Murder in the Dog Days (Maggie Ryan) (21 page)

Holly shook her head. “No,” she said hoarsely. “You’re right.”

“You bet your sweet ass I’m right. In that situation just about anybody would do it. John Wayne himself would do it. I mean, part of you knows it’s wrong but part of you is really enjoying the revenge. Except it’s a phony revenge. You mow down maybe twenty people. And you find no weapons. But you count twenty Cong and no civilians. If they’re dead they’re Cong, right? Keep the brass happy. All dead gooks are Cong.” He leaned forward intently, mismatched arms on his knees, and said softly, “And that’s when you find in your heart that you’ve lost the war. Because you don’t even stand for truth any more. You’ve joined the goddamn fraud.”

Holly nodded mutely. Why, why, why? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn. She didn’t want to hear. How many times must the cannonballs fly? She wanted to forget.

Mitch said, “You okay?”

“Yes.” Get it together, Schreiner, stay cool. She took a long pull on her cigarette.

He said, “See, I’ve got to explain where the rap group comes from.”

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

He tapped ash into the wastebasket and leaned back again. “Okay. One thing stays real, and that’s dying. So you lock your guilt and pain away in the back rooms of your mind, and concentrate on surviving. You slog on through the swamps, the rats. The jungle rot. The leeches. The terror. You get sick, you get wounded, but you survive. A fantastic achievement. And finally the good old Braniff freedom bird takes you away, back to the land of youth and innocence and John Wayne.”

“Disney World,” said Holly.

Mitch laughed, a short bitter burst of appreciation. “You got it, sister. And back in Disney World, well, you don’t expect parades, you know you didn’t liberate France or take Iwo Jima. But you did your best, you survived in a damn tough job. So what happens? You get back and half the country thinks you’re scum because you went. The other half thinks you’re scum because you lost.”

Holly bowed her head. Mitch’s words hurt, ripping open wounds she’d thought were safely scabbed over. Why wouldn’t he shut up? Nothing to be done about it now. She cleared her throat and asked, “Why not forget it, then? Leave it behind you?”

“Oh, sure, you try that first. Try to forget. Numb out. But you fail. Of course you fail. How can a human being let his buddies go unremembered? That’s where the rap group comes in. Guys come in here, claim they don’t remember. But they’re having nightmares, or violent outbursts, or flashbacks. Or they’ve built walls to keep away life.” His words pounded at her. “That’s phony forgetting, just as phony as the war. So the rap group is a place to confront reality. It hurts, sure. But we help each other through the pain. Then a guy can move on. Reorder his world. Renew his life.”

“You can do that?”

“We can help a guy do it for himself.”

“Doesn’t it hurt you to hear it?”

“Sure. I’m no machine. I’m human, so it hurts.” His eyes were fierce again. “But avoiding it is phony. And I’ve had it with phoniness, sister. I’ve seen Death’s face and Death’s backside, and I survived. And I’m going to make my survival mean something. This group is my way of wrestling one little bit of Disney World into something worthy of my dead. Something authentic.”

Something authentic.

She’d written it in her book. She blacked it out with careful strokes of her pen.

“Anyway,” Mitch added more gently, “while a guy is figuring himself out he’s damn fragile. No way am I going to expose him to the cops until he thinks he’s ready.”

The cops. That’s you, Schreiner. Get the information. She asked, “No matter what he’s done?”

A bitter grin. He jerked a thumb at his own chest. “I’ve done worse, sister. I personally have done worse. And Disney World tried to give me medals for it.”

That TV image of the hurled medals bubbled to the top of Holly’s mind. “Yeah. I understand.” She cleared her throat again. “But what if he can help us find why some other guy died? Make sense of it for his family?”

Mitch looked uneasy. “I hear you,” he said. “About making sense. But I can’t break a confidence.”

“Yeah.”

They both ground out their cigarettes.

“Look, I’ll tell you what I can do,” Mitch suggested. “I’ll give the guy your phone number. But it’s totally up to him and I’ll tell him that too.”

