The Burning Day

by Timothy C. Phillips

  “Like I said, I just want to talk.”

  I walked into the office. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting all that I got. Longshot sat behind a desk with a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whisky parked on the blotter. From the level of the brown liquid inside, he’d been whittling away on it all afternoon. What threw me for a loop was the girl standing next to him. I had never seen her in person before, but I had seen her photo.

  She and some friends, all college dropouts, had once been professional shoplifters, or “boosters.” They’d made a pretty good living stealing high-priced items and moving them through a fence in north Birmingham. That is, until they’d stolen a certain something from a mob safe house that was masquerading as a failing antiques shop. The offended party had sent his dogs looking for Dextra and her dropout friends. By the time Broom and I had found them, most of the kids were dead. She’d been one of just two that walked away alive. Two out of six.

  She looked at me with a glare of the rawest hatred. I guess she’s seen my picture, too.

  “This is the son of a bitch got all of my friends killed,” she hissed.

  She’d left out the fact that the Mafia hit man had also shot me and my old police partner, Broom, as we tried to save them all. Broom’s partner, a good cop, had lost his life. But I let her enjoy her anger. I had no time to rehash the past.

  Lonnie downed his tumbler of Bushmills. He didn’t look too worried by her outburst, or her grief. “There, there, Dexie. Roland here is an old friend, and he’s also here as a guest. I didn’t know that you and the gumshoe knew one another. Run along now while we talk.” He patted her on the rear end and she sneered and spat, but she managed to get past me and out the door without clawing my eyes out.

  “Dammit, Longville, what did you do to piss Dextra off? I think she’d kill you if I gave her permission.”

  “Maybe,” was all that I said,

  “Well, take a load off, private eye.” Lonnie poured himself another shot of Bushmills. “I don’t mean to be rude, boyo. I’d offer you a belt but I know you don’t partake . . . any more, that is.”

  He looked me over with his peculiar eyes. The Byzantine blue eye appraised me coolly, and then the Mesozoic green eye, with more than a hint of threat in its smoldering depths. He swallowed his latest drink and set the tumbler down. “What did you come here for, Longville?”

  “Did you know that one of your gun men is carrying around a beagle puppy?” I asked him.

  Longshot poured himself another two fingers and laughed. “You mean Kevin. Got himself a friend at last. Now answer my question.”

  “The answer is, I have a question for you.”

  “So let’s have it.”

  So I asked him.

  Chapter 14

  “Lonnie,” Dextra said softly, her head on his chest. They were in bed, and they lay tangled together, exhausted after a furious bout of make-up sex they had engaged in after their usual fight.

  Lonnie waited before answering. She had pronounced his name as half a question, half a demand. “Dexie,” he said finally, also half a question, noncommittal.

  “What is Roland Longville to you?”

  Lonnie breathed in deeply. “He’s an annoying two-bit private eye, and a royal pain in the arse.”

  “Then do something for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kill him.”

  Lonnie laughed and rolled out from under her. “What kind of person do you take me for?”

  “I thought I meant something to you.” She sat up, letting the covers fall away from her perfect body, knowing the effect that it would have on him. But Lonnie only smiled.

  “I owe Longville a debt I haven’t yet repaid, my love.”

  “What could you possible owe him?” She scowled, covering herself.

  “My life. The man saved my life once.”

  She nodded slowly, though she had still not let go of her anger.

  “Is he your friend, then?”

  Lonnie picked her chin up and brought her eyes up to meet his.

  “I have only one friend, Dexie. And that’s human frailty.”

  She put her arms around him and her face against his chest so that they could not see each other’s eyes.

  “Sometimes I hate you,” she said softly.

  “I know, dearest.” Lonnie smiled and lovingly stroked her silky black hair. “I know.”

