Sorrow's crown afgm-2

by Tom Piccirilli

  "He sure didn't go to any father-son picnics."

  I knew my time was running out; I could tell I'd just about reached my limit with Lowell, and was surprised he'd allowed me as much leeway as he had. He would be about this close to hanging up on me, anyway, so I went for broke. "Teddy could have faked his passport if he needed to get away from his father badly enough."

  Lowell had considered it, of course, and any other angle I could possibly come up with. "Badly enough to kill somebody and cut the guy's face off? No, it doesn't play out. Not like he just found a hitchhiker and laid him to waste. He would've needed the accomplice in order to use his prints on the passport."

  "But-"

  "Like most people, you think it's easy to get a solid print. You have no idea how easily they smudge and smear, and how difficult they are to get off an unwilling party, or a corpse. Like some talcum powder and scotch tape are all you need." A passing eighteen-wheeler drowned him out for a couple of seconds. ". . . assume he did want to get out from under the old man. If even half the rumors about Harnes are true, you know you're dealing with someone capable of cracking your head open or poisoning you in your sleep. He's not on any corporate boards, he runs his shop the old-fashioned way. Alone, and in complete control. If I had a millionaire father like that, a man who makes most of his money from slave labor around the world, and my father was pissed at me about something, I'd probably run-"

  "No, you wouldn't, but Teddy might."

  "-but nobody would do it by leaving a faceless corpse in the cemetery. If he had the money and resources to fake a passport, he's got the brains to go for the long haul. A fire, a car explosion, a rock-slide, those are more effective ways to erase yourself, if you wanted to play dead. Why leave room for questions and doubt afterwards? No, it doesn't play out. Teddy Harnes is dead."

  How did any of it fall back to Crummler? What had he seen the night before the murder that brought him miles out of town in the middle of a freeze searching for me? What had scared him that much?

  "Can you get me in to see Crummler?"

  He thought about that for a while too, turning it over. He was right, I should've bought an extra battery. "Beats the hell out of me. I'm not sure I can. Why?"

  "I don't know. But if I'd talked to him before I'd started pounding him, maybe we'd have some answers and understand what happened."

  "Understanding isn't a word I'd associate with Crummler. Talking, either, really. Prattling is more like it. He babbled and jabbered gibberish non-stop before we transferred him. Gave the guy in the cell next to him the crawling heebie jeebies, this drunk British silverware rep from Briscane County we nabbed on the turnpike doing triple digits. You should have heard Crummler carrying on about ten thousand leagues of evil swamps in dark orders of ocher nights, fighting the dwindling obsidian empires. Dragons and knights kissing and fighting."

  "I have heard him. I like listening to it. He mixes in fragments of the truth, sometimes. Bits and pieces."

  "Maybe. Sometimes. But can you tell the differences?”

  “On occasion something sings out."

  "If that's singing, it must be a Wagnerian opera. Along the lines of 'Twilight of the Gods.'”

  It impressed me that he knew Wagner, and I could hear a soft, angry rattle in his throat because he knew I was impressed. Listening to that rattle coming from him made my scalp prickle. It became startlingly clear to me that one of these days Lowell would probably beat the shit out of me over something like this.

  "Do you think he did it?" I asked.

  "I'm not convinced he didn't," Lowell said. "You're not either. Either way, something else is going on. Crummler may have had cause, but that will never come out."

  The guilt had been hanging on my back since I'd first raised my hand to Crummler. I had to make a choice.

  There are times when the hedging is over and you must make a decision despite confusion. You've seen blood and sharpness coming up at your face, and you react without thought, and the rest follows the way it must, with the shadows already cast.

  If I'd handled it differently, if I hadn't struck first but in-stead danced with Crummler for a little while, calming and reassuring him, I might know who was dead and who had committed murder. My fear had forced my hand.

  I had to put my faith back in him. I couldn't effectively work to free him if I didn't wholeheartedly believe he was innocent.

  "Crummler didn't do it," I said.

  "You just keep telling yourself that, Jonny Kendrick."

