The Walkaway (7 page)

I was a little surprised when less than fifteen minutes later they returned and went back inside, the big man looking dejected and the harlot making plainly unwelcome consoling gestures. I doubted he’d be staying much longer. In the meantime a half dozen cars had parked between me and the front door of the club. If I didn’t get what I wanted in another half hour I’d move on to the Comanche for the night’s second order of business; I’d have to work fast in any case, and if the lot got much more crowded the risk would be too great.

I only had to wait another five minutes. A late-thirties model Oldsmobile chugged in off the street and parked nearer to the neon hillbilly than I would have liked. Out stepped Elishah, instantly recognizable but looking quite different from how he did the night we met. In the hazy multicolored light of the sign his motionless facial features suggested despair rather than anger, and the bitter thinness of his face looked like years of bad luck and hard work instead of just backcountry meanness. It didn’t make the slightest difference to me, though.

Once he was inside I made my way in a crouch to the Oldsmobile and opened the door. Taped to the steering column was the information I required: Elishah Jack Casper, 1565 Lincolnshire Street. I strolled casually back to the Plymouth.

As I neared it I heard the club door open, hillbilly music spilling out into the perfect night air and damn near ruining it. I got down behind another car when I saw that it was Beulah. A minute later somebody followed her, a guy in an old army jacket she didn’t seem much interested in talking to. He whispered something in her ear, though, and she smiled and followed him to another car and they took off.

Lincolnshire Street was a considerable distance south and east, and number 1565 was a small house made of brick that in daylight must have been dark red. There was nothing in the front yard but grass, no trees or shrubs. I drove past it once, parked around the corner and strolled casually to Elishah’s back door, which was unlocked.

The whole house smelled sour, as if he’d been cleaning it with vinegar. I went from room to room, taking inventory. I noticed that there were no pictures of family or girlfriends or ex-wives or any of the kinds of photographs people usually have up on their walls, especially people living alone and far from where they were raised.

I wondered if he and Beulah were lovers, or if he was just a customer. Maybe a little of both. She was the one he was staring at as she danced that night, and it made him so mad he’d started a fight with a stranger, and a soldier at that. If he had some sort of claim on her, his attacking me made sense; he couldn’t have confronted the man dancing with her, a potential paying customer.

I turned on a lamp in the bedroom and looked in the closet. Hanging next to the shirts and pants were several dresses, three blouses, and a black skirt, and beside a single pair of work boots were three pairs of high-heeled pumps, two black and one white. The white pair had little bows at the heel. In the closet was a dresser; in one drawer there was a stack of boxer shorts and half a dozen pairs of socks, and in the next one down were panties and brassieres of various colors and styles, and in the one below that garter belts, stockings, and various other pieces of women’s intimate apparel. Either Elishah was keeping a big secret from the world or he was sharing the place with a woman.

Next to the double bed was a battered nightstand with chipped paint, its drawer empty except for a matchbook from the Hitching Post with a single match left standing, the hillbilly caricature on its cover mocking Elishah right there in his own bedroom. I checked behind the nightstand, too, and found nothing, and then I dropped to the floor to check the slats of the bedframe. I had eliminated, I thought, all the other obvious places to hide a gun, and if Elishah had one I wanted to be holding it when he came home. There was none. What there was, balanced on a slat halfway down the frame, was a little case with a broken lock. Inside was a syringe and a rubber hose and several needles. I didn’t think our boy was a diabetic, and I guessed that in the kitchen I’d find that most of the spoons had scorch marks. There was no dope with the rig, nor anywhere under the bed, and I had a funny feeling there wasn’t any in the house at all.

I sat down in a tattered easy chair in the living room, and it creaked beneath me, a gust of that sour smell wafting up from it. For about an hour I listened to the occasional car passing by, and to a dog that started barking every fifteen minutes or so until its owner stuck his head out the back door and told it to shut up. I thought about doing the whole neighborhood a favor and blowing the dog’s brains out, but the whole cycle—barking, shouting, silence, barking again—amused me. Anyway, that wasn’t what I’d come for, and I didn’t want to attract attention before I’d done what I came to do: jump Elishah and beat the shit out of him. Cripple him, maybe.

The more I thought about it, though, the less sense that made. Elishah was addicted to opiates, and if I could keep them from him I could get even and get a little free labor from him besides.

