An Occasional Hell Read online

  He waited. Just when it seemed he would receive no reply, she said, “I don’t know what it was I heard.”

  “But you did hear something.”

  “I don’t even know that.”

  “I understand,” he said. “A sound like that, it happens out of nowhere and it’s over in an instant. You don’t know whether you really heard it or not. It might have been an acorn falling on the roof. Or a car backfiring.”

  “It might not have been anything.”

  “But it seems to you that you might have heard something like a gunshot, am I right? Except that it could have been something else entirely. But the girl, though. A girl’s screams would be hard to mistake, wouldn’t they?”

  “I didn’t hear anything like that.”

  “Okay,” said DeWalt. “That’s something anyway. I don’t know what, but it’s something.” He tried a smile; no luck.

  “About what time do you think it was when you heard the gunshot? What might have been a gunshot, that is.”

  She inhaled deeply, her eyes never straying far from their focus. “A couple of hours before dinner,” she said.

  Dinner meaning lunch, he thought. “So that would be what—about the same time of morning as right now?”

  “Later,” she said. “Sometime after ten.”

  “And Draper was with you at the time. In the house, canning vegetables.”

  “He come and went all morning. He’s not the kind to stick to one thing for long.”

  “I would imagine he gets tired out fairly quickly. Because of his kidneys, I mean.”

  She said, “He does.”

  “But it seems to you that he was with you when you heard the sound that might have been a gunshot.”

  “As far as I remember.”

  “Did you say anything to him about it?”

  “A gunshot’s nothing unusual hereabouts,” she said. “It’s not something to stop work over.”

  DeWalt nodded. “And let’s see. Clifford was out here in the yard, underneath his pickup. So if you could hear a gunshot while inside the house.…”

  “He says he didn’t. He probably had the radio going in the truck.”

  “He never mentioned that he was listening to the radio.”

  “He says he didn’t hear a gunshot,” she told him. “And Draper says he didn’t. And I don’t know if I did or not.”

  Now, for the first time, she looked away, she looked down at the dog. She slipped her bare foot beneath the animal’s belly and scratched it with her toes. Tippy rubbed against her.

  And DeWalt asked himself, What difference does it make anyway? What does it matter if anybody heard the shot or not? It doesn’t matter. But why lie about hearing it, that was the question that troubled him. And why had Clifford backed away from the inlet, his own property, when he spotted DeWalt’s car there?

  “How’s Draper doing?” DeWalt asked.

  “About how you’d expect.”

  “He’d better not put off that dialysis too long.”

  She said nothing. She stared at the dog.

  “Maybe if you talked to him about it,” he said.

  “What he does is up to him, not me.”

  “Well,” said DeWalt, but then dropped it. She would stand there and listen if he wished to talk to the air but it would have no impact on her.

  “Thanks for your time,” he said. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.” To the quivering dog he said, “So long, killer.”

  Tippy yelped and flew at the screen. The dog was still yapping, alone at the door, as DeWalt drove away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The telephone was ringing as he walked up the sidewalk to his front door. With luck it would stop ringing before he could reach it. He needed to do a bag exchange and then he was going to make some lunch, a couple of vegetable taco rolls—shredded cabbage, carrots, celery, onion, red bell pepper and tomato steamed and rolled in a warm flour tortilla, and drizzled with picante sauce—and then he was going to go back to bed. He had begun to feel sluggish at the Jewett place, sluggish almost to the point of indifference, heavy in limb and movement and head. He doubted that he could sleep this feeling away but it was better than staying awake with it.

  There were times when he thought life’s ruin inexorable, beyond repair or reclamation, a wrecked car abandoned by the side of the road to be consumed by weeds and time, not worth salvage or notice. There were times when he thought life’s ruinous ways malicious, calculated; other times, ruefully hilarious. At any of these times he might think too of his handgun, the .44 in a manuscript box in a corner of the closet. But he knew the weapon’s taste and the memory of this sickened him, it froze his throat and stomach with the same icy smoke of fear that had earlier frozen his hand.