  And that was it; there wasn't a sound on the other end but I could hear Lowell shut down completely and pull away. He hadn't gone this far out for no reason. He knew how it looked to the outside eye, and how it would play out in front of a judge and jury. Crummler would be buried in court, incapable of even giving his own testimony. Nick Crummler had been right, the system just couldn't wait to get a hold of a man like his brother.

  "By the way," Lowell said. "We got a complaint on you.”

  “On me? From who?"

  "Alice Conway."

  I guessed that Brian Frost put her up to it, and wondered what that meant.

  I pulled up in front of Devington's house.

  Watched her.

  "Yeah, well, you're about to get another one."

  Some folks, when they retire, take up a perch in their front windows and wait with the stony patience of the Sphinx for something to happen. Mrs. Devington was such a person, set like a guardian over a king's crypt, with only her diligent, scornful face visible through the parted velour drapes. She spotted me and her eyes filled with expectation and excitement. She drew back and her bottom lip began to quiver.

  She was already freaking me out, this lady.

  The drapes folded shut and she ran through the house shouting for Arnie. I waited on the front lawn and glanced around at the overgrown bushes and untrimmed trees, the dilapidated garage that looked like it would fall over any second. A rusted tool shed with a corrugated metal door appeared eager to slice a finger off anyone stupid enough to try to get inside. There were a lot of shingles scattered across the grass, and a sizable amount of mold and ivy crept up the brick and crumbling gingerbread trim.

  Last I'd heard, Arnie had gotten married and relocated to the Midwest for a couple of years, then returned after a bad divorce and moved back into his parents' house just before his father died. The old man had apparently taken with him whatever love for the place there'd ever been. Arnie's disdain for his home was evident. Perhaps its poor condition proved a testament to his laziness, or merely confirmed his self-disdain.

  Mrs. Devington burst from the door in such a flurry of motion that I nearly dove for cover.

  Arnie came charging out on her heels and pleaded with her for a minute, trying to get a hold of a skirt the way a five-year-old would. He'd gone even further to fat than I'd thought, with male pattern baldness leaving him with only a horseshoe of fluff that he let grow too long so he could feel something dangling down the back of his neck. "Ma, go on inside, I'll handle this. C'mon, go on back inside."

  Rounding in at about two-eighty, I thought Arnie's mother could thrash me and Arnie both without breaking a sweat. If she were a thin woman, one might've noticed the rabbit teeth first, but with so much ballast to her and a nose like a dollop of wet clay, she was more like an enraged wild boar. I wished Oscar Kinion were here with one of his high caliber rifles.

  "You!" she shrieked, pointing at me. "You always been trouble from the first, now get off our land!"

  She said "land" like we were out on the Ponderosa and I was trying to rustle a hundred head of cattle, instead of standing on a quarter-acre of crabgrass covered with wind-blown trash and uncleared brush.

  "Sure," I said. "Right after your son and I discuss the finer points of civil conduct."

  "What's that? What'd you say?" She made a face I don't think I've ever seen on a human being before, and doubted I'd ever see again. A few beads of cold sweat rolled down my back. "You, always thinking you're so superi
or to everyone else."

  Arnie kept trying to get a grip on the situation, alternately scowling at me and working hard to calm his mother. He put his hands on her broad shoulders and tried to shove her back up on the porch. She wobbled a bit, and the meat under her beefy arms swung back and forth. Eventually she decided to just stand and glare, and my old football teammate Arnie Devington stomped on over.

  Devington's younger sister, Kristin, pushed through the screen door and pressed past their mother. I'd dated her a couple of times in high school, and had even taken her to her junior prom. Margaret Gallagher, Katie's aunt who'd owned the flower shop before her, had let me go a few bucks on the corsage and boutonniere.

  Though Kristin and I had never really connected I'd always enjoyed her company. There was something about her I found solemn and intriguing, even after that final game when her whole clan had come after me like crazy hill folk. She'd badmouthed me a little for a couple of years but eventually let it drop. I knew she did it more out of some loyalty to her family than any real deep-seated hostility on her part.

