Daniel gave me business cards for Decontamination Specialists LLC and Dririte, two companies that cleaned violent crime scenes, but I found a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Fantastik and got down on my hands and knees. Thomas refused to come inside until late in the afternoon and then steered wide of the spot where Terrence had died. Susan pretended normalcy. She made us a late lunch and after delivering a plate to Thomas on the front porch we sat together at the dining room table. But the orange scent of Fantastik and something more permanent and terrible hung in the air.
In the afternoon I swam in the pool and then lay on a lounge chair with my eyes closed and let the sun beat against my eyelids. A breeze breathed across the lawn from the quarry pond. Susan lay beside me, wearing opaque sunglasses.
The phone rang inside the house.
I waited for Thomas to get it.
He was still on the front porch.
I waited for Susan to get up.
She’d either fallen asleep or was pretending.
I went inside and answered on the sixth ring.
It was Charles. ‘You’re not answering your cell phone,’ he said.
‘I don’t have one anymore. Terrence broke it after talking with you last night. What did you say to him?’
‘I told him you were going to kill him.’
I said, ‘You upset him pretty well. That didn’t help.’
‘But I understand you’ve done the job now. Put a hole in back and a hole in front.’
It didn’t please me. It was something that had needed to be done and I’d done it. ‘Why are you calling?’ I asked.
‘Just like that? You kill him and it’s Why are you calling?’
‘As you said, the job is done.’
‘Almost done,’ he said. ‘We need to take care of Aggie.’
‘What do you mean? When I asked if you’d taken her to the hospital you said it was too late.’
‘It was too late. But I’ve still got her. We need to put her in the ground.’
The thought of it nauseated me. ‘I’m exhausted, Charles.’
‘You’re exhausted? You know how old I am?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘But I’m not coming, Charles.’
‘Fine. I’ll dump her body on your porch and you can take care of it after you rest.’
‘Charles …’
‘What?’
‘Jesus Christ, I’ll be there in a half hour.’
‘Bring a shovel,’ he said.
We buried Aggie in the woods in front of his house. He’d sponged the cuts that she’d had when I’d seen her at the Luego Motel and wrapped her in a clean white sheet before stowing her in a backyard shed. As we dug, the shovel blades kept striking the hardwood roots of oak trees and red maples as if the soil didn’t want her. The afternoon was hot and thick with humidity and Charles worked as hard as I did but after we lowered Aggie into the hole and covered it, his shirt was still white though mine was soaked with dirty sweat.
I asked, ‘You won’t be bothered knowing she’s buried outside your front door?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Should I be?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Come inside and clean up.’
I showered in his bathroom and he put my clothes in his washing machine. Then I wore his bathrobe and sat drinking beer with him in his screened porch. A blood-red cardinal and his brown mate pulled something from the pine needles, disappeared into the trees and returned for more. A horse fly had become trapped inside the porch and buzzed furiously against the screen. Charles watched it with mild interest.
He said, ‘Not a lot of men could do what you’ve done.’
‘Thank God.’
‘Takes a special kind of man to do that,’ he said.
‘That’s what you told me the first time we met.’
He nodded. ‘Worman’s Deli. After you beat up the Honduran kids.’
‘It was the other way around. I beat up the men who were attacking the Hondurans.’
‘Whatever. It’s still true. It takes a special kind of man. I’m proud of you.’
‘I don’t want you to be proud of me.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s good too.’
We sat silent for a while. The horse fly buzzed.
‘I’m leaving town,’ he said. ‘In a few days.’
‘One of your mysterious trips?’
He shook his head. ‘This time I won’t be coming back.’
The news shouldn’t have surprised me. Charles had always seemed to exist on the edge of the city even if he knew more about the place than anyone else, and he’d always seemed impermanent even if he hadn’t changed in twenty years. I should have been glad to see him go though I knew he’d become a part of me. ‘Where are you going?’
He gave me a look that said I should know better than to ask.
‘I’ll miss you,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I’ll bet.’
