Late Rain

by Lynn Kostoff

  “Nobody asks to be born, Officer Decovic,” she said. “No choice there.”

  “You have one now,” Ben said.

  Another laugh. “Indeed I do,” she said. She slowly lifted her right arm and opened her hand. Something hard bounced on the hood of the Mustang.

  “Satisfied?” she asked.

  “Steady now, Mrs. Tedros,” Ben said. “Turn around slowly.”

  “Call me Betsy,” she said.

  Shadows and splashes of moonlight.

  Corrine Tedros started to turn.

  The leaves shifting.

  Ben saw it then.

  A shoe, not the .38, on the hood of the car.

  Corrine swung and brought up her arm.

  Ben stepped to the left and fired.

  SIXTY

  CROY WENDALL HAD NEVER BEEN in a hospital before. He’d never been shot before either. When he wasn’t sleeping, he made lists in his head of other things he had never been. Mostly he slept though and had dreams of very small things.

  There were tubes running into and taped to his arms and wires running from his chest and stomach to machines that made sounds like hungry baby birds and flashed bright green numbers.

  At first, Croy assumed that when he left the hospital he could take all the tubes and wires and machines with him, and he’d had to hide his disappointment when a nurse explained that wasn’t the way it worked. He’d liked the idea that he’d be part-machine and part-Croy and that the machines would read what was going on inside him and turn it into numbers.

  The nurse also told him he was in Intensive Care and gave him pills to swallow. Croy kept track of their colors and then swallowed them and watched the machines to see what numbers the colors were.

  Mr. Balen came to see him every day. He asked Croy a lot of questions, but sometimes the sleepiness made it hard to remember if Croy had answered them.

  Mr. Balen had dark circles under his eyes, and his hands were jumpy.

  Today, Mr. Balen stopped the nurse from giving Croy the blue pill and the red pills and told her to bring them back later. The nurse didn’t like that, but she did it because Mr. Balen pointed his finger at her and said some lawyer words, and after she left, Mr. Balen had smiled at Croy and asked how he was doing.

  Croy said his tooth felt much better.

  Mr. Balen tapped one of the tubes running into Croy’s arm. “That’s because of the antibiotics,” he said. “When we get you out of here, I’ve got a dental appointment set up for you. We’ll get the tooth taken care of before you have to appear in court.”

  The two sides of Mr. Balen’s mustache did not quite match, and there were little scratches around his chin where he’d cut himself shaving. He had on a red and blue tie that Croy liked because they were the colors of the pills that the nurse would give him when she came back later.

  Mr. Balen leaned closer to the bed. “I need you to listen carefully, Croy. You’ll be leaving Intensive Care tomorrow or the day after, and when you do, there will be some policemen who want to talk to you. I’ve been able to keep them away so far, but that will change very soon. They will be asking you a lot of questions.”

  Mr. Balen paused and looked at Croy for a while. Then he asked, “Do you remember who you killed, Croy?”

  Croy frowned and said, “When?” Croy had done a lot of crimes. Not all of them were killing, but some of them were.

  “Since you first met Mrs. Tedros,” Mr. Balen said.

  “Three,” Croy said. “Mr. Stanley, Jamie, and Mr. Sonny.” Croy stopped. “Oh, and Missy. I forgot her. That makes four. I don’t know about the policewoman I threw into the window of the restaurant.”

  “Don’t worry about her,” Mr. Balen said. “Do you remember who shot you?”

  Croy told him Mrs. Tedros. Mr. Balen smiled and nodded his head twice.

  “I want you to do something for me, Croy,” he said. “I want you to forget everything else but those four dead people. Can you do that?”

  Croy nodded. Forgetting was easy.

  “The police will be asking you questions,” Mr. Balen said, “and this is what you need to tell them. You forget everything else, and you tell them what I’m going to tell you. Just that, ok? Nothing else.”

  Mr. Balen then talked about the crimes Croy had done.

  Croy listened hard because even though the four people he was supposed to remember were in what Mr. Balen said, they were not in it like it happened. Some of it was like it happened, but not all, and so Croy was listening as hard as he could because Mr. Balen was watching to see if he was.

