Only Make Believe (25 page)

“You’d had too much beer. It’s called a hangover.”

“I won’t lie. Yes, sir.”

“Dan.”

“Dan, sure. So I go in the bathroom that I share with my sister, I turn on the hot water, I start to toss my dirty clothes in the laundry hamper and—whoa. There’s a set of Hanes briefs behind the basket.”

Chuck rolled his shoulders as he talked, the muscles moving and expanding. “I wear Jockeys. They weren’t my size, either. And my friend Cy hadn’t slept over in a couple of weeks. He wears Hanes but he’s way bigger. So I sort of confiscated the shorts, put them in my dresser drawer, got my shower, dressed and went and had a talk with Cissy, that’s my little sister. She was crying pretty much non-stop, all broken up over Daddy. First she said she didn’t know anything about the shorts. But after a while she gave in and admitted that they must have been left behind by Roy O’Neill. See, Roy’s her secret boyfriend for the last six months. He’s secret because Daddy and Mother told Cissy she couldn’t even date the guy—or any guys—until she’s sixteen.”

“So it stands to reason they wouldn’t want him taking off his underpants in the house.”

“He’s a pig. I knew she saw him sometimes after school, in the daytime, in public. Anyway, it turns out he was with her, in her room—most of Sunday night.”

Chuck glanced at me, then looked away, blushing. Clearly, he was angry and ashamed at sharing family matters with a stranger.

“My sister was acting like a—like a you-know-what. Can’t hardly get over it. Oh, she swore to me she and Roy were
careful
, said they took
precautions
and there was nothing to
worry
about.”

He paused to check my reaction. I took a swallow of soda and kept my face in neutral. “They were careful. That’s good.”

“Almost makes it worse,” he countered. “They planned it all out, had rubbers and all, doing it right under Mom’s nose. Cissy’s fifteen! She knew I’d be out a little while longer. She knew Daddy was going to Myers. Anyway, I laid out the situation to her—told her she had a choice of either tell Mother she and Roy were in the house and heard Mother moving around—which they did. She admitted that. Or see our mother mixed up in Daddy’s death somehow.”

“Bingo. That explains why Lawyer Dreyer tried to sound out Detective Wright about dropping the case.”

“Cissy said she’d eat rat poison or just drown herself in the canal if I told on her. Daddy hates—oh shit—hated Roy, said he’s nothing but shanty Irish trash.”

“Look at it this way. If Roy hadn’t been there, and your sister was alone and asleep all night at the far end of the house, then your mom wouldn’t have the alibi witness that Dreyer claims she does.”

Chuck caught my eyes this time and held them. “How’s that?”

“Because you weren’t there, were you?”

“Say that again.”

“Because you were out drinking beer with your buddies. Or were you still down here in Myers? What time did you come in?”

He didn’t blink. “I don’t wear a watch. Must have been three at least. Is that what I said before?” He pulled his voice down and tried to look innocent. “The beer I had.”

“You were drunk or close to it. Why was that? I’m not judging you, OK? I drink plenty of beer myself. But you’re kind of young to get all plastered up.”

Chuck swallowed hard and blushed some more. “My family—Jeez. What a mess.”

“Most families,” I countered.

“Mother
really
got up a tree last night. Screamed how she’d been thrown over by another woman, and the woman happened to be her own frigging husband.”

Cute. Making jokes, avoiding the issue.

“Hope you didn’t beat up on Roy too bad,” I said.

“My future brother-in-law? Oh no. But me and Cy, we went over and visited him Thursday evening. Took him out for a ride. Talked serious. Told him he could get hurt. He denied being at the house Sunday night, at first. I asked was he calling my sister a liar. Then he said they didn’t do anything, just fooled around. Said he traded the shorts to Cis for a pair of her panties, said he wanted them for, to … never mind. You know what for. Creepy bastard.”

Bud needed to hear this. Because what if this little confession purged the boy’s conscience and he later clammed up, denied he’d ever said any of it. I held up my hand. “I believe you. I believe every word you’re saying, OK? But before you go any further, I want to give you a piece of advice.”

He looked up, surprised. “Like? Oh, and what kind of sandwiches did you say you had?”

