PART TWO
12
H
e headed north out of town with no particular destination in mind and tried without success to imagine some explanation for Vic’s absence that didn’t imply catastrophe. Five miles outside the city limits he pulled over impulsively at a darkened Skelly station and parked next to a pay phone. He didn’t know Renata’s home number, so on a hunch he tried the Sweet Cage. The other end picked up after ten rings.
“Sweet Cage.”
“Renata? It’s Charlie.”
“You’re in a hell of a lot of trouble, Charlie, you know that? Roy Gelles was in a little after you were. He wanted to know if you’d been around.”
“Oh.”
She snorted. “ ‘Oh’?”
“Can I come over?”
She was silent for a moment. “Park your car around the block.”
“I’m not driving my own car.”
“I don’t give a shit whose car it is, we’re closed and I don’t want any cars in the lot. Park it around the block. Where are you now?”
“Out in the county. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Again he felt his groin warming. “You haven’t heard from Vic tonight, have you?”
“No. Roy was looking for him, too.”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“If Roy came to town on Christmas Eve, it’s something.”
“I guess it probably is.”
He got back into the car and onto the county road heading back into town. Deacon must have gone to the bank that afternoon to make a last-minute deposit to one of the operating accounts, found it emptied, and called Bill Gerard. It would have taken Roy Gelles two and a half or three hours to drive down, so he’d likely been in town for hours, and he knew as well as anybody where to find Charlie or Vic on any given night. Maybe he had already found Vic. If he hadn’t crossed paths with Charlie yet it had been blind luck on Charlie’s part.
West of downtown he drove alongside the river, the sky bright orange again, the snow coming down big and slow. He imagined taking Spencer and Melissa sledding on the sloping bank of the river, the way his father had taken him and his brothers and sisters when he was a boy, and he told himself that if he weren’t leaving he’d do just that, though it had been more than a year since the last time he’d taken the kids on any kind of outing. He wished he could call his brother Dale and say good-bye. Dale had a small farm just outside Shattuck, and Charlie hadn’t talked to him in a year, either. Apart from the occasional conversation with Dale, his oldest sister’s annual Christmas letter was his only regular contact with the rest of the family, and he realized that he hadn’t received one this year. He couldn’t remember if he had last year, either.
In the mirror he noticed a sedan a quarter of a mile back, pacing him along the curve of the river. He stiffened and tried to remember what Roy drove. He became so intent on the car in the rearview mirror that he drove straight into the empty oncoming lane, at which point a bar of red and blue lights atop the sedan began flashing. He panicked, hit the brake, and slid smoothly all the way over to the curb, the cruiser picking up speed and pulling up close behind him with a brief whoop of its siren.
He got out his driver’s license and grabbed for a clear plastic dispenser of breath mints he’d seen in the glove compartment. He shook the container and rattled a number of the tiny white mints into his mouth, crunching them down as quickly as he could. The cop walking toward him stepped over the curb and onto the snowy bank. Charlie swallowed the last of the jagged shards of mint, rolled down the window, and extended his license.
“I realize I’m facing the wrong direction, Officer. I slid.”
“I’ll need to see your registration also.”
“Okay, but it’s not really my car; it’s my sister-in-law’s.”
“Have you been drinking this evening, sir?”
“Just a couple glasses of wine at my in-laws’ house . . . hold on, it’s in here somewhere.” He fumbled blindly through Betsy’s glove compartment, looking for the registration. A Kleenex box, a set of keys, a kid’s report card, and apparently no registration, without which he was screwed.
But the cop was already handing him back his license. “I didn’t know it was you, Mr. Arglist. You want to be real careful on this. Underneath the snow it’s a solid sheet of ice.” He was polite but decidedly cool. Charlie didn’t know him, but obviously he was one of theirs, which was good because this one looked like he would have dearly loved to haul his ass down to the drunk tank.
“Thanks. I should probably be getting home.”
“That’s an excellent idea.” It came out as a command rather than as an actual affirmation of the idea’s excellence.
“Merry Christmas,” Charlie said as he rolled the window back up. The cop strolled back to his cruiser without acknowledging the remark.
