The Walkaway (4 page)

“Neighborhood sure has changed.”

“Yes sir. It’s getting better.”

“Better? You call this better? Jesus, I remember when these motels used to cater to traveling salesmen and families on vacation.”

“Ah, I see what you mean. But it is changing back, bit by bit. Just one year ago, when my nephews bought the Stars and Stripes, it was called the Bide-A-Wee, and the rooms that weren’t being rented by the hour to the ladies of the street were occupied by drug addicts and dealers, all of whom had to be evicted with great difficulty. Now look—a perfectly nice family motel.”

“The Bide-A-Wee, huh? That rings a bell.”

“I’m sure you remember it from its happier times, before the decay of the neighborhood.”

“No, I used to be a policeman. I’m sure it was something bad, whatever it was.” He took his key and left the lobby.

As he filed the form, the man happened to glance at the address, and was mildly interested to note that it was a local one: 1763 Armacost Street. He had no reason to suspect that this was a house Gunther had owned and inhabited with his third and least favorite wife from 1946 to 1950, after which it had belonged to her. If he had turned on the lobby television to the news, as he sometimes did in the early evening, he would have seen Gunther’s picture staring back at him; instead, he sat down to look at a magazine.

Sidney sat looking up at a picture of Jesus on the wall next to his office manager’s desk, swiveling and tapping his fingers on a crude flyer he’d drawn up with Magic Marker. He had planned to print up a few hundred of them on the copier, but after finishing the lettering he remembered he’d given the police the photo of Gunther he’d intended to use.

Now he was trying hard to remember the married names of Gunther’s daughters. One was a nurse in Minneapolis and the other a housewife in Florida, and unless their financial situations had changed since he’d last heard, it didn’t seem likely that they were the source of the extra money.

He opened an enormous Rolodex, a relic from an earlier incarnation of the business, when it had consisted of a single strip club in midtown called the Sweet Cage. Half the cards in it were useless; interspersed with entries for his own friends, family, and associates were cards for those of the previous owner, dead ten years now, and Janice had been trying to get him to weed out the outdated cards since her first week on the job. He shrugged and started with a card for Brennigan Vending Machine Service, which had once serviced the jukeboxes for the Sweet Cage and its sister club, the Tease-o-Rama, both now equipped with expensive, deejay-operated PA systems.

He tossed the card into the trash; eventually he’d stumble across Gunther’s daughters this way, trimming part of the Rolodex and making his office manager happy in the process. After Brennigan was Bristol, Janice, herself; then Castle Beverage Distributors; and then a card that made his stomach muscles clench: Cavanaugh, Victor. One suburban address out west was crossed out and another, this one in Forest Hills, scribbled beneath it in his dead boss’s odd, square foreign handwriting. He plucked it from the Rolodex, crumpled it and flung it into the wastebasket, then flipped ahead to see if there was an entry for Bill Gerard, Cavanaugh’s boss. There was, with business and home phone numbers and the notation EMERG.
ONLY
next to the latter in block printing he also recognized as Renata’s. The day after Christmas, Sidney had opened up the Sweet Cage to find Bill Gerard lying dead on the office floor; several hours later the police found Renata dead on her hall carpet. Vic Cavanaugh, widely presumed to be the killer, was long gone, and now Sidney knew why he hadn’t ever gotten around to editing the Rolodex.

Three days after Renata’s death Sidney was on the couch of his old house on Twenty-third looking without much hope through the
Eagle-Beacon
’s classified section for a bartending job. He answered a knock at the door and found Gunther standing alone, gloveless hands in his pockets against the cold. Gunther had never come over without Dot before that he could remember, and he surprised Sidney by saying that if he didn’t make an offer on the club he was a fool. After the old man left, Sidney phoned Mitch Cherkas, a bank officer whose sole interest outside of banking seemed to be a series of painful, unrequited crushes on strippers. Mitch thought it was a great idea, and they set about raising the down payment. When he told Gunther this two days later, Gunther surprised him again by handing him a cashier’s check for twelve thousand dollars, almost the exact sum they needed to raise. Thus, at the age of thirty-six, Sidney McCallum—bartender, bouncer, part-time cabdriver, and occasional holder of illicit goods—had been reborn as a businessman. Within three years they’d expanded into flea markets and car shows, bought up a rival strip club outside the city limits, and started promoting oldies concerts with a local radio station, and Sidney found himself making more money than it had ever occurred to him to hope for.

He had no idea, then or now, how Gunther could have afforded to loan him twelve thousand dollars, but when he’d tried to pay it back Gunther actually denied having given it to him in the first place. He thought about that for a minute, then picked up the phone and dialed Mitch’s number.

“Cherkas residence, Mrs. Mitchell Cherkas speaking.”

“Francie, I need to talk to Mitch.”

“Hi, Sidney. Just a sec.”

