The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel (12 page)

“Growing up in our shadow.”

“Right.”

“She’s sixteen.”

He couldn’t settle on any single expression. He looked baffled, bemused, embarrassed. He didn’t fully get it. Probably not his fault. His eyes were bright and a little brash.

She might be only the host of this moronic show, but it could only lead to worse things. I could spot the escalation in criminal acts just watching the highlights. If it was an act it would turn real soon. If it was real, it might become dangerous soon. People were bound to eventually get hurt. Lots of home owners kept guns around. A warning shot gone wrong might lead to big-time investigations, the feds, RICO.

“How’d you learn about this?” I asked.

“This is what I do. Part of what I do. I surf the Web finding the viral vids. Most of them are kittens playing piano and shit like that, but I find the darker stuff too. The crime stuff, the horror stuff. That’s what I’m drawn to.”

“John, how did you know this was my sister? Her name is never mentioned. You can hardly see her face. You don’t know her at all. Why did you make the connection?”

“That’s obvious,” he said.

“Not to me.”

“Well … because of the graveyard, ah …”

“Ah?”

“The graveyard … desecration.” I stared at him.

I kept staring at him. “The what?”

“I didn’t want to show you that vid, Terrier. That one, it’">“No, you didn’t.”tps not fake.”

“Okay,” I said. “Show me now.”

He held up his hands like I was a cop about to bust him. “Look, I thought you knew about all of this. I don’t want to be the one who—”

“It’s okay.”

I gave the charmer’s grin right back to him. I knew I was doing it right because I felt like I was the shill and he was my mark. I was the guy he could trust. I was the buddy. I was the inside man. I could talk him out of five grand or I could have him show me the video of a graveyard defilement.

He clicked through a few Web pages and got to one that made him nervous. “You might not like this.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. Hey, John, you think you could go grab me a cup of coffee, man? I’m getting thirsty.”

“Sure, no problem.”

He left the room and I punched the button.

Teenagers always got a little weird and wired around cemeteries. They made out on top of graves, they played tag among the tombstones. It was a place to get drunk and laid and cause insubstantial trouble without anybody around to complain. They toyed with stupid ceremonial rites of witchcraft. They painted swastikas and pentagrams just for the hell of it. The more famous the corpse, the more
midnight visitors showed up to get a look. Adolescents went nuts for local legends.

The summer we turned fifteen Chub and I went looking for the crime scene where a teenage drug dealer from Oyster Bay called the Speed King had tortured and murdered his best friend in front of a group of onlookers. Over some minor infraction having to do with stolen amphetamines, the Speed King beat the kid, stabbed him, cut out his eyes, and eventually tossed gasoline on him and burned him to death. They left the mutilated corpse there and for more than a week the Speed King held tours and invited fellow classmates to come see what he’d done. Eventually word got out to the cops and the Speed King was arrested. Three days later he hanged himself in lockup. We found the spot where the murder occurred and drank a stolen pint of vodka toasting the dead or the living or our own impending adulthood.

The Rogues, all three of them, carried high-powered flashlights through the cemetery. They’d waited for a full moon to shoot this segment of the show. I did the math. They’d been out there either two weeks ago or six. I didn’t think Collie’s headstone would’ve been ready six weeks ago, so I decided this is what Dale and her pals had been up to the middle of last month. While I had been watching Chub’s garage, my sister had been out doing this. I should’ve been aware.

The digital audio recorder was extremely sharp. Dale did her bit as a news correspondent. She laid it all out without any feeling at all. Not a hitch in her throant down? She n

I opened the door and John stepped in, holding
a sugar bowl with a small spoon in it.

His smile was a little nervous and a little stupid. It was a happy smile. He was happy that I was there. I went deep into his face. I shoved my will into his mind. I was good at reading people but I’d made some bad mistakes in my time. I couldn’t afford another one. I looked at the man and I tried to know his heart and intent. I should be sensitive to schemers and killers by now, but in this case, I realized I might have been wrong. I’d wanted to hate him because he reminded me of Collie.

He said, “You okay, Terry?”

“Do me a favor and don’t mention this to my parents,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said, “sure. No problem at all.”

“And for Christ’s sake forget about filming anything with Dale.”

