by Ed Gorman
Except for certain stone artifacts, we don’t really know much about these ancient hunters except that they practiced communal living.
Bison of the size they hunted meant a thousand pounds of meat and that would presumably have fed everybody in the tribe for some time.
We know a lot more about the mound builders who came after them, though these people, too, remain mysterious. The mounds are large, above-ground tombs of maybe one hundred and fifty feet in length and maybe three feet in height. When they were opened, scientists found evidence of a people who were far more sophisticated than any who came before and many who came after. It was as if this certain people took a quantum leap up the ladder of knowledge. But then a strange quirk occurs. The native peoples that European explorers first met do not seem to have descended from the mysterious mound builders. The later people did not have the skills or scientific understanding of the builders of the mounds.
So who were the mound builders and what were they all about? I’m waiting for God to tell me.
Apparently He’s the only one who knows for sure.
Or maybe Andrea Prescott knew. She
was a cold blond, who was not quite as good-looking as she thought, all done up in several hundred dollars of good clothes—blue suede car coat, dark blue sweater, light blue slacks—anda pair of sunglasses that gave her the faint air of a starlet. She had set her very nice bottom on the edge of a picnic table and was in the process of lighting a cigarette when I walked up to her.
“God, you really are short.”
“Why, thank you.”
“I suppose that came off a little shitty.”
She put out a limp slender hand. I half expected she half expected me to kiss it. I gave it a good shaking. “You can do better
than that, McCain. Put a little hurt into it.”
She smiled. She apparently found this all terribly, terribly amusing. Dear, dear Noel. She said, “Did anybody warn you about me?”
“Just that pest control company.”
“My mother says I’m a bitch on wheels.
But I really don’t mean to be.”
“My faith in humanity has been restored at last.”
I wanted a peek at her eyes. The shades made that impossible. “You’re a sarcastic little shit.”
“Thank you again.”
She took a terminal drag on her smoke, exhaled, and said, “I’m the one who called you the other night.”
““It wasn’t an accident”—t thing?”
“Yes. I thought I was pretty good.”
“Not bad.”
“Because it wasn’t, you know.” She reached into the pocket of her car coat and withdrew one of those tiny bottles of liquor they serve on airliners. She had herself a pop then returned bottle to pocket. “Sara was my cousin.”
“Lucky girl.”
“She said somebody was after her.”
“Did she say who?”
“She wasn’t sure. She just had this sense.
She was sort of a goody-two-shoes. She had no imagination at all. I used to put her on all the time and she always took everything I said seriously. A total square. That’s why I believed her. If my little cousin thought somebody was after her, then they were.” She walked over to the mounds. “You know anything about these things?”
“Not much except that the people who built them were way ahead of their time.”
She sighed. “I decided to go to Iowa instead of Northwestern so I could be closer to this boy I’m kind of in love with, who pledged Greek at the university. God, I wonder if it was worth it. I wanted to study real things. Not a bunch of Indians, for God’s sake.”
“The university’s a good school.”
“You went there, I suppose?”
“Yeah, after a couple of years Oxford started to get boring so I came back here.”
“Did I ever tell you how much I hate patter? Don, that’s my fianc@e, people
think he’s stupid because he can’t small-talk.
I think it’s a sign of intelligence, not being a smart mouth all the time.”
“Like certain short private investigators you could name?”
She took off her glasses. She had
wondrous beautiful blue eyes. “Exactly.”
Then, “You wouldn’t know anything about these Indians would you?”
“They’re dead.”
“Patter.”
“Actually, they’re very interesting. There’s a book on them at the library downtown.”
“Did they ever have to fight dinosaurs?”
“Different time period.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed but then most people are disappointed when they find out dinosaurs weren’t involved.
“I’m in a hurry, Andrea. What did you want to tell me?”
She smoked her cigarette right down to the nub.
“The time she had her breakdown? It was because she was seeing an older man.”
“I kind of figured that.”
“She was a sophomore.”
“I know.”
“In high school.”
“I know.”
“Seeing this forty-five-year-old.”
“Are you going to tell me his name?”
“I’ll bet you already know his name.”
“I’m betting Jack Coyle.”
She smiled. “You’re not half as dumb as you look.”
I laughed. “You know, if you were a real bitch you wouldn’t have to work so hard at it. You work up a sweat about it and that’s never any good. Instead of bitchy, you just come off sort of sad. Maybe even a little pathetic. Maybe you didn’t get the Christmas present you wanted one year. Or maybe your daddy would never kiss you. Or maybe you weren’t potty trained properly.”
“Try walking in on my mom screwing my uncle’s brains out.”
“Oh. I guess I was wrong. Sorry.”
It was a pretty dramatic moment. A thing like that could turn anybody into a bitch. “When did it happen?”
“It didn’t really happen. I just wanted to see if I could get you to feel sorry
for me for a half a minute. You should’ve seen your face when I told you the bit about my uncle.”
