Текст книги "Dearly Departed"

Автор книги: David Housewright

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

The sheriff arrived several hours later—at least I was guessing it was several hours. I had lost all track of time. Using the wall for support, I managed to shimmy to my feet. My legs were stiff from sitting, and I tried to stretch them as best I could without the use of my hands.

“How is she?” I asked.

The sheriff closed the door to the holding cell, thought better of it, and opened it again. He stepped out into the corridor and drew the blinds across the cell’s window. When he reentered the cell, I noticed that he was no longer wearing his jacket, Sam Browne belt, holster, gun, or badge.

“So it’s going to be like that,” I said.

“You’re going to answer my questions,” he told me.

“Gladly,” I said.

Only the sheriff didn’t ask any. Instead, he paced relentlessly in front of me, his hands clenched, then pointing, then resting on his hips. His face was red and twitching; his lips were pushed forward bearing his teeth; his breathing was fast and shallow. He was displaying all the classic signals of the first stage of aggression and ritualized combat—assault is possible—that I’d been taught to recognize while training to become a police officer. If I had been in uniform, with my hands free, I would have given him a good whiff of pepper spray.

“You brought them here,” he said at last.

“Brought who?” I asked.

“‘Brought who, brought who,’” he mimicked. “You know who. You brought them.”

“No, no,” I protested. I had thought about it a long time, and my brain—and my conscience—refused to accept responsibility. “It has to be a coincidence.”

“No coincidence,” The sheriff insisted. “They came with you.”

And suddenly it occurred to me that he knew all there was about Alison—where she had come from and why. I told him so.

“Her name is Michael!” he shouted. “Michael Bettich!”

He was in the final stage now—assault is imminent. His face went from red to white; his lips tightened over his teeth; his eyebrows slanted forward into a frown. He closed his hands and started rocking back and forth. His eyes darted quickly to my groin, my jaw—target glances.

“Listen,” I told him, talking loud and fast now, trying to reduce the threat verbally, “only two people knew I was going to Deer Lake and why. Neither of them knew about The Harbor, neither of them knew where Alison could be found. And I wasn’t followed; there was no chance of that. No one followed me to Alison, so it had to be—”

“Her name is Michael!” the sheriff screamed and lunged at me, catching my jaw with his shoulder. His momentum pushed me against the stone wall, jamming my cuffed hands against my spine and knocking the breath out of me. One, two, three blows to my stomach and then one to my face. Then another. I turned my head with the next punch, and his hand caromed off my chin into the wall. The sheriff cried in pain as I pivoted out of his reach.

He turned quickly and swung at my head, but I bobbed and danced away. His knuckles grazed the wall. The miss made him even more furious. He moved toward me with measured steps, his hands held high. When he was in range, I lifted my right leg into the chamber and snapped a kick to his solar plexus. But with my hands cuffed behind my back, I was off balance. When he fell, so did I, landing on my shoulder. I think I hurt myself more than I hurt him. I tried to roll to my feet, but it was too late. He was on me in a hurry, pounding my head, throat, and upper chest. I used my knee to push him away but the relief was only temporary; he resumed smothering me with punches before I could even get to my knees.

I was fading fast.

“Jesus Christ!” a voice shouted. “Jesus Christ, Sheriff! What are you doing?! Jesus Christ!”

A pair of hands gripped the sheriff by his shoulders and pulled him off me. I didn’t see who they belonged to until I was able to shake the sweat and blood out of my eyes.

“Deputy Loushine,” I muttered, tasting blood in my mouth. “How good of you to come.”

“Jesus Christ!” he repeated.

“Get ’im outta here!” the sheriff shouted.

“But, Sheriff …” Loushine protested.

“Get ’im outta here!”

“He’s a material witness—”

“Get this sonuvabitch outta my county!”

I rode in the front seat of Deputy Loushine’s white 4X4. A second deputy followed close behind in my car. My hands were free, and I dabbed at my swollen, cut lip with a white handkerchief now stained pink.

“What you’re doing doesn’t make sense,” I told the deputy.

“You’re telling me,” he answered.

“Do you know who Michael Bettich is?” I asked.

“All I know about her is that she’s been living with the sheriff for over two months now,” Loushine replied. “And that’s all I need to know.”

