The Man Who Killed His Brother (2 page)

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Authors: Stephen R. Donaldson

BOOK: The Man Who Killed His Brother
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G
inny took me back to my apartment to get me sobered up. I didn’t have a car, and she’d left hers at my apartment, so we had to walk.
I live in one of those run-down apartment houses on the edge of the old part of town. The place was just far enough from the center to have been named La Cienga Apartments, but still close enough to be in danger of being torn down for urban renewal every time the city fathers felt like they had to make some kind of choice between “modern” and “quaint.” In Puerta del Sol those words are really two different names for
“profitable”
—the city is growing, and people like to come for a visit, so it’s just a question of whether money is going to be made from redeveloping real estate or from tourism.
Right then I didn’t give a damn. They could blow up the place or sell tickets to my bedroom for all I cared. I was in one of those horrible “between” places any drunk can tell you about—too drunk to cope, not drunk enough to be anesthetized. I was half blind with dread and my mind kept repeating,
Alathea Alathea, Alathea.
I wanted Ginny to talk to me, tell me what was going on. But she just hung on to my arm and dragged me along and didn’t say a thing.
The walk must’ve done me some good. She didn’t have to carry me upstairs.
At least I was spared the embarrassment of a messy apartment. I’m tidy enough when I’m sober, and I hardly ever visit my apartment when I’m drinking. The place smelled musty and it needed dusting, but it wasn’t a mess.
I was a mess. Getting sober is something I usually do for myself. It’s not a pretty business, and you don’t like having people watch. With Ginny there I kept noticing things that
didn’t usually bother me—like the fact that I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. Or that I stank. How many days had I been wearing these clothes? I had no idea. I needed a drink, and I didn’t like having Ginny see it.
She didn’t give me any choice. Before I could get past Alathea’s name to try do something for myself, she had me undressed, God knows how. When you’re six foot five and two hundred forty pounds, other people usually can’t just take your clothes away from you. Then she pried me into the shower. She slammed on the water and left me there as if she wanted me to drown. But after a while she came back, scrubbed me, got me out of the shower and into an old bathrobe. Then she began pouring coffee down me.
That lasted for a while. Then the coffee and the other stuff started to do a little dance inside me, and I threw up for a while. After that I felt better. I was about to tell Ginny about Alathea when I fell asleep.
It was dawn before she woke me up and began treating me again. Orange juice, coffee, toast, vitamin pills of all kinds. She’s a vitamin freak—carries whole bottles in her purse, along with her .357. She even got me shaved. But it was close to nine before I was in any condition to go anywhere. All that time she didn’t say a word. And I didn’t ask any questions. I was too sick.
I was going to be sicker. Already I wanted a drink so bad it brought tears to my eyes—and this was just the beginning. Shame is an awkward thing to live with, and having Ginny there, having her see me like this, made me ashamed on top of all the other remorse and responsibility. And there aren’t many cures for it. Sometimes work is one of them. But the only one you can actually count on is alcohol,
But Alathea was missing. When Ginny asked me if I was ready to go, I didn’t answer right away. I went over to the dresser in the bedroom half of the apartment and got out my gun, a .45 automatic, which is about the only gun I’ve ever found that doesn’t feel like a toy in my hand. I checked it over, made sure it was loaded, then strapped on the shoulder holster and put the .45 under my left arm. Then I looked Ginny in the eye as steadily as I could and said, “Alathea
is my niece. My brother’s daughter. She’s thirteen years old, and beside the fact she’s one of those cute kids that makes you happy just to look at her, she also happens to like me. For some reason, Lona has never told her exactly what happened to her father. She thinks I’m just her nice old Uncle Brew. And besides that, she’s solid as a rock. Half the time these days when things get too much for Lona, Alathea carries her—which is one hell of a job for a thirteen-year-old—and she does it beautifully. It doesn’t matter whether I’m ready or not. Let’s go.”
