by Lynn Kostoff
A tilt of the head. Another smile. “Not exactly original, but I’ve heard worse.”
Ben saw the opening and wanted to keep it that way. He wrote down his name and phone number and tore the page from his notebook and handed it to her. “Anything else you think of about Jamison or Missy or the other man, would you give me a call? Like I said, it’s important.”
She glanced down at the paper, then up again. “Ben, huh? Well, Ben, you just never know when this little old red head of mine might remember something.”
“I’ve been by before,” he said. “This is the first time I caught you at home.”
“Well, that,” Marilyn Keane said. “I took the kids and was staying at my cousin’s across town for a while, you know, until all this divorce stuff settled. My ex didn’t take the news so good, and she, my cousin, I mean, let me stay with her and her family until it became official.”
The baby was still crying.
“Any case, you know where to find me now,” Marilyn Keane said. “I got the papers two days ago. I’m a free woman again.”
Ben walked back to his car. The last of the afternoon light was breaking up, and sunset had begun flaring along the line of the horizon. He called Anne on his cell, but it went straight to voice-mail. He left a message, saying he was on his way and would see her soon.
The Salt Box was one of a number of old neighborhood restaurants and shoppes that lined the west shore of the inlet in north Magnolia Beach. Most of them had been, or still were, mom-and-pop operations that had been rehabbed to preserve their retro-charm. The city council had underwritten a series of low-interest loans for renovations when the tourist boom had first begun to sound, and the inlet area was thriving and enjoying its new status.
Ben parked and cut across the lot, bypassing the entrance to the Salt Box, walking instead to the rear of the building and the first of three large tiered pine decks that had been built into the slope and were joined by a wooden Z of railed stairs. Similar sets of decks and stairs ran from the rear of the other shoppes and restaurants and ended at a wide unfinished plank walkway that followed the contours of the inlet’s shoreline.
Ben waited for Anne to finish talking to a crew of busboys and servers gathered at the back of the restaurant. The wind had picked up, overly warm for the time of day and season, and ruffled the waters in the center of the inlet. A mass of clouds flat on the bottom but whose top mushroomed in thick folds trapped what remained of the sunset and burned pink and orange.
Ben watched Anne approach. She was wearing the standard uniform for the Salt Box—white Oxford shirt, jeans, and athletic shoes. The wind caught and tossed stray strands of hair across her cheek, Anne absentmindedly reaching up to tuck them behind her ear.
She stood next to him at the railing, a little more space than Ben would have liked between them, but he chalked it up to workplace etiquette.
“You got your hair cut,” he said. “It looks good.”
“Thanks for noticing,” Anne said. “I had it done four days ago.”
She brushed by Ben and moved down the stairs to the Inlet walkway. Ben followed. The tide was out, and armies of terns and egrets and gulls and cranes were working the mud-rich flats. Anne stopped and leaned into the railing. Across the inlet, on the northern peninsula, a new condo complex was under construction, its face hung with scaffolding and the small wavering dots of the work lights for the crews putting in overtime.
“Why are you still in uniform?” she asked. “I thought you were working first shift.”
Ben gave her a quick rundown of the off-the-clock hours he’d been putting in, starting with the booking photos of Corrine Tedros and her probable connection to Wayne LaVell and giving her a hit-and-run overview of his talk with Vicki Grant and Marilyn Keane and anyone in the Sentinel Avenue neighborhood who resembled anything close to a reliable witness in the shootings of Jamison Blake and Missy Newton.
“Something’s there, but right now, I don’t know what connects,” Ben said, “and what doesn’t.”
“I could say the same thing about my father,” Anne said. “He’s disappearing right before my eyes. I don’t have the luxury, though, of running around off-shift as a daughter or mother in order to hide from myself and my life.”
“Wait a minute,” Ben said. “You honestly think that’s what I’m doing?”
Anne looked back up the slope toward the restaurant as if someone had called to her.
