The Last Tomorrow (6 page)

Carl and Friedman push out of the car and walk toward Captain Ellis, who stands smoking a cigarette and watching the madness.

To no one in particular Carl says, ‘What do we got?’

Sam Avery from the crime lab says, ‘White male between thirty-five and fourty years old. About five foot ten, one ninety-five. Supine on the street beside a motor vehicle. Gunshot wound to
the left temple, another to the crown of the head. Five-pointed star carved into the forehead. Doesn’t look like he put up a fight. Gunman must’ve took him by surprise.’

‘Interesting,’ Carl says.

The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

2

Candice leans against the outside wall, hugging herself, shielding herself against the night. Vivian stands silent beside her. Candice’s favorite thing about Vivian is
that she knows when not to speak. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, you wouldn’t think she’d know two plus two, her large eyes seeming lifeless as empty fishbowls more often
than not, but she can be surprising in her intelligence, and in how she’s intelligent.

Most people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.

Candice watches the chaos. Several police cars, a coroner’s van, sawhorses, cops knocking on doors, voices overlapping one another. Do you know what time it is? I don’t care if you
are
the police. Has anyone told you what his wife does for a living? That poor little boy. And below the voices she imagines she can hear the steady grinding sound of the world turning on
its axis, a sound like a great stone rolling.

And Neil is dead. Her husband of four years is dead. The only man who’d ever stuck around once he learned she had a son. He’s dead in the street while the world continues to turn and
somewhere someone’s laughing. There is no justice.

She finds a man, a man with a decent job, a man who loves her, a man willing to be a father to her son after his biological father decided to take a powder, and he gets murdered in the
street.

She’s not a regular churchgoer, but she believes in God, she believes He’s looking down on the world, and right now she hates Him for what He allowed to happen. She knows it’s
wrong, she knows there’s a reason for everything, but she hates Him anyway. Because right now she doesn’t care what the reasons are; she doesn’t care about reason at all. Right
now all she sees in God is meanness, set-a-cat-on-fire cruelty. One moment Neil was alive and now he’s dead and God allowed it to happen.

She closes her eyes, tells herself not to cry. When she opens them again she sees two men walking toward her. They’re not uniformed officers but they’re both clearly cops. They have
that cop walk. They’re both wearing suits and fedoras, but they remove their hats as they approach, one revealing wavy black hair, the other thinning gray hair.

The older of the two puts out his hand and says, ‘Detective Bachman, ma’am. I’m very sorry for your loss. This is my partner, Detective Friedman.’

Candice shakes his hand. He has a firm grip, but his palm is sweaty.

‘I understand your son was home when it happened.’

‘He was asleep.’

‘I’d like to speak with him, if I may.’

‘He doesn’t know anything.’

‘Just the same, I’d like a few words with him.’

‘What for?’

‘Ma’am, I understand your loss, I understand you being angry, but I’m trying to find out who killed your husband. I think speaking with your son might get me closer to that
end. May I speak with him?’

Candice believes him when he says he understands her loss. It’s in his eyes. Though his face is expressionless the eyes are red and rheumy with sadness. He looks directly at her without
blinking.

After a long moment she nods.

‘He’s inside.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

The two detectives, whose names she’s already forgotten, step through the front door and into the house.

She follows them in.

3

Carl believes someone in this house knows what happened. He believes someone in this house is responsible for what happened. He isn’t sure why he believes that, but he
does. Maybe it’s the fact that most murders are done by people who know the victim, or maybe he instinctively understood some piece of evidence he isn’t even aware he saw, but his gut
tells him the answer is right in front of him, and he’s a man who pays attention to his gut. Always has been. He’s already told Friedman he should wander away as soon as possible, look
around the house, see what he can see. Carl will talk to the boy, watch how the mother reacts to the exchange. Between the two of them they should find at least one loose thread worth pulling
on.

As the two men step through the front door Carl sees a wallet on the floor next to a table. It shouldn’t be here. If the man was killed in the street, killed on his way home from a bar,
killed before his feet passed over the threshold, it shouldn’t be here. It should be in his hip pocket, or his inside coat pocket. Carl can imagine the dead man drunkenly walking through the
front door, tossing his keys onto the table and his wallet, only his wallet misses and falls to the floor. He had to be alive for that to happen. So how did he end up back outside – and
dead?

