Death at Dawn

by Arthur Day

  Buckmaster had tailed him to a bar in J-ville, but it was just one time. I wanted a more detailed knowledge of his life, where he went and who he saw and when. Perhaps Buckmaster was right but Worth might well lead us to someone else. I thought it was worth a shot. They went into the public garage on Asylum Avenue and I followed waiting a few seconds so that they would not suspect a tail. I had to hope that Worth did not suspect one because I did not have the ability to set up a multi-car operation. I had tried Dianne, but my call had gone to voice mail. I figured she was showing a house.

  Two hours later I was ready to call it a night with nothing gained that I could see. Worth and his companion had gone into several bars where he had several drinks, talked at the bar with people he obviously knew. I had stayed in the rear taking pictures of the people who knew him and of the bar in general. Most seemed like the kind of people you would see in a bar late at night and who would seem perfectly sober until they tried to get off their barstool. When I was able to get close enough without attracting the attention of Worth or the woman, the conversation was totally forgettable and dealt mostly with sports scores, politics, women in general and their body parts in particular. The woman with him either was not listening or had heard it all before or both. She sipped from a glass of coke and kept her head down. That was just fine with me.

  Finally, he walked down the street on rubbery legs singing to himself, his companion and the world in general. He sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. I fell back even further behind him as much to spare my ears as to provide more space between us though I doubted he would notice. His companion, however, was quite sober and might well recognize me from one of the previous bars. Suddenly they both disappeared. I stopped and looked around. They had been right ahead of me and could not have turned off or I would have seen them.

  I walked forward to where I thought they had been and looked about me. On my right were a row of brick buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments above that. This time of night all were closed. Could he have gone to one of the apartments? The windows above the shops were all dark but that was a possibility. Then a square of light appeared below me. I looked down a flight of steps and saw a woman coming out of a door accompanied by a burst of noise and music. She came up to the street level, saw me standing there, smiled and walked away towards the parking garage on Church Street. She didn’t seem quite right somehow, but I could not say exactly what was out of place. I went down the steps to the small landing at the bottom in front of the door that had a small sign on it THE COCKS NEST and the picture of a rooster. I tried the door. It opened, and I found myself in a different world.

  The room was long and rectangular probably running the length of the building. There was a crowded bar along one wall, some tables along the opposite wall and a small dance floor at the end. A trio on a small stage was providing the music. The dance floor appeared packed with a solid mass of writhing humanity. I was dumbstruck. This bar was an LGBTQ bar. Young and maybe not so young men dressed as women, women kissing women, men with men. If your libido had you coloring outside the lines sexually then this was one of the places where you could hang out without feeling uncomfortable or be forced to fake an existence you didn’t feel you belonged in.

  I found it hard to believe that someone like Doug Worth would have any interest sexually or otherwise in a place like the Cock’s Nest. After the bar hopping he had done, it did not surprise me that he might have stumbled into this bar by mistake, but I had not seen him and his companion reappear. Were they meeting someone here? I made my way towards the bar where a bartender dressed in a Little Bo Peep outfit was expertly working the crowd many of whom seemed to have reached the point where privacy was not their primary concern.

  “Have you seen a man, heavy built with a red face in the company of a young woman come in?”

  Bo Peep gave me a quick glance. “I serve drinks here, dearie.”

  “I’ll have a JD on the rocks and an answer to my question.” I put a twenty on the bar.

  The drink appeared within seconds. The Jackson disappeared with no change. “He went towards the back where the band is. Maybe needed to talk with Tiny.” Bo Peep moved on to the next customer, an older man who eyed me with some interest. “Who’s Tiny?” I asked the bartender’s back. “The owner. You can’t miss him,” the man beside me said. “I like them big and rugged. Come back here when you’re finished in back,” he said and put a limp hand on my arm. Every hair on my arm stood up but I thanked him and made my way towards the back of the room, trying to edge around the little dance floor where it seemed impossible to slip through at least with my clothes intact.

  I had misjudged the size of the room. In back of the stage was a short corridor with a bathroom to the right and two closed doors on the left. An Exit sign glowing red in the gloom of the corridor showed a door at the end. So Worth could have come back here and left through the back door. He might have seen me hanging around behind him and decided to lose me. That would make him much less drunk than he appeared to be.

  I tried the first door. Locked. A woman with a five o’clock shadow showing through her heavy makeup waltzed past me and went into the bathroom. I tried the second door.

  The man behind the desk was huge and together with his desk there was barely room to get in through the door. He must have tipped the scales at three hundred pounds. There were a few white strands of hair over his ears but, otherwise he was bald. He had brown eyes recessed behind pouches of flesh. “You must be Tiny,” I said.

  “Yeah. So what?” He shifted slightly, and his chair creaked under his weight. The man was obviously in the process of eating himself to death.

