I found myself at Aja’s house. It was after midnight, but I rang the bell, hoping somehow that she might answer the door instead of her parents. I heard the dog barking and clicking his long nails excitedly on the floor.
Aja’s dad, a short yellow man with a mustache and no beard, answered the door. “Zingha? Now you know it’s too late. Does your mom know—”
“Mr. Bell, I really need to see Aja.”
“Are you serious, girl?” Then he started pushing the door shut. The dog was going crazy.
“Aja!” I screamed.
Her mother appeared. She grabbed Subwoofer’s collar with one hand and pulled him up short. He whimpered and I felt bad for him. All I’d ever known him to attack with was his huge floppy tongue.
“Shut up and get in here,” she said.
Aja’s father moved off to the side but he wasn’t happy about it. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked her.
“Quiet, you!” she responded. She was nearly a head taller than he was, with eggplant-colored lips and very arched eyebrows.
“Look, Nzingha,” she said, “Aja’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”
I shook my head frantically. “We have to find her! You don’t know what’s going on. There’s a—”
“Stop talking and listen,” she said, getting louder. “If anyone comes around asking where my daughter is, tell them the truth. That she has disappeared and that we are very worried. Mr. Bell will walk you home.”
Mr. Bell fumed as he escorted me. “I guess there’s no point in any more stupid fucking shit happening,” he muttered. I didn’t answer; he wasn’t talking to me.
I let myself in as quietly as I had left, shocked by the thick silence of the house. I tried not to imagine Jess’s closed eyes, her blood on the asphalt. I had to remind myself that she was dead, so she couldn’t be as cold as she looked. I tried to tell myself that her floating body, Dahani, and Aja were in another world.
But the next morning I learned that my mother hadn’t been home. She’d been down at the precinct with my brother.
* * *
By the time the police had arrived at the pool, Roger was nearly dead. He had tried to drown himself. He couldn’t answer questions about Jess from his coma, but the police knew he hadn’t done it.
It seemed to me, from what I managed to read before my mother started hiding the papers, that Jess’s death had been an accident. But her dad was a lawyer and Aja was dragged back from an aunt’s house in Maryland to do eighteen months in the Youth Detention Center. I went to visit her once that winter, in the dim, echoing room that reminded me of the cafeteria at our elementary school. I didn’t tell my mother where I was going. She hadn’t let me go to the trial.
Aja and I made painful small talk about how the food was destroying her stomach and about her first encounter with a bed bug. She said fuck more than usual and her skin looked gray.
Then she blurted, “I didn’t do it.”
“I know,” I said.
“Things just got crazy.” She told me about that night. Everyone had been drinking, including her, and Adam called for another chickenfight.
“First I fought that girl Tanya and I beat her easy. Then it was me and Jess. But I had won the time before, the night you came, you remember?”
I nodded, though I hadn’t seen her victory.
“So she was really getting rough. And then she fucking—”
“We don’t have to talk about this anymore,” I said, trying to be the sweet girl my mother remembered.
“She pulled my top down. I kept telling them I wanted to stop. But they were yelling so loud. And Adam was cheering me on. It was so—” Aja’s voice seemed to swell with tears, but her eyes remained empty.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and we were quiet for a moment. The din of the visiting room filled the space between us.
“But Jess was my best friend,” she said. I had come to be good to her, yet I wanted to shake her by the shoulders until her teeth chattered.
My brother was able to convince the police that he hadn’t done it. But he not only needed an alibi, he also had to rat out the Gutter Boys, with whom he’d apparently tried to go into business. Tried, I say, because he was such a crummy drug dealer that he had to steal to make up for what he couldn’t sell. Dahani told the police what he knew about the small operation, and after that, a couple of Jeeps slowed down when he crossed the street, but he didn’t turn up in the Schuylkill or anything. He got his old job at the video store back, but he got fired after a couple of months, and then our VCR disappeared. After two weeks in a row when he didn’t come home, and my mom had called the police about sixteen times, she changed the locks and got an alarm system.
Sometime after that she looked at me over a new tradition—a second nightly beer—and said, “Nzingha, I know we should have talked about this as soon as I knew what was going on with your brother. But I didn’t want to say anything because I know that you love him.”
The scandal didn’t break the pool. They held a floating memorial service for Jess and hired a real security company. The scandal did, however, break the news of the pool to the neighborhood. But at $1,400 a year, none of the black folks we knew could afford to join it anyway.
BUMS
BY WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER
West Side, St. Paul
(Originally published in Twin Cities Noir)
Kid showed up at the river in the shadow of the High Bridge with a grin on his face, a bottle of Cutty in his hand, and a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. Kid was usually in a good mood, but I’d never seen him quite so happy. Or so flush. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a bottle of good scotch.
It was going on dark. I had a pot of watery stew on the fire—rice mostly, with some unidentifiable vegetables I’d pulled from the dumpster behind an Asian grocery store.
I held up the Cutty to the firelight and watched the reflection of the flames lick the glass. “Rob a bank?”
“Better.” Kid bent over the pot and smelled the stew. “Got a job.”
“Work? You?”
