Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “That’s the pit. Majestic Number Two, Hampden Mountain. That mountain used to be nearly as high as this one until they cut the top off it. What do you think?”

  She looked at the splotched landscape, scarred by coal working and obscured by colored smokes. “Terribilità.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s what they said in the Italian Renaissance for the mighty works of men. Iron furnaces and foundries. Horrible, but also terrific, what puny man has accomplished and so on.”

  “Yeah, I’ve felt that. I didn’t know there was a word for it, though.”

  “Oh, there’s a word for everything, just about, in some language.”

  “And you know them all, huh?”

  “Yes. Or will.” She bent down, scooped up a stone, and flung it into the void.

  They tossed stones for a while. Then he said, “Come on, I want to show you something else. This is the real reason I brought you up here. Hold on to my hand, it’s tricky.”

  He led her down a narrow path around the base of the cap rock. The tops of forty-foot pines waved like meadow grasses far below. The path curved south, then climbed upward over a set of natural stairs. She saw that the southern rock face of the peak had fallen away, leaving a high, rectangular niche, open at the top and flanked by a pair of horizontal ledges.

  “It’s like a huge chair!” she exclaimed.

  “Uh-huh, it’s called Aaron’s Throne. This last part is a little rough. Watch where I put my feet. And don’t look down.”

  He clambered up the vertical base of the throne, and after a moment she followed him. It was not as hard as it looked. Dan helped her onto the seat of the throne, an area three yards square, covered (to her great surprise) by short, soft grass. Below, Magog complained about not being able to follow.

  “This is incredible,” she cried. “It’s like fairyland.”

  “Yeah, now turn around.”

  She did and gasped. Green and purple-blue, the corrugated mountains stretched in waves to the limits of vision, their hollows boiling with white mist. In the middle distance a large bird cruised some invisible torrent of air. There was no sign of man’s mighty works at all.

  He came up behind her and clasped his hands around her waist. “This is what this country looked like before people got here. The Throne is set so you look over the south end of the county and into Virginia. That’s Jefferson National Forest to your left. Pretty, huh?”

  “It’s gorgeous. Is that an eagle?”

  “Turkey vulture. But we do have eagles and hawks. We can sit down and lean against the back wall. It’s just the right time of day for the light show.”

  They sat. They watched. The beams from behind them lit up the hills in odd colors, converting the view into something like a Maxfield Parrish landscape. They lay down on the grass. They chewed on each other’s faces, wound tongue around tongue. His arm was up to its elbow in her baggy shorts, his hand exploring the country he had glimpsed for a second on the train, before everything . . .

  “Whoops,” she said, and rolled away, spinning on her long axis several times. She stopped a yard or so from him, looking up at the sky, catching her breath.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I’m about to sink into uncontrollable carnality, and as I think I mentioned on the love boat, I can’t do that.” Silence. She turned her head. “Oh, now you are pouting.”

  “Well, it’s not fair to me. I mean it’s not natural.”

  “You could procure a trollop,” she offered. “To afford you carnal release.”

  “I don’t want a trollop. I want you. Besides, wouldn’t you care if I did? Procured one.”

  “It would pain me, but I’d try to live with it. I would offer it up, as we say. And I am yours, except in that way. As you very well know.” She reversed her rotation and ended propped upon an elbow, looking down into his face. “Look, I have a feeling this is big-time, and I don’t want to mess it up, and I don’t want it to be some boring fifties-type thing, us grabbing at each other and me pulling back and you getting all cranky.”

  “We could do other stuff.”

  “Oh, right, blow jobs, the prep school solution. You’re missing the point. The point is not to release it, because I know and you know that, once we start, we’ll be on each other like minks and that’ll be that. The thing is to raise the energy from here . . .”

  And to his amazement she bestowed a gentle squeeze upon the bulging crotch of his jeans.

  “. . . to here.” She placed her hand under his shirt, on his beating heart. “Do the same to me.”

  “Under your . . . ?”

