Authors: Andrew Coburn
Now he was in his own house and pulling himself from bed, running his hand over the stubble on his jaw. The first thing he did was phone the station to say he would not be in for a while. Meg O’Brien, with a razor in her wit, told him to take his time, Lieutenant Bakinowski was making good use of his desk. When she told him the reason he was uncertain whether to smile or grimace. He did neither.
He was showered and shaved and dressed in chinos and a striped shirt open at the neck when the doorbell rang. It was Christine Poole, a surprise, for she had never come to his house before. She was costumed in a pink sweatsuit. A headband gave her an Olympics look. She stepped just inside the doorway, no farther, and smiled, sort of.
“I’m returning these,” she said, and he knew immediately what was in the clear plastic bag, which he accepted tentatively. “Mrs. Bowman thought you looked cute in them. My opinion was different.”
“Not my style,” he said.
“That’s what I told her. You’ll also find a latchkey in there. She thought you’d want it back.” Her smile evolved into a shape more gentle than not. “You have eclectic tastes with women, James. Or are we all the same to you?”
He had an urge to touch her, but he did not. “Hardly,” he said.
“How’s your back. Has it healed?”
“Pretty much.”
She touched him. “I regret nothing we’ve had together, absolutely nothing, but I’m glad it’s over. It never would have led to anything, am I not right?”
“We’ll never know.”
“Tell the truth.”
“Probably not.”
“That’s what I always liked about you, James. You never made false promises. The fact is you never made any promises at all, and you took only what was offered. But what you got was more than you deserved, which I don’t hold against you, unlike your other friend.” She moved back a step, with a more comfortable pitch to her voice. “Do you like my outfit? I’m on my way to becoming a new woman, one who doesn’t need an extra man in her life for whatever spurious reasons that come to mind.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Yes, of course, you would — and you did your job, James. You aroused my large, dozing breasts. I know what you’re thinking, it didn’t take much. But now it’s time for the rest of me to awake. I want to look in the mirror and feel good — all by myself, no need of you.”
When she took another step back, he teetered forward. “Christine. You’re a wonderful woman.”
“Don’t flatter me, James. I’m just a woman. But in some ways I’m stronger than your friend.”
He walked her to her car, opened the door for her, waited while she started the motor, and watched her buckle up. On the seat beside her was a videotape of
Jane Fonda’s Beginner’s Workout.
“We still friends?” he asked.
“We were never more than that,” she said, putting on oversize sunglasses that consumed the greater part of her face. She looked out at him. “I can understand what attracted you to Arlene Bowman, but you must’ve known you were playing with fire.”
“That’s over and done with,” he said.
“Then I must warn you. You may still get burned.”
• • •
Lieutenant Bakinowski, driving slowly on the rural road, scanned mailboxes. Then there were none. Pines reared up on each side, and a crow flew across the road like a thrown boot. Then he saw a crude sign nailed to a tree,
bikes repaired
, and a mailbox bearing the name he was looking for. Gravel and ruts took him to a small, weathered house. He looked at wild raspberry canes and wished the fruit were ripe. He saw an abandoned bicycle that could have been the cadaver of the one he had ridden until it was handed down to a younger brother. Climbing out of the car, he peered through live pines to dead ones populating a swamp, which queerly gave him a sense of his own boyhood, mostly the mysteries.
“You lookin’ for me?”
The voice startled him. He looked toward the doorway of the house and saw a character from the comic books of childhood, a Yokum or a Snuffy Smith, a sawed-off creature in old clothes, with eyes as blue as any Polack’s, bluer than his own. “Ralph Rayball?”
“Ain’t nobody called me Ralph in years. People call me Papa.” Bakinowski approached him, identified himself, and showed his shield. Papa, stepping aside, did not bat an eye. “Come in.” Bakinowski maneuvered over a dilapidated step and entered a kitchen, where coats and jackets hung from pegs, a greasy stove stood on legs, and a younger version of the cartoon man peered up from his eating. “This is my boy Junior.”
Bakinowski, whose mother had been reared in West Virginia coal country and had passed on stories, wondered whether any Scotch-Irish blood flowed through the veins of these two. His mother’s younger brother, he had been told, had not gotten enough air at birth, and he wondered whether the same had been so with Junior. “Hello, Junior.”
