by Shane Lusher
She would have laughed if she had much of a sense of humor. She wondered if she’d ever had one in the first place, what it would have been like if she hadn’t been adopted, if she’d just grown up in the home.
She wondered that sometimes, but most times she just didn’t give a shit.
She liked her sense of humor the way it was.
There was no wind, but the corn made noise anyway. She crouched down and listened. Crickets, and there, underneath their noise, a sound like muffled popping. She wiped the sweat from her eyes and peered along the rows, toward the town. She could not see the lights in the trailer, down here between the lines of growing things, but she knew where it was.
After a minute or two, she stood up and began walking, the sound of her work boots muffled in spite of the cracking earth. Through the tassels of the corn, off to her left, she could see the light on the pole in the middle of Horton's barnyard, fruit bats flitting in and out of the glow.
It was ten o’clock, but no one was awake. She knew that even without being able to see the farm itself. The only thing she had to worry about was coyotes, and they were cowards anyway, unless they came in a bigger group.
She'd thought for a long time about what to do. Sweeney had been one thing; his hatred, his yellow-black despising of the world that had eventually leached into her. The only thing left for him had been death.
Her mother and father had been yet another thing, but somehow the same. They’d had to go so that she could survive, so that she could continue to be. So that she didn’t wind up like Sweeney.
This was another thing entirely. This was a liability, something that just turned up in the course of events. His living meant danger, and getting found out, and his death meant safety. And she’d killed like this before, anyway.
Still, there was no passion in it.
She stood up and looked beyond the trees across the darkened, mangy lawn to the trailer, and then marched off across the yard and stood on her tiptoes to peer into the window.
He was sitting on his rotten couch, his mouth working, his tongue flitting in and out like a lizard, his hands moving around his jaw. He was meth’d out, staring at the television like it held all the answers in the world, unknowing that she held the only answer he’d ever get right there, in her hand.
There was music pulsating through the door, loud, grinding. She unzipped the bow case and took out the arrow and then put her hand on the doorknob.
It took him a long moment. She looked straight at his face, ignoring the filth of rotting garbage and the stench of the backed up toilet, willing him to raise his eyes and meet her stare.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
Twelve
I crunched over the limestone gravel parking lot and up the wooden steps to the door of the bar.
There had most likely been a building here, on the edge of Tremont, since the town’s inception, but the current clapboard structure could have been anywhere from fifty to a hundred years old. It was timeless, but only because it continued to exist. The Crossroads had never turned much of a profit, and Old Ross, the owner, was perpetually coming out of retirement to take over running the place when the most recent renter had gone belly up.
When I walked in to see Rassi slumped along the Formica countertop that counted as the bar, there was only one other patron, sitting at the end, a man in his forties with a mustache, his face glued to a billiards tournament on a television with the sound turned down.
I sidled up next to Rassi and sat down. He looked up at me and clapped his hand on my shoulder before hunching over again. He waved his glass of beer in my direction without looking up, and took a long swallow.
“I threw all my cards on the table,” he mumbled.
“Okay,” I said.
Old Ross walked over.
“What can I get you?” he asked.
Ross was as timeless as the building itself. He could have been sixty-five, he could have been ninety.
“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” I said, pointing at Rassi and placing a pile of ones on the bar.
“You mean six beers and just as many shots?”
I raised my eyebrows and said, “I’ll just have a beer.”
Ross nodded and filled a frosted eight ounce glass from the freezer. He set it down in front of me and then extracted a one from my pile of cash before moving down to watch the pool game on the television.
“I’m a shitty investigator,” Rassi said. “I showed all my cards.” He leaned forward onto his elbows and rubbed his eyes.
I took a sip from my glass and looked off behind the bar at the row of dusty bottles of bottom-shelf liquor. “What are you talking about?”
“I came clean about giving you the Roe and Sweeney files. Told Dubois about it.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering why that would have made Dave seem so cut up. “No big deal. I’ll take them back in tomorrow.”
“He took me off the case,” he said. “Suspended me, actually.” He waved at Ross, who walked over and pulled another beer from the tap.
“What?” I asked. “Wait a minute. You guys only have three detectives. Why would he do that?”
Rassi looked at me, and when Ross set down the beer he grabbed a hold of it with both hands.
“Two detectives,” he said. “Now I’m out. Now we only have one. Percy.”
He shrugged and took a drink. It struck me, not for the first time, that he’d been given too much responsibility at too young an age, in spite of the maturity and shrewdness that made him seem older. Now he looked ten years younger, all his swagger and confidence gone the way of a snap decision made by a superior officer. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had to be more to it than that.
“Why would he throw you out?” I asked. “He needs you.”
“He said I compromised the investigations,” he said.
I turned to my beer. In the mirror at the back of the bar, I could see him looking at me. He was waiting for something.
“What about me?” I asked. “Am I out, too?”
