Homicide Related (17 page)

“No,” Dooley said.

“You got plans for tonight?”

“I thought I'd hook up with Beth,” Dooley said.
If
he could get hold of her. “You? Jeannie coming over?”

“Maybe,” his uncle said. “I don't know.”

Dooley chewed a piece of pork chop and thought about Jeannie being gone so early that morning.

“Is everything okay between you two?” he said.

His uncle looked at him across the table. “What are you? Some kind of relationship counselor?”

Okay, so he was in that mood—again.

Dooley finished his supper.

“You want me to clean up?” he said.

“No,” his uncle said. “You go ahead.”

He left his uncle sitting at the kitchen table.

Dooley's experience with girls could be summed up in one word: Beth. Sometimes, when he was with her or when he was just thinking about her, he couldn't believe she was in his life. More than that, he couldn't believe that she wanted him in her life. Even more than that—he couldn't believe that she wanted him in her bed. Boy, and that was something else he could never believe, even when it was happening. It always went the same way—he'd go to see her when her mother was at work and they'd maybe do a little homework together or they'd start to watch a movie—just start; he didn't think they'd ever actually watched a movie all the way through from start to finish when they were alone in the apartment. Then he'd look at her across the table or next to him on the couch and he wouldn't be able to stop looking, she was that beautiful, with coffee-colored eyes and coffee-colored hair, creamy-white skin and lush pink lips that, the minute he looked at them, all he wanted to do was kiss them. And that's what always ended up happening. At first, she'd been the one to start it, maybe because she saw how unsure he was. He had to be the only guy his age who had never really kissed a girl, not like that, anyway. The thing he liked about her—well, one of the maybe million things he liked about her—was that she seemed a little nervous about it at first, too. But she'd gone ahead and had come right up close to him and had looked up at him and smiled. She'd slipped her arms around him, so he had pulled her close, and he'd kissed her. Boy, he sure did like kissing her.

He liked touching her, too, and she seemed to enjoy it too. Her hands always slid under his shirt when he did. They worked their way down to his jeans. She'd been gentle and soft at first, and then not so gentle and soft. Then, one day, she took off all her clothes. Dooley couldn't get over it.

It always started off great, and it always got better. But if you asked him what the absolute best part was, he'd have to say it was after, when he was feeling good and she was smiling and was lying there in his arms, her head on his chest or on his shoulder, and they were both naked and he could run his hand down over the curve of her hip. He couldn't think of anything he liked to do more.

Right now, though, things weren't so good. Right now he had the opposite feeling, the one he'd been dragging around with him practically his whole life. An empty feeling. An uncertain feeling. He hadn't heard from her in three days. She hadn't returned any of his calls. He pulled on his jacket and left the house. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket. As soon as he was on the sidewalk, he punched in her number.

“Hi, you've reached Beth …”

He headed for the bus stop and stood for a few moments, shifting from foot to foot, waiting for the bus. When it didn't show up right away, he decided to walk. He looked up when he was finally across the street from her building and saw that someone was home. There were lights on in the living room, which had windows from floor to ceiling and a sliding door that opened onto a balcony. There was a light on a little farther down, too, in what he knew was Beth's mother's room. Shit.

A girl about Dooley's age was coming out the security door when Dooley got there. She smiled at him and held the door for him. Dooley thanked her and headed for the elevators. A couple of minutes later, he was knocking on Beth's apartment door.

Beth, not her mother, answered, but she didn't invite him inside. She looked more tired than angry.

“I'm sorry,” Dooley said right away, before she could say anything.

She still didn't ask him in. Instead, she stood in the doorway, her arms wrapped around herself like she was trying to keep warm, and said, “Mr. Puklicz down the hall told my mother that the police were here this morning. He said they wanted to know if he'd seen you around here a week ago Wednesday.”

Uh-oh. The cops had checked out what he'd told them. On the one hand, that could be good news: If the guy had seen him and remembered him, it would get the cops off his case. But it also looked like it could be bad news—exactly what he'd been trying to avoid when he'd kept Beth out of it the first time he'd spoken to the cops. He hadn't wanted them talking to her, asking her if Dooley had been at her place that night, asking what she knew about his mother. But they'd been here. They'd talked to that man who, it turned out, knew her and her mother. What had the cops said to him? What had he said to Beth's mother?

“About that—” he began.

“You know what he told her?”

He'd been wrong about her not being angry. The tightness of her lips told him that she was furious. And the way she was telling it, with that look on her face, gave him a pretty good idea what this Puklicz guy had said.

“He told her he was leaving the building just as you were going in. He said you caught the security door so you didn't have to be buzzed in. He said he didn't try to stop you because he knows you're a friend of mine.” Her eyes were burning into him.

“Look, Beth—”

“He said you looked furtive.”

Furtive.

“He said you looked away from him, like maybe you were hoping he wouldn't recognize you. What were you doing here, Dooley?”

“I—” Should he tell the truth or would it be easier on both of them if he fudged it a little? “I wanted to see you, but—” He made a choice. He went with the lie, a little white one. “I remembered you were with your history team.”

