An Occasional Hell

by Silvis, Randall;

“So what will they be charged with?” he asked instead.

  Abbott played with the cigar, he twirled it between his lips. “What I’ve got,” he finally said, “is I’ve got Fox on the thing with the cat, which he admits to. It’s up to the DA to decide but we’ll probably hit him with unlawful entry and terroristic threats on that one. Maybe even cruelty to animals, just for the fun of it. We can also nail him with leaving the scene of the crime, failing to report it, aiding and abbetting et cetera. Accessory to murder.”

  “Good luck on that last one.”

  “No luck needed. We stick Gillen in front of a jury, how do you think those folks will take to him? A smalltime coke dealer with some fairly unusual sexual habits. Anyway people from around here will consider them unusual. Even though this might be everyday stuff where you come from, DeWalt.”

  DeWalt did not fail to notice the change of address. He said, “You really believe you have enough on Gillen to charge him with murder?”

  “We’ve got circumstantial evidence by the bucketful. But who can guess the way a DA’s mind will work? All I know is that neither Gillen nor Fox has an alibi. Opportunity they had, just like your client. It can also be shown that all three had motive.”

  “What’s Fox’s motive?”

  “You working for him now?”

  “I’m just wondering, Larry. Trying to put this all together, same as you.”

  “I don’t have to be discussing this with you at all, you know. You’re not her lawyer, I’m not required to do this.”

  “And I appreciate that. Because I value your friendship, and I wouldn’t want to see it damaged by any of this.”

  Abbott looked away. He nodded stiffly. “The way I see it,” he said a moment later, “is that Fox did pretty much what Gillen told him to do. After all, Gillen controlled his supply, and Fox didn’t want shut off. Not from the cocaine and not from Gillen’s wife. Motive.”

  “Okay,” DeWalt said.

  “As for the actual murder—or homicide, if you prefer—you heard them. Gillen claims Fox did it and then made off with his wife, and Fox claims Gillen did it and then sent Fox to the scene to get arrested. And when they’re not pointing the finger at each other, they’re pointing it at your client.”

  DeWalt nodded.

  “And you already know how it looks for her. Here’s a woman who’s sick and tired of having her husband cheat on her every Saturday morning. She calls the husband of her husband’s lover and suggests that something ought to be done about it. We don’t know, by the way, that this is the only time she discussed this with Gillen. We’ll pull the phone records, of course, but they probably won’t tell us anything. She might have called from a pay phone, for example. Or maybe they met in person. In any case, we know they talked.”

  “Don’t forget, though, Gillen knew about the affair. You might even say he encouraged it. So why would he murder Alex just because Elizabeth—and I am not conceding the point—just because Elizabeth might have suggested it?”

  “Don’t forget that somebody had already tried to turn Gillen into a crispy critter.”

  “It wasn’t Alex, though. Two hundred people can verify that on the night of—”

  “Gillen thought it was Alex, okay? Gillen’s been getting threats. Then there’s an actual attempt on his life. He’s convinced that Alex Catanzaro is behind it. Enter the spurned wife, who just so happens to be in the market for a triggerman.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Hypothetically. For the purposes of argument, okay? So she gets in contact with Rodney Gillen, who, as luck will have it, would also like to see the guy dusted off, albeit for a different reason. And Gillen just happens to have a yuppie stooge who likes coke and blowjobs. Likes them so much that he’s willing to decapitate a kitten for Gillen. Is it that much of a stretch to suggest he might be willing to do even more?”

  DeWalt knew that the prosecution could make a case of such an argument, even though to DeWalt it smelled of smoke, it stung his eyes. “Anything turn up out at Honey Lake?” he asked. “Or in Fox’s room at the frat house?”

  “We didn’t find the murder weapon, if that’s what you mean. But I’ll tell you where it is, it’s at the bottom of Honey Lake. Either there or in the river.”

  “And Jeri Gillen?”

  “Ditto. We’ll drag the river again, and we’ll drag the lake, and we’ll find her.”

  “But why would Gillen off his own wife, Larry? Catanzaro, okay. But why Jeri?”

