Angels Burning (11 page)

“What does that have to do with childbearing? In case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of unattractive people out there having kids right and left.”

He laughs at this and finally tears his gaze away from his notebook screen.

I don't add, “Like you, for instance.”

Poor Chet: overweight, insecure, already losing his hair in his thirties, a second-rate undergrad and a third-rate law degrees; the kind of guy who checks out his reflection in the backs of spoons and gives animated interviews in his car to invisible reporters about the cases he'll never have.

To make matters worse, his younger brother turned out to be whip-smart, good-looking, and a natural-born litigator. He went to Cornell Law School, then came back to Buchanan to make his folks happy and brought with him a Jewish wife, who's also a lawyer and who kept her maiden name and added it to the Shank shingle.

“I just had a consultation with a Frederick Dombosky,” Chet informs me while giving Lena some sort of elaborate hand signals. “He wants to hire me to sue you for defamation of character.”

“Lucky?”

“He says you and your sister lied in court. What was it? Thirty-five years ago?”

He shakes his head in disbelief.

“I wasn't even born yet. Anyway, he says he's innocent.”

“What a shocker.”

“I know. They all say they're innocent. But to hire a lawyer
after
you've served your sentence? You've got to admit that's rare. He's really serious about this.”

“Why would we have lied?”

“He seems to think you did it so the cops would stop looking for the real killer. He thinks you were protecting someone.”

“Who?”

“Gil Rankin.”

His answer startles me into swallowing a gulp of hot coffee too quickly and I start coughing.

“He said you kids really liked Gil,” Chet goes on, not noticing my discomfort or surprise.

“We didn't care about Gil one way or the other,” I say once I can speak again. “We certainly wouldn't have lied to protect him if we thought he killed our mother. Besides, he had an airtight alibi.”

“He also fled the country.”

“He didn't flee the country. He went to Europe to get away from all the publicity. He cooperated with the police before he left. He came back for the trial. That's not fleeing.”

And if he was fleeing anything it was his dead wife's three kids. I don't tell Chet this. We went to live with our grandmother.

“Lucky says the alibi was flimsy,” Chet explains with a shrug, his attention wandering back to his iPad. “He says Gil could've left and come back. His employees would've lied for him.”

“What was Gil's motive?”

“His wife was having an affair.”

“Gil didn't know about the affair. Lucky was the one with the motive. Mom was dumping him once again and he was crazy about her. Tons of witnesses heard them fighting the day before and his threatening her. He had a history of violence with women. He had no alibi. His fingerprints were all over the bathroom.”

“Whoa.” He holds up one hand and gives me his insufferable, placating smile again. “Are you trying to convince me or yourself ?”

“I don't need convincing. I saw him do it.”

“Don't get mad at me. He was convicted. He paid his debt to society. Nobody cares anymore except him. He's saying you lied, that's all. He says you didn't see him do it because he didn't do it.”

“Did you say he hired you?”

“He's planning to as soon as he can come up with my retainer.”

“If you take him on, haven't you violated some kind of attorney-client privilege by telling me all this?”

“I'm not sure. Let me Google it.”

Now I do walk away.

Zuchelli's is located on our main thoroughfare named Glencora Street after the wife of our town's founder, Harold Buchanan—not James, our country's fifteenth president and the only Pennsylvanian to hold the office—who owned practically half of Laurel County at the turn of the last century, made a fortune from mining, sold his company to the mammoth J&P Coal, and ran off into the sunset with his wife's
younger sister, the much prettier Annabelle, who also has a street named after her but in a seedier neighborhood.

Even though a major coal company was based here and at one time employed most of our male population, Buchanan survived the collapse of the mining industry. In large part this was due to the fact that we're also home to a small college, a large medical center, Grover's Candy, and AAA baseball franchise, the Buchanan Flames, with their own midsize stadium and adjoining fairgrounds.

