Authors: Andrew Coburn
Chief Morgan waited on the shore of Paget’s Pond for the scuba divers to finish the futile search. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and his forearms were red from scratching mosquito bites. The heat had ushered in a whole new generation. Behind him came footsteps.
“What’s going on, Chief?”
“A hunch that’s not working out,” he said.
Lieutenant Bakinowski stood beside him. “They looking for the weapon?”
“Yes, but it’s not there.”
“Save yourself some time. Ask MacGregor where it is.”
“You’re ruining a good cop,” Morgan said. “He’s not showing up for duty.”
“I can understand why. I’m breaking him. I’m wearing him down. It’s a damn crude way I’m doing it, but you left me no choice. You gave me no help, and neither did Jackson. I went over your head, you know. It didn’t work. That’s what I like about these god-damn little towns. Everybody’s got a finger up the next fella’s ass. You got yours up Jackson’s, MacGregor’s got his up yours.”
Morgan took a breath, held himself in, and swatted his arm. “I have nothing to say to you except leave MacGregor alone.”
“Yeah, I’ll leave him alone. I’ll hand him to you on a plate and you can cut him up any way you want.” Bakinowski turned away and after a few steps looked back. His voice was calm. “I’ve been doing homicide too long not to know a killer when I see one. And you, Chief, you’re plain wrong.”
“Not wrong, just mixed up,” Morgan said. “I had the wrong Rayball, is all.”
“You want to explain that?”
“Yes, when I bring him in on a plate.”
• • •
The evening seemed sultrier than the day had been, no movement in the air. The air in the station was clammy. Bertha Skagg’s thighs stuck together, and her feet swelled. “I can’t take no more of this,” she said, and Chief Morgan sent her home and took her place at the phone with its modest array of buttons, two of which were meaningless. He punched an outside line and fingered in Lydia Lapham’s number, which rang through. Then he called the hospital, but she was too busy to talk. He had the impression she did not want to. After a long hesitation, he rang up Christine Poole’s house, expecting to hear the son’s voice, but it was Arlene Bowman’s.
“How is she?” he asked.
“How do you think she is?” There was a pause. “Are you asking yourself how much you had to do with it? You’ll never know, will you?”
“I understood it was an accident.”
“If you believe that, you must be great friends with the tooth fairy. Services will be private, so you needn’t worry about attending.”
“Are you handling arrangements, Arlene?”
“She has a son here, but he’s no help. Her other son is in Africa with the Peace Corps, he’s sent regrets. Calvin had children of his own, but they’re not here yet. So, yes, I’m helping out. Does that bother you?”
“I hope she can’t hear any of this.”
“Of course she can’t. And let me assure you, you’re least in her mind. You may not even exist.”
“Thank you, Arlene,” he said and quietly disconnected.
A half hour later, Meg O’Brien came through the door with sandwiches and two cans of root beer. The sandwiches were cream cheese and olive, with a side wrapper of dill pickles. She said, “I knew Bertha wouldn’t stay.”
“I’ve got bad news,” Morgan said, immediately biting into the sandwich she had slid his way. “The divers aren’t coming back tomorrow. One’s got commitments, and the other’s going on vacation.”
“Just as well,” she said, passing him a pickle. “That was only a guess of mine about the river.”
Morgan made a space between his finger and thumb. “Meg, I’m this close to getting him.”
“Good,” she said. “For Matt’s sake.”
• • •
Papa said to Junior, “You look at me when I talk!”
“I am,” Junior said, his sneakered feet hooked on the rungs of his chair. He and Papa were at the kitchen table, around which the heat of the day was hovering for the night. Sweat dripped from Papa’s nose.
“You don’t let Clement fill your head with Florida, you hear?”
“I ain’t said yet I’m goin’, Papa. I’m jus’ thinkin’, like he told me.”
“What you thinkin’ with?
This?
“ Papa rapped his own head. “You ain’t got nothin’ in there. I’m the one does your thinkin’.”
Lowering his eyes, Junior placed his hands on the table and played with his fingers. “Would you miss me, Papa?”
“Ain’t a question of missin’ you. It’s a question of what you’re gonna do on your own. Clement, he ain’t gonna have no time for you down there, he’s got his own life. You’d be like shit on his shoe.”
“He wouldn’t of asked me, he didn’t want me.”
