Come Morning - Joe Gores

by Gores

  Moyers was jerking the silenced .38 from his topcoat pocket, but Runyan had already snapped the towel. Moyers yelled as the wet cloth bit at his eyes. He staggered back against the window shade, firing two wild shots as he did.

  The shade shredded as the window burst inward with the double-crump of the 12-gauge shotgun across the alley. Moyers was blown across the room, his back a pulped mass. His inert form slid face-first down the wall to settle in a heap against the torn-up baseboard.

  CHAPTER 31

  The intense glare of the spotlights inside Runyan's room cast an almost palpable bar of white light through the open doorway, washing the wallpaper flowers from the opposite wall. Policemen moved in and out, their shadows cast almost black by the relentless spots. Runyan stood in the hall beside the door, head lowered and arms folded on his chest, listening to his landlady's quiet hysterics from the living room downstairs. He thought he had it figured out now. Of those who had known about the diamonds, only Louise's former lover was still unaccounted for. And the shotgun blasts which had killed Moyers had unmasked him. The problem was, what could he do about it? What should he do about it? Stay here? Leave? Seek vengeance? Seek Louise? Or give up everything, slip back into the narrow existence of so many ex-cons who let their past fuck-ups forever dictate the shape of their futures?

  Prince emerged from the room carrying a clear plastic evidence bag with Moyers's silenced .38 inside it. At almost the exact moment, as if they were indeed identical twins, Waterhouse appeared at the head of the stairs. He waited while two green-coated ambulance men edged their way out

  of the room and down the stairs with Moyers's bodybagged corpse, then they converged on Runyan like a nickel defense on a quarterback.

  "Here we got a thirty-eight automatic with a commercially made, expansion-chamber type silencer," said Prince. He held up the evidence bag as if it were a trout he had caught. "Moyers had the fucking permit for the piece in his pocket-though not for the silencer, of course--and a current passport and a one-way ticket to Israel. Obviously planned to kill Runyan and keep the diamonds for himself. Diamonds Runyan ain't got anything to say about."

  Runyan remained silent.

  Waterhouse asked, "What about across the alley?"

  "Ah, yes. Across the alley. Real cute over there. Guy rented the room today. Big and bearded. The lab boys are going over it for prints, but it doesn't look as if he even whizzed in the john. Just waited. We also got two twelve-gauge double-oh shell casings." He looked at Runyan and laughed sardonically. "Looks like somebody tried for you and got Moyers instead."

  Waterhouse nodded. "It figures. 'Cause after our anonymous phone tip we find Delarty and Gatian just getting a packet out of a locker at the bus station. Do we find diamonds inside?" He answered himself. "We do not. We find sevenhundred K in bearer bonds so hot the bank in New Orleans don't even know they're missing from the vault until I call them up and tell them. Still had the bank's bands on them."

  "If I had a dirty mind," said Prince to Runyan, "I'd think you fenced the diamonds, bought some hot bonds somewhere--probably the same fence, and he's a guy I'd like to meet--and then set these guys up with some of the hot bonds for a fall because they blew away your old pal Cardwell."

  "Would you care if I did?" asked Runyan.

  "Hell, no! I'd love it. Because if you did or not they think you set them up with the bonds, and they're pissed. Since there doesn't seem to be any way we can touch you legally, the idea of people out there after you suits me just fine."

  "To say nothing of how pissed our shotgunner's gonna be when he finds out he scragged the wrong guy," put in Prince with a sort of dreadful relish.

  "So we think you ought to leave town," said Waterhouse. "Like maybe today? Like maybe far away? We'll square it with Sharples down at the parole authority. He sounds so cooperative I keep thinking you must have something on him, too."

  Runyan kept silent.

  Prince said, "By God, another one would like your ass! Go die in somebody else's jurisdiction, Runyan."

  "So Waterhouse and Prince don't get stuck with the paperwork," said Waterhouse.

  Maybe they were right, Runyan thought. Maybe it was time to leave. Maybe it was time to go home.

