The Walkaway (13 page)

“So what’s this book you’re looking for, Moomaw?”

“Not a book. A map.”

“Of what?”

“The state. Or the county if they have one.”

“What for?”

She almost snapped at her again, then made herself answer nicely. “Just thought it might soothe me to look at a map.” In the distance she spotted Sears, at the far end of the mall and a full story higher than the rest of it, and she thought about how there used to be nothing out this far west of town but wheat fields and vacant lots, and how nice that had been.

On his way to Dot’s house Sidney passed the old Riverside Zoo and decided to stop. Gunther had always loved the zoo; Sidney remembered clearly how put out he’d been when the new one opened outside town, and it seemed like a decent bet he might end up here. He parked on the street and walked in; there were a few people milling around in the shade of the big old trees, but he saw no one he could ask about putting a few flyers up. He went over to the old monkey and lion house and taped one to its padlocked front door. It was an imposing brick building decorated with ornate masonry. Inside it was bare concrete with cages on either side: monkeys to the right, lions to the left, all gone for decades.

Turning away from the door an odd memory fragment surged forward: he was about five years old and a couple of teenage girls were fussing over him while their dad talked to his mom. He was someone she knew from work, and Sidney reluctantly went along with the girls to look at the bear cages, terrified his mother would forget and leave without him.

He taped a flyer to each outer wall of the now-empty bear cages and went back to the car. Slowly, hanging his left arm out the window, he drove through the neighborhood to his mother’s house, thinking about the girls. Delighted at the prospect of a few minutes’ worth of baby-sitting experience, they tried hard and failed to cheer him up. He vaguely recalled that their father had bought him some popcorn afterward, at their insistence, which he’d eaten in the car on the way home, and that his mom had asked him not to tell his dad who they’d seen at the zoo.

There was nobody in his mother’s living room when Sidney walked into her house, the sudden cold of the air in her front room stinging his eyes and chilling his sweaty shirt, and checking the wall thermostat he found it set to fifty-eight degrees, forty-five or fifty degrees cooler than the air outside. I’d love to see their electric bills sometime, he thought, and then it struck him.

He made a furtive check of the rooms of the house before he found the note from Tricia on the kitchen counter:

Daddy:

Took Moomaw to Towne West for a change of scene. Back soon.

Love
Tricia

Five minutes later he was going through their bank statements and bills, and while he saw no indication whatsoever of what was paying the balance of Gunther’s nursing home bill, he noted that they hadn’t been paying a mortgage for a long time, and that the paperwork on the sale of their RV indicated that they had owned it outright on the date of sale.

In the living room he heard the front door open, and his first instinct was to replace the paperwork and deny everything, but instead he called out “I’m in here.”

Tricia and Dot appeared in the doorway, and he still had a bank statement in his hand. He stared straight at her, daring her to lie about it or yell at him for digging into her private business. Instead of acting like she’d caught him at something, though, she folded her arms across her chest, her face as closed as he’d ever seen it, and said, “It’s the police pension, I already told you. You’re wasting your time.”

As his bathwater ran Gunther rummaged through a cabinet next to the tub and found a bottle of Mr. Bubble, enough of which remained to produce copious suds. After scrubbing himself thoroughly he sat back in the warm, foamy water and relaxed until he sensed that the wash was done. He pulled a big, fluffy towel down from the rack and dried himself off, feeling physically and mentally better than he had in years.

The wash cycle was indeed finished. Pleased at having got it right on the first try, Gunther opened the dryer and found to his dismay a dry load of lingerie. He debated for a moment what to do—unloading it would involve handling Loretta’s intimate garments, which seemed to him an indecent invasion of her privacy—and decided to throw his wash in with it. He slammed the dryer door shut and pushed the start button, then went back upstairs and started going through drawers to pass the time.

In the boy’s room he found a baggie full of dope hidden under a bunch of Mad magazines, then put it back. He didn’t approve, exactly, but he didn’t think it was worth getting hysterical about either, the way Dot had done when she found a waterpipe at Sidney’s house a few years ago. He’d rather arrest a pot fiend than a drunk any day of the week; nobody high on reefer had ever taken a poke at him. Usually the worst that happened was they’d get to talking and couldn’t stop.

