Murder in the Wings

14

While Donna was taking a shower, I sat in her living room feeling a growing sense of betrayal. I was getting the distinct impression that old Mrs. Bridges had set me up. What I’d found in Michael Reeves’s apartment was an envelope bearing the Bridges’ personal logo, which meant that she and Reeves had been in some kind of contact. That meant that she had not told me the truth, probably about much of anything.

Donna came out with a towel wrapped around her head. I tried hard not to notice her body in the green silk robe. “Your turn,” she said, sniffling. Then she bent over the couch and looked at the envelope I’d set on the coffee table to study. “What’s that?”

I told her.

“So you think she lied to you?”

“I’m sure she did. This letter is addressed to Reeves, and it’s obviously written by a woman in her older years, and it’s her family logo.”

“Why would she write Reeves?”

“I don’t know. But after we meet Wade, I’m going to find out.”

“You want some tea?”

“Sure.”

She put the kettle on to boil and came back and gave me a hug. She smelled of perfumed soap and wet hair. She smelled wonderful. “I’ll have the tea ready for you when you get out of the shower.”

“Is that a hint?”

“No sense in both of us catching cold.”

In the shower I kept wondering about Mrs. Bridges and why she’d write Michael Reeves, and I kept remembering Anne Stewart and her husband in the cabin. What had they been after? And why had Sylvia Ashton visited Michael Reeves the night of the murder? I put on some fresh clothes from the end of the closet Donna had allotted me and went back to the living room.

Donna hadn’t put any clothes on yet. She sat in an armchair in front of the TV. MTV was on: Stevie Nicks working a little too hard at being ethereal. I should have kept my mind on Mrs. Bridges and Reeves and Anne Stewart and her husband and what Evelyn had been doing with Keech in her car, but I didn’t. The thunder made me skitter across the floor like a scared animal. Donna must have been feeling the same way, because when I got there she put her arms out and drew me in. Our first few kisses were very tender — we were giving each other some inexplicable kind of reassurance — and then they were something other than tender. I pulled her up, and the way we stood we might have been dancing, she in her green silk robe, me in jeans and a T-shirt. I suppose we were dancing in a way, all the way over to the couch, where I eased her gently back. She said, “Wouldn’t the bed be better?” but for some reason the couch had great appeal at that moment. Then all she said was, “I just put in a Tampax.” I said, “I’ll buy you another one,” and she went off to the bathroom, where she spent what seemed like four or five hours. When she came back I turned out the light, and we made a slow sort of protective love with the rain and the violence unable to touch us as long as we were in each other’s arms.

“I thought we were going to meet Wade,” she said. This was half an hour later in my car. It was still pouring.

“We’ve still got an hour.”

“So where’re we going?”

“Over to the recreation center where Reeves held his acting classes for the ex-convicts.”

“Why?”

“Well, first of all because that board at the halfway house said that Anne Stewart teaches tonight. Second, maybe some of the men there will know where Lockhart might be. I still want to know what he wanted in Reeves’s office yesterday.”

“Right. I forgot about that. I wonder what he was doing with Evelyn Ashton this afternoon, back at the cabin, I mean.”

“Exactly.”

“Boy, this is starting to be fun again, Dwyer.”

The Stanley Recreation Center shows the scars of being located in what passes for a ghetto in this city. It’s a small brick building that used to be a school, but you wouldn’t know it the way graffiti covers its walls and hundreds of yards of tape cover the cracks in its windows. Even in the rain there were teenagers out prowling, white and black alike, their eyes filled with fear and hunger. I read a book once about juvenile delinquency in the original thirteen colonies. I read it while I was in jail the weekend of my sixteenth birthday for going on a joyride in a stolen car. I wasn’t driving but I knew it was stolen. Anyway, things changed after that weekend. The book taught me that there was nothing unique or special about being a punk, and forty-eight hours in the county lockup taught me that there were guys far more terrifying than I’d ever imagined and that I didn’t want to be like them at all. That night, in the gloom and the downpour, I glimpsed kids as angry as I’d been and prayed they’d have the same kind of luck I’d had.

We parked next to a new tan Saab and got out. “Anne’s car.”

“Well, so far so good.”

“Yeah, and remember that the next time you question what I do.”

