“Typical of grandmothers, right? Tries to buy love with money or food.”
“Yeah?”
“Granddad is still feeling a little low. You can see him afterward.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“He takes a little getting used to.”
“Don’t we all.”
I followed him back through the house. An elderly woman who didn’t look much like my mother stood at the stove with lots of pans and pots simmering. She moved the ladle around like her life depended on it.
He said, “Gram? Gramma? This is Terry.”
Without turning to face me, she said, “Hello, Terry.”
“Hello,” I said.
My mother and Will were at a large round kitchen table. I could picture them in those same places thirty-five years ago. It happened in every family. You got your spot at the kitchen table and you never moved from it for the rest of your life. You never sat in your sister’s seat. You never sat anywhere except in your own, even if you were alone at the table.
Grandma Crowe was practically invisible. I don’t know if she started out that way or if she’d been drained of all color and sound until this was all that remained. She could barely raise her voice above a whisper. There was still some handsomeness to her face but no character, no strength or personality. She looked like my mother and looked nothing like my mother. She wheeled and put plates on the table and then spun back to the stove again. I mostly saw her from the back.
My mother tried to engage her in conversation but the old broad refused to respond much beyond a yes or no or “try it with relish.” Gramma occasionally stole glances and looked at me as if I were the paperboy or the mailman. She kept herself busy and continued putting dishes down. There was already enough to feed half the homeless shelters in the Bowery, and I knew it wasn’t going to stop anytime soon because she just couldn’t handle talking to her own daughter after all these years. The food kept coming. She fed her family. She had that much in common with my ma.
I didn’t recognize most of the dishes. It looked ethnic and a bit exotic, but since I still didn’t know what nationality they were, or that I half was, I couldn’t even take a guess. I followed John’s lead. I buttered some things and put colorful sauces on others. I wrapped some meats in tiny pieces of sourdough bread and sprinkled lots of pepp">“No, you didn’t.”tper and salt around. I swallowed it down but tasted little.
My ma stared after her own mother with her chin pointed and her eyes full of hope, but the old lady beat her at the game. She ignored her even while talking to her. They held an empty conversation about cooking, and my mother brought up the gardens and Grandma Crowe talked a bit about flowers.
John kept up a steady stream of chatter and his father embarked on the same. I couldn’t follow anything they were saying. They laughed at private jokes and two or three times even my mother let out a chuckle. I tried to imagine my father and me bullshitting about nothing like that, and I failed.
Then lunch was over abruptly. Grandma Crowe cleared the table one dish at a time and washed each plate separately in the sink, killing each minute like she was smothering it in its crib.
She said, “I think you should go see your father now, Ellie. He’s waiting.”
My mother stood. So did I. So did Will. He put a hand on my shoulder. He had some muscle to him. He gripped me firmly, doing that massage thing that was supposed to show he was just having his emotions stirred. He held me in place while my mother walked through the doorway.
It was all about assertion and knowing your place. My mother was to go alone. I got that from the top. Will was being emphatic about it but not exactly rude. He had a couple of cigars in metal tubes he kept in his shirt pocket. He handed one to me.
“Let’s go sit and talk in the den,” he said.
“Sure.”
We left John there at the kitchen table looking a little hurt. I followed Will to a room with dark cherry paneling. A huge maple desk dominated the room. Framed photos on the walls showed him with celebrity actors and bigshot politicians. At Cannes, film premieres, and fancy Manhattan and L.A. restaurants. Some of the photos were mounted on wood and metal with cursive engravings: Will Crowe & Edmund Contino, The Dining Car, 2002. Contino had headlined the biggest summer blockbusters for the last couple years running.
Other photos showed an icy-eyed, iron-haired, broad-shouldered coot in his late sixties/early seventies with a lot of the same people. Perry Crowe & Amos Custer, Madrid, March 23, 2004. Custer was a director who made low-budget sleeper hits that took home an Oscar every once in a while.
