Cold Was The Ground

by B A Black

  “You wanna tell me why you snuck out of the hospital last night? I called up the place this morning and they were very perturbed,” Sal says, his hands cupped around his own mug. “I was too, when you showed up looking like you'd been dragged by wild horses.”

  “I feel better today. The hospital was driving me crazy. Besides, it's just a busted arm.”

  “You also got shot twice.”

  “Well,”

  “How's your arm feel today?”

  Like hell. Houston wishes that Sal hadn't mentioned it. “Fine.”

  Sal looks at Houston with one of those deep looks, the kind that suggests he sees right through Houston's answer. He doesn't have to say anything else.

  Houston takes a long sip of the coffee and he has to admit it's good. It makes a fine stall tactic.

  “You gotta let this case go,” Sal tells him, his Chicago accent sliding easy over the words. He leans carefully on the table, elbow up on the surface, looking earnestly across the scarred wood like the great divide and into Houston's eyes.

  “When it's solved, I will,” Houston promises hollowly.

  Sal shakes his head. “Now, Hobbes. Before it kills you. I saw you out in that surgery room and all those doctors hovered over like vultures...”

  He pauses, producing and lighting a cigarette, eyes now distant. “I thought that was it.”

  For a moment, they pause, both startled by the nearness of Sal's admission. By the growing and changing truth stretching between them. As a rule, they never admit they care—not without the veil of anger or outrage drawn over the emotion like a shroud.

  Sal looks up, his hair a mess and his eyes bright-angry and darkly emotional; sparks over water. He starts to say something, and then abandons the endeavor and breakfast table, both.

  7.

  Houston watches Eddie's case slowly dissolve in the newspapers over the next week. The police, first stumped, then seeking leads. By the sixteenth, it fades out of the pages of the paper except for the date of the funeral, the date of the estate sale to clear out his remaining possessions and cover the debts he's left.

  It seems he was living beyond his means, despite appearances. Houston isn't truly surprised. Many of the richest families even now felt the grasp and clutch of the depression—like a slowly tightening noose. They were some of them stolidly awaiting the change—and others were doing a jig, frantically jerking the loop tighter around their necks as they tried to evade it. That Eddie was one of the latter makes a strange amount of sense.

  Houston, leads exhausted aside from accusing the brothers to their faces, plays it as cool as he can. His minor victory has come in transferring his case from the hospital to his normal doctor, a venerable and ancient bearded man who looks once at Houston's casted and slung up arm, the dark bruise under his hair on his scalp, and the bullet wound in Houston's shoulder, and just grunts.

  “You know what infection looks like?” the doctor asks stoically.

  Houston nods.

  “You know how to keep this clean?”

  Houston nods again.

  “Come back in two weeks,” the doctor says dispassionately. “Unless it shows signs of infection.”

  Houston accepts this advice gratefully.

  “You were in the war, weren't you?” The question comes as Houston pulls his shirt back on one-handed.

  “In the medical reserve,” Houston says.

  “Well, that's why. You can't treat a doctor. They always know better than you.”

  “I just don't see a need to lay around the hospital,” Houston says, though he knows it's the truth. He had his own share of difficult patients.

  “Good for you, boy,” his doctor says with a sardonic smile. “But if you get shot again, don't come here. I’m not a surgeon.”

  Houston promises he won't.

  Outside, Sal is waiting anxiously, looking ready to crawl out of his skin. He stands up the instant Houston appears out of the office. He passes Houston back his new coat and leads the way out before he asks any questions.

  “What'd he say?” Sal presses when they're outside in the cold air.

  Houston tucks his empty sleeve into the coat pocket. “He said 'come back in two weeks and get the stitches out’.”

  “That's it?”

  “That's it. What else did you expect?”

  “I'm not sure. Maybe that he'd talk you into going back to the hospital.”

  Houston shakes his head. “I thought we'd go to work.”

  “Work? Pal, you're off your—“

  “You got something better to do? If we want to get paid, we have to work. That means being in the office now and then.”

