An Echo of Death

by Mark Richard Zubro

  I told him about his brother and gave him a brief synopsis of our adventures.

  As I spoke about Glen, tears made occasional forays down Bill’s cheeks. He didn’t seem to have a hankie, but wiped his jacket sleeve across his nose and snuffled deeply.

  After I finished, Proctor stared out at the silent vapors gathering outside. Periodically he snorted the snot in his nose and tamped at the occasional tear that still escaped.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” I said.

  I got a brief nod in response. We sat in silence for some minutes until Proctor asked, “You know what I remember most about him?”

  I shook my head.

  “He was only a year older than me, so we did a lot of things together, but the best was Christmas. We’d hunt through the house room by room searching for the presents. We’d always find some, but then, Christmas morning, he’d come into my room and wake me up, and we’d be the first ones to the Christmas tree, like all kids, but it was always just the two of us with the enormous Christmas tree, lights still off, faint gray light coming through the windows, us still in our pajamas, and we’d search for the presents with each others’ names on them, and we’d make piles around us, and forts, and shoot silent guns, because we didn’t want anyone to hear us, and then we’d combine our packages into one big fort and nestle inside and tell secrets and guess what was inside the packages, what we’d asked for and hoped for, and when your dad is as rich as ours, more often than not, our wildest dreams came true.”

  He dried a few more tears with his jacket. “He was the best brother,” Proctor said. “I hated it every year when he went away to school.

  “You attended school here?” I asked.

  “I went to the public schools on the North Shore. There aren’t many better private schools, and I wanted to be with kids I knew. My parents didn’t have a lot of choice with Glen. A lot of schools kicked him out. Even Dad with all his money couldn’t keep him in. Glen had some brave teachers in kindergarten and first grade. They forced my parents to come in for conferences. Glen was impossible. He was always good to me, but we lost several servants because they wouldn’t put up with the way he treated them even when he was five or six, but Dad’s money always prevailed. It always has.”

  My dislike for Glen Proctor and his privilege burst out in almost-unwonted sarcasm. “Poor little rich boy,” I said.

  “Tom!” Scott said.

  “It’s all right,” Proctor said. “I was lucky to have a rich dad. I don’t hate him for that. Glen loved him. When we were kids, they always hung around together. Glen was oldest, and I guess that was special to my father.”

  He stopped talking and I let the silence continue. Finally he asked me, “What did my dad say when you told him?”

  “I don’t think he believed us.”

  “Typical. He thinks his money will buy anything. There aren’t enough men and horses in his kingdom to put back his son’s life.”

  “Why wouldn’t he believe us?” I asked.

  “I stopped trying to understand my dad years ago. I live in a separate world. I’ll see him occasionally at breakfast like today, but that’s about it.”

  “What kind of trouble do you think Glen might have been in? We’ve been trying to figure out who might have killed him and who would be after us. You know anything about what he’s been up to lately?”

  “I don’t know about recent danger. When we were kids, he was always the one of us who tried the most daring or new or unusual thing. He’d jump first, climb first, dive off first. He got me my first beer, my first hit of dope, showed me how to beat off, got me my first condom.”

  “What kind of trouble did he get into in school?” I asked.

  “I remember he got suspended one time in first grade for telling the teacher, the principal, and the social worker to fuck off.”

  “Not a usual first-grader’s response to stimuli,” I said.

  “No,” Proctor admitted. “Let me think what other stuff he used to do.” He strode to the window and wiped the sleeve of his jacket on the window as if to clear away the mist gathering outside. He spoke without turning around. “One time he threw a condom at the second-grade teacher. It was her first job out of college, and she couldn’t cope with him. I heard she ran down the hall shrieking, although that could just have been Glen exaggerating. I know she didn’t teach the next year in that school.

  “I remember he used to steal a lot of stuff. One time I asked him why, since we had so much at home. He said he liked to. It was fun to see all the grown-ups and the kids go nuts trying to find things, or make things right, or fix things.”

