Homicide My Own (16 page)

“I don’t know why you guys are staying here anyway,” she said. “If you came here to bust Charlie, what’s holding you back?”

I took one of the bar stools from the other side of the counter and brought it around to my side, in the kitchen proper, and sat down. I drank my Molson’s. I planned to hit her over the head with the empty when I finished.

“They’ve got something else going,” said Houser.

“Shaddup.”

“You are
so
rude,” said Stacey.

“They’re working on some murder case, and that’s why they have to stay ‘til tomorrow.”

“Really? Cool! Who got murdered?”

“Her partner. Odd.”

“That’s pretty odd, all right, because the dude is still alive.”

I was too tired to shut them up. I wanted to push her off the bed, lie down, and sleep for about a year.

“Odd is the dude’s
name
. Now. But it used to be Jeannie, and as near as I can tell, that’s who got murdered.”

Stacey was unable to grasp it. Join the crowd. My head got heavy, and down it went, click by click, into my folded arms on the counter. She said something, and he said something back, but it sounded far away, and I could care less, if I cared at all, which I didn’t. I was out.

It could have been a minute, it could have been an hour. Let’s say longer than a minute, because what woke me up was Gwen crying out, “
Stacey
!” She was standing in the doorway, her arms full of freshly laundered clothes. Her fourteen-year-old daughter was on her knees in front of the wicker rocker, her blonde head bobbing rhythmically between Houser’s legs. Startled at the sudden appearance of her mother and my awakening, she bounded back into bed, wiping her mouth with the bottom of her t-shirt. She wasn’t wearing any bra. Houser, one-handed, struggled to stuff his glistening and quivering thing back into his pants and zip up. It was not a pretty sight.

Gwen, defeated all over again, dropped the clothes on the foot of the bed and started sorting, shaking her muddled head in unhappy disbelief.

I don’t know if it was the mother in me or the menopausal madwoman. It sure wasn’t the cop. I kicked the barstool out from under me and I was on that bed in a nanosecond. The bedspread fell off me and for the second time in one afternoon I was publicly naked. Stacey fought back and cursed, but she was no match for me. There are druggies on Sprague Street who would rather be brought down by a canine officer than by me.

I pinned her arms behind her and got her over my knees and gave her the mother of all spankings. She regressed from a garbage-mouthed teenager to a spastic pre-pubescent, to one of the terrible two’s, to a whimpering infant. Somewhere along that reverse psychic catapult she promised me the largest lawsuit known to man and the sure end to my career as a police officer. I could care less.

I retrieved my wrap and pulled it around me. Nobody said a word. The only sound now was Stacey’s sniffling. Gwen had the shadow of a grateful look. Houser was aghast and maybe a little scared that I’d now get to him, which I might have, except my fury was spent, and he was, after all, a man manacled to a rocking chair. He didn’t go to her, she came to him. All right, he was supposed to say no, but he’s only a man and they’re all dogs. I gave him the old one-two with my eyes. That was enough.

By then, Odd pulled up in the car. I decided not to burden him with a briefing of what had happened in his absence. No one else was eager to tell him. That way, at the hearing, he could deny all knowledge, etc.

He came inside, a grocery bag in one arm, and said, “Guess what, Quinn? There was a twelve-year-old boy used to follow Jeannie everywhere. He was in love with her.”

Traumatized, Stacey was half-asleep, still sniffling. Houser slowly rocked, his chin on his chest. Gwen folded clothes automatically. I took my freshly laundered jeans, t-shirt, underwear, and socks, and went into the bathroom. Through the door I could hear Odd ask, probably to Houser, “What’s wrong with her?” He could have been asking about any one of the three females under that roof.

I turned on the blower so that I wouldn’t hear them talk and they couldn’t hear me pee.

Gwen’s claim to being a good cook was more or less true, though I suspected her range was narrow. The scope of her recipes, not the stove she cooked on. We had mac ‘n cheese with little cut up smoked sausages inside, the top nicely browned and crusty, and a cucumber and sour cream salad. My mother used to do the same meal and serve it with her homebrewed iced tea in the summers. Here, I had another Molsons. We sat at a little round dinnette, and Odd had to go get a couple folding chairs from Frank. He had been gone awhile for that and I knew he was pursuing his case, which I had all but forgotten since my spontaneous combustion earlier.

Gwen put on some of the CDs from Houser’s bag and we all sat down to dinner. Before digging in, we joined hands and Stacey, as the youngest, said Grace while we bowed our heads. Houser was on my right, his left hand cuffed to the chair, so I reached down and took the cuffed hand.

It was a grim little dinner at first, but the homey hot mac and the refreshing cool cuke salad soon restored us and before long we were like a family with issues that might never be resolved but at least could be put on hold longer enough to get through dinner.

“The secret,” said Gwen, “ is the Velveeta. I’ve tried ‘tillamook but the good cheddars don’t bind the mac like Velveeta.”

I mumbled some words of interest, like the world is full of wonders, and why shouldn’t Velveeta turn out to be one of them. I did not want to shut down any semblance of normality, but on the other hand I did not want to encourage more stupid talk. I asked Gwen what she did for a living, single parent and all that.

