28

THE MAN WHO DELIVERS PAPERS TO our neighborhood showed up not long after that. He didn’t even get close to our door. Who could blame him? Here’s what he found:

A man in handcuffs sitting out on our front step.

An abandoned Beetle parked on the front lawn, door open, engine still running.

From inside the house, a woman’s screams, a man’s cries for help.

From the trunk of a small car parked at the end of our driveway, even louder screams. They sounded like a man’s.

The paper man (there are almost no boys anymore; papers must be picked up in the middle of the night and delivered before six, and this was a sight you wouldn’t have wanted a young lad to see) went back to his car, where he kept a cell phone, and called for help.

What a production.

Two police cars and an ambulance converged on the scene within five minutes. When the ambulance attendants, who, I’m told, looked upon our house with a certain familiarity, arrived, they were directed first to the trunk of the car by the paper guy. But the handcuffed man sitting on our front step, Don Greenway, advised them not to think, even for a moment, of opening that trunk. You might, he suggested, want to call someone from the zoo.

I was able to reach up and unlock the door to let everyone in. The police came in first, putting some muscle behind the door so as to move me out of the way, duct-taped to the overturned chair as I was. Their eyes had barely landed on me when they saw Rick at the bottom of the stairs, a much more convincing dead person than I ever was in that same spot, a very long time ago.

They must have thought, at that moment, that whoever’d done that to Rick had been the same person who’d put me in the chair, but gradually, the truth began to emerge. I told them to please check on my wife, in the kitchen, and one officer ran ahead to do just that while another stayed with me, wanting to know who else was in the house, how many hurt.

“There’s one guy out there in the trunk,” I said as the officer cut me out of the chair, “but it may be too late for him. And there’s another one, not hurt, but running around the neighborhood someplace with his hands cuffed behind his back.”

“There’s already a guy here in handcuffs.”

“There’s a second one. It’s a long story.”

Once I was free, I was on my feet and running to the kitchen where Sarah was now standing, and we threw our arms around each other and started to cry. I held on to her for a very long time.

“Mom? Dad?”

It was Paul, calling from out front. The police wouldn’t let him inside. We both ran out to see him and embraced him, so happy that we were all alive, except that Paul had no reason to think that all of us being alive was in any way an extraordinary thing.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “What the hell happened to your face?”

“You’re a hero,” I said, hugging him again. “And you don’t even know it.”

“Huh?”

It was my first time outside of the house since the police had arrived, and it was wild. At least half a dozen police cars, three ambulances, a fire truck, just in case. A couple of SUVs with TV station logos splashed across the sides. And nearly everyone on the street was outside, standing in their yards, gawking. It was the first time I’d ever seen the housecoat lady outside without a hose in her hand.

Trixie approached me tentatively as I stood out there with Paul.

“Oh God,” she whispered. “All hell broke loose.”

“Kinda,” I said. “I need you to get me that ledger.”

She nodded and slipped away. I saw Earl across the street, standing by the back of his pickup. Our eyes met, and he nodded, as if to say “I’m glad you’re okay, man, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to stay on this side of the street while the cops are around.” That was just fine with me.

Sarah grabbed one of the ambulance attendants as he walked past, and said, “My husband’s been hurt.”

I recognized him as the male attendant who’d come to our house during The Backpack Incident. While he might have remembered coming to this address, he made no suggestion that we had met before. My face was too badly bruised and bloodied to be recognizable.

They ended up taking both of us to the hospital. Even though Sarah showed no obvious signs of injury, they wanted to check her out just the same. I told Paul to get in touch with Angie, let her know that we were okay.

“Does she think you’re not okay?” he asked.

And tell her not to worry about going to school today, I said. Get one of the officers to bring you to the hospital to meet us once she shows up, I said.

Turns out all Sarah had were some tape burns on her wrists. Hospital officials would later tell the press that she was “in good condition,” but I knew better. Nobody came out of something like this in good condition. I figured the nightmares would begin that night, and would be with her for a very long time.

The doctors and nurses had a fair bit of work to do on me. I needed stitches in three places on my face, my left eye was puffed up the size of an egg but the color of a prune, and I had an assortment of bruises all over my body from my tangles with Rick and crawling across the floor while still secured to a chair.

The police interviewed us separately. Needless to say, I had a lot more to get off my chest than Sarah, who was still pretty much in the dark, and was kept busy with detectives, including my friend Detective Flint, for a lot longer.

Hours and hours longer.

I started from the beginning. I’d considered, briefly, telling them I’d grabbed Stefanie Knight’s purse by mistake, but knew I’d get caught in a lie somewhere down the road once they turned on the hot lights and brought out the rubber hoses.

