“I was just thinking about her,” Dooley said, which was true now but hadn’t been when he’d first said it.
His uncle looked at him. “She is what she is,” he said. “It has nothing to do with your grandfather, if that’s what you’re thinking. He tried. So did your grandmother. Saint Peter himself could have raised her, she would have turned out the same.”
Dooley was what he was, too. But his uncle was giving him a chance. Dooley looked down at his cereal going soggy in the bowl. He wondered if he should say something about Kingston but decided not to. Then his uncle changed the subject.
“That kid you saw go off the bridge,” he said. “What I heard is, he’d been drinking.” Dooley looked at him. “A guy who works downtown came in today to pick up his shirts.” A lot of cops and ex-cops brought their dry-cleaning to Dooley’s uncle. He gave them a special cops-only discount. “He mentioned it. He said the kid was loaded.”
“What? Did they find a bottle?”
Dooley’s uncle shook his head. “Toxicology,” he said. “He had a blood-alcohol level that would have made him pretty near incoherent. If he was that drunk and fooling around up there on that bridge … there’s a lesson in that, Ryan.”
Right, Dooley thought. As if bridges had ever figured into his problems.
His uncle stood up with Jeannie’s glass of vodka. “It’s late. Finish your cereal. Go to bed.”
Eight
That girl was here looking for you,” Linelle said when Dooley showed up for work the next day. She had a cart of returns and was putting them back on the shelves.
“What girl?” Dooley said.
“What girl?” Linelle said, echoing him. “The girl you were making puppy eyes at yesterday. The one who was in here with The Winner.”
“She was looking for me?” He tried to sound casual about it.
“Isn’t that what I just said?” Linelle said.
“What did you tell her?”
Linelle rolled her eyes. “What happened, Dooley? Did your brains leak out of your head while you were sleeping? What do you think I told her?”
“Did she say if she’d be back?”
“Yeah,” Linelle said. “She said she’d check back later.”
“When later?”
“She just said later.”
Dooley headed for the back room to sign in.
“She doesn’t know, does she?” Linelle called after him.
“Know what?”
“About you and her brother.”
“There’s nothing to know. It wasn’t personal. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t even know his name.”
“I’m guessing that’s a no,” Linelle said. She started to wheel her cart over to the next aisle.
“Hey, Linelle? You said she had a lot in common with Rhodes.” He hesitated. He liked Linelle, but he wasn’t sure who she talked to and what she said. “Is she rich?” That would just about clinch it. He couldn’t imagine a rich girl ever being interested in a video store clerk.
“How would I know?” Linelle said. “I don’t know her except she comes in here to rent movies. Based on her picks, though, you know, all that foreign shit she rents, I’d say she has brains. She dresses preppy, too, so, yeah, she’s upscale or a serious wannabe. But is she in the same league as The Winner? I don’t have a clue.”
Now Dooley was baffled. “But you said—”
“I meant the dead sib thing,” Linelle said.
Dead sib thing? What the hell?
“Her brother died. His sister died.”
“Geeze,” Dooley said.
“It was years ago,” Linelle said. “But it means that he can do the I-know-exactly-what-you’re-going-through routine and come off as totally sincere. Girls like sincerity, Dooley.”
What did that mean?
“You think I’m not sincere?”
Linelle rolled her eyes.
“Girls also like guys who don’t come across as totally pathetic,” she said. “If you see her again, try to keep your eyes in their sockets and your tongue in your mouth, you know what I mean?” She pushed her cart into the Action/Adventure aisle and started to re-shelve DVDs.
Dooley waited all afternoon. Beth didn’t show. He had a supper break at seven, but he hung around instead of going, still waiting, until Kevin told him, “Use it or lose it, Dooley.” Linelle was gone by then. Kevin was up front. A new guy named Stefan took over the cash so that Dooley could take his break. Dooley said to him, “If a girl comes in looking for me, I’m across the street at the Greek place. Okay?”
Stefan shrugged. “Whatever.”
“I’m saying, tell her that’s where I am,” Dooley said.
“Yeah,” Stefan said, sounding as bored as he looked. “And I’m saying, whatever.”
She walked into the restaurant just as Dooley was taking a giant bite of his souvlaki sandwich. He wiped the tzatziki off his mouth and swallowed as fast as he could.
“Sit down,” he said. “You hungry? You want something to eat?”
She shook her head. She looked tired. He wondered if that was because of her brother. He wondered if the two of them had been really close. Some siblings were—at least, that’s what Dooley had heard.
“How was the movie?” he said.
“It was good,” she said. “They don’t make them like that in Hollywood. The really interesting movies all come from somewhere else.”
“What kind of school do you go to where you get to watch movies and write essays about them?”
“It’s a private school.”
Private schools cost a lot of money. That had to mean her parents were loaded. But if that were true, how come her brother had gone to a regular school? Why hadn’t they sent him to a private school, too?
At the exact same time that she said, “Would you consent to being hypnotized?” Dooley’s pager vibrated, startling him. He glanced down at it. She looked questioningly at him.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “It can wait.” For another nine minutes and fifty seconds, anyway. “What were you saying?”