  She watched us both closely now and I could see the way she worried her bottom lip. She worked the makeup counter at McGreary's discount store and used an attractive vermilion on her mouth. She'd missed out on nearly all her mother's physical characteristics, but I could see some of the same fleshiness in her face, the softening of her chin. On her it almost looked good, though, the gentle humanity rising in her eyes as she watched me and Arnie on the lawn, each of us harboring resentments that went back to a decade-old football game, knowing something was about to end completely and something else might get kick-started back into motion. She'd root for him, I thought, but I had no real trouble with it.

  He said, "Get the hell off my property, you shit heel."

  "I accept your offer of the olive branch."

  "The hell you talking about, you bastard?"

  "Arnie," I said. "You can growl and glower at me all you like, I really don't mind. But if you bother my girl again we will no longer be able to remain amicable."

  My peripheral vision filled with the wide shadow of his mother stalking closer again.

  "Ain't you done enough?" Arnie asked.

  "Enough? Good Christ. I dropped a pass, I didn't back over your legs with a cement mixer!"

  "You might as well have. I could have been with the Dolphins."

  "Arnie, scouts from Miami don't come to iceberg towns like ours without a reason, and even Lowell wasn't good enough. It was just a rumor. You've been stewing in your juices for ten years over nothing."

  "I could've been with the Dolphins."

  "You couldn't have been water boy for the Dolphins, Arnie. You were a scrub, we all know it. I wasn't much better, but it's time to-"

  Not like I didn't know it was coming. You call an unstable, hypersensitive, borderline psychopathic wretch a "scrub" when his days are built into a shrine for his glory years-which consisted of three seasons spent mostly on the bench and a couple of flounders and fumbles in the mud-and you can pretty much count on him lunging.

  His footwork was about the same. He came at me with his shoulders low, throwing a bad block, looking for a tackle by keeping his eyes on my face instead of my hips. I wondered if he'd raise his fist, knee me, or do anything you might do in a real fight, but he wasn't interested in punching me out anymore. In his head he wanted to knock the ball out of my hand, recover it, run it down to score in the last ten seconds, invite the scout from Miami home for some of his mother's beef stew, talk about the color of the car he wanted, five-speed, fuel-injected, cherry red.

  I set myself, wondering if he really thought he'd find salvation in knocking me down in the dirt and crabgrass of his yard. For a second I felt a great sympathy for him, watching his lumbering charge, his mother's eyes wide with anticipation and pride, hoping he'd find himself again over something as small as dropping me on my ass, letting all the venom pour out of him in some cathartic moment when he might finally jump-start his thoroughly wasted life.

  Then I thought, fuck that.

  We hit the way we had in a hundred practices on the high school field, grunting shoulder-to-shoulder. He'd gone to pot but he had a lot more weight behind him, and the ground was still wet and slippery in spots. He slammed into me like a charging … sea lion, maybe … and his forearms came together hard on my collarbone. It hurt and a red blaze filled my head as we clung together and grappled. I drove hard into his barrel-chest, digging my feet in and working him back one step at a time.

  A sharp stab of pain pierced my back and a loud crack like snapping bone twisted me around. I wondered if the old lady had actually stabbed or shot me. I turned and saw Kristin holding half a broom handle, the other splintered piece lying at my feet. She screamed, "Leave my brother alone!”

  “Kristin…"

  There was a lot more in her face than anger and worry. She spoke under her breath out the side of her mouth. "Sorry, Jonny, she was gonna bash you with a wrench."

  "Oh," I said. "Okay, thanks."

  "You should go now."

  "Your brother hasn't quite seen the error of his ways.”

  “Have you seen yours?"

  Arnie lumbered to his feet, set himself and started to grunt and growl. His hands were bleeding and tiny shards of brown glass stuck to his palms. The yard was in worse shape than I'd thought, a couple years' worth of broken beer bottles scattered in with the rest of the refuse.

  I told him, "If you ever cared this much when we were in high school and didn't always quit after half-time, Arnie, we would've won more games too."

