Dead Man's Bridge

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Thanks to the sour mash, I remembered that the sheriff had scheduled interviews with Dennis Wheatley’s friends and fraternity brothers for two o’clock at Tau Epsilon Rho.

  “Seven o’clock this evening,” I said. “Same place as always.”

  “Certainly,” replied the woman. “Any special requests?”

  “I was hoping to meet Leila again.”

  “May I put you on hold, dear?”

  “Sure.”

  Two minutes passed before she was back again.

  “Leila is not available this evening,” she informed me, “but I notice in our file that you have enjoyed two appointments with Jana. She’s on call this evening.”

  “I’d prefer to see Leila again,” I said, adding a distinct whine to my voice. “Would she be available at double the regular friendly gift?”

  “Please hold on again,” said the sultry voice with a low chuckle.

  Leila must have been connected to a pager or a cell phone. I wondered what she did when she wasn’t having orgasms at the end of a vibrator. This time the voice was back in thirty seconds.

  “Yes, Leila could rearrange her schedule for you.”

  Good old capitalism at its best.

  “Great,” I said. “I’ll see her there, and thanks.”

  After I hung up with the call-girl service, I entered the number for the motel. “Wonderland,” said a male voice. “Buntid speaking.”

  “I need a room for tonight. Around six thirty.”

  “For how long?” he asked.

  “About two hours,” I replied, figuring that would give me plenty of time to check out how the video recording had been done and to have a productive chat with Leila.

  “We rent by the hour. An hour’s fifty bucks,” he said.

  “An hour then,” I said, not having a hundred bucks. I wanted at least twenty minutes to look over the room before she got there. Assuming she was on time, I would have only thirty minutes to talk with her in the room. I could always finish the conversation in my truck. It occurred to me that I had no money to pay her either.

  “Is room ten available?”

  “Yeah . . . in about twenty minutes,” he said.

  “At six thirty.”

  “Don’t worry . . . we got plenty of rooms.”

  “I wanted that one,” I pressed. “I like the view.”

  “The view?” he growled. “Ten looks over the diesel pumps.”

  “It reminds me of home,” I growled back at him.

  There was silence for five seconds. Apparently, I had touched his heart.

  “All right . . . I’ll make a note,” he said as if he were saving me the Warren Buffett suite at the Waldorf Astoria. I was glad he didn’t ask for a credit card number to secure it. I didn’t have one anymore.

  My third call was to Jordan. The first thing he asked me was whether I had any leads. That’s what desperation does to otherwise intelligent people. I told him I needed two hundred bucks in cash for working capital, and he said he would have someone bring it right over.

  When I got back to the bar, Ben Massengale was gone and the prefootball game crowd was thinning out. The Vietnam veteran had left too. His stool had been taken by Johnny Joe Splendorio, another regular.

  “How they hangin’, Jake?” he asked as I sat.

  “Fine,” I said, looking down the bar for Kelly.

  She was already on her way back with two more fingers of sour mash. A Clara Barton for the ages was Kelly. Johnny Joe peered at me through gimlet eyes as I knocked it down.

  About fifty, he carefully patted the dozen strands of hair that were lacquered across his scalp and said, “I’ve written a new song, Jake . . . another hit . . . I mean this one is guaranteed.”

  Johnny Joe claimed to have written several country-western songs that had made the charts. No one had ever heard of any of them. He was always looking for someone to back him in another try for Nashville greatness.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “You got friends, Jake. I mean you know people.”

  I knew better than to say anything. It would only encourage him.

  “This one is really good,” he added with the familiar grinding sound.

  Johnny Joe had a serious chin tick that moved his teeth dramatically to the left as he ground his jaw together. It wasn’t pleasant to look at. My eyes happened to catch the photograph of me over the bar. It was shoe-horned between several others. We had been playing Tulane for the national championship, and I had just broken through the line with thirty seconds left in the game. The kid in the picture was a stranger to me.

