Molly Bit

by Dan Bevacqua

  As Luke pulled in, he heard the chainsaw switch off. He stepped out of the truck and watched Molly’s father approach the house. John came around the same way the woman had, and set his chainsaw down on top of the tree stump. He took off a pair of gardening gloves and some protective goggles. He set those down too. For a moment, he stood there with his hands on his hips. His face looked a lot like Molly’s face, except it was destroyed by wrinkles, and his eyes were a different color than hers. His eyes were a very light blue, like a pair of pilot lights on a gas stove.

  He walked over to Luke and shook his hand.

  “I was cutting brush,” he said. “They snuck up on me.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” Luke said.

  “All of the sudden they were there. The kill switch was stuck. I looked worse than I was.”

  “I got talking to Nate Braun.”

  “He’s an idiot,” John said.

  “He’s alright.”

  “No, he’s not,” John said. “I ran into Ashley. She refused to understand.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Luke said.

  They watched the BMW come back down the road. A tinny, hip-hop reverb shook its chassis. The passenger side window rolled down. The woman stuck her entire arm out and gave them the middle finger.

  “Charming,” John said. “Come inside, Luke. We need to actually talk.”

  INTERROGATION AUGUST 2014

  9

  MARCUS WAS STUCK IN TRAFFIC on Beverly. He had his wife on the Bluetooth.

  “Where are you now?” Alice asked.

  “He’s headed toward Coldwater.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re doing. What are you doing? Why don’t you come home?”

  “I’m following him.”

  “Why?” Alice asked.

  He didn’t know why exactly. At first it was to see if he should call the cops on the guy, or maybe pull up alongside him at a stoplight and ask if he hadn’t changed his mind? Did he want that ride now? “Hey, idiot,” he’d imagined saying. “You’re gonna kill somebody. Get in the car.” This dude, this Luke (that was his name—he’d forgotten), had dropped his keys twice outside the restaurant and when Marcus had asked him how he was feeling, Luke had said, “I’m fine, bro. Be chill. Take it easy.”

  “How’s the kid?” Marcus asked Alice.

  “Tyler, you mean? Our firstborn son?” She was still mad about it. “He’s upset.”

  “Tell him—”

  “You tell him,” she said. “I’m not the messenger girl here.”

  At the intersection where Beverly and Coldwater and Rodeo and Canon and another road he couldn’t remember the name of opened wide into one another, he watched Luke’s rental car half-stop and roll on through—and then he saw a CHP cruiser. It was parked under a looming palm tree out in front of a house that, if you broke it down, was ten years’ TV work. He let a Mercedes go, and then a Cayenne Sport, and then he went too. Until he hit the bend, he kept it at twenty-five. He checked the rearview going up the mountain and saw the cop wasn’t there.

  “He turned onto Carolyn.”

  “Jesus.” Her voice cut out and returned. “—so maybe he’s staying there.”

  “He’s not staying there, Alice.”

  “He could be.”

  “Who would stay there? It’s not a place to stay. He told me he had a hotel.”

  “Where?” Alice asked. “The Beverly?”

  “The DoubleTree.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  His wife had always been a little classist, even when they were poor.

  “People stay there,” Marcus said. “That’s a place where people stay.”

  “I’ve stayed at those places,” Alice said.

  “When?” he asked her.

  At first, everything had been fine at the restaurant. He’d showed up with Molly’s keys and knew the guy right off, saw him at the bar with shit on his boots. They shook hands. It felt cordial. Hunky-dory. Honky-tonk. He thought he might as well eat. Molly’s father had said the guy was down on his luck, but that was half of everybody. Fish tacos it was. Luke ordered another beer and a shot of Bushmills.

  “What about the hotel behind the prison that time?” Alice asked him.

  “That was twenty years ago,” Marcus said. They’d been driving across the country and had almost run out of gas in the middle of nowhere Colorado. He remembered waiting in the car while she went to see if they had a vacancy. “We didn’t even see the prison until the next day. I forgot about that.”

  “You make me out to be some kind of diva,” Alice said. “How could you forget that? I think you should get checked out.”

