New, Improved Murder

by Ed Gorman

  “Mrs. Rutledge?” I called out.

  I looked up the winding staircase that disappeared above. No sign of anybody. Nor was there any in the corridor that led to the main part of the house on this floor.

  In the lemony-smelling gloom, Donna leaned in and took my hand. “Kind of spooky.”

  “Yeah.” I kept thinking about the woman Eve. I also kept thinking about the Oldsmobile parked at such an odd angle outside. “Let’s try the parlor.”

  The hallway creaked as we walked. Donna kept glancing up at the ceiling, as if she expected us to be attacked by bats. By the time we reached the parlor the hallway had gotten almost dark.

  From beyond the double sliding doors came the faint sound of a radio tuned to a station that still played Mantovani albums. I knocked. Once. Nothing. I tried again. The sound seemed brittle, almost vulnerable in the turn-of-the-century silence. Still nothing.

  Donna screamed before I really saw anything. They came out of the gloom near the back. Two of them. Wearing masks.

  Wouldn’t you know—Frankenstein and Dracula. They had been hiding in the deep day-end shadows collecting around a walk-in pantry.

  They seemed to be wearing the same clothes they had worn the night they’d attacked me outside the bar. Now they’d added guns to their outfits.

  “Get in there,” Frankenstein said, waving his weapon.

  “God,” Donna whispered. “A criminal.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “he probably has a record and everything.”

  “Shut up and get in there,” Frankenstein repeated. His mask distorted the true quality of his voice.

  I opened the sliding doors. There was a gray-haired woman in a faded housedress tied to a straight-backed chair in the middle of the room. She’d been gagged.

  Dracula said, “We warned you, pal. The other night. Now it’s too late.”

  “She’ll choke to death,” I said.

  The way the woman swallowed, I could see she was having trouble breathing.

  “Let me loosen her gag,” I said.

  “A fucking boy scout.” Frankenstein laughed.

  I went over to the woman. Took the gag off.

  She had a fleshy, wrinkled face. Her eyes scanned me in gratitude and terror. “They wanted to know about Eve.”

  “Shut up,” Frankenstein said.

  The five of us said nothing for a time. I looked around the room. There was a mantel filled with black-and-white framed photographs. Shawls and doilies covered the armchairs and the lumpy couch. Ferns in various stages of dying stood in the northern-light window. The faint radio played Jo Stafford now. We were trapped in a time warp.

  Dracula went over and got two more chairs. Donna glanced at me anxiously. I tried to calm her with my expression, but I was anything but calm myself.

  Then it was our turn to sit down and be tied to the chairs. They made quick work of it, tying the knots tight enough to cut off the circulation in our wrists and ankles.

  But they weren’t through, of course. This was just the beginning.

  Dracula went out of the room. You could hear the dog coming back into the house with him. The mutt’s paws scratched on the hardwood floors as he slid around.

  Then the animal shot through the doors and crouched in front of us, baring his teeth.

  “We ain’t through with the old lady,” Dracula said. “Come on, Samson,” he said, snapping his fingers. He brought the dog over to the old lady and said, apparently to me, “You interrupted us. We gotta finish our business.”

  In the dying light the two looked comic—and all the more ominous for the comic aspect—their masks cheap and gaudy and very unreal-looking.

  The dog had no problem seeming real. His coat was shaggy and dirty and his breath was bad. His eyes were red, as if he had a hangover, and his snout was slick with snot.

  Nothing about him suggested what came next. It happened so quickly I scarcely noticed.

  The mutt banged his head against the old woman’s leg and ripped a long, clean gash into the flesh.

  The dog started barking and the woman started screaming.

  Frankenstein came over and slapped her once, hard, across the mouth.

  “Now, I want to know where the strongbox is that Eve gave you.”

  But Frankenstein had overplayed his hand. The woman was in such agony that she seemed not to hear him. She moaned, pitching from side to side inside the constraints of the rope.

  Donna’s eyes filled. I wanted to hold her. Reassure her. Hard to do with your arms cinched by rope. “The strongbox,” Frankenstein said again.

