Too Late to Die

by Bill Crider

  “Not bad,” he said.

  We ran along together for a few minutes. I was breathing a little harder than he was.

  When we got to the three mile mark, I said, “I’m turning it around, Ray. Good to see you.” I sprinted out ahead and made an easy, wide turn.

  Ray turned, too. “I’ll go along with you for a ways,” he said.

  Neither one of us was inclined to talk much, so we ran in silence for a while. The scudding gray clouds, the mist, the gray-green water of the Gulf--all of them together didn’t seem to make it much of a day for talking.

  Finally Ray spoke up. “Dino wants to see you.”

  I’d been afraid all along that running into Ray hadn’t been a coincidence, though I’d hoped it was.

  “What for?” I said.

  “He’s lost somethin’. He wants you to find it,” Ray said.

  “I can’t do that anymore,” I said.

  “Hey, I know that,” Ray said. He wasn’t having any trouble talking at all. I was having to pause a little between every second word. “I told Dino that. I said, ‘Man, he don’t do that kind of job anymore.’ Dino just looked at me. You know how he does. ‘He’ll do this one,’ he said. ‘Find him.’ So I found you. I hope you not gonna make me look bad and not talk to him.”

  We ran on for a minute or two. “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Thanks for making it look like I had a choice.”

  Ray laughed, but he didn’t say anything. We ran along until we got nearly to the end of the seawall, where my car was parked.

  “You don’t put up much of a front, man,” Ray said. He was probably talking about my car, a ‘79 Subaru GL with two doors and a fading gray paint that just about matched the color of the day.

  “It gets me where I’m going.” I opened the door and reached into the back seat where I usually have a couple of towels. I threw Ray a green one and kept the yellow one for myself. It’s softer.

  I stripped off the sweatshirt and dried off as best I could in the cold mist. I put on another sweatshirt from the back seat.

  “Sorry I don’t have another one,” I told Ray.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Just give me a ride up to my car.”

  We scrunched ourselves into the Subaru and started up Seawall Boulevard toward the east end of the Island. “About Dino,” I said, shifting through the gears. “When?”

  “Today’s fine,” Ray said. He had my green towel draped around his neck. “You wanna come by after lunch?”

  “Two o’clock?”

  “Two o’clock it is. I’ll tell him. There’s my ride.”

  We were almost to the Moody Center, which had been the Buccaneer Hotel when Ray and Dino and I were young. From buccaneer to retirement home. There was probably a message somewhere in that for me if I let myself think about it. I didn’t let myself.

  Ray’s car, a maroon BMW, was parked across the street from Moody Center. I stopped by it.

  “I didn’t know you’d become a yuppie, Ray,” I said.

  He got out of my car and leaned in to toss the green towel into the back seat. “In the words of Chuck Berry,” he said, “‘it jus’ goes to show you never can tell.’”

  I laughed, remembering the song. I probably had the record someplace.

  “Two o’clock,” he said. “Don’t you forget, now.” He shut the door and the window rattled a little bit.

  “Yeah,” I said to myself, driving to the corner and turning left. “Two o’clock.”

  I was living that year in a two-story unrestored Victorian house not far from St. Mary’s Hospital on Avenue I. Or on Sealy Street. Call it either one; that’s what the locals do. I get the letters just the same, but they’re mostly addressed to “Occupant.”

  For a long time, Galveston seemed determined to destroy all the relics of its historic past and was doing a damned good job for the most part. Now the buildings on the Strand, some of them anyway, have been restored to their former glory, and a lot of the Victorian houses in the Historical District are looking better than they have for over a hundred years. The trim sparkles, and the pastel paint jobs inspired by Miami Vice most likely, would turn Sonny Crockett puce with envy.

  The place where I lived didn’t look that good.

  I wasn’t exactly in the Historical District anyhow, and the guy who owned the house was just holding onto it as an investment. Which meant that he was paying the taxes and hoping that someone would come along and offer him a whopping profit for it. In the meantime I was serving as a sort of glorified house-sitter, supposedly making sure that thieves didn’t break in to steal and vandals didn’t corrupt the investment.

