A Fistful of Rain (15 page)

CHAPTER 20

The service was well attended, if small. Van and Click and Graham were there, and Joan. A handful of other people who had known my brother, including a couple women, one of whom I took to be Avery, his newest. Marcus and Hoffman were there, too, but stayed clear of the crowd, at the back.

Tommy stayed in the back, wearing a suit that must have come from Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul. He was there when I arrived, and he tried to speak to me, but I moved away before he could. I had Joan on one arm and Van on the other, and they provided insulation. After that, he kept his distance.

But not out of sight, and at the grave, when we were finished and moving to the cars, I looked back to see him standing beside where the marker would go. He looked hunched, and I realized he was sobbing.

Maybe if I hadn’t been so drunk, I’d have gone to him.

Joan had found Van at my door when she came to get me for the service, and they came in together to discover me upstairs, in a corner of my bedroom, crying hysterically. I’d finished the bottle of Jack when I’d told myself I was only going to have one drink, and I was really worked up because I couldn’t decide which of the three outfits I was going to wear. Van got the shower running and Joan got me undressed, and the two of them cleaned me up under the ice-cold water, washing vomit off my chin and out of my hair. I fought them a little, spitting and yelling.

“Knock it the fuck off!” Van finally snarled at me. She was in black, not too expensive, not too flashy, and she’d only put on a little bit of makeup. I thought she looked jet-lagged and she was certainly angry. She’d taken the coat off to keep it from getting wet. “Jesus Christ, Mim, it’s your goddamn
brother
! Couldn’t you just give it a fucking rest?”

“I hate you,” I told her.

Together, they got me sober enough to stand, and dressed me. I was back in my head enough to exert some will, and that made it easier on them when I was willing to do what they said, and harder on them when I wasn’t. Once they finally had my clothes in place, Joan sat me on the edge of the bed and held me while Van got my shoes on me, then went back into the bathroom for some makeup. She did my eyes and my lips, and when she was finished, they helped me down the stairs. Van put me in Joan’s car, got me buckled in, and then went to her Beemer to follow us.

Joan didn’t look at me once as she drove to the funeral home.

The service was blurry and went by fast, and there was a guy named Damien who was about Mikel’s age and who gave the eulogy. Mikel had brought him along to a couple of the shows we’d played in town, and he was nice, and he spoke nicely, and he said all of the nice things, and I wondered if maybe he knew about pinhole video cameras and wireless broadband transmission.

I sat with Joan, and Van, Click, and Graham filled out the rest of our pew. I spent most of the time biting my tongue, trying to keep the drunk from making me soggy. The coffin was open, and Mr. Colby of the Colby Funeral Home had done a good job, because Mikel didn’t look like he had when I’d found him, hurting and scared. He looked like he was faking sleep, that was all.

When the service finished, Click and Graham joined the pallbearers, and the rest of us followed them out. I walked between Joan and Van, following the coffin, and once it was loaded in the hearse we turned to our vehicles and got a face full of flashbulbs and hot spots mounted on television cameras.

It must have been every local affiliate, all of them out to catch the show, and there were even a couple out-of-towners trying to make their own coverage. Faces I recognized from television screens and studio interviews dimly remembered, all of them nonetheless strangers.

Most kept their distance, due in part to the six Portland police officers positioned around the entrance and on the curb. But there was one bitch who launched herself forward with microphone leading, cameraman over her shoulder, looking for the kill.

“Mim! Mim! Did you know that the Portland PD hasn’t ruled you out as a suspect?”

I kept my head down, remembering Chapel’s warning, but mostly because I was afraid I’d throw up again.

The Bitch pressed, “Is it possible your brother’s murder is related to your own drug problems? Or to the pornography of you that’s been released on the Net?”

Van let go of me, moving to block. “Hey, bugfuck, leave her be or we’ll be planting two bodies at the cemetery.”

“Excuse me, I’m talking to Mi—”

Van grabbed the mike from her hand, then used it to hit the end of the cameraman’s rig. There was shouting. The police officers started trying to separate Van and the woman, and Hoffman waded in and put herself between the camera and us.

“Trouble with that?” Van was shouting. “My friend has no goddamn comment, okay?”

She threw the microphone overhand into the street, where it bounced off the side of a parked news van. Then she seized my arm so hard it hurt, and helped me again into the Colby Funeral Home’s complimentary limousine, and I was on my way to the cemetery.