“Yeah. Okay.” She was touched by his protectiveness. She scribbled her name and phone number on a page, tore it out for him, and asked timidly, “Are there women in the rap group?”

Mitch laughed. “God, no! What would a woman know about it?”

She swallowed and said, “Well, I was a nurse. I saw a lot of deaths.”

He looked interested but shook his head as though trying to be kind. “Ain’t the same, sister. I mean, nurses prevent deaths. Our guys were pulling the trigger. Even if we did it to survive, even if our fucking country told us to, we’ve got to deal with guilt. Depression. Rage.”

“Yeah. I understand.”

“No! I’m saying you can’t understand!”

Holly blinked down at her notes. Even Mitch thought she shouldn’t feel the way she did. She must be crazy. Schreiner the crazy broad. The scum of the scum.

She put on her impassive cop look, closed her notebook, stood up. “Thanks for passing on the message, Mitch. I’ll wait for his call.”

“If he calls—you’ll remember what I said?”

Holly paused at the door, bleakly. “Oh, yeah. I’ll remember.”

She went out into the rain.

13

Olivia sat stiffly in a living room in Westwood Heights, amidst carved teak, an immensely thick blue-on-ivory Chinese rug, a photo of Frank Resler gazing from a carved wood frame, raw-silk walls. The dumpy woman across from her was in silk too, black mourning silk that should have minimized her stoutness but instead sliced across her body at the wrong places so that her thick neck and thick legs glowed in pale contrast. She should have been wearing a comfy housedress, but clearly she felt an obligation to blend into her elegant surroundings.

Her handkerchief, at least, was a plain white cotton workaday model, slightly damp.

“My husband was devoted to his clients,” Doris Resler told Olivia. “I know Mr. Colby and that other reporter thought someone might have been dissatisfied but I don’t see how that could be! Why, Frank worked so hard for each and every one of them. And Mr. Edgerton agreed with me.”

No wonder she’d looked so satisfied as she left Edgy’s office yesterday. Olivia put down her coffee cup on the ceramic Chinese table. The air-conditioning here was set a notch higher than most and the hot drink had brought a film of moisture to her face. “What kind of clients did he have?”

“Why, all kinds,” said Doris Resler. “They were accused of muggings, robberies, murders, negligence, pollution—”

Pollution? “Some of his clients were corporations?” Olivia asked. Made sense. It would take a lot of fees from muggers to buy that rug.

“Well, some, yes. Took up a dreadful amount of Frank’s time. Frank always said he preferred to work with ordinary people. Help them out, help them remake their lives. Like Bob Bates.” Doris wiggled forward to the edge of her chair. “Have you met Bob Bates?”

“No, not yet.” He’d blown up an armored truck, Nate had said.

“Oh, well, let me call him. I think you’ll understand why I want my husband’s work to go on.” Doris Resler hopped up and scurried to the French doors, fat calves and small feet twitching along below the black silk. To Olivia’s surprise, she opened the door and called out, “Bob? Bob, come in and meet someone!” She returned to her chair with a satisfied smile at Olivia. “He’s coming. I’ve given him the spare room over the garage, so he can help out. You know, I think if I could have introduced Bob to Mr. Colby he would have understood better. But Mr. Colby wouldn’t come. He was getting to be like that first reporter, that Jewish fellow, so sure that someone might have had a grudge against Frank.” She looked back at the man who was entering through the French window.

Bob Bates was middle-aged and middle-sized, lean and tanned. He carried himself humbly, though the quick eyes under handsome brows seemed shrewd enough. His brown hair was silvering at the temples, which added a touch of distinction. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a purple snake tattooed on his forearm, he might have been mistaken for a banker. Or a lawyer, like Resler? Olivia stole a peek at the photograph framed in ornate carved wood that sat centered on a Chinese chest like a little shrine. No real resemblance, but the same air, the same type. Except that Frank Resler, in the photo, looked definitely haughty rather than humble.

Doris Resler was saying, “Bob, I was just telling Olivia about you. She works at the same paper as poor Mr. Colby who was killed.”

“Killed?” The handsome eyebrows climbed Bates’ forehead. “You mean hit by a car or what?”

