Too Close to Home (7 page)

“Sherry,” I said, “you should go to the hospital, see a doctor.”

“Christ’s sake!” the mayor said, throwing some bloodied paper into the wastebasket. “I’m the one who needs medical attention. What the fuck are you doing, asking her if she needs to go to a hospital?”

I gave the mayor my best stare. “I’d be happy to take you to the ER right now if you’d like, but first I have to make a call to the
Standard
.”

The mayor blinked. That was all he needed, to have the press show up asking about his bit dick. He mumbled something under his breath and went back into the bathroom.

I turned my attention back to Sherry Underwood. “Whaddya say?”

She was getting to her feet. “My shoes,” she said. “I have to find my shoes.”

I saw a pair of high-heeled sandals half tucked under the bed. “Over here,” I said, pointing. Sherry slipped her feet into them, teetered on them precariously, an amateur. She’d need a couple more years to master them.

“I guess I’m okay,” she said.

“You got parents?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“They’re dead,” she said. “More or less.”

“Who looks after you?” I asked.

“Linda.”

“Who’s Linda?” Then I thought, the girl in the hall?

“She’s my friend. We look after each other.”

“Sherry, you’re a kid, this is no way to live. There are people, agencies, folks who can help you out.”

“I’m okay,” she insisted.

“No, you are not okay.” I looked into her purse again, pulled out the notebook. I flipped through the pages. It was part diary, part address book, part accounting ledger. One page would have a date followed by a column of numbers, presumably how much she’d made that day. Another page would have a couple of phone numbers next to names or initials, like J., Ed, P., and L.R. I didn’t, at a glance, see Randy’s name in there. I flipped past more pages of shopping lists, license plate numbers, the phone number for something called “Willows,” until I finally reached a blank page.

“That’s personal stuff,” Sherry said.

I took a pen from inside my jacket and wrote “Jim Cutter.” And wrote down my phone number.

I said, “You have any problems, you call me, okay? If you decide to take this further, you’ll need a witness to back up your story.” I didn’t have much hope that Sherry would make a complaint to the police, but you never knew about these things.

She didn’t even look in the notebook when I handed it, along with her wallet and purse, back to her. “Whatever,” she said.

“You need to get your shit together,” I said. “You’re a kid. Jesus, you’re too young to be on your own like this. How long you been doing this? Stop now while you’ve still got a chance.” She wouldn’t look at me. “Are you listening to me? Getting kicked in the jaw, that could be the best thing that ever happens to you if it knocks some sense into your head.”

She shrugged.

As she started to head for the hotel room door, the mayor came out of the bathroom and said, “You forgettin’ something, honey?”

She looked at him, cocked her head. “Huh?”

“My money,” he said. “I want it back. I might have to pay for some fucking rabies shots.”

Sherry shot him the finger. The gesture so enraged Finley that he started moving across the carpet for her, pretty quickly for a middle-aged guy with a wounded pecker. He grabbed the girl by the elbow, hard enough to make her yelp. Her purse slid off her shoulder and down her arm as she tried to wrest herself away from him.

“Hey,” I said.

“I want my money back right now, all of it.” He had his hand locked on that elbow, and he was shaking the girl.

“Randy,” I said for the second time, figuring further disrespect from me would make him direct his anger my way, and he’d let the girl go.

No such luck. With his free hand, the mayor reached for the girl’s neck. That was when I did it.

I made a fist and ran it right into the mayor’s nose.

Finley released Sherry, screamed, threw both hands to his face, tenting them over his nose.

“Jesus!” he screamed, blood trickling out between his fingers. “My nose! You broke my fucking nose!”

I hadn’t, as it turned out. I’d only bloodied it. But at that moment, I knew, regardless of whether his nose was broken, I was going to be looking for a new job the next day. As the mayor returned to the bathroom for more tissue, I thought about the best-paying job—something that didn’t involve putting a brush to canvas—I’d ever had.

It would have been when I was eighteen, cutting grass all summer for a landscaping outfit in Albany. I think I liked it so much because it was a job where you could see what you’d done. You cut a front yard, every pass with the lawn mower, back and forth, you could see the progress. You knew how much you’d accomplished, you knew how much you still had to do. Pushing the Lawn-Boy, watching the perimeter shrink with every trip, the sense of job satisfaction grew. How many jobs could you say that about?

That was more than twenty years ago, and I hadn’t had that sense of accomplishment since. Certainly not during my stint trying to make it as a welfare investigator. I’d felt like shit every day in that job. And the time I’d spent working for a large security firm hadn’t been much better. I already had a pickup truck. Buy a trailer, a secondhand lawn tractor, some mowers, I’d be in business. Get some kids working for me, maybe Derek could help out during the summer. Good hours, might even lose a bit of weight.