“There’s this guy took me up on my offer.”
Most days Kid stood at the top of the off-ramp on Marion Street and I-94 where a stoplight paused traffic for a while. He held up a handmade sign that read, Will Work For Food. He got handouts, but he’d never had anyone actually take him up on his offer.
“What kind of work?”
“Chopping bushes out of his yard, putting new bushes in. This yard, Professor, I tell you, it’s big as a goddamn park. And the house, Jesus.”
He called me Professor because I have a small wire-bound notepad in which I scribble from time to time. Why that translated into Professor, I never knew.
I wanted badly to break the seal on the bottle, but it wasn’t my move.
Kid sat down cross-legged in the sand on the riverbank. He grinned up at me. “Something else, Professor. He’s got a wife. A nice piece of work. The whole time I’m there, she’s watching me from the window.”
“Probably afraid you were going to steal something.”
“No, I mean she’s looking at me like I’m this stud horse and she’s a . . . you know, a girl horse.”
“Filly.”
“That’s it. Like she’s a filly. A filly in heat.”
I watched the gleam in Kid’s eye, the fire that danced there. “You already have yourself a few shots of something?”
“It’s the truth, swear to God. And get this. The guy wants me back tomorrow.”
“Look, are we just going to admire this bottle?” I finally asked.
“Crack ’er open, Professor. Let’s celebrate.”
Kid and I weren’t exactly friends, but we’d shared a campfire under the High Bridge for a while, and we trusted each other. Trust is important. Even if all you own can fit into an old gym bag, it’s still all you own, and when you close your eyes at night, it’s good to know the man on the other side of the fire isn’t just waitin
g for you to fall asleep. Kid had his faults. For a bum, he thought a lot of himself. That came mostly from being young and believing that circumstance alone was to blame for his social station. I’d tried to wise him up, pointing out that lots of folks encounter adversity and don’t end up squatting on the bank of a river, eating out of other people’s garbage cans, wearing what other people throw away. He was good-looking, if a little empty in the attic, and had the kind of physique that would probably appeal to a bored rich woman. He was good companionship for me, always eager and smiling, kind of like a having a puppy around. I didn’t know his real name. I just called him Kid.
The next evening when he came back from laboring in the rich man’s yard, he explained to me about his plans for the guy’s wife.
“She’s got this long black hair, all shiny, hangs down to her hips, swishes real gentle over the top of her ass when she walks. Paints her nails red like little spots of blood at the end of her fingers and toes. Talks with this accent, I don’t know what kind, but it’s sexy. And she’s hot for me, Professor. Christ, she’s all over me.”
Dinner that evening was fish, a big channel cat I’d managed to pull from the river with a chunk of moldy cheese as bait. I was frying it up in the pan I used for everything.
“If this woman is all you say she is, she could have any man she wants, Kid. What does she want with a bum?”
That offended him.
“I’m not like you, Professor. The booze don’t have me by the throat. One break and I’m outta here.”
“Dallying with a bored rich woman? How’s that going to change your luck?”
Kid peered up from watching the fish fry. “I got inside today, looked the place over. They got all this expensive crap lying around.”
“And you’re what, just going to waltz in and help yourself?”
His looked turned coy. “She let me inside today when her old man took off to get a bunch of bushes from the nursery. Asked if I wanted some cold lemonade. Starts talking kind of general, you know. Where I’m from, do I got family, that kind of thing. Then, get this, she tells me her husband’s not a man for her. No lightning in the rod, you know? I tell her that’s a damn shame, all her good looks going to waste. She says, ‘You think I’m pretty?’ I tell her she’s the prettiest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen. Then you know what, Professor? She invites me back tonight. Her old man’s going out of town and she’s all alone. Doesn’t want to be lonely. Know what I’m saying? When it’s dark, I’m heading over.”
“You’re spending the night?”
“Not the whole night. She don’t want me around in the morning for the neighbors to see sneaking off.”
“You sure you’re not on something?”
“Proof, Professor,” he said with a sly grin. “I got proof.”
From his pants pocket he took a small ball of black fabric. He uncrumpled it and held it toward me with both hands, as if he were holding diamonds. “Her panties.”
Thong panties, barely enough material to cover a canary.
“She gave you those?”
“Reached up under her skirt and slipped ’em off where she stood. Said they’d tide me over until tonight.”
He went to his things and rolled the panties in his blanket.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“Naw. I’m going to the Y, slip inside and wash up. I want to smell good tonight. Don’t wait up for me, Dad,” he said with a grin, and he walked off whistling.
He didn’t come back that night. I figured he’d got what he wanted from the rich man’s wife and the rich man’s house and I’d seen the last of him. What did I care? People come into your life and they go. You can’t cry over them all.
So why did I feel so low the next day? All I wanted was to get drunk. Finally, I headed to the plasma center on University, let them siphon off a little precious bodily fluid, and I walked out with cash. I headed to the Gopher Bar for an afternoon of scintillating conversation with whoever happened to be around. It was a place where Kid and I had sometimes hung out together, and I hoped he might be there.
Laci was tending bar. A hard, unpretty woman with a quick mind. She sized me up as I sat on a stool. “Starting the wake, Professor?”
