An Occasional Hell

by Silvis, Randall;

  DeWalt had all three stories now, Elizabeth’s too. Three glass balls to juggle in the air.

  “What time was it when you called Craig, Rodney? On that Saturday morning when Dr. Catanzaro was killed.”

  “I don’t know exactly. I’d been sleeping, and the phone woke my up. I kept waiting for it to stop ringing, for, you know, for Jeri to pick it up. It seemed to ring forever. So I got up and answered it, and I talked to her, his wife, though it was more like listened really, for two minutes at the most.”

  “She did all the talking?”

  “All I remember saying is hello.”

  “What exactly did you say, Elizabeth, when you called Rodney Gillen?”

  “I said ‘I just thought you had the right to know what they’ve been up to. What they’re up to right this very minute.’”

  “She said “I think somebody should do something about them, don’t you?’ Something like that.”

  “What time was it when Rodney called you, Craig?”

  “It was exactly twenty-three minutes till twelve. I’ve got a digital clock right beside my phone.”

  “And after Elizabeth called you, Rodney, after you had hung up, what then?”

  “I guess I just sat there at the kitchen table awhile. Until I came up with the idea of calling Craig.”

  “Hey, Rodney, what’s up? This is kind of early for you, isn’t it?”

  “I just got a weird phone call, man.”

  “Weird how? Was it another threat?”

  “What kind of threat, Craig? What was said?”

  “Around the first of the year Rodney started getting these phone calls whenever Jeri was at work. Told him he better quit dealing, or else.”

  “Did he know who was making the calls?”

  “He assumed it was Dr. Catanzaro.”

  “Why would he assume that?”

  “Because Jeri had made the dumbass mistake once of trying to get the old fart to do some coke with her. And the guy threw a fit. Said he didn’t want anything to do with her if she was going to fool around with that stuff.”

  “And?”

  “And of course she swore she’d quit. You know, he was more important than getting high, blah blah blah, all that garbage. But I guess he didn’t trust her because he went through her purse a couple of times, found her stuff. He’d explode, and she’d start crying and pleading with him, asking for his help, saying how hard it was to quit because the stuff was around all the time.…”

  “Did she love him?”

  “He loved her. Claimed to anyway. Treated her like gold. And she didn’t get a lot of that from Rodney, needless to say.”

  “Did she get much of that from you, Craig?”

  “She got what she wanted, I guess.”

  “Tell me something, Rodney. What kind of relationship did she have with Craig?”

  “The only person Craig Fox loves is Craig Fox. He loved getting head and she loved giving it, that’s all I know.”

  “And as for you, you didn’t mind watching it?”

  “Cheaper than a VCR.”

  “So did Jeri really quit using coke or not?”

  “Not. In a way it was kind of pathetic. There she was fucking Dr. Catanzaro every Saturday morning, then later that same day she’d get high with Rodney and tell him all about it.”

  “She’d come home and tell me about it. I didn’t care.”

  “You liked hearing it.”

  “So what if I did? Anyway, I don’t know, she probably told him that I was forcing the coke on her, something like that. He seemed to think that if he could scare me … like there was only one place in town to get the stuff, you know? The asshole never even realized that he was buying the stuff for us.”

  “How’s that?”

  “All she had to do was to start crying the blues about never having any money. Cause I was blowing it all on coke or grass, stuff like that. Or that she needed a new coat, or new shoes, or new anything she wanted. Fuck, the guy was like a second income, you know? And all Jeri had to do was what she wanted to do anyway. What she was good at.”

  “Let’s go back to the phone call a minute. When you called Craig, what exactly was said?”

  “I told him I’d had a weird phone call and he asked if it was Alex calling to threaten me again. Ever since Alex firebombed our garage, Craig was paranoid that Alex was going to find out about him too.”

  “About how he was buying coke from you to sell on campus?”

  “I don’t sell coke, man. Never have. I wouldn’t touch that stuff.”

