An Occasional Hell Page 8

  DeWalt would have been happy to accomodate her passion had circumstances permitted. But there were circumstances beyond his control now. Circumstances he did not care to explain. Women were too damn understanding and it would only make her want him more. Look at Lady Brett for example. She had been mad for what she could not obtain. But DeWalt did not wish to be the Jake Barnes of the Shenango English Department, not even in this day and age, this era of high technology. Even modern science could not turn Jake Barnes into Don Juan. It could give Jake a permanent erection, which was something no other literary figure had had, except perhaps for Cyrano, who had worn his on his face. But in this particular case, DeWalt decided, it would be better to let Professor Banks think he was a Truman Capote.

  Hearing DeWalt’s and Abbott’s plan, Professor Banks was crestfallen. She took a quick look at the handsome young trooper. Then another look at DeWalt. “Have fun,” she told him. She recognized her loss as an occupational hazard. She would have to see to it that DeWalt got acquainted with the Theatre Department.

  After that, DeWalt and Abbott met from time to time for lunch or for a couple of drinks at the end of a day’s shift. When DeWalt ordered a soft drink the first time they met at a local bar, then barely touched it through the course of the evening, he explained, even though the trooper had had the tact not to inquire, “I took a slug in the kidneys awhile back. Have to be careful about my fluid intake.” It was a partial truth but sufficient. DeWalt might have told him more, might have told him everything, in fact, had Abbott asked.

  Spending an hour or so with Abbott was for DeWalt akin to lifting his head from the trough of pedagogical bullshit for a gasp of fresh air. Whenever the academic atmosphere grew too thick for DeWalt, when it began to reek of departmental gladhanding, handjobbing, backstabbing and butt-licking, he would call Abbott and invite him to lunch.

  Now DeWalt called him again. They shared a corner booth at the Colony Restaurant. DeWalt waited until the trooper had finished his half-pound cheeseburger before he said, “That girl who disappeared last week was our waitress last time we were here, remember?”

  Abbott nodded. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve been picking up a little information about her here and there.”

  “Writing another novel?”

  DeWalt merely smiled. Half a minute later he said, “Elizabeth Catanzaro hired me to do some digging for her.”

  “No shit? I thought you gave up that kind of stuff.”

  “I thought I did too.”

  “You told me you weren’t going to be looking up anything from now on except young girls’ dresses.”

  “That was my plan. Thing is, none of them wear dresses anymore. Ain’t it a bitch?”

  “So … what really changed your mind? She make you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

  “Don’t be crass, Larry. She’s a grieving widow and the mother of two kids.”

  “Yeah, but how’s she look in a bikini?”

  DeWalt said, “Is this the kind of cooperation I can expect from you?”

  Abbott chuckled. Then, “Sgt. Tom Shulles,” he said. “He’s the man in charge. I’ll put you two together and maybe something will turn up. Right now they’ve got diddly.”

  “You’re not a part of the team?”

  “I could maybe get myself assigned.”

  DeWalt signalled to the waitress to bring the check. To Abbott he said, “Who’s doing forensics?”

  Abbott grunted. “There are four hundred forensic pathologists in the whole country, Ernie. How many of them you think live around here? The coroner did the forensic autopsy.”

  “The coroner. Also the local funeral director.”

  “We’ve got what we’ve got. This isn’t Chicago, you know. Investigating murders isn’t a fulltime career around here.”

  “I don’t suppose the murder weapon’s been found yet.”

  “Not unless you happened to bring it with you. In my opinion, though, we find Gillen, we find the weapon.”

  “No sign of him yet either?”

  Abbott shook his head as he dragged a french fry through a smear of ketchup.

  “Any predictions as to where he might turn up?”

  “I have no opinion on that,” Abbott said. “Except to say that, if anybody knows Gillen’s whereabouts, it would be your client.”

  “She’s never laid eyes on the guy.”

  Abbott nodded, unsmiling, but DeWalt could tell that the trooper did not concur.

  “What we’re doing now,” Abbott said, “is we’re checking with a couple of muzzle-loader and black powder clubs hereabouts. Seeing if they’ve had any weapons stolen or misplaced recently. Seeing if we can connect any of the members with Gillen.”