He parked on a residential street around the corner from the Sweet Cage and walked toward the parking lot. It was so quiet he could hear the bare twigs above his head rustling against one another in the light wind. The lot seemed oddly brighter now with the floodlights off, and the opaque sky cast a pale glow onto the snow like ersatz daylight. Black spatters of blood were still visible against the gray of the snow where Sidney had brought Stroke’s musical career to an end, and there was not a single car in the lot. He walked up to the front door, tried the handle, and found it locked. He gave the door a good solid rap with his knuckle and waited. After a minute he knocked again, louder this time. He moved around to the side door, closer to Renata’s office, and knocked again.
“Renata?” There was no response.
He walked to a pay phone on the street corner and dialed the number. He hung up after the twentieth ring.
The county road leading out to the Tease-O-Rama was slicker than before, and a stiff wind had come up, blowing sparkling clouds of old snow across it. Charlie was no longer completely confident of his ability to keep the unfamiliar car on the road, but he was close enough now to the Tease-O-Rama to walk if he cracked up. He was having some trouble judging his position exactly until he saw the partially darkened go-go girl glowing against the sky. The fact that the sign was still on at this hour bothered him less than the three sheriff’s vehicles grouped together in the parking lot, and his first instinct was to pull off onto the shoulder, turn around, and drive away as fast as possible. He was already easing up on the gas when it occurred to him that the presence of the sheriff’s officers might have something to do with whatever had happened to Vic.
He parked the Mercedes at the far end of the lot and crossed it to the cinderblock windbreak, where a young sheriff’s officer in mirror shades stood scowling at him.
“Club’s closed for the evening. Better get along home now, sir.”
“I represent the owners.” The surly contempt on the officer’s face ticked up a notch, and Charlie suppressed the urge to make a comment about people who wore shades at night.
“You Cavanaugh?”
“Charles Arglist. I work with Cavanaugh.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you need to get in there and speak to my commander, mister, because you had some major difficulties in there this morning.”
The officer waved him through and Charlie walked around the wind block and yanked the door open.
Dennis glared at him as he shut the door behind him. “I quit.” His right eye was swollen shut and he held a bloody bar rag against a gash on his left cheek. An officer standing next to him, studiously writing something in a small spiral notebook, looked Charlie up and down.
“Who’s this? Cavanaugh?”
“Charlie Arglist. He’s Cavanaugh’s errand boy. This is all his fault.” Dennis swept his arm in an arc around the club. Chairs lay smashed on the stages, the floor was covered with shattered glasses and bottles, and three more officers stood taking statements from a half dozen patrons, several of whom looked worse off than Dennis.
“You seen Vic tonight, Dennis?”
“Who cares? Look at this fucking place.”
“Did you see him?”
“No.”
“All right, now. This interview’s not over yet.” The officer turned from Dennis to Charlie. “You, sir, are going to get your turn in just a minute.”
“My turn for what?”
“Your turn to speak your piece. Now sit down and be quiet.”
Charlie looked around and didn’t see anyplace to sit. “I don’t have anything to say. I wasn’t here.”
“Do you understand what sit down and be quiet means, sir? If so you’d better do it. Otherwise I’ll have to place you under arrest with those gentlemen over there.”
He gestured with his notebook toward the unhappy group leaning against the wall opposite. Three of them were handcuffed, one of them weeping remorsefully as an officer patiently took his statement.
The first officer had turned his attention back to Dennis. “So the first bottles started getting thrown. What did you do?”
Dennis looked from side to side. “Uh, that was when I took it upon myself to fire the twelve-gauge.” He pointed at the ceiling, where one of the acoustic panels was gone altogether. Next to it dangled the pathetically shredded remnants of two more.
“Usually that quiets things down real quick,” the offi-cer said.
“Didn’t this time.”
Half the bottles behind the bar had been smashed, along with a considerable percentage of the glasses. On the bar itself was a sizable pool of sticky blood.
Charlie looked over the officers and saw no one he recognized. He didn’t think they’d let him leave without good reason, but Vic wasn’t here and he had to go find him. There wouldn’t be much point in trying to explain that none of this was his problem anymore.
“Can I wait outside?” he asked.
