Shallow Graves (6 page)

“Marty?”

The doctor looked at the deputy, who nodded.

He asked, “An accident?”

The deputy said, “I’m sorry, sir.”

“What happened?” Pellam found himself breathless. The air had actually escaped from his lungs.

The deputy said, “His car caught fire. I’m sorry to have to tell you he was killed.”

“Oh, God.” Pellam closed his eyes. He felt an overwhelming, raw sense of loss. Images of the boy flipped through Pellam’s head. Like still pictures. That was one thing about himself he’d always thought odd. For someone who worked in film, his memories were always static. Kodacolor snapshots. They never moved.

“Oh, God. . . .” His voice faded. Suddenly, he thought of all the things he’d have to do. Who should he call? What should he say? There’d be hours of the grim, official business that he’d have to handle. Pellam, surrogate father to this poor young man. “What happened? A crash?”

The deputy, a boy not much older than Marty, but with that vest of self-assurance most cops seem to wear, said, “Truth be told, sir, appears he was doing some drugs. We found pot and some crack cocaine vials. He—”

“Crack? Marty? No, no, no . . .”

“We found the body next to the gas tank. We think some grass caught fire and he tried to put it out. Before he could, she blew up.”

“He didn’t do crack.”

“Well, sir, I should tell you too that we got a call just before it happened. Couple men said they’d seen him selling some pot to a local boy. They—”

“No,” Pellam spat out. “Impossible.”

“They described the car pretty good, sir.”

“Who was it? Who reported it?”

“An anonymous call. There was a foil package with a goodly bit of grass in it. And some crack. It was in the car. The glove compartment. It wasn’t all burnt up.”

Pellam lifted his hands to his face. He wondered if he was going to cry. He’d cried twice in the past ten years. Once was just after the funeral of a friend. The second time was when his ex had left. He’d been drunk on both occasions. He was sober now and he didn’t think he was going to cry.

“If it’s any consolation,” the deputy said, “the coroner said it was fast.” He looked at the doctor for confirmation that a fast death was better than a slow one.

The doctor handed him a paper cup. Inside were two pills, tiny white pills.

“They’ll help you sleep.”

Pellam shook his head but he didn’t hand them back. He held the cup in both hands and stared at the two dots of pills, studying them carefully, noting the way the light, muted by the side of the paper cup, fell on them, how they were perfectly symmetrical, how they rested against each other—a kind of infinity symbol in three dimensions.

What Pellam couldn’t tell them was: one of the things he was feeling was fury. He’d been after Marty for months to give up the pot. Pellam had done his share of controlled substances in his day, but had been shocked to find that Marty had smuggled a few nickel bags into Mexico. When Pellam had found them, he’d pulled the boy from bed, pinning him to the cold metallic sides of the camper just before
dawn, demanding to know where the rest of the stash was. He owned up and handed it over to Pellam, who threw it out. Marty promised he’d abstain while they were driving together.

Would the boy have gone back on his word?

And crack? He’d never even mentioned that.

“Uhm, what—?” Pellam started to ask the deputy but his thoughts jammed. The men looked at him patiently. He remembered. “What should I do?”

The doctor said, “You don’t have to do anything at all but get some rest. I still don’t want you out of bed till tomorrow.”

“But—”

The young deputy held teardrop-shaped sunglasses with haze-cutting yellow lenses—right out of a sixties biker movie. The sincere, well-scrubbed man hooked a thumb into a leather mesh belt and said, “The coroner’s doing his report right now; we’ve already called the young man’s family. And your film studio.”

His family. . . .

Hello, Mrs. Jacobs. You don’t know me, but I worked with your son. . . . The two of us, we got our asses thrown out of a whorehouse in Nogales about three weeks ago. . . .

The deputy continued, “We’re making arrangements to ship the body back to Los Angeles. We figured you’d want to be traveling with him, sir, so we’ve booked you on the same flight. The local funeral home’s agreed to transport the body to Albany Airport. That’ll be American Eagle flight 6733, day after tomorrow.”

“If he’s well enough to travel,” the doctor said.

Your son, Mr. Jacobs, was smoking a nugget of crack and got blown up. . . .

