Kiss Them Goodbye

by Joseph Eastburn

  Nick laughed. “Look, I’d rather not tip my hand to the killer. Do you mind?”

  “All right, then just let me dig things up, Lieutenant. I have a good background in forensics. I have strong research skills.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You need a friend in court, don’t you?”

  “I’ve just always worked alone.”

  The wheels were turning behind her bright eyes. “You know, you could feed me false information—that might throw him off. He could make a mistake.”

  Nick looked at her seriously. “Who said it was a he?”

  “Nobody.”

  Now they were both staring. Something about her was pulling him, beneath that wafer of ivory skin, something charged, utterly electric. He was attracted and threatened—all at the same time—what more could he want? He shook his head. “Better not.”

  “Rather play it by the book?”

  “For now, yeah.”

  She swiveled, speaking toward the windows of the parking lot. “Well, some people say you don’t know what you’re doing, but—”

  “Who?”

  She looked back at him, her cheeks reddened slightly. “Look—forget it, I just—”

  “Who?”

  She could feel his blue eyes boring down on her. Maureen looked down at the stubble of facial hair along his chin. She saw the sensitive mouth closed insolently over his front teeth. She wanted to reach out and touch his face, but couldn’t hide her disappointment. “I don’t remember.”

  “Why are you doing this?” he said wearily.

  She pulled her fingers through her red hair. “Why am I doing what?”

  “Putting me on the spot like this?”

  She stared at him. “I mean, you’re saying some fairly irksome things to me—sure that’s fine, isn’t it?”

  “What have I said?”

  “You don’t mind putting the moves on me—”

  “Hey look, it was just a friendly—”

  “But let me do something where I might have to use my head, well that’s out of the question, right?”

  Nick couldn’t understand how he had gotten into an argument with this woman. He didn’t even know her. Her bright eyes just kept staring at him. “Look,” he said, “people’s lives are at stake here. I can’t play ‘let’s make a deal’ with this case.”

  Nick stood up, grabbed the check, and reached for his wallet. The waitress looked over a Maureen, back at Nick. “It’s six seventy-five,” she said, pushing buttons on the register at the counter.

  Nick gave her a ten, took back the change, put a dollar on the counter.

  “Shall I wrap up the steak?”

  “No, forget it.”

  Maureen was already standing with her back to him, silently looking out the window. He turned around and looked her over once more. The way her high heels were drawn together made him feel cold. He wondered if he would ever be able to get close to a woman.

  She saw him give her the once-over in the reflection of the plateglass window. She smiled into the reflection. She was hoping he would take her shoulder, turn her around, and say he was sorry. At least, say goodbye. Anything.

  He never did.

  SHE STARED THROUGH the window as his car pulled out onto the highway and sent gravel against the metal foundation of the diner. She threw her purse over her shoulder, strutted out into the parking lot and over toward the Thirsty Moose.

  She shook her red hair out as she put her heels down hard on the pavement. She passed by the neon beer sign in a porthole window and stopped, looking back across the highway toward the diner. She was half hoping he would still be there, his back blazing from the counter, looking like an advertisement for Soloflex.

  She kicked the door open.

  Inside the smoke rolled across the bar. The noise from the tables in the corner was deafening. The jukebox was blaring. She pulled up a stool, put her soft pink cigarette case down on the bar along with her keys, lit up, and when the bartender came over, she ordered a White Russian.

  While she was sipping her drink, she noticed she had sighed again, almost not hearing the group at the far table yelling her name.

  “Hey, Maureen!”

  She was in a blue fog. The neon sign above the bar was a buoy on an endless sea of cigarette smoke; she had been on this ocean before, in countless bars, alone.

  She wondered why she hadn’t gone back to L.A. She could get a gig in San Bernardino easy; even her hometown, Bakersfield, which was the pits, had to be better than this.

  Staring at the red neon tubes in the sign, she wondered if that was the size of the vessels carrying oxygenated blood to her brain. Her thoughts were racing. She thought—no newspaper job in the world is worth this humiliation.

