Murder in the Wings

by Ed Gorman

  "So he hasn't called for nearly a whole week," she said.

  "Gosh. Ma Bell must be getting nervous."

  "God, Dwyer, look."

  A black Buick, the sort of car monsignors always drove back in the era of Bishop Sheen, came up to the asphalt, paused, and then proceeded north.

  We sat with the motor off in a grove of white birches just off the highway. If Dr. Kern saw us, he didn't let on.

  "Great," she said, "now we can go back to the cabin."

  We stood in the open area in front of the fireplace, looking around. The place still smelled sweetly of log smoke. The leather furniture needed dusting, the kitchen sink contained some unwashed dishes, and sections of the bookcases needed straightening. But all the same I'd have lived there if they asked me. The freezer alone, over in the kitchen area, must have cost more than my Honda. You could have gotten several head of cattle in it. Live ones.

  "You want to start upstairs?" Donna said.

  "Sure. Why not?"

  She looked at me. "Boy, Dwyer, you don't seem very up."

  "Three days of rain. It's starting to get to me."

  Then she said, quite seriously, "You're being selfish. I've never seen you be selfish before." She leaned over and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. "Think of Wade out there. Think what he must be going through. He's not sure if he's a murderer or not. We have to help him."

  I followed her, pretty much down on myself (so it's raining, big fucking deal; the homeless and hungry and malformed of the world probably have it a bit tougher than I do). When we came to the top of the stairs, Donna stopped and peered into a large den-like room and said, "He cleaned it up."

  I glanced in. "This was the room that was tossed?"

  She nodded.

  "No wonder he had the shotgun," I said. "He probably figured we were the vandals coming back-for a second round."

  She led the way inside.

  "You think we should look around?" she said.

  "Wouldn't hurt."

  She gave me a half-scowl. "C'mon, Dwyer, you still sound morose."

  I put on fake cheesy smile. "Gee, Donna, I'd love to search this room."

  "That's better."

  "Up yours."

  "I heard that."

  "I meant for you to hear that."

  "What an asshole."

  We set to work. The first twenty minutes I found nothing interesting. Medical journals filled some drawers; shirts, socks, and underwear filled others. The daybed in the corner, covered with a spread and tossed with colorful pillows, was apparently where Dr. Kern slept. That made sense; the other rooms all had bunk beds, for patients, I assumed.

  Then Donna said, "Boy, Dwyer, come over here." At the end of the daybed was a big wicker trunk. She had the lid up and was stacking stuff on the floor.

  I knelt next to her, pecking her on the cheek as I did so.

  What she was setting out for me to see was three decades of Dr. Kern's history at the sanitarium and here at the cabin. He seemed to feel a true fondness for his patients. The floor was covered with photographs of Dr. Kern at various ages, standing in the midst of grinning groups of people. Most of the photos had been taken in front of the cabin here. The patients looked happy, if a bit distant; presumably they were taking some kind of medication. The clothes they wore recalled their eras exactly, from the silky, feminine print dresses of the late forties (women never looked more like women than in the late forties and early fifties) to the dull pants suits of the seventies. Here was Kern as a young man with thick glasses, a pipe, and a mop of hair that gave him the air of an engineer; a decade or so later his hair was parted, his glasses were horn-rimmed, and he wore a tan work shirt that lent him the look of an archeologist on a distant dig. Only a few years later, he seemed to have aged and become the man he was today, fleshy and benign and bankerly, the eyes oddly vacant of meaning, as if they only perceived and did not judge what they saw. When he was surrounded by grateful patients, he looked happy and competent. But when he was alone—as in the picture that showed him leaning against the door of a 1957 DeSoto—he seemed vulnerable in the way that only a big man can, and more than a bit lost. He might have been a child waiting for his mother after school.

  "Look at this," Donna said. She showed me a piece of parchment. It was Kern's M.A.M.D. diploma. He was a bona fide shrink—a medical doctor first, a psychiatrist second. He had become a doctor in 1948. The diploma had been issued from one of the state universities.

