Ed Gorman - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

As I pulled away from the front of the summer house, I remembered the sound of a car that had been pulling away as I’d lain there with my head smashed in. I put on my high beams and crawled along the narrow road slowly, examining every foot of the road on either side of me. I was nearly at the end of it before I saw what I needed to see.

I stopped, got out, went over to where a car had angled between two widely spaced trees to hide in deep undergrowth. It had been a rough entrance and an even rougher withdrawal. The whole area looked as if a piece of heavy equipment had smashed it down. I could still smell the fumes of the gasoline needed to push the car through the nearly impenetrable undergrowth.

I spent several minutes examining brush and trees alike. There were two places where you could see that the car had scraped up against a coarse surface. I took out my Cub Scout knife and took a sample of the scrape and then set the sample inside my handkerchief.

I put my flashlight beam on the scrape. Easy enough to see who the car belonged to. The same yellow paint on a certain little foreign car.

NINETEEN

I FOUND A PHONE BOOTH next to “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a honky-tonk visited at least once a week by cops and an ambulance. Them there boys do like their fightin’.

I called Spellman and told him what I’d found and what I’d figured out. He argued against what I had planned next. I told him to give me an hour. I told him this was the best way, the surprise method. He still didn’t like it but he agreed to an hour, at which point he was calling Cliffie if he didn’t hear from me otherwise.

A man in a black leather jacket and a face shiny with blood came staggering out of the door along with his equally drunken pal. A country singer with the unlikely name of Ferlin Husky wailed on the night, accompanied by some very nice picking on the slide guitar.

The man’s friend, who was walking along next to him, said, “Tried to tell you she was his wife, dummy. That’s why he got so mad.”

“All I did was grab her tit. I didn’t even grab both of ’em.”

I could hear this one in court. Your honor, my client grabbed but one of her tits, not both. I ask you, is a one-tit-grabber really a menace to society? Judges are very sympathetic, as you know, to such brilliant pleas.

I made up some pretty good speeches on the drive out there. The accusation, the denial, the final confession. My parts in them, anyway. She’d have to come up with her own and I was sure she would.

I was beginning to understand it, the motive I mean. Maybe I was even a little sympathetic about it.

I’d been spared the kind of household atmosphere she’d grown up in, so I couldn’t judge her. I might have reacted the same way. I had a friend whose mother had an affair years ago and it seemed to have had a permanent effect on every member of the family. The husband was never quite able to forgive the wife; the wife was bitter because the husband would never acknowledge how many times he’d let her down before she had the affair; and the three kids had to listen to their mother being called a whore a couple times a week. They also had to minister—like ambulance drivers—to whichever parent was in the more mental anguish at the moment. They went on to have terrible marriages themselves, the kids. Too glibly Freudian to say that this was because of what they’d gone through with their own parents—but then it must have given them a pretty dark and scary view of marriage.

The lights were on. I knocked. I waited two minutes. No response. I rang the bell. Two minutes. No response. And then suddenly the door was opening and she was there.

If she suspected why I was here, she disguised it well. “I’d say winter’s not far away.”

“It sure isn’t.”

“It’s good to see you. C’mon in.”

I followed her inside.

She wore a white blouse and black slacks. Her bottom was tops. She had put a red ribbon in her dark hair, the red of it matching the rich red of her lipstick. A little touch of the exotic.

“Anything to drink, Sam?”

“No, thanks.”

“Any news?”

“Not anything you don’t already know.”

I think she knew, then. Our eyes met, held.

“Listen to the wind, Sam.”

We were in the den. She was fixing herself a drink at the dry bar. I’d declined. She kept her back to me.

“Autumn wind always sounds so lonely, don’t think you, Sam? Like a little girl crying.”

I was standing. Now I sat. “A little girl crying because her father was rarely home. A little girl crying because her father spent all his time with other women. Driving the little girl’s mother into depressions so bad that she had to be hospitalized.”

She still hadn’t turned around. “Sounds like a novel you’re writing.”

“The father would have left them but he wanted to be governor someday. No way a divorced man would ever be governor in this state. Somehow the girl found out about her father’s indiscretions—maybe stumbled across some letters; maybe eavesdropped on a phone call, could’ve been a number of ways—and realized that this was what was destroying her mother. The mother got worse and worse. The girl pleaded with her father to give up his women, to live a decent life. But the father just kept right on living the way he always had. And the girl grew up hating him for what he’d done to her mother. She didn’t care about herself and what he’d done to her. Her hatred made her strong. All she cared about was her mother and how she’d been destroyed. The girl was strong. The mother wasn’t.”

She walked from the dry bar to the leather couch that faced my leather chair. She sat down, put her head back against the chair, closed her eyes.

She was right about the wind. In the silence you could hear a child crying. A lonely little girl, say—a lonely little girl who didn’t really care much about the fact that she was attractive and rich and clever. She just wanted her mother to be happy. That was all.

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back against the chair. “I don’t suppose it was all that difficult to figure out, was it, Sam?”

“Not after I realized that you’d found out about the blackmail money Karen Hastings wanted. And about the relationship she had with your father and those three other men. You had dinner that night at the Embers with Karen Hastings, didn’t you? I imagine that’s when you told her how much you were afraid of a scandal and that you’d pay her what she wanted even if the men wouldn’t. A week later you called her and told her to come to your house and collect her money. You killed her in the basement and put her in the bomb shelter. You knew everybody would think your father killed her. You didn’t want to prevent a scandal. You wanted to create one. You knew that when the body was discovered, the whole story would come out and he would be destroyed. You wanted him to suffer. And you pulled it off, kiddo. He suffered all right. He was a scandal and a dirty joke and he’d never be able to walk down the streets of this town again without somebody smirking at him. Of course, walking down the street was sort of a moot point, wasn’t it? He’d be in prison for murder.”

We listened to the wind some more.

“You going to say anything?” I said.

“Nothing to say, Sam.”

“What made you decide to kill him tonight?”

Her eyes were still closed. Her breasts rose and fell with her soft sighs. I imagined that she’d spent a lot of sad hours like this, trying to shut out the world.

“Deirdre?”

“Do we have to talk, Sam?” Then: “I read this story once. About this little girl and all these terrible things happened to her. But then somehow she figured out that she was just part of a dream the man upstairs was having. The entire universe existed only in his mind. She was miserable and so was everybody in the world. So she went upstairs with a butcher knife and killed him.”