She’d told him she might stop in and see him tonight. Until that moment, their unofficial date had completely slipped his mind.
For some reason, the sight of his daughter brought the memory of a movie they’d rented together a year or two ago. Stephen didn’t remember the name of the film. But it was all about how life as everybody knew it was really just a great elaborate computer program. And if you knew the program’s secrets, you could bend its rules: jump higher, run faster, float in the air, that kind of thing. If you were truly special, you could figure out how to transcend the program altogether.
For some reason, Fielder thought about the pivotal moment in the movie where the hero finally reaches enlightenment. From that point on, the hero saw everything around him in terms of the endless datastreams that created the illusion.
And it occurred to Fielder that if he were the main character in that movie, this would be the point where he’d observe the bustling chaos of this scene before him and begin to see the underlying patterns, and all would be revealed.
He thought about Happy Joe King. Wondered if the patterns were any clearer to him.
He wondered if he was the only one who seemed to be missing the point.
And then he felt his daughter throw her arms around him, asking him in breathless tones if he was okay.
Fielder stroked her hair, grinned in spite of the pain, and told her he was fine.
<
~ * ~
MICHAEL DOWNS
Man Kills Wife, Two Dogs
from Willow Springs
Three hard raps on the door made Dudek drop his beer. Only the landlord ever knocked, and no way would he knock again. Not after that morning.
“The downstairs door was open,” she explained.
He invited her into the room. She smelled like lilac. He figured her pearls for fake, though she wore them as if she didn’t care. Strawberry blond hair brushed her shoulders and her purple pullover sweater. The reporter introduced herself, said she wanted to talk about the shooting.
“What do you want me to say?” Dudek said, hoping she’d hear how willing he was to say anything. The reporter didn’t bite.
“Tell me what you saw,” she said, “what you heard.” Her voice reminded him of hot fudge pouring over mounds of vanilla. He said the first thing that came to mind.
“He came out with a cop on each arm. I tried to see his face. I mean, how does a guy look after he shoots his wife? I’ll tell you. He was grinning. Like everything was blue sky and bird songs. He was in such a good mood, I thought of yelling at him, ‘Hey, Mr. Tucker! You mind if I’m late on the rent this month?’ Don’t write that. It’s a joke.”
She grinned and watched him while scribbling on her notepad, her hard mahogany eyes unafraid to meet his. One hundred percent flirt. No question. Dudek could lock on a flirty smile through thirty feet of dark, smoky bar even when his heart pumped tequila instead of blood. In his own apartment, having downed only one can of beer, he felt as certain of the reporter’s intentions as he did his own.
He got a rag from the bathroom to wipe up the spilled beer. He’d seen reporters on TV, always yak yak yakking — but not this one. Mostly she listened, frowning in sympathy, pooching her lower lip. “Ask me something,” he wanted to say, but instead he turned the blinds and looked out on the grimy April afternoon. He thought she’d like that picture: the loner in a T-shirt and ratty trousers, staring out the window at a world gone to hell. On Dudek’s street, that world was low-riders and rust-eaten pickups, and the house across the road where kids had hung a cheap nylon banner for the holiday. On it, a pink bunny gathered painted eggs and grinned, ignorant and idiotic, at the house where Dudek lived, where until about half past six that morning, Mrs. Tucker had lived, too.
“It kicks my ass that he picked Easter Sunday,” Dudek said. “For Christ’s sake, wait until Monday. You know what I’m saying?”
“For Christ’s sake,” she repeated, chuckling, so he laughed, too. He liked her freckles, sprinkled around her cheekbones like fairy dust.
Dudek made a show of sweeping crumbs off the couch, even beating a pillow with an open palm. “Have a seat,” he told her while on his way to the kitchen. “Can I make you some coffee? Pop you a beer? Murder on Easter rates at least a six-pack.”
“Sounds tempting, but I’m on duty,” she said.
