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Wasted Life a Law Edwards Mystery by Sam Stefanik
15 The Mystery of Preston Arlott
I took the Broad Street trolley from the hospital to Oregon Avenue, changed and went west again. I got off on 24th Street and walked north through the seedy West Philadelphia neighborhood of gin mills and flophouses until I arrived at the 41st District Police Station at Wolf and Bucknell. I made the trip because that station was the one responsible for the Atlantic Refinery slum. I assumed they'd want a statement.
After I told three different people my name and the name of the murder victim, I was given an audience with a child they said was a detective. He had his own office, a drab windowless, beige box with a grey metal desk, a grey metal chair, and a grey metal trash can. The tall, gangly youth was so thin, I assumed he was a member of the police force and not in the army because he was rejected for being underweight.
The youth introduced himself as Detective Nick Fisher. My mind branded him `Little Nicky,' as I shook his hand. I struggled with the idea that he was a detective. If the month had been October, closer to Halloween, I might have suspected the youth wasn't a detective, but a misguided trick-or-treater. Since he had a badge and an office and everything, I decided to take the boy at his word and treat him like the detective he claimed to be.
"Suicide, open and shut." Nicky explained in a voice so fresh I expected it to crack. "Shot with a .22 caliber pistol with a silencer. Contact burns on the temple. His fingerprints on the gun."
I disagreed with his conclusion and told him so. I might have been less than diplomatic about it. "That's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard." I announced with too much angry volume. "The caliber and silencer scream `murder.' Suicides want to be found. The ones that are serious about it use large caliber. You're trying to tell me this kid killed himself like he didn't want to leave a mess or wake anyone up. Bullshit. To me it looks like he let his murderer in, they shot him, locked the room, shoved the key under the door, and left."
Little Nicky disagreed right back at me. "There just wasn't any murderer, mister private eye." He said to mock my theory and my profession in one statement. His high voice rose to `dog-whistle' pitch as he got excited. "You think you can milk your client trying to find a murderer that doesn't exist, it'll have to be on another case. This one is closed."
I opened my mouth to argue and suddenly realized that I was tired. I felt so very tired. I was tired enough to be reckless. I was also hurt and probably still a little dopey from the morphine they'd shot me with at the hospital. Little Nicky's words made me angry. I felt reckless enough that, instead of arguing, I let my anger loose on the youth. I grabbed the lapels of his dark suit and shook him. "Look you little fuck..." I whispered until a sharp pain in my ribs cut the sentence short. The sharp pain was a gun barrel that Little Nicky had shoved against my chest.
"Take your hands off me." He squeaked.
I released him, took a half step back, and threw a right hook that connected with the side of his face. He crumpled to the floor but to my disappointment, he stayed conscious. I left him lying and walked toward the front door of the station. I was almost through it when Nicky came running after me. He pointed his long-barrel police .38 but kept well out of my arm's reach.
"I'm arresting you for striking an officer!" He blustered.
I shook my incredulous head at him and sighed. "You're just not. I'm leaving. You want to stop me, shoot me." I opened the door, plodded down the steps, and into the street. I glanced back from the sidewalk. Little Nicky still had his gun pointed at where I'd been standing. I left and hopped a trolley back to my neighborhood.
The sun had gone down at some point, but I hadn't noticed when. I didn't even know what time it was when I got to the office. I pushed through the door and flipped the lights on.
"Please, no light." Bea said quickly. She was sitting on the edge of the visitor's chair at my desk with her head down.
I flipped the switch off and crossed the room in the pale glow from the streetlight on the pole outside. I was surprised Bea was there. I expected that she would have gone home long before. I didn't say anything as I lowered myself into the swivel chair. I did it gently to minimize the inevitable screeching protest of the mechanism. I settled and waited to listen to whatever she had to say.
"Are you alright?" Bea breathed without raising her head.
"Fine," I said as a partial truth and a partial lie, "I slipped and hit my head. How are you?" I asked in a low voice that approximated her volume and tone.
Bea shifted ever so slightly in her chair and asked a question that I suspected she'd been brooding over for a while. "Mister Edwards, did my brother kill himself like they said?"
"No, Miss Arlott. I don't believe he did."
Bea drew the obvious conclusion. "Then someone killed him."
"I think someone did." I agreed.
"My brother was a fighter." Bea said in a voice that had risen almost to her normal speaking volume. "He never gave up. Someone murdered my brother."
I mentally agreed with her assertion, but I didn't say anything. I was too busy noticing a pasteboard suitcase on the floor next to Bea's chair. "Are those his things?" I asked.
