A Tap on the Window (32 page)

SIXTY-ONE

Augie
was waiting for me on the corner, a few hundred yards down the street from the Pearce house, sitting high in his white Suburban. I pulled up alongside him and powered down the passenger window. Augie, who probably remembers what everyone in Griffon drives, looked at the Subaru and said, “With all the shit that’s going on, you had time to get a new car?”

“Noticed whether anyone’s home?” I asked, pointing down the street.

“No one’s come or gone, but there’s no car there, so I’d say nobody’s at the house.” He paused. “Except, of course, Harry in the basement.” Augie looked at me skeptically, and who could blame him, really?

“There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” I said. “About Scott.”

“This got anything to do with what you think is going on in that house?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

Augie’s expression turned slightly sympathetic. “Nobody cares more about Scott than me, Cal, but could we tackle one thing at a time?”

I was churning inside about Ricky Haines, but I took his point. We were here to find Harry Pearce.

Instead of answering him, I drove the hundred yards up the street and parked in front of Phyllis Pearce’s house. Augie followed and pulled into the driveway, coming to a stop close to the front porch. Walking up to join him, I noticed again how long the grass was. After Dennis quit, Hooper’s hadn’t had enough staff to meet all their customers’ needs.

We mounted the porch steps together. Given that Augie was the chief of police, I let him go first and be the one to ring the bell.

“You said no one was here,” I said.

“Just in case,” he replied.

Twenty seconds passed with no one opening the door. Augie tried it, but it was locked. I wasn’t naive enough to ask Augie whether he needed a warrant. I wouldn’t have wanted to wait around for one, anyway.

“Let’s take a walk around,” he said. “Before I go busting down a door I might as well see if one’s been left open.”

We went around to the back and tried that door, but it was locked, too. Nor did we find any reachable windows that could be forced open. There were several basement windows at ground level, but Augie had no interest in smashing any of them. “I’m too old to get into a house that way.”

So we went back to the front door.

“Here goes,” Augie said, reared back, and drove the heel of his boot into the door just below the knob. The door didn’t open.

“Shit,” he said. “Nearly broke my knee.”

“Let me give it a shot.” I hit the door hard enough for the jamb to start splitting. Then Augie took another turn, and the door swung open.

“Probably going to get a bill from Phyllis for that,” he said.

We entered the house. Augie called out, “Hello? Police! Anyone home?” We heard nothing back.

We opened several doors. A couple opened onto closets, another onto a bathroom. The fourth door, just as you stepped inside the kitchen, opened onto a set of stairs that led down.

“After you,” Augie said.

I flicked on a light. The basement was low-ceilinged and unfinished. Bare bulbs instead of light fixtures. Cement-block walls instead of paneling. There were half a dozen rooms. One was a workshop, with tools hanging on the wall. A couple of them held old furniture. Another was jammed with metal filing cabinets. Augie opened the top drawer of one of them, glanced in.

“Business stuff for Patchett’s,” he said.

Another room contained a washer and dryer and rack. A shelf, grungy with spilled fabric softener and liquid detergent, was heavy with cleaners and chemicals.

“This is where the fire started,” I said.

“Huh?”

“It’s what got Dennis down here. Smoke from the dryer. Lint catching on fire, probably. Look, there’s the fire extinguisher on the wall.” Off the other end of the laundry room was a short hallway, and a door at the end.

“Augie,” I said.

He looked at the door, then at me.

“Guess we should have a look.”

I got ahead of him. There was a lock hanging from the door. I banged on it.

“Mr. Pearce? Are you in there? Mr. Pearce?”

Augie joined in. “It’s Augustus Perry, Mr. Pearce. Chief of police. We’re going to get you out of there.”

There was a shallow basement window by the door that came down a foot from the ceiling, and just as Claire had said, there was a key sitting on the sill. I grabbed it, fitted the key into the lock, twisted it, and the lock opened. I set it on the sill with the key.

I made an effort to keep my hand from shaking.

Augie placed his hand on the door and started to push.

“Whew,” he said, as we both caught a whiff of something unpleasant that someone had tried to mask with Lysol. A mix of mustiness, dead mice, urine, and God knows what else.