Joan had insisted on holding the reception at her house, and I skirted the fringes, not wanting to mingle with the other mourners. Damien tried to corner me twice, and I retreated farther into the house, trying to find a quiet space to be alone.

I ended up finding Click, Van, and Graham in Steven’s old music room. Click and Graham had both worn sensible, somber suits, and neither of them looked comfortable or even correct in them. Graham looked like his tie was going to choke him to death, and there was just no way Click could sell mainstream with his tattoos and piercings.

Steven had collected instruments, a lot of them drums. Most were busted, ones he’d intended to repair. Before we’d signed with the label, he’d even worked over Click’s kit a few times. He had two Ghanaian tribal drums resting next to a mismatched collection of snares, even a steel drum he’d made himself.

“No Clay, huh?” I asked.

“He thought it’d be presumptuous,” Click said. “Considering how you barely know him. Offers his deepest sympathies.”

I nodded, and there was a beat that threatened to become an awkward pause, and then Graham asked, “How you holding up, Mimser? You good? Given the circumstances?”

“Not so good. I’m sorry about all this press.”

“Ink is ink. You just got to ride it out. Really sorry about that craptroll at the funeral home.” Graham’s face twisted alarmingly with sudden hatred. “Fucking
E!,
I hate them, I fucking hate them.”

“Van shut that down.”

“I spoke to Fred. He says things don’t look that bad for you.”

“Depends from where you’re looking.”

“He’s good at his job, Mimser, he’ll do his best for you. You’ve got to give the man some credit, he’s managed to keep things pretty level on this end.”

It sounded like he was talking as much about the pictures as Mikel’s murder, but I wasn’t certain. So far, none of them had told me they’d as much as heard about the images, and it added yet another tension, because now I wasn’t certain if I should be embarrassed, or just should anticipate embarrassment.

“He seems more interested in the fact that
Nothing for Free
might break the Top Ten,” I said.

“Ink is ink, like I said. Not to be a total dickwad, but that’s kind of an upside, maybe, for a darkness, huh?”

I just stared at him. Every sale was more money in the pocket, and if Mikel was now serving to further promote Tailhook, well, there was really no way that Graham or the label could see his death as an entirely bad thing. It was the way it was, and there was nothing to be done about it. For that instant, though, I hated them all so much I wanted to scream their dead hearts to life.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen your dad,” Van said. “At the service.”

“Tommy,” I said. “Call him Tommy.”

“I didn’t know about your mom.”

“Now everyone does.”

“I thought I knew just about every one of your dark secrets.”

“I don’t write about that one.”

“You will,” she said.

“No I won’t. I can’t.”

She shook her head. “Clay’s temp, I’d have you back in a heartbeat. But you’ve got to deal with this thing.”

I held up my glass. “Mineral water.”

“Not this morning it wasn’t.”

I tried to change the subject. “How long you guys back?”

Van looked annoyed, but Click cut her off. “Couple more days, time to see family and pay bills. Graham figured if we were going to have to cancel one date, might as well cancel three.”

“Where to next?”

“Glasgow, then Dublin.”

“It’ll be cold,” I said. “Bundle up.”

“Our shit is squared away,” Van said, pointedly. “Look after your own, Miriam.”

The reception, such as it was, started breaking up before five, and I wandered upstairs as people began to leave, to get away from the platitudes, eventually reaching my old bedroom. Tommy was sitting at my desk, looking out the window. The room faced west, and the sunset was starting to fade, and that was the only light in there.

He caught me staring at him, got up hastily from the desk, trying to straighten his awful suit. Maybe it was the shadows, but he looked a lot worse for wear, and he hadn’t looked all that good when I’d seen him on Thursday morning.

The silence got awkward fast, so I spoke, told him the first thing that came to mind.

“I used to live here.”

He nodded. “I spoke to Mrs. Beckerman when I arrived. She told me . . . she told me where your room was.”

“How long you been here?”

“Only a half hour. I didn’t . . . I didn’t know if I should come or not.”

“Tell me you didn’t do it.”

He grimaced, slowly, as if feeling heartburn. “I didn’t, Miriam. You’ve got to believe me.”

“Do you know how it happened?”

He shook his head. “I’d been drinking. . . .”

“You said you’d stopped.”

“I had.”

“You know about these pictures? About this fucker who was taping me in my own home?”

He flinched, nodded as if hoping he could get by with only the barest of confirmations.

