by T. Braddy
Before Winston could open his mouth, Yaelis said, “Go ahead.”
“The man I shot was put out of his misery. Somebody cut his throat.”
“How could they blame you for that?”
“Used a knife from the bar where I work. Had my fingerprints on it, I guess, or maybe the police had some help in reaching the conclusion that it was me.”
“And the cops?” Winston asked. “What about shooting at them?”
“They shot first.”
Winston’s eyes became thin slits in his head.
“It was a cheap attempt,” I said, downplaying it. “They emptied a clip into a car next to me, and I felt threatened, so I returned the favor.”
The man of the house rubbed his chin. “You’ll never be able to prove that. They’re going to crucify you, you know.”
“I do.”
He sighed again.
“Rolson, you’re not a bad man, but I hope you understand me when I say I can’t have you in my house.”
“I do.”
“Dad–”
“Yaelis, please.”
She turned and stomped off toward her room.
“I get it,” I said. “I’ll be on my way.”
“I don’t think you should show up for any meetings, either,” he said. “It’s already a delicate balance, and–”
“I know. I’ll stay away. As soon as I get this thing figured out–”
“We’ll see, Rolson. You’ve brought something with you down here, and whatever it is, I don’t think it’ll ever leave you. Yaelis’s family believes in some Roman Catholic form of karma, and I’ve got Haitian relatives down in New Orleans who practice voodoo, but I’ve never been much of a follower of the dark side of religious teachings.”
“There’s something to it,” I said.
He nodded. “Must be. For me, it’s all about giving over power to the Big Guy and letting Him sort out the things I cannot myself control.”
“I hear that.”
“But in the case of you, I think there’s something to it. Sometimes I get the feeling you’re not the only man inhabiting your own body. I took you on as a pet case, because I thought you might have just hit a bad luck streak, but I’m coming to the conclusion that you’re dragging something dark and heavy along behind you.”
“I don’t disagree. If you’ll excuse me–”
I shouldered past him.
“Yaelis’s got a bright future,” he said to my back. I kept walking. “She’s going to college. She’s going to visit all seven continents, and I’ve got to make sure that happens. Someday, maybe, you’ll get that.”
I slammed the door behind me and hobbled the few blocks to my car. I punched the steering wheel until my knuckles poured blood.
Even though Winston was denying me friendship, I didn’t disagree with a goddamned thing he had said.
* * *
My dud of a car made it back to Richie’s without a problem. Richie himself was circling his gigantic living room when I walked in.
“What the fuck were you doing?” he asked, puffing feverishly on a joint the size of my middle finger. “They got your face all over the news and shit. You can’t– you can’t be here.”
Two girls were asleep on one of the couches, spooning in what appeared to be their club clothes. Several other people lay in a heap on the ground, partially covered by old blankets. Upstairs, the vague sound of a generic, bass-y drum beat could be heard. Out on the first floor patio, several kids who could have been in a metal band passed a one-hitter around their little circle.
“Nobody knows I know you.”
Richie wasn’t in the mood. “Man, you’ve got the entirety of my universe focused in on me here. Bellerose. The fucking cops. Because of some shit you did, Jess is trying to convince you I kicked the shit out of her.”
“About that.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” He took a drag, inhaled, and held the smoke in his lungs. His voice was a half-octave higher when he said, “Damnit, what is it?”
“Jess, she–”
“Is she dead, man?” He exhaled, blowing an expanding cloud of smoke toward the ceiling.
“Not yet.” I was exhausted. I went over to the couch with the two well-dressed sleepers and pushed their feet up just enough to be able to sit down.
“The fuck’s that mean. The fuck’s it mean?”
“It means I’ve poked a wasp nest in a very small room.”
“That doesn’t– I don’t think that makes any more sense.”
“Jess is in the hospital. I–”
Richie rushed over and took a swing at me. His balance was way off, so when I ducked, he went sprawling onto the couch, landing between the two girls asleep and snuggling.
