He asked, “What do you call fighting a tree, Mr. Monahan?”
“I call it a losing battle.”
At the last word, his face glowed. I thought, Ah, the old warrior.
“When I saw Mea lying there, I had to whack out at something. I’d’ve liked it to be the Grabber. Maybe some day. Meanwhile, the tree was handy.”
Sue Gahn saw me take out my notebook and pen. She touched her husband’s sleeve cautiously. “Arthur, I think Mr. Monahan wants to start.”
“I’m ready,” he said and pointed to one of the spindly chairs. I lowered my well-fed frame into it and was grateful it didn’t wrestle me to the floor. Gahn got lost in the wing chair’s overgrown upholstery which, in the midst of the unsubstantial-looking pieces around it, reminded me of a throne. On a small table beside him, a corncob pipe rested amidst half-burned dottle in a stoneware ashtray. In back of the ashtray was a stained, visored cap. A tall glass held the remains of a drink that looked as if it had once been a mint julep. Sue Gahn stood above and a little behind her husband’s chair, attentive, her hands over a sheathed bosom that resembled a sail under wind.
“Well, Colonel,” I said, and his face told me I picked the right word, “I know quite a bit already. I was at the site last night, I’ve got information from the reporters and police, and I know about the Grabber’s call to the police. So, I have most of the details. Names are out, of course, in a story like this—”
“Why?” he asked, a little crestfallen.
“To protect your daughter, Mea. She’s a minor. That’s the law in this state.”
“I see,” he said and added, “Well, she’s almost eighteen.”
“Will I be able to talk to her?”
“She’s still in the hospital, but when she comes out—”
“Arthur, do we have to?”
Gahn looked at his wife as though she’d been using four-letter words in church. “Nothing wrong at all,” he snapped. “She’ll probably gain from the experience as I dearly hope she will gain from the experience of last night.”
Sue Gahn lapsed into silence and I forged ahead. “I guess my first question is, What was she doing out so late? You say she’s seventeen?”
“Almost eighteen.” He looked up and back at his wife and she looked down at him. His mouth was half open like a baby bird’s waiting for a worm to drop in. “You take over on that one,” he commanded.
“Mea is an only child and a little headstrong,” Sue Gahn began, seeming to ignore the dissenting harrumph from the chair below her. “Since this will be perfectly anonymous—” I didn’t miss the echo of my own words — “I suppose I can tell you that she had been sneaking out at night. Working out her wildness, I guess, though I’m not at all sure there was that much wildness to work out.” Another harrumph. “The colonel had been going out after her and bringing her back. Last night he didn’t find her.”
I looked at him. “Let’s see, you went out last night after she’d gone. How did you know she went out?”
“Sue heard the downstairs door click. It woke her. She woke me and I dressed, took the Buick, and drove around town looking for her. And never found her. Would that I had.”
“Then you came back here and later got the police call?”
“No. I phoned home to see if Mea had come back and Sue told me what happened. And where to go.”
I went on asking questions and he answering them. Once in a while he’d field a question to his wife, then he’d take over again. I don’t know when it hit me that I regretted the three o’clock call, regretted seeing that poor kid laid out on the ground, regretted going out there to the Gahns, regretted all I had seen and heard there. Suddenly, I had a numbing distaste for this story, didn’t want any part of it. Besides, I wasn’t asking the right questions and wasn’t listening to the answers. I wanted to get out of there, away from Colonel Gahn and General MacArthur, away from that aura of dominance and subservience.
I toughed it out for another fifteen minutes or so, asking questions and pretending to be interested in the answers. I filled my notebook with squiggles and tried hard to hang on every word of Gahn’s — or seem to. I must have been convincing because when I snapped my notebook shut and said I had all I needed, he asked, “When will it be in the paper?”
I almost laughed in his anxious, shrunken face. I made up some quick-fix fiction about editorial review, space requirements, legal overview, the need to contact the families of other victims. By the time I finished, I think I convinced him it might be a good long while before my story saw print, if ever. I could read his disappointment.
“I just don’t understand,” he said with great earnestness and looked at his wife, who seemed preoccupied with the titles of the shelved books. “When it does come out, will you send me some extra copies of the paper?”
“Oh, yes, we do that automatically.” And with that last lie, I let Sue Gahn show me out. He called after her, Take Mr. Monahan around the grounds, Sue.”
The grounds weren’t anything to write home about and she scarcely paid attention to them. We walked toward the backyard along a paved driveway. When we came to the parked Ford, she went around one side and I the other. We came together in front of the car.
I hadn’t fooled her. “You’re not going to write it, are you?”
“No.”
“I’m glad to hear that. People around here—” she gave a little shrug of distaste — “they’d know, they’d talk. Even now, they’ll find out somehow. Anyway, whatever happens, I’ll know I didn’t have to buy your silence.” She gave me a full-faced stare.
I knew that look. I push a lot of doorbells. It was the look of someone rattling the cage; of someone who rushes to the front door when the bell rings hoping the world is calling. Sometimes it takes a crisis, like this thing with Mea, to produce that look. Other times it just happens. I wasn’t happy with the thought that I hardly mattered. I just happened to push her door bell. If not me, maybe a salesman.
“Do you have a first name?” she asked. “You use initials in your column. What’s the first one, the O, stand for?”
Everyone wants to know what the О stands for, and that doesn’t thrill me. But she apparently wanted to drop the formality of Mister and couldn’t very well call me Monahan, so I said, “Oscar. The О stands for Oscar.”
She was silent awhile, then said, “That’s a strong name. I like a man to have a strong name. My first name is really Suleika.”
“A beautiful name like that and he calls you Sue?”
“More WASPish. I used to think it was cute. Are you married, Oscar?”
“I was.”
“Divorce?”
“Death.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a lot of years ago.”
We were walking toward an antique birdbath shielded from the house by the garage. She grasped my hand to guide me. Something charged up my arm.
She asked, “Will they ever catch him?”
“The Grabber? If he gets careless.”
“I wonder what he’ll say when they catch him.”
And so it went. A tour of the yard. A gentle give and take. Some ordinary language cloaking extraordinary feelings. When we came in line with the house, she dropped my hand and I realized we had been in physical contact up to then. The naturalness of it had muted my consciousness of it.
“I wonder how the warrior will take it,” I said, “not seeing the story in the paper.”
“The warrior?”
I nodded toward the house.
“That’s rich,” she said, and gave a ladylike snort. “That’s very rich. How’ll he take it? Oh, he’ll blow his top and maybe bear down on me and even Mea. He might even call up the paper.” Then a new thought came to her. “He’d better be careful. He got out on disability. She touched her left breast, but in a funny way, with her hand cupped under it as if supporting it. Or offering it. “That’s the heart you see in his face.”