A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  She watched his hands on the steering wheel, saw his grip relax. Saw his elbows come down. He said, “There are all kinds of people in this world, I guess.”

  “But what do you think of a situation like that?”

  “I don’t think anything of it.”

  “How do you think it works? One on one? Two on two? Three on one? Every man for himself?”

  He smiled. “It’s trouble no matter how you look at it. People are too complicated for something like that. Too unpredictable.”

  “I agree,” she said. Then added, a few moments later, “They all seemed fairly happy, though, didn’t they? Peaceful, even.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. Glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye.

  She said, “I’m not saying I need a foursome to be happy. I’m just saying, if that’s the kind of setup they all need to be happy, then why not? It seems to be working for them. So why the heck not?”

  He rolled his shoulders. Stretched his back.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she told him. “Don’t you do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Listen to that little voice inside your head that’s telling you all the wrong stuff.” She reached across the seat to lift his right hand off the steering wheel, then pressed her own hand atop his. “I have everything I need,” she told him. “One wonderful man is more than enough for me.”

  He laced his fingers between hers. “So I’m still wonderful?”

  “You’re on probation. But I swear, if you ever beep at me again…”

  He nodded. Kept his eyes on the road, his face stern. Then, when her hand relaxed in his, and he felt more of the tension draining away from him, he said, softly, like a hungry little bird, “Beep.”

  Forty-Nine

  At the restaurant where they stopped for dinner prior to the memorial for Samantha Lewis, DeMarco continued to study the menu. He had already sent the server away twice with, “A couple more minutes, please.”

  Finally he laid the laminated menu flat in front of him. “What are you having?” he asked.

  “Grilled salmon salad. You?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll just get the same thing.”

  She didn’t think it wise to bring up the meeting with Lathea yet, the message from Ryan Jr., or what Lathea had told her privately. So she said nothing.

  He said, “I wish somebody would invent a pill so that we didn’t have to eat. Most of the time it’s just a nuisance.”

  There was something going on with him other than what Lathea had told him. Something that had started earlier. The heaviness in his chest. The exploding head. The general weariness in everything he did. Usually an investigation got his adrenaline flowing and filled him with a relentless energy. She had seen only glimmers of that in the past few days.

  Maybe, she thought, it started when he came back to check on Laraine. Then lifted when he returned to Kentucky, then befell him again when they crossed from West Virginia into Pennsylvania. Maybe spending so much time in Youngstown had churned up too many memories. In any case, she wasn’t going to question him. He didn’t like being questioned. Didn’t like being probed.

  Still, what if there was something physically wrong with him? Something potentially lethal? She said, “This case is really sapping my energy. I could use a couple days of R&R.”

  He nodded, but absently, his gaze on the far wall.

  “Maybe we should think about some downtime,” she told him. “After we see how things play out tonight.”

  He did not reply.

  “Gee,” she said, trying for a lighter tone. “There we were with a psychic, and we didn’t even think to ask who the murderer is.”

  Still he offered no reply. Neither spoke until the server arrived again and asked, “Are we ready?”

  He nodded to Jayme, who ordered the salmon salad with raspberry vinaigrette and a glass of water with lemon.

  “And you, sir?”

  “Same,” he said. “With balsamic, please.”

  He usually ordered the blue cheese dressing, or at least some crumbles. Usually iced tea or coffee. She couldn’t help but to search his face for some indication of illness, an unhealthy pallor, or eyes that refused to focus. But there was no visible sign.

  For the next ten minutes she continued to try to read him, alternating her study of his hands with long looks toward the other customers, then a glance at his mouth, his eyes, the tabletop, the painting of three waterfowl on the wall. But always her gaze came back to his eyes, and finally lingered there too long.

  He turned his head slightly. “Why are you staring at me?”

  “Because I love you,” she said.

  When he offered nothing in return, she said, “Please don’t go away from me like this. It scares me.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he told her. But the sadness of his smile stabbed at her heart.

  She said, “What’s going on with you, babe?”

  He lowered his gaze. Used his fingertips to straighten the edge of the place mat. “I guess a part of me just wants to walk away from all this.”

  She felt suddenly hollow and nauseated.

  He said, “With you, of course. Walk away with you. Always with you.”

  “Then let’s do it. Let’s just walk away right now.”

  “I wish it were that easy.”

  “Why isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t quit things. It’s a bad habit to start.”

  She considered reminding him that he had recently quit his job with the state police. But what good would that do?

  Then the server arrived with their salads. “Anything else I can get you folks right now?”

  DeMarco had turned at the young woman’s approach, and now kept looking intently into her eyes. He didn’t speak, didn’t look away. Finally the server broke eye contact and spoke to Jayme, a bit nervously. “We okay?”

  “It looks great,” Jayme told her. “Thank you.” She watched DeMarco watching the server walk away.

  Finally he turned to Jayme. “How old do you think she is?”

  “Early twenties probably?”

  “Such a child,” he said, and let his gaze sweep the room. “They’re all children, aren’t they? We’re all children, every one of us. We have no idea what lies ahead.”

