by John Inman
Suddenly I had a craving for marijuana. Two minutes with my mother could do that. I scanned every tabletop in the room but didn’t see what I was looking for. “Are you sure you’re out of papers?”
“Pretty sure.” She held the pipe out. “Here. Suck on this.”
I carefully wiped the mouthpiece off with my shirttail, which elicited an eye roll from my mother. What’s a little spit? she seemed to imply, considering the fact that I had once, thirty years earlier, wiggled my way through her vagina. Taking a healthy hit, I stood stock-still for a minute, letting the smoke roil through my system. When I opened my eyes, I thought of Cheetos again.
“Good stuff,” I said.
My mother grinned and wiggled her fingers, asking for the return of her pipe. I handed it over. All humor died in her eyes.
“It’s the sixth of June, you know,” my mother quietly said.
I stared at her for the longest time. Then my gaze drifted to the sofa, where I had noticed a few scattered objects earlier but hadn’t taken the time to analyze them. Now I knew immediately what they were. Photo albums. Assorted snapshots. A blue-and-gold high school graduation cap with requisite tassel still attached. In the middle of this mess lay a framed photo of my twin brother, Jack. In the picture, he was wearing the very same graduation cap that now lay beside the photograph on the couch.
I heaved a sigh and lowered myself into a chair in the corner.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“It would have occurred to you sooner or later,” my mother answered. And I knew she was right. It would most certainly have occurred to me sooner or later.
“Did you call the police again?” I asked.
She stared at the pipe in her hand. It was no longer lit. She set it on the table beside her, propping it carefully in an ash tray so it wouldn’t spill over. “Turn away,” she mumbled softly, and I did. When I wasn’t looking, she slipped her false teeth back into her mouth. Turning back, I saw that her cheeks were less sunken and she looked ten years younger. Or she would have if not for the pain in her eyes.
She situated the dentures a little more comfortably on her gums. “At least this year they took my call.”
Last year they hadn’t, I remembered. Abe Shaughnessy at SDPD Homicide, the detective in charge of my brother’s case—my brother’s cold case—had stopped letting my mother browbeat him several years back. Now he put up with her, usually, but he did so reluctantly. Perhaps he didn’t enjoy having his one big failure flung back in his face every sixth of June.
“They haven’t learned anything new, then.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not sure they’re still looking.”
“Well, it’s been six years.”
“Not to me,” my mother said. “To me it was yesterday.”
I heaved a sigh and stared down at my hands. “I know.” I’d enjoyed a little buzz earlier, but it was gone now. The hurt in my mother’s eyes had zapped it from me.
A fat tear spilled from my mother’s eye. Heart sinking, I watched it slide down her cheek and drop from her chin onto the collar of her robe. She didn’t betray any knowledge of the tear passing over her skin at all, and I wondered how stoned she really was.
“I’ll call them later,” I said.
She turned away and stared through the window. The sun was blasting the purple-and-white hydrangeas along the side of the house. My mother loved those hydrangeas.
“If you think it will help” was all she said. In other words, don’t bother, it’s a waste of time. And I knew she was right. I decided then and there I wouldn’t call.
Her eyes wandered back to me. “Have you eaten?”
“No.”
She nodded as if she’d expected as much, but still she didn’t offer to feed me. Hell, I thought, I’m almost thirty. Why should she? I stared again at the mess of pictures and memorabilia on the couch.
“Have you been up all night?”
She shrugged. “Most of it.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but then closed it again, my words left unspoken. They were unspoken because, honestly, what was I supposed to say?
Her gaze bored into mine. Her eyes were still misty, but the tears had stopped falling.
“No one should die like that.”
“No,” I said. “They shouldn’t.”
“Mugged and beaten to death in an alley.”
“I know.”
“Left in the rain to die.”
“I know.”
When she sighed this time, her breath caught. I waited for her to ask the question she always asked. I prayed she wouldn’t, but I knew she would.
An embroidered linen handkerchief appeared out of nowhere, and she fussed with it in her hands. She used it to finally wipe away that one lonely tear that had traveled down her cheek. Satisfied, she dropped her hands in her lap and leaned toward me. Her chin trembled. She opened her mouth to speak, but I answered before she could ask the same question she asked me every single year.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe he suffered. The coroner didn’t think so either. You know this, Mom. I don’t know why you torture yourself with it. The coroner said he must have died instantly.”
She picked up the pipe and turned it upside down. I jumped when she banged it into the ashtray, emptying it of residue. With a steady hand and a steely eye, she furiously began packing fresh grass from the baggie into the pipe bowl.
“The coroner wasn’t there,” she all but hissed.
“No,” I sadly agreed. “The coroner wasn’t there.”
“He couldn’t have known how Jack died.”
“Well, that’s not entirely tr—”
Her eyes snapped back at me, and I clapped my mouth shut in midsentence.
“He wasn’t there. Don’t argue with me about it. The coroner wasn’t there. He couldn’t know.”
I was suddenly exhausted. I waved my hands in submission. “All right, Mom. All right. He couldn’t know.”
She nodded once, vehemently, then continued packing sprigs of grass in the pipe bowl. When she was finished, instead of lighting it, she wearily placed it back on the table, as if now she was exhausted too.
