Shallow Graves (13 page)

Keith laughed hard. “That’s a good one, sir. That’s very good.” He said, “Come on. I’ll show you around.”

Meg glanced up the stairs. A small face was looking through the newel posts at the landing.

“Sam, come on down here.”

Her son jumped down the stairs.

He walked right up to Pellam and stuck out his hand. “How do you do?”

Megan felt a burst of pride.

Pellam smiled—maybe at the formality and at the firm shake. Meg knew that childless men and women tended to think of kids as, more or less, pets. Meg had worked hard with her son. He was polite and direct. Meg said, “Meet my son, Sam. Sam, this is Mr. Pellam.”

Keith said, “Come on upstairs. Sam, we’ll postpone your homework long enough so you can show Mr. Pellam your room.”

“Yeah!” the boy said in a high voice.

The male contingent of the dinner party vanished upstairs.

Meg walked into the kitchen and poured glasses of Pellam’s wine for the three of them. She sipped hers and stared at the Winnebago. Should she join them or not?

No, something told her to stay here.

Ten minutes later the creak of footsteps had worked its way back to the top of the stairs. Pellam’s camper was next on the tour itinerary. Sam started to burst out the door but Keith made sure he was wearing his jacket. Meg offered wine to the men. Pellam took his, nodded at her with a smile. Keith glanced at the glass but shook his head. “I’ll have some later.” He was a hard liquor drinker mostly. Scotch.

“Mom, I showed Mr. Pellam the computer, then my burglar alarm and my metal detector. . . .”

Pellam said, “He made it himself. I was impressed.”

Sam said, “Dad helped.”

“But not much,” Keith said.

They all moved toward the door. Keith said to Meg, “We’re getting a Winnebago tour.”

She said, “Dinner’s ready.”

“Honey,” he said patiently, “it’s a Winnebago.” And a glance at Sam’s face told her a delayed dinner was worth it.

As they walked onto the porch Sam asked, “Hey, Mr. Pellam, do you like bombs?”

“I’ve worked on a few.”

“Huh?”

“Movies.”

Meg laughed.

Sam continued, breathlessly enthusiastic. “Sometime maybe I could show you these practice bombs. Like from airplanes! They’re at this junkyard. They’re really neat. Mom won’t let me buy one but . . . wow, that’s so neat. Can I sit in the driver’s seat?”

“You can even honk the horn,” Pellam told him.

“Cool.”

AT THE DINNER
table, Pellam looked out over the spread of osso bucco, mashed sweet potatoes, green bean salad, broccoli. How’d she made all this in the two hours since she’d intercepted him downtown?

Sam was in bed, Keith was serving and Pellam kept looking around him. He felt as if he’d never seen a house before.

Keith adjusted his tie and lifted his wineglass. “To my wonderful wife and her superb dinner.”

The conversation meandered. Washington politics, Los Angeles smog. Pellam asked Keith what he did.

“I own a little company that makes over-the-counter products. Cough syrup, aspirin, things like that.”

“He’s too modest,” Meg said. “Keith keeps tap dancing on Bristol-Myers’ face. It’s an uphill battle but he’s getting there slowly.”

“It’s tough for us small boys. But I like the challenge. That’s what’s great about growing a business. The competition.”

“You a corporation?”

“Uh-huh. You have to be, with all the personal injury suits now. My single biggest overhead expense after salaries is insurance.”

“You have a partner?”

Silence. Meg stirred. Pellam had asked something awkward. Keith said, “Dale Meyerhoff. We worked together at a pharmaceutical company near Poughkeepsie. He died last year.”

“Died? Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Car accident,” Meg offered.

Keith said, “It was quite a shock.”

Pellam realized that they’d dealt with the loss a long time ago but they were uneasy now for
him
—probably worried that the reference would remind him of Marty. He said, “So you do everything, hm?”

Keith said, “I had a lot of learning to do. Dale—my partner—was sales and finance. Me, I’m just a chemist basically. A scientist. A nerd, you know.”

“Studio I used to work for did a film about a chemist one time.”

“Really?” Keith smiled. “Usually you just see movies about cops and monsters and private eyes.”

“I guess it wasn’t really a chemist. It was called
The Surrey Alchemist.
We made it in England. It had very limited distribution over here.”

“Witches and sorcerers.”