  “Of course.” He did so. She was extremely warm to the touch. The beat was firm and rapid.

  “Now look into my eyes. Let the energy flow up from your sex organs to your heart.”

  “How come you talk like a book? How come you know this stuff?”

  “Do I talk like a book? Maybe. It could be the languages, a taste for precision. I like words. I can’t bear the inarticulate yawp that passes for conversation. Complaint. Boasting. Sarcasm. Tag lines from sitcoms. How about those Sox? But language is sacred. It has glory, even in ordinary speech. The way most people use it, it’s like a winged horse pulling a junk wagon. As for this”—she pressed on his chest—“this is how I whiled away the long, lonely years waiting for you. My mystical readings. It’s working, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It’s weird. Did you ever do this before?”

  “Of course not. This is my maiden flight. Don’t talk now. In a little while time will stop. Don’t be frightened.”

  16

  “WHAT DID THE JUDGE SAY?” asked Karp.

  “Judge is not inclined to issue our warrant,” said Hawes. “Judge says we haven’t demonstrated the involvement of the union to the degree necessary to open the union books and the personal accounts of all the union’s officers to the extent we asked for.”

  “Christ! Why in hell does he think the Heeneys were killed? We have Floyd involved. What else does he want?”

  “Something besides the Cades,” said Hawes, and added gloomily, “You have to admit he’s got a point.”

  They were walking down a pale green corridor smelling of disinfectant that could have been any hospital in the world, but was in fact the Robbens County Medical Center. They were going to visit Wayne Cade.

  “I don’t admit any such thing,” said Karp. “I should have been there. I assume the Sewer was present?”

  “Yeah, he was in good form, too,” said Hawes, letting pass the small dig. He had grown a thicker skin in the weeks of working with Karp. “Very eloquent about the importance of the Fourth Amendment to our vital freedoms.”

  “And Bledsoe bought it.”

  “Well, yeah. He made the point, which was hard to argue with, that he’d been on the state court of appeals and the state supreme court for twenty years, and if an appeal had come up based on the exclusion of evidence produced by the present subpoena, he’d have been inclined to reverse. Seward pointed out that the only connection we have with the union is through Floyd, and the only inculpation of Floyd is the testimony of a pair of half-wit felons. Hell, they could’ve said the mayor was there, too.”

  “He probably was, in this town,” said Karp darkly. “Well, fuck it anyway, we knew it was a stretch. We’ll just have to find the money some other way.”

  They had arrived at a door guarded by a Robbens County deputy. Officer Petrie looked up from his ragged Guns & Ammo, glared briefly, and with a motion of his head informed them that the occupant was available for interview.

  They found Wayne Cade propped up in his hospital bed watching a NASCAR race on a television hung from the ceiling. He was still huge, but not as ruddy as he had been. Tubes entered his mound of bedclothes at several points.

  “You want to shut that thing off, Wayne?” said Hawes. “We need to talk to you.”

  “I got nothin’ to say,” said Cade, nor did he still the roar of the track.

&nb
sp; Karp reached high and flipped the power switch off. He said, “Your cousins say you shot Lizzie Heeney in the head while she was sleeping. You want to comment on that?”

  “Yeah. My comment is fuck them, and fuck you, too.” Cade stared at Karp. His eyes, like those of all the Cades, were small, close-set, tin-colored. “That’s your girl, ain’t it? The one with that dog tore me up?”

  Karp said nothing.

  “Yeah, you’re that one. You’re that Jew lawyer from New York. Okay, here’s a comment, lawyer man. When I get out of here, I’m gonna find that dog and gut-shoot it, and throw it on a slow fire, and skin it while it’s still wigglin’. And then I’m gonna do the same thing to her, after every man I can drag in has fucked her up the corn hole.”

  “Not a helpful attitude, Mr. Cade,” said Karp. “It speaks to a lack of remorse. When had you planned on accomplishing these deeds? You know you’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison, don’t you?”

  “That’s what you think, shitheel.”

