A Cup Full of Midnight

by Jaden Terrell

  The only thing the residents had in common was a deep distaste for Razor. He’d died on a Friday. According to the police report, it had been a dreary, drizzling day, and any neighbors who weren’t at work were at the mall or the movies, or huddled inside watching HBO. No one had seen anything. No one had wanted to.

  I spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon talking to people the police had already interviewed. The single mother two doors down said she was afraid to let her eight-year-old son play unsupervised in the yard. The elderly woman across the street complained of loud, discordant music and “half-dressed trollops and homosexuals.” About an hour before sunset, the accountant next door, Roland Calder, pulled into his driveway. He invited me in for coffee, and told me he’d doubled the insulation in his house to keep his wife and daughters from hearing the foul language that often poured from Razor’s front porch and driveway.

  “Truth is,” Calder said, sliding a steaming mug onto the table in front of me, “the guy was a jerk. I’m not saying he deserved what happened to him—I wouldn’t wish that on anybody—but if he hadn’t been killed, we’d’ve had to put our house on the market, it was that bad. Cream or sugar?”

  “Black is fine.” I picked up the mug and inhaled the rich, earthy scent of Colombian roast. “Sounds like a popular guy.”

  “Yeah, right.” He rubbed a hand across his balding pate and patted down the long strands of his comb-over. “There’s this guy who lives down the street, you know? And one night, Razor . . . he’s having some kind of party or something, and this guy just goes down there and says something like, ‘Hey, we’re trying to sleep here.’ ” Calder dumped two tablespoons of powdered nondairy creamer into his mug, where it dissolved into a clotted cloud. “Not like the rest of us weren’t thinking the same thing. And Razor goes, ‘Well, Eff you, man. It’s a free country.’ Only he didn’t say eff you.”

  “Not very neighborly.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” He swirled his spoon around the mug, nudging the powdery clumps until they dissipated. “So this guy, Hewitt, his name is, he calls the cops and makes a complaint.”

  “Razor must’ve been pissed.”

  “I guess so. Because the next morning, Hewitt goes out and the air’s been let out of all his tires.” Calder took a sip of coffee and smiled. “Ah, that hits the spot. So anyway, Hewitt figures it’s gotta be Razor that did it, and Hewitt makes another complaint. But there’s no proof.”

  “No proof, no prosecution.”

  Calder raised his mug in agreement. “Exactly.”

  “Was that the end of it?”

  “Not hardly. Razor went to Hewitt’s place and told him nobody liked a rat. A couple of days later, Hewitt’s dog was poisoned. The vet said it was antifreeze.”

  “Motherfu—”

  Calder frowned, and I caught myself before I finished the word. I meant it, though. Antifreeze is an insidious poison, a sweet-tasting substance dogs lap up like gravy. It takes less than a teaspoon to kill a good-sized dog.

  “The dog,” I said. “Did it survive?”

  “Touch-and-go for awhile,” he said. “Doing fine now, though.”

  “Let me guess. There was nothing to connect Razor to the poisoning.”

  “Nothing you could prove,” he said. “But everybody knew. When Hewitt went out to bring in the dog dish, there was a rubber rat in it.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  According to Calder, the conflict had dragged on. Hewitt put sugar in Razor’s gas tank. Razor threw a brick through Hewitt’s front window. Garbage cans were overturned. Punches and epithets were exchanged. By the time Razor died, the feud was a neighborhood legend.

  When I’d learned as much as I thought I could, I thanked Calder for the coffee and walked four doors down to talk to Hewitt.

  A woman answered my knock, a petite brunette in a shapeless gray sweatshirt and baggy drawstring pants. Her light blue eyes were wary, but she gave me a reflexive half-smile. “May I help you?”

  “I hope so.” I flipped open my wallet and held up my P.I. license, which she studied through the screen. A beagle with a grizzled muzzle peered from behind her legs. It had worry wrinkles above its eyes, but gave its tail a tentative wag. “Are you Mrs. Hewitt?”

