Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Arnot King’s idea was just to have your father lie for you about having been at the funeral—because he’s your father, right?

  In King Burger, you’d smiled about this, looked away, could already see this moment: you tossing the bottle down beside your father’s leg then walking through the old smells of the house to the backyard, to sit on the porch and stare up at the sky while he gets drunker and drunker. Drunk enough to not be sure when you got there, really.

  It works.

  14.

  THE LOGO YOU RECOGNIZED from the insurance form in Fin’s Polaroid had the letter B done up like a weathervane. It was for Brock & Associates. The “Associates” part meant Cath, more or less; she had been Junior Brock’s secretary for as long as he’d needed one. Standing outside their office on St. Peters, you still expect her to have cat-eye glasses, a hive of hair balanced on her head. Instead, bent over her old desk, a phone pressed to the side of his head, is a black-haired kid in a three-button suit, his socks tastefully ribbed.

  “Junior?” you say, standing in the door, the cowbell above it still clanging.

  He looks around to you, back to the phone, then shrugs, holds the receiver out. “It’s for you, Mr. Bruiseman.”

  You take the phone and wonder if you ever really woke up this morning. If maybe instead of sitting on the back porch half the night, afraid to move, you went inside to the couch your father had prepared for you. Held your glass out to him, for a slug, a shot.

  But then the phone, it’s real—smells like the kid’s cologne, even.

  If this is a dream, then the last twenty years are too.

  You raise the phone to your ear.

  It’s Arnot King. He’s talking too fast, calling from lockup, just tried to catch you at your father’s house. You narrow your eyes at the desk calendar (July), ask your lawyer how he got that number. He tells you it’s the only Bruiseman in the phonebook.

  The charge against him, like Felson warned, is driving without insurance, and as it turns out: without registration either.

  “She says you were supposed to tell me,” he hisses.

  “Didn’t think you were going to get stopped,” you say. “Where’d they get you?”

  “In the ass, Nick.”

  “Last night?”

  “This morning. The way in.”

  It figures. His words as neutral as possible, Arnot King tells you there’s supposed to be a call into a James Brazos, alias Jimmy “Bones.” A name supposedly connected by paper to the car. According to Felson, he’s a small-timer who runs a few used lots in Midland. And plays pool, you want to add, for the kid—Junior’s son?—pretending not to be listening.

  “I was just test-driving it, though,” Arnot King says, his words clear, for whoever’s monitoring his call.

  “I know,” you say back just as clearly. “This Jimmy Brazos called back yet, to clear it up?”

  “More the kind of thing he’d like to handle in person, I suspect,” Arnot King says. “Being an upstanding citizen and all.”

  “What about the sheriff?”

  “That’s what I’m calling about, she’s—” he starts, but then you catch the kid’s eye watching something, somebody, behind you.

  “—here,” you finish, and hang up.

  In the doorway, her hand up in the cowbell, padding the clangor, is Sheriff Felson. She lowers her face to you, her eyes so dead you want to smile, just as counterweight.

  It’s not like she’s the first woman to look at you like that, though.

  “Sheriff,” you say. “We keep running into each other.”

  “Small town,” she says back, dismissing you almost instantly, nodding once to the kid and saying his name as hello: “William.”

  You turn to him again and he offers his hand, and you nod, look for evidence of his father in the cut of his jaw, in his hairline, but never knew Junior when he wasn’t already an old man.

  “Your place?” you say to him, about the office.

  “Ever since Junior cashed his policy in,” Felson answers for this William the Kid, and William, shaking your hand in both of his, nods once, agreeing with her.

  You rescue your hand, rub the side of your eye. “You’re here to inform me my lawyer’s going to be late, right?”

  She smiles. “Twenty-four hours late, I’d say,” and you do the math in your head, the same math that was stacked against you before. Twenty-four hours from now will be the weekend, officially. Meaning Arnot King will be in until Monday morning.

