CHAPTER 28
HOURS HAVE SLIPPED AWAY; DARKNESS IS OVERALL NOW.
Here is a passenger plane, a Boeing 727, lowering over the dotted lights of coastal highways, offering in its landing pattern out over the dark ocean a night view of Portland, Maine. The plane, a connecting flight from Newark, is all at once, on a line, passing lights, buildings, and trees as high as itself, until its wheels hit and skid, its engines squeal in reverse, and at last, a teetering finned whale with rows of seats in its belly and portholes along its sides, it dips and drifts and rolls uncertainly over the tarmac on its way to the terminal.
At a window seat, in the smoking section in the rear, is a man of forty-nine with a weather-worn face, wearing a western shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps under a mismatching suit coat, open at his dark throat. Not anxious to leave the plane, he watches through the small window at his side, seeing nothing of any greater significance than small ground lights of red and blue, while the other passengers are getting to their feet and unloading belongings from overhead compartments.
It’s a new airport, different from anything he ever saw here before. Noticing the highlighted overlapping tails of other planes, and glimpsing a portion of the city skyline in the distance, he wonders, in a way, as he does almost every day of his life still, if things might not have picked up and straightened out for him here if he’d stuck around.
This is Warren Wells. A Maine native, he is coming back tonight for the first time in over seven years. He is the father of two young sons, one of them due to be buried and the other grown up, more or less. Two sons and a previous life. A hometown and a home state. All of which he’d never quite stopped remembering, not for a minute it seemed, although it was true, all these years had slipped by, and it was true, too, that no one would believe him.
In the seat to his right, waiting for him, is his second wife, Vivian—Vi, he calls her—who has never been so far north or seen snow before, and who may be in no more of a hurry than he is to leave the plane and face whatever it is they have to face. “I guess it’s Portland,” Warren says to her. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“You don’t see your friends?” she says.
“Not from here,” he says.
The plane is three-fourths empty by now and she says, “Come on, Warren, let’s just go and do what we have to do.”
She is up from her seat, giving him room to move into the aisle from his, as he finally presses the release on his seat belt and follows. They retrieve their bags from an overhead compartment, as Vi says, “Come on, your friends will think you didn’t make the flight.”
As Vi is starting along the aisle and he would follow, he holds his bag on an arm, slides a zipper, and half turning his shoulder, slips out a pint in a paper bag, uncaps it, throws off a sizeable shot, wheezes, blinks his tired, watering eyes, and returns all to its place as he moves on along the aisle to close the gap. Vi seems not to have noticed.
Close to her there is still a short line of people deplaning, and taking in a whiff of the sharply chilled Maine air, Warren seems to know in his heart that the trip is a hopeless mistake. For an instant, he wonders if they might stay on the plane, and fly back south just as they had flown north. Fly anywhere, he thinks, as he follows, as emotions he had forgotten were his seem to be returning to him in the familiar misted air. It’s a mistake, he thinks. All his life here, he was pressed and crowded. As if it was any different anywhere else, he thinks. Claire and the two boys. He had loved them, and, it was true, he had run out on them, had worked at not loving them. Nothing in his life had ever really worked out. And it was no one’s fault but his own.
Pausing, turning to him then as they are the last passengers making their way into the terminal, Vi whispers, “No more drinking, Warren, the rest of the time we’re here, or I’m going right back to Louisiana.”
They are on carpeting, as they enter a waiting area and Warren is looking ahead for Bill and Ceil Arthur, his friends from the old days, who had telephoned him about Eric coming up missing and about the discovery of his body. He lets Vi move about half a step ahead of him. He will do, he knows, what she has told him to do. As much as he is able.
