The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Stills nodded. “Other than that, was there anything going on? Did he have plans?”

  There was only so much lying you could do before you got caught. The practice thing was true, and Stills seemed to know it. Bee was going to have to watch her step. She had a feeling she’d better start inching her way over into the truth lane. “This is the week he stays with his father,” she said. “Once every couple of months.”

  “The parents are divorced?”

  “Yeah. And his dad is . . . Well, he’s an alcoholic and . . .”

  Stills waited. “Yes, Ms. Northway?”

  “They don’t get along so well. So Turn, I mean Donovan, was going to tell his father that he wasn’t going to see him anymore. Not until his father cleaned up his act.”

  That got Bell’s nose out of his notebook.

  “I see,” said Stills. “And was this going to be difficult?”

  Bee shrugged. “Donovan’s old enough that he doesn’t have any obligation to visit his father, let alone stay with him. He’s stuck it out for a long time. He knew it was time, but . . . yeah, his father was likely going to make as big a deal of it as he could.” Stills glanced over at her partner. “Listen,” said Bee, “what does this have to do with Donovan’s case? Somebody ran him down. His dad doesn’t drive, so . . .”

  Stills leaned forward and spoke very quietly. “All we’d like from you, Ms. Northway, is to let us know if Donovan said anything that might help us in our investigation.”

  Bee screwed up her face. “You mean something he saw when he was being hurled twenty feet through the air?”

  “You just never know,” said Stills.

  As tired as Bee was, alarm bells were ringing inside her. She looked at Bell, who was leaning back in his chair, casual as could be, but there was nothing casual about his eyes, which were trained on her. What was this? Some kind of ambush? Why did it feel as if they weren’t talking about the accident at all?

  “Were you able to locate his father?”

  That got a rise out of both of them.

  “What makes you ask?” said Stills.

  Bee shrugged. In theater class her favorite improv game was the one where you answered every question with a question. “What’s going on?” said Bee.

  “What has he said, Beatrice?”

  “Why won’t you answer me?”

  Stills gazed at her steadily. “Ms. Northway, we are conducting an investigation. If you don’t mind, we’d appreciate your answering the questions. Can you do that, please?”

  Bee nodded woodenly. “He’s mumbling,” she said again, more convinced now than ever that she would keep what Donovan had said to herself. “Just noises, mostly pain.”

  From the expression on her face, Stills didn’t believe her. Was it that obvious that she was hiding something? She folded her hands over her crossed knee.

  “I’m sorry I can’t help you,” said Bee. “My boyfriend is in there dying and you want to know what was on his mind? As if . . . what? He was looking to get run over?”

  She had raised her voice and a nurse passing by motioned with her hand to keep it down.

  “Sorry,” Bee whispered. Then turned to the detectives. “Maybe I’m just really tired or something. Like freaked out, for instance. But I wish you’d let me in on whatever it is you’re hiding from me.”

  “We’re not hiding —”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Beatrice.” Stills’s voice was quiet, but she managed to turn Bee’s name into a threat. “Excuse me. I am sorry for the awful situation in which you find yourself. But we’ve got work to do here. Trails can grow cold pretty quick. We’re the ones asking the questions, okay? Do you get that?” She held up her hand to stop Bee from arguing. “Just answer me.”

  Bee nodded.

  “A serious investigation is under way, and it is standard practice to keep sensitive information strictly on a need-to-know basis.”

  “A serious investigation of a hit-and-run,” said Bee.

  “That, yes. And another related crime.”

  Here it was. Bee tamped down a rising feeling of panic.

  “We’re just doing our job,” said Bell, trying on the avuncular act again.

  “And we are asking for your help,” said Stills.

  Bee swallowed. She was being obstinate. Obstreperous, her father would say. She lowered her eyes. “Sorry,” she murmured. She was a girl who preferred being backstage, but she’d taken enough acting classes to manage a show of contrition. She looked up, swiped away a tear, and tried to look brave. The tear was real.

