The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  I said it. “Do you think it could have been Cal?”

  She surprised me. “Oh, God, I’m trying not to think about that.”

  “Did he know about your date?”

  She hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “Told him.”

  “So he did know?”

  “I guess I just thought that it’d be worse if he found out about it from somebody else. Somebody was bound to see it and bring it up. David is big news. Was, I guess I should say. God, that sounds so unreal, ‘was.’ “

  “Did you tell the police you told Cal?”

  “I had to, didn’t I?”

  I couldn’t help it. I smiled.

  “I don’t see anything funny here. Poor David is dead.”

  “It’s not Dave. I’m sorry he’s dead, too. It’s Cal. He’s such an arrogant bastard. I pity the cop who has to question him. Cal’ll try to get the guy fired.”

  Even she had a brief smile for that one. “Cal at somebody else’s mercy—I’d love to be there for that. He’ll probably take out one of his guns and shoot the guy.” Then, realizing the implication of what she’d just said: “I don’t think he killed David. I really don’t.”

  I looked up at the clock above the cash register. Nearly four a.m. “Well, I need to get a little sleep, anyway.”

  “Me, too. I just hope I can sleep when I actually get to bed.” She did something so unlike herself—or at least my impression of her—that I watched as if a miracle were unfolding before my eyes. It was a tiny little thing you see people do all the time. People. Not goddesses. She took a mincing bite out of a fingernail. And then spit with great tiny delicacy. The way a goddess would spit. “I wish they’d let you smoke in here. I’m going to ruin my fingernails.”

  “C’mon, let’s get out of here anyway.”

  “Is it all right if I smoke in your car?”

  “I guess I didn’t know you smoked.” I took her down a peg for smoking. It felt good. “But sure. You can smoke. Just roll the window down.”

  Cal Rawlins wasn’t in yet and it was already eleven. Work was getting done sporadically. It was difficult to concentrate when a story like David Osborne’s murder was still breaking. The city desk had four reporters at the police station alone. I couldn’t ever recall that happening before.

  Dulcy wasn’t in yet, either. I was working on a story about the prospect of a new sports center for the poorest side of town. It contained all the usual elements. Funding was the big problem, of course. The last two tax referendums had failed to pass. The prospects for this one looked grim. The yea and nay sides were predictable in their arguing. All these kids have to do is get on a bus and ride over to the west side where there’s a perfectly fine sports center. That perfectly fine sports center, said the yea side, was in fact eighteen miles away, on the farthest edge of the city limits, and was already overcrowded anyway. The yea side implied that there was an undertow of racism here, the nay side not caring if minority kids had a sports center or not. I sometimes got tired of the race issue being applied to so many issues but here I thought it was appropriate. Just last year the nay side had started talking about a second sports facility being built on the west side due to the overcrowding. Pretty hard not to see racism at work in this particular case.

  Dulcy got in at one thirty. She looked pale, even gaunt. She was perfectly groomed as always but even that didn’t help. She closed her office door immediately.

  Rawlins got in at three o’clock. He set another Guinness record for door slamming. The entire floor seemed to tremble.

  I was just picking up the phone to call a black minister involved in the steering committee for the proposed east side sports center when a “Buddy” message came up on my screen. Simple message. The Rendezvous at four-thirty. D

  The Rendezvous was a bar out near the largest of our four shopping malls. It served food of a kind—not a good kind—and was basically a hang out for mall employees. Because of the eighty-seven degree heat, the owners had decided to see how close to winter the air conditioning could get. We sat in the back. Nobody knew who we were and nobody cared except for the men trekking back and forth to the john back by the bumper pool table. Their eyes always got hung up on a glimpse of Dulcy. Even pale, she was a stunner.

  She explained why she was late getting to the paper. “He came over about nine this morning. He told me that he’d been with his lawyer since six o’clock. He told me that I shouldn’t mention to anybody that I’d told him about my date with David. He could see what I was thinking. He went out of his way to convince me that he didn’t kill David. And then he just came apart.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Rawlins. The Great White Hunter coming apart?”

  “You don’t know about his family situation. His older brother Richard was supposed to take over the paper. That’s what Cal’s father wanted. Cal had cancer when he was small. Leukemia. Very few people know about that. He almost died, two or three times. His mother smothered him. Really overprotected him. She wouldn’t let him go out for sports or hang out with any ‘rough’ kids or even go to summer camp. She was terrified that something would happen to him. So Cal’s father thought he was a sissy. He used to make cracks sometimes that his wife had finally gotten the daughter she’d always wanted. He never even considered turning the paper over to Cal.