“But—”

“Just forget it, John.”

He tried to hand me the sugar bowl but I didn’t take it. He set it on the cutting table beside the untouched cup of coffee and started flipping switches on some of his machinery. The faces of film noir villains glared at me from all angles. John plugged a mike into his computer and held it out to me, then sat back the only one I had leftndor like a talk show host. “You wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, though, would you?”

He might’ve been running a game down on me, but I didn’t know what the rules were. I smiled again. “Perhaps another time, cousin John.”

“Oh, right, Terry, yeah, that would be great.” He grinned. He had printed out sheets of notes all over his desk. I saw my sister’s face several
times. The wild makeup made her appear even more like a harlequin. I looked into his dim, happy eyes and wondered again if he was trying to grift me. He seemed eager to help me. He wanted to be my family.

“It’s almost time for lunch,” he said. “Gram’s been cooking all morning.”

“Terrific.” I winked at him. I don’t think I’d ever winked at another person in my entire life.

“Typical of grandmothers, right? Tries to buy love with money or food.”

“Yeah?”

“Granddad is still feeling a little low. You can see him afterward.”

“Looking forward to it.”

“He takes a little getting used to.”

“Don’t we all.”

I followed him back through the house. An elderly woman who didn’t look much like my mother stood at the stove with lots of pans and pots simmering. She moved the ladle around like her life depended on it.

He said, “Gram? Gramma? This is Terry.”

Without turning to face me, she said, “Hello, Terry.”

“Hello,” I said.

My mother and Will were at a large round kitchen table. I could picture them in those same places thirty-five years ago. It happened in every family. You got your spot at the kitchen table and you never moved from it for the rest of your life. You never sat in your sister’s seat. You never sat anywhere except in your own, even if you were alone at the table.

Grandma Crowe was practically invisible. I don’t know if she started out that way or if she’d been drained of all color and sound until this was all that remained. She could barely raise her voice above a whisper. There was still some handsomeness to her face but no character,
no strength or personality. She looked like my mother and looked nothing like my mother. She wheeled and put plates on the table and then spun back to the stove again. I mostly saw her from the back.

My mother tried to engage her in conversation but the old broad refused to respond much beyond a yes or no or “try it with relish.” Gramma occasionally stole glances and looked at me as if I were the paperboy or the mailman. She kept herself busy and continued putting dishes down. There was already enough to feed half the homeless shelters in the Bowery, and I knew it wasn’t going to stop anytime soon because she just couldn’t handle talking to her own daughter after all these years. The food kept coming. She fed her family. She had that much in common with my ma.

I didn’t recognize most of the dishes. It looked ethnic and a bit exotic, but since I still didn’t know what nationality they were, or that I half was, I couldn’t even take a guess. I followed John’s lead. I buttered some things and put colorful sauces on others. I wrapped some meats in tiny pieces of sourdough bread and sprinkled lots of pepp">“No, you didn’t.”tper and salt around. I swallowed it down but tasted little.

My ma stared after her own mother with her chin pointed and her eyes full of hope, but the old lady beat her at the game. She ignored her even while talking to her. They held an empty conversation about cooking, and my mother brought up the gardens and Grandma Crowe talked a bit about flowers.

John kept up a steady stream of chatter and his father embarked on the same. I couldn’t follow anything they were saying. They laughed at private jokes and two or three times even my mother let out a chuckle. I tried to imagine my father and me bullshitting about nothing like that, and I failed.

Then lunch was over abruptly. Grandma Crowe cleared the table one dish at a time and washed each plate separately in the sink, killing each minute like she was smothering it in its crib.

She said, “I think you should go see your father now, Ellie. He’s waiting.”

My mother stood. So did I. So did Will. He put a hand on my shoulder. He had some muscle to him. He gripped me firmly, doing that massage thing that was supposed to show he was just having his emotions stirred. He held me in place while my mother walked through the doorway.

It was all about assertion and knowing your place. My mother was to go alone. I got that from the top. Will was being emphatic about it but not exactly rude. He had a couple of cigars in metal tubes he kept in his shirt pocket. He handed one to me.

“Let’s go sit and talk in the den,” he said.

“Sure.”

