“How much?”
“I’m leaving Grayford.” She rested her forehead on my shoulder, the heat of her words palpable in my chest. “My students have exercises to keep them busy the rest of the semester.”
I stared over her shoulder where the North Carolina Realtor’s Manual sat on the coffee table. Not seeing things never gets rid of them. “New career, new life. I wish you all the best,” I said and reached behind me for the door knob.
Mollie held me by the wrist. It was a tight grip. I didn’t try to break it.
“It isn’t about Benjamin. It wasn’t about him before.”
“It’s about me,” I said.
Mollie shook her head hard. Her black hair levitated like those carnival swings tethered to a carousel. “There will be a time for us, I promise. There won’t be anything to worry about, and we can try, really try, the both of us, to be the person each of us needs the other
to be.”
I wanted to believe her. Sometimes wanting is enough. This wasn’t one of those times. I tangled my fingers in her straight black hair, but it wasn’t the kind of hair that tangles. I pulled her toward me and kissed her lips one last time. I always liked how they felt more than anything they ever said.
At the end of the block, I could make out a rectangle of light from the house I had just left. She was waiting for me to wave. I held up my hand and pretended one last time that I could see her.
Chapter 34
LISTENING TO A LOVER SAY NOT YOU, not now, makes a man very tired. So does walking twenty-plus miles a day, no matter how used to it you are. To those who walk everywhere, I recommend living in a motel room of around three hundred square feet, where the bed is never far away. I locked my door, turned out the lights, and thought I would leave them both that way for a long time. Someone outside thought otherwise. A hard knock went unanswered. I untied my shoes. The knock became a pounding.
Edward went to the door to protect me. More likely he waited for the food with which he associated every knock on the door.
“Tate, it’s Sundeep. Open up.” My landlord pounded one more time before using his key. He turned on the light. “Tate, she is gone.”
“I know.”
“The woman’s body. Someone has taken it. I left it in the car for five minutes, and when I returned it was not there.”
I took a deep breath and tried to decide whether I cared enough to sigh. Sundeep was handing me my shoes.
“Tell the squad car out back, the one watching Totten’s room.”
“It isn’t there.”
“Call another officer.”
“No. No more officers. I do not like that a dead body was stolen from my car. I do not like that I had it in my possession to begin
with.” Sundeep handed me my shoes. I dropped the shoes on the
floor. He handed them to me a second time, and I tossed them against the pole and hangers I occasionally referred to as a closet.
“Fine. Let us pretend someone did not steal a dead body from my car. The next time you are trapped inside a room, I will pretend I do not know you.” Holding open the door, he said, “You had better set aside those filthy clothes. Jaysaree will have to clean them herself.”
“What happened to Mrs. Thopsamoot?”
“Jaysaree was rebuffed. Is that the correct word? An hour ago, she walked across the street to ask about your colleague, and Mrs. Thopsamoot said she had nothing to say.”
“Had nothing to say, or didn’t want to say it?”
“It is possible,” Sundeep said, “she is still angry with us for buying the second washing machine to clean our own linens. We used to provide her with quite a bit of business.”
Sundeep turned off the lights on his way out. Edward remained by the door as it opened and closed. He knew better than to go outside. That made one of us. I peeled off my filthy clothes and placed them in a paper bag.
Across the street, the sidewalk glowed with neon signs of open stores. Businesses in the bad part of town stay open later than their gentrified counterparts. The word “Videos” had burned out so that the sign read simply “AND MORE!” This might or might not have predated the decision to stop renting videos.
Two doors down, in front of Cleaner Than Cleaners, someone only an inch or two taller than a very short detective I knew smoked a cheap cigarette. They smell no better than the expensive ones, but a sensitive nose comes to know the difference. I smiled like someone who doesn’t feel like smiling.
“How are you with mud?” I asked.
“I used to see you all the time. She do your laundry over there, don’t she?” Mrs. Thopsamoot head-butted the air in the direction of the Gray Knight.
“Twenty-five a month.”
Mrs. Thopsamoot flicked her cigarette onto the sidewalk. She ground it with her whole body, doing the twist for a count of three. “Why they want to take my customer?”
“You get new customers all the time. What about that red-headed woman in the wheelchair a couple of days ago?”
“Jaysaree ask about her. I don’t remember.” Mrs. Thopsamoot sounded a little too pleased not to remember.
“She’s my boss,” I said. “I believe she killed someone to get the job.”
Mrs. Thopsamoot turned her body sideways to look at me. “What evidence you have? I serve jury duty one time. They had no evidence. We don’t convict.”
“Maybe you could help me out with that.” She crossed her arms.
“If you don’t remember her, maybe you remember what she brought in.”
“She paying customer. She go to jail, what good it do me?”
I lifted my muddy clothes above her head. “I’m a paying customer.”
Mrs. Thopsamoot took the bag, gauged its weight, and handed it back to me. “You just one customer. Lady in wheelchair just one customer. Tie ball game. You tell Jaysaree she bring back sheets and towels, and I tell you about stain on wheelchair lady’s dress.”
“That sounds fair.”
She directed me inside with her entire arm. “Tell you in private. I am Christian woman.”