“You lost me,” I said.
She threw a bar towel over her shoulder and came my way. “I figured you were planning to tip a few to the memory of your buddy. Not that a piece of crap like him deserves it.”
“Kid? Piece of crap? What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
She turned, took a bottle of Old Grand-Dad down from the shelf, and poured me a couple of fingers’ worth. “This one’s on the house.”
Then she told me about Kid. It was all over the news.
The night before, he’d been shot dead in the rich man’s house, but not before he beat the guy’s wife to death with a crowbar.
“Funny.” She shook her head. “I never figured him to be the violent kind. But anybody beats a woman to death deserves what he gets. Sorry, Professor, that’s how I see it.”
I swallowed the whiskey she’d poured, but instead of sticking around to get drunk, I walked back to the river.
That night I didn’t bother putting together a fire, just sat on the riverbank below the High Bridge, listening to the sound of occasional traffic far above, thinking about Kid. At one point I pulled out my notepad, intending to write. I don’t know what. Maybe a eulogy, something to mark his passing. Instead, I picked up a stick and scratched in the sand. A few minutes later a barge chugged past and the wake washed away what I’d written. I ended up crying a little, which almost never happens when I’m sober.
* * *
Two years ago I had a wife, a good job as a reporter with the Star Tribune, a house, a car. Then Deborah left me. She said it was the drinking, but it was me. I was never reliable. The drinking only made it worse. Not long after that I lost my job because I was happier sitting at the bar than at my desk trying to meet deadline. Everything pretty much went downhill from there. Somebody tells you they drink because they’re a failure, it ain’t so. They’re a failure because they drink. And they drink because it’s so damn hard not to. But as long as they have a bottle that isn’t empty, they never feel far from being happy.
That’s me, anyway.
Near dawn, I stood up from the long night of grieving for Kid. I was hungry. I walked the empty streets of downtown St. Paul to Mickey’s Diner, got there just as the sun was coming up, ordered eggs, cakes, coffee. I picked up a morning paper lying on the stool next to me. Kid and what he’d done was still front-page news.
He had a name. Lester Greene. He had a record, spent time in St. Cloud for boosting cars. He had no permanent address. He was a bum. And he’d become a murderer.
The woman he’d killed was Christine Coyer, president and CEO of Coyer Cosmetics. Deborah used to ask for Coyer stuff every Christmas. All I remember about it was that it was expensive. According to the paper, she’d just returned from visiting family in New York City. Her husband had picked her up at the airport, brought her home, and while he parked the car in the garage, she’d gone into the house ahead of him. Apparently, she surprised Kid, who’d broken in with a crowbar, which he proceeded to use to crack her skull. He attacked her husband too, but the guy made it upstairs where he kept a pistol for protection. Kid followed and the rich man put four bullets in him in the bedroom. He was dead when the cops arrived. The husband knew the assailant. A bum on whom he had taken pity. A mistake he now regretted.
The story was continued on page 5A with pictures. I could tell already the whole thing smelled, but when I turned to the photos I nearly fell off my stool. There was the dead woman. She was fiftyish, nicely coiffed, but not with long black hair that brushed the top of her ass. She was a little on the chubby side, matronly even. Not at all the kind of figure a pair of thong panties would enhance.
If the article was correct, she’d been in the Big Apple when Kid had been given th
at delicate little sexual appetizer. So, if Christine Coyer didn’t give it to him, who did?
During my college days, my clothing came from the Salvation Army. I shopped there in protest against consumerism and conformity. I shop there now out of necessity. For ten bucks I picked up a passable gray suit, a nearly white shirt, and a tie that didn’t make me puke. I washed up in the men’s room of a Super America on 7th, changed into the suit, and hoofed it to the address on Summit Avenue given in the newspaper story.
Like a big park, Kid had described the place. His perspective was limited. It was the fucking Tuileries Gardens, a huge expanse of tended flower beds and sculpted shrubbery with a château dead center. The cosmetics business had been very good to Ms. Coyer. And to her husband, no doubt. So good, in fact, one had to wonder why a man would do any of the dirty landscape work himself. Or hire someone like Kid to help.
I knocked on the door, a cold call, something I’d often done in my days as a journalist. I had my notepad and pen out, in case I needed to pretend to be a reporter.
A woman answered. “Yes?”
I told her I was looking for Christine Coyer’s husband.
“He’s not here,” she informed me. “Do you have an appointment?”
No, just hoping to get lucky, I told her.
“Would you like to leave a message?”
I didn’t. I thanked her and left.
I headed back to the river thinking the woman’s accent was French, but not heavily so. Quebec, maybe. Her black hair when let down would easily reach her ass. And that body in thong panties would be enough to drive any man to murder.
What to do?
I could go to the police. Would they believe me? If I produced the panties, they might be inclined to look more skeptically on the rich man’s story.
I could go to an old colleague. I still knew plenty of press people who’d take the story and dig.
But the influence of money should never be underestimated. Everybody’s integrity is for sale if the price is right. So I knew that turning the information and the panties over to anybody else was risky.
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