He doesn’t see Bill and Ceil, but he knows in the instant of seeing two men in topcoats who lift ever so lightly away from a painted wall and start in his direction that something is wrong—even as he doesn’t know yet just what it is. He is trembling. Bill and Ceil aren’t there. He looks to be sure Vi is close at hand, as he sees the two men coming on. He pauses and wants Vi to pause with him or turn back with him, but she hasn’t tuned in to anything and is walking on. “Vi,” he says. He is looking at the men, though, and in this instant has the thought that his life is not worth the match it might take to light it and burn it up. Is there any way he can get to the bottle in his bag and have another drink?
Vi has turned. “The police,” he says.
The two men close on him, as does Vi, who seems ignorant yet of what is happening. “Warren Wells?” one of the men says in an almost friendly voice.
“Yes sir,” he says, as if he is a Southerner.
“Sir, would you step over here, please. County Sheriff’s Department, Mr. Wells. Mrs. Wells?” the man adds to Vi.
“Some friends were supposed to meet us,” Warren says.
“They’re just ahead, Mr. Wells. You can speak to them in a minute, as we go through.”
“We were told no charges would be pressed,” Vi says.
“The sheriff’s office has issued a warrant, ma’am, so we will be taking Mr. Wells into custody, where he will have the right—”
“We were told that his wife—his former wife—was not going to press any charges! My God!”
“Mr. Wells’s former wife doesn’t administer the law, ma’am,” the man says. “I’m sorry. Any decision about charges pending against Mr. Wells will be decided by the prosecuting attorney for the county and by a judge. Now, ma’am, you’ll be able to join your friends here, if you like. We’ll be taking Mr. Wells to the County Building, where you can see him, if you wish to, after he is booked.”
“My God,” Vi says, with anger, even as her eyes have filled.
“Honey, it’s okay,” Warren says.
“She said she wasn’t going to press any charges,” Vi says. “My God, he just came here to go to his son’s funeral. To see his other son.”
“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” the man says. Turning then, as if to draw Warren a step away from her, he says, “Mr. Wells, I’m going to handcuff your right hand to my left. And we’re going to have to frisk you, if you’d just step over this way, please.”
There are the man’s handcuffs, as he removes them from under his suit coat.
“Good God,” Vi says. “He’s a broken man; give him a chance.”
“Oh, Vi,” Warren says.
CHAPTER 29
HERE AFTER DARK, LEAVING THE STATION AND DRIVING through the small city, it occurs to Dulac that he loves his wife and that he is no longer in love with Shirley Moss. Yesterday and today he has fallen out of love with Shirley, and in the loss he is experiencing he feels solitary and old.
He desires to be home. He desires to be with Beatrice, and to make up with her, even if she may not know—he gives no thought to actually telling her—what it is he is doing. At most, he knows, he will tell her that he needs her tonight, that he needs badly the abstraction they refer to as home. He will make no attempt to explain any of the complicated matters or degrees of fidelity as he has known them, nor any of the characteristics of reach and responsibility on the bridge, however much the two remain alive and troubling in his very heart.
As he pulls over at the house of Claire Wells’s friends, the idea of going out with Beatrice for a drink comes to mind and offers a promise of comfort. Several drinks, he thinks. With Beatrice, whom he does love, loves truly when all is said and done. There is that country music place down on the river and they can go there and have some drinks and hear the jukebox speak of going back to Luckenback,
Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys.
He has this last chore. After so much paperwork, this will be his last item of work for the day, and even if he may not be free, he will be off-duty.
Tapping on the door, let into an entryway by the woman, he is told that Claire is upstairs and she will go and call her down. As he asks where Matt is and the woman says he is in the basement—did he want to see him?—Dulac tells her no, no, he just wondered if he was there.
Coming downstairs, Claire Wells appears entirely confused as he greets her, and then she says to him in a low voice. “Can we talk outside?”
He tells her yes, of course, and as they step outside into the chilled night air, he asks her if she’d like to sit in the car. She says yes and they walk to the car, with her friends’ lighted house behind them, where he opens the door on the passenger side for her to get in.
Going around, getting into the car himself, he says, “I’m sorry about your former husband’s arrest.”
