In the kitchen, there
was more of the same frugality. She had one set of silverware!
That same frugality—or
was it an attempt to stay mobile, to enable a quick, overnight exit? The idea
wormed its way into my head. The proverbial signs were there. Giving Clarence
and myself a fake name. A shortlist of necessary living items. The separation
from her husband. Was she running from something? From someone?
Would she have run
into
my arms, given enough time for her to realize what an amazing life we would’ve
had together?
Simply, yes.
The cabinets contained
a small number of pots and pans. The sink held a dirty dinner plate, smeared
with ketchup swipes and swirls indicative of someone that liked to have it in a
puddle instead of drizzled over her french fries.
A dirty plate left to
be cleaned later. A life left unfinished.
It’s a concept that has
always bothered me—the minutes before the end.
Earlier that evening,
as she’d dipped a fry into the ketchup, she couldn’t have known that she would
be dead soon.
Or what about the guy
crossing the street who gets hit by a distracted driver? What was he doing?
Where was he going? Who’ll miss him?
Or the woman that trips
over her dog and falls down her stairs, breaking her neck in the process? Who
was she on the phone with? What were they talking about? What song was on the
stereo? Did she like it? Was she on her way to change the station?
Abrupt endings leave
too much room for speculation about what
was
, and what
could’ve been
.
It was just their time to
go? Bullshit.
It was just Kerry’s
time to go? Bullshit.
In the minutes leading
up to the abrupt ending of my marriage, before the question, “Steve, would you
like to tell me about the thong I found in the backseat of your car?” I had
been teaching Smoke how to draw a bunny.
Half of a pink bunny
left incomplete on a white sheet of construction paper. A life left
unfinished.
It’s the denial of
resolution that bothers me. For this reason, I never start a jigsaw puzzle. I
don’t read a book I can’t finish in one sitting. I run the same, one-mile loop
around our block eight times so I don’t have to cross the street. Just in
case, because what if?
It’s a quirk that
Shayna found intolerable, but I was working on it. Not for her sake, but for
Kerry’s. I couldn’t risk the fact that it might bother her, as well.
“Be the victor,”
remember?
One single item in the
entire kitchen stood out as a glimpse into Kerry’s past.
A framed photo, of she
and Clarence, sat on an uncluttered countertop. Kerry in a silly, glittery,
cone-shaped
Happy Birthday!
hat and Clarence in his stupid, ragged,
rumpled suit. She smiled around a party horn held up to her lips; the kind
that toot and unravel when you blow. She looked happy.
Clarence—he smiled,
too, but something was off about the look in his eyes. It’s hard to say what
it was exactly, but the feeling I got was something like…I don’t know…gloom?
Like when you show up
to a parent-teacher conference, uninvited, and Mrs. Carson asks you to leave
because the tension is making the other parents uncomfortable, and you smile
and say, “It’s no problem, I understand.”
I didn’t care about
Clarence and his melancholy. Not at the time.
I used a paper towel—to
avoid fingerprints because there was no need to give the inevitable, inept
investigation probable cause—and flipped the picture frame over, face down.
Upstairs, in the spare
bedroom, I found six cardboard boxes. Three of them were empty. The others
contained clothing items, shoes (including a gorgeous pair of Louboutin pumps
that must have cost her—or Clarence—a small fortune, similar to the pair
Johanna wore on The Night of Betrayal) and books such as
Losing a Loved One
,
How to Let Go
, and
Surviving the After
.
I should have realized
these were my first clue.
Before you get the
wrong idea—I’m not a scumbag. You’re probably wondering why I was snooping
around her house while Kerry lay dead on the little strip of lawn that
separated our homes. I understand it sounds bad. I really do. Thinking back
on it, the whole thing comes across as a horrible, disgusting, self-centered,
solipsistic thing to do. I get that. I promise you that I understand how it
looks.
I’ve been accused of
caring too much. That’s the problem.
My need to help, to
make things right, has gotten me into more trouble than you can comprehend.
All right, well, I
don’t like the word “trouble.” What I mean is, it’s led to more unintended
repercussions than expected. For example: “I’m sorry your husband doesn’t love
you anymore. My wife thinks I’m an egotistical asshole. Let’s get some
coffee. Oh, you have fresh scones at your house? Sure, I’d love to sit on
your new mattresses and talk it over.” Really, can I be blamed? I’ll give you
a hint: the answer is “no.”
