Murder in the Wings

11

Jake’s cabin could have served as a garden shed for the Bridges cabin. Two-storied, with a barn-style roof, the place looked like a small resort hotel, complete with a U-shaped drive that curved right up to the long porch. It was the only “cabin” I’d ever seen with mullioned windows.

“Just a nice little lean-to,” Donna said.

“Maybe if Jake wins the election, they’ll let him move in here.”

She laughed as we got out of the car. Then she waved for me to take her hand for the run to the cabin. The rain was cold and blinding. The ground was soggy enough to pull you down like quicksand.

“Boy, I’ll bet it’s beautiful out here when the weather’s nice,” Donna said when we’d reached the porch and were safe under the overhang.

She was right. Several hundred yards ahead of us was the river, lined with weeping willows. On the distant shore were steep hills and an impenetrable forest of pines. It was almost like being in the mountains. We turned back to the front door.

Now there was a man standing there. A tall, gray-haired man in a three-piece suit. He might have been a bank president in a TV commercial. Except for the shotgun in his arms. That was a very inappropriate prop for a bank president to be carrying.

Cabins in this area seemed to be inhabited by some really strange people.

He pulled the inner door open and said, “May I help you?”

“Is there a reason for the shotgun?” I asked.

“Unless you’re illiterate, you read several signs on the road leading here. They each say NO TRESPASSING. That’s the reason for the shotgun.”

Now that I could see him more clearly, I saw that he had a patrician face that had turned a bit jowly. He was in his early sixties or so. He had clear blue eyes that curiously held no expression, almost like a doll’s. I assumed that he was Dr. Kern, the guy whom Leonora Bridges had referred to as “a family friend” and the man the biker had said everybody was afraid of.

“I’m Jack Dwyer,” I said. “This is Donna Harris.”

He nodded. “My name is Dr. Kern.”

I tried to avoid Donna’s eyes when he said that. She’s got this Eureka! look that sometimes tips our hand.

“We don’t mean to trespass, Dr. Kern,” I said. “I guess we just kind of got lost in the rain.”

He nodded. He looked sad. The shotgun he held suddenly looked ineffectual. He didn’t scare me anymore. He just made me curious.

“So is there some way I can help you?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to say next. Donna, with great charm and even greater conviction, said, “We only stopped because I need to use a restroom.”

“Oh, of course,” he said. He indicated for us to come inside and pointed out the bathroom to her.

The interior smelled sweetly of log smoke. The rain on the roof made everything feel cozy and safe, with the big fieldstone fireplace, the rows of bookcases with a few hundred hardcovers, the simple elegance of the leather furniture. There was a TV set as big as my Civic and a dining table next to a huge stained-glass window. The table looked like it could seat about twenty people. A bouquet of red paper roses looked lonely on the long table.

“You’re from the city?” he inquired.

“Yes.”

He went over and laid the shotgun down on a desk. “I apologize again for the gun. The way things are these days... well, you understand.”

“Of course.”

He saw where my eyes had rested. His mouth. The blood.

“Oh, I banged myself on a door,” he said, daubing at the red stuff.

I smiled. I hope I looked sincere. He seemed a decent enough guy.

“Do you live here?”

“Oh, no,” he said, “I only bring some of my patients here occasionally. I have a clinic about a mile from here.”

“I see.”

“The patients appreciate getting out. In good weather, this is a very nice environment.”

“It certainly is.”

We both glanced up the long stairs. I wondered if Donna had taken a couple magazines in there with her. The doctor and I were fast running out of things to talk about. I was wondering if I was going to ask about the migration habits of squirrels when Donna appeared again. To me it was obvious that she was excited about something.

“Thank you very much,” she said to Dr. Kern.

“Not at all. And, as I was saying to Mr. Dwyer, I do apologize about the shotgun. We’ve had vandals lately.”

“I understand,” Donna said.

He smiled at her. She was easy to smile at even though she was six feet tall and could eat your meal and hers in three minutes flat.

He walked us to the door. We said our good-byes again and we ran to the car.

Inside, Donna said, “Boy, did I find some things out upstairs.”

“Like what?”

“Like somebody went through several of the rooms up there and turned everything inside out. Looks like a bomb hit it.”

I started the car and pulled away.

“Aren’t we going to check it out, Dwyer?” she asked as I headed down the road.

“Yeah. But we’ve got to find someplace to hide until we see the doctor leave.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Good thinking.” She had the pure enthusiasm of a sixteen-year-old.

