Cul-de-Sac
Page 21
“Perjure himself.”
“We ran the same line by the Raineys, a couple who worked for J.L., got them to establish that Donald went into Hope’s room around the time of the murder. I never thought it would fly. Really. I was convinced the whole frame would just collapse, I was planning to kill myself. But fuck me if it didn’t hold together.”
“Until now.”
“Until everybody and their frigging brother comes crawling out of the woodwork … Growler, the Milton couple, you.”
“Where’s Annie?”
“She’s locked upstairs, a room on the second floor.”
Camel hadn’t tipped to it, that Annie was here. When Gray said he’d put her somewhere safe Camel assumed that was somewhere else. “You son-of-a-bitch you were going to burn this building with Annie in it?”
Gray looked a little surprised too as if just then owning up to himself the consequences of what he’d intended to do.
Camel told him to drop the goddamn automatic.
Gray stared eye-to-eye for an uncomfortably long time, more than six seconds, Camel sensing a decision being made … something serious coming his way. “Don’t—”
But Gray already was … bringing up the 9mm, forcing Camel to do the same with that shiny .38 in his hand: cowboys.
41
She had broken the habit three years ago when she married Paul but now as she scouted the room for a place to pee Annie was once again biting her nails. She opened the door to that walk-in closet full of old furniture and stood in front of a full-length mirror, cracked on the diagonal and leaning against the closet wall. Annie opened the big blue jacket she was wearing.
Looking at her reflection she made no vain wishes for an inch or two correction here and there, what bothered her was she didn’t recognize those hollowed eyes looking out from a soot-blackened face, the ratty hair and blotchy skin, knot-nippled breasts sagging as if drained dry. Annie wondered if she washed her face and stood up straight and sucked in her tummy and smiled a thousand watts … would it look like me again?
She’d been waiting for Parker Gray to return and let her out, she was wishing Teddy Camel would come rescue her … it seemed she was always waiting, wishing for a man.
Back when they spent that summer together Teddy told Annie to get a career because a good career would never disappoint her while a man usually would. (Actually he said always would but she remembered it as usually.) Annie had always worked hard, holding down an office job during the day and raking in big tips as a cocktail waitress at night. She took classes at a college where she met Paul and she banked most of her money hoping that one day she’d have enough to travel the world. That had always been her dream, to travel.
Then she married Paul and used all she’d accumulated to finance his renovations business, losing everything including her credit rating. Now her husband was dead and Annie had all those debts to pay because her name was on every loan paper and Paul didn’t carry insurance. Annie wanted the elephant. Wrong or not, she intended to have it … that was one decision she’d made while locked in this room. Whatever money the elephant would bring, Annie would consider it compensation for what she’d been through … compensation for what Growler did to her.
She thought of him limping his way back to this room, he would do more than rape her, he would fulfill his promise to cripple her. Annie realized she was waiting for that to happen too, always waiting for men.
She used to think their predictability made them easy to manipulate … all men the same in that each thought he was special … hey, baby, I march to the beat of a different drummer … yeah you and the rest of the army. Golf pros and corporate executives, pretty boys and tough cops, judges and stepfathers … Annie could make them blush and stammer, break into nervous sweats and flare nostrils like stallions with their brains addled by the smell of estrus.
She thought of the girl in those photographs, looking over the shoulders of men and mugging for the camera … did she think men were easy too?
But if they’re so easy why do they keep winning? One of those men killed that girl. And in a lifetime of dealing with men Annie never remembered coming out ahead either. It was as if she’d been playing poker with men, thinking she was taking every hand, but now at age thirty-five she looks down and sees no chips in front of her.
Definitely had to pee. She went further into the closet, between an old chest and a wooden chair with its seat rotted out. Annie pulled up the jacket, dropped her jeans, and squatted … keeping the closet door ajar because she wanted to watch the door to the room, hoping it wouldn’t open to reveal Donald Growler standing there or hoping it would open for Teddy Camel or Parker Gray to come in and tell her you’re safe now.
On camping trips Annie had peed squatting like this but she had never peed on a floor and discovered it required serious concentration … her urine stream starting and stopping and then just when it got going steadily she heard two shots, boom-boom, that shut off the flow like closing a tap.
She stood and felt wet on her thighs as she pulled up the jeans then ran across the room and put an ear to the door, hearing nothing more. The sound of the shots had been muffled but Annie knew it was gunfire coming from somewhere in the building. Parker Gray shooting Growler? Or the other way around? Whoever was the survivor would be coming to this room … Gray because he knew Annie was here and Growler to reclaim the elephant. She stepped back from the door wondering which man it would be this time.
Annie returned to the closet forgetting about where she’d peed and stepping in it, biting her nails again as she looked for a hiding spot somewhere in that jumble of old furniture. Against the back wall was a tall pile of old blankets blue with mold, Annie made her way there and pulled at the top blankets, filling the air with the smell of mold and revealing an upright piano. She could crouch next to it and cover herself, maybe someone glancing in the closet wouldn’t bother coming back here to check what was under those blankets.