“Nah,” Rassi said. “You’re still in. Wayne Trueblood wants you there, you’re going to be there.”
“That’s good,” I said. He was still looking at me. “But it still doesn’t make sense. Is there something else? Something you’re not telling me?”
Rassi was silent.
“What has Dubois got on you?” I asked.
“He's more pissed off about Sweeney.”
“Because you let me look at the file?”
He shook his head and smiled a grim, sad look. “He's pissed off because I want to do something about it.”
I kept quiet and nursed my beer. I’d discovered that the best way to get people to tell you something was to shut up and let them talk.
“Dubois thinks that we should just ignore it,” Rassi continued. “He's only pissed off you were there because he doesn't want any of this getting out.”
“How can you ignore a murder?”
Rassi rubbed his face again. “We did it with Roe,” he says.
“What do you mean, you did it with Roe? Tad was on that one,” I said.
“Yeah, and with Tad gone, now he just wants to file Roe and Sweeney away as cold cases.”
I shook my head. “This doesn’t make any sense, Dave,” I said. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
“Nothing. I—that’s it. Dubois says, someone kills a druggie, and why should he do anything about it? Most people could care less.”
“Well,” I said, “He’s probably right on that one.”
“I mean, it’s not like they’re related to Wayne Trueblood,” Rassi said. He paused and then turned to look at Ross.
“Two more shots of whiskey, please,” he said, pointing back and forth between me and him.
“Just one,” I called out. “I'm driving.”
The other patron down at the end of the bar glanced over from his riveting game of billiards and snickered.
“Like anybody's go
nna pull you guys over,” he said.
“Fucking small towns,” I said, just loud enough for Rassi to hear.
Rassi looked over at the man and then dropped his voice a notch.
“Dubois is pissed because we don't have any leads about the Trueblood murders,” he said.
“We? I just got the case this afternoon,” I said.
“Okay, me,” he said. “He’s pissed off because you got in on it.”
“Well, he didn’t exactly make a secret of that,” I said. “Besides, Trueblood is his baby, right? He's the one who dropped the ball.”
“Yeah,” Rassi said. The whiskey arrived, and Ross had barely picked up the dollar bill before Rassi had downed the shot.
“The thing about eight ounce beers,” he said. “You can drink a lot of them and you never seem to get drunk.” His head wobbled around and he looked me in the eye. He seemed about to say something, but then he turned away.
Ross shuffled over. He gestured with the cigarette in his hand. “You guys watch the place while I step out?”
“What, you think I'm gonna take a freebie?” the patron at the other end of the bar said.
“I ain't talkin' 'bout you, Mike,” Ross said and turned around, hobbling toward the back entrance. He half-turned toward us, his glass eye catching up just as he began to speak.
“You know,” he said, “The only thing I got from the smoking ban was robbed?”
“Robbed?” I asked.
“I was out back having one and I didn't hear the bell. Somebody came in and took a couple of bottles of alcohol.”
“Good thing it wasn't the cash register,” Rassi said.
Ross grunted. “Would've been better if they'd taken that. That booze was worth more'n what's in the register.”
He leaned against the wall.
“The thing is, place like mine, hardly anybody ever comes in here and that's okay. But most everybody doesn't smoke at home any more. The main reason they come here is so they can do that.”
“Yup,” Mike at the bar said.
“Well,” Rassi said. “You could close down, declare the place a private club. Print cards and stuff like that.”
“Yeah,” Ross said. He tossed his hands and turned to leave. “You guys could look the other way, too. Like they all did during Prohibition.”
“Dave,” I said after Ross had left. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
Rassi sighed. “I told Dubois we needed to start checking out what Tad was into before he died. I told him about Roe talking to him.”
“He didn’t know about that?” I asked.
“Didn’t, or pretended not to,” Rassi said.
“What was Tad looking into?” I asked.
“That’s just it. I don’t know. You think I asked you to look into it just because I like you? I figured you’d go all out, if you wanted to solve your brother’s murder.”
I lowered my voice, trying to get him to do the same.
“So, you don’t think it was Alisha Stamm?”
He looked at me. “I think she pulled the trigger,” he said. “I think the why part is more important.” He twisted his beer glass in the ring on the bar. “Shit, man, what am I going to do?” He lowered his head.
Ross came back in and stood in front of us.
“I got to have another drink,” Rassi said.
“No,” I said and looked at Ross. “We need to get out of here.”
I glanced at my watch. Ten-thirty.
“Can we leave our cars in the parking lot until tomorrow?” I asked Ross.
“Where you going?” he asked. “You gonna call a taxi, or something?”
“No, we’re going to walk back to my place,” I said.
“You’re a mile and a half away,” he said.
“He needs some air,” I said.
Ross nodded. “No problem. Shit, park a whole fleet out there, all I care. You get Dave home without him killing himself or somebody else, you’ll probably save me a lawsuit.”
Mike at the end of the bar snickered again.
