Random Road

by Thomas Kies

  It was Kevin’s turn to lean in close and whisper. “How long has Evelyn known about you and Frank?”

  I chewed on a mouthful of arugula and thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. She might have suspected for quite a while, but she found out for sure about a month ago when she caught us at the Z Bar near closing time.”

  Kevin listened intently while he tore a piece from a dinner roll and popped it into his mouth.

  “Frank and I had spent most of the evening together.” I didn’t tell Kevin that it was at a local Hilton Garden Inn. “We decided to have a couple of late cocktails and dance a little bit. Unfortunately for us, Evelyn had attended a musical at the Westport Country Playhouse that night with a group of her rich friends and they thought they’d go clubbing.”

  “Let me guess,” Kevin said. “They ended up at the Z Bar.”

  “In all the world, in all the towns and all the bars, she ends up in mine.” I paraphrased Humphrey Bogart. “Anyway, she sees me snuggling up to her husband on the dance floor and decides that she wants a piece of me. So she takes both hands and grabs up as much hair on my head as possible and pulls…hard.”

  The waiters were taking the salad plates away but Kevin kept his eyes locked on my face.

  “I’d had a few cocktails at that point, so it didn’t take much to yank me off-balance and I fell flat on my ass. I tried to get back to my feet, not easy because I had four-inch stilettos on and all I could see were her fingers and nails going for my eyes. She actually gouged me under the left one here. Can you see the mark?” I pointed to it.

  He leaned in close again and slowly shook his head. “It’s barely noticeable.”

  “I came up swinging. It was self-defense. The problem was, I was pretty blasted so I was swinging wild. It just so happened there was an off-duty cop there, sitting at the bar, guy we went to high school with. You remember Phil Gilmartin?”

  Kevin scrunched up his face, trying to recall. “Yeah he was a year behind us, used to run cross-country.”

  “Same guy. Anyway, Phil’s a cop now and even though he was off-duty, he felt the need to get between me and Evelyn before we killed each other.”

  “And?”

  “And he pushed his way in just as I was swinging my fists and I clocked him right in the eye. Gave him a hell of a shiner.”

  “Oops.”

  “Yup. Bought me a night in jail. I’ll give Frank credit. He posted bail and put me in touch with a good criminal attorney.”

  “What did you get?” he asked. “You didn’t have to do any time, did you?”

  I shook my head. “Nah. Small fine plus court costs. I had to publicly apologize to Phil for punching him. That embarrassed him more than it did me. And I have to stay off the sauce for six months.”

  The light bulb went on above Kevin’s head. “Which is why you’re attending AA.”

  I held up my glass of club soda in a mock salute. Then I nodded to a woman sitting two tables over from us. “That’s the presiding judge over there. Judge Beverly Rath.”

  Kevin peeked around me to see. “The lady with the bad dye job?”

  I snickered. “It’s hard to miss, isn’t it?”

  “She’s sitting at the same table with the guy and his wife who want me to remodel their kitchen.”

  I turned and looked.

  Kevin continued. “They live on Connor’s Landing, just a couple of houses down from where those murders happened.”

  I looked at them with renewed interest. “Small world.”

  I finished the last of my chicken Florentine, then I leaned over and told Kevin that it was time for me to run back to the newspaper office for about an hour. “Will you be here when I get back?”

  He shrugged. “Most likely. You’re my ride. You sure I can’t come with you?”

  “It’ll go a whole lot faster if I concentrate and bang it out. I’ll be quick, I promise.” I gave him a peck on the cheek and I was off. I should have felt guilty leaving him there but the conversation at our table had turned to baseball and Kevin seemed to be enjoying himself.

  ***

  It didn’t take me long to hammer out a puff piece about the Fairfield County Bar Association assuaging its collective guilt by raising an obscene amount of money for the Cancer Association. I didn’t write it like that, of course, but I wanted to.

