Voices in the Dark (13 page)

“Please, Mom, not again. We went through it yesterday.” Patricia spoke over a raised knee, her lashes lowered, her concentration on her foot. “Nothing happened.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion. God knows, you have enough of them.” She had on a camisole top and string bikini briefs. Her beauty was undeniable.

“What you’re wearing’s hardly decent,” Regina said with a sense of frustration while breathing in too much scent. You could cut it with a knife. “I don’t want you walking around the house that way.”

“I don’t see what you’re so upset about. Tony’s my brother.”

“Your
step
brother. That’s a world of difference, as you know very well.”

“You’re making too much of it.” Bending her head, her raven hair cascading, she blew on her toes and then rose with a suppleness seen only in the young. “And you always have.”

Regina watched her angle to the dresser with a movement of her buttocks no man would ever ignore, her body a bright thing framed in sunlight from the window. This was her only child, her only recompense from a marriage in which she had been deceived from the start. She said, “I won’t tolerate him in your room.”

“Okay, I hear you.” Patricia squirmed into designer jeans, a yank needed to force them over the flare of her hips. The cutting teeth of the zipper nearly nipped bare skin. “You ought to ease up, Mom. Trust me, for God’s sake.”

She left her daughter’s bedroom and traveled the distance to her stepson’s room, where she stepped into the screech of a rock singer, savage to her ear, an affront to her sensibilities. Anthony killed the stereo in the instant, which did not appease her. A rumpled sheet trailed off the bed, and soiled socks and a stained jockstrap lay on the floor, another affront. She could see into his bathroom. The toilet seat had been left up, and a towel festooned the tank. She regarded him silently, with the frozen lips of a statue. “Sorry,” he said and began to pick up.

“Look at me,” she said, and he unfolded from a crouch, his height exceeding hers, his uncut hair hanging in his face. “No more lies, Anthony. They taint your tongue, make your breath bad.”

He wore a loose shirt over ballooning slacks that tapered to his slim naked feet. With both hands he palmed his hair back. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The truth about yesterday.”

“I swear, we were just talking.”

She had practice looking a liar in the eye. Her first husband had been one. “This is not something I want to discuss with your father,” she said. “Don’t force me to.”

“We didn’t do anything.”

“If I learn otherwise,” she said, “you’re gone.”

• • •

Mary Williams read some Flaubert to Soldier and then a meaningful scene out of D. H. Lawrence. “I don’t need to be put in the mood,” he said. “I’m already there.”

An undertow of melancholy threatened to carry her away, but a sense of absurdity, perhaps her own, held her steady. Putting the book down, she asked, “Whom would you want, Madame Bovary or Lady Chatterley?”

“Both, same time,” he said with a growing hoarseness. “Three-way snarl.”

“That’s greedy.”

“It’s interesting.”

He spoke from a chair, she from the bed, the bottom sheet bared. Between them, a shaft of sunlight swirled with motes of dust like a universe in miniature, all the principles intact. She raised an arm as if to feel on her hand the breath of God guiding the debris. Soldier took it as a gesture to him and uncurled from the chair, aroused before he touched her, ready before she was willing or able. Her arms were rigid, her torso the white of a lunar moth.

Her mind slipped to other things, to strip poker at summer camp, where other girls had conspired to get her naked first, her shyness part of the allure, her humiliation measured into the fun. An older girl snared the moment with a camera, the picture later bandied about, last seen among the kitchen workers.

Soldier said, “You’re not with it.”

“I will be,” she promised, remembering icy jewelry worn by her mother, lush welcomings from her grandmother, and wistful farewells from her father, who had kept a noose in a closet for when he would find the nerve, though her mother had assured her he never would. She was fifteen when he hanged himself and sixteen when she suffered a breakdown, from which she emerged like an actress seeking a role.

Soldier was on his knees and leaning forward from the hips. “What’s the matter?”

“I fear loss,” she said evenly. “Loss is emptiness.”

“What kind of talk is that?”

Under the careful probing of his eyes, she lay like someone slain until he lifted her legs and drove them back to the exclamation mark of parted cleft and anal bud. “What are you doing?

“I’m interested,” he said.

