Mr. Mercedes: A Novel (22 page)

“Hodges, ma’am.”

“You were the nice one. The other one was very mean to Livvy. She said he was laughing at her. Laughing all the time. She said she could see it in his eyes.”

Was that true? If so, he’s ashamed of Pete. And ashamed of himself for not realizing.

“Who suggested she stop taking her pills? Do you remember?”

Janey has come back with the orange juice and a small paper cup that probably holds her mother’s pain medication. Hodges glimpses her from the corner of his eye and uses the same two fingers to motion her away again. He doesn’t want Mrs. Wharton’s attention divided, or taking any pills that will further muddle her already muddled recollection.

Mrs. Wharton is silent. Then, just when Hodges is afraid she won’t answer: “It was her pen-pal.”

“Did she meet him under the Blue Umbrella? Debbie’s Blue Umbrella?”

“She never met him. Not in person.”

“What I mean—”

“The Blue Umbrella was make-believe.” From beneath the white brows, her eyes are calling him a perfect idiot. “It was a thing in her computer. Frankie was her
computer
pen-pal.”

He always feels a kind of electric shock in his midsection when fresh info drops. Frankie. Surely not the guy’s real name, but names have power and aliases often have meaning.
Frankie
.

“He told her to stop taking her medicine?”

“Yes, he said it was hooking her. Where’s Janey? I want my pills.”

“She’ll be back any minute, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Wharton broods into her lap for a moment. “Frankie said he took all the same medicines, and that’s why he did . . . what he did. He said he felt better after he stopped taking them. He said that after he stopped, he knew what he did was wrong. But it made him sad because he couldn’t take it back. That’s what he
said
. And that life wasn’t worth living. I told Livvy she should stop talking to him. I said he was bad. That he was poison. And she said . . .”

The tears are coming again.

“She said she had to save him.”

This time when Janey comes into the doorway, Hodges nods to her. Janey puts a pair of blue pills into her mother’s pursed and seeking mouth, then gives her a drink of juice.

“Thank you, Livvy.”

Hodges sees Janey wince, then smile. “You’re welcome, dear.” She turns to Hodges. “I think we should go, Bill. She’s very tired.”

He can see that, but is still reluctant to leave. There’s a feeling you get when the interview isn’t done. When there’s at least one more apple hanging on the tree. “Mrs. Wharton, did Olivia say anything else about Frankie? Because you’re right. He
is
bad. I’d like to find him so he can’t hurt anyone else.”

“Livvy never would have left her key in her car.
Never
.” Elizabeth Wharton sits hunched in her bar of sun, a human parenthesis in a fuzzy blue robe, unaware that she’s topped with a gauze of silver light. The finger comes up again—admonitory. She says, “That dog we had never threw up on the rug again. Just that once.”

Janey takes Hodges’s hand and mouths,
Let’s go
.

Habits die hard, and Hodges speaks the old formula as Janey bends down and kisses first her mother’s cheek and then the corner of her dry mouth. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Wharton. You’ve been very helpful.”

As they reach the door, Mrs. Wharton speaks clearly. “She
still
wouldn’t have committed suicide if not for the ghosts.”

Hodges turns back. Beside him, Janey Patterson is wide-eyed.

“What ghosts, Mrs. Wharton?”

“One was the baby,” she says. “The poor thing who was killed with all those others. Livvy heard that baby in the night, crying and crying. She said the baby’s name was Patricia.”

“In her house? Olivia heard this in her house?”

Elizabeth Wharton manages the smallest of nods, a mere dip of the chin. “And sometimes the mother. She said the mother would accuse her.”

She looks up at them from her wheelchair hunch.

“She would scream, ‘Why did you let him murder my baby?’
That’s
why Livvy killed herself.”

8

It’s Friday afternoon and the suburban streets are feverish with kids released from school. There aren’t many on Harper Road, but there are still some, and this gives Brady a perfect reason to cruise slowly past number sixty-three and peek in the window. Except he can’t, because the drapes are drawn. And the overhang to the left of the house is empty except for the lawnmower. Instead of sitting in his house and watching TV, where he belongs, the Det-Ret is sporting about in his crappy old Toyota.

Sporting about where? It probably doesn’t matter, but Hodges’s absence makes Brady vaguely uneasy.

