The phone was located on the nightstand on Wendy’s side of the bed-as was only right; it was her bed-and before I was completely aware of what was going on, she had the phone to her ear and was talking. She’d told me once that all the while her husband was in Nam, where he eventually died on his second tour, she had nightmares about the phone ringing in the middle of the night and a cold military voice telling her that her husband was dead. She told me that she woke up several nights to find the phone in her hand, a dial tone loud in her ear. She’d incorporated the nightmare into reality.
“It’s Mike,” she said, lifting up the Princess-style phone and planting it on my stomach. I took the receiver and listened. I asked him to repeat what he’d said, so he went through it once more. He said he was at the crime scene and that if I wanted to join him it would be all right. He said that Cliffie wouldn’t be there; he’d called the chief but the chief felt that Potter could handle it. I could sense Potter’s smile when he quoted Cliffie: “I think you’ve learned a lot from me since you’ve been here and I’ve let you handle a number of other things already. You just keep me posted-the morning’s soon enough.” This was the first time I’d heard Potter draw down on Cliffie. But it was late and the scene he was at had to be a true bummer.
“What’s going on?” Wendy whispered. Since I was still talking to Potter, I held up my hand to wave her off.
“I’m on my way, Mike.”
Wendy had slipped into the bathroom. I heard her pee and then start brushing her teeth. If the National Dental Society or whatever it was called wanted to give a trophy (a big shining jewel carved into a tooth) to the person who brushed her teeth the most times a day, Wendy would be their choice. Seven, eight times a day and that doesn’t count flossing.
I got a light switched on and dressed. I used one of her hairbrushes to batten down my own dark mess. I was lighting a cigarette when she came out wearing a ragged old robe she liked. She managed to look tousled, sweet, and very sexy.
She came over and took my cigarette from me. She inhaled deeply, exhaled in a blast. She held up a finger. “One more.” After she finally gave me my smoke back, she said, “Mike sounded shaky. What’s going on?”
“Tommy Delaney,” I said, “hanged himself earlier tonight.”
20
Cue the rain.
Halfway to the Delaney residence a hot, dirty summer rain shower started pelting my car. I had the radio turned up to KOMA in Oklahoma, still my favorite station. In the middle of the night this way the signal was stronger than during the day. A bitter anti-war song seemed right for this moment. I kept lighting one cigarette from another. I resented all the snug people in their dark snug houses as I passed street after street.
All the natural questions came to me. What had Tommy Delaney wanted to tell me and then backed away from? Was this going to be another murder disguised as a suicide? Had he left a note explaining everything?
The Hills had never looked better, the darkness a mercy to the crumbling houses and sad metal monsters parked curbside, all cracked windshields and rusted parts and political bumper stickers for men who had only contempt for the owners. The closer I got to the Delaney place the more lights I saw in the small houses. The people inside would have heard the sirens and seen the blood splash of emergency lights pitched across the sky. Most would have stayed inside; after all, it was raining now, and who wanted to get wet? But the vampires among them would have shrugged on raincoats and trudged out. Pain, misery, and death awaited them, and this was a tasty brew that would give them a fix of the life force they sought.
The local press was already there. The cops had shunted them to a corner of the action. A beefy part-time deputy stood next to them to make sure they didn’t stray. I parked next to the ambulance and walked over to where Mike Potter was giving orders to another part-time deputy. The crowd numbered somewhere around thirty, not a sell-out crowd but not bad for a rainy four a.m. show that wasn’t in 3-D or Cinemascope.
The air smelled of wet earth, exhaust fumes from all the vehicles, and a cancer ward’s worth of cigarette smoke, my own contribution included. Two squad cars sat together shining their headlights on the front of the garage. The door was down so all I could see was the blank white wood with rust snaking down from the roof. Above the door was the basketball hoop where I’d seen Tommy Delaney shooting baskets that day.
As I approached Potter I heard a scream from inside the house. The piercing agony of it stopped me as I think it stopped everybody who heard it. I’d been surveying the scene the way an investigator would. The scream forced me to survey it now as a simple human being. No doubt one or both of the parents had found their son hanging from a crossbeam in the garage. A madness would set in. They would blame themselves, they would blame him and they would blame existence itself, a ramble scramble of rage and grief and even more rage. I’d worked with enough social workers to know how suicides like this played out.
Potter said, “I’d stay away from his folks if I was you.”
“They mentioned me?”
Rain pattered on his police cap. “According to her, her son was a nice, easygoing kid until you started pestering him about the Mainwaring girl.”
“That’s bullshit.”
He had a flashlight the size of a kid’s baseball bat in his hand. “C’mon, I’ll take you into the garage.”
On the way in, I said, “Did you hear me? What she said is bullshit. I came out here twice. Twice. That’s hardly ‘pestering’ him or whatever she said. In fact, I’m pretty sure he wanted to talk to me about something.”
“Then why didn’t he?” The cop guarding the side door stood aside as we approached.
“How do I know why he didn’t?”
“But you’re sure he did? He sent you some kind of mind message?”
The sarcasm ended the minute we stepped inside. The hard-packed dirt floor, the rain and cool air streaming through the glassless window frame in back, the smells of gasoline, oil, and dirt, now joined with vomit and feces. Somebody had run the only car outside so that the police could bring in all the necessary equipment to nail down every aspect of the suicide.
The way Tommy’s mouth was twisted, it was almost as if he’d been smiling when death had taken him, a grotesque smile that seemed fitting for his end. He wasn’t twitching, anyway, twitching the way he’d been with his folks screaming behind him in what was likely their ongoing marital war. I remembered the tic in his left eye and the forlorn, beaten tone of his voice. Their voices would have been with him as he’d looked for shelter and solace somewhere else. The Mainwaring home would have provided that.
All he wore was his jeans; no shirt, no shoes. Puke streamed down his chest and his right foot had been splashed with his runny feces.
“He left a note.”
“Let’s talk outside.”
Potter raised his eyes, studied Tommy for a time then looked at me. “Yeah, outside.”
The rain was backing off to a drizzle and the action was slowing down to the point that some of the ghouls, soaked, were wandering home. The hardiest of them would stay to see the corpse inserted into the ambulance.
I felt somebody watching me and when I looked to my left I saw Mrs. Delaney hiding behind a kitchen curtain. Even from here her hatred was clear.
“I got on a ladder and climbed up and looked at the ligature marks, Sam. No doubt about this one as far as I’m concerned. He definitely killed himself. The M.E.’ll examine him and make absolutely sure it’s suicide.”
“I didn’t have any doubt about this one.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, the little time I spent with him he struck me as a pretty sad kid.”
“Hell, he was a football hero.”
“Not when you heard his parents shrieking at each other. I stood on the front lawn and heard them. Tommy was coming apart. It was like shell shock. And that came from years of listening to them trying to destroy each other. The other thing was he wanted to tell me something-at least that was the impression I had. But he could never quite do it.”