I spelled out for them the whole Valley Forest Estates thing. The blackmailing of Carpington, the murder of Spender, how Stefanie was offered up for sexual favors. They’d found Carpington, by the way, sitting down by the edge of Willow Creek, listening to the sound of the water as it flowed by, and when two officers approached him, he turned to them and smiled and said, “It’s beautiful down here, don’t you think? They should never build homes around here.”

The police wanted to know: Did I kill Stefanie Knight?

No, I said.

Did I know who had killed Stefanie Knight?

Not for certain, I said. But my money was on Rick. He certainly had an unlimited capacity for violence.

They told me that his full name was Richard Douglas Knell, that he was thirty-eight, and that while he’d spent much of his life working in construction, he’d also spent some time “inside” (where he did his reading), having kicked in a man’s head outside a bar six years earlier. There was evidence that he’d acted, in some small way, in self-defense, otherwise the sentence would have been longer. He’d come back to work for Don Greenway, who’d been his employer years ago, and Greenway found a way to exploit Rick’s special talents of persuasion.

“He liked snakes,” I said.

My interrogators concurred. But Quincy, alas, was no longer with us. When they popped the trunk of Rick’s car, they found he’d already squeezed the life out of Mr. Benedetto, and was in the process of digesting him. He’d only gotten to his knees, and when the panicked officers saw what they were dealing with, they unloaded several rounds into the snake, trying not to disgrace the body of Mr. Benedetto in the process, although they did nick his shoes. They’d remarked later, privately, that since Mr. Benedetto was already dead, it would have been interesting had they opened the trunk much later. They wondered just how much of the guy the snake would have managed to get down its throat. It would have been something to see, no doubt about it.

Anyone else on my list of suspects? they asked.

Well, there was Greenway, of course. Stefanie had decided, it appeared, to get out of Dodge, and she was leaving with her homemade supply of cash, plus a ledger for possible future blackmail purposes, and the roll of film. It wasn’t clear whether she had the film because she was tired of being used for such seedy purposes, or simply hadn’t gotten around to turning it in to Greenway for developing. I wondered where he normally had his film processed. Mindy’s would do it for you in an hour, $6.99 for twenty-four exposures, another set of prints for two bucks.

I promised to hand over the negatives, still hidden in my Seaview model, and the ledger.

Earl’s name never came up. As far as the police knew, I’d busted into the Valley Forest Estates office alone. I didn’t have to bring Trixie into it, either. The police were left with the impression that I had something of a handcuff fetish. Later, when we compared notes about what we’d been asked, Sarah said to me, “When did you switch from sci-fi modeling to handcuff collecting?”

When the police finally decided to let me go home, with the proviso that they would be wanting to talk to me again, probably several times, I said to them, almost as an afterthought:

“You might also want to take a look in Carpington’s and Greenway’s cars. I don’t think there’s any snakes in them. They’re out behind the Valley Forest Estates offices. You never know, you might find some interesting things in there.”

“Already have,” said Detective Flint.

I WONDERED WHETHER THEY WOULD charge me with something. There had to be lots of offenses to choose from. Not reporting Stefanie’s death to them immediately, hindering prosecution, who knew? They take their time with these things, and I knew that if they wanted to lay charges, they might take months to get around to it.

But they didn’t waste any time charging others. Greenway, who hadn’t bothered to make a run for it that morning, who knew the game was over and simply waited for the cops to arrive, was arrested, as was Roger Carpington.

A couple of days later, with some fanfare, they announced that they were charging Carpington with the murder of Stefanie Knight.

They had found, in the trunk of his car, a bloody shovel. They’d run DNA tests on the blood, and it turned out to be, without a doubt, Stefanie Knight’s.

And I thought: I’ll be damned.

LIFE TOOK SOME TIME TO get back to normal. Sarah’s bosses told her to take off as much time as she wanted, which meant she probably had about a week. In seven days or so, her editors would be calling to say “You okay? You think, you know, coming back to work and editing stories about murder and mayhem would help take your mind off things?”

There were insurance matters to deal with. We’d lost a car. There was a big hole in the basement wall, from my doing batting practice with the tripod. And there was the grisly matter of the blood-soaked carpet where Rick had fallen on his sword.

And there was some other damage that the insurance adjusters weren’t equipped to handle. Sarah didn’t want to talk to me.

She was there for me, of course, while I recovered from my injuries. She’d make me tea, bring me an ice pack, get me a glass of water to help me wash down my Advils. But she didn’t have much else to say, and I couldn’t blame her. I’d nearly gotten us both killed by being a busybody. I’d nearly turned our kids into orphans.

