Red Leaves

by Thomas H. Cook

  I pulled into Warren's driveway behind the battered truck he used in his work. Its open bed was scattered with paint cans and spattered drop cloths, and two equally spattered wooden ladders were strapped to its sideboards, loosely tied and drooping, as I would have expected from Warren. All his life he'd done things haphazardly, with little attention to detail, following a course as wobbly as his footsteps when he'd had too much to drink. Even so, I'd always had a brother's affection for him, overlooked his lassitude, his drinking, those parts of his life that were basically pathetic. But now a vile shadow covered him, my suspicions so intense, and in their intensity, so brutal, that I couldn't ignore them.

  And yet, for all that, I sat behind the wheel for a long time, sat in Warren's weedy driveway, unable to move, staring at the small bleak house he'd lived in for fifteen years. His door was closed, of course, but a sickly yellow light shone from the upstairs room he called his bachelor lair. He'd furnished the room with a motley assortment of furniture, along with a television, a computer, and a refrigerator just large enough to hold a few six packs of beer. He'd lit the place with lava lamps at one point, then a series of garish paper lanterns, but these had ultimately given way to the single uncovered ceiling light and the flickering of his computer screen.

  The image of Warren's dissolute body slumped in an overstuffed chair, his doughy face eerily lit by the computer screen sent a piercing melancholy through me. I saw the weary run of my brother's life, the corrosive nature of his most guarded secret, the unspeakable cravings that ceaselessly gnawed at him. One by one the photographs Detective Peak had found on Keith's computer surfaced in my mind, little girls in nature, naked, innocent, incapable of arousing anything but a child-man. But that was what Warren was, wasn't he? Stunted in every way a man can be stunted, dismal in his own sickly underdevelopment, a wretched, pitiable creature, hardly a man at all.

  But none of that, I decided, changed what he had done. He had come into my house, lived in my son's room, and while living there, had poisoned Keith's computer with pictures of naked little girls. And when Keith's computer was seized by the police, he'd kept the fact secret that such incriminating material might still be floating about in its unknowable circuitry. He had sat back silently, knowing full well that the pictures the police found would be laid at Keith's door.

  Suddenly, whatever pity I'd felt for Warren vanished, replaced by a stinging anger that he had been perfectly willing to feed my son, his own nephew, to the dogs.

  When he answered the door, he was clearly surprised to see me. His eyes were watery and red-rimmed, his cheeks flushed. There was an odd grogginess and imbalance in his posture, so that he seemed almost to teeter as he stood before me in the doorway.

  "Hey, Bro," he said softly. He lifted his hand, his finger tightening around a can of beer. "Want a drink?"

  "No, thanks."

  "What's up?"

  "I need to talk to you, Warren."

  A gray veil fell over his eyes. "The last time you had to talk to me, I didn't like it very much."

  "It's more serious this time," I said grimly. "Something the police found out. Something about you."

  I wanted the look in his eyes to be genuine surprise, because if I saw surprise, then I knew I would force myself to entertain the hope that it could all be explained, every detail of what Leo had told me as I stood, dumbstruck in his office. I wanted Warren to explain away the fact that school officials had reported him for staring out his window at the playground, to explain the pictures on Keith's computer, all of it miraculously a mistake. But I didn't see surprise. I saw resignation, a little boy who'd been caught at something disreputable. There was a hint of embarrassment, too, so that I thought he might actually come out with it without my asking, simply tell me to my face that he knew what I was talking about, and that, yes, it was true.

  But instead of an admission, he simply shrugged, stepped back into the foyer of his house and said, "Okay, come in."

  I followed him into the living room, where he switched on a standing lamp, plopped down on a cracked Naugahyde sofa, and took a quick sip of beer. "Sure you don't want one?" he asked.

  "I'm sure."

  He sucked in a long breath. "Okay, shoot," he said. "What's on your mind, Bro?"

  I sat down in the wooden rocker a few feet away, a relic from the grand house, probably an antique, but worthless now because Warren had taken no care to protect it from scrapes and cuts. "They found pictures on Keith's computer," I began.