“I can’t carry you anymore, Ben,” she said. “I already have two people in my life that need everything I can give them. I’m not ready to turn that into a trio.”
“What do you mean carry?” Ben asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I was lonely, not desperate, Ben. There’s a difference.”
“You sound like you’ve been rehearsing.” Ben saw, in his peripheral vision, a knot of tourists making their noisy way down the stairs to the walkway. They carried drinks in to-go cups and were all laughing and talking at once.
“Someone has to see things for what they are Ben. We rushed into a mistake.” The wind caught her hair again, but this time she didn’t bother to tuck it behind her ear. “I’ve packed up your things. I’ll drop them by your apartment tomorrow. If you’re not there, I’ll leave them at the main office.”
Ben fought to keep his voice down. “Why? Give me one clear reason for any of this.”
Anne looked out over the inlet to the east toward the Atlantic where the clouds had broken and thinned, and a half-moon had risen. “Reason or motive, Ben? Can you even tell the difference anymore? All your talk about dots and connections that aren’t quite connections. You ought to hear yourself sometimes.”
“You still didn’t give me a reason.”
“No,” Anne said, “I didn’t. You don’t want that.”
“One reason,” Ben said.
Anne shook her head and didn’t look in Ben’s direction, and she spoke quietly, so quietly in fact that Ben wasn’t sure he’d heard her start, the words soft and low and torn by the wind. Then he heard what sounded like I’m not here or I’m not her, and it took him a while to finally understand what she was saying.
“I didn’t …,” Ben said. “You made a mistake. The names are close.”
Anne still didn’t look in his direction. “It happened more than once, Ben. It’s not like I wasn’t there.”
“No way. I know the difference,” Ben said. “And I didn’t.”
“Two syllables,” Anne said. “Not one.”
Ben tried once more to convince Anne that he had not called her Diane, his dead wife’s name, when they had been making love.
Below them, a turtle floated in the shallows of low tide, and two gulls picked through an exposed oyster bed. Stands of Spartina grass crackled in the wind, and the half-moon burned through what remained of the clouds.
Ben put his hands on top of the railing fronting the inlet walkway. “Don’t do this, Anne. It’s not right. Tell me what’s really going on here.”
“I need to go,” she said. “I have to get back to work.” Anne waited a moment before adding, “And my life.” She stood on tiptoes and gave Ben a quick kiss and then ran up the stairs and back into the restaurant.
Ben watched her go.
He drove back to his apartment, the half-moon following in the upper right corner of his rearview mirror.
He made something approximating a meal.
Ben was initially sure that Anne had been lying to him, but he couldn’t figure out why or to protect whom.
The evening sagged, then collapsed around him.
All the old and new certainties began to flee.
Two syllables. Not one.
He had what his old partner, Andy Calucci, had called a Biblical-sized thirst. It was immense and unruly.
Later that evening, when Ben dropped onto the bed, he realized he had forgotten to change out of his uniform.
He looked over at the bedside clock but could not bring the time into focus.
When he cl
osed his eyes and headed for his dreams, Ben was sure he would find Diane or Anne in them.
Neither, however, showed.
FIFTY-THREE
SONNY GRAMM was hollowed out. It didn’t take Corrine Tedros long to see that.
The flesh on his face sagged and was creased like a sheet of paper that had been crumpled into a tight ball and then hastily smoothed again. His eyes were watery, and his attempts at shaving had been less than successful. His shirt looked as if it hadn’t been changed in a couple days.
He reminded Corrine of men she’d seen in Bradford, Indiana, men who life had used up but not gotten around to tossing away yet. There was little or no vestige—except for the defiant pompadour—of the man she’d known when she’d been waitressing at the supper club, the Sonny Gramm whose earthiness and appetites had been filtered through Old South manners and licensed by a local social standing based on family name, if not quite fortune anymore.
He sat slump-shouldered at his desk in the office at the rear of the Passion Palace, a bottle of rye whiskey like an extra appendage at his elbow. Various combinations of hurt, dismay, and anger played across his features when he looked at Corrine. She’d just delivered Wayne LaVell’s offer on Sonny’s properties.