  "But these are the weird things," she said. She handed me some playbills from the Bridges Theater dating back to the early sixties. Even then some of the stars they'd attracted were big names. Dale Robertson, Keefe Brasselle, Liz Scott, and Donald O'Connor had been among the guest actors. "I wonder why he'd keep those."

  I shrugged. "Don't know. Unless he has an interest in theater, too." I looked at the whole stack. They were printed on very glossy paper, faded somewhat now to a yellow-gray. The hairstyles were out of date. O'Connor looked seventy pounds lighter. I kept going through the playbills, which were all pretty much alike, and then I set them down again. Sometimes I'm sort of suffused with understanding of how time passes—how it's a rush unfolding infinitely from one end of eternity to the other and how our lives aren't so much as a microsecond in the roar of its passage. Then it's better to force myself to think of something else, and fast.

  "Wow," Donna said, laughing. "Here are some really strange playbills."

  These were of people more familiar. On the front of one playbill could be seen Wade and Sylvia and David Ashton. They all looked impossibly young and attractive and arrogant. They starred in Noel Coward's Private Lives.

  "Sylvia was really a beauty," I said.

  "Well, Wade wasn't so bad himself," Donna said with an edge, and I remembered her jealousy.

  "Christ, I didn't mean anything by it. I just meant that she was very attractive before she started having her breakdowns."

  "Yeah, but it was the way you said it. You haven't sounded enthusiastic about anything all day, and then you see this old photo of Sylvia and you really get enthusiastic. How would you feel?"

  "I don't get jealous as easily as you do."

  "Don't get jealous? God, Dwyer, if you really believe that then you should see Kern."

  "I thought we were gathering evidence here to help out Wade." But I knew her and knew what she was like when she got mad.

  "How about the other night in the pizza place?"

  I felt myself flush. I'd thought my reaction had been noticeable only to myself. "What pizza place?"

  She mocked me. "'What pizza place?' The one where the blond guy named Kevin came up. The guy I used to date? The guy who kept telling me how great I looked and didn't seem to notice you there at all?"

  "Oh, yeah," I said, "that pizza place."

  "Right. That pizza place."

  "What about it?"

  "What about it? Are you crazy? You were so jealous you hardly spoke to me for about three hours afterwards, and when I invited you in, you said you had a headache." She shook her red hair. "A headache. Boy, Dwyer, I expected more of you than that."

  "I had a headache. No big deal."

  "The big deal is, Dwyer, that I can admit I'm the jealous type and you can't."

  "It's because I'm not."

  "You're blushing, Dwyer."

  "Bullshit."

  "Bullshit. You—are—blushing. And you know why? Because you're telling a lie."

  Just as she said that, two things happened. The playbills fell out of my hands and I saw the bill that featured David Ashton alone on it. I was starting to reach for it when the second thing happened—downstairs, out in the rain, a car door slammed.

  "Somebody's here," I said.

  But her temper was not to be put off. She grabbed my sleeve. "I won't let you do anything until you admit it."

  "Admit what?"

  She made one of those faces that one pro wrestler makes to another just before he's going to put the Mongolian Motherfucker on the po
or guy. Except in Donna's case, she was serious. She grabbed my sleeve and twisted it. "Admit that you get jealous just like I do."

  Then I heard a second car door slam.

  "Okay," I said, "I'll admit it, but only because somebody's coming."

  The Mongolian Motherfucker expression had yet to leave her face. "You're going to pay for this, Dwyer. I promise you."

  I stuffed the playbill with David Ashton into the pocket of my sport coat and jumped to the window. "This is really getting crazy," I said.

  "Who is it?" She'd calmed down enough to get interested in investigation again.

  "Anne Stewart and her husband."

  "What are they doing here?"

  I shrugged. "We're about to find out." I looked around for someplace to hide. The only place I could find was the walk-in closet in the next room. "You coming in?" I called, hearing the doorbell bong downstairs.

