Dynamite Road

by Andrew Klavan

  “How’s it going?” he said.

  She gestured vaguely with her cigarette. “Just getting some air. I don’t like to smoke with the AC on.”

  “Yeah, me either. Chris off somewhere?”

  “Down at the Clover Leaf. Bar in town.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Fucking dive, right?”

  “Did look pretty gnarly.” He gestured at the porch steps. “You mind?”

  She shrugged but he saw in her eyes she was interested. He came up the steps. Perched on the railing across from her. From there, he looked her over—a good long look so there’d be no mistake about it. She curled her lip as in: Who gives a shit? But she breathed more carefully and he knew she was aware of him.

  They smoked together a while, quiet. They could hear a phone ringing through an open window nearby.

  “Chris says you’re all checked out,” she said. “Ready to fly.”

  “That’s a helluva checkride he gives,” said Bishop.

  “Yeah, he told me. Don’t mind him. He’s just an asshole.”

  Bishop raised an eyebrow. “He’s your husband, right?”

  “Sweet fucking mystery of love, what can I tell you?” She flicked the ash off her cigarette, indifferent. “Thinks it’s a big yuk to see the rookies wet themselves. Then he pulls it out at the last minute. I told him: He’s the one’ll spin in someday.”

  “Be honest with you, I don’t give a rat’s ass if he does,” said Bishop, “so long as I don’t happen to be in the plane at the time.”

  “Right.” She gave a rueful little laugh. Shook her head at the night. “Look, don’t get me wrong. He’s a good pilot, a hell of a pilot. Been at it since he was a kid. Flew helos in the service and everything. That Cessna—he could pull her out at twenty feet, no question. He had your back the whole time. He just likes to dick around, that’s all.”

  “Sure.”

  Kathleen stood off the rail. Dropped her smoke onto the porch, crushed it under the tip of her shoe. Glanced at him. “Hey, do me a favor, willya? Don’t mention this to Ray, all right? This is Chris’s third job in two years. If this doesn’t work out…Christ, I don’t know what.”

  “Is that right?” Bishop said. “I heard Chris was golden. I heard Ray’d never fire him.”

  “Oh yeah? Where’d you hear that?”

  “Around. I heard he was in with Ray’s partner. What’s his name? Hirschorn.”

  Kathleen gave a weary look at the empty street: There was plenty she could say on that subject. But she didn’t say it. “Chris always thinks he’s fucking golden. Then next thing he knows, he’s out of work.” She puffed her cheeks and sighed. “Look, I’m just saying. He’s young, dumb and full of come, that’s all. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s had a hard time these last few years. Ever since the Army bounced him, he just…that really tore him up, y’know? Then he had the freight job and he lost that. It’s not like this is San Fran or LA or something with a million places to work. I’m just worried if he washes out here…”

  “Yeah, I get you.” Bishop dropped his cigarette now too. Stepped on it too and stood up as he did. “And hell, I’m not gonna say anything.” He pretended to examine the moon as he ambled toward her. Then he was right beside her. She looked up at him and he was very close, standing relaxed with a hand in one pocket of his jeans.

  She looked in his eyes and his eyes held her. “Well, thanks,” she said.

  “But I’ll tell you something,” Bishop pressed on, “if I had a woman like you waiting for me at home, I’d fly a helluva lot safer than that.” He lifted a finger as he said it and laid it against her cheek. Mesmerized, she never took her eyes off his.

  “Don’t do that,” she murmured.

  He stroked the finger slowly over her cheek to her chin. She finally forced herself to say it again, “Don’t, Frank, I’m serious.”

  Bishop let his hand fall away. Kathleen broke the hold of his gaze. She studied the porch floorboards.

  “Like I need that shit,” she muttered.

  He was about to answer, was about to say that she did need it. Was about to say that he was looking right at her and he could see plain as day that she needed it bad—needed something anyway. But now he saw her look up, look past him. He heard the engine coming. He turned and there was Chris’s pickup moving slowly down the street. The way it was moving, Bishop knew right away that Chris was drunk.

