* * *
Marlene drove back to the Island the next day, full of good food and drink, having spent also a night of lust that made both her and her husband ask themselves why they did not get away together more often. Against her always upwelling feelings of discontent she counted her blessings: money, a loving husband, health, one eye, money, a body in the early stages of decrepitude—up a whole size since college—a large number of ugly, fierce dogs, three lovely mutant, peculiar kids not as ruined as they might have been by exposure to violence when young, but who knew?; an amusing and distracting business, but distracting her from what? Yes, that was sort of the problem now, wasn’t it? Marlene had reached the age where she no longer thought either love or friendship would save her, that the decades of her career would not make her mark on the world. The children, of course—the children still needed her, the twins anyhow, Lucy hadn’t needed her since age seven, what with her constant commerce with God and all the saints, but even the twins wouldn’t need her for long. Already Zak was squirming away when she hugged him and tried to sniff his hair. Giancarlo was more patient, of course, but she could feel that he was suffering her intimacies as a favor, not because he needed them anymore. Empty-nest syndrome? Not likely, as she had never been much of a nester when it had been chock-full. So what was it, this niggling feeling, this tendency to snap, to be bored with the stuff of daily life?
“What is it, dog? Analyze me. What should I do with the pathetic tag end of my life? Do I want to run a corporation? Tried that. Private eye? Tried that. Lawyer? Yeah, but only certain kinds of cases, and even then, do I really want to get into that dusty pit with Butch? Doing good? I gave all my money to the Church. Should I also make soup and visit smelly old people, in competition with my daughter? No, thank you. So what?” She nudged the dog. “So? Give me some advice—are you my best friend or not?”
The dog raised its great head and stared at her. It said, maybe it’s been too long since you felt the bones of your enemies crunch between your jaws and tasted the rich tang of their blood.
“Oh, right,” she snapped, “that’s what you always say.”
* * *
“Really?” said Marlene when Lucy told her the changed plans. “I thought you had all kinds of stuff they wanted you to do in Boston.”
Lucy made a sour face. “Yes, but I don’t want to do it. I decided to play hooky. Let there be wailing and gnashing of teeth up and down the river Charles!”
Marlene registered mock surprise. “Lucy! You’re being bad? Oh, come to my arms! You are my little girl after all!”
“Cut it out, Mom,” Lucy said as her mother enveloped her in a theatrical hug. “So, is it all right? I mean, I could work. I could finish Malo and Gringo.”
“No, don’t be silly—I mean, you live here, just as much as the twins do. I’m delighted, to tell the truth. If you’re here with the boys, it’ll free me up to do some things. We’ll have a nice time.”
“We won’t snap and snarl at each other, will we?”
“Of course not, darling,” said Marlene in a sugary voice. “As long as you don’t oppose me in any way and anticipate my every need, we’ll get along fine.”
“I mean seriously.”
“Seriously? What can I say, baby? I love you. I realize I get on your nerves sometimes, and I accept that most of it’s my fault. I’m not an easy person to get along with.”
“Well, you’re not boring anyway,” said Lucy, not wanting just at the moment to pursue the subject of why Marlene was hard to like. “What things?”
“Excuse me?”
“The things you said me being here to watch the boys would free you up for.”
“Oh, you know . . . things,” said Marlene airily, and then Billy Ireland had to see her about something and the moment passed.
As did the next ten days, amid the welter of ordinary life. The water line was completed, hose was laid, the vegetables therefore flourished in the face of unrelenting heat, and those parts of kennel life that depend on plentiful water became easier. The bitch Magog emerged from her confinement stiff and blinking and coursed around the exercise field with her mate and with Lucy, whose special dog she had always been. The puppies, remarkable for sturdiness, curiosity, and hideousness, were everywhere underfoot. Ads were placed; people came in expensive vehicles to look them over. On these occasions, Marlene demonstrated with Gog what a 210-pound Kohler-method guard dog looks like in action. She had added a few personal fillips to the standard training, in one of which Gog knocked his agitator to the ground and, on command, ripped his balls off, in fact, a brace of hand-balls sewn into a leather bag and attached with Velcro to the crotch of Russell’s padded overalls. This always drew gasps of amazement and a pattering of applause from the ladies attending. Magog, who was actually a bit brighter than her old man, also demonstrated the location of personal objects, her forte.
Lucy got her trainees to float on the end of a lead with hardly a tug, to sit, to lie down, to stay. With the aid of a live wire from a fence charger, she taught them what every guard dog must learn: not to eat food except from their bowls. (Zzzzzt! Howl!) Lucy did not mind doing this in the least. She was tenderhearted, but not sentimental. GC harvested early tomatoes and young, tender lettuces. Zak shot three rats and a particularly stupid crow.
Lucy happened to be in the office when the phone call that ended all this arrived. It was Dan Heeney on the line. She felt her heart unexpectedly lift when she heard his voice and cruelly fall when he asked bluntly, “Is your mom there?”
“Sure, she’s around. How are you?”
“Fine. Okay, I guess. Getting along.”
“Wow, that’s vivid. It really gives a precise word-picture of your mental and emotional state.”
