Sixteen   

You look like shit,” Linelle said. “And here I thought you were malingering last night.”

Malingering? If Dooley’s head didn’t feel as if there was a road crew inside it, jack-hammering what was left of his brains, he might have asked her where she’d got that one. The bright lights in the store were like a thousand needles piercing and re-piercing his eyeballs. He wished he could wear sunglasses but knew Kevin would never go for it. Eggs and toast and coffee were churning like dirty laundry in his stomach (his uncle had been wrong about them making him feel better). He wished he wasn’t working straight through to midnight.

Rhodes came in around nine while Dooley was alone at cash. He was wearing a different leather jacket this time and jeans that looked worn and crisp all at the same time.

“Dooley, geeze, are you okay?” he said, peering at Dooley, which told Dooley that Linelle was right, he looked like shit. “The cops came by my house this afternoon. They wanted to know if you were at my place last night. After they left, I realized I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. You aren’t in the book. I was hoping you’d be here. What happened?”

Dooley just shrugged. He didn’t want to get into it, not here.

But Rhodes did. At least he kept his voice low.

“The cops, they were really pressing me about the party,” he said. He looked worried. “My dad nearly lost it. You should have heard him. He gets pissy with cops. Doesn’t like them. He told them, yeah, there was a party. And, yeah, whenever there’s a big party like that, there’s always kids who bring stuff and do stuff.” His voice was pitched lower now, doing what Dooley guessed was an imitation of his father. “What can you do, right? But there was no damage done in the house. No damage done to the property or to any of the neighbors’. No neighbors complaining.”

Dooley spotted Kevin at the back of the store, watching him, trying to figure out if Rhodes was a customer, which would be good, or a friend on a social visit, which was against store policy.

“He said to the cop, this kid who robbed that store—he meant you, Dooley. Geeze, you robbed a store? What was that like?”

“I didn’t do it,” Dooley said.

Rhodes looked a little disappointed. He got that a lot—kids who had never been in trouble always wanting to know what it was really like and always disappointed when what he told them didn’t live up to what they had seen on TV or in some movie or, more often, when Dooley said nothing at all.

“Yeah, well, my dad said to the cop, this kid who robbed that store, nobody twisted his arm to take a drink,” Rhodes said. “He said, there were dozens of kids there who saw him knock them back, isn’t that right? Then he looked at me, and what could I do? I mean, it’s true, right?” He sounded sorry about it.

“Yeah, I guess,” Dooley said.

“Then my dad said, when it comes right down to it, who’s to say this kid didn’t do most of his drinking after he left the house?” Rhodes shook his head. “That’s my dad. He didn’t want to get involved. He never wants to get involved, not when there’s cops around. He doesn’t like me getting involved, either. That’s just the way he is. After the cops left, he told me if anything like that ever happens again, cops coming to the house, he meant, he’s cutting me out of his will.” He showed Dooley a crooked little smile, the expression suggesting to Dooley that this was probably something Rhodes’s father said all the time. “You’re sure you’re okay?” Rhodes said again.

“I’ll live,” Dooley said.

“The cops sure seem to think you robbed that store. That’s why they came by my house. Because you said you’d been at my party. They wanted to know what time you left, what kind of shape you were in, who went with you, stuff like that.”

“And?” Dooley said. He’d been wondering about that himself. When had he left the party? He didn’t remember. Who had he left with, or had he left alone? He didn’t remember that, either.

Two kids came up to the cash with a couple of horror movies. Dooley used to watch stuff like that all the time, but he’d stopped since the last time he was in lockup. Now he wondered what people saw in movies where people got hacked up and ripped open and tortured. He scanned the DVD cases and took the kids’ cash.

“And what did I tell them, you mean?” Rhodes said after the kids left. “I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much. I don’t know exactly when you left. I didn’t see you go. One minute you were there, the next you were gone. I figured you slipped out, you know, on account of Beth and then because of Landers.”

“Landers?”

“You know, because he was ready to tear into you.”

Dooley had no memory of that.

“Because of Megan,” Rhodes said, looking at him closely now. “You know, because Megan was coming onto you and Landers didn’t appreciate it. What’s the matter, Dooley? You’re acting like you don’t remember.”

