His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

Getting in the car, he wondered how his father had put up with her for all those years. Then he remembered that for all those years the two of them had been almost competely in sync, “please”ing and “thank-you”ing through their days in a polite, formal bubble that had shown little resemblance to the real world. It was only since the stroke that the seams had started to unravel.

  He backed out of the driveway, gave a quick cursory wave to the darkened front window, though he was not at all sure that his mother was even watching, and gratefully drove away, not relaxing his death grip on the steering wheel until he was on the freeway and headed south.

  He’d been avoiding Sherry lately. It was hard to be romantic when his brain was weighed down with thoughts of his father’s murders, when the contemplation of anything normal brought to his mind the feeling of Lyman Fischer’s corded neck beneath his tightening arm, the sight of the old man lying dead on the floor. But last night had put some of that to rest, and he decided to surprise Sherry and drop in on her at the library. He wasn’t sure exactly when she had her lunch hour, but it was only ten thirty right now, and he figured he could settle down with a book or a magazine and just hang around until she was off.

  She was working behind the counter when he arrived, and was so engrossed in checking out books that she didn’t notice him come in. Grinning to himself, he went over to the New Releases shelf, grabbed a book at random and stood in the checkout line behind an overweight woman toting a stack of romances in a Defenders of Wildlife bag. He waited his turn, then stepped up and handed Sherry his book. “May I see your card?” she asked, looking up. She smiled as she recognized him and hit his shoulder playfully. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you. I thought we could eat lunch together.”

  The old man behind him cleared his throat rudely, and Steve shot him a look that made him glance nervously away.

  “I’m off at eleven thirty. But I only get a half hour.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “I just brought yogurt and some nuts.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll go out and grab us something. We can eat at one of those tables in the park outside.”

  The old man behind him made another noise, and Steve glared at him, shutting him up.

  “Tacos,” she said. “I’d like two chicken tacos. And a Sprite.”

  “You got it,” he told her. “I’ll meet you at eleven thirty. I’ll find us a table.”

  She held up his book. “Do you want to check this out?”

  He noticed for the first time that it was a chick-lit novel with a bright pink cover featuring a miniskirted young woman talking on the phone. He laughed. “Actually, I seem to have forgotten my library card.”

  With a wave at Sherry and one last look of disgust at the man in line behind him, Steve headed out of the library and back to his car. He drove down the street to Chipotle, got tacos and a Sprite for Sherry, a burrito and a Coke for himself, then returned to stake out one of the picnic tables on the lawn adjacent to the library. There was a homeless guy sitting at one of the other tables talking to his overstuffed backpack, but Steve ignored him, and moments later Sherry came out of the front entrance. He waved her over, tore open the food bag and handed her the tacos as she sat down.

  “Full service,” she said. “I like that.”

  A half hour wasn’t a lot of time, so they ate in haste, then threw away their trash in a nearby receptacle and took a walk around the park, nursing their drinks. Sherry started telling him about her day, but his mind wandered and he found himself looking at a well-dressed man striding down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. It made him think of those 1950s people populating downtown Copper City.

  “Steve?”

  Sherry had stopped walking, and he turned around, surprised. He realized from the expression on her face that this was probably not the first time she had said his name.

  “Something’s up with you,” she said. “You’re acting very strange lately.”

  He tried to smile. “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. I know the situation with your parents has put a lot of stress on you,” she added quickly. “I’m not talking about that. It’s . . .” She took a deep breath. “Did something happen when you went to New Mexico? You’ve been acting weird ever since you got back.”

  His face felt hot, and he prayed the redness didn’t show. He made a concerted effort to keep his voice as neutral as possible. “No,” he said.

  “You didn’t meet anyone there? You weren’t going there to visit an old flame?”

  He relaxed. “No,” he said honestly. “Nothing like that. Why would you even think such a thing?”

  She shrugged. A little embarrassedly, he thought.

  Steve smiled at her. “I’m not seeing anyone else; I’m not thinking about anyone else; there is no one else.”

  “There’s still something,” she insisted.

  He thought of his father, looking the way he had when Steve was young, and imagined him poisoning, burning, strangling, drowning people. “There’s nothing,” he promised her.

  She eyed him suspiciously. “I know you,” she said.

  He saw in his mind Lyman Fischer on the floor of his dirty shack, saw the dead puppy in Sherry’s yellow plastic trash can, one ear pressed up against the curved side.

  No one knew anyone, he thought.

  “I have to go on another trip,” he told Sherry on impulse. “This time I want you with me.”

  Her expression softened.

  “It’s a business trip,” he made clear. “So we won’t be together the entire time. There are a few things I have to do, some people I have to look up. But in between . . .”

  She gave him a quick, happy kiss. “That sounds great. I have some time saved up, and I’m earning extra hours today. I’ll need to give a few days’ warning. . . .”

  “I’m thinking next weekend.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He did some quick calculations. “Five days, maybe. A week at the outside.”

  “That sounds perfect. Where are we going?”

