Empty ever after mp-5

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Later that morning, I was quite amazed at how easily I rattled off the litany of secrets and sins to Sheriff Vandervoort. Yet, rattle them off I did. No hedging, no holding back, no compromising, no spin, just the raw, unvarnished facts. I suppose most of the people in my life knew some of the details of my involvement with the Maloneys, but drips and drabs of reality, no matter how sordid or saintly, never amount to the whole truth. And regardless of what people say, there is only ever one truth of things. There are different versions of reality, not of the truth.

  Vandervoort now knew more about what had gone on between the Maloneys and me than anyone on the planet besides myself. By the look on his face, I wasn’t so sure he was happy to hold the honor. It was a tossup as to whether Pete seemed more horrified by the revelation that Francis had once raped and beaten a transvestite prostitute or that he had once encouraged Patrick to commit suicide.

  “Christ… I’m not sure which I want to do more, throw up or take a shower,” he said. “Do Katy and Sarah know any of this?”

  “Not the real details, no. I’ve carried this shit around with me for twenty-two years. It ruined my marriage and that’s where the damage has to stop.”

  “I’ll do what I can. The thing is, I can see why someone might hate the father. And lord knows there’s plenty of people who hate fags-sorry, gays, but that doesn’t explain why this is going on. This has got to be about you,” he said.

  “That’s the assumption I’ve been working under since it all started.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Too many, unfortunately.”

  “Anyone from around these parts?”

  “Only the longest of long shots,” I said.

  “Yeah, like who?”

  I hemmed and hawed a little.

  “Look, Moe, I’ve cut you way more slack than-”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. Secret keeping becomes second nature.”

  “Names.”

  “There’s Katy’s first husband, Joey Hogan, for one. I’m going to see him right now. Unofficially, of course.”

  “Of course. Who else?”

  “Woman used to cut hair at the Head Shop, Theresa Hickey.”

  “Hot blond, married to a city cop, right?” Vandervoort asked, already knowing the answer.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Forget her. My big sister Mary knew Theresa Hickey. She dumped the cop years ago and moved down to Jupiter, Florida, with some rich guy owns race horses. She hasn’t been back here since.”

  “Tina Martell?”

  Vandervoort smiled sadly at the mention of her name. “Sure I know Tina. She owns Henry’s Hog over-”

  “I know the place. Outside of town, over the tracks, right?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “She owns it?” I asked.

  “Her old man left it to her. What’s old Tina got to do with this?”

  “Probably nothing,” I said, “but remember when I was telling you about how Patrick had gotten a few girls pregnant?”

  “Tina?”

  “Yeah, Tina.”

  “Well, fuck me. I can’t quite picture old Tina and Patrick. You know, Moe, for a-for a gay guy, this kid got a lot of-”

  “It’s testament to how hard it was for him to come to terms with who and what he was.”

  “I guess.”

  “I gotta get to the hospital. They’ve moved Katy into a room and I want to make sure all the bases are covered.”

  “Room 402,” he said. “You’ll find a deputy outside her door.”

  “Thanks, Pete.”

  “Remember, Moe, keep me posted.”

  Just as Vandervoort had promised, there was a deputy outside Katy’s door. It was Robby, the young deputy who had stood out in the rain with me at the Maloney family gravesite. He smiled at noticing me and, I suppose, at the chance of conversation. There are aspects of police work that can be mind-numbingly dull. None duller than guard duty. The deputy assured me that everything had been quiet, that the only people to enter the room were nurses and doctors and not too many of them. As a matter of courtesy, I asked the deputy if I might not take a look myself. He liked that I asked.

  Katy was asleep, but unnaturally still. I don’t know, maybe that was my brain talking and not my eyes. Her attempted suicide had changed everything. For all our years together, I had assumed Katy was a rock, that she could bear anything. Only once, when she miscarried, did she break down. Even then, I thought she recovered well and had gotten back to the business of life quicker than most. But now I wasn’t so sure I knew who my ex-wife had been all those years. Had she misled me or had I misled myself? Did I see who she wanted me to see or did I see who I wanted to see? Had she hidden the pain from me or had I blinded myself to it?

