And the blind lady. Where would he put her?
FOUR
THIS TIME IT WAS FOG. IT SLOWED EVERYTHING DOWN—TRAFFIC, aircraft, thought. When the Vermont Transit bus pulled into the Montpelier station over an hour late, it seemed to float to Denny out of the mist. It delivered him to the airport two hours late, but the planes weren’t going anywhere.
He checked his suitcase and staked out the gate waiting area until he could snag a seat with no armrests. He settled into it, closed his eyes, and stretched his legs out as far as he could, knowing he would soon be bound by the tiny box of his coach seat. He remembered the good old days, when he could use his size as the basis for a first-class upgrade at check-in. That was before the airlines got tough. He stopped trying after one airline agent, on hearing his “I’m large” argument, said with a straight face, “But, sir, you knew you were large when you bought your coach ticket.” What a zinger!
“Would Chicago passenger Dennis Braintree come to the counter, please? Dennis Braintree?”
Denny’s eyes popped open. This was exactly what they said when his request for an upgrade had been successful. But he hadn’t made one. He looked to the gate counter, some distance away past several rows of seated travelers. Was there a problem with his ticket? He hoped so. He liked talking to people behind counters. He scooted forward to get up, but then he spied two men standing at the far end of the counter—two watchful men.
He knew exactly what was going on. There was no way that a busty woman could poke him in the chest and get naked in his Jacuzzi without payment being required. Marge had turned against him, and these two men—cops, obviously—were chasing him. What had she accused him of? He had taken her car, yes, but with her permission. That thought made him feel the outside of his pants pocket. He still had her keys. A blunder on his part, yes, but she wouldn’t send the police after him just for her keys.
One of the cops was scanning the crowd like a surveillance camera on slow rotation. As his gaze approached Denny’s bank of seats, Denny bent over and fussed with a shoe. A minute later, when he looked back up, the cop’s eyes were safely beyond him. The other cop signaled something to the agent, and she leaned into her microphone and repeated her summons for Dennis Braintree.
Denny watched a man step to the counter for reasons of his own. The cops intercepted him, demanded his ID and examined it, then dismissed him and stepped away from the counter, a ridiculous duo now, their cover entirely blown. The size of the man told Denny all he needed to know about the description they were working from. He could see Marge’s lips form the word.
He would wait them out even if it meant missing his flight. When they gave up and left, he would catch another plane. But the cops, as if reading his mind, suddenly turned their attention to the seated travelers. They began to stroll through the crowd, one on each side of the main concourse aisle, demanding an ID from every husky male. At a moment when both were occupied, Denny rose and made his way through the rows of seats to the main aisle.
“Would Chicago passenger Dennis Braintree come to the counter, please? Dennis Braintree?”
The words seemed to chase him. Still walking, he glanced back. To his surprise, the cops were together again at the counter, and one of them jabbed a finger toward Denny but without looking at him. Denny pressed on. How to hurry without seeming to hurry? He heard rapid footsteps on the carpet behind him and braced himself for a tackle. But the cop whisked by and didn’t stop until he was about twenty steps ahead of Denny, at a spot where the gates within earshot of the agent’s announcement funneled into a food court. The cop installed himself there and began scrutinizing passersby, rightly thinking that their man might try to give them the slip.
When Denny slowed, the cop instantly noticed the change in the traffic rhythm. Their eyes locked, and it was all over. The cop’s jaw dropped, and he pointed his two index fingers at Denny and shot him with them, pumping them like ack-ack guns. Denny was disheartened, but he was also baffled. The pantomime fell well outside the taking-into-custody protocol.
The cop beckoned with a broad sweep of his arm. What could Denny do but comply? And as he came closer, the cop stepped forward to meet him, and here came the big arm of the law, wrapping around Denny’s neck in a fierce embrace. The cop was short, and he had to reach up to do it. He stepped back, grinned, and said, “How long has it been?”
Words failed our hero.
“Were you in Florida all this time? That’s what we heard.”