  It drove him berserk and he howled in rage, lunging for me again as if the quarterback had just shouted "Hike!" He kept his head too low, the way he'd always done, so that he couldn't properly judge speed and position. He caught me low but not low enough to actually shove me back, and his ham-hock fists worked ineffectually against my thighs as he tried to find my kidneys. Mrs. Devington shrieked some more, urging him on. This was not exactly the t`ete-`a-t`ete I was hoping for.

  I rolled out from between his meaty arms and wove aside a few paces. "Don't look at the ground, Arnie, I'm up here. You always used to do that, go for a guy's knees, that's why they could always dodge you."

  He worked his lips as if he wanted to chew them off and spit them out at me. His cheeks inflated and deflated like a blowfish until he managed to yell, "You screwed me!"

  "I did not screw you."

  "You did!" his mother chimed in.

  "I dropped the ball. In one game. Ten years ago. You people need a serious reality check, you're both a couple of quarts low."

  Kristin groaned loudly and rolled her eyes at me. I shrugged.

  Arnie was catching his breath, and starting to feel good again, his mouth working into a pretty ugly parody of a smile. "I should've taken care of you a long time ago."

  "How many articles did you ever clip out of the Gazette's sports section, Arnie, huh? How many times were you singled out for ever winning a game? For Christ's sake, get over it. Have you really been like this for ten years? Or did you need me to be the scapegoat again when your marriage fell through?"

  "You son of a bitch! I'll kill you!"

  He swung wildly and caught me on the temple. The red haze returned and I flopped over onto my knees and scrambled. His laughter could hardly fit through that weird smile of his now, coming up hollow and like a gurgle. He sprang, grabbed the back of my head and hauled me to my feet. He pulled his arm back and drove a fist into my stomach twice in quick succession, and I yelped and nearly vomited. He tried it again and I seized two handfuls of his sweatshirt, yanking him around and around, then let him go. Arnie slipped in the mud but tried to stay on his feet, did a couple of fairly graceful spins before he fell on his face. Mrs. Devington held a wrench and Kristin wrestled with her shouting, "No, Ma, no!"

  No matter what our respective intentions had been, we were all beginning to border the farcical. Arnie took a crawling lunge at me and I put my palm down on his bald
head and held him at bay.

  I said, "Couple of things here, Arnie. First, I shouldn't have made that crack about your wife, that was low. I'm sorry." It brought up another snarling cough. "Next, get over that damn game and get on with your life." He'd bitten the inside of his cheek and blood dappled his lips. "Last, and listen good, this is the important part, you can forget the rest but not this… if you have any intention of bothering my girl again, don't do it. You hear me? Don't do it."

  He said nothing, as his mother continued to screech. Kristin looked at me as if she knew this wasn't over, and might never be.

  I had the same feeling, got in the van, and went to buy more batteries.

  The old photo albums had a primitive type of plastic covering the pages, now yellowed and split in places. They made a distinctive crackling snap when you touched them, like freshly cut pine popping in the fireplace. Anna sat with two of the albums on her lap and another few piled atop the precarious tower of hard-boiled Gold Medal paperbacks on the coffee table. I tried to keep things in perspective and not let my usual anal nature take too firm a hold of me, but it wasn't easy. My stomach clenched at the thought of those rare novels from the 'forties and'fifties being crushed beneath the weight of Christmas and birthday pictures from those same decades.

  Semi-conscious and lying flat on the floor, Anubis caught the scent of blood and nervous sweat and reared to his feet in one sinuous wheeling motion. He opened his mouth, mumbled like the priest at Teddy's service, and stalked closer to me. He sniffed my bruised knuckles and stared into my face impassively, but somehow managed to convey the impression that he was rolling his eyes.

  "You've been walloped," my grandmother said.

  "Repeatedly.”

  “That much is apparent. Was it the Asian woman? Jocelyn?”

  “I wouldn't be looking so dejected if it had been."

  She nodded with enthusiasm. "I suspect that's true. I also fear you wouldn't be quite so jaunty afterwards. Let me get an ice pack. Sit down on the couch, darling, you've got quite a lump." She rolled into the kitchen and made up an ice pack. Again I failed to control myself and wound up shifting items all over the coffee table, moving the albums aside.