True Confessions

by John Gregory Dunne

  She hunched against the door of the car and lit a cigarette. The matchbook cover said Hotel Roosevelt. When was it they had been there. A week ago. Two. To hear Frankie Carle. She always kept hotel matchbooks. For memories. She thought of the hotel rooms she had been in. She had always loved hotels. Her father was a pharmacist in Vernon, and when she was a little girl, he occasionally brought drug salesmen home to dinner. After they had eaten, the men would tip back their chairs and talk about the Corn-husker and the Grady and the Tutweiler, and then they would leave, heading on downtown to the drinks they had been denied before dinner. She dreamed then of ordering London broil in the Tutweiler Grill, of knowing how to tip the bellboy and how to call room service for ice, of walking through hotel lobbies and being admired, making friends, a lonely ten-year-old’s dream. Then when she was nineteen, one of the salesmen had brought her downtown and fucked her in Room 432 at the Ambassador. It had hurt and she had bled but what troubled her most was that she had become a traveling salesman’s story. She knew it when the drummers began to call. It was odd knowing you had a telephone number that was passed around in the Palm Court of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

  And at the Raddison and the Grady and the Tutweiler.

  Tom Spellacy stopped the car in front of her apartment. He crimped the wheels toward the curb, turned off the ignition and made sure the rear doors were locked. So he’s going to come in, Corinne thought. To tell me he can’t marry me or where I can get a clean scrape. If he says he’s only thinking of me, out he goes: She wondered if he would offer money for an abortion.

  Tom took her by the arm, and when they got to her apartment, he unlocked the door with his own key. He opened the refrigerator, got out some ice and made them both drinks.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said finally. Corinne braced herself. And then he told her that Mary Margaret was coming home.

  When he finished, she took a sip of the rye highball in her hand. It was too strong and she poured some more ginger ale in it.

  “Well?”

  “It wasn’t what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She couldn’t think of an abortion now. Suddenly she exploded. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me she was coming home?”

  “She’s crazy, Corinne.” He knew the answer was not adequate. It was just his standard line on Mary Margaret. “She’s always got some scheme. Chatting it up with the priests. Next week she’ll say she’s going off to work in the missions. Sister Mary Margaret, the Maryknoll. Raped by a fucking Chinaman.”

  “When is she coming home?”

  “Soon. A couple of weeks.” He did not tell her that Mary Margaret had notified Des and not him. Or that Des would try to get Moira a day off from the convent. He tried to change the subject. “When is it due?”

  “I have plenty of time to get a scrape, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “It wasn’t what I was thinking.”

  “I just might keep it.”

  He stared at her.

  “Make your high and mighty brother an uncle again.”

  That should stop him.

  “And if I do get an abortion, I won’t need your help. I’ve had one before.”

  There suddenly was nothing more to say, only one place for it to end. She unhooked the Murphy bed and let it fall into place. It had always been this way. When words failed, when she could not express fear or doubt, sex was the only release, the gateway to the fatigue that killed pain and anxiety. They coupled briefly, violently, clothes on, clothes off. She claimed him with her mouth, searching his face for the signs of guilt, the sense of sin that anything he regarded as unnatural brought to it. Finally he slept and she dozed.

  After awhile she woke and looked at the luminous hands of the clock on the bed table. Three-seventeen. The sheet under her was stained with semen. It had always bothered her that after lovemaking it was she who had to lay in the warm viscous pool. She went into the bathroom and dampened a washcloth. Her body was reflected in the full length mirror on the bathroom door. She had never had any feelings of narcissism about her body, and as she stared at herself in the mirror, she thought, Now I’m pregnant, but there was no reaction, neither dread nor fulfillment. With the washcloth, she rubbed at the stain on the sheet. She had often wondered if the chambermaids in the hotels where she fucked were aware of the signs of lovemaking in a deserted bed.