  He described the religious college’s reunion booklet, explained that he needed to talk to some of the people at the school in Salt Lake City, then said he needed to go to Tempe and Tucson, Arizona, for his next assignment, which he left unspecified. Thankfully, she didn’t ask for details. “We’ll stay someplace nice,” he said. “Do some sightseeing.”

  “It sounds wonderful.”

  He still needed to go to San Diego as well, check out the bay and look up some people, but he could do that at any time. It was less than two hours from Irvine, and he could take a day off, speed down there, and be back before anyone knew he was gone.

  Sherry’s lunch was almost over, and they turned, heading back through the park toward the library. She was excited and said that she would look up some information about Utah and Arizona so they could make more specific plans. He gave her a kiss when they finally reached the library door, asking her to come over to his place when she got off work.

  “I can check online and see if there are any airline deals,” she offered. “Would we be leaving from Orange County or Ontario?”

  “Neither,” he said.

  “LAX?”

  “No,” he said, and kissed her again. “I thought we’d drive.”

  Eleven

  He wanted, for some reason, to visit the cities chronologically, thinking he might glean more insight if he followed the same trail in the same order as his father. So they went first to Salt Lake City, leaving Southern California shortly after five on a Sunday morning in order to avoid traffic, grabbing a quick McDonald’s breakfast in Barstow, bypassing Las Vegas entirely, eating a Subway lunch at a truckstop between St. George and Cedar City, and arriving in Salt Lake City sometime near sunset.

  It had been a long trip, but Sherry had found the landscape inspiring, and she’d filled the hours with happy chatter, looking through books and magazines that she’d borrow
ed from the library, sorting through pages she’d printed off the Internet that detailed some of Utah’s more obscure sightseeing destinations. It was a far cry from the trips he remembered with his parents, where all three of them had sat in stony silence, and he was glad that he had asked Sherry along.

  It kept him from thinking too much.

  He’d booked them a room at the Royal Arms Lodge. The AAA guidebook had given it three stars, as had a hotel-rating Web site, but he would have considered one star overly generous. Not only was it adjacent to a boarded-up convenience store and across the street from a shabby storage facility, but the painted sign affixed to the front of the hotel was chipped, and there was a conspicuous white patch in the center of the tan stucco wall.

  “This is where we’re staying?” Sherry asked.

  “Only for tonight,” Steve said grimly.

  He pulled into the parking lot two spaces over from the only other vehicle: a dusty black Buick with a cracked rear window. Looking at each other but saying nothing, they got out of the car. Walking past the room in front of the Buick, they saw standing in the open doorway a pot-bellied woman wearing what looked like men’s pajama bottoms and a New Kids on the Block T-shirt so old that its words had faded into near illegibility.

  “This is, like, a transient hotel,” Sherry whispered.

  “Three stars,” Steve reminded her.

  “Three stars, my ass. I don’t know who’s paying off whom, but there should be a minus sign in front of those stars.”

  “We’ll get out of here tomorrow,” he promised.

  They walked into the small, dingy lobby. The room smelled of fried bacon and stale cigarettes.

  “May I help you?” asked the tube-topped woman behind the counter. She was so skinny she looked scary, and she smiled at them, revealing a missing tooth on the upper right side of her mouth.

  Steve handed her his printout. “We have reservations. Under Nye.”

  She typed something into her computer. “Two nights,” she said, reading the screen.

  “Actually, only one. Our plans have changed.”

  “We have a twenty-four-hour cancellation policy,” she told him, an accusatory tone seeping into her voice.

  “That’s why I’m telling you now,” he explained patiently.

  “It’s almost six o’clock. Check-in time’s at four. That’s less than twenty-four hours.”

  He leaned forward over the counter, the polite smile on his face hardening. “You don’t want to fuck with me on this.” She blanched. Next to him, he felt Sherry tense up. “We’re staying one night, we’re paying for one night. Is that understood?”

  “You have to—”

  “Is that understood?”

  She nodded, handing him a pen and an information card to fill out. “May I see your driver’s license?” she said nervously.

  “What was that?” Sherry asked a few minutes later as they walked back to the car to get their luggage.

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t you think you were a little hard on her?”

  “You want to stay in this hellhole for two nights?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But . . .”

  “I got us out of it.” He took a deep breath. “Come on. Let’s unpack.” He reached for her hand. “It’s been a long day.”

  They’d traveled light, one suitcase apiece, although Sherry had brought along an extra book bag filled with reading material and a grocery sack filled with snacks. He opened his suitcase in the room, took out his laptop—and suddenly realized that he didn’t want Sherry to see what he would be looking up online. He placed the laptop on top of the dresser and left it there as though that had been his plan all along.

  “What are we going to do about dinner?” Sherry asked, opening her own suitcase.

  “I’m too tired to go out,” Steve told her. “Why don’t we just grab some junk food and bring it back here to eat?”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said, pulling some clothes out of the suitcase. “Let me take a quick shower and then we’ll see what we can find.”

  “Shower?” he said, frowning.

  “Yes. I want to be clean.”

  He understood. She was having her period.

