An Occasional Hell Read online

  An Occasional Hell

  Randall Silvis

  New York

  This book is for Rita,

  and for Bret,

  and for Nathan

  PROLOGUE

  To Ernest DeWalt, the investigation of a crime seemed not at all dissimilar to the writing of a crime story. As an investigator, he began always with a few known facts, as many as, like the sweet cream of invention, might float readily to the surface. Thus equipped, the investigator, the storyteller, in any case an outsider miles and hours from the radiant heart of the genesis of these truths, would then mix a mortar of possible truths—that is, an honest fiction—and with this putty piece the larger chunks together, hard truth with pliable truth, adding and subtracting bit by bit, ascribing muscle and bone until a working model was formed, an acceptable truth, an agreement of imaginations; something all concerned could live with.

  Such truth, he told himself, is, after all, how history is formed. It is what our lives, looking back, become.

  Such truth, when it turned virulent, was never a pleasant thing for DeWalt to handle, no matter whether the handling was meant to edify or entertain. He had handled and reconstructed and fabricated truths for both purposes. Notwithstanding the wounds inflicted, success in both professions had come easily to him.

  Neither talent was what he would have called a gift.

  And now he had been handed a mere portion of truth once more. Like a forensic anthropologist given a shard of skull, a splintered tibia and a few broken teeth, he warmed the fragments in his hand. Gradually and painstakingly he filled their silent gaps with the soft clay of imagination. He attempted, with little success, not to let his presence contaminate or discolor the facts. And he tried, again and again, to conceive of the whole unruly beast.…

  CHAPTER ONE

  This much DeWalt knows or can imagine:

  Alex Catanzaro and Jeri Gillen have been coming to this place, this tiny inlet beside the Monongahela River, this lover’s venue only a few hundred yards off the highway but completely isolated, unobservable, coming to this place in Alex’s car, a silver Honda Accord, every Saturday morning for over a year and a half. Jeri is a waitress at the Colony Restaurant in the college town of Menona, a town whose name is thought to derive from the Indian word menaungehilla, which means “river with the high banks that break off and slide down.”

  The Colony Restaurant, on Main Street, is a five-minute walk from the Shenango College campus. It serves only breakfast and lunch, seven days a week, closing at five PM each day, its customers the students, faculty and other employees of the college plus those few townspeople who don’t mind the academic chitchat, discussions about tenure, exams, who’s doing what to whom.

  Jeri Gillen is twenty-five, a tall slender unnatural blonde with large almond-shaped eyes. She has the high cheekbones of a fashion model, the sharp points of those cheeks invariably highlighted with too much lavender blush. Except for a nose that is a bit too broad and a wide mouth with full lips set permanently in a pout, she might in fact have become a fashion model, except too that she has had no such aspirations for herself, no expectations of success whatsoever until she met Alex Catanzaro.

  She is married to Rodney Gillen, a musician and vocalist with the rock band the Kinetics, a group that plugs itself as a “Classic Rock” band, which means they will include in their repertoire any four-chord thumping melody at least six weeks old. The Kinetics play every Friday and Saturday night at fraternity mixers, in local bars, at weddings and private parties.

  Jeri and Rodney Gillen were married the year they graduated, both by the skin of their teeth, from high school. They have lived ever since in their one-bedroom second-floor Thurman Street apartment. They have no children.

  On most Saturday mornings Rodney does not return home until five or six AM. He then drinks a beer and swallows a couple of Seconals and falls into bed beside his wife. When he awakes ten or twelve hours later, he will find Jeri in the living room leafing through a magazine or watching television. On those few mornings when he awakes early to find her not in the apartment, she later explains that she had walked to the post office or to the grocery store. In most cases, however, he does not question her absence.

  Jeri Gillen first met Alex Catanzaro several years ago. He is forty-four years old, an associate professor of American History, married, the father of two children: Christopher, age 11, and Nicole, 8. His name for Elizabeth, his wife, is Betts or Betsy; her friends call her Beth.

  Alex is an attractive man, five feet nine inches tall, with a full head of prematurely silver hair, a broad Mediterranean face, strong chin, steady green eyes, Anthony Quinnish. Sartorially he is of the starched and natty school, buttondown collars, colorful silk ties.

  He has been a regular customer at the Colony Restaurant since before Jeri Gillen began to work there, but approximately three years ago his patronage of the restaurant becomes more frequent; he will sometimes pop in twice a day for a take-out coffee, even though there is always a fresh pot in the faculty lounge, two doors from his office.

  Later he begins to show up every weekday at 2:00, after the lunchtime rush and during Jeri’s regular fifteen-minute break, which she often spends sitting across from him in a booth. They laugh and flirt openly and do not appear to be hiding anything. Alex is popular with the other waitresses too, as he is with his students; he consistently receives some of his department’s highest marks during the student evaluation sessions each semester.

  Approximately a year and a half ago, Alex Catanzaro stops coming to the restaurant with any regularity. Once or twice a week he will appear in the morning for a coffee and pecan roll to take with him to his office. He remains friendly with Jeri, but not overly so. He flirts just as warmly, it seems, with Della or Elaine or Sunny, whichever waitress happens to serve him.