  Suddenly someone with nails was tugging at her blouse. “Yo, Maureen,” a loud voice said. “Got cotton in your ears?”

  She turned around and looked into Judy Bayard’s oval face.

  “Hi,” Maureen said quietly. “Sorry, I guess I didn’t hear—”

  Judy’s frosted hair flounced up and down. On her third vodka she talked as if everyone around her were deaf.

  “What’ya sittin’ up here for? We got a whole table of guys down there.”

  Maureen glanced through the smoke-filled room, toward the back of the bar. There, in the dull light next to the bowling machine, was a table of blue arms waving. A few whistles.

  “No, Judy, really, I’m not up for—”

  “Come on,” she said, practically lifting Maureen off the stool, “we’re roasting Dudley Do-right.”

  Maureen’s thoughts were switching gears, grinding. “Who?”

  “That lieutenant I told you about—he’s fucked. You wouldn’t believe what that fool said in his report. The guy is nuts!”

  Maureen put her cigarette down. “How did you find out what he put in—”

  “’Cause I read it, honey. Fuckin’ guy brought it in tonight. Captain’s gonna shit. You can’t believe.”

  Maureen tamped out her cigarette, grabbed her things off the bar, and jumped off the stool.

  “I’d like to hear,” she said as the girl led her to the back.

  13

  NICK WAS BARE-CHESTED, sitting on the edge of the bed in the motel room, his head hanging down. A white towel draped over his knees. He realized he had been staring at the white material for a long time. He was depressed. The fight with that intriguing redhead had left him alienated and edgy.

  His thoughts found safe harbor with the killer. He wondered why a person would dance with someone as they were killing them. The killing must have come out of some kind of romantic alienation—much like what he was feeling now—only with a thousand times more rage behind it.

  Nick thought about his ex-wife, Penny, the pert brunette social worker from the Buffalo suburbs. She had enough guilt to move to the inner city to work with minorities, and enough scotch to cope with it. He heard her voice now, which always struck him as condescending—as if she were sitting in the room—the way she had always accused him of closing her off, taking any excuse to be distant, to be away from her, whether it was the extra duty he took on for his career, drinks with the guys, or even a football game on TV. She always said he kept himself separate. Nick let himself feel his defenses rising. Just for an instant, while he visualized her, he let his mind wonder: What would it take to make a man actually kill? He couldn’t think of anything . . . but betrayal felt close.

  Had the killer been betrayed by the victim? Was the killer attracted to the young boy? Or did the boy represent someone else, someone from the killer’s past?

  Nick dropped his head down into the towel. He wanted to crawl into the killer’s mind—but he had gone blank. While he stared at the items on the desk, feeling numb, empty, he got an idea. He dialed the phone, heard it ring on the other end.

  An elderly woman’s voice. “Hello?”

  “Mom, it’s Nick.”

  Warmer now. “Well, how’s it going?”

  “No
t very good. Look, can I ask you something? I have this black hole in my memory about the night Dad was shot, would you—”

  “For God’s sake, Nick, I was having a nice evening.”

  “I just want to know what I did that night, that’s all.”

  “Please don’t make me go over it, dear.”

  “I have to know—it’s important.”

  “See, there’s a television program on I’m watching. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  “Why do you always do this?”

  “I’m sorry, dear. It’s just too painful. I have to hang up now.”

  Nick was aggravated. “Just tell me why I left that night—Mom?”

  A pause on the other end, a sniffle. “Good night, dear.” A dial tone.

  He slammed down the phone, his head sinking down in the towel again. He forgot the shower had been running in the bathroom. Again his mind was leaping back. The images kept flying toward him; they went by so quickly he couldn’t grasp them. Hospital beds. Pleated, white cotton screens. Empty gurneys rolling down hallways in slow motion. They seemed to float toward him. He was falling.