Again, the intent was
to help Kerry before the situation got mucked up by the powers that be.
Leaving her body alone,
before I called anyone, sounds despicable.
And on some level,
you’d have a right to think that—I’ve gotten used to being the target of
unwarranted disgust—but wait until you hear what I found in her bedroom.
Officer Planck
“I have to inform you
that this meeting is being recorded using both audio and video, so your
statements here today will officially be on the record. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“State your name.”
“Officer Thomas
Planck.”
“State your duties with
the police force, Officer Planck.”
“To serve and protect.
What do you want me to say? You want a rundown of what I do every day?”
“That’s good enough.
How do you know the individual, Steven Allister Pendragon?”
“He tried to sell me a
car one time. Weird, you know, he was too—what’s the word I’m looking for?
Clingy? I mean, yeah, he made for good conversation, but he thought we were
best friends after haggling over a car for ten minutes.”
“And that was the
extent of your relationship with him?”
“My relationship? You
make it sound like we were dating.”
“Answer the question,
please.”
“Yes, that was the
extent of our relationship. At least the way I saw it. In the beginning, it’s
my understanding that he was sort of attached to me, if you can call it that.”
“Would you say
obsessed?”
“Nah, nothing like
that. I’d say something like a combination of needy and harmless creep. Maybe
like an ex that won’t get the hint that you’re done, right? Like he’s standing
outside your window reciting poetry or something. I figured he’d get bored one
day and move on.”
“You didn’t
reciprocate?”
“Reciprocate? Hell
no. He called me at least once a day for over a month. I was polite and I was
civil. Nothing more than that.”
“What was the nature of
these calls?”
“He wanted a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“You know what kind of
favor—it’s in the report right there in front of you.”
“Answer the question,
please.”
“I never did it, but he
wanted me to look somebody up. Make and model of the car, license plate.
That’s all he had.”
“You informed him that
it was against the law without probable cause?”
“
Yes,
I did.
Over and over, but he wouldn’t let it go. He kept going on and on about how he
thought his neighbor was in danger.”
“He meant the
deceased.”
“Yes, Kerry Lynn
Parker.”
“Also known as January
Nicole Oliver.”
“The same.”
“
Did
he have
probable cause, Officer Planck?”
“Nothing that sounded
serious. Not at the time, no.”
“Due to the events that
occurred, it sounds like he was trying to report a threat and you ignored him.”
“What? No. No, no,
no. Look, you have to know this guy to understand. He’s...he’s—”
“He’s what, Officer
Planck?”
“Clueless. That’s what
I’m trying to say.”
“Clueless how?”
“The guy’s stuck inside
his own world. He has no idea how the rest of us see him.”
“The rest of us?”
“Humanity.”
“And how are you aware
of this? You indicated in your report, and here, verbally, that you didn’t
have a relationship with him.”
“I didn’t, not then,
anyway. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. But as I stated, he’d call me at
least once a day. And if I was—I hate to say it this way—if I wasn’t occupied
at the time, I’d let him talk.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning…slow day. No
speeders, no domestics to respond to. Just whenever the stars aligned to keep
things quiet. Like I said, he was—
is
—harmless. After a while, it sort
of became, I don’t know, entertaining to listen to him. Sort of like how my
four-year-old nephew tells these really tall tales about how he gets into
fights with aliens and dinosaurs in his yard. You know not a single word of
it’s true, but it’s fun to listen because he tells it with such enthusiasm.”
“Are you insinuating
that Mr. Pendragon was lying?”
“What would he be lying
about? The fact that he’s an oblivious jerk? I mean, mostly oblivious.”
“Noted. What would he
discuss with you?”
“I’d like to make it
clear that we never had
discussions
. Mr. Pendragon talked, I listened.
That said, he claimed he was worried about Mrs. Parker—Miss Oliver—the victim.
But he had a huge crush on her, and from the way it sounded, he was jealous
that somebody else already had the territory marked. He’d talk about his wife
and how she’d somehow driven him to cheating on her.
Eleven times
.
