by Tod Goldberg
“What do you want me to do about this DA who keeps calling?”
“Tell him to call me if he has any questions,” I said. “The family hasn’t asked for anything and it’s not his case.”
“You’ve got all the paperwork there?” Lizzie asked.
“Right in front of me,” I said. “I’ll sign off on it and get you a copy.”
“Would my dad have done this?” Lizzie asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if you should have.”
“Hawkins said that if there was a problem he’d take the blame,” Lizzie said. “Said that’s how it’s always worked here in Granite City. ‘Let the shit roll downhill,’ were his exact words.”
I thought then that my recollections of Lizzie’s father had grown opaque in my mind—my memories colored more for what I wished was always true than what actually was. We’d worked together for a long time, and time spares no one.
“Tell Hawkins I won’t forget this,” I said.
“Sheriff,” Lizzie said, “can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why’d you stay here all these years?”
After we hung up, I pulled out a piece of letterhead and scratched out a three-sentence letter of resignation. I held it in my hands and ran my fingers over every word, every period. I’d been the sheriff of Granite City for thirty-five years, and I’d never broken the law. I always did the legitimate thing, like telling men who beat their wives that they were going to hell when I didn’t even believe in God, and then letting them go on back home because the law said we couldn’t hold them. Like knocking on poor Gina Morrow’s door at three o’clock in the morning to tell her that her husband had been stabbed to death in a bar fight over another woman.
I’d always followed the letter of the law, no matter my opinion of it. What good did it do? Couldn’t I have lied to Gina Morrow and told her that her husband had been stabbed to death trying to protect an innocent woman’s honor? Couldn’t I have dragged some of those no-good wife beaters out behind the station and pounded them into submission, beaten them until they begged me to kill them?
And yet, there I was with my letter of resignation in my hand and an autopsy report on my desk. Inside both documents were lies. Inside the autopsy report, Dr. Lizzie DiGiangreco, whose dead father I had carried to his grave, stated that all four members of the Klein family had died of exposure and acute hypothermia. She further stated that all members of the family were fully intact—that all hands and feet were connected. An accidental death, no note of foul play.
In my official report, typed the night previous on my old Olivetti, I stated that it was my belief that the Klein family had succumbed during the night of October 10, 1998. The almanac noted October 10, 1998 as being the coldest day of the month during the coldest winter on record. Over a foot of snow fell that night.
Case closed.
Snow did fall in Granite City the night I quit, and though the roads were slick and runny, I called Lyle and asked him to meet me at Shake’s Bar. We sat for a long time in a small booth sipping beer and eating stale nuts. That next day I’d recommend to the mayor that Lyle be named interim sheriff, a post he would eventually keep for three years until he died from emphysema.
“You know what, Morris?” Lyle said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about just closing up shop and moving to Hawaii. You know I was stationed out there, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“In those days, I raised a lot of hell,” Lyle said. He had a faraway look in his eyes, and I thought maybe inside his head he was on liberty in Maui. “I don’t regret it, though. We all had to sow our oats at some point. Make bad decisions and then just close those chapters and move on.”
“I never really did that,” I said. “I’ve loved two women in my life, Lyle, and both of them are dead now. From day one, I’ve tried to do right. What has it gotten me?”
Lyle took a sip of beer and then coughed wetly. “I know that, Morris,” he said. “You did right by everyone, Morris. By everyone.”
Lyle took a final pull from his beer and stood up.
“You heading home?” I asked.
“Naw,” he said. “I thought I’d just take a drive through the streets; make sure no one’s stuck in the snow. You could positively die from the cold out there tonight.”
There was a twinkle in Lyle’s eye then, and I knew that he had seen my report, had seen Lizzie’s autopsy report, and that he didn’t care. That he knew I’d made a judgment call not based on the nuts and bolts of the law, but on how people feel inside, on the mechanics of the human heart.
