by Lewis Shiner
A middle-aged cop in uniform who I knew by sight but not by name made his way over to us. He pointed out a heavy set Chicano in white ducks who was wandering around with a look of profound misery. “That’s the houseboy,” he said. “Name’s Chico. He found the body. Yesterday was his day off, so he can’t pin down a specific time for the killing.”
“How did he find it?” Winslow asked.
“Came up to see if King wanted dinner, and saw him. He’s only been here about an hour.”
“Did you find the gun?” I asked.
He showed us a Colt long barrel .38, and the spot near the body where it had been found. “Houseboy positively identifies it as King’s own gun.”
I stepped over a small grey man with a magnifying glass and looked at King’s desk. In the center of it was a big loose-leaf scrapbook, the kind that ties together with a silken cord. It was open to an article on the Korean War. I flipped through it casually, recognizing photographs of King, his wife, and various others at various ages. Beside it was a desk pad, and the words “Green Chevy” and a phone number were written on it, surrounded by the short crisp lines of a compulsive doodler. I memorized the number, just to have something to do.
On the corner of the desk, as if it had been put aside, was a steel construction handbook. I looked through it, too, but failed to make any sense of it. A few pages were marked, but it would have taken an expert to tell me what that meant. Under it was a mimeo sheet with the heading “County Bond Proposal.” The only other object was a cigarette lighter which I was afraid to touch because of fingerprints. It was standing on end, and from behind the desk I could make out an insignia of some sort, a lightning bolt and the word “Thundermugs.”
I looked up to see Winslow at the door. “They’ve got Mrs. King downstairs,” he said to me. “I’ll be with her for a while.” I nodded and went to the window.
Filmy curtains fluttered in the wind, and it seemed cooler to be up above the lake. I was only in the way in the study, and I had no professional interest in the case. So I fought my way back to the door and went downstairs and into the backyard.
The lawn gave out at a six-foot hurricane fence that surrounded the house. I walked down to the gate and let myself out onto the top of the cliff.
I had started sweating as soon as I stepped outside, and the water looked cool and inviting below me. It looked to be about a fifty-foot drop, almost perfectly straight down to the water. I followed the line of the cliff for a while, and found a path that wound its way down to a shelf just above the water. It was covered with a coarse river gravel that was too uncomfortable to sit on, so I crouched for a while and watched the sailboats. They were a symbol to me of the kind of people, like the Kings, who had everything I never would have—money, prestige, a sense of time. But the sense of time was a lie, and even people like Jason King could die, suddenly, in a brief flash of mortality. I climbed back up the path.
3.
“It’s open and shut,” Winslow confided to me on the way back to town. “Marion King has a motive, what with all this mistress business, and she can’t account for herself at the time of the murder.”
“Why wasn’t she staying at the house last night?” I asked. “She was at her sister’s. She says her sister was sick. I say like hell. Here’s how it was.
“Marion King quarrels with her husband over the mistress and moves out. She thinks it over, decides she wants a divorce, say. Then she tells her sister she’s going to a movie. She doesn’t want her sister to know she’s even seeing her husband again. She goes to the house, tells him she’s leaving him for good. He pulls a gun, threatens her. That’s the last straw, he says, I’d be ruined. They struggle over the gun, it goes off.”
“King was shot through the back of the head,” I said.
“Okay, she pulls the gun and threatens him. He tries to walk out on her, and bang, it goes off. Maybe she didn’t mean for it to.”
The road heaved and dipped over countless hills between the lake and the outskirts of the city. The swaying car and white heat were numbing me. I considered asking Winslow what he made of the scrapbook and lighter, but changed my mind. It wasn’t my case, and there was no point in stirring things up.