For a second there, Ginny almost smiled. The lines of worry around her eyes faded. She seemed to shake herself, and then it was as if she hadn’t been up most of the night taking care of me. She didn’t look tired anymore. “That’s more like it,” she said, mostly to herself. She handed me a jacket, and a minute later I was walking down the stairs.
Talk is cheap. I wasn’t ready, and it showed. I almost didn’t make it down the stairs. My knees felt like mush, and the stairwell kept trying to stand on edge. There was a little voice in the back on my head saying,
You need a drink you need a drink you need a drink.
It wasn’t easy to ignore, even with Ginny watching me.
But I didn’t figure out why she was acting so much like she was worried about me until she took my arm to steer me toward her car. Of course she knew all about the connection between me and Alathea. Now she thought something serious had happened to my niece. She was afraid of what knowing that would do to me. She knew killing Richard had pushed me right to the edge. She was afraid whatever happened to Alathea would push me over.
I wanted to ask her about that. Ask, hell! I wanted to drag it out of her. But I put it off. Just climbing into her Olds left me weak as an old man. And I’d forgotten my sunglasses. Already the sun was beating down on the streets like bricks out of the dry thin blue sky. Made my eyes hurt. If it hadn’t been for the tinted glass in the Olds, I might not have survived as far as Lona’s house.
 
 
Lona Axbrewder, my brother’s widow. I wasn’t exactly her favorite person. There was one question I had to ask. When we parked in front of the house, I stayed where I was for a minute, trying not to hold my head in my hands. Then I said, “Why did she call you? You know how she feels about me.”
“Ask her yourself,” Ginny said. “I’m not a mind reader.” But her voice was stiff, and I’d heard that stiffness before. It meant she knew the answer and didn’t want to tell me.
“Maybe,” I muttered to myself. Maybe I would ask her. I was in no condition to know what I was going to do. I had enough problems just getting the door open and climbing out onto the sidewalk.
Lona lives down on Mission Street in a neighborhood that’s only about two levels up from my apartment building. None of the houses for blocks in all directions are new, none of them look big enough to have more than two bedrooms, and none of them are out of spitting range from the house next door. But it’s a nice enough neighborhood, and people don’t spit. Lona’s house is adobe, but that squat brown shape is softened by rose trellises that frame the top and sides of the front door. She must’ve watered those roses twice a day to make them look so nice.
I spent a minute standing on the sidewalk, looking around. Trees along the walk cut out a lot of the sun, and after the glare of the roads and traffic it was restful in a way to just stand there, looking. The whole place was restful—shade, trees, grass, tidy brown houses. It looked like the kind of place where nothing ever happens. I didn’t want to move—didn’t want to find out any different.
But Ginny took my arm again, and before I knew it we were standing in front of the door, and the door was opening, and Lona was telling us to come in. Then the door shut behind us, and my retreat was cut off. I felt like I’d made a fatal mistake. The voice in my head started to shout,
You need a drink
! It sounded desperate.
Dumbly, I let Ginny steer me. We followed Lona into the living room and sat down.
I couldn’t see very clearly. The room was too dark—she
had all the shades pulled down and didn’t turn on any lights. That made the air dim and cool and comforting, which was nice. It almost seemed like she did it for my benefit, as if she had any reason in the world to give a good goddamn how I felt. But it didn’t let me read her face. I wanted to know how hard she was taking this thing. That would tell me a lot.
The outlines I could do from memory. She was small and vague and somehow brittle, like most wives of cops I’ve ever met. They don’t start out that way. It just happens to them because they’re afraid of losing their husbands, and they can’t share the danger—or even the strain—and they can’t feel good about it because nobody loves a cop. It’s like living with a man who has some kind of terminal disease. She had medium-length brown hair and a habit of pushing both hands through it, pulling it away from her temples as if she were trying to drag some horrible grimace off her face. Even before she lost her husband she used to make me nervous. Now she could’ve made me scream with no trouble at all.
She sat Ginny and me down on the Naugahyde couch across from the TV, then asked us if we wanted any coffee. Ginny said, “Yes, thanks,” before I could even think about the question. Lona pushed her hands through her hair, then left us alone.
