Erie checked the right side of his abdomen where he’d felt the sting a moment before. He’d been wounded but not by buckshot or shrapnel. His shirt was torn, and a short, shallow gash was bleeding onto the white cotton. When he’d jumped, he’d landed on something sharp.
He began walking very, very slowly to his car, trying to remember the last time he’d had a tetanus shot.
3:55 P.M.
A PATROL CAR was waiting for him at 1701 O’Hara Drive when he arrived as he had requested from the dispatcher.
“Geez, Larry, where did the tornado touch down?” one of the officers asked as he limped to their car.
“Right on top of me. Can’t you tell?”
“What’s the story?” the other cop asked.
“I need to pick somebody up for questioning. I’m not expecting any trouble, but I wanted a little backup just in case. You two just hang back and observe.”
“Hang back and observe,” the first cop said, giving Erie a salute. “That’s what I do best.”
Erie walked up to the house and rang the doorbell. Candace Korfmann opened the door almost immediately.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a River City Community College sweatshirt. “I’m ready to go.”
She stepped outside, closed the front door, and brushed past Erie.
“That’s you, right?” she said, pointing at Erie’s car.
“Yes.”
She walked to the car quickly. Erie followed her.
“Do you want me in the front or the back?” she asked.
“The front is fine.”
Mrs. Korfmann opened the door and climbed in. Erie eased himself gingerly into the driver’s seat and started the engine. He gave the cops watching from their patrol car an “everything’s under control” wave.
“I hope you weren’t hurt,” Mrs. Korfmann said as Erie pulled away from the curb.
“You’re not under arrest, Mrs. Korfmann. I’m taking you in for an interview, that’s all. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
“Is he dead?”
Erie took his eyes off the road for a moment to watch her. “Yes, Raymond Long is dead. He was killed about half an hour ago.”
She grunted. A long stretch of road rolled by in silence.
“It was his own fault,” she suddenly announced. “He killed himself when he pulled that trigger.” She didn’t look at Erie as she spoke. She stared straight ahead, unblinking.
“What do you mean?”
“I filled the barrel with caulk last week.” She was still staring at nothing, but tears had begun to trickle down her cheeks. “I was afraid he was going to use it on me.”
“He was abusive?”
“Yes.”
Erie stole another glance at her. The tears were still flowing, but her face was impassive, blank. “He was your lover,” he said.
“Yes.”
“He killed your husband.”
“Yes,” she replied without hesitating.
“He used a van from DeRogatis Ford to fake a burglary.”
“Yes.”
“He kept the things he took from your house and brought them with him when he moved in with you.”
“Yes.” She spat out the word this time. “That idiot.”
“Will you repeat all this when we reach police headquarters? In a formal statement?”
“Yes.”
Another mile rolled under the wheels before Erie spoke again. “Why did you go along with it?” he said. “Did you love him?”
Mrs. Korfmann finally turned to face him. That morning she had reminded him, just a bit, of Nancy. But whatever resemblance he had seen in her then was gone now, crushed with the rest of her spirit.
“Joel used to beat me, too,” she said. “Ray said he would protect me.”
5:25 P.M.
SHE REPEATED EVERYTHING on the record, just as she said she would. Erie stayed in the interrogation room only long enough to make sure it was all on tape. But he left Dave Rogers to prepare her statement and get a signature. He simply stood up and said, “I’m tired, Dave,” and walked out.
Hal Allen was waiting for him outside. “I’d never have guessed it,” Allen said. “You’ve been holding out on us all these years. If I’d known you could wrap up a murder case every day, I never would have let you retire.”
“Too late now, boss,” Erie replied. “All right if I go home?”
“In a second. I wanted to see you at the end of the day, remember?”
“Oh, right. I guess you need this.” Erie slipped his badge-clip off his belt and handed it to Allen. “And this.” He unholstered his revolver and handed that over, too.
“Well, yeah, we need those.” Allen slipped the items into his jacket pocket. “But that’s not what I wanted to see you about. Do you still carry cards for Julie Rhodes, the grief counselor?”
