To Die For (23 page)

At the time, we just all stayed close together. I felt as long as people were around that loved him, he wasn’t completely gone, you know? If it was a big enough crowd, it could seem like he just stepped out of the room for a minute. The times that were hardest were nights, when it was just Joey and I alone, lying in bed holding on to each other and crying so hard you could feel the mattress shake. Those were the worst.

You got through the days, who knows how? I mean at first there was just so much to attend to—the funeral, the police, friends coming by the restaurant, the newspapers. You didn’t have time to think, and that was good. I got dressed in the morning, put on my makeup, fixed breakfast. But I don’t remember any of it.

It was later, after things quieted down some, that I started to fall apart. They hadn’t arrested the boys yet, the investigation seemed like it was at a standstill. I’d go out in the world, and see people going about their business like nothing was wrong, everything was the same as it ever was. That’s what drove me crazy. When that happened, sometimes I’d call up Suzanne, say why don’t you come on over, have a cup of tea?

I just didn’t want to be alone. I’d take out the photo albums, write thank-you notes to people that sent us flowers, polish silver, whatever. Having the restaurant helped. It kept you busy.

But I remember this one afternoon. She was over at the house helping me clean out one of my closets. I was getting rid of a lot of Larry’s things, and I thought she might be interested in having some.

There was this old school jacket he had from his basketball days. Larry loved that jacket. More than one girl tried to get their hands on it. But there was never anyone he felt that way about.

So there we were reliving all these old memories. And suddenly I open a drawer and there’s the jacket. “This should be yours,” I said to her. “Why don’t you try it on and see how it looks?”

She was wearing a heavy sweater of some sort, so she took that off first. There we were up in my son’s old room, Suzanne standing there in her bra and skirt. Which shouldn’t be any big deal—we were both women for goodness sake.

Except that’s when I spotted it. I mean at first I thought she just had a leaf or something stuck to her chest and I was going to brush it off. But no, it was a tattoo. Shaped like a rose. Right over her left breast. Can you beat that?

Don’t ask me why, but I felt a chill come over me, like all of a sudden I knew she wasn’t the person I’d always thought. All this time she’d been hiding that, what else was she hiding?

I didn’t say a word. Neither did she. But we both knew I’d seen it. And that was the first moment I began to wonder. What if she had something to do with Larry’s murder?

I never trusted her after that. Even though I let her take the jacket.

I
’M HANGING OUT IN
my yard, working on the muffler to the Pontiac. On account of I haven’t seen no thousand dollars yet, to get a new set of wheels. Who should pull up but Mrs. Tight Cunt, the grieving widow, in her Datsun. With the radio playing, and that little dog of hers sitting next to her on the seat with a hair bow on, same as hers. She’s got the dog belted in, if you can believe it.

OK, I’m thinking. It’s about time I got my cash. She leans over, opens the passenger-side door, tells me to get in.

“Hello, Russell,” she says to me. “I wanted to give you something.”

“Oh yeah,” I say. “Great.”

Then she bends over and hands me this cardboard box from underneath the dash. Got a Walkman and some tapes inside. Faith No More, AC DC that she never liked, and these tapes about how to get to be a big-shot success just by looking in the mirror every day and telling yourself you’re great. “These were Larry’s,” she says. “I wanted you to have them.”

“Whoa,” I say. “Wait a second. What about the money?”

“I’m sure you can understand this is a difficult time for me,” she says. “Right now I’m still paying off bills for my husband’s headstone and funeral service and so forth. And then there’s the mortgage on the condominium. We could have purchased life insurance that would have paid it off if he died but for some reason Larry never did that. Don’t ask me why. A big mistake.”

“Well yeah,” I say. I’m not really listening to this crap. Alls I want to know is where’s my thousand bucks.

“I’m confident that once everything’s squared away, I’ll want to make you some sort of gift,” she says. “It’s just that right now I’m still overwhelmed. I don’t know where I stand yet.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Well I know where I stand, all right,” I say. “Knee deep in horseshit.

“We had a deal,” I tell her.

