Late Rain

by Lynn Kostoff

  A special task force had been set up devoted solely to working Stanley Tedros’s murder, and Ben was afraid any real progress would be lost in bureaucratic in-fighting and duplication of efforts chasing down leads that went nowhere but produced enough activity to make good copy in press conferences and news releases.

  The department had Buddy Tedros to thank for that.

  His announcement at the close of a memorial supper hosted by the chamber of commerce virtually guaranteed that the case would only go one direction. Buddy, while praising the force and its work, wanted to assist in the swift apprehension of his uncle’s murderer and put up a reward of ten thousand dollars for any information leading to an arrest and conviction.

  By the end of the next day, over one hundred and twenty tips had been logged in.

  Under the media’s eye, the mayor had immediately authorized overtime funding.

  Stanley had been dead for a week, and Ben and the rest working Patrol had been assigned split shifts, half spent on maintaining regular patrol routes and half given over to following up on tips from citizens. Today Ben had dutifully checked up on eight of them, among them, a man in the Willows Trailer Park who claimed that his seventy-eight-year-old wife was responsible for the killing. As evidence, he had Ben watch him count the steak knives in the silverware drawer, triumphantly stopping at nine in a set that originally came with ten. Ben had then talked to a woman who maintained the Vatican and its minions were behind Stanley’s murder and another who believed Stanley had been murdered by the CIA.

  The few leads that had possessed any degree of credibility had quickly bottomed out, each potential suspect having a solid alibi for the time in question.

  What the reward assured was more tips and somebody who would eventually take the fall for Stanley Tedros’s murder. You started turning over rocks, and sooner or later, you’d come across a loser who was mean or stupid enough to give you something to hang him with, whether he had anything to do with Tedros’s death or not.

  After paying, Ben put the groceries in the trunk of his car, then stopped for gas and headed back to Anne’s. He automatically slowed when he passed Stanley’s house, though there was nothing to see. The driveway was empty, the windows dark, and the front door still crisscrossed with yellow crime scene tape.

  Ben was bothered by how quickly the Homicide people had cleared Buddy Tedros and his wife. He knew it wouldn’t be the first time that a murderer or someone who’d hired a murderer offered up a reward to deflect attention elsewhere.

  He kept returning to Corrine Tedros at the crime scene, her backward glance and the expression that followed it. However small, the detail nagged.

  In fact, most everything about Stanley’s murder bothered him. Once Jack Carson had been cleared of any part in the murder except the witnessing of it, they were looking at a home invasion that wasn’t, the house broken into but nothing taken. Nobody could explain why all the clocks in the house were set at different times either. Stanley’s wallet had still been on his corpse and had held over three hundred dollars in cash. He’d been killed in the backyard and not the house. If the killer had been coming through the back door and spotted Stanley, why hadn’t he simply turned and run back through the house and out the front door? Stanley had been stabbed thirty-nine times when once or twice would have been more than sufficient. The killer had taken Stanley’s pocketwatch, of no real value except as a family keepsake. None of the neighbors noticed anything unusual until the police cruisers started showing up. The whole thing was one anomaly and dead-end after another.

  Ben pulled into the driveway and parked behind Anne’s car. It took four trips to unload the groceries.

  After the last one, he joined Anne in putting everything away. Jack was in the living room listening to the radio. The station was playing Big Band tunes. Ben recognized Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” He remembered his parents listening to it.

  The house itself as much as the music conspired to evoke those memories. Ben liked the feel of its rooms. There was something solid to the house, a fullness that invited you in, welcoming you without pretense to the lives that inhabited it. It was a house very much like the one Ben had grown up in.

  Anne abruptly stopped unpacking groceries. She had her back to Ben and looked down at the kitchen floor where the empty bags rustled and trembled under the movement of the ceiling fan.

  “Ben, this is overkill,” she said in a quiet and even voice.

  “It’s ok, really,” he said and rested his hand on her shoulder. He’d not been able to convince her that there were no strings to his financial help. He had the money, and he wanted to help. It was that simple. Anne continued to resist, not accepting his stepping in so much as finally resigning herself to a half-hearted stalemate.

  Ben felt Paige’s eyes on him and dropped his hand from Anne’s shoulder. Her eyes spooked him. Her gaze overrode her age, and her eyes managed to take everything in and give nothing back. Like her often overly precise speech, the eyes remained perpetually at odds with the rest of an otherwise skinny eleven-year-old girl.

  Ben asked her how school was going. It seemed a safe enough topic.

  “The extra-credit work is often very challenging and instructive,” Paige said. “My teachers do not assign extra-credit to the rest of the class. I’m smarter than they are.”

  Anne again paused in putting up the groceries. “We’ve talked about this, Paige. People can be smart in a lot of different ways.”

  “They can also be dumb in a lot of different ways,” Paige said, “and I know the difference.”

  “I’m glad you’re doing so well in all your subjects,” Ben said. He immediately felt like a fool. How much more lame of a statement could he possibly have come up with? He picked up the water filter he’d bought and moved over to the sink and began working on installing it.

  “Of course,” Paige said after a moment. “I’d be doing even better if I had a laptop. Our computer keeps freezing up. It’s ancient.”

