Cold Rain (18 page)

I got back to town at dusk. I went directly to the house on Ninth Street where Denise Conway and Buddy Elder lived. A girl answered the door. She was over-weight but the right age and disposition to be one of Denise’s friends from work. Her kid came up behind her as we talked and stared at me curiously. ‘Denise Conway live here?’ I asked.

The girl shook her head. ‘Not no more.’

‘Actually, I was looking for Buddy Elder. You know where I can find him?’

‘He moved out too. They broke up.’

I tried to get some information from her, but she had been warned. She wanted my name. She wanted to know what my business was. I told her my name was Ralph W. Emerson. I wanted to talk to Buddy about some dead poets. She thought that was strange.

I had her write down my cell phone number and told her to tell Buddy to give me a call, if he had the guts.

I was almost back to Walt’s apartment when my phone trilled. ‘The W. stand for Waldo, does it, Ralph?’

Buddy asked.

‘Where are you living these days, Buddy?’

‘Denise and I broke up, thanks to you, Dave. I got a new place. Just trying to get my head together, start over. You know how it is, I expect.’

‘I’d like to come by and talk to you about a few things.’

Buddy gave me his address. I turned my truck around and went back into town. The lights were off in the house, and I was not sure Buddy actually lived there until I knocked at the door. From the darkened house I heard Buddy’s voice. ‘Door’s unlocked, Dave.’

I opened the door and looked into the darkness.

‘You hiding?’ I asked.

‘A long time ago a cop told me if I ever shot a man breaking into my house I better make sure he falls completely inside. Half-in and half-out isn’t good enough. You want to come on inside?’

‘Are you going to shoot me?’

Buddy laughed cheerfully. ‘If you come inside I am!’

He walked to the door. Barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, he held a nickel-plated .38 revolver. I was guessing it was the same gun he had pulled on me outside The Slipper. As before, he pointed it at me with keen pleasure.

‘Where were you last night, Buddy?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Someone killed our dogs.’

‘Your dogs? All of them?’ I didn’t answer. He shook his head, his eyes locking on mine without the pretence of sincerity. ‘That’s just a shame, Dave. A real shame.’

I pointed at his gun. ‘That’s not going to save you, Buddy. When you need it, you’re not going to have it.’

The street lit up from the lights of a car, and Buddy shifted his gaze from me for a second. ‘I don’t care what anybody says, the cops in this town are good!’

He stepped back into his living room and set his revolver under the cushion of the couch. I turned and walked off the step as the two policemen got out of their patrol car, their spotlight on me.

One of them told me to stop where I was and to put my hands on my head. He came toward me with his hand on his nightstick. His partner worked backup for him. When he got to me he asked me to step toward the house. I did. At his request, I placed my hands against the house and spread my legs. He patted me down, then let me stand up again. ‘I’d like for you to come back to the patrol car with me, sir.’

I did as he asked. His partner went inside and talked to Buddy. ‘You know the person in that house, do you, Mr Albo?’ my officer asked me after he had checked my identification.

‘Joe Elder. Buddy,’ I said. ‘He called me up a few minutes ago and told me to come over. I got here and he pulled a gun on me.’

‘That’s not quite how we heard it from our dispatcher.’

We batted it back and forth, our respective versions of the truth. By the time his partner returned from the house, I was fairly certain I would be going back to jail. The difference this time was my young friend had trapped himself with a lie. There would be a record of Buddy’s call to me. His flank exposed, I was going to make him pay for his games this time. My cop pointed at me and said, ‘He says he got a phone call, was invited over here to talk.’

The other cop nodded. ‘I got the same story, plus a little more. Your name is Dr Albo, right?’ I said it was.

‘You and Mr Elder are having problems?’

I knew enough about the law not to suggest that Buddy had poisoned my dogs. Statements to the police amounted to public record. A groundless accusation would open me up to charges of slander. For all I knew, that was Buddy’s plan.

‘I don’t like the guy,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure I’d say we have problems.’

‘He tells me you were accusing him of sleeping with your wife.’

I expect I smiled. I hadn’t seen that one coming.

‘
That
problem,’ I said.