The inhabitants of the surrounding towns consider our burg to be a bustling city. It's true that we have our own bit of urban sprawl, including chain stores and chain restaurants, six car dealerships, and a hillside checkered with Monopoly-marker low-income housing, but I do most of my living in the heart of town not only because the police station is here but also because I like the feel of continuity it gives me. Our downtown has managed to remain relatively unscathed by progress. A few businesses have fallen victim to the passage of time. The travel agency with its glossy posters of exotic destinations and a life-size cardboard cutout of a hula dancer in its front window is now an insurance office. The newsstand where I used to buy Mom her fashion magazines and hide in a corner with racy paperbacks became a video rental store and is now a coffee shop with Wi-Fi.

The Woolworth's where Neely and I used to go after school to buy our forty-fives, watch hamsters run mindlessly on their wheels in the pet section, gaze longingly at the cheap paste jewelry that for some reason was locked up in a glass case, and share an order of greasy fries at the lunch counter is now an Antiques and Collectibles Shoppe, which is a more upscale way of saying permanent indoor flea market.

Rankin's, the swanky department store Gil owned, is now an American Eagle. The tattoo place became a cigar shop and is now a tattoo place again.

The law office of Chester Shank, Esq., is now the law office of Shank, Shank, and Goldfarb. My department car, a white Ford, is parked in front of it and as I step out of Zuchelli's, I notice Singer and Blonski's cruiser is parked behind it.

Derk is standing on the roof of my car, brown paper bag in one hand, the other shoving a cupcake in his mouth. Singer is trying to reason with him while Blonski is trying to grab him, but Derk deftly dodges his swipes at his feet like he's a small cowboy being showered by bullets from a Wild West villain telling him to “Dance.”

“What's going on?”

Singer turns, red-faced from frustration. Upon seeing me his blush deepens. I know he's thinking about Nolan and me having dinner two nights ago.

“This child was sitting on the roof of your car, Chief,” he starts to explain. “When we told him to get down, he said he's a friend of yours and if we don't piss off he's going to have us fired.”

I step up to the car.

“So we're friends, Derk? I'm glad to hear it. But that doesn't give you an excuse to be disrespectful. If you don't get down I'm going to arrest you.”

“You can't arrest kids,” he tries to shout, his words muffled by the cake and icing in his mouth.

“Officers,” I say.

Blonski needs no other encouragement. He heaves himself onto the trunk of my car and lunges at Derk, barely missing him. The boy takes a flying leap onto the sidewalk, where Singer nabs him. If he were willing to drop the goodies, he might be able to wriggle free and make a run for it, but his concern over them throws off his balance and his judgment.

Blonski pulls his handcuffs off his belt and dangles them in front of Derk.

“You want us to cuff him?”

“That won't be necessary. Put him in my car. He's Derk Truly. Camio's little brother,” I tell the two of them before they can ask.

I don't provide any other information. They don't seem to care. They do as they're told, shut Derk inside my car, then turn back to me practically bursting with something important to tell me.

“We just took an interesting missing-persons report,” Singer eagerly informs me.

“Do you remember that sick rat bastard we arrested last year for domestic abuse? Broke his wife's jaw and almost put her eye out?” Blonski begins. “And when we looked through the house we found all that teen schoolgirl porn?”

“Britney Spears the early years kind of stuff with even less clothes,” Singer further elaborates.

“Lonnie Harris,” I answer them.

“Right,” Blonski confirms, with a nod. “His wife came into the station this morning and said he's been missing since Friday night.”

“Why'd she wait until Monday to report it?”

“He's been known to go on weekend benders, but she says he always stays in touch by phone. No matter how drunk he gets, hardly an hour goes by that he doesn't text her something nasty, but she hasn't heard from him this whole time.”

“She said she wanted to report it because she knew she'd be the number one suspect if he turned up dead,” Singer adds. “This way it would show she has nothing to hide. Pretty smart.”

“She's not that smart,” Blonski throws back at him. “She stayed married to the guy.”

He turns to me.