  “Maybe she freaked out on him, who knows? Maybe she told him she didn’t want anything more to do with him. Or maybe Gillen killed his wife by accident. Missed Catanzaro with the first shot and hit her instead.”

  “A musket is a single-shot weapon. Takes half a minute to reload.”

  “So maybe he had another weapon, ever think of that? The .22 pistol, for example. Maybe he shot her with that.”

  “No blood.”

  “Maybe he grabbed her first, took her somewhere else, and then shot her. Maybe he strangled her. Maybe he bashed her over the head.”

  “Maybe she’s not even dead.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe the boys have her chained to a wall somewhere. Or strapped to a bed. A little S & M maybe? Tell me that’s not a possibility.”

  “Spontaneous human combustion is a possibility too,” DeWalt said.

  “You think this is a joke?”

  “I think maybe you’re trying too hard to pin everything on Gillen.”

  “It’s my job to try hard, all right? It’s not your job, it’s mine, let’s get that straight. I don’t know why I’m even fucking discussing this with you.”

  “Larry, wait.” The air felt thick with smoke, and there seemed to DeWalt a kind of buzzing in the air, as if they were standing too near a high voltage fence. “I understand why you’re pissed off, okay? And you have every right to be. I was out of line. The moment I found out Gillen’s location, I should have called you.”

  “You got that right.”

  “And I apologize for that. I know you’ve probably been getting your ass chewed out all along because of me. I can imagine some of the heat you’ve been taking on my account.”

  “No you can’t.”

  DeWalt chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Okay. I can’t.” If Abbott would not meet him halfway on this, what did concession avail? “Can we talk about the case, though? I need your help on this, Larry. On my side of it, I mean. I need your perspective.”

  Abbott continued to stand with his back to DeWalt. DeWalt imagined that to a passerby they must look like schoolboys refusing to shake hands after a playground tussle. Two women in this situation could throw their arms around one another and embrace and everything would be resolved in the warmth of physical contact, of touch, but such a solution did not exist in his or Abbott’s repertoire of responses; they were too goddamn male.

  “What do you need to know?” Abbott finally said. He did not turn or look over his shoulder, he spoke to the horizon.

  “It’s the thing with the cat that bothers me. I just don’t get it.”

  “What is there to get?”

  “You’ve got two guys involved in a homicide, okay? Maybe even a double homicide. Why in the world would they risk discovery, risk everything, for that matter, just to frighten the wife of the man they’d murdered?”

  “That seems fairly obvious to me.”

  “Only if you believe what you apparently do. That she hired them to kill her husband, and then reneged on the deal.”

  “Where else would two jerks like them, two fucking kids, Ernie, where else would they get their hands on a thirty-five thousand dollar Pennsylvania long rifle? She supplied it to them. Her husband’s newest acquisition. Acquired illegally, by the way; which means she knew it couldn’t be traced back to her. Hell, that rifle probably represented to her everything that was rotten about her marriage. What a joke, she must have thought, to kill him with the very thing he probably loved even more that he loved her or Jeri Gillen. She’s g
ot a terrific sense of irony, I’ll grant her that.”

  DeWalt shook his head. “I just can’t buy it, Larry. I’ve tried, I honestly have. But I just can’t buy it.”

  “Maybe you could if you weren’t sleeping with her.” Abbott looked at his cigar, which had gone cold.

  They had kept her house under surveillance, of course. There had been not only crows in the cornfield, but cops. What were you seeing, DeWalt, all those times you gazed into the trees and fields? Where were your eyes, man? Why didn’t you smell them? Where was your nose?

  The scent of cold cigar ash made DeWalt faintly nauseous. His mouth was dry. He tried to work up some saliva, and then to swallow, but it did him no good. His anger made him short of breath, so that he had to work hard to keep his voice low, his words evenly spaced and carefully chosen.

  “I can’t help thinking that we’re missing something, Larry.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” the trooper said as he turned to face him. “This isn’t a novel, this is real life, okay? Give your imagination a rest.”

  The look on Abbott’s face then, the sudden blush of color, indicated how quickly he regretted his words. But they could not be reclaimed. He looked away for just a moment, then strode briskly toward the courthouse.

