Late Rain

by Lynn Kostoff

  A while later, when he walked past the house again, he pushed down the panic opening like a hand inside him and tried to walk faster.

  He’d just remembered his wife Carol had died giving birth to their daughter Anne.

  He wiped his face with a bandana. He had trouble getting the bandana back in his pocket.

  The air felt baked.

  Then suddenly he was surrounded by four boys on bicycles. Jack wasn’t sure where they’d come from. They circled him like lazy bees.

  The boys looked to be around eight or nine, and they all had buzz cuts, and they were all wearing green Tshirts with X-Men on the fronts, and Jack wasn’t sure which one of them said, “You got any change, Mister? We’re really thirsty.”

  Jack was thirsty too. He’d just realized that.

  One of the boys said, “Forget it, Brian. That’s Paige’s grandpa. She said he’s a head case.”

  Another said, “Paige Carson is a bitch.”

  “He walks funny,” another one said.

  “My dad says he’s the one who got lost driving a bus with all the kids still in it.”

  “Ask him what day it is,” one said. “I’ll bet you a quarter he can’t tell you.”

  The boys kept circling on their bikes and firing questions, and a lot of the questions were simple, and when Jack answered them, he couldn’t understand why the boys laughed, and then he was getting angry and was going to tell them to stop, but before he could, they were gone as suddenly as they’d appeared.

  And then Jack was very tired and a little afraid because he’d begun to suspect that a lot of what he’d set out to do this afternoon had already happened.

  He suddenly knew, for example, that he didn’t live in Myrtle Beach anymore and hadn’t for over ten years.

  He wanted to get home, but he was afraid of getting confused again, so he told himself to watch the telephone wires and follow them. The telephone wires were like lines on a blueprint, and he’d always been good at reading blueprints.

  He told himself to hurry.

  He tried to remember if his shadow had been falling in front of or behind him.

  He was very thirsty.

  He needed to get home.

  The light looked different. There was less of it than he remembered.

  He decided to take a shortcut and left the street and started following the shoreline of the inlet in North Shore.

  Off to his right, three gray and white pelicans skimmed, circled, and dropped straight down into the inlet, breaking the water like divers. Farther out, five small boats trolled, running in wide figure-eights. Beyond them was the east shore of the inlet, and beyond that the Atlantic.

  Just ahead, atop a long sloping backyard was a large two-anda-half-story house planked in weathered pine.

  Jack recognized it. It was Stanley Tedros’s place. Jack had done work on the house. They were neighbors. Jack lived less than a half-mile away.

  Stanley would give him a glass of water, and then Jack would walk home. Everything was all right.

  The ground rose at a steep angle from where it met the water, and the lot next to Stanley’s backyard was wild and overgrown. Jack slowly picked his way up the slope. He was conscious of the light leaving the afternoon.

  There was the sound of a boat approaching, its outboard throttling back to a low rumble.

  There was wisteria growing everywhere, matting the ground, grabbing his shoes, wrapping around the trunks of the live oaks and magnolias and pines. It was like a huge spiderweb.

  The motor on the outboard trailed off and died.

  He cut left, then right, then left again, slowly working his way through the overgrowth across the lot toward Stanley’s house. His calves and lungs burned.

  Below and to his right were a small dock and boathouse. Stanley Tedros tied up his boat and began unloading his fishing gear.

  Jack ran into a wall of holly. When he tried to push through, the leaves sliced at his hands and forearms. The pain was sharp and surprising, like paper cuts. Jack backed off and moved to his right.

  He stumbled, then stopped next to some crepe myrtles to catch his breath.

  There were long shadows on Stanley’s lawn.

  Stanley Tedros began walking up from the dock.

  Jack told himself to move, but he couldn’t. His legs were trembling.

  Someone called out Stanley’s name, and Jack was pretty sure it wasn’t him.

  Stanley stopped in the middle of the yard and lifted his hand to shield his eyes. He looked toward the back of the house.

  A glass of water.

  Jack would feel better after that.

