The next afternoon at five when I got off work and left police headquarters, I wanted a drink as much as I ever had, but I didn’t want to sit around in the Greek’s bar with Doc. I climbed into the Olds, and sat gripping the wheel, staring at the windshield. I was tired all the way to the soles of my feet.
It had been a clear day, but now the skies were blackening and before I had backed out of the police parking lot, the rain had begun. Hell, I thought, there were plenty of places a man could get a drink.
I turned west, moving slowly with the five o’clock traffic, drove to the Third Avenue entrance and out to the Essex Turnpike. I kept to the inside lane, moving at snail’s pace, and the cars behind me honked and snarled. My windshield wipers were going and the rain beat loudly against the car top.
I told myself I was looking for a bar, but when I reached the country club exit, I turned west and kept slowing down until I reached the Flynn house. Three or four cars were parked in the pebbled drive as I pulled up.
Lights were on in the house, glowing yellow against the rain and early darkness. I remembered how Carolyn hated and feared the thought of death—yet what choice had she had? Perhaps she, at least, should know that Tom had had no choice, either.
I did not know what I would tell her as I slogged across the walk to the front door and rang the doorbell. There was a long silence. This place had servants to open doors, answer bells. Maybe today nothing was working right.
When the door was finally opened, Jerry Marlowe stood framed against the light. He wore Italian straw shoes, dark slacks, a white shirt open at the collar. A cigarette hung from a corner of his mouth and his left eye was squinted against the sting of smoke.
His face showed some small surprise, then a touch of color. It was as though he had to dig back into his mind to remember to smile.
“Hello, old Mike. Come on in.” He didn’t shake hands. Instead he plucked the cigarette from his lips and flicked it across the veranda to sizzle out in the rain. He closed the door and when he turned again, his smile looked genuine. “Just follow me,” he said.
I followed him across the foyer into the sun room that Tom Flynn and I had crossed so cautiously the last time I was here. The room did not look the same—it was no longer unused. The cute black-haired chick was sprawled out on the divan in yellow halter and slacks. She had one knee up, the other foot resting on it. Bright cosmetic bottles littered the floor beside the divan.
She was painting her toenails.
“Hi,” she said. “You hunk of man. You beautiful hunk of man. Can I paint your toenails—or something?”
Her voice had an odd, loose quality and there was a light to match in her dark eyes. And again it itched at me that I might have seen her somewhere before meeting her here. Maybe in some expensive cathouse somewhere.
“Shut up, Jackie,” Jerry said. “Don’t mind her, Mike. There’s just one thing Jackie wants. A year’s subscription to any man who might be willing.”
I glanced at her, and winked. “I’m flattered, but a year is a long time.”
The man in the big chair laughed. He was Morgan Carmichael. “Some years are,” he said. “You really have a way with women, don’t you, Ballard?”
“Some of us do,” I said. I felt myself getting tense.
But he wouldn’t let it go at that. “Oh, but you have a special way. Women look at you, just once, and they have you on their little brains forever. Give you much trouble, Ballard?”
I stared at him and felt my hands clench into fists. He met my gaze for a moment and then his eyes moved away.
Jerry was leaning against a club chair, legs crossed at the ankles. I asked, “Is Carolyn seeing anyone, Jerry?”
He shrugged. “She’ll probably talk to you.” He glanced at Morgan, and his mouth twisted slightly “Anything particular you want to see her about?”
“Come off it, Jerry. I guess Tom didn’t mean much to you—”
“For God’s sake, Mike. Did he mean much to anybody? Did he mean much to you?”
“Maybe he meant something to Carolyn. She married him.”
He straightened. The smile around his mouth deepened. “Want to tell me how much loot you drag in per year in the cop racket, Mike? I’ll present your case to the young widow. Sorry though—but, you weren’t quite the first to come calling.”
Maybe I could have taken it some other time, some other place. But tonight everything about the people in this room bugged me—I still did not quite know why I had come.
I said softly, “Talk out of the other side of your mouth to me, kid. Or I’ll paddle some sense into your head.”
Morgan Carmichael emitted another burst of laughter. “And he’ll do it too, Jerry.”
Jackie swung her legs to the floor, sitting up. “Wait till I get the top back on this bottle. I don’t want to miss a thing.”
“Get back in your kennel,” Jerry said to her. He nodded toward the foyer.
His face was starkly white. “I’ll tell Carolyn you’re down here.” I nodded, followed him out to the foyer. Carmichael laughed again—there was no sound from Jackie. I didn’t look at them. Jerry stopped outside the closed door of the sun room. “I still like you, Mike,” he said. “I always have. But don’t ever put your hand on me again. Not even in fun. Clear?” I shrugged. “No comment. Tell Carolyn I won’t stay five minutes. But I would like to see her.”
The man with Carolyn stood up as I entered. I barely saw him. Carolyn wore a lavender housecoat and rested a damp cloth across her forehead.
She peeled the cloth away and sat up.
I had sensed no grief, no sense of loss in the people I had just left. Here sorrow hung like a pall. Carolyn’s face was bloodless, her eyes looked stricken.
“Mike. I’m so grateful you came.”
Even with the grief like a veil over her, Carolyn was lovely, lovelier than she had been as a girl—for she was a woman now. Sorrow became her. She was slender, even with the indrawn quality the shadows under her deep-set eyes and high cheekbones gave her.
