A tall and slender white man in black jeans and a checkered shirt came up and sat down on the bench across from me. He lit a cigarette, reminding me of the pack in my pocket.
The act of striking the match for my Camel brought my father full-blooded into my mind.
There was no doubt of the love he felt in his heart for me and my brother. He would have died for either one of us. He’d been a tough man in his Texas youth. Down in Galveston he carried a gun and a razor. One night he laid in wait for a man, whom he stabbed but who, he said, did not die.
My brother and I speculated on the minutiae of my father’s confession.
“You know he said that that man lived,” Briggs said, “because he don’t want us to think that killin’s okay.”
“But he didn’t say that he was tryin’ to wound the mothah-fuckah,” I argued. “He said he stabbed him and that means he wanted to kill him.”
“Nuh-uh,” Briggs replied. “No he didn’t.”
But whether he had or had not intended to kill that man, whether that man had or had not died, didn’t matter. The fact remained that our dictator father had attacked a man with a knife. We believed him because he attacked both of us every month with his strap. He showed no mercy, never apologized about these beatings. He wouldn’t listen when we’d say that we were good children who deserved better.
“Mr. Dibbuk?” the man in the checkered shirt asked, interrupting my gut-wrenching reverie.
I looked up into his pale face, considering the Western twang to his words.
“Are you the guy Harvard Rollins wanted me to meet?”
He smiled and nodded.
“Winston Meeks is my name,” he said.
He put out a hand but I did not take it.
“My wife told you about my appointment yesterday too late?” I speculated. “And so you dropped by today on the off chance I’d be here.”
“I’m with the Colorado State District Attorney’s Office,” Meeks said, sitting down next to me on the stone bench. “We’d like to have an interview with you if you don’t mind.”
“Or maybe you were going to talk to the doctor,” I added.
Again, I thanked God for that cigarette, God and my father for showing me how to keep my cool when the world wants to get at me.
“We could file a complaint with the New York state attorney,” Meeks said.
I inhaled the tar and nicotine, cyanide and just plain smoke.
“We could ask for you to be extradited,” he added.
“Then why haven’t you?”
“Because we’d like to hear your side of the story first.”
“What story is that?”
“Mr. Dibbuk,” Winston Meeks said. “We won’t get anywhere with you playing coy. Come with me to my office and we’ll talk this out.”
“Your office is in Denver, right?”
“I’m using the Plaza Hotel as my base of operations.” He stood up, expecting me to stand too. I admit that he had power in his voice. I wanted to go with him but I resisted the urge. I was a small boat tethered to the dock in the face of a great swell.
“This here bench is my base of operations,” I said, gripping the seat with the fingers of my left hand. “Why don’t you depose me right out here in plain sight?”
Meeks was not used to being refused or contradicted. I wondered how important this cowboy was, back home in Colorado.
Finally he sat, realizing that he couldn’t pry me loose.
“Do you know a man named Grant Timmons?” he asked.
“Never heard of him.”
Meeks’s eyes turned into slits. I believe that if we were in his private office I’d have gotten slapped right then.
“He died two years ago next Thursday.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “Was he an old man?”
“Fifty-seven.”
“Does this have anything to do with me, Mr. Meeks?”
“He was convicted of killing Sean Messier.” Meeks was staring daggers at me then.
“Yeah?”
“He died still serving his sentence,” Meeks said, “the sentence that Barbara Knowland says that you deserved.”
“Say what?”
“When did you leave Colorado, Mr. Dibbuk?”
It was my turn to stand up.
“I don’t like this turn of questions, Mr. District Attorney,” I said. “For the record, I don’t know anyone named Timmons or Messier. Beyond that I don’t have to answer your questions and I have no intention of doing so.”
“Where can I get in touch with you if I need to?” Meeks said, rising also.
“My house. My apartment.”
“Your wife says that you moved out.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Mr. Meeks. Hearsay is a motherfucker.”
I went straight to the New York Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth. There I utilized the computer system to access old Denver newspapers. In the Denver Post there was an article dated July 1, 1979. A man named Sean Messier was found next to a woodpile that sat at the side of his rural home, his head caved in due to a blow from a hard and heavy object. I found another article from that September that reported Grant Timmons had been arrested for the crime. It said that he was a rival of Mr. Messier for the affections of an unnamed woman and that Timmons could not account for his whereabouts on the night of the murder. Actually, he had lied about where he was and therefore made himself a suspect.
Apparently, Sean had gotten into a fight with Grant a week before. Messier was an accomplished pugilist; he beat up Grant pretty bad. The prosecution speculated that Grant had come up to Messier when he was getting wood for a fire. He hit the unsuspecting Messier with a steel pipe or a crowbar, which he must have discarded elsewhere.
It was enough for a conviction. Grant Timmons, it seems, was a bully of inordinate proportions. He’d been involved in many fights over the years and he always got revenge on those that bested him in anything. He was the perfect suspect in any crime. And here he had actually been in a fight with the victim only a short while before.
There were other articles but no new information.
By September I had already left Denver for New York. I had both of my near-fatal accidents soon after the death of Sean Messier, but that didn’t prove anything. Not a thing.
I tried to think if there was any shred of a memory of somebody named Messier in my mind. He was much older than I was. He was a pilot for a small company and a war hero from Vietnam. There was no place that we would have run into each other except maybe some bar somewhere. But what would I have been doing outside next to his woodpile? Why would I have ambushed him there?
It made no sense to me. It didn’t sound like me.
I was a drinker, a fighter when I was drunk, but I was no assassin. And even if I had gotten angry enough to kill someone, I should have had some memory of who that someone was.
The Fairweather was uptown on the East Side. It was a small hotel but still large enough to have a restaurant and so I could walk in without being noticed. I was just inside the door when I saw Harvard Rollins coming out from the elevator on the far side of the reception desk. I went up to the concierge and asked for the house phone, not because I wanted to call anyone, but just to avoid another conflict with the magazine detective.
I asked the hotel operator for Sean Messier’s room. I don’t know why I used that name. Maybe it was a sense of irony or just the fact that that was the name I’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to remember. When the hotel operator failed to find the person I was looking for, I thanked her and turned around.