  “It’s called ‘Jesus, My Semi, and Me.’”

  I happened to be looking down at the floor as a construction worker on the next stool removed his steel-toed boot from the brass foot railing, leaving the crusty outline of a muddy boot print.

  “See, this ol’ trucker fella is hauling a load of frozen hog bellies in the middle of the night from Muncie, Indiana,” went on Johnny Joe, his face alive with excitement. “He goes through this dense fog, see . . . and when he comes out the other side, his eighteen-wheeler is comin’ up Calvary Hill, and the Romans are about to nail Jesus up on the cross. Can you see it?”

  In my mind’s eye, I could see Dennis Wheatley walking on the edge of the bridge railing. Based on the patterns of the dirt marks I had seen, he had probably made it ten feet before falling to his death.

  “The truck driver’s got an M-4 on his gun rack, see?” said Johnny Joe. “He comes down out of the cab with it and just cuts loose. The chorus goes like this: I killed me some Romans and I killed me some Jews. Now me and Jesus are spreading the news.”

  If Wheatley’s wife was telling the truth about his being afraid of heights, it must have been pure torture for him. Why would a man dying of pancreatic cancer who didn’t drink and was acrophobic be walking on the edge of that railing while drunk?

  “He saves Jesus, see?” said Johnny Joe, showing a hint of frustration.

  “Yeah, I see,” I said, losing my train of thought.

  “I know it needs work,” he went on, “but the important stuff is all there.”

  Kelly appeared again in front of me as Johnny Joe spotted Pete Sarkus coming in the door and moved off to put the bite on him. I decided to have a last hit of George Dickel to help me unravel the mystery a bit further. The tumbler was almost half full when she set it down on the bar.

  I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the questions I needed to ask Dennis Wheatley’s friends at two o’clock. Like where they had been all night. Unfortunately, the mind-boggling image of Jordan in his red lace lingerie kept ruining my concentration. When I reached down for the glass again, it was empty.

  “You want to join me on my shift break?” Kelly asked on her next pass.

  “Can’t,” I said, my brain turning to suet. “Have a lot to do today.”

  She glared up at me as she cleared the bottles and glasses that littered the bar like spent ammunition.

  “I’m going on break,” she repeated. “This is your last chance.”

  I probably should have felt guilty for getting drunk instead of helping out my friend. As they say, bad habits die hard. We were heading out the door when the student intern with the purple streak down the middle of her scalp arrived from Jordan’s office. She handed me a sealed envelope. I put it in my hip pocket and thanked her for bringing it over.

  7

  You stupid asshole, I thought to myself. I was reasonably sober again, and we were lying naked together in Kelly’s queen-sized bed along with her menagerie of stuffed animals.

  “All I want is for life to be like Pretty Woman,” said Kelly, leaning over to nuzzle my throat.

  It was a movie she watched at least once a month, crying at the sappiest moments as if they were cherished friends she hadn’t seen for years.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  We had started sleeping together in the summer. Her car salesman husband had decided she was aging too fast and wa
s in the process of trading her in for a younger model. But the imperfections that bothered him only made her seem more attractive to me. The creases around her eyes, the wrinkles, the slightly sagging skin along her jawline all made her seem more vulnerable and real.

  It had seemed fine at the beginning. She was personally very tidy. Her house was immaculate. She didn’t smoke or chew tobacco. She had a good sense of humor and a good laugh. She took good care of her cat. Her house plants were healthy. She was honest. She worked out all the time. She was a good lover.

  I silently added up all the things I had learned since. Even though she had a good sense of humor, she could never laugh at herself. She had a “thing” about black people. She hadn’t read a book since high school. I wasn’t sure if she had ever read one. Up to the moment she fell asleep, she never stopped talking. It was as if any elapsed quiet time between us aside from sex might cause the end of the world. Her favorite subjects were soap operas and bodily functions. She hated jazz and classical music. Her television set was always on, even if she wasn’t home. The only thing she knew how to cook was chili.

