The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  Ruben was on the ground. On his back, laid out, eyes open, seeing nothing. He lay where Theresa had lain, after Rich killed her. He had switched from one part to the other, from killer to killed. Now he pulled himself up, flipped over and held that shape, on all fours, head down, an old wrestler’s pose. You’ve examined the floors and the bed and the furniture. You’ve held the weapons in your hands. What have you missed?

  If there is something to miss.

  But by now, somehow, Ruben was sure that there was. A crime scene held clues, that’s what it was, a place for clues, even now, even after the room has been stripped and scrubbed.

  “All right, then,” he said softly. “So what’s the clue?”

  A voice answered this thought, a whisper out of the cleaned carpet. Cool and commanding, logical and precise. It was Pileggi’s voice, and it said the wall. The cranky old bastard had complained about the bullet holes, right? A pair of ’em in my nice wall.

  Ruben stood up, put his glasses back on, and laid his palms flat on the wall, beneath the light switch. He moved his hands slowly, in unison, one beside the other, wincing as his bandaged fingertip caught on a rough patch of new paint.

  The bullet holes, when he found them, weren’t really bullet holes at all anymore. Merely indentations. They’d been roughed over with Spackle and covered with new paint, leaving just a pair of shallow indentations in the white of the wall.

  Ruben tugged his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight app. He cast the searching radius of light over the indentations. With the nail of one pinky he scraped and poked at the drywall. It crumbled and caved away, and soon enough he was staring at the holes themselves. He bent his knees, angled in to examine them more closely, rolled his thumb gingerly around the rim of one hole and then the other one.

  He watched the bullets smash into the wall, disappear into the plaster. Watched the explosion of paint and dust. Ruben narrowed his eyes, brought the flashlight closer, angled the very bright light into the nearer hole, like a searchlight into the mouth of a cave. Then he looked back at the bed, where he as Rich had only just been sitting, waiting, gun drawn.

  It occurred to Ruben at this point that the clever thing would be to draw a picture of the holes and what he had noticed about their angle. He was fumbling in his bag for the little notebook he had brought when he remembered that he was literally holding a camera.

  He turned off the flashlight and opened the camera app and just took pictures of the holes and emailed them to himself, one by one.

  And he felt halfway good, walking back through the lobby, more than halfway. He walked briskly, sailing a little as he went. He tipped a swift nod to the clerk, who grunted and gave him a sarcastic thumbs-up. Ruben wasn’t convinced there was meaning in what he had found, but he liked how it made him feel to wonder. The Rabbi felt wise. For good or ill, he felt like he was doing something, and the feeling was unaccustomed and positive and good.

  The night man was in the parking lot.

  The night man was waiting.

  He sat on the back bumper of the pink van, half-illuminated by a streetlight, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Looking right at Ruben across twenty yards of empty parking lot, with his lopsided grin and his dirty tank top and his sandals. He raised one hand and slowly unfurled two fingers into a V for peace.

  He hadn’t aged. He looked like he had looked in the hospital, bent over Ruben’s dying mom; like he had in the offices of Shenk & Partners, foretelling the good and golden world; like he had the night, in the middle of the Keener trial, when he had smashed into their kitchen on Tabor Street, when he had held a knife to Jay’s throat, and—

  Ruben sprinted across the parking lot, but the night man was already going, and by the time he got there the man was gone. Had never been there at all.

  “Come on,” said Ruben. “Come on.” There was a patch of dirty oil behind the van, right where the guy had been, and Ruben stared at the ground, cast about in helpless circles, because there would be footprints, tracks, evidence, and there was none. There was no one following Ruben, tracking his investigation, taunting his fleeting sense of progress.

  I am a part of this, too.

  He imagined the night man out on Sepulveda, ambling south, chuckling to himself.

  You can’t cut me out, Rubie-boobie.

  I’m a part of everything.

  December 18, 2009

  1.

  “You know what?” said Beth, and Rich said, “What?” but then she hesitated.

  Here she was, she was looking out at the fucking Pacific Ocean, for God’s sake, looking at it through a wall of tinted blue glass, with one of those window shades you could raise or lower with a remote control. This house was a goddamn palace.

  But it wasn’t right. It wasn’t right. She turned from the window and looked at Rich, who was already looking back at her with that face of his, braced for whatever it was that was going to piss him off.

  “I think we gotta move.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Rich.

  “No,” she said. “But can I explain?”

  Rich threw his hands in the air. “I mean, you have to be fucking kidding.”

  “Sweetheart,” said Beth. “You wanna calm down?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” And he stalked away from her, to the far side of the room, planted himself at one end of the low, sleek, modernist sofa, and waited. “I’m calm. Let’s hear it.”

  The ocean was an endless field of blue. Pleasure boats way out on the horizon line, a handful of surfers nearer to shore. Seagulls wheeling high overhead.

  “I just think it’s too exposed,” she told Richard. “All the glass. And it’s perched up here.”

  “It’s isolated,” said Rich. “That’s a plus.”

  “It’s exposed. There are like seventeen entrances.”

