Homicide My Own (12 page)

I was beginning to like this grease monkey. “So what did you do?”

“I moved her hand away and said pretty much what I just said to you, and that if we loved each other we’d get to that when the time was right.”

He was hiccuping all the way, until I said, “You were a sensible young man.” After that, he wasn’t nervous anymore, just regretful.

“I was an idiot. If I had done what she wanted, she might not have left me for someone who would, and it was that person who killed her. She might be alive today, if…. And me? Who knows? The only lesson I learned was, never refuse a willing woman.”

“That’s a fairly stupid lesson,” I said.

“I won’t argue it. But that’s how I’ve lived my life. Married three of those willing women. Only because they asked me. Cheated on every one of them.”

“You are an idiot.”

“Yeah, but I’m not a murderer. Life could have been different, if only…”

“So who was this guy, then?”

“I wish I knew, because he’s the one who murdered her. He murdered her because she dumped him for James.”

“That one,” said Odd, “was the man who taught her about making love, but that was all she wanted from him. She couldn’t know all that he would want from her.”

Karl Gutshall looked gut-shot. “What makes you know so much?” he said.

“It’s a long story,” said I. “Look, I’m assuming yours was a pretty small high school, ain’t?”

“There were only twenty-eight kids in our graduating class.”

“Do the math, do the elimination process. Who busted Jeannie’s cherry?”

“Jesus, who are you?” said Karl, offended.

“You’d have to know who it was, small place like this.”

“You did your best to find out back then,” said Odd, boring another hole into Karl.

“Huh?” was all he could say.

“You were hurt and embarrassed and belittled and finally pretty pissed off, weren’t you?”

Karl started hiccuping again. “I was a kid in high school. Ever happen to you?”

“You should have quietly sat and waited for all of that to pass away, but you let your anger consume you.”

I didn’t want Odd to go off on his sitting-still riff again. “What did he do with all that anger, Odd?” I asked.

“Huh?” said Karl.

“He followed her.”

As I said, it was sixty-one, -two degrees, but sweat beaded out right there on Karl’s forehead. Me, the usual spots: my butt, my armpits, my cleavage.

“You followed her!” Odd said, a girlish indignation in his voice, I swear. “You spied on her. You asked all her friends. You tried to break into her locker and read her secret notebook.”

The way Odd held his breath in his sleep? That’s what Karl was doing now, interrupted only by his hiccups.

“You were outraged,” Odd laid into him. “Now you know it was yourself you were mad at, but back then you had to blame it all on her. You were so mad at her you could have killed her!”

The air exploded from Kart Gutshall. “But I didn’t! I didn’t!” He threw his half-full Coke bottle into the trees next to us. I never heard it break. “I didn’t kill her. I loved her. I love her to this day.”

“And you never found out who it was she gave herself to after you refused her.”

“No, I never did, and neither did anyone else, not anyone else who was willing to come forward. Go back to Spokane. Leave me alone.”

He walked in his sad gait back to his garage, in baggy coveralls, reaching back for his cap again and forcefully fitting it to his head.

“Thanks for the Cokes,” I yelled after him.

He stepped under the shadow of the big Suburban and buried his head in its undercarriage.

Odd and I got back into the car, I behind the wheel. We sat for a moment. I didn’t know where we would go next, but I knew where we must finally go eventually.

“You did know a bit about him,” I said.

“Not enough.”

“Here’s what I don’t get. Why can’t you just
say
it. Just say who did it. You know so much, why don’t you know that?”

“I have looked down the barrel of that shotgun. I have seen James’ head blown away, all over me…but I can’t see who’s holding the shotgun. If you asked me what kind of dancer he was, Karl, I could tell you. Lousy.”

I had to chuckle. We were watching Karl as we spoke. You could tell he was rattled, trying to get his head back into his mechanics.

“You were no angel, though, were you?” I said, suppressing another chuckle. “Little Miss Hot Pants, grabbin’ the boy’s johnson.”

He looked at me, rolled his eyes.

“What are we doing here, Quinn? Why’d the lieutenant pick us?”

“Shit detail, where’s Quinn and Gunderson?”

“For that matter, why even Spokane? I’ve lived there my whole life and hated it. Why didn’t I ever move somewhere else?”

“Hey, I married into it. Compared to Shenandoah, though, it’s the Ritz. I always knew I would leave that place. I had to go, just felt pulled away, to the west. Never thought I’d wind up so far away. Where we sit right now? I couldn’t be any farther away from home and still be in the continental U.S. You said
barrel
.”

“What?”

“You said you looked down the barrel of the shotgun. Odd?”

“I said that?”

“You said barrel. So it wasn’t a double-barrel?”

“No…it was a single barrel shotgun.”

“You can see that. Who do you see behind the shotgun?”

“Karl, maybe, I don’t know.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it.”

“I doubt it too,” he said.

“You gotta try to remember your secret lover.”