Annie closed the closet door and opened her eyes very wide, surprised by the darkness, how very complete it was. Feeling her way among pieces of furniture she bumped so hard against the piano that a few loose hammers struck their strings creating dampered notes … and when those false notes faded was when Annie heard the piano buzzing.
42
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting Camel credited being alive to the simplicity of a design patented in 1835 by Mr. Colt because even if Parker Gray’s semiautomatic was cocked and locked, which Camel assumed it was, Gray still had to thumb-off a safety while Camel armed with a revolver could simply point and pull. It was the ever-readiness of Mr. Colt’s design, Camel figured, that gave him the edge over Gray and made Camel the cowboy left standing. But he was wrong.
Just as he’d been taught to do Camel had fired at the center of his target, Gray getting two rounds in the gut, quickly covering his stomach with a forearm, looking down at the sudden blood then up at Camel with questioning eyes.
By the time Camel reached him Gray was slowly folding onto his right side like something made of snow melting. He tried to break the fall but ended up dropping knee-hard in the gas-splashed corridor.
Camel bent down and moved Gray’s arm to see that one round had hit his western-style belt buckle, holing the buckle and entering flesh but only superficially while the second round went on in unimpeded making a neat entry wound just to the left of Gray’s navel. The kind of wide-mouthed hollow points with which McCleany’s .38 revolver had been loaded are designed to spread on contact for two advantages … one, they won’t penetrate most walls so you don’t end up shooting someone in the next room when you didn’t even know the guy was there and, two, after a hollow point enters flesh through a small hole it spreads open its mouth and starts chewing up tissue like a Mixmaster set on purée … except Parker Gray in his current condition wouldn’t of course list this second point as an advantage.
Camel was on his knees next to Gray who said, “Oh Christ call an ambulance huh?”
“Jesus.” He groaned and said Jesus again. “I thought you didn’t feel the pain until later, isn’t that what everybody says huh?”
Camel took the pistol from Gray’s hand. The thumb safety was on as Camel had thought but the 9mm was not cocked and locked, no round in the chamber, the hammer still seated. Gray must’ve known the pistol was not ready to fire, which meant, regardless of the efficiency of Mr. Colt’s patented revolver, Camel had not out-cowboyed anyone … Gray had used him to commit suicide.
There on the floor on his side he began contracting slow-motion into the fetal position like something wet drying up. “Jesus … you think it’s going to get worse than this huh?” He meant the pain.
“You’re not going to make it Parker.”
“Don’t say that,” Gray pleaded, his voice whispering out from somewhere within that fetal curl, commenting again how much it hurt. “Call an ambulance huh, there’s still a chance …”
“No there’s not.”
“Hardhearted bastard.”
“You’re dying, what can I say?”
“You fucked me up good.”
Camel thought, you fucked yourself.
Gray’s blood mixed with gasoline on the floor making a petroleum-protein pool spreading out to confirm Camel’s prognosis … you can’t leak that much blood and live.
“Teddy.”
Hearing his name in a voice so softly pathetic made Camel’s face twinge like Steve McQueen’s when he played a bad character regretting he was about to do something good. “Parker, you Catholic?”
Gray nodded.
“Want to confess?”
“I already told you everything—”
“I’m not talking about who killed that girl, I mean—”
“My soul?”
“Last rites. You don’t necessarily need a priest, any Catholic can perform them in a pinch.”
“In a pinch huh,” Gray said like it was a joke except of course neither man laughed. He paused to consider then agreed, “Okay.”
Camel and Gray stumbled through what they remembered of confession and final rites. Afterward Gray held tightly to Camel’s hand and said, “She’s upstairs in a corner room on the second floor, I left the key in the padlock … I’m sorry.”
“You were going to burn her alive.”
“I’m sorry.”
Camel didn’t say anything, didn’t let him off the hook.
“Hey Teddy you’re seriously fucked too … shooting me like this.”
Gray was right. The manslaughter charge relating to Paul Milton’s death might have been dropped but now Camel had fatally shot a state police associate superintendent, the man who pushed for Camel’s arrest, and it’s going to look like Camel did it for revenge, going to be hell’s own time proving justifiable self-defense, proving that Gray had used Camel to commit suicide.
“Give me something to write on,” Gray said.
Camel dug out a notepad and pen.
“Oh Christ … Teddy … going into … is this it huh … really dying?”
Camel didn’t answer except to cradle Gray’s head.
“You got it, something to write with?”
He held pen and pad ready.
Gray blinked a couple of times like he was thinking things through. “I’m going to write, ‘Teddy Camel shot me in self-defense.’ I’ll write it was justifiable … no crime committed. Help me huh, I’m doing this to save your ass.”
Camel had to bend Gray’s fingers around the pen, then steady the notepad on the floor as Gray forced himself to write … interrupted by a spasm that quickly drew him back into that fetal curl. “Dying,” he said with a sense of astonishment.
“Yeah,” Camel confirmed, wondering too late if simply on principle he should’ve called an ambulance … then he remembered the phone here at Cul-De-Sac was disabled.
