by Robert Ward
That was his girl, Bob thought. Tough, sexy, and capable. Man, what a lucky day it was when Jesse Reardon walked into his life.
It was the morning before the wedding. Jesse was out shopping on her own and Bob was getting ready to go pick up the new suit he’d bought down at Joseph Bank. It was a modest suit, summer weight, and he was debating whether or not he needed to buy new shoes, as well, maybe a pair of old-fashioned cordovans, when his phone rang.
He looked down at the caller ID and saw Dave’s number.
“Hey,” he said, happy to talk to his old friend. “How’s my best man?”
“Great, buddy,” Dave said. “You getting ready for the big day?”
“You know it,” Bob said. “Just heading down to pick up my suit.”
“Cool,” Dave said. “Listen, Bob, before you go, I wonder if you could do me a little favor?”
“Name it,” Bob said.
“Well, I kind of ran into these guys from the Washington Post yesterday, and they said they really wanted to do an interview with you for the Style section. They usually have their own staffers do this stuff, but since we’re old friends and all …”
“No problem,” Bob said. “I can fall by on my way downtown. Won’t take too long, right?”
“Nah,” Dave said. “Hey, don’t worry. I know I can’t expect too much time from the great Bobby Wells.”
Bob blinked and felt a wave of anger. Dave sounded a little bitter. Of course, that was only natural. He was probably a little jealous of all the attention Bob was receiving.
“You’ll have all the time you need,” Bob said, trying to sound generous. “Be right over.”
“Cool,” Dave said. “I worked up a few questions that maybe they haven’t heard before.”
“Fine,” Bob said. There was no mistaking it this time. Dave sounded a little strange. Well, whatever … he’d hang in with Dave just as Dave had for him. After all, there was a little matter of gratitude. He wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to turn his back on his old pal. After all, Dave had gotten the ball rolling for him. He just wished Dave wouldn’t get weird and use that proprietorial tone. Like Bob owed him. That was starting to get a little old.
Dave and Lou Anne lived just a few blocks away in a restored redbrick row house on Boston Street. The place was probably worth quite a bit now, as the area had become fashionable. In fact, Bob recalled, as Dave let him in, he had once been jealous of Dave’s property value. Just a year or so ago, Dave had learned that his house was worth about three times what he’d paid for it and had needled Bob about all the money he could make from selling the place.
Of course, Bob thought now, as he walked in and checked out the living room, if Dave ever did try to sell the place, any real-estate agent worth their salt would have to first throw out all this crummy furniture. Dave’s taste in furnishing was as bad as his prose. The theme was kind of nineteenth-century nautical, the house being only half a block from the wharf. The living room featured a couple of old deck chairs, which were hard and uncomfortable, and a corner in which every sailing knickknack known to man was on display. Sitting on a battered, old mess table were sextants, spyglasses, binoculars, a navy codebook from the same era, a belaying pin, and a grappling hook. The goddamn living room looked like the set from Master and Commander.
“Want a little drink?” Dave said.
“Too early for me,” Bob said. Ten o’clock in the morning. Was good old Dave turning into a lush?
“Me, too,” Dave said. “But what the hell? Some days you just need a little pick-me-up.”
“I can dig it,” Bob said.
“Boy, some day tomorrow, huh, Bobby?” Dave said.
“Yeah,” Bob said. “Never thought I’d get married again.”
Dave gave a little chuckle.
“Boy, things have really turned around for you, huh, Bob?”
Bob nodded his head and sat down in one of the uncomfortable deck chairs.
“It’s great you’ll make the Post,” Bob said.
“Yeah,” Dave said. “They read my other piece on you in the Sun and they realized they want a more personal look at Bobby Wells, all-American hero.”
Dave took a gulp of his drink and Bob thought he felt the atmosphere change in the room. Had Dave actually been a little caustic with the “all-American hero” bit?
“So,” Dave said, clearing his throat, “might as well get to it, huh? Let’s talk about that night. You were taking a walk, right?”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “Right. But everybody already knows all that.”
