Homicide My Own Page 11

  “You didn’t have to chain him like an animal,” she said, needing not to let it go on my terms entirely.

  Gwen had tossed her cigarette and now was behind Odd, who was behind me. “I can explain it,” she said. Odd made her sit on the wicker. I made Stacey sit on the bed. We stood between them. Houser watched from his tether.

  “You’re soaking wet,” said Gwen.

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  “You should get out of your clothes and dry off before you catch a cold. We’re in no rush.”

  “Oh, you’re not in a rush. Thank you.”

  “Maybe you’d better,” said Odd.

  “Off,” I said to Stacey, and when she stood up I tore off the bedspread and went into the bathroom.

  I pulled off the wet t-shirt and the muddy jeans and toweled myself off. I wrapped myself in the bedspread and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. How do I explain all this to Connors, and do I leave out the kiss with a man thirty-one, two, three? A naked kiss, me anyhow. If I tell him it meant nothing, an unavoidable accident, will I free him up to make a similiar confession to me, using the same alibi? All it was was a kiss, though if Houser were an authority, and he might be, a kiss is the “glory of the universe.” It was nice.

  I longed for twenty-four hours ago, when all I feared was losing my essence, and that had already happened.

  “You aren’t gonna believe this,” said Odd, when I emerged from the bathroom.

  “They got a litle laundromat here,” said Gwen, jumping in nervously, “next to the boiler room. I could laundry your clothes for you. Between me and Stacey, we ought to have enough for you to put together a dry outfit. Our bags are over there, just help yourself.”

  “What are your bags doing in our cottage?” I asked, knowing that was part of what I wouldn’t believe, according to Odd, who was smiling at me and the situation.

  “They were on their way to the ferry,” he said, “homeward bound. But...”

  “But what?”

  “Their car broke down.”

  “First time that ever happened,” said Gwen. “Honda makes a dependable product, but that one does have a hundred ‘n sixty thousand miles on it, and...I got it real cheap. There’s this old boyfriend...”

  “You don’t have to tell them everything, mom,” said Stacey.

  “Guess who gave them a tow?” said Odd. “Guess who’s fixing their car?” said Odd.

  “Karl Gutshall,” said I, and he laughed. I didn’t see what was so damn funny.

  “Trying to fix it,” said Gwen. “I gotta call tomorrow and get the damage.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Beginning to see why they’re here?” asked Odd.

  “No, no...”

  “This is the only place got rooms,” said Gwen, “and they don’t got any rooms, not that it matters much anyway, since my Visa is maxed out. Anyway, that nice old couple told us you had this place and we should talk to you.”

  “Why in the world would you feel we’re obliged to take you in?” I asked Gwen.

  “I was kind of hopin’ Spokaneans would stick together,” she said.

  “We don’t even like Spokane...or Spokaneans.”

  Odd laughed. I went to the reefer, pushed Houser aside and got a Molsons. I popped the top and took some down.

  “That can’t be true,” said Gwen. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be cops there, takin’ an oath and everything.”

  “By this time tomorrow we probably won’t be cops.”

  “Oh, sure you will, ‘cause we’re all gonna cooperate. Now, listen, I’m a good cook,” argued Gwen. “I could make us a nice dinner here. And don’t think that I would want to take your bed away from you, you two can have that...”

  “We’re partners,” I said, “we don’t sleep together, doesn’t anybody understand that?”

  “Well, whatever.... I only meant, we can work something out, it’s just for the one night.”

  “This man is our prisoner,” I tried to explain. “He will be charged with statutory rape, and that one,” nodding toward Stacey, “is his victim...”

  “I’m not a victim!” she hissed. “How can you charge him with anything if there’s no victim? You think I’ll testify? As if!”

  “...and whatever his sentence turns out to be,” I continued, ignoring her for the moment, because it would be impossible to ignore her for much longer, “it will include the order to never again come in contact with her.”

  “Try and stop us,” said Stacey.

  “And you expect me, as an officer of the law, to allow a rapist and his victim to share the same room for an overnighter? I don’t think so.”

  “I’m not a rapist,” whispered Houser, ashamed.

  Stacey was too outraged to spit, that I should label their love with such crass and negative name-calling. I got all that from her eyes, and in spite of myself I envied the passion I saw in them.

  “I don’t think anyone would fault us, Quinn, considering the circumstances. We can let Houser sleep on the kitchen floor, cuffed. Gwen and Stacey can have the bed, you can sleep on the sofa, and I’ll sit on the rocker with my weapon in hand. Anyone tries anything, I’ll shoot them.”

  “You’re just dying to shoot someone, aren’t you?” said Houser.

  Odd smiled.

  “Are you enjoying this?” I asked.

  “Compared to everything else,” he said, “it’s a relief.”

  14.