  “I’m looking for a friend who came back here. He was with a young girl. Did he talk with you?”

  “None of your business and I doubt you are a friend of his.”

  “Why would you doubt that?”

  “People don’t come back here if they have friends. They come back here because they’re standing on the edge of a cliff with one foot already in the air. So get the fuck outta here.”

  I leaned over the desk and stared at him. “Listen Tiny. I’m not asking you for your first- born son. I don’t care what you do back here. I just want to know if you’ve seen this guy.”

  Tiny stared at me and suddenly I was looking down the barrel of a .45 automatic. “Are you deaf, asshole? Get back in the front with the fruit salad and don’t come back here again.”

  I could have taken the gun and made him eat it inside of five seconds, but I didn’t think that would accomplish anything except get the police involved. If Worth had come back simply to use the back exit, then Tiny would not have seen him. I could not have been more than a minute or two behind them so if they came to see Tiny it had to have been a really short conversation. We stared at each other across the desk for a few seconds and then I raised my hands and backed into the doorway.

  “Shut the door on your way out.” Tiny barked.

  I turned and walked back towards the stage leaving the door open.

  The heat and the noise slammed into me as I opened the door at the end of the corridor and went back to the side of the stage area where the musicians were taking a break between sets. Loud rock blared from the speakers on the stage. It was impossible to speak let alone hear anyone, so I just slipped by them and went towards the front of the bar and that’s when I saw her standing a few feet from the bar talking with another woman who was dressed in white from head to toe. I stopped and looked again but I had not been mistaken.

  There was Dianne looking slim and beautiful. She and her friend laughed about something and then they hugged far more passionately than a hug from simple friendship. Feeling a little foolish and not wanting her to see me and think I was following her I eased to my right into a crowd of people and slowly made my way to the front door and out to the street.

  I stood there for quite a while, at least i
t seemed that way. The lady I had fallen in love with was a lesbian or maybe not. How did she feel about me? Maybe her friendship with me did not extend beyond professional. My mind refused to come to grips with what my eyes told me. I was caught in an emotional tidal pool and my body was powerless to move. My mother had firmly believed in tolerance. Each to his own she would say, and she said it over and over as I was growing up and I believed that I was tolerant, at least as much as most people and more than some. I had no problem with gay marriage. I did not go to the parades the LGBT people put on but then I did not live in San Francisco but in a part of the country where parents took their kids to church on Sunday and never questioned how Joseph and Mary had made out after leaving Bethlehem with a child that was not his. Life is full of contradictions and I felt most of them that night outside the Cock’s Nest. I had fallen in love with Dianne, but she had no responsibility to return the feeling and, indeed, had tried hard not to lead me on in any way. Did I still love her knowing what I had found out that night? I did not know but I thought so. I was in love with her and not with her sexual preferences. If she did not want me to get physical with her for obvious reasons I thought I could live with that. I hoped I could at any rate. My mind’s storm subsided a bit and I turned and walked slowly to where I had parked my car.

  It had been a lost and found evening. I had lost track of Worth and found out more than I wanted to know.

  BUCKMASTER

  It was, as usual, an impossible situation. Buckmaster frowned down at the duty roster on his desk. Too few people to cover the county and Rockmarsh itself. It was like being the Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke and then another leak occurs further down and just out of his reach. Damn. In a fit of frustration, he took the roster and threw it up on the air where the pieces of paper gently swished back and forth to the floor. He needed more manpower but deputizing the man on the street had its drawbacks. That worked for wide area searches where people walked through an area and reported back on anything they saw but this was a very specific search and the person doing the searching had to know the rules and what he or she had to do and how to do it. That took some training. Hoping he was not making a huge mistake he picked up the phone and made two calls.

  The land was still sloping downwards when Billy Black and Ted Weisman rounded a curve and then pulled over into a makeshift dirt parking area. There was one car already there and Billy pulled his old truck next to it and cut the engine. “The guy who owns this land is okay with people using the ATV trails in the area long as they don’t mess up his fields.” He looked at his young companion. “Have you ever been down one of these trails?”

  Ted Weisman shook his head. “No sir. Usually we get called to help out with crowd control on parade days and stuff like that.” When Sheriff Buckmaster called my dad and asked if I could help out and then my scoutmaster called and said he thought it would be a good experience and would be a step towards my Forestry badge I was really surprised.” Weisman grinned which made him look younger than his seventeen years. “The sheriff said I should go with you, keep my mouth shut and learn as much as possible.”

  Billy looked at his young companion and smiled. This was surely the strangest request he had ever received in a long life full of strange requests. Ted Weisman looked about thirteen. Billy doubted that the kid had even started to shave yet. His crewcut blond hair and blue eyes made him a poster child for the police auxiliary but on the drive over from J-ville where Ted lived, the boy had kept his mouth mercifully shut and simply looked at his instructions that Buckmaster had emailed him or just looked out the window at the passing woods and fields. This whole deal might work out after all. “Right. Let’s get the machine off the back and get started.”

