by Strand, Jeff
It was called The Horseshoe Lounge. If there was a reason for the name it was lost three owners ago. The bar wasn’t on The Block proper, but rather halfway down on Gay St. It was the third place I tried that night and I was tired. If Chavis wasn’t there I’d give it up and start again Monday. I stood in the doorway to let my eyes adjust to the dim lighting then walked over to the bar.
Unlike his customers, the bartender was still breathing. No surprise there. These days almost any skilled profession requires a license, one of the requirements for which is that you have to be alive.
“Beer, please,” I ordered once he decided to pay me some attention.
“No beer,” he replied mechanically, ‘Just the hard stuff.”
“Ginger ale then.” I knew how hard they served it in these places.
He put a small glass in front of me. “Five bucks.”
“For soda?”
“A drink’s a drink, and drinks here are five bucks.” I put a bill on the bar. “No tip?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I showed him a photo of Chavis. “Know this guy?”
He knew him. I could that by the look on his face as soon as he saw the picture. Would he tell me? That was the question.
“Maybe. Why should I tell you?”
I flashed my badge. “Because I said please.” I was hoping the power of the badge would be enough. It was too late and I was too tired to think of any believable threats.
I didn’t have to. He nodded toward a corner. “First booth. What about my tip?”
“Don’t charge so much for drinks.” I went over to where Chavis was sitting and stood by the booth until he looked up at me.
“Detective John Scott.” I showed the badge. “Frank Chavis?”
“I used to be.” He waved me to the opposite seat. “Chavis was my warm name. I’m Frank Thanos now. How can I help you, Officer?”
“I’m investigating the murder of Terry Foreman. I believe you knew his wife.”
He filled a glass from a bottle of the hard stuff, then offered to cut my ginger ale. I declined. He took a drink, filling his mouth then pausing to swallow.
“Debbie,” he said, putting his glass down. Whatever he thought of her was lost in the flatness of his voice. “They say you always remember your first. Debbie was my last. Not everything rises from the dead. I’m a stiff in everyway but the one that matters.” He looked down at the bottle. “The only vice I have left, and it has to be at least 180 proof before I feel any kick.” He looked back up at me. “You think I killed Foreman?”
“Did you?” I asked. I had a feeling he’d tell me if he did. It wasn’t like I could do anything about it. The courts had ruled that crimes committed before a person’s death were not punishable if he returned.
Thanos gave me a slow shake of his head. “No, Debbie was a nice piece, but not worth killing over. When she told me it was over, it was over. Plenty more out there. Of course, after Foreman died I did comfort her for a while. That ended about a week before I did.”
“Debbie ever talk about it, say who might have wanted him dead?”
“Just that scum of a partner of his. Other than that, old Terry wasn’t the type to have enemies. From what Debbie said afterwards, he was an all around nice guy, a church-going Christian sort. He’d have to be some kind of saint to take back a woman who did him wrong like she did.”
“For the record, where were you when Foreman was killed?”
Thanos made the effort to shrug. “Nowhere near Debbie’s place. Other than that, you find out, then we’ll both know. There’s parts of my warm life that just haven’t come back yet. Anything else?”
I pointed to the bottle. “Just one, who’s paying for that? You got a job?”
“Government handout, it’s not much but all us cold ones get something to keep us out of trouble. Plus I got a few friends left.”
“One of those friends named Debbie?”
He didn’t answer, just stared straight ahead. When I got up he was still staring. I left him to his liquor and memories of warmer days.
Despite his denials, Thanos still could be the killer. He did wind up with Debbie. And she wound up with a nice insurance settlement, some of which she could be sharing to keep him quiet. Or she could have killed Foreman herself, with Thanos knowing and not saying. I’d see about getting a court order to look into her financial records. Right after I got back from seeing Morrison on Tuesday.
“Everything I did was legal,” Ronald Morrison told me once I finally got into see him. He’d been tied up in a meeting, he said, explaining the hour he kept me waiting. That hour gave me time to review what I’d learned about Morrison & Associates.
The business grew from the remains of Foreman & Morrison. The two partners had run an advertising firm, not the biggest, but it had its share of regional and local accounts. Morrison was the idea man, the outgoing glad-hander who met and woed the clients. Foreman worked behind the scenes, running the business end of things. It came apart when Morrison emptied the corporate account and filed to dissolve the partnership. He planned to start his own firm, taking most of F&M’s clients with him, leaving Foreman broke and looking for a job.
“I wasn’t my fault Terry made the mistake of trusting me. We each had equal access to the money. He could have cleaned me out first if he had thought of it.”
“From what I heard, Foreman wasn’t that kind of man.”
Morrison let out a hearty laugh, the kind that comes from enjoying a good joke. “No, he wasn’t. He was a good and decent fellow, the poor fool. Honest to a fault, considerate to the employees, fair with the clients. Definitely not meant for the business world.”
