Eve's Men (14 page)

On the one hand, Charley knew that withholding this information even temporarily might be construed by the police or the district attorney’s office as obstruction of justice. On the other, he knew it would be recklessly stupid of him to go to the police without a lawyer at his side, someone looking out for
his
interests and no one else’s. So his decision was, as the cool people said, a no-brainer. He would wait till three o’clock.

Meanwhile he wanted very much to talk to someone about it all, what a lovely fix his little brother had gotten him into. He considered phoning Donna again and telling her about Brian’s latest jape, but he knew that would only set her off again, at his expense as much as Brian’s. That left the bed, the almost sexual appeal of getting in an hour’s nap before leaving for the courthouse. But he was afraid that once he dropped off, he would sleep through Armageddon, let alone a bedside alarm. So he elected to freshen up, to shower again and put on a clean shirt and the tan Armani, the only suit he had brought with him. Though he didn’t particularly like the idea, he knew that the police were prone to go easier on men who came in wearing a good suit instead of a workshirt and dirty khakis. And he wasn’t Brian; he didn’t
like
to stack the deck against himself.

At about two-fifteen he was getting ready to leave, just then putting on his jacket when there was a knock on the door. Thinking it might be Brian and Eve, overcome with guilt and ready to face the music, he opened the door. And there stood Chester Einhorn, carrying what appeared to be a bag of groceries. Though it crossed Charley’s mind to slam the door in the little man’s face, he found himself stepping aside and letting him come on in. As the door closed behind him, Chester reached into the paper sack and drew out not a loaf of bread or a can of corn but a blue-barreled pistol so huge it looked like a cannon in his hard little fist as he raised it now and pointed it at Charley.

“Where’s your brother?” he asked.

Charley couldn’t take his eyes off the gun. As if by magic, it had loosened his bowels and weakened his knees and sucked the air out of his lungs. He could barely speak. “I don’t know. He took off, that’s all I know. I drank pretty late last night and just got up. I—”

“Where’d he go?”

“If I knew I’d tell you, believe me. He just took off. Jumped bail even. I can’t figure it.”

Chester stood there looking up at him, eyes squinting and lipless mouth curved in the wraith of a smile. Then, abruptly, he cocked the gun—to Charley, a sound uncomfortably like that of a breaking bone. By then his hands were shaking badly.

“Seattle,” he got out. “I think he went to Seattle.”

“You
think?
”

“No, I’m sure. That’s what he said. He’s got an old friend up there. Lives aboard a boat called the
Seagull
.”

“
Seagull?
”

“Yes—plain old
Seagull
.”

“What’s this fella’s name?”

“I don’t know. I remember Brian talking about him a few times, but I don’t remember his name. Brian said they go way back, the two of them. Real buddies.”

“And you’re his brother. So how come you rat on him?”

Charley looked at the gun. “Why do you think?”

Chester appeared satisfied with that. “Makes sense.” He uncocked the gun and motioned with it for Charley to move. “Okay, git yer stuff together. We goin’ on a little trip, the two of us.”

“We are?”

“Yep, we sure are.”

“Seattle?”

“That’s what you said, wasn’t it?”

Charley was furiously trying to think of something he could do: go for the gun, jump off the balcony, pretend to faint. Only the last seemed feasible, but in the end he couldn’t even bring himself to do that. He opened his suitcase and began to throw into it the few things he had bothered to unpack.

“Yessir, that brother of yers, he shore is a card,” Chester said. “But we gonna find him, and he’s gonna learn a thing or two, he damn well is. So hurry up, will ya?”

Charley didn’t answer. But he was hurrying.

An hour later Charley had reached the point where he would almost have preferred being shot by Chester rather than have to listen to one more minute of the man’s nasal drone as he expounded on his dreary philosophy of life. In the beginning, though, as Charley drove Chester’s bright red pickup out of Colorado Springs and headed north for Denver, he had been an avid listener to everything the little man had to say, beginning with the welcome news that Jolly hadn’t been killed after all, that it was not his head but his
hairpiece
that had been blown away as the bullet apparently glanced off his skull. That glancing, however, had cracked bone and caused the director a blood clot on the brain, which had required immediate surgery.

Incredibly, Chester’s greatest concern about the shooting seemed to be his aim, the fact that he had
not
blown off Jolly’s head.

