by Bryan Gilmer
When the DIY staff had found the disruption in the garden department, they had closed it to customers and spent two hours cleaning up while managers debated calling the police. It looked like an outlandish employee prank of some kind, and they were leaning toward handling it in-house. Then a 19-year-old clerk named Eileen got to the bottom of her pile and found the body of Robert W. Claypool. He was 47. His wife was being notified.
“Where was he impaled?”
“In the gut. Employees found pieces of his intestines in the main aisle of the store by the paint department first thing this morning. They didn’t know what they were and didn’t connect them to the Lawn & Garden thing until – shit, until a hell of a long time after they should’ve. We had to fish them out of the trash. There are red circles the size of a nickel every five feet from the back to the front of the store.”
“You think an employee did it?”
Cooperton nodded vigorously, smiled and said, “No comment.”
“Who’s your suspect?”
“Can’t tell you that, either.” Cooperton dipped his clipboard, and Jeff could read the tab of a personnel file underneath it: “Grant, Eddie.”
“New guy started part-time a couple weeks ago,” Cooperton said. “Only forklift driver working last night. Bullshit address. Bullshit social.”
“Bullshit name,” Jeff said. “Remember that ‘80s song Electric Avenue? That was Eddy-with-a-Y Grant.”
“Interestin’. I listen to country... Anyhow, these jackasses they send me for detectives up here ain’t gonna be able to find out shit. If you can figure out who it is, and it leads to an arrest, I’ll take you along to pick him up. Hell, I’ll let you question the suspect or whip ‘im with a belt and snap pictures if you want, whatever it takes to make your client happy.”
Jeff hoped the whipping part was Southern cop bravado. He raised his eyebrows expectantly. Cooperton slipped him a copy of the employment application “Eddie” had filled out. Jeff tucked the sheet underneath the blank pages of his legal pad so it would look to an observer as if he were reading his own notes. To Jeff’s surprise, Eddie’s Rocky Falls address was not on any avenue that sounded even vaguely electrical. A number on some local street called Upsal. He didn’t recognize it, so he assumed it was made up. Maybe something spelled backward? Laspu? Didn’t make sense.
“Got his photo?”
Cooperton’s jowls quivered as he shook his head no, then changed mid-movement to make a half nod. “Kind of. There’s some grainy, longshot stuff from the security cameras last night. He knew where they were placed, and he kept a cap pulled down low whenever he was around one. Was supposed to have a close-up taken for his permanent ID badge, but never did it, apparently.”
“What about older security-camera footage?”
“Possible. But they only save a week’s worth, then they tape over them unless there’s been some kind of incident. He only worked one other night this week. And it’s the kind of system where it records four cameras on one divided screen, so the picture’s shitty.”
Jeff let the notepad pages fall to conceal his copy of the employment application as an underling approached Cooperton.
This time, the TV crews didn’t show up until 15 after noon, too late to get onto the air before the 5 p.m. newscast. They’d have to type up a blurb for their websites and then go live at 6. The body had already been hauled to the morgue, and they didn’t have a clear view to the end of the plant display table where Claypool had been found. The only decent video for them to shoot was the sign on the front door that read, “Closed due to emergency. Shop DIY Warehouse for everything you need to make your house a home.”
* * *
“Come on, Jimmy.” Caroline crossed her arms under her boobs and pouted at Detective Norton. She had guessed he was one of the ones inside the DIY Warehouse all afternoon investigating, so she’d been waiting out here, figuring he’d duck out sooner or later for a smoke break. “You’re my buddy. Make a girl happy. Just give me a 10-second peek. Just for background.”
He leaned against the loading dock bumper, looking more uncomfortable the longer she held his eyes. He wanted to make her happy, she knew, and he liked standing here with her. He was just afraid of getting into trouble. She knew she almost had him.
When the pink color drained from his face, she let her lips slide into a smile. “I promise I won’t put anything in the paper that could lead back to you. You’ll be my secret source.”
The detective checked around and saw no one. He held his clipboard face up at a level even with his crotch. “Ten seconds.”
Caroline scanned the form, labeled as an employment application, and memorized Eddie Grant’s name and address. Norton pulled the clipboard out of her view a little before ten seconds was up, but she’d gotten it all. He said, “White male, shorter than average height. Beard. But don’t you put any of that into the paper unless the lieutenant gives it to you.”
Caroline met his eyes and mouthed, “Thank you,” brushing her tongue against the underside of her front teeth. As she walked around the outside of the store, Norton told someone, “She’ll have to get the lieutenant to brief her.”
When she turned the corner, she leaned against the wall to write it all down in her notepad.
Twenty-one
No matter what angle Jeff worked, he couldn’t find any connection between poor Robert Claypool and Mickey Reuss. Claypool lived in Durham County and commuted to the store job in Raleigh. Reuss had never heard of him, didn’t care a thing about the guy. Reuss’s crews never even bought building supplies from DIY Warehouse.