“Why?” He asked. “Why you?”
“That’s not important.” Corrine slid the shot he’d poured her back in the middle of the desk, untouched.
“The offer’s low-end and an insult,” Gramm said, balling his fist.
“LaVell bought out your debts, Sonny,” Corrine said. “He’s not going to offer you more. You ought to know that by now.”
“He can’t do this to Sonny Gramm. I’m not going to lie down and let him walk away with everything that’s mine.”
The bass-line from the music in the club pounded in the walls. Corrine let Gramm rant a while longer before she interrupted.
“Wayne LaVell will kill you, Sonny,” she said. “Believe it.”
Gramm lurched from his chair and stood up. He looked around the office. “He can try. LaVell might just find out Sonny Gramm’s not as easy to take out as he thinks. I’m not alone in this either. I hired me a new bodyguard, the kind I needed from day one. He’s not like the other ones. He does exactly what he’s told.”
Corrine watched him pour another drink. He saluted the Confederate flag thumbtacked to the wall behind the desk and tossed back the shot. The gesture was hopeless as it was doomed and as doomed as it was ludicrous. For a moment, Corrine almost felt sorry for him.
“It’s his final offer, Sonny,” Corrine said. “LaVell made that very clear.”
The rye had forced some color into Gramm’s cheeks. “You delivered the message, Corrine, and you can deliver this one for me. Tell Wayne LaVell to go fuck himself.”
“I’ll be going to your funeral before the month is out.” Corrine started to get up, but Gramm waved her down.
“I want to know one thing,” he said. “You never told me why. What are you getting out of this?”
Corrine sat back and crossed her legs. Another angle presented itself. It had been nudging its way into her thoughts during the course of the meeting.
“Can you pull a trigger, Sonny?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a complicated question.”
Gramm squinted and scratched at his cheek. A moment later, he let his hand fall. “He’s got something on you too, doesn’t he?”
Corrine nodded.
“And what you’re saying is you and me …,” Gramm began moving back and forth behind the desk.
Corrine nodded again.
“The house would work best,” Gramm said, nodding his head. “It’s quiet and private. You can tell LaVell that I’ll sign the papers, but that I refused to meet anywhere else but there. Tell him too I want you there as a witness when I sign.”
“He’ll probably bring along Raychard Balen.”
“You’ll be a good distraction, Corrine. You can wear something sexy, talk things up, move around the room.”
“Ok.” She’d hoped to push Sonny in the right direction and then step back, stay off the scene of the meeting itself and simply let things unfold, but she realized Sonny was right even if his reasoning was wrong. She needed to be there to monitor his liquor intake if nothing else and to make sure he kept his resolve. There was too much left to chance otherwise.
And that was the one thing Corrine was sure of. They had one chance and only one to finish off Wayne LaVell. He wouldn’t give them another.
“What about Raychard Balen?” she said.
Gramm gave a dismissive wave. “Let him scramble back under his rock. With LaVell dead, he has nothing to gain. He won’t bother us.”
Corrine wasn’t so sure about that, but let it pass for now. She’d make sure they got back to Balen.
She waited while Gramm went over the set-up one more time, coaxing the idea of murdering Wayne LaVell into a sequence of actions and then letting the details find and settle into their place in the sequence, Corrine watching Gramm carefully as he paced, waiting for that moment when his expression told her he was ready to carry through.
“It has to be at the house,” Gramm said. “It’ll only work if he agrees to meet there.”
“He will,” Corrine said. “He wants the properties.”
Gramm stopped pacing. “Why should LaVell believe you’ve convinced me to sell in the first place?”
“Because he thinks you’re weak, Sonny.” Corrine paused and stood up, letting him feel the full weight of the insult. “He’ll believe because I’ll tell him I agreed to fuck you on the side on a semi-regular basis, and you settled for that and his offer.”