“I jest cain’t figger it,” he lamented. “That two-seventy of mine is mostly a real right-on weapon. Hell, I’ve hit turkey vultures with that dang rifle—and I mean when they’s flyin’. You try doin’ that sometime, buster, you’ll find out it ain’t so easy. Only way I can figger it is this dang Colorado air—itchy, lip-crackin’ shit! A body cain’t hardly breathe, you know that? And I jest figger that’s what the trouble was up to Jolly’s place. I jest bet the air was so dang thin it probly jest lifted that li’l old bullet a smidgen off dead center. Cuz I had the hairs right on him, believe you me, I did—right twixt his snotty fag eyes. Him posin’ up there in his goddamn sissy robe.”

Charley didn’t comment on any of this, mostly out of fear that he would say the wrong thing and set Chester off, and that was not something he wanted to do. Also, Charley sensed that though the tiny cowboy’s main reason for dragging him along might have been to birddog Brian, he probably needed him equally as an ear, someone to whom he could pour out his mad little heart for hours on end.

Every now and then, however, he would drop a random pearl of information, such as his casual explanation of how he had found out that Brian had lied to him—by hearing it from the one person who knew, Belinda herself, who had come out of her coma with her memory sufficiently intact to recall that she had been with Brian, not Jolly, on the night of the accident. Fortunately for Charley, she apparently had no recollection of the accident itself and had told Chester only about being with Brian in his motel room at the Goodland and innocently taking the pills he had given her—for her upset stomach, she had told Chester—this last most likely an invention on her part in order to maintain her image before her big brother as a pure and wholesome country girl debauched by a known drug fiend. Chester said he then had cautioned her not to tell the police or anyone else about Brian because he wanted to take care of that little matter himself.

“Yessir, I jest told her to lay back and not worry her purty head about anythin’ ’cept gittin’ on her feet again. She’s got my ma and cousin Lil with her, so I jest told her to fergit all about Brian Poole cuz Chester Einhorn was gonna take care of him. And by Jesus, that’s jest what I’m gonna do. My pa and uncle can handle the ranch or the dang thing can jest go to seed—I don’t give a shit one way or t’other. Alls I care about is runnin’ that brother of yers to ground and havin’ him suck on this for a while.” At which point he waggled the three fifty-seven magnum in Charley’s face. “Let him get a real good taste of it—that’s all I want.”

Then he chuckled and shook his head fondly, like an old man gossiping on a park bench. “That old Brian, though, you gotta hand it to him, you know that? He’s really some piece of work, he is. What a card! Gettin’ me to do his dirty work like he done, and damn near makin’ me like it too. He’s some kinda charmer, all right. Hell, old Brian, he could charm the birds right down outa the trees if he’d a mind to, and that’s a fack.”

“So why not drop all this?” Charley suggested. “Jolly wasn’t killed. And Brian didn’t call the law in on you. He just split. You’re in the clear.”

Chester snorted and shook his head, as if Charley were something of a card himself. “What do you take me for? Some candyass city fool? Don’t you think I got enough smarts to figger out that if the law gits to Brian afore I do, he’s gonna sing—and I don’t mean sing ‘Miss Colorado’ neither. The ballad of Chester Einhorn, that’s what he’s gonna sing. And you know it same as me. So there ain’t gonna be no droppin’ nothin’, not now and not never.”

It surprised Charley that he could adjust so quickly to a situation that should have been a scene on television or in the movies rather than a slice of his own life. Here he was, competently chiving on while this wiry little cowboy waved a cannon in his face and prattled on in the very lingo of showbiz: “singing” to the police and “taking care” of Brian and giving him “a real good taste” of a gun barrel. But the lingo in no way tempered Charleys anxiety and fear. Chester may have had the dialogue all wrong, but Charley still knew the little man was for real, in fact was probably the very worst—and commonest—of America’s bad dreams: another lunatic with a loaded gun.

With this in mind, Charley wouldn’t let himself relax for a second. He knew with every breath he took that his life was on the line and that his survival might well depend on just how patient and calm he could be, and how
ready
, when his moment came. So he waited. And he listened.

