Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  A story I heard someone tell. A Scotsman, as thrifty by nature as his countrymen always are in such stories, is in a store inspecting an overcoat. He’s concerned about the garment’s durability; how long, he asks the saleswoman, is it likely to last?

  She looks at him, she looks at the coat, she looks at him, she looks at the coat.

  “It’ll see ye oot,” she says.

  And Thompson Dawes will see us oot, yielding a satisfactory income for as long as Louella and I are around to spend it. That’s as long as it needs to last. Alden’s set on becoming a veterinarian, he’s never wavered in his enthusiasm, and it’s too early to guess what career might beckon to Kristin, although I can sometimes picture her as a stand-up comedian, or backstage writing lines for someone else to deliver.

  Neither of them will want to be selling hammers and nails and pots and pans to the good people of Lima—or Penderville, for that matter. Thompson Dawes might stay in business with a new owner or two—and with a name change, no doubt.

  Or the stores could close. I wasn’t concerned with leaving a commercial legacy. Neither my name nor that of Porter Dawes needed a spot in Lima’s pantheon of retailers.

  Things I found myself thinking about, when I wasn’t thinking about murder and suicide.

  I WENT TO my meeting, heard a story or two, retold the one about the Scotsman and the coat when someone else wondered whether to trade his second car or try to get another year out of it.

  “Well, I hope it won’t see me oot,” he said, “but I guess it’ll see me through another model year.”

  I got caught up on some news, and learned that a man named Charles Kittredge had taken a turn for the worse, and his family had opted for at-home hospice care. I’d known Charles for a good deal longer than I’d been familiar with the word hospice, he’d already been an active Rotarian when I came to my first meeting, and while the end had been inevitable for the better part of a year, I hadn’t expected it to be this soon.

  Charles and I—and it was always Charles, never Charlie or Chuck—were never close, but we saw each other often enough, and always in pleasant circumstances, to make each of us a part of the other’s social landscape.

  Would I miss him?

  I’d go to his funeral. I had the option of seeing him before then, I could contrive to stop by his home for a visit, but I knew I wasn’t going to do that. We weren’t close enough to warrant it. I’d wait for his death, and send flowers and a note to his widow.

  And put on a suit and tie and go to his funeral. And think of him infrequently after that. If at all.

  THINGS TO OCCUPY my mind, while I wasn’t busy weighing about the pros and cons of killing my family and myself.

  “DAD? HAVE YOU got a minute?”

  I had written that last paragraph, and spent perhaps five minutes sitting at my desk and looking at it. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to add.

  Or to subtract, come to think of it.

  And so I shut down and came downstairs and sat in my chair and picked up a novel Louella had read and recommended. So far I hadn’t made much headway, and I certainly didn’t mind the interruption.

  Louella was in the kitchen, Kristin in front of the TV. Alden and I went out on the porch. He started to say something, then broke it off when someone roared by on a motorcycle. When the sound died down he said he wondered what it was like to ride one of those. I said I’d often wondered myself.

  “But not enough to find out,” I said.

  “I’d feel funny,” he said. “Making all that noise, interrupting all those conversations.”

  “I suppose a person gets used to it.”

  “I suppose. Dad? There was another email. For Kristin, but it came to me.”

  “Another match.”

  He nodded. “A man in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he’s a closer match than the others. Like he could be an aunt or an uncle. Except he couldn’t be an aunt because—”

  “Because he’s a man.”

  “Uh, right.”

  “I don’t suppose they gave you his name.”

  “Actually they did.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s Henry Elmont Borden.”

  My brother Hank. Had I ever known his middle name? I suppose I must have, but it didn’t ring any bells. Elmont. A family name, I suppose, and it imparted a certain distinction. There were probably hundreds of Henry Bordens, but there would have to be far fewer with Elmont for a middle name.

  “And this email came in today?”

  “Actually it was yesterday. I was going to mention it last night, but—”

  “But there was no hurry.”

  “I guess. Was that okay?”

  “Perfectly okay,” I said. “You want to go for a ride?”

  THE RADIO CAME on when I started the engine, tuned to an oldies station. I turned it off and drove with no real destination in mind, letting the car find its way around the outer suburbs.

  We were silent a while. Then I said, “Scottsdale’s outside of Phoenix. An upscale area, I believe. There’s an independent retailers’ trade association, Porter Dawes was a longtime member, and the annual dues are low enough that I’ve never canceled. They’ve had conventions in Scottsdale. I’ve never gone, never really considered it, but that’s what comes to mind when I think of Scottsdale.”

  “And this man—”

  “Lives there, evidently.”

  He waited.

  “My brother,” I said. “Henry, but most people called him Hank. Maybe he goes by Henry now, maybe he calls himself H. Elmont Borden. Was that the middle name? Elmont?”

  “That’s what it said.”

  “Henry Elmont Borden. There were ten of us, I had all of these brothers and sisters. I wonder how many of them are still around. I suppose we’ll find out, through the miracle of genetic analysis.”

