The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

Isak Romun The Grabber

Isak Romun is former infantryman, paratrooper, airdrop specialist, and program officer in the U.S. Army. He retired in 1965 and joined the Federal Civil Service, first as a public affairs miter and then as a supervisory education specialist. He presently oversees a publication group at the U.S. Army Quartermaster School, Fort Lee, Virginia, and teaches fiction writing at Christopher Newport College and John Tyler Community College. His first story was published in 1975, and five of his stories have made the Honor Role of the Yearbook of the Mystery and Suspense Story.

Police bullets put an end to the Grabber. But not before he scratched the number six three times across the wall of the room he holed up in. A plainclothesman, viewing the sixes, pronounced them one number: 666.

I don’t know why I got up at three o’clock on that miserably cold morning and went out there. The Grabber and the kids he left half dead or wanting to die were news beat, I was features. Mine was a nine-to-five kind of existence. The Grabber, a ski-masked, leather-jacketed brute specializing in assaults on lone, teenage girls, didn’t interest me particularly.

I had, of course, gotten myself involved in news stories before; after all, I was a newspaperman. But I was only interested if I could view a news story as the seed source for the kind of in-depth writing I was paid to do. I made the mistake of casually mentioning that the Grabber story might meet my specifications. One of the news people overheard me. Accordingly, the three o’clock call.

“Monahan, interested in the Grabber?” he asked, then didn’t wait for an answer. “He got number six tonight. And her boyfriend. Better move it if you want to beat the ambulance here.”

He told me where “here” was and I pulled myself to a sitting position in bed. For about a minute I fought between getting up and remaining in the warmth of the bed. Then I thought, even if I didn’t want this one, not showing up might cut off future leads from the news lads. So, I got up, dressed, and went out there.

Recollecting now, from the perspective of the present, I wish I had fallen back upon my pillow.

I did beat the ambulance, which didn’t surprise me. The Paulsburg ambulance service wasn’t noted for speed, but that night I think the driver was going in reverse.

What I saw was a nightmare scene. Cops and reporters were falling over each other. A bank of black-and-whites was drawn up, batteries slowly draining as high beams threw light on the area, pure white light striped blood red every second or so by the still-revolving lamps on the car tops.

The lights illumined the scene with a kind of staggering intensity. Everything was thrown into high, two-dimensional relief. You had the impression of looking at a very old movie, a movie of stiff figures in swift, articulated movement. Order was demolished. I looked on everything at once as if, as Chesterton wrote, a hundred windows opened on all sides of my head.

Later, I couldn’t recall the sequence of the things I saw: the dazed boy saying he knew nothing, he was hit from behind (“No, nothing hard”) by a blow delivered with numbing force and perhaps chance accuracy (“He must have hit a nerve”); the girl, alive but unconscious, bruised about the face, oddly passionless, lying on her back as the police found her, woolen cap down around her ears, winter coat buttoned up, collar drawn about her neck, gloved hands joined suggesting an attitude of prayer, like the effigy of a medieval queen surmounting her crypt; a cop running to his car, belatedly thinking of a blanket; the father coming upon the scene, looking once at his daughter, then turning to a nearby tree and pounding the tree as if he had the Grabber in front of him, pounding the tree until his fists were bloody knots of torn flesh; a cop trying to coax him away from the tree; and, finally, another cop attempting to explain that it looked like she was only beat up good and not the other — the Grabber must have been scared off — and pretty soon the ambulance would arrive.

The ambulance came. I must have been at the scene only two or three minutes. But I had seen a lot — those windows opening. There was scribbling over three pages of my notebook which included the girl’s name, Mea Gahn, which I couldn’t use because she was underage. Perhaps, I thought, I’ll keep on this.

The next day, my editor approved the story and I made two calls. One was to the Gahn house. I got an okay to come over later that morning. The other was to police headquarters. I asked for Lieutenant Brosnan. The desk sergeant told me Brosnan had stepped out for coffee. I knew where Brosnan got his coffee. The White House wasn’t far from the newspaper, so I walked it.

I got through the door in time to see him squeegeeing a moustache of foam from his upper lip. On the bar in front of him were an empty glass, a saucer holding an egg, and a half-full bowl of small pretzels. He said, “Join me?”

