Murder in the Dog Days

by P. M. Carlson

  “Hey, Liv, can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Jerry protested.

  “This is a bar. Now’s the time.” She hesitated, thinking of one a.m. at some bars she knew. “Though I wouldn’t say no to some company.”

  “Hey, I have to make hospital rounds five hours from now!” Jerry complained. “And I was hoping to have a couple more minutes to talk to Maggot while she’s here. We were so busy yesterday seeing the Mosby Museum and the battlefield, and this morning she was tooling around Maryland while Nick and I took Sarah to the Smithsonian. And then the beach. So can’t you do this tomorrow, Liv? I don’t even know what my own sister’s current projects are!” He glanced at Maggie. “Well, except for the obstetrically obvious.”

  The hell with it, she could take care of herself. Olivia put her hand on the doorknob. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

  “Hey, Liv, please!” Jerry said.

  Nick lumbered to his feet. “I’ll play backup for you, Liv,” he said.

  “I can manage.” But she was pleased.

  “No, let’s let these Ryans chatter away. Leave them to their remembrances of days foregone. I tune out anyway when the talk turns to life in grade school.”

  “Great! Well, let’s go!”

  “Listen, be careful, Olivia.” Maggie was rummaging through a straw handbag. Olivia realized suddenly it was Donna’s. “Here,” said Maggie, and handed her a photo from the wallet.

  “Oh. Right.” Olivia took the snapshot. In it Dale smiled his miserly smile, his arms around his two girls. “This could speed things up.”

  “Take care,” Maggie warned them both.

  Olivia waved, flung open the door, and dug out her keys as she ran through the rain to the van.

  “Thanks for coming along,” she said to Nick as she flipped on the windshield wipers and pulled out of the driveway. “But it wasn’t really necessary.”

  “I know. But in some bars, being alone would say something that you’d have to waste a lot of time explaining away.”

  “Sexists,” grumbled Olivia.

  “The millenium has not yet arrived.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  He grinned. “So where is this Donovan’s Bar?”

  “Other side of the S-D offices. Fringy area.”

  It was a working-class bar. Lots of jeans and plaid shirts, few women, a TV with sallow color propped on a high shelf in the corner. It was tuned to a wrestling match.

  Olivia hauled herself onto a bar stool. Nick sat next to her and told the bartender, “Coupla Millers.”

  Olivia didn’t want a Miller. But her flash of indignation was followed by grudging admiration. Maybe she wouldn’t have to use her press card yet. Nick sounded local. He sounded like her plumber. And her plumber would probably order a Miller for her.

  The bartender was middle-aged, a surprisingly handsome man with smoky gray curls and only a hint of belly. His shirt was green plaid. “There you go,” he said genially, pushing two foaming glasses across the worn bar toward them.

  “Rain feels good after all that heat,” said Nick.

  “Yeah, you said it! It was like living in a goddamn fry pan,” he said. He glanced up at the TV.

  “Right. Goddamn fry pan.” Nick guzzled half his beer. A burst of laughter came from a group watching the wrestlers. Someone swore good-naturedly. Nick said, “Nice place you got here. Congenial, y’know?”

  “Yeah, well, Dale said it was okay.” Olivia hoped she didn’t sound too prissy. She took a swig of beer and eyed the bartender. “You know Dale?”

  No guilty starts, just a bored shrug. “Can’t say as I do.”

  “I bet you do. Here, look.” She dug into her bag and pulled out the snapshot. “That’s him. See?”

  The bartender took the photo and squinted at it in the combined light of the lamp and the TV. He shook his head. “No. He’s not one of our regulars.”

  “Maybe he just came a couple of times.” Disappointed, Olivia took back the photo. “You sure you don’t remember him? Newspaperman. Wrote about that plane crash over on Blue Hill back in January.”

  “Nope.” He shook his gray curls again. “Don’t know the guy.” His eyes strayed to the TV again, then back to Olivia’s doubtless crestfallen face. She wished she had Nick’s control. The bartender took pity and threw her a sop. “I remember that plane going down, though.”

  “You do?” Damn, she sounded too eager.

  “Yeah. Old Ernie got all excited, said he knew the pilot.”

  “Ernie?”

