Richard, she said, did not miss a beat. Evie was paralyzed with terror, clutching the lamp that had become a bludgeon, and he grabbed it from her and said “Go.”
“What?” Evie said. “No.” But he kept saying it: “Go. Honey. Evelyn. Baby. Go.”
Telling Ruben this last piece of the story, Evie—Evie the Guilty, Evie the Damned—was all full of tears. She blinked them away and they kept coming. She was so tough, steely and beautiful and self-assured, and yet she was still a child as Ruben was still a child, as we all are, all the time. Not so far below the surface. All caught like Wesley is caught, in the thrall of the past, walking in circles forever.
“I shouldn’t have let him do it. But he did—he insisted.”
All that Richard wanted, in the aftermath, was for her to go.
All that he said was “I will not lose you also.”
His daughter was all he had left. Wesley was gone, and Beth was in Wesley’s shadow world half the time.
How could he lose her, too? How could he?
So Evie left. Stripped off her wings and tossed them in the sewer, went to her gig and played it. She went on exactly at 9:15, and so was onstage at 9:25, when the murder was committed. The thing was, though, and this is what Ruben had double-checked, reviewing the police file in his apartment, the time of the killing only came from one source, from the killer’s confession, and the killer had waited fifteen minutes or half an hour even to call the police.
Given his daughter time to go, to get there, to change, to get onstage. Given her the time to get free.
Evie the Free even debuted a brand-new number that night, that alternate-universe Bob Dylan thing. She wrote it on the fly, eyes closed, her band scrambling to follow the changes, the audience wising up and finding it with her, running alongside her, a thousand voices into her one.
Nobody.
Feels.
Any pain…
Meanwhile, Richard waits to be arrested. Richard calls Ebbers from the police station, asks his sort-of friend how to convincingly explain how he ended up in possession of an unregistered handgun. Richard confesses, and he knows the police will never investigate this too deeply—not when they’ve got the killer, who they found on the scene, sitting with the murder weapon, covered in blood.
And who pleaded guilty. Who wanted to get this thing over with “as soon as possible,” get himself sent away and the fucking case closed.
The Rabbi stood up. He had gotten it all right. Solved the mystery. But he felt no relief or satisfaction. What a world it is. How confusing and frustrating and crowded with pain.
He looked at Evie, and she looked at her feet.
“I don’t know if I can do it, Ruben. I don’t know if I can live with it, him sitting in prison. How can I do it?”
“I don’t think you have to.”
And then the two of them were kids again. The first day they met. Ruben quoted himself, maybe remembering or maybe not remembering. Maybe it was just the past punching through in that moment to the present.
“Listen, Evelyn. Hey. My dad is the best,” he said. “He’ll find a way to fix it.”
Coda
Summer 2019
The Rabbi returned, just like he promised, and when he got up the hill, Samir was waiting.
Ruben had gotten lucky once again at Ed’s Cars in Kusiaat. He drove the same beige Range Rover back to the post office, where he was greeted like an old friend.
As Ruben had expected, the postman and his scrawny friend Langstrom were up for anything. A long walk up the hill, pulling a laden sledge; a day’s labor at the old station. Ruben and the two dudes, laughing and heaving wood and hammering plywood up over the windows. Drinking their way through the case of Labatt’s the postman had packed onto the sledge.
Samir sat on a tree stump, watching warily, his eyes jumping. Every once in a while he would get up and pace a minute, back and forth, just like the man they were walling inside.
Ruben’s first idea had been to lead Dennis into the forest on a rope, hike until they found a ravine or a gully, or maybe just dig a hole wide enough to push him into.
But this was better. This made sense. They shut off the old ranger station; they bricked in the windows and welded shut the doors. There had only been two exits, and now there were none.
Langstrom spray-painted the words RADIOACTIVE: CAUTION over and over, in bright neon letters, on all the walls.
“Nice work, dingleberry,” said the postman, but Langstrom ignored him. He stepped back, surveying their handiwork, wearing a surprisingly wise little smile.
