Cinnamon Skin (17 page)

When the road was clear ahead, he came on up alongside. I could see him, sitting high and grinning.

The instant he started to move in toward my front corner, I warned Meyer and hit the brakes hard. Jesse went shooting on ahead. The moment I slid to a full stop, I put it in reverse and backed it on up to speed, then banged the brakes again, turning the wheel hard right as I did so. The front end slid around beautifully and we rocked up onto two wheels momentarily, bounced back down, and I had it in gear and gaining speed, leaving a teenage pattern of black rubber on the pavement behind us.

I had come to my dead stop, and gone into reverse, right near the brink of that long upcurve to the left, that climbing curve a little way out of Cold Brook. Jesse had gone down the downhill curve to the right, out of sight. I kept looking back. No Jesse. Meyer said, "I heard something back there."

"Such as."

"Well… a thud. A kind of crunch-thud noise." At the end of a long straight stretch, I found an unmarked dirt lane. I turned in, went up a way, turned around, and came back to where I could park out of sight of the main road, yet see anything that sped past the leafy mouth of the lane. Nothing came from the south. A bread truck and a pickup passed by from the north. After ten long minutes, we started up and headed south, after them.

From his tire marks and the location and condition of his vehicle, it was easy to see what had happened: an error of judgment. When I had out-smarted him again, it had made him very very angry. And in his rage he had tried to make a U-turn halfway down that slope. He probably knew his vehicle well enough so that, had he tried the same turn at the same speed on the flat, he would have had no problem. But on the slope, the inside wheels were at a slightly higher level, and about two thirds of the way around his U-turn, he lost it. The Bronco tipped over and rolled. It threw him out ahead of the roll, and rolled over him, and kept rolling until it wedged itself into a grove of small trees beyond the ditch.

He lay face down amid bits of glass and twisted little pieces of tarnished trim. His back was bloody. We parked beyond the bread truck and walked up to the scene. He had tried to make his turn where the curving downslope had been widened to three lanes to accommodate cars turning left into a side road. He was stretched out on the shoulder, face down, only his head on the paving. As we neared him, it looked as though his face had sunk into the concrete road surface as if into a liquid. The pool of red around his head revealed the basis of this curious and sickening illusion. Some part of the vehicle, probably one of the big tires, had rolled across the back of his head, and under the pressure the facial bones had given way, leaving the back of the skull undamaged. A spectator who had been headed north brought a frayed old blanket from his car trunk and spread it over the upper half of the body.

The pickup driver said to the bread-truck driver, "You know who it is, don't you?"

"I know who it was, pal. Crazy Jesse that played piano weekends up to Heneman's Grill. Moved in with the Fox woman last year. I said he was going to kill himself sooner or later the way he drove that souped-up Bronco."

There were seven of us standing there by now, and we all turned and looked down the hill slope to the southwest as we heard the distant keening of the ambulance siren, coming closer.

"No need to hurry." Bread truck said.

"Funny thing," Pickup said. "If they had put Jesse away for a couple of years for assaulting that Jamison kid, like they should have, instead of giving him probation, he wouldn't have been out getting himself killed today."

The Dodge ambulance pulled up, and two attendants ran to the body, slowed when they saw the blanket. One lifted it up, felt for a pulse in the neck dropped it again, shrugged. The other strolled over to slide the body basket out of the back of the ambulance. A couple of northbound cars slowed for a look, then hurried on. A State Police sedan arrived. Meyer and I walked back to the rental. and got in.

Meyer said, "If there is anything at all useful that she can tell us, we had better be the ones who tell her about Jesse."

"I want to thank you for thumping him."

"Not exactly a frontal assault. Not exactly meritorious. You would have taken care of the problem."

"Don't be too sure. He was reaching to unsnap that little knife case on his belt when you turned off his lights."

"I was too angry and too humiliated to stop to think about what I was doing. Look at my ear." He turned and looked to the rear so I could see his right ear. It was puffy and bright red.

I had turned back north, leaving the little roadside scene behind. I said, "I think you'll be better at talking to her. Okay?"

"If you wish."

He was silent until we turned into the dirt driveway, to park where the red-and-white Bronco had been. Then he said, "Stay in the car." A direct order. Unusual and unexpected.

She came out, trotting toward him when he was halfway to the trailer, her strong face vivid with the unasked question. The left side of her face was swollen and was turning dark. I heard her helpless cry. "I tried to stop him! I tried. I really tried!" Then I could hear the murmur of his voice, explaining. She seemed to become a smaller person, to collapse in upon herself. He touched her shoulder and she turned into his arms. He patted her, comforted her. They walked together to the steps, his arm around her thick waist. He lowered her to a sitting position on the middle step, and she put her face down on her knees.

Meyer looked toward the car and made a small beckoning gesture. I got out and went to them. Her shoulders were shaking, but I could hear no audible sobbing. Finally she raised up and looked at both of us, tears running down her face, and tried to smile. "You'd miss even a lizard if you lived with it and fed it for over a year. He could be real sweet sometimes. I told him not to go after you and he knocked me down. Is the Bronco ruint?"

"It isn't very pretty," I said, "but I think it's just damage to the body. Frame, engine, wheels, and radiator should be okay."

"I'll have to see about getting it fixed up. I got to have a car, living way out here. I bought it for him. I traded my old car in on it, and it's in my name."

"Insurance?" Meyer asked.

"Only what they make you take out. I don't even know where they'll take the body. I haven't got any phone out here any more. It was a party line, and Jesse cussed the people who were talking when he wanted to use it, so they complained and one of them recorded what he said to them, and they came and took it out. I didn't know they could do that, but they can."