I had to chew on that one for a while. Finally I said, “It doesn’t make sense.”

We drove without further conversation. Twenty minutes later Loushine stopped at an intersection of two county highways, crossed over, and stopped again.

It was nearing 8:50 central daylight saving time, and the sun was fading fast. Loushine sat with his eyes on the road ahead while the second deputy parked behind us, came around, and yanked open the passenger door.

“This is the county line,” Loushine announced.

“I guessed,” I told him.

I left the 4X4 and struggled to my own car. I hurt all over, and my head felt light and fluffy, but I managed to squeeze behind the steering wheel without fainting. The keys were in the ignition; the engine was running; the headlights were on. Suddenly Loushine was next to the door, squatting so that he could see my face through the window.

“Sorry ’bout this,” he said.

“To serve and to protect,” I told him. “Have a nice day.”

I steered my car more or less south, driving on automatic pilot, not knowing where I was until I saw the sign: WELCOME TO MINONG. There was something familiar about it, even in the dark. That and the county blacktop where I turned left, the gravel road where I turned right, and the dirt driveway at the end of the gravel road that I followed to a large two-story lake house.

The pain was a flashing red beacon blinking a simple message: Lie still, don’t move. I ignored the instructions and left the car, hugging my sides like a grocery bag that was threatening to burst open at the next hard jolt. I staggered to the door of the house in the light of my high beams. I immediately recognized the man who answered my knock. He recognized me, too.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, obviously confused.

“Dean, who is it?” a woman’s voice called from behind him.

I moved past the man into the hallway. The woman was wearing a flowing white robe that my wife and I had presented to her on her birthday over five years ago.

“Excuse me, Phyll. I don’t mean to intrude.…” then I collapsed at her feet.

Never let it be said that I don’t know how to make an entrance.

eighteen

A bright ceiling light was in my eyes, and a cool washcloth was on my forehead. Voices filtered through the bedroom door.

“No police,” one of the voices insisted. “Not until we know what happened.”

“Why did he come here?” asked the other voice.

“I don’t know. We’ll ask him when he wakes up.”

“Think he’s in trouble?”

“That’s my guess.”

“He looks different.”

“Honey, he’s beat up. You’d look different, too, if you were beat up.”

I heard nothing for a moment, then: “What are you doing?” my mother-in-law asked. The metallic sound of the hinge of a double barrel shotgun opening and closing punctuated her question.

“Think I’ll just take a look around.”

“Dammit, Dean, you haven’t been in the service for good long time.”

“Honey. Once a marine, always a marine.”

I woke up tired and sore, remembering vaguely a dream in which I was running naked through the forest, chased by a bear wearing a sheriff’s badge. I couldn’t remember if he caught me or not, and then I moved. Oh, yeah! He’d caught me.

The washcloth was still damp and resting on the pillow next to my head. I carried it from the bedroom to the kitchen. Phyllis Bernelle was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, a black briefcase opened in front of her. Her head jerked up at my entrance.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“How do I look?”

“Like someone beat you up.”

“That’s how I feel.”

I sat across from her, and she poured me a steaming mug of coffee, French almond, one of my favorites. It had been Laura’s mother who first introduced me to the pleasures of coffee made from beans you grind yourself.

“Are you hungry? Do you want some breakfast?”

I shook my head. I doubted my stomach could handle the job.

Phyllis was dressed in a simple sports jacket over a white shirt and blue jeans. That was another one of the things I liked about her. She dressed like me.

“I’m sorry, Taylor, I have to leave. I’m showing some property in about twenty minutes. Guy from Chicago is thinking of buying five lots on the flowage. It’s something I can’t get out of. I’d like it if you stayed, though. Will you, please? Will you stay here at least until I get back? You could use the rest.”

I could at that.

“Thank you,” I said.

She smiled and cleared her coffee cup to the sink.

“Where’s Dean?” I asked.

“Up at the garden.”

I nodded. Dean Bernelle had studied horticulture at the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, then inexplicably took a job in the accounting department of 3M. He retired the year I married his daughter with a pension I wished I could look forward to, moved to his Wisconsin lake home, and now has the most ostentatious garden in the state—an entire acre’s worth. But while he is quite content digging in the dirt, his wife is not. So Phyllis, who had never worked outside the home while Dean was working, earned a realtor’s license and now makes more money than he ever did, selling lakeshore property. Which was perfectly fine with Dean. “The more she makes, the more I get to spend,” he liked to say.