  The mutt had moved back a few feet, waiting his call.

  “I don’t have it,” the woman said miserably.

  “Bitch,” Dracula said.

  He said “Beefsteak” and the dog lunged at the woman. This time he raked his teeth down her other leg. He had begun to smell. A kind of lust.

  This time the woman put her head back and started to shake it from side to side. I wondered how long Frankenstein and Dracula had been here. They seemed like patient boys. Maybe a long time.

  We sat there twenty more minutes while it went on. The dog had a go at her three more times. The last time he got her hand. He was extremely well trained. He didn’t make a mess. He just inflicted very precise pain, making holes in her skin, blue where puckered, red where the blood came slowly forth. The dog cleared up any doubts I’d had about Frankie and Drac. Not punks at all. Pros.

  “Stop it!” Donna screamed at them toward the end. But they were having too much fun with the old woman to pay any attention.

  Then above all the noise—the dog growled steadily, like a beast in a slasher movie—and the two thugs kept up steady cursing beneath their masks—I heard the car.

  As daylight waned in the parlor, tires crunched on gravel outside. I felt an idiotic relief. A movie formed in my head. The florist back in Tanrow hadn’t trusted us and had sent the local cops to check us out. Here they were now. Boy, were these two bastards going to get theirs.

  For what seemed an hour or two there was no further sound from outside.

  Had I imagined the car crunching on gravel?

  The dog went on snarling, hunching, ready for another lunge; Frankenstein and Dracula kept up their demands; the old woman said “I don’t have it, I don’t have it,” in a kind of rosary of pain; and I let my mind wander to the strongbox and realized that it was probably the key to everything, from the murder of Stephen Elliot to the deaths of the motel clerk and the hooker.

  Then I heard footsteps on the front porch and the rusty hinges of the door squeaking open.

  The thugs heard the noises too.

  They snapped a command to the mutt, “Ease, boy, ease.” He went into a state of suspended animation. The one with the Dracula mask jerked a Luger from the belt inside his jacket and started toward the sliding doors. The other came over to us. We knew better than to talk.

  “Shit, it’s you,” Dracula said in the hallway outside. “Scared the shit out of us.”

  Frankenstein waved his gun at us, glanced at the mutt crouching by us, then went out into the hallway too. The shots came very quickly.

  Four of them.

  As abrupt and final as an execution.

  Two bodies collided with the floor.

  Donna looked over at me as the steps started toward us.

  We were next. Or at least I thought we were, but then there was the sound of an oncoming car on the lonely road.

  Steps retreated from the hallway. Down the front stairs. A car motor was twisted to life. Tires on gravel. The whine of a transmission in reverse.

  Gone.

  “My God,” Donna said. “My God.”

  There wasn’t much else to say.

  Chapter 30

  The oncoming car belonged to Ab Windom, the florist. He came in, took a startled look at our bonds, and proceeded to set us free.

  “Did you get a look at the car?” I asked.

  “Afraid I didn’t,” he said. “I was listenin
g to the Cash Call Contest on the radio. I was pretty engrossed.”

  “Why’d you drive out here?”

  He flushed. “Well, to be honest, I got to thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have trusted you as much as I did. No offense. I just wanted to make sure everything was all right.”

  Later, after we had rubbed some circulation back into our arms and legs, this is the story Mrs. Rutledge told us.

  In the early sixties a very beautiful but frail high-school teacher named Eve Evanier came to Tanrow. The eligible bachelors of the community were enchanted, if a little frightened—her honey-blond hair, her curiously gentle manner, her melancholy silences confused them. If she’d been a carhop, they’d have had no problems with her. But, given the fact that she was so shy, given the fact that she never seemed to go anywhere but to work and church, they didn’t know what to make of her.

  The women of Tanrow did, of course. Eve Evanier’s mailman told everybody that she received The New Yorker and Evergreen Review by subscription, which marked her as slightly sinister in the eyes of the women. Then a local sheriff’s deputy named Sale told of stopping her one evening while she walked and finding her absolutely drunk. This was all the nervous men and the jealous women needed—some objective proof of her moral shortcomings. Now they snickered at her openly, and many housewives talked of going to the school board and getting her fired.