  “It wasn’t Alex who firebombed the garage, Rodney.”

  “Who was it then?”

  “He was at a high school play that night. It couldn’t have been him.”

  “Jesus, I just figured.… It wasn’t always the same voice on the phone either, you know? But I just figured he was trying to disguise himself, you know?”

  “What about your call to Craig?”

  “So I say to Rodney, Weird how? And he says it wasn’t Dr. Catanzaro this time, it was his wife. And I say, His wife? What the fuck did she call for?”

  “Just to inform me that her husband and Jeri are parked down by the river fucking each other’s eyes out.”

  “Holy shit. How’d she find out?”

  “She knows where and everything, man. She knows the exact fucking location!”

  “So what did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t say a damn word. What do you think I’d say—‘Oh, yeah, I know all about it. Relax, it’s cool’?”

  “So what did you call me for?”

  “Because she sounded pissed off enough to go and do something about it, that’s why.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “How do I know, man? What do women usually do when they catch their old man fucking somebody else?”

  “Maybe all she needs is a good stiff one herself. You did offer, didn’t you?”

  “This is no joke, man. I mean what if she goes down there and does something? Who do you think she’s going to go after, her fucking husband, or Jeri?”

  “So what do you expect me to do about it?”

  “Just go on down there before she does and scare them off. Jeri knows your truck. So just drive on in like you’re going to go fishing or something, pull up close to the river like you don’t even know they’re there. If Jeri doesn’t realize that something’s up and gets them out of there, Alex’ll see the college parking sticker on your bumper. Either way they’re going to split, right?”

  “So why don’t you go?”

  “Because he knows me, asshole. He hates my fucking guts.”

  “You afraid of him or what?”

  “The guy threw a fucking gasoline bomb at me!”

  “I don’t know, Rodney. Did she just now find out about this? Did she say anything about—?”

  “She was pissed, man. Fed up. I could hear it in her voice.”

  “The thing is, I’ve got a meeting with my advisor at one.…”

  “So leave now and you’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with me, Rodney.”

  “I got a bunch of pictures here with your bare ass in them that says it does.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “If you want to keep getting what you get from Jeri, and you want to keep getting what you get from me, asshole, then you better do this for me. And I mean now.”

  “What did you find, Craig, when you got there?”

  “I found that Dr. Catanzaro’s wife had already come and gone. And that she was just as pissed as Rodney said she was.”

  “So you went back to Rodney and told him that Dr. Catanzaro had been murdered.”

  “So where the fuck is Jeri, man? Didn’t you see her anywhere? Didn’t you at least look for her or try to find her?”

  “I never even got out of my truck, Rodney! The fucking professor’s lying there with his head ripped open, you think I’m going to hang around?”

 
“Well we gotta go back right now! Jeri’s probably still down there somewhere!”

  “Jesus God, Rodney, use your head. She’s gone, man. She’s either dead too or maybe somehow she managed to get away. Either way, you’d better get lost and do it quick.”

  “Why should I get lost, I didn’t do—”

  “It’s a setup, man! His wife calls you and tells you to go down there, right? Then she calls the police and tells them Hey, I just talked to Rodney Gillen and he threatened to kill my husband! It was just dumb luck the cops didn’t show up while I was there.”

  “And what did Rodney do, how did he react, after you told him this?”

  “He just stood there staring out the window. And then he started crying. He was like, I don’t know … helpless. He said ‘It’s raining so hard now. She’s going to be caught out there in the rain.’”

  “So you hustled him away up here to the lake.”

  “He had to go somewhere.”

  “But why get yourself involved in it, Craig? Why not just let him fend for himself?”

  “I guess I didn’t think of it as getting myself involved.”

  “Did you think you were involved when you stuck the cat’s head down Elizabeth Catanzaro’s sink?”

  “Cat’s head? What cat’s head?”

  “How did Jeri get hold of his house key, Rodney?”