“Besides,” Ross said as I opened the door. “If I got more cars out there, the chances are higher that more people’ll stop in.”
Rassi opened up his car and got in, but I pulled on his arm.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“We’re walking,” I said. “I’m too drunk to drive and you need to sober up.”
He started to protest, but then he followed me around the back and out across the soybean field behind the Crossroads, the lights at Grzanich’s farm across the road from mine flickering spots in the distance.
“Talk to me,” I said. “No bullshit, now.”
“Dubois took me off the case,” he said. “Did I tell you that?”
“Forget about that for now,” I said. “Just start at the beginning.”
Tad had been looking into certain people in the county, Rassi began. He’d found out several things that didn’t add up. The murders had taken on less and less of a priority as he investigated something he hadn’t been willing to reveal to Rassi.
“What kind of ‘things’?” I asked.
“He never told me.”
“So that’s what he said, ‘Some things are bothering me’?”
“Tad was like that,” he said, “He wasn’t exactly the talkative type.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but then shut it. Rassi was right. Tad generally kept to himself, unless he was with his daughter, or with me, and then he never talked about what he did for a living. Not even after I’d made a little bit of a name for myself in Chicago and Tad must have come to realize I knew a little bit more about police work than what you got from television.
“He never made you feel like you were his partner,” Rassi said. “Which I wasn’t, not by a long shot. I never could measure up, you know?”
“What do you have to say, Dave?” I asked. We stopped, standing in the rut between two rows of beans. “There’s nobody out here. Now say it. I’m getting tired of dicking around.”
“Tad told me something the day he died,” Dave said. “Right before he got shot, actually.”
I looked at him, but there was no moon and his face was obscured in the darkness. “Wait,” I said. “When did you talk to him?”
“I was on the phone with him when he got shot,” Rassi said. “He called me-”
“Wait,” I said again, “You were actually speaking to him when Stamm shot him?”
“Yes,” he said, and started walking again, quickening his pace.
I caught up with him. “Why didn’t you say-”
“Just listen to me,” he hissed. He was out of breath. “We were talking on our private phones. Tad called to tell me he had something. Said it wasn’t good for him to withhold the information any longer. Then he happened upon Alisha Stamm.”
“Did you hear everything?” I asked.
“All the way through to the first gunshot,” he said. “But before that, we were on the phone for about five minutes. He said if something happened to him, then everything I needed to know was at his house.”
“Where?” I asked.
“That was as far as he got,” he said, stopping abruptly.
“I don’t buy this whole thing, Dave,” I said. “Nobody asked who he was talking to when he got shot? Did you follow up?”
He ignored me. “Nobody asked,” he said finally, and started walking again.
I brought him up short, held an arm out so that he had to stop.
“Who killed my brother, Dave?” I asked. I could just make out his silhouette.
“Alisha Stamm killed your brother, you stupid shit,” he slurred.
“Go to hell,” I said.
“You think I’d be telling you all of this if I knew who killed him?”
“So you don’t think Stamm did it,” I said.
“She did it,” Rassi said, “No chance anybody else did. They were alone on the street.”
“You sure?”
“I know.
I also know that she wasn’t alone on it. What I mean is, she was physically the only person on that street. Her fingerprints were on the gun. Nobody else was around to shoot him. But somebody must have put her up to it.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. We were a hundred yards away from the turnoff into the farm.
“Because right before she shot him Tad said something.”
“What was that?”
“He said ‘Jesus, they’re going to kill me.’”
“What?” I said.
“Wait, there’s something else,” Rassi said, but then he stopped.
Headlights were coming down the lane, driving away from the farm. We picked up our pace as a car turned left on Franklin Street and drove away from us, toward Springfield Road.
Thirteen
We’d both sobered up considerably once we got to the house. Whoever we’d seen leaving had been inside, and judging by the condition things were in, whoever it was had gone through everything. Papers were strewn across the floor in the kitchen, the drawers in the bedroom were open, my suits thrown in a pile in the corner, the door to the bathroom medicine cabinet hung haphazardly by one hinge.
I checked the safe in the basement. It was still locked, its contents undisturbed. My Diamond Ben laptop was open on the desk in my office, but I couldn’t be sure if I had left it that way when I finished work on Monday or not.
I booted it up and logged in, but a quick check showed that everything appeared to be in order.
“He came in here,” Rassi called out from the basement bedroom.
I went in and stood next to him at the fire escape window. He pointed at a single footprint in the dirt outside.
“I left it open,” I said, remembering I’d opened the windows during my earlier battle with the air conditioning.
Rassi was fingering some residue on the windowsill. “Latex,” he said. “They were wearing gloves. You wouldn’t even get any prints. Anything missing?”
“Not that I can tell,” I said.
“Well, they were looking for something,” he said.
“You think?” I asked and went into the kitchen in the basement to get a Diet Coke. I changed my mind and got out a bottle of bourbon and poured myself three fingers.