All the Things You Are (30 page)

They had all agreed that they would throw them nowhere near the house, that had been established in the ground rules. Danny – because it was his operation, after all, his revenge – had been very particular about this. And because it is his spectacular, he gets the first throw, and he lines himself up to pitch it at this enormous old sycamore in the far corner of the garden, diagonally opposite the house, right by the fence the boys had all piled over. The flames are beating hard and loud now, and the heat is building, and a couple of voices agree with Dan that the sycamore tree is the best, indeed, scanning round the yard, the only tree sufficiently far away from the house to be safe.

Afterwards, they decide that Danny broke the rules: he panicked, or freaked out, or slipped and, in trying to keep his balance, lobbed the fire bottle at the house. Whether by accident or design, it was Danny who did it, and the result was the same.

But that's not the way it actually happened.

What happened was they all lined up, Danny first, and as he ran, the others followed, and Ralph skidded and pushed Danny in the back and they both went tumbling through a blazing skull. Ralph landed on top of Danny in the flames – he scooped him up and hurled him away and Danny went flying into the tree and knocked himself out. Meanwhile, the two remaining were lined up, ready to throw. They couldn't throw at the tree, because Danny was there and they would have risked setting him alight. One of them – F – threw his bottle at the fence the other side of the tree, on the boundary with the next yard over. And then P – Ralph was watching, and he
saw
– P, careering through the blaze in Danny's direction, flung the fire bottle over his head and back in the direction of the house. Nobody could find Danny's fire bottle, so it was clear he had thrown his too. And when they saw the house in flames, they panicked, and hauled Danny out of there, and ran.

Afterwards, out of their costumes, it was all decided: Danny had thrown the bottle that set the house on fire.

But years later, Ralph read the report of the investigation into the fire, and found that a fire bottle had been found intact, with the cloth fuse unlit, lodged between the sycamore and the fence on the other side of the boys' exit route. Danny's fire bottle. So it hadn't been him. And it hadn't been Ralph. And Ralph was Pestilence, he'd picked P because Gene had picked Plague, and Ralph did whatever Gene did. Gene was P and P threw the bottle that hit the house.

It wasn't Danny after all.

It was Gene.

Danny had spent all this time thinking it had been his fault, had been
told
it was all his fault. But it wasn't. What's more, it hadn't been all along. It had been a lie, insisted upon by Gene Peterson, and the others had gone along because it had all happened so fast; the heat had been so intense and the flames so bright and so high. They had been scared and uncertain, and Gene had been calm and sure, and that was what they had looked to Gene for all along, and so they believed him.

But they were wrong.

Extract from

Trick or Treat

Unpublished manuscript by Ralph Cowley

P
eterson Sportswear's head office is in a building that would look magnificently ornate in any other context, but appears almost self-effacing when set a hundred yards up North Michigan Avenue from the white terracotta facade and French Renaissance ornamentation of the Wrigley Building. With the Tribune Tower glittering like a Gothic cathedral across the street, it's hard for a visitor not to stop and stare in awe at the architectural riches of the Magnificent Mile. Unless he's Danny Brogan, in which case he just pays the cab driver and walks into the lobby of the Ainslie Building and tells the guard at the desk he has an appointment with Gene Peterson. He has to show ID, and sign in, and he gets a clip-on badge to wear, and he walks through a metal-detector gate and takes the glass elevator to the thirty-seventh floor, soaring above the Chicago River. He has already called ahead, of course. He refused to be deflected by his lack of an appointment. ‘Just tell Gene it's Danny Brogan. It's about Jackie Bradberry. He'll agree to see me,' he said, and of course, Gene did. And here he is, standing inside double doors by the Peterson Sportswear reception desk as Danny comes out of the elevator, arms extended, face all smiles. Danny takes the embrace and returns it. Even now, with all he knows, with all he has to say, he can't go on the attack straight away. It's not how he rolls, and it seems like it never will be. After all, Gene is the man who blackmailed him, who helped to ruin him, who lied to him all these years, and still he stands, smiling like a fool. Danny Brogan: if not now, when?

