A Killer's Kiss

by William Lashner

  “Against his will,” said his wife, sitting demurely beside him on the sofa. “But the team didn’t have a very good season that fall.”

  “We stunk,” said Mayhew.

  “And there was rumbling about maybe getting a new coach.”

  “Like Vince Lombardi would have made a difference. We were small but slow. Marshall, Lee-Davis—they all ran right over us.”

  “And so when they asked him to take on the play, he thought he had no choice but to step up.”

  “I wanted it to be the best damn production Ashland had ever seen,” said Mayhew. “That’s just the way I am. And we had a chance. Right away I saw it. In football one great player can make a team, and it’s the same in the theater. And we had the one great player. The Crenshaw girl. When she was onstage, you couldn’t take your eyes off her. It was just a matter of finding the chemistry. I wanted Sherman, my quarterback, to be Romeo. He was handsome enough, but there wasn’t an ounce of chemistry between our Juliet and Sherman. The truth was, Sherman was an oaf, on and off the field. But we found our chemistry, yes we did. With Tipton.”

  “Terrence Tipton,” I said.

  “That’s right. I didn’t like him much, one of those sensitive types, you know what I mean. He was too good for the school or the town. Let his hair grow and pouted all the time. Like he knew something the rest of us didn’t. But when he read with her, there were sparks. Undeniable. So I made a mistake and I cast him.”

  “In the rehearsals they were quite wonderful,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “The rest of the show, well, they were kids. Do you remember Sherman as Mercutio?”

  “It was like the words turned to fudge in his mouth.”

  “With the rest you could see the seams. But whenever Romeo and Juliet were onstage, there was magic. It was so touching. Young love.”

  “That was the problem,” said Mayhew. “The fools fell in love. And that always screws up everything.”

  “Jeremiah.”

  He reached out a hand to his wife, gently cupped the back of her neck. “Almost everything,” he said.

  “So what went wrong?” I asked again.

  “They did.”

  “For a while you could see the sparks,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “And then something happened, and they could barely look at each other. Something had gone drastically wrong, and it showed. In every gesture, every word.”

  “I took them aside, both of them, and told them to suck it up. To make it work. It’s called acting, I told them. For the good of the play, they had to make it work.”

  “They tried,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “Things seemed to get better, until opening night.”

  “Worst night of my life,” said Mr. Mayhew.

  “Oh, Jeremiah.”

  “It was. If I had to do another, it would have killed me. Thankfully, Mrs. Pincer returned in the fall, and I went back to teaching health. But that wasn’t the end of it.”

  “He still blames the play,” said Mrs. Mayhew.

  “Course I do. First comes the losing season, then that disaster of a play, and next thing you know, they hire a new football coach up from North Carolina and I’m coaching weight football at the junior-high level.”

  “Romeo and Juliet,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “I suppose there’s a reason it’s a tragedy.”

  “Left with nothing but to teach string beans how to block. Damn,” said Mr. Mayhew. “I always hated that play.”

  “God, it was funny,” said Frankie Tipton. “I didn’t want to go, actually. It was our mom made me, but I’m glad she did. Funniest thing I ever saw. I still wake up in the middle of the night laughing about it.”

  Frankie Tipton was a hard-lived thirty-five, sitting on a lawn chair atop a cement slab behind his house. He wore jeans and boots, a black T-shirt, a trucker’s hat with a logo that matched the beer in his right hand. He lifted the can, sucked down half, showed me the label. “You want?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Too early for your kind, I suppose.” I was sitting on a chair beside him. We were both facing the long weeds in his backyard. He turned his head and eyed my suit. “Where’d you say you was from?”

  “I didn’t, but I’m from Philadelphia.”

  “Ah, sure you are. What kind of trouble is he in now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s convenient, because I don’t care.”

  He took a sip of his beer, looked at it, took a longer draft.

  “I never liked the son of a bitch,” he said. “Even when he was a baby. He was sick when he was born, the doctors were running back and forth, Mom was crying on and on. He was grabbing all the attention even then. I could tell right there he was trouble. And I was right, wasn’t I? He killed our mother. The worrying about him after he left, the asking for money. And she always gave it, like a fool. I told her it wouldn’t do no good, but she couldn’t help herself. Every time the phone rang, she was afraid to answer it. Thought it would have been word that he was dead. Too bad it wasn’t.”

  “Was this your mom’s house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “It’s a shithole, but I’ve been fixing it up some, when I can. Putting in a new bathroom upstairs. The kitchen needs something, too.”

  “You might want to mow the lawn.”

  “Yeah, as soon as I fix the mower, which I got to tell you is not next on my list.”

  “So tell me about the play.”

  “Well, it all come about because he was in love, he said. Love. It was that skinny little dark-haired girl in the play he was all mooning over. Writing poetry, singing sad songs with that guitar. Love. Like that was ever going anywhere, the way he was. But first things was working out and then they wasn’t. He never said what had happened, but it wasn’t no mystery. And the story was out about the girl and that quarterback and what they was doing backstage.”