In the kitchen, he fished a can from the fridge, glad the reporter had turned down his offer when he noticed that can was the last one.
“You read our paper?” she asked as he sat near her on the couch. The newspaper lay slapdash over the coffee table he had scavenged from a neighbor’s junk pile.
“It’s the Tuckers’.” He sipped his beer, folded the paper. He had read about two wars, a flood in China, and about people who wanted a state beach declared nude for one week a year. He was rooting for the nudies.
“So, when did you hear the shots?”
“I was making breakfast,” he said, “boiling eggs, you know, because it’s Easter. It was dark outside. Quiet. I can’t sleep late. My old man was the same way, but he could blame smoker’s cough. Me, I don’t know. Anyway, the Tuckers. I’m hearing nothing from downstairs, which is strange, because I always hear them when they’re at each other’s throats. I mean, I used to hear them. Before. You’d think this morning they’d have been at it, too.”
“What would they fight about?” she asked.
“Stupid things,” he said. “Sad things. She called him fatso, though she was fatter. He hated that she didn’t work. Some nights, I’d wake to him shouting, “You ignorant witch!’ or her yelling about how he was lousy with his hands.” Dudek grimaced. “Stuff I didn’t need to know. Some nights it sounded like they had fun hating each other that much.”
Dudek swigged a mouthful, let it tingle his gums. Mornings after those fights, Dudek would listen carefully before leaving for work, waiting until he could hear either Mr. or Mrs. step out of their apartment. Then he would hurry down the stairwell that landed at their apartment door, wanting to see in their faces how they’d got through the night, how they’d changed from the day before, if something moved in or moved out. He didn’t tell that part to the reporter.
She scribbled something and crossed her legs, her black pantyhose shimmering from the glare of the bulb on his ceiling. She had small feet, the reporter. And she wore black heels that came to a point like a knife. The heels were low, but he could imagine her in higher ones. He drained his beer and set the can between his feet next to the earlier empty, thinking she’d like it if he said something generous about the Tuckers.
“They loved the dogs. Two boxers. Purebreds. Frazier and Foreman. Cocky things. Big chests. God, they barked like maniacs.”
“This morning?”
“All the time, but this morning . . . I’d never heard them bark like that before. Strangled. Half a howl, almost. You’ll think I’m crazy” — he paused for effect — “but it was like they were begging.”
He noticed her fingers as she wrote: mid-length nails, shiny with clear polish; no ring on the important finger. “When did the dogs start?” she asked.
“After the first shot. Like I said, I was at the stove.” He told her how he’d stood there, the eggs knocking together, rattling the pot. The first bang. Jesus. He ran downstairs like an idiot. In his underwear, halfway down, he’d heard two more, the sound slamming through the walls to his spine. He turned back. One shot might be an accident. Three means something awful.
“Then?” she asked.
Silence. No barking. No nothing. He locked the door. Called the cops. “They were here in a few minutes,” he said, though it had seemed longer as he waited, wondering if Tucker would come upstairs next. Dudek had sat in his living room, gripping the aluminum baseball bat he hid beneath his bed in case of trouble, trying not to throw up. Nothing Ms. Lilac-and-Fake-Pearls needed to know.
“When they brought her out she was on a stretcher,” he said, “covered by a sheet. One of the wheels cau
ght in a crack in the walk and they nearly tipped her. The dogs they brought out in garbage bags.”
The reporter uncrossed her legs, but kept her knees tight together. She leaned toward him, and then placed the tip of her pen between her teeth, lips apart.
Jesus H. Christ, Dudek thought, and he laughed at his good luck.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing. What else do you want to know?”
She thought a moment. “Why didn’t he kill himself, too?”
“Seems dumb doesn’t it? Maybe that’s because when you hear about these things it’s always murder-suicide. But Tucker walked out with that big grin. Maybe it’s like a car alarm loud as hell in the middle of the night. You know how you want to shoot those things. You just want to shut it up. Nothing else matters.”
