The next evening when he came back from laboring in the rich man’s yard, he explained to me about his plans for the guy’s wife.
“She’s got this long black hair, all shiny, hangs down to her hips, swishes real gentle over the top of her ass when she walks. Paints her nails red like little spots of blood at the end of her fingers and toes. Talks with this accent, I don’t know what kind, but it’s sexy. And she’s hot for me, Professor. Christ, she’s all over me.”
Dinner that evening was fish, a big channel cat I’d managed to pull from the river with a chunk of moldy cheese as bait. I was frying it up in the pan I used for everything.
“If this woman is all you say she is, she could have any man she wants, Kid. What does she want with a bum?”
That offended him.
“I’m not like you, Professor. The booze don’t have me by the throat. One break and I’m outta here.”
“Dallying with a bored rich woman? How’s that going to change your luck?”
Kid peered up from watching the fish fry. “I got inside today, looked the place over. They got all this expensive crap lying around.”
“And you’re what, just going to waltz in and help yourself?”
His looked turned coy. “She let me inside today when her old man took off to get a bunch of bushes from the nursery. Asked if I wanted some cold lemonade. Starts talking kind of general, you know. Where I’m from, do I got family, that kind of thing. Then, get this, she tells me her husband’s not a man for her. No lighting in the rod, you know? I tell her that’s a damn shame, all her good looks going to waste. She says, ‘You think I’m pretty?’ I tell her she’s the prettiest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen. Then you know what, Professor? She invites me back tonight. Her old man’s going out of town and she’s all alone. Doesn’t want to be lonely. Know what I’m saying? When it’s dark, I’m heading over.”
“You’re spending the night?”
“Not the whole night. She don’t want me around in the morning for the neighbors to see sneaking off.”
“You sure you’re not on something?”
“Proof, Professor,” he said with a sly grin. “I got proof.”
From his pants pocket, he took a small ball of black fabric. He uncrumpled it and held it toward me with both hands, as if he were holding diamonds. “Her panties.”
Thong panties, barely enough material to cover a canary.
“She gave you those?”
“Reached up under her skirt and slipped ’em off where she stood. Said they’d tide me over until tonight.”
He went to his things and rolled the panties in his blanket.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“Naw. I’m going to the Y, slip inside and wash up. I want to smell good tonight. Don’t wait up for me, Dad,” he said with a grin, and he walked off whistling.
He didn’t come back that night. I figured he’d got what he wanted from the rich man’s wife and the rich man’s house and I’d seen the last of him. What did I care? People come into your life and they go. You can’t cry over them all.
So why did I feel so low the next day? All I wanted was to get drunk. Finally, I headed to the plasma center on University, let them siphon off a little precious bodily fluid, and I walked out with cash. I headed to the Gopher Bar for an afternoon of scintillating conversation with whoever happened to be around. It was a place where Kid and I had sometimes hung out together, and I hoped he might be there.
Laci was tending bar. A hard, unpretty woman with a quick mind. She sized me up as I sat on a stool. “Starting the wake, Professor?”
“You lost me,” I said.
She threw a bar towel over her shoulder and came my way. “I figured you were planning to tip a few to the memory of your buddy. Not that a piece of crap like him deserves it.”
“Kid? Piece of crap? What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
She turned, took a bottle of Old Grandad down from the shelf, and poured me a couple of fingers worth. “This one’s on the house.”
Then she told me about Kid. It was all over the news.
The night before, he’d been shot dead in the rich man’s house, but not before he beat the guy’s wife to death with a crowbar.
“Funny.” She shook her head. “I never figured him to be the violent kind. But anybody beats a woman to death deserves what he gets. Sorry, Professor, that’s how I see it.”
I swallowed the whiskey she’d poured, but instead of sticking around to get drunk, I walked back to the river.
That night I didn’t bother putting together a fire, just sat on the riverbank below the High Bridge, listening to the sound of occasional traffic far above, thinking about Kid. At one point I pulled out my notepad, intending to write. I don’t know what. Maybe a eulogy, something to mark his passing. Instead, I picked up a stick and scratched in the sand. A few minutes later a barge chugged past and the wake washed away what I’d written. I ended up crying a little, which almost never happens when I’m sober.