  Warren lowered his gaze, all the proof I needed that he'd done exactly what I suspected.

  "They were of little girls," I added. "Naked little girls."

  Warren took a long pull on the beer, but held his gaze on the floor.

  "Keith says he never downloaded any pictures like that," I added. "He absolutely denies that they're his."

  Warren nodded heavily. "Okay."

  "The police checked on when the pictures were downloaded," I said though I had no real proof of this. To this bluff, I added another. "You can do that, you know. You can find out." I watched Warren for any sign that he might come clean. "The exact dates. Literally, to the minute."

  Warren shifted uneasily in his chair, but otherwise gave no hint that he could see where I was going with all this, how relentlessly I was closing in.

  "They were all downloaded a year ago, Warren," I said. I could not be sure of this, but in my dark world, a lie designed to expose other, darker lies seemed like a ray of light. "Last September." I looked at him pointedly. "You remember where you were last September?"

  Warren nodded.

  "You were staying in Keith's room," I told him. "You were using Keith's computer. No one else was using it."

  Warren lowered the beer to his lap, cradling it between his large flabby thighs. "Yeah," he said softly.

  I leaned back in the chair and waited.

  "Yeah, okay," Warren said.

  Again, I waited, but Warren simply took another sip of beer, then glanced over at me silently.

  "Warren," I said pointedly. "Those pictures are yours."

  One fat leg began to rock tensely.

  "Little girls," I said. "Naked little girls."

  The steady rock grew more intense and agitated.

  "And then I learned that some people at the school have complained about you," I said. "In the past, I mean. Complained about you watching the kids. Somebody reported that on the police hotline."

  "I just look out my window, that's all," he said. The leg rocked violently for a few more seconds then stopped abruptly. "I wouldn't hurt a little girl." He looked lost, but more than that, inwardly disheveled, a crumpled soul, but for all I knew this was no more than a ruse.

  "Then why do you watch them, Warren?" I demanded. "And why did you download those pictures?"

  Warren shrugged. "They were pretty, the pictures."

  A wave of exasperation swept over me. "They were little girls, for Christ's sake!" I cried. "Eight years old. And they were naked!"

  "They didn't have to be naked," Warren said weakly, his voice little more than a whine.

  "What are you talking about?" I barked. "They were naked, Warren."

  "But they didn't have to be, that's what I'm saying." He looked at me like a small child desperately trying to explain himself. "I mean, I don't ... need them to be naked."

  "Need?" I glared at him. "What exactly do you need, Warren?"

  "I just like to ... look at them," he whimpered.

  "Little girls?" I fired at him. "You need to look at little girls?" I bolted forward, my eyes like lasers. "Warren, did you know those pictures were on Keith's computer?"

  He shook his head violently. "I didn't. I swear I didn't. I tried to—"

  "Erase them, yes, I know." I interrupted. "The cops know it, too."

  "I can't help it, Eric."

  "Can't help what?"

  "You know, looking ... at..." He shook his head. "It's sick. I know it's sick, but I can't help it." He began to cry. "They're just so
... adorable."

  Adorable.

  The word leaped in me like a flame. "Adorable," I repeated, all but shaking with the vision my mind instantly created, Warren coming out of Jenny's room that final morning, his face wreathed in what I had taken for exhaustion, but now saw as a scalding shame. "You always said that about"—I saw my sister as she lay in her bed later that same afternoon, her eyes darting about frantically. She'd seemed desperate to tell me something, her lips fluttering in my ear, until suddenly they'd stopped and I'd glanced back toward the door and seen Warren standing there, head bowed, his hands deep in his pockets—"about Jenny."

  He saw it in my eyes, the searing accusation that had suddenly seized me.

  "Eric," he whispered. He seemed to come out of his stupor, all the day's accumulated drink abruptly draining from him. It was as if he'd been dipped in icy water, then jerked out of it to face a reality colder still. "You think...?"

