Cold Rain

by Craig Smith

  Barbara came by the apartment at nine o’clock the following morning interrupting a particularly nasty hangover. Walt, so inured to the feeling he hardly noticed, blushed like a schoolboy and started trying to pick the place up. As it turned out I was the reason Barbara was there. Neither Walt nor I had his cell phone turned on, and Molly had asked Barbara if she could drive by and tell me to call Molly’s cell phone.

  At my look she explained. ‘Something happened to the dogs.’

  I found my phone under a pile of pizza boxes and called Molly a few seconds later. ‘What’s the matter?

  What happened?’

  ‘Someone poisoned the dogs, David.’

  By the time I got to the farm the animal control unit had packed all seven carcasses into the back of its panelled truck, and Molly was signing something so they could take off. ‘You’ve got the animals?’ I asked. The driver could see I was as upset as Molly.

  He answered apologetically. The sheriff’s people wanted them to examine the animals. They wanted to know what kind of poison was used.

  I shook my head. I said I wanted to bury the animals on the farm. ‘It’s our business,’ I said. ‘They’re just dogs. We’ll take care of it. I don’t care what kind of poison it was, and neither does she.’ The man looked at Molly, then spoke to the deputy investigating the case. Finally, he got the bodies out.

  They were stiff with rigor and came out of the panelled truck like so many logs. Only the eyes and the fur and the remnant animal smell of them recalled anything of their sad lives. I carried all seven, one at a time, off the hill and down to an area in the pasture where we had buried different animals over the years.

  We had two cats that had died on us, Pollock and Picasso, and a hamster named Susie. There were two stray dogs already in the earth. They had got hit before we could adopt them: Gilgamesh and Ulysses. I buried the murdered dogs deep in the earth in seven separate holes. Molly left me alone until I had finished. I was tamping down the last, Melville’s grave, when she came out to join me. She smiled at my work, which we both knew was partly for Lucy’s benefit and partly for my own.

  ‘Lucy hasn’t come out of her room since she found them this morning.’

  ‘She found them?’ I had been hoping it had been otherwise.

  Molly nodded.

  ‘She got home around midnight. She says she didn’t hear the dogs, but she didn’t think anything about it.’

  I understood how she could miss it. The racket they made, had made, was so familiar you didn’t really hear it. It was the silence you noticed. But I understood why Lucy had missed it.

  ‘So they were dead by midnight? Weren’t you around?’

  ‘I heard them barking. I thought it was the wind upsetting them.’ Molly began shaking her head as tears formed on the rim of her eyes. ‘They were just mutts!

  They weren’t hurting anyone!’

  I didn’t bothering responding. I was thinking about Buddy holding his gun against my face, the words he spoke. ‘You and me… we’re going to have some fun before I’m finished with your ass.’

  BEFORE I LEFT, Molly showed me the work she had done on Lucy’s apartment. Over coffee she told me someone had made an offer on one of our rentals.

  When we had finished with business there was nothing left to say, so I went upstairs and knocked on Lucy’s bedroom door.

  She was on the phone and took a minute before she let me in. When she did I told her I had identified each grave, but I wanted her to paint the names on the stones, the way we had done it with the others. That was when she started crying. She cried just like her mother, wiping the tears away, half in embarrassment, half in fury.

  I asked her about the night before. She had been at a party. Home at midnight? Pretty much about then, she said. There was no mystery to chase down, except the motive, and Lucy couldn’t help me with that. ‘Have you talked to your mother about the grass, kid?’ I studied her face. This was standard operating procedure. Silence drilled her conscience.

  ‘I’m careful, Dave. I mean I don’t do it all the time like some kids. And I don’t like lose control.’

  ‘You need to come clean with your mother. Knowing her, she’s probably just waiting for you to show her you’re honest with her.’

  ‘What if she grounds me?’

  I shrugged indifferently. I’d love to be grounded. I’d take any excuse to move back in with the two of you.

