by Neal Bowers
Fingering the tape as if he could hear what was recorded, Davis imagined it contained someone’s last words to Ralph Banks, something that hadn’t been said in life because of shyness or negligence. Pathetic to think of the driving need behind such a message to the dead. Or it could be a song. Dear God, it could be someone’s idea of a final tune, “Feelings” or “Scarlet Ribbons.” If something like that had been recorded for eternity, Davis didn’t want to know. But the only way to find out was to listen.
After dropping the tape into the portable machine his mother had carried from room to room, he let his forefinger hover over the play button. No turning back once he punched it, like sending the rocket. He pushed down delicately and heard the machine engage. At first, the tape seemed blank. Then background noises, a rhythmic click. Then a woman’s voice: “Oh, dear God! Please. Oh, God!” Her voice was husky, breathless. “Oh, God! Yes! Yes! That’s it! That’s it! Yes!” Davis stopped the tape.
“Jesus,” he said aloud, realizing he was aroused and hating his body for responding. What the hell kind of tape was this? Pornographic? Having gone this far, he had to hear the rest of it. “Oh, yes, sweet baby. Come on. Come on.” Then he heard a deeper voice grunting, a rhythmic rocking. “That’s it. That’s it. Oh, oh, oh!” And then silence.
Davis let the tape play to the end, hearing only blankness, and then flipped it to the other side. Nothing else there, either. Static of dust and emptiness. The house was quiet, except for the low drone of the tape player. When the machine automatically shut off at the end of the tape, he took the cassette and studied it again, hoping he had overlooked some identifying marks. Blank. Just eight or ten minutes of intercourse. No, of fucking.
No way to identify the man on the tape, so it could be his father or Haupt or John F. Kennedy. And the woman’s voice was humped out of shape by the grit of the moment. Could be his mother or any woman. So many coupling possibilities, the whole world seemed to be screwing. And, of course, it was, at that very moment.
Shaking off the thought, Davis focused on the possibilities. The most benign was that he had just listened to his parents. If that were so, then his mother had left it in the casket as a kind of sweet, if kinky, memento for the dead. If it were his mother and another man, or his father and another woman, his mother still might have tucked it underneath the satin pillow during the final viewing. Could have been her way of taunting him beyond life, saying, “Take your goddamned infidelity with you” or “Take mine.”
Maybe Haupt put it there. Had he been around that long? Pretty sick to screw another man’s wife and then bury him with the evidence. Could that have been what Haupt was looking for? Maybe there were other tapes, all made by Davis’s mother. What if it aroused them to record themselves? Wanting more than grunts and invocations of God, Davis made a cursory search for a cache of cassettes. He needed a name, a recognizable voice, but there were no other tapes.
Hoping fresh air would clear his head, he stepped out onto the front porch. The night was crisp by Tennessee standards but balmy to Davis, who was used to Iowa winters with hard freezes into spring. The lives around him were palpable, and he imagined he could hear the unintelligible drone of a hundred conversations. Friday night. End of the work week and payday for almost everyone. By now, they had gone for groceries, splurged on fast food for the family, or were on beer number four or five. “My people,” Davis said, lifting his hands like an evangelical preacher.
He walked to the edge of the yard and looked up and down the overparked street. Not enough room in the driveways and garages for everyone’s four-wheel drive or minivan, those second and third family cars, Grandma’s or Junior’s. Maybe Aunt Widow was staying for the weekend, her boxy Dodge doing its part to narrow the street to a single lane right in front of the house. Stupid to think he could see into their lives, feel even a distant kinship. No one here knew him. Worse, he didn’t care.
The people he thought he knew best were turning out to be strangers to him. If he didn’t know them, maybe he didn’t know himself. Who he was, and what he had done with his life, were premised on being Ralph and Ellen Banks’s son. Nice couple. Happily married. The kind of folks you’d want for neighbors and would be glad to give a spare key to your front door. How many times had his father said, “If a man isn’t exactly what he seems to be, I don’t want to know him”? Plain-spoken Ralph, screwing away the afternoon with some other woman. Modest Ellen, tangled in the motel sheets with Haupt. Decent people. “My people,” Davis said again, this time barely muttering the words, feeling himself dissolve.