Two years ago I had a wife, a good job as a reporter with the
Star Tribune,
a house, a car. Then Deborah left me. She said it was the drinking, but it was me. I was never reliable. The drinking only made it worse. Not long after that I lost my job because I was happier sitting at the bar than at my desk trying to meet deadline. Everything pretty much went downhill from there. Somebody tells you they drink because they’re a failure, it ain’t so. They’re a failure because they drink. And they drink because it’s so damn hard not to. But as long as they have a bottle that isn’t empty, they never feel far from being happy.
That’s me anyway.
Near dawn, I stood up from the long night of grieving for Kid. I was hungry. I walked the empty streets of downtown St. Paul to Mickey’s Diner, got there just as the sun was coming up, ordered eggs, cakes, coffee. I picked up a morning paper lying on the stool next to me. Kid and what he’d done was still front-page news.
He had a name. Lester Greene. He had a record, spent time in St. Cloud for boosting cars. He had no permanent address. He was a bum. And he’d become a murderer.
The woman he’d killed was Christine Coyer, president and CEO of Coyer Cosmetics. Deborah used to ask for Coyer stuff every Christmas. All I remember about it was that it was expensive. According to the paper, she’d just returned from visiting family in New York City. Her husband had picked her up at the airport, brought her home, and while he parked the car in the garage, she’d gone into the house ahead of him. Apparently, she surprised Kid, who’d broken in with a crowbar, which he proceeded to use to crack her skull. He attacked her husband too, but the guy made it upstairs where he kept a pistol for protection. Kid followed and the rich man put four bullets into him in the bedroom. He was dead when the cops arrived. The husband knew the assailant. A bum on whom he had taken pity. A mistake he now regretted.
The story was continued on page 5A with pictures. I could tell already the whole thing smelled, but when I turned to the photos I nearly fell off my stool. There was the dead woman. She was fiftyish, nicely coiffed, but not with long black hair that brushed the top of her ass. She was a little on the chubby side, matronly even. Not at all the kind of figure a pair of thong panties would enhance.
If the article was correct, she’d been in the Big Apple when Kid had been given that delicate little sexual appetizer. So, if Christine Coyer didn’t give it to him, who did?
During my college days, my clothing came from the Salvation Army. I shopped there in protest against consumerism and conformity. I shop there now out of necessity. For ten bucks I picked up a passable gray suit, a nearly white shirt, and a tie that didn’t make me puke. I washed up in the men’s room of a Super America on 7th, changed into the suit, and hoofed it to the address on Summit Avenue given in the newspaper story.
Like a big park
, Kid had described the place. His perspective was limited. It was the fucking Tuileries Gardens, a huge expanse of tended flower beds and sculpted shrubbery with a château dead center. The cosmetics business had been very good to Ms. Coyer. And to her husband, no doubt. So good, in fact, one had to wonder why a man would do any of the dirty landscape work himself. Or hire someone like Kid to help.
I knocked on the door, a cold call, something I’d often done in my days as a journalist. I had my notepad and pen out, in case I needed to pretend to be a reporter.
A woman answered. “Yes?”
I told her I was looking for Christine Coyer’s husband.
“He’s not here,” she informed me. “Do you have an appointment?”
No, just hoping to get lucky, I told her.
“Would you like to leave a message?”
I didn’t. I thanked her and left.
I headed back to the river thinking the woman’s accent was French, but not heavily so. Quebec, maybe. Her black hair when let down would easily reach her ass. And that body in thong panties would be enough to drive any man to murder.
What to do?
I could go to the police. Would they believe me? If I produced the panties, they might be inclined to look more skeptically on the rich man’s story.
I could go to an old colleague. I still knew plenty of press people who’d take the story and dig.
But the influence of money should never be underestimated. Everybody’s integrity is for sale if the price is right. So I knew that turning the information and the panties over to anybody else was risky.
I realized I was probably the only shot Kid had at justice.
I sat by the river, smelling the mud churned up from the bottom, but also smelling the perfume of the black-haired woman as it had come to me on the cool air from inside the big house. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what she wore under her dress. I could understand completely why Kid had been so eager and disregarded the obvious dangers.