I wasn’t sure how Ellen would respond, but I had a feeling she’d be okay with it. “You’re still not pursuing your dream,” she’d say, “but it’s no worse than what you’re doing.”

All that went through my mind in a couple of seconds. Then, back to reality, as the mayor tended to his wounds in the bathroom, I said to Sherry, “Take off.”

She slipped out the door. “Jesus,” I heard Linda say, probably looking at Sherry’s face. “What the fuck?”

When the mayor came out of the bathroom, I took hold of his hand and with my other slapped the Grand Marquis keys into his palm. “Take it easy around the corners,” I said. “It turns wide.”

I ran into Lance in the lobby.

“What happened?” he asked, breathless. “What’s going on?”

“He’s in there. If he asks you to bandage his dick, get a raise first.”

“Jesus, what the hell happened?”

I didn’t have the energy to explain. Instead, I phoned Ellen and asked her to come pick me up.

SEVEN

A
TYPICAL SUNDAY MORNING, we might have slept in. It’s the one day of the week where I don’t feel guilty sleeping late. If it weren’t for the goddamn work ethic drilled into me by my father, I think I might be happy to stay under the covers until noon most days, but I generally wake up before six, thinking about the things I have to get done. Not just work stuff, but things around the house. If there aren’t clients’ yards to mow, there’s a screen door that needs new screening, a slow drain that needs to be unclogged, a busted lawn mower that needs to be fixed.

But Sundays, screw it.

There’s certainly no church to get up and dressed for. I’m not a big fan of organized religion. Ellen’s parents raised her as a Presbyterian, but sometime in her late teens she simply didn’t buy it anymore and couldn’t be persuaded to go. I was never sure whether being a lapsed Presbyterian was that big a deal. It wasn’t like being a lapsed Catholic. My parents, on the other hand, had raised me to be nothing, other than a decent, I hoped, and responsible individual who could figure out what was the right and moral thing to do in any given situation, and then do it.

My track record in that regard, however, had not always been exemplary. Working for as long as I did for Mayor Finley is a case in point.

While for Derek, a standard sleep-in means getting up in time for supper, for me and Ellen, it’s somewhere between eight and nine in the morning. But this was hardly a typical Sunday morning, not even twenty-four hours since we’d learned about the Langleys.

And even though our scare in the night—Derek’s rendezvous with Penny—had turned out to be nothing, it took us a long time to get back to sleep after that. Around six, lying on my side and staring at the clock radio’s digital display, I sensed Ellen was awake as well. We had our backs to each other, and no one was moving, but there’s a way she breathes when she’s sleeping, deeper, that I wasn’t hearing, so I reached over and lightly touched her back.

“Hey,” I said.

Ellen turned over without saying anything, looked into my eyes without so much as a smile, then reached out and pulled me close to her, pressing her body up against mine. I responded as she knew I would, and she rolled me on top of her. We engaged in an act of wordless lovemaking that was born not out of any kind of sexual frenzy, but a need to reassure ourselves that we were still alive, that we had each other, that we could connect in this most intimate of ways, aware that at any moment, without any warning whatsoever, it could all end.

ELLEN WAS PUTTING a plate of French toast in front of me when she looked out the window and said, “Barry’s coming around the side of the house.”

A moment later, Barry Duckworth was on the deck, rapping lightly at the back door. It was nearly eight in the morning by now, and Ellen and I had been up a couple of hours but only just now gotten to breakfast.

I stayed in my seat at the kitchen table while Ellen opened the screen door. “Hi, Barry,” she said.

Barry nodded, almost apologetically. “Sorry to disturb you folks so early,” he said.

“Come on in,” I said.

“Coffee?” Ellen said.

“That’d be nice,” Barry said. “Black.” He stepped into the kitchen, moving tentatively toward the table and me. Only eight in the morning and already his white shirt was starting to stick to his ample stomach. Ellen handed him a mug of black coffee as he glanced at my breakfast, drenched in maple syrup. Ellen noticed, and said, “A slice of French toast, Barry?”

“I really shouldn’t,” he said.

“It’s no trouble.”

“Well, if you insist,” he said. “All I had before I left home was a tiny bowl of bran with some strawberries on it.”

“Sounds healthy,” I said.

“Maureen’s trying to get me to lose some weight,” he said. “So I eat healthy at home, then get something else later.”

I smiled and motioned to the chair across from me. Barry took a load off. I saw Ellen dipping two slices of bread into some eggs, turn the heat back on under the frying pan.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

Barry ran his hand over his nearly bald pate. “Well, we’re following a number of enquiries,” he said. “Isn’t that how the Brits say it?”

