As the two men step through the front door Carl sees a wallet on the floor next to a table. It shouldn’t be here. If the man was killed in the street, killed on his way home from a bar, killed before his feet passed over the threshold, it shouldn’t be here. It should be in his hip pocket, or his inside coat pocket. Carl can imagine the dead man drunkenly walking through the front door, tossing his keys onto the table and his wallet, only his wallet misses and falls to the floor. He had to be alive for that to happen. So how did he end up back outside — and dead?
Carl turns to look at the blonde woman, the decedent’s wife. He wonders if she was the one who pulled the trigger. Goodbye, bad marriage. He wonders if her friend is simply covering for her, giving her an alibi. It’s possible.
‘You told my captain that your husband left the nightclub about an hour and a half before you did.’
She nods.
‘People at work can confirm this?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did he, by chance, get free drinks?’
‘Nobody got free drinks, why?’
Carl shrugs noncommittally, turns back to the living room, sees a small boy sitting on a couch, hugging himself defensively. A pale boy with freckles dotting his cheeks. His lips are chapped. His eyes are large and glistening with fear.
Carl walks toward him, says, ‘Mind if we talk a minute?’
The boy licks his lips. ‘Okay.’
‘Maybe at the dinner table?’
The boy nods and pushes himself off the couch. He walks to the dinner table, feet dragging on the carpet, pulls out a chair, sits down. He puts his hands on the table and clasps them, then pulls them apart and puts them in his lap.
He looks sick.
Carl wonders what’s happening behind the eyes.
Then Friedman touches his shoulder and nods toward the floor behind the couch. Two dents in the carpet where the couch was sitting prior to its recently being moved. Maybe it has nothing to do with the murder victim outside, or maybe the couch was pushed forward to cover something. Coincidences that look like evidence happen, of course, but not as often as you’d think. He nods.
Walks to the dinner table. Sits across from the boy.
The boy’s mother sits down as well.
The other woman stands by the door, looking in, silent.
Friedman wanders off, meandering toward the hallway before silently disappearing into it. No one else seems to have noticed.
Carl looks toward the boy and says, ‘This must be hard for you.’
The boy nods.
‘Were you and your stepfather close?’
‘They weren’t real close, but they got along okay.’
‘Ma’am,’ Carl says, glancing toward the boy’s mother, ‘I don’t mind if you sit here, but I need your son to answer the questions himself.’
For a moment it looks as though the woman will protest. Something flickers behind her eyes and she opens her mouth to speak. But before any words get out she closes her mouth once more and nods. But she’s tough. If she hadn’t just lost her husband, if she was fully herself, he doesn’t think he’d be sitting here at all, much less telling her how the conversation would go — not without a fight.
She’s tough like his wife was tough.
But now’s not the time to think about such things.
He looks to the boy.
‘Son?’
‘I don’t think he liked me.’
‘Why not?’
The boy shrugs.
‘A shrug isn’t an answer.’
‘He was mean.’
‘All the time?’
‘Most of the time.’
‘Then you must have tried to avoid him whenever you could.’
‘I guess.’
‘I bet your spent a lot of time alone in your room just so you wouldn’t get in his way.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How was dinnertime?’
The boy licks his chapped lips. ‘It made me feel sick.’
‘Because you didn’t know what might set him off.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Because if you chewed too loud, he might hit you. Or if your knife scraped the plate wrong. Or if he just didn’t like your posture.’
‘Yes, sir.’ His eyes are moist with tears.
Carl glances at the mother, sees that the boy’s emotion has put a crease into the center of her forehead. She hadn’t known how bad it was for him, what turmoil it created within him. All she knew was that after her husband walked out she was alone with a mortgage payment and a son, struggling to make ends meet. All she knew was that there was a fellow with a job and an engagement ring who was willing to lighten her burden if she said I do, and she said I do. And all she saw in his behavior was a man trying to be a father to her son, and her son didn’t have a father.
People see what they want to see, or what they need to see. Sometimes they’re the same thing.
‘Was he meanest when he was drunk?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So you must have really paid attention if he’d been hitting the bottle.’
The boy nods.
‘But you didn’t hear anything when he came home?’
‘I was asleep.’
‘That’s what your mother said. But I had a father like your stepfather when I was growing up, and I think I would have woken up if I heard the car pull up. I would have woken up and listened, made sure he wasn’t on a rampage, made sure he wasn’t looking for someone to take something out on, made sure I didn’t have to hide in the closet or crawl out the window. I was a light sleeper when I was a boy, listened for any hints that trouble might be near. I noticed your bedroom screen was missing. Do you sometimes sneak out the window like I used to do?’
‘He was killed outside, detective,’ the boy’s mother says. ‘I don’t like where these questions are going.’
‘I don’t much like it either, ma’am. But your husband’s wallet is on the floor by the front door and he would have needed it if he was buying drinks tonight. I’d like to know how it got there if he was killed outside.’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’ The boy’s face is pale, full of fear.