  ***

  Portland had changed in 12 years, had grown, become citified, gotten cluttered up with traffic--but still, despite the new skyline and the Portland Mall, reminding him in some odd way of suburban Cincinnati on a bad day. It was still too early to make contact with Art at the truckers' union office, but he wanted to see the old homestead first anyway, alone.

  He caught a Woodstock 19 bus and rode it out past Reed College to the end of the line at 103rd Street. Old white frame houses almost touching elbows on barren, tough-looking streets. Fast-food joints next to liquor stores, pickups with gun racks, outlaw motorcyclists in black leather, semis snoring through gears on the thruways. Not much really changed.

  A mile's walk brought him to his old high school. He went up the walk to the front entrance of the tan three-story stone building. It was not yet seven o'clock in the morning, so it was still locked up tight.

  He pressed his nose against the glass, cupping his hands around his eyes so he could peer in. The hall stretched straight ahead through the building. Classrooms had their doors still open from the cleaning people the night before.

  Runyan seemed to hear the muted rattle of football cleats on the terrazzo floor, vague youthful voices, laughter. It was almost as if he could see padded and suited football players coming up the hall from the far door, backlit almost to transparent silhouette. They were carrying their helmets in their hands or under one arm. He and Art were among them, chatting and laughing as they headed for the locker room after practice.

  He turned away and went back down the walk to the sidewalk, filled with an unfocused yearning that was neither regret nor nostalgia. Rather, a sense of incompletion.

  Ten minutes later a teenager in a pickup truck stopped for his raised thumb. The boy had an acned chin and a spiky yellow cellophaned Laurie Anderson haircut, but he talked of the hunting season with the reverence usually reserved for religious beliefs. The inevitable gun rack held an 1897 Winchester 30-30 lever-action carbine, the old one with the hexagonal barrel.

  "That takes me back," said Runyan, sounding momentarily old even to himself. "I killed my first buck with one of those old Winchesters."

  "Me too," said the boy. "Last fall. First one." His warm brown eyes shone at the memory. "Me'n my dad..."

  The pickup dropped him and rattled off along the country blacktop. Runyan started across a stubble field toward low hills covered with hardwoods, oaks, and elms and a few birch, not yet leafed. Twenty minutes later, memory bursting upon him, he swerved to a brush pile and kicked it.

  A cottontail bounced out, jinking away in terrified delight, and in his memory Runyan raised the long-barreled .22 Colt Woodsman and snapped off a single shot. The rabbit tumbled over, throwing up a spray of snow. Today's rabbit zipped under another brushpile and was gone.

  Runyan went on into the marshy triangle at the foot of the hill. When he stepped on a tussock of winter-dried grass, a hen pheasant burst out in a rush of wings to angle up and away like the ringneck 15 years before, in full plumage, long tail fluttering and stubby pheasant wings beating to raise his heavy gallinaceous body. Runyan raised the .22 and fired a single shot. The pheasant took a heart-stopping pinwheel tumble to land a hundred feet away with an audible thud. The hen set her wings and glided into safe cover in the hedgerow at the far edge of the marsh.

  Runyan nodded slightly to himself, then went on. Ten minutes later he came out of the woods to the narrow drive meandering up through the hardwoods. Now he strolled uphill as then he had walked up the slight rise in the cemetery to the open grave. He'd been in hunting clothes and had carried the fresh-shot rabbit and pheasant. Snow had fallen from a leaden sky.

  The other mourners had departed but the casket was still above the open grave on its slings. Runyan laid the ra
bbit and the pheasant on top of it, disturbing the snow as little as possible. The blood, fur, and bright feathers were very vivid against the white. He stood with his bared head lowered.

  Goodbye, Pops. Goodbye to deer-shining out of season in the hardwood belt across the creek. Goodbye to jump-shooting mallards down in the river bottoms. Goodbye to woodsmoke and mellow bourbon by firelight and all the things that made a part of you mine. The part they could never get at.

  A long time ago, almost in another life; a life of primary colors which had long since faded. Then he thought of Louise, and wondered if his losses were more in memory than in fact. Only time would tell.