  "You going to admit you get jealous?"

  "All right for God's sake, I admit it."

  "Good. That time you sounded serious."

  I reached out and pulled her in and pushed us both down into the gloom at the back of the closet. Then I leaned up and slid the doors closed.

  "Now what?" Donna said.

  Right after she said it, we heard the glass in the door break downstairs. Anne Stewart and her husband seemed very anxious to get in for some reason. Because we'd parked in the deep forest behind the cabin, well out of sight, the Stewarts would naturally assume the place was empty.

  There was another sound of shattering glass, the door creaked open, and we heard tramping feet. The Stewarts were inside.

  Chapter 12

  For a long time we heard nothing. Just our breathing in the closeness of the closet.

  Then a chair scraped downstairs; doors were jerked open, banged shut. Above us rain hammered the roof. I could smell strawberry jam on Donna's breath; her stomach gurgled symphonically several times (she's got the only stomach I know that can do arias). Then more chairs scraping, more doors being jerked open and banging shut.

  The stairway creaked. The Stewarts were on their way up.

  Donna's nails bit into my wrist. She whispered, "What if they find us in here?"

  I whispered back. "If we keep whispering, they damn well will."

  She took great offense. "Oh. Sorry." Her nails withdrew. "I don't suppose I'm behaving like a professional detective, am I?"

  She scooched away from me, as far to the other side of the closet as possible.

  Wonderful.

  At the top of the stairs, Anne Stewart said, "I suppose we should split up and start checking rooms." I thought of Anne sneaking out of Michael Reeves's office at the theater. Whatever she'd been looking for was obviously still unfound.

  "This is a great way to spend a day." Her husband's voice was harsh and carried more than a hint of bitterness. I'd met Donald once. He was a short, trim man who divided his life between the white smock of dentistry and the blue togs of Adidas. At fifty, he was apparently a marathoner of some repute.

  Anne said, "Maybe you should wait in the car."

  "Maybe I should go see my lawyer."

  "That's up to you, Donald. All I care about is that you give up your whining."

  "Maybe I could if I could get a certain image out of my mind. You on his bed with your legs spread—"

  "Goddamn you!" The slap was gunshot sharp. In the silence afterwards were unspoken rage and the rain.

  Then there were tears. She mustn't have been practiced at crying, Anne Stewart, because she more choked than sobbed.

  "Can't you at least fucking hold me?" she said after a time. Now it was her turn for bitterness. "I'm your wife."

  "You only seem to remember that when it's convenient."

  She started choking again. Finally tears came pure. She sounded almost like a little girl. He let her cry. Maybe he thought letting her cry was good for her. Or maybe he hated her so much he couldn't bring himself to touch her.

  In the darkness, Donna's hand found mine and squeezed. The gesture told me what she was feeling. A terrible kind of awe in the face of two human beings destroying each other.

  "I'll try this room first," Donald Stewart said as his wife's tears began to subside.

  "Wait. I want to say something."

  "We've said it fucking all," Donald said. The anger was back in his voice. There was weariness there now, too.

  "I never for a moment loved him. I wasn't unfaithful in that way."

  "No, you just let him screw your brains out."

  Pity shook him, but you knew right away it was for himself and not for any notion of them as a couple. "I wish I could get somebody to cut the thoughts I have out of my brain. I mean that, Anne. Just cut them out like a cancer so that I didn't know that you'd slept with him and didn't know that you wrote him those letters—"

  "It hasn't been easy for me. You've changed—ever since you started embezzling." She meant to hurt him and obviously she had. He was silent.

  "But why did you have you tell Reeves about it?" he said after a time, miserably.

  "Let's just see if the letters are here someplace and not talk," Anne said. "I'm so damn tired of talking."

  They searched for half an hour and made a great deal of noise. A couple of times they called out to each other as if something important had been discovered, but in the end they didn't seem to find anything. They finished back at the top of the stairs again.

  "Great, just fucking great," Donald said.

