The Last Kind Words (14 page)

“I wish you would’ve called me. I wish you would have asked. I deserve that much respect, no matter what you think of me or cops in general.” He rubbed my back again, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and let the smoke out over my shoulder. “I thought you were the bright one. I thought you might be going somewhere. I had hopes, Terry, I really did. I figured you and Kimmy would get out of that house and go your own way. You’d leave the life behind and raise a family. It would’ve been a good thing. I knew you had it in you.” He sighed. “But then you ran out on everyone. You showed a real lack of character there, you know?”

I knew.

“You got a wife wherever you been living? Kids?”

I coughed and shook my head.

“That’s too bad.” He flicked his cigarette butt away, lit another. “Did you really come back just to stir up trouble?”

“No,” I groaned.

“Well, that’s good to hear. I’m happy to hear that. You still on the grift wherever it is you’ve gotten to?”

“No.”

“Good, that’s good to know. But there’s something about home that brings it out in you again, huh?”

I thought it might be time to try standing. He slung one of my arms over his shoulder and helped me up. When I was on my feet again, I propped myself against the back bumper of my car. I slumped there for a couple of minutes, watching him smoke.

When I was able to, I bent and retrieved the copied files, opened the car door, and stuffed them back under the passenger seat.

“I bet you could use a beer right about now,” Gilmore said.

My voice sounded exactly like I felt—sick, weak, trembling. “I think I’m done for the night.”

“Then you can buy me one. Come on, Terry.”

He turned away from me and headed into the Elbow Room. I followed him, limping along. I smelled like asphalt and vomit. I thought I might get sick again the second I stepped back into the bar. Gilmore breezed over to the table I’d been at and took the opposite bench. I sat exactly where I’d been sitting all night.

The waitress came by and Gilmore ordered us two beers. She returned with them and he paid her and said thank you. I grabbed the wet bar towel from her tray and wiped my face with it.

Gilmore sipped his beer and stared at me like I was a long-lost friend he’d been searching for and had finally found. “You look well,” he said.

“I’ve been better.”

“You deserved worse from me, but we’ll let that slide for now.”

His eyes were dark and lonely. His kids were gone. He probably saw
them only on alternating weekends, if that. When he was forced to drop them off at their mother’s again, the grief would try to drown him from the inside.

“You didn’t hang around for your brother’s trial,” he continued. “You never got to see the evidence against him. Hear the witnesses. Listen to the testimony. Take the stand in his defense. Your mother did, you know. She wept the whole time but she tried to put in a righteous word. You could’ve said something too, if you’d cared.”

“What would the point have been? He admitted his guilt.”

“That’s right, he did.”

I started to feel better. Suddenly I wanted the beer that was in front of me. I took a swig. Gilmore finished his and ordered another round. He paid again. Our eyes met.

“You know what he says now?” I asked.

“That he didn’t smoke the teenage girl. Rebecca Clarke.”

“That’s right. Is there any chance it’s the truth?”

“None,” Gilmore said. “He did them all.”

“He never confessed to killing her.”

“He didn’t have to. Maybe he just forgot. Isn’t that what he said? That he wasn’t sure at the time? A night like that, a crazy murder spree. Who wouldn’t want to forget?”

I nodded and sipped. “What about the kiss?”

He pulled that tight and wistful grin again. He couldn’t help himself, his face fell into it so naturally now. It showed me how forlorn he’d become. He let out a false chuckle that told me even more about how his life had smashed up since I’d last seen him. “You spotted that, huh? Sharp eyes.”

“Yes. He apparently kissed them all on the forehead. But not Rebecca Clarke.”

“So he was too excited. So he was too juiced up on rage or adrenaline to perform that specific sick ritual that one particular time. He still choked her to death.”

“Maybe not. What about the sash or cord? What about the knife? They were never found.”

“So he ditched them. He admitted to knifing the gas-station attendant, Douglas Schuller.”

“Right, he admitted it to me again the other day. But he said he didn’t snuff Becky Clarke.”

“Did his wife put you up to this?” Gilmore asked.

I drew my chin back. “You know about her?”

“Yeah, she haunts me on a weekly basis.”

“But you never mentioned her to my mother or father?”

“They’ve cut themselves off from your brother. It wasn’t my place to lay something like that in their laps. Have you told them?”

“No,” I said. “You’ve met Lin?”

“She’s made it her life’s mission to cause me heartburn. She camps out in my office, brings me information. What she calls evidence. Jail-house lawyers are bad enough, but jailhouse wife attorney-wannabes are much worse. You know who falls in love with death-row inmates?”

“Mentally unstable individuals.”

“That’s right. Imagine what Christmas dinner is going to be like if she ever shows up on your doorstep.”

I took a pull of beer and propped myself up lengthwise in the booth. I swallowed a grunt of pain. I watched Gilmore. There was a certain air to him that it took me a moment to place. He was doing his best to assure and console me.

“He told me there’d been others,” I said.

Gilmore angled himself closer. “What others?”

“Not others he’d iced. Other girls who fit Rebecca Clarke’s profile, murdered in similar ways. Some while he was in prison.”

“Three or four.”

“Doesn’t that make it suspicious?”

Gilmore held back a mocking laugh, the strength of it causing his body to shake. “You know how many unsteady drunken bastards kill their wives or girlfriends every year? You know how many do it by choking them to death? How many of those women are young, cute, and brunette?”

“You’re saying they were all snuffed by their boyfriends?”

“No, I’m not saying that, Terrier.”

“Then what?”