I suppose I should have been thinking about Alathea—as a way of fighting off the need—but I was too strung out to have any control over my thoughts. I was sitting exactly where I used to sit when Richard and I watched football together. I knew from memory that there was a picture of him sitting on top of the TV, staring at me with that lopsided grin of his. Richard Axbrewder, my younger brother. Rick and Mick. It was when he died that people stopped calling me Mick.
Died, hell. I killed him, and half the city knows it. The papers didn’t exactly play it down. One of them had it right there on the front page,
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR KILLS COP. BROTHER
SHOOTS BROTHER. There’s no way I can pretend I didn’t do it.
It happened five years ago, when Ginny and I were partners. I remember everything about it. I was sitting at a table by the window in Norman’s, which is one of those downtown bars that caters to the business-man-getting-off-work trade. It just happened to be right across from the First Puerta del Sol National Bank. I was having a few drinks—exactly six, according to the testimony of the barkeep—and trying to make up my mind about whether I wanted or had the nerve to ask Ginny to marry me. Not an unpleasant kind of indecision, and I had enough stuff in me to glow while I thought about it. It was almost dark outside, but the streetlights hadn’t come on yet so I couldn’t see very well, and the air was dim and relaxed.
Then I heard gunfire. I snapped a look out the window and saw a man running away from the bank in my direction. He was carrying a bag of some kind and waving a gun over his shoulder, shooting at something behind him. There was a cop chasing him. I jumped to the conclusion he’d just robbed the bank.
I was out the door and on the sidewalk in no time. I had the .45 in my hand. I shouted at the man to stop. When he pointed his gun at me, I fired a couple of times. He kept running, but the cop chasing him went down.
It turned out the man was a purse snatcher. Richard had already been chasing him for three blocks. If the snatcher hadn’t had a gun, I would’ve been indicted for manslaughter. As it was, the commission read the results of my blood-alcohol test, charged me with “negligence,” and took away my license. For good.
The cops were not amused. For a while, a bunch of them used to roust me every time we ran across each other. I spent a lot of time in the drunk tank in those days while bruises I couldn’t remember getting turned black-and-blue on my ribs and face. Probably that was where I got in the habit of not letting anybody touch me. But after a couple of years they let it ride. Then I got into trouble only when some cop got the bright idea I was working for Ginny without a
license. But that’s pretty hard to prove, because I was careful and I never got caught doing the kinds of things you’re not allowed to do without a license. So far I’ve been able to get away with it.
So what? So now I don’t drink in bars like Norman’s anymore. I go down to the old part of town, where they don’t care what I look like or smell like as long as my money’s green and my Spanish doesn’t sound like it came out of a textbook in some Anglo school. When I’m not working on a case for Ginny, I’m drunk. When I am working on a case, I’m sober. She’s the one friend I’ve got, and everybody who remembers Richard hates me. Except Alathea. She doesn’t know I shot her father.
Or at least she
didn’t
know. Maybe she was missing because she ran away when she found out the truth—the truth her mother hadn’t told her.
I was trembling deep down inside my gut. When Lona brought the coffee, I had to hold the cup with both hands to keep from spilling it. While I drank it down, she stood right in front of me as if she was waiting until I finished to start screaming at me. But she just refilled my cup, then put the pot down where Ginny could reach it, and went to sit in the armchair beside the TV. Her hands she knotted in her lap, as if she were trying to keep them out of trouble.
When she spoke, her face was aimed at me, and her voice was brittle. “Will you take the case?”
“Of course,” Ginny said smoothly. Her tone was sympathetic-neutral. Gentle but businesslike. The kind of tone she uses when she doesn’t want a client to break down. “But I have to ask you a lot of questions.”
“Yes.” Lona sounded small and far away. The light was so dim I couldn’t even see her lips move—her voice could’ve come from anywhere in the room. All of a sudden, I knew for a fact it was serious. Lona wouldn’t have me sitting in front of her like this if it wasn’t serious. She kept the room dark so I couldn’t see the need in her face.

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