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NOTE: Check out my other stories in the Sci-fi / Fantasy Section Crown Vic to a Parallel World From Whence I Came Stolen Love
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Wasted Life a Law Edwards Mystery by Sam Stefanik
3 The Detective
I was lighting another cigar when I heard the door latch click. The closed door seemed to give Walt license to speak. "Who is David?" He asked.
I pretended not to know what he meant. "What?"
"David." Walt pressed me. "Her brother's name is Preston, but you called his picture David. Who is David?"
I shifted from pretend ignorance to a straightforward lie. "I didn't call him David."
Walt insisted that his senses hadn't lied to him. "You forget I work in a loud kitchen where reading lips is easier than shouting. You called her brother David."
I studied the snapshot again. My stomach lurched, my mind filled in the colors, and the boy in the photo was David. I saw the same sweet, foolishly optimistic face I'd looked into fifteen years before...except this boy wasn't David. I forced myself to acknowledge that fact. "David is someone I knew in another life." I admitted at the end of a sigh and pocketed the picture.
Walt didn't ask me for any more information. He had other things he wanted to know. "What's the other case you have?"
"I lied." I said and puffed some more smoke around. The cigar was dried out and stale, but it still smoked, so I smoked it. "Missing persons cases are fucking impossible for a one-man outfit. I shouldn't have taken it at all, especially not for a measly twenty-five bucks. Still, there's no business coming in and when I get thrown out of here for being three months behind on the rent, at least I can get a hotel for a few days."
Walt's face grimaced with worry. His tone shifted. "You're getting evicted?"
Part of the harangue Walt had used to get me out of my apartment and into the office to meet Bea was the assumption that I needed money. He hadn't been wrong, but I'd evaded him on the subject. Since I'd already admitted my situation, I decided to come clean to the man who I thought of as my friend, probably my only one. "You were right earlier. I've been ducking the landlord for a month. He finally caught up with me yesterday. He's going to be out of town for a long weekend and is coming back on Tuesday."
I dragged the tear-off calendar across the desk and pulled several pages from it to bring it up to date. It was May 20th, 1944, a Saturday. "He'll be here at five to either collect the money or change the locks. I've got four days, counting today, to rake up one hundred and fifty dollars. It may as well be a million with the way things have been going. Fuck it."
"I could help you," Walt offered with a voice that pleaded for me to take his charity. "There hasn't been much to buy because of the rationing. The cafeteria at the shipyard, with the war on, has been operating around the clock. They always need cooks to work overtime. Since I've been there the longest, I get first choice of the extra hours. I've been saving for my restaurant, but if you need money..."
I raised my hand in an unintentional mime of Bea's `shut up' gesture. "I couldn't. I just...I just couldn't."
Walt crossed his strong arms over his deep chest. His hairy, muscular arms bulged in the short sleeves of his yellow and plaid buttoned-down shirt. Walt's arms distracted me from his obvious disappointment over my refusal of his help.
I'd always been attracted to Walt's stocky, athletic build. The shirt he wore that day did a good job of showing it off. It clung to his broad shoulders and tapered to where it tucked into his high-waisted blue slacks. Since he was seated, I couldn't admire his legs, but I remembered them. Their masculine strength matched the rest of Walt. His legs both supported and complimented his very male physique.
I knew the body inside of those clothes. I knew it intimately. I desired it, but I couldn't let myself pursue it. I was no good for the man who lived within it.
Walt had often compared us, in our private moments. He'd said we were good together because we were both big, solid men. He wasn't wrong about our similar appearances, but what was inside us couldn't have been more different. Walt's entire person was built of gentle strength. He moved with the natural grace of the athlete he had been in high school and college. Whether clothed or not, Walt always seemed comfortable wherever he was or whatever he was doing.
We were close in age. He was two years younger than my forty-three years. At five feet ten, I was three inches shorter than Walt, but also big, broad, and barrel chested like him. Our physical appearance was where the similarities ended. Instead of being full of thoughtful kindness like Walt was, I was full of angry violence. It seeped into my language, I exhaled it with my cigar smoke, and I acted on it with my ham-sized fists. The anger contaminated everything I touched.
It was the anger inside me that kept us apart. It was that anger that had hurt Walt too many times, never physically, but always emotionally. Walt and I had a lot of history and had been lovers at different intervals starting a year after he'd moved in upstairs, seven years before. The relationship had been rocky, but he never completely broke it off.