  “Well, Mr. Cade, given your current legal position, ordinarily I’d have to say you have a lot of balls, but in your case . . . exactly how many do you have now?”

  Cade roared, clenched his fists, made a move to leave the bed, grimaced in pain, and fell back on his pillows, yelling, “Petrie! Goddamnit, Omar, get these goddamn people out of my face!”

  * * *

  “We’ll try him first,” said Karp after they left the room. “A conviction will give us a nice base for going after George Floyd and Lester.”

  “You’re pretty confident,” said Hawes.

  “Yeah, aren’t you? We have good forensics, prints at the scene, his prints on the cans and bottles along with those of the other two we know for sure were at the murders. We even have an I.W.Harper pint with all three of their prints on it, overlapping. Also, since all the DNA stuff from the shoes came back positive, there’s a lock on Bo and Earl, and the bottle prints mean Wayne was at the party. We have the two cousin confessions. He killed the child with a gun. We have the gun, too.”

  “But no prints on it, and no knowledge of how it came to be buried at Floyd’s. We do know it was in the Guyandotte. They compared the mud on the gun and got a match.”

  “Yeah, my darling wife was right on the money there, if a little late. And for sure I’d dearly love to have whoever saw them toss the piece and fished it out. And planted it on George. But you can’t have everything.”

  “I don’t like it, though. It’s just the kind of thing that screws up a case.”

  Karp waved a dismissive hand. “But we don’t need that for Wayne. We got Wayne without his gun.”

  * * *

  Emmett Heeney was driving the old red Farmall tractor, with Zak on his lap, steering and crowing with joy. The tractor towed a little stake-bed trailer on which bounced Emmett’s brother, his brother’s girlfriend, her dog, and her other brother. Also in the trailer were tools of various kinds, fishing equipment, weapons, and a large picnic hamper. The Heeneys had acquired nearly forty acres along with their farmhouse; today Emmett and Dan were providing a tour of the land.

  It had not been a farm for a long time. As Dan explained, Red had not been interested in land and had been a little wary of accepting the title of landlord—so bourgeois! Rose had raised a garden, but the rest of the land had been allowed to follow the natural succession and had grown up in thickets of dogwood, white oak, bay laurel, above which young yellow pine were beginning to tower. There was still a good-sized apple orchard, which they now passed, descending a little hill toward a shallow stream that ran through a sparse, pale forest of beech and willow. Emmett stopped the tractor. They all unloaded and walked along a narrow trail through the trees and over an earth berm. There was a little pond there, made by damming the stream, with lilies in the water and a tiny beach.

  They ate barbecued-chicken sandwiches and potato salad and drank beer and lemonade. After lunch, Emmett took Zak to the pond’s edge and taught him the first lessons in fly casting, and to call dragonflies snake doctors. Then Emmett went with tools to repair the dam and clear culverts. Giancarlo sat on a rock with his pad and markers and drew the pond and the surrounding woods, adding to it many creatures not normally denizens of West Virginia. Dan and Lucy put in an hour’s work helping Emmett. Afterward, they sat against a log cooling off, talking or not as the mood struck them. They were for whole minutes at a time extremely silly, which delighted both of them, since neither had logged much time in that country. Lucy had almost forgotten the extreme unlikelihood of her situation, and that the delight was likely to stop before too long. Dan, for his part, was still wondering why the colors were so extraordinarily bright, why time had become variable in its pace, why he was never bored anymore, why music seemed more lovely and compelling than it once had. In common with many alienated bright kids, he had taken LSD a time or two. This was like that, but not like as well—the intensity and peace without the speediness or paranoia. Somewhere in the lower reaches of his overintellectualized mind, the L-word began its slow rise to the surface.

  Zak caught a bass, which was admired, as was Giancarlo’s drawing. Later that afternoon, Lucy went a distance away from the campsite to pee, and after emerging from the bushes, she heard Zak’s voice coming from above.

  “You can’t find me.”

