The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (52 page)

“I'll call you sometime tomorrow,” Will says, closes the door as softly as he can, and turns away.

The moment the truck disappears around the corner Will can hear Harvey retching at the end of the alley. Harvey is on his knees beside the dumpster, his face to the wall. Will stands over him, a hand on his brother's back. He can feel the rigidity of Harvey's spine, the way his shoulder blades quiver. Will has never before felt so helpless. Every breath is redolent with dumpster stink.

Harvey climbs to his feet finally, shaking, and allows himself to be steadied by his brother's hand. Will says, “We better get back inside.”

Harvey wipes his mouth and nods.

“Wait here by the door. I'll check things out first.”

Will walks softly through the kitchen, peeks out behind the bar. Giffy and Eight-Ball are seated at a table facing the big-screen TV, watching a boxing match on ESPN, two Hispanic featherweights slamming away at each other. A pitcher of beer, nearly empty, sits in the middle of the table, accompanied by a couple of bags of potato chips.

Will tiptoes back to the door and ushers Harvey inside. Harvey sneaks around to the front of the bar, slides onto a stool while Will silently lifts two bottles of Schlitz from the cooler, twists off the caps, and hands a bottle to his brother. They settle into position as if they have been there all night.

Overhead, footsteps hurry back and forth. Will knows that Lacy has been awakened from her sleep either by the police scanner or by a telephone call. Now she is throwing on a pair of jeans and a shirt, making sure she has fresh batteries for her digital camera, sitting on the bed to tie her shoelaces. It isn't long before Will hears the quick patter of her footsteps on the back steps, then coming through the kitchen. When she appears on the threshold to the bar, Will asks, “Where's the fire tonight?”

She digs around in a cooler for the coldest bottle of Coke. “Break-in over at the high school.”

“Kids,” Will says, and shakes his head. “They bitch about having to be there, and then what do they do but break back in over summer vacation.”

Harvey stares at the bottle in his hand.

“Molly still asleep?” Will asks.

“She was thirty seconds ago.” Lacy gives him a peck on the cheek. “I shouldn't be long.”

“Take a lot of pictures,” Will says.

“I always do.”

“And hey.”

She turns at the door. He points to the front of her blouse, sleeveless yellow cotton with a rounded collar. She looks down, sees that it is buttoned incorrectly, one side of the shirt higher than the other.

“Geez,” she mutters as she yanks open the door, unbuttoning on the run.

Now Will notices that Giffy is looking his way. Will says, “Anything you fellas need back there?”

“Where the hell did you two come from?”

“Been here quite a while, Giff. Not that you two would've noticed, drinking up all my profits the way you've been doing.”

Giffy grins. “These two little Cuban guys are pretty good. They're pounding the shit out of each other.”

“We've been watching,” Will tells him. “My money's on the one in red trunks.”

At that moment the boxer in red trunks, Morales, having driven his opponent into a corner, delivers a mad flurry of punches to the midsection, then caps it with an unexpected hook to the head. The referee shoves the two boxers apart and gets in between them, pushing Morales back. His opponent collapses against the ropes just as the bell signals the end of round seven.

“I don't think I'm going to take that bet,” Giffy says.

 

Twenty minutes later, Will and Harvey are alone inside the bar. Will thinks of Molly asleep upstairs, dreaming sweet dreams. Dreaming of bright possibilities. He wishes he could hand them to her on a platter, pave her path with the softest of carpets, remove every thorn from every rose she will ever pluck. He feels very tired suddenly with the knowledge that he can do none of that for her, can never shield her from disappointments or failure, can offer her nothing more than his own helpless love.

He gazes down at Harvey then, only forty-three years old. He looks ancient sitting there. He looks beaten.

“What can I get for you?” Will asks.

“We should have taken that CD.”

“I'm pretty sure Stevie grabbed it.”

“You think he did?”

“I'm pretty sure of it.”

“Christ, I hope so.”

