Already Dead: A California Gothic (24 page)

“That’s fine,” Donna said.

“It’s just a good idea, when there’s been a death, sometimes,” Schooner assured her, standing up now from his seat.

“That’s just fine,” she repeated.

Navarro followed the doctor through the living room and up a staircase with a turn in it, then a few paces along a hallway and into a lightless bedroom that smelled of age and illness.

“The cancer started in his colon.” Schooner turned on a bedside lamp.

The corpse lay in a hospital bed with the blanket drawn up over its head. Schooner gripped the hem, flipped it down to expose the face for a second—Navarro was looking elsewhere, looking around the room—and covered it over again.

“Why am I here?” Navarro asked.

“Well, he was out of bed.”

“At the time of death.”

“Yessir, just here beside the bed, they tell me.”

“And who put him back?”

“The son did—Bill. And Donna helped, as I understand it.”

“Does that seem suspicious?”

“Nah. Your time comes wherever you are. He voided in the bed, but there was also urine on the floor. He was often incontinent,” Schooner explained, “but he refused to be catheterized.” Already Dead / 151

Navarro spoke with a certain gruffness that generally worked to cover the kind of confusion he was feeling right now: “I don’t make the deduction here. I mean about urine and so on.”

“He was pissing his bed, started for the john, and dropped dead on the floor. And finished pissing.”

“He had colon cancer, right? You got a specific cause?”

“Something coronary, probably.”

“Heart attack?”

“Nah, there wasn’t enough heart left
to
attack. It just ran down and stopped, more likely.”

“Well then, but—”

“He had about eleven holes in his pump.”

“But what about the colon thing?”

“That too.”

“So, cancer, heart—shouldn’t he have been hospitalized?”

“
Should
’ve been, definitely. Should’ve been in CCU the last six months. Should’ve junked three yards of lower intestine. Should’ve been hooked to a gallon of painkiller.”

“And you wanted me?”

“If he dies out of bed, yessir.”

“Because you’re not sure as to cause?”

“Because I had a lot of trouble on one of these many years back. So now if anybody under my care goes down while away from his or her bed—well.”

“You don’t just toss him in a casket and say adios—not unless I sign off on it.”

“Right. Roger that, as you men say. But if you say so, I can have him in the funeral home in forty-five minutes.”

“On the other hand, if I tell you to ship him to Ukiah for an autopsy, which might take—how long?”

“Which might take a week or more, and would certainly lather up the relatives—”

“Right. I’d take the heat.”

“I guess taking the heat is partly what you’re paid for.”

“Almost entirely what I’m paid for, I’ve been thinking lately.”

“Well, give yourself a raise,” Schooner said.

“Yeah. Roger that.”

Navarro wandered over to the window. It was wide open, and a little rain had wet the sill. He listened to the sea, realized he wasn’t 152 / Denis Johnson

coming to a decision—wasn’t even thinking, if the truth were known.

“Well,” he said, “let’s hear what the wife thinks.” He stood staring at the bed as Schooner went out to stand at the top of the stairs and call down for Donna Winslow. By the small round depression in the bedclothes covering the corpse’s head, Navarro figured that at this moment Nelson Fairchild’s mouth was wide open. Navarro felt a brief, crashing vertigo. Nothing to do with corpses, because he’d seen plenty, but more to do with the force, the jolt, of suddenly remembering that just an hour ago he’d been making love with Mo.

He noticed the electric cord dangling beside the mechanical bed—the button that worked it up and down. He reached for it, held it in his hand, and would have indulged a sudden macabre impulse to make the corpse sit up and the shroud fall away from its face; but he heard the others on the stairs. He stepped away from the bed as the doctor came back with the woman of the house, Donna Winslow.

Donna Winslow took three steps into the room, looked at her lover’s shape under the sheets, and sighed.

“Did he like the window open?” Navarro asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Even in the rain?”

“I don’t think the storm started till after…so no one noticed.”

“Dr. Schooner says he was on the floor when you found him.”

“Bill and I found him together. Something made Bill come,” she said,

“in the middle of the night.”

“And this is his urine here, right?”

