by M. M. Mayle
Inside the motel room, he cable-locks the bike to the clothes bar like he always does—like nothing’s changed—and dumps the contents of the backpack on the bed like he always does after he’s been out. But this time he doesn’t pick through the stuff on the bed to make sure everything’s there. He doesn’t have to look at it all to know the knife sheath is empty, just like he doesn’t have to go in the john and look in the mirror to know the lawyerwoman marked him for life.
The less thought about that the better. He’s better off to stay fixed on the part of today’s plan that did work—the part that saw the rock star’s head caved in and throat cut before the woman spoiled things by fighting back.
His own head still pounds from the blow she landed with the flat of the spade. There’s no forgetting about that. There’s no forgetting about anything that happened today, so there’s no need to write any of it down in the copybook. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a look at the copybook—to look again at the page he chicken-scratched after his drunked-up talk with the Chink bartender a couple of weeks ago.
He lowers his aching haunches onto the bed and pulls the black-speckled book from the pile of things just emptied there. He opens it to the writing that gave him the idea to use Laurel Chandler’s father as bait.
Chink guy works 2 night jobs on top of day job. Needs money for papers--airplane tickets?--to bring old father to USA from Orient. Doesn’t hold with nursing homes or people that shun duty to elders. Overproud that way.
The first time he read this through he laughed and mocked himself for ever thinking it important enough to write down. The next time he opened to this particular page he saw it differently and laughed out of the other side of his mouth, like he’d do now if his mouth wasn’t pulled off kilter by the gaping wound to his chin.
He reads down to the bottom of the page, nods approval at written mention of the bus that the Chink got on that night—one with a bike rack attached to the front bumper. Another entry that looked stupid at first, then answered how to go long distances without extra strain.
There’s more to approve of when he finds the drawing he made of the Sawyer Manor Nursing Home and the page of written remarks he made about the lack of good help there. And back toward the front of the copybook, he nods more approval at what he wrote about the drug death of that other British rock star—that Rayce Vaughn guy everybody made such a fuss over—without knowing the information would come in handy later on.
He pores over a few more pages until the blood smell of his clothes starts to get to him. Without a window that opens or a working air conditioner to turn on, the smell has ripened into a strong reminder that he still needs to get cleaned up. And he still needs to do something about the bone-deep wound to his chin. But not yet. Not till he hears them say on the music channel that Colin Elliot’s done for.
The hand controller for the TV doesn’t work at first. Three tries later, he’s ready to call it quits when the screen lights up on one of the local stations. Then the controller won’t change stations or lower the sound, so he’ll either have to roust his aching self from the bed or be satisfied with whatever is tuned in by chance.
While deciding if changing channels is worth the effort, he paws through the jumble of possessions on the bed. Nothing holds his interest very long and nothing they’re saying on the TV grabs his attention till he hears the lawyerwoman’s name said.
This could be it. This could be what he was hoping to hear on the music channel. He swings his feet to the floor and sits up straight to drink in pleasure from news of the rock star’s death, but they’re talking about somebody else. They’re going on and on about somebody called David Sebastian, who was struck down at a suburban New Jersey location by an unknown assailant. And they’re saying Laurel Chandler Elliot was witness to the attack that occurred in the garage of her family home, and that she and Sebastian had a professional relationship over the years and were at the Glen Abbey residence to select burial clothing for her father, who died yesterday after a long illness.
Hoop gets to his feet, closes in on the TV. He can’t have heard right. But they keep blathering about David Sebastian instead of Colin Elliot and showing pictures of a guy that doesn’t look much like the rock star except for having a full head of hair.
They’ve got a lot to say about Sebastian’s global prominence in the field of entertainment law and what a big deal he was in Manhattan, where he was senior partner and backbone of the law firm founded by his father and Laurel Chandler’s grandmother.