“I was hoping there might be something I could do to help, Carolyn.” Surprisingly, I felt the old strong longing that I’d thought time-diluted.
Fred Carmichael moved away from the wing chair near the window and walked to the lounge. That was when I first really saw him. He stood behind Carolyn and put his arm about her shoulders. I tried not to see the way she reached up and touched his hand with caressing fingers.
“It’s a good thing I’ve friends like you and Fred, Mike—or I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“We’ll do anything we can for you, Carolyn,” Carmichael said. He was a big man, taller than his son, bigger in the shoulders and chest. He was in his middle forties, but he was flat in the belly, trim in the hips. The tailored suit didn’t hurt him any, or the imported linen shirt, or the close-cropped iron-gray hair. He was a handsome man, even with the broken nose and the faint scar tissue that quirked his right brow slightly so that no matter what he intended, he always looked slightly supercilious. “I don’t know you as well as I’d like, Detective Ballard, but I’ve always admired you. A strong man. I admire strong men.”
“I know that you used your influence to keep me on the police force four years ago,” I said.
“You belonged there. Every man makes mistakes. Few of us ever rectify them quite as completely as you did when you wiped out the Luxtro mob.”
“I was in love with Mike once, Fred,” Carolyn said softly.
“I know, my dear.” Carmichael still had his hand on her shoulder. I began getting a subtle feeling that he was trying to get some message across to me.
“It was a long time ago,” Carolyn said. “Sometimes it seems to me, whenever I think of any happiness at all, that it was always a long time ago.”
“This is a bad time, Carolyn.” Carmichael’s thick hand caressed her shoulder. “You’ll be happy again.”
Suddenly I was very tired of this house, these people. The very air seemed stagnant here, still and purposeless. The thought of the Greek’s bar seemed pretty good. I had not said any of the things I had come to say— nothing I thought or felt seemed to fit, quite. It was as if death existed here only as a reaction, a feeling, a mental state—not as a fact.
“I’d better leave now,” I said. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was about Tom.”
Carolyn stood up. Her eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. She touched at them with her handkerchief. “I—I’ll walk downstairs with you, Mike. Do you mind, Fred?”
“Of course not. I’ll come with you. I tell you, Ballard, I appreciate your coming like this. It’s helped Carolyn. By God, it really has.”
Carolyn had moved across the room. She took my hand, pressing it.
“I never knew I’d miss him so terribly, Mike.”
“Tom was a great man.” Carmichael had followed her and touched her shoulder again. I tried to remind myself that it was a gesture of sympathy. “Essex City has lost a valuable citizen. We’ve all suffered a great loss with you, Carolyn.”
I wished three things—that Carmichael would take his hands off her and shut up, and that he would leave us alone. He trailed us to the door.
Carolyn still held my hand. “Mike. They—won’t let me see him. They won’t let me see Tom’s body.”
“I’m sure you understand, Ballard,” Carmichael said. “I’ve tried to tell her. The wreck—ghastly—Tom wouldn’t want the woman he loved remembering him so. Or his friends either. Right, Ballard?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I saw him at the scene of the crash. He just looked dead to me.”
Carolyn’s fingers tightened briefly on my hand. She said nothing. Neither did Carmichael.
Jerry and young Morgan Carmichael were waiting in the front hall. Jerry had heard me say I had seen Tom Flynn’s body at the wreck. He laughed in my face. “I heard Tom was supposed to have been driving while drunk, Mike.”
“That was in the report,” I said.
“Hell, how dumb can you be? What is there about being a cop that attracts the worst of men to the force?”
“Jerry!” Carolyn’s voice was sharp.
“What the hell, sis? How dumb can those cops be? Everybody in town knows Tom Flynn never took a drink in his life.”
Carmichael’s voice was very soft “Maybe that’s why drink hit him so hard this time. He wasn’t used to it.”
Jerry laughed again. “Sure. Tell it that way. It’ll sound great to everyone who didn’t know Tom. It won’t even damage his memory much. But it won’t bring him back to life, either.”
Carolyn stared at him, her eyes helpless. “Jerry, you’ve got to stop talking like that.”
“You’re in very poor taste, young fellow,” Carmichael said.
“Why?” Jerry moved his gaze from Fred to Carolyn. “Why? Even the cops ought to stick close to the truth when a man like Tom is killed. Everybody knows he never drank.”
Carmichael stared at Jerry a moment. His voice was low “Don’t you think your sister is suffering enough, young man?”
Jerry laughed again. “I think she just got a reprieve from prison. That’s what I think—if she just had sense enough to realize it.”
Fred Carmichael’s face was white, fists clenched and he was almost upon Jerry before he could stop himself. He got his temper under control just in time.
Jerry stood smiling at him.
Carolyn, shaking her head, took my arm.
At the door she said, “I wanted to ask you something, Mike.”
“Sure.”
“The funeral. Tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be alone, unless—would you come with me?”
I glanced over the top of her head, wondering why she needed me with big Fred Carmichael in the house apparently ready to plug up gaps in her life. But I didn’t argue with her. I told her I would be there. She pressed my hand and I went out the door and crossed the yard to my car. The rain was whipping in now, harder than ever.