Murder Straight Up

12

She had the kind of uptilted nose and wide eyes that fashion photographers go slightly crazy for. Her blond hair was pulled back in a bun, her blue eye makeup was applied a bit heavily, and she needed to lose maybe five pounds of baby fat — but in all, and even in her brown Hardee’s uniform, Diane Beaufort was a classic beauty.

She was behind the counter, using one of those little metal chutes they fill french-fry bags with. I recognized her from last night. The tall kid with the baseball for an Adam’s apple noticed me and stepped up instantly, perhaps fearing I was a Hardee’s inspector.

“Help you?”

“I’d like to speak with Diane.”

He looked back over his shoulder.

Diane was watching us. Frowning. Then she put down the french-fry device and wiped her hands with such elaborate care that all my cop instincts got riled.

“Hey, Diane,” the kid said, as if she hadn’t heard me.

She had, of course. Which was why she was taking off. In less than ten seconds she was gone.

I ran out the door, around the side of the big windows where mommies and daddies sat feeding their kiddies. The air was sweet and gentle and made me feel young and needful of sex. Instead, I was running alongside a Hardee’s window providing a few moments of TV-like entertainment for the diners watching me.

In the rear, big lights shone on an open area of dumpsters and empty egg crates. She wasn’t there. I ran to one end of the parking lot. No sign of her. Nor had any car taken off. I ran west to a street shaded by blooming elm trees that cast peaceful shadows on the pavement. I squinted, peering as far down the street as I could see. Nothing. No sign of her whatsoever.

I went back to the Hardee’s. The exhaust fans kicked everything in my direction. I felt as if I had been buried alive inside a hamburger.

There was only one other possibility.

I went in the back door. Down a corridor I could see the backs of several uniformed high school kids preparing various kinds of food. A radio played loud rock and roll Nobody noticed me.

I went along the corridor until I came to two doors marked men and women. I had to wait five minutes before a female came along. She was a black girl, pretty in a gangly way, with amused but now suspicious eyes.

“I need you to do me a favor,” I said.

“Nobody’s supposed to be back here but employees.” She looked around. I could picture a manager rushing out. I could picture a scene.

I took out my wallet. Showed her my Federated ID.

“This doesn’t mean you’re a policeman,” she said.

“No, but it does mean that I’m a guy who’s trying to do somebody a favor.”

“Who?”

“Diane Beaufort.”

“Diane’s nice.”

“I know. That’s why I’m trying to help her.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Go in the women’s john and see if she’s in there.”

Her eyes, which had gotten friendly for a time, were suspicious again.

“Is she hiding from you?”

I had to take the chance of telling her the truth. “Yeah. But she doesn’t know that I’m trying to help her.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Just tell her this. Tell her that Mitch Tomlin was arrested tonight.”

“Mitch Tomlin? The boy from Falworthy?”

“Yeah.”

“God.”

“Please tell her.”

She stared at me a moment then nodded. “Okay.”

She was gone two or three minutes. In the interim a boy in a brown uniform walked past me and said, “You’re not supposed to be back here.”

“I know.”

Then he just kept walking right out the back door.

The girl led Diane Beaufort out a few minutes later. “He has a badge,” the girl said, “but it doesn’t mean anything.” Diane nodded. She stood straight and still, as if she were about to be executed. The girl said, “You want me to wait with you?”

Diane shook her head.

The girl looked at Diane and then looked at me and left.

“How about going out in the parking lot?” I said. “It’s sort of tough to talk in here.” And it was: too narrow, too shadowy, with people hovering on the edges.

“No,” she said.

“The police arrested Mitch tonight.”

“That’s what Loretta said.”

“Do you think he killed David Curtis?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to help him?”

“Yes.”

After a few zombie-like exchanges I finally realized I was dealing with a very stoned young lady.

“Can you take some time off?”

“When?” she asked.

“Right now.”

“I don’t know.”

“You need to get straight.”

She touched nail-bitten fingers to a beautiful cheekbone. “I know. I’m pretty fucked up.”

“What would help?”

“Probably walking around. There’s a place down by the river.”

“Fine.”

“You’re not going to hustle me or anything?”

“No.”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” I said.

“I’ll bet he’s scared.”

“Who?”

“Mitch.”

“Yeah.”

“Mitch isn’t real tough. That’s why I was surprised he had guts enough to go to Channel Three last night.”

“Why were you there?”

“When I figured out where he’d gone, I just wanted to go and see if he was all right and everything.”

For a time neither of us said anything. Just listened to birds in the trees, to the last bell at St. Michael’s for the day.

“I got some tapes,” she said.

I wanted to get going, but she was so precariously stoned that I didn’t want to alarm her by pushing too hard and too fast.

“What kind of tapes?”

“Of when Stephen was being interviewed about suicide.”

