Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (14 page)

“Now, Maria,” Dennis said, his voice higher-pitched than hers and as flat as hers was musical, “that’s nonsense. It’s been almost two years since the trouble.”

“We were followed,” she said gravely, her distressed gaze starting on him, landing on me—and holding.

“Were you?” I asked him.

Dennis shook his head, no, insistently. “Highway was darn near empty. One farmer in a beat-up old pickup went roarin’ around us, like to have his fenders fall off. That wasn’t any government man.”

“They have devious ways,” she said.

Her melodrama was at once silly and disturbing.

“I’d like to interview you, individually,” I said. “But first, let’s get to know each other a little. Why don’t we have dinner? I’ll admit to being starved; I haven’t eaten since Chicago.”

“I could eat,” Dennis admitted.

She shrugged. “Fine.”

Just off the lobby, the dining room was called Rebecca’s (after the gorgeous ghost, whose image in stained glass adorned several windows) and we had the place pretty much to ourselves. Despite the Victorian trappings, the menu included plenty of traditional New Mexican dishes, and I tried the green chile stew—which made first my mouth, and then my eyes, water—while Dennis had spareribs with
chauquehue
(cornmeal and red chile) and Miss Selff a small bowl of soup, Anasazi bean with lamb, which smelled so good I had the waitress bring me a cup.

I used small talk to get information out of them and, I hoped, put them at ease. Dennis, it seemed, was not a full-fledged mortician at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell, but an assistant, serving a sort of internship.

“I graduated in ’46, from the San Francisco Mortuary College,” he added cheerfully, cutting meat off a bone. He said it as if he were looking forward to the class reunion.

Miss Selff had been a nurse since 1945, only it wasn’t “Miss.”

“Actually,” she said, “it’s Mrs. Selff. My husband was a pilot, Army Air Force.”

I drank some ice water; those green chiles were getting to me. “What does he do now, Mrs. Selff?”

“His B-17 went down over Dresden.”

“I’m sorry.” That was a tough break: only a handful of planes were shot down in the devastating raid on the so-called Florence of Germany. “Do you have any children, Mrs. Selff?”

“No. We didn’t have much time together—just one leave.”

She looked like she might start crying again, so I dropped the subject.

The mortician, however, picked it up. “After the tragedy, Maria decided to dedicate herself to her husband’s memory, and stay in the service.” He beamed at her. “I really admire her for that.”

This, understandably, seemed to embarrass her.

She pushed her barely touched bowl of soup away and leaned forward, the big blue eyes wide enough to dive into. “Is it possible, Mr. Heller, that we could talk more privately than this?”

“I’ve arranged a suite for that very purpose, Mrs. Selff. But I would like to interview you separately.”

Dennis frowned. “Why? Our stories kinda dovetail, you know.”

“That’s the problem.” I sipped my ice water. “I really need to hear your stories independently. It’s not good investigatory technique to allow interview subjects to interact…. The result can be a collaboration that doesn’t truly represent what either party saw.”

“I’d really like to get away from this public area,” she said, scooting her chair away, wadding her napkin and tossing it on the table, with an air of finality. “I don’t want to be seen.”

I got the room key out of my pocket. “Why don’t you go ahead to the suite, and wait there? I can interview Glenn downstairs, in the bar.”

She worked up a tiny smile, but on those luscious lips it was monumental; I wasn’t quite in love with her yet—at this point I’d only steal for her: we were hours away from murder. “Could you walk me to the suite, Mr. Heller? I’d feel more at ease.”

“Certainly.”

The mortician started to rise, but the Selff woman gave me a quick, narrow-eyed glance that sent a message: she wanted to speak to me, alone.

“Glenn,” I said, with a familiarity generally reserved for close friends, “why don’t you settle up the bill for me—just charge it to my room, Suite 101. Then go on down to the bar and find us a nice private booth.”

“Sure,” he said, but he obviously sensed something. “See you in a little bit, Maria.”

She smiled and nodded to him, rather stiffly.

Then she and I were on our way to the suite, moving together down a wide empty hallway. We’d walked silently for maybe a minute when Maria planted her tiny black-pump-shod feet on the carpet and swiveled toward me, clasping her hands tight before her like she was trying to keep a lightning bug from escaping. Her voice trembled as she said, “I need your help.”

