The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  A reporter for a newspaper that had supported the man all these years…a reporter who had proof that the rumors were true…and a reporter who knew firsthand that there was a government conspiracy to keep a certain coded communiqué hidden from the public.

  These were powerful and wealthy men, yet even they knew they had reason to fear not only for their reputations but for their lives. They had to be careful.

  They hid Stover and his family in a safe house in Phoenix, Arizona, while he wrote the book. Had to be done quickly. They copy-edited and typeset chapters as soon as he finished them. The publisher was a small place called Patriot Press. A printer was selected who was in great sympathy with their cause. The book was bound and shipped in secret. Key newspapers received—without any advance publicity— copies of the book. As did the key radio commentators.

  There had been no news story like it ever before in the history of the country. It was a bigger story than even the war itself.

  People chose sides quickly. And, for the most part, predictably.

  That portion of the press favorable to the man began proclaiming that author Frank Stover was in fact a foreign agent, a psychotic who had recently been treated in a mental hospital, a drug addict, a homosexual with brutal tastes, a seditionist, a publicity monger, and a lifelong enemy of the man.

  That portion of the press that had always despised the man began proclaiming that author Frank Stover was a patriot, a hero, a model husband and father and citizen, a devout Christian, a man who had begged to serve his country, and ironically, a lifelong admirer of the man, who was just as shocked by what he’d learned as everybody else.

  Three attempts were made on his life in the first month following publication of the book, but in each case the culprit proved to be an inept-insane amateur who just couldn’t live with the fact that the name of his idol had been dirtied in this fashion.

  Another safe house. Another town. Frank Stover was rich now— twenty-one printings in nine weeks, radios and newspapers filled with it—but he was also a scourge. No matter how he disguised himself, somebody found him out.

  Many other safe houses. Many other towns.

  And always, always, somehow, somebody found out who he was.

  And if they couldn’t find Frank, they’d find Tommy. Or they’d find Mary. And humiliate them. And sometimes inflict physical harm. And it would become the summary judgment of whatever community they were living in that the Stovers were not welcome here.

  Were not welcome anywhere, in fact, in the entire country.

  He was half a block away from his house when he saw them in the street. No guns. No knives. No clubs. Not even any overt threats. Not yet, anyways.

  There were maybe a dozen of them, men and women alike. Nicely dressed, middle-class folks just like Stover and his family.

  A woman spotted him first and then said something to the others. Then they were all watching him.

  Sweat. Heart pounding. Hands gripping the steering wheel so hard in anger and frustration he nearly snapped it in half.

  Damn them. Damn all of them. Everywhere. Would have been different if he’d told a lie. But he’d told the truth. That was his sin. He’d told the truth.

  They watched him. Didn’t shout. Didn’t raise fists. Didn’t acknowledge him in any way that he could see. They just watched him. This was how it started. By nightfall, it would be different. People would start drinking. Rocks and bottles would be thrown through windows. Taunts would be shrieked into the night. In a couple of towns, men had even tried to storm the house, get inside. God knows what would have happened if Stover hadn’t turned them back with his shotgun.

  He pulled into his driveway and as he did so, he saw Mary peeking around the curtain at the group in the street. The look of fear was back in her eyes and it broke his heart. She deserved one whole hell of a lot better life than this.

  He closed the garage and hurried into the house through the side door.

  He went straight to the living room. She came quickly into his arms. He held her, all the aspects of her—friend, wife, lover. There was nothing to say. It had all been said so many, many times before. This town or that town. Before they’d started running again.

  “How’s Tommy?”

  “Scared. He’s getting those cramps again.”

  Kid was going to have an ulcer before he was fifteen, Stover thought bitterly. And there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  “Maybe I should call the moving van people,” she said softly.

  He held her away from him. “We’re not moving.”

  “But Frank—”

  “Where to this time? West? East? South? It doesn’t make any difference. It’s always the same. Don’t you see that, honey? There’s no place we can run unless it’s—”

  She shook her head. “Don’t even say it. Out of the question.”