“Oh,” she said, grabbing a box of tissues from the bedside table, kneeling—“oh, let me just”—and she sopped it up with a succession of wadded napkins, tossing them in a wicker wastebasket, while the two men stared down at her.

“Who put him back in bed?”

“We both did. Bill did mostly, I guess.”

“Here—maybe we should adjourn to another room,” Dr. Schooner suggested.

“In a minute.” Navarro knelt by the bed and picked up a pillow from the floor beside it—bare, no slipcase. He asked the wife, “Would you have been the only one in the house around the time of”—he sought a word other than
death
but couldn’t find one—“when his time came?” Already Dead / 153

“I was alone downstairs.”

“Did you strip this pillow?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Where’s the pillowcase? Any idea?”

“The pillowcase?”

“Just curious.”

“The hamper’s in the bathroom. That’d be the logical place, I guess.”

“Could Nelson have put it there? Did he have the strength?” She came closer to the corpse and pulled back the sheet to bare the astonished death mask—blue-gray, openmouthed, with deep-sunk, wide-open, porcelain eyes—and said, “This is Nelson Fairchild, Sr. He could’ve done anything at just about any time. If he wanted to right now he could probably jump up and spit in your eye. There’d probably be no truer epitaph than that.”

She didn’t replace the blankets until Schooner cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, Donna.”

“Let me just peek in the bathroom a second,” Navarro said.

“Whatever you have to do, Officer,” she said.

Schooner directed him across the hall, and he went into a small chamber and found the lightswitch and then the clothes hamper. Among the musty pyjamas and towels, all of which felt like artifacts because in them lingered the life that had just been lost, he found the pillowcase.

Holding it up before the light, he examined a patch of half-dried saliva and mucus in the center of the white material, of a size and shape, he would have wagered, that nearly matched the corpse’s open mouth.

He bunched it up and threw it back into the dirty laundry.

When he came out, Donna Winslow was gone. But Schooner was still hanging around. “What’s all this about a pillow?” he asked, following Navarro down the stairs.

Navarro shrugged. “Details, details.”

“You want him cut up?”

“Do you?”

“I asked you first.”

By now they were about to enter the kitchen, to which Donna Winslow had returned and where she now stood beside the table, pouring out cups of coffee for the two sons.

“I don’t see where it’s required in this case,” Navarro suddenly con-cluded.

154 / Denis Johnson

It stunned him that he had said it, because the statement ran straight up against his duty and training, which at a time like this required him to initiate all sorts of procedures. He was almost sure the man had been murdered.

What had him stalled was the added certainty that this had been a mercy killing. Probably perpetrated by this poor tired woman.

“I was seconds too late,” the younger brother said. “Something’s gonna be missing forever. At the end of time it’s all gonna come up short!”

It occurred to Navarro that the younger brother could have done the killing. But everything he knew about people told him this one wouldn’t hurt anybody intentionally.

“Would anyone like some coffee?” Donna said.

“No. Thanks. I’m going,” Navarro said.

The older brother sighed and stared at his coffee, his hands circling the cup and his arms stretched out straight. Navarro could see that it was hitting him now, everything attending the death of a family member. Guilt. Relief. And a white curtain over the future.

To Donna Winslow he said, “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief. We’re satisfied he passed on as a normal consequence of his illness.”

“I’ll call the mortuary in a minute,” Schooner told them all. “Let me just see the officer to his car.”

Outside, Schooner held the car’s door as Navarro got in. He rapped with his knuckles on the roof, basically a nonspecific gesture, one that might have meant,
case closed
; but maybe not, because he failed to shut the door. “I guess you can see for yourself this is a colorful bunch.” Navarro said nothing, and hoped the doctor wouldn’t say too much.

Schooner took several short breaths, as if suffering a spate of indiges-tion. “Look,” he said finally, miserably, “it’s my signature that goes on the death certificate. If this family gets a notion, they’ll be in everybody’s hair till Judgment Day.”

Navarro coughed. Cleared his throat. “You bet.”

“They think they’re important. The old man’s famous up and down this coast, a big property owner, sort of a semisociopath. I knew him well, and I can tell you that most of the rumors you’ll hear about him are true.”

