The Night Remembers

36

All I could find was a no-parking zone, so I took it, knowing I’d most likely have to pay a $15 fine.

I climbed the stairs to my office, not wanting to wait for the elevator. When you do something like that at my age, and while you haven’t completely given up smoking, you pay for it.

I arrived at my office door panting and sweating.

I pushed open the door. Irma, her thumb in her mouth, paced back and forth in front of the inner office. Seeing me, she jerked her thumb from her lips, as if I’d caught her doing something disgusting, which perhaps I had.

“Where is he?”

“In there.” She indicated the inner office.

“Have you called an ambulance yet?”

“I thought you’d want to talk to him first.”

I nodded a thank you and went on inside.

In the drab daylight, the place looked more like a museum than ever. The aged furnishings, the painted steam heat register in the corner, the linoleum floor — it was like stepping inside a time capsule.

He sat in the plump leather chair angled to the side of the coffee table. On his white shirt inside his tan suit you could see a wide patch of blood. He was pale and sweating, and when he spoke, you could almost hear his dry lips crack from fever. “You took a while.”

“I got here as soon as I could.”

“I didn’t mean to scare the old lady.”

I smiled. “Takes more than that to scare her.”

“I’m not the guy you’re looking for.”

“Why don’t you let me call an ambulance?”

“I want to tell you something first.”

“No; first we call an ambulance.”

I turned away from him and walked back to the door. In the silence my footsteps made squeaking noises on the old floor. Back when this place was new, men were probably still wearing spats.

He said, “Don’t you see the gun I’ve got in my hand?”

“I see it.”

“I told you I didn’t want you to call an ambulance for me just yet.”

I glanced back at him. “I guess you’ll have to shoot me.” I opened the door and said to Irma, “Dial 911. Get an ambulance here as fast as you can.”

She nodded.

After closing the door, I walked back to the desk and took the chair across from him. He was going quickly. His breathing was coming in small spasms and he didn’t have enough strength to hold on to his weapon any more. It dropped from his hand to the floor. I was afraid it might discharge.

“You want to know something funny?”

“What?” I said.

“I’m the straight one. Paul, he—”

Richard Heckart’s head twisted to the side abruptly, as if an invisible hand had slapped it. He lay like that a long moment and then angled his face back to me. “I just wanted you to know what really happened.”

“You can tell me later. Maybe you’d better rest now.”

“I just couldn’t let Paul bring down the whole company. Our father’s reputation. That’s why I got involved with Vandersee and those slides. I wanted to force Vandersee to stop before people found out what he and Paul were doing.”

Since he wanted to talk, I thought I might try to take advantage of it. “Who shot you?”

“I’m not sure. I was in my garage—”

“Could it have been Paul?”

“It could have been.” He started to say something else and then stopped. His whole body had begun to twitch. During the Fifties I’d had a Collie who’d died of a lung disease. I’d held him there at the last as my two boys looked on, held him tight so they wouldn’t see him tremble and get frightened. Richard Heckart was going into that phase now. “Could you get me a glass of water?”

“You bet.”

I went to the door and asked Irma to get a glass of water quick, but when I turned around I said over my shoulder, “Forget it, Irma.”

“What?”

“Forget it. I don’t think he’s going to need it.”

Down the street I could hear the whoop and wail of the ambulance. On television, detectives always know when somebody’s dead. In life they rarely do. Once, I threw a sheet over the face of a guy struck by a car, sure he was dead. He reached up with a big bear paw of a hand and ripped the sheet from his face, understandably angry with my mistake.

But instinctively I sensed that Richard Heckart had passed on. In the war I’d known a kid from Des Moines who always studied the bodies of people recently killed. While he would never admit it, I always suspected that he sat there and watched the corpses to see if he could find any evidence that souls did indeed migrate. Maybe now, as I stood over Richard Heckart, I was looking for the same thing. Maybe, given Faith’s possible condition, I needed reassurance that we had souls to begin with, and that after our bodies died they did indeed go someplace more peaceful.

“He was a nice-looking man,” Irma said, coming up and standing beside me. “I wish he would’ve let me call an ambulance earlier.”

“I’m not sure he wanted to live all that badly.”

“How come?”

“Oh, people made a lot of unfair judgments about him — and I think he was also tired of protecting somebody.”

“Who?”

“His brother.”

“What’d his brother do?”

“Well, for starters, I think he killed Karl Jankov.”

“I thought George Pennyfeather—”

That’s when the male-and-female ambulance team came trotting through the door, intense and singular in their white uniforms and air of urgency.

They went over to Richard Heckart and started all their procedures.

I leaned in to Irma and said, “I’ve got some things I’ve got to do.”

“You be back today?”

“Probably not.”

“What if somebody calls?”

“Just tell them I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You okay?”

I laughed. “Do I look okay?”

She patted me on the shoulder. “Tomorrow I’ll go over to Big Boy for the donuts. How’s that?”

“Sounds more than fair.”

“You going to look up Paul Heckart?”

“I guess that sounds like as good an idea as any.”

“You think you’re ever going to let me be your assistant?”

“Sure. Someday.”

“I’d be a good one.”

I then did something I never thought I ever would or even could. I brought my lips to Irma’s forehead and kissed her. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said, and left.

She looked as surprised as I felt.