Skunk Hunt (48 page)

"They can doctor pictures," I said. "I
thought
Jeremy
was the Neerson
twin when someone gave me a photo of him and a lookalike. There's
nothing you can show or tell me that will change the fact we're
brothers...much as that dismays me."

"What picture?" Todd asked. "Did Jeremy give
it to you?"

"Why would you think that?"

"He's been here." Todd had raised the
picture-frame drawbridge and was again holding it to his chest, as
though shielding a poker hand. "He couldn't remember the address,
but he knew the area he'd come from. He drove around these
neighborhoods for days, until he saw my yard..."

I had to laugh. In poshland, a McPherson yard
would stick out like a gangrenous limb.

"I've cleaned up since then," Todd asserted
in an afflicted tone that acknowledged circumstances had prevented
him from completing the job, which was perfectly reasonable if you
counted being a lazy pig an unavoidable circumstance.

"It wasn't Jeremy," I said. "The picture came
from our mystery man, the same guy who sent us letters. And if he
wrote intimate details about your life that only you could know, he
knows more about our extended family than anyone in the
family."

"Yeah," Todd said pensively. "He really knew
some shit about me."

"Really 'really'?" We don't always know when
we lie to ourselves. In fact, we lie to ourselves better than we
lie to anyone else. But if I sat in front of a mirror and told a
whopper, I would probably recognize it for what it was. I was
recognizing one now.

"Really," Todd said, reinforcing the lie with
a stiffened back. "And don't ask me to repeat it." He gave another
one of those death-defying sighs and lowered the drawbridge again,
only this time lower. I could see silhouettes beneath the frame
glass glare, but not much more.

"Just give me the damn picture," I said.

With a sound like a throttled python, he
hissed it onto the table, nearly knocking over my beer. I rescued
the bottle, then lowered my eyes.

I recognized Todd through twinship, from one
or two pictures Skunk had snapped of me when I was around one year
old. It's hard to imagine a cold picture of a baby, but those had
been icily analytical, as if Skunk was preparing documents for an
insurance claim. But this photo showed both parents, proudly
shoving my infant lookalike towards the lens, the father's lips
pursed in googoos and gagas. I didn't recognize Mrs. Elizabeth
Neerson, because whoever had taken the picture had chopped off her
head, leaving it somewhere beyond the left-hand corner.

Mr. Benjamin F. Neerson was not Skunk. He had
a face like chewed gum.

Winny Marteen. The man who had so slavishly
clung to my father's shadow, and who had died alongside him in the
botched robbery at the Ice Boutique.

My eyes drifted back to the woman. I
struggled desperately for a glimpse beyond the chin. In my
imagination, I thought I glimpsed sadness beneath an Avon patina.
There was something familiar about her, but I couldn't pin it.

"Skunk?" Todd asked, biting his nail in a
perfect imitation of my nervous habit.

"No," I said. "That's not Skunk. But I know
him. And you're right."

"About what?"

"He's deader than a doornail. But not from
asbestos. More like lead poisoning."

CHAPTER 23

In all innocence, Todd had a lot to answer
for. And because he was innocent (in his own slimy way) not many
answers were forthcoming.

"When is the last time you saw Winny?" I
asked as calmly as I could.

"Who?" he asked.

"Your father, idiot!" I half-shrieked, my
calm on the micro-clock. I wouldn't have liked to be called an
idiot, so naturally Todd didn't, either. I tried to think of some
way to mend the stricken look on his face and sighed,
"Sorry..."

My brother-clone-clod was as unused to
hearing the word as I was and fluttered around his beer as he
transcribed it into his own West End vernacular.

"Idiot," he sneered.

"Fair enough," I shrugged.

"Dad was always flying the coop," he
admitted. "Asbestos abatement conventions, right? But Mom knew
better, and she began flying the coop, too. I'm surprised Dad
risked losing her. You can't tell from this, but she wasn't half
bad looking, and he's...you see. The last few years I hardly saw
either one of them."

I was beginning to choke on the smokescreen.
"You said your mother had just 'gone'."

