The End of the Pier

by Martha Grimes

  Zero hated beautiful women.

  • • •

  That week in March before Chad pounded on his door, Zero had answered none of his calls. His Porsche had been in place; Chad figured he must be in his apartment.

  It was dead dark. Zero had called out, “Enter.” Even coming from the relative darkness of a March dusk, Chad had to blink up outlines of sofa, bureau, and Zero sitting at a card table set before the window. He was looking out at nothing except a few dark trees that hadn’t yet come into leaf.

  “So, Chad.” Zero made it sound as if they’d been conversing here for hours and now came the summing-up.

  “Where the hell’ve you been?”

  “Sitting here, smoking. And drinking.” He lifted a bottle of Jameson Black Bush an inch from the table.

  “That all?” Chad made as much of a survey of the room as he could in that light. “No coke? Not even a little pot?”

  “I don’t do drugs. Never did. You know that.”

  True. And he didn’t sound drunk, either. Never had. In another room the telephone rang. Chad stared at him. “You’re not going to pick up?”

  “The machine will,” Zero said to the window.

  The ringing stopped. The faint, metallic sound of a voice ran onto the tape.

  “Eva again. She keeps calling. This is, oh, the eighth or ninth one.”

  Chad was angry. He himself had called a half-dozen times. All right, so it was Zero’s business if he wanted to hole up. But it’d been a week now, and this was his own mother. . . . “Why the fuck don’t you answer? Your mom is probably climbing the wall.”

  The silence and darkness deepened as Zero looked across at him. “My ‘mom’? Eva?” He smiled slightly. “What about your mom?”

  “What about her?”

  “What’s she like?”

  “I’ve told you.” Chad felt uncomfortable.

  Zero flicked ash from his cigarette with his little finger. “She reads poetry and works her ass off in a diner so you can flunk French and smoke pot.”

  The look he gave Chad, from smoky eyes under dark brows, was excoriating. Chad felt singed. And more than a little angry. “Who the hell are you to comment on the way I run my life? You don’t seem to be doing such a hot job of yours.” Immediately he felt sorry when Zero, who had taken no offense at, nor apparently any interest in, this mild attack, turned his face toward the watery windowpanes and the leafless trees, past which the snow fell slowly, illuminated by the globe of a street lamp. And he had, in that instant, an entirely different picture of Zero—Zero of the cashmere coats, the silk scarves, the Italian suits, the Porsche convertible. In that instant Chad knew that Zero had no attachment whatever to the things of this world.

  “Dude, listen . . .” Chad began.

  “Segue off, will you?” His tone was devoid of animosity, almost pleasant.

  But Chad didn’t. He sat down there at the table, his presence seemingly unfelt by Zero, and poured himself a shot of Jameson and looked around the room, wondering what to say. But the room revealed nothing, and Chad had, once again (for he had been here many times), the odd feeling that the separately and carefully chosen pieces of furniture did not bear the stamp of their owner.

  The room was not filled with the secondhand junk that you could find in most of the rooms around town, purchased quickly and by the roomful from one or another of the dark shops whose cranky owners would never go to the trouble or expense of fixing a broken spring or polishing up a surface and whose living depended on the coming and going, the arrival and departure, of the students. Chad had been in several of these shops with Zero and had felt how he would hate for his livelihood to be wedded to transience and impermanence.

  Zero, however, did not buy junk. He had an uncanny talent for ferreting out, amidst broken-springed, legless, stacked-up pieces, a true antique whose value seemed lost on the owners of the stores. In this way, Zero had acquired the Sheraton sideboard, inlaid with marquetry, above which hung a handsome mirror of beveled glass; the rosewood writing table; the Elizabethan chair of wood so dark it looked burned black, with a high ribbed back and strange gargoylelike finials at the end of its arms.

  Chad let his look rest like a patina of dust on each of a dozen pieces in turn, and he thought how like a small museum Zero’s room was, the furniture beautiful or bizarre, but unique. Yet for all of its uniqueness, the room spoke less of its occupant than would a hotel room where a traveler might set out on a bureau a framed picture. Zero seemed like that traveler without a picture, or a visitor who had come and gone and refused to leave his calling card.

