by Mark Zubro
I never quite figured out the point of what I called Barryisms. Was the other person supposed to hear them? If so, were they to rush over and prostrate themselves at his feet and declare themselves converted to his way of thinking because of his self-proclaimed brilliant but barely heard bon mots? Were they designed to provoke someone into calling him on his ludicrous nonsense, to provoke a fight, to compel acquiescence? If they were designed to convince someone to come to agreement with him, they seemed pointless.
Pointless never bothered a Republican.
My sister had made peace with all of the Grums years before. I was not about to start World War III with them while she was overwhelmed with her loss.
“Where’s Veronica?” Barry asked
“With the children.”
He said, “We could ask her about food.”
I was incapable of a civil response at this moment. Scott leapt into the breach. He said, “She’s talking to the children. She’s telling them what happened. I think we’d best leave them alone for a while.”
“Oh. I guess.”
Scott said, “I’ll check the kitchen in a few minutes, and we can put something together.”
Barry nodded. “I hope she’s going to pray with them.”
Blank stares from Scott and me.
“That’s what helps at a time like this, praying to God. She and the kids have to put faith in Him.”
Except for weddings and funerals, I hadn’t been inside a church in more years than I could count. And if he wanted to chat with an invisible being in the sky, that was his business. I repeated today’s mantra to myself. He’d just lost his brother. I had to give him some slack.
Scott murmured, “It’s a tough time for everyone in the family. We’ll all have to be supportive.” Neutral and faintly positive, with not a hint of snark. The man is a saint.
As Barry turned to the door, I said, “Veronica told us the police claimed Edgar was murdered.”
“Well, I’m sure the police were probably hysterical. And I’m sure Veronica was confused. I’m sure we’ll get this all sorted out.”
Barry gave us a vinegary smile as he sidled out of the room.
Scott watched the door close then said, “Waiting for me to get into the kitchen is gonna be the longest few minutes of his life.” He turned to me. “I feel so sorry for Veronica and the kids.”
“Me too.”
He came and took the chair I had been in next to the large swivel chair. He took my hand.
Scott said, “Barry or any random Grum can make murder go away?”
“Too bad nobody murdered him.”
“You’re upset. About what? Not Edgar being dead. I know you.”
“I’m upset for Veronica. The Grums will make this harder for her and the kids, not easier. You’ll see. I don’t like them.”
“Me neither.”
I said, “I didn’t follow Barry’s parting crack. Hysterical police? I find that hard to believe. And Veronica confused? About murder? Nobody makes that kind of mistake. What’s he up to?”
“Veronica told us the police said murder. Even Edgar didn’t deserve that.”
I blurted before I thought. “The man deserved to be tortured and die miserably.” I looked Scott in the eye. “I don’t believe I said that.”
“You feel it. No point in denying your feelings.”
“I know I’d never say any such thing to Veronica or the kids.”
“I know. And be careful what you wish for.” He then quoted from Tolkien, Gandalf on the worth of the life of Gollum when Frodo expresses the wish that Bilbo had killed Gollum when he had the chance in the caves in the Misty Mountains. Gandalf said and Scott quoted, “And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to hand out death in the name of justice.”
I said, “You know I agree with that, but Edgar was such a shit.”
“I know. The question is who would kill him?”
I said, “I presume most people who came into contact with him hated him. Except maybe his family and a whole lot of them sure didn’t seem like they were all that fond of him either, or of each other for that matter. If the police were looking for people who hated him as the killer, they’d probably need a list of everyone he’d ever met.”
“Veronica loved him.”
“Are you defending him?” I asked.
“No, of course not, but he’ll have had friends. If you’re that rich at the very least somebody is eager to suck up to you.”
“That’s not friendship.”
“But it might be close enough. For someone as awful as Edgar, maybe that’s all he had, or that’s what he was used to. Maybe he chose to be that way, which is really sad.”
I felt a twinge of guilt. “I shouldn’t be speaking ill of the dead?”
“You’re recognizing reality. It just sounds kind of jarring, but if that’s all he had, I do pity him.” He sighed. “I wonder if it would help if we knew details about what happened.”
“We can try the Internet.” Scott got my laptop from next to the bronze grizzly. Supposedly the giant was some kind of family heirloom. Yeah, this family would have a bronze, angry grizzly as a keepsake. Next to it was its companion, a three-feet-high, on-all-fours, four-foot-long, brown bear.
Standing on the other side of the desk from me, Scott moved some of the junk on the top of the desk to the side to make room. He placed the laptop in the now empty space and began to boot it up. I moved the keyboard and computer monitor on the top of the desk toward me. As soon as I pressed the mouse, the screen came to life.
Scott pointed at Edgar’s computer. “Why didn’t the cops take that?”
“I would if I were a cop.”
The computer immediately opened to the last page it had been on, a porn site.
I said, “He didn’t shut it down so it went back to the last place he’d been. Here’s something ordinary.” The site was called Mona Moans for You.
Scott came around the desk and stood next to me. He gazed for a moment. “A straight site. We needed confirmation he was heterosexual?”
