The Last Kind Words: A Novel

by Tom Piccirilli

  “You want to discuss him,” she said.

  I turned and looked at her face in silhouette. “Christ, no.”

  “I think you do. It seems to be what matters most to you right now. That much is obvious, Terry.” Her voice rose a bit with a tinge of anger. I wasn’t sure if it was for me or Collie. “You’re thinking about it right now. Anybody can see the pressure you’re under.”

  “He’s not what matters most.”

  “Then what does? I’d like to hear.”

  I thought I might talk about Kimmy and Scooter. I thought about telling her to interview Cara Clarke again, because there was a girl who had a lot of pain to purge.

  Eve said, “Why did you feel the need to visit him a second time?”

  It had to come back to my brother. “He asked me to.”

  “And that was all you needed to prompt you.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Will you see Collie again?”

  I turned and snapped, “Who the hell are you to use his name?”

  She relaxed and fell back in her seat, opened her purse, drew out a cigarette, and lit up off my car lighter, the way Kimmy used to do. I almost wanted to put my arm around her. “You’re protective of him.”

  “I just don’t like to hear his name.”

  She was in shadows, the smoke catching the light and drifting across my face. “Did he tell you why he killed those eight people?”

  I thought, Seven. He says it was only seven. But I don’t know. How the hell am I supposed to know?

  Already there were several accidents on the road. Late dark night, wet country roads, you had vehicles wiping out into one another like they were playing bumper cars. Cops in their rain gear directed traffic. The flares left flaming streaks across my vision as we passed by.

  “That’s not how this is going to work,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not going to get anything out of me because I have nothing to give, Eve.”

  By the burning red glare I watched as she nibbled at her bottom lip with her front teeth, held on for an instant, then slowly let out a small sound that wasn’t quite a sigh. “I want your perspective.”

  “I can’t give that either,” I said. “I’m too close. What do you really expect me to say? I have no more insight into Collie than anybody else does. I’m at even more of a loss, right? Because I never expected this to have ever happened. So I’m worthless to you. But you’re not to me.”

  She kicked off her shoes, shifted in her seat, got more relaxed. I turned the heater up and opened the vent onto the floor so she wouldn’t get cold.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll listen. What can I help you with?”

  “Did you interview the families?” I asked.

  “The victims’ families? Yes, of course.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything to connect them?”

  “The police say no.”

  “I know what the police say, Eve. What do you say?”

  “I say no.”

  The same images scuttled through my head. The little girl, twisting away from the barrel of his gun. The old woman, meeting my brother on the sidewalk, passing him without a word, fearful of such a large man, and Collie spinning the full force of his strength on her with his fists. Her breathless grunts beneath the awful sounds of her bones snapping, screams choked in the center of her flailed chest. I held on to the steering wheel at ten and two, a conscientious driver. I was worried that the images were already losing some of their power over me. Another accident was coming up. I rolled down my window partway and the rain sluiced in and wet the side of my face.

  “Give me something I can use,” I said.

  “To what end?”

  “To the only end, the very end. I need to know if he did them all or not.”

  She drew her knees up and angled closer to me. Her breath warmed my neck. “I think you should just accept that he’s guilty of killing them all. It would be easier for you.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not sure.”

  “Your father is still robbing houses,” she said.

  It took me so off guard that I nearly missed a bend in the road. Shining reflectors appeared across the dark expanse of a guardrail. I eased my foot off the gas and maneuvered into a tight turn. “How do you know?”

  “He was detained three months ago for breaking in to a home.”

  “Whose home?” I asked, and my voice was sharper than I intended.

  She looked aside at the wet empty woods flashing past as if she had to think hard to come up with the name. She was deciding whether to tell me or squeeze me for another angle at the story. Our attraction for each other was secondary to a night of murder and the continuing fallout. She glanced at the side of my face. I turned and she read something in my eyes, despite having nothing more than the dashboard light to read them by.

  “The Wright family. Do you know them?”

  I didn’t let my expression change. My scalp prickled with sweat, and a sliver of ice worked itself into the small of my back. My father had crept Chub and Kimmy’s house. I imagined him parking in the same spot where I had parked in front of their place. Watching them as I had watched. Seeing Scooter race by on the front lawn. My old man that close to her. I watched him popping out a screen window and sliding through, wandering the house in the darkness while Kimmy and Chub slept. Or made love. My old man listening. The fuck was going on?

  “You said detained. He wasn’t arrested?”

  “No, Terry. But it’s on record.”

  Had Gilmore shown up to talk Kimmy or Chub out of pressing charges? Had she or Chub simply shown mercy? I wondered at the fear in her face, awakening in the night to see her ex-boyfriend’s father at the foot of her bed. My hands tightened on the steering wheel, and a muscle spasm made me tug right, then left, the tires chirping on the wet road.

  “Who was the cop on scene?” I asked.

  Eve reached for my knee in a show of concern. The rain sprayed my temple. I was driving sharp but fast. I wanted to go faster. I wanted to take the next right and head back home and confront my father. I thought, This means something, this will paint your old man in a way you have never seen before. My stomach twisted. I’d never been angry at my father, not even when he’d torn my rib through my flesh. But now I was chewing my tongue and tasting blood.