“How are things, Phyll?” I ventured.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“I’ve been better.”

Phyllis Bernelle had a way of asking questions without uttering a sound. She would stare at you with clear green eyes, and you would fall all over yourself confessing to various misdeeds. “The trick,” Laura once told me, “is not to look at her.” But I was looking at her, and I couldn’t resist.

“I was worked over by the Kreel County sheriff yesterday.”

“Why?”

“I think I upset him,” I told her. “Something to do with his girlfriend.”

She stared at me some more.

“I’ve been looking for a woman who was supposed to be dead but apparently isn’t. I found her, and then she was shot.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out,” I vowed. And please, don’t let me be an accomplice, I prayed.

Now she was nodding.

“You always had such interesting stories to tell,” she told me. “I’ve missed them. I’ve missed you. I wish we could have seen more of you since Laura was killed.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

My mother-in-law closed her briefcase and pulled it off the table. “I have to go.”

“I appreciate your taking me in.”

“Will you wait until I get back?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me what happened in Kreel County?”

“In grisly detail.”

“Don’t let Dean put you to work.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“Listen,” she said, “if you’re in trouble, I know a good lawyer.”

“Thank you,” I answered. “But lawyers are a dime a dozen. It’s friends that are hard to come by.”

“Where the fuck are you?” Hunter Truman wanted to know.

“Minong.”

“Where is fucking Minong?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Where in fucking Wisconsin? Goddammit, you were supposed to call me yesterday. I’ve been waiting by the fucking phone since—shit—since noon. What’s going on? Didn’t you find her?”

“I found her.”

“And?”

“Hang on to yourself, Hunter,” I told him. “I found Alison, and two minutes later someone shot her. She’s badly hurt.” The pause was so long, I was compelled to ask, “Are you still there?”

“How bad?” he asked. “Will she live?”

I told him I didn’t know and why.

“The sheriff assaulted you?!” Truman was clearly outraged. “The bastard assaulted you?!”

“Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Fuck, yeah,” he said. A moment later, he added, “Shit, Taylor, what’s going on?”

I told him my only theory. “It wasn’t Alison who was shot—”

“Not Alison?”

“What I mean is, I think whoever shot her was shooting at Michael Bettich, the person she’s pretending to be.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but it might be connected to a small resort she’s building across the highway from a proposed Indian gambling casino.”

“She’s building a resort?”

Truman was asking too many questions; my head started to throb violently.

“I’ll tell you more after I have a chance to get back up there and poke around,” I told him, hoping to end the conversation. “Assuming I can avoid the county cops.”

“Fuck ’em!” Truman said so loudly it hurt my ear. “You get your ass back up there; I’m officially authorizing you to do that. You find out what you can about Alison, and if the cops get in the way, we’ll sue the shit outta the whole fucking lot of ’em.”

“Whatever.”

I was pleased that Truman was still paying, but even if he had pulled the plug, I would have gone back.

“When are you leaving?” he asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?! Why not today?”

I told him I had to go and quickly hung up the phone. My head couldn’t take any more.

“Hi, Desirée. Cynthia Grey, please,” I told her office manager-cum-Doberman about an hour later. I hadn’t been able to reach Cynthia at home, so I tried the office.

“Whom may I say is calling?”

“Holland Taylor.” As if she didn’t know.

“Miss Grey is in meetings all day. However, I will inform her that you called.”

“Please don’t do this, Desirée; I need her.” I wondered if my voice sounded as pathetic to her as it did to me. Probably, because she put me through.

“Holland?” Cynthia asked. “Are you okay? Desirée says you sound funny.”

“If you really want a laugh, you should see how I look,” I told her.

“What’s going on?”

I gave her the short version, lingering on my injuries only long enough to solicit her sympathy. When I had finished, she told me, “Come home. You did your job. You found her. Now come home.”

“I can’t,” I told her. “I have to know—”

“If you’re responsible?” she finished my sentence. “Don’t give me any of that male-pride bullshit,” Cynthia added earnestly. “And I don’t want to hear how a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You come home. Right now. You come home to me before you get hurt again.”

