by Jason Allen
After a pause, he added, “On the lives of my kids, I didn’t kill him. I would never have even hurt him. Just like I’d never hurt you. Never.”
Gina hadn’t intended to listen, but since she’d been forced to lie there pressed beneath him, unable to move, his story had seeped in regardless, detail by detail. The dead man under the blanket, whose name Leo said was Henry, their secret affair, the accident, his whole bizarre story—while Leo had been speaking she’d witnessed the disastrous chain of events from Thursday night as if watching a sped-up movie reel—it was all too crazy and too detailed to be a lie.
“And the rest of it,” Leo said, finally releasing some pressure from his hand over her mouth. “The conversation you heard today. That was another part of this whole fucking awful mess. See, Angelique was here Thursday night, too.”
While he paused to catch his breath, Gina shouted into his hand and squirmed to get him off her, though much more out of frustration now than fear.
“She saw me with Henry in the pool just after he died,” he said. “But she misread what she’d seen, and when she ran off I went into a sort of autopilot mode and chased her. I needed to explain to her what I’m explaining to you now—that it had been an accident. This whole nightmare started with an accident. And then somehow it escalated into something so much worse. I chased her, she was screaming. I tackled her. I didn’t know what to do. I’d just held my dead lover in my arms...and I was so drunk. So insanely drunk.”
During this last bit of his story, Gina had been lulled into a drowsy state, hating him still for scaring the shit out of her, but she also couldn’t imagine him killing someone. She believed everything he’d said, even felt a twinge of pity for him now. Her assumption about him forcing himself on Tiffany’s friend had been so far from the truth. The truth hadn’t involved any predatory, pedophilic evildoing—only tragedy. The world of the past few days, for everyone in her life, was just so damned sad. She sobbed quietly. For the man in the blanket, for Corey and Dylan, for herself—maybe even for Leo.
“Last things to tell you,” he said, still breathing unevenly. “Someone hit me from behind just after Angelique and I fell to the ground, knocked me out cold. Whoever it was, she referred to him as her boyfriend, and now the two of them, they want money to keep quiet about Henry. I can’t prove it had been an accident, and supposedly they have photos. But that’s not even the worst part. Henry’s mother reported him missing. He’s only been here for the past twenty-four hours, but supposedly she hadn’t heard from him all week, long enough for a detective to take the case and to call his phone. I listened to that message, too. No one’s seen him since Pete dropped us off, and even though I begged him not to, I know Henry told his mother about me. He was excited to tell her I’d invited him out here—he’d told me as much in the car. Sooner or later, all the detective will have to go on is that Henry was supposed to be here. I’m in an impossible position, Gina. I’m sorry for this, for everything. I’ll stop now. I’m going to take my hand away. Just please don’t scream. Please. Don’t scream.”
SATURDAY
TWENTY-THREE
Throughout the morning guests arrived at the Sheffield estate in limousines and luxury cars, and Corey tried to will away the encroaching delirium from lack of sleep while trudging up the stairs a half-dozen times loaded down with suitcases, satchels, garment bags and carryalls. Aside from a brief nap sometime around sunrise, he and Angelique had stayed awake all night again, talking about the craziness with Ray outside Layne’s house, then about their plan for the money handoff with Leo, though mostly they spent the night listening to the ocean waves, huddled together under a blanket on the sand.
Out of breath and sweating, he passed by some of the new arrivals and others who’d spent the previous night in the guest bedrooms, most of them already decked out in awful yuppie-wear—the tennis shorts or white slacks or khakis with a sharp crease ironed down the center, collared T-shirts (also ironed) or designer button-downs (also ironed) rolled just above the wrists or tied at the belly button. And worst of all, those few with sweaters draped over their shoulders, the sweater arms loosely folded at their chests, a layer that served absolutely no purpose in the unseasonable heat other than to advertise the obvious—that the person wearing the sweater like a bright white stole was rich, and today they’d dressed in their Hamptons-wear.