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
Will
Richard expected that there would be a will reading, that somebody would call him a few days ahead of time—enough time, at least, for him to wrangle a decent pair of shoes for the event—with directions to one of those skyscrapers with reflective windows and orders on protocol. Don’t look anyone in the eye. Refer to everyone as sir. Do not wear jeans. It was the clothing aspect that had Richard most worried. Here he was, thirty-five years old, and he’d lost the ability to dress appropriately. Having money again would change that, Richard was certain, and if that meant feeling uncomfortable for one more afternoon, well, that was a length Richard was willing to go.
He even knew how the event would go down, more or less. He’d be ushered into a room lined with dark oak walls and walnut cabinets, and a man wearing an ascot would pull out a high-backed leather chair for him to sit in. The man in the ascot, who’d have a British accent, would say something like, “I am so very bloody sorry for your loss, lad; my own father’s heart was weak, too,” and would leave him be for a few minutes. Richard would sit there in the austere office and he’d try not to laugh. When was the last time he actually saw his father? 1992? He’d remember breaking into the house in 1995, but he wouldn’t dwell on that. He’d remember stealing his father’s Benz in 2002, but, again, why dwell? No, he’d just keep real calm, and when the lawyers or servants or strippers brought in the bags of cash he was inheriting, well, then he’d celebrate, catch a plane to Vegas, and start living, finally.
That’s how Richard figured it would happen. He even let his mustache grow so that, if need be, he could pluck out hairs from above his lip to produce tears or staunch smiles. So when the doorbell rang on the last Thursday of January and through the peephole he saw the same motherfucker who served him six months ago waiting with another envelope, he didn’t even bother to open the door.
“Get a real job, you fucking jackal,” Richard said through the door.
“It’s not like that this time,” the man said.
Richard knew that process servers were just normal people trying to make rent and feed their families, but it still rankled him that they should earn their livelihoods on his human suffering, even if his suffering was largely self-imposed. The last time this particular process server came for a visit he handed Richard a temporary restraining order from his own twin sister, Amy. Apparently, you call your twin sister a stupid cunt who doesn’t deserve the air she breathes and then you accidentally set her hair on fire when you flick your butt at her, the State of California views that as paramount to a death threat.
That Amy actually did die in a car accident a few weeks before the hearing was no recompense to Richard. He didn’t want her dead. Hell, he loved her, loved the memories of her he still had, the ones that lived inside of old pictures of the two of them in footsy pajamas and Rick Springfield songs and the smell of freshly cooked pretzels smothered in mustard. And there was the larger, genetic ache that still woke him up in the night; a kind of welling pain that felt like someone was trying to push all of his internal organs up into his chest. Somewhere along the line, things in Richard’s life had simply turned to shit. That little boy with the twin sister dancing to “Jessie’s Girl” had turned into the kind of guy that process servers remember explicitly, and though Richard couldn’t pinpoint the exact date of this shift, he non
etheless realized that, at thirty-five, with no family left and with no one who actually loved him more than they loved his car or his sofa or his ability to steal identities off the of the Internet for a fee, shit had to change. Shit had to get better. Shit had to stop being shit.
“Whatever you got,” Richard said, “I don’t need.”
“You don’t even have to sign for it,” he said.
Richard trolled through his mental Rolodex to see if there was anything he actually had pending legally and the fact was, since his sister’s and father’s passing, he’d felt it important to actually try. That was his buzzword: Try. Try to be good. Try not to fuck up. Try to do honor to the family name, though Richard truly never knew what that meant, apart from not embarrassing the dead, which seemed a ludicrous proposal; but in the wake of being the last living American branch of the Charsten tree, even Richard had to admit there was some psychic weight to it now.
When Richard finally opened the door he noted that the process server actually recoiled, and, for not the first time, he wondered when it was that people figured out he wasn’t someone you wanted to be terribly close to. Even if the process server was lying, well, he was going to try to be understanding of the world and let him do what he needed to do without violence or threats or spitting.