She goosed me hard enough that I gave out an unmanly yelp and jerked away from her. She’s good at tickling, but she’s twice as good at goosing.

The interior of the place changed our playful mood abruptly. The institutional green walls were lit by naked bulbs hanging from an exposed electric cable. Unused desks were piled along the walls, which were swollen with moisture. A tidy pile of petrified dog crap had been pushed off to the side of a door, and the graffiti alluded to virtually every part of the human anatomy. Down the corridor was a small gym where two young black men took turns taking devastating shots from past the free-throw line. Next to this was a smaller room where a group of elderly women listened to a public health nurse talk about Medicare benefits, or what was left of them now that the boys in Washington had decided to turn the country into an arsenal. A hand-lettered sign said ACTING CLASS and an arrow pointed upstairs. The deeper into the place we went the more it smelled like the schools of my memory — the aromas of floor wax and chalk dust, window panes cold with rain, steam heat, and the most ineffable smell of all, wood aging over the decades, a smell peculiar to old schools and old garages.

Just before we entered the classroom, I thought I heard a noise at the opposite end of the corridor in the deep shadow. I waited thirty seconds but heard nothing else, so I followed Donna up to the threshold.

There were half a dozen of them, all but one seated in ancient cane chairs. They were watching a tall guy in the center of the big empty room as he put his face in his hands, apparently trying to come into some sort of mystical contact with himself. He reminded me of a coke junkie on the downside. Over in a corner, near a barren steam-heat register, sat Anne Stewart and Keech watching the man in the center of the room. They seemed as fascinated as the ex-cons by whatever process was going on.

Abruptly, the tall guy threw his head back and screamed. For the first time I saw his face full on. His black hair needed cutting and his lantern jaw needed a shave, but what he seemed to need most right then was some kind of medical help to calm him down. His scream lingered in the damp, dusty air. It wasn’t a theatrical scream, not at all. There was real frenzy and horror in it, as he proved by grabbing one of the empty cane chairs and smashing it against the register near where Anne and Keech stood. There was something orgiastic about the way he beat the chair into splinters. His dark eyes looked psychotic. Rheumy spittle shone on the edges of his mouth. He grunted in rhythm to his violence, and his grunts were far more obscene than any words he could utter. Donna put her face into my arm to hide her eyes. The poor bastard was coming undone. I looked around the room. In their way, the audience was just as spooky as the guy. They watched him with glazed fascination. They seemed to be in the same sort of psychosis that he was. One guy writhed in his chair. He appeared to be caught up in some kind of sexual rhythm. I glanced over at Anne and Keech. Their spell seemed broken now. Anne was putting out a hand to the crazy guy, muttering reassurances. Keech just looked scared. But the guy had found a new way to dazzle himself. He started pounding his fists against the register. He didn’t seem to notice the blood that smeared his knuckles almost immediately or the bones that made cracking sounds like dry twigs snapping.

I crossed the room and got him under the shoulders and threw him into the wall, not hard enough to hurt him but hard enough to break his eerie concentration. A couple of the cons started to get up from their chairs and make menacing motions toward me, but they knew better — I had rage and animal fear on my side at the moment, and they sensed this and stayed where they were.

Not that the dark-haired guy was completely free of his frenzy. He took a good punch at me, a roundhouse right that he delivered with some expertise, and knocked me into the wall. The next one I saw coming and moved in time. I threw a block into him and slammed him back against the wall again.

Anne came up. “Karl, calm down, calm down! He’s just trying to help you! All he wants to do is help you!”

At the last, Karl looked like Ahab. There was madness in his gaunt face and a crazed strength that scared me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to withstand him for long.

Keech came up then. “Karl, were you taking the mescaline tonight?” In his yellow pullover sweater and designer jeans, Keech still looked the part of the perfect little man. But now he was frightened like the rest of us, and with Keech, fear spoiled the whole act. “Were you taking mescaline?” Keech was screeching.

One of the cons came up, a jittery man with bad teeth and a busted nose and brown eyes, like someone out of a Russian novel. “Keech, we was all takin’ it. Shit, man, that’s what Michael wanted us to do.”

Anne said, “Byrnes, Keech and I told you last night that the class would be different from now on. We told you that.” She sounded as if she were going to cry.

