Fatal Obsession

by Stephen Greenleaf

  The last time I’d seen Billy, even in photographs, was more than ten years ago, and I still pictured him in my mind the way he was then—late teens, handsome and strong, full of the spark and spirit of youth. But the body I saw beneath the shroud wasn’t a boy at all and seemed never to have been one. It had been a man, thirty or almost so, emaciated and frightfully ascetic in appearance, with a long braid of greasy matted hair. Lividity wrapped his neck like a scarf. He had hollow sallow cheeks and a scruffy stubble of blue-black beard that crossed his face like the mask of an outlaw. He was wearing a faded field jacket and tattered fatigues, and I realized he looked something like the person I’d seen earlier in the day, the person who had suddenly angered Chuck Hasburg up on the square.

  I looked again at the body. Billy seemed to have shrunk inside his clothes, as though his departed spirit had left behind a void and the flesh had reacted in abhorrence of it. He had the look of the wanderers I saw so often in San Francisco, the street people scavenging for food in trash cans, begging for change on corners, their homes the tattered bundles of rags upon their backs.

  I moved Billy briefly, looking and feeling for signs of foul play, but the only thing I saw was a thin line of dried blood on the back of his neck. When the BCI man noticed me he headed my way with a frown on his face. I replaced the shroud quickly and was on my way back to the picnic table when he caught up to me. He was barely five feet tall and belligerent as a result. “Who are you, mister?” he challenged.

  “Uncle of the deceased.”

  “Name?”

  “John Marshall Tanner.”

  “Residence?”

  “San Francisco.”

  That widened his eyes. “What brings you to Chaldea?”

  I smiled. “First, who are you?”

  “Agent Clarkson. BCI.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Bureau of Criminal Investigation. State. Now. What brings you to town?”

  “Family business.”

  “Where you staying?”

  “Hotel National.”

  “How long you plan to be here?”

  “Another day, at most.”

  “Let me know before you leave town. The sheriff will know how to reach me.”

  “Will do.”

  “You know anything about this?” he asked, gesturing toward the body.

  “Nothing. I haven’t seen Billy in ten years. Haven’t been back here in longer than that.”

  “If anything comes to mind, you let me know. Pronto.”

  “Right. You calling it suicide, Agent Clarkson?”

  “Not calling it anything till after the autopsy.”

  “Good.”

  “Why? You got doubts?”

  “A few.”

  “Reasons?”

  “Nothing specific.”

  “What do you do out there in Frisco, Mr. Tanner?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like Rockford?”

  “Only not as clever.”

  “Not as cute, either.”

  “No, not as cute. And not as short.”

  Agent Clarkson swore. “Don’t get in the way, Tanner. In this one you’re just an observer. I see you touch the deceased again, I’ll take you into custody. Now. That the father over there?” he asked, gesturing again.

  “Right.”

  “Name?”

  “Curtis Tanner.”

  “Residence?”

  “Glory City.”

  “Yeah? What’s he live out there for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He have any ideas why his kid ended up swinging from a tree?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I’ll want to talk to him.”

  “Can’t it wait a day?”

  The BCI man shrugged. “I’ll get to him when I get to him. Meantime I got work to do. Why don’t you clear on out?”

  “He wants to wait till the body’s taken away.”

  “Yeah, well, the coroner’s called the hearse, so that won’t be long.”

  “So you’ve about wrapped it up? No more evidence to gather?”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Murder, maybe.”

  “Shit.”

  The BCI man turned away and went over near the body and said something to a man who was putting something into plastic bags. The man didn’t stop doing what he was doing. Which meant the BCI man hadn’t made up his mind about the cause of death, which was good. I went back to where my brother still sat.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him again.

  He nodded and pulled out a bandanna and blew his nose. The wind crackled the leaves overhead and sent a chill across my flesh. Up the slope behind us a child was pumping a rusty swing to life. “He’s been dead a long time, Marsh,” Curt said in a voice that became a whisper. “Dead for ten years. He just didn’t know enough to fall down.”

  “What did it to him, Curt?”

  “The war. That goddamned war. It killed Billy as surely as it killed the Heinz kid or any of the others they got out in the cemetery.”

  Small towns. If not for them there would be no one to man our wars. “What did it to him though, Curt? What did he do there that changed him so much?”

  Curt shrugged wearily. “He never talked to me about it. Whatever it was, it turned him totally against me, and Laurel, and the town, the country, everyone but that group of hippies he hung out with.”

  “What group is that?”

  “The WILD bunch. Run by a criminal who’s walking free, thanks to Clark Jaspers.”

  “Where’s their office?”

  “Shack out on Elm Street that’s about to fall down.”

  “Was Billy married, Curt?” I asked. “I heard he was.”

  “Had a girl. Don’t know if they were married or not. Likely not.”

  “You ever meet her?”

  “Not formal. Saw her once in a while. Kind of pretty but real sad.”

  “Where did they live?”