“Who owns the property now that he’s dead?” Already Dead / 155

“I couldn’t say for sure. From what I know of him I’d guess most of his holdings go to his sons, the lunatic Fairchild boys. Donna wouldn’t—I mean to say, I doubt if Donna…”

“She doesn’t profit from his death.”

“No,” the doctor said.

The dawn seemed ready to light up. Navarro hadn’t realized he’d been here that long. Perhaps it was an illusion created by the ocean’s phosphorescence or something like that…He sat back in the seat, feeling tired in a cranky, unpleasant way. But all in all, this hadn’t been so bad.

He’d seen real killings, occasions where he’d reached the blood half a block before he met the person it was flowing from. “Well,” he told the Doctor, “tag him and bag him, and let’s all get some sleep.”

“Fine.”

One of the brothers had just come from the house. “Gotta go,” Navarro said.

“All right, sir. I’ll get him shipped out.” Navarro said goodbye and headed north, away from Gualala, toward Anchor Bay and toward Point Arena. In his rear view he saw the Porsche leave the drive and turn south.

Nobody had complained about the lack of an autopsy. Navarro could have promised the doctor they wouldn’t hear a word from Donna Winslow…though now, today, he knew his reasons for believing that had been completely wrong.

Thinking back on it now, Navarro wished he’d found some excuse to show up at the funeral. No reason it should have occurred to him at the time, but if he’d come around the Catholic cemetery in Manchester that day he’d have seen the whole crew in one spot, the living and the dead.

He shuffled through Nelson Junior’s letter, looking for the part about the funeral—if he remembered right it started on a page winding up the description of one of Fairchild’s boring, pointless dreams, but finally for once a dream in which Fairchild had been feeling good, everybody had been joyful and content—

content and having fun, and I’m not annoying, I’m comic. It’s happy, pleasant—some part of me must be that way. But I don’t want to meet that part. Why should a man who’s plotted murder dream happy moments?

156 / Denis Johnson

I haven’t been damned by dreams. Haven’t had dreams that fall into the classes described in the Talmud, prophetic, oracular, therapeutic, spontaneous, provoked, and so on, or dreams where long-sought answers come, answers that disappear at dawn—Wait, it suddenly comes back to me that Mother was at the dream’s periphery. I can see her but not her face, now let me think, basically she’s dressed as she was at the cemetery, in fact I see now that this dream is a reprise or a revision of Father’s funeral. Curious as hell that you never met her. I really don’t think you recognized her when she turned up at the service and didn’t say a word. Sorry, turned
up
? No, she was an apparition, she signaled that all the prophecies had been accomplished, her gown was blacker than if it had actually been black, if it had actually been a gown.

You, Winona, or anybody who happens to make such arrangements for me: I want a plot in the same graveyard, the Catholic cemetery south of Manchester, there by the sea, at the end of the world. Not because my family’s in it but just because it’s such a pleasant grove, with that long soft grass and the giant kneeling cypresses whose prayers have outlived all the griefs and crimes of the people beneath them, and the cliffs from which probably their souls plunged out after their funerals into the endless cycling of the water. Nice to anticipate getting buried in a place where you wouldn’t mind, actually, residing in life.

Did you know Dad’s was my very first funeral? We weren’t invited to our grandparents’. Nothing for a child there anyhow, what’s to experience, basically a static display around an open grave, almost like Christmas but with a coffin instead of a manger and a pile of dirt instead of straw, a kind of reverse Nativity scene composed mostly of people you haven’t run into in a while—I guess, in the case of you and Mom, people you’ve never even met. But there was only one total stranger there—Father himself. He’d worked up something to amaze us all! He’d turned himself into a thing in a box, he’d accomplished the ultimate refusal. Of course we all knew he’d have arranged his own service, the cheapest one possible, practically nothing to it, and almost nobody welcome.

And what about William, did you get a load of William? All dressed up with that self-inflicted haircut and that suit from Hell? He looked like Stalin-Goes-to-Church, I mean you’d have thought he not Dad was the one worked up for the occasion by some unaes-Already Dead / 157

thetic mortician’s helper. He did however appear calm. Let’s give him that. Three nights before, he went quivering through the house insisting that he’d gotten some sort of telepathic summons from dying Father.