  No sooner had I sent the story to Casper’s queue on the server than I started working on a follow up to the homicides. I’d made some phone calls earlier in the day to some of the neighbors out on the island and discovered that nobody knew much about the Chadwicks. I was a little luckier in getting background information on the Singewalds and the Websters. The consensus was that they were nice people and didn’t deserve to die like they did. Since Mike had confirmed their names, I could use it all in the story.

  Throughout the day, I’d kept in touch with my police contacts but there wasn’t much new to report. They were trying to reconstruct where the victims might have been earlier in the evening and what they’d been doing, but hadn’t made much progress. So while there wasn’t much more about the official investigation I could put into the paper, I was able to incorporate what Mike had told me at the party into the first paragraph of the story.

  Casper loved it. The story was the lead on page one again. His headline read Cops Call Murder Scene ‘Slaughterhouse.’ It wasn’t going to win me a Pulitzer, but it made me grin.

  Chapter Seven

  “So, other than when I left you all by yourself, did you have fun?” I nosed my car out of the parking lot of the Shorefront Club.

  I’d gotten back as they were clearing away the tiramisu and the band was winding down with the last few songs of the night. Before the end of the evening, Kevin and I managed to mangle two fast dances and one slow grope. I do recall dancing with him at our prom when we were in high school, even though we weren’t each other’s date, and frankly after twenty years, he hasn’t gotten any better at it. Kevin is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, but he’s got the rhythm and grace of a spastic giraffe.

  However, I’d spotted Frank Mancini out on the dance floor with Evelyn, and damn it, I wanted him to see me with Kevin. Okay, so at one point when we were slow dancing, I might have let my hand drift down from his lower back and gently, quickly run my palm down Kevin’s butt, just so Frank could watch. The way I did it, it could have been an accident. Or it could have been on purpose.

  It’s disconcerting to me that, even when I’m sober, I can be childish and bitchy.

  “Yeah,” Kevin answered. “I actually I did have fun. It was fun and profitable.”

  “Really?”

  He pulled a couple of business cards out of his shirt pocket. The only illumination in the front seat of the Sebring came from the dashboard so showing me the cards was purely for effect. “I met your judge, Beverly Rath. I’m driving out to her place in Darien tomorrow morning to give her a quote on putting in a guest room. And in the afternoon, I’m going out to Connor’s Landing to take a look at remodeling a kitchen for that lawyer’s wife, Becky Elroy. She was there tonight, with her husband, Pete. You know them?”

  I searched my memory and then slowly shook my head. They hadn’t looked familiar when Kevin pointed them out earlier in the evening.

  “She’s a little bit of a nut,” Kevin said. “You know what she wants to put in her kitchen?”

  “A personal chef?”

  He waved his hand. “Don’t be silly, she already has one. No, she wants to put in a backsplash that’s mined from a quarry in Wyoming. They sell slabs of stone imprinted with fossils from a subtropical rainforest that’s over fifty-million years old.”

  “Let me guess, it’s expensive.”

  “I love working with people who have more money than brains,” Kevin laughed.

  “So what do you want to do now?”

  “How about we go get
a cup of coffee?”

  I glanced at the digital clock on the dash. “How about we have a cup of coffee at my place? I’ve got a dog that’s ready for a walk right about now.”

  He didn’t answer right away. Had I made him a little nervous by asking him back to my apartment? He was most likely remembering that I’d brushed my hand along his tush during “Unchained Melody.” I tried to put him at ease, ‘We’re two old friends having coffee, Kevin. No strings, know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” he mumbled. “Yeah, of course, okay.”

  ***

  My Yorkie spent about two seconds growling at Kevin when he first came through the door and then the dog must have decided that, if he’s with me, the big guy must be okay. My pup started dancing around, tail wagging, and yipping that he was long overdue for a stroll through the neighborhood.

  Kevin leaned down to give him a scratch behind the ear. “What’s his name?”

  “Tucker.”

  “Tucker,” he repeated, low and friendly. “What a good boy.”