“I work construction,” she said.

“Really?” She didn’t look the type, woman in a man’s world.
I
was the type.

“Highway construction. I’m the one with the orange vest and hardhat and the two-sided sign, stop and slow. I either wave you through or make you stop and wait.”

“Is that a good job?”

“When it’s not raining or freezing or you’re almost taken out by some driver in too big a hurry, talking on their cell phone and all. It pays the rent, but to tell you the truth, all I ever wanted to be was a homemaker.”

“Mother,” whispered Stacey, a warning.

“But you need the right partner for that job,” she went on, “and I could never quite swing it. Tried it three times. Stacey’s father was number two. He was a long-distance hauler who one day just couldn’t find his way back.”

“Do you always have to tell everybody every lousy detail, mom?” said Stacey. “Couldn’t you just chill out?”

“The last husband was working out okay, ‘til he started getting fresh with Stacey.”

“Mom!”

“Well, it’s true!”

“That’s all right, Gwen,” I said, “you don’t have to talk anymore.”

I knew she felt obliged. She’d washed our clothes, made our dinner, and now thought she had to fill the dead air, so that the imposition of her and her virgin daughter might be made a tad more palatable.

I changed the subject and asked Odd what the other incurable romantics had to say.

“Who?

“Frank and Angie.”

“About what?”

“You know what. You were gone a long time for a couple of folding chairs.”

“They told me that Jeannie’s father is dead. He died a few years after, of a broken heart, everyone says. So it’s just the mother. She lives not far from here, in the same house.”

“Everything is not far from here, we’re on an island. Everything but the world.”

At the mention of Jeannie, both Stacey and Houser perked up. They looked at each other, in the know.

“I think I must have missed part of the conversation,” said Gwen.

“You miss most of everything,” said Stacey, and in the know of that was the real heartbreak.

“Respect your mother,” I said. I knew she was right, though, and I knew what had been missed.

“I don’t want to be presumptuous…,” said Houser, and everybody at the table looked at him. For a moment I thought the attention would render him powerless to go on. Then he said, “…but maybe we can help. Five heads are better than two. And I’m trained in the analytical process.”

“What?” asked Gwen. “What’s going on?”

“Somebody got murdered, okay?” said Stacey. “It doesn’t concern you.”

Gwen’s fork stopped on the way to her mouth.

“Don’t worry, it happened a long time ago,” I said.

“Who?” she asked.

Odd and I looked into our plates.

Houser nodded in Odd’s direction and said, “Him.”

The fork in Gwen’s hand started to shake. Pieces of mac ‘n cheese fell back to her plate. She laid down the fork and folded her hands in her lap.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand anything.”

I brought them all up to speed. I don’t know why. Maybe because arrangements would eventually have to be made, and we were a group now, whether we liked it or not.

I expected some skepticism. I would not have been surprised by derisive laughter. Instead, all three of them gave my news the most serious kind of attention. Not that any of them, or either of us, for that matter, knew any more about past lives than what we had seen on TV talk shows: middle-aged women claiming to have been Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette. Or phoney channelers talking in fake voices to ancient masters, for a fee. Or psychics who could make that long distance call for you to your dearly departed, if the price was right. I never saw a psychic yet who could tell you what the weather would be like two weeks down the road.

Nobody jumped on that end of it, though. It was the double-murder itself got to them. If Odd had an inside track, and it seemed very much that he did, then he had to go with it, take it to the end and bring down the son of a bitch who blew away those two kids. On that, there was consensus, with one possible hold-out, me.

Stacey, especially, got into it, identifying with Jeannie, and confirming from her own raging hormones that Odd was surely right in his belief that it was an older man, and that the motive was jealousy.

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “If she hooked up with some other guy, she
told
somebody. You have to, you can’t keep a thing like that to yourself.”

“You told somebody…about us?” asked Houser

“
Duh.
I told Britney. I tell Britney everything.”

“I told you not to tell anyone. You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Anyone but Britney. You didn’t tell anybody?”

“No,” said Houser, “are you crazy?”

“Well…well… Britney saw me writing your name in my secret notebook and she made me tell.”

“You wrote my
name
?”

“A thousand times,” she said. “I
loved
you.”

Houser looked like a man contemplating suicide by mac ‘n cheese asphixiation.

“Odd,” I said, “you mentioned a secret notebook.”

“I did?”

“When we were talking to Karl Gutshall. You said he tried to break into your…into Jeannie’s locker and read her secret notebook.”

“I don’t remember that.”

Joan Osborne was singing…about God, of all things.

“Do all young girls keep secret notebooks?” Odd asked Stacey.

“For sure,” she said.

“I wish I’d known that,” said Houser.

“Did you?” asked Odd, of me. “Keep a secret notebook?”

I could still see it, after all these years, pink, full of swirls, in each swirl a dream, but those I did not remember, not the dreams, just the swirls, so many of them.

“Even I did,” said Gwen.

“Mom, please,” said Stacey.

“Well, I did. I’m not going to tell you what was in it. That’s for me to know and nobody to find out.”