The Bad Box

by Harvey Click

  Thursday night when Howard didn’t come back she had called Okpara, and when he called her back an hour later with the terrible news she went out to the front porch with her gun and apparently had sat out there the whole night without sleeping, though Ben couldn’t be sure because eventually he had drifted to sleep on the sofa in the front living room.

  Yesterday she had eaten two donuts and an apple, an improvement over the day before. Now it was Monday, and her eyes were still glazed with an inward look, as if she was watching something inside her mind more than anything in the material world.

  It was a look all too familiar to Ben, a look that frightened him more than an open wound. Flesh wounds were much easier to treat.

  He hated to leave her like this. He had canceled his appointments with most of his patients, well-to-do neurotics inventing problems because life hadn’t provided them with enough, but there were a few patients he didn’t feel comfortable canceling, those who really needed some help. The irony didn’t escape him: dreading to leave Sarah in order to go see patients, when in fact he was the last person on earth who could help any of them.

  “Physician, heal thyself,” he muttered as he opened the garage door.

  Sarah’s car was parked in the garage beside his. Yesterday he had gotten it with the help of a friend. Ben had dropped him off at the park near Howard’s house. From there the friend had walked to Sarah’s car and had driven it to a parking lot a mile away and had waited there until he was certain no one was following him. Only then could he bring the car to Ben’s place.

  Ben backed out and shut the garage door. At least Sarah would be safe here, he thought. No way anyone could slip down that long driveway without her noticing. And despite her state of shock, she was certainly alert, like a coyote. But he knew that the deadliest foe was the enemy within.

  He headed up the driveway. The last thing he had wanted was a house guest, especially a woman with Sarah’s troubles. If anyone except Howard had requested the favor, he would have refused. But Howard had been such a help during Ben’s darkest time, offering better remedy with his bottles of wine and hours of company than any psychiatrist could have done with his meds. It seemed impossible that the gentle, kind man was dead. And now that Sarah needed help, Ben couldn’t abandon her.

  In his rearview mirror he could see her sitting there and watching. God save you from my help, he thought.

  ***

  Sarah watched Ben’s car pull out of the driveway. If she was sorry to see him leave, it was only because four eyes could watch better than two.

  He no longer annoyed her. His quiet aloofness didn’t matter to her one way or another. All she felt toward him was gratitude for providing her with a place to stay, a place with such a long safe driveway. Aside from that, he was merely a body, something that walked around and banged cupboards and doors and tried to get her to eat sandwiches that she didn’t want.

  She didn’t have any room in her mind to think about Ben because all the room was taken up by grief, remorse, and anger. She would gladly trade her life for a chance to turn back the clock a few days and undo her idiotic mistake of moving into Howard’s house. What had she been thinking? She had placed her needs above his safety, and now Howard’s blood was on her hands, and she knew she could never wash it off.

  Avenging his death wouldn’t wash her hands, but at least it would give them something to do. She watched the driveway hoping that his killer would head down it toward the Ruger waiting in her lap or the .30-30 Winchester lever rifle waiting in the living room. Would it be Peter or Angel? If the cops had noticed any clues to link one or the other, Okpara hadn’t shared them with her.

  Sometimes she imagined driving to Peter’s house, ringing his doorbell, and blowing out his brains. Then she would comb every street of the city looking for Darnell or Angel or whoever the two-brained monster was pretending to be at the moment. But she wasn’t entirely crazy, not yet at least, so instead she sat and watched and waited.

  The driveway remained empty. At last she went into the house and hunted through Ben’s duffle bag for ear protectors and ammunition. She went to the range, stood in the blazing sun and shot until her wrist ached.

  Amazing how purpose improved one’s aim. She left a large ragged hole in the center of the target, a few stray holes surrounding it like flies buzzing around the body of her prey.

