Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  Zach wasn’t innocent exactly. He had slept with a woman, one of his customers, who had a big house in Berkshire Heights. Twice. He had told Anna about it, though now he regretted it. It all happened six months ago, and though it was easy, even sweet, it was over. The woman helped make it work, that’s what he couldn’t get Anna to understand, all he had to do was show up. She was relaxed. If he said, I’ve got to go home to my girlfriend, she said, “Sure.” He hadn’t yet told Anna that even though the woman was forty, she was an extremely tasty, sexy woman with a soft little belly and sharp breasts like a girl. That the woman was funny and oddly kind. “Generous” was the word he had settled on.

  He wanted Anna home before the TV people showed up. He wanted somebody else on his team. He had felt like a shmuck the night it happened, standing around while the police and the television crews went about their work.

  Other people had been in the parking lot that night and one of them called the cops on a car phone. A guy named Dick Connant had gotten all the attention at the time, a loudmouth who really hadn’t seen much of anything. He told the cops the little guy looked Mexican. That the guy was old. That the guy got into a car … uh, I think it was some kind of four wheel drive. None of that was true. The little guy was blond, young, ran on foot. The cops were oddly uninterested in Zach, when he had tried to tell them what he had seen. To be fair, they weren’t very interested in Dick Connant’s story, either. But he had been all over the TV for two nights.

  The other guy, the dead one, had worked at a machine shop. Zach didn’t know what exactly a “machine shop” was, except that that was where they send brake discs to be “turned”—ground smooth—things like that. It wasn’t like he was really dead, he hadn’t been dead the last time Zach had seen him, when they trussed him up and wheeled him into the ambulance waiting in the alley at the end of the parking lot. “Dead” was something they said on television. The guy across the street in the shiny suit was “dead.” Dead. Zach almost didn’t believe it. But it was beginning to get to him.

  There wasn’t any music, he thought, watching the street from his window, looking for Anna. In movies, there’s always lots of music. He had seen fights, even been in fights, in school, and they were usually clumsy and often short. This one had been like that. He had never even seen the knife, just the two guys clinch and then the big guy fall back and the other guy run. Took fifteen seconds, tops. And now the guy’s dead? He shook his head.

  “What’re you doing?” Anna said, from the doorway.

  “I was waiting for you,” Zach said. “I didn’t see you come up the street.”

  “I’ve been downstairs for twenty minutes,” she said, small, blonde, with shining blue eyes. She was still wearing the black slacks and white tuxedo shirt from the restaurant. “When do the TV people get here? Two?”

  “Yeah, I thought they’d be here by now.”

  “Zach, it’s one-thirty.”

  “One thirty-five,” he said, nodding toward the clock on the bedside table.

  “Have you thought about what we talked about the other night? I don’t want to lose you, as a friend, I mean, but I don’t want to go on this way, either.” Smiling, she looked to him particularly beautiful in the midday light passing in the big windows, clear and edged by the whiteness lent them by the thin curtains pulled back to the sides of each. “I move in with Mary and Marianne next Friday,” she said. “The first.” She watched him, waiting for a protest, and when she didn’t get any, turned and walked out of view down the hall.

  They didn’t come until four. There was Sandy Dean, who looked enough like the sea of blonde anchorwomen on the networks to pass at a small local news operation, and three men, the two with the camera and the sound equipment who looked like kids, and a third guy, older, who basically stood around and did nothing, looked at the furniture and a framed photograph Anna had on the wall, a picture of ice cubes on a white enamel surface, melting.

  “Don’t be nervous,” Sandy Dean had said, in the little preparatory session they had sitting together on the couch in the living room, before going outside to “shoot.” She patted his forearm gently, and smiled. It was hard not to like her, and Zach didn’t try. The light was easier to handle outside, she said, as long as it wasn’t too bright, and it wasn’t too bright this afternoon. “You’re a veterinarian?” she said. “That’s great. I wanted to be a vet when I was little girl, I really did. But you know, I got interested in journalism. Did you know the two men that were fighting in the alley?”

  “Parking lot,” Zach said. “No, I didn’t know them. I was just leaving, getting my car.”

