The Wait
Page 15
“She’s my wife,” I said.
“I know. I was at the wedding. Remember?”
“Your mother sleeps in the same bed with her husband.”
“No, she doesn’t,” Gretchen said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“They’ve got separate rooms. Anyway, it’s not your business anymore. You didn’t want to be married to Mom, so now you’ve got a new wife…”
I stopped her in the middle of the sentence. “What do you mean I didn’t want to be married to your mother?” I said.
She hung up the phone. It was an odd revelation, Kate and her husband in separate rooms. I didn’t know what to do with the information. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to do anything with it at all. Maybe I was just supposed to not think about it one way or the other. Maybe I was supposed to be satisfied with my life, my job, my wife, and not reserve a corner of my mind for Kate Shepherd. The same corner she’d always occupied, maybe smaller now, but pretty much the same general location of the brain. The back left corner. Next to the part that thinks about food and oxygen.
Of course, there wasn’t enough room in my mind for Kate Shepherd, or anything else for that matter, since Allen Kilborn Sr. crawled around inside every hour of my day. It got so bad I created a mechanism inside myself to cope with the problem. An automatic switch. When I’d catch myself thinking about the man, or what I did to the man, I’d switch to something else immediately. I started with Samantha, and then Little Allen, but it didn’t work well. My thoughts would circle back. I tried unrelated subjects, like the batting averages of third basemen, or listing the presidents of the United States in chronological order, but the relief was temporary. The only subject I found successfully distracted my attention was sex. The images inside my mind were vivid enough to start a chain reaction throughout my body, and the natural instinct seemed to take over.
This caused new problems in the house. Since about a year after we got married, the sexual opportunities with my wife began a slow, steady decrease. There were plenty of excuses, and I began to obsess on the subject. It seemed like such a small sacrifice for her to make. I worked very hard. I provided. I was loyal and dependable. How could she let weeks pass without providing for me? I walked the line between beggar and brooder, and not very well I might add. A line I’d walked before, and just as poorly.
“Samantha, it’s important to our relationship. I don’t understand.”
Sometimes, when she would give in, I’d find myself on top of a dead body, warm and supple like a new corpse before the onset of rigor, with her head craned way to the side, probably thinking about grocery shopping, like an animal pretending to be dead until the predator moves along. As much as the situation disgusted me, I wouldn’t stop until I was finished, and satisfied, if only for a few hours. Sometimes, while we were doing it, I’d think about him on top of her and wonder if it was the same. Wonder if maybe with him she writhed and bucked and moaned.
The value of sex for a man in a marriage far outweighs the five-second orgasm. It’s the ultimate reassurance. The ultimate display of complete trust, loyalty, and respect, to allow someone to enter you, literally, to physically enter your body. It’s an act of appreciation that can keep a man getting up in the morning and going to a job he doesn’t like, at least for a while.
I found myself creating a new mechanism. An automatic switch away from sex and nasty fantasies of my wife doing things she’d never let me do. I started thinking about nothing. Started visualizing a blackboard at school. On the blackboard were words like Allen Kilborn, Kate, district manager, Gretchen, cigarettes, step #7, and Frank Rush.
I would lie perfectly still on my back, eyes closed in the dark room, and start with ten deep breaths. Then I’d visualize the blackboard with the words written haphazardly from top to bottom. One by one the words would be erased, and with each disappearing word, my body would relax. Finally, all the words would be gone and I’d be left thinking of absolutely nothing. Dark, black, nothing, surrounded by thick metal walls to keep everything else away from the nothingness.
The front page of the paper said: SUSPECT ARRESTED IN MURDER OF KILBORN. The picture of Eddie’s face these years later made him look blank and hollow. It was a booking photograph from the jail. His eyes seemed to look directly at me and no one else.
The article didn’t give many details. I can still recall my first clear thought after reading the headline. It had to be a trick. A ploy to get me to come forward. There couldn’t be any evidence against Eddie. He was innocent. All he did was drive me to the house earlier in the day. He couldn’t confess to something he didn’t do. He couldn’t lead them to the murder weapon, or the clothes, or the key.
I sat at the kitchen table staring down at Eddie’s picture. Samantha must have been looking over my shoulder.
“Oh my God. Isn’t that your friend?”
I didn’t react.
“We were friends in grade school. I haven’t seen him but a few times since we grew up.”
“He was at the wedding!” she yelled.
Allen Jr. ended up in the unhealthy conversation.
“He killed my father? Your friend killed my father? Why?” he asked me.
“It must be a mistake, Allen. I’ve only seen Eddie a few times since college. He always seemed like a good man. It must just be a mistake.”
Samantha read the article. “I hope they execute the bastard.”
Little Allen started crying. All the emotions came upward from wherever he’d locked them down below.
“It’s just got to be a mistake,” I said again. It was the only explanation I could offer. My mind started spinning around back to that day.
Frank Rush must have convinced himself that Eddie was involved. Out of desperation, he must have finally decided to make a move, try to shake things loose. Rush probably figured if Eddie was involved, certainly now, sitting in jail with no bond, and facing execution or spending the rest of his life in jail, he would tell what he knew. What if he made things up? What if he told more than he knew, or could know, just to give Frank Rush what he wanted, which was me?
The police car could pull up to my office any day, or maybe come to the house in the middle of the night, and they’d pull me off my limp wife and drag my sorry ass to jail. It could be me next week on the front page of the paper, with a washed-out photograph, and other people sitting at their kitchen tables saying what a nice guy I always seemed to be.
There was nothing for me to do but wait. It was ironic, if that’s the right word. I would depend on the same judicial system for Eddie, an innocent man, as I depended upon for myself, not innocent, but prepared. If the system provided protection for a guilty man, even a well-planned guilty man with good intentions, then certainly it would protect Eddie Miller. If it didn’t, what would I do? And was it possible Eddie was in on the trick?
That night, on the way home from work, I took a longer route through town. Nobody seemed to be following me. I drove south and then looped to the backroads where I’d dug the holes out in the woods. It was hard to tell exactly where they were. The area was being built up, new subdivisions, box houses one next to the other. I didn’t turn my head to look into the woods as I passed. I just aimed straight ahead in case Frank Rush stood behind the line of trees waiting for me to pass. Waiting for me to coincidentally be on the wrong road, looking into the woods at the wrong spot, on the day after the wrong man was arrested.
I stopped at a convenience store and bought a pack of cigarettes. My first pack in over a year. At home, after Samantha fell asleep in the middle of a conversation, I checked on Allen. His light was off down the hall. On the screened back porch, in the dark, I lit a cigarette with matches hidden by the grill. I could feel the thick smoke fill my lungs and then disappear invisibly into the night. I let the silence come down on me, and I listened for any sound. A dog barked down the street. An airplane roared way above in the sky, taking people I didn’t know to see other people I didn’t know, and I imagined each o
f them thought of things like me, but different from me, and they didn’t even know I was down below smoking a cigarette in the dark.
The back door swung open. My head spun around to see the silhouette of Little Allen, not so little anymore as a teenager, standing in the doorway. I dropped the cigarette to the brick floor and stood on top of it with my bare foot, twisting as I turned to Allen.
“Is everything okay?” he said.
“Yeah, yeah. I thought I heard something. It was just a dog.”
He was in shorts and an oversized t-shirt. He was a good boy. Honest, with a full heart. It was the people around him who were crazy and disjointed.
“A dog? What kind of dog?” he asked curiously.
“I didn’t see it. I just heard it.”
“Is there something burning?” he asked.
It should be the other way around. It should have been me catching a teenage boy sneaking a smoke on the back porch at night. It should have been me at the door in my boxers asking the questions. Instead, I felt a burning on the bottom of my foot. The pain built to a point I nearly cried out, then slowly lessened until there was a sound in the bushes to the left of where we stood. We both turned to look.
“What was that?” Allen whispered.
“Probably the dog again,” I said calmly, but we both knew it was a lie. It didn’t seem like the sound a dog would make. It seemed more like the sound a man would make in the bushes. A man who watched me when I didn’t know it.
two
I was in my office, daydreaming about nothing, when the speakerphone on the corner of my desk said, “Mr. Winwood, there’s a Frank Rush here to see you.”
The daydream ended abruptly. My secretary must have thought she was talking to an empty room.
“Are you there?” she asked softly.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I was in the middle of something. Send him in.”
The door opened a few seconds later and Investigator Rush stood in the doorway. He was a bit larger than the last time I’d seen him, but the face was the same. Heavy.
He sat down, and as was the custom between us, I waited. A brown briefcase rested in his lap.
He said, looking around the room, “You’ve done pretty good for yourself.”
The panorama of framed certificates seemed impressive, but it was all bullshit. Seminars where I sat in the back not listening to the boring guy stomping around the stage. Training sessions I didn’t actually attend.
“Did you see Eddie in the newspaper?” he asked, focusing on a gold-leaf diploma to my left on the wall.
“Yeah,” I answered.
I felt a line of sweat sneak from my left armpit down my ribs beneath the blue button-down shirt. Mr. Rush watched me, and I watched him, the usual dance. I’m not sure what he expected from me. I’m not sure what anybody expected from me.
In the silence between us I heard someone laugh in the outer lobby. It was the laugh of a woman, unrestrained, tickled by something, with no time to muffle the response. It was genuine, and I wished I was sitting next to her, whoever she was, instead of sitting across from the man with the briefcase in his lap, a thin line of cool sweat inching downward to my hip.
Frank Rush opened the briefcase and casually placed a large pistol on the desk between us. He closed the case. It was Allen Kilborn’s pistol, or one that looked like Allen Kilborn’s, only older, weathered, dug up from its grave.
“You recognize that?” the man asked. He pointed at the gun but started directly at my face. I leaned up a bit in my chair to see the pistol, and then leaned back again.
“No,” I said.
The investigator leaned up in his chair also and looked at the gun like it was the first time he’d ever seen the thing.
“We found it at a construction site off Highway 33. It’s a pretty remote area back there, but over the last few years neighborhoods have popped up. They were puttin’ in the foundation for a house. It was buried about a foot and a half.”
I glanced from his eyes back down to the gun.
“It’s cleaned up now,” he said. “It was in pretty bad shape. At first, I figured there was no chance a fingerprint could survive, but we sent it off to that fancy lab up in Virginia, the FBI lab.”
In my mind, I watched myself put the gloves on my hands. I saw the gloved hand open the drawer and remove the gun from the special wooden rest. I saw the hole I dug, about eighteen inches deep. Two feet at the most.
“They found a fingerprint. One fingerprint.”
I didn’t flinch. I didn’t swallow. I just looked him in the eye.
“Guess whose fingerprint?” he said.
The woman in the lobby laughed again. Almost identical to the first laugh, but longer. She let it linger at the end, trailing away.
Frank Rush said, “Eddie Miller’s.”
It was a lie. I knew it was a lie, and he knew it was a lie. Eddie never touched the gun. It wasn’t possible. But I was the only person to really know for sure, and the investigator across from me looked so hard into my face for anything at all, anything, I began to feel physical pressure along the top of my eyes and down to my cheekbones, like his big hand was touching my face, holding my face like a soccer ball.
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
He studied my answer. “Why not?”
“Because Eddie Miller doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who would kill somebody. And why would he kill Allen Kilborn? I don’t think he even knew Allen.”
Frank Rush said, “You can’t always tell a killer by how he looks, Mr. Winwood. I believe we all have it inside us. The ability to kill, I mean. A man who wouldn’t kill to protect his child, or his family, is a coward. We all have a reason, a reason worth killing over, most of us just never get to that point. I guess Eddie Miller got to the point, for whatever reason, and now he has to face the consequences.”
I said, “I don’t know much about you, Mr. Rush. When I was younger, I could see people a lot better. I don’t see ’em so good anymore, but you don’t appear to be the type of person willing to send an innocent man to prison just so you can close an old file.”
The gun was directly between us and I tried very hard not to look at it again.
“What makes you so sure Eddie Miller is an innocent man?” he asked sincerely.
I turned my chair slightly to look at the gold leaf diploma displayed so proudly.
“Because when we were kids, maybe twelve years old, we planned an elaborate heist from the drugstore. A candy bar heist. Eddie’s job was just to be the lookout.”
I glanced back from the framed diploma to Frank Rush where he sat.
“He couldn’t do it,” I said. “He couldn’t even be the lookout for a candy bar theft. He started shaking all over and looking for excuses. He wouldn’t be a very good murderer.”
Frank Rush seemed to consume the story I told, and as it digested he shook his head up and down like he understood.
He said, “What exactly was your role in the candy bar heist?”
I thought of the countless diagrams I’d drawn. Diagrams with locations of mirrors, and employees, with an X marking the spot where the candy bars were displayed. Frank Rush stared so hard at the side of my face I felt he could steal the thoughts right out of my head.
My secretary’s voice blared out from the speakerphone, startling the hell out of me, and in turn startling Frank Rush.
“Mr. Winwood, I’m sorry to disturb you, but Gretchen’s mother is on the line. She says it’s an emergency.”
It was Kate. Something about a seizure. Something about Gretchen in the television section of a big store, she had a seizure, fell into a TV, she was at the hospital. Kate was crying. The doctors weren’t sure what caused the problem. There were tests to do.
I hung up the phone.
“I have to go to California, Mr. Rush. My daughter’s in the hospital. I need to be there. I hope I’m right. I hope you’re not the type of person willing to keep an innocent man in jail, for whatever reason.”
Samantha helped me pack my bag. She wanted to know details, but I didn’t have any details. She wanted to know exactly what Kate said, but I couldn’t remember the exact words, and it seemed like a strange time to be thinking about herself. I looked at Samantha across the room, my eyes red from crying at the thought of Gretchen dying in a hospital in California, and it occurred to me Samantha wasn’t capable of giving me comfort. She loved me when I was strong and dependable, because that’s what she loved about me. There was no place for me to be needy. When I needed comfort, affection, sexual reassurance, I was no longer strong and dependable, I was weak, and she didn’t love weak, so why would she want to have sex with a weak man, or put her arms around me and tell me she loved me?
I wanted to tell her right then and there that I killed Allen. Right in our bedroom, me standing by the closet, her standing by the bed, my suitcase open, my eyes full. I wanted to tell her what I’d done for her, Allen Jr., and all of us. Ironically, one of the primary purposes of killing the man was to remove all impediments in the relationship between myself and Samantha, but the guilt and suspicions, the underground doubts, had built a wall even larger, an emotional barrier we couldn’t seem to cross. I created unreasonable expectations.
I turned away, but she knew something had clicked inside me. She watched as I packed my bag. The picture of my father was in my sock drawer, down at the bottom, and until I saw it, I’d forgotten where it was hidden. I’d forgotten again exactly how he looked, smiling, his head turned a bit to the side. The white t-shirt had a dark stain near the belly like he wiped his hands across his shirt. Maybe working on his car. Maybe working in the yard.