I followed her into the tight, humid space. The floor this side of the counter was empty, save a possibly artificial tree in the corner.
Mrs. Thopsamoot took my clothes out of the bag. “You want tonight or tomorrow?”
“A little late to pick them up tonight, isn’t it?”
She set the wet contents of my pockets on the counter. “Many men at Gray Knight need clothes clean fast. Can’t go home to wife smelling like whore. They main reason I stay open all night.” She made a few marks on a slip of paper and slid it across the counter. “You pay tomorrow. Bring Jaysaree with you. Tell her I give discount, cheaper than before. I am not bad person. I am business woman.”
“That you are.”
I stuffed the sodden trash in my back pocket. Mrs. Thopsamoot put her elbows where the trash had been and motioned me closer.
“Silk dress,” she whispered. Her elbows slid backward on the counter, her feet returning to the floor.
I stayed put in the middle of the counter. “What was on the silk dress?”
“Oh, you don’t want to know. Very bad.”
“That’s kind of the important part,” I said.
“I am Christian woman.”
“What does the Bible say about murder?”
Mrs. Thopsamoot looked behind her. She looked behind me. She propped herself on the counter and whispered, “Big white stains.”
My mouth opened. I hadn’t asked it to. “What kind of white stains?”
Mrs. Thopsamoot cupped a hand around her mouth. She motioned me closer, and I gave her my ear. “Man stains,” she said.
I thought of and tried not to think of those pictures Carly had e-mailed Delilah. I connected them to the silk dress and the hardened spots on the floor beside Simkins’s chair, on the opposite side where I had found the blood.
“Now you have evidence?”
I nodded. It’s the easiest way to lie.
“Your clothes be rea
dy by noon,” said Mrs. Thopsamoot. “Clean like new. Like stain never there.”
Chapter 35
THE FORMER VIDEO STORE SOLD their wine on a former bread rack along the back wall. Unintelligible voices, faint and possibly Hispanic, emanated from the former librarian’s tinny black-and-white television behind the counter. Each year Galen was at Parshall, he proposed a course in film studies to the curriculum committee, Delilah Bibb and Dean Simkins, who suggested revisions until the course overview had replaced the word “film” with “audio-visual,” replacing the films with the morning news, the capstone filmmaking project with a PowerPoint presentation.
I asked my former colleague for a recommendation. This is the best way to give yourself options when you can’t see what they are.
Galen had on a purple button-up shirt tucked into chinos a couple of sizes too short. His silver tie matched his ponytail. “You might think they overdid the oak,” he said, crouching to pull a red from the bottom row, “but you would be quite wrong. The vanilla arrives just in time. I opened a bottle when I heard Simkins finally took my advice.”
“What advice was that?”
“To go to Hell.”
I carried the bottle to the register. Galen took a moment to watch his movie, laughing heartily at a weeping Latino boy. For once, my confusion at a foreign film had nothing to do with my inability to
read subtitles.
Galen swiped my debit card. “Which one of you finally grew the balls to off that fat bastard?”
“The police labeled it a suicide,” I said.
Galen laughed at me as if I were a Latino boy crying softly. “What do you call it, Mr. Cowlishaw?”
“I call it an opportunity for change. Let me know when that full-time wine consultant position becomes available.”
Galen handed me the receipt to sign. I estimated where the line might be. They never care where you put your signature.
“With your business background, Mr. Cowlishaw, you should open your own store. Being laid off was the best thing that ever happened to me. Now I’m my own boss. I get to watch movies all day. I set my own hours—sixteen a day, but if the economy turns around, I might hire another part-timer. So what if I clear eight or nine hundred a month after taxes. And can’t afford insurance. And sold all my belongings that wouldn’t fit in the two rooms in the back of the store, which aren’t as drafty as they used to be once I patched the holes where the rats got in.” Galen sighed not quite as heavily as a bus coming to a stop. “Paper or plastic?”
Taking hold of the plastic handles, I wondered how much baggers at grocery stores cleared after taxes. Cashiers probably made more, but I would have difficulty with the register.
“I’ll tell you how I always wanted to do it,” he said.
“Find a job?”
“Kill Simkins. There’s a second-floor window in the library parallel to his office. Fifty-foot shot. Rifle out the window of a library, Oswald-style. It wouldn’t take a trained marksman. Mrs. Garten, bless her heart, used to say she could do it were it not for her arthritis. Of all the shitty things Simkins did to faculty and students, laying off that sweet old woman six months before she would have received her pension was just about the shittiest. Why are you looking for a job, anyway?”
I explained the exciting opportunity with which Delilah had presented me.
“That’s probably who killed him.”
“That is an idea,” I said.
“She had plenty of motive. Who didn’t, right? But from what I hear, she moved right into his old job, complete with that ridiculous salary. She probably got tired of bobbing for apples behind his desk, if you know what I mean. I’m not judging anyone, but for God’s sake at least pull down the blinds.”
“When did you see them?”
“When didn’t I see them. Like I said, that window on the second floor. By the way, did you ever meet her daughter?”
“Briefly.”
“Who did she remind you of? In the eyes and chin, a little in the ears?”
