You Killed Wesley Payne

by Sean Beaudoin

  “Somehow I think downtown Tehachapi has different rules than the Galápagos.”

  “This is a family of failed apes,” Sherry insisted. “We’re good with crude tools, but we can’t hunt to save our opposable thumbs. I’m sorry, but we simply don’t seem to have vital-enough genes to merit passing on. I’ve decided it’s just as well that we allow our line to wither off and die.”

  “We’re not failed. We’re… in flux. Dad will—”

  “No, Dalton. That’s the thing. Whatever you’re about to say he will do, trust me, he won’t.”

  Dalton cleared his throat. “Well, okay, Landon—”

  “Halfway around the world.”

  “True, but at least Turd Unit—”

  “Maniacal. Unparentable.”

  Dalton shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “That’s all a little grim, Ma, don’t you think? I mean, you can’t just give up, can you?”

  Sherry Rev was quiet for a moment.

  “Actually, I can. Besides, being a fossil won’t be so bad.”

  “Yes, it will. It’ll suck.” All the patience drained from Dalton’s voice. “You need to stop feeling so sorry for yourself.”

  Sherry Rev tossed off her blankets and glared at her son. She stuck a pinky nail between her teeth and adjusted the wet architecture of her braces. “And what do you know about feeling sorry?”

  “Probably nothing,” Dalton admitted.

  “Have you ever sent a boy off to war? A boy you birthed from between your own screaming loins?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Have you ever raised an enfant terrible so ter-ee-blay that even his own teachers are terrified of his little red head?”

  “Again, no.”

  “Proves my point, doesn’t it? About the whole you-knowing-things thing?”

  “You just won another case, Ma. I stand corrected.”

  Sherry threw a pillow at Dalton. “Don’t patronize me. There’s nothing worse than being patronized by someone who doesn’t shave. Not to mention wearing a four-dollar tie. You look like an undertaker.”

  Dalton picked up the pillow and put it back on the bed. Undertaker? That was actually pretty cool. He tightened his Windsor knot. “Ma, can I make you a pot of tea?”

  Sherry Rev sighed. “Yes, please.”

  Dalton went down and put together a tray of silverware and the ceramic tea set. He arranged some cookies on a plate and picked a flower from the yard and put it in a water glass. When he came back up, his mother was sitting at her bureau in a robe. She looked at the tray and then at Dalton, wiping her eyes.

  “Thanks, honey.”

  “Sure.”

  They appraised each other through the ornate mirror.

  “You haven’t sat there and looked at me like that since you were ten. You were trying to work up the courage to ask me to stop holding your hand on the way to school. It was, apparently, embarrassing you in front of your friends.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. If it makes you feel any better, it wouldn’t embarrass me anymore.”

  “It does, actually. Make me feel better.”

  “Although that may be less a function of my maturity than the fact that I no longer have any friends.”

  Sherry laughed, putting on lipstick. She leaned close to the mirror, holding one hand steady with the other.

  “So what now?” Dalton asked.

  Sherry blotted her lips, then picked up a compact. “I suppose I traipse out a few stock phrases like come to terms or soldier on, or something to do with pulling up bootstraps. I’ll grudgingly accept Landon’s absence in an abstract way that mostly involves not really thinking about it. And then a month or so from now, I’ll take you aside and kiss you on the forehead and thank you for helping me through this.”

  “You will?”

  She nodded. “Unless I forget. In which case I won’t, but you’ll be able to tell by my forgiving-of-your-bad-grades demeanor that I still appreciate it.”

  Dalton looked at his mother, half made up, disheveled, a mischievous grin on her face. He wondered why he so rarely took the time to consider how excellent she actually was.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I, uh, sit over there with you? Like, maybe hold your hand for a while?”

  Sherry looked amazed. Then shocked. Then sensing a trap. “Do you really want to?”

  “No,” Dalton said. “Not at all. But if I do, it’ll be so like the end of a cheesy movie where the doe-eyed son learns to come to terms with his angrily beautiful psychologist mom, that for a few minutes it’ll seem like we both deserve an Oscar.”