  ***

  Matthew Hamelin sat alone in the back booth of a bar. He was making every effort to look as if he shunned attention, knowing that this was sometimes the best way to attract it, and in fact he wanted attention very badly. He hadn’t had sex in months, actually years, in fact only twice in his life, and those two times were way back three years ago when he had attended Warren G. Harding High and they were with the second-fattest and first-ugliest girl in his class. Not exactly the love-life of Shelley or Byron.

  So he huddled in his booth hunched over his notebook, in which he had started to write a poem, though in fact he had written only one line and was unable to think of another because the bar was unusually busy and noisy for a Monday night. Even though it was pretty far from campus it had been invaded by a mob of brainless drunken students who were shouting dumb jokes and hooting with laughter over the blaring jukebox.

  Hamelin huddled and frowned and hunched and chewed his pencil and tried to blare just as loudly with his posture that he wanted no attention whatsoever, that he was far too serious to be bothered by half-dressed women and their silly breasts. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to notice.

  Hamelin reread his line, wondering what should follow it: “The tethers of time shall tick with tedious tyranny . . .” Until when? he wondered. Until the end of time, of course, and he tried to find words to capture the end of time. Bones rocketing out of the hills. Yes, that was good. “The tethers of time shall tick with tedious tyranny / Until bones rocket out of the hills and . . .”

  But wait, hadn’t he read that phrase somewhere—Dylan Thomas, maybe? Sure, everything had been said before, and he hunched down further, bitterly envying dead poets, whose jobs had been easier because in their day everything hadn’t already been said.

  A shadow fell over his page. Hamelin looked up at an attractive woman, a bit older than most college students maybe, a bit too heavily made up for his taste, but attractive nonetheless, her brilliant red hair shimmering mysteriously in the dim bar light.

  A Pre-Raphaelite enchantress, he thought. A lovely haunter of tombs and ruins, pale of skin with pale blue eyes, a beauteous muse of poets and painters.

  “What are you writing?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he stammered, suddenly ashamed of the single line he had written, so silly with all that ridiculous alliteration.

  “Please, let me see.”

  Hamelin reluctantly handed her the notebook. She furrowed her pretty brow and studied the line. At last she smiled.

  “I like it,” she said. “The tethers of time shall tick with tedious tyranny / Till the box, unlocked, bequeaths its darkness to all.”

  “Yes!” he exclaimed. “Pandora’s box! The end of time! May I write it down?”

  “Sure,” she said, handing him the notebook. “But why don’t you come with me, and I’ll teach you some different words. Words you’ve never even dreamt of.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Howard’s funeral was the next day, and the melancholy reality brought Sarah a step or two out of her withdrawal.

  “I can’t go,” Ben said. “I don’t want anyone to see me there and say, yeah, that’s one place I haven’t looked, I’ll bet Sarah’s staying with that guy.”

  “I’m going,” Sarah said. “I need to.”

  “I figured you would. I’m going to follow you and try to find a place to park where I can keep my eye on the funeral home.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” she said. He didn’t answer, and she said, “It’s not fair that you can’t go. He was your friend too.”

  “Yeah, he was my friend, maybe my best friend, but I c
an honor his memory best by keeping you safe. That’s what he’d want me to do.”

  He said it with no particular affection, just stated it as a fact, and she knew he meant it.

  “There’s one other thing,” he said. “I know you’ll resist my advice, but I want you to listen to it. I think you’re feeling guilty for his death, and I know from long experience that guilt mixed with grief is deadly poison. It’s essential that you stop feeling guilty.”

  “That’s not so easy.”

  “No, but there’s a method that helps. Every time you feel guilty, the instant you know you’re feeling it, you need to repeat something like a mantra until you’ve blocked the feeling. Maybe the mantra should be ‘Howard wouldn’t blame me, so I won’t blame myself,’ or whatever works for you, just so it’s short and to the point. Say it out loud if you’re alone, otherwise sound it out in your mind. Maybe for a while you’ll need to repeat it hundreds of times a day, then after a while not so much.”

