“That’s what I seem to remember, but I’d really have to ask a priest or a canon lawyer. There might be some sort of exemption if you’re genuinely unable to get to a priest and you genuinely want to confess. Maybe some extra time in purgatory.”
“Fucking lawyers, always looking for a loophole. I say Roy’s going right from Lake Bascomb into the lake of fire.”
At that Roy began kicking fiercely at the top of the box, and Charlie began to imagine dropping the trunk into the frigid black lake water. He wasn’t sure he could make himself do it, wasn’t even sure he could stand by and let Vic do it. Why couldn’t Vic have just shot the poor bastard? This was a long way out of their way and a lot of time out of the schedule just to satisfy Vic’s Grand Guignol sense of revenge. Maybe Roy was right, and once they were out at the lake Charlie would be joining him under it. Maybe he should consider accepting Roy’s offer. He knew the part about letting him get away with the money was a bluff, but it seemed to him there was a good chance Roy would let him live. Not a bad quid pro quo, it seemed to Charlie. Roy bellowed incoherently inside the footlocker, probably delirious from the lack of oxygen, or maybe from the blow to the head.
“You ever killed anybody before, Charlie?” Vic looked at him sideways.
“No.”
“Thought you were in the army. Weren’t you in Vietnam?”
“I was stationed in Germany. I was out before they started the big buildup over there, anyway.”
“I could’ve gone to Korea, if I hadn’ta been in jail. I even volunteered to go if they’d let me out, but they didn’t bite. I would’ve gone, too. I wanted to.”
Charlie cleared his throat. “So how come you went all the way out to the Midas Touch to bury Deacon?”
Vic shrugged as if it were obvious. “If I left him in the house or buried him in the yard someone might’ve seen me, and if I ever got picked up it’d be that much easier to pin it on me. And I figured if you and me are missing, and Roy’s missing, and they find Deacon’s body, who’re they gonna blame for all of it?”
“Bill Gerard?”
“Exactly.”
Roy’s breathing was ragged now, loud, heaving wheezes.
“Maybe we should let him have a little air in there, Vic.”
“Are you nuts? He’ll be dead in ten minutes.”
Charlie pondered the idea of Bill Gerard going down for the whole mess. That he and Vic might be considered possible victims instead of perpetrators hadn’t occurred to him before this. They would be counted as missing and presumed dead. A sudden, intrusive thought brought with it a momentary wave of panic.
“Hey, Vic?” He felt his voice rise half an octave on the second syllable.
“Yeah?” Vic was looking away from him, out the passenger side at the passing snowscape of low fences and telephone poles.
“What do you think really happened to Desiray?”
Vic said something under his voice without turning.
“What? I didn’t hear what you said.”
His voice rose as he repeated himself, still facing out the window. “I said don’t worry about Desiray.”
“I’m not worried. I just, you know, I wonder sometimes.”
“Don’t think about it.”
They drove on, accompanied by the loud, wet gasps from inside the footlocker. Finally Vic faced forward.
“Look, Charlie, she knew what we were up to.”
“How’d she figure it out? Nobody else did.”
“I was screwing her at the time. She was around a lot; she started putting things together. One day she just asked me, Are you ripping off Bill Gerard? She caught me off guard. I told her.”
“You told her?”
“What was the point of denying it at that stage? Jesus, she’d already figured it out. She wanted to cut in, come along with us. She wanted to come with me, specifically.”
“So you killed her?”
“What would you have done? She wanted a third of it. That’s one-third of my half and one-third of yours.”
“Jesus, Vic, she had two kids.”
“Hey, those kids are with her sister and brother-in-law. The sister’s a nice churchgoing gal, nothing at all like Desiray. She’s a much better influence on those kids than that greedy whore was. And don’t forget, you’re part of it. I was defending your interests just as much as my own.”
“So where’s the—” He stopped himself and rephrased it. “Where’d you put her?”
“Same place as Roy’s going. In another footlocker.”
“Jesus. You didn’t put her in there alive, did you?”
“Would you feel better if I said no?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I would.”
“Okay, then. She was dead before the box hit the water.”
Neither of them spoke again until they got to the lake.
There were no tracks in the snow leading to the short wooden dock. Charlie brought the car to a stop about ten feet away from it, then got out and opened the rear driver’s-side door. Vic opened the other door and pushed as Charlie pulled. Charlie’s hip was throbbing again, and he slipped, pulling the footlocker down with him and out of the backseat. When it hit the ground a sound came from inside it like a basketball deflating. Another inch forward and its corner would have hit him right in the balls.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, certain that Vic intended to kill him right there, the second he was no longer needed to help push Roy under the waves.