  Her laundering did not affect Tom. She picked up his shoes and his socks and hung up the clothes scattered on the floor. He slept on his stomach, his face cradled in his arm, his sleep punctuated by a slight, even snore. She couldn’t bear the sound of snoring. It grated on her nerves like the sound of fingernails scraping down a blackboard. Tom groaned and rolled over. She wanted to wake him, to talk to him, but he seemed to resist conversation. It was as if he wanted to protect himself from being told anything more.

  She went back into the bathroom, tripping over an ashtray brimming with dead cigarettes. She thought the noise would awaken him. His breath caught for a moment and he coughed, but then the even pattern of his snoring continued. She closed the bathroom door and sat on the toilet seat. She could feel a migraine coming on. When she had a migraine, she thought of sex, not in any lubricious way—she never got wet—but almost as a problem in physics, the interaction of two moving properties. She reduced the act to an equation whereby the circumference of the orifice equaled the circumference of the member plus friction. She wondered how Sister Angelica, her physics teacher at Holy Resurrection, would react to this application of elementary physics; the thought made her laugh. The reduction of the sexual union to a scientific equation seemed to blunt the pain of the headache. Even the aura disappeared. After a few moments, almost out of a sense of duty, she wet a finger and put it between her legs. She could feel the first flickering of response, then she stopped. She never brought herself to orgasm. It was a holdover from her childhood when she believed that masturbation was sinful only if she came. A theory she never tried out on Sister Angelica.

  She was wide awake now and in her mind she began to make a list. Corinne always made lists when she couldn’t sleep. It was her way of counting sheep. Somewhere in the apartment, there was a list of lines from Gone With the Wind. She was always adding to it. “I believe in Rhett Butler—that’s the only cause I know.” “Some little town in Pennsylvania—called Gettysburg.” “If you have enough courage, you can do without a reputation.” “She’s a pale-faced mealy mouthed ninny and I hate her.” Corinne thought: “Fiddledeedee. I get so bored I could scream.” She must remember to write that down. What else?

  She remembered the books in the cabin at Arrowhead.

  The weekend when she got pregnant.

  Arrowhead had been her idea. She knew Tom would never go, but she had made the reservation and packed his clothes without telling him and by that time it was too late for him to say no, to invent an excuse. They drove the two hours to the lake in silence. The storekeeper at the combination gas station and general store had the key to the cabin. He wore slippers and a mothy cardigan and he apologized for not having a greater selection of food in stock. “Don’t get too many folks out here this time of year,” he had said automatically, as if he had seen too many couples out of season and knew they would never complain about the quality of his stock. They bought some bread and milk and bacon and instant coffee and set off down the boardwalk for the house. The houses on the lakefront were gray and weathered, their verandahs bereft of furniture. The loneliness of the lake seemed to Corinne to contain an intangible threat, as if there were nowhere deserted enough for the purpose for which they came.

  The house was on the hill overlooking the lake. Tom un-stacked the upended wicker chairs in the living room and placed them around the straw floor matting. Going into the kitchen, he lit the pilot light under the stove and searched around for ice and glasses. There was no ice, but he finally found two empty peanut butter jars and poured two drinks. The
tap water tasted of rust, but Corinne drank gratefully, eager for anything to ease the weight of silence. With her finger, she traced her initials in the dust on the table at her side.

  “You didn’t find a duster?”

  “No.”

  “I’d better clean up.”

  She pulled sheets and blankets from a closet and went into the bedroom. As she tucked in the hospital corners on the double bed, she could feel Tom watching her through the open door and knew he was wondering what he was doing there. She placed their suitcase on the bed and unpacked it, hanging her coat and nightgown neatly on hangers, arranging his shaving equipment and her cosmetics carefully on the cigarette-scarred bureau. When she was finished, she picked a book from the cheap stained bookshelves by the bed. The volumes left in a summer house always seemed so sad to her. She examined the titles and wondered who and why in the past had been given or bought A History of Phelps Dodge or Hardy Perennials and Herbaceous Borders or Anthony Adverse or Harper’s Electricity Book for Boys. Inside The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale was the inscription, “To Betty Howard, with love from Aunt Agnes, March, 1928.” Corinne wondered who Aunt Agnes was, and Betty Howard. Where had the young girl gone, what had she become. What tremor of youth had made her underline the words:

  Heart, we will forget him

  You and I tonight.