  “This happen when he went away to school?” I asked.

  Bill turned back to us and sat back down. “I’m not sure. I think he found other things to get in trouble about.”

  “Drugs?” I said.

  Proctor nodded. “And alcohol. I used to watch him sneak drinks before, during, and after family holiday parties. He must have been five or six the first time I saw him do it. Once in a while he’d offer me some, but I hated the taste. He started on drugs in fifth or sixth grade when he was away at school. He came back one summer and introduced me to pot. I smoked a few times with him and his buddies each summer, but I didn’t see him as much as he got older, because he was into baseball so much. I had lots of other sports, crafts, classes, and special trips. Thinking back on it, my parents probably planned it so I’d have less contact with him. I seemed to be in a lot more activities than most of my friends every summer.”

  “He ever do harder drugs?” I asked.

  “Cocaine and marijuana, mostly,” Proctor said. “He never did anything else in front of me. Claimed he wasn’t an addict, before and after he went away for rehab. The family kept it real quiet, and with Dad’s money, that means total silence. Nobody knew Glen went away after sophomore and junior years in high school to some clinic. I think the baseball people would have hesitated if they’d known about his problem.”

  “Would have avoided him completely,” Scott said.

  “What I remember most was the fun times. The wild things he did.” Proctor nearly smiled.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Bill was silent for a minute. Then smiled. “One time we were at some friends’ house in Wisconsin. Glen didn’t have his driver’s license yet, so he must have been about fifteen. The kids we were staying with weren’t old enough to drive, either, but we took the car one afternoon. We drove to some railroad tracks, and the other kids suggested we let half the air out of the tires and drive along the tracks. Glen did. I remember the wild sensation of flying down the tracks barely feeling the bump of the ties. It was a convertible, and Glen had real long hair at the time. His hair flew in the wind as he laughed and sang.”

  “No train came?” Scott said.

  “No, Glen’s luck always seemed to run that way, even with some of the dumbest stuff he did. He finally graduated high school from an exclusive place somewhere in Vermont. I think my dad had to promise them a huge endowment for them to let him be in the ceremony and graduate on time. For a celebration we had half the kids on the North Shore at this big bonfire on the beach. It was great. Glen was drunk and nobody else was feeling a lot of pain, when Glen took a lighter out and casually set his chest hair on fire.”

  “He did what?” I asked.

  “Swear to God,” Bill said. “Just casually flicked it on and applied it to his chest.”

  “How come his chest hair didn’t just go foof with him going up in flames? That can’t be just luck.”

  “One guy threw a glass of beer on Glen, but it missed the flames. Actually what happens is the hair kind of curls in on itself and melts and the fire goes out. It’s hair spray and stuff that makes it go foof in flames.”

  I was flabbergasted, but I believed Glen Proctor would do something that crazy. I didn’t stop Bill from talking. I might be impatient about getting us out of danger, but I hoped Bill might actually mention something that could help us. And the m
an had his grief to work out. If he could remember with smiles and tears, then that was okay.

  “Didn’t he ever get caught?” Scott asked.

  “Never for the really big stuff,” Bill said. “He came close once when he almost got busted for a huge drug shipment.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What happened?”

  “He must have been sixteen. He’d gone down to Mexico for a month. My dad has lots of business down there, so we went pretty often. How Glen got to know the local drug people, I don’t know. He always seemed to be able to know people with illegal secrets and deals. Glen agreed to have a huge shipment of drugs sent back across the border with some stuff for my father. Glen almost got caught.”

  “By the cops?” I asked.

  “No. My dad’s security forces. He has a lot down there. Glen managed to get the shipping invoice changed, like maybe seconds before he would have been discovered. I think the head of security was awful suspicious. Maybe Glen paid him off some way. I don’t know. Anyhow, the stuff got to Chicago, the drug guys got their shipment, and Glen got enough stuff to supply his whole school for a semester.” Bill was silent for a minute. He sighed and tears started again. “Mostly his schemes seemed to work.”