  Odd drove to the little island grocery store and persuaded them to stay open a few minutes longer so that he could buy the things on Gwen’s shopping list. They stayed open even longer, long enough to tell him what they remembered, that Jeannie was a rare beauty, jewel of the island. Everybody had a crush on her, but there was one particular boy, only twelve, who followed her around like a puppy. Who? They couldn’t remember. They remembered only that for a time he was her shadow.

  Gwen, true to her word, gathered up my clothes and some of their own and took them to the laundromat. I was left with Houser and Stacey and my second bottle of Molsons. I moved Houser from the reefer to the rocker and cuffed him to the arm of it. He was no great risk and I was thinking seriously of bagging the cuffs, but the presence of Stacey made me uneasy. Individually, they were harmless. Together, I didn’t want to know.

  I made her stay on the bed and the inactivity was driving her nuts.

  “No TV in this dump, no magazines even. Charlie, don’t this suck?”

  “Don’t talk to him,” I ordered.

  “I can’t talk to him?”

  “What did I just say?”

  “Well, then, can I talk to you?”

  “Only if you have something big to say?”

  “How do I know if it’s big?”

  “If you don’t know, don’t say it?”

  She was in bare feet. She yanked at a ragged toenail, then said, “Your boyfriend’s a real babe.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend, and that wasn’t a big thing to say.”

  “You have to tell Charlie not to get jealous, ‘cause he gets jealous when I say somebody else is a babe, even though I might be teasing. Your guy really is, though. What’s his name?”

  “None of your business.

  “Jeez, don’t you ever chill out?”

  “No.”

  “I’d just as soon hitchhike home as be stuck here with you, lady.”

  “I’d just as soon you did that too.”

  “Girls, girls...,” said Houser. “Can’t we all just get along?”

  She was a spirited girl, I’ll give her that, and I wondered what she saw in Houser. My mother always used to say, there’s a lid for every pot. Even she would have to admit some matches are better left unmade. I had to remind myself this was neither a match nor a mismatch, it was a felony.

  “I don’t know why you guys are staying here anyway,” she said. “If you came here to bust Charlie, what’s holding you back?”

  I took one of the bar stools from the other side of the counter and brought it a
round to my side, in the kitchen proper, and sat down. I drank my Molson’s. I planned to hit her over the head with the empty when I finished.

  “They’ve got something else going,” said Houser.

  “Shaddup.”

  “You are so rude,” said Stacey.

  “They’re working on some murder case, and that’s why they have to stay 'til tomorrow.”

  “Really? Cool! Who got murdered?”

  “Her partner. Odd.”

  “That’s pretty odd, all right, because the dude is still alive.”

  I was too tired to shut them up. I wanted to push her off the bed, lie down, and sleep for about a year.

  “Odd is the dude’s name. Now. But it used to be Jeannie, and as near as I can tell, that’s who got murdered.”

  Stacey was unable to grasp it. Join the crowd. My head got heavy, and down it went, click by click, into my folded arms on the counter. She said something, and he said something back, but it sounded far away, and I could care less, if I cared at all, which I didn’t. I was out.

  It could have been a minute, it could have been an hour. Let’s say longer than a minute, because what woke me up was Gwen crying out, “Stacey!” She was standing in the doorway, her arms full of freshly laundered clothes. Her fourteen-year-old daughter was on her knees in front of the wicker rocker, her blonde head bobbing rhythmically between Houser’s legs. Startled at the sudden appearance of her mother and my awakening, she bounded back into bed, wiping her mouth with the bottom of her t-shirt. She wasn’t wearing any bra. Houser, one-handed, struggled to stuff his glistening and quivering thing back into his pants and zip up. It was not a pretty sight.

  Gwen, defeated all over again, dropped the clothes on the foot of the bed and started sorting, shaking her muddled head in unhappy disbelief.

  I don’t know if it was the mother in me or the menopausal madwoman. It sure wasn’t the cop. I kicked the barstool out from under me and I was on that bed in a nanosecond. The bedspread fell off me and for the second time in one afternoon I was publicly naked. Stacey fought back and cursed, but she was no match for me. There are druggies on Sprague Street who would rather be brought down by a canine officer than by me.

  I pinned her arms behind her and got her over my knees and gave her the mother of all spankings. She regressed from a garbage-mouthed teenager to a spastic pre-pubescent, to one of the terrible two’s, to a whimpering infant. Somewhere along that reverse psychic catapult she promised me the largest lawsuit known to man and the sure end to my career as a police officer. I could care less.

  I retrieved my wrap and pulled it around me. Nobody said a word. The only sound now was Stacey’s sniffling. Gwen had the shadow of a grateful look. Houser was aghast and maybe a little scared that I’d now get to him, which I might have, except my fury was spent, and he was, after all, a man manacled to a rocking chair. He didn’t go to her, she came to him. All right, he was supposed to say no, but he’s only a man and they’re all dogs. I gave him the old one-two with my eyes. That was enough.