“Alchemists were considered scientists at the time,” Pellam said. “We did a lot of research. Turning lead into gold is called base alchemy. True alchemists practice spagyria.”

He noticed Meg checking out the plates, pushing bowls toward Pellam when the helpings got too close to empty. Keith seemed fascinated with the story and wasn’t eating.

“Spagyria?” Meg asked.

Pellam said, “It means extracting basic properties from things, usually plants. What an alchemist does is try to find the essence of something and that essence supposedly had powers beyond just the chemical composition of the material.”

Keith said, “What’s the movie about?”

“It was based on a real story. In the late 1700s, in England, there was a rich man named James Price. He was like a lot of the wealthy then. You know, dabbling at science. Maybe he was a little more than a dabbler since he got named a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also kind of a crank. A little bizarre. He set up a lab in his home—in Surrey, out in the country. He does all this secret work then calls a meeting of his friends and fellow scientists. He brought them into his lab, where he’d set up a display—the three basic ingredients of alchemy: mercury, nitrate and sulfur—”

Keith laughed. “Hey, you know what those are?”

Meg said, “Let him finish.”

Pellam said to Keith, “What?”

“A formula for a bullet. Nitrate and sulfur are in gunpowder and fulminate of mercury’s in the firing cap.”

Pellam laughed. “Wish I’d known that. It would’ve been a nice metaphor for the flick. Anyway, Price also had some other ingredients—something secret—in covered boxes. He got this crowd together and made a grand entrance. He looked awful, though. Sick and pasty, exhausted. Then he mixed a white powder with the three basic ingredients and turned them into an ingot of silver. He did the same thing with a red powder and produced gold. The metals were tested by a metalsmith and were supposedly genuine.”

“Then he sold the ingredients on late-night cable TV and made a fortune,” Meg said.

Keith hushed her.

Pellam continued, “But here’s the interesting part. Price kept up the alchemy and made a huge amount of gold but after a few months his health began to fail. Finally, when the Society insisted he do another experiment under observation, he agreed. Three members of the Society rode to his laboratory one morning. He invited them in, set up his chemicals and drank a cup of poison. He died right in front of them—without revealing what the powders were.”

Keith, tilting back his chair, then said, “What was it, a hoax? And he had to kill himself?”

“We left it up in the air. It’s tough to make movies based on true stories. You have to pamper reality.”

Meg laughed at this.

Keith suddenly squinted at Pellam. “You seem real familiar.”

Pellam said, “Really?”

“Were you ever famous?”

Meg said, “Keith—”

Pellam said seriously, “In my mother’s eyes.”

Meg laughed. “Sorry. Didn’t mean it like that.”

Keith shook his head. “It’ll come to me.” He squinted again in recognition but apparently the thought vanished; he began talking about his company, new product lines. Stories only a businessman would love. Pellam nodded and ground his teeth together to squash the yawns. He was pleased that Keith wasn’t a movie hound and hadn’t asked for one iota of Hollywood gossip. On the other hand he was a major bore. Pellam hardly listened to a word he said—until he realized Keith was talking about someone dubbed Miss Woodstock, who knew the astrological sign, as well as a few other intimate facts, of every single man in town. Meg leaned forward and with a coy smile caught Pellam’s eye. He knew what she was up to and kept his eyes on Keith until she disappeared into the kitchen of dishes.

The womenfolk gone it was time to talk about serious stuff. Keith lowered his head and asked, “Have you talked to the insurance agent? About the accident?”

“Not yet. Meg gave me his name. The doctor said he’d have a bill ready for me in a couple days. He was waiting for the X-ray lab’s bill.”

“If you have any problems, you come to me, okay?”

“Appreciate it.”

“How long you think you’ll be in town?”

“Don’t really know. I—”

Meg returned. “Coffee’s almost ready.” She sat.

“So tell us, you married?” Meg asked.

He’d told her. In the clinic. Maybe the question was for Keith’s benefit, to show that she hadn’t known. It meant a bit of intimacy existed between them. Pellam’s eyes swept over her dress. The pin above her breast. She looked a lot younger today. The makeup was better. Maybe she had to wear realtor camouflage when she was selling houses.

He realized he was staring at her and still hadn’t answered the question.

“Nope,” he said. “Was divorced a few years ago.”

“That’s right. You’d mentioned that.”

