Max Collins: Mourn The Living

“Yeah, but...”

“What is it?”

“An ancient Plymouth, why?”

“Walking distance?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact it’s in a parking lot over by the Arms. Couple, maybe three blocks.”

“Ever been to Wisconsin?”

“No, but...”

He tossed a ten dollar bill in her lap. “If you want to go to Wisconsin with me, go get your car and fill it with gas. Drive it back here and wait for me. If you don’t want to go with me, don’t be here when I get back.”

Nolan left her before she could say anything else and opened the door in the middle of Chelsey Ford Sales. He went up the flight of stairs that led to Vicki’s apartment and knocked once. She came to the door, smiling in relief at the sight of him and throwing her arms around him.

He broke her warm clasp and led her to the couch. He told her to sit and she did.

Nolan went back and closed the door. He looked at her. She seemed tired but was still very nice to look at. He remembered how she’d been in bed.

“Like I said before, I got nothing personal in this,” Nolan said. “We slept together once and I like you, but it ends there.”

There was horror in her face. “What are you talking about, Earl?”

“Go ahead and call me Nolan. I haven’t figured out yet what I’ll be calling you.”

“You’ll keep calling me Vicki, of course! What are you talking about, what’s wrong?”

Nolan stood over her and looked down. “I owed Sid Tisor a debt. So to pay it back to him I came to Chelsey to look into his daughter’s death. If it was murder, he would as soon I kill the murderer. If suicide, or an accident, I was supposed to confirm it with him and let it go at that.”

“Why are you going over all this past history?”

“Be quiet.” Nolan let a cigarette, the last of the pack. He crumpled it and tossed it on the table and went on. “My first thought was to look into Chelsey’s branch of the Outfit. As it turned out, the Boys didn’t have anything to do with Irene Tisor. Other than indirectly, sell the initial cube of LSD she took that night.”

“Isn’t that where you were? Having it out with the criminals and all? Isn’t your debt paid?”

“I had it out with the ‘criminals,’ all right. Three more died, died before I could ask them what they knew about Irene Tisor. But I didn’t have to ask, because they didn’t know anything. No, Vicki, the debt isn’t paid.”

“What are you talking about? Why are you telling me all this, Nolan — I really want to know!”

“Maybe you should be doing the telling,” he said. “Maybe you’ll tell me what’s going on here.”

“Nothing’s going on here!”

Nolan said, “You could start by telling me how the real Vicki Trask died, Irene.”

She looked up, slowly, and saw in his face, in the ice-grey of his eyes, that he knew the truth, at least partially. Her mouth jerked spasmodically and she brought up her hands, cupping them over her face to catch the tears.

Nolan spoke softly. “It took a long time to recognize you, Irene.”

She glared at him wildly, her eyes red, her face streaked with tears. “How... how did you know?”

“It was hard,” he told her. “Your hair is different now. And you had your nose fixed. Your father told me about that, I should have remembered. And when I saw you last you were a child. Not a woman.”

“When... when did you know?”

“Tonight in bed I figured it. But I must’ve suspected all along. You couldn’t resist calling me Nolan, could you? You had to play a game with me.”

“It wasn’t really a game,” she said, beginning to regain control. “I did idolize you, Nolan, as a child and a teenager and even now. But since I was playing Vicki Trask, I couldn’t recognize you first-hand.”

“Why, Irene? Why did you play Vicki Trask? Why does everyone who knows you in Chelsey know you as Vicki Trask? Why did everyone in Chelsey think the real Vicki Trask was Irene Tisor? And why is the false-Irene/real-Vicki dead?”

The tears began again, and Nolan waited for them to stop. Then he said, “Tell it, Irene.”

She nodded, swallowing the hard lump in her throat and rubbing her red eyes with balled fists.

She said, “Before I left home for college, my father had one of his infrequent heart-to-heart talks with me. He told me... told me that before he’d retired, he’d been involved with organized crime. Our whole family was, on my mother’s side. That he had been involved for more than twenty years.”

She stopped and Nolan said, “So?”

“I was... was ashamed. Oh, I know, I should have guessed what kind of business he was in. If from nothing else, from the kind of people who showed up now and then at the house. People like you, Nolan. But... but he was such a mild man, a gentle person... it really threw me to find out he’d been a... a criminal. I’d always thought of him as so upright... it suddenly disgusted, revolted me... with him, myself, my whole life!”

She hesitated again, but Nolan prodded her and she resumed.

“I wanted to be respectable. It made me feel... feel dirty, somehow. A dirt I had to wash off. He was my parent, my only parent, since my mother died when I was born. And now, I... I just wanted to start over. So I decided to go to Chelsey and on the bus I struck up an acquaintance with a girl, a girl who was headed for Chelsey herself. Vicki Trask.”

“Go on.”

“Vicki looked something like me, and we had similar interests. She wanted to go to college and study art, but her parents were both dead and left her without a penny. And her grades weren’t strong enough to get her a scholarship. I... I didn’t care about college any more... I just wanted an anonymous life, away from my father. But I still wanted my father’s monthly allowance — I felt he owed me that much. It was Vicki who got the idea... the idea to switch names and everything. She could go to college, and I could keep getting checks from daddy to underwrite my college-girl existence. It sounded like it might work, and if it didn’t, the worst that could happen was she could be kicked out of a school and I could be fired from a job. Well, it did work. We made a pact. We set it up together, got this apartment and all and traded identities. It took some doing, but we managed to shuffle some papers around and fix some documents and... and just swap places.”

Nolan stabbed out the cigarette. “Why didn’t you just get married if you wanted to change your goddamn name?”

“It... it was a mental thing with me... and I wasn’t ready for a man in my life. Nolan, you were the first man I’d been with since I came to Chelsey.”

Nolan shook his head, said, “Okay. Go ahead and tell the rest.”

“Well, everything worked out pretty well. It wasn’t hard for me to get a job in a small town like this without anybody checking the references too close. Though I was kind of scared, since it was a bank I’d applied to, and I figured they might be careful about who they hired. But they didn’t spot anything false in my references and I’ve been working there ever since.”

Nolan said, “Yeah, I can believe it.” He knew a lot of banks picked girls on a basis of looks and personality; he just hoped they were more cautious in the banks his money was stored in. He said, “Keep talking.”

She stared at the floor, avoiding Nolan’s eyes. “And... and my father... I loved him so much, once... respected him... but the love was transformed into hate, when I found out what he really was.”

“Cover some new ground,” he told her, seeing the first light of the sun coming in through the loft windows above them.

“What... what’s left to tell?”

“Quit stalling. How did your roommate die?”