Bleeders, page 20
part #27 of Nameless Detective Series
“Your property?” I asked him.
“My brother and me built it with our own hands,” he said. “Frank came here from Down Under in the fifties, when the land was cheap hereabouts. Bought a parcel big enough for both of us. Took him ten years to convince me to join him. Raised chickens, alfalfa, apples, the both of us. You can see there’s still part of my orchard left.”
The apple trees numbered a dozen or so, stretching away behind the barn. Gnarled, bent, twisted, but still capable of producing fruit. Ignored and long-rotted fruit.
“Frank died twelve years ago,” Manganaris said. “My wife, eight years ago. That was when I moved to the Outback. Couldn’t stand to live here without Betty. Couldn’t bring myself to sell the place, even so.” He paused, drew a quavery breath, let it out in a kind of whistle. “Don’t come out here much anymore. Twice a year to visit her grave and Frank’s grave, is all.”
There were no other cars in sight, but I could make out where one had angled off the roadway and mashed down an irregular swath of grass not long ago. I followed the same route when we reached the farmyard. The swath stopped ten yards from what was left of the farmhouse’s front porch. So did I.
I had my window rolled down, but there was nothing to hear except birds and insects. The air was thick with the moist smells of growing things. I watched the house’s front door; it stayed shut. And a tattered shade over the one facing window remained motionless.
“He inside the house?”
“Around back,” Manganaris said.
“Where around back?”
“Beat-down path over yonder. Follow that.”
“Not alone. You come with me.”
“No need for that.”
“Both of us, together.”
He said, “As you’ll have it, then,” and eased himself out through the passenger door. I had the .38 drawn and down against my leg when he came around to where I stood. He saw it and said, “Told you, mate, you won’t need that.”
“Just lead the way.”
He set off stiffly through the tangled vegetation. I followed at a wary distance, keening, trying to watch everywhere at once. Nothing made noise, and nothing moved but the two of us. A faint fermented-apple smell came to me as we rounded the house to the rear; bees swarmed back there under the trees. Near where the orchard began, the path veered off toward a huge weeping willow that grew on the creek bank.
“Over there,” the old man said. “Under the willow.”
Graves, three of them.
Two were old and well-tended, marked by marble headstones etched with words that I didn’t read. The other was new, the earth so freshly turned some of the clods on top were still moist. That one bore no marker of any kind.
I jerked my head around to stare at Manganaris.
“Now you know,” he said without emotion or irony. “I didn’t lie to you when I said I have no son.”
I did not know what to think or feel. It was like being electrically shocked: confusion, temporary disorientation. I heard myself say, “He’s dead? Why didn’t you tell me he was dead?”
“Wanted you to see the grave for yourself.”
“How do I know he’s really in there? Some kind of trick....”
“Dig him up if you’re a mind to. But I won’t help or watch if you do.”
He wasn’t lying; it was not a trick. The truth was plain in his face, in his voice—a darkling thing.
“How long has he been dead?”
“Three days.”
Three days. All the running around I’d done, all the tension and anxiety and hungry anticipation and driving need, and the whole time Dingo, Harold Manganaris, the man who’d murdered me ... dead and buried himself. No confrontation now. Nothing now, finished now. Dead, goddamn it, dead dead dead.
“How did he die?”
“I shot him,” the old man said.
“You shot him?”
“With my old service pistol. Two rounds, one through the heart.”
“Why, what happened?”
“He brought me trouble and heartache, same as before.”
“Put it in plainer words.”
A little silence. Then, “He was bad, Harold was. Mean and wicked from birth. You said it true this morning—psychotic. Stealing, breaking up property, taking drugs, hurting other boys. Hurting his mother.” Manganaris held up his crooked left arm. “Hurting me.”
“He did that to you?”
“When he was eighteen. Broke my arm in three places. Two operations, and the wrist still wouldn’t heal proper.”
“What made him do it?”
“Wanted money, I wouldn’t give it to him. So he hurt me to get it. I told him before he ran off, don’t ever come back, you’re not welcome in my house again, you’re no longer my son. And he didn’t come back. Not until last Sunday.”
Dead and gone. Dead under those clods of dirt beneath the willow. I still could not seem to come to terms with it.
“He wanted money again, is that it? Tried to hurt you again when you wouldn’t give it to him?”
“Punched me in the belly,” Manganaris said. “Still aches when I move sudden. So I went and got my pistol. He laughed when I pointed it at him and told him to get out. ’Won’t shoot me, you old fuck,’ he said. ’Your own son. But I’ll sure as hell shoot you if you don’t tell me where you got your money hid.’ Then he showed me that gun of his. Two of us standing there pointing guns at each other, like in a bloody cowboy movie. Makes me sick to remember it.”
Won’t shoot me, you old fuck. Lay still, you old fuck.
I said, “What happened?”
“He tried to take the pistol away from me and I shot him. Once, in the chest. Stopped him, but only for a second. Then he shot me.”
“Shot you? But....”
“His gun jammed. Didn’t go off.”
“... My God.”
“That’s right, mate. That’s the real reason I brought you out here, why I’m talking to you like this. He killed both of us, Harold did, only God stepped in and we’re both still alive. I reckoned God put the job of vengeance in my hands, so I fired again—shot my son through his evil heart. I didn’t know then about the people he’d murdered. When I found out, I was all the more certain I’d been God’s instrument, but after what you told me this morning....”
He rubbed his face with gnarled fingers. Now I understood that look in his eyes, the one I hadn’t been able to define. It was pain, and it was blood. Another bleeder, Adam Manganaris, the same kind as me.
