Falls the Shadow

by William Lashner

  “What is it exactly you’re doing here again?” said Jim.

  “Your brother is involved in a very delicate mission,” I said, somewhat truthfully.

  “What kind of mission?” said Jim.

  “Oh, I can’t disclose anything more. You both understand, I’m sure, what with the current climate.”

  “He’s into something, isn’t he?” said Jim. “Bobby was always into something. He liked to play with knives, poking and prodding. Does he still do that?”

  “In his way, yes,” I said. “But in order to allow him to handle the sensitive matters which I’ve already described, we are required to do a customary background check. It’s quite usual. I just wanted to come to his boyhood home and find out if his childhood was normal.”

  “Normal?” said Jim. “What the hell’s that?”

  “You know, baseball, birthday parties, that sort of thing.”

  “There’s never been nothing normal here,” said Jim.

  “But Bobby did like baseball, Jim, you remember,” said Fran. “In the afternoons he used to sit in the backyard listening to the games on his transistor radio. He said, with the play-by-play and the cheers from the ballpark, it was like sitting in the bleachers.”

  “I ain’t cared much for baseball,” said Jim, “not since they kicked away the pennant that year.”

  “Don Young,” I said, nodding.

  “Don’t get me started on Don Young,” he said.

  “What we’re especially curious about,” I said, “is whether or not there were any childhood traumas that might affect Bobby’s performance on his mission.”

  Jim squinted at me for a moment before looking at his sister, who gazed back with tenderness.

  Just then another grunt from upstairs.

  “You feed him yet?” said Jim softly.

  “He spit up most of the oatmeal,” said Fran, “but enough stayed in to keep him till supper.”

  “What are you giving him for supper?”

  “Oatmeal.”

  Jim laughed. He didn’t look so much like his brother, but they had the same laugh. Fran, on the other hand, was Dr. Bob in drag.

  “You said you wanted some tea?” Fran said to me.

  “That’s right, ma’am,” I said.

  “How do you take it?”

  “Just a little sugar.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, remaining solidly on the couch, her raised slipper still twitching back and forth. “I like a little sugar, too.”

  “So you want to know about childhood traumas?” said Jim, taking out another cigarette, lighting it with his Bic. “Well, let me tell you, mister. You come to the right place.”

  It was the father, Virgil, at the center of the story. With his own father and mother and spinster sister, he had come up to Chitown from the hills of Appalachia as part of a famous migration north from coal country. There was a whole community in a part of the city called Uptown, mostly poor and struggling, but Virgil didn’t come up north to live the same life he had fled. He found a good job, ventured out into the city, met a pretty Polish girl on the elevated line one afternoon. Her name was Magda, Maggie, and she fell for his tricky accent and rawboned good looks. When he popped the question a month later, she was only too thrilled to get out of the stifling atmosphere of her father’s house with her seven brothers. Virgil’s factory job paid enough so that eventually he could buy a house south of Uptown, just a few blocks from the baseball field, and he and Maggie started a family. First Jim, then Franny, and finally, almost as an afterthought, little Bobby.

  “It’s like the American Dream made real,” I said.

  “Maybe,” said Fran, “except Daddy never was the dreamy type.”

  He was a hard man, he worked hard, drank hard, was hard on his family. If the children misbehaved, they got the back of his hand. If they spilled their milk, they got the back of his hand. If they breathed wrong after he had been drinking, they got worse than that. And he was harder on Maggie.

  “It wasn’t really his fault,” said Fran. “He was just born in a different place. He didn’t know no better. He used to tell us that was the way his daddy treated his mommy, too.”

  “But his mommy lived till she was eighty-nine,” said Jim.

  “True,” said Fran. “Got to give her that.”

