All for One (11 page)

“You’re Joey,” Dooley said.

Go away. Leave us alone. It’s all right now. Just go away.

Mary cleared her throat, halting the one sided exchange. “Joey. You can take your seat. You did very good.”

He backed away and waded through congratulatory offerings to his desk. Some were surprised that he wasn’t smiling.

*  *  *

Almost three, the final bell threatening, and Dooley watched order descend upon the class. Two students went about collecting any refuse from the floor, one took the erasers from the chalk tray and beat them semi-clean out on the stoop, another three gave the desks a quick wipe-down while the rest of the class, seated quietly, held their books on their laps.

Elena went to the duty roster posted next to the coat closet and ran a finger down the names for this week. She was not one of the chosen and returned to her seat.

Dooley came forward from his mini-seat at the back and stood next to Mary’s desk. “This is impressive.”

She looked up from her lesson plans. “It’s what’s expected.”

He nodded and stood quietly as two students approached the desk. Two that he recognized.

“Miss Austin,” PJ began, Joey at her side, both avoiding the detective’s two-way gaze. “The council met with Greg yesterday.”

Mary closed the lesson plan book and folded her hands over it. Seriousness molded her face. “And what was the decision?”

“He admitted violating school rules,” PJ informed her. “His punishment is going to be serving two recesses in the library shelving books for Mrs. Toomey.”

“That sounds appropriate,” Mary commented.

Dooley said nothing until the two had returned to their desks. “They handle discipline?”

“Of minor matters.”

“Only minor?”

Mary breathed slow and said quietly, “You’re as deft with insinuation as a you are at the chalkboard.”

“I played along,” Dooley said. “You got your shot in. You showed me who was in charge. And them.”

“You were a good sport today,” Mary agreed. “That’s all I know about you so far.”

“You make that sound like a bad thing.”

“It’s neither good or bad. It’s what you were like for a while. That’s all.”

Dooley’s brow furrowed. “You don’t have to like me. This isn’t about you.”

“I have a lot invested in these children,” Mary responded. “If it’s about them, it’s about me.”

The cool exchange passed as Dooley looked over the room. “They seem older than they should.”

“Because they take care of themselves? Pick up their things? Detective Ashe, low expectations are the enemy of any child. They’re very capable if given the chance to succeed.”

Dooley crossed his arms. “The drill. A chance for the less capable to succeed? With others pulling for them? You were one of the ones neither team wanted when you were little...right?”

“You’re more in tune than I thought.”

He snickered. “Thank you.”

“Maybe you’ll learn even more tomorrow.”

“No. Not tomorrow.”

“We won’t be graced?”

“I have some reading to do.”

“One can never read enough,” Mary said as she stood. “It’s been...educational.”

Dooley stepped back as she brushed past, a delicate hint of the perfume she wore charming him. He watched her go to where Elena Markworth sat, an emotional self exile wrapping the little girl like a familiar blanket, and kneel close. She talked softly to Elena, putting a hand to the back of the little girl’s neck, saying something that Dooley could not hear, but that elicited a meek nod.

Instinct made him survey the other five. He recalled the pictures in the file, informal snapshots taken against the gray wall of some police interview room. Small, stony faces that could not hide the dread the moment had chiseled upon them. He compared the then with what he saw now.

Joey. Paula Jean. Jeff. Michael. Bryce.

Then was also now. The worry was there, in their eyes, and in the nervous twiddling of their thumbs.

And who were they? Dooley asked himself. And who was Elena? Her mark had been left on the instrument of Guy Edmond’s demise, as had theirs. She was one of them.

But she was also not. Not one of the junta. She was the outsider. The outsider who was inside. Invited or compelled?

This was the one Joel had expected to talk. Dooley knew this without having to be told. And if
he
had expected her to talk...

The final bell blared long and sharp, masking the clatter of twenty-odd sixth graders suddenly freed from invisible anchors. Mary finished with Elena and pointed to the assignment list on the far chalkboard. “States of matter tonight. Please remember.”

Bodies trickled from the rows of desks, narrowing to a singular flow near the door and spilling down the stoop to a spreading wave behind the bungalows. Elena was second out the door, well ahead of the others.

“She’s a troubled little girl,” Dooley commented when Mary was back at her desk. “Did she say anything?”

