No Regrets, Coyote

by John Dufresne

“This is private property, and you are trespassing.”

  Shanks said, “It will not take much provocation for me to slap the cuffs on you, partner.”

  I stood there wishing I had a phone with a camera on it like the bald girl in the Mini, but knowing if I tried using it here, I would lose it in a hurry.

  I asked Shanks, “What do you think happened at the Halliday house?”

  Clarke got in my face. I could smell the chorizo on his breath. I took a step backward and said I was going.

  “You have a nice walk,” Shanks said.

  “You have a nice watch,” I said, indicating the black band on his wrist.

  “Impoundment yard’s just five blocks up on Oleander.”

  I missed the days when cops wore those visored service caps with the high crown and the shield right there up front. And they wore ties and black brogans and maybe a fitted jacket or a topcoat or a yellow raincoat. Now they’re like storm troopers. The two squad cars passed me, followed by the loaded truck. Shanks gave me a toot and a wave when he drove by.

  My car smelled like something had died in it. Then I saw the damp carcass—a possum, it looked like—on the floor behind the driver’s seat. I walked back to the impoundment office and told the woman who’d given me my keys and taken my money what I had found. I said, “I want to complain.”

  She said, “Go right ahead.”

  “No,” I said, “I want to file a written complaint.”

  She opened a drawer and slid a form to me under the glass partition. She said, “You’re wasting your time.” She pointed at the form with her pen. “It’s in one eye and out the other.”

  So eyes were going to be a theme today, I thought.

  She walked into a back room and returned with a green trash bag and a pair of stiff work gloves.

  I drove with the windows down to Kmart and bought carpet shampoo and Febreze. I cleaned the mess as well as I could in the parking lot and then drove to Splash ’n’ Lube and had them detail the car. A kid with gold teeth and a neck tattoo (bullet hole dripping blood) opened the back door and jumped away from the car. He waved his chamois in front of his face. He said, “You got a corpse in the trunk?”

  Then I stopped at La Mélange to see if I might run into the elusive Pino. I walked inside. The place was empty. The waiter I’d met previously told me he was alone except for the cook, who was napping. He asked me if I wanted a coffee. I didn’t, but thanked him. Join me, he said. On the house. He pulled out a chair, and I sat. He told me his name was Luis, and he went to the kitchen. I noticed a photo of Chafin Halliday on the wall. He wore a chef’s hat and was carving a roast. The restaurant’s name on his white jacket was backward, as if da Vinci had written it.

  Luis returned with the coffees and we wished each other a Happy New Year. He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him.

  He said, “Crazy people all day long?”

  “Not crazy. In pain.”

  “My sister’s crazy,” he said. “She thinks her dog Charlie is the devil. She thinks Charlie is trying to control her thoughts.”

  I told Luis I’d once had a client who brought her dog to our sessions. Genghis, a bullmastiff, would sit alertly by her side and stare at me. Whenever I made a sudden move, he’d growl. If I leaned forward he’d stand. She told me Genghis was a wonderful judge of people; he’d saved her from more than one sorry relationship. I never actually had a client who brought her dog to the office, and I wasn’t sure why I made up the story. Maybe to cheer Luis up. I gave Luis my card and asked him to give it to Pino. Tell him I’d like to talk to him.

  Later at home I matched Wayne’s signature to some of the handwriting on the note. I put the note in my cookie jar. I Googled Eden family slain, so I could see if there was anything new about the Hallidays. I helped Django up onto the desk. He stared at the computer screen and tried to catch the cursor. The first hit was, improbably enough, about another crime. On his way to a date with his estranged wife at a popular restaurant on the Intracoastal, Ivan Kouzmanoff stopped by his wife’s house, shot his ten-year-old daughter, bound and gagged the fifteen-year-old babysitter, drove to the restaurant, kissed his wife on the cheek, ordered both of their meals, oak-grilled quail and marouli salads, finished the meal with a glass of ouzo, pulled out his pistol, shot his wife in the forehead, and turned the gun on himself. He did not leave a suicide note. Friends and family were stunned. I found out with a little more research that Mr. Kouzmanoff was an attorney who was working for the Tequesta Tribe on the South River burial ground case and that he was prominent in the county’s Republican Party circles. He was a well-respected philanthropist—a wing of the McRaney-Lanuer Eye Institute was named for him—and served on the board of several Everglades County arts organizations, including the Eden Playhouse. So we were connected.

