The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Robert McKee The Confession

From Eureka Literary Magazine

I pulled into the Thatcher driveway and shut down my motorcycle. I dropped the sidestand, but I didn’t climb off — not yet. When Jane called a half-hour earlier, she told me Charlie was worse and he wanted to see me. She asked me to come right away. I had rushed to their place, but now that I was there, instead of going in, I sat astride my bike taking in deep lungfuls of air. It had just stopped raining, and the night was heavy with the smell of jasmine. Charlie Thatcher took great pride in his yard, and I told myself I just wanted to steal a moment to enjoy the fragrance of his night-blooming jasmine. That was what I told myself, but even before the thought could form, I knew it was a lie.

The porch light came on, but I was parked beyond the reach of its yellow glow. The front door opened, and Jane stepped outside. “Pry?” she called. “Is that you out there?”

“Yeah,” I said as I stood and swung my leg over the bike, “it’s me.”

She came down the steps and met me. “I can’t believe you rode a motorcycle,” she said. She held her hand palm up. “Didn’t you notice it was raining?” She tried to smile, but there was a puffy thickness to her face, and the smile couldn’t quite materialize.

“Yeah, I know, but I felt like riding.” The truth was that when I got depressed, I liked to ride, and depression that night was as pervasive as the smell of Charlie’s jasmine. I gave a little shrug. “Sometimes it makes me feel better.”

When I said that, Jane’s features came all unscrewed and fell apart. “Oh, Pry,” she said, and she rushed to me and threw her arms around my waist. She dropped her head to my chest, and deep, horrible gusts of sound came out of her. She was getting soaked from the water that clung to my oilskin coat, but that didn’t seem to matter. “It’s happening,” she said. “It’s happening so fast.”

I put my arms around her and pulled her close without saying anything. Charlie had been diagnosed a month earlier with liver cancer. A week ago, he had been admitted to the hospital. Two days ago, against his doctors’ advice, he had insisted we bring him home.

“He asked me to call you,” Jane said. She lifted her head and looked up at me. “He said it’s important that he talk to you right away. He’s in terrible pain, but he won’t take anything because he wants to have it together when he talks to you.”

I gave her a squeeze, and with my hands still on her shoulders, I pushed her back a step and looked down. “It’s okay. I’m here now. How are you doing?” I asked.

She wiped her tears away with both hands and said, “I’m not doing so good. I cry constantly, except when I’m around Charlie. I haven’t cried in front of him yet. He doesn’t need to see my hysteria on top of everything else.” She punctuated her comment with another of those not-quite-right smiles.

We walked to the house, and once we were on the porch, I took off my coat, shook the rain from it, and draped it over the railing. “Did he say what’s on his mind?” I asked.

“No, he’s being secretive as hell, but I could tell that it’s important to him.” She opened the front door and led me inside. “He said he would explain everything to me and the boys once he’s had a chance to talk to you.” She nodded toward the staircase and told me to go on up. There was the glint of a scolding mother in her eye. “I’d offer to bring you a beer,” she said, “but since you’re riding that motorcycle, I won’t.” Jane never missed an opportunity to let me know she thought motorcycles were dangerous.

I grabbed hold of the thick oak banister and pulled myself up the stairs. The Thatcher home was on Fifth Street, one block from Balboa Park. It was a large, drafty place built in the early 1930s. Charlie had been my number-two man for years, and when I sold my security business, the new owners promoted him to general manager. I assumed when that happened, he and Jane would then sell this place in San Diego and move up to North County, where the main offices were located. When I suggested that, though, Charlie wouldn’t consider it. “This is where we raised our two boys,” he told me, “and this is where we’ll stay.”

Once I was at the landing outside Charlie’s room, I hesitated again about going inside. I could no longer smell the jasmine, so I was forced to admit the truth. Charlie Thatcher was as close to me as an uncle, and I was not taking this well.

When a hoarse voice called, “Come on in, Father Delaney,” I swallowed, gave the door a shove, and stepped inside.

“I’ve never been mistaken for a priest before,” I said. Charlie was in a hospital bed, and it had been adjusted so that he was more or less in a sitting position.

“Oh, Jeez, lookie who’s here. It’s the biker trash.” Charlie was originally from Queens, New York, and to my West Coast ears he sounded exactly like Archie Bunker from that old television series. Except for his size, he even looked like Archie. Charlie was much bigger, though — six-three and well over two hundred pounds. At least before he’d gotten sick he’d been over two hundred pounds. Now he was losing weight fast. It had been only two days since I had seen him, and in that short time, Charlie looked to have taken off twenty pounds and put on twenty years.

