The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  Delancy parked his car near a plant that had once manufactured farm equipment but was now making tank parts. He had to pass in front of the main gate to reach the coffee shop he wanted. Two armed guards in Army uniforms looked him over carefully as he limped past. Saboteurs could be anywhere.

  The coffee shop greeted him with the inevitable sound of the Andrews Sisters on the juke box. Their relentless cheeriness depressed him as did most of the propaganda lies. He knew that keeping spirits up was a critical part of the war effort. But after coming close to dying in combat and then seeing the wasted remains of hundreds of soldiers in the military hospital—

  Thankfully, the song ended just as he was seating himself in a booth near the back of the small, clean place with a six-stool counter and the smell of fresh pies that brought back sentimental memories of visiting his Grandparents near Rock Island. Benny Goodman came on next, which was fine by him.

  He felt a spasm of anger when a cute girl in her factory uniform walked in with a handsome guy in a white shirt and blue trousers on her arm. The guy looked plenty healthy. And that was the source of Delancy’s anger. He knew he was probably being unfair and he didn’t give a damn. All the corpses he’d seen in the Pacific; all the near-corpses he’d seen in the military hospital and here lover boy courting a chick. He was probably her supervisor at the defense plant. For all the positive publicity the plants got when the women took over, there were, as in any human enterprise, a lot of secrets that few cared to know about.

  A number of Rosie the Riveters had sex right at work, in storage closets that contained a cot and could be locked from inside. Their partners were men who’d been declared unfit to serve—sometimes legitimately, sometimes not. It wasn’t the single women Delancy cared about. It was the engaged and married women. He’d seen too many Dear John letters held in the trembling hands of combat soldiers learning that their fiancés and wives were calling off their relationships because they’d met somebody knew. If he was drunk, Delancy might have gotten up and gimped over to loverboy here and smashed him in the mouth. Of course, with his luck, when he sobered up he’d learn that loverboy here had a heart condition and probably wouldn’t live another six months. Much as he wanted to, he restrained himself from punching people. The least they could do was carry their medical records so Delancy could see if it was all right to slug them.

  While he waited for his black coffee and slice of peach pie, he lighted a cigarette and scanned two war posters he hadn’t seen before.

  He still read pulp magazines so his favorite posters were those that looked like pulp covers. The war bond ones were usually the best for drama. His favorite today was of a soldier parachuting from the sky with a machine gun in his hands. This could have been a Doc Savage cover.

  His art appreciation was interrupted by a softly seductive voice saying, “You’re a patient man. I like that.”

  As Beth Hewitt slipped into the booth seat across from him, she smiled and said, “I loved my husband very much. But he wasn’t what anybody would call clever.”

  He thought of what the two shelter girls had told him, Sarah believing that her mother’s infidelity had driven him to suicide.

  The waitress came. All Beth wanted was coffee.

  When they were alone, she said, “You’ve changed.”

  “I’ve changed?” He smiled. “We’ve known each other maybe half an hour. How could I change in half an hour?”

  “You started looking into things and you heard something about me and now you don’t see me the same way as you did back in your office.”

  He wanted to keep smiling it off but her observation was true. He’d seen her as an innocent while they were talking before; now, after talking to the girls, he saw her as—what? That was the power of gossip. Even if a story wasn’t true, simply hearing it altered your perception of the person being discussed. Even if it wasn’t true.

  “I went to the shelter.”

  She slumped back in her seat. She really did have the kind of good looks that snuck up on you. The longer you looked, the better she looked. That melancholy little face, the eyes that so easily reflected pain.

  “I imagine you talked to some of her friends.”

  “I’m not sure I’d call them friends. But they told me what they knew about her.”

  “I’m sure they told you that I caused Sarah’s father to kill himself. That’s what Sarah would have told them. She told me that twenty times a day before she ran away.” She reached into her purse next to her on the booth seat and withdrew a package of Chesterfields. She had her own lighter. She took a deep drag which she French-inhaled, the smoke in elegant tendrils escaping her perfect nostrils.

  “That’s why you don’t look the same. I’m some kind of whore to you now.”

  “Whatever happened or didn’t happen isn’t my business unless it helps explain her murder.”

  “Well, you may as well know the truth,” she said bitterly. “It’s true. I was having an affair with my husband’s best friend and I planned to leave him because of it. I told him that and very soon after he killed himself. Sarah blamed me, of course; I would’ve done the same thing in her position. The only thing I had was the family respectability. She wanted to destroy that so she started to do everything she could to humiliate me. She started sleeping with everybody she could. She started drinking. She got into two car wrecks within a month of getting her driver’s license. She was lucky to live through them. She quit going to school and she started hanging out in hotel lobbies. The police were nice enough not to officially charge her with prostitution. She’d apparently slept with as many as a dozen older men. That’s what the officer told me, anyway. Then she started shoplifting. This time it wasn’t kept out of the papers. I hate to say it but I do care about the family name—more than I should, I know—so I really had it out with her over that. The next morning, she was gone. Two weeks later Laura, from the shelter, put her on the phone and we talked. We were very cold to each other.” Her tears were glycerin-pure standing in the corners of those soft dark eyes. “But I’m not making any apologies. I didn’t go looking for an affair but I was obviously ready for one.”