“What do you think, Chief ? You think he could be the killer and he's split town? We know he's violent and we know he likes teen girls.”

“We also know Camio wasn't sexually assaulted,” I remind him.

His face falls. Singer looks dejected, too.

“But you never know. We have to follow all leads. You should take this seriously.”

They brighten up a bit.

“Check out his residence. His phone records. See what he was up to these last few months. Talk to everyone who knows him. If you come up with any tie to Camio or any member of the Truly family, no matter how tenuous, let me know right away.”

Blonski heads for their cruiser. I touch Singer lightly on his arm before he can follow.

“Can you get those muddy footprints off the roof of my car?” I ask him.

He nods.

“Sure thing, Chief.”

Singer originally put Derk in the back but he's already climbed into the front, leaving smears and fingerprints of yellow, blue, and brown frosting all over my seats.

“Why do they call you Chief ?” he asks me once I'm settled behind the steering wheel.

“Because I'm the chief of police.”

“No, you're not,” he snorts.

I toss a bunch of napkins at him. He ignores them.

I'm suddenly hit by a memory of Champ: he's the same age as Derk, sitting next to Gil in the front seat of his big Buick looking lost and small but smiling because Gil has just handed him a big chocolate cupcake out of a red Zuchelli's box that also held a coconut cream pie he had picked up for dessert, Mom's favorite.

I remember the pang of jealousy I felt when Gil gave Champ the treat and wondering why I cared. I didn't want a cupcake. I was too old for that. And I didn't want Gil's attention. Like most of Mom's boyfriends, he creeped me out. I didn't care about letting my little brother have the front seat. It was summer, and Neely and I had just spent the afternoon at the public pool and were happy to sit together in the back, smelling of watermelon Lip Smacker and chlorine, where we could whisper about the older girls' bikinis and the older boys' developing muscles, and giggle over Gil's outdated pompadour.

Later, when I came upon Champ and Gil watching TV together while sharing a plate of Oreos, something Champ usually did with his sisters, I wondered if maybe I wasn't jealous of what Champ was receiving from Gil but what Gil was giving Champ.

I knew it was a good thing for him to finally have a dad even if the dad in question wasn't his real one. The important thing was he would have a man in his life to teach him stuff, to care about him, to play with him, and set an example. Next Father's Day, while I was putting flowers and a Hot Wheels car on Denial Donny's grave and Neely was reading her
Encyclopedia of Dogs
for the thousandth time while musing about the
limitless glamorous identities Passing Through might have—astronaut, captain of industry, European royalty, rock star, Olympic athlete, dog owner—Champ would no longer have to content himself with a drawer full of empty envelopes.

I was happy for him, but Neely and I had always been the center of Champ's universe, and maybe I was a little worried that he didn't have enough love in him to share with all of us. Whenever I'd spot a cupcake paper in the kitchen trash can, I'd wish Gil would dump Mom like all the others. Sometimes I'd wish he'd disappear altogether.

After Mom died, Champ wouldn't go near cupcakes. Grandma used to bake dozens for him because she knew how much he liked them, and he'd pale at the sight of them. Grandma took it in stride as she did everything and chalked it up to one more strange manifestation of the grief we were all experiencing: boy misses murdered mother who was too pretty to die; can no longer eat cake.

By then I knew the reason must be something stomach-turning, but I never made him talk to me about his sudden cupcake revulsion or anything else about Gil. At the time, Neely and I thought we were doing him a favor. If we didn't make him talk about it, he wouldn't think about it, and maybe it would go away. We were kids, too. We didn't know any better.
We didn't know living nightmares don't ever go away because you can't wake from them. The most you can hope for is to dilute them by spreading them around.

“When's the last time you saw Camio?” I ask Derk after ten minutes of driving in silence during which time he's eaten two more cupcakes.

I'm amazed when he replies, “Couple days ago.”

“Which day?”

“Don't know.”

“What was she doing?”

“Going for a walk.”

“Where did she go?”