A Welcome Grave lp-3

by Michael Koryta

  “What in the hell?” Brooks lifted his hands, palms out, and stepped away from the door, and that was when Doran shoved past Gaglionci and pointed his gun at Brooks.

  “This him?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, and Brooks looked at me and frowned. His face, with the hard jawline and smooth skin, made me think of an aftershave commercial.

  “Can I ask what you think you’re doing?” he said.

  “Shut up.” Doran stepped all the way into the house, shoving Gaglionci in with him, and kicked the front door shut. Brooks was backpedaling, and Doran followed him.

  “You recognize me, asshole? You know who I am?”

  Brooks hesitated, not because he was trying to place Doran, but because he was trying to decide whether to tell the truth.

  “You’re Andy Doran,” he said. “The murderer.”

  Doran let go of Gaglionci and hit Brooks in the face with the gun, a loud, vicious smack, and Brooks stumbled and caught the banister at the foot of the stairs to keep from going down. I’d moved maybe a foot toward them before Doran spun and put the gun to my forehead.

  “Stand down, Perry. Like I said, you’re here for the show. You’re a spectator now, all right?”

  We were standing in the long entryway of the house, the kitchen looming dark behind us, the stairs heading up to our left. A wide loft hung just above us, a bank of skylights reflecting the light from the open room below. Brooks clung to the banister and stared at Doran as blood dripped out of his nose and splashed onto the shining hardwood floor. Gaglionci had fallen to the floor when Doran let go of him, and stayed there now. Doran pivoted and pointed the gun at him.

  “This is your boss, right? Guy who paid you?”

  Gaglionci nodded.

  “You tell me,” Doran said, “you tell me here, in front of him, why he had you kill Jefferson.”

  Gaglionci fought his handcuffs, trying to sit upright. “Because he killed that girl. The one you went to prison for.”

  As soon as Gaglionci spoke, Doran hit Brooks again. He was ready this time and turned his head in time to take the blow above his ear instead of flush in the face. He moved up one step, trying to put himself behind the banister and use it as a shield. Doran was in front of me now, and I took one small step backward. I wanted to be out of his field of vision if I saw an opportunity to make a move.

  “Is that true?” Doran said. “You kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  Brooks tried to avoid the blow entirely this time, stumbling backward up the steps, but Doran grabbed him and pulled him down and cuffed him twice across the back of the head before shoving him to the floor. There was hair on the barrel of Doran’s gun now, and a ragged line of blood began to show along the base of Brooks’s skull.

  “Perry here agrees with your boy. Thinks you killed her.”

  Brooks shifted his eyes to me, trying for shock but offering only anger. “Are you insane?”

  Even on the floor, with blood on his perfect aftershave-commercial face, he oozed a haughty arrogance.

  “Probably be best to tell the truth tonight,” I said.

  “I have no idea—”

  Doran swung on him again, and Brooks moved with surprising speed, ducking the blow and scrambling free. He was on his feet, halfway back to the kitchen, hands held up to ward Doran off.

  “Admit it!” Doran screamed. “Say you did it. Say it!” He sprayed spit when he screamed, and his knuckles were white against the stock of the gun, his whole body trembling with fury.

  “I didn’t—”

  Doran fired. The gun, that big revolver he’d had at the trailer, bucked in his hand, and the bullet buried itself in the wall just behind Brooks, who shouted at the sound and ducked.

  “Admit it,” Doran said, his voice calm again, as if the shot had soothed him.

  Brooks was cowering. He’d backed up against the wall but still had his hands lifted as if he thought they might be able to protect him if Doran fired again.

  “I did it,” he said. His voice was a whisper, so soft I wasn’t sure he’d actually spoken at first, even though I’d watched him say it.

  “What?” Doran said.

  “I did it.” Louder this time. “I killed the girl. Monica Heath.”

  It was almost a full minute until Doran spoke, and then it was just a single word. “Why?”

