Fatal Obsession Page 3

  I shifted in my chair. “I don’t know my schedule yet, Mr. Gladbrook. I haven’t talked to Gail today. I’ll stop by if I can.”

  “Well, good. That’s just fine. And if you can’t make it, why I can catch you here at the hotel. Right?” The smile returned.

  “Right.”

  “Matt going to be staying here, too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bringing his new wife, I hear.”

  “So they say.”

  “Supposed to be a real looker.”

  “I imagine.”

  Gladbrook paused, evidently to remember if he’d forgotten any part of his gambit, then pushed his chair back. “Well, real good to talk to you, Marsh.”

  “You, too.”

  “Lots of things about the old town here you probably don’t know about, being gone so long.”

  “I imagine.”

  “We need help, I don’t mind telling you. Folks are hoping you feel about us the same way your daddy did, is what it comes down to, I guess.”

  Gladbrook’s eyes probed my face. Since I didn’t know what my reaction was, he didn’t find the one he wanted. “Well, we can go into all that when you come by the store.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, that’s real fine. Real fine. I’ll be seeing you, Marsh. You have a good day.”

  “You, too.”

  Gladbrook stood over me, gazing down like a pachyderm. “Still remember that run you made against Bloomfield. Damnedest thing I ever saw on a football field. Still the record down at the high school, I think. Ninety-six yards.”

  I gave Gladbrook about half the smile he’d awarded me and watched him walk off, the fluff of a gray-white handkerchief sticking out of his pocket like the tail on a double-knit bunny.

  My second cup of coffee came and went, as did some more diners. All of them spotted me, and a few nodded my way with a puzzled reflex. One or two looked like they wanted to say something, but none of them did until I stood up to pay the check.

  The man who clasped me on the shoulder and shook my hand was one I knew and liked. Arnold Keene had been my high school history teacher. He was now superintendent of schools, or was the last I heard. He’d been the best teacher by far when I was in school, among other reasons because he had an approach to the Civil War that was both rapturous and mystical, of the stuff from which pacifists are made.

  “Marsh.”

  “Hey, Arnie.”

  “It’s great to see you.”

  “You, too.”

  “Heard you were in town, Marsh. Ann and I sure would like you to come to dinner while you’re here.”

  “I will if I can, Arnie. Say hi to Ann for me, anyway.”

  Arnie nodded his balding head. He had to be over sixty-five but he looked a decade younger. His wife had been his student, and their courtship and marriage had been scandalous to many, as those things tend to be, but my knowledge of it was all hearsay. All I knew for sure was that they were both good people who’d taken a genuine interest in me when I was too young to be much of anything but irritating.

  “How long you staying?” Arnie asked as I pocketed my change.

  “I’m not sure. Probably only a day or two. How’s Craig?” I asked, naming their son, a star miler in his time, which had been about five years after mine. Craig was a doctor in Texas, last I heard. The thought made me smile. Everything I knew about Chaldea’s present was what I had learned through Gail. If she didn’t deem it important enough to tell over the longdistance wire, it didn’t exist.

  “Craig died two years ago, Marsh,” Arnie said, jolting my thoughts. “Car wreck. Down in Dallas.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay. We’re over it now. Took a while, I admit. Hard to understand a thing like that. Just like what happened to you folks.”

  He stopped, stabbed by the pointed blade of memory, and his gaunt face grew even longer, assuming an aspect that on another face would have been a caricature of grief. “Left a wife and three kids,” he went on. “We never see them. She thinks we’re too backward up here in the sticks. Big society woman. Married Craig’s partner six weeks after he died. Thank God Ann has her church.”

  Arnie’s eyes returned from the gruesome burden of the past. He rubbed them back to life and coughed while I searched for something to say. “Come see us, Marsh,” he said, before I thought of anything.