Gray had collapsed onto the notepad. When he was still, was dead, Camel dug it out. Gray had scrawled his signature followed by this: “Teddy Camel shot me in—” But that’s as far as he made it. Didn’t get to “self-defense,” much less “justifiable” or “no crime was committed.” Show this to a prosecutor and she could argue Gray intended to finish his dying statement any number of ways: Teddy Camel shot me in … cold blood.
Camel tore off the page anyway, put it in a pocket and checked his watch, ten P.M. on the nose. As he was standing he heard a noise behind him, Camel wheeling to see Jake Kempis there in the corridor.
“Jesus Teddy what’ve you done?”
Killed a man, Camel thought, the full awareness of it sinking in, soaking right through to his core … I have just now killed a man.
43
At 9:20 P.M. they were all three in Elizabeth’s china blue Cadillac, Murray on the front seat with his head on Elizabeth’s lap as she drove, Donald Growler sprawled in the back holding his left arm on a diagonal pressing close across stomach and chest, that softball hematoma indicating where the bone had broken, halfway between wrist and elbow, his left foot offering up another source of pain along with enough blood to make the bandaging squishy.
Still he wasn’t hurting now as bad as he did after being thrown from Annie’s truck and then limping naked and winged back to Cul-De-Sac. Upon getting there he went immediately to the cellar for his stash of drugs and alcohol, dusting the foot wound top and bottom with almost a gram of cocaine which not only stemmed the pain but also slowed the bleeding, though Growler now wished he still had that gram of magic to put up his nose because the pain from his various wounds, psychological and physical, were all returning with a vengeance.
Just hold on until it’s done he told himself as he leaned forward to make sure Elizabeth was still driving toward Cul-De-Sac and not taking a detour to a police station. Back at her house, when he forced her to make that telephone call, she had performed flawlessly.
“This is Elizabeth Rockwell,” she announced in that tight-jawed patrician manner of hers. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course I remember you Elizabeth.”
“I have some photographs I think you should see.”
No comment.
“You’re in these photographs … with Hope.”
Still no comment.
“You do remember the photographs?”
“Who else has seen them?”
“I don’t think you want this discussed on the phone do you? I’ll be at Cul-De-Sac within the hour, meet me there and come alone.”
Arriving at Cul-De-Sac, Growler instructed Elizabeth to stop in front of the building, he wanted her Cadillac prominently displayed … neither he nor Elizabeth saw the two cars parked around at the side.
When Growler leaned forward from the backseat he regretted most painfully that all his medicines had worn so thin.
Elizabeth sat behind the wheel stroking Murray’s silky ponytail.
“You going to wake up the big guy or not?” Growler asked.
She turned and gave him the strangest look before announcing in a curiously distracted and formal voice, “I’ve never known anyone as aggrieved as you Donald.”
He brought his good right arm around to smack her in the face. “Aggrieved … aggrieved?” He didn’t know where to start. “You bet your ass I’m aggrieved … aggrieved all the way from these goddamn Frankenstein teeth I had put in my mouth … all the way down to that spike-nail hole in my foot is how bad I’m aggrieved … seven years pulling a train for a crime I didn’t commit is how I’m aggrieved … backstabbed by my best friend, betrayed by my partner St. Paul, everyone lying to me and about me … aggrieved, aggrieved, I’ll show you aggrieved, now get out of the fucking car.” As an afterthought he hit her in the face again.
When Growler stepped from the car door he inadvertently put weight on his left foot which sent back enough pain voltage that he collapsed onto his right
knee and dropped the machete … was it the paranoia again or did he really hear Elizabeth laughing at him from the front seat, that bitch is asking for it.
“Get out of the car!”
As she did, Murray’s head rolled off her lap and onto the cold April ground with a solid thump, no bounce.
Growler’s turn to laugh. “Pick it up.”
“Donald …”
He alternated words with open-handed smacks to the back of her head: “Pick … it … up … you … rotten … cunt.”
She required a moment to regain her bearings then said, “I’ve never been called that in my life.”
When Growler retrieved the machete and put it to her face Elizabeth lifted Murray’s head by the ponytail.
Growler laughed again. “Come on.”
She carried the head away from her body though Elizabeth’s skirt and blouse were already elaborately stained, Murray having leaked enough blood to fill several fat children.
“What’re you going to do to me?” she asked once they were inside.
“Anticipation sharpens pain, you sure you want to know?”
He was right, she didn’t want to know.
Growler told her anyway. “I’m going to take you around back to the storage room … remember the storage room where I grabbed your tit, remember testifying about it at the trial, making me out as a some kind of sex—”
“I told the truth at your trial.”
“You want the truth Mommy … I’m going to cut off your head.”
She didn’t doubt it.
Walking the overheated and cluttered hallways of Cul-De-Sac, Growler limping and pushing Elizabeth on ahead of him, they made their way around to the rear of the building where they turned a corner and nearly tripped on a five-gallon can of gas … down the corridor two men stood talking over the body of a third.