Curtains (15 page)

What stuck in Richard’s throat was Ted’s ridiculous
belief that he was as successful as Bill Gates. Other people’s
successes were his successes. He put himself on the same level,
never once acknowledging that he lived in near poverty, and he
still had the audacity to consider himself better than Richard.

Just sitting there, Richard’s blood pressure
skyrocketed. Ted made him sick. He felt sorry for Eleanor for
having to be married to that, especially since he was going to kill
her too. But she was just as guilty. She condoned every one of
Ted’s harebrained schemes. She never said, “Ted, you’re a grown
man. Act like it.” If she had, maybe her name wouldn’t be on the
death warrant.

He’d gone there to study their movements, understand
their habits, in the hope of seeing a chink in their defenses. But
he knew them already. There was nothing to learn.

Instead, Ted and Eleanor were feeding his hatred for
them. He despised their squandered lives and the way they were
attempting to squander his and Michelle’s. He hated having to be
the grown up on this one.

A speeding truck from the water plant roused Richard
from his angry thoughts. The dashboard clock said it was after
three. He’d been parked there for five hours. It was time to do
what had to be done. He gunned the engine.

***

A week had passed since he spent the day watching
Ted and Eleanor’s home, but tonight was the night he was going to
do it. It was all planned, and he couldn’t afford to waste any more
time. The house buying pretense wasn’t going to last much longer.
The mortgage broker had a bank ready and waiting and house viewings
with the realtor were a nightly affair. He’d turned down two
excellent investment properties already. If he didn’t act now, he’d
end up in the financial hole he was trying to avoid.

Tonight was a night off from house hunting and that
was his alibi. Richard was a minority in that he loved soccer.
There was a night game in San Jose and he would be going alone. The
drive to San Jose would take him past Ted and Eleanor’s. He would
kill them, go on to the game and return home to the shocking news.
He would miss the first half, but that wouldn’t matter. The game
was being broadcast on the radio. He took his ticket from his
breast pocket and popped his “get out of jail free” card in the
glove box. He turned up the radio, listened to the game and peeled
off the freeway off-ramp to Ted and Eleanor’s.

Richard concealed his Honda in the
park’s overflow parking lot and joined the trail. It was dusk and
essentially the park was closed, but it was unsupervised. Ted and
Eleanor walked the trail every night to reflect on another great
day in paradise. This was their main form of entertainment because
it was free and their
supposed love of
nature could camouflage that. Richard hid himself in an avenue of
trees a quarter mile from the parking lot. He slipped into
coveralls, snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and pocketed a
knife.

Waiting was hell. He kept swallowing, working his
tongue over the roof of his mouth, and wiping his gloved hands on
his coveralls. Paranoia seeped in. Maybe he’d screwed up and given
himself away. With every passing second, he expected his in-laws to
round the bend and the police to swoop in. He knew it was stupid.
He was letting idiotic guilt take over, but he couldn’t stop
it.

But fear, paranoia and guilt evaporated in a second
when Richard heard Ted and Eleanor approaching. Ted’s inane banter
cut through the night and Richard’s hand tightened around the
knife. He couldn’t make out what was being said. It was all noise.
But it didn’t matter. He would pounce the moment they were level
with his position.

They were laughing when Richard leapt out of the
trees. Laughing at their good fortune at his expense, no doubt.
Well, the laughing was over.

They gasped when he growled something and they
spotted the knife glinting in the moonlight. How he wished their
faces hadn’t been lost in the dark.

“You’ve been taking advantage of me for too long.”
Richard didn’t wait for a plea for clemency. He plunged the knife
into Ted’s bloated belly, swollen from sponging off others. Blood
spilled over Richard’s gloved hand and he pressed the blade
deeper.

Ted crumpled, sliding off the blade. Eleanor
screamed. In reflex, Richard lashed out with the knife, catching
Eleanor’s throat. She went down without another sound.

Richard rummaged through Ted’s pockets for his
wallet. Their deaths couldn’t look motiveless. They had too look
like a violent robbery carried out by a desperate junkie. Senseless
tragedies like this happened every day. He jerked out Ted’s wallet
from the back pocket of his pants. Ted groaned and Eleanor
gurgled.