“So, Mrs. Tucker was like a car alarm.”
Dudek shrugged. “I’m no head shrinker. Just a neighbor.”
“Did the Tuckers have friends or children?”
“None I ever saw.”
“You didn’t know them too well, then?”
“It’s not like we bar-hopped together, but you live above people, you get to know something about them. They were nice enough, I guess. She read those true-life crime books. In summers she’d read on the porch, fall asleep in one of those scratchy lawn chairs, and snore. He watched the fights. As far as landlords go, he couldn’t tell a wrench from pliers, you know? Cheap, too. You can tell he didn’t like to spend money on the place.”
She had stopped writing. She looked bored. Dudek chewed his lower lip.
“Our apartments have the same layout,” he said. “My bedroom sits over theirs. The cops told me that’s where he killed her, if you want to . . .” He pointed out of the living room, his face so dumb with faked innocence that she smiled.
Dudek had left his bed unmade, and dirty clothes shaped a hill in the room’s far corner. “Maid’s sick,” he said, kicking underpants and T-shirts under his bed. Then he pointed at the floor. “Down there.”
The reporter stepped around Dudek’s dresser and his bed, her high heels clicking on the worn wood floor, and Dudek realized how eerie the room had become, how he’d avoided it all day. Suddenly, he couldn’t help imagining Tucker, a few feet below, squeezing soft on the trigger, the jolt in his hand, the noise. Tucker must have blinked. When he opened his eyes . . . and what about Mrs. Tucker? Had he nudged her shoulder to wake her? Did he turn on the light? Tucker would have needed light. Unless he stood close enough to touch metal to scalp.
Dudek stopped rubbing his temples; he couldn’t remember having started. “Blows my mind,” he said. “Killing the wife and dogs on Easter. It’s got a kind of poetry though, you know what I’m saying? Everybody’s looking forward to a nice time. And bam! That’s it. Tucker’s waving his gun around shouting, ‘Hey everybody, look at me! I’m in the shits big time! Forget spring. Forget that rising from the grave stuff. Let me give you a big wad of death.’ “
“Why would he do that?” she asked.
“That’s the big question, huh? Why would he put it in God’s face that way, say ‘Screw you, God!’” Dudek waved his middle finger at the ceiling. “Something must have made him that crazy ...”
She wanted to know. She really did, he could tell — from her insistent voice, from her pale throat now flushed red — she wanted to brush against the ugliness and danger of that morning, feel the electric jolt that he’d stumbled into. She shouldered against the wall of his bedroom, hair tucked behind an ear to lay bare her smooth neck and delicate lobe pierced by a tiny, crystal stud.
“Well, I could’ve predicted it,” Dudek said. He sat on the corner of his mattress, which sagged a few inches. “Early, before I even started breakfast, I heard the outside door of the house banging around, like someone wanted in. I went down, keeping quiet in case it was some thief. Brought my baseball bat just in case.” He pulled it out from under the bed to show her. “I found Mr. Tucker at the landing, fully dressed.”
She waited.
“It wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night out,” Dudek said. “‘Happy Easter,’ I said to him. He’d bent down to pick up the key they keep under the mat. I said, ‘Happy Easter.’”
‘“Happy Easter, Henry,’ he said, and looked at the baseball bat. “Watch out for the slider,’ he said. Lots of laughs, that Mr. Tucker. He unlocked their door, then put the key back in its place. I could smell his breath.”
When Dudek looked at the reporter, she stared back, writing without looking at her notepad. She tilted her head and asked the question with her eyes.
“Booze hound,” he whispered. “Her, too.”
She stopped writing. She looked as if she had heard that story before.
“They just weren’t hobby drinkers,” he insisted. “This was a career. You should see the liquor boxes stacked out back. Mr. Tucker used to miss work. And the dogs roamed loose everywhere. Come Tuesday, if he managed to get out their garbage, the bags of empties made Mount Everest on the sidewalk. Sometimes, they’d forget I owed rent. Fine with me, but you know . . .”