  “You get checked out,” he said.

  But then this guy, this Luke, had gotten drunk. He’d started talking about Vincent.

  “They transferred him.”

  “Where to?” Marcus asked.

  “Sensitive Persons Unit,” Luke said. “Same prison, different wing. He doesn’t speak. He moves. He eats. He looks. But he doesn’t speak.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I hear things.”

  “From who?”

  “The internet,” Luke said. “You live next door? I could have met you there.”

  “We moved,” Marcus said.

  “Makes sense,” Luke said. “Someone tried to stab him with a toothbrush. You gotta wonder: how do you fuck that up? How do you not keep on stabbing until the job’s done? You stab-stab-stab-stab-stab-stab-stab-stab. You check to see if he’s breathing. If he’s breathing, you stab some more. It’s simple. Somebody quit on that job is what. And you can’t ever quit. Not ever. You can’t just give up because something’s difficult. That’s the whole problem with this country. That’s it right there. We gotta stop it with these fucking handouts. That’s the first thing.”

  On the flatscreen above the bar, the news ran a story about a kid who’d been shot to death outside St. Louis. They’d left the kid’s body out there all day long rotting in the street. They’d thrown a tarp over him. They’d let the heat of the sun bake his corpse. His family came. His neighbors cried and screamed and pointed at the body. They’d left him there. Marcus sat next to this guy and watched it.

  “So wait,” Luke said, as if the sound of his voice was capable of changing the subject. “You’re on TV?”

  “Got canceled,” Marcus said. “It was a good run. It went six seasons. My kids won’t starve.”

  Luke wanted to see a picture of his family. He scrolled one over on his phone.

  “That’s your wife?”

  “Yup.”

  “That lady right there?”

  “Her name’s Alice.”

  * * *

  “We’re here,” Marcus said.

  Maybe he wanted to see it for himself was why. Their old road was narrow, like all the roads off the canyon. Luke parked his car at an angle outside the fence. Marcus pulled over beside an embankment and switched off his headlights. He rolled his window down. He missed the cool air and the darkness of the hills. Silver Lake was bullshit. It was old hipsters.

  “What’s he doing?” Alice asked him. “Can he see you?”

  “He can’t see me. He’s just standing there. He’s doing the code.”

  Whatever it was, the rental car was a piece of shit. The headlamps were plastered with dead bugs. Luke stood there in the yellow light and tapped the panel.

  “He’s wasted,” Marcus said.

  “What’s he doing?” Alice asked again.

  “He can’t figure out the damn code. He keeps trying different combinations.”

  From where he sat in his car, Marcus could see his old gate too. The place had been astonishingly easy to sell. There was a market for everything. Sooner or later, the new owner would turn to a bored dinner party guest and say, “She was murdered upstairs. You wanna see?”

  It had been hard on all of them. Eric, who was seven, didn’t speak for three days. Finally, Marcus had lifted him out of his bed one grim night (the boy would wake u
p in a cold sweat, like a faucet had been turned on inside of him) and had him sleep with them. Marcus turned over the next morning and looked at his son. He asked him how he was.

  “Hungry,” Eric had said. “What do we have for breakfast stuff?”

  Ty was thirteen. He had fallen back into his own kind of silence. Everything was, “Yeah, ma.” “Alright, ma.” “Everything’s good.” He’d go to his bedroom, close the door, and post memes. The night before, scrolling through Instagram, Marcus had asked him what a particular acronym of his had meant.

  “That Hoe Over There,” Ty had informed him.

  “What about now?” Alice asked.

  Molly’s gate slid open on its electric runner. Marcus watched him get back in the car.

  “He’s driving down to the house.”

  “Come back home.”

  “I just wanna see what he’s doing.”

  “He’s probably going to sleep.”

  “He’s not going to sleep, Alice. If you had talked to this guy, you would know he wasn’t going to sleep,” Marcus said. “He did the gate wrong. It’s still open.”

  “Come home,” Alice said. He heard something rhythmic in her voice. She was worried, but she liked it. One of the reasons their marriage was successful was because he was never boring. He was a lot of things, but he was never boring.