“Detective Ashe, I am not on your side,” Mary declared. “You’ll have to find another informant.”

She dropped into her chair and drew a stack of math papers onto her blotter, red pen hunting errors. When she cooled off a moment later and looked up the room was empty.

*  *  *

Joey, PJ, and Bryce were the first to round the corner to the ball field, eyes searching the crush pouring toward the main gate.

“There she is,” Bryce said. He had picked Elena out, stuck behind a wall of fifth graders that, regardless of chronology, eclipsed her in every dimension.

“Go talk to her,” Joey told PJ. Michael and Jeff came up as the suggestion was heeded.

The vice president of room 18 sprang into a trot that put her alongside Elena in no time flat. PJ paced her in silence for a moment, then asked, “How are you?”

Elena looked up at her friend and peeled away from the crowd, letting the masses pass while she slowed. PJ followed her lead. “I’m okay.”

“We were worried about you yesterday.”

“My parents kept me out.”

“So everything is okay?” PJ glanced briefly back at the rest, then turned again to Elena. “Everything?”

A circle of leaves crackled beneath the girls’ feet as they walked beneath the bare, gangling limbs of a maple tree. Elena stopped very near the trunk and faced PJ, looking beyond at the guys. “I didn’t tell. I know they want to know.”

“You’re right,” PJ said. “They do. But I’m asking about you.”

“I’m trying.”

“That’s all right,” PJ reassured her. “Everything is going all right. No one’s in trouble. Just like we figured.”

Elena watched a group of giggling third graders pass, and said, “My mom’s going to pick me up out front. It would be better if you didn’t walk all the way out with me.”

PJ nodded. “I understand. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, tomorrow.” Elena’s eyes fled before she turned away. A minute later she was funneling through the main gate, and PJ had been joined under the tree.

“She didn’t tell,” PJ said when her friends came alongside.

“She says,” Jeff doubted coldly.

“So help me, Bernstein,” PJ threatened, spinning toward Jeff. What she saw just beyond his cocky facade quashed any further recrimination. The others noticed PJ’s abrupt retreat into silence and turned.

“Good afternoon,” Dooley said.

Five distrustful glares were the only return greeting.

Leave us alone
, Joey silently urged, letting
his
stare now command the man who had come unwelcome into their world. He wanted so much to actually say the words, to tell this man all that he could tell him, to explain all that he knew he could explain. But that was not possible. He could say nothing. This man was their enemy. Silence was their friend.

“We’ve gotta go,” Joey said, and showed the detective his back. PJ followed, then Jeff and Michael together. Bryce was the last to leave, backing away, unable to take his eyes off the man.

“Bryce, c’mon,” Michael called to him. The class treasurer spun and ran toward his friend.

Dooley stood quiet beneath the maple and listened to the wind wheeze through its naked limbs. He matched the tune, whistling as he walked toward the main office. When he got there Mrs. Nelson had a box waiting for him. It was brimming with files.

Nine

Thunkin’ pain, Dooley told himself as he tapped two aspirin into his palm and washed the tablets down with a swallow of water. That’s what his mother would have called it. The cause sat next to him on the small couch, a lopsided stack of files leaning toward him like a tawny cornice, threatening to avalanche against his left leg. He’d read through each at least three times, and the last one, which topped the mound and might as well have been stamped ‘Account Closed’, maybe five, or maybe six. He’d stopped counting.

Dooley opened it gently where it lay once more, peeling the manila cover back slowly to reveal the face of Guy Edmond, the image captured in his school photo taken just weeks ago. Dooley stared at it, at Guy’s living face, his screaming crack of a smile, his Cimmerian eyes, the camera flash caught in their blackness like bolts of lightning.

The aspirin sizzled in his stomach.

Dooley let the file folder close. He put a pair of fingers to his left temple and kneaded circles into the flesh. His eyes were leaden and his neck hummed with a constant ache that dripped annoyingly from his head with each beat of his heart. A faucet suddenly leaking to the metronome rhythm in his chest, spitting liquid pain that sparked as it hissed off muscles pulled taut and nerves that smoldered.

Dooley pushed the files into their box on the floor and sat back into the cushions. When he blinked, his eyes only reluctantly opened again. Sleep begged his company.