  He rounded the final bend at the edge of the trees and got his first glimpse of the old-fashioned white two-story frame house set in among the oaks. He went up the turn-around, past the kennels where memory foxhounds bayed and wagged their tails and leaped around the young Runyan and

  Pops in hunting clothes and cradling cased shotguns in the crooks of their arms.

  Runyan turned away. The kennels were empty and weedgrown, the dog houses half rotted away. So were the bird feeders in front of the house, though he almost heard the clamor of the chickadees and juncoes as Pops put out a mesh bag of suet and ten pounds of cracked corn.

  The doors were locked, so he continued on around the house to the corner downspout that once had been his nocturnal route to adventure. It seemed as sturdy as ever; he started up, jamming stiffened fingers into the space between the spout and the siding, his body angled out from the wall.

  At the second-floor level, he reached over and pushed up the unlocked window of what had been his folks' room. He swung himself from the drainpipe right in through the window, landed off-balance on a rag rug, slid across the polished hardwood floor and crashed into a table by the far window. A typewriter fell into his lap as a snow of papers blizzarded in all directions.

  Runyan sat on the floor and laughed. "Watch that first step, it's a bitch," he said aloud.

  The room was essentially unchanged. Same old faded family portraits on the walls, his mother's old-fashioned tortoiseshell toilet articles on the dresser top, the double bed with the brass bedstead and the quilt his mother had made ...

  He remembered his father dying in that bed, his arm hanging limply over the edge, smoke from his cigarette running up to the ceiling in a thin unwavering blue line. That arm, unable to hold a cigarette up in the air, gave Runyan the same wrench as finding a good foxhound that had gotten mixed up with a bobcat.

  Runyan righted the table and put the typewriter back. He had just collected the scattered papers when he heard cars coming up the drive. More than one of them. He folded the papers over and stuffed them almost absently into his pocket. Through the front window he watched a current Caddy stop at the foot of the front walk. Art got out. Runyan's lips twitched. Trust Art to drive the biggest, gaudiest thing Detroit currently produced.

  As a woman got out of the second car, Runyan crossed to the door and stepped out. A complex of conflicting emotions made his inner compass spin. From below drifted up the sound of the front door opening distantly, the woman's voice demanding sarcastically, "What's the matter, Art, did you think I was going to sneak out here and steal the silver or something?"

  Runyan opened the door of the study and went in, shutting off the voices and sounds from below.

  CHAPTER 32

  I don't understand you any more, Louise," Art said coldly. "You fucking got what you went after, why did you come back?" He was in the middle of the front room, between her and the stairs. It was an old-fashioned room with an overstuffed leather couch and chairs of rosewood and needlepoint seats. On one wall was The Dying Indian hunched on his pony, feet hanging, head drooping, warlance angled down in defeat.

  Louise, reeling with fatigue, knew just how he felt. Despairing. She had driven all night, had stopped off at Art's office to tell him she was going out to the house for just a minute, and now this.

  "I came to get my stories, Art," she said in a tired voice. "My typewriter. Small things, but my own. So if you'd just kindly get to hell out of the way ..."

  Art, his face ugly with emotion, said, "Why bother? Now you can buy a thousand fucking typewriters." He added bitterly, "How much did you work him for, baby?"

  She stared at him, astonished.

  "Is that what this is all about? I told you on the telephone, I just wanted-"

  "Oh, don't give me that shit, Louise. When you called me that last time, I knew he was getting the diamonds and you were getting a share. You saw your chance and took it. I don't blame you. But you knew I really needed that money to pay off the union pension fund before the audit. Shit, they're going to indict me! How could you-"

  "Art. .." Then she paused. What was the use? He wouldn't believe whatever she told him anyway. Maybe she should just turn around and walk away.

  ***

  Up in his father's den, Runyan was walking slowly around, touching things, looking at things, remembering. He could almost see Pops and him across the big hardwood desk from each other, feet up, sipping bourbon.

  Remember, boy, you can do things you can't walk away from.

  Maybe he was doing one now. He moved past the desk to the glass-fronted gun cabinet. It was unlocked, as it always had been: No one in this house had ever been careless around guns, there'd been no need for locks or safety devices.