"Did I?"

"And that your father was dead."

"Well..." he said, expressing his empty head
with empty air.

"Why would you bring up the subject of a will
if they were both alive?" I insisted.

"I didn't bring up the will. And dead? They
might as well be." This was spoken with the clarity of a childhood
grudge. "Even when they were here, they weren't, not most of the
time. They hardly ever said two words to each other, and even less
to me. It gave me the creeps."

My eyes kept going back to the picture. "You
swear on your mother's grave..." Oops, wrong oath.

"No, the picture isn't doctored," Todd
said.

"Do you have more?"

"In a shoe box somewhere, but they're just of
me or Dad, never all three together." He reached across and flipped
the picture over. "This was taken at a studio, which is why it's
got all three of us."

"All of Winny and three-fourths of Mom. What
kind of studio is that?"

"Okay, the photographer screwed up. But you
can still see the three of us. I sometimes wonder if they had it
done just to prove we belonged together."

"And there's none of Jeremy?" I asked. "As a
rugrat, I mean. And what about brothers and sisters? They're
mentioned in the will."

"Just us three," Todd reiterated. "Tell me
again where you got a copy of the will? Is it the same guy who gave
you Jeremy's picture?"

But I was plumbing my mind for memories of
Winny Marteen. And of Mom, because she was either Todd's biological
mother or my illegal guardian. I had been a kid when Mom dropped
out of our lives, my last image of her being of an unhappy creature
whose suicide made good contextual sense. Mental images of Winny
were sharper, partly because they were more recent, partly because
his downright ugliness made him unforgettable.

But that chin. And the body type. So much
like Barbara's....

No, no, no. For Winny to be carrying on
with Mom was perfectly inconceivable. The opportunities were there,
of course, what with Skunk spending so much quality time with the
Department of Corrections. But that had to be balanced against the
fact that, if he found out, Skunk would have cut out Winny's heart
and fed it to the neighborhood cats. And what would be the
attraction? Mom had standards, after all. Okay, she married Skunk,
but at least Dad had character. It was a completely
bad
character, but on Oregon Hill,
bad boys were all the rage with the seaweed-brained girls I grew up
around. Granted, it would have been hard for an adult, let alone a
fledgling wuss, to spot sexual passion or jealousy in the
prevailing dismal miasma of the McPherson household. I had a
reasonable concept of the mechanics (sex involved gooey tinkertoys,
I believed) but the underlying emotions would have been beyond
me.

Yet here was this damn family portrait. Winny
and (possibly) Mom had run off to live a separate life together,
and a pretty nice life it had once been, financially speaking.
Where had the money come from? The day after the jewelry store
debacle the police had swarmed into my house like rabid zombies.
After they questioned me and told me not to leave the city ("For
where?" I asked inanely), I strolled over to Winny's and saw his
place was getting the same treatment. If they had done the same at
Todd's, he would have known Winny's fate. Up to now, though, he had
given no hint his father had been blown away. Then again, with
everything here upside down, it had the look and feel of a
temporary police playground that the grownups had neglected to
clean up.

"Did you have a visit from the police last
December?"

"Why?" Todd was alarmed by the
question. "I haven't done anything wrong. Oh...you mean because of
my neighbors? They don't call the police just because you aren't
anal. And I
have
cleaned up
the place, remember?"

I thought he was wrong. His anal-free version
of real estate hygiene might very well bring down the cops on his
head. And being an accessory to a kidnapping might be interpreted
as more than just a peccadillo in some quarters. Rather than argue,
I accepted his ignorance at face value. He didn't know his alleged
father had died in a hail of bullets. Nor did anyone else in our
little circle, it seemed, with the exception of our secret
benefactor.

"Did you visit your father in the hospital
when he got sick?" I asked carefully.

"It was sudden, you know? He was scoping out
a shipyard in Hong Kong, if you must know. He was planning on his
next job. There's only so many state buildings with asbestos left
in them. He just sort of keeled over and they buried him
overseas."

