No Way Home (34 page)

Papa was gone.

• • •

The eldest Wetherfield boy, Floyd, sat before Chief Morgan’s desk. He wanted to be a policeman. Now that a spot was open with Officer MacGregor gone, he thought he might have a chance. “My mother said I should see you personally.”

“How is your mother?”

“She’s all right. Always working at that sewing machine.”

“See much of your father?”

“Not too much.”

“Floyd, it’s too soon for me to start thinking about filling the vacancy. Too much else is going on.” Morgan leaned toward the calendar block. “But look, I’ll write your name here and keep you in mind.”

“I want to be a policeman bad, Chief.”

Morgan considered the face. It carried the strong good looks Thurman Wetherfield had once had before a nimbus of drunkenness circled him whether he was drinking or not. “How old are you, Floyd?”

“Twenty-one. I started college late. I’m putting myself through scraping chicken mess out of Tish Hopkins’s coops. I don’t mind. I want to make something of myself.” He lowered his hot eyes and then raised them with twice the fire. “I want to be more than my father.”

“Every boy does.” Morgan mutilated a paper clip. “On your way out ask for one of those civil service forms. If Miss O’Brien’s gone, ask the sergeant.”

Floyd Wetherfield lifted himself up and stood taller than his father. “Do I have a chance, Chief?”

“Everybody has a chance.” Morgan tossed the mangled paper clip into the wastebasket. “Well, ‘most everybody.”

Watching him leave, Morgan sat back. His eyes were unnaturally bright. He was afraid to close them, sure he would nod off. A few minutes later Meg O’Brien poked her head in and said something, but his ears were not receiving and his eyes were not focused. “I’m sorry, Meg. What did you say?”

“Someone else is here to see you, Clement Rayball.”

Morgan showed no surprise. “Tell him to come in. Here, first take this.”

She stepped forward and took back her little gun. “You sure you don’t still need it?”

“Positive.”

Presently Clement Rayball appeared, closing the door behind him. He looked different in a way Morgan could not put his finger on. Or maybe he looked more intensely the same, which was a difference in itself. At another time Morgan might have pondered the implications of that. Clement sat down.

“I’m leaving town tonight. I’ve got business in Boston tomorrow, and then I’m on to Florida. I did some dirt to you while I was here. I’m sorry.”

Morgan waited. “Is that all you came to tell me?”

“No, there’s a little more,” Clement said. “You can write my father off your books. He’s not around anymore. It was his choice.”

Morgan’s voice deepened. “Where is he, Clement?”

“Where he threw the rifle.”

“Then I have a fair idea where to look, unless you want to tell me exactly.”

“He’s not in a hurry to be found.”

Morgan reached for another paper clip. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“No, Chief, same as you didn’t. Junior’s gone too. It didn’t happen here. It was misadventure in Boston, but he came back and died here. He’s with his mother, where you found her.” Clement reached under his shirt, where the handgun had been, and drew out an envelope, which he placed on the chief’s desk. “That’s the money to bury him. Put him next to where she really is.”

“What about your father?”

“Like I told you, he doesn’t want to be found.” He watched Morgan’s fingers try to bend back into shape what they had unbent. “I was a kid somebody dared me to swallow one of those. To this day I don’t know if it ever came out.”

Morgan threw the clip away. “So it’s time for you to go back to Florida and be someone else?”

“You never forget who you are,” Clement said with a cynical smile. “Dreams remind you.”

“The trick is not to have any.”

“Then you die.”

“That sniper’s rifle. That was yours?”

“Yeah, that was mine. I never should have left it there.” There was a look on Morgan’s face he did not like. “When I leave tonight, you’re not going to try to stop me, are you?”

“I haven’t decided.”

He slouched easily in his chair. “Be careful, I know tricks you’ve never heard of. You can kill a man with your thumb.”

“But I don’t think you ever have,” Morgan said.

Clement smiled. “You’re right — not with my thumb.”

“I want something from you,” Morgan said in a suddenly stiff voice. “I want it in writing that Papa told you he shot and killed Florence Lapham. Also that he killed your mother. I’m sorry, Clement, but I know for a fact he did because he told me. In the same statement, write down everything you know about Junior’s death. Then I want you to mail it to me from Florida, so it’s like I’m learning about it for the first time.”

