Murders Among Dead Trees

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  He pretended to be oblivious to her apprehension. “You look great,” he said.

  “It’s what I do for a living.”

  “You don’t sound happy about it.”

  “I’m not a whiny bitch about it to anybody, but between you and me, it would be great to cut loose and have a cheeseburger sometimes.”

  He looked around the shabby living room. He recognized the tattered old plaid chair and three gaudy floor lamps. It was easy to peg her uncle as a bachelor who bought his furniture at garage sales. He remembered the old green couch. Things age, he thought, even when you aren’t looking.

  “Sorry to hear about your Uncle Joe. He was quite the hero around here.”

  “He was a pig,” she said. “No pun intended.”

  “I heard his cruiser crashed into a tree because he was in a rush to get to a fire.”

  “Yeah, to direct traffic around a fire. Doesn’t sound very heroic.”

  “Well, his partner was killed in the crash, too, so don’t talk that way down at the General.” He meant the store. When she was 16 he bought her a popsicle just for the thrill of watching her slowly suck it. He had often replayed that memory of her melting a popsicle with her lips and tongue.

  “The last time I saw you — ”

  “The last time you saw me I was Betty Jane Minor,” she said. “Please call me Asia. Betty Jane is dead. I killed her on the boat ride away from here the day after graduation. You want a drink? Have a mojito with me.”

  There was a well-stocked bar in the corner of the room complete with a small fridge. He watched her as she mixed the drinks. He remembered how she always had to push her long black veil of hair out of her eyes to read and write in her notebooks at school. It was a detail he thought must have been forgotten but there it was. As he watched her, he realized her perfect hair didn’t move anymore. It couldn’t get in her way because, he supposed, it was now sprayed in place. He’d seen her on TV in small roles and in a couple movies that were pretty bad. He had watched her over and over again and it was all he could do not to stand up in the middle of the theatre and announce to all the teenage boys drooling over her ass and cleavage, “I used to tap that!”

  She held out the drink. A cluster of charms at her wrist made the glass tinkle.

  “Nice bracelet.” His eyes lingered over it. Diamonds beneath a variety of hanging charms.

  “You want it?”

  “Uh…no.”

  “I’ve got a charm on here for every country I’ve visited. It seemed important for awhile. Now it seems kind of pathetic, like I’m trying to hold on to something that’s gone.” She let cool eyes run over him and he felt smaller. “Is that why you’re here, Marky?”

  “It’s Marcus now.”

  “Right. I heard! Marcus in the Morning.”

  “Yeah. You hear the show?”

  “No.”

  His face betrayed him, masking his disappointment too late.

  “I’ve only been in town a day or two,” she said. Her smile was kind. The silence stretched out like the room’s air pressure was building up, pressing in on them and pushing them apart at the same time. He sat on the couch, hoping she’d join him. Instead she sat on the edge of the chair opposite him, ready to pop up and run in case of emergency it seemed. “Sorry I missed your show,” she said. “With the funeral arrangements, things have been busy.”

  “No big deal. Speaking of big deals, I heard your dad is negotiating something that has to do with the Olympics so he sent you to the funeral instead. True?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Actually, I guess I read it online.”

  “Dad’s not doing so well. He’s got something called phantom appendage syndrome.”

  He gave her a blank look.

  “Yeah, I know. No one’s ever heard of it. Basically, he had a stroke last year and since then he thinks he’s got an extra leg. I mean, he knows he doesn’t actually have another leg, but he can feel it there and it gets in the way so it’s hard on him to move around. Getting to the bathroom he has to scrabble sideways like some human crab. It’s really kind of funny to see…the first time. Then it’s a curiosity and after that it’s a huge pain in the ass. Air travel is out of the question so he’s taken up a hotel floor in Dubai and doesn’t see anybody. He talks on the phone all day and watches CNN and the stock crawl. That’s about it.”

  “They’re talking about him like he’s the new Howard Hughes.”

  “You ever see the Leonardo DeCaprio movie?”

  “The Aviator.”

  “Yeah. It’s more interesting and fun when it’s compressed into a movie that only lasts a couple hours. Marty should have gotten the Oscar for that. Instead the Academy gave him the Oscar for The Aviator and said it was for something else.”

  “Marty?”

  “Scorsese.”

  “Right. Knew that. I just never heard anyone call him that before.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Listen to me. I never really thought I’d make it but I was really lucky.”

  Being an heiress must have sped things along, he thought.

  “At first I was star struck by it all,” she said, “especially when you see them all at once for the first time at the Oscars. Actors are kind of crazy. It’s all the unemployment between jobs and waiting for the phone to ring and wondering if you’re done and it’s time to go away. The other thing that makes you crazy is all the people you’re responsible for while you’re between gigs.”

  “So you don’t get star struck anymore?”

  “After you get used to seeing them at all the same bars and parties, they’re all just people.”

  “Just, huh?”

  “Sure. Remember when I was just Betty Jane Minor, daughter of an oil rig engineer?”

  “You were never just anything,” he said, taking a long swallow. “And I’m feeling very…rural right now.”