I rose and went to the back door. It was still only one o’clock, time enough to get to the Comanche and have a drink before closing. If I was lucky I might run into someone from the line at Collins with a story to tell about what a wild and woolly place Wichita had become since I’d left.

7

At eight-fifteen Gunther sat at the bus terminal lunch counter finishing up a rotten breakfast; the scrambled eggs, though drowned in ketchup, still tasted like burnt grease, the bacon was undercooked and chewy, the toast blackened yet so cold the paper-thin butter patty on each slice retained its sharp edges.

He’d seen his face in the newspaper machine and knew he was going to have to lie low. Here he more or less blended in: an elderly man in rumpled clothes, more recently shaved than the others, maybe, eating in morose silence. Chewing joylessly he pondered getting to Loretta’s house. There was the bus, but he might sit down next to some do-gooder and then there he’d be, heading back to the goddamn old folks’ home empty-handed. He didn’t know the bus routes anyway, and he wasn’t the kind to ask for help. By now the cabbies would all have his picture. He wondered suddenly if Loretta herself might come pick him up, and he moved to the pay phones along the wall, fishing in his pockets for a dime.

The call cost twenty cents, which seemed like an odd amount, but he put in two nickels plus the original dime and dialed the number scribbled on the back of Loretta Gandy’s business card. He thought he remembered her now, a quiet little kid, scared of everything; he was glad to see she’d turned out okay, with a brand-new Caddy and a house in a nice neighborhood.

“This is the Gandy residence,” Loretta’s stiff, prerecorded voice said. “We’re not here. Leave your name and number and we’ll call you back.”

He’d have to remember to tell her it wasn’t safe to say they’re not at home on the outgoing message. “Loretta. Mrs. Gandy. This’s Gunther Fahnstiel. Sergeant.” He nearly left the number of the police department and his old extension, and when he stopped himself he couldn’t think of anything useful to add. “I’ll talk to you later.” Might as well start walking, he decided, before it gets too hot.

Heading back to his half-eaten breakfast he saw that one of the other old guys at the counter was looking at the paper, and it occurred to him that Loretta had probably seen it, too. He was sure if he could explain himself she wouldn’t turn him in, but he’d better hurry up and get there. He paid and left without anyone seeming to recognize him.

A few blocks in the direction of Loretta’s neighborhood was a military surplus store, already open at a little after eight-thirty, and he thought it might be wise to buy a hat. He pushed open the front door and stepped inside, setting off a warning buzzer somewhere in the back. Only a third of the overhead fluorescents were on, and large sections of the musty interior were bathed in shadow. Behind the counter sat a middle-aged man with a military haircut.

“Welcome to the Quartermaster. You are under video surveillance. You are also under my personal surveillance. Shoplifters will be dealt with,” he barked in a drill sergeant’s cadence without looking up from his issue of
Soldier of Fortune
.

Down the middle aisle Gunther found the mess gear section. Having abandoned his breakfast in mid-meal he was starting to get hungry again, and he wondered if he should get a mess kit, or at least a canteen. They sold good metal ones with green cloth covers like when he was in the army, not those goddamn goatskin things his grandkids took when they used to go camping. Too much to carry, he decided, and at the end of the aisle he confronted a back wall covered with tools, shovels and axes and saws. He turned up another aisle and found gloves, winter coats, rubber raingear, and heavy sweaters. No summer clothes, though. When he got to the front of the aisle the door opened again, activating the buzzer behind him. The woman who entered got no warning from the clerk, and she approached Gunther with a pleasant smile, her head cocked to one side.

“Good morning, sir. My name’s Lena. Is there anything I could help you find?” She was sixty or so, plump and shapeless, with a mop of equally shapeless curly hair of indeterminate color.

“Looking for a hat to keep the sun off my head, but all I see is winter hats.”

She beckoned him and turned down another aisle and stopped at a big cardboard box filled with floppy hats.

“We have khaki or camouflage, whichever you prefer.”

Gunther reached down and pulled out a camouflage hat. When he tried to put it on his head it wouldn’t go.

“No, that’s a child’s size, here. . . .” She grabbed one in khaki and put it on his head. “Perfect. You want camouflage?”

“Khaki’s fine, I ain’t trying to be pretty.”