Dave took out a small pad of paper and began writing things down.
“I know, but I just have to get the chronology straight. You know how tough those Post fact-checkers are. Much tougher than the guys at the Sun.”
Bob nodded his head and tried out a friendly smile.
“I know this is boring,” Dave said. “Going over the same old stuff again and again. Guess you might call it the price of fame. Now you walked from your house all the way to Gay Street. That’s a long walk.”
“Right,” Bob said. “But I had a lot on my mind.”
“Of course you did,” Dave said. “But see, Bobby, right here is where I might have a little problem. With the fact-checkers, I mean.”
There was a long silence. Bob stared directly at Dave and was stunned to see Dave, lovable, old-shoe Dave, staring directly back at him. No blinks. No embarrassed turning away. No deferential cough.
“What do you mean, Dave?” Bob said.
“Well, Bobby,” Dave said. “As it so happens, I called your house that night. I was heading on down to the Lodge and thought you might want to tag along, have a few beers. But when I got through to your house Jesse told me you weren’t home. So I asked her if you were down American Joe’s … figured I’d stop by there and pick you up, but she said, no, you weren’t out drinking, but were at this lecture series over at Johns Hopkins. So I asked her which one and she said she wasn’t sure, but she thought it was all about the new activism, some anti-Bush kind of deal. Well, that struck me as odd. If there were something like that going on I’d certainly know about it. Wouldn’t you think, Bob?”
Bob felt his fingertips getting cold and a kind of panic had started roiling in his stomach, like he’d taken a little drink of battery acid.
Frantically, he tried to think of something … anything … that would cool Dave down, but he could think of absolutely nothing.
“Of course, it’s always possible I could have missed the lecture,” Dave said, warming to his own voice now. “So I called Hopkins and talked to a woman I know over there, Julia Dietz, who runs the series. And I found that no such lecture had taken place. That struck me as odd, Bob, very odd. But I doubt I would have pursued it if Jesse hadn’t picked up on my silence. You know how perceptive she is, Bobby? Well, it turns out she was worried about you, said you’d been out meeting with your accountant, what’s his name, Schur … a bunch of times lately. At night. She was worried about that, too … she even asked me about your savings … wanted to know if I knew how much money you really had. Seems she’d heard how you lost all your money playing cards.”
Bob looked at Dave with a deep scowl on his face now. He didn’t like where this was heading, not at all.
Dave smiled and poured himself another drink.
“Anyway,” he said, “I might not have paid any of this much notice, but it so happens Mike Schur was down the Lodge that night with a couple of his buddies and I asked him how you were doing, and he said, ‘As far as I know, fine.’ Well, when I asked him what that meant, he said that he hadn’t seen you for a few months, and in fact, you owed him a bill that he couldn’t collect. Well, now, I found that very, very interesting. Seems you were going out at night a lot and lying about it. Tell you the truth, I might have still let it all go, but then the explosion happened, and they found Ray Wade up there and that was too good. So I went down and saw Ray’s good old mom, and she told me that you had come around to see Ray a coup
le of times, and that he had mentioned he had to meet with you about something. Well, what could my old friend Bob Wells want with a guy like Ray Wade … that was hard to figure. Until I heard that the same night of the explosion another fellow I know, Emile Bardan, the art dealer, had been robbed of a precious antique mask. Then it all added up. Because I remembered once you’d told me that Emile Bardan was your patient. Your only interesting patient. I did a little more digging and I found out that he’d been arrested a few times for suspected art theft. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the rest. You used your position as his shrink to find out about the mask, then you got Ray and the other guys to rob him … then you went to fence the mask at the American Brewery Building, but something went very wrong. How am I doing, Bob?”
There was a long and terrible silence. Bob felt as though something was crawling up his spinal column.
“It’s a fascinating story, Dave. Maybe you should write that novel after all.”
“But this isn’t fiction, Bob. It’s all real. I even figured out the motivation. Jesse. You met this great new woman and you had to have money to keep her. But you’d lost all your money. A fact she doesn’t know. So what to do? Then Emile came along….”