  I got an e-mail from Phoebe letting me know that she had set up an account for me on thatsamore.com, that she was casting her baited line upon the waters, and that I’d gotten several nibbles already. She said she’d be screening the candidates and would get back to me. I e-mailed her and asked her to cease and desist.

  She wrote: This gal in Colahatchee said she’s looking for a guy thirty-five to fifty-five who’s a great kisser, won’t hit on her mom, will take her to Bali, and goes commando. What do you think?

  I got ready for bed. Django watched me brush my teeth in the mirror. That’s when it hit me—the photo of Halliday. I called Carlos and left a message on his cell. “Halliday was left-handed.” The photograph had been flipped when it was developed.

  8

  Cameron was the happiest child I’ve ever known. He had a bright and constant smile and loved to laugh. He memorized books that he loved and would recite them at the drop of a hat. He was grateful for every meal and gift and said so. He was always thanking people for telling him something he didn’t know or pointing out something he had failed to see. Life was a miracle, and Cameron was delighted to be a part of it.

  Cameron went off to the state’s Honors College—a barefoot-white-kids-with-dreadlocks kind of place—and I worked at Winn-Dixie and went to the local branch of the state U. I got my bachelor’s in psychology, and Cameron dropped out of school two weeks before he would have graduated. He came back home, grew quiet, and wandered about the house in a state of blissful indifference. He spent more and more time alone in his room writing in his notebook, working on what he called his memoirs: Cameron Lucida; Cameron Obscura. He had, it seemed, become his own double, and now I was a shadow.

  He told me he wanted to live on the edge, and so he invited death. Most of those invitations came in the form of prescription meds. He said, Only when you have death in your heart can you know how precious life is. I said, Don’t you mean love in your heart? He had no ambition, no curiosity, no courage, no friends, no future. He coveted oblivion and chose to live his life in the languid pursuit of the beautiful lie, the pleasurable pulse of euphoria. He didn’t work, but did spend what must have been forty hours a week searching through the house for hidden cash or items he could pawn.

  The last time I saw Cameron alive, he was in a familiar position, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk in front of Publix, insensible, a book opened on his knee, a lit cigarette in his fingers, his head slumped, his eyes shut, blacked out and heedless. I kicked the cigarette out of his hand, and he didn’t move. I picked up the book: The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? I shook him awake. He didn’t know who I was, so I told him. He said, Buy me a coffee, bro.

  After Cameron’s murder, I went to his room, #210, at the Buccaneer’s Inn with Carlos, who told me the weapons, the drugs, the ball python, the kittens, and the boxes of fried chicken and biscuits had been removed, but everything else was pretty much as it had been on the night of the murder a week earlier. The blood-spattered carpet was covered with a plastic drop cloth. I was hoping to find Cameron’s notebooks and read about this cruise to nowhere he’d been on. Someone’s game of solitaire was still spread on the twin bed. A skeleton’s-s
kull bong stared at me from the top of the dresser. Inside the drawers I found a box of Müeslix, a dozen or so past issues of Smithsonian magazine, a Bic lighter, and overdue library books: Sartre, Arendt, and Heidegger. “I should return these,” I told Carlos. He nodded. Cameron had written a poem with magnetic word tiles on the side of his microwave: Saint Blown Apart, please help me to put all the pieces back together.

  The story goes that Cameron had let the two junkie thieves who lived upstairs store their loot in his room in exchange for a nostril’s worth of crank. That night, the thieves had robbed an antique store on Main and had gotten away with a crate of Nazi paraphernalia and a pair of medieval-style war clubs. According to the thief with the ARBEIT MACHT FREI button pinned to his Iron Maiden T-shirt, Everything in the room was copacetic as the three of them enjoyed their chicken and Southern Comfort, but then Cameron began talking philosophy or whatever you call it, talking about how time is matter and bullshit like that, talking to them like they were in preschool, and he wouldn’t shut up and said he could feel the effects of the future, and so the thief with the swastika armband and the Simpsons T-shirt picked up the three-foot war club, the one with the iron bands and the pointed studs, stood behind Cameron, took a batter’s stance, lined up Cameron’s head, winked at Iron Maiden, swung, crushed my brother’s skull, and delivered him to nothingness.

