Damnation Street wab-3

by Andrew Klavan

  Wary of nosy neighbors, he approached the place carrying a clipboard as if he were going to read a meter or take a survey or something. He had a set of burglar picks in the pocket of his tweed jacket, but it turned out he didn't need them. The door was unlocked. He walked right in.

  The massive man had to step gingerly across the living room. The Bremer boy's superheroes and the girl's dolls littered the tan carpeting. Weiss reached the stairs. He went up to the second floor. He went down a hall and found Bremer's study, his computer, his cabinets. He turned the computer on.

  The computer had no security system. The passwords were stored right on the machine. Weiss went through Bremer's word-processing files and e-mails. Bremer served on the church vestry and worked on a committee for the local United Way. His son had had a problem with a bully at school. His wife had had a breast cancer scare but was all right. The real estate business was on the upswing. There were other things, this and that. But nothing about Julie Wyant. Nothing about the Shadowman.

  Weiss blew out a long, weary breath. He turned his attention to the desk drawers. He found manila folders full of credit card statements. He laid them on the desk and paged through them. Here finally, there was one small item that caught his attention: an American Express charge for a night at a Super 8 Motel on the edge of town. The charge had been made one week ago. Checking back, he found another Super 8 charge two months before. When he dug up the records for another two months back, there was the Super 8 again.

  There was an oak close by the study window. A goldfinch perched on one of its naked twigs. Weiss glanced up from the pages in his hand when he heard the bird's triple chirp and trill. It was a pretty yellow bird, a cheerful sight. His gaze rested on it absently and then wandered back to the room.

  He was sitting in the cheap leatherette swivel chair behind Bremer's desk. The desk was a battered crescent, the walnut veneer chipped away in places to show the plywood underneath. The surface of the desk was crowded with framed snapshots of Mrs. Bremer and the two children. Left and right of the desk, there were scribbled crayon drawings thumbtacked to the wall paneling. Weiss's gaze lingered on one of them: four stick figures-Mommy, Daddy, sister, brother-standing under a rainbow hand in hand.

  The picture made Weiss feel bad: lonesome and low-down. The whole place made him feel like that. He had no business being here. The empty house around him felt like a stage in a closed theater when the play's over and the actors and the audience are gone. It was charged with traces of an intimate energy that belonged to the people who had been here and left. It was not meant for him. For him, the place was hollow, echoing, dead. He would've liked a family like Bremer had. He was the family type. He would've liked a wife who leaned against the kitchen counter and drank coffee and chatted, children who gabbled at him. But he was never any good with women. He thought too much of them, in spite of everything he'd seen. He'd even had a wife once-a poisonous snake of a woman, the whole thing had been a disaster-and still he held on to his high romantic notions. Somehow that made the simple things impossible for him. The only women he had these days were whores.

  He went on gazing at the crayon drawing without really seeing it. He held the pages of the Amex statements drooping from the fingers of one hand. Why did a man get a room in a Super 8 in his own hometown, he wondered distantly. For an affair maybe, but there were plenty of innocent explanations too. It might've been for a visiting friend or relative, or for a night away from the kids with his wife, or for a business associate. Weiss moved his hand up and down as if weighing the pages. It probably had nothing to do with Julie Wyant. But it stuck with him, all the same.

  A clock chimed somewhere downstairs, bringing him back to himself. The Bremer family would be home soon. Weiss put the pages back in their folders, filed them away. Switched off the computer. Grunted out of the chair and lumbered out of the study. Trudged downstairs. He stepped out of the house into the cool morning. He left the door unlocked just as he'd found it.

  He drove slowly through the neighborhood, past sidewalks overshadowed by oak trees and the occasional yellowing sycamore, past low houses on half-acre lawns. He came to the Bremers' church on the corner of a broad thoroughfare. There was a grassy median in the middle of the road, early traffic whizzing by on either side. He parked outside the church and waited.