They weren’t that pleased with me, either, but they were more upset that their mother and I weren’t speaking. Or that their mother wasn’t speaking to me.

“I’ll talk to her,” Angie said to me.

“Thanks, honey,” I said. “But I just think it’s going to take some time.”

“How much time?”

When I crawled into bed next to Sarah, she flicked off her light, turned her back to me, and pulled the covers up around her neck. I stared at the ceiling for an hour or more before finally falling asleep.

It was during this time, while still awake, that I started thinking about things that I had no business worrying about. For me, this should all be over, and yet…

Roger Carpington. They’d charged Roger Carpington with murder. They’d found the shovel in the trunk of his car.

I’d seen that shovel. It had been there, on the floor, next to Stefanie Knight’s body. How had it traveled from there into the trunk of Roger Carpington’s car?

Maybe, after I’d left, he’d come back. Maybe he was concerned that he’d left his fingerprints on it, so he came back, snuck inside, grabbed the shovel and threw it in his trunk.

I suppose.

Except by the time I’d left Stefanie Knight’s house, there was an Oakwood Town Council meeting under way. Carpington’s wife had told me, when I’d phoned his house looking for him, that the meeting had started at 6:30 P.M. The councilman would have had to excuse himself in the middle of a council meeting, drive across town, retrieve the shovel, drive back across town, take his seat again in the council chambers.

And he couldn’t have grabbed the shovel after the council meeting, after I’d seen him, because by then the police were already at the scene. Sarah had phoned when I was at the interview with Paul’s science teacher-Ms. Winslow or Wilton or whatever-and told me she’d sent a reporter to cover it.

The next morning, after a nearly sleepless night, I phoned the town clerk.

“Did Roger Carpington leave during the council meeting for a long time?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I should be answering your questions, Mr. Walker. This is a police matter.”

“I’m only asking the one question. Was he there for the whole meeting, or did he skip out for a while?”

The clerk sighed. “He was there the whole time.”

“Thank you.”

I called my good friend Detective Flint and told him what I had uncovered. He was not impressed. “Mr. Walker, really, you’ve done more than enough. We can look after this investigation on our own, thanks very much.”

“But what about that shovel? I saw it with my own eyes. I was there, in the garage, and saw it.”

“You must have the times screwed up, then. Maybe you were in her house earlier than you think. Listen, Mr. Walker, once again, we thank you for your help and all, but we’ve got our guy.”

SO I LET IT GO.

Maybe I was wrong about the time. Or maybe, just like there could have been a second shooter on the grassy knoll, there was a second shovel.

Did it really matter?

Carpington was a weasel. Did it make any difference, if they were already going to send him away for five years for municipal corruption, if they left him there for another five for murder? What was it to me?

I mentioned to Sarah, in the kitchen, that we should go away. Leave the kids with her parents, go someplace for a week or two. Maybe rent a cottage, or spend some time in New York. She could use her contacts in the entertainment department to wangle some tickets to a couple of shows. Or maybe even Europe. Spend a week in London, or better, a week in Paris. How did that sound? Tom Darling thought the Missionary sequel was going to do better than expected, what with-I hate to say it-all the media exposure I’d gotten in the last week. So there was bound to be a little extra money coming in.

Sarah said she didn’t know, and went outside.

I WANTED TO THROW A little party. Okay, “party” is too strong a word. But I wanted to do something for Trixie and Earl. Have them over for a drink. I mentioned this to Sarah.

“So we’re going to throw a bash for a pot grower and a hooker,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “to the best of my knowledge, she just ties them up and spanks them, but she doesn’t fuck them.”

“Oh, my mistake. I’ll get out the good china.”

But she was actually pretty decent about it. At some level, Sarah seemed to understand that once I was in this mess I’d created for myself, I had to find a way out of it, and that Trixie and Earl were the unlikely pair who’d been there when I needed help. So we invited them over for a Wednesday evening, early. Trixie explained that she had a nine o’clock, and there was a lot of prep work. Costuming and all. Sarah made a lasagna and we uncorked a few bottles of wine.

Earl had said no, at first. He was glad to have helped out, but he wasn’t sure he felt comfortable coming over. He knew Sarah was pissed. But I leaned on him a bit, reminded him that, up to now, I’d managed to avoid mentioning his role to the police, and I was pretty sure they weren’t going to hear about him from Greenway or Carpington, who’d both hired high-priced lawyers and weren’t saying a word to anyone.

Trixie, too, had concerns about coming over. “Sarah knows what I do?”

“Yeah.”

“And the kids?”

