The Walkaway (20 page)

17

A mong Sally’s clippings was an item from the Eagle about Loretta getting a real estate award. It mentioned that her husband was Eric Gandy, the prominent local developer, though Gandy was not evident in the accompanying photo. There was a drawing of a hot rod by a boy named Tate Gandy on the kid’s page, and a brief mention in the Neighbors column that Michelle Gandy had been selected for the National Honor Society. A whole obituary page turned out to include Donald’s, and Gunther wondered if he and Donald hadn’t known each other as children, being three years or so apart in a town as small as Cottonwood.

Digging a little deeper he hauled out some whole newspaper sections, quite a bit older than the clippings. The first was an old afternoon
Beacon
. On the front page below the fold was an article written by Frank Elting, accompanied by an early-morning photo of a parking lot crawling with cops, including Gunther, and in the midst of them a sheet covering a body. The sheet had been heavily retouched so that its contours would show up in the rotogravure, and in his mind’s eye he clearly saw old Gus Linderman standing there in the parking lot holding his Speed Graphic with the flash bar on the side, trying to stay out of everybody’s way and be at the center of everything at the same time.

Underneath was another edition of the
Beacon
, and when he saw the headline over Elting’s story the question he had wanted to ask Sally in his dream bubbled up to the surface. This was the kind of story the
Eagle
never would have printed, let alone the headline:

DA TO FILE CHARGES IN COLLINS PLANT SEX LOTTERY

There was no picture accompanying the article, but some of the names in it he remembered well: Lynn Furness, Sonya Bockner, Frieda Singer, Amos Culligan. Sally Ogden. He skimmed the rest of the article and dipped down into the box, and he pulled out another
Beacon
from around the same time:

LOVE WAS PRIZE IN COLLINS RAFFLE

Beneath that was the next day’s paper:

NAB COLLINS SEX RING OPERATORS

The photo showed the five of them being led away by police, hiding their faces with their hands and in Culligan’s case his hat. The unpleasant time the photo evoked notwithstanding, it was good to see the faces of the arresting officers, Lou Preston and Albert Vance, both of them dead for years and years now, the two of them grinning at the photographer like it was the funniest goddamn arrest they ever made. Gunther read down to the end of the column, then carefully opened up the section like an enormous, brittle butterfly to page 3, section A, where it continued. There, buried in the middle of the article, was a description of the cabin and a vague reference to its location: an abandoned gravel quarry twenty-seven miles southwest of town, outside of Pullwell.

With that the first part of the route opened up before him in his brain as though he were driving it at that very moment: the turnpike down to Pullwell, old state highway 129 to the turnoff, and then what? Maybe if he got that far the rest would come back to him.

He left the newspapers on the cement floor of the garage and returned to the living room, where he stood on the couch looking at Sally’s painting and contemplating his transportation options. He was startled out of his reverie by the sound of the back door opening, and he tiptoed into the bedroom hallway.

“Sally? You home?” The voice was familiar. “It’s Eric.” He heard keys being dropped onto a hard surface.

Eric entered the living room as Gunther slipped quietly into the kitchen, where a set of keys sat on the table. He walked out the backdoor with them to find the Volvo sitting in the driveway like a gift, and he took its wheel in something not unlike a state of grace. He was sorry about not staying to say hello to Sally, but they wouldn’t have had much to say anyway; there hadn’t been much left the day he drove her from Wichita to Cottonwood in his old Ford.

It took him a few blocks to quit pawing around with his foot for the nonexistent clutch, but he soon had the hang of it again, moving through the darkness past neighborhoods as strange and new as Sally’s. He began to wonder whether the street he was on reached the turnpike or not, and when he got to a cross street leading downtown he took it, thinking the more recognizable streets would take him where he needed to go.

“Mr. Brown? I’m Ed Dieterle, I think Dorothy Fahnstiel called and told you I was coming.”

“She sure did. Come on in.” They passed through a dark living room and into a home office, and Brown pointed him to a chair. In the distance kids could be heard fighting, followed by the sound of their mother intervening and telling them to pipe down.

“Sorry I couldn’t wait for business hours.”

