His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  The office started to fill up as everyone returned from lunch, and Steve logged off the missing-persons registry, hiding his scribbled notes in the top drawer of his desk. Gina stopped by, asking how his father was. She’d been coming by a lot lately, even acting a little flirty—had she seen him that day by the bay?—but he always managed to maintain his distance, and he gave her the generic nonanswer “Fine,” rather obviously turning back to his computer screen in order to get rid of her. Surreptitiously, he watched her walk away. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering about the older man he’d seen her with, and was disgusted with himself because he didn’t want to wonder about the secretary’s personal life.

  After work, he went to the VA hospital. His father was awake when he arrived, and though he looked dazed and blank, there seemed a shred of comprehension in his eyes when Steve said hello. Hoping to take advantage of that and glean some more information, Steve closed the door to the room, checked to make sure the patient on the other side of the curtain was asleep, then sat down, scooting the chair close to the head of the bed so he could speak into his father’s ear.

  “Do you remember when we lived in Salt Lake City?” he asked softly. He waited a moment, but there was no response. He repeated the question, adding his father’s line, “Both of them burned,” hoping it would trigger a reaction. Nothing. The old man wasn’t smiling, though, wasn’t spouting nonsense, and Steve chose to believe it meant that on some level he understood.

  “I think you killed those two brothers, Dad. Alex and Anthony Jones. I think you set fire to their apartment. But did they die in the fire or did you set that fire to cover up how they really died? And why did you kill them in the first place? What did they do?”

  His father’s eyes closed even as they looked into his. Had he fallen asleep or was he just trying to avoid the questions? Steve remained where he was for several moments, waiting, but when it became clear from the deep, even breathing that his dad was honestly and truly out, Steve stood. Maybe his father had only fallen asleep after pretending to do so, or maybe he’d actually nodded off, but either way, it would be quite a while before he awoke again.

  One of these times, Steve thought, he wouldn’t wake up at all.

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  He arrived home after dark. The apartment seemed emptier than usual, and listening to the hum of the refrigerator, the only noise in the silence, he wondered whether he should ask Sherry to move in with him. Or, better still, talk to her about finding a place that could be theirs, a condo or a house, maybe not in Irvine but in a less expensive part of Orange County. It would be nice to come home to noise, to light, to have someone he could talk with as he ate dinner and breakfast, someone he could sleep next to not just occasionally, but every night.

  If that was the case, though, why did he feel as though his personal space was invaded each time she invited herself over unannounced?

  His head hurt, and his neck. Stress. Buried somewhere in his bedroom closet was something called Twinkle Neck, a present given to him by his parents several Christmases ago that supposedly helped soothe tired neck muscles. But he was too lazy to look for it and instead sat down on the couch, using the remote to turn on the TV.

  If Sherry were here she could give him a massage.

  Was she even the type of woman who gave massages?

  He wasn’t sure. It had never come up.

  He thought of calling her. Didn’t. Whenever he thought about Sherry these days, he thought about Lyman Fischer. It was an almost Pavlovian reaction, one that he could not seem to shake, and each time, the juxtaposition in his mind of her pretty, kind, trusting face with the dead body of the old man made him realize anew that he did not deserve her.

  He had killed a man.

  There was no reason to feel guilty, he tried to tell himself. Lyman Fischer had been a horrible person, a blackmailer, a criminal. And Steve was certainly not like his father. He had done what he’d done only to protect his father, to protect their whole family.

  But his father didn’t deserve protection.

  Steve closed his eyes. No matter which path of reasoning he took, guilt lay at the end of it.

  He sat there for a while, but when neither his headache nor his neck pain lessened, he opened his eyes, stood and went into the kitchen, where he opened a box of Tylenol, popped three gel tabs into his mouth and washed them down with Coke. He threw a frozen Stouffer’s dinner into the microwave, then stood next to the sink and ate it, staring out the kitchen window at the leafy, well-manicured courtyard of the apartment complex.

  Sherry phoned soon after—Where had he been? Wasn’t he supposed to have called her?—but he explained that he wasn’t feeling well, and she was instantly solicitous, asking what was wrong, whether there was anything she could do. Ironically, his headache disappeared halfway through their conversation, and by the end of it even his neck didn’t feel as stiff and sore. The Tylenol kicking in, he supposed. But he continued to maintain the illusion that he was ill and promised to call her in the morning before work, saying that he was tired and needed to sleep it off.

  He wasn’t tired, though. He was wide-awake. He tried to read, couldn’t concentrate, tried to work on a new short story but wasn’t inspired, and he ended up camped out in front of the television all night, rewatch ing shows that he’d already seen, before finally going to bed sometime after eleven.

  He continued his research the next day. And the next. By Friday, he had a pretty good idea of his father’s trail of carnage. There’d been a married middle-aged woman from Tempe tied to a rock in the desert and left to die, a pimp in Tucson strangled in a cheap hotel, a single mother drowned in the bay in San Diego. The MOs were different each time, and Steve assumed that that was not only intentional but was probably the reason his father had never been caught.