  “This isn’t a detective movie, Marcus.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said. “Our banter’s too good.”

  He took her off the Bluetooth and put her back to regular.

  “Please don’t get out of the car.”

  “Too late,” he said.

  The show was called The Heights. It was supposed to have been a two-episode run for his character—the charming, handsome lawyer next door—but the ratings had shot up, especially in the all-important Atlanta metro region, and by the second season he was a regular. At least once an episode (more often twice) his character, Gerard, would either say or be greeted with the tagline, “Oh, hey now.” A gorgeous woman would enter Gerard’s room, or he’d catch a girl who’d fallen from a ladder, and either he or another character would say, “Oh, hey now,” one syllable stressed more than the others in order to convey that scene’s particular information. The line had become famous, and Marcus along with it. For the first year and a half of his Gerard-ness, every time he and Alice heard or saw the line, they would make the slot machine motion. They added on to the house. Alice began to audition again. More important, Marcus looked forward to a life in which he no longer had to play Gangbanger number 3, 7, or 22. Stereotype and pigeonhole aside, it was also boring. A man could only scowl in so many ways.

  From the edge of her driveway, he could see the addition Gerard had paid for. Ty’s room more or less looked out onto Molly’s property. There were trees in the way, but what teenage boy wouldn’t crane his neck for a better view? But Ty hadn’t seen anything. He’d slept through it.

  Marcus watched Luke open the front door and enter the house. He walked down the steep driveway. He’d taken a class on modern architecture at Villanova, but he couldn’t remember anything from it. The house looked like a series of shrinking boxes stacked on top of one another. There were a lot of windows. The fountain out front was off. If one of the neighbors called the cops, he’d get down on the ground spread-eagle and scream, “My show’s syndicated!”

  “Where are you?” she asked him.

  “Whisper,” he whispered.

  “Where are you?”

  The exterior floodlights came on, and Marcus ran behind the fountain.

  “I’m hiding.”

  “Is he after you?”

  “No,” he said. “He’s not after me. He doesn’t know I’m here. He’s in his own world.”

  “Can you see him?”

  He could see him. Luke was standing in one of the living rooms. He looked at one part of the living room, then quarter-turned and looked at the next part. He kept doing this.

  “This motherfucker has lost his goddamn mind.”

  “How long do you plan on watching him for?”

  “I don’t know. Until he does something.”

  “Does what?”

  “Something,” he said.

  It wasn’t the answer Alice was looking for.

  “You need to talk to your son,” she said. “I’m serious.” And then she hung up on him.

  He thought about texting her “What do you know about it, white lady?” but decided not to.

  It was inevitable that “Oh, hey now” would catch on as a phrase at the boys’ school. Both of his sons were popular. Ty described it as “No big deal, Dad.” Friends addressed them with it in the halls and the cafeteria. “It’s nothing,” Ty had said, but it sounded like something to Marcus.

  It was a majority-white private school, and Marcus felt that anytime a white person took a black person’s saying, a black person’s gesture, a black person’s story, and made it their own, it was ninety-nine times out of a hundred racist, and even that hundredth time, that “exception,” had a stink about it, a questionability that sat uneasy with him. The white writers, and they were mostly white on The Heights, had every so often carted out a message script. When Marcus became an executive producer during the third season he’d gone into the writers’ room and told them they should tread softly. The last thing Marcus wanted was to perform in an episode solely to make someone else’s—some white person’s—point. He wasn’t a lesson. He wasn’t a point to be made. Gerard was a character. He was a person.

  Before Molly’s murder, Ty had told him not to worry. He’d suggested the line was tossed around within the proper boundaries of inflection. They were his friends. He busted on them too. It was a joke, right? Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it supposed to be funny?

  Marcus didn’t know if he found it funny. And what he definitely hadn’t found funny was when a camp counselor had called him earlier that day to let him know Ty had punched another camper in the face. And not just any camper, but Xander Rice, who’d been Ty’s best friend since they were five.