  There were other times, however, when he thought of life as a beautiful but failed experiment. He could not say as much of his own life in particular but of all of life, a lovely sweet idea too quickly gone awry, by accident or design or perhaps by poor execution, a matter of reach exceeding grasp. With this type of thought he was moved quite differently, empowered, it seemed, with a peculiar kind of energy, the second wind of the recalcitrant pipsqueak determined to remain on his feet while the bully bashes his brains out.

  This was not the way he felt just now, however, as he took his time closing the door and then moving toward the jangling phone. He waited to see if the phone would ring one more time. It did. He picked it up and said hello.

  “Oh god, finally, where have you been? I’ve been calling since seven o’clock!” It was Elizabeth Catanzaro, breathless and shrill.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Could you come out here please? I need you to come here right away.”

  “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I just need you to come out here and see something, all right? I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

  “Why can’t you talk about it? Is somebody there?”

  “No. I don’t know, I don’t think so. Just come out, all right? God, I’ve been calling since first thing this morning. I didn’t think you were ever going to answer.”

  “If you think there might be somebody in your house, I want you out of there right now.”

  “No,” she said, and seemed to be calming now, “no, there’s nobody here now, I’m sure of it. But will you come out, Ernie, please? I need you to explain why somebody would do such a thing to me.”

  “What thing, Elizabeth? Tell me what happened.”

  In her silence as she calmed herself further he realized that they had called each other by their first names, that her fear and his response to it had erased a distance between them. His reaction to this was a kind of anger, a tension which, for the moment, supplanted fatigue.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Just tell me that.”

  “I’m fine, Ernie, really. I’m sorry if I sounded hysterical, it’s just that … I really would like you to come out here if you can. It doesn’t have to be immediately but … the sooner the better.”

  “A half-hour?” he said. He had already begun to unbutton his shirt, to expose the plastic bag and rubber tube flattened against his skin.

  “A half-hour’s okay,” she said. “I can wait another half-hour.”

  “Goddamn it,” he said after he had hung up the phone. He unbuckled his trousers, unwound the tube, tossed the empty bag onto the floor. He wanted to kick the thing away from him, tear out the catheter, undo the past.

  “Goddamn fucking shit.”

  She was sitting on the front porch, on the top porch step, smiling wanly as he approached. She had pulled a thin satiny robe on over her summer nightgown but her feet were bare and she had not brushed her hair yet nor washed her face. She held her hands clasped between her knees, knees and fingers squeezing hard.

  “It’s in the kitchen,” she said.

  Inside, DeWalt paused on the threshold. The overhead light in the kitchen was on. At first he could see nothing unusual, walls of yellow-painted wa
inscoting below white wallpaper adorned with butter-yellow stripes and miniscule red and blue hummingbirds. A floor of shiny brown ceramic tiles. The kitchen table and counter empty. The glass pot from the coffee maker, however, was lying on its side on the sink counter, the glass cracked. Something had made her drop the pot as she was about to fill it with water.

  He went to the sink. The left basin was empty. But in the other one, stuck in the drain that emptied into the garbage disposal, pushed down so that its face was flush with the bottom of the metal basin, it eyes open, staring up, was a cat. A calico cat, small, probably a kitten. Mouth parted as if trying to mew.

  DeWalt did not touch the cat. He touched nothing in the room except for the wallphone. Abbott was not at the barracks but the dispatcher took the number and radioed the message to Abbott’s car.

  Elizabeth turned to look up at DeWalt as he came out onto the porch. “What did you do with it?” she asked.

  “Nothing for the moment. The state police should be here in ten or fifteen minutes. Are you all right?”

  “Who could do such a thing?” she asked. “And why?”

  He sat beside her and took her hand. “You found it, when? First thing this morning?”

  “Yes. God, I was barely awake. I think I even turned on the water and.…” She shuddered, she shook her head, she blew out a noisy breath.

