Late Rain (2 page)

“You’re lying, Stanley. I heard what I heard.”

“Corrine,” Buddy began, but she told him to shut up. Her hands had begun to tremble, and Corrine dropped them into her lap, balled them into fists. Something lurched in her stomach.

Stanley went back to cutting his meat.

Corrine knew she should drop the whole thing, but she couldn’t shake Stanley’s mocking smile or the way his eyes had zeroed in on hers when she challenged him. Her anger pushed her on, and she leaned forward and said, “You couldn’t pay a hooker enough to fuck you, Stanley.”

He barked out a short laugh, then winked. “You might be surprised, Corrine.” He paused and shrugged. “And then again, maybe not.”

Corrine turned to Buddy. “I want to go home. Now.”

Stanley waved off her words. “A little misunderstanding,” he said. “That’s all it was. You need to be more forgiving, Corrine. You’re too high-strung.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hey, what are we talking about here? Words. That’s all. Sticks and stones and all that.” He paused and ran a napkin across his mouth. “Just words, Corrine. Besides, if you think about it, can’t a looker be a hooker or a hooker a looker? It’s like the song says, ‘You say Poe-tay-toe, I say, Poe-tat-toe.’ Any way you slice it, in the end, you’re still looking at French fries.”

“I’m leaving, Buddy. I’ll wait for you in the living room.”

“Hey, what about dessert?” Stanley said, not bothering to get up when Corrine walked past.

The living room bore the stamp of Stanley’s origins. It was dreary and oppressive and cluttered, and despite Stanley’s net worth, relentlessly blue-collar in its furnishings and décor. He was living in the same North Shore neighborhood and the same house he’d bought when he moved to Magnolia Beach. Nobody upon entering it would find any sign of what Stanley was actually worth.

Buddy’s voice carried from the dining room as he tried to placate Stanley.

Corrine walked over to the turntable as Side B of
Zorba The Greek
finished. She watched the arm lift and return to rest. Then she opened her purse.

It took her a while to find her nail file.

MID-SHIFT WAS THE USUAL PLATTER. Ben Decovic worked his patrol sector, North Shore to the border of the downtown district and west to I-17. He responded to calls involving a stolen ATV, a lost German Shepard named Brigadier, two fender benders, a noise complaint involving a cadre of college students pilot-testing a couple twelve-packs and attempting to break the sound barrier with a new entertainment system. He took his dinner break at a Denny’s, pushing an undercooked omelet around on his plate and drinking two cups of watery coffee. The rest of the time, he ran the routine, driving in repeated loops through his sector, as swallows darted and the light drained from the sky.

He stayed on the move, fell into a rhythm that ran like an alternating current. He anticipated. He reacted. He drove and he watched. He monitored the radio.

After he’d resigned from the Ryland Ohio Homicide Division, Ben had drifted south and eventually taken the first available opening on the Magnolia Beach Police Force and had seen it as a sign of sorts that it had been in Patrol. That had been fine with him. He told himself he could live with the step down in salary and status. He’d been on the job for ten months since then. Working Patrol carried its own kind of sense.

Homicide required a different set of eyes, and Ben Decovic had come to distrust his.

So he returned to Patrol, a part of him welcoming the reassurance of its rhythm and routines, and another part, one that was tied to his past and everything he once believed he was and knew, saw each shift as an unruly hybrid of penance and test.

He was waiting for a day that did not hold a reminder of the need for each.

At a little after nine, he swung down Pine Street and parked curb-side opposite a small white house with green shutters. The front porch light was on, a high-watt bulb throwing a wide semicircle of light almost halfway down the slope of the lawn.

Ben radioed in his location, and Juanita, the dispatcher, laughed and said, “Right on schedule, as usual, Decovic. Tell your honey hello for me.”

Ben took out his flashlight and walked up a blacktopped driveway, pausing a moment to check the lock on the garage door and then moving into the backyard and the long tangle of shadows that the mercury light perched on the lip of the garage roof could not unknot and scatter.

He walked the perimeter of the yard. Then he returned to the front of the house and knocked on the door. Ben reattached the flashlight to his belt and listened to the click of the deadbolt.

“All clear, Miriam,” he said.

“Thank you.” She stepped away from the door. “I’ve already poured us a cup.”