  Sal looks pained.

  Houston persists. “Look, you don't want me to pursue the Winsome case anymore, I get it. But I can't give up the entire job, Sal.”

  “No, I know you can't, and you shouldn't, of course. You're damn good at it and you listen to your heart more than the rest of us.” Sal sighs. They've made it to the car. “But you look like hell. You could use some time off after this one. I know you took it personal.”

  “Personal?” Houston asks, playing dumb.

  “Yes, Houston, personal,” Sal repeats, giving him a stern look. “You know why.”

  “And you didn't take it that way?” Houston challenges, wheeling to look up at his partner. “It could be me out there under the water next time, for the same reason they killed Charlie.”

  “You don't know that,” Sal starts to protest. “Houston, you don't know that.”

  “It could be you,” Houston spits. “The lord and everyone knows you're not careful when you're high out of your mind.”

  Sal looks angry then, upset. Houston feels it's long past time when Sal should be—that somehow this case should mean more to both of them. It should matter when the threats of such a world got so close to them they could feel the hot breath on the back of their necks.

  Suddenly, dangerously, Sal leans over in the seat of his car and pulls Houston to him, kissing him squarely and boldly on the mouth.

  Sal doesn't draw back. He should. They're barely hidden, right out in plain sight for anyone walking by. Here was Sal, fully sober and in the light of day, kissing Houston like he wanted it. The bulk of the cast on Houston's arm interrupts the leaning together, and lends a strange reality to the dreamlike moment.

  When it's over, neither knows what to say. Sal leans back, looking wary. Houston discovers he's leaned nearly across the whole length of the seat, and slowly straightens.

  “What was that for?”

  A slow transformation overtakes Sal’s face, his brightening grin holding all the careful mystery of the Sphynx. “What was what for?”

  Houston lets it sit, unable to help his own faint smile. For a moment, he forgets to be anxious or upset. He just turns to look out the window while Sal drives them back to the office. He's not really sure if he's won or lost the argument, or if it really matters.

  When they step into the lobby of the office building, Houston ducks into the switchboard room.

  “Miss Wentz,” he says, rubbing a guilty hand over his mouth as if to erase wayward traces of lipstick that won't be there. She turns with a bright smile.

  “Hey, Huey!” She says it with such enthusiasm that Houston can't bring himself to correct her. “I heard you got shot! I was so worried, and let me tell you—it's hard to get anything out of the hospital. Why, they said you just got up and ran away.”

  Houston can't stop his amused snort at her wide-eyed disbelief. Her eyes get even bigger when he tells her—“I did.”

  “What Huey here is trying to say,” Sal puts in over his shoulder, “is that he's a terrible patient.”

  “Gosh. You didn't like the bedside manner?” Miss Wentz asks.

  “I didn't need to be there, is all,” Houston assures her.

  “Well, it's good to see you back,” she says. “I hope you plan on taking it easy for a little while.”

  Her gaze drops down to his cast. Houston
makes no such promise.

  “Who'd you hear from?” Houston asks, suddenly curious that the very small number of people who knew about his injury would have any connection to Miss Wentz.

  “A police detective came around,” she says. “Asked if you'd gotten any threatening messages.”

  “Well,” Houston says, surprised that they would be so thorough when the police so far hadn't even interviewed him about being shot. “Had I?”

  She shakes her head. “No sir, hardly anybody called at all. I took all your messages. No matter what that big oaf said, I don't think any of them were all that unusual.”

  Miss Wentz pulls a small stack of buttercup-yellow memo slips from a slot labeled “Mars and Costanzo, P.I.”. She offers the pitiful sheaf—not half of what it would have been before the war—up to Sal, as if judging Houston to be too infirm to handle the thin pages.

  Sal flips the papers dutifully in front of his generous nose.

  “What big oaf?” Houston asks.

  “Why, the policeman,” she says, seeming exasperated by the memory. “He looked over the messages even though I told him none of them were of interest, and then he took one—without even letting me make a copy.”