  Perhaps because of the dark, or perhaps because Chad hadn’t wanted to see it, it wasn’t until after he’d made his survey of the room that Chad saw the white bandage. The cashmere sweater sleeve had drawn back with the movement of Zero’s hand, raised to smoke his cigarette, and the bandage seemed almost luminous, raised there like a little white flag against dark water.

  Chad’s throat felt raw, as if he’d been swimming against an icy current. It was hard to get the words out. “What’s wrong with your wrist?”

  “Hmmh?” Zero said dreamily. The glance he gave Chad was more a look turned inward.

  “Your wrist. What happened?”

  Zero looked down at his arm. “Burned it.” His smile was a little slow.

  The two of them sat there at the table by the window with the snow clumping now on the sill, skirting the trees, and mounding on the tops of the cars.

  The walk glittered in the cone of light streaming down from the street lamp, and Chad said, “Remember Shadowland?”

  • • •

  “Shadowland” was like a code name for that winter when, just before the Christmas break, students and faculty had been stopped from leaving because of a snowfall so dense and deep it barricaded most of the little town behind doors and windows. Chad and Zero had been on the verge of leaving when their flight was canceled, and they couldn’t have got to Chicago anyway to catch it because Zero’s Porsche was buried under a cloud of snow, a white mound in a string of white mounds by the curb.

  Oddly, neither of them was disappointed. They took their white imprisonment as an opportunity and managed to get to the grocery store and the liquor store before everything shut down.

  They had been passing the Paper Store when Zero caught sight of some party hats in the window and insisted on setting down the crate of champagne and going in to purchase the hats.

  Thus, they had spent five days drinking only Dom Perignon and eating Hebrew National salami sandwiches and caviar, and watching from Zero’s shadowy room, the snow plows beetling heavily along the street outside.

  They wore their party hats for five days. They made up personae to go with them. There were eight hats, and that gave them four characters each. Zero would sit in the Elizabethan chair wearing the flimsy gold crown and intone lines from King Lear; or Chad would put on the frog hat and search for the wizard; or beneath the tall blue cone, Zero would weep, taking on the character of the Princess of Shadowland. She was his favorite character, and her palace his favorite domain. The Princess had woken to find the king and queen and ladies-in-waiting all gone, vanished, until she recognized in the flitting shadows along the cold walls king, queen, ministers, and servants. It was the job of the Princess to turn the shadows human.

  There was an elephant hat and a lion hat; there was a hat with a picture of Elvis Presley and his guitar; a black cone with silver stars; and one with a silver Studebaker. (This one really killed Zero; he loved playing the Studebaker.) They had decided that these were leftover hats, extra hats from some job lot of hats for theme parties, and that the bespectacled woman who ran the Paper Store (and didn’t look like she’d ever been to a party in her life) had cheaply sold them together in one package. Probably, there’d originally been eight hats for Elvis fans; or a set of animal hats for a kiddies’ party; or even hats for a bunch of car buffs.

  In the stories that Chad and Zero concocted, each had to participate i
n the other’s tale, wearing the appropriate hat. Zero could continue Chad’s plot line, and Chad could add elements to Zero’s. There was some sort of loose idea that each would stump the other, but it never worked, because events simply became more fantastical. The lion was fixing flat tires; the frog was making salami sandwiches with caviar for the wizard. The only act to be mastered was a quick changing of hats, for if the frog spoke from under the Elvis hat, you had to pay a dollar. Or if you were at one moment the Studebaker and quickly changed into Elvis, the other person had then to shift his manner of speaking to you (for you wouldn’t talk to Elvis as you would to a Studebaker) or pay a dollar.

  Zero never had to pay a dollar, for he was able to slip in and out of roles as easily as water sliding through weeds or over pebbles, no sudden hat switch of Chad’s too difficult to make his way through or around. But his favorite character was always the Princess of Shadowland.