  “There are five. Ebbers’s guys went over all of this with us. Front, side, side, back, garage.”

  Beth was shaking her head. It didn’t matter. She knew how she felt. They weren’t going to stay here. She had been crazy to agree to this house in the first place. She peered down one long hallway, and down another, both of them hung with different kinds of froufrou modern art. Slashes of color; shit made out of wires.

  They couldn’t stay here. It just—it wasn’t right.

  “I’m really sorry, baby,” she said, and Richard pursed his lips and exhaled, a long, controlled release of breath. “I’m not trying to be difficult.”

  “OK,” he said, and nothing else, just “OK.” Which both of them knew meant But you are, aren’t you? You are being difficult.

  Wes walked between them, and Beth reached out to brush his shoulder with the back of her hand as he passed. In his endless unvarying circle he walked, the same here as anywhere, tracing a wide circumference in the massive unfurnished house, from the front door across the grand length of the living room, to the enormous window and back.

  The Malibu house belonged to a television star who was the ex-husband of another, starrier television star. The TV star had been granted the house in the custody deal but then immediately got remarried, to a film executive with a massive house of her own, and left this one standing open. When they’d explained it to them, Beth could hardly believe it. You just couldn’t fathom there was so much money in the world: people just buying houses, leaving them empty.

  “So what are you saying we do?” Rich asked, implicitly conceding the argument. They were leaving the Malibu house. That part was done. “Go home? Or—what—back to the Redondo place?”

  “No.”

  “The trailer, then? The fucking—”

  “No. Rich.”

  “You wanna put him back in the hospital?”

  “Oh no,” said Beth. “No way.”

  Wesley passed. His eyes stared at Beth, unseeing, as he moved by. She reached out to him; she was always reaching out to him, as if one time he would stop and reach back.

  “So what, then?” said Rich, impatient. “So wh
at do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. We just—I don’t know. We can ask Ebbers, right? He’ll find us somewhere else.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to go back to Ebbers.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we don’t need to keep bothering the man.”

  “Bothering him? Rich, we had a tragedy.” She gestured to Wesley, who had reached the rear window and turned back. “We are a tragedy. People want to help.”

  “We’re not going back to Ebbers.”

  “Maybe another place’ll be cheaper, anyway.”

  Ebbers’s work came pro bono, but all the rest of it—the guards, the private-duty aides, the rental on the house itself—did not.

  “I know you’re worried about the money part of it.”

  “I love the way you say that. The money part of it.” He looked at his watch. “Shit. I should be at work right now.”

  It wasn’t just the money, Beth knew. Rich hated asking people for help, hated people making allowances for them. He was a guy who solved problems, who built things. Not a guy who needed. Not a guy who took. Not a guy who bothered anyone for anything, even in the most minor possible way, even for the best possible reason. His fucking kid was sick. Worse than sick. Nobody fucking knew what he was.

  Beth had quit her job a long time ago. Eddie and everybody had been understanding, told her to take the time she needed, and even asked her to consider coming in two days a week. But even two days a week was too much. Two days out of seven trying to give a shit about anyone or anything else? Answering the phone, dealing with people’s plumbing emergencies?

  Richard was still working, just short-term on-set gigs, abiding by all the protocols Ebbers had taught him: working under fake names, making sure he wasn’t followed. He walked around looking over his shoulder half the time, like a goddamn crazy person.

  Nobody could get to Wesley; nobody could try to hurt him again. That was the important thing. That was all that mattered.

  “We have to do what’s best for him,” Beth said, and Rich scowled.

  “You said this place would be a good spot. A safe spot. We stood here, and we all agreed: Yes. Great.”

  Beth shrugged. She turned back to the magnificent window. She wasn’t going to explain herself. She couldn’t. The world was an infuriating, horrible, always-changing thing. Sometimes you just had to keep up.

  “Rich. Baby. I can call him.”

  “Ebbers?”

  “Do you want me to call him?”

  “No.” He sighed. She saw him softening, as she had known he would. She had known him for such a long time. “I’ll do it.”

  Her big husband opened up his arms. They had met when she was fifteen. It was fucking ridiculous. How many married people fell in love in third-period gym class? She shook her head at her husband, at the fact that after everything, they still loved each other. After his motorcycle accident, after all the stupid jobs they’d suffered through, after the two bad years in New Mexico, after the shit with his mom and after this, now, this living nightmare. Their boy.

  After all of it. Still in love. He was a goon. Her man. He needed a haircut.

  She fell against his body and let his arms close around her, and then she tilted her head up and kissed him hard on the mouth. How long had it been since they’d had sex? Christ—was it possible she had not fucked her husband since before the accident? For over a fucking year?

  She kissed him harder, held herself against him, and they stood that way for a while, the only two adults in the world who knew what they were suffering, pressing their two bodies in one shape, while their son moved in his slow circle around them.

  Beth spoke into Rich’s chest.

  “Shenk says it’s looking good. He found her.”

  “Who?”

