The Skelly Man

by David Daniel

  Heinz showed me to the door. When I got outside, I filled my lungs several times with the cool autumn air.

  * * *

  My office was on the way to the Riverfront Plaza, and I pulled into the adjacent alley and parked. Upstairs I got a number from my notebook and dialed it. As the other end rang, I unlocked a drawer in my file cabinet and took out the Smith & Wesson K-38 Masterpiece that was half-lifing in there. I checked the load. I put it into the snap-holster and fastened the holster on my belt. Justin Ross would be happy. I was about to hang up the phone when Missy Pickering answered. We chatted a moment about the impending end of Indian summer. Then her husband got on another phone and Missy hung up.

  “Yes, what’s up?” Noel Pickering asked.

  “Try a name for me,” I said and gave it.

  There was a silence on the line, and I thought I could hear the moan of a foghorn off the Cohasset coast. I wondered if Pickering was in his studio, painting viscera. Then he said, “Well, what do you know? An old sawbones like me, and I’d forgotten that. Sure, the club Tom Chapman belonged to was Crossbones.”

  27

  PHIL GRIPALDI ANSWERED the hotel room door wearing a tuxedo. He blushed. “I know. I look like kinda normal, huh?”

  “Fifty-inch chests are everywhere,” I said. “Is Chelsea in?”

  “She’s over at the U. already. I’m waiting on Mr. C. Come on in.”

  The suite had an expectant energy: people adjusting cummerbunds, flapping pages of script. I didn’t see any champagne, but there was a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on a table. I went back to the bedroom and knocked. Corbin sat at a dressing table with a napkin around his neck as a makeup girl brushed his face. His eyes met mine in the mirror.

  “Jesus, Rasmussen, you going like that? Where’s your tux?”

  “I had to return it after the senior prom.” I said, “Let’s talk about this.”

  He drew the napkin off his neck and thanked the girl, who took her kit and went out. I shut the door behind her. “I think you should cancel,” I said.

  “Sure, no problem. Cancel the show. Are you crazy? It’s two hours from now! It’s sold out.”

  I replayed my conversation with Basil Devlin about Crossbones. Corbin scowled the whole time. “One of the Harvard quiz group was a member,” I said.

  “Yeah, a guy who’s dead. I’m getting sick of this. Fun is fun, but this has gone way too far. There’ve been opportunities to make trouble before now, and nothing’s happened. Someone was yanking my chain. It’s over.”

  “Maybe that’s the idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tonight’s the show. Maybe it comes down to tonight.”

  “Forget it. The show is on.”

  I said, “I could change that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I had my back to the closed door. “You’ve still got to get to the auditorium.”

  He shook his head, trying a grin. “Gripaldi’s out there. You want to tangle with him?”

  “Wouldn’t have to. I’ve got this.” I opened my jacket to show him the butt of the .38 on my belt.

  “You work for me, damn it!”

  “That’s kind of how I figure it, too,” I said. “The stock on my shelf is my ability to deliver. Okay, we’ve kept all this off the news. The other idea was I’m supposed to protect you.”

  Corbin chewed the implications of that for a moment, then shook his head. “Cancellation isn’t an option. It never has been. Too many people are counting on this. The show is on.” He got up. “You gonna shoot me?”

  It had been worth a try. I shook my head. “I can’t. You’ve still got my retainer.”

  Corbin forced a grin. “You’ll be there, and Gripaldi, and the cops. Plus I’ve got my dynamite material. I’ll knock ’em dead.”

  In the outer room, Gripaldi told me that Chelsea was on the phone. She wanted to speak with me. I went into the alcove where the fax machine was and took the call. “How’s it going?” I said.

  “Much better. I’ve decided to talk with Jerry, but after the show. He’s got enough on his mind without worrying whether he’s got a bastard daughter.” Her laugh sounded nervous. “How are you?”

  “Happy that you’re happy,” I said.

  “Thanks. Did Justin get hold of you?”

  “When?”

  “A couple hours ago? He told me he’d call you before going over to see Professor Westrake.”

