All he can do now is wait to see what happens.
3
Candice walks toward the front door. She feels lost, detached from everything, a rudderless boat adrift on the sea. Vivian reaches out and grabs the doorknob, turns it, pushes open the door. Candice can see it all happening, can feel Vivian guiding her into the house with a gentle hand pressed against her back, can feel her legs moving under her, step after step, but she also feels that she’s very far from all this, feels that she’s not a part of it at all.
She walks across the living room to the couch. Vivian helps put her into a sitting position. She sinks into the couch and stares across the room to the wall.
The wall is white.
Vivian walks to the telephone. She calls the police. She says hello, there’s been a murder. A man’s been killed. Yes, killed dead. I think he was shot in the head. She gives the address. She hangs up the telephone.
She looks at Candice and says, ‘Do you want me to make some coffee?’
Candice thinks no, no I don’t want any coffee, it’s late, and how could I drink coffee while Neil lies dead in the street, but instead of saying that, instead of saying anything, she nods her head.
‘Okay,’ Vivian says. ‘I’ll put the percolator on.’
‘Can you check on Sandy first? Can you make sure he’s okay?’
‘Oh, God,’ Vivian says. ‘Yes — of course.’
She disappears into the hallway.
4
Three quick taps on the door, the rattle of the knob. Sandy sits up expecting to see his mother, but when the door swings open it instead reveals Vivian, the right half of her face splashed with light from the living room, the left half covered in shadows. He’s glad it’s her. He wasn’t ready to look into his mother’s eyes. He wasn’t ready to lie to her.
‘Sandy?’
‘I’m here,’ he says in the darkness. ‘Is everything okay?’
He wonders what’s next. He heard their voices but couldn’t make out their words. He wonders if somehow they already know what he’s done, if his pretending at innocence will only make it worse for him. He knows it’s a possibility, but the alternative is to admit guilt before anyone has expressed suspicion, and that he won’t do, can’t do. The consequences are far too great.
‘No,’ Vivian says, ‘everything isn’t okay. Why don’t. . why don’t you come out to the living room?’
‘Did something happen?’
‘Come out to the living room.’
‘Okay. I have to get dressed.’
‘Get dressed, then come right out, okay?’
‘Okay.’
She pulls the door closed.
Sandy turns on his lamp and gets to his feet and pulls on his pants and a shirt.
He walks out of his bedroom, down the hall, to the living room.
His mother sits on the couch, her back to the hallway entrance. He can see her blonde hair, her slumped shoulders, the way her head hangs forward, but not her face. Vivian sits at the dining table on the other side of the house, looking at him sadly.
‘What happened?’
His mom turns around. Her eyes are very red and swollen, her lipstick smeared, and when she tries to smile, to comfort him despite her own pain, he sees lipstick on her teeth.
‘Sandy,’ she says.
She reaches an arm out toward him beseechingly. He walks around the couch, walks to her, feeling sick in his stomach. If everything else hadn’t yet made it clear, his mother’s face lets him know it: the shock in her eyes, the way her mouth is turned down, and the crease between her eyebrows all tell him the same thing: he was wrong and wrong and wrong.
But it’s strange. He still feels nothing for his stepfather. He knows he should, but he doesn’t. He’s sad because his mother’s sad, and he’s afraid he might get caught, and because of those things he would take back what he did, but if she weren’t so sad, and if he knew he would never be found out, he’d kill him again.
He hated the man almost as much as he loves his mother.
She wraps her arms around his neck and pulls him close. She kisses his cheek and his forehead and says his name. She cries.
He sits silently beside her, afraid to speak. Afraid his mother will find out he’s responsible and will hate him. She will hate him forever if she finds out, and he’s sure she will find out.
In his heart, where he keeps his secret fears, he’s certain of it.
She’s going to find out, you know she will. She has to. She’s your mom. She knows when you’ve lied about doing your homework; how could you ever have thought you would get away with this? How could you have possibly-
He swallows back his fear.