  On the day that Chad and Zero were able to leave for home, all of the characters were to appear together in one tale, or at least as together as Chad and Zero could bring them, hastily taking off and putting on hats, becoming one and becoming another and telling of their travels and travails. Zero said they would all live in Shadowland together, Elvis and the Princess, Lear and the frog, the wizard and the elephant, the Studebaker and the lion.

  They were, at the end, each supposed to solve the Princess’s dilemma; to come up with a way of turning the shadows back into king and queen and servants. But on that last day, they awoke from their champagne sleep to sunlight so bright and hard they had to turn away from the window. Outside, the Porsche was revealed in all of its geranium red, and people were walking to and fro with brightly wrapped packages along pavements from which nearly all traces of snow had melted.

  So, in order to get to Chicago and catch their flight, they had had to scramble, to shower and shave and change and toss their cases in the car.

  They never broke the spell; they never solved the puzzle; the palace remained filled with shadows, and the Princess drifted and sighed among them.

  • • •

  That was, at least, the way Chad saw her now, sitting again in Zero’s room, watching the snow fall. Saw her walk down colonnades, shadow-sunken. He watched Zero watching the unhurried fall of March snow and assumed he’d never heard the question.

  “Remember Shadowland?”

  And then he assumed Zero wasn’t going to answer, for the silence went on and on.

  At last, Zero turned from the window and said, “That fucking frog never could drive—he ran over Elvis and totaled the Studebaker.”

  • • •

  “What’s funny?” Eva Bond asked, with a smile.

  The shadowy room in Chad’s mind was replaced by this strangely lit one, and he realized he must have been sitting here for some moments without commenting.

  Chad shook his head quickly, trying to recall what Eva Bond had said just a moment ago. He remembered. “The police?”

  “The one who called me back said there was nothing wrong. Billy looked pale, he said, and tired, but he was dressed, and the apartment was perfectly neat. ‘No orgy, Mrs. Bond.’ The policeman laughed a little. He was very nice—very. ‘Your mother called, wants you to call her,’ I told him.” Ruefully, she looked at Chad. “That’s a wonderful reason for the police to bang on your door. ‘Your mother called.’ ” She sighed. Then she said to him, “I wonder why he wouldn’t answer my calls.”

  Was this it, then? Was he to be the messenger who bears the bad news, who recounts the sad tale of spoil, woe, and death, and gets hanged for his trouble? For reasons obscure to him, he grew angry. “Why don’t you ask Zero?”

  She stood up, turned to the French window, turned back. “Oh, Billy wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Why not, I wonder?”

  There was a silence. “I can hear that self-righteous anger in your voice. It comes, I suppose, from your twenty-year-old vision of what parents should be and do.” She smiled. “I find most children to be somewhat pious and preachy.”

  “Are we?” Chad was annoyed with this unjust assessment, made worse by her controlled little smile. He had to match her. Leveling his voice, he said: “Do you think that’s all we are—ingrates?” He couldn’t keep his voice down, spotlighted as he felt by her cool stare. “Don’t you know you can all make us feel guilty as hell? I wonder: why didn’t Zero let you know where he was for two weeks? And why did he have to put on that crazy display with Casey tonight?”

  Her eyes hadn’t left his face. “I thought it was rather good—idiotic, perhaps, a bit like his father’s poker game, but quite brilliant in its way. Billy likes attention.”

  “Likes attention? Can’t you see behind it?”

  She did not answer this directly but said, “We all had parents once.” She started to button up her coat, turning again to the window. “We were all, as the poet said, fucked up in our turn.” She paused. “I gave up long ago trying to change the course of things. Things just happen. You can’t alter their direction or ward them off, like holding up crosses in the face of the devil.” With her hand on the latch of the French window, she smiled. “You really think I don’t love him, don’t you?”

  When she reached the path she turned and gave him a little wave.

  He listened to the sound of her heels scraping on the gravel. Then he walked over to the desk and looked down at the large leather book she had been fingering. It was a photograph album of the sort that he had seen years ago and wondered at the patience of the organizer. The corners of each snapshot were secured by small black triangles.