  Saturday mornings, he explains to Beth Catanzaro, are the quietest times at the college library, where he goes to research a novel about the War of 1812, a war that began the day after both sides had agreed not to fight, a war that continued after both sides had agreed to stop, a war that resolved none of the issues over which it was fought, a comic-opera war, a bloody irony.

  Alex soon establishes a routine of visiting the library early every Saturday morning. He reads and writes for a couple of hours—he tells his wife—then cools down with a workout on a stationary bicycle in the field house. Then a swim and a sauna. He leaves his home at 7:45 each Saturday morning and returns by one in the afternoon. This routine begins at approximately the same time as his regular patronage of the Colony Restaurant ceases.

  It is on a Saturday morning, sometime between ten and ten-thirty, when Beth Catanzaro receives a telephone call from an old friend living near Williamsburg, Virgina.

  “She was calling from an estate auction to tell me about some Civil War diaries that were going to be sold. Diaries written by a soldier who had fought at Gettysburg under Longstreet. Anyway, she knew Alex would want them—he’s a collector of Civil War memorabilia. That’s his true passion, the War between the States.”

  “Not the War of 1812?”

  “No. The only reason he was writing his novel about that war was because there are already so many Civil War novels. And … I don’t know, but I don’t think he had enough confidence in his abilities to put his work up against that of Cantor and Shaara and all the others.”

  “So you told your friend.…”

  “She said the diaries could go on the auction block at any minute, so I told her I’d get in touch with Alex and call her right back. Because I personally had no idea how much they might be worth. I guess, in the end, I had no idea about a lot of things.”

  She telephones the college library but her husband can not be located in
any of the carrels or common areas, nor do the library employees recall having seen him there that morning. She telephones his office but there is no answer. The equipment manager at the fieldhouse assures her that her husband is not yet in the building.

  “He usually doesn’t get here until well after twelve. And then only for a quick shower. You want me to tell him you called?”

  “No, please don’t,” she says, and tries to keep her voice from trembling. “It’s nothing important.”

  She telephones her friend at the estate auction and tells her to forget about the diaries. She then drives into town and searches each of the campus’s five parking lots for Alex’s car.

  When Alex returns home in the afternoon, his hair still damp from the shower, Beth asks, “How was your workout?”

  “Great,” he says.

  “How’s the book coming?”

  “Slowly but surely.” Then, as is his routine, he goes to his study above the garage, to, as he explains, “organize my research notes,” and she does not see him again until late in the afternoon. She makes no mention of the telephone call from her friend.

  The following Saturday, Beth watches as her husband’s car leaves the garage. She waits until the car is out of sight down their long hemlock-lined drive. She then climbs into her own car and follows her husband into town.

  “What about the children?”

  “I left them watching cartoons. And I know what you’re thinking—”

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “Well, you’d have the right to. It was stupid of me to leave them alone like that. What if something had happened to them while I was gone?”

  “Nothing did though.”

  “No, but it could have. I hate myself for doing that.”

  “You were upset. Confused.”

  “I was enraged.”

  She follows Alex at a distance but close enough to see when he, at just a minute or two before eight, drives up close to the rear entrance of the county courthouse. The building is locked and the parking lot deserted. The sky is as blue as a gas flame, clear, scalding bright. It is late Spring, new leaves, new growth, the season of youth and hope.

  Alex drives within four feet of the rear entrance, and stops. He leans across the seat and pops open the passenger door. From the shadow of the recessed doorway steps a young woman, smiling. She slides in beside Alex, pulls shut the door, leans across the seat and kisses Beth Catanzaro’s husband.

  “Why didn’t you follow when he drove away from the courthouse?”

  “I don’t know, I was.…”

  “You said you were enraged.”

  “I was, until I actually saw the woman with him. The girl. Then it was like … I don’t know. I couldn’t lift my foot off the brake.”

  “How long did you sit there like that?”

  “Long enough to watch thirteen years of marriage fall apart. Long enough to think all kinds of things.”

  “Did you think about killing him?”

  “In a dozen different ways.”

  “You didn’t tell the police that, did you?”

  “Do I strike you as an inordinately stupid woman?”

  The next Saturday she follows him again, having all week kept silent, having stilled the efflorescence of dread with the impossible allowance of an alternative explanation for her husband’s action, some dissembling innocence to that furtive kiss. Again she parks in an alleyway unseen and again watches the same young woman step from the courthouse shadows to climb into her husband’s car; again watches and this time follows the car down the steep highway to the river, across the bridge’s quivering gridwork, six miles along the river road to the entrance of a narrow and deeply-rutted dirt lane.

  A sign at the mouth of this lane reads PRIVATE: NO TRESPASSING. She sits staring at this warning even as the veil of dust raised by the other car’s trespass settles on the weeds. It is not the sign that keeps her from going further, but the fulmination of hope. She will not drive through her husband’s dust, will not darken her lungs with it, will not breathe the suffocating wake of his deceit. No more evidence is needed; no alternatives possible. She knows too much already.