  Overseas, he’d been going to say. But he hadn’t meant it. He was like she was. Wouldn’t give up on his country no matter how bad it got.

  “I’ll go see Tommy.”

  Red Ryder, The Durango Kid, and Captain Marve l were the comic books of the day for Tommy. He obviously derived not only pleasure but a sense of well-being from them. Like a security blanket. Even when he slept, he liked to have comic books scattered across his bed. His escape from the cruelties of the outside world.

  “How you doing?” Stover asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

  Tommy looked up from Captain Marvel. “This is a good one. There’s lots of Billy Batson in this one.” Billy Batson was the teenage alter ego of Captain Marvel. It was easier for Tommy to identify with a teenager than a guy in long red underwear with a golden cape and a bolt of lightning sewn on his chest.

  “Yes, I like Billy, too.”

  Tommy put his comic book down. “You see them out there?”

  Stover nodded.

  “You think they’ll try to get inside again, like those people did that one time?”

  Tommy’s right eye had begun to tic. And every so often, he’d flinch from the pain in his stomach.

  “I’m sorry about this, son.”

  “I know you are, Dad. It’s not your fault.”

  That was the worst thing of all. Neither Mary nor Tommy blamed him. Maybe it would have been easier if they did.

  The first rock hit the front door around nine o’clock. By that time, the crowd was maybe fifty deep. Mary had called the police a couple of times. They’d promised to get right out there. Somehow, they hadn’t made it yet.

  Stover had his shotgun ready and loaded and standing just inside the front door. Ready if he needed it.

  They’d fixed up the couch in the basement for Tommy. It was cool and quiet down there. They’d also let him take his radio along. He got to listen to all the crime story programs he normally couldn’t stay up for.

  They sat in darkness.

  “I shouldn’t have done it,” he said. They sat on the couch, holding hands. “I should have seen where it would all lead. I should’ve just kept my damned mouth shut.”

  “You couldn’t have lived with yourself, Frank,” she said. “And I couldn’t have lived with you, either. You’re an honest man. You had to tell the truth.”

  “Yeah, and look what we got for it.”

  “I just wish you’d reconsider moving. There’s a nice suburb of Minneapolis I’ve been wanting to try. I always keep a place in the back of my mind and then write the chamber of commerce and ask for pamphlets and things about the town. It’s a real nice place, Frank. Real nice. We could go on ahead, the three of us, and then have the moving company bring our things later.”

  “We’re not moving,” he said. “Not this time. Not anymore.”

  The knock surprised them.

  This was just after ten o’clock.

  A couple of things had happened.

  Tommy had fallen asleep. They’d switched off the radio and pulled his covers up good and tight.

  And a white-haired man they recognized as Dr. Stuart from
the end of the street had shown up suddenly and begun giving everybody hell for carrying on like the KKK. That’s just what he’d said, too, the KKK. He told them to go home and leave these people alone. And in twos and threes and fours, over a period of ten sullen minutes, they started drifting back to their houses like children who’d been chastised with especial harshness. They didn’t like being treated this way or being compared to the KKK, but every block had an icon, and Dr. Stuart was the icon for this block.

  And so they left, disappearing into the shadows around the street-lights, fireflies darting at their heads as they walked up sweet-smelling newly mown lawns and headed inside to have a nightcap beer and a couple more cigarettes and maybe another little rant about that bastard Frank Stover.

  You just never knew who was living in your neighborhood…

  Mary opened the door.

  Stover stood behind her, his shotgun pointed directly in the center of the doorway.

  Dr. Bill Stuart said, “Sure hope that thing isn’t loaded, Stover. Guns make me nervous.”

  “What do you want?” Stover said.

  “To talk. To apologize. To explain.”

  “I’ve heard it all before,” Stover said.

  “Frank,” Mary said. “Come in, Dr. Stuart. I’ll get some lights on. And Frank, put that shotgun away. It makes me nervous, too.”

  She put a table lamp on, and the three of them sat down.