Geeze, where had that question even come from?
“Maybe you saw something you don’t even realize you saw,” she said. “Something that could help the police.”
“The police?” Dooley said. “But I thought—” He shut up fast. Just because some cop friend of his uncle’s had said something in passing, that didn’t mean they had got around to saying anything to the family.
“You thought what?” she said.
“Nothing.” It wasn’t his place to break the news to her. Besides, no one had said he’d been drinking alone. Maybe he’d been with someone, maybe someone who had panicked when he went over. It was possible.
“People who witness traumatic events sometimes go into shock. Sometimes their mind blocks out what they saw and they don’t even realize it. It’s like a coping mechanism, you know?”
Dooley nodded. He knew all about coping mechanisms. He didn’t tell her that seeing her brother take a header off the bridge hadn’t even come close to traumatizing him. Seeing him lying there on the ground, that was something else. But even that wasn’t what Dooley would call traumatic.
“Sometimes, under hypnosis, people remember things that their conscious minds have been shutting out,” she said.
What Dooley knew about hypnosis: not much, other than you were talking in your sleep to a complete stranger and when it was over, you couldn’t remember what you had said. No way did Dooley want to be involved in anything like that. There was no telling what he might say. Geeze, look at some of the stupid things he’d said when he was drunk or stoned. Look at the trouble that had got him into.
“I’m pretty sure I remember what I saw,” he said. “You want me to get the waitress for you? You want to order something?” He felt bad eating a sandwich in front of her.
She shook her head, so he pushed his plate aside, even though he was still hungry.
“See, that’s the thing,” she said. “You’re pretty
sure. But you’re not positive, right?”
“I saw what I saw,” Dooley said.
“Maybe you only think you saw what you saw,” she said. She looked right at him with those coffee-colored eyes. “Okay, maybe what you say you saw is really all there is to it. I’m not saying it isn’t. But what if it was your brother who died? Wouldn’t you want to know for sure what had happened to him?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Dooley said. He wondered if she’d say the same thing if the cops had already told her that her brother had been drinking and that it was his own stupid fault he’d gone off that bridge.
“So you’ll do it?” she said. “You’ll agree to be hypnotized?” She sat forward in her chair now, her eyes sparkling.
“I didn’t say that,” Dooley said. “No offence, but I’m not into that whole hypnosis thing.”
Her expression hardened. “You don’t know me,” she said. “And I don’t know you. But you know what? If I’d seen your brother go off that bridge, I’d do whatever you asked me if it would help you figure out what really happened.”
Boy, she was intense. Her eyes were glistening now, like maybe she was going to cry. But she didn’t. She stared at him fiercely.
“Okay,” Dooley said. “How about this? How about you let me look into this hypnosis thing a little, you know, ask a few questions, find out what’s involved? Then, if it seems okay, maybe…”
“I can give you the name of a police officer I spoke to,” she said, all eager now.
“It’s okay,” he said. There were enough cops in his life. “I know a few people I can ask. I’ll get back to you. Okay?”
She pulled out a notebook and a pen and wrote something down—her name and phone number, it turned out.
“Call me,” she said. “If you can’t get me, leave a message.”
He nodded.
She smiled at him, reminding him of a little kid. Dooley knew the way most little kids were; you tell them maybe, and they automatically think it means yes. But for Dooley, it was different. When Dooley was growing up and Lorraine had said maybe, it always meant no, so that’s what it meant when Dooley said it. He knew he should have come right out and said it. But he couldn’t make himself do it. Not to her. Not right away.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
As soon as she left the restaurant, he fumbled in his pocket for a quarter and dashed to the pay phone near the door.
“I called the store,” his uncle said when he answered the phone. “They said you’re on your break.”
“Yeah,” Dooley said. “I’m across the street at that Greek place.” Then, partly kidding around and partly wondering if his uncle was making any progress on trusting him, he added, “You want me to put the waitress on?”
There was silence on the other end of the line, and Dooley imagined his uncle thinking it over. But all he said was, “Jeannie wants to know if you can bring home a movie for her. There’s this new one she’s interested in—I never heard of it.”
Dooley grinned when his uncle told him the name of the movie. “Yeah,” he said. “I think we’ve got that one. Tell Jeannie okay.” He wished he could be in the room when Jeannie popped that one in the DVD player. It was pure chick flick. His uncle was going to hate it.
Nine
Dooley knew exactly what Gillette thought of him. Fill a room full of serial killers, whack jobs, perverts, mass murderers—hell, throw in Hitler and Stalin and Saddam Hussein, add those other guys, too, that guy in Cambodia and the one in Africa who got his people to hack the competition to death with machetes—and then put Dooley in the same room and tell Gillette he had to invite any one of them to dinner, his choice, and the very last person he would pick, no matter what, would be Dooley. Those other people, they were all hearsay to Gillette, all he had to go on were other people’s accounts of what they had done and why they had done it (they were insane, that’s why). Dooley, though—Dooley was first-hand. Gillette knew what Dooley was capable of. He’d seen him in action.
So what the hell was he doing leaning against Dooley’s locker and glancing down the hall now at Dooley, looking like he’d been waiting for him?