“It’s a little early for beer.”

“Beer? I came out for coffee.” Brosnan tapped the empty glass and the bartender refilled it, cut the head, then let another half inch or so of liquid run slowly into the glass.

I always hated to see Brosnan. He was bigger than I and as heavy. He ate and drank to what would be excess for me. Yet every inch of his body was rock hard, except his head. He projected a fumbling massiveness that put crooks off guard just long enough for him to snap on the cuffs. Brosnan was tough and bright and given to a droop-lipped jocularity which didn’t hide the fact that he’d been around a long time and probably seen too much.

“What brings you to the Oval Office?” he said mirthlessly. He picked up the egg, cracked it, pulled away the shell, and popped it in his mouth. Then he drank off the beer, but I swear he swallowed the egg whole.

“I’m doing a story on the Grabber,” I told him. “On the victims, that is.”

“So, read the papers. You guys know as much as we do.” He saw objection brimming to the surface. “No, I mean it, Monahan. We’re shooting blanks on this one. Those reassuring public statements we make now and then are not progress reports as much as they’re desperate attempts to stave off a wholesale firing.”

He grew thoughtful. Then he gave a decisive grunt and said, “There is something. Two conditions and you get this gem: One, it’s off the record, and two—” he looked wistfully at his glass like a kid who’s just been told the penny-candy counter is out of marshmallow twists — “as our Gaelic forebears would say, it’s hard to sing with an empty cup.”

“That’s a glass you have there.”

“I use the term generically, perhaps symbolically. The cup that cheers?”

“And numbs.”

“Mercifully, that too.”

I signaled the bartender and threw a bill on the bar. “So?”

“Here it is.” Brosnan drew near and said in a low voice, “He called last night. That’s a first. That’s how we knew where to find the Gahn girl. Some bombhead took the call and didn’t snap on the recorder.”

“That’s against the law unless the caller knows.”

“Wow! I’ll bet it is at that.”

“That’s it? That’s the big news?”

“That, I’m afraid, is it. You can’t use it, but maybe it’ll give you some insight into the character of this bird. And, remember, nobody knows about it except you, me, and a couple of bluecoats.”

I gestured at the beer the bartender had just served. “Can I get a refund?” Then I turned and walked toward the door. Brosnan threw a pretzel. It beat me to the door.

The Gahn house was in a better, not the best, part of Paulsburg. It was one of those neighborhoods where the houses look as if they have everything in common even though their plans are different. All the lawns are a uniform two-inch cut of greenness, the Buick’s in the garage and the Ford’s pulled up in the driveway, and inside the house some ugly, middle-class things are often going on.

The mother answered the door. When I introduced myself, she held out a dark hand with a quick motion that spoke of latent vigor, of some remembered urge to challenge. A faint odor of Emeraude hung in the space between us. She was a handsome woman, and you could see in her handsome face that somewhere in the past she had traded off beautiful for handsome. After the handshake, and under my scrutiny, she brushed nervously at her hair, black hair with strands of gray not quite combed under the black.

“I don’t know, Mr. Monahan,” she said in a washed-out voice. “We told the reporters everything…” Her voice trailed off.

I’d be put out if a newspaperman showed up on my doorstep the day after my daughter was beat up bad enough to go to the hospital. But she forced a smile. It was a small, soft, tepid smile, the kind you produce when you’re running at about half power. It contrasted with a tightness around her eyes, almost producing a squint, as if she were looking for something in the distance.

I went into my line about what I did on the Advance-lndicator, emphasizing I wasn’t a reporter. “No pictures, no names, no gawking crowds on your perfect lawn. Fm writing a story about feelings, and hurt, and impact.” It sounded so glib, I was encouraged to go on. “You’ll all be perfectly anonymous.” (As if there were degrees of anonymity!)

We were interrupted by a sharp, angular voice from inside the house. “Who’s it, Sue?”

She looked in the direction of the voice and I saw her deep brown eyes narrow and her forehead take on furrows. “The newspaper. The man from the newspaper.”

“Bring ’im in!”