  DeWalt remained where he stood. He stared at the opposite edge of lawn some thirty yards away, the cracked uneven sidewalk. There had been more to Abbott’s statement than mere resentment that DeWalt had succeeded where the police had not. There was a deeper and more personal resentment, a suspicion confirmed, a mistrust.

  It had to do with DeWalt’s previous life as a writer. This isn’t a novel, Abbott had said. You writers. Give your imagination a rest.

  It had something to do with a common ambivalence toward writers, toward artists of any kind who labor in secrecy and in solitude, who do not publicly sweat except to preen and puff. There is something masturbatory about what they do. They are manic depressives, alcoholics and queers. They are intimate with madness. They know secrets.

  The artist, even a mediocre one like DeWalt, even a pretender, is always watching, always listening. He keeps his own council. He communes with unseen forces, holds conferences with birds and grass and wind. He practices a strange alchemy, it cannot be quantified, it is not predictable, it delights in nonconformity, in anarchy, it conspires for change.

  DeWalt had not thought of himself as a writer for quite some time now. But he understood suddenly that other people continued to think of him as one, that because of one book he would be praised and condemned for a very long time. He understood too that he had been relying all this time on his writer’s instincts. He was writing a story now even as he stood there, writing about himself thinking about himself, a story empty of epiphanies about a man staring at the juncture of sweet grass and dirty sidewalk, about an August that feels like autumn, a growl of closing thunder and a gathering of dusk, the scent of dead ash, and the chill thought that perhaps this man has been betrayed by his own heart, this man friendless and weary; this man is a fool.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Catanzaro place is so quiet when DeWalt arrives, he feels as if he has driven up the long sheltered lane into a churchyard. A New England churchyard, survivor of three hundred years of progress. Anglican probably, venerated now for its age and remoteness, its indominatibility. Used only for weddings and Sunday services.

  But today is not Sunday and there is no wedding to celebrate, no lovers joining lives. The sexton here, the caretaker of this solitude, is seated on the uppermost porch step, a dinner plate on her knees, a glass of iced tea by her hip. She is dressed in blue jeans and a longsleeved blue cotton shirt, probably her husband’s. Perhaps his scent still lingers on the shirt, and this is why she wears it. She is trying to fill those bottomless spaces of her solitude with something more tangible, more experiential than memory alone. Perhaps that is why she appears so small, so childlike: failure reduces all of us to our elemental virtues or flaws.

  DeWalt did not consciously decide to park his car forty yards short of the house, he did not consciously reflect that he wanted, needed, to approach her slowly this time, needed to walk unhurried through the churchyard stillness with the sun dipping below the curtain of trees and the sky as gray as tomorrow’s headlines.

  She did not wave or call hello. The dogs were silent. A killdeer screeched. Behind him, from somewhere near the tree house, a woodpecker rapped its jarring rhythm.

  He smiled as he approached her, her brown eyes steadied now by a day of reflection; speculation. She held her plate with both hands. On the plate was a single ear of sweet corn, half-eaten, a shallow pool of melted butter, tiny black islands of pepper. Her lips were shiny with butter; her fingertips too. He wished this were a previous night so that he could kneel on the step below her and kiss the butter from her mouth, take her slippery hands in his, put her fingers to his lips. It would be a different night this time, an honest and more gentle night. He wished it were that other night now. Or a night five years in the past. Ten years. Or any other miraculous night wherein this now did not exist.

  “Am I too late for dinner?” he asked.

  She lifted the plate an inch off her knees. “This is all I made.”

  “It smells delicious.” He watched her hands lower the plate again, watched them motionless, thumbs hooked over the rim. What did he want to say to her? And why can’t you say it, DeWalt? He looked away, to the side of the house, as if there were something intriguing about the rain spout. Then into the sky.

  “There’ll be a good rain tonight,” she said.

  “A real thunderboomer.”

  She waited. Then she picked up her plate in one hand, her glass in the other, and stood. “Go on out to the garden and pick yourself some corn,” she told him. “I’ll get the water boiling.”

  “I was just kidding about dinner.”