  I thought about lifting the sheets to see if her wrists were restrained, considered consulting the attending psychiatrist to find out if Katy was sedated or if her sleep was a natural reaction to the trauma. I did neither. It was all I could do to swallow up the guilt I was already feeling. I knew I couldn’t handle anymore revelations about the myths of our marriage, not now, not yet. When I walked back past Robby, he called out to me. Something about last night’s Mets score, I think. For some reason it just made me angry, really angry, but not at him.

  I started toward Joey Hogan’s house. Joey, what kind of name is that for a grown man, for chrissakes? Joey was Katy’s ex. Now, I suppose, first ex is more accurate. Not that I had anything against him. On the few occasions fate had thrown us together, he had been more than cordial, friendly really. He was a stand-up guy who cared so deeply for Katy that if another man made her happy, well then, that was okay with him. They had been high school sweethearts. Katy grew out of it, but Joey never did. As Katy said, she agreed to marry him for all the wrong reasons. He was loving. He was handsome. He was a good provider. It was time.

  “You don’t marry a man because he scores well on some stupid test,” Katy had said many times. “Marriage isn’t about a checklist. It’s about passion.”

  I wondered if she would still feel that way when she got out of the hospital and took stock of the last twenty years of her life. In any case, there wasn’t any passion left between Katy and Joey by the time they took their vows before Father Blaney. And moving into his parents’ house right after the wedding hadn’t exactly enhanced the chances of their rekindling any dormant high school sparks. Their divorce had been relatively painless, at least for Katy, and had come as a relief for the both of them.

  Francis Maloney loved to use Joey to get under my skin.

  “He still loves my daughter, you know,” my father-in-law jabbed at a family barbecue, Katy and Joey chatting happily at the opposite end of the backyard. “All she’d have to do is say the word and that boy would take her back, no questions asked.”

  “Except she’s never going to say the word.”

  Then Francis would smile that smile at me, raising his glass of Irish. “Ah, don’t be so sure, lad. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  He’d always find some excuse to ask me that fucking question. I never quite understood what he meant by it. I did now, of course. Back then, when I didn’t answer, Francis would have a private little laugh at my expense. It was a laugh with red fangs and talons.

  “Are you laughing now, you prick?” I shouted out the window.

  Joey Hogan’s impeccably restored Victorian put a lie to the adage about the contractor owning the worst house on the block. Man, with the spindle work, wrap-around porch, clapboards, rows and rows of fish scale and diamond siding, a lot of trees had given their lives to let that house live again. Between the turrets and gables, between the asymmetry and compound angles, there was enough visual noise to keep my eyes busy for a week. And forget about the color scheme. Only on a Victorian could you use twelve different colors-including lavender or purple-without getting arrested. But I guess maybe that’s why I liked Victorians. They could break all the modern rules and still look beautiful.

  I halfway p
ulled into the driveway and stopped, the ass end of my car sticking out into the street. Around here you could get away with that without getting the rear of your car sheared off. Truthfully, I didn’t think Joey had a thing to do with what had happened at the gravesite or with torturing Katy. Even if he wasn’t as comfortable with another man having his ex-wife as he let on, I knew as surely as I knew anything that he could never hurt Katy. I guess it was possible that he might hurt me, but he wouldn’t use Katy to do it. Nor did I think he had much in the way of information that could shed light on who might actually be hurting my family, but based on proximity alone-his home was less than a quarter mile from the entrance to the cemetery-I had to talk to the man. Yet, for some reason, I couldn’t quite bring myself to pull all the way down the driveway.

  I was afraid. I was afraid that Joey Hogan might accuse me of fucking up Katy’s life. I was afraid that he was right. But it wasn’t Joey Hogan who accused me. Christ, I wasn’t even fully into the man’s driveway. My own guilt accused. Guilt and me were usually strangers. Like jealousy, guilt was a cancerous waste of time. The world was only too happy to beat you up, so why do it to yourself? Anyway, I was suspicious of the eagerly guilty. They stank of martyrdom.