I took my best shot at a smile and said, “Good God, Charlie, you look like hell.”

“Thanks a lot. I was feeling kinda blue until now, but you really perk a fella up.”

I patted his hand. “It’s the least I can do.”

He growled. “Lately, doin’ the least is what you do the most.” Charlie liked to give me a hard time about what he considered my life of leisure. I had spent my twenties and early thirties building my business. By the time I sold out, we were doing it all: uniformed security guards, night watchmen, the installation of burglar alarms, private investigations. It had been an all-consuming process for a lot of years. Now I could afford to spend my time doing what I wanted to do, which usually involved riding the motorcycles I had customized myself at my home up the coast. It was not the sort of activity the hard-working Charlie Thatcher considered productive.

We had gotten past our obligatory insults-at-first-sight, and now there was a moment thick with silence. It was Charlie who broke it. “The doc figures less than a week.” When he said that, I felt very heavy and allowed myself to drop into the straight-backed chair beside his bed. “Maybe a lot less,” he added. “I didn’t believe it at first, but I know it’s true. It’s strange, you know? It’s like I can feel myself draining away.”

I started to tell him how sorry I was, but he knew that without my saying it. Charlie could always read my mind. We had known each other for eighteen years. Right after he retired from the navy, I hired him as a security guard for a strip mall in National City. It was a tough area, but Big Charlie was perfect for the job. Providing security for that place had been my first contract, so Charlie had been with me since the beginning.

With what looked like a lot of pain, he lifted a hand toward the door. “Close that thing all the way, would you, John?” My name’s John Pryor, but most people call me Pry; Charlie always called me John. I shut the door, and as I came back he said, “I thought you might be Father Delaney because I asked Janey to give both of you a call. Since the rectory’s only a few blocks away, I expected him to show up first.”

“You must have forgotten my disregard for speed limits.”

He gave my little joke a quick smile — more than it deserved, really — but I could tell the niceties were over. Charlie had something on his mind. “This is better,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you first, anyway.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

He stared for a long moment at his frail, blotchy hands. Finally he shook his head and said in a weak voice, “I’m not a good man, John.”

I sat back down in the chair and leaned my forearms over the bed’s rail. “That’s crazy. You’re the best man I’ve ever known.” And I wasn’t just saying that, either. Charlie Thatcher was an honorable, unselfish man. He was a loving father and husband. He was a Boy Scout leader and a Little League coach. He spent one night a week serving soup in a shelter down on Market Street. He had been a Big brother to dozens of underprivileged kids. “Hell, Charlie,” I said, “you’re the guy that every sleazeball politician in the country pretends to be. What do you mean, you’re not a good man?”

He turned to me, and the rims of his eyes stood out red against his yellowed complexion. “I’m not, John. I wanted to be. I tried to be.” He turned his head toward the window and looked into the darkness of his large backyard. “I wanted to make up for what I had done, but there was no making up for it.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

He turned back to me, and the pain I saw in his face was not pain caused by his sickness; it came from something else. “I’m a murderer, John. Thirty-five years ago, I killed a man.”

I’m not sure how long it was before I stammered out, “You’re kidding, right?” Of course the question was so stupid, Charlie didn’t even bother to answer it.

“You’re the first person I’ve ever told. But now it’s time I tell everyone. Father Delaney—” His voice broke. “—Jane, the boys. I should have told them long before now.”

“What happened, Charlie?” I asked. I still didn’t believe him. I couldn’t picture Charlie Thatcher being a murderer; the image just wouldn’t come.

He dropped his head back to the stack of pillows behind him and stared at some spot on the ceiling. “When it happened,” he began, “I was in the navy. I was drinking in a bar in East San Diego, and for some reason — I don’t remember why — this guy wanted to fight. I was a tough kid with a hot temper, so we stepped out into the alley.”

I asked, “It happened in a fight?”

“Not really. The guy was my size or even bigger, but he wasn’t a fighter.” Charlie looked at me, and I knew what he was saying was true. “I punched him a couple of times, and he hit the ground hard, smacking the back of his head. It could’ve ended there, but something in me clicked, you know? I had this — I don’t know — this rage, and it took over. There was no stopping it. I knocked this guy down, and then I was on top of him driving my fist into his face over and over and over. When I came to my senses, I started running, and I didn’t stop until I was back at the ship. The next day I heard on the radio that the guy was dead.”