“You used him,” I said, my tone accusing him of a crime akin to murder, “to build the business, to get everything running smooth, then you screwed him over. The night he was killed he was coming to see you, to give you a chance to do the right thing.”
“And I was waiting for him,” Morrison said calmly. “Was surprised when he didn’t show. Terry never, ever missed an appointment. Didn’t hear about his death until the next day.”
“Unless you arranged it.”
Morrison took the accusation of murder lightly. “Detective Scott,” he smiled, “I’ll admit that over the last year of our partnership I slowly drained the corporate account. Terry kept the books and he wasn’t a hard man to fool. However, according to my attorney I had a legal right to do so. Terry’s attorneys would no doubt see things differently and he was free to sue me. He might even have won, if he had any money left to hire attorneys. So you see, I had no motive to want him dead. In fact, he had a better reason to kill me.”
Morrison was so gleefully venal and proud of the way that he’d cheated Foreman that I doubted he’d killed the man. He’d want his victim alive. He would have gloated over the remains of Foreman’s shattered career then thrown the man a bone, offering him a job with the new firm. If he had no other prospects, Foreman may have swallowed his pride taken it. I got the feeling that when the Lord called the next batch of us up, Morrison wasn’t going to make the cut.
A week went by. In between doing the work the Department paid me to do I managed to get Debbie Lochlear’s bank statements. She showed a regular pattern of deposits from her job and withdrawals from both savings and checking. She could have been giving money to Thanos, but there was no way to be sure except to follow her. I also checked on the bullet that had been dug out of Foreman’s head. It had yet to be matched to a gun, nor had the Firearms Unit’s computer paired it to bullets recovered from other crime scenes.
There comes a time with some investigations when you look at what you’ve got and realize that you’re not going to get anymore. That’s when you know it’s time to close the case folder for good. I was at that point with the Foreman murder. I suspected that Debbie, Thanos or both knew more than they were telling, but suspicions aren’t proof. Maybe it was time to admit defeat and call the real homicide detectives. I’d give them what I had and maybe they could close things
out. For me, there were just too many questions I couldn’t answer.
I was going over these questions yet again, looking for answers, not really wanting someone else to break this case when I thought of the big question, the one nobody had asked. I signed out a car and drove to Perry Hall.
After the last time I didn’t think Debbie would let me in, so I sat in my car and waited for someone else to enter and went in behind them.
I knocked on her apartment door. When Debbie answered and saw who it was she tried to slam it shut. I was a bit faster and had my foot and shoulder past the door before she could close it. “Get out,” she told me, “I don’t have to talk to you.”
“Just one question,” I said quietly, not wanting to rouse any helpful neighbors who might call the county police. “What did you do with the gun?”
“I didn’t…” she started to deny it, then looked at my face. “You know, don’t you?” I nodded and she let me in.
She gave it all up––what she did, what happened to the gun, all of it. “What happens now?” she asked when she was through.
“I honestly don’t know,” I told her before leaving.
Foreman lived with his sister in a housing development on 33rd St, near where Memorial Stadium used to be before Baltimore’s sports teams moved downtown. On the way there from the station I stopped at Lake Montibello. How, I thought, looking at the placid waters of the lake, did she get the gun past the police? They would have searched her, the cars, the house. Where did she hide it? No matter, every house has a dozen hiding places known only to its occupants. It didn’t matter either that the gun was now resting somewhere at the bottom of the lake. Let it lay there. No one needed it.
Foreman was waiting for me. “You have news?” he asked, as excited as his kind can get.
“I know who killed you,” I told him. We sat down. I took out a sealed envelope. “Before I give you this, what are you going to do after you open it?”
He thought a moment. “I, I don’t know.”
“No ‘Revenge of the Zombie’ plans?”
“No. I think that I just want to know.”
“Good, because there’s nothing the Department can do.”
“Statute of Limitations?” he asked.
“Something like that. Listen, Mr. Foreman, before you open that envelope, ask yourself how badly you need to know the name, and how willing you are to forgive the person who killed you.” I stood up, offered my hand. “Good luck to you,” I said, meaning every word.
The big question in this case hadn’t been who killed Terry Foreman. It wasn’t whether or not Debbie was paying for Thanos to keep his dead mouth shut. And it wasn’t why she hadn’t told the police about Morrison cheating her husband. No, it was more basic than that. This is a world where the sky is falling, where the truly good have been taken away and the dead walk among us. So why in this world did Terry Foreman, a man everyone agrees was a good man, return after death? Was it because he had some secret sin, some vice no one knew about? Or was it because in a moment of weakness and despair, having lost his wife, job and future, he got a gun, put it to his head and pulled the trigger?