  “How’s it looking so far?”

  “Like a serious waste of time.”

  “How about this, Lar. How about if one of those muzzle-loader afficionados was doing some target practice down near the inlet. And Alex Catanzaro was unlucky enough to catch a stray ball?”

  “That ball was no stray. It went exactly where it was aimed. Point blank.”

  “How about the ball itself? Learn anything from it?”

  “Nothing revelatory. It was made from the same kind of lead as used in fishermen’s sinkers. Nearly all the local muzzle-loader nuts mold their own.”

  “What about matching the ball to a specific mold?”

  “There’s a man working on that. Thing is, it could take months. My guess is, we’ll locate Gillen first, and he’s going to tell us exactly where the weapon came from, and the answer will be the obvious one.”

  “Despite Elizabeth Catanzaro’s disavowal that it belonged to her husband?”

  “Would you really expect her to admit that it was his?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this. If the weapon did belong to her husband, she knew nothing about it. Trust me on this.”

  “I don’t have to trust you, I’m not even on the team yet. And neither are you.”

  DeWalt conceded with a smile. “Are you and Laraine still trying to make a baby?”

  “Yeah, but we’ve cut down to five times a day now. I told her I’d better pace myself, just in case this takes awhile.”

  It seemed to DeWalt that he and Abbott always began and ended their conversations this way, with sophomoric jabs or rotomontade. But there was comfort in this familiarity, there was solace. Larry Abbott was, DeWalt realized, his only friend.

  “You want a last refill on that coffee?” DeWalt asked.

  “Naw, I’d better not. I gotta watch my sperm count.”

  “Right there’s your problem,” DeWalt said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not supposed to watch your sperm, Larry. That’s not how babies are made. I have to admit, though, that it’s damn interesting that yours can count.”

  “Hey, you ought to hear them singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It would be wrong to think of Ernest DeWalt as an exemplary human being, a man of consummate morality, a man who never entertained a duplicitous or savage thought. He did not love all mankind; in fact he loathed a fair proportion of it. He did not believe that all men are inherently good. He did not wish well of everyone he met.

  The anger in him was never fully suppressed. It kept him company at night, warming his narrow space, his share of darkness. It was one of the few things that could warm him, for he was always chilled, even on a sultry August night, chilled in that hollowed-out center of his being.

  On particularly frigid nights he would welcome the warmth of anger and huddle close to it, a campfire to keep the beasts away. In the living room the television would be left on, volume low, the brightness of the screen dimmed to gray, whispers and flickerings of light sufficient for the ordinary hours of loneliness. But on particularly frigid nights he needed more. He would think of causing some damage, an unprovoked act, a violation in kind.

  A man could take a fair-sized rock—an intelli
gent man; a man smart enough to have no motive, no greed or jealousy or passion fueling the act—he could take his rock and, wearing gloves of course, walk down to Second Avenue at four AM—it was now 3:47 AM; close enough—and standing across the street from, say, Kingman’s Jewelry Store, sail his rock through the plate glass window, and, having never emerged from the shadows himself, seen by no one, unidentifiable, walk away, stroll briskly home to the music of the store’s whining alarm, never be caught or suspected, sit at his breakfast table the next morning as if nothing unusual had ever happened to him, nothing the least bit adventuresome, and be an overall happier man for his secret, a more productive man, his attenuation slowed.

  But a middleaged man is hope betrayed. Time subverts his plans. Dawn arrives too quickly, before strategy can become execution. And yet, another chill night has been outrun. The day lies ahead, another search for one’s soul.

  He sits on the edge of the bed and stares out the window. He is silent and motionless but something is happening. He is coming to grips with another day dawning in the chill of the shadow of the past.

  There is no question that every effort of the coming day must fail. An understanding of this is the only possible success.

  Yes, to live another day is a Cadmean victory. We are all sprung from dragon’s teeth. And on a fog-enshrouded battlefield, on this day or the next, we will each of us be slain.

