Other Resort Cities (15 page)

“You know, Morris, when I can,” Lyle said. “Why?”

“How about you take today off and drive down and see your daughter,” I said. “Shoot, take the whole week off. Fly out to California and see your son. When was the last time you saw him?”

Lyle squinted his eyes at me and rolled his tongue against his cheek. “Whatever this is, Morris,” he said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

 

Lizzie answered on the first ring. “They’re all wrapped up and ready to go,” she said.

“How do they look?” I asked.

I heard Lizzie sigh on the other end of the line. “I had to use fishing line to sew the boys’ feet back on; Hawkins had
some thirty-five-pound test that worked great,” she said. “It should hold for a long time.”

“I appreciate this Lizzie,” I said. “More than you’ll ever know.”

“What do you want me to do about this DA who keeps calling?”

“Tell him to call me if he has any questions,” I said. “The family hasn’t asked for anything and it’s not his case.”

“You’ve got all the paperwork there?” Lizzie asked.

“Right in front of me,” I said. “I’ll sign off on it and get you a copy.”

“Would my dad have done this?” Lizzie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if you should have.”

“Hawkins said that if there was a problem he’d take the blame,” Lizzie said. “Said that’s how it’s always worked here in Granite City. ‘Let the shit roll downhill,’ were his exact words.”

I thought then that my recollections of Lizzie’s father had grown opaque in my mind—my memories colored more for what I wished was always true than what actually was. We’d worked together for a long time, and time spares no one.

“Tell Hawkins I won’t forget this,” I said.

“Sheriff,” Lizzie said, “can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why’d you stay here all these years?”

 

After we hung up, I pulled out a piece of letterhead and scratched out a three-sentence letter of resignation. I held it in my hands and ran my fingers over every word, every period. I’d been the sheriff of Granite City for thirty-five years, and I’d never broken the law.
I always did the legitimate thing, like telling men who beat their wives that they were going to hell when I didn’t even believe in God, and then letting them go on back home because the law said we couldn’t hold them. Like knocking on poor Gina Morrow’s door at three o’clock in the morning to tell her that her husband had been stabbed to death in a bar fight over another woman.

I’d always followed the letter of the law, no matter my opinion of it. What good did it do? Couldn’t I have lied to Gina Morrow and told her that her husband had been stabbed to death trying to protect an innocent woman’s honor? Couldn’t I have dragged some of those no-good wife beaters out behind the station and pounded them into submission, beaten them until they begged me to kill them?

And yet, there I was with my letter of resignation in my hand and an autopsy report on my desk. Inside both documents were lies. Inside the autopsy report, Dr. Lizzie DiGiangreco, whose dead father I had carried to his grave, stated that all four members of the Klein family had died of exposure and acute hypothermia. She further stated that all members of the family were fully intact—that all hands and feet were connected. An accidental death, no note of foul play.

In my official report, typed the night previous on my old Olivetti, I stated that it was my belief that the Klein family had succumbed during the night of October 10, 1998. The almanac noted October 10, 1998 as being the coldest day of the month during the coldest winter on record. Over a foot of snow fell that night.

Case closed.

 

Snow did fall in Granite City the night I quit, and though the roads were slick and runny, I called Lyle and asked him to
meet me at Shake’s Bar. We sat for a long time in a small booth sipping beer and eating stale nuts. That next day I’d recommend to the mayor that Lyle be named interim sheriff, a post he would eventually keep for three years until he died from emphysema.

“You know what, Morris?” Lyle said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about just closing up shop and moving to Hawaii. You know I was stationed out there, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“In those days, I raised a lot of hell,” Lyle said. He had a faraway look in his eyes, and I thought maybe inside his head he was on liberty in Maui. “I don’t regret it, though. We all had to sow our oats at some point. Make bad decisions and then just close those chapters and move on.”

