The Last Kind Words: A Novel Read online

  “Fuck this,” I said.

  “Listen to me, Terry. You’ve got to listen.” He pawed at his face but he wasn’t sweating. I was. “Someone’s out there snuffing women.”

  “What do the cops say about all this?”

  “They still think I did her.”

  “So do I.”

  “Check with Lin.”

  “Check with Lin?”

  “Stop repeating everything I say, Terry. Just do it.”

  “Why? Why should I?”

  “Because I’m asking you to.”

  I slumped back. “You haven’t actually asked me anything, Collie. And that’s how I know you’re bullshitting. You’re giving orders, you’re pushing me around the way you always do. Fuck this nonsense.”

  “Please, Terry. Please. I’m begging you.”

  “You’re not begging me. You’re simply saying that you’re begging me. But why? Why do you care so much?”

  Collie leaped up in frustration and I slipped out of the chair, put some space between us, got my fists up. My brother could be a fearsome sight, the way he moved like a caged beast waiting for the proper moment to strike. His eyes settled on me and he frowned, like I was an idiot to be afraid of him. He was detached from the horror of his own crimes. He had no idea how intimidating it might be for me to sit across from him, from those hands. They were powerful and menacing. They could strangle a young woman easily. They could do the same thing to me.

  “Why wouldn’t I care?” he asked.

  “Why didn’t you say anything about this before?”

  “I did. But no one believed me. Look, you’ve got to trust me on this.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Wait. Wait.” I mouthed the word again but nothing came out. Then there was a trickle of sound that turned into a chuckle thick with revulsion. “I have to trust you? And what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Ask questions.”

  “Ask questions? That’s what you’re telling me to do? What does that even mean?”

  “Find out who did it. Stop them.”

  “Why do you care? What difference does it make now? Five years later?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a long time.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense. You iced one young girl but you want to see justice for another you claim you didn’t kill?”

  “It’s not a claim, Terry. I didn’t kill her. I man up for my own crimes.”

  “You’re not even sure!”

  “I am sure now. Find Gilmore. You remember Gilmore?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, I remember Gilmore.”

  “He still hangs around the house. He can probably put you in touch with the dicks who handled my case and the cases involving the other girls.”

  “Why the hell would I want to surround myself with cops?”

  “Because they think I’m lying.”

  “I think you’re lying too.”

  “No, you don’t. You think I was wrecked out of my mind and can’t remember, but you don’t think I’m lying.”

  I didn’t like being corrected. “Actually, Collie, I do think you’re lying and I think you’re setting me up to take some kind of fall here. I don’t think you want to go out of the game alone.”

  My brother didn’t have the capacity to look hurt. It wasn’t in his nature. I wasn’t sure if it was in his nature to even be hurt. But the look that crossed his eyes came as close as I’d ever seen.

  I knew every muscle and vein and scar in my brother’s face. I’d seen him with a 106-degree fever and his eyes rolling back and showing only white from the agony of sepsis. I’d walked in on him more than once while he was in flagrante delicto, usually with one of my girls. I knew every twitch and tell he had.

  I got in close. “Say it again.”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  Maybe it was the truth. I just didn’t understand why he was bothering to tell it now. It earned him nothing. He couldn’t buy his freedom or his life for it. And a mass murderer couldn’t possibly care about justice for a victim that wasn’t even his own.

  The exhaustion and miles and edginess caught up to me in that moment. I slumped into the seat and dropped my chin to my chest, and before I knew it I felt tears on my face.

  “Are you crying?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You are. For me?”

  “Fuck no. I want to know what set you off.”

  “Nothing.”

  He’d spent the evening drinking at the Elbow Room. He’d gone on his spree and then returned to the bar, ordered a beer, and casually informed the bartender and patrons that he’d just murdered several people. He’d cracked open the .38 and unloaded the weapon. His knuckles were bruised but not bloodied or torn. It didn’t take much to beat an old woman to death. He waited without incident for the cops to show up. He confessed on the spot to what he had done.

  I lifted my shirt and wiped my face. I breathed deep. I tried to calm myself. I could be cool and steady burgling the house of a cop while he slept six feet away from me. But my own brother made me a heaving mess.

  “Something had to,” I insisted.

  “No.”

  “You had no drugs in your system. You’d only had a few beers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you were sitting in the Elbow Room, minding your own business, having a pilsner by yourself—”

  “A Corona.”

  “—having a Corona by yourself, and you decided, Hey, I need to go out and kill a bunch of people.”

  “It wasn’t a decision,” he said. “It just … happened. I’m not lying. I haven’t lied to you yet, Terry.”

  “You told me you were making ghosts. Why did you do it?”

  “Stop asking.”

  “Was it because of a woman?” I asked.

  “What woman?”

  “How the fuck do I know what woman? Any woman.”

  “Why would a woman make me—”

  “How the fuck do I know why? For any reason.”

  “No, it wasn’t a woman, Terry. Listen to me.”