I lifted the top of the cooler. “Chicken salad, tuna salad, roast beef, ham-and-cheese.”

“Roast beef.”

I tossed him the sandwich and unwrapped a tuna for myself. “If your mother’s in the clear, Detective Wright needs to know it now. Before this thing gets any more fucked up.”

Chuck cocked his head, leering slightly at my rough words. “Can it get any more—fucked? And how does that help catch who—whoever hurt Daddy? The—the fucker who did that?”

Has he ever used the word before? What a great influence I am. Here’s a respectable, well brought up kid and I’m teaching him to swear like a sailor.

I said I didn’t know how it was going to work out. But I said I was sure we needed to fill Detective Wright in on what he’d just told me. Bud’s rooming house was five minutes away, I said. Chuck shrugged, wolfed two more bites, chewed, stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his pocket and agreed to follow me over to Bud’s.

Bud scowled but silently saluted when we appeared in the rooming house backyard. He’d been working with a barbell set. He was wearing mud-stained combat boots, Marine-green workout shorts and an undershirt with the arms ripped off. The GI trunks hung loosely on his hips. He hadn’t broken a sweat.

“What the fuck?” he said by way of greeting. “What the fuck you up to, Dan? Junior, you doing OK?”

“Call him Chuck, will you? His dad’s dead. He’s not a junior anymore. He doesn’t like it.”

I caught Chuck’s smile out of the corner of my eye. Bud nodded, growled, “Chuck, huh?” and followed up with, “You gents got something on your mind?”

I filled him in on Chuck’s discovery of the size 28 Hanes briefs, his sister’s confession and her boyfriend’s role in establishing an alibi for Amelia DiGennaro. I ended with Roy O’Neill’s reason for wanting a pair of Cissy’s panties.

Bud couldn’t help laughing. “There’s men in my reserve unit bring worse than that in their packs when we go on maneuvers. Fucking sex fiends.” He picked up one of a pile of folded towels on the grass and tossed it to Chuck. “You want to work out a little?”

Chuck snatched the towel out of the air. “Sure.”

Bud turned, retrieved the barbell set he’d been using, spat on his hands and knelt before the bar. “Here’s the drill. One.” He lifted the bar to his chest. “Two.” Up went the weights past his face. “Three.” He shifted his hips, balancing the iron over his head as if lifting nothing heavier than a waiter’s tray. “Four.” Down came the bar to his heaving chest. “And five, and finish,” a whisper now. He executed the movement cleanly, stepping back and rolling the bar slightly forward. The set bounced and clanked on the St. Augustine sod.

He turned to Chuck. “What can you lift? Hundred and ten, hundred and twenty?”

“Start with a hundred, OK, sir?” Bud removed two rounds of iron from the bar. Chuck spat on his hands, rubbed them together and addressed the set, his back to me.

“One,” Bud said. “Two. Good.”

On “Three,” Chuck hesitated, his arms upraised and quivering, the weighted bar poised directly above his crewcut head. He was staring at Bud, working his mouth, taking short gulps of air. Bud held his gaze. Chuck suddenly drew a deep, lung-filling breath, gathered himself, hoisted the bar higher, shifted his hips just as Bud had and straightened his arms.

“Good, good. And four. Good. And five.”

“Aaaah!” Chuck shouted, stepping back, checking Bud’s face again. Bud wore his best coach-to-player grin.

“You want to give me four more?”

Chuck spat on his hands. “Sure. Let’s go.”

After the fourth rep, Bud took the barbell and set it aside. “So you and your friend had a talk with Mr. Roy Boy,” he said, his tone suddenly jovial and light. “Tell me about that. You and Cy didn’t force him to say nothing that wasn’t true, did you?”

Chuck swabbed his hands and face with his towel, picked up one of two hand weights and started doing slow curls. “Cy’s a lot bigger than me. Strong as hell, like you. Plays fullback. Roy Boy’s a shrimp. I told Roy exactly what Cissy said, about
precautions
and all. And I told him if he even touched my sister again before they were formally engaged, we’d go after him.”