“Okay,” Richard said. “Here I am. Let’s get this done.”
The process server handed Richard a thick manila envelope that bore the watermark of one of his father’s numerous companies, this one the law firm that bore his name, and for a moment Richard got the same nauseous feeling he always got when he saw his father’s name in print, be it in the newspaper or on the Internet, as if his father’s name actually possessed eyes and could see Richard.
The process server was already walking away when Richard called out to him. “That’s it? Just this? Nothing else?”
“Your lucky day,” the process server said.
Luck, Richard Charsten III knew, was fickle. In his life, Richard reasoned that most of his luck had been inordinately bad, resulting, most likely, from being born into tremendous good. His father, Richard Charsten II, was a lawyer of such means that he eventually decided that owning baseball teams would be a decent hobby to occupy his down time, just like owning multinational shipping companies once had, and, before that, tinkering around with a small start-up coffee company in Seattle which still bore his nickname, Deuce’s, twenty years and fifteen hundred franchises later.
For the first seventeen years of his life, Richard basked in the remarkable luck of his birthright, knowing with perfect certainty that no matter how poorly he did in school, his father’s money was as firm as bedrock. There was the house in Maui, the house in Aspen, the house in Paris, the house in Los Angeles he actually considered home, and the house in New York that was only used to impress politicians and free-agent ball players. There were the glossy debutantes who always had the best intentions and lowest expectations of him, which he met with gusto, and there was even a small circle of other would-be heirs that he considered true friends, though that turned out not to be true once his circumstances changed. It seemed then to Richard that he’d turn eighteen and would simply matriculate into a better party at some red-brick university in the East for four years before taking a token post in one of Deuce’s companies. Life would continue in all its lavish glory until he eventually died of the clap or liver disease or another less enervating side effect of the good life.
He didn’t expect to be kicked out on his ass. But then Deuce probably hadn’t expected Richard to steal his credit cards, to crash three of his cars, to deal coke out of his home, to break into one of his offices in Los Angeles and throw a party. In retrospect, Richard understood why his father kicked him out, respected him for it even, because it takes a man to realize that his own son doesn’t measure up. Back then, though, Richard didn’t expect that he’d wake up on the morning of his eighteenth birthday to the sight of three men in Bekins shirts boxing his shit up. He didn’t expect that the next seventeen years would be punctuated by stints at four different community colleges, nearly three aggregate years locked up for various felonious acts, and two ex-wives, one whom he actually loved and one who actually loved him.
His twin sister, Amy, had been his lone champion most of those years, handling his cases, loaning him money, eventually even buying him his small apartment in Burbank so that he’d always have a place to live, even if he didn’t have the money to pay for electricity or water service. What Richard never could comprehend was why Amy hadn’t warned him about what was coming that morning of his eighteenth birthday, since he was sure she knew, because she’d always been the family consigliere.
The last time he saw Amy alive—the day he set her hair on fire—she’d just gotten him off with a small fine and time served for stealing the toner carriage out of a copy machine at Kinko’s, an important element needed in a counterfeit check scam he was working.
“I really appreciate your help,” Richard said. “That was a tight one.” They were sitting on a bench outside the courthouse in Van Nuys. It was November, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, and the air was damp and cold. Days like this always reminded Richard of being in Paris with Amy when they were kids, acting crazy in the streets surrounding Sacre Coeur, him already high at age twelve or thirteen, hanging out with artists and hash heads, acting cool; Amy just happy to watch out for him, the two of them such different species. Shit. Van Nuys. Like Paris in November. That was the kinda shit that made him steal.
“How did it feel sitting in County for two weeks for ink?” Amy said. “Ink. Unreal.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Richard began, but Amy cut him off before he could finish.
“You know, you’ll be forty in five years, and you still act like everything just shines right off of you.”