  “Out at the farm, last I heard. They say Billy built a cabin for himself somewhere out there, but I didn’t ever see it. Went out there once but couldn’t find the place. Remember when we used to go out there for picnics, Marsh? The whole family, even grandpa? Remember grandpa and his gravy? And him always trying to catch a fish out of that little creek? He never did catch a one, I don’t think.”

  A sudden sob forced its way out of Curt’s throat, gagging him as he tried to keep it down. I put my arm across his shoulder, feeling helpless and stupid and somehow to blame for everything.

  “It’s all gone wrong, Marsh,” Curt said through his sorrow. “You might as well put that rope around my neck and haul me up there, too.”

  And then Curt was crying openly, and so was I. For Billy and for grandpa and for the rest of us as well.

  Eight

  I took Curt back to Gail’s house. There was no one there when we arrived, so Curt got in his car and drove off toward Glory City, refusing my offer of company. He was my brother, and it should have been a time for me to share his sorrow, but that’s not quite how it was. Billy’s death was already more of professional than personal interest to me. Had a crime been committed, and if so, by whom? That was all it was, though I tried to make it more. After Curt disappeared around a corner I went back to the hotel, absorbed by the foulness of greed and murder and my own hard heart.

  There was no point in making assumptions about Billy until the results of the autopsy were in. And even then, well, boys like Billy, living on the outer husk of rationality, expose themselves to many similar minds and to the crazy, hallucinatory violence such minds find easy and perhaps require. Billy might simply have been killed by someone as universally hateful as Billy himself appeared to have become, by someone else beyond the sanction of morality or fear. If that’s the way it looked, then I would probably leave it be. Such a case would be difficult for me to solve alone, and even if I did, no punishment would be worse th
an the madness already inflicted upon the guilty. But if it had been something else, an act more rational and self-serving, then I would have to do something about it.

  I was in the bathroom of my hotel room getting ready to go out when someone knocked. I put on my jacket and tucked in my shirt, then opened the door and looked into the hazel eyes of the person who had convinced me, once, that everything was all right and would be.

  “Sally,” I said, my stiff throat a splint around the name.

  “Marsh.” A smile quivered, but for an instant only.

  “How are you, Sally?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?” She donned a new-moon smile this time. It glowed for seconds as I looked at her.

  “I’m average or above, I guess,” I said. “You look great.”

  “So do you.”

  “I don’t, but thanks.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure. Sure. Sorry.”

  I backed away to let her enter, glad to be able to do something besides speak. And then I laughed.

  Sally turned and frowned nervously. “What’s so funny?” she asked, fingering her clothes, uneasy because humor had not been among the expectations that sent her to my room.

  “I was just thinking of how many years I spent trying to get you alone in a hotel room. And here you are. Success at last, thirty years too late.”

  Sally relaxed and stretched her smile. “Here I am, all right. But not for the first time. Or maybe you forgot.”

  “I forget almost everything, but not that.”

  “Good.”

  She was speaking of the first night we had allowed ourselves to do it right, the night before I was sent away for the summer to work on a ranch, the night we needed clean sheets and wide beds and safe harbors instead of cold car seats in crowded drive-ins or scratchy couches in the homes of parents. We’d driven in an awed silence to a nearby town, to a motel that lurked like a highwayman at its far end. I’d obtained a key and a smirk from a desk clerk who’d given lots of keys to lots of kids and liked it, signed Eugene Gant’s name in the book, and led Sally into unit four with a hand as wet and hot as boiled clothes.

  Perhaps because we had done it wrong so many times, it turned out just the way the songs and movies said it would, the ones with Rock and Doris or Perry and Patty. And though the place was more thrilling than the deed, somehow, the vision of Sally lying finally fully naked on a blue speckled bed below a white speckled ceiling, wearing blinking rays of neon and a blush, that vision had aroused me on many nights thereafter, college nights, army nights, lonely, hollow, seamless nights.

  While I was away at the ranch that summer, Sally had dated someone else, as I had urged her to do but hoped she wouldn’t. Even when my jealousy subsided, and we were allied once more, she had never allowed me to take her to such a place again. It was a perverse punishment, because we still groped and sweated in cars and parlors, shunning not biology but only the supernal beauty of romance.

  Those memories were surprisingly hot, thirty years after they’d been lit, and they burned even brighter as I watched Sally Stillings move toward the only chair in the room, the chair beside the rumpled bed. Sally did look good, her vanity both a shield and a sword in her middle age. Her clothes were simple and flattering, her skirt and blouse pressed stylishly against her long legs and high breasts. The ponytail of old was now bobbed, its remnant a kind of knot at the base of her neck. Her skin was tan, the color of apple juice. Her eyes seemed bigger, her cheeks higher, her nose finer, but whether from a defect of memory or a triumph of makeup I couldn’t say. When she was seated Sally looked at me with a flirting confidence and I felt like a kid again and vulnerable to the goblins that had plagued me then.

  “I heard you were in town, Marsh,” she began, “so I decided to come by and say hello. I hope you don’t mind.”

  I shook my head. “I’m glad you did.”

  “Are you sure?” She raised one brow. “We didn’t part on the best of terms, as I remember.”