Ruben rubbed at the cartilage of his right ear, nodded at the men, then said, “Let’s go.”
They left the night man inside, walking.
He couldn’t think of the last time he prayed.
But Ruben prayed now, walking back down Renzer’s Peak. They trudged back all together, this strange parade, Samir shivering in Ruben’s North Face jacket, the pair of jovial Alaskans weaving a little, howling like wolves. A cool rain stung Ruben’s cheeks.
He prayed to his mother. To Marilyn, up there in heaven or wherever she was.
“Keep him safe,” he told her. “For as long as you can.”
And then he got to the bottom of the hill, and all the way home to Evie.
“It will be helpful, this time around,” Jay Shenk told Richard Keener, “if, during our conversations, you were to actually talk.”
There was long enough of an empty moment, of Rich just staring back like he always did, that Shenk worried his client was once again opting not to cooperate. That he hadn’t understood the plan, which Shenk had communicated via Beth. That he had rejected it, or agreed but now changed his mind.
“Yeah, I know,” said Rich finally. “I hear you.”
He was not sullen. He was not cool. He looked scared. He had fucked up, and he was running out of chances.
Jay saw it all, and if he could have hugged the guy he would have, but they were on opposite sides of thick meshed glass. Richard was at Chino now, in the California Institution for Men. Death row had its own rules, and flesh-to-flesh visiting was not allowed.
So Shenk leaned forward and put his head on the barrier and said, “It’s gonna be OK.”
Our bodies are constantly generating new cells to replace the ones that die and slough away; the flesh of our bodies like the flesh of our brains is forever expanding, degrading, rewiring, being made new. So the figurative idea is also literally true: Neither Jay Shenk nor Richard Keener was the man he used to be.
“Jay,” said Rich. “I’m sorry. About all of this.”
“Rich,” said Jay. “I was gonna say the same thing to you.”
It’s hard to really smile in a deep and true way, on a death-row tier of a state prison. But they both smiled at least a little, and then Shenk said, “But listen. It’s time to tell the truth. OK? Now we’re going to tell the truth.”
And then Jay Shenk told him what the truth was going to be, doing what he had always done for all the days of his life, picking the right details of the story, shifting the outlines, pouring the facts into new shapes.
It was one visitor at a time up here. When Shenk was gone, Beth came in.
“Hey, baby,” she said, and he couldn’t even answer. God: all his big, dumb fucking ideas, trying to control an out-of-control situation. It was all like some game he’d been playing. Look at her, looking at him through the glass. Beth with her thick black hair. This was it, man. Those eyes. This girl.
He must have been crying, he must have looked down at the counter to hide himself from her, because she was tapping on the glass, knuckling it hard, and she was saying, “Hey, dummy. Hey, asshole. Hey.”
He blinked, rubbed the tears out of his eyes.
“Years,” she said, and he said, “What?” Dragging his thick forearm across his nose, which was bubbling with snot.
“We’re gonna get years.”
He put his big hand up on the glass, and she put hers up on her side, and they
touched, separated by nothing, because what was it, just glass and wire?
“Years and years and years.”
“No,” sang Evie—Evie the Wild, Evie the Free—and the crowd sang it back to her: “No!”
“…body!”
“Body!”
Nobody feels any pain.
She was hitting her fucking stride today. She was on fire. The air up by the stage smelled richly and pleasantly of weed. There was a bit of wind; the late-summer sunlight was a kind of miracle.
Her thin legs were planted on the stage, and she sawed at her guitar with big jagged strokes, pick hand diving back down, over and over, her new and bigger band behind her giving it the business as the melody took its time to grow. She’d added a second drummer, a guy named Big Nicholas who rumbled his rattletrap kit like a fucking truck. She’d always wanted to have two drummers.
“So, look,” said Evie Keener, when the song was over, and then paused, smiling, to acknowledge a couple of wild hoots from the crowd, a couple of boisterous Love you, Evies.