She stood aside and I walked past her into a foyer. She closed the door, dodged around me, and led me into what I guessed was the house’s living room. Everything in it was bright and crisp, and obscurely depressing. Except for a wing chair, the furniture pieces were straight and spindly and modem and looked as if they had just been called to attention. There was the de rigueur television console along one wall, floor-to-ceiling bookcases along another. The books on the shelves appeared to be divided about evenly between military and historical titles at one end and fiction and poetry at the other. The first group of books looked spanking new, as if they had just been unboxed; the other group, the fiction and poetry, had tom or missing dust covers, and some looked as if their spines were broken. There was a selection of bookless shelves used to display trophies and a number of small figures and plaques of the type given to departing members of organizations, a custom associated more with protocol than affection. The dominant feature of the room was a large framed poster showing Douglas MacArthur’s beat-up Filipino marshal’s hat with the words “Duty — Honor — Country” below it, and below these, in smaller type, a number of MacArthur quotes. Around the poster were about ten smaller frames housing newspaper clippings and certificates for awards, honorable retirement, and varying species of patriotism, all earned by one Lt. Col. Arthur W. B. Gahn.

Who, I presumed, was standing now, back to his wife and me, looking up at the poster. His arms were behind him, the hands, bandaged, resting lightly on his buttocks.

His wife introduced me to his back.

Arthur Gahn made a slow, precise about-face and I saw the small, black-haired, middle-aged man I had seen the previous night. He had a reddish, shrunken, almost shriveled face, keen eyes, and a slight, wiry body like that of a terrier ready to spring. He wore a sweater with an outline of stitches on it where an alligator patch had been.

Gahn stuck out one of his bandaged hands, drew it back, then held up both of them so I could get a good look at the wrappings. I had the feeling I was supposed to admire them, gaze at them interestedly, as if reading an inscription on one of his trophies.

He asked, “What do you call fighting a tree, Mr. Monahan?”

“I call it a losing battle.”

At the last word, his face glowed. I thought, Ah, the old warrior.

“When I saw Mea lying there, I had to whack out at something. I’d’ve liked it to be the Grabber. Maybe some day. Meanwhile, the tree was handy.”

Sue Gahn saw me take out my notebook and pen. She touched her husband’s sleeve cautiously. “Arthur, I think Mr. Monahan wants to start.”

“I’m ready,” he said and pointed to one of the spindly chairs. I lowered my well-fed frame into it and was grateful it didn’t wrestle me to the floor. Gahn got lost in the wing chair’s overgrown upholstery which, in the midst of the unsubstantial-looking pieces around it, reminded me of a throne. On a small table beside him, a corncob pipe rested amidst half-burned dottle in a stoneware ashtray. In back of the ashtray was a stained, visored cap. A tall glass held the remains of a drink that looked as if it had once been a mint julep. Sue Gahn stood above and a little behind her husband’s chair, attentive, her hands over a sheathed bosom that resembled a sail under wind.

“Well, Colonel,” I said, and his face told me I picked the right word, “I know quite a bit already. I was at the site last night, I’ve got information from the reporters and police, and I know about the Grabber’s call to the police. So, I have most of the details. Names are out, of course, in a story like this—”

“Why?” he asked, a little crestfallen.

“To protect your daughter, Mea. She’s a minor. That’s the law in this state.”

“I see,” he said and added, “Well, she’s almost eighteen.”

“Will I be able to talk to her?”

“She’s still in the hospital, but when she comes out—”

“Arthur, do we have to?”

Gahn looked at his wife as though she’d been using four-letter words in church. “Nothing wrong at all,” he snapped. “She’ll probably gain from the experience as I dearly hope she will gain from the experience of last night.”

Sue Gahn lapsed into silence and I forged ahead. “I guess my first question is, What was she doing out so late? You say she’s seventeen?”

“Almost eighteen.” He looked up and back at his wife and she looked down at him. His mouth was half open like a baby bird’s waiting for a worm to drop in. “You take over on that one,” he commanded.