“Lucy, I really have to talk to your mom.” Now she heard the tension in his voice and said sure, she’d go get her, and did.
When Marlene came on the line, he did not pause for pleasantries with her, either.
“Why I’m calling, ma’am, I mean bothering you, is you said, if there was anything you could do . . .”
“Sure. If you call me Marlene instead of ma’am, I’m at your service. What’s up?”
“Okay. Well, Emmett doesn’t know I’m calling. I mean maybe this is crazy.”
“What is?”
“I mean . . . okay, they arrested this guy for the murders?”
“Good. I’m glad. Who was it?”
“A guy named Moses Welch. He lives down in Fairless Holler, about three miles from our place. Mom used to give him odd jobs, like hauling stuff, digging the garden, like that. He’s about Emmett’s age, a couple of years older.”
“How did they find him?”
“From his shoes. He had blood all over these yellow boots he was wearing, spatters and along the sole. He was in town and someone noticed and told the cops, and they went and picked him up. It was human blood and the right kind. When the tests came back from the state lab in Charleston, they charged him.”
“And . . . ?”
“Well, it’s crazy. Moses Welch didn’t kill my family. Moses Welch can hardly drive a car. He’s got an IQ of about twenty. He wouldn’t know which end of a gun to point.”
“So how did he get their blood on his shoes?”
“They weren’t his shoes. He said he found them under the bridge over the Guyandotte. Almost new shoes. He thought it was paint on them.”
“And you believe him?”
“Well, yeah! The guys who really did it tossed them over the bridge and he found them.”
“And the cops don’t buy that?”
“Oh, hell, ma’am . . . I mean Marlene—we don’t have any real cops here. We got J. J. Swett. He’s been the sheriff for about a hundred years and he’s got a total of six officers, and none of them can tell their sorry butts from a hole in the ground. Besides, all of them are in with Weames or the coal company.”
“Weames is the man your father was running against.”
“And he beat him, too
. Emmett did an exit poll after the election; Dad won by ten points. Then Weames announces the results, and of course he said he won. Dad was going to bring DOL into the election to investigate. That’s why Weames killed him. Or had it done.”
“You sound pretty sure about this.”
“Well, hell, I didn’t need to go to damn MIT to figure that out,” said Dan, his voice grating and loud over the phone. “One—he threatened Dad; two—he knew he was going to go down if there was an investigation of the election; and three—it wasn’t some damn retard that did this.”
“Is that what Emmett thinks?”
“Oh, yeah. Except he thinks he’s going to find out who did it and kill them himself. That’s why I need your help. Could you come here? My mom told me . . . I mean about what you used to do, and you’re a lawyer, too. Moses got a lawyer, but he’s a joke, the courthouse drunk. He can’t defend anyone on a murder charge. We’ve got some money from the insurance. We could pay you . . .”
“Hold on a second. You want me to defend this man, this suspect in your family’s murders?”
“Well, yeah, to start with. If they convict him, hell, it’s all over. No one will ever look at the thing again, not in Robbens County, anyway. And then after you get him off . . . well, you know, find out who did it.”
“Find out . . . ?” exclaimed Marlene incredulously. “Okay, look, Dan—I appreciate that you have a problem there, but first of all, I am not licensed to practice law in West Virginia. Second—”
“You went to Delaware. My mom told me about that girl who killed her baby.”
“She didn’t kill her baby. And that was different. I had a local co-counsel and—”
“Well, you’d have Ernie Poole, wouldn’t you?”
“Who?”
“The fella who’s defending Moses now.”
“The drunk? Oh, thank you very much! Second, as I was saying, in the real world, as opposed to books and movies, crimes are solved by the cops, not by private investigators. I can’t just drop into a strange part of the country, ask a few pointed questions, beat up some villains, and come out with the answer. It don’t work that way. A triple-murder investigation is a big, big operation.”
“You have to come,” cried Dan, his voice breaking. “I haven’t got anybody else. Everyone around here is too scared now, or bought out by the company or Weames. And Emmett is drinking and talking big about going over to Weames or one of his people and beating the truth out of them, and he’s going to get killed, too, and he’s all I’ve got left in the world.” Heavy breathing, then stifled sobs.
Marlene sighed and rolled her eyes upward. Lucy, who had not gone far, asked, “What’s wrong?”
Marlene put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “He wants me to go down there and . . . Okay, Dan, calm down. Get hold of yourself! Look, here’s what I think you should do.” She paused there. What should he do? She had no idea, except maybe not to have called, not to have had a mother who struck up a conversation on a Long Island beach with a woman who should have known better than to blather on about her colorful past, and then gotten herself killed in some godforsaken hole in West . . . No, that was the wrong line of thought. The question was, what should she do? Marlene felt Lucy’s eyes on her.
“What I think you should do,” Marlene resumed, “is get your drunk lawyer friend to hand you copies of all the paper he’s got on the case, as complete a record as he can—arrest reports, evidence reports, whatever. I’ll need to look at all that. Where are you guys staying now?”
“At our house . . . Wait, does that mean you’re coming?”