For a long time, I’d been telling myself I was happy with nothing. Give me a bedroll and a place to lay it, a decent meal now and then, and a few bucks for a bottle of booze, and what more did I need?
But the circumstances of Kid’s death suddenly opened the door on a dark, attractive possibility.
I thought about the lovely house and its gardens.
I thought about that fine, beautiful woman inside.
I thought about the deceased Christine Coyer and all the money she’d left behind.
I thought about all that I didn’t have, all that I’d fooled myself into believing I didn’t care about—a set of new clothes, a soft mattress, something as simple as a haircut, for God’s sake, nothing big really, but still out of my reach.
I was a starved man looking at the possibility of a feast. In the end the choice was easy. After all, what good did justice do the dead?
I got the telephone number from a friend still employed in the newspaper business. I kept calling until the rich man answered.
I identified myself—not with my real name—and told him I was a friend of Lester Greene.
He scraped together a showing of indignity. “I can’t imagine what we have to discuss.”
“A gift,” I told him. “One your wife gave to him. Only she wasn’t really your wife. She just pretended in order to lure Lester to your house to be murdered.”
“I’m hanging up,” he said. But he didn’t.
“Ask the woman with the long black hair,” I urged him. “Ask her about the gift she gave to Lester. Here’s a hint. It’s black and silky and small enough to be an eye patch for a pygmy. Ask your beautiful friend about it. I’ll call back in a while.”
I hung up without giving him a chance to respond.
When I called back, we didn’t bother with civilities.
“What do you want?”
Justice for Kid
is what I should have said. What came out of my mouth was, “One hundred grand.”
“And for one hundred thousand dollars, what do I get?”
He sounded like a man used to wheeling and dealing. According to the paper, he was a financial advisor. I advised him: “My silence.” I let that hang. “And the panties.”
“You could have got panties anywhere,” he countered.
“She’s beautiful, your mistress. Who is she, by the way? Your secretary?”
“Christine’s personal assistant. Not that it’s important.”
“But it is important that she’s not very bright. She took the panties off her body and gave them to Lester. A DNA analysis of the residual pubic hair would certainly verify that they’re hers. I’m sure the police would be more than willing to look at all the possibilities more closely. Do you want to take that chance?”
“Meet me at my house,” he suggested. “We’ll talk.”
“I don’t think so. Your last meeting there with Lester didn’t end well for him. We’ll meet on the High Bridge,” I said. “I get the money, you get her panties.”
“The panties I can verify. What about your silence?”
“I talk and I’m guilty of extortion. Jail doesn’t appeal to me any more than it does to you. The truth is, though, you have no choice but to trust me.”
“When?”
“Let’s make the exchange this evening just after sunset. Say, nine o’clock.”
I wasn’t sure he’d be able to get the money so quickly, but he didn’t object.
“How will we know each other?” he asked.
We’ll have no trouble, I thought. We’ll be the only cockroaches on the bridge.
The High Bridge is built at a downward angle connecting the bluffs of Cherokee Heights with the river flats below Summit Avenue. Although it was after dark, the sodium vapor lamps on the bridge made everything garishly bright. I waited on the high end. Coming from the other side of the river, the rich man would have to walk uphill to meet me. I found that appealing.
The lights of downtown St. Paul spread out below me. At the edge of all that glitter lay the Mississippi, curling like a long black snake into the night. The air coming over the bridge smelled of the river below, of silt and slow water and something else, it seemed to me.
Dreams
sounds hokey, but that’s what I was thinking. The river smelled of dreams. Dreams of getting back on track. Of putting my life together. Of new clothes, a good job, and, yeah, of putting the booze behind me. I didn’t know exactly how money was going to accomplish that last part, but it didn’t seem impossible.
The evening was warm and humid. Cars came across the bridge at irregular intervals. There wasn’t any foot traffic. I thought for a while that he’d decided I was bluffing and had blown me off. Which was a relief in a way. That meant I had to do the right thing, take the evidence to the cops, let them deal with it. Kid might yet get his justice.