Briney had Kelly pinned on the floor as he had last week, and he was putting punches into her at will. Even at a glance, I could see that her nose was broken. Ominously, blood leaked from her ear.
I got him by the hair and yanked him to his feet. He still wasn’t completely sober so he couldn’t put up the resistance he might have at another time.
I meant to make him unconscious and that was exactly what I did. dragged him over to the door. He kept swinging at me and occasionally landing hard punches to my ribs and kidney but at the moment I didn’t care. He smelled of sweat and pure animal rage and Kelly’s fresh blood. I got him to the door frame and held him high by his hair and then slammed his temple against the edge of the frame.
It only took once. He went straight down to the floor in an unmoving heap.
Murch came running through the door. “I called the cops!”
He went immediately to Kelly, knelt by her. She was over on her side, crying crazily and throwing up in gasps that shook her entire body. Her face was a mask of blood. He had ripped her nightgown and dug fierce raking fingers over her breasts. She just kept crying.
Even this late at night, the neighbors were up for a good show, maybe two dozen of them standing in the middle of the street as the whipping red lights of police cars and ambulance gave the crumbling neighborhood a nervous new life.
Kelly had slipped into unconsciousness and was brought out strapped to a stretcher.
Two uniformed cops questioned Briney on the porch. He kept pointing to me and Murch, who stood holding Caesar and stroking him gently.
There was an abrupt scuffle as Briney bolted and took a punch at one of the cops. He was a big man, this cop, and he brought Briney down with two punches. Then he cuffed him and took him to the car.
From inside the police vehicle, Briney glared at me and kept glaring until the car disappeared into the shadows at the end of the block.
Kelly was a week in the hospital. Murch and I visited her twice. In addition to a broken nose, she’d also suffered a broken rib and two broken teeth. She had a hard time talking. She just kept crying softly and shaking her head and patting the hands we both held out to her.
Her brother, a burly man in his twenties, came over to the house two days later with a big U-Haul and three friends and cleaned out the Briney apartment. Murch and I gave him a hand loading.
The newspaper said that Peter James Briney had posted a $2500 bond and had been released on bail. He obviously wasn’t going to live downstairs. Kelly’s brother hadn’t left so much as a fork behind, and the landlord had already nailed a Day-Glo For Rent sign on one of the front porch pillars.
As for me, the crew was getting ready to move on. In two more days, we’d pack and head up the highway toward Des Moines.
I tried to make my last two nights with Murch especially good. There was a pizza and beer restaurant over on Ellis Boulevard and on the second to last night, I took him there for dinner. I even coerced him into telling me some of those good old WWII stories of his.
The next night, the last night in Cedar Rapids, we had to work overtime again.
I got home after nine, when it was full and starry dark.
I was walking up the street when one of the neighbors came down from his porch and said, “They took him away.”
I stopped. My body temperature dropped several degrees. I knew what was coming. “Took who off?”
“Murch. You know, that guy where you live.”
“The cops?”
The man shook his head. “Ambulance. Murch had a heart attack.”
I ran home. Up the stairs. Murch’s place was locked. I had a key for his apartment in my room. I got it and opened the place up.
I got the lights on and went through each of the four small rooms. Murch was an orderly man. Though all the furnishings were old, from the ancient horsehair couch to the scarred chest of drawers, there was an obstinate if shabby dignity about them, much like Murch himself.
I found what I was looking for in the bathtub. Apparently the ambulance attendants hadn’t had time to do anything more than rush Murch to the hospital.
Caesar, or what was left of him anyway, they’d left behind.
He lay in the center of the old claw-footed bathtub. He had been stabbed dozens of times. His gray fur was matted and stiff with his own blood. He’d died in the midst of human frenzy.
I didn’t have to wonder who’d done this or what had given Murch his heart attack.
I went over to the phone and called both hospitals. Murch was at Mercy. The nurse I spoke with said that he had suffered a massive stroke and was unconscious. The prognosis was not good.
After I hung up, I went through the phone book looking for Brineys. It took me six calls to get the right one but finally I found Pete Briney’s father. I convinced him that I was a good friend of Pete’s and that I was just in town for the night and that I really wanted to see the old sonofagun. “Well,” he said, “he hangs out at the Log Cabin a lot.”
The Log Cabin was a tavern not far away. I was there within fifteen minutes.
The moment I stepped through the bar, into a working-class atmosphere of clacking pool balls and whiney country western music, I saw him.
He was in a booth near the back, laughing about something with a girl with a beehive hairdo and a quick beery smile.
When he saw me, he got scared. He left the booth and ran toward the back door. By now, several people were watching. I didn’t care.
I went out the back door after him. I stood beneath a window-unit air conditioner that sounded like a B-52 starting up and bled water like a wound. The air was hot and pasty and I slapped at two mosquitos biting my neck.
Ahead of me was a gravel parking lot. The only light was spill from the back windows of the tavern. The lot was about half full. Briney hadn’t had time to get into that nice golden Mercury convertible at the end of the lot. He was hiding somewhere behind one of the cars.
I walked down the lot, my heels adjusting to the loose and wobbly feel of the gravel beneath.
He came lunging out from behind a pickup truck. Because I’d been expecting him, I was able to duck without much problem.
I turned and faced him. He was crouched down, ready to jump at me.
“I’d still have a wife if it wasn’t for you two bastards,” he said.
“You’re a pretty brave guy, Briney. You wait till Murch goes somewhere and then you sneak in and kill his cat. And then Murch comes home and finds Caesar dead and—”
But I was through talking.
I kicked him clean and sharp. I broke his nose. He gagged and screamed and started puking — he must have had way too much to drink that night — and sank to his knees and then I went over and kicked him several times in the ribs.
I kicked him until I heard the sharp brittle sound of bones breaking, and until he pitched forward, still screaming and crying, to the gravel. Then I went up and kicked him in the back of the head.
A couple of his friends from the tavern came out and started toward me but I was big enough and angry enough that they were wary.
“Personal dispute,” I said. “Nothing to do with you boys at all.”
Then they went over and tried to help their friend to his feet. It wasn’t easy. He was a mess.
Murch died an hour and ten minutes after I got to the hospital. I went into his room and looked at all the alien tentacles stretching from beeping cold metal boxes to his warm but failing body. I stood next to his bed until a doctor came in and asked very softly and politely if I’d mind waiting in the hall while they did some work.
It was while the doctor was in there that Murch died. He had never regained consciousness and so we’d never even said proper good-byes.
At the house, I went into Murch’s apartment and found the shoebox and took it into the bathroom and gathered up the remains of poor Caesar.