The Underground Lady

by JC Simmons

"Yes, Sanders. She was enamoured with the man. I remember telling you about him."

  "We've ruled him out."

  "Then I can offer nothing else, except…"

  "Except what, Mr. Spruance?"

  "Dead people always appear in complicity with their circumstances…"

  We left Raymond Spruance to his bird watching and headed north to a familiar house on a lake with an empty boathouse.

  "The man had nothing to do with any of this. I realize it was twenty-five years ago, however he's easy to read. Drop bombs from the air, shoot down an enemy aircraft, but get up close and personal for a kill – I don't see it."

  "I agree, that's why I wanted you to meet him, see if we drew the same conclusion. I truly look forward to your impression of Mr. VonHorner."

  "If we eliminate him, then what? You got any other suspects?"

  I did not.

  ***

  The same small, Mexican-looking woman from my last visit opened the door at Gerald VonHorner's home. She looked at Hebrone, their eyes locking as if in recognition. It was as if two sets of killer eyes were saying hello.

  Then she turned to me. "He no home. You no come back."

  "We need to talk to him. When do you expect his return?"

  "You no come back."

  "Do you know Hadley Welch?"

  "She dead. You no come back." She started to shut the door.

  Hebrone stuck his arm out and stopped it from slamming in our faces. "We want to talk to the man."

  "You go now. No come back, be really bad." Her words came like a stale breath that somehow had been exhaled from a corpse.

  Hebrone looked at her in a silence as fatal as a rattlesnake. The air around us was dead and smelled dead. We stood stupidly, everything about us was alien, and so we felt alien – almost apologetic, I think.

  "Let it go, Hebrone. There will be another time."

  He moved his arm, and the door slammed shut.

  Heading north toward Union, I asked. "You two seemed to have some kind of connection?"

  "She's an old soul, a true killer. We've met before, a long time ago, maybe in another life."

  I was sorry I asked.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was almost six p.m. when we arrived back at the cottage. Shack was sitting in a chair on the porch waiting for us. B.W. lay in the cypress glider eyeing him, his tail switching in jerks. I don't think the two liked each other.

  "I left Rose's a few minutes ago. They are fine. We talked about the note from last night. Hope you don't mind that I told her. Be prepared, she's pissed that you didn't call her immediately after you found it, but that's Rose. At any rate, she bought a whole ribeye at the grocery store the day she cooked them and had the butcher cut two-inch thick steaks. There were several people in the store. The butcher argued they should be one and a half inches, and Rose said that if he didn't cut the steaks as ordered, she would come behind the counter and stuff them up his ass. It was a small to do. We think the one made the threats or one of his accomplices was in the store."

  Laughing at the story, I said, “It would explain how he knew about the steaks, but not that we would be at table."

  "Assuming it's a he." Hebrone tried to rub B.W.'s head, but the cat jumped down and came to me.

  "What?"

  "We don't know that our threat-maker is a male."

  "It's after six, I've got to get a shower and meet Miss Galore. See what information she has that could help us. Hebrone, take my truck and B.W. Tell Rose and Sunny that we will talk in the morning. Shack, you keep checking on your friend Ralph Henderson. We need to have a conversation with him."

  "What about the interviews today? How'd they go?"

  "Hebrone can catch you up on his impressions.

  ***

  It was after seven when I left the cottage. The sky changed through several colors and became soft, crumbled dark gray, then black. It was like driving under the roof of an enormous cave where hidden fires burned below. I could see stars overhead, and below them the sharp, ragged edges of trees looking as if they had been fenced with light and seeded with more stars.

  The address was hard to find, and it was almost seven-thirty when I knocked on the door. It immediately opened, and Pussy Galore stood there wrapped in a heavy wool robe which made her look androgynous and monk like. But the steel-rimmed glasses were gone. The hair was down and flowed silk-like across her shoulders. She looked much younger.

  "I thought you weren't coming."

  "It took awhile to find the address."