“Most of you know what we’re doing here, right?”
Light cheering, scattered claps. The crowd was sprawled out on the lawn of the old zoo, spread out on picnic blankets, climbing on the railings of the empty enclosures, which would once have held giraffes and lions.
“Well, if you don’t know,” she said. “We’re here for my dad.”
The concert was a fundraiser for the legal defense fund that had been established to subsidize Richard Keener’s appeal. It was a great story—it was a fucking saga. The story of Evie Keener, the indie darling, whose life had already been hard enough, and now her father had been falsely charged with murder, and then been screwed over by his own lawyer. One of these ambulance-chasing shysters. The guy had decided to make an easy thousand by taking on Keener’s case, take ten minutes to show up in court, file a guilty plea. But then evidence starts coming out that Keener was innocent, that he’d acted in self-defense. The lawyer realizes how much time it’s gonna cost to actually follow the leads, how many months and dollars it’ll take to vigorously represent this client, and he’s like thanks but no thanks. Buries the evidence. Watches Evie Keener’s father go to death row to save himself the time and trouble.
But now—a few weeks ago—the lawyer confessed everything. His own private investigator ratted him out, and then the lawyer—Shenk his name was, Shank or Shenk or Shink—provided a hand-wringing mea culpa in the pages of the LA Times, sitting down with the A1 columnist to express the intensity of his remorse. The whole tale—of the singer-songwriter, her tragic brother, their unjustly incarcerated father, and now the father’s lawyer—was the kind of messy interfamily drama, with the overlay of legal peril, that made for good copy and great publicity. It was the sort of story that pricked up people’s ears, especially now, with Newsom’s moratorium, with everybody talking about how fucked up the death penalty was anyway.
Before she started the next song, Evie brought to the stage the magnetic Erskine Buxley, the renowned litigator who would be arguing the ineffective-assistance-of-counsel case on appeal. The man’s face was familiar, from CNN, from the steps of the Supreme Court. Buxley, a tall and striking man with a short graying afro, took the mic to say some inspiring words.
The point was, they would #FreeRichKeener. And this so-called lawyer, this asshole Shenk, he’d get disbarred, for sure. Disbarred, at least.
Buxley stood beside Evie, their respective charismas each burnishing the other, and they clasped their hands together and held them high, like prizefighters. The crowd whooped. They’d paid top dollar to be here, to see Evie Keener and to raise money for her dad, and there were buckets going around, too. The appeal would take time. It would take money, a lot more money than indie darlings still recording their sophomore efforts had on hand.
Evie was happiest when the talking was over and she could start playing again. They launched back in with a new song called “Dare Me to Forget,” a melancholy midtempo thing with a back-and-forth verse that Evie and the bass player sang together. The truth is that Bernie had written this particular song, but he had asked her not to introduce it that way, so she didn’t; he did smile singing it, though. He smiled the whole way through.
Evie saw Ruben out there. It was a good turnout, a big crowd, and she had on sunglasses, but she could just make him out: his quiet private energy like a buoy, steady and calm in the rollicking sea of strangers. They had a plan to spend time together this weekend, now that he was back from his trip. He’d been back to Alaska, back to Indiana. He’d had a couple of loose ends to tie up, he’d told her, from his investigation. She had asked if he wanted to tell her more, and he just shook his head. “It’s over” is what he said. “It’s all good.”
Ruben the mysterious. Ruben the kind.
Between chords she waved, and decided he was waving back.
He was. He was waving.
“All right,” said Beth, tilting the mouth of her beer bottle toward Shenk to say thanks for the round. “So? What about you?”
“Me? Who cares about me?”
They sat side by side like old soldiers, belly up to the bar at some harmless touristy roadhouse in the High Desert, fifteen or twenty miles outside of Palm Springs. Beth took a swallow of her beer.
“What’s your plan?”
