A Shiver of Wonder (15 page)

“Shit,” David muttered to himself. “Shit!
Seriously?”

Detective Ormsby was in front of the Rainbow
Arms, leaning nonchalantly against what was clearly his unmarked
police car. He was working a toothpick around his mouth with
fastidious pedantry, but pushed himself off the vehicle and tossed
the toothpick onto the grass as David approached.

“Mr. Wilcott. You made it back.”

“Excuse me?” David was still reeling from
his encounter with Clair at the school. “What could you possibly
need from me now?”

The detective smiled. The brightness of his
teeth terrified David. “Just wrapping up a few details. Tying a
ribbon around the box, as it were.”

David halted a few feet away from him. “I
read in the paper that you’ve got your murderers, and it’s just a
matter of time before you catch them. Shouldn’t you be in
Greenville? Shouldn’t you be chasing some real criminals instead of
pestering citizens who had nothing to do with it?”

Ormsby’s smile only widened. He had
obviously anticipated David’s reaction to seeing him, and was ready
to milk the antipathy until the well ran dry. “The newspapers are
spewing trash, printing crap! It’s how they stay in business, you
know.” He edged a step closer. “Let’s go through some of my
questions again.”

David closed his eyes, wondering if the
whole afternoon was going to be a nightmare. It had been bad enough
walking home from the school, trying to keep his head from swimming
after the emotional encounter with Mrs. Jenkins and the latest
pronouncement from Clair. Now, he was being baited by a puffed-up
authority figure who clearly had a rather large ax to grind with
him, for whatever reasons.

“By the way, that
is
your dog making
all that noise in there,” Detective Ormsby said. David opened his
eyes to discover that his wish for the sidewalk to be cleared in
front of him had not been granted. And indeed, he could hear the
muted sounds of Johnson going more than a bit crazy inside
apartment 1F. “I knocked. Several times,” he added. “But I knew
you’d be back soon if Mr. Johnson was left home all alone.”

“Johnson,” David automatically corrected
him. “Just Johnson. Can I at least get him so he doesn’t tear the
door down?”

Ormsby’s eyebrows rose. “If you feel you
need him here with you.”

And as his face tightened, David berated
himself for even asking; he understood as unmistakably as the
detective had that Johnson would only have been a crutch for him.
“Ask your questions,” he said aloud, his voice thick. “Let’s get
this over with.”

Again, a smile. Ormsby was reading him like
a book. “You know, I looked you up online,” the detective said, his
voice sickeningly pleasant as David’s heart began to sink. “Quite a
few hits for ‘David Wilcott.’ Not many folks out there with that
name. There were images, too. A lot of them.”

David licked his lips, wondering how far
this humiliation would go.

“You were on quite a different career path
then, weren’t you?” Ormsby’s head appeared to be growing larger.
David could almost see the bristles sprouting from his nose and
ears, the reddening of his eyes as they grew bulbous and
malevolent.

“It was a long time ago,” David replied,
astonished at how calm he sounded. “It didn’t work out. I moved
here.”

“It wasn’t that long ago,” the detective
countered. “I’d heard about it, of course. It was part of every
late show monologue for weeks! But to have a superstar like David
Wilcott come to my little burg of Shady Grove, and no one seems to
know about it? Shameful, shameful.
There’s
something the
Shady Grove Courier should have covered. Not this tripe about
Greenville, and alleged squabbles between lowlife drug
dealers.”

David breathed in, breathed out. Breathed
in, breathed out. No response was a good response.

“Was that how you got Mr. Johnson? Oh! And
my apologies,” Ormsby offered with a gallant wave of his hand.
“Johnson, I mean. I recognized him in a few of the pictures as
well. And speaking of which, what a girlfriend you had!” He shook
his head while puckering his lips as though he was sampling a
delectable wine. “Quite a looker, if I do say so myself. Not
exactly who I would have imagined you with, but still… Amber,
right?”

“Camber,” David corrected, knowing full well
that the detective was purposely muffing the names so that he would
respond.

“Camber,” was repeated thoughtfully. “Camber
D’Angelo. That was it. She’s engaged to the first baseman of the
Mets now, isn’t she?”

