Fast Lane

Chapter 5

First thing next morning I spoke with Jimmy Tobbler. He was disappointed to hear that his job was cut short. We argued back and forth about whether he should be paid for the previous day. Even though I’d called early in the morning he didn’t get the message until after he’d put in a hard day’s work interviewing the girls at Tiny’s peep show. He also didn’t want to have to eat the expense money he laid out that day in tips. We worked out a compromise; I’d pay him for the day, but the tips would come out of his own pocket. He agreed to send back what was left of the retainer.

Arthur Minnefield wasn’t listed with information. I made a call to the Oklahoma Bar, found out that Minnefield had died fifteen years earlier and was given the number of his widow. When I explained to her who I was and what I wanted, she told me she still had all her husband’s files and agreed to let me look through them.

I took a nine-thirty train to Oklahoma City. It was an eight-hour ride, during which I tried to think things over. I decided nothing made any sense. That’s pretty much the only way to explain what had happened with Craig Singer and later with Mary.

I guess with Singer I must’ve cracked. Even though I’ve made a success of myself there’s still a lot of crap I got to take. Anyone in my situation has to. All the winks and nods. Shoveling up your client’s messes. Making sure to look the other way when it’s in their interest. It’s all part of the job and it builds up inside you. When a piece of scum like Singer comes around, you just let it out.

And once the genie is out of the bottle . . . .

It had to be something like that. Because what happened with Mary made no sense whatsoever. I’d been with quite a few gals in my life-as my faithful readers can attest to-and while it hadn’t always gone smoothly, it never ended up before with me on my knees retching my guts out.

It just made no sense.

* * * * *

The train didn’t pull into Oklahoma City until six, and by the time I rented a car and checked into a hotel it was past seven. I called Arthur Minnefield’s widow and told her I’d be over in the morning.

Irene Minnefield had to be close to eighty, a shriveled gray-haired little thing peering up at me through thick glasses. We were sitting in her living room and she was holding a plate of oatmeal cookies with both her hands. She pushed the plate towards me.

“I got up early to bake them,” she told me, letting me in on her little secret. To oblige her I took one and chewed on it. It tasted a bit like sawdust.

“You’re the first person who’s needed to see Mr. Minnefield’s files,” she said, disappointed, no doubt, that she hadn’t had more opportunities to bake oatmeal cookies in all these years.

I showed her Mary’s picture. I told her how her husband had arranged for Mary’s adoption and how I was hoping his files would list her birth parents. She put down the plate of cookies and grasped the photo with both hands.

“My, what a pretty girl,” she remarked. “Mr. Minnefield and I never had children.” There was a note of regret in her voice.

“Could you show me where his files are?”

I took Mary’s picture from her and helped her out of her chair. She led me toward the basement. “My nephew put them down there for me,” she said at the top of the stairs.

I turned the light on and went down alone. The basement was unfinished, with a dirt floor. Water and heating pipes hung down low, so I had to crouch. No one had bothered to clean the place in years. It was filthy. About a third of the floor was stacked with boxes. None of them were marked and it didn’t take me long to realize there was no order as to how things were stored in them. I’d have to go through each box, checking each individual paper in it.

Irene Minnefield came down after two hours bringing more oatmeal cookies and milk. She stood around chatting incessantly, telling me all about her late husband. After a while her voice was like a dentist drill grinding in my ear and I started to get a headache. The mustiness of the basement didn’t help.

“It sure seems like Mr. Minnefield saved everything,” I said.

“He was a very careful man,” Mrs. Minnefield said, her raisin-like eyes brightening with pride.

With half a dozen boxes to go I found the Williams’ adoption papers. Mary was obtained from the Oklahoma City Baptist Hospital on July 30, 1977. It didn’t list her birth parents. It also didn’t list the date of her birth.

I thanked Mrs. Minnefield for her help. She seemed disappointed I was leaving. “Would you like lunch? I could make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Or if you like, I could heat up some soup?”

“No thanks, ma’am. I have to get going.”

I stacked the boxes back in place and helped Mrs. Minnefield up the stairs. At the door she told me if I needed anything else to be sure to call her.

After stopping off at my hotel to shower and change into some clean clothes, I headed for the Baptist Hospital.

* * * * *

I asked the woman at the records office if she could get me the birth records from May through July 1977. She looked annoyed but she made her way over to one of the file cabinets, walking as if she had pebbles in her shoes. After a few minutes she came back with a folder and handed it to me.

I went through the folder and started copying down names, putting asterisks next to the ones where the father’s name was blank. I had about twenty reasonable candidates. As I read over the names a funny feeling hit me in the stomach. Kind of like I’d swallowed a peach pit.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I steadied myself against her desk, not knowing what the hell had come over me. “I’ll be all right in a second,” I said.

* * * * *

The next two days I crossed off all but one name from my list. There were a few cases where the daughter couldn’t be accounted for, but in none of these was there any physical resemblance between Mary and the mother. The last name on my list was Rose Martinez. Something about the name troubled me, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

I found her address in the phone book and drove out to a small clapboard shack on the outer edge of Oklahoma City. There wasn’t much to it and there was almost nothing to the little strip of land that made up her front yard. Nothing more, really, than a pile of dust with a few wild thorn bushes growing out of it. Standing in front of her house, I felt that same odd feeling in my stomach. I waited until it passed and then walked up to her door and rang the bell.

