by Dan Deweese
“They don’t want to elope. And he wouldn’t embarrass us in front of the guests.”
“No?”
“Did she say anything to you last night? Anything that might give us a hint?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“You were there,” she said. “We had the dinner. We went to that loud bar and had drinks. When I left, she said she would see me in the morning. That’s it. Why don’t you get ahold of your friend and ask him?”
“Who? Grant?”
“Prove to me they haven’t run off somewhere together.”
“They haven’t run off, Sandra.”
“Prove it, dear,” she said, and hung up.
The field of bricks that formed the broad, windowless side of the bank yawned overhead. Looking up, I felt momentarily dizzy and considered sitting down. The sidewalk was dirty, though, so I just leaned there and closed my eyes as the wall tilted on me, the bricks cold and damp against my hair. Keep moving, I thought, and bracing myself against the wall, I did, until I made my way to the front of the building and stepped into the sunlight. Approaching the front door, I saw Mr. Fingerprints still crouched behind it as he examined the lower pane, almost entirely covered in his dark dust. Looking at him there in the doorframe was like studying a photo whose surface had corroded with age. But he shifted, he moved—it was no photo, and struck by the effect, it took me a moment to realize that he was no longer examining the window, but instead looking through it at me. I raised my hand in acknowledgment.
“Could I talk to you?” he said, his voice flattened by the glass between us.
“Here?” I asked, though I mouthed the word rather than saying it.
He tipped his head toward the side of the building. “Come back in around the back.”
So I headed back the way I’d come, walking briskly now that I’d been given a directive. I would talk to Fingerprints, check the photos, sign the police report, and move on, I thought. Then I turned the corner at the back of the building and nearly collided with the plastic grille of a shopping cart.
“Somethin’ happen?” the man with the ball cap asked. Thinly bearded, he wore a flannel shirt and ragged jeans, and though at close range I could see he was older than I had expected, his gaze was not unintelligent.
“Yes. A little robbery,” I said.
I looked past the man’s shoulder to the long-haired person three steps behind him. It was not a woman, but a man, gazing resolutely down as if absorbed by the sidewalk. Then, without lifting his face, he peered at me through his eyebrows, and even with the hair hanging before him I could see the red, scabbed crater where his nose should have been.
“We saw the cops pull up, and then they didn’t leave, so we figured,” the man with the cart said.
“It was nothing major,” I said, stepping around his cart. “I’m sorry, I have to get back inside.”
“We didn’t see anything,” the second man said.
I stopped. “No?”
He shook his head slowly, his hair swaying. From the side, I couldn’t see his wound—it had probably become second nature for him to orient himself to others at an oblique angle. But he said nothing more.
“You have a good day, sir,” the man with the cart said, dismissing me.
He was protecting his friend from my scrutiny, it seemed, so I told them to do the same. Post-robbery procedure required that I lock the doors behind me after I reentered the branch. I did my best to lock them quietly.
AT THE TIME OF the Mooncalf robbery I had been dating Sandra for only six weeks, but she spent large parts of the following three days in my hospital room. She worked at her parents’ small paint and wallpaper business and was able to take time off to stay with me while varying degrees of pain medication bounced my utterances from vaguely lucid to completely incoherent. Seventeen stitches sutured the wound on the top of my scalp, and eight more closed the gash where the back of my head had hit the floor. One or both of the blows had given me a concussion, and I floated in and out of shallow sleep from which I awoke muzzy, disoriented, and surrounded by an increasing number of flower arrangements: oversized yellow daffodils stood in one corner, spotted pink lilies gaped from another, and an ivy attempted to strangle a spherical wire frame on the bedside table. Sandra moved around the room at one point, reading the cards. “From Grant,” she announced, “from the bank, from your coworkers, from Grant and Gina, from me”—she flashed a coquettish smile there—“from the bank again, from your grateful customers, from me again…” I can’t recall her reaching the end of the list, probably because the memory is mixed with a dream I had that same day, in which Sandra circled the room again and again, intoning the same litany of names. Or was Sandra’s reading of the cards only ever a dream, an entirely fraudulent item I’ve inserted into my memories? What I know for certain is that when I awoke Saturday afternoon from another uncomfortable doze, it was to discover a flock of irises clustered right next to the bed, not more than eighteen inches from my head. “Aren’t they pretty?” Sandra asked when she saw I was awake. “And they smell wonderful.”
The green stalks and purple flowers defied my attempts to resolve them into sensible focus—they were too close, or there were too many. And I couldn’t smell a thing.
“Even the nurses have been admiring them,” Sandra said. “You should find out where they got them.”
“The nurses?” I said.
“Your friends Grant and Gina,” she said. “They told me they knew you from college. Grant said he’s a customer, too?”