He tries to block all the worries from his mind, all the bad thoughts. He imagines them being shoved into a chest and the hasp slammed into place and a lock through the staple and the lock latched with a click.
He manages to say, ‘What’s wrong, Mom?’
‘It’s Neil,’ she says. ‘He’s. . he’s been murdered.’
‘What?’
Mom nods. ‘I know.’
He can’t stop looking at the lipstick on her teeth.
Then the windows flash with red and Sandy knows the police have arrived. Mom gets to her feet, but Vivian tells her to sit down, then walks to the door herself. Mom does sit down. She collapses back into the couch.
Sandy wants to be sick. He thinks he might be sick all over himself.
He looks at Vivian. She stands in front of the door, staring at it, waiting. He doesn’t know why she doesn’t just open the door, but she doesn’t, not for what seems like a very long time.
Sandy closes his eyes and imagines himself far away from here. He imagines himself as a bindlestiff, clothes on a stick flung over his shoulder. He imagines himself walking alongside rusty railroad tracks, surrounded by trees, the sun shining down on him, birds singing, a dog trotting alongside him, another outcast befriended, and the sky as blue as it’s ever been, so blue it hurts your eyes to look at it. He could disappear into that world and never come out. Everything would be perfect in that world. There would be laughter and friendship and no one would ever hurt him ever again.
There’s a knock at the front door.
Sandy opens his eyes.
Vivian grabs the doorknob, turns it, and pulls.
SIX
1
Look at this man wearing nothing but a pair of tattered underpants and one argyle sock. Look at him with his pale white belly gone soft. Look at him with his stick legs lined with blue veins and his once-muscular arms now wasted. Look at the gray hair on his head thinning at the temples and the dry riverbed wrinkles in his face. Look at the purple smears like bruises under his eyes.
Look at the pale band of skin on the ring finger on his left hand.
He snores quietly, lying on top of the green wool blanket stretched over his narrow, sagging mattress. If he’s dreaming it doesn’t show. His face is still and without expression, and, being expressionless, free of the scowl he puts on daily, like a hat, before stepping into the morning sunlight. In sleep he looks innocent. It would be a shame to wake him, to bring reality back to that face, to the brown eyes now lidded, to the weary mind behind them.
A knock at the door.
The man shifts in his sleep but the shutters of his eyes remain fixed.
Another knock. A woman’s voice speaking his name.
Carl Bachman opens his eyes and sits up with a curse. He stares at the blank wall. He clears his throat, crawls out of bed, pads to the door. He says what. He’s told there’s a phone call for him. He says okay and pulls open the door, squinting at his heavy-set landlady, Mrs Hoffman. She looks away from him, clearly embarrassed by his lack of clothing. He scratches himself and yawns. She says you shouldn’t be getting calls at this hour. House rules say no phone calls after nine o’clock. You should respect the rules, being a policeman. He says he didn’t exactly call himself and won’t be held responsible for other people’s actions. Besides, he says,
this is probably police business. He pushes past her, walks down the hallway in his stained underwear to the telephone stand, picks up the telephone and says ugh. Captain Ellis, Homicide Division, sounding like he was just awakened himself, speaks into his ear, telling him there’s been a murder. You and Friedman are next in the rotation so you probably want to catch the scene. He says okay, writes down the address on a pad of paper which rests on the telephone stand, hangs up.
He feels sweaty and sick in his stomach. His legs feel cramped. He rubs his face, walks back to his room, grabs a clean pair of underwear. He looks at the brown paper bag in the top drawer of his dresser, tucked in beside his underclothes, but tells himself no, don’t, not right before a job. You have to keep this in check. You can’t let yourself lose control. He pushes the drawer closed, tries to massage the cramp out of his left thigh.
Ignore it.
