“Yeah? Then maybe you’d think it’s a little funny that she never wrote me after her n Mikey got settled somewhere. Not so much as a postcard. Me, I think it’s a lot more than funny. Because she woulda.Sheknew how I felt about her. And she knew how much I loved that kiddo. She was twenty and Mikey was sixteen months old when that joke-tellin cuntwipe reported em missin. That was the summer of ’38. She’d be forty now, and my nephew’d be twenty-one. Old enough to fuckin vote. And you want to tell me she’d never write a singlelineto the brother who kep Nosey Royce from stickin his wrinkled old meat inside her back when we was kids? Or to ask for a little money to help her get set up in Boston or New Haven or wherever? Mister, I would have—”
He winced, made a littleurk-ulpsound I was very familiar with, and staggered back against the garage wall.
“You need to sit down,” I said. “You’re sick.”
“I never get sick. I ain’t even had a cold since I was in sixth grade.”
If so, that bug would blitzkrieg him like the Germans rolling into Warsaw.
“It’s stomach flu, Turcotte. I was up all night with it. Mr. Keene at the drugstore says it’s going around.”
“That narrow-ass ole lady don’t know nothin. I’m fine.” He gave his greasy clumps of hair a toss to show me how fine he was. His face was paler than ever. The hand holding the Japanese bayonet was shaking the way mine had until noon today. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Sure.” I snuck a glance at my watch. It was ten past six. The time that had been dragging so slowly was now speeding up. Where was Frank Dunning right now? Still at the market? I thought not. I thought he had left early today, maybe saying he was going to take his kids trick-or-treating. Only that wasn’t the plan. He was in a bar somewhere, and not The Lamplighter. That was where he went for a single beer, two at the most. Which he could handle, although—if my wife was a fair example, and I thought she was—he would always leave dry-mouthed, with his brain raging for more.
No, when he felt the need to really take a bath in the stuff, he’d want to do it in one of Derry’s down-and-dirty bars: the Spoke, the Sleepy, the Bucket. Maybe even one of the absolute dives that hung over the polluted Kenduskeag—Wally’s or the scabrous Paramount Lounge, where ancient whores with waxwork faces still populated most of the stools at the bar. And did he tell jokes that got the whole place laughing? Did people even approach him as he went about the job of pouring grain alcohol onto the coals of rage at the back of his brain? Not unless they wanted impromptu dental work.
“When my sister n nephew disappeared, them n Dunning waslivin in a little rented house out by the Cashman town line. He was drinkin heavy, and when he drinks heavy, he exercises his fuckin fists. I seen the bruises on her, and once Mikey was black n blue all the way up his little right arm from the wrist to the elbow. I says, ‘Sis, is he beatin on you n the baby? Because if he is, I’ll beat onhim.’ She says no, but she wouldn’t look at me when she said it. She says, ‘You stay away from him, Billy. He’s strong. You are too, I know it, but you’re skinny. A hard wind would blow you away. He’d hurt you.’ It wasn’t six months after that when she disappeared. Took off, that’s whathesaid. But there’s a lot of woods out that side of town. Hell, once you get into Cashman, there’s nothingbutwoods. Woods n swamp. You know what really happened, don’t you?”
I did. Others might not believe it because Dunning was now a well-respected citizen who seemed to have controlled his drinking a long time ago. Also because he had charm to spare. But I had inside information, didn’t I?
“I think he snapped. I think he came home drunk and she said the wrong thing, maybe something completely innocuous—”
“Inocku-what?”
I peered through the hedge into the backyard. Beyond it, a woman passed the kitchen window and was gone. IncasaDunning, dinner was served. Would they be having dessert? Jell-O with Dream Whip? Ritz cracker pie? I thought not. Who needs dessert on Halloween night? “What I’m saying is that he killed them. Isn’t that what you think?”
“Yeah…” He looked both taken aback and suspicious. I think obsessives always look that way when they hear the things that have kept them up long nights not just articulated but corroborated.It has to be a trick,they think. Only this was no trick. And it certainly wasn’t a treat.
I said, “Dunning was what, twenty-two? Whole life ahead of him. He must have been thinking, ‘Well, I did an awful thing here, but I can clean it up. We’re out in the woods, nearest neighbors a mile away….’Werethey a mile away, Turcotte?”
“At least.” He said it grudgingly. One hand was massaging thebase of his throat. The bayonet had sagged. Grabbing it with my right hand would have been simple, and grabbing the revolver out of his belt with the other wouldn’t have been out of the question, but I didn’t want to. I thought the bug would take care of Mr. Bill Turcotte. I really thought it would be that simple. You see how easy it is to forget the obduracy of the past?
“So he took the bodies out in the woods and buried them and said they’d run off. There couldn’t have been much of an investigation.”
Turcotte turned his head and spat. “He come from a good old Derry fambly. Mine come down from the Saint John Valley in a rusty ole pickup truck when I was ten n Clara was eight. Just on parle trash. What doyouthink?”
I thought it was another case of Derry being Derry—that’s whatIthought. And while I understood Turcotte’s love and sympathized with his loss, he was talking about an old crime. It was the one that was scheduled to happen in less than two hours that concerned me.
“You set me up with Frati, didn’t you?” This was now obvious, but still disappointing. I’d thought the guy was just being friendly, passing on a little local gossip over beer and Lobster Pickin’s. Wrong. “Pal of yours?”
Turcotte smiled, but it looked more like a grimace. “Me friends with a rich kike pawnbroker? That’s a laugh. You want to hear a little story?”
I took another peek at my watch and saw I still had some time to spare. While Turcotte was talking, that old stomach virus would be hard at work. The first time he bent over to puke, I intended to pounce.
“Why not?”
“Me, Dunning, and Chaz Frati are all the same age—forty-two. You believe that?”
“Sure.” But Turcotte, who had lived hard (and was now getting sick, little as he wanted to admit it), looked ten years older than either of them.
“When we was all seniors at the old Consolidated, I was assistant manager of the football team. Tiger Bill, they called me—ain’t that cute? I tried out for the team when I was a freshman and then again when I was a sophomore, but I got cut both times. Too skinny for the line, too slow for the backfield. Story of my fuckin life, mister. But I loved the game, and I couldn’t afford the dime to buy a ticket—my fambly didn’t havenothin—so I took on bein assistant manager. Nice name, but do you know what it means?”
Sure I did. In my Jake Epping life, I wasn’t Mr. Real Estate but Mr. High School, and some things don’t change. “You were the waterboy.”
“Yeah, I brought em water. And held the puke-bucket if someone got sick after runnin laps on a hot day or took a helmet in the nuts. Also the guy who stayed late to pick up all their crud on the field and fished their shit-stained jocks off the shower room floor.”
He grimaced. I imagined his stomach turning into a yacht on a stormy sea. Up she goes, mateys… then the corkscrew plunge.