  “He let her take the car one time to buy their lunch. He kept all of his keys on the same key-ring—car, house, whatever, a whole bunch of them. She had duplicates made of all of them.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Who knows? Maybe she was going to give them to him as a Christmas present.”

  “She and Rodney figured they’d rip him off royally someday. They knew he’d break up with her sooner or later.”

  “How’d you talk Craig into doing the thing with the cat’s head, Rodney? You had a lot of leverage, of course. You had the photos of him and Jeri. You had a mutually beneficial business relationship. You had the threat of public exposure of all this. Which argument did you use to persuade him?”

  “I appealed to him as a friend.”

  “You kept the kitten in your room at the fraternity house, didn’t you, Craig? Just for a day or so, but long enough. I smelled the litter box. It was your idea what to do with it, wasn’t it?”

  “I finally convinced Rodney that Jeri wasn’t going to be found alive. I mean, any woman who can blast her old man’s brain away isn’t going to be gentle with her old man’s girlfriend, right? So, once he accepted that, we started thinking about some way to get the police off his ass. But it was Rodney who came up with this plan for a kind of campaign of terror. The first step was the cat’s head.”

  “You thought that if you kept the pressure on Elizabeth Catanzaro, maybe made her believe her own life was in danger, that she’d finally confess to the murder?”

  “Hey, it was worth a shot. Anyway, we had to do something.”

  “What if there isn’t anything for Elizabeth Catanzaro to confess? What if she’s not the murderer?”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “What if Elizabeth isn’t the murderer, Rodney?

  “What if Elvis is alive and singing backup for Alvin and the Chipmunks?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  This could be your last impeachable night, DeWalt.

  Your last opportunity to call the darkness to account. To resist. To impugn the integrity of surrender. To not go gentle.

  There has never been a better time than tonight. The sky is clear and the stars each a brilliant tremulous white. Over the horizon to your right the moon hangs as if too swollen to rise, it awaits anxiously some disturbance in the earth’s field of gravity, a loud cry, a splash, a gunshot, any rippling wave of abnegation on which it might ascend. You are moving with little awareness of movement over a body of water called Honey Lake, moving deeper into darkness, ever closer to the point of no return, and the irony is that you have been placed at the rudder, given charge of direction, charged with holding to the direction ordained. Your captain is less than half your age but he thinks he has a future and he grips that notion as urgently as he does the .22 revolver in his right hand and the bottle of beer in his left. He sits at the starboard rail, your other companion on the portside, watching the sail, believing his own improbabilities, correcting you occasionally as you veer off course. You hear the wind flapping the sail and the water splashing along the hull and you hear the buzz of all past misery fading, it is a buzz like that from an electrical transformer but you are moving away from it, it is somewhere back on shore, two hundred yards behind, three hundred, it is barely a hum now, no longer exacerbation but reduced to mere nostalgia, the incentive of indifference.

  All right then. The past does not matter except that it gives you more or less reason to value the present. Whether you value the present more or less does not matter either.

  You are sober and your blood is cool and your senses have never been more alert. You can smell the water and your own perspiration, you smell the beer in your captain’s bottle, you smell the boy’s fear. There is a vague scent too of wildflowers but it is not palpable enough to believe. You are leaving no one behind. You are expendable.

  “I want you to know something, Rodney.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “I believe that you didn’t shoot Alex and that you don’t know where Jeri is.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “I do, Rodney. And if you would trust me, I could help you out of this mess.”

  “I’m helping myself out of it. I don’t need nobody else’s help.”

  “Once you step foot on shore, things will change.”

  “You better believe they will.”

