The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  Later, when the ambulance crew came, they asked me my name. I almost said Max.

  I got it back by nightfall. At least, as much of yourself as you ever get back when death picks you up, grins at you from an inch away, and then drops you on the ground again.

  I felt as if I were still running away, and kept waiting for death to jerk the string and pull me back.

  “You should have gone to the hospital,” Carol said.

  We were alone in a house owned by a friend of Sandy’s. Sometimes, when he was on one of his frequent overseas trips, he let her use it as a kind of hideaway, and so far we had managed to keep from getting it trashed, which was just as well, considering the expensive objects d’art it contained.

  “Nothing’s broken,” I said. “And they can’t do anything for the shakes but give me some tranquilizers. I don’t know what effect their pills would have on me. I don’t need to knock myself out for eight hours.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me,” she said, pouring herself a half-tumbler of whiskey. “God, and I swore off the stuff, too. Bad for the body.”

  “So is plastique,” I said, and poured a shot for myself. I’d held off until Sandy left, pacing myself. I didn’t need to be staggering drunk, but I wanted something to calm me. I figured a couple of ounces an hour was something I could function with.

  “It really is eerie,” she said. “First they try to kill you and almost get Sam. Then the bomb.”

  I knew what she was getting at but I didn’t want to admit it.

  “Coincidence,” I said.

  “No. I used to believe in that, but not anymore. Things make sense. Not always our sense, but some kind of sense.”

  She was sitting on the sofa, a bathrobe around her. There was a bruise on her arm where she’d fallen on a bottle when I pushed her into the ditch.

  “You think it was on purpose, then?” I asked. “Somebody is setting out to reenact the Max Chantry case, with me as the main character?”

  “I don’t know. I just mean there seems to be so much similar between you and Max. You were both hurt in a war …”

  “True.”

  “Then, somebody tried to kill you both, and missed and got somebody else instead.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Do you believe in karma?”

  “Sure. Everything’s karma after it happens.”

  “But this can’t all be accident. Don’t you think there was some significance to your being there when we found Max? Something that brought you there?”

  I looked at her.

  “Something brought me there. But it wasn’t fate.” It was Katherine, and she was six hundred miles away.

  I started to tremble again. I turned away, trying to keep her from seeing it, but it wasn’t any good. She got up and came over, reaching out a hand to touch me.

  “Are you all right?”

  “It happened all the time in ’Nam,” I said. “Sometimes it happened right away and other times it happened hours afterward. It’s a normal reaction.”

  She put her arms around me then and I realized her head only came midway up my chest.

  “I don’t know what I’ve gotten us into,” she said, hugging me as a child would its parent. “When it started out I was interested in it because it was like a historical problem. I didn’t expect people to get killed.”

  “It’ll turn out okay,” I reassured her, smelling the freshness of her hair and feeling a sudden surge of desire.

  “I’m through with Sam,” she said then, turning her head up to look at me. “He’s all bluster and threat. I’ll keep going to the hospital, but it’s all over between us.”

  “That’s your business,” I said.

  “Aren’t you glad?”

  “For your sake. Sam doesn’t strike me as much of a bargain.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  “What do you want me to say? You’re young enough to be my daughter.”

  “So what?” She closed her eyes and my lips came down to meet hers. Her mouth opened immediately and I felt her tongue flick against my own. She moaned deep in her throat and her arms came up, around my neck, and she pulled me down, toward the rug.

  The bathrobe came open and her breasts were pressing against my shirt and I wanted her with the kind of animal hunger I could only remember from ’Nam, and I was reaching down, to ease us toward the rug, when I stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Except that you really are young enough to be my daughter.”

  “So what? Don’t you want to?”

  “I want to. Too much.” I started to tell her it was because we’d both almost gotten killed; that after something like that, the life instinct springs back with a vengeance. But I knew the truth, and the truth was that I was still thinking of Katherine, and I knew that if I went through with it, I’d feel guilty tomorrow, even if I never saw Katherine again. So instead I just drew her to me and held her against my body. We stayed on the sofa like that, most of the night. Once, when I drifted off, and saw the Sandman at the door, dragging himself forward with a lopsided smile on his face, I awoke with a little cry. And she was still there.

  When Sandy came the next morning she brought a Sunday Picayune with a picture of the gutted car on page two.

  MAN KILLED, the headline read. I was getting ready to read the story when a knock came at the door.

  Before I could ask who it was Sandy was across the room and opening it. I had my gun in my hand but lowered it when I saw Mancuso.

  “How the hell did you find us?” I asked.

  He gave Sandy a guilty look.

  “Yesterday, while you were kind of in a daze, we had a long talk,” Sandy confessed. “I told him you hadn’t been on the Gourrier case, this was something different.”

  “And I pretended to believe it,” Mancuso said, folding his arms.

  “You gave him this address,” I said.

  “Seemed like a good thing,” Sandy said. “Anyway, he kept Carol’s name out of the papers.”