  Chapter 15

  I rarely break the conditions of a contract I make with an employer, unless they do something on their end that breaks the rules. But an abiding curiosity made me make a sudden and fateful decision: I would go to Wiggin’s house and confront him. I remembered the little BMW convertible pulled into the double garage, all alone. His office visit left me with the impression of a lonely man, resigned to life with his erring wife, stoically going about his business until I reported back to him with details. But was he really waiting for the whole story from me? Or did he know more than he was telling? Something wasn’t adding up. We needed to talk about that, never mind his instructions to meet away from his home.

  I figured that Wiggins would be angry at me for disregarding his strict prohibition against calling on him at his place of residence. Since I was already upset with him for lying to me, though, I figured fair was fair. I speculated that if I showed up unannounced, I might shake him up enough to get the straight dope from him, or at least learn more than I knew about what was going on. As it turned out, I was right about that last part.

  As I drove through Wiggin’s quiet, upscale neighborhood, kids played in the yards and happy dogs barked and ran in the parks, chasing Frisbees and harassing the ducks that lived in the ponds. Henry Wiggins’ car was in the yard, just where it had been a few days earlier. Maybe he was home early, or taking a sick day. Anyway, he was in. I parked at the curb and walked up to the door. I squared my shoulders and rapped with my knuckles on the jam. I counted off twenty seconds before I heard a muffled call from inside and steps coming towards the door, heavy, as if whoever was inside was half-stumbling.

  The door opened, and a tall, athletic-looking man of about forty stood squinting against the sudden light. He would have looked at home on a tennis court, I supposed, under normal circumstances. This morning, though, his circumstances weren’t normal. He was dressed in a badly rumbled suit and his eyes were red and glassy. I had felt like that enough times in my previous life to know—the man was hung over, and in a very big way.

  “Uh . . . hello,” he managed, somewhat pleasantly. There was already a question in his eyes, however.

  “Sorry if I woke you. I’m here to see Henry Wiggins.”

  The man blinked rapidly, and now there was confusion to go with the hangover and the question in his eyes. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. You are . . . ?”

  “My name is Roland Longville. I’m a private detective, and I’m employed by a Mr. Henry Wiggins.” I brought out my I.D. and flashed it at him.

  The man squinted at my credentials, rubbed his temples, and broke into a wide smile. Then he scratched his head through his thick sandy blond hair. He made a weak effort at straightening his rumpled appearance. “Is this some kind of a joke?”

  “I’m afraid not. Why do you ask that?”

  “Well, it’s just that I’m fairly certain that I’m Henry Wiggins, and I’m also pretty sure that I’ve never seen you before, let alone hired any . . . private detective, did you say? Since you’ve shown me your identification, Mr. Longville, if you want, I can prove who I am.”

  I stood there for a second, at a loss as to how to follow up. Clearly someone was playing a game, but the purpose of the game, and the rules themselves, were completely unknown to me. I mentally backed up a step, and tried again.

  “I came here to see if Mr. Wiggins was at home . . .”

  Mr. Wiggins was at home. The man at the door fished a driver’s license out of his pocket and put it in my hand. He was, indeed, it proclaimed, Henry H. Wiggins. He followed up with a busine
ss card that identified him as a Certified Public Accountant. I cursed silently and went on.

  “I’m sorry. Someone who claimed to be Henry Wiggins . . . that is . . . you . . . came to my office three days ago. This man . . . the man who hired me, said that he wanted me to follow a woman. This was a woman he said was his . . . or . . . your . . . wife. Do you recognize her?” I took the picture of Mary out of my pocket and showed it to him. The smile vanished instantly, and something like despair replaced it.

  “That’s Mary. She is my wife . . . well, not any more. She’s my ex-wife.” He looked up from the photo. “I have no idea how this man would know my wife, or why he would pretend to be me.”

  Ex-wife, I mused. That was interesting. I quickly described the False Wiggins’ archaic suit, his Reader’s Digest vocabulary, his model’s stature. “Any idea who that man might be, or why he would want your ex-wife followed?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know the answer to either of those questions. Say, Mr. Longville, why don’t you come inside? The bright sunlight out here is killing me.”

