The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  Maybe I’d concentrated too much on his being a wounded vet. Everyone thought that made us alike, even me. But it didn’t. We were two different people who’d had one thing in common. I’d managed to pretty well put my injury behind me.

  And Max, who had been wounded in the last week of the war, had dealt with his.

  Or had he?

  I stared out at the placid Gulf, where the streamers of sunset were reflected in the water like blood.

  You came here and were killed, I thought. But didn’t you have any idea when they called you? I thought of Idola’s eyes, riveted on my midsection. Of course: She’d been looking at my gun. Max had gone out armed. Who would you have gone to meet by yourself? Not Tommy Noto or his people. You’d have to be drunk or crazy to want to take them on. It had to be somebody you knew, somebody you figured you could take.…

  I thought of the old man scowling down from the wall and I thought I knew why Lydia wouldn’t talk.

  We ate at Barichev’s, looking out over the dark waters.

  “Have you got it right yet?” she asked.

  “I think so. But I still don’t know why he was buried out there.”

  “Maybe the killer couldn’t afford to have him found yet. Maybe there was some tip-off about the way he looked.”

  “Then why not dump him at sea? That’s what I keep coming back to.”

  “Sentiment?”

  “Whose?”

  “His wife’s, maybe. Maybe she killed him.”

  “But why? Max was after the bad guys. Why would she kill him for that?”

  “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with gangsters. Husbands and wives kill each other all the time.”

  I nodded. What she said made sense. Except that I still couldn’t see Lydia as a killer. Her father was another matter.

  “So she had him carried away to where he wouldn’t be found, but wouldn’t be lost, either.”

  “Isn’t it possible?”

  I stared hard at her and suddenly another piece seemed to fall into place. Because there was suddenly another reason for not disposing of the body completely.

  We didn’t talk during the drive back. Inside, she showered and then came out wearing a shorty nightgown. She gave me an appraising look and then sat down on the bed, one leg under her.

  “So why did the pair of you break up?” she asked.

  I stared back at her. We were alone in a motel room on the seashore. She was mine for the asking, and yet it was clear to her that I couldn’t carry it through. So hers was a fair question.

  “It started with her son,” I said. “He wanted to work with me on a case and she was against it. I didn’t encourage him but he was old enough to do what he wanted and so he mixed in anyway. He almost got killed, but we got him out. She never forgot how close it came.” I looked down at her. “As a matter of fact, he isn’t that much younger than you are.”

  “Am I really that young to you?”

  I smiled. “No. Maybe it’s just that I’m that old.”

  “Maybe you need to go find her,” she said.

  “Yeah. But it wouldn’t change the business about her son. She can’t run his life for him, and neither can I.”

  She gave me a hard stare. “It may work out,” she said, and pulled the sheet over her. “Good night.”

  I was Max, speaking at a rally. Flash bulbs were popping and I was holding up a list of the names of the bagmen down at City Hall. Reporters were asking me questions and I was trying to respond. But somehow the rage wasn’t there. I was telling myself it was useless, because there would always be crooks downtown and one little purge wasn’t going to do anything but let another bunch of pigs in to slop at the trough. Then I glanced down at my arm and realized I really wasn’t Max at all. I was Micah Dunn, and I had a bone-deep cynicism that Max had never had, and I felt ashamed.

  I turned back to the reporters. I was going to tell them there was a mistake, they thought I was somebody else, and then I saw the woman from the Item in the first row, and she was staring at me. But not at all of me, just at my midsection. I reached down to see what was wrong and my hand touched something cold.

  My eyes went down to the pistol in my belt and suddenly I glimpsed another, darker reality.

  CHAPTER 26

  The sun was hot, as hot as it had been that day two weeks ago, and the same ranger with a sidearm was there watching people disembark. I followed Carol to one of the new wooden buildings that served as park headquarters and was introduced as one of her collaborators. The bag I carried attracted no attention, because archaeologists might be expected to carry tools. But if they’d looked they would have found a Walther PPK and an extra magazine.

  The meeting with the superintendent was brief and consisted merely of a résumé of what remained to be done. He asked Carol if she’d found bones before, on other digs, and she said yes. He said it was the first time anybody had ever popped up out here, but nothing surprised him anymore. We all shook hands and Carol asked to go back to the place where work had stopped.

  We walked across the hot beach, where another day’s bathers had already begun to gather, and I had a sudden urge to turn around and walk back to the dock.

  What if Max were still here? What if they’d unearthed somebody else by mistake? What if he’d somehow managed to get himself reburied?

  The thought was stupid and I fought it back, but when we came up off the beach and into the salt marsh I had a cold feeling in spite of the boiling sun.

  Carol bent down and lifted the plastic sheeting off the excavation unit.

  My heart stopped—and then started again when I saw the unit was empty.

  I closed my eyes, soaking up the faint sound of voices, the squeak of seabirds overhead, and the distant crash of the surf. I was trying to recapture what I’d seen that day, but all I could remember was a glint of clean white bone.

  I hadn’t looked closely enough to see what Carol had seen, the bullet hole between his eyes, or that one leg was missing. Or that he had amalgams in his teeth.