“What about Esperanza?” Dooley said.

Rhodes looked completely baffled. “Esperanza? What do you mean?”

It sounded like Esperanza hadn’t told Rhodes what Landers had done. Landers had tried to scare her, and it looked like he had succeeded. She’d kept her mouth shut because she didn’t want Landers talking to Rhodes’ father. Dooley wondered what that was all about. He wondered if he should say something to Rhodes but decided not to. Things were hard enough for her. She was a maid, for Christ’s sake. He didn’t want to mess her up if he didn’t have to. So he said, “The blonde girl. That’s her name, right?”

Rhodes laughed. “The blonde girl is Jen. Esperanza is our maid. Geeze, Dooley, you were really wasted, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Dooley said.

He wondered if he should ask Rhodes about the roofies, did he know if anyone there was doing them or did he notice if anyone had slipped him anything. Landers could have done it. He had sure been pissed off enough. Or it could have been Gillette.

“What about Gillette?” he said to Rhodes.

“Eddy? What about him?”

“When did he leave?”

Rhodes shook his head. “I’m not sure. Late. You two got into it, too. You really have a temper when you get going, don’t you, Dooley? But you calm down again, which is good.”

“So you don’t remember when he left?”

“I saw the two of you talking, then I kind of lost track.”

A middle-aged woman came up to the counter with a sullen-looking teenaged girl. As Dooley reached out to take the DVDs she had in her hand, Rhodes said, “I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Look, I gotta run. I got someone waiting for me out in the car.” He nodded over toward the store window. Dooley turned and saw Beth sitting in the passenger seat of a black Mustang. That figured.

Dooley made it through his shift. He also made it through cleanup and Kevin’s non-stop mouth-running about up-sell-ing—“ So they rent a DVD, maybe a couple of DVDs. It’s obvious they’re going to be planted in front of the tube all night. So you’re doing them a favor by asking, you want snacks with that? You’re doing them a favor by checking their record, looking up their rental pattern. You say, I notice you rent two movies a week every week, or whatever it says. You tell them, you know, you should be a gold-card member. Nine-ninety-nine and you’ll save a dollar off every new rental for the next year—you have two movies tonight, that’s like getting the gold card for seven-ninety-nine and you’ll end up saving a hundred dollars…” Blah blah blah. Dooley’s headache came back.

What Dooley wanted to do the next morning: find Gillette and Landers and ask them a few questions. The stuff in his drink—there were different ways that could have happened. Some kids who party want everyone else to party, too. Anyone who was there could have done it. Or he could have picked up the wrong glass. Or, true, someone could have slipped him something. Someone who thought it would be funny. Or someone who wanted to get back at him for something. But his wallet at the electronics store? If he was brutally honest with himself, he’d have to admit that it was possible he’d done what the cops suspected—if he’d been blasted enough and angry enough, and all the evidence suggested that he’d been both. But if he hadn’t done it—and, boy, did he ever want to believe that he hadn’t—then how had his wallet ended up in front of that store? The cops had someone who had seen two people near the store. Who were they? Say he was one of those two people—who was the other person? Had those people or that person taken Dooley’s wallet and planted it at the store? It was possible. The shape he’d been in, someone could have lifted him upside down and shaken everything out of his pockets and he wouldn’t remember. Why would someone do something like that? To make him look bad, maybe, or maybe to get even with him for something. Once upon a time, there would have been a long list of people out to get him, but given the life Dooley had been leading lately, he felt he could whittle it down to just a couple of names: Gillette or Landers. Or maybe both of them.

So what he wanted to do was find them and talk to them. See if one or other of them had fucked him up.

What he didn’t trust himself to do: stay calm if it turned out one of them had. It was a real Dr. Calvin moment.

Dr. Calvin: So you think someone maybe drugged you and then framed you for a smash-and-grab. What’s the smart thing to do about that, Dooley?

Dooley: Kick the guy’s teeth in?

Dr. Calvin: I believe I said smart thing.

Dooley: Let the police handle it?

Dr. Calvin: Very good.

