Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  “What happened to your face?” he said.

  “None of your business,” I said, and I walked out of that place, leaving him behind.

  So they were about to wrap this one up. Pick up Tanner, call a press conference, then stick Jeff in jail for six to nine months to await trial. Once that happened, it would all be out of my hands. But it wasn’t yet.

  It was afternoon and I was getting hungry. I stopped at a mom-and-pop and bought yet another tuna sandwich on an Italian roll. I ate it in the car, parked across the street from Foxy’s and fifty yards down. And then I waited.

  It was interesting to see who went through the door of that dirty little place. A guy with a long lens and an entrepreneurial spirit could probably make some decent money sitting outside Foxy’s.

  I wasn’t in it for the money. I was in it for Donna.

  So I sat and then sat some more. I recognized a bank teller and the owner of a Kennebec real estate company. Two guys were wearing ties; one was wearing a blue uniform with his name over the front pocket. My buddy from behind the counter came out four times to smoke. I leaned back in the seat and tried to get comfortable.

  Turned on the radio and turned it off. Little kids walked by with backpacks on, throwing rocks at each other back and forth across the street. One of the stones skittered on the pavement and dinged off the wheel of my car. They looked at me and ran. I sat some more.

  An older man, stooped and furtive, came around the corner of Foxy’s and went inside. I marked the time on my watch and waited for him to come out. How long would it take for him to do whatever it was he did in there? Ten minutes? A half hour? I timed him. Five, ten, fifteen. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty. What was he doing? Rearranging the films in alphabetical order? Come on, man. Get a life. Get—

  There he was.

  Tanner came around the same corner and slipped inside. I got out of the car and crossed the street and hurried down the sidewalk and up the steps. The door pulled open and the stooped man came out. He looked down at the ground as he passed me. I stopped the door from closing and went in.

  My buddy looked up at me and then quickly away. I scanned the first movie room, saw a guy in a suit reading a film package. I went into the rental room and there was a guy with his back to me, hands in his pockets.

  Tanner.

  I looked at the titles too, circling opposite Tanner as he moved along the wall. He took one package down and flipped it over, then put it back. I did the same. Tanner took another one down and put it back, and then he was moving toward the doorway to the other room. With a last glance, he walked out.

  After five or ten seconds, I followed. He was handing my buddy a bill, getting change and tokens back. I hesitated, and he put his money in the pocket of his jeans and walked around the corner into the hall and the peepshow booths. I was right behind him.

  Tanner went down the hall almost to the end, where it was so dark I could barely see him. I padded along behind him as he pushed one of the doors open and went in. The door clicked shut and I put my shoulder to it and pushed it back open.

  “Hey, sorry, I’m not into any—”

  “Shut up,” I said, and slid past the door and pushed it closed.

  “What are you doing? I told you. Hit the road, ass—”

  “Nice hobby, Jeffie boy. Why don’t you put one of those nickels in the machine so I can see your face.”

  “Is that—?”

  “C’est moi. How’s your mouth?”

  “You son of a bitch. You’ve got two friggin’ seconds before I—”

  “Before I scream bloody murder,” I said. “And your reputation as a pervert is further enhanced. Put the money in the machine.”

  “What for? What the hell are you doing?”

  I took a quarter out of my pocket and, in the dim light, shoved it in the slot. The screen turned pale gray and I banged a red button. Naked bodies appeared. Two women and a man. They were moaning, as if in extreme pain.

  “This is pretty pathetic, you know that?”

  “Who asked you, McMorrow? Get the hell—”

  “I’ll try not to look,” I said. “And I’ll try not to touch anything, including you. While we talk.”

  “I’m not talking. I got nothing to say to you.”

  Tanner was against one wall. I was against the door. The screen was to our left. The women and the man were still on it, still moaning.

  “What a weird job,” I said, looking at the screen and then back at Tanner. “I want to know about that night. Everything.”

  “I got nothing to—”

  “Or I make such a ruckus in here that the cops come and, you know, they might get the wrong idea. And word would get around.”

  “About you too,” Tanner said.

  “But I don’t hang around with homophobes.”

  “What?”

  “Bigots,” I said. “Listen. I don’t have time to explain it. You want me to start screaming or you want to start talking?”

  One of the women on the screen started to shriek.

  Tanner hesitated.

  “About what?” he said, the flickering light playing off his face. His mouth was still swollen.

  “That night. Tell me what happened.”

  “I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning.”

  “I did that with the cops,” Tanner said.

  “And they don’t believe you. I want to hear it myself.”

  “I ought to friggin’ kill you.”

  “Maybe, but not now. Now you ought to tell me what I want to know. Believe me.”

  Now both women were going into what appeared to be some sort of seizure. The man was feigning pleasure, very badly.

  “So ask,” Tanner said.

  “When did you get there?”

  “I don’t know. Eight fifteen. Maybe a little later.”

  “You weren’t supposed to be there. Why’d you go?”

  “To talk to her. She was blowing me off, you know. I mean, I won’t take that from anybody, never mind a—”

  “A woman. Right. So what happened?”

  “What happened? I don’t know,” Tanner said. “We got in a fight.”