  “Whatever this one was,” Scott said, “it went bust big-time.”

  “Yeah,” Proctor said. The tears came again. “He really loved me,” Bill said. “One summer when I was twelve, he and I hot-wired some farm equipment and drove it around in the middle of the night. It was my idea and I got them started. Glen took the blame for me. I was too scared to speak up. And when I was sixteen, the first girl I loved broke up with me. Glen stayed with me the whole night. I loved her so bad, and Glen was so good. He helped me a lot. I really loved him.” He shut his eyes and sobbed. Scott held him briefly.

  It was nearly nine o’clock. I wasn’t eager to go back to our hotel room, but I didn’t see any alternative. We stayed a few more minutes to comfort Bill Proctor and told him if we found anything out we’d let him know. He promised to do the same. By ten we’d driven through the drive-up window at a fast-food restaurant and arrived back at our hotel.

  Edna was still on duty at the desk when we returned. The lobby had a collection of transvestites and prostitutes, the tame version of which you’ve seen on Phil Donahue and Geraldo.

  In our room we sat on the bed and ate greasy hamburgers. When we finished, I tried calling our answering machine. I got the distinct bong from AT&T, then punched in my code number.

  I listened to the beginning of the message on our machine and then punched the two-number code that gave access to the messages. Scott lay down next to me on the bed. I listened to his breathing in the pauses between messages. The hotel itself was amazingly quiet for the moment.

  One message was from Lester, asking us how we’d done and to give him a call. Another was a woman’s voice, who said her name was Felicia Proctor, Glen’s and Bill’s mother. A third was from Brad—no last name—telling Glen he was at the Hotel Chicago and he had to talk to him.

  Next I tried calling the cops in Chicago. I got Joe Quinn at his desk. I told him about our conversations at the Proctors. He seemed slightly interested in that.

  He said, “We’ve tried to find out what we could about who attacked you on the street this morning, but I gotta tell you, we’ve got nothing. I don’t think we’re going to get much.”

  “We obviously need protection. A crime is trying to happen. Us getting killed.”

  Quinn said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but your buddy Carpenter could afford to hire an army. We’re poor cops with a lot of real crimes and cases to solve.”

  “We’re scared,” I said. “We’re stuck in this dump, and we don’t dare return home. What do you suggest we do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  I called our lawyer. I like my legal talent to be nice and conservative and that’s what my lawyer was. Todd Bristol had been my lawyer since before I met Scott. Now we kept him on a yearly retainer. He was a partner in one of the big law firms on La Salle Street.

  I caught him on the way out to a party. As soon as he knew it was me, he covered the phone, but I heard his muffled voice say, “This is going to take a while. You’d better grab a cab and go ahead. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I knew Todd hated parties in direct proportion to his lover Ed’s passion for them. Todd wouldn’t mind missing any portion of it.

  “What is going on?” he asked. “The radio is filled with crazy stories. Reporters are dying to talk to you guys.”

  “What have they said?” I asked.

  “One of your neighbors swore he saw Scott driving one of those carriages down the Inner Drive like somebody out of one of those Roman chariot races.”

  I explained everything to him from the beginning. He listened without interruption.

  When I finished, he said, “Where are the necklaces?”

  “Mine’s in the penthouse. Scott must still be wearing his.”

  “Get them to a safety-deposit box, or someplace reasonably safe as soon as you can.”

  “I’m worried about going to the penthouse,” I said.

  “You could try going in with a police escort,” Todd suggested, “or wait, then whoever is after you will just pick up your trail again. I think those necklaces are a menace.”

  “You think they’re the key?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s the most obvious place to start, although it would have made a lot more sense if whoever was after you simply said, ‘Could we have our necklaces back, please?’ Of course, yours may be gone already.”

  I told him I wanted to call Lester to get more information about the Proctor family and their wealth.

