King Maybe

by Timothy Hallinan

  Two minutes down, six to go.

  I laid out the long piece of ribbon on the floor and rolled her over it until it wound around the blanket multiple times in a spiral, like the red stripe on a barber pole, and then I pulled it as taut as I could and secured the ends, tightly enough that I didn’t think she’d slip out of the blanket. I grabbed the shoe I’d removed from her foot, paired it with the one on the carpet, and put them, side by side, very neatly in the hallway, just outside the entrance to the drawing room, where I figured they’d give Granger a heart attack. In pursuit of heart attack number two for dear Jeremy, I gimped as fast as I could down to her bedroom and pulled open some drawers at random, assembling a couple of blouses and two pairs of jeans, laying them out on the bed as someone would who was packing. I left the drawers open and also slid aside two of the doors to her enormous closet and took a last squint. Persuasive, I thought. The shoes in the hall, the clothes on the bed.

  All laid out by a dead woman.

  Seeing a big purse on a table by the door, I grabbed it and hung the strap over my shoulder. Of my arbitrary eight minutes, a little less than five remained. He had to be on his way, had to be arriving soon. It suddenly made sense: he was a control freak on the scale of Caligula, and he’d want to be in charge when the cops poured in.

  In the drawing room, I replaced and smoothed the corner flap of carpet that Granger had kicked up. Then, with an explosion of pain in my knee, I knelt beside Suley, put my arms around her, and almost gasped when I lifted her from the floor: she weighed practically nothing. Carrying her in both arms, one beneath her shoulders and the other under her knees, the way I’d carried Kathy over the threshold of our house all those years ago, I limped her down the hall, the big purse slapping against my left side. Once in the elevator, I looped her arms, her wrists still secured by the ribbon, over my head and around my neck and started very carefully up the ladder, climbing only with the good leg and then putting my weight on the bad one just long enough for me to get the stronger leg secure on the next rung. From time to time, I had to put one arm around Suley to prevent her from swaying back and forth and pulling me off balance. It was a slow, painful climb, but eventually we were both on top of the elevator car, and I brought the ladder up, hand over hand, and propped it against the elevator shaft for the second half of the climb. I laid her down gently on top of the elevator and went up the ladder with the flat boxes, which I set in the entrance to the crawl space with the purse beside them, and then, breathing hard, went back down again to get her. This time it was even harder. Once I was up there, I hauled both of us into the space, onto the spongy cellulose, and positioned her on her back on the flattened boxes. On my hands and knees and keeping my head down, I used the boxes as a sort of sled, towing her around to the back of the elevator shaft, where there were only a couple of feet between the back of the shaft and the exterior wall. Putting my weight on the knee was enough to make me groan. If Granger did somehow know of this space and sent the police up to check it out, which I doubted he would, they wouldn’t be able to see this area without actually coming in and crawling all the way around, as I had. I scooped cellulose from between two of the two-by-twelve ceiling joists until I could ease Suley into the space I’d made, and then I placed the boxes on top of her to create a flat surface and covered them evenly with the insulation. I backed off a little bit and shone the penlight on it. It looked good.

  I had less than a minute left of my imposed time limit, and what remained was the impossible part.

  Sitting with my legs dangling into the shaft to ease the strain on the knee, I unlooped the long coil of clothesline and tied a knot every three or four feet as fast as I could, trying to drown out the laughter of the Cub Scouts who’d left me behind all those years ago as they scaled the rope and the ranks, and the barely concealed displeasure of my father every time I came home with the same solitary badge I’d had when I left. With my minute long gone, I looped one end of the rope over an upright two-by-four that looked sturdy, gave it a test yank, and dangled the free end down the elevator shaft and through the open hatch. Then I went back down the ladder.

  Ninety seconds later I was hurrying, as fast as my stiff leg would permit, along the first-floor corridor to the kitchen and counting as a miracle every passing second that the house remained locked. I toted the ladder into the pantry, opened the door at the end, and slung it down the stairs, the first shortcut I’d taken. I hobbled after it, leaned it back against the wall near the painting supplies, and, for what I hoped would be the last time in my life, went up those cellar stairs and along that corridor and through Granger’s smug, buttery office, into the elevator. We were almost home, I thought, and the house was still in lockdown. I might get out of this yet.

  And then I looked up and realized that the rope, which was still dangling through the open escape hatch, was out of reach by almost two feet. I’d underestimated how far the elevator had to descend to get to the ground floor. The rope was too short.

  And at that moment, the house shuddered and went whunk.

  Lockdown had been lifted.

  How fast could they get inside? I punched the button for the second floor, grabbing for the rope as I rose, sooooo slowly, toward it, and the moment we stopped on two, I hit 1 again to send it back to the first floor, where it had originally been, and started trying to climb the rope. I managed to pull myself up one knot and then another, my hands slick with sweat and slipping with each try, until my head and shoulders had almost cleared the frame of the escape hatch, and at that moment the elevator decided to start its downward journey. I swung my legs up, completely forgetting the knee, and yanked the rest of the rope out of the cab, and as the elevator sank, I reached below me and slammed the escape door shut. Then I grabbed the rope for dear life as my floor fell away beneath me in the dark, on its stately descent.