My hand was on the door. I took it off.
“The asshole had no other relatives. I don’t know what he was worth, but if Delilah Junior was his daughter, she should receive whatever he left behind. This was before your time, but Mrs. Garten and I used to wonder why on Earth Delilah Bibb would leave a tenure-track job at Appalachian State, where she was chair of the education department, to join Falstaff’s army for less than half her old salary. Just a theory,” he said. “Like gravity and evolution.”
I asked Galen if he recalled any faculty having taught at Coastal State.
“Nobody I know of. Speaking of dead people,” he said, “what happened at the Knight a little while ago?”
“What do you mean?”
“A cop pulled a body from the backseat of Sundeep’s car.”
“Black officer in a squad car?”
“Tall white guy in street clothes. He was driving one of those cars with the shield painted over. It had one of those removable lights on the roof. He removed it when he drove away.”
“I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
“Let me know your thoughts on that cabernet.”
“Will do.”
Outside, I turned the opposite direction of the Gray Knight. At the end of the block, I turned the opposite direction of downtown. A girl seated in an alley asked if I wanted a date. She had a lisp consistent with missing teeth. I kept walking and she yelled something in Spanish or Italian. Her words reminded me of the foreign film, and I wondered about becoming a translator, the kind who work over the phone and don’t have to read. Then I remembered that I didn’t know any foreign languages. I didn’t even know Braille.
The money I had in the bank would float me for a couple of months. The Gogeninis would let me slide on the rent. They might never ask for another dime. People like helping the blind. The government offers supplemental income to poor people with bad eyesight. I took it for a year. It was hardly enough to afford the finer things like pride or a decent cabernet.
I cut through the parking lot of the boarded-up tobacco store
that had once roasted their own coffee. After closing, it became a parking lot for the Civic Center, where touring rock stars from the
70s and 80s played their old hits without a band, calling it “An Evening with So and So.” This was repurposing, I told my students, a way to breathe life into a product consumers had already purchased or no longer wanted. I passed through the tree-lined neighborhood regarded as run-down when blacks lived there. When whites in their thirties moved in, it became up-and-coming. I tried swapping adjectives on my own predicament, tried to think of a new purpose for myself, wondering what the old one was.
I had been walking long enough to reach the edge of the college from the opposite direction I usually came. Techno music thumped in the house across the street. I cocked my head back and held my blind spots aloft while the half-moon filled the lower corner of my eyes. The stars never came into focus. You can’t hold a magnifier up to the sky.
The library remained unlocked. I felt my way behind the front desk into Galen’s old office. I thought he might have left a corkscrew in his desk, but there was only his name plate, snapped in half. Mrs. Garten’s drawers held a plastic fork and a pair of paper clips. I decided to try the desks of my colleagues in the pool. Those who graded papers with more rigor than me claimed they went down better with alcohol. I was already outside, between the library and Furley Hall, when I heard a sound like a drawer of silverware colliding with aluminum blinds. It came from the library’s second floor, behind the window parallel to the office of our late dean.
I set my cabernet beside a few bags of colored sugar. One by one, I threw the bags at the library window. The crashing sound was now a squeak. I found a smashed beer can and flung it at the second floor. The sounds ceased. A minute later, the window opened.
“Dr. Cowlishaw.”
“Wade Biggins. What are you doing up there?”
“Stealin
g shit. What are you doing down there?”
“Looking for a corkscrew. You got one?”
“Not with me. Can you help me carry something downstairs?”
I hadn’t had a reason to venture upstairs in years. Moonlight gleamed on the empty bookshelves. The four leather chairs and the round wooden table they had surrounded were all gone. Ditto the sofa that had sat beneath the sun-faded mural of the school’s founders with their stern expressions, as if posing for portraits on currency.
“Over here,” Wade said.
I traced his voice to the study carrels, or where they used to be, on the other side of the last bookshelf. The floor was gritty with accumulated dust. I doubted it had been cleaned since the librarians, who were required to clean the floors and bathrooms, received their final paychecks.
“The bottom came off the telescope when I was trying to get it to
fit down one of the other aisles. I could have just gone around. I’m so fucking stupid.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Wade. I didn’t even know there was a telescope up here.”
“The guy at the pawn shop said he could only give me ten bucks for it. I usually sell shit online, but with big things like this you end up losing money on shipping. I wasn’t even going to take it, but fucking Tweel this afternoon, you know? I found him using this a couple of times, so fuck him.”
It seemed like the inexpensive, half-plastic sort found in toy stores. As little as I could see through the lens, it seemed weak compared to the telescopes Tweel kept by various windows in his house. I asked Wade where he had found it.
“The middle window.”
I raised the mini-blinds, confirming the view I had recently seen in photographs. Whether Tweel’s aim was as effective with a gun as it was with a camera I couldn’t say. The broken glass of Simkins’s window was certainly consistent with shots fired. From this vantage, if Simkins was seated at his desk, the bullet wounds would have been on his left temple rather than the top of his head.
Loose parts of the telescope hit the floor. They seemed to multiply upon impact. “Fuck this, Dr. Cowlishaw. I’m wasting more time than this thing is worth.”
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