  “I don’t remember,” Eve said. “Is it important? Who are the Wrights?”

  “What did he take?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then he wasn’t robbing the house.”

  “So what else could he have been doing there?”

  The stink of burning flares continued to fill my nostrils. I glanced at Eve. She was watching me intensely. She said, “Terry … please, slow down.” This whole scene might turn up on page three. The way I folded under questioning, how I sweated and barked. My mother would want to break Grey’s ass for putting me in this position. My sister would think I was a dunce. Lin would pass word back to Collie that I had been wooed. I didn’t know what my father would think. It seemed a little pathetic that I wouldn’t know what my father would think.

  We got to Head of the Harbor and she directed me along a series of back roads to her isolated neighborhood. She looked at me like she knew I had boosted a lot of TV sets out of houses like these, but it wasn’t true. There were too many private security forces and it wasn’t worth the risk.

  She lived in a beautiful home that wasn’t more than five years old but had been built in the Victorian style. Three floors with arched windows set in squared-off bays. The front door was centered in an elaborate porch, and the roof featured gabled ends edged in a decorative carved timber.

  “Come inside for a drink,” she said.

  “I’m not going to tell you anything you can use, Eve. I’m sorry I wasted your evening.”

  She kissed the edge of my mouth. “You haven’t. Not at all.” It was prim by any standard of kissing, but there w
as a controlled heat to it. I turned to her and she thumbed her lipstick off my cheek. She placed a hand on my forehead like she was checking for fever and then leaned in and kissed me again, much more passionately. I didn’t entirely return it but I could feel something loosening within me. Our tongues rested against each other for a time. I liked not having to talk. She drew away.

  Not everything had to lead back to Collie and death. I could have something of mine. I wanted her. I could have her. There was nothing wrong with it, and I tried to believe it.

  “Is there a Mr. Drayton?” I asked.

  “Mr. Drayton is shacked up with a twenty-year-old theater-arts major in Miami. He won’t be bothering us. Come inside for a nightcap.”

  I shut off the engine. The pulse in my throat snapped. Kimmy had been on my mind so much that the very idea of sleeping with another woman somehow felt like a betrayal. Eve noted my resistance. She also saw my desire. She brought my lips to hers again. I fell into it and started reaching for her hungrily.

  My conflict heated her even more. She liked a little obstinacy. She lifted a knee and swung closer to the driver’s seat and ground herself against me. I started to groan. The pictures in my head continued shuffling. I hugged Eve tightly and licked beneath her ear. It made her laugh. I liked the sound of it. Her laughter got louder and poured itself down my throat.

  In the dark, when we were about three quarters of the way through the funky stuff, I heard the front door open. I thought maybe Mr. Drayton had returned from Miami a sadder and wiser man. My thief’s instincts took over. I extracted myself from Eve and hopped off the bed. I looked at the door. I looked at the window. We were on the first floor and I wondered if I should climb out. I looked for my pants. She caught her breath and turned on the nightstand light.

  I thought of Mr. Drayton wearing a bright-yellow shirt and holding a 10-gauge. I pictured Collie slipping through the tight rooms. Someone moved up the hall toward us. I scanned for my pants but couldn’t find them.

  “Relax, Terry,” Eve said. “It’s my daughter, Roxie. She works late for an emergency animal clinic.”

  “Oh yeah.” I remembered the photos of the newborn Rottweilers.

  “I think I mentioned that she’s training as a vet technician.”

  “That’s very … professional,” I said.

  “Yes, she is. Come back to bed.”

  Roxie’s footsteps continued to the door. She knocked quietly and asked, “Mom, you still up?”

  “Not now, Rox,” Eve said. “We’ll talk in the morning, all right?”

  “Sure thing. Good night.”

  “Good night, honey.”

  Roxie headed up the stairs, and a door on the second floor opened and shut. A stereo turned on in a distant corner of the house, and quiet music made the ceiling thrum.

  “Come back to bed,” Eve said.

  I slid in under the covers and she rolled into my arms. She inspected the black and yellow bruises over my kidneys. “My God, I didn’t notice these before. Who’ve you been tussling with?”

  “The cops,” I said.

  I shouldn’t have, but I was still a little miffed at Gilmore and the truth slipped out. She was right. I guess I did want to talk.

  “I can do an exposé,” she told me, her voice tight and serious. “I started my career investigating a sergeant in Bedford-Stuyvesant who had raided his own evidence locker. Give me the officer’s name. I’ll visit him with a news crew every day. I can have him walking a beat in Cudahy, Wisconsin, this winter.”

  “No,” I said. “He’s a good cop. He’s not hurting anyone else.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He and I just had some personal issues. And I might still need him.”

  “What for?” she asked. “A burglar needing a cop is an odd state of affairs.”

  “I need him to keep looking into the Rebecca Clarke murder.”

  “Then you do believe your brother is innocent.”