  His breath was still high and fast in his chest, so he stood very still at the edge of the overgrown lot and waited for his legs to return, and he watched a short man with short gray hair walk down the lawn toward Stanley.

  TWENTY-ONE

  CROY WENDALL WAS LATE, and it seemed like everything in the universe was trying to remind him of that. The dashboard clock in the car. The sign flashing the time and temperature at Nation’s Bank. His wristwatch. His pulse. The afternoon sun, itself, in the slant of its light.

  Nothing in his day so far though had gone right. First off, at breakfast, Missy had finished the box of Lucky Charms, and Croy had to settle for Shredded Wheat. Then Jamie had wanted to go talk to Mr. Balen about doing some more crimes to Mr. Sonny Gramm. Jamie had already spent his share of the money they got for smashing up the Mustang, and he needed some more. Croy had to put Jamie off on account of he was already doing a job for Mr. Balen and Miss Corrine by killing the old man, but Croy couldn’t tell Jamie that because he promised Mr. Balen he wouldn’t. Mr. Balen didn’t want Jamie helping on the killing because Jamie had never killed anyone. Mr. Balen said in matters like this, experience counted.

  When Croy had said he couldn’t go with Jamie to see Mr. Balen, Jamie had wanted to know what Croy was going to do instead, and Croy wouldn’t tell him, and that made Jamie even more insistent about finding out about Croy’s plans, and Croy had to keep coming up with things to change the subject. After a while, Jamie drank some beer for lunch and went and watched some HBO in the living room.

  Throughout it all, Croy hadn’t been paying attention to the time. He’d gone back to his own room, and as periodically happened, he wondered if it had been such a good idea to move in with Jamie and Missy in the first place. He paid his share of the rent, which Jamie had worked out one time based on the square feet in Croy’s room and of the number of square feet Croy generally took up in the other rooms of the house when he was in them.

  Croy had met Jamie when they were both working temporary and off-the-books for a landscaping service, and he hadn’t minded getting to be friends and doing some crimes together, but he’d never been fully comfortable with the living arrangements. The house was small, and Missy, who was Jamie’s common-law wife, was always around and wore these little nighties instead of normal clothes, and she would often come into Croy’s room without knocking until he finally had to put in a new lock.

  After Croy had gotten away from Jamie and all his questions, he sat in his room and went over in his head what Miss Corrine had told him about killing Stanley Tedros. He did that five times. Then he checked his watch. It had been almost noon. Croy wasn’t hungry, so he took a chair and moved it to the window and looked at the sky and imagined it looking back at him. Then he looked at the backyard and watched one of the neighborhood cats stalk a robin.

  The problem was, when Croy got around to checking his watch again, he discovered it had stopped and that it was still almost noon.

  So Croy got in his car and drove as fast as he dared. Whenever he was in situations that left him uneasy or agitated, he’d do the numbers or a rhyme in his head. Sometimes he’d find a way to do both.

  This afternoon he tried thinking about how time rhymed with crime, which was what he was driving to do, and then he thought about ides, which was what the calendar said the day was, and then Croy thought about four, which was th
e number of the letters in ides. Four also had four letters, which made them like the skin of the number, and skin had four letters, and so did Croy, and then he started thinking about ides again and the word dies that lived inside it.

  He got to North Shore and parked the car in the spot Miss Corrine told him to, and then he walked around to the back of Stanley Tedros’s house and broke in.

  The place was dark and high-ceilinged and had an old people’s smell to it. Croy circled the living room a couple times, then veered off to the kitchen where he discovered the remnants of Stanley’s lunch on the counter, and remembering what Miss Corrine had said about Stanley’s routine, Croy climbed the stairs and hunted down the master bedroom. The digital alarm clock flashed the message that he was over two hours late for killing Stanley during his nap.

  He went back downstairs again and looked for something to steal. That’s what he was supposed to do, make the whole thing look like a burglary that got messed up, but Croy didn’t see anything. Everything in the place had the feel of being handled past the point of any fence’s or pawnshop’s interest.