  “A fistfight?”

  “No. You know. Yelling and shit.”

  “Yelling what?”

  “Oh, man, how the hell am I supposed to remember all of it. Just yelling. I’m telling her she can’t just give me the boot. She’s telling me I’m nothing and I’ve got no say and get out now and all this. And I’m saying it’s my stereo and she can’t just take it and she’s saying she’ll call the cops.”

  “Then what?” I said.

  Tanner took a deep breath. The film on the screen suddenly went off. I took out another quarter and rammed it in. The threesome popped back on, still writhing like the damned.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “So we kind of calm down a little and Donna goes and gets a bottle of Jack out of the cupboard there and she gets a drink and I take the bottle and take a swig and I’m standing there.”

  “Where’s Adrianna?”

  “Oh, she’s in the living room with the TV on or something. Donna wouldn’t let her come near me, since I left, you know? Like I’m gonna kidnap her or something. Hey, I always kind of liked the kid. We used to joke around and shit.”

  “I’m touched. So what happened?”

  “So Donna slams down a couple. That’s how she drinks—”

  “Drank, you mean.”

  “Yeah, right. She didn’t drink that much, like she’d go weeks without one, but when she did, she’d go right at it.”

  “And she did that night?”

  “Yeah. I mean, she started to. She had two or three. And she’s telling me about her rights as a person and stuff, and how I have no right to do this and that, and she says she never should have let me touch her and she wouldn’t ever again.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Tanner fidgeted a little. Looked up at the screen, w
here the film had looped around to the beginning. The two women and the man were clothed, sitting on an orange plaid couch.

  “So then she really starts in on me, you know, calling me this and that, and she’s met this other guy and he’s from the newspaper—that’s you, I guess—and he treats her with respect and all this, and I was just a control freak and a drunk and I wasn’t worth shit, and I’m standing there listening to this and man, you know you can only take so much.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I popped her. But just a little tap, you know. A little slap on the face. She goes friggin’ ballistic. She’s screaming and swinging at me with both arms and the kid comes out and she’s screaming and crying and it’s a goddamn nightmare and I’m, like, I don’t need this. I mean, I don’t want to end up in the joint.”

  “But you didn’t leave?”

  “No. I mean, I did. In a few minutes. But she’s friggin’ swinging at me and I’m backing away, you know. Bumping into stuff in the kitchen and she’s calling me this and that and then she friggin’ kicks me right in the balls, and I mean hard. I mean, she practically dropped me and there’s one thing I won’t take from some chick and that’s it, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I guess I do,” I said.

  “So I, like, grab her arms and she’s still kicking and screaming and she spits in my face and I grab her by the throat, you know? Like, to shut her up. And I guess I sort of choked her a little, but I didn’t try to kill her. I mean, I held her like that ’til she calmed down and then I, like, let her go.”

  I looked at him.

  “What do you mean, you ‘like, let her go’?”

  “I, like, spun her away from me. But she wasn’t dead. I mean, she was coughing and crying and shit. I don’t know how they can pin this on me. I told those cops. When I left, she was pouring a goddamn drink at the kitchen counter. She was no more dead than you or me. They can’t pin this on me. I told ’em. She weren’t even hurt, hardly.”

  “And then you left?”

  “Right. I said, ‘I don’t need this crap.’ And I went down the back stairs and out the side door.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. A little after nine, I think, maybe. I got back to The Mansion and had a few drinks and, like, calmed down, you know? And then I left and went back to the place where I was staying.”

  “And you didn’t go back to Donna’s?”

  He looked at me. I watched his eyes.

  “No way. I’d had enough of that . . . of her. I mean, friggin’ A. I don’t deserve this. What does she want? A goddamn guy to put his coat in the goddamn puddles or something? Yes ma’am, no ma’am?”

  “She doesn’t want anything now,” I said.

  He paused, and I did too. The two women and the man had shucked their clothes and were pawing each other. One of the women was saying, “Oh, yeah,” over and over.

  “So did you kill her?” I said.

  I watched him.

  “Hell, no. I didn’t even hurt her. I mean, not like some of the other—”

  Tanner caught himself.

  “So you used to pound on her pretty good, didn’t you,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “She could aggravate a man, I’ll tell you. And turn it on and off. When I come home, I want to know what I’m getting, you know?”

  “And if you didn’t get it, you’d hit her?”

  Tanner stared.

  “Yeah. Sometimes. But I didn’t kill her.”

  “Hard?”

  “Sometimes. But I didn’t kill her.”

  “Ever break bones? Bloody her face? Hold her down and make her cry for you to stop hurting her?”

  He looked at me.

  “Yeah,” Tanner said slowly. “But I didn’t kill her.”

  I looked into his eyes. He looked back.

  “I just plain didn’t,” Tanner said.

  No, you didn’t, I thought. And as we stood there, face-to-face, chest to chest, the screen suddenly went blank. Tanner looked at me, then took a token from his pocket and dropped it in the slot. The two women and the man were on the carpet, and he glanced at them and then back at me.

  “Why do you want to know all this?” Tanner said.