“Ew, Richie, no,” the brunette on the inside said. “Not after last time.”
She nuzzled into the neck of her friend and seemed to go instantly back to sleep.
I got up, and Richie followed. The joint dangling from his lips, he tried to land another wild haymaker and stumbled again. I sidestepped the shot and pushed him to the ground. When he landed, I knelt and pinned his arms to the ground with my knees.
He struggled, and some of the patrons sleeping off whatever they had ingested the night before turned and looked, but when they saw it was Richie, they sighed and tried to go back to sleep.
“I had nothing to do with it,” I said.
“Let me up,” he said. “I need to go see her.”
“Something tells me you’ll end up in jail or dead if you do that.”
“I don’t care, man. I don’t– why?”
“Somebody’s using her for bait. Trying to draw me – and maybe you – out of the woodwork. I don’t like that she’s the rope in whatever game of tug-of-war is going on, but right now, that’s the reality.”
Richie looked up, peering at me one-eyed through the haze of smoke. I was amazed his joint had remained lit.
“Sounds exactly like what happened to your old lady, my man.”
He said it gently, but the revelation knocked me onto my ass. I toppled over and landed hard on my shoulder. I covered my face and tried to think of anything other than what Richie had just suggested.
My mind reeled. Richie got up, stamped out the joint in a nearby skull-shaped ashtray and held his hand out to help me up. I didn’t take it, not at first.
“Rolson?”
We stood in awkward silence for a minute.
“Yeah.”
“Holy shit, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to– do you really think...I mean, shit man.”
I shook my head, but my head was wrong. It absolutely was the truth. It absolutely was the case, and how I hadn’t seen that coming made me very, completely ashamed.
“No, it is,” I said, contradicting myself. “I’m in denial.”
I let him help me up, and then I walked out to the downstairs patio. The crew smoking the bowl had moved into the kitchen for some Peanut Butter M&Ms and Doritos. That and beef jerky were just about all Richie kept in the house, when he wasn’t ordering Papa John’s.
“You need me to bust a cap in somebody’s ass, I’m down,” he said, leaning against the railing. “It’s been awhile since my life has felt street.”
Has it ever? I wanted to ask him but demurred.
“I don’t think you’re safe here,” I said. “If they got to Jess, they can get to you, and I don’t imagine they’ll take it any easier on you.”
The metalheads had created a thin haze of smoke out here. I was getting a contact high from it all.
I continued. “And clean yourself the fuck up. You’re starting to be the lunatic Jess described.”
“I know.” He thought about saying something else. Then, he closed his eyes and tilted his head back. “I know. I know. I know.”
“If you’re down for this, though,” I said, “I’m going to take you up on it. But I need you clear-eyed. You hear me?”
“I’m down. I mean, I just smoked a fat-ass joint, so I’m going
to be high for several, several hours, but after that, yeah, totally.”
“Things are about to get real dangerous. Both our lives are at risk. We’ve got a few people we need to keep safe, and that’s our primary concern right now.”
“Not figuring out your ex-wife’s bullshit?”
I clenched my teeth, then relaxed my jaw. “Guess not.”
“Then let’s do this. Where can I get my ACR?”
“How do you even know what that is?” I asked.
“Call of Duty, man.”
* * *
Some major questions needed answers, and I was getting ready to dig. My first call was to D.L., who was sluggish in answering the phone.
I had a head full of facts ready to go, but as soon as he answered, as soon as I heard his voice, I froze.
All of the normal topics for discussion lay just out of reach. None of the “how’s retirement” talks, or “you doing all right with the missus” kinds of discussions. It wasn’t going to fly, not anymore, and even though I considered Vanessa’s dad the closest thing to a father I’d ever had – him and a lowdown son-of-a-bitch named Jarrell Clements – it now felt as though I were talking to a stranger.
Thankfully, he saved me the business of explaining myself by initiating the call.
