Suicide Season

by Rex Burns

  “They are.” I swirled the clear red liquid up the curving sides of my glass and watched its color drain back like fresh blood. “Margaret—”

  “What?”

  “Your husband. Did he make any trips to Las Vegas before he died?”

  “Austin?” She blinked. “I can’t think of any. He often made business trips for Owen, of course, but I can’t recall any there. Why?”

  “Apparently the Aegis people have connections to Vegas. Mob connections. I just wondered.”

  Her silence lengthened. Finally, she said, “I accept that Austin … stole the plans for the projects and sold them to Aegis. I have to accept that. But I can’t believe that he was involved with organized crime. Not knowingly. Not willingly.”

  “I’m not saying that he knew. Aegis is a legitimate company and the Vegas connection isn’t all that definite.”

  “Then what would it mean if he had gone to Las Vegas?”

  “Probably nothing. Possibly that’s where he met Neeley or whoever approved his deal with Aegis. Maybe that’s where he got the payoff.”

  “If there were a payoff.” A bitter note came into her voice. “That hasn’t been proven, has it? If you could find the money, you’d have the final proof of Austin’s complicity, wouldn’t you?”

  “You wanted me to look for that kind of evidence, Margaret.”

  “I know. I suppose it hurt me more than I can admit to learn things about the man I spent so much of my life with. A man I used to love. I suppose it still hurts.”

  I slowly finished my wine. “Of course it does.” I set the glass hesitantly on its coaster. “I’d better go.” A man she used to love. “I have to look over the work at AeroLabs. They’re finishing the installations tonight.”

  She put her half-full glass on the end table and leaned her head back on the sofa. The soft light from the lamp seemed to gather in her eyes, which looked wide and large and yet sleepy. “It’s still early.” Her arm lay along the sofa back, the flesh touched by the lamplight and made warm in its glow. Slowly, her hand turned palm up and open toward me. “Please stay awhile.”

  The first indication of the success of the rumor about us working again for McAllister came in a telephone call from Leonard Kaffey.

  “You’re Kirk? The one who came by here with that cockamamie story about investing in our company?”

  “That wasn’t one of my brighter moments, Mr. Kaffey.”

  “From what I’ve seen, it might have been. I hear you’re working for …?”

  “McAllister. You hear right.”

  “I hear you’re supposed to be investigating …?”

  “You hear right about that, too.”

  “It’s lies, Kirk. We never heard of that woman.”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

  The line’s silence drew into a weighty length. “I was hoping what I heard was wrong.”

  “Why’s that, Mr. Kaffey.”

  “Complications, Kirk. Life should not be so complicated. Much better for all concerned if things are kept simple, you know?”

  The line clicked dead and I glanced at Bunch who had been listening to the monitor. “He wanted things kept simple.”

  “Sure he did, that bastard. A simple assault here, a simple homicide there.” Bunch turned off the monitor and replayed the tape of Kaffey’s words. “So now what?”

  “It’s their move. Kaffey found out what he called for; now they’ll try something.”

  Bunch’s knuckles gave a muffled series of pops as he mashed one fist inside the other. “Something they didn’t want to do unless they were sure?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “I hope to hell they try soon.”

  I didn’t think they would—it was too close to the call from Kaffey. If the thugs followed their usual pattern, they would wait until we had relaxed our guard and then come at us from some blind side. The answer was, of course, not to relax and not to offer a blind side. But I had been wrong before.

