The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  “Heeeeeeeeey,” Ralph bellowed. Nobody moved, so he hollered again. Nothing. “Buncha damn drunks,” he mumbled.

  I saw George Paris twitch down at the far end of the couch and then crane his neck forward. With his gaunt face and slicked-back white hair, George looked like a defrocked boxing announcer. Years ago he’d been an important banker and a mover and shaker in the Downtown Businessman’s Association. He blinked me into focus and then put the bottle to his lips for a quick pull. “Leo,” he said. “Damn good to see you, boy.”

  I watched as he tried to lever himself off the couch. “Ugh,”

  he grunted as he tried to sit forward. No go. The force of Harold and Norman pressing against his right shoulder was too great. He was stuck. I suppressed a giggle. Undaunted, he tried again. And again. This time kicking his legs out in an attempt to create some forward momentum. When that didn’t work, he completely lost it. Thrashing about like a stroke victim. Spewing spittle. Screaming.

  “Goddammit, get offa me. Ya hear me, here. Goddammit. Stop leanin’ your big ass on me. I’ll…” Neither Harold nor Norman batted an eye. Against the far wall, Frank broke wind and fell over on his left side. George redoubled his thrashing and swearing efforts. I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh.

  Behind me Ralph clung on to the doorknob for dear life, laughing hysterically. I turned back toward him. “You stay right where you are,” I said. I don’t know whether he heard me. By that time he was down on one knee, pounding the floor, his body wracked by uncontrollable whoops of laughter.

  I kept my weight back like I was waterskiing and crossed to George. He didn’t look good. “Gemme outta here, Leo,”

  he wheezed. I took the bottle of schnapps from his hand and set it on the coffee table. Taking both of his hands in mine, I leaned back and pulled him from the couch like a cork from a wine bottle. As I threw an arm around his narrow waist to prevent further slippage, Harold and Norman slid across the slick leather surface of the couch, filling in the area so recently occupied by George.

  He snatched the bottle from the table and started up for Ralph. By the time he was halfway up the incline, he’d walked completely out of his baggy woolen socks and was now barefoot and waving the bottle in the manner of a drum major with a baton.

  When it appeared he might falter and end up back on the couch, I grabbed him by the belt and propelled him the rest of the way. “What’s so goddamn funny?” he demanded. Ralphie, of course, laughed harder. I decided to nip the bickering in the bud.

  “George,” I said. He was still glaring down at Ralph. “I came to invite you guys to a party.”

  “I don’t see what’s so goddamn—” He stopped shouting and looked over at me. “A party? What kinda party?”

  “A Christmas party for you guys,” I said. “Next Thursday night.”

  Ralphie staged a miraculous recovery. Regaining his feet, wiping his eyes.

  “At your place?”

  “Yeah.”

  George leaned in close. “Can…you know…some of the other…”

  “Sure,” I said. “As long as it’s somebody I know.”

  When we’d hatched this scheme, Rebecca and I had made a list. By our reckoning, if you counted the fetid foursome, we knew about twenty of the domestically disadvantaged, sixteen of whom had worked for me at one time or another. We figured we could handle it. With a little help from a caterer, of course.

  I slipped George a twenty and told him to have the gang take the bus to the top of Queen Ann Hill and then walk over. Eight sharp. Spit and polish. No kneewalking drunks. Cops aren’t going to like a pack of you in that neighborhood. Scout’s honor.

  They both followed me outside. Rebecca’s voice rang from above. She was standing behind the barricade at the far edge of the cut, waving.

  “Hi, Georgie,” she trilled. George looked up too quickly and nearly swooned. He had to lean back against the doorframe or go down in a heap.

  Ralph showed a couple of teeth and waved. “Miss Duvall,”

  he shouted.

  I could hear them shouting back and forth as I made my way back up to the road. She saw me coming, cupped her hands around her mouth. “See you at the party,” she yelled. I looked down. George waved the bottle. I waved goodbye. The little drummer boy was beating that friggin’ drum on the car radio. That’s another big player in the Christmas crazies…that damn music. Coming at ya twenty-four seven, from every channel like Red Chinese propaganda. Used to be just the standards. Bing crooning White Christmas. Gene and Rudolph. Burl and Frosty. Nat roasting those chestnuts. These days we’ve got everything from squads of beefy tenors Aveing so high even Maria can’t hear it, to rednecks telling us how their grandma got snockered and was trampled by hooved creatures. What’s next? In twenty years…? “Marilyn Manson—A Christmas to Remember.” Yeah, the tunes are a killer.

  As we rolled into the driveway, I punched the garage door opener. She slid the Explorer in next to the Fiat. Home again…home again…Something about living together changes all the rules. It’s like when you move in together, you automatically become your parents. Our nearly twenty-year relationship had always been based on equality. Sort of a physical, spiritual and intellectual Dutch treat, so to speak. Sure, I’d always been in charge of the heavy lifting and anything that involved sewage. And you sure wouldn’t want me out there buying baby shower gifts. Rebecca had always handled that sort of thing. But…She stuck the Explorer into park and turned off the engine and the lights.