“Were you ever questioned by the police?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t know the man. There was nothing to connect me to him. I don’t even remember how the argument started in the first place. We’d only talked for maybe ten minutes in the bar, and I guess no one had noticed us. San Diego was a pretty rough place in those days, especially in that part of town. There was a story in the newspaper a couple of days later. His name was Duane Tragovic. He was a petty criminal. He’d been arrested a dozen times. There wasn’t much of an investigation. I don’t think this guy’s death was real high on the cops’ list of things to do.”

We both sat silent for a moment. “I tried to just forget about it,” Charlie finally said, “but I couldn’t. Maybe Tragovic was a criminal, but it didn’t matter what he was; what mattered was what I was, and I was a murderer.

“The paper said that Tragovic had a wife. Marlee was her name, and for some reason I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I’d not only committed a crime against Tragovic, but I had committed a crime against her as well. It got to where I couldn’t stand being in San Diego. I thought if I could get out of town, I could put this behind me, so I volunteered for duty on a river patrol boat in Vietnam.” He fixed me with his rheumy eyes. “But I could never stop thinking about it, John.” He lifted his hand and formed a fist. “Every single day for the last thirty-five years, I have remembered the feel of hitting that man — beating him. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of him and his wife. I wanted to find her and tell her how sorry I was, but I couldn’t do it. I knew if I ever found her, the truth would come out, and I couldn’t face what that would mean. Eventually I had a family of my own, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell them.” His eyes filled, and he shook his head. “I was too much of a coward to let them know what kind of a man I really am.”

As soon as he said that, he gave a gasp, and his body jerked. He clenched his eyes and sucked in a quick, shallow breath. It was clear he was in severe pain.

“Charlie,” I said, “what can I do?”

He didn’t answer. He just lay there with his eyes clasped and his teeth gritted. After a bit he seemed to relax, but when the pain passed, he looked thinner and even more frail. The angles where the sheet touched his body seemed sharper. In a matter of seconds the pain had come and gone, but when it left, it had taken a piece of Charlie with it. It seemed that there was less of him lying in front of me now than there had been only a moment before.

Slowly he rubbed his eyes, but there was a shadow there — a darkness — he could not rub away. “I tried to be good,” he said in a raspy whisper, “but it didn’t matter what kind of a man I tried to be, I could never change what I became that night so long ago.”

There was a faint rapping at the door, and a middle-aged man wearing a white clerical collar stuck in his head.

“Father Delaney,” Charlie said, “give us another second, would you?”

The man nodded. “I’ll be right out here when you’re ready.” He stepped back into the hall and closed the door.

“I need to make my confession, John.”

I stood and looked back toward the door that led into the hallway. “Sure, I’ll leave and send the priest right in.”

“No, no,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. I am going to confess to Father Delaney and to Janey and the kids, too, but that wasn’t what I meant when I said I need to make my confession. What I meant was I need to make my confession to Marlee Tragovic. I have to tell her what I did to her husband and beg her to forgive me.” He lifted his eyes to mine, and I saw the sadness that had always been there. I had seen it before, but I had never recognized it for what it was. “I want you to find her for me,” he said. “I want you to bring her here.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “My God, Charlie, it’s been thirty-five years.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and the shadow in his eyes darkened. “Thirty-five long years.” He swallowed hard. “You can do it, though, John. I have faith in you. But you better hurry. I’m not getting any younger.” Then he added with a feeble smile, “Or much older, either, for that matter.”

I avoided the freeway and went home the long way around Mission Bay, through Pacific Beach, La Jolla, and past the cliffs at Torrey Pines. The constant gear shifting, stopping, and starting provided the activity I needed to prevent myself from thinking. But as I rolled down the ramp into the underground garage at my house in Del Mar, despite my best efforts, the thoughts flooded in.

I doubted I was the right person to do the job Charlie asked. I had been out of the business for over three years, but it was more than that. This was important to Charlie, and I was afraid I would let him down.

I climbed the stairs from the garage into the house, dropped an old Crusaders CD into the player, sloshed some brandy into a glass, and sat down in front of the computer. The e-mail was the usual junk. I trashed it all and clicked on to the ‘Net. I did a search for “Marlee Tragovic” and got nothing. It didn’t surprise me, really. After so long, if she were still alive, it was likely she had remarried. Even these days, more often than not a woman took her husband’s name, and the divorce rate being what it was in the last thirty-five years, it was possible her last name had changed more than once.