David met his eyes evenly. “I wouldn’t know.
We haven’t been in contact. Do you want to ask your questions now?
Perhaps something pertinent to your case? Or would you like to
cover who I dated in junior high as well?”

“Background information, Mr. Wilcott,”
Ormsby said, his whimsical air evaporated. “Background information
is everything. It leads us to understand character, which allows us
to determine motive.”

“Motive for what?” snapped David. He
couldn’t stop himself from taking a step forward. “You know I
didn’t kill Heck. And it’s great that you can quote a textbook from
your junior college days to me, but what’s
your
motive?
Alleviating the boredom brought on by writing parking tickets for
most of the year?”

“Oh ho! A touch of the famous Wilcott wit!”
Ormsby looked happy; his eyes were practically dancing as David
once again attempted to clamp down on his ire. “You were the
darling of the Internet world with that silver tongue of yours! How
have
they survived without you? And how is the world a
better place without Puppy Love ’n Friends? Dot com, that is. Was
it
you
who came up with that asinine gem, social petworking?
God, how I
love
that phrase!”

Social petworking. Social petworking. God,
how David
hated
that phrase. “It wasn’t me,” he intoned,
hating himself as well for bothering to chase the bait. “I was the
background guy. I built the website.”

“You mean you were the
architect
of
the website,” Ormsby taunted. “But you were hardly in the
background when the money started rolling in.”

Gobs of money, buckets of money. David
exhaled heavily, and his eyes found the façade of the Rainbow Arms,
its peeling stucco patches, the dingy lobby that was smaller than
David’s shoe closet had been a couple years before.

“You guys tore up the town. Facebook for dog
owners, right? What a pack of animals you became. Probably a good
thing it all came crashing down before you crashed any more fancy
cars, eh?”

David’s eyes moved slowly toward Ormsby
again. The Maserati had been a rental for the one evening, thank
God. But the image of an inebriated David doing a jig on the side
of the road while his chocolate Labrador sat obediently nearby, the
most exquisite quizzical expression on its face, had quickly gone
viral. The background, the neatly wrecked, bright red GranTurismo,
had been endlessly photoshopped to become a cliff on the Alps, the
surface of the moon, an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, the deck
of the Titanic with the iceberg looming.

The metaphors had been apt. Doubts as to the
long-term financial viability of Puppy Love ’n Friends had already
begun to creep into the news. The partying and antics of its
founders had first brought in the investors, and then frightened a
few off. David’s unintentional foray into a telephone pole while
driving drunk with his promotional puppy Johnson along for the ride
had driven the final nail into the coffin of the venture.

“I hope you managed to put a few pennies
by,” Ormsby said as he pitilessly met David’s hollow stare. “It
would suck if this was all you had.”

Once more, David closed his eyes, blotting
out the detective as well as his malicious gloat. This
was
all he had, Goddamn it, but it was enough, it truly was. What were
all of his former friends to him now? Nothing! And, no doubt, he
was nothing but an embarrassing memory to any of them. The money
was gone, the attention, the incredible prospects, the egotistical
heights… yet what had any of those brought him? Where could they
have taken him that could offer a richer life than what he had
right here in Shady Grove?

“What the hell’re
you
doin’
back?”

David’s eyes flew open. It was Bill, angrily
mauling his unlit cigar as he stomped out of the Rainbow Arms’
lobby toward Ormsby.

“Does nobody have respect for the law down
here?” the detective asked as he turned. “I’m questioning a
witness. Back off, Lo-pes!”

Bill’s countenance became ugly. His fists
balled, and David wondered if he were so hung over that he would
actually do something as stupid as to hit Ormsby. He probably could
have knocked him out more easily with the fumes coming out of his
mouth.

“It’s Lopes, you jackass,” Bill snarled.
“And why don’t you take a flying leap off a really tall building?”
He came to a stop, a foot away from the detective.

“You know, I spent some time doing research
on Mr. Wilcott’s background,” Ormsby said casually. “I wonder what
would turn up on you if I poked around.”

A look of wariness flitted across Bill’s
face, and then evaporated just as quickly. “Clean as a whistle,” he
growled. “Have at it.”

“I can’t help but question,” Ormsby
continued, “how it is that a man got the life beaten out of him,
yet you were only a few feet away and purportedly heard
nothing.”