  Arnie slapped my shoulder again and walked away. I took some quarters back to my table and left them for the waitress. When she saw me she hurried up and asked if anything was wrong with the buckwheats. Her breasts bounced furiously within their sheaths. I told her I’d been too busy to eat, then hurried out into the street without meeting any of the eyes that sought out mine.

  Four

  The Hotel National was in the center of town, on the east side of the city square. It faced, as did all the buildings on the square, the four-storied courthouse, whose Byzantine roofline and high clocked cupola and rough stone walls sheltered everything from municipal offices to the only public rest rooms in town. The clock was stopped at ten past twelve, and as far as I knew it had ever been thus.

  On the lawn that stamped the center of the square were four Civil War cannon and the modernistic band shell that had garnered Lem Fiddler the Citizen of the Year award, but there were none of the giant trees I remembered climbing to view parades or peer in windows or show off for girls. I assumed they had fallen when Dutch elm disease savaged the state some years before. Without them, the square seemed meek and defenseless, open to plunder.

  Between the hotel and the courtyard was traffic, two lanes of cars, one driving clockwise, the other counter, with parking in between. By day the drivers searched out places to park and shop, but by night they were looking and being looked at, with sex the ultimate medium of exchange. In my day a bargain was seldom struck, at least by me.

  Like every other kid in town, I’d cruised the square as regularly as an electric motor, on Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. One time, after a win in the big game, we had circled it one hundred and forty consecutive times in my father’s Impala, checking the action, seeking brazen girls, finding none. At various times I’d been arrested on the square for shooting fireworks, gotten drunk on blackberry wine while circumnavigating it, necked in the shadow of the bandstand, and seen everything from knife fights to Estes Kefauver within its boundaries. Those times and others joined me as I began to walk, my dark glasses donned as black disguise, my stroll as brave as Lash LaRue’s.

  The Chaldea square. Never grand, it had dwindled further in the years I’d been away. Several storefronts were boarded up and many of the businesses I once patronized had been replaced by specialists in chiropractic or pictured shirts. It seemed less crowded, too, and so less prosperous. Times had never boomed in Chaldea, but I sensed depression, a hanging on. I didn’t know precisely why or what had happened, but I had a feeling Norm Gladbrook, Chamber of Commerce president, would tell me all about it when and if I got around to stopping by his store. I left the east side and headed west.

  It was only nine o’clock but already there was much activity. All the stores had opened, and most of the proprietors were sweeping off the walks in front of their establishments. I passed the Firestone outlet, where I’d earned my first paycheck patching tires; the pool hall where my brother Matt had spent every spare hour between the ages of twelve and eighteen; the old Ritz Theater, now a discount variety store, where I’d seen Gene and Roy and Johnny Mack Brown shoot it out for a dime and dreamed to strike it rich at Bank Night or to win a prize from Hadacol; and the Owl Drug, scene of my first date, tremulous words rasped across the top of a lemon Coke on a Sunday after church.

  I went inside the drugstore but it had been remodeled in chrome and glass, with space for everything but a soda fountain and the kids it would attract. As a compromise I bought a roll of Necco wafers and went back outside to encounter Ziggy’s, source of model airplanes and comics you could read without pay
ing for or being urged to. And then the bank and the dime-store, the shoe store, clothing store, jewelry store, paint store, and Sears, Coast-to-Coast, Western Auto, Gamble’s, Penney’s, Woolworth’s, Spurgeon’s, and the Blackbird Café.

  Not so different, really, from before, but not the same. Once I’d known and been known by every business on the square. Now the faces I saw were strangers, trying to weather the slings and arrows of economic fortune in a place that didn’t have many things that anyone else in the world wanted very much.

  I continued my stroll, noting other changes. There seemed to be a racial diversity that hadn’t existed before—I noted several black faces and even an Oriental. And the farmers came to town in big cars instead of rattling pickups with hogs in the back. And the girls didn’t seem quite as cute as the ones in my day, but they were sexier and knew it. And not as many people said hello to strangers like myself.