All the lights in the house were on. Ben followed her into the living room, Miriam Holmes taking a seat on the couch, Ben dropping into a green plaid easy chair angled so it faced an ancient color television on low and tuned to CNN.

“Thank you, once again, for checking,” Miriam said. “You must think it silly, but the news these days, it’s just full of such stories that an old woman like me can’t help but worry some.”

Ben smiled. “You’re not old, Miriam. And a little worrying about the state of the world is ok, too.”

She nodded slowly. “Better safe. That was what Fredrick always said, and it’s still true.” She pointed at the cup on the table next to Ben. “It’s going to get cold.”

The house was small and cluttered with memorabilia and possessions from the forty-seven years of marriage Miriam and Fredrick Holmes had shared, everything anchored in place by Miriam’s memories. The fireplace mantel was thickly clustered in photographs. Ben sat in Fredrick’s favorite chair. He drank his coffee from a cup belonging to the set of china Fredrick had bought her on their thirtieth anniversary. He knew the story behind the print of Charleston’s Rainbow Row hanging above the couch, the one behind the braided oval rug on the pine floor, and the two small sweet grass baskets on the end table.

Just as he knew the story of Fredrick Holmes’s last day on earth, all the details of the Thursday morning in an Indian summer October three years ago: Miriam having started the coffee, Fredrick, though retired, up early and already dressed for the day and standing at the front window, waiting for the delivery of the paper, which turned out to be twenty minutes later than usual, Miriam bringing two cups of coffee into the living room just as it finally arrived, Fredrick opening the door and Miriam taking his place at the window, watching him start down the lawn surrounded by that early autumn light and brilliant color, a calendar day she remembered calling it, the lawn still bright green though the trees had turned, Fredrick moving with his characteristic purposeful stride, a moment and a morning like so many others in their lives, until she noticed a sudden hitch in Fredrick’s step, and a second later his heart exploded and Fredrick collapsed, and forty-seven years of marriage ended as abruptly as fingers hitting a light switch, no time for 9-1-1 or EMS calls, for defibrillators or nitro or for even setting down the two cups of coffee Miriam was still holding.

“I hate to be a bother,” Miriam said. She remained perched on the lip of the couch.

“You’re not,” Ben said.

“What you hear,” she said. “The world and all. What goes on. So many disturbing things.”

Ben nodded.

“If only ...,” Miriam began. She looked away for a moment, her gaze lingering on the fireplace mantel and the photographs crowding it.

Ben felt his smile tighten. He drowned it in the coffee cup.

“Hostages,” Miriam said, “to Fortune. That’s what Fredrick used to call them. I never fully understood what that meant until he was gone, and they moved away.”

Ben worked on a nod. The mantel held a crowded chronology of a boy and girl moving toward early adulthood, but even though he was sure Miriam had told him their names, he drew a blank on them. A small blossom of panic opened in his chest.

“An old woman going on and on.” Miriam pulled and straightened the sleeves of her housedress. “I don’t know where my mind is tonight. I just remembered I forgot to bring out the pound cake. Everything is turned around. Even the weather. It’s too warm and dry for the first week of March. I can’t remember one like it.”

Ben got up from the chair. “That’s ok, Miriam. The coffee was fine.”

“I’ve already cut you a slice,” she said. “I’ll wrap it up. Won’t take a minute.”

“That’s ok,” Ben said. “I really should get back to the car.”

“Won’t take a minute,” Miriam said.

She turned and hurried into the kitchen. Ben glanced at the photographs. He spidered the front of his uniform, touching the buttons, his fingers abruptly falling away when he reached the center of his chest.

Then Miriam was back, smiling and pressing a square of pound cake wrapped in wax paper on him, thanking him again and wishing him godspeed, and Ben was out the front door and moving across the lawn, the wind running through the trees and threaded with the faint cries of gulls, Miriam at the window watching, as he retraced Fredrick’s last steps on the way to the cruiser parked curb-side.

THE BATHROOM DOOR off the master bedroom was open and leaking thin clouds of steam. Buddy was in the shower, singing an off-key rendition of some Beach Boys song that had been on an oldies station on their drive back from Uncle Stanley’s earlier.

Corrine had yet to undress or completely calm down. She paced the length of the bedroom, still feeling the weight of Sunday, the peculiar way that time gathered itself, swelled, and pressed against her insides.