  I wanted to howl no! no!, deny in the most passionate and conclusive terms that I had the slightest suspicion that he had ever harmed Jenny, that even his most desperate urge would have stopped at her bed, her helplessness, that as she lay dying, pale and wracked with suffering, he could not possibly have found her ... adorable.

  But the words wouldn't come, and so I only faced him silently.

  He stared at me a moment in frozen disbelief. Then he shook his head wearily and pointed to the door. "I'm done with you, Eric," he said. His wet eyes went dry as a desert waste. "I'm done with everything." He pointed to the door. "Go," he said, "just go."

  I knew nothing else to do. And so I rose, walked silently out of the room and back to my car. As I pulled out, I saw the light flash upstairs in Warren's bachelor lair and imagined him there alone, sunk in this new despair, wifeless, childless, motherless, fatherless, and now without a brother, too.

  I drove back home in a kind of daze, Meredith, Warren, Keith—all of them swirling around in my head like bits of paper in foaming water. I tried to position myself somehow, get a grip on what I knew and didn't know, the dreadful suspicions I could neither avoid nor address, since they were made of smoke and fog.

  I pulled in the driveway a few minutes later, got out of the car, swept past the branches of the Japanese maple and headed on down the walkway to the front door.

  Through the window, I saw Meredith clutching the phone. She seemed very nearly frantic, her eyes wide in an unmistakable look of alarm. I thought of the other time I'd come upon her abruptly, the way she'd blurted, "Talk to you later," and quickly snapped her cell phone shut and sunk it deep into the pocket of her robe. I had caught her again, I supposed, and, with that thought, fully expected her to hang up immediately when she heard me open the door.

  But when I opened the door, she rushed over to me, the phone trembling in her hand. "It's—Warren," she said. "He's drunk and"—she thrust the phone toward me almost violently—"Here," she blurted. "He's yours."

  I took the phone. "Warren?"

  There was no answer, but I could hear him breathing rapidly, like someone who'd just completed a long exhausting run.

  "Warren?" I said again.

  Silence.

  "Warren," I snapped. "Either talk to me or get the fuck off the phone."

  The silence continued briefly, then I heard him draw in a long slow breath.

  "Bro," he said softly, "your troubles are over."

  Then I heard the blast.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The ambulance and police had already arrived by the time I got to Wirren's house. The whole neighborhood strobed with flashing lights, and a yellow tape had been stretched across the driveway and along the borders of the yard.

  I had called 911 immediately, though even at that moment, I wasn't sure exactly what Warren had done. He'd been drunk, after all, and on such occasions in the past, he'd not been above making some melodramatic gesture in order to win me back. Once, as a boy, he'd taken a plunge off a high embankment after I'd yelled at him. He'd pulled similar stunts after my father had laced into him for one reason or another. It was a pitiful attempt to regain whatever he thought he'd lost in our affection, and it had never worked. Warren had never been one to learn from experience, however, and even as I watched the flashing lights that surrounded his house, I half expected to see him stagger out into the yard, arms spread in greeting, all bleary good cheer. Hey, Bro.

  But as I closed in on the house, I knew that this time, it was different. The front door was wide open, and Peak stood, backlit by the light of the foyer, scribbling in a small notebook.

  "Is he okay?" I asked as I came up to him.

  Peak sank the notebook into his jacket pocket. "He's dead," he told me. "I'm sorry."

  I didn't shudder at the news, and even now I can hardly recall exactly what I felt, save the curious realization that I would never see my brother alive again. A moment ago, he'd spoken to me. Now he was utterly and forever silent. If I thought or felt more than this at that moment, then those feelings were too vague and insubstantial to make a sustained impression.

  "Do you want to identify him?" Peak asked.

  "Yes."

  "Mind if I ask you a few questions first?"

  I shook my head. "I've gotten used to questions."

  He drew the notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. "You spoke to him just before he did it, right?"

  "I heard the shot."

