The Twenty-Year Death (55 page)

I picked up the bottle, poured myself a glass, and tossed that one back too, pouring the next one while still swallowing. It was helping calm me at least. “Lie down,” I said.

“No,” Mary said, while lying down anyway.

I brought her a blanket from the closet, and draped it over her.

She reached out with a hand and pulled it closer to her chin, rocking once back and forth. “You look so much like him,” she said, looking up at me.

I smiled. “Thank you.”

“How am I going to live?”

I could ask myself the same thing. But I said, “Close your eyes.”

She did, and she was asleep within moments. I sat and drank and made an active effort to think of nothing but pouring the liquid from one container to another and then into me. It was a lucky break, Carlton seeing me with Mary and thinking she was a girlfriend. I don’t know if Vee knew who Mary really was or not, but I hoped if she was angry, she was at least a little relieved at being in the clear with Browne. That wouldn’t help her face, she would have told me, and I wouldn’t have had anything to say to that, but it was something.

I thought of Mandy. She was the girlfriend in Hollywood who had gotten killed. We’d been...dating, we’ll call it, for a few months when it happened. We fought all the time we weren’t in bed, although I couldn’t tell you what we fought about. And it had Clotilde out of sorts with me too since I was never too good at keeping anything secret. (Only I’d have to keep this secret, Joe, this one thing.) Then Mandy was murdered by some madman they never even found, and I discovered her body all cut to ribbons, blood everywhere. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen, and I’d dreamt about it a long time after. Was this going to be like that?

Clunk—he went down—clunk—he went down—clunk.

Of course it would.

I poured another drink, and drank it down. My stomach began
to feel full, but I was calm, able to think on it and stay calm. Mary slept silently on the couch. She slept with such trust, I wanted to get her up and get her out of there, to tell her to stay far away from me, that I was no good, she didn’t need to know why, but Joe was right, I was a terrible person, and she should keep away.

It hit me that Joe had been visiting when Mandy was killed. No, wait, that couldn’t be, because I’d really gone on a drinking binge after that, enough so I remembered it. And that was when Clotilde...when she first went to the hospital. So Joe hadn’t been there. But he’d met Mandy. I’d practically handed him off to her like she was a babysitter. And Quinn let me have him at all. I was no good even then. Yeah, he had been right to hate me. Here’s your kid. Why don’t you leave him with your mistress so you don’t have to stop getting drunk? I could have killed him any number of times, I was so irresponsible. But he had been the one to hit me at his high school graduation. Hell, he had stabbed me last night. But...

Clunk—he went down—clunk—he went down—clunk.

I needed to do something. The whiskey was good, and it helped, but I needed to do something. I couldn’t just sit there thinking about it, not if I didn’t want to go crazy. Mary slept on. Should I leave her? Where should I go?

And I don’t know why it came to me. You probably won’t believe it if you try. But I thought, I should write something. I should do some writing. I hadn’t done that in who knows how long. That was what I needed.

I retrieved the pad, and this time I found a pencil in the back of the desk drawer. It had gotten lodged in a small space between the back of the drawer and its bottom, so it hadn’t rolled around when I opened the drawer the day before. I took the
pad and the pencil back to the easy chair I had been sitting on. I balanced the glass of whiskey on the armrest, and I sat staring at the page.

Clunk—he went down—clunk—he went down—clunk.

And I started writing, whatever came into my head. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I filled up most of that pad, and I finished the bottle of whiskey. I wrote, but don’t ask me what I wrote, because I don’t know. It probably didn’t make any sense, but I wrote it all down anyway, and I think there was something about Joe in there, and I don’t know what else.

Mary slept, and I wrote, and Joe was dead.

My hand started to cramp and I wore out the pencil’s lead and had to find another, which took me a few minutes, but then I found one just under the edge of the couch, where it must have rolled off the telephone stand. But I filled up pages like I hadn’t been able to in years, just pouring it all out, the anger at being washed up, the hate for the people who had done it to me, the fear for Clotilde, and all the goddamn YMCA rooms, and living with a whore, and just all of it, all of the meanness that had settled inside of me since Clotilde went away, hell, maybe before then, maybe from when Quinn and I started fighting. Yeah, I’d always gotten a raw deal, and I was too pathetic to do anything about it, and I hated myself for that. I hated myself and every goddamn one else, every last one of them.