  “Where did you go to vet school? Cornell?”

  “You did want to be a veterinarian, didn’t you?” Zach said, and Sandy Dean laughed. He liked her laugh. “No, I went to Texas A & M. They’ve got an awful good school down there, too.”

  “They sure do,” Sandy Dean said. “When we go outside, just talk to me, pretend the other people aren’t there. And think happy thoughts. The camera magnifies everything and a frown’ll make you look like Ebenezer Scrooge on the tape.” She cocked her head to the side and made a big clown frown at him. Then she laughed. “C’mon, sugar, let’s make some news,” she said, standing up.

  Zach stood up, and following her outside, he saw a look pass from her to the guy who was inspecting the furniture, an instant in which her entire personality seemed to fall away and she looked as if she was thinking, I hate this job.

  The interview itself took ten or fifteen minutes. Zach thought about setting things straight, but finally he only suggested that he wasn’t certain that the guy was young and Mexican-American. Sandy Dean wasn’t interested in his doubts and the more diffident his answers got, the more she suggested maybe the police or the medical technicians had not or were not handling the matter very well. Whatever she was looking for, he wasn’t supplying it, which on a moment’s reflection seemed like the best way to proceed, especially if you might have to explain yourself to cops later on. So he gave a dull interview, and even though he felt like a failure, especially after she had been so charming and schmoozy earlier, he didn’t have to worry about it. He even said to Anna, after Sandy and the others had packed their gear and left, “If I get thirty seconds on the news, I’ll be surprised.”

  • • •

  He went back by the office at five to check on things, happy to find Stephanie still there.

  “The old man has a little business in his bad eye,” she said from her chair behind the high reception counter which cut off the back third of the room. She was watching television. Only the very top of her head was visible, her streaky brown and yellow hair. “Hector? He’s got a little infection, I think.”

  “Did you put some antibiotic in it?”

  “From a tube,” she said.

  “That’s what I meant,” Zach said, and shuddered. “What did you think I meant, an injection?” He walked back and around the counter; it was a baseball game on WGN, a Cubs game. “How can you watch that?” he said. “It’s soporific.”

  “Used to be good, when they had the Hawk. Andre Dawson, he was a coiled spring. A natural phenomenon. Like bacon, or something. That Astros guy—Bagwell—he has a little something of the old Andre, but not really. So, how did your interview go? It took three hours?”

  “I think you’re wonderful,” Zach said. He watched her slow turn, her lowered brows. He could feel the dumb look on his face.

  “Pardon me?” she said.

  “Nothing,” Zach said. “Nevermind,” he said, and took the second chair. “They did that in school, stuck needles in their eyes.” He shuddered. “I hate baseball. Every bore in the world likes baseball. You don’t like baseball, do you?”

  “I’m only in it for the beefcake.” She shook her head. “There was a call from that cop, Officer Hodge.” She drew herself up in a military bearing and mocked his voice: “ ‘This is Officer Hodge; make my day.’ He was a little insistent. Are you avoiding him?”

  “Of course I�
��m avoiding him. He’s the fucking police. Look, the way I see it, one guy was behaving really badly and the other guy finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I’m supposed to be Mr. Good Citizen and send him to Raiford for life?”

  “Okay, okay. All right. You also got a frantic call from Mrs. Hochstetter. She’s afraid to feed it at all. You were a little hard on her. So pussy’s a little chubby, so what? What are you laughing about?”

  “It’s—When I was working for Dr. Warren, he used to have people bringing in these cats worrying about how they’d lost their appetites and he’d pull a serious face and say he’d need to keep them for a couple days. So he’d just not feed the cat at all, he’d starve it, and then he’d say—” Zach was laughing. “—he’d say, ‘That cat’ll be so hungry when they get it home, it’ll tear a leg off the dining room table …’ And then he’d just laugh and laugh.” He caught himself, shrugged. “You asked me what I was laughing about.”

  “Is it time for your interview?” Stephanie looked around and found the remote control, cut to a local channel.