“Mea is an only child and a little headstrong,” Sue Gahn began, seeming to ignore the dissenting harrumph from the chair below her. “Since this will be perfectly anonymous—” I didn’t miss the echo of my own words — “I suppose I can tell you that she had been sneaking out at night. Working out her wildness, I guess, though I’m not at all sure there was that much wildness to work out.” Another harrumph. “The colonel had been going out after her and bringing her back. Last night he didn’t find her.”

I looked at him. “Let’s see, you went out last night after she’d gone. How did you know she went out?”

“Sue heard the downstairs door click. It woke her. She woke me and I dressed, took the Buick, and drove around town looking for her. And never found her. Would that I had.”

“Then you came back here and later got the police call?”

“No. I phoned home to see if Mea had come back and Sue told me what happened. And where to go.”

I went on asking questions and he answering them. Once in a while he’d field a question to his wife, then he’d take over again. I don’t know when it hit me that I regretted the three o’clock call, regretted seeing that poor kid laid out on the ground, regretted going out there to the Gahns, regretted all I had seen and heard there. Suddenly, I had a numbing distaste for this story, didn’t want any part of it. Besides, I wasn’t asking the right questions and wasn’t listening to the answers. I wanted to get out of there, away from Colonel Gahn and General MacArthur, away from that aura of dominance and subservience.

I toughed it out for another fifteen minutes or so, asking questions and pretending to be interested in the answers. I filled my notebook with squiggles and tried hard to hang on every word of Gahn’s — or seem to. I must have been convincing because when I snapped my notebook shut and said I had all I needed, he asked, “When will it be in the paper?”

I almost laughed in his anxious, shrunken face. I made up some quick-fix fiction about editorial review, space requirements, legal overview, the need to contact the families of other victims. By the time I finished, I think I convinced him it might be a good long while before my story saw print, if ever. I could read his disappointment.

“I just don’t understand,” he said with great earnestness and looked at his wife, who seemed preoccupied with the titles of the shelved books. “When it does come out, will you send me some extra copies of the paper?”

“Oh, yes, we do that automatically.” And with that last lie, I let Sue Gahn show me out. He called after her, Take Mr. Monahan around the grounds, Sue.”

The grounds weren’t anything to write home about and she scarcely paid attention to them. We walked toward the backyard along a paved driveway. When we came to the parked Ford, she went around one side and I the other. We came together in front of the car.

I hadn’t fooled her. “You’re not going to write it, are you?”

“No.”

“I’m glad to hear that. People around here—” she gave a little shrug of distaste — “they’d know, they’d talk. Even now, they’ll find out somehow. Anyway, whatever happens, I’ll know I didn’t have to buy your silence.” She gave me a full-faced stare.

I knew that look. I push a lot of doorbells. It was the look of someone rattling the cage; of someone who rushes to the front door when the bell rings hoping the world is calling. Sometimes it takes a crisis, like this thing with Mea, to produce that look. Other times it just happens. I wasn’t happy with the thought that I hardly mattered. I just happened to push her door bell. If not me, maybe a salesman.

“Do you have a first name?” she asked. “You use initials in your column. What’s the first one, the O, stand for?”

Everyone wants to know what the О stands for, and that doesn’t thrill me. But she apparently wanted to drop the formality of Mister and couldn’t very well call me Monahan, so I said, “Oscar. The О stands for Oscar.”

She was silent awhile, then said, “That’s a strong name. I like a man to have a strong name. My first name is really Suleika.”

“A beautiful name like that and he calls you Sue?”

“More WASPish. I used to think it was cute. Are you married, Oscar?”

“I was.”

“Divorce?”

“Death.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a lot of years ago.”

We were walking toward an antique birdbath shielded from the house by the garage. She grasped my hand to guide me. Something charged up my arm.

She asked, “Will they ever catch him?”

“The Grabber? If he gets careless.”

“I wonder what he’ll say when they catch him.”

And so it went. A tour of the yard. A gentle give and take. Some ordinary language cloaking extraordinary feelings. When we came in line with the house, she dropped my hand and I realized we had been in physical contact up to then. The naturalness of it had muted my consciousness of it.

“I wonder how the warrior will take it,” I said, “not seeing the story in the paper.”

“The warrior?”

I nodded toward the house.

