The knife was still in his chest. Just to the right of his heart. A long, pearl-handled switchblade. The sobs were his. “This is really going to look like shit in the papers tomorrow.” All this, and his primary concern was still his rep with the country club boys. “Son-of-a-bitch stabbed me. His own brother.”
I half-carried him back to the chair he’d been in and sat him down. There might still be time for an ambulance. I went to the phone and dialed 911.
The boat was laid out with bunks on both sides, a tiny kitchen, and a living room arrangement dominating the center of the room. The couch had been opened up to become a bed and now there were two people in it. One of them was alive. That was Jim Shea. The other was dead, six, seven days into death judging by what I could see of the lividity and rigor mortis. The body was bloated and badly discolored. There were flies and maggots, too. The facial flesh itself had separated and spoiled but even so you could still see the scarring. Jim Shea didn’t seem to notice any of this. He wore a black T-shirt and chinos. He lay up against her, an arm wrapped around her hip with great proprietary fondness. She was his woman, the woman he’d dreamt of most of his life, and he wasn’t going to let go of her even now. He probably didn’t even know she’d been dead for nearly a week. Or maybe he didn’t care. She wore a white blouse and a dark skirt. No blanket covered them. There was a bullet wound in her right temple. I was going to say something to him but then I looked at his eyes and saw that it was no use. Certain mad saints had eyes like his, and visionaries, and men who believe that God told them to go down to the local school and open fire on the children on the playground.
The note was still on the small dining table. Simple enough. She couldn’t handle it and killed herself. But he’d kept right on taking care of her, killing those who had made fun of her at the clubs.
“I work my ass off and make something of my life and this is what I fucking get for it,” Matt Shea said somewhere behind me.
10
After the DA decided to go with a plea bargain and a reduced sentence — Jim Shea’s defense attorney deciding to drop the insanity defense even though Jim was clearly insane — I got a call from Matt Shea thanking me for everything. He said things hadn’t gone so badly for him, after all. In fact, ironically, some of the members feeling badly for him, he’d been nominated to sit on the board of the country club. First time a west sider had ever been nominated.
Then he said, “You hear about Jim?”
“No.”
“Killed himself.”
He was so calm, I thought he might be talking about some other Jim. “Your brother?”
“Yeah. Started squirreling socks away in jail. Made a noose for himself.” Pause. “I know you think I’m a callous bastard, Payne. But it’s better for everybody.”
“He belonged in a psychiatric hospital.”
“You know what that fucking trial would’ve done to me? All those headlines day after day? They wouldn’t’ve done my mother any good, either, believe me.”
“That’s touching, you caring about your mother and all.”
“Believe it or not, Payne, I do. And Jim was never anything but a burden to her. His whole life. If he’d lived, she would’ve had to go up to the penitentiary and see him every month.”
“You wouldn’t have?”
“Sure, sometimes. When I had the time, I mean. But prisons spook me. Like hospitals. Or graveyards. I just think it’s bad luck to be anywhere around them. Well, I just thought I’d catch you up on some things. You get my check by the way?”
“Very generous. I appreciate it.”
“You helped me, Payne, and I appreciate it. Well, listen, gotta run.”
My first thought was to have one of those dramatic little moments you see in bad movies and tear his check up into a thousand pieces. Moral outrage.
But then I realized that I badly needed the money, the old cash flow not being so hot lately.
I went down and deposited it right away. Just the way Matt Shea would have.
A Girl Like You
And hearts that we broke long ago/
Have long been breaking others.
He knew they were in trouble and he couldn’t eat. He knew they were in trouble and he couldn’t sleep. He knew they were in trouble and he couldn’t concentrate.
Not on anything except his girl Nora.
His name was Peter Wyeth and he was eighteen, all ready to enter the state university this fall, and he’d met her two-and-a-half-months ago at a kegger on graduation night. He’d been pretty bombed, so bombed in fact that she’d driven him home in the new Firebird his folks had bought him for graduation.
That first night, she hadn’t seemed like so much. Or maybe it was that he’d been so bombed he didn’t realize just how much she really was. The truth was, Peter pretty much took girls for granted. He could afford to. He had the Wyeth look. There was some Dartmouth about the Wyeth boys, even though they’d lived all their lives here in small-town Iowa; and something Smith about the Wyeth girls. Between them, they broke a lot of hearts hereabouts, and if they didn’t seem to take any particular pleasure in it, still they didn’t seem to care much either.
Nora Caine was different somehow.
He’d never seen or heard of her before the night of the kegger. But he asked about her a lot the next day. Somebody said that they thought she was from one of those little towns near the point where Iowa and Wisconsin faced each other across the Mississippi. Visiting somebody here. It was all vague.
He ran into her that night at Charlie’s, which was the sports bar on the highway where you could drink if you had a fake ID. Or if you were a Wyeth. She was dancing with some guy he recognized as a university frosh football player, something Peter himself had planned to be until he’d damaged his knee in a game against Des Moines.
He didn’t like it. That was the first thing he noticed. And he realized instantly that he’d never felt this particular feeling before. Jealousy. He didn’t even know this girl and yet he was jealous that she was dancing with somebody else. What the hell was that all about? Wyeths didn’t get jealous; they didn’t need to.
He watched her for the next hour. If she was teasing him, she was doing it subtly. Except for a few glances, she didn’t seem aware of him at all. She just kept dancing with the frosh. By this time, Peter’s friends were there and they were standing all around him telling him just how beautiful Nora Caine was. As if he needed to be told. What most fascinated him about her physically was a certain... timelessness... about her. Her hair style wasn’t quite contemporary. Her clothes hinted at another era. Even her dance steps seemed a little dated. And yet she bedazzled, fascinated, imprisoned him.
Nora Caine.
She left that night with the frosh.
Peter spent a sleepless night — the first of many, as things would turn out — and knew just what he’d do at first light. He’d go looking for her. Somebody had to know who she was, where she lived, what she was doing here in town.
He met her that afternoon. She was sitting along the peaceful river, a sleek black raven sitting next to her, as if it was keeping guard. Her apartment was only a block from here. The landlady, impressed that she was talking to young Wyeth, told him everything she knew about Nora. Girl was here for a few weeks settling some kind of family matters with an attorney. The frosh football player a constant visitor. Nora listening to classical music (played low), given to long walks along the river (always alone), and painting lovely pictures of days gone by.