Bad People (32 page)

He found a reference to Barry. Ah, good old Barry. Out of the picture. He had taken Barry’s address off on Connie’s smart phone and written it down a while ago. He kept it in his wallet.

Chapter 35: Barry

Barry was home most days now, and habitually made spaghetti for breakfast. He found that, with butter and salt instead of sauce, it made a perfect breakfast food. He had started it out of necessity a few weeks ago when he had had nothing left in the house, went to the supermarket and couldn’t shop because the employees were harassing him.

He had gone in, got his cart, headed down between the aisles, and started fumbling through his pockets for his list. He hadn’t remembered which pocket he had put it in and he went through several, turning out all of them until he found it. The search had frustrated him, and he cried “there you are goddammit!” when he finally found it. A dark-skinned man in a leather coat was at the other end of long aisle doing almost nothing, spending an inordinately long time turning a can over and over in his hand as if examining the label. When Barry said “there you are, goddammit” to the paper in his hand, the words broke an almost cathedral silence that had seemed to have settled below the elevator music there in the supermarket, here on an empty weekday early morning.

The dark-skinned man looked up. He went almost immediately back to his label reading. Almost too immediately, Barry felt.

Barry steeled himself and pushed his cart down the aisle, passing the man, defiantly ready to make eye contact, but the man kept on with the label reading, pears as it turned out. The man carried a hand basket, which had only a can of Campbell’s in it. Why was he shopping in the middle of the day, and why was he standing there reading a label for so long? And why did he have only one item in his basket, a non-perishable good.

Barry moved to the pasta aisle. He grabbed a few varieties of sauce in jars, and then piled in some boxes of spaghetti. He pushed his cart down the aisle, and headed to the next row to get packets of oatmeal. The dark-skinned man passed before him, at the end of the aisle. He didn’t look at Barry. When Barry got to that end, he saw that the man was now turning into the cereal aisle, so Barry turned the other direction first, toward the dairy, to get milk and butter. The man did not follow him there, but later in the produce section where Barry had gone to get bananas, the man again appeared. He examined some produce but didn’t touch anything. Incredibly, after all his shopping the man still had very little in his shopping basket, only the soup can, some peanut butter, jelly, and cereal. No milk or bread or anything that would spoil if he wandered around all day with it. Barry was certain the man was following him, but he was not yet certain whether the man was an undercover store detective, or a cop still hounding him. He could even be a private investigator. Anything was possible, but why would a store employ a detective to work this empty hour of the day? Perhaps they had a problem with homeless in the store, or kept undercover security on the floor at all times not matter how empty the store. They might always be there, and Barry had just never noticed. The store had never been quite this empty before.

Barry didn’t know what to do. He considered making a slow circle around the perimeter of the store, pushing his cart, but adding nothing to it, to see if the man followed. Maybe this would let the man know Barry was onto him. Or he might just go up to the man and simply accuse him. Would he deny it? How good a liar could he be? Probably not that good, Barry reasoned, as the detective was not even good at hiding himself from his target; Barry had spotted him almost instantly. Or should he leave things as they were, at a stand still, leave, and keep an eye out for the man the rest of the day, outside the store. If he turned up somewhere else—or if Barry found others following him at other times—then the dark-skinned man was a cop. If it ended here, then perhaps he really was a store detective.

Barry moved his cart toward the checkstands. No one was manning them at first. He slowed toward one of the two empty checkstands with lit signs, unsure what to do next. Generally, when he got this close, if the stands were empty, a clerk usually emerged from doing some stock work in an nearby aisle. He waited what must have been two full minutes for this to happen. He did not mind the time; it gave him a chance to wait and see if the dark-skinned man showed himself again.

He did. Just as the clerk lazed her way forward, wordlessly put her pricing gun down by the stand, and began pulling Barry’s items out of the cart, one by one and scanning them, the dark-skinned man appeared behind Barry and waited with his basket of four items.

Barry stared at the man, holding his gaze on him as long as he dared, but the man never looked directly back.

Barry paid for his purchases and left. He glanced back over his shoulder after he exited. The man was now at the checkout stand. He and the clerk were talking and smiling.

When Barry got in his car, he circled around the parking lot and back by the front of the store. The man was no longer at the checkout. Barry didn’t see him walking or driving anywhere in the parking lot. He was gone.

That had been the last time Barry had gone shopping, or indeed out of the house at all. He was now out of everything except salt and spaghetti, having just put the last end of butter onto the spaghetti in the strainer. He dumped the noodles from the strainer onto a dish, and was salting it thoroughly when the front door buzzed. He dropped the strainer into the sink and instantly, and involuntarily, jumped back, ducking at the same time as if the avoid a blow or a crow attack.

He waited. The doorbell did not buzz again. He crept through the kitchen, his slippers squeaking loudly on the floor. He was certain they could be heard outside. How couldn’t they be? They were pounding his eardrums. So he tried to step even more lightly. He got to the front door. The living room blinds were all drawn of course. Barry crept a little faster now, his footsteps muffled by the carpet. He went to the door, leaned against it carefully, pressing his ear to it lightly, so that not even the sound of that could be heard outside. He listened, for shuffling or (hopefully) the sound feet made when an unwanted visitor has given up and walked away. He didn’t dare look into the peephole, for fear that he would find an eye filling the other side.

He heard nothing. Slowly he lowered himself to his knees, and then to all fours.

His robe slack and falling open, he lay the side of his face onto the carpet and peered into the sunlight shining through the doorjamb. The line of light should have been broken by the feet of the stranger if he was still there, but it wasn’t. Instead he saw a unbroken light. He exhaled.