Bob stared at Dave with such ferocity that Dave finally looked away.
“Oh yeah,” Dave said finally. “The two kids, Leslie and Ronnie, that you saved? I don’t see them as part of it. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, taking drugs and screwing, and Bob Wells, decent man that he is—at heart, that is—saves their lives. I think that about covers it.”
Bob twisted in his seat. He heard the roaring inside his head again and for a second he shut his eyes and had a visual image of a whirlwind of fury, like a screaming mouth.
“If you knew all this, why did you write the piece?” Bob said.
Dave gave a nervous little laugh.
“Because you and I are so much alike,” he said. “See, you met a nice girl who expects something more out of life, and I met one, too. Lou Anne is a lot like Jesse, Bob. Okay, not as sexy—on the surface, granted. But what she knows in bed more than makes up for that. Anyway, just like you and Jesse, Lou thought that meeting a published writer was a big step up the ladder. But now she sees us eating the same old frozen dinners and having to clip coupons and she’s already starting to wonder if she made herself that good a deal. There’s plenty of those rich D.C. guys hanging around the Lodge these days. My piece on the Rockaholics saw to that. Lou Anne is getting hit on all the time, and she’s not the loyal type, like Jesse. In short, I need money, Bobby boy. So I decided to make you a hero. And it worked. You gotta admit that. It worked better than I could have ever expected.”
Bob slowly nodded his head. The roaring was louder now and there was this terrible pressure in his temples. Like a hand inside his head pushing out.
“So what do you want, Dave?”
“I propose that we go into business together. The Bob Wells Hero Business.”
“You do?” Bob said. He looked at Dave and felt a strange sensation that this wasn’t really Dave talking at all. Not the real Dave, who was as loyal as a Chesapeake Bay retriever. This was somebody else, somebody who had temporarily taken over Dave’s mind and body.
“Yes, I do,” Dave said, with finality.
“But you have a problem, Dave,” Bob said.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Dave interrupted. “Since I wrote the original story making you out a hero, how can I turn around now and write another story telling the truth? Who would believe me?”
“Yeah, who would?” Bob said.
“I thought about that,” Dave said. “And I decided that I don’t need to write a story at all. All I have to do is tell Detective Garrett about this, about how I went to see you in the hospital and how I told you what I know and how you threatened to kill me if I talked. They might not believe that either, but Garrett wants you so bad that he’ll start investigating Emile Bardan. And guess what? He’ll find out that he’s an art dealer with a very shaky reputation. Oh yeah, and one other thing, that he’s disappeared from his home and his art gallery. Yeah, I found that out just recently. Wonder where he is, Bob?”
“I have no idea,” Bob said.
“Well, of course not,” Dave said. “But I bet Detective Garrett would find all this very interesting, don’t you think? Especially when I tell him that Bardan was your patient. He’ll find that very fascinating because he’s already put together some fragments of a sculpture of some kind from the brewery floor.”
“When did you hear that?” Bob said. His voice rose a little. How he hated Dave now. The phony, the sycophant, the third-rate hack.
“Heard it yesterday,” Dave said. “From a good friend of mine who works the crime blotter. They’re already getting the idea, Bobby. All they need is a little push in the right direction.”
Dazed, Bob stood up, his legs wobbly, his head spinning. He walked toward the far corner of the room. Dave, sensing his panic, stood up and followed him. Bob felt a fire building in his chest. It burned so hot that it made him want to run out the door, go hide somewhere until it went out. But, of course, that wasn’t going to work. He would never get away from Dave now.
His back still to Dave, Bob picked up the sextant, rattled it around in his hand, then set it down. He looked at the binoculars. He could just see Dave peering out at the sea at night, pretending he was a nineteenth-century whaling captain. The idiot, the moron. To think that he could be stopped by a third-rate creep like Dave McClane? It was the ultimate insult.
“How much do you want?” Bob said.
Dave moved up behind him, only a couple of feet away, and Bob felt as though he’d suffocate.