“Of course,” the deputy said. “Sure.” The man leaned forward and Pellam saw a roll of dense fat encroach over the black belt of his Sam Browne harness, Vaseline-shined patent leather. The deputy said, “I don’t like, you know, drugs much, sir. Especially if he was into selling them to some of our young people. But I’m truly sorry about your friend. What happened wasn’t fair. All outa proportion, you know what I mean?”

The man’s battleship-gray eyes were tight with sorrow and Pellam thanked him. He looked again at the pills. The cup wasn’t waxed and he found that his sweat had left fingerprints on the sides.

The doctor said, “Take those now. You need rest.”

Pellam couldn’t speak. He nodded.

“We’ll leave you alone. You want some company or anything, my wife and I live a hundred yards up the road. There’ll be someone here all night, a nurse. Just tell her and she’ll call me.”

“Thanks.”

The men left the room. Pellam set the cup on the tabletop. He misjudged the distance and it hit the edge and fell to the floor. He heard one or maybe both of the pills, rolling somewhere, endlessly. He didn’t even look down. He lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling as the dusk turned into night and finally he slept.

THE NOISE.

Sitting in the Winnebago, Pellam remembered the way the boy would sit sideways in the camper’s small
bunk and swing his Adidas back and forth. The thud-thud, pause, thud-thud. A monotonous heartbeat.

God, it was quiet. Pellam cocked his head and couldn’t hear a thing. A hum, but that was in his head. (Well, he heard Marty’s voice and his laugh and the fake heartbeat of his boots but those were in his head too.) No airplane drone, no diesels. No children whooping as they played. Pellam sat in the driver’s seat of the camper, looking back into the living quarters. The pain in his back was less when he sat upright. Standing was agony, unless he leaned. For some reason when he moved the pain wasn’t as bad as standing still.

Ah, Marty. . . .

He stood up. The tragedy tired him out more than the injuries did. He walked stiffly. He’d refused the cane the doctor recommended. There was a black scab on his head and the bruise now had some green in it.

While he still had the courage, he filled a Macy’s shopping bag with the boy’s belongings. He rested, sitting on the bunk in the camper, looking at the bag for a few minutes, the big brown-red logo, the white, spidery wrinkles. Pellam stood, emptied the bag and packed the contents back into his own leather suitcase, which he’d bought on Rodeo Drive eight years before, folding the boy’s shirts and jeans and Jockey shorts as carefully as if he were doing piece cleaning in a Beverly Hills laundry.

Then he sat and studied the suitcase for a half hour.

After he’d been released from the clinic a few hours before, the first thing he’d done was shave.
He’d passed a mirror, and his face, with the uneven beard laced with gray, had shocked him. He looked like he was a badly abused 50. Then he’d called Marty’s father. It had not been a good conversation. The man, a retired studio gaffer, blamed Pellam. He wasn’t contemptuous, he wasn’t snide, but throughout the conversation, Pellam could hear the pedal tone of suspicion—as if Pellam had supplied the drugs that had killed his son. Pellam wondered what the man looked like, what his house was like, what his relationship with Marty had been. The boy had complained about his parents a lot but most of the examples the boy cited made Pellam think: And the problem is what exactly? Marty bitched about the time they took away car privileges for a month after he’d passed out drunk in a HoJo’s off the Edens Expressway. And the time they made him go to a counselor when he went through a spell of cutting classes.

All high school stuff—bitching and moaning.

Pellam also asked to speak to Marty’s mother. He felt a wave of relief when the boy’s father said that wouldn’t be a good idea. Then he’d hung up and lain back in the camper cot.

He clicked the heavy brass latches back and forth. The suitcase had cost him a thousand dollars.

Pellam felt the bottle of Demerol in his pocket, took it out and tossed it into one of the kitchen drawers. He needed something different. He slowly crouched down and reached into a cabinet. Out came a bottle of mescal, a quarter full, with a bloated white worm in the bottom. Pellam poured a double shot and drank the liquid down in two swallows. He coughed and felt the crackling wave from his chest up to his
face and the nearly instantaneous deflating of the pain. He poured one more, smaller, and again began the slow crouch to replace the bottle. He set it in the back of the cabinet but it landed on something and fell forward. The loose cork stopper fell out and a quarter cup of liquor spilled out before he could snatch the bottle up again. “Damn.” He managed to save the worm. Pellam reached in the back and felt for what the bottle had landed on. It was soft and crunched. He jerked his hand back, thinking: Rat, mouse. . . .