  ‘Does it matter that much? I mean… are you seeing someone?’

  ‘No.’

  Between lying salespeople and lying customers eager to promise me anything if I would just let them go home and think about it, I had developed an excellent feel for liars. The standard assumption in the industry was summarized in the acronym APAL: All People Are Liars. The trouble with such universal cynicism is sometimes people will let the truth slip out when they’re not careful. You need to know how to separate the gold from the brass. The look-you-in-the-eyes effect was the general method for most amateur liars. With Lucy, who was not a very good liar, the eyes darted first and then they stayed frozen on me.

  If she was seeing somebody it was all right. She was seventeen. At seventeen that’s what you do. But she was lying to me about it. Or not sure herself.

  ‘But you might want to?’

  She smiled. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You see him last night?’

  ‘It was a party. He was there.’

  ‘And he smokes grass?’

  ‘He’s not a pothead, Dave. He’s a nice guy.’

  ‘We’re all nice guys, Lucy. That’s how we get to be with nice girls. What’s his name? How old is he? What kind of grade point average does he have? Does he know I have a couple of shotguns in my office and I’m not afraid to use them?’

  Lucy sneered. ‘I’m not even going out with him!’

  ‘Yet.’

  She smiled prettily, a girl with a lot of hope. ‘He’s just a guy, Dave. Give me a break.’

  ‘Talk to your mother. Tell her about the pot.’

  As I was leaving she called to me. ‘Are the horses going to be all right, do you think?’

  I looked at the doorjamb and thought about it: Jezebel with a tendon cut, Ahab’s neck slit open. ‘I don’t know, Lucy. If they wanted to hurt the horses I guess they could have last night.’

  ‘Why would somebody kill the dogs? If they wanted to hurt us why not the horses?’

  That was when it came to me: Buddy Elder had gone after our alarm system.

  BEFORE I LEFT I TOLD MOLLY to keep her revolver close. ‘Whoever hurt the dogs,’ I said, ‘might be back for you.’ I said the best thing would be for me to move back in, if she would let me. To my surprise Molly said she’d think about it.

  I got back to town at dusk. I went directly to the house on Ninth Street where Denise Conway and Buddy Elder lived. A girl answered the door. She was over-weight but the right age and disposition to be one of Denise’s friends from work. Her kid came up behind her as we talked and stared at me curiously. ‘Denise Conway live here?’ I asked.

  The girl shook her head. ‘Not no more.’

  ‘Actually, I was looking for Buddy Elder. You know where I can find him?’

  ‘He moved out too. They broke up.’

  I tried to get some information from her, but she had been warned. She wanted my name. She wanted to know what my business was. I told her my name was Ralph W. Emerson. I wanted to talk to Buddy about some dead poets. She thought that was strange.

  I had her write down my cell phone number and told her to tell Buddy to give me a call, if he had the guts.

  I was almost back to Walt’s apartment when my phone trilled. ‘The W. stand for Waldo, does it, Ralph?’

  Buddy asked.

  ‘Where are you living these days, Buddy?’

  ‘Denise and I broke up, thanks to you, Dave. I got a new place. Just trying to get my head together, start over. You know how it is, I expect.’

  ‘I’d like to come by and talk to you about a few thin
gs.’

  Buddy gave me his address. I turned my truck around and went back into town. The lights were off in the house, and I was not sure Buddy actually lived there until I knocked at the door. From the darkened house I heard Buddy’s voice. ‘Door’s unlocked, Dave.’

  I opened the door and looked into the darkness.

  ‘You hiding?’ I asked.

  ‘A long time ago a cop told me if I ever shot a man breaking into my house I better make sure he falls completely inside. Half-in and half-out isn’t good enough. You want to come on inside?’

  ‘Are you going to shoot me?’

  Buddy laughed cheerfully. ‘If you come inside I am!’