He grabs a towel from the back of a chair where he set it out to dry and walks down the hallway to the second-floor bathroom. His landlady walks behind him telling him no showers after nine o’clock, it wakes the other tenants. He tells her your running mouth is more likely to wake them than running water, so why don’t you clap your trap. Then he walks into the bathroom and closes the door in her face. He turns on the shower and waits for the water to get hot. While he waits he pulls off his underpants and kicks them into the corner. He steps into the shower with one sock still on his foot, curses, pulls it off his foot, throws it over the curtain rod. It hangs there, dripping water onto the floor.
He washes himself quickly — armpits, asshole, face, and feet — steps out of the shower, dries off. He wipes the mirror and looks at himself, deciding he doesn’t need to shave. He puts on his clean underwear and pads back to his room. He slips into blue slacks, a white shirt, a holster, a red tie, a coat. He runs his fingers through his wet hair and puts a fedora onto his head. He clips his badge onto his belt.
The telephone in the hallway rings again.
He walks out and picks it up himself.
‘Captain?’
‘Friedman.’
‘Shit.’
‘Nice to hear your voice, too, Carl. You mind picking me up on the way?’
‘It’s not on the way.’
‘You mind picking me up not on the way?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Will you do it anyhow?’
‘You need to get yourself a more reliable car.’
‘This week. Will you pick me up?’
‘Yeah.’
He drops the phone.
Locks his room door.
Heads down the stairs to the front of the house.
Two steps from the exit door, his stomach goes sour. He turns around, walks to the first-floor bathroom (which none of the tenants are supposed to use, but he isn’t walking back upstairs), unsnaps his belt, hooks his thumbs in, and pulls down his pants and underwear in one motion. He sits on the toilet just in time. He’s been constipated for two days and now diarrhea. While he’s there he checks his pockets for cigarettes, finds a crumpled packet of Chesterfields, slips one between his lips, lights it. He takes a deep drag. When he’s finished with his shit he wipes twice, pulls up his pants, buckles his belt. He checks his stool for blood, but finds none. He always expects blood in his stool, but there never is any. Sometimes he’s disappointed, sometimes relieved. Depends on his mood. He flushes, takes another drag from his cigarette, heads once more toward the front door.
This time he makes it through, pulls it shut behind him, trudges across the lawn to a black Ford parked at the curb.
It takes three attempts to get it started, but finally the engine rumbles to life.
He rolls down the window and inhales the chill night air. He takes another drag from his cigarette and steels himself for what’s coming.
He likes the puzzle aspect of being murder police, likes fitting together the pieces till he has a picture of what happened, but the blood and loss he hates. The dull shocked expressions on the faces of those left behind. The swollen eyes. The question there’s no answer to: why. You try to wall yourself off from that part of it, crack jokes (as long as survivors aren’t around), pretend you don’t care, but you can’t block it all out. It simply can’t be done.
Still, you try.
He’s become, in the last several months, better at it than many.
He puts the car into gear and gets it rolling.
Despite what he will have to deal with at the scene he’s glad to have a case. It might distract him from everything else that’s going on in his life right now. Something outside himself and his own bullshit. Even someone else’s pain would be better than his own, and he’ll do his best to avoid even that. He’ll focus instead on how the pieces fit together. If you think of human troubles, you’re thinking human thoughts, and those just get in the way. Human emotions get in the way. The trick is to feel nothing. The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.
He drives in silence through the night, stopping only once between the boarding house and the murder scene. His partner Zach Friedman is already in front of his house when Carl pulls to the curb. He’s standing on the porch sipping coffee from a red cup.
He pulls open the car door and gets inside.
‘Thanks for picking me up.’
‘You’re buying breakfast when we get done with this.’
‘Deal.’
Fourteen minutes after pulling away from one curb they pull up to another. Carl brings the car to a stop behind a row of police vehicles. Wooden sawhorses stand in the street, cordoning off a large area, and uniformed police officers stand with them, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from thermoses. Other cops are already knocking on doors, asking questions. And the crime lab boys are going about their business flashing bulbs and taking swabs.
