Tony and Susan (24 page)

‘Be careful mister, you got witnesses in this room.’

‘You talking about my ladies, man? They know what they’re seeing, don’t you, gals?’

All for Tony’s sake, who felt irrationally ashamed, wondering what Bobby Andes hoped to gain by this scary talk. Wondering how Bobby knew it wouldn’t blow his case against Ray Marcus in any court of law.

Lou with his wrists handcuffed behind him was twisting his shoulders back and forth. ‘Feeling uncomfortable, son?’ Bobby said. He went over, unlocked him, patted him on the shoulder, fatherly. Now both men had their hands free, with Bobby grinning at them through his sickness.

He went back to his chair. Conversational, to Tony: ‘I’ve been making a study of torture.’

Tony heard Ingrid breathing.

‘These guys are good at it, I hear,’ Bobby said. ‘But they’re
amateurs. I’ve been studying legal torture. What governments use, which is more efficient than private torture, like what guys like these here perform on women and children.’

‘You’ll pay,’ Ray murmured.

The possibility hit Tony, if Bobby had actually given up on a legal solution, if he really was intending to execute his own remedies. Which made Tony wonder what to do if that were the case. If he should intervene – if he had ever intervened in anything in his whole life. To intervene he would have to know what he was trying to stop. Tough talk, aggressive police work? Bluster, intimidation, psychological tactics. What would he propose instead?

‘In government torture,’ Bobby said, ‘there’s supposed to be a purpose. The purpose is to get a confession. That’s what they have to say, the ostensible purpose. Do you guys know what
ostensible
means? The real purpose is different. The real purpose is to make them wish they was dead.’

The trouble with intervening was that Bobby was riding a plan like a horse, and no cautious question about legality or charity could stop him now.

‘Nobody gives a shit about confession. The great thing about torture, it gives you a maximum awareness of your natural instinctive death wish. How’s that for a definition, Tony?’

So Tony said, ‘Bobby.’

‘What?’

Tony didn’t know. If Bobby was merely talking, Tony would feel like a jackass.

‘What should we do with them, Tony?’

‘I don’t know.’

Bobby Andes was thinking it over. He looked at his gun, weighed it, picked it up and aimed it experimentally at Ray’s head. Ray ducked, then sat straight. Bobby Andes cocked and
uncocked it, aimed again, put it down. He looked a long time at Ray and Lou and Lou and Ray and then got up. He winked at Ray and handed his gun to Ingrid. ‘Here, hold this.’ She handed it back and went into the kitchen alcove. He handed it to Susan, who held it in her fingertips with astonishment. He went to the back and opened the closet door and squatted down, looking for something on the floor.

Ray leaned back on the cot with his hands behind his head while Lou sat on the edge, and Tony with his gun in the straight chair watched. Ray snickered. ‘You scared, Lou?’ he said. He tickled Lou in the ribs. ‘Cut the fuck that out,’ Lou said.

‘He ain’t nice, that man of yours. He’s gonna get in big trouble when he grows up,’ Ray said. He watched Bobby’s back as he put his old fishing tackle box on the table in the alcove.

In the other wicker chair the girl named Susan, who had no last name, handling Bobby’s gun as if it were a turd, was trying to keep its cold metal from touching her bare white thighs. In the alcove Ingrid was banging around. ‘I didn’t know I was going to guard a prisoner,’ Susan said.

They watched Bobby take something out of the tackle box and hold it up, examining it. He got up and took a rusty sickle out of the closet, felt the edge, put it back and brought what looked like an old automobile battery back to the table. Seated with his back turned, he held up a long piece of wire. He cut something with his knife, then held up the wire to make a loop, then leaned over and scraped something metallic with his pocket knife. He had fishhooks and pieces of wire scattered around him, and Tony could not see what he was doing.

Ingrid was sloshing water in the sink. They heard the tin dishes bang. Susan squeaked. The gun had slid onto her thighs.
‘I wonder if I could use this thing if I had to,’ she said.

Ray sat up.

‘It’s a pretty dangerous weapon,’ he said. ‘You gotta be careful how you handle something like that.’

Ray was thinking about something, Tony could see that. He was looking at Lou trying to communicate, but Lou sitting there gloomy didn’t notice. Bobby glanced around, then back to his work. Bent over the table he made a grinding sound.

‘Can I go to the potty?’ Ray said.

‘You just went.’

Ray got up. ‘Watch it,’ Tony said.

‘It’s okay, okay, just stretching my legs.’ He went to look at the magazine pictures tacked on the wall.

‘Sit down,’ Tony said.

‘Aw jeez, I need to exercise.’

‘Sit down.’