  Anne slowly let out her breath. “I told you, Paige. Four months. It’s in layaway.”

  “In four months, school will be over. I need it now.” Paige sat back in the kitchen chair and ran through, once again, all the problems with the current family computer and then launched into an equally detailed account of all the new worlds she could conquer with a laptop.

  Ben finished tightening the filter. “How about,” he started, but Anne stepped over and said he’d already done more than enough.

  “Call it a loan instead,” Ben said.

  Anne shook her head no and began gathering the plastic grocery bags.

  Paige watched them from the kitchen table. “The tape recorder then,” she said. “Perhaps Grandfather will remember who murdered Mr. Tedros, and we can use the reward money for the laptop and everything else we need.”

  “Tape recorder?” Ben said

  “A voice-activated one, small enough to fit in Dad’s shirt pocket,” Anne said. “Buddy Tedros brought it by this afternoon.”

  “I see,” Ben said.

  Anne walked into the living room, and Ben glanced over at Paige and then joined Anne.

  Jack Carson sat in his recliner. Anne gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then extracted the tape recorder from his pocket and showed it to Ben.

  “Buddy thought it was worth a try,” she said. “There are still times when I feel like I’m getting through to Dad.”

  “How well do you know Buddy?”

  “We were in high school together when I moved here with Dad from Myrtle Beach,” Anne said. “Buddy was a couple years older than me and, well, moved in different circles, but he was always friendly.”

  Ben nodded and handed back the tape recorder.

  “I feel so bad for him,” Anne said. “Buddy, I mean. He’s taking his uncle’s death hard. They were very close. Mr. Tedros raised Buddy after his parents died.”

  Jack started to get up from the chair and then sat back down.

  Anne jerked her head
, frowning and looking over Ben’s shoulder toward the kitchen and Paige.

  “I heard that,” Anne said. “Don’t talk about your grandfather like he’s a walking lottery ticket, young lady.”

  Paige opened her math book. “But that’s what he is now,” she said. “You can’t pretend otherwise, Mother.” She paused, then added, “I heard you tell Mr. Decovic grandfather doesn’t even have life insurance.”

  Ben started to touch Anne’s shoulder and then dropped his hand. He couldn’t say for sure, but he thought that conversation had taken place two nights earlier behind a locked bedroom door after Anne and he had finished making love.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  JAMIE DIDN’T LIKE THINGS WITH FUR, so it was Croy Wendall’s job to get the rats. Croy had found all he needed at the landfill south of town, and he’d put the rats in two large cardboard boxes and taped the lids shut after punching holes in the top.

  The two boxes were in the back seat of Jamie’s car, and Jamie kept adjusting the volume on the radio as he drove because of the noise the rats made. Jamie told Croy all that scrabbling of claws on cardboard and the overlapping high-pitched squeals sounded like a windstorm from Hell. Croy just thought it sounded what it was, like two crowded boxes of rats.

  Other than that, Jamie was in a good mood, and Croy didn’t mind doing some crimes with him. It was a sunny March afternoon, and the world felt like a letter with your name on it.

  “Man, I’m already counting the cash,” Jamie said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “This job’s a walk.”

  Jamie liked money, but he was always running out of it. He’d already spent what Mr. Balen had paid him for smashing up Mr. Gramm’s Mustang, and the same thing had happened to Missy’s disability check for the month.

  Croy had heard them, Jamie and Missy, talking about where the money went and what they’d do with more, but it always ended up sounding as if the money spent itself while Jamie and Missy were out doing something else.

  Croy still had all the money for smashing up the Mustang as well as for killing Stanley Tedros, except for thirty-five dollars he spent when he went to Myrtle Beach’s Ripley’s Aquarium for a ticket to get inside and then for a souvenir T-shirt. The T-shirt was green and had Amphibians Rule! silkscreened on the front.

  The man on the radio had been talking about no rain and the watertable and all the fires popping up that had to be put out, and then a song came on, and Jamie reached for the dial. “Hey, good omen,” he said. “Hear that?

  The man on the radio said it was Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” from Bringing It All Back Home, and Jamie said that’s exactly what they were going to do to Mr. Sonny Gramm today. It was their job to bring it all back home.

  Dylan rhymed with killin’. Home rhymed with comb. Home didn’t rhyme with some, even though it looked like it should. Croy had to take things like that into consideration when he was building a rhyme to say in his head.

  Croy took out the pocketwatch he’d taken from Stanley Tedros and checked the time. He’d begun doing that a lot lately. The pocketwatch was confusing, just like trying to rhyme home with some, because there were black capital letters on its face instead of numbers.

  “Hey, where’d you get that?” Jamie asked, glancing over. “That’s a nice one.”

  “I found it,” Croy said and then immediately wished he hadn’t because it was not the kind of answer that made the right kind of fit in Jamie’s mind.

  “Found it, huh?” Jamie said and smiled. “Sure, Croy, I hear you.”

  Croy was glad that Jamie had taken some of the prescriptions the doctors gave Missy after her car wreck. Jamie liked the prescriptions almost as much as he liked money, and he didn’t ask as many questions or remember the answers after he swallowed some.