“Hey, there, Rolson. I’ve got some people down here been wanting to talk to you.”
D.L. was drunk. It was still fairly early in the morning.
“I’ve been a bit too busy for a social visit. D.L., listen. What did the toxicology reports in Vanessa’s autopsy say?”
There was a long pause.
“Wasn’t one.” His voice was watery and weak. It was apparent he was crying, or had already been covering up his tears with scotch.
“Why not?”
He took a deep breath, but his voice still shook when he returned an answer to my question. “Me and her mother, we– there wasn’t much of a question it was an overdose. Accidental or no, she had relapsed, and, well, we wanted to be done with the business of burying her. She was– our little girl was dead, and she was so lost, and we couldn’t handle the hurt it was causing. I mean, you know. You were there. You didn’t ask for an autopsy to be done.”
“I just figured, with the way she died, something would be done.”
“What needed to be done got done. She was dead, and it was her sickness about life that killed her.”
The silence that followed indicted me as a potential suspect in the sickness she had contracted. I allowed it to linger there, pushed myself to feel every bit of it before I continued.
My mouth, even, got in the way of what I had to say next. “What if some new information has come to light?”
“Doesn’t matter to me, Rolson.” He sounded tired. Very, very tired. “What put her in the ground is irrelevant, because no matter how she got there, the outcome is exactly the same.”
“D.L., brace yourself.”
“Okay.”
“I think she might have been forced to O.D. on whatever she took.”
“Huh.” He said it flatly, as though he were completely disinterested in the comment.
“You don’t believe me?”
“You don’t sound like yourself, son. You sure you’re clean and sober right now?”
I am a different person altogether, I wanted to say.
“I’m a little high from this guy smoking a joint in front of me, but otherwise I’m fine.”
“Still sober, though?”
“As a judge.”
“Round here, that don’t mean much.”
A joke that used to draw a laugh between us. Now, it only drove a silent wedge in the conversation.
“I– I know I should have called. I’ve been figuring myself out.”
“Wherever the hell you are.”
“That’s fair, I guess. But, D.L., it hurt to think about.”
“I am a man of a certain age now, and if there’s something I understand, it’s pain. It’s kind of like the soul’s arthritis. Starts small, with a little twinge here and some achiness there, but before long you can barely move around, it’s so bad. You don’t owe me nothing, Rolson McKane.”
“But I do,” I said, even if my pronouncement wasn’t convincing.
“There’s some things you can hang your head about,” he said. “Being a good husband. You tried, but you and Vanessa married young, and you didn’t have yourself together, so how could you be the equal and opposite force to another person?”
D.L. was the sort of man who managed to make even withering attacks on your character sound like reasoned, sound judgments. This one, I’m afraid, hit too close.
“Right.”
“But there are things you can’t beat yourself up about, and Vanessa’s predilection toward the obscenities of drug abuse would have occurred with or without your involvement. So don’t go on giving yourself that much credit.”
“D.L., what is it you’re not telling me about Vanessa? What happened to her that drove her to use?”
“I don't–”
“Tell me.”
“Rol, you’ve got to be kidding me. Six months gone, and you–”
“Tell. Me.”
He stood in defiance of my request by sitting in complete silence. My counter-proposal was a silence of my own. He was a small-town cop, as I had been, but I had been hardened by an attachment to the grimy underside of life, and so I won out.
He exhaled with the force of a man whose anger was a mere mask that was falling away. “She never said anything?”
“Not a single word. I’d always assumed she started the drug abuse because of us.”
Memories of arguments, hours-long screaming matches, inserted themselves silently into the crevasses of our exchange. Some of the cuts still felt fresh. Van was the queen of acrimonious feuds, which was more than I could say. I outlasted my bouts of unhappiness in a kind of embittered solitude, content to become a martyr to my own feelings. I felt like an empty suit of armor relinquished to the corner of the house, standing guard over my own feelings, until Van and I could make a pass at the old olive branch.