‘How are you, Danny? Good to see you, man,' Gene says, beaming, no flicker of unease in his expression, and stands back, hands raised in Danny's direction like a fond uncle, gesturing expansively, including the girls at reception in the fun.

‘Sharp as ever, I gotta say. Peterson Sportswear will never make a dime out of this man; probably wears a neck tie to the gym. No one rocks a three-piece suit like my friend Danny Brogan. It's Cary Grant here – ask your mother, girls.'

And it's true. Before Danny went to see Dave over on West Wacker, he changed in the underground parking lot from dove- to charcoal-gray wool, fresh white shirt, black knit silk tie. It doesn't come without effort, but it's not affectation, it's … for better or worse, it's at the core of who he is. Women understood this better than men, although not Claire, who doesn't seem to care what she wears, maybe because she has the gift of looking good in anything.

Danny follows Gene down a carpet-tiled, fluorescent-lit corridor. Along the partition wall is a succession of functional modular offices with glass panels in the doors and along the tops of the walls. At the end, a similar door gives on to a slightly larger, strictly non-luxurious room, into which Danny follows Gene. There's a desk and a few chairs, a glass and to one side, a costume rail with all manner of brightly colored sportswear. It could be a mobile trailer on a construction site.

‘The days of the palatial office are done,' Gene says as they sit, Danny in front of the desk, Gene to one side of it, perched on the edge. ‘Don't mistake it for your living room. Not with this employer at any rate. Do your job and go home, that's what everyone wants. Certainly what I want.'

Gene looks at Danny and smiles a not entirely convincing smile.

‘What can I do for you, Dan? Jackie Bradberry? Jesus. Haven't thought about that in a long time.'

‘No? I think about it a lot, Gene. As you know.'

‘As I know? I don't know. Jesus, first Ralph, then you. What is this all about? The past is the past. Over. You've got kids, right, two girls, Barbara and, and, Irene, am I right? And so do I. And the duty we owe them is, not to turn into sad old men, drinking to days gone by, thinking the past outshines the present. We've got to live in the future, Dan.'

‘Easy for you to say,' Danny says, his tone sour.

‘Easy for you to say, too, and that's what you did say, last time we met. Brogan's Bar and Grill survives and thrives, two beautiful daughters, lovely wife, no doubt in the marriage there's this and that, what marriage doesn't have its interesting moments, its phases, its sequences, but hey. Compared to a lot of people … compared to
Ralph
, you're a lucky man. Am I wrong?'

‘Yes, you are wrong. I am lucky, compared to Ralph, but then again, so is everyone. But otherwise, I am not lucky.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because I lost two hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars. Because I am days, weeks away from ruin. Because someone is trying to destroy my life. And that someone, Gene Peterson, my old friend, that someone is you.'

Gene, with his square jaw, his sandy cowlick hair gelled into a helmet of submission, with his khakis and deck shoes and navy blue blazer, Gene with his golf-club ease and his self-made drive, says: ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Last thing I remember, I got you into Jonathan Glatt, you know how hard it was to get into that fund?'

‘And see what happened?'

‘Didn't happen to us,' Gene says, shrugging.

‘It happened to me. You didn't tell me I needed to get out.'

‘Of course I did.'

‘No, you didn't. You told Ralph, and Dave, but not me.'

‘Yes I did, I sent you an email.'

‘I never got an email.'

‘I sent you an email. And you replied.'

‘No,' Danny says. ‘No, that didn't happen.'

Gene looks at Danny a second, hard, then stands and beckons him over to his desk, where there is a metallic desktop iMac and a MacBook Pro. Gene flips the MacBook open, double clicks the Mail icon in the dock and, when the mail window appears, types Danny's name in the search field. There are more than twenty results, stretching back months. Gene clicks on the second from the top, message from Gene Peterson. Subject: Jonathan Glatt. Priority: Urgent. It reads:

Danny, get your money out of Jonathan Glatt's fund, things are not looking good there, cannot expand but trust me, we had a good run, but now it's all going to hell. You have about forty-eight hours. Otherwise, you can wave goodbye to the cash. Please acknowledge this email – and act on it now!