  Which was when Eve and Gil Powell began spending time together.

  Gil was, like the Evanier woman, an outcast. His father, a handyman, was long dead and his mother spent her nights dancing in the plastic glow of big Wurlitzer jukeboxes and sleeping with traveling salesmen. Gil possessed only one real virtue—his looks. It was widely said that he could go out to Hollywood and become a movie star. The problem was he had nothing to put with his looks—he wasn’t intelligent or sensitive or funny. He was, in fact, more a mannequin than anything. He stayed by himself. You saw him most often watching TV and shooting baskets in his driveway. He was a terrible basketball player.

  In his senior year Gil happened to take an English course taught by Eve Evanier. On the first test he got the lowest grade she’d ever given out to anybody not retarded. She called him into her office. That was the day it all started. Within a week Gil Powell drove his 1953 Chevrolet fastback out to Mrs. Rutledge’s rooming house, where Eve stayed, nearly every night. Everybody knew what was going on. Gil seemed amused by the affair. Eve took it desperately seriously. Gil’s mother called the Evanier woman several times, threatening her; she even sent a beefy used-car salesman named Dolan out there to call the Evanier woman a slut; but Gil and Eve Evanier became inseparable.

  She was good for him. He’d been dull—now at least he made a pass at reading and developed something resembling a sense of humor. She bought him clothes and taught him how to dress. The snobby girls of his class, who’d always avoided him before, started writing him notes and working him into their more lurid conversations.

  Tanrow people often saw Gil and Eve in nearby towns—dancing very tightly in supper clubs to steamy records by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Once Gil and Eve were even seen checking into a motel. There seemed to be no end to the scandal. Gil was eighteen; Eve was thirty-six, a dipsomaniac old maid who’d taken up with a veritable kid.

  Not that Tanrow permitted it to go on indefinitely. Three weeks before the end of Gil’s senior year Eve Evanier was fired by the school board. The session was open to the public and the public turned out. Not even the annual Tanrow-Capitol City football game rivaled the attendance that night. Eve was flayed, flogged, and removed in scathing language, language she’d never forget.

  So Eve Evanier left Tanrow with Gil in tow. Or the kid who used to be Gil, anyway. Now he was tall and trim and looked a great deal like Natalie Wood’s husband, Robert Wagner. With Eve’s help, he dressed a bit like him too.

  Mrs. Rutledge, whose husband had been a drunk himself, a man given to not paying his bills and to making scenes with “respectable” folks, had become a friend of Eve’s during all this. She liked the woman, felt sorry for her, feeling that Eve was in some way not quite right—not just alcoholic, but clinically ill in some other ways. She felt anxious for Eve too—the Evanier woman put everything she was and owned into Gil. Someday she would be old and no longer beautiful in her fragile way and Gil would leave her. Mrs. Rutledge feared for that a great deal.

  So Eve and Gil left Tanrow and nobody, not even Mrs. Rutledge, heard from them for fifteen years.

  Mrs. Rutledge began to wonder if Eve were even alive any longer.

  But it wasn’t, as things turned out, Eve who died. It was Gil Powell. Eve put the unsophisticated small-town boy to rest and resurrected him as somebody witty and elegant and polished as chrome—Stephen Elliot.

  “The last couple of years, Eve started calling me again. Stopping out sometimes,” she said. “That’s why those men came here. They knew she started leaving things here.”

  “What things?”

  She shrugged. “A couple of trunks and cardboard boxes of old junk. I’m not sure, I never looked through it.”

  “Why’d she leave it here?”

  “She said somebody was trying to get it. She wasn’t sure who.” She sighed. “Then that guy was out here a couple of weeks ago.”

  “What guy?”

  She described him.

  “What did he want?”

  “Oh, he didn’t come right out and say what he wanted. Said he was running a credit check on Eve. But I wondered if he wasn’t—what’s the word?—you know, casing my place.”

