Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017
- Автор: Фузилли Джим, Харрис Шарлин
- Год: 2017
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017». Краткое содержание книги:
He turns to face me. “Don’t tell me that,” he says. “You think I don’t know it? You’re not as smart as you believe you are, Jerry. You never were.”
“Sit down,” I say. “Have some coffee.”
“You think she loves you? That she fell head over heels?” he says, his voice quavering. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“Leave it alone,” I say, not wanting this and not wanting him here in my kitchen and not wanting anything to go the way I know it will.
“Man, she picked you because you had money at the time. She thought your job at Peabody would keep you all rolling in it from now till death do us part. She thought she’d punched her ticket when she spread her legs.” He sweeps his arm to take in the paint-flecked cabinets and peeling wallpaper and the ripped linoleum on the floor. “Just look how that turned out.” His laugh is an ugly, shrill cackle that makes my stomach flutter. “I ain’t as stupid as everybody thinks I am,” he says. “I’ve got prospects when I get out. Who knows? Dianne might just crawl right back between my sheets before all of this is over.”
He smirks as if he’s got a secret, but he doesn’t. A week ago last Saturday, he showed up drunk and stoned, caught between strutting pride and weepy self-pity. We sat at the kitchen table and drank straight through until dawn. Before he passed out, he told me about the six thousand dollars he stole from Hugh Mitchell — a local real-estate developer, schoolboard member, and the former and most likely soon to be again county commissioner. Wendell told me more than I wanted to hear about how he’d come to be spending the night with Mitchell while the man’s family was out of town and why Mitchell, who he’d robbed and beaten, had used his influence to have the charges dropped to a misdemeanor and then get Wendell released on his own recognizance until his court date.
“I know,” I say now. “You’ve got a rainy-day fund tucked away. You told me that.”
On the night he told me all of that, he was one or two beers shy of comatose and doesn’t remember exactly what he said. It feels good to see the uncertainty in his face.
“But I didn’t give you details,” he says with more hope than certainty.
“Nah,” I say. “Just that you had some cash tucked away somewhere and weren’t proud of how you got it. I’ll tell you the truth. It didn’t make much sense.”
“That’s the story of my frigging life,” he says. “I might have been talking about anything.”
He takes out a cigaret, fumbles through his pocket until he finds a lighter. “Hey,” he says once he has it going. “You want to get out of here? Maybe pick up a case of beer, some sausage biscuits from the Pantry, spend the morning driving around and see what kind of trouble we can find. Like back in high school.”
“Wendell, I only went drinking with you once or twice back then. You were running with the Avery brothers full-time.”
He scratches the stubble on his cheeks. “Christ, I wish you hadn’t mentioned them. Three or four nights a week, I dream I was with them when they ran their old Merc into the river. When I wake up, I still hear them screaming.”
“Look,” I say. “I’ll fix you something here. I’ll scramble some eggs.”
He squints at me through a cloud of smoke. “You got any Tabasco?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “We’ve got ketchup.”
“It’s not the same,” he says. “I can’t stand eggs without hot sauce.”
“Dianne told me that.”
“She also tell you I’m a lot better in the sack than you?”
“The way I remember it, she said it was the other way around.”
He winks at me. “Well, that’s all right. I don’t reckon it hurts for her to lie to make you feel better.”
We stand there, grinning at each other across the kitchen, and for a second, I think I’m actually going to miss him. When we were kids we were best friends, a pair of white-trash boys from the hollows who spent their summers and weekends roaming the woods and playing pirate along the banks of the Green River. But by high school, we started drifting away. In our sophomore year, Wendell discovered the joys of Falls City beer and Kentucky Tavern whiskey while I stayed more or less sober and did my best to limp towards graduation. The month after I made it, Wendell went to prison for stealing a car, and thirteen months after that, I went to Vietnam. When I got out of the army, I wasted a year or so drifting, then nineteen months working the oil fields in Louisiana, and finally, nearly three years hauling cars out of Jacksonville, Florida, before I came home and lucked into a job at River Queen. On the night I first bumped into Dianne at Redheaded Ray’s Roadhouse, it had been years since I’d said as much as hello to Wendell, and she had already served him with divorce papers while he was serving ninety days on a possession charge. Back then Joni was just learning to talk. She insisted on calling Wendell “Daddy” and me “Da.” Everything about my relationship with Wendell and Joni and Dianne is complicated. Sometimes my life feels like an end-of-term exam for a class I’ve never attended.
Now, Wendell turns on the transistor radio Dianne keeps on the shelf over the sink. A nasal-voiced reporter drones on about the hostages in Iran and the challenge President Carter is facing from Ted Kennedy and the rising price of gasoline and heating oil. Wendell fiddles with the dial, and country music fades in and out before he settles on a weather report. Cold today with flurries, colder tonight with a winter storm set to kick in by sunset.
“You ever take Joni sledding?” he asks.
“A couple of times,” I say.
“But not at Five Spot Hill.”
“No,” I say. “Of course not.”
He turns off the radio, then sits at the kitchen table and picks up the giraffe. “I want to give this to her,” he says.
“She’s staying with Dianne’s mom up in Elizabethtown. You know that.”
He glares at me. “Christ,” he says, “I don’t even get to see my little girl before I go inside.”
I remind him he said his goodbye last Monday when he came to dinner. Joni is getting old enough to ask questions — which is why Dianne had him over and fixed a baked lasagna as a special treat, why we’d told Joni that he’d found work up in Chicago and wouldn’t be back until summer.
Now he says, “I know, man, I know, okay. The booze makes me cloudy.” He picks up the giraffe and then sets it back down. “You’ll give it to her, though, right? Tell her it’s from me.” He drops his half-smoked cigaret into an empty RC can and sighs. “Hell, a hundred and twenty days isn’t that long,” he says. “I’ll be back before the fishing gets goods.”
“Sure,” I say. “But you don’t fish.”
He smiles and trails his thumbnail along the rim of the can. “Maybe I’ll start. Get off the booze and the drugs, get my head together so I can keep a regular job. I’ve got to do something. I mean, I tell myself that everything’s fine, that I’m maintaining. But look at me now, man.” He sighs, hides his face in his hands. “Jesus, I wish I’d never met Hugh Mitchell.”
I don’t point out that meeting him didn’t mean he had to beat him up, steal his money, and threaten to expose his secret unless Mitchell intervened to get him a better deal. I don’t remind him that he’s said this same thing about fresh starts and fishing at least a half-dozen times. He looks low enough this morning, so I keep my thoughts to myself.
“Listen to me,” he says. “There are worse places than jail, aren’t there?”
“Yeah,” I say. “There are.”
He runs his tongue over his bottom lip. “You never talk about Vietnam. I bet you saw some things. Probably killed some people.”