  “I don’t think Peter Jennings is going to run it,” Zach said. “I don’t think it’ll be on at six, either. She didn’t even show up till four o’clock. Maybe at eleven.”

  “We’ll watch it at my place,” Stephanie said.

  He just stared at her bright eyes for a moment, thinking in a vague way of what his life had been like twenty years earlier, when he was a teenager, remembering what it was like to spend every moment thinking about women, girls, one particular woman, one particular girl.

  “Great,” she said. “Should I get dip?”

  Zach shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s too much.”

  She had turned back to the television, her jaw and her shoulders set, her eyes narrowed. “Yeah, yeah, sure,” she said, and shrugged.

  “Stephanie …”

  “I’ve got to get going,” she said. She stood up and started straightening the desk below the high counter. “You should call Mrs. Hochstetter and let her off the hook. She’s sure the cat is headed for renal failure. Tonight. Stress on the kidneys, you know.” She swung around, barely missing him with an elbow, and walked out from behind the counter and over to the door. “Good night, Zach,” she said, and left.

  “Stephanie,” he said, softly, watching the big door swing closed behind her.

  Zach called the cop and was surprised that he was still there. He had to come down and identify the suspect, and he had to do it this evening. Zach tried to ask some questions but Officer Hodge only asked him if he could get there in twenty minutes.

  • • •

  Zach had been to a police station in another town once long before, when he had to give them fingerprints to get a taxi license. He had driven a cab for a while when he was an undergraduate, a lot of taking very poor people to cash welfare checks and very old people to supermarkets, people who couldn’t afford or couldn’t control cars. And once also long ago, he had picked Anna up outside this police station, after she’d been arrested for shoplifting. They had gotten a lawyer and he made the thing disappear, charged a hundred dollars or so. It was bewildering how easily it evaporated. Nothing ever happened the way it did on television, or in books.

  But he’d never been inside this one before. The building was a big long rectangle with a ten foot ceiling, mostly open space. Zach asked two people who didn’t know who Officer Hodge was before finding a woman who did, who made a telephone call and then said he wasn’t there. But whoever the woman was talking to told her that Zach should wait. The woman wasn’t wearing a uniform. She was young, with a dark complexion, probably an Arab, pretty enough but with slightly protruding eyes. She pointed to a chair.

  “Someone will be with you,” she said. And then when he didn’t move, “Sit down.”

  Zach sat. He hadn’t anticipated waiting. There was nothing to look at beside the woman and he didn’t want to look at her so he looked around at the furniture, a few desks and some polished aluminum chairs like the one he was sitting in, a burlap-covered room divider with things pushpinned to it, a picture of an old woman with glasses and white hair, a picture from the newspaper of two TV cops with their guns held high, pointed at the picture of the old woman.

  Zach looked at the floor. Scratched white linoleum. Waiting. What am I doing here, he thought.

  The Arab woman got up from behind her desk and started toward some double doors in the back wall of the big room, limping. One of her legs was markedly shorter than the other. She was wearing a stylish, close fitting black skirt. She pushed through the doors and they swung back. From somewhere came the sound of a police radio, and from somewhere else the sound of a fat man, laughing.

  Zach felt wrong, queasy, out of balance. Hector’s dying, he thought. He’s going to die. He’s dying now. I didn’t put him down, but I put him in a cage. The halfass kind of thing I always do. He shook his head. It occurred to him to jump up and run out of the building, run to his car, drive back to the office, and see. I’m losing it, he thought. Hector is fine. Hector is okay. Like a thief in the night. Nothing ever happens the way you expect it. He looked around, but there was no one, so he looked back down at the linoleum.

  The double doors swung in, and a short, balding blond guy in a suit came in and walked over. “Dr. Zachary?” he said. “I’m Detective Welch.”

  Zach stood up, and took the man’s hand, shook it. “No, Zachary’s my first name. Zachary Thomas.”

  “A pleasure,” the cop said. He was a smiley guy, sure of himself. “Could you come with me?”

  He led Zach through the door and up a stairway to a room on the second floor where seven or eight men and one woman stood and sat here and there in a room about half the size of the lower floor. One of the men was the pale blond boy from the parking lot that Zach had seen four days earlier.