Dooley stopped in front of Gillette and locked eyes with him. Gillette stared right back at him—see, you don’t scare me—before standing aside, casually, as if to say, hey, look at Joe Student, what a loser, the guy is desperate to get to his locker, so, fine, be my guest. Dooley wished Gillette would get lost. He grabbed the lock with one hand and spun the combination with the other.
“Hey, how’s it going?” Gillette said.
Jesus, Dooley thought, does he realize how phoney he sounds?
Dooley pulled on the lock, opened his locker, and started to fill his backpack with textbooks and binders. When he’d finished, he zipped it shut, locked his locker, and spun away from Gillette, heading for the stairs. Gillette scampered after him like a three-year-old trying to keep up with his long-legged daddy.
“Hey, what’s the rush?” Gillette said, catching Dooley on the main floor and grabbing him by the arm to make him stop.
Dooley looked at Gillette’s hand. You didn’t need more than one brain cell to know what he was thinking: take your hands off me or else. That was the thing that Gillette knew better than anyone—the “or else.” He dropped his hand.
“I was just wanted to talk, see how things are going, that’s all,” he said.
“Yeah?” Dooley said. He had a pretty good idea what it was Gillette wanted to say, but was surprised that he still wanted to say it. “Why’s that?”
“Old time’s sake,” Gillette said.
“Right,” Dooley said. He turned and walked out the door. He glanced over his shoulder as he went through it and saw Gillette just standing there, as if he couldn’t decide what to do—let it go or chase after Dooley. In the end, he chose the latter and caught Dooley this time on the street, heading away from school.
“I heard you saw that kid go over,” he said, getting right to the point this time. It wasn’t the point Dooley had expected.
“That kid?” Dooley said. “Like you don’t know his name? What’s the matter with you? You think I’m some kind of idiot?”
“No,” Gillette said, startled. “No, it’s just a way of speaking, that’s all. Yeah, I knew him. A lot of people knew him. But so far as I know, you’re the only person who saw what happened to him.”
Dooley gave Gillette a look he knew Gillette would recognize, one that said you can kick me, you can kill me, it’s all the same to me, but whatever you’re going to do, do it now, before I take you out.
“What’s it to you?” he said.
“I was just wondering, that’s all.”
“So it’s, like, idle curiosity,” Dooley said. “Kinda like those videos, huh, the ones where you see animals rip other animals to shreds.”
Gillette stepped back a little, like Dooley was making him even more nervous, but he didn’t back off altogether. Dooley wondered why not.
“A lot of people are saying he jumped,” Gillette said. “But there’s some people wondering if he was pushed.”
Dooley just stood there, dead-eyed, but also patient—his hands crossed over each other, one knee bent a little—waiting for Gillette to continue. Anyone looking at him would think he looked pretty casual. Well, anyone except Gillette. He knew better.
“So, what do you think?” Gillette said. He kept glancing around, like he wished he were somewhere else. Anywhere else. “You were there.”
Dooley looked at him a little longer before he said, “Why? Are you worried?”
He enjoyed the look of alarm that appeared on Gillette’s face.
“What do you mean?” Gillette said.
“You knew the guy,” Dooley said. “You worried the cops’ll think you had something to do with it?”
“Fuck, no,” Gillette said. He stiffened and now Dooley could see a little of the old Gillette. “What about you?” he said, an edge to his voice. “Did you tell the cops about you and Everley?�
��
Dooley tried to keep his face blank, but he saw a look of triumph in Gillette’s eyes. Gillette knew he’d hit something, and he liked the feeling.
“You know what I thought when I saw you there at my locker?” Dooley said. He let Gillette wonder for a few moments. “I thought maybe you were going to finally come clean with me—to my face. Who knows, maybe you were even going to apologize.”
Gillette frowned. He looked wary now.
“I know what happened,” Dooley said. “I know exactly what happened and what a fuck-up you are. But, funny thing, I didn’t hear it from you.”
“Hey, look—”
“Stay away from me, Gillette. Don’t make trouble for me, and I won’t make trouble for you.”
Dooley watched Gillette’s eyes go cold. He wondered if Gillette was sorry he’d approached him. He still couldn’t figure out why he had. What difference did it make to Gillette what Dooley had seen out there in the ravine?
Ten
Dooley couldn’t get Beth out of his mind and not just because she was beautiful—although she was that. It was also the way she was so direct. She just came right out with whatever was on her mind. Dooley was no expert on girls. He’d never had a girlfriend—he’d never had the time, he got locked up when he was fifteen. But he’d known a few girls who’d hung around with some of the older guys he used to hang with, and they were nothing like Beth. Even the pretty ones looked somehow harder than her. Their hair was stiffer or they fooled with it more. They wore more makeup. They dressed in a fuck-me way. Beth, though—she just looked good. Her hair was long and always shone and always hung a certain way over her shoulders. She probably had stuff on her lips and on her eyes, but not so you’d notice. She dressed nice—pants and sweaters, nothing too fancy, but you could tell it was good stuff. He wondered if she had a boyfriend. He wondered if it was Rhodes.
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