Michael R Collings (11 page)

Maybe a quick visit to a park, if it proved warm enough. Or a surprise early dinner at Carl’s Jr. or Burger King. The boys would love a kids’ meal, complete with toy treat. It was an inconvenience to have to stay away so long, Willard thought, but better that than the alternative. Better that than the unending colonies of roaches that seemed suddenly to have infested their house.

Squaring his shoulders and sternly reminding himself to ignore the increasing odor emanating from the hamster cages—now accented by a hauntingly similar odor from Sams—Willard drove away.

By eight thirty that night, the house had returned to a semblance of order. The padding and carpet had been folded back in place, minus the splinters of tackless carpet strips. Willard wasn’t too happy with the slightly rumpled texture the carpet had taken on near the baseboards, but there was little he could do about that. And a few ripples were the least of his problems at the moment.

He stood up and surveyed the carpet, then turned away and began staring at the walls and ceiling, probing in the cracks along the interior baseboards.

“What are you looking for?” Catherine said as she came in from the bedrooms. She sounded worried, as if she were afraid that their attempts to eradicate the roaches had failed. “Are there any more....?”

“No,” Willard said. “No sign of wildlife.” He grinned, trying to lessen Catherine’s lingering horror over the experience.

She grimaced.

“No, I’m just curious.” He pushed the thin blade of a small screwdriver into the back corner, along the juncture of the rear wall and the common wall between the living room and the back bedroom. The plaster resisted for a moment, then the blade disappeared.

“Shit,” Willard muttered as his knuckles scraped abruptly against the plaster.

“What’s wrong?”

“Look.”

He sliced downward with the screwdriver—the blade slit through the plaster as neatly as if it were warm butter. He gestured to the dark opening.

“I’ll bet this whole damn back wall’s separated from the house. The gap’s been plastered over and painted.”

“Willard,” Catherine said sharply. “The children might not be asleep. I don’t want them to hear that kind of....”

But he wasn’t listening. He was already in the kitchen, rummaging through the utility drawer until he came up with a small hand flashlight. He carried it through the living room, knelt in the entry hall, and began examining the shiny Solarium tiles.

“Look,” he said after a few moments. He held the light at a sharp angle to the floor. Small as it was, the bulb was sufficient to cast hairline shadows that zigzagged faintly but definitely from wall to wall across the entryway. “See that.” He pointed with his free hand to the shadows.

“What is it?”

“Another crack. In the foundation slab.” He rose to his feet with a grunt and disappeared into the hallway, the flashlight throwing a faintly orange glow in front of him.

It took less than half an hour to discover that the house—walls and slab alike—seemed laced with cracks, major and minor, each of them carefully retouched with plaster and then artfully repainted to disguise the flaws. The worst of them seemed to be in the northwest corner of the master bedroom, where the plaster split the entire length of the juncture of the two outside walls—another hairline crack, so fine as to be virtually invisible unless one searched for it. In addition, the line separating wall from white popcorn-textured ceiling was ragged and rough.

Obviously the entire side wall of the house was shifting

The more he discovered, the angrier Willard became.

Curiously, he was not so much distressed at the fact of the structural flaws as at the equally obvious fact that the previous owners had clearly known about them and had done everything in their power to hide them. Fresh paint, new coats of texturing, re-plastering in strategic corners, new tiles on the entryway floor—all with the express purpose of hiding the serious problems in the house. Without a word, he stalked back through the house to the wall phone in the kitchen and began ruffling angrily through the phone

“Ma…Mar…Mat…Max—here it is,” he said, more to himself than to Catherine. “Maxwell, William. Realtor.” He punched the numbers, allowing his growing fury to communicate itself through his fingers. He tapped on the receiver as the phone rang once, twice, three times.

“Maxwell.” The voice on the other end sounded confident, sure of itself. Willard recognized it immediately, remembering the ease with which Maxwell had worked the deal for the house. I wonder how much he got from the scam, Willard thought, even as he was speaking.

“Mr. Maxwell, this is Willard Huntley.”