  The first thing Alice had said to Marcus when they’d met at the athletic compound was, “I told you something like this would happen. You need to talk to him. You don’t talk! He punched Xander! Xander!” And Marcus had said, “Well, hold on. Maybe Xan had it coming,” which it turned out Xander had.

  The two of them, Ty and Xander, and the rest of their little eighth-grade friend group had, like usual, lined up like orphans in the lunch line. It was an open secret among the parents that puberty had hit Xander hard, and that almost overnight he’d changed from a sweet-tempered, goddamn wonderful kid into what was pretty much unanimously understood to be an arrogant, conceited little asshole. The only exception to this New Xander Rule was Ty. When he was with Ty, Xander felt bonded to someone who “knew the real him” (this was Xander’s mother, Patricia, talking to Alice outside of yoga) and he could relax a little and not say things like, “Nice face, bitch.” But today the exact opposite chemical reaction had occurred. In front of Ty in the lunch line, Xander had suddenly spun around and said, “Oh, hey now! Oh, hey-hey-hey now!” letting it out like the last minstrel act on vaudeville, snapping his fingers in a Z formation, and Ty had banged him one right on the nose, the blood instant and everywhere.

  Marcus watched Luke go to a small end table, pick up a vase, and smash it on the floor. Then he watched as Luke tried to pull a picture from off the wall, but the picture wouldn’t come down. Luke walked out of the living room and Marcus lost him for a second, and when Luke came back into view Marcus saw he had a knife in his hand. Luke took the knife blade and wedged it in between the frame and the wall and jerked the blade back and forth until he’d made enough space for his fingers to slide in. It took effort, but finally the picture came down. It landed with a crash at his feet and then Luke picked it up off the floor and threw it like a Frisbee across the room. Luke turned around slowly. He raised the knife high over his head and then stabbed it hard into the wall. It went in easily, all the way t
o the handle. Marcus watched Luke stare at it there. It was like something he didn’t quite recognize. After a second, he went upstairs.

  Marcus didn’t drink much. He’d always been paranoid of potential excess. Like anybody’s family, it ran in his. As a boy, he’d once looked out the window of his aunt’s apartment and seen his uncle chase her down the block with a brick in his hand.

  He walked to the back of the house where the pool was. He was less worried about being seen or heard, least of all by Luke, and it was unlikely the neighbors knew what was going on either. They hadn’t seen or heard anything the night she’d been killed—why would they now?

  Hiding in the overgrown poolside greenery, he thought about his son. He was furious Ty had been kicked out of the day camp, but he couldn’t very well say this, considering Xander had been given the same exact punishment (mostly, Marcus thought, because the administrator hated Xander), and also because Ty had in fact broken his nose. Ty had ridden with Alice back to the house, and when Marcus pulled in behind them, the two of them were hugging in the driveway. When Ty saw Marcus’s car, he wiped his eyes, said something to his mother, and walked inside.

  “Say something,” Alice had said.

  “Can I get inside the house first?”

  Marcus waited for him in the kitchen. Ty was always coming into the kitchen. He ate twice as much as anyone in the house. He was 5'11" and weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds.

  He sulked on through.

  “Hey, Apollo.” It was maybe the wrong note.

  “Funny,” Ty said. He opened the refrigerator door and stuck his head inside.

  Marcus and Alice weren’t in town the night Molly was killed. They were in New York. Marcus had a press junket at the Standard. Ty was very much home.

  A maid had found Molly’s body. An hour later, two detectives cut through the bushes, knocked on Marcus’s door, and encountered his son. As the nanny tried to console Eric, the detectives spoke to Ty for two and a half hours.

  What was it like living next door to a movie star? they’d asked. She was pretty hot, right? Did he ever take a peek? Sometimes? Who wouldn’t? Is this a photo of your mom over here? You into white girls? You like your dad that way? What’s wrong with black women? Black women are beautiful too. But maybe they’re too sassy for you guys? Do they break your balls too much? A little too strong for you? Where were you last night? We’re just talking. We’re just having a conversation. Let’s start again. You’re tall for your age, son…