The woman took the hat up to the register. “Jim, you want to ring this up for this gentleman?”

“Three fifty-four,” he said.

“Three fifty-four what?” Lena chirped.

Jim looked like he wanted to punch her, but she kept smiling. “Three fifty-four, please, sir,” he said in an absurdly cheerful, high-pitched voice. Lena either missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it.

“See? Isn’t that nicer?”

Gunther handed Jim five dollars. “You get a lot of shoplifters in here?”

“Damned few on my shift anyway,” Jim said. “I was a cop after the army.”

“Until he got fired,” Lena offered cheerfully.

Now Jim looked like he wanted to take one of the shovels down from the back wall and brain her. “I was placed on administrative leave and during that time I chose to resign.” His voice was level and quiet.

“Jim, this gentleman doesn’t care one way or the other. Anyway, if you were still on the force you wouldn’t be working here and we’d have never met.” She kissed Jim on the mouth, to Gunther’s surprise, and Jim kissed her back, which surprised him even more.

“You want a sack?” Jim said, looking no friendlier or happier for his moment of bliss.

“I’ll wear it.”

Gunther stepped out into the sunlight and headed eastward. He didn’t guess Lena and Jim had much of a future together; he’d spent too much time as a referee not to think that someday her inability to sense his resentment would lead to something bad. About the best you could hope for was that it would be nonlethal, and that Lena would have the sense not to forgive him and take him back.

Nearly a mile farther east he reached Bleeker’s drugstore, and outside it he stopped to look at his arms, whiter than they’d ever been in the summertime but already getting pink from yesterday’s exposure. If the goddamn rest home would just let him spend more time outside he’d have had a tan already. He decided he’d better get some Coppertone if he was going to be walking very far in the sun today; if it hadn’t gotten so cloudy before the storm yesterday he’d have had a bad burn.

Bleeker’s looked completely different inside than he remembered, full of name-brand junk and lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree. “Where’s the suntan lotion?” he asked the young woman behind the counter, who was busy filling out a clip-out form in a magazine ad.

“Sunscreen, aisle seven A.”

“Where’s that?”

She looked up, annoyed, and pointed to the sign at the end of aisle seven. “It’s right between aisle six B and aisle seven B.”

He walked over to where she’d pointed, grabbed a squeeze bottle, and headed back to the counter. The woman who used to manage the front desk would have fired the girl for that kind of smart talk, he thought. Mrs. Perkey was her name, a nice, polite churchgoing woman with a round face. She had worked here until 1954, when her husband, Albert, died outside a roadhouse, having fallen down drunk in its parking lot behind a Cadillac belonging to Everett Collins, founder of Collins Aircraft. Collins, only a hair less drunk than Perkey, had backed over the poor bastard with his rear tires and then his front and then, wondering what the thumping sound had been, shifted into first and ran him over again getting back into his space. He climbed out to see if he’d damaged his tires and saw Perkey lying there, presumably dead already, and he pondered his options: going forward would take him into the wall of the roadhouse, and backward would involve running Perkey over again. He chose the latter option, and this time somebody saw him as the Caddy’s tires bumped over Albert Perkey for the third time, tail fins sashaying from side to side with each impact. A squad car arrived a few minutes later, and once they realized who they were taking in the arresting officers apologized but took him in just the same, and Gunther remembered seeing Collins being led that night to the holding cell that would serve as his private drunk tank.

“This is going to cost him a fucking bundle,” Ed Dieterle said as Collins passed by them, handcuffed and blubbering. Just keeping it out of the papers was a major undertaking for Collins’s lawyers, and Mrs. Perkey turned down flat an initial offer of fifty thousand dollars, demanding that amount plus a substantial chunk of stock in Collins Aircraft Corporation. In the end the police report recorded that the driver of the offending vehicle had driven away without having the courtesy to identify himself, and Mrs. Perkey quit the drugstore. Two years later Collins was himself nearly run over by a twin engine Collins Perfecta coming in for a landing, having passed out in the middle of one of the company runways, and six months after that he dropped dead in the same roadhouse. A squad car dropped his body off at his house where, according to the newspapers, he had died after a brief illness.