“That’s rich,” she said, and gave a ladylike snort. “That’s very rich. How’ll he take it? Oh, he’ll blow his top and maybe bear down on me and even Mea. He might even call up the paper.” Then a new thought came to her. “He’d better be careful. He got out on disability. She touched her left breast, but in a funny way, with her hand cupped under it as if supporting it. Or offering it. “That’s the heart you see in his face.”

And then we heard him calling, the distant assertiveness of an off-stage horn. She looked warily at the house, then pulled my head down and kissed me full on the lips.

There was everything in that kiss: passion, hunger, longing, promise. When she was through with my lips she drew back and lightly touched them with two fingers.

“I read somewhere,” she said, “it takes practice to kiss like that, like a beginner.”

“Practice has nothing to do with it,” I said.

At the back door, she said, “I’d like to see you again.”

I looked at her, not just a handsome woman, but a woman capable of the full expression of her feelings. Maybe she was seeking rescue from this outpost of whoredom: the unloved on top of the unloved. There was something about her that legitimized what she was doing.

Then I looked at the flip side. There was every indication she wanted more than a lover, probably a confessor or maybe just a big ear. I thought of being privy to every secret in that house, of knowing every niggling mean-spirited thing that went on in it. Aside from all the right considerations, the wages of sin, in this case, would be boredom. I decided to make some salesman happy.

“Well, Oscar?”

I felt like a kid whose path to First Communion is strewn with demons. “I wouldn’t want to do anything—” I stumbled over the word, then expelled it like a ball of phlegm — “bad.”

“Bad, Oscar?” she said, laughing. “You writers. The magic of words. I’m giddy.” Her laughter had a surface ripple that didn’t do much to hide the scorn beneath.

Then she went into the house.

His voice was the last thing I heard as I walked down the driveway. He was alternately shouting and whining. “Where have you been? You know I can’t do for myself with these hands.” Then softly, “He’ll write it?”

My editor was ticked off when I came back empty-handed, but he didn’t reassign the story. No one wrote it. A month or so later, I got a call from the colonel asking about it. I told him it had been killed, and dumped all the blame on my editor. I told my editor afterwards, in case Gahn called him. He took it with a measure of expected bad grace. On a newspaper, it’s the editor who wears the flak suit.

The Grabber went into a period of inactivity, and then, about a year later, struck once more. He assaulted and raped a girl who was going home alone. I kept a distance from the story, expressed no interest in the Grabber or his victim.

Then Brosnan called me. “He’s come out of the woodwork,” he said. “Number seven.”

“So I heard.”

“He picked on the wrong kid this time. She fought back. Hard. Ripped off the ski-mask. Made a positive ID. A squad s gone to get him. I’m leaving now. Want to come?”

Hit with a question like that, a newsman’s reflexes take over. I forgot that just before Brosnan’s call I didn’t want to hear a thing about the Grabber. I said, “Pick me up!”

We got there quickly. But it was too late. As Brosnan eased his car, portable flasher going, next to a black-and-white, the popping of rifle shots above us followed by a heavy silence told us it was over. A uniformed arm signaled from a third-floor window and, on the street, cops got up from behind parked cars, put bullhorns and special weapons into the trunks of the cars, and began talking to each other in that hushed way we do when death is around.

After a while, a middle-aged plainclothesman came toward Brosnan. He was pale and it didn’t look like that was his natural color. As he got nearer, he visibly straightened up so that by the time he got to Brosnan he was almost jaunty.

“So, Dempsey?” Brosnan said.

“He got it in a room up there, Lieutenant. Something interesting up there in that room. I could show it to you.”

“Please do,” Brosnan said, and then to me, “Let’s go, Monahan.”

We followed Dempsey into the apartment building. It was the kind of place that had never seen better days. All its days had been the same, sad and hard. We got in a rickety elevator that made me feel glad when its door opened on the third floor. We walked down a hall to an apartment.

In the apartment, we went to the living room. This was where the Grabber made his stand. His last stand. Already someone had thrown a covering, a uniform jacket, over the upper part of the body. I expected Brosnan to bend down, lift the jacket, and look at the Grabber’s face. He didn’t. All he did was ask Dempsey, “Sure he’s the right one?”