"We'll take you down to the village," Meyer said. "You can find out there, and make arrangements about the truck."

She wiped her eyes. "That would be a real help. I got to fix up a little." She struggled to her feet and went in and closed the door.

"What else do you think she can tell us?" I asked Meyer.

"I noticed something when we talked before. She said she was certain they would never catch him. There didn't seem to be any thought in her mind that he might be dead. It was a long time ago. If she had no word at all from him in all that time, she might believe he was dead. It would be a logical assumption. Certainly he had a better-than-average reason for suicide. But his possible death was no part of her monologue, Travis. So that seems to me reason to believe he has been in touch with her. I want to find out how. And when."

When she came out, ready to go, the change startled both of us. She wore a dark blue dress and carried a shiny blue shoulder bag. Her hair had been brushed, and she had managed to hide the deepening color of the bruise on her left cheek. She wore sandals with one-inch heels, and stockings which covered her scratched and bitten legs. She wore lipstick and some eye shadow. She looked slimmer and younger.

"Do you want to lock up?" Meyer asked.

She gave him a pitying look. "Who would look at my place and think there's anything worth stealing?" She patted the shoulder bag. "Anything worth stealing is in here."

Meyer folded the seat down and climbed into the hack. She sat beside me. Meyer leaned over toward her and spoke to her. "How does Cody keep track of where you are?"

"I let-" She stopped abruptly.

"Who is it you let know? Who is the intermediary?"

"Damn you, Meyer. I thought you looked cuddly. You're a smart-ass son of a bitch. You tricked me." She worked herself around to face him. "You could set fire to my feet, I'd never tell you. You could pull out my fingernails, I wouldn't say a word."

"I don't think you know where Cody is."

"You're right! I don't have no idea at all."

"So you would write to this intermediary, or maybe phone when there's a change of address, and then when Cody phoned the intermediary he would get the information."

"Smart-ass!"

"He needs the address because he sends you money."

"Why would he do that?"

"You and he are family. He did a terrible thing. He wants to take care of you, so you'll think well of him. As you obviously do."

"He sends it because he's my kid brother and, until Coralita came along, we always looked out for each other. He doesn't have to buy my feeling for him."

"How does he send it?"

"He ties it onto a pigeon."

"Come on, Helen June," Meyer said in a wheedling tone. "If you don't know where he is, and I don't believe you do, then the way he sends the money can't tip us off as to where to find him. He's a very clever man. I'm just curious as to how he would go about sending cash to you. It must be cleverly done."

"He's smart."

"We know. He'd have to be to stay at liberty so long."

"I nearly messed up the first time he sent any. It was a kind of messy old package that came for me. I was still living with Sonny. Thank God he wasn't around when I opened it. On the outside it said BOOKS. My name was typed on the label. The return address was a box number in New Orleans. Inside were three paperback books with two rubber bands around them, one going one way and the other going the other way. I read the titles and decided it was some kind of sales gimmick. I'm no reader. Maybe the newspaper sometimes. So I unsnapped the rubber bands and leafed through the first one looking for the sales letter. And when I opened the second one, a bunch of hundred-dollar bills fell out onto the floor. There was forty of them. I damn near fainted. The middle book had been hollowed out, probably with a razor. Kind of a messy job. I guess it didn't have to be real neat. There was a typed note with it. And it said, 'Happy birthday Helen June. Whenever you move, let so-and-so know right away. Get rid of this note and don't talk about the money.' Isn't that great? Here I am talking about the money."

"How many packages have you gotten?" Meyer asked.

"I don't know. What do you care? You with the IRS? Maybe a dozen, maybe more. They were mailed from Miami, Tampa, Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles. Big cities. Sometimes with a little note. Birthday or Christmas or something. The biggest was eighty-five hundred. And the smallest was the first one. I never know when they're coming. He cares about me, that's all I know. That's all I care. It keeps me alive. I told you this just to show you that he's a good person."

When we got to the place where Jesse had died, a tow truck was backed up to the Bronco. The winch was grinding and they were gently picking it out of the small trees. There were no other cars there. Two little farm kids were watching.

Helen June got out and trotted to the tow truck.

"This is my car!" she shouted over the sound of the winch. "Where are you going with it?"

He turned off the winch. "Hi, Helen June. Sorry about Jesse. His own damn fool fault. Bound to happen some day. We're taking it down to the Village Garage. Okay?"

"What's it costing me for you to take it, Jimmy?"

"Forty bucks, to you."

"Is that a discount or are you hiking the price?"

"A discount, damn it. Sixty otherwise."

"I got it right here and I want a receipt. Just a second."

She came back to the car.

"Thank you for coming to tell me, and thank you for the ride. I talked too damn much. I don't know what got into me. I don't tell people my private business. Not to a couple of strangers. Meyer, you came up on my blind side."

"I'm sorry that we… caused all this."

"If you hadn't it would have been somebody else. Or something else." Her mouth twisted, the smile bitter. "He was a real sorry man, but he was the only one I got."

"I know you don't want to talk about your brother," Meyer said, "but…"

"You are so right."

"… you might want to see a recent picture of him."

She stared at him. "You got one? How?"

"It's back at the motel in Utica," he lied.

"I sure would like to see how Cody turned out," she said.

"It's a little past noon now," he said. "We could go get it and come back."

The Bronco had been plucked out of the shrubbery, and they had it ready to roll. "Hey, Helen June!" She turned and yelled, "Hold it a minute, okay?"

She turned back to us.

"I hafta see about my car. I hafta find out where they took Jesse and tell his people. He's got folks in Gloversville. You want to come out to my place late this afternoon? Four thirty?"