“Um-hmm.”
“Could I see one?” Erie pulled out one of the cards. He handed it to Allen, who looked at it for a moment before handing it back.
“Here,” Allen said. “I think you should use this.”
5:50 P.M.
ERIE STOPPED AT a grocery store on the way home. He found the cheapest red wine in stock and put four bottles in his cart.
But on the way to the register he changed his mind.
He found the aisle marked Pet Supplies and threw a bag of kitty litter and a dozen cans of cat food into his cart. He left three bottles of wine on the shelf next to the “cat treats.”
When he got home, he opened one of the cans of cat food and dumped its contents onto a small plate. He took the plate out to the front porch along with his wine, a glass, and a bottle opener. He placed the plate on the walk that led to the driveway, then eased himself down on the first step of his porch.
He opened the wine and waited.
JANICE LAW
TABLOID PRESS
February 2000
IN A CAREER that has spanned nearly thirty years, Janice Law has written nine novels in an award-nominated mystery series, beginning with The Big Payoff in 1977. She’s also written a historical novel that takes place in Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV, All the King’s Ladies, and most recently, the literary novel Voices, which explores the connection between memory and identity. In this story, a naïve convenience store employee gets caught in a multilayered cat-and-mouse game.
Kim is standing there between Princess Diana—tiara, white satin, eyes blue as window spray—and Monica Lewinsky—dark suit, lots of curves, mega-lipstick. Though not as nice as Diana’s, Monica’s eyes are on the blue side, too, which doesn’t surprise Kim. She’s had a weakness along those lines herself, named Chris. When she was sixteen and three quarters and bored with school, Chris seemed exciting. Besides the blazing blue eyes he had a truck, a trailer, independence, a job. Now she knows he’s got a six-pack-a-day beer habit and a lousy temper from inhaling spray paint at the body shop.
Well, everyone has problems. There’s the princess dead with that fat Egyptian: “Diana a Year Later” is the People headline, and though Monica looks pretty good in most pictures, today’s tabloid screams “Monica on Suicide Watch.”
“What a shame,” one old geezer had told Kim just that morning, though another one didn’t buy the usual and said she’d get more than she wanted on the Internet.
Now the woman off pump four in the dark green Jetta wants to give Kim exact change and can’t come up with the final thirty cents. She’s got her crap all over the counter—pennies, a pen, car keys, Kleenex. “I know I’ve got it somewhere,” she says with this loopy, idiotic smile.
And pump two is screwed up as it’s been all week. Some guy in a big Suburban is yelling over the intercom that he’s got five seventy in the tank; and the pump’s froze on him. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get it started for you,” Kim’s saying when Joe, fat and fortyish but agile, hustles behind the counter to stand in her back pocket. He’s wearing the baggy gray suit and beige shirt plus, tod
ay, the Tweety Bird tie that he claims gives the customers a laugh. Kim can smell his cologne.
Joe says, “I need some help in the storeroom, Kim. Let Michael handle the front.”
Automatically Kim looks at her watch; that’s what she always does when Joe wants something, she checks the time: twelve thirty-five. Lunch is at one, after the trades guys have come in for sandwiches, beer, and sodas, after the high school kids have bought ice cream and Tabs, and after the elderly morning shoppers have stopped for gas and papers. Twelve thirty-five: time for her to hump a few dozen cartons and for Joe to try to get his hands down her jeans.
“Michael’s gotta leave early today for an exam,” she says, thinking quickly because between Joe hitting on her and Chris wanting beer money, Kim doesn’t want to stay and can’t afford to quit. “Michael’s got early class this semester, so I gotta be up front. And pump two’s jamming again.”
That distracts Joe for a minute because he likes to have everything running just right—pumps fast, counter manned, sandwiches fresh, coffee made every couple of hours. He’s got an eagle eye for the register, too. You have to move fast to get away with anything. He’ll count every damn pack of cigarettes himself if he has to.