I stood there trying to figure out what it was about that name. Rose Martinez . . . Rose Martinez. Why did it sound so damn familiar? All of a sudden I remembered. A panic overtook me as I cleared the lawn and dove headfirst over one of the thorn bushes, bouncing off my left shoulder. I felt a tightness in my gut suck my breath away and realized my back wasn’t going to be right for days.

The door opened and a smallish, dark woman peered out. It was the same Rose, older of course, but there she was.

At that moment a man driving past the house spotted me hiding behind the thorn bush, and seeing Rose standing there looking puzzled, decided he was going to slow down and stick his nose into things. I caught his eye and let him know he’d better not try it. He looked away and kept driving.

I turned my gaze back to the house as Rose picked something off her walkway, and realized I had dropped Mary’s picture. As Rose studied the photo, her puzzlement slowly dissolved into a kind of pained blankness. I could see the resemblance between the two of them, and I was sure Rose could see it too. It was funny, though. She didn’t bother calling out to see who had rung the doorbell and run off. She turned back into the house and closed the door.

Rose Martinez. Rose Martinez Murphy. She must have gone back to her maiden name after her husband’s death. I didn’t really know her- only met with her that one time years ago. I guess it must have seemed crazy, me reacting the way I did, but I couldn’t help it. After what had happened all those years ago . . . .

Standing on Rose’s doorstep and realizing who she was, I felt as if my heart had dropped to my feet. I just didn’t feel it was right to bring back what had to be hell to that poor woman. Not with all she must have been through and me being somewhat to blame. After all, I was the one who killed her husband.

Sometimes you look back at something that happened in your life and you swear it couldn’t have happened. The more you think about it, the crazier it seems. And you just about convince yourself it was something from a movie you once saw or maybe from a story you heard. The same is true with people you once knew. A name might pop into your head and you start wondering whether or not you ever knew that person. And after thinking about it you realize at one time in your life the two of you were drinking buddies or worst of enemies or lovers or whatever. But when you think about it some more, it doesn’t seem possible.

That’s the way it is when I think about Walt Murphy and that afternoon all those years ago. The thing is, I have newspaper clippings to prove that we did meet up once. And that I ended up shooting him to death.

That day Walt Murphy had called me to arrange an appointment. Over the phone he told me he thought his wife was cheating on him. There’s not a whole lot someone like me can do about a thing like that, except maybe confirm his suspicions or provide evidence for a divorce trial, and that’s all I assumed he wanted. When he showed up at my office he seemed normal enough, a little wild in the eyes maybe, but I wouldn’t have guessed him for a lunatic. Just an average guy who was down on his luck. He started telling me about his problems and when he got to his wife, something snapped.

Whatever edge he was balancing on crumbled away. He started ranting that he wanted his wife dead and demanded to know how much it would cost to blow her brains out. I should’ve taken him more seriously. I got him to be quiet but I should have known the craziness that had taken him over was too far gone. There was a fire raging in his eyes and I should have known better than to turn my back to him. All hell broke loose when I did. My legs were knocked out from under me and I did a headfirst tumble. As I lay there, tangled up with my chair and the phone, he kicked away at my head like it was a tree stump he was trying to turn over.

He must have guessed I had a gun because he broke off trying to kick in my teeth to start tearing my desk apart. In the position I was in, I was about as much use as a turtle flipped on its back. It was about all I could do to get to my knees. As he was taking the gun out of the drawer I threw myself at him.

The rest of it, at least until the shots were fired, is pretty much a blur. All I can really remember is fighting like hell, thinking that I was going to die, shot to death for something that just didn’t make any sense. And then came the explosions. Two of them. If I had to swear on it, I would have said that bombs had been set off under me. But there weren’t any bombs. There were only two things under me-my gun and him, at least some of him. I jumped up and saw there was a lot less of him than there should have been. Most of his head was gone and a bloody mess remained where his belly used to be.

The toughest thing I ever did in my life was to stay put and call the police. I didn’t think anyone could possibly believe me. The whole thing was so damn crazy, but I guess if you think about it, any other explanation for what happened would have been even crazier.

As the police questioned me, I sweated bigger bullets than the ones that chewed up Murphy. I had convinced myself it was useless, and was more shocked than anyone else about how things turned out. Because in the end, three things happened: the cops believed me; my hair turned gray as a cigar ash; and my career shot off faster than the top of Walt Murphy’s head.

All of a sudden I was a hero. At least that’s the way the media made me out to be. With all the newspaper stories and the radio and TV appearances, I became just about the best-known private investigator in Denver. Not only did I have clients lining up outside my door to hire me, but the papers were knocking down that door to get whatever piece of me they could. The Examiner paid me to write up my own firsthand account of the incident, which evolved into my regular monthly feature ‘The Fast Lane-from the files of Johnny Lane’. It has appeared faithfully ever since, and, along with my smiling mug shot, has become an institution to the Denver public.

I’m grateful for my success and I don’t want to sound as if I’m complaining, but I wish it had happened another way. I don’t like thinking of Walt Murphy lying dead on my floor. I don’t like to think I benefited from his death. Maybe if I’d tried humoring him that afternoon none of it would have happened. Maybe he would’ve been able to get some help and would’ve pulled his life back together. Or maybe not. Maybe things would have ended up worse, with him blowing his wife’s head off. You see, I don’t know whether I screwed up or not. I don’t have a clue.