  Most were of Zero; many were of Zero and Casey; a couple of dozen of Zero and his mother; fewer of his father; fewer still of the whole family. And they had been taken by many different cameras: Polaroid, thirty-five-millimeter, an old Instamatic.

  The album was worn, some of its pages loosened from the metal rings. It had been handled a great deal over the years. As he went to close it, a few loose pictures at the rear fell onto the floor. Chad looked down to see Eva Bond looking almost roguish in her flying gear. She was leaning against the single-engine plane, wearing a leather jacket, helmet, and white scarf. It looked like white silk. For a moment he merely stared, sightlessly, at the figure in the carpet against which they lay. As he reached to pick them up he had the strange sensation he was looking at two lives, lived long, long ago, now fallen into desuetude, irreclaimable. He thought of Zero, sitting in that dark room; he thought of Zero’s mother, standing a moment ago at the French window. He felt ill.

  At the sound of the car engine, Chad went to look up the little path she had walked towards a garage large enough to house a half-dozen cars. The lights of Maurice Brett’s BMW glowed. The car backed up, spat gravel as it accelerated, and nearly leapt towards the long driveway.

  What?

  He couldn’t believe it. Was Maurice Brett by way of being a penance?

  • • •

  Zero was standing at the window that overlooked the path his mother had just taken, looking down at the path with such concentration that Chad had to say his name twice.

  He looked around. Chad might have been someone he knew from the past but couldn’t quite place. His face was ashen. “Where’s she going?”

  “What? Who? What’re you talking about?”

  Zero was across the room in a flash and running out and down the stairs. Chad followed, saw him go into the huge living room, now empty of everything but flat champagne, half-drunk cocktails, sodden food. He heard the yelling. He heard the sound of glass breaking. Then he saw Casey, in the hall, in an old bathrobe and what looked like Zero’s leather slippers.

  “Go on back to bed,” said Chad.

  But she stared at him, twisting and twisting the cord of the bathrobe.

  When Chad said it again, she turned towards her room. But when he got to the bottom of the stairs, she was still standing there at the top, looking over the banister.

  • • •

  Will Bond was gazing up
at his son. He had a drink in his hand until Zero yanked it away and threw it against the wall. Whatever the father was trying to say was lost in the firing of glasses and bottles—against the patio door, against the huge mirror over the fireplace, against the hearth itself—and Zero was shouting, “You knew it, didn’t you? You could have stopped her. God damn it, that’s my mother!”

  Zero raced past Chad without even looking at him to the front door. Within fifteen seconds Chad heard the Porsche’s engine roar.

  Jesus, he was going to drive that car at a hundred per, if Chad knew him. The Porsche might even overtake them, despite the long head start. And could the Bonds’ Jaguar keep up with it?

  “What the hell’s going on?” asked Will Bond, who was swaying where he stood, not from vodka but from the assault on his senses.

  “Give me your car keys. Please.”

  Will Bond made no move, simply looked at Chad from blurred eyes.

  “Gimme the keys to the Jag, damn it!”

  In a stupor, Zero’s father reached in his pocket and tossed him the keys.

  The Jaguar careened down the drive. In five minutes he was coming up to the highway and had to decide: north or south? He made a sharp turn to the south and pressed down hard on the accelerator. In a few moments he discovered how powerful this car was.

  Chad heard a scuffling in the back, looked in the rearview mirror, and saw Casey climbing over into the front, still in the bathrobe.

  The Jag swerved, and they nearly rolled onto the soft shoulder. “Christ! You could get killed!”

  The shoulders of the robe moved indifferently. “So what? I’m going to die anyway.”

  FOUR

  How much of a head start had Zero got? Five, maybe ten minutes. But he was driving a Porsche; he could overtake the BMW. The BMW wouldn’t be speeding.

  The Porsche would overtake it, yes. And then what? Chad could visualize Zero moving up alongside and, like the state police, motioning them to pull over. And if they didn’t, the Porsche would keep the BMW in view, even if Zero had to tailgate. But the car would pull over. Chad hoped at least that Zero would not be fool enough to try and run them off the road.