She makes no response to this, so he lets it drop. He had been prepared to explain that once her former husband signed an agreement to make up the child support payments—which would mean nothing more than his word, anyway, because they’d have to let him return to Louisiana to his job—he would be released to attend the funeral service. Such at least was his understanding from the authorities in Maine.
They sit in silence. It’s her meeting, Dulac is thinking. In this moment, though, he sees again the brief white splash in the swollen green water far below. He experiences, too, the momentary dropping of the elevator. “What’s the problem, Claire?” he says to her.
“It’s hard for me to say,” she says.
“I realize that, Claire. That’s okay. What is it?”
“I don’t have any money,” she says.
A moment passes, and she adds, “I wondered if there might be some city agency I could borrow from to pay for Eric’s funeral and burial? I will certainly repay the money.”
There is no such agency, and Dulac responds by saying, “What about Eric’s father? Apparently he doesn’t have any money, but he does have a job. We could have him—”
“No,” she says. “No. I couldn’t do it. I don’t want his money. I want to bury my son myself.”
On a pause, Dulac says, “There’s no one you can borrow from?”
“I just can’t ask Betty and John. I can’t do that. They’ve done so much for me. I don’t want to lose them as friends. I just thought, if there was some agency I could borrow from, then I would repay the money as soon as I can. Matt could get a job, too, and we could take care of it.”
Dulac pauses again, before he hears himself say, “Well, there is an emergency fund at the police department. I’ll tell you what you do. You go ahead and order what you need; charge it to the Portsmouth Police Department. I’ll call the funeral home in the morning, so they’ll know. Then you just use my name. Okay? So just put it out of your mind for now. Tell them to refer all bills to me, care of the Portsmouth Police Department.”
After a moment, seeing her back to the front door and saying good night, Dulac leaves to drive home at last, to see if he may come back down to earth from whatever odd dimension it is he seems to be traversing. He longs all the more to be with Beatrice. She will forgive him. At last, and unlike any other person—it is the product of their years together—she will forgive him. They will go out, go to Jimmy’s on the river, and he will tell her how he has committed their savings—they have about three thousand dollars in the credit union—to pay for a funeral, and she will look at him and shake her head at him, but will remain on his side in her way, and they will go ahead and have too many drinks, and probably go out on the small lighted floor and cling to each other in some lumbering forgotten dance of their life together—two oversized creatures seeking equilibrium, matched as a pair, the King and Queen of their bungalow on their small street in their small town—but he will not, not now or ever, reveal to her any more than a little of what he knows.
CHAPTER 30
MATT IS DIALING IN A NEW STATION. THE OLD RADIO, REPAINTED avocado by hand and shaped like a toaster, is on a littered workbench in John and Betty’s basement. Matt has been reluctant to change the radio’s setting, as he had been reluctant to turn the radio on in the first place, for it had been presumed that he came down here to be by himself, to be alone with thoughts of his brother.
In truth, he knows, he is here to be away from all that is going on upstairs. He’d feel okay. Almost okay. Then someone—his mother usually—would start in and her sobbing would have tears coming up in his own throat, headed for his eyes. He didn’t want to cry anymore. He didn’t want to hurt anymore. Eric himself, he has thought, wouldn’t want to be caught in that scene upstairs. It was at times like these, in fact, in odd situations and in strangers’ houses, that they did more together, had more fun as brothers, than at any other time. And down here now, it isn’t so bad. It’s like one of those good times, those fun times. And so he is alone with thoughts of his brother.
It is as Matt is standing with his back to the workbench then that a radio news report comes on, and against an initial urge to search for more music—he’s heard and seen enough reports already—he lets the radio have its way. He stands and hears.
The suspected killer of twelve-year-old Eric Wells of Portsmouth has been identified as Vernon R. Fischer of Laconia. The body of the twenty-two-year-old senior honors student, who died late this afternoon in a death leap from the I-95 bridge between New Hampshire and Maine, has been recovered from the Piscataqua River by state police and Coast Guard crewmen. Chased by foot onto the bridge by Portsmouth Police Lieutenant Gilbert Dulac, the ten-year resident of the state is reported to have leaped from the bridge to elude capture.
