The Ruthless

by David Putnam

Over dessert of canned circle-cut pineapple, she told him that Melvin and Cleo were going to stay a couple of days on the couch. He hesitated, going over the options in his head, the cause and effect of each possible answer. He didn’t want these sketchy people staying in his home. Not for one minute more, let alone a couple of days. But he had to remember the house was half hers as well and to keep peace in his new family. He put on a fake smile and said, “How nice.” The two words threatened to choke him.

  That night in bed after they’d made up a pallet of couch and chair cushions on the floor for their guests, they argued for the first time. She slept with her back to him instead of cuddled up close. The next morning, he went to work mad and at the same time hurt that she couldn’t see his side of it.

  All day he mulled over how he had handled the whole situation and convinced himself he’d been wrong and would apologize. When he arrived home, no dinner waited on the table. Bea sat on the couch with her arms across her chest, angry and not radiating one iota of love. She didn’t have to say a word. He’d do anything to get back what he’d lost. Anything.

  He sat next to her, put his arm around her, and nuzzled her neck. “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “Our guests left. You ran them off. You should be ashamed the way you acted.”

  “I’m sorry, really I am.”

  She glared at him a moment longer and then said, “Are you hungry? Do you want me to make you something to eat?”

  “I want you not to be mad at me.”

  She struggled to get out of his snuggle and stood. She leaned down and kissed him on the lips. “I could never stay mad at a man as cute as you. How does warmed-up Chung King sound?”

  “Wonderful.”

  That night in bed after they made long, slow love and he lay with his head on her hot, sweaty tummy, he joked with her. “Bea, honey?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  He patted her tummy. “I think you may have eaten a little too much leftover Chung King.”

  She whispered, “No. That’s our own little Chung King.”

  He jumped up. “Whaaat? Do you mean what I think you mean?”

  “I sure do—Daddy.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  DAD SUDDENLY QUIT telling the story. I wanted more. I had to have more. He just had to tell the rest of it. I was his little Chung King. “What happened? You can’t just stop right in the middle of the story.”

  Dad stared at the wall across the room, lost in a sad reminiscence, a life I knew nothing about, one he had tried hard to forget. I could see it in his face, a horrible emotion he’d always kept hidden. I’d been the one to dredge it all up.

  I waited.

  He said nothing.

  I didn’t want him to hurt anymore and asked, “Then, why don’t you tell me about Alonzo? How’s he doing? Does he look okay?”

  The ugly emotion that filled Dad’s expression shifted back to the good old Dad smile. “Don’t be silly, you just saw him last night. He’s fine, just fine. Better now that he gets to see his blood relatives, people who love him. You should’ve seen how happy he was to see me.” Dad put his hand over his heart. “I stayed with him for a couple of hours. We played on the floor with his favorite toys.”

  Dad must’ve taken along Alonzo’s favorite toys. What a great idea.

  “That’s good.” I again fought down the jealousy, silly as it was. Dad was Alonzo’s great-grandfather and had every right to see him. If I tried to see him more than the one time, Child Protective Services would hear about it and move Alonzo to another foster home farther away, maybe in the next county. I wouldn’t push it, no matter how much I wanted to. I’d made my bed and now I had to accept the result. I’d been the one to make the conscious decision to crush Derek Sams’ fingers in the door crack. I took a second to weigh the consequences of that act. I knew it was wrong to derive so much pleasure from it and didn’t care. But was the act worth the cost of not seeing my grandson? No. Not by a damn sight. But I had confirmed my belief about what happened to poor little Albert. To let that kind of secret go unanswered would’ve eaten away at our lives and left that question forever on the forefront of our minds. No, it was something that had to be done and I didn’t regret it. My mind shifted all on its own away from the heated emotion.

  “Oh. Shoot, I forgot something.” I stood and padded barefooted over to the phone on the wall.

  “What?” Dad asked.

  “Nothing big, just something about work.”