Back downtown in his office, Jeff got Robert Claypool’s wife on the phone for a wrenching interview. Her husband had been saying he didn’t think his employees liked him. He hadn’t been happy since being promoted to supervisor. He really just wanted to be a front-line, regular workin’ boy, not the boss man. She felt guilty because she’d told her husband he was getting too old for physical work and that they needed the extra money from his manager’s job.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people in your situation,” Jeff told her. “And let me tell you, Mrs. Claypool, you ought to stop thinking like that and try to be nice to yourself. No matter what happened, you’d be able to find some way to blame it on yourself if you were determined to. You have to keep yourself from doing that.”
The idea that these diverse crimes might be connected fascinated Jeff. His gut told him they were. As the sun set outside his office window, he went into a fugue-like state, writing everything he knew on 3x5 cards, taping them to the giant panes of one wall of windows and drawing lines among them on the glass in three different colors of dry-erase marker, trying to find the connections, to identify some pattern.
None of his online databases had come back with anything usable on Eddie Grant; the name was so common there were a few hundred of them around the country, though none in the Triangle. It was a fake name anyhow.
He was coming up with nothing.
On the second, empty window, he transcribed in black marker each piece of the burglar’s graffiti – and the alcohol smell of the marker reminded him of how the paint itself had smelled. He couldn’t find any coherent message.
Twenty-two
Leonard picked up a pair of jeans from the front table in Abercrombie & Fitch. They looked like they were about to fall apart – holes in the knees, frayed cuffs, even brown stains on the ass. $159. They were the kind of thing you’d buy only if you had grown up out here in the burbs with brand new, perfect clothes all your life. You’d pay that for a pair that had been through some fake danger and friction and life experience to make it seem like you had, too. He looked at the tag and wondered what the $1 a day garment worker in Macau thought about being paid to ruin a pair of jeans he really needed so that they would fall apart in six months for someone who was so rich they were just looking for new stupid shit to spend their money on.
All these mall stores acted as if they could sell you a personality, an identity �
�� or as they put it, “a lifestyle.” The most ironic ones catered not to the hottest kid in school like Abercrombie did, but to the outcast nonconformist skater kid. Buy into our edgy corporate brand, and you’ll be making a statement.
Leonard tossed the jeans onto the floor and stepped out into the mall concourse. There was almost no one standing in front of Center Court Stage. But Leonard walked 50 feet across the granite tile, mounted the stage and nodded at his bandmates as he launched into the bass lead-in for Track One.
He was debuting his masterwork at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday night at a crass shopping mall. It was like some legendary Charlie Parker gig at a rent party Harlem in the ’40s. Few would have the experience of being there, but everyone would wish they had, imagine they had – say they had. He hoped someone would be smart enough to save the vinyl banner attached to the stage that read, “Rocky Falls Crossroads Presents: New York Jazz Composer and Artist Leonard Noblac.”
As the track reached full swing, two wandering couples stopped to listen, and by the end of the piece, a few dozen people were standing there clapping. Leonard pretended he didn’t see them. The band knew to head straight into Track Two after eight beats of pregnant silence. The crowd was expanding. When Leonard opened his eyes after a long solo, he nearly had a stroke when he saw how many people were listening.
He was grinning and sweating by the end of the fourth track, exhilarated by the attention, by the power of his music to STOP PEOPLE COLD, the now huge audience completely hooked, people even looking down into the atrium from behind the chrome-topped glass railing around the mall’s second level. Bennie the drummer, whispered, “Hey man, flog the CD.”
When the cut ended, Leonard bowed to applause and walked to the microphone.
“Thank you very much, folks.” His voice sounded embarrassingly squeaky over the PA. People looked as if they might drift away, like they thought this was a set break. Well, it wasn’t. “I’d like to take ten seconds before we start the next piece to let you know that if you like what you’re hearing tonight, our CDs are on sale right here at the corner of the stage.” He pointed to Bennie’s girlfriend, who held up a cardboard box of their old albums and waved. “They’re $10, and based on the fantastic response you’re giving us tonight, it seems like they may become a collector’s item.”
He gave a winning smile, and Bennie’s girlfriend sold three CDs on the spot as a line formed leading toward her.
“Two, three, four!” Leonard shouted, and he and the drummer opened the final track.
“I don’t see you out there, honey,” Leonard said into the mic before stepping into the background, “but wherever you are, this one’s for you.”
* * *
Yet the second set, after the break, was totally different. Leonard seethed about two things: His bitch of an ex-wife wasn’t here even though she’d promised. And now the band wasn’t as in the groove; most of the people were just walking by the stage like there wasn’t even a band up here; just a dozen people sat on benches actually listening.
When he looked at his watch and realized it was almost 7, Sarah finally walked up with a thick file folder filled with papers. She gave a mild smile, but Leonard was pissed. He ended the song they were playing with a flourish, and Sarah started clapping, inducing a couple of mall customers to join in.
But he’d already set the bass down on its side and charged down the two steps toward her. “Where the hell have you been? What makes you think I’m going to sign now? You didn’t come when you said you would!”
