“Me?”
“Or me.”
He looked for a clearer euphemism. “You mean, bending the law?”
Bobby Andes explained: what you might have to do to help the law if fucking technicalities prevent it.
Tony was scared. He did not want to answer the general question. He said, “What specifically are you talking about?”
Andes was impatient. “I’m trying to find out if you really want this guy.”
Of course Tony wanted him. Andes was disgusted. He just wanted to know, if Tony didn’t like his methods. Tony wondered, what’s wrong with your methods?
Bobby Andes calmed down, took a breath, waited. “Some of these new law school jerks don’t like my procedures. They’re afraid my procedures will create a scandal if Ray Marcus comes to trial, burn their ass.”
Tony felt the whiff of a different horror. “Could that happen?”
“Not if the police stick together like they should, sons a bitches.” Deep sigh, end of the world. “That’s why I gotta know.”
Know what?
“If you’re gonna wimp out on me too. If you have a congenital aversion to strong aggressive police work.”
Tony did not want to answer. He wondered, why are you asking me?
“This guy raped and killed your wife and daughter.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
Bobby Andes wasn’t sure of that. He pushed the point. Law says he should be punished, but if the law can’t, do you want him to go free? Does the law really want him free?
“What else can you do?”
“You can help the law. Like I said.”
Tony wished he wouldn’t keep thinking of different ways to put it. He didn’t want to go against Bobby Andes. He said, “Take the law into your hands?”
“Act on behalf of the law.”
“To do what?”
Andes didn’t answer. He was working his mouth, chewing, not looking.
“To do what, Bobby?”
No answer.
“Act on behalf of the law to do what?”
Now Andes looked at him, looked away, looked back again. “What do you think?”
Two possibilities occurred to Tony. One terrified him. He mentioned the other. “To get new evidence?”
Andes half laughed, not a real laugh. “You think that’s possible?”
“How would I know?”
The woman called from the counter. “Is your name Andes?”
Bobby Andes went to talk on the phone. In a few minutes he came back.
“Okay,” he said. “Ray Marcus is at Herman’s. I mean to go pick him up. It’s your god damn case. I have to know now. Are you willing to participate, or are you going to fink out on me?”
“Participate in what? You haven’t told me, Bobby.”
Bobby Andes spoke slowly, carefully, patiently. “I want to bring the sonofabitch to justice.” His voice had an emotional catch in it, Tony noticed. “I’m taking him out to my camp. I want you to come too.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Be there. Trust me and be there.”
“Then what? I mean, what’s your plan?”
Bobby Andes thought a little, as if deciding whether to say some particular thing. “I asked you before. What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
“I want to bring the fucker to justice.”
“Okay.”
“So you tell me. You be the judge.”
“What do you mean?”
“What should he get? Five years and parole, hey?”
Wondering what he was being goaded to say, Tony said nothing.
“More than that, huh?” Tony stared from inside his dizziness, feeling sick trying to guess. “I hope you’re not one of these capital punishment wimps.”
“Oh no, not that.” Tony shocked cold: permission to kill Ray, is that what Bobby Andes is asking? His voice broke as he asked once again, “What are you going to do?”
Bobby Andes gave him a funny searching look. Then laughed. “Relax,” he said. He started to speak, caught himself, and after a moment spoke more quietly. “I want to take him out to the camp with us and keep him for a while. I want to work him over. Get a little rough, make him suffer a little. See what he does. Would you like that?”
Tony could imagine enjoying it. He could see the possibility like a bit of bright dust in the murk.
“It’s your case, I want you to see it. You can help.”
Relieved by the soothing tone more than the words, Tony Hastings had his questions, two or three distinct and others less definite, but he saw the impatience in Bobby Andes’s eyes, like fear of dying or the end of the world.
“If you can make him confess, that would be good,” he said.
Bobby Andes laughed.
FOUR
Susan Morrow sees a new issue shaping up through the battle of euphemisms, unless it’s a red herring. She doubts that, it looks like a true fish: Bobby Andes takes the law into his hands. Tony Hastings meets John Wayne. With little space left, at most five chapters, more likely four, the risk of being disappointed was never greater than now.
Meanwhile, dialogue. Susan likes dialogue, how print fastens ephemeral words to the page like flattened animals on the road, so you can go back and inspect them in their non sequitur, as when Bobby Andes says irrelevantly: This place stinks. Yet behind all this imagined Pennsylvania and Ohio stands the ego of Edward the Writer. Tony Hastings, Ray Marcus, Bobby Andes, Louise Germane, the shades of Laura and Helen, these people who have, as she imagines, some relationship to herself, all are icons of that great Edward ego, projected on a screen. Twenty-five years ago she ejected the Edward ego, clumsy and crude, from her life. How subtly it works now, soaking up her own, converting hers into his.
Nocturnal Animals 22
Two cars, Tony Hastings in his following Bobby Andes through the quiet streets of Topping to Herman’s. A big parking lot around Herman’s, which was a one-story sprawling building with a red sign in the window. The sign cast a brighter glow than the twilight and accelerated the night. Bobby came over to Tony’s car. “Wait here,” he said.
From his car Tony watched the door to Herman’s while the night came on. After a while two men came out. He recognized Bobby and realized the other was Ray. They talked in the glow of the sign. Ray stood with his hands on his hips, Andes looking up to him with his back twisted. Ray made a gesture of disgust, turned to the door, changed his mind. Two policemen appeared in the door. Ray gestured. One of the policemen touched Ray’s shoulder. He recoiled, then submitted while the policeman put handcuffs on him and led him over to the lieutenant’s car. Bobby Andes came back to Tony.
“We’re going to my camp. It’s in Bear Valley. You follow.”
Full night while they drove, a three-car caravan, the police car in front, down the fast valley road. A passing car got between Tony and Bobby, then passed Bobby but dared not pass the police car, making it a four-car caravan for the next five miles.
He saw the flashing turn signal of the cars ahead and put on his own, though nobody was behind. A side road to the left, the sign read WHITE CREEK. The road went narrow and straight between two fields, bumpy, they had to go slow. Tony could make out the ridge rising ahead out of the flat valley floor. At the end of the fields the road turned left. There was a narrow stream on their right under the bluff, with woods beyond. Light ahead, a cottage in a grove next to the stream. The two cars pulled in under the trees and Tony pulled in beside them. They all got out and Tony followed them in.
“My camp,” Bobby Andes said.
They went in through the screened porch. It seemed like a crowd in the little room, and it took Tony a moment to straighten them out. There was a woman, but the others were only the people who had come from Herman’s: the two policemen, Bobby Andes, Ray Marcus. Bobby Andes had a gun in his hand, and the sight of it shocked Tony like an exposed penis. Bobby was glaring at the woman. He said, “How did you get here?”