  “Listen to you!” I jumped out of the chair. His voice, or my own, was too loud inside my head, and I couldn’t hear myself anymore. “You listen to me!” I shouted. “Are you …?” The words caught in my throat. I tried to cough them free. I couldn’t catch any air. I tried again, my voice sounding nothing like me, sounding, in fact, more like him. He stood and reached for me. I backed away. “I mean, I know you’re crazy, you had to be, you have to be … but man, Jesus, Collie, really, just … just … are you fucking insane?”

  “No.”

  I stumbled toward the door while he continued to plead with me. He said her name again. Becky Clarke. It’s all he cared about. Not the other kills on his conscience, not what he was doing to our family. I hammered at the door like a terrified child. It brought the screws running. I was so pale that they checked me for shiv wounds.

  My Christ, I thought, I have the same blood running through my veins.

  You walk into a department store and there are security cameras and undercover employees everywhere. You try to creep an apartment building and you have to get past a front door, a security door with an automatic lock, closed-circuit television, and a doorman who gets paid by the pound. You want to score a warehouse and you’ve got a couple of twenty-year-old fuckup minimum-wage rent-a-cops patrolling the grounds just waiting to pull their revolvers, dive and roll, snap off six wild shots, and blow somebody’s face away.

  But if you want to slip in somewhere that’s full of people, action, money, drugs, weapons, where no one even looks at you much less questions you, then try a police station about six P.M., dinnertime.

  Cops are hungry and tired and wanting to get home. They’re sloppy and sign out early. The ones left around figure that if you’re in the squad room you must have a good reason. You’re a victim, you’re waiting to make a complaint, look at mug shots, sign a statement. If they don’t recognize you and you’re not part of their casel
oads then they don’t want anything to do with you. They’re already burdened with unsolved crimes and vics and pains in the ass of every stripe. They pretend to be busy and refuse to meet your eye. They don’t check up on you. They hope the next cop down the line will take care of you instead.

  First thing I did when I walked into the squad room was scan the on-call board. Gilmore had the late shift and wouldn’t be on until midnight. I went looking for his desk.

  I recognized the framed photo of his two daughters, Maggie and Melanie. It was an old picture. No snapshots of his wife. A happily married man always puts a photo of his wife on his desk. He changes the pictures of his kids and keeps them up-to-date, unless they no longer live at home with him. Like my father had said, Phyllis had finally walked out and taken their daughters with her.

  I sat in his chair and went through his desk hoping I might find Collie’s jacket or files on the case. It was a long shot and I came up empty. I did find an old rent receipt that gave me Gilmore’s new address. I knew the apartment house. The neighborhood was good, but he wasn’t paying much. Police discount.

  Cops walked past me by the boatload. They dragged in suspects who whined and complained and tried to look menacing. They threatened to sue, wanted their lawyers, proclaimed their innocence. The cops ignored them. So did I.

  Under Gilmore’s phone was a directory sheet of extension numbers. I called the archives room and asked them to bring up Collie Rand’s file. Some old-timer gave me static about proper channels.

  I kept my voice quiet but filled with a self-righteous sharpness. “Move your wrinkled ass, pops. Protocol takes time and we don’t have any to waste.”

  The geezer sputtered. I told him to leave the file on my desk in the next ten minutes, even if I wasn’t there. That brought another round of protests. I cut him off. “If you don’t get moving now you’ll work the last of your thirty on the bay this winter. It’ll be the boat for you. You got insulated drawers, old-timer? You ever seen hypothermia of the ball sac? You want to go out of the game with your ex-wives knowing you’ve lost your package?”

  I hung up.

  The desk next to Gilmore’s was also unoccupied. I went and sat over there and watched the squad room fill and empty. I went to the little kitchenette area and got myself a cup of coffee and a stale bagel. It wasn’t until I took the first bite that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I was starving.

  Gilmore was one of those cops who had more in common with the criminals he was trying to put away than with the rest of the joe-citizen world. He’d been in trouble himself as a teenager, orphaned early and kicked around the foster-family system, spent some time in the juvie reformatory and then county lockup later on. He’d steal a car, go joyriding, get laid in the backseat, then return it a couple of days later.

  He had his big turnaround when he tried to outrun a statie with his girlfriend riding shotgun and got into a minor crackup on the LIE that cost her the full use of her right arm. He did a nine-month jolt, came out, and started going to a community college. Must’ve stood on tippy-toes to get him over the police height requirement and graduated middle of the pack at the academy. For years he kept changing divisions—bunko, vice, narco—but they all brought him around to Big Dan Thompson.

  Big Dan had a way of working his magic on a cop like Gilmore. Gilmore wasn’t dirty but he was just bent enough to help Big Dan out on occasion. So if Dan knew a little about one of the rival syndicates—the Chinese, the Colombians, the Russians—maybe what time a shipment was coming in or who pulled the trigger on some witness for the D.A., he’d turn Gilmore on to it for some kind of trade. Nothing that couldn’t be considered a legal gray area. Maybe Gilmore would let one of Big Dan’s boys off on a leg-breaking rap or he wouldn’t get around to popping one of the big games even when he knew about it. I never found out if Big Dan gave Gilmore a monthly envelope, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Gilmore had a wedge of Dan’s cash hidden in a lockbox buried in his yard someplace.