Outside the drugstore Gunther applied the lotion to his arms and face and neck, and tried to pursue a train of thought. Something about Sally and Mrs. Perkey? They didn’t go together in his mind; maybe something to do with old Collins. Probably he’d think of it on the way.

Eric Gandy was unexpectedly enjoying his long walk home. Once he’d managed to orient himself he’d realized his wallet was gone and so were his keys, presumably lying somewhere between Belinda’s stairs and her fireplace. He had the five-dollar bill, though, more than enough for breakfast at a tiny, dismal doughnut shop that caught his eye after a couple of miles of walking. The screendoor swung shut with a loud slap as he walked in and sat down at the counter.

The counterman looked like he lived on the doughnuts, and in fact in the half hour he was there Eric saw him remove and consume four glazed ones from the case. He looked about thirty, with short shiny black hair and skin so pale it was almost blue. He was so fat he could barely move, and got up off his stool only when there was no other option. His entire body moved sideways with each step, and a ten-foot trip across the backbar to get some half and half had him wheezing so alarmingly that Eric almost regretted having asked.

He picked up a paper from the stool next to him with the vague idea he might like to go out to the track and watch the greyhounds that night. There was no sports section, though, and he glanced at the national news for a moment before tossing it aside.

“You ever go out to the dog track?” he asked the counterman.

“Nope. In my church we don’t believe in games of chance.”

“Dog racing’s not a game of chance. It’s who the fastest dog is. Nothing random about it.”

“It’s gambling.”

“Yeah, but you’re betting on your own handicapping skills.”

“Not me. Jesus says no gambling, that’s good enough for me. Ought to be enough for anybody.”

“Hard to argue with you there.” He’d lived his whole life among the devout and knew that arguing over matters of doctrine was pointless. He had been raised Lutheran and couldn’t remember any proscription against gambling ever being mentioned there, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Apart from weddings and funerals he’d hardly been inside a church since his kids were little.

“Want some more coffee?” the counterman asked. Eric didn’t, but he wanted to see the self-righteous bastard walk again. The wheezing wasn’t as funny the second time; he swigged the coffee and stood before the man had made it back to his stool.

“Keep the change,” he called over his shoulder. It was appreciably warmer than when he’d walked in, the sky was a brilliant blue and the humidity hinted at what was certainly destined to be a miserable afternoon. By the time he got to Loretta’s office the real scorching wet heat would be starting, but by then he’d have her Caddy.

Sidney hadn’t eaten breakfast, and by the time he took off for an early lunch he was in such foul spirits he didn’t announce to Janice that he was going, just stormed through the reception area and slammed the door on his way out. She warbled “see you” at the closed door.

It was too hot for a walk already, over ninety degrees at barely eleven in the morning. Slowly he passed hair salons, mailbox rental facilities, credit unions, and used-record stores. Halfway to his destination stood ten rows of small warehouse spaces set perpendicular to the street and containing a variety of small businesses ranging from aircraft parts to artificial limbs to a beanbag chair outlet. Feeling the heat of the sidewalk bleed through the soles of his shoes he started worrying about Gunther keeling over from heatstroke.

Walking had been a big mistake, he now realized, but he was almost there and ravenous. His shirt and hair were drenched, his scrotum felt prickly, and he was very conscious of the material of his trouser legs rubbing against each other with each step, sticking to the insides of his thighs.

He stopped at the pay phones outside the front door of the restaurant, dropped two dimes, and called Janice.

“I’m at Harold’s. Anybody calls about Gunther, you call me here right away. Nothing else, understand? I don’t want to hear about the fucking lights at the Sweet Cage.”

“Have a nice lunch,” she said with a chirpy sweetness he would have taken as sarcasm from anyone but her. When he finally pushed through the inner door of Harold’s he just stood there in the air-conditioning for a minute with his face turned upward toward the vent, letting the heat drain away from him. After thirty seconds or so he felt a hand around his upper arm. “Hi, Barbara,” he said without opening his eyes.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“You’re the only waitress who touches the customers.”

“I don’t touch all the customers. Just my regulars.” Barbara was forty-five years old and working her way slowly through a community college business degree, and Sidney had been nursing a mild crush on her since she first started working lunches. She led him to a booth in the nonsmoking half of the dining room, chatting merrily at him over her shoulder on the way. “You know people actually keel over and die walking in heat like this, don’t you?”