“If he was the last one using it. I think Veronica’s got her own laptop, and I vaguely recall her telling me the only other time I was in here, that the kids weren’t allowed entry to this room. So it was probably him, and judging from this he was pretty heterosexual.”
“Why did he need to look at porn?” Scott asked.
I shrugged. “Why does anybody? Because it’s there? Because he can? I know for sure I am not going to speculate about its significance in terms of his and Veronica’s sex life. I’m not going to go there. Dead or alive I never want to think about Edgar’s sex life.”
Scott pointed at the list of bookmarks at the top of the page. One read ‘tits’ another ‘legs’. A smorgasbord of anatomy abbreviations. I clicked on the show all bookmarks tab. A list of hundreds popped up.
Scott peered at the screen and nodded. “Relentlessly heterosexual.”
“I’ll try to care.” I tapped the tip of my finger on the screen. “The real question is the one you asked. Why haven’t the police taken the computer? Why aren’t there police swarming all over this place? Why is there only the one guarding the door?”
Scott shrugged. “We don’t know anything about the circumstances of the murder. For all we know, they have a suspect in custody, someone who has motive, means, and opportunity.”
“You’d think they’d have mentioned that to Veronica.”
I got my laptop carrying case from next to the grizzly bear and took out my flash drive. I stuck it into Edgar’s computer.
“What are you doing?” Scott asked.
I worked as I spoke. “I’m going to save what’s on this computer. Something odd is going on here. The cops should be here, not us. They’re not. I don’t trust the Grums. Maybe I shouldn’t do this and maybe Veronica would be angry if she knew, but I don’t like this. If I was a cop, I’d want this information. I don’t trust any of these people.”
“Seems like a bit much,” Scott said.
I closed the site and then clicked out of the Internet. The desktop appeared. It was filled with photo icons. These were labeled by name: Susie, Sharon, hundreds more. Turned out Mona was not the only site Edgar perused nor were her pictures the only ones he saved. Further icons on the desktop showed pictures of downloaded videos from porn sites. They were alphabetical. Above Mona were Mandy the Randy and Luscious Laura. Good to know idiot porn names knew no sexual orientation. I took my flash drive and fitted it into the USB port.
“Are you sure about doing that?” Scott asked.
“In the middle of all this other crap, somewhere on here could be financial information. We can look at it later. The cops could take it away any moment. I’d rather be careful.”
“Are you supposed to take another guy’s data?”
“Two things. He won’t care. He’s dead. Plus Veronica asked us to help.” I highlighted all the desk top items and then dragged them to the zip drive. I had 64 GB space on the drive so I wasn’t too worried that everything on the computer would fit. After I downloaded all these I would check the documents folder and move everything there over.
I concentrated on Edgar’s computer for a few minutes. Data began to transfer. While the computer and flash drive made friends, I said, “I don’t like it when cops don’t act like what I know cops usually act like.”
I watched as Scott established the wireless connection on our laptop. He clicked over to Google and called up the Milwaukee papers. Huge election news headlines proclaimed the candidates to be within twenty votes of each other.
Useless, I thought. If it was close, the Republicans would know how to steal it: think Florida in 2000, or the special election for judge in Wisconsin. We liberals knew how it worked. You either won by a whole lot, or the Republicans would find a way to fuck you over.
Scott found one breaking news squib outlined in yellow about a possible tragedy at the governor’s campaign headquarters, no details.
EIGHT
Wednesday 7:26 A.M.
I pointed at the door Veronica had indicated. “We should start with the stuff in there that she asked for help with. She said she needed money. I can give her some for now, but she claimed she didn’t know about the family’s finances.”
Scott said, “In this day and age? That sounds kind of medieval.”
I shrugged. “She said she didn’t know how she was going to pay for the funeral. There’s not much else to do at the moment. I might as well start now.”
“I’ll help,” Scott said.
We used the key Veronica had left me.
I was reasonably familiar with end of life details: insurance papers, powers of attorney, and that kind of stuff. Years ago Scott and I hired a gay lawyer who was familiar with what needed to be in a gay couple’s wills, and with all the things a gay couple needed to have to ensure each other’s future in case one of them died. There were a lot of legal papers to go through and sign. Including simple things like power of attorney for medical decisions, power of attorney for financial decisions, pre-paying for our funerals, investments, who inherited precisely what, who was the beneficiary of every single thing. Scott was listed as the person for me in all these matters as I was listed for him. We especially made sure we had the kinds of things we could wave in the face of legal and medical personnel if they gave us hassles about end of life decisions.
We entered the room. It was a size between a regular closet and a walk-in closet. A tiny desk in one corner had a straight-back wooden chair in front of it. Except for that space and a few feet between them and the door, the room was filled with boxes; floor to ceiling, side to side, with barely enough room to open the door more than half way.
I looked at Scott. I said, “It’s always best to begin at the beginning.”
I took down the top box from the first stack on my right. He took one from the top of the heap in the middle of the floor. We each took our box to the large desk. I carried my box around to the back and pushed aside more of the paraphernalia from the top of the desk to the far sides. The stuff from the box Veronica had started on, I put to the far left side. Scott and I put our separate boxes on the half of the middle closest to us.