  “Micah?”

  I opened my eyes again.

  “Sorry. I was just thinking.”

  “Any results?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah. I think we can go home now.”

  We got back to New Orleans at about six-thirty. The city had quit for the weekend and traffic on the freeway was still bumper to bumper. I took Carol to my place and called the hospital to talk to Kelso. He told me they were holding him against his will and he was about to file unlawful imprisonment charges. I told him I was glad he was better and when he felt like it I’d explain my solution to the case. He shouted an oath and told me I’d tell him now. I told him I’d tell him when I got the last bit of evidence, and hung up.

  Then I called Sandy and asked her to come get Carol. She left me her car and they drove off together in Carol’s. I called Lydia Goodfather’s number; Julius answered.

  “I need to speak to your mother again,” I told him. “I’ve got all the answers. She doesn’t have to say a word. I’ll tell her what happened. But I have to have her comfirm it.”

  “My God, don’t you ever quit?” Julius snapped, and the line went dead.

  No, I thought, I don’t quit. I owe that much to the people who have been killed over this.

  So I drove back through the twilight to the house on Fontain-bleau.

  I parked on the street and started up the sidewalk to the front door. I knocked and the door was opened by the maid.

  “Yes?”

  Before I could answer Julius materialized from the shadows. His face went white.

  “You.”

  “I don’t like being cut off,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed behind the thick lenses.

  “Damn you, what’s the meaning of this? How dare you?”

  “I’m sorry. I know your mother’s sick. But, like I told you, I need to talk to her. This has all gone too damn far. I’m sorry if I’m going to upset her, but she’s just one person. She�
�s not more important than anybody else and I’m tired of getting the runaround. Now, either she talks, or I spill what I know to the Picayune.”

  His eyes skewered me with hatred and then he stepped back.

  “Very well. Follow me.”

  He showed me down the hall, but this time we went past the sun room, to a door at the rear. He opened it and walked over to a huge four-poster bed, where his mother lay.

  The nurse stood up, her face drawn, and a man I recognized as the doctor from the other night glanced up from a desk, where he was writing something.

  I felt my stomach tighten.

  “You wanted to see my mother,” Julius said, turning to face me at the head of the bed. “Well, here she is.”

  I looked down at the waxen image on the white sheets.

  Her eyes were closed and there was no movement of breathing.

  Now I understood about the doctor. He wasn’t writing another prescription. He was making out a death certificate.

  “I’m very sorry,” I murmured.

  I turned and walked out, feeling his hatred follow me like an evil wind.

  Lydia Chantry Goodfellow was dead, and now I would never know for certain.

  I locked myself in my office, took the phone off the hook, and poured out a stiff bourbon.

  I thought back about my dream: I knew which of the men in the hospital Max was now. I knew where he had gone when he had left home. I knew what Idola Marsh had seen to make her confuse me with Max. I knew why he had been taken to an island ten miles offshore and buried, rather than dumped in the waters between. I knew, because it was the only explanation that made sense. And yet knowing wasn’t enough. I could never prove it.

  But at least now that Lydia was dead, the killings would stop, because she was the only one the killer really feared.

  I’d been a nuisance, because I might get to Lydia. But Lydia was gone, so there was no further danger. My suspicions weren’t worth a damn. And the cops wouldn’t run with the case, either, because they had their man, and I knew the bureaucracy well enough to know that they’d rather have a closed case with a few loose ends than an open case that was a can of worms.

  My eyes fell on a book Katherine had loaned me. It was Kelley’s text on Maya hieroglyphs. I’d only skimmed through it, because it was abstruse and out of my field. But compared to what I’d just experienced it seemed straightforward: You find meanings for each element and you string the meanings together. Of course, as Katherine had liked to remind me, Maya was a difficult language, because so many words that sounded similar had different meanings.

  But if you got one wrong nobody got killed.

  Max, you son of a bitch.

  I looked over at the photo of my platoon, and tried to remember how it had been before. It wasn’t hard, because, in a sense, all of my life was before. In one part of my mind I was still Micah Dunn, the person with full use of his body. What had happened had been a deviation and what I was now was not the true me, the me I remembered, as I truly was.

  Somewhere along the line I’d managed to integrate my memories into the current me. To realize that the first perception was an invitation to live in the past and hate the future. To survive I’d managed to move on. But the feelings were still there, ever ready to spring out of hiding and seize control, plunging me into a pit of self-pity and rage.

  Max had been a true war hero.

  But now I knew he had never managed to climb out of that pit. Max had been an idealist. But somewhere the idealism had turned to rage.

  “Oh, Christ,” I said as I threw my glass against the wall.

  It was long after midnight and I was still sitting in the darkness when I heard the knock on the downstairs door. Some wayward tourist or drunk party-goer, I told myself, and ignored it. Then the buzzer sounded and I knew they were ringing for me.

  I roused myself from my chair, reached down into my bag and took out the Walther, and started down the stairs.

  Sandy or Mancuso would have tried the side gate, around the corner. There was a number code that Sandy and a few others knew. So this was somebody else.

  I came down into the little anteroom that divided the front door from LaVelle’s shop, and unlocked the wooden door.