  By then, Odd pulled up in the car. I decided not to burden him with a briefing of what had happened in his absence. No one else was eager to tell him. That way, at the hearing, he could deny all knowledge, etc.

  He came inside, a grocery bag in one arm, and said, “Guess what, Quinn? There was a twelve-year-old boy used to follow Jeannie everywhere. He was in love with her.”

  Traumatized, Stacey was half-asleep, still sniffling. Houser slowly rocked, his chin on his chest. Gwen folded clothes automatically. I took my freshly laundered jeans, t-shirt, underwear, and socks, and went into the bathroom. Through the door I could hear Odd ask, probably to Houser, “What’s wrong with her?” He could have been asking about any one of the three females under that roof.

  I turned on the blower so that I wouldn’t hear them talk and they couldn’t hear me pee.

  Gwen’s claim to being a good cook was more or less true, though I suspected her range was narrow. The scope of her recipes, not the stove she cooked on. We had mac ‘n cheese with little cut up smoked sausages inside, the top nicely browned and crusty, and a cucumber and sour cream salad. My mother used to do the same meal and serve it with her homebrewed iced tea in the summers. Here, I had another Molsons. We sat at a little round dinnette, and Odd had to go get a couple folding chairs from Frank. He had been gone awhile for that and I knew he was pursuing his case, which I had all but forgotten since my spontaneous combustion earlier.

  Gwen put on some of the CDs from Houser’s bag and we all sat down to dinner. Before digging in, we joined hands and Stacey, as the youngest, said Grace while we bowed our heads. Houser was on my right, his left hand cuffed to the chair, so I reached down and took the cuffed hand.

  It was a grim little dinner at first, but the homey hot mac and the refreshing cool cuke salad soon restored us and before long we were like a family with issues that might never be resolved but at least could be put on hold longer enough to get through dinner.

  “The secret,” said Gwen, “ is the Velveeta. I’ve tried 'tillamook but the good cheddars don’t bind the mac like Velveeta.”

  I mumbled some words of interest, like the world is full of wonders, and why shouldn’t Velveeta turn out to be one of them. I did not want to shut down any semblance of normality, but on the other hand I did not want to encourage more stupid talk. I asked Gwen what she did for a living, single parent and all that.

  “I work construction,” she said.

  “Really?” She didn’t look the type, woman in a man’s world. I was the type.

  “Highway construction. I’m the one with the orange vest and hardhat and the two-sided sign, stop and slow. I either wave you through or make you stop and wait.”

  “Is that a good job?”

  “When it’s not raining or freezing or you’re almost taken out by some driver in too big a hurry, talking on their cell phone and all. It pays the rent, but to tell you the truth, all I ever wanted to be was a homemaker.”

  “Mother,” whispered Stacey, a warning.

  “But you need the right partner for that job,” she went on, “and I could never quite swing it. Tried it three times. Stacey’s father was number two. He was a long-distance hauler who one day just couldn’t find his way back."

  “Do you always have to tell everybody every lousy detail, mom?” said Stacey. “Couldn’t you just chill out?”

  “The last husband was working out okay, 'til he started getting fresh with Stacey."

  “Mom!”

  “Well, it’s true!”

  “That’s all right, Gwen,” I said, “you don’t have to talk anymore.”

  I knew she felt obliged. She’d washed our clothes, made our dinner, and now thought she had to fill the dead air, so that the imposition of her and her virgin daughter might be made a tad more palatable.

  I changed the subject and asked Odd what the other incurable romantics had to say.

  “Who?

  “Frank and Angie.”

  “About what?”

  “You know what. You were gone a long time for a couple of folding chairs.”

  “They told me that Jeannie’s father is dead. He died a few years after, of a broken heart, everyone says. So it’s just the mother. She lives not far from here, in the same house.”

  “Everything is not far from here, we’re on an island. Everything but the world.”

  At the mention of Jeannie, both Stacey and Houser perked up. They looked at each other, in the know.

  “I think I must have missed part of the conversation,” said Gwen.

  “You miss most of everything,” said Stacey, and in the know of that was the real heartbreak.

  “Respect your mother,” I said. I knew she was right, though, and I knew what had been missed.

  “I don’t want to be presumptuous...,” said Houser, and everybody at the table looked at him. For a moment I thought the attention would render him powerless to go on. Then he said, “...but maybe we can help. Five heads are be
tter than two. And I’m trained in the analytical process.”

  “What?” asked Gwen. “What’s going on?”

  “Somebody got murdered, okay?” said Stacey. “It doesn’t concern you.”

  Gwen’s fork stopped on the way to her mouth.

  “Don’t worry, it happened a long time ago,” I said.

  “Who?” she asked.