  Brooks cocked his head, his mahogany hair flopping across his forehead.

  “It wasn’t intentional. I mean, I didn’t want to . . . she’d started fighting me. We’d been fooling around a little. We were out on the deck. I reached under her skirt and pulled her underwear down and she started to fight me. Then she got loud. She was almost shouting, really. And there were all those people outside of the house, my father and all of those . . .”

  Doran stood with the gun lifted, still aimed at Brooks, but he seemed not to breathe. He reminded me of a statue from a war memorial I’d seen somewhere, a frozen moment of imminent violence.

  Brooks broke the silence. “I didn’t want to kill her, I just wanted her to shut up. She was trying to walk away from me, and I grabbed that towel and just came up from behind and took it and used it to quiet her down. I didn’t want to kill . . .”

  He stopped again.

  “You sent me to prison,” Doran said. “I did five years for you. Five years because you didn’t want to be embarrassed by a girl who didn’t want to have sex with you.”

  Brooks didn’t say anything.

  “Why me?” Doran asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t pick you.”

  “Why me?”

  When he said it again, Brooks paused, mouth open. Then he said, “Because you were there. It wasn’t personal. You were just there.”

  “I was just there. I was just there, and it wasn’t personal,” Doran echoed. “Good. That means a lot. Those five years I did inside, they weren’t personal.”

  “You want money?” Brooks said. “All of you? Fine. Name a price. Anything. You pick a figure, and I’ll make it yours.”

  I actually moved toward Doran when Brooks said it, I was so sure he was going to fire. So sure that he wouldn’t be able to bear what Brooks had just done, trying to quell Doran with money, to control this situation in the same way he had the murder of Monica Heath, the way Doran had ended up in prison. Doran didn’t fire, though. He smiled.

  “Money,” he said. Rolled the word out slow, as if he were enjoying its flavor. “You can give me some of your money?”

  Brooks nodded. His nose was still bleeding, splattering the blue robe. “I can give you more money than you’ve ever imagined. More money than you can believe.”

  Doran looked down at Gaglionci, still on the floor, then back up to me. I couldn’t read his eyes. They didn’t seem to be seeing me, or anything in the room.

  “How much money can you give me tonight?”

  Brooks frowned. “You mean cash?”

  Doran tilted his head and studied Brooks, still with that remote expression on his face. Then he shook his head. “A check. I think I’d like a check.”

  Brooks stared at him. Then he nodded. “Okay. A check. All right. Yeah, I can write one. As a down payment, right? And then we can get you more. We can get you more later.”

  “Sure,” Doran said. “As a down payment.”

  For a moment Brooks just stood there, still nodding, and then he pointed down the hall to his right. “In my office. The checkbook is in my office.”

  “Then we should go there,” Doran said. His voice wasn’t his own anymore. It was relaxed, almost amused, as if he were on a different plane of the conversation and we couldn’t follow it. The voice bothered me.

  Brooks started down the hall, and Doran looked back at me and waved his gun. “Come on, Perry.”

  “Leave,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Get out of here, Doran. Take the van and go.”

  He smiled at me. The blood on his lips was dry now. “I don’t think so.�
�

  I walked down the hall behind Brooks, and Doran followed. Nobody said a word to Gaglionci; we just left him bleeding on the fancy hardwood floors with the handcuffs on. Brooks hadn’t turned a light on, and it was dim in the hall. There was an extravagant wine rack along the wall, probably fifty or sixty bottles in it, the white wines reflecting the faint light and the reds blending into the shadows along the wall. Brooks was walking fast, hands at his sides. He turned into the first door on the right and hit a light switch. We were in his office now, an expansive room with windows that would look out on the deck and the trees and lake beyond during the day. Now, at night, the dark glass simply showed the room.

