Tough Guys Don't Dance (26 page)

I could almost feel him brooding over his own past. Had he lived through experiences to compare with this on the morning he was shot? “What kind of impending events do you mean?” he asked.

“Evil events.”

He was being cautious. “What kind of evil events?”

“Murder, for one.”

He pondered what I said. Then he shook his head as if to say, “I do not like your input.” He looked at me. “Tim,” he said, “do you remember the bartender's guide?”

In my turn, I nodded. When I started my first job as a bartender, he had given me a schedule. “Son,” he had said, “keep this in mind. In New York, on the streets, it's Peeping Toms from twelve
A.M.
to one
A.M.
, fires from one to two, stickups two to three, bar fights three to four, suicides four to five, and auto accidents from five
A.M.
to six
A.M.
” I had kept it in my head like a typed schedule. It had proved useful.

“Nothing special about murders,” he now said.

“I'm not talking about New York,” I said, “but here.”

“You're saying a murder in this place is an extraordinary event?” I could see him all but measuring the cold damp of Cape Cod air against the blood and steam of the act. “Yeah,” he said, “all right, I'll grant the point.” He looked not altogether
happy. “What's the purpose of this discussion?”

“I'm tangled up in coincidences,” I said.

“Well, by your line of reasoning, you must be close to something bad,” he said.

“I'm closer than that.”

He took the pause.

“There was a suicide last week,” I said, “although the man may have been killed. I believe I stole his woman the night it happened.” The most curious thought came to me next: because my father had cancer, whatever I told him would never touch the air for others. That might be one of the virtues of his cancer. He could receive messages like a tomb and never send them out again. Was my father now on the other side of the spirits from all of us?

“There's more to tell than that,” I said. “It's not public knowledge as yet, but two women have been killed in this town in the last week.”

“My Lord,” he said. That was a lot of news, even for him. “Who did it?”

“I don't know. I have a few ideas, but I'm not certain.”

“Have you seen the victims? Are you sure of your facts?”

I hated to reply. As long as I said no more, we might still cling to the premise that we were drinking in the kitchen: we could surround his visit with lulling recollections of other boozy meanderings through the uncharted spaces of philosophy. But by my next remark, we would both
be brought up dripping, sober, and on another beach.

I suppose I took so long to reply that my father repeated the question. “Have you seen the victims?”

“Yes,” I said. “They're in the cellar.”

“Oh, criminey!” His tumbler was empty. I saw his hand go for the bourbon bottle and then withdraw. Instead, he turned his glass upside down. “Tim, you do it?” he asked.

“No.” I couldn't refuse my own liquor. I swallowed what was left in my glass. “I don't think I did,” I said, “but I can't be certain.”

So we got into it. Bit by bit, detail by detail, I told him more and more of what I could remember of each of these days after the night I went to The Widow's Walk, and when I soon confessed (for confession is indeed how it felt) that Patty Lareine was one of the two women dead, my father gave one groan of the sort you might utter if you fell from a window to be impaled on a spike.

Yet I cannot say he looked terrible. The fierce pink flush, which had been restricted to his cheekbones and left the rest of his face pale compared to his once red color, now spread a flush to Dougy's forehead and chin. That provided the illusion he was less ill than before. Indeed, I think he was. No matter his antipathy to cops, he looked so much like one himself—Captain of the Precinct or Lieutenant of Detectives would have been seized on instantly by any casting director—that
willy-nilly he found himself playing the role for a good part of his life. I have to say on the strength of his questions, he was no mean interrogator.

Finally I came to a halt in my account (although in the telling we passed from morning to afternoon, made a few sandwiches and drank a little beer). He said at last, “There are two questions that keep me from seeing straight on this. One is whether you are innocent or guilty. I find it hard to believe the first, but then, you're my son.” He stopped and scowled, and said, “I mean, I find it hard to believe the second—that you're guilty.”

“What you're saying,” I told him, “is that I could have done it. You said it! The reason is:
You
are capable of murder. In fact, maybe you did pull off one or two in the union days.”

Dougy gave no reply to that. Instead he said, “Good people kill for duty, or for honor. Not for money. A sleazo kills for money. A coked-up greed bag slays for money. But not you. Do you stand to benefit from her will?”

“I have no idea.”

“If her will leaves you real money, you're in a load of trouble.”

“She may have had no money left. She was always secretive about how much was there. I suspect Patty Lareine made some terrible investments in the last couple of years. We could be broke.”

“I sure hope so,” he said. Then he laid his frozen blue eyes on me. “The problem is in the manner of those killings. That's my second question.
Why? Why would someone decapitate those two women? If you did it, then you and me, Tim, have to pack it in, I figure. Our seed has got to be too hideous to continue.”

“You speak calmly about such matters.”

“That's because I don't believe you're capable of such an atrocity. I mention it only as an option. Set the record straight.”

His monumental sense of always knowing the right thing to do irritated me in the most peculiar fashion. It was as if we were not speaking of ultimate matters so much as having a family spat. Ideological divergences. Kill the son of a bitch, says Dougy Madden. No, says the son, put him in a home for the mentally ill. I wanted to shake my father.

“I am capable of such atrocities,” I said to him. “I can tell you. I know that. I'm prey to the spirits. If I did do it, I was in some kind of coma. I would have been carried to it by the spirits.”

Big Mac gave me a look full of distaste. “Half the killers in this world make that claim. Fuck 'em all, I say. What does it matter if they're telling the truth? They're just a lightning rod for all the shit that other people are putting on the air. So they're too dangerous to have around.” He shook his head. “You want to know my real feelings? I'm hoping and praying you didn't do it because, in fact, I couldn't off you. I couldn't even turn you in.”