  Croy had seen the billboards for Julep and the cut-out placards of Stanley at convenience stores, and he’d figured a man like Stanley Tedros would be living like a king and had even come to think of him that way, as King Stanley, and Croy didn’t know what to think about the old house and its dark, worn furniture. He thought there would be swords and tapestries on the walls and a banquet hall and dungeon.

  Every time he came across a clock, Croy changed it to a number he was thinking of.

  He spent a while looking for hidden panels that led to secret rooms full of untold treasure.

  Then he went out to the kitchen and made a sandwich.

  Eating with latex gloves on gave the bread a funny taste even though Croy was careful to keep his fingers away from his lips. He poured a glass of milk and finished it in two swallows. Then he washed everything up in the sink.

  He sat in an old chair next to a record player on a table.

  Croy suddenly remembered he’d left his gun in the glove compartment. He looked at his dead watch. He wondered if he could run back and get the gun in time to shoot Stanley Tedros.

  He heard the sound of an outboard motor.

  Croy moved to the back door.

  An old man in a boat edged up to the dock.

  Croy stood at the door and went over in his head what Miss Corrine had told him to do until he could see it happening, except he’d forgotten the gun in the car, and that changed some things, and then Croy was getting jumpy because what he could see happening in his head couldn’t happen now because it was supposed to be happening when Miss Corrine had told him to do it, and Croy’s hands got very wet inside the gloves while he tried to make the two times fit what he was seeing in his head, but everything was mixed together now, and finally Croy quit trying to unmix them and just opened the back door and started down the lawn.

  As he walked, Croy called out Stanley’s name and pulled out a gray tube sock he’d tied to one of the belt loops on his pants.

  Croy called the name again, and Stanley stopped and lifted his hand to his eyes.

  Then Croy stepped up and hit him with the sockful of heavy-gauge washers. Stanley turned at the last moment though, and Croy hit him in the shoulder instead of the head.

  Then Stanley swung back and hit Croy with the stringer of fish Croy hadn’t noticed he was carrying.

  Croy could smell the fish on his cheeks, and the skin underneath his left eyes was stinging from where one of the fins had cut him.

  Stanley swung the fish again. It felt like Croy was getting slapped by three pairs of hands at the same time.

  He dropped the sock and took out his knife.

  Stanley had a bunch of brightly colored lures attached to his vest, and after Croy knocked him to the ground, he was careful not to catch his gloves on them when he tore open the vest and started stabbing Stanley in the stomach.

  He wasn’t sure exactly how much noise Stanley made because Croy was doing a rhyme in his head while he stabbed him.

  After a while, his arm got tired, so he stopped.

  Croy rocked back on his heels.

  Some of the washers had spilled out of the tube sock where he’d dropped it, and Croy started gathering them up, but then he remembered his knife was still inside Stanley. His arm had been so tired he’d let go of it without thinking.

  Croy leaned back over and started rummaging around Stanley’s insides. His fingers were slippery and made a lot of sounds like rubber boots stuck in mud.

  It took a long time to find the knife.

  Just as he was about to straighten up, Croy noticed the thin, shiny chain spilling from Stanley’s pocket, and he wrapped it around his index finger and pulled, and a gold pocketwatch followed.

  Some blood had gotten on it. Croy wiped it off and put the pocketwatch in his pocket. He liked the idea that its name matched where you were supposed to put it.

  Two egrets landed on the dock and moved in little circles on the planking. There were shadows on the lawn now.

  For a moment, Croy thought he saw someone standing among some bushes down in the corner of the yard.

  It looked like another old man.

  A car door slammed shut on the other side of the house.

  Croy hesitated, looked toward the bushes again, then picked up his knife and took off running for his car.

  He made sure he kept the blade pointed down when he ran.