“Please, Quinn, don’t put it that way. I’m having a hard enough time here…can this possibly be happening? Am I trying to solve my own murder?”

And was I trying to help him? Da frick.

“Jeannie can’t wait to give up her virginity. Her boyfriend, for whatever reasons….let’s take him at his word…won’t deliver. If she went to another boy, everybody would know it before the end of the seventh period. I think she’d go to an older man, someone who could teach her and keep his mouth shut.”

“Yes,” he said. “She used him, thinking that would be all right with him, with any older man. Have you ever used a man just for sex, Quinn?”

Why deny it, there were a lot of men in the late sixties, early seventies, just because I could, the right had finally been seized, including one memorable one-night stand with a Japanese akido instructor, but I had always had some mutual connection beneath the skin. Maybe not the things sonnets are made from, but nothing so simple as using someone to satisfy a need.

“No,” I told him. “I never have.”

“Being used, that could be a motive for murder.”

“If he, you know, fell in love, or something. If he lost his mind.”

“Like Houser,” said Odd.

“Good example.”

“She never expected that would happen. How could that happen? She thought she was choosing someone safe, someone older, someone who would walk away and keep his mouth shut, someone who would have to keep his mouth shut.”

“Someone married?”

“Yes. Or a friend of the family…a teacher…someone who had something to lose if he talked about it.”

“A teacher makes sense, married or not. If he’s discovered, he loses his career. A teacher, because what was she after, really, besides knowledge? Carnal knowledge, the great mystery explored with a seasoned guide.”

“Is that what you did?” he asked.

“I wish. Me and ‘Our Johnny,’ both of us stumbling terrifed sixteen year olds in the back of his father’s station wagon, scared to death. I didn’t know it would hurt so much, when he started. After, the condom was wet when he took it off—duh?— and he made us both terrified it had broken on us. Other than that, it wasn’t half bad.”

“What happened after that?”

“We didn’t do it again for two months, and then we did it again, and after that we didn’t do it anymore ever.”

“We’re all pretty stupid, aren’t we? I mean, that first time.”

“Then I don’t want to be smart. At least there was passion, loss of control, eyes closed and labored breathing, sighs and cries and tingles, and I miss it all, I miss it so much, skin, sopping wetness, handfuls of tightly clutched ass.”

Odd’s head came forward, then turned toward me. I looked him right in the eye and confessed, “The last time I got off was a date-rape with myself. That’s when I gave it the nickname, ‘Little Sahara.’”

11.

The wipers were on intermittent because it started to drizzle again. The radio was off, the digital clock read 2:48 At the fireworks stands a slow but building trade was gathering.

We were on our way to the Tribal Headquarters, to check with Shining Pony on the condition of our boy Houser.

“I don’t know what made me say all that, Odd.”

“Maybe you thought we were having a girl gabfest,” he said.

Sometimes you just have to laugh, ain’t?

“Do you know why?” he asked me.

“Why what?”

“Why that suddenly happened to you.”

“It wasn’t all that sudden.”

“You ought to know, Quinn, all the guys think you’re pretty hot.”

“All the guys… I’m used up, buddy.”

“That’s not true. A woman doesn’t get used up, I don’t care what age she is. How old are you?”

“I’m forty-nine.”

“Forty-nine. That’s not even old. That’s only…that’s how old Jeannie would be if she lived.”

“So she never knew what she was missing,” I said, the bitch back in my voice.

“Forty-nine is not old, not even,” he said.

“There’s no reason in God’s world for any man to come into me again.”

“It’s not God’s world, it’s yours.” For Odd this bordered on irreverent outrage. For the moment, he was like the rest of us. “He may have made it but He doesn’t live here any more. Quinn, I’m disappointed in you, man, you’re a tough chick. I can’t believe you’re caving in like this.”

Sweet boy, he didn’t have a clue. He thought it was something I could fight. “It’s got a name, Odd, it’s called menopause, and the tough and the weak stand about the same chances against it, and, frankly, they ain’t good.”

“I know about menopause.”

“Men don’t know shit, why should they?”

“Well, that’s pretty obvious. Every man has a woman, or wants one.”

“So what do you know about menopause?”

“I know you stop having periods, you get hot flashes…”

He knew more than I gave him credit for. Hell, he knew more than I did when it hit me.

“Phantom sweats,” I said, “so bad you want to rip off your clothes and run through the rain.”

“You can do that, who’s going to stop you?”

“Tell me what else you know?””

“That you get used to it, that it passes, and if you were sexy before you can be sexy after. Look at Tina Turner!”

Could he have any idea how often I
have
looked at Tina Turner, wondering if at the end of the show she slips between silk sheets with a stud muffin half her age and fucks his brains out, or is it all performance, and her reality is that off the stage she sits weary and alone with a cup of tea praying he doesn’t walk by and say something like, “Honey, you in the mood tonight?”