“And I’m a person who honors her commitments,” she says. “It’s just, I’m not ready yet.”

“Fuck this,” I tell her. “I want my money.”

“You know, Russell,” she says to me. “I’ve tried as hard as I could to ignore this attitude of yours. But if you’re going to use foul and abusive language I’m going to have to ask you to get out of my vehicle. I don’t want to see anymore of you until you simmer down.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m leaving. I don’t like to hang around places where they’re shoveling shit.” I’m halfway out the door when she calls me back.

“Russell,” she calls to me. “Don’t forget your box.” And like a fool I take it.

A
T FIRST OF COURSE
it just looked like a burglary where the guy walked in at the wrong time. But it didn’t take long before we started asking questions.

For starters, we figured they must’ve broken in the back door, so why didn’t we see some evidence of tampering with the lock? Then there was the way they just disconnected the television set. Left the CD in place, the amp, the color TV. The jewelry we found scattered, that came from all the way upstairs. You’d think they’d have finished with the stereo stuff first before working their way up to the bedroom.

Everyone we talked to said what bad luck it was, the dog not being home. “If he was around when someone tried breaking in, the whole condo development would’ve heard him carrying on,” the father said. Noisy little critter I guess. So it was either bad luck he was off getting his shots, or else good planning.

But the main thing that just didn’t jibe with the theory of unplanned assault on a burglary victim was the way they shot him. Point blank, and at close range. Someone held him down while someone else put a gun up to his head and pulled the trigger. And not in the middle of the living room either. This was right next to the door. Right next to where he’d put his briefcase down. Like they’d just been waiting for him.

Of course you had to wonder about motive. Guy had a clean record, no signs of drug abuse, no gambling debts. Didn’t appear to be any other woman in the picture. Looking at her, you wondered about other men. And then there was that insurance money. A hundred thousand dollars might seem like enough to kill for, to some people anyway. I worked on a case one time where a guy blew a gas station attendant away for charging him the extra penny when he ran over the ten-dollar mark filling his tank. You figure.

Other than the nature of the bullet wounds, we didn’t have much to go on. No fingerprints. No sighting of the perpetrators or a vehicle. No gun.

But then there was the wife. She seemed like a solid person. Real cute, nicely spoken. There was just something about her I didn’t trust. She had an airtight alibi of course. At the instant her husband was being shot, she was having an interview for some sort of television reporter job, over in the city. They actually had tape of her there, talking about some movie.

Fact is, it was something she said about this job audition of hers that got me wondering. We’re sitting there going over the details of that evening. How she walked in and found him and all. And right in the middle of telling me how he was lying there with the top of his head blown off, she says to me, “Isn’t it ironic?”

“Beg pardon,” I say. “How’s that?”

Him dying on the very night when everything was going so great for her, she says. Almost like that was the price she had to pay for having something go so well like that.

“Have you ever noticed the way every time something really good happens to you, usually something bad has just happened, and vice versa?” she said. “Almost like life just has to balance itself out.”

I was thinking it didn’t seem to me like much of a balance, getting a job at a TV station maybe, in exchange for a guy’s life. But then what do I know?

T
EACH HIGH SCHOOL AS
long as I have, you get antenna. I mean, there’s days you’ll just walk in the cafeteria and feel it, something’s up. A week later you find out that was the day some girl got the results of a home pregnancy test and tried to give herself an abortion in the girls’ room. Passed out in home ec a week later from internal hemorrhage and infection. That’s when the teachers finally get clued in. But the kids—they knew that day in the cafeteria. Which was what you were picking up on.

Now that I look back on it, I can see last February was one of those times. I mean, at first you would’ve thought it was simply Suzanne Maretto’s husband being found murdered. Reason enough for a certain sense of malaise, I’d say. But instead of blowing over after a week or two the feeling grew stronger. By the time vacation week rolled around the whole school felt ready to snap. We’re not talking about academic tension, mind you. I’m talking about a crowd that isn’t exactly spending their every spare moment bent over their books. And still, you knew they were all charged up about something. You’d walk into study hall and a hush would come over the room. You’d leave the room and feel the whispers starting again the moment you stepped into the hall.