While he waited Sidney scribbled on a sheet of scratch paper. He had doodled an entire dog by the time Mitch got to the phone. “Hello? Sidney?”

“Mitch. I need six grand right now.”

“Six
grand
? From
me
?”

“I’m gonna put up a reward for Gunther, goose people a little. Six each.”

“In
cash
?”

“We owe him and you know it. I want twelve grand in the bank tomorrow.”

“Can I send you a check?”

“Bring it in person.”

Sidney hung up on him and started going through the Rolodex again. He was up to Trusty Bail Bonds and the Rolodex was twenty cards lighter when the phone rang.

“McCallum Theatrical Enterprises. Sidney speaking.”

“Daddy? I called Moomaw and she said Gunther ran away?”

“Hey. Amy. I’m glad you called. What’s Ginger’s last name?”

“It’s Fox.”

He thumbed his way backward. “Fox. Got it. Thanks, honey. I gotta call her now, she doesn’t know about this yet.”

“Call me when you know something, okay?” she asked, disappointed, and he felt guilty for rushing her off the phone. His eagerness to get hold of Gunther’s daughters was only part of it; Amy was in college in Wyoming majoring in Women’s Studies, and their conversations tended lately to center on the exploitative economics of his business. The last time it had come up he’d testily reminded her that nude dancing, whether she approved of it or not, was paying for her courses in GynEconomics and Herstory, and of course he felt like an asshole the moment he said it. The worst part was that she’d halfway convinced him she was right.

“Don’t worry, he’s gonna be fine.” He hung up and dialed Ginger Fox’s number. What a great name for a stripper, he thought, and the mental image of sturdy, short, serious Ginger onstage and stripping brought forth a laugh and a small shudder. On the fourth ring a machine picked up.

“This is Sidney McCallum calling. We have kind of an emergency here. Call any time, as soon as you get this.” He left his number and decided it was best not to get more specific. He hoped he could get Ginger to call her more volatile sister Trudy with the news. Both sisters loved the old man to excess, just like the grandchildren did, both Gunther’s own and Dot’s, and like Dot for that matter. How, he wondered as he locked the office up for the night, did a man as tight-lipped and glum as Gunther inspire so much devotion from women and children?

The main room at Ruby’s was an atrium overlooked on all four sides by offices on the third and fourth floors of the former Hammerschmidt hotel downtown. The building dated back to the 1870s, and it was believed that its original owner lay beneath the cement floor of the basement, murdered by his very young second wife and her lover in 1887, shortly before the start of the renovations that occasioned the laying of the new floor. Even on slow nights the room’s acoustics made everything loud, and Eric Gandy had to raise his voice to be heard over the easy listening pseudojazz as well as over all the other voices trying to be heard. It was a few minutes before ten o’clock and Eric was flirting with a woman fifteen years his junior, a reporter from one of the local TV stations. She hadn’t invited him to sit down yet, but she had allowed him to buy her a vodka tonic, and a Stoly at that.

“You know, Lucy, we ought to pull on out of here and head over to the Brass Candle and get some prime rib.”

“You’re married, aren’t you, Eric?” she asked, though she didn’t sound as if the answer meant much to her one way or the other.

“It’s just dinner.”

“I have a basket of cheese fingers coming.”

She was very slender for a consumer of deep-fried cheese. Her immaculately made-up face was quite round, though, more noticeably so for being surrounded by a frothy blond semicircle of hair. He felt an urge to reach over and lightly caress its brittle, shellacked surface; aware that this would not advance his cause, he resisted and pressed on. “That’s not dinner, that’s just to keep people from getting shitfaced too quick.”

“Be that as it may,” she said evenly, “they’re coming.”

The need to urinate, which had been building in him for a good ten minutes, was suddenly too powerful to ignore, and he straightened up, gesturing at the men’s room.

“I’m gonna hit the john, and when I come back I want to hear all about that story you did about the kids at that school, with the little kid in Africa they adopted with their allowance money.”

“South America.”

“That’s it.” He was already maneuvering through the crowd toward the men’s room, and by the time he got there what had seemed merely an urgent need had revealed itself to be an emergency situation. There was no one at either stall, and he unzipped with the speed and grace of a virtuoso and let loose his stream onto the minty urinal cake. On the back of the basin someone had pasted a 55MPH—
PISS
ON IT!! sticker, gray and tattered from long and steady use as a urinary bull’s-eye, and tiny flakes in its center shivered in the current.

The comics pages were tacked up on a pair of cork bulletin boards at eye level above the urinals, and Eric reread the current episode of “Mary Worth” for the fourth time that evening. She was mediating between an estranged couple, the husband domineering and cruel, the wife addicted to pills because of it. “Mind your own business, you nosy old bitch,” he drawled into the ether, and the sound of a flush came from the sitdown stall, followed by the click of its latch unlocking. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a woman of about thirty-five push her way out of the stall. She stared brazenly at his prick, its flow momentarily interrupted, flaccid in his right hand.

