The Last Kind Words: A Novel

by Tom Piccirilli

  “Yes.”

  We pulled up in front of the house. She didn’t say, I know you won’t let me down. She didn’t say, I believe in you.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked.

  “I have to be somewhere. Take the dog, all right, Blanche?”

  “Fucker.”

  She almost gave me that gentle empty touch on the arm that she’d trained herself to give the rubes. Instead, she leaned over and kissed my cheek.

  Dale called the dog. JFK climbed out the passenger side and let my sister lead him up the walk. He turned back once and gave me a sad stare, like he had plenty of his own secrets to spill that would haunt us all forever.

  Wes used to have a small apartment on the north side of Main Street, above a delicatessen that was one of Big Dan Thompson’s fronts. Now he owned a nice house on the south side, right off the bay. A canal ran behind his patio deck. A twenty-eight-foot sailboat sat at a private dock. The sails hadn’t been tied down properly and they’d become worn and frayed, flapping loose in the wind. The rails hadn’t been polished in years and the deck had banged around so much in storms that I could see cracks worrying up from the keel.

  The four-bedroom house was full of expensive, practical furniture. Chandeliers, marble tiling, a fireplace without an ounce of ash in it. A dining room that sat twelve. A living room with lush leather L-shaped couches, thick white carpeting, a huge plasma television and entertainment system. Coaster trays on every end table. The kind of room where you hosted large parties, serving martinis and canapés.

  There were two fresh gallons of milk in the fridge but no beer. It told me that Wes either ate a lot of cereal or had ulcers.

  No photos on the shelves, no pictures on the walls. No CDs or DVDs. Nothing that said he spent any time here relaxing. No sign of friends or family anywhere. No women’s deodorant or Tampax in the bathroom. No drawer set aside for a girlfriend. No condoms in his nightstand. No spank mags in either of the bathrooms. No recreational drugs. I found the ulcer meds in his medicine cabinet.

  Wes had moved up in the world but wasn’t enjoying himself much.

  He was out cold in the master bedroom. Like every syndicate guy who did business out of a bar or a titty joint, he didn’t crap out until eight or nine in the morning and didn’t get his day started until maybe five P.M.

  He slept with a .32 snub under his pillow. I’d never known anyone paranoid or dopey enough to really keep a pistol under their pillow. He could sneeze or have a nightmare and put one in his own ear. Danny really had him knotted up inside. I unloaded the snub and left it on his dresser. In his closet I found a false back with an assortment of guns stashed behind it, including two .357 Magnums, a couple of Desert Eagle 9mms, and one semiauto rifle. They all appeared to be unfired.

  There were banded blocks of hundred-dollar bills amounting to around fifty g’s. If I was still a thief I’d be having a very good week. Between Chub’s cache and Wes’s hoard I could’ve set myself up in Miami and lived the righteous life for a year.

  He also had five untraceable burner cell phones. I tried one and it worked. I pocketed it. In a small box were a couple of switchblades and a butterfly knife. I snatched the butterfly.

  I watched him sleep for a few minutes. His hundred-and-fifty-dollar haircut still looked good after eight hours of tossing and turning. But his face remained scrunched into a harassed expression. I wondered why he put himself through all of this. He wasn’t a born mob mook and he didn’t have the disposition for the serious roughnecking. I couldn’t see him ever killing anyone, but who the hell really knew.

  I cleared my throat and said, “Evening, Wes.”

  He was a light sleeper. He snapped up out of bed and looked side to side. It took him a second to go for the gun under his pillow. He scrabbled at the mattress and then checked the sheets.

  I said, “Relax.”

  His eyes cleared and he focused on me. Then he laid back down and rubbed his face. “Terry. Jesus God. You trying to juke me?”

  “If I was I would’ve been long gone by now. Besides, Wes, you don’t own a hell of a lot to fence.”

  His face fell and flushed so pink that it looked like a kid had dabbed him with a paintbrush. He wouldn’t have minded me robbing him nearly as much as my finding out he was boring as hell. “I’ve been meaning to buy some new stuff.”

  “Right.”

  “Give me a minute. And get out of my bedroom.”

