The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  Matt drew his arm back to fire again, and Eric said, “Maybe we should let him go.”

  Matt fired. This time, he clipped the bird somewhere about the head, although in a glancing shot.

  “Maybe it’s not fair,” Eric said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Maybe it’s not fair,” Eric said. “He doesn’t have a chance.”

  “It was your idea!”

  The bird blinked an eyelid.

  “I think you got him,” Eric said.

  “Well, what did you expect?”

  Crouching, Eric duck-walked a step closer. “Let’s help him,” he said.

  “You better watch it, he might go for your eyes.”

  “I think he’s tame,” Eric said.

  “Tame?”

  “He could be somebody’s pet. I bet he understands what we’re saying.”

  “Hey, Mister Pheasant,” Eric said to the bird. “Come on now, we’re not going to hurt you anymore. Come on now.”

  “Better be careful!” Matt said.

  Crouching, reaching in, Eric gripped the bird all at once in his hands. “See, he’s tame,” he said, backing out with him.

  “Jesus, keep him away from your eyes,” Matt said.

  Out from under the porch, holding the pheasant away, Eric walked back in the direction of the field. Matt followed. “You’re going to be fine, Mister Pheasant,” Eric was saying. “You’re going to be okay now, so don’t worry. Hey, his eye’s bleeding.”

  In the knee-high weeds, Matt stood next to Eric to study the bird’s eye. A droplet of blood, as dark and thick as a drop from a girl’s bottle of nail polish, had appeared on the surface above his eye.

  “You think he’ll die?” Matt said, for this, too, was Eric’s territory.

  “Nah,” Eric said. “It’s just a nick. Or his eye wouldn’t blink.” And Eric said, “He’s tame. I can tell.”

  The bird’s face became familiar. They stood looking at it.

  Then Eric said, “Here you go, you dumb bird.”

  He gave the bird a launch into the air. Its wings came up and flapped and caught and it sailed over the weeds a distance and settled in once more, out of sight, fifteen or twenty or thirty feet away.

  “There goes supper,” Eric said then.

  “Let’s go,” Matt said.

  “You wouldn’t believe how oily his feathers are,” Eric said, wiping his hands.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Matt said, and it was the first time, he sees now, he had ever asked anything of his brother. Always before—and since—he told Eric what to do.

  As Matt rides, pedaling block after block on the wobbly bike, from street to sidewalk and back again, Eric slips to the rear of his mind. Vanessa Dineen returns to the forefront. Maybe she has been close by all along, for the experience of last night has not really left him for a moment, in spite of all else that has happened. A feeling of her has remained as close around him as his shirt.

  He peddles on.

  On Maplewood, coasting back into downtown, he decides to call her. It seems a new decision and he feels new boldness making it.

  In town, at side-by-side telephone stalls, he leans the old five-speed onto the ground and decides to gamble with himself on remembering her number. If he remembers it, it will mean they may be together again soon—today?—like they were last night. If not, he will only lose a dime.

  He dials. A telephone rings.

  “Dineen residence,” a woman says.

  “Vanessa there?” Matt says, pleased with himself.

  “Just a moment,” the woman says.

  Matt glances over an adjacent parking lot. There is a restaurant called Tortilla Flat, and something, he isn’t sure what, clings to his mind. There, at the sound of the receiver being taken up, is her voice, which affects him in his neck and shoulders, along his spine.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi,” she says, after a pause.

  “How are you?” he says.

  “Okay, how are you?”

  “I been thinking about you,” he says. Staring at the pavement, he seems to be seeing the sky. “A lot.”

  “Have you?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Well. What have you been thinking?”

  “That was really something.”

  “What was?”

  “You know.”

  “Okay. I thought so, too. It was nice.”

  Matt glances to the blue sky; he is smiling but doesn’t know what to say.

  “Don’t get any ideas, though,” she says.

  He laughs. “I like you,” he says.

  “Well,” she says. “It’s a nice day today.” Her voice is direct. He laughs some again.

  “You know why I did that?” she says.

  “Did what?”

  “That which has made it a nice day today,” she says. “Don’t be so slow.”

  “What—why?”

  “It was what you said about my fingers.”

  “Was it?”

  “Don’t bother saying it again, though. It won’t work a second time.”

  He laughs. “Was that your mother who answered?” he says.

  “Yes, that’s my mother. She’s an Air Force brat, too; that’s why she talks like a secretary.”

  “You won’t believe what’s happened,” Matt says. “Police and everything. I’ve been out looking for my brother.”

  “What?”

  “My brother’s missing. My little brother. I been out looking for him. It’s kind of scary, like he ran away or something.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I have a brother, twelve. Eric. He’s been gone since last night, and I’ve—”

  “He’s missing? You don’t know where he is?”

  “No. The police are—”

  “He’s twelve?”

  “Yah.”

  “Gee. Did he run away?”

  “I don’t know. I guess he could have.”

  “He was gone all night?”

  “Yah, but I been looking for him,” Matt says.

  “That’s serious. You better keep looking,” she says.

  “I know,” he says.