“You best be sure about Seattle,” Chester warned him. “Cuz that’s where we goin’, all right. And if old Brian turns up on the moon, then
that’s
where we goin’. Cuz justice is all that counts in this world, Charley, and they’s only one way to git it. You go out and take it, that’s how. Court justice and all that horse manure ain’t fer people like me, it’s fer lawyers and judges and big business honchos, that’s who. It ain’t nothin’ but a guvmint subidy fer ’em, jest like welfare and food stamps is fer niggers. No different. No sir, if yer a workin’ stiff and you want you some justice, you gotta go git it fer yerself. You git you some guns and learn how to use ’em, and then you can think about gittin’ you some justice. Cuz there ain’t no other way, and that’s a fack.”

They were descending from the higher ground south of Denver down into the city, which appeared to have been erected in the middle of a lake, a rusty yellow layer of smog that stretched far out into the prairieland to the east. Listening as Chester droned on, Charley thought how nice it would have been to push the little cowboy overboard, right into the yellow lake. Sweets for the sweet.

Much of the time Chester didn’t bother to hold the gun on Charley, or for that matter even to keep it in his hand. Sometimes he would casually lay it down on the dashboard in front of him, either because he enjoyed playing cat and mouse or because the thing was heavy and he judged Charley wasn’t fool enough to struggle over a loaded gun while zipping along the freeway. Still, holding the gun or not, the little cowboy kept his eye on Charley. Most of the time he sat leaning back against the passenger door, his boots barely touching the floor as he chewed contentedly on a match and squinted over at his captive, his seamed and sunken face looking almost happy for a change, almost relaxed, as if the two of them were driving farther and farther from that biting cold wind he was always hunched against.

“Anyways,” he said, “I bet ya been wonderin’ how come my politics is like they is. I bet ya been wonderin’ what in hell happened to old Chester. Well, I’ll jest tell ya. I don’t s’pose I mentioned it before, but it was my great granddaddy who got our place, back after the Civil War. He traded fer it with some dumb Cherokee, gave him two beat-up horses and a barrel of rotgut for all twelve hunnert acres. And we’ve had the place ever since. My granddaddies and my pa and uncle—and now me and Belinda—us Einhorns, we been livin’ and dyin’ there for over a hunnert years. And it’s a real nice little ranch, it really is. Only problem is this crick we got. It cuts across our north quarter and it’s got these rock cliffs and all that kinda purty shit that turns city folk on. Anyways they come on over from Tulsa to picnic there or skinnydip or what the hell have ya. And they tear up the fences and leave their garbage and they shit all over the place. So my pa and me, we useta jest git our guns and run ’em off. Shoot over their heads and such. Give ’em a scare. You know.”

At that point he shook his head in rueful disbelief, a philosopher still amazed at the world’s perfidiousness.

“Then one day the goddamn sheriff waltzes in and tells us the guvmint declared the crick a ‘scenic waterway’ or some fool thing, and we had to fence it off so’s our cattle wouldn’t dirty it up. Meantime the public had the right to come in and do whatever fool thing they wanted—on
our land
, mind you—and we couldn’t do one dang thing about it. Well, my ma, she writes the guvner and our congressman and senators and everybody but the goddamn dogcatcher. But of course it don’t do one damn bit of good. The guvmint one day jest tells ya ya don’t really own what’s been yers fer a hunnert years. So what in hell is a body to do? Change who ya vote fer? Change yer political party? Call up radio talk shows and piss and moan about it?”

Chester laughed at the absurdity of the idea. He snorted and shook his head. “Not this cowboy, no sirree. Instead, what I did was
undeclare
our li’l crick a ‘scenic waterway.’ I jest git out my guns jest like before, only I don’t show myself this time. And I don’t shoot above no heads either. I blast Thermos jugs and shoot beer bottles right outa their grubby mitts, and I part their fag hair and shoot their fuckin’ dogs too. And when the sheriff comes roarin’ out afterwards, I’m jest settin’ there on the porch swing drinkin’ a beer, innocent as a lamb. They couldn’t prove nothin’. Some weekends they’d send out a deputy to guard the fuckin’ trespassers, but soon as he’d leave, I’d jest start in again. And finally they wasn’t no more trespassers. And we had our crick back.” At that point he actually lifted the gun to his lips and kissed it. “That’s what I mean by a party of one. Me and this li’l baby, that’s all the political party I need.”