“Let me take you to brunch,” I said.
She resurrected a tiny smile. “Can we go to the Broken Yolk, Lawrence?”
I offered a wee smile back. “It’s Larry. And yes, we can go to the Broken Yolk. Brunch is on me. I got a bonus at work.” God, what a liar I am.
Her eyes lit up. “Ooh. How much?”
“Never mind how much. Get dressed.”
She unfolded her stoned bones from the recliner and stretched her back, trying to get her bearings. She took one step, and not seeming too surprised that she was still mobile, she proceeded to cross the room and stand over me in my chair. She bent and kissed the top of my head.
She bent farther down and whispered in my ear, “Someday you’ll get him for me, won’t you, darling? The man who killed your brother. Someday you’ll make him pay for what he did. Of course, you can’t even kill a fly, can you? I suppose that will hinder your efforts to avenge your brother’s death.”
If you only knew.
I looked up at her, batting innocent eyes. “Yes,” I said. “I suppose it will.”
And then, my mother being my mother, she clucked her tongue and growled. It was a good-natured growl, but it was a growl nevertheless. She stared at me, leaning closer, her eyes as big as tennis balls.
“Good lord, Larry. When the hell did you shave your head?”
Chapter Four
WITH MY belly full of french toast and mimosas and my dear old mother deposited back at her tiny gazillion-dollar house considerably more cheerful and less stoned than she was when I found her, I tried to shake the melancholy away. The anniversary of my brother’s death six years earlier took a toll on my mother and me every year, but this year was perhaps the worst.
Maybe it was because after six years of incompetent and uninspired detective work by the San Diego Police Depart
ment, my mother and I were having to finally face the awful truth that we might never know who killed my twin.
Strangely enough, it was because of what happened to my brother that I was in my line of work.
Only days after Jack was found in that alley with his head bashed in, I embraced my grief long enough to stumble into a support group for victims of violence. Seeking solace. Seeking a way to express the fury and the helplessness I felt over my twin brother’s death. It was during that meeting that I met my first client, although at the time I had no idea that was what she would turn out to be.
Her name was Lana James. She was a hairdresser with big hair and big hips and a penchant for gaudy clothes. She flashed gigantic boobs, spouted obscenities like a sailor, wore earrings the size of hubcaps, and had a voice that carried across a room like a tsunami siren. She also had the deepest, most injured eyes I had ever seen in a human face. Her fourteen-year-old boy had been abducted, raped, and murdered by the twenty-year-old son of a wealthy land developer. A neighbor. The land developer dug deep into his bottomless pockets and hired a jackpot team of attorneys to defend his son. After a cantankerous trial where more evidence was kept away from the jury than was admitted into court, the murderer was set free, all charges dropped. It left the victim unavenged and the mother heartbroken by the callous treatment she had received at the hands of the justice department. Heartbroken and furious.
That night, she and I talked for hours over coffee in an all-night diner after the support group ended. We quickly formed a bond. When she asked if I knew any hitmen, not quite jokingly, I foolishly, also not quite jokingly, said I would ask around.
With information provided by the victim’s mother, I did some investigating and ascertained to the best of my ability that all Lana James’s claims were true. The young man she suspected of killing her son had indeed done exactly that. He even bragged about it one night to a gay friend of his who also happened to be a bit of a sot. Later, I followed that gay, alcoholic friend around until I spotted him plopping his ass down in one of the gay bars sprinkled about town. Casually, I claimed the barstool next to him. After nine or ten rounds of drinks paid for by me, plus a little footsy under the bar, which happily did more to loosen his tongue than his pants, I coerced the story from him.
After listening closely to everything the young man said, I downed my last drink and excused myself politely, which he wasn’t too happy about since he clearly entertained plans for an all-night fuckfest with little old moi. I ducked out into the night, and leaning against a tree not ten feet from the door of the bar, I sucked in all the clean air my lungs would hold. I thought back to everything Lana James had told me. About her boy, about the crime. About the uselessness of the San Diego Police Department. When I added it all up, something snapped inside me. By the time the night was over and dawn began to creep across the city, I knew exactly what I had to do.
Later that week, Lana James received a note. Written in block letters and handled with gloved hands, the note was slipped under her front door. It established a means of communication by way of a PO Box between herself and the anonymous deliverer of the note. Me, although Miss James didn’t know that. It also set a price for services rendered that I knew would not leave the woman destitute but would make the risk for what I was about to do acceptable to myself. Once both parties were satisfied, we entered into a deal. Easy as pie.
Less than two months later, the real-estate developer stood at the grave of his son, just as my client had stood at the grave of hers only months before. Both sons were murdered. One for his innocence, the other for his guilt. At long last, justice was served.
I wept after that first job, not so much from remorse but because I realized I had discovered a reservoir of cool detachment inside myself that was all but devoid of conscience. The lack of empathy that allowed the real-estate developer’s son to rape and kill a fourteen-year-old boy was the very same lack of empathy that allowed me to kill the boy’s murderer and not lose a minute’s sleep over doing so.