Although they are continuing their investigation, Portsmouth police speculate that this is the final chapter in a bizarre abduction-murder case which has stunned the Seacoast area over the past several days, beginning on Saturday evening when the twelve-year-old boy disappeared while walking home. His sexually molested body was discovered before noon today next to the parking lot of an office supplies store on Islington Street, less than two blocks from where he disappeared.
In a related story, forty-nine-year-old Warren Wells, reportedly of New Orleans and the father of the victim, was arrested this evening by York County, Maine, authorities only moments after he stepped off a plane at Portland National Airport. He is charged with being over twenty-six thousand dollars in arrears on support payments, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of three years in prison upon conviction. A spokesman for the County Sheriffs office reports that the boy’s father will be kept overnight in the county jail but will be released, on his own recognizance, to attend his son’s funeral. Eric Wells’s father is described by authorities as being a man with a lot of personal problems who is very upset and heartbroken about his son’s death. At the same time, the bereaved father will be asked to agree to a twenty-five-thousand-dollar personal bond, which requires no posting of money, and to sign a pledge to comply with a court order to bring overdue support payments up to date. Wells and his former wife, Claire, were divorced in June 1974.
Most of his friends, most of the kids in school, Matt knows, would not have tolerated even that much talking before searching for sounds along the dial rather than words. Even those words. He knows, too, has a glimpse in this moment, that by Monday in school the incident, the story of his brother, will be forgotten and life will be rolling along as it always has, toward Friday or Saturday, and as it says in all the songs, he will be the only one who remembers. He and his mother. Maybe his father, too. And he knows, too, at last, that his mother was right after all, and that he will not dislike his father for it, but his father could have saved them all, long ago, could have led them elsewhere than here, and he failed.
Matt knows this as he stands here. A moment standing before a cluttered workbench in a basement, while a radio plays and he is alone with his thoughts and his thoughts of his
brother. He has stood here through the news, and perhaps some of it was news to him, although he has taken it in rather as he takes in music, as a commodity to feel more than to weigh and measure, as a shivering over his skin, a stillness in his mind.
He is on his own now, he thinks. More or less. Well, no more or less about it. It’s true. It is what he knows as he stands here. He is on his own now.
AFTERWORD
GOING HOME
JULY 1981
TERI FISCHER
GETTING RID OF HIS CLOTHES was easy. So was selling his car, for next to nothing. What has her feeling uncertain is what she is doing now, taking this drive this evening, out of town, to dispose of his personal belongings. Letters, photographs, keepsakes, his papers from school. They are in the trunk behind her, in cardboard boxes of odd sizes. The final contents of his wallet are there, too, all but two fives and two singles she removed at last, just an hour ago, separating them from each other and folding them over three times, as she always folded money, and pushing the folds into the rear left pocket of her jeans.
The urn with his ashes is in the trunk, too, lodged between boxes. She is taking it along to throw it away. Screw it, she has said to herself at last, concerning the urn. She has to get rid of it. She cannot stand having it in the house, speaking to her, telling on her, it seems, however hidden away it may be in a closet or even in the attic. The little sonofabitch, she thinks. Goddamn him. He messed things up for both of them in life; she’d be goddamned if she’d let him do the same in death. No way.
She has an idea by now for the twelve dollars, too, something she sees as symbolic, a secret gesture of good-bye and farewell. At the end of this drive, this curious mission, she will treat herself to a couple drinks—at work, to be among the only friends she really has anymore. She will have a couple drinks and decide for herself once and for all if she can continue to live in Laconia or if she should sell out and return, say, to San Diego, where she believes she can pick up some of the threads of the life she left behind, even if it was nearly a dozen years ago, when it was excited with the general activity of the war in Southeast Asia.
The True Detective Page 44