  Stills’s expression lightened, but only minimally. Her eyes were still hard, determined. “Donovan’s mom is away?” Bee nodded. “With her boyfriend; is that right?”

  “Scott,” said Bee. “Her live-in boyfriend.”

  “Do they do this often?” said Stills. Bee was perplexed; it must have shown on her face. “Go off and leave Donovan with no contact information.”

  Bee’s mouth gaped, then she caught herself and snapped it shut. She shook her head but didn’t dare speak.

  “Donovan’s relationship with his father was troubled, from what you’ve said.” Bee nodded hesitantly. “What was his relationship to his mother?”

  “Excellent.”

  “And this boyfriend —”

  “Scott,” snapped Bee, interrupting the woman. “They’ve been together for, like, years.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, it isn’t okay,” said Bee. “This is ridiculous. It makes no difference where Trish or Scott are. You have a phone number for his birth father and can probably find his address — you’re cops, after all. So something has happened to his father. Right?”

  The detectives conferred, but this time it was a handoff. Stills nodded, frowning, and Bell sat up straight, tugged his slacks up at the knees. Then he flipped a few pages back in his spiral pad.

  “Allen Ian McGeary. That the boy’s father?” Bee nodded. He read out an address on Carling Avenue in Britannia, out in the west end. “Apartment number 304?”

  Bee shrugged. “I’ve never been there, but that sounds right.”

  Bell closed the notebook. “Well, McGeary wasn’t answering his phone because he’d had an accident, as well.”

  Bee could see in Bell’s face that the word “accident” was a place saver, a euphemism. She turned to Stills, who looked as if she were trying to work up her youthful we’re-in-this-together expression again. So Bee turned her attention back to Bell. “What kind of an accident?”

  Bell held her gaze. “McGeary is dead,” he said.

  There was broken glass everywhere. Beer bottles. Broken crockery that had once been a cheery polka-dot bowl. The floor was littered with popcorn, like a hailstorm indoors. His father’s apartment. And Al sitting there in his La-Z-Boy looking up at him. Was that really fear in his eyes? Was he frightened of his own son? Good! About time! He loomed above his father, wanting to see him squirm — squirm and apologize. He had a baseball bat in his hand, a bat with a pulse of its own. Then suddenly his father’s face cracked and he laughed. Just laughed.

  They would come to the door, the lion or the leopard. They would see him sitting there, immobile, his arms pooled in his lap like some spineless Raggedy Andy. They would drag him inside and who knew what they would do to him: make him kneel before his father — kneel and apologize. Because now it all made some kind of mad and fantastic sense. The blanket-covered wreck in the Malibu, the stinking creature who had wandered off into the darkness ahead of him. His father. Passengers in the same car. Donovan shook his head.

  No.

  He had left his father’s place in the west end. Run from him, from what he had done. And somehow he’d gotten all the way from Britannia in the west end to his home south of center town. And then left again. Just stepped into a car driven by a complete stranger.

  His senses were shot.

  The leopard called the man Murphy. Not his father’s name. Not the name Donovan had changed to Turner, his mothe
r’s name, in an act of defiance that his father had shrugged off.

  There was a roar from the lion and Donovan looked up expecting to see his face at the window. But there was no one there. The leopard was laughing. It sounded as if he’d just won another hand. The game was still on.

  Donovan climbed slowly to his feet, and though every sensible bone in his body wanted him to get out of there, head back into the darkness, the least sensible bone in his body — the one between his ears — made him limp back to the window to that room, where the leopard was gathering the chips, where the lion shook his head and poured himself a generous helping of rye, and where Donovan’s father rubbed sleep out of his eyes and slowly pushed his losing hand toward the dealer. There was blood on his shirt. Blood that had dribbled down from the cut on his chin, where he had fallen . . .

  Al’s chin smacked the edge of the glass coffee table and his head jolted back, toppling him over. The room swam and tumbled. Someone yelled at Donovan; his father’s friend Rolly Pouillard, the apartment super. He couldn’t hear a word Rolly said. Only the sound of the roaring inside his own head.