  A man I didn’t know stared at me from outside the grille.

  “You Micah Dunn?”

  “That’s right.”

  He looked down, saw the gun in my hand, and took a half-step back.

  “Look, I’m just delivering something, okay? Mr. Chantry tried to call but your line was busy.”

  “Mr. Chantry? You mean Julius Chantry?”

  “That’s right. He wanted me to give you this.”

  He handed in a small package and I stuck the gun into my belt and took it.

  “Sorry I bothered you,” the man said, and started away, obviously eager to leave.

  I stared down at the small package in my hand.

  It was the size of a pack of cigarettes, or a small camera.

  I went upstairs and unwrapped it.

  It was a cassette tape. With it was a brief note from Julius.

  “My mother wanted you to have this. I started to destroy it and then I decided you were right. People have been killed. No one should profit from that. It has to end. Maybe you can find a way to end it without the police.” The last part, “without the police,” had been scratched out, but Julius had evidently been too distraught to rewrite the note.

  I knew what he meant, of course. But I wasn’t a hired killer. And he probably knew it. He was just flying on hope.

  I found my player and stuck in the tape.

  After a few seconds of silence Lydia’s voice crackled out.

  “My name is Lydia Althea Sonnier Chantry Goodfather and I make the following statement of my own free will and volition, as a dying declaration …”

  Hours later the darkness outside turned to gray and I went over to the side window and watched the outline of the old Mint building emerge from the fog.

  In a few hours the Quarter would be into another tourist day, full of promised evils it didn’t have, the real evil lurking just out of sight in the gangs of thugs that periodically showed up to steal purses and smash heads.

  Evil was funny: Everybody liked the illusion. It was just the reality that they couldn’t take.

  I knew the reality about the Max Chantry case and I knew the illusion. And all at once I wanted to be like the merchants in the Quarter and foster the illusion.

  Lydia was dead and nobody but Julius knew about the tape. I could walk down to the riverfront at Jackson Square, and throw it out into the water and then it would all be over and only two living people would know.

  Instead, I watched the mist burn away and then, like an automaton, I turned and shuffled back to the desk and made the calls.

  It was harder to locate Sandy than Jake Kelso. Kelso had been released from the hospital and I got him at his place. When I told him I had a tape he said he’d be along as soon as he dressed. Sandy I couldn’t find at her address, so all I could do was leave a message. Then I called Carol. She sounded half-asleep but when I told her what it was about she woke up.

  Everybody deserved to know, I thought.

  I went down to the Café du Monde and had coffee and beignets at one of their outdoor tables. Half an hour later I came back and found Carol and Kelso waiting. To my surprise, Sam was seated beside Carol.

  “We had a long talk,” she said. “Things are better now. And he wanted to come.”

  “Damn right,” Sam said, but I thought some of the force was gone out of his voice.

  Carol’s features were sleep-logged and her hair was mussed, but Jake looked little the worse for wear, with his left arm in a sling. I shook hands with him and took my usual seat behind the desk.

  “So while I was laying on my ass you went and solved the thing,” he said ruefully. “I knew it. Maybe I am gettin’ old.”

  “No, Chief,” I said. “You aren’t getting old. In fact, you’re the youngest
seventy-year-old I ever met.”

  “Seventy-three,” he beamed. “But it makes me feel good to hear you say it.”

  Carol leaned forward. “So what’s the deal? You said you had some kind of tape?”

  I pointed to the player.

  “It’s from Lydia,” I said.

  “Lydia?” Kelso asked. “Chantry’s wife?”

  “She’s dead,” I told them. “Natural causes. But I don’t think this business did her any good. She wanted to make a clean breast of it before she died.”

  “Then it’s a confession?” Carol asked. “You mean she killed Max? She was behind it all?”

  I didn’t say anything, just reached forward and punched the button to start the tape.

  “My name is Lydia Althea Sonnier Chantry …” She made her declaration, followed by a silence as the tape ran. Jake’s eyes were fixed on the spinning reel in fascination, as if it were a mechanism he had never seen before, and Carol stayed hunched forward, the same frown on her face. Then Lydia’s voice began again:

  “The years have been kind to me except for one thing, and that relates to the death and disappearance of my late husband, Max. I do not want to go to my Creator without having the truth made known.”

  There was another brief silence and Carol closed her eyes as if something hurt. I knew what she was thinking: Lydia, wife and executioner.

  Lydia’s voice continued:

  “Max Chantry was an idealist, a man of the highest principles. He was a hero in the war. He saved his platoon in the Battle of the Bulge. He was commended by General Eisenhower himself. And he received the Silver Star for valor. If he hadn’t been wounded in the last week of the war I think it would have been all right.”

  Another pause.

  “But when Max came back he was a changed man. He was as energetic as ever. But the war and what had happened to him made him angry. He had come so close to getting through it all, you see.”

  Kelso’s eyes came up to mine and he gave a little shake of his head.

  “There was corruption at City Hall. There always has been. But Max’s crusade was more than political. It was a vendetta. Nobody noticed that at first. But when he talked about it I began to see: He hated them, not because of who they were, but because of what they were. Whole human beings.”