  Unless Jimmy Bones shows up with bail in one hand, a lead pipe in the other.

  You smile back at her, with her, everything a game, and open your mouth to say something smart when it hits you. In her car, or in a locker at the station, is what Arnot King had on the seat beside him: the shotgun.

  “What?” she says, stepping in.

  “That Lincoln,” you say, and look around, trying to think of some filler. “He was just test-driving it, you know? That a crime?”

  “Kind of what I’m here about, Mr. Bruiseman.”

  “At the insurance office.”

  There’s a new glitter in her that you think is swallowed laughter. “Can you account for your whereabouts since the last time we spoke?”

  “You told me not to go to Rory’s funeral, if I recall.”

  “Kind of what I thought.”

  You start to say something back, reevaluate. “You’re using past tense. Thought.”

  She prunes her chin out in appreciation, nods.

  “Meaning?” you lead.

  “Your attorney’s cute little sports car finally turned up,” she says, watching your face. You try to keep it as slack as possible.

  “Where?” you say, your tone either dead-on or absolutely fake—you’re too close to tell.

  She hooks her head west. “East side of Midland. I need to ask you if your prints are going to be in it.”

  “Like you said,” you tell her, “he’s my attorney.”

  “But you walked back to your—to the storage units, I thought. After your stay with us.”

  “He picked me up on his way out of town?”

  “After he left before you? I presume this would be when he had already looped into Midland, to test-drive the Town Car.”

  You shrug. “Stanton is the test, yeah. Car can make it here, it can make it—”

  “Mr. Bruiseman.”

  “Didn’t know I was going to need to keep notes, Sheriff.” You keep staring at her. “What are you thinking I did, though? Drop Fin off to you, hide the car, then have somebody dump it in Midland?”

  She shakes her head no. “I don’t think you dropped Fin off at all.”

  It almost makes you smile.

  “I was at my father’s house,” you say. “Went to ask him for some life advice, all that.”

  Felson likes this, has to cover her mouth with the side of her fist, like she’s about to cough into it.

  Your face still as slack as you can get it, you pick up William the Kid’s phone. “Ask him,” you say.

  She takes the phone, lets you dial it. For an uncomfortable moment, your eyes and William’s get tangled up, and still the phone’s ringing.

  Finally your dad picks up. You can hear exactly what he says into his end: nothing.

  “Mr. Bruiseman?” Felson says loud into the phone, turning away.

  Thirty seconds of questions later she hangs up, holds the phone down, thinking of what to say next, and how to say it. “Your father says you were there long enough for him to drink this much out of a quart.”

  “How long is that?”

  “You tell me,” she says, and shakes her head no, as if abandoning this already. “Your attorney—”

  “—just called.”

  She nods, waits before speaking, to see if you’re going to be interrupting again. “Your attorney says that he was coming into Stanton to meet with his client. You.”

  “He was,” you tell her. “We had an appointment.”

  “For thirty minute
s ago.”

  You look back to the clock above the door to what must be William’s office, nod. “For eleven, yeah. Guess I overslept.”

  Felson studies a stapler or paper clip holder on the reception desk. Says without looking up, “He told us everything, Mr. Bruiseman. Gwen Gates, Fin, this imaginary third party.”

  You watch her, are nodding with this.

  “…an insurance policy,” she adds for William Brock.

  He comes to life, pushes off from the cheap seats—the wood-veneer coffee hutch—and says, “Gates, is it?”

  “Rory,” you say, and follow him into his office.

  The policy, it turns out, was for a hundred and twenty-five grand with Gwen as sole beneficiary. Serious money. The worth-killing-for kind. None of the cases you tried to work in Midland were like this. Your first was a man on Front Street, beaten to death with a tire-iron. Your last was a man changing his tire on the side of the road, some truck or car clipping him just as he was rolling the spare into place. This insurance stuff, though—the follow-the-money trick, instead of follow-the-tire—if you’d just pulled one like this in those two dry years in Homicide, then you probably never would have leaned down over a pool table with Jimmy Bones. Never would have seen Judge Harkness’s breasts through a telephoto lens.