  "Maybe we can try his apartment tonight."

  "That's one I'll let you handle yourself. I'm really not up for seeing the bed where you let him turn you into a whore."

  They went down the stairs and across the hardwood floor and outside, dragging their griefs along behind them.

  Car doors opened and slammed. A transmission whined in reverse. The sound of the motor was lost on the vanishing point of the rain.

  The weird thing was, we didn't move. Even long after it was all right to crawl out of the closet and begin to bring proper circulation back to our legs and buttocks, we sat there and just listened to the rain.

  "We shouldn't argue," Donna said.

  "Yeah. I know."

  "After hearing them, loving somebody sounds so hopeless."

  She came into my arms. We didn't kiss. We just held each other. "It's so fucking scary," she said.

  "Yeah," I said, "yeah it is."

  We never did kiss there, just held each other (I kept my eyes closed and smelled her hair and skin, the soft warmth of them) and then we went downstairs and got into our car and drove off.

  As soon as I got back into town, I pulled up to an outdoor phone and called the American Security office. Just before they answered I started hacking suddenly.

  "God, are you all right?" Donna asked.

  I turned my back into the receiver and really blasted it down the phone lines.

  "Bobby Lee?" I said between blasts.

  "Are you all right, Dwyer?" Bobby Lee said.

  I should tell you about her. She is an amply endowed lady who wears Merle Haggard T-shirts and a beehive hairdo you could hide microwaves inside. She buys pro wrestling magazines, and is also the receptionist where I work. She was also the receptionist at our previous place of employment, where she had another duty as well—mistress to the owner. When the man threw her out, she rediscovered the wisdom of the most fundamentalist Baptist church in the city and has since given up swearing, married men, and, alas, her tighter T-shirts. Her new man is Harold, a wholesale auto parts dealer. He's also a born-again Republican who genuinely believes that Latin America is ours to do with as we see fit, and the bass in a barbershop quartet. Whether you choose to believe it or not, he's also a gentle, intelligent, and warm man and I'm damn glad Bobby Lee found him, for both their sakes.

  "Just picked up a cold," I said. "I'd better talk to Kastle."

  But Bobby Lee, who still appreciated my getting her this job, said, "Let me handle it, Dwyer. I'm going to tell him you'r
e sick and need to be in bed for at least a day. Now you just tell Donna to fix you up some soup and head for bed. You understand me?"

  I gave her another blast for good measure. "Well, if you say so."

  "Soup and bed, Dwyer, and no ifs, ands, or buts—all right?"

  "All right," I said between hacks.

  After I hung up, Donna said, "Boy, I don't know if I'll ever believe anything you tell me after that performance."

  "I'm sure I'm going to need the day off tomorrow. We're getting close to something."

  "Yes, but what?"

  "I'm not sure. Now I'm going to call the answering service and then we're going over to Reeves's."

  "Why Reeves's?"

  "Because that's who Anne and her husband had to be talking about." I reminded her about seeing Anne come out of Reeves's office. "Maybe we'll turn something up. We can also ask the tenants some questions." I searched in my pockets. Nothing. There was a clap of thunder. The rain came down even harder. I felt wet and cold. I wanted to be under a warm electric blanket. "You got two dimes?"

  She looked in her purse. She had two dimes. I called my answering service. The people who had called me included my agent, my insurance man, a costume rental place I still owed twenty bucks, and a Mr. Tyrone, who said he'd meet me tonight at St. Philomena's at 9:00 P.M. I thanked her and hung up.

  "We're going to see Wade tonight," I said as we pulled away.

  "How do you know?"

  "He left word with my service."

  "You kidding? He's crazy to leave his name."

  "He didn't leave his name. He left the name of the man in the play. Mr. Tyrone. James Tyrone, Senior."

  It was early dusk now. Donna sounded hoarse and lost. "Everything gets so fucked up sometimes."

  We held hands for several blocks without talking. There was nothing to say.

  Chapter 13