Two little girls trot to the curb with money clutched in their hands. They have undoubtedly been taught, both at home and at school, to never approach strangers, especially strange
men
, but who could be less strange than good old Mr. Tastey?

He sells them a cone each, one chocolate and one vanilla. He joshes with them, asks how they got so pretty. They giggle. The truth is one’s ugly and the other’s worse. As he serves them and makes change, he thinks about the missing Corolla, wondering if this break in Hodges’s afternoon routine has anything to do with him. Another message from Hodges on the Blue Umbrella might cast some light, give an idea of where the ex-cop’s head is at.

Even if it doesn’t, Brady wants to hear from him.

“You don’t dare ignore me,” he says as the bells tinkle and chime over his head.

He crosses Hanover Street, parks in the strip mall, kills the engine (the annoying chimes fall blessedly silent), and hauls his laptop out from under the seat. He keeps it in an insulated case because the truck is always so fucking cold. He boots it up and goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella courtesy of the nearby coffee shop’s Wi-Fi.

Nothing.

“You fucker,” Brady whispers. “You don’t
dare
ignore me, you fucker.”

As he zips the laptop back into its case, he sees a couple of boys standing outside the comic book shop, talking and looking at him and grinning. Given his five years of experience, Brady estimates that they’re sixth- or seventh-graders with a combined IQ of one-twenty and a long future of collecting unemployment checks. Or a short one in some desert country.

They approach, the goofier-looking of the pair in the lead. Smiling, Brady leans out his window. “Help you boys?”

“We want to know if you got Jerry Garcia in there,” Goofy says.

“No,” Brady says, smiling more widely than ever, “but if I did, I’d sure let him out.”

They look so ridiculously disappointed, Brady almost laughs. Instead, he points down at Goofy’s pants. “Your fly’s unzipped,” he says, and when Goofy looks down, Brady flicks a finger at the soft underside of his chin. A little harder than he intended—actually quite a lot—but what the hell.

“Gotcha,” Brady says merrily.

Goofy smiles to show yes, he’s been gotten, but there’s a red weal just above his Adam’s apple and surprised tears swim in his eyes.

Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy start away. Goofy looks back over his shoulder. His lower lip is pushed out and now he looks like a third-grader instead of just another preadolescent come-stain who’ll be fucking up the halls of Beal Middle School come September.

“That really hurt,” he says, with a kind of wonder.

Brady’s mad at himself. A finger-flick hard enough to bring tears to the kid’s eyes means he’s telling the straight-up truth. It also means Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy will remember him. Brady can apologize, can even give them free cones to show his sincerity, but then they’ll remember
that
. It’s a small thing, but small things mount up and then maybe you have a big thing.

“Sorry,” he says, and means it. “I was just kidding around, son.”

Goofy gives him the finger, and Not Quite So Goofy adds his own middle digit to show solidarity. They go into the comics store, where—if Brady knows boys like these, and he does—they will be invited to either buy or leave after five minutes’ browsing.

They’ll remember him. Goofy might even tell his parents, and his parents might lodge a complaint with Loeb’s. It’s unlikely but not impossible, and whose fault was it that he’d given Goofy Boy’s unprotected neck a snap hard enough to leave a mark, instead of just the gentle flick he’d intended? The ex-cop has knocked Brady off-balance. He’s making him screw things up, and Brady doesn’t like that.

He starts the ice cream truck’s engine. The bells begin bonging a tune from the loudspeaker on the roof. Brady turns left on Hanover Street and resumes his daily round, selling cones and Happy Boys and Pola Bars, spreading sugar on the afternoon and obeying all speed limits.

9

Although there are plenty of parking spaces on Lake Avenue after seven
P.M.
—as Olivia Trelawney well knew—they are few and far between at five in the afternoon, when Hodges and Janey Patterson get back from Sunny Acres. Hodges spots one three or four buildings down, however, and although it’s small (the car behind the empty spot has poached a little), he shoehorns the Toyota into it quickly and easily.

“I’m impressed,” Janey says. “I could never have done that. I flunked my driver’s test on parallel parking the first two times I went.”

“You must have had a hardass.”

She smiles. “The third time I wore a short skirt, and that did the trick.”