  “Yes. Judith Hewitt. Why?”

  “I’m investigating Sebastian Parker’s death. You probably knew him as Razor.”

  She squeezed her arms across her breasts and squinted up at me. “I heard his vampire buddies killed him. Sacrificed him or something like that.”

  “Maybe. Probably. But we still need to look into everything. What he was into. Who might have wanted him dead.”

  She gave an angry laugh. “Everybody wanted him dead.”

  “He poisoned your dog, didn’t he?”

  “Buddy’s dog.” She stroked the beagle’s head. “He had her before we were married. She’s the sweetest thing. But if you’re thinking Buddy might have had something to do with that killing—”

  “I’m not thinking that.”Although I was. Some bastard hurt my dog, I might not kill him, but I’d sure as hell think about it.

  “He wasn’t even around. He was gone all day, hunting ducks up at his daddy’s farm.”

  “I’d still like to talk to him.”

  “Knock yourself out. Him and Elgin are out back. You can go on around.”

  “Elgin?”

  “Around back.”

  “I’ll go talk to them. Thanks for your time.” I started down the steps, turned back as the door was swinging shut. “Mrs. Hewitt . . .”

  She paused, peering through a six-inch crack in the door. “What?”

  “The police report said you were at home that afternoon. Did you see anything? Anybody coming or going? Anyone at all, even somebody who belonged there?”

  “I told the police no. The answer is still no. And if I had seen anyone, I wouldn’t tell you. As far as I’m concerned, whoever killed him should get a medal.”

  She closed the door firmly between us, not quite slamming it. I went around to the back of the house, where a chain-link fence separated the front yard from the back. An elongated gate cut across the driveway. On the other side, two men in jeans and camouflage jackets hunched under the hood of a maroon 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix. A plastic strap held the rear fender in place. The body of the car was flecked with silver where the paint had chipped away. The smaller of the two men, who sported a scraggly beard and an orange toboggan cap, reached for a Budweiser bottle perched on the fender and took a long swig.

  Never too cold for beer.

  I lifted the latch on the gate and pushed it open. “Mr. Hewitt?”

  The man in the toboggan turned to face me. His breath puffed out of his mouth and swirled around the lip of the bottle. “Who wants to know?”

  I handed him my license. He gave it a cursory glance before tossing it back to me. “P.I., huh?” He glanced at his companion, who ducked out from under the hood of the car and looked at me as if I were a new and interesting species of reptile. Hewitt nodded toward his friend. “Jared McKean, Elgin Mayers. Elgin, whyn’t you get this guy a beer?”

  Elgin shrugged and strolled over to an open cooler overflowing with ice and a variety of bottled beers. Hewitt was a little shorter than me, but Elgin topped my six feet by at least four inches, muscled but not muscle-bound, with a bushy, unkempt mustache and a long, angry scar that ran from one corner of his mouth to a place just beneath his jawline. A corkscrew of greasy brown hair whipped across his face, exposing reddened ears and a forehead pitted with acne scars. His eyes were pale blue like a husky’s.

  He pitched me a beer and I caught it one-handed. “Thanks.”

  Hewitt took another swig and leaned against the front of the Pontiac. “So. What does a P.I. want with me?”

  I gave him the same spiel I’d given his wife and added, “I wondered if you saw anything. People coming and going. Unusual noises. That kind of thing.”

  “Can’t help you. I wasn’t home.”

>   “Your wife said you were out hunting that day.”

  “Hard to see anything, if I wasn’t here.”

  I looked past his shoulder at a line of starlings perched on a telephone line. “My brother and I used to hunt.”

  “Yeah? What’d you hunt?”

  “Mostly rabbits and squirrels. The occasional quail.”

  “Any deer?”

  “No. Never really got the chance. You?”

  He gave me a hard flat stare that said a man who’d never killed a deer had no right to call himself a hunter. “Sure. In season.”

  “How long you been doing it? Hunting, I mean?”