“So I just told Chad to leave me alone. I mean, there wasn’t much he could say after he handed me a ring and I led him into the bathroom and made him watch me flush it down the toilet.”

The subject was Chad, her ex-husband.

A few months ago she’d gone to Mexico on a lonely vacation to forget him. I’d been skeptical about the results, but apparently it had worked. Oh, Chad, who had dumped her for a younger woman and had then changed his mind, Chad was still around, calling her more frequently than her mother, making the sorts of promises that only somebody who has the looks of Robert Redford and the personality of John Davidson can make. She genuinely seemed to be working him out of her life. Lately, I’d even felt some pity for the bastard. I don’t really wish heartbreak on anybody. I was there once myself. I lost thirty pounds and more than a little dignity.

“So he hasn’t called for nearly a whole week,” she said.

“Gosh. Ma Bell must be getting nervous.”

“God, Dwyer, look.”

A black Buick, the sort of car monsignors always drove back in the era of Bishop Sheen, came up to the asphalt, paused, and then proceeded north.

We sat with the motor off in a grove of white birches just off the highway. If Dr. Kern saw us, he didn’t let on.

“Great,” she said, “now we can go back to the cabin.”

We stood in the open area in front of the fireplace, looking around. The place still smelled sweetly of log smoke. The leather furniture needed dusting, the kitchen sink contained some unwashed dishes, and sections of the bookcases needed straightening. But all the same I’d have lived there if they asked me. The freezer alone, over in the kitchen area, must have cost more than my Honda. You could have gotten several head of cattle in it. Live ones.

“You want to start upstairs?” Donna said.

“Sure. Why not?”

She looked at me. “Boy, Dwyer, you don’t seem very up.”

“Three days of rain. It’s starting to get to me.”

Then she said, quite seriously, “You’re being selfish. I’ve never seen you be selfish before.” She leaned over and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. “Think of Wade out there. Think what he must be going through. He’s not sure if he’s a murderer or not. We have to help him.”

I followed her, pretty much down on myself (so it’s raining, big fucking deal; the homeless and hungry and malformed of the world probably have it a bit tougher than I do). When we came to the top of the stairs, Donna stopped and peered into a large den-like room and said, “He cleaned it up.”

I glanced in. “This was the room that was tossed?”

She nodded.

“No wonder he had the shotgun,” I said. “He probably figured we were the vandals coming back-for a second round.”

She led the way inside.

“You think we should look around?” she said.

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

She gave me a half-scowl. “C’mon, Dwyer, you still sound morose.”

I put on fake cheesy smile. “Gee, Donna, I’d love to search this room.”

“That’s better.”

“Up yours.”

“I heard that.”

“I meant for you to hear that.”

“What an asshole.”

We set to work. The first twenty minutes I found nothing interesting. Medical journals filled some drawers; shirts, socks, and underwear filled others. The daybed in the corner, covered with a spread and tossed with colorful pillows, was apparently where Dr. Kern slept. That made sense; the other rooms all had bunk beds, for patients, I assumed.

Then Donna said, “Boy, Dwyer, come over here.”

At the end of the daybed was a big wicker trunk. She had the lid up and was stacking stuff on the floor.

I knelt next to her, pecking her on the cheek as I did so.

What she was setting out for me to see was three decades of Dr. Kern’s history at the sanitarium and here at the cabin. He seemed to feel a true fondness for his patients. The floor was covered with photographs of Dr. Kern at various ages, standing in the midst of grinning groups of people. Most of the photos had been taken in front of the cabin here. The patients looked happy, if a bit distant; presumably they were taking some kind of medication. The clothes they wore recalled their eras exactly, from the silky, feminine print dresses of the late forties (women never looked more like women than in the late forties and early fifties) to the dull pants suits of the seventies. Here was Kern as a young man with thick glasses, a pipe, and a mop of hair that gave him the air of an engineer; a decade or so later his hair was parted, his glasses were horn-rimmed, and he wore a tan work shirt that lent him the look of an archeologist on a distant dig. Only a few years later, he seemed to have aged and become the man he was today, fleshy and benign and bankerly, the eyes oddly vacant of meaning, as if they only perceived and did not judge what they saw. When he was surrounded by grateful patients, he looked happy and competent. But when he was alone — as in the picture that showed him leaning against the door of a 1957 DeSoto — he seemed vulnerable in the way that only a big man can, and more than a bit lost. He might have been a child waiting for his mother after school.

“Look at this,” Donna said. She showed me a piece of parchment. It was Kern’s M.A.M.D. diploma. He was a bona fide shrink — a medical doctor first, a psychiatrist second. He had become a doctor in 1948. The diploma had been issued from one of the state universities.