  “But then the father died of a heart attack. Cal was at Yale when that happened. He changed a lot there. His room mate took him hunting and Cal loved it. He even started boxing. He loved that, too. He started womanizing and drinking and spending a lot of time in New York at the dance clubs. This was before AIDs so the times were pretty wild. His mother was horrified, of course. She felt betrayed. She’s a very melodramatic woman. She was always sending him these long ranting letters. She even had him followed around by private detectives from time to time. One of them got hold of his medical records and found out that he’d gotten clap twice. Cal laughed when he told me that. He said he could just imagine his mother’s face when she found out about that. ‘Absolutely stricken,’ was how he put it; clutching her bosom and screaming for the maid to bring her a vodka tonic. Anyway, she saw that the only way he might settle down was to make him the publisher. She even had the proper young woman lined up for him to marry. Strictly Junior League, though the times I’ve met her—and believe it or not, Jason, I feel damned guilty about her—she seemed like a very bright, very decent woman. I feel sorry for her and so does Cal. She loves him very much. She knows about me now but still doesn’t want a divorce. That part of it’s very sad.”

  “When did you learn all this?”

  “That’s what we were doing all day. Sitting in my apartment, drinking pot after pot of straight coffee, talking about Cal’s past. He’s been publisher for eleven years now. His brother hasn’t spoken to him in all that time.”

  “Is his brother in town?”

  “Chicago. He’s a very high-power corporate attorney. And Cal—” She frowned. “Cal has just now realized that all the drinking and hunting and running around—he’s been trying to become the kind of man he thought his father would like.”

  “Is his brother that way?”

  “Very much so. He’s on marriage number three.”

  “Well, thanks a hell of a lot,” I said.

  That beautiful head of hers gave a tiny backwards jerk. She looked shocked at what I’d said.

  “You’ve just managed to turn the guy I hate most in the world into a somewhat sympathetic human being. Cal had cancer? An overprotective mother? A macho jerk father? Now I can’t even hate him anymore.”

  Her smile was radiant. “So you do have a heart, after all. You’re so cynical and hardboiled all the time. And by the way, you’ve probably slept with half the girls who work at the paper. So you don’t have any right to criticize Cal. Or even his brother.”

  “One difference, babe. I’m not married.”

  She shrugged. “Does that really matter these da
ys? It seems as if just about everybody I know is on marriage number two or three.”

  I could see what she was doing. Or not doing. She was avoiding the subject that had brought us together.

  “You realize, of course, that Cal may have killed him.”

  “I know. He—cried. He was talking about everything—it was like this real long shrink session—and then he just started sobbing. Put his face in his hands. His whole upper body was shaking. I tried to comfort him but he was inconsolable. But when I was holding him that’s all I could think about. Maybe this whole thing—telling me all about his past and all—was really a long roundabout way of working up to telling me that he’d killed David.”

  “Did he ever say that or even hint it?”

  “No. But he did say that he was afraid that the police were looking at him very carefully. They found out about something that happened over in Dubuque one night. At this little jazz club there. Some jerk was really coming on to me. I was just trying to be polite to the guy but Cal was so drunk he thought I was coming on right back. Before I could stop him, he grabbed the guy and took him out on the side-walk and really beat him. Thank God I was sober. I took the guy to the ER and then convinced him that there’d be a sizeable check for him if he didn’t go to the police. He got a couple teeth knocked out and a black eye. Could’ve been a lot worse. We worked out the financial arrangement and it was kept out of the news.”

  “So now the police know about it. And they’ve got proof that Cal is one very jealous dude.”

  “Exactly. That’s what he’s so scared about. He also feels terrible for what this will do to his family.”

  “Dear old mom.”

  “Not her. His wife and kids. The kids are all in their early teens. This kind of scandal’ll be very hard on them. And he has genuine affection for his wife. He cares about her. He just kept saying ‘She sure doesn’t deserve this’ over and over.”

  “So you think it’s a possibility. All this talk we’ve had comes down to one thing. You think it’s a possibility that Cal killed Dave.”

  She sighed. “I feel disloyal saying it but yes, I do.” Then: “And disloyal about one other thing, too, since I’m fessing up all this stuff. I plan to move to LA in two months. I woke up on my thirty-second birthday six months ago and saw what I was. A powerful man’s mistress in a little nowhere city where I was just going to fade away if I didn’t do something and pretty quickly. I’ve got a good voice. I probably could have made a living playing clubs in Chicago. I even got offered a CD contract. I met Cal at a club. When he found out that I was already working for a newspaper, he made me an offer. I couldn’t make that kind of money playing clubs. I had a lot of college loans. Plus credit cards. So I took Cal up on his offer. I knew what his ‘offer’ really meant but I pretended it was just a regular job.”

  “Have you told Cal you’re leaving?”

  “No. And now,” she said, “now I’m afraid to. He really loves me. I’m afraid of how he might react.”

  “The way he maybe reacted to you and Dave going out?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  4

  The manilla envelope was in my mailbox when I got back to my apartment. I happened to get there around six o’clock just when everybody else in my building arrived.

  There were the usual conversations in the vestibule. The single men and women were discussing the evening that lay ahead, those who didn’t have dates sighing that they’d have to settle for TV or catching up on their bills or just going to bed early after a long hard week. The frenzied single working mothers had collected their 1.2 children and were hustling upstairs for dinners that would come from freezers, cans or boxes.

  There were a few old people. They looked the most relaxed and comfortable. The sex wars and the raising children wars were behind them. They could look at the rest of us with a certain superiority; or with a certain melancholy, some of them probably missing the wars, especially the sex wars. Or simply missing youth itself. I’d be there myself someday.

