Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  ARE YOU A FRIEND

  “These beetles are making my life miserable,” Mona said. “People look at a house and they like it, they want to buy it, but then they say, ‘But how will it look without any trees?’ And then I say, in my politest voice, ‘These aren’t all oak trees, this is Tower Hill, everything’s fine here, there’s no need for alarm.’ But of course it’s the middle of winter and everything looks dead.” Mona glanced around the Lowerys’ living room, so elegant but dark. With a little staging—a bit more light, a bit less clutter—she could sell their house in a minute. “People just aren’t very bright anymore,” she continued. “The younger buyers especially. Like what’s-her-name, Leonard’s new girlfriend. She’s young, but I’ve heard she’s quite dim too. A loose sort of girl. I don’t know, I hate to say it, I really do, but is slut too strong a word?”

  Vera Lowery stared off into the corner of the room. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to Mona. “Did you say something?”

  “I was just talking about Leonard. I know he isn’t my husband anymore, but— Oh, never mind.” Mona gave up. There was still only one topic of conversation on these visits. She glanced out the window to where the Lowerys’ handyman was sweeping snow off the walkway between the garage and the house. “So,” Mona sighed, restarting, “I heard Hartley Nolan just got sentenced. Eight years doesn’t seem like nearly enough.” She watched Vera closely, trying to gauge whether this was the first time she was hearing this news. But Vera’s attention slid off into the corner of the room where her deceased daughter’s face stared back from an easel plastered with photos.

  Mona looked at the easel too, which had been put together months ago for the funeral, along with several others like it, each one documenting an era of Sonia’s life. They’d been brought home from the funeral parlor and left like traps all over the house, waiting around corners, in half-darkened rooms, Sonia’s piercing green eyes ambushing you on the way to the bathroom. Somebody rearranged them every few days. The handyman, probably, though what else he did anymore wasn’t clear to Mona. There were baskets of rotten sympathy flowers still in some rooms, a pile of melted candles and ice-crusted teddy bears at the base of the sickly oak out front.

  “But what I really think we should discuss,” Mona said, “is getting this house listed as soon as possible. Come spring, the market will heat up fast.”

  Vera’s husband materialized in the doorway, pale and hunched. You couldn’t take a step on this old-growth flooring without announcing yourself, but Bart Lowery, as he shuffled across the room, made no sound at all. Lame for decades since falling off a chairlift in Jackson Hole, his body had been failing more rapidly of late—spinal fusions, nerve damage, incontinence even—and now the crushing loss of a child.

  “You two need a new beginning.” Mona looked out the window again, at the handyman now in the driveway. He was glaring at her BMW. “I’ll stage the heck out of this house for you,” Mona said. “I’ll trim the dead branches off that oak. I’ll fix that railing out front—”

  “Oh, I’ll have Raymond take care of the railing,” Vera interjected.

  Bart Lowery made a sound in his nose, but when Mona turned to him his eyes had closed. “Yes, well that actually leads me to another thought,” Mona said. “That garage apartment should be empty for the sake of selling the property.”

  Vera’s back straightened. “Oh dear, Raymond will not take kindly to that idea.”

  Bart’s eyes opened, a smile tugging his lips. “Especially if he hears it came from you, Mona.”

  Mona offered an acquiescent little frown, her dislike of Raymond Bello being no secret. That the Lowerys kept a handyman on full-time wasn’t so outlandish, she supposed—the need was there, and they could certainly afford it—but Mona had never understood how they’d let him settle into an uncle’s role. A grown man without a family of his own, with his mumbled greetings and his spattered clothes, his ever-wringing hands. Always present at birthdays and holidays, even driving the children to school.

  Once, years ago, Mona came over to pick up her own daughter, who’d been a friend of Sonia’s, to find that Vera had gone off to a tennis game and left the handyman in charge. The handyman! Mona said some harsh words to Vera over the phone that evening, then some harsher words in person days later in the Lowerys’ driveway, which Raymond Bello had undoubtedly heard through his open windows—that she found him to be grimy and strange and unfit, and that if Vera and Bart were going to abdicate their roles as parents, they might hire a nanny instead.

