John was stationed at a base called the “Rose Garden” (as in I-never-promised-you-a) and had been running missions along the Thailand and Vietnam border. As far as most Americans knew, our troops were out of the Vietnam conflict; but that just wasn’t really the case. Still, even the Rose Garden would be closing its gates soon, and soldiers like John, who, crazy as it seems, wanted combat, would have to go the mercenary route to stay in the game.
He said, “I don’t want to talk about it, Mal.”
“I know, I know. Your ex-wife racked up debts you got to pay. And combat pay with Air America beats hell out of Uncle Sam’s stateside duty pay. And you don’t want to start civilian life in debt. I know all the reasons, but it’s still crazy.”
“Do me a favor.”
“I won’t. I’m going to bitch about this the whole month you’re home. I don’t have so many friends that I can afford losing one.”
“Do me a favor.”
“Okay. You just got here, I realize that. You want to relax, I know, I know. I’ll back off. For now.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. But going back is crazy, John.”
John ignored me, sipped his beer. “Ever stop to wonder what’s going to happen if you run into that guy again?”
“What guy?”
“That black guy at the station.”
“That’s a possibility better left unthought of.”
“Maybe. Maybe you better talk to Brennan about it.”
“Oh, Christ. That’s all I need. Listen, you give me your word you won’t mention this to him? I mean, he’s going to want to know about that phone call I made to him and I’m going to give him some phony song-and-dance, so don’t go messing me up with the truth.”
“I won’t tell him anything, Mal.”
“Good man.”
“Are you sure this blonde didn’t know the guy?”
“She said not.”
“Well, I don’t know. Anything she said make you think maybe somebody might have cause to sic him on her?”
I hesitated.
What Janet had told me was kind of in confidence, and with John’s stepdad being sheriff...
But John and I had always been open with each other and I wanted to keep him open with me, since I wanted to score some points with him and eventually talk him out of going in with the mercenaries and back to Indochina. So I told him what Janet Taber had told me.
“Jesus,” John said. “Has she talked to the police? If her mother really was beaten....”
“I assume she will,” I said. “She did say that the local people are investigating for possible arson.”
“The mother may have some answers,” John said.
“If the old lady is in as bad a shape as Janet said she was, I got my doubts about her ever answering anything again—in this world, anyway. How about we sit around and swap war atrocities to brighten things up a little?”
From my stereo, Deep Purple said, “Hush... hush...”
John rose and went over to the icebox and got himself a fresh Pabst. “I think she was putting you on,” he said, returning to his spot on the couch. “You told her you were a mystery writer, and she took it from there—the whole thing’s a whopper dreamed up by a seasoned bullshitter.”
“A whopper.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s some imagination she’s got then. Especially dreaming up that one-eyed apparition I clobbered.”
“That was just her excuse to bullshit ya. Her starting point. That’s probably something else, out of her real past, something her own fault, something less sensational. Maybe he’s her boyfriend—or maybe her pimp!”
“Not her,” I said, draining my beer. “Not a chance. She was no hooker. It was the truth—it was all there. In her face.”
“Really got under your skin, didn’t she?”
I ignored that, got up and went over to my turntable and turned the record over. When I came back and got settled on the couch again, I said, “Seems to me we’re due for a change of subject again. So what the hell’s been happening with you in the last couple years?”
The next few hours went fast, and talk of old (and new) times almost pushed Janet and her fantastic story out of my head. But she was there, occupying a small corner of my mind, sitting patiently, silently, just as she had in the bus station.
I was turning on the television so John and I could catch the ten o’clock news when the phone rang. Thinking it might be Janet, I jumped for it.
“Yes?” I said.
“This is Brennan. Where the hell’s my son?”
Brennan. Damn.
“Sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “Been hogging him, haven’t I? We got to drinking beer and talking, you know how it is.”
“Put him on.”
“Okay, okay, keep your badge on.” I looked over at John. “He sounds even more belligerent than usual.”
John took the phone and said hello and listened for a while and said yeah a few times and hung up.
“What’s the deal?”
“Been an accident or something out on Colorado Hill. Says if I want to see him tonight I probably ought to forget it—he’ll be tied up with this.”
“Did he sound pissed off?”
“Yeah. He figures I should’ve stopped in to see him first.”
“You should’ve.”
“Why don’t we drive out there and keep him company?”
“Won’t we be a bother?”
“What? An Army sergeant and an ex-cop?”
“Well, okay,” I said, “it’s your homecoming. You got a right to spend it any crazy damn way you want. Let’s go.”
FIVE
There are two paved highways leading from Port City to Davenport, and Colorado Hill is on the older, less traveled of the two, a narrow strip of deteriorating concrete winding along the Mississippi. The only advantage of the older road—called by locals the River Road—is its scenery: Colorado Hill, for example. Since the Hill is only ten miles from Port City, most sightseers drive out there, sightsee, and turn back, not even thinking of using the River Road as a route to the nearby Quad Cities, though it remains well-traveled because of various factories and a stone quarry located along it.
“Damn,” John said, working his voice up over the noise the Rambler made as it chugged along. “No moon, wouldn’t you know it?”
