Orchard Grove

by Vincent Zandri

  But that’s when he slowly pulled the barrel away from his mouth as he focused on something on the floor only inches away from the gun cabinets on the opposite side of the room. It was smear of blood. My blood. My blood from this morning. Neither of us noticed it until now.

  “Is that blood on the floor?” he said. Then, looking up at me, the pistol barrel still only inches from his face. “You’ve been standing by the door this whole time. How did you get blood all the way over there while you were standing there? That is, unless you were here already. Maybe today, while I was at work.”

  Pulse throbbed, my breathing coming in short breaths, brow soaked in sweat.

  “You have been fucking my wife, Hollywood. This whole time, you’ve been fucking her.”

  Releasing the crutches, I took hold of the inverted pistol grip with one hand, and grabbed a fist full of his hair with the other, and I rammed the metal barrel into his mouth. He reached up, grabbed hold of my neck as I shoved my index finger into the trigger guard and pressed down on his thumb.

  The explosion took the back third of his head off, the meat, bone, and blood slapping up against the window glass directly behind him, while scarlet arterial blood gushed out both nostrils, pulsating with the final beats of his taken-entirely-by-surprise heart. His dark eyes went wide, as if he were thinking, How stupid can any one man be? His stocky body relaxed after only a few seconds while his cancerous soul exited his body, and no doubt, made a beeline straight for hell.

  Coming from the opposite end of the house, a scream.

  Lana.

  “For the love of Christ!” she shrieked. “Was that a gunshot?!”

  I released my hold on the pistol and his hair, gathered up my crutches, shoving them under my armpits, my entire body trembling but also feeling as though it were levitating. For a brief second I considered wiping my prints from the gun barrel but it was now covered in John’s blood. What good would my wiping anything away do?

  “Lana!” I barked, pressing my fingers against the soreness in my neck. “Call 9-1-1. Your husband’s had a bad accident!”

  I wasn’t sure why Lana decided to play it like she didn’t know what was coming. Like she hadn’t played a pivotal role in making it all happen. Like she hadn’t asked me to do it!

  Maybe she acted innocent of the whole bloody affair because she didn’t want to implicate Susan in any of this. It’s possible she wanted Susan, who possessed full knowledge of the plan, to somehow remain entirely free of guilt. As if simple denial had the potential to erase any shred of truth. As if it could be equated with plausible denial. Whatever the case, as I heard the two women making their way from the back end of the house to the gunroom, I decided that the best idea was to play along.

  Entering into the room, Lana caught sight of John’s now smashed pumpkin of a head, and dropped to her knees on the carpeted floor.

  “Oh dear God,” she cried, the tears bursting from her blue eyes. “My God, John, how could you do this to me? To us?”

  My wife stood behind the grieving woman. Her face had turned pale at the gruesome sight of John, and she seemed to lose her balance so that she was forced to grab hold of the solid wood doorframe to hold herself up. Then, making an abrupt about-face, she took the corner into the adjoining bathroom where she began to vomit into the toilet.

  I too began to feel sick to my stomach, like my guts had spilled out of me. Not at the sight of the blood and brain that covered the window behind John’s now blown away head, but at the reality of what I’d just done. I’d not only assisted in plotting a man’s death, I pulled the damn trigger. I knew full well that if, in the end, it turned out the police smelled foul play, I would face lethal injection. So would Lana. It was even possible that Susan would receive twenty or thirty years for having been privy to the plot and in turn, doing nothing about it. Sure, John put a gun to Susan’s head. Sure he was going to kill Lana, and perhaps even Carl and me. But he was also a cop. And cops took care of their own. There would be no mercy for a team of cop killers. Still, inviting the police to the scene of the suicide was the next item on the grisly to-do list.

  I made a cursory inventory of my body.

  Was I covered in any spatter? None that I could see, almost the entirety of his brains, blood, and bone, shooting away from me out the back of his head. Once more, I caught sight of the blood smear on the floor. My blood. It could be easily explained. The surgical wounds on my foot have been bleeding, and when John invited me into his gunroom, I couldn’t help but shed blood on the floor. Simple as that.

  “Lana,” I said, the word scraping itself from off the back of my throat, “we have to call the Albany Police Department.”

  She continued to sob while down on her knees, her body rocking back and forth like a penitent woman at the Wailing Wall.

  “Lana,” I repeated, louder this time. “We must call the police.”

  But she just kept right on crying like all this death and destruction had come as a tragic surprise. Susan came back in. I turned to her.

  “I don’t know what’s come over her,” I whispered. “This is what she fucking wanted.”

  My wife looked at me with hard eyes, and a coldness that cut right through me like razor sharp steel.

  “Maybe it’s what you wanted,” she said.

  Hobbling along the hallway I entered into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, grabbed a beer, popped the top and drank it down on the spot. Wiping away foam from my mouth with the back of my hand, I noticed Susan’s cell phone set out on the counter. Acting on instinct, I grabbed it, quickly punching in the security code, which was her birthday. When the main screen appeared I went to Texts. There was a text from Lana.

