rage?”

It is all over, Marion thought, and I am somehow glad. It is my time to speak. It is my time to lay my sins bare.

“I am ready,” she said. But before she knew it, her head wobbled and her chest turned to fire and she felt herself falling again.

T
HE POLICE DOCTOR
was peering over her with his aluminum headlamp glaring like a magnificent third eye.

“I fainted,” Marion whispered. She who’d not fainted in her life now twice in three days.

“Correct,” the doctor said. His breath smelled of cloves. Marion thought of Christmas back in Michigan, of clove-spiked oranges dusted in cinnamon hanging on snow-pattered windows at school. Had Christmas passed this year? Why couldn’t she remember the mistletoe and the holly pricking her fingers?

He kept peering.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“Glad about that,” he said, “but why don’t you tell me now about the hole in your hand.”

Marion looked down at her bullet-torn palm, then back up at the doctor, who tilted his head, watching her closely.

“I’m not talking. I’m through talking,” she said, feeling peaceful, half dead. This was to be it. This was to be it and suddenly it felt so perfect. “The only talking I will do now is to confess. To confess all. I will bear the sins no longer. I will walk those gallows steps head held high.”

“Mighty strong words, miss,” he said, taking her hand in his and turning it over. “But I don’t guess you heard.”

“Heard?”

He took an alcohol-daubed swab to her hand and she cried out.

“About your husband,” he said. “I guess it’s to me to tell you.”

She felt all the sound go out of the world and then she screamed.

T
WELVE HOURS PRIOR,
bleary and still broken, Dr. Seeley had dressed and found a doctor’s coat, contriving to secure ten grains of morphine, and so taking, wandered out the hospital doors and hitched rides all the way to the big reservoir on the far northern edge of the city. The jump from the top of the concrete dam was more than two hundred feet and he was found by maintenance workers. The note he left on his hospital bed proclaimed:

The letter was all. When Marion read it, and she would only read it once, she wondered how long it would take her to understand the nature of her husband’s sacrifice.

Part of her wanted to confess everything and clear his name—this was the biggest part. But doing so would deny his ultimate gesture.

Part of her wanted to follow him.

Part of her could feel herself falling, feel the water filling her mouth, her chest. The peace in that.

But part of her, in the winnowing corners of her fevered head, felt very, very differently. Part of her could not stop herself from thinking, hot-teared:
Dr. Seeley, you have taken something from me. I was ready. It was time. This was to be
my
redemption and now it is yours.

“M
RS.
S
EELEY,
we know you were trying to protect your husband. We know your motives were pure and selfless. And that will not be forgotten.”

That’s what they told her. Mr. Quint, her lawyer, took the reins fast and handled everything.

What could be more noble, what could be a greater act of love than Dr. Seeley’s keen sacrifice? On lower currents, she knew the answer: for him to have let her choose how to reckon with it, to have left it to her to choose. That would have been greater still. For she had been ready to face her crimes and, most of all, her sins. And now her chance, it was gone.

Privately, Mr. Quint did not believe his client to be of sound mind after her husband’s demise. He did not believe her ramblings about Mr. Joseph Lanigan—hell, he knew Joe Lanigan, had dinner with him at the lodge once a month and went hunting with him every November.
What stories lovestruck ladies will tell. Alas…

“I’m a big Mick and I can take it,” Joe Lanigan laughed, laughed all the rumors away, to all the out-of-town reporters who didn’t know that, facts aside, Gentleman Joe Lanigan could never be a part of something as sordid as this, would never dip his manicured finger (oh, didn’t he love his weekly manicures the cute marcelled girls at the Biltmore gave him) into such low revels, this a Lodge man, an Elk, a Mason, for goodness’ sake. Didn’t these Los Ang-e-lees scribes, with their pomade and shiny shoes, grabbing for ink, making the most of their small entr’acte in the crime of the decade, didn’t they know our Joe?

Sure, his name tripped from tongues in ways that might, in other towns, bigger and smaller, have torn down reputation, his good name: this man, he can never now lead our school board, cannot sit on the council, run for office, run for mayor. But outsiders never would understand, would they? He is one of our own and we know things they never could in their blaring scandal-sheet Babylons. In fact, he carries a new sheen, the love object, the knightly swain, valiant is as valiant does, his acts of kindness spurring crushes, the crushes spurring jealous husbands and jealousy turned tragic, tragic. But tragedy so dogs our Gent Joe, what with that poor sick wife and he to raise two daughters virtually alone. Oh, our Gent Joe. Our Gent Joe. Who wouldn’t stand beside him? He stands for us all.

