“Okay, take it easy—”
“You don’t know what it’s like! You live off your dog! I’d go up for parts, parts I was perfect for. Perfect! Nothing, not a smell. Not even a callback. ‘Here comes that old fossil from Ten Pins,’ which everybody thinks was just a rip-off of The Waltons in a bowling alley! I can see it in their eyes when I walk in! And some of these kids today, hell, they never even heard of The Waltons! My health insurance expired two years ago, and now I’m losing my hearing. I’m going deaf! Do you know what it’s like to go deaf?” he shouted. Then he began to cry. He lowered the knife to rest on his thigh.
I considered rushing him.
But he cocked it again. “I needed something, a shot in the career arm, something a little quirky, a little offb eat to get their attention. But I never meant for anybody to get hurt. And I never meant to hurt the dog. I was going to make a big show out of letting him go. Then say on TV how I was having this drinking problem, break down a little, be real. It’d make every news and entertainment spot from coast to coast. Five weeks at the Betty Ford Center and I’d be working again. But he started killing! Always the killing!”
“Who did he kill?”
“Besides, he tried to make an independent deal with the studios. You can’t do that! Hell, it was my concept!…Who did he kill? Those people in town, he killed them. Your friend Sid Detweiler, he killed him. For no reason. For kicks! That’s not the kind of attention I seek, Mr. Deemer.”
“Call me Artie. I know how you feel. It’s a tough business. I’ve seen it, from the outside, of course, but I can empathize. Look, this dog right here can help you get work. You know Clayton Kempshall?”
“The actor?”
“Yes, he was just in a Jellyroll movie, juicy role, an evil high school principal. I couldn’t guarantee anything, but I could set up a serious audition for his next feature.”
“Oh, was that the movie young Kevin James directed down on the piers?”
“Yes.”
“He rejected me. Young James rejected me, too.” Desmond wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve like a little boy.
Poor Kevin. But I wanted to stay away from that, I didn’t want to inject the reality of a murder rap. “What do you want right now?” I asked. “So we can end this.”
“I can still kill this dog,” he assured me.
“I know it. That’s why I’m asking.” I could feel Jellyroll’s eyes on mine.
“But if I did, then I’d no longer have any protection, would I? You’d probably kill me then, you and your friends.”
“Look,” I said, “it sounds like we can work this out without any more killing. Let’s not get sidetracked with killing. You said yourself there was too much of that.”
“That lobsterman type, he’d kill me.”
“No, he won’t—”
“How do you know what the fuck he’ll do? He’s obviously insane!”
“He promised me he wouldn’t.”
“Promised. Right.”
“Look, I can guarantee nobody will hurt you. Nobody has a reason to hurt you. He’s my dog, and III don’t want to hurt you.”
“People are funny about dogs…When I was on Ten Pins, people used to send me bowling sheets as a kind of fan mail. So I used them, give it some identity, some character to the whole thing, for the media. They love that kind of thing. But what happens? It turns into a bloodbath because of my no-good stinking son. He was always that way. Incorrigible. He was incorrigible from birth. The wife and I always—Did that fisherman find my son’s camcorder?”
“Oh yeah, do you want it?”
“What do you think?”
“I’ll bet you do. And I’ll get it for you, but why don’t you release my dog first? You let Jellyroll go, and I’ll give you a boat. I saw your boat—it’s a total wreck. You get in my boat and go as far and as fast as you can. There’s nothing to connect you to any of the killings. Somebody’ll eventually find the body out in the woods, but nobody will know about you.”
“Jellyroll? That’s his real name?”
“Yes.”
“That’s cute. You mean that boat right out there?”
“Sure, take it.”
“Let me be sure I have it. I take the boat and vanish. Somebody finds the boy’s body—No, it won’t work. The cop has seen us together, thanks to that crazy fisherman. As soon as they find the body—”
“Well, suppose they never find the body? It’s a big ocean.”
“You’d get rid of it?”
“I would.”