  “I’d take a beer if anybody’d offer it,” Dr. Stuart, a hefty but not fat man, said. His white hair and large blue eyes and hard face gave him a granite authority, even while he was wearing walking shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.

  “Of course,” Mary said. “Frank?”

  “Please.”

  They sat and stared at each other while Mary was gone. She returned with three bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and their pilsner beer glasses.

  After they were all wearing foam mustaches, Dr. Stuart said, “First of all, let me apologize for the neighborhood here. There are a couple of bad ones in the bushel—about the same number of bad ones you’d find in any bushel—and they spoil everything. They’ve always got some angry cause they’re promoting. This teacher is a communist, this city councilman is a queer, or this new businessman may be part of organized crime. Nothing pleases them more than to make trouble. And the men are just as guilty as the women, in case you think it’s only women who like to gossip. They’ve driven people out of this town before, and they’ll drive them out again.”

  He took some more beer.

  “My husband told the truth,” Mary said. “That’s why they hate us.”

  Dr. Stuart smiled sadly. “That isn’t why they hate you, Mrs. Stover.

  They hate you because you told them there was no God. That the man we thought was God was just as weak and conniving and dishonest as every other human being. That he could be good—just as most of us are most of the time—but that he could also be bad. Very bad, in fact.”

  Mary glanced at Stover. “It wasn’t Frank’s intention to—”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t, Mrs. Stover. And as far as I’m concerned, your husband did tell the truth. Franklin Roosevelt—as that coded message proved—did know about Pearl Harbor in advance. He could’ve saved all those lives and all those ships. But he saw a way of getting us into the war and he took it.” More beer. “I lost two sons in the war. And I’m damned proud of them because if they hadn’t given their lives along with all the other boys, Germany and Japan would have won. I don’t even hate Roosevelt for what he did at Pearl Harbor. We should’ve gotten in the war even earlier than we did. Maybe this was the only alternative he had. But when your book came out, Mr. Stover, Roosevelt’s enemies ganged up on him and made him out to be the most treacherous man in our history. All those boys killed at Pearl that morning. And all that blood on his hands.

  “And you have to remember how the majority of people saw FDR. He was God. He created Social Security for the old folks; he got the farmers back on their feet; he started fixing up cities and building national parks and even helping colored people. He was God. People had that kind of faith in him. It really was religious, the way they saw that. And your book destroyed that faith. Even the people who called you a liar knew that you were telling the truth. In their hearts, they did. But they’ll always hate you for making them face up to it.” He smiled his sad smile again. “I even hate you a little bit, Mr. Stover. I sort of looked up to him as a God myself. I was really shocked when he committed suicide. I guess he couldn’t face up to the truth of what he’d done, either.”

  A rational, not unkind, very articulate man had just explained to Frank Stover why he was a pariah. It had never been put so simply, so compellingly to him before.

  Mary took his hand. Gripped it tight.

  “Frank’s a good man, Doctor.”

  “I don’t doubt that he is, Mrs. Stover. But I’m not sure most people are ready to believe that.”

  The medical man had drained his bottle of beer and now put big hands on big white knees and levered himself up from his chair. “I wish I could tell you that things’ll get better here for you. But I’m afraid they won’t. Well, good night now.”

  Five days later, in sunny Timberlake, Minnesota, Mary Stover stood on the edge of the driveway watching the moving van back in. She slid her arm around her husband’s waist and gave him a hug. “Things’ll be better here for us, Frank. I just know they will. Can’t you just feel it?”

  He leaned down and gave her a kiss. “Sure I can, honey. Sure I can.”

  Sixteen days later a local reporter recognized Frank’s face.

  Their next destination was Hastings, Maine.

  MUSE

  1

  There were a couple of things you learned pretty quick at the Skylar Times. One was that you weren’t ever going to own a BMW if you stayed in newspaper journalism. And two that the cosmically desirable Dulcy Tremont, editor of the weekly Entertainment magazine, was the property of publisher Cal Rawlins, husband, father and tireless exponent of Family Values.