“Will you take care of Ogilvy for me?” I asked. “Make sure he has plenty of alfalfa and water?”

Cynthia hesitated before saying, “Of course.” Then she added, “I hope he eats your Nolan Ryan autographed baseball.”

That hurt.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I promised.

“Please do.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I know.”

“It’s personal now,” I told her. “Maybe it always was.”

“I know.”

I hung up the phone and stared out the window. Every muscle and bone in my body hurt. Even thinking hurt. “Run it off,” my coach used to say. That had been his cure for everything. “Run it off, sweat it out.” During those few brief years when I had the audacity to consider myself an athlete, I would follow his advice like it had come down from Mount Sinai. I wondered what had become of him as I crawled back into bed and pulled the blankets to my chin.

Dean Bernelle can’t cook. He was one of those older-generation gentlemen who bought into the theory that cooking, that anything to do with the kitchen, was women’s work. But he made a valiant effort nonetheless, whipping up fried eggs, toast, and canned chili for a late lunch. I thanked him profusely even though the toast was burned and the yolks of the eggs were rubbery.

The death of his daughter, Laura, and his granddaughter, Jennifer, had hit him especially hard. Yet he never discussed it. At least not that I was aware of. But it was always there, just below the surface.

“I’m putting in a wall of blueberry bushes near the shed,” he told me. “I remember Jenny used to love picking blueberries. She’d eat a berry for every one she dropped in the bucket, then come home with her mouth and fingers all purple. Laurie would get so angry at us.”

“That was just for show,” I told him. “Mostly she didn’t mind at all.”

“Guess you’re right,” he agreed, then rapidly changed the subject. “Are you in trouble?” he asked. “Do you need help?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You look it.”

“I admit I could have used a hand yesterday.”

“Cops beat you up, is that right?”

I nodded.

“They used to do the same thing when I was young. They see a guy they thought was trouble, they’d smack him around a little just to keep him in line. I saw that a lot when I was young. I bet you did the same when you were a cop.”

“No, not at all,” I assured him.

Dean just smiled. I don’t think he believed me.

“You’re going back, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Back where?”

“Back where they beat you up.”

“I suppose,” I admitted.

“Yeah, I knew it. I remember telling Laurie when she first started bringing you around, ‘One thing about Taylor,’ I said. ‘He’s no quitter. He’s not going to quit on you. He’s like a marine. You can kill him, but he’s not going to quit.’”

“Did you really say that?”

“Yes, I did.”

“No wonder it took her so long to accept my marriage proposal.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said. “If you only had the guts to ask, she would have married you the weekend after you two met.”

“Really? She said that?”

Dean nodded.

The things you learn.

The warm sun played peekaboo behind white, fluffy, daydream clouds—perfect weather for lake watching. I descended the long, steep flight of stairs that led from the Bernelles’ home on top of the hill to the lake below, carrying three cans of beer that I’d found in the refrigerator. About halfway down I realized I was overburdened and stopped for a half hour to drink one of the beers. My load reduced, I continued to the L-shaped dock, making myself comfortable on the bench at the base of the L.

Like most forms of human endeavor, lake watching can be elevated to an art form in the proper hands. Me? I’m the Monet of lake watching. I can do it for hours, thinking about nothing and everything, whereas less dedicated artists grow weary and bored after thirty minutes or so. The difference is that most people look for answers in the gently rippling waves while I search only for questions.

“I wonder how much that cost?” was one of the questions. It was directed at the sailboat moored to the stem of the L. I remember the day Phyllis had launched it. Dean and Laura had both asked, “Where did you get it?” I asked, “How much did it cost?” I wondered what that said about me.

I was tempted to pollute Phyll’s lake with the empty beer cans, thought better of it, and set them on the dock. A short time later Phyllis herself came down the stairs. The sports jacket was gone. In its place were pink shorts and a white tank top. She was a fetching woman, my mother-in-law. Like her daughter.

She sat next to me and looked out over the lake. She asked me how I was feeling, and I said I was okay and asked her how the meeting went, and she said the customer bought all five lots. The exchange pretty much exhausted us, and we sat there without speaking for a good half hour. Finally, Phyllis took my hand, gave it a tug, and asked straight out, “Have you found anyone yet?”