They dropped me at my house and I waved as they pulled away. Two bills sat waiting for me in the mailbox and a jug of milk had gone sour overnight. I cooked a couple of hamburgers and took a shower, then went outside with a beer. I sat in the front lawn and drank the beer and pulled Johnson grass. Johnson grass is a vicious, predatory plant that can take over a lawn in a matter of weeks. All its leaves come out of a central root system, and to pull it up you have to track down all the runners and separate leaves and pull them back to the center. Pulling Johnson grass is just the job for an out-of-work detective. I stayed at it until it got too dark to see what I was doing.
4.
My employment status changed at ten o’clock the next morning. I heard a tapping at the door and dropped my book into the center drawer of my desk. Before I could say anything, a husky blond kid with short hair and bangs came in. He introduced himself as Jeffrey King, the dead man’s son.
I offered him a chair, noticing a gold cross at his throat and a strong smell of aftershave at the same moment. I guessed him to be about eighteen.
“I assume you know what happened to my mother,” he said. I nodded, and he went on. “She didn’t kill him, Mr. Sloane. If you knew her, you would know she couldn’t have done it.” He had a clear, ringing voice, with a taste of the deep south—Alabama or Georgia—in his accent. He was calm, direct, almost painfully sincere.
“I know the man who’s handling the investigation,” I said. “He’s a friend, and he’s an honest man. You can trust him to see that justice is done.”
“The Lord said, ‘Woe to you lawyers also, for you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.’ It doesn’t matter to Mr. Winslow whether my mother did it or not. I’d prefer to have. someone working with her interest in mind.”
His mannerisms and voice were those of a mature public speaker. I had to keep blinking my eyes to be sure he was the same person who’d come in the door.
“Let’s hear your side of it,” I said.
He paused, collected himself, seemed to be waiting for the right beat to come in on. “I can’t claim my mother and father had a perfect marriage. They’ve been rather...distant from each other for some time. It was perfectly natural for her to leave the house in which my father had committed adultery. ‘Do not look back or stop...lest you be consumed.’ But that hardly means she would kill. The thought would not even occur to her.”
“Do you live with your parents?”
“No. I’m in a dormitory at school, Texas Seminary.”
I nodded, made a nonsense note on my blotter. I printed the letters slowly, paying no real attention to them. “Did you get along with your father?”
“I hardly see what that has to do it.”
“Look, Mr. King—”
“Jeffrey.”
“All right, Jeffrey, if we’re going to work together you’re going to have to trust me. If I ask a question, it’s probably for a good reason.”
He blinked his eyes down, then back up to mine. “My father was a difficult man. I respected him, and I honored him, as I was taught to do.”
I decided I was not going to be able to crack Jeffrey King, and that it probably wasn’t worth my effort anyway. “All right, Jeffrey,” I said, “I’m interested.” I recited my rates, adding, “Plus a bonus if I get her off. A hundred will do for a retainer.”
“Will a check be all right?”
I nodded, and while he started writing I asked him, “Who do you think did it?”
He finished making out the check, tore it out with a long, backhanded rip. Then he looked at me with smoldering eyes. “The whore,” he said. “Charlene Desmond.”
“Have you met her?”
“No. But I’ve read what she said in the
newspapers. She’s evil, Mr. Sloane. A desperate, misguided woman.” He was sounding twice his age again, and I wondered just how much he knew about desperate, misguided women.
“What’s her motive?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? But she must have known Chico was off on Thursdays. That would be the day when she was used to visiting my father. So when she wanted something from him, she knew when he would be alone. He refused her, probably refused to continue his relationship with her, and she shot him.”
“Um hmm,” I said, and picked up the check. “Can I reach you at this number?” He nodded. “All right. I’ll get on it right away. If there’s anything else I need I’ll call you.”
He left and I threw open a window. The smell of baking asphalt wafted in from Congress Avenue, but it was an improvement. I called the sheriff’s office and asked for Winslow.
“Hello, Sam. This is Dan. Looks like we’re going to be working together.”
“How’s that?” His voice had a tentative sound to it, a little frayed at the edges.