The officer looked up sharply from his note taking, thought about it, and nodded. Charlie walked out the door and past the wall and the first officer. “They didn’t need me after all,” he said in passing. The officer’s upper lip curled a little further, but he said nothing.
Seated at the wheel of one of the sheriff’s cruisers was a sixth officer, filling out a form of some kind, and as Charlie passed it an evilly distorted face lunged cackling at the window from the darkness of the backseat, slathered with dried blood and leering at him. It was Culligan. He seemed to be missing a front tooth, and the officer barked an unintelligible command into the backseat at him. Culligan settled down and obediently leaned back into the shadows. Charlie got back into Betsy van Heuten’s Mercedes and left.
Driving away he tuned in to the C&W station to see if there was any mention of the brawl, but the police reporter was long off the air and the news report, when it finally came, consisted of a disc jockey reading national news straight off the wire in a weary monotone. As he passed the city limit he turned to the easy-listening station, where a disc jockey who sounded like he’d been knocking them back for a while ruminated on the meaning of the holiday. This whole goddamn thing was Dennis’s fault, anyway. He never should have taken the dancers’ stage rentals back.
He wasn’t far from Dora’s place, and on impulse he made a wide U-turn in the middle of the street and headed toward it. She lived with a roommate in the eastern half of a two-story duplex four blocks away from the hospital. He parked in front of the house and climbed the steps onto the front porch.
The living room was dark, but in the bluish light from the street lamp coming through the living room window he made out a small, raggedly decorated Christmas tree with a few presents scattered around it. He pressed his cheek against the cold glass of the front door and held it there for a minute, uncertain whether to press the doorbell. He stepped back and leaned against the edge of the railing, trying to think of what he’d say when she came down.
Maybe she wasn’t home. He stepped carefully down the snowy steps and walked up the short gravel driveway to the garage. Standing on his toes he looked in and saw two cars, one of them Dora’s old yellow Beetle. He went back to the door and stood there for a few seconds, finger poised an inch from the button. Finally he pressed it. It was three-thirty Christmas morning, and he had no idea what he’d say when she came down.
A light came on upstairs and he thought about running away. He dug around in his pant pocket for a comb and didn’t find one, so he ran his hands through his hair, sticking them quickly into his coat pockets when he saw her slippered feet appear at the bottom of the stairs. She had on a robe, and she crossed the living room without turning on the light. The porch light came on, and he squinted, his hand shading his eyes, trying to get a look at her face. The door opened. It wasn’t Dora.
“Charlie?” It was Lori, the roommate. Her face was puffy and red.
“Sorry. Did I wake you up?”
“No, my shift just ended an hour ago. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”
He forced an insincere grin. “Waiting for Santa, right?”
“What’s up, Charlie?” She wasn’t smiling, but she stood aside and motioned him into the living room.
Lori shut the door and switched on a floor lamp. The room was bitterly cold, even stepping in from outdoors.
“I came by to see Dora. Is she asleep?”
“She doesn’t live here anymore.”
“I just saw her car in the garage.”
“I bought it from her. I have a new roommate now, from Lithuania. Come on into the dining room; I’ll put the space heater on.” She shuffled toward the back of the house in fuzzy pink slippers, beckoning.
“Where’d she move to?”
“Texas, a couple of months ago. Fort Worth.” She knelt before a small, cheap space heater and clicked it on, turning the dial all the way to the top, and then she shut the dining room door behind them.
“She didn’t tell me.”
“You stopped calling her, Charlie.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. You want something hot to drink?”
“I could use a drink, now that you mention it.”
“All I got is coffee. I quit drinking.”
“Oh. Yeah, that’d be fine, if you’re having some anyway.”
Without a reply she went into the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind her. Charlie sat down at the round, bare table, and as the space heater’s coils slowly shifted from gray to orange he took inventory of the tiny, sadly familiar dining room. On the shelf were two oversize coffee-table art books he’d given Dora, and last year’s Christmas gift to her—a framed pastel-toned poster of an Indian woman sitting on a blanket mashing corn—was still hanging on the wall. He’d bought it a year ago tonight, in fact, at a joyless little gift shop downtown that had gone out of business shortly afterward. Christmas morning Dora had given him the impression that she was crazy about it.