Corey had been doing his best to bat away hateful thoughts, recalling that here and there during the summers he’d worked at the estate a certain guest hadn’t been so bad, some had even been nice to him. But today the lack of sleep opened him to the old resentments, and they welled up over and over, especially after he’d recognized that none of the guests seemed to notice his existence at all once they’d handed off their bags. Despite his efforts to think about something else, this sense of invisibility gnawed at him. It also occurred to him that no one in his real life had ever spent a day as these people were spending theirs today—waited on hand and foot, yawning poolside, bored in paradise.
After he’d finally hauled the last two bags from the porch to a third-floor bedroom and returned downstairs to see what other tasks Mrs. Sheffield had in store for him, he passed by two middle-aged couples munching on breakfast snacks in the sunroom and overheard fragments of their conversation about how awful the holiday traffic had been when they left the city, the four of them exchanging complaints about how they’d endured a four-hour crucible all the way up the Long Island Expressway, Sunrise Highway and finally Montauk Highway. Widening his search for Sheila, he passed by other guests, some with even more distance in their eyes, some wandering the downstairs rooms and a few scattered pairs strolling outside toward the pool with mimosas in hand. They all had an oddly dazed look, as though they’d volunteered to while the day away as extras in an incredibly boring film, killing time before the next meal by lounging poolside or moving from the sunshine to a patch of shade, or vice versa. Nothing to do and nowhere to be, and yet they complained to each other about the people in their lives or the state of things in their companies, though more often than not they complained to the help, sometimes to Corey, though usually to Gina or Josie, their complaints loosely veiled as requests.
It wasn’t a good feeling, loathing each and every guest and the Sheffields themselves—especially Leo Sheffield for what he’d done to Angelique—but Corey continued wearing his servant-boy mask as he plodded along the lawn toward Sheila, who’d waved at him from the porch steps, taking some solace as he imagined Leo pacing back and forth in the master bedroom, his feet licked by the flames of his own private level of hell.
“I have a very important task for you,” Sheila said, pointing at the muddy paw prints Clay’s dog had tracked across the painted floorboards. “We need to rectify this situation, wouldn’t you say? Our guests should be able to walk barefoot without fear of infection.”
Corey looked down at the paw prints and called her a psycho in his head. Lack of sleep made it much more difficult to hide his disdain, but then he thought of Angelique receiving a million dollars of the Sheffields’ family fortune and managed to smile as he answered, “I’m on it. You can rely on me, Missus S.”
She led him inside the house to a supply closet, handed him a large metal bucket and explained which environmentally friendly soap to use, emphasizing more than once the importance of his mission. A few minutes later, he carried the sloshing bucket of soapy water, a mop and two oversize beach towels out to the porch, sweating as he got to work. Because the old-fashioned bucket didn’t come equipped with a wringer, each pass Corey made with the mop left the porch sopping wet and dangerously slippery from the soap. To counter that, Sheila expected him to get on his hands and knees every ten feet or so and rub the porch boards dry with the towels until the entire fifty-foot length gleamed once more.
He was ten minutes into swabbing and drying the boards like a pirate ship’s deckhand when the jingling of dog tags pulled Corey’s attention from the section
of floor he’d been rubbing with the towel. Polly shook pool water from her thick coat, looked right at him and then charged back and forth across the nearest flowerbeds, then veered toward the porch, already too close to the steps for him to have any chance of altering her course. He stood and tilted his head from side to side to crack his neck. The dog’s tongue flapped and slobbered, and she appeared to be smiling as she thundered past, stamping out a new track of brown paw prints down the entire length of painted boards. Polly made it to the opposite end, launched from the steps and circled quickly on the lawn before scampering back up. She charged right at him, splotching a whole new trail of tracks in her wake, which for Corey was the last straw—he lunged to grab her but fell hard on his knees and elbows, and she rumbled past, barely escaping his outstretched hand.