  “Guy who comes in here sometimes. Said he’d heard of the guy in Nam.”

  Bull’s-eye. Olivia found herself squeezing her beer glass with both hands in her excitement. She stared blindly at the TV, thinking how to follow up. But the bartender caught a signal from one of the tables and bustled away to take the order.

  Nick had been studying his beer with sleepy plumber’s eyes. Now he looked up, as though recognition had at last penetrated his weariness. “Ernie!” he said. “Hey, wasn’t that the guy brought Dale here?”

  “Maybe so,” said Olivia cautiously.

  “Carpenter,” Nick said. “Wasn’t that it? Ernie Carpenter? Hey!” He waved the bartender over again. “Is this guy we’re talking about Ernie Carpenter?”

  “Doesn’t sound right to me,” Olivia said dubiously, and thought she caught a glint of approval in Nick’s eye.

  “No, not Carpenter. Hey, Mike!” The bartender hailed a sunburned man at one of the tables. “What’s Ernie’s last name? You know, the guy with a beard? Dog in his truck?”

  “Ernie,” said the sunburned man. “Grant, ain’t it? Something like that.”

  “Grant? You sure? The Ernie I’m thinking of lives on—what street did Dale say?” Nick turned to Olivia.

  “Vienna Road.” Olivia named the area where her plumber lived.

  “Nah. Must be a different guy,” the sunburned man said. “Ernie Grant talks about his farm. Appleyard Road. Off Vale.”

  “Yeah. Different guy. You’re right.” Nick slumped over his beer.

  Olivia wanted to find out more about this Ernie Grant, but she couldn’t think of how to ask without getting the bartender suspicious of her motives. In a moment Nick nudged her. “Ready to go?”

  She realized that the noisiest table of drinkers had just paid and were filing out. Only a few people were left in the bar. She didn’t want to look conspicuous. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s go. I’ll follow up tomorrow.”

  7

  One a.m.

  Holly plopped onto the Colby sofa and kicked off her sandals. She was tired to her bones. She’d just seen Colby’s parents, a cold bristly old couple from Richmond who seemed convinced that poor Donna had caused their son’s illness if not death. She’d sent them packing. About time to wind things up for the night. Crime Scene had just finished this room—inspecting the windows, the bookshelves where the tapes were missing, even checking out the Barbie and Ken dolls lying on the hearth. Winks had been full of crude comments about Barbie’s spectacular shape and how well she’d sell in a life-size version. Holly had ignored him, and they’d all moved on after a while to the back of the house. She could hear their voices now back in the kitchen.

  Dale Colby’s body had been removed an hour ago. Doc Craine was long gone, and the local uniforms, Higgins and Patterson, had been relieved by the night shift. Colby’s den had been searched and sealed, and they were nearing the end of the methodical search of house and yard. The Latents man had been full of sarcastic comments about blundering flatfoots when Holly had told him that a witness had seen someone enter the front door that afternoon. But he’d dutifully dusted the doorknob with its mass of overlapping cop fingerprints. He was much happier with the interior. Donna apparently kept most of the surfaces in the house cleaned and polished regularly, and he’d picked up satisfyingly clean prints. Whether they belonged to anyone besides the Colbys and their visitors remained to be seen.

  God, she was exhausted.

  Outside,
they had done what they could in the sporadic rain, under artificial lights. She’d return tomorrow in the daylight to see if anything had been missed. But for now, as soon as Gabe decided they were done in the kitchen and garage, it was time to take a break.

  She laid her notebook down beside her, scooted forward on the cushion a little, stretched out her legs, and slumped back to rest her head on the top of the sofa back. She let her eyes close. Not that she was sleepy. Her body was exhausted, her mind jumpy. Same as last night. Christ, what a fiasco. And he’d seemed, for a few minutes, so understanding. Genuine.

  But hell, so had that goddamn actor tonight. The whole goddamn world was a con. A shitheap.

  She’d even conned herself for a while. Imagined herself a healer. Worked her butt off helping hundreds of critical patients, thousands, in country and later in post-op at St. Mary’s. And then she’d lost two in a row, though she’d worked her butt off, and she got the shakes so bad with the next one that they transferred her. You’re working too hard, they said, you’re a safety hazard to your patients. They’d sent her to work with outpatients and it hadn’t taken much of that kind of boredom to show her she was no longer a healer. So she’d followed in Pop’s footsteps and joined the cops. It suited her. She got to use her brain, her adrenaline, her reflexes. But she didn’t have to put on a cheery face. Didn’t have to pretend she was a healer.

