by Robert White
“You creepy son of a bitch! You have ice for blood? I showed you what your friend and his cellmate, your own flesh-and-blood brother did to that little girl back there.”
“I can’t help you, Agent Pippin.”
“Can’t or won’t? You know what happened to her, and I want to know what you know!”
His ring tones went off. I recognized the opening notes of a song made popular by England’s blue-eyed soul singer, Lisa Stansfield. Sarah had all her CDs. Pippin spoke a few clipped words, snapped his cell shut and slipped it back into his belt.
He looked at me. “It’s foolish to be worried about you. You’re a cold fish, Jack.” He told me to stay put and walked away. I looked over at the ambulance driver who stared back at me with loathing and curiosity.
Pippin left me there for an hour while he was inside. The ride back to the motel was made in grim silence with Pippin staring straight ahead. For whatever reason, he decided to break the silence with an odd comment: “One of our guys dug up some Interpol info on Calderone’s woman. She’s related to Ante Pavelić.”
“Who’s he when he’s at home?”
“She didn’t mention that in her pillow talk, huh? She’s related to a big shot. He was the head of the wartime quisling regime in Croatia,” Pippin said.
“I’ll bet a person doesn’t get more than one or two chances in life to use a word like that,” I said. What was wrong with me anyhow? I wondered. The man could have had me cuffed in a cramped interrogation room, and all I seemed to do was goad him.
When he dropped me off at my motel, he said, “I’ve got a first-class polygrapher coming up today. I want him to test you.”
“Be glad to oblige, Agent Pippin,” I said and tried out a brief smile.
He looked at me with pure disgust. “It’s no wonder your wife left you,” he said.
#29
I knew that when they found the gun it would have my prints all over it. Marija’s idea, probably. Calderone’s style was more like writing my name in block letters on the bathroom mirror with a bar of soap. I wasn’t in the databases used by US law enforcement, but my prints were taken by the Coast Guard in Cleveland when I applied for my seaman’s ticket years ago. Canada was stringent about sealing juvie records. My father had done everything he knew to make us invisible to the government’s reach, but nobody’s good enough to do that for long. All Pippin had to do to match the prints he’d find on the gun would be to throw a little carbon dust on my side of the car or any door handle upstairs in my room.
I hit my bed with my clothes and shoes still on. I slept until 4:05 when the phone became an intolerable wail. “I’m coming down,” I said and hung up.
Pippin wore a different suit. He looked like one of Northtown’s local yachties, one of the doctors, lawyers or stockbrokers who comprised the upper class and swapped wives among their own kind. Pippin’s blue blazer and gray slacks with their razor creases down the front complemented an off-white shirt and silver tie that looked as if it had been dipped in Day-Glo paint. It flashed with different geometric shapes.
“You look spiffy,” I said.
“What kind of word is that?”
“It means nice,” I said.
“Then say ‘nice,’ damn it,” he said. “I’ve been waiting down here in this heat.”
That seemed odd considering he kept the a/c in the car at morgue temperature.
His Navigator hadn’t been washed to disguise any tell-tale marks where my prints might have been lifted from the finish. I was getting as paranoid as the old man in his latter days.
“We’re going to use the local sheriff’s,” he said. “It’s in Jefferson about six miles from here.”
“I live here, Forzell,” I said. “I’ve been all the way to Youngstown once.”
I managed to get a few facts from him but nothing that wouldn’t be splashed all over the front pages of the paper tomorrow morning. Her larynx was crushed, petechial hemorrhaging in the lone white of the eyeball meant strangulation occurred prior to the gunshot that left a snowstorm in her brain and would have turned her eyeball black.
“The head shot wasn’t necessary,” Pippin said. “Why do you suppose that is?”
“Coup de theâtre,” I said.
“Did your momma make you swallow a dictionary when you was a kid?”
“No, my father,” I said. “Maybe it was done to disguise the forensics.”
“You been watchin’ too many assheaded forensics shows on TV with all that computer-generated nonsense.”
“Did you find the gun?”
“We found guns,” he said. “Whole bunch of them, in fact. Ballistics doesn’t work on fragments, in case you were worried, but I hear we’ve got some good thirteen-point prints on a couple of them. We’re running them through AFIS and NCIC.”
He turned off the Jefferson exit and started to turn left.
“Go right. It’s the other way,” I said.
“Why not put a damned sign up? You know, with an arrow, maybe? Is this some kind of hillbilly thing up here?”
“You’re not getting much sleep yourself, are you, Agent Pippin?”
He let that go. “You know who Youngstown’s most famous crook was, Jack?”
“Yeah, he just died. A tractor fell on him, I heard,” I said.
“No, not him. Not even close. Emil Denzio. Youngstown bank robber, a legend back in the sixties and seventies.”
“Why does he have to do with me?”
“Emil was a real smart guy. Like you. But you know how he and his crew fucked up?”
“They bragged,” I said.
“Not a bad guess, but no. They did their biggest score in Las Vegas. He knew everybody would figure it for a Denzio job, so he had his boys clean up the house where they were planning their score, scrubbed it from top to bottom. But they forgot to check the dish washer. Can you believe it? Everybody’s prints all over the dishes. Bagged them all in a week – phhht, like that.” He tossed an imaginary jail key out the window.