That’s not a one-off. That’s serial infidelity. He’d talk about his boss and
how he got fired for sleeping with the man’s wife. Nothing was ever his
fault. And the craziest thing? The guy was nuts over how the mail worked. I
kid you not, Steve talked about how amazing the post office was for over an
hour one day. He seems like the kind of guy that everybody loves to hate, but
inside his head, everybody adores him.”
“Steve? You’re on a
first name basis?”
“No, that was—that was
a slipup. Mr. Pendragon. My apologies.”
“No apology necessary.
We’re simply trying to confirm that your association with Mr. Pendragon didn’t
cloud your judgment. Dereliction of duty is a severe offense.”
“
That’s
what
this is about? God, I should’ve known better when you guys showed up. Here’s
the thing,
sir
, if helping a guy solve a murder is dereliction of duty,
then somebody has their priorities out of whack. Here, you can have my badge
and gun if that’s the case.”
“We’ll discuss your
future in a bit, don’t worry. Now that we’ve established a background, what
we’d like to hear is a complete recount of the events following the murder up
until yesterday evening.”
“What do you want to
know?”
“What were you and Mr.
Pendragon doing while Detectives Schott and Berger were investigating the
case?”
“Solving the damn
thing, that’s what we were doing.”
“And what did you
find? Details, please.”
“I guess your question
should be, what
didn’t
we find?”
Okay, now, I know this
sounds clichéd and deplorable, but when I walked into Kerry’s bedroom, I had
this miniscule moment of some imaginary choir of angels singing.
The kind of voice-over
reaction you hear when something amazing happens in an old television show.
Some low-budget train wreck of a sitcom that you somehow find yourself watching
at four in the morning, in an equally shitty hotel room full of its own sense
of train wreckitude after your wife kicks you out of the house.
I offered to serve out
my sentence on the couch, but Shayna declined. Apparently my perfectly
acceptable solution didn’t provide her with enough
distance
. The mere
separation by levels wasn’t enough. Miles barely sufficed.
Really, I couldn’t help
myself. I’d had daydreams of the magic happening in Kerry’s bedroom. For
months.
I know. Trust me, I
know. Sick, pathetic, twisted. But you have to understand something: the
reality of Kerry being dead hadn’t truly sunken in just yet. Of course there was
the absence of essence I’d mentioned earlier, yet when something is there and
then it isn’t, you need time to adjust.
Think of it as
something akin to jet lag. Like when you fly to New York in an attempt to
check, in person, whether or not Brian Williams has had a chance to look over
the packages you’ve been sending. Your body still thinks it’s noon, regardless
of the fact that every clock around you, even the one on the police cruiser
dashboard outside of Thirty Rockefeller Plaza, says it’s three o’clock.
A change has happened
within the world, but your soul hasn’t had time to catch up.
Acceptance comes later,
after you’ve had a chance to process.
Maybe jet lag isn’t the
right way to describe it. Think of pressing Enter on an old, dusty computer,
like something from the early 90s, and then waiting around for thirty seconds
for the grinding, screeching hard drive to execute your command. You’ve
pressed Enter, the information is out there—it simply takes a while to show the
results.
Copying files… You
have five hours and forty-three minutes remaining
.
So yeah, the bedroom.
Her bed was made. Her
nightstand was free of the usual jumble like lotion, a jewelry holder, and an
alarm clock.
Who doesn’t need an
alarm clock? I admired her confidence.
I didn’t notice the
blood on the carpet, not at first.
Inside the single
drawer of the nightstand, I found an eye mask, cherry lip-gloss (
yuck
—cherry,
an abomination to flavors everywhere) and…well…and a
personal massager
.
Hint taken? I won’t
bother to tell you the places my mind went for a fraction of a second. How
could it not? Remember…still computing.
Nothing of consequence
there.
To my left, a cat tree,
of all things. The tall kind, covered in rainy-day gray carpeting, with
multiple levels and legs covered in sisal rope for scratching. I have the
exact same one in my house. Sparkle loves it. That’s his territory. His
domain. His perch atop the world where he can nap lazily while I bust out the
morning workout routine.
Sparkle’s idea of “Be” is sleeping eighteen of twenty-four hours.
the victor
He succeeds daily.