  “Put the stuff up in the guest room,” she said cheerily and headed for the house. I took a deep breath. I’d made a pact with myself. No matter what little annoyances I encountered this holiday season, I was going to remain Mr. Affable. Mr. Christmas Spirit himself. No more hanging out by myself. No more of those turkey dinners at the Yankee Diner, where everybody else in the place looks like they work for Ringling Brothers. No sir. Chalk it up to getting old and sentimental, but these days I’m prepared to gag down a piece of my aunt Hildy’s truly execrable fruitcake in return for the joy of seeing four generations of my family, gussied up and gathered under a single roof. Something about time making cowards of us all, I guess.

  Four trips between the car and the guest room had us back to where we’d started this morning, except way broker. When I came downstairs for the last time, Rebecca was sitting on the couch going through the mail. The doorbell rang. She was closer, but I said I’d get it. What a guy. The UPS person. Gender not immediately apparent. Two big parcels wrapped in brown paper. Sign here. And here. Thank you very much. Packages were, and always had been, Rebecca’s domain, so I carried them over and set them down next to her leg. She pointed to the card in her hand. “From Jed and Sarah,”

  she said, naming my attorney and his wife. It was one of those family portrait Christmas cards. Jed, Sarah, both girls and their hubbies, and this year…the first granddaughter. All dressed to the teeth around Jed’s massive dining room table. Crystal both overhead and at hand. The perfect turkey on the table. Very nice indeed.

  “What’s this?” she said while I was still studying the picture.

  “Gifts,” I said.

  “No,” she said emphatically enough to get my attention.

  “No, they’re not. These are the packages I sent Claudia and J.D.” She picked up the top box and held it up under the lamp. The purple stamp read, Undeliverable. Party no longer at this address.

  I don’t believe in ESP or any of that stuff. I think it’s like the guy said: Inevitable is hindsight for random. But, I must admit, the instant I read that bright purple message, something inside of me went bump in the night. Something cold. I wandered out into the middle of the room and began to count my breathing. In…out…one…I needn’t have worried about passing on the vibe. Before I got to three, she was headed for the kitchen. A couple of drawers slammed and then I heard her banging the buttons on the phone. Then nothing.

  She came back through the swinging door. “No answer. Just the machine.”

 
; I did my duty. I came up with a half a dozen well-reasoned explanations why there was nothing to be concerned about. Reluctantly, she allowed how I was probably right, and she was just being silly, but she didn’t believe a word of it. I could tell.

  Dinner was declared to be a “fake it,” every person for himself, eat anything you can find in the house, no ordering takeout, except by prior agreement. I put together a procciutto and provalone sandwich on onion rye, sliced myself a kosher dill and washed it all down with a couple of icecold Mirror Pond Amber Ales. Rebecca was down the hall in the den, working on some notes for a speech she was going to deliver to some pathol ogist gathering or another. I was sitting on the couch reading Stephen E. Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers. Every half hour or so, she’d pad into the kitchen and try Claudia’s number. No go.

  By ten-thirty, middle age caught up with me and I was beginning to yawn. She said to go ahead; she’d be right up. At two in the morning, I awoke to find her wrapped up in a green blanket, sitting in the rocking chair across from the bed with a cookbook in her lap.

  I sat up. She’d combed her hair all the way out and was wearing one of her old flannel nightgowns. One I hadn’t seen in years.

  “Sorry if the light’s bothering you,” she said. “I’ll—”

  “We’ll go in the morning,” I said.

  She nodded and turned out the light.

  6

  NO BLOOD. WE’D BEEN OVER THE CABIN FROM THE SOOTYceiling to the glass-covered floor and hadn’t found a drop. Rebecca was down on one knee, using the screwdriver she’d found in the kitchen to pry another slug from the logs in the living room. She held it between her thumb and index finger and squinted at it, then placed it in her palm and hefted it.

  “They’re all from high-powered rifles,” she announced. No way to tell exactly how many rounds had been fired into the cabin. By conservative reckoning, at least fifty. In the back of the house, not only were the windows completely blown out, but several of the window casings had been torn to splinters by the high-velocity slugs. The board for hanging keys on had taken a direct hit, but except for the one marked SUBARU, the keys remained. Out front, the big window overlooking the river was also gone, but with the majority of the glass on the outside, you had to figure it had been shattered by one of the rounds passing through the master bedroom door. Didn’t take a forensic team to figure out that the gunfire had come from the woods behind the house. Not much doubt about the source of the fire that had claimed two walls and most of the ceiling in the kids’ bedroom, either. You don’t set moss-covered logs to burning with a Bic lighter. Somebody’d used an accelerant. The heavy alligatoring around the exterior window frame said it had been started from the outside. Below the window a wide arc of burned grass. As if the firebug had tripped and spilled most of the gas on the ground. Overhead, the charred ends of rafters stuck out like ribs. On the tangled floor, a thick red fire extinguisher. Empty.