One entire wall featured built-in shelves that provided the space to show off seven Emmys and a number of other awards I didn’t recognize.
Two leather chairs faced each other at a slight angle, a small antique table between them. A large portable bar covered in top-shelf liquor bottles and decanters was within easy reach. The room tried hard to give off the milieu that million-dollar deals happened here over drinks all the time. For all I knew, they did.
Will clipped the end of his cigar with a cutter and then stared at me expectantly. I slid the cigar out of the tube and handed it back to him. He cut off the end, returned it, then motioned for me to sit.
I did. The chair smelled like thirty years of liquid leather polish and felt like it had never been sat in before. He lit his cigar with a wooden match, then held the burning match out toward me. I put my cigar between my lips and slowly rolled it around as he set the match to it. I took a few puffs and tried not to turn verdant. I wondered what he wanted to say to me that he didn’t want John to hear.
“I don’t know whether to offer you my condolences or not,” my brand-spanking-new uncle Will said.
“If you’re not certain,” I said, “then I suppose you shouldn’t.”
“I mean, about your brother. You loved him, so I gather I should extend my sympathies over his death.”
“Why?” I asked.
It made Will look at me sadly. I could tell he was a man who looked at almost everybody sadly, for any reason or no reason at all. He rolled the cigar around in his mouth, drew on it, and huffed smoke. “We followed the … the case quite closely here. For your mother’s sake we were hoping for a reprieve.”
“For her sake, and for everyone else’s, I’m glad he didn’t get one.”
“You didn’t like him much.”
“He killed seven people. There wasn’t much to like.”
“I thought it was eight.”
“No,” I said, without explanation.
He cocked his head and his eyes unfocused into a thousand-yard stare and he gazed through the wall and through the fence surrounding the house and went someplace else for a minute. He returned and nodded at me like he agreed with every sentiment I’d ever had about anything.
“Did your mother ever say anything about us?” he asked.
I placed my cigar on the edge of the ashtray. “No.”
“Never told you how close we were as kids?”
“No.”
“I introduced her to your father.”
That caught my attention. My chin lifted.
“Pinscher and his brothers used to race a 1969 Chevelle 396, up and down Ocean Parkway, out on the abandoned airport roads. In movies they always race for pink slips, but we just ran for peanuts. Gas money. Forty, maybe fifty dollars a run.” Will smiled thinking about the good old days. “I had a ’76 Bumblebee Camaro. There was real muscle to the car, and I had good reflexes. I won my share. Pinscher and the other one, the huge brute—”
“Mal.”
He took a long draw on the cigar, let the smoke out with a chuckle. “Yes, that’s right. Mal. Malamute. Mal, he weighed too much to be a driver, he was much too big behind the wheel, even in that big-block Chevy. So he always hung back and worked on the engines. Pinscher and the slick one—” Snapping his fingers, one, two, three.
“Grey.”
“Greyhound, yes. Grey always had the girls clinging to him w
ithout having to earn any sort of prestige by winning races. It all came naturally to him. But your father, he worked for it. One day Ellie showed up at a race. She’d never been to one before, but she turned up with a few of her girlfriends. They stopped in on the way home from a day at the beach. This small group of pretty girls all in bikinis, sunburned, covered in dried sand and salt, their hair flying in the wind, half of them wearing high heels so they could turn heads. Pinscher took me for forty bucks and said we’d be square if I introduced him to my sister. He was pretty slick too, when he wanted to be. And he could drive.”
My father was a driver.
the only one I had leftndor I tried to picture him racing down Ocean Parkway out by the closed tollbooths near Jones Beach. It shouldn’t seem so weird. All Long Island teenagers looking for a little action or gamble eventually wound up racing down one strip or another. I did it. Of course my dad did it. I had a flash of him as a young man, in his glory, winning a race, and my mother rushing over to him and falling into his arms, the tailpipe hissing. My head was full of movies. Girls in a bikini and high heels. I just couldn’t see my mother in a bikini and high heels.