  I drove into the alley behind the house and parked in the back yard. There was no carport, but I had a cloth cover I could toss over the Subaru in case of storms. I climbed the outside stairs of the house to the second floor. The first floor was used mostly for storage, and it would take a lot of work to get it back where it had been in the previous century. The original hardwood flooring was still there, but not much else.

  Upstairs wasn’t that much better. I’m not known for my neat housekeeping habits, and the furniture hadn’t been approved by anyone’s decorator. In fact, most of it was cast-off items that I’d picked up from friends or found lying in the streets. The sofa was missing a cushion, the recliner wouldn’t recline, and the old RCA color set insisted that most of the people on TV these days had a vaguely green cast to their skin. It also had a nearly round picture tube. I didn’t particularly care. I also had an old Voice of Music portable hi-fi record player that I could play my 45s on. It sat on the floor by the sofa.

  There was a real brass bed in the bedroom, but the mattress sank in toward the middle and was probably as old as the bedframe, not that I minded.

  Most of the rest of the furnishings were books, paperbacks mostly, stacked haphazardly by the couch and the chair and the bed. I was reading Faulkner then, straight through, starting with Soldier’s Pay and working my way up to The Reivers. It passed the time.

  There was an old chiffonnier by the bed, and there was a picture of my sister, Jan, on it. I kept it there just to remind me.

  Nameless was lying in the middle of the bed. He’s an old orange tomcat who is totally unrefined and doesn’t really care where he lies down. The couch, the bed, and the recliner are all the same to him. He comes in most every day and since he can’t read, or so he pretends, he passes the time sleeping. He lets me feed him if I behave myself.

  I hadn’t intended for him to be nameless. When he first came in I tried various names on him--Sam, Leroy, Elvis--but nothing seemed to fit. Besides, I didn’t really expect him to take up permanent residence. By the time he did, I’d run out of names. So now he was just Nameless.

  Nameless looked at me through slitted eyes as I came in, then ducked his head around and tried to shape himself into a ball.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m not going to roust you.” I threw the towels and sweatshirt I was carrying into the corner by the chiffonnier and then stripped off what I was wearing and added it to the pile. There was an old Maytag washer on the first floor that still worked pretty well. I’d take a load down later.

  I went into the bathroom and took a shower, first hot, then cold. The bathroom had been modernized about twenty years before, and the plumbing still worked just fine. I toweled off, dressed in jeans and yet another sweatshirt, this one with a red Arkansas razorback on it, and looked for something to eat.

  There was a kitchen where another bedroom had once been. The kitchen had been installed at about the same time as the bathroom, but the appliances had not been new even then. The freezing compartment in the refrigerator was about the size of a cigar box. I found some bread that wasn’t molded and made a peanut butter sandwich.

  I sat in the recliner and tried to read Absalom, Absalom while I ate. Every now and then the knee would twinge, just to remind me that I’d been running. My mind kept drifting off the book and I had to drag it back forcibly. After a while, I we
nt to sleep.

  Chapter 2

  Sometimes I have trouble sleeping at night, and it catches up with me. I woke feeling a little stiff from having dozed off in the chair, and I was sorry I hadn’t rousted Nameless from the bed earlier.

  I checked my black plastic Timex. It was one-thirty, leaving me plenty of time to get to Dino’s. I wondered what it was that he wanted me to look for. Or who. I wasn’t sure I could be persuaded to do it, even by Dino.

  I put a couple of 45s on the Voice of Music’s thick changing spindle, “Ruby Baby” by the Drifters and something by Ricky Nelson, and tried to read a little more of the Faulkner book. I got through a page or two before it was time to leave.

  I went into the bedroom and gathered up Nameless, no small job considering that he must’ve weighed eighteen pounds or so. I carried him down the stairs and set him in the yard. He didn’t object, but he didn’t look too pleased with me, either. He watched sullenly as I got into the Subaru.