  I followed Wiggins into the interior of the house. It was a nicely appointed home: real art on the walls; comfortable-looking, expensive furniture; a grand piano under a skylight that was currently covered with a blind; a wide arch that opened into a dining room with a banquet table under a crystal chandelier; and a wine rack sparkling mysteriously beyond, with its charge of bottles that meditated on festivities yet to come. The shades were drawn, and there were no lights on in the house. That self-imposed darkness was a scenario I well remembered all too well from my own drinking days.

  The coffee table told that things were starting to slip in this perfect world. A mostly empty liter of Maker’s Mark Bourbon played general to a platoon of empty beer bottles that stood at attention nearby. These would have told the cause of the real Mr. Wiggin’s present discomfort, had it not been obvious at first glance. He’d been drinking most of last night, apparently in the dark, and quite probably alone. Only a few things will make a man do that.

  “How long have you and Mary been divorced?” I asked Wiggins, taking a shot at one of the most common causes. He crossed to the couch and flopped down, his right arm crossed over his eyes.

  “It’s been about three months since the divorce was finalized. We’d been apart, on and off, another three.”

  “You miss her, don’t you, Mr. Wiggins?”

  “Call me Henry. Miss her? What does it look like?” he asked. “I thought my despair was pretty obvious.”

  “You must still miss her badly.”

  “It’s all my fault, Mr. Longville. I screwed up. More than once. She found out. I agreed to a trial separation. Little did I ever suspect that she would find someone else. That was stupid of me, too—of course she would. She’s a wonderful woman, and lovely, too. It didn’t take her long. I guess I’m getting just what I deserve. I didn’t realize until she was gone that she meant everything to me.”

  I sat without speaking, because there was nothing to say to that.

  “Anyway, she filed for divorce, and I didn’t contest it. It killed me to sign those papers, but I had to take responsibility for what I had done. I’d cheated on her, betrayed her trust. So now what’s done is done.”

  The Real Henry Wiggins arose and went to the kitchen, where he rummaged in the fridge and came back with a beer with gold foil around the lid. He tore the foil and unscrewed the lid and took a sip, made a face and said, “God. Got to quit drinking this stuff,” and took another.

  I looked on for a second, then said, “Mind if I ask who you did the cheating with?”

  Wiggins shrugged. “The one that broke the camel’s back? An intern at my accounting firm. A college girl. A young woman, interested in boring old me. It was hard to resist. It was also the dumbest thing I ever did. I should have ended it. I didn’t. It cost me my marriage, and the young lady has graduated from college and moved on, and I am boring old me again, and quite alone.”

  “Sounds like you regret some of the choices you made.”

  “To tell you the truth, yes. I haven’t been able to put it all behind me . . . I just sit here most days.” He sheepishly looked down at the bottle he was holding. “The last week or so, I’ve mostly been staying drunk.”

  “Just the last week?”

  “Okay. Maybe more like . . . three months. Time’s been getting away from me.”

  “You can’t spend the rest of your life in a bottle, Henry.”

  “A private eye who’s against drinking? I thought you guys kept a bottle of whiskey in your desk. You some kind of religious guy or something?”

  “I’m no Phillip Marlowe. What I am is a recovering alcoholic. I’ve done what you’re doing. I’m not preaching to you, because that never worked on me, Henry. But I can tell you this. You’re trying to drink Mary back, and she’s not coming.”

  He took another look at his hair of the dog beer and put it down. “You recognize my own self-disgust, then? I have been hitting it a little heavy lately, that’s for sure.”

  “You’re a successful man, Henry, like it or not. You can move on. It’s up to you. It’ll smart for a long time, but your other choice is to sit here and drink yourself to death. Any fool can do that.”

  He smiled. The hair of the dog had restored his humanity a little. “I like you, Longville, you’re an okay sort of guy, but you’re also a frikkin’ hard ass.”