Debbie told me she had heard the shot and ran out to find Foreman slumped over in the front seat, gun near his hand. Even in her shock and grief, she realized that suicide cancelled Foreman’s insurance. So she took the gun, hid it well and waited for the police to ring her doorbell. Later she dropped it in the lake. When the police decided it was probably a robbery gone bad, she let them think it, rather than tell the truth or trying to place the blame on Morrison.
I closed the case out as a suicide. One day someone might read the file and contact the insurance company. If so, Debbie might be in some trouble, but it’s not likely.
I never saw Terry Foreman again so I don’t know if he ever opened the envelope. If he did, I hope he found the strength to forgive himself, to take the second chance we’ve all been given to make up for the weakness that had denied us Paradise.
On the Usefulness of old Books
KIM PAFFENROTH
He scanned the binoculars along and counted them again. On the length of fence they were responsible for watching this morning, there were only twenty-seven. Four years after the initial outbreak, their clothes were faded and shredded, and the owners weren’t in much better shape––digits and ears and eyes missing, toothless mouths hanging open, barely able to moan anymore. In the summers there would be hundreds outside, and they’d have to go up to the fence and shove spears through, stabbing the dead in the foreheads and eyes in order to thin them out, lest they break through the fence with their sheer weight. But now it was autumn, and the nighttime cold was slowing the dead down, so that fewer and fewer new ones showed up at the fence each day. Soon it would be cold during the day as well, and the dead would stop arriving at the fence entirely, so the living could venture outside their compound again to gather supplies. They would also take the killing past the fence and catch the dead out anywhere they could find them. He couldn’t say he exactly enjoyed it, for it was hard and dirty work, but he did smile at the prospect of going outside the fence. His smile had the slight downturn of a sneer at the irony that the living were now most active during the night and the winter, times when people used to huddle inside and hear tales of the undead and other monsters.
“What are they, dad?” The man looked over at his son, eleven years old, who had again asked this rather obvious and wholly unnecessary question. The man’s smile softened to the quizzical and bemused one he usually turned on his son at times of such pointless questioning. The boy looked exactly like him––same hair and eye color, same nose and chin, same gaunt build. But the boy would always have his mother’s mind, a mind insatiable for questions, especially ones that seemed to have an obvious answer, but which both of them would always push further and further, never ceasing to look for what they were so certain was there––the hidden, truer meaning under the obvious, surface answer. As much as he had loved both of them, it was maddening at times, for he had long since learned that some questions were better left unasked, and many more were better left unanswered. He’d learned that long before the dead rose, and that particular phenomenon had only driven the point home in the most vivid way imaginable to him.
His remembrance of the boy’s mother wiped the smile from his face, but he kept his reaction just to that, as he almost always kept his emotions under control in front of the child. At the beginning of the outbreak they had fled north, as far as they could go. Given what they heard on the radio, it hadn’t been the worst choice of action. It had prolonged their lives past the initial, universal, and unimaginable carnage of cities being overrun by the living dead. But “not worst” and “good” were two totally different things, and that first winter had nearly killed all three of them anyway. The boy’s mother had died in March, even as things were beginning to thaw and melt; she had been so painfully, so maddeningly close to surviving. He’d tried to cut their rations to the point where they’d last until the spring, but it had left them all too weak and susceptible to disease and she had died. He had been pretty sure at that point––and was now completely convinced––that there was no hell worse than the one they were in now. Nonetheless, he was equally sure that there were still some things that one simply never did, no matter what––if not for fear of hellfire, then just out of some sense of primal, ineradicable pollution. He therefore had decided that he would feed the boy only the remaining, regular rations, while he would take upon himself the internal torment and sickness of eating the other sustenance that had become available with her death. The two of them had survived that way, but he had known there was no way they’d make it through another winter like that on their own, so in the spring they had started moving southwards until they arrived at this community of survivors.
That other unpleasant remembrance he wiped from his mind as quickly and cleanly as he had the smile from his face, and he finally replied, “Son, I keep telling you: they’re just dead peo
ple.”
The boy’s eyes were defiant, and he knew that, although exactly like his own, they would always sparkle with a fierce intellect that he had never had. Like any parent would, he often wondered what the boy would’ve become, if things hadn’t changed, and he had tried out all the usual answers that proud parents would’ve given in that other world––doctor, scientist, president, Academy Award-winning director. But today a different answer came to him, and with an unnerving, breathless clarity that few other than religious mystics ever experience: the man knew––not wondered or hoped, but knew––that the boy would’ve been a prophet, though the man barely knew what that meant in any world other than a made up one of gods and priests. But he knew, somehow that the boy would’ve railed against injustice, and ignorance, and hate: the fire in the boy’s eyes and the vehemence with which he now spat out his words left no doubt.
“I know that, Dad, but why do they walk around? Why do they try to kill us? Why do we have to go out and kill them? The books we have, that we read in class, they don’t talk about that. I remember when Grandpa died, when I was really little, and he didn’t become one of… them. When someone dies, they lie down and they stop moving. It isn’t right.”