Gramm cocked his head and looked at Corrine for a long moment. He started to reach for the bottle of rye, but Corrine stepped up and pulled it toward her.
“You never answered my earlier question, Sonny,” she said. “
Yes,” he said, taking the bottle back. “Hell yes, I can pull a trigger. You’ll see.”
FIFTY-FOUR
CROY WENDALL was thinking about shovel and radio. He was digging in the middle of a grove of pecan trees. The ground was hard and dry. The radio was on the cell phone Mr. Balen had given him, and man on the radio was talking about fires. Croy’s tooth hurt.
Shovel. Radio.
Croy had tried, but he couldn’t find any words to rhyme with either one, so that made the words just what they were and the things he was doing.
He was digging and listening.
There were a lot of fires. The man on the radio told where they were and how big. He said things like “efforts to contain” and “raging” too.
One of the fires was burning near the Two-Bridge River, close to the cabin Croy had stayed at, and he could see the cabin in his head while he dug, and he could see the tree next to the cabin where he had hung the frogs on the limbs, and then he could see the frogs, everything inside them dried out so that their skin was more like little pieces of paper hanging from the limbs than skin, and then he could see the fire on its way to meet them.
The fire was not like shovel or radio.
It was like the fire had been an idea inside the frogs when Croy caught and put them in the bags and then hung them on the tree, and then inside that idea there had been another one about the frogs’ skin turning dry and like little pieces of paper that the fire would one day come and burn up.
Croy quit shoveling for a minute and chewed some aspirin. His tooth was hot. Croy had forgotten to tell Mr. Balen about the tooth when Mr. Balen had called him at the cabin and told him about the crime he needed Croy to do, and Croy had not mentioned it since because he was very busy doing the crime Mr. Balen had told him about.
The sore tooth was like a little fire in Croy’s mouth, and when the man on the radio talked about the other fires, it was like he was talking about Croy’s tooth too.
Croy picked up the shovel and started digging again.
The man on the radio disappeared.
A woman
began talking. She stretched out the vowels inside her words.
The woman was on a radio show called One Way. For a while, some people sang God-songs. One of them had a part in it about a fiery sword and lambs and blood.
Then the woman came back on the radio and talked about God some more. She said God was not the name of things in this world. She called him a Force.
Croy kept digging. He thought about God the way the woman said on the radio, and he thought about the frogs and the fire that was on its way to meet them, and the day grew very large, and Croy was in the middle of it.
FIFTY-FIVE
BEN DECOVIC LEFT MESSAGES.
He layered the space on Anne Carson’s answering machine with them. He called her cell, and when it went straight to voice-mail, he filled it with more messages.
He stopped by the Salt Box, but got no further than the front foyer when one of the greeters recognized him and handed over an envelope with his first name inked on it and holding inside a telegraphed message from Anne: Please. Not at work. I need this job.
Ben inked one of his own—where and when then?—and asked the greeter to pass it on to Anne.
No reply.
Roil and blur. At the end of day or middle of the night, that’s what Ben Decovic was looking at. He was afraid things were starting to get away from him again. He resurrected the practice of marking hash lines on the inside of his wrist to monitor his drinking.
He ran his own version of home movies, ransacking his memories with Anne, trying to re-create the moment when everything went bad, when he’d called her by his dead wife’s name, and he went from not believing it had happened to not wanting to believe it happened to not sure of anything that had happened except the fact of a dark bedroom, a locked door, and two bodies.
Ben understood exhaustion and what it could blunt or erase. He began volunteering for double shifts. First shift was west Magnolia Beach and Old Market Boulevard with all its attendant commercial clutter. Second shift suited him better. He drew south Magnolia Beach and with it, everything that had begun and ended on Sentinel Avenue.
Ben parked a half block up from where Third Street intersected with Sentinel and radioed in. He walked in the direction of Mac’s Shack, which, at least according to Jamison Blake’s neighbor, Marilyn Keane, had been Blake’s second home.