  The old smoke had clogged my nostrils and painted a gritty, acrid taste on the back of my throat. While Rebecca was working another slug out of the wall, I stepped out into the yard and blew my nose down onto the grass. First one nostril, then the other. Then I hawked a couple of times and spit. Better, but I still felt filthy, so I walked down the launch ramp to the river. I squatted with my toes in the shallows, scooped up a double handful of water and rubbed it over my face. Then again. Slowly this time. Better. A mantle of fog covered the rivers like a shroud, leaving the far banks sketchy, and indistinct, like a half-erased pencil drawing. Somewhere in the fog, a fish rolled. I listened intently for another, but the ripple never came. I shook the water from my hands, then dried them on my jeans. The jet boats bobbed quietly at moorage. The Avon inflatable was gone.

  Rebecca was standing on the concrete porch, peeling off the pair of blue rubber gloves she’d found under the bathroom sink. “Well,” she said.

  “You want to know what I think?”

  “You’re the detective.”

  Normally I would have taken this as an invitation to banter. Not today. No point in beating around the bush, either. She was far more experienced in this kind of site investigation than I was ever going to be. I beckoned her out onto the lawn with me and then pointed at the ghostly line of trees a hundred fifty yards behind the house. “The shooting came from up there in the trees,”

  I said. “That explains why the impact points are so much higher up in the back of the house than in the front.”

  “At least three different calibers,” she said. “Probably more.”

  I took her by the arm and led her around to the back of the house. Walked her down to the far end, to the gray electrical service box bolted to the back of the house. In modern homes the service panel is in the laundry room or the garage. On old handmade houses, they just cut a hole in a wall and nailed the box over it.

  The rectangular steel box had been torn to pieces by gunfire. The door had been blown completely off and lay pretzeled in the high grass at our feet. The interior section where the plastic circuit breakers had been was completely gone, leaving only a dangerous-looking thicket of black and white wires sticking out like quills.

  “I’m thinking the first salvo or three went right here,” I said. “Knock the power out. Put ’em in the dark. Scare the hell out of them.”

  I saw her shiver. She’d done it a couple of times since we’d come sliding to a stop in the driveway, but she’d never lost her cool. Not when I’d noticed the shot-out windows. Not even as we’d crept from room to room looking for bodies. She looked up the hill at the tree line. “Pretty good shooting.”

  She was used to more urban forms of mayhem. Up close and personal. Uzis and Saturday night specials, where hitting something at a distance greater than a hundred feet was pure dumb luck.

  “Deer rifles,” I said. “Telescopic sights. In a place like this, everybody over the age of ten can make that shot.”

  “So…you think they were home when it happened?”

  I thought it over. “Hard to tell,” I said. “If I had to guess, I’d say yes.”

  “There’s no other explanation for the fire extinguisher,”

  she said. “If J.D. or Claudia didn’t put out the fire, who did? The shooters?”

  Smart girl. Always was.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And because I think whoever did this was trying to scare the hell out of them rather than kill them. And if that’s what you’ve got in mind, you make sure they’re home before you start.”

  “Why just trying to scare them?”

  I gestured toward the service panel. “’Cause of that,” I said.

  “I mean…what’s the point of all the marksmanship? What does it matter whether or not they have lights? If you want’em dead, you sneak down, kick the door in and shoot all four of them in their sleep.”

  I could see she wasn’t convinced, so I kept at it. “Picture yourself in the cabin when the shooting starts. You’ve got two little kids sleeping in the next room. What do you do?”

  “I go for the kids,” she said immediately.

  “What then?”

  No hesitation. “I take the children and run for cover.”

  “Which is where?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I bobbed my head at the cabin. “Where in there could you find shelter?”

  She looked over her shoulder at the cabin; I saw the light bulb go on. She bobbed her eyebrows. “It’s a log cabin. Nothing is going to penetrate the logs. Shelter is everywhere except right in front of the windows.”

  “That’s how I see it,” I said. “They take their time…pump a dozen rounds into the electric service, create a little chaos, give the folks inside time to hunker down and then they start laying down a field of gunfire while their buddy sets the other end on fire.”

  “The firebug must have had a lot of faith in his friends to come down here with all that lead flying around.”

  She had a point. If it came down as I was pretty sure it had, whoever had crept down to start
the fire either had very big balls or a very small brain.

  “I agree with you,” she said. “I think they left on their own. I checked the closets and the drawers and the bathroom. Everything personal is gone. There isn’t so much as a toothbrush or a diaper anywhere in there. Adam’s pottytraining seat is gone. They may have left in a hurry, but I feel certain they left.”

  Part of me knew what we were saying made sense, but another part knew how badly we wanted the family to be okay and how having such a personal stake in something colors the judgment. I closed my eyes and thought it through again.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “I’d say we go talk to the local law.”

  “Great minds think alike,” she said and headed for the car. I hoped we were right. I hoped it had come down the way we imagined. That, scared stiff, they’d packed their tents in the dead of night and stolen away. Maybe over to his parents’place. Normally I could have sold myself the story, but I’d already seriously underestimated the situation once. If I was wrong this time…Naaah…not twice in a row.