  For what must seem a very long time to Elizabeth Catanzaro she keeps her knowledge to herself. She keeps the unavailing rage and ineffable grief to herself. She keeps that coil of slippery fear lashed tightly around her, that constricting braid of terror. She lives alone with these elements and does her best to display to her family no sign of infection, even though it taints her every perception and rumination and in her mind it explains those times when Alex was irritable or distracted, when unduly solicitous, when angry for no apparent reason, when amorous and when too tender after love—as tender, she now understands, as only a guilt-ridden man can be.

  What she knows quickly numbs her because numbness is the only practical response to such killing pain. But at the same time, her knowledge renders her keenly aware in a way she has never been, aware of her past and the ever-fleeting present. The future is a blank, a darkness. But in the past she can now detect nuances, corners and facets and adumbrations she had previously strolled past without noticing.

  She lives inside this world of heightened and terrible perception through another seventeen Saturdays, always waiting for that one Saturday morning when Alex will linger over his coffee and instead of hurrying out the door look at her nostalgically and utter something perfectly banal and revivifying, “Let’s spend the morning together, Betts. I don’t feel like working today; let’s take the kids on a picnic.”

  But this hope too becomes untenable when she realizes that the part of her gone numb is more important than the surviving part, that she is dead to everything except knowledge and the selfish bitterness of it, and that it has to end.

  And on that Saturday morning she watches her husband’s car speed away and she goes into her bedroom and closes the door and she sits calmly at the telephone and punches in the seven numbers that have been pulsing in her brain for too long now, the number of a telephone in a second-floor apartment on Thurman Street, a number obtained by spending a Saturday noon parked in view of the courthouse, finally seeing the young woman being deposited there just as she had been picked up some four hours earlier, then following Jeri Gillen as she walks home alone, Alex on his way to what he believes will be a purifying shower at the fieldhouse.

  Elizabeth Catanzaro follows her husband’s lover and sees where she lives and inquires of the waitress’s name from an older woman who emerges from a neighboring apartment twenty minutes later, and Elizabeth Catanzaro thereby adds to the store of bitter knowledge she keeps to herself, has kept to herself until she hears and feels the telephone ringing in her hand. Twenty jangling rings and then Rodney Gillen finally stumbles out of bed and into the living room and picks up the phone. And Elizabeth Catanzaro’s silence comes to an end. And she finally tells somebody everything she has never wanted to know.

  Things change so quickly, and not at all.

  This is what Ernest DeWalt told himself on his way to meet Elizabeth Catanzaro. He had seen her picture in the newspaper and her face on the evening news, and now, little more than an hour ago, he had heard her voice on the telephone. Her husband was dead—with a musketball through his forehead—and Elizabeth Catanzaro needed someone to help her prove that she had not had a hand in the murder.

  But DeWalt did not want to have to prove anything. He had bailed out of that business five years ago, had gotten out by pulling a Wambaugh, as he called it—that is, by writing a novel about his former profession, which in his case had been a profession less noble than Wambaugh’s, DeWalt’s a profession of snoopery, of eavesdropping and Peeping Tomism and of softporn shot through telephoto lenses. But his novel Suffer No Fools had been too successful and he had had to get out of that profession too—because in truth he had not wanted success, he had wanted catharsis, an exorcism, and so had endowed his book with three hundred pages of hate and anger, every page soaked in blood; and after writing it had b
ecome embarrassed by it, ashamed; ashamed too because he had not made any of it up except for the chronology of events, twenty years compressed into less than one, the creativity of a minor artist, a juggler; and ashamed most because the book’s success made him little more than a panderer, pimp to a bloodthirsty world.

  And so, two and a half years ago, at the overripe age of forty-six, he found himself, quite by accident, awarded a sinecure thanks to his embarrassing successs as a novelist, a comfortable position in the only sanctuary that exists for a man too skeptical for the monastery, the only refuge from real life left to the civilized but cowardly, that tweed and ivy enclave of self-reassuring insularity: academia.

  And that’s the truth, isn’t it, DeWalt? That you’ve been running from life, looking for a place to hide, ever since you were shot.

  Not running very fast, DeWalt.

  But fast enough to stay ahead of yourself, am I right?

  Apparently man was meant to run. We have legs and feet, don’t we? Not roots.

  Do feet of clay count?

  Shut up, DeWalt.

  Get off your butt, DeWalt. You’re getting fat and lazy.

  I’m not going to do this thing. I’m not equipped anymore for investigative work. I’m not equipped physically or temperamentally. Investigation is a job for somebody who cares.

  Keep talking; sooner or later you’ll find an excuse you believe.

  I don’t need an excuse. I’m not obligated to anybody.

  For over twenty years he had been a private investigator, working first in Chicago for an agency that specialized in the recovery of lost individuals and objects. It was satisfying work but seldom exciting or dangerous enough for a young man, so he and a friend drove to Los Angeles and went into business for themselves. But then the friend had an abortion and stopped being a good friend, and a year later she swallowed too much phenobarbital and stopped being a good partner.

  Glib, DeWalt. You’re so fucking glib.