GENE SWUNG HIS LEG over the seat and settled back on his bike, then immediately decided riding around town for such short distances would only call more attention to himself. All the places he needed to visit seemed to be a few blocks apart, so he drove south on Market Street and started looking for a safe place to park. He spied a couple small alleyways that didn’t look promising. Past Superman and the Superman Museum catty-corner to it, he noticed the Massac County Law Enforcement and Detention Center and decided their small parking lot would have to be the safest and most unobtrusive place to leave it. People never looked in their own front yards. The sheriff’s car he’d seen at the Daily Planet was back in its parking space, and he pulled into a motorcycle slot not far away. He put his helmet in the saddlebag and, before he locked it up, slipped the SIG into the breast pocket of his jacket. Gene had a license for all his guns, but Illinois didn’t have a concealed carry law. Looking around this gloomy little town, though, he decided it was more risky not to carry one than to get caught carrying.
Walking east on Fifth Street, he passed the abandoned movie theater and ramshackle post office. To his right he could see the casino and hotel and also the Ohio. Two barges stretched slowly down the muddy but gleaming river, one heaped with coal, the other mounded with bright red cedar mulch. Metropolis could have cultivated a pleasant small river-town feel if it weren’t for the dilapidated houses and poverty sprawling all around him—and of course the new casino, which looked to Gene about as quaint at the river’s edge as an alien warship. Any small-town charm also evaporated in light of Gene’s immediate mission, which he was dreading. His first thought was to wonder if he could trust Miller’s girlfriend. If she were anything like Miller’s ex-wife, he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d put out the hit. Whatever Cora was like, the encounter would certainly be emotional, and Gene would rather face the barrel of a gun than raw emotions, especially female emotions. Women had so many feelings, even feelings about their feelings, and they seemed to evolve new feelings, never felt before by anyone else, almost daily. Gene figured he had three or four feelings at best, and one of them he felt this very moment—dread—as he walked up the sidewalk past the little gold-painted globe and went through the door.
Standing in the small lobby area, Gene noticed immediately how low the ceilings were in comparison to the high tin ceilings of Egyptian Trails. Light trays hung so low that even a normal-sized person would bump his head against them if they weren’t hanging above tall tables. Most of this space had been designed for newspapers laid out the old-fashioned way, before everything was done on computer. A morbidly obese woman in big blue-framed glasses and a polyester pantsuit sat at the desk nearest him. She looked up from a magazine she was reading and her big-jowled face immediately registered fear when she saw Gene, who filled up most of the lobby and must have looked extremely threatening in his black bike gear and boots, his shaved head and stubbly chin beard. The fear he could incite in others went more than a little way to undercut his own dread and social awkwardness.
“May I help you?” she asked, opening her cell phone. Gene figured she was about to call 911.
“I’m, uh, here to see Cora. Is she around?”
The fat woman looked over a few desks and tables to a woman whose back was to them.
“Cora! Do you know this man?” she asked, hand still poised on the cell phone.
Gene had everyone’s attention now. Everybody in the office had turned from a computer screen or craned a head around a door. They were all women, too, which Gene figured was perfect for Miller. He smiled imagining Miller strutting around these cluttered desks and tables like a cock in a henhouse.
“Hello?” asked a girlish young woman with fuchsia streaked hair. She stood up and walked hesitantly toward him.
“Cora?”
“I’m Gene Barnes, Miller’s brother.”
He stuck out his hand to shake it, but she stayed back a few feet. She nodded slightly, apparently perceiving resemblance.
“Do you know where Miller is?” she asked.
Gene withdrew his hand. He made a motion to put his hands in his pockets but his riding outfit didn’t really have pockets, at least not big enough to stick his hands in, so he hung them at his sides, which felt awkward and ape-ish, so he crossed them over his large chest, which he immediately realized may appear threatening and defensive. Finally, he put them behind his back, which felt even more unnatural and foolish, but he felt even more foolish continuing to move and hide his hands, so he kept them there.
“Yeah, I do,” he said after realizing he hadn’t thought about how he was going to say this. “Is there someplace we can talk?”
“Come on, outside,” she said, grabbing a tiny white purse and slinging it over her shoulder.