  “No.”

  “But it wouldn’t have worked out for us. Not then.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “But, well … I didn’t mean to, well, you know. I had to do what seemed best.”

  “I know. It’s all right.”

  “You never married, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Was it because of me? Because I left you for Eric?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, trying to spike the hope in her voice. It was like Sally to want to be a cause of pain, just a little, to have been a prickly presence in my life for thirty years, to have scarred me just a tiny bit. And she had.

  Sally shifted her position and the subject. “I was sorry when your folks were killed in the accident, Marsh. I meant to write you but I never did. I liked them a lot.”

  “They liked you, too.”

  “Not always,” she said with a wry smile. “Not your mom, anyway.”

  I laughed. “They liked you a lot better once I was safe in college and you were still unfertilized,” I said.

  “Do you think they knew what we were doing out there on the porch?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did they ever say anything?”

  “No. Not directly. Just some general discussion of abstinence and contraception, with emphasis on the former.”

  Sally frowned.

  “That’s a long time ago, Sally. No one’s keeping track.”

  Nothing was said for a minute. She reached into her purse and brought out a cigarette and lit it. I fumbled with the knot on my tie, started to sit on the bed but then decided not to, and waited for Sally to speak.

  “We’re old, Marsh,” she said suddenly. “Old.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you think it would turn out this way, Marsh?”

  “What way?”

  She frowned with thought, its burden wrinkling her upper lip the way it always had. “I don’t know. Being so old so fast, before you had time to do the things you wanted to do.… Being back here in Chaldea again … living our lives without each other.” Sally’s voice grew dry and crackled. I thought she was going to cry.

  “It’s not good to have regrets, Sally, if that’s what you mean. It’s too long a list. Once you get started you can never find a place to stop.”

  She sighed. “I know. It’s being back here, I think. It seems like thirty years have passed and I haven’t done a damn thing with them, except get old and worry about what menopause will do to me. And wish sometimes I’d married you.”

  “Why are you back, Sally?”

  “Divorce,” she said simply, then looked at me with eyes more defiant than shamed.

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. For the best, really.”

  “Your husband was a dentist, right?”

  “Orthodontist. Fell in love with his hygienist. The lack of imagination in that move is typical of his entire life.”

  “So are you back for good?”

  She shook her head quickly. “God, no. I’m just spending my alimony, biding my time, giving Rachel some stability while I put myself back together. Plus letting Mom and Dad feel needed again.”

  “Rachel?”

  “My daughter. Age sixteen, if you can believe it. Very beautiful.”

  “Like her mother.”

  “Thank you, sir. Luckily, Rachel’s much smarter than her mother. About men, about money, about everything. She’s been on the pill for two years.”

  “Is that what passes for smart these days?” I asked. It was automatic and mean. I still wasn’t sure what I thought about Sally, it seemed, wasn’t sure I forgave her.

  “That stinks, Marsh. The things I could tell you about kids these days. About what they do, what they’re expected to do. I …”

  “Relax, Sally,” I said. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I’m sure it is the smart thing.”

  “I’m a good mother, Marsh. Maybe not much else, but I’m a good mother. It doesn�
��t count for much these days, I admit.”

  “It counts with Rachel. It counts with me.”

  Sally nodded, and some of the red left her face, but the pain stayed in her eyes. “So. How have your thirty years been?” she asked with a reluctant grin.

  “Dull. Long. Quiet. At least the way they measure things these days.”

  “You’re not a lawyer anymore, did I hear that right?”

  “You did.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lots of reasons.”

  “Like what?”

  “Being a lawyer scared me.”

  “And being a, whatever you call it, doesn’t?”

  “Not as much.”

  “Why not? Don’t people shoot at you and things?”

  “Once in a while. But these days I know which direction the bullets will come from. When I was a lawyer I wasn’t sure.”

  “Am I supposed to understand what you’re talking about?”

  “No. I don’t understand it myself. What I’ve done for thirty years is find more reasons to stay alive than not, I guess. Not much else.”

  “Why didn’t you get married, Marsh? Really.” Sally’s look was impish, her posture in the chair suddenly provocative.

  “Marriage scared me, too, I guess.”

  “You sound like such a coward, Marsh.”

  I shrugged. “There’s a lot around to be afraid of. More every day if you read the papers or walk the streets.”

  Sally stood and walked to the window. The pane was reinforced with chicken wire and the outer side was streaked with filth. The view was mostly brick, but through a crack you could see a portion of the square. “Remember where you first kissed me?” Sally asked.

  “Where?”

  “On the courthouse steps. On Pancake Day, right after the beauty contest. I still think I should have won.”

  “So do I. How was the kiss?”

  “Off-center, as I remember. C-minus.”

  “And you were used to better?”

  “You weren’t the first, if that’s what you mean,” Sally said, and turned around and faced me. “To kiss me, that is.”

  There was a place to go with it then, but I hoped we wouldn’t. I had the memories of those times and that emotion labeled and filed the way I wanted them, the way they were most useful to me. I didn’t want them scrambled or even added to.