“Too bad he wasn’t mobbed up,” I said.
“Huh, why’s that?”
“Because Hoover was running the bureau then. The Chicago mob blackmailed him with photos of him and Clive Tolson, the number-two man at the FBI.”
“Jack, that’s old shit, and nobody cares Hoover was a homo or a drag queen or whatever the fuck,” he said.
“He was a transvestite,” I said. “They used to call him J. Edna behind his back. You don’t know your bureau mythology, Pippin.”
“There you go again. Just when I think we got us a little rapport goin’ on, you have to go and say something like that.” He shook his head at me, an errant pupil who missed the lesson in the parable. Except that I hadn’t: fingerprints. Mine. He intended to nail me on them.
We parked behind the court house and walked to the sheriff’s office in the adjacent building. He introduced me to the polygrapher and said he would wait for me downstairs.
“How soon will I have the results?” I asked.
He just stared at me and trotted out his best blaccent for the reply: “Ya’ll know when you’re tellin’ a fib, don’t you?”
I was in the room for forty-seven minutes before the polygrapher came in. He had that faraway, worried look some professionals get. He sniffed like a prairie dog and mumbled his name but didn’t offer to shake my hand. When it was over, he folded the sheets and left me sitting there with the blood-pressure cuff still attached. Pippin strode into the room as if on cue and undid my cuff. “Let’s go.”
When we were outside, he said, “You mind if I axe you somethin’?”
“You can drop the ghettospeak, Forzell. I know that you were Phi Beta Kappa and Columbia Law wasn’t filling a racial quota when they admitted you.”
“How did-”
“Hillbilly towns have libraries and computers too,” I said and got out of the car in the back of the lot.
I was starving. The overpass exchange was a hub of fast-food franchises, which was like Tantalus�
�� situation. I wanted to walk down the aisle of a supermarket and see real food. The night air was cold enough to raise gooseflesh on my arms.
“My man said he’s never seen anything like that reading. You made a casserole out of the test questions and the base questions both. How did you do it? Some convict trick, right, like drinking a couple Coca-Colas, swallow some aspirin, maybe?”
I stretched and heard vertebrae crack all the way down my spine. “I answered the questions,” I said.
“I promised myself I wasn’t going to lose my temper with you again,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Maybe some people control their emotions better,” I said.
“You mean, like some woodpeckers get headaches and some don’t?”
I watched him drive off. I saw the stars overhead. The autumn sky was shifting the constellations into the new tangents and angles of the autumnal rotation in sidereal time. The headlights ahead disappeared in the traffic.
“It’s like this,” I said to the empty elevator. “You take one rogue, insane CIA agent and you turn him loose on a couple boys. Then you count the ways he can fuck with their minds.”
From my tiny balcony, I gazed at the night sky wheeling overhead as it had for millennia and would until our second-rate star collapsed in on itself, all fuel spent. Sodium lights and smog from the plastics factories and power plants near the shoreline obscured everything but the brightest of stars and turned part of the horizon orange. High up, just beneath Polaris, Altair, Deneb and Vega reformed their isosceles triangle. The sizzling din of traffic below the overpass on Interstate 90 took my thoughts away from the stars back down to this planet, this flyspeck rock in a vast, dark universe of emptiness and cold.
I wondered how far my brother had motored since that morning. I wondered how long I was going to last this time without somebody else putting some kind of cuff on me. Stamina – wasn’t that Marija’s word?
#30
“I want to see you,” she said. “I’m downstairs in the lobby.”
I didn’t recognize the voice right away. I told her I’d be right down. I checked the time: ten oh-seven. I had sated my ravenous hunger with more bags of greasy snack food and felt the clot in my protesting stomach.
Alicia Fox-Whitcomb wasn’t dressed for work either. She wore a beige pants suit with a casual look that belied her curves. The pendulum of my sexualized mind put her in the middle with Sarah in her faded Levi’s at one end and Marija – wanton, sans clothes, and brazen in her sexuality – at the other.
There was something I liked about the woman the first time I saw her – the regal walk, maybe, something indefinable; she wasn’t attractive or fine-boned or even aging gracefully for that matter. Words like ‘class’ and ‘grace’ seemed too remote.
She cut me a quick smile when I exited the lobby elevator and then, as before, it disappeared and remade itself into a bland corporate stare.
“We can have coffee and talk here,” I said. The motel offered a miniature comfort room, or whatever their brochures called a nook where you could eat a stale donut and drink their watery coffee. I took a rubbery Danish from the tray and set it back down.
She glanced around the room and dismissed it. “Let’s walk outside,” she said.
The sun was high and the air had that fall tang without letting go of summer, the between-times feeling that life gives you sometimes when you remember all the promises you failed to keep.
“I’m leaving,” she said.
“Ohio or your job?”
“Both, everything,” she said. “My family, too.”