“
Now
he wants you, later he won’t.” Papa snorted, the sweat flying. “You don’t know how to do nothin’ without me, when you gonna learn that?”
Junior lifted his face, with some fight in his eyes. “Lots of things I do you don’t know about.”
“Like goin’ behind my back, that what you mean?”
Junior flushed and said nothing. His fingers were at play again, with Papa watching him closely. A bug beat at the screen in the window. Then Papa rose from the table, his voice softening.
“I’m gonna watch some TV, you wanna watch it with me?”
Junior shook his head.
• • •
Chief Morgan drove through the warm thickness of the night to Lawrence. He left his car in the Emergency lot and, entering the hospital, filtered into a waiting crowd of mothers with crying children, men with fierce wounds, and youths with their eyes glued to their hundred-dollar sneakers. A nurse bellowed a name. In some ways the area had the accusing air of a courtroom. He found quiet in a corridor and sought direction from a woman worker in sagging support stockings. At a nurses’ station he was advised to try the cafeteria.
Lydia Lapham was sitting with a doctor. He guessed who it was. The gray in the man’s hair pleased him. “Can I talk to you?” he said to her.
The doctor rose as if on a command from his scrotum. “I was just leaving.”
Morgan sat in the vacated chair and pushed aside the empty coffee cup, which rattled in its thick saucer. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
She did not look it. Stark minimum makeup put her face closer to the bone and made her eyes enormous, forcing them to shift for themselves. Her frazzled uniform looked like milk hesitating between fresh and sour. “Was that your friend?” he asked.
“Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”
“I don’t have the right to be.”
“But you are,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That’s interesting.” A few white threads dangled from a sleeve, like thistledown. “Tell me more.”
He pushed the doctor’s cup farther away and said, “Was the other night something that happened and won’t happen again?”
“I don’t know what it was. I’ve been pondering it. I’m a little afraid of you. Who are you?”
“I’m starting to ask myself that.”
“You’re not Frank. You’re certainly not Matt, and I’m not the wife you lost. They say you still carry her around.”
“Not like I used to. Not as much.”
“I hope to hell I don’t look like her. Do I?”
“No.”
“That’s something.” She had a little coffee left. She drank it. Two nurses smiled at her in passing. “I don’t want to make any more mistakes with men. What bothers me is that I’m fair game. The Reverend Mister Stottle showed me that.”
“Did
I
take advantage?” he asked.
“No, James. But could it have been anyone if it hadn’t been you? That’s the question in my mind.”
“I’d like to think no.”
“I would too.” She looked at her watch and rose. Quickly she freed the back of her uniform, which was sticking to her legs. He was conscious of her down to the tips of her toes. He felt her in his nerves. She said, “My mother used to say I looked like a bride in my whites. Do I still?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“I have to go,” she said. “Thanks for dropping by.”
• • •
Mrs. Stottle joined Reverend Stottle in the study, where they enjoyed late after-dinner coffee flavored with chocolate, a particular favorite of the reverend’s. His brow was faintly troubled. “Do you remember, dear, our first parish in Rhode Island?” She did. She remembered it well. She had been some thirty years younger. He said, “The ladies’ garden society kept the grounds beautiful, but I noticed something sinister. The magnolia blossoms lasted less than a week, the same with irises that bloomed later. Day lilies gave a show of longevity but only because they staggered their wealth. In reality everything was over in a wink. That’s the way it is.”
“And always has been,” she said.
“Of course, we have heaven to look forward to.”
“Heaven, I suspect, is filled with happiness too horrendously consistent to enjoy.”
“I was thinking of Mrs. Dugdale, poor dear. Heaven is where she is, certainly not hell.”
Mrs. Stottle tinkled her cup, paper-thin china, in the saucer. “Hell is hard labor and heaven no work at all. Which is worse?”
“Purgatory,” the reverend said. “But of course we’re not Catholics.”
“Even they don’t believe in it anymore. How are you feeling?”
“Better.”
“I’m going to bed,” she announced.
“Yes, I’ll follow,” he said, but settled a little more comfortably in his club chair, which had accompanied him to all his churches. On the wall hung a photograph of his graduating class, the cream of their generation, he liked to think. Then, for an hour, he listened to Beethoven and entered the depths of the music.