‘Yes boss.’ He sat down.

At the table in the alcove Bobby turned around and looked at them. He had a knife and a pair of wires in his hand. He turned back to his work.

‘Better do what the man says,’ Bobby said, his back turned.

Ray said, ‘Did you ever shoot one of them things?’

Tony did not want to answer.

‘I bet you never did.’ He was talking quietly, but not too quietly for Bobby to hear.

‘Hey Tony. If you shot me what excuse would you use?’

‘That’s my problem, not yours.’

‘This ain’t the law, this is kidnapping. If you shoot me that ain’t a police action, that’s murder.’

Tony chilled, what he had hoped would not occur to Ray. Which would take the gun away from him. He wished Bobby would finish what he was doing.

‘Where do you teach, professor?’ Ray said. He got up again. ‘Let’s go, Lou.’

‘What?’ Lou said.

There was Ray, moving around to the side, along the wall toward the door, ‘Let’s go, move it!’

Lou looked at Ray, blankly.

‘Sit down,’ Tony said. ‘Bobby!’

‘Come on you jackass, it’s time to go,’ Ray said.

Tony jumped up. He tried to cock the gun and block Ray from the door. In the alcove he saw Bobby Andes stand up in the shadow. ‘Shoot him, Tony,’ Bobby Andes said.

‘Let’s go, let’s go.’

‘You crazy, man? That’s a gun he’s got.’

‘Move man, move.’

Standing in front of the door, Tony got the gun up and pointed it. ‘Stop.
Halt!’
he said, while Ray came right at him, and he ducked aside because he was afraid Ray would grab the gun out of his hands. When Lou saw that he jumped up too, and Susan screamed.

The door caught Ray, who fumbled with the catch and broke out. Now Bobby moved, Tony saw him rush forward, grab Susan’s hand, heard him say, ‘Gimme that,’ saw the inner door slam into Lou’s face, heard Ray’s feet running off the screened porch, saw Lou push the door out of his way and run, and Bobby rushing by Tony, shoving him aside and shouting, ‘Now I got you, bastards.’ Then a great explosion just outside the door threw all his perceptions into chaos.

A bomb, he thought, thinking the cardboard ceiling would collapse. He saw the faint blue smoke, smelled the powder, saw the gun in Bobby Andes’s hand held up as he jumped off the step running after Lou. That was Susan who was screaming. He saw her, she had picked up a carving knife, while Ingrid
held the dishpan full of soapy water cocked and ready to throw.

Outside another explosion, then another. He ran out to the porch, saw the man standing on the path with hands extended aiming the gun, looked and saw one man running along the river’s edge. One more shot while the man kept going and disappeared down the path by the river, behind the trees. Then Tony noticed the other man lying on the grass near the river.

There was Susan on the porch beside him, gasping, and Ingrid wiping her hands on a towel. There was Bobby Andes on the path, small and fat, tucking in his shirt. He was looking down the river to the woods, where the man had escaped.

‘Get the keys,’ he said. ‘We gotta catch that guy.’

‘Wait, Bobby,’ Ingrid said.

Tony’s car keys were in his pocket. The man on the grass was Lou. He was groaning, trying to get up, his hands on the ground, but he couldn’t make it. He was looking at them, calling. ‘Somebody help me, please.’

Ingrid went into the house and came back with a towel. Bobby Andes was staring down the river or thinking.

‘I’m hurt, man,’ Lou said.

‘It’s no use,’ Bobby said. ‘We’ll get him later.’ He looked at Tony. ‘Christ. Why didn’t you shoot him?’

A quick answer jumped into his head, ‘That’s your job,’ but he couldn’t say it and couldn’t think of anything else instead. With the towel in her hands, Ingrid went out across the grass to where Lou lay. ‘Stay away from there,’ Bobby said.

‘He’s injured. We’ve got to look at him.’

‘Get back here.’

‘Snap out of it, Bobby, and get dressed. We’ve got to take him to the hospital.’

‘Be quiet.’

‘He could die while we wait.’

Transfixed, thinking about something. Suddenly Bobby Andes moved. ‘Stand back,’ he said. He walked over to Lou and shot him in the head.

One of the women said, ‘Mother of God.’

Go back over that. There was Lou on the ground, sobbing from the pain, looking with pleading at Bobby Andes striding toward him like a soldier. There was the executioner’s gun pointing at him, the shocked face and the man hiding his head in his arms trying to roll away. Then the explosion and the body like a jumping bean, falling back with a kick of the legs, then limp.

Susan cried like a child.

There was Bobby, nudging Lou, who would have to be dead, leaning over to look at him, then back at the others on the porch or at something above their heads. He raised his gun, pointed it at them, and fired again. The wild shriek of total terror was Susan, running inside.