The cigar was removed from his mouth. Bill
inched closer. “You smug turd,” he said in a low, dangerous rumble.
“You know damn well what I was doin’ at the time.”

“Cleaning a fountain,” Ormsby sneered. “A
more ridiculous excuse for a grown man making a living I’ve never –
”

“Hey, hey,
hey!
” David interjected,
stepping between the two men as Bill surged toward the policeman.
“Cool it, cool it. Bill, let it go. It’s not worth it.”

Ormsby had barely even shifted. “Mr.
Wilcott’s had some experience with the police before,” he said
lightly. “Better take his advice, Lo-pes.”

And this time it was Bill grabbing David as
he tensed, desiring nothing more than to punch the pompous
detective right in the teeth.

Instead, David forced himself to back away,
from both of the men. “The fountain is in the courtyard, at least
seventy feet away from Janice’s door,” he said, his voice strained
and a touch shaky. “Bill cleans it in the middle of the day each
week.” He found that his hands were quivering as well. “You’re
serving no purpose here, Ormsby, except perhaps to provide yourself
with some sort of sick amusement. Either tell one of us that we’re
under arrest or leave.”

Ormsby appeared entertained. Bill was
staring at David with his mouth hanging open.

David’s voice grew stronger, the shake
evening out to form a core to his words. “That’s what I thought.
You’ve got nothing. I don’t have a clue what your
motive
is
for this sorry excuse for an interrogation, but I’m going to go let
my dog out now, and Bill is coming with me.” He stepped toward the
lobby of the Rainbow Arms, roughly grabbing Bill as he did so.

“I told you he was an asshole,” Bill
muttered, as behind them Ormsby started to laugh, a raucous,
braying chortle.

“You need to brush your teeth, Bill,” David
replied. “You could sterilize the entire fountain with a single
whiff of that stench.”

The laughter continued, becoming hollow as
the men entered the lobby.

“Is it that bad?” Bill asked, actually
sounding worried. “Sorry, David. I’ll fix it up in a jiff. I mighta
had one too many last night, I think.”

David patted his friend’s back. “More like
ten too many, but I’m not gonna judge ya.”

Bill smiled at him, keeping his lips closed.
And then he aimed his next words away. “I bet I don’t stink half as
bad as that pig back there. That Ormsky’s been dippin’ into the
squirrel stash.”

“That’s a truth,” David replied with a grin.
“That’s a truth.”

It was twenty-seven years earlier that
David’s parents, Ned and Penny Wilcott, first came into some good
money. David had been four, his sisters Nancy and Fran six and
seven, and with three growing kids eating them out of house and
home, it was about Goddamned time that the Wilcotts finally figured
out how to make the sales game pay off.

For two and a half years, the commission
checks rolled in, rolled in, rolled in. Penny kept the books; Ned
stayed out on the road, pounding the pavement and beating the
bushes. David recalled most of his childhood as having taken place
in a household populated solely by older females.

The kickbacks to buyers were eventually
unearthed by the corporate mother ship, though, and Penny’s books,
beautifully cooked to a crisp, were dissected, reconstructed, and
then buried. The Wilcotts moved right out of their brand new
four-bedroom with a pool in suburbia, and back into an
apartment.

This pattern repeated itself, with varying
lengths, throughout David’s formative years. The unraveling of what
fortune had blown the Wilcotts’ way was never due to identical
factors, but unravel things did, over and over and over.

David, smaller than most of the boys his age
while growing up, had been teased, bullied, and beaten up. His one
weapon of counteraction had been his gradually acquired ability to
make his tormentors laugh. If he could break through their
determined harassment with his wit, he would usually be sent on his
way with only a few sore spots as opposed to a bumper crop of
bruises.

His repartee fell flat at home, though.
Penny, worn, bitter, and resentful of all that the world had taken
away from her, had no patience for her weakling of a son or his
pathetic attempts at drollery. Fran and Nancy, desperate to move on
to any pasture other than their own – greener or not – ignored
David, became adults as fast as humanly possible, and bailed on the
family unit at eighteen. Ned had rarely been around, but tended to
find his underdeveloped male progeny irritating and strange.