“Hello, sir.” Junior ate with his face in the plate. Beans mixed in ketchup. He raised a glass, and his nose touched what he tasted, which looked like apple juice.
Papa said, “My firstborn, Clement, he’s come up from Florida. He ain’t here right now.”
“Do you know why I’m here, Mr. Rayball?”
“Sure I know. Chief Morgan thinks my boy here did somethin’.”
Junior spoke with his mouth full. “What’d I do, Papa?”
“Nothin’. You almost done eatin’?”
“Don’t rush,” Bakinowski said. His mother’s brother had operated on a short fuse but never harmed anyone, died young, and had been buried in the coal country. He watched Junior wipe his mouth and carry his plate to the sink. The refrigerator made sounds like a human.
Papa said, “You go on outside so the man and I can talk — ’less you want him to stay.”
“No, that’s all right. You go on out, Junior.” He watched him leave, pint-size like the father, in need of a haircut, his neck nappy.
“He’s a good boy,” Papa said. “Never finished school because kids picked on him.”
Papa drew up chairs, and they sat opposite each other at the table. Bakinowski said, “I’ve heard it mentioned he’s not a whole dollar.”
“That’s right. He’s maybe seventy-five cents, but that don’t give people the right, Chief included, to take advantage of him.”
“Why would the chief do that?”
“He thinks we’re trash, never liked any of us, but there’s more to it than that. Maybe you’ve heard.”
“Suppose you tell me.”
“He thinks I killed my wife. That happened a long time ago. I’ve had to live with it.”
“Did you kill her?”
“I ain’t answerin’ that anymore, I’m sick of answerin’ it. Sick of bein’ looked at for somethin’ I never did.” Papa pulled himself up in the chair. “But I’ll tell you this. My wife used to meet somebody out on the road. I always had the suspicion it was him, but I never had no proof. He’s a woman-chaser, you know.”
“I read the former chief’s report. Nothing in there about Morgan having known your wife.”
“Ain’t likely there would be. He used to kiss the old chief’s ass — that’s how he got Carr’s job, plus suckin’ up to the selectmen. He could say any thin’ he wanted for that report. Carr would’ve wrote it that way.”
Bakinowski looked toward the window. For a second he thought he saw Junior’s shadow, but then he looked beyond the window and glimpsed him near a woodpile.
“But it don’t matter no more,” Papa said. “My wife’s gone, I ain’t never pretended I was sorry. Maybe that’s why he never let up on me, on Clement neither. Tried to put words in Clement’s mouth to use against me. Now he’s trying to get at me through my youngest.”
“Could he be right about him, Mr. Rayball?”
“
You
saw my boy. You tell
me
he shot somebody.” Papa flumped a hand on the table. “You want some of that juice he was drinkin’?”
“No thanks, Mr. Rayball.”
“You know, people don’t call me
Mister
Rayball much. It don’t sound bad.”
Bakinowski rose, stiff in one knee. For the first time he felt the heat of the house. He loosened his necktie and opened his collar.
“You leavin’?”
“I thought I might talk to Junior first, alone. Do you mind?”
“Don’t mind a bit. Just let me say somethin’ ‘fore you go. Morgan, he’s thrown a lot of dirt at me, but I got an answer to that. You wanna hear it?”
Bakinowski nodded. He was tired. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“You ever go fishin’? You ever dig for bait? The darker the dirt, the whiter the worm.”
“I don’t get the meaning.”
“The meanin’ is I ain’t guilty of nothin’ and neither is my boy.”
Bakinowski opened the door, which had squeaky hinges. The screen was patched here and there, in some places left torn. Papa was at his elbow.
“Clement, he won’t be here all that long. He’s not permanent. Junior’s all I got.”
“I heard you didn’t think he was yours.”
“I reckon he is.”
Bakinowski’s arm brushed a torn part of the screen. He conjured up images of coal country girls precociously developed, the sort his mother had said got themselves in trouble. “Was your wife pretty, Mr. Rayball?”
“She was a slut. You asked, that’s what she was.”
Bakinowski stepped out into the sunshine, tramped over bright ground, and approached Junior, who was sitting on a stump with his arms wrapped around his knees. He was wearing a cap now. The name of a heavy-equipment company graced the front. Bakinowski pointed at the ground. “Isn’t that poison ivy?”