  No, that’s wrong…

  There were dozens of texts from Lana dating all the way back to early June when the Cattivo’s first moved in. My brain on fire, I scrolled through some of the messages, speed reading them as I went. “I’m falling for you,” Susan said in one. “Go with your feelings,” Lana responded. In another text, Lana said, “I’m going to kill my husband.” Susan responded with, “My husband can do it for you.”

  I put the phone down, not because I thought I heard Susan coming my way, but because I didn’t want to see anymore. My head was spinning, my heart lodged in my throat. It was as if the earth had shifted on its rotation around the sun somehow, and gravity was no longer working for me.

  What the hell was happening?

  Susan had been lying to me after all, that’s what was happening. So had Lana. The two have known one another far longer than they’ve let on. It’s possible they weren’t just acquaintances who occasionally carpooled to the downtown P90X class or waved to one another across the front lawns. I couldn’t be sure, but judging from some of their texts, their relationship was physical. Had they set me up to kill John? Is that what this had been all about? I’d have to read all the texts to be sure.

  Christ, if only I’d snuck a look at Susan’s emails four or five hours ago, John would still be alive and I would be packing my bags, getting the hell out of Orchard Grove for good…

  Before I snuck a look at any more texts, I needed to do something else first. The police had to be notified now. With every minute that passed, John grew colder and colder. If we waited too long, the APD forensics team would become suspicious. Right now, it still looked like an accident and that’s the way I had to keep on playing it, especially now that the true nature of Lana’s and Susan’s relationship was slowly being revealed to me. If Lana wanted to continue to play things straight throughout the ordeal… if playing the innocent and shocked wife of a suicide was her modus operandi… then so be it. In truth, it could only help our cause. My cause, which was to be free of this mess.

  The cordless phone was also sitting out on the counter, not far from Susan’s cell phone, near the sink. I went to it and, releasing my crutch so that it leaned against the counter, I picked it up. Inhaling a calming breath, I dialed 911, pressed the phone against my ear and waited for an opera
tor to come on the line.

  “Please state the nature of your emergency,” ordered the dispatcher.

  “I’d like to report a suicide,” I said.

  “Is the victim alive and/or in need of medical assistance?”

  “The victim is fucking dead.”

  “I see,” she said. “Please stay on the line and refrain from any further foul language.”

  I didn’t exhale until she placed me on hold.

  It took the cops, a team of EMTS, and the fire department only a few minutes to get to Orchard Grove. During that time, Lana never moved an inch from down on her knees on the gunroom floor. Susan stood out in the hall, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her face tight as a tick, every single pore and wrinkle filled with anxiety. She wasn’t speaking and neither was I, even if I did want to scream at her. She wasn’t looking at me either, avoiding eye contact altogether, as though to lock eyes would be an admission of guilt, both in her complicity in the plot to kill John, and in her withholding the truth about her relationship with Lana. In the time it had taken that bullet to pass through John’s brains until now, she had transformed herself into a person whom I did not recognize.

  While the blue-uniformed EMTs looked over the body, checking for vitals that were obviously no longer vital, another crew of uniformed cops scoured the house. What exactly they were looking for, I had no idea. But these were the men and women who had worked with John, however briefly, and maybe it was standard operating procedure for them to make a thorough examination of the home that belonged to one of their own brothers in arms.

  They also made sure to take care of Lana, escorting her from the gunroom to the kitchen where they tried to coerce a statement from her, however gently. Susan never left her side, making her tea, holding her hand, wiping her tears as they fell from her blue eyes down her smooth cheeks. It was all very dramatic and convincing. Had I been one of the cops placed in charge of questioning her, I would have said she was truly upset, truly grieving, truly shocked. But I wasn’t a cop.

  I was a killer.

  Then Carl showed up.

  The big plain clothes detective just barged through the front door, barreled his way through the cops and emergency professionals standing in the vestibule, and entered into the gunroom where his partner still sat in the swivel chair behind his desk. Carl was dressed in the same blue blazer and tie he was wearing that afternoon when he, John, and Lana got together for their little come-to-Jesus regarding his feelings for his partner’s wife. For sure I smelled alcohol on his breath as he brushed past me without so much as glancing my way.

  Following him into the room, I stared at what was left of his dead partner’s head. He made a point to examine the blood-stained automatic that was still gripped upside down in John’s right hand, as though not entirely convinced his partner managed to perform the ultimate final act of self-destruction on his own. By then Lana had come back into the room, her eyes still filled with tears, a pink tissue crushed in her hand. The tension between the two was almost too much to bear, even for me.

  After a beat he turned to her, staring her down with big brown eyes that were no longer hidden by aviator sunglasses. She returned his gaze and sniffled.

  “He was always so careful,” she said. “Even when he was messing around… he was careful, you know?”

  “It was an accident,” I said, picturing myself grabbing John’s hair, shoving the piece in his mouth, pulling the trigger. I swallowed something that felt and tasted like a brick. “He was showing me his collection. He insisted on demonstrating how a cop eats his piece. He obviously didn’t know the gun was loaded.”

  Carl turned quick, shot me a look, then reached out with his hand, placed it on Lana’s shoulder.