He closed the front door behind him. The air inside the house was still acrid from cigarette smoke. Haupt must have been there a long time, waiting for Davis or looking for something. This must have been how the place smelled when Haupt and Ellen shared a cigarette after sex. Davis opened front and back doors to make a draft through the house and swung wide the doors to all the rooms to let out any molecules of smoke breathed out by Haupt. Was it an exorcism or an act of purification? Davis pondered the difference but couldn’t decide which. Malevolent spirits either way. When the breeze slammed the back door, Davis stepped outside to find a brick or a heavier prop. There, where Haupt had flicked them, were three cigarette butts.
When Ann Louise called through the opened front door, Davis was lost down such tangled, smoky passages that he thought his mother was summoning him. “Davis?” The name was a question, meaning not simply Are you home but Who the hell are you. True son of the South, named for the president of the Confederacy. No one had ever told him that. His mother claimed she just liked the name. Whatever her real reason, she bequeathed her son a legacy of place and history. In his heart, he had always felt proud of the name. Rootless, he had a place to look back to, a complex story still unfolding in which he was a character. He was one of the Southerners.
“Davis? Are you in there?”
As he stepped inside from the back steps, saying, “Come on in,” he shuffled the weight of the past. Ann Louise was standing just beyond the threshold, an uncertain look on her face. “Come in,” Davis insisted, motioning her forward.
“You all right?”
Hesitating, Davis replied, “That’s a complicated question.”
“Did you eat something?”
“Yeah. Maybe more than I needed.” Then he remembered being out of insulin. “Know a drugstore that’s still open?”
Ann Louise’s tentative expression changed to serious concern. “What do you need? Insulin?” As she spoke, she guided Davis to the sofa.
“How’s the archaeological dig going?”
“For God’s sake, Davis, I’m trying to help you. Tell me what you need and I’ll go get it.”
“I’m out of insulin. The fast kind.”
“I don’t know what that means. How many kinds are there?”
Davis slowly brought himself up through the smoke and the grasping fingers of the dead. “Humalog. Just ask for the fast-acting kind.”
“What about a prescription?”
“You’re a cop; just flash your badge. Walk right up and buy it. Not really a drug, but that stuff can kill you, you know.” Davis heard his clipped speech and knew he was exaggerating his condition. But it felt good to be attended to by Ann Louise. She was all tenderness and concern. She was on his side.
“You lie down and I’ll be back in ten minutes. You hear me?”
Davis lifted his legs one at a time and carefully placed them side by side on the sofa. Closing his eyes, he said, “Okay.” Then he lay quietly, thinking of Ann Louise rushing to his aid. The house now smelled of night air and Ann Louise, and Davis inhaled deeply, bobbing in and out of sleep.
CHAPTER 13
__________
ANN LOUISE HAD closed the front door behind her, but the back one remained open, and a breeze drew through the house. Davis thought of it as a single strand of green, stitchery of spring, the beginning of a thin muslin that might cover him. Around the edges, a mockingbird made embroidery. Stupid, beaut
iful bird, fooled into song by a streetlight. Hidden in the heart of the dogwood, the bird outdid itself, pretending to be chickadee, cardinal, robin, and wren, shrilling like a bluejay, all in the artificial light. “Has to know the difference between night and day,” Davis mused. “Has to be more than a jumble of songs.” What was that old joke about the Englishman? Wake him in the middle of the night, and he’ll talk just like you and me? Must be some way to startle the mockingbird into sounding like itself.
When the door swung open, Davis jerked upward on the sofa as if doused with a bucket of water.
“It’s just me.” Ann Louise’s voice was reassuring but breathless. “Were you asleep?”
Davis swallowed wrong as he sat up, and a cough convulsed his throat. He wanted to say he was all right but couldn’t find the wind for speech. When Ann Louise moved toward him to pound his back, he waved her off and bent himself double, clutching his ankles.