  In the meantime, life went on. The AeroLabs project was into its last phase and we spent a lot of time there checking out the circuits in a final inspection before giving the subs our okay. There was the usual handful of problems, generally the result of a faulty relay or switch or an occasional wrong hook-up. That was Bunch’s forte, and he sniffed them out with Martin hanging over his shoulder to give a deep sigh at every additional expense. That was one of the pleasures of working with Martin: he was a penny pincher who knew it saved money to do the job right the first time—provided there was a good chance of getting caught. And with Bunch the chances were very good indeed. My job was to familiarize the security people with the newly installed equipment, to show them the little they needed for operations, preventive maintenance, and test procedures, and to establish security routines and methods that would complement the equipment. It’s surprising how many corporations will spend like a drunken computer freak on fancy new gear and think that’s all there is to it. Then they either cut back on personnel to cover the cost of equipment, or they don’t train their people to get the most out of their new toys and supplement those areas where the gadgets are weak. They forget that the primary line of defense is still people, and they forget that the foolproof system has never been invented—that the persistence of human greed and of time itself is against them. But then, as my father would have been quick to remind me, it’s against all of us; and if one aspect of the proper life for man was to create a momentary stay against time’s confusion, another might be a momentary stay against greed. Or perhaps confusion and greed were one. Waxing philosophical, I was; that usually happened at the end of a long day when I could at last prop my shoeless feet up at the edge of the flickering fireplace and take my time sipping a tall, heavy mug of Belhaven. That was also the time when the telephone usually rang.

  “Kirk? It’s me—Vinny. What’s this shit I hear you’re working on Carrie’s murder, man?”

  “Rumor has a thousand tongues.”

  “Does that mean it’s true?”

  “It’s true.”

  “That’s my case, Kirk! You’re moving into my territory!”

  “Your case? Who’s paying to make it your case?”

  “Nobody has to, man. She was a client. I been thinking—word gets around I let my clients get squelched and don’t do anything about it, pretty soon I got no clients.”

  “Public relations! I hadn’t thought of that angle. Is that what you’re telling the cops?”

  “What?”

  “It’s their case, too, Landrum. And you telling them to stay out of your territory?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s different, and you know it. Besides, they’re goddamn happy to let somebody else do their work for them. The bastards.”

  “Do I detect bitterness?”

  “You know it. They held me for seventy-one hours on nothing. Didn’t even check out my alibi, the bastards, until the second day. Just put me in the can and sat on me. On suspicion.”

  “Frankly, Vinny, I can’t blame them.”

  “Shit. Listen, Busey was my client, so I got a claim. You know that. Cut me in, Kirk—let me work with you on this one. There are things I know about her that you don’t and you’re going to have to come to me sooner or later. Besides, she was a friend, too. Like I told you, we had something going. I didn’t want to admit this before, but all this has really got me broke up. I had a lot of time to think—seventy-one fucking hours—and Carrie wasn’t so bad, you know? I owe her.”

  “What are you asking for, Vinny?”

  “Nothing special—the usual fees and expenses.”

  “A hundred bucks a day for one week. No expenses. If you come up with anything, you get a bonus.” And I would probably get lumps from Bunch for doing it. But for a change there was a little truth in what Vinny said: he knew Busey better than we did.

  “A hundred—? How in shit’s name can I live on that? What’re you getting from McAllister? Two thousand a week? Three? And you tell me a lousy hundred a d
ay?”

  “You’re doing it because Busey was a friend, remember? And that’s the offer—take it or leave it.”

  “I got no choice, do I?”

  “Start tracing out her day—who saw her last, if she was with anyone, if any of the people in the neighboring buildings saw her enter your office or saw anyone else go in.”

  “I know my fucking job, Kirk.”

  “And I don’t want that information to come second hand from police reports—do your own legwork.”

  He didn’t hang up yet. “I want half up front or it’s no deal.”

  “Come by the office tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be there early.”

  He was, layered hair freshly blow dried and a heavy fragrance of some kind of perfumed male pheromone radiating from him. He read the check carefully before folding it away in his wallet. “I don’t know how much I can find out in just a week. I got other clients with business to look after, too.”

  Bunch answered, “If you want social security, get old. The contract’s for a week, and that’s eight days longer than I’d give you.”

  “We’ll talk about it at the end of the week,” I said. “Don’t forget our generous bonus plan: we pay for results.”

  “Hey, the Vincent Landrum Detective Agency gets results; it says so on my business card. I’ll check in tonight. So long, Homer.”

  Bunch, his mouth a sour twist, eyed me.