  Doran stepped past me and stood in front of the desk while Brooks sat down in the chair. He didn’t look away from Doran while he pulled a black checkbook across the top of the desk and set it in front of him. He flipped it open and found a blank check, then reached out and patted his chest just over his heart, searching for a pen. I tensed when he did it. It wasn’t a genuine gesture, there was something heavy and false about it, but I didn’t understand why.

  “Now just let me get a pen,” he said, and he pulled open the drawer on the right side of the desk.

  “Don’t,” Doran said, but Brooks already had his hand inside the drawer, and Doran fired.

  The shot hit Brooks, shattered his collarbone and blew through his body and the chair behind it, but he’d gotten his hand on the gun in the drawer and he pulled the trigger. A hole opened in the desk with a cloud of splinters and then its twin bloomed red in the center of Doran’s stomach.

  Doran got off one more shot, and this time the bullet caught Brooks in the middle of the throat, tore a bloody fissure through his neck and slammed his head back against the chair. Blood burbled in the open wound as he tried to take one last breath that never came.

  I started to move toward Doran, who was still standing, and he made a wavering turn to point the gun at me. I stopped where I was and held my hands out. For a second he looked right into my eyes. There was an expression of great concern in his face. Blood welled out of his stomach and spread across his shirt. He dropped the gun and sat down on the floor and looked at the wound for the first time.

  “I wanted to kill him with his checkbook out. I wanted to kill him while he wrote the check,” he said, and then he died.

  44

  Rain was falling again, drumming on the big window behind Brooks, keeping me company as I sat with two dead men. I stayed in that office watching Doran long after I knew he was dead. The only sound was the rain at first, and blood dripping off Brooks’s chair to the floor, but then I began to hear things from out in the main body of the house. It took me a minute to remember Gaglionci. Best not to leave him to his own devices.

  I stood up and walked out of the office and down the dim hall, came around the corner, and found the front door open, Gaglionci gone, a trail of blood splatters leading out into the dark, rainy night.

  Go after him, or stay here and call the police? It should have been an easy decision, but my brain was cloudy, unconcerned, as if none of this mattered anymore. Sit in a room with two corpses long enough, that’s the way it starts to feel.

  I went through the door and stood on the porch, watching the rain splash into puddles in the driveway and pound off the roof of Doran’s rusted van, and then I heard footsteps from up by the road and a silhouette appeared, moving slowly. For a moment I thought of the guns back with Doran and Brooks and considered going for one of them. Then I saw it was Thor.

  He had Gaglionci, now unconscious, draped over his arm, feet dragging along the wet pavement. Thor hauled him up onto the porch and dumped him at my feet.

  “Thought you would want him back.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s good.”

  Thor stood on the porch and peered in at the house, saw the blood on the polished floors and heard the silence.

  “It is done,” he said. It was somewhere between a question and a statement of fact. He believed it to be true but was asking for verification.

  “They’re dead,” I said.

  He didn’t respond. I realized that it was exactly what he’d meant.

  “I didn’t kill either one of them. They shot each other.”

  Still silent. I supposed it really didn’t mean a damn thing to him one way or the other.

  “Where are Amy and Joe?” I asked.

  “Going for help. To the police. I thought it would be best if I went after you. It seems that was unnecessary. Your partner told me how to get here.”

  “I’ll need to call the police now,” I said. “You probably shouldn’t be here when they come.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll try to keep you out of it, Thor. I’ll do my best.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You got her back,” I said. “It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been on my own. Thank you.”

  He made a slight bow. It was the motion of a professional performer thanking the grateful audience that had appreciated his talents, and I thought it was damn appropriate.

  “Do you need to go to a hospital?” I looked at his side, where the blood was still not dry.

  “I know a man who can help with that.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “I will leave now,” he said. “You make your calls.”

  “How are you getting back to the city?”

  “That is not a problem,” he said, and then he turned and walked off the porch and into the woods.

  ______

  I gave him five minutes before I called the police. By then, Gaglionci was conscious again. I passed on 911 and called Targent. He answered on the first ring, and he recognized the number.