  “My lawsuit is going forward,” she said.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “The Razzano brothers have agreed to represent me,” she went on. Rolling on top of me, she straddled my hips and added, “I’m going to sue the hell out of them, Jake.”

  Kelly had interviewed a few months earlier for a hostess position at a Hustler’s restaurant near Binghamton. Like Hooters, it specialized in amply endowed waitresses. After being turned down, she became convinced that it was a case of age discrimination.

  “Are these anything to be ashamed of?” she demanded, fondling her breasts as if they were Fabergé eggs.

  “No,” I agreed.

  When it came to breasts, Kelly’s were spectacular. Even in her forties, they rose heavenward like twin sidewinder missiles.

  “Hustlers only hire children with big tits,” she said angrily, “and that’s wrong.”

  She lowered herself toward me and nestled into my arms. As her erect nipples grazed my chest, she slid me inside her again. Her hair covered my eyes, blotting out the sunlight from the window.

  She began to ride me with a leisurely, measured rhythm. By the time we reached climax, the two of us were thrashing around the bed like rabbits in a snare, her lips locked onto mine and her tongue at the back of my throat. After my heart stopped pounding, I tumbled back into a black hole.

  I was awakened by the sound of garbage cans being overturned in the alley behind her apartment. When I opened my eyes, Kelly’s face was a few inches from mine. Droplets of sweat dotted her forehead. She used her fingertips to sweep away the tendrils of blonde hair that covered her eyes. Her hot moist skin was still adhered to mine.

  “I love you, Jake,” she whispered. “If you marry me, I’ll fuck you like this every day and night.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was two fifteen.

  “Shit,” I said, sitting up.

  Her eyes filled with tears. It was pointless to explain that I was already late for the sheriff’s interviews. She had heard too many different excuses in recent months to believe me anymore.

  “You’re already married,” I said, putting on my socks.

  “I meant after,” she said earnestly. “You deserve to be happy, Jake. You were so depressed when I met you. I could make you happy. I know it. I so love you, baby.”

  She was waiting for me to repeat the love word back to her. That word so often used to rationalize basic sexual needs, the poetic justification for millions of desperate couplings every minute all over the world. I had given love once, and Blair had thrown it away.

  At the same time, I despised myself for what I had become. I knew I had given Kelly pleasure, just as she had me. We shared the same desperate hunger. But for my part, it was no more than the need for intimacy, the temporary pushing back against the loneliness of the spirit, cornering it for a time in a dark place while we were joined together. When it was over, Kelly and I were lonely strangers lying in the same perfumed bed surrounded by her stuffed animals.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  As soon as I stood up, my headache kicked in again with a vengeance. Glancing momentarily into the gilt mirror as I went past, I thought that I could actually see my head throbbing. Usually, my headaches built like a slowly developing storm front. This one was coming on fast. I could feel it gathering strength in my sinus cavities and behind both eyes.

  Kelly kept a full supply of headache, back ache, and female remedies in her medicine chest. I swallowed four extrastrength Tylenol tablets with a glass of Alka-Seltzer and stepped into the shower. I kept it at the hottest setting for as long as I could and then adjusted the faucet to full cold.

  Ten minutes later, I was out the front door and headed on foot for Tau Epsilon Rho.

  8

  Dennis Wheatley’s fraternity house was a throwback to the grandiose times in the 1920s, when major movie production companies were based in Groton before Hollywood took hold of the industry.

  Early film producers had been drawn by the dramatic backdrop of waterfalls and deep gorges. Derring-do serials like The Perils of Pauline, the kind of stuff where the damsel is tied to the railroad tracks by the villain and saved by the hero, had been shot here.

  A couple of the early movie moguls had foolishly decided to build lavish homes in town, and after the movie business died, one of them had eventually become the Tau Epsilon Rho fraternity. It was a four-story pile of stone with leaded casement windows, Wuthering Heights chimneys, and a dramatic view of Groton Lake.