It was only when I woke up that I knew I had fallen asleep. Someone was moving in the bedroom, and the sound of drawers opening and slamming shut had seeped into my dream and woken me. My watch said two o’clock. Mary was gone. She had draped over my legs the same blanket that I had draped over her that morning. The pad I had been writing on was still in my lap under the blanket, but the pencil was gone.

I listened to the hurried sounds in the other room for another minute, working up the energy to get up. I knew it was Vee and I had a pretty good idea of what she was doing and I wasn’t ready to deal with it just yet, to deal with her after last night. My shoulders and back ached from sleeping in a chair for too long, and when I stood up, everything went black for a moment and I thought I’d lose my balance, but the black resolved itself to white patches, and then the room came back into focus.

I stepped over to the entryway into the bedroom. Vee was stuffing things into a suitcase with bitter violence. “Vee,” I said, my voice coming out in a croak.

She yelped, and brought her hand to her chest. “Jesus H. Christmas, Shem, you scared the bejeezus out of me. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“What are you doing?”

She went back to it. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Where are you going?”

She stormed around the bed to the vanity where she started
collecting her makeup and perfume. “Carlton wants me upstairs in his suite. He wants to keep an eye on me, no thanks to you.”

The makeup was zipped up in a carrying case and brought over to the suitcase on the bed.

“You better start packing too,” she said. “You’re thrown out.”

My lingering exhaustion deepened, my shoulders sagging. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“I’m lucky he hasn’t killed me,” she said, pulling some shirts on hangers out from the armoire. “I just wish he’d send me home. I’m not too keen on sticking around.”

“Where am I supposed to go?” I said again.

She looked up at me. “Quit whining! You start whining, I’m going to beat your head in myself, getting me mixed up in a murder, getting me in hot water with Carlton...” She was so angry, she didn’t even know how to finish. She stuffed shoes into the suitcase, forcing them into a corner on top of some clothes. “I don’t know why I even helped you,” she said, and paused in her packing, sneering at the suitcase. “I’d say something about love, if I didn’t know that was just a crock.”

I felt sick to my stomach, or I had heartburn, or both, and I was suddenly very hot and clammy.

“Why aren’t you packing!” she yelled. “Start packing. You’ve got to be out of here toot sweet.”

“I feel sick,” I said. How had I looked with loving calm on this no-good woman only that morning as she slept?

“What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” She was trying to close the suitcase, leaning on it with all of her weight.

I retrieved my duffel, my mind dead as I did it. In the mirror on the front of the bathroom door I looked like I had a hangover and had slept in my clothes, which was how I should have looked,
and it wasn’t any great surprise, I’d looked that way plenty of times before.

“Vee,” I started, but she cut me off.

“Don’t say ‘I love you,’ I just told you love’s a crock, and only foolish little girls believe any different, and I’m not a foolish little girl, so you can just hold any sentiment, it’s not going to buy anything with me.” She crossed her arms over her breasts, and her face grew narrow. “Besides, you love Chloë, and you always have and always will, calling every day to check on her, begging me to take you across the country so you can pay for her precious hospital. You sponger, you bastard, don’t you dare say anything to me.”

Her suitcase was still open, and she hit it, and said, “I hate this thing.”

I knew I needed to say something, but my mind couldn’t catch on what it was I was supposed to say. “I guess I’ll stay with Great Aunt Alice,” I said.

Vee stamped her foot, and then clopped around the bed, heading past me to the bathroom.

“Vee, I’m sorry,” I said, panicked all of a sudden that she wasn’t just leaving me until we could get out of this situation, but that she was leaving me for good, and I couldn’t live with that. I grabbed at her shoulder, and she shook off my grip, but didn’t go into the bathroom. “Please,” I said.