Byrnes shrugged. “It’s like Michael always said, man, it’s the one way to connect with the truth.”

Anne nodded to Karl. “It seems to be an expensive price to pay.” She looked at two other cons who’d come over. “Can you take Karl downstairs to the men’s room and wash his face and see if that helps?”

They shrugged, mumbled. They were shabby, shambling men, and from the little I’d heard from Byrnes they sounded like jail house intellectuals, filled with half-baked ideas expressed with a hipness that was one part desperation and one part naïveté. Some of them would be basically decent men crippled by a mean and uncaring society; others would be (yes, there really is evil) mean and uncaring men who wanted to cripple society. I was beginning to sense Michael Reeves’s kinship with this group — certain, lawyers and social workers use cons in the same way. The cons have a great need to express their rage and self-pity and sense of doom, and people like Reeves show them how to do it — just as long as the cons show total allegiance. It’s a cheap way to play God.

Karl was crying now, sobbing and writhing in the grasp of his friends. You could see a big stain where he’d peed his pants. His eyes were shot with red. He stank of sweat. He needed to throw up and sleep. Not much else would do him any good. When they took him away, he was still crying.

Donna drifted over. “Is he going to be all right? Shouldn’t they take him to a hospital?”

Before I could explain, Keech said, “The hospital would call the cops and they’d bust him for parole violation. Using drugs is something parole officers frown on.”

“Where did he get his mescaline?”

“Michael’s desk,” Anne said simply, as if it were perfectly logical that a desk would be used to dispense drugs. “In the next room he had a small office. That’s where he kept it.”

“Why mescaline?”

Keech shrugged. “He said it helped get at the truth.”

“I thought this was an acting class.”

Anne smiled ironically. “Michael always said that acting and truth were the same thing. You couldn’t act well unless you understood the truth about yourself.”

“So he fed these poor bastards mescaline,” I said. “Great fucking guy.”

“It just kind of got out of hand is all, Dwyer,” Keech said. “I mean, for the first six months it was a great class. A very straight acting class. No drugs, anything. Hell, I got good enough in here to get the part at the Bridges Theater. The whole experience made being an ex-con tolerable. Then things changed, I guess.”

“How?”

Anne said, “Michael started playing ‘truth’ games, the way acting coaches like to. You know, tell us something painful about your past. Well, as you can imagine, people who’ve been in trouble with the law feel a great deal of anxiety. Michael became more and more obsessed with getting to that.”

Keech shook his head. “By the end, it was much more like some kind of group therapy than an acting class. Michael would just sit over there and watch us and never say a word. With the drugs, he didn’t have to.”

“You said ‘us.’ Did you take the drugs?”

He flushed. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

“How about you, Anne?”

She stiffened. Despite her regal good looks, she seemed older now. “Yes.” I thought of her and her husband in the cabin this afternoon. The ugly things he’d said to her. Their search for something unknown.

“Who else was in the class besides the men from the halfway house?”

Keech thought a moment. “Evelyn.”

I watched Anne’s face as Evelyn’s name was mentioned. A tic appeared at the corner of her right eye. It was not difficult to guess that they’d both been rivals for Michael’s attention.

“How about Lockhart?”

Now it was Keech’s turn to look uneasy. “Lockhart?”

“Yeah. He’s another guy from the halfway house.”

Keech nodded. “Sure. He was a member of the group for a while.”

“He was very tight with Michael,” Anne said. “Very tight.”

I studied Keech’s eyes. “He’s missing. You have any idea where he might be?”

“No, I don’t.”

We were having a stare-down. He won. I glanced back at the door, where some of the halfway house men had begun to file in. They looked sad and scared and I wanted to say something to them, but they’d already heard far too much from fellow cons who’d used them and dark saviors like Michael who’d exploited them.

“Why don’t you do these guys a favor, Keech, and throw the fucking drugs away?”

“I’m going to. Believe me.” He sounded young and lost.

For the first time I sensed something likeable in Keech. He was a polished little guy who came on like a hustler, but there was grief in him, and remorse, too. Anne must have sensed these things at the same moment, because she slid her arm across his shoulder. “It’s going to be a different acting class from now on, believe me.”

Keech said, “They haven’t found Wade yet, I take it?”