‘Shut up,’ Bobby said, ‘I’m not shooting at you.’

He held his belly as he hobbled back to them, leaning over, gun hanging in his hand. ‘Go on in,’ he said. ‘You look like a bunch of idiots.’

Wherever he was aiming that last shot, what he actually hit must have been the door spring, which was hanging loose and vibrating next to a torn piece of screen.

Nocturnal Animals 24

They stood in Bobby Andes’s camp while the echo of catastrophe died in the woods: the girl named Susan in her miniskirt, Ingrid with a dish towel, Tony Hastings with his unused gun, all in shock by the table. Bobby Andes full of police work fixing his pants, holding the gun he had used. Lou Bates outside on the grass with a bullet hole through his brain.

‘Shit,’ Bobby said. ‘What happened, Tony, gun wouldn’t work?’

The rage Tony wanted to feel was smothered by the shame of not knowing what he was supposed to do, so he said nothing.

Bobby looked at Susan. ‘Sorry I scared you. I saw a bat.’

‘A bat, Bobby? You were shooting right at us.’

Andes’s face changed. He put his gun on the table and went out the back door. They could hear him heaving like a seal. He came back. ‘Christ of all fuckin times to be sick.’

He sat down at the table and took deep breaths. ‘Got to move,’ he said.

‘Bobby,’ Ingrid said, ‘there’s that man you killed out there.’

‘Give me time.’

She looked at Tony and Susan, they all looked at each other.

‘Bobby? What are we going to do?’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s under control.’

‘What are we going to do? You killed that man.’

‘Right. He tried to run away.’

‘You deliberately killed him.’

‘He was trying to escape.’ He looked at her. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘You shot him a second time. You shot him in the head.’

The room was still, everyone looking at him, the sound of peeping frogs once more down the river. He ran his hand across his head, opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind.

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Because I didn’t get him the first time. Jesus.’ He felt in his pocket and brought out his car keys. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Go where, Bobby?’

‘Telephone call.’ She touched his shoulder, he brushed her off. ‘Don’t touch me, I’m all right.’

‘Can’t you send Tony?’

This alarmed Tony, but Bobby looked as if she were crazy.

‘Tony can’t do it,’ Bobby said.

‘Can’t do what? He can deliver a message to the station. What more do you want?’

‘I want to catch that bastard when he gets out to the road.’

‘Oh no, Bobby.’

‘Oh yes, Ingrid. I have to catch that bastard.’

‘And leave us here by ourselves?’

He stood up, straightened himself, walked to the door. She cried out. ‘Bobby!’

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Tony’s got a gun. If he can remember how to use it.’

‘There’s that man lying out there.’

‘Leave him lay. Don’t touch him. Stay inside and hope no early morning fisherman trips over him.’

He went out. They heard the car go. Ingrid said, ‘Damn him to hell.’

Susan asked, ‘Was that
legal
, what he did?’

‘Shooting him?’

‘Is a policeman
allowed
to do that?’

‘He was trying to escape. However,’ Ingrid added. ‘That second shot in the head. There was no need for that.’

‘Will he get in trouble for that?’

‘Also.’

‘What?’

‘He had no legal grounds for holding the other man.’

‘You mean Ray?’

‘That was against all rules,’ Ingrid said.

‘Will that get him in trouble?’

‘I don’t want to think about it.’

‘Maybe if we don’t tell.’

‘They’ll know,’ Ingrid said. ‘The wounds in the body will tell. The question is, will the buddies rally round?’

Tony’s shock was turning rancid.

‘What was he trying to do?’ Susan said. ‘I mean, when they find out, won’t it ruin him?’

Ingrid’s half laugh. ‘When who finds out?’ She said, ‘I don’t think he cares. I think he decided if the District Attorney wouldn’t go after him, he’d do it himself.’ Ingrid trying to figure Bobby Andes out. ‘What I don’t understand is, how he could have been so careless.’

‘Was he careless?’ Susan said.

‘Fiddling at that table. Expecting Tony to stop them. That’s not like him.’ She looked at Tony. ‘I guess
you’re
glad that man is dead.’

He couldn’t think about it, distracted by the question of what Bobby expected when Ray made his dash to escape. The death of Lou Bates seemed unimportant, as if he had ceased to be Lou Bates. It had no satisfaction for Tony, no more than
had the death of Turk. Time had redefined the crime, and the only criminal who mattered was Ray. It was all Ray and Ray alone, and once again Tony had been afraid and let him go.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ Susan said.

‘He was shot through the head,’ Ingrid said.