  I hung there from a small, slippery knot, swaying back and forth like the pendulum on a clock in the pitch-blackness of the elevator shaft, and considered the long, long slow-motion practical joke that had put me here—almost thirty years after my first major failure in life—with my entire future depending on my ability to climb a rope.

  And the house was no longer in lockdown.

  Which would come first? Would they enter through the front door in time to hear the elevator going down—or not? And, I suddenly wondered, had the wind stopped?

  I tightened my right hand around the knot in the rope, wrapped my feet around another one farther down, not even feeling the knee in my anxiety, and blindly reached up. And reached up.

  And reached—

  Up.

  And got my hand around the next knot.

  I hung there, grabbing huge lungfuls of air. Said to the darkness, “And fuck you, Dad,” and pulled myself up again, wrapping the rope around my feet as I went, straining up for the next knot and the one after that, and the door into the entrance hall opened down below and banged against the wall, and the elevator shaft was full of echoing voices.

  But the elevator had already stopped moving.

  I heard yelling, people calling for whoever they thought it was to come out, hands clasped over his head, to make it easy on himself, and then the door to the office opened almost directly beneath me, and I knew they’d have guns in their hands, that they’d be looking in the space under the desk, that there’d be a lot of pulses racing and adrenaline as they opened the doors to the closet and the secretary’s office, drama that would be repeated a hundred times as they searched the enormous house, and I turned it all off and reached for the next knot and the next knot and the next knot, and the higher I went, the easier it got.

  29

  Strung Too Tight

  They were there almost three hours. Outside, the helicopters multiplied miraculously as the TV news operations sent theirs to rattle through the dark sky. Must have been a slow news night.

  Even given the sound-amplifying echo chamber of
the elevator shaft, the search downstairs faded in and out of earshot as they worked toward the back of the house and along the wings. I used the time to flick on the penlight and open Suley’s purse, which contained her wallet, complete with her driver’s license and all her other identification.

  I experienced a brief surge of unholy joy, imagining Granger foaming at the mouth in his eagerness to get the cops up the stairs to the second floor and the world-altering shock he’d feel when he saw those neat little pink shoes in the hall and went into that clean, empty drawing room, as silent and peaceful now as a room behind glass in a fancy dollhouse. I envisioned him standing right there in the middle of the room, gazing at the bright, shining candlestick centered on the table, his heart pierced by a sharp icicle of fear, as the cops gave the room a cursory look and went down the hallway to the bedrooms. And came back to say he needed to check out his wife’s room, that it seemed like she might have taken off.

  Sitting there, hunched over in the dark with my legs dangling into the darkness, I wondered how long it would take them to ask him where she kept her purse and could he check to see whether she might have taken it with her? And him, wanting to scream that she couldn’t, that she was dead, and knowing even then that the purse wouldn’t be there.

  But missing wife or not, the burglar alarm had gone off, and he was Jeremy Granger, so they gave it a good, solid try. Twice I had to pull my legs out of the way as the elevator glided by, taking a bunch of them up to the third floor and back down again while, I imagined, a phalanx of cops took the stairs to cut off that possible exit route. Most of the sound-absorbing material was underneath me, so I heard them shuffling around above, heard voices but not actual words, the cops, professional and not very interested, Granger’s voice slightly sharp, like a violin that’s been strung too tight. I imagined the speed at which his mind had to be racing and leaned back on the soft bank of cellulose and enjoyed it. Time passed.

  At some point, I guess, I sat up again, because that’s the way I found myself, looking down the shaft, when I said, “Goddamn his soul to hell.”

  “Don’t take it so hard,” she said. “You’re takin’ it harder than I am.”

  I turned to see her sitting behind me. My flashlight was in my pocket, but I could see her clearly. The ribbon tied around her wrists was a deep, gleaming red, the same color as the blood on her neck and shoulders, which was as fresh as it had been when I found her. The bones of her face were too close to the surface and looked as fragile as glass, and her thinness had made her eyes enormous, but she was still beautiful. Her eyes were the phantom ice green of the sea in Garlin Romaine’s painting of the coast of Verdinha.

  I said, “How else can I take it?”

  “You know,” she said, “when it came tonight, when it finally came, all I could think was, better to git it over with. Better not to spend ever’ day waitin’ on the first slap, the first ‘You stupid bitch,’ the first thing that’d stop my breakfast where it was, half swallowed. Sure, he caught me unaware tonight. I was all wrapped up reading about them brave girls, and he come up on me quiet, but he wasn’t any bigger than a minute, was he? I probably could have pushed him down, probably could have run away from him, but where? Wasn’t like anybody gave a shit.”

  “Someone did.”

  “Who? Oh, you mean Garlin. Yeah, Garlin cared, God love her, but what could she do?”

  “She’s making a painting that’s got the color of your eyes in it.”