  "Come in, have a seat. I'll fix you a drink. Is bourbon okay?"

  "If you're having one?"

  "I am."

  When she disappeared into a small kitchen, I turned on a tiny voice recorder that fit snuggly in my shirt pocket like a credit card. I had no idea if this could be a setup. She and her attorney boss could be in on this together. Hebrone had me on the verge of paranoia. It never hurts to be safe, though.

  Looking around, I saw that this was a one bedroom furnished apartment. Kind of sad, I thought. Hang your clothes in the closet and use the bed after everything in town closes and there's no place else to go. Live in one sometime. See if the place ever shows any more outward trace of your personality than one of the railroad cars a few blocks to the west. I had spent too much of my life in rooms like this, rooms that pierced the soul with silent screams of loneliness and desire, rooms as warm as a ship's hole and as lovely as an open wound.

  Hanging behind an old overstuffed chair was a hand-stitched, framed Biblical quote:

  The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?

  Jeremiah 17:9

  She returned with the drinks, having discarded the robe. A thick, plaid shirt, faded blue jeans, and worn tennis shoes were now her attire. One could take her for a logger's wife. A wife with a fine body that she took pains to conceal.

  Noting that there was no television, I thought that lonely people sometimes become associated with local t.v. shows in order to belong to a family of people. "What do you do to make time pass around here?"

  She sat down in the overstuffed chair. "Time passes by itself – you don't have to do anything."

  Taking a sip of the drink, which surprisingly contained expensive whiskey – Jack Daniel's, I guessed – I said, “Tell me about your life in Union?"

  She looked up at me, and her face was pale in the light of the room. Her eyes were lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for their glint and I could see in her expression something not seen before, and the name of that thing was sorrow. "You ever been married, Mr. Leicester?"

  This was the second woman to ask me that question this week. "No, and I think we can be on a first name basis."

  Her eyes were transparent and bottomless, like deep water where men have drowned. "Tell me, Jay, why are men always embarrassed when women give them what they want?"

  "I've never been embarrassed by what any woman ever gave me."

  "Then I wish I'd met you a long time ago."

  She had been hurt before, had hidden her soul deep within herself. If you keep it buried far enough away you can protect it, but it may go blind in the eternal darkness.

  "Could I have another drink?"

  "Sure."

  She took the glass and I watched her walk to the small kitchen, her hair flowing across her back like corn silks blowing in a summer breeze. Returning, she handed me the whiskey with the self-aware look of one who understands reality is basically an ironic joke that no one else gets.

  "I like the fact that you are patient."

  "You will get around to it when you're ready. I'm enjoying the whiskey and the company."

  She smiled. "You're a good liar, but thanks." Her eyes were very beautiful without the glasses, halfway hidden in the wrinkled blackness of the sockets, showing something the hardness of her life had been unable to touch.

  I thought it good that God keeps the truth of life from the young, or else they would have no
heart to grow old.

  She went to a bedside table, returned with a brown manila envelope. "Inside are copies I made of a file my boss kept on Hadley Welch. I found it after your first visit. You may find some of it helpful."

  "Do you think he killed her?"

  "There is no confession in there, if that's what you are hoping for."

  "Why?"

  "Why am I giving you the file? Think about it, you'll figure it out."

  Her phone rang. It surprised me that she had one. It was beside her bed. The conversation was short. She frowned at the receiver in her hand as if it were a live thing that had died on her. Then she lifted her hand and slammed the receiver down rather violently.

  "Bad news?"

  She turned to me with a smile. It was a smile of triumphant loathing, so frightening and vicious that it nailed me to the chair, immobilized, breathless.

  "You have to go now."

  "Are you going to be okay?"

  "Yes."

  "Thank you for the file."

  "Just go."