Everything from the day of the robbery carried the quality of a fever dream for me, so I struggled to make sense of what Sandra was telling me. In the images I was able to conjure, Grant and Gina floated across the bank lobby in the manner of movie ghosts, I had a fevered and private conversation with Gina regarding the urgent necessity of our having sex, I began to demonstrate the utility of the suggestion, and then a man in a monster shirt hit me on the head with a gun. Not only did I believe the images belonged to dreams rather than waking life, but I was thankful they were dreams. To actually run into Gina with a new boyfriend would have been awkward, and nearly as unpleasant as being pistol-whipped and robbed. And yet it seemed clear that I had been robbed. And now Sandra claimed my encounter with Gina and Grant had also been real. Had the sex with Gina occurred, too, then? Had I been robbed in flagrante delicto? With a mixture of regret and relief, I decided it was unlikely.
Sandra seemed amused by my confusion. “You spent twenty minutes talking to them about Bristol’s,” she said. “How you wanted to take them there and buy them scotch and sit in leather chairs. You said you would buy them the leather chairs, too, if they were for sale, and you would introduce them to movie stars, because you weren’t afraid of famous people. You said you would go right up to celebrities and talk to them, because you just have to treat them like normal people and bring them down off their pedestals. You said the pedestals thing at least seven or eight times—Down off their pedestals, down off their pedestals! And then you offered Grant your IV, and he said thank you, and you seemed really happy about it.”
“So I completely embarrassed myself?” I said. “Wonderful.”
“Oh, they knew you were on medication,” she said. “But you were so chatty. Normally you’re so self-consciously cool and reserved. It made watching you babble and offer to buy things for people and make crazy promises so much funnier. I think I like you better now. Even better than before, I mean.”
Her appraisal irritated me. How could I be self-consciously cool when I wasn’t conscious of being self-consciously anything, much less cool? How, therefore, could one be unconsciously self-conscious? And checkmate. I was too tired to press the issue, though, and resigned myself to asking how the visit had ended.
“Grant said we should all get together when you’re better,” she said. “He said he wants to make sure we go to Bristol’s now that you’ve made all these promises.”
“I won’t be able to look
him in the eye.”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “And there’s nothing wrong with being nice to your friends, especially when you’re on narcotics. And anyway, Grant has already sent three different flower arrangements. You really can’t smell them?”
I could not.
AT THE FRONT DOORS to the branch, Mr. Fingerprints twisted the bristles of his brush over a grooved metal hand bar—a cloud of dust rose and then settled like ash upon the glass. “You’re the boss?” he said without turning to look at me.
“The manager, yes.”
“Your janitorial service, is it nightly?”
“Except Sundays.”
“Well they’re doing a good job,” he said. “Because the customer side of the teller counter is clean. No new prints, no old prints.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Oh, there are prints all over the girl’s side of the counter,” he said. “But I’m willing to bet those belong to her, so we’ll have no problem tying her to the scene. The fella who visited, though, remains at this point what we call anecdotal.”
“That’s disappointing,” I said.
“But not unusual. The largest part of planning a crime is planning covering up the crime. Smart guys cover up before, during, and after. Look at this door.”
I bent to examine the glass, and saw in the dusted surface a tremendous number of egg-shaped reticulations, the whorls and lines of which interrupted or overlapped each other, or broke off as if they had reached some unseen border. A horror movie I’d seen as a boy came to mind, in which a mound of cockroaches had scurried wildly across and over one another’s backs in a flesh-eating frenzy.
“It’s good glass and there are plenty of prints,” he said. “But do you think someone careful enough not to touch the counter would use his hands to open the glass door? And these prints are smaller and lower, probably women’s. But look at this.” He pointed to a spot higher on the door, where I could just make out a faint crescent in the dust. “Stand next to the door, but don’t touch, please. You see how it’s just below your shoulder? Someone roughly your height leaned into this door and pushed it open with his shoulder. Did you open this door with your shoulder when you got here?”
“No. I used my foot.”
“Because you didn’t want to leave any prints, either. Smart man. Good manager. And of course neither did I when I came in. We were being careful, just like this guy was being careful.” He smiled. “We could rob a bank together someday, you and I. And if we invited the fella who visited earlier, we could all work as a team.”
“We would just need to choose the right bank,” I said.
“Oh, I think we should rob this one,” he said, laughing. “It’s pretty easy.”
He seemed content to have shown me that there was nothing to see. I turned toward Catherine, who was at her desk, speaking to someone on her cell phone. She caught my eye and shook her head contemptuously while waving at her monitor, which I understood to mean the computer had still produced no images. “It hasn’t been that long, really,” she was saying into the phone. “I’m sure it will all get cleared up soon.”
Charlotte, Tina, and Officer O’Brien weren’t visible, but I could hear their voices in my office. Were they all in there with Amber? It seemed an odd place for people to congregate. Martinez paced a solitary circle a few yards off, hunched at the shoulders and speaking loudly in police jargon to no one. There was a microphone of some kind threaded into the lapel of his uniform, I assumed, though deranged people on the street argue with their invisible tormentors from the same posture. It seemed likely that at least some of Martinez’s discussion was about our branch, but he spoke in an impenetrable code. At one point I heard him say the word niner, which struck me as ridiculous, and then I overheard something that made me pause.
