The Happiest People in the World (10 page)

C
apo was sitting at Doc's counter. The lights were off. Doc was in the kitchen, making corned beef hash and scrambled eggs in the dark. London was sitting in a car outside Matty's house; Crystal was across the street in the Lumber Lodge. In front of Capo, on the counter, was an open laptop. A cell phone was plugged into the laptop. Capo was certain of four things. He knew that Locs had rented a blue Chevy Cruze, because she'd paid for it with her agency credit card. He knew that Locs was in town, because at the baseball game Kurt had described to him the woman who had taken the cartoon from him, the cartoon that Kurt himself had originally taken from the cartoonist. He knew that Locs would find Matty, or Matty her. He knew that Matty would, at the last minute, suffer a failure of nerve, again, and that he would walk away from Locs, again. After that, there were a number of possibilities. Locs might decide to murder Matty. Locs might decide to murder Ellen. Locs might decide not to murder Matty or Ellen but instead to murder their marriage by calling Ellen at the Lumber Lodge and telling her that she and Matty had seen each other again. This was why London and Crystal were stationed where they were stationed. This was why the laptop was open in front of Capo: if Locs used her cell phone, the laptop would tell him where she was using it, and if someone called the Lumber Lodge, the call would be routed into Capo's computer and he could answer it on his cell phone.

But there was another possibility. That Locs would do something else, something even Capo hadn't yet thought of.

Meanwhile, Capo watched, on his laptop, the barroom of the Lumber Lodge as seen through the camera he'd placed in the eye of the moose head. There was no sound because the microphone wasn't working, again. Every year Capo, Doc, and Crystal replaced the camera and the microphone, and every year the microphone stopped working immediately after they replaced it. Capo had wanted to put the camera and the microphone there in the first place, not because he thought the Lumber Lodge worth spying on, but because he didn't want his and his agents' bug-planting skills to get rusty. Anyway, a little after eight, Capo watched Crystal get off her barstool, walk across the room, look up the stairs, and then walk back across the room to her barstool. From there, she gave the moose head a thumbs-up. This wasn't as conspicuous as it seems: Capo had noticed that the bar patrons tended to gravitate toward the moose head. The drunker the patrons, the greater the gravitational pull. They stared at the moose head, toasted it, talked to it, confided in it; once, a man had propositioned it sexually. The microphone hadn't been working that time, either, but the man had made a series of vulgar hip thrusts so there was no way the moose head, or Capo, would mistake his meaning. Good Lord. Sometimes, Capo wished that the camera didn't work, either, or that it had been placed in a different stuffed animal head, in a different bar, in a different town.

But regardless, Crystal's thumbs-up meant that the Danish cartoonist was safely in his room above the Lumber Lodge.

A little after that, he heard from London: Matty was safely inside the old stone house.

A little after that, the phone rang. The call was not from Locs's cell phone. It was a local number. But it was from someone calling the Lumber Lodge. Capo raised his eyebrow at Doc and then answered the phone. “Lumber Lodge,” he said in Ellen's voice.

“Yeah,” the voice said. It was a woman's voice. It was muffled, slurred. The woman sounded drunk. But it was Broomeville. That could mean it was lots of people. “I just saw your fuckin' husband. With that Lorraine chick. The bird woman. You know who I'm talkin' about. In a blue Chevy Cruze out on Route 356, by the power lines.”

“Who
is
this?” Capo asked in Ellen's voice. But the woman had already hung up. Capo hung up, too. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene: Matty and Locs together in the car on Route 356. Matty telling her the inevitable. Matty getting out of the car. Matty walking home. Locs sitting in the car, and sitting there, and sitting there, not believing that she had let this happen to her again; trying to figure out whom to blame; trying to figure out where she was going to go; trying to figure out what she was going to do next.

Capo opened his eyes and called London. London was already in his car. He was closer to Route 356 than any of the rest of them. Besides, he had helped make this mess. It made sense that he be the one to clean it up. Capo gave London the information, told him what to do. Then Capo hung up. Five minutes later, just as Capo was about to tuck into his eggs and hash, London called. Crying. Really crying. Not as though he was afraid he had done something wrong, but as though he
knew
it. The poor boy. Perhaps Capo had been wrong after all to recruit him. This was the dangerous part of recruiting among the young. You never knew how much they weren't going to change when they got older.