He stood up and brushed himself off, the pain in his hip worse. They carried the footlocker toward the dock, with Vic taking the front end and walking backward. Vic stepped carefully onto the snow-covered dock, and before he’d taken two more steps his foot slid out from under him. The locker hit the planks hard on Vic’s end, the gasp from within barely noticeable this time.
“Shit. Come on, let’s get this cocksucker in the water and hit the road. Set it down and push.” Vic stood again and began dragging the locker to the end of the dock. Charlie pushed, sliding the locker over the bumpy planks.
“Okay, stop.” Vic stood at the very edge of the dock. He turned to look out at the lake, frozen over and covered with a thick layer of luminous snow. He let out a satisfied sigh. “It sure is pretty, Charlie.”
“Yeah.” He watched Vic admiring the view, the footlocker heavy behind his knees, the dock slick with snow, and as he reached his decision he was already bending over to shove the footlocker, putting his shoulder into it. It slammed into the back of Vic’s knees, and his feet flew out from under him. He managed to keep himself vertical, his feet dropping toward the ice, and his arms flew out behind him and he barely clung with one, struggling, to the end of the dock for a moment. Then he lost his hold and, after a brief, silent fall, hit the ice with a thud and a crack, but no splash.
“You dumb son of a bitch! Help me up!”
Charlie leaned over the footlocker and looked down at Vic’s dark silhouette, spread-eagled on the ice to distribute his weight evenly. The drop had been a good eight feet; the lake was low this year.
“Hold on, I’ll go get something for you to grab onto.”
“Hurry the fuck up.”
Charlie walked slowly back to the car and opened the trunk. He reached behind the bags and pulled out a tire iron and a two-piece jack of a type he’d never seen before, then returned to the dock.
“Hurry up; this ice ain’t gonna hold forever.”
Charlie winced as he dropped the first part of the jack a few inches from Vic’s face. It smashed straight down through the snow, through the ice, and into the water. There was a creaking sound like an old house settling.
“What the fuck are you doing, Charlie?” Vic very carefully raised his head above the ice, inching himself away from the jack’s hole and its spreading cracks, moving away from the shore in the process.
“Sorry, Vic.”
“You piece of shit.”
“You were going to kill me.”
“You don’t know where the money is, Charlie. You’re screwed without me.”
“It’s in one of your suitcases.”
“No, it’s not.”
The creaking came again, louder and a little higher in pitch, and Vic moved very gingerly, looking toward the shore and reaching into his coat pocket for something. Charlie dropped the other part of the jack. It, too, went straight down, hitting less than a foot from Vic’s chest, and the ice opened up under him. He disappeared for a second, and then he reappeared, sputtering. Only his head and the shoulders of his down jacket were visible above the surface as he began treading water.
“Jesus Christ, it’s cold. . . .” His voice broke with his shivering. “Charlie, help me. I wasn’t gonna kill you. I swear.”
Charlie stepped off the dock and rummaged around in the snow for a rock. He returned to the dock’s edge with a couple of big ones, the larger a good ten pounds, and he dropped the smaller one. He missed Vic’s head, and the rock made a loud, plosive sound as it hit the water. Charlie dropped the second rock, and Vic yelled in pain and surprise as it hit the top of his head with a surprisingly wooden sound. Vic stared up at Charlie, dazed, and then he went under with an audible intake of lake water. Charlie watched the jagged black hole for a minute and a half, timing it with his watch, then turned to open the footlocker. He worried briefly about Vic’s coming up through the hole in the ice once he began to bloat, but he decided that the ice would probably re-form over the hole by then. In any case it was a big lake, and he was unlikely to come up right where he went down.
“I’ll have you out of there in a second, Roy, and we’ll talk about a deal.” His great, life-changing plan was over now, years of careful planning and deception over and done with, and poor Desiray lay dead in a trunk just like this one in the icy water beneath him for nothing. He felt curiously relieved, prying at the cheap combination padlock with the tire iron until its hasp twisted and snapped open.
“Roy?” He reached inside and gave him a shake. Roy’s eyelids half-covered his motionless eyes and his jaw hung loose, his tongue visible between his teeth. Charlie checked his neck for a pulse and found none, but he didn’t really know exactly where to press. He shook Roy harder. “Come on.” Roy didn’t move. He remembered an old story his great-grandfather Arlen used to tell about a country doctor who’d revived a supposedly dead tenant farmer by breaking his big toe. The farmer had shrieked in pain and surprise and sat up, alive and apparently healthy, prompting talk locally of resurrection and miracles, but the toe turned black with gangrene and killed him a week later. The tale was always accompanied with gleeful laughter on the part of the storyteller.