“Do you know who did that? Was it one of Mikel’s buddies? Damien?”

“I don’t know anything about that.” Tommy ran his hand over the top of the old stereo, disturbing the light dust. “You were drunk at the service.”

“It would be you who could tell.”

“I wasn’t the only one who could tell.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “You need to stop doing that. Need to stop drinking like that.”

“I don’t need this kind of advice from you.”

Tommy took a step forward suddenly, grabbing my arm. I felt his grip tightening on me. My insides fell to liquid, seemed to foam up and fill my lungs, flooding them and forcing away my breath. I was eleven again, small and scared.

“Listen.” He hit both syllables evenly, equally. “Listen to me, Miriam. You don’t know how dangerous this is. You don’t know what could happen.”

I tried to pull away, to back away, but his grip just tightened. I suppose I could have kicked or punched or screamed, but I didn’t think of it, I didn’t even consider those actions as options.

He was my father. His anger, his power, all over again, inescapable.

It froze me in place, and it terrified me.

All I could manage was, “Please.”

The word was enough, the effect was enormous. Tommy dropped my arm like I was a hot wire, backing away, and his expression changed from anger to alarm, and then to something else. He seemed confused, as if he’d lost his bearings.

“Oh, God,” Tommy said. “Oh, Mim. I’m so sorry.”

Then he pushed his way past me, going for the stairs, taking them quickly, double, triple steps at a time.

When I got downstairs, he had gone, and the party was over.

CHAPTER 21

The caterers were out of the house within minutes of the last guest’s departure.

Even though Click and Graham had departed, Van had lingered, offering to help with the cleanup. I could hear her and Joan talking in the kitchen, and just from the tenor of their voices, I knew they were talking about me, trying to stay quiet. I stood just outside the arch which opens into the kitchen, listening.

“. . . bad it was,” Joan was saying.

“She took a fall in Tokyo,” Van said. “End of the third set, just went right off the stage. Didn’t even know she’d done it.”

“She’s not made for it.”

“She’s brilliant.”

“She’s a musician, Vanessa. Not a performer, not like you.”

“She’s great onstage.”

There was a rustle, the sound of a cabinet opening and closing. “My husband knew.”

“About the drinking?”

“Not that, not specifically. But he knew what she was in for, knew where you were all headed. He tried to warn her. He wanted her to understand how isolating it would be, how lonely. But mostly, I think, he wanted her to understand that she shouldn’t trust it, not any of it, not anyone.”

“You mean me, too?”

Another cabinet opened, closed. I heard a sigh. “Sending her home proved him wrong about you. But even now he’d say that for everyone else—and he really did mean everyone—it’s about money. How much of it they can make off her, off the band. Those people, they don’t care about art or entertainment. They just want to keep getting richer.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being rich.”

“Depends how you get there, Vanessa. There was this thing, I heard it on the news this morning, about how the albums have shot up the charts.”

“You think it’s someone close to her?” Van asked. “Someone who put the cameras in her house and killed Mikel?”

“She doesn’t want to think that her brother could have done a thing like that.”

“Would you?”

I’d heard more than enough, retreated, back to the living room. Their voices faded, leaving me with my own.

We’d been with the Larkins for just under two weeks when the same Gresham detective, Wagner, came to talk to us again. He came in the afternoon, after school, and he got lucky, because Mikel was actually at the house, along with me. Mrs. Larkin invited him in and offered him a soda, then went to fetch us.

Mikel and I had been sitting together, in the room he shared with the eldest Larkin boy. I’d been trying to do homework, taking comfort in having him close. When Mrs. Larkin stuck her head in to tell us that Detective Wagner was here, Mikel put his magazine down and told her we’d be right there.

“What does he want?” I asked him as soon as she was gone.

“He wants to know what we saw.” He said it all flat, trying to be bored by the horror of it all. “Dad’s going to be on trial and stuff, and he wants to make sure that he really killed Mom.”

“But he already asked. We already told him.”

“He wants to check it.”

“I didn’t really see,” I said, after a moment. “I was going back to the porch.”

“You saw enough.”

“But I didn’t really see it, Mikel.”

“I did.”

“He just ran her over?”

He nodded, slowly, as if leery of the memory, then got off the bed. “We should go down.”

I followed reluctantly, trailing after him down the stairs. The detective scared me, the thought of talking to him again, remembering again, disconcerting. I was still having nightmares, and having to listen to questions that would force me to see things I hadn’t, make me recall things I was trying so hard to forget, filled my feet with lead.

