Murder in the Wings (19 page)

I
n my
cop days I was knocked out only once. I was in a union bar trying to break up a fight and somebody hit me from behind with a bumper-pool cue. I felt two sensations at once, the shutdown feeling of slipping into unconsciousness, and a terrible arctic cold spreading from my face to the rest of my body. When I came to, I was in an emergency room on a gurney, and I had the impression that my father had visited me. When the intern came up, I said, "Is my dad here?" and he said "I don't think so, sir." Then my wife stepped up and said, apparently in a play for pity on my behalf, "His father is dead." The intern nodded as sagely as he could, as sagely as any twenty-five-year-old snot can.

When I came to I saw Donna bent over me, her red hair draping her face like a cowl. "Boy, Dwyer, thank God, really, thank God," she said. "I mean, for you being alive and everything."

Then I felt the goo, right where my hairline has started to recede. At first it felt like paste but of course it was blood and of course it was mine. We were in an attic surrounded by many ancient cardboard boxes and a couple of trunks.

"Would you do me a favor?"

"Sure, Dwyer, what?"

"Put your hand in my back pocket."

"God, Dwyer, are you joking at a time like this?"

"Right, Donna, my fucking head feels like somebody dropped a cement block on it and I'm telling fucking jokes."

"Well, God, you don't have to get so mad. I mean, you've got to admit it's kind of a weird request and all. I mean, right after you regain consciousness."

"Are you going to do it or not?" I was getting angrier by the moment.

Beneath her breath, she said, "Boy, what an asshole." Then I threw my weight to the left, lifting my left cheek off the floor, and she squeezed her hand down my pocket and said, "Okay, now I've got my hand in your pocket. What should I do next?"

"Is there a handkerchief there?"

"Yeah."

"Then take it out."

"All right. I've got your handkerchief out."

"Good. Now hand it to me."

"Delighted."

She gave me the handkerchief and I applied it to where the rifle had connected. Then I started the long and painful process of standing up.

I had just gotten my right palm flat on the floor for leverage when she said, "He's going to come up here and kill us, Dwyer. That's what he said. David Ashton, I mean."

"Where are we?"

"He made me help carry you up to the attic. There's a stairway down, but he's got the door locked at the bottom and there's only the one window, the weird little round one up there."

"Wonderful."

"What?"

"I said wonderful."

"Oh." She was on her knees next to me. She got her arms under my arms in a kind of hammerlock, and I'll be damned if it didn't help me get to my feet without much trouble.

I spent two minutes leaning against a dusty wall. I wanted to make sure the dizziness was going to subside at least a bit before I tried walking.

"Boy, Dwyer, you knew it was Ashton all along, didn't you?"

I just looked at her. "You're hyperventilating."

"How can you tell?"

"Some bastard's down there with a hunting rifle and he's going to come up here and kill us and you're just jabbering away."

"Well, at least you didn't attribute it to my period."

"Seriously, will you shut up for a minute and let me think?"

"I can't help it, Dwyer, I'm scared, and when I'm scared I talk my ass off. I used to drive Chad crazy sometimes."

"Gosh, that's hard to believe."

"All right," she said, making a silly little gesture with her fingers and mouth, "it's locked."

Rain pounded the roof. On the little window it sounded like BBs. I could hear nothing from below. I held out my hand. "How about holding on to me?"

"Where are we going?"

"Down the stairs."

"But the door's locked."

"You forget all the keys I've got."

"Hey, yeah."

"
'Hey, yeah.' Take my arm, okay?"

She took my arm. My head hurt and I really needed to pee, and I felt feverish from the pain. The steps seemed twenty feet apart. We moved slowly. I could smell sweat from my own pits, or maybe it was from Donna's pits. We'd spent a long day alternating activity with anxiety, so probably neither of us was up for a fancy dinner party.

At the bottom of the stairs was a door framed by yellow light from the other side. The door was locked.

"What're we going to do?" Donna whispered.

That was when the gunshot came from downstairs.

"Use one of my basic Boy Scout tools," I said.

I knelt down and got out my pocket knife and proceeded to have at the door. The house still echoed with the gunshot. My head still hurt from all the abuse of the past day. Donna knelt next to me, looking cute and lost and scared and wet.

"You going to pick it?"

"I'm going to try."

"I thought you did it with credit cards."

"Some locks you do with credit cards."

"But this isn't one of them?"

"Right."

"It's a good thing you were a cop."

"Please."

"What?"

"Ssshh."

"Oh, yeah. Right."

So I started. Various second-story men I'd busted during my days on the force would have paid a great deal of money to see this. A great deal.

I started sweating, and my headache got worse. I turned the knife right, I turned the knife left, I wiggled, I waggled, I waffled. The mother still wouldn't open.

Then Donna said, "Maybe you're not doing it hard enough."

"Donna, believe it or not, I know what I'm doing." I could hear the pissiness in my voice. Pissiness is not my best quality. I tried a patient explanation, but it probably just came out patronizing. "I mean, this isn't a matter of brute force, it's a matter of delicacy. Of finding the tumbler and turning it."

"God, Dwyer, just jam the darn thing in once. What've we got to lose?"

So I jammed the darn thing in once, and of course the darn thing (which is to say, the motherfucker) opened right up.

We knelt there looking at the next room as the door swung open.

"Now what?" Donna said.

"Now we sneak down the hall and see what's going on."