“He checks. Also, he resisted.” Dempsey pointed to a wicked-looking automatic on the floor in one of the comers. “We’re leaving it there for the technicians.”

“Very wise,” Brosnan said. He nodded at the wall opposite the double windows fronting the street. “I guess that’s your interesting thing?”

“Yes, sir,” Dempsey said. “Notice, they’re not on a line, but they’re pretty close together. Six-six-six. You see?”

“Why don’t you tell me.”

Dempsey flashed a wide smile, trying hard to keep it from growing into a grin. “Apocalypse. Revelation. Six-six-six — the sign of the beast. The Grabber identified with the devil. Maybe he thought he was a demon or the beast.”

“I have it now,” Brosnan said, looking down benignly at his man. “That explains those numbers — that number. Sounds great, Dempsey. Make sure you get that into your report. Off you go now.”

When Dempsey left, exit beaming, Brosnan turned back to the wall and looked at the three sixes. I did too. They didn’t look altogether that close to me.

I said to Brosnan, “The sign of the beast? You believe that?”

Brosnan kept his eyes on the numbers. “Monahan, you’re confusing belief with acceptance. Belief is a fringe benefit. Acceptance is what closes the books. I wouldn’t want you to quote me.”

“Not to worry,” I said. “Acceptance also makes good copy.”

Back in my office, I got right on the story, maybe the easiest I ever wrote. It was a good piece and pointed up the distance between what a feature writer does and what a reporter extrudes from his typewriter. When my editor read it, his eyebrows went up, a sign he liked it. Without comment, he blocked in space for it in the evening edition.

My work done, I decided to call Arthur Gahn and give him the news. She answered the phone. I told her who I was and asked for the colonel.

“He died, Oscar. The notice was in your paper. Don’t you read it?”

“Only the poets’ corner and the funnies.”

“Why did you call?”

“The Grabber was killed. About an hour ago or so.”

“I’d like to talk to you about that, but I don’t have much time.” There was a five-second pause, long enough for her to look at her watch and figure out just how much time she did have. “I’m taking flight six-sixteen to Chicago tonight. Is there someplace I could meet you for a drink beforehand?”

I told her how to get to the White House and she said, okay, she’d be there in about ten minutes.

The White House had a small lounge at its rear. I waited for Suleika at the front entrance and when she showed up took her back there. We found a table and sat down. A waitress transferred some dampness from a cloth to the table surface and waited for our orders. I got a beer. Suleika ordered one of those things with fruit and a parasol and a colored straw, a little floor show atop a glass.

I drank off half my beer in a healthy gulp and wiped the liquid off my lips with two fingers. She sipped noiselessly through her straw, dabbed at her mouth with a flimsy cocktail napkin. With both of us reinforced, I told her of the events earlier that day, of what the police and papers would call the Grabber’s seventh and last assault.

“What if I told you it’s only six?” she asked abruptly.

“I’d believe you.”

“You would? Why?”

“I guess you know why. Except for being battered, there wasn’t much else done to Mea. That wasn’t like the Grabber, he always had the ultimate fun. Mea’s coat was neatly buttoned. She had a wool cap pulled down on her head. Her gloves were on her hands. All of this as if to protect her from the cold. If it had been the Grabber, it would have been very different. Mea would have been lucky to have any clothes on at all. She was with someone. The five girls before her and the one after were alone. And today, those sixes, the Grabber was telling us something and it wasn’t something out of the Bible, which I doubt he knew an awful lot about anyway. He was telling us his score was six, not seven. Finally, that day at your house, when I let slip about the Grabber’s phone call, neither of you showed any interest. I figure the colonel must have made it and told you the Grabber did. But the cops didn’t give out that information.”

She picked up her drink and sucked fiercely. With most of the liquid gone, the straw made a dry, rattling sound as it pursued the remains. She put the glass down, picked up the miniature parasol and twirled it between two fingers, the same two fingers that touched my lips the year before. She hadn’t dabbed at her lips. They glistened. So did her eyes. So did her hair, jet black without a trace of gray.

“You may be stuffy, Oscar, but you’re no dumbbell,” she said. “Do you know why he did it?”

