Five

At four-thirty the next day, Dooley was sitting in a booth facing the door of the restaurant directly across from his school, working on his second cup of coffee. Big surprise, Jeffie was an hour A late, which made Dooley think he wasn’t coming at all, which, in turn, put Dooley in a bad mood because he’d given Jeffie a lot of money and he wanted it back. And that put him in an even worse mood because it underlined just how fucked up his life was. Lorraine had just died. If she’d been a normal mother—and if he’d been a normal kid—the absolute last thing on his mind right now would have been money, right? But there he was, his eyes glued to the door, his mind working on all the things he would do to Jeffie if Jeffie tried to stiff him. He had tried Jeffie on his cell phone half a dozen times already and had ended up in Jeffie’s voice mail every time. The first time, he left a message: “It’s me. Be here, Jeffie, or else.” The second time: “Get your ass over here if you know what’s good for you.” The third time: “I told you, Jeffie. You fuck this up and you’re gonna be sorry.” The other times, he just ended the call. It didn’t make any difference. Jeffie didn’t walk through the door. Dooley swallowed what was left of his coffee, checked his watch and the clock above the counter one more time, and decided that if Jeffie wasn’t here by now, he wasn’t coming. He put some money on the table to pay for his coffee and left the restaurant.

When the doorbell rang just before supper the next night, Dooley looked through the glass in the door and saw the round florid face of Jerry Panelli, retired cop, friend of his uncle’s, a cynical son of a bitch whose bitter-eyed world view extended to Dooley, as in, “You’re gonna tell me a kid like that’s ever gonna fly straight? That’s like asking a dog to stop smelling shit.” He knew Jerry had seen him, but Jerry pressed the doorbell again anyway, letting Dooley know exactly what he thought of him. Dooley swung the door open.

“Your uncle here?” Jerry said, already looking past Dooley.

And a good evening to you, too, Jerry.

“He’s in the kitchen,” Dooley said.

He stepped aside to let Jerry through, and then he went back into the dining room where he had his homework spread out. Jerry glanced at the textbooks and binders as he went by. He paused when he got to the kitchen door and stood there for a second until Dooley sat down and dug into a math assignment. Jerry looked at him a moment longer. When he went through into the kitchen, he closed the door behind him. Dooley heard the rumble of Jerry’s voice, but he couldn’t make out what he was saying. He sat there for a minute, staring at the table, then, what the hell, he crept to the door and held his breath as he listened.

“… relationship with Lorraine,” Jerry was saying. “How you two hit it off, how often you saw each other, that kind of thing. He asked me a lot of weird shit, Gary.”

Silence.

Then Jerry’s voice again, Dooley’s uncle not having said a word.

“I didn’t get where they were going, but I didn’t like the questions, you know what I mean? There was something behind them. It was like that prick Randall was insinuating something. I told him I didn’t know anything. I told him if he had any questions, he should ask you.”

More silence before his uncle finally said, “Thanks for coming by, Jerry.”

Dooley slipped back to the table and was staring at his math text when Jerry and his uncle came out of the kitchen.

“If there’s anything I can do—” Jerry said.

“I appreciate it,” Dooley’s uncle said. He didn’t even look at Dooley as he walked Jerry through to the front door and saw him out. He stood in the front hall for a few moments after that, looking more tired than Dooley had ever seen him.

“Is everything okay?” Dooley said.

“Everything’s just hunky-dory,” his uncle said.

“It’s just that he sounded concerned.”

“He was expressing his sympathy.”

His uncle went back into the kitchen. It wasn’t long before the phone rang. Dooley heard his uncle talking but couldn’t make out what it was about. After he hung up, his uncle called Dooley for supper. When they had finished eating and Dooley was clearing the table, his uncle said, “I have to go downtown tomorrow.”

“Yeah?” Dooley said. He waited.

“The guys in Homicide want to talk to me.”

Dooley paused on his way to the sink, a dirty dinner plate in each hand. “What about?”

“What do you think?” his uncle said. “Lorraine.”

“I told you, they’re treating her death as suspicious.”

“Yeah, and—?”

“And they want to talk to me.” His uncle looked pointedly at the plates. Dooley rinsed them, set them in the dishwasher, and went back to the table to clear the cutlery.

“But everything’s okay, right?” Dooley said. He picked up knives, forks, a couple of serving spoons.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why do they want to talk to you?”

“I mean, Jerry will alibi you, you know, in case the cops think you had anything to do with it.”

His uncle looked at him. “Why would they think I had anything to do with it?”