  “This good boy needs to do some serious business,” I told him. “If you’d like, you can turn on the TV while I’m out.”

  He looked around the apartment and for a moment I wished that I’d picked up a little before I asked him in. I have two bedrooms, a kitchen, tiny dinette and a single bath in an old Victorian home that’s been chopped up into apartments. I’m on the ground floor and I have a private doorway and access to the front porch, which I use often, drinking wine, relaxing in my chaise, and reading mysteries. The ceilings in the apartment are high, the windows offer a view of the wetlands behind the house and I sometimes pretend that I’m staying in a bed and breakfast.

  I’m happy with where I live. I’m just not a great housekeeper.

  It’s not like I have piles of dirty clothes and old pizza cartons lying around. But I don’t run the vacuum or dust the furniture every week and there are a few scattered magazines and newspapers on the floor next to my place on the couch.

  Showing Kevin that I was serious about the TV, I picked the remote off the coffee table and handed it to him. It’s as domestic as I get. “The TV section of the newspaper is on the floor next to my chair over there,” I pointed out. He’d have to get that himself.

  He shrugged. “Would it be okay if I tagged along with you and Tucker?”

  He made me happy. “Sure.”

  My neighborhood is in the process of being gentrified. At one point, about fifteen years ago, it looked like South Sheffield was going into the terminal phase of urban blight. There were empty storefronts, old houses boarded up with plywood, and drug dealers who bought and sold with impunity.

  And then an amazing thing happened. Property values in the area soared.

  Because Sheffield is so close to New York City, there are no parcels of real estate in town anymore that aren’t worth a fortune. Businesses on the harbor-front, their doors closed and windows dark for so many years, became trendy restaurants, nightclubs, and boutique shops. Old manufacturing buildings, some burnt out, mostly empty and gutted, were transformed into million-dollar homes or torn down and reborn into chic condominiums. The drug dealers? They either left the city for other rat-holes or else they got into something more lucrative: They started buying and selling real estate.

  My house was right around the block from the line of nightclubs. I liked it because, when I was drinking, I could hit as many of the bars as I could afford and then walk safely home. If I get caught in a DUI again, I’ll lose my license for a very long time.

  Tucker likes it because we’re a short walk to the docks. We can be on the waterfront in about seven minutes. Pleasure boats are tied alongside oyster trawlers and the ferry. There’s the sound of the waves gently slapping against their bows and there’s the smell of the sea air and saltwater. When I let him off his leash during the day, Tucker likes running back and forth on the wooden docks, terrorizing the gulls, who rise up reluctantly into the air and scream shrill epithets at the little dog while wheeling in slow circles a few yards above his head.

  Kevin had left his suit coat back in my living room. His collar was unbuttoned, his tie loosened, and his sleeves rolled up.

  I was still in my black dress, but I’d traded my high heels for a pair of flats.

  As we walked along the waterfront, streetlights glittered on the black, rippling surface of the water. I glanced over at Kevin. “Thanks for being my date tonight.”

  He looked down at his shoes, adorably shy. “Thanks for asking me.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get to spend as much time together as I would have liked.”

  “It was nice being with you again,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”

  It was dark, so I’m not sure if he could see me smile. “I never even had a chance to ask how things have been for you.”

  “Okay,” he said, uncertain. “It’s been good, most of it.”

  “Life?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s the abridged version. How about you fill me in on your life…let’s see, say after we graduated?”

  “Well,” he brightened, “after high school, you know I was a psych major at UConn. I lasted about three years, ran out of money and figured that I’d had enough higher learning. I’m not sure what I would have done with a degree in psychology anyway. I certainly wasn’t going to go on and get my PhD. So I moved back home and I can’t tell you how much that thrilled my dad. But only for a few months and then I went to work for my Uncle Jack.”

  I interrupted, “Your Uncle Jack. Jack Bell? I remember him. Wasn’t he…?”