“You’ve got it,” Clement said quietly and picked himself up from his chair. “About my mother. I guess I always knew.” He smiled again. “I guess we both know everything now, unless there’s something missing?”

“Do you need to know?”

“Will it change anything?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t need to know.”

Morgan picked up the envelope, weighing it in his hand as Clement moved to the door. “I suspect there’s too much in here.”

“No, there isn’t. Give him the best.”

• • •

Gerald Bowman had second thoughts even before he climbed out of his Mercedes, which he felt would not be safe. The street festered with activity. A man in a black shirt and tight jeans stepped out of a martial arts studio and gave the car a long look. Across the street, costumed in Spanish colors, was a man Bowman suspected was a drug merchant flanked by bodyguards. Nearby women paraded in and out of a body-toning salon. “Nothing to worry about,” Pierre said, but he went through a dense moment of doubt.

Pierre lived above the martial arts studio in a tastefully decorated apartment, except for erotic artwork on the walls, which he ignored. He did not want to get into a discussion about it. The liqueur Pierre served was exotic, nothing quite like he had tasted before, and not entirely to his liking. The music was Wagner, but tuned low, which made it something other. They talked with quiet voices. His was strained while Pierre’s came through pure.

“You’re not comfortable yet, are you, Mr. Bowman?”

That was true. His eyes skimmed objects and returned to a wrought-iron piece of table sculpture that appeared to be a male figure swinging a baseball bat. Pierre was on his feet.

“Do you know the best way to relax, Mr. Bowman?”

He had never relaxed. Always the push to be better, supreme, not merely to be smarter than most but smarter than all, the cock of the walk. He had wanted the power to pull strings and make the world tilt his way. His eyes burned blue through his rimless glasses.

“What are you waiting for, Mr. Bowman?”

Stripped of his clothes, Pierre was pigskin. He was still dressed, and he stayed dressed. This was not what he had in mind, or if it had been, it wasn’t anymore. How to explain?

“I can’t do it. It’s not you, Dennis. It’s me.”

Pierre had an erection and made it nod. “How do you know?”

All that skin — too pink and too moist-looking, hog hairs on the shoulders — was threatening, menacing. This was not for him, he wasn’t that way. When Pierre stepped closer, he snatched up the statuette to ward him off.

“Put it down, Mr. Bowman. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

He felt he was ten years old again and a bully was taunting him, humiliating him for his prissy ways. His father, who should’ve protected him, taunted him too.
Stand up to him, Jerry!
His father had never known his ass from his elbow. And had it been left to his father, he never would have gone to Boston University. His mother’s push got him there.

“I didn’t force you here, did I?”

“No, you didn’t, Dennis.” He was being humble and hated himself for it. And he hated this hulking bald man with no clothes on, whose erection had fallen.

“If you don’t know what you are, how am I to know?”

He reached inside his suit jacket for his wallet, though usually there was little money in it, only major credit cards honored in most parts of the world. “Let me give you something.”

“Keep your money, Mr. Bowman. I’m not a whore. You are.”

He got out of there, descending narrow stairs, which shook with thumps coming from the martial arts studio, along with blood-curdling shouts of assault.

The Mercedes was safe and sound. The man in the black shirt and tight jeans said, “Nice wheels.” He went around him, stepping into the gutter, where a pigeon lay dead like the remains of someone’s hurried lunch. The man said, “You must be a big shot.”

“I am,” he said.

• • •

It was dark now, and time to tell her. Chief Morgan phoned the hospital to leave word that he would see her later, but she was not there. He phoned her house, no response. Then, on a whim, he punched out his own number, and she answered. “What are you doing there?” he asked, an inane question. She was waiting for him. He asked how she’d got in, another silly question. Through a window.

Meg O’Brien was gone. He told Bertha Skagg that he was going home and did not want to be bothered the rest of the night, even if the station caught fire. Bertha, who tended to take things personally, said, “I don’t smoke.” Morgan, who always tried to be nice to her, though she got on his nerves, asked about her ankles, and she stuck them out. “Now don’t you wish you didn’t ask?”

