For one thing, if Gordon Fraymore ever found out I went to see Guy, my ass would be in a sling for certain-not only with Fraymore, but also now with straight-shooting Tony Freeman back home in Seattle. Freeman wasn't the type to rave and carry on, but when he said, "Act like you're on vacation," he expected people to pay attention.
As I left Ashland heading north, Guy Lewis bothered me more and more. What would make somebody fall off the wagon after being sober that long? I wondered. God knows I had come close to slipping myself that very day. In retrospect, I could see how emotional overload about Kelly and Jeremy had almost sucked me into a relapse, but I had pulled myself back from it. In the past two days, even though things had continued to spiral downward, I hadn't been in nearly the same jeopardy of taking that first drink as I had been when I ventured into the smoky bar of the Mark Anthony. Guy hadn't been as lucky.
That brought me to another question. How long had Guy Lewis been sober? Ten years stuck in my mind. Something about his first wife leaving him about the same time he dried out.
Between Saturday night and six o'clock Sunday morning, something had pushed Guy Lewis off the edge of a very steep emotional cliff. Old habits die hard, and he had set out to drown his sorrows. In those few hours, he had downed enough booze to require a doctor's care just to regain consciousness. I don't call that slipping. It's more like crashing and burning.
Had Lewis been drinking at the party? I didn't remember smelling booze on his breath when we chatted in the Members' Lounge or seeing him drinking hard stuff later on at the Bowmer, although he could have been. Drunks are cagey that way. They drink and drink, and it's all invisible-up to a point.
Whatever caused it, once he was drunk, he must have decided to leave town, with or without Daphne in the car. Again the question came to mind-was Daphne Lewis still alive at the time Guy headed north?
I was in a 928 equipped with a working cellular phone, so I dialed Ron Peters' extension at the department in Seattle. He didn't answer, and I didn't dare leave a message on his voice mail-not after being told in no uncertain terms to butt out.
And then another thought hit me. Peters had said that when Fraymore came to the hospital to deliver the bad news about Daphne, Guy had suffered some kind of coronary disturbance. That meant one of two things. The first choice was the most obvious: News of his wife's murder had so shocked Guy Lewis that his heart went gunny-bags on him.
Option number two was that Guy already knew Daphne was dead because he personally had something to do with her murder. If that was the case, finding himself trapped in the same room with the man sworn to find his wife's killer might very well have scared the living piss out of him. It would have scared me.
So which was it? Number one or number two? As optometrists are so fond of saying: Which is clearer? This? Or this? I didn't have an answer right then, but I was going to find out.
I'm learning. When I pulled off the freeway in Medford, I stopped at the first gas station and asked for directions. I didn't want to waste any time at all being lost.
CHAPTER 14
I've heard stories about people who age overnight, but Guy Lewis was a true flesh-and-blood example-the first one I ever observed with my own eyes. I found him sitting in a wheelchair in the lobby at Rogue River Medical Center. His skin was sallow; the muscles and skin of his body seemed to have collapsed in on his bones.
"Hello, there, Guy. Could you use a lift?"
He looked up at me out of dull eyes that had no spark of life left in them. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Beaumont. I'm waiting for a cab. I can walk, but I have strict orders from that idiotic nurse over there not to step out of this thing until the cab gets here."
"Where are you going?"
"The Red Lion," he said. "Out along the freeway. I screwed up the undercarriage on my Mazda. They had to order in a special part from L.A. It'll be ready later this afternoon."
"If you want, I can take you wherever you're going."
He nodded gratefully. "I'd sure appreciate it. This place makes my skin crawl."
We canceled the cab dispatch. I brought the Porsche around, and a very brusque, businesslike nurse supervised Guy Lewis' transfer from wheelchair to automobile. The man breathed a sigh of relief when the door closed, effectively shutting the nurse out and us in.
"You saved my life," he breathed. "If I'd been stuck in that lobby for another ten minutes, I would have gotten up and gone looking for the nearest bar."
"We both know that's a bad idea," I told him.
"Yes," he said. "I guess we do."
On the way to the hospital, I had considered dozens of possible ways to begin asking the necessary questions, but that was before I saw how frail Guy seemed. How could a man who looked as though he would be bowled over by a strong breeze hold up under one barrage of questions after another-not only from me, but also from Gordon Fraymore? Studying him, I wondered if the incident of arrhythmia was more life-threatening than I'd been led to believe.
"What brings you to Medford?" he asked, eyeing me suspiciously. "Twelfth-stepping?"
I shrugged, uncomfortable with his use of A.A. jargon. I hadn't come calling on Guy Lewis in a single-minded effort to save him from Demon Rum.
"After a fashion, I suppose. I have a plane to catch later on, around five. That left me with an hour or two to kill."
"How did you know I was here?"
"One of my friends in Seattle. The story about Daphne was in the papers up there this morning. I don't know how he found out about you."
When Guy heard my answer, he made a strange, strangled sound-a choking, hiccuping noise. I looked at him anxiously, thinking maybe the heart problem had returned. Instead, he slouched against the far car door, sobbing.
At last he pulled himself together. "She's dead," he said brokenly. "I don't know how I'll get through all this-making the arrangements, planning a funeral. Some things you never expect to do. Look at me. I'm twenty-three years older than she was, and overweight besides. I don't exercise, and I've had a heart condition for years. I'm the one who should be dead."
With that he broke down again. To hear Guy's anguished sobs and see his quaking body was to experience misery made manifest. Daphne Lewis might have had much to answer for in this life, but her passing had left behind a man stricken by the rampant paralysis of grief. It was impossible not to be touched by his overwhelming suffering-touched and awed.
I believe younger people-those in their twenties and thirties-assume passion will more or less disappear over time. They expect that, with age, raw emotion gradually slips out of our lives, gliding silently from view the way a molting snake abandons the shell of last year's useless skin. Here was Guy Lewis-a heavyset, balding man in an improbably gaudy orange Hawaiian shirt-weeping uncontrollably. At his age-the far end of fifty-one might expect anguished passion to surface as only a rare comic anomaly.
But there was no pretense in the sorrow that etched Guy's face, no playacting in the way he huddled miserably in my car, no phoniness to his hurt. For all Daphne's faults, Guy Lewis had loved his second wife-loved her wildly, with-holding nothing. And that's when I realized something about his arrhythmia episode-something an empathetic doctor might possibly have already recognized. What had been observed medically on high tech EKG monitors was nothing more or less than the outward symptom of a newly broken heart.