I gave for you and gave for you. I would have laid down my pasteboard life for you, Joe Lanigan. But I’m through now. I’m all through. And the nails you struck across my mouth have all been pried loose and my mouth is one hundred miles wide and here I broadcast, my voice tinny, lost but no less your reckoning-day judge, what you have done to me, to those lovely girls, to my dearest Doctor, to us all. I will speak now, Joe
Lanigan, with mighty breaths, and will keep speaking until the caul you hide behind is lifted evermore.

“You’d best get on the nearest train, Mrs. Seeley. Fresh start. Heard your father wired your train fare back east. Be on that train, will you?”

“Yes, warden. Yes, I believe I will.”

They gave her a new dress of robin’s egg blue and her old shoes and purse and hat. Her hair was stripped of all peroxide and looked her own again but, squinting in her old compact mirror, she barely recognized herself.

Instead, she saw Ginny’s plummy smirk and Louise’s soft, piping cheeks and Dr. Seeley’s eyes, his eyes and all the sad tenderness they could hold, that the world could hold. He had held it all, for them both.

In the tiny mirror, she saw them and felt strong.

She felt as if her shoulders held wings and she would rise, alight, feet twittering, body rising so high…

A
T
M
RS.
G
OWER’S,
the house throbbing with memories, Marion sat on the parlor sofa, waiting. Mrs. Gower had left word at the prison that she should come and retrieve her belongings. Marion wondered what could be left. But the old woman appeared with a small banded suitcase, the one Marion’s father had given her on her wedding day.

Marion felt its lightness, touched its corners, its burnished latches.

“The policemen came. I gave them everything of that man’s,” Mrs. Gower said, her upper lip twitching. “Your…personal items, undergarments and such, I held them in my own
quarters. It’s not right for gentlemen to go through ladies’ private things.”

Marion nearly smiled. She was remembering something. Could they still be there, tucked between her dainties?

“I knew how he was,” Mrs. Gower was saying, but Marion wasn’t listening. “The doctor. Your doctor. I could see what he was.”

S
HE HELD THE LETTER
in her hand. It had come five days before her release.

She would see Mr. Worth. She would see Mr. Worth first. She would see him first and then she would see the other. She would see the other because she must.

She had ideas. She did not trust herself. In there, inside, she was not sound, curled tight in a cell, hundreds of letters of sympathy and calumny each day, the witchy stares of fellow prisoners, the crowded feel in her head, all the time, even when sleeping, although she did not truly sleep. She was not sound, but now she held the suitcase tight and wondered what her path would be.

T
HE
W
ORTH
B
ROTHERS
M
EAT
M
ARKET
was not open yet when she arrived, but she peered in the window and there was Mr. Worth, face pale at her sight.

He unlocked the door and let her into his back office. No, she did not want coffee, not even with a pinch in it, no, she did not want to pause at all. She could scarcely make herself sit in the chair opposite his desk.

The door ajar, she could smell the meat and see red edges of hanging carcasses. She could almost see them rocking, shaking even though hooked fast.

In her head she saw visions of him at one of the parties, shirtsleeves rolled up, cranking his hand organ as she warbled, when they all asked her to sing for them and Mr. Worth,
“’Twas down where the bluegrass grows, your lips were sweeter than julep, when you wore that tulip, and I wore a big red rose
.”

Sitting before her now, the gin was radiating from him, seemed to be leaking from his skin.

His blood-thatched eyes settled on her and he rubbed his chin.

“Mrs. Seeley, I know I’ve wronged you. I know it.”

Marion looked at him, feeling the wave of surprise only faintly. She could not hold on to anything long enough to truly feel it.

“It is not you,” she said. “You have nothing to account for.”

“When I saw what Joe was doing, I might’ve stopped it. I figured from the start you were a cat’s paw in this thing.”

“No, no,” Marion said. “I know my share in this. I have faced it.” Before jail, she could look at her guilt only in passing, a rustle in the back of her head. Now it was finally hers. She clung to it.

“At first he told me you murdered them both, but I knew you couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.”

“I don’t wish to talk about it anymore, Mr. Worth,” she said. “I don’t. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.” As she said it, she knew it was true. Joe Lanigan’s sins stacked so high. She would not let him forget them. This was what she meant to tell him. This was what she would say when she said her last piece to him
and then let him live with them, if he could. But she knew he could. That was the worst of it.

“He’s got a new nurse,” Mr. Worth said. “You know about the nurses.”

“I do.”

“The last one, the St. Monessa girl, he got tired of her. Too noisy, he said.”

“I see,” Marion said, looking around at Mr. Worth’s desk, the cloudy bottle, the curling matches spent and piled thick along cigarette butts spread in a fan. She was beginning to feel dizzy.

“Elsie,” he said. “This one’s Elsie.”

The name brought a hot flicker of shame to Marion’s eyes. No surprises to be had, were there? She felt something sorrowful rustle in her chest. Elsie Nettle. She pictured the girl’s fawn face on that long-ago night, the way her leg trembled against her in Joe’s car, after everything.