They’ve got too much to say about how the Chandler woman just got married to rock star Colin Elliot yesterday, and what a shame her wedding night was ruined by news of her father’s death and her honeymoon was scrapped when she had to go to America instead of some exotic locale. And worst of all, they tell how she barely escaped with her life and that she’s now in seclusion at an undisclosed location with the rock star who’s supposed to be dead.
“No,” Hoop says and backs away from the TV that goes right on spewing things he doesn’t want to hear and can’t stop listening to. “Nooooo!” he howls as his knees buckle and drop him to the floor.
Rage runs through him like an electrical current and it might as well be 110 volts because he’s so paralyzed he can’t act on it. He’s got nothing left. No strength, no answers, no excuses, no new tradeoffs for restoring luck. He can’t think. He can hardly breathe. He chooses not to see and tries not to hear.
He’d rather not move, but after lying there on the floor long enough to suffer through another full newscast starring David Sebastian, he has to. He has to do away with those voices mocking his mistakes and blaring his failures—those voices that are cycloning around in his head like the time at the Chink restaurant when all the setbacks attacked him at once.
He elbows himself up onto the bed, where his hand closes around the bundle of tools that survived the changeover from heavy metal case to backpack. They’re wrapped together in one of the tourist Tshirts from Gibby Lester’s place. The shirt gives him a good dry grip when he throws the bundle at the television screen.
The sound of destruction is one he can live with. The smell of the brief dust fire that flares up is a nice change from the abattoir smell he’s sick of. He sucks in a lungful of smoke, looks around for something else to punish, and splinters an already rickety chair. After that, it’s a lamp he beats into submission, and a couple of dated phone books he rips to shreds. The headboard to the bed is bolted to the wall; same for the other two pieces of furniture—the bedside table and the writing desk—so that leaves just his personal possessions to ruin. He starts in on the copybook, breaks its back and starts to lay waste to a handful of its pages when something stops him, something stays his hand and steadies him down. Something tells him to preserve the scattered contents of the backpack, gather them up and save them for a better day, saying there ever is one.
His stayed hand nevertheless trembles as he begins putting everything back in the carrybag, starting with the bundled tools and broken copybook. The lawyerwoman’s locked leather diary and the rock star’s pocket photo album don’t seem so much like amulets when he stuffs them inside. His unsteady hand wavers over the battered box of Polks Extra Strength Headache Powders because he can’t say for sure if it’s ground-up aspirin or dope that’s sifted from the box onto the bed like the kind of sugar the crazy old woman sprinkled on the cherry pancakes. But the final item—the empty knife sheath—is hardest to get a grip on.
After a bath hot enough to scald a pig, he leaves his clothes in the tub to soak and sticks a wad of toilet paper over the wound on his chin. Dressed in clean jeans and undershirt, he goes to the motel supply room three doors down and lets himself in with an employees’ key. He’s not after regular supplies like soap or Kleenex; he’s looking for things left behind when people check out—things the maids are supposed to fork over in case anybody returns to make a claim.
When he locates a row of cartons marked “Lost and Found,” he knows nothing of value w
ill have got past the maids, but he can hope they’ve skipped over the ordinary stuff people leave in bathrooms.
Right away he finds a big jug of mouthwash shoved in with near-full bottles of shampoo and suntan lotion. The mouthwash is the strong kind you can get drunk on if the taste doesn’t sicken you first. He takes a big swig of it, swallows hard and digs around in the next carton where he finds a pair of cheap sunglasses and a full tin of Band-Aids decorated with cartoon figures. He clamps the sunglasses on top of his head and pockets the bandages.
In another carton, he pushes aside pads and plugs meant for women’s monthlies in order to get at a sewing kit marked with the name of another motel, and a matchbook from the restaurant next door. He stuffs those in a pocket along with a pair of bent fingernail scissors he happens to notice as he’s leaving.