When he crept into bed, his wife was asleep, snoring ever so lightly. He stole back portions of the top sheet that belonged to him, a theft that occurred nightly, a sin of less importance than the colors of her garden. Then he laid his head on his pillow, contented.
Twenty minutes later, waking abruptly, he exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”
His voice bit through Mrs. Stottle’s sleep, and she lifted her head. “What’s wrong, Austin?”
“Matthew is going to kill somebody. Maybe himself.”
“What? Don’t talk nonsense. Why would he do that?”
“I
know
why.”
• • •
Matt MacGregor ate a meal and listened to his mother’s music. Peggy Lee sang “Say It Isn’t So” with a mellow seductiveness that affected his stomach. Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love” churned it. The pain was bearable, in ways enjoyable. He could not imagine his father having shared with Mom what he had shared with Lydia, the kind of kisses that wallowed into the deeper ones and led to the antics of porno films. Hidden in his room was an old Polaroid of Lydia posing in a wet T-shirt. His mother never would have done that, nor would she have stood for his father whispering explicit things in her ear. That was a different generation.
He cleared up, stacked the few things he had used into the dishwasher, and put away the milk. The house had one and a half bathrooms. The half bath had been his and his sister’s. Ducks, frogs, and sunfish still provided the motif. In the mirror he absorbed his own cankered smile in memory of a father whose face he scarcely remembered but from whom he had got his pug nose and nothing else.
Stepping back, he shucked off his shirt to look manly. He looked more than manly. He was a cop. Flexing an arm, he made a muscle. He had more than muscles, he had firepower.
Bare-chested, he phoned Lawrence General Hospital and, adding depth to his voice, asked for Lydia. He was transferred to a person who said she might be in the cafeteria. Would he like her to call him back? The impersonal tone of the voice, vaguely patronizing, kicked up a memory of Mrs. Lapham, whose dream was that Lydia would marry a doctor. He, Matthew MacGregor, was not up to her mark.
“Sir.”
An old anger moved a muscle. The old bitch never knew that Lydia had fucked around with a doctor already married and that he, Matthew MacGregor, had waited in the wings until she came back to him, damaged goods, which he received willingly, no complaints, no recriminations.
“Do you want Nurse Lapham to call you back?”
“Not necessary,” he said and banged the phone down. Even old man Lapham had considered him scrub, not varsity. It was not until the past year that the two of them had started worrying that Lydia would never marry and began favoring him.
He turned up the radio. Sinatra was beating out “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” which stretched his anger. He climbed the stairs heavily, each thinly carpeted step sending up a discordant note of music, and entered the larger bathroom, where an old-fashioned tub clawed the floor and his mother’s best towels hung from a rack. The mirror flashed at him, and he menaced himself with a look. His eyes waxed. The lines around his mouth were ugly.
He clumped into his boyhood bedroom in half mufti, and minutes later reappeared in full uniform, armed for bear. The handgun was unauthorized, a Magnum. He poised himself in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom, which was almost consumed by a four-poster for two people. His father had left so long ago he was no longer sure the man had ever existed. A framed photograph propped on the dresser was the only evidence. He aimed the Magnum. His hand jerked, the picture exploded.
He descended the stairs with a lighter step and a vision. The entire length of Lydia’s body lay suddenly in his mind as if he were two persons and the other were with her now, having his way, taking his due. When she lay flat, her belly went in and her ribs came out. Then the vision darkened and altered. Not he but the chief was having his way. Whirling, knocking over a table lamp, he faced the old piano, tuneless now, that his sister had played dreadfully and he not at all. He fired two shots into it and struck chords drawn from the depths of the earth.
His heart pounded, overdriven. His eyes were lightning bugs. In the heat of his head Lydia rose, turned her back on him, and mocked him with the bold slash of her rump. The chief crazed him with a fatherly smile. He fired again, shattering his mother’s only heirloom, a vase, and blowing a hole in the wall.
His chest heaved. Through a roar he heard Peggy Lee crooning, “Where Can I Go Without You” and saw the singer’s gold-trimmed eyes and felt the breath of her red mouth. The words struck him. Lurching, Lydia in his head and the chief in his sights, he tripped over the lamp. His free hand leaped out to break the fall, but his gun hand, doubling in, detonated. In an instant, ugly and irrevocable, the shooter became the shot.