by Lynn Kostoff
Ben Decovic had come to understand the curse of early promise.
How, if you were not careful, early promise could turn on you and begin to promise too much, and you started to think you and your life and plans were inviolate and unassailable.
At thirty-seven, Ben Decovic discovered the fine print to that promise.
Until that point, possibility followed him like his own shadow.
A gangly teenager, he’d spent the summer of his sophomore year in high school on a blacktopped city basketball court, drilling himself on the fundamentals and playing in an endless stream of pickup games until his top-of-the-key jumper was as automatic as striking a match and his passing could thread the eye of any needle the defense put up.
Before that, music lessons, the piano, junior high, the same deal. Ben had large hands and a good ear. Ran the scales until they were chasing him. Worked through a song three times and could play it from memory.
An honors student in high school. Named three years in a row to the All-City basketball team.
A Merit Scholar who caught a full-ride to Kent State. A succession of majors—geology, psychology, philosophy and religion, secondary education, history—his interest snagged by each new semester’s schedule. Pocket money garnered by delivering pizzas four nights a week and spent on Diane Walsh, a pre-vet major with pale green eyes and a quick laugh and slow kisses.
A top-end LSAT score and acceptance to Ohio State Law School. Second in his class at the end of his first year before he got restless and dropped out.
A little bit of time off to figure out exactly what he wanted to do with his life. He’d learned it wasn’t practicing law.
An impulsive application to the police academy. A holding-action decision that eventually took hold of him.
A return to Ryland, Ohio. Ben’s home-ground. Patrol, Crimes Against Property, Vice, and then Homicide.
Ben doing the job and doing it well. Natural aptitude. Discipline and concentration. Talk among the higher-ups. Ben a quick-study. An impressive closure on his case loads. Administrative potential. The hometown boy with promise.
In the meantime, Diane Walsh and her slow kisses.
In the meantime, marriage, her finishing vet school, then setting up a practice.
In the meantime, love and work and the life they built from each, the old words made new again.
In the meantime, talk of starting a family.
Plans and a future as cleanly calibrated as a blueprint or map.
All they had to do was follow it.
And then the fine print.
And where that led and what it took away.
Ben had come to fall asleep with and wake to one overriding fear: that despite all the bonhomie and Hallmark moments the culture could muster, all the self-help and esteem manifestoes and reconstituted Cinderella stories, all the come-from-behind sports mythos and metaphors and sanguine third-act movie logic, despite the natural mother-lode of raw optimism and the it’s-alwaysdarkest-before-the-etc., Ben Decovic was afraid that at the heart of it all, there was only one chance, one real chance, and Diane Decovic nee Walsh had been his — a chance and a love that left no room for anything else, that was as necessary as breath and reduced everything else to an anemic approximation of what he knew as true and binding; a love and a chance, like early promise, that came to mark him and his days.
So he sat, off shift, in his uniform in the dark and quiet of St. Katherine’s a couple times a week, having stopped in the narthex on his way in, stepped past the icon stand with Katherine’s visage and moved to the bank of candelabras where he struck matches and watched the flames appear at his fingertips, Ben saying the names as he lit each candle, starting with Nicholas and moving through to Emily and then repeating the process, Karl Metz to Diane Decovic.
He always left two candles unlit.
One for Greg Hollinger.
The other for himself.
TWELVE
WHEN CORRINE had laid out her proposal to James Restan at the restaurant in the Marriott, he had waited a full minute before responding, and then after he was sure Corrine was serious, he had taken a felt-tip pen and a bar napkin and written down a telephone number, swiveling the napkin in her direction and telling her to memorize the number, and when Corrine had, Restan took his near empty scotch glass and set it back on the napkin, turning the numbers into a damp smudge, and he’d gone on to tell Corrine the phone number would work once, just once, and would connect her to a service that he referred to as a “resource clearinghouse,” and the next day, when Corrine put in the call, an anonymously pleasant male voice simply asked her name and city and state of the party in question, and after putting her on hold for five minutes, no confectionary muzak icing the wait, just five minutes of faintly humming silence, he came back and gave Corrine another telephone number, asked her to repeat it for him, and then thanked her and hung up.