  “Killed by lightning.” Kevin filled in the blank.

  I’d finished college and was just starting to write for a newspaper in upstate New York when my mom sent me a clipping about Kevin’s uncle. She’d sent it with a note saying that this was the kind of story that sells newspapers.

  Honestly, Mom was right, and it was a lesson I took to heart.

  Kevin told the tale. “Uncle Jack was patching over some weathered spots up on the steeple of the Silver Hill Methodist Church. He’d been a loyal member of the church for over twenty-five years. In all of that time, it was rare that he missed a service. Plus, he was always doing odd jobs for them. On that particular day, he’d supplied the lumber for free and was donating his time, and he was just about finished when the storm hit. Uncle Jack owned and operated his own construction company for over thirty years. He taught me everything I know about contracting, which includes not handling metal tools and getting to a safe location during an electrical storm.

  “But for some odd reason,” Kevin continued, “Uncle Jack kept on working. Maybe it was because he was almost done with the job or maybe it was just because he wasn’t paying attention. Anyway, the storm clouds moved in fast, riding a stiff wind off the sound. I heard that when the sky opened up, the rain fell so hard you could barely see your hand in front of your face. I wasn’t there, but one of the deacons said that he thought he’d seen Uncle Jack start down the ladder and that was when he was hit.”

  All I could say was, “Oh, my God.”

  “It literally hurled him off the ladder and into the air. He dropped almost a hundred feet to the ground. The doctor said that the lightning had probably stopped his heart and that Uncle Jack was dead before he hit the parking lot.”

  I reached over and took his hand.

  “For a while after that,” Kevin said, “a lot of people wondered how God could do something like that to someone who was so devout. Jack practically lived in that church. He was always helping them raise money or he was doing repair work in his spare time either for the church or for some parishioner who was down on his luck. People wondered how something like that could happen to a man who was fixing the steeple of a church, God’s own house. At the funeral, Reverend Cleese said it had to be the Lord’s way of rewarding my uncle for his good works, a
nd now and forever Uncle Jack would sit at the right hand of God in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  I watched as Tucker trotted up to Kevin and put one paw on his shoe, looking for attention. He knelt down and scratched the pup behind his ears. “Then the rumors started. About how Uncle Jack and Reverend Cleese’s wife had been having an affair, maybe going on for years. That was why Uncle Jack was spending so much time at the church. And then everyone started talking about how the bolt of lightning had been just punishment for committing adultery.”

  Yikes, “just punishment” for committing adultery. I don’t like the sound of that.

  “No matter who you talked to,” he mused, “it amounted to the same thing. Whether he was being rewarded or he was being punished, it wasn’t an accident. There was a purpose for Uncle Jack being struck by lightning.”

  Kevin stopped petting Tucker and we started walking again. I tapped his arm. “Is that what you think? That everything happens for a reason?”

  He nodded. “In this case, yeah. The reason Uncle Jack died was because he didn’t put his tools away and get down off that scaffolding when he saw the storm coming.”

  ***

  As we walked back to my apartment, he finished telling me about his life. He’d started his own company soon after his uncle died. He’d met Joanna, married her, bought the house on Random Road, and Caroline was born. They never were rich but they were never poor. They took vacations to places like the Grand Canyon and Disneyworld. When he was single, Kevin had owned a motorcycle, but after he’d gotten married, all he drove were minivans and SUVs. Their lives were full and happy even if, at least to me, it all seemed a little non-eventful.

  But maybe in the grand scheme of things if you’re sharing it with the right person, that’s a pretty good way to live.

  Suddenly Mike’s words came back to me, “Kevin put his family and friends through hell.”

  By the time we got back to my place he hadn’t said anything about the death of his wife and I didn’t ask.

  Once we were inside, we went straight into my tiny kitchen and I started bustling around, getting a filter for the coffeemaker, pulling a bag of coffee out of the freezer, getting cups out of the cabinet. Once I had everything on the counter, I turned and sighed.