  “Got my first buck when I was twelve.”

  “Impressive.”

  “Not really.” He nodded toward his companion. “Elgin was ten.”

  Elgin grinned, his pale eyes hard and feral.

  I said to Hewitt, “You were hunting when Razor was killed. Where was Elgin?”

  Hewitt gave a startled laugh and glanced sharply at Elgin, who took a long draw from his beer bottle and gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Come back with a warrant,” Elgin said, “and maybe I’ll tell you.”

  “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m relying on the goodness of your hearts.”

  Hewitt said, “They tell you that son of a bitch gave my dog antifreeze?”

  “They said they suspected he had.”

  “So I’ll admit it. I hated the guy’s guts. But I didn’t kill him.” He turned back and bent over the engine again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta get to this alternator.”

  “You dress your own deer, Mr. Hewitt?” I asked.

  There was a pause before he answered. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  I kept my voice light when I asked my next question. Too light. I knew that in itself would call attention to it. I wanted it to. “What kind of knife do you use?”

  Hewitt’s back stiffened. Then he placed his palms flat on the front of the engine housing and took a long, deep breath. “You ought to go now, Mister,” he said softly.

  Elgin pushed his hips away from the car and shook the tension from his neck and shoulders. I took a step back, out of arm’s reach.

  “You have a good afternoon, Mr. Hewitt,” I said. “And thanks for the beer.”

  “Take it with you,” he said. “And go to Hell.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Since Hell was low on the list of places I wanted to go, I stopped by the bookstore at Opry Mills instead and picked up copies of the books on Absinthe’s list. Crossing the parking lot, green bookstore bag in one hand, I flipped open the cover of my cell phone with the other and tapped in Josh’s number with my thumb. “Anything about that game we talked about?”

  He couldn’t disguise the excitement in his voice. “There’s one Friday night at seven. Dad didn’t want to let me go, but my therapist said it would give me closure, plus she doesn’t think the game’s a big deal. So Mom said okay.”

  “Josh, your dad—”

  “Wait, that’s what I’m saying. They had a talk, and Dad finally said I could go.” He sounded happy. It had been a long time since I’d heard that in his voice.

  I rang off and dialed Alan Keating. He was booked for the week, he said, but could squeeze me in during lunch the next afternoon. He sounded annoyed to hear from me, but maybe that was only my imagination.

  Jay’s door was closed when I got home, so I took care of the horses, wolfed down a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, then went upstairs and crawled into bed with the player’s handbook for the vampire game. Lots of complicated pen and ink artwork, from the grotesque to the glamorous. A woman with a punk hairstyle opened her mouth to show elongated canines. A hairless vampire with bulging eyes sipped from the throat of a woman wearing little but a dazed expression. Dracula meets Heavy Metal.

  The rules for the game were punctuated by fictional journal entries and profiles of character archetypes. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was a hell of a lot more complicated than Chinese Checkers.

  After awhile, I closed the books and went online. Googled Goth and vampire, and spent the next few hours lurking in chat rooms and surfing the web. It was a different world, a world of shadings and subgroups—artists and poets, stylers, vampire pretenders, and vampire wannabes. A culture in flux, constantly evolving. Razor and his coterie seemed to think they were at the pinnacle.

  It was after midnight before I turned out the light and settled into an uneasy sleep, so I was tired and out of sorts when I showed up at Alan Keating’s office the next day at noon.

  Keating worked out of a small building on the west side of town, a few blocks from St. Thomas Hospital. He shared the building with three other psychologists whose placards read, “Andrea Shilling, Child Esteem Specialist,” “Tony Kent, Psychoanalysis and Hypnosis,” and “Glorianna Plummer,Women’s Issues and Repressed Memory Recovery.”All that was missing was a placard for Madame Zelda’s Voodoo Parlor.

  Keating’s placard said simply, “Alan Keating, Ph.D., Psychologist.”

