Shallow Graves (21 page)

“Sorry, sir. I’m heading the opposite direction.”

“Sure,” Pellam said, watching his black-and-white pull dramatically out of the parking lot, slinging gravel behind it. “Thanks anyway. Sir.”

BOBBY SAT INSIDE
the cabin at the junkyard and read a
National Geographic.
He looked at the stain in the margin and wondered what it was. Grape jelly, maybe. Blood? Beef juice?

R&W was fat with
National Geographic
s. Stacks and stacks of them, going moldy. Yellow and green. His brother didn’t understand why Bobby continued to buy the old ones. Something about that magazine, people thought you shouldn’t throw them out, like doing that was somehow unpatriotic. So what they did was bundle them up and take them to antique stores or tag sales or junkyards like R&W and sell them, all organized by year. Or decade. Didn’t matter if they made money on them. The point was, a part of America
got preserved and, besides, where else but in articles about Africa or the Amazon could a twelve-year-old boy get a look at tits and not run the chance of getting whipped?

Today, Bobby was reading about Portland, which seemed like a great place to live. He closed the magazine and tossed it against the wall of the shack. True, they
were
starting to smell. He’d have to get out the Lysol spray.

He heard the car door slam.

Bobby knew right away, even before the door to the shack opened, that there was trouble. This was something about twins, at least something about Billy and him. A telepathy thing. So now when his brother opened the door and walked through it, Bobby was staring right into his eyes, frowning with an expression that matched Billy’s almost identically.

He said, “So?”

“So our ass is in deep shit,” Billy muttered.

“What?”

“Torrens’s kid got some of the pills. Almost OD’d.”

“Fuck. That little blond kid?” Bobby glanced in a perfunctory way toward the back room of the shack where several cartons of their special candy were stacked. “How’d he get it?” Then he knew, the message from his brother coming through loud and clear. He nodded grimly. “The pretty boy? Ned. The other day.”

“Your playmate.”

Bobby said,
“Our
playmate. Just ’cause I saw him first don’t go blaming me. Why’d he give them away?”

“Why’d you give him so many in the first place? Damn, I’ll ream that boy’s ass.”

Bobby gave a splinter of a smile. “You already done that.”

But his brother wasn’t in any mood to joke. “This isn’t funny.”

Bobby was nodding slowly. “The Torrens kid,” he muttered. “They know it was us?”

“They did, don’t you think we’d’ve heard by now?”

“What if Ned said something to the kid. About where he got it?”

“Could be a problemo,” Billy said absently. “Too bad the kid didn’t take ’em all. And just, you know, die. Would’ve been better.”

“So they’ve got some? Of the stuff, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Billy explained.

“Ouch.”

“It’s at the clinic. They’re going to be shipping it somewhere to find out what it is.”

“Fuck,” Bobby said. “That’s bad. Man, that’s bad. What’re we gonna do?”

And Billy looked at his brother as if he’d just asked the most dumb-ass question in the world. “Well, if you think real hard, maybe a couple things’ll come to mind.”

He didn’t have to wait very long before they did.

“
HELLO
?”

The voice of Wex Ambler’s housekeeper answering the phone.

Meg didn’t know the woman. She’d seen her several times since she and Ambler had begun their affair—once coming out of the brick and white-trim First Presbyterian Church on Maple Street. But Meg hadn’t actually heard her voice before this moment. She sounded older than Ambler.

“Is Mr. Ambler there please?” Meg, who had never typed a letter for anyone other than herself or Keith in her life, tried to sound like a Kelly Girl.

“Just a minute, please. Who shall I say’s calling?”

This she’d thought about. “Dutchess Realty Company.”

“One minute.”

“Hello?”

“Wex.”

A moment later, she was listening to her lover say with a tortured formality, “Yes, Meg. How are you? I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.” There was a pause at the end of his sentences. She knew that Ambler liked phrases of affection and it would be natural for him to add a “darling” or “dear.” Under the circumstances, of course, he’d have to watch himself carefully to avoid these.

Ambler had reluctantly agreed to Meg’s demand that not a single soul in town know about their affair.

Meg asked, “Is it safe to talk?” Then she regretted the idiocy of the question.