  Not that you regret that part of it, mind.

  “Either of you care if I record this?” Felson says, setting her silver microcassette recorder on the leading edge of William the Kid’s mahogany desk.

  He looks to it, opens his mouth, then finally gets it out with as much tact as he can manage: “Actually, since none of the beneficiaries are here, it might be best if—”

  Felson saves him the trouble. She hits the stop button with the ring finger of her right hand.

  You don’t need this. Especially now that you can’t be involved—now that this insurance form can be entered into evidence. With it in hand, you’re just another of Gwen’s victims.

  “Pay it out already?” you ask William.

  He looks to Felson for permission, then nods yes.

  “Hundred and twenty five thousand.” You lean back. “That’s a lot of reasons, right, sheriff?”

  “For suicide, maybe,” she says. You pull the document across the table, William’s hand following it. Felson stops him, shakes her head. “He needs to see.”

  You hear yourself fake a single laugh that sounds like a cough.

  “He—he…” you say.

  “Signed it,” Felson says. Then, to William, “You wouldn’t have mailed it to the widow if he hadn’t—am I right?”

  He nods, makes a face as if he’s about to apologize for policy, but she holds her hand up, goes on. “Insurance companies tend not to release funds until the investigation has cleared their payee.”

  William the Kid nods. “It’s not like we didn’t trust Mrs. Gates, Mr. Bruiseman. Please understand. It’s just that—”

  “You can’t be too careful,” you add, still studying Rory’s signature, trying to match it up with what you don’t remember from his check.

  “It’s real.” William pulls the paper back to his side of the desk. “Cath notarized it.”

  Hearing her name, you jerk your head around, and there she is, in her same place at the desk. Same glasses, same hair.

  She smiles an embarrassed smile, waves her fingertips to you. Might even still have suckers in her drawer.

  You come back to William.

  “He couldn’t have,” you say. “The copy Gwen—”

  “The one she had for her files was incomplete, I’m afraid.”

  “Not valid?”

  “She paid a year’s premiums in advance, Mr. Bruiseman. All done in good faith.”

  “But—”

  “She said Rory would be in to sign it later.”

  You probably could have guessed this: that of course that’s what she’d say. And even if the policy turned out not to be wholly valid, Stanton’s got three thousand people, would Brock & Associates really argue details with a grieving widow, when it might cost them 2,999 clients?

  “Well?” Felson says from some other dimension.

  You wade back, focus in on her, on William. “And you—you actually saw him sign it. Rory Gates?”

  Felson shakes her head, reaches forward for the silver recorder, its tiny heads turning silently.

  “Must have a voice-activated mode,” Felson says, doing her eyes like Oops, forgot.

  She knows about Fin, then. That you’re working for him without a license. That he’s making you work for him.

  You close your eyes, try to just see now, here. Finally you say to William, “He signed it?”

  William looks to Felson about this, like you’re a joke they’re sharing. “He came in to get liability for a truck he’d bought for his son at an auction, Mr. Bruiseman. I told him I had something else he could sign while he was here.”

  There’s more—he’s a salesman, after all, has to give you the whole scene, reel you all the way in, sell it to you—but you lose the thread of what he’s saying, like he’s distant again, on tape.

  The Ford.

  It all starts with the Ford.

  15.

  THE FIRST PLACE YOU LOOK for it is in all sixteen storage units at Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, even the ones blocked off by Betsy Simm’s horse trailer. Ten of the units have numbered green padlocks on them; the other six you have to cut with the shiny new bolt cutters Arnot King left in the office. They’re better than the ones that came with the place.

  The truck isn’t in any of the units.

  You stand in the alley between them all, looking to each one in turn, then go to the one that’s your living room, drag the wooden spool and bench seat out to the center again. The tractor on the calendar for January is a double-wheel, four-wheel-drive job, the tires beautiful and black. You flip through the rest of the months, don’t like any of the other tractors as much, so leave it on January.