She held her hands out before her. They would not quite stop shaking. She was not sure if she felt angry or apprehensive. The warm, queasy feeling still nested in her stomach.

Corrine told herself she would not think of Phoenix.

She would not think of Betsy Jo Horvath or Wayne LaVell.

She was Mrs. Corrine Tedros now.

She had never been in Stanley’s plans for Buddy. Stanley was big on plans, especially if they originated with him. He’d always intended for Buddy to settle down with one of the eligible Greek women in the community, and when Buddy ended up marrying Corrine, Stanley had gone Old Testament and pronounced,
I don’t give it eighteen months. You’ll see.

And kept saying it. Publicly and privately.

At times, he made it sound like a statement of fact. At others, it came across as a prediction, a warning, a command, threat, or promise.

But never as a question.

From the shower, Buddy sang about California Girls.

Corrine stopped pacing and kicked off her shoes. They were low-heeled sensible shoes that along with hose and the navy blue dress were standard fare for Sunday dinner with Stanley. Something conservative and wifey.

Once again, she’d made the mistake of expecting more out of Buddy than he could deliver. Corrine had coached and prodded, counted on his making a strong case for the Restan buyout of Stanco Beverages, but Buddy had characteristically rolled over at the first sign of disagreement from Stanley.

The buyout would have changed everything.

She’d be stuck in Magnolia Beach until Stanley died. Or until he tried to make good on his pronouncement on the marriage.

When Buddy finally inherited Stanco Beverages, there was no guarantee that the current buyout offers would resurface or if they did, that they would be as lucrative as the present ones.

Right now, the Restan offer was the kind of money that changed things forever.

Julep was the beverage of choice at the moment. No one, let alone Stanley Tedros, could have predicted its meteoric rise and reign among men and women from thirty to fifty, particularly white-collar workers. Julep was embraced as the first genuine adult soft drink. Its relative scarcity, Stanco Beverages being the sole manufacturer and distributor, only added to its allure. It was a marketer’s wet dream. The public was already sold on Julep; they simply wanted more of it.

Restan and the other two reps for the soft drink conglomerates were talking figures attached to a dizzying number of zeroes for the right to give that public what it wanted.

Corrine had hoped Buddy could get Stanley to come around. Buddy’s parents had died in a car accident when he was six, and Stanley, who’d never married, had taken in his brother’s son and raised him as his own. Stanley Tedros might have wanted to bill himself as a hard-working, self-made entrepreneur, but at bottom, he was a Greek and big on family and blood ties. Buddy, if anyone, should have been able to convince Stanley to take Restan up on his offer.

The problem, though, Corrine knew, was and would always be Buddy himself. He had no backbone. Stanley might have mentored him in preparation for taking over the business, forcing Buddy, after he’d graduated from college, to learn it from the ground up by making him work on the line and then methodically moving him through each of the company’s divisions, and Buddy might have dutifully done everything his uncle asked, but in the end it was a lost cause, the equivalent of a Doberman trying to train a Chihuahua to be an attack dog.

It turned out to be patently simple for Corrine to lead Buddy through the steps of eventually proposing to her. Corrine had read him correctly from their first encounter when she’d been waitressing at Sonny Gramm’s supper club in Myrtle Beach and been tapped one Friday night to cover a bachelor’s party in the banquet room. Buddy and a bunch of his former frat brothers meeting in Myrtle Beach, acting like bad little boys, spilling their drinks and oogling the two by-the-numbers strippers performing to bad Areosmith, Corrine making sure Buddy was included in her station after another waitress pointed out who Buddy was, Corrine knowing just how to move and how far to lean over and how to flash a smile that promised more than the two strippers could ever hope to deliver, and by the end of the night making sure she delivered on that promise, giving Buddy the fuck of his life, and then the next morning retracting that promise with a nicely timed bout of tears, a carefully constructed heart to heart full of orchestrated remorse and guilt and fear that Buddy would get the wrong idea about her, Corrine going on to bookend the session by blindsiding Buddy’s vanity, quietly telling him with averted eyes that Buddy had unlocked something in her that she didn’t know was there, a level of sexual ecstasy that she had never experienced before that left her feeling vulnerable, happy, and afraid at the same time because she didn’t know what all this meant or where it left them.