Carl turns to look at the blonde woman, the decedent’s wife. He wonders if she was the one who pulled the trigger. Goodbye, bad marriage. He wonders if her friend is simply covering for
her, giving her an alibi. It’s possible.

‘You told my captain that your husband left the nightclub about an hour and a half before you did.’

She nods.

‘People at work can confirm this?’

‘Of course.’

‘Did he, by chance, get free drinks?’

‘Nobody got free drinks, why?’

Carl shrugs noncommittally, turns back to the living room, sees a small boy sitting on a couch, hugging himself defensively. A pale boy with freckles dotting his cheeks. His lips are chapped.
His eyes are large and glistening with fear.

Carl walks toward him, says, ‘Mind if we talk a minute?’

The boy licks his lips. ‘Okay.’

‘Maybe at the dinner table?’

The boy nods and pushes himself off the couch. He walks to the dinner table, feet dragging on the carpet, pulls out a chair, sits down. He puts his hands on the table and clasps them, then pulls
them apart and puts them in his lap.

He looks sick.

Carl wonders what’s happening behind the eyes.

Then Friedman touches his shoulder and nods toward the floor behind the couch. Two dents in the carpet where the couch was sitting prior to its recently being moved. Maybe it has nothing to do
with the murder victim outside, or maybe the couch was pushed forward to cover something. Coincidences that look like evidence happen, of course, but not as often as you’d think. He nods.

Walks to the dinner table. Sits across from the boy.

The boy’s mother sits down as well.

The other woman stands by the door, looking in, silent.

Friedman wanders off, meandering toward the hallway before silently disappearing into it. No one else seems to have noticed.

Carl looks toward the boy and says, ‘This must be hard for you.’

The boy nods.

‘Were you and your stepfather close?’

‘They weren’t real close, but they got along okay.’

‘Ma’am,’ Carl says, glancing toward the boy’s mother, ‘I don’t mind if you sit here, but I need your son to answer the questions himself.’

For a moment it looks as though the woman will protest. Something flickers behind her eyes and she opens her mouth to speak. But before any words get out she closes her mouth once more and nods.
But she’s tough. If she hadn’t just lost her husband, if she was fully herself, he doesn’t think he’d be sitting here at all, much less telling her how the conversation
would go – not without a fight.

She’s tough like his wife was tough.

But now’s not the time to think about such things.

He looks to the boy.

‘Son?’

‘I don’t think he liked me.’

‘Why not?’

The boy shrugs.

‘A shrug isn’t an answer.’

‘He was mean.’

‘All the time?’

‘Most of the time.’

‘Then you must have tried to avoid him whenever you could.’

‘I guess.’

‘I bet your spent a lot of time alone in your room just so you wouldn’t get in his way.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How was dinnertime?’

The boy licks his chapped lips. ‘It made me feel sick.’

‘Because you didn’t know what might set him off.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Because if you chewed too loud, he might hit you. Or if your knife scraped the plate wrong. Or if he just didn’t like your posture.’

‘Yes, sir.’ His eyes are moist with tears.

Carl glances at the mother, sees that the boy’s emotion has put a crease into the center of her forehead. She hadn’t known how bad it was for him, what turmoil it created within him.
All she knew was that after her husband walked out she was alone with a mortgage payment and a son, struggling to make ends meet. All she knew was that there was a fellow with a job and an
engagement ring who was willing to lighten her burden if she said I do, and she said I do. And all she saw in his behavior was a man trying to be a father to her son, and her son didn’t have
a father.

People see what they want to see, or what they need to see. Sometimes they’re the same thing.

‘Was he meanest when he was drunk?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you must have really paid attention if he’d been hitting the bottle.’

The boy nods.

‘But you didn’t hear anything when he came home?’

‘I was asleep.’