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll scrape by a couple years, till the kid can support me. I could paralegal. Maybe get myself a job over at Telemacher, Goldenstein.”
Beth couldn’t tell if Jay was kidding or not, but she could tell that he was happy. His hair was tugged back in that ridiculous little ponytail; his face was open, full of laughter. There was Bob Seger playing on the sound system in the bar. Shenk looked relaxed, and younger, somehow, than when she’d first met him.
After she finished her beer, Beth left Shenk in the roadhouse and went across the road to spend some time with Wesley.
This was where he had ended up, after the years of being shuttled, place to place, under expensive guard. When the money ran out, when the publicity died down, they’d found this spot out here, just off Highway 74: the Desert Star, a motel that was really just a clutch of cabins, laid out haphazardly, the dusty paths between the cabins crowded with night bloomers and Joshua trees. Since each room was its own small building, you didn’t have to see the other guests if you didn’t want to, and nobody had to know that Wes was in here. Tourists came and went, throughout the year. Coachella people, stargazers, solitary seekers. Nobody ever saw him. He made no sound.
Beth walked past the stand of scraggly desert foliage that stood outside cabin 4 and knocked gently on the door. Wesley’s boon companion these days was Moshe, a burly Israeli, supposedly ex-Mossad, who worked for nothing. He liked the peace, he said. He found the boy to be inspiring, although all he was inspired to do was set up multiple chessboards on multiple upturned shoeboxes, which Wesley automatically navigated around in his unending circuit of the room.
Moshe was castling his queenside king at one of those boards when Beth knocked. He rose, putting one hand on the holster at his hip as he lumbered to the door. As he brushed past Wesley he murmured, “Excuse me, son,” with grave politeness, as he always did.
“Hey, Mo,” said Beth, and he said, “Good evening, ma’am, how are you?” in his husky sabra accent.
“I told you to knock it off with the ma’am shit, asshole.”
He raised his arms in mock surrender. Besides the gun on his belt, he had—or said he had—a dagger in his boot.
“I’ll fucking strangle you where you stand,” Beth told him.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, dry as the desert sand, and Beth punched him on the arm. She liked Moshe—he reminded her of Rich, in his broad-chestedness and in his habitual silence.
The thought of her husband, of the future they might yet seize hold of together, fluttered her heart, and she smiled.
“Give us the room for a minute, will you, Moshe?”
The big guard ducked his head and slipped p
ast her, out into the night. For a man of his size, he moved in absolute silence: a born spy.
“Oh my love,” said Beth to Wesley, and planted herself before him, so he stopped. Then she took his shoulders in her palms and went up on her toes to kiss his forehead.
“I gotta tell you something,” she said. “OK?”
She stepped out of his way, and immediately he began again to walk. Beth tossed her big pocketbook on the bed and sat down next to it. The bed was pushed up against the wall, unmade. Moshe slept on a chair, and Wesley didn’t sleep.
“Are you listening?”
He wasn’t, of course. He was just walking: there to here, here to there.
In talking to Wes, Beth was talking to herself, telling herself a story.
There was one small window in this room, and through it she could see right across the road, where she had left Shenk in the roadhouse, jawboning with the bartender about the baseball season.
“You’re a hero,” she told Wes, standing before him and holding him still. “You’re my hero.”
Beth had never totally believed in Syndrome K.
She had needed to believe it, when it was going to bring justice to her family. But it had always felt slightly far-fetched. The dormant pathogen, the trauma of surgery, the cortisone flaring through the brain, shutting it down like a circuit. Even Dr. Theresa Pileggi’s precise articulation of the medical science, presented in all its granular detail, which Shenk had been certain would sway the jury…it had never gripped her and demanded she believe it was true.
But then she had heard this other story: how there was a dark and dangerous spirit trapped inside her boy. How if released this spirit would swell out across humanity, relieving every person of their feelings, their emotions, their intentions, their selves. Stripping away not only the pain of consciousness but consciousness itself.
The Quiet Boy Page 37