Oh. A bad memory. That’s all.

“There’s a girl I’ve been dating off and on. Nothing too serious. Her name’s Trudie.” (Damn! He’d forgotten to call. He would tomorrow. Definitely.)

A timer bonged in the kitchen. As Meg rose Pellam glanced at the pin on her dress again. Thought of Janine’s pin. And her breasts. She’d had a moon. Meg was wearing a sun.

“Dessert,” Meg said, walking back in from the kitchen with a tray.

Keith said, “Meg’s a whiz with desserts.”

She set the tray down.

“Brownies,” Pellam said.

“You like brownies?” she asked.

“Can’t get enough.”

THE BEIGE CAR
pulled off the highway and into an asphalt parking lot, which was slowly turning into black gravel.

Sleepy Hollow Motor Lodge.

“Here we be,” Billy said.

The twins got out of the car and Bobby snagged a big bag from the backseat. “Heinekens,” he said, proud he’d bought imports in Genny Ale country.

They inhaled deeply and Bobby said, “Fall. I love it.”

Billy looked at his watch. “Late.”

Bobby walked past him and opened the door. Inside was an ugly square room, too hot, too brightly lit.

Billy followed him in.

“Toasty,” Billy said. He opened a window.

“Fucking hot. Heh.”

Neither of them really liked the hotel that much. Cheap, plastic, tacky. It reminded them of Brooklyn, where they’d been born, or Yonkers, where they’d lived until their junior years in high school, when their father had been laid off from the Stella D’Oro bakery and had moved the family up to Dutchess County. He’d bought what he said was an antiques business, but which turned out to be—to the young twins’ delight—a junkyard.

They’d finished high school. Bobby, just barely, though he was captain of the rifle team. Billy, with a B average. When their father died they inherited the family’s lime-green split-level and the junkyard, which they renamed after themselves, Robert & William. They’d promised each other that they’d only marry another set of twins—which didn’t make room for a lot of matrimonial material in Dutchess County—so their social life was pretty limited.

They had a few other business dealings that took them to New York every couple of weeks and they
were always glad to hightail it back to their house, which happened to be in the first tract of land that Wex Ambler had ever developed in Cleary. It was a nice house. Big and filled with the things they loved—dark still-life paintings of dead birds and rabbits, prints of leaping fish, carved wooden statues of horses and bears, a Franklin Mint model car collection. The twin leather recliners, Sears Best, were aimed right at a huge stereo TV. Within arm’s reach of Billy’s chair was a Better microwave, which was perfect for heating nachos and chili during
Jeopardy
or
The Tonight Show.

A perfect home for two boys on their own.

Exactly what this dingy hotel was not.

Billy expressed this sentiment, as he stepped on a silverfish in the bathroom.

His brother shrugged. “We don’t have much choice. Can’t do this at home.”

“Don’t mean I have to like it here.”

Bobby shrugged in reluctant agreement. Then sat down on the bed and opened two beers. The twins drained them. Billy turned the TV on, grumbling that the remote was broken.

In five minutes there was a knock on the door.

Billy opened it. Ned, the boy from the pancake breakfast, stood there, in jeans, a T-shirt and a varsity football jacket.

“Ned, hey, how you doing? Come on in.”

“Hey, guys, what’s up?”

“Nothing yet,” Bobby laughed, beating Billy to the punch by a millisecond.

Ned frowned, not getting what seemed to be a joke. “Kinda hot in here,” he said.

“Yeah, a little. Funny weather.”

“Hey, totally fine place here. Totally.” Ned looked around.

The twins exchanged wry glances as Ned studied the brown and orange shag, the laminated brown furniture, the prints of flowers bolted to the wall. Looked like he was examining the grand ballroom of a Fifth Avenue hotel.

They cracked open more beers and turned on a rerun of the
The Cosby
Show
.

Bobby said, “He’s stupid in this one. Cosby, I mean. He just mugs for the camera and counts his money. I liked him better in
I Spy.
That was some real acting.”

“I never saw it,” the boy said.

“On before your time. These two CIA guys. White guy, he was Robert Cummings—”

“Culp,” Billy corrected.

“Robert Culp. Right. And Bill Cosby. Man, it was a good program. They knew some real shit karate.”

“Course,
this
show’s got Lisa Bonet,” Bobby pointed out.”