  “See anybody you know?” Welch said, happy.

  Zach looked sharply away from the boy and back at Welch, with an uncomprehending expression on his face which made no impression on the cop, who looked back down at a piece of paper.

  “That’s the way Hodge has it in his notes—Dr. Zachary.’ ”

  He grinned. “He’s only working with fifteen watts, if you know what I mean. Could you wait here a minute?” he said, getting up. Then he walked all the way across the room and out a door opposite the door they had come in.

  Smug little shit, Zach thought. It’s one thing to be a big guy and push people around, but it’s even worse to be a little guy. A little guy should know better.

  Zach looked around at the boy, who was sitting fifteen feet away in a burnished aluminum frame chair like the ones downstairs, like all the chairs. He was facing straight ahead, occasionally glancing this way or that, like a kid at a party to whom no one was speaking. He didn’t seem to recognize Zach, even though he looked right at him a couple of times. He looked frightened, doomed, the same way he had looked that night in the parking lot. But now he has us shoving him and slapping his face, Zach thought.

  Welch came back into the room with another guy in a suit, a tall guy with a pock marked face. He was chewing gum. “Well?” Welch said.

  Zach blinked. “Well what?” he said.

  The cops looked at each other. “Do you see anybody that you know?” Welch said, slowly, with menace in his voice.

  Involuntarily, Zach began shaking his head.

  “What do you say?” Welch said.

  Zach shook his head. “I thought I was supposed to look at a line-up or something,” Zach said.

  The cops snorted. “Maybe you’d like a guest spot on Geraldo, too,” Welch said. “Or a maybe a ride with O.J.” He put a hand on the back of Zach’s chair, slipped into a half crouch beside it, lifted his other hand and uncurled a finger to point across at the pale boy sitting terrified. “You see that kid? Is that the kid you saw in the parking lot the other night?” He was pointing at the boy, but looking at Zach.

  “No,” Zach said. “No, that’s not him. He was olde
r, and sort of dark.” Zach took a deep, loud breath.

  Welch looked at the pock marked guy, then back at Zach. He flicked his coat open. There were handcuffs shining on his belt. “What are you saying, doctor?”

  “It’s not him,” Zach said, shrugging, stifling a smile. “I’m sorry.”

  Welch straightened up. “We’re going to get him anyway, doctor,” he said. He waved a hand, dismissing him.

  • • •

  Zach drove past his apartment and on to the office. His heart was galloping a little in his chest. It was about nine-thirty when he let himself in and turned on all the lights; it always felt creepy in the office at night in the dark. I want a drink, he thought. I’m so tired of doing what I should do.

  There was beer in the small refrigerator in the office kitchen in the back, but he took a bottled water instead. It felt creepy with the lights on, too, like he was too visible, so he turned them off in the front and sat in the dark. After a while he went back to the boarding cages. Hector was still alive, just asleep.

  Zach woke the old cat up to bring him out front and set him on the desk behind the reception counter and sat in Stephanie’s chair, but with his feet up to block the cat from jumping from the desk. Hector wasn’t inclined. He lay where he had been put and went back to sleep. As Zach sat in the dark, glancing at the telephone, thinking about her, it was almost as if he was breathing her presence in and out, thinking, remembering being seventeen, watching the tall red numbers on the digital clock at the edge of the desk registering later and later, trying to quiet his breathing. She’s what I want, he thought, picking up the phone. I might as well start it.

  Hush Hush

  When Paulie, on her way to her interview with the arts people, had stopped by his office at the bank, she laughed and said, “Tilden, when’re you going to move in?” He had ignored it, but now he agreed.

  His office was dull, as dull as people had always said it was the first time they saw it. The first six months he had left it as he had found it, the shelves empty, the walls bare. Wooden coat rack in front of the windows. But it drew so many comments and strange looks that he had taken a weekend and moved all the furniture around; everybody else was always doing that. Then he bought Mexican rugs for the walls and, for the table, marketing and shelter magazines which when they were superseded each month moved to tidy stacks on the shelves. Got rid of the damn coat rack.