  Gilmore hooked on to me when I was sixteen because he suspected I was the one pulling burglaries in Dix Hills, a ritzy neighborhood where some of the residents had clout with the town council. He was right, I was. He followed me for days, trying to catch me climbing into someone’s window. He dragged in known fences and tried to get them to roll on me.

  He braced me hard the first time—cuffs, twelve hours in the holding tank without a phone call, no food or toilet break, threats against the family—and then later he tried playing soft, telling me about his own run-in with the law, giving me his whole life story. I thought he was lying but later on found out it was all true.

  While he chased after me, I watched him. He was a little bulldog who seemed to be running from himself. It was written in his face. He eventually caught on that the Rands were satellite members of the Thompson crew and started coming around the house. At first he just rousted my father and uncles and Collie, trying to pick up information in exchange for favors. Except the Rands didn’t play that kind of game.

  For some reason, he seemed to like the family. He couldn’t hide his interest in us. I knew it was because he’d never had a family of his own, no father to talk to about guys like Big Dan. He rousted us less and less and started hanging around. Eventually he began sitting out on the porch, having beers with my father. My mother knew the birthdays of his kids and would send cards.

  One time Gilmore found me reading to Dale and said, “That’s not how you do it. You have to work the voices, put on a show. When the vampires bite, you have to pull back your lips, show teeth.” He told me how he read children’s books to his two daughters, the way he’d get into character, the different voices he’d use. At the time his daughters were three and four, and Dale was ten. He didn’t think it mattered.

  When Collie dove into the underneath Gilmore actually came around and tried to console my parents. He hugged my mother and patted my father’s arm. He brought flowers like he was attending a funeral. He didn’t cry with them but I could see that he was trying to. I thought, even then, Gilmore, he’s going to be the one in the end who gets close enough to stick in the knife.

  I finished my bagel and scarfed down two more. When I returned to Gilmore’s desk Collie’s file was there. Five files, actually, stuck inside a huge accordion folder. I photocopied everything. I had a stack of about a hundred pages. I found a couple of thick rubber bands in Gilmore’s junk drawer and snapped them around the bundle. I called the geezer back and told him to come pick up the file. He started yelling and I said, “You did good, pops, you may have just saved a life,” and walked out.

  JFK met me at the bottom of the driveway. He looked regal and aware, his eyes lit by the setting sun. I got the sense that he knew there was potential trouble coming down from different quarters and he planned on being ready for it.

  I left the thick sheaf of paperwork under the passenger seat and slid out of the car. As I moved up the walk I called JFK to me, but he remained staunchly on guard, continuing his watch.

  I passed the trash can and thought of chucking all the pages in and forgetting my brother had said anything at all. I thought I could very easily live in denial back at the ranch or at another one like it. I had already done it for five years. I could do it for another fifty. If anyone asked if I had a brother I could say no or say yeah, he lives back east, or say he was dead without explaining anything more. I could sleep well without any remorse for never following up.

  My old man was inside with my mother, watching television with Gramp. My uncles and sister were nowhere in sight. I could hear my dad talking to his father as if he might get coherent responses. My mother did the same thing. They were having a lively conversation that would sound buoyant to anyone else but sounded strained to me.

  They weren’t doing it just for Gramp’s benefit, hoping to keep what little personality he had left alive for as long as they could. They were doing it for themselves because it was the only way they could possibly accept the burden of caring for him. Pret
ending that it mattered. I imagined that when my father spoke to Old Shep he heard the man’s deep voice talking back to him. His thunderous laughter so forceful that you had to lean away from it.

  I tried to figure out how much I should tell them. Would it make them feel any better that Collie now admitted to killing only seven people instead of eight? Hell, I decided to say nothing. It wasn’t much of a decision. It was the path of least resistance. When you heard someone at the door, you dove out the window. Avoid confrontation, hide or run away. I’d been doing it my whole life.

  I walked in and my parents immediately quit their little performance. I vibed that there was a darker subtext to their benign chatter. I wondered if the news crews had been more aggressive after I left, banging on the door, asking my mother where I’d been these last few years, why I was back, if I’d been in prison too. If I had blood on my hands too.

  My father asked me, “Hungry? Got some leftovers. Steak and mashed potatoes, yams, corn on the cob. Your favorite.”

  It was my favorite. It was also Collie’s favorite. I had no doubt he’d ask for it for his last meal. All I’d eaten today were the rubbery stale bagels. My guts were knotted and I had cramps. My stomach made a weird sound and I said, “Maybe later.”

  “You know where the fridge is.”

  My mother was watching me intently. I could tell that she knew I’d visited the prison again despite her warning not to go. Her eyes flashed and I could feel her reading exactly where I’d been each minute of the day. The meeting with Danny, the stalking of Kimmy, the face-to-face with Collie. I wondered if I should tell her that Collie had gotten married behind bars like all the rest of those death-row douche bags.

  She tucked a few coarse strands of Gramp’s hair back behind his ear, then did the same with her own soft auburn curls. She was gathering herself.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Jesus Christ, considering you’ve lived with second-story men all your life, you’re a really awful liar. What is it, Ma?”