  “I just do. And another thing I want to know. Was that you, with the cat on my windshield?”

  Tanner’s eyes said yes.

  “Hey,” he said. “She was mine and you were pissing me off.”

  He looked at me as if he’d done nothing wrong.

  “I owe you one for that,” I said.

  “You were in my face, McMorrow. You broke my window too.”

  “But you shouldn’t have killed that cat.”

  Without saying another word, I leaned to the right and pulled the door open behind me and left.

  25

  If not Tanner, then who?

  Maybe he had done it. Maybe he was a pathological enough liar to look me in the eye and say he hadn’t killed Donna, and to make it believable.

  But I didn’t think so.

  Tanner was a lot of things, very few of them good, but he wasn’t devious. In his life in bars, on binges, he seemed to have developed an odd but fairly rigid code of behavior. It was okay to beat a defenseless woman. It was okay to be a cokehead and a drunk. But it was not okay to go around telling lies. To tell a lie betrayed weakness. Lying meant you cared what somebody else thought about you or anything else. And bullish Jeff Tanner didn’t. He just plain didn’t.

  I mulled this over as I inched through Kennebec’s six-car rush-hour traffic jam and then crossed the tumbling gray river. Even on this blue-sky afternoon, there was something threatening about the slipping and sliding torrent, something relentlessly lethal in its movement. And there was something—someone—lethal moving around me too. I couldn’t give it a name or a face, but I could feel myself getting closer to it. How would I know when I met it? How did I know I hadn’t met it already?

  I had to keep pushing. Keep moving. Keep talking. Go back to the old woman in the apartment. Keep talking to Lenny. Get Marcia calmed down somehow and maybe even talk to Adrianna. Because Tanner was headed for a murder conviction as slowly and surely as if he had been plunked on a conveyor belt. And then Donna’s story would be over. There would be no reason for me to ask, no reason for anyone to answer. The puzzle would be finished and put away, and there I’d be, hunting around the floor for the missing piece.

  The sun was at my back as I swung through Albion village and headed for Prosperity. Up ahead, an empty pulp truck rumbled, its chains jingling against the side posts on the truck bed, the driver’s tanned arm hanging out of the window. The arm disappeared and the driver downshifted and there was a cough of diesel smoke and then the arm poked out again. He slowed more on an upgrade and the arm waved me by. I passed him, still half lost in thought. Jeff and Leaman. Donnie and Marcia.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled into my dooryard and shut off the motor. I sat there in the driver’s seat, blackflies buzzing around me, and thought some more.

  “I think there’s moss growing on you,” a voice said.

  I looked up. Clair was standing five feet away.

  “I hate it when you do that,” I said. “You should wear a bell around your neck or something.”

  “I was about to hold a mirror up to your mouth to see if you were breathing,” Clair said.

  “So far, so good.”

  “How’s the rest of your day been?”

  “Peachy. I went to the porn shop. Saw one of those peep shows.”

  “Forget I even asked,” Clair said.

  “And you know who was in the booth with me?”

  “How ’bout we talk about the weather.”

  “Jeff Tanner,” I said.

  Clair looked at me.

  “Yeah, it was the only place I could find where we could talk. He said he didn’t kill Donna.”

  “So what’d you expect him to do? Get down on his knees and confess?”

 
“Wrong venue. No, really, I believe him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I looked right at him and I think he was telling the truth. Donnie, too.”

  “There were three of you in there?” Clair said.

  “No, that was out on the interstate in a new Lincoln. Donnie, he’s Donna’s ex, he said he wouldn’t throw away his fancy Jeep and cowboy boots by killing her.”

  “That would be a consideration, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It has a power sunroof and everything,” I said.

  “Power sunroof?”

  “Yeah, but you don’t say it right. You have to say it like it’s the Holy Grail or something.”

  “I’ll work on it. So you believed him too?” Clair said.

  “Yup.”

  “So where does that leave things?”

  “I don’t know. Tanner’s going down for it. He doesn’t know that, but he is. They’re just waiting for the last pieces to fall into place. For a tough guy, he’s really pretty naive. Like a little kid, sort of.”

  “The schoolyard bully who never grew up,” Clair said.

  “No, that’s Leaman. Speaking of him, you have to shoot the Fuller Brush man today?”

  “Just winged him. Other than that, things were pretty quiet.”

  “So what’d you do while I was watching dirty movies?” I said.

  “Tilled the early spinach under.”

  “All this clean living’s gonna catch up with you.”

  “I did put real butter on my kale at lunch,” Clair said.

  “I knew you had a dark side.”

  “And it’s ready for a beer.”

  “That makes two of us,” I said.

  “Fifteen minutes. Up at the house,” Clair said, and he turned and headed back the way he had come, which was very quietly.

  I took the rifle out of the trunk and the cartridges out of the glove box. Standing by the car, I loaded the rifle and carried it as I walked to the door. At the door, I stopped and listened. I heard chickadees in the distance. I opened the door and went through the mudroom to the door to the house. The shed was still, and I waited and listened at the inside door too. I heard the refrigerator click on. I opened the door slowly and walked in, rifle at my side, finger inside the trigger guard.

  The house was still.