  You will forget the warmth he gave,

  I will forget the light.

  Even now Corinne could remember how the words had touched her.

  “Shall we go for a walk?” Tom had said.

  “No.”

  It was a tired summons and she took him by the hand and they lay on the mildewed sheets, more alone than together.

  Eleven weeks ago.

  Corinne looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. There were tears in her eyes. She dug the heels of her palms into her cheekbones and moved them back toward her ears, then down over her jaw until the pinched pity disappeared from her long, guarded face. She turned out the lights and went into the living room.

  It seemed simpler to spend the rest of the night on the couch.

  2

  When Tom Spellacy awoke, she was gone. There was a penciled note on the floor under one of his shoes saying she had gone to mass. Swell. He noticed the pillow and the blanket on the couch and felt a momentary flash of irritation. She was usually as neat as a pin and he suspected that the mess of bedclothes on the divan was her way of telling him she was perfectly capable of going it alone, of taking care of herself. He rolled over and swore. Why had he agreed to go away to Arrowhead? It was the first time he had ever gone away with a woman. A weekend was trouble. A house and keys and groceries and arrangements and excuses to be away from town. Too many people knowing what you were doing, too many opportunities for things to go wrong. A cop’s reasoning. That’s all right, that’s what I am. There was a lot to be said for the anonymity of an automobile, the lack of commitment in a motor court.

  He thought, I always seem to fail women, but even as he said it, he knew it was a lie. He never gave enough of himself to women to fail them. He knew it and they knew it. Which made it a self-congratulating lie at that.

  He lay back on the pillow, trying to make out objects around the room. It occurred to him suddenly that he had never been alone in the apartment before. Corinne had always been there. He had slept there for months, but to him it was a room like so many others he had known, a room with nothing of himself in it. There were two photographs in a silver frame on the bureau and he assumed they were of her parents, but he had never asked. A Tiffany lamp shade with a crack in it that must have meant something to her, but he did not know what. He got up and walked around the apartment. He was a detective, but he had never paid any attention to the old invitations he found in the desk drawer or the books that said Ex libris Homer Morris. They were clues to a mystery he did not want to understand.

  He thought of Turd Turner. He supposed it was only natural. Without Turd Turner, there would be no mystery to understand.

  He considered the ifs. If Turd Turner had not snatched Corinne, she wouldn’t have met me. She wouldn’t be pregnant. Turd Turner wouldn’t have gone to the gas chamber.

  Poor Turd. If. If. If.

  A 207 conviction hung on a three-time loser. It didn’t matter that Corinne had not been harmed except for a bad case of hysterics. (And meeting a cop who would knock her up, he thought.) The law was the law. A snatch under those circumstances meant the gas chamber.

  He did not like to think of his part in it.

  Not now.

  With Corinne pregnant.

  He never told Corinne that he had watched Turd die. The surprise was Turd asking to see him the night before he went to the gas chamber. He could have avoided it. There were any number of excuses. Fuqua didn’t want him to go. We’re short-handed, Fuqua had said. He’s a nobody, Fuqua had also said. Meaning that if Turd Turner had been a somebody, Fuqua would have gone himself. He went anyway. And not just to spite Fuqua. The fact was, he felt a little guilty about his part in sending Turd to the gas chamber. He lied to Corinne to cover his absence. A stakeout. You won’t see me for a couple of days. And he went to Q. It was creepy sitting in the holding cell on death row. He thought it wouldn’t get to him, but it did.

  “I got no family, Tom,” Turd Turner had said. “All the times you collared me, I guess you come as close as anyone, being family.”

  “There’s no hard feelings, then?”

  “Jesus, Tom, you were just doing your job.”