Cora was in her early twenties, twenty years younger than Miller, and was almost pretty, but Gene wasn’t sure why she was only almost. She looked like she was made from a pretty mold but didn’t come out of it quite right. He looked closer and he saw that her eyes weren’t quite symmetrical—was her left eye a little smaller than the other? And her mouth may have been a little too wide, with a bit of an overbite. She wore bobbed dark brown hair with bright pink streaks in it, but it looked like she had dyed it herself one evening when she was bored. An adolescent girlish figure stuck out of a yellow and white sundress, an adolescent look emphasized by pink Converse tennis shoes. She dressed like the arty, pretentious “new wave” or “punk” girls dressed back in the eighties, when he was in high school. For a moment before she opened the door, Gene could smell her shampoo, clean and cucumber sweet.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said as soon as they exited the building and started walking down the sidewalk.
Gene was a few feet behind Cora, and he felt bad checking out her ass as he was about to tell her about her boyfriend’s, his brother’s, death, but he couldn’t check the impulse. The sun shone through the dress just enough to show her figure. She had a nice little ass.
“Yeah. He is.”
“How do you know?” she asked, still walking away from him. Gene wasn’t sure if her squeaky voice was her normal speaking voice or if it was affected by the situation. “Did you see him?”
“I did.”
“Where did you see him?”
“I can’t really tell you, ma’am.”
“That’s bullshit. And don’t ma’am me.”
Cora pulled a Marlboro Light out of her tiny purse, stopped, and lit it. This allowed Gene to catch up with her, and when he did, he noticed not only that she was crying yet fighting the tears, but that she was someone very much like himself—someone who thought of emotions as weak or, at the very least, nobody else’s business. They turned right at the next block, onto a street with no sidewalks. Once he had caught up with her, she started walking quickly again, just ahead of him. Trash was piled on corners—Gene guessed for pick-up the following morning. They passed a house with three deer statues set up in the lawn to look like a little deer family grazing contentedly. They were so old and weathered they looked like they had mange.
They walked another block, Cora two steps ahead of him, before she asked, “So are you caught up in all this too?”
“No,” Gene said. Then after a moment added, “Not yet anyway. I don’t even know what ‘all this’ is.” He was working up a good sweat in his jacket now. He noticed that Cora was getting pretty dewy, too, that her sundress was starting to stick to her back as she walked, and he wondered how far they were going—or if Cora even had somewhere in mind.
“How did he die?” she asked.
“Shot.”
“I knew it. Where?”
“Are you sure you want to know all this?”
“No,” she said, tossing her cigarette in front of her and smashing it into the pavement with her Converse. “But tell me anyway.”
“He was shot in the head.”
“How did you find him?”
Gene thought about his next answer for a while, then said, “I guess you could say he found me.”
Cora cut left at Second Street and Gene continued to follow her east for a few blocks. Finally, she turned onto the front walk of a yellow two-story clapboard house.
“Where are we going exactly?” he asked.
“This is Miller’s house—our home” she said, her voice choking slightly on the word “home” as she pulled a single key from her mini-purse.
The house looked exactly like the kind of house Miller would live in—old, once charming, falling apart. Miller had no home-repair skills and even less interest, and the place needed a good scraping, priming, and painting, as well as new gutters and some work around the windows. Miller must have bought it for a song—a one-week-on-the-charts-then-gone-and-dated-Top-40-Country song.
Cora went in and called back toward Gene, “Close the door behind you.”
The house was dark, a little dreary, but he could see that the entryway opened onto a set of stairs straight ahead, a small living room with nice furniture that was clearly never used, a little hallway to the left of the stairs that seemed to wander back to the kitchen, and a combination sitting room and study to his right. The floors were hardwood except in the sitting room, which was covered in a musty, mottled brown carpet, the color of a forgotten chocolate Easter bunny. Cora sat on a brown leather couch with her face in her arms, which rested on her skinny legs. After a while she looked up, her eyes red, mascara streaked.
“Are you OK?” he asked, taking off his jacket and folding it over a chair.
She shrugged.
“You don’t seem very surprised.”
She shrugged again. Her eyes shone large and vacant and her face was blank, like a cinder block had fallen on her head and she sat in a coma. Gene didn’t know what to say, so they sat in silence for several minutes while he looked around the house, then thought that might be rude, like snooping, so he looked at his boots for a while.
“Do you want some tea or something?” she asked at last.
“Sure,” he said, tired of his boots and grateful for a new activity. Small things like walking and making tea helped distract from the pain and the painful awkwardness.