In the kitchen, someone thrust the sliding glass door open. Barry screamed in shock and twisted around himself to stand and run. His foot caught the trim of his robe and messed him up. He slipped back against his door and onto his rump. He raised his hands in protection.

He expected the cops, having found some new evidence, would come to arrest him. Or he expected some random intruder, that would be the way his life had gone; it would be just like that, cursed un-favored, he could never ever catch a break. What he did not expect to see was the tall figure of Robb’s killer, the assassin running in now at the sound of Barry’s cry, running in from Barry’s kitchen, Barry did not expect that.

An almost feeling of relief washed over him. Maybe the man was here to kill him, to tighten up loose ends. Now he knew instantly how and why Jay Porter had disappeared. No matter, Barry welcomed it. He laughed as the tension left his body for the first time in months.

“What are you doing,” said Luke.

“How did you find me?”

Luke smiled at that. “I found you,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.”

Something about that made Barry sober up. He pushed himself up against the wall, his back straightly aligned as he sat. That was bad for your back. The spine should curve in at the lower back, above the tailbone; he had never learned that, and had tried to mend his back ailments in an impossible lifelong effort to force it straight instead of pulling his shoulders back and keeping his chin lifted. He had only learned how to correct human posture in the last few weeks. “I spent my life doing it wrong,” he said, only half-recognizing that he had said the last sentence out loud.

“What you thought you could get away with paying me,” said Luke, “that was not enough. It’s ten grand more.”

There was a moment, a single moment of blessed myth wherein Barry believed that the last year had not happened at all. Here he was, meeting the would-be assassin, for the first time. The would be assassin who would not take the job because the money offered was not enough. He wanted twice what Barry could pay and Barry didn’t have it. “So forget it,” said Barry. He was happy.

“Listen to me,” said Luke. “I know you have it. Take it out of your half of the business.”

Barry could feel the smile on his own face. The pleasant dream ended. “There is no business; Robb took it all. If I knew that then, I wouldn’t have needed to do anything. It would have all worked out. She would have left him.”

“Tell me what you are talking about.”

Barry didn’t bother. “I don’t have another ten grand.” He put his hands in his robe pockets and flapped the robe. “No money, no honey, that’s what Mom used to say.”

Luke grabbed him by the robe labels, bunching the fabric in one hand and then slapped Barry’s face. The slap felt bracing, like winter, like one of the few times it snowed on Christmas when he was young. “There that’s good,” said Barry, mostly to himself.

“Straighten up!” shouted Luke. “You get me my money. You get it for me!”

Barry found that he’d gotten himself a sudden and incurable case of the giggles. He couldn’t even speak through them and the only answer he could give to Luke was in the form of a shrug.

Luke pushed him back. His head bumped the wall, but not too bad. “Have much have you got here!” he shouted. Barry still couldn’t answer. Luke turn to an end table with a drawer in it. Not really a drawer however, it was just a decorative handle on a false drawer, which Luke soon found out, when he upended the table trying to open it. He stood where he was again and glowered at Barry, who did not bother to attempt to rise. Let him do it, he thought, what is the difference. But Luke, maybe seeing that Barry wasn’t about to move, turned and wandered through the house. Barry heard him in the study; there the drawers weren’t for decoration and Barry could hear them being pulled roughly out and dumped of their contents. Then he heard the same kind of action, but with a metallic ting, as Luke tore into his filing cabinets. Eventually Luke did find the old petty cash box; Barry heard that breaking and Luke smashed the little lock against something; it sounded like the edge of the cherry wood desk. His father’s desk.

“This is all there is,” said Luke, coming back in, the five or six twenties from the cash box in his fist. Barry pointed upstairs, to his bedroom. His wallet was in the dresser. Luke went up the stairs, two and three at a time, throwing himself up them and pounding upon each step that he did touch like a jackhammer. The foundations shook. He disappeared upstairs, all but the sound of his footsteps, they continued to pound and the ceiling bounced and rocked. Luke went through all the rooms, even his parents’ old room, where this had all started with the hidden cash that had given him the easy untraceable money. What a godsend that had turned out to be. The old man and the old lady were still controlling his life from the grave. Now they were up in heaven laughing at him. He got what he had wanted. Robb was out of the way, long out of the way now, and nothing—nothing—in this world stood between Barry and happiness.

The crashing and pounding above come to and end. From the sound of it there was nothing else to turn over. The noise stopped. Then he heard a creaking that he could only image was Luke, sitting down in Barry’s father’s old rocking chair. That familiar sound. The rocking chair rocked and then finally it stopped. Luke’s heavy footsteps on the hardwood hall floors, came slow and deliberate now. He returned to the staircase, and stood at the top regarding Barry. “You don’t have anything else,” said Luke. “You’re broke too.”

Barry shook his head. Luke raised one eyebrow, and then Barry said, “Yes, I’m broke.” His headshake had misled Luke; Barry had shaken his head no, meaning
no, I don’t have anything else
, not
no, I am not broke
.

“I
am
broke,” Barry repeated, for emphasis. “You tried out the old rocker?” said Barry. Luke looked at him quizzically. “The rocking chair,” Barry clarified. “My father’s. It’s the only thing that makes a sound like that in the whole house.”

“Is it worth anything,” said Luke.

“I doubt it,” he laughed. Then the laughter faded as soon and as mysteriously as it had come. “No it isn’t,” he said.

“I need money, Taupe,” said Luke.

“You know everything about me.”

“I know everything.”

“I have no money. None. You want my car, take it. I don’t want it.”

“I don’t want your car. I can’t use that.”

Barry pointed around the room. “You want a TV? You want an Xbox? You want that painting?” With the last he indicated a landscape painted in a style after Turner. It had been his parents’ and he had never removed it once he’d moved back in after their deaths. He had changed hardly anything.