“On the King case. His son hired me.”
“Oh really.”
“What’s wrong? You and Jeannie slug it out again?”
“No. No...just can’t see why you’d want to bother with the King case. It’s all over but the trial.”
“Well, maybe so. But I still got to make a living. Listen, can you give me some info? I need to know where the King woman stands.”
“Like what?”
“Like did you get prints on the gun?”
“Yeah. They were smeared, but we got two good sets. One hers, one his.”
“Do you have an address for Charlene Desmond?” He gave it to me and I wrote it on the blotter.
“One more thing,” I said. “What about traffic up at the King house Thursday night. Did you find out anything?”
“The cab companies say none of their people went up there. Neighbors don’t remember much.” He found a quieter, apologetic tone. “Say, Dan, I have to go.”
“Yeah. I understand. See you, Sam.” I did understand. I’d been around long enough to know the sound of pressure coming down.
5.
In 1959 I gave up my DA haircut and sold my Chevy and joined the Marines. My girlfriend was very proud of me for about two weeks, then she found somebody who was still in the neighborhood, and that was that. When Kennedy sent the “advisors” to Viet Nam in ’61 I was along for the ride, and I was flying choppers by ’62. Then my hitch was up, and I was ready to go home. So my sergeant got me drunk and got me to sign a blank piece of paper and I was suddenly in for three more years. They hadn’t been able to make their idea of a man out of me, and they wanted another chance.
I didn’t want to give it to them. I’d been rooked and they knew it, but the pressure was on. I tried to raise a stink, but it was hopeless, and finally the word came down: if I wanted out badly enough I could have a Dishonorable Discharge. I walked out of the Commandant’s Office in Saigon and watched a Buddhist monk pour gasoline on himself and set himself on fire. I went back into the Commandant’s office and talked some more. I finished my hitch at a desk in Germany.
I took my hand-to-hand combat training to Pinkerton while I was at Berkeley on the GI Bill. They used me for muscle while I finished my college, and let me do my required two years of investigating when I got out. With my license in hand I proceeded to starve for a year in a Northern California full of private eyes and impoverished kids. It was 1971 and the magic that was Berkeley was dead, along with the magic of most everything else.
I moved back to Austin and found some of it again. The kids were here, and it was a wide-open, all-night sort of town. The work wasn’t much better, but I made do with odd jobs here ‘and there. I made friends, and I found out that I’d been under pressure for a lot more years than I’d known. And now it was all coming back.
I drove down 11th to the Courthouse Annex where the commissioners had their offices. I had nothing particular in mind by visiting the place, but it was close enough to be worth the effort. I found a tree to park under and went inside. The withered smell of the place wrinkled my nose.
King’s office was locked with an air of permanence. I tried the door and it echoed hollowly down the hall. The next one over was open, though, and said Hoyt Crabtree, County Commissioner, so I went in. A drab, middle-aged woman looked up from her typing and gave me an encouraging smile.
“Do you have a key to next door by any chance?” I asked her. “I’m working for Jeff King...” I let the sentence hang as if it explained everything.
“Oh yes. Jeff was such a nice boy. How is he?”
“Fine,” I assured her. I sat on the edge of a table and tried to look cheerful and harmless.
“I’m afraid I don’t have a key,” she said. “Was it important? I could call the janitor...”
I waved my hand. The janitor would doubtless want more credentials than I could offer him. “Not really. Did you know Jason King very well?”
“Oh yes, both him and that dreadful secretary.” “Dreadful?”
“Yes. I can’t understand why someone would tell lies like that just to get a fine man like Mr. King in trouble.”
“You think she was lying, then?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Pshaw. I’m sure of it. He hadn’t the slightest interest in her. I don’t think she would have lasted another week, even if that awful scandal business hadn’t come up. He was forever having to ask me to help out in getting his work done. I swear he only kept her on as long as he did out of pity.”