  Of the six storage units you haven’t been through yet, four of them are a wall of broken appliances, exercise equipment, and mismatched cardboard boxes—the clear tape on them just decoration now. The other two units are a surprise: one is walled with cages, still smells like animals, has a pallet of forty-pound concrete bags directly under the light; the other, the one just before Betsy Simm’s mother’s new unit, has a coin-drop little pool table in it, old skin magazines folded under the legs to level it out, beer bottles on every flat surface, the sticks leaned in the corner, their blue tips bunched together like they’re talking about you.

  You shake your head in wonder, either smell stale smoke drifting up from the green felt or remember it. You feel in your pocket for two quarters, come up instead with a handful of Polaroids: Gwen’s tat and the incomplete insurance form.

  You hold them for a long time, telling yourself what Felson told you before dropping you off: that this isn’t any of your concern anymore. That even if Gwen was sleeping with Fin, which her sweet spot tattoo doesn’t legally prove, that still, Rory signed the insurance form. William the Kid saw him do it, even.

  The part he left out, though—the part he would have left out, because he didn’t know to look for it—is the way Rory had to have hesitated when William said there was something else he needed to sign. How it must have felt seeing that insurance form, how it must have felt standing in a strange office, having to keep a smile on your face while it dawns on you that your wife has been unfaithful to you. That she’s planning to kill you. That you’re worth more to her dead than alive. That you’re in the way of everything she seems to want.

  What you want to ask Gwen is how it felt for her seeing Rory’s name on the dotted line of that policy. His note to her from the grave. How much it might be worth to her for you not to say anything. Five percent? Ten?

  Maybe it’ll be enough to get Jimmy Bones off your back.

  Your only other choice is to actually solve the case somehow, figure out who Jim Martindale is. Really, it’s what Rory hired you to do
.

  You toss the Polaroids onto the pool table. They fan out, stay there, and you pull the overhead light, shut the door, then shut the fifteen other doors, dig up six new locks and go inside to wait out the heat of the day.

  Four hours later you walk out into the glare coming off all the white storage unit doors, think for a second you should paint them, that they’re too bright. You remember your sunglasses, thread them onto your face instead.

  Like Stace’s parents would pay you to paint them.

  Nod once to Betsy Simm’s horse trailer as you walk alongside it. The one she wasn’t able to get since the gate was locked.

  There’s no way to both leave the gate unlocked and keep anybody from driving off with the riding lawnmower, so you drift over to the water station instead. Sherilita sets a chopped beef basket and an empty styrofoam cup on the counter for you. You take them both, jerk your own tea, want her to call you a gumshoe or ask about the private eye racket. Instead she looks to you once, then away.

  “What?” you say.

  “Shouldn’t you be working?”

  “What?” you say again, not playing.

  She’s doing something with the pickle jar. Doing nothing, really.

  “Thomas told me about the other night,” she says, her lips thin.

  “He helped me unload—”

  “—Mrs. Rankin’s stuff, yeah.”

  “He wasn’t late, was he?”

  She smiles about this, is still looking down at her hands. “No, Nick. He wasn’t late. You did good.”

  “For once,” you add, giving her your best smile. But then she looks up to you and you see she’s about to cry. That what she’s doing with her hands behind the gallon pickle jar is folding a napkin down smaller and smaller. Like everybody else, she’s human, has her own story, her own shit going on. Her world doesn’t revolve around you coming in for chopped beef sandwiches.

  You lose the smile, say the first part of her name.

  She shrugs her left shoulder, keeps folding the napkin. “Thomas. He’s—the other morning, when you sent him home—”

  “To go to the farm sale.”

  “To meet his dad to go to the farm sale.” Sherilita composes herself. “He sat there in the kitchen waiting for him, Nick. Until I came up here at nine.”