The next few days I did a pretty good Lauren Bacall imitation, my battered larynx delivering the deep, low rumble of the lifelong smoker. From jawline to collarbone, my neck was a rainbow of black, blue, green, and yellow beneath skin scraped raw and pink. It hurt like hell to move anything from my shoulders up, and in order to shift my field of vision, I had to move my entire upper body. Frankenstein with a sexy voice …
Between the tape, the paperwork, and the eyewitness accounts of the assault on me, the Williamson County District Attorney’s office charged Travis Webber with a laundry list of offenses ranging from first-degree murder—which would almost certainly be bargained down to second-degree, if not voluntary manslaughter—to attempted murder and aggravated assault. They’ll pile on a few other things before trial for leverage. He’ll plea-bargain and be gone for a few years.
Sykes professed ignorance of any of this and is scrambling to avoid a charge of accessory after the fact. It’s anybody’s bet whether he’ll succeed. As far as I know, Life’s Little Maintenance Manual, Volume II will be published just in time for Christmas.
Victoria Reed paid my bill and wrote me a note of appreciation that included a couple of the more poignant nuggets of her dead husband’s wisdom. I valued it just long enough to fold it into a paper airplane and launch it into the trash can. The insurance company, which had been balking at paying Reed’s life insurance until she was cleared, came through in about ninety days. Between that and Reed’s estate, I’d say Victoria Reed and her kids are set for life.
I was cleared of any suspicion in the murder of R. J. Reed. Of all the media, Randy Tucker wrote the longest and most in-depth article, in which he outlined in great detail the conclusions that the Williamson County District Attorney’s office had jumped to. He called me a month later and told me Greg Bransford, the assistant DA, had been officially reprimanded and had recently been assigned the task of prosecuting a teenage band of cattle rustlers.
I took a couple of days off to recover, then borrowed Lonnie’s pickup and cleared out my office on Seventh Avenue. It took only one pickup load and a couple of hours. A month later the building was sold for demolition as part of a plan to convert the entire block into satellite parking for the arena and the new football stadium.
So I guess it worked out okay in the end.
Mrs. Hawkins was disinterred and autopsied. Two weeks later the results came back. She died of old age. Her heart gave out and she went. I never heard a word of apology or otherwise from the Reverend Hawkins or the Ice Queen. I briefly thought of suing them or causing some other mischief in their life, but then, perhaps out of respect for his mother’s memory, I decided to let it go.
That and the fact that I just didn’t give a damn anymore.
Lonnie and Sheba moved in together and for a few weeks I didn’t hear much from him. In the meantime, Mrs. Hawkins’s part of the house had been cleared out and I began to ponder what to do with it. Truth was, I had all the room I needed upstairs and even though she’d been kind enough to leave me a bathtub full of cash, I saw no need to spend it all buying a lot of furniture and stuff to furnish a place that was too big for me to begin with.
I decided to renovate her part of the house and rent it out. The house was paid for; all I had to cover was the property taxes and the upkeep. Anything else was gravy. She had three bedrooms downstairs, and fixed up I guessed I could get somewhere between eight hundred and a grand a month. Not a ton of dough, mind you, but enough that if I went a few weeks without picking up some work, I wasn’t going to starve. Working without a net was eventually going to get old.
Besides, it would give me something to do while I figured out what to do next. I liked investigative work, but in the past few months it had taken a real toll. Maybe I was ready for semiretirement. If nothing else, it would be nice to know I could pick and choose the cases I wanted to work.
I started by gutting the bathrooms and replacing the ancient fixtures. Then I installed a dishwasher and a new kitchen sink. I discovered, much to my surprise, that I was pretty good with my hands and that hard physical labor was gratifying in ways I’d never understood before. The reward was nearly instant, compared to the work I’d done most of my life, and it felt good to go to bed at night physically drained but emotionally charged. I lost some weight and started to firm up a bit. I kept a radio going in the background, tuned to the jazz station, and a cordless phone nearby that almost never rang. I spent a great deal of time alone and that was just fine.
