Crooked

by Laura McNeal

  The only portion of Eddie’s face that moved was his mouth. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Good.” Charles’s sweet voice had become reassuring, soothing, almost fatherlike. “I need you to go downstairs now, Eduardo. Don’t worry about anything up here. Everything up here will be right as rain.”

  Eddie pulled his face back from the knife. Then, without a glance toward Clara, he slunk away and disappeared through the trapdoor, which he pulled closed behind him.

  46

  THE APPOINTMENT

  Amos’s body seemed about to explode as he turned finally up Genesee. He drew short sharp breaths and with each exhalation heard the word run in his mind. Run, run, run. When he drew up in front of Clara’s house, it looked abandoned. It was completely dark. Amos, gasping, circled the house, peering in windows, hearing nothing, seeing nothing but darkness. In the front yard, off toward the bushes, he heard quick heavy breathing. He moved toward the sound, toward a breathing mass on the ground. It was Ham, lying on his side, taking rapid, shallow breaths. His eyes were wide and white. He stood uncertainly, then sat back down. “It’s okay, Ham,” Amos whispered, even though he didn’t think it was.

  As he was leaning over the dog, Amos heard a door open behind him. Into the dim light of the streetlamp walked Eddie Tripp.

  Amos understood that this was the appointed time.

  He stepped out of the shadow. “Where’re you off to, Eddie?” he said, and was relieved his voice sounded steady and normal.

  For a moment—because of Amos’s suit?—Eddie seemed to think Amos was an adult, and looked ready to cut and run, but then, seeing who was actually wearing the suit, Eddie visibly relaxed. “Well, well. Our hero.”

  Amos stepped closer. “What did you do to the dog?”

  Eddie laughed. “Dog?” he said innocently. “What dog?”

  “And what were you doing inside the house?”

  This time Eddie merely grinned. “Wasn’t. I was just knocking on the door, and nobody answered. There a new law against knocking on a door?”

  Amos didn’t like the way this was going. It was as if Eddie kept sliding into a position just beyond him.

  “And how about my pigeon?”

  A false cackling laugh erupted from Eddie. “And maybe you’d like to finger me for killing JFK? Or how about Roger Rabbit? You want to finger me for killing Roger Rabbit?”

  “No,” Amos said, and a strange calmness came over him. “No, I’d just like to finger you for being such a lame human being.”

  Eddie’s smile evaporated. A hardness came over him, but then softened again.

  He held his hands up, fingers splayed, in a universal gesture of surrender. “You take things a little too serious, Hero,” he said, and began moving toward Amos. “We don’t have to agree on everything. In fact, we can agree to disagree. But we can do it with the mutual respect of warriors.”

  Amos didn’t know how to respond to this. He had the feeling that the appointment was over before it really started. That Eddie-the-enemy had vanished and been replaced by Eddie-the-not-so-bad-guy. Amos lifted his head, straightened his back, and had relaxed for just an instant when from Eddie’s small muscular body, a leg shot up and his shoe swung sharply into Amos’s crotch.

  By no more than an inch, Eddie’s foot missed its target and lost itself in the loose material of the baggy trousers. Amos grabbed the foot with both hands and gave it a violent clockwise twist that sent Eddie over onto his stomach. He began to push himself upright.

  The three terra-cotta rabbits stood on their hind legs in the flower bed beside the walk. Amos grabbed one of them, lifted it overhead, and struck Eddie a glancing blow. The figurine shattered. Eddie fell back, stunned. When he touched his scalp, his hand came away with blood. “Jesus,” he said in a small voice.

  Amos picked up another of the terra-cotta rabbits. “You want to go now, or you want to stay and keep chatting?”

  Eddie got up unsteadily and, trying to keep his dignity, stopped rubbing his head. He tried to drill his eyes into Amos, but they had lost all influence over him. Still, Eddie kept talking. “You’re a pretty sorry hero, Hero. I’m not Clara’s real problem. Clara’s real problem has got her cornered in the attic.”

  Amos glanced quickly at the house, then back at Eddie. “Charles?”

  Eddie stared at Amos evenly.

  Amos moved toward the front door, but looked back at Eddie. “Wanna help?”