  After a hesitation more mental than physical, Runyan opened the cabinet and reached in and took out a leather case. He carried it over to the desk, unzipped it, and almost ritualistically brought out the two halves of a broken-down 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun. Someone had crudely sawed off the barrels to make them several inches shorter than legal length.

  That removed the last doubt, although he'd already been morally certain. Who else still alive and free had known about his Bush Street address where the second shotgun attack had taken place?

  He snapped the two halves of the shotgun together, then broke it at the breech to expose the chambers, laid it down on the desk, and went back to the cabinet to bring back a box of 12-gauge double-oh shells. About half the shells were missing. He took out two of them. Stood with them in his hand, thoughts, memories, and emotions running through his head.

  The sound of raised voices from downstairs dimly penetrated the thick floor of the room. He started slightly, dragged back from his reverie.

  ***

  "Goddammit, Art, let go of me!"

  She had tried to leave, but he had grabbed her from behind and spun her around. He started kissing her, smearing his face against hers, seeking her tongue with his. His mouth smelled of the cigars he smoked.

  'C'mon, baby, one last go for old times' sake. .."

  She twisted and raged and broke free, face flushed with anger and effort. "Jesus," she exclaimed, "to think I ever-"

  Art backhanded her across the face, a full-arm vicious swipe that knocked her right to her knees. She stayed there a moment, as a fighter who has been knocked down will stay there for the mandatory eight-count.

  Then she picked herself up, warily--frightened more of his thoughts than of anything else. He believed Runyan had gotten the diamonds and that she had gotten part of the action. If he tried to extract her nonexistent share from her ... But as he bulked over her threateningly, there was only sarcasm in her voice.

  "Terrific! Hold that pose! This is just the way I want to remember you!"

  Art said in a low enraged voice, "Sure, you'll fuck my brother any time he'll have you, but since I don't have a stash of diamonds to hold you. .." He burst out, "You were there because I sent you, for Chrissake! You never heard of the diamonds until. . ."

  He stopped because she had started to laugh: genuine, delighted peals of laughter.

  "Everybody has been after the diamonds ever since Runyan got out of prison," she said. "But someone built a subdivision over them. The diamonds don't exist any more."

  Even as she said it, she regretted it. No telling what sort of rage that would arouse
in him. Art had never been long on ironies. But to her amazement, he started to guffaw, his heavy laughter so delighted there could almost have been an edge of hysteria in it.

  "You're taking it well," she said flatly.

  "No, the joke. .. the joke's on you. And on Runyan." He laughed again. "The fucker's dead."

  Louise felt herself stagger, almost fall, as if he had struck her again so swiftly and unexpectedly that she did not feel the blow, only its aftereffects.

  "What are you telling me?" she exclaimed. "Goddamn you, what are you saying to me?"

  "That he killed me," said Runyan's voice. "With this shotgun."

  They whirled toward him. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, cradling the cocked and ready sawed-off shotgun in the crook of his left arm.

  Art, ashen-faced, began backing away, hands raised to shoulder-height. He tried a sickly smile.

  "Hey, Runyan, look, I can explain..."

  Louise felt dead, frozen inside. Now Runyan knew it all: about her and Art. That it was his brother who had schemed to take the diamonds from him. She had let Moyers drive her away for nothing. She should have stayed, let him do his worst. Now it was too late. Now there was too much that was bitter between them to ever ...

  But she didn't understand, either, what Runyan had said. That Art was the shotgunner who had tried to murder him?

  "Twice," said Runyan. "The first time was straight economics--he thought I was dumb enough to be running around with the diamonds on me. He called you off so you wouldn't know. But he missed, so he had to send you back in." He turned to Art with a sardonic smile. "The second time you shot the wrong guy."

  Art had backed slowly away across the room until he touched the credenza against the far wall.

  "He ... he knew the Bush Street address," said Louise haltingly. "That's where he sent me the second time. .."

  "He sent me money there." He turned back to Art. "But why the second time, Art?" He asked it as if he really wanted to know. "Why, when you thought I'd already recovered the diamonds and they were out of your reach anyway? Was it just simple frustration? Doesn't seem much of a reason to kill someone."