  “Nice to know. She mixed up the paint a bunch of times while I was just sittin’ there, trying not to blink. She was just swearin’ and scrumblin’ paint around, trying to find the color. But I figured she’d forgot all about it by now. She told me a hundred times, while she was workin’ on that paint or makin’ her pictures, she told me not to . . . you know, with Jeremy. Said he’d eat me alive and spit me out again. Said I wasn’t strong enough, I was just a skeeter he’d swat.”

  I said, “I didn’t know you came from the South.”

  “I didn’t. You’re making me talk like this, probably thinking about that girl, that Casey, you fixed up with Garlin.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “How did you really talk?”

  “Like you, I guess,” she said. “Is it okay if I do that now?”

  “By all means.”

  “Thank you. I was starting to feel like I was in the Grand Ole Opry.”

  I said, “But how do you know about Casey?”

  She looked at me reproachfully. “If you know about it,” she said patiently, “I know about it.”

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “Garlin was the closest thing I had to a mother, those last three or four years. Maybe the closest thing I had to a friend, ever.”

  “Why didn’t you go to her? She would have taken you—”

  “He’d have destroyed her. He said he would, and he meant it. Wherever I went, he would have ruined it. You should know, you met him. He doesn’t lose. He doesn’t ever lose.”

  I said, “We’ll see about that.”

  “Tough talk,” she said. She leveled the ice-green eyes at me. “You know it’s hard to kill people, unless they just don’t care.”

  “Some people,” I said, “are easier than others.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “Change of subject. Listen, it’s nice that you’re worried about leaving me here. When you get out, I mean. But you realize, same as I do, that I’m not really here. What’s here isn’t me.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” I said.

  She sighed and said, “Men,” and someone screamed below, so I turned back to the darkness of the shaft.

  It was a real throat shredder, and a moment later he screamed again, and this time I could make it out. He was screaming, “Suley!” Something crashed and broke, and he screamed it once more.

  But I wasn’t looking down the shaft anymore; I was flat on my back in the blown cellulose, looking up through the dark at the pale phantoms of the beams above me. The voice echoing up the elevator shaft was followed again by some sort of violence, perhaps furniture being thrown against walls. From the sound of it, he was in his office, directly below.

  He screamed again, “Suley, goddamn you!” If he was calling her, the cops were obviously gone.

  A door slammed, and I sat up and waited but heard nothing. I envisioned him wandering the house in a red haze of anger and alcohol. I’d learned, when I was living with my father, to hear what too many drinks did to a voice, not so much how words were pronounced, because my father grew ever more precise as he got drunker, but the way the voice was produced, lower in the throat, a kind of swallowed sound, like talking through a folded towel.

  Below me, Jeremy Granger was raging through his house, drunk beyond caring and screaming for the wife he had killed. And it came to me, in finely tuned color and high-definition detail, that this would be an excellent time to break his neck.

  I looked to where Suley had been, but of course she wasn’t there; she was where I’d put her, around on the far side of the elevator shaft, resting between two-by-twelves beneath a blanket of cellulose. I supposed, as she’d made clear during our chat, that she wasn’t really there either, of course, but I wasn’t in a metaphysical frame of mind. I was in a neck-snapping frame of mind.

  The elevator was down on the ground floor, meaning I was going to have to go down a longer stretch of rope than I would have liked. I said, out loud, “Tough,” and began to lower the rope. And then the door to the office below me hit the wall with an impact that actually traveled up the house’s supporting beams and vibrated beneath me.

  I stopped paying out the rope.

  Silence. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out slowly. Then the shouting started.

  I only got a bit of it, mostly scrambled, but I heard “old asshole” and other terms of endearment, and then Granger’s voice scaled up into the soprano range, an
d I heard “. . . know where he is, you motherfucker,” and all at once it was clear.

  He was on the phone, talking to Jake Whelan. He’d finally remembered he knew someone who might be able to find me. More screaming, something else heavy hitting the floor, and then the door banged again, and there was silence. I had just gone back to lowering the rope when I heard an engine catch. It revved a few times and then got pushed into the shrillness of the tachometer’s red zone, culminating in a neighbor-awakening screech of tires. I waited, thinking it might just conceivably be a trick to draw me out if he thought I was still here someplace, but the sound of the engine decreased and fell off and then died out, a victim of distance. He was gone.

  It was 1:57 a.m. by the blue numerals of my watch, so I’d apparently gone to sleep at some point. I sat for a minute or two, following several possible starting points to their most likely conclusions, and then I pushed the button for Ronnie.

  “You’re all right?” She sounded wide awake.

  “So far. How fast can you—Wait a minute. Are you willing to commit a Class A felony with me?”

  “Is a girl allowed to ask what it is?”

  “Unauthorized transport and burial of a murder victim.”

  “Yours?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t’ve mattered if it was. Thirteen, fourteen minutes.”

  “I have to make a couple of other calls. You tell me when you make the turn into Granger’s street, and I’ll open the gates.”