The door was wide open. I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

The room was littered with odd bits of furniture, stacks of old magazines, a busted record player with no arm, a box of eight-track tapes. An old metal rollaway bed that was folded up at the middle, a soiled-looking mattress trapped within it, was tucked into a corner behind more cardboard boxes. A junk room, illuminated by a bare bulb in an exposed ceiling receptacle.

That was it.

No Harry Pearce.

Augie turned and looked at me. “When Phyllis sends me the bill for her front door, I’m giving it to you.”

SIXTY-TWO

Phyllis
unlocks the door and says to him, a broad smile on her face, “This is your lucky day.”

Harry Pearce sits up in bed. “What are you talking about?”

“Ice cream,” she says. “We’re going out for ice cream.”

Harry looks skeptical. “Don’t tease me.”

“It’s true. We’re going to do it.”

He’s a kid getting a new puppy. “This is the best day ever
.”

It amazes her sometimes how childlike he has become over time. Once so argumentative and abusive, now so compliant and captivated by the thought of the simplest pleasures.

Phyllis nods. “It’s time,” she says. “It’s really time. But it’s going to take a bit of work to get you out. It’s not like we’ve installed ramps over the years.”

“That’s okay,” he says, swinging his legs out of the bed and leaning forward to grab onto the arm of his wheelchair. “We’ll figure something out.”

He pulls himself out of bed, twists, and drops into the chair. While his legs have withered away to sticks over the years, his arms are roped with muscle from lifting himself into and out of the wheelchair. Not that he’s had a lot of places to wheel himself around. The room he’s lived in for seven years is only ten by ten feet, and not the most hospitable environment. Cold cement floor, cinder-block walls. Every once in a while, she has let him wheel himself around the basement for exercise, past the washer and dryer, into the sewing room, or the workshop he once enjoyed, with his wrenches and other tools all arranged so perfectly.

But even those short times outside the walls of his cell have made her nervous. If someone were to show up unexpectedly, she’d have to return him quickly, close the door, get the lock on in a hurry.

She tried to tell herself the room was not a cell. For the longest time, it was Harry’s recovery room, where she and Richard treated him, looked after him, nursed him back to health. Sure, he was never the way he was before. Not even close. But what was done was done. One had to make the best of a bad situation, and hadn’t they done their best to do that for him? All this time?

In retrospect, sure, there were things they could have done differently. Maybe, if they’d called for an ambulance right away, the moment he tumbled down those stairs, they might have been able to do something for him. But who knew he was paralyzed from the waist down and that his spine was in all likelihood broken? How were they supposed to know that? And there was more at stake, too. After all, Richard had just joined the Griffon police. He had his whole future ahead of him. Was it right for him to give up all that for a momentary lapse in judgment? Was that fair?

In many ways, really, Harry only had himself to blame. He’d been a good man, most of the time. He’d been there for Phyllis when her husband died years earlier, had comforted her, helped her settle the estate, taken her to dinner, invited her, and her son, to join him on trips to California and Mexico. He’d treated Richard like he was his own son. Harry loved the boy, there was nothing fake about it, and Richard, who so desperately needed a father figure, loved him right back. If anything, it was the bond between them that persuaded Phyllis to let Harry move in with her, and eventually accept his proposal to let him be her second husband.

She should have paid more attention to the signs. There was something not quite right about Harry. Before their marriage, his obsession with record-keeping, with saving every receipt—he had six-year-old receipts from donut shops, for crying out loud—seemed like nothing more than charming eccentricities. In fact, he’d be a real asset at the bar, making sure the books balanced. But there were other things. Those books where he recorded everything he ate, in that small, precise handwriting of his, always making note of the date. Didn’t matter how often folks at Patchett’s teased him about it. It hadn’t occurred to Phyllis back then that maybe Harry was obsessive-compulsive.