Without thinking, he dropped his towel and chased after her, leaping to his right off the steps and then streaking across the grass along the side of the house as though someone were chasing him, running as fast as he ever had. From behind, some of the people by the pool whistled and cheered him on as the dog picked up speed through the lawn ornaments and chess pieces. Corey began to suck wind even before he passed the final bronze bishop and rook, but he continued pushing, refusing to let up as he followed Polly’s trail past the tennis courts and the toolshed. His lungs burned, his legs felt shaky and yet he couldn’t slow down. Why was he chasing this stupid dog? The question sapped his energy as though someone suddenly pulled a plug, and he slowed to a jog. A few wobbly steps later, it occurred to him that the dog wasn’t merely playing with him and enjoying the chase, she’d been running toward a specific destination. She wanted him to follow her to that spot way out in the woods where he’d watched Leo dragging his friend. The dog was leading him there, to the body.
Fueled by a curiosity he couldn’t ignore, he quickened his pace into the woods between some of the wider pine trunks, and after a minute, in the distance, he saw the mound over by the neighbors’ dark hedge wall. Polly crouched beside the body, her tags jingling like mad as she growled and tugged at the corner of the blanket, tearing the fabric. Corey approached her and tried to shoo her away, but the dog had her front paws dug in for leverage, pulling and ripping the blanket more with each thrust of her jaw until suddenly a scrap tore free.
Polly bounded past in a blur, once again just beyond Corey’s reach. He fell to his hands and knees and watched her run full-stride through the woods with the scrap in her mouth, with no energy left to follow. She had too big a lead, and he knew her trajectory, anyhow—straight back across the acres of lawn. Easy enough to assume that she would first celebrate her theft by tramping her dirty paws all along the porch, and then would likely show off her newfound treasure to the sunbathers by the pool. Leo, he thought, you’re so fucked.
Exhausted, with his head tipped forward, Corey covered his nose against the smell as he crept the last couple feet and then stood beside the body, horrified to find it only partially covered by the blanket. Three of Henry’s mottled fingers lay curled above the dirt, his bare shoulder and the left half of his face exposed. The dead man’s wrinkled eyelid, thankfully, still remained mostly closed, but the purplish spiderweb of capillaries along his skin and the pine needles stuck to his open lips were disturbing enough. He’d watched Mr. Sheffield kiss this young guy, both before and after his death. Leo definitely hadn’t killed him; even so, the sight of this poor guy lying here like trash felt so wrong that Corey considered saying, The hell with the money, just call the police.
But then something beyond the promise of a huge payday for Angelique and the possibility of escaping with her that night compelled him to let the universe decide how it all should go, as a mosquito-like thought pierced his conscience—a clear vision of Leo behind bars for a murder he hadn’t committed and which hadn’t actually occurred. Corey hurriedly pulled the blanket over Henry’s clawed hand and head, then scuttled around gathering piles of pine needles and spreading them over the body until he’d effectively camouflaged it so much better than Leo had.
He couldn’t remain out here another minute. Sheila Sheffield would be looking for him, livid when she saw crisscrossing tracks of Polly’s paw prints all along the porch. Little did she know that, if not for his complicity in keeping her husband’s secret, the estate would be a crime scene within the hour, a breaking news story. National, maybe even international news. He felt no affection for this family, no discernable sympathy or respect, so why did he feel such a strong obligation to protect the guy who’d scared the hell out of Angelique? He had no answer beyond two facts: first, Leo had been decent to Gina over the years; second, Leo hadn’t hurt Henry at all, so it would just be wrong for him to be hauled off to prison for murder.
He backed away from the body, his hand still over his nose.
I’m not protecting him much longer, though, he thought, and started toward the house with two comforting thoughts playing in his head on a loop: As soon as he hands over the cash to Angelique, we’re gone... After that, Leo’s on his own.