  He walked to the door. Barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, he held a nickel-plated .38 revolver. I was guessing it was the same gun he had pulled on me outside The Slipper. As before, he pointed it at me with keen pleasure.

  ‘Where were you last night, Buddy?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Someone killed our dogs.’

  ‘Your dogs? All of them?’ I didn’t answer. He shook his head, his eyes locking on mine without the pretence of sincerity. ‘That’s just a shame, Dave. A real shame.’

  I pointed at his gun. ‘That’s not going to save you, Buddy. When you need it, you’re not going to have it.’

  The street lit up from the lights of a car, and Buddy shifted his gaze from me for a second. ‘I don’t care what anybody says, the cops in this town are good!’

  He stepped back into his living room and set his revolver under the cushion of the couch. I turned and walked off the step as the two policemen got out of their patrol car, their spotlight on me.

  One of them told me to stop where I was and to put my hands on my head. He came toward me with his hand on his nightstick. His partner worked backup for him. When he got to me he asked me to step toward the house. I did. At his request, I placed my hands against the house and spread my legs. He patted me down, then let me stand up again. ‘I’d like for you to come back to the patrol car with me, sir.’

  I did as he asked. His partner went inside and talked to Buddy. ‘You know the person in that house, do you, Mr Albo?’ my officer asked me after he had checked my identification.

  ‘Joe Elder. Buddy,’ I said. ‘He called me up a few minutes ago and told me to come over. I got here and he pulled a gun on me.’

  ‘That’s not quite how we heard it from our dispatcher.’

  We batted it back and forth, our respective versions of the truth. By the time his partner returned from the house, I was fairly certain I would be going back to jail. The difference this time was my young friend had trapped himself with a lie. There would be a record of Buddy’s call to me. His flank exposed, I was going to make him pay for his games this time. My cop pointed at me and said, ‘He says he got a phone call, was invited over here to talk.’

  The other cop nodded. ‘I got the same story, plus a little more. Your name is Dr Albo, right?’ I said it was.

  ‘You and Mr Elder are having problems?’

  I knew enough about the law not to suggest that Buddy had poisoned my dogs. Statements to the police amounted to public record. A groundless accusation would open me up to charges of slander. For all I knew, that was Buddy’s plan.

  ‘I don’t like the guy,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure I’d say we have problems.’

  ‘He tells me you were accusing him of sleeping with your wife.’

  I expect I smiled. I hadn’t seen that one coming.

  ‘ That problem,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to let you go with a warning this time, Dr Albo, but I’m also going to file a report on this incident. You come out here again, you’ll be explaining yourself to a judge the next morning. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Let me give you some free advice,’ the senior partner added with a sigh. He had a dozen years on me, a look of perpetual misery that could only come from too much domestic bliss. ‘You’re going through a divorce, am I right?’ I nodded. ‘I see this kind of thing a lot more than you’d believe. Decent, clean-cut woman, all of a sudden she goes for something like that.’ He pointed his thumb absently in the direction of Buddy Elder’s house. ‘Two reasons. First, it makes her feel young again. Maybe she’s not sure if she’s still desirable. She wants to find out. Second reason is she knows it’s going to hurt you.

  ‘Truth is mostly she wants to hurt you. Now when you come out to this fellow’s house and make threats, maybe even get yourself arrested, she’s going to know she won. You follow me?’ I nodded. I followed. ‘You seem like a bright enough guy, professor. You don’t want to step into that kind of game.’

  Once I was in the truck again and had started away, I began laughing. The son of a bitch was good!

  Chapter 16

  ‘I SAID I WANT to think about it,’ Molly told me the following afternoon.

  I paced nervously, my cell phone pressed to my ear.

  ‘You said you never wanted to sell the farm.’

  ‘We both said a lot of things, David. Look, I want to go down to Florida for a few weeks. Take a look at the situation. Doc says the housing market is getting stronger. I can flip a place in three-four months if I buy the right property.’

  ‘You’re quoting Doc on real estate, Molly. Listen to yourself.’

