It's a Crime: A Novel

by Jacqueline Carey

  “It’s outrageous, what they’ve gotten away with,” said Ruby. “We’re going to make them sorry.”

  Will wanted to laugh. She sounded awfully self-righteous, considering that her father was in jail and she was planning to break into an estate on the Jersey shore.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Late the next afternoon, after Pat and Virginia had left for the airport, Will found it hard to believe that he and Ruby would go through with their plan. For one thing, Ruby had disappeared. But soon she was back downstairs again, dressed in black, her hair braided and wrapped around her head. So Will changed into his new clothes, too. Then he went looking for something to cut out the weird tag at his waist and ended up making himself a sandwich with the pork left over from the night before, scraping off most of Chef Pete’s sauce.

  “We’ll take the Mustang,” he said, watching Ruby pick at the skin on her thumb. Pat wouldn’t mind if he drove the Touareg, wouldn’t even have noticed most likely. But Will’s Mustang—okay, Lemuel’s—could feel like a shooting cork.

  “I don’t think anybody will be mad at us,” said Ruby. She would not stop picking at her thumb.

  “We don’t have to go,” said Will.

  “Yes, we do,” she said. “We’ll be heroes. All the victims will thank us.”

  “Could be.”

  She was picking that skin raw.

  “Maybe you should eat something.”

  Ruby grabbed a bag of popcorn with rare obedience. “Virginia always makes me feel as if I’m about to commit a crime.”

  “Well?” said Will. “Aren’t you?”

  Ruby looked shocked for a moment, then giggled. “I guess so,” she said.

  The phone rang, and the caller ID spit out a fizzy sound.

  Ruby giggled again.

  Will looked at the handset and saw a string of consonants, followed by “Corp.”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” said the voice, which belonged to…Lemuel! “The flight takes a couple of hours, and we left Miami…When did we leave?” He was talking in a courtly fashion to someone next to him. “So when do we land? Of course I want another. I told you, you won’t be able to keep up with me.”

  Will broke in. “Okay, okay,” he said. “When and where?”

  By the time he got off, Ruby’s face had closed like a fist.

  “I’ve got to pick him up first,” said Will. “Otherwise there’s no telling what he’ll do. We’ll be visiting him in jail.”

  “My father is already in jail,” said Ruby, her voice little and hard.

  By the time Will parked at the airport, his father had already pulled his luggage off the carousel and sat on it, legs spread wide. He didn’t look too bad, considering, but he was wearing suspenders over a waffled long underwear shirt like some old coot brandishing a shotgun in a southern gothic. “Will, my boy!” he bellowed. “I barely survived! My knees are too big for those seats!” Just the sort of nonsense he always came up with. Knees couldn’t be too big. They were probably the only part of you that couldn’t.

  “What made you come back so soon?” Will asked, exasperated. Lemuel wasn’t due till next week.

  “It was great for a while,” he said. “But I got bored.”

  “You can’t leave a boat at sea because you get bored,” said Will.

  “Why not?” said Lemuel, standing up and kicking his suitcase. “Who says?”

  “How did you get to land? Swim?”

  “Ha!” said Lemuel. “I’m no fish.” As he spoke, he nonchalantly but covertly allowed Will a glimpse of the Swiss army knife cradled in the palm of one hand. He then raised his eyebrows and gave a secret nod, as if to suggest that he’d had it with him on the plane—maybe even on the boat—which was of course impossible, though where he might have picked it up, Will had no idea.

  “Come on,” he said. “Ruby’s waiting.”

  When Will had spotted his father in a heap at the bottom of the basement stairs, he felt as if he’d never actually seen him before. That’s because Lemuel, when he wasn’t in a coma, was always coming at you or ducking away from you or somehow involving you so much that you were more aware of your reactions than his.

  Will picked up Lemuel’s suitcase, which was heavy and wheel-less, with a handle on the top. This close, Will could smell the alcohol. Even before Lemuel had ended up at the bottom of the stairs, he hardly ever got noticeably drunk, just sodden and slow. His skin was spongy; his face, red.

  He got into the back of the car meekly enough, although he did yell, “My knees! My knees!” Then he asked, “Are we going to take this little lady home with us?”

  Lemuel always tried to act the gentleman around kids and females, and Ruby was both. But Will wished he would just shut up.

  “No one is taking anyone anywhere,” said Will. Which was the absolute truth, because where was he supposed to take his father? Back upstate, as he seemed to expect? Then how was Will going to get to Rumson? He found himself heading west, toward Hart Ridge, as if the other two impulses were canceling each other out.

  “Your mother was one class act,” said Lemuel. “So I never knew what she was up to.”

  “Where are we going?” hissed Ruby, squirming in her seat.

  “I vote for some sustenance,” said Lemuel.

  Will pounced. “That’s a great idea. A nice place by the water.”

  “We’ll get some seafood. Maybe a beer,” said Lemuel blandly.

  “Sure, sure,” said Will. He’d find some restaurant on the shore to park his father in for a while. He looked for an exit. He could take the turnpike south.

  “Look. Perth Amboy,” said Lemuel, reading a sign. “I was once in a great bar in Perth Amboy. I stopped for directions and ended up staying the evening. I think they served food, too.”

