He grabbed jeans from the floor, pulled them on.
“Maybe you’d rather not talk about this,” she said. She closed the door behind her. “But I think we need to.”
Tug yanked on a shirt. “Okay.”
Sunglasses and purse and keys in hand, she sat on the edge of the bed.
“We’re getting money,” she said. “From the insurance. And, Tug, your father and I had two mortgages. And our worst fights always happened when those stupid payments came due. So I want to pay both mortgages off—so we can be done with them. Just pay both in full so we can own this place. With no resentments.”
Tug smelled her dabbed-on lemon juice for the first time in weeks. “You’ll get enough from the insurance to do that?” he asked.
“Yes, but not by much.”
“Then—I don’t know. Do what you want, I guess.”
“I’m thinking I will, Tug. But I wanted to tell you first. Because from now on, you and I need to be much more open about things like finances.”
Tug nodded. Then, despite himself, he sighed. As open as she was being, this was her unspoken way, it seemed, of proposing a deal: She’d keep this roof over their heads if he’d find work and pay for everything else.
“Can I say something then?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“I mean, if we’re going to be open?”
She nodded.
“First thing I’m doing today is buy another forty-gallon drum.”
“What? Tug, why would you—Tug, we really need to consider—”
“We need to send a message, Mom. We need to say we consider all of his accounts closed and paid in full.”
“You’ll do that by going to the track, Tug.”
“You’re right. You’re right. But if I show up there today with a new drum in the truck bed, those chumps’ll have no doubts about why I’m there. I’m there to say: Got another drum, gentlemen. You want me to keep talking to sheriffs, go ahead and steal this one, too.”
Colleen sat there for a while, lips pressed. She stood, stepped to the window, and gazed out over the lake.
She cleared her throat and said, “And you actually think that will work.”
“I do,” Tug said. “Plus consider how you’ll feel the longer a new drum stays put in our yard.”
She didn’t move, not even to breathe.
“I mean, seriously, Mom: Wouldn’t you sleep a lot better?”
“I really do want to say yes, Tug. Except there’s this one little thing.”
“What.”
“Your dad always asked that exact same question.”
Tug let this truth sink in, among the others, new and old.
Then he asked, “Well? How did you usually answer it?”
She shrugged.
“Apparently not well enough,” she said, and the way she both turned and stepped away from him, as he sometimes had from me, assured him that he was his mother’s son.
So he tried for a hug, but she stiffened.
Nor would she let him see her face.
“Go,” she said. “Get the stupid thing. I’ll give you the cash—that is, if you really think it’s for the best.”
“I do,” Tug said. “Believe me: I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“Then just buy one and let them see it at the track as quickly as you can. Just get this whole damned thing over with.”
She glanced over at Tug, and Tug kept his eyes on her.
“But then, Tug?”
“What.”
“I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see anything resembling a drum sitting in our yard. I don’t want to stand in my kitchen and ever have to as much as notice it.”
“Okay,” Tug said. “I’ll put it on the horse farm. We should probably quit burning the damned leaves anyway.”
61
DEESH
THIS TIME IN A SPORT COAT, his head shaved clean, Gerelli takes his place on the other side of the table in the visiting room and says, “Someone’s been found,” and all I can think is Jasir.
But then Gerelli says, “Upstate,” and before he adds another word, my mind takes me back to the stench I smelled in that crawl space, and now there’s no chance that my gut feeling then—about death being in that rusty drum—was misguided, because here, now, is my attorney talking about the discovery of an adult white male corpse identified as Tom Corcoran, a retired jockey who was strangled.
And this attorney of mine and I are not teenage hoopsters shouting laughter. We are not two men who’ve loved the same woman conning ourselves about the tightness between us. We are not two experienced souls at wit’s end on some stream spilling our guts about love. We are, as Gerelli puts it, the accused and his counsel, and now, as he also explains, we are the apparent perpetrator of a third homicide and the public defender who, at this moment, feels tempted to quit this insane profession altogether.
And, now, we are quiet.
Until Gerelli says, “You look upset.”
I shrug. “Why would I be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you accusing me, Mr. Gerelli?”
“I’m asking you.”
“But are you accusing me.”
“I’m your attorney, Douglas. I’m trying to help.”
“How can you help when you don’t believe—”
And here my mind jumps to Madalynn to Gabe and back to Madalynn, and heat rushes quickly into my face, and I turn away from Gerelli: I am welled up, yeah, a jailed-stupid brother welled up.
But not crying.
“We’re going to have to work on our credibility, Mr. Sharp.”
“Fuck you,” I say. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Mr. Sharp, a footprint that matches your sneaker precisely was found near the drum. And traces of similar dirt were found on your shoestring.”
“I didn’t kill the jockey, Mr. Ger—”
“And the gun that killed the cop was, without question, the same gun that killed the guy in Pennsylvania. Do you hear that, Mr. Sharp? Do you know what all of this means?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” I say.