“And this is why he killed her?”
“Yeah. What? Murder on Easter Sunday, fighting, alcohol, that’s not enough?”
“No,” she said and scribbled something. “I mean, yes, of course it’s enough. It is what it is. Well.”
She handed him a business card, smiled, and asked him to call if he had anything else to say, and he nodded like it wasn’t any big deal as she stepped out of his apartment and down the stairs in those pointy-heeled shoes. From the window, he watched her walk through the dusk to her car — a little Honda. She looked once more at the Tuckers’ apartment and then slid into the driver’s seat. Headlights on, zoom, she was gone.
~ * ~
In and out. That was Dudek’s plan. He knew they’d have beer or some liquor, and they owed him. Mr. Tucker did at least, for raining murder down on the holiday. The man owed the whole block drinks.
The police had blocked the Tuckers’ apartment, twisting yellow tape around a couple of rusty nails hammered into either side of the door frame. Dudek unwrapped the yellow tape, then found the key where Tucker had left it under the doormat. He rolled the deadbolt back into the door.
From where he stood he could see almost nothing, and the only light came from a low-watt bulb high above the stairway behind him. He waited for something to move or to make a sound, not surprised at how scared he was, but not having expected it either. A moment later, his eyes adjusted and he stepped inside. The room smelled sweet and coppery like a fresh pack of cigarettes, and he could hear the Tuckers’ fridge humming from the kitchen. A clock ticked the time. From the darkness came a steady pulse of blue light, the display on a VCR. He knew there was a couch near the door; he’d seen it from the stairwell when passing their apartment as Mr. or Mrs. was on the way in or out, and he recalled that he’d never seen them together, never on the porch or walking the dogs; always he met them one without the other.
He felt the wall near the door for the light switch that would be in the same place as the one in his apartment, but then he worried maybe some neighbor would notice and call the cops. Burglars made a living like this, didn’t they, raiding the homes of the recently dead? But that’s not what he was doing, not really. Besides: quick in, quick out. The apartment would be dark again before anyone noticed.
When the lights flashed on, he expected to see a home wrecked by the violence of three murders, but it wasn’t that way at all. He saw the couch, over-stuffed, with balding corduroy upholstery, and a coffee table with a wood laminate surface; on its top, an open TV guide from the newspaper, a coffee mug with coffee in it, a pen, and a few scraps of paper on which someone had written to-do lists: renew the termite policy, brake job, talk to Dudek about parking . . . He suspected that had pissed them off: parking behind them in that skinny driveway so they couldn’t get their car out. In two of the room’s corners were plaid doggie beds for Frazier and Foreman, their names emb
roidered on the pillows. On the eggshell-colored walls, framed prints — one of a barn in a wheat field and the other of toddling girls holding fistfuls of dandelions. A television and that VCR he’d noticed. A shelf with a few of Mrs. Tucker’s books, but mostly a place for framed eight-by-tens of some kids in cowboy hats, posing and faking smiles in front of a photographer’s background drape. In another photo, a thirtyish guy — who shared Mr. Tucker’s pointed nose and pear-shaped ass — shook hands with Tommy Lasorda. So the kids lived in L.A. and that explained why Dudek had never seen them. Maybe they’d be flying in now to take care of things. Dudek supposed the police would have called them.
In the kitchen, he grabbed three beers, then changed his mind and took the whole six-pack in its paperboard carton. What difference did it make? Would Tucker junior take inventory? So what if he did? When Dudek shut the refrigerator door, magnets fell and along with them a Chinese menu and some photographs. He picked them up, started to put them back when he noticed — right at eye level — lottery tickets stuck to the fridge by a rubber magnet of Florida.
The Best American Mystery Stories 3 Page 11