  “I haven’t been at my office.”

  “He’s convinced it’s Westrake who’s been sending those messages.” She paused. “Is he right?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll come over there.”

  “Westrake’s not here. Justin was going out to his house.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Wait.” I heard pages rattle, then she gave me a phone number and an address far out on Pawtucket Boulevard. “Good luck, Alex. I’ve got to go. See you tonight.”

  I dialed Westrake’s home number, but I got Ma Bell telling me the line was not in service at this time. As I broke the connection, about to call Ed St. Onge, I got another one of my funny notions. Call it intuition—or curiosity. Possibly it was paranoia. I unscrewed the mouthpiece of the receiver. Nested among the colored wires, stuck to the diaphragm with a magnet, was a little extra widget that didn’t belong to Ma Bell. I picked it out and examined it in the light. I didn’t need an entomology book to identify it.

  28

  TEN MINUTES LATER, I was picking my way out Pawtucket Boulevard, trying to get some running room in the 6:00 rush. The clocks would fall back tonight, and tomorrow it would be dark as a pocket at this hour; now, though, there was still fading light. A glow in the mist above the river foretold where the full moon would shortly rise. In the side streets I could make out the early flit of witches and ghosts. I found myself thinking about the night in the Copper Kettle when Justin Ross had hired me, the fog pressing against the barroom window, red-stained with neon. All of this had begun in mist. I wondered how it would end.

  At a stoplight, I slipped the bug out of my pocket and looked at it again. It appeared to be a miniature radio transmitter. It hadn’t swayed Corbin one bit. If anything, his bravado had grown. But I understood why he would scoff at the notion of someone eavesdropping on his conversations, sending him kook mail, stalking him. He had to. He was afraid of a subtler enemy; one with a Nielsen report in one hand, and a remote channel control in the other. If I could have I’d like to have laid everything out for him, even if just to hear it said; but he wasn’t listening. And who else was there? Justin Ross? Chelsea? St. Onge? It would take too long, and it wouldn’t make any sense. It didn’t make enough sense to me. Yet I believed that everything was connected: from Florence Murphy to the college quiz bowl, the Crossbones Club to the Canal Club, to the little voice-activated bug in the phone in Corbin’s suite, and to Alfred Westrake, too—links that needed only to be assembled in the right order to become a chain that stretched from some old past and was trying to reach down the years to tonight. I had told Corbin, “Break a leg.”

  * * *

  Westrake’s house was out beyond the city waterworks, set back from the road, along the riverbank. I drew in front and shut off the headlights and motor. Dusk was full now. The house was a bungalow, brown maybe, or dark gray, with a light burning somewhere inside. At the far end of the driveway, there was a car in front of a garage. A wind had risen, and the yard seemed to be in motion, filling with drifted leaves. I went to the front door and knocked.

  The moon was up, fat and waxy yellow beyond the dark line of trees on the other side of the river. My knocking raised no one. I tried the knob and discovered the door was unlocked. That gave me a moment’s pause. Then I pushed open the door and called Westrake’s name. Nothing. I yelled Justin Ross’s name. Silence. My heart beat a little faster.

  Another man might have gone home then and listened to one of those AM radio call-in shows with advice about investing for the future. Or he would dole out candy
for the neighborhood trick-or-treaters, then instruct the baby-sitter and bundle his wife into the minivan and go catch Jerry Corbin and laugh with his fellow citizens and forget for a while that there was trouble in the world at all. I lifted my weapon out of its holster and stepped inside the silent house.

  I shut the door. The light was coming through from another room, just enough to see by. The bungalow was small, but even so, each room I came to was given over to books. Hundreds of them, arrayed on shelves, heaped on every available surface, erected like barrier reefs against the tides of change. They lent the house their weight and their musty aroma. It was testimony to Westrake’s mania that even the kitchen had been converted to simply more book space. It was there that the lamps were lighted; one over the sink, the other on a table against a wall. The table did double duty as an eating surface and a work desk, but it was far messier than either one should have been. And I saw why. It had been searched hastily. Notes and correspondence, student blue books, academic journals, and the incomplete manuscripts of scholarly works lay scattered amid upset salt and pepper shakers and teacups. An overturned ashtray had spilled the stubs of dead cigars.