Ambler ignored it. “What can I do for you?”

“There was an accident. Somebody gave Sam some drugs.”

There was a pause. “Is he all right?”

“He’ll be okay. But I can’t make it today.”

“Of course. I understand. What kind of drugs?”

“Heroin, it looked like.”

“Are you sure?” His voice sounded flatlined. As if he hadn’t even heard her.

“That’s what the doctor said.”

“Where did he get it?”

Meg hesitated. “I have no idea. He claims he found it.”

“Will he be okay?”

“The doctor said he would.”

He spoke again slowly. “I’m sorry. I wish I could have been there.”

She said, “Yes, that would have been good.”

Static growing on the line. She guessed he was on a cordless phone and had moved into a den, or outside. He spoke more freely. “When can I see you? I—”

Then he stopped talking and—his housekeeper undoubtedly approaching—said, “Those prices are a little high.”

“I want to talk to you,” she said. “There’re some things we should talk about.”

She was thankful Ambler wasn’t alone and wasn’t free to ask the questions that she didn’t want to answer right now, certainly not over the phone. She heard the frustration in his voice. “I understand. It’s a mutual situation. Day after tomorrow?”

“Probably.”

“Have you thought any more about my proposition of the other day?”

“I don’t want to talk about that now.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I’ll look forward to seeing you day after tomorrow.”

Meg found she was answering as if Keith were in the room, which he was not. “Those would be acceptable terms.” She hung up.

“
HOW YOU FEELING
,
skipper?” Keith asked his son.

“Pretty good, Dad.” But Sam’s voice was weak and he was huddled in his bathrobe and blanket on
his bed. Heartbreaking, the way he was lying, so small and fragile.

The computer’s fan whirred softly; the screen was blank except for the C prompt, waiting for instructions. Keith thought about shutting it off but didn’t; he figured Sam had left it on for whatever comfort the sound of the machinery might provide.

Keith sat on the edge of the bed and tucked the blankets around the boy. “How’s the stomach?”

“I liked the ice cream. It didn’t make me feel icky.”

Keith nodded and remembered to look the boy in the eyes. Meg had once told him that he looked away from people too much. He’d explained to her that his mind wandered; he couldn’t help it. She’d told him that was no excuse. When you had children, you had to give them a hundred and fifty percent of yourself.

There was a lot he wanted to say. About how he knew he wasn’t as attentive as he ought to be, how he didn’t like sports the way most of Sam’s friends’ fathers did, how he kept putting off vacations. About how if he hadn’t been working today this probably wouldn’t have happened. But he thought that talk like that now would just upset the boy, make him think that the incident with the drugs was worse than it was. He told himself that he simply would make it up to the boy. Not after the expansion at the factory was completed, not after the first of the year, not after the cold-season rush, but soon, very soon.

“I’m sorry about what happened, Daddy.”

“We don’t blame you, Sam.”

“I was like pretty stupid.”

“Sam,” Keith leaned forward. “It is very, very important that you tell me where you got those pills.”

“The candy?”

“Right. The candy. I know you didn’t just find it.”

Tears had started and the little boy was shaking. Keith put his hand on Sam’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Don’t worry. I won’t let anything else happen to you.”

“He said he’d beat me up.”

“I won’t let anyone beat you up. I promise you. Tell me.”

“A kid from the high school.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know his last name. His first name’s Ned. I think he’s a senior.”

“What does he look like?”

“He was like sort of tall. Like a football player . . . Oh, Daddy . . .” Sam bolted forward into Keith’s arms. They hugged for a few minutes. Keith stood up. “You want me to leave the light on?”

“Uh-huh. Is it okay?”

Keith mussed Sam’s hair. “I’ll be up later and look in on you.”

“Okay.”

“Good night, son.”

THE FIRE AT
the clinic wasn’t too bad.

Nowhere near the excitement of the Great Fire of 1912.

Only one of Cleary’s trucks was needed and the men got the blaze under control with fire extinguishers, which was a big letdown because of all the hours they’d spent at hose drill. Brush fires and burning toasters—that was all they ever got. And at the clinic they didn’t even get to use an axe. Like a lot of buildings in Cleary, the clinic was left open even when the all-night nurse went out for coffee, or—as in this case—to buy batteries for her Walkman.