That second telephone call had led her to Conway, South Carolina and the office of one Raychard Balen, Attorney at Law.
The red brick building was a one-story square with tall narrow windows set equidistantly across its face. The flowerbeds on either side of the front door were empty except for churned dirt.
Raychard Balen was expecting her. Corrine guessed he was somewhere in his midforties. Balen was slight in build but had a disproportionately aggressive waistline, the swell and girth of his stomach throwing everything else about him out of balance. He wore a pair of wire-frame glasses and had pale, watery blue eyes. His suit was out of season and wrinkled, and his tie, banded in orange and black, lay on his chest like a sluggish coral snake.
The mustache, though, was what kept drawing her eye. Unevenly trimmed, perched like two sides of a triangle beneath Balen’s nose, the mustache was a seedy anachronism, pencil-thin.
He ushered Corrine to a chair, poured her a cup of coffee, and moved behind his desk and went to work on the remains of a fast-food breakfast.
“Eleven hundred dollars for a retainer,” he said. “Check’s fine. Everything else is cash.”
When Corrine hesitated, Balen said, “You want to jaw about the weather some, fine, we can do that, but nothing else is on the agenda here, Mrs. Tedros, until you officially retain me as your lawyer.”
Corrine pulled out her checkbook.
She waited until Raychard Balen had finished his breakfast and dumped the jumble of grease-stained bags, plastic forks, and Styrofoam cups into the trashcan before sliding over the check. Balen folded and slipped it into his breast pocket without glancing at it, then got up to pour himself another coffee.
The east and west walls of the office were covered in photographs, one side given over to black and whites of local landmarks over the years, the other wall to Raychard Balen and an assortment of prominent clients leaving court after their arraignments, all of them attempting to duck the cameras and hide their faces with varying degrees of success, Balen standing next to them in each one and smiling broadly.
Balen produced the same smile for her and set down his coffee. “I guess it’s time we got to know each other, Mrs. Tedros.” He patted his breast pocket, then leaned back in his chair, summoning the smile again.
Corrine had barely gotten beyond her name and address when Balen closed his eyes and raised his hand. “Point of clarification, Mrs. Tedros. I meant you getting to know me. I checked up, already know everything I need about you. If I didn’t, you would have never gotten through the door.”
Corrine listened while Balen made his point, self-importantly running through the particulars of her life, the warm queasy feeling moving from her stomach to her throat the further back he went, but in the end, Charlotte, North Carolina held. She waited, but Balen made no reference to Phoenix or Bradford, Indiana and didn’t appear about to.
“And now,” he said, with a sweep of his arm, “yours truly, Raychard Balen. I’m forty-four years old, an exceedingly undistinguished graduate of the University of South Carolina law school, and a rather unprepossessing and unattra
ctive specimen of manhood if you are prone to judge solely on appearances. I have never been arrested. I have more money and expensive possessions than a universe governed on the principles of fairness and justice would ever permit. I’ve been told I have absolutely no taste in clothes, music, landscaping, or women. I’m prone to corns, cold sores, and hemorrhoids. I’ve never missed my church tithe, not once. I do not like swimming in the ocean. I have a pair of lucky socks that I only wear when closing cases. I have no real friends to speak of and more enemies than I can count. And I do not like the color blue in any of its various and manifold shades.”
Balen paused, took a sip of coffee, then resumed. “My mother was a whore, the Madam of a first-class Pussy Farm outside North Myrtle Beach. I grew up on the premises. She never made mention of the father from whose loins I sprang, and I never pressed the issue. Growing up, I never lacked for attention, in fact, was excessively doted on by the succession of males passing through the house, most of whom unimaginatively and predictably appended ‘Uncle’ to their surnames on their visits.