Carl and Friedman push out of the car and walk toward Captain Ellis, who stands smoking a cigarette and watching the madness.
To no one in particular Carl says, ‘What do we got?’
Sam Avery from the crime lab says, ‘White male between thirty-five and fourty years old. About five foot ten, one ninety-five. Supine on the street beside a motor vehicle. Gunshot wound to the left temple, another to the crown of the head. Five-pointed star carved into the forehead. Doesn’t look like he put up a fight. Gunman must’ve took him by surprise.’
‘Interesting,’ Carl says.
The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.
2
Candice leans against the outside wall, hugging herself, shielding herself against the night. Vivian stands silent beside her. Candice’s favorite thing about Vivian is that she knows when not to speak. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, you wouldn’t think she’d know two plus two, her large eyes seeming lifeless as empty fishbowls more often than not, but she can be surprising in her intelligence, and in how she’s intelligent.
Most people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.
Candice watches the chaos. Several police cars, a coroner’s van, sawhorses, cops knocking on doors, voices overlapping one another. Do you know what time it is? I don’t care if you are the police. Has anyone told you what his wife does for a living? That poor little boy. And below the voices she imagines she can hear the steady grinding sound of the world turning on its axis, a sound like a great stone rolling.
And Neil is dead. Her husband of four years is dead. The only man who’d ever stuck around once he learned she had a son. He’s dead in the street while the world continues to turn and somewhere someone’s laughing. There is no justice.
She finds a man, a man with a decent job, a man who loves her, a man willing to be a father to her son after his biological father decided to take a powder, and he gets murdered in the street.
She’s not a regular churchgoer, but she believes in God, she believes He’s looking down on the world, and right now she hates Him for what He allowed to happen. She knows it’s wrong, she knows there’s a reason for everything, but she hates Him anyway. Because right now she doesn�
��t care what the reasons are; she doesn’t care about reason at all. Right now all she sees in God is meanness, set-a-cat-on-fire cruelty. One moment Neil was alive and now he’s dead and God allowed it to happen.
She closes her eyes, tells herself not to cry. When she opens them again she sees two men walking toward her. They’re not uniformed officers but they’re both clearly cops. They have that cop walk. They’re both wearing suits and fedoras, but they remove their hats as they approach, one revealing wavy black hair, the other thinning gray hair.
The older of the two puts out his hand and says, ‘Detective Bachman, ma’am. I’m very sorry for your loss. This is my partner, Detective Friedman.’
Candice shakes his hand. He has a firm grip, but his palm is sweaty.
‘I understand your son was home when it happened.’
‘He was asleep.’
‘I’d like to speak with him, if I may.’
‘He doesn’t know anything.’
‘Just the same, I’d like a few words with him.’
‘What for?’
‘Ma’am, I understand your loss, I understand you being angry, but I’m trying to find out who killed your husband. I think speaking with your son might get me closer to that end. May I speak with him?’
Candice believes him when he says he understands her loss. It’s in his eyes. Though his face is expressionless the eyes are red and rheumy with sadness. He looks directly at her without blinking.
After a long moment she nods.
‘He’s inside.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
The two detectives, whose names she’s already forgotten, step through the front door and into the house.
She follows them in.
3
Carl believes someone in this house knows what happened. He believes someone in this house is responsible for what happened. He isn’t sure why he believes that, but he does. Maybe it’s the fact that most murders are done by people who know the victim, or maybe he instinctively understood some piece of evidence he isn’t even aware he saw, but his gut tells him the answer is right in front of him, and he’s a man who pays attention to his gut. Always has been. He’s already told Friedman he should wander away as soon as possible, look around the house, see what he can see. Carl will talk to the boy, watch how the mother reacts to the exchange. Between the two of them they should find at least one loose thread worth pulling on.
The Last Tomorrow Page 4
