Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

looks. You’re like the rest of the citizens. You thought they made the Susan B. Anthonys as a sign of their new respect for women, or maybe because some faggot at the mint had been to England and got taken by the idea of coins with flat sides. Well, no. Maybe some of that—politics is always tricky. But mainly, dahllar bills wear out, they’re money down the drain.” He turned to Mickelsson again to study him, or rather, dully stare at him, as one might stare at a wall. “Every year’s dahllar bills are a little bit different—you aware of that? It’s like motorcycles or cars, small changes every year. Anyone deals with money all the time, such as a banker, he can tell at a glance if a bill is a seventy-nine or an eighty. Imagine how surprised he’d be if he suddenly got a handful of bills from, say, nineteen sixty-five. That’s when the fat man you murdered robbed the Cass Bank in St. Louis.”

Mickelsson said nothing, the words you murdered crackling through his brain.

“I ain’t saying you didn’t kill him,” Tinklepaugh said, and sighed again, tightening his hands on the steeringwheel. “But I had a talk with your psychiatrist.” For an instant he glanced at Mickelsson, evilly grinning. “We cover all the bases, any bases we can find. Routine, you know, all of it.” He raised two fingers up to his forehead to tip his hat up, then returned the hand to the steeringwheel. “If your psychiatrist thought you did it, he wouldn’t say so, I expect, but after I talked to him I had a kind of a hunch that sooner or later you and me would have dealings.”

Numbly, Mickelsson said, “You think I killed them … him, and …” The mistake baffled him, made him forget what he was saying.

Tinklepaugh didn’t notice. “Let’s say I’m just puzzled over how come you never spent the money.”

Mickelsson looked down at his knotted hands. Somewhere Donnie Matthews was spending those old dollars. It seemed unlikely that Tinklepaugh didn’t know about his nights with Donnie. No doubt they were looking for her, would eventually find her. They’d call Donnie an accessory.

Softly, staring forward, his eyebrows lifted in what he would have recognized another time as his crazed look, Mickelsson asked, “Who do you think did it?”

“I guess we know who did it,” Tinklepaugh said. “It’s a question of finding proof.”

“Who, though?” he asked.

“Who broke into your house? Who set the fire up on the mounting?”

Mickelsson twisted his head around. “What do you mean?” The nape of his neck tingled. Then he said, “I never told you my house was broken into!”

Tacky Tinklepaugh leaned back, hung his arms over the steeringwheel, and let his eyes fall shut. “If you don’t want things known, don’t talk. Don’t even breathe. Now go home, Professor. If I find out you killed him, you’ll be one of the first to know.” He let his eyes fall shut and at once seemed fast asleep.

Mickelsson looked down at the bottle in the seat beside the man, then back up at the face. At length, quietly, hurriedly, he got out and closed the door. Returning to his car, he moved recklessly on the icy sidewalk, almost running.

3

Two days later Finney called again. The divorce hearing would be the following morning at nine, in Providence. He’d better be there.

“What’ll happen?” Mickelsson asked. He could imagine Finney swinging around in his big leather deskchair, pushing off from the glass-topped desk with three fingers, great pink fatrolls bulging above his collar. On the desk, just within reach, Mickelsson imagined or conceivably saw a box of After Eight mints.

“She won’t want to get into a pissing match,” Finney said. “She’ll huff and blow a lot, rattle a few cages, see if you throw your tire, but she knows right well the court’ll never give her what you’ve offered her—nowhere near it.”

“I doubt that she believes that,” Mickelsson said. Finney’s line, he remembered.

Finney apparently did not remember. “Well, you’re more familiar with the lady than I am,” he said. “But I can tell you this, whatever she may think, her lawyers know a damn sight better. The bottom line is, she’s lucky to get one red goddamn cent, and when the I.R.S. drops the other shoe, maybe she won’t get a red goddamn cent. As you know, ole pal, if you’d left it up to me—”

“All right,” Mickelsson said, “I’ll be there.”

And so by one that afternoon he was on the road east, pushing the repaired Jeep at seventy in spite of snow flurries and ice. He arrived in Providence in a blinding snowstorm, put in at a cheap motel, watched television and drank, put in a wake-up call, and went to bed. He reached the courthouse at eight-thirty. Finney arrived about twenty minutes later, dressed in dark green, his face brick-red and scowling, even the flesh around his eyes unhealthily swollen. When he spotted Mickelsson he forced a sudden grin and held out both arms as if to hug a long-lost brother. For an instant Mickelsson got a nightmare flash of the fat man he’d killed, reaching up to him from the lawn. Finney’s suitcoat was open—Mickelsson suspected it would no longer button—and the buttons of his pale yellow shirt were tight, ready to pop. “Hey, Professor,” he yelled, “how ya doing? How’s it go?”

“I’m fine,” Mickelsson said.

“Good boy! Good boy!” Finney put his arm around him, talking a blue streak—“Jesus, you look like you lost fifty, sixty pounds! You sure you’re all right?”—urging him up the broad, waxed steps to a small room upstairs, just off the courtroom. “Hope ya brought something to read,” he said, “You know how it is with these things.”

“I’m not sure I do.” He had not brought something to read.

Finney laughed. “First time, eh? I figured it must be, that deal you cooked up for ’er.”

“She hasn’t accepted it?”

“She’ll accept, don’t you worry! But first we have to go through the motions a little, old