Richard raced back to his Honda with the wallet and
Eleanor’s rings. He dumped them with the knife into a Ziploc he’d
brought with him and stuffed his coveralls and rubber gloves into a
trash bag. Peeling out of the parking lot, he headed for San
Jose.

At a gas station outside San Jose, Richard filled up
and dumped the trash bag in a nearby dumpster. Five miles from the
gas station, he tossed the knife out the window and down a freeway
embankment. Parking outside Spartan Stadium, he still had the
wallet to get rid off. The rings and the wallet’s contents he would
keep for now and dispose of down a storm drain on the way home. He
opened up Ted’s wallet and tugged out his cash, credit cards and
driver’s license.

On the drive to the game, he’d been on a high,
delirious to be rid of his burden, but not anymore. The driver’s
license pictured a man who wasn’t his father-in-law. Just to
reinforce the calamity, the credit cards didn’t have Ted’s name on
them, but instead, the name Thomas Fairfax. The rings he held in
his palm weren’t Eleanor’s. He’d killed the wrong people.

“Oh God,” he murmured.

Richard stumbled into the stadium on uncertain legs,
water gurgled in his ears and he couldn’t breathe. He dropped
Fairfax’s empty wallet into a nearby trashcan. He handed his ticket
to the yellow-jacketed ticket taker. He climbed the steep steps to
his seat, not taking the free program offered.

Goals flew into the back of the net one after
another. The San Jose Earthquakes were having a landmark game, but
Richard couldn’t raise a smile. The murders of two strangers
weighed heavily on him, but that wasn’t what was worrying him. Ted
and Eleanor were still alive. That meant he had it all to do
again.

The fifth goal went in and the crowd leapt to their
feet. A man noticed Richard was the only one who wasn’t cheering.
“LA can’t win them all, buddy.”

Richard said nothing and the man dismissed him with
a wave of his hand.

The game ended and Richard trudged back to his
Honda. He’d left the car on a residential street and trash and
recycle cans for the following morning’s pick up blocked it in. He
dumped the Fairfax’s belongings in a can.

Driving home, he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t
use the same MO to kill Ted and Eleanor now. It was so perfect, but
his bungled murders would lead to better security at the park. He
couldn’t afford to be hasty, but time was against him. Ted and
Eleanor would be evicted in less than a week.

How could he have been so wrong? It had sounded like
them. It had looked like them. How did he kill the wrong
people?

Richard’s question went unanswered. The
eighteen-wheeler changed the subject. The semi’s blowout rendered
the rig helpless and the trailer section plowed into the Honda’s
passenger side. From the frenetic action inside the cab, the truck
driver was doing a valiant job, but he lost the good fight. The
eighteen-wheeler smeared Richard’s car across the freeway and drove
it into the median.

***

Richard awakened in a hospital bed. Molasses-thick
memories trickled back into his consciousness. Progress was slow.
He tried to move but he only managed to move his head.

Suddenly with the intensity of a thunderbolt, he
remembered and began to cry. The accident had left him a
quadriplegic, but he wasn’t crying because he was incapacitated for
life. He was remembering what Michelle had said to him the day
after the accident.

“We’ve all decided,” she said. Standing on either
side of her, Ted and Eleanor nodded and smiled. “There’s no point
in buying a second home, Mom and Dad can live with us. They will
look after you while I’m at work. Just think, honey, we can all be
one big happy family. It’s the safest solution too. Did you know
there were two murders near their home last night?”

###

SEWING CIRCLE

“The only Jew in town,” Morris said as Laney
pulled into the church parking lot.

He pointed to the stained-glass window cut
into the middle of the belfry. It looked expensive, more than a
little country church could afford. Jesus smiled down from the
window, arms spread in welcome and acceptance.

“The story’s about the sewing circle, not the
church,” Laney said.

“Jesus as a ragpicker. Was that in the
Bible?”

“You’re too cynical.”

“No, I’m just a frustrated idealist.”