  The same thought occurred to me. I’d even begun to suspect who’d hired Frankenstein and Dracula. And Mrs. Rutledge’s description wasn’t far off.

  “When was the last time you spoke to Eve?”

  The Rutledge woman frowned. “Week ago. But I didn’t talk directly to her. She—she has these spells, kind of. Withdrawals. I talked to her man, Kenny. He said she wasn’t doing real well. He was thinking of putting her in a hospital.” She shook her head. “Mental hospital.”

  Donna looked at me. She was still frightened from the gunshots. She just stared. All Ab Windom could seem to do was shake his head.

  “My God, I don’t want to see what’s out in the hallway.” Mrs. Rutledge said.

  Donna grabbed my arm as we left the parlor.

  Only police photographs do justice to murders. The blood is usually sloppy, as if it had been sprayed over things, and even black-and-white snaps capture the peculiar colors of dead skin. The two thugs’ eyes bulged at nothing. Frankie’s shirt was soppy with leakage from his stomach. Drac had been caught in the throat. His twisted fingers gave the impression he’d been clawing at something. Behind us the mutt growled. I snapped out the command phrase: “Ease, boy.” He obeyed.

  “God,” Donna said, “there are flies and bugs.”

  As, indeed, there were. Already. Crawling on the dead bodies. It’s sort of a quick reminder of the messiness of existence, the flies and bugs.

  I helped her find the bathroom. She wanted to be sick alone.

  While Ab Windom helped Mrs. Rutledge pack—he was going to take her to the doctor and then to a nearby town where she could stay with a cousin, her tolerance for excitement having been passed a few weeks before—Donna and I went upstairs to look at the things Eve had stored.

  Past a painted-over door, in a room thick with dust, was a lifetime collected in four cardboard boxes and a steamer trunk. Letters, faded photographs, souvenir menus, and maps and pennants described the past twenty-five years of Eve Evanier’s life as busy but curiously hollow. Especially when you read some of the letters Stephen Elliot had written her.

  “He really was scum,” Donna said.

  From the tone of most of the letters it was obvious he knew that Eve Evanier was mentally ill—probably hopelessly schizophrenic. He was polite enough to her, but there was a placating tone to the words—as if he were addressing someone he was impatient with.

  Then Donna found a stash of Eve�
��s letters. They were straight out of Tennessee Williams. Florid, overwrought, sad. They described a woman who had made her young protégé the center of her life. For a time the protégé had responded appropriately. They’d lived together as lovers. But you could see that he had begun to withdraw, to find other interests.

  “God, I really feel sorry for her,” Donna said.

  “Yeah.”

  Then she smiled, tapping a stack of letters Elliot had written to Eve. “He must’ve gotten a lot better at writing at some point too. His letters are nearly illiterate.”

  I smiled back. “Professional jealousy?”

  “No. He’s really bad.”

  I went through the remaining boxes of memories. All lives could be reduced to this. Mine would be someday. My son would look at odds and ends—cuff links and an appliance store receipt and maybe a slightly out-of-focus photo of me at the beach or in my cop uniform—and that would be the only proof he would have that I’d ever existed at all.

  When I finished I turned around and found Donna staring out the window at the dusk.

  “You okay?”

  “Maybe I’m not cut out for this, Dwyer. There are two dead bodies downstairs. There’s a really depressing story in all these boxes. And it doesn’t seem to bother you. You just go right on with your work.”

  “Maybe that’s how I deal with it.”

  “Shit, I don’t know,” she said.

  I went over and knelt down next to her. I put my arm around her and lost my face in her hair. I’d forgotten about Donna’s impending decision. About Chad’s marriage offer. Now it came back to me. Chad was probably offering her a slightly better life than any I’d come up with. “Maybe I should just get another agency job,” she said.

  I stood up. “I’m going to call the sheriff. Explain what happened,” I said. “Then we’ll go back to the city. I need to look somebody up.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who came out here a few weeks ago pretending to run a credit check.”

  Interest stirred in her gaze. “You know who it is?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who?”