  Always, with Mona, a rift of one kind or another eventually developed. It was what her ex-husband once described as her “expiration date.” Inevitably, people grew weary or offended. Neighbors raised a fence. Friends stopped calling. But then, just days after their spat, Vera showed up at Mona’s door for their regular Tuesday coffee as though nothing had happened.

  It turned out to be the handyman who held the grudge, with his hateful glances and his terse replies. But in the end, he wasn’t Mona’s concern. After all, what kind of man dispatched himself to a life of tinkering with kitchen appliances? To living alone above someone else’s garage? And even when the tools went missing from Mona’s garden shed a week later, she felt sure that this was the worst such a person could do.

  The back door whined open and boot steps could be heard coming through the house. The unpuckering of the seal on the fridge door. Then the handyman appeared in the living room doorway with a flap of cheese in his hand.

  “Raymond,” Bart said, “Mona thinks you ought to be fixing that railing.”

  The old man’s forehead creased, small eyes blinking behind his wire glasses.

  Vera frowned at her husband. “We were just talking about the railing is all. We’re just talking about the house in general.”

  Bello turned to Vera to estimate the breadth of this gathering betrayal. “The house, ma’am?”

  “About selling the house,” Mona interjected. “The Lowerys have decided to move.”

  The handyman’s brow collapsed and he cast a long despairing gaze into the blackened maw of the fireplace. It was the same look he’d worn months earlier when he’d learned of Sonia’s death. On the morning following the accident, Mona had come to the house to offer support, but Vera and Bart were still out tending to the earliest business of the tragedy. After trying the front door, she came around back to wait until the Lowerys returned. For several minutes she stood in the drizzle, patiently facing the house as though she were still expecting someone to let her inside, when a throat clearing startled her from behind.

  “Raymond,” she’d said, turning, “you scared me.”

  Bello rubbed his hands on a rag.

  “I’ve brought something.” Mona shook the paper bag. “I had to bring something.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged, extending a greasy hand. “I sign for deliveries all the time.”

  “I’m not the UPS man, Raymond.” Mona glanced down the driveway. “It’s just bagels is all. But what are you supposed to bring on a day like this?”

  He yawned, squinting at a mess the squirrels had made of the bird feeder.

  “Oh my God,” she said, “you don’t know what’s happened, do you?” She watched him try to put it together—the wailing sirens in the night, the predawn car backing down the driveway.

  It was the same look on his face now in the Lowerys’ living room, hearing again such awful news from the woman who thought him “strange” and “unfit.” He stood speechless as the conversation moved on without him, as Mona explained how she planned to stage the Lowerys’ house.

  “I have a storage unit full of antiques that’ll fit perfectly here. Lamps especially, to brighten things.” When she looked at Bello again, the cheese was wadded in his fist, threads of yellow mush worming out between his fingers. He turned and trudged off, reappearing in the same window as before, stomping toward his apartment over the garage.

  Bart made an unimpressed sound. “How many years has he been living up there, rent fre
e? And now he’s going to throw a fit?”

  “For some people it’s never enough,” Mona agreed.

  Vera nodded absently, gazing again at the easel in the corner. “Yes,” she muttered. “Eight years isn’t nearly enough.”

  //

  Mona had met the killer once, years earlier. He and his wife had been looking at houses around Tower Hill, and when Mona’s partner was on vacation, she took the young couple herself to view a ranch-style near the post office. Hartley Nolan wore dark blue jeans and dock shoes, a merino sweater. The wife had a wry smile and a sensual voice and had come to the showing wearing aviator sunglasses and a hooded college sweatshirt. Not the type of girl Mona might’ve expected to be with a stock trader, but they were cute together anyway. By the end of the afternoon, she decided they’d end up somewhere better suited to people under forty without any children yet—a condo in the West Loop or a bungalow in Evanston—but a month later they made an offer on a handsome three-bedroom on Cherry Street.

  Walking up to this Georgian Colonial now, Mona noticed mail piled on the stoop, soggy newspapers, a smattering of eggshells stuck to the welcome mat.