“I see,” I said. I didn’t. I expected this to be payback, an overdue delivery on a promissory note when she spat in my face. She was here to point me out and Pippin would leap from behind the next hedge with a pair of shiny handcuffs.
We were close to the overpass exit where the traffic below was starting to affect the decibel level of our conversation. Crows in some poplar trees on the Austinburgh side of the freeway communicated in their cree-caw dialect above the din. Why was it called a murder of crows? My unfocused mind drifted with a dull fascination at everything and nothing. I was blitzing too many brain cells with beatings and booze. And mostly I was enervated from the sheer tension of waiting for more violence to seek me out. Sarah’s grandmother had died in the rehab center out here; we used to bring her favorite Finnish casseroles. Captain John Brown, with his flaming red beard, struggled on a homestead not far from here before his abolitionist obsession told him to stockpile weapons in his barn for the coming slaughter.
“We’re going away together,” Alicia said.
I knew she didn’t mean her husband by that. Once again, I pictured the woman scolding and cursing me from Danko’s driveway.
“We’re in love,” she said. “We’ve been in love for years,” she said. A wisp of hair blew across her forehead. She gave off a lavender scent that seemed right for the time and the place.
“Love,” I repeated. I didn’t know what else to say.
“You haven’t asked me why I haven’t identified you,” she said. “That’s the one question anyone in your situation should want to know first.”
“Would you feel any better if I said it kept me up at night?”
“No, not really, Mister Trichaud.”
“I think, after all that’s happened, we should be on a first-name basis by now.”
“You’re an odd man, Jack.”
“People keep saying that. They’re probably right.”
I had not said a word to her inside her house on that awful day. I wasn’t going to insult her by saying I was sorry.
“I met her on the internet three years ago. I can’t live without her. She loves me too.”
“Have you-”
“Have I told my family? Yes – and no. We’ve been planning to tell our families this for a long time... and then – and then Phil, that’s Emma’s husband, when he got called up for that thing in Afghanistan, and then you three showed up and threatened to ruin us by revealing our... secret.”
“I know,” I said.
“Nothing’s gone right since that day. It’s as if I – none of us – can move on with our lives.”
The traffic was a softer roar below us. “I’ve given two weeks’ notice at work. We’re leaving for California at the end of the month.”
I nodded. Why make this revelation – confession? – to me, I wondered.
Maybe my expression made her laugh, but it was a bitter laugh. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this before I’ve told Brandi or David.”
She faced me directly.
“Why haven’t you turned me in?” I asked. “There’s an FBI agent who’s playing cat-and-mouse with me, but that’s going to end soon,” I said.
“Will you be going to prison?”
“I assume so. They take a dim view of kidnapping and armed robbery in this state.”
How had my fool of a brother ever thought this woman was the kind who fell for the Stockholm syndrome?
She brushed hair out of her face. I noticed her wedding band was off. “That FBI agent. He even calls me at work about you.”
“I was part of what put you and your family through a nightmare that no one should have to experience,” I said.
“Will it help if I say I won’t forgive you?”
“Maybe.”
“I notice you haven’t formally said you’re sorry for it.”
I stopped and looked down at the two lanes, the filthy tops of semis whistling past, and wished I was joining them.
“Because you saved Brandi,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“My husband told me about it.”
I remembered looking once into her husband’s face and seeing his eyes pleading with me, but that was just a flicker and it was gone.
“The agent told me about this Randall Calderone. He said we were lucky to get out alive, all of us.”
“I won’t disagree with that,” I said.
>
Pippin told me that the next time Calderone saw a judge he’d get one of those Buck Rogers sentences where he’d be released in the twenty-fifth century if they didn’t stick him with a lethal injection, which is the more likely.
“He – David – said that Calderone was going to take Brandi upstairs. He said he looked into that bastard’s face and he knew what he was going to do.”
Carlos was too stoned to even notice what was going to happen.
“You stopped him, you stopped him...”
Then she cried, and I held her in my arms and tried to tell her I was so sorry, so very sorry. She sobbed in my arms like a mother, not a businesswoman or a wife. Just a mother whose child had experienced a terrible ordeal and come so close to a much worse one.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said and smeared tears and makeup with the back of her hand. She took some kleenex out of her purse and wiped her face clear of everything. “I had Brandi late in life. That doesn’t matter, does it? No one is prepared for it,” she said.
“No,” I agreed. None of us is prepared for any of it.
I remembered Calderone’s face close to mine, my hand grasping his wrist with the knife. He gave me that convict grin, flipped me the bird, and retreated back to the den, where he stayed until morning. I didn’t think Brandi or her father were aware of any of it.
“About the money-” I began.
“I’m not interested in the money,” she said. “We’re insured. Besides, the bank’s portfolio is over four billion annually.”
“So what happens now?”
“Once I’ve told my family and made arrangements with David, I’m never coming back here. I’m not wasting any more years of my life being unhappy. Brandi’s a young woman now. She’ll have to cope with... with this new arrangement,” Alicia said.
It was a conversation between a man and a woman overlooking a freeway overpass. No one observing would ever guess what mayhem lay beneath it.
She seemed to recover some of her steel. “Do you believe in God?”