“Dark night like this doesn’t do much for the scenery or the driving.” I was hunched forward, clutching the wheel, peeling my eyes for stray chunks of concrete, potholes and any bridges that might be out.
“I always liked this drive,” John said. “I was looking forward to the view of the river.”
“Try it on foot next time. At noon.”
“Something up ahead, Mal.”
“Yeah, I see it.”
A quarter mile up two small dots of brightness were moving along either side of the road. As I neared them, the dots became flares, shooting off red-orange light, their bearers a couple teenage boys. I watched the boys set their flares to the left and right of the road and waited as one came running up to the car on my side; I rolled the window down and listened to him.
“Accident ahead! Accident ahead! You better turn back.”
I nodded to the kid and rolled the window back up and crawled forward. In another fifty yards we came to a man setting another pair of flares, bigger ones, and he held out his palm for me to stop.
“Yeah?” I said.
It was Oliver DeForest, a guy who worked in a shoe store downtown, one of the Sheriff’s Patrol—a group of citizens who worked as part-time deputies. He said, “Accident, Mallory, kinda confused up there, better turn around.”
“Got the sheriff’s stepson here to see him, Ollie.”
“Oh....” He bent down and looked into the car and nodded to John. “Good to see you, son.” He scratched his head. “Go on through, I guess.”
I kept on at my slow pace as the hill steepened and finally approached the point of the slope that turned shar
ply, and would level out flat with a high, sheer wall of rock on one side and a bottomless drop-off on the other. The latter provided a postcard-picturesque view of the Mississippi, only on this dark a night, you’d have to take my word for that. A pair of flares was set just before the turn, one on the left against rock, the other to the right under a 20-mile-an-hour-curve sign. The flares glowed hot pink.
When I rounded the turn and drove onto the flattened-out area, the night lit up like a small, cheap carnival. Half a dozen more flares were set, several stuck into holes in the rust-rock of the upward cliff, others along the fence of stubby white posts and thick wire that guarded the drop-off. Two cars were parked flush against the rock, neither official (more civilian deputies, I supposed); the sheriff’s gold Buick, the only official car there as yet, was on the gravel parking area next to the drop-off fence, the metal bar atop the car swinging its two lights, one red, one blue, slowly around. Front and back lights were on all three cars, and six or seven men were running around the small area aimlessly, waving flashlights, moving through the darkness like big fat fireflies.
Brennan was standing at the point in the fence where one of the stubby posts was crushed and the heavy wire trampled down; there were no skid marks on the pavement, but tire tracks were visible in the gravel in front of the crushed post.
I pulled in next to Brennan’s car and John and I hopped out.
Brennan took off his obligatory Stetson and tugged at a lock of brown, greased hair as he watched John and me approach.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “You pick a fine time to come calling.”
John shrugged, thrust out his hand, and Brennan took it with mock reluctance.
“Glad to see you, son,” Brennan said, “no matter the conditions.”
“Glad to see you, sir.”
Brennan turned and glared at me. “Mystery writer,” he said, derisively, then nodded toward my Rambler and said, “We already got one accident, let alone you driving up in another.” He looked at John’s fringed jacket and said, “Nice goddamn coat you got there. You had one like it during the Davy Crockett craze, too, if I remember right.”
Nice guy, Brennan.
I said, “What happened here?”
This time Brennan shrugged. “Just got here myself. Car lost control, went over, far as I can tell.” He walked beyond the fence to the edge of the drop-off and looked down and pointed. “Car’s down there. You can see it didn’t catch fire when it hit or anything, don’t ask me why. Ambulance is on the way, but we don’t have any idea who or how many’re in the car, or in what shape. After a ride like that, hell.... I just hope we can haul it up with the crane on the wrecker, if there’s enough coil on the damn thing.
“I was just getting ready to try to walk down the hill a ways when you boys dropped in for tea.”
“We could join you,” I suggested.
“We’ll just tag along, sir,” John said.
“Okay....Hey, Russ!”
One of the guys with the flashlights stopped flitting long enough to come over and say, “Yeah?”
“You try and keep these idiots organized up here—I’m gonna try and get down to the wreck. Wrecker or ambulance get here, tell ’em what’s going on.”
“Okay, Sheriff.”
Brennan went back to his car, grabbed a flashlight out of the front, and returned to lead John and me on foot back down the slope of the highway. At the point at which John and I’d met Ollie DeForest on the way up (he was standing faithful guard over his pair of flares), Brennan trailed off the highway, stepped across the fence and began angling down the underside of the drop-off at the place where it became less cliff and more hill.
It didn’t take long for me to lose all sense of direction: I just followed the Stetson and flashlight up front of me and stumbled along after. John was behind me, but wasn’t having any trouble; he was used to seeing at night, and, to a jungle fighter like him, the dry dead weeds, brush and trees we were moving through must’ve been nothing.
Four minutes later we saw the car.
It was in a small, relatively open space of ground, standing on its head, a blackly humorous monument balancing with its ass in the air, just off-center in the semi-clearing. It was a dark color Ford, fairly new, but that was all I could make out: it’d squashed itself down like a bug in the process of its nose dive.