Over the next three days, Susan, Thomas and I tried to put together the fragments of our lives even though the cracks were twenty-five years old and older. The scratches on my hands and face healed. The split on my forehead where Don Melchiori had butted me mostly vanished, and the bruises on my ribs where he’d kicked me were fading. The concussion where Terrence had smacked me with a branch still gave me headaches but they would pass. The newspaper and nightly news cycled through the story. They started with Terrence’s death in my kitchen, and by day three they had long biographical accounts of him with high-school photographs, remarks from high-school friends, comments about his visits to the Little Vegas Gentlemen’s Club, and insinuations about his sexuality. I made the rounds to my gas stations and when the slow-witted day manager at my Best Gas station said nothing about my troubles I felt generous and told her I was giving her a raise. Thomas swam in the backyard pool and drew obscene superhero comic books. Susan showed houses to clients without selling any, saw friends and ate meals with Thomas and me. At night I stayed home instead of going to see Lee Ann.
On the third evening, as we sat for dinner, there was a knock at the door. Christopher stood on the front step. His face was flushed and slack. He was drunk. He held a rock in his hand, about the size of the ones we flung through the Mabrys’ windows before they moved into the neighborhood.
‘Hey, Christopher, what’s up?’ I said, though I was sure that I didn’t want to know.
He stepped inside smelling of gin and beer and handed me the rock. ‘I was going to throw this at your house,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ I said, as though he’d given me a bottle of wine.
He looked into the living room. ‘This place looks just like it did when we were growing up.’ It was a criticism.
‘Some things don’t change,’ I said.
‘Ain’t that the truth.’
Thomas joined me at the doorway.
I asked Christopher, ‘What are you doing here?’
He gestured at the rock in my hand. ‘Like I said.’
‘Why?’
‘My wife’s leaving me,’ he said. ‘She took her daughter and she’s staying with her parents. For a week. But it’s her house. I’m to move out before she returns.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t see—’
‘I can’t get Belinda out of my head,’ he said.
I laughed. At him. At myself. I couldn’t stop.
He stared at me with uncertain anger. ‘What?’
‘You want to have dinner with us?’ I asked.
The idea seemed strange to him. ‘No.’
‘What can I do for you then?’
Again he looked uncertain. He asked, ‘How did it feel to kill Terrence?’
‘Honestly?’
‘I mean, your own boy.’
Thomas looked at me for an answer too.
I nodded. ‘I didn’t feel it at all. It was just something that needed to be done.’
The next morning there was a service for Belinda, though her body remained at the morgue pending final disposition. The service was held on a rolling lawn between an ocean-side beach and the third fairway of a golf resort south of the city. The sun had risen from the ocean but a soft sea breeze nudged at the heat. There were white broad-board lounge chairs and unlighted gas lanterns on metal posts. The minister said that Belinda had loved to come to this spot and the service would celebrate her life, not mourn her death. With a put-on laugh he said he would return to this spot later in the week to conduct a wedding.
Christopher was there in a blue suit, looking mostly sober. He sat by himself and talked to no one. Bobby Mabry had arrived from the hospital in a special van, and a nurse pushed him on to the lawn in a wheelchair. Already a small man, he seemed hunched inside himself. A white sheet was draped over his burned and bandaged legs. His short beard, neat and clean the last time I’d seen him, looked matted, and the skin on his cheeks glistened with a pained sweat. He kept his eyes to himself.
Daniel Turner sat next to another man who looked like a police officer. Charles sat at the back of the crowd looking as content as a man with tearstain scars on his cheeks ever could look. He chatted quietly with the strangers next to him. Tralena Graham’s father showed up late in a dark suit with his two bodyguards. When he caught me watching him he nodded in my direction.
In the crowd of forty, only two women attended. One of them was the nurse with Bobby and the other looked like a plainclothes police officer. Four police cars had parked in the resort lot and a couple of uniformed officers stood behind the rows of folding chairs. I wondered what loose ends Daniel was still investigating.
I looked out at the ocean. Seagulls soared ten or fifteen feet above the waves, plunged into the water and emerged, their beaks empty.