“No,” Olivia explained. “He was murdered at his home. We know he was working on the story about the plane crash last January, so we thought we’d ask you if you remembered his general line of questioning recently.”

“I see,” said Bob Bates slowly. His voice was educated enough. With a pinstripe suit he could probably walk up to any bank in the country. Could even get some employee to lead him to their armored truck. As long as that snake was hidden. Bob asked, “So you’re thinking that something he was investigating may have caused the trouble?”

“Well, I’ve got to look into the possibility. The reason for the plane crash is still unknown.” At Olivia’s words, Doris Resler gave a sniffle and brandished her big cotton handkerchief. Olivia went on, “I mean, if Dale had learned something about who caused the tragedy, the guilty party wouldn’t want it published, right?”

“Are there other possible reasons for Colby’s death?” Bob wanted to know.

“Sure. But this story is a definite possibility too,” said Olivia tartly.

Bob Bates smiled. Good teeth too. What on earth had possessed him to get that tattoo? He said, “Well, I’ll be glad to tell you whatever I can to help. Though I’m afraid it won’t be much.”

“Can you tell me where you were yesterday afternoon?” Olivia asked boldly.

“I was right here, working in the garden,” said Bates glibly. “The garden suffered terribly in the heat wave.”

“Oh, yes, it did,” agreed Doris Resler.

“And what time did you get back, Mrs. Resler?”

“Back?” The widow looked puzzled.

“You were at the Sun-Dispatch office around noon.”

“She arrived here before one,” said Bates. “And we worked on foundation business all afternoon.”

“Now, Bob, let me tell you why I asked you to come in,” Doris Resler said pettishly, as though she didn’t understand the relevance of Olivia’s question or Bob Bates’s answer. “You see, Miss Kerr was just asking about Mr. Colby’s idea that one of Frank’s clients might have been angry at him. I just wanted you to explain how good Frank was.”

“He was a hell of a guy,” Bob Bates confirmed. “I’m the first to admit I had a serious drinking problem. Blacked out for days sometimes. Couldn’t keep a job. I ended up resorting to some very unscrupulous things.” He was clenching and unclenching his hands in tension or distress at the recollection. The play of muscles in his forearm made the purple snake writhe in an oddly voluptuous way. Bob’s eyes flicked up, catching Olivia staring at it. She could have sworn there was an edge of mockery in his voice as he concluded, “I was arrested.”

“I see,” said Olivia heartily, hoping that her warm cheeks just meant the room was hot.

“Luckily I was working for a firm that was concerned about its own possible liability, and they went to the top. To Frank Resler.”

He bowed his head toward Doris, who smiled a tearful proud smile. “And Frank not only got me a lighter sentence than I deserved, he turned around my life.”

“How?” asked Olivia.

“Advice plus concrete help,” Bob Bates explained. “He encouraged me to join AA. And when I got out of prison, he helped me financially while I took a couple of business courses. Really showed he had faith in me.”

“And now you have a job?”

Doris started to say something but Bates said quickly, “Yes. I’m working for a hardware wholesaler. Mosby Hardware.”

“And the firm you were working for before?”

The snake rippled on his arm. Why hadn’t Nate mentioned it? Of course Nate had spoken to him back in January, and had been pulled off the story soon afterward. Bates said wryly, “Well, of course they didn’t want me back. I’d blown up their truck, after all.”

“No. I meant, were they held liable?”

“No. Frank got them off scot-free.”

Hah. Olivia had been sure that the picture Doris Resler had presented, of a lawyer devoted to kind treatment of reformed criminals and only grudgingly spending time working for corporations, was oversimplified. Bob Bates’s story made it clear that he, at least, would not have enjoyed Resler’s services if he’d had to depend on his own resources. And he’d served time while the corporation he worked for hadn’t even paid a fine.

Bates was watching her closely. “I was guilty, you see.” That hint of mockery was in his voice again. “They’d put me in a position of trust but Frank proved I was the one who’d tricked them. No, I’ve faced up to it now. I was guilty. Now I must move beyond that.”