“No.” I answered quickly, without even thinking of Cynthia—and when I did, I didn’t take the answer back. I guess that said something about me, too.

“I’m sorry.”

“I can’t imagine getting married again,” I said.

“I wish you would,” Phyllis told me. “Imagine it, I mean.”

I shrugged, wincing at the pain the gesture caused me.

“There is a woman,” I said. “Her name is Cynthia. My mom can’t stand her.”

“Why not?”

Because she defended the man who killed your daughter and granddaughter, I nearly said. “It’s a long story,” I told her instead. “Anyway, she’s somebody. I just don’t know if she’s someone, if you know what I mean.”

“I know. It’s just that I see the loneliness in you.…”

I turned quickly to face her. How could she see that?

“It’s in your eyes, the way you carry yourself.…”

Nonsense.

“Maybe I recognize it and others don’t because I knew you before the loneliness came.”

“I’m not lonely,” I insisted. “Alone, okay, but not lonely. There’s a difference.”

A small cloud passed over the sun before Phyllis replied, “It’s time to move on. Laurie would say so, too.”

A few more clouds came and went.

“I want you to come visit us again real soon, and I want you to bring a girl with you.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“‘Most people are just as happy as they make their minds up to be.’ Know who said that?”

“Who?”

“Abraham Lincoln. Find a girl,” Phyllis told me. “Start over.”

I thought of Alison. She had tried to start over. Look what had happened to her.

“It’s not that easy.”

“It’s not supposed to be easy. Loving someone is the hardest thing there is.”

She got that right.

“Find someone. If not this Cynthia, then someone else. A life unshared is a life wasted.”

“Yeah? Who said that?”

“Me.”

I had to smile.

“Find someone to share your life with,” Phyllis added.

I gave her hand a squeeze.

“How ’bout you?” I asked, waving at the sailboat and the lake and the house on the hill. “Let me take you away from all this.”

Phyllis laughed. “Then who would feed Dean?”

The next morning I waited in bed as long as my conscience would allow. When I finally shuffled into the bathroom, I was appalled by what I saw in the mirror. I touched each bruise that marked my body from face to upper rib cage to belt line—connect the dots and see a gruesome picture. There was some physical pain, some stiffness, but nothing I couldn’t live with. My mental health was a different matter. My hand shook when I borrowed Dean’s razor to shave, and I caught myself humming the theme songs to movies in which the hero got killed—the part of my brain that decided I was going back there was having a hard time convincing the rest of me that it was a good idea.

Dean lent me a shirt, and to my great relief, Phyllis had run the rest of my clothes through the washer, so they were lemon fresh—she’d even managed to remove most of the bloodstains; it was a miracle. I put them on and examined myself in the mirror, full face and then profile. I was convinced I looked presentable if not downright handsome; pretended that no one would notice the dark splotch beneath my ear or my bruised lower lip or the blood clotted in my right nostril.

After a while, I stopped humming.

Dean was standing by the kitchen sink drinking coffee when I entered. Phyllis, dressed like she intended to skip down to the dock and jump into her sailboat at any moment, was sitting at the kitchen table and reading the newspaper.

“You’re leaving now,” she told me, looking up from the paper.

“Yes.”

“Are you coming back?”

“When I can.”

She folded the paper neatly before asking, “Is there anything we can do for you?”

“I need a favor.”

“What?” Dean asked.

“I want to borrow the Walther PPK that I gave you that Christmas.”

“My gun?”

“I’ll make sure you get it back.”

“No problem,” he said and left the room.

“You didn’t tell us exactly what happened in Kreel County,” Phyllis reminded me.

“I’m not sure I know myself,” I told her.

Dean put the gun down on the table in front of me. It was lightly oiled, in the box it came in. The Walther PPK weighed only twentythree ounces but it felt heavy in my hand. My reason told me to leave the gun. But my instincts—and my bruises—told me to load the Walther and slip it into my jacket pocket. So I did.

“I have to go now. Thank you both for everything.”

“Holland,” Phyllis called, stopping me at the door, hugging me. “Remember what I told you.” There were tears in her eyes.

“I’ll remember.”

Dean smiled at me. “Semper fi,” he said, reciting the Marine Corps motto. Always faithful.