Like many of the houses in this area, Mrs. Hawkins’s house was built after the famous tornado in the early Thirties—1932, I think it was—wiped out most of the area. Construction methods back then were different from what they are now; cruder in some ways, more refined in others. Interior walls were constructed using traditional lath and plaster methods. I discovered after phoning around that plastering walls is almost a lost art. Everybody uses drywall now. For some reason or other, I wanted to stay with the old methods and after some inquiries I found a retired plasterer down on Sixteenth who was willing to teach me. I spent the rest of the summer replastering walls and mastering the art of flowcoats, then painting and trimming and replacing molding. Then I hired out for refinishing the oak floors. Better to pay for that; it’s too easy to destroy a good floor if you don’t know what you’re doing. I landscaped the yard and cleaned up, then painted the garage while the floor guys did their work.
The summer months passed quickly and pleasantly and by Labor Day I had a house that was prime rental property. I went through an executive relocation firm and found a young couple with one kid and another on the way. He’d been transferred from L.A. and they were delighted to find a three-bedroom rental near downtown in a decent neighborhood for only $1250 a month. I suddenly understood the complaints by locals that the immigrants from L.A. and the northeast were driving property values up.
I was making lunch one afternoon and studying the classifieds to check office rental rates when the phone rang. Startled because my phone had become so silent I sometimes checked just to make sure it’s working, I picked it up.
“Hello,” I said. Original, huh?
“Hey, you.”
It took me a second. It’s not that I’d forgotten what she sounded like; it’s just that I’d finally managed after all this time to go as long as forty-five seconds or a full minute without thinking of her.
“Marsha?”
“Yeah. How you doin’, babe?”
So it’s babe, is it? What the hell is going on?
“Okay,” I said. “And you?”
“As big as the Goodyear blimp. I heard you were cleared of the murder charge.”
“Yeah. Beat the rap one more time.”
“Got your good name back, eh?”
I laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
We both sat there for a few moments, awkward and clumsy. “So,” I said finally, “what’s new?”
“Well,” Marsha said. “It looks like I’m having this baby in a couple weeks. I’m ready for it to be over.”
“How are things working out at your aunt Marty’s?”
“Fine. She’s rarely here. I’ve got a young woman who comes a few hours every day to cook, clean, help me out. She’s not much company, though, because her English is not too good and my Spanish is nonexistent.”
“Gee, sorry to hear that.”
“It’s not so bad. After the past few months, I’m glad to be left alone for a while.”
“Funny you should say that,” I offered. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
“So what are you up to?”
“I spent the summer renovating Mrs. Hawkins’s house. I’ve rented it out to a nice young couple and I’m still living upstairs. Truth is, I’m trying to figure out what to do next.”
“Yeah, I know the feeling.” She was quiet for a long time, and I decided it was her turn to speak first.
“So,” she said, “you think about me much?”
What was she up to?
“Yeah, I do.”
“I think about you a lot, too, Harry. I wish I’d done some things differently.”
“Like what?”
“I made a lot of mistakes, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well … Shit happens.”
She cleared her throat. “So,” she said brightly, “would you like to know what we’re going to have?”
“What we’re going to have?”
“Okay, what I’m going to have, but what we made.”
“And what did we make?”
“We made a little girl, Harry.”
It was like a fist in my gut. I drew in a sharp breath and tried not to choke. There was this lump in the middle of my chest and pressure in my eyes and for a brief moment it was like I could feel Travis Webber’s latex-gloved hands around my throat again.
“You there?” she asked.
I cleared my throat, tried to compose myself as best I could.
Damn her.
“Wow,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” she continued, just as chipper as she could be. “I had my last ultrasound a week ago and you know how they always want to know if you want to know, whether it’s a girl or boy, you know, and I’d always said don’t tell me. But this time I just decided I couldn’t wait anymore, so I said—”
“Marsha,” I interrupted, “why are you telling me all this?”
She stopped, stunned. She seemed to hiccup into the phone and there was a long, staticky silence.
“Because,” she said, her voice breaking, “I miss you and I’m scared and I need you and I want you here to see your baby being born.”
“What?” I asked. My eyes welled and everything went out of focus.
“Is that too much to ask, Harry?” she said, clearly speaking through tears now. “Is that too damn much to ask?”
