Easy Death (8 page)

“Thanks but no.” Walter shook his head. “So what you gonna do?”

“Guy I know, he’s got a gas station on a sweet little corner just outside Akron. Needs a partner, a mechanic partner, I mean, and I figure to buy in with him. Akron’s a good town for fixing cars.”

“You gonna make a living fixing cars?”

“Yup. You can make good living at it too, when you run your own place, I mean. That’s how come I to know Brother Sweetie, working on those heaps he cuts up and sells out, but I don’t figure to spend my life working for him. And Akron, it’s one fine town for fixing cars.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure is.” Eddie took a last gasp on the cigarette, hot to his lips now, and reluctantly stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray. He rolled up his window. “They make tires there, you know. And they got bad winters, which is good for a mechanic’s trade.”

“Well you can fix cars, Eddie, and no doubt about it. Never knew somebody to cure up a car like you.”

“It’s about the only thing I learned in the Army was fixing cars.” Eddie reflexively felt in his pocket for another cigarette, but decided against it. Regretfully. “I just been looking for someplace I could work for myself. Not work for wages. This job comes off like it should, I’ll do it, too.”

“Makes sense and that’s facts.” Walter looked like he had something on his mind, but before he could speak, Eddie asked him,

“So what are you doing for Christmas?”

“Going to visit my brother’s wife. Down south a ways. My brother, he’s dead, a little time back. She got a house full of kids will be glad to get some new clothes and maybe a toy or something.”

“You going to play Santy Claus with the kids?”

“Ain’t going to spend it all show-boatin’.” The road curved and Walter eased his left foot gently down on the clutch. As he did, the shotgun on the floor at his feet slid forward. “Hey move that thing, will ya?”

Eddie bent forward. “Nothing wrong with playing Santa Claus.” He picked up the shotgun by the barrel, and, keeping the muzzle carefully pointed away, jammed it between the bags in the back. “Just don’t go blowing all your money, that’s all.”

“Well, Jesus said to help the poor and be nice to little kids, didn’t he?”

“Yeah but I ain’t heard him talking it up lately.”

“How about you?” Walter let the clutch out again. “What’s your Christmas?”

“I don’t know. Family, I guess.”

“You mean Brother Sweetie?”

“Hell no. That miserable low-down sunuvabitch ain’t kin to nobody.” Eddie spat on the floor. “I got family upstate, I can do Christmas together with them.”

“Should be nice.”

“It will be, do I get there,” He looked out at swirling white all around them and wiped the window with a blue-sleeved forearm. “We don’t freeze to death out here and get buried in snow, it ought to be nice.”

Behind the wheel, Walter tried to concentrate on his driving and not worry too much over what else he had on his mind.

December 20, 1951

12:30 PM

Mort and Healey

In the room back of Lola’s, Mort ran a hand through his thin red hair, looked down at his cards, then separated two from the hand and set them on the table.

“Gimme two?” he said.

Across the table, Boxer Healey peeled two cards from the deck, his gnarled, big-knuckled hands amazingly deft at it, and flicked them across the table with bent-up fingers.

“Gimme one.” The man on Mort’s right laid a card on the table without much enthusiasm and picked up another with equal disinterest.

“I’ll keep these.” Howard from the barbershop held his cards close and kept checking again and again to make sure they hadn’t changed. Healey looked at his face and decided there should be a rule against doing that, just to keep the game from getting too predictable.

He looked back at Mort. “What you gonna do?” His jet-black face creased open in a carefully staged smile below his broken nose, a smile made up especially to show off the single gold tooth shining out from a bed of ivory-white.

Why’s he smiling?
Mort looked nervously to his left at Howard from the barbershop, then at the heavyset grey-haired stranger on his right. Then down at the loose pile of five-dollar bills on the table.
Is this my pot? Does he really mean me to take it?

“You need to think it over, Mort?” Healey’s voice, which never showed anything he didn’t want it to show, sounded a little impatient. “Because if you want to take a walk or something and turn it over in your mind, well, me and the boys here, we’ll watch your money for you. Won’t we guys?”