  Sherry laughed again, this time louder than before. “Get out of here! I have to get dressed. My god, who knew my son was going to be such a walking cliché?”

  “Pretty much everyone,” Dalton said. “They’re always like, Hey, there’s that hard-boiled kid from across the tracks. The one with stars in his eyes, feelings on his sleeve, a crazy dream, a checkered past, and a heart made of solid gold.”

  Sherry Rev slid over. Dalton sat beside his mother and took her hand in his.

  CHAPTER 22

  REVIVE ME HIGH

  Dalton opened his eyes. It wasn’t heaven. It might have been hell, if they had interrogation rooms in hell, which they probably did. He was handcuffed to a chair in front of a folding table with an ashtray and a tape recorder. Up on the cinder-block wall was a calendar from 1982, a corkboard full of rusty tacks, and an ancient security camera whose red eye blinked derisively.

  Estrada came in the door. He loosened his tie and tossed something that landed with a loud smack on the table. It was a yearbook.

  “Am I dead?”

  “It’s negotiable,” Estrada said. “But not yet, no.”

  “How come every time I pass out, when I wake up I’m looking at you?”

  “Who would you prefer?”

  “I’m not sure, but whoever she is, she doesn’t have a mustache.”

  “You must be okay—your sense of humor’s intact and still lousy.”

  “I got shot. I felt it.” Dalton pressed his hand to his sternum, looking at the huge purple bruise between his nipples. The skin remained unbroken.

  “You weren’t shot. You were hit with a piece of shrapnel.”

  “Shrapnel?”

  “Well, a piece of microphone to be exact.”

  Dalton coughed. “Even if that made sense, it makes no sense.”

  “There was no shooting. No bullet. One of the band’s microphones overheated.”

  Estrada held up a blackened stand, the twisted metal base of the microphone still screwed onto one end.

  “Then what knocked me out?”

  “Nothing knocked you out. You fainted, tough guy.”

  THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #43

  Unless you’re a Russian general’s daughter who hangs out in the parlor, receives eligible bachelors for tea, and is prone to the vapors, fainting isn’t a good look.

  Estrada held up the yearbook. “For some reason you had this stuffed down the front of your shirt.” There was a hole in the cover. Inside, a piece of metal had obliterated the picture of Lenny Poole, a Face Boi sophomore who’d won Nicest Glutes. “Lucky it was there. Might have done some real damage otherwise. If you didn’t have. Something hidden. Like a thief. In your shirt.”

  Dalton pretended to marvel at the hole, sticking his finger in it.

  Estrada held up the compressed mic fragment, the size and shape of a ball bearing, and then dropped it into Dalton’s palm.

  “You were under observation in the infirmary most of the night, out cold. Had nothing to do with that bruise. Doc says you were just tired.”

  “All night? What time is it?”

  “It’s Saturday afternoon.”

  “You call my parents?”

  “Not yet.”

  Dalton nodded gratefully. “I owe you one.”

  Estrada smoothed his mustache. “Questions. Answers. Favors. They all come around in the end.”


  “Am I under arrest?”

  “No.”

  “Then why am I handcuffed?”

  Estrada produced a key. Dalton rubbed his wrists.

  “And why was Hutch chasing me?”

  Hutch barged into the room, laughing. “ ’Cause you ran, perp. Big-time Private Dick like you should know better than to take off running with officers of the peace in the vicinity.”

  Estrada gave his partner a tired look.

  “Also, you bag of hair, we’ve been wanting to have a chat. But, like most perps, you’re hard to find. We get a call, party out of control turning into a full-scale riot, what do you know, guess who I run into? Not only that, we got you nailed for suspected theft, a clear-cut sixty-one forty.”

  “What’s a sixty-one forty?”

  Estrada rolled his eyes.

  “Hot book,” Hutch said, with slightly less verve.

  “Book thief?” Dalton laughed. “Nice collar, Hutch. They’re gonna give you a captain’s shield soon.”