  I suppressed a smile. “Does Mary have any family besides you?”

  He smiled a little at my referring to him as ‘family.’

  “Not that I know of. She always told me she had been adopted by an older couple, and that they had passed away some years back.

  That wasn’t very helpful, so I asked him, “Did Mary leave any of her things here?”

  He shook his head and smiled a bitter smile. “Nothing but me.”

  “Well, then, I thank you for your time, Mr. Wiggins. It has been an instructive afternoon. I guess I’ll leave you to it.”

  He looked at his beer and frowned. “I suppose that I could get up from here and go down to the office. I haven’t been there in a few days.”

  “I would if I were you. Especially since someone’s running around pretending to be you.” I stood to go.

  He knitted his brow. “Tell me something. This man who was pretending to be me. What do you suppose he wants with Mary?”

  “I can’t say. Up until a few minutes ago, I thought he was you. By the way, did you know that Mary had been married previously?”

  Wiggins looked thunderstruck. “Why, no. If that guy told you that—”

  “He didn’t. I found that out for myself. You can go look it over for yourself. It’s all on file, downtown.”

  “I’ll be damned. She never told me. So you think maybe she went back to her ex?”

  “I think not. He’s been dead for four years.”

  He looked even more thunderstruck. “Dead? But how did it happen?”

  “A traffic accident, apparently.”

  “It seems there’s a lot that Mary never told me.”

  “A lot, maybe, yes.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Nothing I’d like to talk about. Mary has some interesting people in her past, though. I don’t have all the details, but it looks to me like something from her past is trying to catch up to her. Something bad.”

  Wiggins nodded, and sat there for a second. Then he rose and took the beer to the kitchen, where he poured it down the sink.

  I smiled at him. “Going to move on?”

  “Proud of me? I’m going to try. I’ll take a few small steps, anyway. First thing, I’m going to grab a shower, then maybe a big, greasy breakfast somewhere, with some coffee. Lots of coffee.”

  “That sounds like a good start, Henry.”

  I started for the door.

  “Mr. Longville?” he called after me. I turned back to look at him.

  “Whatever’s going on . . . I know it’s over between us, but, hey, make sure nothing h
appens to Mary, will you?”

  “I’ll do my best, Henry. You can count on that.”

  Chapter 16

  I drove back to north Birmingham, intent on going to my office to sort things out. I parked in the plaza and headed toward the front door of the Brooks Building. I walked up upstairs and opened the door to my office. The message light on my answering machine was blinking. I reached over and pressed the replay button, but I only heard a series of hang-up calls.

  I was just starting to get irritated when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.

  “Is this Roland Longville?” A man’s voice asked. The voice sounded ragged, like that of an exhausted man.

  “This is Longville.”

  “All right, Longville. Let me lay it all out for you. A man hired you the other day. This man said that he was someone he’s not. You follow me so far?”

  I thought about the real Henry Wiggins, trying to sober up and get on with life, and the fake Henry Wiggins, with his big words and antiquated clothing.

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “Well, I’m going to throw you a bone. Have you got something to write with?”

  I picked up a pen. “Go ahead.”

  “Zellars. Z-E-L-LA-R-S. Charlie Zellars. You might want to look him up.”

  I cradled the phone on a shoulder while I wrote down the name. “Can I get your name?” I asked.

  The caller hung up, of course. Nothing to lose in asking.

  Chapter 17

  The blood of thine is thine to avenge. It was a maxim that Don Ganato knew well. His father and his grandfather, stern Sicilian gangsters from the old school, had taught him this and other rubrics from a very early age. It was part of a code that he and other men like him had lived by for centuries. Little Tony had been hot-headed and on a one-way street to getting exactly what he got, and Don Ganato had seen that coming. But he knew his duty. His nephew was dead, and his blood cried out from the ground for revenge.

  The Don was talking to two of his men in hushed tones in his office. “Have you found out who killed Little Tony?”