  “I’ll try that,” she said.

  She had nothing appropriate to wear, her only black suit still hanging at Howard’s place or maybe even impounded as evidence at the police station, so when she got to Columbus she stopped at a store, bought the first dark dress she saw, and put it on in the dressing room.

  When she came out to the parking lot she saw Ben watching her, his car parked some distance from hers. She liked his wariness. The mind of a warrior, she thought, or maybe an outlaw, and she wondered who he was, this stranger who was sheltering her.

  The viewing room at the funeral home was nearly full, many people whom she recognized from the department, many others whom she had never seen. He’d had so many friends that it seemed odd she thought of him as a lonely man. The dignified silver-haired woman sitting in front she had met a couple of times—it was Howard’s mother, and she thought she should go up and offer her sympathy, but she was afraid that if she did something might break inside. The smell of flowers and the cloying sound of the piped-in organ music were making her feel sick, and she wished she hadn’t eaten the food Ben had forced on her before she left the house.

  She went to the front of the room and stood at the closed casket. Another smothering box, she thought. How many boxes had already been spawned by Gus Dietrick’s grim original, evil begetting evil like a malignant cancer, and how many more boxes would there be?

  Over the casket she mumbled some lines from Blake, Howard’s favorite poet:

  So I turn’d to the Garden of Love

  That so many sweet flowers bore,

  And I saw it was filled with graves,

  And tomb-stones where flowers should be . . .

  She tried to pray, but found herself talking to Howard instead of God, hoping that something remained of him to hear her thanking him and giving him her love and begging his forgiveness.

  She hardly noticed that someone had come up beside her until he spoke: “How’s it going, Sary baby? I’ve been looking high and low for you.”

  She could scarcely believe this was Peter. He looked like a punk rocker from Bedlam. His head and face were shaved and dotted with pink razor nicks. He wore sunglasses, dirty khaki shorts, and a garish Hawaiian shirt. She recognized it as one he used to wear sometimes at his parties as a gag. “The loudest shirt in the world,” he used to call it—just the thing for a funeral.

  “Such a tragedy he said,” he said. “I loved him like a brother. Or maybe like a sister. Poor Howie, not quite a man, not quite a woman, and now not even quite all there. I read that somebody gutted him like a pig. Imagine how that must have smelled!”

  It took all of Sarah’s self-control to keep from moving away. But Peter sounded so deranged, scarcely aware of what he was saying, that she believed it was possible he would let something slip.

  “Nice crowd of gawkers,” he said, looking around the room and grinning at everyone he saw. “I’ll be Goddamned, there’s that old tosspot Hoffmann. Surprised the DTs haven’t carried him off to his great reward. Yes sir, everyone loves a good funeral. Too bad it’s not open casket, give the folks their money’s worth. Such rubbish, all this embalming and fastidiousness. We want the flies, we want the flies! So, Sary baby, how ya been? You gettin’ any?”

  She didn’t answer. She was trying to keep her food down. She was aware that half the people in the room were staring.

  “Jesus H. Christ, it’s hot in here!” Peter said. “These thieving morticians charge enough you’d think they could afford to crank up the air conditioning. I mean, do these corpse fuckers want their goodies to rot before they get ‘em planted?”

  Everyone was looking. A priest was walking up the aisle toward them, and he stopped and stared.

  “You know what I always think of in this hot weather, Sary baby? I think of your sweaty snatch. Yes sir, the mercury shoots up and I can’t get my mind off that sopping wet gash. Bet you’re not wearing panties in this heat, either. Tell ya what, sweetheart, let me know where you’re staying and I’ll come by tonight and suck the juices right out of you. I’ll bet funerals get you horny too.”

  Sarah suddenly felt so sick that she tottered and nearly fell against the casket. A hand clasped her shoulder to steady her, and she looked around and saw Detective Okpara. Peter grinned at him and slunk away.