“Sure, Will. How’s the new homeowner?”

Faced with the easy assurance in the voice, Willard suddenly found himself stalled for words. He was still angry—furious and upset—but he wasn’t quite sure how to begin. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “actually that’s what I’m calling about.”

There was another long pause. He was half waiting for Maxwell to ask for particulars, but the silence on the other end of the line remained deafening.

“I, uh...I’ve found some problems.”

“Yes?”

Apparently Maxwell wasn’t going to make things any easier.

“Well,” Willard took a deep breath. “The walls and foundation seem to be cracked to hell and gone, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it.”

There, it was out. He felt better already. After all, there were such things as local ordinances, required inspections, things like that.

“Me?” Maxwell sounded honestly surprised. “What makes you think that I can do anything?”

“Well, you helped us with the house. You must know how to begin....”

“Begin what?”

”For starters, I want the previous owners....”

“The Merricks,” Maxwell added, as if he were trying to be as helpful as possible.

“The Merricks,” Willard repeated, nodding as if Maxwell could see him. “Anyway, I want to know how we can get the Merricks to make good on the problems. We haven’t even been in here a year yet—hell, we haven’t been in here more than a couple of months, and already the place is falling apart.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Catherine whispered.

“And besides,” Willard added, her presence reminding him of the immediate cause of their problems. “Besides, the place is overrun with roaches.”

“Sorry to hear that, Willard,” Maxwell said, “but there’s really nothing I can do about the problems. There was a clearly stated ‘as is’ clause in the contract, remember?”

Willard was stunned. He searched his mind but could dredge up no mention of any such thing.

“Just a minute,” Maxwell said, his voice ebbing gradually, replaced by the sound of shuffling papers. “I’ve got a copy here somewhere,” he continued, again speaking more to himself than to Willard. “Yeah, here it is.” He fell silent, except for a murmur as he scanned the contract sheets. “Right, here it is. Page seven of the original contract. ‘Summary of county inspection, specifying items anomalous to original construction, accepted and countersigned by purchaser(s).’ A couple of other items, but the gist is that any such problems become the responsibility of the new owners.

“That’s you.”

Willard opened his mouth to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. “But...but,” he finally sputtered. “But I didn’t know, I mean, it’s our first house and everything. I thought, I figured that you would let us know if there was anything wrong.”

Maxwell laughed. “Huntley, do you know that your house was the least expensive one in the entire Tamarind Valley? By a factor of several tens of thousands of dollars?”

“No, I didn’t. But what....”

“My commission on any other house listed with this agency would be almost double yours. And over the past six months, I’ve had seven houses in escrow.”

Willard was beginning to understand.

“So maybe I might have let a few details slip. But you got the house, didn’t you? And the property values will probably go up two, three thousand a month when real estate gets hot again. So you’re not really out anything. And it’s not as if you were planning on selling tomorrow or anything, is it?” Maxwell laughed.

Through the phone lines, the laughter sounded tinny and hollow.

Willard sputtered a few sounds, then fell silent. Everything Maxwell said was true.

“And anyway, the house isn’t going to fall in any time soon. Maybe in forty or fifty years, but not tomorrow.” He paused, then said, “Good to hear from you, Mr. Huntley. Have a good day.”`

And then the line clicked and Maxwell was gone.

“Damn,” Willard swore softly as he hung up the phone and looked quizzically at Catherine.

“Damn.”

From the
Tamarind Valley Times
, 29 June 1991:

STRONG QUAKE FELT, LITTLE DAMAGE IN VALLEY

One person died in Arcadia and one person died of a heart attack in Glendale as a result of yesterday’s 5.6 earthquake, centered near the San Gabriel Mountains. Although extensive damage was reported in Pasadena, Sierra Madre, and other near-by communities, Tamarind Valley escaped with minor damage.

Several local stores reported overturned shelves but....