Florida. Denny had heard it mentioned before. He nodded.
“You look different. Is it your hair? Have you lost weight?”
Denny gestured vaguely.
The cop shook his head in wonder. “I’m looking for a bad guy and I find a good guy.” With this reminder of his mission, he glanced around, then looked back at Denny. He frowned. “Three years,” he said, the frown disappearing. “That’s how long it’s been. Almost exactly. Hey, you know what to call me?” After an excruciating pause, he said, “‘Detective.’ We opened our own little BCI two months ago, just like the big boys. So, when did you get in? I thought nothing was landing.”
Denny scrolled through several possible answers. “Last night,” he said. “Late. I’m waiting for a friend who’s arriving. Or not arriving.” Denny laughed. It didn’t sound like his own laugh.
“Yeah. Two spring snowstorms back to back. Then this fog. We gotta catch up, man. You need a ride home?”
The gears of speech failed to engage.
“Is someone picking you up? Sarah?”
There existed no plan for anyone named Sarah to pick Denny up. “No.”
“We’ll give you a ride. What about your friend? Where’s he coming in from?”
“Hong Kong.”
“Wow. Through what city?”
“I don’t have that information.”
The cop waited for more.
“I think I’ll just let him call me when he lands,” Denny said.
“That’s a plan.” The cop gave a decisive hand clap and looked over Denny’s shoulder. “I’ve got a new partner. He’s a tiger.” Denny turned around. The other detective, having abandoned his crowd survey, stood right behind him. How long had he been there? “Lance, this is an old friend of mine. And a fair backstop at Dog River Field, at least when he’s sober. Homer, this is Lance.” The second detective was Lance. That meant that he, Denny, was Homer. Homer. The first detective told Lance that they would give Homer a ride to Montpelier. Lance wasn’t particularly interested. He seemed disappointed that Denny wasn’t Denny. He looked at his partner and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “What now?”
“I think he skipped.”
“Then he’s guilty,” Lance said. “It’s like a confession. I love it when that happens.” His lips curled strangely. “I’ll go back and give the agent my number in case the creep still tries to board. We should check the toilet, Nick.” He pointed to a nearby men’s room.
“I got to go anyway,” the first cop said as he eased away. Nick, Denny thought. His friend was named Nick.
The simultaneous departure of the two men in different directions broke the spell like a hypnotist’s finger-snap. And what a spell it had been. With just a few words, Nick had turned Denny into an entirely different person. It was an unreal condition, like being in a bubble with fragile, wobbly walls. But it was thrilling to inhabit it. The bubble of Homer.
He watched Nick’s partner, Lance, talk with the airline agent and then slowly walk back, his eyes still roaming over the passengers. Denny reviewed the few crumbs of knowledge he had. Homer. Florida. Sarah. A backstop. What was a backstop? Away three years. Homer. Where had he heard that name before? From Betsy? She had thrown so many names at him that it was hard to be sure.
Lance pulled to a stop, looked at Denny indifferently, and scrutinized the people walking by—travelers waiting out the weather and drifting in and out of the food court. Lance wore a tight yellow turtleneck shirt that elongated his neck, and he had a lean, angular,
face. The people he stared at squirmed under his gaze.
“Who are you looking for?” Denny asked.
Lance scowled. “A creep.” He studied the crowd while Denny tried not to look like a creep. Lance asked for a man’s identification without showing any of his own. The man complied. “Move along,” Lance said by way of thanks. Then to Denny: “We’ve got shit for a description. ‘Fat.’ The whole world’s fat.”
“How fat?” said Denny.
Lance ignored the question. He studied the flow of people.
“What did he do?” Denny said.
Lance’s lips curled. “Creep checks into the Ethan Allen. Hooks up with a local. They drink. They fight.”
“They fight?”
“If people drink, they fight. Look at them.” Lance jerked his bony chin toward a bar where two or three passengers hunched over noonday drinks. To Denny they seemed more depressed than bellicose.
“So,” said Denny, striving for understanding. “They drink. They fight.”