  “It’s nice you’d think that way,” Tom Spellacy said. “You seen the chaplain?”

  “Shit,” Turd Turner said. “The regular chaplain’s sick and they wanted me to hold hands with this nigger minister. I seen him taking a leak in the crapper and he’s got this thing, it looks like a Louisville Slugger. ‘You got one of them in white, I’ll take it,’ I says to him. I mean, I’m going out tomorrow, I can use a few laughs. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Laughs, shit, he starts giving me this shine voodoo.”

  “They do that.”

  “Fuck him,” Turd Turner said. He smiled conspiratorially. “You’re the law, Tom, but I bet you got a drink.”

  Tom Spellacy nodded. A cop could get away with a lot of things on death row. Especially the arresting cop. He took out a flask and poured some rye into a paper cup.

  “Jesus, that’s good,” Turd Turner said. He downed the drink and held the cup out for a refill. “You know they got two chairs in there. Chair A and Chair B. Like in a fucking Chink restaurant. So when the warden comes around to see me this morning, I says to him, I say, ‘Chair B, that’s for me, with the warden on my knee.’ Another fuckin’ stoneface. Like he never heard a pome before.”

  Tom Spellacy poured some more rye into the outstretched cup. Anything to keep Turd Turner talking. The manic conversation was the last line of defense against death.

  “You know, Tom, I nearly made the Ten once.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s a federal list is the reason you didn’t know, probably.”

  “Probably.” Under any other circumstances the idea of Turd Turner being on any Ten Most Wanted list would have made him laugh out loud.

  “A lot of my friends in law enforcement told me I was the eleventh most wanted man in the country and that Mr. Hoover was fixing to put my name on the Ten as soon as he had an opening. Mr. Hoover said my nickname was against me or I would have made the Ten a lot sooner. That’s what my friends in the FBI tell me. If I had a name like Two-Gun Turner or Machine-Gun Turner, I would have made it easy.”

  “Tuffy Turner.”

  “That’s a swell name, Tom.” He burped and Tom Spellacy filled the cup to the top. The cup was beginning to soften at the sides and the rye was leaking out. Turd Turner held it in both hands and downed it in a gulp. “But all my friends in the press, they all knew my nickname was Turd, and my real name was Horace, and that wasn’t good enough, Horace. I mean, there’s never
been a Horace on the Ten. Ever. Horace Turner. That’s not a tough name.”

  “It’s got a nice ring to it, though,” Tom Spellacy said carefully. “Horace.” It was the only thing he could think to do, calling him Horace. It was bad enough going to the gas chamber without the last person you talked to calling you Turd.

  “It was really swell of you coming here, Tom. I mean, how many guys take the deep breath with a hangover, right?” He reached for the flask and put it to his mouth. “And hell, the things I’ve done, I was going to end up here sooner or later anyway.”

  They were like that, guys going to the gas chamber, Tom Spellacy knew. When the jig was up, they confessed to a lot of crimes they had nothing to do with. It was the stand-up thing to do. Palship. Taking the heat off someone else in the bunch. Going out doing some other guy a good turn.

  Turd Turner mentioned a hit in North Hollywood.

  A bank job in Inglewood.

  Running forged green cards down to Mexico for Jack Amsterdam.

  The flask was empty. Turd Turner stood up unsteadily.

  “Well, I guess that’s it, Tom.”

  “I guess it is, Horace.”

  Turd Turner embraced Tom Spellacy and then sat down heavily on the bunk.

  “One thing, Tom . . .”

  “Sure, Horace.” He knew what was coming, knew the reasons he had been summoned to this holding cell on death row.

  “Was she really a les?”

  “A real bull, Horace.”

  He didn’t tell Corinne that. Nor did he tell her that Turd Turner had held his breath for forty-one seconds. Not good, not bad, the warden had said. The record was two minutes fourteen seconds. A professional life guard from Seal Beach who had taken out his boyfriend. It was like he wanted to get his name into “Believe It Or Not By Ripley.”