The Dead Past (15 page)

"You don't know anything. You don't know a goddamn thing about me."

Lowell nodded to himself. "It's why you hate living under the same roof as her parents. 'Cause you can't get away with everything all the time. They get on your back. But you're too lazy to get a job and earn your own way, so it's a wash. Builds the pressure up inside, don't it?”

“I don't need a lecture from you!" Dean shouted.

"You need to listen to somebody, kid. Your free ride is over, and you're making matters worse. You think you got power in your hand right now, but all you've got is more trouble than you've ever had in your miserable life. You couldn't pull the trigger if I paid you.”

“Don't be too sure.”

“That's the one thing I've been sure about all day.”

“Don't dare me," Dean said. "I've used a gun before, plenty of times. My father knew everything about them and he taught me. You're standing there and you're talking at me and daring me. Don't do that."

I agreed with him. I didn't understand how Lowell could continue to speak so calmly when he was literally staring down the barrel of a gun; I also thought it was excessively stupid for him to piss off a crazy kid who might pull the trigger accidentally just as soon as aim to blow somebody's brains out.

"Put it down," Lowell said.

"Do it, Dean," Angie pleaded. "Please. Everything will be okay, I promise."

The confusion played in his glare. "You always do that, Angie! You always make promises you can't keep." He didn't want to let go of what little power he had in the world and return to being a boy with no job and a pregnant wife and to live beneath the roof of a man who rightfully talked down to him. "Oh, shit." The blood drained from the kid's face until he was just another nineteen-year-old standing there without any edge on the future. Angie dumped the chipped vase and broke from her mother's grasp. She rushed to him, and the two of them hugged and she started to cry against his chest and he looked around the room searching for answers that nobody had.

Two more deputies clattered at the top of the stairs, came down and pressed past me and looked at the scene without any surprise.

Lowell said to them, "I told
Meg
I had everything under control."

"I know," one of the other deputies answered. "But that place was just too damn hot."

~ * ~

Driving back to the station, Lowell said, "Told you men do strange things when they're fighting with their wives."

"And their consciences."

He grunted. "Yeah."

Icy fingers still kneaded my back. "You wanted me to see you in action. To get back at me for making that crack about civil servants."

"What crack?" he asked.

"Oh, boy."

The entire episode hardly affected him. "You ever think about when we were kids?"

"Stick to the subject."

"Do you?"

"I've been doing nothing else lately."

"Me, too. Why do you think that is?"

I thought about it and couldn't come up with an adequate answer. "Mid-life crisis?"

"At twenty-nine?" He laughed for the first time all afternoon. "I hope to Christ not. That doesn't say a hell of a lot for our longevity."

I hated the thought of dealing with the Dobermans again, but I wanted to find out why Tons
Harraday
hadn't shown at the bar last night. I got lost again driving up the back hills and wound up passing the same gas station as before. I turned around and went east of Warner fork and made it to his place without any more trouble.

This time I didn't park at the bottom of the driveway. I checked for the dogs, didn't see them, and drove straight up across the snowy lawn to the foot of the front door. I hopped out of the Jeep and rushed for the small and rotted, sagging porch. Still no sign of the Dobermans.
Tons's
motorcycle sat at the side of the house near the trailer.

I knocked on the metal frame of the storm door and waited, trying hard not to keep checking over my shoulder. A half minute passed and I knocked again, much louder. A deadbolt
snicked
back, the lock clacked, and the front door opened with a huff of air.

Tons's
wife, Deena, stood looking at me without a hint of expression. Her unnaturally scarlet hair was splayed around her neck and shoulders, down to the waist, much longer than I'd originally thought. She proved to be prettier, too,
than
I remembered. Her nose didn't seem so long or mouth so crooked, and her breasts arched
lissomely
against the silky blouse; she possessed that unnamable sensual quality certain women have, and it was like having a powerful charge snapping at me to be so near it.

Deena continued to stare impassively, eyes so emotionless that she appeared blind, and didn't say anything. Fred and Barney watched me from around her skirt with their cute names and their cute uncut ears and their equally deadpan eyes. Some days you just can't plan well enough. This house must be a ball at Christmas.

She pushed open the storm door and said, "Yes?"

"I'm looking for your husband," I said.

"He's asleep."

I checked my watch. "At four in the afternoon?" The dogs nudged a step closer, and I wished she'd let them out and let me slip in. "Could you wake him, please?"

She smiled without humor. "You'd think that was a normal request, but you don't know what you're asking. I don't need to hear his yelling and bitching."