Lance took it from there. “They hot-tub. They probably get it on. We’re looking for semen. We’re always looking for semen. It’s our bread and butter. The room gets trashed. The fight goes outside onto the balcony. Over she goes. Creep flees.”
The sheer volume and variety of information—old, new, false, true—triggered a nervous laugh from Denny. “She fell off the balcony? How do you know? I mean, did she tell you that?”
“She would if we could talk to her.”
“Is she unconscious? She’s not dead, is she?”
“Four stories? Concrete sidewalk? What are her chances?”
“But . . .” Denny fought a reeling sensation. “How do you know what happened if she didn’t tell you?”
“Reconstruction. I’m really good at it.” Lance flashed a twisted, vain smile. “Get this: before he takes off, Creep leaves a note behind on the bed. It says he had a visitor in his room and she did some damage and he feels terrible about it. Says the hotel should bill his credit card for the repairs. Like that was his main offense. Like he didn’t throw his visitor off the balcony.”
“Maybe she went out there alone and fell. Maybe he didn’t know it.”
Lance shook his head. “Two sets of footprints in the snow on the balcony. Hers and Creep’s.”
Denny nodded, probably more than he should have. When he had gone out to the balcony to look for a light from Marge’s hotel room, was it possible that she was lying on the sidewalk four stories below him? But why would she have gone out to the balcony?
“Who found her?”
“Nobody yet.”
Denny frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand?”
“Where is the woman now?” Flustered, he almost said “Marge.”
“We’re looking for her.”
“You and Nick?”
Lance whistled softly—at Denny’s stupidity, apparently. “Me and Nick are looking for a fat creep. Others in the department, patrol officers, are looking for the missing victim. Heads up—here comes a porker.” Lance stepped forward and stopped another innocent.
Denny kept seeing Marge on the balcony, then off it, tipping over the railing. She must have stepped out there for air. No—for the opposite of air: for a smoke. Her last cigarette. But what made her fall? Drunkenness?
After Lance had dismissed the man, Denny said, “If you haven’t found her body, how do you know she fell?”
“From her shit on the sidewalk.”
“Her feces?”
Lance stared at Denny. “Her shit. A hair brush and a cigarette lighter.”
“Oh. But couldn’t she have dropped those things and forgotten about them and not fallen at all?”
Lance shot a quick, derisive snort of air through his nostrils. “Homer, here’s some career advice. Don’t go into police work.” Lance laughed hard at that. He laughed and laughed all by himself. “Obviously, she had her purse with her on the balcony when they fought. I can see her picking it up from the dresser in a huff, saying she was leaving. See, that’s reconstruction at its best right there—details that are rooted in a behavioral average. She picks up her purse and says she’s leaving, and Creep drags her outside. All sorts of shit must have flown out of it when she fell. Creep hurries down and picks it up, but he doesn’t get all of it. Then he picks up the body and dumps it somewhere. Or maybe he’s doing unspeakable things to it right now.”
Lance seemed to hope for this last possibility, just as his strange hope for a major crime had led him to decide that Marge had been thrown from the balcony. Because some items from her purse were found below? Lance’s theory made sense only if someone had removed the body, and that someone would have to be the person who had thrown Marge from the balcony, and that someone would have to be the one who had made the second set of footprints, but that someone was Denny and he hadn’t done any of those other things—not the throwing or the removing or the unspeakables.
Denny’s explanation, though unflattering to himself, had to be the right one: at some point, Marge had decided that she didn’t want to sleep with this portly stranger after all, and she had simply departed, leaving Denny holding his bag of condoms. In the course of her decision-making, she had stepped out on the balcony for a smoke—and to brush her hair after being in the Jacuzzi. She had fumbled the lighter and hairbrush and dropped them from the balcony. It actually could have been that small event, dropping those two things, that had tilted her against spending the night with Denny. His sexual outcomes often pivoted on such small variables.