He didn’t want to take off Roy’s shoe, so he grabbed the clammy left hand and snapped its little finger. The expression on Roy’s face didn’t change. He reached down into the footlocker and came up with Roy’s empty pistol, a tiny nickel-plated thing he must have kept hidden in his sock. He didn’t feel right stealing from a dead man, and in any case he didn’t know where to get ammunition for it or even what kind of ammunition it took, but he thought it might be good to have. He dropped it into his inside overcoat pocket. “Sorry, Roy.”
He closed the footlocker and shoved it off the end of the dock. It instantly tore a long rectangular hole in the ice just to the left of the first. It floated for a moment, foundered, and sank.
14
V
ic’s suitcases contained eight or ten changes of warm-weather clothes, three pairs of alligator shoes, a shaving kit, and a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks. There was no other money. Charlie hauled both suitcases to the dock and dropped them into the larger hole, got back into the Mercedes, turned the radio back on, and started the drive back to Vic’s house.
An all-string orchestra made its way through a tepid arrangement of “White Christmas” as he drove along the blank drifts and poorly kept fences on either side of the road. The ragged-voiced disc jockey murmured in a slurred, hushed tone of awe over the end of the song about the deeper meaning of this particular snow, suggesting that it might be a Christmas miracle. Charlie thought for the first time in years of his eighth Christmas, when it had snowed three days straight, the year he got the Labrador puppy on Christmas morning. Even though it was intended as a pet for all six kids, the pup had attached itself to Charlie immediately. He named him Duke, and Duke was always primarily Charlie’s dog, at least until he went away to college. Whenever he came home on a break Duke was hysterical with joy, whining and barking and licking, and his eyes took on an almost comical sorrow when Charlie inevitably packed back up and headed off again. The dog had died when Charlie was in the army, and he felt himself getting teary-eyed at the thought of the old dog dying without him. He realized he didn’t even know where his parents had buried Duke. Now that he thought about it, his great-grandfather had also died while he was in Germany, and he wasn’t sure where he was buried, either.
He wondered if Great-grandfather Arlen’s story about the tenant farmer had been true, or if he’d just made it up to scare Charlie and his brothers and sisters. Most of his anecdotes about his frontier youth were similarly sensational, filled with gory, petty violence, drunken cowboys, ubiquitous, terrible sickness, vengeful Indians, and wandering ghosts. The old man would have been tickled at the idea of the three cadavers spending the winter together under the ice in Lake Bascomb, a murderer and his two victims waiting for the spring thaw.
At bottom Charlie was as disappointed to find out that Desiray had been sleeping with Vic regularly as he was to learn that he’d killed her. More than once she’d expressed a strong dislike for Vic, and he didn’t see anything Vic could have done for her professionally that he couldn’t or wouldn’t have done himself. She did have a pretty voracious appetite for coke. He remembered going home with her one summer night and watching her do line after line, becoming more and more manic as the night went on, punctuating her intake with glasses of jug wine and finishing off the evening with an enthusiastic blow job for Charlie. Now that he thought about it, if Vic was trading her coke for sex, his seemingly limitless supply of the former might have caused her to make the lethal mistake of speculating out loud to Vic about its source. Charlie had liked Desiray, liked her a lot, in fact, and for months he’d tried hard to pretend that her disappearance hadn’t been what it had seemed. He was sorry that she was dead after all, sorry to know that Vic had done it, and now that he thought about it, he wasn’t at all sorry he’d killed Vic.
He returned to the Cavanaugh residence without much hope of finding the money there. If Roy hadn’t found it, it was most likely somewhere else. According to Dennis, Vic had stopped in at the Tease-O-Rama that afternoon, but there’d been too much chance of Charlie going back there for Vic to have risked using it to hide the money. After a cursory and unsuccessful search for any liquor he and Vic might have missed earlier he sat down at the kitchen table to think. On the counter next to it was an answering machine, its red light blinking on and off.
“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice, husky and wary, and she said nothing else before she hung up two or three seconds later. It sounded a lot like Renata, but after five playbacks Charlie still couldn’t say for sure one way or the other. He picked up an address book from the scattered contents of an overturned kitchen drawer and looked up Renata’s name. Her home number was there in Vic’s childish hand, and Charlie started to dial it. He stopped and looked down again. Her home address was there, too. It was five-thirty. Whether he found the money or not, he was going to have to get out of town very soon.