  “Responsibility and guilt are not the same things, Mr. Moe,” Israel Roth used to say. “We all do wrong things for all kinds of reasons, mostly they’re not worth losing sleep over. Besides, what does guilt change? A real man, a mensch, he knows when to feel guilt. When you’ve done what I had to do to survive, you know guilt. I can see in your eyes, Moses, that you too know guilt. For this you have my pity and my respect.”

  Because guilt and I were usually estranged, because it was not my first instinct, I knew when I felt it, that it was right. I felt it now and it was right. It was to laugh, no? One lie, a lie that wasn’t even mine to begin with, still impacted lives in ways I could never have anticipated. I thought of Katy lying in the blood and broken glass. I thought of her lying so still in bed and imagined Joey Hogan’s face as I tried explaining myself to him. I backed out of his driveway and drove away as quickly as I could.

  Located several miles outside Janus in sort of a municipal no man’s land, Henry’s Hog was on the wrongest side of the tracks. When my tires crossed the pair of tracks on Industry Avenue, I could swear that the sun’s light became more diffuse and the air got thicker and smelled of burning oil. The dust and decay, however, were not products of my imagination. Industry Avenue, once a meaningful designation, had long since given way to irony. Even before my first and only visit here, the area factories had already been abandoned. Now the only industry around here was of the cottage variety: meth labs and warehouse marijuana farms.

  Henry’s Hog, an old wood frame house that had been converted into a bar, hadn’t much changed. The joint was as welcoming as a stuffed toilet and its windows were as yellow as a smoker’s fingers. The desolate paint factory and auto body shop that had once bookended the place were now masquerading as empty lots. There weren’t any bikes parked outside, but I tried the doors anyway. Pessimistic about success, I nearly fell inside when the door swung open.

  Age hadn’t much improved the interior of Henry’s Hog either. The aroma was a vintage blend of black lung and beer piss. I wondered if the lazy fly that buzzed me as I stepped in wore a nicotine patch. A broad-shouldered woman in a Harley tee and black leather vest leaned over the bar, reading the New York Post. Her body jiggled as if she were laughing, but I can’t say she made any sounds that I recognized as laughter. And because she had her head down, I couldn’t see much of anything but the top of her short gray hair.

  “Excuse me, I’m looking for Tina Martell.”

  When she raised up to face me, I knew I had found who I was looking for, but not all of her. Tina Martell had once been the girl most likely to fuck you because she felt like it. She liked sex and didn’t dose it out like saffron or gold dust the way the other girls in town had. That hadn’t won her a lot of close girlfriends back in high school, but it made her pretty popular with the boys. When I met her, she was thick-bodied and big-breasted, but she had a cute face with a friendly mouth. She was tattooed and pierced a good two decades before every suburban kid came with a nose ring and ink as standard equipment.

  Now part of her neck and throat were missing and ugly scars obscured her tattoos. A flap of white material covered the front of her throat above her collar bone. She sort of resembled a Salvador Dali painting, the entire left side of her face drooping down toward the scarring. Although her shoulders were still broad, Tina’s breasts were much smaller. Seeing her this way, I understood Vandervoort’s sad smile and his confusion over Patrick and Tina. She raised a clenched right hand to her throat.

  “Who is… looking?” she asked in a robot voice, pressing her other hand to the white flap of cloth.

  “Throat cancer?”

  “Breast cancer… too,” she said, with an unexpected smile. “I’m thinking of getting… skin cancer and going… for… the trifecta. Wait, you look… familiar.”

  I explained that we had met once, many years before. She remembered.

  “You bought mea…beer.”

  “That’s right. You told me to go fuck myself.”

  She liked that, giving herself the thumbs up.