  This did not faze Peak, and for a moment it struck me that he probably thought it a way of gaining the sympathy he was not inclined to offer.

  "What did he say?"

  "That my troubles were over," I answered.

  "What did he mean by that?"

  "That he wouldn't be a bother to me anymore, I guess."

  Peak looked at me doubtfully. "You don't think this had anything to do with Amy Giordano?"

  "Just the pictures you found on Keith's computer," I said. "They were his."

  "How do you know?"

  "Warren stayed at our house while he was recovering from a broken hip," I said. "He stayed in Keith's room."

  "That doesn't mean the pictures were his," Peak said.

  "I know they weren't Keith's."

  "How do you know?"

  I shrugged. "Why would Warren have done this if the pictures weren't his?"

  "Well, he might have thought we'd shift away from Keith," Peak said. "I mean, he all but confessed, didn't he?"

  "No, he didn't," I said. "Except that the pictures were his. But he said they weren't ... sexual. That he didn't use them that way."

  "Then why did he have them?"

  "He said he just thought the kids were ... adorable."

  Peak looked at me squarely. "Do you think he had anything to do with Amy Giordano being missing?"

  I gave the only answer I could be certain of. "I don't know."

  Peak looked surprised by my answer. "He was your brother. If he were capable of something like that, kidnapping a little girl, you'd know it, wouldn't you?"

  I thought of all the years I'd spent with Warren and realized that for all we'd shared, parents, the big house we'd lost together, the joint trajectories of our lives, for all that, I simply couldn't answer Peak's question, couldn't in the least be sure that I knew Warren at all, or knew any more than his glossy surfaces. "Can you ever know anyone?" I asked.

  Peak released a long frustrated breath and closed the notebook. "All right." He glanced inside the house, then back at me. "You ready to make the identification?"

  "Yes."

  Peak turned and led me up the stairs, then down the short corridor to Warren's room. At the door, he stepped aside. "Sorry," he murmured. "This is never easy."

  Warren had pulled a chair up to the window, facing out toward the elementary school's dimly lit playground. His head was slumped to the right, so that he looked as if he'd simply gone to sleep while staring out the window. It was only when I stepped around to face the chair that I saw the shattered mouth, the dead eyes.

  I don't know what I felt as I stared dow
n at him during the next few seconds. Perhaps I was simply numb, my tumorous suspicion now grown so large that it was pressing against other vital channels, blocking light and air,

  "Was that all he said?" Peak asked. "Just that your troubles were over?"

  I nodded.

  "How about before he spoke to you? Did he talk to anyone else in your family?"

  "You mean Keith, right?" I asked.

  "I mean anybody."

  "Well, he didn't talk to Keith. He talked to my wife briefly, but not to Keith."

  "What did he say to your wife?"

  "I don't know," I told him. "When I got home, she handed me the phone. Then Warren said that my troubles were over—nothing else. When I heard the shot, I called 911, then came directly here."

  "You came alone, I noticed."

  "Yes."

  Peak looked as if he felt sorry for me because I'd had to come to the scene of my brother's suicide alone, without the comfort of my wife and son.

  "Do you want to stay a little longer?" he asked finally.

  "No," I told him.

  I gave Warren a final glance, then followed Peak back down the stairs and out into the yard where we stood together in the misty light that swept out from the school playground. The air was completely still, the scattered leaves lying flat, like dead birds, in the unkempt yard.

  Peak looked over toward the playground, and I could see how troubled the sight of it made him, the fear he had that some other little girl was still in peril because whoever had taken Amy Giordano was still out there.

  "I read that leads get cold after a couple of weeks," I said.

  "Sometimes."

  "It's been two weeks."

  He nodded. "That's what Vince Giordano keeps telling me."

  "He wants his daughter back," I said. "I can understand that."

  Peak drew his gaze over to me. "We're testing the cigarettes. It takes a while to get the results."

  "And what if they were Keith's?"

  "It means he lied," Peak said. "He told Vince Giordano that he never left the house. He said he was inside the whole time."