  The universe may be tenderly indifferent to our fate, but we shouldn’t be. We are our brothers’ keepers. There is right, and there is wrong. There are consequences to our actions or inactions. Disregard can be an act of violence. I may not have been vigilant enough to save my brother from himself. I was hoping I might save the Hallidays from the disinterest and haste of the legal system.

  Brantley Halliday loved his Skull Candle skateboard and worshipped Tony Hawk. His brother Briely’s friends called Briely “Dr. Everquest” or just “Doc.” Their sister, Brianna, was crazy about the colors pink and purple and wore a pink tulle tutu and purple ballet slippers to preschool every day. Her best friend was a boy with long brown hair and blue eyes named Ocean. At every costume party she’d put on a pair of silky wings and become an angel or a butterfly or a swan. I had decided to find out what I could about the victims, so I spoke with neighbors and with the children’s teachers. To take the sticky matter of confidentiality off the table, I told them all I was working with the Eden Police Department, which was not a complete lie. The EPD had neither the time for nor the interest in gathering irrelevant information about a closed case. I was trying to imagine the first two acts of the tragedy and needed the provocative details. The boys attended Jaco Pastorius Elementary School. Their sister went to Guardian Angels Catholic Preschool.

  Brantley was described as happy, active, personable, popular, and was well thought of by his teachers. He especially loved reading and social studies. He liked studying maps and once wrote a poem about Dodo Preston, the man who assigned every country its map color. Brantley was independent and confident. His science teacher, Anne Beachy, told me that, of course, all of that brilliance and enthusiasm can wane in the blink of an eye; all that effervescence can fizzle and flatten—she snapped her fingers—just like that when they get to middle school. Ms. Beachy wore a personal air purifier around her neck like a pendant—a Germ Guardian. When I have them, she told me, the children are still precious, and I don’t want to let them go. Some of them are crushed in middle school. Others are inflated beyond their worth. You can smell the cruelty in the air. We seem unable to do anything to stop the despondency, self-destruction, and venom. The children are so much stronger than we are. They vanquish us with their insouciance.

  Several girls in the class had crushes on Brantley and were now inconsolable and in counseling. A neighbor, Mr. Matisse, showed me a photo on his iPhone of Brantley on his skateboard doing a flip kick. He was wearing board shorts, a black T-shirt, and a beanie that said MYSTERY on it. He had painted Into the Wild on the board. He had dimples and bushy red hair. He listened to Mozart to put himself to sleep, his friend Fausto told me.

  Briely was obsessed, you could say, with online role-playing games. All his best friends were medieval warriors and elf- princesses whom he’d never met in person. He played piano and clarinet but didn’t like to practice. He seemed to be more at ease when he was someone else, like Virdo, a horned night elf druid, his avatar in World of Warcraft. This worried his guidance counselor, Gentry Ledee. Gentry told me over stale coffee in the faculty lounge that Briely was a kid who might have had a hard time of it later—his need for constant stimulation might have led him astray. Maybe his life would have been difficult, he said, but so what? Who said life was supposed to be easy? What’s the point of ease? We’re not here to enjoy ourselves, are we, Mr. Melville? I told him I didn’t know why we were here. I told him I didn’t even think why mattered. I don’t know why I said that, and I was relieved he ignored me. He talked about how for the kids in private schools, the dicey and sketchy ones, how all of their tribulations would be lifted, and life for them would be all bread and chocolate. But with our kids … He pressed his lips, flared his nostrils, and shook his head. I asked him if he’d had a hard time of it when he was younger. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his chair. He nodded and said, That’s why I can relate to them. He remembered that Briely wore this wonderful T-shirt that read, DRUM ROLL, PLEASE!