  “The radiologist, baby.” Richard wasn’t keyed in. He wasn’t really paying attention. He was waiting for it to be over. “Shenk’s got her. It’s really good. He says when we win, we’ll walk away with like four million bucks.”

  “And what if we lose?” he said.

  “Come on. Honey. We’re not going to lose.”

  2.

  “Good morning, Dr. Allyn. My name is Jay Shenk and I’m the counsel for the Keeners in this matter, and let me say, first of all, thank you for making the time to talk with us today.”

  “Like I had a choice.”

  “Well, sure.” Shenk shrugged. “Still. I appreciate it.”

  “Can we get this over with, so I can go back to work?”

  Jay Shenk smiled appeasingly, tossed a quick glance at Ms. Clarissa, the court reporter, who kept typing. “I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot, Dr. Allyn.”

  “I was ordered by a judge to do this, so I’m doing it. Can we start?”

  “You bet.”

  They were in La Rioja, California, a map-speck in California wine country, a gorgeous forty-five-minute drive from Paso Robles, the closest town of any size, which was still not really of any size. Dr. Barbara Allyn, formerly a radiologist at Valley Village Hospital Corporation, was seated across from him at a metal-mesh picnic table outside the screening center where she was now employed; there was a plastic sun umbrella emerging from a round mouth in the table’s center, the pole of which partially occluded Shenk’s view of his witness. Allyn was a sharp-eyed woman with silver hair and strong features, the kind of lean middle-aged white lady who looked like she ate only salad and did a brisk four-mile power walk every morning.

  Sitting beside Jay was Ms. Clarissa, who had been flown up here at his expense—this whole exercise, as the judge had warned him, on his dime—and who sat clacking away on her clever little portable machine. Next to Dr. Allyn was the local counsel Riggs had scrounged up to keep a seat warm for this procedure: a twentysomething clown named Smith or Jones or something, whose modishly long hair fell over his face as he took desultory notes, casting longing glances at the paperback novel half-hidden under the Keener file on the table in front of him.

  “How long have you lived in La Rioja, Dr. Allyn?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “I do, yes. But the way this works is that I ask the questions and you answer them. Your feelings about the questions don’t come into it. Isn’t that right, Mr. Jones?”

  “What? Oh. It’s Smith, actually.”

  “Can you tell your client to answer the question, please?”

  “Oh. What was it again?”

  “I have lived here about a year and a half.”

  “Since November 2008, is that right?”

  Allyn sighed. “Yes.”

  “OK.” Shenk looked around. “It’s nice here.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “Nope. Just an observation.”

  From where they were sitting Shenk could see the quaint town square, populated with benches and old people walking dogs and a little playground area where squealing toddlers chased one another around a play structure. The grass on the lawn was astonishingly green, and the ocean was visible past Main Street and a neat strip of beach beyond it. The whole town smelled very faintly of flowers.

  Shenk smiled broadly at Dr. Allyn, and she scowled back at him.

  “You responded promptly, Dr. Allyn, to the questions we sent along. I appreciate that. Now, I’d like to know what you left out.”

  She paused for a half second and then said, “What?”

  “I’ve known a lot of radiologists. Great people, by the way. Nice tribe, your tribe. But under-respected. Right? What my radiologist friends tell me is that they’ll sometimes point out something to another doctor—a surgeon, say—and the other doctor just overrules it or ignores them.”

  “What is this?” Dr. Allyn turned away from him, turned to the dolt with the hair. “What the hell is this?”

  “Sorry—what?” said Smith, looking up.

  Allyn jabbed a finger toward Shenk. “Are you tryna make some sort of case here, that I’m at fault? That I did something wrong?”


  “No. I’m not. Unless…” He raised his palms, the picture of innocence. “Should I be?”

  “I’m not an idiot. I went to medical school, remember?”

  Shenk chose not to list the medical school graduates he’d known over the years who had definitely been idiots.

  “I’m just saying,” he said instead, “that sometimes radiologists are a little cowed by the surgeons they’re working for. Working with. Sorry. You know the type. The arrogant guys—and they are always guys, aren’t they? The whole God-complex business. Brain surgeons, often. Big beards.”

  Dr. Allyn’s long nostrils were flaring. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  Shenk nodded sharply. Given the doctor’s attitude, given the fact that he had a plane to catch at 5:27 out of SLO, given the fact that he was paying Ms. Clarissa by the hour, it was time to cut to the chase.

  “I’m suggesting that you saw something that wasn’t right. I’m suggesting you saw our friend Catanzaro behave in a manner that was inappropriate and which jeopardized that kid’s outcome. Sealed his fate.”

  Allyn stared at him, aghast. “Like what?”

  “Well,” said Shenk. “You tell me.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Um.” Mr. Smith raised one hand uncertainly. “Hey. What’s happening?”

  “The man’s a bit of a drunk, Dr. Allyn. Let’s be honest here.”

  “Who is? Dr. Catanzaro?”

  “Let’s not play make-believe, OK? His ex-wife testified to it in their custody hearings.”

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  “There are three previous settlements held under seal—”