Hush Money (3 page)

Location wasn’t the only nice thing about his living quarters; nicer yet was the privacy. He had his own entrance around back, four little cement steps leading down to the doorway. The apartment was one large room that took up all of the basement except for a walled-off laundry room, which he was free to use. He also had his own bathroom with toilet and shower, though he did have to go through the laundry room to get to it. Otherwise his apartment was absolutely private and he had no one bothering him; he saw the Parkers (the family he rented from) hardly at all. He had a refrigerator, a stove, and a formica-top table that took up one corner of the room as a make-do kitchenette. A day bed that in its couch identity was a dark green went well with the light green-painted cement walls. There was also an empty bookcase he hadn’t gotten around to filling yet, though some gun magazines and
Penthouses
were stacked on the bottom shelf (he’d given up
Playboy
while in Nam, as he didn’t care for its political slant) and a big double-door pine wardrobe for his clothes and such, which he kept locked.

The wardrobe was where he stowed the Weatherby, which he’d brought into the house carried casually under and over his arm. It was zipped up in a tan-and-black vinyl pouch, with foam padding and fleece lining, and he’d made no pretense about what he was carrying. He’d already explained to the Parkers that shooting was his hobby. Luckily, Mr. Parker was not a hunter or a gun buff, or he might’ve asked embarrassing questions. Someone who knew what he was talking about might have looked at the Weatherby and asked, “What you planning to shoot, lad? Big game?”

And he would’ve had to say, “That’s exactly right”

He laid the Weatherby Mark V in the bottom of the wardrobe, alongside the rest of the small but substantial arsenal he’d assembled for his war: a Browning 9-millimeter automatic with checkered walnut grips, blue finish, fixed sights, and thirteen-shot magazine, in brown leather shoulder holster rig; a Colt Python revolver, blue, .357 Magnum with four-inch barrel, wide hammer spur and adjustable rear sight, in black leather hip holster; a Thompson submachine gun, .45 caliber, black metal, brown wood; boxes of the appropriate ammunition; and half a dozen pineapple-type hand grenades, which he’d made himself, buying empty shell casings, filling them with gunpowder, providing primers.

He closed the wardrobe but left it unlocked.

He felt fine. Not jumpy at all. He sniffed under his arms. Nothing, not a scent; this afternoon had been literally no sweat. That was good to know, after some years away from actual combat. Good to know he hadn’t lost his edge. And that the helicopter crash hadn’t left him squeamish: that was good to know, too. Very.

But he took a shower anyway. The hot needles of water melted him; he dialed the faucet tight, so that the water pressure would stay as high as possible. If he told himself there was
no
tension in him, he’d be lying, he knew. He needed to relax, unwind. He’d stayed cool today, yes, but nobody stays
that
cool.

The phone rang and he cut his shower short, running bare-ass out to answer it, hopping from throw rug to throw rug to avoid the cold cement of a basement floor that was otherwise as naked as he was.

“Yes?” he said.

“Stevie, where’ve you been? I been trying to get you.”

It was his sister, Diane. She was a year or two older than he, around thirty or so, but she played the older sister act to the hilt. It was even worse now, with their parents dead.

“I was out, Di.”

“I won’t ask where. I’m not going to pry.”

“Good, Di.”

“Well, I just thought you’d maybe like to come over tonight for supper, that’s all. I came home over lunch hour and put a casserole in, and it’ll be too much for just Joni and me.”

Joni was her six-year-old daughter. Diane was divorced, but she hadn’t gotten out of the habit of cooking for a family, and consequently he’d been eating at her place several nights a week this last month. Which was fine, as his specialty was canned soup and TV dinners.

“I’d like that, Di.”

“Besides, I want to talk to you.”

“About school, I suppose.”

“About school, yes, and some other things. I’m your sister and interested in what you’re doing. Is that so terrible?”

“Well, not a lot has changed since you saw me yesterday, Di.”

“I give you free meals, you give me a hard time. Is that what you call a fair exchange?”

“Hey, I appreciate it, Sis. I even love you part of the time.”

“When I put the plate of food down in front of you, especially.”

“Yeah, especially then.”

“Look, I got to get back to my desk. See you at six?”

“That’ll be fine. What’s for dinner? Casserole, you said.”

“Oh, you’re really going to love me tonight, little brother. Made one of your favorites.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“Lasagna.”

Appropriate
, he thought to himself, smiling a little.

“Stevie? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here, Di. See you at six.”

3

EVERY DAY
, both going to and coming from work, Diane would turn her head away as she drove by the little white clapboard house where her mother had been murdered. Across the way was a junk dealer’s lot, a graveyard for smashed-up and broken-down automobiles, which she would shift her attention to to avoid looking at the house. The junk yard was hardly a pleasant landscape to gaze upon and even had its metaphorical suggestion of the very thing she wanted not to think about: death, destruction, mortality. But she would look at it every day, twice a day, rather than look at the house.

She would have avoided the whole road if that were possible, but there seemed to be no way to avoid this particular stretch of concrete. East 14th Street seemed to run through her life like her own personal interstate, complete with all the rest stops and exits of her life, significant and insignificant alike, everything from the insurance company where she worked to shopping centers, restaurants, movie theaters. Her mother’s house, of course, was on East 14th; so was the Travelers Inn Motor Lodge, where her father had been manager and where, in his private suite of rooms, he had died. Her brother lived in an apartment on Walnut, just off East 14th, while she herself lived in an apartment house on the outskirts of Des Moines, where East 14th turns into Highway 65, the highway along which the DiPretas, her father’s employers for so many years, lived each in their individual homes, enjoying the expanse of Iowa farm country between Des Moines and its smalltown neighbor, Indianola.