But Mikel, he was tougher, and if he was scared, it didn’t show, and that made it easier when I followed him into the kitchen. Wagner was at the dining table, with a smile this time, and Mrs. Larkin guided us to him, put us in chairs.

“I just want to check some things, all right?” he told us.

“Sure,” Mikel said.

He started by asking where we were when it happened, what we were doing. Wanted to know how long Mom and I had been working on the pumpkin in the driveway, wanted to know how she’d been acting. If she was upset with me, perhaps, or maybe just upset about something else entirely. My answers were sullen, one-word, a string of nos.

“He picked me up on the corner,” Mikel told Wagner.

“Where were you going?”

“Meet some friends.”

“And your father saw you?”

“He stopped the truck. He was mad. He doesn’t like my friends. Told me I had to come home.”

Wagner asked some questions about Mikel’s friends, and my brother confirmed that they sometimes got into trouble. Sometimes they broke things, sometimes they took things, but it wasn’t like it was ever anything someone would miss, it wasn’t ever anything important, Mikel said. Wagner asked him if he was still getting into trouble, and after glancing to Mrs. Larkin, Mikel confirmed that, too. Not embarrassed, almost defiant.

“What about you, Miriam? You staying out of trouble?”

“Trying,” I said.

“That’s good.”

I looked at Mikel, longing to be tough like he was, to be strong and act like I didn’t care. Wagner made more scribbles on his pad, flipped pages, asked a couple more questions. He asked if Tommy ever hit our mother, if he ever hit us.

“He never hits Mim,” Mikel told him, by way of an answer.

Joan was saying my name, and Van was standing at the door, ready to take me home, and I got off the couch, feeling caught by the memories.

Joan gave me a hug and a kiss, and I thanked her for everything.

“I mean everything,” I said.

“You’re worrying me, Miriam,” she said, and then told me to call in the next day or so. She’d be back in school, teaching again, but she said she’d try to keep her evenings free.

The top was up on Van’s convertible, and when she switched on the engine the stereo began blaring Radiohead, and she lunged for the button to turn it off. There wasn’t much of a point to the silence; we didn’t have anything to say to each other.

She drove me home, and I got out of the car, thanked her for the lift.

“I’m having a thing at my house,” Van said. “Tomorrow night. If you want to come.”

“You mean a party?”

“Just for fun. I’m keeping it small.”

“I’ll probably give it a miss,” I said.

“Thought I’d offer.”

“I don’t really hate you, you know that, right?” I said.

“Sure you do,” Van told me. “Just not for the reasons you think.”

There was a new mess to clean up after I’d changed into comfortable clothes, and I went through my bedroom and bathroom, mopping up the spills and finding the top to the bottle of Jack, trying to ignore the smell. I brought it downstairs and poured a small shot before putting it in the pantry with its brothers-in-proof, then checked the phone for messages while I took the drink. The voice-mail lady told me there were two messages, which I took to mean that the press had found a new story to pursue for the time being.

The funeral home had a question about the bill, but said it could wait until tomorrow. The other one from Hoffman had been left only ten minutes before I’d gotten home. She said she had some questions for me, and would I please call when I got the message. She left her home number.

Chapel would throw a fit, but if Hoffman had questions for me, maybe I could ask some questions of her, maybe get an idea about what was going on with Tommy. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

“This is Tracy.”

“It’s Miriam Bracca, I’m calling for Detective Hoffman.”

“This is she.” She sounded surprised. “Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you.”

“You left a message.”

“I’ve got some questions I’d like you to answer.”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking I should probably talk to Chapel, first, or at least have him present.”

“Look, you’re not a suspect, and I’m not going to try to trick you into anything. I’ve got some questions, I’m hoping you can help me find your brother’s killer, that’s all this is. Chapel would just complicate it.”

“Is my father still a suspect?”

“Are you willing to talk to me?”

“Yeah, if it’s actually a conversation and not an interrogation.”

“Are you at your home?”

“Why?”

“Could I come over there? I’m in Sabin, it’d take me about ten minutes or so to get there.”

“You’re sure I’m not a suspect?”

“You’re not a suspect,” she assured me.

“Then why do you want to talk to me?”

“I’m hoping you can help me find a new one.”

It made me laugh, I don’t know why.

“Sure,” I said. “Take your best shot.”