  Then he was standing outside a hospital door. It opened as if a gust of wind had sucked it inward. Papers flew across a room, and out open windows where clouds hung in the distance. Dr. Koenig was standing in the room, over a covered body, pulling on his surgical gloves. He smiled, then ripped the white sheet down. An older man sat up, slowly, looked toward Nick and started to scream. The man was his father. His open mouth, coming closer, swallowed the room.

  NICK SUDDENLY WOKE up. The steam from the shower was pouring out of the bathroom. He looked up just long enough to see a face in the mirror before it fogged over.

  It was his father’s face—then it became his own.

  CARY WAS RIDING on a roller coaster. There was some man next to him he didn’t know; he was laughing. As they came over the top of a hill, high in the mountains, the track seemed to veer around a dark rock formation. When they crested a steep hill, their car swerved at a sharp angle, the light changed, and they were thrown inside a cave heading toward a sheer drop into blackness.

  The man got out and glanced down into the tunnel. Cary was trying to pull the car back up the steep tracks but kept slipping. The man was waving him forward when the boy lost his footing. The weight of the car suddenly dragged him over the edge. As the man waved, he plunged into darkness.

  CARY OPENED HIS eyes. He could feel thousands of tiny stones under his back. Had he fallen through a cavity in the earth’s crust? He lifted himself up and felt gravel under his elbows. He could see the smokestack of the power plant in the distance. He saw a few stars. The sky was wearing a fierce blue coat. In the distance he saw chimneys on buildings. One of them was Ardsley.

  He looked down, noticing that he was still dressed. The four black chimneys on the infirmary gave the small building the look of a castle. He saw a poplar next to the building moving slightly, but there was no wind.

  He heard a laugh coming from the dark lawn below.

  The gravel crackled under the soles of his shoes as he crept toward the edge of the roof.

  Across the lawn was a patch of undergrowth, some woods standing barren in a flat bottom of land where the power plant was almost hidden by vines. There was a bright white light on the top of the brick smokestack.

  The light exaggerated the silhouettes of two figures running toward the woods. Their slanted shadows swept across the grass until they loomed, covering the lawn, then whipped back at an angle toward the plant.

  Even from the roof, Ballard could see one of them was the kid named Finkelstein. He could tell from the gangly lurch the kid had used trying out for the track team. He seemed to be chasing someone.

  Ballard leaned over the edge of a wall, focusing his eyes. The student was chasing a woman. He heard a giggle, then saw a flash of white material pass under the glow of the light. He thought for a moment it was Ms. Coates, his math teacher.

  They disappeared between the boughs of the small trees that bordered the building. Then there were only footsteps, rustlings like the kind he remembered in the woods as a child. Animals. Creatures just beyond the naked eye. He stood at the edge of the roof blinking.

  Cary thought he was still dreaming. His mind started to race. The old dread was coming toward him as from the horizon, huge, immense, relentless. Something kept him from seeing it, however, some sound, below.

  Someone else was watching. He didn’t know how he knew. He thought he had heard breathing underneath him on the ground, or was it the wind rustling leaves on the poplar at the edge of the building?

  He found the stairs that led down from the roof. The hook that held the door closed was still unfastened. He stepped down into the dark stairwell, anchored the door, and half crawled down to the landing. There, across the dim hallway, was the policeman still asleep next to his door.

  He watched the little man’s nostrils flare as they sucked in the stale air of the corridor. Cary managed again to slither behind the chair that was tilted back against the doorjamb. When he was inside his black room, he eased the door closed.

  He had gotten back in bed before he realized he still had his clothes on. He stood out on the floor, stripped off his jeans and, in his underwear, got back under the covers. He felt the stillness of the night come down on him. It landed like an extra quilt. The quiet became so heavy he actually thought that sound itself had disappeared from the earth.

  That was when he heard the noise. He knew it was a tile. The eave that bordered the second floor, running all the way around the four sides of the infirmary, was lined with orange Spanish tile. Again, he heard it. The wind would have to be high to make the tiles shift. He sat up in bed and peered through the window that threw a pale cast across the sheets.