Then he was on her, kissing her with an open mouth, which she endured with the knowledge that he was not integral to her life but merely a collage on the surface of it. Her thoughts were clear, bright, loud inside her skull. Soldier was chosen but unwanted. Without someone, anyone, she was a stranger to herself.

When she felt him dissolve inside her, she waited for him to hop away like a soldier on the run. Instead, overstaying his welcome, he shrank out of her and then propped himself up to look into her face. His eyes were bloodshot, with the same thready redness clinging to the stone of a peach.

“You didn’t come,” he said.

• • •

Chief Morgan keyed open the padlock, loosened the chain, and opened the cell door. Dudley was napping again. Morgan gently shook him awake and said, “Someone to see you.”

His color was pale, disinfectant, with sleep marks withering a cheek. “Has my time come? That’s not an undertaker, is it?” Then his eyes went small in a yawn big enough to threaten his jaw. “I wish he wouldn’t.”

Smoke twirled from a cigarette.

“I had asthma as a child.”

Harley Bodine, spooled silent and tight in pinstripes, viewed him with ferreting eyes, as if reading the fine print of a contract.

“My mother almost lost me.” The cot creaked. Sitting up, Dudley scratched an underarm and smiled at Morgan. “I was dreaming. Little animals were everywhere, and I knew their names.”

“What’s mine?” Bodine said and received a look empty of substance. “He’s not connecting.”

Morgan stepped in. “Answer the question, Dudley.”

The cot creaked again. “I know it’s not Sweeney.”

Bodine’s gaze went to a book that lay open on its pages. “Is that what he reads?”

“This is Mr. Bodine, Dudley. It was his boy who was killed by a subway train. Did you know him?”

“His name was Glen,” Bodine said in a voice that sounded ripped from a bone, menace in his unblinking eyes, and for a bare second something in Dudley’s face altered, as though heat and cold had collided. Dudley was slow to gather words.

“It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“But you knew he wore braces,” Bodine said with dry intensity.

Moments of confusion passed, and Dudley’s voice came out small, with a spin. “Was it in the paper?”

“You tell me.”

Morgan’s attention wavered from one to the other, from Bodine’s chalk part and silky tie to Dudley’s restless forelock. Dudley was concentrating on his thumb, and Morgan hoped he wouldn’t suck it. He did.

Bodine’s shoe scraped, as if a nerve had leaped. “I’ve had enough.”

Morgan, disappointed, held the door as Bodine stepped from the cell. The chain was left to dangle, the padlock to fend for itself. Meg O’Brien looked up when Morgan passed by her desk without a word, Bodine in the lead. Outside, in the gloom of the heat, they stared at each other as if for an instant their feelings matched.

“I don’t need this, Morgan. I’m trying to put what happened to my son behind me.”

“I think he fakes some of that foolishness.”

“He could’ve fooled me. Not you, though, huh?”

Morgan, compelled to defend himself, said, “Two children with Bensington connections have died in apparent accidents. Your son and, three years ago, the eight-year-old daughter of Paul and Beverly Gunner. Both deaths took place outside of Bensington. Boston and Cambridge.”

“What am I supposed to make of that?”

“I’m a policeman. I have to consider outside possibilities.”

“If they’re reasonable, yes. That man in there isn’t.”

Morgan walked him to his car. The car was elegantly free of exterior accessories. He remembered when every automobile had been an overenthusiasm of ornament and chrome, the tires big and fat, the horses under the hood chomping at the bit.

Bodine opened the driver’s door and slipped into quiet luxury. The window lowered itself as if from a verbal command. “My wife and I plan to have a child. Has she told you?”

“No reason she should have.”

“My mistake. I thought it might interest you.”

Morgan watched the automobile glide around the sweep of the lot and vanish through the gateless opening in the shrubs. “It’s nothing to me,” he said to himself, and the words had weight but not reality.

• • •

It was cocktail time when Harley Bodine entered the busy lounge at the country club. Carrying a wineglass and a smoldering cigarette, Bodine mingled easily, with a renewed sense of himself, for he’d been challenged and tested and was stronger for it. He felt experienced, felt about him almost an aura of immortality. Here and there he returned smiles. Phoebe Yarbrough was a Calder mobile in a sequin dress. Illusions shaved and contoured her; her height diminished her husband’s. “Where’s Kate?” she asked.