  Brianna cried a lot at preschool. If her friend Ocean was absent, she cried. If Ocean played with Tiffany or Harold, Brianna cried. She enjoyed helping the teacher, Ms. Houllebecq, with the cleaning and organizing. Brianna had won many holy cards for falling asleep most quickly during naptime. Ms. Houllebecq showed me Brianna’s cubby, which she, Ms. Houllebecq, had been unable to empty. She thought of it as a memorial. Brianna had a friendship bracelet in there, several barrettes, a photo of a brindled kitten asleep on a mastiff’s head. Brianna had yet to blossom, Ms. Houllebecq told me. Several mothers in the neighborhood said they thought Brianna was withdrawn. The adjectives I heard used most often to describe her were quiet, timid, invisible.

  Krysia Halliday had worked as a physical therapist in Poland, she told her neighbors, and then in London, where one of her patients was the reggae legend King Nelson Philp. She met Chafin, she said, when he was in London on vacation and they were both standing in the queue at Ronnie Scott’s for a John Zorn concert. Halliday extended his stay and they were married in Camden Town the next week. According to neighbors, the kids were Krysia’s life. She was not one to chat or socialize, but she was not unsociable. She was pleasant and polite, if not enthusiastic and hospitable. She earned her real estate license, but did not seem to have used it. She took creative writing classes at FIU and joined the South Florida Writers’ Network. Her short story “Mom Has Issues,” about a single mom and her young son on a three-hour layover at the Atlanta airport, won third place in last year’s Network Fiction Contest. Mom, Temple, meets a gentleman traveler, a salesman, on his way to Birmingham from Flint, who calls himself Dickie Chapdelaine. He buys Temple another mojito at Houlihan’s. She says it’s only nine in the morning. He says, It’s ten o’clock somewhere, and they laugh. The boy, Kody, says, “Dickie, that’s a bad name.” You can find the story on the network’s website.

  “Mom Has Issues” may not have been Krysia’s only work of fiction. One of her friends from the neighborhood, Geraldine Barry, heard that I’d been asking questions about the deceased Mrs. Halliday and her family, got my business card from Dahlia Salazar, and called to say she’d like to talk. We met at Honey’s on Main for coffee. Geraldine had close-cropped blond hair and apple-green eyes. She was slender and wore no makeup. She had on an Obama T-shirt, jeans, and red espadrilles. She shook my hand and sat. She ordered hot water and ignored the waitress’s raised eyebrow. She said, “Don’t look now, but isn’t that guy at the counter what’s-his-face from the Monkees?” I told her it was. He lives at the beach and eats here all the time. “If I weren’t a married woman …” she said.

  When the hot water a
rrived in a little silver pot, Geraldine pulled a silky tea bag out of her leather clutch. “Nepal First Flush,” she said.

  I said, “You knew Krysia?”

  Geraldine put her elbows on the table, rested her face on her fists, and told me about the conversation she’d had with Krysia two weeks ago over drinks at Davy Byrne’s Pub. “I was telling her about my long line of loser boyfriends before I met my husband: the OCD psychologist; the married, it turns out, neurosurgeon; the philandering semiotics professor; the ex-seminarian with commitment issues; blah blah blah. I could have gone on. My life was a country-and-western ballad for a long while. And then I noticed that she was crying when she ought to have been amused, and I asked her what was going on.” Geraldine lifted the tea bag out of her cup and squeezed it against her spoon. She took a sip of tea. She said, “Krysia blew her nose with a napkin and said, ‘Gerry, you just don’t realize how much we talk about our pasts until you have no past to talk about.’ Isn’t that a strange thing to say?”

  “Maybe hers is a past she’d rather forget.”

  Geraldine didn’t think so. “I said, ‘Krysia, your childhood in Poland. You’ve told me all about it.’ She told me she had to leave her past behind because of her husband, and she hated him for that. She said she’d start to make friends, but couldn’t because she was afraid the truth would leak out. I said, ‘How can the truth hurt you, hon?’ And she put her face in her hands and sobbed. What do you make of that?”

  “Did she have an accent?”

  “Yes, but not very thick. Dese and dose, dis and dat. Dropping the articles. But she lost it a bit when she drank. And then she avoided me after that. Didn’t return my calls or my texts, didn’t answer the door when I knocked, didn’t come to Zumba class.”

  The once and future Monkee thanked his waitress and headed for the door. He smiled and nodded at Geraldine when he passed our table. “He’s the cute one,” she said, and she watched him out the restaurant window until he turned the corner on Avila. “He was my favorite.”