‘He might not be dead though. Maybe we should go see.’

‘He’s dead. No doubt about that.’

‘I think someone should look at him just in case.’

‘Not me.’

Not me either, Tony’s thought repeated when she turned to him. They stood in the door and watched while the policeman’s young cousin whom he and Ray had both considered a prostitute but who seemed to be rather only a kind of child in her miniskirt went out with the flashlight and gingerly approached the dark shape by the river and watched while she crouched down courageously and studied him, her knees pale in the black. They saw the spot from the flashlight as she moved it over the man’s body and saw her hands touching his face. When she came back her face was wan. ‘His eyes are open,’ she said.

‘That’s what they do when they die,’ Ingrid said. ‘They open their eyes but can’t see.’

Things go sour. Food spoils, milk curdles, meat rots. In the dim light of the camp there’s this feeling of accident and breakage. The death of Lou Bates was not a right death. Tony wondered if he had caused it by having failed to stop Ray and Lou with his gun. But the only way to stop them would have been to shoot them, which would have made him rather than Bobby the killer, and that would have been worse. Therefore it wasn’t his fault. The reason for his dumb rage burst into light: if Bobby had intended him to be the executioner of Ray and Lou. The question was intolerable. Whatever went wrong, he insisted, he was only a witness, not an actor.

Susan yawned again. Tony remembered how he walked through the woods and along the roads without sleep a whole night until he found a farmer getting up in the earliest dawn.

‘You want to go in the bedroom, lie down?’ Ingrid said.

‘I can’t sleep with him out there,’ Susan said.

‘Me neither,’ Ingrid said. ‘Bobby’ll be back soon.’

‘Will he? I thought he was going to try catch that guy.’

‘If he does that, I’ll kill him.’

But Bobby Andes was already back. They heard the car in the driveway, the sweep of its headlights through the window again, the car door. They saw Bobby Andes striding up to the cottage, fast into the room, transformed.

‘That was quick,’ Ingrid said. ‘Are they coming?’

‘I got to go to town,’ he said.

‘No, Bobby, not again.’

Notice the change in him, leather face, no debilitating liquid sickness now, only the harder more permanent kind.

‘Wickham’s got the phone. I got to see Ambler myself.’

No panic, but urgent. Everything under control, but effort needed to keep on course. No catastrophe if we keep our heads.

‘Before I go,’ he said. He looked around at the three of them, as if waiting for their attention, though he already had their attention. ‘You need to know what happened tonight.’

‘What happened?’

‘What happened here. What you saw.’

‘I saw what happened,’ Ingrid said.

‘Did you?’ He gave her a look.

‘Oh,’ she said. A silence, queasy.

‘You want us to lie?’ Ingrid Hale said. ‘Please, Bobby, don’t make us lie.’

‘You don’t want to lie? You want to tell the whole truth,
nothing but the truth, so help you God, everything you saw tonight? That what you want?’

She looked miserable. Tony was full of palpitation. She said, ‘Oh Bobby, dear.’

Bobby dear had droopy bloody eyes, his mouth gaped like a fish for air. It always had, but Tony had not noticed it before.

‘I don’t give a shit,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d
like
to have a story. If you don’t want one, the hell with it.’

She slumped in her chair. ‘All right. So what story are we supposed to tell? Are you going to tell us?’

‘That was
Ray Marcus
who shot Lou Bates. Shot him twice. Once in the body, once in the head.’

‘My God,’ Ingrid said.

‘Shot him because Lou had agreed to testify in court.’

Quiet while they think this over. Ingrid gave Tony a desperate look, help, help, though he avoided it.

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Ingrid said.

‘It makes all the god damn sense you’ll need.’

Tony was trying to visualize Ray Marcus shooting Lou Bates.

‘You want to know how he did it?’ Bobby said. ‘You do want to know, don’t you? You can’t just have Ray popping up suddenly with a gun when he’s a prisoner here, right? You want to know?’

‘You’d better tell us then,’ Ingrid said.

‘I’ll tell you. He wasn’t a prisoner. I mean he was here but he left. He left after we had a conversation and I dropped him off at the road on my way to pick up Bates. Only he didn’t go home. Or he went home and got his gun, or got a gun somewhere and hitchhiked back, and that’s when he did it. Ambush. Lay in wait outside the cabin, shot him as I was taking him into the house, caught me by surprise, pow pow.’

‘You’ve got it all figured out,’ Ingrid said.

‘It’s enough.’

‘It’s ridiculous.’

‘Naw it ain’t.’

‘You can’t get away with it. Can you?’

‘What’s to get away with? I got Ambler, I got George. All we need is you guys to agree, not tell more than you need.’

