Nick's Trip (26 page)

I stumbled and fell back. Crane grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me back up. There was blood now streaked across his teeth, and in his eyes a mechanical rage. He shook me and then without releasing his grip quickly moved me backward with a shove that sent me into the punchboard. Knives loosened and fell to the concrete. I groped for the handle of the largest one as it bounced but got my hand around its steel blade instead. I heard pigs wheezing and I heard Crane laugh as he kicked my hand and pinned it against the punchboard. I felt the edge of the blade bite the skin of my fingers, and I watched my hand release the knife, and I saw the clean, even slice and then the blood.

Adrenaline brought my knee violently up into Crane’s balls. He grunted and his eyes jerked skyward, and I shot my hands up between his and broke out of his grip. He threw a wild roundhouse. I ducked it, then shifted to the left and came up in a boxer’s stance and combinated again with a left and then a right to his back. Crane screamed and spun with a hammer fist that hit my ear like a club and knocked me to the ground. I was up quickly and shaking my head clear when he grabbed me and ran me into the punchboard again. My forehead hit first, and as he pulled me back the sty was spinning and the sounds of Crane and the pigs were in the distance. I was pushed out the exit then, and I fell to my knees in the hard mud, and Crane put a
boot to my back. I rolled over and stared at the moving gray sky as squealing pigs brushed my arms and walked with manic clumsiness across my chest. I was still trying to make the sky stop moving when everything suddenly turned to night.

It was day again. I raised myself up on one elbow. The pigs were now back along the fence. I moved my arms at the joint and then my legs. Nothing was broken, and nothing felt right. I wiped blood from my palm onto the leg of my jeans and stared at the ground until I could focus on the ridged mud. When I looked up I saw Crane taking long strides through the sty in my direction. The snub-nosed .38 was in his hand.

“I should have killed you straight up,” he shouted, still walking with purpose. “Makes no difference now.”

I didn’t try to move. I took a deep breath and smelled the air, and I remembered that it was Christmas Eve. Crane ducked his head and exited the sty. I thought of my grandfather, and of his hand around mine, the two of us, walking at night through the snow. Crane stood over me and cocked the pistol’s hammer and pointed the .38 at my head.

He said, “No mess, friend.”

There was a roar. Crane’s red shirt ripped apart in the middle of his chest, and his black vest waved out as if it had been blown by a sudden gust of wind. Blood and bone jetted out and rained down. Crane threw the .38 aside and did an airy two-step dance. His eyes rolled as he fell to the ground and landed at my side, his arm draped across my chest. The arm jerked in spasm. I pushed it off me. Then I looked in the direction of the sty.

Hendricks was standing in the exit. Smoke curled out of the barrel of the .357 that he held at his side.

I wiped chunks of Crane off my face with a shaking hand. I looked at what was left of him. His mouth was open and his gray teeth were sunk into the mud. The large white boar hobbled by and stopped and inspected Crane’s inert body. Something like a smile was on the boar’s snout. I looked at Hendricks and nodded. Hendricks nodded back.

“April’s dead,” I said.

“Then Crane had it comin’.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But you didn’t have to kill him.”

Hendricks smoothed out the brim of his hat as he holstered the .357. “I was aiming for his legs,” he said, with a shrug. “Sight’s way off on this goddamn Smith and Wesson.” A slight gleam appeared in his eye. “Gotta get that son of a bitch fixed. Know what I mean?”

H
ENDRICKS WALKED SLOWLY
back to his car and radioed for an ambulance. While we waited for it he had a seat beside me in the mud and asked for the details. I handed him April’s ring and described everything I had seen in the cottage, with the exception of the brown leather briefcase. Hendricks listened closely. He never once looked at Crane or touched the corpse.

When the ambulance arrived I left the keys to my car with Hendricks and was gurneyed and rushed north to La Plata General. I spent the next three hours in the emergency room, mostly next to a moaning, liver-spotted old woman who had stumbled and broken both wrists on what was probably her last Christmas Eve. She complained about her daughters who lived in Pittsburgh and never called, even at Christmas, and I sat there and let her complain. I had eaten a couple of Tylenol 3s, and I wasn’t feeling all that bad. But a taste of whiskey would have made things a whole lot better.

The bearded doctor who finally saw me had the look of a lawn and garden department manager. He cleaned out the cut across the inside of my hand and wrapped my fingers together with tape over a gauze bandage. After that I was ushered off into a busy room and laid on a cold table, where an unsmiling brunet with shapely but occupationally cumbersome breasts took several X-rays of my bruised arms and shoulders. Everything turned up negative.

I asked for “something stronger,” but the good doctor ignored me as he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses back up over the bridge of his nose and wrote out a prescription for more Tylenols. When I was released I walked out to the parking lot alone. Hendricks leaned on the trunk of my Dart. His white car sat idling next to mine.

I followed him to the station in La Plata and sat at a nondescript metal desk in a room that had a gated chain fence run along its interior. Hendricks asked me the same questions he had asked earlier, and I tried to duplicate my answers exactly. When it was over I asked if I was to be charged with anything, and I asked if my name would be released to any of the local media. He answered no to both questions, and I thanked him again and wished him a good Christmas. He did the same, and as he handed me the keys to my car I shook his hand and said good-bye.

Two miles up the road I pulled off onto the shoulder, got out of the car, and walked back and unlocked my trunk. Inside was my automatic, and next to that the leather briefcase. I closed the trunk and got back into my car and stopped at the next open bar and had a beer and two shots of Jim Beam, then drove back to my apartment in Shepherd Park.