  “Did you hear anything through the night?” he asked.

  “I took a Valium before going to bed.”

  “How long have you been doing that?”

  “Five, six months now.”

  “Maybe it’s time to stop.”

  “Obviously you don’t know what it’s like to lie awake every night with a horror movie running through your head.”

  He stared out across the lawn. “What time did you go to bed?”

  “Eleven, eleven-thirty maybe. I don’t look at the clock much these days.”

  “And you got up around seven? You said on the phone that you had been trying to call me since seven.”

  She nodded.

  “You keep all your doors and windows locked at night?”

  “The doors, yes. But it gets so hot upstairs that we have to keep most of the windows open. But there are screens on all of them.”

  Her eyes were wide and bright and there was a kind of smile on her face, but the smile was involuntary, the tension of incredulity, and the glint in her eyes came from the dark light of fear.

  She said, “Maybe I should … change my clothes or something. Get dressed.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Let’s just sit here for awhile.”

  She sat motionless, her breath audible. Her pulse throbbed inside his hand. “Why would somebody do this, Ernie?”

  “There are a couple of possibilities, I guess.”

  She looked at him and waited.

  “It could be the work of some crank,” said DeWalt. “Some self-appointed judge who wants to punish you for what he thinks you did. Some friend of your husband, for example. Or it might have been somebody who saw you on TV and, for whatever reason, decided he or she didn’t like you. It might be somehow ritualistic, it’s hard to say.”

  “Satanic?” she asked, and he saw the terror flare in her eyes.

  “Now, I doubt it. It’s highly unlikely.”

  “Or it might have been done by the same person who killed Alex,” she said.

  DeWalt thought, Cat. Kitten. Kitty. Pussy. Dead pussy. You’re dead, pussy. Garbage disposal. Garbage. Disposable.

  “Can you think of anybody who might have had something against both of you?” he asked. “Somebody who might have had reason to resent not just Alex, but you too?”

  She squinted, thinking, trying to think, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, my mind’s a blank. I’m lucky I can remember my own name right now.”

  “Of course,” he said. He looked down at her hand in his, the small fingers, the warmth. He had not held a woman’s hand for a long time. He turned her hand over, exposing the back of it, and he touched the fingertips of his free hand against it, stroked gently the lovely small knuckles and the warm valleys between them.

  A moment later he caught himself, and stopped. He loosened his grip.

  She withdrew her hand from his then. With both index fingers she picked the sleep from the corners of her eyes. “I’m a mess,” she said.

  “You look fine.”

  “I look like hell.”

  He smiled. Then he thought of something. “Was it the kids’?”

  She did not understand.

  “The kitten. Did it belong to your kids?”

  “No, we’ve never owned a cat. The kids have a Sheltie, it’s with them at my mother’s. But no, I don’t know whose it is, I never saw it before.”

  “How long before the police come?” she asked a moment later. “God, Ernie. I want that thing out of here.”

  When Troopers Abbott and Brown arrived nearly twenty minutes later, Brown carrying a black plastic tackle box, DeWalt escorted them into the kitchen. Elizabeth remained outside. DeWalt filled them in on the little he knew. Trooper Brown, a man younger than Abbott, thinner, his neck scarred from acne, then donned a latex glove. He grasped the kitten by the fur between its ears, having to work his fingers into the drain, and gingerly extracted the animal from the sink. There was no body, only the severed head.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Trooper Brown. Water dripped off the exposed muscles and tendons. Abbott held open a plastic bag, into which Brown deposited the head.

  This done, the ziplock bag sealed, Abbott leaned over the sink and peered into the drain. “She didn’t hear the garbage disposal running?” he asked.

  “She took a Valium,” DeWalt said. “Besides, I don’t think the disposal was used. The cat’s head is small enough, it would have gotten sucked down into the blades.”

  “What if somebody was holding onto the head?”

  “There’d be more body left. To the front legs at least.”