  Once inside my apartment, automatically clicking on the local TV news, I opened a bottle of beer and the manilla envelope. Sitting there in an easy chair, I gradually began to lose all contact with the external world. I was completely involved in the loose pages inside the envelope.

  Sheets of music. Everything had been hand done in pen and pencil. There were erasures. There were even a few strike-overs. The pages were old enough to be yellowed along the edges. There were five songs. Each one of which had helped turn young Dave Osborne into the new Cole Porter or the new Jacques Brel or the new George Gershwin. Take your pick.

  I was tired enough that I didn’t get the significance of the yellowed, handwritten pages until I’d drained most of my beer. It came down to mathematics. Osborne had claimed to write most of his hit songs in a burst a few years ago. Yet these pages had to be at least ten years old. Maybe even fifteen. Osborne would have still been in high school. Or maybe even junior high.

  There was no return address on the envelope. No letter or note inside. My first impulse was to call Dulcy. I always kept my trusty cell next to me on the chair. Reporters get calls 24/7. I started to punch in the numbers but stopped myself. What if Cal Rawlins was there when I called? I needed my job. I had all sorts of day dreams about having the same kind of success Osborne had had. But in the meantime, I needed to eat the same kind of freezer meals those single mothers served their little ones every night.

  I went through the sheets again. This time I noticed it. Just a pair of tiny initials in the upper right hand corner on one of the back pages. SR. Once again, it took me a while. I watched some tepid TV entertainment show filled with grinning robots and endless noisy commercials. And I was fixing my eyes on a particularly fetching pair of real breasts (they sure did look real, anyway, but then maybe plastic surgeons were finally learning subtlety or there was a shortage of silicone), I made sense of the initials.

  SR. Sam Reed. The man who’d mistakenly killed his girl friend while aiming at Osborne. Why were his initials on a song that Osborne had written? Or was I missing the point? Why had Osborne claimed to have written a song that had been written long ago and had Reed’s initials on it?

  I tried Dulcy’s home number. Got the machine. Tried her office number. Got the machine. It was difficult to just sit there and stare at the pages in front of me. I needed to talk to somebody about all this. I examined the envelope three different times looking for any clue as to who had sent it. None. My name and address in ballpoint pen. Three stamps. Local postmark. No other clue.

  I tried reading, watching TV, reading again. Didn’t work. Too fixed on the envelope and what it might mean. Not only was it some sort of challenge to the authorship of Osborne’s songs, it might even bear on who’d killed Osborne. And why.

  I called Dulcy three more times before deciding to try and sleep. I didn’t want to leave a message in case Rawlins came in with her.

  A few minutes after I settled into bed with a paperback, the phone rang. I snapped up and grabbed the receiver.

  “I sent you an envelope. You should’ve gotten it today.” Woman’s voice. Middle-aged. No hello. No name.

  “Yes. I did get it.”

  “He didn’t write them songs. That friend of yours.”

  “I need to know who I’m talking to here.”

  There was a long pause. “My husband had some trouble with the law down South. This was a long time ago.”

  “He jump bail?”

  Another long pause. “Yes.”

  “What was he charged with?”

  “Armed robbery. But nobody was hurt.”

  Though she was reluctant to say much, her words sounded truthful. If her husband had killed somebody, I’d feel bound to turn him over. If I got a name from her, I’d run a check on the last name anyway.

  “Why do you care?” she said.

  “Just trying to figure out who I’m dealing with.”

  “Sam Reed was my husband’s cousin.”

 
“I see.”

  “Fifteen years ago, when he first come to Chicago, he stayed with us. We had a nice house. Got the basement all fixed up for him. He had his piano down there. He wanted to be a songwriter but he never had nerve enough to play anybody his songs. Which was kinda funny, him bein’ arrogant and all. Me and the mister always told him he should play his songs for somebody but he never did. Only reason we’d heard `em was because he was right downstairs. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “So after a while, he got to be such a well-known musician, he quit writing songs.” Another pause. “What happened was he got to be a cokehead. And then he got involved with that damned girl. That Eve. She couldn’t handle his coke thing. She was always breakin’ up with him. Made him crazy.”

  She’d tried to make Eve sound unsympathetic. But living with a junkie wasn’t easy.

  “He started getting crazy jealous. That’s what happened with your friend. Osborne. Sam thought they was getting it on. That’s why he tried to kill him. But he killed her by mistake.”

  “You say Osborne took his songs.”

  She laughed bitterly. “You afraid to say the word?”

  “What word?”

  “What word? He stole ‘em, man. He didn’t just ‘take’ them. He stole them. He tried to buddy up to us while he was writing all his articles for the newspaper and then for his book. He wanted us to give him Sam’s personal things to look through. But we wouldn’t. About a month after he started bothering us, we went on vacation. My folks have a little house out near Phoenix. We stayed there a couple of weeks. When we came back, we knew right away something was wrong. Somebody’d been in here. In the basement, I mean. Where Sam was still living. He was getting so bad off on dope, he needed somebody to take care of him. We took care of him, my husband and me.”