Not unlike that barber last night. Gunther looked in the boy’s mirror at the haircut. Pretty sharp, he thought, though the shave was all gone to hell and back; he should have had another one that morning. There was no razor in the boy’s bathroom—presumably he was off at school somewhere—but Loretta would have to have one, wearing those short dresses like she did, and he headed for the master bathroom.

The delicate pink razor was in the first drawer he opened, and he wondered if women used shaving cream on their legs or just soap, or some other mysterious feminine product entirely. In the big medicine cabinet he found an abundant supply of men’s toiletries: shaving cream, razors and blades, aftershave, cologne, deodorant, toothbrush and paste, athlete’s foot powder. Maybe her husband had died. No, she’d have pictures up. A boyfriend, maybe? It was a lot of stuff for someone who wasn’t a full-time resident, but if the husband was still around he didn’t otherwise leave much of a spoor. Gunther replaced Loretta’s razor in the drawer, inserted a fresh blade into the man’s razor, and lathered up. It wasn’t a really first-rate shave like last night’s, but it would keep him presentable until Loretta got there.

Afterward he went back down to check the dryer. The cycle was done but the wash was still damp, his clothes and Loretta’s formerly dry undergarments intermingled in a way that, his cheeks burning, made him wish he’d been brave enough to take them out and put them into a basket. He hit the switch again and as the clothes started to spin he decided to play a little pool in the next room. The table, balls, and cues were all virtually without wear, and he marveled at the waste of money—it was a good table, sturdy as you’d find in a pool hall—as he racked up.

He broke and began shooting stripes, knocking the straight shots right in and having a little trouble with his bank shot. Once he’d finished with the solids he racked up again, and before he had a chance to break a second time he heard the muffled sound of a door slamming upstairs. He moved to the bottom of the stairs and listened. Someone was in the kitchen, the footfalls too heavy for a woman.

Holding the business end of the cue he crept as quietly as he could up the stairs, and at the top he heard the man, whoever he was, going up the other staircase to the second floor. Maybe it’s the son home from college, he thought. He tiptoed across the kitchen and over to the staircase, where he heard the man open the door to one of the bedrooms. He flattened himself against the wall of the stairwell and moved slowly up, thinking maybe it was the husband after all as he stepped into the master bedroom.

But the man he found going through the dresser was clearly a transient. Dirty, sunburned, and moving like a drunk, Gunther could smell the booze on him halfway across the room. He wished he had his service revolver with him, but he gamely raised the cue and used his command voice for the first time in a very long time.

“Hey!” The drunk turned, startled, and looked at Gunther. “You just broke into the wrong house, partner.”

“I used the key. I live here.” Failing to take his own nudity into account when assessing the man’s reaction to him, Gunther took his uncertain tone of voice as evidence of a lie.

“Uh-huh. Looks to me like you haven’t slept under a roof in a year.”

“I had a rough night.”

“You live here, huh? Show me some ID.”

The drunk began improvising, always a bad sign. “I left it at a friend’s house.” With a move he no doubt meant to be a surprise, he moved in to grab the cue from Gunther, who surprised him with a solid blow across his left temple from the heavy end of the cue. The drunk crashed dizzily to his knees, his hands on his head, squinting at the pain.

“Jesus! Who the fuck are you?”

Gunther maneuvered to his flank. “Did you hear me? What are you doing here?”

“I told you this is my house. . . .” He struggled back to his feet, one hand on the bed and the other on the carpet.

“Lady owns this house is a friend of mine, and I’m damned if I’ll let a goddamn dirty bindlestiff like you waltz in here fresh off a fuckin’ boxcar and claim he’s her husband.”

Gunther slammed the cue into his left kidney, and as the drunk went down again, eyes closed, he hit him hard in the right temple. He lay there, facedown on the carpet, and once Gunther verified that he was still breathing he dragged him over to the closet. He propped a chair against the door and took the cue back downstairs where it belonged.

12

GUNTHER FAHNSTIEL
June 20, 1952

The phone rang at eight A.M. and I let it ring ten or twelve times before I finally got up and answered. I was off duty until four P.M. and didn’t want to get up until nine, so I guess I didn’t sound too friendly.