“You're playing with me. First it's one option, then the other.”

“You damn fool,” he said, “I'm trying to find my own head.”

“Have a drink,” I said and spilled a little more bourbon down my throat.

“Yes,” he said, ignoring me, “the second big question takes care of the first. Why would anyone perform a decapitation? All you do is avoid a maximum prison in order to get a maximum mental hospital. You can even bring capital punishment on yourself by the hideousness of the crime—at least if they hang you in this state. So you'd have to be nuts. I don't believe you are.”

“Thank you,” I said, “but I don't believe the killer is nuts either.”

“Why would anybody sane cut off the head?” he repeated. “There's only one good reason. To entrap you.” Now he beamed like a physicist who has found his hypothesis. “Is the burrow in your marijuana patch large enough to hold an entire body?”

“Not unless the footlocker is removed.”

“Could it hold two bodies?”

“Never.”

“The decapitation may have been reasoned-out. There are people capable of anything once they decide it gives them a practical advantage.”

“You're saying …”

But he was not about to relinquish the fruits of his thinking process to me. “Yeah, I'm saying those heads were cut off so they'd fit your burrow. Somebody wants you to take the fall.”

“It's got to be one of two people,” I said.

“Probably,” he said, “but I can think of a few others.” Now he tapped the table with his middle fingers. “Were the women shot in the head?” he asked. “Can you see from the heads how they were killed?”

“No,” I said. “I didn't study them.”

“What about their necks?”

“I couldn't look at that.”

“So you don't know if the beheading was done by a hacksaw, a knife, or whatever.”

“No.”

“Don't you think you ought to find out?”

“I can't disturb them any more.”

“Tim, it's got to be established. For our own sakes.”

I felt ten years old and ready to blubber. “Dad,” I said, “I can't look at them. It's my wife, for God's sakes.”

He took that in. The heat of the chase had made him oblivious to much.

“Okay,” he said at last, “I'll go down and take a look.”

While he was gone I went to the bathroom and threw up. I wish I could have wept instead. Now that I was alone and no longer had the fear of breaking down in front of my father, there were no tears. Instead, I took a shower, put my clothes back on, splashed my face with after-shave lotion and went back to the kitchen. He was there and looking pale. All of the flush was gone. His cuffs were damp and I realized he must have washed up at the cellar sink.

“The one who's not your wife …” he began.

“Jessica,” I said. “Oakwode. Laurel Oakwode.”

“Yeah,” he said, “that one. She was decapitated with a sword. Or maybe it was a machete. One big stroke. Patty is a different business. Somebody who didn't know how to do it sawed her head off with a knife.”

“Are you certain?”

“Want to look for yourself?”

“No.”

I saw it anyway. I do not know whether it was in my imagination or a true glimpse of his retina, but I saw Jessica's throat. There was a straight slash across, and the nearest flesh was bruised by the weight of the blow.

Patty's neck I did not have to visualize. I would not forget a red jungle.

My father opened his hand. The fragment of a spent bullet was in it. “That's from Oakwode,” he said. “I can't get the rest without making a mess in your cellar but I've seen stuff like this before. It comes from a .22 with a hollow tip. That's what I'd say. It spreads on contact. In the brain, one .22 can do all the work. Probably with a silencer.”

“Fired into her mouth?”

“Yes,” he said. “Her lips look bruised, like somebody forced her to open her mouth. Maybe with the gun muzzle. You can still see the powder burns on her upper palate where the entrance hole is. Small enough. Just right for a .22. No exit
wound. I was able to fish this much out.” He pointed to the bullet fragment.

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Fish this much out
. My knees were quivering and I had to put both hands on the glass to get the bourbon to my lips. I found that I was not ready to ask about Patty.

He told me all the same. “There are no marks, entrance wounds or bruises on her face and scalp. I would assume she was shot in the heart and died quick.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Just a guess. I don't know. It could have been a knife. Her head tells me nothing but who she is.” He frowned as if forgetting a most important detail. “No—it tells me one more thing. You would need a coroner to be sure, but I would guess that your wife,”—now he could not say Patty Lareine either—“was killed twenty-four to forty-eight hours later than the other woman.”

“Well, we'll find out,” I said.

“No,” he said, “we will never know.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Tim,” he said, “we have to dispose of these heads.” He held up his hand to forestall me. “I know the price,” he said.

“We'll never be able to find out who did it,” I blurted.

“We'll determine that, I think. We just won't be able to prove it.” The flush was coming back to his face. “If you want satisfaction, we'll have to look for other means.”

I let that pass for now.

“Follow my reasoning,” he said. “I figure there's more than one executioner. People who use machetes don't fuck with knives.”

“People who use machetes don't usually have .22s with special bullets and silencers.”

“I have to think about that,” he said.

We were silent. I was doing very little thinking myself. A numbness was settling through my limbs as if I had been walking for many hours through the November woods and had just stopped to rest.

“Here's what I am clear on,” he said. “Somebody chose to use your marijuana stash to hide Jessica's head. That implicates you so deeply you still can't say you didn't do it. Then the head is removed. Why?” He held up both fists as if he were steering a car. “Because somebody has decided to kill Patty. This person wants to be certain both heads will be found there later. He doesn't want you or the first killer going back to destroy the evidence. Or suppose you panic. You might reveal it to the authorities. Therefore, this second person, he takes the head.”

“Or she,” I said, “takes the head.”

“Or she,” said my father, “although I don't know what you mean by that.” When I said nothing further—I had spoken out of impulse—he said, “Yes, I figure two principals. The one who killed Jessica, and the one about to kill Patty. The first puts the head there to implicate you. The second removes it so that both can be put back
later. At which time, or soon after, you will have to take the onus for both crimes.”