  It might have been easier if Maggie just took it, like Jim and Franny took it, but that wasn’t her way. She had a temper, too, and she liked her drink, too, and as she got older, she turned more than sturdy. Sometimes they would go at it for hours, the fight ranging over the whole of the house, pots flying, vases, invective screamed in two languages. In the middle of it all, the children would hide in the darkness of a closet, peeking out the crack of a barely opened door, helpless as their world imploded in on itself. Jim had learned that if he got in the middle, he would get hell, not just from his father but from his mother also, so he kept out of it, and he kept the others out of it, too.

  “It wasn’t so hard keeping Franny in that closet,” said Jim, “but Bobby, he was a troublemaker.”

  Little Bobby was more like his mother. He wouldn’t simply accept getting hit by his father as would Jim and Franny. Instead he would reflexively strike back whenever his father smacked him, and even though his blows had no real effect, they only made his father hit back harder. He was the youngest, but of the three children, he was the most battered. And when the three were hiding in the closet, with the cage match going on throughout the house, he was the one who wanted to run out and defend his mama.

  “The little fool was small for his age,” said Jim. “An eight-year-old midget thinking he was going to stop them two. You know, when they got like that, they weren’t aware of nothing but each other. They would of killed him, he tried to get in the middle. So I held him back best I could. Sometimes he struggled so much I had to tie a rope around him to keep him from running out and doing something stupid.”

  “How long did this go on?” I said.

  “Until it stopped,” said Jim.

  A groan from upstairs, a banging on the wall.

  “Shut up, you,” yelled Franny. “I’ll change your pan when I’m good and ready. Didn’t I tell you we got a guest?”

  “He still can be demanding,” said Jim cheerfully. “But he ain’t forty no more.”

  “Wouldn’t matter much even if he was,” said Fran, “the way half his body don’t work and he lost his speech.”

  “Thank God for that,” said Jim.

  “Why did it stop, the fighting?” I said.

  “He killed her, that’s why,” said Jim. “Stuck a knife in her neck.”

  “Sad,” said Fran. “It was Bobby who found her.”

  Came home from fishing. To find his mother. Dead. On the floor. He was ten. This was just after the Cubs collapse in ’69, the last baseball season any of them cared about. He rode his bike home from the lake, pulled up to the porch, left it there as he pushed open the front door. And saw the blood.

  “Daddy got out after twenty years,” said Fran. “Parole, on account of his condition. We was still here, still in the house. He moved right back in, thought it would be the same. But it wasn’t.”

  A groan, a bang, and then a thump as if a sack of sand had landed on the floor.

  “Sometimes he thrashes about so much,” said Fran, “he falls right out of his bed.”

  “You going to go haul him back up?” said Jim

  “I will eventually. But first I’d like some tea. Would you like some tea, mister?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m really not thirsty, and I do have to be going.”

  “You got what you needed?” said Jim.

  “Pretty much,” I said, standing.

  “Our Bobby passed the test?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  A groan from upstairs, a single fist pounding the floor.

  “You’ll tell Bobby to visit, won’t you?” said Fran.

  “Sure I will.”

  “We’d love to see him. And I
’m certain he’d like to see his daddy. It’s been a long time since he’s seen his daddy.”

  “You tell him we think of Mama every day,” said Jim.

  “I will.”

  When I got to the doorway, I stopped and turned around. There they sat, brother and sister, watching the actors pretend to have lives on the television. I thought of their mother, dead and bloody on the floor, and I flashed on a photograph that had become all too familiar, a photograph of another woman lying dead and bloody on another floor.

  “Can I ask one more question?” I said.

  “Go ahead,” said Jim.

  “Where was she when Bobby found her?”

  “Upstairs,” said Jim, “in the bedroom.”

  “On the same floor where Daddy’s lying now,” said Fran.

  “There was blood all over everything,” said Jim. “The couch, the rug”—he indicated toward the parlor couch and rug as if they were the very same—“and then there was a trail of blood up the stairs. Bobby followed it up, followed it into the bedroom. That’s where he found her, sprawled dead on the floor. The knife was in her neck up to the hilt.”