  “In Texas, once,” she says, “well, there was this boy who lived in the same building where we lived. He was missing. He was twelve.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was killed.”

  “He was?”

  “This man, a major, asked him in to help him paint or something. And he killed him. In a bathtub.”

  “Why?”

  “I shouldn’t have told you that. I didn’t mean to scare you. Your brother is probably just hiding out. But I’d go look for him if I were you. That’s what I’d do.”

  “Why did that guy kill him?”

  “I don’t know. He was crazy or something. Go look for your brother. Jesus, get off the phone.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “I’VE CAUGHT THE BROTHER IN A LIE,” DULAC SAYS TO Mizener, as they are pulling away from the police station in Dulac’s unmarked car.

  “What do you mean?” Mizener says. “How old is he?”

  “The brother’s fifteen,” Dulac says. “What’s interesting about his lie is that it covers precisely the time the little brother came up missing. He said he was with his friend, at the movies—that’s what he told me—at the same time he was acting pretty strange. I was there a good ten minutes before he came out of the bathroom, even though his mother called him. Then he said he was with this friend of his at the movies in town, and returned home at nine thirty. Now his friend says that wasn’t so. His friend says it was five o’clock, about, that the movie had just gotten underway. The older brother—unlike anything he’d ever done—got up and walked out of the theater. All he said was that he’d see him in school on Monday.”

  “So he lied about where he was during that time?” Mizener says.

  “That’s right.”

  “That sure sounds like something, doesn’t it? Are we going to pick him up?” />
  “In just a minute. We’re going to stop first and get a statement from the friend, just to be sure.”

  “Well, Jesus, Gil, not to tell you how to run your business, but if it was me I’d pick him up first. That sure sounds like something to me. What if he takes off?”

  “I’m not too worried about that.”

  “I don’t know. It really sounds like something to me.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of cult stuff, maybe. Jesus, the stuff that’s going on anymore. I mean around here. All these people moving in here. My daughter tells me that some of the beach areas are so weird now that the ordinary kids don’t go there anymore, because they don’t know what’s going on.”

  They race along. The town is small and in just another moment they are turning onto the street where Cormac lives. “This won’t take long,” Dulac says. “It could tell us what’s going on with the brother. I mean he could have the simplest reason for lying.”

  “Initiation stuff,” Mizener says. “Kids that age get into stuff like that. The little kid could be tied up somewhere. A lie doesn’t sound good to me. Not at all.”

  “But it’s not a good lie,” Dulac says. “Is it? If something was going on and it was serious, wouldn’t he come up with a story which wouldn’t cave in half an hour later?”

  “Could be. But maybe not. It still sounds like something to me.”

  “Well, we’ll pick him up in a few minutes,” Dulac says. “I’m not real worried about him taking off. Although I’d have to admit, he did act pretty nervous.”

  CHAPTER 10

  WRISTS REMAINING UNTIED AFTER EATING HIS HAMBURGER and drinking his drink, the boy sits looking mainly down the front of his shirt. Turned to face him—they are parked in the furthest corner not of the Burger King lot but of a closed Dairy Queen further along the highway—Vernon is no more than a foot away. The windows are rolled up and the doors locked. Sometimes the boy turns up his eyes, to glance at Vernon. He does so when Vernon calls on him to guess his age, and tells him that he could be eighteen, or seventeen, even sixteen, but he isn’t going to tell him exactly, so he won’t be able to tell on him even if he wanted to.

  “His name was Sal,” Vernon says. “His regular nickname—what I came to call him—was Uncle Sally. He was a friend of my mother’s, one of her boyfriends, the only one really, who came over to eat meals with us. He brought food over, and for a long time I thought he was the nicest man. In the end you could see how it was all a scheme he was working out, that he really was just out for himself, but it was some time before that became clear.

  “I liked him, in the most genuine way, which, I believe, is why the whole thing hurt and left scars when it was finally over.

  “What happened to tell it exactly, is he seduced me before he really seduced me, if you know what I mean. I mean he talked to me, and acted like he was my friend, brought me presents and things, brought my favorite foods, ice cream, things like that.

  “Then, this one night when my mother was working. It was one of the first times I was left alone—when I was about your age. I was just falling asleep and I heard someone come in the house downstairs, and this voice called out not to be scared, that it was just Uncle Sally coming to see if I was okay.

  “What was odd about this was that I think, deep down, I really knew what was happening and did my own share, you know, of participating. He sat on the side of my bed, and rubbed my foot and leg while he talked to me, and I certainly felt aroused before anything actually happened.

  “Of course I liked him. He was always fun to be around, and this was no exception.

  “He was rubbing me elsewhere by then—up over my thighs, over my belly—teasing me in the way he circled around. If I said I didn’t want him to go ahead and cross the line, I wouldn’t be telling the truth. It felt nice. I was twelve years old, and—well, believe me, it was nice, it was exciting.

  “What he did then, he wanted me to show him where the bathroom was, because that’s what he said he had to do was use the bathroom. Of course he knew where the bathroom was—just down the hall, on the way to my mother’s bedroom—and it took me a while before I realized what a turn-on it was for him to stand at a toilet and have someone there, I guess, to look at him.