"It's important," I said.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"My name's Jonathan Kendrick. I was here yesterday afternoon."

"I remember. I just didn't know your name."

"Tons was supposed to meet me last night at
Raimi's
and never showed."

"What do you want to talk to him about?"

Tons had said he'd wanted to ask questions of me, too, and I wondered why. How much did Deena know about her brother-in-law Richie, and could she shed some light on what might have happened to him? Nobody seemed to know much about what he was into or who he might have been mixed up with—it suddenly struck me that I'd forgotten to ask Lowell if Margaret's jewelry had ever been found. Tons had said Richie was a quiet and shy kid who kept to himself; if that were true, Richie may have told things to Deena he wouldn't have spoken about to his own brother.

I said, "I'm just trying to find out a little more about Richie."

The muscles in her face softened all at once, leaving her with an even blanker expression, if that was possible. "Richie was a good kid."

"Do you know if he was hanging around with anyone in particular?"

She shook her head. "No."

"A close buddy? A girlfriend?"

Her voice grew faraway. "I already told you no. He had no friends or girlfriends at all that I know of. He stuck to himself. He never wanted any trouble."

"Why do you think he broke into Margaret Gallagher's house?" I asked.

Flakes of snow sprinkled off the rain gutters and landed at our feet, light breeze whirling them between her bare toes. She shivered and hugged herself, but didn't ask me in. "So he did stupid things every once in a while. He was just a kid. He never would have hurt anyone."

"I don't know. How long did you know him?"

"Since I met Tons, of course. A year and a half ago." The amount of time seemed to impress her, and those thread-thin eyebrows fluttered and a wrinkle creased her forehead. "Somehow it doesn't seem that long ago, and in another way it feels much longer."

"Did he ever mention why he—"

"Why do you keep asking so many questions?"

"Because his body was found virtually on my grandmother's doorstep, and I want to know if that means something."

"How could it mean anything?"

My next question was cut off by a loud, low groan from the back room.

"It's awake," Deena said.

Tons stumbled behind her into the kitchen, wearing only sagging boxer shorts and a black T-shirt with the sleeves sliced off that said HARLEY RULES. My ex-wife would have loved him. "Get me a glass of juice," he croaked. "Jesus, it's cold. Shut the damn door will you, baby." He fell over into a kitchen chair and the floor rocked.

"There's somebody here to see you," she told him. He peered around her to look at me but the sunlight was enough to blind him. "Who?"

"Jonathan Kendrick," I said.

"
Who?
"

"Guess you should come in," Deena said.

The dogs backed off and went to Tons and he swatted them away, grousing. Fred and Barney sat in the center of the small, cluttered living room and looked at me the same way the information clerks at Motor Vehicles will look at you.

Empty beer cans littered the floor and a quarter bottle of Scotch peeked out between the cushions of the couch; Tons had spent the night drinking alone at home rather than at the bar.

"You again," he said.

"Me again," I said.

"What do you want now?"

"To find out why you never showed at
Raimi's
last night."

"Huh?" he said, peering at my face as if he occasionally recognized me but kept forgetting from second to second. "Oh yeah, shit. We were gonna talk." Deena brought him a tall glass of V-8. He slurped half the contents down in one pull, then pressed the cold glass against his forehead. He burped and said, "One of them nights."

"Yeah." It wasn't hard to see where Richie may have inherited his drug problem from.

Tons drank the rest of the V-8 and Deena filled a second glass for him. He squinted so hard that his large face scrunched into strange, fleshy angles. "Somebody sure came down on you."

"
Raimi's
doesn't always draw a friendly crowd.”

“Ain't that the truth."

"I was hoping we could finish our talk."

"What time is it?" He spotted a clock on the kitchen counter, reached over, and pulled it to within six inches of his eyes. "Four o'clock?"

Deena moved behind him, cleaning dishes in the sink. "You slept in big-time today."

"Oh, man." He pushed the clock away from him. "Baby, why didn't you stop me when you got home last night?"

"Like that's my responsibility? I've got to take care of an infant, work, and watch out for you, too? You're over eighteen, you do what you want."

"Why didn't you show up?" I said.

He sipped the juice. "I don't know. I meant to, but. . . I got to thinking, after our talk, about my brother, and I just started drinking some beer, and. . ." He let the sentence drift. "Maybe you can't understand this, but he's been dead four days now and it feels like I'm
just
noticing, you know? That make any sense?"

"Yes," I said.

"I sound like an ass."

"It's tough to put into words."

"Do you kinda feel like that, Deena?" he asked.

She nodded slowly. "Yeah."