The Internet was just coming into common use when I retired, and I never got to take full advantage of all the things it offered private investigators. I knew, though, that the investigations side of my old company used it extensively, and they had access to databases that I didn’t. The office was manned twenty-four hours a day, so I fired off an e-mail asking them to run a check for me. I was on my third brandy when they wrote back saying they couldn’t find anything either.

So much for the easy way.

My breakfast the next morning consisted of one poached egg, two cups of coffee, and four aspirin. The aspirin was the price I paid for drinking more than one brandy the night before.

I had no confidence in my ability to accomplish what Charlie asked, but I knew that I had to try, so I made a call to Sergeant Al Bruun, a friend of mine on the SDPD. We were the same age and had hit the streets of San Diego at about the same time. The two of us had been trading favors for years.

“Damn, Pry,” he said, “I had no idea Charlie was even sick.”

“Yeah, it came on fast.” Without mentioning Charlie’s involvement, I told him about the homicide thirty-five years earlier. He said he would have to send someone to the warehouse to scrounge around for the file, but with any luck, he could have a copy to me by the end of the day.

“Do you still have the same fax number?” Al asked. I told him I did, and we said good-bye.

After one more coffee and a fast shower, I climbed on my bike and rode into San Diego. The city had changed a lot since Charlie was a young man. In those days Broadway was lined with strip bars and clip joints. Slick guys in shiny suits would stand in front of the businesses hawking whatever scam they were trying to work on the sailors. The city fathers had cleaned that up in the ’70s and ’80s, and, as in all major U.S. cities, they had redirected their efforts to a more sophisticated kind of scam — the kind they worked on the tourists.

I rode up Broadway, and the farther east I got, the seedier things were. The city had dumped millions into cleaning up downtown, but the fringes were apparently invisible to the big-money boys, and these areas had not aged well.

Before I had left Charlie the night before, he had given me a little more information. There was still a bar where the killing had taken place. It was located in the middle of the block, and I whipped a quick U-turn and backed the rear wheel of my bike into the curb. The place was called the Silk Hat Lounge, and there was the unlit neon outline of a top hat above the front door — tacky, maybe, but still the bright spot in an even tackier neighborhood. The place wasn’t opened yet, but I could see through the window that there was a woman behind the bar counting bottles and making notations on a piece of paper.

I rapped on the window to get her attention, and she called out, “We open at eleven.”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions. It won’t take but a minute.”

She was a redhead who looked to be in her early sixties. She had melonlike breasts that threatened the stitching of her nylon blouse. She had obviously seen me pull up on my chopped Harley-Davidson. “I don’t like bikers,” she said. She flipped a backhand through the air as though shooing a fly. “Beat it.”

I dug into the pocket of my jeans and pulled out some bills. I peeled off a twenty and held it flush to the plate glass. I expect ol’ Andy Jackson had been an accomplished public speaker in his day, which was only fitting since his picture these days spoke with such eloquence. She stared at it for a moment, snuffed her cigarette, and stepped around the bar.

She wore tight, hot-pink slacks and had a surprisingly tiny waist. “One minute’s what you asked for,” she said as she opened the door, “and by a strange coincidence, that’s just what you get for a twenty.”

She reached for the bill, but I pulled it back. “This’ll be yours in sixty seconds,” I said, “assuming you’ve got something to sell.”

“What are you in the market for, biker?” She said “biker” with a sour tone.

“Information,” I said. “Do you own this place?”

She seemed wary. “Yeah, what’s it to you?”

“How long’ve you had it?”

“‘Bout fifteen years. I waited tables here for eight years before that.”

I could tell that at some point in her distant past this woman had been very attractive. Now, though, she had the kind of face that harsh morning light did not improve.

I asked who she had bought the bar from, and she said a name but added, “He only had it a couple of years. I got the place at a bargain ’cause he was forced to sell.” She gave a smile that multiplied her wrinkles by a factor of three. “He suffered from a common problem in the bar business.”

“Yeah, what’s that?” I asked.

“He drank his profits.” She dug into her front pocket and pulled out a semicrushed pack of Winstons. She lit one with a disposable lighter that was encased in a chrome holder trimmed with plastic jade. “He’d bought the bar from Parker Heath. Parker owned the place for close to thirty years. He built it right after he got back from Korea.”

Her eyes cut to the twenty.

“Now, now,” I said, “don’t get greedy. You have fifteen seconds to go. Is Mr. Heath still around?”

“That depends.”

“Let me guess. It depends on why I want to know, right?”