  My eyes fell to the first line of the story:

  “A local investigator was killed …”

  “You mean …?” I asked.

  “That’s right, hotshot,” Mancuso finished. “As far as everybody else is concerned, you’re dead.”

  It took a while to get used to the idea of being dead.

  For one thing, it meant keeping a low profile, and it was hard to live with the idea of staying inside this house, letting others do my work.

  But there was another effect, one I’d felt in ’Nam when a man near me had stepped on a mine: I felt as though I ought to be dead, I’d been so close to the brink. It didn’t make sense that a bum I’d never seen before had died in my place when, had he not been there, I would have been the charred body in the morgue.

  I’d worked my way through it the first time, right after ’Nam. But I didn’t know how often it could happen without it changing me permanently.

  Then I thought about Max: I wondered how he had been changed, first by the army hospital, after Germany, and then after the bombing, realizing his partner had died in his stead. Max, wounded in the last days of the war, as if fate had struck him down. Max, coming back like a wraith, determined to bring the bastards to justice. Max, driven in a way I would never be. For the first time I caught a glimpse of the burden it must have been.

  Until Max ended up truly dead.

  Didn’t he?

  In the evening Sandy came back. She’d been to the office, and LaVelle had actually been wiping his eyes, but she wasn’t sure it wasn’t the result of some herbal concoction he’d dreamed up. He’d wanted to know what had been done with my body. Sandy had put him off.

  There was also a call from a distraught Jake Kelso. He’d offered to come over, sit at the wake, take over the case, do whatever was called for. She told him she’d get back to him later.

  Sam had called to ask where the hell Carol was. No mention of my death.<
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  And O’Rourke had left six messages, the last one barely coherent.

  I lifted the phone to call him but Sandy put her hand over mine.

  “It’s best not to call him just yet. You know how straight John is. He couldn’t keep it out of his face.”

  I thought of a few of his court appearances, when he’d made them cry. But he really had felt those cases, and he hadn’t been play-acting. I reluctantly acknowledged that she was right.

  “I can’t stay here forever,” I said.

  “No, but it’s just a matter of time before they catch him. How far can a guy with a face like that go?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to think about that,” Carol said with a shiver. “He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave town.”

  “No,” Sandy said, “and that’s why they’ll catch him.”

  But she didn’t say what we were both thinking: How many more bodies had to pile up before he fell into the net?

  “Well, at least I can call my father,” I said. “Before some well-meaning friend sees it in the paper and calls him.”

  Sandy nodded. She knew the Captain was too far away for anybody involved to get to.

  “Okay, Micah-man,” she said. “As for me, I reckon I better go out and arrange a funeral.”

  I watched her go; a few seconds later her car door slammed.

  What if he really was out there? What if he’d followed Mancuso? I hadn’t caught him trailing us yesterday, and I’d been watching. Was he that good?

  Something told me he wasn’t, and I didn’t like the corollary.

  Was the person who hired Frake taking a direct hand now?

  I punched in my credit card number and then pushed the right buttons to give me the Captain.

  To my relief, he answered after two rings.

  “This is your dead son,” I told him.

  “I was wondering when you were going to admit it,” he snapped back. I heard glasses clinking in the background and some forties-era big-band music. “You picked a fine time to call.”

  “Who is it this time?” I asked. “Commander Rafael’s widow or some Navy nurse?”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say,” he growled. “It’s just a gathering for a few friends.”

  And all navy blue, I thought. The navy had been his life and he’d only lately forgiven me for taking a marine commission when I’d left the academy.

  “I really am dead,” I told him. I explained about the bomb and Max.

  I thought I heard him sigh across the wires. “Well, I knew a J.G. named Smith that happened to once,” he mused. “Navy notified his wife and everything. Wrong Smith. Poor bastard came home to break the good news and found her in bed with an air corps major.”

  I’d been watching Carol as he talked. She’d wandered over to the television and was in the act of turning it on.

  When I turned back to the phone I realized there had been a long silence.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking, son?” he asked.

  “You mean about Smith not really being dead?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It had crossed my mind.”

  “Well, you go easy, boy. Stay dead. Let your friends carry the weight for a while.”

  “When did you ever let your friends carry the weight?”

  “You really are a Dunn, aren’t you?”

  It was the nicest compliment he’d ever paid me.

  We said our good-byes and I went over and flicked off the TV.

  “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have anything that masks out sounds from outside.”

  Carol nodded and smiled.

  “That doesn’t leave much,” she smirked.

  I knew it was going to be another long night.

  CHAPTER 17

  We were back on the beach. I was standing in the sun, staring seaward, at the Sandman stretched out a few feet away from me, near the lapping waves, when somebody pulled me down.

  “Hit the dirt, you fool.”

  An 88 hit the beach twenty yards away, geysering sand all over me and rocking me to my knees. I was aware now of the other sandmen, hundreds of them, all around, some burrowed into the sand, others twisted into macabre positions. Then I realized it wasn’t sand at all: It was snow. The figures on the ground were covered with it.