  It seemed impossible that there could be legitimate reasons for all of those killings. The first wife, yes. Maybe even the Mexican prostitute. But murder after murder in city after city? Looking at the situation objectively, he could think of no circumstance in which such a string of killings could be justified. Perhaps his father had felt wronged or slighted by each of those individuals, but death was an extreme punishment for such transgressions, and the chances that his father had been in the right each and every time were not only remote but virtually nonexistent.

  Still, as with Copper City, Steve had a desire—no, a need—to go to those places, see for himself. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake as last time and talk too much or ask leading questions—he didn’t want a repeat of that experience—but he wanted to poke around, find out what really happened. And if his dad did kill those people, he needed to understand why.

  He was almost done with the reunion booklet for the religious college. A few more days and he’d be through. And since the deadline for his next project wasn’t for another month, this was the perfect time to take a few days, a week even, and investigate these deaths more thoroughly. He had plenty of vacation time saved up. He could bring along his laptop and stay at hotels that offered wifi so he could continue to do research on the way. His father’s situation was stable enough that he didn’t have to check in every single day, and if he was ever going to find out what really happened, he needed to do it now.

  Instead of meeting his friends after work, Steve decided to surprise Sherry and drop by her place. When he arrived at her apartment, however, no one answered the door. He walked down to her parking spot in the rear of the complex, but it was empty, so he dialed her cell number. After one ring, it went straight into voice mail. Rather than leave a message, he hung up and returned to her apartment, letting himself in with his key.

  He closed the door carefully behind him, feeling like an intruder. She had given him his own key some time ago, but this was the first time he had used it, the first time he had been in here without her, and it seemed strange being in the apartment by himself. He turned on the lights. Glancing around, he saw the entertai
nment section of yesterday’s Los Angeles Times on the coffee table next to a hairbrush and a pair of nail clippers. Lying open on the couch was a decades-old issue of Time with Jackie O on the cover. He frowned, wondering where she had gotten the magazine—and why.

  Steve walked slowly from the sitting room to the kitchen. Looking through an apartment was like dropping in on a life. More intimate than mere spying, it allowed the intruder access from the inside, enabled him to almost become that person. Since Sherry had not known he was coming, she had not cleaned up or rearranged anything, had not prepared for his visit by putting on a false front. This was her life, raw, without any aspect of performance. He saw breakfast dishes in the sink: a spoon in a coffee cup, a trio of Cheerios floating in milk-tinged water at the bottom of a rinsed-out bowl. He not only knew what she’d eaten this morning, he knew how she’d eaten it.

  It was this admittance to the personal and private, the exposure to details of everyday living, that had raised his hackles when Sherry had shown up at his place without his knowledge. Maybe she was right; maybe he was not ready for real intimacy, because he didn’t feel comfortable allowing her unfettered access to his life. Which was probably why it felt so wrong for him to be snooping around her apartment like this.

  But she had given him a key. She had given him permission.

  Besides, turnabout was fair play.

  He opened her refrigerator, looking for something to drink, but found only orange juice and bottled water. He settled for a water, twisting the lid and downing half the bottle in one swig. The clock on the wall above the breakfast table said six twenty-three, and again he wondered where Sherry could be. The library closed at five on Fridays, and she didn’t really hang out with her coworkers, since all of the ones who weren’t old and/or married were basically high schoolers working part-time. He hoped she hadn’t been in an accident or had car problems. Just in case, he called her cell again. Once more, he was put directly into voice mail.

  He decided to wait here until she returned.

  What if she was out with some guy?

  He pushed that thought from his mind, walking into her bedroom. The bed was unmade—she was sloppier than he’d thought she was—and yesterday’s clothes were piled on a chair. She’s not bringing anyone home, he thought. Not to this. The realization left him relieved. He didn’t know he’d been worried, but he had been.

  It didn’t seem right snooping through her bedroom. It seemed a little pervy, and Steve turned and made his way out to the short, nearly nonexistent hallway. He took a quick peek in the small bathroom—

  —and stopped.

  There was a dead puppy in the trash can next to the toilet.

  Sherry didn’t have a puppy. He was not even sure pets were allowed in her apartment complex.

  He took a step closer, staring at the animal. It was lying atop an empty toilet paper roll and a mound of white tissues, its head pressed against the far side of the rounded yellow plastic, one ear pointing upward. The small brown body was twisted in an odd way that made it appear as though the animal’s neck had been snapped. There had to be a reason behind this, but at the moment he could not for the life of him think of what it could possibly be. If she’d found the dead puppy outside, why had she brought it into her apartment? If she’d discovered the body in her apartment, why hadn’t she told him about it or called the apartment manager? Even if she’d found a live puppy and for some bizarre, incomprehensible reason killed it herself, why hadn’t she disposed of the body in the trash bins near the parking area? Why had she dropped it into her bathroom wastepaper basket?

  None of this made any sense, and, frowning, he went back out to the sitting room to see whether he could find anything else amiss.