“I’d have to take the dog as insurance that you wouldn’t try—”
“Nope.”
“Nope? What do you mean, nope? You do what I tell you to do. You can’t reject me!”
“You can’t take Jellyroll.”
“What can you do about it?”
“Look,” I reasoned, “you said yourself that everything’s different because of your son’s murderous tendencies. If you try to go on with your plan, they’ll connect you with the murders. I’m offering you a way out completely. Look, the guy who did the killings is himself dead. But taking Jellyroll from this room is going to fuck up the balance.”
“Yes, but how will you stop me?”
“Why, I’d murder you. Eventually.” Maybe on some level this is what he wanted to hear, so I laid it on. “But I wouldn’t do it quickly. My friends and I would sit down and think up the most hideous possible ways to torture you—”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I get the video camera—and the tape. You get Jellyroll.”
“Sure. I have some personal effects I want out of the boat. When I come back, I’ll give you the camera, then you give me Jellyroll, and I give you the boat. Is it a deal?”
“What about the others?”
“What about them?”
“They’ve got to go up in the woods. I don’t want them around to attack me.”
“They won’t bother you. They want this to be over, just like me. Okay?”
“…Okay.”
“It’s okay,” I told Jellyroll. “I’ll be back in two minutes,” I said to Desmond and dashed out the door.
Trying to hear, Hawley, Clayton, and Crystal had gathered in a semicircle around the stoop. I skidded to a stop before running over them.
“He’s coming out. He’s going to give up Jellyroll, and then he’s leaving in the boat. I told him I’d give him the camcorder and that you’d move back away from the house.” I wanted to stop and hug Crystal and have her tell me that I was doing the right thing, but I barely paused before sprinting down to the boat. The wind was dying. My pants were stiff with dried mud. It fell from me in clods as I ran.
The ebbing tide had left the boat up on the flat rock. Cradling my wrecked hand to my chest, I planted my feet, leaned against the side of the boat, and shouldered it off the rock…I looked out across the water as I strained. Poor Sid was down there somewhere. Maybe the tide had already swept him into the deep water beyond, maybe he’d never come up. The hagfish would have him. Even as a pro, he didn’t recognize the level of psycho he was dealing with when he went aboard their boat. I went aboard mine…
When I returned to the house, my friends were standing shoulder to shoulder looking at the little screen on the back of the camera. Their faces were ashen.
Clay handed it to me and shook his head. “Desmond did it. He killed them all, and his son took the pictures. Jesus, you should see what they did to Kevin James.”
“Desmond did it all?” I whispered.
“It’s all in here,” said Crystal, tapping the video recorder, her eyes wide.
Then I went back into the house. I remembered Desmond’s face, his young face, not his present lined and lifted face. He was handsome then, and he had a quality about him, he had a presence. The good qualities of masculinity. I remembered thinking of that when I saw the program on a black-and-white TV mounted on the wall in the officers’ family rec room on an air force base in the California desert,
a cinder-block and linoleum room full of orange molded chairs. And remembering, a fog of depression rolled over me, but I snubbed it off. I couldn’t give in to it now. Later. I put the camcorder on the floor beside my dog. “I’ve held up my end of the deal,” I said. “Now let him go.”
“Believe me, that fisherman is a killer. You better not turn your back on that man,” said Desmond.
“He won’t hurt you,” I said.
And then he released Jellyroll, who sprinted into my arms. He yapped and jumped at my legs as I beat it out the back door. He tangled in my legs and tripped me halfway to the woodpile, and there in the mud we cuddled. I hugged his body to me, while he twisted around to lick my face. His whole being beamed with delight. “Let’s go see Crystal,” I said, but here she was. He jumped to kiss her until she dropped to her knees, and then they cuddled in a mass. I love dog delight. Then he spotted his old pal Clayton and went to him for further cuddling.