  There went his plans for the evening.

  She went into the bathroom and closed the door. Seconds later, he heard the rush of water and the loud vibration of bad pipes as she turned on the shower. Walking over to his laptop on the dresser, he happened to look into her open suitcase as he passed by.

  Lying atop a folded yellow blouse was a small red dog collar.

  Steve stopped. The collar seemed about the right size for a puppy, and he reached down and picked it up. “Boo” was the only word engraved on the silver heart-shaped dog tag. He put the collar back exactly where he’d found it. Inside the bathroom, the water was still running, the pipes still making noise, but she wouldn’t stay in there forever. As concerned as he was about Sherry and the puppy, he had his own business to attend to. He hurried over to the laptop, opened it and logged on.

  The hotel was actually not too far from the spot where Alex and Anthony Jones had burned to death in their apartment, though that incident had happened twenty-some years ago, and he wasn’t sure if an apartment building still stood at that location or if something else had been built there in the decades since. The hotel provided neither pen nor notepad, but he’d brought along both, and he scribbled down directions on how to get there before exiting the page and moving on.

  The father of the brothers was still alive and living in Salt Lake City. Steve had the man’s address and wanted to meet with him, although of course he needed to call first. He couldn’t have Sherry tagging along, though. And he didn’t want her accompanying him to the site either. Or anywhere else. So until they checked into their new hotel tomorrow, he wasn’t going to be able to get started. They would have to spend their time together doing innocuous things. It would waste half a day, but he could see no way around it.

  He quickly looked up directions to a few more addresses, writing them down on the top sheet of his notepad, then tearing off the paper, folding it and putting it in his wallet. The water had been turned off in the bathroom, though he was not sure exactly when that had happened, and he quickly closed his laptop and grabbed the remote control from its perch atop the television, lying back on the bed as he flipped on the TV.

  Sherry emerged from the bathroom seconds later, hair washed, wearing clean clothes and smiling. “Let’s get something to eat,” she said. “I’m starving.”

  Morning dawned cool and beautiful, though the local newscast the previous night had said it would heat up to ninety degrees by the afternoon. The sky was bluer than it ever was in Southern California, and the mountains towering over the city, unobscured by smog, were capped with pure white snow.

  They were packed and checked out by eight, and they ate breakfast at Denny’s before following Sherry’s sightseeing itinerary. They toured the Mormon temple, or the part that was open to the public, took a walking tour through the historic downtown, and checked out an art museum. It was fun, relaxing, and felt almost as though they were on a real vacation—though not for one moment did Steve forget the reason he was here.

  After lunch, they found a new hotel in a nicer section of the city, and while the official check-in time was three o’clock, Steve explained that they’d come all the way from California, and were really tired. The accom odating desk clerk said there was a room ready on the second floor that they could have if they didn’t mind a view of the parking lot.

  Grateful, he took the room, and they quickly unpacked.

  Now, finally, he was ready to go.

  “My meeting starts at one fifteen,” he lied. “So I’d better get going. I’m not sure how long it’s going to last, but it could be all afternoon. So I’ll probably see you tonight.” He leaned forward for a kiss.

  “Wait a minute.”

  He stopped, looked at her.

  “You’re just going to take
off and leave me here?”

  “You knew ahead of time this was a business trip. I told you I’d be on my own a lot, and you said that was okay.”

  “I didn’t come all this way just to sit in a hotel room and watch TV.”

  “There’s a pool.”

  She looked at him. “No.”

  “Then why don’t I drop you off somewhere? Someplace historic. You can go sightseeing. Or a mall. You can go shopping. I’ll pick you up after I’m done.”

  “Why don’t I drop you off?” Sherry said. “Then I’m not stuck in one place. You give me a call when you’re through, and I’ll come and get you.”

  He had to think fast. “The meeting is at the college, but they may need me to go to wherever the reunion will actually be held.”

  “Then they can give you a ride.”

  He had no answer for that, at least nothing that didn’t sound suspicious, so he let her drop him off at the college. He’d brought his laptop and his cell phone with him, and the moment she was out of sight, he trudged over to a nearby café, where a banner out front promised, FREE WIFI. He ordered coffee, then set up his laptop on the small square table before him and accessed the information he had for Frank Jones. Taking out his cell phone, he called the displayed number.

  As he listened to the phone ring, Steve wondered how his father was doing. Since he’d been put on medication, there wasn’t much day-to-day change in his condition aside from those occasional bursts of lucidity, but according to Dr. Curtis it was possible, if not probable, that his dad could suffer an episode that would further debilitate him.

  Someone answered. “Hello?”

  The voice on the other end of the line sounded not only old but angry, and Steve chastised himself for not coming up with a good rap ahead of time, some sort of cover story that would have enabled him to easily invite himself over. “Hello,” he said. “Am I speaking to Frank Jones?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m . . . a reporter,” he said, winging it. I—”

  “What’s your name?” the old man demanded.

  Shit! “Jason Greene,” he said quickly, wincing as he gave out his friend’s name. “I’m writing an article about—”