"Yes, I had to empty the room after they took him away. I gave him this suitcase when he graduated high school. It's a cheap thing, but he needed it to go back and forth to college. Now, I guess it belongs to me again, except I don't think my father will allow it in the house."
I ground my teeth at the mention of Bea's father. `This is his fault.' I thought. I forced my jaw open and stuck an unlit cigar in my mouth to keep my teeth apart. "Leave it here...the suitcase. I want to look through it."
Bea raised her head to me. Her eyes glowed in spite of the darkness. "Does that mean you're not finished? Will you find who killed my brother? I can't pay you, not right now. I will, but I don't know when."
"It doesn't matter." I shook my head and added a shrug of resignation to the negative gesture. "I'd do it anyway. I'd do it if you told me not to."
Bea looked away. She seemed to look very far away. Her eyes stayed on that far off place for a long moment. When she brought them back to me, I could tell she'd made up her mind about something. Bea's manner changed from desperately sad to business brisk as quickly as I'd switched the office lights on and off.
"I'll be back in the morning," she announced, "after I make Preston's arrangements. I don't even know what that means. Father will know, he buried my mother. My father will make the arrangements. He'll have to do it. I need to be here with you."
I tried to tell her not to worry about it. I tried to spare her some of the effort and grief that would come from digging into her dead brother's affairs. I took the cigar from between my teeth and set it on the edge of the desk. "You should stay at home. I can deal with this." I said as a gentle suggestion.
Bea stood abruptly and scowled at me. "Why should I stay home?" She demanded and stamped her right foot on the floor. "Should I do it to console my father, to mourn? NO!" She refused. "Somewhere in this city is a murderer. You WILL find him, and I WILL help you. I'll see you at eight tomorrow morning. Good night, Mister Edwards."
Bea bit the words off and spat them at me like verbal bullets. She stamped her foot one last time, strode to the door, and plunged into the night. I ran out after her with the idea that I'd have to stop her from doing something reckless.
She seemed to have no such intention. I watched her plow a straight furrow down the sidewalk. She moved with long strides while her brown oxfords hammered the pavement. I could barely believe my eyes as I watched her walk away. I realized that I'd seen the irresistible force, and it was a teenaged girl.
I watched Bea until she was out of sight, then I reentered the office. I flipped the lights on as I went in. I was exhausted, but the force of will that I'd just seen motivated me to look through Preston's suitcase before I went to bed. I stacked all the letters and yearbooks to one side to make room and opened it up on the desktop.
Inside were some threadbare clothes, some toiletries, a small, brown, imitation-leather shaving bag, a soft hairbrush and a comb, one towel and one washcloth. The suitcase held the bare minimum for a meager existence. Under the clothes was an engineer's metal slide rule for doing advanced mathematical calculations, and a double-stack of soft-bound, light-blue notebooks, a little larger than steno pads.
The pages inside the books were ruled in a grid and every bit of paper on every page was filled with arithmetic and rows of figures. Many of the pages were headed with a date and a two or three letter abbreviation. The left column of these was numbered in sequence, normally one to nine, ten, eleven, or twelve. The next column was a fraction, then more whole numbers, presumably the results of the precisely written free-hand arithmetic on the opposite page.
None of it made any sense to me. I wondered if it was an engineering exercise. A deeply pressed note appeared at the bottom of many pages. It read, `too many variables.' I remembered that phrase from Preston's letters, but I didn't see the connection.
I was puzzling over the third of the dozen or so of these strange blue books when I heard the front door open and shut. I didn't look up because no one spoke, and I heard no footsteps. I assumed old George had stuck his head through the opening, saw that I was busy and retreated without a word. It took me a few moments to realize there was a presence in the room beside mine.
"I came for my plate and glass." Walt's voice said. He was using his stern, `you're an asshole' tone.
I realized that Walt had entered the office and crossed it on the soft-soled shoes he wore for his kitchen job. "They're on the corner of the desk." I replied and didn't look up. I was engrossed in the mystery of the notebooks and desperately wanted to be left alone.
Walt either didn't notice my preference or didn't care. He kept talking at me. "Did you find the boy?" He asked.
"Yes." I said. My mind couldn't help but picture Preston's drawn, bone-white, dead face. My insides lurched at the thought.
"So that's all done, then." Walt said, like it was just that simple. "Now we can talk about us."
