Эд Горман - Stranglehold

“A question for the ages, my friend. For the ages.”

Rain and darkness hid the grim little strip mall. The only light came from Hair Fare and that was in the back of the shop. I peeked through the window. The front of the place was in shadows. The barber chairs were empty. The light came from the tiny office. I knocked and got no response, so I started pounding.

Sister appeared soon after. She waved and shook her head. With the unlocking of the door came the apology: “I’m so sorry. I didn’t hear you. The rain drowns everything out.”

“Is Heather still here?”

“Yeah. Sitting in the office. Hurry up. I didn’t tell her I asked you to come over. She’ll try and get out the back door if she figures it out.”

We hurried through the darkness ripe with the scents of hair spray, hair dye, and all the other chemicals used in the various processes.

Sister was right about the bolting. Heather was facing front when I reached the threshold of the office, but when she turned and saw me, she jumped up and said, “No way! Goddamn you, why did you tell him to come here?” Then she lunged at me, palms flat so she could push me away. She was a forceful woman but not forceful enough. I spun her around and dragged her back to her chair and pushed her down in it. Then I slammed the door shut behind us.

“I’m not going to say a single goddamn word to either of you,” Heather said, folding her arms across her chest. “We can just sit here all night.”

Sister sat behind her desk now. “I did this for your benefit, whether you believe that or not, Heather. You’re terrified of something and all you can think of is running away? To where? You don’t have any money. I’ll bet if I checked your account you’d be overdrawn as usual. And where the hell would you go anyway?”

“To Aunt Sally’s.” Heather had broken her vow of silence, but now wasn’t a good time to point it out.

“Aunt Sally’s.” Sister found this hilarious. “Between her cooking and his farting, you’d go crazy after one night.” Sister looked at me and said, “Aunt Sally gave people food poisoning at three different family reunions over the years. And Uncle Len’s always had these gas problems. And it’s not just that he farts loud — he smells. We used to have to sit on his lap when we were little, and you just had to hold your breath.”

I stood to the left of the desk so that I could see both their faces. Heather couldn’t help herself. She smiled at the memory. Sister smiled, too. Her eyes gleamed with tears. “Honey, you got to tell Mr. Conrad here about what you saw. I know you saw something, and I know that you think if you tell anybody, the cops will think you were in on the whole thing.”

Heather, blond, blowsy, beaten, now said quietly, “I was in on the whole thing, Sis. I mean, I helped him with things.”

“What sort of ‘things’?”

Heather’s ruined eyes met mine. “I made a couple calls to Cooper’s mother. That rich bitch. I disguised my voice though.”

“Anything else?” I said.

A long sigh. “I stood in the hallway the night he killed Monica Davies. He wanted me to warn him if anybody came along.”

“Oh, God, honey. Oh, God.”

Sister’s tears reached her cheeks now.

“So he admitted that he killed Monica and took the money?”

“Oh, yeah. He told me all about it. He told me what her face looked like when she was dying.”

“What do they call that, Mr. Conrad — assess—”

“Accessory.”

“Oh, shit, honey. When Mom finds out—”

We sat in silence. All three of us knew the implications of what she’d just said. Sister started crying now, openly. Put her elbows on her desk and put her face in her hands. She’d been tough and now she was no longer tough, and it was sad to see.

“That’s why I want to run away.”

You and Bobby, I thought. The pipe dream of Mexico.

Sister snuffled up her tears and sat back in her chair. In the silence, it creaked. “What can she do, Mr. Conrad?”

“The first thing she needs is a lawyer.”

“We know one, but he’s pretty much a cokehead.”

“You mean Larry? The one I dated?”

“Yeah.”

“I wouldn’t want him as my lawyer. I couldn’t even stand him as a boyfriend.”

“I guess you weren’t listening, Heather. I wouldn’t want him as a lawyer, either. That’s why I said he was a cokehead. What’s so damned hard to understand about that?” Then: “Sorry I snapped at you. It’s just—”

“Let me help you find a lawyer.”

Heather’s hard gaze met mine. “All this is for Bobby, right?”

“Right.”

“And you don’t particularly give a shit about what happens to me?”

“I give a shit only to the degree that you tell me everything you know about who killed Donovan in his motel room.”

“That’s fair,” Sister said. “That’s damned fair. You help him, he helps you. What the hell’s wrong with that?”

Heather traced her fingers across the top of her skull. A sigh exploded from her ripe lips. “I don’t know if this means anything or not.” She was watching me. “I lied to the cops. I told them I wasn’t at Craig’s motel last night. But I was. He told me he had some business to take care of and he couldn’t see me till morning. Sometimes I’d stop in before work. He never got tired of it, that’s one thing you could say for him. You could never wear him out.”

“But you went there?”

“Not inside. Not at first. I stood behind a tree — it was like I was back in junior high and following a boy I had a crush on — and just watched. I didn’t even care about the rain. I was picturing him in there with a girl. I was really mad. I wasn’t there very long before I saw this other guy come out. He was really in a hurry. I wondered why. Dumb me, I thought maybe he was in there on business or something. I didn’t think he might’ve done something to Craig. So when he left I went up to the door. It wasn’t closed all the way. I just kind of nudged it with my knee, just enough so I could see inside, you know? And that’s when I saw Craig. And I knew he was dead. He was the first dead man I’d ever seen except for people at funerals. But I knew he was dead. And I knew I had to get out of there. I thought maybe the police wouldn’t connect me with anything, that maybe I could get by with it. But too many people knew about Craig and me, so the cops found me right away.”

“Who was the man you saw?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I saw the car he was in.”

“What kind was it?”

“Some kind of foreign thing, really expensive from the looks of it. It was silver.”

There wasn’t much doubt about whose car she was describing. But to be sure, I said, “Was it a convertible?”

She sounded curious and surprised. “Yeah. How did you know?”

“Just a lucky guess.”

Sister said, “You know who that car belongs to, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do.”

Then she looked at Heather. “I hope you’re happy, Sis. This is going to tear Mom apart.”

But by then I was already at the door and moving fast.

Fog rolled down the streets on my way to foundation headquarters. Streetlights were dulled by ghosts and stoplights burned like evil eyes through the mist. A long stretch of fast-food places shone like a cheap carnival midway in the rolling clouds. And always there was the relentless cold rain, gutters and intersections filling up fast.

Maybe I would have done what Manning did. Maybe I would have started to hate myself so much for being in Natalie’s grasp that only an act of violence could make me feel honorable again. Easy to rationalize killing a monster like Craig Donovan. Easy to rationalize taking the money and hiding it until one day you made your escape. People escaped all the time. Just vanished. A good share of them were caught. But some weren’t. Some were never heard from again. The lucky ones. The ones who got to start over, clean and whole.