With this Quick Mart, one in Putnam, another two in Norwich, Joe Gleb should be a rich man, and sometimes Kim tries to imagine what if he were handsome. Maybe bald like he is but attractive, even passable, not so fat, nicer manners. Or maybe elegant with fancy suits, gold jewelry, and a convertible like the rich, wrinkled geezers who pose with blonde girlfriends in the tabloids and who set up love nests and get themselves into expensive divorces. What then? Would that be a way out? An escape from Chris and misery?
But Rakesh has told her Joe isn’t really rich. Rakesh is the other college student, not at the community but at the state college, and he does some of the books cut-rate for Joe. What Rakesh told her was that it’s Joe’s wife who has the cash. Kim tends to believe that, because Joe is always bitching about money. It’s a lousy day at the store after he’s been to the casino, and sometimes there are odd phone calls that get Joe upset good.
Twelve fifty: pump two’s running again; Michael, who doesn’t really have an exam, is on the counter; Kim’s back shifting cartons of motor oil with Joe, who really should get one of the guys to do the heavy work. Joe’s told her he likes her jeans and likes her tank top, and next she’s expecting he’ll try to get her onto the night shift, when he says, out of left field, like, “Chris still picking you up?”
“You see me with a car?” Kim asks. One of the few smart things she’s done with Joe is to impress him with Chris’s temper, jealousy, and strength.
“I wanna talk to him next time he comes by.”
“Yeah? I’m not working the night shift,” Kim says quickly. “I don’t care if you talk him into it, I’m not working any night shift.”
“Who said I want you working the night shift?” asks Joe. “I thought you said Chris is outa full-time work. Didn’t you tell me that?”
Kim nods.
“So I’m maybe looking for workers.”
That’s an idea Kim will have to digest on her break. One o’clock sharp, she takes a cigarette from the pack she keeps in the counter drawer, buys a bottle of juice and a brownie, and crosses the road, because lunch choice between the storeroom or the cemetery is a no-brainer. Kim walks through the tall iron gates and down the deeply grooved dirt and gravel road. There are graves on either side, neat rows of gray, brown, and white stones, trees, too, and farther back, the big monuments of the formerly rich, still looking impressive fifty, eighty, one hundred years after.
If it’s a hot day, Kim likes to pick one of the ones that look like Greek temples, where she can sit in the shade with her back against the cool stones and have lunch and smoke in peace. But since today the sun will feel good, she picks a brown mottled obelisk that supervises a mess of little individual markers. The obelisk’s got KIERNAN cut in the base in letters big enough for a highway road sign, and Kim’s leaning up against it, drinking her o.j. straight from the bottle, when someone coughs. Kim jumps so quick she slops juice down her top. “Christ!” she says, and a few other things, because her new tank top is white and the stain’ll be a bitch.
“Excuse me,” says this voice. “You’re standing on my grave.”
WHEN WORK’S OFFERED, Chris is cautious. He’s reckless and wild with every other thing, but he approaches work like it’s a rabid cat. He wants to know exactly what Joe said and how he said it, and when Kim says, “Why don’t you ask him yourself, he’s still there,” Chris gets all mad and unreasonable. He smacks her one and sulks through dinner, though he does make a call after Kim goes outside with the garbage. Coming back, standing on the step with one hand on the screen door, she hears him saying, “Yeah, we’ll see about it, man. Long’s you’re talking serious money.”
Of course he tells Kim nothing, though she goes so far as to ask if Joe Gleb has a job for him. She risks that much. Chris says it’s none of her business and his eyes get mean, so Kim shuts her mouth and figures she’ll find out soon enough.
DULL DAY, MIST so heavy it feels like rain, or rain so light it feels like mist. Kim goes across to the cemetery anyway; she never misses a day now, though she always says she has an errand to run at the supermarket, that she’s got to stop by the pharmacy, whatever. Through the parking lot, dodging cars, carts, delivery trucks, across the street, three lanes, always jammed, then into the cemetery, into what she thinks of as real life, but Kim isn’t into irony. She’s fallen for happiness.