We left John there at the kitchen table looking a little hurt. I followed Will to a room with dark cherry paneling. A huge maple desk dominated the room. Framed photos on the walls showed him with celebrity actors and bigshot politicians. At Cannes, film premieres, and fancy Manhattan and L.A. restaurants. Some of the photos were mounted on wood and metal with cursive engravings:
Will Crowe & Edmund Contino, The Dining Car, 2002
. Contino had headlined the biggest summer blockbusters for the last couple years running.

Other photos showed an icy-eyed, iron-haired, broad-shouldered coot in his late sixties/early seventies with a lot of the same people.
Perry Crowe & Amos Custer, Madrid, March 23, 2004
. Custer was a director who made low-budget sleeper hits that took home an Oscar every once in a while.

One entire wall featured built-in shelves that provided the space to show off seven Emmys and a number of other awards I didn’t recognize.

Two leather chairs faced each other at a slight angle, a small antique table between them. A large portable bar covered in top-shelf liquor bottles and decanters was within easy reach. The room tried
hard to give off the milieu that million-dollar deals happened here over drinks all the time. For all I knew, they did.

Will clipped the end of his cigar with a cutter and then stared at me expectantly. I slid the cigar out of the tube and handed it back to him. He cut off the end, returned it, then motioned for me to sit.

I did. The chair smelled like thirty years of liquid leather polish and felt like it had never been sat in before. He lit his cigar with a wooden match, then held the burning match out toward me. I put my cigar between my lips and slowly rolled it around as he set the match to it. I took a few puffs and tried not to turn verdant. I wondered what he wanted to say to me that he didn’t want John to hear.

“I don’t know whether to offer you my condolences or not,” my brand-spanking-new uncle Will said.

“If you’re not certain,” I said, “then I suppose you shouldn’t.”

“I mean, about your brother. You loved him, so I gather I should extend my sympathies over his death.”

“Why?” I asked.

It made Will look at me sadly. I could tell he was a man who looked at almost everybody sadly, for any reason or no reason at all. He rolled the cigar around in his mouth, drew on it, and huffed smoke. “We followed the … the case quite closely here. For your mother’s sake we were hoping for a reprieve.”

“For her sake, and for everyone else’s, I’m glad he didn’t get one.”

“You didn’t like him much.”

“He killed seven people. There wasn’t much to like.”

“I thought it was eight.”

“No,” I said, without explanation.

He cocked his head and his eyes unfocused into a thousand-yard stare and he gazed through the wall and through the fence surrounding the house and went someplace else for a minute. He returned and nodded at me like he agreed with every sentiment I’d ever had about anything.

“Did your mother ever say anything about us?” he asked.

I placed my cigar on the edge of the ashtray. “No.”

“Never told you how close we were as kids?”

“No.”

“I introduced her to your father.”

That caught my attention. My chin lifted.

“Pinscher and his brothers used to race a 1969 Chevelle 396, up and down Ocean Parkway, out on the abandoned airport roads. In movies they always race for pink slips, but we just ran for peanuts. Gas money. Forty, maybe fifty dollars a run.” Will smiled thinking about the good old days. “I had a ’76 Bumblebee Camaro. There was real muscle to the car, and I had good reflexes. I won my share. Pinscher and the other one, the huge brute—”

“Mal.”

He took a long draw on the cigar, let the smoke out with a chuckle. “Yes, that’s right. Mal. Malamute. Mal, he weighed too much to be a driver, he was much too big behind the wheel, even in that big-block Chevy. So he always hung back and worked on the engines. Pinscher and the slick one—” Snapping his fingers, one, two, three.

“Grey.”

“Greyhound, yes. Grey always had the girls clinging to him without having to earn any sort of prestige by winning races. It all came naturally to him. But your father, he worked for it. One day Ellie showed up at a race. She’d never been to one before, but she turned up with a few of her girlfriends. They stopped in on the way home from a day at the beach. This small group of pretty girls all in bikinis, sunburned, covered in dried sand and salt, their hair flying in the wind, half of them wearing high heels so they could turn heads. Pinscher took me for forty bucks and said we’d be square if I introduced him to my sister. He was pretty slick too, when he wanted to be. And he could drive.”