  He bounced away to hit the head and I went and sat on his nice couch in his nice empty living room. He joined me in ten minutes, freshly showered, wearing a clean suit, his eyes as red as if he hadn’t slept at all.

  “You’ve got a sweet touch,” he said. “You must if I didn’t wake up.”

  “Some skills you never lose.”

  He frowned at me. His knitted eyebrows made him look like he was about ten years old. “I don’t appreciate you coming here like this. You could have just called or rung the goddamn doorbell.”

  “Don’t get your feelings too bent out of shape or I might remind you that you’ve been parked at my curb, watching my house.”

  “I was only doing what the boss told me.”

  “I’m only doing what I have to, Wes. Next time I’ll knock, right?”

  He sat opposite me. “What do you want, Terry?”

  I knew he wanted to get himself some milk. I wanted to tell him that it was okay, but I’d already embarrassed him enough. He wasn’t my friend, but I didn’t have to put him on the defensive like this. I’d been creeping around so much lately after so much time being out of the bent life that I wondered if I could go through a front door anymore.

  “It hasn’t been easy for you since Big Dan blew out his heart,” I said.

  “I get by.”

  “What is Danny into that’s so off course from the way his father played the game?”

  “You don’t need to know that, Terry.”

  “You really ought to retire.”

  It made him laugh and glance around the room like I’d told a complicated joke to a large group of guests and he wanted to see if everyone else was laughing. “And do what? Garden? It’s in my blood. Same as being a second-story man is in yours.”

  “I don’t take ulcer medication or have two gallons of milk in my house.”

  He leaned in. “You don’t have a house.”

  “Good point.”

  “So what did you do? Climb on the roof?”

  “No,” I said. “Popped out a basement window. It’s easy to creep another criminal’s house. They never have alarm systems hooked up to the police.”

  “I’ll remember that.” He held his arms up in a gesture of resignation. “So, you going to tell me what you want, Terry? We haven’t been back to your dad’s place.”

  “Let’s table it. Tell me about Butch.”

  “Butch?”

  “Started hanging around Danny’s not too long ago. Thinks he’s an outlaw. Twenty-one, skinny, busted nose, shaggy hair, pencil beard, smells like acne cream. Sounds like maybe he’s taken down a few small scores.”

  “Oh, that kid. Yeah.”

  I could tell by the way he said it that he knew my sister was seeing Butch. That it was something they talked about around the Fifth Amendment. Maybe as a joke, maybe as something more. Look at who the Rands are going to welcome into the fold—this dumbshit poser. What’s that make him? How do we turn that to our advantage?

  “What’s Danny got him doing?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “You know why I’m asking, Wes.”

  He put his hand to his belly as if the acid were about to eat through his shirt. “If you’ve got questions for the kid, you should break in to his place. Not mine.”

  I waited. I wanted a cigarette but Wes didn’t even have any ashtrays.

  “He doesn’t do much. He’s an errand boy. Chauffeurs some of the guys around. Picks up food. We send him to the bakery. Gets the dry cleaning and like that.”

  “What crew does he r
un with?”

  “No real crew so far as I know. But I don’t know much about the kid. He comes in with losers, strings with a lot of third-raters.”

  “You know if they’re moving up?”

  He answered carefully. “If they are, Mr. Thompson will get a piece of it.”

  I nodded. It sounded about right. Danny wasn’t pushing Butch and his crew into anything, but he wanted them to kick up in case they got away with a score.

  “And my sister, Dale?” I asked.

  “What about her?” Wes said.

  I didn’t want to form the words. “Has she been working for Danny?”

  “Ask her.”

  “Hey, let’s pretend I’m asking you, right?”

  It got tense for a moment. We glared at each other. We were both good at holding a malevolent stare. The pause lengthened. It could go on all night. I let my eyes soften. It was a calculated move for an honest purpose.

  “It’s my sister, Wes,” I said. “I need to know if she’s in trouble.”

  “She’s what, sixteen? Fifteen? Running around with a scumbag amateur punk who thinks he’s up to raiding big scores. Is she in trouble? Is that really even a question, Terry?”

  “I suppose not.”

  He smiled without any warmth. “Well, there it is then. But for the record, I don’t know if she’s involved with the crew.”