“Your father,” Will continued, “he was quiet. Shy really, and very reserved despite the family reputation, which I knew, of course. So I didn’t want Ellie anywhere near the Rands. I told him no. I was scared doing it, actually. You didn’t talk that way to a Rand.”
He kept smoking.
“My fear presented itself as anger. I got in his face. I shouted. I shoved him. I was showing off a little in front of the beach chicks standing around. My father was successful. We had money. I wasn’t going to be intimidated by a guy who didn’t come up to my shoulder, except that I was. I reacted badly. I was too nervous and stupid to even appreciate the fact that I might have to fight all three brothers.”
“They’d never team up on you,” I said. “Unless you were playing cards.”
“Yes, Grey and Mal only laughed at my little display. The ugly one working under the hood on that three-niner-six. The handsome one with a girl on each arm.”
It still wasn’t noon yet. Will hadn’t offered me a drink, but I reached over and got myself a glass and poured two fingers of rye. I slugged it down and let the heat burn out the image of Grey as a youth surrounded by petite brunettes, the kind of woman whom decades later he’d be driven to kill.
Will lifted his cigar and drew on it. I poured another glassful and tried to sip it and couldn’t. I threw it back.
“So Pinscher, he just patted me on the shoulder, smiled, and said, ‘All right, friend.’ Then he walked away. I was stunned by that. All right? All right, friend? Who speaks like that? Who backs down from the kind of jerk I was being? It threw me off completely. It was more embarrassing to have that happen in front of the girls than if he’d punched me or threatened me. Then I would have been the victim. Then I would have gotten sympathy. I called him back. I asked, ‘Don’t you want the money? I still owe you the forty bucks.’ He didn’t answer, he just kept walking.”
“He’d snatched your wallet,” I said.
“So you have heard this story before.”
“No. But the pat on the shoulder was to distract you while he went through your pocket. His mind was set. All he needed was her name and an address.”
Will chuckled, showing warmth in his eyes, but there was something else in that laughter. An old admiration refined by the sharp-edged years, and a little burr of anger at having been one-upped.
“He stole a photo of Ellie with her name written on the back. And he had my driver’s license. He stepped over and introduced himself to her. She was smitten from the first. He took her out to a pizza joint that night, she and her friends, and paid the bill with my money. I had over a grand in my wallet. I was foolish carrying that much but I thought I’d get a chance to show off, wave“It wasnplas some cash around. All I had going for me was my father’s success and wealth.” The cigar smoke boomed from his mouth. “Sharp, your dad. Very sharp. When he wanted to be.”
My old man, who could give me the slip night after night, in and out of the house even when I was watching for him, listening for any sound, my will wired to the darkness, and him graceful and silent, sharp.
I vibed that Will’s piece was full of fudging or embellishment. For one thing, even in his story he hadn’t actually introduced my parents at all. For another, I couldn’t picture him going up against my father no matter how much he wanted to protect his sister’s virtue or show off for the chippies. Especially not while Mal was around. Nobody would go up against Mal, no matter how angry or stupid they might be. And considering Will came from cash, I didn’t quite understand why he didn’t just pay the forty bucks and be done with it. Guys must’ve hit on his sister all the time.
But whatever the truth was, I liked that he was trying to impress me with a part of my own history.
Will reached for the liquor cart, poured himself a short scoe deserved. Th
Perry Crowe sat up in bed wearing black silk pajamas, a stack of pillows behind him. The bedspread was folded down to about mid-thigh. His hands hung loosely in his lap. They were big and covered with thick navy blue veins. They looked strong.
There was no indent beside him on the mattress. My mother hadn’t sat.
I was surprised there wasn’t a couple million bucks’ worth of machinery crowded into the room. I expected tubes, heart-rate monitors, oxygen tanks, defibrillator paddles, all of that. But it was just him. No nurses, no panic button near his hand to alert his wife or son or doctor, no bottles of medication on the nightstand. Only a little silver bell for him to ring.