  She laughed. ‘That’s why I need to go down there and take a look. You move back to the farm.’

  ‘And Lucy moves in with the Sloans until you decide what you want to do. I know. I just don’t know why you’re doing this.’

  ‘You’re the one who wanted to move back to the farm. So move back. Make Walt happy.’

  ‘I’ll break Walt’s heart. I didn’t tell you but we’ve zipped our sleeping bags together.’

  ‘That’s sweet.’

  ‘When are you going to take off?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  I hated the sound of that word. It meant she had already arranged everything. ‘Am I going to see you again?’

  Silence answered. When I didn’t break it, she told me, ‘Why don’t you come out tomorrow around four-thirty? Lucy will be here. The two of you can see me off.’

  MOLLY HAD THE CAP ON THE BACK of her truck, a few tools packed away in a trunk we had used over the years to keep the horse gear, and a couple of suit-cases. She was travelling light, but not so light she couldn’t stay for the winter if she decided to.

  The weather was cold, the sky overcast. A brutal wind swept in from the north.

  ‘People are crazy to live in this weather,’ Molly announced happily. ‘I called Olga this morning. It’s eighty degrees today, blue skies, and just a light breeze.’

  ‘I’ll join you, if you want,’ I said. ‘Nothing holding me here.’

  ‘You hear something from school?’

  I shook my head, sorry I had broached the subject.

  ‘It’s not going to be good when I do.’

  ‘I don’t get it. Randy Winston’s been screwing around with students since he got here, and everybody knows it.’

  ‘And Walt can’t open his mouth without offending someone. What don’t you get?’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘I refused to take my lawyer’s advice.’

  Molly looked out at the pasture. She shook her head and smiled, recalling our earlier conversation. ‘Every time I start thinking that maybe you’re telling the truth, I remember: this guy made a living by lying.’

  ‘I never lied on the car lot. I told you that. That was the deal with Tubs.’

  ‘It makes a good story, David. But I don’t believe it for a minute. You can’t help yourself. You open your mouth and a lie pops out. I think you’re lying about Tubs, like everything else!’

  ‘How many times have I lied to you, Molly? I mean about something important.’

  ‘That’s the point! I don’t know. Last summer, you went into town for a couple of hours, you came back with whatever you went for and had a little smile on your face! Did
you sleep with Denise? I don’t know!

  How many times did you lie about her? I have no way of knowing. You won’t even admit it!’

  We heard Lucy’s Toyota come off the pavement and climb the hill. A moment later she pulled her vehicle into the circle behind Molly’s truck.

  ‘You taking off?’ she called.

  ‘Not without a hug.’

  They hugged. They talked about Lucy flying down for the week of Thanksgiving. Lucy had cleared it at school, pulling the divorce trump card to get them to give her the extra three days.

  Molly said there was some good in it after all. Lucy glanced at me to see how I was handling the joke. I just smiled. I was thinking about an axe in Buddy Elder’s skull, though I was more inclined to give him something along the lines of what he had fed Hawthorne & Co. I had heard that Liquid Plumber was an especially slow and unpleasant way to go, but naturally for an occasion like Buddy’s imminent demise I would want to do my research. That’s what Ph.D.s do.

  ‘You’re going to be all right?’ Molly asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The minute you drive away from here half of my reason for living just disappears.’

  ‘Don’t do this to me.’

  ‘You asked.’

  She walked away, hugged Lucy one last time, and then to my surprise came back to me and threw her arms over my shoulders. ‘You broke my heart, you bastard,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll never forgive you for that.’

  A moment later her truck started up and she drove away.

  With Lucy’s help I moved back into the house. The whole process took about ten minutes. I offered to fix her dinner, but Lucy said she’d told the Sloans she would have dinner with them.

  ‘I’m going to have a talk with Mom when I go down for Thanksgiving, Dave. About the grass, I mean.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got your mother figured out.’