  I froze. Dad didn’t know I’d returned to the job and that I now worked at the sting at TransWorld.

  “Work?” Dad asked.

  “My old boss, you remember Wicks, he asked me to talk to a guy we arrested two years ago to see if I could get him to talk about a suspect who had possibly killed the judge and his wife.” No part of that statement was a lie and still blackness crowded me a little bit more.

  I took a deep breath having dodged that bullet and picked up the phone as I searched for the florist’s number pinned to the corkboard on the wall. I kept the number handy. In the past, I would periodically send Esther, the court clerk, flowers with an unsigned card. She thought she had a secret admirer. The joy it brought her would last a couple of weeks. I never told her and kept sending them even after I’d gone back to the violent crimes team. The judge figured it out early on without me saying a word. He’d give me a knowing look every time the roses were delivered.

  I dialed and got the owner of the florist shop. I pulled the address out of my pocket. “Hey, Lori, this is Bruno Johnson. Fine. Fine. And you? Good. Hey, I’d like to send a dozen red roses to a Mrs. Agnes Ray who lives at 1535 East 113th Street in Los Angeles. Yes, that’s right, and I want you to send the roses on the first of every month. Yes, please send me the bill. No … okay, wait. Yes, on the card put ‘From your loving son.’ Yes. Yes. Thank you so much. Goodbye.” I hung up.

  Dad said from the couch, “What in the world was that all about?” I told him the whole story about what happened in the jail with Little Genie.

  He sat back and stared.

  “Don’t give me that look. You’d have done the same thing if you were in my place.”

  “I don’t know, Bruno, sometimes when I think you’ve crossed over to a place where I can’t reach you anymore, you go and do something like this.”

  My face flushed hot.

  He nodded to himself. “Okay.” His voice came out lower and husky. “You really want to hear the rest of this?”

  I hurried over to the couch and sat down. “You know I do.” Even though saying that I did came with a price.

  He swallowed hard. “I think it’s wrong to tell you, but you’re a grown man and you get to make your own choices. I don’t want … never mind. I’ll tell you what happened. Then you can judge—”

  “I’d never judge you, Dad.”

  He took in a deep breath and held it while I waited. He finally nodded, turned his head to stare at the wall across the room, and started to tell the part of his past I so desperately needed to hear.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  DAD CAME HOME late on a chilly Tuesday night after taking half of another mail route in addition to his regular one. He needed the overtime. Heat hit him in the face when he opened the door, along with the loud racket of a crying child. His child. The house was all closed up. Bea had two burners on the stove going full blast to take the edge off the cold that permeated the house’s paper-thin construction. Little Bruno, barely four months old, lay in the bassinet left alone and crying his lungs out. Bea wasn’t anywhere in the house or out in the backyard. He picked Bruno up and gently bounced and shushed him, all the while whispering in his ear that everything was okay, until Bruno quieted.

  A few minutes later, he heard the muffled sound of a car pulling up to the curb out front. He parted the curtains and caught Bea slithering from the front seat of a newer Kelly-green Ford. The winter sun set early and the moonless night made it difficult to see, but he was still able to make out that scoundrel Melvin Shackleford,
and his girl Cleo Elliott with two t’s. Shackleford sat behind the wheel with Cleo right up beside him. How could a two-bit huckster like Shackleford afford a car like that when he didn’t have a job? Bea smiled and laughed and waved as the car roared off snatching the door from her hand and closing on its own.

  Xander ground his teeth, his jaw muscle working hard as he tried to quell his anger. He hurried into the bedroom and set Bruno down in the playpen and gave him a toy. He came back out just as Bea came through the door. She lost her smile when she saw him.

  He kept his clenched fists down at his side. “Where have you been?”

  She held up her hands. “Now, honey, don’t go getting all mad. I was only gone a minute. I had to run to the store to get some … some milk for Bruno. He’s hungry.”

  “You left him alone?”

  “Just for a minute, honey. It’s no big deal, just to run to the store. I do it all the time, but just for a minute.”