  Not that cops didn’t con each other, con their superiors, con the public. No different from doctors and nurses, that way. Or reporters. Or federal employees. Or goddamn statisticians, flashing their little tables of numbers, counting the nonexistent, glibly proving the untrue. But as a cop you didn’t have to believe the cons. Sure, you filled out the stacks of forms, took the jokes and needling of your so-called brother officers, listened to the bullshit the public handed out. But sometimes, every now and then, you could touch reality. Dig through the shit and come up finally with a fact. Because one thing at least wasn’t false. Death at least was genuine.

  She had pills at home. Darvons. Enough, counted into a brown bottle that sat on the middle shelf of her kitchen cabinet. Last night, weary after a hot day of typing useless reports, the emptiness an ache inside her, she’d opened the cabinet to get out a can of fish for her cat. Behind her a curtain stirred and the hot cruel sunlight flashed from the brown glass. God, it would be so easy. Hesitantly, she’d touched the bottle with her fingertip. Behind her, Country Joe had mewed plaintively.

  “Sorry, Joey.” Holly had pulled herself together, taken out the cat food. Country Joe had studied her with his amber eyes as she opened the can, scraped it into his dish, and set it on the floor. Then he stepped over to it in his gentlemanly way, not what you’d expect from a scuffed-up battle-scarred tom, and began to nibble at it.

  Holly had moved restlessly to the window and looked out at the heat-wilted foliage of her building’s courtyard. She’d chickened out again. A commercial ended and a woman on the radio began to sing “I think I’m losing my mind.” Billie Ann’s letter, carried unanswered for months in Holly’s wallet, said the same thing. Angrily, Holly had switched off the radio. Time to get out, Schreiner. Maybe try the Banana Tree. Okay, so it hadn’t worked out before, but maybe someday. At least they mixed a good drink.

  She’d showered, made up her eyes carefully to hide the hollowness, put on her jade-green dress and strappy high-heeled sandals, and gone out into the muggy evening.

  At that time of night you could get to D.C. in under an hour. The sun had set but the brief walk from the car to the Banana Tree set her sweating again. Dog days. She hoped her mascara wouldn’t run. Inside she’d ordered a gin and tonic and was feeling better by the time someone edged up to the bar next to her and said, “Hey, you’re looking gorgeous tonight, baby.”

  Not Mr. Goodbar, not that one. The conversation hadn’t gone anywhere, had fizzled on both sides inside ten minutes. But the next guy was a little different. Well, she’d thought so at the time. Alec, he’d introduced himself. “Like the English movie actor.”

  “I’m Holly,” she said. “Like ‘Deck the halls with boughs of.’”

  He smiled. A nice, shy smile. “Pretty name. But I bet kids teased you when you were little.”

  “Yeah. Holly-ween, my brother called me.” She had a sudden image of Chuck at twelve, sitting on the other end of the porch steps on a hot night like this one, both of them drinking Kool-Aid and thinking of clever ways to mutilate each other’s names. “Or he’d call me Hollow, and tap his head.”

  “Yeah. Know what you mean. I was usually saddled with Smart Aleck. Or sometimes Alas and Alec, even though the rhythm’s all wrong.” He slid onto the seat next to hers, a fair-haired man, skin reddened from the summer sun, crinkles around his eyes. “I work at OSHA,” he said. “Engineering stuff. What do you do?”

  “I’m a nurse.” Only once had she been asshole enough to admit she was a cop. Exit Romeo, running.

  “Did you always want to be a nurse?”

  “When I was little I thought I’d be a glamorous singing star and marry Elvis Presley. But it turned out there were more applicants than openings.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. After I outgrew my fireman period, I decided my real calling was to be a millionaire. But I couldn’t figure out what the entry-level job was.”

  “Not nursing,” Holly informed him.

  They’d talked for a pleasant hour before he’d said, looking nervously at his glass, “It’s getting pretty noisy in here.”