  “Perry, you are about twelve hours late with this call, you son of a bitch, and you’d better be ready to come in.”

  “You want to close your investigation?”

  “I doubt you say that because you’re offering to confess.”

  “Good guess.”

  “What do you have for me?”

  “I’ve got two bodies in a house by Geneva,” I said. “I’ve got a woman who was abducted today and is now safe and ready to explain some things to you. I’ve got the man who killed Alex Jefferson and Donny Ward in handcuffs.”

  “Tell me where you are,” was all he said.

  45

  They held me for three days. The warrant for Donny Ward’s murder was still plenty valid when police arrived at the winery, and nobody was so impressed with my explanation that they wanted to tear it up and cut me loose. Tommy Gaglionci wasn’t offering a confession, either. I’d been arrested on a Friday night, which gave the police—or maybe me—a break, because it postponed arraignment until Monday morning, giving them forty-eight hours to plunge into the stories Amy and Joe and I had to offer. On Monday morning my attorney learned there would be no arraignment.

  By then, my claims had some evidence behind them. Along with Amy’s story of how Gaglionci had abducted her, breaking into her apartment and covering her mouth with a sweet-smelling rag, the evidence techs had matched prints left in Donny Ward’s yard with the boots on Gaglionci’s feet.

  They finally kicked me loose slightly after noon on Monday. Targent came to take me out of the jail himself. Joe was waiting to drive me home, but Targent held the door of a small interview room open and asked me to give him a minute. I went in and sat behind the table, enjoying the absence of handcuffs.

  “Listen,” Targent said, “maybe you’re wanting an apology from me.”

  “I’m wanting to go home. That’s it.”

  “Maybe you deserve one,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “I thought about that a lot last night. We still don’t have all the details of this thing worked out, but if it holds up the way it looks now . . . My point is, you think I tried to force this onto you. That’s not true. The things that happened to increase my suspicion, I didn’t imagine those, Perry. I wouldn’t have been doing a good job if I didn’t try to explain them, right? And that
’s all I was doing. I was just trying to explain—”

  “I’ve got it, Targent. I understand. No, you didn’t imagine those things. You didn’t need to believe them so completely, or at least disbelieve me so completely, but I know what your job was, and I do understand that you were trying to get it done.”

  “A case like this,” he said, “somebody actively trying to frame a guy . . . You don’t see that much. It’s tough to believe even when it’s in your face.”

  “Your approach, while unimpressive, was no worse than what I brought to the table.”

  He tilted his head, looked at me curiously. “Yeah?”

  The better part of three days spent in jail, I’d had a long time to consider it. Liked myself less as each day passed.

  “You got a taste of some evidence against me and shut out the rest of the possibilities,” I said. “Because you wanted me to be guilty. You didn’t like me. You wanted to take me down. All of that? Same thing I did with Alex Jefferson. I railroaded a suspect, him and the son both. Decided they were guilty because I didn’t like them. I didn’t go out to find the truth, I went out to prove they were guilty. Even while I was ripping you for that approach with me, I was doing the same thing to Alex Jefferson and his son. At least you had the dignity to railroad somebody who was still alive.”

  He’d kept his eyes moving around the room when he’d talked, but now they were full on mine. Neither of us said anything for a while. Eventually, he stood up.

  “Go home, Perry. Go home.”

  Amy and Joe met me outside of the jail. Amy got out of the car when she saw me approaching. She reached for me and I caught her and held her and for the first time I felt like it was done. The worst of it was done. She was here, and she was safe, and I was with her. Tommy Gaglionci and Paul Brooks and the rest of them be damned. They hadn’t done as much damage as they could have.

  When Amy stepped back, her eyes were bright with tears that didn’t fall.

  “About damn time,” she said.

  “Yeah. Long weekend. The accommodations in there aren’t nearly as nice as what I was treated to in Indiana.”