  I put my gun away.

  Among the papers I found a journal. It was one of those old booklets with a marbleized paper cover. Handwritten across the front was “Diary of Shame.” I skimmed pages. The journal told of how in the early 1950s, while Westrake was a lecturer at Harvard, a small group of students had mounted a campaign of lies and false witness, charging him with treasonous ideas and “academic turpitude,” whatever that was.

  What had been only fragments of meaning were coming together in my mind, an incomplete picture emerging that was far different than what I had begun to assume. I fanned more pages and found a photograph.

  The picture was the same, or a duplicate, of one Westrake had shown me in his office, of the old quiz-bowl team—except with a change. In red marker pen, someone had drawn horns on young Jerry Corbin. Devil’s horns.

  My heart had begun to bang with a more insistent tempo. I went back to the front room and picked up the phone. Time to get St. Onge. The receiver made no sound. I followed the cord and saw why. Cut.

  As I stepped outside, a gust of wind lashed at me. Turning away from it, I peered up the dark driveway. What I had taken before as a garage, I saw now was actually a small cabin.

  I got a flashlight out of my car. Walking back toward the cabin, I came to the car in the driveway and realized this was the third time I had seen it. The second time had been two nights ago, when it had tried to run me down in a parking lot. In the windshield was a crack that my bottle of gin had made. Satisfying myself that there wasn’t a skeleton at the wheel, I opened the driver-side door. The ignition wires were twisted together and taped. There were some audiocassettes on the console: Black Flag, Sick of It All, Suicidal Tendencies … music no seventy-five-year-old scholar would be into, no matter how hip. I eased the Camaro’s door closed and went on past.

  Though I couldn’t see it, the cabin’s rear had to be pitched right on the bank of the Merrimack. The water was a slick blackness beyond. I knocked on the door. When no one came, I tried the knob. This one was locked. I directed my light through a door pane and stooped to look in. The place was small—three rooms, I figured. Gripping the knob tightly and twisting, I rammed the door with my shoulder. It moved as much as the Patriots’ offense. I took out my no-knock warrant. Holding the walnut grip, I tapped the three-inch barrel against the pane above the knob. Glass tinkled in. I holstered the .38, reached through and turned the deadbolt. For the second time in ten minutes, I performed criminal trespass.

  I flipped a wall switch, but got nothing. My flashlight picked out scant furnishings. A worn-out couch. A TV. On a coffee table lay an open book. There was a passage underlined in red marker pen.

  Full fathom five thy father lies,

  Of his bones are coral made.

  Those are pearls that were his eyes,

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

  Ding-dong.

  Hark, now I hear them—Ding-dong bell.

  The book was Shakespeare’s The Tempest. An impression stirred at the edge of my memory and I tried to get hold of it; but just then the flashlight beam lit something standing upright in a doorway. A boot. I went over and picked it up. I ran my fingers over little bumps in the leather.

  I had never touched ostrich skin before.

  I shone the light into the next room and saw someone sitting there in the dark, facing a wood stove. He had one bare foot propped on a stool, as if he’d taken the boot and sock off to warm his toes. Except the stove was cold.

  I said Justin Ross’s name. The person didn’t turn. I stepped closer. His head glimmered. There was a clear plastic bag over it, cinched in place with his bolo tie, puckered where his last breath had sucked it into the O of his mouth. I peered through the fogged plastic to be sure it was Ross. It was. I touched him. He was as cold as the stove.

  My mind frayed out for a moment … then came back. Touching nothing else, I examined him visually. He was handcuffed to the arms of the chair. On the back of one hand was a small red circle that puzzled me a moment until I found several others on the sole of his bare foot. They were scorch wounds, like a hot poker or a lighted cigar might make. I felt sick, unnerved at the knowledge that my delays had brought things to this. As I pondered my failings, the darkness on one side of me moved. I whirled. The flashlight lit a face: wild-eyed, longhaired, white with ghostly suddenness. Westrake. His hand was up in what I thought was a wave, but that was only more dumb thinking. The arm dropped, and before I could react, something tore into my chest.