TWENTY-FOUR
Leo paced in his bedroom after going through his messages.The same detective who’d called Henry had left a voice mail for him. Detective Faraday conveyed the details of Henry’s disappearance, the fact that Henry’s mother had searched his apartment and found Leo’s number, and finally ended the call with a stern “Please call me as soon as possible.” Leo tossed the phone on the bed, yanked the balcony doors open and was met by a humid morning breeze. Gina knew about Henry now. This detective awaited his response. Angelique wanted a million dollars in exchange for her silence and for not releasing the photos her co-blackmailer had taken the night Henry died. Leo had far less than a full million in the wall safe, and no solid option as to how to get his hands on the rest, even less of an idea of who to ask to bring another seven or eight hundred thousand here from the city by nightfall.
He poured four fingers of Scotch and pulled one of the antique Victorian-era chairs that no one ever sat on from the bedroom to the balcony and slumped down. Sipping his drink with his chin in his hand, he gazed out through the wrought-iron bars and watched the guests milling around between the porch steps and the pool. Sooner or later, one or two of them would no doubt wander out to the other side of the property, drunk or horny or just curious to explore. Sooner or later, Angelique and her partner would decide to break their word and screw him. Sooner or later, Gina might decide to follow her conscience and call the cops. And worst of all, sooner—rather than later—if his phone call wasn’t returned, Detective Faraday would pull up to the intercom at the gates and ask to be let in.
Looking out through the balcony bars, he felt trapped, caged, imprisoned. His father’s words returned in conjunction with the pounding in his temples: Be a man... No son of mine... You represent me when you go out into the world. Leonard Sr. had never haunted him so persistently, his voice itself the original prison.
Leo focused on his two sons lying out on lounge chairs alongside the pool, hoping to avoid his father’s voice by observing them. Andy had all the traits of a stereotypical man’s man, the gorgeous girlfriend on his arm to boot. And yet Clay had remained single most of his young life, never with a serious girlfriend at all. The sensitive son, the one who preferred dolls to toy soldiers as a child, just as Leo had—for years now he’d been more interested in his dog, Polly, than in dating women.
Leonard Sr. had beaten Leo into a sort of brainwashed submission after he’d showed some of the same affectations Clay had displayed early on and never felt the need to suppress. He’d forced Leo to deny his true nature prior to his death, and that denial had remained entrenched within him for all the decades since. For nearly sixty years now, not only had Leo never vocalized to anyone that he was gay, he’d never even allowed the thought to linger, not even when alone with Henry.
My father, for all his fury, Leo thought, did he hate me for mirroring what he’d denied in himself? He stared through the balcony bars for
another minute, focused on Clay more than the others, hoping his son might live a much freer life than he had, when suddenly a commotion arose down below. Most everyone bordering the pool began whooping and hollering as Polly darted past, followed by Corey running after her, both of them racing at top speed toward the north side of the property.
Leo stood and gripped his rocks glass. From his high vantage point he watched Gina’s son chasing the dog across the acres to his right, through the sculptures and past the tennis courts and between the old-growth oaks on the way to the pines. He gripped his glass tighter, realizing where Polly was headed.
He held his breath as the dog and the boy grew smaller and smaller, approaching the literal skeleton in Leo’s secret closet. Then, one after the other, the two tiny bodies way out there veered sharply into the woods and disappeared. Leo felt an intense pressure from head to toe, as if he’d entered a deep-sea trench and kept on descending, the surrounding water squeezing the oxygen from his lungs, his brain, from each and every blood vessel. His grip loosened. His glass slipped through his fingers. He couldn’t bear to look down. He took a step back as his sons and the dozen or so guests beside the pool sharply turned their heads toward the balcony in unison, alerted by the sound of smashing glass.
He had to head out there, head Corey off the trail if possible; if there was still any time. If the boy had already seen Henry’s body, Leo would need to hold him off in the woods long enough to explain, to plead, to bribe him if need be. Still in his robe and slippers, Leo double-timed his way downstairs and out of the seemingly empty house through a screen door on the opposite end from the sunbathers by the pool. He jogged while glancing over his shoulder every few steps, hoping nobody had seen him, though the one person he’d most hoped to avoid appeared in his periphery a moment before she ordered him to stop.