“I wonder if you know this, Mrs. Seeley,” Worth said, voice softening. “When he drinks, he says things. He says he’s a lost man.” He looked her in the eye. “Says he loves you still.”

“I didn’t ask for that,” Marion said, hard and rough. “Don’t tell me that.”

“Says you brought him ruin and hellfire and yet he loves you still.”

Marion, sprung back to vivid life, looked up fast and wanted to laugh. “Brought him to ruin. Oh, isn’t that a fairy tale, a dreamy little love book to end all.”

Mr. Worth looked at her warily, unsure. “But I wanted to say I’m sorry, and…your husband. I’m sorry.”

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a gun.

And she saw it was the pistol, the Colt. The very one.

“What do you have there?” she asked, thinking she might be ill. The heat, the smell of the meat, the gin swirling.

“Joe gave me this to hold,” he said. “He trusted me with everything, you see, because he knows things about me. Things I’d rather not share.”

He set the pistol lightly on the desk between them. “I don’t want him having this over you. I don’t know what he might use it for, or what you might.” He looked at her. “But, on the balance, I’d have it be with you.”

She was shaking. Her shoes were clacking on the floor. What did he mean by this?

“I am also afraid to have it with me,” he said. “Lately I have developed weaknesses. There have been moments of despair and…”

Marion looked at the pistol, that same dire pistol, and felt her blood rush from her head. Blurry with heat, she took off her hat and held on to the desk edge.

“I took those girls to pieces, Marion,” he said, voice so low as to be scarcely a breath. “Nights, early mornings, I think I cannot live with what I did to those girls.” He looked up at Marion. “Their blood,” he whispered.

“Yes, Mr. Worth,” she said.

Looking at him and the heavy sags under his eyes, she wondered what he thought he was doing by giving her this. She had a head filled with bad thoughts of her own to lead her to dark places. She had no room for his. But then she realized he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do and he wasn’t strong enough to keep hold of it anymore. He was shutting a door. By giving her the gun in this way, he was trying to shut a door.

He should know, she thought, that door never shuts. She curled her finger around the handle of her suitcase.

Reaching for his glass, he took a long swallow. “Mrs. Seeley, I do feel I must tell you,” he said. “One night, end of a daylong
drunk, we boys were up over at the Grand Lodge. Well, he said it to me. He said it to me.”

“What?” Marion said, steeling herself, teeth gnashing to stay upright. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I tell you, Ab, I know things now, about myself. I know what I am capable of. It is a shadow self under this one and I’ve seen it. You see it was a chance—Louise Mercer, she was to bleed me dry. She would not be stopped.’”

Mr. Worth looked at her. “Mrs. Seeley, he told me he shook up the delicate balance. You three girls. That delicate balance. Gave Ginny a big dose, knowing it’d get her all jazzed up. Then told her Louise was itching to get rid of her. Mrs. Seeley, you know Ginny was a jealous girl and a sick one. Joe said he thought to get her riled about you and Louise. He warned her she’d best steal away with Louise while she could. He figured they’d skip town and he’d have thrown off their snaky coils for good.”

Something flashed before Marion’s eyes, the moments before the murder, Ginny laying her charges before them. Louise knowing something was behind it, saying,
I wonder who’s been filling your ear with tongue oil
.

Why, it was Joe, it was Joe. Of course it was Joe. “She’s Pandora,” Ginny had raged, “come to town with her dirty little box to bring us all to ruin.” Was it not Joe Lanigan who had long ago told her,
You are Pandora. You came to town with that beautiful little box I had to, had to open
. Even now, she could picture Joe’s lips to Ginny’s pearly ear, warning her of the same.

Mr. Worth looked at Marion. “And he’s a cold one, Mrs. Seeley. He is. He says to me, he says, ‘But, Ab, I played the wrong card and Ginny went cockeyed. And I had to fix things. I did. Why, Marion already had the blood on her hands and we were nearly through. It had to end. Had to. And the end was at hand. I
was to be through with them all. But then there was Louise, on her feet again.’”

And Marion saw it again, in her head, in images stuttering together:

…the way his arm extended, like he was batting off a fly…and Louise slumping to her knees like at a church pew.

“And he said, ‘Ab, this here is the truth, when I look at it with sharpest eyes, which I do not often do, I cannot fairly say what was in my head. I cannot be certain of it. Does that make a monster of me, Ab? Then that is what I am. Darling, dark Louise. Maybe it was this: that I saw my chance and I blew a hot hole right in her chest.’”

T
HERE WERE PLACES
too murky ever to see through. The bloody fury of the night and everything storming up to it, none of it was ever going to lie flat and let her run knowing fingers across it and see all the patterns and shapes and meanings for what they were. There was no essence to them. It was all mayhem and blood and now preening sorrow.