“You
remembered
? I told you when you called that night that that was what I was doing. Didn't you believe me?”

“What? Of
course
I believed you!” This wasn't going at all the way he had hoped. “But I thought maybe I could see you anyway, maybe meet some of your friends.” So far, she hadn't introduced him to any of them. “Then I thought maybe that wasn't such a good idea. I know how serious you are about school. So I didn't come up. I went home.” That part was true. He'd been down there at the elevator, his hand out to push the button, determined to go up there, determined to check on her, to see if she was really doing what she told him she was going to be doing. And then something had happened: Common sense had kicked in. He'd imagined the look on her face when she opened the door and saw him there. He'd thought about what she would think of his explanation—
Hey, I know you're busy with your history team, but I—.
And that had stopped him, that but, and the lame excuse he would have had to follow it with, and the possibility—the probability—that she would see through it. That and the thought that he could well and truly blow it with her.

“I bet your mom freaked out when she heard the police were asking about me, huh?” he said, trying to keep it light, like it was no big deal.

She wasn't buying it.

“Why were the police even here?” she said. “Why were they asking about you?”

“I told you about that, Beth. I told you about how the cops are with me.”

“Right,” she said. “Right.” The sarcasm in her voice rattled him. “Because when we started going out, you told me all about yourself.”

Terrific. She was back to that again—back to Lorraine.

“That's why I came over tonight,” he said. “To apologize.”

“You said you'd told me
everything
.”

He remembered that day. He'd sat down with her, his belly clenched like it was now, his head bowed in shame like it was now, feeling certain that the more he said, the greater his chances were of losing her, just like he felt now, but talking anyway because he felt he owed her that much. He wanted her and she deserved to know what kind of person he was. So he had swallowed hard and started talking. He'd told her every ugly, dirty thing he had ever done, every ugly, dirty thing he wished he could forget. He'd told her all about himself. Himself, not Lorraine. He couldn't remember if he'd even mentioned her.

“I'm sorry,” he said again. “But she wasn't like your mother—not even remotely. Why do you think I live with my uncle?”

“You lied to me,” she said.

“She's gone, Beth. She wasn't part of my life. She's never going to be part of my life. So it doesn't matter.” Why couldn't she see that?

“I don't mean when you told me she was dead,” she said. “I mean the other day, when I was at the store. You told me you hadn't seen her in years. That's what you said, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” he said, cautiously. Now what?

She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. She unfolded it and thrust it at him. It was something she'd cut out of a newspaper, from the obituary page—a picture and a little write-up about Lorraine. He skimmed it. There was no way his uncle was responsible for this. It must have been some of Lorraine's friends, maybe the ones who had been at the funeral, the ones who had insisted that she had been doing so well.

“When I found out your mother had died, I looked in the paper to see if there was anything about it, and I found this. See, it even mentions you.” She pointed out his name. “And that's your mother,” she said, jabbing the picture. “Right?”

It was a photo of Lorraine from back a few years. She looked pretty good in it—smiling, her eyes with a real sparkle to them, although Dooley had no idea what had put it there—maybe a man, maybe a chemical—her hair falling in waves over her shoulders, her dark lashes—she never went anywhere without a couple of layers of mascara accentuating her pale blue eyes.

“That's her, right, Dooley?” Beth said again, her voice harsh now. “Your mother who you haven't seen in years, right?”

“Beth—”

“That's the woman you were talking to outside your school that day,” she said. She shook the newspaper clipping under his nose. “You were talking to her, but when I asked you who she was, you said she was—”

Just some woman.

“—just some woman. That's what you said. You lied to me, Dooley. You keep lying to me.”

Which was his cue to say: “I'm sorry.”

“I would never lie to you,” she said.

She said it so easily, as if it were indisputable.

“I thought you were different,” she said. “I respected you, Dooley.” He couldn't think of a single other person who had ever said that to him, and it made it all the worse that she'd used the past tense. “I respected you because you told me about yourself, even though I knew you were afraid to. I thought, someone who would tell me all that about himself would never lie to me.”

He could have said again that he was sorry. He could have said it over and over, a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times. But he had a sick feeling that it wouldn't make up for what he had already done.

“Come on, Beth. She was high almost all the time.”

“That's not what it says here.” She waved the clipping at him again.

“Her friends wrote that. A person's friends say nice things when a person dies. But she was my
mother.
I
know
what she was like.”

A cell phone trilled. Hers, not his. She reached into her pocket, pulled it out, glanced at the display. Dooley saw it, too.
Nevin.
He looked at her.

“Are you seeing him?” Dooley said.

“I told you, he's on the debating team. We—”

“Take each other on,” Dooley said. “Right. You going to take him on tonight?”

She stiffened. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“You tell me.”

She flipped her phone open. “Nevin,” she said, putting a smile into it. “Give me a minute.” She held the phone to her chest. “Goodnight, Dooley,” she said. She stepped back inside and closed the door.

Eight