Bud spread a towel out on the grass, lay down on it and began pulling slow stomach crunches. I pulled off my sweatshirt, picked up one of the hand weights, settled onto the chair and attempted a set of curls. Bad move. I’d gripped the bar slightly off center. The weight of the thing twisted my wrist sideways. “Ow, fuck!” I cried. Chuck was beside me in half a second, steadying my arm with one hand and guiding the weight with the other.

He knelt so close I could smell his sharp clean sweat. Our eyes caught. He blinked first. I moved the weight up, down, up, down, up. His face a blank sheet, he rose and went on. “Cissy and me, we went and talked to Mr. Dreyer in his office. Cissy told him all about being home Sunday night, said that after me and Cy and Eldon dropped her off, she got ready for bed, turned out the lights in her room and let Roy in through a sliding door. Roy—who’s twenty, by the way—admits he stayed until after I came in. He got dressed in the dark. Which I guess is how his shorts got lost.”

Lost his shorts and set himself up for a shotgun wedding,
I thought but didn’t need to say.

Bud paused between sets of crunches. “And Lawyer Dreyer contacted Roy Boy. And Roy signed a statement to the effect that he and your sis were together from midnight to dawn and that he heard your mother moving around shortly after midnight, and then an hour or two later.”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“But you didn’t hear them?” Bud asked quietly.

Chuck ignored the implication. He and I had already covered that topic. “Huh?”

“Never mind that. You and your Daddy weren’t best pals, not all the time. Do I have that part right?”

Chuck handed me the other weight. “Try both of ’em together. Sure, sir, OK. Daddy could be wonderful, best I ever heard of. Like, last spring, we spent a whole week together at Boy Scout camp.”

Bud threw me a sharp, sad look. Neither of us ever had real dads or went to camp.

“But it wasn’t like that most of the time. At home. He was busy all the time. His business. Choir practice. He went back to taking singing lessons last year. Listened to the opera on Saturday afternoons. We didn’t talk much.”

Bud lay still, flat on his back. “What was he like?”

Chuck shook out his towel, spread it on the grass between Bud and me, flopped down and started his own set of crunches. “Look, he—look, sir, I know what Daddy was wearing when he—you know. Got beaten up. About him at the hotel, wearing a dress. I kind of knew about it some before, only I didn’t think too much about it. It was just … I didn’t know what to think. But if I tell you what I know, Dan says it’s sure to help you find who did it, who hurt him.”

Bud glanced at the boy, muttered, “Yeah, right, it’s got to help,” and started pulling slow reverse curls. “Swear to God.”

“I went through Daddy’s stuff a couple of times. La-la-last year. Went through his dresser. I didn’t know—don’t know—what a man’s supposed to have, what he keeps in his closet and in his pockets. Nobody told me.”

I smiled. I’d gone through my Uncle Bob’s dresser when I was fourteen. Chuck’s words made me wonder if every boy performs some such search as this, hoping to discover who he is or what he may become.

“His dresser, his closet—nothing I didn’t know about. Just—stuff. Then, one time when he was out of town, I opened up this foot locker he kept in the garage, under a tarpaulin. It had a padlock on it, as well as the regulation suitcase lock. I found the keys in Daddy’s dresser, in a box with a bunch of small change.”

Chuck was talking faster and faster. He was determined to get through this but I could see it was hurting him. He was blushing again. He pulled his knees to his chin and held them there.

“What was in the foot locker?” I asked as quietly as I could.

“He had rubbers. We’re Catholic and he had rubbers.” Chuck released his knees. “Fuck! He had dirty pictures of women. And a signed picture of a New York opera singer and a letter from her. Daddy had sent her a fan letter. Jeez. And he had a corset and some kind of supporter with just one little strap, in the middle, up the ass crack.”

The dance belt
.

Bud quit pulling curls and rolled on his side, facing the boy.

“Daddy had a lot of pictures,” Chuck sobbed. “Dirty pictures, you know, naked women, naked except their brassieres and underwear. Some worse, doing things to men, to each other. Had ’em hidden in the garage. Why’d he have to dress up in a—in a dress if he liked to look at whores? Oh Jeez. Is that what got Daddy killed?”