I tried to end the conversation the only way I knew how, with short answers. "I'm busy." I said and hoped that Walt would get the hint. I hoped he would realize that now was not the time. I hoped he'd do it before he decided to expound on the sourness that was in his tone of voice. I wasn't ready to deal with our relationship issues. Too much had happened that day to leave me in shape for that discussion.
To my surprise, Walt was quiet for a while, so long that I thought he might have left. I turned a page in the notebook, and he spoke. His voice startled me after the long silence. "That's the end then." Walt's flat, `long-suffering' tone insisted.
I looked up to see him standing at the edge of my desk, feet wide apart and arms folded over his chest. I kept my eyes on his face and waited for him to say what he wanted to say. He didn't make me wait for very long. "I came down here to give you one final chance. You've just had it. Now, it's over. We're not a couple, we're not lovers, we're not even friends. Thank you for giving me the answer I needed. Now when you get evicted, I won't have to miss you. I'll take my plate and glass and get out of your life."
I let Walt finish. As he did, a spasm gripped my tortured insides. I rode it out, then decided it was my turn to speak. "He's dead." I whispered and lowered my eyes to my desktop.
Walt didn't know who I meant. He raised his voice in question. "What do you mean? Who's dead?"
I closed the notebook I'd been puzzling over and hauled myself out of my chair to talk to Walt face to face and man to man. I looked at the man who had once been my lover and who I always thought of as my friend. I saw that he was angry, frustrated, disappointed, and sad. I felt bad that I was the cause of all of those things, but I couldn't apologize. We were long past the point where even a heartfelt apology would make any difference. Instead, I told Walt the simple and bitter truth of the day.
"I found him, and he's dead. He's been dead for days, probably a week. He was dead when his sister came here to ask me to find him. These are his things." I spread my hands out to indicate the stuff piled on top of my desk. "This is all that's left of his short, wasted life."
I heaved a sigh that was full of my own misery and went on with my explanation. "I have to find out who killed him. I also have to find something he stole. If I find what he took, I get paid and can keep this...this life." I waved a disgusted hand around my office. "If I find who killed him, I get to keep what little self-respect I still have."
I paused for just a second. I paused while I tried to decide how to finish my story. I decided to offer Walt the plain truth because that was as close as I could come to an apology. "You have a right to be pissed off. Everything that's wrong between us is my fault. Now we agree on something. I still have a job to do. Please go away and let me do it."
Walt was unmoved. He was still angry and sad. He stood firm in his anger. "Don't think that dead boy buys you anything. We're still through."
Something about the way Walt said those words kindled the rage inside me. The way he dismissed the poor, dead boy sparked the fire of my impulsive violence. I had an urge to hurt Walt. I felt it rise inside me. The impulse swelled from my core and surged down my arms. They reached out on their own to grab the drinking glass and plate from the corner of my desk. My hands hurled them, one at a time, at the opposite side of the room. "FUCK...YOU!" I barked, one word per throw.
Walt flinched as his things shattered against my filing cabinets. "You're an animal." He growled at me.
Walt's use of the ancient pejorative dumped gasoline on the flames of my rage. If not for the long history I had with the man, I would have taken him apart. Even with that, I barely held myself in check. My hands balled into tight fists and my whole body shook with boiling rage.
I needed Walt to leave me. I needed him to leave without another word. If he said anything, especially if he leveled another accusation at me, I felt that I could kill him. At the very least, I'd do him a great deal of harm. I forced my unwilling voice to warn Walt of the coming violence. "Get...out." I whispered.
Walt got the message. He looked at me like I was a lion, and he was a lion tamer who'd misplaced his chair and whip. He unfolded his arms and backed the length of the office. He bumped into the storefront, groped for the door, found it, and slipped through without ever taking his eyes off me.
I stared at the closed door until I could open my hands from the fists they'd automatically turned into. I lowered myself into my swivel chair and tried to get back to the notebooks. I couldn't focus on the work. My insides crawled and spasmed and the figures swam in front of my eyes.
I couldn't stop thinking about Walt. Thoughts of Walt led to thoughts of David and those thoughts led to thoughts of Peter. The three men rotated through my miserable mind, and with them the three phases of my own wasted life. The three men I'd cared for, and the three men I'd lost.
To torture myself just a little more, I pulled that day from the calendar, balled it up, and dropped it into my overfull ashtray. "Less than forty-eight hours and you're homeless, pal." I said aloud to the office that had been mine for nine years, but that very soon would belong to someone else. "I only need to make three bucks an hour until five on Tuesday," I paused to do some quick math in my head, "and I still won't have enough. FUCK!"
I gave up and went to bed.