Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “Since when did you start smoking?” Paul asks.

  “A while ago,” Lawson says. “You want one? They’re chemical-free.” He exhales a long trail of smoke, the same color as the autumn air. “So things are okay?” Lawson asks.

  Paul is silent for a moment, seeing his chance to say something, and trying to gauge what his life would be like were he to actually tell his secret. When he feels as though the silence cannot be extended further, he says, “Kate’s annoyed with me, I think.”

  “You think?” Lawson says. “That’s the problem right there. You can’t be guessing what she feels, you’ve got to know.”

  “I brought this dog into our life, and I didn’t exactly have the green light on that one.”

  “You just walked in with it?” Lawson’s tone conveys that he is impressed.

  Paul senses another opening, a place where he can imply more of the truth. It is like being lost in the darkest heart of the woods and seeing a flash of light that suggests a way out. But for now he remains in darkness.

  “That’s a whole other story,” Paul says. “But Shep’s a stray.”

  “Well not anymore he isn’t,” Lawson says, with a laugh. Lawson snaps his fingers, beckoning the dog to come. Shep turns toward the sound but doesn’t move.

  “He’s actually sort of practical,” Paul says. “You haven’t done anything for him so he doesn’t figure to owe you anything.”

  Lawson shrugs. “I can relate,” he says. He pats Paul’s knee and looks at him curiously. “You look sort of tired.”

  “Up late,” says Paul. “Three o’clock in the morning, not good.”

  Lawson smiles. “Maybe that’s what we should be talking about, my friend. What would a fine hardworking man such as yourself be doing up and around at three in the morning? Why would you abandon the bed of your lovely consort? Why would you expose yourself to the demons who rule the earth at that ungodly time?” Lawson wets his fingertips with saliva and pinches out his cigarette, drops the twisted butt of it into his jacket’s pocket.

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” Paul says, looking away. Shep has seen or heard or picked up the scent of something—not enough to bring him to his feet, but his spine straightens, his ears go back, and he raises his muzzle.

  “Anything you feel like putting out there?” Todd asks, and when Paul shakes his head Lawson looks somewhat relieved. He gets off the boulder, and Paul readies himself to resume walking, too. They walk beneath an old spruce. Lawson lifts the lowest bough so he can pass under it, and lifts it a little higher as Paul passes under, followed by Shep.

  “All right, here’s the Todd Lawson diagnostic test for good relationships. Do you guys still laugh together? I mean, is it still fun?”

  What would be funny, Paul thinks, is if I right now just said, “Hey I killed a guy a couple of weeks ago.” But instead he says, “No problems there.”

  “Well, if you guys are still laughing. And I’m assuming the other more unmentionable things are all copacetic.”

  “Very much so,” says Paul.

  “Well then,” says Todd.

  Paul is quite sure that this is as far as the inquiry will go. Women have told him that among female friends all sorts of sexual confidences are exchanged, often quite graphically, but in Paul’s experience this is not the case with men. Men protect the details of their intimate lives like poker players holding their cards close, and for very similar reasons, too—they either want to give the impression of holding aces or they want to be able to quietly fold without showing their hand. Knowledge is power and men don’t want to give it away.

  “Well if you’re still laughing, and the night life is still cooking, who knows? This one might be a keeper.”

  “My keeping Kate isn’t really the issue,” Paul says. “I’m more worried about her keeping me.”

  “You? A fine strapping young specimen such as yourself?”

  “When was the last time you hit someone?” Paul asks. “I mean really fucking whacked them in anger?”

  “Oh man, I have no idea,” Lawson says. “Years, many years. Not since I was a kid.” He rubs the stubble on his chin with his palm. “You didn’t hit her, did you?” Paul shakes his head. “Then what? The dog? The kid?”

  “Nothing like that,” Paul says. “Just thinking, that’s all. There’s something inside of me that scares the shit out of me.”

  “Is that all?” Lawson says. He puts his arm over Paul’s shoulders. “Welcome to the world. And, by the way, welcome to America. I was just last night reading this story by D. H. Lawrence where he says the typical American is private, independent, and sort of a killer, in his heart.” Lawson delivers a thump to his chest, as if to correct an irregularity. “I’ll give you the book sometime, if you want.”

  Paul shoves his hands into his pants pockets. His hands feel suddenly cold, stiff. Fallen leaves cover the ground in gold, yellow, brown, and orange, and make walking slippery and difficult, though not for Shep, whose tongue is lolling out the side of his mouth and whose eyes sparkle, as though remembering some droll incident from his past. The woods are filled with birds who are staying put for the long winter—woodpeckers and blue jays, cardinals and chickadees. A hefty crow lights upon the tip of a nearby spruce, and sits there swaying back and forth like a black star on top of a Christmas tree. The temperature seems to be dropping, but there is a sudden presence of light coming from the west, as the sinking sun is making the last ten degrees of its journey toward the horizon free of the cloud cover. Traces of brilliant orange and red sky show through the spaces between the trees. The light, the light. Yet what Paul is thinking is: Every step I take I go deeper into the darkness.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Don’t touch nothing more in the apartment,” Jerry Caltagirone says to Frank Mazzerelli. “I’m going to send someone over there and matter of fact I’m going over myself. As far as I’m concerned, you touch anything in there you’re tampering with evidence. But you know what? I still don’t understand why you waited this long to come in.”