  “He knew her, Bunch. Better than we did. He can save us a lot of time tracing her movements. And he’ll be all right for the scut work.”

  “Maybe. But he’s still a living, breathing dog turd.”

  “Did you get anything from homicide?”

  He snorted the last of Vinny’s fragrance from his nostrils and tossed a manila folder on the desk. “Yeah, here. They don’t have a thing. They really figured Landrum for the job, but his alibi held up.”

  I read over the shiny Xeroxed sheets. They included the pathologist’s findings, which confirmed the cause of death to be the gunshot wound, and the diary of the investigation up to the present date: witnesses interviewed, evidence catalogued, and lab findings. Vinny’s name rated a paragraph that, reluctantly, showed his alibi to be supported by several witnesses who neither knew him beforehand nor had any reason to lie for him. Right now, the file was resting undisturbed in the division’s Open drawer and would stay there until something new turned up.

  “Did you talk with Kiefer?”

  “Yeah. He couldn’t tell me anything more than what’s in the file—which, of course, we’re not supposed to have. So put it in the safe when you’re through.” Bunch added, “He wanted to know what our angle was.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “That McAllister hired us to look into it and we were just getting started.”

  That was part of the truth, anyway, and all that was necessary right now. Perhaps this occupation was, as my father had worried, eroding my sense of morality. But that could happen anywhere and to anyone. The world wasn’t the home of morality; that resided somewhere in the self and tried to work its way out into the world through what you did. You clung, as we had discussed it, to whatever you believed—to the idea that the ends don’t justify the means, or to your sense of right and wrong—even if some occupations placed you in situations where more choices of that kind had to be made. But whatever the job, you had to work with the material the world gave you, no matter how corrupt or immoral it might be, because that was usually the only material there was. The main thing was to try to hang on to that narrow territory of right and wrong that you could defend against the world, and then you hoped to draw a balance between what you had to do and the justice and morality and virtue you felt in what you accomplished. That’s how my father had concluded, anyway, as we talked on the telephone. The next evening he blew his brains out. It was a hell of a way to change his mind.

  “Dev? You listening?”

  “What?”

  “I said I can’t take that damned piano anymore. I’m going over to the hospital to see Susan. You want to come along?”

  “Yeah—let’s see how she’s doing.”

  Mrs. Faulk was there as usual and was glad to see us. Susan had just finished a physical therapy session and was back in bed, sitting up with her hair freshly washed and dried. She looked scrubbed and pale and porcelain-like, the kind of lack of color that comes from missing the sun, and her eyes despite being brighter and quicker, had gained a kind of puzzled pleading as if she were trapped in a glass maze somewhere inside her skull and could see us out there but could not work her way past the silent barriers to reach us.

  “Suze! Hi, Suze—you look great!”

  The word struggled somewhere in her throat before it finally rose to her lips, “Bunch.”

  “She’s having more trouble speaking,” Mrs. Faulk murmured to me. “She’s back to one-word responses.”

  “Regressing?”

  “The doctor said it wasn’t unusual. It’s probably temporary.”

  Susan’s eyes turned to me and she held still for a moment, groping to find the name lost somewhere at the edge of recall. Then the effort crumbled into tears and her voice gasped roughly, “Shit-shit-shit!” and her slender fist pounded against the white blanket.

  “Hey, now, take it easy—you can’t do it all at once.” I held the fist and stroked it until it began to loosen and she managed to stifle the angry sobs. Bunch dabbed at her eyes and nose with a Kleenex. “You’ll make it—you’ve got a lot of help. It’ll just take time.”

  “She always was so eager for everything.” Mrs. Faulk managed to keep her own eyes dry as she smiled at her daughter. “So athletic. So self-confident.”

  “She will be again.”

  “Yeah, she will,” said Bunch. “Hell, she’s getting there now—that’s why she’s fighting. Right, Suze?”

  Her head, sunk back against the pillow, nodded faintly and she stared at the trapeze bar dangling over her head.

  “I’ve heard of a therapist who has a clinic up in Boulder,” said Mrs. Faulk. “She integrates occupational therapy and speech therapy in a new way. They say she’s very good.”