Morris rubbed his stomach. He’d gone soft
from years at a desk, his only exercise the occasional outdoor
feature story, usually involving a free meal. He’d given up the
crime beat, preferring to do the “little old lady in the holler”
stuff, the cute little profile features that offended no one.
Still, the fucking quilt beat was the bottom rung on the ladder
he’d started climbing back down a decade ago.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Laney said. She was
the staff photographer, and true to her trade, she managed to keep
a perspective on things. Cautious yet upbeat, biding time, knowing
her escape hatch was waiting down the road. For Morris, there was
no escape hatch. The booby hatch, maybe.

“‘Fun’ is the Little League All-Stars, a
Lion’s Club banquet where they give out a check the size of Texas,
a quadriplegic doing a power wheelchair charity run from the
mountains to the coast. But this”—he flipped his notebook toward
the little Primitive Baptist church, its walls as white as pride in
the morning sun—”Even my Grandma would yawn over a sewing circle
story.”

“You can juice it up,” Laney said as she
parked. She always drove because she had two kids and needed the
mileage reimbursement. All Morris had was a cat who liked to shit
in the bathtub.

“That’s what I do,” he said. “A snappy lead
and some filler, then cash my checks.”

Though the checks were nothing to write home
about. He’d written home about the first one, way back when he was
fresh out of journalism school. Mom had responded that it was very
nice and all but when was he getting a real job? Dad had no doubt
muttered into his gin and turned up the sound to “Gunsmoke.” They
didn’t understand that reporting was just a stepping stone to his
real career, that of bestselling novelist and screenwriter for the
stars.

They headed into the church alcove, Laney
fidgeting with her lenses. Morris had called ahead to set up the
appointment. He’d talked briefly to Faith Gordon, who apparently
organized the group though she wasn’t a seamstress herself. The
sewing circle met every Thursday morning, rain, shine, flood, or
funeral. Threads of Hope, the group called itself. Apparently it
was a chapter of a national organization, and Morris figured he’d
browse the Web later to snip a few easy column inches of back
story.

The alcove held a couple of collection boxes
for rags. Scrawled in black marker on cardboard were the words:
“Give your stuff.” Morris wondered if that same message was etched
into the bottoms of the collection plates that were passed around
on Sundays. Give your stuff to God, for hope, for salvation, for
the needles of the little old ladies in the meeting room.

“Hello here,” came a voice from the darkened
hallway. A wizened man emerged into the alcove, hunched over a push
broom, his jaw crooked. He leaned against the broom handle and
twisted his mouth as if chewing rocks.

“We’re from the Journal-Times,” Morris said.
“We came about the sewing circle.”

One of the man’s eyes narrowed as he looked
over Laney’s figure. He chewed faster. “‘M’on back,” he said,
waving the broom handle to the rear of the church. He let the two
of them go first, no doubt to sweep up their tracks as he watched
Laney’s ever-popular rear.

The voices spilled from the small room, three
or four conversations going at once. Morris let Laney make the
entrance. She had a way of setting people at ease, while Morris
usually set them on edge. His style was fine on the local
government beat, when you wanted to keep the politicians a little
paranoid, but it didn’t play well among the common folk in the
Appalachian mountain community of Cross Valley.

“Hi, we’re with the paper,” Laney said. “We
talked to Faith Gordon about the circle, and she invited us to come
out and do a story.”

Five women were gathered around a table, in
the midst of various stitches, with yarn, cloth scraps, spools of
different-colored threads, and darning needles spread out in front
of them.

“You ain’t gonna take my picture, are you?”
one of them asked, clearly begging to be in the paper. That would
probably make her day, Morris thought. The only other way she’d
ever make the paper was when her obituary ran. She was probably
sixty, but had the look of one who would live to be a hundred. One
who knew all about life’s troubles, because she’d heard about them
from neighbors.

“Only if you want,” Laney said. “But a
picture makes the story better.”

“We just thought the community would be
interested in the fine work you ladies are doing,” Morris said.
That wasn’t so bad, even if the false cheer burned his throat like
acid reflux.

“If Faith said it was okay, that’s good
enough for us,” said a second woman. She was in her seventies,
wrinkled around the eyes, the veins on her hands thick and purple,
though her fingers were as strong as a crow’s claws. “I’m
Alma.”