For a second I thought I heard hushed voices. Something toppled over upstairs. The curse that followed seemed to be filtered through a mountain range of junk. This was no short-term accumulation, but evidence of powerful tectonic forces. He might be able to prove we weren't kin, but there was no denying we were spiritually connected to the Big Slob in the Sky.
Todd returned looking doubtful and sheepish, holding a picture to his chest. The brown plein air frame seemed a little wormy until I realized that was the style.
"Dad wasn't Prince Charming, but there's no way he's the Skunk you're talking about." He tilted the picture like a drawbridge, using his abdomen as a fulcrum. I would have to lean forward if I wanted to see more than the bottom of the frame. Sensing a powerplay, I leaned back, instead. Todd frowned. "Hey, you don't want to see, you can kiss my ass."
"They can doctor pictures," I said. "I thought Jeremy was the Neerson twin when someone gave me a photo of him and a lookalike. There's nothing you can show or tell me that will change the fact we're brothers...much as that dismays me."
"What picture?" Todd asked. "Did Jeremy give it to you?"
"Why would you think that?"
"He's been here." Todd had raised the picture-frame drawbridge and was again holding it to his chest, as though shielding a poker hand. "He couldn't remember the address, but he knew the area he'd come from. He drove around these neighborhoods for days, until he saw my yard..."
I had to laugh. In poshland, a McPherson yard would stick out like a gangrenous limb.
"I've cleaned up since then," Todd asserted in an afflicted tone that acknowledged circumstances had prevented him from completing the job, which was perfectly reasonable if you counted being a lazy pig an unavoidable circumstance.
"It wasn't Jeremy," I said. "The picture came from our mystery man, the same guy who sent us letters. And if he wrote intimate details about your life that only you could know, he knows more about our extended family than anyone in the family."
"Yeah," Todd said pensively. "He really knew some shit about me."
"Really 'really'?" We don't always know when we lie to ourselves. In fact, we lie to ourselves better than we lie to anyone else. But if I sat in front of a mirror and told a whopper, I would probably recognize it for what it was. I was recognizing one now.
"Really," Todd said, reinforcing the lie with a stiffened back. "And don't ask me to repeat it." He gave another one of those death-defying sighs and lowered the drawbridge again, only this time lower. I could see silhouettes beneath the frame glass glare, but not much more.
"Just give me the damn picture," I said.
With a sound like a throttled python, he hissed it onto the table, nearly knocking over my beer. I rescued the bottle, then lowered my eyes.
I recognized Todd through twinship, from one or two pictures Skunk had snapped of me when I was around one year old. It's hard to imagine a cold picture of a baby, but those had been icily analytical, as if Skunk was preparing documents for an insurance claim. But this photo showed both parents, proudly shoving my infant lookalike towards the lens, the father's lips pursed in googoos and gagas. I didn't recognize Mrs. Elizabeth Neerson, because whoever had taken the picture had chopped off her head, leaving it somewhere beyond the left-hand corner.
Mr. Benjamin F. Neerson was not Skunk. He had a face like chewed gum.
Winny Marteen. The man who had so slavishly clung to my father's shadow, and who had died alongside him in the botched robbery at the Ice Boutique.
My eyes drifted back to the woman. I struggled desperately for a glimpse beyond the chin. In my imagination, I thought I glimpsed sadness beneath an Avon patina. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn't pin it.
"Skunk?" Todd asked, biting his nail in a perfect imitation of my nervous habit.
"No," I said. "That's not Skunk. But I know him. And you're right."
"About what?"
"He's deader than a doornail. But not from asbestos. More like lead poisoning."
CHAPTER 23
In all innocence, Todd had a lot to answer for. And because he was innocent (in his own slimy way) not many answers were forthcoming.
"When is the last time you saw Winny?" I asked as calmly as I could.
"Who?" he asked.
"Your father, idiot!" I half-shrieked, my calm on the micro-clock. I wouldn't have liked to be called an idiot, so naturally Todd didn't, either. I tried to think of some way to mend the stricken look on his face and sighed, "Sorry..."