“But these are the weird things,” she said. She handed me some playbills from the Bridges Theater dating back to the early sixties. Even then some of the stars they’d attracted were big names. Dale Robertson, Keefe Brasselle, Liz Scott, and Donald O’Connor had been among the guest actors. “I wonder why he’d keep those.”

I shrugged. “Don’t know. Unless he has an interest in theater, too.” I looked at the whole stack. They were printed on very glossy paper, faded somewhat now to a yellow-gray. The hairstyles were out of date. O’Connor looked seventy pounds lighter. I kept going through the playbills, which were all pretty much alike, and then I set them down again. Sometimes I’m sort of suffused with understanding of how time passes — how it’s a rush unfolding infinitely from one end of eternity to the other and how our lives aren’t so much as a microsecond in the roar of its passage. Then it’s better to force myself to think of something else, and fast.

“Wow,” Donna said, laughing. “Here are some really strange playbills.”

These were of people more familiar. On the front of one playbill could be seen Wade and Sylvia and David Ashton. They all looked impossibly young and attractive and arrogant. They starred in Noel Coward’s Private Lives.

“Sylvia was really a beauty,” I said.

“Well, Wade wasn’t so bad himself,” Donna said with an edge, and I remembered her jealousy.

“Christ, I didn’t mean anything by it. I just meant that she was very attractive before she started having her breakdowns.”

“Yeah, but it was the way you said it. You haven’t sounded enthusiastic about anything all day, and then you see this old photo of Sylvia and you really get enthusiastic. How would you feel?”

“I don’t get jealous as easily as you do.”

“Don’t get jealous? God, Dwyer, if you really believe that then you should see Kern.”

“I thought we were gathering evidence here to help out Wade.” But I knew her and knew what she was like when she got mad.

“How about the other night in the pizza place?”

I felt myself flush. I’d thought my reaction had been noticeable only to myself. “What pizza place?”

She mocked me. “ ‘What pizza place?’ The one where the blond guy named Kevin came up. The guy I used to date? The guy who kept telling me how great I looked and didn’t seem to notice you there at all?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “that pizza place.”

“Right. That pizza place.”

“What about it?”

“What about it? Are you crazy? You were so jealous you hardly spoke to me for about three hours afterwards, and when I invited you in, you said you had a headache.” She shook her red hair. “A headache. Boy, Dwyer, I expected more of you than that.”

“I had a headache. No big deal.”

“The big deal is, Dwyer, that I can admit I’m the jealous type and you can’t.”

“It’s because I’m not.”

“You’re blushing, Dwyer.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit. You... are... blushing. And you know why? Because you’re telling a lie.”

Just as she said that, two things happened. The playbills fell out of my hands and I saw the bill that featured David Ashton alone on it. I was starting to reach for it when the second thing happened — downstairs, out in the rain, a car door slammed.

“Somebody’s here,” I said.

But her temper was not to be put off. She grabbed my sleeve. “I won’t let you do anything until you admit it.”

“Admit what?”

She made one of those faces that one pro wrestler makes to another just before he’s going to put the Mongolian Motherfucker on the poor guy. Except in Donna’s case, she was serious. She grabbed my sleeve and twisted it. “Admit that you get jealous just like I do.”

Then I heard a second car door slam.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll admit it, but only because somebody’s coming.”

The Mongolian Motherfucker expression had yet to leave her face. “You’re going to pay for this, Dwyer. I promise you.”

I stuffed the playbill with David Ashton into the pocket of my sport coat and jumped to the window.

“This is really getting crazy,” I said.

“Who is it?” She’d calmed down enough to get interested in investigation again.

“Anne Stewart and her husband.”

“What are they doing here?”

I shrugged. “We’re about to find out.” I looked around for someplace to hide. The only place I could find was the walk-in closet in the next room. “You coming in?” I called, hearing the doorbell bong downstairs.

“You going to admit you get jealous?”

“All right for God’s sake, I admit it.”

“Good. That time you sounded serious.”

I reached out and pulled her in and pushed us both down into the gloom at the back of the closet. Then I leaned up and slid the doors closed.

“Now what?” Donna said.

Right after she said it, we heard the glass in the door break downstairs. Anne Stewart and her husband seemed very anxious to get in for some reason. Because we’d parked in the deep forest behind the cabin, well out of sight, the Stewarts would naturally assume the place was empty.

There was another sound of shattering glass, the door creaked open, and we heard tramping feet. The Stewarts were inside.