Maybe he thought he could salvage me, I didn't know. I liked him as a friend and enjoyed him as a lover when he let me. Recently he'd shown signs of being fed-up. He'd hinted it was time to either commit or move on. He'd more than hinted.
For whatever reason, the concern Walt had for me and my well-being remained strong. He remembered my painful grimace from earlier and asked about it. "What happened to you when you were looking at the photo before? You looked like something happened."
"Just some indigestion." I lied in an attempt to minimize the cramp that had nearly sent tears streaming down my face.
"You haven't eaten." Walt reminded me.
I didn't have an answer for him, and I hated being mothered. "Walt...please."
"ALRIGHT, LAW!" He shouted and slapped an open palm on my desk in frustration. "I won't say anything. I'll just quietly watch you self-destruct."
"Thank you." I said to mock him childishly. "Seriously though, I need to get cleaned up for real, get something to eat, and get moving on this."
Walt swallowed his anger and made another offer. "Take a shower and come upstairs. I'll make us lunch."
"Lunch?" I asked and checked my wristwatch. I'd forgotten to wind the damn thing and it had stopped sometime in the night. The hands were stuck at some hour that I knew wasn't correct. Walt informed me it was almost noon. I reset my watch and made certain it was wound up tight.
Walt renewed his offer of lunch, but I balked at it. I appreciated his kindness, and the offer was a compelling one. I longed for Walt's cooking. His talent was wasted in that cafeteria. They didn't appreciate what a master he was. I couldn't do it, though. I couldn't bring myself to climb those steps. I refused Walt's kindness. "No, thank you. I'll grab something when I go out." I said and distracted myself to avoid his gaze. I pawed around in my desk drawer, looking for nothing.
"That's fine." Walt muttered as he rose to leave.
"See you later."
"Yeah." Walt muttered some more as he moved reluctantly toward the door with his hat crushed in his oversized fist. I watched him go. Even disappointed, he maintained the erect posture and smooth, effortless motion of the athlete he once was.
My guts lurched again as he left. I rode the spasm out and waited for the door to close. "Welcome to the bottom, Law." I said aloud as the latch clicked. "Twenty-five bucks for a missing brother. Shit." I rubbed my face again and retreated to my apartment.
The room that served as my bedroom and would have been my living room if I ever bothered to fold up the pull-down bed was a complete disaster, but that was nothing new. I checked the floor for any clothes that might be fresher than the ones I wore. When I didn't find anything, I decided the wreck of a suit that I had on was probably the best of the lot.
I made sure the door between my apartment and the office was shut and locked, then I stripped to the skin for a shower. I tossed the suit on my bed so I wouldn't have to look for it again when I was clean. I was in sore need of a shower because I hadn't had time for one when Walt rousted me earlier. I'd done the bare minimum to make myself presentable, but now that I had time, I wanted to get all the way clean.
The night before, I had been fed-up with everything. My pending eviction had left me depressed. I wanted a release from my misery, so I went to a private queer hangout, a club with no permanent membership that was on the other side of Broad Street. I had a passing notion that I'd try to pick someone up, but I didn't work at it very hard and when the hour got late, I gave up on that. Once a tumble seemed out of reach, I got roaring drunk on the gasoline they called gin at that establishment.
When I exhausted my drinking money, which was all of my money, I left the bar for the long walk home. I vaguely remembered staggering along the glittering thoroughfare that was Broad Street, then plodding my way through blocks and blocks of lower and lower class until I got to the neighborhood which I called home.
I'd arrived in gritty Lower Moyamensing with the sour feeling of liquor dying inside me. I'd entered the office without bothering to lock the door behind me, plunged through it, and fell into the pull-down bed in my apartment. That's where I remained when Walt woke me too few hours later.
He'd objected to the way I'd treated myself and said so during his opening harangue. "You didn't have to crawl inside a bottle for comfort." He'd said in his inflectionless, long-suffering tone. "All you ever have to do is climb the stairs."
Walt wanted far more than that from me and he knew it and I knew it. I'd told him to leave it be, but he pressed me like he always pressed me. It wasn't until I'd whispered at him that he ceased his incessant mothering. I reasoned that Walt stopped pressing me because he remembered that when I whispered, physical violence was the next step.
