Max Collins: No Cure for Death

“All right. All right. We’ll start in where Rita called you and told you how a guy named Davis busted into my trailer and ended up dead. That was the breaking point, am I right? When Stefan went so far as putting your own sister in danger?”

Harold didn’t say anything. He was going to make me do it all.

I said, “You probably already had your mind made up to have it out with Stefan, just from the things I’d told you about him. Things like his denying he knew Janet Taber, his denying even that he knew you. And then there was that business of Phil Taber being in town, five thousand bucks richer than before he came, last payment for services rendered to one Stefan Norman. This time Taber was getting paid off for seeing that Janet and her mom got shoved under the ground as soon as possible. But he’d been paid by Stefan Norman before.”

Harold remained silent. He wasn’t going to give me any help at all.

I said, “So what happened, after Rita called you? Did you try Stefan’s Davenport number and get no answer? And then did you try his office number here in town, and he was there, but waiting for a call? Did he answer the phone saying something like… ‘Davis, how did it go?’”

Harold stirred.

“And what then? Hell, why bother? We both know what happened after that.”

“It wasn’t what you think. It wasn’t that way.”

“Sure it was. You got Stefan’s gun out of his room here in the house. Then you went down to the Maxwell Building, went up to the Fund office and held Stefan at gunpoint and told him what to put in the note. Somebody had to have told Stefan about Davis’s death-I figured maybe Brennan or one of the local cops had. But it was you, Harold. You. You shot him.”

“You know what the trouble with you is, Mallory?”

“No. Tell me.”

“You don’t think. You put things together, but you don’t think. Did you read the note?”

“You know I did.”

“Did it sound like a suicide note?”

“It sounded like a phony suicide note.”

“Did it even sound like that? Did it even sound like a convincing fake?”

I didn’t know what he was getting at and said so.

He said, “It was a confession. I made him write a confession, can’t you see that? You can see the rest, why can’t you see that it wasn’t meant to be a suicide note, not when I had him write it.”

“A confession.”

“A confession. What I wanted from Stefan was a written statement of guilt, something I’d have to hang over him. The sword of Damocles, ever hear of that? I had to keep him in line. Make sure he didn’t go pulling any more stunts. Make sure he didn’t make miserable what little there is left of Mr. Norman’s life.”

“But it wasn’t an accurate confession….”

“Of course not. I wanted a confession that would give Mr. Norman the least possible pain, but still would be damning to Stefan. Do you think I wanted Stefan’s suicide? Do you think Stefan’s suicide is the kind of thing I’d want to put Mr. Norman through?”

“Stefan is dead, Harold.”

“Yes, he is.”

“So something went wrong.”

“You might say that.”

“What? How?”

“Once he got it written, I told Stefan what I planned to do with the note. I told him it was going to be sealed in an envelope and given to a lawyer, with instructions to open it either at my death or my request, whatever came first. After that, when Stefan knew that, that was when he got stupid.”

“And tried to take the gun away from you.”

“And tried to take the gun away from me.”

“And, in the struggle…?”

“In the struggle.”

We sat and looked at each other.

Then I said, “And you left the confession there, to make do as a suicide note?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said. “So now I know.”

Harold smiled on one side of his face. “So now you know it all. How’s it make you feel, mystery writer? All satisfied inside?”

Rita came in and set down a dish of hash browns and said, “Here’s your seconds.”

Before we finished eating, Rita went back out to the kitchen for some more coffee, and Harold said, “Mallory?”

“Yeah?”

“What I told you… you believe me?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s no way Brennan’s going to figure it out, and even if he does, he’s not going to prove anything. Or want to. Not with Davis dead. Funny.”

“What?”

“Stefan wept when I told him Davis was dead. I didn’t know Stefan had it in him. But it must’ve made him a little bit suicidal at that.”

I sipped my coffee.

“Mallory?”

“Yeah?”

“What’re you going to do now?”

“Finish my eggs.”

“And then?”

“Drive your sister home.”

“That all?”

“No. I’ll probably try and get some sleep. I’m feeling tired.”

Harold nodded. “I know what you mean.”

Rita came back in and filled our cups and we finished our food and coffee and soon she and I were getting into the Rambler and Harold was standing, filling the back doorway, like something permanent in the house, watching us go.

I looked down at the picture on the cardboard container. Turkey with dressing and potatoes and peas, buttered, with a smidgen of cranberry sauce, garnished with parsley, served on a china plate. I took the cold aluminum tray out and closed it up in the oven, set the heat on four hundred and the timer for thirty minutes. On my way to the couch I got myself a Pabst.

If you ever spent Christmas Eve alone, you know the kind of depressed I was. And putting John on the plane this afternoon hadn’t helped any.

I’d spent the better part of the rest of John’s leave trying to convince him not to get back in the Indochina soup like a good li’l fly. But he said it was too late for him to get out of it, said I might as well get off his back, the papers were all signed, but I had a feeling he wasn’t leveling: I had a feeling if he’d come home to something that seemed like home to him, he might’ve stayed. But Suzie Blanchard was seeing her ex-husband again, and his stepfather had been a big disappointment, and he’d killed a man.

So last night we got drunk on red wine, and I didn’t say a word about any of it, and he likewise gave me a period of grace, not saying anything about the Janet Taber/Sy Norman matter, which was still a sore spot for me.

Because John had been right the first time: solving Janet Taber’s “mystery” hadn’t made either her or me rest any easier. I thought finding “the truth” would help her in some vague metaphysical way, but it didn’t, because the kind of truth I found was one-dimensional; there was another kind of truth that couldn’t be gotten at, because the clues to it were the skeletons of events from lives that weren’t being lived anymore, because it was a truth locked away in the minds, the psyches, of dead people.

The puzzle pieces had been made to fit, and the surface level was now a picture you could look at, but what was underneath was something neither I nor anyone else could ever know. There were people involved I hadn’t ever met, people who were dead before I got there. I didn’t know the name of Richard Norman’s wife, for instance. Or the name of his little girl. I’d read their obituaries, but their names hadn’t seemed important enough to bother remembering.

For that matter, I didn’t know Richard Norman beyond his name, really. Or Janet Taber’s mother. Or Janet Taber, if you got right down to it.

I’d met her, but I didn’t know her.

I’d met Stefan, but I didn’t know him. Oh yes, he was the bad guy, he was who the killer turned out to be, and his killing machine was a man named Davis. But I couldn’t know what it was in Stefan Norman that let him have people killed, just as I couldn’t know what it was in Stefan Norman that made him weep for Davis. Or what it was in Davis that made him worth weeping for.