  On Mazzerelli’s request, they have left the station and are sitting across from each other at a sticky little table at a nearby Wendy’s. “Some reason for that?” Caltagirone persists. “You’d think you’d know better.” He is recovering from the walk over, having gained nearly fifty pounds in the past couple of years. His heart is still not used to the increased work, and it is always a bit exhausted and a little bit behind, or so it seems to Caltagirone: there is always some part of his body where the heart has failed to send the proper amount of blood and he feels cold and clammy either around his feet or his hands, and sometimes between his shoulder blades, assuming they are still in there, somewhere.

  Mazzerelli shakes his head, extends his lower lip. He feels monstrously unlucky. True, he chose this place because he didn’t want to talk to Caltagirone or anyone else at the station—just smelling that cop smell of aftershave and shoe polish and onions and tobacco-tinged collars, seeing that bleak cop light falling from the fluorescents, those metal desks with the family pictures four years out of date, just five minutes in that place was more than he could take. But what were the odds, what were the fucking odds against walking away from Depot Plaza and ending up in this Wendy’s and the first thing he sees is the one man he’s been with in the past year and a half? The guy’s name is Lester Ortiz, at least that’s the name he gave, and he doesn’t give the slightest flicker when Frank walks in. Maybe he feels shitty being seen working behind the counter in this place like some kid. As Frank remembers it, Ortiz said he taught in the high school. Frank looks at his watch. It’s after four, so maybe this is Ortiz’s after-school gig, though even thinking this way is dumb since what reason is there to believe a thing Ortiz said, up to and including his name, even though Frank himself had been more or less honest, saying his right name, his right first name anyhow, he didn’t say his family name, and also saying Yonkers when Ortiz asked him, though Frank wasn’t living in Yonkers anymore, and probably never would a
gain, in fact he more or less held his breath when he passed the sign for the Yonkers exit when he drove into the city, but still it was where he was from, it was the place he worked, spent all those years, it was, as a friend used to say, the place where the deal was done.

  “I don’t follow the news except in baseball season,” Frank says. He can feel Ortiz’s eyes on him. “But I saw the picture, and here I am.”

  “And you say this guy, you knew him to be Alfred Krane, with a K.”

  “That’s right,” Frank says. “Which I gather is not his real name.”

  “Who the fuck knows at this point,” says Caltagirone. “We ran his prints, we got no hits. And we got three different kinds of ID, with another name on each one. We figured our best bet is the driver’s license, but the address on it doesn’t exist and the California DMV doesn’t even have him in their system, which is not too unusual from what I can tell. And now you—what’d you call him?”

  “Klein,” Frank says. “Alfred Klein.”

  “Klein or Krane?” Caltagirone says.

  “Krane,” says Frank.

  “Yeah, but you said Klein,” Caltagirone presses.

  “It was just a mistake. I meant Krane.”

  Caltagirone looks at Frank for an extra couple of moments and then lets it go. “Yeah, well whatever name he gave you—” Caltagirone waves his fingers through the air, indicating nothingness, powerlessness, a world of false leads and blind alleys, the tedium of things not adding up. “Did you ask him for any proof when you rented to him?”

  “What kind of proof?” Frank says.

  “Of identity,” Caltagirone says. His tray holds a milkshake, three hamburgers, a large order of fries, and some sort of pie. He had ordered freely, but now, suddenly, he is doing his best to resist what appetite has put before him. “Proof of employment, bank account, references. This guy comes to you, you don’t know him, he could be wanted in six states. I think you’d want a little reassurance.”

  “That’s not how I do it,” Frank says. He holds a French fry between his thumb and forefinger, shakes off some of the salt. Ortiz is working hard behind the counter; he seems to be managing the place, barking orders at the four teenagers running the counter and six more of them back in the kitchen, but he also seems to be doing the same work as everybody else. “I got my own method,” Frank adds, which he immediately regrets. Years on the job taught him that the road to hell is paved with extra words. People who know how the world works say as little as possible.

  “Yeah,” Caltagirone says. “I got that. Well your method”—Caltagirone says the word as if it were in itself suspect—“is what maybe put this whole mess in my vestibule.” He hurriedly, angrily unwraps one of the hamburgers, pokes it with his forefinger, looks at it as if it were an uninvited guest. He starts to wrap it up again but reverses himself and picks it up, takes a large bite, and drops it back onto the tray.

  Frank folds his arms over his chest. He wants to ask Caltagirone how renting out an apartment without running a credit check on the tenant has anything to do with anything, but he holds it back.

  “This guy’s three days away from potter’s field, you know?” Caltagirone says. “I got prints going nowhere, I got no witnesses, and I got no motive because I don’t know who the fuck this guy even was so how am I supposed to know who wants to beat the shit out of him? And speaking of shit, someone took himself a dump about a hundred yards away from the crime. You know what they’re calling me down at the station? I come in it’s like Hey Bag of Shit, How you doin’, Bag of Shit, Good night, Bag of Shit.”

