Apathy and Other Small Victories

by Paul Neilan

  “Who told you?” he said. He was terrified. I was the greatest detective ever.

  “That’s not important.”

  “It’s important to me!”

  “Bryce, there’s no time.”

  “But I had nothing to do with it!”

  “You think that matters? You think that matters to the police?” I said. “All they care about is what they think they can prove. They work everything else around to make it fit.”

  “Oh god, I can’t go to jail. I can’t! It wasn’t my idea. I told them, I wasn’t even a part of it really! What am I supposed to do?”

  “Bryce, I shouldn’t even be here. I’m putting myself at risk just by—”

  “Please! What do I do?” His voice was breaking.

  “You know what you have to do. Just don’t tell anybody about it. Not even your wife. And forget we had this conversation.”

  “Oh god. Oh god,” he kept saying, tearing chunks out of the back of his neck with his fingernails. It was fucking gross.

  “All right,” I said, disgusted. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Okay.” He was staring at the ground, clawing at his neck as I walked away.

  “Shane!” he yelped after me, right before I turned the corner.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks,” he said. “For everything.”

  I nodded.

  Then I went up to my apartment and paced around and waited. He’d probably killed Marlene, I’d figured out that much. It was either him or Doug, after she broke it off with them, and Doug was too tragically humiliating and weird to kill anybody. Bryce was nervous enough to be capable of murder. You just can’t trust high-strung people in certain situations. Like messy breakups, or Vietnam.

  So it was probably Bryce. It had to be. And I was giving him a pass. He’d killed Marlene and I was letting him get away with it. That was a shame. But with him gone things would be much simpler. There’d be fewer questions, less mess. The police would find him eventually, or Marlene’s one-handed husband would track him down and beat him to death with his prosthetic fist. It would be better that way. Vigilante justice is more satisfying, for everyone involved.

  Either way he’d be gone in half an hour. Maybe less. He’d throw some clothes in a bag and take off. She probably wouldn’t even ask him where he was going. She didn’t care. But should I go to her tonight or wait until morning? I didn’t want to seem eager. I’d wait.

  Then tomorrow I’d show up and there’d be no need to explain. It would all be taken care of. Then we’d take off ourselves, after we gave the police the story they wanted to hear, blaming Bryce for everything. Or maybe we’d stick around for a while. I could be a landlord. I would be ruthless, but fair.

  She’d know what I’d done. She probably knew already. But she wouldn’t know how exactly. She wouldn’t know what I’d said to Bryce to give him that petrified look as he frantically stuffed his clothes into a garbage bag and ran out the door without saying goodbye. And I’d never tell her. There would always be that mystery between us. That mystery is important.

  Then I heard it.

  Then I heard it again.

  If I’d learned anything in the past week it was what a gunshot sounded like, and I knew I’d just heard two. And I was pretty sure where they’d come from.

  Then it was silence.

  I stood in the middle of my apartment rooted to the floor in mid-stride, stricken, sure I’d shatter if I tried to move. I managed to fall over like a pile of blocks all at once onto my bed, and I lay there listening. There was silence, still, and I pulled the sheet up over my head. Just over my head, draping it over my face like a shroud.

  And that’s where I hid. I hid there until I heard the sirens, and for a long time after that. Cowardice, when done correctly, can be its own kind of bravery.

  Chapter 11

  “Where have you been all week?” Detective Sikes said the next day. We were standing on the sidewalk outside my building. The sun was out. It was a nice day. To look at it you wouldn’t have thought there’d been a shooting the night before. There was no crime scene, no yellow tape blocking any doorways. No city blocks were roped off. I didn’t hear any sirens. Murder isn’t such a big deal after all.

  “Down at the Best Western,” I said.

  “Nice place?”

  “Very elegant.”

  “You should have come in that night, after what happened with the husband,” Sikes said. He wasn’t cocky like before. There was nobody he had to impress. And he was much nicer now that he knew I hadn’t killed anybody. “I can understand why you didn’t, but you should have.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have ended up like this.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not that it was your fault really. Not all of it anyway,” he said, and smiled. “Marlene Burton was having an affair. Guy lived in your building too.”

  “I know.”

  “Rick Beekman.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Rick Beekman. He was in the apartment right above you actually.”

  “You mean Mobo?”

  “Yeah, that’s what he kept telling us to call him. ‘My name is not Rick Beekman. Rick Beekman is dead to me,’ he kept saying.”

  “Mobo’s real name is Rick Beekman?”

  “Yep. But we came up with a few other names for him down at the station,” he said.

  So they’d shoved the old splintered baton up Mobo’s ass and called him Sally. You hate to see that.

  “And he was having the affair with Marlene?” I said.

  “Yep. Pretty sick, huh?”

  “Oops.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Uh, nothing.” So I wasn’t the greatest detective ever. Sometimes people make mistakes. The important thing is that you learn from them.

  “We came by your place the next day to see if you were all right, but it looked like you’d taken off in a hurry. We figured you left town.”