“That’s a good question,” Dave said. “See, I don’t know how much you made from the heist, Bobby.”
“I didn’t make anything,” Bob said, trying to sound bitter. “There was a bomb, remember?”
“I do recall that,” Dave said “But I know you, Bob. You wouldn’t go into this thing without making something out of it. You’re too smart for that.”
Bob almost laughed. Dave was right again. What a smart and clever bastard Dave was.
“How much do you want?” Bob said. His eye lit on the old grappling hook. It was polished and sharpened. Cap’n Dave always took care of his relics.
“Well, since I don’t really know what you made,” Dave said, “I have to look at it another way. How much is your freedom and your new life worth to you, Bobby?”
Bob reached down and picked up the hook. It was surprisingly light and balanced nicely in his sweating palm.
“How much do you think it’s worth?” Bob said, squeezing the hook’s handle.
“Two million dollars,” Dave said. “And a fifty-fifty split of whatever money you make on your book and any movie or television deals we make about your life. Since I made you, I think that’s a fair and equitable deal.”
“Very fair,” Bob said. “Does anyone else know about me, Dave?”
Dave hesitated for a second before saying, “No, of course not.”
“What about Lou Anne?” Bob said. “She knows, right?”
There was a short silence before Dave nodded his head.
“Okay,” he said. “I had to tell Lou Anne. But she’ll never say a word. Not as long as you pay.”
“Don’t worry,” Bob said. “The check’s in the mail, Dave.”
He pivoted quickly on his right foot, faced Dave, then raised the hook above his head and brought it down with all his force into his old friend’s right eye.
Dave fell backward screaming, as blood and bits of eyeball splattered on his shirt.
“Bob?” he said. “Oh God … God …”
Bob moved in on him, slashing him again, this time through his ear, ripping it in half. There was a brief moment when they both watched it fall to the floor, and then Bob took the hook and sliced it in a sideways stroke across Dave’s neck. The blood surged out, flowing down his shirt, ma
king spiderweb lines over his pants.
Dave made a low groaning sound and fell to the floor, the blood pouring out of the severed veins and pooling around his chin.
Bob sat down in one of the hard captain’s deck chairs and watched Dave twist and twitch on the floor.
“Sorry, Dave,” he said, “but I’m not taking any passengers on this trip.”
As he watched Dave die, he waited to feel a surge of pity or unbearable guilt, but instead felt nothing at all.
He took this as a good sign. All his life he had been too attached to the other guy’s story to do anything for himself. Well, that was over now … he was out there at last, fighting his own battles, on his own destined path.
Bob noticed the smell of the blood. It was overpowering really.
He leaned down and put a little of it on his forefinger. Was it wrong to taste it?
Bob put his blood-dipped finger into his mouth. It was warm, thick, salty, like goose gravy, he thought, though he had never tasted goose gravy, had only read about it in fairy tales.
Bob sat back and watched Dave McClane, his oldest friend, leak his life’s blood out all over the wooden floors.
When his body had stopped twitching, Bob pulled himself out of Dave’s chair and walked upstairs to the bathroom. What he needed now were some towels. Lots and lots of towels.
After he cleaned up the mess, moving Dave’s corpse into the cellar, Bob realized he would have to hang out for the rest of the afternoon, until Lou Anne came home from the Lodge. He dreaded sitting there in old Cap’n Dave’s house. What was he supposed to do all that time? Read a novel? Watch TV? Bob looked at the corner and saw the bottle of booze. God, that was tempting. But what if he got drunk? What if he fell asleep?
No. He couldn’t let that happen. The price of crime was vigilance. Wakefulness.
Bob sat down in the hard deck chair and stared blankly at the wall.
“You’ve done it now,” he told himself. “You’ve really done it now.”
It was about seven o’clock at night when Bob heard Lou Anne outside the house, having trouble with the lock. Jiggling it left, then right, as Bob, waiting behind the door, nearly laughed. Somehow it (and everything else) made perfect sense. Of course, she would have trouble with the lock. She was goofy, awkward, and loud Lou Anne, wasn’t she?