  She looked. “I can’t. Where are you? In the tree?”

  “In the deer blind. Emmett showed me.” There was a rustling forty feet above, and the boy’s delighted face showed in the leaves of a tulip poplar. “Come on up. It’s great!”

  Lucy found climbing rungs on the tree’s other side and climbed up.

  “Wow, you’re pretty invisible. What’re you going to shoot?” The rat rifle was couched in his arm.

  “Squirrels. They’re considered varmints. You could eat them, you know. Emmett’s going to show me how to make squirrel stew. I almost got a crow, too. Emmett’s going to let me nail it to his barn if I do. And he’s got a hunting bow, too, he showed me. This is what they use this blind for, bow hunting. It doesn’t have a season. The deer come down to the stream there, through the laurel. They have paths.”

  She riffled his hair. “You’re having a great time, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I never want to leave.”

  “Oh, yes, I know just what you mean.”

  * * *

  When Karp returned to the Burroughs Building, he was not amazed to find his wife there, in the room with the state detectives, kibitzing and making herself useful, which was useful indeed. Karp did not believe there were three people in the country he would rather have involved in a criminal investigation than his own dear one, as long as she stayed continually under adult supervision. For the past several days Marlene had realized that she was not, in fact, made to lie around pools. Working on her tan was not enough work, it appeared. So she had started to show up and was accepted immediately by the staties as a colleague. Word had spread about her speckled background.

  Virtually all the person-power Karp had at his call had been directed at a single goal: tracing the $7,500 blood money to a source of funds controlled by George Floyd, Lester Weames, or both. He found her working on just this with Mel Harkness.

  “Any luck?” Karp asked, kissing the top of her head.

  “Zilch. I am prepared to state that at no time in the past six months did either of the two scumbags in question withdraw that sum in cash from either private or union bank accounts. Those that we know of, anyway.”

  “Mel?”

  “I don’t get my head kissed?”

  “Maybe later. Is she right as usual?”

  “She’s right,” said Harkness, a rotund, balding, bespectacled state police detective who looked like an accountant and was an accountant. “We got pretty excited there for a bit. We found a ten-grand check to cash written out, but then there was a ten-grand cash deposit a day later.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Can’t say. But if there’s no net withdrawal, we can�
�t attribute it to any illegal payoff. Of course, there’s a million ways they could have done it that we can’t trace. They could have used a kickback from a purveyor. They could have private accounts. The company could have slipped them the cash. They could have cashed in their piggie pennies . . .”

  “Unlikely,” said Marlene. “I would be inclined to doubt that either of them spent their own money on this. Weames has a rep for cheapness. Neither of them spend their own money for anything, as far as I can tell. Car, travel, meals—it’s all out of the union account. And perfectly legal, too. It has to be union cash, and since your judge won’t let us look at the union books . . .”

  “He’s not my judge,” said Karp. “But let’s think about this. They didn’t expect an investigation by us, but they had to know that the feds would be interested in the union, since Red had said he was going to bring them in. The feds would want to look at the union finances, therefore they have to be a little careful. So no big cash withdrawals. What do they spend their money on, anyway, the union?”

  “Mainly pensions and health,” said Harkness. “Salaries. Mortgage on the hall. Bonuses. Research. Very straightforward as far as the bank is concerned. It could be cooked as hell, but we can’t tell from this.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to follow up every check they cut and make sure it’s legit.”

  “Better call in the marines, then,” said Harkness.

  “He doesn’t have marines,” said Marlene, “just us.” To Karp she said, “I bet you wish you were back chasing Beemer and the congressman now.”

  “What congressman was that?” Harkness asked.

  Neither Karp answered. They were staring into each other’s eyes, combining brainpower in a way that they hadn’t in a while.

  “Smurfs,” said Karp. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  “The old guys’ spending money,” said Marlene. “The bonuses.” He grabbed her, they kissed.

  Harkness stared first at one, then at the other, a confused look on his face. “What’re you two talking about?”