My brother-clone-clod was as unused to hearing the word as I was and fluttered around his beer as he transcribed it into his own West End vernacular.
"Idiot," he sneered.
"Fair enough," I shrugged.
"Dad was always flying the coop," he admitted. "Asbestos abatement conventions, right? But Mom knew better, and she began flying the coop, too. I'm surprised Dad risked losing her. You can't tell from this, but she wasn't half bad looking, and he's...you see. The last few years I hardly saw either one of them."
I was beginning to choke on the smokescreen. "You said your mother had just 'gone'."
"Did I?"
"And that your father was dead."
"Well..." he said, expressing his empty head with empty air.
"Why would you bring up the subject of a will if they were both alive?" I insisted.
"I didn't bring up the will. And dead? They might as well be." This was spoken with the clarity of a childhood grudge. "Even when they were here, they weren't, not most of the time. They hardly ever said two words to each other, and even less to me. It gave me the creeps."
My eyes kept going back to the picture. "You swear on your mother's grave..." Oops, wrong oath.
"No, the picture isn't doctored," Todd said.
"Do you have more?"
"In a shoe box somewhere, but they're just of me or Dad, never all three together." He reached across and flipped the picture over. "This was taken at a studio, which is why it's got all three of us."
"All of Winny and three-fourths of Mom. What kind of studio is that?"
"Okay, the photographer screwed up. But you can still see the three of us. I sometimes wonder if they had it done just to prove we belonged together."
"And there's none of Jeremy?" I asked. "As a rugrat, I mean. And what about brothers and sisters? They're mentioned in the will."
"Just us three," Todd reiterated. "Tell me again where you got a copy of the will? Is it the same guy who gave you Jeremy's picture?"
But I was plumbing my mind for memories of Winny Marteen. And of Mom, because she was either Todd's biological mother or my illegal guardian. I had been a kid when Mom dropped out of our lives, my last image of her being of an unhappy creature whose suicide made good contextual sense. Mental images of Winny were sharper, partly because they were more recent, partly because his downright ugliness made him unforgettable.
But that chin. And the body type. So much like Barbara's....
No, no, no. For Winny to be carrying on with Mom was perfectly inconceivable. The opportunities were there, of course, what with Skunk spending so much quality time with the Department of Corrections. But that had to be balanced against the fact that, if he found out, Skunk would have cut out Winny's heart and fed it to the neighborhood cats. And what would be the attraction? Mom had standards, after all. Okay, she married Skunk, but at least Dad had character. It was a completely bad character, but on Oregon Hill, bad boys were all the rage with the seaweed-brained girls I grew up around. Granted, it would have been hard for an adult, let alone a fledgling wuss, to spot sexual passion or jealousy in the prevailing dismal miasma of the McPherson household. I had a reasonable concept of the mechanics (sex involved gooey tinkertoys, I believed) but the underlying emotions would have been beyond me.
Yet here was this damn family portrait. Winny and (possibly) Mom had run off to live a separate life together, and a pretty nice life it had once been, financially speaking. Where had the money come from? The day after t
he jewelry store debacle the police had swarmed into my house like rabid zombies. After they questioned me and told me not to leave the city ("For where?" I asked inanely), I strolled over to Winny's and saw his place was getting the same treatment. If they had done the same at Todd's, he would have known Winny's fate. Up to now, though, he had given no hint his father had been blown away. Then again, with everything here upside down, it had the look and feel of a temporary police playground that the grownups had neglected to clean up.
"Did you have a visit from the police last December?"
"Why?" Todd was alarmed by the question. "I haven't done anything wrong. Oh...you mean because of my neighbors? They don't call the police just because you aren't anal. And I have cleaned up the place, remember?"
I thought he was wrong. His anal-free version of real estate hygiene might very well bring down the cops on his head. And being an accessory to a kidnapping might be interpreted as more than just a peccadillo in some quarters. Rather than argue, I accepted his ignorance at face value. He didn't know his alleged father had died in a hail of bullets. Nor did anyone else in our little circle, it seemed, with the exception of our secret benefactor.
