The Ethical Assassin

by David Liss

  B.B. strolled over to the boys, who were playing at the other end of the pool. They splashed around the deep end but seemed capable-enough swimmers. They darted back and forth, up and down, while talking about a comic book character called Daredevil. From what B.B. could tell, this Daredevil was blind and so sounded like a low-rent sort of superhero.

  “How you young men doing today?” B.B. asked. He sat on a chaise across from them and smiled a new smile, the one that he knew neglected, aimless boys- boys in need of a role model- found reassuring.

  “Fine,” one said, and the other echoed in mumble. The older one, who was probably about twelve, was blond and tan and fit, with firm pecs, a flat stomach, and tight little arm muscles. His nose was a bit too long and too narrow for him to be truly handsome, and he had a bit of a receding chin, but he didn’t look weak for it. No, with his trim, lithe physique, he wasn’t the kind of young man who took crap from bullies. The other boy, much darker and covered with unsightly freckles, was probably closer to nine. He was thinner, less graceful.

  B.B. cracked his knuckles and leaned forward. “You like this blind superhero, huh?”

  “Yeah,” said the blond kid. “Daredevil.”

  “It’s a shame,” B.B. observed. “The way they force that stuff on you. You can’t turn on kids’ programs anymore without seeing someone in a wheelchair or on crutches or missing an arm or doing sign language like a monkey. And now they’re giving you blind superheroes? They want you to look up to some blind gimp beating up on bad guys with his cane?”

  The blond kid didn’t say anything. The younger one said, “I’m sorry.” He said it very quietly, and he held his head so far down that the water bubbled around his lips.

  “And the Hulk,” B.B. said. “Half the time he’s a loser egghead, and the other half he’s a big green moron. What the heck is that?”

  “I don’t know,” the little kid bubbled.

  “Now Superman,” B.B. said. “There’s a superhero for you. He’s smart and strong, and he’s that way all the time. He pretends to be a dweeb, but that’s only to put people off guard. And Batman. You know why I like Batman? Because he’s really a regular guy. He doesn’t have any superpowers. He’s just a man who wants to do the right thing and uses the resources he has to help him do it. And he’s got Robin to help him. He’s Robin’s mentor. I like the way they work together, the way they learn from each other. That’s how it is between a mentor and the boys he helps.”

  “They’re DC,” the blond kid said.

  Something twisted in his gut. Something ugly and mean and judgmental was now stomping toward him like an ogre. “What does that mean?” He felt his face grow hot. Were these kids calling him a queer?

  “We don’t read DC comics,” the boy said. “We read Marvel. DC is, you know, stupid.”

  Okay, they weren’t calling him a queer. Just stupid. Well, that was fine. Kids often had this notion that adults were somehow dorky or clueless. He could live with that for now. Let them spend some time with him and they’d know better.

  “Yeah?” B.B. asked. “So, who else do you like?”

  “I like Wolverine,” the boy said defiantly. “I read mostly X-Men.”

  “That’s great,” said B.B., who lamented a world in which kids read a comic book called The Ex-Men. What was going on, exactly? Blind guys and transsexuals? “Listen, I was thinking about heading out to get some ice cream. You boys like ice cream?”

  “Ice cream,” said the beautiful blond kid with an unmistakable note of caution in his voice. A sort of “Who wants to know?” kind of tone.

  The thing you had to remember, though, was that these were kids, and they had thoughtless, neglectful parents, the sorts of parents who instilled fear in their kids because they couldn’t be bothered to teach them how to distinguish between dangerous strangers and kind people who wanted only to help. They knew adults often told them not to do things, but they also knew that adults often had their heads up their asses. The trick was to get them to see that the “Don’t go off with strangers” rule didn’t apply here, couldn’t apply here, not when this stranger had their best interests at heart. Once you broke down those barriers, you were home free. “There’s an IHOP down the road. I thought you boys might want to get an ice cream with me.”

  “Really?” the little kid asked. “What flavor?”

  “We’re not supposed to,” the older boy said, looking at his brother rather than B.B. “Our dad said we had to stay here. And he says we shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

  There it was, regular as clockwork. “I’m sure your dad means that you shouldn’t talk to bad men. I can’t imagine why he would have any problem with you talking to a nice man who wants to buy you ice cream. Anyhow, my name is William. Everyone calls me B.B., and I work with young men like you every day. I’m a mentor.”

  They didn’t say anything.

  “We’re even staying at the same motel,” he continued. “I’m over in room one twenty-one. What are your names?”

  “I’m Pete and he’s Carl,” said the little one.

  “Pete and Carl. Well, it looks like we’re not strangers anymore, don’t you think?”

  “I want strawberry ice cream,” the little one said. He nearly sang it. Too loud for B.B.’s taste. The last thing you wanted was a bunch of meddlers getting involved in what they didn’t understand. “I don’t like chocolate.”

  “Forget it.” His brother shook his head. “I can ask my dad when he gets back tonight.”