“When he was on TV, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Maybe you’d let me borrow them,” I said.

“If you promise to bring them back.”

“All right.” I put out my hand and touched her on the shoulder. “You need to walk around,” I said.

Maybe because we’re so landlocked out here, maybe that’s why the river plays so important a role in this city. You see people walking the shoreline even when it’s cold enough to wear a winter jacket.

We sat on a park bench that needed to be painted for the new season and looked at a speedboat perform some stunts until a police patrol boat showed up, all harsh white lights and bullhorns, and forced the guy out of the water. There was a good possibility the guy was drunk.

I had bought two big containers of coffee and, at her request, a pack of Winston Lights. She smoked and bit her nails and looked beautiful in a forlorn way.

“Curtis definitely killed him,” she said.

“Killed Stephen Chandler, you mean?”

“Yeah, and when you see the tape you’ll know what I’m talking about. He really forced him to — to talk about things Stephen didn’t want to.”

“Like what?”

“Like about getting somebody pregnant and stuff and not being able to handle it.”

“Stephen had gotten somebody pregnant?”

“Yes,” she said. “Me.”

I just watched her.

“Then Curtis kept pushing him to talk about his old man and how his old man committed suicide.”

“Stephen’s father committed suicide?”

“Yeah. He was in prison and he just couldn’t take it anymore. So one day he drank some bleach and died.”

“Why was he in prison?”

“Killed a guy who’d been sleeping with Stephen’s mother.”

“I see.”

“Kind of low rent. That’s what Stephen always called it. ‘Low rent.’ He was always real ashamed about it. But it was my fault Curtis asked him about it.”

“Your fault?”

“Umm-hmm. Curtis talked to me about Stephen. You know, about how Stephen had tried to kill himself three times in the year before he did the interview. I also told him about Stephen’s father.”

I nodded. Now I was curious about the tapes. “I guess I never understood the circumstances of Stephen’s death. How did he die?”

“OD’d.”

“On what?”

“Smack.”

“How long had he been doing heroin?”

“Maybe six months. He started when he started hanging around the apartment.”

“What apartment?” I asked.

“Downtown.”

“Whose apartment is it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re losing me, Diane.” Her vagueness was starting to make me irritable. “Please tell me about the apartment, okay?”

“You getting pissed?”

“No, it’s just my old man’s crankiness.”

She didn’t laugh, of course, because for someone as young as she was, there was no irony in my line. I was indeed, for her, an old man.

“So how about the apartment?” I said.

“Stephen met these guys a while back.”

“What guys?”

“These twins.”

“They have names?” The irritation was back in my voice.

“John and Rick.”

“Last name?”

“I’m not sure. But they’re the reason we broke up, me’n Steve. John and Rick were ‘the good life,’ as Steve always said. I guess I wasn’t. He had money, clothes all of a sudden.”

“What happened when you got pregnant?”

“We found this woman.”

“You mean an abortion?”

“Yeah. This woman. Anyway it didn’t take very long. I think it bothered Steve more than me. He got really fucked up on reds and wine that night and started hitting stuff, you know, pounding his fist into stuff, and he ended up breaking two of his knuckles.”

“What about John and Rick? What do they do?”

“Have a lot of money. That’s all I know.”

“Can you tell me how to get to their apartment?”

“Sure.” She described the place. It was an expensive high-rise building west of a large city park.

“How long did Stephen know them?”

“I’m not sure. Not exactly. He only started talking about them a few months before he died.”

“Didn’t Karl Eler know Steve had become a junkie?”

She laughed unpleasantly. “Karl’s a nice guy, but he should have been a minister. That’s why his old lady up and split. She couldn’t take all his sermons. Anyway, Eler wouldn’t know enough to see that somebody was a junkie, not unless they shot up right in front of him. He’s real naive.”

For now I’d learned enough. Junkies and walking-out wives and men in prison who drank bleach and teenagers who kept trying to kill themselves until they got it done. Sometimes your mind can contain only so much. What’s the Bob Dylan line? I need a dump truck, Mama, to unload my head. I know what he means.

So for a time I just sat and watched the river and tried to imagine what the shores must have looked like in my great-grandfather’s day. There were barges then, headed for the Mississippi, and nearby there had been a dock where kids came to watch the boats. I had seen ink sketches of it all in an old book. The kids in the sketches were immortal, grinning and waving as they would always grin and wave, and the boatmen waved back for all time, too. There had never been a time like that, of course, not really, the human lot being what it is, but it was nice to think otherwise, nice to think that teenage girls hadn’t always been the shambles that Diane Beaufort was.

“He was trying to quit,” she said after a time.

“Stephen?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“A few nights before he died, he snuck into my room — Eler doesn’t want boys and girls in the same room, you know — and he started crying and he told me. He said he’d gone for four days and was going to turn himself into this rehab center.”