  This, too, surprises Houston.

  “Do you remember the message?” Sal asks, tucking the other papers hastily into his pocket. They, apparently, are not worth a second look.

  “It was something about...” she says, clearly searching the corners of her memory. “Something from a man named Edward, about...”

  This catches Houston's attention, and he sees Sal straighten up next to him, either piqued or worried about a re-awakened interest in the Winsome case.

  “About a bank,” Miss Wentz continues, her tone on the edge of full recall. She almost has it.

  Behind her the board buzzes and an incoming call light illuminates in a bright, attention-catching orange. The answer must slip away as she turns in a hurry, shaking her head at them to indicate she doesn't know—and isn't going to try and remember again—before answering the incoming call professionally and directing it to the patent broker on the second floor.

  ◆◆◆

  In the stairwell, Sal hesitates, turning while he has the advantage of height and two stairs over Houston. A charming, sardonic grin twists his mouth. “Huey?”

  “She knows two Houstons,” he tells his partner. “And don't you dare start.”

  Sal gives him a long playful look. Then, from his pocket, he produces the stack of papers—now folded and crumpled but still legible. He fishes a white slip out from among the yellow ones. Houston recognizes a police evidence claim slip.

  Good for Miss Wentz, Houston thinks.

  Sal passes him the slip wordlessly. The handwriting is crude and square, but legible. It is a claim for one piece of paper, described as, yellow, with writing on it in a woman's hand, affirmed by the signee to be her own.

  At the bottom there are two signatures—one is Miss Wentz's, the other isn't quite familiar but legible enough to read.

  “What the hell would Ex want with one of our damn phone messages?” Houston demands, jerking the paper down from his line of sight as if looking at it any longer will ignite it.

  “Wouldn't I like to know,” Sal muses. He turns to head the rest of the way upstairs to their office.

  Houston follows in stewing silence. Whatever it was, Exeter doesn't seem to have made any good use of it.

  The casual violation of courtesy bothers Houston. Why hasn't Exeter told him he was sniffing around Houston's practice? He’s still a rat, stealing the easy crumbs from the mice.

  “Do you want to know what the other messages are?” Sal asks. “Or are you going back into this thing?”

  Houston hesitates. Usually Sal listens to his lead, regardless of the situation. He trusts Houston's judgments, except on this case. Is he really going so far off his usual track, or is it just a new overprotectiveness after Houston's injury?

  “You think I should just let Ex get away with it?”

  “Get away with what? Doing the job that you dumped in his lap? The message he took was from Eddie, and you know damn well that if it points to the Winsome brothers, his hands are as tied as ours were on the case for Charles.”

  “He could have told—,”

  “Yeah.” Sal drops the yellow slips on Houston's desk and heads into his own office, leaving Houston alone with his anger and questions.

  Mollified, Houston settles down into his chair behind his desk. The office is cold from disuse and distant to him. Unused. Houston looks over the messages—two from the hospital to call back, one from a potential client with missing jewelry. The sort of nice, easy case where the police fall flat because they lack the time. The sort, along with cheating husbands or missing wives, that kept food on most P.I. tables these days.

  Sal is right, this is what we should be doing—safe, detached work.

  Houston looks up from the crumpled paper across the span of his scarred desk. The ashtray is still on it. He can still see, in his mind's eye, Mrs. Winsome poised tensely in the opposite chair and smoking.

  He found her husband—or, the body was found, anyway. The case was over. Houston tries to put it down, to lay it aside like dragging a dead animal out of the road. Exeter can handle the rest.

  The sound of slow, lonely jazz drifts out from Sal's office, followed behind by the sharp scent of his cigarette and the low thump of the desk lighter returning to its place.

  That’s it, no more, Houston tells himself. Sorry Charlie.

  Houston pulls up the paper with the missing jewelry and calls the woman. Miss Wentz connects him deftly to the outside line. While it rings through, he waits, letting thoughts turn over slowly in his mind.

  They seem to bob and recede, like the slow tide at the lake shore.

