The table was covered with a flowered plastic cloth, like Meers’s and Latovsky’s and probably most of the kitchen tables in town. Levy’s variety store in Glenvale center must do the bulk of its business in flowered plastic tablecloths.
The table was clear, the counters bare except for a set of ceramic canisters and an old-fashioned cookie jar in the shape of a puffed-cheeked face with a three-cornered hat for the lid. Odd for a man living alone to have a cookie jar; maybe Fuller was a fag who screwed the women to show he wasn’t, then realized anew that he was and killed in a convulsion of self-loathing.
Shit-think. You didn’t have to be a fag to have a cookie jar.
He turned away. There was a recycling setup on the porch with separate bins for glass, cans, paper, and plastic, and next to them a large, high-impact-plastic garbage container.
Latovsky raised the cover, and smells of spoiling food, coffee grounds, and moldering citrus rinds wafted out.
He didn’t want to, but there was nothing left to do except cut dolls out of the papers waiting for the recyclers. He pushed up his jacket sleeves, unbuttoned the cuffs of the good dress shirt he’d put on for Bunner’s funeral (that seemed half a century ago), rolled up the sleeves, and dug in.
He felt soft this, slippery that, found cartons from lots of frozen dinners, especially Swanson’s chicken pot pies, which Latovsky also favored.
Fuller made fresh morning coffee, as Latovsky did, and squeezed fresh orange juice, which Latovsky didn’t. Then he touched something small, hard, and sharp-edged that didn’t feel like the rest of the muck, and he made himself grasp it and pull it out.
He shone the penlight on it and saw smeared thick yellow ooze that he recognized as chicken pot pie gravy. He carried it down the steps to the edge of the lawn, wiped it clean on the grass, and shone the penlight on a tape cassette of Bach sonatas played by Yo Yo Ma.
Fuller had good taste in music, or maybe not, since he’d thrown this away. Maybe he’d grabbed it in a rush in a discount mart thinking it was 2 Live Crew or some other bunch of morons, and he’d put it on, expecting mindless cacophony, and gotten Bach, then pitched it out in a rage... but kept the case?
Why?
To hide the tape he’d taken from Bunner’s machine.
The answer came without thought or fanfare. One minute he didn’t have it, the next he did, and he knew Eve had been right about the doll’s eyes as she had about everything else.
He jammed the cassette into the pocket of his good suit, gravy and all, and pounded back up the wooden steps, shaking the whole porch structure.
No more Mr. Nice Guy, he thought crazily and turned the knob. The door was locked, of course, but the lock didn’t look like much and he took out his Swiss army knife, which had an awl kind of thing he’d never used before. He pried it up and thought, Tainted fruit, nothing. He was about to break and enter and commit criminal trespass, and Linney was too much of a hard-ass to let it go. He could wind up in the slammer, and even if he got clear, the tape would be inadmissible. But Meers had friends among the brass; he’d figure out some way if Latovsky presented him with hard evidence that Fuller had shot Bunner. He let all this flash through his mind for a nanosecond, then thought, fuck it, jammed the awl into the lock—and heard tires crunch on gravel. He froze as the garage door ratcheted open and a car pulled in.
Latovsky pulled the awl out of the lock and crouched on the deck.
The engine stopped, the car door slammed, followed by the click of leather heels (dress shoes for the funeral) on the garage floor. The door into the house opened, then closed, lights came on inside, made slanting rectangles on the porch and Latovsky was trapped. He was six four and weighed 230; if he tried to slip down the slat steps like a wood nymph and disappear into the ground fog, Fuller would hear him, throw open the door, and it would all be for nothing. Fuller was a fiend, not a fool; he’d know what he had that could hang him and he’d destroy the tape.
Latovsky stayed in the crouch, listening to Fuller on the other side of the wall. Water ran, but not loudly enough to drown out other noises, then the furnace throbbed as it fired up. It was getting cold; Latovsky’s hands were damp from the garbage and freezing as the goo on them stiffened. Flies whined around his head, attracted by the smell, but the Cutter’s kept them at bay. His spine felt fused; he thought it would pop like gunshots if he straightened it. He couldn’t stay like this much longer: another minute or two at most and he’d have to move.
Then he heard the click of leather soles crossing the kitchen. They faded away, and the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth crashed through the house. Under its cover, Latovsky eased himself down the stairs and scuttled around the side of the house to the road.
Adam hung up his jacket, pulled down his tie, then went back into the den and sank into his easy chair. For once, he was too lazy to untie his shoes properly, and he pushed them off with his feet, scuffing the heel of one. His mother would not approve.
He gave himself five minutes of listening to music, then hauled himself to his feet and headed for the kitchen. He couldn’t remember ever being this tired; partly the strain of waiting for Latovsky to ring the bell with a warrant, he thought, and partly the wait to give Ellen Baines the rotten news he had for her. He’d tried, but her eyes had opened slowly, looked blearily at him, then past him, then closed again.
He’d tell her tomorrow.
He picked up the phone, punched in the number in Sawyerville, and his father answered on the second ring, sounding more or less sober.
“It’s Adam, Pop.”
“Recognized your voice,” his father said drily.
“I spoke to that lieutenant, the one who left the card?”
“Remember that too.”
“Yeah, well, he said all he wanted was to know if we were the Fullers who rented a cottage on Raven Lake for the summer of nineteen sixty.”
Silence at the other end.
“Were we, Pop?”
“What’s he want to know a thing like that for?”
“Something about a case he’s working on. Were we, Pop?”
“Jesus, I almost forgot, it was so long ago. Yeah, we were, boy. Best summer we ever had, too. You’n Mikey were in that lake or on it in a little skiff that came with the house all day every day. Unless you were on the swing. You were mad about that swing.”
Swing. He saw the sky moving in jagged patches through a jigsaw of leaves. Swing...
He tried to hold on to the vision, expand it to see the house and lake... and maybe his five-year-old self and twelve-year-old Mikey. But the picture faded until it was only words: jagged patches of sky through leaves.
“Where was it, Pop?”
“Raven Lake, just like we been talking about.” A hint of impatience.
“Where on Raven Lake?”
“Don’t remember anymore—it’s been thirty years.”
The old fart had to remember. Adam had seen lights from twenty or thirty houses around the lake from Frank’s parking lot and there’d be more that were shut up until the flies were gone. He had to have the address.
“Try, Pop.”
“I could try till my balls turned to brass, boy. I can’t and that’s—” He stopped, then said excitedly, “Hold on now, just hold on a damn minute here. Bet it’s in your ma’s files. Woman kept every piece of paper ever crossed her hand, all neatly labeled and filed. You remember her files, son?”
Adam did: a series of large brown cardboard accordion envelopes with elastic around them. He’d looked in them years ago in case his father or brother (slipshod men) had missed important papers. The cardboard was faded and grainy, the elastic had lost its snap, but her neat backslanted printing was still clear and black against the ivory-colored index tabs and, halfway into the first accordion, he’d started feeling uneasy. The feeling reminded him of when he played Joseph in the grammar school Christmas pageant, a feeling that he’d swallowed something alive and it was trying to bat its way out of his gut. Only handling something she’d handled was much worse than the Christmas pageant jitters; it actually made him sick to his stomach and he’d given up less than three quarters through the first of about twenty accordions.