  “Babe,” she said. “You’re really scaring me now.”

  His eyes went into a squint. He seemed puzzled. But it lasted only a few seconds. Then he smiled, unfolded his napkin, and spread it over his lap. “Preprandial depression,” he told her, and picked up his fork. “There’s another p-word to try out on Fascetti. Pass the pepper, please.”

  Fifty

  “Quite a crowd,” Jayme said.

  From the corner of the visiting team bleachers, they looked out across the football field twenty yards below, where some two hundred people were gathered at the nearest end zone. Many of them held a paper cup in which a small candle burned, even though the sky was still bright with evening light. The crowd was compressed near the front, where it formed a half circle close to a display of photos and mementos. It widened and separated at the back, where it had broken into small pockets of a few people each, those who had shown up out of curiosity or a sense of obligation. On both sides of the crowd a handful of smokers had stepped aside to inhale whispers of their own deaths.

  A murmur of voices could be heard, as could occasional bursts of laughter from the back of the crowd. The most prominent voice was male and emanated from the end zone. “That sounds like the commissioner,” DeMarco said.

  Jayme asked, “How do you want to do this?”

  “We should be able to spot Gillespie from here. How many people are six three? I’m betting he’s near the front.”

  “There he is,” Jayme said a minute later. “Left of center.”

  DeMarco nodd
ed. He glanced at his cell phone. “7:19. Let’s hold off till it winds down a bit.”

  Twenty minutes later they approached from the rear, then skirted the crowd from the far side. By this time Samantha’s father and two other individuals had finished their remarks. Music from a suitcase-size boom box in front of the photo display was playing, with most of the crowd singing along and swaying back and forth. Others sobbed and held to each other.

  Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb” began just as DeMarco and Jayme eased into the edge of the crowd a few yards behind Gillespie. She whispered, “Want me to scout ahead?”

  “Roger that,” DeMarco said.

  She moved unobtrusively along the outer edge, close enough finally to look across the faces in the front row. A few minutes later she turned and walked, head bowed, back to DeMarco.

  “I could make out both Kaitlin and Griffin in a small group of students at the very front,” she told him. “Gillespie is a couple of rows behind them.”

  “Like a mother hen watching over its brood?”

  “You might say that.”

  “We need to do this in the parking lot,” DeMarco whispered. “Can you keep an eye on the kids from the bleachers? I’ll take Gillespie.”

  “What if they break up?”

  “Stick with Kaitlin, I guess. If you can keep Griffin from seeing you, all the better. We’ll chat with him and the other ones later.”

  They turned and retraced their steps. Jayme stationed herself at the corner of the bleachers, from which point she could look down almost directly onto the front of the crowd. DeMarco crossed back to the parking lot behind the other end of the bleachers. From there he walked the rows until he spotted Professor Gillespie’s charcoal Volvo Momentum. He then hurried back to his own car, and moved it to a slot facing the rear of the SUV.

  And he waited. Switched from one radio station to another. Fiddled with the air conditioner vent. Then reset it to its original placement. Moved his seat back forward a notch. Too straight. Took it back two notches. Uncomfortable. Moved it forward one notch. Just right.

  It was well after eight before people started returning to their vehicles. Gillespie was not among the first rush, nor in those who trickled past throughout the next ten minutes. Only twenty or so cars remained in the lot when DeMarco saw Gillespie approaching. He turned off the radio, shut off the engine.

  Ten yards from his own vehicle, Gillespie used a remote starter to fire up the SUV. DeMarco popped open his door. “Professor!” he said.

  Gillespie turned, smiling. The smile was short-lived. “Well hello,” he said. Then mustered a different kind of smile. “Such a sad, sad occasion,” he said, and opened the vehicle’s door.

  “It is,” said DeMarco. He paused adjacent to the rear door of the SUV, less than three feet from Gillespie, and leaned against the car’s hull. The scent of pine air freshener seeped out of the car. And underneath it…was that cannabis smoke he smelled?

  “I’m a little surprised to see you here, Professor,” DeMarco said. “Considering that you couldn’t remember if Ms. Lewis was a student of yours or not.”

  Gillespie looked at the electronic key in his hand. “You jogged my memory. It was over two years ago.”

  “Even so,” said DeMarco. “A student gets brutally murdered, a close friend of the student who cleans for you, and it takes me to jog your memory?”

  Gillespie now considered the roof of his vehicle. Rubbed a fingertip over a smudge of dirt. “I deal with hundreds of students every semester. I tend to remember their faces, but seldom their names.”

  DeMarco nodded. Knew that Gillespie had spoken with Kaitlin by now, probably with Griffin too. So he stood there smiling, giving the professor a bit more time to get nervous. Then he said, “It’s an interesting coincidence though, don’t you think?”

  “What is?”

  “You do research on the Talarico/Brogan murders, then one of your students happens to be murdered in a fashion similar to those. And not long before that, you made a presentation to an audience of law enforcement personnel and amateur criminologists, in which you proposed that both the Talarico murders and the Cleveland Torso Murders were perpetrated by some kind of weird religious fanatic? A subject that just happens to be your academic specialty.”