Renata’s house was a plain-looking white A-frame on a side street a mile west of the Sweet Cage. A light was on in the living room as he drove by. He parked the Mercedes down the street and walked up the sidewalk to her porch. The snow had stopped, and the neighborhood was perfectly still except for the crunch of his feet on the snowy sidewalk. He stepped onto the porch and rapped on the glass. A moment later a hand pulled the front window curtain back and Renata peered out at him, looking not the least surprised. She opened the door.
“Hello, Charlie.” She opened the door wide and he shouldered past her into the house. “What brings you here? Hoping I might still reward you for your act of kindness toward me?” She shut the door behind her.
Her living room was warm and dim, her furniture old and worn. A fire burned in the fireplace. She had on tight pants, a clinging black turtleneck sweater, and no shoes. Her bright red toenails showed through a filmy layer of nylon to match her long fingernails, and the detail aroused him slightly. Her hair was still pulled into a tight knot behind her head.
“Where were you? I went by the Sweet Cage after we talked and there was nobody there.”
“I couldn’t sit there and wait for you anymore, Charlie. You said you’d be by in twenty minutes.”
“A cop stopped me.” He was sure it hadn’t been much more than twenty, but there were other matters to attend to now. “I heard your message.”
“What message?” She moved toward the kitchen and turned back toward him, standing in the open doorway.
“You left a message on Vic’s answering machine.”
“Why would I call Vic? I don’t even have his phone number. Anyway, whenever I get one of those things I just hang up. I won’t talk to a machine.”
“It was someone who sounded a lot like you, then.”
“Sounded like me? What did she say?”
“Just ‘hello,’ then she hung up.”
“It wasn’t me. Did you ever find Vic?”
“Yeah, I found him. He’s dead.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Did Roy Gelles do it?”
“Roy’s dead, too.”
“So you’re free to go. Why stop over here?” She leaned back onto the frame of the kitchen door with her arms folded over her chest, an amused, slightly disdainful smile beginning to play at the corners of her mouth. It seemed to him she was consciously arching her back in order to accentuate her breasts.
“I can’t find the money. I can’t leave without it.”
“You think it’s here?”
“I don’t know. All I know is the voice on Vic’s machine sounded like you.”
She shrugged. “Look around if you like.”
He sat down at her dining room table. “I guess not. You have anything to drink?”
“Just coffee and tea.”
“No liquor?”
“Not even wine. You want some coffee? Yes or no.”
“I guess not.” His head throbbed, and the dull pain in his hip was constant now.
“Maybe the woman on the answering machine was Bonnie. She has a husky voice. You know, one of those booze-and-cigarette voices.”
“Vic and Bonnie haven’t spoken in three years, as far as I know, except maybe to exchange insults.”
“As far as you know. Maybe she’s got the money.” She sat down at the table next to him and leaned forward. “She still lives in their old house, right?”
Charlie nodded. It seemed unlikely. Charlie had never seen a marriage break up with such animal viciousness as Vic and Bonnie’s, not even his own.
“You don’t suppose he was planning to take her and the kids with him all along and cut you out of it, do you?”
“You got the last part right. He was planning to put me in Lake Bascomb.”
“Or if he wasn’t taking her with him he might have just thought her house would be a safe place to stash the money until the morning.”
“It’s possible.”
“Even if she’s not in on it, isn’t it possible he went over to see the kids? He might have some kind of hiding place there, maybe a floor safe or something.”
It began to make sense to him. Vic was no more attentive a father than he was, but Christmas would have presented him with the perfect excuse to go over there and hide something. “He could have wrapped it up and put it under the tree.”
Renata nodded. “How much money are we really talking about, Charlie? If you were both planning to skip town on it, it’s got to be a lot more than what you managed to skim off the top for a couple of years.”
“Yesterday at noon I cleaned out the operating accounts for the whole operation.”
“So that’s, what, five or six businesses total? Let’s say twelve grand, maybe fifteen. Still not nearly enough for you and Vic both to be planning to cash out on.”
Charlie sighed and stood. It was five-forty-five. “We were running some coke on the side. A pretty fair amount of it, actually. Behind Bill’s back.”
“Jesus Christ, Charlie. Bill Gerard would have cut off your skin in little pieces if he ever found out.”
“The idea was to get out of town after we’d made a lot of money but before he found out about it.”
“It’s a lot of money, then.”
“It’s a great big fucking pile of money. I’d better get over to Bonnie’s before they come downstairs to open presents.”