  Donovan stepped drunkenly away from the kitchen window, bent down, his hands on his knees, then threw his back up straight again, afraid he would topple over headfirst and never stop falling. He rested his hands on his hips, a runner safe at second — only just — after a headlong slide.

  He knew he should leave but he couldn’t. He felt as if it were somehow out of his control. He was supposed to be here. Back here, where he’d been before, as a child. He shook his head and stumbled to the window a third time. Stared inside, saw his father’s stunned face.

  “You in?” said the leopard, leaning toward the man they called Murphy. He nodded, and the lion poured him a drink and Murphy downed it in one shot. His head trembled from the jolt of it, and he took a long breath and stared at the table with the eyes of a man who wasn’t entirely sure where he was. It was an expression Donovan had seen too many times on his father’s face to count.

  “Read ’em and weep,” said the leopard with that half smile on his face that wasn’t really a smile but an accident.

  Then Donovan heard a car. He ducked and turned in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of it on the side road before it disappeared behind the bulk of the shed. Quickly, on shaking legs, he made his way back to the storm cellar and crouched in the dark behind the bunker wall, holding his knees in tight to his chest. He had seen enough of the car to recognize it was a police cruiser.

  The cruiser pulled into the yard and stopped near a mud-stained pickup. The driver turned off the engine. There were two officers, but neither moved. Donovan could see from the ambient light that the driver was radioing headquarters. Backup? Then the right side door opened slowly and the passenger cop stepped out. He was wearing a flak jacket. He looked carefully around, as if there might be snipers on the henhouse roof, the barn, the huge shed. Gunmen behind the dark skeletons of the farm machinery littered around the yard. His partner opened his door, got out, closed it quietly, and joined the other policeman in checking the yard. If the boys inside the farm had noticed they had visitors, none of them made an appearance.

  Cautiously, their hands on their service pistols, the officers approached the kitchen door. They weren’t crouching or sneaking up, just watchful, alert.

  One of them stepped quietly onto the covered porch. He examined the boots lying on the decking, lightly toed one with his shoe and then looked back at the other cop, who nodded as if to say he’d noticed, too. He knelt down, pulling a penlight from his gadget belt to examine the boots more carefully. Then he flicked off the light, replaced it in its holster, and shook his head at his partner, the answer to an unasked question. He stood up. The leader rapped on the door, the passenger stood back at a good response distance. Donovan heard the sound of a chair scraping the floor, cowboy boots clumping across tired floorboards. Then the door opened inward. The light from the kitchen spilled out, animating the first cop’s face. “Evening, Mervin,” said the cop.

  “Hey, if it isn’t the boys in blue,” said a deep voice with all the consonants worn off at the edges.

  “Can we have a word?” said the cop.

  “Kinda late for a social call.”

  “Just want to ask a question or two.”

  “Well, Jeezus H. Christ,” said Mervin. “You guys and your questions.”

  The screen door reluctantly swung outward and Donovan saw the lion’s thick-wristed arm hold it open. The first cop stepped into the room. His partner followed him in, letting the screen door snap shut behind him. And then the inner door closed. Donovan slipped from his hiding place and headed back to the open window. Part of his brain said to turn tail and run. But his aching foot vetoed the running part of that idea. And by now another voice in his head was saying, Let’s face it, Dono, you’re bat-shit crazy — this whole thing is crazy — but maybe somebody will say something enlightening and you will learn what the hell happened and why you are here and not in your bed asleep. So go listen. Get yourself arrested.

  “Any you boys see the accident up on Seven?”

  “Does it look like we been out and about?” said the leopard. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands out to his side all innocent-like and a snide look on his long-ago injured face.

  “You didn’t hear nothing?” asked the second cop.

  “We heard a lot of moaning from our host here, Mr. Green,” said the leopard, indicating the lion, who reoccupied his seat, which strained under his weight. They all got a laugh out of that, even Mr. Mervin Green.

  “Bad night, Merv?” said the cop.