  As I was walking across the far end of the campus, I heard a howling roar from the football stadium and realized the homecoming game was in progress. I thought back to the years when Jordan and I were the tandem backs on two undefeated teams and had both been showered with fleeting glory. It had all been so trivial.

  When I arrived at the frat house, a touch football game was taking place on the expansive lawn. The players had gone to the trouble of marking off the sidelines with orange construction cones.

  “You only tagged me with one hand,” screamed the player holding the football after an apparent touchdown run.

  “I got you with both,” shouted another player.

  They were all trying to prove they hadn’t lost a step since college. A cafeteria table covered with a white tablecloth stood at the fifty yard line. Behind it, two winsome young women were filling green plastic reunion cups with draft beer from a metal keg. Several dozen spectators were doing their best to keep the cups empty.

  The side parking lot of the fraternity house had several million dollars’ worth of cars in it. A lone Ford pickup was parked behind the dumpster near the back entrance to the kitchen. It was probably the cook’s.

  Checking my watch as I went through the ornamental iron gates flanking the entrance, I saw that I was only thirty minutes late. A deputy sheriff was standing in the front foyer talking into a handheld radio.

  “What’s the score?” he asked whoever was on the other end. When he punched the device to receive, I could hear the bellowing of the football crowd over at the crescent.

  “We’re down two points with ten minutes to go in the quarter,” said a voice over the clamoring noise. “Durbin just got intercepted again.”

  The deputy waved me down the carved mahogany staircase that led to the fraternity’s chapter room. There, a group of older alumni stood solemnly in the corridor just outside the closed entrance doors. Waiting in a ragged line, they ranged in age from forty to senility. Two of the women were dabbing at tears with handkerchiefs.

  Another uniformed deputy was standing guard at the doors. As I came up, he motioned for the man at the head of the line to go inside. I showed him my campus security badge and he let me through.

  The chapter room was about fifty feet square with hand-hewn beams on the ceilings and a fireplace large enough to hold an Abrams tank. I assumed it was used for special occasions like
donkey basketball games and torturing new pledges. Hiking across the parquet tiles, I imagined decades of pledges, stripped naked and scrubbing the floor with toothbrushes in order to earn the privilege of becoming a member.

  At the far end of the room, a cluster of people stood near leather armchairs that faced a picture window overlooking the lake. Three plainclothes investigators from the sheriff’s department were conducting interviews with individual alumni at the mahogany library tables.

  I saw Evelyn Wheatley in the group near the window. Standing next to her was a tall, distinguished-looking man wearing a gray suit with a white shirt and black clerical collar. Nearby, Sheriff Jim Dickey was talking to a florid woman in a pink sun suit. Seeing me coming, he excused himself from the woman and came strutting toward me.

  “Glad you could spare the time to make it on over here, Soldier,” he said. “Sorry we couldn’t wait on you.”

  American flag patches were sewed onto both arms of his khaki uniform blouse, and another was emblazoned on the crown of the Smokey the Bear hat he held in his hand.

  “I’m also working on another case,” I said.

  “It got big tits?” Dickey came back with a toothy grin.

  He was still sheriff because the rednecks in the rural parts of the county kept voting to reelect him by overwhelming margins. According to Jordan Langford, his slogan in the last campaign pointed out that “Groton is two square miles surrounded by reality.” He would have been popular in any rural county of Mississippi back in the 1950s.

  “You goin’ ta seed, Soldier,” said Big Jim. “You be sproutin’ gin blossoms pretty soon. But don’t worry. We got everything under control here. My people have already interviewed everyone who was stayin’ in the alumni wing last night. Most of ’em was snug in their beds when the fella decided to end it all.”

  “Someone was out there on that bridge to help him,” I said.

  He shook his head with a condescending smile.

  Dickey’s standard approach for intimidating people was to get right in their face, just as he was doing now. His breath reeked from whatever he had eaten at lunch. Maybe he thought it was going to make me faint.