  Okpara took her arm and steered her gently out of the room. In the hallway he said, “Do you need the restroom?”

  She nodded. He led her to the door, and she stumbled through it and knelt at the toilet. Another prayer, she thought—this one brutally honest and sour in her mouth. When she was done, she rinsed her mouth and returned to Okpara waiting in the hallway.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “He already left. Would you like a stick of gum?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He gave her one and they stepped outside into the heat. Peter was sitting in his Volvo, grinning at them. They went to Okpara’s car, and he started it to run the air conditioner.

  “I came to see who would show up for the funeral,” he said. “Sometimes a killer is so proud of his work, he cannot resist returning to view it.”

  “Did that asshole do it or was it Darnell?”

  “Mr. Bellman seems to have a good alibi,” Okpara said. “At the time of the murder, two policemen were watching his house. Still . . .”

  “Still what? Still you don’t know who killed Howard. Still you can’t find Darnell. Two fucking cops can watch Peter’s house, but still maybe he can slip away. Cops can supposedly watch Howard’s house, and still he can be murdered inside it while they sit there on their asses.”

  “I understand your anger, Miss Temple. The department gave less priority to watching Mr. Goldwin’s house after the two of you left. This was not my wish, but I don’t run the department.”

  Sarah chewed her gum and didn’t say anything. She suddenly became uncomfortably aware of the gun that was hidden in her purse. All she needed right now was to be arrested for illegal carry.

  “I’m angry too, Miss Temple, but this case has top priority. The FBI is involved, and it’s only a matter of time, but terrible things can happen during that time. Did Mr. Bellman say anything to you that may be useful?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  But just in case there was some shred of a clue hidden in Peter’s deranged peroration, Sarah recounted what she could remember, even the comments about her body, which embarrassed her no more than if Peter had been describing a rock. The only thing that could cause her shame was to allow the guilty to go unpunished.

  “Are you aware that Ben Easton is sitting in his car across the street in a McDonald’s parking lot?”

  “Yeah, I know. How did you know it’s Ben?”

  “We ran his plates.”

  “So I guess he’s so obvious that anyone would notice him?”

  “No, not obvious to anyone but a cop casing the immediate area. Do you intend to stay at his house for a while?”

  “Don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “Are you c
arrying a gun?”

  “Um, I’m planning to get one.”

  “That would be wise.”

  Mourners began to file out of the funeral parlor to their cars. Pall bearers carried out the coffin and placed it in the hearse.

  “Do you wish to go to the cemetery?” Okpara asked. “You may ride with me.”

  “Let’s see what he does,” she said.

  Peter’s Volvo was flagged along with the other cars, but when the procession began to move, he waited in the parking lot.

  “He’s waiting to see what we do,” Okpara said.

  “Pull out,” she said.

  Okpara joined the line of cars, and Peter pulled directly behind them.

  “Mr. Bellman does not appear to be intimidated by the law,” Okpara said. “That’s good. It may work to our advantage.”

  The procession of cars moved slowly down the street, a motorcycle cop leading them through red lights and stop signs. Sarah glanced back and saw Peter staring at her and grinning. He was jerking his head back and forth, and she could hear a rap song blaring from his radio.

  “Can you U-turn?” Sarah asked. “I’m not going to the cemetery if he’s going to be there.”

  Okpara smiled and said, “Cops can do anything.” He waited until there was no oncoming traffic, then pulled out of the procession and headed back toward the funeral home.

  “He’s not following us,” she said.

  “That’s a shame,” Okpara said. “I was hoping he would make a U-turn. Then I would be able to arrest him.”

  “How soon can I get my stuff from Howard’s house?” she asked.

  “Whenever you wish. The forensics work is finished. You’ll want to make arrangements with Mrs. Goldwin. I believe it’s her house now.”

  For some reason the words struck her with more finality than the funeral itself. Soon there would be a for sale sign in front of Howard’s house; soon it would be owned by people who had never met him.