He threw back his beer and looked for the waitress. I wondered if he was going to step up to double shots of scotch. I wondered how much booze he had to kill every night to help him get to sleep. I was curious as to how often he was allowed to see his kids and if he could still come up with those unique and colorful voices to entertain them. I imagined Phyllis with a new boyfriend, trying to get on with her life, and Gilmore holding on to the past like so many of us did. I could picture him in the darkness, reaching out to clench a woman who was no longer there.

He caught the waitress’s eye and she came by with another round. He pushed one to me and I pushed it back to him.

Gilmore’s lips jacked up as if someone had jammed their thumbs into the corners of his mouth and pushed. “Listen to me,” he said. He tapped a fingernail on the tabletop. It clicked as loudly as if he’d pulled the trigger on an empty gun. “One of those women was found behind a motel in Riverhead, garroted with her own bra. It looks like a rape job gone bad.” He tapped his finger again. “One had her hyoid bone broken, which probably happened in an accidental fall. She was drunk at the time. She was nineteen and out of work. She’d spent an hour that night arguing with her father on the phone because he wouldn’t send her enough money to pay her rent. Neighbors heard her stumbling around. When they found her she was lying on a futon, her throat crushed against the wooden arm.” Again that click, like we were playing Russian roulette. “Someone used a belt on the last girl. She was a distributor for a low-level meth dealer. She was hooked on her own product and undoubtedly shorted her supplier. That’s why she bought it.”

“Did you personally investigate those cases?”

“No, they weren’t mine. But I looked into them when Lin brought me her concerns. I do my job. There’s nothing there.”

“Give me those files too. Give me names.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

His eyes went hard as shale. “You’re a burglar, Terrier, like the rest of
your family. You don’t get to see police files. Let me amend that. Let’s make that, you don’t get to see any
more
files. I don’t need you running around out there stirring up strife, putting your nose in business that doesn’t concern you. You want to talk about Collie or discuss his case, I’m here to help. He’s going to be gone in a week and a half. You need someone to give you an ear, I’ll do that. But you have to keep away from the rest of it.”

“The kiss,” I said.

“I hate to tell you this, Terrier, but just in case you haven’t realized it yet, your brother is out of his goddamn mind. Anytime you get too curious about what was going on in his head, remember where that kind of thinking leads. You really want to start down that road?”

Gilmore stood. I could tell he wanted to shake my hand or give me a hug. His eyes were full of regret and remorse and a hope toward friendship. He walked away and took his fucked little grin with him out the door.

Like
the last lone soldier defending a fort, my father stood guard on our house. He leaned against the veranda railing. Backlit by the porch light, he was lent a kind of mythic presence. He had the grave bearing of someone thinking hard on a particular subject. He showed no sign of restlessness at all, but I knew it was there. Maybe his tension was merely calling to my own.

Pinscher Rand had become a criminal for the same reason that I had. Because he’d been born to it. I wondered if he ever pulled a cheap score nowadays just to keep the old skills sharpened and to remember how exciting and awful it had once been. I imagined him picking a wallet and not pulling the money, just poking around the contents, looking at the driver’s license photo, the credit cards, the carefully folded sheets of paper that rarely made any sense. A note from an ex-girlfriend that the mark valued, a frayed motto or private joke that had gone through the wash a couple of times. He’d pass by a mailbox and dump the wallet in. He’d feel some strange sense of accomplishment, knowing his fingers were still supple enough to get the job done.

He should’ve been a carpenter. It was the only other skill that was in the Rand blood. Maybe I should have been too. I imagined us razing the house and building another one, a smaller one, without the hidden caches, maybe with a nursery.

I wondered what he did with himself now that he’d quit creeping houses. What shit he wasted his time on. He and my mother should be
out enjoying themselves, making the most of life. Except that I knew the burden of the murders tore him up with guilt in a way that none of his own crimes ever had. My father hid himself away out of shame.

JFK lay across the top stair and I had to jump over him. My side hurt so badly that I almost flubbed it. He gave me a resolute eye roll and coughed out a small belly bark.

I lit a cigarette and sat in a chair, trying to hide my discomfort. It was too late. My old man had already noticed.

“Someone worked you over,” he said.

“I’m okay.”

“Not Dale’s boyfriend?”

I frowned. “Hell, no.”

“Didn’t think that one would get over on you.”

“Not likely.”

He nodded, took a step toward me, and looked me deep in the face like he was checking for bruises. “That’s not what’s on your mind, though.”

“No, Dad, it’s not.”

My father sat, opened his cooler, and handed me a beer. I shook my head. He dug around in the ice chest until he came up with a small carton of orange juice. I drank and felt a little better.

We relaxed and watched the road and the black brush beyond it. JFK had picked up on my mood. He came over, circled and pawed and collapsed. His ears kept snapping up and he let loose with a deep-throated whine. I wanted to do the same.

We nodded. We sipped. We smoked. We took turns patting the great beast at our feet who’d once been young and fierce and was now only well muscled, noble, and old. The immense topic of our lives loomed between us.

We’ve failed. We’ve failed to hold our family together. We’ve failed to protect one another
.

My old man started to clear his throat like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the proper words. I turned and watched him until our eyes met.

He said, “You want to talk about it, Terry?”

I sat up like someone had just lobbed a grenade. It was a question that my father never asked. I thought, Christ, I must look
really
bad.

Or maybe it was just his way of getting me to start a conversation that he himself needed to have.

I listened to my mother inside murmuring to Gramp, the way new parents talk to infants. She sounded elated. I waited for her to say, “Look at these chubby cheeks. Who’s got such chubby cheeks? So big!” I thought about the toll it must be taking on her. If ten years ago Gramp had been able to see himself in this state, he would’ve put one in his head. Another one, that is.