Desmond, having gone out on the porch and down the stairs, peeked from around the house at a scene of joy. Wordlessly, he turned away and hurried down the sloping rock to the boat. We could see the boat from the woodpile through sparse but thick red pine tree trunks. We couldn’t see Desmond until he emerged from behind the house. Desmond sat on the gunwale and pivoted his legs aboard.
“Come on,” I said to Crystal, taking her arm. “Come, Jellyroll. Come on, everybody,” I said, leading the way toward the rear of the house.
Clayton came right along, but Hawley lagged, watching poor insane Dick Desmond start up the boat.
The shock wave hit the house before the sound arrived. Windowpanes rattled in the French doors. One pane near the top collapsed and tinkled to the floor. One instant Hawley was standing up, the next he was sitting down. I guess that’s the way of it with gasoline explosions, things happen fast, but luckily no debris made it through the trees to take his head off. I guess you could say things worked out.
When Crystal, Clayton, Jellyroll, and I looked around the corner of the house, the fireball had already formed and risen with an air-sucking whoosh. The rich red flame dissolved into a broiling black mushroom cloud that lingered in the air. Wooden pieces of the poor Hampton boat still pirouetted in the blue sky above the mushroom cloud. They seemed to hang up there as if in slow motion. The big stuff came down first, some of it on the boathouse roof, then the smaller stuff landed, peppering the surface of the water and clattering the porch.
I knelt to reassure Jellyroll. “Want some water?” I asked him. He views cold water as a treat, so I always keep some in the refrigerator. “I’ll get it,” Crystal said. We went inside. Hawley and Clayton went down to the flat rock to see what was left of Desmond.
“Let me see your hand.”
I held it palm up for her, and she examined it without touching. My hand was grotesque. I looked into Crystal’s eyes for a measure of just how bad it was. She gasped through barely parted lips. Then she asked me to turn it over.
My finger flopped like a dead eel.
“Let’s wash it off and see what we have here.” She held her own hand under the water as she regulated the temperature for my comfort. I was getting dizzy now. Jellyroll stopped drinking, watched me. The sink ran black for a while. The mud looked like blood going down the drain.
Crystal held my wrist and looked again, brow furrowed with concentration. When Crystal concentrated, only her right brow furrowed. I loved that. I felt like weeping with the power of my love for her brow—
“Let’s go in the bedroom,” she suggested. She led me gently by the wrist. She closed the door, then sat on the edge of the bed. I stood before her, and she gently cradled my hand in hers.
“It’s very painful now, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I was regressing. Mommy would make it stop. I stared at her moist eyes as they examined my injury.
“I don’t think it’s fractured. I think it’s dislocated. It’s always best to reduce dislocations right after they happen before everything has time to tighten up in there, get all angry. By the way, how did this happen?”
“I tripped over a dead body.”
“It’s been a while, so it’s going to hurt. But I think I can do it on the first try. Why don’t you look away?”
She didn’t dally. As soon as my head turned, she clutched my finger in her fist and pulled it straight out.
The pain drove me to my knees. I moaned. When I was a boy, the men in the movies never moaned in pain. Their jaw muscles twitched when it got really bad. I buried my face between Crystal’s breasts, hugged them around my face, a fine place to be when the next wave of pain landed…But it didn’t.
“It’s in,” she said.
The pain was gone! I peeked out. Was it going to stay gone? She stroked my hair. “It’s in!” I giggled. I could feel my grasp on reality slipping away. I could let it go now, what the hell, my loved ones were safe from the devils in the dark.
“Good, good, there’s no pain now, is there?”
“None.”
“Artie?”
“Hmm?”
“You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you? You knew the boat would explode.”
“Yes.”
“Did you cause it to explode?”
“It might have exploded anyhow.”
“But you intended for it to explode?”
“Yes. How do you feel about that?”
“I feel okay about it. But I want to go now. Okay?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
We said our good-byes to Hawley and Clayton. Clayton still had the gym bag in his grip as we cleared the cove and turned for Micmac aboard Sheriff Kelso’s boat. This last crossing of Cabot Strait was rough and cold, though the sky was so clear it seemed we could see the curvature of the earth.