“He was a father. She was an unruly child. It was punishment, a gritty object lesson to give her a taste of what she might run into if she kept sneaking out. Maybe he wanted her to be like him. I don’t know.”

“He never wanted her to be like him, only less like herself. He couldn’t stand anyone being themselves.” She laughed cruelly. “You saw him hit the tree. God, I wish I had seen that. The pain, the sweet, excruciating pain. He didn’t take off those bandages for over a month.”

“Did it ever occur to you he might have been punishing himself?”

Her eyes went wide. “You don’t believe that, Oscar.” When I didn’t say anything, she said, “He hit that tree to cover up the bruises already on his hands.”

I nodded, a little sadly. Right there, at that grimy gin-mill table, we were stripping away from Arthur Gahn the last shred of humanity that still clung to him.

“Maybe all we got are guesses,” I said. “Good guesses, but still only guesses.”

“Not me! Not guesses.” She leaned over the table, almost toppling her glass. “He did it all right, and he planned it. Want to hear what I found in the Buick? That’s the car he took that night. Only the best for the colonel, even going out to assault his daughter. I had to get dressed and move the Ford so he could get the Buick out of the garage.”

“What did you find?”

“In the trunk. The ski mask and the leather jacket.”

I ordered another beer. She didn’t want another floor show. When my beer came, I let it settle, watched the foam bubbles burst one after another, then stared down at the flat golden surface. I raised the glass and talked into it as it neared my lips. “Did you tell Mea?”

“I waited till she got her head screwed on straight, then told her. She was eighteen by that time.”

“Why did you tell her?”

“I wanted him to have more than a pair of sore hands. She moved out lock, stock, and barrel. He never knew why.”

“He who plucks a flower disturbs the farthest star.”

“Is that authentic Monahan?”

“No. I picked it up somewhere along the line.” I swallowed some beer and tried a final time to bring Gahn back into the human race. “In his screwed-up way maybe he thought he was doing it for her good.”

“You men always make excuses for each other. Ever admire a statue from a distance, then get up close and see it’s covered with pigeon excrement?”

“So, hose it down.”

“Too late. The filth has eaten at it until, underneath, its character is changed. The corruption has shaped itself to the sculpture’s original lines.”

“What’s in Chicago?”

The change of subject seemed to startle her. It was a thing of seconds, a forming cloud hovering between us, then it was gone and she answered, “I have a detective agency looking for Mea. They seem to have a lead out there.”

“Going to bring her back?”

“Not unless she wants to. I just want to tell her he’s gone and how he went. Her leaving brought it all on.”

“How did he go?”

“Painfully. He was twisted in knots. Medicine was keeping him alive. Someone had to be with him all the time to give it to him.” Her eyes went dull and she smiled, but it wasn’t a smile she was giving to me. It belonged someplace else. She was seeing something else. Somewhere inside her a record went on and a calm, ordered monologue came out.

“The nurse didn’t come that day. I’d been waiting on him all day. At the end, I was sitting with him. He was in bed asleep. His mouth was open. I could hear his breath whistling over his teeth. I must have dozed. I dreamed. I was on a sidewalk. In the middle of the street was this dog. He must have been run over. He was whining. A really rotten sound. A plea for life. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see him. Closing my eyes on one nightmare, I opened them on another. He was on the floor. He had tried to crawl to me. I think I heard him cry out one last time. I reached into my apron pocket for the medicine. It was no good. He was gone. There — on the floor.”

“Suleika,” I said sharply. “Suleika!”

She came around, her smile now directed at me. She said she’d better start out for the airport.

“Need a ride?”

“No thanks. I have the Buick. Ill leave it in longterm up there.”

Before we parted, she said, “Can we see something of each other when I get back?”

I said, “I’ll keep in touch.”

I didn’t, though.

Arthur Gahn was no great shakes as a human being, but he deserved a better death. I think of him whimpering, crawling toward the woman just feet from him. The same woman who, once, on the top floor of her home, awoke to the faint click of a downstairs door.

Later, I heard she remarried. I saw them one day on a busy street. He was talking incessantly and bounding ahead of her. She looked briefly my way but I don’t think she saw me. She wore a half smile, and there was a tightness around her eyes.