  “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No. But that doesn’t—”

  “You have to eat,” she said. She turned and went inside, catching the screen door with her heel so it would not bang shut.

  Not for thirty years had he walked through a cornfield and felt the long green leaves slapping his legs, the firm stalks bending against his hand, heavy tassles nodding as he passed. Back then it had been a hundred-acre stand of field corn and he had crept through it late one moonless night, he and three other boys filling a burlap bag with stolen ears ripped from the stalks. He had had to feel for the cornsilk in the dark, to search for its exquisite softness by sliding his fingers up the stalk, that womanly softness so fragrant and anomalous. He stumbled over a pumpkin once and fell flat on his face, the broken stalks gouging his stomach and chest and neck as he lay there laughing, the other boys whispering for him to be quiet, shut up, you want us to get caught? Until with the effort of suppressing laughter he had laughed himself breathless, and then remained against the cool dirt, safe in the fragrance of earth and corn and pumpkin vines, until his worried friends urged him away.

  They had soaked that corn all night in a washtub filled with ice water, and late the next afternoon baked it on a bed of wood coals, the husks blackened and the golden silk seared away, the four boys and a dozen friends. Everybody laughed goodnaturedly when told how DeWalt had been felled by a pumpkin. The corn was tough but nobody complained because there were two quarter-kegs of cold beer and a clear starry night, and DeWalt had known since the party began that the longlegged girl sitting next to him would join him later on a blanket beside his mother’s car. And when he tasted the butter on her lips that night and felt her warmth beneath him he had been grateful and pleased but the thought never crossed his mind that he might be engaging in an experience rare and finite, a soon past perfect joy. He had never suspected a day would come when he would hunger without hope for the taste and touch of a woman and the moment shared, or that a handful of cornsilk could bring it all back to him now, so new and fragrant and impossible to sustain in a hand nearly fifty years old.

  “I’m ready when
you are,” Elizabeth called from the back door.

  He looked up at her.

  “Water’s boiling!” she said.

  He laughed at himself then, stiff old scarecrow, pumpkin-stumbling romantic. Quickly he plucked three ears of corn from the stalks and shucked them bare, green husks trembling heavily to the ground. He stroked away the tufts of cornsilk, and let them fall, and shook the last golden strands from his fingers. The air smelled of rain.

  In the kitchen Elizabeth rinsed the corn under the tap and then slipped the three ears into a pot of boiling water, its steam rising into her face. She remained facing the stove then, her back to him. DeWalt knew she did not want to turn because she sensed somehow the coming of bad news, had seen it on his face perhaps, his reserve, the sadness of his eyes.

  But it’s bad news and good news, he thought, and then dismissed the phrase as something he would never say. A cliche, supposed to be medicinal, but astringent, wounding. The bad news always outweighs the good, he thought. Nullifies it.

  Which do you want first, the good news or the bad?

  Better give me the good news first, doc.

  The good news is, if you take care of yourself you can expect to live a reasonably long and productive life.

  Hey, great. And what’s the bad news?

  You can’t drink, fuck, hope, trust, feel young, be innocent, wear a swimsuit in public, or sleep soundly ever again.

  Can’t you give us a prescription, doctor? Can’t you do something?

  Certainly. Repeat after me, son: Now I lay me down to sleep.…

  Elizabeth said, without turning, feeling his eyes on her, “I’ll bring it out to the porch when it’s ready.”

  So he walked past her then, toward the living room and the front door. In doing so he trailed his fingertips over the nape of her neck. She reacted with a shiver, and moved closer to the stove.

  Later he sat alone on the porch step, the plate in his lap, three golden ears of corn, kernels bursting with sweetness. No butter for DeWalt, no salt or pepper. He wanted the taste of the corn itself, the taste of yesterday pure and undiluted. She had also made him a salad: slices of ripe tomato, Vidalia onions and provolone cheese, a few drops of olive oil, three broken leaves of fresh sweet basil. He ate hungrily, gnawing off an entire row of kernels before pausing to wipe his mouth or to take a bite of salad. She had brought a glass of tea too but he could not drink it all. He poured it out off the side of the porch.