On the way back to his room, he slugs down half the remaining mouthwash. Bent over the sink in the john, he pours the rest of the mouthwash into the wound and braves the pain without gasping or flinching. If he can stand that, he can stand a few jabs with a sewing needle.
He threads the needle with black thread from the sewing kit. Black, because it’ll be easier to follow. The light in here’s not that good, and going by the jackassed-fool mistake he made in the lawyerwoman’s garage, his eyes aren’t that good, either. He holds the tip of the readied needle in a match flame till it glows red and braces himself against the sink.
To work the needle in and out he has to pinch the two sides of the wound together in a ridge—like an extra pair of lips—then pull tight with the thread to make it look less like he’s sewing a mouth shut. When he’s done, there’s not enough thread left to tie off in a needle-guided knot, so he does the best he can with his fingertips and trims the ends with the bent scissors.
The scissors aren’t so bent they won’t cut hair, but they pull at it till this job seems almost as bad as the one before. Then, when it’s finally over with and his hair is only an inch long in places, he’s got a new problem. Despite the towel wrapped around his shoulders, stray hairs have worked down inside his undershirt where they itch bad enough to give him another temper fit. He leaves the scissors in the sink, throws off the useless towel and goes back to the scene of the earlier blowup, itching all the way.
The itching serves him right, he decides as he takes in the wreckage in the main room with new and improved vision. But it could have been worse; if he’d still had the knife, no telling what all he would have slashed before common sense got hold of him. As it is, he’ll have to pay for the things he broke and they’ll probably make him post a deposit for the replacements.
The sooner that’s done the better because no matter how much horse manure comes out of a TV set, some of it is bound to contain grains of truth. And the sooner he starts cleaning up, the less he’ll feel like one of those low-lifes that trash hotel rooms just for the fun of it.
When he goes for the vacuum sweeper and a broom, his head is high, his repaired chin is up, his shoulders are back, and his manner is proud. To look at him no one would guess how much his head aches, how much his shoulders itch, and how much his pride is injured. And they’d never guess that with every breath he takes, the stitching in his chin pulls at his very guts—guts that are worming around like nightcrawlers at thought of having to tell Audrey how bad he failed her today.
— SEVEN —
Evening, August 15, 1987
Yesterday, as a bride, Laurel expected to be stared at and withstood the attention for the most part. Today, as a survivor, a mourner—whatever she’s seen as now—the attention is a lot harder to tolerate.
Throughout the supper of soup and sandwiches she could feel their eyes on her. Colin, Nate, Amanda, her brothers, her sister, both bodyguards, the cook-housekeeper and her helper, all watching and waiting for a stronger reaction than she’s shown so far. They don’t know the half of it, none of them. And if she does collapse it won’t be because she’s grief-stricken, it will be because she’s exhausted.
She asks to be excused without looking directly into any of those vigilant eyes, pausing only to add a few more words to her already stated regret over Nate’s bruised ribs and wrenched shoulder.
Just as Laurel rises to leave, Emily wonders aloud how they’re going to hold a funeral in the midst of a criminal investigation and what they’re supposed to do about the family home now that it’s a crime scene.
“Why don’t you and your brothers figure that out?” Laurel flings down her napkin and pushes back from the table with enough force to topple a wine glass and send coffee sloshing out of cups. “Why don’t you come up with answers for a change?” She bangs her chair into a wall and caroms off the wall herself in the hurry to reach the other end of the table, where Emily is slack-jawed with hurt surprise and her brothers are back to looking the way they did when they first heard about David.
“You slept on the plane, I saw you sleeping.” Laurel makes a sweeping gesture that includes both brothers. “You were rested when we got here and you must be over the worst of your shock by now, so get off your collective asses and do something!”
Like he’s had a lot of practice—as though she’s drunk as well as disorderly—Colin hustles her out of the kitchen before she can do more damage.
Upstairs, he neither scolds nor soothes. He says nothing at all for a while. When he does speak it’s to ask the same question he’s asked at regular intervals—ad nauseam—since their wedding celebration deteriorated into funeral preparations: “Do you think you can sleep now?”
