by Robert White
Then she staggered me: “You seem like a sad man. Like someone who’s waiting for something to happen and hoping at the same time it doesn’t.”
I stopped short of the car and turned to her. “Your daughter is dead. I was supposed to find her and bring her back. I didn’t do that because I was either careless or stupid. She paid with her life for my mistake.”
“You’re wrong, Mister Haftmann. She was my responsibility. My husband’s and mine. We bungled it, and I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life. Don’t you dare take my grief from me! It’s too selfish, it’s too selfish!”
At that, her face transfigured itself into a blood-darkened mask of misery and suffering that stunned me, and I felt her heave with great, racking sobs she could not suppress. I led her to the car and we drove home in silence except for those terrible sounds she made. That’s me, I thought, Mr. Fix-It. There ought to be about a million fewer in the world just like me.
Chapter 7
The mail brought me a check for five hundred dollars. It was sent by a former client of mine who was currently doing a three-to-five bid in another state. He had stiffed me on the bill and skipped town. This was shortly after I had provided explicit proof that his wife was unfaithful to him. I have often had occasion to show men photos of their wives in the embraces of other men, but I had never before shown a man a glossy of his wife having a champagne bottle inserted deep in her vagina; her lover, an imaginative coworker, gave it a good shake first and rotated it slowly up until the neck of the bottle disappeared. I also had photos of her and a large dog that I ripped up because I figured he didn’t need more than the champagne douche to convince him. Maybe, like so many cons for all the right and wrong reasons, he got religion in the joint and wanted to square his debts.
I paid some bills and then I made a phone call. I had a stack of mail to open when I returned from Boston and there was a short note from a couple from Sandusky who looked good. One photo enclosed. She was big and blonde and wore black high heels and nothing else. I called them and made a date for that night.
I met them for dinner at a restaurant near Cedar Lake. We agreed well enough among ourselves after dinner that we would return to their house. Did I mind if they smoked? I thought the question strange because they both smoked as soon as we arrived at our table, but then I realized she meant dope.
“Not at all,” I said.
“I like a little dope that you can reason with,” she said and thought that very funny because they both laughed.
I had her from behind while the husband was in front of her. They had the air conditioning off and rubber sheets on the bed. We were all sweating. I watched drops of sweat collect in the sacral dimple just above her rump. She had a very high and shapely rear.
The room was redolent of the musky smell of sex and marijuana. My head kept pummeling me with unbidden images of Annaliese’s blonde mother having sex with a black man. I imagined Annaliese too, simpering at me while she performed fellatio.
Safe from the pollution of this world.
These terrible images kept me past my point of endurance, all the more unusual because I had not had sex since the motel couple in early spring. I was locked into my own twilight zone, oblivious to this display of masculine staying power. At one point she disentangled herself from us and came back with towels to wipe our sweating faces. The husband had been gone for a while and I hadn’t noticed. He was a dentist who specialized in orthodontics. The rhythmic slapping, the mindless stroking was beyond sex. She had quick, easy orgasms: a spasm, a moan, and then back at it. She turned her head to regard me from that angle, but her eyes were slits, barely visible, and clouded by the effects of the grass. She wasn’t a natural blonde. Her pubic thatch of dark, tangled curls was slick from perspiration. She was still looking at me but I couldn’t tell what she was saying. Her husband came back into the room and she said something to him. He came closer to me and said, “She said you need to finish this marathon. She can’t come anymore. But she said she’ll suck you off. We’ve both got to get up early for work.”
On the ride home on the Shocknessy Turnpike, I remembered Old Man O’Reilly’s words: She’ll be in her father’s arms soon. I was thinking he meant our heavenly father. The man who called him must have been the killer, mocking him with his perverted priesthood, predicting O’Reilly’s own imminent death. I had an image of O’Reilly on the bed, rigorous death’s head grin, rotting in his leather outfit, his arms cinched upwards toward the ceiling and his lifeless hands drooping in mock supplication.
I got in at three and slept until seven. My cell phone on vibrate: Booth. God damn it.