“I never really did that,” I said. “I’ve loved two women in my life, Lyle, and both of them are dead now. From day one, I’ve tried to do right. What has it gotten me?”

Lyle took a sip of beer and then coughed wetly. “I know that, Morris,” he said. “You did right by everyone, Morris. By everyone.”

Lyle took a final pull from his beer and stood up.

“You heading home?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said. “I thought I’d just take a drive through the streets; make sure no one’s stuck in the snow. You could positively die from the cold out there tonight.”

There was a twinkle in Lyle’s eye then, and I knew that he had seen my report, had seen Lizzie’s autopsy report, and that he didn’t care. That he knew I’d made a judgment call not based on the nuts and bolts of the law, but on how people feel inside, on the mechanics of the human heart.

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

R
ichard expected that there would be a will reading, that somebody would call him a few days ahead of time—enough time, at least, for him to wrangle a decent pair of shoes for the event—with directions to one of those skyscrapers with reflective windows and orders on protocol.
Don’t look anyone in the eye. Refer to everyone as sir. Do not wear jeans
. It was the clothing aspect that had Richard most worried. Here he was, thirty-five years old, and he’d lost the ability to dress appropriately. Having money again would change that, Richard was certain, and if that meant feeling uncomfortable for one more afternoon, well, that was a length Richard was willing to go.

He even knew how the event would go down, more or less. He’d be ushered into a room lined with dark oak walls and walnut cabinets, and a man wearing an ascot would pull out a high-backed leather chair for him to sit in. The man in the ascot, who’d have a British accent, would say something like, “I am so very bloody sorry for your loss, lad; my own father’s heart was weak, too,” and would leave him be for a few minutes. Richard would sit there in the austere office and he’d try not to laugh. When was the last time he actually
saw
his father? 1992? He’d remember breaking into the house in
1995, but he wouldn’t dwell on that. He’d remember stealing his father’s Benz in 2002, but, again, why dwell? No, he’d just keep real calm, and when the lawyers or servants or strippers brought in the bags of cash he was inheriting, well, then he’d celebrate, catch a plane to Vegas, and start living, finally.

That’s how Richard figured it would happen. He even let his mustache grow so that, if need be, he could pluck out hairs from above his lip to produce tears or staunch smiles. So when the doorbell rang on the last Thursday of January and through the peephole he saw the same motherfucker who served him six months ago waiting with another envelope, he didn’t even bother to open the door.

“Get a real job, you fucking jackal,” Richard said through the door.

“It’s not like that this time,” the man said.

Richard knew that process servers were just normal people trying to make rent and feed their families, but it still rankled him that they should earn their livelihoods on his human suffering, even if his suffering was largely self-imposed. The last time this particular process server came for a visit he handed Richard a temporary restraining order from his own twin sister, Amy. Apparently, you call your twin sister a stupid cunt who doesn’t deserve the air she breathes and then you accidentally set her hair on fire when you flick your butt at her, the State of California views that as paramount to a death threat.

That Amy actually
did
die in a car accident a few weeks before the hearing was no recompense to Richard. He didn’t want her dead. Hell, he loved her, loved the memories of her he still had, the ones that lived inside of old pictures
of the two of them in footsy pajamas and Rick Springfield songs and the smell of freshly cooked pretzels smothered in mustard. And there was the larger, genetic ache that still woke him up in the night; a kind of welling pain that felt like someone was trying to push all of his internal organs up into his chest. Somewhere along the line, things in Richard’s life had simply turned to shit. That little boy with the twin sister dancing to “Jessie’s Girl” had turned into the kind of guy that process servers remember explicitly, and though Richard couldn’t pinpoint the exact date of this shift, he nonetheless realized that, at thirty-five, with no family left and with no one who actually loved him more than they loved his car or his sofa or his ability to steal identities off the of the Internet for a fee, shit had to change. Shit had to get better. Shit had to stop being shit.

“Whatever you got,” Richard said, “I don’t need.”