“So your mom didn’t sleep with him?”
“His own wife won’t sleep with him.
He’s got this skin condition all over his body.”
“Ah.”
She smirked. “You should’ve seen your face, McCain.”
I knew my face was red. She was some piece of work. “So had she heard from Jack Coyle lately?”
“Three times in one week. Wanting to get together.”
“So that’s what you meant by it wasn’t an accident?”
“He has a terrible temper. She told me that much. I could see him killing her and David.”
I pictured him in his tennis whites. I guessed I could see him killing them, too.
“He was completely obsessed with her,” she said. “Say, you wouldn’t write a paper for me, would you?”
“Too busy.”
“A hundred dollars?”
“Too busy.”
A smirk. “A hundred dollars and an hour with me in the back seat.”
I decided to surprise her. “You know something?”
“What?”
“I like you.”
“Sure you do.”
“I do. You’re as insecure as I am but you don’t handle it well at all. You need to relax. The bitch acts gets old fast.”
“I got you going, didn’t I? With that story about my mom and my uncle?”
“Yes, you did. I felt sorry for you. I could actually see you as a little girl walking into that bedroom. What you mst’ve seen and how you mst’ve felt.” I reached out and shook her hand. “Thanks for the lead on Jack Coyle. It may come in handy.”
After finishing our handshake, I started toward my car.
She said, to my back, “McCain?”
“Yeah?” I kept on moving.
“What I told you about walking in on my mom was true.”
“I kind of figured it was.” And
I had.
“That’s why they got a divorce. But she wasn’t with my uncle.” Beat for maximum dramatic effect: “She was with my aunt.”
Eighteen
Mike Carlyle made it easy for me. He stood in the entrance to his lumberyard talking to a customer. He glanced at my ragtop as I drove by but didn’t seem to find it interesting enough to glance for long.
As I drove out to his place, I noticed all the early spooks appearing all over town, jack o’lanterns and cardboard witches in windows, and a few scarecrows on front lawns.
Halloween. With the smoky scent of autumn on the air, it made you want to be a kid again when the most frightening thing you had to face was boogeymen you could buy at Woolworth’s. I thought of Linda.
A cancer ward was about as scary a thing as I could imagine.
The Carlyle house was one of those new ranch styles that sprawled over half an acre in a valley. The wine-colored house was surrounded by jack pines that hid it almost completely when you approached, as I did, from the west. A long metal rail ran in front of the place up on the roadside to keep cars from sailing off the asphalt and smashing into the house below.
I found a small park a quarter mile away and walked back. I didn’t want to advertise I was coming so she’d have time to hide.
The sun was just beginning to set. A yellow school bus roared past, scattering dust and gravel. The air was brisk and clean. I always told big city people that I liked living in a small city because I was so close to the outdoors.
But I didn’t get outdoors all that much.
The drive was a long slope of gravel leading to a two-stall garage with one car in it and a huge water tank. I went past them and on to the house.
No dog. Out here, on the edge of town and on every farm, there’s a dog. There are just enough prison breaks, just enough roaming intruders to make a dog a good investment. But there was no dog.
I knocked on a screen door that ricocheted each time I struck it. Nothing. But the car in the garage told me she was in there.
I walked around the house peeking in
windows. The furnishings were new but not expensive or noteworthy. Just good solid stuff. There was a cuckoo clock somewhere that celebrated the half hour. Four-thirty.
I went back to the screen door. Tried the front door behind it. Unlocked. I pushed in and called her name several times. There was an interior silence that bothered me, and as I looked around at the furniture, the silence became more pronounced.
I tried to put the size and ferocity of Mike Carlyle out of my mind. Cute little tricks-kicking guys in the balls chief among them—cd buy you a few cheap victories from time to time. But not with men like Carlyle. You’d never get close enough to kick him.
I decided an inspection was required and I decided that it was best if I could pull it off in less than .0000038 seconds.
I went room to room and found nothing other than the same good solid unremarkable furnishings I’d found in the living room. The bedroom wall was interesting. Several framed photos of Brenda in various bikinis over a span of several years. Kind of a grotto to one sexy body.
She’d put on weight at about midpoint in the span of pictures but it was the kind of weight that somehow only enhanced her sexuality. I got a pleasant little ache in my groin looking at the later ones. Mike was nowhere to be found in the photos.
I found her in the john and even though she was naked I didn’t get any little ache in my groin, pleasant or otherwise.
She’d been taking a bath when somebody had struck her on the side of the skull, much as Sara Griffin had been struck. The bath water was filthy with her blood and the pink-tiled bathroom stank of her dying and her death. Her left hand, resting on the edge of the bathtub’s side, was crabbed into a claw. Her green eyes glared up at me. A tiny trickle of blood had wormed its way from her nostril to her upper lip.
