Tanrow people often saw Gil and Eve in nearby towns — dancing very tightly in supper clubs to steamy records by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Once Gil and Eve were even seen checking into a motel. There seemed to be no end to the scandal. Gil was eighteen; Eve was thirty-six, a dipsomaniac old maid who’d taken up with a veritable kid.
Not that Tanrow permitted it to go on indefinitely. Three weeks before the end of Gil’s senior year Eve Evanier was fired by the school board. The session was open to the public and the public turned out. Not even the annual Tanrow-Capitol City football game rivaled the attendance that night. Eve was flayed, flogged, and removed in scathing language, language she’d never forget.
So Eve Evanier left Tanrow with Gil in tow. Or the kid who used to be Gil, anyway. Now he was tall and trim and looked a great deal like Natalie Wood’s husband, Robert Wagner. With Eve’s help, he dressed a bit like him too.
Mrs. Rutledge, whose husband had been a drunk himself, a man given to not paying his bills and to making scenes with “respectable” folks, had become a friend of Eve’s during all this. She liked the woman, felt sorry for her, feeling that Eve was in some way not quite right — not just alcoholic, but clinically ill in some other ways. She felt anxious for Eve too — the Evanier woman put everything she was and owned into Gil. Someday she would be old and no longer beautiful in her fragile way and Gil would leave her. Mrs. Rutledge feared for that a great deal.
So Eve and Gil left Tanrow and nobody, not even Mrs. Rutledge, heard from them for fifteen years.
Mrs. Rutledge began to wonder if Eve were even alive any longer.
But it wasn’t, as things turned out, Eve who died. It was Gil Powell. Eve put the unsophisticated small-town boy to rest and resurrected him as somebody witty and elegant and polished as chrome — Stephen Elliot.
“The last couple of years, Eve started calling me again. Stopping out sometimes,” she said. “That’s why those men came here. They knew she started leaving things here.”
“What things?”
She shrugged. “A couple of trunks and cardboard boxes of old junk. I’m not sure, I never looked through it.”
“Why’d she leave it here?”
“She said somebody was trying to get it. She wasn’t sure who.” She sighed. “Then that guy was out here a couple of weeks ago.”
“What guy?”
She described him.
“What did he want?”
“Oh, he didn’t come right out and say what he wanted. Said he was running a credit check on Eve. But I wondered if he wasn’t — what’s the word? — you know, casing my place.”
The same thought occurred to me. I’d even begun to suspect who’d hired Frankenstein and Dracula. And Mrs. Rutledge’s description wasn’t far off.
“When was the last time you spoke to Eve?”
The Rutledge woman frowned. “Week ago. But I didn’t talk directly to her. She... she has these spells, kind of. Withdrawals. I talked to her man, Kenny. He said she wasn’t doing real well. He was thinking of putting her in a hospital.” She shook her head. “Mental hospital.”
Donna looked at me. She was still frightened from the gunshots. She just stared. All Ab Windom could seem to do was shake his head.
“My God, I don’t want to see what’s out in the hallway.” Mrs. Rutledge said.
Donna grabbed my arm as we left the parlor.
Only police photographs do justice to murders. The blood is usually sloppy, as if it had been sprayed over things, and even black-and-white snaps capture the peculiar colors of dead skin. The two thugs’ eyes bulged at nothing. Frankie’s shirt was soppy with leakage from his stomach. Drac had been caught in the throat. His twisted fingers gave the impression he’d been clawing at something. Behind us the mutt growled. I snapped out the command phrase: “Ease, boy.” He obeyed.
“God,” Donna said, “there are flies and bugs.”
As, indeed, there were. Already. Crawling on the dead bodies. It’s sort of a quick reminder of the messiness of existence, the flies and bugs.
I helped her find the bathroom. She wanted to be sick alone.
While Ab Windom helped Mrs. Rutledge pack — he was going to take her to the doctor and then to a nearby town where she could stay with a cousin, her tolerance for excitement having been passed a few weeks before — Donna and I went upstairs to look at the things Eve had stored.
Past a painted-over door, in a room thick with dust, was a lifetime collected in four cardboard boxes and a steamer trunk. Letters, faded photographs, souvenir menus, and maps and pennants described the past twenty-five years of Eve Evanier’s life as busy but curiously hollow. Especially when you read some of the letters Stephen Elliot had written her.
“He really was scum,” Donna said.
From the tone of most of the letters it was obvious he knew that Eve Evanier was mentally ill — probably hopelessly schizophrenic. He was polite enough to her, but there was a placating tone to the words — as if he were addressing someone he was impatient with.
Then Donna found a stash of Eve’s letters. They were straight out of Tennessee Williams. Florid, overwrought, sad. They described a woman who had made her young protégé the center of her life. For a time the protégé had responded appropriately. They’d lived together as lovers. But you could see that he had begun to withdraw, to find other interests.
“God, I really feel sorry for her,” Donna said.
“Yeah.”
Then she smiled, tapping a stack of letters Elliot had written to Eve. “He must’ve gotten a lot better at writing at some point too. His letters are nearly illiterate.”
I smiled back. “Professional jealousy?”
“No. He’s really bad.”
I went through the remaining boxes of memories. All lives could be reduced to this. Mine would be someday. My son would look at odds and ends — cuff links and an appliance store receipt and maybe a slightly out-of-focus photo of me at the beach or in my cop uniform — and that would be the only proof he would have that I’d ever existed at all.
When I finished I turned around and found Donna staring out the window at the dusk.
“You okay?”
“Maybe I’m not cut out for this, Dwyer. There are two dead bodies downstairs. There’s a really depressing story in all these boxes. And it doesn’t seem to bother you. You just go right on with your work.”
“Maybe that’s how I deal with it.”
“Shit, I don’t know,” she said.
I went over and knelt down next to her. I put my arm around her and lost my face in her hair. I’d forgotten about Donna’s impending decision. About Chad’s marriage offer. Now it came back to me. Chad was probably offering her a slightly better life than any I’d come up with. “Maybe I should just get another agency job,” she said.
I stood up. “I’m going to call the sheriff. Explain what happened,” I said. “Then we’ll go back to the city. I need to look somebody up.”
“Who?”
“The guy who came out here a few weeks ago pretending to run a credit check.”
Interest stirred in her gaze. “You know who it is?”
“Maybe.”
“Who?”
“When I know for sure I’ll tell you.”
“Thanks a lot. I thought we were working on this together.”
It was easy to see I had made her mad, but before I could say anything she stomped out of the room, having to duck her considerable lovely height to pass beneath the frame.
31
“I’m sorry I was such a jerk back there,” I said as we took the exit ramp into the city. The sheriff had come and we’d answered his questions. The ambulance had taken away Frankie and Drac — who, without their masks, had been just as unknown to me as before — and Ab took Mrs. Rutledge to the doctor.