She rose and moved toward him. “If you want to come back here before you go, Charlie . . .” She put a hand on his shoulder and the other on his hip. They leaned together and kissed for a moment. Her mouth tasted like Doublemint gum masking tobacco, one of Charlie’s favorite combinations. Then she pulled back, her palms flat on his chest, her fingers arched and their long red nails pressing through his overcoat and his shirt. “You should get going now.” Her accent seemed slightly thicker than usual.
Ten minutes later he was sitting in the Mercedes across the street and three houses down from Bonnie’s house in a newish subdivision of almost identical two-story houses in an area that had been farmland when Charlie was growing up. He got out of the car and crossed the street, the edgy anticipation of the break-in diminished somewhat by the notion that hardly anyone would suspect a middle-aged, well-dressed white man driving a late-model Mercedes of anything sinister in a neighborhood like this, even before six in the morning. That this was a man who had that very Christmas morning committed his first murder and was about to commit his first burglary would not have occurred to the casual observer.
He moved to the side of the house, where he brushed the snow from around a basement window. He sat down in the hollow he’d made and braced himself, knowing he could afford the noise of only a single kick. His right foot shot straight through the window, knocking his shoe loose at the heel and making what seemed to him to be an excessive amount of noise, but he sat motionless for thirty seconds with no indication he’d been heard. Carefully he extracted his foot from the cracked window, his shoe dangling from his toes, and as he pulled it out the shoe caught on an outcropping of broken glass and dropped into the basement. Cursing quietly he got onto his knees, stuck his hand in, and managed to unlatch the window without gashing his wrist open.
He lowered himself quietly into the basement, his right sock soaked. The almost perfect blackness was broken only by the pale gray rectangles of the windows where the walls met the ceiling. He felt his way to the wall and moved lopsidedly inch by inch around the room by touch, careful to avoid upsetting the storage boxes lining the walls, until he reached the stairs just opposite the windows. Moving his palm up and down the rough wall he located a light switch and flipped it on. The basement was unfinished, with mottled gray concrete walls and a smooth cement floor, stacked high with unused junk. A pair of bare bulbs glowed yellow in the ceiling fixture, one considerably dimmer than the other. He spent a minute looking around under the broken window for his shoe without success, bewildered, quietly moving aside boxes of old clothes and toys. He searched the rest of the room for two or three minutes before giving up on it. He turned out the light and moved slowly up the stairs.
The kitchen was only marginally brighter than the basement. He pulled open the refrigerator door, holding on to the body of it with his right hand to steady himself and minimize the dull pop of the separating rubber door seal. He leaned down and found no beer or wine inside, just a large assortment of soft drinks, fruit juice, and milk, and he moved on.
The tree was a big one, standing in the far corner of the living room, with a good thirty brightly wrapped packages scattered beneath it. He knelt to examine them and found that he was unable to make out the writing on the tags in the dark. He crawled around to the back of the tree, found the end of the light cord, and plugged it into the wall. The multicolored lights cast a surprisingly bright, soft light on the room, and on the coffee table he saw a plate of partially eaten cookies and a half-empty glass of milk; at least he wouldn’t have to worry about Bonnie coming down to play Santa. On the mantel above the fireplace hung three filled Christmas stockings beneath a multitude of framed family photos, including one, surprisingly enough, of Vic. Charlie doubted very much that his own photo was to be found anywhere in Sarabeth’s house, unless Melissa had one hidden away somewhere. The names on the packages were clearly legible now, and he began sorting through them. The first package he found with Vic’s handwriting on the tag was a big box addressed
To: Nina. From: Daddy
. He dug at the ends of the Scotch tape with the ends of his fingernails, trying and failing not to tear the paper beneath in the process. When he peeled the wrapping paper from the top he saw the words
Little Baby ChewyFace
, and under those the recommendation that the toy was for children from four to eight. He pulled the top of the box open and inside it found Little Baby ChewyFace, some instructions, and nothing else. He remembered the doll well, having given one to Melissa two or three years earlier when it had been the hot item of the moment. When the child put baby food in its mouth the doll seemed to chew, particles of food actually dribbled out the sides of its mouth, and at some point the child’s mother had to clean the doll. It performed several other more or less disgusting and high-maintenance functions as well, and Melissa had seemed pleased enough with hers at the time. He replaced the doll in the box and repaired the wrapping as best he could, then set about looking for more of Vic’s packages. He’d found one marked
To: Danny. From: Dad
and was about to open it when it occurred to him that even Vic wouldn’t have left a present for one of his children that he’d have to take away before Christmas morning rolled around. The money would have to be in a box addressed to Bonnie.