The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (4 page)

She understood this as fantasy. She’d always gone to sleep with dreams of flight, since she was a little girl. They were the way you calmed yourself.

What happened with her parents had nothing to do with that.

BABE WAS CONSULTING a woman who had perioral dermatitis but thought it was globally antisocial to take antibiotics. At the end of aisle six (First Aid, Cough & Cold, Pain Relievers) two teenage boys walked up to Connie.

“Can I ask you a question?” said one of the boys, the boy Connie had asked about the coolness of his pants. Only fair: of course he could.

“Sure,” said Connie.

“My friend says you killed someone.”

“Shut up!” said the other boy.

“Shut up!” answered the first. “No, seriously. We heard you killed someone.”

Connie held still. She bit the side of her thumb. “Yeah,” she said at last. “I did.”

The first boy shoved both hands deep in his pants pockets: the force of the admission seemed to knock him at an angle. “Get out!” he said. “Really?”

“Yeah,” she said, casually, but now she wouldn’t look them in the eyes.

“Like, how?” said the second boy. He grabbed at her elbow to get her attention. “Like, with a gun?” He raised his hand to hold an imaginary gun parallel to the ground and made a consonant-rich gunfire noise, a single shot.

“Who’d you kill?”

“Or didja go psycho on them with a knife? Ee-ee-ee-ee!”

“No seriously, who’d’ja kill?”

“Or like run them over!”

“Leave her alone!” said the little old lady, who’d come to the rescue, but from a distance. She was afraid of the boys. She aimed her tiny shopping cart at them as though prepared to use it as a weapon.

“It’s all right,” said Connie, exhausted.

“Go away,” the little old lady commanded, and the boys were about to, until Connie said, “My parents.”

“Your parents?”

“Fu-
huck
.”

They took a step back to look at her better.

“Darling, you don’t have to tell them anything.”

“She
is
a psycho,” said the second boy.

“She’s a fucking psycho!”

“Fuck!”

Did Connie think they’d like her, if she told them, or did she just want to testify? The boys looked at her as though—well, as though she’d just announced she’d murdered her parents. One of the boys laughed a sudden run of nervous silver laughter: a giggle really. He put his hand to his mouth. “C’mon,” he finally said to his friend. “Let’s book.”

But they didn’t turn and leave. Instead, they walked past Connie as though she’d become invisible. So invisible, in fact, that one knocked into her on either side, a girl in their way for whom there was no reason to expend any energy whatsoever, not even to step around her.

“Pharmaciss!” called the old woman. She hailed Babe like a cab. “Pharmaciss!”

Connie leaned on the end-aisle display of on-sale contact lens solution. The old lady stroked her arm. “Tugs,” she said. “Common tugs, sweetheart.”

“I know,” said defeated Connie. The circles beneath her eyes looked like tarnished silver.

“You’re a goot girl,” the woman told her.

“That’s not true. You know, I did it.”

“Not you, sweetheart.”

“
Me
. I killed my parents.”

“So long ago,” said the little old lady. She looked as though she were about to crawl into Connie’s lap. “Not you. Someone else, so long ago. You know? Ziss is life. Pharmaciss,” she said to Babe. “Cheer up the girl.”

“What a command!”

“Yes, please,” said Connie, and then she added, “pharmaciss.”

“OK,” he said.

“Good boy,” said the little old lady.

HE THOUGHT OF dark-haired breasty serious Samantha, his kind, late wife. He heard her make fun of him:
you have a crush
on a Christian murderess.

“Go away,” he thought, for the first time.

A person who can do that is not a person. It’s not a crime of passion, a person who can do that feels nothing, least of all passion.
Think about her grandparents: they lost their children, and even so
they tried to save their grandchild. Can you imagine what that feels
like?

No.

She’s not more saintly for having been so bad before, you know.
Real saints start out saintly and stick with the program
.

Oh, Samantha, let me have this. Surely this is the exception to every single rule. She wants to save me. I promise I won’t let her do it, but let her try. Let her do her best.

Sam—

Promise.

Promise.

HE TOOK HER to the spinning restaurant on top of the Holiday Inn, another childish pleasure for childish Connie, the definition of a place that would cheer you up. The place revolved once an hour. Every table was its own minute hand: you could keep time by yourself, quarter past, half past, quarter of. The diners couldn’t tell they were turning, they only knew that the scenery changed. In his pre-Samantha youth, Babe had waited tables there, a disaster considering his sense of direction. Eventually he took to wearing a compass around his neck, though how did that help? A four top would be pointing north for the appetizers, south-by-southwest for the entrées. He took Connie there for the same reason doctors prescribed Ritalin, a CNS stimulant, to hyperactive patients to calm them down. He figured they’d be less disoriented there. Sometimes they’d look out and see the downtown. Sometimes the highway. Somewhere there was a universe where her parents were alive.