“Name it.”

Her eyes tensed. “Glenn … he’s a problem.”

“How so?”

She sighed and her bosom strained at the embroidered bodice and, as I tried not to pass out, she looked away from me and began walking again, slower; I tagged along.

“We were dating,” she said, “back in ’47, at the time of … you know, at the time of all this … strangeness. We’d just gone together a few weeks, a month at most, and then when the strangeness began, I … I told Glenn it was better we didn’t see each other.”

“And not just because of the ‘strangeness,’ I take it.”

She nodded, smirking with chagrin. “I’m afraid I used that as an excuse to break it off with Glenn. He was moving way too fast … I’d only just started dating again … after Steve died, for the longest time, I …”

“I understand.”

“Anyway, now, almost two years later, against my better judgment, I agree to talk about what happened, and suddenly it’s thrown Glenn and me back together—I allowed him to drive me down here.”

“I see. And he’s trying to rekindle a spark you never felt.”

She stopped again, looking up at me with an expression that was not without compassion. “Yes. Glenn’s a nice man, but he thinks ‘no’ is a three-letter word.”

“Nice men usually spell better than that.”

The expression darkened, she shook her head and began walking again, more quickly now. “I don’t want to ride home with him tonight. I don’t trust him.”

“Hey, you wouldn’t catch me dead, riding with a mortician.”

That made her smile, just a little; she started walking again. Did I mention she smelled of Evening in Paris perfume, ever so delicately?

She was saying, “I’m enough of a nervous wreck without having to worry about those clammy mortician hands of his…. Would you drive me back to Roswell?”

“Tonight?”

“No, tomorrow morning…. I’ll get a room or something.”

Normally a letch like me would take this as an opening; but something wasn’t right about it, and I said so. “I thought you didn’t want to be seen with me. That was the whole point of meeting away from town—”

“I left my car in a parking lot at Bottomless Lake, southeast of Roswell. That’s where Glenn picked me up. You can drop me there. No one will see.”

“You should have just come separately …”

Abruptly she stopped, and clutched my arm: a tiny hand with surprising power. “I needed to talk to him about what happened; I needed to try and make him understand how dangerous this is. I need to do that with you, too, Mr. Heller.”

Then she let go of my arm and began to walk again, slowly, saying nothing.

Soon we were at the door to Suite 101. I asked, “Do you want me to tell Glenn you’re not going back with him?”

She beamed at me and it was like watching one of those speeded-up movies where they show flowers blooming. “Will you handle it, Mr. Heller? I’d be very grateful.”

That voice … she talked like Dinah Shore sang….

“Sure,” I said. “Which is a four-letter word, by the way … but don’t worry about it.”

That got another little smile out of her, and she handed me my key, and I unlocked the door for her, and she slipped into the suite, the first pretty girl who ever figured my hotel room was a safe haven from wolves.

In the basement of the hotel was the Western-themed Red Dog Saloon, with timbered fake-adobe walls, an intricately carved mahogany bar and wanted posters of Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Black Jack Ketchum. A bartender in a red vest and a barmaid in a dancehall dress were entertaining a handful of couples sipping beers or cocktails at tables and booths. This seemed to be—in the off-season, anyway—a place for couples, not necessarily married ones, to get quietly away.

Glenn sat in a back booth, sipping a glass of beer. I slid in across from him.

“She’s a little high-strung,” I said, arching an eyebrow.

“No kiddin’! She was weird all the way down here. You know, we used to go out, a little, you know—date? Hell, I know that’s over but I don’t see any reason we shouldn’t be civil to each other.”

“She wasn’t civil?”

“More like sullen. She’s really got herself worked up over this.” He sighed. “Not that I blame her. If she saw what she says she saw, it’d give anybody a permanent case of the willies.”

“Glenn—is it all right, me using your first name?”

“Sure. You go by Nathan or Nate?”

“Make it Nate. Glenn, you don’t share Mrs. Selff’s fears about reprisals?”

The heavy eyebrows lifted. “Well, hell, Nate, maybe she’s right—there were all kinds of threats and even some strongarm tactics …”

“By the military?”