‘Perjury?’

‘Jesus, girl. Think of it as the potential in the situation. It would have happened, given enough time.’

‘Come on, Bobby.’

‘What do you mean, come on? I’m offering you scandal-free days for the rest of my life, whatever that may be. If you think that’s perjury, turn me in, I don’t give a shit.’

She looked at Tony, at Susan. ‘Can you go along with this?’

‘Me?’ Susan said. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

‘You’re supposed to say that Ray Marcus person wasn’t here,’ Ingrid said.

‘He left before you came,’ Bobby said.

She got it. ‘Oh. And then he came and shot the other guy with the beard?’

‘That’s right. If they ask you, that’s what you saw. Only, wait, you didn’t actually see him. You didn’t see the guy with the beard either. All you heard was shots as I was bringing the guy with the beard in from the car.’

‘That’s what I’m supposed to say, huh?’

‘That’s what you’re supposed to say.’

He seemed relieved and pleased with himself. Tony, thinking if I object to this I destroy Bobby Andes, was scrambling through his mind for questions he could be asked on the witness stand.

Ingrid said, ‘He’ll deny it.’

‘His denial ain’t worth shit. He denied killing Tony’s folks.’

‘He’ll go to the police and report it.’

‘He’s not that dumb.’

‘He’ll go to the police and tell what he saw. He’ll tell everything, Bobby. How you kidnapped him and the handcuffs and how you killed Lou.’

‘Nah, he won’t.’

‘How do you know? If it was me I would.’

‘He won’t because he knows they would arrest him for killing Lou. He knows because he knows me and he knows my friends and he knows you three are witnesses. That’s why he won’t go to the police. But if he does go, that’s what he’ll find. He’ll find out no one believes him.’

‘It’s so cynical, Bobby.’

‘What’s cynical? Don’t argue with me. If that’s cynical, give me an alternative. Tell me the non-cynical thing to do.’ He was melodramatic, full of opera.

As for Tony, full of woe, at fault and to blame for everything, he was groping around in the empty spaces of the story he was supposed to tell, looking for its questions. ‘Bobby,’ he said. ‘If Ray Marcus killed Lou Bates, when did he leave here?’ More. ‘Where did he go?’ Still more. ‘How did he get his gun? How did he get back here?’

‘Let me worry about that,’ Bobby said. ‘He left here when I left. I took him in town. I took him in town, yeah, because I didn’t want to do business with Ingrid here, that’s how it was. God knows what he did then. Got hold of a gun. Hitchhiked back this way. Don’t worry about it.’

He was looking at them like a sick scoutmaster. Have you got it now? Can I leave it with you? Are the gaps plugged?

‘Let me recapitulate,’ he said. ‘Shall I do that? Yes. So I brought Ray. When I saw Ingrid here, I took him away again. You waited. Susan came. You wondered where the hell I was. After a while I came back. As I came up to the house with
Lou, bang! Two bangs. You ran out and saw this guy lying on the ground, the other one running away. Simple, right?’

Tony thought how galling to have Ray Marcus on the right side of the law against him.

‘Don’t worry about Ray,’ Bobby said. ‘He’s liable to get killed resisting arrest. Yes?’ To Ingrid. ‘Did I shock you?’

She didn’t say anything.

‘I have a job to do, and I have to find ways to do it.’

No one said anything.

‘Shit. You’re all so fuckin honest. You too, Tony? Your wife and daughter murdered and you sit here splitting hairs?’

‘Bobby,’ Ingrid said, ‘is this how you always work?’ She looked as if she had never seen him before.

‘You criticizing the way I do my job?’

They stared at each other. After a moment he yielded. ‘No, I don’t usually do it like this.’ He sounded reasonable now. ‘No, I never did it like this before.’ Regretful.

‘You’re a stubborn bastard, Bobby,’ Ingrid said. ‘Why can’t you just say you lost control of a prisoner? Then you lost your head and shot him. Will they kill you for that?’

Bobby thought about it. ‘It’s not so simple,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t lose control of prisoners. I prefer my version.’

Tony was thinking about the hostile officials who would be cross-examining him.

‘I’ll explain it to Ambler,’ Andes said. ‘He’ll take care of it. You probably won’t have to say anything at all.’

He rubbed the gun with a handkerchief and went to the door. ‘Be right back.’ They watched him from the porch. He went by the body of Lou where it lay, shadow like roots of a tree, and on down to the river where he flung the gun into the water. When he came back he said, ‘If you’re worried it’s not the truth, think of it as the intrinsic truth. What
happened is what would have happened.’ Then, ‘Tony, I need your help to catch Marcus.’