She looked at him like she was surprised, saying something about how her paralegal had been late getting the paperwork all set and printing it out, and then how there had been traffic on Rocky Falls Boulevard and she was sorry. She had intended to be there.
“Fuck your damn excuses,” Leonard told her. “Forget it. You had your chance. I asked you for something really easy. And you didn’t do it.”
* * *
Now, in the car, Leonard was listening closely to the new melodies in his head, realizing that some of them were the same ones he had already composed for the burglary album – well, almost the same. A few notes were different. A new musical bridge between sections had appeared, that kind of thing.
At any rate, the plan for tonight’s track was almost the same; he’d just play it with a little more verve. He hadn’t thought about it before, but this performance always had required Aggravated Assault.
So Leonard went to his job at a takeout driver as planned. His first run was to drive an order of fried chicken and potato salad to a ‘50s ranch house, and that wasn’t right for this track at all.
But he would perform the first half of “Emptiness and Fullness/Aggravated Assault” at the first obscenely large house that ordered a gourmet meal.
* * *
Jeff didn’t leave work until 7:30. The images of his evidence windows stayed inside his head as he stopped on the way home for a take-out plate of Eastern North Carolina pulled pork barbecue soaked in a sauce of apple cider vinegar, crushed red pepper and powdered mustard.
He got back to the loft and realized the moving company hadn’t ever returned his call about bringing his stuff from storage. Not that he had really had time to deal with it, but one night on the air mattress had been enough. There was a note from the cable company, though, that his service had been activated.
So he unboxed the new TV that waited in a corner and connected the coaxial cable that his electrician had installed to the back. He tracked down The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, and he laughed his ass off. That, the savory barbecue, two beers and letting a call from Ashlyn go to voicemail made him sleep more soundly than he had in at least a week.
* * *
The honest truth was, Sarah certainly hadn’t wanted to sit in an audience and hear her husband play jazz again – at a mall. She was afraid she’d embarrass herself by weeping through the entire set, mourning over her broken marriage as she remembered the night she’d fallen for Leonard as a young woman at the Viceroy Hotel. That she would mourn the loss of her ability to form a reckless crush like that ever again. She would mourn raising a son mostly by herself for the next 18 years – she understood how severely stacked against her the odds of remarrying were. Men her age would marry a 28-year-old with no kid. Sarah didn’t want to cry like that in public, or pour out all that emotion in front of Leonard.
But she damn sure had tried to get to the show on time, anyway. And not just because he’d agreed to sign the settlement. Because she had once loved the man and wanted to do it for him.
Naturally, Leonard wasn’t empathetic enough to understand that she legitimately couldn’t get it together to be there on time. All he registered was that Sarah hadn’t showed up, didn’t believe in his music, didn’t care about what was important to him.
She sniffed, cleared her throat and called Leonard’s mobile phone number. She got his voice mail greeting. She left a message in a gentle voice explaining all of it the best she could. “I am so sorry. I want you to know I really tried to make it.” She told him that if he still wanted to settle, he could come to the small law office of a friend of hers to sign the papers. It was near his house. “Neutral ground,” she called it.
“Leonard, I’m sorry not to be there tonight like you wanted.” Then she told the computer recording her words what she’d said to Leonard 500 times or more as he’d left her alone for an evening to go play some smoke-filled bar: “Have a great show.”
She replaced the receiver in its cradle, turned out her office lights and locked the door.
Twenty-three
Walter Ellis flipped through the channels looking for something besides CNN. You didn’t want to see that depressing stuff on a high-definition, 42-inch screen.
In the kitchen, Janet was clinking around with plates and silverware, which in his mind defeated the whole point of ordering Chef-2-U. Sure, you didn’t have to cook, but there were still dishes to clean up. The containers the meals came in were perfectly fine. Whatever;
when you’d been married as long as he had, you didn’t start fights over piddly stuff. You just let it grate on you.
He found a landscaping show on one of the cable channels. They were building a pretty neat flagstone terrace in a steep back yard like his. They were showing how the workers chipped and set the stones, but he didn’t care. If he put one in his yard, he’d get a crew of Mexicans just like the folks on TV had.
The doorbell rang, and the show cut to a commercial. Good timing, because when they came back from the break, the host was just going to reveal whether the homeowners liked the finished project or not. The odds were on “Oh my God; thank you so much! We love it.” He could skip that and eat.
He felt his back pocket, fished out his wallet and pulled out two twenties as he padded across the Brazilian cherry floor in his blue dress socks. He looked through the window set into the Craftsman-style front door. The delivery guy wore a tweed, snap-brim cap and a salt-and-pepper beard that could use a trim. He was a good bit older than these fellows usually were. Probably a real sad sack to be delivering takeout in his 40s. Walter depressed the brass lever and pulled open the heavy door.
The man mumbled toward the floor: “Janet Ellis; wine-braised sage and thyme turkey breast with cranberry couscous, mixed baby field greens salad with toasted pine nuts and balsamic mustard vinaigrette. Times two.”