“That’s okay. I was just watching some TV when Mrs. Fahnstiel called. Now I can’t tell you everything I could tell the trustee, but I can tell you everything I’m allowed to tell Mrs. Fahnstiel.”

“She’s the beneficiary but not the trustee?”

Brown leaned back with his hands behind his head. “One of the beneficiaries. The trustee was Mr. Fahnstiel, until he became incapacitated. Then the Trust Department took over.”

“The account was established when?”

“Nineteen eighty, I think. Might have been eighty-one.”

“And it was a big cash deposit?”

The banker’s swivel chair squeaked as he leaned forward. “Mr. Fahnstiel had a large sum of cash he’d been saving for quite a long time, and he’d suddenly become aware of the need to protect it. You see that from time to time with clients of his generation. Your generation. People who’ve been through the Depression and don’t trust the banks, they suddenly get nervous about having all that cash around.”

“So he just had this money tucked away in a mattress before?”

“Not really a mattress as such. But I believe he kept it in his house.”

“And how much money was this?”

“A little more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Ed asked him to repeat the sum, and he did. “And you don’t think that’s a lot for a policeman and a nurse to have squirreled away?”

Brown shrugged. “That was none of my business.”

“And the money’s running out.”

He nodded. “Dwindling, let’s say. Mrs. Fahnstiel came to me just last week to see what we could do about putting her in there with Mr. Fahnstiel, and that’s what got me sitting down to do the numbers.”

“But you can’t tell me where the rest of the money’s been going?”

“Not without a court order.”

Ed thanked the man and went outside. He sat at the wheel of the rental car for a while and tried to imagine a way Gunther could have ended up with that much money without having done something very bad.

Twenty minutes after leaving Sally’s house Gunther, still nowhere near the turnpike, passed by the old Riverside Zoo. He recalled walking there from his old bachelor’s studio when his daughters, still in their early teens, used to visit him on weekends; being in the neighborhood for what might be the last time he thought he’d swing past his old apartment, just for a quick look.

The building was still standing. It had been new then, long and narrow with apartments on either side of a central corridor, made of blond brick with thick blocks of glass instead of bricks on the front end. Being halfway underground like Ray and Cal’s Barber Shop, the studio was always a little dark even in the daytime, its windows opening out at the level of the grass. There was another floor above his, and the building was full of people like Gunther: single, or single again, working odd hours, having just arrived in town or trying to get up the courage to leave. For him it was a place to hang his clothes and to sleep when he didn’t have a girlfriend who’d let him stay over; when he moved there in 1950 he was thirty-eight years old, and he’d already been married and divorced three times.

He pulled away and circled the block, eventually braking in front of the zoo. He thought it had been replaced by a new one, but its buildings and cages appeared intact, and people were strolling through them in the warmth of the late evening. A row of enormous bird cages still stood to the right of the entrance, one of the tropical birds inside cawing frantically. Directly behind the cages had been the big redbrick monkey and lion house, and right in front of it the alligator pit, always his favorite part of the park. Fondly he recalled the old gator sunning himself in the circular trench with its hollow eyesockets, both eyes— so his daughters had assured him—lost to bottle caps thrown by wanton boys. During the warm months when it could be displayed outdoors it seemed never to move except to follow the sunlight, slinking from one end of its pit to the other, and he wondered now what possibly could have seemed amusing about such a spectacle. He almost felt like getting out to see if it was still there; instead he let slowly up on the brake and crept forward, his arm hanging out the window in the slight breeze.

Three blocks up and to the left was Daisy and Ed’s old place, a small apartment complex built in the twenties; it was designed to look like a bunch of small houses attached side by side to one another, with a shared, sloping roof and flower beds and big windows looking out onto a central courtyard. It hadn’t changed much, as far as he could see. Lights were on in most of the apartments, and someone was playing “Stardust” on a piano.

He’d first laid eyes on Sally Ogden here, at one of the loud, boozy parties Ed and Daisy used to throw before Daisy got religion. Sally drew his attention shortly after his arrival by flinging a drink at another guest, a tipsy woman who kept playing the first bars of “My Funny Valentine” very badly on Daisy’s upright piano, again and again, faltering every time at the key change.