  This is what Croy was supposed to tell the policemen: Corrine Tedros had been afraid that Stanley Tedros was going to turn her husband Buddy against her. Stanley couldn’t stand the idea that Buddy had married a woman who wasn’t Greek. He didn’t hide that feeling, and Stanley had told Corrine he was going to find a way to break up the marriage before the year was out. Stanley’s influenceover his nephew was very strong, and Corrine had every reason to believe Stanley would make good on his threat. She went to Sonny Gramm who she used to work for and asked Sonny for help. Sonny introduced her to Croy. Corrine met Croy and offered him money to kill Stanley. Croy did. Then Buddy Tedros put out the reward for information about Stanley’s murder. It took a while, but Croy’s friend Jamie figured out Croy was the one who killed Stanley, so Croy had to kill Jamie. Missy was in the house with Jamie, so Croy had to kill her too. Then Corrine Tedros called Croy again because she had another problem. Sonny Gramm was trying to blackmail her about hiring Croy to kill Stanley. Corrine Tedros was afraid again and hired Croy to kill Sonny Gramm. On the night Corrine was supposed to pay the blackmail money to Sonny Gramm, Croy went with her. He killed Sonny like Corrine had asked him to. Croy thought she was going to give him some money for shooting Sonny, but Corrine shot Croy instead. She left Croy for dead, and then the policeman shot Corrine when she was leaving Sonny Gramm’s place.

  Mr. Balen finished the story and looked at Croy.

  Croy said that Mr. Balen had forgotten to put Mr. LaVell and himself in what happened.

  Mr. Balen nodded. “Mr. LaVell and I are part of what you’re supposed to forget, Croy.”

  Croy said ok and then asked about Jamie and him smashing Mr. Sonny’s Mustang and putting the rats in his house.

  Mr. Balen said to make that not happen too. “There’s no real evidence to tie either of you to the crimes, and with Jamie dead, no one to claim otherwise.” Mr. Balen paused and tapped Croy’s arm. “Anybody asks, you tell them you weren’t there and don’t know anything about it.”

  “That policeman knows though,” Croy said.

  “But he can’t prove it,” Mr. Balen said, “and that makes it the same as if it didn’t happen.”

  Mr. Balen got Croy a glass of water with little pieces of ice in it, and then he made Croy tell the story like he had told it to Croy.

  “After I leave today,” Mr. Balen said, “I want you to tell that story to yourself over and over until you remember it all.”

  Croy said he could do that. It would be like saying the numbers and rhymes in his head.

  Mr. Balen winked and smiled. The two sides of his mustache fought with each other.

  Croy asked if the fire had burned up the cabin and the tree with the frogs. He could tell Mr. Balen didn’t know what he meant at first, but then he nodded and said that the fire was out now, but it had burned up the cabin.

  Mr. Balen looked at him for a long time after that. Then he folded his hands and said, “I remember how much you liked that cabin, and I have a surprise for you. I’m going to build you another cabin, Croy, if you tell the police what I told you to tell them. The new cabin will be yours, nobody else’s.”

  Croy told him he would like a new cabin. He asked if it could be painted orange inside.

  Mr. Balen said that would be no problem, and then he was quiet again.

  After a while, he said, “There’s one other thing, Croy, about telling the story like I told it to you. You killed some
people, so you’ll have to go to prison for a while. As your lawyer, it’ll be my job to make that stay as short as possible, but there’s no getting around the fact that you’ll be spending some time behind bars.”

  Mr. Balen went on to talk about mitigating and extenuating circumstances and how the story Croy would tell assigned primary motive to Mrs. Tedros and how if they caught the right judge, Mr. Balen could cook the case so that the sentencing would be bearable.

  Croy was thinking about the new cabin and the sound of the frogs in the river at twilight, and he didn’t say anything for a while.

  Mr. Balen’s hands got jumpy again.

  “You’re worried about prison,” Mr. Balen said. “That’s perfectly understandable, Croy.” He stopped to nod twice. “Mr. LaVell and I have discussed this too. He wants to do something for you, and he wanted to be here to tell you himself, but something came up, and he couldn’t make it, so he asked me to tell you for him.”