  “I don’t think a garbage disposal can chew up bones, can it?” Brown asked.

  DeWalt shrugged. “Even if it can, it wouldn’t do such a clean job of it. The neck would be more chewed up. It looks to me like maybe the head was whacked off with a hatchet.”

  Abbott laughed, not at all amused. “It’s like a fucking B-movie,” he said. “Where do people get these ideas?”

  Brown laid the plastic bag atop the kitchen table, then opened his plastic tackle box. “The sink and what else?” he asked Abbott.

  “Yeah, dust the sink, and the back doorknobs, and … shit, whatever you want, you’re not going to find anything anyway. Anybody sick enough to pull this stunt is smart enough to wear gloves. We’ll just end up wasting a week and a half matching prints to the people who live here. So forget the sink. Do the back door. We’ll need something to prove to Shulles we weren’t in here just jacking each other off.”

  To DeWalt Abbott said, “You check around for forced entry?”

  “Let’s do it now.”

  Ten minutes later they returned to the kitchen. DeWalt said, “So somebody had a key.”

  “Or knows how to spring a deadbolt.”

  “Alex might have given Jeri a key, though I can’t imagine why. Except that he was thinking with his dick. More likely, she stole it from him.”

  “And somehow Rodney got hold of it. Which suggests to me that our primary suspect is still in the neighborhood.”

  “Possibly,” said DeWalt. “I mean I can understand him wanting to blow away his wife’s lover. Maybe even his wife. But considering Rodney’s knowledge of her affair, even his encouragement of it—”

  “You don’t know that for certain.”

  “I don’t have an affidavit to that effect, no. But let’s assume, okay, Rodney murdered Alex and murdered or abducted Jeri. Why come after Elizabeth? What’s to be gained by killing her?”

  “Not a thing. Which is exactly why we pulled a cat’s head out of the sink and not her head. Rodney’s trying to make a point is all.”
r />   “And what point would that be?”

  “Don’t bristle on me, Ernie, okay?”

  “You think she made a deal with him to kill her husband.”

  “Her old man’s fucking around on her,” Abbott said, his voice low, conspiratorial. “She wouldn’t be the first woman to get pissed off in a situation like that.”

  “But now she won’t pay up. Or else Rodney is trying to squeeze a little extra out of the deal. And so, this gentle reminder in the sink.”

  “You’ve got to admit, Ernie. It makes sense.”

  “Based on two criteria only. Her telephone call to Rodney, and the nature of the murder weapon.”

  “You think those criteria should be ignored?”

  DeWalt shook his head, not in answer but in disgust. He felt sick to his stomach. “So why would she hire me to look for the truth if the truth is precisely what could convict her?”

  Abbott did not respond to this question. He was looking at the sink again, absentmindedly scratching his Adam’s apple. “There’s another possibility too,” he said.

  Trooper Brown nodded. “Kitty’s a red herring,” he said.

  DeWalt laughed softly then, a tired laugh, and sour. “I’m having a hard time picturing Elizabeth Catanzaro whacking off a cat’s head and shoving it down her garbage disposal. I’m sorry, but I am.”

  “That’s because you’re a romantic, Ernie.” There was a broad smile on Abbott’s face as he said this, but the statement had more layers than the smile implied. The resentment was building, DeWalt could feel it. Abbott was starting to regard him not as an ally but an obstacle. “Let’s go chat with the missus now, shall we?” Abbott said.

  DeWalt nodded toward the plastic bag as Trooper Brown picked it off the table. “Keep that thing out of sight. She hasn’t had her breakfast yet.”

  They walked single-file through the living room and out onto the front porch, where Elizabeth Catanzaro was sitting now on the porch glider to the right of the door. Brown shifted the plastic bag to his left hand, holding it close to his leg as he carried it to the car. DeWalt stood a few inches behind Abbott, just off his right shoulder, so that Elizabeth could see his face clearly while speaking with the trooper.