D.L. sheathed his sword, lowered his shield. He said, “This dies with you.”
“Way things are going, that might not even be a long time,” I said.
“My wife’s brother lived on the panhandle in Florida, and we took Vanessa for a trip Gulf-side when she was three. I had never met him before, but apparently he had moved away from the homestead pretty early on in life to get in on Florida real estate when it was really kicking. He and his wife were a little bit on the strange side, you could tell, and even Paula didn’t seem to recognize him. They were kind of...estranged, you know? He was fifteen years her senior, moved out when she was a baby. That sort of thing. Then he went off and became the family’s black sheep, to boot. Didn’t keep the family in good graces.”
He paused, and I heard ice tinkle against glass. Scotch. Three fingers, if I had to guess.
“We spend a few days with them, trying to figure out what the in the hell it was which had driven us to go and visit them at this point in our lives. Looking back, I reckon we figured we’d have some time in the sun, maybe make it a true Florida vacation, even if we had to put up with the weirdness surrounding these apparent unknowns.”
I said, “What made them so bizarre?”
“Just little things. The way he and his wife looked at one another when they were around us, like they knew a secret we didn’t know. I got suspicious pretty early on, especially when Paula told me about him misremembering aspects of their childhood. Being a young police officer myself, I started to dig a little bit. Found myself doing a half-assed interrogation of them, but they knew just enough to fend off my questions, or at least to change the subject.
“One of those days, we were all getting ready for a trip to the beach – it was an easy way to ignore the suspicion that we were staying with criminal imposters – when Vanessa wandered off. Paula and I drank a little bit more heavily than we should have in
those days, but I think it was the awkwardness that magnified it. Anyway, she got to wandering around the house and–”
He paused. On the other end of the line, I heard a faint sob.
He recaptured a sense of composure before stepping out onto the ledge of this story again.
“We should have been watching more closely, but we were supposed to have been with family. They were weird, but they seemed decent enough, even if there was reason to suspect they were posing as Paula’s brother and his wife.
“After a few minutes, maybe ten, I went looking for her, and I came to a spare bedroom at the end of the hallway. Cracked door and everything. When I peeked in, she wasn’t, Jesus God, she wasn’t– she was just in her bathing suit, but she was on his lap, and the wife was taking pictures, and it wasn’t just pictures, not with the way he had her.”
Multitudes filled the pause between us. I left it in the air until D.L. was ready to speak again.
“Everything after that went quickly. I yanked her off his lap and put her outside before I went to work on the husband. Broke the camera, destroyed the Polaroids. He didn’t fight back. I hit him until I was tired of swinging. He was pretty bad off then, but the wife, she stayed silent the whole time, cowering in a corner of the room. Like – I tell you what – she was like a goddamned china doll. Pale skin. Eyes wide as dinner plates. Staring without blinking. Looking without really seeing. I went to my room and got the piece I carried with me everywhere back then. Held them at gunpoint while I tore that room apart.”
He paused again. I listened, not daring to interrupt the man.
“I found things. Pictures. Hundreds of them. Felt like they burned my fingers when I touched them, and I’ve been privy to some sickening shit in my life, Rol. Then I found some more pictures, but these weren’t like the other ones. These ones, they belonged in the house. I can’t tell you how I knew this, but I did. Even before I looked at them, I knew. They were packed up photographs of two people who looked very similar to the people we had been staying with, but the husband was the spitting image of Paula.”
I cleared my throat. “What had they done to them?”
“Killed them. Took up at their house. They were convicted sex offenders who had been living these falsified lives for years, and no one had found them. They thought they’d never get caught, I reckon, and who knows what possessed them to respond to Paula’s request to stay with them. Guess they felt invincible by then, or maybe they wanted to get caught, needed to be punished. Some criminals get that way. Jesus God, why, I don’t know.”