He drove home with no sense of himself, only of Lydia. A sickle moon guided him. Stepping out of his car, he was amazed by the way stars used the night to defy time and space to make themselves known to someone as insignificant as himself. She met him at the door. He expected a kiss but did not fret when he failed to get one.

They went into the living room. He sat at his desk as if he were back in his office. She made herself comfortable on the sofa with her stocking feet drawn beneath her. She was in her uniform, for she had been to work and left early. Leaning sideways, she extended an arm and switched off the floor lamp. The only light leaked in from another room. Sitting back, she let the gloom eat up half her face.

“I’m ready,” she said.

He went way back, to the very beginning, to Eunice Rayball, whose death mask he would never forget, and to Papa Rayball, who piled up hate the way Silas Marner bagged money. He jumped the years to the day Junior Rayball hid in the high grass edging the girls’ softball field and Matt MacGregor grabbed him by the scruff. He moved to the tragedy of her parents and ended with Papa stomping his wife’s grave. He did not tell her everything about Matt MacGregor. Maybe in ten years he would and then risk being hated for having held back. He told her he believed Papa was dead. He did not tell her how he knew, and she did not ask. He said nothing about Clement Rayball. She did.

“I saw him a few days ago at the hospital. I was looking at the son of the man who killed my mother and father. I’m glad I didn’t know.”

He watched her suffer a small death and slowly come out of it with tears. He moved from his desk and sat with her on the sofa. A warm breeze billowed the thin curtain. She sat in silence, and he did not break it. The night gathered around them and became a collection of summer sounds, all intimate. Finally she spoke again.

“Matt died with people thinking the worst about him.”

He groped for a response but felt he would be absurd rendering any. She spoke of Matt’s poor mother and sister, the ordeal of a funeral. She asked whether Matt would be buried in his uniform, and he said, “His mother may not want that.”

In the kitchen was a small grocery bag. She had brought it. She began scrambling some eggs and sizzling bacon. Getting in her way, he prepared the coffee. She was out of her uniform and wearing one of his old T-shirts over her briefs, which covered little. Stepping back, he said, “You have the loveliest bum in Bensington.”

“You’ve seen them all?”

“A few.”

“You proud of that?”

“No,” he said.

They ate together at his table, which in his mind he marked as an occasion, a memory he might take to the grave with him. Again, through a window, the night delivered its sounds and spread them around. She said, “Do you have a picture of your wife?”

“Many,” he said. “They’re packed away.”

“You should bring them out, let them breathe. Then maybe you can.”

The eggs were good, much better than his own efforts would have produced. The bacon was lean. She had given him the most. She lifted her coffee cup.

“One thing you really ought to do, James. Forgive her for getting killed. It’s time.” She lowered her cup, and he nodded. She said, “I thought that would throw you.”

“No,” he said, “there’s truth in what you say.”

The sheets on his bed were fresh. She had been busy. Laundry left on the floor had been tossed into a corner. Insubstantial in the half-light, she waited for him with her head in the pillow and said something that did not carry. Shadows figured her face. He breathed in what he could see. This time, he was sure, she would stay the night.

When he woke in the false dawn, she was gone.

• • •

Clement Rayball woke to a ring, compliments of the Ritz-Carlton. His room overlooked the Public Garden. Arlington Street throbbed with early traffic, the sidewalk with people hustling to jobs. One beautiful woman seemed to breed another. They were everywhere.

In the dining room he had English muffins and coffee at a corner table, where he looked out at businessmen who had forsaken power lunches for power breakfasts. The businessmen bored him, and he turned to the newspaper. The front page told him that Crack Alexander was hanging up his spikes. His horoscope advised him not to hold grudges. From a pocket he withdrew a scrap of ratty paper on which was scribbled the name and address of another hotel.

He found it without trouble and, though he did not know it, parked the rental in the space where his brother had spent some of the last hours of his life. In the hotel he described Junior to the fat man, who said, “No kiddin’, that’s your brother? Yeah, he came in, but he didn’t have enough money, so he left. That’s all I can tell you.”