  Croy listened to Mr. Balen name some money for each year of his sentencing. Mr. Balen took a little brown book from the inside pocket of his coat and showed it to Croy. Croy’s name was in it and an account number next to his name. There were little squares and columns on the pages.

  “Each year,” Mr. Balen said, tapping the Deposit column. “Just like a payday.” He started nodding again. “If you think about it, Croy, prison will be just like having a job except you don’t have to get up and go to it every day. You’ll already be there.”

  “And you’ll build me a cabin too?” Croy asked.

  “Absolutely,” Mr. Balen said.

  Croy said ok.

  Mr. Balen tapped him on the arm again and smiled. The two sides of his mustache weren’t fighting anymore. He told Croy he’d be back to see him tomorrow, and if the police showed up in the meantime, Croy should tell them he wanted his lawyer present and then wait for him to get there before Croy started telling the story they’d told today.

  After Mr. Balen left, the nurse came in with Croy’s pills. She took his temperature and blood pressure and adjusted something on the bag connected to one of the tubes that ran into his arm.

  Then the nurse left, and Croy was by himself. He watched the bright green numbers on the machines and thought about the cabin and the river and about prison and about the hospital and about how all the smells inside it were layered, and then he thought about what he was supposed to forget, and did.

  SIXTY-ONE

  THE TELEVISION IN THE CORNER of the bar at Monroe’s was on, but the volume was turned down, and Ben Decovic worked on a cold draft and watched the mayor and chief of police mime their way through the press conference that had been scheduled for late in the day in the lobby of the new City-County Complex. The color on the set needed to be adjusted, the mayor’s suit wavering between a watery blue and a bright green and his face shading back and forth from an apoplectic red to a hamburger pink.

  Ben lowered his head. He watched himself shoot Corrine Tedros.

  Her blood had appeared black in the moonlight.

  A disable, that’s what he’d wanted to go for, a disable, but Corrine Tedros was forever turning and lifting her arm, and he was forever a second off in reaction time after he’d seen it was her shoe and not the gun she’d dropped on the hood of the Mustang, and in the end, which felt like a forever too, Ben had been reduced to pure reflex and placed the shots without thinking, one at the base of Corrine Tedros’s throat and the other in the center of her chest.

  Ben heard someone step up behind him.

  “Thought I recognized your car out front,” Ed Hatch said. He took the stool to Ben’s right, lifted two fingers, and signaled the bartender.

  “Monroe’s used to be a cop bar,” he said, “back when the department worked out of East Queensland. Wall to wall blue in here, end of every shift. Now, with headquarters at the Complex, they’ve shifted base of operations to Schmidt’s over on Heritage.”

  The bartender brought over two beers. Hatch gave him a ten and waved away the change.

  They watched the mayor shake hands with the chief of police. “Heard you were officially cleared,” Hatch said.

  “The fires,” Ben said. An in-house review had determined that his leaving the patrol sector before permission was granted and the subsequent shooting of Corrine Tedros were warranted by the circumstances, the proliferation of wildfires in the region and the danger they’d posed to the residents causing the delays in backup and communication.

  “Heard the prosecuting attorney paid you a visit today,” Hatch said.

  Ben looked over. Hatch wore the same brown off-the-rack suit Ben had seen him in every other time. Add the buzz cut and black-framed glasses, and Hatch looked more like central casting’s idea of a middle school science teacher than a homicide detective.

  “You,” Ben said. “I wondered who’d slipped me a copy of Croy Wendall’s confession.”

  Hatch sipped his beer. When he set it back down and turned his head, the press conference was reflected in miniature on each lens of his glasses.

  “The whole confession was cooked,” Ben said. “It’s one long lie.”

  Hatch loosened his tie and looked back at the screen.

  Croy Wendall’s confession had been a simple, uncluttered line of motive. Corrine Tedros, its alpha and omega. Everything had been laid off on her. There’d been no mention of Raychard Balen or Wayne LaVell in the entire transcript.

  Everything fit except the truth.

  “What did the PA say when he met with you?” Hatch said.