  “Is everything okay here, gentlemen?” It’s Ortiz, he’s standing there like the table’s covered by a white tablecloth and he’s holding the cork from the wine bottle for them to sniff. “Is there anything else we can help you with?” He’s saying this with a straight face and mostly looking at Caltagirone. Frank feels like someone’s tossed a bucket of horse piss in his face.

  “We’re good,” says Caltagirone, acting like there’s nothing out of the way about some guy in a Wendy’s coming to your table.

  “Okay,” says Ortiz. “Just making sure. Customer satisfaction is job number one.”

  But he just stands there, in his Wendy’s apron and a kind of shower cap, with the headset that connects him to all the important goings-on behind the counter and in the kitchen. Ortiz seems to have fallen into a trance and by now Frank has fixed his own gaze so powerfully on his own hands that his fingers look like they’re melding together. At last, Ortiz snaps out of it and comes to his senses. “Okay, enjoy,” he says, and heads back to the counter, where by now there’s got to be at least fifteen people waiting for their orders, which tells Frank that headset or no headset, Ortiz’s responsibility is no different from any seventeen-year-old kid’s working the counter, because if he was the manager his stepping away from the counter for a couple of minutes wouldn’t have caused a logjam.

  “I’ll tell you another thing,” Frank says to Caltagirone, feeling suddenly expansive from the relief of Ortiz’s leaving. He takes a deep breath. “Another lie that guy told me.” He taps the side of his head, by which he means he is just now thinking of it. “He had a dog.”

  “He had a dog,” Caltagirone repeats.

  “Yeah, he had a dog,” says Frank.

  “And what? He told you he didn’t have a dog?”

  “No, he never said nothing about it. Nothing about a dog one way or the other. It was a lie of o-mission.”

  “All right,” says Caltagirone, “he had a dog. That could be something.”

  “He definitely had a dog,” Frank says. “I went into his apartment and there was a bag of dog food, and a bowl, plus dog hair on the floor, a lot of it.”

  “I don’t want you going in that apartment,” Caltagirone says.

  “Got it,” says Frank. “Next forty-eight hours it’s all yours. But after that…” Frank shrugs, as if his right to clean that place out and get it rented again is an immutable law of nature.

  “So the dog ain’t there, right?” Caltagirone says.

  “No, no dog.”

  “I’m thinking that sometimes dogs get microchipped,” Caltagirone says. “We get the dog, we check out the microchip, that could be the thing. If he put a microchip in that dog it’s because he don’t want it going lost, in which case I’ll bet you anything he gives the vet his real information, name, telephone number. Some guy going to the trouble plus expense having his dog microchipped, it would pretty much defeat the whole purpose if he puts down a bunch of bullshit on the forms.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have the dog,” Frank says.

  “I’m saying if you did,” says Caltagirone.

  Suddenly, practically tearing the tissue paper, Caltagirone unwraps another of his hamburgers and eats it. He chews the bun and the meat, moving it around his mouth in a circle; Frank imagines the food tumbling around like laundry in a dryer. Barely giving himself time to swallow, Caltagirone begins on the third hamburger. It’s as if he knows he has perhaps a minute in which he can slip the collar of cause and effect, a minute of waking dream in which he can eat the way he bitterly imagines other people eating—freely, lustily, and without consequence. He believes that the massive coat of calories he wears is a special curse he bears, a piece of metabolic misfortune. He has several ways of consuming food that come down to magical eating—eating very very quickly is one way, breaking the food into pieces is another, as are eating while standing up, eating after midnight, and eating in the car. Yet, for the most part, he knows he will one day collapse at his desk or keel over in the street face-first and end up with a mouth full of blood and porcelain or black out dead in the car and run it right through a plate-glass window and every last person who knows him—even his own wife and kids—will think, What the fuck, Jerry? What did you think was going to happen?

  “My thing is,” Caltagirone says to Frank, “someone’s waiting for this guy.” As he speaks, he rewraps what is left of his third hamburger, and then his hand sudde
nly manages to dump the order of fries onto the tray. “Maybe he was a piece of shit,” Caltagirone says, staring at the oily heap of fried potatoes, “and maybe at the end of the day we’re going to figure this for a misdemeanor homicide, but right now there’s someone out there waiting for him and maybe worrying themselves sick, maybe his mother, or his sister, maybe he’s married, and I’m going to put it to rest for them because knowing someone is dead is better than just not knowing and waiting and waiting for something that don’t ever happen.”

  “Nothing in Missing Persons?” Frank asks. A little tremor of nostalgia for the job goes through him. The thing about the job, whatever bad you could say about it—and Frank hated it, hated the way people looked at him, hated the way people hated him, he hated the precinct and just about every last person in it—but the thing about the job was you were always up to something, you were always doing or maybe you were about to do or you just got through doing something that mattered.

  “I keep checking,” Caltagirone says. “Maybe someone’s waiting for a little more time to pass. Or maybe they haven’t figured out he’s missing yet.” Detective Caltagirone pries the plastic cover off his cup of Coke and tips it a little, spilling soda on all his fries and the remains of his hamburgers, like he’s putting out a fire.