Murder Straight Up

11

From there things happened quickly.

Hanratty jumped into the black car and they were off. I hadn’t gotten a single glimpse inside, because the windows were tinted nearly as black as the car itself.

A steady stream of traffic separated us. I waited with my usual patience. Yelling and swearing at cars to hurry past. Slamming my fist on the dashboard a few times. Stomping my foot on the floor. Nobody seemed especially impressed. By the time I made my move, the XKE had disappeared out the back entrance of the motel.

I reached the parking lot, followed the course they must have taken and ended up at the entrance to a wide avenue filled with lovers strolling in the spring night and no sign of the black XKE.

Wonderful. I hadn’t even had time to check out the license plate.

There were two black-and-whites and two unmarked cars parked in front of Falworthy House when I got there twenty minutes later.

The same kids I’d seen earlier in the day sat on the same stoop smoking cigarettes and spitting with practiced malice. When they saw me, the kids looked at each other and then back at me. Behind their easy contempt I now sensed something else.

“You the one who turned Mitch in?” the kid with the earrings said.

“No,” I said.

“Well, somebody sure as fuck did.”

Then I realized what I was hearing, and I don’t know why it should have surprised me but it did. The kid was scared.

In back of them, Falworthy House loomed like a prison, front-yard lights angled to emphasize its institutional ambience. So many of its kids would graduate from here into real prisons and never know that there was another kind of life. Society had every right to protect itself from them, of course, but it had nothing to congratulate itself about, either. Nothing at all.

“He won’t let them in.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Mitch Tomlin. He’s in the attic and he’s got a shot-gun.”

“He’s got this Remington,” one of the other kids said in a kind of awe. “It’d put a hole in you this fucking big, man.” He spread his hands wide to indicate the width of the damage it would do.

I went on up the stairs. Someone buzzed me in.

The place smelled of institutional food — meat loaf and green beans maybe — and disinfectant where the halls had been scrubbed down recently. In the vestibule I saw Karl Eler. He stood next to the staircase and shook his head over and over like one of those little dogs people put in the back windows of their cars. Across from him a hefty uniformed officer stood with his right hand resting on the handle of his Smith & Wesson.

“You with the press?” he asked me nervously. Obviously the press didn’t know about this yet, and obviously nobody official wanted them to know.

Eler looked up and saw me. “My God,” he said, “do you know what’s happened?”

“One of the kids told me.”

“Who is this guy?” the cop wanted to know.

“He’s all right,” Eler said. “He’s trying to help Mitch. At least I think he is.”

The cop frowned and walked a few steps away.

“When did this all happen?” I asked.

Eler went back to shaking his head. The life in him had begun to fade some time back — maybe about the time he realized that the sixties had failed its own dream or maybe about the time his wife had left him — and tonight was making it fade even faster. He was chalk white and his eyes were a washed-out blue. Even his flowered silk shirt and bell bottoms were faded from too many washings.

“Mitch got back here in time for supper, and I had a little talk with him about the things you and I discussed this morning,” Eler said. “And he got very nervous. Obviously it was him you saw in Channel Three last night. Then he went upstairs to the attic and locked himself in. I got worried, so I called the police — I wanted to make sure we didn’t have another Stephen Chandler incident on our hands — so when the officers started talking to him, they found out two things. One, that he had a shotgun with him, and two, that he was afraid he was going to be blamed for David Curtis’s death last night.”

“He told them he was in Channel Three?”

“Yes,” Eler said. “Mitch is the confessional type, I’m afraid.”

I could imagine a criminal lawyer listening to our conversation. They always like to hear that their clients are the confessional types.

A few girls came down a long hallway. They were crying. One of them, a short chunky blonde with a masculine haircut, came up and slid her arm around Eler, and he patted her much as you would a dog. “It’ll be all right,” he said, but there wasn’t much conviction in his voice.

Then there was the gunshot, and it was so loud and unexpected that it had the impact of something supernatural on the moment. Eler’s whole body jerked; I’m not sure what mine did.

The uniformed man in the vestibule said, “Holy Christ,” and went running up the stairs a lot faster than his heft should have allowed him. The chunky girl whom Eler had been embracing backed away from him and slid over to the other two girls. They all held each other and gazed silently up the long stairs, at the top of which the shotgun blast still echoed.

