Lost Echoes

5

Here’s what happened, down there in the honky-tonk below Harry’s house. One night, on a Saturday, after the tonk closed, and all the sights and sounds and parked cars were gone, and everyone at the drive-in theater across the way had long filed out, about three A.M., a half hour after closing, during cleanup time, there was a murder.

No one knew about it until Monday, about two P.M. when the bar was supposed to open.

Guy who discovered the body was a customer named Seymour Smithe, pronounced Smith, but spelled Smithe, and Seymour was always adamant about that. “Name’s Smithe, with an e on the end.”

Most people just thought of him as a drunk.

He had lost more jobs than a squirrel had eaten acorns.

Thing he did know was how to sell Bibles. He liked selling Bibles. He didn’t know dick about the Bible, outside of what he’d seen in The Ten Commandments, an old movie, but he could sell the hell out of those damn things, ’cause all the Christians, or would-be Christians, wanted one, liked to pretend they were going to read it.

He appealed to their fear. Fear was always a good way to sell anything.

Insurance.

Politics.

War.

And gilt-edged Bibles.

When Smithe wasn’t selling Bibles, he was drinking.

Now that was something he was good at. Drinking.

He was the goddamn Old and New Testament of drunks.

He was thinking about drinking, about how he had to sell some Bibles this day, and he was thinking of that woman he had talked to yesterday on her front porch. What a looker. And he sort of thought she had wanted him to come back, even if she didn’t buy a Bible or let him in the door.

But she had smiled. And she had been positive, even if she hadn’t bought anything. Something had passed between them; he was almost certain.

Almost.

He wanted to get certain, thought four or five beers would make him certain.

The door was open and the sign read OPEN, so Seymour went right on in. It was cool and dark in there and smelled the way it always smelled, like beer and sweat and sexual anxiety stirred by air-conditioning. But there was something else. It was faint, but he knew that smell immediately.

Once, for a summer, he had worked in a slaughterhouse, and once you smelled that odor, you knew it fresh, you knew it dried, and in each form it smelled different, and yet somehow the same.

It was the smell of blood.

The hair on the back of Seymour’s neck poked up, and he thought—or imagined—that above the aroma of the tonk he could smell his own fear, a kind of sour stench of sweat and decay. And in the back of his mouth he could taste copper. He turned slowly, almost crouched, expecting someone to leap from the shadows like a goddamn gazelle.

And he saw someone.

But she wouldn’t do much leaping.

It was Evelyn Gibbons.

The formerly attractive, middle-aged Evelyn Gibbons. The owner of the tonk. The breezy little woman with the dark bobbing hair and the bouncy step and the bouncy ass, the latter usually tucked nicely beneath short black dresses, her buns jacked up by thick high heels.

She was sitting down by the jukebox, her head against it, leaning farther than it should have on a neck. That was because her throat was cut from ear to ear, and there was blood all over the jukebox, on her, and the wall behind her. Her hair was matted in blood and stuck to the jukebox like a big spit wad. The floor beneath her had plenty of blood too. Her dress was hiked up over her thighs, and Seymour could see her panties. They were dark, and had probably been white before they soaked up a lot of gore.

Seymour backed toward the door, looking over his shoulder carefully. He figured the blood, dried like it was, meant the murder had happened some time ago. But he looked about just the same, in case some madman armed with a blade should come for him.

He made it out into the blinding sunshine to his car, where he had a cell phone on the passenger’s seat. He called 911, and while he waited for the cops to arrive, he wished repeatedly that he had a beer. Maybe some whiskey. A little turpentine. Rubbing alcohol. A shot of piss. Damn near anything.

The cops showed up. They looked around. They took notes and photographs and fingerprints and such. They questioned Seymour until he really needed a drink.

Seymour was the prime suspect for about six months, but that died out. Even those who never gave up on him quit worrying about it when Seymour, full of gin, lost control of his vehicle, slammed on the brakes as he careened off the road, and was struck violently in the back of the neck by a case of gilt-edged Bibles thrown from the backseat. It was a good shot. It snapped his neck and checked him out.

After that, there wasn’t much shaking in the Evelyn Gibbons case. There were a few who didn’t think it was Seymour at all. They pursued leads, one or two in particular.

But it resulted in nothing.

No idea who.

No idea why.

A year passed.