by Ed Gorman
“Half,” I said. “I’m no drinker.”
She smiled. “Neither am I. Not until lately, anyway.” For the first time I
heard sorrow and perhaps fear in her voice. “But then everything’s changed now, hasn’t it?” She put a full shot in her coffee.
We sat at a small table that smelled of its oilcloth covering. The ancient refrigerator throbbed. The faucet dripped. The Jesus of the kitchen lithograph looked just as sad as I felt.
“You know what’s funny?”
“What?”
“I never liked him.”
“That surprises me.”
“Right from the start he was moody and angry and belligerent. And he started stealing from us when he wasn’t even quite seven years old. I even thought of sending him to an orphanage—Lord knows we didn’t have the money to send him to some private school—but Amy wouldn’t hear of it. He was Amy’s boy. No matter what he did, she found some way of excusing it. If I was hard with him, she’d sneak into his room and give him money, to make him feel better. She never saw the way he used her. So she let him get away with everything.”
I lit a cigarette. The kitchen had never seemed this small, this oppressive before. I wondered if it felt the same way to her.
Emma smiled as radio music came on
upstairs. Dance band music from the thirties.
“Poor Amy. I treat her so bad sometimes.”
“I’ve been trying to put this together, Emma.
From what you just told me, I can see why you have lost your temper with David. But why Sara?”
“You’re not that good at it, Sam. David killed Sara, I didn’t. Right in the backyard here. They’d been upstairs arguing for half an hour at least. Her parents thought she was home.
But she snuck out and came over here. David said they were going out. She looked very embarrassed about all the arguing. He killed her in the car right out there in the backyard, like I said. I watched him put her in the trunk. When he came home that night, I told him I was going to the police.
I made him tell me everything. He put her body in the Coyles’ gazebo so Cliffie would think that Jack Coyle had killed her. I guess they’d been having some kind of unholy affair—Lord, a man of that age. Then after he dumped the body, he tore out to Brenda’s house. She was drunk, of course.
He’d convinced her that he’d been there for an hour longer than he actually was. He told me that he was going to pretend to save her reputation by not telling Cliffie who he’d been with. Then at the last minute, he’d tell Cliffie her name and he’d have his alibi.”
“Then you went ahead and cut his brake line.”
She sighed. Dropped her eyes to the worked and wrinkled hands that surrounded her coffee cup.
“I’m going to have a hard time telling Father Laymon that in confession.”
“And then Brenda,” I said quietly.
A sip of her coffee. A hand at the back of her neck, as if she were having pain. And a deep ragged sigh.
“She wanted money to leave her husband—j run out on him. She wanted two thousand dollars from me. Can you imagine that? Where would somebody like me get two thousand dollars?”
“She was blackmailing you?”
“Trying to. She called me three different times. She was drunker every time she called. She’d figured out that David had tricked her into giving him an alibi. She said that the way things stood, a lot of people thought David had just committed suicide. That he didn’t have nerve enough to do it the way most people do. So he cut his brake line.
He wouldn’t know when or where or how it would happen. He’d just get in a drag race and—”
She raised her gaze to me directly. “She was so miserable, I probably did her a favor.
That’s a horrible thing to say. But it’s true. I don’t think much of her husband—the way he’s always swaggering around like he’s still the big sports hero—but he deserved a better wife than her.
I almost felt sorry for her.”
Her gaze shifted past me and she smiled then at something I couldn’t see. “You’re getting sneaky in your old age, sister.”
I turned and saw Amy in the doorway. In little more than a whisper, she said, “You should’ve talked to me, Emma. I could’ve helped you.
I’d never desert you, Emma. I want to go where you go.”
Just before she moved away from the kitchen door, sobbing, everything in the house took on its old, comfortable self. I liked all the old mismatched furnishings, and the thrum of that damned refrigerator motor, and the smell of the oilcloth.
We listened as Amy, still sobbing, ran up the stairs, slamming her door when she reached her room.
“She’s never going to forgive me, Sam.”
“Maybe never forgive you. But she’ll understand you. Someday.”
“At my age, I don’t have a lot of
somedays left, Sam.”
I let her cry for a while and then I went around the table and raised her to her feet and took her in my arms. She had the bones of old age, so fragile and yet so sharp, and flesh that was dried freckled tissue covering the lean meat of mortality.
I sat down in her chair and put her on my lap and said, “We’re going to figure out how to handle Cliffie tomorrow morning when I take you in. And then we’re going to get you the best criminal lawyer in the state, all right?”
And when she raised her ancient face, she was no longer monster or ghoul, but a young Irish girl again—for just that moment I saw the girl she’d been, Easter hat and Christmas dress and first-date hair ribbon—and when I held her this time, I was holding all those years, an entire life, in my arms and I felt her heartbeat slow and the nervous spasm in her left arm cease and heard her crying become little more than sniffles.