“And the problem is,” Gerelli says. “You want to know what the problem is, Mr. Sharp? The problem is you didn’t tell me about this retired jockey when I asked you my first question, which was the simple inquiry of what happened. So now it appears you had something to hide.”
Gerelli grabs his chin with one hand, blinking nonstop.
He drops the hand but keeps right on sitting there, staring at me incredulously.
62
JAN
TUG KNEW WHERE YOU COULD BUY a new drum, the lumberyard on an unnamed east-west road just past the second town north, but it would more than help his cause, he figured, to first off buy a Form and visit Bill Treacy’s feed store, to ask where a guy could get a new forty-gallon, the kind used to burn leaves.
And Jasper’s presence there, on the decrepit wooden chair beside Bill, meant that Jasper was finally getting out again, holed up as he’d been since Tom’s wake the previous week, but, still, the only greetings between Jasper and Tug were nods, Bill Treacy then taking the conversation’s reins to ask Tug how Colleen was managing, whether my mother and I planned to stay much longer, whether Tug still had aspirations about law, all of which Tug answered as straightforwardly as he could.
Bill then recommended that same lumberyard north, which strengthened Tug’s resolve to do what he told his mother he’d do, and Tug pressed on during the drive north and bought a drum painted the same orange as the first, not at all rusted but otherwise quite the replica. And with this new drum on the bed, kept there by a discarded chunk of cinder block, he returned south to make his showing at the track, which hadn’t yet opened for the day.
&nb
sp; But the regulars were there, on the edge of the parking lot near the grandstand, strung out in a line that stretched to the turnstiles, smoking, clustered in groups of two and three, all reading Forms except The Form Monger, who apparently felt no need to hide his bewilderment—or was it respect?—thanks to Tug’s presence in Tom’s pickup with a new orange drum. In fact, The Form Monger stood pathetically for well into a minute, unconscientiously agape, eyes shifting from the drum to The Nickster and back to the drum, the scarred wrist beneath The Form Monger’s phantom hand all the more purple in the late morning sunlight.
And after The Form Monger stared like this for so long Tug was sure every chump at the track today would get the message, he went ahead and waved in their direction, at all of them, he thought. And The Form Monger waved back, then turned to interrupt a conversation between a very young gambler and The Nickster, and The Nickster looked up and over at Tug, then gave Tug a nod more resolute than any Tug had hoped for. And Tug felt the sense of worth he’d sometimes felt months earlier, back when he’d done chores to benefit the horses on his farm. Then, to make sure The Nickster knew Tug’s days of feeling intimidated were certainly over, Tug made a show of gathering up something from the pickup’s passenger seat: the first issue of a Daily Racing Form he’d ever purchased for himself.
And to convey even more nonchalance, Tug, on his own accord, spent a few minutes pretending to read results in that Form’s past performances.
And soon there Tug was, actually reading some of those results, probably seeing, in some racehorse’s officially documented win, an indisputable quality that he, like Tom—like everyone, really—could never possibly find in love.
63
DEESH
“WELL?” GERELLI SAYS. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I hadn’t gotten around to it,” I say. “Anyway here’s the question you should be asking prosecutors: Why would I leave the gun there?”
“With this Gabe Cutler’s body?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t. It was found well upstream from where his body was found. Not to mention, Mr. Sharp, you’d just used your last bullet on him. There was, of course, another bullet from that gun in the cop’s head. So as a result, the prosecution is now saying, you didn’t know what to do after you shot Gabe Cutler point-blank. I mean, the sight of a third person killed by you is presumably a tad more disturbing when you yourself are now no longer ably armed. So you panicked and tossed the gun in the stream, maybe hoping Gabe’s death would look like a suicide.”
“But it was a suicide,” I say.
“Mr. Sharp, I do need the truth. We both do.”
“I’m telling you! Gabe Cutler killed himself. I’ve been telling you this since day one.”
“Yes, but how do we know this?”
“Because he was depressed.”
“Yes, but how do we know he was depressed?”
“Because everyone is. Because the world is extremely fucked-up.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gerelli says, and he leans back and tosses up his hands.
And it’s right here that I lose all doubt about whether, if I ever do find myself on the streets of the Bronx again, I won’t be best buds with Lawrence Gerelli.
64
JAN
“THEY CAUGHT HIM,” my mother said.
And she sat down beside me on the cot, the same cot where Tug and I had made love, and she did her best to ignore the lake as I squeezed one of my knees and said, “Who?”
“The guy who strangled Tom.”
“Well, good,” I said—I actually said that.
“Thirty-seven years old. Unemployed and, bless his heart, about as black as you are white. Named Douglas Sharp or some such.”
“Rest in peace, Douglas Sharp.”
“You’re saying you prefer him dead?”
I shook my head no. “Just that now that they caught him, he’s as good as it.”
