Diablerie (14 page)

I sat up on the couch after half an hour of these laments.

"A lot of fathers beat their kids," I said. "That doesn't mean anything."

Shriver said nothing to this. There was no smirk on his lips to contradict the deep sympathy in his eyes.

"Tomorrow?" he asked. "Same time?"

"Tomorrow's Sunday."

"I'm not doing anything," he said. "So tomorrow?"

It was eight
A.M.
when I left the therapist's office but the heat was already beginning to rise in the humid air. Across the way was a small concrete plaza that hovered above the river. I went out there and sat on a bench, wondering about the things I'd said on the couch.

A tall and slender white man in black jeans and a checkered shirt came up and sat down on the bench across from me. He lit a cigarette, reminding me of the pack in my pocket.

The act of striking the match for my Camel brought my father full-blooded into my mind.

There was no doubt of the love he felt in his heart for me and my brother. He would have died for either one of us. He'd been a tough man in his Texas youth. Down in Galveston he carried a gun and a razor. One night he laid in wait for a man, whom he stabbed but who, he said, did not die.

My brother and I speculated on the minutiae of my father's confession.

"You know he said that that man lived," Briggs said, "because he don't want us to think that killin's okay."

"But he didn't say that he was tryin' to wound the mothah-fuckah," I argued. "He said he stabbed him and that means he wanted to kill him."

"Nuh-uh," Briggs replied. "No he didn't."

But whether he had or had not intended to kill that man, whether that man had or had not died, didn't matter. The fact remained that our dictator father had attacked a man with a knife. We believed him because he attacked both of us every month with his strap. He showed no mercy, never apologized about these beatings. He wouldn't listen when we'd say that we were good children who deserved better.

"Mr. Dibbuk?" the man in the checkered shirt asked, interrupting my gut-wrenching reverie.

I looked up into his pale face, considering the Western twang to his words.

"Are you the guy Harvard Rollins wanted me to meet?"

He smiled and nodded.

"Winston Meeks is my name," he said.

He put out a hand but I did not take it.

"My wife told you about my appointment yesterday too late?" I speculated. "And so you dropped by today on the off chance I'd be here."

"I'm with the Colorado State District Attorney's Office," Meeks said, sitting down next to me on the stone bench. "We'd like to have an interview with you if you don't mind."

"Or maybe you were going to talk to the doctor," I added.

Again, I thanked God for that cigarette, God and my father for showing me how to keep my cool when the world wants to get at me.

"We could file a complaint with the New York state attorney," Meeks said.

I inhaled the tar and nicotine, cyanide and just plain smoke.

"We could ask for you to be extradited," he added.

"Then why haven't you?"

"Because we'd like to hear your side of the story first."

"What story is that?"

"Mr. Dibbuk," Winston Meeks said. "We won't get anywhere with you playing coy. Come with me to my office and we'll talk this out."

"Your office is in Denver, right?"

"I'm using the Plaza Hotel as my base of operations." He stood up, expecting me to stand too. I admit that he had power in his voice. I wanted to go with him but I resisted the urge. I was a small boat tethered to the dock in the face of a great swell.

"This here bench is my base of operations," I said, gripping the seat with the fingers of my left hand. "Why don't you depose me right out here in plain sight?"

Meeks was not used to being refused or contradicted. I wondered how important this cowboy was, back home in Colorado.

Finally he sat, realizing that he couldn't pry me loose.

"Do you know a man named Grant Timmons?" he asked.

"Never heard of him."

Meeks's eyes turned into slits. I believe that if we were in his private office I'd have gotten slapped right then.

"He died two years ago next Thursday."

"That's too bad," I said. "Was he an old man?"

"Fifty-seven."

"Does this have anything to do with me, Mr. Meeks?"

"He was convicted of killing Sean Messier." Meeks was staring daggers at me then.

"Yeah?"

"He died still serving his sentence," Meeks said, "the sentence that Barbara Knowland says that you deserved."