My landlord was waiting for me at the door with my annual Christmas present, a fifth of green-seal Grand-Dad. I gave him a hug and a kiss on his dark brown cheek, and picked up my cat on the way in, rubbing the scar tissue in the socket of her right eye as I carried her. My landlord followed me. I poured two slugs of
Grand-Dad into juice glasses and shook two Tylenol 3s into his palm, and two into mine, and we washed those down with the bourbon. Two hours later the bottle was nearly empty, and I had the English Beat’s
I Just Can’t Stop It
on the stereo, full blown, and my landlord and I were dancing wildly around my living room while my cat watched calmly from her roost on top of the radiator. It was Christmas Eve, and I guess I had a right to celebrate, but I wasn’t thinking about the holiday. I was thinking that I had come close this time, that I had seen the empty black eye, and I had walked away. I was thinking how good it felt to be alive.

HENDRICKS PHONED ME FROM
southern Maryland two days later. A dog search of Crane’s property had failed to turn up any sign of April Goodrich. The cottage had been combed as well, with no result. Only when Hendricks screened the tapes from the root cellar did he find the evidence.

The collection had consisted of the standard rough trade pornography, with a few snuff films in the bunch. On the tail end of one, some home video footage had been cut in.

“You sure it was her?” I said carefully to Hendricks.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “You don’t want to know the details, Stefanos. Let’s just say he did her like one of his pigs. Tied up, with one bullet to the head.”

I thought about it and closed my eyes. Hendricks coughed once on the other end of the line. I said, “That kind of thing can be faked, Hendricks. Any reason to think…”

“No reason. Listen, Stefanos—I’ve seen the tape, you haven’t. What I saw can’t be done with trickery, or special effects. April Goodrich is dead. Now, I don’t know the motive, except that Crane surely was one sick son of a bitch. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“I guess not,” I said, thinking of the money.

“I called her husband,” Hendricks said.

“I know. I spoke to him myself.”

“How’s he doin’?”

“How would you be?” I said.

“Right,” Hendricks said.

“There’s a service for her tomorrow, outside of town.”

“I never get that close to D.C.”

“Bad things happen in the country too, Hendricks.”

“Bad things happen everywhere,” he said tiredly. “You take care.”

THE MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR
April Goodrich was held in a small Baptist church in Beltsville, just south of Laurel. April had no family, and none of her former friends were in attendance. The group consisted of Billy, his parents, me, and a pale, anemic minister. I kept three pews back from Billy and his family and watched Billy the entire time. He stood with his hands folded, expressionless throughout.

Outside the church I shook Billy’s hand and began to walk away. Billy told his parents to wait on the front steps and followed me across the gravel lot to my Dart. He caught me as I was putting the key to the driver’s side lock.

Billy thanked me for coming, and for seeing everything through to the end. Then he asked if I had “found anything” that day at Crane’s.

I shoved him back with both hands. Billy fell onto the gravel. He sat there looking up at me, and we stared at each other for what seemed to be a very long time. Finally I got into my Dart, started it, and pulled out of the lot.

In the rearview I saw him stand and brush the dirt from his billowing cashmere overcoat as he watched me drive away. Billy’s parents were behind him, staring at us both. They held each other on the steps of the church, wondering what kind of horrible thing had finally happened, just then, to end it between their son and his old friend.

T
HE DAY AFTER
April’s service I took the Metro to Gallery Place and had lunch at the District Seen. A bartender in combat fatigues served me a club sandwich and a cup of vegetable beef to go with it. I washed that down with a Guinness, and then another while I read that week’s
City Paper
and listened to De La Soul on the house deck. When bicycle messengers started to crowd the place, and Jaegermeisters were served, I settled up my tab.

Out on the street I walked down Seventh, opened a common-entrance glass door, and took the stairs that led to both a portrait gallery and the offices of
DC This Week
, the alternative weekly that was itself a more hard-news alternative to
City Paper
. I entered the door marked
DC THIS WEEK
.

A young woman in rimless glasses was sitting at a desk, talking into a headset as she clipped art on a rubber mat. She
looked up as I walked in, and raised one finger in the air to hold me off. I waited until she had released her call.

“Yes?” she said.

I placed my business card in front of her on the mat. As she looked it over I said, “I’d like to speak to your editor, if he has a minute.”

“Do you have an appointment with Jack?”

“Nope.” I smiled. She didn’t.

“What’s this abou—what’s this in reference to?”

“It’s about my friend, William Henry.”

She relaxed, took off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “You knew William?”

“Yes.”

The woman slid her glasses back on and punched a finger at the switchboard. “I’ll see if he’s in.”

I stood with my hands in my overcoat pockets and listened to her mumble into the phone. Other phones rang from beyond the makeshift barrier that nearly encircled her desk, and in between their rings the tapping sounds of several keyboards meshed with a dublike bass. The multitalented receptionist removed her headset and stood up.

“Follow me,” she said with a come-hither gesture.

I walked behind her through a room where several tieless young men and young women typed on word processors. In the corner of the room a man with no hair on the sides of his head but plenty on top leaned over a drawing table and drew a line down a straightedge. A small boom box sat on a makeshift ledge above the drawing table, and out of the box Linton Kwesi Johnson spoke over a throbbing bass and one scratchy guitar. None of the people in the room looked up as I passed.

The receptionist stopped at the first door on a row of small offices and opened her palm in direction. I thanked her and stepped into the office. A woman stood up from behind an oak desk.

She was my height, with full-bodied, shoulder-length red
hair that had fine threads of silver running through it in several key places. Her cream satin blouse was open three buttons down and tucked into a short olive green skirt. A wide black belt was wrapped around her waist. Black stockings covered her legs, and on her feet were a pair of olive green pumps. Her thin face was lightly freckled, and the freckles were the same shade of those that were liberally sprinkled across the top of her chest. Lipstick the color of her hair was drawn across her wide mouth. Her eyes were pale green. She extended her hand. I shook it and held it until she pulled it gently back.