To keep from snapping at him, Laurel agitates between closet, open suitcase, and a tall chest of drawers. “I’ll sleep.” She plucks something from the suitcase. “Eventually I’ll sleep.”
“Yeh, eventually. Sometime down the road. After you’ve keeled over in your tracks. After you’re crumpled on the floor. And before I see that happen you’ll take some of the sedative the doctor left for Nate,” he says.
“No, I won’t.”
“Fine. Then you’ll take vodka. A snootful. Beer, wine, brandy and milk. Whatever knocks you out.”
“No!”
The argument erupts in the bedroom she occupied the night she appealed to Nate to hide her from Colin. She points that out for the sake of distraction.
“And look here.” She inspects the cassette protruding from the VCR. “The video that put me over the top is still in the machine. Shall I play it?”
“Are you mad?”
“Not in the way you mean.”
“You’re pissed at me, then.”
“I’m getting there.”
“Because I’m trying to look after you? Because I don’t want you out of my sight? Good Christ, Laurel, what would you have me do after you were very nearly taken from me? And with me to blame?”
She heaves a dramatic sigh and drops into a plump boudoir chair. “Do we have to go through that again? Do we?”
“Yeh, we do.”
“Very well . . . If you absolutely must blame someone, blame me. I’m the one who failed to safeguard my house against intruders and forestalled an investigation when it might have done some good. Or blame Nate. Blame him for not being more insistent sooner. And while you’re at it, blame Amanda for not putting more pressure on Nate to step forward.”
“Yeh, right. And it still comes down to me. Didn’t I hear everyone agree I’m the one who attracted this bleeding nutter? And all because of something I did or something he thinks I did? Wasn’t that the basis of your argument in Paris, and before that, the attempt to sneak in a bodyguard clause? And weren’t you quick to point out earlier today that I was the intended victim, not David?”
“Yes, yes, and yes. And that still doesn’t make you to blame. You didn’t willfully bring this on, did you? Of course not!”
“But it doesn’t change anathing, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t. All the more reason to end this silly blame game right now. And it’s not too soon for you to relax your . . . your attentiveness. I’m aware I may have
set a precedent when I hovered over you after Rayce’s death, but please do not feel you have to respond in kind.”
“You think my present concern is of obligation? Because I feel I owe you? Have you forgotten that I’ve always been concerned about you? Have you forgotten that our earliest rows were about the responsibility that became mine the minute your name was linked with mine? How could you forget my insistence that you get the garage door opener fixed straightaway so you wouldn’t have to expose yourself to every fuckbag photographer that came along and—”
“I didn’t forget! And I’d rather not talk about garage door openers right now!”
“Sorry. Is there something I can bring up without risk of—”
“Sit down!”
“You’re in the only chair!”
“Sit down on the bed. Please. We need to talk.”
“I thought we were talking, actually.” Colin sits on the corner of the bed nearest her chair. His tired posture and longsuffering expression describe the extreme conditions that have shortened tempers and harshened words all afternoon and evening.
She makes a conscious effort to transcend that tendency when she steers the talk in another direction. Her hand moves to her throat to touch the diamond and pearl wedding gift she has yet to take off. “Do you remember that I said I had something for you when you gave me this beautiful necklace?”
“Yeh, now that you mention it. Yeh, but you said you wanted to wait till we were alone in Antalya to give it to me . . . So?”
“So we’re not as alone as I’d like to be and we’re not sailing on the Turquoise Coast, but I hope that won’t make too much difference . . . I hope that won’t keep you from seeing this as the gift I see it to be.” She hands him a plain white envelope she hasn’t bothered to seal and sucks in a deep breath.
He takes his time removing the contents from the envelope. He’s even more deliberate about inspecting the contents, viewing it from different angles and varying distances before scowling at her.