"Did you visit your father in the hospital when he got sick?" I asked carefully.
"It was sudden, you know? He was scoping out a shipyard in Hong Kong, if you must know. He was planning on his next job. There's only so many state buildings with asbestos left in them. He just sort of keeled over and they buried him overseas."
Shipyard-keeled-funny rippled through my liquid brain. I wondered if I should break the news to him, but you never know how people will react. If he went all blubbery with grief I might feel obligated to console him. I was put off by the idea of giving him a hug, and not only because he was my cretin twin. I guess I'd seen and read too many time travel stories where the scientist hooks up with his younger self and implodes when he makes the mistake of touching him. In a way, we were both time travelers, rollicking in our separate dimensions, happily unaware and uncommitted, matter and antimatter.
"Who told you that story?" I asked.
"It's not a story, it's the truth."
Ahem. How could I tell him that his scummy father had lived a scummy life and had died a scummy death alongside my scummy Skunk? The creep was lying his head off, but about this he seemed to be telling the truth. He really believed Winny Marteen aka Benjamin Neerson was lying in an honorable grave beside his gravy train passport.
"Did your father have any cronies?" I asked.
"'Cronies'? You mean, like from the wrong side of the tracks?"
"Did he have any friends, then?" I would leave some tracks on his backside if he didn't start cooperating more cooperatively.
"I guess he did, but they didn't come around here," Todd answered after minimal thought.
"Not even coworkers?"
Todd shook his head. "He was pretty much a loner. I could be wrong. Maybe he was having road parties all the time, Richmond to Anchorage and back. How long would that take? Theoretically, I mean, stone sober?"
"Winny drank a lot?"
"Who?"
"Ben Neerson," I amended.
"I prefer that to 'Winny'. Did he drink? Only to prevent drying out."
"That's Winny all right," I nodded. "Weaned on moonshine. You'd think a contractor would stay sober some of the time."
"You're talking about my father, here."
"What was the name of his company?" I asked.
"New River Environmental Group, specializing in asbestos abatement and mold remediation."
"What the hell is 'mold remediation'?" I asked.
"Hell if I know."
My laugh probably sounded meaner than I intended. "If any mold needed rehabilitating—"
"How well did you know this Whiny character?" Todd scowled.
"He was always hanging around Skunk," I said, not having to think back very far. "It was almost like love."
"I don't need this," Todd said.
I could see this had to be nipped in the bud. Todd's disbelief could end any joint venture I might cook up, not that anything particularly important was simmering in my brain. Yes, it was unfair to give him another nasty shock—the first being me. But fairness was luxury at the moment, as it had always been.
"Winny Marteen and Skunk were killed six or seven months ago trying to rob a jewelry store on Staples Mill Road," I said abruptly.
Todd stared at me for a beat, then said, "I heard about that."
"That's all?" I asked.
"It was on the news, but I didn't watch all of the report. It seemed pretty useless."
"You got that right," I asserted. "He barely got in the door before the clerk shot him. You have a computer? The whole thing is posted on YouTube."
Pretty callous, right? I was asking my brother to watch the death of his stepfather, or father, or significant whatsitz. I was still wrapped in the unreality of the situation and found it hard to assign emotion to the lead characters. Barbara and Jeremy and I had seen the security video without blinking. But hearing the shot, then seeing Winny's shady eyes go wide for the first time ever before he fell back on the sidewalk, perfectly dead, might break poor lil' Todd's soft heart.
"Come on, where's your computer?" I urged. "I can find the website for you. I think."
"You're a sick bastard, aren't you?" Todd said. "This Winny character had nothing to do with my father."
"I don't know about the sick part." I was feeling my sadistic oats, I suppose. A lot of stress had been compressed into the last few hours. I had been kidnapped, harassed and confronted by a most-unwanted twin brother. Give me points for not snapping entirely.
"Well forget it," said Todd. "My computer crashed and the Geek Squad is out of my price range."
"I hear those porn sites are pretty dangerous," I nodded sympathetically.