She turned, and said, “No, you comfort me this time,” and she fell into my arms.

“Shhh,” I said, and patted the back of her head. It was the second time that day that I’d found myself in that position, a girl in my arms, but I still didn’t know what to say, so I said, “It’ll be okay.”

“No it won’t. Carlton’s going to kill me,” Vee said.

“He’s not going to kill you.”

“He’s not, huh?” She pulled back so I could see her bruised face. “This was just a love tap?” And then she put her head back on my chest. “You better be getting a good share of that money now, with your son out of the way.”

I stiffened.

“You talk to the lawyer yet?” she said.

I pushed her away from me, and turned to get my clothes out of the closet in the living room.

She followed me. “Oh, I repulse you now? I’m a gold digger?”

I didn’t say anything, but walked around her and stuffed my clothes into my duffel. I don’t know why I was angry at her for asking about the money. I certainly had no right to be.

“Well, did you go to the lawyer?” she said, putting her hands on her hips.

“No.”

“You better.”

“I will.”

“You better, that’s all.”

“Didn’t I just say I will?” I said, spreading my arms in defiance. “How long are you going to be staying with Carlton anyway?”

“I don’t have much choice in the matter.”

“Damn it, how long are we going to be
stuck
here?”

“Do you get the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I don’t know how long we’re going to be here. Until Carlton gets bored with me, I guess. That’s usually four or five days. Don’t you have to go to the funeral anyway?”

The funeral? What funeral? Oh, right, Joe’s funeral. “I guess I do,” I said, and dropped my duffel on the floor.

“I guess I do,” she mimicked. She went back to her suitcase
and started to struggle with the zipper again. I came around to help her, and she stepped back, and let me take over. I put my weight into it, and the zipper started to move. I had to switch hands to get it to go all the way around, repositioning the pressure from my other hand as I went. It closed and I straightened up, a fine sheen of sweat on my forehead.

I turned to go back around the bed, but Vee stopped me. “I’m just scared,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Of Carlton and of getting caught.”

“I’ll go see the lawyer,” I said. “Then we’ll get out of here.”

“We better get that money.”

“I’ll call the lawyer,” I said again.

She picked up her suitcase, staggered under the weight for a moment, and started across the room. Without looking back, she said, “The room’s already checked out. You just have to vacate.”

She went out the door. My neck and back muscles were all tensed, and I tried to relax them. I’d fought with a lot of women, but none who could hang a murder on me, only that part I didn’t figure out until later. For now, I was thrown out without any money, and nowhere else to crawl but Great Aunt Alice’s, and that wasn’t the best position to be in, believe you me. There are always ways in which things can get worse.

Great Aunt Alice’s house was one of the old mansions in Washington Hill facing north on the eastern square. There was still a marble stone at the curb from the time when such a step was necessary to descend from a horse-drawn carriage, as there was a wrought-iron boot scraper at the foot of the stone-carved stairs that led to the front door. The house was a three-story townhouse built of Cockeysville marble, the first floor one and a half times as high as the second and third floors, which allowed for large wooden pillars and a small portico above the door. Narrow black shutters framed each of the four windows across the second and third floors, held in place by hammered iron S’s.

I had stopped on the way there to get one drink, which had turned into two, and I wondered how long this bender would last. I mean, I was still on the wagon and this was a temporary setback due to circumstances. But the alcohol had bestowed on me a general lightness that allowed me to think it wouldn’t be so bad to see Great Aunt Alice, it might even be nice to see a familiar face, and one who called you family even when you weren’t. She had always remained a friend to me, remembering me at Christmas and my birthday, and unashamed at chiding me for what my life had become. She was sure to take me in, and could be just what I needed to pull myself together. I pressed the button for the bell, and deep chimes played an eight-note melody somewhere inside, real classy.

Connie answered the door in a frilled apron tied over a black ankle-length skirt and a deep blue blouse. She didn’t seem surprised to see me standing there with my duffel bag in hand, some shirts hanging on hangers over my shoulder, she just took it in stride. “Mr. Rosenkrantz. You come in now, come right in.”