  Dino didn’t live far, but then nothing is far from anything else on the Island. His neighborhood was a long way removed in time from mine, though. A hundred years ago, people built their houses high to get the afternoon breeze off the Gulf and maybe even to take a look out at the surf every now and again. Then, thirty or forty years ago, the natives, the ones who called themselves BOI for Born on the Island, went the other way and built houses that looked like houses anywhere and tried to deny that the water was even out there.

  Dino lived in a big Tudor-style house that would have looked right at home in one of the older neighborhoods in West Texas, in Abilene or San Angelo, and up and down the street there were similar stodgy brick houses pretending that they were built on solid rock instead of shifting sand.

  There were people on that street who never wet a toe in the Gulf. Some of them probably hadn’t even seen the water in years.

  I parked on the street and went to the door. Ray opened it before I could ring the bell.

  “Come on in,” he said. “Dino’s in the living room.”

  Dino’s living room was nicer than mine, but the furniture hadn’t changed since the 1950s, except for the entertainment center, which must have held every electronic device known to the video trade. There were a huge, flat-screened TV, a VCR, a video disc player, stereo speakers, and a couple of items I couldn’t identify.

  Dino was sitting on a floral-covered sofa watching General Hospital. “This shit hasn’t been the same since Luke and Laura split,” he said. He turned off the set with a complicated device that was about the size of a paperback book and had more buttons on it than a doorman’s coat. “How’s it hanging, Tru?” He got up and offered me his hand.

  “It’s fine, Dino,” I said. “You’re looking good.” It was true. He was still solid and hard, like the linebacker he had once been.

  “I still work out,” he said. “I hear you do, too. I could never do that running stuff, though. I pump a little iron. How’s the knee?”

  I looked over at Ray, who smiled. “It’s OK,” I said. “I get around all right. Ask Ray.”

  “That’s right, Dino,” Ray said. “The guy nearly ran me into the seawall today.”

  “I bet,” Dino said. “Well, let’s sit down. Get us some drinks, Ray. What’ll you have, Tru?”

  “You got a Big Red?”

  Dino made a gagging sound. “I got it. I knew you were coming over. Bourbon and Seven for me, Ray. Big Red. Jesus.” He sat on the sofa.

  I went to an overstuffed straight chair nearby. “What’s the deal?” I said.

  “Let’s wait for Ray,” he said. So we waited.

  Dino and Ray and I went back a long way. We grew up together on the Island, though in different parts of the town. When the Island had been wide open, which it had been until the mid-1950s, a couple of Dino’s uncles had controlled all the gambling and most of the prostitution. I didn’t remember anything about that time, having come along at the tail end of it, but I’d heard plenty. You couldn’t grow up on the Island and not hear. Ray had been born in one of the black whorehouses, and somehow one of the uncles had gotten to know him (or maybe it was Ray’s mother that he got to know). Ray had been brought up practically like a member of the family. Me, I was just another guy, until high school, when I have to admit in all modesty that I became the best damned running back that Ball High had ever known. My ability on the field got me inside a lot of doors that would have otherwise been slammed in my face, and Dino had been on the team.

  Ray came in with the drinks. “I forgot you liked yours out of the bottle,” he said, handing me a glass of Big Red and a napkin.

  “I’ll manage,” I said, taking the glass and wrapping the napkin around it.

  “So, Tru, how long you been back on the Island?” Dino said, sipping at his drink. “A year now? Little more?”

  “About that,” I said.

  Ray had left the room again. He hadn’t had a drink for himself. I took a swallow of the Big Red. Some people say it’s like drinking bubble gum, but I like it. I figured Dino would get to the point eventually.

  “You think you’ll be staying?”

  “It’s a thought,” I said.

  “You got any money?”

  “A little. I’ve been painting a few houses. Not too many lately, though. But business will pick up in the spring.”

  “I got a little job you could do,” Dino said, twirling his glass between his palms as he leaned forward on the sofa. “You could make a little money before spring.”

  I took another swallow of Big Red. “What’s the job?”

  “I want you to find somebody,” he said.