  “Sherman?”

  “That’s the one. Hell, it wasn’t going be the last time he lost a girl, I tell you that. But still, the sadness, it was coming off him in waves. Far as I was concerned, she didn’t have tits enough to get so cut up over, but that might have been the thing he liked, the way he was.”

  “You said that twice,” I said.

  “What?”

  “‘The way he was.’ What do you mean, the way he was?”

  He eyed me a bit. “That’s family business, isn’t it? And no damn business of yours.”

  “Okay. You were telling about the funny play.”

  “Right. So the day of the play, he comes to me and tells me he can’t do it. I didn’t think nothing of it, you know, it was just a stupid play, but Mom was so looking forward to it. So I told him, hell, just drink a few beers and it won’t be no problem. I set him up with a couple six-packs and that was that. I done my brotherly duty.

  “So it’s showtime, right, and I’m sitting there next to my mom, and he comes on, and there’s all this applause, and he starts talking this nonsense, and I got to tell you, he didn’t look so good. He didn’t look so good at all. Like they had put green makeup on him. And then, not too far in, there’s the dark-haired girl on this balcony. She’s in this pretty blue dress, and there’s a ladder leading to it. So she’s talking to, like, no one, and he’s talking from behind this bush, and then he starts climbing the ladder. But not so good. Halfway up, his foot slips, and he bangs his head, and everyone starts laughing. Like it’s part of the play. Though it’s not, I can tell. But he keeps climbing. And she says something, something about stumbling, and everyone laughs again. And he says something about love and wings or something stupid like that, and they lean forward to kiss. And they do. And then he stops. And pulls back and wavers. Like a thin stalk in the wind. And then he leans forward over the balcony, and the son of a bitch, he throws up, on her, yes he does, pukes right onto her fancy blue dress.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, I told you it was funny. Best play I ever saw. And she can’t help herself—what’s she going to do—she pushes him a
way. And he loses his balance, and his arms are swinging in these crazy big circles, and next thing you know, he’s falling backward. In the air. Falling, falling with a thud right onto that fake bush.

  “Everyone is just stunned for a bit, and then they all start laughing again. And I’m laughing, laughing so hard the tears are coming. And next thing you know, he’s up and jumping off the stage and running right down the middle and out of the auditorium. And then the curtain, it just drops, right on top of some people who come out onstage to make sure he’s all right. And that was the play.”

  “Did they stop it?”

  “No, they finished it, with that stupid football coach reading out of the book with his shiny bald head while the Juliet said her lines with a T-shirt over her dress. From what I hear, first there was laughter, then silence, and then the place emptied out. But I didn’t see it, because when Terry left, I went out with my mom to try to find him.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sure. Right here. Sitting outside, staring. Like a zombie. He wouldn’t say a thing. Mom tried to talk to him and gave up, went inside. I just laughed and told him to forget about it, that it was nothing to get shook about. And then I lit up a bone and handed it to him.”

  “He take it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What happened afterward?”

  “Nothing, really, he just kept smoking. And not only that night. It was every night. But he was mainly stealing from my stash, so I had to cut him off. Told him to buy his own, which he did. I even set him up with Rupert, who’d been selling to me. So he was taken care of. And he actually got back together with that girl for a while, believe it or not. But it didn’t stop him smoking, or from drifting away. He would disappear for a few days, and then a few weeks, and then he disappeared altogether. Just up and left. Never did finish school. A little later the calls started coming, from all over, California, Arizona, all the time hitting Mom up for money.”

  “And now he’s in Philly.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Pretty much. You got an address?”

  “Something someplace, I don’t know. He stopped calling after Mom died, but he sends me a card every year on the anniversary of her death.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. And then I send him a check.”

  “I bet you do. Can you get that address for me?”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe your brother won the lottery and I’m trying to find him.”

  There was a chuckle. “That loser?”

  “Or maybe I might just head over to the county courthouse and check out your mother’s will. See if half this house belongs to Terrence. We can have the sheriff sell the thing right from under you, split the proceeds. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “An only child,” I said, “and suddenly damn glad for it. Let’s go get that address, shall we?”

  34

  The address Frankie Tipton gave me was about 250 miles north of Ashland, Virginia, in a ragged part of industrial Philadelphia called Kensington. I could have given the address to the police, left it to them to roust Terry and ask him the questions, but the task would then have ended in Sims’s hands, and I held no confidence that he wouldn’t scare off Terry like he’d scared off Jamison. Whatever angle Sims was pursuing, it wasn’t designed to be beneficial to my health. So no, this I would have to do myself. I figured I’d slip into the house, grab hold of Terry, shake out the truth, and bring him and it to my pal Detective McDeiss, along with any evidence I could grab. But as soon as I got a gander of the row house that sat at the address, I revised my plan.

  “Squatters,” said Antoine from the driver’s seat of his Camaro.