  “You don’t know? You’re Danny’s right-hand man. You fucking run the crew.”

  He rubbed at his stomach again and grimaced. “Not so much lately. I handle his business and the main crew, but Mr. Thompson’s … been dealing with out-of-towners.”

  “You mean he’s having other syndicate guys whacked.”

  “There’s some of that. But other things too. He’s a little paranoid. It’s not his fault. It’s just the life. He has a lot of new help. Some of these guys, I barely know their names. He keeps them close. He includes me on most of it, but not all. I don’t think he trusts me with some of the rougher stuff.”

  “Don’t drink milk in front of him. You got any Mace?”

  “What? Mace? No. Why would I have Mace? What the hell do you want Mace for?”

  I got up and headed for the door. “Forget it.”

  Coming out of Wes’s neighborhood, I took a corner too fast and Collie’s folder came sliding out from under the passenger seat. The papers scattered across the floor mat. I tried to ignore them but they kept drifting, whispering, and drawing my attention.

  I pulled over into a strip mall and watched folks going in and out of the stores. Kids still playing on those nickel rides that had been set in cement twenty-five or thirty years ago. A mini-helicopter that went up six or eight inches, then down, a couple of lights flashing. And the children excited as hell and clambering all over it while their mothers did their business in the stationery, the bakery, the laundromat.

  I drew the butterfly knife and whipped the blade out, twirled it shut, then snapped the point out again. Dale would get the feel of it in five minutes. If she was going to hang around Butch and his crew and felt better with a little protection, then I wasn’t going to deny her. I’d have to get her clear of them some other way. I didn’t know how. She was on the edge, trying to decide which way she wanted to go. My stomach twisted at the idea of her getting in deeper with the crew, even if she wasn’t running heists yet. Maybe the blade would wake her up to the fact that she wasn’t playing a game. I thought how easy it would be for women to defend themselves if only men taught them a little about how it was done.

  I put the paperwork back in order and paged through it. I wondered how much of it Collie’s wife had access to. I remembered her in the prison, the way she used her hands to form compact, brusque gestures. The way her glossy black hair lashed the air. The way he had shrunk from her like a child being punished. She wasn’t afraid of him. She had control over him. Maybe because he loved her. Maybe because he was locked up and needed someone on the outside to help.

  How much help was she giving him? And what kind?

  All I knew was that her first name was Lin. I dug through the file, hoping there’d be additional details. I didn’t find any. I had to get to a library or hop on the Internet. I had to do a little research. Dale would have a laptop. I wondered if Collie’s wife knew how to use a pistol or a blade. She seemed like the type who would.

  Then I realized, Jesus Christ—Lin. Her last name would probably be Rand. Why not? Anyone who felt the need to go through a formal marriage even within the walls of a prison might be traditional enough to take her husband’s last name.

  I drew out my new cell phone and called information. They gave me her number and I punched it in.

  There wasn’t any ringing, just music. I waited for voice mail or an answering machine but nothing came up. Finally a woman answered with a crisp, “Yes?”

  “Lin … Rand?”

  Hearing her own name made her even more irritated. “Yes. Who is this? What do you want?”

  I said, “This is Terry Rand.”

  “Oh.” She brightened instantly. “Oh, Terry, yes, pardon me. My God. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever hear from you. I’m so glad you called.”

  “I’d like to meet with you if I can.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. Are you free for dinner? We could—”

  I didn’t feel like spending an evening talking with a woman who had married a child-killer behind bars. “I’d like to meet now, if that’s okay.”

  “Certainly. You could come by my apartment. I live in West Islip, off Sunrise Highway.” She gave me directions. I knew the apartment complex. I’d boosted a few TVs out of there years ago. Who knows? Maybe I’d juked her place before.

  “I’ll see you in twenty minutes,” I said, and hung up.

  It took me fifteen. She had a ground-floor corner unit in the rear. Outside her door was a small but impressive garden and a couple of wrought-iron chairs that looked charming but impractical. I knocked and got an eight-count wait.

  She opened the door, smiled at me, and said, “Terry, it’s such a pleasure.” First she held out her hand, and as I went to take it she drew me into an embrace. I didn’t return the hug.