  He didn’t hurry though. He drifted away from Kathleen but he took his own sweet time about it. Then the two stood and watched as the truck pulled into the carport.

  “What’s this? What’s this? What do I find?” Chris spoke loudly, rolling out of the cab. Swaggering toward them. He was drunk, all right, very drunk, well and truly drunk. “I go away for a couple of hours and what do I come home to find…?” He smacked his fist into his palm five times fast to indicate fucking. “Huh? I ask you. Is this what a man should come home to?”

  “God damn it, Chris,” said Kathleen. She turned away, disgusted, ashamed of him.

  Chris came reeling up the porch steps. Loomed up in between them. He stood swaying over Bishop. “You move in fast, my friend.”

  Bishop answered him with that tongue-in-cheek look he had and those pale, uncaring eyes. “Just being neighborly.”

  “Neighborly!” Chris cackled. He swung round unsteadily to his wife. “He’s neighborly. That’s all he is. Shit, anyone can see that, right? How ’bout you, Kathleen? You neighborly too?”

  “Fuck you, Chris. Just shut up, okay?”

  She was still turned away. He reached out savagely and gripped her jaw in his big hand, held it hard. He forced her to face him. His fingers crushed the place on her cheek that Bishop had stroked.

  “I asked you a question,” he said. “Are you neighborly or not?”

  “Get off me!” She tried to get him off her, pushing his wrist. He resisted, held on hard. “God damn it,” she said. She dug her fingernails into him.

  “Ah…” said Chris. He let her go and casually cuffed her above the ear. The blow made Kathleen’s head snap to the side. She stayed like that, faced away, to hide her tears. “God damn it, Chris,” she said again.

  Chris smiled. Now that she was crying, he was satisfied. “Neighborly,” he said. He snorted, swaying over her. Then he staggered around to confront Bishop.

  Bishop had not moved. He stood a little apart on the porch, watching, his thumbs hooked behind his belt buckle.

  Chris sneered at him. “You say something?”

  There was a long silence. Bishop standing there with that smile and those colorless eyes. He didn’t answer. The bigger man took a step toward him. Bishop could smell the beer on him.

  “I asked you a question, man. You say something?”

  Slowly, Bishop shook his head: no.

  Chris shuffled closer. “You even think something?”

  The night heat hung heavy over them. A plastic trash can lid thudded somewhere down the block a ways. A screen door slammed.

  “Well, for one thing,” Bishop answered mildly, “I think you probably oughta stick to beating up women.”

  Kathleen wedged herself between them quickly. The porch light glistened on the tears on her cheeks.

  “Just don’t now, Chris. Okay? Just fucking don’t. He wasn’t doing anything. We were just talking. I swear.” She put her two hands on his chest. “Please. Okay? I swear to God. Please.”

  Chris and Bishop stared at each other over the woman’s head. The drunkenness was washing down over Chris in waves now, forcing his eyes closed. He was blinking hard, swaying hard, just barely keeping his feet. He grinned stupidly.

  “You’re lucky she’s…lucky…she’s standing there,” he said.

  He staggered up close against his wife. She put an arm around him.

  “Come on,” said Kathleen. “Come on, let’s get you inside.”

  She began to guide him toward the door. She glanced back over her shoulder at Bishop, gestured with her head, telling him to g
o. Bishop nodded. With a lingering smile, he strolled away casually down the porch steps.

  “Neighborly…fuck,” he heard Chris say behind him. But he didn’t turn around. Soon he heard the door shut.

  A dog barked in the distance. The cicadas rattled in the trees.

  Nine

  Weiss waited in front of the small white house. Hands in the pockets of his wrinkled pants, his wrinkled jacket unbuttoned. It was a gray day, and the wind from the Pacific stirred the narrow tie on his white shirt. Weiss could see his reflection in the glass on the storm door. With a twinge of pride, he saw that he still looked like a cop for all the world.

  But in fact, when the Mousey Guy’s mother finally opened up, she took one sorry glance at the large, ugly specimen on her front step and said, “Oh God. Let me guess. Another private detective.”

  “Mrs. Spender?” said Weiss.