  TWENTY-TWO

  BEN DECOVIC WAS WORKING the North Shore sector and ended up the first one on the scene at the Tedros place. An old man in a green cardigan and baggy pants was standing at the end of the drive and frantically waved him in. He identified himself as Leonard Renisopolos, a friend of Stanley’s, and told Ben he’d found the body, and then he pointed to the rear of the house and said, “From the bushes. He walk right up I am making the call to the police.”

  Renisopolos suddenly stopped and gestured for Ben to pull his gun. “Maybe he still there.”

  “What do you mean? Who?”

  “The man I’m thinking is the one did it to Stanley. He just stand there. I hurry to wait out front for you.”

  Ben sprinted back to his car and called in the full platter. Two other patrol cars pulled in, and Ben waved one officer to the front of the house and motioned the other to follow him.

  Stanley Tedros was lying in the middle of the backyard. Jack Carson stood a few feet away from the body.

  Ben and the other officer walked down the lawn, guns still drawn. “You ok, Jack?” Ben asked. “What are you doing here?” Ben stepped over and quickly patted Jack down. No weapons.

  The other units arrived.

  “I’m thirsty,” Jack Carson said.

  “Oh man, look at this,” the other officer said.

  Ben had spent enough time in bars with off-duty cops who, over drinks, talked up the number of corpses they’d seen and then tried to top each other with stories of the ones who’d been in the worst shape, the cops—at least publicly—all subscribing to the conventional wisdom that seeing enough corpses eventually toughened you to the reality of death, but Ben, like most cops, knew that conventional wisdom worked fine when you were perched on a bar stool but was not much help anywhere else.

  Stanley Tedros looked like someone had run over his abdomen with a lawn mower.

  “Jack,” Ben said, “did you do this? You can tell me.”

  “Something’s wrong with this man,” Jack said, then went silent and studied the stringer of fish lying next to Stanley’s right leg.

  “Did you see what happened here, Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  The EMS people arrived.

  Another patrolman appeared at the back door of the house and shouted down that the place was clear.

  A moment later, Leonard Renisopolos, gesturing and talking excitedly, walked down the lawn flanked by two Homicide detectives, Hatch and Gramble. Both had on anonymous brown suits. Above his, Hatch’
s face was lean and sharp-featured, topped with a military-sized buzz cut. Gramble’s face wore a fast food diet and a pair of unfashionably long sideburns.

  Hatch stepped over. “You’re the one caught the call, right?”

  Ben gave him what little he had and was explaining who Jack Carson was and how he more than likely had ended up in Stanley Tedros’s yard when Hatch interrupted him and said, “You’re telling me we got either a suspect or eyewitness here, and the guy’s got Alzheimer’s? Wait’ll Gramble hears this.” Hatch shook his head.

  Three officers finished the initial sweep of the adjoining lot. Someone yelled that the tech people were here. Another patrolman appeared at the top of the lawn and shouted down that they had a woman out front claiming to be the old man’s daughter.

  “Which one?” Hatch said. “We got three old men here. One dead. One who can barely speak English. And one with Alzheimer’s. Probably a couple more too we haven’t met yet.”

  “Carson,” the patrolman said. “She said her name’s Anne Carson.”

  Hatch waved to let her through, then told Ben to move the old man out of the way so the crime techs could work. “Babysit the daughter and old man until I see what Gramble’s got from the Greek.”

  Somebody called out that the coroner was on her way.

  Anne Carson ran down the lawn and up to her father. “You’re all right,” she said, grabbing him by the arms. “I’ve been looking for you. I heard the sirens and saw all the lights and thought that—” She stepped back and started crying.

  Despite himself, Ben felt it, that tug, faint but unmistakable, of old ambition, the desire to be at the center of things, working a homicide again, the pull of everything he’d told himself he’d left behind when he resigned from the Ryland police force.

  Hatch walked back over, introduced himself to Anne Carson, and then said, “See if you can get your father to tell you what happened here.”

  Anne wiped at her eyes and over the next twenty-five minutes did her best to elicit a response from Jack, but got nowhere. Jack just became more agitated and disoriented.

  The crime tech people had set up arc lights and were sweeping the lawn. Another group was working the house.