  Where on earth did that boat go? Why?

  ◆◆◆

  The answer comes to Houston two days later. He’s solved the case of the missing jewels with Sal's help—hard for anyone to take a P.I. in a full arm cast and a sling seriously—and landed a neat if unsatisfying paycheck. The jewels had vanished into her son's pockets, gone to pay off some steep debts accrued in an atmosphere that wasn't lenient toward accounts outstanding.

  Sal's gone home for the night—home for real, Houston thinks, and not down to Lee-Lee's with his portion of their pay. Not tonight, anyway. He went out with a twinkle in his eye, and no complaints about his back.

  The radio drones on with the evening news, lulling. It's after office hours, but Houston has nothing calling him home except the cat, and the unending itch of his casted arm near the elbow. A week before Christmas, and all the radio has is bad news.

  Houston is wiggling a pencil with a broken tip ineffectively against the itchy place on his arm when the reporter's voice calls his attention

  “An abandoned Yacht has been found frozen in the ice of Lake Michigan after apparently being set adrift from the home of a murder victim, Edward Phillips. Phillips, found dead in his home on the seventh, is the apparent victim of a killer who is still at large.

  “The boat seems to be the subject of much police attention this evening after a local ice fisherman discovered it trapped in the new freeze offshore. Police suspect the yacht has been there for some time, but the rocky nature of the area disguised its location until the fisherman stumbled on it in his usual spot.”

  Houston has gone still, the itch relenting for the moment.

  “The fisherman, a local, informs us he called the police after seeing damage to the vessel and what looked like blood on the deck. Authorities have asked us to urge any member of our audience who might have any insight as to the circumstances of this crime to come forward. Your anonymity will be protected.”

  Houston gets up, ignoring the ache that sudden motion puts into his collarbone. He turns off the radio and gets his coat and hat on before heading down to the street.

  At the curb, he finds Sal waiting, reclined in the driver seat of his Ford with the blank
et tucked up to his chin and watching the door for Houston from under the brim of his hat.

  “What are you doing here?” Houston asks, leaning down to look in the window as casually as he can with his slung up arm.

  “I started to leave, but then I figured you were going to miss the bus,” Sal explains. “I figured only a louse would let his partner walk home in the cold in your condition, so I just waited down here for you to come out. I figured you’d get down from the clouds eventually.”

  Houston smiles and feels it, genuine, in his heart. “Well, I'm glad to see you.”

  “You can still catch the bus,” Sal says, smiling back.

  “They found the boat.”

  “Boat?” Sal’s smile fades quickly.

  “Eddie's boat,” Houston elaborates. He gets into the car settling into the passenger seat before Sal can drive off and leave him with his obsession. “It was frozen into the lake.”

  “That's not our case. Leave it to the boys in blue.”

  “They say it may be the scene of a crime. Maybe somebody tried to sink it. You aren't curious?”

  Sal doesn't look curious. Instead, he looks down at Houston's casted up arm.

  “Somebody sure tried to sink you. You're in no shape to go clambering around on the ice,” Sal says in a flat tone. He starts the car.

  “Sal, please. I just want to know why.”

  Sal looks Houston in the eyes with a long, dark look. Assessing. Measuring. There's a depth to the gaze, a pain that recognizes something in Houston. For a moment, wordless, they understand each other.

  Sal puts the car in gear. “I should have my head examined.”

  “This isn't the sort of decision you make with your head,” Houston assures him.

  “I don't think you make any decisions with your head,” Sal retorts, pulling away from the curb and pointing the car toward the lake.

  ◆◆◆

  They don't get anywhere near the scene, turned away at the head of the street by a stone-faced patrolman who refuses to even listen to their reasons. There’s police activity at the beach down below, searching for signs that have been buried under the snow in the passing weeks. Far up the coastline, Houston can see the heavy, grey smoke coming from the Winsome Steel factory, drifting upward toward an equally grey and darkening sky as the sun dips early below the horizon and leaves them in twilight just before 5 P.M.