  “Come on in, come on, let’s get this over with.”

  She was a tired, sour old woman. Small and narrow and sharp like her mousey son. Her hair was gray and framed her gray, wrinkled face. Her rheumy eyes watched Weiss miserably as she stood back to let him in.

  Weiss knew the smell of the house as soon as he stepped across the threshold. Airless, old, oppressively respectable. There would be floral prints inside and worn rugs and suffocating curtains. Some sentimental painting of Christ somewhere. The furniture would be hers from the larger house she’d lived in with her husband till he died. He knew all this just standing in the little foyer without even looking at the rest of the place.

  “I take it your son has hired detectives before,” he said.

  “You’re joking, right? Around here it’s an annual tradition. Hey, why not? I mean, we have money to burn, don’t we? This way, Mr….?”

  “Weiss.”

  “Come upstairs, Mr. Weiss, and I’ll save us both a lot of time and expense.”

  The narrow stairway was dark and so was the second-floor landing. Weiss followed the woman’s dim figure to a closed door at the end of the hall. Mrs. Spender threw the door open with a flourish.

  “This is my son’s room,” she announced. “This is where he concocts his nonsense.”

  She didn’t bother to turn the lights on in here either. But the gray daylight came in through the windows. Weiss could see clearly when he stepped in.

  The Mousey Guy’s room was like a child’s room, like a twelve-year-old’s. There was even a model spacecraft on the dresser top and a pair of Giants baseball pennants on the wall. There was a single bed made with hospital corners, the blanket pulled drumhead tight. There was a desk-and-shelf unit against one wall. Weiss scanned the books on the shelves, books about coin collecting, picture books about Spain, a long row of well-worn science fiction novels.

  Suddenly, there was a loud, startling whap. Mrs. Spender had pulled a stack of notebooks from her son’s closet and thrown them down on the desk.

  “I’m not supposed to know where he keeps them,” she said dryly.

  Weiss came forward. He tipped the stack of notebooks over, splaying them across the desktop. They were ordinary spiral notebooks, not many of them, four or five. And there were magazines in the pile also. What else: naked girls. Weiss heard Mrs. Spender give a derisive snort as he leafed briefly through one magazine’s pages. The girls, he saw, were all Hispanic.

  At the bottom of the stack, there were some coin-collecting folders. Weiss opened these too. He smiled wistfully at the familiar blue interiors with the circular pockets for the coins. Even the coin collection was like a twelve-year-old’s, he noticed: All the best stuff, the really valuable stuff, was missing—because who could afford those coins when you were a kid?

  Finally, Weiss put these aside and opened the first of the notebooks. The pages were filled with writing, Spender’s painfully cramped hand. Weiss read a line or two and saw what it was. The little man’s fantasy of the Spanish virgin was worked out here in detail. How he spotted her in the cafe, how beautiful she was, the whole story. Weiss paged ahead slowly. The rape, he saw, was lovingly described, especially the part where the woman’s resistance melted and she succumbed noisily to Mousey Guy’s overpowering virility.

  She trembles in my embrace. You are too much man for me, señor, she whispers in her thick accent. She grips me helplessly as I carry her to the bed.

  Weiss smiled to himself as he tried to imagine Mousey Guy carrying a grown woman anywhere.

  I think I have a hernia, I whisper in my thick accent. You are too much woman for me by about thirty pounds.

  He kept turning the notebook pages. There were other fantasies written out. Most of the women in the fantasies were Hispanic. The Mousey Guy would describe how he forced them into some sexual act or other. They’d resist at first, then end up being wildly orgasmic. There were also some crude pencil drawings of naked Latina girls sprawled on the floor with their legs splayed.

  “Disgusting,” said Mrs. Spender with a sniff.

  Weiss shrugged. Flipped the notebook closed. “People have all kinds of fantasies, Mrs. Spender,” he said. “I just want to make sure your son hasn’t done any actual harm to anyone? A real person, I mean.”

  The Mousey Guy’s mother let out a laugh. “Wally? Of course not. He’s a bookkeeper.”

  “Well…that’s not always a guarantee.”