Dooley couldn’t stand sitting around the house. He couldn’t stand the buzz from the TV that he knew his uncle wasn’t even watching. He called Beth. They talked for a while and Dooley thought she sounded different—distant, maybe distracted. He had to work at filling the gaps in the conversation, which he’d never had to do before. Then, just when he was wondering what he’d done, or what Nevin had done, something in her voice changed and she said, “They’re doing inventory at the store tonight.”

Dooley perked up. “Yeah?”

Every couple of months the store where Beth’s mother worked, did inventory. That always meant two, maybe three nights when Beth’s mother didn’t get home until past midnight.

“Yeah,” Beth said. “You want to come over?”

She’d asked him—him, not Nevin. Maybe the things he’d seen didn’t mean anything. Maybe it was like she said—maybe they were just debating. Maybe he had nothing to worry about.

“Well?” Beth said.

“I’ll be right there.”

His uncle didn’t take his eyes off the TV when Dooley told him where he was going.

“Be home by eleven,” he said.

When Dooley got to work the next day after school, Beth was at the front counter, talking to Linelle. At first he smiled. He still felt good from the night before. He wondered if she did, too. Maybe she wanted to tell him how great it had been. Maybe her mother was doing inventory again tonight.

She turned when she heard the electronic buzzer over the door, and the smile faded on Dooley’s lips. He could see right away that something was wrong. He glanced at Linelle, who shrugged—wait a minute, was that an apologetic shrug? Before he could even begin to decipher what she might be apologizing for, Beth was in his face.

“You told me your mother was dead,” she said.

Dooley shot Linelle another look. She raised her arms in a gesture of surrender: So shoot me. He looked back at Beth.

“She is.”

“Very funny.” But, boy, no way was she even remotely close to amused. “You lied to me, Dooley.”

“Well, she’s dead now,” Dooley said. “And, anyway, what difference does it make?”

He knew as soon as the words were out of his mouth that he’d taken the worst possible approach. This was Beth he was talking to. Beth had lost her father and her brother. She’d cared a lot about both of them. She took family seriously. That’s why she was staring at him like his skin had split open and she could finally see what lay under that Dooley face and what was hidden inside that Dooley body: Satan. Dooley took her by the arm to lead her outside where they could talk without Linelle and, now, Kevin, watching and hearing everything, but she shook off his hand. She hadn’t been this angry in a long time.

“I can explain,” Dooley said in a quiet voice.

She turned abruptly, her long dark hair flicking him in the face as it spun out around her, and did what he’d asked her to do in the first place—go outside—but marching out not because it was what he wanted but because it was what she wanted, which was to punish him. Dooley ran after her and caught her by the arm again.

“Come on,” he said, begging her. She faced him, her arms crossed over her chest, her chin jutting out, her eyes filled with fury. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you.”

“You were with me,” she said. “You were with me on Friday night and again last night, and you didn’t tell me.” Her eyes were hard on him. “But you told Linelle.”

Yes, he had done that. And it had been a mistake. He regretted it. He should have kept his mouth shut. He shouldn’t have told anyone.

“She was messed up,” he said. “Seriously messed up. I hadn’t seen her or talked to her in years.”

“What happened?” Beth said. “How did she die?” Her tone told him that she was softening a little. She was concerned. She wanted to know. But he was pretty sure she would stiffen up again when he told her the truth.

“Drug overdose.” The words had the effect of a cattle prod, sending a shock through her and making her retreat a pace.

“You mean, like sleeping pills?” she said.

He shook his head. She was dead, for Christ’s sake, and she was still fucking him up.

“The kind of drugs she used aren’t the kind you get from your neighborhood pharmacist. She had a problem, okay?”

She peered at him like a jeweler examining a suspect stone: Was he kidding? Of course he was kidding—wasn’t he?

“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” he said.

“What’s why?”

“The way you’re looking at me now. It’s why I didn’t tell you about her.” What was the point? “Look, she wasn’t part of my life. We never talked. She wasn’t interested in me.”

“But she was your mother.”

“That doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.”

She seemed to think about that. Or maybe she was thinking about what it might mean when you were going with a guy and his mother, who you thought was long dead, suddenly passed away from a drug overdose.

“Linelle said there was a funeral,” she said at last. “She said she wasn’t clear whether you’d gone or not. Did you?”

He nodded. He couldn’t tell whether she was happy with his answer—at least he’d cared enough to do the right thing—or whether it made things worse—he had gone to his mother’s funeral but hadn’t asked her to come, hadn’t even told her about it. He stepped toward her. She did not shrink back.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you. But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what you’d think.”

She tipped her head back so that she could look him in the eyes.

“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

Boy, how could he even start to answer a question like that?

“I have to get back inside,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Kevin’s disapproving face on the other side of the glass. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

“I have a history team meeting,” she said. “I’ll be late.” There was something in her voice—a stiffness and a weariness—that jarred him.