The others laughed dutifully.

Mort felt himself redden. “I call,” he said.

The grey-haired man on his right showed his cards. “Three fives.”

Howard from the barbershop laid his hand down. “I guess that beats a pair of tens.”

Across the table, Healey folded his cards. “I got nothing.” He stretched the long, powerful arms that got him his name, and leaned back, displaying the soft belly that had ended his career so spectacularly five years ago against Archie “Mongoose” Moore in the Arena.

Mort stared in disbelief and laid down his cards. “Four nines.”

“Yeah?” the grey-haired stranger tried to sound surprised. “Thought I had that one.”

Mort pulled the bills to him like he was doing it in a dream and rifled them with his fingers.
Fifty bucks… Damn, if Magruder hires me on, I’ll be bringing this home every week. Think of that? Me bringing home fifty every week to…
He counted again. Eleven of them!
I’m even five bucks up! Why now I can buy—

“You done us good that time,” Howard said. “Four nines! I never knew you could take on Boxer that way, Mort!”

“He done us for sure,” Boxer nodded, his pride hurt. “Can’t believe I let old Mort do me out of a pot like that.”

Mort tried to read the black man’s eyes, knowing he wouldn’t see anything Boxer didn’t mean him to see.
Here’s where he gets mad and tells me to get out.
He glanced at his watch.
Damn, past noon. I gotta get out and get busy—

“Tell you what.” Boxer relaxed and fine-tuned his smile. “Why’nchu just put fifty of that in your pocket and we play another hand with that loose five you came in here with?”

Mort looked over at him, really confused now.

“Ted,” Boxer said. He nodded at the grey-haired man, but kept his eyes on Mort, nailing him down in his seat. “Tell Lola fix us some sandwiches and draw a couple beers. Might as well relax and get sociable now while I try to get a little piece of me back off old Mort here. Whattaya say there, high-roller? Just another couple hands? Just enough till I win that five off you?”

Mort hesitated.

December 20, 1951

11:30 AM

Slimmy

Slimmy sat in the warm station wagon, watching the landscape around him get whiter and whiter, listening to

…that glorrriouss so-ong of old
,

From an-gels benn-ding near to earth,

To touch their haaaaarps of gold,

Peace onnnnn the Earrth….

He took another sip from his flask.

Damn
, he thought.
Ain’t they never getting here?

He flipped around the dial on the radio with clumsy, fumbling fingers, looking for news. Any news. But all he could find was

…Two turtle doves
,

Three French hens
,

And a parrrtridddge….

He turned it down and took another drink. A longer one this time.

Hell, they probably botched it all to Kingdom Come
, he reflected.
Leaving me out here to sit and rot. That’d probably tickle Brother Sweetie plumb to sweet mother of Jesus, leave me out here to sit and rot. Work me all day and then just put me out in the snow to sit and rot….

He looked at the bottle and noted morosely that only about a quarter of it remained.
Well, how the hell’d that happen? Damn near gone. Out here to sit and rot and now the booze, it’s damn near gone. Where are those bastards, anyhow?

He took another drink, then tilted the bottle and looked at the tiny bit puddling sadly in one corner.
One thing
, he thought,
those bastards show up, they’re gonna have to drive. Can’t work me all morning and put me out here to sit and rot and then expect me to drive, too. I can’t be the brains of this outfit and doing all the work, too. Nossir, they show up, I’m just going to say, “You gentlemen will have to drive, because I’ve been put out here to sit and—”

A sound came from just behind him at the driver’s window, a tapping. It wasn’t loud, but the sudden, sharp sound of it made Slimmy lurch and drop the bottle in his lap. He looked at the trickle of liquor soaking into his pants, and it made him sad, somehow.

The tapping came again. It was like something hard and metallic on the window, just behind him.
Oh yeah
, he thought,
must be them…

He opened the door and the weight of it or the wind or someone pulling from outside overbalanced him and sent him sliding out and into the snow. The sudden cold got his attention but it didn’t sober him up. He peered up, confused, at the man who had tapped on his window.