  “Where’s the milk?”

  “I … I got there and realized I forgot my money.”

  He pointed to the bassinet. “He’s too big to be in that. We talked about this, remember? I brought it out here last night because I’m going to put it out in the yard this weekend and sell it.” For months during the pregnancy she hounded him about having a bassinet. As if they couldn’t have a baby without one. Sometimes she spent money frivolously in her desire to be somebody she wasn’t. Bruno used the bassinet for four months until he grew too big and that was it, a huge waste of money.

  “And it’s not okay to leave him alone, not even for a minute. I have to tell you, Bea, I am not happy about this.”

  She gave him a wave. “Oh, what do you know.” She sat on the couch.

  He’d been told at work by his friends that women could act strangely right after having a child and that he should try to be understanding until it passed. He had no problem about being understanding, just not when it concerned the safety of their child. He moved to the couch and sat next to her and immediately smelled alcohol. “You’ve been drinking. How long were you really gone?”

  She struggled to her feet. “I’m going to bed. You try watching him and see what it’s like. He takes up every hour, every minute of my time.”

  Xander slept on the couch with Bruno in his arms. They couldn’t afford it, but the next day he hired a sitter while he was at work.

  For the next month, Bea would get home just before or just after he did. Six times she didn’t get home until after nine p.m. He tried talking to her and she’d have none of it. All he could do was wait and hope she’d snap out of it.

  One night in late April, long after midnight, he’d fallen asleep sitting on the couch with Bruno lying next to him. He was exhausted from working full-time and taking care of such a small child after he got home.

  The front door burst open. Out of a dead sleep he jumped up ready to defend his home, to defend his son against this violent interloper.

  His fists raised, he confronted a wild-eyed Bea. She wore a new dress he’d never seen before, made of red crepe with little fake pearls. The dress hugged her figure. It was torn at one shoulder and sagged down revealing her bra and the top of her breast. She clutched his arm. “Help me, Xander, please help me!”

  “What on earth, girl? What’s the matter? What’s happened?” He moved around her and checked up and down the street before closing the door. In the darkness of the living room, she’d gone to the couch and sat cocked forward, her arms under her breasts as she swayed to and fro.

  “How did you get here?”

  She shook her head as she tried to catch her breath. His arm suddenly felt wet. He looked down and found blood. He rushed to the couch. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” He moved his hands all over her looking for the injury and didn’t find one. Thank goodness.

  “What?” She checked her arms and hands. “No. It’s not mine.” She reached down and picked up Bruno as tears filled her eyes. “I’m scared, honey, really scared.”

  He didn’t want her holding Bruno, getting someone else’s blood on him, but let it go if holding him calmed her down.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Bruno roused, nuzzled her neck, and fell back to sleep. Bea still had a hard time catching her breath. Xander went to the kitchen and wet a dishtowel with warm water. He wiped down her arms and face and exposed shoulder. Her breathing calmed some.

  Blood marred the sleeping Bruno’s bedclothes. Xander got up again and poured her three fingers of E&J brandy in a jelly jar glass, thought about it, and poured a little more. As she gulped it down, he tried to take Bruno from her. She latched onto him and wouldn’t give him up.

  She calmed even more while he waited patiently on the couch for the alcohol to take effect.

  Finally, she said, “Honey, I made a mistake. You’re allowed one mistake in life, aren’t you? Right, honey? One mistake?”

  “Of course you are. Just tell me what happened.”

  “Okay, okay.” She gulped a breath as she started to get spun out again. “We … we did that deal. You know the one?”

  He knew immediately what she was talking about. “Oh, my dear Lord.”

  “No, Xander, don’t say that. Please, I’m scared to death already. You have to help me, please.”

  “I will, just give me Bruno, okay?” She let him have the baby. He set him down on the couch and took up both of her hands. “Now tell me.”