“Drive away,” Capo said. “Calmly, calmly. The roads are treacherous. Don't worry. The county coroner is on his way.” At that, Doc took off his apron, withdrew his black bag from under the counter, and ran out the door. Not many people knew that Broomeville County even had a coroner, let alone that Doc was that coroner, let alone that that's why Doc was called Doc.

That was that. London had killed the wrong woman. Locs was gone. Who knew where? She was an excellent agent; they probably wouldn't be able to find her. They would probably have to wait until she decided to come back to Broomeville again. In the meantime, Capo, Doc, Crystal, and London would keep watch over the cartoonist. No one else in Broomeville would know his true identity. But what about Matty? Doesn't Matty know who the cartoonist is
?
Capo asked himself, and then quickly answered, No, Matty doesn't even know who
he
is. Matty doesn't even know who
I
am.

That decided, there was nothing left for Capo to do except eat Doc's eggs and hash. He did love Doc's eggs and hash. He often rhapsodized about them during his time away. “Broomeville! Oh, I'll never forget the eggs and corned beef hash at Doc's!” he would say. Since his return, he'd spent as much time there as his other job allowed. In fact, he had been there that Saturday morning, seven years earlier, drinking his coffee, in the company of his clocks, looking out the window. Matty had just gotten out of the car and walked away, but Locs was still sitting inside. Capo knew what she was doing: she was trying to figure out whom to blame; trying to figure out where she was going to go; trying to figure out what she was going to do next. Capo finished his coffee, walked outside. Locs's head was thrown back against the seat; her eyes were closed. He tapped on the window and her eyes sprang open and she gave him a calculating but still furious look. A very promising look. Although also a very dangerous look. He gestured with his hand for her to roll down her window, and she did that.

“What the fuck do you want, Lawrence?” she said.

“Lawrence,” he repeated. “Some people call me by another name.”

“Creep?” she suggested. “Asshole?”

Capo tried to ignore that. “I
am
sorry my brother”—and here Capo paused, pretending to search for just the right word—“
dumped
you. But you should have known something like that was going to happen.” When Locs didn't say anything to this, he asked, “What will you do next? Where will you go?”

“What do you care?” she said. And then, in a different, lonelier voice, she said, “I really don't know.”

“Don't worry,” Capo said. “I know some people who will take you into their home.”

Broomeville Bulletin,
October 12, 2009

Sheilah Crimmins, age 47, was found dead in her automobile on State Route 356 early Thursday morning. The county coroner has ruled that the deceased died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to reports, Ms. Crimmins had a history of substance abuse and was distraught over recently losing her job at Broomeville Junior-Senior High, where she'd been employed as a guidance counselor for eleven years. She was a lifelong resident of Broomeville and is survived by her older brother, Ronald, also of Broomeville.

W
ell, that was bullshit, as far as Ronald was concerned. This was what he'd told Doc the day the newspaper report had come out, which was the day after the police had told him what was going to be in the report, which was a week after Sheilah had died. Ronald was sitting across Doc's counter from Doc. Doc, in his early sixties, was about fifteen years older than Ronald. He was from Broomeville, too, but Doc must have gone away at some point in his life, because then he'd come back with Crystal, grouchy Crystal. But anyway, as far as Ronald could remember, Doc had always been on the other side of that counter, with his spatula and his greasy apron and his yellow-arm-pitted T-shirt. This seemed like the only thing there was to know about him. But now, Ronald had just discovered another thing.

“You're the coroner?”

“Elected.”

“I didn't vote for you.”

Doc nodded. He picked up the coffee pot and refilled Ronald's cup. There was no one else in the place. There was basically never anyone else in the place. “Well, somebody did,” Doc said.

“My sister never owned a gun,” Ronald said, “let alone fired a gun.”

“I am sorry,” Doc said.

“If she killed herself,” Ronald said, “then why was the window blown out?” Because this was what the police told him: a bullet had gone through the passenger's side window, destroying it. Meanwhile his sister's dead body had been found in the driver's seat.