  “Sorry.” She gave him a helpless shrug.

  “Don’t be. I’m sorry about your dad. I always liked him.”

  “Thanks. He always hated you, but you know why.”

  “I understand better now that I’m older. When he caught us that night out in the boathouse — ”

  “Yeah, I know!” she said. She laughed. He didn’t recognize the sound she made when she laughed. Something had changed but he couldn’t say what.

  Another silence filled the gap between them and he nursed his drink, making it last.

  “You and I have unfinished business,” she said.

  He looked at her but he couldn’t read her anymore. Whatever had happened to her in the fifteen years since he had seen her, he didn’t like.

  “I never said goodbye,” she said.

  He made a face and shrugged. “Oh, that’s all watery shit under the bridge now.”

  She was about to say something more but he waved her off. “Thanks. Back home they make you grovel for the slightest infraction, and what I did to you wasn’t a slight infraction.”

  “You left. I understand that. I’m been trying to achieve escape velocity since high school. The mistake I made was that I should have chased after you.” Her jaw hardened and he hastened to add, “Hey, we were just kids. It wouldn’t have worked out. I understand that now. Still, if I had come after you, you would have kicked me out eventually, but then I would have still been somewhere far away from here.”

  Her face softened and they shared a look that he remembered. It made him feel warm. A lock of his hair fell over one eye and he thought of the summer of 1989 when he developed a tic, flicking hair out of his eyes every few minutes. For a moment he felt much younger.

  “Marky…uh, Marcus, I want to tell you something.”

  “I don’t mind Marky when you say it.”

  “Okay. Marky, when I left it wasn’t about you and I should have told you more at the time. Now it’s all going to come out. It’ll be splashed all over the papers tomorrow, so I guess this is my chance to tell someone without them reading about it first. It makes a lot o
f sense that you’re here so I can tell you. I like the symmetry of it.”

  He relaxed and sat back, feeling for the first time that she wasn’t going to kick him out at any moment. “Tell me.”

  “Today at the gravesite, I thought I was going to finally put something to rest. Not Joe. He can burn in hell. I mean, I thought I’d have closure.”

  “I don’t know about that idea. It’s been years since you left and here I am with you again and I still want to call you Betty. Asia is someone else who belongs to everyone else. Do you really believe in closure?”

  “I’ll never know now. Last night I wrote out pages and pages. I raged at everything I could remember about what Joe did to me. I poured out my heart about being a scared little girl. My dad was away a lot, so I was at Uncle Joe’s mercy a lot. The last period of school was always the worst because I knew I’d have to go home and almost every night he’d come in to my bedroom and…what could I do?”

  “I wish you had told me.”

  “It rarely works that way. I’ve talked to my therapist about it. You see pretty little girls at every school and a whole bunch of them have uncles who prove to them they’re too pretty for their own good.”

  He shifted in his chair, opened his mouth but nothing came. Her eyes were wet. He wanted to go to her but didn’t know if he should. He knew her when she was a human. How could he console a goddess? He didn’t feel big enough to try.

  “You saw what the paparazzi did?”

  “Yes. I was at there.”

  “The second before I did it, I felt so powerful. It felt like such a dramatic stroke of genius. That line of hard-faced cops with their shaved heads was ahead of me, each throwing a clod of earth on the coffin, and when I took that letter out of my purse to throw in the grave I felt like I was getting the last word or something. It was supposed to be such a grand gesture. And it was supposed to be a mystery forever.”

  He had seen it all and it had turned his stomach. The line of photographers behind a rope were clicking away, taking picture after picture, dollar signs racked up with each click. She was impossibly chic in black, as if she had stepped airbrushed off a magazine cover. Her eyes were hidden behind huge sunglasses and for once her full lips were a thin line.

  When she threw the letter into the grave, there was a gasp from the assembled that was swallowed in a whip of wind that carried the pages up, up and off to the grasping hands of the vultures behind the red velvet ropes. They scurried and leapt and grabbed up every page and ran for the woods. Some of the cops bellowed after them but did not move. She stood and wept, an ethereal creature among drooling Neanderthals. Her great rage had led her to win a moment’s small satisfaction and now she stood on wobbly knees, broken and violated again. She grieved not for her pedophile uncle but for the death of the last vestige of her privacy. She wept loudly. A few photographers, not as quick as the others to grab the pages from the wind, stayed to click away, freezing her pain for the world digitally.

  He hadn’t gone to her then. He stood in confusion instead. She was crying again and she came to him now. She sat in his lap and buried her face in his neck and sobbed like a child.

  They sat there for a long time, her cries blocking out any cogent thought. Finally all he could say was, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” He apologized for every star struck, jealous nobody who wanted to see a goddess brought down.

  When she pulled away from him, she gave him a sisterly squeeze of his shoulder. It seared him. She stood up and rearranged her black dress. There was something regal in her as she stood up. She rearranged her face to erect a shield of dignity.

  “I need another drink. You want one?”

  “You sit down. I’ll get it.” He strode to the bar. “What’ll it be?”

  “Screwdriver. OJ’s in the fridge.”