I ignored it and slept until noon. On my way out the door, I saw some white-crowned sparrows flitting about the empty feeder. I’d been neglecting them lately, so I threw a whole ten-pound bag on the ground and waited a moment to watch them gather and feast.
I drove to the Strip for a meal at the Boar Room where they scorched my eggs and took the chill off my steak. Filling up the inner man, filling in the lacunae of my life between choices. I took my notepad out and reviewed every page since O’Reilly had walked into my office eight weeks ago; there was a single bright thread connecting my mental snapshots of three people now: Annaliese, O’Reilly, and Lawrence Gallatine, the Vo-Ed teacher.
Sex.
And now there was racism in the mix. Galltine’s flaxen-haired blue-eyed Jesus paintings resurfaced in my mind. Time to pay another visit to northeast Ohio’s favorite academic martyr.
I had plenty of time on the way to formulate a plan too. I believe in planning; plans are signs of intelligent action. The trouble is, I didn’t have one, and when I saw Gallatine’s expensive cars in his driveway, I lost it. I stood on my brakes so that my rustbucket of a Plymouth stopped about an inch from his Porsche’s outside fender. The sound of spitting gravel was something out of an old World War Two newsreel where you expect to see guerrillas dying against a wall in a hot fusillade of lead. I slammed the car door and saw Gallatine looking out his front picture window regarding me. The look on his face was not welcoming.
I put one fist against the door and drew it back over my shoulder because I intended to dislodge the little half-round pane of decorative glass, if at all possible. Gallatine, however, opened it, before I could and then opened his mouth. Before he uttered a syllable, I had him firmly by the lapels of his suitcoat and in one fluid motion, I whipped him past me the way you might see kids do on a playground. His arms flailed, he lost his balance and went down in a heap.
My next thought was purely rational: I hoped that he didn’t keep a varmint gun on the premises and that it was being trained on my back right now. I heard him scream to his wife to call the police. A door slammed behind me.
Good. Plenty of time.
I was on him in a second, had him hoisted upright so that my face was right in his, and then I gave him one hard shot to the solar plexus. A whole bunch of nerve endings join up there. It’s a little bonus in law enforcement that it doesn’t leave a bruise.
He gagged and began retching out ropy strings of bile. That was good too because it meant lots of nausea. You hit a guy and he starts that projectile vomiting bit, and you’ll be lucky if he can remember his name on the fifteenth try. I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a cruiser in the area, so I figured we may as well begin with the fifty-thousand dollar question:
“What’s his name?”
He was on all fours, not even looking at me or attempting to move. I kicked him in the same place. That got the heaving going again, and then a rancid spume erupted from his mouth and burst out his nostrils. He tried to stop it with one hand and steady himself with the other, but neither effort worked; he tottered and then nosedived into the ground. He lay there and made sounds like an old lawn mower I couldn’t get to fire up.
I kneeled next to his head and said very closely to his ear, “If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to hit you in the stomach again.”
He wagged his head
from side to side. His eyes were full of fear.
“No. Don’t. Hit. Please. No . . . more.”
“Tell me who you talked to in Boston.” I had sized Gallatine up at our first encounter; he was strictly middle-management. Somebody a whole lot bigger was behind him pulling his strings. There had to be. I knew it in the deepest cockles of my heart this guy was a nobody. A rotten nobody but no sadistic killer. I could hear my ex’s mocking laughter when I accused her of cheating on me, calling it one of my hunches, a lucky guess.
“Can’t. Tell you. Name.”
Fuck. Valuable seconds were passing.
I tried another angle, “How did you meet him?”
“Sent me information. Got . . . my name . . . from a list.”
“You knew O’Reilly, the father?”
He spat out a little blood. “Yes, yes.”
“How did you know him?”
“Met him at Klan rally in Painesville. I was there with some students to study crowd reactions. Noticed him. Arranged to meet him later. Meetings together.”
I shook him a little. “What kind of meetings?”
“Christian Identity.”
Byron De La Beckwith’s radical white supremacists. The gun-toting kind.
I thought of the FBI profile of the killer. I had to put on that mask and be emotionless for a moment. There was no time. I jerked his head upright by the hair and slapped his face with a loud cracking sound.