  A face appeared in the window. Ballard lurched backward off the bed. He landed on his back on the floor. The face was still there, covered with the black scarf as always, the black hat, the eyes—even in the dark—carrying an inhuman, feverish glow.

  Ballard’s legs wouldn’t move. He squirmed backward, something retching up from deep inside him, as he watched the eyes of the figure burn like torches. He flopped over, dragging his body across the floor with his elbows. His fingernails found an uneven slat of wood raised slightly off the floor, and he pulled himself toward the door, his mouth unable to make any sound, though he was trying to scream.

  14

  THE NEXT MORNING, in his motel room, Nick Fowler shaved, showered, and was dressed by nine. When he turned off the water and wiped his face, he heard a stream bubbling behind the flat pink building. He opened his bathroom window.

  He put on a pair of slacks, a clean shirt, sports jacket. He straightened his tie and drove to the diner to get some coffee to go. He dropped a quarter in the slot of a newspaper machine in the vestibule, not really paying attention, and folded the paper under his arm as he paid for coffee and a roll, no butter.

  When he was behind the wheel, he opened the container of coffee, took a sip, and casually flipped the paper open on the seat.

  The headline hit him in the face. ROOKIE INVESTIGATOR THINKS KILLER IS ARTHUR MURRAY. Fowler swallowed hard, looked down at the byline, with his mouth open, his coffee hovering in the air. He was stunned. It said “Maureen McCauley.”

  First the feature article distorted his history with the police department, fudged the dates of his employment, making him sound inexperienced. Next, it hinted he had based his entire theory—that the killer was dancing with his victims—on his own deprived feelings of wanting to belong.

  A few people working the night shift at the station house in Buffalo were carelessly quoted when asked—over the phone probably—if he could dance himself. They said, “No, he had two left feet.”

  The article called the investigation “misguided.” It called for Fowler’s removal from the case, “reflecting the outcry from local officials.” As far as he knew, Fowler hadn’t heard of any outcry—only some disgruntled cops who had misse
d their turn.

  The final paragraph asked if the community was going to stand by while a “wallflower” danced (badly) around the real issues of what happened the night of the murder.

  Fowler shoved the transmission in gear and gunned the car out of the diner. He made the engine bawl through the quiet streets. It roared up the hill. His face was a shade of vermilion, he was sweating through the back of his clean shirt, he had spilled his coffee already, and he was seething.

  He stormed up to the fourth floor, burst into the temporary office, where Bill Rodney stood by the window with a silent look of anxiety on his face.

  In the corner, sitting on a student’s chair much too small for him, was the captain. Allen Weathers stood up as the door flew open.

  His short gray crew cut, an homage to his days as a Marine, could not hide the red color that had risen up under his scalp. Some people felt he was too tough to be a country official, that he took his frustration out on the men.

  Nick Fowler stopped in his tracks. “Captain,” he said, giving him a short, grim nod.

  “Sit down, Fowler,” he said, and sat down himself.

  He picked up a copy of the Tribune, glanced at it, then threw it against the wall. “What the fuck is this?”

  Fowler opened his mouth. “Lies, Cap—”

  “How the fuck did you manage to get—”

  “It’s lies, Captain. That bitch doesn’t know her ass from—”

  “I don’t care if it’s lies, I want to know how in the name of Jesus, she got—”

  “I just talked to her for—”

  The captain’s voice was rising. “Don’t you know who the fuck she is?”

  “No, I don’t know who the fuck she—”

  Weathers stood up. “Don’t raise your voice to me!”

  Fowler was up on his feet too. “Then don’t play me for a fool. The whole story is a—”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Nick Fowler shifted his weight. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled, sitting down.

  Weathers started pacing, his giant hands behind his back. “Look, Lieutenant, I went out on a limb to put you on this case.”