Two Days Gone

by Randall Silvis

  “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll see you later maybe.”

  A half hour later, DeMarco’s car rolled to a stop beside Moby’s little trailer. There were no lights on inside, no signs of habitation. He shut off the engine, then peered through his windshield at the layer of frost atop the trailer’s tarred roof. He popped open his door and lifted the two paper cups of convenience store coffee out of the cup holders.

  There was no response when he knocked on Moby’s front door. He set one cup down on the concrete step and turned the knob. The door opened easily and released a chilled, sour scent into DeMarco’s face. He picked up the second cup of coffee, stepped inside, and closed the door with his hip.

  Moby lay on the short vinyl sofa, knees drawn against his chest, hands shoved between his legs. He was wearing a too-large black suit, probably a recent purchase from the Goodwill store, and a pair of scuffed brown loafers with white wool socks. Close to the sofa, a gallon bottle of Rhine wine sat on the floor beside a plastic coffee mug. The mug was empty; the bottle held only a puddle of wine.

  DeMarco stood over him for a moment, motionless and listening. The coffee was hot against his hands, but the room was so cold that he could see his own exhalations in evanescing puffs of ghostly white. He leaned closer to Moby, watched the man’s chest for a rise and fall. Satisfied then but beginning to shiver, DeMarco looked around for the thermostat, found it in the corner of the room, leaned close, and squinted. Fifty-four degrees. He slid the plastic lever to seventy-two and heard the pop of the oil burner’s flame kicking on.

  With the back of his hand, he nudged Moby’s shoulder. Two more nudges, each more forceful than the last. Finally a low grunt and a slit-eyed squint. DeMarco said, “How about you sit up for a minute and have some coffee.”

  Another ten seconds passed before Moby responded. Instead of sitting up, he squeezed himself together even more tightly. “It’s fucking cold in here,” he said.

  DeMarco took a seat at the little dinette table across from him. He set both cups of coffee atop the table. “You had your heater turned off,” he said. “You should feel things warming up in a minute or two.”

  Moby lay there and blinked at him.

  DeMarco said, “I brought one coffee black, one with cream and sugar. Take your pick.”

  Moby gave a little nod at the bottle on the floor. “There anything left in there?”

  DeMarco emptied the dregs from the bottle into the plastic mug, but instead of handing it to Moby, he set the mug on the table. He said, “I need you to sit up for me.”

  Moby brought a hand to his cheek, rubbed his face for a while, then scratched his forehead. His movements fell into a slow repetition, fingernails tracing a slow loop from the top of his forehead to his eyebrows and back around again, over and over. Finally DeMarco leaned forward and pushed the hand away. “You’re scratching the hell out of yourself, Moby. Sit up and talk to me.”

  By slow degrees, Moby dragged himself into a lopsided sitting position. DeMarco handed him the mug of wine. Moby took a long swallow, then shivered. DeMarco told him, “You’d be better off with the coffee.”

  Moby said, “I disagree.”

  DeMarco peeled the lid off the cup of black coffee, took a sip, held the paper cup between his knees. “I need you to help me figure something out,” he said. “Why would Inman kill your sister?”

  With both hands, Moby clutched the mug of wine against his chest, just below his chin. Every now and then, he raised the mug to his lips. His gaze never left the floor.

  “Why, Moby? You’re the only one who might know.”

  Moby’s head moved back and forth, a slow negation. But, DeMarco wondered, a negation of what?

  Moby said, “She wasn’t in on any of that shit he did. She wasn’t like that.”

  “That’s the way I see it too,” DeMarco told him. “But afterward. When it came out in the news what had happened at the Huston place. She must have had her suspicions, right? She must have asked him a question or two.”

  “You ever notice that little limp she’s got? That was from asking him a question he didn’t want to answer.”

  “What about the abortion?”

  Moby sat motionless, said nothing, held himself unnaturally still.

  “You knew about it, right?”