  The Deere ATV motor rumbled and roared as they drove down the trail that led between the fields and into the woods beyond. Billy had been driving machines like this for fifty years and they made good time into the woods where the trail narrowed, and sometimes disappeared and smaller trails led off to the left and right. They went down a small ravine, splashed through a creek at the bottom and up the other side. Ted looked back at the kit in the small load bed behind the front seats, but it was still secured.

  “You think he would have used a main trail?” he yelled over the noise of the motor. They went up a gentle slope and Billy brought them to a stop at the top where the land leveled out for about fifty yards.

  “Nope but from here we can get a feel for where he might have driven. Let’s say we need to get rid of a machine. Maybe hide maybe not but we don’t want it found at least for a while. This trail continues up the slope for maybe a half mile and then circles down and around back to the fields.” Billy sat staring out at the trail ahead of them. Where would a person hide a machine. Not on this trail that was open on both sides and had no good place to abandon it. There were smaller trails that circled through the woods but again they were well travelled and fairly open.

  “Could he have driven it into the woods and covered it with branches?” Ted asked remembering his scout manual for building a lean-to.

  Billy considered that. It was a possibility. His companion might be a kid, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. But that answer meant that the driver would have to cut down saplings and use them with whatever deadfall was on the ground. That would take time. It would also leave signs of recent cuttings. Now if he were this asshole what other options did he have? He could transport his machine out of the area. He had to have brought it to this part of the state from elsewhere probably by truck as Billy and Ted had done. He could hide it in somebody’s shed or barn with or without their knowledge. They could find a place in the woods where they would not have to disturb the trees and deadfall but was off the trails. Billy grinned. He knew just the place. He had been there with John Rossman years before and he remembered it as a kid because his father had tanned his butt for going near there. “I hate you,” he’d told his dad when he’d pulled his pants up over his sore butt. “That’s okay, “his father had replied with a smile “as long as you’re alive to feel that way.”

  “Hold onto the bar kid. I think I know what he did.” Billy floored the accelerator and the powerful little motor shot the vehicle up the trail with all four wheels spinning in the muddy patches. Ted hung on for his life but afterwards admitted that it was the coolest most exciting ride he had ever been on.

  Maybe a mile further on, Billy turned off the trail and slowed to a crawl. Billy thought he saw faint marks of someone going through there recently, but he couldn’t be sure. They went through a grove of pines and hemlock. Billy kept his eyes ahead and prayed that the old tree had not blown over in some storm. There it was, a giant Pin Oak standing like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput amidst the firs and rock maples. Billy stopped the ATV and they got out and walked forward towards the giant tree. “Used to be a lot like this,” he told Ted “but most have fallen victim to the chain saw and bulldozer.” They gazed up into the branches that seemed to go forever. “Must be at least fifty feet tall,” Ted commented.

  “Closer to seventy-five,” Billy told him, a certain pride of discovery and indirect ownership showing in his voice. “Johnny Rossman and I used to pound in some nails to help us climb up to the lower branches. He went higher when I dared him. We were both young and stupid,” Billy admitted. Ted laughed with the insouciance of youth that does not consider the future but considers the present to be all there is in life.

  “Stay on the upside of me,” Billy said and the two walked slowly forward towards what looked like just another part of the forest floor. He picked up a five-foot branch of dead wood that had come off the oak and prodded the ground in front of them as they went forward. After about twenty yards the tip of the stick disappeared, and he stopped and held out his hand for Ted to do the same. Billy prodded the ground constantly and walked forward a step and then another. “Here it is,” he said. Kneeling, he pushed away the layers of leaves and dead branches.

  A
small hole appeared. Ted put his hand over his mouth to smother a laugh. Billy brushed some more leaves aside and the hole grew wider, perhaps the width of a man. Billy turned to his right and started to crawl along poking with the stick.

  Then a whole section of the ground in front of them disappeared and Billy and Ted found themselves on the edge of a twenty-foot cliff that narrowed to a crack in the direction from which they had come. “I knew it broadened out, but it’s been years and I wasn’t quite sure where it was,” Billy explained. Ted stared down into empty space that had been covered with leaves a moment before. His eyes were wide with shock.

  They moved along the edge of the cliff for about fifty yards and then the cliff merged with the hillside and they were able to slide down to the bottom.

  There it was lying on its side in a tangle of metal and wood. The two stared at the wreck for a moment and then Ted pulled out his cell phone looked at it and shook his head. “No bars. We’ll have to go back a bit before I can let the sheriff know that we found it. I’ll get the police tape from the ATV. We need to protect this whole area. He looked down at the instruction sheet Buckmaster had provided.”