The presence of a cat
tree surprised me, because, again, I thought I knew her, and I couldn’t recall
ever seeing a cat coming or going from her home. I’d never gotten the
cat-owner vibe, so it was bizarre, for lack of a better word.
As if the whole situation
wasn’t cuckoo enough, here’s where it got strange.
Or
began
to get
strange, I should say, because the events that followed made this tiny
discovery seem like a minor coincidence in comparison.
On the top level was a
black collar, decorated with a series of small, silver, glow-in-the-dark Harley
Davidson logos, and dangling from it, a skull-and-bones ID tag.
Do I have to tell you
that it belonged to Sparkle? Or could you have guessed?
Myself? Not in a
million years.
He’d lost it weeks
ago. Or so I’d thought.
Here’s the funny thing:
isn’t it ironic, Alanis, that a male cat with such a frou-frou name like
Sparkle would be wearing such a badass collar? No, not really. That’s just
amusing. Maybe the irony would be this: a cat named Traitor pulling a Benedict
Arnold in his neighbor’s home.
I did, I felt
betrayed. Yet another instance of being not good enough for someone in my
life.
Felis catus
or
homo sapiens
.
In the months since
Kerry had moved in next door, Sparkle would often disappear for hours, and me
being me, the trusting individual that I am, I would just assume that he was
out doing cat things. Like sleeping in a different place.
And by that I mean in
my lawnmower shed or under the front porch where the dirt is cool, especially
when it’s ninety-five degrees out and I’m keeping the tan even. He likes to be
near me. Usually.
I could’ve guessed the
correct set of lottery numbers every Tuesday and Friday for the next fifty
years before I would’ve guessed that Kerry’s bedroom had been his retreat.
You would think that in
all of our fleeting discussions, Kerry would’ve mentioned that she’d been
harboring my cat. She’d
seen
me with him. I’d taken the time to
introduce them formally one day. “Kerry, this is Sparkle. He loves women.”
Strange choice of words? I didn’t think so. Kerry didn’t, either.
But no, never. Not one
mention of it.
It might seem like such
an innocuous, petty, pointless thing to note. My cat enjoyed her company, he
loves women, she’d been kind enough to get him a tall cat tree just like the
one he had at home. So what, right?
I suppose that last
detail didn’t stick out to you, did it?
Just like the one he
had at home.
Yeah, me neither.
And again, so what?
There are twenty places around the city that sell cat trees, most of them in
some amalgamation of the same thing. Tri-level, carpeted scratching posts for
legs.
However, there’s only
one place—this hole-in-the-wall, entirely-out-of-your-way pet store over on
Waverly Avenue—that sells handmade, master craftwork like the ones in my house
and Kerry’s bedroom. Their signature is the top level. It’s in the shape of a
mouse.
Coincidence? Could
have been, easily.
If I’d never looked in
her closet, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
If I’d never looked in
her closet, the next few days would have amounted to nothing more than
answering police inquiries with a befuddled expression, wondering why they
found the following:
Three of my shirts.
One pair of my pants.
A small stack of my
Entertainment
Weekly
magazines that I’d assumed I had thrown away. I remember them being
on my coffee table one morning, and then they were gone that evening. The
recycling had gone out that day, and rather than harping on the fact that I may
have a minor case of Alzheimer’s slipping in like my father, I chalked it up to
the fact that I’d tossed them out and simply forgotten.
Lastly, a set of photo
prints—pictures of Sparkle and I in the bathroom mirror (selfies, I think
they’re called…but no duck lips), pictures of Smoke and Shade from a year
prior, pictures of Kerry smiling at me from the other side of a screen door,
and a single picture of Angry Shayna after I told her I was in the process of
moving on, that I’d found someone new, someone named Kerry.
Pictures that could
have only come from my iPhone.
***
I’m not under any sort
of delusion that there’s something on my iPhone that’s important enough to
protect, thus the lack of security. One swipe and you’re in. This cavalier
attitude came about as a result of my previous iPhone performing a perfect
somersault into the toilet after Shayna discovered a couple of unaccounted-for
phone numbers. I learned that if I ever wanted something kept private, it
needed to be stored in a place that couldn’t be ruined by water, like my head,
supposing Shayna didn’t see fit to drown me at some point.
