Homicide Related (25 page)

He went to work and put up with Kevin's asking him, “Would it kill you to smile once in a while?” When Linelle opened her mouth to say something, Dooley shook his head. Linelle closed her mouth again. When it was time for his break, Dooley stepped out onto the sidewalk, turned on his cell phone, and punched in Beth's number.

She answered right away.

“I've been trying to call you,” she said. “Did you see the news?”

“I'm at work,” Dooley said. “The only thing I've seen is the latest Robin Williams release.” They played DVDs non-stop on the monitors in the store, but only stuff that the littlest kids could watch without some pickle-up-her-ass mommy complaining to management, which meant, essentially, that they only played crap, and that described every Robin Williams movie Dooley had ever been subjected to, although Beth insisted there was at least one good one and that old Robin had even been nominated for an Academy Award one time, saying it like it was a big deal.

Dooley heard a voice in the background—a female voice.

“Just a minute,” Beth said. He heard muffled voices. Beth probably had her thumb over the mouthpiece on her phone. “Sorry,” she said when she came back on. “My mother is freaking out. She saw the news, too. She saw your uncle was arrested for murder.”

Terrific. Beth's mother already treated Dooley like he was some kind of criminal. She already didn't want Beth to have anything to do with him. Now Dooley's uncle was in lockup. Dooley could only imagine how that was going down.

“He didn't do it, did he?” Beth said. “It's all a mistake, right?”

“Yeah,” Dooley said. He tried to muster some conviction.

“I mean, he wouldn't kill his own sister, would he?”

“I don't think so,” Dooley said.

“You don't
think
so?”

That was the thing. He
didn't
think so, but he wasn't sure. He knew Lorraine. He knew what she could be like. He knew how his uncle felt about her. He knew his uncle had lied to him about her.

“I mean, no,” Dooley said. “Of course I don't think he did it. He used to be a cop. He's Mr. Law and Order.” Mr. Law and Order who had never said a good word about Lorraine that Dooley could remember and who'd said plenty of not-so-good things. Mr. Law and Order who, it looked like, had fudged it the first time the cops had asked him where he'd been when she was killed. Why had he even bothered? Did he think the cops weren't going to check? Or had he done it for the same reason Dooley had—because nobody had said murder, everyone had been talking drug overdose, so, really, what did it matter where he was, and if it didn't matter, why get into it? Everything to do with Lorraine just got messy sooner or later. But there was that other thing that kept niggling at Dooley—his uncle also hadn't mentioned to Dooley that Lorraine had been at the house the week before she'd been killed. And something else, the kicker, the thing Dooley would never have figured, not in a million years: His uncle had known Jeffie, which meant he probably knew what Jeffie was into.

“I have to get back to work,” Dooley said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.” That wasn't the whole truth, either. He wanted more. He wanted to see her. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to smell her and taste her and lie next to her. When he was with Beth, he didn't think about Lorraine, ever. He didn't think about drugs and booze. He didn't think about what had happened so far in his life. He didn't think about all the crap he'd done and how he wished he could undo it. When he was with Beth, he was one hundred percent there and so full of her that there wasn't room for anything or anyone else. “I wish your mom was out of town or something,” he said.

“Me, too,” Beth said softly.

And there he had it—the best high he could ever hope for, that floaty up-there feeling of rightness.

“I'll talk to you tomorrow,” he said.

“I'll dream about you tonight,” she said.

The minute he ended the call, Lorraine filled his thoughts again. Someone had killed her. There'd been a time when he didn't think he would care, but here he was, thinking about her, unable to stop himself, and not just because his uncle seemed to be the best suspect the cops had. He'd known for a long time how messed up she was. He'd never known, until his uncle told him, how far back that went and why it might have been. He still didn't really know the why of it.

Before he went back into the store, he made another quick call, this one to Warren.

By ten o'clock that night, Dooley was restless and fed up. His uncle was in jail, and what was Dooley doing? Putting up with what seemed like an endless stream of customers who were looking for, “You know, that movie, the one with that guy in it from that TV show,” but when you pressed them, they couldn't recall anything about the movie, the guy, or the TV show, not that that stopped them from giving him attitude when he had to confess (politely) that he had no idea what they were talking about. And people thought video-store clerks were brain-dead.

Dooley tried to put himself on automatic pilot—scan the product bar code, check to make sure that the correct DVD or game was in the case, demagnetize the product, take the money, print the receipt, bag the product, “Please call again”—taking on every customer in the store because Linelle, who was supposed to be up on cash with him, was making nice with a male customer in the action-adventure aisle, Linelle laughing a lot, which tipped Dooley that she was interested in the guy because most of the time—hell,
all
of the time—she had as little patience with the customers as Dooley did.

Linelle came up to the cash, still with the guy, who Dooley could see was a sharp dresser, but in a flash way, not in the money way of someone like, say, Nevin with the midnight blue Jag. The guy was buying, not renting, and Linelle rang up the sale. When she gave him his change and his receipt, he flipped the receipt over and scrawled his number on it.