“You think he was serious?”

“I know he was.”

“How?”

“He asked me to meet him at this church the next day. I did. We went up to the rail, you know in front of the altar, and we said prayers together. I thought, Whoa, he’s really serious about this.”

“Did he actually go to the center?”

“I think so.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“Not positive.”

“May I have the name of the center?”

“Sure. The Stillman Center.”

I knew where it was. I watched the river some more but the images of the waving kids and the barges were gone. Now I smelled the factories downriver and watched a nearby robin struggle to fly. Even in the half-light of the moon you could see the damn thing was sick and dying. It would struggle that way for a long time and absolutely nobody would give a shit. Diane started watching it, too. “Poor little thing,” she said. I got up and went over to it and had a closer look to make sure it was sick, and then I raised my heel and crushed its head. When I got back, she was crying.

I took her hand. She slid it easily into mine. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll get you back to Eler’s place.”

“I wouldn’t have had guts enough to do that,” she said.

“I didn’t think I would either,” I said.

I took her back to Falworthy House and dropped her off.

From a pay phone I called Edelman, my friend on the force, to give him my arguments against Mitch Tomlin as the killer, but Edelman’s wife, Mona, told me he was out. “He’s at the university as a guest speaker in a criminology class. I can have him call you later.”

“You mind if I try him?”

She laughed. “You should know I’m used to late-night calls by now.”

“Great. I appreciate it.”

Then I checked my answering service. There was only one call, and it was a surprising one. Donna Harris.

She answered on the second ring. “I was hoping it would be you,” she said.

Despite my better judgment — I was preparing myself for word that she was reuniting with her husband — I felt the old thrill.

“How are you doing?” I said.

“I miss you.”

I cleared my throat. “I miss you, too.”

“And I know I’m being terrible about this, my indecisiveness, I mean.”

“I’m a big boy.”

“I’ve decided I’m not going to see Rex any more.”

“Why?”

“I think he just confuses me. You know how I told you he was starting to touch me? Today he slid his arm around my waist and suggested that I start seeing him at night, when we can ‘relax’ more. There are a lot of shrinks who do that, hustle their female clients.”

“Nice guy.”

“Really.”

“Maybe you can find another one.”

“Maybe I should just make up my mind.” She really did sound miserable. “The more I think about it, it’s just this father thing that he has over me.”

“Who?”

“My ex-husband. There’s a part of me that needs to be treated that way because my father was so cold to me. I feed on it somehow. But it’s not a good thing.”

“Did you learn that from Rex?”

She laughed. “No, basically all I’ve learned from Rex is that you should do whatever pleases you most.”

“Sounds reasonable,” I said.

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Because if you weren’t kidding, I’d be very surprised.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re so Catholic and so guilty. You’re not real modern, Dwyer.”

“There are worse faults.”

She laughed again. “You always get defensive when I mention that you’re a Catholic. I don’t mean it as an insult. Anyway, I like the image of you dressed up in an altar-boy costume.”

“They’re not called costumes.”

“What are they called?”

“I forget but I know they’re not costumes.”

“You can sleep with anybody you want, you know,” she said, “and not feel guilty. I mean I wouldn’t have any right to be mad.”

“I thought we were talking about altar boys.”

“I just wanted to say that to you, but I had to sneak it in somewhere and that seemed like a good place. But I’m serious. I mean I have absolutely no right to any claim on you. Not with the situation as it stands.”

“Then you really wouldn’t mind?”

“If you slept with somebody?”

“Yeah.”

There was this pause. Then she said, quietly, “I didn’t say that.”

“Say what?”

“That I wouldn’t mind.”

“Then you would mind?”

“I would mind but it wouldn’t be any of my business.”

“I see.”

“I really think I love you, Dwyer, so of course I’d mind. You know what I mean?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“But given the situation, I wouldn’t have any right to say anything. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

“I’m getting the picture.”

There was another pause. “So,” she said, “what have you been up to?”

I described most of the things that had happened since last night. When I got through, her first response was, “Is Kelly Ford her real name?”

Here we’d been talking about murder, drugs and all kinds of nasty lives, and she wanted to know if somebody’s name was real.

“I suppose so.”

“Is she nice-looking? With a name like that I suppose she’s very nice-looking.”

“She’s all right.”

“You had to think about that, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“How you were going to answer my question. Just the way you said ‘she’s all right’ when I asked you if she was good-looking means that she’s much better-looking than you’re telling me.”

“Well—” I started to say.

“But that’s what I mean. This is a perfect example. Here I am getting bent out of shape and it’s really none of my business. Not in the least. So let’s not talk about it.”

“All right.”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, and her voice started to tremble, “let’s not talk at all.”

Then the line was dead.