  “It wasn’t no mystery who done it,” said Fran. “They found blood on his clothes and his shoes. Daddy even admitted it. Almost like he was proud of it. She had it coming, he said.”

  “But still, what Bobby found in her hand was pretty damn interesting,” said Jim. “Like she had climbed up them stairs just to fetch it.”

  “A photograph of her husband,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Jim. “How’d you know that?”

  Just then there was a groan from upstairs and a strange swishy sound.

  “Oh, my,” said Fran. “Daddy wet the floor again.”

  59

  In the interstices of the American landscape, we have built our cathedrals. Upon useless wedges of real estate they sprawl, upon the trash-strewn boundaries between one exurb and the next, upon land fit neither for human nor for beast. Squat, rectangular, with cinder-block wall and steel door, the monuments of our age have risen to embrace the very stuff of the American dream. And what is that exactly? Why, stuff itself.

  E-Zee Self Store sat just off a highway near the town of Exton, Pennsylvania. I stood before the red corrugated-steel door of unit 27 as the hiss and vroom of highway traffic rose and fell behind me. Weeds to the left of me, desolation to the right, here I was, officially nowhere. Exton. But behind the red steel door, I believed, might be a message from a murderer.

  It was on the plane home from Chicago, with the stink of the Pepper household still in my nose and the certainty in my gut that Dr. Bob had killed Leesa Dubé, that I realized the message might exist. I was sitting back in the seat, arms folded, trying to figure it all out, the whole horrid story, when I felt this jabbing in my chest. I ignored it as best I could as I struggled to come up with an explanation for why Dr. Bob would murder Leesa Dubé. Had she betrayed him in some way? Had she rejected him somehow? Had she failed to floss?

  None of it made much sense, except that he had done it. It wasn’t François, it wasn’t Velma, it wasn’t the mythical Clem, it was Bob. The similarities were too similar to be a coincidence, two murders that somehow involved Bobby Pepper, the picture of the murderous husband gripped in the murdered wife’s hand. It was his way to deflect blame, almost a reflexive action. How do you frame the husband for a murder you committed? Reach into your past, pull out a trick. Yes, Dr. Bob had killed Leesa Dubé, but why?

  Blaming the murder on the dead woman’s dentist, without a motive, wasn’t going to help François, it was just going to make us all look desperate and pathetic. I needed a why. I sat back in my seat and crossed my arms and let the question rattle about my brain. Even as I felt something jab into my chest, I ignored the pain and tried to think it through.

  There was an image I couldn’t shake, hadn’t been able to shake since I left that sad Chicago house, and I let it overwhelm me for a moment. The three Pepper children hiding in the closet as the fights between father and mother rage. And little Bobby Pepper, peering out the crack of the door, wanting to step in and stop it, wanting to save his mother from the brutality of his father, wanting to do something. Yet stopped, stopped by his older brother, tied up to stop him, helpless within the closet, watching his life tear itself apart. I like to help, he often said, and suddenly you could understand why. But what did that have to do with Leesa? Was she stopping him somehow? Was she threatening to tell about something? What? Why had he killed her? It again all came down to the why. Sitting in that plane, I thought it through, and I came up with, and I came up with…

  Nothing. Not a damn thing. Except for the point that was jabbing into my chest. I uncrossed my arms, reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out a thin piece of metal.

  The key that had been sent to me as if I had lost it, except it had never been mine. I held it in my hand and turned it over and again. The bronze caught a shard of sunlight from the window and threw it straight into my eye. I had mentioned to Whit that I was worried about Beth, and next thing you know Dr. Bob was telling me all about Beth’s painful past. I had mentioned to Whit that I was wondering about François’s missing stuff, and lo and behold, as soon as my Clem defense crumbles, like a message from on high comes a key. I held it out in front of me and looked at it closely, as if maybe it had an answer for everything. And surprise, surprise, maybe it did.

  E-ZEE.