“No, he’s here,” Catherine said into her phone, gazing impassively at me. “Absolutely, as soon as I can. You don’t have to worry about that at all, Sandra. I’ll talk to you soon.” She closed her phone and set it on her desk.
Occasionally one stumbles upon a conspiracy of hidden forces that, working in concert, have concealed some essential fact of life. Deducing the world-market-level fraud regarding Santa Claus is an early instance, but one must also stumble upon the truth about sex, or discover that adults lie, you can’t actually be whatever you want, crime pays, a tacitly condoned and perpetuated class system rules the population, love is a delusion far more often than a fact, capitalism is not the only way, death comes for everyone, recreational drug use is almost always harmless, and so on. I had felt no further revelations awaited me in life, but upon hearing Catherine say good-bye to Sandra, yet another seemingly solid boundary had disappeared: in addition to pro wrestling being rigged and innocent people being convicted, I now had to add that Catherine could use her cell phone to call my ex-wife. Sandra had most likely been speaking on her cell phone, too. They had each other’s numbers. They carried them around in their little phones.
“I didn’t know you and Sandra were friends,” I said. “Much less that the two of you would be chatting today.”
“Do you think I’ve spent the last ten years with my eyes and ears closed? That I’ve never written a number down and kept it in case of a situation exactly like this?” she said.
“Is it normal for you to call Sandra and discuss our family’s personal crises with her? Do the two of you talk regularly?”
Absorbed in some occult activity involving rapid typing on her keyboard, Catherine shook her head impatiently, as if hurrying me through an argument whose opening moves were obvious. “Of course not,” she said. “But I’ve answered occasional calls from Sandra for ten years, so I’d like to help her. And I can’t help unless I ask what kind of help is needed.”
“But you already asked me that. Was my answer not sufficient?”
“It’s best to have as much information as possible.”
“Best for whom?” I said.
In the instant in which I turned to walk away, Catherine actually glared at me. I turned back after a few steps, but her eyes were on her computer monitor by then, and she didn’t bother to raise them. She leaned toward the screen as if increased intensity of focus might make the machine work faster, but I could see the color had risen in her cheeks. It was yet another benefit to seeing her without her makeup that day: her pulse was revealed immediately. My question had gotten its intended effect. “Please do not call Sandra any more today,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“It undermines my authority. It means you don’t respect my decision making.”
She laughed, but that was fine, since it at least got her to lift her eyes from the computer. “It doesn’t mean anything like that at all,” she said.
“When you’re printing out branch sales reports,” I said, “do I call Tony Sacco and ask him what order he thinks we should do them in?”
“No.”
“Let’s say you were getting ready to do the reports, and I called Tony and chatted with him about how they do them over at his branch, and then I walked over to you and told you that I had just called your old boss and he said they do the reports in such and such an order. How would you feel?”
“What would it matter what Tony thinks? I haven’t worked in his branch for years. He knows less about branch reports than I do, anyway.”
“Right. So when I hear you calling my ex-wife, it’s weird. Because what does it matter what she thinks?”
“No, that doesn’t work,” she said. “Because I know more about branch reports than Tony, but Sandra knows just as much about Miranda as you do. She probably knows more about Miranda than you do.”
I tried to gauge the degree to which the anger Catherine was raising in me was intentional. She maintained an eyebrows-raised expression of innocence.
“Do you have kids, Catherine?” I asked. I knew perfectly well she didn’t.
“No, Paul,” she said. “I do not.”
“The
n listen. Never tell one parent that it’s the other parent who truly knows their child.”
“I didn’t mean it the way you’re making it sound.”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that I am going to find my daughter, and I will be in charge of doing that. Not you. Not Sandra.”
“And if I don’t help you, you won’t sign my transfer form,” she said. Her tone was one of exhaustion. Did she believe I had invented the situation I was in solely to frustrate her attempts to complete paperwork?
“That’s not true,” I said. “The thing is two pages of small type and blank spaces that I don’t have time to sit down and study right now is all. I promise you, Catherine, that when I have a moment at some point later today, I will take out your form and carefully fill it out and sign it. And then you will not have to work here anymore.”
“It just means I’m allowed to apply for open positions,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t mean I’ll get one.”
“We both know you’ll get one. Notice how I am having confidence in and supporting you, while you are busy questioning and doubting me.”
“You are blowing this out of proportion on purpose,” she said. “And I think you know that.”
During the first few years Catherine worked for me, I sometimes worried whether she found me likable. Eventually, however, that concern faded—but not due to any evidence. It just seemed unlikely she would have continued working with me over the years if I were truly intolerable.
ON THE AFTERNOON I was to be discharged from the hospital, an older gentleman stepped into my room and asked Sandra if he could have what he called “another bit of time” with me. Shrugging, she said she would go out to get a sandwich. When she stepped out the door, I heard the man tell me his name was “Detective Buckle,” and that we had spoken before. Sandra had told me a detective visited the day of the robbery, but I had no memory of it, and in my narcotic punchiness that afternoon a few days later, I heard myself tell the detective he had a funny name.