‘Also, the couch has been moved. There are dents in the carpet.’
‘What does that have to do with anything?’ the boy’s mother says.
‘I’d like to know why the couch was moved, that’s all.’
‘Sandy,’ the boy’s mother says, ‘did you move the couch?’
The boy shakes his head.
‘Why’d you move the couch, son?’
‘I didn’t.’
Carl gets to his feet and walks to the couch. He pushes it back, revealing stained carpet. He leans down and touches one of the dark stains. His fingers come away red.
‘Is this why you moved the couch, son?’
‘I didn’t move it, I swear.’
‘Bachman.’
He looks up, looks toward the hallway entrance. Friedman is standing there with a shoebox in his hands. He pulls a zip gun from inside.
‘From the boy’s room.’ He sniffs it. ‘It’s been fired.’
Carl turns to the boy.
‘You weren’t being completely honest with us, were you, son?’
‘I don’t know how that got there.’
Carl can’t help but feel for him. Part of it is the fear in his eyes, the sheer terror, but only part of it. Truth is, there were times growing up when he wanted to kill his own father. He thinks he understands what drove the boy to do what he did. There are things that happen in relationships that people can’t see from the outside. Little things that accumulate one by one. A tree gets chopped down one swing of the axe at a time, but eventually it falls. And sometimes it falls on the person who did the chopping.
Carl leans toward the boy, catches his eye, and says, with kindness, ‘I’m afraid we’re past the point where lying will do you any good, son.’
4
Sandy can’t believe what just happe
ned. He’d thought he might get away with what he did, but knows now there was never any chance of that. His construct fell apart so quickly, so easily. A few jostles and it collapsed, leaving behind a mere heap of rubble. He looks from the detective to his mother, but can’t stand to see what he sees in her eyes, disbelief and horror combined, so he looks back to the detective. There’s sympathy there at least. He’s understanding, if merciless.
‘We’re going to have to go over this step by step, son.’
‘I don’t know anything.’
But that, of course, is a lie. He knows plenty. He knows he’s caught. He knows it’s over. He knows lying further is pointless. But he can’t let it go. He can’t put the words into the air that he needs to put there.
The detective is silent a moment. He scratches his cheek. He looks to the corner a moment, then back to Sandy, eyes full of understanding.
‘Would this be easier if your mother wasn’t in the room?’
For a long moment Sandy doesn’t move. But finally, knowing there’s no way out of this, he nods.
‘Okay,’ the detective says.
5
‘Do you mind, ma’am?’
‘Do I. .’
Candice looks from her son to the detective. She feels dizzy. This is like a dream. This is the sort of thing that happens to other people. This is the sort of thing you read about in the paper. You shake your head at such horrible goings on, the world’s just spinning out of control, isn’t it, and you sip your coffee, and it’s sad, very sad, and it’s so distant from where you are that you can actually afford to feel sadness. Being in the middle of the experience she feels nothing but a kind of shocked disbelief, a strange unbelieving numbness. This simply isn’t happening.
She looks again toward Sandy but can’t see murder in his face. She should be able to see it on him, some horrible red blotch like a birthmark on his face, but when she looks at him she sees only her boy, her baby, whom she loves more than life, and she thinks of holding him in her arms, of nursing him, of his infant mouth on her nipple, of his infant tongue against it, pulling — not of death, not of murder, not of a black hole in her husband’s temple from which the life has oozed — so he couldn’t have done it.
He could not possibly have done what they say he did.
‘Ma’am?’
‘I’m not leaving him alone with you.’
‘Ma’am, we just want to talk to him.’
‘He couldn’t have done what you think he did. He couldn’t have.’
‘I think it would be easier to do this here. I can take him down to the station and do it there, I can do that, but this is better. For him.’
‘He didn’t do it.’
‘Ma’am.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘If you don’t step outside for a few minutes while we talk to your son, we’ll have you escorted out.’
‘This is my house. You can’t kick me out of my own house.’
Vivian, who till now has been standing silently by the door with her arms crossed, walks to Candice, puts a hand on her shoulder, and says her name. Candice looks up and sees her friend’s kind eyes glistening with empathy.
‘They’re just gonna talk to him, hon.’
‘They think he murdered Neil. I can’t leave him alone with them.’
‘We’ll be right outside.’
She helps Candice to her feet, and even though Can-dice doesn’t want to leave, even though she’s thinking no, I should stay, I should stay here with my son, her body rises, and she finds herself being led outside, led into the dark April morning, and was her biggest problem two hours ago that Neil had taken the car and left her without a way home? Is that really possible?
6
Carl pushes the front door closed behind the women and turns around to face the room. He looks at the boy but the boy doesn’t return his gaze. Instead he stares down at the table, looking sick. Carl knows the feeling. His stomach is cramped. The sweat beading on his face feels slick and oily. He can smell his own armpits, the awful stink of ill health. And an itch at the back of his brain that only one thing can scratch.