  “Don’t stay in here anymore,” he said.

  Wiping her eyes with the tissue, Lana walked out, as ordered.

  Then, turning back to the couple of forensics cops who were also standing in the room on either side of the body, their hands covered in blue latex gloves, Carl said, “Tag him and bag him, for Christ sake’s. Then get him the hell out of here already.”

  He took a step toward me, eyed me once more.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and the way he said it, made my blood turn to ice.

  Brushing past me for a second time, he left the house through the front door.

  It takes an enormous amount of energy and concentration to keep from gagging. Her stomach muscles are convulsing, her chest heaving as she watches two separate beams of bright white Maglite dancing on the gravelly riverbank. When she begins to make out voices along with the stomping of boot heels, she knows that two police officers are standing only a few feet away from her.

  “Whaddaya think, Detective Miller?” says the first cop.

  “What do I think?” says, Miller. “I think two things are possible here, Brad. Either we’ve scared away the perp. Or, we scared away somebody who just happened to come upon that mutilated body back there. That’s what I think.”

  “And he or she ran away because he or she don’t want to be accused of no homicide, ain’t I right?”

  “Only reason people hang out in these woods at night is to shoot up. No junkie in my book is taking a chance on getting snagged for murder one. ‘Sides, Brad, whole thing doesn’t fit the profile. The North Albany Mauler knows what he’s doing. He’s methodical and precise in the method and manner by which he kills. No way he’d be caught out in the open like that. Having studied this case for three years, I suspect our killer…our Mauler…is white, single, fairly well off, and gay.”

  “That the shit they teach you in college, Miller? I remember when cops didn’t go to no college, me included.”

  “Times’re changing. It’s the 1980s. Computers can help us narrow down the playing field. Soon everyone will have a computer in their house, access to more information than is stored in the Library of Congress, right at their fingertips.”

  “Sounds like science fiction. But then, I guess everybody’s got cable TV now. Fifty freakin’ channels and a Home Box Office station that shows movies. It’s like the Jetson’s.”

  “High technology is advancing right now… right this very second… as we jerk off on this riverbank doing absolutely nothing.”

  “Okay then, young Detective Miller, your call. What the fuck do we do now?”

  “Let’s get back, Brad. I wanna take a closer look at that poor young man who’s sliced from ear to ear.”

  “But what about down there in that concrete hole in the ground? Shouldn’t we check that out?”

  “The culvert? Good idea. But be quick.”

  She panics. She has no choice but to try and make herself invisible. But how exactly? The tubular culvert is partially filled with fluid. Rancid, toxic fluid that contains God knows what. Instant cancer is what she’s breathing. And now she’s got to soak in it? She hears footsteps outside the tube. No choice. Lays herself out, face-first down into the filthy water, hopes for the best.

  A few minutes later a man dressed in plain clothes entered through the front door. When one of the uniformed officers identified me as the man who’d been with Detective Cattivo in the gunroom when he shot himself, Plain Clothes approached me.

  “I’m Senior Homicide Detective Nick Miller,” he said, holding out his right hand. “The deceased worked with me at the APD. You’re the writer? The movie guy? I understand you were with him when the, ahhhh, accident occurred.”

  Why isn’t Carl in charge of the investigation? Maybe Carl, as John’s partner, is too close to the victim. Maybe the situation is too emotional for him. Maybe his judgment would be called into question, especially if he was sleeping with the deceased’s wife…

  I took Miller’s hand, shook it. The hand was cold but strong.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was there. In the room. Unfortunately. He insisted on demonstrating.”

  “Demonstrating a suicide?”

  “Eating his piece. He was insistent, Detective. It was his idea, his gun, his
bullet. Hell could I do?”

  He took back his hand, shoved both hands into the pockets on his professionally cleaned and pressed khaki trousers. Looking down, his eye caught something.

  “You’ve got some blood on your wrist,” he said. “Lots of blood inside a brain. It tends to spatter. Ever see the Zapruder Film… JFK’s murder?”

  I swallowed something cold and bitter, released my crutch, raised up my hand. On the wrist, several specs of blood. How in God’s name was he able to see it? I guess he was trained to notice such things. Trained to spot even minute traces of blood.

  He got the attention of one of the forensics people working inside the gunroom. A woman. He asked her to step out and take a picture of my wrist, which she did. He then gave her my name, which she jotted down in a notebook before making her way back into the room.

  “Look,” he went on, looking downwards, taking notice of my foot, “I’m going to take a decent look at the deceased before they ship him out. You can either come along or wait right here for me.”

  “Which would you prefer?” I said, my mouth still dry and pasty from frayed nerves.

  “You gotta ask?” he said.

  I followed him into the gunroom.

  Miller was a tall guy. Thin and wiry, like a life-long competitive runner. Maybe even a marathoner. I pegged him for his mid-fifties. Getting on in cop years anyway. He had all his hair, but it was cut Marine Corps short, and what I took to once be sandy blond had by now morphed into an almost snow white gray. His face was narrow, if not concave at the cheeks, and shaved close. But then, I’m not too sure the fair-skinned Miller could grow a beard if he wanted to.