“So they say, and I witnessed a little of it, myself. Anyway, there was enough of that nonsense that I can see Maria bein’ spooked. But that was almost two years ago, and—speaking for myself—there’s been nothin’ since.”

I got out my spiral notepad. “Why don’t you tell me your story, Glenn? Do you mind if I take notes?”

He didn’t mind. Back in ’47, on the afternoon of Saturday, July 5, Dennis had been “minding the store” at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell. Ballard’s, “the biggest firm of undertakers in town,” had a contract with the RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field) for both embalming and ambulance service.

So it was no surprise to Dennis, receiving a call from the RAAF’s mortuary affairs officer.

“This fella,” Dennis said, cradling his beer in both hands, “Captain somebody, don’t remember his name, he was more an administrator than a technical specialist, and didn’t know the ins and outs of handling corpses.”

The officer had asked Dennis if Ballard’s had any small caskets available, child- or youth-size, and if those caskets could be “hermetically sealed.” The assistant mortician had said there wasn’t much call for the latter, but as to the former, the funeral home had one kid casket in stock, and could call the warehouse in Amarillo and have more in by the next morning.

Dennis had asked, “Has there been some kind of crash, or accident, Captain?”

The Ballard Funeral Home had handled as many as twenty bodies at a time, from crashes out at the base, and had invested in building a special chamber next to the embalming room specifically for such emergencies.

But the captain had said, “No, no … we’re, uh, having a meeting and discussing provisions for, uh … future eventualities…. We’ll let you know when and if we need a coffin.”

“Well,” Dennis said, “if you need a bunch of little coffins quick, I gotta get the call in to Amarillo before three, and that’s just a couple hours from now.”

“At present I’m only gathering information,” the mortuary officer said, thanked the mortician and hung up. Dennis shrugged off the peculiar call and was in the driveway, washing one of the hearses, when the phone rang again. Running in to answer it, Dennis found the mortuary officer on the other end of the line.

“Glenn,” the captain asked, “how do you handle bodies that have been exposed out in the desert sun?”

“For how long?”

“Four or five days. What happens to tissue when it’s laid out in the sun like that?”

“Are you just gathering information, I mean is this a hypothetical situation, or do you need to know specifically how Ballard’s goes about it, what chemicals we use and suchlike?”

“It’s a hypothetical, but we want to know Ballard’s procedure. For example, what chemicals does your embalming fluid consist of? And what would you do if you didn’t want to change any of the chemical contents of the corpse? You know—not destroy any blood, destroy anything that might be of interest, down the road. Also, could holes in a body be sealed over, holes made by predators, I mean? What’s the best way to physically collect remains in such a condition?”

“That’s a whole lot of hypothetical, Captain….”

“Well, let’s start with the steps you could take not to change the chemical contents of the corpse.”

“Well, we usually use a strong solution of formaldehyde in water, and that’s damn sure gonna change the composition of the body. Of course, if a body’s been sunnin’ out on the prairie in July for four or five days, it’s already gone through some changes, lemme tell you, gonna be in real sorry shape. In a case like you’re describing, I’d recommend packing the body in dry ice and freezing it, for storage or transport or whatever…. Look, Captain, I can come right out there and help—”

“No! No thank you, Glenn. This is strictly for future reference.”

And the mortuary officer had hung up.

“Of course I knew right away,” Dennis told me, smiling as he sipped his beer, “that something big had happened, some VIP got killed or some such, and they weren’t ready to release it. But I might have forgot all about it, if an airman hadn’t got in a fender-bender that same afternoon.”

In routine Ballard’s business, Dennis had transported an airman who’d broken his nose in a minor traffic accident out to the base hospital. At about five p.m., Dennis—who was well known around the base, and had rather free access because of the funeral home’s contract with the RAAF—pulled around back to escort the injured airman in the emergency entrance.

But the ramp was blocked by three field ambulances, so the mortician parked alongside and walked the patient up and in, on the way noticing that standing near the rear doors of each of the boxy vehicles was an armed MP. The back doors of one vehicle stood open and Dennis glimpsed a pile of wreckage—thin, silver-metallic material, with a bluish cast.

“One piece was formed like the bottom of a canoe,” he told me, “and was maybe three feet long, with writing on it, about four inches high.”