“This is Gunther, what do you want?”

“It’s Ed. I need to see you this morning. How about Cliff’s?”

“I’m off-duty, Sergeant.” It was going to be more grief about Sally and how I was wrecking my own life, and I didn’t want to hear it.

“I got some bad news about a friend of ours. Real bad, maybe. I’ll see you there in half an hour.”

He hung up on me, and I threw on a shirt from the clean clothes pile over the back of my easy chair and pulled on my pants from the day before. When I finally found my shoes I put them on and strolled out the door.

I decided to walk; since I hadn’t bothered to shower or shave I’d still be there before he was. There was all kinds of traffic around the park, people headed for work in offices and stores, and I felt lucky for having a job that kept me outside so much of the time. The zoo wasn’t open yet, and walking by I saw the keepers feeding the animals and hosing the cages and sidewalks down for the day to come. School was out, so they had a lot of visitors, even on weekdays. Jack’s Packard was sitting outside the tavern, shined up as usual, and next to it was a shiny new Ford pickup truck with a bedful of construction materials. Jack stepped outside with a cigarette in his mouth.

“You sure look like shit this morning,” he said. He was in his seersucker suit again.

“You start that work already?”

“I got a man looking the place over, taking measurements, but shit, how smart can he be? This’s a brand-new truck, here. Look at this. Got boards and a toolbox right there, unsecured and scratching the paint on the bed.”

“It’s his truck, not yours.”

“Of course you wouldn’t care. You’re not a detail man, Gunther, but I am, and I want my new place looking nice and new, not like I just took a goddamn sledgehammer and knocked down some plaster.”

I moved along, and I could still hear him grumbling a couple of doors down, where a man sat on his front lawn next to the sidewalk in a chair, reading the paper.

“Howdy, Mr. Blake,” I shouted, since he was hard of hearing. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, eighty-some-odd years old and married to a good-looking woman in her early forties. They had a son Ginger’s age who’d from the age of twelve or so started looking exactly like the old man, jug-eared with a nose like a gherkin, which put the lie to all the things people had said about Mrs. Blake’s honor and Mr. Blake’s virility.

“Morning, Officer,” he shouted back, though I was in civilian clothes. He’d left the first three fingers of his left hand on San Juan Hill, and he held the front part of the paper delicately between his thumb and pinkie. “Fucking Reds are taking over the whole cocksucking Orient and there’s nothing we can do about it. Not a goddamned thing.”

“Hope you’re wrong about that,” I said, and didn’t stop. I liked Mr. Blake, but those loud conversations with him were hard to get away from, and I wanted to get to Cliff’s to read a little of the paper before Ed got there and started his usual speech about me ruining my life. Ed’s butting his nose into my business didn’t bother me as much as him treating me like a greenhorn and a moron. I tried not to be mad—I knew he was just trying to look out for me—but I couldn’t help it.

I bought the morning paper from the man outside Cliff’s and took it inside. I sat down at the counter and started reading about the Korean situation that rankled old Blake so bad, the presidential election and a whole lot of other stuff that didn’t interest me much. I was just getting to the sports section when Ed walked in and stood behind me.

“Let’s get a booth,” he said. There were eight of them, all empty except for the one in front. An old man sat there talking to himself over a cup of coffee the way he did almost every day. Sometimes when he went he’d let out a loud yell before he got up and left, and I never once saw him pay his check.

I took my coffee over to a booth toward the back and we sat. “How’s Daisy and Jeff?”

“Dandy. Listen. That Sergeant I saw out at Wesley?”

“It’s not him, I already told you.”

“It goddamn well is. I saw him last night at the Comanche, and he was getting real friendly with Amos Culligan.”

“You followed him?”

“I sure did. He hasn’t made any effort to contact Sally?”

I shook my head, trying to figure it out. “Not as far as I know.”

The waitress came over right then, and all of a sudden I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat. I ordered ham and sausage anyway, and pancakes. Ed got scrambled eggs and toast and reminded her to bring a ketchup bottle.

“Wonder how much Culligan spilled.”

“Probably all of it. I need you to tell Sally about this. You think she’ll call this weekend off?”