The man wore a blue uniform and a hard look, and they both fit him pretty well. Slimmy had never seen his face before, but he was all too familiar with the look on it.

“May I see your license, sir?” the cop asked him.

December 20, 1951

12:25 PM

Officer Drapp

“But I do beg your pardon.” She said it like she’d spilled tea on a laid-out doily. “I seem to have been going on about myself.”

On the other side of the windshield, the snow was still beating us to death, and gusts of wind hit the square sides of that Jeep till it rocked. I had on big leather gloves with knit-wool glove liners under them, and the leather strained across my knuckles, I was clutching the wheel that tight as we moved maybe fifteen miles an hour along the park road. The tracks of the getaway car had faded into the snow, but I told myself I didn’t need tracks now; there was only one way through the park and we were on it.

“That’s okay.” You learn that you get a person talking, they’ll sooner or later get around to what you need to find out. So I tried not to clench my teeth when I said it. “Sounds like you’ve had an interesting time.”

Well I’d got her to talking all right.

Or maybe she just got lonely sometimes, working out in the woods like that. Whatever it was, in the last half-hour I’d heard all about the life and times of Calpurnia Nixon. How her dad owned umpty-ump acres of forest out west where she used to play. Then college at some place called Barnard, but they didn’t have the kind of courses she wanted, so she spent summers working at parks and lumber camps—I tried to figure what she’d be doing in a lumber camp, but nothing pretty came to mind. And then when the war came and able-bodied men were scarce, she’d got a hitch as a sure-enough Park Ranger.

“That’s when I knew this was my life,” she said. “Those years living in the park and looking after the woods. It seemed as if I were supposed to be here.”

She paused, like she was swallowing something hard. Or maybe just stopped to take a breath, then went on. “But after the war they didn’t see much need for women to be park rangers anymore.”

“They fired you?”

“Colonel Powell—he was my commanding officer at the time—was quite straightforward about it,” she said. “He said now the men were coming back for the jobs, well, I was taking a job away from a man who needed it and it was time I got married and raised a family.” She made that noise again, like she was swallowing something hard just thinking about it. “Well, I had no plans for anything like that and I told him as much, and I’m afraid I may have been a bit vituperative. At any rate, he insisted I had to go, and that’s when I found that having a cousin in politics wasn’t such a bad thing.”

“Yeah, I guess not.” Funny, her voice was kind of pretty, and listening to her talk was almost restful. Just about took my mind off what was really going on here, and the way it was, driving in the snow and wind like this. Just listening to her helped ease the strain.

But she still hadn’t got around to what I wanted to hear about.

“So with my Cousin Richard’s help, I stayed in the National Parks,” she said, “but they have ways of getting back at one…” She stopped talking. Just trailed off like when you pull the plug on a record player. And I needed her talking.

“Seems to me you done a pretty good job here.” I tried to sound like all those trees covered up in snow was something real special just to look at.

“Well, it’s a work in progress,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“A park, a forest, is a work in progress. It keeps growing and changing—that is, if it’s managed properly—and it never stops. That’s the wonder of it.”

“I think I see what you mean.”

Actually, only thing I saw was more trees and more snow, but I figured now I’d got her relaxed, it was time to find out what it was she’d been shying away from saying since I’d met up with her. Time to use those careful, subtle questioning cop techniques you see in the movies.

“What is it you’re not telling me?” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s something about this situation with your Captain out at the watchtower, and you’ve been dancing around it this last half-hour. Now, was there something you don’t want to say, that’s fine, but I get to thinking maybe we’re driving into something I ought to know about, and if there is, well…maybe you ought to come out with it.”

“You’re probably correct.” The tone in her voice sounded like she really wanted to come out with it. “But first I wonder if you could satisfy my curiosity?”

“About what?”

“How does a police officer happen to be driving around in a pick-up truck full of hay bales?” she asked. “And back at the ranger station, why didn’t you call for more officers?”