  With that key in my hand, I leaned down and unlocked the padlock of E-Zee Self Store unit 27. I pulled up the door and stepped inside and switched on the light and closed the door behind me and found myself smack in the middle of a puzzle.

  The space was about the size of a two-car garage, with cinder-block walls and a cement floor. Stuff was massed in dusty piles, all kinds of stuff, cartons, couches, a brass lamp with its pleated shade askew, spotted mattresses along with their box springs, pots and pans, strange masks, big copper bowls, a computer, a headboard, leaning towers of books, a large ceramic Dalmatian. But it wasn’t the amount of the junk in the piles that surprised—indeed, the amount was just what I expected, create a space for junk in America and America will fill it—but it was the way the piles were formed. Everything was jammed up against the walls, stacked high in teetering heaps that reached almost to the ceiling, so that in the middle of the unit was created a clearing.

  And in that clearing, like a tableau of the ordinary in an avant-garde museum, was situated a La-Z-Boy chair and a six-pack of beer and a television and a VCR, the latter two connected to an extension cord that ran up to the light fixture in the ceiling.

  Now, this was most peculiar. All of the contents of the unit, including the chair and television and beer, were covered in the same layer of dust, so nothing had been moved or touched in years. But why was this chair here, this television and VCR, the beer? Someone with a key had pushed everything to the walls and set up the television for viewing. Who? When? For whose viewing? And for viewing what? And even if it was clearly set up this way long before I first met François Dubé, why did I feel as if it had all been set up for me?

  See what I mean about the puzzle?

  In the cleared area were two boxes, one cardboard and one wooden. I opened the cardboard box first and immediately recoiled. I knew now what Mrs. Cullen meant when she talked about toys. Harnesses and cuffs, rings and electrical devices with long dangling cords, a hodgepodge of bizarrely shaped phallic toys made of metal, plastic, silicone, leather, all well worn, all enough to make me sick to my stomach. So tell me this, is there anything more disgusting than someone else’s used sexual devices?

  I quickly closed it up and kicked it aside, then I stooped down to the wooden box, which sat beside the VCR. I lifted off the top. A box of videotapes, about twenty in all. I went through them, one by one. Fantasia? Sillyville? Magical Musical Mansion? Yes, tapes to keep the daughter happy when she came for a visit. Park her in front of the telly, press play, watch her pupils dilate.

  But there were other videos
, with less childlike names. Sodomania 36. Aim to Please. Sluts with Nuts 5. Succubus. Oh My Gush 7.And the ever-popular Bad Mama Jama. Nice. Let’s just hope he never intended to show his daughter Snow White and by accident slipped in Nubian Nurse Orgy instead.

  And then there were a series of videocassettes without preprinted labels or covers, cassettes with French words scrawled across white labels, some of the labels badly stained with spots of something that looked like coffee. At least I hoped it was coffee. Yuck. Home movies of birthday parties and the like or something a little less innocent, though no less staged? I remembered the inventory found in the apartment at the time of François’s arrest, the video camera with tripod and lights but no videos. Now here they were, waiting for me.

  I turned on the television, powered up the VCR, slipped in one of the self-labeled tapes. While I was waiting to see what was what, I sat down in the chair, pulled a beer from out of the cardboard six-pack holder, blew away the dust, twisted off the cap, took a whiff.

  Skunk city. Ugh.

  I twisted the cap back on, replaced it, leaned back in the La-Z-Boy, rested my shoes on the conveniently risen footrest.

  Static, then the swelling music and HBO logo indicating the showing of a feature presentation, then a blank screen for a moment, before a fixed shot of a bedroom appeared on the screen. I had never seen the bedroom before, but I recognized it right off, what with the same brass lamp with pleated shade, the same headboard, the same ceramic Dalmatian that stood in the piles pushed to the walls. François’s bedroom. No clap from the clapper, no shout of “Quiet on the set and…action,” but it wasn’t needed, was it? First there’s nothing but the bedroom, then an entrance from stage left.