Homicide My Own Page 8

  “Can we push it out into the light?” asked Odd.

  “You can,” said David. “I’ll watch.”

  The vehicle was already in neutral. Odd and I got behind it and leaned backwards. I put a muddy foot against the far wall. Odd did likewise, and we flexed that four-by off the spot it had stuck to for over thirty years. It broke free and rolled easily out of the shed, coming to rest over the tarp on the gravel.

  I believe the natural inclination of anyone looking at a vehicle for the first time would be to look into the driver’s side window. That’s what I did. You look at where you would sit if you had this car. You look at the steering wheel, where your hands would be. You might check the mileage from there. That was my theory, still is, but Odd got into the passenger seat without any hesitation.

  No way would I get into that vehicle, either side. Dry and hardened blood, and if I’m not mistaken, brain matter, was all over the dash, the seats, the passenger window, and the back window. He ignored all that and settled himself into the seat. He shut the door and turned his head a few times, as though trying to click into a position, which he did finally: looking across the imaginary driver and through the open window, at me.

  He put his hand to his throat and swallowed hard. “Something’s wrong here,” he said.

  “What?” said I.

  “That window is open.”

  “Yes,” said the father.

  “And this one closed?” The passenger window was all but opaque with dried blood and specks of other stuff.

  “Everything is like it was.”

  “The killer must have gone to the driver’s side,” I said. “Shot James, then Jeannie.”

  “No, something’s wrong. They talked to the killer through the open window. They knew him.”

  “Maybe the window was open ‘cause they wanted some air. They were necking, the place got steamed up,” I said.

  “No, they would have just cracked it then. It was raining that night, hard. They wouldn’t roll the window all the way down unless they were talking to someone, unless they knew who they were talking to. The killer stood on that side. They talked to him. Then Jeannie clutched Jimmy’s arm, so hard she left bruises there.”

  Jimmy?

  Odd’s hands seemed to clutch at an imaginary arm, and they trembled. They were out of his control, shaking in the air, clutching to nothing. His eyes glazed over. There was a terror on his face I had never seen before. In fact, it was no longer his face. That expression of fear did not, could not, come from Odd Gunderson. I was standing where the killer would have been, and so he was looking at me, and never in my life have I engendered such fear in another human being, but, of course, it wasn’t me. It was whoever Odd was seeing where I was standing.

  “Who are you looking at? “ I asked him. “What’s his name? Odd? Odd? Who is it?”

  When I said his name, his head jerked sideways in an involuntary spasm, and he was back. The face was Odd’s again.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said.

  Across the hood of the car, I looked at the old Indian who had brought us here, Drinkwater, and I thought I saw in him the flash of recognition.

  10.

  I made the decision I was in the better condition to drive, and so I did, back to the part of the island under county jurisdiction. Our old Indian guide wanted to show take us himself to Karl’s Auto Repair, but I settled for directions instead. I told him, politely, to get on with the rest of his day.

  The garage was easy to find. Seven cars were parked outside and two were up on lifts, a mechanic under each of them.

  “Which one is Karl?” I asked Odd, as we approached, half-testing, half already believing that of course he’d know.

  “How should I know?” he said.

  “Karl Gutshall?” I asked, when we got to the open bays.

  The tall one on the right turned and came out from under the lift, looking us over. He wore greasy coveralls baggy in the butt and a gimme cap backwards on his head. He was my age. I noticed both the little and ring fingers of his left hand were missing. I wondered if anyone around here was still in one piece, and if we would be by the time we got off this damn island.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “We’re from out of town.”

  “From the looks of your vehicle I would guess you’re also cops.”

  “Oh, yeah, that too.”

  “Where’re you from?”

  “Spokane,” I said.

  He took off the cap and crumpled it into his back pocket. His hair was long, unkempt, and black. He was tall and stooped a bit and sad.

  “But we’re not here as cops,” I said.

  “Or maybe we are,” said Odd.

  “Odd, you got something you want to ask this man, as a police officer?”

  “No, Quinn, you go ahead.”

  “Or otherwise?”

  “Not just yet.”

  Odd might have needed to stand back and look at him for awhile. After all, it was possible that this grease monkey had been his boyfriend in another life, thirtysome years ago. Something like that happened to me once, in the real world, when I went back to Pennsylvania to bury my mother and met up again with my high school boyfriend, “Our Johnny.” Let me tell you, it was a major jolt. How’d he get so heavy? Where did all that rich wavy hair go? What were those gin blossoms doing on his nose? In Karl’s case, I’d be wondering, how’d he lose those two fingers?