All best,

Gene

Danny is shaking his head.

‘I never saw that before,' he says.

‘Well,' says Gene, and clicks the top email in the list, message from Danny Brogan. Subject: Re: Jonathan Glatt. The text reads:

Gene – received and understood – I will take steps to get the money out today. Thanks for the warning, you're a lifesaver.

All best,

Danny

‘I didn't send that,' Danny says.

‘You didn't send it?'

‘I never saw the email you sent me; never sent the reply.'

‘Can you think of anyone who might have? Because someone evidently did.'

Danny considers this, doesn't want to think about it. It's Gene. It's Gene.

‘What about Claire Bradberry?'

‘What about her?'

‘I went to see Jonathan Glatt. And he told me that everyone got out of the fund early, except me. And that there was one other person, on top of the four of us. Claire Bradberry.'

‘Yeah. You keep saying that name, Dan, as if, I don't know, music is gonna start playing, and I'm suddenly gonna know what it means.'

‘Bradberry.'

‘Oh. You mean, like Jackie. It's a common enough name, Danny.'

‘But there was just the four of us. I mean, the four of us and her, Claire Bradberry. Did that not make connections in your mind?'

‘Not really.'

‘What else in common do we have?' Danny says, his voice a little strained, a little hoarse now. Gene looks at him as if he's volatile material.

‘Well. Many things. We were friends for years after. I haven't seen much of Dave. But I saw you over this thing, we had dinner, drinks, four, five hours, you didn't mention the Bradberrys once. And I wasn't waiting for you to.'

‘What about Ralph?'

‘Well, Ralph … Ralph is who I thought of first when the Glatt thing came up. Poor Ralph needed a helping hand, he seemed a bit lost. And I reckoned, make a bit of money, that'll give him a lift. And when I thought of him, I thought of you guys too. How it would be nice to see you again. How for old times' sake, I should spread some good fortune around. God, I'm sorry, Danny, how much did you say, two hundred and fifty K?'

‘Two-five-five. Claire Bradberry. Who is she?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You don't know? Jonathan Glatt said you brought her in.'

‘Yeah, but I don't know who she is. Ask Dave. She's a friend of Dave's.'

‘A friend of Dave's?'

‘That's right. He asked if she could be included. I didn't want to, thought it was a bit cheeky on his part. But I let it go.'

‘A friend of
Dave's
,' Danny repeats, wanting to sound ironic, or skeptical, but unable to process this as anything other than news. He's come to a halt. A friend of Dave's? Dave said Gene had slept with Claire in Chicago. Now Gene is saying this Claire Bradberry is a friend of Dave's. Maybe it is a coincidence. But who was blackmailing him? If it wasn't one of the guys, who could it have been? And what about the email? That's pretty irrefutable, Gene definitely sent it. Unless you can fake that kind of thing. But even if you can, is it possible in the ten minutes between Danny calling Gene and his arrival at his office?

‘Sorry, a work thing,' Gene says, waving a hand above the laptop whose screen has suddenly absorbed his attention.

Danny had three killer blows, or so he thought. Two have failed to find a target. He still has one left.

‘Ralph came to see me.'

‘Oh yeah. To talk about his book? No, he abandoned that, didn't he? In the event that it had ever really existed in the first place.'

‘He had a, a manuscript – I don't know if you could call it a book. But he certainly did have a story.'

Gene, clicking away at his keyboard, splutters with laughter.

‘Well, that was Ralph. A day late and a dollar short. Ralph always had a story. Beats me why they hung on to him in that school for as long as they did.'

‘Gene. Can you do that later? Because I want you to look at me now when I'm talking to you.'

Gene looks above his laptop.

‘OK, Dan. I do have some breaking stuff here, but …'

Gene does something involving the sound of keystrokes, and then gives Danny his undivided attention.

‘Shoot.'

‘Ralph told me that … that he'd figured it out, basically. And you know, because I saw Dave Ricks, and Dave Ricks mentioned Ralph's novel, and I think it wasn't really a novel at all, it was his account of that night, of Halloween night 1976, thirty-five years ago tonight.'