  “I went along with this game. My little thing, it was sticking up just like a branch inside my pajamas, and I went along, down the hall, and turned on the light inside the bathroom door, just like he told me to.

  “He finally touched me where I, of course, was longing to be touched. Passing into the bathroom, he said something about having known for some time what a little devil I was, and when I said, meaning what? he said, meaning this, and he reached down and felt me with his fingers through my pajamas and made some joke about keeping a flashlight there. He had me come inside and close the door, and standing at the toilet, he let himself out of his pants, and it wasn’t to use the toilet at all, I realized in time, it was just to stand there while his thing got hard, and then he had me stand next to him, and so we ended up holding each other in our hands and rubbing together, you know.

  “That’s what always happened. I mean he took me back to my bed and did all kinds of things to me that were sensational, to be sure—although he didn’t do anything or make me do anything, at least for a while, that hurt or that I resisted.

  “For a while. He came over all the time after my mother had gone to work, and I think I really liked it for some time. Because I had this secret, and this secret friend, although he would get a little angry and pushy with me sometimes if I didn’t want to play the games he liked to play or do things he wanted me to do. Still, it was a special thing for me, and even though he’d hurt my feelings at times, I always looked forward to him coming over after my mother had gone to work, and I was disappointed if he didn’t.

  “What happened then was he took too many chances. He came over this one Saturday when my mother was working lunch and was due to get home any minute. He had me go into the little downstairs bathroom with him and we were standing there and had to hurry out and look innocent as my mother came into the house.

  “She wasn’t fooled. I don’t know if he knew it at the time, but I think I did. What happened then, it got to be another Saturday and he came over early again, and there we were in that little bathroom, playing dirty like that, and suddenly there was this knock on the bathroom door. I think my heart just fell all the way through me.

  “It was my mother. In this real calm voice, she said, ‘Sal, please come out here.’

  “He walked out and I never saw him again after that. Not ever. Not even accidentally.

  “When I went out, finally, what my mother said to me—well, it was awful—she called me a little fairy, and she said I had no idea how much she resented me, how much I was ruining her life. That was bad enough to have to hear, and know—and you know things like that, if you want to or not—but there were other things that were actually worse. Because she was there, even if she did feel that way about me. What hurt more, though, and hurts still, was being used and betrayed by someone I liked and admired—and being abandoned. I mean I knew by then that it was his own gratification he was after—even as a twelve-year-old I knew that—but what was hard to handle, endlessly after that, was not having him as a friend anymore. Because—if he was out for himself or not—he liked me. And I liked him. He cared about me, cared who I was. He wanted me to be someone special. When he was there, life had something.

  “Which isn’t to say that that’s some kind of excuse. It’s only to say that that’s what it is. That’s all.”

  CHAPTER 11

  AT THE KITCHEN SINK, CLAIRE IS SEPARATING AND RINSING icy chicken parts. She will start the chicken frying in the skillet as soon as she has the potatoes boiling. Perhaps she is a little angry. She isn’t sure. She is going to fix a meal though, if anyone comes home to eat it or not.

  It is something to do, and she has another reason. It is a notion which has entered her mind—S
unday afternoon dinner may be all that is needed, traveling on its aroma, to call things back to normal. It had worked before somewhere in her life. When feelings were confused and tempers loose from their stalls, mashed potatoes and chicken gravy seemed more effective than anything else at coating over the rawness.

  To believe or to not believe? This is the issue with which she is struggling as she begins opening and closing refrigerator and cupboard doors in her preparation of a Sunday meal. Is something awful happening? Is something terribly wrong? Why did those detectives ask so much about Matt? What was that all about? What in the world is happening?

  She can’t believe anything. She won’t, she decides. She will not let herself accept that something is wrong. She starts the burner under the potatoes, turns the chicken where it is draining. Faith. In itself, she thinks, faith may help them. Help Eric. It has to be real, though. She has to believe. If she can believe, her belief may be the force which will do the job, will save Eric, whom she knows by now, at this odd Sunday hour, to be the center of her everyday life, the mere reason she lives. She knows this as she unwraps a stick of Blue Bonnet margarine. Her faith alone, and the chicken, may be the force which will bring him running up the stairs any minute, running into the kitchen hardly out of his jacket, which will wake her from this dream as the screen door, which he never closes quietly, at last, finally slams, because no one else ever takes those steps so quickly.

  The margarine is melting. Believe it! she is saying to herself. Do your best. Do better than that. Believe.

  Dinner’s under way, she’ll say. But it’ll be a few minutes yet. Watch TV for a while. Do you have homework to do?

  She adds some oil, guides the melting margarine around with a fork. Where is Matt? Why did he take off like that? No, she thinks. Don’t let yourself get carried away. Matt’s a good boy. He’s a fine boy. He’ll be here any minute. They’ll both be here. We’ll eat dinner. In the servings of fried chicken, of potatoes and gravy, this nightmare will slide away, disappear into clouds of memory as a lesson against taking their love for granted.