  Every Tuesday and Thursday evening the Kinetics practiced in a two-stall garage behind the home of the drummer’s parents. The carport doors were kept locked and the windows had been blacked with paint. DeWalt drove slowly down this street, window open; he could hear the Kinetics from a block away.

  To DeWalt’s ears the music was all volume and no heat. Bessie Smith had heat, as did Billie and Dede Pierce, Bix Bierdecke, Coleman Hawkins, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman. But when DeWalt pulled open the garage’s side door, the sudden blast of noise made him shiver. The reverberating chords seemed as hard as the concrete floor.

  The drummer and the electric bassist looked up at DeWalt as he stood there in the doorway, but they kept playing, kept pummeling the notes. DeWalt smiled and nodded; he slapped his hand to his thigh, hoping to find a beat, looking as if it was all he could do to keep from breaking into the funky alligator, the convulsing monkey, or whatever gyrations kids were doing these days. The lead guitarist, bent almost double over his instrument, grimacing as his fingers stabbed the frets, the guitar extruding from his crotch like an odd red phallus being madly massaged, had not yet noticed DeWalt. Rodney Gillen’s electric keyboard stood empty.

  They were in their early twenties, DeWalt guessed, these jean and tee-shirt clad musicians. Town boys, he could tell at a glance. They did not attend college and if asked would profess revulsion of the very notion of college, would complain that their hometown had been ruined by college assholes, but they were secretly flattered when asked to play their music at a frat house every weekend, secretly enamored of some classy cold and impossible college bitch, then openly disdainful of any coed who eventually revealed her rural roots by actually sharing her pussy with him.

  DeWalt kept smiling, nodding and slapping enthusiastically, even though the catheter in his gut was vibrating from the noise, tickling his skin. Except for the boys and their instruments, the room was virtually empty: a cardboard barrel brimming with beer and soft drink cans; a ratty brown sofa partially covered with a green army blanket, the blanket abundantly stained by a variety of fluids DeWalt made no attempt to distinguish.

  The room smelled vaguely of marijuana, although DeWalt could spot no evidence of a joint, no roach in the ashtray at the feet of the bassist. The preeminent odor, however, was of old woodsmoke, the smoke of a fire that had blackened the rafters and left a sizable scorch stain on the concrete floor. One of the carport windows, now patched with plywood, had been smashed out, and the fire stain on the floor lay in a direct path approximately six feet inside this window, half a step from where the lead guitarist squeezed and thrummed his instrument. His left forearm from wrist to elbow was pink and thin, discolored by a wide scar that had the look of melted plastic.

  He did not unbend from his strings until the last note quivered away. Even in this silence, DeWalt’s abdomen tingled. The guitarist finally unwound and noticed him.

  “You guys have quite a sound,” DeWalt said. Not unlike that of a mastodon polishing his tusks on a blackboard.

  “You want to hire us?” the guitarist asked. It was more of a challenge than an inquiry.

  “My name’s Ernie DeWalt, guys. I’m investigating Jeri Gillen’s disappearance.”

  “You mean murder,” the drummer said.

  The bassist told him, “You don’t know that, man. Shut the fuck up.”

  DeWalt smiled. “Nobody knows a thing at this moment. That’s why I’m here. I was hoping maybe you fellas could clue me in on a couple of things.”

  DeWalt grinned broadly now, to show that he knew his question was a ridiculous one. “Anybody know where I might find Rodney Gillen?”

  “Try Jamaica,” said the drummer.

  The bassist said, “Fuck, and get blown away in a hurricane? He’d never go there.”

  “That’s where I’d go if I was him.”

  “Not me, I’d stay right here in town. Right under the cops’ noses. That’s the last place they’d think to look.”

  DeWalt asked, “Is that where you think Rodney is?”

  Nobody answered.

  “He couldn’t stay around here without help,” said DeWalt. “He’d need somebody to keep him supplied with food, do his laundry, that kind of thing.”

  Again, no response.

  Finally the lead guitarist asked, “So what do you think? You think he wasted that guy?”

  DeWalt shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know enough yet to form an opinion. Tell me something, though. Was Rodney into guns?”

