Orchard Grove (28 page)

Carl.

I bounded up, my crutches slipping from my grip. I lost my balance, went over hard onto my side.

“You fucker!” I screamed, feeling a shot of pain shoot up my right leg. “I know what you’re doing!”

I cocked my head, saw him in the window, smiling. Lifting up his right hand, he made a pretend pistol, shoved the barrel into his mouth, brought down the thumb, shouted, “Bang! Bang!”

I rolled over onto my stomach, started crawling toward the sliding glass doors. When I came to the steps leading down into the playroom, I tried to pull myself up onto my feet. But my right foot was too tender, too swollen, too raw with pain. I dropped down, rolled down the steps.

When I caught my breath, I once again looked out the window.

Carl was gone.

Tears filled my eyes while I sat myself up. Rolling back onto all fours, I crawled my way up the two steps, and then pulled myself up into my chair. I grabbed hold of the whiskey bottle, didn’t even bother to pour a shot. I just drank from the bottle while droplets of sweat poured from my brow into my eyes and my foot throbbed like a beating heart. What the hell was the temperature outside? A comfortable sixty-eight degrees? Inside this house it was a sweltering two hundred. It felt like hell, and I supposed I’d better get used to the idea.

How could I have been so blind that I couldn’t see through the ploy?

The sunlight that reflected off a dame like Lana Cattivo was blinding. It also sucked me in like a black hole. I’d been damned from the moment she moved in and I was more damned now that they were all plotting against me. Christ, for all I knew, Miller was in on it too.

Leaning over, I picked up my crutches, but then in a spontaneous burst of anger, tossed them across the room. I could either sit there and wait for Miller to build his case against me or I could do something about this mess right now. I could head back over to Lana’s and demand that she tell the truth about the plot to kill her husband and make it appear to be an innocent suicide. She wasn’t about to willingly confess to Miller about what she cooked up, but if I could somehow record her confession, I’d have the fuel I needed to at least save my tortured ass from frying.

But in order to pull this off, I needed a bit of a convincer.

Looking down at my foot, I saw the fresh blood that stained the sock.

“Screw you and the horse you rode in on,” I said aloud.

Limping into kitchen, I went to the silverware drawer. Pulling it open, I found the big French knife. If Lana, Susan, and Carl wanted to play rough, then so be it. Gripping the blade by the wood handle, I hobbled back down into the family room and, opening the sliding glass doors, made my way back out into the dead of night.

W
hen I got to the Cattivo’s back deck, I heard music playing. Although the lights in front were extinguished to make the place appear locked up for the night, the lights were still burning in the kitchen and the dining room. I could easily make out slices of electric white light as they spilled out through the partially open horizontal slats on the venetian blind that covered the big picture window. I made out the noise of laughter. People enjoying themselves. Partying. I listened for a male voice to cut through the female chatter. I couldn’t make anything out. But that didn’t mean Carl wasn’t in there with them.

The French knife in hand, I limped over to the window, peeked in through the narrow space between the shutter slats. What I saw felt like a quick, unexpected jab to the face. Lana and Susan were dancing in the middle of the kitchen floor. They’d both stripped down to their panties, and they were dirty dancing to some sort of free form jazz that was blaring out of the home speaker system. Lana was stealing a toke off a joint while Susan gripped a long neck beer bottle in her right hand.

This wasn’t the way people acted when death touched a close family member. But then, I guess Lana and John didn’t have any family to speak of, other than each other. Their bond wasn’t blood, but it certainly ended that way. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to find a big rock and shatter the picture window. I wanted to jump on through the window and strangle them both, then use my knife on them.

Whiskey muscles.

The better move would be to head back home, get my shit together, and try to find a way out of this mess. Legally. No more violence. In the morning I’d confront them both, make them admit that they, along with Carl, set me up to take the fall for John’s murder. I’d bring along my cell phone and record Lana’s confession, which I would deliver directly to Detective Miller. No one saw me shove that pistol into John’s mouth. No one saw me press the trigger. Only he saw me. He and God and the Devil.

I wasn’t the least bit aware of it when my grip on the knife loosened and it fell onto the wood deck. As if on cue, Lana and Susan both stopped dancing. They looked into each other’s eyes without saying a word.

“You hear something coming from outside?” Lana said.

“Not sure,” Susan said. “Maybe it’s that Miller cop guy again.”

The jazz was still going strong. Trumpets, bass, and drums. Something from the Fifties or Sixties maybe. Miles Davis or Cliff Brown. Sexy music from a black and white era. For a split second I thought they might both head outside to investigate, or the very least approach the picture window to get a good look out on the deck.

I bent over, clumsily, picked the knife back up, then pulled back and shifted myself away from the line of sight.

“Maybe your husband is spying on us,” I overheard Lana say.

“He’ll be passed out by now,” Susan responded. “He was half drunk when he left here. There’s whiskey at home. He’s no stranger to the bottle. Seems it’s all he’s capable of these days is getting hammered.”

“Maybe we just heard an animal,” Lana said. “A raccoon. Or maybe it’s the asshole’s ghost.”

“I’ll go with the animal,” Susan said. Then, “Let’s go to bed, baby. If the police come back tomorrow to ask more questions, we’ll want to be well rested.”

“Carl said there’d be no more questions,” Lana said. “He’d make sure of that. No more Q and A’s with that pinhead, Miller. But I agree. We should go to bed. But…” Her voice trailed off.