  Eddie shrugged and made a small, strangely contorted smile that Amos would always remember as regretful. “I tried,” Eddie said. “Now it’s your turn.”

  47

  IN WHICH A SHOT IS FIRED

  “Listen,” Charles Tripp whispered.

  He was standing over Clara in the darkened attic. The beam of his flashlight shone on Clara’s face. Her eyes were wide with alarm. She couldn’t run. She couldn’t scream. She wished the attic window would open. She wanted to climb out onto the roof. She looked at Charles and looked away. He was huge. He was huge and bald and creepy. But she couldn’t scream and she couldn’t run and the window she wanted to climb out of wouldn’t open. She would fight. But she somehow knew that her fighting would only heighten his appetites.

  “Listen,” Charles said again in a crooning whisper. “All we can hear are heartbeats. Your heartbeat. My heartbeat. There is something going on here, Clara, something beneath the surface, where things are important.” He’d made his whisper soothing and low. “Can you hear it? Can you hear your heart go bop bop bop?”

  In movies, at a moment like this, the heroine would sometimes spit into the villain’s face, but Clara couldn’t make any spit. Her throat was sticky and dry.

  “Here,” Charles said, kneeling close. He unbuttoned his shirt. He took Clara’s hand and placed it over his left nipple. “Feel. Can you feel it pounding? Can you feel my heart going bop bop bop?”

  Clara said nothing. She tried to pull her hand away, but he gripped it tighter.

  “There,” Charles said soothingly, resetting her hand. “What do you feel?”

  Clara felt skin and hair and muscle and the sledgehammer throb of a pounding heart, either his heart or hers, she wasn’t sure.

  “There, Clara. Right there. What do you feel?”

  “Nothing,” she said in a hollow voice. “I’m dead. I’m already dead.”

  Charles laughed a low, pleased laugh. He touched a finger to her hand and ran it very slowly along her bare arm. Clara closed her eyes. She willed herself to stop feeling. She was somewhere else. It didn’t matter where his hand was. She was somewhere else.

  A low creaking noise, from behind them. Clara’s eyes flew open. Charles twisted around. The trapdoor rose. Amos’s head poked through, then his shoulders, his body rising, growing larger until he stood in the dim attic squinting into the beam of Charles’s light.

  “This is an attic,” Charles said in his calm soothing voice. “It isn’t a coffee shop. It’s not designed for drop-in visits.” Charles’s voice was patient, but Clara sensed that he was annoyed, that he’d had all his preliminary fun and didn’t like being interrupted now. He rose from his kneeling position.

  Amos stood fast, waiting.

  “Okay, okay,” Charles said. His voice was no longer just patient. It was appeasing, almost contrite. He took a cautious first step toward Amos. “No harm, no foul, right? I mean, we’re all human. You can’t blame a guy for trying, right?”

  Don’t believe him, Clara thought. Whatever you do, Amos, don’t believe him.

  Charles set down his flashlight, beam on, so that a fan of light opened on the attic floor. “I was invited here,” Charles said in his calm, sweet voice. “I was invited here by Clara.” He turned in the dark toward Clara. “She might deny it, but it’s undeniable. She invited us here. Me and my compadre. We came as an accommodation to her. We took nothing. We did nothing.” Charles shrugged. “But now you’ve dropped in, and suddenly things are...too congested.” Charles raised his hands, stretched wide his fingers. “So even though
invited, I’ll now excuse myself, if you’ll just let me pass.”

  When he heard Charles’s words and saw Charles raise his hands in surrender, Amos almost had to laugh. He’d seen this routine minutes before from Eddie. He knew what was coming, and this time he wouldn’t have to trust to dumb luck. This time he’d be prepared. When Charles’s leg swung up, Amos would slide back with his feet and lean forward with his arms to catch Charles’s foot and twist him down, as he’d done with Eddie. And so, as Charles moved slowly toward him, hands raised, talking in a calm, soothing voice, Amos kept his eyes on Charles’s feet.

  Which was why Amos never saw coming the compact downward punch that Charles delivered with his fisted right hand to the center of Amos’s face.