“Really,” he said. “Call me.”

Linelle smiled at him so sweetly that Dooley wondered if she had fallen on her head on the way to work and sustained a serious head injury. The guy had obviously made some kind of impression. But what kind, exactly, Dooley wasn't sure, because the minute the guy cleared the store, Linelle was on the computer, sweetness replaced by a look of intense concentration.

“I knew it,” she said with disgust a few moments later. “I fucking knew it.”

Kevin's head popped up in the family section where he had been shelving new product.

“Language,” he said.

Linelle flipped him the bad finger.

“The guy tells me he lives in some big-deal condo,” she says. “Bullshit. He lives in a crap neighborhood. Asshole. That's why I don't give out my number, Dooley. It's why I always get guys to give me their numbers. They want to give me their cell number, okay, I'll take that. But I always insist on a landline, too. A guy tells me he doesn't have a land-line, he'll never hear from me.”

“What's the big deal?” Dooley said. “A number is a number.”

Linelle rolled her eyes. “Are you for real? A cell number is a number that could be anywhere.” That was why Dooley's uncle had insisted on a pager at first. It was also the reason Dooley was suspicious of cell phones—well, of Beth's cell phone. “A guy gives you a cell number and tells you he's a movie producer based in L.A., how can you check? You call the number, and there the guy is. But where's there? There's no way to know. You can't check it with the phone company. You do a search on the number, and all you get is that it's not a published listing. In other words, no information. Are you with me, Dooley? But a landline? A landline is somewhere, and you can check exactly where. When a guy tells you he lives in an exclusive neighborhood, but the landline is registered to some dump in public housing, you know you're being snowed. Or maybe it's registered to another name—maybe the guy lives with his girlfriend. Worse, his mommy. You want me, you gotta have a landline. You gotta be 411-checkable.”

Dooley gave her a blank look.

“You're kidding, right?” Linelle said. “Don't you know anything?”

“I know 411,” Dooley said.

Linelle shook her head. “Come here.”

He went over to the computer she was at and saw that she was on the Internet.

“Here,” she said. “You can type in an address and it tells you who the place belongs to and the phone number—perfect for checking out that adorable hunk of man who just moved in up the block. Or you can put in a phone number and, bingo, you get the name the phone is registered to and the address. Jesus, Dooley, where have you been?”

Dooley caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Kevin was coming up the aisle toward them, a suspicious look on his face.

“You better not be gambling on-line again, Linelle,” he said.

Dooley looked at her with new interest. Linelle was full of surprises.

“It was dead in here the other night,” she said to Dooley. “I was bored.”

“But on-line gambling?” he said.

“Hey, I was up a hundred bucks by the time Kevin busted me.” She clicked off the 411 site and was back in the IMDB site that they used to check movies for customers.

Fourteen

Y
ou didn't have to wait up for me,” Dooley said when he let himself into the house and Jeannie got up off the couch in the living room. He felt bad. If he'd known she was waiting for him like that, he would have come straight home. He wouldn't have stopped at Warren's place. He saw that there was a wineglass on the coffee table and a bottle of wine, half gone, on the floor beside the table.

“I never had kids,” she said. “It occurred to me that you might be embarrassed if I sat up to wait for you, but then it occurred to me that you might be even more embarrassed if you came home and found out that I was asleep in Gary's bed …” She said all that out straight, with no problem. But when she said, “Gary explained the conditions of your supervision order,” she blushed. Dooley didn't know if it was because of the wine or because she was self-conscious about having to talk about him and his past, if she was one of those people who found things like that harder to talk about than the regular awkward stuff like, say, sex. “He said one of the things that was important was ongoing adult supervision, which includes curfews.” Her face turned even redder, which told him it wasn't the wine. “I promised …”

“It's okay,” Dooley said. “I appreciate it. Really.” He looked at the half-gone bottle of wine and wondered if she'd been plowing through it because she was nervous about being here with him. “If it's okay with you, I'm going to bed,” he said.

She nodded. He heard her footsteps soft on the stairs maybe twenty minutes after he crawled in under the covers. He waited until he was pretty sure she was settled in. Then he got out of bed, turned on the lights, opened his backpack, and pulled out the thick envelope he had picked up at Warren's. He opened it. Inside was a small, square photo album, the cheap kind that you can buy at any dollar store. Dooley had never seen it before. The pages were clear plastic sleeves you could slip photos into, back to back. The photos inside were mainly of Dooley, mainly from school—individual shots and group shots of his entire kindergarten class, his entire grade one class, his entire grade two class, right up to grade six. He remembered the pictures being taken, but he hadn't seen them in ages. Lorraine had never framed them or displayed them around whatever piece of-shit apartment they happened to be living in. He figured she had thrown them out or left them behind as she moved from place to place. But, no, here they were, six years' worth of school pictures of Dooley, alone and with all the kids in his class. After grade six, though, there was only one school photo. Dooley thought it must be from grade seven or eight. He'd started skipping pretty regularly once he hit junior high and almost always dodged picture day.