  There were four signs, three arrows. What on earth did they point to? Fortunately the Mustang responded so quickly it could have been alive. Will merged left in the nick of time.

  “Yeah, that was an awfully good bar,” said Lemuel. “I wonder if it’s still there.”

  He sounded more speculative than manipulative. Will had never seen him descend into any kind of savagery, no matter how drunk he was. And that was because Lemuel had always already got what he wanted. Will could not believe it when he caught sight of his father drinking straight from a bottle of rum in the backseat. “What are you doing?” said Will.

  “It’s all right. It’s duty free. My choice was that or perfume. Of course if I’d known I was going to be seeing the little lady here…”

  Lemuel seemed to have expanded to take up the entire back. He must have been buckled into the middle seat belt—or maybe he wasn’t wearing a belt at all. Will didn’t want to know.

  “We’re not going to stop at Perth Amboy,” said Will shortly. “We’re going to Hart Ridge by way of the Jersey shore.”

  “By way of the Jersey shore?” His father’s voice boomed. “What kind of way is that? Oh, you are your father’s son.”

  Traffic was heavy, worse than any Will had ever seen, and he had a flash of insight into the SUV/rolling living rooms: They might be handy if you were barely moving.

  “Before the cruise, I never paid enough attention to rum,” said Lemuel. “I’m glad I got a chance to rectify the situation.”

  He was smacking his lips.

  “I never could follow that goddamn mystery on the cruise. There were clues and deathbed utterances and oversize plastic weapons lying around everywhere. A lot of short underpaid foreigners were running around, babbling like idiots. Half the time they’d be cleaning your stateroom, and the other half they’d be saying something like ‘The pretty songbird was seen with the captain on the night in question.’ I was supposed to memorize a bunch of nonsense, too. I remember something about a casino and a button that looked like a chip or vice versa. They were always trying to get those poor suckers into the casinos.

  “I never could keep any of my lines straight. So they soon gave up and loaded me down with matches. Ni
ce ones, too, considering they were supposed to be clues. I still have some. I’ll give you one. I’d wander around, go from bar to bar, and if anyone spoke to me, I’d hand over a matchbook. Sometimes I’d stand in the middle of the main deck and demand rum at the top of my voice. Those mystery nuts loved it. They’d crowd around, and I’d give them all matches. I never did have to pay for a drink. Other times, I’d waylay a guy at night and force him to take a few extra books. A couple from New England complained that nothing made any sense but I don’t know what they expected. We were all just floating in a floating chamber of vice.”

  Ruby was squirming so much she was making the seat squeak.

  “I thought you said you got bored,” said Will.

  “I was exaggerating,” said Lemuel. “Is that what it’s called? Yeah, exaggerating. I haven’t slept in days. I’ve got to get a little shuteye.”

  Then he passed out.

  CHAPTER

  27

  My friend Sydney was on TV for raising hundreds of dollars selling cookies and lemonade after 9/11,” said Ruby.

  “That’s good.”

  “But you know what? All those cookies were bought by her mom for like a hundred dollars apiece.”

  They were crossing the bridge into Rumson. Ruby’s breathing was shallow, and she kept checking to make sure she hadn’t forgotten her gloves (supposedly important because of fingerprints, though there was no way he was going to let her near the house). At a rest stop Will had checked to make sure his father was really out. Now Ruby was filling in the silence he’d left, and she was certainly equal to the task. Will had never before met anyone so determined, so grandiose, so anxious.

  “Do you think we’ll be on TV?” she said.

  “I hope not.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t want anyone to know about this.”

  When Will had first moved in with Lemuel, he’d hoped to get some mileage out of being related to him. But because his old friends weren’t around, there was no one to get mileage for. Too bad, because Lemuel had let him take the Mustang the first morning. The top was down. It was a clear July day. When Will came to a deep, slow slope, he left the car in second, pulled himself up onto the headrest, and began to steer with his toes. To be above roof level was to soar, unconstrained by wall or windshield, connected only by the curious sensation of cool plastic wheel tucked against the instep of one foot, and between the first few toes of the other. The air hummed. He raised his hands into the sky as if he could touch the dark leafy greenery around him. He felt as if he could. He felt as if he could do anything.

  That sense of buoyant power came back to him as Ruby said, “I think someone should make a movie about us. I wonder if you ever get to play yourself.”

  There was no moon that night. The lights of the town provided only the dimmest illumination, which was probably good. Will had to leave the car at the side of the road a ways down from the Culp driveway. There was no point in advertising their presence. He cut the engine, put his finger to his lips. What he was listening for, he couldn’t have said. The engine ticked as the crickets resumed. Ruby refused to stay put. Will started to argue with her and considered driving off, but he finally figured she might be safer with him. He took a last look at Lemuel and told her she could come as long as she stayed out of sight at the edge of the woods. “Don’t say a word,” he said.

  It was so dark, though, that he had to tell her to be careful once they got to the driveway.

  “How come you can talk, and I can’t,” she said.