“Okay, tomorrow then,” he said.

“We’re doing a field trip tomorrow night for English. We’re going to a play. I won’t be home until late.”

“I have to work Friday night,” he said. “Come on, Beth.”

Kevin rapped on the glass. When Dooley turned, Kevin pointed to his watch.

“You’d better go,” Beth said.

For the first time in a long time, she didn’t go up on tiptoes and kiss him before she left.

Shit.

He called her cell phone on his break. She didn’t answer. He left her a voice mail. He tried her cell again later, when he got off work. Voice mail again. He had already said what he had to say. He didn’t leave another message.

Dooley’s uncle was sitting in front of the TV, when Dooley got home.

“So, how did it go?” Dooley said.

“How did what go?”

“The cops. You went to talk to them, right?”

“Yeah, I talked to them.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did they want? How come they wanted to talk to you?”

His uncle leaned forward toward the TV, trying to catch the weather report, like that was more important than answering Dooley’s question, maybe even more important than going in to talk to the cops.

“What did they want?” Dooley said again, going for patience but not quite getting there.

His uncle kept his eyes on the TV screen. “They wanted to know where I was the night she died.”

That was a no-brainer. They’d asked Dooley the same question. It was police investigation 101.

“You were at the poker game,” Dooley said. “You already told them that, right?”

“Yeah,” his uncle said.

Something was wrong. Dooley saw it in the dullness of his uncle’s eyes, the slump of his shoulders.

“What else?” he said.

“They wanted to know where I was between eleven and eleven-thirty.”

“Is that when she died?” Dooley said.

His uncle nodded.

No way, Dooley thought. There was no way they could have narrowed down the time of death to such a small time frame. Thanks to all those crime-scene shows, everyone knew they couldn’t do that. The time frame was always longer.

“She was wearing a cheap watch,” his uncle said. “They showed it to me. It was broken. Time said eleven-thirteen. I think they think that means something.”

“But if you were at a poker game—”

“Seems I got there a little later than I intended.”

A little later?

“How much later?”

“A couple of hours.”

“Jesus,” Dooley said. A lot could happen in a couple of hours. “Don’t tell me you lied to the cops?”

His uncle’s eyes flicked away from the TV screen to Dooley. “I told them the truth.”

“So,” Dooley said, “when did you get there?”

“Get where?”

Where did he think?

“To the poker game.”

“A little after twelve.”

Twelve?

“So when I called you—” Dooley began slowly. He was having trouble processing this piece of news. He had called his uncle at eleven o’clock that night. He had heard music and had asked him if he was at the poker game or a party. He thought about their brief conversation. No way, he told himself. No way. Except that his uncle had given him a distinct impression. “You lied to me?”

His uncle muted the TV and turned his eyes on Dooley. His gaze was firm and steady. It felt forthright. But maybe it wasn’t. Dooley couldn’t shake the idea that his uncle was doing what Dooley himself did all the time—making a point of looking him straight in the eye because he knew if he didn’t, Dooley would think he was trying to hide something.

“It wasn’t intentional,” his uncle said. “I just lost a couple of hours, that’s all.”

“What do you mean, you lost them?”

His uncle, whom Dooley had known for a grand total of two years and had lived with for a little over six months now, and who always came across as Mr. Straight-and-Narrow, said, without a trace of apology or regret, “I guess you could say I was kind of pissed by the time I got to Jerry’s.”

“Pissed?”

“I’d had a few drinks. Maybe more than a few. I wasn’t keeping track. They talked to Jerry and some of the other guys. Then they wanted me to go down and talk to them again, so they could get everything straight.”

“And they did, right?” Dooley said. “I mean, if you had a few drinks, someone must have seen you. You told them what bar you were in?”

“I wasn’t in a bar,” his uncle said. “I was in my car.”

Alarm bells went off. “You were drinking in your car?” When did that ever happen?

“I had a bottle I was taking to the game.”

“So you had a few drinks and then what? You got so pissed that you lost track of the time, and then you drove to Jerry’s?”

“I think maybe I nodded off for a while first,” his uncle said. “It’s stupid, I know, especially considering the past six months.” The past six months, during which he had been on Dooley’s case to do the right thing, which, mostly, meant staying away from substances like alcohol. “But shit happens, right?”

Right. Except that his uncle wasn’t a guy who got pissed on his way to a poker game. He didn’t even get pissed when he was there unless the game was at his own house and he was either winning big or losing big. Getting pissed wasn’t what his uncle was about—at least, it hadn’t been up until the last couple of days. And getting pissed and then getting behind the wheel of a car? No way.

“What did the cops say?” Dooley said.

“They thanked me for coming down.”