  They all said that. Holly flashed on the interchangeable apartments: shag rugs, Naugahyde sofas, grocery-store wine, towels that never saw bleach. But she’d said, “Yeah. I’m getting tired of shouting too.”

  “Let’s go to my place, okay? It’s not far.”

  Schreiner the slut. But she shook off her misgivings. Better than home. And maybe Alec really was different. He was lonely, she knew, and sensitive. And maybe he’d hold her. She was so hungry for someone to hold her.

  The shag rug and the sofa were regulation issue. But he’d surprised her by bringing out a cold bottle of real French champagne and a pair of crystal champagne glasses. “Hey, I’m impressed. Is it your birthday or something?” she’d asked.

  “No. But I think I’ve just met a very special person.”

  Somehow even then it didn’t sound like a cliche, because he said it with a little sheepish grin. She drank the champagne, and he stroked her cheek with timid fingers, and pretty soon they were in the dim soft lamplight of the bedroom, clothes heaped on a chair beside the king-size bed.

  And she’d been right. He had held her. Even afterward, cradling her in gentle arms, murmuring drowsily to her that she was the most perfect woman he’d ever met. She’d clung to him, trying to believe, almost succeeding, almost happy.

  But then, gazing dreamily past his shoulder in the dim light, she’d noticed the door. A closet, she’d thought as she passed it on her way in.

  Skip it, Schreiner, she warned herself.

  Alec shifted in her arms, rolled away, settled into deeper sleep with a sigh.

  There was a moan.

  Dread filled Holly. But she knew what she had to do. She sat up slowly, pushed back the hair from her eyes, and tiptoed to the door. It was ajar, just an inch or two. Dusky light from an unseen source cast long shadows across the room within.

  The moaning was louder.

  She pressed the door open gently and stepped in.

  It was a long room, crammed with close-spaced ranks of cots. Bodies lay on the cots. All dead. The moan hummed in her head. She tiptoed closer, looking at each. A young man with skin roasted black. Another swathed in blood-soaked bandages, a symphony of reds, only the black curls visible. The next with guts spilling sausage-like onto the sheets. Another lay on his stomach, the open wound in his side writhing with maggots chewing the dead flesh.

  But there was something she had to find.

  She crept on. Limbs torn off. Jaws missing. Then a young one in a white starched student cap, head turned away fr
om her. Gently she reached for the chin, gently turned the face toward her.

  She screamed.

  It was herself.

  A rough hand shook Holly’s shoulder. A male voice demanded, “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  She whirled, lighting-quick as she’d been trained, found the vulnerable hollow of the throat, dug her fingers in hard. He yowled and jerked away. “Hey, what the fuck? What are you doing?”

  Holly dove for the floor, snatched her .38 from the purse she’d nudged under the bed. The cold metal sent a shiver up her arm.

  With a shock she realized there was a champagne glass on the night table before her.

  And next to her, the king-size bed.

  The dream was disintegrating around her like a rotting curtain, black shreds dripping into nothingness.

  She looked back over her shoulder. Alec, naked and terrified, was backing toward the door. Holly dropped the gun back into the bag and turned toward him, still on her knees, palms held out.

  “Sorry, Alec,” she faltered. “Just a bad dream.”

  “Fuck your dream!”

  “Yeah.” She was shaking, drenched in adrenaline sweat. She pulled herself up to sit forlornly on the edge of the bed and dragged a sheet around her shoulders.

  “Yeah, okay.” A little bravado was returning to his tone. He’d had a hit of adrenaline too, now stood shivering at the foot of the bed, arms wrapped across his chest. Hugging himself, not her. “But look, maybe you better go, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, you’re some crazy broad, attacking me like that!”

  “Yeah. Sorry.” She’d crept to the chair, pulled on her jade-green dress again and her fancy sandals, stumbled out to her car, and—

  “Ahem.”

  Someone cleared his throat, cutting through the memory, jolting her back to the present, to the Colby sofa. Holly’s eyes flared open. Pollard stood there, the patrolman who had relieved Higgins. There was a suspicious look in his eye. The look cops got when they figured they had proof she was just a dumb broad after all, because she was doing something they all did themselves. Holly sat up and said, “Yeah? What do you want, Pollard?”