Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

In most cases he’ll ask for nothing in return, not until he needs help.

But there are a few people he needs favors from immediately. He believes he’ll start with Woodrow Selby at Monocle Pictures. He’ll hand the photographs to Selby and mention that he’s seen this background actor Leland Jones in several of his Western pictures. He’ll say he doesn’t like to recognize background actors, it pulls him right out of the action. He’ll ask Selby if he doesn’t find it distracting as well.

The telephone on his desk rings. He jumps, feeling guilty, grabs a handful of photographs and throws them into the box, then realizes how absurd that is and lets the others remain where they lie, spread out across his desk.

He picks up the telephone.

‘Hello.’

‘Seymour. It’s Bill.’

There are only a few reasons Bill Parker would be calling Seymour on a Saturday evening, none of them good. He and the chief of police have a fine professional relationship, but that’s the only relationship they have. They’ve not spoken a dozen words to one another outside the context of work.

Seymour clears his throat. ‘I’m almost afraid to ask.’

‘It’s your witness.’

‘Theodore Stuart?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s dead.’

Seymour finds it difficult at first to process the sentence, a mere two words though it is. He remains silent for a long time. He stares down at the photographs on his desk. He blinks.

Finally he says, ‘I thought he was under police protection.’

‘His police protection is dead too.’

‘James Manning?’

‘Too early to say. We have homicide detectives on the scene and boys from the crime lab are on their way. We’ll see what we get.’

‘I want to talk with the detectives on the case.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

2

Seymour drives through darkness, his stomach empty and sour. Margaret tried to get him to eat some dinner, but he had no appetite. She wrapped his plate in tinfoil and put it in the fridge. It’ll be here when you get home. She kissed the corner of his mouth, looked into his eyes. You work too hard.

Be back in a while.

He turned, headed out the front door.

Theodore Stuart’s dead, murdered, and it almost has to have been James Manning behind it. People don’t murder people under police protection without good reason, there’s too much risk, and Seymour can think of only one man with a strong enough motive to take said risk.

The fact that he could get to Stuart means, too, that Bill Parker’s department has been compromised. That’s the problem with money. It can make even good cops spill. You get in a little over your head on house payments, or the vigorish on your gambling debt gets out of control, and along comes some grinning mustache with a fat wad of cash, and he doesn’t want anything from you but a few words, what’s the harm, really?

He pulls his car into the parking structure and brings it to a stop.

3

He looks at the three men sitting across the desk from him, Captain Ellis crisply suited while to his left a couple homicide detectives — Bachman, clothes nearly as wrinkled as his face; and Friedman, the youngest man in the room by at least a decade — slouch red-eyed after a long day on the job.

Seymour exhales in a sigh.

‘So,’ he says, ‘what do we have on Manning?’

The silence stretches out.

Finally Detective Bachman sits up and clears his throat. He scratches his left eyebrow and looks uncomfortable.

‘Nothing,’ he says.

‘Nothing?’

‘Well, uh. .’

‘As of this moment,’ Captain Ellis says, ‘it doesn’t look like James Manning was responsible for the murder.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘What do you have?’

‘Our primary suspect is a milkman named Eugene Dahl,’ Bachman says. ‘He was at the crime scene with the murder weapon on his person. He escaped capture, but we’ve just searched his apartment and found shoes with blood on them and a box of shells. Guys from the crime lab are matching footprints at the scene to the shoes we found in his apartment. The evidence is solid.’

Bachman shifts in his chair, looking physically pained. Indigestion perhaps, or kidney stones.

‘A milkman?’

‘He used to write comic books,’ Friedman says.

‘Is it possible he was hired by Manning?’

‘It’s possible, but we don’t have any evidence to suggest it.’

‘Look into it.’

Captain Ellis says, ‘We have every intention of finding a connection if there is one. We’re looking into everything.’

‘I don’t think he was working for Manning,’ Bachman says. ‘If he did this, and it looks like he did, he did it on his own.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He’s not a professional. He’s a failed writer working as a milkman. Been a milkman since he moved out to Los Angeles in fourty-nine. No connection to organized crime, not even a tenuous one so far as we can tell, though we’ll continue to look into it. But the bottom line is, he’s simply not the kind of guy who’d get called in for a job like this.’

‘What’s his motive?’

‘He was afraid Stuart would spill his name during his grand-jury testimony. And we think he had reason to be.’

‘How’s that?’

‘We found what might be a blackmail note in his apartment.’

‘Who was blackmailing whom?’

‘Looks like Theodore Stuart was trying to get money out of the milkman.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘It does if Stuart was scared,’ Friedman says. ‘Good way to collect some cash so that once this grand-jury thing was finished he could disappear.’

‘So he tries to blackmail the milkman and the milkman kills him.’

‘That’s the way it looks,’ Bachman says.

Seymour shakes his head. He doesn’t like it. It makes as much sense as any scenario he’s been able to imagine, more sense than several, but it doesn’t feel right. Or he’s telling himself it doesn’t feel right simply because he needs there to be a connection to James Manning. If his key witness is dead, then the investigation might be dead with him, might be dead before they’ve even presented the indictment to the grand jury, and he was taking an enormous political risk on this one. He’ll have to think it over.

‘How did this milkman find out where Stuart was being held?’

‘It was on the blackmail note.’

‘None of the officers watching Stuart saw what he was up to, saw that he was busy blackmailing this milkman?’

‘They were outside his room,’ Captain Ellis says. ‘They were there more to make sure no one got to him than to monitor what he was doing while hidden away. And in truth, it’s possible one or more officers worked with him for the promise of money.’

Seymour nods unhappily, then leans back in his chair to think.

Captain Ellis must see the worry on his face because he says, ‘We’re gonna get this milkman. We want him in an interrogation room by Monday. Once we’ve got him nailed down, we’ll get the answers we need.’

‘You think you can have him in custody by then?’

‘He’s square,’ Bachman says. ‘He’ll probably turn himself in.’

Seymour nods. He likes the sound of that.

‘Okay,’ he says, and gets to his feet.

1

Next morning, the thirteenth of April, Carl finds himself in a chair in the corner of his room at the boarding house in nothing but tattered gray underpants. His soft white belly bulges out over the elastic waistband as he slouches before a small table on which rest the accouterments of what is quickly becoming the point around which his life orbits: a glass of water, a small paper bindle, a shining spoon he took from the kitchen downstairs, a syringe, a pocket knife, cigarettes, a lighter. His forehead is covered in sweat, his legs are cramping. His stomach and liver hurt. His eyes itch.