  Her body was taut and well muscled, but soft in the appropriate places. She put in a lot of time at the gym. I spotted some oddly pigmented areas at her neck, breasts, and hips that might have been very faint surgery scars. Her breasts were large and didn’t sag much. Her belly was trim and tight and slightly freckled. She wore a thin golden chain across her midriff that chimed so faintly while we’d been making love that I thought there might be a cat walking around the place with his tags tinkling. Legs lean, calves well defined as she arched her toes out and her whole body tightened with a yawn.

  “Whatever I believe, I don’t want to talk about it now,” I said.

  She ran her hands over my stomach, my chest. “How could you stand it?”

  “It was only two sucker-punches.”

  “No, not that.” She kissed my chest. “This.”

  I thought she meant my scars, but then I realized she was talking about my tattoo. “Yeah, it hurt like a bitch.”

  “It’s so intricate.”

  There had been a lot to cover. I nodded. She ran a hand through my chest hair like she was petting the head of the hound. She pressed her lips to the dog’s eyes, his nose, then licked across the teeth of its open, barking mouth. She laid me back against the set of thick pillows and ran her tongue down from my navel. I started to pant. I took hold of her head and gently guided her lower. She went with it for a moment, then resisted.

  “Why are you all named after breeds of dogs?” she asked.

  “Why in the hell are you asking that now?”

  “I’m curious.”

  Upstairs, Roxie closed a bathroom door. A fan went on, water ran, and the pipes groaned in the walls. Her phone rang and she answered and immediately began arguing with someone. The rain kept spraying against the windows, like it was being cast off by a woman whirling her wet hair against the glass.

  “No one seems to know,” I said. “It’s just been the way of our family for at least the last four generations.”

  I brushed her hair back with my fingers. She kissed my inner thigh. She flicked her tongue against my flesh and murmured and giggled. She nipped at me. She turned her face upward at me. I thought, Jesus, she’s going to keep me vibrating like a cello string all night long.

  “Isn’t it degrading?” she asked.

  “I thought you liked it,” I said.

  “Not this. Being named after a dog.”

  “No. It’s my name.”

  She tried to be ingratiating, whispering cutely the way real lovers do. Upstairs, her daughter was on the verge of yelling and then must’ve hung up. The pipes kept groaning. Eve made me groan too. “Still, if you’re named after an animal, doesn’t it make you feel like you should act like an animal?”

  I didn’t know what she was asking, if it was a risque way of saying I should be more aggressive or if she was going deeper than that, asking if I ever felt the temptation to go mad dog. Let the beast loose.

  “Playing timid isn’t your strong suit,” I said.

  “You might be surprised, Terry.”

  She began to stroke my thighs again. She used her skilled hands to make me sip air. She continued trying to distract me in an effort to make me more pliable. Her eyes were amused and bright.

  This time we kept the light on. Afterward, she walked naked to the kitchen, got me a beer, poured it for me in a tall glass, and snuggled beside me while she sipped two fingers of Glenlivet. I noticed now that she was shaved, oiled, well powdered despite the sweat streaks, and I wondered if it was really for me. Grey had admitted to sleeping with her. I wondered how often and how recently.

  I finished the beer. We fell back into bed and went another round, this time much smoother and suppler and maybe even a touch sweeter. I hated drinking scotch, but for some reason I liked the taste of it on her lips.

  After, she said, “You’re a good man, Terry.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I’ve met a lot of bad ones. I’ve interviewed them and covered their court cases and done follow-ups through the years. I onc
e visited Manson for an hour-long prime-time special. Five minutes in his presence and I knew we’d never air it. I knew you could see the fear in my face. You’re a good man at your heart.”

  I let out a chuckle. “Because I’m not as nuts as Manson?”

  “You don’t have to worry about being like your brother.”

  “Eve—”

  “One doesn’t have to be very astute to know what’s so heavy on your mind. It would happen to any of us. It does happen. It’s why people like Dahmer’s father write books. They feel a need to understand where that kind of evil comes from.”

  Evil. It was a word I hadn’t used in connection with Collie yet. He was a mass-murdering prick, but I hadn’t thought beyond the act itself to imagine him as truly evil.

  “This is some kind of fucked-up pillow talk,” I said.

  “I was just trying to put you at ease.”

  “I think falling asleep in each other’s arms would be more helpful.”

  Eve held me tightly and said, “Say no more.”

  She dropped off to sleep first. I thought about Chub unwinding himself from Kimmy and sneaking back to his garage to pore over his getaway maps. Checking up on the roadwork conditions, which lanes would be shut down tomorrow, where the detours were. I had to talk to him. I felt myself drifting, Eve’s breath glancing off my chin. I started to dream before I was fully asleep.

  My sister had been right. I had a head as full of snakes as when I’d left. Now I clung to memories that weren’t mine. I couldn’t be sure if I was awake or out cold. My stomach burned. The smell of whiskey seemed overwhelming and made me gag. Eve’s soft snores pounded at me. I saw hands pulling a sash around a young woman’s throat. In her dead eyes I saw my face.

  I snapped fully awake with the sense of someone watching me.