“I’m less sure. I haven’t told them directly. But they’re not stupid. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but as long as you’re not going to be their guidance counselor, I think it’s okay.”

And so they came. We even invited over some of the other neighbors, the ones who’d stood out on the sidewalk the morning everything happened. We thought they might like to get to know what we were like when there weren’t so many emergency vehicles around. We finally met the people directly next door, in the house between ours and Trixie’s-the Petersons-a couple who worked as control room technicians for a Christian television network. I so wanted to tell them what their other neighbor did for a living, but held my tongue.

We didn’t all sit around the same table. It was informal. You grabbed a drink, scooped out a heap of lasagna and some salad on a plate, and ate it wherever you wanted. In the kitchen, in front of the TV, whatever.

“You’re back to work?” I heard Trixie ask Sarah from across the kitchen.

She nodded. “I took a week, went back. But Zack and I, we’re thinking maybe of taking a vacation.”

I stopped chewing so I could hear more.

“Maybe a cottage, maybe even a week in Paris.”

“That would be fabulous,” Trixie said. It sure would, I thought.

Earl came up to me, kept me from hearing anything else. There was a bit of tomato sauce on the cigarette he had between his lips. “So you’re sure you kept me out of it?”

“So far,” I said. “What if I have to tell at some point?”

Earl shrugged. “Thing is, I’m thinking of moving on. Let the Asians get somebody else to run the house. I don’t own it. I can walk away. Chances are, by the time you have to tell all, I won’t be around.”

I smiled. All I could think to say was “Yeah.”

Angie strolled by, rubbed her hand on my shoulder. I’d noticed both the kids were more physical lately. A hug here, a pat on the back there. I touched her hair as she passed me.

Paul, his plate heaped with lasagna and two rolls, came around the corner.

“Man of the hour,” Earl said.

Paul grinned. “For once, I didn’t get reamed out about leaving my backpack at the top of the stairs.”

Earl blew out some smoke, shoved a piece of bread into his mouth.

“You still going to help me with the yard?” Paul asked. “I want to put in some rosebushes, maybe.”

“I don’t know, sport,” Earl said. “I don’t think I’m the kind of guy your dad wants you to associate with.” I had, once the dust settled, told the kids how Earl made his living.

“Jeez, Dad, they’re going to legalize the stuff any day now.”

I felt awkward. “I think Earl’s thinking of moving on, anyway. Maybe I’ll have to learn a little about yard work myself. Or you can teach me, and I’ll just push the wheelbarrow around.”

“You know, Dad,” Paul said. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

I eyed him warily. “What?”

“The way I see it, if it hadn’t been for me, you and Mom, like, you probably wouldn’t be here now. So I was thinking some kind of reward was in order.”

I ran my tongue around inside my cheek. “Like what?”

“I think you should let me get a tattoo.”

“No way.”

“Come on! Look, if that guy had-” and he paused here “-killed you and Mom, I’d have been able to go ahead and do it anyway.”

“Too bad things worked out the way they did.”

Now he was frustrated. He hadn’t meant anything like that, and I was instantly sorry that I’d made the crack. But Earl seemed to find the exchange amusing.

Paul said, “You’re screwing up my words. I guess I’m saying, I mean, couldn’t I just get one? Remember I told you how people you know have them, and they’re not bad people? Like my math teacher, Mr. Drennan?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what about Earl here? He’s got one. Do you think he’s a bad person?”

Earl’s smile vanished. “Hey, Paul, don’t go dragging me into this. This is strictly between you and your parents, okay?”

“But the thing is, you’ve got one, and here you are, talking to my dad and all, and I don’t think he thinks any less of you because you’ve got one.”

“Of course I don’t,” I said to Paul. “But Earl’s an adult, and you’re not.”

“Just show it to him,” Paul coaxed Earl.

“I don’t think so, really.”

To me, Paul said, “It’s so cool, although I’ve only seen it once. Remember, Earl, we were putting in those shrubs, and you took off your shirt that one day, it was so friggin’ hot?”

Now I was curious. “What is it, Earl? A naked lady, I’m guessing.”

“No,” said Paul. “It’s way more cool than that. It’s a watch.”

Earl took a very long drag on his cigarette.

I said, “You might as well show me, Earl. Paul’s going to hound you until you do.”

Earl put his plate of lasagna down on the counter and slowly rolled up the right sleeve of his black T-shirt. He got it up above his shoulder and took his hand away.

It was a watch. But not a normal watch. It looked like a pocket watch, no strap, and it was melting, just like in that Salvador Dali painting.

He gave us a second to look at it, then rolled the sleeve back down.

“That’s quite something,” I said, and Earl’s eyes caught mine.