  “Don’t worry about the cost,” said Bunch. “Anything the insurance doesn’t cover, I’ll help out with.”

  “That’s not necessary, Bunch. But thank you.”

  “I want to, Mrs. Faulk. I want to be able to do something.”

  The woman’s hand, as slender as her daughter’s but showing the exercise of years, rested a moment on Bunch’s shoulder in gentle benediction. “You are.”

  Mrs. Faulk and I moved away from the bed to leave Bunch and Susan alone. On the other side of the curtain, the patient in the second bed shifted and grunted with a twinge of pain and settled back into the chatty narcotic of daytime television.

  “Have the police ever found out anything about the person who did this?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t expect them to. Not unless they’re very lucky.”

  “It doesn’t seem right that he could do this and then disappear completely.” Absently, she straightened the fleece pad that softened Susan’s wheelchair. “It isn’t revenge I want but … some indication of responsibility. Something on that person’s part that shows he cares about what he did to another human being.”

  She wasn’t likely to get it. Their only regret was that they didn’t hit the person they were after; and if there was any emotion at all for what they did to Susan, it was the satisfaction of having hurt someone Bunch and I cared for. But there was no sense telling that to Mrs. Faulk; it would only deepen the shadows of a world that was unfair and make it tilt into malevolence for her. The world still held sunshine, even if it was only outside a hospital window, or caught in the petals of the flowers beside the bed. There was no need to darken those things for her, too.

  “I suppose if he hadn’t been so frightened, he wouldn’t have driven off, would he? Perhaps he’s suffering in ways we don’t know.”

  “Perhaps.” More likely gl
oating in ways that would be difficult for Mrs. Faulk to comprehend. But not impossible for me, because I knew that in all of us was the seed of that satisfaction in hurting someone. It seemed so long ago now that Susan had seen it surface in me, and it was still there when I thought about those two. The seed of willful destruction in all of us, my father had called it, whether the destruction of others or of ourselves. And, he’d added, the two were usually one. Words of wisdom from a man who was to destroy himself. Words, at least. And maybe words that only measured the limits of wisdom without leading us to the goal.

  I gave Susan a final hug before we left and this time, with a silently mouthed hint from Bunch, she managed my name and we all clapped and smiled and she looked pleased with herself. In the car, Bunch broke the silence once to say, “She’s going to make it.” And I answered, “Yes.”

  We were swinging with the column of traffic through the stoplight leading onto University Boulevard when, in the rearview mirror, I glimpsed a car that seemed vaguely familiar—a nondescript sedan of modest, tan color. I’d seen it in the mirror recently, and now it seemed to hover at a fixed distance behind us.

  “What’s wrong?” Bunch didn’t look back but watched my eyes study the mirror.

  “Maybe we’ve picked up the scumbags. Let’s find out.”

  “Don’t rush it, Dev. Go on down to I-25.”

  We did, arcing through the cloverleaf that fed into the northbound lanes. Behind, the tan car blinked its turn and followed, two or three vehicles back. I held my speed steady on the freeway, just over the fifty-five limit, which meant that ninety percent of the cars zipped past in the fast lanes. But not the tan one. Sometimes dropping back, shifting occasionally from one lane to another, the car always managed to glide closer with the approach of every off-ramp and to fall away when the exit had been passed.

  “I think we got us one, Dev. I think we got a nibble.”

  “Let’s see if we can hook him.”

  Signaling the turn at the Sixth Avenue exit, I led the tan car south on Kalamath and into the tangle of over-and-underpasses that made that area a bewildering snarl of sharp turns and dead-end streets. Other traffic sloughed off heading for the factory or warehouse or distributor’s office that the roads serviced, but the tan vehicle, torn between coming too close or losing us on one of the sharp angles, hung at the edge of vision. Lumbering across an aged bridge over the South Platte, I led it through the Valverde neighborhood and finally to an almost empty stretch of pitted and forgotten highway that wound along the west bank of the river. There we stopped.