While I Disappear

by Edward Wright

  Rusty Baird, who was tending bar, came over and uncapped two bottles and set them in place. “How’s Cassie?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” Mad Crow responded. “At least she’s on her own now. Instead of tearing up saloons, she’s got herself a job driving a cab, terrorizing innocent pedestrians.”

  “You got yourself quite a niece there,” the bartender said with a grin. Rusty Baird had come out to California with his family during the Depression. He started as a fruit picker but, after discovering Marx and Steinbeck in the public library, found his calling as a labor organizer. When a blow from a strikebreaker’s club left him deaf in one ear and near-blind in one eye, he bought a big fruit stand, put a roof on it, turned it into a honky-tonk, and named it the Dust Bowl. It now drew an eclectic mix of ranchers, cowboys—both real and Hollywood—and Mexican farm workers.

  Baird moved down the bar to wait on someone else, and Mad Crow looked at his watch. “Guess I should head out pretty soon. The boys’ll be opening up, and the customers like to see me standing around looking colorful.” But he didn’t move. “Do you think I was too rough on her?”

  “No. You did what you thought was best. She’s got problems with you, but she’s going to have to work them out herself. Why don’t you invite her out for a meal this weekend?”

  “I’ll see. I’m gonna be busy. Since you turned lily-livered on me and wouldn’t help with the mustang, looks like tomorrow’s the day I’ll have to go out to the corral and get myself all dirty.”

  “Can I come watch? Maybe bring a friend?”

  “Hell, I don’t care. Come around noon. Bring a brass band.”

  When Baird returned, he and Mad Crow began discussing the virtues of beer in the new aluminum cans, and Horn’s mind wandered. He lifted his eyes to his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar, lazily scanned some of the familiar black-and-white pictures obscuring part of the glass. There was Gene Autry holding a guitar, Roy Rogers resplendent in a fringed shirt, and others: Charles Starrett as the masked Durango Kid, Al “Lash” La Rue wielding a wicked-looking bullwhip, silver-haired William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy. And the sidekicks: George “Gabby” Hayes, Smiley Burnette, Andy Devine and, in a prominent spot, Joseph Mad Crow. Horn’s eyes stopped on a newly framed photo. “What the hell is that, Rusty?”

  Baird had an almost boyish, freckled, open face, a look that had fooled many a drunk into thinking he was a pushover. He looked slightly guilty and shifted his eyes to Mad Crow, saying nothing.

  “Did you give him that?” Horn asked Mad Crow.

  “Hell, yes, I did,” Mad Crow responded belligerently. “You belong up there as much as him. Or him. Or him.”

  “Take it down, Rusty,” Horn said. “I mean it.”

  “All right,” Baird said, removing the offending photo and putting it beneath the bar.

  “I don’t know about you, partner,” Mad Crow said, shaking his head. “You got no reason to be embarrassed—”

  “Don’t worry about me, Indian,” Horn said, eyes straight ahead. “Just don’t go around doing things behind my back, all right?”

  “At your service. Put your six-gun away, and let’s get back to Lombard. You said you and Willie Apples mixed it up. How bad?”

  Horn finished the story, telling of the fight by the warehouse and his long walk back to his car. Mad Crow whistled appreciatively and slapped his friend on the back. “You want to tell me where you managed to get your hands on a pair of brass knuckles? Far as I know, you don’t keep those down there with the nickels and dimes and all the lint in your pocket.”

  “I’d seen them in the window of a pawnshop by the Anchor,” Horn said. “You’d already told me about this Willie Apples. When I went over to pick up Emory Quinn to go out to the Olympic, something told me I might need a little equalizer. As it turned out, things just barely got equalized.” He paused, thinking. “You know, Quinn said something to me about not having the killer instinct when he was in the ring. I think that about myself sometimes. I don’t like to fight. But out on that street, all I could think about was how that big son of a bitch might have been the one who went into Rose’s room, put that rope around her neck….”