  Moby pursed his lips, thought for a moment, and nodded.

  DeMarco said, “Huston claimed he never touched her.”

  “Far as I know he didn’t.”

  “So the baby was Inman’s?”

  Moby said nothing. He stared at the floor.

  “Moby?” DeMarco said. “She doesn’t need you to keep her secrets anymore.”

  Moby raised the mug to his lips, held it there for a moment, smiled a small smile. Then he tilted the cup up and took a swallow. Then he closed his eyes and sat motionless for a while, the cup against his chest. Finally he sucked in a noisy, glutinous breath, then opened his eyes, leaned back against the cushions, and fixed his gaze on the door.

  He said, “She had a couple of regular customers, you know? I don’t mean at Whispers. Private customers. Longtime friends. All she knew was that somebody’s stuff must have slipped past her diaphragm. She’s forty-two years old, runs a strip club, for Chrissakes. You think she was going to let herself bring a baby into this world, no matter how much she might have wanted one?”

  “So how did Inman find out about the abortion? Why would she tell him?”

  “That abortion place did a thing on her. Before they gave her the pill and whatever. Like an X-ray or something. On her belly.”

  “A sonogram.”

  Moby nodded. “They put the picture of it on a computer disk for her. She said it looked like a fuzzy dot is all. But she just kept telling me about it, you know; she got all teary-eyed. Over a fuzzy little dot. I guess that’s why she held on to it. That computer disk, I mean.”

  “And Inman found it?”

  “She already knows he’s going to beat the shit out of her, right? I mean, that’s a given. But if she admits that the baby might not be his…”

  “So she did what she had to do.”

  “All her life,” Moby said.

  “Okay. So you think that’s maybe why Inman killed her that night he came for me?”

  Moby shrugged. “All I know is she thought you were a decent guy. A decent guy for a cop is what she said. And when she packed up to leave her place, she just thought they were clearing out for a while. Getting away from all the mess. He was taking her someplace warm, she said. Sit out the winter. She hated the fucking winters here. Always did want to get away from the cold.”

  “So it probably surprised her when he pulled the car over on the street behind my house.”

  “I figure he would have reached for that big knife of his, you know? He kept it under the seat when he was driving. She would’ve said something then for sure.”

  DeMarco nodded. “She knew where I lived. From the old days. Back when she had that little place on West Venango.”

  Moby sipped his wine. Then, “She didn’t often stand up to him, but she would have over that. I even know what she would’ve said. She’d’ve said, ‘You do this, and I won’t be here when you get back.’”

  DeMarco nodded and considered the possibilities. So Inman had planned to kidnap me, steal my car, transfer his clothes and traveling money out of the Mustang, then drive north. The maps were probably a ruse to fool Bonnie into believing they were headed for Mexico. Maybe he had intended from the beginning to kill her too. As punishment for destroying what he thought of as his, for depriving him of another poor creature to bully and beat. He was a nutcase, but not an idiot; he knew I’d be hauling him in sooner or later. Maybe he thought that by kidnapping me, then killing me, making it difficult for anybody to find my body for a while, he could short-circuit the investigation long enough to find a safe place to hid
e. Maybe he thought I could lead him to Thomas.

  “The thing about Bonnie,” Moby said. “She didn’t often go off, you know? But when she did, she let it fly in all directions.”

  “Go off how? I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  “It took a lot for her to snap. Usually it only happened when she was really, really scared about something.”

  “Like what?” DeMarco asked.

  Moby said, “You know why she gave me that job at Whispers?”

  “How about you tell me.”

  “Up till three years or so ago, she always hired some college kid as a bouncer. Somebody with more muscles than brains.”

  “So what happened three years ago?”

  “I had a little too much to drink one night. Borrowed somebody’s car. Sliced a telephone pole in half. The top half came right down through the roof of the car. Missed me by half a splinter or so.”

  “That’s when she lost her temper?”