"Say what?"

"When did you leave Colorado, Mr. Dibbuk?"

It was my turn to stand up.

"I don't like this turn of questions, Mr. District Attorney," I said. "For the record, I don't know anyone named Timmons or Messier. Beyond that I don't have to answer your questions and I have no intention of doing so."

"Where can I get in touch with you if I need to?" Meeks said, rising also.

"My house. My apartment.''

"Your wife says that you moved out."

"Don't believe everything you hear, Mr. Meeks. Hearsay is a motherfucker."

I went straight to the New York Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth. There I utilized the computer system to access old Denver newspapers. In the
Denver Post
there was an article dated July 1, 1979. A man named Sean Messier was found next to a woodpile that sat at the side of his rural home, his head caved in due to a blow from a hard and heavy object. I found another article from that September that reported Grant Timmons had been arrested for the crime. It said that he was a rival of Mr. Messier for the affections of an unnamed woman and that Timmons could not account for his whereabouts on the night of the murder. Actually, he had lied about where he was and therefore made himself a suspect.

Apparently, Sean had gotten into a fight with Grant a week before. Messier was an accomplished pugilist; he beat up Grant pretty bad. The prosecution speculated that Grant had come up to Messier when he was getting wood for a fire. He hit the unsuspecting Messier with a steel pipe or a crowbar, which he must have discarded elsewhere.

It was enough for a conviction. Grant Timmons, it seems, was a b d y of inordinate proportions. He'd been involved in many fights over the years and he always got revenge on those that bested him in anything. He was the perfect suspect in any crime. And here he had actually been in a fight with the victim only a short while before.

There were other articles but no new information.

By September I had already left Denver for New York. I had both of my near-fatal accidents soon after the death of Sean Messier, but that didn't prove anything. Not a thing.

I tried to think if there was any shred of a memory of somebody named Messier in my mind. He was much older than I was. He was a pilot for a small company and a war hero from Vietnam. There was no place that we would have run into each other except maybe some bar somewhere. But what would I have been doing outside next to his woodpile? Why would I have ambushed him there?

It made no sense to me. It didn't sound like me.

I was a drinker, a fighter when I was drunk, but I was no assassin. And even if I had gotten angry enough to kill someone, I should have had some memory of who that someone was.

The Fairweather was uptown on the East Side. It was a small hotel but still large enough to have a restaurant and so I could walk in without being noticed. I was just inside the door when I saw Harvard Rollins coming out from the elevator on the far side of the reception desk. I went up to the concierge and asked for the house phone, not because I wanted to call anyone, but just to avoid another conflict with the magazine detective.

I asked the hotel operator for Sean Messier's room. I don't know why I used that name. Maybe it was a sense of irony or just the fact that that was the name I'd been trying, unsuccessfully, to remember. When the hotel operator failed to find the person I was looking for, I thanked her and turned around.

I was a part of the scenery by then. I'd used the phone, so it was no surprise to see me taking the elevator. I got out on the eighth floor and knocked on the door numbered 829.

Star certainly was not expecting me. She would have closed the door in my face but I pushed past her.

Her room was what they call a junior suite. Bigger than a regular room, it had enough space for a small settee with a stuffed chair at its side. I sat in the chair and put up my hands, indicating that I just wanted to talk.

"That detective from
Diablerie
is coming," she said, trying to move me out with words. "He wants to turn you over to the Colorado authorities."

"You mean Winston Meeks?" I said.

That stopped Star with her mouth open.

"And Harvard just left your room," I added. "I doubt if he'll be back anytime soon."

"What do you want, Ben?"

"You say my name like you've known it your whole life," I said, "and here I don't even recognize you."

"How can that be, Ben? You and I were together when you killed a man."

I felt a coolness run through my chest like the breeze out of an open tomb.

"I don't remember anything about anything like that," I said, almost absolutely certain of my ignorance.

"Then why did you come to my readings?"