“You don’t even have to sign for it,” he said.

Richard trolled through his mental Rolodex to see if there was anything he actually had pending legally and the fact was, since his sister’s and father’s passing, he’d felt it important to actually
try
. That was his buzzword:
Try. Try
to be good.
Try
not to fuck up.
Try
to do honor to the family name, though Richard truly never knew what that meant, apart from not embarrassing the dead, which seemed a ludicrous proposal; but in the wake of being the last living American branch of the Charsten tree, even Richard had to admit there was some psychic weight to it now.

When Richard finally opened the door he noted that the process server actually recoiled, and, for not the first time, he wondered when it was that people figured out he wasn’t
someone you wanted to be terribly close to. Even if the process server was lying, well, he was going to
try
to be understanding of the world and let him do what he needed to do without violence or threats or spitting.

“Okay,” Richard said. “Here I am. Let’s get this done.”

The process server handed Richard a thick manila envelope that bore the watermark of one of his father’s numerous companies, this one the law firm that bore his name, and for a moment Richard got the same nauseous feeling he always got when he saw his father’s name in print, be it in the newspaper or on the Internet, as if his father’s name actually possessed eyes and could see Richard.

The process server was already walking away when Richard called out to him. “That’s it? Just this? Nothing else?”

“Your lucky day,” the process server said.

 

Luck, Richard Charsten III knew, was fickle. In his life, Richard reasoned that most of his luck had been inordinately bad, resulting, most likely, from being born into tremendous good. His father, Richard Charsten II, was a lawyer of such means that he eventually decided that owning baseball teams would be a decent hobby to occupy his down time, just like owning multinational shipping companies once had, and, before that, tinkering around with a small start-up coffee company in Seattle which still bore his nickname, Deuce’s, twenty years and fifteen hundred franchises later.

For the first seventeen years of his life, Richard basked in the remarkable luck of his birthright, knowing with perfect certainty that no matter how poorly he did in school, his father’s money was as firm as bedrock. There was the house
in Maui, the house in Aspen, the house in Paris, the house in Los Angeles he actually considered home, and the house in New York that was only used to impress politicians and free-agent ball players. There were the glossy debutantes who always had the best intentions and lowest expectations of him, which he met with gusto, and there was even a small circle of other would-be heirs that he considered true friends, though that turned out not to be true once his circumstances changed. It seemed then to Richard that he’d turn eighteen and would simply matriculate into a better party at some red-brick university in the East for four years before taking a token post in one of Deuce’s companies. Life would continue in all its lavish glory until he eventually died of the clap or liver disease or another less enervating side effect of the good life.

He didn’t expect to be kicked out on his ass. But then Deuce probably hadn’t expected Richard to steal his credit cards, to crash three of his cars, to deal coke out of his home, to break into one of his offices in Los Angeles and throw a party. In retrospect, Richard understood why his father kicked him out, respected him for it even, because it takes a man to realize that his own son doesn’t measure up. Back then, though, Richard didn’t expect that he’d wake up on the morning of his eighteenth birthday to the sight of three men in Bekins shirts boxing his shit up. He didn’t expect that the next seventeen years would be punctuated by stints at four different community colleges, nearly three aggregate years locked up for various felonious acts, and two ex-wives, one whom he actually loved and one who actually loved him.

His twin sister, Amy, had been his lone champion
most of those years, handling his cases, loaning him money, eventually even buying him his small apartment in Burbank so that he’d always have a place to live, even if he didn’t have the money to pay for electricity or water service. What Richard never could comprehend was why Amy hadn’t warned him about what was coming that morning of his eighteenth birthday, since he was sure she knew, because she’d always been the family consigliere.

The last time he saw Amy alive—the day he set her hair on fire—she’d just gotten him off with a small fine and time served for stealing the toner carriage out of a copy machine at Kinko’s, an important element needed in a counterfeit check scam he was working.