I leaned back in my kitchen chair and stared out the window. Is life weird or what? Here this woman takes me on the rowdiest roller-coaster ride of my life, announces that I am definitely not the guy she wants to spend the rest of her life with, keeps me in the dark when that life falls apart, then walks out on me. And now she’s halfway across the country, weeping into the phone and pleading with me to come keep her company.
Modahn women, as Mrs. Lee would say.
What the hell, I thought. If the last six months hadn’t killed me, a drive out West wouldn’t. Besides, I could use a vacation.
“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
“Well, I think you’re out of your frigging mind.”
“Oh, shut up, Lonnie,” Sheba said. “Give him a chance.”
Lonnie walked back into the dining room of their condo with a fresh bottle of wine. They’d invited me to dinner the following Saturday night and I’d been shocked to see a wonderfully furnished, top-floor condo of a West End high-rise near Saint Thomas Hospital. The place was full of antiques and packed bookcases and original art by some of the finest local artists around: huge Polly Cook tile paintings, Myles Mailie murals in chaotic swirls, lots of Southwestern stuff in big comfortable rooms full of Stickley furniture. And the real shocker was that it had been Lonnie’s all along; she’d moved in with him because his place was bigger and the address was more prestigious. This guy was full of surprises.
“No, seriously, love,” Lonnie said. He wore a pair of pressed jeans and a tuxedo shirt and was clean shaven and well groomed and had a diamond stud in his left ear. Guy cleans up well.
“Here’s this woman who dumps on my main man here. Who uses him essentially as an anonymous sperm donor, then discards him when she’s done with him.”
He turned to me. “Take my advice, Harry. Stay here. What the hell you going to do in Reno, Nevada, anyway? I’ve played poker with you, pal. You got no future in that.”
“He’s not staying there forever, right?” Sheba turned to me, almost imploring.
“No, of course not,” I said, sipping a buttery California chardonnay Lonnie’d set out to accompany the fresh lobsters we’d just finished chowing down. “I’m going to go out for the birth, and then we’ll negotiate. We’ll figure out what to do next.”
“Well, I mean, look, dude, it’s your call. We’ll watch the house and if there’s any maintenance problems, you just tell the Steinbergs to call here and the old Lonmeister will get right on it. And we’ll collect the rent checks and pay the utilities and you can take that management fee and stick it where the sun don’t shine. But I still think you’re nuts.”
“Love is nuts.” I smiled at him as he sat across from me at the table with an arm around Sheba’s chair. “But it’s one of the few things that makes getting out of bed every morning worthwhile.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet,” Sheba cooed, turning to Lonnie and gazing into his eyes.
“Yeah, you’re a regular poet,” Lonnie said. “I’ll just say the one thing that I seem to say to you a lot these days.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Will you please watch your ass?”
Lonnie and I tuned up the Mustang the next morning, changed the plugs and the oil and lubed it up. Then I packed a bag, gave the Steinbergs instructions on how to find Lonnie and where to mail the rent checks, then bade farewell to their seven-year-old girl—who’d developed sort of a crush on me, I think.
Then I headed for the freeway. I-65 north to I-24, then on to St. Louis and points west. If I didn’t dawdle, I could make Reno in three days, maybe four. Marsha and I’d have maybe a week to readjust before the baby came.
There’s a place on I-65 north, right before you get to the I-265 junction and a few miles before you take the I-24 split, where you go under a bridge. When you come out, you’re on a little rise and in the rearview mirror you get a portrait of downtown Nashville. It’s the place where some photographer about three decades ago took a picture of the Nashville skyline and put it on the cover of a Bob Dylan album of the same name.
I’d forgotten about that picture, that place. I came out from under the bridge in a long line of traffic and glanced in my rearview mirror and there it was. And I thought of how much the Nashville skyline had changed since that time, since my days as a young man listening to “Lay Lady Lay” and wondering what love and life and women were really about.
I still haven’t figured it out. And I’d had the crap beaten out of me a few times trying. But I realized, as I said goodbye to the Nashville skyline receding in my mirror, it was still worth the trouble to keep trying. As long as the secret handshake was still out there, it was worth going after. Some time away would do me good. I felt almost young again.
Go West, middle-aged old gentleman with the heart of a boy, go West.