  “What do you think? His office is ready to move on an indictment. It didn’t bother him that all the other principals,” Ben said and ticked them off on his fingers, “Corrine Tedros, Sonny Gramm, Jamison Blake, and Missy Newton, are all dead and can’t contest any of the details in Wendall’s account.”

  “Nothing to connect the vandalism at the Palace and Gramm’s house?” Hatch said.

  Ben shook his head. “Croy Wendall was the one who attacked me in the parking lot. I know it. The PA, though, had the file and kept pointing out that the two men were wearing masks.”

  Ben picked up his beer and then set it down again. “Even my gun,” he said.

  According to Croy Wendall, Jamison Blake had bought it on the street. Neither Blake or Wendall had been on or near the premises of the Passion Palace on the night Ben had it taken from him.

  Any ties to Raychard Balen and Wayne LaVell squeezing Sonny Gramm had disappeared. Ben had not been able to get the prosecuting attorney to look beyond Croy Wendall’s statement.

  “An uncontested lay-up,” Ben said. “That’s what he called the case. Wendall is going to plead out a straight guilty.”

  Ed Hatch frowned, his mouth set as if he’d taken a bite of something disagreeable. “I was hoping to get another shot at Wendall,” he said.

  “The guy’s lying,” Ben said. “He left out Balen and LaVell. They were part of the mix from the beginning. No way they’re clean.”

  “One loose thread,” Hatch said. “I thought maybe you’d spot something in the transcript I could use.”

  Ben scratched his cheek. “I wish there’d been. Believe me, I looked.”

  “I can’t get his voice out of my head,” Hatch said. “I hit Wendall hard, came at him from every direction I could think of, but he never tripped up.” Hatch paused and shifted his beer on the bartop. “That flat monotone. An answering-machine voice. Wendall giving me the confession back word for word each time. Never deviating on a detail. It spooked me. I mean, I’ve handled enough suspects who’ve been coached by their lawyers or who are arrogant enough to believe they’re fully alibied-out. They’ll usually trip up sooner or later if you keep going at them. They’ll give you something to work with. Not Wendall though. He’s a whole new species.”

  Ben looked up at the television. The press conference was ending. The mayor was smiling.

  “Time to mow the lawn,” Hatch said. He picked up his beer and checked its level.

  “Sometimes t
hat’s all you can do,” he said. “You go home and mow the lawn. Then you eat supper with the wife and kids, maybe watch a little television afterwards. The next day you get up and go back to work.”

  The bartender walked over. “I’m going to turn it up, ok? Frank wants to hear this.” He nodded toward a guy in his late fifties sitting further down the bar. The guy waved a thanks in Ben and Hatch’s direction.

  An Inside Look segment on the Tedros case started.

  The anchor’s lead had barely begun before Ben turned to Hatch and said, “It appears our honorable mayor decided to selectively leak details from the press conference early to some of his favorite affiliates.”

  “He knows he has to answer to the tourist bureau,” Hatch said. “They’re the ones with the behind-the-scenes clout come reelection time.”

  Ben tipped his beer toward the television screen. “Well, that ought to please them.” The take on Stanley Tedros’s murder would not threaten tourists or the town’s image. There was nothing in it to keep anyone from booking a hotel reservation or buying into a vacation package.

  Inside Look had played up and off the ethnicity angle, turning the events behind Croy Wendall’s confession into an updated Greek tragedy, Stanley Tedros, the soft-drink king and scion, reigning as a rich and powerful patriarch over a troubled family; Corrine Tedros, the beautiful and scheming woman with the dark past and wife of the heir apparent; Buddy Tedros, the prince of a man blinded by his love for both his wife and uncle; Croy Wendall, the unwitting agent and arm in the murder which eventually opened and emptied the bag of tricks that fate, luck, or the universe held over us all.

  In the end, justice was not so much served as served up.

  The segment ended and was replaced by a commercial for hand soap and later an update on the three wildfires. They were now contained, but the estimate was still out on property damage. The anchor added that a suspect had been taken into custody.

  Hatch cleared his throat.

  The guy down the bar said, “Jesus. What kind of parents would do that?” He pointed to the screen. “Hanging a moniker like that on their own kid. Stuff like that’s not funny.”

  Hatch cleared his throat again and rapped the bartop in front of Ben.