“Would it be too much to ask to cut that shit
out
?” Sally said just before emptying a full highball glass in the woman’s direction; Gunther was stunned both by the coarseness of the act and the beauty of the woman performing it. She looked like she belonged in a painting.

While Daisy walked the weeping pianist home Sally turned on Gunther, whose inability to stop staring at her she misinterpreted as disapproval.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t have to listen to ‘My Funny Goddamn Valentine’ twenty times in fifteen minutes,” she said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking it.”

“I’m not thinking anything either.”

Other people were, though; a tall, blond pinch-faced woman passed close by and murmured “bitch,” and Sally twisted her head around just long enough to spit “trash” back in her direction.

She looked him in the eye. “I’ve had enough of this shit. You want to go down to Jack’s?”

He’d never been to Jack’s but he was pretty much up for anything this woman wanted to do short of getting married. As they left the party he heard Ed Dieterle’s voice bellowing over the heads of the guests “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Now he sat in front of that same apartment building close to forty years later in a car he’d stolen from Sally’s son-in-law. In the Dieterles’ old apartment a big middle-aged man with a beard peered through the curtains at him suspiciously, and he noticed that whoever had been playing “Stardust” had stopped. He made a U-turn away from the curb and drove.

He had been disturbed since leaving Sally’s by the Volvo’s failure to shift reliably, but he attributed the unpleasant sound coming from under the hood to the unfamiliar automatic transmission and left it at that. Now there was another noise, an alarming, high-pitched whine, and he noticed that the temperature gauge was edging into the red. He pulled over and looked down at the stick. P, R, N, D, D1, D2. He’d been switching back and forth between D1 and D2, unsure of which was the optimum setting.

He was a few blocks west and north of the zoo now. A block away on the corner stood Jack’s; he could wait inside while the engine cooled off, and probably someone there would know the way to the turnpike.

He sauntered up the sidewalk toward the tavern, feeling very much at home. Despite the day’s heat he could still see signs of yesterday’s shower; between the concrete blocks grew clumps of grass three or four inches high, and the lawns he passed were all thick and past due for mowing. He halfway hoped it would rain again before he went back to the home.

Sticking out of the bricks above the tavern’s doorway was a dull and fissured yellow Plexiglas sign with red cursive letters so badly faded they were almost illegible even with the light on inside it: Jack’s River-bank Tavern. Approaching the door he saw as if in a dream the same old black Packard that had belonged to Jack back then, sitting fat and shiny next to the curb, and as he yanked open the battered old screen door its dry hinges let loose a grating metallic shriek.

“Hey, there, stranger,” a lady of sixty or so called out to him from behind the bar. She had a deep, unnatural-looking tan set off with pinkish white eye shadow and lipstick, short hair bleached very blond, and stretched across her substantial bosom a tight blue T-shirt with glitter all over it that read WORLD’S SEXIEST GRANDMA. In her left hand, its nails long and lacquered the same color as her eyes and lips, she held a long, thin cigarette. “What’ll you be having?”

He hadn’t really thought about it. He hadn’t had a drink in a long time, since before Lake Vista anyway. “What kinda beer you got?”

“On tap I got Miller and Miller Light.”

“Miller High Life?”

“Genuine Draft. I got High Life in a bottle, though, if that’s what you want.”

Gunther nodded and she pulled a bottle out of the cooler and set it down in front of him.

“Seventy-five cents. You need a glass?” He shook his head no.

He handed her a dollar, and when she gave him his quarter back he dropped it into a jar marked TIPPING ENCOURAGED.

“Thanks,” she said, then returned to a conversation with a woman at the end of the bar.

He took a swig and set the bottle back down and slushed the beer around in his mouth. It was blander than he remembered, although he might have been remembering some other brand, or even another type of beverage entirely.

Across the pass-through behind the bar he saw a man his own age playing pool with a woman in her twenties. He was nattily dressed, with a bow tie and suspenders and a neatly trimmed beard, and he frowned thoughtfully at her every shot.