He might have succumbed to its call had he not heard the tap of narrow heels on his porch, the latch turning, and the same cadence moving back toward the kitchen.

“Hello, Karen.”

The footsteps ceased briefly, then began again, slowly now, coming toward the den.

Dooley moved not an inch as his ex came into view, though his eyes worked in their sockets admiring the short red number hugging her body. A cocktail dress, it was called. But he knew Karen. This was her
Fuck Me
dress. “You still have a key.”

She dangled it between them. “I called earlier to see if you were in. You don’t answer your phone?”

“Do you have a date?” Dooley inquired. There was no art in his probe, just an ambiguous jealousy that left him wanting purity in his emotion.

Karen retraced part of her path and entered the kitchen. The fluorescent lights buzzed on. “I figured since you weren’t here you wouldn’t mind.”

“Mind what?” Dooley asked. He heard glass clink against glass and saw the glow from the kitchen dissolve. Then those heels again, coming his way.

“Mind me borrowing this bottle of Crescent Valley Pinot,” Karen said. She held the bottle out by it neck and cocked her head, a wanting innocence gracing her splendid face.

“A ninety-two?” Dooley commented. “He must be special.”

Karen hugged the bottle appreciatively and strolled to the window. “He might be. I’ll search high and low to replace it. I promise.”

As she looked out over the dark water, moonlit whitecaps curling onto the shore, Dooley savored the subdued contours of her form. He found himself lost in remembrance of her skin, and how soft it was after a gentle toweling in the morning.

“I miss the view, you know,” Karen said.

A repetition of the comment occurred to Dooley, but he knew it would sound crass. Hell, it was crass. “Karen?”

She turned to see him coveting her shamelessly from across the room. “If you’d leered at me like that when were married we might have saved some money on lawyers.”

“You look really good.”

“Oh, God, Dooley. Don’t compliment me. Maul me with your eyes all you want, but don’t say nice things like that. I want to get lucky tonight, and there’s no way that’s going to happen if I’m thinking about how nice it was to hear you say what you said.” She took a few quick steps toward him and glanced at the bottle of Pinot nuzzled in her cleavage. “Do I let this decant?”

“Ten minutes should be good.”

Karen stood frozen in place and shape for a long moment, then rolled her eyes at the ceiling and spun completely around, her knees bending so she ended up in a crouch. Her dress strained to cover any thigh. “Don’t be so damned cute. We let this happen once before and it sucked afterward. Divorce means no sex. They should make you say vows when you split up, you know. ‘I promise to like, not speak ill of, and keep my genitalia from thee.’”

“I’m just sitting here,” Dooley said, pleading his innocence.

She scolded him with a look, and in doing so noticed the box of files on the floor next to him. She rose slowly. “What’s that?”

Dooley glanced at the box. “Some files.”

“You’re retired,” she reminded him obviously. Suspicion spilled into her expression and tone. “Since when do retired cops have a files?”

“I’m helping out with something.”

“You don’t need to work anymore,” Karen said.

“I’m just...consulting.” It was a feeble lie and he knew that she knew it.

“Dammit, Dooley, I divorced you before all that crap with Jimmy Vincent started because you couldn’t say no to anyone or anything, except me. I played at hating you for a while and that made it easier when you tried to give a big, permanent
no
to everybody.” She took the wine in one hand and, with the other, roughly grabbed one of his arms and turned the soft flesh of his wrist upward. Diagonal pink welts scarred the spot. “Wasn’t this enough punishment for saying yes all the time?”

Dooley drew his arm away. “It wasn’t that.”

“Oh?” Karen said doubtfully. “If you cut across the veins, you don’t want to die. A cry for help, maybe. Cut up and down you lay the veins wide open. You
want
to die.” She smiled curiously at him. “You did this angle kind of thing. What was that for? Hedging your bets, just in case you decided you deserved a little more pain. Is that what it is now? Time for another dose.”

“That’s not it at all.”

“Bull,” Karen countered. She shook her head slowly and said, “Six months ago I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room wondering if my ex husband is going to die, wondering if I should be there. I’ll always love you Dooley Ashe, but I can’t stand caring about you. Caring about you is second-hand anguish. I hate that you make me feel that way.”