“Water?” Realizing the question couldn’t be answered, Ann Louise headed to the kitchen as she asked it. When she gave the glass to Davis, he took it and set it down, sloshing the end table as his coughing shook him.
“It’s all right.” His voice was hoarse, barely audible. Worse than the spasmodic cough was his embarrassment. He wished Ann Louise would leave and come back later, when he would be composed, when he would be himself.
After the coughing subsided, she handed Davis the pharmacy bag containing the insulin.
Davis lined six boxes along the arm of the sofa. “Why so much?”
“I figured you’d go through one or two of those little things in no time.”
When Davis laughed, his cough returned, and he threw back a quick drink of water. “Takes almost nothing to keep things going,” he said, clearing his throat. I use a vial about every three weeks. You’ve bought a supply that’ll last until August.”
“Will it keep?”
Davis nodded as he focused on stopping another coughing spasm.
“Shouldn’t you take a shot?”
Remembering that he had come up short with his injection for the burger and fries, Davis nodded again, making growling noises deep in his throat to stop the tickle. Retrieving a syringe from the kitchen, he opened one of the boxes of insulin and drew four units from the thumb-sized vial. Anne Louise studied him as he lifted his shirt and stuck himself in a pinch of flesh above the belt.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
With the syringe cap still clenched between his teeth, Davis mumbled, “Sometimes,” thinking he should have checked his blood sugar before injecting the insulin. Too late to worry about it now, as the insulin swept down his veins.
Ann Louise looked different than she had when Davis left her at the cemetery. A change of clothes. She must have gone home after her work at the grave was done. Her exhaustion showed in the way she sat, giving herself to the soft cushions of the chair, seeping down as if she might finally submerge, her hands loose in her lap. Something in her fatigue made her more attractive—a fallen facade, maybe, revelation of the true Ann Louise, lovely in her weariness. Her eyes were focused softly on Davis.
“You must be beat. Have you had supper?” he asked.
“Yes and yes.” Her answer was a lazy sigh.
“What we need is something to drink. Too bad my mother was a teetotaler.” Then, remembering Haupt, he amended his remark: “At least I think she was.” Propelled by that small doubt, he went into the kitchen and searched the cabinets, banging each door shut. On the top shelf above the stove, his hand touched something smooth, a curved secrecy. He stood on his toes to reach it and then could only wobble it out toward the edge, where it toppled toward him, a jug of burgundy.
Peeking around the doorway into the living room, he said, “Looky what I found,” and extended the jug. “I hear March was a pretty good month.” He wiped dust from the jug’s green neck and shoulders. Little more than a glass was gone; still enough in the bottle to make a glugging sound when poured.
Ann Louise drew away, wide-eyed, as Davis approached her with a water glass filled nearly to the top.
“Wait’ll you see mine.” He returned with a brimming iced-tea tumbler, and they both laughed.
“I’m not much of a drinker,” Ann Louise said, warily studying the dark glass.
“Once you get it in your mouth, it usually goes on down.” Davis demonstrated by taking a big gulp, holding it in a way that made his cheeks bulge, then swallowing. “Whoo, that’s good as ditch water!” As soon as he said it, he remembered it was his father’s expression, and he could see him downing his shot of whiskey every night before bedtime. “For medicinal purposes,” he had always explained.
Ann Louise sipped cautiously at the brim of her glass. “I didn’t think diabetics were supposed to drink.”
“Pancreases aren’t supposed to stop working, either. I figure it all evens out.” The remark was a smart-assed backhand Davis had often used to fend off unwelcome attention to his disease, but he hadn’t meant it in the usual way.
He was eager to change the subject. “So, how’d it go at the graveyard?”
Ann Louise held her glass with both hands, looking down at the reflection of her face in the unsteady circle of wine. “Got all the bones and other remains removed.”
“And . . . ?”
“Found a wallet with Winningham’s driver’s license and pictures of his family. Even had fifty-seven dollars in it.”
“You were right, then. You’ve found Charles Winningham.”