  The church had a square tower of brown brick with narrow arched windows and battlements on top like a castle. With the car window down, Weiss could hear the people singing hymns inside. Now and then, he checked the rearview mirror, looked right and left out through the windows, checking to see if he could spot the assassin he knew was watching him, trailing him. There was nothing. The whizzing traffic. An old couple, bent-backed, arm in arm, walking away from him on the sidewalk. A woman on the median waiting for a bus.

  Weiss turned back to the church. He sighed and waited. He still felt sordid and depressed. He was on the wrong trail. Wrong guy. Wrong place. But he kept thinking about the charges for the Super 8 Motel. That held him.

  The last hymn ended. The minister came out of the church and stood in the entryway. Then the people came out, shaking his hand as they left. There was Bremer with his wife and children in the exiting crowd. The children wore paper crowns they must've made in Sunday school. Bremer and the minister shook hands and smiled and spoke together a moment. Then Bremer took his wife's hand. The children ran laughing in front of them toward their car, a red Buick SUV Mrs. Bremer belted them inside the car, and her husband held the passenger door open for her. Then he went around to the driver's side. He got in and the SUV drove off.

  By now Weiss had to take a piss pretty badly. He hated following people.

  He started up the Taurus and went after the Bremers.

  15.

  Bremer dropped his family off at the house. Then he drove on alone to his real estate office, a glass-fronted box between a diner and an ice-cream parlor on Main Street. Weiss waited outside in one of the slanted parking spaces out front. He could see Bremer moving around inside through the window. Most of the rest of the shops were closed, but people came in and out of the diner as the little town woke up. Craggy-faced men in woolen plaids and middle-aged women with their hair dyed blond. They all seemed to know each other, greet each other as they passed in the diner doorway. It was not like the city.

  Half an hour of that and Bremer was on the road again with Weiss behind him. They drove to a house on a street called Arcadia. It was a long ranch faced with white shingles. It was out by the edge of town, on the edge of the desert, the last empty home in a new development. Bremer hauled an A-frame sign from his SUV and placed it out front. The A-frame sign said: OPEN HOUSE. ANDREW BREMER, HANNOCK HOMES. He went inside.

  Weiss had hung back at the corner to keep from being spotted on the empty street. But now he edged the Taurus into position so he could watch the house. He needed to piss like crazy at this point, but there was nowhere to go. He sat tapping the steering wheel, chattering his teeth. To take his mind off his bladder, he ate a sandwich he'd bought off the shelf in the gas station food mart. He couldn't even tell what was in it. It tasted like paste.

  After a while house hunters began to show up. over the course of an hour or so, Weiss counted four young couples, one family with children, and a man alone. From time to time, he watched them through the big lens of his camera. The house hunters prowled from room to empty room with their hands behind their backs and their chins jutting forward. They stepped warily, as if they might turn a corner and plummet into a hidden pit.

  Weiss thought Bremer looked like a good salesman. He seemed to follow the customers and lead them at the same time. He kept a certain distance from them, but he was always near enough to gesture at the house's selling points or deliver some pitch or other Weiss couldn't hear.

  The people came and went, and after a while the house was empty except for Bremer. It was now around three o'clock. The sun was descending toward rising groves of pine trees to the west. In the east the distant mist
of clouds was gone. The blue behind the mountains was growing deeper.

  Weiss had to make a decision. A man can't go without pissing forever, that's just the truth. He figured Bremer would probably stay at the house another hour or so. There was time to find a bathroom somewhere and come back.

  But Weiss decided to go into the house. He'd convinced himself now that his hunch was all wrong, that the call to Bremer hadn't come from Julie at all. And he figured, if it had, there was no better way to find out than to ask him.

  He unfolded himself from behind the wheel and headed up the front path in the chilling afternoon air. Dressed in slacks, a dark blue polo shirt, and the tweed jacket, he looked like the cop he'd once been. He pretty much always looked like the cop he'd once been. He secretly prided himself on it. When he bowed beneath the lintel of the open door, he stood within the threshold in a small foyer, his hands in his pants pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched-exactly the way he'd stood waiting for hundreds of interviews during his stretch on the force.