The minister said, ‘The pain that Belinda Mabry suffered in death is nothing when compared to the pleasure she brought to others when she was alive.’
Sitting next to me a gray-haired black man wearing a bolo tie called out, ‘Got that right.’
There was no music and there were no testimonials from friends or family – just the minister’s voice, the breeze, the roar and hush of breaking ocean waves and children laughing on the beach. When the service ended, the minister was the first to go and most of the others followed him. Daniel and the police officers stayed and studied the crowd. I wandered over to Charles.
‘I thought you were leaving town,’ I said.
‘Soon.’
We watched Christopher join Bobby, who stared at him, slack-jawed with medication.
‘Twenty-five years ago,’ I said, ‘that man raped him.’
Maybe Christopher was apologizing. Bobby raised a hand a few inches off the sheet and Christopher took it in his own hands and held it. He stooped so that he looked at Bobby eye to eye and held his hand as if he were trying to pass strength to him or take strength into himself.
‘Funerals are hilarious,’ Charles said.
I went home and lay by the pool with a pitcher of margaritas, and Thomas swam lap after lap like a metronome counting the slow beat of our existence.
That night, Susan, Thomas and I ate a late dinner on the pool deck with the pool filter chugging reassuringly in the dark beside us and then I went inside to my bedroom, climbed into bed and turned on the ten p.m. news. A Breaking News banner appeared across the screen and the anchorman announced a tragic development in an ongoing story and cut to a reporter on the street.
The reporter, a young man in short shirtsleeves, stood outside University Hospital. The yellow-orange glow of streetlights cast weird shadows over him. Police and paramedic emergency lights flashed behind him. He said, ‘According to hospital officials, a little after nine tonight City Councilman Don Melchiori was attacked violently in the room where he was recovering from a gunshot wound sustained earlier this week. We learned minutes ago that Melchiori has died. Police haven’t named or apprehended a suspect. The mayor’s office has issued the following statement: Don Melchiori was a dedicated public servant and civic supporter. His contributions to historical preservation will be felt for generations to come. We offer condolences to Don’s family. We’ll be back with more details as this story develops.’
I was out of bed and mostly dressed by the time that the camera cut back to the anchorman. The phone rang as I headed for the front door, and I went back to the kitchen and answered.
‘You see the news?’ Charles said.
‘Just turned it off,’ I said. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘The man I’ve talked to says it was strangulation by ligature,’ he said. ‘Clothesline. They haven’t matched it yet but I’m guessing it’s the same line as the others.’
My stomach fell. ‘Which means Terrence Mabry didn’t do the killings?’
‘Which is something I’m thinking the police already suspected since they showed up at Belinda’s funeral in big numbers,’ Charles said. ‘Maybe he was in it with someone else who’s continuing alone. But if I had to guess, these are one-man jobs.’
‘No one saw Melchiori’s killer go into his room?’ I asked.
‘The security camera in the corridor was disabled and the nurses at the station apparently saw no one suspicious.’
‘Do they have any idea who did it?’
‘That’s why I’m calling,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping that around nine o’clock you were surrounded by friends and neighbors who can testify that you weren’t at University Hospital.’
‘I was home with Susan and Thomas.’
‘That might not be enough,’ he said. ‘If I were you I’d get out of your house fast.’
‘I was leaving when the phone rang.’
‘Yeah? Where were you heading?’
‘I was going to find Daniel Turner to see what was happening.’
‘I wouldn’t do that. He thought you were the man before. He probably thinks it again.’
I closed my eyes and breathed deep.
‘You still there?’ he asked.
‘Can I hide out for a while at your place?’
‘Any time,’ he said.
I said, ‘I’ll be there in a few hours.’
‘Where are you going now?’
‘I need to check on a couple things.’
‘You need help?’ he asked.
‘I need a hell of a lot of help. But I’ll see you in a few hours.’
I hung up, turned and saw Thomas in the doorway.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s all right now.’
‘Are you in trouble again?’
I started to lie but instead said, ‘Yeah,’ and tried a smile. ‘It seems to follow me.’
‘What can I do?’ he asked.
‘You can lend me your cell phone.’