“Line in the ladies’ room. I didn’t feel like waiting.” He didn’t know her name, but she worked at an accounting firm with his friend Gary Halloran, and he remembered flirting with her at a Christmas party at Gary’s house a couple of years earlier. She’d had on a short white V-necked knit dress that night; tonight she was wearing a burgundy dress of more or less the same design but cut from a lighter-weight material and affording a still better view of her breasts.

He put his organ back in its place and zipped up, more or less finished anyway. “Who likes to wait?” was all he could manage as she pushed the men’s room door open.

“Let me know if you need a designated driver later,” she called to him as the door floated shut.

When he got back to the table Lucy was gone, her change untouched on a small black plastic tray. The almost-f drink and full basket of cheese fingers on the table suggested a hurried exit, which most nights would have pissed him off; tonight, though, he had a better option to pursue.

She was standing by the bar, openly watching him, and he decided that once he subtracted the undeniably arousing factor of his having seen Lucy on television, this woman did more for him than she did. She gestured to him, whatever her name was, jerking her head in the direction of the door. Eric nodded and signaled for the waitress, who brought him his tab. He paid it, then followed the woman to the front door, flush with victory. He hadn’t even had to buy her a drink.

4

GUNTHER FAHNSTIEL
June 14, 1952

I was in Jack’s Riverside Tavern for a beer after I got off duty. My knees hurt from eight hours sitting at the wheel of a prowl car and I didn’t want to listen, but Jack kept talking anyway.

“I’m gonna buy the whole goddamn building, Gunther,” he said. “Take that empty space next door, knock down this part of the wall here, and put in some pool tables.”

“Gonna have to move the bar, then,” I told him. It ran along the wall he wanted to remove.

“Not at all,” he said. “I’ll knock out a passage on this side, and I’ll put a pass-through back here, so the bartender can see into the pool-room.” He was wearing a seersucker suit. He was skinny and five-six, but he had a low, growly voice that helped him handle drunks and high-school kids trying to talk their way into a beer.

“You ask the bank about this yet?” Jack had a daughter in college, and I knew he didn’t make that much off this place. He made a little book on the side, but that still didn’t amount to a great deal.

“I got me a real friendly banker down at Third National. He owes me a thousand dollars, personally, and I’m graciously allowing him to pay it off in bits and pieces, no interest, just because I’m a nice guy. So when I went to him for a loan he was anxious as hell to give it to me.”

“A grand? Didn’t know you were taking in that size bet.”

“I gave him credit for a few months. Twenty dollars here, fifty dollars there.”

“I never heard of you giving anybody credit, even for a beer.”

“Giving credit for beer’s illegal, you know that. I gave him credit because he works at the bank, and I already had this idea in the back of my head. He was real surprised when I showed him my black book, boy. He hadn’t been adding it up, thought it was maybe two hundred, two-fifty. ’Cause he was winning a little every once in a while, and he started to feel like a winner.”

“Who is this banker, anyway? Anybody I know?”

“Dave Atley.”

“Maybe I ought to go see him about a car loan for Ginger.” My daughter was about to turn sixteen.

“He don’t owe you anything. Don’t fuck up my sweet deal here, Gunther.”

“Yeah.” I finished my beer and he poured me another one. He was smart to expand, because as it was he could barely serve a dozen customers at a time. It was the tail end of a dog-ass hot afternoon, and he had the door wide open with the screen door closed to keep the flies out and a couple of big Vornado fans blowing at full speed. There was no cross draft, though. The windows were painted over and nailed shut, and it was hot as hell.

“Might be a little cooler if you pried up the nails from the windows and opened one of ’em up.”

“That’s what the beer’s for, to cool you off.”

Behind me the screen door opened and pulled itself shut with a hissing sound. “Howdy, Jack. Gunther.”

It was Ed Dieterle in his suit and tie. He’d made detective sergeant three months before, and he thought I was pissed off at him since I was still in uniform. I wasn’t, though. I wasn’t going to make sergeant without some big changes I wasn’t planning to make any time soon.

Jack poured him a beer and set it down on the bar. “Fifteen cents.”

“Put it on my tab,” Ed said.

“You know I don’t keep no goddamn tabs, Ed. It’s against the law in the state of Kansas to sell beer on credit.”

“It’s illegal to make book, too,” Ed said with a wink, and he put a quarter on the table. “Been looking for you, Gunther.”

“I didn’t come in here for a lecture.”

“Didn’t come in here to give you one. Sally ever hear from that ex of hers?” Ed asked me.

“Wayne? They’re still married.”

“You hear anything about him coming home?”

I shook my head and took a swig of my beer.