I’d caught a domestic disturbance once where a steel-worker on a Friday night had put a twenty-two gauge to the temple of his three-year-old and inside the mouth of his faithless wife. Then he’d put it to his own temple. They were just meat and nothing more than meat by the time we got to them, and when you realize that — that in a very real way we are nothing more than meat — the way you look at life is never quite the same again. You’ve lost your philosophical cherry, I guess.

I was afraid I was going to see something like that now, and for a moment I didn’t know if I could handle it. I wasn’t going to vomit or get hysterical, I’d be sure not to do anything like that, but if Mitch Tomlin had put the gun to himself, it was going to stay with me a long time, like an illness you can’t quite shake.

Eler looked at me wild-eyed and started up the stairs. I grabbed his elbow and brought him back.

“I have to know what’s going on up there,” he said. He was almost shrieking. You could see in the girls’ eyes that this was the kind of reaction they’d expected from him. Disappointment fought with pity in their gaze.

“No you don’t,” I said.

“But Mitch, he’s—”

“Whatever’s happened, the police will take care of it. The best thing we can do for them is stay right here and let them handle it. It’s their job.”

“But what if they’re hurting him?”

That was something else he’d carried over from the sixties. His distrust of cops, which was all well and good until you remembered that he’d called them in the first place.

“They’re not hurting him,” I said. “They’re probably trying to help him.”

He came down the stairs first. They already had him handcuffed. In his T-shirt and Levi’s and short blond hair and sensitive face, he might have been James Dean in a juvenile-delinquent movie circa 1956.

“Oh, God, Mitch,” the chunky blonde cried, “you’re all right!”

But he wasn’t there anymore. Something had happened upstairs and he just wasn’t there anymore. He was like a junkie twenty minutes after shooting up. Not there.

A bald homicide detective kept a beefy hand on Mitch Tomlin’s bicep. The detective stopped when he reached Eler. “We need to question him at the precinct, Mr. Eler. We don’t know if any charges will be filed other than pertaining to the weapon he had upstairs.”

“But what happened? The gunshot—”

The detective nodded to Mitch Tomlin. “Apparently, he thought about killing himself, then changed his mind at the last second. The weapon was fired, but only into the wall.”

The detective nodded, then led his prisoner outside. The handcuffs made a metallic noise as Mitch Tomlin walked. His eyes hadn’t made any kind of contact with anybody while the detective and Eler had talked. He was in shock. Other detectives came down from upstairs. I didn’t recognize one of them.

I had come here to talk to Mitch Tomlin and Diane Beaufort about last night. Now that Tomlin was gone, I needed to find Beaufort. I wandered back to the kitchen and waited until Eler was free. The kitchen reminded me of the kind you see on military bases. Big and clean and well organized. There probably weren’t a lot of great meals fixed here. Just big and clean and well-organized ones.

In ten minutes Eler came back. You could tell he was about to cry, and that didn’t sound like so terrible an idea actually.

“I suppose they’re just going to give up, aren’t they?”

“What?” I asked.

“The police. I’ve always heard that.”

He was babbling. “Heard what?”

“That they just decide who is the killer and slant their whole investigation to that. They don’t even consider any other possibilities.”

“A lot of what happens next depends on what Mitch tells them.”

“Did you see his face?” The tears were back in his voice.

I nodded.

“I’m afraid of what he’ll tell them.”

“Then what I’d suggest is getting a lawyer as quickly as you can.”

“I’ve got a friend in the public defender’s office.”

“Call him then. Right away.”

He seemed surprised. “You don’t think he did it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you’re a pretty decent guy after all.”

“You’d better get to the damn phone.”

“Yes. Of course. Good idea.” He looked to be in shock himself.

“Where do I find Diane Beaufort?” I asked as he was going through the kitchen door.

He turned. Seeming confused again. “Probably, uh, at work.”

“Where’s work?”

“There’s a Hardee’s about four blocks from here.”

“All right. Thanks.”

He was back to shaking his head. “You really don’t think he did it, do you?”

“He was there last night and he shouldn’t have been. He was bitter over Stephen Chandler’s suicide. If I were a homicide detective, I’d have to take a damn good look at him.”

“My God,” he said, “they’re really going to charge him with murder, aren’t they?”

Gently, I said, “You’d better get to the phone, Karl.”