Thinking about how much he’d like to see her in a short skirt—the shorter the better—Hodges says, “There’s really no trick to it. If you back toward the curb at a forty-five-degree angle, you can’t go wrong. Unless your car’s too big, that is. A Toyota’s perfect for city parking. Not like a—” He stops.

“Not like a Mercedes,” she finishes. “Come up and have coffee, Bill. I’ll even feed the meter.”

“I’ll feed it. In fact, I’ll max it out. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

“You learned some stuff from my mom, didn’t you? That’s why you were so quiet all the way back.”

“I did, and I’ll fill you in, but that’s not where the conversation starts.” He’s looking at her full in the face now, and it’s an easy face to look into. Christ, he wishes he were fifteen years younger. Even ten. “I need to be straight with you. I think you’re under the impression that I came looking for work, and that’s not the case.”

“No,” she says. “I think you came because you feel guilty about what happened to my sister. I simply took advantage of you. I’m not sorry, either. You were good with my mother. Kind. Very . . . very gentle.”

She’s close, her eyes a darker blue in the afternoon light and very wide. Her lips open as if she has more to say, but he doesn’t give her a chance. He kisses her before he can think about how stupid it is, how reckless, and is astounded when she kisses him back, even putting her right hand on the nape of his neck to make their contact a little firmer. It goes on for no more than five seconds, but it seems much longer to Hodges, who hasn’t had a kiss like this one in quite awhile.

She pulls back, brushes a hand through his hair, and says, “I’ve wanted to do that all afternoon. Now let’s go upstairs. I’ll make coffee and you make your report.”

But there’s no report until much later, and no coffee at all.

10

He kisses her again in the elevator. This time her hands link behind his neck, and his travel down past the small of her back to the white pants, snug across her bottom. He is aware of his too-big stomach pressing against her trim one and thinks she must be revolted by it, but when the elevator opens, her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are bright, and she’s showing small white teeth in a smile. She takes his hand and pulls him down the short hall between the elevator and the apartment door.

“Come on,” she says. “Come on, we’re going to do this, so come on, before one of us gets cold feet.”

It won’t be me, Hodges thinks. Every part of him is warm.

At first she can’t open the door because the hand holding the key is shaking too badly. It makes her laugh. He closes his fingers over hers, and together they push the Schlage into the slot.

The apartment where he first met this woman’s sister and mother is shadowy, because the sun has traveled around to the other side of the building. The lake has darkened to a cobalt so deep it’s almost purple. There are no sailboats, but he can see a freighter—

“Come on,” she says again. “Come on, Bill, don’t quit on me now.”

Then they’re in one of the bedrooms. He doesn’t know if it’s Janey’s or the one Olivia used on her Thursday-night stays, and he doesn’t care. The life of the last few months—the afternoon TV, the microwave dinners, his father’s Smith & Wesson revolver—seems so distant that it might have belonged to a fictional character in a boring foreign movie.

She tries to pull the striped sailor shirt over her head and it gets caught on the clip in her hair. She gives a frustrated, muffled laugh. “Help me with this damn thing, would you please—”

He runs his hands up her smooth sides—she gives a tiny jump at his initial touch—and beneath the inside-out shirt. He stretches the fabric and lifts. Her head pops free. She’s laughing in little out-of-breath gasps. Her bra is plain white cotton. He holds her by the waist and kisses between her breasts as she unbuckles his belt and pops the button on his slacks. He thinks, If I’d known this could happen at this stage of my life, I would have gotten back to the gym.

“Why—” he begins.

“Oh, shut up.” She slides a hand down the front of him, pushing the zipper with her palm. His pants fall around his shoes in a jingle of change. “Save the talk for later.” She grabs the hardness of him through his underpants and wiggles it like a gearshift, making him gasp. “That’s a good start. Don’t go limp on me, Bill, don’t you dare.”

They fall onto the bed, Hodges still in his boxer shorts, Janey in cotton panties as plain as her bra. He tries to roll her onto her back, but she resists.

“You’re not getting on top of me,” she says. “If you have a heart attack while we’re screwing, you’ll crush me.”

“If I have a heart attack while we’re screwing, I’ll be the most disappointed man to ever leave this world.”