Max Collins - No Cure for Death

John leaned over him, felt for his pulse on his neck; but we both knew the man was gone-his blood-flecked face had its eyes open in the stare of the dead.

John stood up and walked across the hospital lawn and stood and stared at nothing in particular; I followed. Both of us were bleeding a little, from the punishment Davis had dished out on us. Behind us the doctor and a couple of orderlies rushed to the body.

I stood there with him; put a hand on his shoulder.

He turned and smiled at me. Not his dazzler: a tight-lipped, sad smile.

“See, Mal?” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

“Where you go,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “You sure don’t need to go to Vietnam.”

“What?”

“You don’t have to go there to find it,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

He looked older to me then than anybody that young ever looked, except maybe for Janet Taber.

“What are you talking about?” I repeated.

“Killing,” he said. “Death.”

Pretty soon Brennan showed with some local cops and we gave him our statements while the emergency room doctor looked us over and cleaned and dressed the places where we bled.

I got back to my trailer around four-thirty and found Rita up, stirring around in the kitchenette. She was wearing a stretched out old Iowa sweat shirt of mine that hit her mid-thigh like a miniskirt, and normally I’d have spent some time wondering what she had on under there, only I was too burned out to really care. I had called her from the hospital an hour or so ago, to warn her I’d be late-and to tell her about Davis’s fall. As I walked across the living room I tripped over the empty beer bottle I’d tossed at Davis and the bottle seemed an apt metaphor for how I felt: empty, useless, nonreturnable.

Rita said, “I couldn’t sleep.”

“I haven’t been up this late since junior-senior prom.”

“No offense, but you look like shit, honey.”

“Guess how I feel.”

“Like you look.”

“Like I look,” I confirmed, stumbling over to the couch where I flopped down on my stomach. My nose sniffed the air: something nice cooking. I said, “What smells good?”

Rita said, “I found a coffee cake mix in your cupboard. I’m making it. Is that okay?”

“That’s not okay. That’s wonderful. What else do I smell?”

“Coffee to go with it, stupid.”

“How long till the coffee cake?”

“Few minutes.”

“How long till the coffee?”

“Right now.”

“Hot damn.” I rolled over on my back-the dying dog’s last trick. I pulled the flesh away from my eyes with the flats of my hands, then got started on a series of overlapping yawns.

Rita came over bearing coffee. Good hot steam rose off the liquid in the cup and I inhaled it, then sipped. She nudged herself room next to me on the couch. Her big brown eyes were open wide as she said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know how John’s doing, though.”

“Why?”

“I think it disturbed him, having this sort of thing happen in… the civilian world.”

“Oh.”

“Too bad it went the way it did. Davis is no great loss to humanity, I suppose, but he took a lot of information with him.” I sipped the coffee. “You know, Brennan came out and admitted he’s been sweeping the case under the carpet for the Normans.”

“No shit?”

“None at all. I’ll say this much for him: it took a certain quota of guts just to admit it.”

She made a face. “Oh, please.”

“He’s an SOB, all right, I won’t argue with you there. But even a belated stand against the Normans could cost the sheriff his job. I just hope he doesn’t go overboard trying to make up for lost time. You know, going into a gestapo number.”

“Coffee cake.”

“Huh?”

“The coffee cake should be done.”

“But I got some brilliant deductions to share with you.”

“If I don’t take it out it’ll burn.” And she rose and bounded toward the kitchenette.

I said, “I know who killed Janet Taber.”

“Tell me over the coffee cake,” she said, opening the oven door.

“Sheesh,” I said. “I solve the mystery and nobody gives a damn.”

The coffee cake was very good, moist and yellow and rich with crunchy cinnamon topping and my mouth surrounded a piece as Rita said, “Well, don’t pout. Spill!”

I spoke with my mouth full. “I don’t have any of the details figured out, understand. I mean, the pieces don’t form a picture yet or anything.”

“So who did it, already?”

“Davis did it, no doubt in my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because Stefan Norman told him to.”

“Why?”

“I think because Janet had something on the Normans. Maybe something she ran across back when she was working on Richard Norman’s campaign team.”

“What about Harold?”

She flipped the question out casually, lightly, like the rest of her conversation, but unlike the rest of it, this didn’t float: it was a leaden lump in her throat even after spoken.

I said, “Don’t worry. Your brother’s in the clear. I’m as sure of that as I am of Stefan’s guilt.”

She couldn’t hold back her sigh of relief, but she tried to cover it by sipping her coffee right after.

“You know,” I said, “your brother’s a nice man.”

“I could’ve told you that.”

“You did. Several times.”

“Now that you’ve ruled my brother out, I suppose you’re through with me. Won’t be needing my services anymore. Shove my black butt right out your door.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I could use a sleep-in maid around here.”

“Oh, typecasting, is it?”

“Maybe. Only I think of you more as the French maid type.”

She smiled and flicked a crumb of coffee cake at me and it landed on my nose. I brushed it away and leaned over and kissed her.

We were lying together kind of half asleep on the couch when the phone rang.

“Yeah?”

“Mal?”

“John, why in hell are you still up? Are you all right?”

“I went back to bed for a while, couldn’t sleep. Then the phone rang.”

“So who called?”

“The nightwatchman at the Maxwell Building.”

“The nightwatchman at the Maxwell Building. Well, what did the nightwatchman at the Maxwell Building have to say?”

“Nothing to me, Mal. It was Brennan’s call.”

“What about?”

“Swing by the jail and pick me up, will you? We’ll go over there and you can see. Brennan’s there with the cops now.”

“What the hell is it?”

“Stefan Norman’s been shot.”

“Suicide,” Brennan said.

I said nothing.

I looked at the desk where a few minutes prior the husk of Stefan Norman had been sitting. Stefan’s desk was big and black and metallic, with a small white blotter in its center, a throw rug on a ballroom floor. The blotter where Stefan’s head must have rested had a wine-color stain that had blossomed out, suggesting hidden shapes and meanings in Rorschach fashion. Otherwise the desk was bare, except for the blood-red push-button phone, and a small black automatic, responsible for the smell of cordite in the air.

Stefan’s office was large and the lack of furniture made it seem larger. The desk with one brown leather chair behind it and another opposite and a couch along the draped window-wall were like the last props waiting to be cleared off the set of a play that had closed. Not that this indicated the Norman Fund was a dummy operation: the outer office had rows of file cabinets and all the standard equipment, including a photocopy machine and the work-heaped desks of two full-time secretaries. And beyond that was a reception area complete with stacks of old U.S. News amp; World Report s. The Norman Fund had indeed been functioning at something or other.