The winter of Frankie Machine

77

Daylight finds Frank in San Diego.

Counting on the fog and the hour to shield him from view.

And the gun at his hip to protect him from harm.

Frank hobbles down toward Eleventh and Island, where the old men sleep on cardboard on the sidewalk. Limping past the line of the sleeping homeless, he listens to their mumbles and their groans, smelling the body odor of caked night sweats and stale urine, and the stink of rotting skin.

He stops at the door of the Island Tavern and bangs on it. The place is closed, but he knows he’ll find the heavy drinkers in there for their eye-openers. After a minute, the door cracks open and a jaundiced eye peeps out.

“Corky there?” Frank asks.

“Who wants to know?”

“Frank Machianno.”

Frank hears some muddled conversation; then the door opens and the old man-Frank searches for the guy’s name, remembers it’s Benny-lets him in and points to the bar.

Detective (retired) “Corky” Corchoran sits on a stool, hunched over the bar, a squat glass of whiskey by one hand, a cigarette in the other.

Frank sits down next to him.

“Long time, Corky.”

“Long time.”

Back in the day-before the bottle and the bitterness got him-Corky was a damn good cop. On the arm, like a lot of guys, he’d take an envelope to overlook the gambling and the hookers, but Corky was a straight arrow on the serious things, and all the guys knew it.

You beat a woman, you hurt a civilian, you killed someone outside the lines, Corky was after you. And if Corky was after you, he was going to get you.

But that was a long time ago.

“Buy you a drink, Corky?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Corky was never a big man, but he seems to have shrunk, Frank thinks as he signals Benny to bring another. And his hair is thin and dry, his skin yellowish, drawn tight over the bones in his face.

“I need your help, Corky.”

Corky finishes his old drink, then takes Frank’s and knocks it back. “What can I do you for?”

“Summer Lorensen.”

Corky looks at him blankly and shakes his head.

“Back in ’85,” Franks prompts him. “You were Homicide then. All those prostitute murders.”

“‘No humans involved.’”

“‘No humans involved,’” Frank says. “That’s right. Her body was found up on Mount Laguna, in a ditch off the road.”

Corky sits there thinking about it for a long time. Just when Frank thinks the old cop has drifted back into the Enchanted Forest, Corky says, “She had rocks in her mouth.”

“That’s right,” Frank says. “It went unsolved, but the department later laid it on the Green River Killer.”

Corky pulls a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lights another. His hands tremble. “Wasn’t no Green River Killer. We laideverything on that fucking guy. He was a one-man clearance sheet.”

“How do you know?” Frank asks. “How do you know it wasn’t him?”

Corky shifts into that crystal clarity that winos sometimes get. They don’t come often and they don’t last long, but he’s in one now, and Frank hopes he stays there long enough.

“First,” Corky says, “she was beaten to death, not strangled. The Green River Killer strangled his victims. She had trauma marks on her throat, but they were made postmortem. Two, there was no sign of intercourse. He raped his girls. Three, she wasn’t killed out there along the road.”

“How do you know?”

“No blood smears, Frankie. She’d stopped bleeding a long time ago.”

“But she had rocks in her mouth,” Frank says.

“So fucking what?” Corky asked. “Her real killer couldn’t read a newspaper?”

“So if you knew-”

“The department shut me down,” Corky answered. “It came down from on high-‘Lay off the Lorensen file. Move on. No humans involved.’”

Corky takes another long pull from his cigarette.

“Beginning of the fucking end for me, Frank,” he says. “The top of the slippery slope.”

Frank reaches into his wallet, pulls out two one-hundred-dollar bills, and presses them into Corky’s hand. It brings back old times.

“Stay out of sight,” Frank says. “Don’t let anyone know you were talking with me.”

Corky stares at him. “You gonna take them on, Frank? Take my advice. Don’t do it. You don’t want to end up like me.”

“You’re okay, Corky.”

“I won’t see another summer, Frankie.”

And then he’s gone. Eyes sunk back in his head with the thousand-yard stare, and Frank realizes that Corky Corchoran is in a place where he lives alone-somewhere in the past, maybe, somewhere in the future, nowhere in the here and now.

And he’s right, Frank thinks-he won’t see summer.

And neither, probably, will I.

He pats Corky on the shoulder. “I’ll see you.”

“Not if I see you first.”

Frank turns to leave. He’s almost out the door when he hears Corky say, “Hey, Frank!”

Frank turns around.

“We had our day, didn’t we?” Corky’s smiling.

“Yes, we did.”

Corky nods. “Damn right. We had our fucking day.”

Frank walks back out into the foggy morning.

All right, think, think. Who else was there that night? Donnie Garth, for one, but that’s not going to get you anywhere. There was another girl, the redhead. What was her name?…

Alison.

But it was over twenty years ago.

Who would know where she is now?