  “Oh, I know but…I mean, he goes to work every day at eight, comes home every day on the button, five-forty-five. Some days he works at the pharmacy, some days at the electrical supply store, some days at the—whatever-it-is—the artsy crafts store. I always know where he is, he always calls to say. We talk three and four times every day over the phone.”

  “His cell?”

  “Sometimes, but I call at the places he works sometimes too. Not that I’m checking on him—he’s a grown man—but…He’s always there, right where he says he is.”

  “Weekends?”

  “He takes me shopping. We go to the movies. We live a quiet life.”

  “What about Spain? Your son ever take a vacation there or anything?”

  “On his income? If my husband hadn’t left me a little something to live on, we wouldn’t even be able to afford this house. We take a week at the beach in the winter, that’s all. Wally doesn’t even have a passport.” Her pinched expression softened a little. She searched Weiss’s eyes for some understanding. It was easy to find: Weiss understood everything.

  So she went on more softly, “It’s not much of a life for a grown man, Mr. Weiss. It’s not like I don’t know that. Wally always did want to go to Spain. Even as a little boy but…Something always came up, this, that…It’s nobody’s fault. Wally just is who he is.” She tilted her head at the notebooks on the desk. “As God is my witness, he could never actually rape anyone. He has fantasies. Like you said. It’s not a crime.”

  “No, ma’am. If it were a crime, everybody would be in prison.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What about this man, this man your son says is trying to kill him. Could he be real?”

  Mrs. Spender rolled her eyes. “The famous man. With the big knife outside the window.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” she said. “Three years ago, my son turned forty. Every year since then, it’s the same thing. One year it’s the girl’s brother, then it’s her father, her husband. Whatever. Always with the knife outside the window.”

  “Always out for revenge?”

  “That’s my Wally—the world’s most hunted man.”

  “So you’re sure the man’s imaginary.”

  “The man’s imaginary, the woman’s imaginary. The whole thing’s imaginary. You’re the fourth detective he’s hired. I’ll give you their cards, you can call them. They charge eighty-five dollars an hour, I can tell you right now. Eighty-five dollars—plus expenses! One of them phoned Wally’s employers, asked if he’d had any unexplained absences when he might’ve been off raping people. Nearly got him fired. And in the end? Lo and behold, what do they fin
d out? Big surprise. It’s all in my son’s head. In his doodlings. Not real. Thank you very much, the bill’s in the mail.”

  Weiss nodded absently. Ran his fingertips over the cover of one of the notebooks. He didn’t tell Mrs. Spender that he had had a friend get him her son’s phone records. He knew there were no midnight phone calls, hardly any incoming phone calls at all, certainly nothing out of the ordinary or threatening.

  What a crazy thing, he thought. What a crazy kind of thing.

  He straightened. Turned so that his large body, his great, saggy face, hung over the sour old woman in that sheltering way he had.

  “I’ll deduct my expenses from your son’s retainer,” he said, “and make sure the rest is returned to you.”

  That reached her. The money, I guess, reached her. Her thin lips tightened and her rheumy eyes got rheumier still. “Thank you, Mr. Weiss,” she said. “That’s very kind of you. You’re a very nice man.”

  “Thank you for your time, ma’am. I’ll show myself out.”

  Bearlike, he lumbered sadly away, leaving her alone there in that small strange room with the pennants on the wall and the spaceship on the dresser and the notebooks and magazines splayed across the desk.

  “Well,” I asked later, “did you break the news to Spender that he wasn’t really a rapist?”

  Weiss stood over my desk now, his hands in his pockets, his chin on his chest. He watched me absently as I ran the Agency mail through a stamp machine. The machine went buzz-thwack, as it laid the stamps on the envelopes. Weiss nodded slightly, thinking. “I went and saw him at the pharmacy. He had a little cubbyhole in the back. We had a private chat.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “He cried.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No. He was very ashamed.”

  “Because he’s not really a rapist?”

  Weiss lifted his shoulders. “He told me that, once, several years ago, he hired a hooker to play out the fantasy with him? She’d be the Spanish Virgin, you know, and he’d force himself on her and then…”