  The Foy house back in Hart Ridge was so big—and so close to the driveway and the road—that it looked as if it could fall over and crush you. Here the Culp estate, which was lit up in vertical bands like an alien spaceship, looked as if it would always be far in the distance, no matter how much you traveled toward it. Will slowly inched along, partly because he didn’t want to be heard and partly because it would be easy to stray off the asphalt; they could trip or fall or run smack into a branch or tree. But they were doing okay. This quiet creeping around was exhilarating. He shivered in the cool, damp air.

  “Stay here,” whispered Will, heading around to the front of the house, where the river lay in wait. He would be okay as long as he stayed close to the building. That way he couldn’t fall in. The grass was spiky with a mix of old and new shoots, but its pile was deep and soft; no one could hear him. He followed the edge of the lawn, fearing that the ground would give way beneath him at any moment, because of Pat’s landscapers. Who knew what holes they had dug or what equipment they’d left out. But he reached the other side of the house without incident only to sense the vast, troubling emptiness beyond. He could hear some hungry lapping. That would be the tide, reaching into the river, stirring it up.

  He crept to the window beside the French doors, careful to stay to one side, away from the light. Inside he could see a huge, white, airy living room. Leaning haphazardly against the walls were several wavery pastel paintings as big as panel trucks. Stacked opposite them were similarly sized sheets of plywood: shipping material.

  The next room was half a dozen windows farther down. In it was an old man, bald, sitting in a brown leather recliner that was tipped back about halfway so that he could watch a huge box of a television. Neil Culp. He was wearing a burgundy wool robe over a pair of gray slacks and matching burgundy slippers.

  The room was large and somehow recessive, notably lacking in bad-guy equipment. There was no levitating swivel chair, no capped pipe for noxious gas, no secret panel behind which lurked Culp’s zombie minions. This room was very much just a room—like a department store display you’d walked by dozens of times and never could remember.

  Will looked again at the man, who did not have lizard skin, fly eyes, or slit nostrils. Not close. But he wasn’t constructed of simple shapes like squares or circles, either. He was riddled with pointy curves. His slope-shouldered body was dome-like. His fingers were slightly convex. The edge of his sash was puckered. The flaps of his robe hung down in pointy V’s. His slacks were slightly belled. His slippers were the leather sort that crossed at the arch.

  The table lamp next to the old man shed so much light on his face that his features were whited out. There seemed to be a slight uptick in the right side of his upper lip—a sort of sneer—but it was hard to be sure. His nose was waxy. And his eyes—they were closed. He was asleep.

  A blow to Will’s head sent him forward; he was on his knees. For a moment the invisible river seemed to have vomited up some violently sharp rocks through the damp night air. But no, there was a boot, definitely a boot, and a river had no need for boots. Another kick jerked his head up as it sent his body sideways. Then his elbow exploded in electrical sparks. His chest was pierced, and a thin grunt was released. Was this a fight? He had seen no one. He heard a grim voice: “You little shit.”

  Later he opened his eyes and saw a hank of dark, dense, dead grass. His cheek was pressed against a couple of cold stones. He heard footsteps retreating, a string of curses. Then, a chilly, lonely silence. Shouts and shrieks existed, but they were trapped within him. He lifted his eyes to the edge of the woods and thought dreamily, those trees are going to fall on me.

  Instead an image rose before him. It was Pat Foy, fluttering and chattering, or maybe the sound was the sweet high sort a brain in pain emitted as a natural narcotic. The sound organized itself into a wail. It was a siren, he realized foggily, and this person was not Pat, but Ruby; hers was the face that was taking shape in the near darkness. As she bent over him, he could smell tropical fruit.

  “What are you doing?” she cried, her flat black eyes gleaming with fierce panicked excitement. “I’ve already been in the house. I got it. He wrote it down. It’s a crime.”

  The sirens were suddenly close upon them. Will pulled himself to his knees, then staggered and fell forward again as Ruby screamed.

  CHAPTER

  28

  The police car paused in front of a row of floodlit Victorian
houses decked out in convivial towers and porches. Then it turned into the small parking lot for the station, which was across the street. In contrast to its neighbors it looked modest and domestic. This is the sort of home you get, Will told himself bitterly. Isn’t it nice? You’re lucky to find a home at a police station.

  The next thing he knew, he was slumped in a gray chair next to a gray desk, one of many in the unpartitioned room. His hands were cuffed in front, his shirt was bloody, his black pants were torn. He was having trouble catching his breath. Ruby was huddled over by the window. She was not cuffed, but she looked all knotted up.

  “What’s your name?”

  The cop questioning Will was not the one who’d put the handcuffs on him; he’d done the driving. He had a soft, pained, creaky voice. Despite the uniform, he did not look like a policeman. He was young and dark-haired, clearly strong, the sort who, if you didn’t watch, might pick you up and set you aside, as if you were an inconvenient traffic cone.

  “Is Ruby…okay?” said Will. He managed to raise his voice enough to say “Ruby!” then coughed weakly. The cop did not lift his eyes from the paper in front of him.

  Will should have been terrified. There was plenty of reason to be: the cuffs, the cops, the guns, the nightsticks. But he seemed to have crossed the line into a realm of suffering where none of that mattered anymore.