It was a street that rolled up and down and over hills that seemed surprised to have a city on them. On her drive home, once past certain landmarks—the skyscraper outline of the Des Moines downtown, the awesome Capitol building, the bridge spanning the railroad yard—East 14th turned into an odd mélange of small businesses and middle-class homes, with random pockets of forest-type trees as a reminder of what had to be carved away to put a city here. It was an interesting drive, an interesting street, and she liked having access to all her needs on one easy route. But today, as every day, she averted her eyes as she drove by that little white clapboard house where her mother had been shot to death.

Diane didn’t look at the house, just as she didn’t look at the loss of her parents. She ignored both, because recognizing either would emotionally overwhelm her. She hid the pain away in some attic of her mind and went on with her life as though none of it had happened. She’d cried only twice during the course of the whole affair: first, on receiving the news of her mother’s murder, and second, on hearing of her father’s suicide. Both times she had cried until she hurt; until her chest hurt, her eyes hurt, until nothing hurt; until emptiness set in and she could feel nothing at all. After that, after crying those two times, she didn’t cry any more. Not a tear. Even at the funeral she hadn’t wept. People congratulated her on her strength, found it remarkable she’d been able to face the tragedy head on as she had. But they were wrong; she hadn’t faced a thing, head on or otherwise. Facing it would have ripped her apart, left her emotions frayed and her mental state a shambles. So she faced nothing; she blocked off everything.

And she knew it. She knew that repressing emotion, letting the pressure build up behind some closed door in her head, was probably an unhealthy attitude. Sometimes she wished she
could
cry again, wished she
would
cry again. Sometimes she wished she could get it out, all of it. She’d lie in bed, consciously forcing the thoughts from her mind, feeling emotion churning in her stomach like something she couldn’t digest. Wishing that were the case, wishing it were that simple, wishing she could stick a finger down her throat and make herself heave all of that bile out of her system.

Her husband, Jerry, used to try to make her talk about it; talk it out, get rid of it. It wasn’t that Jerry was a particularly sensitive individual, Christ no. She smiled bitterly at the thought. Jerry just wanted in her pants all the time; that was Jerry’s only concern. After her parents died she lost interest in sex, which had of course bruised Jerry’s overinflated ego. She didn’t know why, but she just felt cold toward Jerry as far as sex was concerned. Nothing stirred in her, no matter what he tried.

And try he did. Before, he’d never been particularly sex-oriented during their marriage; after the first year, it had been a three-times-a-week affair: Friday, Saturday,
Wednesday, a passionless, clockwork ritual. She used to feel slightly rejected because of that, since she’d always been told she was sexy and sexy-looking, had always been sought after by guys and liked to think of herself as cute. Sure, maybe her boobs weren’t so big, but how often did a guy meet up with a girl with natural platinum blonde hair and the blue eyes to go with it? She
was
cute, goddamnit, and knew it, and was proud of it. She’d always
liked
sex, had
fun
with it; that had been a lot of what she’d liked about Jerry, though Jerry the Tiger had turned tame after a marriage license made it legal. That was Jerry, all right: back-seat stud, mattress dud. But when he found out about her newly acquired sexual reluctance, Christ, then he was waving a damn erection in her face every time she looked at him. Which was as seldom as she could help it.

“You’re frigid,” he’d tell her, and she wouldn’t say anything. After all, she didn’t turn him away; she just wasn’t particularly responsive. And how the hell could she help that? How the hell could she help how she
felt
? You don’t turn love and sex on like tap water, Jerry. “If you didn’t think about your parents all the time, we wouldn’t have this problem,” he would say. I am
not
thinking about my parents, she’d say. “Oh, but you are. You’re thinking about
not
thinking about them.” That doesn’t make sense, Jerry. “It makes more sense than you, you frigid goddamn bitch.” And she would say, all right, Jerry, do it to me if you want, Jerry, you will anyway. And he would. And she would feel nothing.

Nothing except contempt for her husband, which blossomed into the divorce, which as yet was not final, as the law’s ninety-day wait (to allow opportunity for reconciliation) wasn’t quite up. But the marriage was over, no doubt of that. Diane was aware that even before the divorce thing arose Jerry had been seeing other girls; and mutual friends had told her recently that Jerry had already narrowed his field to one girl, who oddly enough was also a platinum blonde (not natural, she’d wager) and who had a more than superficial resemblance to somebody named Diane. Which seemed to her a sick, perverse damn thing for the son of a bitch to do.

She thought back to what he’d said to her the night their marriage exploded into mutual demands for divorce. He’d said, “You’re cold, Diane. Maybe not frigid, but cold. You got yourself so frozen over inside you don’t feel a goddamn fucking thing for or about anybody.”

It was a blow that had struck home at the time, a game point Jerry had won but a thought she’d discarded later, after some reflection. She wasn’t cold inside. She could still feel. She could still love. She loved little Joni more than anything in the world. She was filled with the warmth of love every time she held her daughter in her arms, and she was having trouble, frankly, not spoiling the child because of that.