I play games on it. I
take pictures. I read the news.
I would occasionally
call my old house, just to see if one of my children would answer the phone
before Shayna.
They never did. It was
my assumption that caller ID was the culprit. I assume that they’d been warned
about talking to strangers.
Stranger danger! Dad bad!
If the iPhone gets
stolen, it gets stolen. I’ll lock it remotely and go buy another one when I
can afford it. The only real loss would be all the photos that I hold on to
like Uncle Scrooge and his money.
Never would I have
guessed that someone, Kerry most of all, would’ve stolen photos from it for the
lone purpose of printing and hiding them in a shoebox.
For the love of God,
when, when,
when
did that happen?
But hang on, I’m
getting ahead of myself.
After finding Sparkle’s
collar and cursing his traitorous name, I took a deep breath and reconsidered.
He’d been in good company. It wasn’t like he’d been out prowling the neighborhood
with a clowder of cats, howling and getting tattoos, chasing little old
ladies.
Although, I have
considered the fact that I wouldn’t mind if Sparkle happened to scratch Mrs.
Epstein across the street. Mailman Jeffrey doesn’t like her, either. In all
seriousness, she has enough Keep Off the Grass! placards to rival any
godforsaken election year.
At the foot of the bed,
I froze and looked at the bloody handprints on the floor.
Two of them. Kerry’s,
obviously.
I watched the replay in
my mind. Kerry, backed up near the window, pleading. Apologizing for
something. Begging for mercy. A handgun raised, a trigger pulled, a sharp
crack
,
a hole opening in her chest. You know how a strobe light flickers in a dark
room and you can only see movements happening to a timed beat? That’s what I
saw. Flash, gun, flash, trigger.
Flash, blood.
Kerry’s hands going up,
grabbing her chest, stumbling backward.
But that hadn’t been
enough. Whoever the shooter was, he must’ve grabbed her, turned her around, and
threw (no,
launched
) her out the window.
What level of fury did
he have to make him do such a thing to such a wonderful person?
I mentioned that it had
to have been a crime of passion, a momentary explosion of feeling that had
resulted in death. But really, was that it? He’d arrived with a gun, so there
was premeditation, but did he actually mean to use it? Maybe it was just to
threaten her. Maybe. Possibly.
Yet, the more I thought
about it, shooting her hadn’t been enough. Tossing her out the window—what
that said to me was that he was ridding himself of something. Like throwing a
bag of garbage down a chute. It’s done. It’s gone. Yes, honey, I took out
the trash.
Which meant a history
of something. Arguments? Betrayal? The books in the spare bedroom that
hinted toward a separation, the divorce papers from Wellington &
Wellington, Attorneys at Law—they could have easily pointed to her ex-husband.
And it was that thought
that led me to searching her dresser first. There hadn’t been any sort of
paperwork scattered around the kitchen, like the utter, out-of-control mess
that Shayna left behind on a regular basis, often leading to questions such as,
“Steve, would you like to tell me why there’s a charge for forty-seven dollars
from the Hideaway Motel on your credit card statement?”
There had been no sign
of bookkeeping in Kerry’s spare bedroom, so she had to have the divorce
papers—where I’d find the name of her murderous ex-husband—stashed away
somewhere in the bedroom.
The dresser seemed like
a logical choice.
It hadn’t been the best
spot for
me
to store things. I learned that late in my failed
marriage. I mean, you know me, I’m smart, but sometimes haste erases the
benefit of good judgment. Here’s another question I heard, and picture this in
a tone so disgusted, you’d think I’d eaten someone’s puppy: “Steve, are you
seriously stupid enough to keep
porn
stashed in your
sock drawer?
I mean, for God’s sake, if you’re going to hide it, at least put it in a place
I don’t look in
at least three times a week
.”
I found socks in the
top drawer. Mostly athletic ones, the kind that come up to your ankle, two
sets of pantyhose, one black and one flesh-tone, and a pair of white, knee-high
stockings trimmed with lace. For a moment, I got this mental image of Clarence
drooling over Kerry wearing nothing more than those knee-highs and a set of
heels. I’m fairly certain that the combination of jealousy and disgust caused
me to dry heave, just a little.