Will leans back against the cash register, the hard metal edge across his spine. The beer tastes bitter this late at night, it sours in his stomach. He thinks he can hear a police siren across town, but he isn't certain, it might be nothing more than the residue of the school's alarm still ringing in his brain. He thinks about locking the front door but knows that nobody will be coming in anyway. He thinks of several things he might say to his brother, but he doesn't say any of them because what good would they do, clumsy phrases, useless; there is no magic in words.

It is Harvey who breaks the silence. “The two of us were over at the Ramada one night,” he says. He picks at the label on his beer bottle, tears off tiny pieces and leaves them lying on the bar. He speaks haltingly, in no hurry to hear this or to be heard.

“This was just a month or so after we'd gotten engaged. We were dancing, drinking, having fun. And then this band-geek friend of Kenny's, he comes over and keeps trying to drag Jennilee out on the dance floor. He's so shitfaced he can barely stand up. She sees I'm getting kind of hot about it so she excuses herself and goes off to the ladies' room. But the guy still won't leave. Suddenly I'm his best buddy in the whole damn world and he's telling me how she's got the nicest body he's ever laid eyes on, all that kind of crap. I'm just about ready to deck the guy when he up and asks me if Kenny's still got those nude photos of her he had in college.”

“Jeezus,” Will says.

“I just went cold.”

“So... what happened then?”

“Soon as Jennilee came back, I dragged her outside. We sat in the car and...” He tears the last of his label free. Scratches a fingernail over the rough smear of glue.

“At first she denied it,” he says. “Claimed she didn't know what the hell I was talking about. So I threatened to haul that geek in the bar outside there with us and beat the truth out of him. Funny, but she didn't seem to mind that idea. So then I said, ‘No, no, on second thought I think there's somebody else who needs it even more.' So I started the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. I must've laid rubber for fifty yards down the road, I was so pissed.”

“The somebody else meaning Kenny.”

“She made it sound like it was all so innocent, you know? Like something brothers and sisters do all the time. Just fooling around, she called it. She'd let him take pictures and maybe touch her once in a while, but she swore up and down that it never went any further than that.” He looks at his bottle as if he is considering taking a drink, then changes his mind, too weary to raise it to his lips.

“So I drove her over to Kenny's and told her either she went in and got those pictures or I did. And if it was me, I was more than likely to turn her into an only child.”

Will waits for the rest.

“She used the cigarette lighter from the car and burned them right there along the curb. Then she used her bare hand to sweep the ashes down into the sewer drain.”

And you probably thought that was touching, didn't you?
Will thinks.
Jennilee's beautiful, perfect hand sweeping away the ashes. You poor helpless son of a bitch
.

Will says nothing for a while. Then, “So now what?”

“Now?” Harvey asks, and looks up finally, his eyes as fierce as embers. “Now I kill him whether she wants me to or not. And this time
nobody
is going to stop me.”

“Hell, brother,” Will tells him. “I'm not going to stop you. I'm going to load the revolver and drive the getaway car.”

Harvey smiles, though there is not a trace of happiness in his expression. He holds out a hand to Will. Will takes it, grips it hard.

“But first we wait,” Will says.

Harvey jerks his hand away. “Wait? Wait for what?”

We wait for you to cool down
, Will thinks. He says, “News gets out about those magazines in Kenny's drawer, a lot of people around here are going to want his hide.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So in the meantime, you don't say a word about any of this to Jennilee. We can't say a word to anybody. You think you can do that?”

“The same goes for you and Stevie, you know.”

“It goes for all of us. What we have to do is just stand back and let the shit fly on its own. Hell, we might wait a year before we do anything. Because by then, at the least Kenny will have lost his job and be living somewhere else. Us, we're just going on with our lives same as always. Until that one night, a long time from now, when we pay Kenny a long overdue visit.”

Harvey nurses his beer, turns the bottle slowly in his hands. The glass is warm now, sticky against his skin.

Will wishes his brother would say something more, offer his hand again, some affirmation. Instead, Harvey sets his bottle down. He slides his stool away from the bar. He stands.

Will asks him, “Where you going?”

“I'm not feeling so hot. I think I'll call it a night.”

“Have a ginger ale. It'll settle your stomach.”