  “Dad, I never meant for this to happen.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. There was no way for you to see it coming.”

  “I just didn’t think.”

  And what did he think now? That there was something in the past that I felt a need to avoid, but did he have an idea what it might be?

  I looked for a place to pull over, found a strip mall, its handful of stores closed for the day. There were only two vehicles in the lot, a panel truck and an SUV, parked side by side in front of an auto parts outlet. I pulled into a spot at the far end, cut the engine.

  “When I first came here,” I said, “I had to cross a lot of state lines. I grew up out West.”

  “I think I knew that.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Huh?”

  “Or suspect. You must have some sense of the situation.”

  He had his hands in his lap, resting on his seatbelt strap, and his eyes were fastened on them. He said, “I know there’s something in the past that could be a problem if it comes to light.”

  “And can you guess what it might be?”

  “Not really.” He turned, looked at me. “It really doesn’t matter what it is, you know? What you did, or what somebody thought you did, or whatever it was. It’s been buried for all these years and all it has to do is stay buried, and if I hadn’t been stupid enough to mail off that DNA swab—”

  “Then we would have gotten to the same place by some other route,” I said. “So you can quit blaming yourself.”

  “If you say so, but—”

  “I was a very different man,” I said. “Rootless, drifting. No sense of a social order, no sense of my place in it. No perspective on the thoughts that came to me. Or what I did about them, because I didn’t have much in the way of impulse control.”

  He was sitting in silence, eyes lowered.

  “Do you know what a sociopath is?”

  “Sort of.”

  “The definition varies, depending on what dictionary you consult. But if you checked an illustrated dictionary it would show you a picture of Buddy.”

  “Buddy? Was that what people called you?”

&
nbsp; “Only if they were reading the embroidery on my shirt pocket. One of the jobs I had, I was a few years older than you are now. I was pumping gas down in Southern California.”

  “You weren’t still living at home.”

  I shook my head. “I would pick up a job, sleep in my car until I found a room, hang around for a while, then move on. Pumping gas—this was before gas stations figured out that people could fill their own gas tanks and wipe their own windshields, so they’d pay minimum wage to a guy like me. Someone who had the job before me left this shirt behind, Buddy in script on the breast pocket, and it was my size so I got it washed and wore it.” I frowned. “I think I got it washed,” I said, “but maybe not. I tended to be a little casual about such matters.”

  He sat there, taking it all in.

  “One job I had, I cleaned out the cash register before I took off. But that was because I didn’t like the manager’s attitude. It’s funny, I can picture the man’s face, but I can’t remember what he did or said or why it bothered me.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “A very long time ago, and you could say that I was a different person then. And maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.”

  He didn’t say anything, and we let that last sentence hang in the air for a moment.

  I said, “I should get to the point. Your mother’s probably ready to put dinner on the table. One night after work I was still wearing the Buddy shirt and I went to a bar to get a beer, and I did something. And I’m having trouble coming right out and saying what it was that I did.”

  “You don’t have to say anything, Dad.”

  “I killed someone,” I said.

  Another sentence to leave hanging in the air, except this time the words darted around, bounced off the dashboard, echoed and somehow grew louder in the silence. I lowered a window, not so much to let a little air in as to give the words a way out.

  “A woman,” I said. “Her name was Cindy Raschmann, but I didn’t know her name until later, and she never knew mine. All she knew was what it said on my shirt. ‘Hey, it’s Buddy.’ I remember she spoke those words early on. I don’t remember anything else she said.”

  Except for what she’d said so many years later, in what must have been a dream but seemed much more real than any dream I ever had. She’d said those same words again, Hey, it’s Buddy, and she’d added a few more sentences. I wrote them down earlier when they were fresh in my mind but I won’t bother looking for them now.

  And then she said I forgive you.

  “I killed her,” I said.

  “It was an accident.”

  What a fine son he was. What a decent and loyal and generous young man. Could I accept the gift he was offering?

  Evidently not.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “And I wasn’t drunk. I’d had one glass of beer and I don’t even think I finished it. We left the bar together.”

  Memories flooded in, but I didn’t feel the need to find words for them. I skipped ahead.

  “I wound up with my hands around her throat,” I said. “I didn’t let go until she was dead.”

  “AND THEN I fucked her corpse.”

  But no, I didn’t say that.

  THE NEXT THING I did say, breaking an extended silence, was an apology. Not for the act but for the recounting of it.

  “I never expected to tell you all this,” I said. “I never thought I’d have reason to. I assumed the past would stay in the past.”

  “But I had to go and—”

  I stopped him right there. “If you need to blame someone,” I said, “stick with Crick and Watson. Once the science was there, the technology was sure to follow. Then all they had to do was find uses for it, and everything just kept evolving. Keeps evolving, because there’s something new every time you turn around. Touch DNA, for God’s sake. Early on they needed bodily fluids to get enough cells for a DNA profile. Now any contact between two people transfers enough DNA for them to work with.”