“Because I was down at the hospital this morning and a couple of deputies, Fallon and what’s his name, the big dumb-looking one, they brought this soldier into the emergency ward, he got the shit kicked out of him over at the Hitching Post out on Forty-ninth. I only met him once, but I’d swear up and down it was Sally Ogden’s husband.”

“He’s in Japan far as I know.”

Ed shrugged. “Just thought you ought to know, in case he’s back looking for trouble.”

“Sally says he’s never coming back here.”

“Well, next time you see her, ask. Because it looks like this guy started a big fucking brawl.”

“What about?”

“Fallon said nobody was talking. He had some horseshit story about getting jumped in the parking lot, but he still had his cash on him. Nobody saw anything, one of the whores just found him when she stepped outside for some fresh air.”

It wasn’t Sally’s husband. “Thanks, Ed.”

He nodded. “Taxi picked him up and took him away. Might be worth checking the dispatch. He gave his name as Master Sergeant Thomas McCowan, U.S. Army. Claimed to be on furlough and Fallon said his papers looked okay.”

I nodded.

“Something else I got to tell you about. I was talking to Hawkins the other day, he was telling me he got a call last month from some guy, got beat up while he was staying at a cabin with a couple of gals. Thought the guy who shoved him around might have been a cop.”

I nodded. “He got rough with Lynn and she blew the whistle. I backhanded him one and let him know the weekend was over.”

“You know how much trouble you’re going to be in if one of those guys files a complaint and points to you?”

“He didn’t, did he?”

“He backed down when he realized he’d have to file it in his own name. His wife thought he was duck hunting. But someday there might be a guy who’s single, or stupid, or just doesn’t give a shit.”

“He hit Lynn. While he was fucking her.”

“You don’t understand, Gunther. Whether you were right or wrong doesn’t matter. The point is what were you doing there in the first place?” Ed was getting loud, and I wasn’t going to say any more.

“How’s about you boys find something nice to talk about,” Jack said, and we got quiet.

“How’s old Daisy doing?” I finally asked.

“Fine,” Ed said, and he looked away. I didn’t want him to do me any favors, and he couldn’t stop trying.

“How’s Jeff?”

“Fine.”

“How old’s he, now?”

“Three.”

I shut up and drank my beer. Pretty soon a guy came in and placed a bet with Jack on a fight, and all four of us started arguing about it, and pretty soon me and Ed were pals again. The thing was still between us, though, and I didn’t plan to quit anytime soon.

Afterward I drove over to my mother’s house to do some fixing up. Since I couldn’t do it most weekends I came by evenings after work. Her eyesight was going and she had a bad hip, and living alone was getting to be too much for her. My brother and his wife invited her once to move into their house, but she had the sense to say no. I didn’t want to think about what was going to happen when things got really bad.

“Ginger tells me you’re buying her a car,” she said. I was nailing a new gutter to the edge of her roof.

“Used.”

“I never heard of a sixteen-year-old with her own car.”

“She’s going to have to drive her sister around, and then when Trudy’s sixteen they can share it.”

“You are spoiling those girls rotten. Do you know they have a television set in their house now?”

I knew. That was part of why I was buying the car. My mother would never own either one; she didn’t know how to drive, and the television was Lucifer’s playhouse.

She slunk back into the house to listen to the “Gospel Hour” and sulk. She wasn’t being mean. She just wanted the best for me and the girls, but she was a country girl and the modern world scared the hell out of her. Lately she was interested in flying saucers, since one of her radio preachers had said they were visitations from heaven, sent down by God to warn the wicked. The older she got the more she liked to listen to the fire-and-brimstone type of sermon on the radio and the less she worried about whether one of us drove her to Sunday mass or not. She wasn’t born a Catholic, just converted when she married my father, and I wondered if it ever really took.

She wasn’t my real mother either, though I thought of her that way. I was eight years old when she came to our house, two years after my first mother died of the flu. I hadn’t prayed a lick since that happened so I didn’t much care whether our new mama was Catholic or not, but it was strange thirty-two years later to watch her listening to these programs, nodding her head and saying “uh-huh” and “praise Jesus” like a Holy Roller.

I finished the gutter and passed through the living room on my way out. It was almost dark outside but she had all the lights off.

“Want a lamp on?”

“I don’t need any. Thank you.” The radio dial next to her was about the only light in the room.

“I’ll be back tomorrow to fix the bathroom sink.”

“Why can’t you come Saturday?”

“Got a security guard job lined up. All weekend.”

“You ought to be spending weekends with the girls. If you can’t live with them you at least ought to be seeing them once a week.”

“I know, Mama.”

“I don’t care how much you’re making, the girls are more important, even if the money’s for them. They’d rather see their daddy than have a new jalopy.”

“I know.”

I left then and drove home. She was right about the girls, but the money wasn’t the only reason I worked every other weekend.