  Moments later, there was a rattle of keys and doorknob as Sherry walked into the apartment. She found him crouched on the floor, searching through the contents of a low end-table drawer. He looked up at her, caught, but saw none of the hostility that he had exhibited toward her when she’d shown up unannounced at his place. Instead, she seemed thrilled that he was there, and she put down her purse, threw her arms around him and kissed him, her happiness and excitement obvious in every movement, every breath. “What a great surprise!” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here!” She obviously didn’t care that he’d come over and let himself in without giving her fair warning, and didn’t worry about him digging through her stuff while she wasn’t there.

  Which probably meant that there was nothing weird about the dead dog at all, and there was no doubt a perfectly logical explanation behind its presence in the trash can.

  But he didn’t ask her about it.

  They went out to eat at an Italian restaurant in Newport Beach, and afterward she invited him to come back to her apartment to spend the night. He was still curious about the puppy, and using her bathroom would give him the perfect opportunity to find out why it was there, but the thought of making love and sleeping in an enclosed area with a dead animal sickened him, and they ended up going back to his place as usual.

  Sherry had to work on Saturday, filling in for someone on vacation, and after she left in the morning, he stopped by to see his mother, something he had not done in nearly a week. He had called her a couple of days ago, but while they’d spent a lot of time together at the outset of his father’s hospitalization, making joint decisions and having daily discussions, there now seemed to be a disconnect, and the two of them had reverted to type, both of them forging their own new relationships with his father, dealing with him separately, though Steve still drove her to the hospital when she asked.

  He pulled into his parents’ driveway, parking behind his dad’s old Chrysler. There were spiderwebs visible between the tailpipe and the right rear tire, and he thought that it was probably time for him to take the car out for a drive, just to keep it in decent running condition. The lawn, he saw, was overgrown, though the plants had been watered and were in good shape, and he wondered whether his father had been the one to mow the grass. He needed to ask his mother about that and make arrangements with a gardener if necessary. He didn’t want his parents’ yard to sink to the level of their neighbors’.

  One good thing that had come of all this was that his mother locked the doors of the house now. He tried the knob, then rang the doorbell and waited on the stoop. Several moments later, he heard movement from within. There was a rattling of the latch chain, a click as the dead bolt withdrew, and then his mother was opening the door and telling him to come in.

  There was no hug, no kiss—even after all that had happened, they still didn’t do that—but he followed her into the kitchen, where she motioned for him to sit down at the table. He turned down pound cake, accepted coffee, and waited for his mother to join him before telling her of his plans. She sat down in the chair opposite him, put down her own cup of coffee, and he cleared his throat nervously. He knew she wasn’t going to like this.

  “I’m going on a little trip,” he said. “A business trip,” he lied.

  “Oh?” Her mouth tightened into a line.

  “I’ll be gone about a week, probably. To Utah and then Arizona.”

  “You’re just going to abandon me?”

  “I’m not abandoning you, Mom.”

  She looked at him.

  “Mom . . .”

  “All I know is, if my father were dying in the hospital and my mother were the victim of a crazed attack, I would not be gallivanting around the country on a holiday vacation.”

  “It’s a business trip, Mom. I told you.”

  Her face was set. “I am very disappointed in you, Steven. Your father would be too, if he knew what was going on.”

  “Jesus, Mom—”

  She reached over and slapped him. He heard the slap before he felt it, whip-crack loud in his head, followed by a stinging so severe it brought tears to his eyes. He raised his own hand in response, an automatic defensive measure, and she pushed her chair away, shrieking. He dropped his hand instantly—the reaction was invo
luntary, and he never would have gone through with it—but her eyes were wide and frightened. “Just like your father!” she screamed. “You’re just like your father!”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “Blasphemer!”

  He had never seen her like this before, had never seen her worked up into such a state, and the sight frightened him. He wondered for the first time whether she had some sort of mental problems as well.

  He held up his hands in apology. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But I have to go on this trip. It may be only a few days. A week at the most. I’ll make sure you have enough groceries before I go. We can stop by and see Dad. . . .”

  “I can drive! I’m not a cripple!”

  “That’s fine,” he said placatingly. “But I know you don’t like driving on the freeway—”

  “You don’t know anything about me. You or your father. Birds of a feather.” She glared at him. “Just leave; just get out. I’ve had enough of you.”

  He should have been used to her anger. He’d had a lifetime of it already. As a child, he had had to deal with it on a daily basis, watching what he said, where he went, what he did, aware at all times that anything could set her off. Unlike most of his friends’ mothers, she had never been able to put his needs in front of her own. If she was out of sorts, he knew it, felt it, and as a result he’d grown up a very serious boy, forced to provide his own emotional support. It was still difficult for him, even at this age, to cross her.

  He stood. “I have to get things sorted out, so I won’t be going for a week or so. Probably next Saturday. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said. Already the anger was giving way to her poor-me routine.

  He sighed. “Bye, Mom.”

  Once outside, he saw the Chrysler again, saw the grass, and realized he hadn’t talked to her about any of the practical things that needed to be done around here. They had to figure out who was going to do what, work out some sort of schedule, but this was obviously not the time.