  I explained about what I was doing there. The last time we’d spoken, Tina Martell hadn’t been particularly sympathetic to Patrick’s plight or mine. Not that I blamed her. Patrick had gotten her pregnant and asked her to marry him just as he had later done with Nancy Lustig. For all I knew, there were other women with whom Patrick had danced that dance.

  She shook her head a little bit, eyes looking into the past. “I don’t know what to… tell you. I never wished no harm to… come to him. Wished harm on some, but not… him. Lotta tragedy in that family

  … lotta tragedy. Too bad about Frank Jr., he was… hot.”

  “So you don’t know anything about the desecration of the graves or about-”

  “I got my own… problems, mister. Don’t need to cause none for… others.”

  “You know anyone else who might have it in for the Maloneys?”

  “The old man… maybe. Someone might’ve had it in… for him. He was a bona fide… cocksucker.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “But I can’t think of no one who’d want to hurt… the daughter. Hey, you wanta…beer?”

  “It’s kinda early.”

  “Early’s a matter of… interpretation.”

  “Sure. Fuck it!”

  She put a Bud up on the bar and went back to her paper. I tried searching for some follow-up questions, but came up empty. When the bottle was likewise empty, I said my goodbyes and headed for the door. Before I got halfway there, a familiar figure came strolling on in. It was Deep Voice, the biker who’d been in the ER. The doctors had patched up his head, bandaged the nasty road burns and scrapes on his arms, washed the blood off his face and beard, but he was still wearing the shreds of the clothing he’d worn last night. He stared at me without recognition. I realized I still had trace amounts of cop vibe and that didn’t work for him.

  I put my hands up in submission. “Haven’t been a cop for a long time,” I said. “Besides, I’m kinda hurt you don’t recognize me.”

  The light went on behind his eyes. “Last night in the hospital. You were all up in the sheriff’s face. What was that about?”

  I should have told him it was none of his business and walked out, but I didn’t. For reasons I was only vaguely conscious of, I wanted to talk to this guy. I wasn’t at all sure why. I suppose I figured the why would come to me eventually.

  “Let me buy you a beer.” He was thinking about it when I made the decision for him. “Tina, two Buds over here, please.”

  We sat down at a nearby table and waited for Tina.

  “How you know Tina?” he asked in that low rumble of a voice.

  “We’re old acquaintances is all. So,” I asked, “how are you feeling?”

  “Sore as
shit, but they sewed me together okay. I’ll live. It’s not the first time I’ve had to lay a bike down.”

  “I don’t doubt it. You got a name?”

  “Crank.”

  Great, I was buying beer for a meth cooker, but I didn’t react other than to reach my hand across the table to him. “Moe.”

  Tina brought the beers over and I paid her. “Hey, Crank.”

  “Hey yourself, Tina.”

  She walked away shaking her head at the odd pair of us.

  “So what about last night?”

  “My ex-wife tried to kill herself.” He stopped mid-sip, eyes wide. “That’s why I was so agitated. It’s a long story.”

  “Always is. Your old lady okay now?”

  “She’ll live, but she isn’t okay.”

  “Here’s to her,” he said.

  We clinked bottles. A question was wiggling around in the back of my head. I thought it might be about something Crank had said last night. I tried recalling what he had said to Vandervoort about his accident. Just as words started to come out of my mouth, my cell phone vibrated. The question vanished.

  “Hey, I gotta take this,” I said waving the phone at him. “Feel better. Enjoy the brew.”

  I walked outside in a near panic. “Hello.”

  “Moe, where are you at?” It was Carmella.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “Sharing a beer with a meth cooker named Crank.”

  “You’re right, I think you’re fulla shit.”

  “I’m up in Janus. Katy tried to kill herself last night.”

  “Oh, my God! Is she-”

  “She’ll live. We can talk about it later. What’s up?”

  “Can you get into the office? We got something.”

  “I got something too,” I said. “Let me check in with Sarah and then I’ll be down. Make sure Devo’s around.”

  “Okay.”

  “How are you and…I mean-”

  “I’m still pregnant, if that’s what you’re asking.”