Scott paused before opening his box. “Maybe we should go through the desk first. He might have kept the most up to date or most important stuff in there.”
I agreed.
I started with the center top drawer. As I looked through his desk I thought perhaps I’d find something that redeemed Edgar as a person. A picture of him with a warm fuzzy puppy? Edgar serving food to the homeless in a shelter? And if I found something, would that redeem the life of a mean spirited, racist, sexist, homophobic son-of-a-bitch? What would redeem such a person?
Unbidden into my imagination came the old joke. A man dies and shows up at the pearly gates, and St. Peter asks what good work have you ever done for your fellow man. The guy thinks for a long time and finally says that he once gave twenty-five cents to a homeless man. St. Peter calls out loudly to the Lord asking what he should do with the guy. There’s a long pause and a then a great voice says, give him back his twenty-five cents and tell him to go to hell.
I wondered if that joke would have even more resonance with me if I believed in heaven, pearly gates, St. Peter, and/or god. Probably not.
But the center drawer confirmed the mundane: pencils, pens, erasers, scissors, paperclips, markers, transparent tape, stapler. Drawers only on the right: the top one had an unopened ream of blank copy paper and a box of manila folders, the second different sizes and colors of blank note pads. In the largest drawer on the bottom were three thick books on computer programming followed by two books on how to build guns.
I flopped each book out on top of the desk. Page after dense page of instructions on building computers, programming computers, and making guns, but nothing of financial significance to help Veronica at this moment.
Edgar read these? I had no notion of his IQ level. Certainly, from the bigoted and ignorant comments he made, he showed no inclination to use any intelligence he did have in the service of sense and reason. And really, when someone says they don’t believe in evolution, how can you not think they’re an ignorant rube?
The gun books were fascinating in a can’t-look-away-from-a-train-crash way.
“Check these out.” I showed them to Scott. “Maybe he built the gun that killed him.”
Scott said, “That’s ghoulish and scary.”
“Did he go around armed?”
Scott said, “The few times we saw him, I never noticed a gun.”
I opened the box I’d gotten from the storage closet. On top was a brochure from a local pizza place for a dollars-off bargain. I checked the expiration date; four years ago. The next item was a receipt printed out from a porn site for 39.99 for one month on Mona Moans For You. The date was six months prior. It was a payment for a one-month non-recurring membership.
I held it up and showed it to Scott. I said, “He was definitely straight.”
Scott said, “Not as comforting a thought as we might like.” He glanced at the picture. “She looks nice in a big breasts kind of way, if you like big breasts.”
I said, “I’m indifferent.” I checked the bookmarked sites on the computer. “It matches one of these.” I examined the desk top. “She’s on here, too. I’m just not sure I care.”
The papers quickly began to settle into logical patterns. Bills: we put these in chronological order by company. Receipts: from the local fast food restaurants to exclusive Parisian three star restaurants and a million places in between, again time order by venue. Travel brochures: mostly from hunting lodges around the globe. Coupons: for discounts on anything from pizza to airlines, to the local grocery store. He clipped coupons? Whatever for? He could probably buy the whole restaurant, but coupons he had.
Early in the process of sorting, the computer and the zip drive concluded their successful relationship. I pocketed my zip drive and let the c
omputer rest.
For an instant I thought about hiding the porn receipts, then dismissed it. Fear of porn in the face of death, a nonsensically absurd notion. Besides, Edgar wouldn’t care anymore if someone found out; he was dead. Veronica’s opinion of him might change? That wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t going to alter reality. Who knew what would or would not help?
The desk top was soon filled with receipts set out by category, venue, and year. We began to make piles on the floor. I even used the grizzly bear’s out-stretched arms. Scott placed some of his stuff on the bronze closest to him, the wolf whose head was up, mouth open, howling soundlessly at the moon.
Most of the brochures and the coupons we dumped into a trash can that quickly began to overflow.
A half hour in and Veronica had still not reappeared. I expected her back any moment. Telling your children about such a tragedy must be horrific. I could only imagine what my sister and her kids were going through. I was tempted to find her and see how she was doing. If there were books for what to say and do at a time like this, I didn’t know about them. Even if there were such books, there wasn’t time to read them and get their advice.
I presumed she’d be explaining to them, comforting, reassuring them. Sudden death was bad enough, but murder?
I didn’t want to disturb a moment of such profound intimacy. To make the presumption that any intrusion of mine would be of help was on a level of arrogance I’d never want to display. I was less than thirty feet from where she was. If she needed help, I could get there in seconds.
I wished I knew of a way to make things better for her or them. There wasn’t, really. Just to be here and help, offer assistance, and do things like sort through tons of crap.
I stopped at one point and said to Scott, “Why aren’t the cops doing this?”
“You’re asking me impossible questions. I have no answers.”
“I knew that,” I said.
“Sorry.”
I asked, “Are we just sorting this stuff and the cops come in here and use it to prove someone guilty. We’re doing their work?”
Scott added, “Or we find something that proves he was in some criminal conspiracy that got him killed?”