  Opening my car door, I felt that someone was watching, but there was no one in sight. Driving home with the brown envelope beside me on the seat, the night had a full-moon feel to it, ebbing and flowing the blood in my veins. The moon sat low like a bleached skull. Clouds slowly passed across it, fading the glow in and out, eerie, alien, scary, and preterit. I thought that there was something about Pussy Galore that whispered of cotton sheets, lace negligees, some unarticulated hint of passion, motionless beneath the flawless tranquility of her appearance. I admired it, contemplated the clear, unexpressed certainty that exotic carnal excess was there for the asking.

  Turning onto the terrace row that led to the cottage, all I could see was the faint light from the doorbell. It was quiet, and I was anxious to read through the contents of the manila envelope. Shutting the engine off, I opened the door, got out, and stood beside the car. In the middle distance, a screech owl made a mournful, tremulous, whinny-like noise as if nature was talking back to the world of people. The air was cold and the Big Dipper still framed the opening in the tree line of the driveway. Loose sand under my feet reminded me that all life depends on a few inches of topsoil and some rain.

  Inside the cottage, I thought of building a fire, but decided against it. Instead, I sat in a recliner, rewound the tape in the tiny recorder, and listened to the conversation between Miss Galore and myself. Why she would give me the file still puzzled me. Maybe she and Collinswood were having an affair and it had ended. This was her way of getting back at him. Could be that she was lonely. People need to feel wanted, loved, appreciated. They need to feel the intimate familiarity of another's nearness. A closeness to stroke the ego. However, the phone call suggested some lover who watched me arrive at her apartment and was unhappy with me being there. Had she been humiliated? That would change a person – for better or worse – it either beat them down into pathetic creatures, their spirits killed, or brought out a viciousness they didn't know they harbored.

  I opened the manila envelope. Collinswood kept a detailed account of the disappearance of Hadley Welch, but there was nothing about her prior to that event. No mention of the dating, no embarrassing run-in with Peter Pushkin at a restaurant. There were a couple of follow-up articles in the Meridian Star newspaper, although nothing of importance was in them, only that the search had been called off with no evidence found of a crash.

  Putting the file back in the envelope, I ran the recording of the conversation at the apartment again, listening for what, I didn't know. Was this something Collinswood concocted with his secretary/lover? A lie is most convincingly hidden between two truths. Who was it that called the apartment and so angered her that she asked me to leave?

  I thought of having a drink before going to bed, but the trouble with alcohol as a sedative is that it floated you off reality for awhile, but it brought you back by a route that sometimes wasn't pleasant.

  The cottage was warm. I cut off the heat, turned the ceiling fan over my bed on slow, letting it push hot, heavy air down and cool air up. A good night's sleep was what I needed.

  ***

  The phone rang incessantly, so irritating that I was glad my magnum was not within reach. My eyes itched, my arms hurt, I smelled my own sweat on the pillow. The clock glowed six a.m. "Yes?"

  "Sausage and biscuits in half an hour."

  "Who is this? Is this that girl I was with last night?"

  "Nature is loathing of all that is feeble, or those who sleep all day. We won't wait."

  "Yes, mother."

  The phone went dead. I rolled over and laughed.

  From my bed, I could see the sunrise through the window, a bruised tangerine in the foggy mist above the trees, seemingly too ovoid. The air in the cottage was very cold. Turning the heat on, I jumped into a hot shower. While the stinging warmth of the water loosened stiff muscles, I thought about a conversation with Rose on dying, telling her that death is the most terrifying thing humans are forced to accept. She scoffed at the idea, saying that it can't be that horrible if it happens to every living thing. She went on to say that she was real surprised when she was born and would probably be surprised when she died. Toweling off, I thought how lucky I was to have a neighbor like Rose.

  Shack's truck was parked in the driveway at Rose's house when I arrived. She must have invited him to breakfast also. Sunny opened the door for me, looking radiant, her green, emerald eyes dancing as if hiding some medieval secret. Hebrone and Shack were sipping coffee at the kitchen table, Rose was frying sausage.

  Hebrone glanced up. "Well?"