  “Is Glennis in?” she asked a man who opened the door.

  “She is not,” the man said in an Indian accent. Sweat stains bloomed in the armpits of his button-down. A gnarled wad of packing tape clung to the thigh of his slacks. Behind him, boxes were stacked in the foyer. He asked in a doubtful voice, “Are you a friend?”

  “My agency helped the Nolans find this house,” Mona explained. “And now we’re going to help them sell it.” She passed him her business card. “Are they selling it?”

  The man introduced himself as Hartley Nolan’s stepfather. As he spoke, he cast a wary look onto the street behind her. From somewhere deeper inside the house a woman’s voice conducted a phone conversation. “. . . I haven’t seen her since the sentencing . . . yes . . . or that’s my assumption, on some kind of bender . . .”

  “Glennis is . . . out,” the stepfather said, his eyes continuing to worry over the street. “Is that man with you?”

  Mona turned around. At the curb, watching them from the passenger seat of her BMW, was Raymond Bello.

  Mona shook the stepfather’s hand and rushed back across the frozen lawn. The passenger window was down, and the handyman, as he watched her approach, bore the determined look of a rodent.

  “You don’t know me at all,” Bello began. “I was a harbor welder . . . I know how to keep things safe—”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Raymond?”

  “I’m talking . . .” he said. “Mr. and Mrs. Lowery . . . they need . . . I can help . . .” He seemed to have a compelling speech going inside his head, only a fraction of which was actually reaching the surface. Mona had never heard the man string more than two full sentences together, and as he spoke now his words came in spits and chokes.

  “Get out of my car,” she said, striding around to the driver’s seat.

  He climbed out onto the curb, glaring hatefully at the Nolans’ house before turning and putting his withered hands on the open sill of the car door. “You don’t understand,” he said, craning into the car. He tried to smile now, to soften his appearance, but there was a gap in his mouth where a tooth had gone missing and his bloodshot eyes were magnified behind his glasses. “I am like family to them.”

  It was possible, Mona thought, that he wasn’t only trying to preserve his comfortable existence in that garage apartment, that he actually wanted to do right by his grief-stricken landlords. But as Mona looked at the rumpled little peasant begging at the window of her sedan, his turpentine stink lingering inside her car, she couldn’t conjure the mercy he’d come for. She glanced past him to make sure the stepfather had gone back into the house, and said, “You can’t see it, can you, Raymond?”

  “See what?”

  “The Lowerys don’t actually care about you.” She turned the key and the BMW growled to life. “They’re just too weak to do this themselves.”

  //

  If the divorce had taught her anything, it was that when other people lose control it’s time to seize it for yourself. Late in the divorce proceedings, her husband came to the house one night and threw a fit on the lawn, screaming loud enough for the neighbors to hear. He’d even picked up a dead branch and threatened to smash the mailbox, before growing suddenly exhausted and slinking back to his girlfriend’s apartment. This had always been Leonard’s complaint, how “exhausting” Mona could be. Even their daughter, grown and married now, living in Colorado, couldn’t seem to handle her mother’s energy and ambition, her short-fused honesty.

  All around her, people lacked the strength and fortitude for real action. It came as some surprise, then, when Mona emerged from her office the next day to find that someone had keyed her BMW. Not a simple scratch but several long deep gouges running parallel across all four panels on the driver’s side. And there was also something on the windshield, a bird dropping she thought at first, wadded on one of the wipers, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a gob of human phlegm.

  She never told Vera and Bart that Raymond Bello had probably stolen her garden tools those years ago. It was the kind of thing she imagined they wouldn’t have wanted to hear, or that they couldn’t have heard. And as she sat inside her BMW while the carwash’s high-powered sprayers blasted his phlegm from her windshield, she endeavored to continue insulating her grief-sick friends from details that might unnecessarily complicate their already fragile states. This had been her role always, and especially of late, to pass along the most straightforward facts pertaining to Sonia’s death—Mr. Nolan’s name, his blood-alcohol level, the length of his incarceration—but to filter out the community’s muddy conjecture.