Dooley looked at his uncle, who was staring at the TV again. Something wasn’t right. He looked around the house, feeling a void.

“Where’s Jeannie?” he said. “I haven’t seen her for a while.” In fact, he hadn’t seen her since before the cops had showed up with the news that Lorraine was dead.

“She’s busy.”

“Yeah, but I would have thought, you know, under the circumstances—”

His uncle’s eyes flicked over him, the chill in them telling Dooley that his uncle didn’t want to talk about that, either.

Oh.

“You didn’t tell her, did you?” Dooley said. He couldn’t believe it after the way his uncle had tried to make him feel about lying to Beth. “Does she even know about Lorraine?”

His uncle turned back to the TV and turned up the volume on some reality-TV bullshit that Dooley knew for a fact he wasn’t really watching. No, that was just the excuse.

Dooley hated having to wait. He also hated not knowing, which was too bad because he was faced with a whole lot of both. He hated having to wait to see Beth and not knowing what was going on, what she was thinking, if she was even thinking about him at all. He hated having to wait to find out where the cops were going with their investigation into Lorraine’s death and not knowing what they had talked to his uncle about and why they had asked Jerry Panelli all those “weird shit” questions. He hated not knowing what those weird shit questions were. He hated having to wait for his uncle to spit out whatever he seemed to be choking on and not knowing why he was acting the way he was, or even whether the way he was acting was in character or not because, when you came right down to it, he didn’t know his uncle all that well. He’d met him for the first time two years ago, and what had come after that were once-a-week, sometimes once-every-two-weeks, visits, which really didn’t tell him anything except what his uncle was like when he was doing his hard-ass, retired cop routine, visiting his newly discovered nephew who was up shit creek. Then came the past six months living in his uncle’s house. Maybe those six months should have told him something, but, then again, maybe not. After all, his uncle had lived nearly three times longer than Dooley before Dooley had even made his acquaintance, and that made it hard for Dooley to tell if the way he had been the past six months was the way he always was or just the way he was now that Dooley was around. Finally—and, okay, it was a minor problem, all things considered—he hated having to wait for Jeffie to pay him back and not knowing whether he’d been stiffed or not. If he ever got his hands on Jeffie …

When Dooley turned up the front walk after school, a woman got out of a car that was parked at the curb. Gloria Thomas, Lorraine’s sponsor. She had a package in her hand.

“You didn’t get in touch,” she said. “So I thought I should drop by.” She held the package out to him.

Dooley looked at it. It was a squarish object in a big brown envelope.

“What is it?”

“Why don’t you open it?”

He looked at her. She didn’t know him, but he bet she thought she knew Lorraine.

She took one of his hands and folded it around the package.

“I don’t want it,” Dooley said.

Her hands were wrapped around his so that he couldn’t let go even if he’d wanted to. He saw a steely determination in her.

“About two weeks after I met your mother, she went through a bad patch,” she said. “I found her tearing her place apart, ripping things up, smashing things—she was on a real rampage. I managed to wrestle this away from her. I was sure she’d regret it if she destroyed it. When she pulled herself together, she asked me to keep it for her. It’s yours now. What you do with it is up to you. It was very nice meeting you, Ryan.”

She released his hand and started back to her car.

“Hey!” he called.

She turned.

“You said she called you the night she died.”

She nodded.

“What time?”

He could tell she was wondering why he wanted to know, but she didn’t ask.

“Ten,” she said, “according to the read-out on my home phone.”

The cops knew Lorraine had been alive at ten o’clock. They figured, by her watch, that she’d died a little more than an hour later. What they didn’t know for sure yet—his uncle said they were treating her death as suspicious—were the circumstances. It made Dooley uneasy.

She walked to the curb and climbed back into her car. Dooley went around the side of the house where his uncle kept the garbage cans. He removed the lid from the nearest can and dropped the package inside. On his way back to the house, he realized that Gloria Thomas’s car was still there. Their eyes met. Then she turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto the street.

Jeannie came over that night—for the first time in a long time. She filled the house with her perfume, made his uncle smile a little, and, when she went upstairs with him later, made Dooley yearn for Beth. He tried Beth’s cell. No answer. He prowled restlessly in his room. There was too much going on, too much to think about, and no way to make it all go away.

As soon as things quieted down in his uncle’s bedroom, Dooley went outside and dug Gloria Thomas’s package out of the garbage can. He held it in his hands. It felt like some kind of book. He thought about opening it but couldn’t make himself do it. He wanted to tear it up, burn it, shred it, stomp it, hack it to pieces. His hands picked at the corner of the envelope. If he kept it, he’d destroy it for sure. He lifted the lid on the garbage can again. Then hesitated. Finally he took the package inside and slipped it into his backpack.