Maybe, if that had been it, things would have been manageable. But there were the mood swings. One day he’d want to take her and Richard to the movies or the outlet mall to spend some cash, and then the next he’d be plunged into the depths of depression. And with the depression, there was often anger. And drinking. He refused to see a doctor—let alone a psychiatrist or psychologist—but Phyllis figured that in addition to his OCD tendencies, he might be bipolar, or manic-depressive. As time went on, he became a compendium of psychiatric tics.

At his low points, nothing was too trivial to find fault with. Lights needlessly left on, getting in the car after Phyllis or Richard had used it and finding less than a quarter tank of gas. Phyllis had to make sure the spoons stood up in the drying rack so water wasn’t trapped in them. Made Harry crazy when that happened. He believed Phyllis and her son discussed him behind his back, which, of course, was true.

On rare occasions, there was violence.

Like the time Phyllis lost the phone bill. Harry, who paid the bills every two weeks, couldn’t understand why it wasn’t with all the others. He searched the trash and determined that Phyllis had inadvertently pitched it with the junk mail. Harry was apoplectic. In a fit of rage, he grabbed her by the wrist, held her hand flat on the kitchen table, and slammed a mug down on it.

No broken bones, but she couldn’t move her hand for a week. Harry was instantly remorseful. Became the world’s most attentive husband. Made all the meals for days. Bought Phyllis flowers. Took Richard to a Bills game to prove he was a solid stepfather.

But he couldn’t hold it together indefinitely, especially if he’d had too much to drink. Sometimes it’d just be a slap. And there was that time, while behind the wheel, he punched her thigh when she thought she’d left an iron plugged in. (She hadn’t, which only further exasperated him.)

And yet, in spite of everything, Phyllis and Richard did not hate the man. Phyllis made apologies for him, said they had to cut him some slack. He was a tormented person. He’d served in Vietnam, seen things no one should have to see, done things no one should have to do. Often, in the middle of the night, he’d wake up screaming, the mattress soaked with perspiration, as he relived some horror from over there in the late sixties.

“Harry served his country,” Phyllis often said, “and it left him scarred.”

Phyllis had her hands full with Richard, too. Maybe, when your real father dies and you’re just a boy, it messes up your head. Or when you get a new dad who’s got a slew of problems, you find a way to inherit them, even though there’s no genetic link. Who knew? But as Richard moved through his teens, he showed signs of not being able to control certain impulses. There were those two incidents—at least two that Phyllis knew about—where he inappropriately touched some girls at school. Okay, call it what it was: fondled. There were meetings with the principal, apologies, a suspension. Luckily, nothing more than that. And then there was his propensity to erupt in anger. Calm and serene on the surface, but simmering underneath, like lava bubbling in a dormant volcano. Then, boom. Phyllis wanted to take him to see someone, too, but Harry wouldn’t hear of it. “He’s just a boy,” he said. “He’s burning off steam.”

That’s certainly what happened that night, seven years ago.

Harry was in the grips of the black dog, as Winston Churchill had famously said, and had been that way for the better part of a week. Phyllis and Richard had tried their best to steer clear of him. Phyllis was looking after Patchett’s on her own, insisting that her husband stay home until he was feeling more up to it.

One Monday night, when the staff were trusted to run Patchett’s so that the Pearces could have a night off, after Harry had recorded in his notebook what Phyllis had served for dinner—pork chops, macaroni and cheese, and canned peas, as it turned out—he announced he wanted ice cream.

Phyllis said they had no ice cream. Harry wanted to know how this was possible, since he had prepared a shopping list for Phyllis and he knew he had written ice cream on it.

“I missed it,” she said. “I’ll get some next time.”

“What is the point,” he wanted to know, “of my writing things on your shopping list, if you’re not going to look at it and read what’s on it? Maybe you got it and forgot.” He rooted around in the freezer atop the refrigerator, knocking frozen steaks and containers of Minute Maid orange juice onto the floor. “Goddamn it.”

“Harry,” Phyllis said.

Richard watched this play out, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, arms folded across his chest. A member of the Griffon police department for only a few months but still living at home, he hadn’t yet changed out of his uniform after a day of writing tickets and directing traffic at an accident scene.