  “We’ve just come from the Coyotes, you know them?” I asked him.

  “Know them all. Which ones?”

  “The old ones, David and his wife.”

  “Sure, I know them. Jimmy’s folks.”

  “Jimmy’s folks, right. We talked about this and that, sitting on their porch, threw a ball for the dog, and then we looked at Jimmy’s old four-by...they still have it, you know.”

  “Yeah, tribals can’t sell a car somebody’s died in.”

  “Anyway, we bounced around a couple ideas about how Jimmy and Jeannie wound up murdered...”

  “You’re here for that?”

  “No, we’re here on an entirely different matter, but since we had time to kill, we’re visiting and talking and trying to come up with a profile of the kind of man who could shotgun two kids. The Coyotes didn’t say much but they listened and after a while they came to understand that we were actually trying to figure out who did this thing. That’s when they said to us, ‘Everybody knows who did it.’ Well, I was shocked. Weren ‘t you shocked, Odd? A little? I mean, we spent all that time there and conjectured right and left and at the end of it, they say, everybody knows who killed their son. Karl Gutshall did it.”

  “They always did believe that,” said Karl.

  I was disappointed. I’d hoped to unhinge him a little.

  “Why would they believe that?”

  “It made sense to them, then, and they never let go of it. Not even when I was cleared by the police, who did their best to scare something out of me, and I was a scared kid, believe me, but you can’t scare something out of a kid if it’s not in him to begin with. I could never do anything like that, not then, not now, not ever.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “I don’t get it. Why are you here, two cops from Spokane?”

  “You were Jeannie’s boyfriend. She dumped you for James. You had a shotgun, recently fired. You had no alibi.”

  “So they did say, the Coyotes.”

  “They said that much.”

  “Okay, I don’t know who you are, and it bothers me that after all these years I could be pulled away from my work to go through another third degree, and, mister, you, I don’t like the way you’re boring a hole through me,” he said, turning to Odd, “but let me bring you up to speed and then you can get the hell away from me.”

  “Take it easy, don’t get all worked up.”

  “I didn’t have an alibi because nobody who sleeps alone in his own bed had an alibi that night. It was the middle of the night. Everybody wa
s home, asleep. That’s my alibi. My mother, my father, my brother, we were all asleep. Sure, I had a shotgun, still do, most people on the island had a shotgun and most of them had been recently fired, because we had a rabbit problem you can’t imagine. The more of ‘em you shot, the more there were the next day. I don’t ever want to eat rabbit again as long as I live. And, yes, Jeannie dumped me, but it wasn’t for James.”

  Angry, he pulled his cap back out of his pocket, slammed it on his head, and rubbed it in. But he didn’t go back to the Suburban he had up on the lift. I couldn’t tell if he were steamed because of our intrusion or all over again because of what had happened to him back in high school. I couldn’t tell if Odd were filled with lover’s regret or simple pity.

  “I’m sorry,” Odd said.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Not that long, though.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes, not long enough by half. I loved that girl.”

  I waited for Odd to return the sentiment, but he held silent.

  Karl went on, “If I knew who did that to Jeannie, I’d kill him with my bare hands.”

  Minus two fingers. I asked him, “If she didn’t dump you for James, who then?”

  “You guys want a Coke?”

  We said we did. With the sun out it was getting a little warm for late May, sixty-one, two, degrees.

  He took off his cap again and stuffed it back into his pocket. It seemed to be his emotional abacus. He opened up the Coke machine with a key and pulled out three cold ones. We took them to a log bench down by the main road, put there I supposed for customers to sit and watch the traffic go by as they waited for their own rides to be serviced. Odd and I took the bench, Karl sat on a large painted white rock, his back to the southeastern flow of traffic, of which there was precious little, and not a bit more in the opposite direction, but what little there was slowed down to have a better look at us.

  “Jeannie was, how do I put this...?” he said. “She matured earlier than a lot of us, earlier than me, for sure. We were crazy in love, from the end of our junior year, through the summer. She was ready, you know.”

  “Ready for what?” I asked.

  “She was sexually ready. One night, in my father’s car, she just went and put her hand on my...I almost went through the roof. It was the sixties and everybody was doing it or talking about doing it or talking about how many times they’d already done it, but I was scared, frankly. I worried that I’d be too small, that I’d be too fast, too awkward all down the line, if you know what I mean.”

  I was surprised to hear a man my age recollect his youth in this way. At the same time I was dying to crack wise to Odd about what a slut he was in his former life, but I kept it zipped.

  Odd said, “Do you still get the hiccups when you’re nervous?

  Karl got them right then and there, had to put down his Coke, almost brought some of it up.