  It was as if Amos’s whole body gathered in and collapsed around his nose. As Amos was falling, Charles came up with his right foot to Amos’s chin, snapping Amos’s head back. For a long moment, Amos heard and saw nothing. Then he felt his body being shifted one way and another on the attic floor. He heard ripping sounds. He felt wide tape being wound around his arms, his legs, his mouth. “And your eyes,” Charles whispered. “This is nothing for a hero’s eyes to see.”

  Amos closed his eyes just before the wide silver tape stretched over them.

  Clara was holding the gun.

  She hardly knew she had it. But while Charles was wrapping Amos with tape, Clara, almost without thinking, had reached into her wooden hope chest, had slowly run her fingers across the baby quilt until she’d found what she hadn’t really known she was looking for, the cool metal of the stage gun.

  Charles, when he saw the gun, broke out in a low chuckle.

  “You are a spunky little rabbit,” he crooned, and took a slow step forward. He peeled back his shirt and pointed toward his heart. “Aim here, Clara,” he crooned. “Where it’s thinking of you and going bop bop bop.” He took another step and another. “Where it’s thinking of kissing your lips and kissing your earlobes and kissing your neck and going bop bop bop.”

  From outside, a deep, unamplified voice rose in the cold night air. It was Bruce, Clara could tell, using his huskiest register. “This is the Jemison city police,” he called out. “We need all occupants to show themselves at the front door with hands raised. I repeat, we need all— ”

  Charles snickered. “If that’s a cop, I’m Brad Pitt,” he said.

  Clara raised the stage gun until it was level with Charles’s chest. He laughed and took another step. The gun was a bad idea. She shouldn’t have brought it out. She wished she hadn’t. Charles knew it was a fake or he knew she was a fake. He knew something. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. She straightened and extended her arm, still pointing, and he kept coming, one slow step after another, saying things she willed herself not to hear.

  What Clara did then wasn’t planned. It was just some instinct, some divine shadowy instinct for self-preservation.

  Very tiredly, Clara turned the gun away from Charles. She closed and opened her eyes in a long tired blink. Everything was happening in slow motion. Clara crooked her arm. She turned the hand with the gun inward. She pointed it at herself and stared with dead eyes at Charles Tripp. She pulled the trigger. The gun exploded and all at once she felt sharp pain and then a sticky wetness, and then she saw Charles draw up short, gazing down at her.

  Charles Tripp stared at her with shock and disbelief. “You shot yourself,” he said, and then said it again: “You shot yourself.” There was something wild and scared in his gaze, which moved from her bloody wound to her vacant open eyes. She made a faint smile. Part of her was acting now, but part of her wasn’t. She made turning the gun back toward Charles seem both wearying and unimportant. She knew what her eyes were saying. They were saying, I just shot myself, so it doesn’t much matter who in the big wide world I shoot next, but I think it ought to be you.

  Charles, taking two involuntary steps backward, stumbled over Amos. As he pushed himself up, he found himself near Amos’s face. Amos’s eyes and mouth were taped, but his ears were not. “You know what?” Charles whispered into Amos’s ear. “You can have Clara Wilson. I wouldn’t have her. I wouldn’t have her with mayonnaise.”

  Then, while Clara watched with dead-alive eyes, Charles Tripp scuffled his way out of the attic and down the ladder.

  He was gone. Charles Tripp was gone for good.

  48

  MOPPING UP

  When Clara ripped the silver duct tape from Amos’s clamped-tight eyes, she tore hair from his temples and lashes from his eyelids. The pain was startling. For a moment he kept his eyes tightly shut before opening them uncertainly. It took a second for shapes to form and come into focus.

  Clara wasn’t talking. Her hair was wet with sweat. She leaned forward and looked him in the eye for an instant and then without a word quickly ripped the tape from his lips. Amos clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from crying out in pain. He looked at Clara, who just kept unwinding the tape automatically. She was like someone who’d just been in a car wreck, Amos thought. “You okay?” he said.

  She nodded. She didn’t speak. When she’d untaped his hands and legs, she fumbled her way to the trapdoor and worked her way down. Amos followed. The lights were still off, but Clara leaned against a wall in the dark upstairs hallway. There was a funny clicking noise. When Amos came close, he realized it was her teeth. They were chattering as if from cold, even though the house wasn’t cold. He took off his father’s suit jacket and put it around her, and without any planning, they stood hugging, swaying slightly in each other’s arms. “What did you do?” Amos said finally. “How come he left?”