Nobody spoke much on the way across. Out of sight of land, Jellyroll hooped in the stern. I wiped it up. I loved that he was still around to hoop, but that was only my perspective. He had just disgorged this nasty puddle of yellow bile in the back of Kelso’s boat, and Kelso’s gaze at me was as chilly as the sea. He was probably glad we were going. I guess I couldn’t blame him. Although on another level, depending on how you wanted to look at it, we had solved his Micmac murders for him. Of course, on the other hand, we had brought the killers to his neighborhood in the first place.
I put my arm around Crystal’s shoulder, after I’d thoroughly wiped my hand, and we let the wind slap our faces. Only the wind kept my head up, I was so tired. Crystal, too.
“Remember those country inns?” said Crystal in my ear.
“Sure.”
“Let’s stop at one.”
Most of the Jesus people had dispersed. Here and there small groups remained on the hillside, packing their belongings. Others, singly or in family units, were walking out of town. They didn’t seem particularly dispirited. They seemed like folks heading home at the close of the company picnic, weary and spent but not disappointed. Sleepy boys and girls rode like lemurs on their fathers’ shoulders. Mothers and daughters walked hand in hand. Two of their number were dead, and it didn’t seem that anyone had been saved, at least not to me. Where would they go now? Did they have other prospects and possibilities?
Dockside, the town went about its business. Fishermen in black rubber boots threw crates of ice from their decks to colleagues up on the dock. A lobster boat backed off the dock, another took its place. Several people from away ate on the porch at the Cod End, gulls circling. The guy from the marine store wheeled a barrowful of heavy gear out to a big rusty commercial fishing boat at the end of the dock. He nodded to us.
“Sheriff, have you seen the face in the lichens?” I asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“…I just wondered. I was thinking of having a look. What’s it like?”
“I’ll show you if you want.”
“Thanks. Do you want to see it, Crystal?”
“No, I don’t. I think I’ll stay down here.”
I could understand that position, but I still wanted to see.
It seemed important, a kind of closure. I helped him tie up the boat. Then we started up the hill.
A few people, volunteers perhaps, had stayed to pick up the litter. They were spearing it into garbage bags tied to their waists. Where the incline was still shallow, we passed a white-haired man of retirement age wearing a multicolored jogging suit trying to spear a soda can. It kept rolling from under his point. We said good afternoon. He stamped it flat, then speared it up.
I looked back over my shoulder as the hill steepened near the top. The setting didn’t look real from here, a perfectly round harbor with Round Island right outside, white light shimmering on the surface all the way to the horizon. It was a place out of time, yet there were Crystal and Jellyroll, waiting.
“It was right here,” said Kelso, pointing to a vertical crag of the same pink granite that formed Kempshall Island.
About the size of a suburban garage door, the exposed rock was fissured and crinkled. It had been exposed to the elements for thousands of years. Now it was almost covered with a growth of tan, olive, and yellow lichen. The short, coarse plants somehow found sustenance here. Did they draw nourishment from the rocks themselves? If so, they were the smartest creatures around this coast.
“It’s gone.” Kelso put his hands on the rock as if to summon it up again. He turned to me with a stricken look on his face.
“Gone?”
“Yeah, the goddamn thing’s gone. It was right here!”
“What did it look like? Did it look like a face?”
“Well, yeah. I saw it when somebody pointed it out to me. Yeah, you could say it was a face in profile. You see a lot of things in the lichens if you look. I know. I sat here and tried it. But the face was right here, I’m certain.”
“It’s gone.” It was the man who’d been spearing trash. He stood below us cradling his weapon in the crook of his arm, his bag hanging from his belt. He shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand.
“Where’d it go?” asked Kelso.
“Stolen.”
“What do you mean, stolen?”
“Yep. Last night. Somebody stole it. Just took the face with them when they left. Most people left, you know, because of the murders.”
Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 22