  Croy had to be careful because that’s what Mr. Balen told him. Mr. Balen would be very upset if he knew Croy was out doing crimes with Jamie because he wasn’t supposed to do anything that might draw the attention of the police, and Croy understood that, but Jamie had needed the rats and wouldn’t quit asking Croy to get them, and after he did, Jamie wanted him to come along for the job because he didn’t want to handle them then either, and Croy had said ok.

  But he was still going to be very careful. He just wished he’d asked Jamie what time it was instead of looking at the pocketwatch.

  Jamie drove them to Mr. Gramm’s house. It was almost twenty miles outside the city limits and had a long driveway lined with oyster shells and a lot of old pecan trees. The house was big and white with a wide front porch that had wicker rocking chairs on it.

  He and Jamie put on some gloves, and then Jamie broke in through the front door. He took a small piece of paper from his shirt pocket and stepped over and punched in some numbers, deactivating the alarm system. Mr. Balen had given him the numbers as well as the times the house would be empty.

  Croy carried in the two boxes of rats. He set them down in the middle of the living room.

  Jamie handed Croy a crowbar. He had one too.

  “Let’s do it,” Jamie said. He hopped up on a coffee table and swung at a big chandelier dangling above him.

  Croy started in too. After a while, he moved from the living room to the den.

  He worked fast, so fast that he watched things breaking in his head before he hit them.

  Wood, metal, glass. Glass, wood, metal. Everything made a sound when it broke.

  In the kitchen, Croy watched Jamie lever the door off the refrigerator and then carry an armload of frozen roasts out to the backyard and fling them into the swimming pool.

  Croy put a loaf of white bread in the microwave and turned it on High and peered through the little window in front until the outer wrapping puckered and melted.

  Jamie came back in and broke some pipes under the kitchen sink.

  Then they moved upstairs.

  They saved the rats for last. Croy opened one box in the bathroom and then shut the door behind him on the way out. The other box he opened in the kitchen. The small and medium rats followed the biggest one to the open face of the refrigerator and scrambled inside, nesting among the shelves. Croy watched one of them chew through the side of a milk carton, and then he walked back to the living room where Jamie was waiting.

  Jamie winked and reactivated the alarm system, and then they left.

  Croy took a nap on the ride back. Doing crimes always left him feeling sleepy afterwards. He dreamed about tadpoles and race cars. Jamie woke him up when they got home.

  Missy was wearing her neck brace and one of those little nightie things that she called a teddy. She handed Jamie a Schlitz, and Jamie went to call Mr. Balen. She gave Croy a soda, and then she tried to give him a hug, but Croy sat down on the couch. He could hear the pocketwatch ticking against his leg.

  Jamie came back and sat in his recliner and tipped his beer at Croy and said he was going to pick up the money for the job from Mr. Balen tomorrow morning.

  Missy brought some snacks in from the kitchen. There were little dots of mustard down the front of her teddy. Jamie turned on the television, and they ate the snacks and watched some shows.

  TWENTY-SIX

  BEN DECOVIC’S SUPERVISOR, La’Shawn Samuels, tapped him for desk duty on the Task Force when the wife of one of the regulars working full time on the Task Force went into early labor. Ben spent the shift evaluating and ranking the tips still coming in about the Tedros murder, as well as coding those tips that had proved dead-ends and those that warranted some follow-up, and then typing them into the computer system.

  In order to process the tips, Ben needed access to the murder book on the Tedros case, and Homicide had provided copies for the various support units of the Task Force. The murder book was a compendium of everything that had been gathered on the Tedros case so far, and Ben cross-referenced the tips against it.

  The case was going nowhere. The media people were growing restless, and their slant on the case was becoming more critical concerning how it was being handled. The mayor
was not happy. The city council was not happy. Neither was the tourist bureau. High-profile unsolved murder cases did not encourage moms and dads to book hotel reservations and spend money and frolic on the beach with the family.

  For many of the citizens, the reward Buddy Tedros had put up for information on the murder had come to be seen as another form of playing the state lottery. The tips proliferated, the citizens vetting long-and short-term grudges against family, friends, neighbors, lovers, coworkers, bosses, clergymen, and teachers. Conspiracies, terrestrial and otherwise, abounded. People smelled money and pointed their fingers. By the end of the shift, Ben figured the ratio of unreliable to reliable tips was running at six to one.

  On his way home, Ben decided to swing by North Shore and see if Anne Carson wanted him to pick up anything for supper.

  Conventional wisdom might dictate that you shouldn’t expect more from sex than pleasure or procreation, but Ben believed if you were lucky, you also found an earthborne grace. Flesh yielded more than flesh. Ben had found that unexpected grace with his wife, Diane, their passion and desire underwriting a future together, a life that carried its own sweet weight.

  Ben saw the outline of that passion and grace with Anne. They’d found each other and took off their clothes. They took off their clothes and found each other. In the dark, in Anne’s bedroom, they took and found, and in doing so, for a while, they gave each other what the world couldn’t and wouldn’t. Grace. If you found it, you didn’t question why. You lived it.