First they visit the grave, which is in Maureen’s family’s plot. Her name was once Maureen Kiernan, which has a nice ring to it, not like Gleb, which sounds to Kim like something nasty. The Kiernan plot is a generous square of lawn with the obelisk at the back and granite blocks on each comer. There are a lot of dead Kiernans under the grass, including the real money man, Joseph Patrick Kiernan, who founded the textile mill that’s now a hightech fish farm.
The Kiernan plot is impressive but high maintenance. There’s always something to be done, especially around Joey’s grave, which has to be kept weedless and perfect with every dead flower and faded plant removed, with each of the little boxwood shrubs perfectly pruned.
“Did he like flowers?” Kim asks once.
“He liked basketball,” Eileen says, “but you can’t plant basketballs.”
Which makes sense to Kim.
After tending the grave, they walk around the cemetery. Maureen always brings a picnic: nice deli sandwiches, cheese pies, or slices of meat bits in jelly with fancy French names; pretty cookies and little square cakes with icing all over; grapes or peaches or strawberries big as ping-pong balls. There’s a thermos of coffee if it’s cool; a half bottle of wine or cider if it’s warm. Kim and Maureen sit on the porch of one of the Greek temples, which are properly called mausoleums, Kim learns, and talk. They talk about Joey and the grave first, and then about themselves and their situations, and finally about their need for different lives, for freedom, for escape.
THIS ONE NIGHT, lights sweep across the trailer windows, the neighbor’s coon dogs go wild, and, surprise of surprises, Joe’s white Cadillac bounces over the ruts in the yard. Joe hops out, his heavy face sweaty. He’s got a cigar in his hand and a big charge of nervous energy on his back.
“Hey, Kimmie,” he says. Joe never calls her Kimmie at work, and she takes this to mean he’s trying to be chummy and friendly. She assumes he wants something. “Your man at home?”
Kim looks over her shoulder. Chris is sitting in front of the TV in the crowded main room. He’s got a NASCAR show on, and the racing motors produce a steady, whining drone that seems to mellow him out as much as anything can. When she nods her head, Joe squeezes past her into the trailer.
“So Chris,” he says, and something about the way Chris lifts his head, all alert and interested, tells Kim this is trouble.
“Take a walk,” he says.
“In the dark?”
“Go sit in the Caddy,” Joe says, tossing her the keys. “Play with the stereo. Check out those dynamite graphic equalizers.”
The Caddy has leather seats the color of caramel and nearly as soft, a fancy wood-faced dash, and a stereo with enough lights and dials for four, five ordinary boom boxes. Kim finds copies of Penthouse and Convenience Store Decisions under the front seat, along with a few old newspapers and an empty bag from the doughnut shop. The glove compartment has maps, a flashlight, aspirin, Tums, an inhaler, and an envelope of photos, mostly showing a boy of ten or eleven, a chubby, round-faced little kid.
In several, he’s smiling in a red and white basketball uniform with shorts that come down below his knees and a baseball cap on his head. In others, he’s all Sunday-dressed in shirt and slacks and bareheaded, so she can see the dark wavy hair. The boy waves to the camera from the white Cadillac, kneels on the grass to play with a beagle, cocks his arm to throw a football. Kim can see Joe in the fat cheeks and stocky form, but the child’s eyes are blue, startlingly blue. Kim flips through the rest of the snaps, quickly and not really paying attention, until the final picture, a family grouping, stops her cold. She’s looking at the child, the dog, and a tall blonde woman with the boy’s blue eyes. Kim looks at the picture and hears a voice saying, “You’re standing on my grave.”
“I SHOULDN’T BE here,” Kim says the next day. Just after one P.M., break time, a cloudy day with fall in the air. They’re eating these really nice ham and cheese sandwiches with fine crunchy green pickles.
“Why not?”
“I’m working for your husband.”
“I knew that.” Unconcerned. That’s one of the things that fascinates Kim about Maureen, that unconcern, that lack of fear. “I think these should have more onion. I like red onion on a sandwich. Don’t you think these need more onion?”
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