  Merv took a swig of his whiskey, shrugged. “Might’ve been if we was playing for money. But that’d be gambling, Harry.”

  The lead cop chuckled and sniffed the air. “Smell that, Pete?”

  The other cop nodded. “Oo-ee! What brand of tobacco you fellas smoking?”

  Donovan noticed that the ashtrays were all empty now.

  “If you’re talking about illicit substances, I don’t see none,” said the leopard, not in the least perturbed. “But you’re here ’bout an accident. What kind of accident would that be?”

  “Guy flipped his car,” said the lead cop, pointing north.

  “Hurt?”

  The cop nodded.

  “Bad?” said Merv. He sounded hopeful, as if bad would be entertaining.

  The cop nodded again. He’d been leveling his gaze at the three of them, one after the other, while his partner scanned the room, taking in the pizza boxes, the low fire in the woodstove, the coats hanging by the door. He reached out, touched the sleeve of the nearest coat. Not wet. That’s what he was doing. And now Donovan knew what the boot inspection had been about: looking for signs of mud. The third man at the table was resting on his arms, seemingly dead to the world.

  “So, no liquor run? Nothing like that?”

  “Hey, officer —” said the leopard, leaning forward so that the front legs of his chair made contact with a clunk on the floor. “Cameron,” he said, reading the lead’s name tag. “Have we met?”

  “Harry Cameron,” said Merv. “You remember Harry, Oscar.”

  “I remember a pip-squeak of a guy named Cameron back in high school,” said Oscar, scratching the barbed wire around his wrist as if it were real. “In the stamp club, I think. Maybe the chess club? Think I stuffed him in his locker once.”

  Cameron chuckled. “Ya think?”

  “You grown some since then.”

  “Grown a thick skin, Oscar.”

  Oscar chuckled.

  Then Pete tried to get the conversation back on track. “About the accident,” he said.

  “Does it look like any of us is in a position to drive a vehicle?” said Oscar.

  Constable Cameron piped up. “As I recall, Oscar, you’ve been known to drive under the influence.”

  The leopard nodded. “Damn straight. And I lost my license. When I got it back, I took the vow.” Merv laughed out loud, a low, smoke-stain
ed roar. The third player was roused from his sleep or inebriation or death — whatever it was he was dealing with. He stared at the table with such intensity it was as if his gaze were the only thing keeping it from floating away. Cameron noticed that, too.

  “Don’t know your friend here,” he said.

  “Murphy,” said Oscar. He leaned across the table and poked the man in the arm. “Say hello to these here fine, upstanding law enforcement officers.”

  Murphy glanced up at the cop, who stood less than a yard away. He nodded in greeting and then resumed staring at the table.

  “New in these parts, Murphy?” asked Cameron.

  The man nodded. “He’s just passing through,” said Oscar. “Said he liked to play cards, and I said, ‘Well, that’s good, because I love to separate a man from his money.’”

  Everyone laughed. Clearly the cops were not there about gambling — or weed, either, it seemed.

  “This accident,” said Oscar. “Something missing?”

  Cameron stared at him sharply now, then turned to his partner with his eyebrow raised before returning his attention to the skinny man in the leopard-skin vest. “What makes you say that?”

  Oscar smiled on both sides of his face, but it wasn’t a pretty sight. “You said the guy was hurt bad. Sounded like maybe you meant dead.” He rubbed his chin with his right hand. “And since you didn’t mention no other car, just the one, at first I wondered if maybe you was looking for a witness. But now I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  Oscar leaned back again, never taking his eyes off the cop. “I’m reckoning you’ve got yourself a crime scene up there.”

  “Go on,” said Cameron.

  “Don’t rush me,” said Oscar. He looked at the cop, looked down at the chips piled high in front of him. “This guy get rumbled or what?”

  Again, the cops exchanged glances, which made Oscar chuckle and rub his hands up and down his vest.

  “As a matter of fact, it does look as if there is some merchandise missing. And you just guessed at that?” said Pete.

  “Oscar’s got the vision,” said Merv, tapping his forehead.