  “How did you get into my apartment? The door was locked this time.”

  “You want to ask questions or you want me to tell you what happened?” he said, annoyed.

  “I’m sorry. Please, go on.”

  “Okay,” and he exhaled. “We went down to your landlord’s place to see if maybe he knew where you were, and when he opened the door he was shaking. Then when we flashed our badges he fell apart. Most people get a little nervous, we’re used to that, but this guy could barely stand.”

  “Was he scratching his neck?”

  “I thought he was gonna pull his fucking head off. I was getting sick just looking at him. I almost cuffed him, just to make him stop,” and he laughed. “But the way he was acting we knew he had to be up to something. And we didn’t have anything else to do that day so we brought him in for questioning, gave him that whole ‘You don’t need a lawyer, don’t make trouble for yourself’ speech in the back of the car on the way in, same one we gave you. Sorry about that by the way.”

  “It’s quite all right,” I said.

  “You have to admit, that’s a good bit we’ve got there. You should’ve seen your face.”

  “I was fine. I’m very brave.”

  “You were better than this Bryce guy, I’ll give you that. He just kept mumbling about how he had nothing to do with it and he didn’t used to be like this, but we could barely understand him because he was crying so hard. We had to go easy on him. We were afraid he’d piss his pants. We had a guy do that once. Had to rip out all the upholstery in the backseat. Car still smelled like piss six months later.”

  “Yikes.”

  “We couldn’t get much because of all the sobbing, but we did find out that he’d seen a deaf woman who fit Marlene Burton’s description singing down at Kahuna Karaoke.”

  “Kahuna Karaoke?”

  “That tiki bar on Grand, across the street from the bowling alley.”

  “I see.”

  “He used to go down there every Tuesday and Thursday night to s
ing. Said he used to be in a band.”

  “Funk,” I said.

  “That’s what he told us. I didn’t see it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “He said he didn’t know who the girl was, but he’d seen her with Beekman before.”

  “Did Bryce call him Beekman too? How come everyone knew he wasn’t Mobo except me?”

  “You want me to finish the story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. So we go to Beekman’s apartment and he opens the door with no shirt on and says, ‘Who sent you?’ real suspicious. ‘Bryce,’ I said. ‘Your landlord.’ Then he relaxes and invites us in. Told us to sit Indian style on his leopard-print rug while he waited for his press-on tattoo to dry. A dragon on his right arm. The guy was so skinny it wrapped all the way around on itself. Dragon’s head was up its own ass,” he said, and laughed. “Then he pulls out a briefcase and asks us how much we’re looking for.”

  “Fireworks?”

  “Drugs.”

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah, real nice. Turns out he’s been dealing down at Kahuna Karoake, selling baggies to all the accountants and kindergarten teachers who like to cut loose and sing “Sweet Caroline” and “Dancing Queen” every night after work. They like to pretend they’re real rock stars and blow lines in the bathroom with rolled-up dollar bills before they go onstage.”

  “Mobo’s a coke dealer?”

  “In a decent world he would be. He was dealing Ritalin, that stuff they give to kids who won’t pay attention in school. But he told people it was coke. When you crush it up it’s just white powder, and when you snort it it opens up your lungs and gets you real focused on what you’re doing, so for these people it was perfect. And none of them would know a bag of coke from a finger up their ass, so they had no idea it wasn’t real.”

  “That’s very entrepreneurial of him,” I said.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t a bad idea, I’ll give him that. He used to deal at the bowling alley too. Those guys take their league games pretty seriously.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “He even had a plan worked out in case any rival gangs tried to move in, or he thought the feds were on to him. He had copies of all the keys to every apartment in the building. He figured he’d plant the stuff on someone else, let them take the fall.”

  “I’m just glad he wasn’t using my place to take shits.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Kahuna Karaoke is where he met Marlene Burton, and then they started up their little affair. They used to come back to his place after they were done for the night. I’m surprised you never heard them. He said she was a screamer.”

  “The scream of the deaf,” I said quietly. “So he wasn’t fucking his guinea pig.”

  “All right, if you’re gonna get weird I’ll just—”

  “No, sorry. It’s just, forget it. Please, go on.”

  He shook his head.

  “They went on like that for a while, and then she just stopped showing up. That was the end of it. He hadn’t seen her for a few weeks and since he had no way to get in touch with her he figured that was it. He had no idea she was dead. We knew that as soon as we told him, just from the look on his face. This guy wasn’t smart enough to fake anything.”

  “So who killed Marlene?”

  “Nobody. Two days ago we got a call from a lady who lives in the house next door to the Burtons, and she was hysterical. Turns out her fourteen-year-old son is a peeping Tom, and he’d been taping Marlene Burton in the shower for months. He had a clear shot of her bathroom mirror from his bedroom window. He was taping the night she died. She slipped as she stepped into the shower and fell backwards and smacked her head on the tile floor. It was an accident, just like we’d figured all along. Her husband confirmed that she was clumsy. The week before she tripped into a door knob and gave herself a black eye.”