People like Dr. Calvin always thought that you should leave things to the experts because people like Dr. Calvin were experts, and experts always thought they knew everything—it’s what made them experts.

Dooley wasn’t so sure. Not when it came to the cops and for sure not when someone had handed the cops a gimme. I mean, come on, there’s a smash-and-grab and what do you find at the scene? Something that screams the name of a person who is not only known to the police but who is known for crimes that are similar in nature. You gotta check it out, right? And what do you find? Said guy, passed out in his own backyard—where have we heard that one before, my fellow officers? And the guy claims that he doesn’t remember a damned thing. Right.

No, Dooley didn’t like the odds on that one.

But—and here, he believed, was where there was some wisdom in what Dr. Calvin always said—if he went and found Gillette and Landers, and if he came to believe that one (or both) of them had framed him, he wasn’t sure he would be able to hold it together. And that would jam him up even worse. So instead of doing what he wanted to do—find Gillette and Landers—he went down into the ravine. He spent the morning there, walking, looking, talking to anyone he could find. On the way home, he circled around and climbed up onto the old railway bridge, the one Everley had gone off, and got a big surprise. Beth was sitting there, her arms on her knees, her head on her hands. He hesitated—should he advance or retreat? Before he could decide, she raised her head, and he saw that she had been crying. She had a fierce expression on her face as she wiped the tears off her cheeks.

“What are you doing here?” she said, as if he were on private property instead of on a public walking path.

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure himself why he had come up here.

She stood up. “Get off this bridge,” she said.

“Look, I’m sorry about your brother,” he said. “I really am.”

“Right.” Boy, was she bitter. Was she still mad about his reluctance—okay, his refusal—to be hypnotized? “You expect me to believe that after what you did?”

“Look, about the hypnosis this—”

“The hypnosis thing?” She shook her head in disgust. “You’re going to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

He stared helplessly at her.

“Right,” she said again. He was getting the idea that she was one of those girls who always said the opposite of what she meant. “Mark came home a couple of months ago with one eye swollen shut and a big bruise on his face. Ring a bell, Dooley?”

Oh.

“He wouldn’t say what happened,” she said. “My mother wanted him to call the cops, but he wouldn’t do it. He said he was afraid what would happen if he got the cops involved. He said, you know how it is with bullies, you tell on them and all you get is bullied more.” Yeah, Dooley knew all about that. “He wouldn’t even say who did it. But now I know it was you, and you have the nerve to come up here and tell me you’re sorry about him?”

“Who told you?” he said. He didn’t even bother trying to sound indignant.

He read contempt in her eyes. “Now you’re playing dumb. Friday night you looked ready to rip his head off, and now you don’t remember?”

It must have been either Gillette or Landers.

“What else did they say about me?”

She held herself tall, reminding him of a little bird puffing out its feathers to make it look bigger than it really was. But he knew from the tremble in her lower lip and the way her eyes jumped from him to around him and behind him—probably hoping to see someone else, anyone else, nearby—that she was afraid to be up here alone with him.

“Everything,” she said.

If she knew everything, then it had to have been Gillette. To hell with Dr. Calvin. He wanted Gillette.

“Were you up on this bridge the night my brother died?”

“What?” Dooley said. “No!”

“You said you didn’t know my brother, but you did. You beat him up.”

“I didn’t beat him up. He was hassling a kid. I tried to get him to stop. He shoved me. I tried to get him to back off. That’s all.”

“Peter was there, too. He told me what happened.”

So it had been Gillette and Landers.

“Then he lied to you,” Dooley said. “So did your brother.”

“Mark would never lie to me.”

Oh boy.

“Maybe you didn’t know your brother as well as you thought you did.”

She didn’t like that.

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry he died. But I didn’t have anything to do with it. I just saw him fall.”

She looked at him a moment like he was Satan, complete with horns and a tail. Then she turned and walked off the bridge.

Dooley went to every single place he could remember having been with Gillette. He ran into people he used to know, most of whom were surprised to see him out, some of whom probably wished he wasn’t, a couple of whom offered him some refreshment, all of whom were amused when he said, no, he didn’t do that anymore. None of them had seen Gillette. None of them knew where he was living now.