He thought the scenery, north, northeast, east, southeast, all the clockwise way around, would distract them. Where’s the mall? Where’s my house? Neither of them knew where the other lived. Mightn’t this be a way to explain your life in a place, up above and rotating. There’s where I was born, there’s where I get my car fixed, there’s where I met my wife, there’s my opticians, there’s where I cried, they tore down my parents’ house, there’s Mal’s Donuts, there’s where you and I met, there’s where I lost my wife, you can’t really see it, but right there, you see, left of the green neon, right of City Hall.

But they scarcely looked out of the window, as though the universe were rotating around them, instead of them rotating inside of the universe, and to acknowledge this would be to interfere with the most basic rules of physics. Gravity might let up. The earth might go squealing through space like a let-go balloon.

“I didn’t even know a place like this existed!”

“They used to be the rage. Can I take your coat?”

“I think I’ll keep it, if you don’t mind. I’m really cold-blooded. Um, obviously. Not really, bad joke. It reminds me a little of a place I used to eat with my parents. Didn’t spin though.”

“So it reminded you—”

“I don’t know. I’m making conversation. I’m nervous. I’m depressed. Those boys, they just got me thinking. My
parents—
”

“You miss them.”

“I do. Yes. I mean it’s stupid, not stupid—I do, my father particularly, but both of them. And at the same time, I know they’re with me, looking over me.”

“Sure. No, I understand.”

“Oh, I’m glad. I’m glad ’cause most people don’t. I don’t feel
sorry
for myself ’cause I’m an
orphan
, ha ha
ha
. But. Gosh. I’m glad you understand. I’m really, really glad you understand. Is that the courthouse over there?”

“I think so. Yeah. Connie, can I ask you something?”

“. . . Yeah. Of course. What? Go ahead.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“Oh God.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No, it’s all right. I just—I never answered this before. Not even Jewels, and he’s my shrink.
Was
my shrink.”

“You don’t have—”

“I was mad.”

“What?”

“I was mad.”

“What do you mean, crazy mad?”

“No.
Mad
mad. Like angry, ticked off. I had a date, for the first time in my life, and I didn’t tell my mother because I was afraid she wouldn’t let me go, so I said I was going to see a movie with friends and she still said I couldn’t go. If my mother said no, it was no.”

“You killed your mother because she wouldn’t let you go to a movie?”

“You’re not listening, Babe. Because I was mad. That’s all I can say. I was angry and I picked up the candlestick and I hit her twice, and I got angrier and angrier. It had nothing to do with my mother. Of course she was yelling, of course she was fighting back, but it was like I was, oh, what’s the word, the girl in that movie,
possessed
. The longer it went on the angrier I got. I was angry that I was angry, I was angry that I was doing this, and then my mother wasn’t my mother anymore. And then she was dead.”

“. . . Your father—?”

“He loved her. He loved me. How could . . .”

“Ah, ah. Okay. A mercy killing.”

“Don’t be mean! I sound horrible and I know it. This is why I’ve never said. It’s horrible, it’s evil, and there’s never been anything I can say. It’s
indefensible
, but people still want me to explain. All I can say is, that lady was right. Completely right. It’s like a different person killed her parents and a different person went to jail. I have to believe that. If I think, right, Constance, you killed your parents, now how are you going to spend your day? I couldn’t function. I’m telling you the truth. I killed my parents because I was angry. It was like I had food poisoning—that’s the best way I can put it, I don’t want to say I was diseased or crazy. But the strangest thing is, I’ve never been angry again. I used it up.”

“You were never angry in prison?”

“No.”

“With Jewels, then.”

“No.”

“I’ve heard you!”

“Lonely. Sad. Um, disappointed. But that, that’s over for me now. You know me! How could I hurt anyone? I used it up. We all get a certain amount of anger, and in some of us it just surges one day and then, for the rest of your life, the fuses are blown. Then God steps in. Look. Hey, look at that.”

“Where? I don’t see where—the mall?”

“The moon, dummy. Look at the moon.”

Connie of the bad sweaters. Connie of the flowers. A violent death is like no other, said the self-help books, you need to seek people out, you need to go to support groups and talk to people who understand. Your wife was murdered, people told him, and his brain didn’t disagree but his heart did: the worst thing of all is that he understood the driver of the car. It was an accident. You kill someone and you panic. A family man, too, probably, with a wife and maybe two kids who never knew, a guy who realized he had killed someone, he read the papers, but that was his punishment, to live with it forever in secret.