“Who is he, Gallatine? Tell me who organized these meetings. Who is the Boston man?”
He shook his head from side to side. “He’ll kill me.”
“I’ll kill you right here, fucker. Tell me!”
This time he looked right in my face. “No. You could . . . never do to me . . . what he is capable of. Beyond imagining . . . beyond pity.”
His eyes started to cloud over and he groaned, so I slapped him again. Craaack! “Give me his name!”
Nothing. Two more, a backhand to finish. Tears streamed down his cheeks. I twisted his hair harder and wrenched his face closer. The irises of his eyes were flecked with green. “Tell me!”
I drew back for another one and let him have it on the meat of his swollen cheek. Spit and a little blood flew. “Tell me, God damn you. What’s his fucking name?”
“Can’t tell you. Don’t know name. Just number. Only number to call.”
Bingo. “Where’s the number?”
His mouth was swelling up too much to talk but it sounded like “briefcase.”
“Get me the briefcase.”
He tried to get up, and I saw him grope around in the direction of his pockets. Keys, I thought. I patted him, felt his keys in a pants pocket and dug my hand for them. My mitt too big. So I ripped the pocket open and let the keys and coins fall to the ground.
Shit Piss Fuck. My magic triad wasn’t going to tell me which of the dozen or so keys on his ring was the house key. Sirens in the distance.
“Gallatine, which key? Which key! Don’t faint on me, you miserable piece of shit. Which fucking key!”
He tapped one in my open palm, and I ran to the door.
The wife and two daughters were staring at me, eyes enormous with fear. The headlines were shaping in my brain, and I could imagine the words in that type-point size they use for declaring wars screaming in my brain, tomorrow’s Jefferson Gazette: PSYCHOPATH ATTACKS FAMILY IN ANDOVER, BEATS FATHER SENSELESS BEFORE WIFE AND CHILDREN. Forgive me for what I am about to do.
“Mrs. Gallatine, where is your husband’s briefcase? Tell me, please! Where is it?”
She stiffarmed the air toward another room. The den, I hoped.
His office at home. The sirens were whooping close now, too close.
I found myself in a utility room. Crazed, I ran back toward the mother, but I heard the door slam just as I got there.
I could see a couple Sheriff ’s cars just cresting the hill. A hundred yards.
I tore from room to room. Nothing downstairs that even looked close. The back door opened to a redwood deck and a lot of woods where I could make my getaway. Call Reggie Stevens to intervene for me. Shit! Upstairs. Run! The sheriff ’s car was in the driveway; the gravel spat by the tires pinged a hubcap. I bolted from room to room—bedrooms, theirs, closets, bathroom, girls’ room, bunk beds. I stopped in my tracks and looked out the window. The deputy, a young man in his twenties was keying the mike and looking up at the house. Gallatine was being comforted by his wife and daughters. The little girls were crying hard. I could see their mouths working. I thought, Game over. I tried, Annaliese. I’m sorry.
Then I glimpsed a corner of it. Just visible from the hallway beneath the bed in the master bedroom: Gallatine’s briefcase. What to do now? I made my way down the stairs and slipped around back through the kitchen. There was a second deputy, older, circling out back with his weapon drawn. I hadn’t even heard the second car pull in.
I walked out the front door, my hands up, the briefcase dangling from my right hand. The young deputy roared at me to stop. He put himself in a two-handed stance and walked toward me. “Drop the briefcase! Now!”
I did.
I thought, Keep calm. Slow down the breathing.
I felt the second deputy coming up on what I call my near-blind side.
Please let him put the barrel against me.
As if he were reading my mind, he did—squarely in the middle of my back.
It was a crazy thing to do, with all those people standing around, and hoping the young deputy wasn’t the panicky sort. I had a moment more to think, Please, Jack, let this work . . .
I spun toward the older, overweight deputy holding the gun snug to my back and slapped his arm away with my momentum. Some part of my brain registered the shot.