Most of the carnage was confined to the office. A lot of patient records were destroyed as was all the outgoing mail and a number of envelopes bound for the testing lab in Albany. The gushing water had caused the most damage.

The fire chief, a lean, chiseled-faced man who ran an insurance agency in town and took both jobs equally seriously, went through the office slowly. He didn’t really need to, though; it didn’t take any length of time, or great forensic skill, to make the discovery. He put his find into a Hefty trash bag (the Cleary Fire
Department wasn’t entrusted with evidence bags) and then went to his car to call the sheriff on his CB. He had trouble getting through and went back inside to call him on the phone, which was partly melted but still working.

As he stood at the charred desk and waited for Tom to come on the line he stared at what he’d found. For some reason the fire had not completely consumed the incendiary device. He knew, from the label, that the bottle at one time had held Taylor New York State sparkling wine and, from the smell, that it had more recently held gasoline.

He knew too (from research and continuing education—never having encountered a fire bomb before) that cloth was standard procedure for fuses. But this one was different. He held it up close.

The fire chief was pretty much a humorless man. But as the sheriff came on the line with a “’Lo?” the chief was laughing, thinking they must be dealing with some pretty literate arsonists. Who else’d use pages from a
National Geographic
to light a Molotov cocktail?

“
MARK,” SAID MAYOR
Hank Moorhouse, after hearing him out, “it’s no crime for the man to wander around and take pictures. If it weren’t for assholes taking pictures of the leaves, we’d be a much poorer town. You know that.”

It was suppertime. Succulent smells—roasts and fatty potatoes—floated through the Moorhouses’ Victorian home. The sound of utensils and muffled voices came from another part of the house.

The heavyset and damn-scary young man, moving
a pile of chewing tobacco around inside his cheek, said, “This guy is dangerous. You heard about Meg Torrens’s kid? He got his hands on some dope.”

“No! I didn’t hear about that. Sam?” Moorhouse’s eyes flicked down to the blond moustache then up again.

“The word is he got it from Pellam. A couple guys saw ’em together.”

Mark moved the chaw around his mouth.

Moorhouse’s nostrils dilated at the smell of dinner. He wanted this over with, and fast. But Mark worked for Wexell Ambler and Ambler held the first and second mortgages on Moorhouse’s six-bedroom home and was an assemblyman on the town council. He said, “That somvabitch.” He tore off a piece of Scotch tape, wadded it up and started chewing. He’d tried to stop the habit but thought now: Better’n tobacco.

“There’s more.”

Mark dropped a packet of white powder down onto the desk.

“What’s that?”

“What do you think it is?”

Moorhouse stared at the package as if it were from the melted core at Chernobyl.

“I saw him drop it,” Mark said. “Pellam.”

Moorhouse leaned forward carefully. He didn’t want to touch the plastic. “We don’t get much of this stuff around here. Christ, I worry about my boys—” He nodded toward the dining room. “—drinking beer. They tell me they’ve never tried pot and I believe ’em. But this . . . What exactly is it, Mark? Cocaine, huh?”

“Speed, I think.”

“What do you suppose it’s worth? What’s the, what do they say on the news, what’s the street value?”

“You’re asking me?” Mark said, his voice high with surprise. “What difference does it make?”

“Can’t arrest someone just ’cause you saw him drop it.” Though when Moorhouse thought about this, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe you
could.
He wondered where you could look that up. Cleary had a town attorney.

Mark smiled amiably and leaned toward Moor-house in a way that he thought of as doing what he did best. “Then we’ll have to think a little harder.”

Moorhouse’s eyes kept circling in on the packet like a mosquito over flesh. “I don’t know.”

The brown envelope hit the desk with a slap. Moorhouse jumped, hesitated a moment, then picked it up. He glanced up at Mark, who said, “There’s three thousand dollars in there.”

Moorhouse thumbed through the bills. “Take your word for it. Where’d it come from?”

“Let’s say a bunch of folk took up a collection. We don’t think this guy should be here any longer. Movie ain’t gonna be made here. No reason for him to hang around.”