I could almost hear the tinkling sound of it. I imagined hearing it ten times a day for weeks, months. It was things like that tinkling bell that drove people to murder or suicide.
There was a slight tilt to his mouth, the only lingering aftereffect of a stroke that I could see. He had icy eyes. They regarded me intently but dispassionately, the way you watch a movie you’re not enjoying that is only slightly less boring than everything else there is to watch.
His shoulders remained broad. I got the feeling he was very proud of them, and that he only sat up so straight to affect an assertive position. He looked good for his age, and healthy too. I vibed another scam at work. He wasn’t dying. He’d set the grift up just to get me here so he could dupe me, explain his scheme, embroil me in his plot, turn me into a part of his string. Maybe he’d promise me big money. Maybe he’d pledge to write me into his will. Maybe he’d fork over red carpet tickets to Grauman’s or let me dance with a movie star. I thought of Darla on the red carpet.
John had said that the strokes had taken it all out of old man Crowe. That he’d become a paralyzed scarecrow with mostly empty eyes. That he cried a lot, and was scared like no one he’d ever seen before.
John had either been lying or had misinterpreted his grandfather’s condition. Maybe he saw fear only because he wanted old Crowe to reach out in need. Maybe Perry had faked him out.
I did my thing. I memorized the layout and likely hiding spots for cash, jewelry, and other valuables. Dresser drawers, armoire, back of the closet, under the mattress. Which paintings might cover a safe, the thickness of the carpet so I’d know how heavily I could tread without making a sound.
Then he started to cough. It was a rough ugly sound that shook him violently, rippled up into his chest, and just kept going for his throat. Every muscle and tendon in his body knotted. His face turned red as a stoplight and the cords and veins in his neck stood out as thick and well defined as sculpted marble. I thought he might be having another stroke and started to break for the door to get help.
Crowe reached for a box of tissues on the nightstand but couldn“It wasnplas’t make it. I moved and handed him a bunch. He covered his entire face as the cough continued to wrack him. He spit black into the tissues, balled them, and threw them into the wastebasket.
His face showed strain and weakness now as he lay back against the pillows, sucking air
heavily. Sweat covered his prominent forehead. His eyes rolled for a second before he was able to refocus through a massive assertion of will.
Considering his current state and that of Old Shep, I didn’t exactly have a positive feeling about my impending old age.
“You,” he said. “Come nearer. Let me look at you.”
I stepped closer.
“Gray already. You get that from me.”
“I get it from my mother.”
“She got it from me.”
It was a small distinction but an important one, I thought. He was a presumptuous prick, ordering people around, crafty and cranky on his deathbed. I owed him nothing. He had treated my ma badly.
“Which one are you?” Crowe asked.
“Which one am I?”
“Your breed. You’re all named after dogs, aren’t you?”
I could see him trying to hike his bloodless lips into a smirk. A thin sneer managed to crease his face. It tickled him to think I’d be embarrassed by my own name.
“You like making people feel like shit, don’t you, old man?” I said. “Puts you in the power position, in control of the situation. But you can’t humiliate me with my name. I’m Terrier Rand.”
I was lying. I’d pretty much always been embarrassed by my name. I’d once crept a death row guard’s bedroom while he and his wife slept because he’d made me say my name aloud.
“Tell me something about yourself, Terrier,” he said. “Have you ever been in jail?”
“No.”
“How did you avoid it?”
“The answer is no, I’m not going to tell you anything about myself.”
Crowe’s ashen face firmed up. He scowled. “You’re a real hard case, kid.”
“Why did you want to see my mother?”
“That’s between her and me.”
“You’ll explain it to me anyway.”
His eyes shifted left and right, as if he was searching for a witness, like he needed to confirm that this conversation was happening.
“What is this?” he asked. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel Page 10