I shook my head.

Keech’s gaze got distant. “That’s got to be a special hell.”

“What’s that?”

“Being stalked the way he is.”

I nodded. Then I said, “There’s a cabin out by the town of Brackett.” Both of them visibly stiffened.

“You were both out there this afternoon. Keech with Evelyn, Anne with her husband. I think you know a lot more about Michael’s death than you’ve let on.”

Keech’s face took on a look of misery that made him look like a very haggard boy. “Were you following us?”

“No. It was a coincidence.” I waited. Neither of them said anything. “After visiting this acting class and hearing about how Michael conducted it, I’m starting to put certain things together. Probably not too long from now, I’m going to go to the police with what I know.”

“You think one of us killed him?” Keech asked.

“I think it’s at least a good possibility.”

Anne said nothing. Just put her eyes to the floor and kept them there.

“Somehow, Lockhart figures in all this, doesn’t he?” I waited for my words to unnerve Keech a little more.

“Tell me about Lockhart, Keech.”

“What about him?”

“How old is he?”

He shrugged. “Thirty, I guess. Why?”

“Is he bright?”

“Sort of, I suppose.”

“What’s he like to do?”

For the first time recognition shone in his eyes. He understood that I was going to force him to reveal something he probably didn’t want to reveal.

“Just the usual stuff.”

“What would that be?”

“Well, he always talked about girls a lot, so I guess it’s safe to say that he liked girls.”

“All right. What else?”

“And he always talked about baseball a lot, so I guess you could call him a baseball freak.”

“Did you know him in prison?”

“Yeah, but not real well.”

“What was your job in prison?”

“I worked in the prison library. I have a B.A., so they figured I’d be comfortable around books.” He smiled at the irony of institutional wrongheadedness. “My B.A. was in physical education.”

“What was Lockhart’s job in prison?”

He did not look happy about telling me. “He worked in the infirmary.”

“What did he do there?”

Again, the words seemed reluctant. “Oh, he was kind of a paramedic, I guess you’d say.”

He was making me curious. Why wouldn’t he want to tell me that Lockhart had been a paramedic?

“Was he good at it?”

“I guess so.”

“What kind of things did he do in the infirmary?”

“Oh, he’d give you cold tablets and things like that.”

“Anything else?”

“Shots. I guess.”

“Shots?”

“Yeah, you know, injections.” He glanced at Anne uncomfortably.

Anne said, “We give the men rides back to the halfway house and we’re late already. Do you mind?”

So my conversation was ending. “Sure,” I said. I’d learned something, but I wasn’t sure what.

Anne turned to the men. “If you’ll go downstairs and get in my car, I’ll be right down.”

When they were gone, she said, “Dwyer, I’d like to speak to you alone, if that’s all right.”

“Of course.”

I smiled at Donna. Keech seemed agitated about the whole prospect. He gulped very loudly.

We went over to the corner by the register that Karl had tried to demolish. She said, “Wade killed him.”

“I’m not sure of that.”

“I love Stephen. I really do. But he killed him. Stephen’s a drunk with a violent temper, and he knew that getting fired from a job out here would ruin what was left of his reputation.”

“Anne, what are you trying to tell me?”

She looked as if she were trying very hard not to cry. “There’s no point in digging around in all this. Wade killed him. He really did.”

“What were you and your husband doing at the cabin this afternoon?”

Now the tears came. “It has nothing to do with Michael’s death. Nothing.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

Keech called out. “We’ve got to go, Anne!” The agitation was still obvious in his voice.

Anne said, “Please, please, Dwyer. Please just leave things alone.” Then she was gone, over to Keech and down the stairs and into the rainy night.

For a long time Donna and I stood just holding each other, saying nothing. Finally, she whispered, “There’s something down at the end of the corridor.”

“What?”

“Sssh. Not so loud.” She leaned closer again. “There’s somebody down by the end of the corridor.”

Now I whispered, too. “How do you know?”

“I heard something sneak up the corridor and then sneak back.”

“Shit,” I said.

“What?”

“I wish I had my gun.”

Her grip stiffened on me. “God, I didn’t even think of that.”

“What?”

“Maybe he has a gun.”

“Well,” I whispered.

“Well, what?”

“Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out.”