She studied a sunlit oak and it struck me that there were too many men to think about. My father and Tug’s, Tug himself, and now whoever it was that had killed Tom—men were always running roughshod over the brighter future I’d long ago hoped for.
My mother leaned a little toward me—or maybe I had toward her.
“If I were you,” she said, “I’d tell Tug to forgive him.”
“Of course you would,” I said. “It’s just that there’s one not-so-small problem with that.”
“Huh.”
“You will never be me.”
And here my mother was, definitely leaning in, pressed against me so intently it was clear she wanted to keep touching me. “I’m aware of that, Janny,” she said. “All I’m saying is that here I am, feeling sour because you’re feeling sour because Tug’s off every day watching horses run. So it seems to me that—maybe?—if he’d forgive this Douglas Sharp . . .”
“Maybe what.”
“Maybe some of that sourness would leave us all.”
“Yeah, well, Tug Corcoran isn’t just watching those horses. He’s betting on them. And if you ask me, that’s your basic problem here.”
“That he’ll turn out just like Tom? All in love with betting and in debt up to his eyeballs and gone for good from his fine-looking woman?”
I felt a smile threaten then, and I thought: If only men loved as easily as mamas could. “Something like that,” I said.
“Then all the more reason to forgive Douglas Sharp. Not that this should be repeated, Jan? But Colleen and I have been talking, and if you ask her, neither she nor Tom were all that prone to forgiving—or apologizing, or accepting apologies, or making good out of bad—or anything along those lines. It was all stone-cold business around here, and now she believes it stayed like that because she and Tom never forgave.”
“And you didn’t prompt her, even the tiniest bit, to adopt that belief?”
“Maybe a little. But if so, barely. Anyway forgiveness is only a matter of saying three words. I mean, from Tug’s point of view, there’d be very little to lose.”
“I kind of doubt just saying I forgive you is all it takes,” I said, and right then, out a window to the south of us, a healthy-looking leaf fell straight from an oak. It appeared to be a big, fine leaf that was still shiny and dark green, but it fell.
“And how would you know,” my mother said.
“You’re right, Mama. I wouldn’t. Just making my best guess, really.”
“Jan, no one’s asking anyone to join some church or tithe instead of gamble. I’m just saying come out with those three words. I mean let’s be serious, girl—how could that hurt?”
And of course I’ll never like when anyone tries to force beliefs on me. But then again, it really did feel like Tug was starting to get stuck on gambling.
If nothing else, he kissed differently now, all eager to pull away.
65
DEESH
“SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT, Mr. Sharp,” Gerelli says. “You actually want me to argue . . . now . . . after this damning discovery of Tom Corcoran’s murdered body . . . that you killed neither Tom Corcoran nor the cop in the Bronx. And that what happened in those woods in Pennsylvania was that a despondent, underemployed, aging white male willingly navigated you away from his house and well into the woods, then peaceably came into the possession of the same gun used to kill the cop in the Bronx, then freely decided, with you sitting in his boat and looking on, to end his own life.”
“Well, I wasn’t looking on, but—”
“What were you doing, Mr. Sharp?”
“Looking overboard.”
“At what?”
“The water.”
“Because it was so freaking beautiful?”
“Because I was fishing. And deciding I would come back here to talk to my kid.”
Gerelli rolls his eyes, then closes them and covers his face with his hands.
And I let this silence play itself out, my hope right now being that maybe he’s prepping me for how it’ll feel to be cross-examined.
Then he says, “Well, we can argue that, Mr. Sharp. But before we decide what to argue, I need to know every single one of the facts. Because we just can’t walk into another surprise.”
I nod, dumbstruck all over again about how it didn’t matter who pulled the trigger in Gabe’s boat, since I should have known better than to put down the gun around Gabe in the first place. Then it occurs to me that, in fact, I am guilty of kidnapping Gabe, and that Gerelli and I have yet to discuss this.
“So what the fuck do you want me to tell you?” I ask. “A list of every wrong thing I’ve ever done?”
“That probably wouldn’t hurt, Mr. Sharp. I realize you have no priors, but there are also certain exigencies a public defender like me and a client like you need to address. Such as how much fucking time do you actually expect me to dole out to you when I have other clients—who are far more upfront and grateful—waiting encouragingly for me?”
“What are you saying? You want me to pay you something after all?”
And it’s here that he just stares across the table at me, lips pursed.
“That,” he finally says, “was really not the kind of question you should feel the need to ask me.”
And now’s when I realize that if he isn’t suggesting that I arrange for him to receive some kind of payola, he’s just playing judge and punishing me by messing with my head.
66
JAN
EVERY GRANDSTANDER TUG HAD KNOWN had harbored a tragic tale that explained why he, that poor, poor grandstander, wagered on horses every day, as well as a story about the giant trifecta he almost bet on, as well as a nonstop stream of anecdotes about his unbelievably persistent losing streak.
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