Connie of the bad makeup. Connie of the brown eyes. Connie who killed her parents, and didn’t that make more sense, for him to seek out Connie, didn’t those pieces fit together better than two people filled with grief and anger,
no my loss is
worse, no mine is.
There was Connie, who had a space in her life shaped just right for his grief and anger.

To never be angry again! To use it all up in one terrific surge. What a relief that might be, and what a disappointment. To think,
That was another person, not me
.

If he could have seen the future: the Dutchman’s real sorrow, the coverage in the newspaper, all of Connie’s eccentricities, of course, her blankness, her sickening love of animals, her failure to love particular people, she only loved mankind, wasn’t it interesting, said the papers, what a saint she was?, and he was happier than he’d ever been, and more miserable, too, and he was sure it wasn’t worth it—if he’d known he would have stopped himself. No question whatsoever.
I was a di ferent person then too,
he thought,
and what was wrong with the person I
was?
He was a coward. He only thought he could see the future. He had a brilliant, impractical imagination.

They were leaving the revolving restaurant. He’d already stepped off next to the stationary maître-d’ stand. She stood straight up on the revolving platform in her puffy pink jacket with the white-fur-trimmed hood. “Maybe I’ll just stay!” she said. You couldn’t see her move, you could just tell, second to second, that she
had
moved. “Maybe I’ll just ride the restaurant all night! Here I go! Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!”

“Good-bye! See you around!”

“Good-bye! Come back soon!”

“I will! Good-bye!”

She had her hood up: this trip would take her to the Arctic. She had her coat open, for the breeze off the coast. She was a brave, curious traveler.
You never let me do anything
, she told her mother, and shortly thereafter she learned what it really meant, never to do anything. The hood had fallen over her eyes. The maitre d’ was frowning, but they were like the teenagers in the store: they didn’t hate him, they just didn’t care. She was two feet away from him now.

“Here I go!”

“Send me a postcard!”

“I will! Good-bye!”

He reached out and grabbed her waving hand.

“Marry me,” he said.

The Safe Man

THE HOUSE ON SHELL ISLAND was as its owner had described it over the telephone, large and white with black shutters and wide porches running the length of both the first and second floor. The house had two dormer windows that creased the roofline like eyebrows raised in surprise or maybe anger. The columns that sustained the double layer of porches looked like teeth below those eyes. Brian Holloway parked his van on the left side of the turnaround circle and got out without any of the tools he would need. It was his routine to meet the client first, survey the job and provide an estimate, then come back to the van for the appropriate equipment if he secured the job.

It took two rings of the bell and a hard rap from the brass lion’s-head knocker before anyone answered the door. It was a man in blue jeans and a sweatshirt. He was barefoot. He was clean shaven and Brian guessed he was of similar age to himself. Late thirties, maybe a little older. The man had a scowl on his face.

“Didn’t you see the sign?” he asked.

“The sign?”

The man pointed to a small brass plaque posted beneath the mailbox to the left of the door. It said, ALL SERVICE AT SIDE DOOR. There was an arrow pointing to the right.

“Uh, no, sorry, I didn’t.”

“I will see you over there. And could you move your truck to the driveway on the side as well?”

It was a question but it wasn’t spoken as a question.

“Sure.”

The man abruptly closed the door. Brian walked back to his van, trying to hold back his anger. He reminded himself it was a job and, yes, after all, he was in the service industry. He moved the van to the driveway that went down the side of the house and widened in front of a three-car garage. He found the service door and headed toward it. As he walked he looked across the expansive backyard to the view of the open bay.

The same man from the front door opened the service door before he got there.

“Are you Mr. Robinette?” Brian asked, though he recognized him from photos on the backs of his books.

“Yes, that is right. You are the safe man, I assume?”

“Yes, sir.”

Brian could see Robinette eying his van. He realized he had forgotten to attach the magnetic signs to the side panels. He worked out of his house—his garage, actually—and neighbors complained about having a commercial van parked there all the time. So he painted the van a pleasing pale blue and went with magnetic signage. The problem was he often forgot to put the signs on when he went out on a call.

“Don’t you have any tools?” Robinette asked.

“I like to look at the job first, then figure out what I need,” Brian replied.

“Follow me then.”

Robinette led him down a back hallway that led to a kitchen that looked as though it had been designed to serve a restaurant or maybe Noah’s Ark. He counted two of everything; ovens, stoves, sinks, even dishwashers. They then moved through a vast living room with three separate seating areas and a massive fireplace. Finally, they came to a library, a room smaller than the living room but not by much. Three of its walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves. The books were bound in leather and the room smelled musty. There were none of the bright colors Brian saw on book jackets whenever he went into a bookstore. He didn’t see any of Robinette’s books on the shelves.