"So you're saying my father..." Todd began, giving me a sideways glance sharp enough to slit my throat.
"You can see why I asked if the cops search your house," I said. "He had another house on Oregon Hill, and they turned it inside out. They would have done the same here..."
"You're crazy." Todd gave me a guarded look. "The police would have known these two are one and the same."
"Unless Winny had a twin, too," I grimaced. "A real possibility, as you can see."
"There aren't that many twins around."
"There's more than I counted on," I said.
We were quickly resolving our sibling chemistry into mutual suspicion, acrimony and sheer loathing—exactly as if we had lived together all these years.
"Why don't you give me a lift home?" I added sourly. "The longer I sit here, the more I think I have an interest in this property."
"That's a two way street," Todd said sharply. "Didn't you inherit a house?"
"Skunk was my father, not Winny," I reasoned.
"If Skunk was my father, too, I might—"
"You might want to see my house before you go to the trouble of laying claim to it," I cut him off.
"What could be worse than this?" Todd shot back, openly acknowledging his sloth.
A bit of reverse psychology was called for. If I made a big deal about my festering pit of a house, he might think I was putting him on. West Enders rarely ventured into the old downtown neighborhoods, which to their thinking were either dangerous haunts (like Jackson Ward) or historic acreage (like Windsor Farms) whose old money made their new shinola look like antique camel droppings. But it was general knowledge that Oregon Hill had come in for some extensive renovations. For all Todd knew, I spent my afternoons lounging in my backyard Olympic-sized pool sipping mint juleps as I floated aimlessly on my rubber ducky. I proceeded to paint a vision of complete squalor. My brother's eyes narrowed in growing disbelief.
"Nobody lives like that," he said when I finished.
"Who said anything about living? It's only a hole where I exist." The exaggeration consolidated a host of truths while managing to sound like a bloated lie. Todd drew back
a little, as though dodging a sucker-punch. His eyes widened along a you've-got-to-be-kidding-me axis.
"Why is it I think you're bullshitting me?" he said.
"Why is it I think the same?" I said.
Our mutual alarm only emphasized our twin-ness. We had grown up separately and never had the opportunity to develop a sibling secret code, like the only two people in a crowded room who speak Armenian. We were strangers to each other. Sharing thoughts or even moods crowded our personal space. I wanted to warn Todd against reading my thoughts, but he probably would have said the same thing at the same instant and we have both stroked out.
"I'll give you a ride home," he announced suddenly.
I knew he would.
But when we stepped out the front door and I noted the immaculate Jaguar in the driveway, I turned to the immaculate asshole next to me and said, "If you're so broke, that needs explaining."
"If you need a ride so bad, you'll stop the questions now."
It was one of those sinister shut-ups that told you your listener was tired of more than just the noise coming out of your mouth. I would have stomped away and taken a fat chance with hitching a ride on River Road if I hadn't been drooling to sit in the bucket seat of an XJ-L. It's not like I'd never seen a Jag before. There are even a couple parked on Oregon Hill. Belonging, I figured, to rich parents who had sent their college kids slumming. But to actually ride in one of these chariots was beyond the means of anyone lacking a gold-rimmed sphincter. It seemed like a miracle when Todd pressed his remote and the car beeped demurely. I wondered if the Jag's posh personality could distinguish between the two of us. Make no mistake, cars have personalities. My own Impala is saturated with the ill will of the previous owner , spewing toxins and carburetor malevolence, magnifying its presence on the road in spite of my attempts to remain inconspicuous.
A Jaguar's whole purpose is to be an object of ornate consumption. I felt conspicuous just looking at it, and had to stifle an urge to genuflect before getting inside. But just because he had a big engine didn't make him better than me. Just because I didn't figure out relativity doesn't make me worse than Einstein. Just because I can't pump more than forty pounds doesn't make me less of a man than Arnold. Just because I sell popcorn instead of Kissmecanoe Ice Cream doesn't condemn me to the ash heap. I mean, this is America, after all—nobody is better than anyone else. In fact, everyone else is a lot worse. That's what makes us equal.
Skunk Hunt Page 35