“I guess not.”

“At least stay until Lacy gets back. We can quiz her on how things went.”

But Harvey is already headed for the door. “I'll talk to you tomorrow,” he says.

 

Out on the street, halfway through town, Harvey hears a dog barking somewhere. A dog on a chain, he thinks. Poor bastard, what a life that must be, even for a dog. Chained up and howling at distant sounds, wanting to chase after them, snap his tether, revert to the dog he should have been, a hunter, meat-eater, not some neutered pseudo-dog grateful for an occasional pat on the head and a bowl of dry kibble.

This heat
, he thinks,
is something strange. It's like a steam bath out here
. Every breath is a heavy one, a soggy lump of air.

Yet he feels chilled at his core. Every now and then a shiver wracks through him, a quick icy rattle up and down his spine. His body aches with the hot, heavy drag of the heat, but he can't stop the chills from rattling through him.

He approaches the high school from the long front drive, walks toward the white illumination of the lights in the windows, the lobby lit up like a jack-o'-lantern, a big brick Halloween pumpkin on a steamy August night. He counts four vehicles lined up around the circular drive. A patrol car, Lacy's Subaru, Kenny's Sebring, and a red Jeep Wrangler.
Must be the janitor's
, he thinks.

He cuts across the circle of grass in front of the school, drags a hand over the flagpole. The metal is cold, flaked with rust. No flag flapping in the breeze, not the slightest breath of wind. He pauses there beside the flagpole and looks at the front entrance, can almost hear the sounds the kids make piling out of the buses every morning, the yips and laughs and moans like the ones he used to make.

If I had any kids
, he wonders,
would they be happy here? Would they be popular and smart?

I was never smart
, he tells himself.
I got passing grades, but I was never very smart
.

From twenty yards away he can see through the window of Kenny's office, can see Lacy with her back to him in there, bent toward something with her camera in hand. Kenny is there beside her, standing in profile, watching. Half a minute later, Deputy Walters comes into the room, stands close to Kenny and tells him something, finger pointing toward the hall.

Harvey watches it all as if it is a television show with the sound turned off. They are just characters in a show, nothing more. Superintendent Fulton, good-looking and well dressed even at midnight, khakis and a red polo shirt, every hair in place. Lacy the photographer, the girl next door, cute as Doris Day. And Deputy Walters, not the sharpest tool in the shed but wholly likable, self-deprecating, constantly trying to lose a few pounds but never able to resist just one more Big Mac, one more order of fries.

The show leaves Harvey cold and he tires of watching it. No drama, no comedy. He is not involved in any of it but feels as distant from it as a chained dog must feel when it howls at the moon. He turns his back to the school and starts down the long drive, past the darkened homes of people he knows, the lives he has no involvement in, the secrets they hide.

He has been standing at the corner for maybe fifteen minutes, maybe more, when the lawn directly across the street is lit up by a car's headlights. The car comes up behind him, slows, stops. Lacy leans toward the open passenger window and asks, “You lost?”

Harvey turns to look at her. He smiles. Wonders if she can see his coldness inside, if she can feel it radiating off his flesh, the chill off refrigerated meat. “Just thought I'd walk over before heading home, see what all the fuss is about.”

“Some kids broke in and trashed the place. Spray-painted the walls, tore up Kenny's office pretty good.”

Harvey makes a sound that is supposed to be a laugh. “Maybe Kenny did it himself. You know how he loves to redecorate.”

Lacy slips the gearshift into park, then slides the whole way across the seat. “You still pissed at him?” she asks. “I mean, earlier, you were mad enough to kill him, you said.”

“Yeah, well, you know how I get. Lucky for me, Will talked me out of it. Even so... I can't honestly say I'm sorry for any trouble that comes Kenny's way.”

She nods. “I can see why a person wouldn't like him.”

“Oh yeah? You mean you're somehow able to resist his legendary charm?”

“He gives me the creeps,” she says. “He's one of those touchy-feely guys, you know? Always has to have his hand on you during a conversation. Ten minutes with him and I feel like I've been licked all over with a long, wet tongue.”