  “What do you mean, into?”

  “Whoever blew Catanzaro’s head off was fairly knowledgeable about firearms. Especially old ones. Muskets, muzzle-loaders, that type of thing.”

  “Shit,” said the bassist. “Rodney barely knew how to shoot that little twenty-two of his. I think he was scared of it. Couldn’t hit a fucking beer can from ten feet away.”

  “Shut up, asshole.”

  “Rodney had a twenty-two?” DeWalt asked. “Rifle? Automatic? Revolver? What?”

  “Revolver,” the bassist told him. “But so what? I got one too. We all got guns. Sometimes we go out to the dump to shoot rats and tin cans, shit like that. There’s nothing illegal about it.”

  DeWalt smiled. “I’m not a cop, fellas, so don’t worry about me. I don’t even like cops very much.”

  The lead guitarist dug his fingers into the scarred skin of his forearm, scratching, clawing at a deep itch. “I can guarantee that Rodney didn’t know shit about guns,” he said. “Hell, the guy’s practically spastic.”

  “So what’s he hiding from?” DeWalt asked.

  “Think about it.”

  “Let’s just suppose then,” DeWalt said, “hypothetically. I mean, not did he do it, but could he have? Is he psychologically capable of that kind of thing?”

  Said the drummer, “Anybody’s capable.”

  “Yeah, right,” the bassist scoffed.

  “They are, man! In the right situation, you push anybody too far, they’re going to push back. It’s human nature.”

  The guitarist told him, “He wouldn’t have wasted Jeri, I know that for sure.”

  “How heavy was his drug use?” DeWalt asked.

  “Drugs?” said the drummer. “You mean, what? Like penicillen?”

  DeWalt laughed. Good joke, asshole, ha ha.

  Anyway he had seen enough. The garage was little more than a shell, exposed rafters and concrete floor—nowhere to squirrel Gillen away. Nor did the Kinetics appear to be concealing information. Liars would be more sincere than these young men; sincerely helpful or sincerely hostile.

 
“When was the fire?” DeWalt asked.

  “Which fire was that?”

  DeWalt nodded toward the dark stain on the floor.

  The drummer told him, “That’s where we have our weinie roasts.”

  To the guitarist DeWalt said, “Is that how you burned your arm?”

  Again the drummer answered. “Yeah, reaching for somebody’s weinie!”

  They were a riot, these boys. A fun bunch of guys. “Well, anyway,” DeWalt said. He half-turned toward the door. “Where will you be playing this weekend?”

  “Theta Chi house,” the drummer said.

  Said the bassist, “The I-ate-a-thigh house.”

  “Even without Rodney?”

  “Our sound’s got a hole in it as big as a truck,” the guitarist answered, “but yeah, we’re still playing.”

  Your sound’s got a hole in it as big as the Grand Canyon, fellas. “You never know, maybe Rodney will show up by then.”

  “Yeah, right,” said the bassist.

  At the Theta Chi house, fifteen minutes later, DeWalt found a half-dozen cleancut young leaders of tomorrow engrossed in a Star Trek rerun. Four of the students knew him. He said he was working with the state police on the investigation of Professor Catanzaro’s homicide case, and when they asked if he was going to write a book about it he said only, “We’ll see how it goes.”

  They were polite and conservative young men, even anxious to tell him what little they knew. Except for their boom boxes and wide screen TV they might have been boys from his own college days, leftovers from the Eisenhower era, atavistic Dobie Gillises with their short hair and short-sleeve starched shirts, their creased chinos and Bass loafers and their winning Crest smiles. They were all very likable and unmemorable but they could not tell him anything useful about the professor and his town girl. About Rodney Gillen they knew a bit more. His group played at the Chi house regularly, at least every other weekend. The students suspected that the Kinetics used drugs—“You could just sorta tell, you know, by looking at them. They’re all a bunch of deadheads.”—but drugs were never permitted in the house, not even marijuana, no sir. But maybe Craig Fox would know something more about Gillen. Fox, a senior, Theta Chi VP; in charge of booking the bands, organizing smokers and other functions.