  //

  Later that afternoon, as she came to the top of the Lowerys’ garage steps, the door opened before she could knock. She thrust a stack of papers into Bello’s hands, a dozen listings on the north side of Chicago, and a few, at the very bottom of the pile, of apartments closer to Tower Hill above ethnic restaurants and dog groomers. She tried to move inside, but he held firm in the doorway.

  “You don’t like me,” he said slowly, as if reading from a script. “Fine. But don’t do this to them.”

  Leonard had come to flail in this same way. One night drunkenly shouting on the lawn, and the next so polite and sober, quietly insisting that ruining him in the divorce might distress their grown and married daughter. Don’t do this to Liz! Grown men reducing themselves to helpless, whining children.

  She supposed Bart Lowery wasn’t any different either, another man losing touch with reality and family at once. As a young father he’d been sweet with his daughters, attentive at least. But as Allie and Sonia grew, he seemed to shirk his connection to them, as if they were just a pair of boarders at the other end of the upstairs hallway. Mona recalled a time when there’d been rumors about a youth minister at the Community Church, something involving an inappropriate relationship with a girl at a previous parish. Child endangerment, people were calling it. Vera had been sick with the news, every day in Mona’s kitchen lamenting how Sonia had already been around this minister for months—Sunday school, youth groups, an overnight retreat to a lake in Wisconsin. Yet Vera never actually managed to broach the subject with her daughter. And when Mona finally brought the rumors to Bart’s attention, he absorbed the information as if he’d been told his daughter wanted a new pet. “Well,” he’d said, “she hasn’t mentioned anything like that to me.”

  Her sense of the Lowerys had long been colored by this episode of reckless inertia. Such a charming and attractive bunch, but doomed from the beginning to wear a stain. It was why Mona needed to intervene now—sell the house quick; whisk the grieving parents to a condo; deliver a lasagna to Allie’s family. But first, evict the aged freeloader.

  “It’s already done,” she informed the handyman. “If you’re not out by Friday, I’m calling the police and telling them you’re trespassing. A
nd that you’re stealing things.”

  Bello wheeled around to regard one of the funeral easels, propped up at the foot of his bed. Soccer pictures and Halloween costumes, a school portrait with Sonia missing two teeth.

  Mona pressed into the apartment now, its galley kitchen full of dirty dishes, greasy tools all around, a motor laid out on newsprint. An old TV on a milk crate showed a man in a ski mask snipping wires beneath a dashboard. She felt like a parole officer making a surprise visit. “Why does it smell like turpentine in here?” she asked.

  At the window, she brushed the curtain aside to see the back of the Lowerys’ house, a view into an upstairs bedroom—pink comforter, stuffed animals, shelves of orderly knickknacks—a child’s room frozen in time. For a moment, Mona lamented having turned her own daughter’s room into a guest suite. Perhaps that’s why Liz kept herself in Colorado with her ski bum husband. Then she thought of Sonia’s husband, the chemist who became a gravedigger. A vaguely feral sort, but educated, like a scientist who’d turned himself into a werewolf. What had Sonia seen in such a man? Maybe the youth minister had fornicated with her.

  Liz had long insisted the rumors were true. And Sonia had always shouldered a certain reputation, a shadowy appeal, a looseness. Dark hair in a family of sandy blonds, watchful green eyes, an offbeat dress style suggesting the possibility the Lowerys were hosting an exchange student. A girl whose exotic sensibilities might have insisted on a certain amount of speculation, but not some dumb slut!

  “What?” The handyman looked out the window, then back at Mona. “Who are you talking to?”

  Mona blinked, trying to reorient herself in the present. The smell of turpentine was making her dizzy, nauseous with memory. She glanced around Bello’s junky little home, not unlike the old apartment above her father’s body shop in the city, with parole officers stopping by now and again to ask their questions. Tell me, kid, does your father drink a lot? Does he ever do drugs? Where’s your mother? Slowly she regathered her wits, regathered the decades since. She thought: You live in Tower Hill now, Mona. Everything is fine here. No need for alarm. Then she looked at the old con in front of her and smiled.