  "Hi. Welcome."

  That was Bremer. He came out of the kitchen at Weiss's back. Weiss turned to see the short, stocky man approach with a swinging stride, his broad chest leading the way. Weiss shook his offered hand. Bremer had a powerful handshake. He had a direct gaze through crystal-blue eyes and a strong, rugged face under shaggy white hair. Weiss, being the way he was, caught something in his glance, some hesitancy or emotion. He couldn't quite figure it out. Whatever it was, it made him wonder about his hunch all over again. He decided to go slowly, play out the house-hunting routine until he had a chance to take the measure of the man.

  So they moved through the place together. It was newly built, unfurnished. Its walls were lined with broad windows and sliding-glass doors. In every room hardwood floors gleamed under the westering beams that fell through the panes. Bremer talked about the durability of red oak, the insulation of dual-pane windows, and other things Weiss hardly listened to. Weiss stepped warily with his hands behind his back and his chin jutting, trying to imitate the other prospective buyers he had watched through the camera.

  After a while he asked to use the bathroom. He pissed with great pleasure and relief, closing his eyes and lifting his face to the ceiling. When he was done, he washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror. His sad-sack mug and his cop costume. What the hell was he doing here? What the hell was he doing?

  When he came out, he couldn't find Bremer at first. Then he found him in a broad bright room in back. He was stand- ing in front of yet another wall of sliding-glass doors. He was looking out one of the doors at the swimming pool behind the house and the wide brown valley that stretched out beyond it. The land was dotted with brown shrubs and dull green cacti. The sky was still changing color as the day died. The sky seemed to be growing more solid somehow. The mountains were beginning to seem flat against it as if they were painted on.

  "Nice view," said Weiss, still playing the house hunter.

  Bremer nodded his head up and down a few times, his lips working. Then he said, "Listen, Weiss, you keep following me and my family, and I'm gonna take a crowbar to that rolling hunk of shit you drive and maybe to you too."

  Weiss found he was only half-surprised by this. He had sensed something, after all, from the moment they'd shaken hands. He went on looking out at the desert.

  "I guess Julie warned you I might show up when she called from paradise," he said.

  Bremer gave a rough snort. "Listen to you. 'Julie.' You don't even know her real name. That's a whore name. That's all you know."

  "All right," said Weiss. "What's her real name, then?"

  "What difference does it make? That's gone. Everything she ever had is gone. All she's got left is her life and that's just running away all the time and now you're gonna take that too. You bastard. What're you doing here? Don't you understand you're gonna get her killed?" The man had a voice like concrete: level, hard, rough. Weiss felt as if it would scrape his skin. He didn't answer. He had no answer. Bremer snorted again. He sneered out through the glass door. "What is it? You got some old grudge with this guy that's after her? You're gonna settle your grudge over her dead body? or is it just her? Yeah, I'll bet that's it, isn't it? Guys your age get stupid for her. It happens all the time."

  Weiss stared out through the glass door too, stared hard at the brown valley and the mountains painted on the sky. His hangdog face stayed hangdog and impassive, the way it always did. But he felt what Bremer was saying. It didn't just scrape his skin either. The words landed in his gut like punches.

  "One of us'll find her," he answered after a minute. "In the end, it's gonna be one of us. Better me than him."

  "Yeah, but you're the one who can do it, and you bring him with you. You know you do."

  "That's the thing. He's on me," said Weiss. "He's on me like he's on her. I wake up, he's there; I go to sleep, he's there-and it's the same for her, only she's running from it, like you said. She's gonna have to run forever. I want it over. I figure she must want it over too."

  Bremer glanced at him sideways-undiluted disdain-then looked away. "Not like this. Not over like this. You know what this guy is, this maniac fuck. You know what this maniac fuck will do to her. Christ, he did it to her once already. If he was just gonna kill her, that'd be one thing, that'd be bad enough. But you know what he is. The maniac fuck. So what're you doing? Why the fuck are you doing this to her?"