  “I shot myself with the stage gun. But it hurts a little bit when you do it point-blank.”

  Amos tried to look at her stomach, but there wasn’t enough light. It was just a dark, gooey, frightening mess.

  “I’m okay,” Clara said. “Let’s just get out of here before they come back.”

  “I don’t think they’re coming back,” Amos said. “I saw Eddie as he was leaving.” Amos paused. “Eddie was the one who sent me up to help you.”

  Clara looked blankly at Amos. She really did seem to be in shock. Amos was helping Clara down the stairs when Bruce’s voice carried up from the front door. “Who’s here?”

  “Us,” Amos yelled. “Everything’s okay, I think. But check out Ham. He’s in the front yard somewhere.”

  Amos helped Clara to the front yard, where Bruce was down on both knees beside Ham. The dog was trembling and panting and pressing forward into Bruce, who had to hold him up. Ham’s legs shook uncontrollably, and his tail was clamped tight between his legs. Something was terribly wrong.

  Clara bent down and wrapped her arms around the dog. “Oh, Ham, oh, Ham, it’s okay, it’ll be okay.”

  But it didn’t look okay to Amos, as much as he could see from the streetlight. “Flashlight,” he said. “Where’s a flashlight?”

  Without looking up, Clara said, “Top of fridge.”

  When Amos returned with the flashlight, he trained the beam on the dog. Ham’s mouth was slack. He was drooling. His eyes were hugely white. They stared off into some other world.

  “Hey.” It was Bruce. He was holding a small vial he’d found lying on the patio. He shined the flashlight on it. Strychnine, it said. Poison XXX.

  Clara began to cry.

  Amos turned the flashlight back to the dog—panting, drooling, straining forward unsteadily into Clara—and then, when he saw a drop of blood fall on the pavement, he turned the beam toward Clara’s stomach. He stared in horror. They all did.

  The shot from the stage gun had frayed the flannel shirt and the nightgown underneath. There was blood everywhere. The more they looked at it, the less fake it seemed.

  “Oh, man,” Bruce said in a low, disconsolate voice.

  “Ambulance,” Amos said out loud to himself. “Ambulance.” He ran to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and had already dialed 911 before he realized there was no dial tone. “Dead,” he yelled.

/>   “They’re all dead,” Clara said. “But I’m okay. I don’t need an ambulance. It’s Ham who does. It’s Ham who’s bad.”

  It was quiet for a moment except for Ham’s rushed, shallow gasping.

  Then Bruce said, “How about the keys for your mom’s car?”

  “Top drawer left of sink,” Clara said.

  “Okay, then,” Bruce said, and within minutes, they were headed toward St. Stephen’s Hospital, Clara lying on the backseat but scooched over to whisper to Ham, who lay on the floor, gasping. Amos sat sideways in back, watching Clara, watching Ham, and watching the road in front of them, all with equal nervousness. Bruce was up front, driving badly.

  “Since when do you drive?” Amos said.

  “Since Iowa. Farm kids drive young.” He braked roughly for a merging car, then sped ahead. “’Course, in Iowa, you’re about the only car on the road.” Then he said, “How’s the dog?”

  “The same,” Clara said.

  Bruce increased speed, screamed around corners. Seven or eight blocks further west on Colonial, a police car appeared behind them, red lights swirling. Bruce pulled over and jumped out to meet the policeman.

  “We’ve got a situation here, Officer. A girl’s been shot and her dog’s been poisoned. We’re on our way to emergency.”

  The policeman beamed his flashlight into the backseat and held it on Clara’s stomach for a long second, then shined the light on Ham. “Detective O’Hearn’s on this case,” Bruce said. “You might call Detective O’Hearn.”

  The policeman swept the light into Bruce’s face, then snapped it off. “Okay, champ, we’re gonna assume you’ve got a license. Just follow me.”

  The police car pulled out and led the way, siren blaring, the river of cars parting before them. The policeman had evidently radioed ahead, because when they got to the emergency door of the hospital, there was a nurse and attendant waiting with a gurney. And standing behind them, looking large and a little foolish in sweat clothes and jogging shoes, was Detective Lucian O’Hearn.