‘I’m going to let you go with a warning this time, Dr Albo, but I’m also going to file a report on this incident. You come out here again, you’ll be explaining yourself to a judge the next morning. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Let me give you some free advice,’ the senior partner added with a sigh. He had a dozen years on me, a look of perpetual misery that could only come from too much domestic bliss. ‘You’re going through a divorce, am I right?’ I nodded. ‘I see this kind of thing a lot more than you’d believe. Decent, clean-cut woman, all of a sudden she goes for something like that.’ He pointed his thumb absently in the direction of Buddy Elder’s house. ‘Two reasons. First, it makes her feel young again. Maybe she’s not sure if she’s still desirable. She wants to find out. Second reason is she knows it’s going to hurt you.

‘Truth is mostly she wants to hurt you. Now when you come out to this fellow’s house and make threats, maybe even get yourself arrested, she’s going to know she won. You follow me?’ I nodded. I followed. ‘You seem like a bright enough guy, professor. You don’t want to step into that kind of game.’

Once I was in the truck again and had started away, I began laughing. The son of a bitch was good!

‘I SAID I WANT to think about it,’ Molly told me the following afternoon.

I paced nervously, my cell phone pressed to my ear.

‘You said you
never
wanted to sell the farm.’

‘We both said a lot of things, David. Look, I want to go down to Florida for a few weeks. Take a look at the situation. Doc says the housing market is getting stronger. I can flip a place in three-four months if I buy the right property.’

‘You’re quoting Doc on real estate, Molly. Listen to yourself.’

She laughed. ‘That’s why I need to go down there and take a look. You move back to the farm.’

‘And Lucy moves in with the Sloans until you decide what you want to do. I know. I just don’t know why you’re doing this.’

‘You’re the one who wanted to move back to the farm. So move back. Make Walt happy.’

‘I’ll break Walt’s heart. I didn’t tell you but we’ve zipped our sleeping bags together.’

‘That’s sweet.’

‘When are you going to take off?’

‘Tomorrow.’

I hated the sound of that word. It meant she had already arranged everything. ‘Am I going to see you again?’

Silence answered. When I didn’t break it, she told me, ‘Why don’t you come out tomorrow around four-thirty? Lucy will be here. The two of you can see me off.’

MOLLY HAD THE CAP ON THE BACK of her truck, a few tools packed away in a trunk we had used over the years to keep the horse gear, and a couple of suit-cases. She was travelling light, but not so light she couldn’t stay for the winter if she decided to.

The weather was cold, the sky overcast. A brutal wind swept in from the north.

‘People are crazy to live in this weather,’ Molly announced happily. ‘I called Olga this morning. It’s eighty degrees today, blue skies, and just a light breeze.’

‘I’ll join you, if you want,’ I said. ‘Nothing holding me here.’

‘You hear something from school?’

I shook my head, sorry I had broached the subject.

‘It’s not going to be good when I do.’

‘I don’t get it. Randy Winston’s been screwing around with students since he got here, and everybody knows it.’

‘And Walt can’t open his mouth without offending someone. What don’t you get?’

‘Why you?’

‘I refused to take my lawyer’s advice.’

Molly looked out at the pasture. She shook her head and smiled, recalling our earlier conversation. ‘Every time I start thinking that maybe you’re telling the truth, I remember: this guy made a living by lying.’

‘I never lied on the car lot. I told you that. That was the deal with Tubs.’

‘It makes a good story, David. But I don’t believe it for a minute. You can’t help yourself. You open your mouth and a lie pops out. I think you’re lying about Tubs, like everything else!’

‘How many times have I lied to you, Molly? I mean about something important.’

‘That’s the point! I don’t know. Last summer, you went into town for a couple of hours, you came back with whatever you went for and had a little smile on your face! Did you sleep with Denise? I don’t know!

How many times did you lie about her? I have no way of knowing. You won’t even admit it!’

We heard Lucy’s Toyota come off the pavement and climb the hill. A moment later she pulled her vehicle into the circle behind Molly’s truck.

‘You taking off?’ she called.

‘Not without a hug.’

They hugged. They talked about Lucy flying down for the week of Thanksgiving. Lucy had cleared it at school, pulling the divorce trump card to get them to give her the extra three days.