  She gulped air again. “Okay, like I said, we did that job. The telephone man job. We followed the telephone man around and caught him on an empty street and conked him on the head. Easy as pie, just like I told you it would be.”

  “We? You mean with Shackleford and Cleo?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So all the blood … it belongs to the guy you hit over the head?”

  “What? No. No.”

  Her eyes searched his, seeking comfort.

  “Go on, then.”

  “Okay, Shackleford conked this guy on the head and … and you’re not going to believe this. It was just like I told you it would be, but more. Much, much more. The back of that old guy’s van was filled with bags and bags of coins.” Her fearful demeanor shifted back to wild-eyed excitement as her eyes grew large. “So many bags, Xander … So many, the weight almost popped the tires to our car. We drove to a motel and waited until dark to take all those bags in the room. We counted for a long time and tried to put them in rolls. There were just too many coins. I got tired of so many coins. I never thought I’d say that. And my hands”—she looked down at her hands—“you can’t believe how many times I washed the black off my hands. Money is so terribly dirty.” The E&J brandy started to work. Her body gave way to too many hours of adrenaline rush and such a large dose of E&J. Her eyelids drooped and her speech slowed.

  “What happened? Where’d the blood come from?”

  “Whaaat?”

  “Never mind.” He got up and draped an afghan over her. He stood in the middle of the living room watching her sleep, torn, more torn than he’d ever been in his life. He didn’t know how long he stood there.

  Finally, he went to the telephone, picked it up, and dialed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  DAD SHOOK MY shoulder. I came out of a dreamworld filled with a mother who didn’t have a face, just a smudged blur of brown skin. I sat with Mom in a car parked running at the curb in front of Bank of the West. She held a big Colt .45 in her small, delicate hand that rested in her lap, as she tried to explain to me that it was okay to take money from other folks as long as you spent it wisely afterward and didn’t waste it. Spent it on the wonderful things she always wanted and couldn’t have, a large house with regular heating, beautiful clothes, and food that filled your stomach and didn’t leave you wanting.

  How would Doctor Abrams interpret that one?

  Dad said, “You told me to wake you at eight. I forgot to tell you there was a note on the door. Here.”

  “Whaaat?”

  “There was a n
ote on the door. You told me to wake you at eight.”

  “Yes, thank you.” I got up and shook off the fatigue and the stiffness from falling asleep on the couch. I shuffle-stepped barefoot into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Back in my bedroom, I took a set of clothes from my dresser, laid them on the closed toilet in the bathroom, and stepped in the hot water. Steam roiled up all around. I let the hot water sluice over my body and ease a deep-seated tension as my mind went over the surreal story Dad told a few hours earlier. This version of his history dispelled all previous images of a mother I’d been forced to make up on my own. I could never justify any motivation as to why he would not tell me about her. Now it all made sense.

  A few hours ago, he had ended his story with my mom out cold on the couch while he dialed the phone. Tears had streamed down his face as he said the last words and stopped talking. I couldn’t ask him who he called back then or what had happened to her. I wanted to know but wasn’t sure I could ask him to once again make that trip back to a time he would rather forget, a time that caused him so much pain.

  With a refreshed mind, my thoughts quickly shifted to the obvious: poor Dad, what he had gone through. And worse, that he’d kept it bottled up for so long dealing with it all on his own.

  Then another thought struck. Was I genetically predisposed to my mother’s criminal behavior? Was that why I had been so good at tracking down murderers? Because I thought like them and instinctively knew what moves they’d make before they made them as the law continued to close in? Was I destined to eventually deviate and break bad like Wicks had already thought I had? Would I turn criminal and have to run from the law the rest of my life?

  No. Not a chance. I was a deputy sheriff and I’d never give that up. Never. This same resolve had been challenged before and that’s how I knew. I was tan and green through and through.

  I dried off, dressed in my usual truck driver garb—the khaki shirt with the TW patch and denim pants—and came out into the living room carrying my shoes and socks. I sat down on the couch to put them on.