  We had made the drive in a straight shot, and now, in the ill-lit darkness of Kensington, we could see a swarm gathered on the front stoop of the house as we passed it slowly.

  “Does that mean it’s abandoned?” I said.

  “It mean anything, mon,” said Antoine. “Maybe the owner’s renting space cheap for a few dollar here and there. Or maybe he being generous, who knows? But I can tell you just by looking, there be a crowd inside.”

  “Park here,” I said.

  “What you doing, bo?” said Derek.

  “I’m going to find out what’s going on.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve got a source.”

  About fifty yards down from the house, on the opposite side of the street, an old man sat flat-footed in a lawn chair set up on the sidewalk. He wasn’t smoking a cigar or drinking a beer or discussing the state of the union. He was simply sitting, still as the earth, as if he had been planted in that very spot a century ago and grew up and old with the neighborhood, sitting there, losing teeth as the block lost buildings, letting time wash over him. The perfect spy. In Philadelphia there’s one on every corner. I knelt down beside him. He didn’t turn his head a degree.

  “You see that house over there?” I said. “The one with all the folks milling about in front?”

  “I see it.”

  “You know who lives there?”

  “A bunch of fools.”

  “You know their names?”

  “Don’t want to know their names.”

  “Who owns it, do you know that?”

  “The king of fools.”

  “A white guy, dark hair, about my age?”

  “He don’t dress as good.”

  “You like the way I’m dressed?”

  “Except for that tie.”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

  “And the shoes ain’t nothing to write home about neither.”

  “What are all these other people doing there at that house?”

  “They do errands, keep intruders out. But mostly he lets them stay to up and rile the block.”

  “Tough crowd?”

  “They too drugged out to be tough. Back in the day, I would have cleared them out myself with but a baseball bat.”

  “I bet you would have. Ever see a woman show up, dark hair, well dressed?”

  “Pretty?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I seen her. Seeing her always cheered up my day.”

  “How often she show up?”

  “Once or twice a week.”

  “Have you seen her in the last couple of days?”

  “Come to think of it, no.”

  “You see anyone peculiar show up instead of her?”

  “You mean other than you?”

  “Yes, other than me.”

  “Bow tie.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Little man, near bald, in a black Volvo.”

  “When?”

  “Couple times.”

  “How long you been sitting out here?”

  “How long you been breathing?”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Good luck to you, young man.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I stood up, patted the old man on the shoulder, went back to the Camaro, where Derek and Antoine leaned against the hood, their arms crossed.

  “What’s the word, bo?” said Derek.

  I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t like the crowd of squatters we’d have to wade through to get inside, I didn’t trust that things wouldn’t spiral way out of control. But then I didn’t like the crowd behind me either, Trocek and Swift and Sims and Hanratty, a vicious gang of cutthroats and cops that all seemed to be aiming their malevolence at me.

  “The word is,” I said, “that we’re going in.”

  “Then let’s do it,” said Antoine.

  I took the lead, Antoine and Derek walking on either side of me. I was like a Piper Cub with an undersize fighter plane off one wing and a Boeing 757 off the other. On the porch of the house, five or six of the squatters were lounging on a bench or on the stoop, eyeing us suspiciously as we made our approach. Let’s just say the welcome mat wasn’t being cleaned and pressed for our visit.

  “W
hat you want here?” said a woman sitting closest to the door. She had short hair and a wide jaw, and her arms were crossed.

  “We came to see the owner,” I said.

  “You from the city?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re not here about them back taxes? He been getting letters.”

  “No, we’re not from the city.”

  “You cops, then?”

  “Not that either,” I said. “I’m simply a friend of a friend. And these are my friends. We came to say hello.”

  “In a suit?”

  “I like to play it formal. My name’s Victor Carl.”

  “I got to check with Romeo afore I let you in.”

  “Romeo, huh? Is that what he’s calling himself? That’s almost sweet. Well, then, by all means check with Romeo. Tell him Victor Carl is here to see him. I’m sure Romeo will think it’s time we met at last.”

  The woman eyed us for a moment longer and then pushed herself off of the bench, pulled open the screen door, and slipped into the house. A moment later she came back through the doorway, the screen door slamming behind her.

  “Romeo’ll be out in a minute,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Maybe you should wait on that,” she said before sitting down again.

  When the screen door opened once more, standing there wasn’t a dissolute drug addict with curly dark locks and a pout as I expected. Instead it was a giant of a man, with no neck and a shirt that hung over his belly like a curtain. A man to make Antoine look small.

  “Where’s Romeo?” I said.

  “I’m Romeo,” said the man, his voice deep enough to send wild dogs scurrying.

  “You got to be kidding,” I said.

  “Time to go,” said Romeo.

  “I’m here to see Terry,” I said.

  “That too bad,” said Romeo, “’cause Terry told me he don’t want to see no one.”

  “But he’ll want to see Victor here,” said Derek. “We’ve traveled five hundred miles to find him. Why don’t you let us in there, Romeo? We’re just a friendly little crew. No reason to make a fuss about this.”