“I loaded his body into my truck,” he said, “drove out here, brought him to the creek in a wheelbarrow, dug the grave, and buried him. Hard work, hardest I’ve ever had to do.”
“Why bury him next to his mother and your brother?”
“Told you before. ’Home is the place where.’ I had to take him in, didn’t I? For the last time?”
I walked away from him. Not going anywhere, just needing to move. How did I feel? Relieved, yes. And a little angry and let down, the way you do when you’ve been cheated out of something that was rightfully yours. For Adam Manganaris it had all ended with a bang; for me, with a whimper. No confrontation, no satisfaction in helping to put Dingo away in a cage, no sense of personal vindication. Yet it was stupid to feel that way. There were no guarantees that I would have been able to bring about the finish I’d envisioned; that more blood, my blood, would not have been spilled. The bottom line was that Harold Manganaris had paid for his sins without anyone else except this poor old man being harmed. Closure, Kerry had called it. Right. Justice served, case closed.
Manganaris was standing under the willow, looking down at one of the graves. When I rejoined him I saw that it was his wife’s and that there were tears in his eyes. The moist earth and rotted-apple smells seemed to have grown stronger in my nostrils; the skeletal buildings and fungoid primroses were ugly reminders of death. I did not want to be here any longer—not another minute in this place.
“We’ll go back to the car now,” I said.
He nodded, wiped his eyes with the back of one hand. “Then where?”
“The car first.”
We retraced the path, buckled in. I jammed the .38 into the dash clip and then backed the car around and drove fast up and over the hill without a glance in the rearview mirror. Neither of us spoke until I turned off the county road onto the highway.
Manganaris asked then, “You planning to notify the sheriff?” Matter-of-factly; not as if he cared.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Your son’s dead and buried. I don’t see any reason not to leave him right where he is.”
“But I killed him. Shot him down like a dog. I deserve punishment, eh?”
Old and dying like his crossroads store, like his farm. Precious little time left. Where was the sense—or the additional justice—in forcing him to leave the Outback and die in prison? But all I said was, “Not by anyone on this earth. God’s instrument, you said. All right. We’ll let God make the final judgment.”
TWENTY-THREE
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE OUTBACK, Manganaris seemed reluctant to quit the car. He sat motionless, staring at his knobbed wrist. Without looking at me he said, “I’ve got a gift bottle of whiskey in my cabin.”
“A drink at this hour? It’s not even eleven.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t use hard liquor.”
“Neither do I,” he said.
He opened the door, lifted himself out, moved away in slow, arthritic steps. After a few seconds, I shut off the ignition and followed him.
His cabin was cluttered with possessions, mostly books. While he hunted up the whiskey and a couple of glasses, I sat at an oval table and watched him. It struck me then, for the first time, that he was not very much older than me. All along I’d been thinking of him as an old man, but there could not have been more than a dozen years separation in our ages. If he was old, what did that make me?
The whiskey was single-malt Scotch in a dusty, unopened bottle. He broke the seal, poured two fingers for each of us, lowered himself into a chair across the table. He still wasn’t looking at me, as if he’d grown too embarrassed to make eye contact. He didn’t want to be alone, but he didn’t really want me there, either. Neither of us had anything more to say.
Pretty soon I picked up my glass and drained it. The Scotch went down easily, trailing smoky heat. So easily that I craved another. But I wouldn’t have one, not now and not ever again.
Manganaris hadn’t touched his. He was staring away from me, at something not in this room—something long ago and far away. His eyes were full of blood.
I left him in silence and got into my car and went away from there. Once I was on the highway, moving at speed in the direction of Hollister, I began slowly to uncoil inside. And my thoughts grew as clear and sharp as they’d ever been.
Maybe the law would get onto Dingo and come around asking his father the same sort of questions I had. I hoped not, but if they did he wouldn’t tell them anything; I was the only one he would ever share his secret with. Maybe Annette Byers would recover and provide details of the murders and make noises about the missing money; maybe Grant Johnson would be forced to tell about me after all. And maybe Fuentes would hound me for a while whether I decided to turn the seventy-five thousand over to him or not. But none of that seemed to matter much right now, one way or another. It was all little more than echoes of a period of sound and fury that signified nothing.
Four things had come out of that period, and as far as I was concerned only those four were meaningful.
I had survived.
I had finally stopped bleeding—unlike Adam Manganaris, who would continue to bleed until the day he died.
The clicks were fading, and with the passage of enough time, they would stop haunting my waking hours.
I could not, for any reason, go through something like this again. When you boiled that last one down, it meant that Kerry had been right and I had been wrong. It was in fact the answer to my morning-after question of how, in what profound way, I’d been changed. My work was no longer the only thing that defined and sustained me; I would not shrivel up and die without it. I was sixty years old. I was tired mentally as well as physically. I was sick of pain and sorrow and blood; of dealing with lowlives like Dingo and Byers and Cohalan and Steve Niall and Charlie Bright and Nick Kinsella and Jackie Spoons and Zeke Mayjack and the drunk at the Blacklight Tavern. The time had come to pull back, look elsewhere for satisfaction and peace of mind. I’d had a good long run, done pretty decent work for more than thirty years. I could take pride in my accomplishments, and I had nothing left to prove, to myself or to anyone else.
I’d known all this for some time now at the center of myself, maybe even before Harold Manganaris put that gun to the back of my head, and I was finally able to admit it and to act on it. Tomorrow I would have a long talk with Tamara, start making arrangements for her to take over primary control of the agency and for the hiring of someone to do the fieldwork. The sooner there was an ending here, the sooner there would be a new beginning.
I thought about Kerry, Emily. How much I missed them, how much I needed them, how much I owed them. And I drove a little faster.
Home is the place where.
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