A huge man stuck his head out of the back office, then lumbered into view. He must have been six foot six and weighed over two fifty. “Oh, Mr. Crabtree,” she piped, “this nice young man is a friend of Jeff King’s.” I didn’t try to correct her.
“Daniel Sloane,” I said as he shook my hand, a broad smile on his face and his eyes utterly vacant. He had graying hair that looked like a stack of hay, and when he spoke he sounded like the pedal notes on a pipe organ.
“Pleased to meet you,” he boomed, his eyes already wandering around the room. “Terrible thing about Jason, I could hardly believe it.” He was headed out the door and hardly seemed conscious of the fact that I was in front of him. He shuffled forward and I backed out of the way, but then he was coming at me again. “Knew him for years,” he said, and I found myself standing outside his office. He shook my hand again, and said, “Give my sympathies to the family if you see them, pleasure meeting you.” The door closed gently in my face.
It took me a minute, but I calmed down enough to shrug and walk away. I imagined that Crabtree had been having a lot of trouble with reporters and rubbernecks. I sympathized with his position. I still wanted to drop a grenade down his shirt.
Charlene Desmond’s house sat up on a hill overlooking Pease Park and Shoal Creek. It had been a luxury neighborhood years ago, and now was full of college students, like everywhere else in Austin. The place looked deserted but I knocked anyway. After two or three tries, the door opened back on the chain and a woman’s voice said, “What do you want?”
I showed her my license and said, “I’m looking for Charlene Desmond.” I could see just a little of her face, wrinkled, wearing too much makeup, topped off by salt and pepper hair.
“She’s not in.”
“Are you a relative?”
“I’m her mother.”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I may.”
One finger came out from behind the door and pointed at the wallet still in my hand. “Does that mean I have to let you in?”
“No, ma’am. It just means—”
“Oh, Mother,” came a friendly voice from inside. “Let him in.” She shut the door and I heard the rattle of the chain being let off.
The inside of the house smelled faintly of incense. Furniture was sparse, consisting mainly of throw pillows, low tables, and those bedspreads from India that everyone used to have. Sitting on a divan, legs tucked up under her, was a small blonde who
I took at first glance to be a little girl. Her eyes had too much makeup, though, and her body was too clearly developed. She was wearing blue jeans and something I think they call a tube top, that had no other means of support than what she provided herself. She gave me a broad, slightly coy smile. “I’m Charlene Desmond.”
“Daniel Sloane. May I sit down?”
“Sure.” I took off my coat and sat in the only real chair in the room. She turned and stared at her mother until the older woman left. “Mother has been such a help this last week I can hardly believe it. But she does go too far sometimes. Drink?”
“No thanks,” I said. It was too early for me by about five hours. There was a table to my right, by the front window, and she stood at it and poured coke over some bourbon. Light from the drawn Venetian blinds made intense stripes across her hands.
“I expect you’ve had a good share of visitors lately,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, and took a big slug of the drink. If it weren’t for the violence of her makeup and the lines it didn’t quite hide around her eyes, I could have taken her for a teenager. “It’s pretty exciting, really. I’m used to attention—” here a not-quite-shy smile—”you know...but not anything like this.”
“Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
“That’s what I figured you were here for. What sort of questions?”
“I’m a private investigator. I’m trying to clear Mrs. King.”
“Oh.” She looked down at her glass and shook the ice cubes around in it. She seemed almost embarrassed that I had brought up the idea of the murder.
“How did you get drawn into all this?” I asked.
She shrugged, still looking down. “The usual way, I suppose. I came in from the pool when his regular secretary got married, and I just stayed on.” She stubbed out the remains of one cigarette and lit another with a lighter sitting on the table. It was a standard Zippo, with a lightning bolt insignia on it. It was an exact duplicate of the one on Jason King’s desk. “Then he asked me out—l guess I’d been there about a week—and I knew better than to say no. I’d had enough trouble getting on there in the first place.”