  This was how things were on the day a few years ago when David Osborne came strolling into the newsroom one fine spring morning, direct from his recent guest shot on Jay Leno’s show, and from his even more recent appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone. Not too long ago, Osborne had sat at the desk next to mine, cranking out copy and, like the rest of us males and probably at least one female, dreaming uselessly of possessing Dulcy Tremont. Osborne and I had another passion in common. We both wrote songs.

  Osborne had had it particularly bad for Dulcy. They were both part-time jazz musicians and singers who worked in Chicago most weekends. They sang and played well but without any particular distinction. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people sing and play well. Plus he spent half his time at the newspaper working directly with Dulcy. That had to be a special kind of hell, if you were in love with the lady. Forget her looks for a moment. I’d never met a woman who smelled as good as Dulcy. Her scent alone could drive a man to testicular frenzy.

  But now it was Dulcy, standing in the doorway of her office—a real office, not a cubicle, or just a battered desk in a sea of battered newsroom desks—now it was Dulcy who did the gaping. Gone was all her imperious blondeness. She was now just a celebrity-struck prairie girl with her eyes fixed upon somebody whose name could be found every other week or so in the pages of Entertainment Weekly.

  There was just enough left of Osborne’s old face so that you recognized him. But cosmetic surgery had turned an average looking guy into something resembling a movie star. Same with the body. He was twenty-five pounds lighter. And he covered what was left in the kind of Southern California Casual that you just don’t see here on the Illinois edge of the Mississippi river. He’d previewed the new face on Rolling Stone cover. But it was a lot more startling in person. How could this be the pudgy, pasty, shy kid who’d always deferred to me as the newsroom ass bandit, which I pretty much am by default. All this means is that I bathe regularly and have had my acne under c
ontrol for some years now.

  If lording your success over former colleagues had been an Olympic event, Osborne would have won the gold and silver on the spot. He was like the Pope making his way through a throng of unwashed peasants.

  Me, he left till last. Amidst all the computer keyboards clacking away, amidst all the phones ringing and the fax bells going insane, amidst all the earthquake rumble from the basement where the giant presses were being fired up for the day, he swaggered over and said, “You have time for a coffee break?”

  “Not right now, Dave. Maybe in an hour.”

  He smiled. There was a little bit of Elvis’ old sneer in that smile. Maybe the plastic surgeon built the sneer capacity into Dave’s new face.

  “We’ll go now.”

  “But I’ve got to finish—”

  He put up a halting hand. “I’ll take care of it with Rawlins.” Then: “By the way, it’s ‘David’ now. Not ‘Dave.’”

  He made a point of not looking at Dulcy. He just let her slump against her doorframe, spent in an almost post-coital way. It was a wonder her hair wasn’t mussed up and she wasn’t smoking a cigarette. But at least a part of her considerable mind, the part that wasn’t receiving sexual charges from the mere presence of a Star in the newsroom—at least a part of her mind had to be remembering all the ways she’d snubbed Dave—pardon me, David—over their working years together. She’d treated him as she treated everybody else, male and female alike—as if we were silly little people whose lives didn’t interest her in the least.

  He walked all the way to the back of the newsroom where Cal Rawlins’ vast baronial office stretched across the length of the entire southern wall. The door was open and moments later the tall, solid red-bearded man in a blue custom-made suit appeared and bellowed out “David!” as if he hadn’t spent all of Osborne’s years here bullying him as he bullied everybody else. Rawlins slid his arm around Osborne’s shoulder and they vanished inside the office that was filled with huge black and white photographs, very artsy you know, of Rawlins killing every kind of animal that moved. He dispatched them with gun, bow and arrow, and even, on one of those Africa veldt safaris for American tourists of the faux macho persuasion, hurling a spear into the side and hide of a rhino lumbering its way to a small lake. The only thing impressive about all these kills, as he called them, was that his blood alcohol levels were probably setting Guinness Book records while he was doing in all the poor animals. He had some issues, as they say, with the bottle.