“I doubt it.”

“I could threaten a raid,” he said. “You think she’d cancel then?”

“Not a chance.” She’d see right through the bluff, and Ed knew it just like I did.

The food came and we ate without saying much more. He’d done this on his own time, and if he’d left it up to me who knows what would have happened. I wanted to thank him for it but I couldn’t, so I picked up the check when we left and he didn’t stop me.

Sally was at work, and what I had to tell her could wait until her shift ended at three. I didn’t want to monkey around at the front gate at Collins, since I didn’t have an employee identification tag or an appointment to see anyone. I could have flashed my badge and said it was police business, but lots of the guards are retired cops. If I chanced on one of them he’d know it wasn’t a plainclothes officer’s shield and I’d have a lot more questions to answer.

So I got into my broken down old Ford and headed to the hospital. The chassis rattled every time I hit thirty-five miles per hour, and there was a shimmy every time I braked over forty. I’d been gypped, but I hated to admit it so I didn’t gripe. I wished I’d taken better care of the Hudson, but Mildred would have gotten it in the divorce anyway.

One of the doctors on duty in the Emergency Ward had been there and remembered him from the other morning. He talked to me in an examination room while he treated a little boy who’d bent his thumbnail backward playing football in the house. The thumb was all swollen and full of pus, and the doctor was heating up a bent paper clip, and the boy and his mother were watching the end of it get red.

“Charming fellow. Said he’d been jumped after he left some dive out in the county, two or three guys he’d never seen before. He took it pretty philosophically.”

“How bad was he beat up?”

“I’ve seen lots worse,” the doctor said, “but he was knocked around pretty well. No broken bones. One eye swelled shut.” By now the hot paper clip was glowing orange on its end, and without any warning the doctor held the boy’s hand down and burned a neat little round hole in his thumbnail. The boy hollered, but it was already over, and he just watched and sniffled a little while the doctor squeezed the pus out the little hole like toothpaste coming out of a tube. I thanked the doctor and left.

As long as I was at the hospital I had something else I wanted to do. I went upstairs to the obstetrical ward, where the admitting nurse squinted at me, puzzled at seeing me out of uniform.

“Your wife didn’t have a baby, did she, Gunther?”

“Haven’t had a wife for a couple of years now. If I’m lucky I won’t have one again ever.” I meant it to be a joke, but I guess I looked so serious it came out mean. “I’m just funning, Constance. Mrs. McCallum on duty today?”

“Oh. She is, just let me check.”

She paged her like nothing was odd, but she was dying to know why I wanted to talk to Mrs. McCallum. I was too jumpy to make small talk, and if she wanted to know what the story was she could ask just about anybody else on the ward.

After a minute Dot popped her head around a corner. “Five minutes,” she said. “I rescheduled my break.” Then she disappeared. I wandered down to the nursery and watched the families waving through the glass at the nurses holding the babies up. I was still there when she crept up beside me in her white uniform, all business and no fun, the way she always was now when we were face-to-face. Behind the stern look, though, I thought she was happy to see me. Not that it would ever do me any good.

“I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I was here for something else. Hadn’t talked to you in a while, thought I’d come up and see if you had a minute. You want a cup of coffee?”

She looked at me funny, like I must be up to something with this coffee business. “Come on,” I said. “It’s your coffee break.”

I could tell she wanted to smile, even if it wasn’t there on her face. “Let’s keep it brief. I don’t want to start any tongues wagging around here.”

Tongues around that place hadn’t stopped wagging on the two of us since 1942, but I kept my mouth shut. Since the hospital cafeteria was usually full of nurses and cops we wandered across the big green hospital lawn and jaywalked over to Rudolf’s coffeehouse. We took a booth and ordered coffee, with a danish for her. Her starched white uniform made her seem even smaller than she was, and her hair was pulled up so tight under her cap that from the front you couldn’t really tell she was a redhead. Sitting across the booth from her it was impossible to imagine her laughing, or driving out to the lake on a weekend. She was still pretty but doing everything she could to make it not matter.

“So how’s he doing?”

“He’s fine. Having a big summer at day camp.”

“That’s good. School year went okay?”

