Why, baby? Jack piped up. You of all people ought to know. Dead guys can accomplish an awful lot.
I DIDN’T HEAR from Jack again until hours later. I was tucked under the covers, reading the Penguin edition of Poe’s Selected Writings. When I finally shut off the light, I felt the room’s drop in temperature, the soft kiss of wind brushing my cheek, that frisson of electricity tickling my skin.
You ready for that night on the town yet, baby?
I smiled, settled into the pillows. “You’ll never give up, will you?”
A guy can dream.
“So, apparently, can a girl.”
You did good. You should be proud.
“I didn’t do it alone.”
Yeah, that geek show you parade around with helped a little.
“I meant you, Jack. Thanks.”
Don’t thank me. Without the trouble you get into, I’d be bored out of my skull in this hick town.
“Did you just give me another compliment? You’re spoiling me.”
Yeah, well, don’t let it go to your head. You’ve still got a lot to learn. Back in my time, when your gumshoeing wasn’t hinky it was lousy.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
So what were you reading tonight, lamb chop?
“Poe’s short story ‘The Oval Portrait.’ I’d never read it before, and I decided it was about time.”
Give me the highlights.
“It’s about an artist who’s so obsessed with his work, he neglects his young bride. So she agrees to sit meekly as his subject. The artist spends weeks painting her. He’s so enamored of the image on the canvas, he never notices how the cold, shadowy turret of his studio is withering the health of his bride. Day after day, she grows weaker and sicker. Finally, he finishes the oval portrait. Gazing on it, he cries out, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ Then he turns to regard his wife: she’s dead.”
Sounds like a happy-go-lucky yarn.
“Well, Poe was a gothicist. He had reason to be, of course, since he’d lost a young wife whom he’d loved dearly. That’s where the story comes from—he drew imagery and emotion for his writing watching his bride suffer and die slowly from tuberculosis. Her death fueled his art. Morbid and sad, but true.”
You know, that old Chesley geezer sounds like the painter in the story, holing up for years, obsessing over the cataloging of that moldy mausoleum.
“Yeah, I’d hate to think of Aunt Sadie trapped in a place like that. I think, in the end, she did okay without him.”
And you did okay, too, baby.
“What do you mean me?”
I been around guys like that rummy late husband of yours. Alkies, wife-beaters, it don’t matter. They’re all the same. They drain the life out of the ones who love them.
I lay quietly, considering what Jack had said. He wasn’t wrong. I’d been obedient and meek in my marriage, just like the bride in “The Oval Portrait.” I wondered what would have happened if Calvin hadn’t bailed. Would I have wised up on my own? Or, little by little, over time, would he have crushed my spirit? Drained the life out of me?
Not for nothing, sweetheart, but there are some questions you’ll never get answered.
“Well, how about your life then? Now that it’s over, maybe you can give me a few…answers, I mean.”
What do you want me to spill?
“First of all: what ever happened in that Vincent Tattershawe case? You never showed me.”
Not much to show. The address on the ticker tape wrapped around the key led to a bank. The key opened a safety deposit box. Inside was a pile of stock certificates for Ogden Heating and Cooling. Turns out it was a legit business. Some big conglomerate bought it, and the stock paid off ten to one. Dorothy Kerns was a multimillionaire before the year was out.
“You mean Vincent Tattershawe was on the up-and-up all along?”
Yeah, baby, Dorothy Kerns’s picture of Tattershawe turned out to be the one that rated after all. He left a short note in that bank box, told Dorothy it was better for her if they never saw each other again. Seems he’d been building a case against the firm. Was going to take it to the authorities. But his boss caught on, tried to have him clipped. Vincent escaped the lead poisoning and took a powder.
Grabbing the photo off Mindy’s desk was a last-minute idea. He figured no one would suspect a photo having incriminating info. A straight letter could have been intercepted and he was pretty paranoid. Judging from what happened to Mindy, turned out he was right.
“And what happened to Baxter Kerns and the corrupt investment company?”
I dropped a dime on both of them, honey. Went to the feds with the address of the warehouse, info on the records room. Caught up with old Baxter nice and private like before the badges took him away.
“What did you do?”
Let’s just say I introduced him to a new gourmet dish: brass knuckles.
“Is that what went wrong that you set right again?”
Excuse me?
“Last week, you said there was something that went wrong in your life that you wanted to see go right in someone else’s.”
Dorothy Kerns and Vincent Tattershawe. That’s what went right. I helped Dorothy find him.
“How?”
Tattershawe didn’t leave any contact info, but I noodled out where he’d gone just the same— back to Cherbourg. That’s where I would have gone. After serving over there, he knew the old HQ like the back of his hand. So I took Dorothy to France, and we tracked him down. They got hitched over there and stayed. Started a family right away, too. Adopted two little orphan girls.
“Jack, that’s amazing…but if that’s what went right, what was it that went wrong? For you, I mean?”
It’s not a happy story, baby.
“Tell me anyway.”
Back in the ’30s, before I did my bit for the war in Europe, I’d been seeing a woman—
“Wait, did you actually say a woman? Not a dame? Not a broad?”
Her name was Sally Archer. She was a nurse. She had a russet pageboy and a pert little nose. She was small and practical, full of sunbeams and fresh air but strong enough to kick a stevedore into holding the door for her.
“Sounds like she was right up your dark alley. What happened to her?”
Well, she wanted to get hitched, but I was a pretty angry, unhappy bird back then, and I was fairly sure I’d make any dame miserable, so I walked away. I joined the army, spent four years over there, you know, like the song…
“And?”
And…they say one bad night in a foxhole can change any man. I had hundreds of them. But by the time I got back stateside, Sally was married. A doctor she worked with had snatched her up, and she was living in the suburbs, had a kid already and another on the way.
“Jack, that’s so sad…but couldn’t you find another woman to settle down with?”
No, sweetheart. Went through plenty. But none were Sally. There’s only been one other woman who’s reminded me of her since…
“Who was she?”
I waited for an answer.