The Warrens, April 1992-November 1997

Living the Dream

At age thirty-two, Daniel Warren could surely be counted a success, in his own eyes if not in the eyes of his mother. He owned his own Ford dealership—one of the most lucrative in the entire San Fernando Valley. His apartment, snuggled in the dense greenery of the Santa Monica Mountains just off Sepulveda, was well furnished with antiques that even his mother recognized cost more than she had ever had to spend on furniture, Heaven knew, and more than she would ever feel comfortable spending on furniture. His clothes were always immaculately tailored, his shoes always expensive continental brands.

All in all, he was a success.

But success is as success does, as they say. And no amount of money could atone for what Amanda Warren considered her only son’s greatest failure.

“You should be thinking about getting married,” she would repeat every Sunday afternoon as Daniel Warren sat at the family table, surrounded by innumerable bits of bric-a-brac from his mother’s sixty-seven years of life. The faded black-and-white pictures of Alfred Warren—none showing a man beyond his late thirties, and several of the later images eerily reminiscent of Daniel Warren as he sat at the side of the table—served as silent reminders that thirty of those years had been spent in patient widowhood and selfless, focused motherhood, days and months and years devoted to seeing that her Daniel had only the best she could offer. Now it was her turn, she had thought more than once. Now it was her turn to have what
she
wanted.

And what she wanted was simple.

She wanted grandchildren.

“You’re not getting any younger,” she would argue as she ladled gravy onto the flawlessly creamy mashed potatoes mounded at precisely eleven o’clock on her son’s plate. It didn’t matter that she knew he was watching his cholesterol count and that he had warned her that the gravy would probably send the numbers skyrocketing. She’d served gravy for Sunday dinner every day since she married Daniel’s father thirty-eight years ago this September, and it certainly hadn’t killed anyone yet.

“What about that nice young thing who lives on your floor, what’s her name again, oh yes, Rita. Have you asked her out?” she would say as she set his huge wedge of cherry pie in front of him at the end of the Sunday meal, in spite of the fact that he had just announced that he was full, thanks Mom, but no dessert for me. And while she listened to him explaining how Rita was engaged to a construction foreman that weighed three hundred pounds and would probably snap Daniel’s spine in two at the first sign that Daniel even knew Rita walked the face of the earth, Amanda watched each heaping forkful of pie disappear into Daniel’s mouth, watched, almost not breathing until the entire wedge was gone.

Daniel was used to her obsession. For the past seven years, the litany had altered only fractionally. Sometimes it was “that nice young thing Rita,” then it would be “that nice young thing Ellen.” Always one “nice young thing” or another. Always after him to marry.

Daniel Warren was not particularly interested in marriage. He worked hard and he lived well. He could get what sexual companionship he wanted whenever he wanted it, and if that particular companionship was not precisely what his mother might have imagined—or approved—well, that was her problem not his, wasn’t it.

After thirty-two years of Amanda Warren, thirty of those without even the questionable buffer of the father who had so inconsiderately keeled over from a heart attack on Daniel’s birthday, just after Daniel had puffed out the candles on the cake and held out his plate for the first, special, birthday-boy slice, Daniel knew when to nod and smile, and when to answer Amanda’s questions with just the right touch of ambiguity to assuage her for a while longer at least.

And he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

In April of 1992, however, on the Sunday following his thirty-second birthday, Daniel Warren broke his cardinal rule about keeping his mouth shut. He spoke out, and in doing so came as close as he ever would to killing his mother.

He didn’t do it intentionally, of course (although he might perhaps have considered such an action more than once), but even without meaning to, he almost killed her.

On this particular Sunday afternoon, he sat for a long time, staring at his nearly empty plate as if the single smudge of pie filling (peach this time, not cherry—he had grown to hate both) along the floral edging concealed the intricate answers to an infinite universe, he removed the carefully ironed napkin from his lap, folded it just the way Amanda expected him to when he was finished with his meal, laid it precisely across the top edge of the empty plate, sat back in his chair, and looked at his mother for another long time.

When she began to shift uncomfortably under the weight of his gaze, he grinned at her, a foolish, little-boy grin, as if he already knew that he had done something wrong and was trying to figure out the best way to break the bad news.