  I’d noticed her killer heels in the prison, and now I saw how petite she was. She couldn’t be taller than four-eleven and she wouldn’t hit a hundred pounds if she had rocks in her pockets. I imagined Collie opening her letters, finding snapshots of her that would make him flinch after so much time in the can. She had a resolute poise but also seemed little more than an attractive wisp, her shining black hair gliding about her as if in slow motion, so that you felt if you looked away even for a moment you’d turn back and find that she’d evaporated.

  Her place was clean and stylishly furnished. There were touches of formal Chinese setting. Mats, silks, bamboo, and a large framed painting of what appeared to be Hong Kong, taken from a junk in the harbor at sunset.

  “What can I offer you?” she asked. She reached out and put three fingers lightly on my wrist. I could barely feel them. “A beer? A glass of wine?”

  “You sounded terse on the phone,” I said.

  She nodded. Her glossy hair took a second to follow the motion of her head. “I’ve recently started getting a lot of crank calls.”

  “Because of Collie.”

  “Yes. Please sit.” She directed me to a settee that was uncomfortably hard. She poured two glasses of wine and sat one in front of me. I didn’t touch it. “He’s in the news again all the time now. There’s been a resurgence in interest. I did a few interviews with reporters, but they trim the coverage and edit out anything I have to say about the new details in Collie’s plight. They make me appear to be an unbalanced … groupie.”

  I thought, Plight.

  She went on. “People phone and tell me how next week they’re going to be sitting in the dark, saving electricity to make sure there’s plenty of voltage for his electric chair. They don’t realize he’s going to—”

  “Get the needle.”

  “Yes.”


  She sipped from her glass, and her hair folded over her face like curtains at the end of Act I and she started to cry. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t trust her. I didn’t believe you could fall in love with a mass murderer through prison letters scanned by guards. I didn’t believe you could have a legitimate relationship with a killer of nine-year-olds. But I’d abandoned the woman I’d loved and spent an entire afternoon watching her and her child from another man, jealous and sick and wishing I could steal her away, so what the fuck did I know?

  “He told me to talk to you. He said you had information.”

  “Excuse me, Terry. I don’t often get a chance to speak with someone who … understands. It’s a relief.” She wiped her eyes with her index fingers and took a slow deep breath. “And you look so much like him. It’s a bit startling. Yes, information. About the other girls. Yes. Even so, it’s nice to finally meet his family.”

  I smiled vapidly. Family. This was Lin Rand. She got up and walked out of the room. I wondered how she’d do feeding Gramp. I imagined her and my mother cooking together in the kitchen, boiling cabbage, providing plenty of leafy greens to my uncles. Her on the porch sharing beers with my old man. Giving JFK a flea bath. Paging through the photo albums, laughing at Collie when he was a kid. Look at him here without his front teeth. Here with a foot up on the bumper of his first muscle car, wearing a T-shirt, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Me in the background glaring, brooding, always angry with him. Her sitting with us on Christmas Day, opening presents, handing me a box. Here, Terry, he wanted you to have this; he made it himself. Me opening it and finding a license plate. TERRIER 1. I looked down and saw that the wine in my glass was full of tiny thrashing waves. I realized I was nearly panting, practically snorting.

  Lin returned with an accordion folder like the one I’d grabbed at the precinct. She sat it in front of me and said, “This is some of what we’ve discovered.” I flipped it open. Instead of official reports inside, there were dozens of pages of handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, obituaries. I took my time. I read through a lot of the data. I recognized the women that Gilmore had talked about. There were another three women listed, two who’d died before Collie’s spree. I didn’t know what to make of it. I had a hard time seeing one guy snuffing all these women without anyone catching on, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. On the surface of it I saw a lot of disparate deaths, some clearly murders, others possible accidents. There were a lot of angry men in the world. So much of the focus of that rage would be women. I pictured insecure boyfriends diving onto these girls in a fury. I saw bitter, defeated men prowling, hunting, snickering, sneaking up. I saw my brother beating an old woman to death with his fists. I saw him strangling Rebecca Clarke and leaving her body in the grass.