  “Tonight?” B.B. asked, letting the judgment and incredulity seep into his voice. Caution was one thing, but they were standing in their own way. When was the next time they were going to meet someone who was willing to help them, to make them feel important and special, in control of their own destinies, if not their lives, at this moment? “You want to wait until tonight? I’m going for ice cream now. It’s hot, and I want ice cream, but I can wait a few minutes if you want to run upstairs and get changed. How fast you think you can be ready?”

  “Five minutes!” the younger one said.

  “Wow, that’s fast.” B.B. grinned. “You think the Ex-Men could get ready that fast?”

  “Even faster!” the little kid shouted.

  It was hard to keep a little triumph from creeping into his smile. Jesus, he was on a roll.

  “I don’t think we should go,” the older one said.

  B.B. shook his head sadly. “Well, if your brother wants to go by himself, that’s okay, too. You sure you want to stay alone?”

  Doubt stretched its shadow across his face. His feet twirled anxiously in the water. He bit his lip. “We’re not either of us going?” It was a question, not a statement.

  “Just because you don’t want ice cream doesn’t mean your brother shouldn’t enjoy it. I think it’s wrong to deny things to other people because you don’t want them yourself. That’s what they call being selfish, Carl.”

  “Yeah,” his brother agreed.

  “I don’t know,” he said again, which was not exactly a yes, but certainly a retreat from “We’re neither of us going.” B.B. was gaining momentum; he could feel it. The thing here, he knew, was to go with the flow, to keep it outside of his head. If he thought too much about it, if he concentrated too hard, he would say the wrong thing and blow it. Stay in the zone.

  “What’s going on here?” the sunbathing woman asked. She now stood directly behind B.B., hands on her massive hips, sunglasses propped on her head. Her exposed brown skin glistened with suntan oil. Glimpsing her over his own sunglasses, he was struck by the prettiness of her eyes. Not that B.B. went for fat bossy cows, but still, there was no denying it- they were stunningly green, healthy-lawn green, emerald green, tropical fish green.

  “My goodness,” B.B. said. “Those are the prettiest green eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. What’s going on with you and these boys?”

  “I was asking them to play quietly,” B.B. said, “so they wouldn’t bother you any
more.”

  “And ice cream,” the little one said. “Don’t forget the ice cream.”

  B.B. went pink as he looked at the woman. “I thought that if I bribed them with a little ice cream, they might leave you alone.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “Now why don’t you get out of here before I call the cops?”

  B.B. took off his sunglasses entirely and met her gaze. “Lady,” he said, “I am the cops.” He’d tried this one before. Always worked like a charm. Better than telling someone he ran a charity that helped young men.

  She wasn’t going for it, though. “Let’s see some ID.”

  “I’m off duty. I don’t have it on me.”

  “Well, if you go and get it now,” she said, “you’ll have it ready by the time your fellow officers get here.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be right back. See you in a minute, boys.”

  B.B. walked breezily toward his room, where he would have no choice but to hole up until the cow finished baking.

  Chapter 26

  MELFORD HAD BEEN DRIVING in silence, and I was paying him very little attention. Mostly I was trying to come up with ways to convince myself that my run-in with Bobby wouldn’t end in disaster. It was only once we’d pulled into Meadowbrook Grove that I snapped out of my fog.

  I stared at the trailers, the ragged lawns, the empty lots. “What the hell are you thinking? We need to stay away from this place, not go back to it.”

  “Your plan of avoidance sounds fine in theory, but the truth is that we need to figure out what is going on. And to do that, we have to learn who that third body in the trailer was. As near as I can tell, the only lead we have is going to be what the neighbors can tell us. So you’re going to go into salesman mode, only instead of selling worthless encyclopedias, you’re going to ask about Bastard and Karen and who might have been by to see them last night.”

  “Should I also ask them if they’ve seen anyone who looks exactly like me fleeing the scene of the crime?”

  “Relax, Lemuel. No one saw you.”

  “If it’s so relaxing, why don’t you do it?”

  He shook his head. “Me? I stand out too much. Dig my crazy hair. You’ve been in this neighborhood before. Besides, you’re the salesman. This is your territory.”

  There was no way to fully express the degree to which I did not want to do this thing. “What if that cop drives by and notices me? Should I explain to him that it’s my territory while he punches me in the stomach?”

  “It won’t happen. I’ll be keeping a lookout. If anything goes wrong, I’ll grab you and we’ll take off. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

  I then leveled my most compelling argument. At least most compelling to me. “But I don’t want to do it.”

  “And I don’t want us to get fucked, Lemuel, but we very well may if we don’t take charge of the situation. Believe me, I don’t like this any better than you do, but Jim Doe is now on to you. And whoever sent that woman we saw at lunch is on to you. We’ve got to take action instead of sitting around and waiting for everything to catch up to us.”

  I knew he was right. I hated it, but Melford was right. There was no getting around this. I couldn’t simply recede and think that, well, maybe things might have been different if I hadn’t gone to jail for multiple homicides. I had to do this.

  “So what do I tell people?”

  “I don’t know. But if you can convince people to spend a ton of cash on books they don’t need or want, how hard can it be to get them to gossip?”

  He had a point.

  “One more thing,” he told me. “It’s not going to happen, but let’s just say things go totally haywire.”

  “Shit,” I began.