“I never catch it. I can touch it, it don’t do nothin’.”
“Where’d you get the cap?”
“Place I used to work.”
“Do you work now?”
“Not much.”
Bakinowski crouched down for a better look into Junior’s eyes. “I’m going to ask you something, and you just answer yes or no, OK? Did you shoot anybody?”
“No, sir.”
He returned to his car while removing his suit jacket, which he tossed into the back. He gave a thoughtful look at the house and then a swift one as he drove away. It reminded him of a dented tin can with the label peeled off, which was how his mother with a bitter laugh had described the houses in the coal country.
• • •
Papa Rayball watched the car leave in a cloud of gravel, took a swig of apple juice from the jug, and with a liberated swing of his arms went outside to Junior, who was still sitting on the stump, the visor of his cap pulled lower over his eyes. “You did good,” Papa said, standing over him. “You did real good.”
Junior did not look up. His shoulders were slumped. He nibbled a nail.
“Did you hear me?”
Birds chanted. Junior said, “I heard what you said about Mama.”
“You got big ears, always said that.”
“Did you kill her, Papa?”
Papa slapped him in the face, savagely. The cap flew off. Junior rolled into the poison ivy. Papa shook a fist. “Don’t ever ask me that again!”
Lying flat, Junior looked up with blotted eyes. “I betcha did.”
• • •
In his room at the motor inn Clement Rayball phoned Florida, the hotel where he had a semipermanent residence, and got hold of the desk clerk whom he knew well. “I need a favor,” he said. “Do you remember the woman I was sitting with in the patio bar the day I left. She still there?”
“Christ, Chico, you sit with a lot of’em. What’s her name?”
“I don’t know her last name. Her first name might be Esther. Big, attractive woman, frosty hair, curly. She was there with her grandson and I guess her daughter.”
“You’re talking about Dr. Rosen. I forget her first name, but it’s not Esther. She’s a shrink, did you know that?”
“She still there or not?”
“They checked out this morning.”
“Look in the phone book, see if she’s listed. No, never mind. It’s not important.”
“Chico, when you coming back?”
“Soon, I hope,” he said and rang off.
He went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, washed his face, and slicked his hair back; then he looked at his watch. It was too early for what he had to do. He left his room and went to the bar, peering in before he entered. He did not want to run into the same woman. In his room it had taken him a half hour to calm her down, and the last look he had of her was haunting.
The bartender remembered him. “Miller, isn’t it?”
“Usually,” he said. “This time make it bourbon on the rocks.”
• • •
Lieutenant Bakinowski phoned Chief Morgan from his office in the Andover barracks. “You got your story, Ray ball’s got his,” he said. “Which am I to believe?”
“Believe what you want,” Morgan said, “I don’t give a damn.”
“I thought that might be your attitude. I’m sorry to hear it.”
“You got anything more to tell me?”
“I do, but I don’t think you’d hear. You got a voice in your head twenty years old that drowns out everything else. I’m sorry for you, Chief.”
The line went dead in Bakinowski’s ear. He replaced the receiver and looked at the young detective who had come into his office to scan the Lawrence paper. “I’ll give you some advice,” he said to him. “Never trust a local cop. Every one of them carries baggage.”
“That’s what I was told at the academy.”
“Then they taught you right,” Bakinowski said and locked up his desk. On his way out of the office he snatched the newspaper from the young detective’s hands and took it with him. Outside in the fenced-in parking lot he saw a Bensington cruiser parked near his car. Walking toward it, he said, “Something you want, MacGregor?”
MacGregor stepped out of the cruiser in full uniform but with nothing aggressive about him. His face was pale. “I took the polygraph, I want to know what more you want.”
Bakinowski had rolled up the newspaper and was slapping it against his leg. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”
MacGregor spoke calmly. “I wish we could change shoes, then you’d know.”
“I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a million dollars. I’d cut my feet off first.”
MacGregor did not respond. He climbed back into the cruiser and shut the door. He put his sunglasses on slowly, hanging his head one way and then the other in fixing the wire wings to his ears. His demeanor was quiet and controlled. Bakinowski stepped close to the open window.
“I knew you did it from the start. I smelled it all over you.”