  “I don’t do that anymore.”

  Just about then Ray walked back into the room. “That’s what I told him,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I figured that was just bullshit,” Dino said. “You aren’t the kinda guy who’d just quit like that. Not you.”

  “Sure I am.”

  I set my glass down on the floor. There was a coffee table that had legs that started somewhere in the middle and curved out to the edges and were tipped with something that looked like copper claws, but it was too far away to reach.

  “Look,” Dino said. “I knew Jan, too. I liked her. Ray knew her. He liked her. Everybody liked her. Nobody blames you. You got to get over that.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Dino put his glass on the coffee table, got up, and started pacing around. “It’s not your fault she disappeared,” he said. “It’s not your fault you couldn’t find her.”

  “He’s right,” Ray said. “Maybe she just wanted to disappear. She may turn up any day now with a story about spending a year in Vegas.”

  “No,” I said.

  “OK, probably not,” Dino said. “I got plenty of contacts in Vegas. I checked that one out.”

  “That was just sort of an example,” Ray said. “She could be anywhere.”

  “She’s dead,” I said. “We all know that. We just don’t know who did it, or why, or what he did with her.”

  Dino sat back down on the couch. “OK. OK. Maybe so. But that’s no reason for you to fold it up. You can’t just lie around and paint houses when you get the chance. I checked you out, too. You had a good thing going when you were a P. I. You could find anybody.”

  “I couldn’t find my sister,” I reminded him.

  “Let me put it this way, then,” Dino said. “You owe me one. I called in a lot of markers to help you look for Jan.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. I owe you one.”

  “Besides that, I . . . what’d you say?”

  “I said, ‘I know. I owe you one.’”

  “That’s what I thought you said. You mean it?”

  “I mean it,” I said. “You helped me out, and you didn’t have to, not even for old time’s sake.”

  Dino laughed. “That knee still bothers you, huh? Well, I didn’t help on account of that. You were a buddy, and you needed help. So I helped. It didn’t work out, but I tried.” He picked up his glass and
tried to take a bite off one of the ice cubes that was left. “So, you gonna help me with this one?”

  “Maybe. Tell me what it is, first.”

  “I don’t think he trusts you, Dino,” Ray said. He was standing somewhere behind me.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just that you might be asking something that I really can’t do. Or won’t do. So tell me who you want me to find.”

  “Get the picture for him, Ray,” Dino said.

  I didn’t hear Ray leave the room, but he must have. In a minute he was back, holding a cardboard folder. The outside of the folder had a sort of woodgrain look, just like the folders we’d gotten our own high school pictures in twenty years before. Ray handed me the folder.

  “Take a look,” Dino said. I opened the folder. Inside was a five-by-seven color glossy of a girl about sixteen or seventeen. Straight hair, the color we used to call mousy blonde. Blue eyes, a strong nose, a firm mouth. She had a prettiness about her, but there was nothing fragile in it.

  “So,” I said. “A nice looking kid. She the one that’s missing?”

  “That’s right,” Dino said. “Two days now.”

  “And you want me to find her.”

  “Right again. No wonder you were such a hotshot investigator.”

  “No need to be touchy,” I said. “Whose daughter is she?”

  “A friend’s,” Dino said, looking at his empty glass.

  “That won’t get it,” I said. “If I do this little job for you, and I’m not saying I will, I’ll have to talk to her parents. Kids disappear for a lot of reasons. Some of them are right at home.”

  “Not this kid,” Dino said. “Take my word for it.”

  I handed the folder back to Ray. “This isn’t going to work,” I said.

  “Goddammit, Tru!” Dino jumped to his feet.

  I stayed in my chair. “Look, Dino, I work the way I work. In a case like this, I always talk to the parents. Besides, it’s bound to be complicated. I’m sure you’ve already tried a few things yourself, like you did for me.”

  “Tell him, Ray.”

  “We’ve checked with the cops,” Ray said. “We’ve put out feelers in other cities where we still have contacts. I’ve been to the bus station here and in Houston. And in a few towns in between.”