  “At the hospital that night. I was just banged up a little is all. Till she started laying into me. Called me every name in the book at the top of her lungs. It got so bad, they wanted to give her a shot of something and strap her down. I told them to leave her alone, ’cause I had it coming. And I knew she was just scared because of what I almost done to myself.”

  “And you think she might have lost her temper like that with Inman?”

  “I think she could’ve. He was always pushing, always digging. Always accusing her of this and that. For all I know, they really were off to someplace warm and then he started in on her. Calling her a slut, a whore. Saying she fucked this guy, she fucked that guy. Maybe she just lost it. With him, she was damn close to the edge most of the time. And she could cut you when she wanted to. She’d say shit that’d make you bleed like a stuck pig, whether it was true or not.”

  “So what do you think she might have said that night?”

  “His big thing was… I mean, the thing he was always throwing in her face was the sex stuff. It was like, ‘How many dirty cocks did you suck today, bitch? Who’d you fuck today, slut?’ If he wasn’t accusing her of fucking, he was telling her she was too ugly to fuck, she was all used up. She was just a fuckbag is all. That was his nickname for her. Fuckbag. That really used to piss me off.”

  “And you think she might have finally had all she could take of it.”

  “I can hear her, man. I mean, I didn’t; I don’t know for sure. But I can hear what she might have said. It would’ve been like, ‘You want to know what I did today? I sucked some stranger’s dick, then Huston fucked me three times, then DeMarco came in my ass. Then after lunch, I sucked DeMarco’s cock and licked out Huston’s asshole.’ And on and on and on. She could be as crude as they come, I’ll tell you that. But she was no whore. She did Inman because she was afraid of him, plus she had a couple of private customers who treated her right. But she was no goddamn whore. And I am glad as hell that sick, twisted motherfucker is dead. I just wish I’d had the balls to be the one who took him out.”

  By now, Moby was sitting huddled over, scrunched up in misery with the plastic coffee mug pressed to his chest.

  DeMarco sipped his coffee for a while. It was only his second of the morning, but it tasted bitter already. It tasted like his fifth cup, when his stomach would start to sour and a tight astringency would rise into his throat. He set the half-empty cup on the table beside the full one. I need to start treating my stomach better, he thought.

  Then he looked at Moby again. A small man in a too-large suit, stubbly cheeked, hopeless and alone, wet eyes blinking back tears.

  DeMarco told him, “You can’t be falling asleep in here with the heat turned off, Moby. Have you been like this since the funeral?” He was answered with a look from baleful eyes, a look that asked him, What difference does it make?

  DeMarco told him, “I could get you into a place in Erie if you’d let me. Sort of a community house. You’d have your own room probably, but there’d be a few other people around. It’s a place where everybody sort of watches out for each other.”

  “You’re saying I can’t take care of myself. Maybe I don’t want to.”

  “Fine. Turn the heat off and fall asleep. The kind of sleep you don’t wake up from, is that what you want? If so, I hope you like the idea of rats crawling around in your stomach, because that’s what’s going to happen in a day or so. The minute you start to stink. You’ll be a rat smorgasbord in no time at all. They start out anywhere they can find an opening—eyes, nose, asshole, you name it. Eat their way inside, invite the family and all the neighbors in, then they just slurp and chomp away. You end up as rat shit scattered all over your own floor. It’s a very efficient process.”

  Moby hugged himself and shivered. After a while he said, “They going to let me drink in that place?”

  “You know better than that.”

  Another minute of silence. Then, “Am I going to get Bonnie’s car back at least?”

  “When you’re ready for it, I’ll see that you get it. Same thing with Bonnie’s house.”

  “Is there blood all over it? The car, I mean. Where she was sitting.”

  “You can have the seats replaced. There’ll probably be some money coming to you as well. Did she own Whispers or rent the building?”

  “Rented.”

  “So that’s one thing you won’t have to worry about. You get yourself right, and I’ll see that everything of hers goes to you. But not unless you get yourself right.”