“Working on something,” he said. “She fancies she’s a writer.”

Myles Yarbrough wore an aspect of worry and unease and offered a handshake. The small diffident knot of his tie squeezed up a cleft of skin when he spoke. He was hard to hear, for his sentence frayed at the end.

Phoebe said clearly, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Does it bother you?” Bodine asked, unaccustomed to the bold way she looked into his eyes.

“May I?” She took a drag from it, and her face flared out of a pageboy, hollowed dramatically under high cheekbones, and seemed in a pending state of foreclosure. She was not beautiful, he decided, merely vaguely bizarre.

He moved on, abandoning his cigarette in the nearest ashtray, and spotted the Gunners near the buffet table. Paul Gunner was eating bleeding meat off a skewer, his stance preemptive, unopposed, supreme.

Seconds later Gunner plodded toward the men’s, and Bodine followed.

The mirrors were ice, the floor a checkerboard of black and white. He and Gunner spaced themselves a urinal apart, and Gunner pissed without looking, without touching, shivers running through his shoulders. Bodine stood straight, like a priest being watched.

“I have something to tell you.”

“Not now,” Gunner grunted.

“It’s about my son.”

“This isn’t the time.”

“It’s also about your daughter.”

Gunner shook himself dry by jiggling his stomach. “I don’t discuss family in a shithouse. Call me later.”

They moved in unison to the mirrors, Bodine to rinse his hands, Gunner to pull a hair from his nose. The nostrils were strawberry, as if he’d had a bleed. Bodine subjected his hands to the fierce breath of a blower as Gunner heaved away.

“My private line.”

Bodine nodded.

• • •

Peering through the bars, Chief Morgan watched Dudley consume an apple. Dudley ate it to the core, to the pips, which he spat into his hand and deposited neatly in a saucer. Then he looked up and said, “I could use a clock.”

“I’d like a million dollars.”

“I’d like a cuckoo clock.”

“You’re cuckoo enough,” Morgan said, opening the cell door, both ends of the chain banging against the bars. “How about a stroll outdoors?”

“Yes,” Dudley said, popping up from the cot. “I could use the exercise.”

Moonlight drifting through clouds was a kind of spiderweb holding the night together. In front of the town hall the emerald eyes of a raccoon glared, then vanished. Morgan crossed the street with a hard step. Dudley’s seemed weightless, and when they entered the green he moved as if some half-heard music were drawing him along, giving his step a slow lilt, his breathing a mild beat. He touched Morgan’s arm.

“I won’t run.”

“If you do, I won’t chase you,” Morgan said wearily, stiff in the joints. The night delivered its own sounds, its liquid tastes, its touches of the unknown. Shrubs charred by shadows stood jagged. “It would settle a lot if I knew who you were.”

As they moved deeper onto the green, Morgan’s gait became more like Dudley’s, almost somnambulistic. The darkness had various shades and shapes, the deepest dark lurking in the trees. Dudley said, “Are you angry?”

“I think you like making a fool of me.”

“Yes, you are angry.”

“I think you rehearse your lines.”

Dudley gazed up at drifting clouds, all resembling slow barges bereft of goods. “We’ll never see eye to eye, Chief. That’s because you only have two.”

Morgan spoke softly. “Would you agree to a polygraph?”

“A lie detector? I wouldn’t want to be strapped in.”

“It isn’t like that.”

“I wouldn’t want anyone getting into my mind.”

Morgan felt a greater stiffness in his legs. The texture of the air had altered, and a breeze strolled toward him. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks and looked around, for Dudley was no longer with him. “What are you doing?”

His hand was out. “I felt a drop.”

Morgan was glad of the distance between them. It seemed to lessen a tension, and he spoke in his coolest voice. “In this town we like our eccentrics harmless, not homicidal.”

“I go where there’s a need.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m a professional,” Dudley said, only a part of his face visible. “A hitman.”

“You don’t look like Mafia to me.”

“I only do children. Reasonable rates.”

Morgan felt a greater weariness than before. Who is this man, he asked himself, and why am I listening to him? “I see. Contract stuff.”

“Yes. I’m quite good.”

“How do you get business? You can’t advertise.”

Dudley smiled through the dark, teeth and dimples showing. “Word of mouth.”