“I said thank you,” Richard said, standing up. He dug into his pocket and found a pack of smokes, lit one up and started walking away. This was a conversation they’d had before, and Richard knew enough that he didn’t want to have it again, especially since they had it at twenty-five and thirty as well. It was like a five-year warranty that expired directly after particularly stupid crimes.
“No,” Amy said, calling after him, “you didn’t say thank you. You said you appreciated my help. There’s a difference.”
Richard turned back and faced his sister then, startled to see she was near tears. “What do you want me to do, Amy?”
“Stop fucking up,” she said. “Stop being such a fuckup.”
He’d meant to flick his cigarette in resignation. He’d meant to flick it and walk off wordlessly, holding firm to the last bits of dignity he thought he possessed. Instead, standing there, he finally figured it out. Amy hadn’t told him what was coming that morning seventeen years earlier because she thought he deserved it. No. No. Needed it. And what good had come?
So he told his sister to stop being such a fucking cunt, to stop hogging all of the air with her sanctimonious bullshit, because better people deserved to breathe and that she should fuck off . . . and then he flicked his cigarette, and it landed in her hair, and now, three months later, he was sitting at his kitchen table needing her more than ever.
Spread out before Richard was the final will and testament of his dead father, Richard “Deuce” Charsten II, former owner of the Seattle Mariners, former shipping magnate, former coffee impresario; former living, breathing, cocksucker who booted his lone son out on his ass at eighteen in order to for his boy to “earn it on his own.” The good news, Richard saw, was that he was the rightful heir to approximately $250 million dollars, plus property and stock interests that nearly doubled that amount. Unfortunately, in order to claim his money, he’d need to handle one small bit of business in the next ten days that, Richard realized in sinking horror, was simply not possible. It was right there in plain legal English:
I give the rest of my estate (called my residuary estate) to my wife, Lenore. If she does not survive me, I give my residuary estate to thos
e of my children who survive me, in equal shares, to be divided among them and any descendants of a deceased child of mine, to take their ancestor’s share per stirpes. The following must be observed for my funeral and burial for the estate to be honored as such: 1. My body must be cremated within forty-eight hours of my death.
2. No autopsy must be performed unless required by the law of the land.
3. My ashes must be distributed along the first base line of the Seattle Kingdome within ten days upon the issuance of probate.
It heartened Richard that his father was so irresponsible that he actually failed to update his will since the death of Richard’s mother in 1996, though Richard figured old Deuce probably imagined he’d live forever and that the will was just something perfunctory to appease some estate planner in his firm.
The more pressing issue was that the Seattle Kingdome, in an act of tremendous grace, was imploded in 2000. From the outside, the Kingdome had looked vaguely space age—like a standing set from Logan’s Run had impregnated Space Mountain—but the inside was positively disco, right down to the hideous artificial turf that was basically cement covered with green fabric. Richard still had a scar on the small of his back from trying to slide on it in 1981, when he’d served as the Mariners’ batboy over the course of his tenth summer. It would have been fun if the players hadn’t hated his father so much, though not many other kids or adults could say they’d been spit on by men enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Reverie aside, Richard was smart enough to realize this was a big fucking problem. The idea of possessing his father’s ashes for any length of time was troubling enough, but the proviso that they be dumped inside the Kingdome was beginning to make him sweat behind his knees.
Well, he decided, he’d just do the right thing and call the person in charge, see what could be done, see if there was a deal to be made, try to make this work out well for everyone. He flipped to the front of the packet and reread the cover letter, which was, it seemed, a rather simple bit of correspondence signed by a lawyer named Calvin Woods. Richard pictured in his mind the kind of person Calvin Woods might be: probably about Richard’s age, probably of a similar caste (at least initially), and now probably just as dissatisfied with his life as Richard was. If there was one certainty Richard picked up during the last seventeen years, it was that everyone wanted something better or, alternately, everyone wanted something less so that they could get home at a decent hour, kick off their shoes, watch American Idol, and fall asleep on their own schedule.