"I'm scared."

"So am I."

"Yeah, but you're better at pretending than I am." I put out my hand. She felt it twitch.

"Boy, Dwyer, you really are scared."

We left the room on tiptoes and went down a long, dark hall to the top of the stairs. We huddled in the gloom and listened. There was just the rain. I could smell gunpowder.

"What're we going to do?" she breathed into her cupped hand against my ear.

"Go downstairs."

She pantomimed. "Are you crazy?"

I led the way down. With each step I pictured the layout of the large first level. The open living room. The fireplace. The dining room in the left wing. The kitchen in the right. There had been a screened-in back porch, too.

I was almost giddy when we reached the bottom. Fright does that to you sometimes. Blood was running into my eyes.

The living area was well lit and empty. The smell of gunpowder was especially strong there.

"Did he take them somewhere?"

I shrugged. She took my hand. We went into the dining room. We found Sylvia Ashton in the corner.

At first, remembering the gunshot, I thought she was dead. But in the shadows I saw her mad, lovely eyes glint, and as I moved closer, even above the rain, I could hear the soft rhythm of her breathing. Donna knelt on one side of her, I knelt on the other.

"Where did he take her, Sylvia?"

She said nothing.

"She isn't his daughter, is she, Sylvia? She's Stephen Wade's daughter, isn't she?"

Nothing.

"That's what you told Michael Reeves when he used Sodium Pentothal on you, wasn't it? That's why David killed him, isn't it?"

Donna and I looked at each other across Sylvia's tousled dark hair.

"David knew that your mother would push him out of the family if she ever knew that Evelyn wasn't his child. That's why David had to protect your secret—he'd be penniless, otherwise."

She raised her head. "He's been a good father to her. Better than Stephen ever would have been."

Then she began sobbing. She fell into Donna's arms, an eternal child seeking eternal succor.

I went out through the house to the screened-in back porch. I could smell rain and fresh earth and chill night. I had no idea what I was going to do.

"Please, Dwyer, don't come any further."

The voice jarred me. Not because it was so menacing, but because it wasn't menacing at all. It belonged not to David Ashton but to Evelyn.

He sat in a white porch swing, huddled into the corner of it, and he was a mess. He'd been shot in the stomach. He was crying and trying to vomit.

She sat across from him, on a metal coaster that squeaked.

She looked up at me. "He grabbed the gun and tried to shoot himself. I tried to knock it out of the way. He got shot in the stomach."

She was in shock. It was then that I noticed the shotgun sitting next to her.

Just then he moaned and you could see on the floor where some of his innards had dropped to form a slick, hot little pile.

"Help me," he said, "for God's sake, Evelyn, please pick up the gun and help me."

She looked at me and then she lifted the Browning. "It's all so fucked up," she said. She raised her head and looked at me. "He's not my father. Did you know that?"

"I know."

"But I love him anyway." She was hysterical. "And now he's in such pain."

Right before it was all over, he said, "Please, let her do it, Dwyer. Please let her do it. I can't take the pain much longer."

I started for her, but she was way too fast. She did it, and there wasn't any way I could stop it and I wasn't even sure I wanted to.

When she finished she went out into the rain under the elm branches dripping cold silver, and vomited.

I went in and called the sheriff's department.

A
week later we were walking down a long, sunny white corridor, following a nurse who wore squeaking white shoes. We walked past a big blue statue of the Virgin to an even sunnier room where a man who resembled Stephen Wade sat on the edge of a bed holding in his right hand a cigarette smoked down to the filter and in his left a paperback book by the monk Thomas Merton.

In a week he'd lost ten pounds. He looked a little younger and a lot more scared. He put the book down and stubbed the cigarette out and then held up both hands, the fingers of his right counting five, the fingers of his left counting two. "Seven days."

"Congratulations."

"You know, I haven't gone seven days without a drink since I was a teenager." He hacked out a ciga
rette cough. I could see that Donna wanted to give him her standard lacerating antismoking sermon, but right then obviously wasn't the right time.

She leaned over and kissed him and then he took her in his arms and held her tight and long. Then he let her go and, weary and sad, said, "I don't know what to do."

"Go see her."

"They say the whole drying-out process takes about a month up here."

"Then go see her in a month."

He had another cigarette. "Sylvia any better?"

I shook my head.

"She may never pull out of this one," he said, referring to her total retreat into her illness. He took a big drag. The smoke was blue in the sunlight. "What's going to happen to Evelyn?"

"We're not sure. But her lawyer thinks he can make things reasonably easy for her, given the circumstances. A verdict of temporary insanity would play pretty well here."

He looked at us and frowned. "You know, I never had a clue about her being my daughter. Sylvia and I only slept with each other a couple of times, when David was away on a four-month road trip once."

Donna said, "That's how Dwyer figured it out. He kept staring at the playbill of David in that road company. Then when Dr. Kern mentioned it being Evelyn's birthday, he realized that she couldn't possibly be David's daughter because David hadn't been around."

"I never had a clue," Stephen Wade said again. He had some more of his cigarette, or it had some more of him, depending on your point of view, and then he sat back against his pillow, looking as if he were about to drop off to sleep. "I should probably spend some time with her now, huh?" he said.

"She's your daughter," I said.

"You know how goddamn funny that sounds?" he said. "I'm fifty-three and I just learned I've got a twenty-four-year-old daughter."