Shipyard-keeled-funny rippled through my
liquid brain. I wondered if I should break the news to him, but you
never know how people will react. If he went all blubbery with
grief I might feel obligated to console him. I was put off by the
idea of giving him a hug, and not only because he was my cretin
twin. I guess I'd seen and read too many time travel stories where
the scientist hooks up with his younger self and implodes when he
makes the mistake of touching him. In a way, we were both time
travelers, rollicking in our separate dimensions, happily unaware
and uncommitted, matter and antimatter.

"Who told you that story?" I asked.

"It's not a story, it's the truth."

Ahem. How could I tell him that his scummy
father had lived a scummy life and had died a scummy death
alongside my scummy Skunk? The creep was lying his head off, but
about this he seemed to be telling the truth. He really believed
Winny Marteen aka Benjamin Neerson was lying in an honorable grave
beside his gravy train passport.

"Did your father have any cronies?" I
asked.

"'Cronies'? You mean, like from the wrong
side of the tracks?"

"Did he have any friends, then?" I would
leave some tracks on his backside if he didn't start cooperating
more cooperatively.

"I guess he did, but they didn't come around
here," Todd answered after minimal thought.

"Not even coworkers?"

Todd shook his head. "He was pretty much a
loner. I could be wrong. Maybe he was having road parties all the
time, Richmond to Anchorage and back. How long would that take?
Theoretically, I mean, stone sober?"

"Winny drank a lot?"

"Who?"

"Ben Neerson," I amended.

"I prefer that to 'Winny'. Did he drink? Only
to prevent drying out."

"That's Winny all right," I nodded. "Weaned
on moonshine. You'd think a contractor would stay sober some of the
time."

"You're talking about my father, here."

"What was the name of his company?" I
asked.

"New River Environmental Group, specializing
in asbestos abatement and mold remediation."

"What the hell is 'mold remediation'?" I
asked.

"Hell if I know."

My laugh probably sounded meaner than I
intended. "If any mold needed rehabilitating—"

"How well did you know this Whiny character?"
Todd scowled.

"He was always hanging around Skunk," I said,
not having to think back very far. "It was almost like love."

"I don't need this," Todd said.

I could see this had to be nipped in the bud.
Todd's disbelief could end any joint venture I might cook up, not
that anything particularly important was simmering in my brain.
Yes, it was unfair to give him another nasty shock—the first being
me. But fairness was luxury at the moment, as it had always
been.

"Winny Marteen and Skunk were killed six or
seven months ago trying to rob a jewelry store on Staples Mill
Road," I said abruptly.

Todd stared at me for a beat, then said, "I
heard about that."

"That's all?" I asked.

"It was on the news, but I didn't watch all
of the report. It seemed pretty useless."

"You got that right," I asserted. "He barely
got in the door before the clerk shot him. You have a computer? The
whole thing is posted on YouTube."

Pretty callous, right? I was asking my
brother to watch the death of his stepfather, or father, or
significant whatsitz. I was still wrapped in the unreality of the
situation and found it hard to assign emotion to the lead
characters. Barbara and Jeremy and I had seen the security video
without blinking. But hearing the shot, then seeing Winny's shady
eyes go wide for the first time ever before he fell back on the
sidewalk, perfectly dead, might break poor lil' Todd's soft
heart.

"Come on, where's your computer?" I urged. "I
can find the website for you. I think."

"You're a sick bastard, aren't you?" Todd
said. "This Winny character had nothing to do with my father."

"I don't know about the sick part." I was
feeling my sadistic oats, I suppose. A lot of stress had been
compressed into the last few hours. I had been kidnapped, harassed
and confronted by a most-unwanted twin brother. Give me points for
not snapping entirely.

"Well forget it," said Todd. "My computer
crashed and the Geek Squad is out of my price range."

"I hear those porn sites are pretty
dangerous," I nodded sympathetically.

"So you're saying my father..." Todd began,
giving me a sideways glance sharp enough to slit my throat.

"You can see why I asked if the cops search
your house," I said. "He had another house on Oregon Hill, and they
turned it inside out. They would have done the same here..."