You could see the wide swaths of dried soap and water on the sink, walls, doorknob. The place had been wiped down thoroughly.
I haven’t seen that many corpses in my young life but I’ll tell you one thing, that old Irish maxim is true. When you see a dead person, one of your first thoughts is how you’ll look when you’re dead. There’s your mortality
staring right up at you.
After that moment passed, I realized two things.
I needed a cigarette and I needed to get out of this house.
As I got to the end of the hall, a heavy vehicle popped gravel and came to a rumbling stop somewhere near the front door. Mike and the big Chevrolet pickup he drove for the lumberyard. I was sure of it. I went to the curtained front window, peeked out. He had just left the truck, toting a large cardboard box in both hands.
I had some alternatives. I could hide, I could run, or I could confront him.
Just as the front door was shoved inward, I thought of a fourth alternative. There was a black telephone sitting on a dry bar. I picked up the receiver and dialed the police station.
Mike Carlyle saw me just as Mooney, the asthmatic man who answers the phone in the daytime, wheezed, “Police station.”
“Mooney, this is Sam McCain. Tell the chief that I just found Brenda Carlyle dead in her bathtub. He’d better get out here fast.”
Carlyle dropped the heavy box on the floor and made a sound deep in his throat that combined shock and rage and loss. The noise paralyzed me, forced me for the first time to see him as a human being, the eloquence of his stunned pain.
Then he came rushing at me.
Part
Nineteen
His shoulder collided with mine. He was big enough and crazed enough to knock me several feet across the living room without even being conscious of it.
He was on his way to the bathroom and to his wife. I’d expected violence from him, verbal and physical. What was I doing here? Had I been sleeping with her? Why had I killed her?
He didn’t walk out of the bathroom. He exploded at me, this gigantic crazed animal ducking his head as if he were going to attack me the way a bull attacks a matador. “You killed her and now I’m gonna kill you!”
“I didn’t kill her, Mike. I didn’t
have any reason to. Now calm down.”
I grabbed a fifth of whiskey from the
bar and got ready for him. I figured he wouldn’t calm down. When he got about two feet from me, I smashed it into the side of his head and stepped aside. And then I decided we were in a Warner Brothers cartoon where the good guy, the extremely psychotic sadist Bugs Bunny, slams somebody over the head with an anvil, only to see the bad guy shrug it off and keep right on charging.
Which is just what happened.
While he grabbed me by the throat, I had time to swipe a fifth of scotch from the bar top. And then he was running with me right back into the wall.
There is nothing good to say about strangling.
Somebody can knock you out and do you a favor. You don’t have to be awake while they stomp you. But strangling folks takes a relatively long time and you’re awake until near the very end.
He’d clamped his hands on me so tight I forgot everything except trying to breathe.
Instinctively, though, I knew enough to hold on to the fifth of scotch.
I dangled about two feet off the carpet.
He alternated between choking me and slamming my head into the wall. It was hard to tell which I enjoyed more. I kept kicking him in the shins because that’s where my toes were. He’d curse when I’d get him a good one but his hands never let up on their pressure.
“You killed her, you bastard. You killed her.”
I wasn’t in any position to argue, much as I wanted to. Hell, I was a lawyer. I could argue my case.
I don’t know how long it was before I started losing consciousness. Couple minutes, maybe.
But suddenly I was hot and cold—shivering cold —and I started losing strength and I ke
pt trying to gasp down some air and-And then I did it. I gathered enough strength and intelligence to raise the scotch bottle and smash the neck of it against the wall behind me.
If he heard the smashing glass, he didn’t let on. He just kept pressing my larynx harder. He knew he was almost home.
I stabbed him in the head.
Not all that deep but enough so that there was a lot of blood immediately. Enough so that the pain forced him to drop me and to fall away. Enough so that he tripped backward over the coffee table and sprawled face up on the couch.
“Now listen to me, you big stupid ape,” I said, advancing toward him with the smashed bottle.
The jagged parts ran with his blood. “I didn’t kill your wife. I didn’t know your wife. I talked to her once. That’s all. And that’s all we did was talk. You understand?”
I don’t know what I expected. But whatever I expected, it wasn’t this awful stretching silence with him looking up at me like a sad lost child. Just this awful stretching silence broken finally by a single sob.
“You really didn’t kill her?”
“No, Mike, I really didn’t kill
her.”
“I’m not any big stupid ape.”
“No, I don’t guess you are.”
“There’re a lot of smart football
players.”
He didn’t want to think about his dead wife so he led us off the trail. A little diversion.
“There was this fullback who had a doctorate in—”
“Mike.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“Sit up. I’ll get you a drink.”
“I think you broke all the bottles.”
“Just two. Now sit up on the couch and I’ll get you a drink.”
I got him his drink and he said, “You see her in there?” I set the bottle of sour mash on the coffee table in front of him.
“Yeah. That’s why I called the police station.”