“There were two bullets fired,” Doc said. “One through the window, and then one into her head.”

“Why would she fire a bullet through her own window?” Ronald wanted to know.

“Why was she stuck in a snowbank? Same reason she shot out the window before she shot herself. She was really drunk, Ronald,” Doc said. “I'm sorry, but she was.”

“But she was always really drunk,” Ronald said. “Why would she kill herself?”

Doc shrugged, as if to say, Hey, I'm just the coroner. “She'd just lost her job,” he said. “Maybe she was distraught.”

“That's bullshit,” Ronald said.

“What part?”

“
All of it.
”

And it was. Ronald knew this because of what had happened earlier that night. The new guidance counselor had shaken Ronald's fucked-up hand at the baseball game, and it'd bothered the new guidance counselor not at all, and later on Sheilah had said, “Your hand didn't work.”

“I'm sorry,” Ronald had said.

“Hey, it's all good,” Sheilah had said. They were sitting in the kitchen in the house they shared, which before that had been the house they'd shared with their parents. Sheilah was drinking vodka out of a juice glass. No ice or mixer or fruit or anything. At least she wasn't drinking it straight out of the bottle. “I wasn't much good as a guidance counselor anyway.”

“Maybe you'll end up being good at something else,” Ronald had said, and Sheilah had lifted her glass in his direction.

“Maybe I already am,” she'd said. It'd made Ronald so sad to hear his sister say this. But Sheilah
had not seemed sad saying it
. She did not seem like a person who three hours later, after all the vodka in the house was gone, on the way to doing more of what she was good at at the Lumber Lodge, would decide, You know, maybe I will kill myself, and then somehow, somewhere, from someone, get a gun and then drive herself into a snowbank and then shoot a window and then herself. It was bullshit and Doc was bullshit and the county that had elected him was bullshit and the town in the county and everyone in it was bullshit, including the principal who had fired his sister for bullshit reasons and then hired this guidance counselor, this bullshit Swede or whatever he was, and the bullshit principal's wife, who was bullshit herself if for no other reason than she'd served Ronald's sister so many drinks and made so many people laugh at Sheilah and not love her the way Ronald, her bullshit older brother, had loved her, and he, Ronald, was the biggest bullshit of all with his bullshit hand, which was not magic or any bullshit like that, it was just mangled and disgusting and weak and pathetic and it did not
tell
him anything, it did not
tell
him, for instance, not to have a funeral for Sheilah, he
decided
on his own not to have one, because he was afraid that no one would come to the funeral and how awful that would be, and can you
believe
that bullshit, oh God, he had not even had a proper funeral for his sister, his only sister, instead he had had her cremated, which is the bullshit term for what you do when you don't know what to do with a dead person's body, and then after he did that, he did not know what to do with her ashes, either, there was no special enough place for him to scatter her ashes, no place she loved, and so he just kept the urn on the top of the kitchen cabinet with the dust and that fondue pot, and sometimes when he tried to remember her, to remember her when they were young, for instance that time when their mother was reading a book to them, maybe Sheilah was three and Ronald was six and the book had an armadillo in it and Sheilah said, “What means armadillo?” and Ronald and their mother laughed, it was cute, how she'd said that, and so they laughed, and Sheilah didn't know why they were laughing
or
what armadillo meant, and so she said, really mad now, “What
means
it?” and then they laughed even harder, but whenever he tried to think of that person, of that time, the urn and the supposed self-inflicted gunshot wound to the face and the shot-out passenger's side window and the car in the snowbank and the alcohol in the bloodstream and all that
bullshit
got in the way, and the only way he knew to get that bullshit out of the way was to find out who murdered his sister, and it was probably one of two people, either the principal or the new guidance counselor, or maybe it was both, either way, he would find out, he would prove it, and if he couldn't prove who killed her, then maybe he would just go ahead and kill both of them, and while he was at it maybe he'd kill
all
of them, maybe he'd kill every single human being in this town and then let the coroner deal with that
bullshit,
unless Ronald decided to kill the coroner, too.