Lance stopped another man, bigger even than Denny—a two-seat purchaser for sure. As Denny watched the man’s flustered reaction, he had a happy thought. Since the cops hadn’t spoken with Marge, she couldn’t have been the one to describe him as fat. But who had given them that description? Blind Betsy? Did Denny sound fat? Who else besides Marge had seen him at the hotel?
Nick came out of the bathroom checking his fly with his fingertips and, apparently not satisfied, bent over for a visual check as well. He said, “I hate John surveillance. Washing and combing. What else am I gonna do? Chat? I had my hopes on one stall. Guy was in there forever. Turns out it was a little kid. Probably exploring his unit.”
Lance grunted. The two men cast their eyes over the crowd in the gate area. They seemed reluctant to give up.
Without looking at him, Nick asked Denny where his bags were. Denny had anticipated the question. “They didn’t make the connection. The baggage office will send them on to me.”
“To Sarah’s? Are you staying with her?”
“No.” In his file cabinet devoted to Homer, the drawer labeled “Sarah” was empty. He needed to get some information into it. “She doesn’t know I’m back.”
Nick frowned. He wouldn’t pry. Nor would he reveal, unfortunately. And the question of his luggage hung in the air. Denny, worrying that short answers might look suspicious, became expansive:
“They’re going to send my bags to the Delta office in Barre and hold them there for me.”
Lance had been looking around the waiting area. Now he jerked his head to look at Denny. “Where the hell’s ‘Bar’? You mean Barre?” Lance’s pronunciation sounded like “Barry.” Denny had seen the name of the town on a sign during his condom run. It had reminded him of the barre at the dance studio his mom took him to in the winter, and so of course he had pronounced it that way. He had blundered already.
“‘Bar,’” said Nick, laughing lightly. “The classic flatlander mispronunciation—and the old Homer humor.” He clapped Denny on the back and looked at him affectionately.
“I live in South Barre,” Lance said, an edge to his voice. He was looking at Denny through narrowed eyelids. “Where’s this Delta office you’re talking about?”
“I’m not sure,” said Denny. “It’s new.”
Lance grunted and looked away, back to the passengers, as did Nick. No further challenge was offered. In fact, Lance’s question hadn’t even been a c
hallenge—it was just grumpy surprise at an unknown fact. Denny was Homer—this was a given. Any gap in his knowledge, any oddity of behavior, would be strange, yes, but all by itself it wouldn’t make him not-Homer. He needed to remember that.
What was odd, really odd, was that Denny had a feeling for Homer. He had a leg up, a sense of who he was. How? All he had was his name, but it was a name he associated with a way of being—a sad way. Because he had been away for so long? Was there sadness in the name itself? Homer. It made him think of the word troubled.
He saw Betsy’s lips form the word, and he had his answer. Homer was her beloved nephew, the cubby dweller. Denny inhaled sharply and dispatched his mind to reinterpret his day at the hotel. Someone must have seen him and thought he was Homer and told Betsy, or told someone else who told Betsy. Betsy would have had no idea that the man reported as Homer was actually Denny the hotel guest. All she knew of Denny was his voice, which was evidently not like Homer’s, or at least not enough like it to be confused with Homer’s.
If he was going to be Homer, he would have to explain the voice. His hand went to his neck. He stroked it in thought.
Another strange aspect of his day in Montpelier now suddenly made sense to him—the excessive familiarity of the townspeople. Nice coat. Who died? Pussy boots. And the dogs in front of the hotel! Did the dogs think he was Homer? Denny let out a strange laugh.
Lance threw him a look. So did Nick, but Nick’s was friendly. “Good to be home?” said Nick.
Denny gave his friend a happy puppy bark.
FIVE
“SO. THREE YEARS IN FLORIDA. WHATCHA BEEN UP TO?”
Nick’s question, cheerfully tossed his way as the three men neared the main terminal exit, sent Denny scurrying into the men’s room. Nick called out that he and Lance were parked in the taxi stand, and Denny waved to signal understanding. Homer would know where it was.
From Away Page 4