  I’d almost made it all the way around when a man came out of the Blackbird and bumped into me before he saw me coming. We backed away and apologized routinely, then looked at each other a second time. “Marsh?” he said. “Marsh Tanner?”

  “Hello, Chuck,” I said, addressing my first and best friend.

  “I’ll be damned. Heard you were in town. Didn’t know if I’d see you.”

  I laughed. “Everyone’s already heard I’m in town and I didn’t get here till last night.”

  “Yeah, well, you know how it is in Chaldea. Remember that time you took Bonnie Conway to the drive-in and wouldn’t tell your mom who you went with? How long did it take her to find out?”

  “Two hours. And I’d never been out with Bonnie before in my life.”

  “Know where she is now?”

  “Where?”

  “Vegas. Husband’s a pit boss at the Sands. Look her up when you’re there, she’ll get you into any show in town, Sinatra included. You screw her that night, Marsh? You never said.”

  “Screw you, Chuck,” I said, and laughed.

  The smile dropped off Chuck’s face. “Yeah. Screw me. Well, someone beat you to it.”

  I looked more closely at my friend. Like me he had added some pounds and lost some hair, but there was a further debilitation I didn’t think we shared. His short jacket was frayed at the cuffs and collar and the front of his shirt was rumpled and puckered and in part unbuttoned. His skin had always been fair, as befit his reddish hair and blue eyes, but the flesh was waxen now, unpolished beneath a bristle of rosy beard. As the seconds drained away I thought I detected the smell of cheap booze.

  At one time I would have died for Chuck Hasburg or at least have wanted the chance to, but when I’d gone off to the army our relationship had foundered after a couple of halfhearted letters full of facts and empty of feeling. Looking at him now, I wanted him to be the man he’d been at seventeen, but perhaps it was because I wanted to be who I’d been then as well. Chance meetings of former friends seldom work, but I owed Chuck something, a gesture at least, so I asked if he had time for coffee at the hotel.

  He shook his head immediately. “I got to get going, Marsh. Thanks, anyway.”

  “Maybe we can have a drink before I leave.”

  “Sure. Give me a call.” He started to walk away.

  His lack of interest suddenly hurt me. “Say hi to Carol for me,” I called out.

  Chuck stopped and cocked his head and seemed to give my request more analysis than it deserved. “I will if I see her,” he said after a minute, then teetered and almost fell. “We split up a while back. Guess you haven’t heard.”

  “No. I’m sorry, Chuck. I … I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Well, people change. Carol, anyway.”

  Chuck’s eyes left mine and found something behind me and he frowned, first with surprise and then with urgency. When he began to gesture oddly, I turned to see what he was seeing.

  The only thing I saw was a man, walking along on the other side of the square. He was wrapped in a sort of cape and wore boots that came to his knees. His hair was long and tied in a braid behind his head. His walk was rapid, almost manic. He vanished quickly behind a building, perhaps fleeing from Chuck. “You want to know about Carol,” Chuck said through clenched teeth, “you can ask that son of a bitch.”

  “Who is it?”

  “You ought to know,” Chuck said. “He and your nephew are big buddies. Two peas in a pod, the fucking double-crossing hippies.” Chuck walked away, his hands balls of knuckled anger. I hurried after him and slowed him by putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “I need to ask you something,” I said when he stopped.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “People in town seem real involved in this business of what we’re going to do with our farm. I mean, more than just idle curiosity. Or is it my imagination?”

  “It’s not imaginary,” Chuck said.

  “What’s the deal, then?”

  “The deal is the future of this burg, Marsh. At least that’s the way some people see it.”

  “But how?”

  “You’ve got big-timers interested in that place. Big money, big jobs, big boom. That’s what people say. They look on the Tanner place as the salvation of the county.”

  “Are things that bad?”