  “I know,” Mad Crow said quietly. “Damn, I wish I’d been there last night to see it.”

  Rusty Baird stepped away from the jukebox, and a voice filled the bar, backed by steel guitar and little else. The voice sang about the time when you’re so lonesome you could cry, and it carried a whole world of knowledge and pain.

  “Who’s that?” Horn asked.

  “Fellow named Hank Williams,” Baird replied. “Alabama boy. He’s on the radio sometimes, the Louisiana Hayride. Good, ain’t he?”

  “Sounds like he’s been there and back.”

  “Well, he’s just a kid. In his twenties, I hear.”

  “Somewhere inside,” Horn said, “he’s old.”

  * * *

  Back at the cabin, he found a handwritten note in his mailbox that said simply Drainage. It needed no translation. Harry Flye, his landlord, had amassed a fortune speculating in real estate without ever acquiring manners or much of a vocabulary. He and Horn had spoken of the need to clear the estate’s old drainage canal of weeds and brush. The note said it was time to begin.

  Carrying a shovel and dragging a moldy, discolored tarpaulin, he climbed the road that led up to the ruins of the estate on the plateau. At the edge of the property, he found the spot where the concrete-lined drainage canal began its course down the mountain, paralleling the road. Over the years, the concrete had been breached by roots and tough weeds and choked by debris. He began digging with the shovel, flinging the contents onto the spread-out tarp. After digging out the caked mud and brush until the concrete was exposed, he began pulling weeds.

  Even in the cool air, he quickly worked up a sweat. After almost two hours, he had barely covered twenty yards. But it was a start. He dragged the tarpaulin and its contents down the road. The mud looked like rich soil. He could spread it over the grounds around the cabin where, years earlier, someone had planted an array of flowering shrubs. The rest he would burn.

  Inside, he drew a hot bath, poured a glass of Evan Williams and soaked away some of the soreness. Tired as he was, he let his guard down, and for an instant Rose’s face in death emerged, like a too-quick image in a badly edited film. An involuntary noise came from his throat, and the image dissolved. To keep it from returning, he decided to deliberately go back over the events of the last few days.

  He had learned some things.

  Rose had killed someone. Or so she had said. An accident, or murder. Given what he knew about her, he could barely make room in his mind for the idea, but he allowed it there anyway. If it was true, it was no great stretch from there to the notion that Rose herself might have been murdered in retribution.

  Jay Lombard. He had known Rose years ago and met her quietly not long before her death. Horn had no idea yet of the shape of his relationship with her. But he knew Lombard and his thug-companion were men of violence. Were they capable of murder?

  Whether or not she was a killer, the Rose he had known had touched people, left them changed in some way by her friendship and decency. Horn himself was one of those. Dexter Diggs and Emory Quinn were others. Dolores Winter might be another, he thought, and could possibly be a helpful ally. If only she didn’t dislike him so much.

  The phone interrupted his thoughts. It was Dex.

  “I’ve found out something,” he said. “Someone died, remember? At a party? I’ve got the name.”

  “Good for you, Dex. Who was it?”

  “A girl named Tess Shockley.” Diggs spelled the name. “She was eighteen. She—”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Luck, partly. An old friend of mine—I knew him when he was doing publicity for Paramount—is now in the advertising department at the Examiner. He put me in touch with one of their police reporters, who agreed to dig some clippings out of their morgue. I now owe him a bottle of his f
avorite sour mash. By great good fortune, this character has been working there since the Woodrow Wilson administration and, once he pulled the clips, realized he’d been one of the reporters who worked on the story. He began to recall it and was able to embroider some of the details that didn’t make it into the paper. Anyway—” He paused to catch his breath.

  “Tess Shockley. She came here fresh out of high school to make it in the movies. Sound familiar? She was only here for a year before she died, and she never did make it, although she did land some bit parts. Being pretty, she got invited to a lot of parties, including some where the Hollywood people would show up. There was some talk of her dating for money, but that was probably just yellow journalism talking. Indications are she was just another one of these nice, star-struck kids.