“Come on,” she said, getting up and walking to the kitchen. “Green tea? That’s what Miller always drinks. Drank. Drunk.”
“That’s fine.”
The kitchen looked to be the only room in the house that Miller had remodeled and updated, or perhaps he bought it that way. It was a room that seemed perfect for Cora—a nice white-tiled floor, white stove and refrigerator, yellow flowered curtains, and all kinds of matching red pots and pans and salt-and-pepper shakers. It smelled clean, but under the clean odors Gene could smell hearty cooking—enchiladas or fajitas, something rich and spicy. Cora filled a red kettle with water, put it on an electric stove, and grabbed two red mugs. She dropped two bags from a cylindrical box that said “Honey Ginseng Green Tea” into the mugs, then sat down on a stool at an island and rested her head on a small fist.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “I thought this might happen months ago, but then everything seemed OK. But when Miller didn’t come home for dinner, I had that feeling. You know—” Cora put her right hand on her solar plexus, her left still holding up her head.
“Do you live here?” Gene asked.
“Not officially,” she said.
“But you re-did this kitchen.”
“Officially I still live with my parents out on 45, but I spend most nights here. You like the kitchen?”
“It seems more like you than Miller.”
“He let me make all the decisions.”
Gene nodded appreciatively. He always felt stupid and forced giving compliments, if he even remembered to, and this would have been a good time to compliment Cora’s interior decorating, but for some reason he shied up. The tea kettle started gasping, whispering, and sputtering, but before it could shriek Cora took it off the heat and poured two cups of hot water over their tea bags.
“So what is ‘all this’?” Gene asked at last.
“Fuck! Why did Miller have to be so stubborn?”
“He was always stubborn.”
“I know! The fucker! Even when he knew he was wrong he refused to budge. God, I hated that!”
“So what happened? Was he wrong this time?”
“No, he was right. He probably handled it wrong.…” Her voice trailed off, the rest of the sentence unsaid or unthought.
“What did he get himself into? The casino? Gambling?”
“Ugh! That fucking casino! I hate it! It’s ruined this town. Do you know nobody from this town even works there? Everybody who works at the fucking casino comes over from Paducah.”
Gene looked at Cora blankly. This wasn’t telling him anything he understood or wanted to know.
“That’s across the river. In Kentucky,” she added.
“I know where Paducah is. What about Miller? Was it gambling?”
“No,” she laughed. “He certainly wasn’t a gambler. He almost never ever even went to the fucking casino.”
Despite the fact that she hated the casino, the way she said the word—something about the long o after the n, like it had a w at the end—was endearing.
“So what did he get himself into?” Gene asked again. He was trying to be patient but a part of him wanted to reach into her and rip the information out of her overbit mouth.
“You know, I don’t really understand exactly what Miller found out. I know it had something to do with contractors and state money and how it was all a rip off. There was lots of money under the table and he found out about it. He wrote a couple editorials in The Planet, but he was working on a much bigger piece and had pitched it to a couple bigger papers. He still has ties to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Had ties. Jesus.”
Cora shook her head and took a sip of tea. Gene sipped his, too. He didn’t think he’d ever had green tea before. It tasted like old grass, like something only Miller could have refined a taste for, but it wasn’t terrible.
“You want anything to eat?” she asked him.
Gene shook his head.
“I’m not hungry, either. Fuck. Sorry I’m not a very good host. Hostess,” she said, and Gene could see the tears starting to form in her eyes again. He fidgeted awkwardly with his red mug. Unfortunately there was nothing else on the counter to fidget with.
“You’re good,” he said.
After it looked like Cora’s tears had started to recede a bit, he said, “So Miller was working on a newspaper story?”
“He’d also pitched it to The Chicago Tribune, or maybe The Sun-Times. They all seemed like they were interested. Then one day we got up to go to work and the front door was gone.”
“Someone stole your front door?”
“Yeah, it was completely gone, sometime in the middle of the night. Miller called some contractor to see about putting it back on, and this guy came over and said he could put another back on for a hundred bucks. After he left we looked and it was the same door. The same fucking door! He was probably the same asshole that took it off in the middle of the night.”
“Balls.”
“That’s when we knew this town was in deep.”
The two sipped their tea in silence. It tasted better after the second sip, maybe even seemed a little calming. A wooden cuckoo clock hung on the wall, and Cora kept glancing at it between long stares into her tea.