  “What I need to figure out,” Delancy said, easing the conversation to Sarah’s more recent behavior, “is if Sarah carried on the same way here she did back home.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. And when I said I don’t have any apologies to make, I meant about my husband. Not about Sarah. I was a terrible mother and I can see that now. I just assumed she was old enough to accept what was going on.” She shook her head. “I’ve been in and out of mental hospitals all my life for depression. I don’t deal well with things—and neither does Sarah.”

  Delancy let her finish her gentle crying. She had a thick supply of Kleenex in her purse.

  He was thinking about a wine-colored Packard and an older man. Maybe the same type of older man she’d solicited in the hotel back home.

  “I don’t suppose this has been much help,” she said. “I just wanted you to get my side of things, too. As soon as you said you were going to that shelter, I knew what you’d hear. That’s why I called your office and asked you to meet me here.” Nona had given him the message when he’d checked in earlier.

  “Does a red Packard mean anything to you?”

  She gave one of those small but telling starts, as if somebody had prodded her with a sharp stick.

  “Oh, God, a red Packard?”

  “You know somebody who owns one?”

  “Of course. Ted Carlson. My lover. What about it?”

  “Well, Sarah was seen getting out of a red Packard a few nights before she died.”

  “But why would Ted come here? How did he find her? We tried for weeks and didn’t have any luck.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. Now that I’ve got his name, I’m going to start looking for him.”

  She still looked shaken. Could the news have been that startling? “Are you telling me everything? I need as good a sense of your daughter as
I can get.”

  The small face was composed again. “I just want you to find the man who killed her. I didn’t do much for her the last year of her life. That’s the only thing I can do for her now. So that means I’ll tell you everything I think that’s pertinent.”

  5

  He was popular at the police station. A few cops beat the draft by having the city proclaim them vital to local safety. While this was legitimate, it was understandable that a large number of officers who had to serve were resentful of the cops who got to stay home. The cops who went to war far outnumbered those who stayed behind, which was another thing the press got wrong in its reporting. There were a lot of young cops who’d been rushed through police training and who still didn’t know what the hell they were doing. But in a town that had turned into one big rising crime statistic, Delancy was proof that not all soldiers resented cops. Here was a man who’d not only seen combat but had been wounded. And he walked among his old friends without a hint of bitterness.

  He came in the front door so he could pass by all the office workers. They were his friends, too. Everybody waved, smiled. He grabbed a Pepsi from an ice-packed chest and went on back to the detective bureau.

  Until Pearl Harbor, the most popular topics of discussion in the bureau had been which guy had seen the biggest breasts that day, which guy was foolish enough to bet on either the Cubs or the Bears, which guy was likely to become chief of detectives when fifty-four-year-old Bob Casey retired, and which guy was having the most problems at home because of all the extra hours he had to put in. After Pearl, all those topics got shifted downward by one. The war was now the first thing the detectives talked about.

  There was only one cop present when Delancy walked in that afternoon. Fortunately, it was the cop he wanted to see, Tom Gibson, the slender, red-haired dapper man who wore Sears suits. But somehow, on him, they looked as if they’d come from an expensive Chicago men’s store. The trouble was, Gibson was the resident expert on the Zone and the thugs, grifters, hookers, drug addicts and killers of the Zone probably didn’t have an eye for male fashion. Gibson was the expert because he’d had the bad luck to have grown up in the Zone where his old man had been a bartender in one of the most profane of all the Zone dives.

  Gibson was a wry man. “So you’re going to show me up and find out who killed that girl from the shelter, huh?”

  “I’m sure going to give it a try.”

  Gibson nodded to Delancy’s leg. “You used to be quite a dancer. Think you can still handle it?”

  Delancy knocked his knuckles against the hollow leg. “I’m already entered in a jitterbug contest.” He smirked. “Sure I am.” He got out his smokes and put one between his lips. “You pissed?”

  Gibson grinned. “Yeah, I’m real pissed. I got six open murders right here on my desk, the stooge they gave me as an assistant had a nine-day course in police procedures, and this morning that rag of a newspaper criticized the police chief for letting the Army push him around. Why would I want a trained detective with a lot of experience behind him to help me out?” He shoved his hand over to Delancy. “You’re savin’ my ass on this one, Nick. And I appreciate it.”

  The newspaper reference revealed how bitter the tension had become between townspeople and the Army camp. Two members of the city council wanted to ban the military entirely from entering the city limits. The only place soldiers could pass the time was in the Zone. Any soldier caught in the city would be fined and jailed for forty-eight hours. They buttressed their arguments by citing the stats on auto theft, vandalism, assault and rape. The newspaper was all for the ban. The chief of police, a wise and calm man, had pointed out that a) such a ban wouldn’t stand up in court b) he didn’t have enough men to enforce such a ban and c) was this any way to treat young men who were being sent into war?

