Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

“He called me,” I said. “It must have been Saturday morning, early. Probably just a few hours after he closed up at Grogan’s.”

“I talked with him that night. We locked the door and turned down the lights and drank whiskey and he told me how she’d gone to Hollywood to be a movie star. And then he called you? What did he say?”

“That I should stop looking for her. That I was wasting my time.”

“Stupid lad. Stupid call to make. Just let you know you were getting on to something, wouldn’t it?”

“I already knew.”

He nodded. “Gave it all away myself, didn’t I? But I never knew I had anything to give away. Thought for all the world she was home in Indiana. What’s the name of the town?”

“Muncie.”

“Muncie, that’s it.” He looked at his whiskey, then drank some of it. I never drank Irish much but I got a sudden sense-memory of it now, not as smoky as scotch or as oily as bourbon. I drank the rest of my coffee, gulping it as if it were an antidote.

He said, “I knew he was lying. I gave him a little time to let his nerves get the better of him, and then last night I took him for a long ride upstate and got it all out of him. We went up to Ellenville. That’s where the farm is. That’s where he took her.”

“When?”

“Whenever it was. July. He took her there for a last weekend, he said, a treat before she went back home where she came from. And he gave her a little cocaine, he said, and her heart failed. She didn’t take that much, he said, but you can’t predict with cocaine, it will get the better of you now and then.”

“And that’s how she died?”

“No. Because the bastard was lying. I got the story out of him. He took her up to the farm and told her how she had to go home. And she refused, and she got drunk and angry and started threatening to go to the police. And she was making a lot of noise, and he was afraid she’d rouse the couple who take care of the place. And, trying to quiet her, he hit her too hard and she died.”

“But that wasn’t it either,” I said. “Was it?”

“No. Because why would he drive her a hundred miles to tell her she had to get on an airplane? Christ, what a liar he was!” He flashed a shark’s grin. “But, you know, I didn’t have to read him his rights. He didn’t have the right to remain silent. He didn’t have the right to an attorney.” Unconsciously his hand moved to touch one of the darker stains on the front of his apron. “He talked.”

“And?”

“He took her up there to kill her, of course. He claimed she never would have agreed to go home, that he’d sounded her out on it, that all she did was swear she could be counted on to keep her mouth shut. He took her up to the farm and gave her a lot to drink and then took her outside and made love to her in the grass. Had all her clothes off, laid with her in the moonlight. And then while she was lying there afterward he took out a knife and let her see it. ‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’ And he stabbed her.”

My coffee cup was empty. I left Ballou at the table and took my cup to the bar and let the barman fill it up again. Crossing the floor, I fancied the sawdust underfoot was blood-soaked. I thought I could see it and smell it. But it was just spilled beer that I was seeing, and the smell was the meat smell from the street outside.

When I got back Ballou was looking at the picture I’d given him. “She was a pretty girl,” he said evenly. “Prettier than you’d know from her picture. Lively, she was.”

“Until he killed her.”

“Until then.”

“He left her there? I’ll want to get the body, arrange to ship it back to them.”

“You can’t.”

“There’d be a way to do it without opening an investigation. I think her parents would cooperate if I explained it to them. Especially if I could tell them that justice had been done.” The phrase sounded stilted, but it said what I wanted to say. I glanced at him. “It has been done, hasn’t it?”

He said, “Justice? Is justice ever done?” He frowned, following the thought through the fumes of his whiskey. “The answer to your question,” he said, “is yes.”

“I thought so. But the body—”

“You can’t take it, man.”

“Why not? Wouldn’t he say where he buried it?”

“He never buried her.” His hand, resting on the table between us, tightened into a fist. His fingers went white at the knuckles.

I waited.

He said. “I told you about the farm. All it’s supposed to be is a place in the country, but the two of them, O’Mara’s their name, they like to farm it. She has a garden, and all summer long they’re giving me corn and tomatoes. And zucchini, they’re always after me to take zucchini.” He opened his fist, spread his hand palm-down on the tabletop. “He has a dairy herd, two dozen head. Holsteins, they are. He sells the milk and keeps what it brings him. They try to give me milk, but what do I want with it? The eggs, though, are the best you’ll ever have. They’re free range chickens. Do you know what that means? It means they have to scratch for a living. Christ, I’d say it does them good. The yolks are deep yellow, close to orange. Someday I’ll bring you some of those eggs.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He keeps hogs there, too.”

I took a sip of my coffee. For a moment I tasted bourbon in it, and I thought he might have added it to my cup while I was away from the table. But of course that was nonsense, I’d had the cup with me, and the bottle on the table held Irish whiskey, not bourbon. But I used to take my coffee that way, and my memory was pitching me curves and sliders, showing me blood on the sawdust underfoot, putting a bourbon taste in my coffee.

He said, “Every year there are farmers who pass out drunk in the hog pen, or fall and knock themselves out, and do you know what happens to them?”

“Tell me.”

“The hogs eat them. Hogs will do that. There’s men in the country who advertise that they’ll pick up dead cows and horses, dispose of them for you. A hog needs a certain amount of animal matter in his diet, you see. He craves it, thrives better if he has it.”

“And Paula—”

“Ah, Jesus,” he said.

I wanted a drink. There are a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed the drink, that I couldn’t bear it without it.

But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It’ll hurt, it’ll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.

“I believe he wanted to do it,” Mickey Ballou said. “To kill her with his knife and hoist her into the pen, to stand with his arms against the rail fence and watch the swine go at her. He had no call to do it. She would have gone home where she belonged and nobody would ever have heard of her again. He might have thrown a scare into her if he had to, but he never had any call to kill her. So I have to think he did it to take delight in it.”

“He’s not the first.”

“No,” he said fervently, “and sometimes there’s joy to be found in it. Have you known that joy?”

“No.”

“I have,” he said. He turned the bottle so that he could read the label. Without looking up he said, “But you don’t kill for no good reason. You don’t make up reasons to give yourself an excuse to shed blood. And you don’t fucking lie about it to them you shouldn’t lie to. He killed her on my fucking farm and fed her to my fucking hogs, and then he let me go on thinking she was baking cookies in her mother’s kitchen in fucking Muncie, Indiana.”