  “One night she turned up on the doorstep of the emergency room at Cedars of Lebanon, bleeding uncontrollably. They took her in, but they couldn’t stop the bleeding. She died a few hours later.”

  “Where did she—”

  “Wait. Let me finish reading from these notes. At first they thought it was a botched abortion, but she was too well-dressed, as if she’d been to a party. Emergency room doctor found alcohol and cocaine in her system. He also concluded—and this wasn’t in the paper—that she’d been penetrated by a hard object with enough force to rupture the wall of the uterus.”

  “She wasn’t pregnant?”

  “No. She was a very unlucky young lady who went to the wrong party. Someone got her high and raped her, most likely using something. And killed her.”

  “Maybe she got herself high, Dex.”

  “You mean maybe it was just one of those jolly, madcap parties full of coke and copulation? All right, maybe she got herself high. But she didn’t do the rest of it to herself, my friend. She had some bruises on her arms, suggesting a struggle. The coroner called it homicide, and it wound up just another unsolved killing. After a while, people forgot.”

  “Do they know where she’d been?”

  “The party, you mean? No. She was dumped at the hospital, like a bag of dirty laundry. The police talked to her landlady and any friends they could locate, trying to find where she had gone that night. Nothing. She died in the early hours of New Year’s Day, so I’m sure she had plenty of parties to choose from the night before.”

  “How about relatives?”

  “A day later, another story mentioned that her parents showed up to claim the body. But they had asked the police to keep their names out of the paper, and it was done.”

  “Well, this is all interesting stuff,” Horn said. “But we don’t know yet if this Shockley girl—”

  “Is connected with Rose? Let me finish,” Diggs said urgently. “Although the paper didn’t name the parents, it didn’t have to. It mentioned where they came from, which was enough.”

  Horn waited, but Diggs said nothing. He filled in the silence himself. “Oklahoma City?”

  “That’s right. And the first day’s story ran a picture of Tess Shockley. It’s her, John Ray.”

  “Same picture Rose had?”

  “Exact same. Tess probably had it in her apartment, and some reporter swiped it for the paper. Common practice among the gentlemen of the press, my friend tells me.”

  “So this is who Rose meant when she said—”

  “We don’t know that for sure. But it’s a natural assumption to make, isn’t it?”

  Neither man spoke for a moment. “I don’t like where this is going,” Diggs said finally.

  “Me neither. But we can’t stop now. I’m going to see if I can track down her folks, if they’re still alive.”

  “Rose couldn’t kill anyone.”

  “I want to believe that. Thanks, Dex. I’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  He was up early the next morning, thinking about things he needed to do. He started some coffee and fried a couple of eggs. Adding a few slices of white bread and a splash of hot sauce on the eggs, he carried the breakfast outside, eating and gazing through the dense growth of trees to the far rim of the canyon. Sitting quietly for a while in the mornings helped him prepare for a day that might include confrontations in the service of the Mad Crow Casino. Evenings, it helped him journey back to a peaceful place inside his head.

  On this day, it seemed most important to try to locate relatives or friends of Tess Shockley. He had to know why Rose had kept her photo all those years. Would a murderer keep a photo of her victim?

  Two decades had passed. He hadn’t the name of a single friend of the dead girl. He hadn’t even the full names or address of her parents, assuming either was still alive. But he knew they were from Oklahoma City.

  And he had the name of the photo studio that had once taken her picture.

  He went inside, retrieved the photo from his jacket pocket, and studied the back of it.

  Beasley Studio, Oklahoma City, it said. He picked up the phone, got the long-distance operator, and asked for Oklahoma City information. The Beasley Studio, it seemed, was still there, and a minute later the operator was ringing the number.

  “Beasley’s,” said a male voice in a familiar accent.