“Fine. Mostly Bs again. Teacher said he’d do better if he didn’t daydream all the time.”

“Bs are okay. Hell, I was happy when I got Cs.”

“Not to hear Fred tell it. If he doesn’t bring home As it’s because he’s not trying, or because he’s stupid.”

My jaw clenched up and I had to work it around in a circle to get it relaxed again. “And how’s Fred?”

“He’s fine, still having that trouble with his elbow.”

“I’m not asking after his health. I want to know how he’s treating you and the boy.”

“Fine.”

“Still drinking?”

She looked at me for a second before she answered. “He drinks.”

A year earlier I’d run across him at a roadhouse, stumbling drunk and surly, and watched him try to pick a fight with a guy with a goddamn peg leg. Fred was mad and itching for a fight with somebody who couldn’t fight back, which I figured would end up being Dot or the boy when he got home. What I wanted to do was knock his fucking head off his shoulders, but instead I called dispatch and had Tommy Carlisle and Rory Blaine wait outside the roadhouse for him to leave. When they pulled Fred over he got lippy and tried to shove Rory, which gave him and Tommy the perfect opportunity to beat the crap out of him. Rory’s nightstick cracked a bone in Fred’s arm at the elbow, and though I’d never owned up to it, somehow Dot had always known it was my doing.

“You know what’s gonna happen if he lays a hand on either one of you.”

“You’ve told me.” She was scowling now, the way she always did when we talked about Fred. I hadn’t meant to bring the whole business up for that very reason, but the truth was I liked her better pissed off than blank-faced. “I’ll be in touch with his teacher come autumn, just like I was with Mrs. Bleecker last year. She sees any sign there’s trouble at home and I’ll be all over Fred.”

“Our hero,” she said. Her face was pinched and even more pale than usual. “Anything else before I go?”

I didn’t answer, and she stood up just as her danish and coffee arrived. She walked away, and as I watched her go through the door and across the street I thought about how nice things used to be before I fucked everything up by joining the army.

I walked into the lobby of the Bellingham a little before noon and introduced myself to the day manager, Mr. Nash. He didn’t look too happy, and he sighed out loud when I told him Dan Hardyway of Vice said to say hello. He didn’t like informing on hotel guests, and to tell the truth I didn’t much like strong-arming him that way, but neither of us had much choice.

“I hear he paid cash for a week in advance. That true?”

“It’s true. But it’s not as unusual as you might think.”

“He’s traveling with a lot of green, though, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“He paid cash for a Plymouth at Welker Brothers.”

“I doubt he paid more than five or six hundred dollars.”

“That’s a lot of cash. And he bought a whole bunch of nice clothes over at the Thistle.”

“You already know this. What do you want me to tell you?”

“I want you to let me into his room.”

Mr. Nash was shocked. “I can’t do that.”

“And if he comes back while I’m up there you ring the phone three times so I can get out quick.”

“I told you I can’t do that.”

I leaned forward. “Three arrests, all in the small hours of the morning, all in the park.” I was talking real low, but he still raised his finger to his lips and shooshed me. “Indecent exposure twice, solicitation once. Charges dropped because it’s good to have an inside man at a big hotel. If you don’t want to play ball anymore you better call Dan Hardyway and tell him. Otherwise give me the key and remember it’s three rings if he shows up.”

Mr. Nash handed me the key looking like he hated my guts. The elevator operator stood at attention the whole ride up to the sixth floor, and when I got off he said “Have a pleasant afternoon, Officer,” even though I was still in my civvies.

Ogden’s room was more of a suite. There was a duffel bag on the folding stand next to the bed, and his civilian clothes were folded up in the top drawer of the dresser. His Class A uniform was hanging in the closet along with some expensive civilian clothes, all of them with the Thistle’s label. I looked out the window at the bridge below and the river, and I wondered what the hell was so great about army life that he’d left a woman like Sally for it.

In the duffel bag was a packet of letters tied together with a rubber band. The top letter was worn, as if it had been read over and over, and at least once it had been crumpled and then smoothed out again. The date at the top of the page was less than three months ago. The page had been unfolded and refolded so many times it was hard to read around the creases. It was on Collins company stationery, with the name Cecil Wembly on the letterhead: