“Friends?” he said.
“Friends,” I said. “But I still want to call the cops.”
“And spoil our fun?” Neil said.
“And spoil your fun.”
“I say we take it to a vote,” Bob said.
“This isn’t a democracy,” I said. “It’s my house and I’m the king. I don’t want to have a vote.”
“Can we ask him one question?” Bob said.
I sighed. They weren’t going to let go. “One question?”
“The names of the guys he was with tonight.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. That way we get him and his pals off the street.”
“And then I call the cops?”
“Then,” Mike said, “you call the cops.”
“One question,” Neil said.
While we finished our beers, we argued a little more, but they had a lot more spirit left than I did. I was tired now and missing Jan and the kids and feeling lonely. These three guys had become strangers to me tonight. Very old boys eager to play at boy games once again.
“One question,” I said. “Then I call the cops.”
I led the way down, sneezing as I did so.
There’s always enough dust floating around in the basement to play hell with my sinuses.
The guy was his same sullen self, glaring at us as we descended the stairs and then walked over to him. He smelled of heat and sweat and city grime. The long bare arms sticking out of his filthy T-shirt told tattoo tales of writhing snakes and leaping panthers. The arms were joined in the back with rope. His jaw still flexed, trying to accommodate the intrusion of the gag.
“Maybe we should castrate him,” Mike said, walking up close to the guy. “You like that, scumbag? If we castrated you?”
If the guy felt any fear, it wasn’t evident in his eyes. All you could see there was the usual contempt.
“I’ll bet this is the jerk who broke into the Donaldsons’ house a couple weeks ago,” Neil said.
Now he walked up to the guy. But he was more ambitious than Mike had been. Neil spat in the guy’s face.
“Hey,” I said, “cool it.”
Neil glared at me. “Yeah, I wouldn’t hurt his feelings, would I?”
Then he suddenly turned back on the guy, raised his fist, and started to swing. All I could do was shove him. That sent his punch angling off to the right, missing our burglar by about half a foot.
“You asshole,” Neil said, turning back on me now.
But Mike was there, between us.
“You know what we’re doing? We’re making this jerk happy. He’s gonna have some nice stories to tell all his criminal friends.”
He was right. The burglar was the one who got to look all cool and composed. We looked like squabbling brats. As if to confirm this, a hint of amusement played in the burglar’s blue eyes.
“Oh, hell, Aaron, I’m sorry,” Neil said, putting his hand out. This was like a political convention, all the handshaking going on.
“So am I, Neil,” I said. “That’s why I want to call the cops and get this over with.”
And that’s when he chose to make his move, the burglar. As soon as I mentioned the cops, he probably realized that this was going to be his last opportunity.
He waited until we were just finishing up with the handshake, when we were all focused on one another. Then he took off running. We could see that he’d slipped the rope. He went straight for the stairs, angling out around us like a running back seeing daylight. He even stuck his long, tattooed arm out as if he were trying to repel a tackle.
“Hey!” Bob shouted. “He’s getting away.”
He was at the stairs by the time we could gather ourselves enough to go after him. But when we moved, we moved fast, and in virtual unison.
By the time I got my hand on the cuff of his left jeans leg, he was close enough to the basement door to open it.
I yanked hard and ducked out of the way of his kicking foot. By now I was as crazy as Mike and Neil had been earlier. There was adrenaline, and great anger. He wasn’t just a burglar, he was all burglars, intent not merely on stealing things from me but on hurting my family, too. He hadn’t had time to take the gag from his mouth.
This time, I grabbed booted foot and leg and started hauling him back down the stairs. At first he was able to hold on to the door, but when I wrenched his foot rightward, he tried to scream behind the gag. He let go of the doorknob.
The next half minute is still unclear in my mind. I started running down the stairs, dragging him with me. All I wanted to do was get him on the basement floor again, turn him over to the others to watch, and then go call the cops.
But somewhere in those few seconds when I was hauling him back down the steps, I heard edge of stair meeting back of skull. The others heard it, too, because their shouts and curses died in their throats.
When I turned around, I saw the blood running fast and red from his nose. The blue eyes no longer held contempt. They were starting to roll up white in the back of his head.
“God,” I said. “He’s hurt.”
“I think he’s a lot more than hurt,” Mike said.
“Help me carry him upstairs.”
We got him on the kitchen floor. Mike and Neil rushed around soaking paper towels. We tried to revive him. Bob, who kept wincing from his headache, tried the guy’s wrist, ankle, and throat for a pulse. None. His nose and mouth were bloody. Very bloody.
“No way you could die from hitting your head like that,” Neil said.
“Sure you could,” Mike said. “You hit it just the right way.”
“He can’t be dead,” Neil said. “I’m going to try his pulse again.”
Bob, who obviously took Neil’s second opinion personally, frowned and rolled his eyes. “He’s dead, man. He really is.”
“Bullshit.”
“You a doctor or something?” Bob said.
Neil smiled nervously. “No, but I play one on TV?’
So Neil tried the pulse points. His reading was exactly what Bob’s reading had been.
“See,” Bob said.
I guess none of us was destined to ever quite be an adult.
“Man,” Neil said, looking down at the long, cold, unmoving form of the burglar. “He’s really dead.”
“What the hell’re we gonna do?” Mike said.
“We’re going to call the police,” I said, and started for the phone.
“The hell we are,” Mike said. “The hell we are.”
~ * ~
3
Maybe half an hour after we laid him on the kitchen floor, he started to smell. We’d looked for identification and found none. He was just the Burglar.
We sat at the kitchen table, sharing a fifth of Old Grand-Dad and innumerable beers.
We’d taken two votes, and they’d come up ties. Two for calling the police, Bob and I; two for not calling the police, Mike and Neil.
“All we have to tell them,” I said, “is that we tied him up so he wouldn’t get away.”
“And then they say,” Mike said, “so why didn’t you call us before now?”
“We just lie about the time a little,” I said. “Tell them we called them within twenty minutes.”
“Won’t work,” Neil said.
“Why not?” Bob said.
“Medical examiner can fix the time of death,” Neil said.
“Not that close.”
“Close enough so that the cops might question our story,” Neil said. “By the time they get here, he’ll have been dead at least an hour, hour and a half.”
“And then we get our names in the paper for not reporting the burglary or the death right away,” Mike said. “Brokerages just love publicity like that.”
“I’m calling the cops right now,” I said, and started up from the table.
“Think about Tomlinson a minute,” Neil said.
Tomlinson was my boss at the brokerage. “What about him?”
“Rememb
er how he canned Dennis Bryce when Bryce’s ex-wife took out a restraining order on him?”
“This is different,” I said.
“The hell it is,” Mike said. “Neil’s right, none of our bosses will like publicity like this. We’ll all sound a little — crazy — you know, keeping him locked up in the basement. And then killing him when he tried to get away.”
They all looked at me.
“You bastards,” I said. “I was the one who wanted to call the police in the first place. And I sure as hell didn’t try to kill him on purpose.”
“Looking back on it,” Neil said, “I guess you were right, Aaron. We should’ve called the cops right away.”
“Now’s a great time to realize that,” I said.
“Maybe they’ve got a point,” Bob said softly, glancing at me, then glancing nervously away.
“Oh, great. You, too?” I said.
“They just might kick my black ass out of there if I had any publicity that involved somebody getting killed,” Bob said.
“He was a frigging burglar,” I said.
“But he’s dead,” Neil said.
“And we killed him,” Mike said.
“I appreciate you saying we,’” I said.
“I know a good place,” Bob said.
I looked at him carefully, afraid of what he was going to say next.
“Forget it,” I said.
“A good place for what?” Neil said.
“Dumping the body,” Bob said.
“No way,” I said.
This time, when I got up, nobody tried to stop me. I walked over to the yellow wall telephone.
I wondered if the cozy kitchen would ever feel the same to me now that a dead body had been laid upon its floor.
I had to step over him to reach the phone. The smell was even more sour now.
“You know how many bodies get dumped in the river that never wash up?” Bob said.
“No,” I said, “and you don’t either.”
“Lots,” he said.
“There’s a scientific appraisal for you. ‘Lots.’”
“Lots and lots, probably,” Neil said, taking up Bob’s argument.
Mike grinned. “Lots and lots and lots.”
“Thank you, Professor,” I said.
I lifted the receiver and dialed 0.
“Operator.”
“The Police Department, please.”
“Is this an emergency?” asked the young woman. Usually, I would have spent more time wondering if the sweetness of her voice was matched by the sweetness of her face and body. I’m still a face man. I suppose it’s my romantic side. “Is this an emergency?” she repeated.