  “If it’s mine, you can’t keep it from me.”

  “You’d be surprised what I can do, Moby.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be a decent guy.”

  “You think Bonnie wants you to be rat shit? I’m doing this for her, whether you like it or not.”

  Moby sniffed a couple of times. “What about him?”

  “Who? Inman?”

  “Where’d they bury him?”

  “He was cremated.”

  “Where’s his ashes?”

  “We’ll hold them for a while to see if anybody claims them. Then we’ll dispose of them.”

  “Can I claim them?”

  “Why would you want them?”

  “So I can dump them in a toilet somewhere and piss all over them.”

  DeMarco thought for a few moments. “You going to let me drive you up to Erie?”

  “I don’t know,” Moby said. “I might.”

  “In that case… In a way, you’re sort of the brother-in-law, right?”

  Something like a smile came to Moby’s lips. “Seems to me.”

  “So we give it thirty days,” DeMarco told him. “If nobody has claimed the ashes by then, they’re all yours.”

  Seventy-One

  Now came the emptiness. A deep hole that if not soon filled would make a perfect home for the birds of sorrow. DeMarco could sense them circling already, twittering shrilly, eager to move in. But DeMarco did not want to accommodate them this time. Why must his heart be always a nest of sadness? Unfortunately he had little talent for making it otherwise. He lacked Thomas Huston’s gifts for creation, for imagining himself as something other than he was.

  So he sat on the back porch a long while that afternoon. For a long while, he stared at the unkempt yard and the unfinished path, but they registered on his optic nerve only as backdrop to what could not be seen. He understood the cause of his sadness. The source of all sadness. The loss of what had once been but was now irretrievable. The loss of what had never been and could never be.

  For the past many years, he had filled that emptiness with his work. One case of tragedy after another, puzzle after morbid puzzle to solve. Is that all you have to look forward to? he asked himself now. Just sit here and stare at the grass until another catastrophe occurs? Live a life that can find meaning only in other people’s mistakes and misfortune?


  The air was crisp and clean and cool as only a day in November can be. Three weeks before Thanksgiving. Seven weeks before winter. He did not want the birds of sorrow taking up residence in his heart again. They were small, black, noisy birds, and they would add nothing but darkness to the dark days and long dark nights ahead. But he did not know how to keep them out. Work silenced them only during the daylight hours. No amount of whiskey could drown them.

  • • •

  At the end of Thomas Huston’s novel, the one Huston had signed and presented to DeMarco in appreciation of the lunches they had shared, the novel’s protagonist says, “What I have to do now is that which is not easy. That which I most fear. If I keep accommodating my fears, I can only move in reverse. That would be fine if by moving in reverse I could move back through time, but the past is a wall, a solid and impermeable wall. The past is a fortress that cannot be stormed.”

  DeMarco remembered the first time he had read that passage, and how, when he'd read the first line, he had thought it a grammatical error. Years earlier, back when Laraine was pregnant and he had decided to try for a promotion to station commander, he had asked her to proofread the short essay he had been required to submit. What he remembered most about her critique was the lesson on the difference between that and which. The difference between nonrestrictive and restrictive modifying phrases. A comma preceding which, no comma before that. Then, years later, alone in a quiet house, with no wife or teacher or proofreader to explain things to him, there on the final page of Huston’s second novel was that which is not easy. No comma. What had initially puzzled DeMarco was that the error was repeated in the next sentence too. That which I most fear. So, he had concluded, Huston must have had a reason for that awkward construction. DeMarco studied those two lines. He read them out loud. Listened to them. And finally heard the hesitancy couched in an awkward formality. The hint of exhortation. Yes, of course, DeMarco had thought back then. Huston wants the sentences to be awkward. Because the narrator is screwing up his nerve here, trying to talk himself into something. Trying to force down his terror of what he knows he has to do. Of that very difficult thing he knows he must do.