  Weiss stood shoulder to shoulder with the man. They both stared out through the glass. The desert shadows and the light of the sky shifted again, grew deeper. Bremer's reflection began to appear on the pane, Bremer's and Weiss's both, their images transparent, like ghosts haunting the wilderness beyond. Weiss could see Bremer's lips working, his jaw working in the image on the glass. Weiss could feel his own stomach churning as the things Bremer said punched into him.

  Still he insisted, "I want it over. She's gotta want it over too."

  "Not like this. You're gonna lead him right to her."

  "It's not gonna be that way."

  "Bullshit. It is."

  "All right, look," said Weiss. His gut was really roiling. He was finished with this. He'd taken enough. "Look, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you think or I think. I'm here now and he's on me. Watching. Listening. Right now. And what do you figure he'll do if you don't tell me what you know?"

  "Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ," said Bremer with a hard laugh. "You're using him on me?"

  "I'm just telling you."

  "Jesus." Weiss saw Bremer's reflection, the twisted expression of disgust. He saw Bremer shake his head. "You dumb shit," Bremer said. "You think he won't do it anyway. You think he won't come after me, my family. Look what you did now. You probably got us all killed already."

  "No. That won't happen," said Weiss. "Because then it's over. He knows that. Then I'm done and he's fucked. Like you said, I can do this; he can't. Like the way I found you, came here-that's what I can do. He can't. If he comes after you or your family, it's over and he's fucked. That's what protects you. He needs me."

  "It wouldn't have started at all if you hadn't come."

  "Tough shit," said Weiss. "I came. It started. Now it's on."

  "You bastard. You dumb bastard." Weiss heard the other man swallow hard. That was all. Then the empty house was silent around them. It was silent and new and had a fresh, empty smell of wood and paint, and one day a family would come to live here. It seemed very sad to Weiss somehow. It weighed on him with all the rest. "It doesn't matter," Bremer said finally. Weiss saw his shoulders sag in the reflection. "I don't know anything. I don't know where she is. I don't have any idea."

  "You lie to me and I can't help you," said Weiss.

  "I'm not lying. She called me that one time, that's all. You said she called from Paradise. That's more than I knew. I don't even know the name she goes by."

  "What about the motel?"

  "What motel?"

  "The room at the Super 8."

  "What…?" Bremer s
tarted-but then he must've realized what Weiss had done. "Jesus Christ," he said again, disgusted.

  "What about it, Bremer? Is that where you meet her? Is that where you two get together when she comes? You must pay a lot for her to make the trip way out here. But, then, guys our age get stupid for her, isn't that what you said?"

  Bremer shook his head. Weiss saw it in the glass doors. "That's not her. That's not about her. The Super 8. That's something else."

  Weiss knew he was lying. And he could look at his face in the glass and he knew Bremer knew he knew. So all that high moral talk was bullshit in the end. All that squeaky-clean living. Making waffles for his kids, going to church. Every two months his favorite hooker came to town and he had her out at the old Super 8. That was Bremer.

  "So-what, then?" said Weiss. "She called you to say good-bye? Is that what you're telling me?"

  Bremer only nodded.

  "She called you to tell you she couldn't see you anymore."

  "That's right. Never again. She said she couldn't see me ever again."

  "And she warned you I might come. I might come or he might. That's why she couldn't tell you anything about where she was going."

  Bremer nodded again, swallowed again. "That's why she said she could never come back. She didn't tell me anything else, just that, I swear." Now he turned from the glass. He turned to face the detective. He let Weiss see the sneer straight on, never mind the reflection. "Look at you. You bastard. Going after her. Bringing him with you. You're twice her age. You don't even know her. You've never even been with her. It's all just daydreams. You're gonna make her die for your daydreams."

  Weiss sneered back. "What makes you any better? You'd do the same. And you're just as old as I am-you're older. What the hell makes your daydreams any better than mine?"

  Bremer's hard face seemed to go out of focus. His blue eyes went soft, looked lost. He turned back to the glass door. He looked out at the brown desert running to the blue-and-white mountains, all of it growing dark as the sun westered down.