  The Cong were pushing us back. We had been told the enemy artillery had been neutralized, that once onto the beach we would move steadily inland. But instead the VC were putting up resistance.

  No. Not the Cong.

  Germans.

  The snowman near the water’s edge got up and started forward, but a bullet caught him, knocked him down. He swore, picked himself up again.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said, turning to look me in the eyes.

  It was Max.

  I lay on the sofa for a long time, sorting out reality from dream. It was dark yet; my wristwatch said two A.M. The central air conditioner made a soft purr and now and again a car slid past in the dark street. I strained to listen for some noise that might have shaken me out of my dream, but all I heard was silence.

  I got up and padded to the front window and lifted the curtain. The streetlight on the corner cast a lonely yellow glow on the night. I let my eyes move slowly over the landscape, alert to movements in my peripheral vision. As I watched, a car moved slowly past, barely rolling at all. I waited until it was gone and then tiptoed back to the rear of the house. The patio was enclosed on three sides by a cinderblock wall topped by wire and glass, but that wouldn’t stop anybody who was really determined.

  I went down the hallway, past the bedroom where Carol slept. For an instant I thought I heard a tinkle of glass on the patio, and I drew the revolver from my belt, but when I got close to the back door I realized it was the wind chimes. I stayed beside the door for ten minutes, but there was no movement, no other sounds.

  I’d just started back into the hallway when I heard it: a strangled gasp, coming from the bedroom.

  When I reached the doorway Carol was sitting up in bed.

  At first all I saw was a vague shape. Then I made out her breasts and realized she’d been sleeping nude.

  “Micah? Is that you?”

  “It’s me,” I said. “You were having a dream.”

  “My turn, huh? Did I wake you up?”

  “Not really,” I lied. “I was having my own bad dream.”

  “What was it?”

  I leaned against the wall.

  “The Bulge.”

  “You mean the World War Two battle? Wasn’t that near the end of the war?”

  I nodded and told her about how the troops had been pushed back by the German panzers and how some had been surrounded, at Bastogne.

  “The weather was too bad for Allied air cover. The Americans had to use cooks and clerks—whoever they could scrape up—to fight.”

  “Is that where Max was?”

  “Right.”

  As soon as I said it I felt myself starting to shake again.

  “And after that, he went to Germany and that was when he was almost killed,” she whispered. “Not with the car bomb. That was the second time. Germany was the first.”

  Just like I had almost been killed twice.

  “It doesn’t work,” I said at last. “I had so many misses in Vietnam I can’t remember them all. And the last time was when my arm was wounded.”

  “Time, space—maybe things get a little out of whack,” she said. “Maybe you can’t expect a mirror image.”

  “Maybe you can’t expect anything at all,” I said, getting up. “Look, I’m not much for mysticism. Somebody’s trying to kill us because we’ve stirred something up. No karma, no cosmic forces.”

  “But do you believe it?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said, and the word sounded hollow in the quiet house.

  She pulled the sheet up to cover her.

  “Go back to sleep, Micah. I won’t try to tempt you again.” Her voice was shaky. I touched her cheek and pulle
d the door behind me when I left.

  I went back and stood next to the window. My war was one that was yesterday and yet I was already middle-aged. Max’s war was nearly half a century old, a montage of grainy newsreels and photographs, and yet Max had died younger than I was now.

  Max had died but somehow he was still alive, because the killings had started again.

  Max …

  I tried NOPSI the next morning and they told me they didn’t even have a listing for my aunt, so I sighed and crossed that one off. I spent the next few hours calling hospices in Orleans and the surrounding parishes while Carol paced the floor in frustration. I sympathized with her; at least the telephone gave me something to do. By eleven I’d exhausted everything and started on nursing homes for St. John the Baptist, St. Bernard, Jefferson, St. Tammany and Plaquemines parishes. No one had any patient named Marsh, nor had one recently died. I tried State Employees Group Benefits, in Baton Rouge, on the chance she had ever worked for the state, but they wanted a Social Security number. I told them she was my old aunt, who had died, and I was trying to straighten out her affairs. They wished me well.

  Next I tried hospitals. I used the name of the place in Charleston where my father had been confined for his kidney stone. When I called the medical-records sections at the local hospitals I told them an Idola Marsh had skipped owing her room bill but that she’d listed a previous stay in whatever New Orleans disease palace I was calling. Three hospitals fell for it and told me they had no record of her. The others told me to get lost.

  When I put down the phone at noon, it rang immediately and I heard Mancuso’s voice.

  “Just checking to see you’re still alive. I had patrols going past all night, in case you didn’t notice. I want you to stay dead.”

  “Good of you,” I said. “And I did notice. Tell those guys they have to go a little faster. They looked like they were burglars casing the place.”

  “That bad, eh? Well, look, Sandy told me about this Marsh woman. I checked DMV and they don’t seem to have any record of her. Of course, they wanted a birthdate and a Social Security number to be sure, because she could have married and changed her name, but so far nothing.”

  “Thanks for trying.”