  “I don’t really get how that works,” he said, “but I guess it does.”

  “Say our hands touch,” I said, “and some of what’s on my hand winds up on your hand. That case a week or two ago on 48 Hours, the serial rapist who followed women home from Walmart.”

  “I think it was Target. Like it makes a difference.”

  “It evidently made a difference to him. I guess you meet a more appealing class of women at Target. He used condoms.”

  “I remember.”

  “And disposed of them elsewhere. He wasn’t afraid of picking up an STD.”

  “Or getting anybody pregnant.”

  “He knew about semen and DNA,” I said, “and he thought he was playing it safe. What would he have done if he’d known about Touch DNA? Worn gloves?”

  “Or one of those HazMat suits.”

  I was picturing that, or trying to, and he said, “Dad? After you . . .”

  “Killed her,” I supplied.

  I thought he might flinch at the words, but no. “Then what happened? You just left?”

  “Drove for awhile, found a motel room. I was a drifter, so I drifted. It seems to me I was waiting for them to catch me. But they didn’t, and I don’t know how close they may have come or how much they learned from the crime scene or in the course of their investigation. But then Sirhan Sirhan came along.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who assassinated Bobby Kennedy.”

  “Right,” he said. “I knew the name, but not how I knew it, and you want to know the first thing I thought just now? That it was the name of a band.”

  “Or a rapper.”

  “Li’l Sirhan. This was really a long time ago, wasn’t it?” He drew a breath and straightened up in his seat. I picked up the cue, if that’s what it was, and keyed the ignition and drove us home.

  SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE strip mall and our house he found an oblique way to ask me if there were any other entries keeping Cindy Raschmann company in my résumé.

  I assured him I’d never before done anything of the sort. But I said I had thought about it. It was a fantasy, I said, a longstanding one, and I’d figured that was all it would ever be.

  “And you never—”

  “Did anything like that again? No, never.”

  He nodded, grateful for the assurance, but something kept me from leaving it at that. “I thought about it,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “There were times when I might have acted.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, never. And the impulse—”

  “Went away?”

  “Subsided,” I said.

  AT THE DINNER table, it was as if we’d never had the conversation. Louella had made a lamb stew, tweaking a recipe she’d prepared in the past, pepping it up with cumin and cayenne.

  “And I used the slow cooker,” she said, “instead of the pressure pot. And I must say I felt the slightest bit disloyal.”

  They looked at her.

  “The first conversation I ever had with your father,” she said, “was at the store, over a pressure cooker.”

  “We talked about rhubarb,” I said.

  “And I brought that pressure cooker home with me, and it’s held up perfectly well over the years.”

  “Better than I have,” I said.

  “You’ve both held up beautifully,” she said, “and I’ve never cooked rhubarb in anything else.”

  How I Met Your Father. Louella reminisced, and I contributed a recollection or two of my own. This wasn’t the first trip the four of us had taken down Memory Lane, and Alden and Kristin seemed as usual to enjoy this back-in-the-day glimpse of their parents.

  I had to wonder, though, what Alden made of it, now that our conversation at the strip mall had put me in a different light. Or could he just wall that off and keep it at a safe distance from the rhubarb and the pressure cooker?

  WHEN WE LEFT the table I told Alden I’d be upstairs in my office. “Why don’t you give me, oh, half an hou
r? Forty-five minutes?”

  I sat down at my desk and got to it right away, recreating our conversation as you see it above. I typed the last sentence and looked at it for a long moment, wondering if I had anything further to add. I decided that I didn’t, and had just closed the file when there was a knock on the door.

  I looked at my watch. He’d given me a full hour.

  I told him to come in, pointed to a chair. It’s a comfortable chair, but he didn’t look all that comfortable in it. And I could understand that. I’d already provided an unbidden confession to homicide. Who could say what I might come up with next?

  “You probably have some questions,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Like why did I decide to tell you all this.”

  “I guess I wondered.”

  “I never expected to. When I started driving east, I’d reached a point where it was beginning to look as though I might get away with it. By the time I got to Ohio I had a new name and some ID to go with it. I began to create a completely new life for myself, and I figured the past could stay in the past.”

  “But then with DNA—”

  “Not just DNA. The whole business of cold case investigation. The world’s changing at a pace that makes your head spin, and one big change is that there’s no getting away from the past. It’s right there in the present.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “If you go back, oh, say a hundred years ago. No, make it a little more than that. A hundred and fifty years, say. All the way back to the days of the Old West. Think of those movies and TV shows that open with a guy on a horse, riding across the prairie and into town. Whatever past he may have had, he could just leave it behind—in some other town.

  “His name was whatever he called himself. Nobody could ask to see a man’s ID, because he didn’t have any and neither did anybody else. Your story was whatever you said it was, and unless somebody from your past rode into town, you could live your new life and forget about your old one.”