"The
Diablerie
dinner was because my wife made me go," I said. "The college was to get you to tell me why you're doing this to me."

"I'm only protecting myself," she said. "The first time in my life that I do something right and you come out of the woodwork to threaten me with more trouble."

"Miss Knowland," I said. "You have to understand me. I don't want anything from you."

"Not now," she said. "Not now that I've told the authorities all that I know. Now if there's a trial, you'll be the one in the docket. You'll be the one to go to prison. I'm not going to pay for what you did."

As she spoke, Barbara Knowland's face distorted into a kind of malleable rage, like that of an infant who does not comprehend her own emotion. She had worried for years about someone like me coming out of the shadows.

"But I don't remember," I said.

"How can I believe that?"

"Why would I kill anyone?" I asked. "What reason would I have?"

"Blind, drunken rage," she said. "We went up to his house together. I just wanted you to help me move my things. It was you who went crazy. He told you to get off of his property and let his guard down. That's when you hit him with your crowbar or whatever."

"If I was such a demon, then why didn't you turn me in to the cops?"

"You know we didn't do things like that back then," she said again, like an old friend. "Things happened and we just moved on."

It was true as far as it went. Drug dealers and burglars, car thieves and gangs were all a part of my social landscape back in my drinking days. I could remember many crimes and criminals that I would have never even considered reporting.

But I had never been with anybody who'd committed murder. At least I didn't remember being there.

Squat and middle-aged, Barbara "Star" Knowland peered into my eyes. She was nervous, scared of me, of what I might do. I raised my hand to scratch my eyelid and she flinched. This fearful gesture was more damning than her verbal accusation. She was actually afraid of me. Maybe she really had seen my rage before.

I thought about Svetlana sprawled on the floor where I had thrown her.

"Why don't you sit down, Star?"

"I'm fine where I am."

"What did you tell Meeks?" I asked her.

"I told him about Messier," she said, screwing up her courage. "I told him what happened."

"What happened?"

"I, I don't think I should be talking to you about it. If there's a trial, you could use it."

The meanings behind the words that my accuser spoke went through me like waves of electricity. She had seen me, remembered me, called my wife's magazine, called the Denver prosecutor. Because of her I might soon be in prison clothes standing trial for a crime I had no inkling of.

I stood up, feeling the strength in my thighs. I reached out to take Barbara by the arm. She opened her mouth and I said, "Do not yell," and she remained silent as I pulled her toward me.

I witnessed all these events unfolding as if they were the actions of another man.

"What happened that night?" I asked her.

"I can't tell you."

"Listen, bitch," I said. "You came up to me when I didn't know you. You blindsided me and then you turned me over to the cops. You are the only one who knows about this, as far as I can see. And so tell me what you know right now."

There was a threat wrapped up in my words to her. I wondered if I meant it.

"We met in a bar outside of Boulder," she said. "You had been drinking already, and Sean Messier had kicked me out of his house—"

"You were his girlfriend?"

"I was fucking him and he was feeding me. But I got pregnant and he didn't want to pay for an abortion. He drove me down to the highway and put me out on the side of the road. It was two days after that that I met you. We started messing around and I told you about what he'd done. I was hoping that maybe you'd help me with some cash but you said that we should go up to his house and steal enough for the abortion.

"I, I didn't want to rip Sean off, but he did have my things in a trunk, so I said we could go. I knew his flight schedule and so we drove up there after he was gone."

"What do you mean, 'his flight schedule'?"

"He was a small-plane pilot who worked doing deliveries for a farm-supply company.''

"Were we drinking?" I asked.

"You had a couple of quarts of whiskey in the trunk. We drank one of the bottles on the way up to his place. You broke through his big picture window in the living room and then I went upstairs to get my trunk and, and the money he kept in a cigar box in his bathroom. It was you who said that we should fuck in the living room. If you hadn't started that shit, we would have been out of there before he got back. If we weren't doin' it, we would have heard him before he dragged you off me and took you outside."