‘That’s what your mother said. But I had a father like your stepfather when I was growing up, and I think I would have woken up if I heard the car pull up. I would have woken up and
listened, made sure he wasn’t on a rampage, made sure he wasn’t looking for someone to take something out on, made sure I didn’t have to hide in the closet or crawl out the
window. I was a light sleeper when I was a boy, listened for any hints that trouble might be near. I noticed your bedroom screen was missing. Do you sometimes sneak out the window like I used to
do?’

‘He was killed outside, detective,’ the boy’s mother says. ‘I don’t like where these questions are going.’

‘I don’t much like it either, ma’am. But your husband’s wallet is on the floor by the front door and he would have needed it if he was buying drinks tonight. I’d
like to know how it got there if he was killed outside.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’ The boy’s face is pale, full of fear.

‘Also, the couch has been moved. There are dents in the carpet.’

‘What does that have to do with anything?’ the boy’s mother says.

‘I’d like to know why the couch was moved, that’s all.’

‘Sandy,’ the boy’s mother says, ‘did you move the couch?’

The boy shakes his head.

‘Why’d you move the couch, son?’

‘I didn’t.’

Carl gets to his feet and walks to the couch. He pushes it back, revealing stained carpet. He leans down and touches one of the dark stains. His fingers come away red.

‘Is this why you moved the couch, son?’

‘I didn’t move it, I swear.’

‘Bachman.’

He looks up, looks toward the hallway entrance. Friedman is standing there with a shoebox in his hands. He pulls a zip gun from inside.

‘From the boy’s room.’ He sniffs it. ‘It’s been fired.’

Carl turns to the boy.

‘You weren’t being completely honest with us, were you, son?’

‘I don’t know how that got there.’

Carl can’t help but feel for him. Part of it is the fear in his eyes, the sheer terror, but only part of it. Truth is, there were times growing up when he wanted to kill his own father. He
thinks he understands what drove the boy to do what he did. There are things that happen in relationships that people can’t see from the outside. Little things that accumulate one by one. A
tree gets chopped down one swing of the axe at a time, but eventually it falls. And sometimes it falls on the person who did the chopping.

Carl leans toward the boy, catches his eye, and says, with kindness, ‘I’m afraid we’re past the point where lying will do you any good, son.’

4

Sandy can’t believe what just happened. He’d thought he might get away with what he did, but knows now there was never any chance of that. His construct fell apart
so quickly, so easily. A few jostles and it collapsed, leaving behind a mere heap of rubble. He looks from the detective to his mother, but can’t stand to see what he sees in her eyes,
disbelief and horror combined, so he looks back to the detective. There’s sympathy there at least. He’s understanding, if merciless.

‘We’re going to have to go over this step by step, son.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

But that, of course, is a lie. He knows plenty. He knows he’s caught. He knows it’s over. He knows lying further is pointless. But he can’t let it go. He can’t put the
words into the air that he needs to put there.

The detective is silent a moment. He scratches his cheek. He looks to the corner a moment, then back to Sandy, eyes full of understanding.

‘Would this be easier if your mother wasn’t in the room?’

For a long moment Sandy doesn’t move. But finally, knowing there’s no way out of this, he nods.

‘Okay,’ the detective says.

5

‘Do you mind, ma’am?’

‘Do I . . .’

Candice looks from her son to the detective. She feels dizzy. This is like a dream. This is the sort of thing that happens to other people. This is the sort of thing you read about in the paper.
You shake your head at such horrible goings on, the world’s just spinning out of control, isn’t it, and you sip your coffee, and it’s sad, very sad, and it’s so distant from
where you are that you can actually afford to feel sadness. Being in the middle of the experience she feels nothing but a kind of shocked disbelief, a strange unbelieving numbness. This simply
isn’t happening.

She looks again toward Sandy but can’t see murder in his face. She should be able to see it on him, some horrible red blotch like a birthmark on his face, but when she looks at him she
sees only her boy, her baby, whom she loves more than life, and she thinks of holding him in her arms, of nursing him, of his infant mouth on her nipple, of his infant tongue against it, pulling
– not of death, not of murder, not of a black hole in her husband’s temple from which the life has oozed – so he couldn’t have done it.