By some secret grapevine among victims, my career was born that day. Since then, once or twice a year, I would receive a plea for help in my PO Box. A story would be told to me on paper. A meeting would be set, which I carefully regulated. While remaining in the shadows and never once exposing my face or my true identity, I found a way to either accept or decline what was asked of me. It sounds disingenuous to say I wasn’t in it for the money. But in fact, I only chose to work with the clients who touched me somehow. The ones who had exhausted all other options. The ones who were desperate. And the ones with proof to back up their claims. I refused to kill indiscriminately. I wasn’t a murderer. I thought of myself more as the shoal upon which murderers were flung. The place where karma came to rest. While for my clients, I was the last road to justice for the loved ones they had lost.
While I’m on the subject of clients—it must be said that not all of them were likable people themselves. Still, if crime had touched their lives and they had no other way to redress it than to come to me, I gave them a hearing. Murder doesn’t affect only the cream of society, nor is it only the scum of the earth who commit it. Lines are blurred all around. It was my job to unblur them.
And speaking of murder….
On a fine June day, two days after brunch with my mother, I stopped at a newsstand and grabbed a morning paper. It was time to check on any possible fallout from my last wee enterprise. Leafing through the Local section of the San Diego Union-Tribune, I found two inches of newsprint casually mentioning the discovery of a body in Logan Heights. The victim was a city trash collector, as it turned out, and why did that not surprise me? While foul play was initially considered, the coroner eventually determined that with no overt injuries to the morbidly obese body, the man had died of accidental asphyxia from unknown causes, possibly related to his poor physical condition.
I had to chuckle at that. So the pillow over his face and the garbage bag around his head had nothing to do with it?
I gave myself a congratulatory pat on the back for removing all evidence and covering my tracks as well as I had, then dumped the rest of the newspaper in a trash receptacle and took off across town. Motoring along, I whistled a merry tune between my teeth. I knew exactly where I was going, but I hadn’t admitted it to myself yet. So when the blind center popped into view, I parked my little Kia under the shade of a pepper tree and stared out over the sloping lawns in front of me.
To my left I spotted the park bench I had shared with a pleasant young guy named Ken three days before. To my right I saw the compound of apartments where Ken resided. Dead ahead stood the blind center where he unflinchingly volunteered his services to the betterment of mankind. I freely admit, since all I did for a living was kill people, I found his generosity of spirit appealing.
I was in no hurry, so I thought I would sit there in the car for a while, enjoying the shade, savoring the cool breeze. And who knows, maybe Ken would come shuffling along at some point or other. If he did, not that it really mattered of course, I could pop quietly out of the car and pretend to be surprised that we had run into each other again so soon after our last meeting. Maybe I could even convince him to let me take him out to dinner. I mean, if he was hungry and all. No biggie if he wasn’t.
Can I lie to myself, or what?
I have to admit that aside from those times when I was actually plying my trade—i.e., working out the logistics for bumping somebody off—this whole lurking and waiting thing was a little out of character for me. Usually if I met someone socially interesting, screw the niceties. I all but dragged them into bed right off the bat. I might do it only once, or I might do it enough times for us to build a little camaraderie and get to know each other fairly well. I enjoyed sex as much as the next guy, after all. The search for romance, however, was not high on my bucket list of things to strive for. I had no great longing to settle down with anyone and adopt a cat, say. For one thing, I already owned two dogs. For another thing, if I had a lover, how would
I explain what I did for a living? And how would I explain that box of rectal cattle gloves I had stashed in my garage? I shuddered to think.
Feeling a need to stretch my legs, I squeezed my way out of the driver’s seat and set off across the sloping lawn to the park bench in the distance. Somehow the fact that it was empty bothered me a bit. I didn’t want it to be empty. I wanted to see Ken sitting on it. I wanted to see Ken smile when he heard my footsteps approaching, exercising that extrasensory skill that blind people wield, knowing immediately that it was me headed his way. And I wanted to see the telltale evidence etched into those wondrous green eyes that he was glad to have me there. Was that so much to ask?
I plopped down on the empty bench, closed my eyes, and promptly fell asleep. Jeez, am I suave, or what?
When I awoke, I was not alone.
“Is this a dream?” I carefully asked, blinking myself awake.
Ken had positioned his white cane along the length of his leg and was currently tapping the toe of his shoe with the red tip. Wearing his sweater-vest, bow tie, and linen pants like before, he stared straight ahead, smiling and looking a little smug. “I don’t think so,” he said. “And if it is, it must be mine, not yours.”
I liked the sound of that.
“Where’d you come from?” I asked.
He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, aiming it at the blind center behind us. “Work,” he said. “Did you know you snore?”
“No, I don’t. How did you know it was me?”
He stopped tapping, draped his arm across the back of the bench, and shifted his weight toward me. “I didn’t. Not until I was about eight steps away.”
“But how did you know it was me then?” I persisted.
“I smelled the Sea Breeze. The rest I filled in with wishful thinking.”
“Wishful thinking?”
He gave his long eyelashes a languid flutter. His hair was mussed, as if he’d just stepped out of a wind tunnel. His bow tie was crooked. He gave a guilty shrug, like a kid who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I was hoping I’d meet you again.”