“Looks like it. Can’t say officially until Ted finishes his examination of the remains.”
“You’re being pretty cagey. Makes me think you’re leaving something out.”
“No, not really. It’s just that Winningham is one for the books.”
“Meaning?”
“Okay, get this. When we excavated the bones, they were in a little pit in the bottom of the grave, a place someone had dug out for the body. I’m guessing he was covered with only enough dirt to keep from being seen during your father’s burial. We even found a little camping shovel between his legs.”
“And if he hadn’t tried to shake hands with me the other day, nobody would ever have found him. How was he killed?”
Ann Louise was slow to respond. “That’s the kicker. We found an empty bottle of sedatives with Winningham’s name on it.”
“Somebody drugged him and buried him alive?”
“That’s one theory. The other is that Winningham did it himself.” When Davis said nothing, she continued, “He had a plastic bag over his head, black so it would be hard to see in the bottom of the grave. A rubber band cinched it tight around his neck. In every other way, he looked like someone who had just gone to bed. Pulled that cover of dirt over himself and went to sleep. Of course, the weight of the casket and vault did some damage, but mostly just pressed him into the earth.”
“Seems an unlikely way to commit suicide.”
“You wouldn’t think so if you’d seen the remains. Not like any murder scene I’ve ever investigated. Too tidy. A calmness about the whole thing.”
“Yeah, but aren’t there meticulous murderers? Not every killer uses a lead pipe or a butcher knife.”
“The coroner’s report will tell us more, one way or the other.”
“Will it tell you why no one saw Winningham when my father was being buried, or how a man can dope himself, put a plastic bag over his head, and then lie back in the dirt and die?”
“Well, we don’t always get all the answers, do we?”
Because the subject made Ann Louise remote and seemed a part of her lethargy, Davis changed the subject. “How’s the wine?”
“Mighty fine.”
The rhyme made them laugh, and Davis said, “What we need is a little music.” Vanishing into his old bedroom, he returned with a Brenda Lee album, concealed, to surprise Ann Louise. The needle fuzzed in its groove until it bumped into Brenda’s voice: “There’s too many rivers between you and me.”
Ann Louise’s face brigh
tened. “You know, I used to think the words were ‘There’s two muddy rivers.’ ”
“I like that better,” Davis proclaimed and began singing Ann Louise’s version, adding other words of his own until he came to the line “We both killed the fruit on the vine.” “That’d be what we’re drinking,” he said, taking a swallow.
Ann Louise lifted her glass and toasted, “To the killed fruit,” and they both giggled, caught up in their own silliness. But when the cut of “I’m Sorry” started, they grew quiet, listening to Brenda’s quavering voice plead for understanding.
“This was one of the songs I waited for—a slow dance. You remember those awful evenings at the gym in junior high?” Ann Louise smiled but said nothing, so Davis continued. “I was always too shy to do any of the fast dances, but I figured I could clutch and stumble as good as the next guy. Thank God for slow songs.”
Ann Louise was on her feet, dancing with thin air until Davis rose and stepped into her moving embrace. She felt smaller in his arms than he expected, almost fragile. They rocked back and forth in the narrow space of the living room between the coffee table and the other furniture, and when Brenda finished her song, they kept swaying and shuffling slowly as the record spun into silence, the needle clicking a steady cadence against the spindle. When they stopped and stood looking into each other’s eyes, Davis felt as if they were still moving, spun by the night breeze. Their first kiss was little more than a touch, lips barely pressing. The next was longer, and Davis felt himself quicken as he touched her breasts. Ann Louise’s arms loosely encircled his neck, and she let his hands move wherever they moved.
Saying nothing, Davis took her by the hand and led her to the only bed in the house, his mother’s. In the dark, they slowly undressed each other, stopping now and then to kiss. When they were completely naked, they stood apart for a moment, breath coming heavily as though the oxygen had thinned. Davis felt Ann Louise’s hand on him and steered her to the bed, an underwater slowness, his head humming from the depth of the dive. “Rapture of the deep,” he thought. Then he said it out loud.