  “Worse. Look around. Square’s half empty. Only crowd in town’s down at the unemployment office. Half the jobs have been taken by the niggers or them fucking boat people they brought in here. Hell, I’m out of work myself.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Went with the box factory after we graduated. Then they went bust and I bought a fast-food franchise and that got squeezed out when the fucking Colonel came to town, and in the process I just about got myself wiped out. What little I had left Carol got, her and her fucking lawyer. Clark Jaspers, remember him? Remember how we all felt sorry for him, the crippled little bastard? Well, first he started getting fucking criminals off scot-free when they should have been hung and then he tried to make a mint in a real estate deal out by the country club and lost his shirt. And I let him get me into a deal that just went sour. The son of a bitch.”

  “I’m sorry, Chuck,” I said again. “If I can help somehow, just let me know.”

  “Well, what you can do for me is think real hard about what you do with that farm of yours. About who gets it and what they’ll do with it when they do.”

  “I will.”

  Chuck chuckled bitterly and shook his head. “Hell, don’t let me get you down, Marsh. Other folks, either. There’s lots of sob stories around, but they’re not your problem. Take the money and run. It’s what I’d do if I had the chance. Fuck the town. That’s the way I see it. What’d it ever do for you?”

  I could think of several things, but I didn’t mention them just then.

  “Hey,” he said. “Know who’s back in town?”

  “Who?”

  “Sally.”

  “Sally? Sally Stillings?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Christ, Chuck. Sally? What’s she doing here?”

  “Same as the rest of us. Just trying to get through it.”

  “Through what?”

  “Whatever it is between now and the day you die.”

  Five

  Back at the hotel I called Gail to check the schedule for the day. She told me to come for lunch, that Matt should be in town by then and that Curt was driving in from Glory City for a meeting and that I should stop at the South End Bakery for some rolls on the way. “Why didn’t you tell me Sally Stillings was back in town?” I asked after Gail had stopped instructing me.

  She laughed. “I was afraid you’d turn around and go back.”

  “I would have,” I said. “And I still may.”

  “Not before we talk, Marsh. Please?”

  I grumbled some more, then hung up and spent a few minutes thinking about Sally and deciding I wanted to see her again. After that I was bored, and I had a couple of hours to kill, so I got in the car and drove around town, doing what I’d always done in that condition.
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  I hadn’t gone far before I began to sense again that ineffable freedom of a kid with a car and a Sunday afternoon and enough gas to get to the end of his world and back. The nip of autumn was in the air. Red and yellow leaves scampered frantically to avoid my wheels. My first forays as a detective had been on days like this, when I’d picked out other cars and followed them wherever they led me, for no other reason than my interest in other lives and how they were lived.

  The town slipped past me like a winding river. There was less change in the residential areas than on the square, and as a result time collapsed around me. Some new developments, a rest home, a new grade school, even a new stoplight, bringing the town’s total to two, were the only things that jarred me. But the major hallmarks of my youth, the high school, City Park and the pool, the library, the reservoir, the golf course, even the house I grew up in, were unchanged in every way but one: they were so much smaller than I remembered. I felt like Gulliver afoot in Lilliput, huge and unaware.

  I kept driving. A thicket of memory thistles pricked at me relentlessly, some sticking, some jabbing me briefly but falling away, a few drawing blood. I passed the place where I’d fallen off a horse, where I’d fought in a rage over the rules to Red Rover, where I’d seen my first dead body, the result of an unwon race between a train and a car, and, down a little lane that lead, ultimately, to a tiny Jewish cemetery, the place where I’d first touched a naked woman’s breast. I passed the houses of friends and enemies and girls, and the gas stations and cafés where we’d hung out, and faded billboards that sang of Colonial Bread and Meadow Gold milk and Salada tea. I drove up the hill we’d slid down on snow and around the field we’d played football on in fall and past the grocery store I’d helped build and the office where my grandfather had practiced law and died, and more and more, clustered within a few square blocks, insignificant to anyone but me, and maybe by now to me as well, the way a bad poem is familiar but unimportant.