“You’re a real smart boy, aren’t you?” She gave me a look that communicated she might be inclined to set aside her prejudice against bikers after all. I suspected it was a look she had tossed at more than a few men over the years. When I didn’t respond, she shrugged and said, “I worked for Parker a long time. I don’t think it would be very nice of me to help just anybody hunt him down.”

“All I want is a few answers.”

She dragged deep from her smoke and exhaled through her nose. “Twenty bucks,” she pointed out, “buys a few answers, but addresses cost extra.”

I could hear Charlie’s clock ticking, and I didn’t have time to haggle. I dug out another twenty and handed her both bills. She tucked them into the pocket with her Winstons, lifted the two fingers that held her cigarette, and pointed at a spot over my left shoulder. I turned around. Across the street was a ratty apartment building, and peering down at us from a second-story window was an old man munching on a sandwich.

Parker Heath’s rooms smelled of fried baloney. When he let me in, his sandwich was half gone, and in an apparent defiance of gravity, a dollop of mayonnaise clung to the stubble on his chin. I explained that I did not want much of his time, but I needed to visit with him about something that had taken place thirty-five years before. When I said that, the width of his smile suggested he was a man who enjoyed discussing the past.

I followed him through his living room and into a small kitchen. Waggling his sandwich at one of the two vinyl-covered aluminum chairs beside the table, he said, “Have a seat.” I pulled the chair out and sat down. “You’re a lucky one,” he said as he looked through the fly-spotted window next to the table. He had a perfect view of the bar on the other side of Broadway. “Ain’t many fellas able to escape Arlene with their pants still on.” He cackled a high-pitched, old man’s laugh, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“She looks like she might’ve been a tiger in her day,” I allowed.

“In her day, hell. The sun set on her day years ago, and she’s still a tiger. I could tell you some tales about Arlene, I could.” He took a big gulp of milk from a tumbler beside his plate. “Care for some cow juice?” he asked.

“No, thanks.” I jerked my thumb toward the street. “Arlene says you used to own the bar.”

“I did. Built it with my own two hands in the summer a ’53.” He rapped his knuckles against his right temple. “Thanks to a Chinese hand grenade, the army had to stick a steel plate in my noggin. I’d been out of the hospital about six months, but I was still gettin’ dizzy spells every time I had ta climb the damned ladder.” He looked down at the bar. “I got her built, though,” he said. “I surely did.” He reached a hoary hand up and wiped the mayonnaise from his chin, then sucked it from his finger. “Sold out in ’82, but I moved in here so I could keep an eye on the place.” He directed a wistful gaze out the window. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”

“Do you remember a time, Mr. Heath, in the late ’60s when a man named Tragovic was murdered outside the bar?”

“Sure, I remember.”

“What can you tell me about that?”

He shook his head. “Not much to tell, really. Tragovic was just this runt who used to hang around; that’s all. I never liked him. No one did.”

“Do you remember seeing him the night of the murder?”

“Boy, you’re goin’ back a ways.” He popped the last of the baloney sandwich into his mouth and continued talking without slowing down. “‘Bout all I remember is someone found the body, and when the ambulance arrived, all my customers headed out to watch ’em load Tragovic up. That was maybe an hour before closing time. Once the ambulance left, everybody filed back in. I ended up selling more drinks in that last hour than I ever sold in an hour’s time before or since. I reckon death tends to make folks thirsty.”

“Was Tragovic talking to anyone that night that you recall — maybe involved in some kind of an argument with a sailor?”

He dug his pinky into his ear and then gave a close inspection to whatever it was he fished out. “I remember the cops asking me that same question the next day. From what I heard, there was some winos sharing a bottle on the street corner who said they had seen a sailor beatin’ the hell out of some guy in the alley out back. But, no, I never knew anything was going on. Fights’d happen from time to time. That was just the nature of the business. Hell, sailors were in and out a lot, ‘specially then what with Vietnam and all.”

“I understand Tragovic was married.”

“Yep, he was. His wife came in some, not much, though. She wasn’t old enough to drink, which is just as well. Tragovic was the sort of fella who’d use what little drinking money they had on hisself, I’m sure. I don’t recall much about her, ’cept she was a mousey little thing. Pretty, I think, but timid, like.”

“Whatever became of her? Do you know?”

He gave his head a slow shake. “I’ve got no idea.” He peered again through the window. “She’s just one a the many that came and went.” A somber cast settled across the old man’s brow. “There was thousands of ’em I knew over the years,” he said. “Thousands.” After a bit, he cleared his throat and turned back to me. With a frown he added, “I don’t even remember her name.”