  The beer has given him something, resolve or confidence; indifference. He has had three bottles of it, whatever it is. One as he led DeWalt and Fox to the dock at nightfall, the sixpack of beer concealing his gun. Three men out for an evening cruise. He had surprised DeWalt with his competency, his caution in maneuvering DeWalt and Fox to and onto the sailboat, always staying far enough from them that neither could disarm him with an unexpected move, but close enough that they could not anticipate escape either. Gillen had the edge because he was afraid and fear will always give a man the edge. Fox had gone beyond fear to abject terror, he could smell his red suspenders and yellow power tie and his cellular phones going up in smoke. DeWalt could have used a little fear but he had dropped too far below it. He did not know where he was exactly, this place was new to him, but there was no fear.

  Where are your endorphins when you need them, DeWalt?

  “Is that it?” Gillen asked. Lights on the eastern shore, approximately a quarter mile ahead. “What’s the name of it?”

  “Chelton,” Fox answered.

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes.” Fox was useless ballast now, and he sounded as if he knew it. His voice quavered when he spoke. He sat there whimpering, as he had whimpered all day. DeWalt wished he were sitting closer to the boy; he would cuff him alongside the head.

  It would be so sweet just to brain the kid, to bash him a few times with anything handy. DeWalt could bash them both and leave them there to rot. He didn’t have the stomach to shoot them but a full bottle of beer would make attractive dents in their foreheads. Two blows each would be sufficient. A week from now something would wash ashore and the smell would waft across Honey Lake. Fishermen would sniff their bait buckets. Sunbathers would wrinkle their freckled noses. God it would feel good to hurt these kids. It would feel so fucking sweet—a sweetness that might last him a lifetime.

  “You’re not aimed at the lights,” Gillen said.

  DeWalt told him, “I’m tacking.”

  “I don’t care what the fuck you call it, I want you to head for those lights up there.”

  “Calm down, Rodney, this is the only way to do it. We don’t have a motor, remember? We have to work with the wind, and the wind isn’t precisely in our favor right now.”

 
“It feels all right to me.”

  “It’s tricky, Rodney, believe me. You’re welcome to take over if you think you can do a better job.”

  “Just shut the fuck up and get us there as fast as you can, okay?”

  “You’re the captain.”

  DeWalt let a couple of minutes go by. He was beginning to feel very good. It was an unexpected and almost sexual feeling. He remembered being twenty years old and combing his hair in the dormitory mirror and smiling to himself because he knew that in a couple of hours he would be lifting a silky blouse off the shoulders of Katherine Lundeen, that her red hair would fall over her shoulders and he would kiss the warm flesh of her neck and back. There was no question that the night would progress in this fashion. Theirs was a temporary love but very real temporarily and the pleasure of thinking ahead to their time together and the certainty of it was almost more exquisite than the pleasure of their time together.

  That was the feeling he had now. He couldn’t help smiling. He smiled as he looked at the black-barreled pistol in Rodney Gillen’s hand.

  “I think Jeri’s still alive,” he said.

  Abruptly Gillen turned toward him.

  “It’s just an opinion, of course. But it’s what all the evidence points to.”

  “Like what evidence?” Gillen asked.

  Yes, DeWalt, like what evidence? “If the murder was truly motivated by jealousy,” he said, “why kill only one of the principals? Would a woman shoot her husband, let the only eye witness, her husband’s girlfriend, escape, and then go home and telephone the eye witness’s husband? It’s a ludicrous idea, Rodney. No, if Elizabeth Catanzaro were the murderer, she would have made damn sure that she got Jeri too. You don’t leave somebody who can nail you wandering around freely. And if she does happen to get away from you, you certainly don’t try to frame her husband as the murderer. Or you’ll have Jeri popping up at the trial to point a finger at the real murderer.”

  Gillen thought about that for a moment. “So what you’re saying,” he said, “it still doesn’t sound to me like a good reason to think she’s alive.”

  “What I’m saying is, if Elizabeth Catanzaro were the murderer, Jeri wouldn’t be alive. Her body would have been found right there beside Alex’s. Or in any case, not far from it. But there wasn’t a trace of Jeri anywhere. Not a single trace of evidence that she had been murdered. No blood, no tissue, no real sign of struggle.”