At that moment, for the first time since I’d got out of the car up on the Hill, I noticed the cold. There was no breeze, just silent dead cold, smoke-breath cold. I stood at the edge of the little clearing and let Brennan and John run over to the upended car, digging my hands down in my pockets, hunching my shoulders together, listening to my teeth chatter in my head. I stood among the trees that circled the open area, trees standing ’round like old women with tall thick bodies that for icy instants became their own long, cartoonish, wrinkled faces, with hair of skeletal branches that reached into the sky like dark seaweed, hanging upward.
They were having trouble getting the door pried open, so I went to help. Above us the sound of an ambulance’s siren cut the air, distant and remote as a weak radio signal, but growing; the ledge up there where we’d been a few minutes ago cast an orange blush against the darkness. The door finally gave, and the smell of alcohol crawled out.
An empty bottle of Haig & Haig rested on the floor on the rider’s side in the front, unbroken, the sole ironic survivor of the trip. The driver was not so lucky: a young blond woman crushed against and into the steel and glass of the smashed auto, a limp rag doll barely containing her stuffing, with the doll-face turned toward us, pretty much intact, eyes mercifully closed.
“Christ,” I said, and covered my mouth, trying not to heave. I leaned against the wreckage and looked away. Looked out toward where the river was supposed to be, but through the trees and blackness I could see nothing, though the presence of the river was there, in the soft but distinct sounds of waves lapping, lapping.
Brennan snorted, disgusted by my reaction. “Seen a hell of a lot worse,” he said.
“So has he,” John said. “What is it, Mal?”
“The woman. In the car.”
“What? Who? Somebody you know...?”
“Somebody I just met.”
“Christ,” John said, understanding, and covered his mouth, and looked away.
PART TWO
NOVEMBER 27, 1974 WEDNESDAY
SIX
“So you told Brennan all of it,” John said.
“That’s right.”
“The bruiser at the bus station, Janet Taber’s story about the burning house, everything.”
“Yup.”
“And he just sat there. Didn’t say a thing.”
“Oh, he said something. He said, ‘Why don’t you go write one of your silly stories and leave me alone?’”
John was sitting across the table from me, wearing a blindingly orange turtleneck ski sweater. It was too early in the day to look at that sweater. John and I were upstairs in Brennan’s living quarters over the jail, a study in drab browns except for the yellow kitchen the two of us were sitting in. It was nine o’clock, give or take a few minutes; I’d waited till this morning to tell my story to Brennan, downstairs in his office—last night at the accident scene, things had been too harried for that.
“Didn’t he say at all what he’s going to do about it?” John spoke through a bite of the eggs and potatoes I’d stood and watched him cook for himself minutes before.
“Nope,” I said. “He’ll talk to the coroner and arrange an autopsy, I suppose.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I can’t picture this. He sat there and listened to that whole intricate story of yours, and then told you to get the hell out?”
“He wasn’t as polite as all that.”
“All ’round great guy, my stepdad.”
“I wasn’t supposed to come up here and wake you up, either. He’d like to ‘see the boy get rested up,’ you know.”
“Hell with it. I don’t know why I’m even st
aying here with him. If I had any sense I’d be over at my sister’s.”
“Sometimes I think Brennan doesn’t like me.”
“Perceptive. Very perceptive of you.” John got up and took his dishes over to the sink and dumped them in, ran water over them. It was a somewhat strange sight, as the window over the sink, the only window in this typical American kitchen, was barred and caged. He turned to the icebox and got out a jug of orange juice and asked if I wanted some and I nodded.
He poured me some juice and said, “How’d he react when he found out that phone call you made from the depot yesterday wasn’t a practical joke? That you really did have a hassle with a big black dude?”
“Like he reacted to everything else I told him. Like I’d said, ‘Nice day.’ He muttered something about never hearing of anybody around here who fit that description.”
“What about Janet Taber’s mother? Has he checked with Iowa City yet to see how the old lady’s doing?”
“Not yet he hasn’t. I assume he’s going to. I suggested it, anyway.”
“Mal.”
“What?”
“You aren’t satisfied, are you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what I mean. You aren’t satisfied you’ve gone and done your duty. Paid off the obligation you feel you owe that girl on the basis of the five-minute relationship you had going with her.”
I sipped the juice. I was starting to feel awake; I could tell because my eyes could focus on John’s bright orange sweater without fuzzing up on me.
I said, “No.”
“No, what?”
“No, I’m not satisfied.”
“All right. You’re not satisfied. Where do you go from here? I’m not auditioning to play Tonto to your Lone Ranger, understand—I’m just interested.”
“Well.” I took another sip of the juice. “This is how I figure it. I got a few days off now for Thanksgiving. Don’t have to register for new classes at the college till Tuesday. That gives me almost a week to do some nosing around.”
“What is this, research? So you’ve sold a few mystery stories. That doesn’t make you a... a private eye, you know. That’s a fantasy, Mal.”
No Cure for Death (A Mallory Mystery) Page 3