“Marlee,” I said.

“Was that it? Hell, you coulda fooled me. I do remember she had a couplea brothers who were regulars for a while there. Likable fellas, too, as I recall.”

“Do you remember their names?”

He scratched the spot where the army had installed the steel plate. “Boy,” he said, “you make a fella shake the dust off, don’t ya?”

“Anything you could remember would help.”

He pondered it for a moment, then the edges of his mouth crinkled into a smile. “Abbott and Costello,” he said.

“Abbott and Costello?”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone used to call ’em ’cause their real names was Bud and Lou. Get it? Abbott and Costello.”

I nodded. “Sure, I get it. The old comedy team. Do you remember a last name?”

“A last name, huh? Now that’s tougher, ain’t it?” He gave a long pause, then turned to face me with a sly look on his face. I started to dig into my pocket for another one of the twenties that had worked so well on Arlene across the street. Before I could pull it out, though, Heath smiled and said, “I don’t want your money.” He then told me the name, and when he did, I realized his long pause was just an old bartender’s skill at building a little suspense. He was a man who had shared thousands of chats over the years, and he knew how to make a conversation interesting. “Bickman,” he said. “Bud and Lou Bickman. If you don’t mind me askin’, why is it that you are rummaging around so deep in the long ago?”

I shrugged. “I’m just trying to do a favor for a friend.”

“A friend,” he said, and with a nod, he added, “That’s good.”

Even though some of what the old man said didn’t add up, it was clear he’d told me all he knew. I had to ask, anyway. “Is there anything else you can remember? I’d like to find Marlee, if I could.”

“Find her, huh? I expect the trail’s damned cold after thirty-five years.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “it is.”

“There’s nothin’ more I can tell you,” he said. “People come along, and then they’re gone. That’s just the way it works. You never see ’em again.”

I pushed away from the table and stood. “Well, thanks. Mr. Heath, you’ve been a lot of help. I appreciate it.”

“They come then go. That’s what they do — come and go.”

I let myself out, and just before I shut the apartment door, I thanked him again. I don’t think he heard me, though. He didn’t respond. He just sat there drinking his milk and staring out the window at the Silk Hat Lounge.

I called directory assistance on my cell phone. There was a Louis Bickman listed in El Cajon. I got both the address and phone number, but I decided to ride out rather than call. I fired up the Harley, made my way to the freeway, and headed east.

The Bickman residence was a small but tidy place on the outskirts of town. As I pushed the button for the doorbell, I thought I could hear the sound of a television game show coming from somewhere in the house, but no one answered, and I wrote a note saying if the Louis Bickman at this residence had a sister named Marlee, to please give me a call. I said I wished to discuss with her the death of her husband, Duane Tragovic. I gave my name, address, and phone number. I closed the note by writing, “This is an urgent matter. I need to speak to Mrs. Tragovic right away. Please call as soon as possible.”

I tucked the note into the Bickman mailbox, climbed on my bike, and headed home.

I noticed Al Bruun’s fax when I dropped the chopper’s keys onto my computer desk. It consisted of six pages that I could tell had been originally produced by a manual typewriter. Some of the letters were darker or slightly higher on the line than others. It was a nostalgic reminder of a less polished time. The light was flashing on the answering machine, so I pushed “play,” and as the tape rewound, I scanned the three-and-a-half-decade-old file on the homicide of Duane Tragovic.

“Hi-ya, Pry,” said the tinny voice that came from the answering machine’s speaker, “this is Al. I just faxed you what we had on that case you asked about. As you can see from the report, they didn’t have much. One of the bar patrons called for an ambulance, but the guy was dead when they showed up. A half-dozen winos had seen a sailor beating on someone earlier that evening. The uniformed boys interviewed as many of the winos as they could round up, but they didn’t get much info. Homicide detectives asked a few questions around the neighborhood over the course of the next day or so, but there were no leads. Tragovic had a wife. She was young, only seventeen years old, and apparently pretty hysterical over her husband’s killing. They questioned her, of course, but didn’t get much from her, either. She said she didn’t know any sailors, and as far as she knew, neither did her husband. They kept the file open, but there was nothing to go on, and it doesn’t look like they ever did much more with it. I sent along a copy of Tragovic’s rap sheet. You can tell by his record that he must have been a real sweetie-pie. I expect the guys doing the investigation knew him pretty well, and it doesn’t look like they killed themselves working the case. I also sent along the autopsy report. No surprises there. The mechanism of death was a fractured skull.