“But what, baby?”

“I’m not sure how much sleep we’re going to get.”

I made out the distinct sound of an ass cheek being slapped. Then I made out more laughter. Susan’s laughter.

“You naughty girl,” my wife said.

Then Lana said, “We did it, didn’t we? We got rid of the bastard and other than Miller, the cops don’t have a clue.”

“Not about us,” Susan said. “Can’t say the same about my husband.”

“He’d be in the way anyway. Did he really think we were going to live as a threesome together? If he did, he’s more insane than John was.”

“What about Carl?”

“We need Carl,” Lana said. “Carl is the cops. He brings something very special to the table.” Then, she said. “By the way, sweetie, I’d like to congratulate you on your acting skills. Ethan truly believes we only really got to know one another just this week.”

“You took a real chance sending me those gifts,” Susan said. “I had to flush the card that came with the panties down the toilet after Ethan found it.”

“But he never would have guessed we’ve been together for weeks now. He’s the blind leading the blind.”

“He’s gullible. Always been gullible. It’s why he bailed out of Hollywood. Some drunk producer would kiss his ass, tell him to write a script that he’d produce no questions asked, and of course it wouldn’t happen. Ethan would be left holding onto a ream of worthless paper. Now he’s broke and unemployable. A loser.”

My head was filling with adrenalin. My veins felt like hot electrical wires. My foot throbbed in thunderous jolts of pain. The voices stopped for a few moments while the jazz kept on playing. I knew they were kissing then. Caressing and holding each other.

Then Susan said, “Let’s go to bed, baby. I can’t wait any longer.”

After a minute, the music stopped, the window closed, the slats on the venetian blinds drawn all the way, the lights in the kitchen and dining room extinguished. The pain in my foot was getting worse, along with the bleeding. But I didn’t care. Right then, pain was the only thing keeping me from breaking into the house and killing the women I loved most in the world.

Loved
and
hated.

I love you. I hate you…

I felt the knife in my hand, gripped the wood and steel so hard I thought it might melt. Taking a gimpy step or two backwards, I looked over my right shoulder. I saw a light go on in the master bedroom. Like the rest of the windows in the single-story house, the slider window was open, so it was easy to make out the giggling. Giggling that lasted for a few minutes until the light was extinguished and I began to hear the sound of something else.

It was the sound of passion and pleasure. Moans and wails of two people who could not get enough of each other.

All the oxygen in my lungs emptied out. All the blood in my veins spilled out onto the wood deck. I turned for my house, but as I passed by the sliding glass door, I put my hand on the opener. When I yanked on it, I found, much to my surprise, that it hadn’t been locked. Locking up the house at night must have been John’s job. But John was no longer around to keep his wife safe. John was dead, because of me. Me and Lana.

I looked down at the knife gripped in one hand and my other hand gripping the slider.

“Go home,”
insisted the voice inside my head.
“Go the hell home now.”

“Kiss my parched ass,” I whispered to the voice.

I
didn’t bother with checking the time when I got back to the house. I just gravitated toward what was left of the whiskey bottle, and drank it all down. Then I found another bottle and started in on that one. I drank and I cried and I cursed myself for playing the fool. After a time, I began to laugh hysterically, because I was nothing more than a clown. A stinking, filthy drunk clown.

At one point, my eyes connected with the bowl of apples set out on the table. In my alcohol-soaked head, my mind shifted from the apples to the memory of my making love to Lana on the table, back to the apples again. The French knife was set on the table. I took hold of it and began to stab at the apples, feeling the blade slicing through the fruit’s skin and flesh, knowing all along that the sensation could not have been more different than the feel of a blade slicing through human skin and meat.

I didn’t realize it at first, but there was blood all over the knife.

Last I’d heard, apples didn’t bleed.

It had to be
my
blood. I released the blade and looked at my hand. Somehow, in the process of drunkenly stabbing at the apples, I’d cut it up. Cut my fingers when my sweaty hand slipped from the moist grip and slid along the sharp edge of the blade. I was too drunk to feel any real pain. Tossing the knife against the wall, I limped my way to the master bedroom, where I collapsed onto my back.

In my head I once more felt my finger pushing John’s finger against the trigger, heard the gunshot, saw the brains spatter against the window behind him. Then I heard the jazz music that had been playing inside Lana’s kitchen, and I saw my wife dancing with her new lover. My head did somersaults as I lay prone on the mattress, fully clothed. I felt like I was spinning out of control while dropping at breakneck speed into a bottomless black pit. I dropped and I dropped until sleep overtook my soul, and I found myself in a different place altogether.

I’m walking a city street in the dark of night. It’s cold and the city is empty, entirely devoid of life. The scene is desperate, post-apocalyptic. I’m walking without the aid of my crutches and the pain from the incisions in my foot are shooting up and down my right leg. The colorless atmosphere is black and white, but when I look down at my foot, I can see that I’m leaving a trail of crimson blood on the cracked macadam.

A wind blows and sends a shiver up and down my spine. I feel eyes on me. Multiple sets of eyes. Then, appearing before me in the distance, two women. It’s Susan and Lana. They’re standing in the middle of the empty city street. Although they are far away they begin to approach me at the speed of light. They haven’t moved a muscle but suddenly they’re standing only inches away from me, staring at me. Into me.