I felt nothing, but I was clear of the gun. Before he could swing it back toward me, I closed in on him, and caught him in an embrace so that my arm could curl around his gunhand. I held it against me so that he couldn’t move his arm. Then I shoved the heel of my hand under his nose. I telegraphed the punch too obviously, so he managed to twist away from the blow. My back was wide open to the other deputy. Whether there was screaming or talking or whatever, I can’t say because the tunnel vision was so intense that I could count the hair follicles on that deputy’s nose, but I couldn’t tell you if anybody spoke any words during the whole time. My second shot to his nose broke it. Then, steeling myself for what came next, I clasped my arm under his elbow, locked my wrist and jerked upright, once, hard.
I didn’t hear his elbow breaking, but I know it did. He just crumpled from the incredible pain, and I let him shield me from the other cop as I lowered him to the ground and grabbed his gun. The young deputy had me in his sights, an easy headshot. He could have blown my brains out my ears from where he was. Impossible to miss. I could see his knuckles whitening beside the trigger guard. This time I heard the words, he was screaming at me to drop the gun. Get away from his partner. Just screaming. Words coming out the hole in his face while I concentrated on my next move. The deputy was close to my body, but he was in a dead faint, and his body weight, although about one hundred seventy pounds was like twice that much on a bench press.
“You drop it,” I said.
He just stared at me. He couldn’t believe this was happening, I suppose. I could see him thinking, goddamned domestic calls, the oldtimers were right, you never knew about these, always the worst.
That’s when I went into my spiel, told him my name, profession, just gabbed to get time—and a little closer to him. “I’m going to set down your partner,” I said. “Here’s the gun, I’m not going to shoot.” I kept repeating: “Here’s the gun, take it.” He should have backed up, but he watched me come on, my patter soothing him. He was still tight and a touch would set the gun off. I nearly burst into hysteria when I caught sight of the family standing there taking it all in like some kind of virtual reality playacting. They looked like cardboard cutouts to me. Gallatine was on his feet, eyeing me. His wife’s mouth was open in a perfect
circle.
This is ridiculous, ridiculous.
“He’s hurt,” I said, “I think his arm’s broken.”
As if on cue, the older deputy moaned as I made to set him down. That’s when the deputy lowered his vision, and that’s when I made what must be the luckiest move of my life. I threw the deputy toward him, and, sensing the ruse, the young deputy raised his gun to fire. The bullet made a sucking noise next to my ear.
Before he could get another shot off, I deflected the barrel with the edge of my hand and raised his gun with his fingers locked. With my own gun, I brought the butt around in a long arc that caught the deputy right under the jaw. The blow didn’t disarm him, but it sent off two more shots overhead. I clubbed him over the temple, harder than I intended, and his lights went out. He toppled sideways and lay motionless. The skin over his eyebrow was split and blood was pumping out hard.
I told the family, “Take care of these men.”
I walked up to Gallatine and put the gun to his head.
“Did you kill O’Reilly?”
“No, no, please—I—I watched. God help me, he made me watch it!”
I fetched Gallatine’s briefcase, tossed it onto the front seat with the deputy’s gun, and did a three-point turn across his lawn. I floored it down the driveway, reckless of me at this point, but the adrenalin was churning in me too. Before I was out of the township, I pulled off to the side of the road opposite a row of mailboxes and tossed up what I had for breakfast. Some cars, I remember, passed me and saw the grotesque apparition of a man’s head leaning out a car door a foot from the ground. Out of Andover, I took back roads all the way back to Jefferson-on-the-Lake. No sirens. No police cars passed me or saw me. It was like a dream, a very crazy dream. I was following the loneliest hunch of my life, and I had never yet played a long shot to win in all my gambling years.
Two miles from 531 I found a dirt road and pulled behind a deserted homestead to take stock of things. My back was stuck to the seat where the bullet had creased me. Jack used to practice that move on me with an empty revolver when I was a rookie. We’d drive down to the docks behind a warehouse where the night shift used to drink after the bars closed. If the gun is touching the body, it can work if you’re fast. The last time, a few beers too many, Jack hadn’t emptied the gun, or thought he had, and the instant I cleared the gun and swatted his arm, I heard the explosion.