“I know it’s not much, but it’s all we have. If you need anything else, just give me a call. And tell Charlie we’re pulling for him.” The machine clicked to a stop.

I took what Al had faxed outside to the deck that overlooked the beach. I dropped into a chair, slipped off my boots, and propped my feet on the rail. It didn’t take long to read the little that was there, but when I was finished, my palms were sweating and there was a lump in my throat the size of a softball.

I lay the pages in my lap and looked toward the water. There was a young die-hard on a surfboard a few hundred feet out doing his best to snag one of the pathetic waves that stumbled toward shore. He was a very small man — tiny, really; the board was much too big for him, and despite all his effort, he wasn’t having any luck. I watched for a while; then I picked up the papers and reread that portion of Tragovic’s autopsy report that described the deceased.

I gave Lou Bickman until six o’clock that night to call; when he didn’t, I set my telephone to forward calls to my cellular in case he tried while I was out, and I headed back to El Cajon. I parked in front of the Bickman house and made my way up the cracked walk. There was a pickup truck in the carport, and I could hear voices coming from the open windows that lined the front of the house. They must have heard me climb the three steps to the small stoop because the voices went silent, and just as I raised my hand to ring the bell, a large man came to the door.

“What do you want?” he asked. He had wide, heavy shoulders and a neck as thick as my thigh.

I heard a soft voice from behind him say, “It’s him, isn’t it, Louis?”

“It’s okay,” the man said over his shoulder. “I’ll take care of this.” The man was at least two inches taller than my six-one, and he must have outweighed me by sixty pounds. “What’s on your mind, mister?” he asked.

“I’m John Pryor,” I said. “I’m the guy who left the note in your mailbox this afternoon. I’m looking for a woman by the name of Marlee Tragovic.” It was a long shot, but I decided to play a quick bluff. “I know you’re her brother, Mr. Bickman. I’d like to talk to her about the death of her husband back in the 1960s.” I could tell by the expression that hit his face that I had found the right man. “I don’t mean you or your family any harm. I just need to find your sister; that’s all.”

The voice spoke again. “Please, Louis, let him in.”

He turned in the doorway, and I got a look at the woman behind him. If she was who I thought she was, she couldn’t have been more than fifty-two, but she looked a decade older. She was thin and frail, and she leaned with both hands on an aluminum walker. “You gotta trust me,” Bickman said. “This is a bad idea.”

Her voice had an even, resigned tone. “You’ve been a good brother, Louis, but, please, just let the man in.”

Bickman hesitated, but finally he moved back, and I stepped into the house.

“Have a seat,” the woman said. She motioned toward a couch across the room, and I sat down. She was wearing a terrycloth bathrobe, and she pulled it tighter around her slight frame. She touched her limp hair and said, “I have a back problem. Sometimes it’s worse than others.” I took this as an excuse for her appearance. “It’s been very bad lately,” she added as she eased herself into a chair across from the couch. Bickman continued to stand at the front door, his large arms folded across his chest.

“Your name is Marlee, isn’t it?”

She held the lapels of the robe so tightly her knuckles were white. “Yes,” she said.

“Is it still Tragovic?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said again. “I never married after Duane.”

I glanced across the room at Bickman. “Where’s Bud?” I asked.

“We don’t have to talk to this man, Marlee.”

“I know, but it’s okay. Bud died of a heart attack in 1983,” she said. “Why are you here, Mr. Pryor? What is it you want?”

“What I don’t want is to hurt you, Mrs. Tragovic. If it wasn’t for a friend of mine, I would not be here at all. I think I understand what happened to your husband, some of it, anyway.”

“It’s been a long time,” she said. “It’s been a lifetime.”

I waited for her to offer more; when she didn’t, I said, “Duane Tragovic was a difficult man to live with, wasn’t he?”

She didn’t speak; she just gave a quick nod.

“He used to hurt you.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“I’ve seen his record, Mrs. Tragovic. He was charged a half-dozen times with battery against you. Twice he served jail time for it, but he didn’t stop, did he?”

She shook her head.

“Finally he did it once too often, and either you or one of your brothers killed him.”

Bickman’s arms came unfolded, and he moved to the center of the room. “Marlee, you do not have to talk to this man. You don’t have to tell him a thing.” He turned to me and came to the couch. Looking down, he said, “I don’t know who the hell you think you are coming in here like this.”