“Is it too fucking much to ask that we always have some ice cream in here?” Harry asked, tossing out more items. An ice cube tray hit the floor, scattering tiny blocks of ice across the linoleum. “What about the downstairs freezer?” he asked. “We have any down there?”

“No,” Phyllis said.

He flung open the door to the basement anyway.

Richard, up till now, hadn’t moved an inch.

Harry spun around, took a step in her direction, pointed a finger, holding it three inches from her nose. “After all I’ve done, helping you and your boy all these bloody years, do I ask for that much? Do I? I swear to God, if I—”

It all happened in less than ten seconds.

“Shut up!” Richard said, storming into the room, grabbing one of the wooden kitchen table chairs, holding it by the back with both hands, swinging it like a bat toward his stepfather.

He instinctively turned away, and the chair hit him across the back. Hard. Harry Pearce stumbled forward, his foot landing on one of the cubes of ice.

In a Three Stooges episode it might have been comical.

Harry’s foot went out from under him and he pitched forward, right through the open doorway to the basement. Made a hell of a noise going down. But when he reached the bottom, there was total silence.

Phyllis screamed.

“Dad!” Richard cried, throwing aside the chair.

The two of them ran down the steps, finding Harry in a twisted heap, eyes closed, not moving.

“Oh my God, he’s dead,” Phyllis said.

Richard knelt, laid his head sideways on his father’s chest. “No, he’s not. He’s breathing. His heart’s going.”

Phyllis dropped to her knees, put her head to his chest as well, needing to confirm it for herself. “Yes, I hear it. I hear it. Harry? Harry, can you hear me?”

Harry, who had adopted the shape of a pretzel, did not respond.

“I’ll call an ambulance,” Richard said, getting up. He went up the stairs two at a time and as he was disappearing into the kitchen his mother called up to him.

“Wait,” she said.

His head reappeared, framed in the doorway, silhouetted against the kitchen lights. “What?”

“Don’t . . . I mean, just . . . wait.”

“Mom, every second counts.”

“He’ll be okay,” Phyllis said. “He just needs a minute. Help me straighten him out.”

“We shouldn’t move him,” her son said.

“We’ll be really careful. I’ve got that old rollaway bed in the back room. I’ll bring it out and we can put him down on that.”

“Mom . . .” Richard came back down the stairs halfway.

“Richard, listen to me,” she said. “If you call the ambulance, they’re going to call the police, too.”

“I’m the police,” Richard said.

“I know. But others will come. And when Harry wakes up, and tells them what you did . . .”

“I . . . I didn’t mean to do it. He just made me so angry. I thought he was going to hit you.”

“I know, love, I know. I totally understand. But the police, they won’t. They won’t understand. You’re just starting out. It wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be fair for them to hold this against you.”

“I . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Get the bed set up. Set it up right here. I’ll straighten him out.”

Richard brought in the rollaway, the rusty wheels squeaking in protest. He opened it and flattened it, patted the mattress to smooth it out.

“Help me lift him,” Phyllis said.

Together, they got him onto the bed. “He’s still breathing,” she said. “He seems to be breathing just fine.”

“I couldn’t stand what he was doing,” Richard said. “He just wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t let it go, he—”

“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll look after him. He’ll probably be fine in a few hours. He’ll have a bad headache is all. You wait and see. It doesn’t make any sense to make a bigger deal out of this than it really is.”

“If that’s what you think, Mom,” Richard said. She always seemed to know the right thing to do.

But was this right? It had seemed so at the time. But Harry was not fine in a few hours. He didn’t regain consciousness for two days. When he did, he wasn’t the same. He was simpler, somehow.

When Richard and Phyllis tried to coax him out of bed, they discovered he could not move his legs.

“We should call a doctor,” Richard said. “He probably needs an X-ray or something.”

“We’ll give it a few more days,” Phyllis insisted. “Maybe—maybe whatever broke that keeps his legs from working will fix itself.”

Neither one of them really believed that, but they were willing to give it a go.

At Patchett’s, people asked where Harry was.

“He’s got that nasty flu bug that’s been going around,” Phyllis told them. “Last thing I want is him coming in here and sneezing on the chicken wings.”