  “Does he know where you are?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish nobody knew. Don’t tell anybody else—including me—where you are. Not even your best friend. Something loony is going on. You cannot be too careful.”

  “I’ve known Lester for years,” I said.

  “Have you been chased and shot at? Have these people shown a tendency to be nasty and persistent? Come on, Tom. Use your head. You’re frightened, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then use that fear to be supremely cautious. The cops are probably all right, but don’t take any chances.”

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  “Figure out who’s behind all this. Find out what they want, and if at all possible, give it to them; and if it is impossible, try to make a deal.”

  “We need to find out about Glen Proctor’s movements in Mexico and what he was really there for,” I said.

  “I don’t think I can help you there, but I’ll make a few discreet calls in case there are skeletons in that closet. With all that money and all the enemies he’s made, Jason Proctor’s got to be hated by a whole lot of people.”

  I thanked him and hung up, then called Lester.

  “What happened at Proctor’s?” he asked.

  Something about his eagerness made me wary, or was it that Todd had sufficiently frightened me into general paranoia? I gave him a brief outline of our two discussions. I asked, “Can you find out about any real-estate dealings old man Proctor had in Mexico? The reason his kid died and why we’re being stalked has got to be connected with what Glen was doing in Mexico.”

  “You could go down there and try to track his movements,” Lester said.

  I’d thought of it, and I supposed we could, but I’d rather not be snooping around in a foreign country, where I didn’t know the language or any of the people. At least here I knew people and could call for help. I explained all that to Lester.

  “You’re right,” he said. He promised to do what he could to find out about Proctor senior’s dealings in Mexico.

  I sat near the head of the bed and leaned my back against the wall. I was totally bushed. I gazed out the window to the brick wall next to us.

  “I’m tired,” Scott said.

  “You and Glen know some
body named Brad?”

  “Brad who?”

  I explained about the message on the machine.

  “Only Brad I know is a guy from Glen’s rookie year. He used to pal around with Brad Stawalski who was kind of big and goofy and not real bright. The kind of guy you play practical jokes on. Stuck with the team that year for a few months because our regular first baseman was injured. They were roommates.”

  “Did they keep in touch?”

  “Glen didn’t mention him before he was killed.”

  I tried calling the Hotel Chicago for Brad Stawalski. He was registered, but his room didn’t answer.

  “Do we go chasing after him tonight?” Scott asked. “We’ve only had a few hours’ sleep, and I’m too wiped out. We don’t know when he’ll be back or even if he knew anything about what happened to Glen.”

  We agreed to check on him tomorrow.

  With the lights out, we got only a faint glow from outside through the torn gauze of the curtains. Our view was of a brick wall two feet away. We stripped to our underwear and crawled into bed. The pillows were nearly flat. The metal joists of the bed stabbed my back through the thin mattress. My feet hung over the end. I thought it was heavenly to relax.

  Scott snuggled close, lying on his side next to me while I lay on my back. I could feel his legs and chest warm against my own, along with his arm draped over my chest, and his chin on my shoulder.

  I reached over with my right hand and ran my fingertips down his arm to the elbow, then over to his side, down his torso to his waist, and then to his hips, where the cotton waistband of his tight white Jockey shorts met his skin. I let my fingers rove down the waistband to where it stretched and made a bridge over his flat abdomen then over to where skin met material again. I heard his breathing quicken in my ear, felt his desire with my hand.

  I turned toward Scott and pulled him close. I listened to the sounds of air being taken into and being expelled from his lungs. I put my hand on his chest, felt the golden downy fur and the slightly freckled skin, and beneath it the beating heart. I sighed deeply. I was incredibly tired. I felt myself dropping off to my favorite fantasy of making love to Scott on the pitching mound, after he hurled a complete game victory, and he would pull me to him, and he’d be all sweaty and happy about winning, and he’d kiss me passionately in front of his assembled teammates and thronged fans.