In the center of one end of the room was a large mahogany desk with a computer screen on it. There was a stack of white paper with a bust of Sherlock Holmes as a paperweight. In front of the desk was a Persian rug of primarily maroon and ocher colors.

Without a word Robinette used his foot to flip up the corner of the rug. He then kicked the fold back until the rug had been moved aside to reveal a small rectangular door set in the wood flooring. Brian estimated that it was two feet by one-and-a-half feet in size. It was old plywood and there was a finger hole for pulling it up and open. There were no hinges that Brian could see. Robinette reached down and pulled the door up. He then used both hands to lift the plywood out of the inset in the floor.

The opening revealed another door a few inches below—the black steel facing of a safe with dusty gold filigree at the edges, a brass combination dial, and a hammered steel handle. Robinette crouched next to the opening and reached down and gave the steel handle a solid tug, as if to show Brian it was locked.

“This is it,” he said. “Can you open it?”

Brian crouched down across the opening from Robinette and looked at the box. He could see writing in gold script beneath the combo dial. He braced his hands on the floor and leaned down closer to read it. It looked like it said “Le Seuil” but he wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was that he didn’t recognize the safe or its manufacturer, let alone know how to pronounce its name. He gave the dial a turn just to see whether it was frozen, and it turned smoothly. That wasn’t the problem. He straightened up until he was kneeling on the floor next to the opening.

“I don’t recognize the make offhand,” Brian said. “In a perfect world I’d have a design schematic. It always helps to know what you’re getting into. But don’t worry. I can open it. I can open anything.”

“How much will it cost?”

“Unless I find it in one of my books it’s probably going to be a double drill. I charge one-fifty for the first and a hundred for the second.”

“Jesus. You’re killing me.”

“I might get lucky with the first drill. You never know.”

“Just do it. I want that thing opened. Too many people have seen it.”

Brian wasn’t sure what he meant by that.

“Do you have any idea how old this thing is?” he asked.

“The house was built in ’29. I assume that it came with it.”

Brian nodded.

“You said on the phone you just bought this place?”

“That’s right.”

“The former owner didn’t give you the combo?”

“Do you think you’d be here if he did?”

Brian didn’t answer. He was embarrassed by his stupid question.

Robinette continued as if he had not asked a question. “It was an estate sale. The old man who lived here died and he took the combination with him. Nobody even knew there was a safe until I had the floors redone before moving in. Now all the painters, the electricians, everybody who was working on this place to get it ready knows I have a safe in here. You ever read
In
Cold Blood
?”

“I think I saw the movie. That’s the one with Robert Blake playing a killer before he supposedly became a real killer, right?”

“That’s right. It’s the one where they kill a whole family to get to the fortune in the safe. Only there isn’t any fortune. Every one of those workers who was in here went out and told who knows who about the safe I’ve got in here. I started having dreams. Me with a gun to my head, being told to open up a safe I don’t know how to open. I know these guys. I write about them. I know what they’re capable of. I’ve got a daughter. I want that safe open. I don’t even want a safe. I don’t have anything to put in it.”

Brian had never read one of Paul Robinette’s novels, but he knew before he ever saw the house that he was successful. He’d seen stories about him in the local papers and national magazines. He’d seen a couple of the bad movies based on the books. Robinette wrote crime novels that were bestsellers, though Brian didn’t think there had been a new book in the stores in a long while. Brian was willing to accept him as an amateur expert on the criminal mind. But he didn’t think that qualified Robinette as an expert on the character of painters and electricians and floor refinishers.

“Well, Mr. Robinette, whatever the reason, I will get it open for you.”

“Good. Then after you get it open, can you get it out of here?”

“The whole safe?”

“That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

Brian looked down at the edges of the safe. The steel framing went under the flooring. He was pretty sure the houses out on the island were built on fill—the coral and shells dredged up to dig the barge channel leading to the phosphate plant.

“You’ve got no basement here, right?” he said. “No way under the house?”

“No, no way.”

“Then it looks like I’d have to tear up the floor. It goes over the lip of the box. This wood is so old you’d never match it. But I guess you could keep it covered with the rug.”

“No, I don’t want to tear up the floor. I’ve spent enough on the floor. What about the door? Can you just take it off? I could leave it with just the plywood on top, cover it back up with the rug.”

“Once I get it open I can take it off if you want. But why? You might as well just leave it unlocked.”

“Three words:
In Cold Blood
. Things could go wrong. I want the door taken off. Go get your tools.”