  He smiled broadly at Gillespie then, and said, “It does make a man curious.”

  Gillespie said, “I am a scholar, sir. The extremes of religious thought move like dangerous currents through man’s history. For you to insinuate for even a second that I had something to do with that poor girl’s death…”

  DeMarco waited, kept smiling. But Gillespie had temporarily run out of words.

  “Is there any chance you have a book you’re trying to get published?” DeMarco asked.

  “You,” Gillespie sputtered, “you—”

  “Naw, never mind,” DeMarco told him. “Every academic has a book he’s trying to get published, right? I’ll just ask around, see what I can find. Save you the trouble of answering. Nice to see you again.” With that he straightened and took a step away from the vehicle.

  Gillespie remained frozen in place, face pinched, nostrils flared.

  Three steps from the SUV, DeMarco paused. He didn’t want to let Gillespie off the hook yet. Wanted him to swallow the hook. Wanted the hook to rip his guts out.

  DeMarco made a quarter turn and looked back at Gillespie. “I was wondering, though,” he said. “University policy.”

  “What about it?” Gillespie managed.

  “In regard to a female student cohabiting with a male professor. Is that something you have to file a formal request for? Some kind of holy dispensation type of thing?”

  “Miss Mahood…I assume you are referring to her…is employed as my housekeeper. I already made that clear to you.”

  “Yeah, that’s another thing. Because what she said is that she was at your house to study. Though she looked to me like she had just rolled out of bed.”

  “She does not live with me. That’s absurd. Sometimes she brings books with her, she studies a bit, does some cleaning…”

  “Except that the last summer classes are already over. So what was she studying? The Kama Sutra maybe?”

  Gillespie lurched forward, shaking his finger at DeMarco. “I treat my students with the utmost respect! My students admire me! For you to suggest such a thing…I…I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

  “Her campus roommate hasn’t seen her for weeks. Coincidentally, not since her friend, and your former student, was murdered.”

  “How does that involve me?” Gillespie demanded. “There is no correlation. In fact, as I recall, Kaitlin mentioned that she went home for a while. Spent most of that time with her family.”

  “I’ll check that out,” DeMarco said. “It will be interesting to hear what her folks have to say. What do you wanna bet they think she’s been in her apartment all this time?”

  Gillespie’s stiff finger of indignation was now limp at his side, long arms hanging down. He stared at the pavement just in front of DeMarco’s feet.

  “But hey,” DeMarco told him. “She’s a legal adult, right? No harm, no foul.” He looked up at the sky. “It’s going to be a nice clear night after all. Crescent moon. Good night to lie in the grass and ponder the stars. You have grass back at your place, right?”

  Gillespie lifted his head. He looked at DeMarco with a sneer that was probably permanent by now, probably born in his childhood thanks to an overly critical mother or abusive father. But he was no child now and long past the time when one has to start taking responsibility for his tendencies, whether it is narcissism or meanness or just a sneer that seems to be begging for a punch in the mouth.

  DeMarco asked, “Do you sleep well, Dr. Gillespie?”

  “Most nights. Do you?”

  “I used to like to punch people in the face. Still have an
occasional urge.”

  “I would suggest that you find yourself some help for that condition.”

  “Help comes in various forms. Sometimes a couple of jabs to the mouth are exactly the medicine a man needs.”

  “Are you threatening me, sir?”

  DeMarco shrugged. “I have a long history of violence. And history is the mother of philosophy. So maybe if I knock out a few of your teeth I will have a better understanding of the meaning of life.”

  “I believe it’s considered a crime to make such a threat.”

  “If I were threatening you, and not merely theorizing, it might be called simple assault. Me, if I’m going to break the law, I break it all the way. Like knocking your nose out the other side of your cheek so that you can smell sideways. That would be a law worth breaking.”

  Gillespie blinked, looked away. His mouth opened slightly as if he wanted to speak, but then he changed his mind, licked his lips, took half a step backward, turned his body to the side.

  DeMarco counted to five, then smiled again. “Nice chatting with you,” he said.

  He returned to his car, climbed in, started the engine, and pulled out of the parking space. Gillespie remained just as he had been a minute earlier, limp and immobile.

  DeMarco gave him a friendly beep beep. He just couldn’t resist.

  Fifty-One

  Kaitlin came away from the dispersing crowd along with Griffin Lewis and two other students, one white male, one African American female. The four walked the length of the football field together, talking most of the way as they angled toward the parking lot. Jayme followed along the front of the bleachers, staying far enough behind to remain out of their peripheral vision.

  As the four closed on the parking lot, the unfamiliar male peeled off from the group and headed toward the far end of the lot. The other three remained in a tight knot as they left the grass and made their way to the second row of cars. Jayme kept an eye on all of them, watched the unfamiliar male climb into a car and speed away. She then approached the group of three.

  Kaitlin and the other female stood facing the driver’s door on a yellow Mustang, with Griffin Lewis leaning against the door panel. They stopped talking when Jayme approached. “Hi, guys,” she said.