“What else do you want to know?”
“What else can you tell me?”
“That’s about it. After the door incident, Five Star bought an ad in the DP—Daily Planet—and I figured everyone was friends again. Naïve.”
Cora warmed their tea a bit, mostly out of something to do. Gene decided he would make a terrible detective or investigative reporter. He couldn’t even think of what to ask next.
“If you want to know more,” she added, “I know who you can talk to. Danny Hansen. That’s who Miller first found some things out from. I don’t understand it all. All I know is it’s a bunch of fucking bullshit and probably nothing is going to happen to change anything and nothing will happen about Miller and no one will go to jail.”
At 1:15 a small yellow bird, more of a blur, popped out of its wooden door and cuckooed and was gone again. It lasted half a second at most.
“That’s Pedro,” she said.
Gene raised his eyebrows, confused.
“The bird. We named him Pedro. So I need to get back to the paper. We’ve got to get it done today. Apparently I’m the only one who can finish it.”
“You really feel like working?”
“No, but it’s better than sitting around here,” she said. “Not that it’s your company or anything. I think I’d rather—I maybe just want to think about something else for a while. Now that I know he’s dead.”
Gene nodded. He tried to imagine how he’d feel if his girlfriend had been shot, and he couldn’t, largely because he couldn’t even imagine having a girlfriend. Gene tried not to consider what it would be like if Cora were his girlfriend, but he couldn’t help it. He liked that she didn’t mince words, that she called Miller “dead” instead of using any of the “passed on” or “resting in peace” euphemisms.
“How do I find this Handsome guy?” he asked.
“Who?!”
“That guy you said who first told Miller—”
“Danny Hansen. He’s always at the Egyptian Trails after dinner. That’s on Fifth Street, right by Superman.”
“I was just there,” Gene laughed. “Lotta help they were.”
“Danny might not want to talk to you. Nobody wants to talk around here, but if anyone will, it’s Danny Hansen. How long you think you’re gonna be here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t stay at the fucking casino,” she said. “You’re welcome to stay here. I’ll probably go to my parents’ house tonight. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”
Cora’s voice broke and trembled, sounding like she could have added “ever again as long as I live,” but she fought back her tears and went to a kitchen drawer. With her back to Gene, he could hear her sob and sniff, her head down and her frail shoulders trembling. Gene fought the urge to go to her, as he knew he’d be pushed away, and he looked around the kitchen—at the clock, their mugs of tea, a shelf of cookbooks, mostly Indian, Thai, Cajun, and Mexican. After a few minutes, Cora reached into the kitchen drawer and pulled out a key.
“This is to the front door,” she said, wiping her eyes and holding it out for Gene to take.
Cora unceremoniously walked out of the kitchen. Gene didn’t know what else to do so he followed her down the hall to the two-story foyer.
“Make yourself at home.”
She gestured to the study area with its piles of papers, notebooks, and books on a little side table and on what was only messy enough to be Miller’s desk.
“Some of his stuff his missing,” she said suddenly, not moving, as if not moving might make it reappear from its hiding place. “Maybe he took it with him to St. Louis. Anyway, that’s what he was working on if you want to look through it. Maybe you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for. What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just what happened?”
“I guess so.”
“Miller didn’t talk about you very much,” she said. “I didn’t even know he had a brother until a year ago.”
“We weren’t very close.”
“I got that impression. I knew it was you, though, when I first saw you. You look like him, and he described you perfectly. You’re broader and your jaw is bigger, but you look like him.”
Gene didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. He thought of Miller’s face again when he turned him over in the hog shed.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m sorry, too,” said Gene. He didn’t know what exactly he was sorry for at that moment—her loss, Miller’s death, the fact that they weren’t close—but he did indeed feel terribly sorry as he stood there in Miller’s study watching Cora’s reddening eyes start to fill up with tears once more.
“Gotta get back,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you around. Put the key under the flowerpot on the front porch when you leave. Or I guess you could just keep it if you want. It doesn’t really matter.”
Cora left behind a lingering smell of sadness and cucumber shampoo. Gene wondered if the sadness was hers or his now that she was gone. He could certainly see why Miller liked her, and he wanted to see her again soon but then felt guilty for feeling it. He was as bad as a woman—having feelings about having feelings. It made him want to throw up, and he put two more tropical Tums in his mouth and let them dissolve to mush on his tongue.