  “Thief’s a thief,” Hutch said, with a half pout that reminded Dalton a little too much of Turd Unit.

  “How do you know it’s not mine?”

  “All the inscriptions are addressed to a girl. You named Lu Lu? Huh, Private Dick? You got a special private name?”

  “Forget the book,” Estrada said, annoyed. He slid it toward Dalton. “Give it back to her when you’re done with it, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Better yet,” Estrada said, “let me borrow it. Seems to work better than Kevlar.”

  Dalton chuckled. Hutch scowled.

  “Listen,” Estrada said, straightening his cuffs. “We just want to check in on a few things. I did you a solid, you do me a solid.”

  “What few things?”

  “Wesley Xavier Payne.”

  “I thought the case was closed.”

  “Yeah, well, we have some new information. Little birdie told us you might too. We want to compare notes.”

  “Like what information? What little birdie?”

  “You first,” said Hutch. “And never mind who our sources are.”

  Dalton laughed. “Sources? You mean Honey Bucket? Slip a C-note in her nylons and she tells you anything you want to hear?”

  “Just get us up to speed,” Estrada said wearily. “Huh? So we can all go home and watch the game?”

  “You mean I should act like they do in all the cop shows where the poor mope being squeezed finally tells what he knows, and then they toss him in a cell anyhow?”

  “Trust me, that’s not—”

  “There’s two ways to insult a Private Dick,” Dalton interrupted. “And the second one is to say ‘trust me.’ ”

  “Fair enough,” Estrada said. “So don’t trust me and just listen.”

  Dalton nodded.

  “We hear you had a body in your basement. We hear it was duct taped. We hear it looked a whole lot like—”

  A sergeant opened the door and poked his head in.

  “Not now!” Hutch barked.

  “Sorry, sir. The kid’s bail has been posted.”

  “How? He’s not even under arrest!”

  “The party that posted bail is waiting in the lobby,” the sergeant said, winking clumsily. “That same party is making a lot of noise? Um, about lawyering the kid up? About the kid being interrogated underage and without family present?” The sergeant cleared his throat, palms out. “Just thought you’d want to know this party is tossing around a lot of convincing legalese along the lines of contacting the newspaper and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Estrada said, standing. “You can go, Rev.”

  “Wait a minute!” Hutch said. “He hasn’t even told us—”

  “He can go,” Estrada said, staring at his partner.

  Dalton got up and walked toward the door. “Who is it?” he asked the sergeant. “My mother?”

  The sergeant looked over his shoulder. “If that’s your mother, kid, you got more troubles than I thought.”

  CHAPTER 23

  KISS FIST, EAT FLOOR

  Dalton signed nine pieces of paper before being given his personal belongings. The sergeant dumped a manila envelope on his desk and read them off one by one, “Penknife, check, three nickels, check, six thousand dollars in cash, check. Notebook entitled Private Dick Handbook, check. Envelope filled with poetry, check. Index cards with mysterious block handwriting, check. One slightly damaged yearbook, check.”

  “There was a key,” Dalton said. “In my pocket.”

  The sergeant went down his list. “No key.”

  “I’m positive. Small. Silver. A number 9 on it?”

  “You want I should go ask the detective?”

  “No, don’t do that. I guess I, ah… I guess I left it at home.”

  Dalton signed another four papers and then was walked to the gate for release.

  “Oh, wait!” the sergeant called, turning over the envelope one more time, as a small silver key slid out. “You mean this?”

  Dalton almost laughed. Almost.

  “Yeah, I mean that.”

  He pocketed the key, trying to figure out what he was going to tell his mother on the other side. But it wasn’t Sherry Rev waiting.

  “You!”

  “Me,” Elisha Cook said as they buzzed Dalton out.

  “But why?”

  Elisha Cook held a finger over his lips. “Come this way.” They walked down the hallway, past offices and racks of brochures with titles like Not Doing Tempting Crimes: A Primer and This Is an Egg, This Is Your Brain, and This Is 10 to 20 in Leavenworth.