“I’m not the police, Mr. Bickman. I don’t intend to go to the police. I’m here for my friend, nothing more. I’ve read the reports, Mrs. Tragovic, and what I think happened is that your husband was not killed in the alley behind the Silk Hat Lounge as everyone assumed at the time. I think he was dumped there by your brothers.” I looked at Bickman. “How big was Bud, Mr. Bickman?”

He hesitated but finally answered. “I don’t know. Five-eight, five-nine. Hundred and seventy-five pounds.”

I nodded. “I believe that you and your brother wanted to throw the police off. To do that, one of you — and I think it was you, Mr. Bickman — picked a fight with a young, drunk sailor. You wanted the fight to be witnessed, but you also knew who those witnesses would be, and you were confident that they would not be able to give the police a very good accounting of what happened.”

The big man stood silent, staring down at me, his eyes wide and unblinking.

“You picked a fight, Mr. Bickman, but it was never your intention to win that fight. You just wanted the winos to see someone getting worked over in that alley, and when Tragovic’s body was found, the police would look for a sailor.”

“You have no way of knowing that,” Bickman said, but he said it softly, without force.

“The sailor you picked for your fight was my friend. He explained to me that the man he fought that night was big, but according to the fella who owned the Silk Hat at the time, Duane Tragovic was a runt. The autopsy report put him at five-foot-four and a hundred and forty pounds. My friend said he hit the man repeatedly in the face, but Tragovic had no injuries to his face. The only injury he had was to the back of the skull, as though he had banged his head against the pavement in a fight, or—” I looked to Marlee Tragovic. “— maybe someone hit him with something from behind.”

“He’s guessing, Marlee,” Bickman said.

Marlee whispered, “He’s a good guesser, though, isn’t he, Lou?” When she said that, a rush of air escaped from the big man, and he dropped, deflated, to the couch. We were all silent for a long moment.

It was Bickman who broke the silence. “All right, smart guy,” he said, “I killed the son of a bitch. You figured it out. Good work.”

“Oh, stop, Louis,” Marlee said. “Just stop it. You and Bud have taken care of me all my life, even to the point where you had no lives of your own, but it’s time I faced what happened.” She turned to me. “My brothers would do anything for me, Mr. Pryor. They devoted themselves to me. They would have gladly killed Duane — Bud even threatened to more than once — but they didn’t. I did. I was only seventeen, but every time I moved, I ached from Duane’s beatings. He would hit me in the small of the back where it was particularly painful, but where the marks wouldn’t show. The last time was especially bad, and I have never recovered from it. I’ve lived in constant pain all these years because of that last beating. But it was the last beating, Mr. Pryor. When Duane turned his back, I took a saucepan from the kitchen counter, and I hit him. I just hit him once, but I hit him hard. When I realized he was dead, I called my brothers. They said they would take care of it, and they did. They took care of it then, and together they’ve taken care of me ever since.” She reached over and placed her small hand on her brother’s massive forearm. “When one passed on,” she added, “the other took care of me by himself.”

I nodded and offered a smile that I hoped would show them both that I understood.

Bickman ran his thick fingers through his hair and asked, “What is it you want?”

When he asked that, I turned to his sister and explained what I needed her to do.

Bickman had to carry Marlee up to Charlie’s room. She’d had three back surgeries over the years, and it was impossible for her to climb stairs. She lived in constant pain, but both Marlee and her brother agreed that it was a miracle she could still walk at all. Once we were on the landing, Bickman put her down.

“Let me go in first,” Janey said. “I’ll tell him that you’re here, Pry, and that you need to see him.” The puffiness in Jane’s face was even more pronounced than it had been the night before. She knocked once on the closed door and stepped inside.

“I’ve got to do this alone, now, Lou,” Marlee said. “You wait with Mrs. Thatcher and don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” Bickman still seemed reluctant to have anything to do with this, but it was clear he was devoted to his sister.

When Janey came back out, she was crying openly. I guessed she had stopped trying to hide her tears from Charlie. “Don’t be too long, Pry. He took a turn for the worse today.”

I nodded, and she and Bickman started down the stairs. I faced Marlee. “Are you ready?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. And she did seem ready. She even seemed eager.

I put my hand against the door, but before I pushed it open, I said, “This will mean everything to Charlie.”

A wisp of a smile tugged at her mouth. “It’s funny, isn’t it? He was going to make his confession to me, but as it turns out, it’ll be the other way around.”

“I want to thank you. He’s spent his life carrying the guilt of this thing.”

Marlee’s eyes brimmed with tears. “And guilt is a heavy burden,” she said. “Believe me, Mr. Pryor, I know.”