She said, “Will you go talk to Amy for me, Sam? I’d really appreciate it.”
Twenty-five
I drove around and then I didn’t drive around, sitting in a tavern where the gents along the bar were arguing Kennedy-nixon, coming up in two weeks, and then I drove around again but not for long because I just kept thinking of Amy sobbing, “If our father ever knew what his daughter did—I’m so glad my folks are dead and don’t have to see this.
And killing poor David.” And finally, realizing for the first time the practical implications of this terrible night: “Who’ll I live with now, Sam? Emma’s my whole life, my whole life.”
The lights shouldn’t have been turned on. Neither should the Tv. My first thought was a burglar of some kind, but who’d burgle my little apartment?
Or maybe a dissatisfied client
or his emissary. You lose a trial, sometimes they have kin gunning for you. Hell, if a plotline like that is good enough for Gunsmoke, it’s good enough for Black River Falls.
I saw her through the window in the door. All comfy-cozy on the couch. Tasha, Crystal, and Tess all pushed tight against her at various points in her body.
She looked like she belonged there.
When she heard my key in the door, she jumped up and rushed toward me.
“I’ve really been worried about you. Mrs.
Goldman let me in again. She’s sure a nice woman.”
“She sure is.”
I came in. Took off my suitcoat,
balled it, and tossed it for two points on the chair. “Needs to be dry-cleaned, anyway.”
“Oh.”
“I thought maybe you were a burglar.”
“I don’t think I could ever be anything as exciting as a burglar. And besides, I’m very happy being a nurse.”
“You sure are pretty.”
“I’ve missed you, Sam. I’m just confused about everything.”
“Me, too.”
We still weren’t touching in any way. We were maybe half a foot apart. The cats were on the couch, watching us. They wanted some action.
“Sam, have you ever just slept with a woman? No going all the way, I mean?”
“Honest?”
“Honest
.”
“I’ve tried.”
“It didn’t work?”
“I don’t think she really wanted it to work and I know I didn’t want it to work.”
“Oh.”
“But if I really made my mind up—”
“It’d be putting a lot of pressure on you—”
“I’ve got the shower standing close by.”
She grinned. “That’d be a help. You have any handcuffs?”
“Sorry, all out. Just leg irons.”
“Well, that could be interesting.”
“I could loan you my gun. You could pistol whip me.”
Half seriously, she said, “Well,
it was a stupid idea, I guess.”
“Aw, let’s give it a try.”
“You won’t try—”
“We’ll do whatever you want. Or don’t want.”
“We have to have strict rules, though.”
“How strict? Is kissing allowed?”
“I suppose kissing would be all right.”
“Sort of pressing against each other. Would that be all right?”
“I suppose sort of pressing against each other would be all right, too, if it was just sort of.”
“Saying that I’ve missed you and I don’t know where this is going but I sure do like you? Would that be all right?”
“That’d be best of all, Sam.”
“Well, how about if we start the kissing part just standing right here in the middle of the floor?”
“Sometimes that’s the best place of all, Sam.
Right here in the middle of the floor.”
“The good old middle of the floor,” I said.
“The good old middle of the floor.”
Twenty-six
The call came at 3cccg A.M. according to the glowing face of my nightstand clock.
Judge Whitney. Not only sober.
Alarmed.
“Did Cliffie just call you?”
“No.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie. The phone had rung. I just decided not to answer it. I didn’t want to go down and bail somebody out. But this time the phone woke Linda first and she said, ever the responsible nurse, “You’d better get it, Sam. It could be important this hour of the night.”
So I’d lifted the receiver and put it to my ear and listened to the judge and said, “So what did Cliffie want?”
“Then you haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
And then she said it: “Emma Kelly killed her sister tonight. And then killed herself. I imagine she didn’t have a hard time finding a weapon. Her father was a gunsmith, you know.”
I must have made some kind of startled sound, because Linda sat up in bed and turned on the
reading lamp.
All I could think of was sad, lost Amy in the doorway of their kitchen saying, I want to go where you go. I wondered if she’d begged Emma to kill her, too. A mortal sin, to be sure, but Amy would likely commit it to be with her sister.
“Did you hear what I said, McCain?”
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah, I heard all
right.”
I sat silent on the edge of the bed for a long, long time, smoking one cigarette after another.
Linda knew not to ask me about it.
After a while she came over and sat down on the bed next to me and put an arm around my shoulder. “Maybe I’d better go, Sam.”
I came out of my silence and looked at her and said, “I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll stay.”
She smiled. “How about two dollars?”
She was kind enough and smart enough to take me in her arms and just hold me for a long and silent time.
The End
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