  “We have some very important matters to go over schoolwise. However, I don’t feel comfortable… discussing Harvard in this place. My car is outside.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable either,” Dalton said. “Mostly because I gotta hit the splashbox. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Elisha Cook raised an eyebrow but said nothing, continuing on through the double glass doors. Dalton went back around the corner and crouched by the brochure rack, waiting until the sergeant turned to file something. Then he sneaked back through the buzzer gate he’d left slightly ajar by stuffing a yearbook page into the bolt slot. He tiptoed along the wall, hid behind a file cabinet until another Snout walked by, and then slipped through a heavy green door that had OFFICERS’ LOCKER ROOM stenciled in gray paint.

  Inside it smelled like sweat and cheddar. There were towels and jockstraps all over the floor. There were shelves of billy clubs and walkie-talkies and uniforms stuffed in cubbies. Near the showers were three parallel rows of lockers. Dalton hid behind the first row, numbers 99 to 66. There were two Snouts getting dressed on the other side, talking about last weekend’s Salt River game.

  “That Chuff kid is one tough bastard. Took the team onto his back single-handed in the fourth quarter.”

  “I know it. That last drive was a thing of beauty. Up the middle six plays in a row. Took real stones. Then, you know…”

  The other cop joined in.

  “Chuff to Chugg… touchdown!”

  They slapped five. Dalton ducked behind a big laundry cart, waited a beat, and then slid over to the next row, 65 to 32. It was empty. The cops’ voices started to fade as they headed toward the door. Dalton crept to the final row and found locker number 8. Not 9. Eight. But it had to be a mistake, since the nameplate read HUTCH HUTCHERSON.

  Dalton slipped the key into the slot. It fit perfectly. He turned it, but it didn’t want to go. He tried again. No good. He tried number 9. This time, the key wouldn’t move at all. Dalton laid his forehead against the cool metal of the locker.

  THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #44

  The only people who need a key are Francis Scott and girls with drugstore diaries. Stop being a murse and improvise!

  Dalton waited until the Snouts were gone for sure. Then he punched the long rectangle of fire safety glass with a Hutch-smelling towel wrapped around his fist, grabbing the ax mounted to the wall behind it. He hefted the we
ight, trying to calculate distance and torque, and then swung the blade at number 9, levering it into the gap just above the bolt. He widened the space between the door and swung again, popping the lock. Empty. He did the same thing with Hutch’s. It didn’t want to come as easily, and Dalton had to swing twice more. A fourth hit sprung it open, just as an alarm went off.

  REEE-EEER, REEE-EEER, REEE-EEER.

  There was a red canvas duffel in Hutch’s locker. Dalton grabbed it and closed the mangled door.

  In the parking lot, Cassiopeia Jones screed up in her red Jaguar as Dalton clomped over.

  “Get in!”

  He slid into the passenger seat as the alarm was joined by multiple sirens.

  Cassiopeia turned her head as they passed Elisha Cook, who was waiting for Dalton beside an enormous black Diktatorat LE. The car had to be thirty years old but was in pristine condition—a huge steel boat, painted hearse black. Elisha Cook looked up and saw Dalton in the Jag, confusion on his face as Cassiopeia took a left out of the parking lot and accelerated away.

  “I think we just drove away from my scholarship.”

  “Yeah, he’s not going to like that. Oh well, there’s always state school.”

  “I was sorta getting used to being Ivy League material.”

  Cassiopeia pointed to the large red duffel bag between Dalton’s feet. “I didn’t see the sergeant counting that back as part of your personal effects.”

  “You were watching?”

  “Behind the chair in the lobby. I was pretending to read pamphlets.”

  “Of course.”

  Cassiopeia downshifted. “I presume all those alarms going off were the result of your need to visit the bathroom?”

  “Yup.”

  THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #45

  When you’ve run out of excuses, acting like a little boy on a long car trip who’s had too much lemonade never fails.

  “I further presume that your wriggling out of the only window in the police station without bars on it, and then dropping fifteen feet to the pavement like a thief with the Hope Diamond stuffed in an examination-unlikely crevasse is also related to said alarms?”