  As he reached for the fridge handle, he spotted the dead mouse in the trap. “Jesus!” he said as he stepped back instinctively. “You know you’ve got a dead mouse here?”

  From her seat she made a dismissive wave. “I know. I know. The house is infested. All the traps are full.”

  “All?” he said. He looked down at the mouse and saw that a line of ants had taken the little mouse’s eyes and were ferrying rodent meat away as he watched. His stomach threatened to rise up in revolt against his vision.

  “The house is full of traps and each one has a little mouse with a surprised look on his face. You know what I notice? With every one of them, the tail is stuck straight out. The trap snaps down on their necks and the tails go pencil-straight.”

  He opened the fridge door, retrieved the orange juice carton and mixed her a stiff drink. “You should really get them cleaned out. You want me to do that for you?”

  “Nah,” she said. “I didn’t bring my assistants. I thought it would look silly to show up in Poeticule Bay again with a fucking entourage. I figured it wouldn’t go over well. Back home I would have told somebody to take care of it, or they would have taken care of it and I never would have known about it. Now that I’m here I figure I’m an adult again. I should do it. I just — ”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Don’t. I’ll deal with it.” Her tone was sharp for the first time.

  He handed her the sweaty glass and instead of taking a sip she put it against her forehead. “Do you believe in reincarnation, Marky?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me, neither, but yesterday I wasn’t so sure. As long as I’m unburdening here, I’m going to confess something awful to you.”

  “Okay.” He sat down again and looked at her long bare legs. When he looked up he felt ashamed because he saw the raw pain in her eyes again.

  “I arrived day before yesterday. I’d gone straight to the funeral home first and made the arrangements. You know…all that bullshit. All I could think about was how I was going to go to this fucking funeral and some asshole was going to go on and on about what a great guy Uncle Joe was.”

  He took a big gulp of his drink and gave her an encouraging nod.

  “You’re going to think I’m a terrible person.”

  He wondered how she could have managed to keep her secret and keep him out.

  “I am a terrible person,” she said, “or at least I can be amazingly stupid.”

  “That just makes you human.”

  “Then I’m ready to stop that,” she said and let out a throaty laugh. “Remember how good I was at math?”

  “I always let you figure out the tip when we had clams and chips.”

  “You always let me pay the bill.”

  “No apologies. You were the local rich girl and I had nothing. You want me to cut you a check for all those clam dinners at The Skinny Dip now?”

  “Nah, we’ll let that go.”

  “Thanks, because you’re still the local rich girl.”

  “I’m probably the richest girl on the east coast.”

  “Then I think I’ll have another drink on you. I might even make it a double. You were about to tell me why you’re such a terrible person.”

  She sobered. “Well, as I was saying, I was always good at math. Won first prize in a couple things. Dad thought I should go take a business degree. I was thinking astrophysics.”

  “I remember. Our first kiss was when you invited me up the hill to look through your telescope.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure astronomy was foremost in your mind.”

  “I was fifteen. Give me a break.”

  “I was fifteen, too. That’s something else I have to thank you for. See, after you came into the picture, Big Joe lost interest in me.”

  “You think he was afraid he’d get caught?”

  “No, it’s sicker than that. After we started dating, I was too old for his games. I was ruined — by you, I guess.”

  “I’m glad. I just wish you’d told me at the time.”

  She shrugged and raised her empty glass, tinkled the ice, and he got up to fill it again. This time he avoided looking at the mouse.

  He re
filled her glass and she waited for him to sit down again. “Math always came easy and I liked that there was only one right answer. It’s binary. It’s right or it’s wrong. Subjectivity means no one is ever simply right. Arguing some obscure point in an essay just pissed me off.”

  “Your history marks reflected that.”

  “You’re getting entirely too comfortable around me awfully quickly.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  She cleared her throat and warned him to be quiet with a look. “I also have a thing for symmetry. When I walked into this house after all these years…when dad was away in the oil fields or flying around the world selling stuff to the Chinese, I stayed here with Uncle Joe. This was my torture chamber.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re goddamn right. I really, really wish you had told me.”

  “So you said. Anyway, I walked in here straight from the funeral parlor and headed straight to the toilet and what do I find but a little mouse is swimming in the fucking toilet bowl!”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. Just this little mouse. Probably went in for the water and couldn’t get out. And you know what? I had this fantasy that this mouse somehow was Uncle Joe’s reincarnation or soul or something. I don’t know. It sounds pretty stupid now that I’m saying this out loud.”

  “No, I can see why you’d think that. I mean, yeah, it doesn’t really make sense, but I’m sure it did at the time. You’d just come from arranging your…pedophile’s funeral.”

  “Exactly. Thanks. I knew you’d understand.”

  “Just give me half what you pay your regular therapist.”

  She let out another throaty laugh and took another long drink from her glass. He thought she might be getting drunk but with really elegant women it was so much harder to tell. He didn’t have much practice hearing the confessions of boozy starlets. When he knew Betty, she didn’t drink at all. He hadn’t driven a car when he knew her.

  “What did you do about the mouse?”

  “Hm?”

  “The mouse in the toilet. Did he flush easy?”