I set those thoughts aside, or tried to as I got in the shower and turned the water on full blast. I scrubbed my body like I hated it and hoped the hot water would clear my head. It helped, but it didn't do the whole job. I got out and dried off. As I did, the steam fog cleared from the medicine cabinet mirror. The glass showed me my reflection. There was very little to be proud of.
The older I got, the closer I got to the age my father was when he died, the more I looked like him. I hated to look like him. I was heavier than he ever was, and my nose didn't match his because he had never been smashed in the face by a fist wrapped around a billiard ball. If I set those nuances aside, I was forced to recognize that, as my black hair lost its color, and my skin started to sag, the long, tan face in the mirror was becoming his.
More than once, I considered growing a beard to hide my father's face from myself, but my eyes, more than any other feature, matched his exactly. Nothing could be done to change the oblong shape, dark brown color, or the heavy-lidded, always-tired appearance we shared.
I sighed out my frustration over that fact and patted my stomach. The unnatural horror that was my navel-less belly and the network of rubbery scars that made up the front of my torso was something else my father never had. I'd gotten those in 1918 when I was in France to fight in The Great War. The nightmare of the event that had given me those scars was what Walt had woken me from when he'd knocked on my apartment door.
It was a familiar nightmare, one that I had more nights than not. It was a nightmare that started with my first desperate attempt at revealing myself to a man I loved, only to be rejected and called a filthy name. When I reacted angrily to that rejection, that same man, a man who had been so kind to me, referred to me with ignorance and hate. `Animal.' He'd spat at me as I walked miserably away.
Sometime later, when the shells started to fall, I'd returned to protect him, but there was nothing I could do. I couldn't save him. My stomach heaved and lurched at the memory. Sour bile filled my mouth. I spat it into the sink and held my belly until the cramps relaxed. "I miss you anyway, Peter." I said to the scars. With that thought expressed to a ghost, I went to get dressed.
I put my suit on and tried to find my hat. I looked high and low, but I couldn't lay my hand on it. I assumed I'd left it at the bar, or maybe in the gutter somewhere between the bar and my office. I decided it didn't matter. Last year's black fedora would have matched my rumpled brown suit like stripes match plaid. I'd only planned to wear it because I didn't have another. When I gave it up for lost, I figured I'd be hatless for the foreseeable future.
I went into the office with the intention of passing right out to the corner diner, but I saw something on my desk that arrested my progress. In the middle of my blotter was a plate. On the plate was a square something wrapped in waxed paper. Next to the plate sat a fresh apple. Next to the apple was a glass of water, an envelope of bicarb, and four aspirin. Inside the waxed paper was a beautifully made ham and Swiss sandwich.
The sandwich was from Walt. He was the only person who could have brought it. My mouth watered as I cradled the culinary delight between my hands like it was an injured baby bird. I decided that Walt was using the right bait for his tender trap. I also gave him points for being a little devious. For him to make the sandwich and deliver it like he had, wasn't just about reminding me of some of the benefits I would enjoy if he and I were a permanent item. By bringing water in a glass and putting the sandwich on a plate, he'd left his belongings in my possession.
The polite thing for me to do would be to bring those items back to him later that evening. If I wanted to maximize that politeness for my benefit, I would bring the items back around dinnertime and see about inviting myself to stay for the meal. I'd done that before, more than once, and it had always worked. I shook my head because I wasn't going to allow myself to do it again.
"Nice try, but no sale." I said to an imaginary Walt. I knew if I climbed those stairs, he'd force me to have the relationship conversation, and that wasn't a showdown that I was ready for. I decided the truly right thing for me to do was to refuse Walt's love and his sandwich. Still, the sandwich looked good, and I was hungry. In the end, I decided that it was likely Walt had already eaten, and there was no reason the sandwich should go to waste. I reminded myself that there was a war on. I rationalized that resources needed to be conserved.
I ate the sandwich, and it was delicious. The apple that went with it was perfectly crunchy ripe. I finished the meal and mixed the bicarb with the water. I used both to wash down the aspirin. The food filled my belly, and the bicarb kept the bile at bay. I begged the aspirin to hurry up and soothe my headache.
With that plea made, I stacked the plate and cup on the corner of my desk where I planned to leave them until Walt retrieved them. If Walt came to my office, it would be harder for him to force the relationship issue. I patted my satisfied stomach and decided it was time to start work.