But he shouldn’t think about that. He can’t think about that. He needs to think only about what’s happening with this case.
He takes the box with the gun in it from his partner and walks back to the table at which the boy is sitting and once more takes a seat himself. He sets the box down on the table between them. He glances into it. As well as the gun there are several comic books, a Slinky, and three spent bullet casings.
There are only two bullet holes in the man on the street. Probably the boy missed with one, his hand shaking, the gun not having a rifled barrel.
‘I guess you know it’s over,’ he says.
The boy is silent. He swallows. Carl sees the thoughts behind his eyes passing like the shadows of clouds over a green earth as he tries, one last time, to think his way out of this, but he must realize there’s no way out because, after a while, he only nods.
SEVEN
1
Here we are, New Hampshire Avenue, a narrow strip of asphalt lined with dark-windowed stucco apartment buildings, trees, and parked cars. For the moment silence covers the street like a blanket. Even the neighborhood cats seem to be sleeping. Then the rattle of a doorknob, a man stepping into the early morning. A bespectacled man with black hair and green eyes. He wears white pants, a heavily starched white shirt with short sleeves, and a black bowtie. Perched atop his head, a white captain’s hat.
The air is still and cool and the sky dark, though it’s already begun its morning fade to the milky blue-gray of daytime.
A block north Wilshire Boulevard stretches out empty across the land.
This man, just shy of six feet tall, taps an Old Gold cigarette from its crushed packet, lights it, and walks to his Divco milk truck, all white but for the fenders painted light blue, and, on the side of the truck, also in blue, the words,
H.H. WHITE CREAMERY CO.
In Business Since 1912.
In business since the year this man, this milkman, Eugene Dahl, was born. In business for fourty years. In business since milk was delivered by horse and carriage.
He steps into the truck and gets it started. He pumps the gas pedal to keep it running while the four-cylinder engine warms up. It takes a few minutes.
While he waits for the engine to start running smoothly he smokes his cigarette and looks out the windshield at his quiet street.
He spits a bit of tobacco off the end of his tongue.
It’s hard to believe this is where life has brought him: to a finicky milk truck in front of his one-bedroom apartment just west of downtown Los Angeles. Once he thought he was going to be something.
Once he almost was.
2
After a childhood of squalor in rural Kentucky, living in a shack with a dirt floor about thirty miles outside of Elizabethtown, surviving only on the meat he and his father could shoot — deer, wild turkey — Eugene made his way to New York to become a writer. He rented a room in Red Hook and got a job in construction. His skills were limited, but he could swing a hammer. After work he’d go home, sit at the typewriter with a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him, and bang out stories with titles like ‘Planet 17’ and ‘The Black Ooze Had a Name’. Sometimes they’d sell to Astounding Stories or Weird Tales and he’d get a check for twenty or fourty bucks.
Usually they wouldn’t.
Every once in a while he pretended to work on a novel.
Then, in 1938, he got an idea for a comic book.
He’d spent many a Sunday in his youth learning to draw by copying the funnies, and later by writing and drawing comics to hand out to his friends, so, though he was out of practice, he thought he might have enough ability left in him to create on paper what existed as yet only in his mind.
It turned out he was right.
He spent hours writing and drawing after work. He checked out anatomy books from the library to help him, and books on
architecture, and books on animal life. He almost always found an image that could work as a reference when his abilities or his imagination failed him, as they often did. If he couldn’t find a reference, or if something was simply beyond him, he drew around the problem.
It took him months to finish, months hunched over his small table after long days of swinging a hammer in the sun. He worked with aching muscles. He worked with blood-blisters throbbing on his fingers. He worked with gashes in the backs of his hands. Then one day he looked up and was finished. He had four seven-page stories written and drawn, and, as far as he was concerned, ready to be printed up and put on newsstands.
It was a superhero comic.
His superhero was called Rabid, but Donald ‘Don’ Coyote was the name of the man behind the mask. He was a bookstore clerk who spent his days and nights lost in tales of adventure. He lived with his mother, had a cat named Meow he fed every morning, had a crush on a girl at work he was afraid to ask out.
The first story began with Don Coyote being bitten by a rabid dog as he walked home from work. Over the next several days he changed. His cat noticed the difference before he did and began hissing at him when he walked by. Then his hearing improved. High-pitched sounds began to bother him. His teeth grew long and sharp. He began to crave raw beef, and eat it with his bare hands. His muscles doubled in size.
Then he went to work and learned that the girl he liked, Sue, had been mugged the night before. He asked where she’d been mugged and what the fellow looked like. That night he went hunting. He found the man who stole Sue’s purse and recovered it. Then he beat the mugger to a pulp and left him on the front steps of the police station with a note pinned to his shirt.
After creating his superhero and spending two stories developing him, Eugene introduced the villain who was to become Don Coyote’s arch nemesis.
The Last Tomorrow Page 5