Molly said there was some good in it after all. Lucy glanced at me to see how I was handling the joke. I just smiled. I was thinking about an axe in Buddy Elder’s skull, though I was more inclined to give him something along the lines of what he had fed Hawthorne & Co. I had heard that Liquid Plumber was an especially slow and unpleasant way to go, but naturally for an occasion like Buddy’s imminent demise I would want to do my research. That’s what Ph.D.s do.

‘You’re going to be all right?’ Molly asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The minute you drive away from here half of my reason for living just disappears.’

‘Don’t do this to me.’

‘You asked.’

She walked away, hugged Lucy one last time, and then to my surprise came back to me and threw her arms over my shoulders. ‘You broke my heart, you bastard,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll never forgive you for that.’

A moment later her truck started up and she drove away.

With Lucy’s help I moved back into the house. The whole process took about ten minutes. I offered to fix her dinner, but Lucy said she’d told the Sloans she would have dinner with them.

‘I’m going to have a talk with Mom when I go down for Thanksgiving, Dave. About the grass, I mean.’

‘Sounds like you’ve got your mother figured out.’

With entirely innocent eyes she asked, ‘What do you mean?

‘Molly isn’t going to want to let Olga know the two of you are having problems. Absolute best place to confess is with Olga in the next room. Your mother will just smile and say that’s wonderful, Lucy! I hope you’re only smoking good dope. Bad grass can be so irritating to your little throat.’

Lucy laughed. ‘You think?’

As she was getting in her Toyota I said to her back,

‘You going to tell her about the boyfriend?’

Lucy froze. It was a just a second, and then she turned. ‘Nothing to tell. Not yet anyway.’

‘The weekend’s coming up. You never know.’

‘That’s right, Dave. You never know.’

‘Be smart, Lucy. You want to get serious, fine, it’s your choice, but don’t assume a guy has been as careful about things as you would be. Some of these guys drink first and think later. Even
they
don’t know where they’ve put it.’

I sounded like Tubs and I hated myself. At least I hadn’t mentioned genitalia turning into vegetable matter.

‘Talking from experience, are we?’

‘Say hi to your grandparents for me, kid.’

AFTER I FED THE HORSES and fixed my dinner, I settled into the guest bedroom across from the room Molly and I had shared. Then I went up to look at the work Molly had done on Lucy’s apartment. The bathroom and kitchen appliances were in. She had the tile for the floor still in the boxes. I wasn’t doing anything else, so I started tiling the kitchen floor.

Around midnight I had a good start and went downstairs. As long as I was working, everything was fine.

Once I stopped the place felt enormous and empty.

Not really frightening. Fear comes from the unknown.

I knew who had killed the dogs, and a part of me yearned for him to show up and take his best shot.

No, it wasn’t frightening. Just empty and lonely and far too grand for a man on his own.

I spent a couple hours the next morning in my office.

The latest short story I had been working on was in trouble. At least it had gone stale on me. I could not find the excitement I had felt at the beginning. On the first page a woman had gone off to meditate in silence at a Buddhist monastery for six weeks. Coming home refreshed and revitalized, she discovered her husband was living with another woman. The thing had seemed so rich at the beginning, so full of possibilities, but I had lost the momentum. I no longer had the distance and confidence I needed to write about love and relationships. My sense of humour had died.

I had eight weeks of paid leave, I told myself. I knew writers who could crank out a novel in that time, and I knew others who could produce a chapter and a full outline. For me a short story would be about right.

The trouble was I could think of nothing but Buddy Elder, plot nothing but his murder. Pleasant as the fantasy was in the abstract, I did not dare think in practical terms about it. My greatest fear was that I would come up with something that might work.

So I went upstairs and threw myself into laying tile.

In January my life at the university would resume or it would end and I would begin something else. If it came to starting over, I would probably get another teaching position.
Jinx
would get me something. I wasn’t ready to learn another profession. The very idea of it at this late stage made me want to kill myself. I looked around my office and saw my shotguns in the gun case, a twelve-gauge and a four-ten. Definitely the twelve-gauge. Because if you’re going to do a job, do it right.