  “You interviewed a kid at the shelter named—”

  “—Dwight Abernathy. He sure looked good for it. But—”

  “—he was at the movie with friends.”

  Gibson sighed. “I even checked out the ticket lady and the usher at the movie house. They remember him coming with four or five others kids and leaving with them too.”

  “No chance he could’ve snuck out? That theater isn’t that far from the shelter.”

  “The usher said it was a slow night and he would’ve remembered the Abernathy kid leaving.”

  “No fire exit?”

  “How about this crap? The fire department has given them three or four citations over the past year to get it fixed. I tried to get the door open and I couldn’t. The frame is wood and it’s warped from rain and snow over the years. I couldn’t budge the damned thing. And it’s in plain sight, right to the left of the screen. You’d notice anybody who tried to wrestle it open.”

  “How about a red Packard?”

  “Hey, that’s not fair,” Gibson said.

  “What isn’t fair?”

  “I worked on this for a week and didn’t hear anything about a red Packard.”

  Delancy smiled. Gibson and he had always felt casually competitive with each other. Even after all this time, it felt good to spring a surprise on him.

  “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  “Gee, thanks. Maybe being a private eye is making you smarter.”

  “I was wondering if you’d found out anything more about Sarah Hewitt.”

  Gibson sat up straight, eager to get involved again. “I was in court testifying four days in a row so didn’t have time to follow this up yet. But I heard whispers about her working for that Justice of the Peace— Cyrus Banning.”

  “How the hell did he get to her? With her background and everything, she was way out of his class.”

  “Kiddo,” Gibson said. “She may have come from money but she managed to turn herself into just another street kid who’d put out for cash and might even have picked up on drugs. Very angry; almost like she was trying to kill herself.”

  “This thing with Banning—you’re saying she was an ‘Annie’?”

  “That’s the word I picked up from a few people in the Zone. But as I said, because I was in court so much—I had six cases I had to testify in—I never really got a chance to find out, for sure.”

  An Annie, Delancy thought. Life forms didn’t get much lower than that.

  6

  “Because I was worried about her. Why the hell else would I drive all the way over here?”

  “And stay for two weeks? You’re a successful trial lawyer, Mr. Carlson. How can you spare this much time?”

  Ted Carlson was a well-dressed gray-haired man whose looks were just starting to fade into fat. There were only two excellent hotels in Prescott. He hadn’t been hard to find. Delancy called his room and asked to meet him in the coffee shop downstairs.

  The waitress had just served them coffee. Carlson had a plum Danish even though it was afternoon.

  “I’d say it was my business. And tell me again just what your professional interest in this is.”

  Delancy had assumed that the man would go lawyer on him so he produced his ID from the mayor’s office and then his private investigator’s license. “Take your pick.”

  Carlson gave the IDs a quick legal look then shoved them back to Delancy’s side of the booth.

  “I’m sure Beth told you all about our history together. We each broke up our families. I’m not proud of it and neither is Beth. But in the course of it, Sarah became like a daughter to me. I cared about her very much.”

  “That sounds nice, Carlson. But Beth didn’t know you were in town here until I described your car.”

  He smiled, a toothy effect that he probably used with great success on juries. “I probably should drive something a little less conspicuous, shouldn’t I?” He took a bite of his Danish. “I didn’t really need that now, did I?” He patted his stout stomach. “I’m not the golden boy I used to be.” He wiped a napkin across his lips and said, “She didn’t know I was in town because I didn’t tell her. And the reason I di
dn’t tell her is because we haven’t spoken in more than a month. All the misery we caused our families—and we’ve both been having problems ourselves. She almost broke it off. And then so did I.”

  “She told me you’re still lovers.”

  “She’s more optimistic than I am.”

  “Why say it that way?”

  “Is that really any of your business? I mean, no offense, but you’re not a real cop.”

  “If you want to talk to a ‘real cop,’ I have the authority to hold you here and then walk over to that payphone and ask a ‘real cop’ to come out here.’”

  That Broadway smile again. “I doubt you’ll believe this but she found out I was interested in somebody else. She found that out on her own. And she won’t let go of it.”

  “I thought you were so deeply in love and all that.”

  He frowned. “I’m something of a libertine, I admit. But I do have a conscience. I got to the point where every time I look at her, all I can think of is all the people we hurt. We were pretty damned selfish, when you come right down to it. Her husband committed suicide; my wife’s been seeing a psychiatrist for months. My two kids were straight A students. Now their grades are bad and they get in trouble a lot at school.” The frown, this time accompanied by a solemn shake of the head. Delancy realized that he was playing to a jury of one—Delancy. “I can’t look at her and feel good about myself. I know she hates me but I can’t help it.”

  “I still don’t understand why you’re here?”

  “You don’t? Isn’t it obvious? To get Sarah to go back home. As miserable as my kids are, they still have their home environment to fall back on. She is—was—over here. In a frigging army town for God’s sake.”

  “So you saw her?”

  “Three or four times. I was planning to see her tomorrow night. She didn’t tell me all the things that had happened to her while she’d been here. But I assume they were pretty bad.”