  “Let’s say things go completely nuts,” he continued, “and you end up with Doe again.”

  “Screw this,” I said. “I’m not going.”

  “It’ll be fine. I’m just giving you worst-case scenario advice. If you end up with him, and you’re in some kind of danger, hit him in the balls.”

  “You think that’ll hurt?”

  “Trust me, smarty pants. He’s had some testicular distress recently, so he’s going to be extra sensitive. Give him, you know, a good smack to the nuts. It should make all the difference.”

  “And you know this how?”

  He smiled. “Because a friend of mine recently had cause to smash him in the nuts,” he told me. “Now enough with the questions. Get going.”

  ***

  It all felt too familiar. Hot, covered with a slick of sweat, the plankton coating of grime on my tongue, standing at a door, ready to knock, the sickly smell of pig shit wafting through the air. Only this time I wasn’t trying to make money, I was trying to get information- information wanted by an assassin, not me.

  I stood on the stoop of the trailer several doors down from Bastard and Karen’s. I’d already had one no-answer, two suspicious doors closed hastily in my face, and one veiled threat from an exceptionally short and obese man in boxers and a sleeveless T-shirt. Then there was number five. The day before, it had been dark and empty when I’d passed by. This afternoon, I could see lights on in the living room and hear the hum of the window-unit air conditioners. A woman in her sixties opened the front door but refused to open the screen, as though that would somehow protect her. Her hair, dyed to the color of yellow grapefruit, was cut short and permed into a dense jungle of cheerlessly fisted loops. She wore thin sea green sweatpants and a University of Florida T-shirt on which a saucily agitated gator charged forward.

  “Hi. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about your neighbor over there, Karen.”

  “I don’t want to buy nothing,” the woman told me.

  “I’m not selling anything, ma’am.” I said, noting how odd it felt to mean it this time. “I was hoping you could answer a couple of questions for me. You’d be willing to do that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I told you, I ain’t buying,” she said, and began to shut the door.

  Part of me was content. I might go back to Melford and say that no one would talk to me, then we’d get into the Datsun and cruise out of Meadowbrook Grove forever. But that other part of me, that niggling part, knew that Melford would send me right back out, to another part of the trailer park, this one maybe closer to where Doe kept his police station.

  So I said, “Hold on.” A clever little lie occurred to me, and I figured I had nothing to lose. “Ma’am, I’m really not selling anything. I’m a private detective.” Private detectives were on the brain, after all, following my conversation with Chris Denton. So why not?

  She looked at me, this time more kindly. “Really?” Her eyes were wide with wonder.

  “Yes, ma’am.” It was incredible to me. This being assertive business actually paid off.

  “Like Cannon?” she asked.

  I nodded solemnly. “Exactly like Cannon.”

  “Not exactly. We’ll have to fatten you up first.” She opened wide the screen door.

  ***

  Her name was Vivian, and she sat me at a padded card table in her kitchen and served me a can of Tab and supermarket-brand frosted oatmeal cookies that she daintily placed on a layer of paper towels.

  There were pictures of poodles everywhere- on the walls, in frames on the counter. I counted at least a dozen. But there didn’t seem to be a dog around, though the place had the wet smell of dog hair.

  “Oh, that girl was always a slut,” Vivian said thoughtfully. “Just like her mother. Whores, the two of them. And into drugs, too.”

  “What sort of drugs?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t know that,” she said with a cluck of her tongue. “I hardly even know what people today take. In my day, we just drank, you know. The other things, like reefer and such, were for coons.”

  “Raccoons, ma’am?” I asked.

  She giggled and waved a hand at me as if we were old joking pals. “Oh, you stop.”

  “What about the man she was seeing?” I ventured. I liked t
he way it came out, all TV and professional sounding. “Are you familiar with him?”

  “You mean that Bastard fellow? Oh, yes. I didn’t much care for him. Not a nice man. You could tell by his name. Not a proper nickname, I don’t think.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “Nice people have nicknames like Scooter or Chip.”

  “That’s right. I heard he was into drugs, too. And I heard he was selling them with-”

  And then she stopped. She stopped, she looked around the trailer, and she flipped at the metal ring on the top of her can of Tab.

  “Go on,” I urged.

  “It don’t matter. But she and her boyfriend were into drugs all right. And that’s why her husband took her kids away, because she was hooked on something, and they say she was letting that Bastard fellow have his way with one of the girls.”

  “Ma’am,” I said evenly, “tell me more about the business with the drugs. Does this have anything at all to do with the police chief, Jim Doe?”

  Vivian looked down. “Oh, no. Not that I heard nothing of. I got nothing bad to say about Jim Doe. He’s always been nice to all of us. Except for the smell that comes over from his pigs there, he’s done nothing but good here. I’ll tell anyone that.”

  “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. Just one more question.” I was beginning to feel my audience straining, and I wanted to get out before I frightened her too much.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think we done enough questions today. I think maybe it’s time for you to go.”

  “Just one more,” I urged.

  “No,” she said. Her face had grown pale and her skin slack.

  “All right.” I stood up. “Thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. I’m sorry if you feel like talking to me might get you in trouble with that policeman.”