  I patted him on the back and said, “It’s a trick he does, don’t let it rattle you.”

  It wouldn’t rattle you, if someone knew about every idiosyncracy? I urged him to go on, and finally he was able to, keeping one eye on Odd.

  “What scared me most was the risk of losing her. I thought that if we did it, and it was bad, I would lose her, but if we didn’t do it, and we had more time for her to, you know, get attached to my other qualities, we would have a better future together.”

  I was beginning to like this grease monkey. “So what did you do?”

  “I moved her hand away and said pretty much what I just said to you, and that if we loved each other we’d get to that when the time was right.”

  He was hiccuping all the way, until I said, “You were a sensible young man.” After that, he wasn’t nervous anymore, just regretful.

  “I was an idiot. If I had done what she wanted, she might not have left me for someone who would, and it was that person who killed her. She might be alive today, if.... And me? Who knows? The only lesson I learned was, never refuse a willing woman.”

  “That’s a fairly stupid lesson,” I said.

  “I won’t argue it. But that’s how I’ve lived my life. Married three of those willing women. Only because they asked me. Cheated on every one of them.”

  “You are an idiot.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not a murderer. Life could have been different, if only...”

  “So who was this guy, then?”

  “I wish I knew, because he’s the one who murdered her. He murdered her because she dumped him for James.”

  “That one,” said Odd, “was the man who taught her about making love, but that was all she wanted from him. She couldn’t know all that he would want from her.”

  Karl Gutshall looked gut-shot. “What makes you know so much?” he said.

  “It’s a long story,” said I. “Look, I’m assuming yours was a pretty small high school, ain’t?”

  “There were only twenty-eight kids in our graduating class.”

  “Do the math, do the elimination process. Who busted Jeannie’s cherry?”

  “Jesus, who are you?” said Karl, offended.

  “You’d have to know who it was, small place like this.”

  “You did your best to find out back then,” said Odd, boring another hole into Karl.

  “Huh?” was all he could say.

  “You were hurt and embarrassed and belittled and finally pretty pissed off, weren’t you?”

  Karl started hiccuping again. “I was a kid in high school. Ever happen to you?”

  “You should have quietly sat and waited for all of that to pass away, but you let your anger consume you.”

  I didn’t want Odd to go off on his sitting-still riff again. “What did he do with all that anger, Odd?” I asked.

  “Huh?” said Karl.

  “He followed her.”

  As I said, it was sixty-one, -two degrees, but sweat beaded out right there on Karl’s forehead. Me, the usual spots: my butt, my armpits, my cleavage.

  “You followed her!” Odd said, a girlish indignation in his voice, I swear. “You spied on her. You asked all her friends. You tried to break into her locker and read her secret notebook.”

  The way Odd held his breath in his sleep? That’s what Karl was doing now, interrupted only by his hiccups.

  “You were outraged,” Odd laid into him. “Now you know it was yourself you were mad at, but back then you had to blame it all on her. You were so mad at her you could have killed her!”

  The air exploded from Kart Gutshall. “But I didn’t! I didn’t!” He threw his half-full Coke bottle into the trees next to us. I never heard it break. “I didn’t kill her. I loved her. I love her to this day.”

  “And you never found out who it was she gave herself to after you refused her.”

  “No, I never did, and neither did anyone else, not anyone else who was willing to come forward. Go back to Spokane. Leave me alone.”

  He walked in his sad gait back to his garage, in baggy coveralls, reaching back for his cap again and forcefully fitting it to his head.

  “Thanks for the Cokes,” I yelled after him.

  He stepped under the shadow of the big Suburban and buried his head in its undercarriage.

  Odd and I got back into the car, I behind the wheel. We sat for a moment. I didn’t know where we would go next, but I knew where we must finally go eventually.

  “You did know a bit about him,” I said.

  “Not enough.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get. Why can’t you just say it. Just say who did it. You know so much, why don’t you know that?”

  “I have looked down the barrel of that shotgun. I have seen James’ head blown away, all over me...but I can’t see who’s holding the shotgun. If you asked me what kind of dancer he was, Karl, I could tell you. Lousy.”

  I had to chuckle. We were watching Karl as we spoke. You could tell he was rattled, trying to get his head back into his mechanics.

  “You were no angel, though, were you?” I said, suppre
ssing another chuckle. “Little Miss Hot Pants, grabbin’ the boy’s johnson.”

  He looked at me, rolled his eyes.

  “What are we doing here, Quinn? Why’d the lieutenant pick us?”

  “Shit detail, where’s Quinn and Gunderson?”