“It wasn’t until much later that my mother informed me of the true identities of all these Uncles, and it wasn’t much later after that, when she been diagnosed with breast cancer, that my mother bequeathed to me the trove of materials, including photographs, she’d collected on the house’s patrons over the years and explained to me the various uses it could be put to and how an enterprising young man, such as myself, could benefit from that.”
Raychard Balen spoke in a soft sonorous voice and with a practiced delivery that told Corrine both that Balen was enjoying himself and that he probably inflicted this same story on each new client, and so Corrine prepared herself to wait him out, listening to Balen summarize the lowlights of his college years, his inglorious stint as a law student, a disastrous first and only marriage, and of his return home to set up practice and be a permanent thorn in the side of all those, and the friends and relations of all those, for whom his mother had ever opened her legs.
Balen paused, then leaned further back in his chair, steepling his fingers and resting them atop his head. The armpits of his sports jacket held faint overlapping stains resembling old coffee spills.
“To this day, Mrs. Tedros,” he said, “I remain my mother’s son. I am completely indifferent to the guilt or innocence of my clients and have no qualms whatsoever about representing some of the lowest members on the food chain. I do not have to worry about compromising my ethics or principles because I never had any to begin with. I am the human equivalent of a toilet. An absolutely necessary but underappreciated component of everything we pride ourselves on and value as a civilized culture. Without people like me, everybody would be up to their necks in shit.”
“Ok,” Corrine said and waited, half expecting Balen to continue.
“That’s what your retainer has bought,” he said. “Now, why don’t you tell me what you’ve done.”
Corrine set her coffee cup on the edge of the desk and crossed her legs. “Nothing yet,” she said.
“The problem, then?”
“Somebody’s standing in the way of what I want,” Corrine said.
Balen scratched his cheek and nodded. “An impediment. Ok, I may be able to help you out there, Mrs. Tedros. I’ll make a couple calls and get back to you.”
Raychard Balen stood up, resting his fingers on the desk, and asked, “This impediment, what will be necessary to remove it? In short, how badly do you want this person hurt and for how long?”
“Six feet and forever,” Corrine said.
THIRTEEN
BEN DECOVIC stood on his third-story patio at the White Palms Apartments, or what approximated a patio: thirty-two square feet of pre-cast, freestanding cement that jutted from the outside wall like a lower lip in an exaggerated pout. Besides Ben, the patio held enough room for two small deck chairs and a Hibachi grill.
The railing gave slightly when he leaned into it. Ben looked over the parking lot at a halogen light that had begun to flicker and strobe, an earthbound cousin to the moon throbbing in the southeast corner of a night sky cut by streams of lowlying and fast-moving cloud masses.
The wind carried the scent of the ocean and the overripe contents of the dumpsters in the northeastern corner of the lot. Ben glanced once more at the flickering moon and then turned and went back inside, closing the sliding glass doors behind him and crossing to the kitchen where he opened the refrigerator and took out a cold beer. After opening it, he inked a blue hash-mark on the inside of his left wrist. The mark joined the four already there.
The television was on, more for the noise than anything else. On the shelf above it, the digital clock read 12:21, time sandwiched, mirrored, and folded on itself like a slice of bread or piece of paper.
The phone started in, and Ben picked up on the second ring. It was an old habit, pure reflex. He knew who was on the other end of the line before a word was spoken just as he knew what the first words would be. The routine never varied.
“Figured you’d probably be up,” Andy Calucci said.
Calucci, his former Homicide partner in Ryland, Ohio. When they’d worked together, Andy had gotten in the habit of calling Ben shortly after midnight when something was bothering him and wouldn’t let him sleep.
“This morning, we got another three inches of snow,” Andy said, “and that’s on top of the two we got Monday. It’s the last week in March, ok, and not that unusual, but still.” He paused, and there was a glassy clink followed by an abrupt cough. A moment later, he continued. “Tonight, I’m watching the Weather Channel, you know, what we’re looking at the next few days, and the anchorwoman, she says South Carolina, you’re unseasonal, no rain and the temperatures running high for the middle of March — short-sleeve weather she called it, an exact quote there — and I get to thinking it’s been a while, you and me talked.”