“I think so,” I said.

“You can’t have been a lawyer as long as Albert was and not made a few enemies over the years. I’m sure he knew plenty of folks who might be capable of this sort of thing.”

Ellen said, “I can’t imagine anyone being capable of what happened over there.”

“Yeah, well,” Barry said. “I know what you mean. I was gonna say, when you’re in my line of work, you start accepting that people are capable of all sorts of horrible things, but the God’s honest truth is, I’ve never seen anything like this. Not a whole family. Not like that. Not in Promise Falls.”

“This is America,” Ellen said, putting the two slices of bread into the frying plan. “These kinds of things can happen anywhere.”

“We’ve had more than our share the last little while,” he said. I perked up at that. “You have?”

“Well, a couple anyway,” Barry Duckworth said. “There was that one out back of the Trenton, three weeks ago.” A bar on the north side of town. Not an area where I get many calls to cut people’s lawns. “Guy named Edgar Winsome. Forty-two, married, couple of kids, cement worker. Shot in the chest.”

“Jesus,” I said. “A bar fight?”

Barry shook his head. “Maybe. But it didn’t spill out of the bar. No one saw him having it out with anybody. Nobody remembers him getting into an argument or anything. Came in, had half a dozen beers, talked with a few of his buddies, leaves, they find him later, out back. Loud music, no one heard a thing.”

“He must have pissed off somebody,” I said.

Barry nodded at that. “Seems a reasonable assumption. He wasn’t robbed. Still had his wallet, cash, and charge cards.”

“Well,” said Ellen, flipping the toast.

“And we haven’t gotten anywhere with it,” Barry said.

“A couple,” I said.

“Huh?” said Barry, taking a sip of his black coffee.

“You said there were a couple.”

“Yeah. The other one, older guy, fifty, last name of Knight, has a machine shop about five miles west of town, on 29. He was locking up one evening, everyone else had already left, still light out, someone comes along and pops him in the head. This was about a week before the Trenton guy bought it, a Friday night.”

Ellen put the French toast on a plate. “Powdered sugar and syrup?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, please,” Barry said. Ellen dressed his toast and set the plate in front of him. “Good God, this looks magnificent,” he said.

“How come I don’t know about this?” I asked him.

He was about to put the first forkful of toast and egg and syrup into his mouth, and he looked at me. “I can’t help it you’re uninformed.” He savored his mouthful, swallowed, raised the mug to his lips, had some more coffee. “To be fair, the Trenton thing, papers only gave it a couple of inches, guy gets killed behind a bar, how weird is that, really? The Knight guy, at the machine shop, that one got a bit of attention, but not all that much, I suppose.”

Ellen said, “That’s when we were away, remember?”

I thought a moment. We’d driven to Vermont, taken the ferry across to Burlington for a couple of nights, an anniversary getaway, leaving Derek on his own, but not quite. We’d arranged for Ellen’s sister Carol to drop by periodically, make him some dinner, pop by unannounced in the evening. We weren’t going to give him the opportunity to have a party at the house, and it’s fair to say he hated us for it. “Add it to the list,” I’d told him at the time.

“By the time you got back, it was out of the paper,” Barry said. “Honest to God, Ellen, this is delicious. I shouldn’t even be having this. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to skip lunch. This should carry me through the whole day.”

Ellen smiled, but it looked forced. She had to be wondering, as was I, why Barry was here so early on a Sunday morning. It was a given that he was working on the Langley murders, but I didn’t believe he’d dropped in just to be friendly, or score a breakfast out of us. I had the feeling Barry was working up to something.

“So, Barry,” I said, “these various leads you have, how’re they coming?”

He waited to swallow another bite. He was making fast work of Ellen’s French toast. It’s one of the things she does best. He glanced into his mug, saw that it was empty, and said to Ellen, “You got another half a cup there?”

“Oh, sure,” Ellen said, and brought the pot over to the table and poured him another full cup.

“Oh, that’s great.” He used his napkin to dab some syrup from the corner of his mouth. “We have some idea of the order of things, that Albert answered the door, that he was probably shot first, that his wife was shot next, and that Adam, he was shot trying to get away.”

Imagining it, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Right there at the back door,” Barry said. “He almost made it. Maybe, in a weird kind of way, it’s a good thing he didn’t. If he’d made it, he’d probably have run straight here. And then whoever was coming after him would have been led right to your door.”

Ellen gave me a look. This wasn’t the sort of thing she needed to hear.

“Barry,” I said, “you and I, we’re friends, but I’m guessing you didn’t drop by just to shoot the shit. What’s on your mind?”

He shoved the last bite of French toast into his mouth, washed it down with coffee, and said, “It’s about your boy.”