Slowly the rumors began to surface. Someone had seen a photograph of Jimmy Emmet holding Suzanne Maretto on his lap. Someone else heard Suzanne had bought Lydia a pair of sneakers. Someone else said no, it was a CD player. A leather jacket. They said Suzanne Maretto was pregnant. Someone said that video they were making wasn’t really about high school life at all, it was a pornographic video in which Mrs. Maretto and Jimmy Emmet were naked, in bed together. They said Jimmy did all sorts of things to her, with shaving cream and cucumbers. Or that Lydia and Suzanne were lesbian lovers. Or that Larry was selling drugs to Russell, and Russell got mad when Larry sold him a bad batch of crack. A girl who’d been having sex with Russell Hines said she’d heard him and Jimmy Emmet talking about how to keep Lydia quiet. Someone else said Suzanne Maretto had a tattoo that said “Jimmy and Suzanne” on her buttocks.

We had a special assembly about AIDS and safe sex sometime in March. When it was time for questions and answers a boy in the senior class raised his hand and asked if it was true you could get AIDS from a tattoo needle. The speaker said she had to admit there were conflicting opinions on that one and she couldn’t say for sure. Someone in the bleachers called out, “Let’s call up the cable TV station and ask the weather girl.” You could almost feel five hundred people gasp. I guess by then everybody knew.

S
HE STOPPED CALLING ME.
She wasn’t inviting me over to her house anymore. Of course she wasn’t staying at her house at this point, but we could’ve gone out for pizza. We could’ve hung out. Just so I could see her.

I brought a flower arrangement to the memorial service. Pink carnations. That color always seemed to fit with her. After the service there was this line you went through, shaking hands with everybody in the family and saying how terrible you felt. Naturally I didn’t have that much to say to the parents, but when I got to her, I just threw my arms around her and started bawling. We’d been through so much together. And I felt like it was just the beginning.

“It means so much to me that you’d come,” she said to me. Same thing I heard her say to the guy right ahead in the line, and the one in front of him.

Well, I’m thinking, this just isn’t the place to talk. She’s got to keep up appearances here. It’s like she’s acting in a play here. Later on, we’ll go to the mall and try on silly hats and stuff, blow bubbles, sing songs from
The Wizard of Oz
. We’ll just be a couple of crazy girls together again. So I wait to hear from her. I sit around at home thinking any minute now I’m going to see the Datsun pull up and she’ll hop out and say, “How about we go over to the mall, Liddy?”

I just sit there in my room, waiting. I hear the TV, one soap after another. Hear that damn Dexatrim commercial nine million times. My mom screaming on the phone to her sister all about what a jerk Chester was. Kid next door playing Super Mario. But never her.

After she moved back from her parents’ place to her condo, when the police were done looking for fingerprints and stuff, I went over right away. “I missed you so bad,” I say. “My life was just unbearable when you weren’t around.”

She laughs. Pokes me in the stomach—just lightly, you know? “You hitting the ice cream again, Liddy?” she says. That’s Suzanne for you. She knows me so well, she notices everything.

I tell her I was thinking maybe we could go drive around. Like before. There’s so much I want to tell her. And naturally I want to know how things are going with Jimmy. And what about our trip to Florida this summer?

“Gee, I don’t know,” she says. “There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a crazy time, you know?”

“How’s Walter doing?” I say.

She says, “Poor little guy. He keeps sniffing around like he’s looking for Larry.” The blouse she was wearing the night she found Larry, that got blood on it. One day he dragged it out of the hamper and brought it into her bed. Like he recognized the smell. Another time it was a pair of Larry’s old dirty gym socks. She didn’t have the heart to wash them.

“So,” I said. “Whatever happened to that TV job you tried out for the night Larry, you know. Got killed.”

“It didn’t work out,” she told me. They were crazy to get her on their news team, only the terms of the contract were just too unreasonable. She’d be locked into the same station for two years. She explained to me she had to keep her options more open than that.