Ben set down his beer, picked up the remote, and killed the sound on the television.
“That what they call it?” Andy asked.
“What?”
“Short-sleeve weather,” Andy said. “That how they talk down there?”
“No,” Ben said. “At least not what I’ve heard.”
“I didn’t think so,” Andy said. “Short-sleeve weather. I’m betting that’s just some Weather Channel lingo.”
Calucci paused. On the other end of the line, there was a soft, irregular clinking. It was followed by two sharp clicks.
Ben recognized the soundtrack. It too was part of the late-night call routines. Ice cubes bumping against glass, a Seagramsand-Seven kickback. Followed shortly by Andy firing up his Zippo and burning a Kool.
“Phil Varner,” Andy said after a while. “He’s got the pancreatic.” More ice cube and glass action. “Even with the chemo and all the other stuff, we’re talking months here. Basically, the Big Countdown.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry to hear that,” Ben said, and he was. Varner showed up each day and did the job, and there was something to be said for that. He may not have cleared as many cases as some of the others in Homicide, but Phil Varner was steady.
Andy Calucci worked on clearing his throat. “So the thing is, Ben, what with Phil V. and the pancreatic, we’re going to be looking at a slot soon.”
Ben went back into the kitchen and got another beer, then hunted down a pen and pushed back his left shirt cuff.
“You still there?” Andy said.
“Look, I appreciate the thought,” Ben said.
“Something to consider is all,” Andy said. “I mean, the opening, it’ll be there, and it’d be good, you back here again.”
“I don’t think,” Ben said slowly, “that’s in the cards right now.”
“Jesus Christ,” Andy said. “No offense, Ben, but Patrol? What exactly you think you’re doing down there?”
When Ben didn’t reply, Andy started ticking off some of the major homicides they’d closed when they’d worked together. “No reason that has to stop,” he added.
“I can thi
nk of a couple,” Ben said. “Father Sarko not pressing charges being one.”
“Water under the bridge,” Andy said and fired up the Zippo again.
“A little more than that,” Ben said. “Thanks to you.”
“Yeah, well,” Andy said. “Ok.” He paused, then asked, “You getting out at all down there?”
“What?” Ben said.
Andy sighed. “Look, you know you got the tendency since Diane and all to shut everyone out, go to ground, and not even mean to or notice that’s what you’re doing, and then if you’re not careful, you get jammed up.”
“You’re calling,” Ben said, “because you’re worried I’m going to try to shoot myself or someone else, is that it?”
Ben waited to see if Andy would add an again.
“All I’m saying, you’re alone, it’s easy to get jammed.”
“I’m doing ok,” Ben said.
Andy went quiet.
There were bets you made with the world, Ben thought, and those you made with yourself. If you were lucky, they turned out to be the same ones.
If you weren’t, you ended up with your days having dwindled to the half-life of a prayer and a chambered .22 semi-automatic.
“The thing is,” Andy said finally, “you can’t watch your own back. Nobody can. I know you miss her. You can’t help but. Hell, we all do.”
“I’m doing ok,” Ben said again. He crossed the living room and paused before the sliding glass doors leading to the patio, his reflection appearing, then disappearing in the lightning-like stutter of the faulty halogen parking lot light.
“Ok then,” Andy Calucci said. “I hear you. I was just getting worried we might be looking at some serious déjà vu action here.”
“No déjà vu,” Ben said. “I’m doing ok.”
FOURTEEN
JACK CARSON was at the kitchen window, the early morning sun slow and just starting to snake through the tree lines and over the neighboring rooflines. He was in a brown terrycloth bathrobe and a pair of old slippers. He held a plastic glass covered in cartoon figures. Jack Carson was trying to remember if he’d already drunk what the glass held or if he needed to go on and fill it.