  The flashlight sprang from my hand. I rode a shock wave, trying to stay on it, to stay up; then my legs were gone. For just an instant, I stared sideways into a circle of light, then it was nowhere.

  29

  I WOKE FACEDOWN in darkness, pain a dull presence in my chest. I lay on a hard surface. As I moved, my cheek came unglued from the surface with a sticky sound. I rolled onto my left side. The effort made my chest thud. Dimly I was aware that there was something I needed to do, a place I should be, but for the life of me I couldn’t recollect what it was.

  Using my hands, I managed to get to a sitting position. I was on a floor. As I felt around me, my hand bumped something, spinning it. My flashlight. I turned it on. The floor was smeared with blood: not too much of it, but what’s too much? The front of my shirt was wet with it, too. With careful fingers, I probed inside my shirt. There was a wound in my chest, but evidently lying on it had slowed the bleeding to an ooze.

  In the light’s glow I saw a few snippets of copper wire and a length of cloth on the floor. The cloth was damp. Nearby lay an eighteen-inch piece of aluminum tube. Something wanted to come into my memory, but I couldn’t grab it.

  My watch said it was after 7:00. A chunk of time was gone. Taking more of it, I got to my feet. I made my way to the kitchen and splashed cold water on my face, wiping at the blood on my cheek. Bits of the past came back. Westrake stabbing me with a metal tube. And …

  I shone the light behind me.

  Like a watcher in the dark, Justin Ross peered out of the fogged plastic bag. I clapped at the .38 on my waist: still there. But I’d been asleep on the job. I went over. Justin was a long way from sunshine and palm trees. I wanted to loosen the bolo tie from his throat, remove the bag, take the cuffs off his wrists, speak with him, drive him down to the Copper Kettle, buy him a non-alcohol drink. But I couldn’t. I touched nothing.

  I got outside. The Camaro was gone. I walked to my car carefully, like a man wanting to keep something from spilling. Just climbing in, shutting the door, gripping the wheel, shifting the gears … every movement was an effort. In some small way, I welcomed the glitter of pain each brought, as if it were my due for having screwed up. As I got out onto Route 113, I saw fla
shing lights approaching. I didn’t stop. A cruiser sped past in a blur of red and blue. I blinked my vision into focus. I switched on the radio, and began poking the channel presets, trying to remember which station was carrying The New Gong Show. Disembodied voices drifted out like ghosts before I remembered television—not radio—and I snapped it off.

  The shoulder above my chest wound was stiffening. Pain had settled into a jagged ache, making movement difficult. Thoughts came randomly: bits of wire and aluminum, Shakespeare, Westrake’s diary, darkness. I shouldn’t be driving. How much blood had I lost? Lowell General wasn’t far away—should I go there? Or try to get St. Onge? Too late. If he figured I’d tried to end-run him, I wasn’t going to have to worry anymore about losing my P.I. license. Somehow none of that bothered me. It was all just mind noise.

  When I came to the turnoff for the hospital, I kept going.

  I opened the window, wanting air to clear my head. What I got were voices: You bozo, Rasmussen, you should’ve seen this coming. But no, you were too busy finessing your theories of guilt and motivation. Busy planking the boss’s daughter. And now Justin Ross was dead, maybe tortured before he’d died, your own life almost snatched by an old man with a piece of aluminum tube, and you’re spinning radio dials when you should be doing … going … I jerked the wheel as the car started to veer off the road. I gulped cold air.

  Aluminum tube, damp cloth, copper wire … the details kept nagging. Full fathom five …

  As I neared the university campus, traffic thickened. There were cars parking along both sides of the road. I was still a half-mile from the college auditorium. Jerry Corbin might be dog meat to the industry hacks, but he still had pulling power with the people of Lowell.