  “Touché,” I said. “So the kid showed the tape of her in the shower to his mom?”

  “No, she walked in on him masturbating to it. She thought it was one of those German snuff films. She’d just seen a special on CNN about them, so she called us to report him.”

  “Some people shouldn’t be allowed to watch cable,” I said. “And she turned in her own son?”

  “Yep.”

  “It figures. These are the days of tyranny and bullshit in which we live.”

  “You finished?”

  “I think so. But if you thought all along that she died accidentally why did you bring me in and make me jerk off into that plastic bag?”

  “We have to examine all the possible scenarios,” he said. “Detective work is really just the elimination of possibility. You see,” he bit his lip, trying to hold it in, then started laughing. “I’m sorry. I’m just fucking around with you,” and he kept laughing, and pointing at me. “We figured you hadn’t done anything, we were just having some fun. That’s the thing. Everybody thinks cops are such hard asses, but most of the time we’re just fucking around. Nobody realizes how funny we are.”

  “That must be really hard for you.”

  “Don’t be mad,” he said, sweet talking me like I was an asshole. “Anyway her husband was so sure you’d killed her we had to play along with him for a little while, just to get his mind off things. You have to think of the victim’s family in these situations.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Of course we didn’t think he’d try and kill you or anything. We obviously wouldn’t have kept it up if we thought that’s what he had in mind.”

  “That means a lot to me.”

  “So we closed out the Marlene Burton case, but we still had Beekman to deal with, and your landlord. We usually like to stick it to these pharmaceutical-type offenders, just because it’s so embarrassing.”

  “Prescription drug addicts are kind of humiliating.”

  “Your landlord even started going through withdrawal. We offered to enroll him in a methadone clinic, just kidding around, you know? But he said he didn’t want to quit. All he had left was his music, and he needed the Ritalin he thought was coke to perform.”

  “Just like Huey Lewis in Duets.”

  “He said if doing drugs and singing your heart out was wrong he didn’t want to be right.”

  “I’m the same way about stealing saltshakers.”

  He looked at me for a minute, and somewhere crickets were chirping.

  “Anyway, him and Beekman worked out an arrangement. In exchange for free fake junk your landlord did all the dealing down at Kahuna Karaoke and the bowling alley and he referred big clients to Beekman’s apartment. That’s who he thought me and Brooks were when we knocked on the door.”

  “An honest mistake.”

  “He started a little taxi service for Beekman too, driving Marlene Burton to and from his apartment on Tuesday nights after he was finished dealing. Beekman told us that, not your landlord. We couldn’t wait to throw it at him though, just to see how he’d react.”

  “That does explain things,” I said.

  “And get this. For an extra baggie a week, he pimped out his wife to him.”

  “What?”

  “Every Thursday night Beekman stopped in on the guy’s wife while he was out singing George Clinton covers cracked out on children’s medication.”

  “Mobo and Bryce’s wife?”

  “Every Thursday,” he said. “That’s some sick circle you were running around in down here.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Why does anybody do anything? People are stupid. Maybe she was getting a cut. Maybe she liked the guy. I don’t see how, but maybe she did. Maybe she had some kind of retard fetish, who knows. Working this job you learn not to ask why people do the stupid shit they do. You just put as many of them in jail as you can and move on.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So then we came down here to find this. What a mess. Your landlord killed
himself pretty good. A big fat bullet in the head. Nobody knows where the wife is.”

  “But I heard two shots.”

  “Yeah, there were two shots fired. The first one either he was shooting at her or he was shooting at himself. Either way he missed. The second blew out the back of his skull.”

  “Yuck,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  We both looked at the sidewalk. It was a moment of silence.

  “So where do you fit into all of this?” he said.

  “I’m just not sure about that.”

  “You have any idea where the wife might’ve taken off to?”

  “Nope.”

  “Supposedly she was spotted outside the bus station late last night, but that’s all we’ve got. The woman fit the description, but we’re still not sure it was her. I doubt she’d even be charged with anything. It looks like your basic case of stupidity and suicide, but we’d like to ask her a few questions anyway.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “We’ve still got Beekman in a holding cell down at the station. He’s trying to plea bargain down to a lesser charge of fireworks possession on the condition we don’t tell his parents about the Ritalin. Fireworks possession isn’t even a crime in this state,” he said, and laughed again. “We’re gonna keep him around for a while, see what he comes up with next. The guy’s pretty entertaining.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We’ve still got your sperm down in the lab. You want us to just throw it out?”

  “Eww. Yeah.”

  “And what do you want us to do about Brian Burton?”

  “Who?’

  “Marlene Burton’s husband? The guy who tried to gun you down in the street last week? That one is considered a crime in this state. Most states actually. He’s still in the hospital but he should be getting out in a few days. You want to press charges?”

  “Nah. It was just a misunderstanding. Some bad detective work by him. Anyway he’s got no hand.”

  “That’s nice of you,” he said.