“No; no, it isn’t.”
“I’ll connect you,” she said.
“You think your kids’ll be able to handle it?” Neil said.
“No mind games,” I said.
“No mind games at all,” he said. “I’m asking you a very realistic question. The police have some doubts about our story and then the press gets ahold of it, and bam. We’re the lead story on all three channels. ‘Did four middle-class men murder the burglar they captured?’ The press even goes after the kids these days. ‘Do you think your daddy murdered that burglar, son?’”
“Good evening. Police Department.”
I started to speak, but I couldn’t somehow. My voice wouldn’t work. That’s the only way I can explain it.
“The six o’clock news five nights running,” Neil said softly behind me. “And the DA can’t endorse any kind of vigilante activity, so he nails us on involuntary manslaughter.”
“Hello? This is the Police Department,” said the black female voice on the phone.
Neil was there then, reaching me as if by magic.
He took the receiver gently from my hand and hung it back up on the phone again.
“Let’s go have another drink and see what Bob’s got in mind, all right?”
He led me, as if I were a hospital patient, slowly and carefully back to the table, where Bob, over more whiskey, slowly and gently laid out his plan.
~ * ~
The next morning, three of us phoned in sick. Bob went to work because he had an important meeting.
Around noon — a sunny day when a softball game and a cold six-pack of beer sounded good — Neil and Mike came over. They looked as bad as I felt, and no doubt looked, myself.
We sat out on the patio eating the Hardee’s lunch they’d bought. I’d need to play softball to work off some of the calories I was eating.
Birdsong and soft breezes and the smell of fresh-cut grass should have made our patio time enjoyable. But I had to wonder if we’d ever enjoy anything again. I just kept seeing the body momentarily arced above the roaring waters of the dam, and dropping into white, churning turbulence.
“You think we did the right thing?” Neil said.
“Now’s a hell of a time to ask that,” I said.
“Of course we did the right thing,” Mike said. “What choice did we have? It was either that or get our asses arrested.”
“So you don’t have any regrets?” Neil said.
Mike sighed. “I didn’t say that. I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened in the first place.”
“Maybe Aaron was right all along,” Neil said.
“About what?”
“About going to the cops.”
“Goddamn,” Mike said, sitting up from his slouch. We all wore button-down shirts without ties and with the sleeves rolled up. Somehow there was something profane about wearing shorts and T-shirts on a workday. We even wore pretty good slacks. We were those kind of people. “Goddamn.”
“Here he goes,” Neil said.
“I can’t believe you two,” Mike said. “We should be happy that everything went so well last night — and what’re we doing? Sitting around here pissing and moaning.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s over,” I said.
“Why the hell not?” Mike said.
“Because there’s still one left.”
“One what?”
“One burglar.”
“So?”
“So you don’t think he’s going to get curious about what the hell happened to his partner?”
“What’s he gonna do?” Mike said. “Go to the cops?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? You’re crazy. He goes to the cops, he’d be setting himself up for a robbery conviction.”
“Not if he tells them we murdered his pal.”
Neil said, “Aaron’s got a point. What if this guy goes to the cops?”
“He’s not going to the cops,” Mike said. “No way he’s going to the cops at all.”
~ * ~
4
I was dozing on the couch, a Cubs game on the TV set, when the phone rang around nine that evening. I hadn’t heard from Jan yet, so I expected it would be her. Whenever we’re apart, we call each other at least once a day.
The phone machine picks up on the fourth ring, so I had to scramble to beat it.
“Hello?”
Nothing. But somebody was on the line. Listening.
“Hello?”
I never play games with silent callers. I just hang up. I did so now.
Two innings later, having talked to Jan, having made myself a tuna fish sandwich on rye, found a package of potato chips I thought we’d finished off at the poker game, and gotten myself a new can of beer, I sat down to watch the last inning. The Cubs had a chance of winning. I said a silent prayer to the god of baseball.
The phone rang.
I mouthed several curses around my mouthful of tuna sandwich and went to the phone.
“Hello?” I said, trying to swallow the last of the bite.
My silent friend again.
I slammed the phone.
The Cubs got two more singles. I started on the chips, and I had polished off the beer and was thinking of getting another one when the phone rang again.
I had a suspicion of who was calling and then saying nothing �
�� but I didn’t really want to think about it.
The Best American Noir of the Century Page 49