He looked. Just a Baggie. He reached in and pulled it out. Filled with Marty’s stash. He looked at it for a long moment then wrapped it in paper towels, which he soaked under the low-pressure water tap and wadded up. This he dropped into a brown paper bag, crumpled that up and then stepped outside and tossed the whole thing into a refuse basket.

Pellam hefted the suitcase, wheezing painfully from the effort, and left the camper. He walked stiffly through the cold autumn sunlight to the Greyhound depot, which took up a small portion of a gas station on Main Street. He paid to have the bag shipped to Marty’s parents.

The clerk stroked the leather. “That’s a fine suitcase.”

“Yessir,” Pellam said and, as it joined other luggage on a baggage cart, walked listlessly outside.

HE WAS REMINDED
of the last time he went hunting with his father—in his hometown, Simmons, New York, probably no more than sixty or seventy miles from where he now stood.

Walking then through the same stubbly grass he
now limped over, smelling the same scent of damp foliage, bathed in the same pale cast of light. Twenty-five years ago Pellam Senior had struggled through the fields, lifting the long Browning shotgun with an effort and missing even the slowest of pheasants. Two days later the man had collapsed with the first of the heart attacks that would eventually finish him.

Pellam associated the hunting trip with his father’s death.

That memory came back to him now and would not leave.

He walked slowly, favoring his left foot to ease some of the dull ache in his back. Should’ve taken the damn cane the doctor had offered him, he thought again.

The top of the park had been roped off by the police. A thin yellow tape that said, “Sheriff’s Department,” every few inches stretched from one thick rusted pipe to another. There was a chain on the ground attached to one pipe; they could have used that to bar the entrance but Pellam guessed the cops wanted the chance to use all their crime-fighting gear. He walked around the pipe and started to climb toward the summit of this hill.

Pellam, breathing hard against the pain, reached the top of the drive and stopped.

Obliterated.

He walked to the center of the parking area—what had been grass and gravel was now just a pile of rich dark earth and the surrounding mess made by the dozer, whose tread marks he’d seen on the way up but hadn’t thought anything of.

Obliterated.

In the exact center—probably just where Marty’s car had been—there was no trace of scorch marks, no trace of footprints, no car treads. Just a dry foamy powder of dug-up dirt like a huge round grave. He stayed here for a long time. Mostly just walking around in slow circles, listening to the birds and the whiplashing wind in the leaves; there was really nothing to see. Nothing at all.

“
WHAT HAPPENED?
”

“Happened?” the deputy asked.

They were standing outside the camper, parked on Main Street. The beefy deputy looked familiar. Pellam thought he was maybe the same one who’d helped him to the clinic after his accident. (What was the driver’s name? May? Mary? No, Meg. That was it. Meg.) The law enforcer stood with his arms pushed out from his body by a lot of biceps muscle. He noticed the man’s .357 had rubberized combat grips. He wondered if the gun had ever been fired anywhere but on a range. This deputy also had teardrop-shaped glasses though his had lavender-tinted lenses.

“I get to where the accident was,” Pellam explained, “and the ground’s all plowed over.”

Lavender?

“Oh, that. What it was, they figured it would be, you know, discouraging for people to see where it happened.”

Discouraging?
“How do you mean?”

“Wasn’t my decision. I don’t really know. I just heard, what with leaf season here and all, it might hurt tourist trade.”

“Discouraging?” Pellam asked in exasperation.

The deputy answered in a monotone. “It was kind of unpleasant. A bad fire, you know. Blood. We get a lot of hunters too. We—”

“Then why was the tape still up?”

“Tape?”

“The police tape. That’d discourage tourists too pretty fast, you’d think.”

“Oh, the tape. You’re right, sir. We forgot about it. But thanks for bringing it to our attention.”

“You’re welcome,” Pellam said. “What happened to the car?”

“Car?”

The miniature troops with needles were climbing up and down Pellam’s back, working hard. He thought about the Demerol. He thought about tequila, with or without worms. The pain was bad and he was losing patience fast. “My friend’s car, the one that burned?”