“Yes,
sir
.”

Brian started out of the room.

“Excuse me. Are you being sarcastic?” Robinette asked.

Brian stopped and looked at him.

“Uh, no sir. I’m just going to get my tools. By the way, it’s going to get really loud in here when I start drilling and hammering. It might last a while, too—depending on the thickness of the front plate.”

“Beautiful. I’ll work in the upstairs study.”

In the truck Brian looked through all his manuals and catalogs for a listing on Le Seuil or anything close to it. He found nothing. He called Barney Feldstein, who worked in San Francisco and was the most knowledgeable box man he knew, and even Barney had never heard of the maker. He put Brian on hold and checked the archives of the Box Man website. When he came back on he had nada.

What Brian wished was that he could talk to his old man about it. If anybody knew the safe maker it would be him. But that was impossible. It took a request from a lawyer to set up a phone call and a letter was useless. He needed advice right now. Resigned to the idea that he would go in blind, he gathered his tools and went back into the house. Robinette was still in the study. He was gathering some files from the desk to take with him upstairs.

“I couldn’t find anything in the manuals and I called a guy who’s been doing this longer than anybody I know in the business,” Brian said. “He never heard of this safe company either. So I’ll do my best, but it’s looking like a double drill.”

“Explain to me why you have to drill it twice,” Robinette said impatiently.

“I’ve got to pop out what they call the free wheel. It’s the locking gear. To do that I have to drill through the front plate so I can hit it with a spike. With most safes I know where the free wheel is. I have design manuals. I can look it up. I then come through with the drill, pop the gear, and open the safe. With this one, I’m going in blind. I’ll take an educated guess but most likely I’ll miss. I’ll then snake it with a camera, find the right spot, and drill it again.”

“You’re sure you’re not just taking advantage of me here?”

“What?”

“How do I know this isn’t some kind of a scam designed to get the double dip? Or the double drill, as the case may be.”

Brian was thinking that he ought to pick up his tools and just walk out, leaving the arrogant writer with his unopened safe.
You open it, asshole.
But he needed the money—Laura was planning to take the option of extending her maternity leave by four unpaid weeks. Besides, he was curious about the safe. He’d have something to post on the website after he got it open.

“Look,” he said to Robinette. “If you want to go out to the truck and look in the manuals and try to find this, be my guest.”

Robinette waved off the suggestion.

“No, never mind. Just get it done. Come to the bottom of the stairs and call for me when you are about to open it. I want to be here to see what that old fool Blankenship put in there.”

“Arthur Blankenship? This was his house?”

“Yes, that’s right. Did you do work for him?”

“No, I just knew of him. He owned the plant. His father dug the channel.”

“Yes, that’s right. The Blankenships made this city what it is today. I’ll be upstairs.”

He left the room, carrying his files with him. Brian shook his head. He hated working for assholes but it was part of the job. He turned and looked down at the safe. Every job was a little mystery. He wondered when was the last time the black steel door was opened. He wondered what Arthur Blankenship had put in there.

The first thing Brian did was strap on his kneepads. He then got down on the floor and contemplated the spacing between the combo dial and the handle. He took a piece of white chalk out of his toolbox and marked an X on the door about three inches to the right of the dial on a direct line to the handle. He knew he’d at least be close.

He set the tripod up over the X and hooked the lockdown chain to the safe’s handle. He fitted a half-inch bit into the drill, mounted it on the tripod, and plugged it into a nearby wall socket. He was ready to go. From the toolbox he took out the gloves, safety glasses, and breathing mask and put them on. Lastly, he pressed foam plugs into his ears.

The first drill bit lasted twenty-five minutes before shattering. He guessed he had gone only a quarter inch in at that point. He let the drill cool for a few minutes while he drank a bottle of water he got out of the toolbox. He then locked a new bit into place.

The second bit completed the penetration. Brian pulled the drill out and checked the hole. It appeared that the front plate was three-quarters of an inch thick. He unlocked the tripod and moved it out of the way. The drill hole was still smoking and hot. Brian leaned down and blew away the steel shavings that had accumulated around it.

He got the camera scope out of the toolbox, plugged it in, and turned it on. He manipulated the snakelike camera extension, bending it into a curving L shape. He then fed it into the drill hole, keeping his eyes on the small black-and-white video display screen.

Almost immediately Brian saw movement inside the safe. A whitish gray blur moved across the three-inch-wide screen. He froze for a moment.
What was that?

He moved the camera in an exaggerated sweep but saw nothing else.
Was it smoke? Did he really see something?
He wondered if the camera movement had simply blurred a reflection of the camera’s light off of one of the gears or the underside of the faceplate.