  “Good morning,” he said. “My name is Horn, and I’ve got kind of a funny request.” The sounds of Oklahoma and Arkansas speech have a lot in common. Almost unconsciously, like an actor learning a part, Horn found himself lapsing into an exaggerated version of the accent of his early years.

  “I’ve got an old picture of a cousin of mine, taken at your studio maybe twenty years ago. Her name is Tess Shockley. She’s deceased, I’m afraid. I’m looking into my family tree and trying to get addresses on everybody who’s still alive. I believe her folks may still live in Oklahoma City, and I’m wondering if you’d mind seeing if you have an address for them.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” the man said slowly. “Twenty years ago, you said?”

  “That’s right,” Horn said, laughing as if in embarrassment. “I know it’s asking a lot….”

  “You see, Mr. Beasley, he cleaned out a bunch of the records and moved them upstairs not long before he died.”

  “Uh huh,” Horn said. “Prob’ly a big job to go through ’em. Listen…what did you say your name was?”

  “Ernest.”

  “Ernest, I’m calling long-distance from Los Angeles, California.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir. I wouldn’t be calling if this wasn’t real important. I have to be honest with you. This isn’t for me, it’s for my wife. She’s been ailing lately, and she wants to get in touch with all the family before she…well, you know.”

  “I see.” Ernest sounded vaguely sympathetic.

  “All I can do is hope you understand how important this is for our family. If you’d be willing to take a little extra time and go through those records, my wife and I would be really grateful to you.”

  “Well, I suppose I could take a few minutes during my lunch.”

  “You’re very kind to do this. May I call you back later?”

  He hung up. Another concern, he reflected, was money. He wondered briefly if he needed to take on a quick job for the Indian, either a collection or something else. Pulling out his wallet, he estimated that he had enough cash to last several days if he was frugal. There was no need to go to work just yet.

  He went back outside to plan his day, but the rocking chair had barely reached its usual tempo when the phone rang again.

  “This is Dolores Winter.” He thought he would have recognized her voice anyway—direct, low, almost husky. A voice that sounded like cigarette smoke. “I had some bad words for you the other day.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I don’t like to apologize. It spoils my image as a tough broad, one I’ve spent years building up. But after I ran into Dexter Diggs, I started thinking about old times. I called him just now, to say thanks for coming out to Rose’s grave. He told me a few things about you. One was that you thought a lot of her. Another was that generally you�
�re an all-right guy, even if your reputation is shot to hell these days.”

  “Thanks for putting it so delicately.”

  “So, as long as we don’t call it an apology, what say we start over?”

  “Fine with me.”

  “I’d like to buy you lunch. At my place, next Thursday. Dexter and his wife will be there. I hope a weekday’s all right with you. I’m not working right now. You want to come over?” She gave him the address, and he wrote it down. “We can talk about Rose, if you want to. Dexter said you’d like to know who killed her. So would I. If there’s anything I can do—”

  “I’m grateful for lunch,” he said. “That’s a start.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “What do you want?” Cassie leaned out the window of the cab, a cigarette hanging lazily off her lower lip.

  “I want a cab. Just like I told the dispatcher.” Horn had to raise his voice to be heard over the buzz of activity in front of Union Station. The big white stucco building loomed behind him like a modern-day Spanish mission. It was late morning, the Super Chief had just pulled in, and travelers, many toting luggage, jostled each other on the concrete expanse in front of the terminal.

  “You asked for me.”

  “That’s right. Any crime in that?”

  “What’s wrong with your car?”

  He walked over and leaned both hands on the roof, looking down at her. “I came down here to see someone off for San Francisco. Now my car won’t start. Battery, I think. I’ll take care of it later, but I need to go someplace now.” It was the first of many lies he planned to tell her.

  She exhaled, squinting through the cigarette smoke, one elbow resting on the open window. Her cap rode at a jaunty angle. She’s got the cabby look down real good,he thought admiringly.

  “Where do you need to go?”

  “Out to Joseph’s place.”

  She removed the drawn-down stub from her mouth and flipped it away. “Get somebody else.”