  "She gave me a file Collinswood kept on Sunny's mom. Not much in it, except a record of the disappearance."

  "Why?"

  "Hard to tell. She could be mad at her boss, or it's some altruistic reason."

  "Or wanting to get laid." Rose set a platter of sausage in the middle of the table. "Men are scarce around here for women like her, even ones like you."

  "She got a call from what I took to be the jealous type while I was there. She asked me to leave. So I don't think she had sex in mind."

  Sunny set down at the table. "Would you have slept with her if that had not happened?"

  "No, it could have been a setup by whoever caused your mother's death, if that's what happened. I was tape recording the visit."

  "Wow! Kinky. Can we hear the playback?"

  Rose laughed, set hot biscuits beside the sausage. "Everybody eat up. Deer sausage compliments of Ken and Rose Marie. The biscuits, I made."

  Shack set his coffee cup down. "They gonna bury old man Shaw in the morning at ten o'clock. We all need to be there, see who else shows. We could talk to the widow after the service, she may know something."

  "Had not thought of that. Good idea."

  "Wasn't mine." He pointed to Rose. "The biscuit woman's."

  "I want you to wear a coat and tie to the funeral."

  "Don't own a tie."

  "You can borrow one of mine. You, too, Hebrone. Jay has an extra coat you can wear."

  "Why do you have men's ties?"

  "Never you mind, Leicester. You want another biscuit?"

  "I do."

  Sunny put her hand to her mouth and laughed.

  After breakfast, Shack and Hebrone followed me back to the cottage. Both of them read the file.

  "Not much here," Hebrone said, handing the last page to Shack. "I'd love to know Miss Galore's reason for making this available. Maybe it was a plea for help. There is an inherent loneliness in a whisper from the dark."

  Shack nodded. "We need to know who left that note on your kitchen table. That's our danger point."

  One of the things I admired about Shack was that he never merely made conversation. When he asked a question he wanted an answer. When you got through talking with him, you usually knew more about the subject than when you started, even if it was your own subject.

  "You sure the coyote hanger isn't in town?"

  "I can tell you this, Hebron
e, if the man was back, you'd know it."

  "Okay, but nothing stupid."

  "Only if you are there."

  "Good."

  "Shack, if you don't mind, keep an eye on the girls. Hebrone and I want another shot at VonHorner today."

  "Not a problem."

  ***

  The morning fog burned off, leaving a hazy winter sky. It made me feel cold all the way through to the bone. Hebrone and I parked in front of Gerald VonHorner's house. The street was getting all too familiar.

  "If the slant-eye answers the door, let me deal with her."

  "I thought she was Spanish? Isn't slant-eye politically incorrect?"

  "Everyone in America has freedom of speech except white people?"

  Laughing, I said, “I guess you could ask Don Imus. He could give you a pretty good idea."

  It wasn't the small, ebony-eyed, dowdy woman with hair like a horse's tail that opened the door, it was Gerald VonHorner. He seemed even older than a few days ago. The lanky frame, cold, bleary, blood-shot eyes, and gray hair gave him an aura of unhealthy living, yet he was still ruggedly handsome.

  "Name's Leicester. I was here the other day with Hadley Welch's daughter. You refused to talk to us. Now, I would suggest that you do so."

  He looked back over his shoulder as if he was afraid someone would overhear what he had to say. "Who is this?" He pointed at Hebrone.

  "Hebrone Opshinsky. He works with me."

  "Walk around to the dock on the lake. I'll meet you there." He disappeared inside the house.

  We headed for the boathouse, familiar with the route. I watched a huge red-tailed hawk drift down on wings so wide they looked unnatural. When this bird of prey folded its wings, feathered down like flaps on an airplane for slowing its flight, and extended razor-sharp talons toward a live oak limb, its beauty affected me as no art or music or book ever had, as no landscape or beautiful woman ever could. For a brief moment I was lost in nature.

  "Here he comes," Hebrone said, bringing me back to the present.