“At your house?” cried Marlene. “You’re living in the crime scene?”
“Uh-huh. It’s our house. They took all the, you know, the murder evidence out. And we hired a couple of women to clean it up and paint and all.”
“Oh, great!”
“What’s wrong? Did we make a mistake?”
“Oh, no, it’s not your fault—but just so you know, in the regular world, crime scenes are usually sealed for a considerable time. Sometimes even until the trial. I’ve known defense lawyers and prosecutors to actually tour a jury through a preserved crime scene. Well, it doesn’t matter now.”
“But you’re coming, right?”
She blew out a long breath. “Yeah, I guess. Hang in there, kid. And try to keep your brother from doing something stupid.” After a few more similar encouraging banalities and a brief logistical discussion, she hung up.
“Speaking of stupid,” she said to the air.
Lucy was almost trembling with frustration. “Mahumm! What is going on?”
Marlene explained the situation. “I want to come, too,” was the response.
“Idiot child, you can’t come. I couldn’t go at all if you weren’t here. The boys . . . ?”
“They could go to summer camp. And you might need help down there.”
“Yes, and if they held court in Estonian, you would be invaluable.”
“That is really nasty.”
Marlene hung her head and controlled her temper. “Yes. I’m sorry. Look, here’s what’s going to happen. What we have here is a case of panic. It’s a delayed reaction to the shock, and God knows those poor kids have a right to be a little weird. I will go there, take a look around, calm them both down, find them a decent West Virginia lawyer, and depart. It should take a week, two tops.”
“You going to take your gun?”
“No, but I am going to take a lot of Kleenex.” Marlene held her hands palms up and pirouetted once. “Look, this is the new nonviolent mom, just like you always wanted. It’s a mission of mercy.”
“Uh-huh. Are you taking the dog?”
“Well, yeah,” said Marlene, startled a little by the question. Of course she was taking Gog. She would take her shoes, her toothbrush, and a change of undies, too.
Lucy raised an eyebrow over a baleful look, then left the room.
This is ridiculous, thought Marlene—why am I trying to impress my daughter with my benevolent intentions? Feeling annoyed at herself, at the Heeneys, and at Lucy, she decided to call her husband and vent.
“Well, any comments?” she demanded after she had apprised him of the situation and her plans.
“I’m jealous,” he replied. “You get to go flitting off to fight evil, and I have to stay here and be evil.”
“I thought you were the good guys.”
“Oh, yeah, maybe once a week. Meanwhile, 75 percent of the cases we handle involve putting black and Latino kids in jail forever for selling dope. The really evil still flourish, as you may have noticed. And my youth and beauty are fading and every day is like every other day, and it’s hot as a bitch in here, and you’re wandering away to the cool mountains to wipe noses. It’s not fair.”
“You’re right. Are you going to whine any more?”
“Yes. I might even get all red and sweaty and snotty-nosed.”
“Seriously, what do you think?”
Karp paused before answering, detecting one of the numerous no-win queries (Am I too fat? Does this look good on me?) that husbands are so often called upon to answer.
He said, “It seems like a charitable act as long as you don’t get involved. I assume Lucy is going to watch the boys. You have no problems with that?”
“Of course not—for a couple of days? She’s the most responsible creature on God’s earth. They’ll be prepping for seminary by the time I get back.”
“Maybe I’ll take some leave anyway.”
“Do that. What did you mean about getting involved?”
“I meant involved. Legally, emotionally—it’s not your problem, it’s a complex situation in a part of the world you don’t know diddly-squat about, and where you’re liable to make things worse.” In your inimitable fashion, Karp thought, but declined to say.
“Make things worse? Gosh, this is just fucking great. I volunteer to upset my life and go help out a couple of kids I barely know, and all the support I get from my family is a kind of
insinuating suspicion. For crying out loud, don’t you trust me?”
No, thought Karp. “Of course,” he said.
6
SHE DECIDED TO LEAVE JUST before dawn, to get free of the City-bound traffic and be out on the great American road at sunup. Having committed herself, having spent the whole of the previous evening generating quality time with her sons (Monopoly, casino, hours of Tolkien) and explaining what she was doing, having overinstructed her daughter and her manager, she felt for the first time in a long time like the old Marlene, or at least like the nostalgic memory thereof. As she loaded her bag and dog into the Dodge, she discovered she was humming the Pirate Jenny song from Threepenny Opera.
She stopped when she saw that her daughter, dressed in an old flannel bathrobe, was watching her from the doorway, smiling.
“Off on an adventure,” Lucy observed. “You’re as happy as a puppy.”
“It’s not an adventure,” answered Marlene a little testily. “It’s a very dull mission of mercy. I should be back in a week, tops.”
Lucy shook her head pityingly. “Oh, Mom . . .”
“What? What’s with this ‘Oh, Mom’? I fail to understand why everyone is making such a big deal out of this. Could you please explain that?”
Lucy walked over and embraced her mother and kissed her cheek. “Take care of yourself, okay? Call me when you get there, and give my regards to the Heeneys.”
Absolute Rage Page 11