  The four psychologists shared a receptionist, a sleek redhead with a pair of rings on her left hand and a smile that said maybe her I do had really meant I might.

  Her lips pursed as she studied my ID and then my face. When she handed back my card, her fingertips brushed my hand. “Third door on the right,” she said, her voice sultry. “I think it’s open.”

  Keating’s office was spacious, with pale walls and a wine-colored Persian rug. On one end of the room, a child-sized, kidney-shaped table surrounded by blue plastic chairs dug moons into the rug. Against the wall was a wooden shelf lined with toys that looked like they’d never been played with. At the other end of the room, behind a cherry wood desk so glossy you could see your reflection in it, Alan Keating sat in a high-backed leather swivel chair poring over a sheaf of papers in a manila folder.

  He looked up when I came in. Closed the folder and stood up, fingertips absently straightening the edges. He was dressed in another pricey Italian suit. Same gold tie chain, same gold tips at the wings of his shirt collar. This time, the tie was blood red with a pattern of gold running through it. Crisp. Clean. Careful. It made me want to pitch him into a dumpster.

  He gestured to the cushioned leather seat across the desk from him. “Come in. Have a seat. Let’s get this over with.”

  I settled into the chair, pulling my jacket across my chest to conceal the shoulder holster. His eyes flicked toward it as if he knew it was there. Which he probably did, since I’d shown it to him at the funeral. I let the jacket slip a bit and said, “How’s Byron?”

  “Shaken. As you’d expect.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  Keating sat. His chair was higher than mine, and he rocked back in it. Fancy. “I’m neither Byron’s warden nor his social director. If you want to talk to him, you’ll have to make your own arrangements.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “What kind of arrangement do you have with Byron?”

  He glared at me. “He’s fifteen, for God’s sake.”

  “That didn’t stop Razor.”

  “I’m not Razor.”

  We stared each other down like a couple of alpha wolves. It was what Josh had called a pissing contest, and it wouldn’t get me any closer to what I needed. I held up my hands to signal a truce. “Okay. I was out of line.”

  “Damn straight.” He stepped past me to a shiny black filing cabinet, yanked open a drawer marked Q–Z, and slid the folder he’d been studying deftly into place. Closed the drawer. Locked it. Then he blew out a long breath, came back around the desk, and slid into his chair. “What is it with you?”

  “Something about your boyfriend,” I said.

  “My boyfriend?”

  “You’re not going to tell me you and Razor didn’t have a thing going?”

  His gaze slid away, back toward the files. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Then it won’t hurt to tell me about it.”

  He pu
shed himself away from his desk and paced a path from desk to window and back again, then over to a rosewood bookcase filled with professional journals and hardbound books. Absently, he traced the titles with his index finger. People of the Lie. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

  He saw where I was looking and said, “The psychology of evil.”

  “A specialty of yours?”

  “More like an interest.”

  “Tell me about you and Razor.”

  He came back and settled into his chair with a creak of leather. Swiveled his chair away and looked out the window. The view was unimpressive—a narrow, cluttered alley separated from a row of dingy red-brick buildings by a sagging chain-link fence. It didn’t mesh with the Italian suits and the gold tie loop.

  “We met in grade school,” Keating said, eyes fixed on the glass. “Mrs. DeVray’s fifth grade class. We called her The Beast. She used to keep us inside at recess every day and make us write ‘play is the devil’s workshop’ over and over again.”

  “Gunning for that teacher of the year award, was she?”

  He spared me half a smile. “She hated children, I think. Children in general. But me especially. Maybe she thought I was weak. Or maybe she realized my parents wouldn’t intervene. You can guess how the other children reacted to that.”

  “Open season,” I said.

  “Exactly. They’d jump me on the playground, chase me home after school. They called me names, tripped me up, bloodied my nose. Once they made me eat excrement.” His jaw tightened. “Made me eat dog shit. They were like sharks smelling blood.”

  “Kids can be cruel.”

  “I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because it was something Bastian and I had in common—that Mrs. DeVray hated us both.”