Big Bad, page 23
“Sorry, man. Nothin personal,” someone said.
Then everything went dark, and Rabbit was being swallowed by the soft black warmth. He floated, suspended in a sea of fragmented thought, until that childhood spark in his heart went out.
2
Guppy pulled his cab alongside the curb in front of a building with an LED marquee hanging over the front entrance. A neon sign above the marquee read ISLAND TWIN MOVIE THEATER in bright-blue letters that shifted fluidly through every spectral color. Emma didn’t recognize the two movies being offered, and considering it now, she couldn’t even remember the last movie she’d actually seen in a theater. Then she could.
Three or four years ago, she and Malcolm had been in Boston for a behavioral science seminar and had gone to see Life of Pi when one of the keynote speakers had missed his flight. She had hated the movie because she had felt like hating it, had expected to hate it. Malcolm, on the other hand, had loved it for perhaps the exact same reason. It hadn’t been a date, just two colleagues killing some time on a rainy evening. They had gone back to the hotel and had sex afterward. It had been good sex. Great sex, even. She had come twice by the time they had collapsed in a sweaty heap of heaving chests on the damp and rumpled hotel sheets. They ate room service and drank champagne. But no, it had not been a date.
I’ll call him tonight, she reminded herself, agreeing that she would follow through on it. She needed to. He could be helpful. Though it wasn’t fair the way she might need to use him. She would ask for something, and he would oblige because he would know she was investigating her sister’s death, which he would misconstrue as the itch, the taste of that old familiar hunt, that might convince her to return to work when all was said and done. Of course, she had no intention of returning. Too much inside her had shifted. But she would subtly manipulate him this way. Because it was what she needed, and it would work.
Emma looked down the alley to her right. It was narrowed by snowdrifts, dumpsters, and crates. “Down there?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Prolly tucked between some of them dumpsters, havin himself a nap.” Guppy looked over his shoulder at her, the leather upholstery squeaking as he turned around in his seat. “I can come with if you like.”
“No. Keep warm. Two people confront him and he might feel ganged up on or threatened.”
“Whatever you say, ma’am. You’d know better than me.” He turned back around and reached for his thermos of coffee. “O’course, might not matter either way,” he said, unscrewing the lid.
“What do you mean?”
“Rabbit’s usually loaded by noon. And… oh”—he tapped the dash clock, which read 4:12—“we’re a few hours past that now, ma’am. He’ll be good and ripe, I’d imagine.”
“I guess we’ll see.”
She got out and shut the door. Rockcliffe’s downtown district seemed deserted for late afternoon on a Saturday. The sun had sunk below the buildings, the air holding a sharper edge now. The cold ocean atmosphere felt like it was rusting her skin, corroding her. A mother and son holding hands strolled up the sidewalk and passed by Emma. The woman was holding a white paper shopping bag with the word ZENOBIA written across the side in fancy black lettering. One thing Emma had noticed in her limited time on Rockcliffe—both now and when she had come here almost a decade ago for Molly’s wedding—was that with the exception of Dunkin Donuts, the island was completely absent of franchises. It didn’t have a single Bank of America—instead she had seen a Rockcliffe National Bank—Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, or mega store that sold everything under the sun in one convenient location. Rockcliffe was homemade, everything its own. Zenobia was likely one of the many boutique shops lining the sidewalks of the quaint downtown strip.
She zipped her jacket up to spare her neck from the steady breeze and headed down the alley. A bank of dumpsters stood halfway down on the right. Between the last two, she spotted a sleeping bag. She shifted to the left side of the alley to try to open up the angle. In her experience, it was safer not to surprise people, and even safer still not to be surprised.
She announced her presence: “Rabbit?” she said with an upward lilt, feeling a little foolish.
The sleeping bag didn’t move. Guppy’s probably spot-on, she thought. The guy’s passed out.
She went farther down the alley, and her view of what was between the two dumpsters deepened. “Rabbit, I just want—oh fuck!” She hurried the last five feet when she saw the whole scene.
An old man with a wild gray beard was sitting up against the wall, chin on his chest. Frothy pink sputum and something brown that looked like coffee covered the front of his sweatshirt. His jacket was open and sloughed off around him. The sleeve of his sweatshirt—an oldie that sported the word FILA across the front in blue and red letters—was rolled up. His arm, gray and waxy looking, was tied off, a needle still stabbed in the crook of his elbow.
She dropped to her knees beside him and pressed her fingers to his neck, searching for a pulse. Nothing. She tried his wrist. Nothing. With her thumb on his forehead, she pushed back and lifted his head. Eyes set into a gray and pallid face stared right through her. His lips were deep bluish-purple and rimmed with more pink froth. She let go and his chin fell back against his chest and he slid a few inches to the left. Rabbit was dead.
“Son of a bitch,” Emma said, and rested back on her heels. The bell buoy chimed off in the distance. It was an awful sound, always there, tolling its slow and lonesome knell—ding… ding… ding…—reminding her where she was and what she had lost.
Emma closed her eyes and stayed there a moment, listening to the buoy. She was a stranger in a strange place, kneeling in a cold, dark alley beside the cold dead body of a man who may or may not have witnessed the final moments of her sister’s life. This all felt like a deviant kind of madness that was too familiar. She felt lost and at home all at once.
Sighing, Emma opened her eyes. Then she went to work looking around the scene. She didn’t expect to find what she was looking for, and that was exactly the point. When she lifted the sleeping bag off Rabbit’s legs, the sharp, layered scent of old urine and body odor hit her in the back of the throat. She checked his pockets, being careful in case he had other needles on him. She very much doubted he did. All she found was a smooshed pack of cigarettes and a little box of wooden matches. On his lap, she saw a baggie of white powder. She left it where it was.
When she was satisfied that what should’ve been there wasn’t, she stood and headed back to the cab.
3
Chief of Police Leslie Bayard came walking out of the alley, putting on his gloves. Behind him, the body of Dougie “Rabbit” Jepson, the only witness to Emma’s sister’s final hours—or the only one she knew of so far—was being loaded onto a gurney. An ambulance was waiting in the parking lot behind the movie theater, rear doors open and ready to be fed a body. Its red-and-white flashers strobed up the alley, printing quick, hungry shadows on every surface. They were so bright and crisp that Emma was sure she could hear each and every snap of the bulbs, like tiny wet teeth gnashing.
Bayard approached the cab.
“Careful,” Guppy said softly, a last-minute warning. “He doesn’t look so happy to see you.”
“Nope,” she said, and rolled the window down.
“You’re still here, Ms. Shane. Why?” Bayard said. It was dark now, and his pale and tired face looked ghoulish under the light of the movie theater marquee and the streetlights that had just tripped on.
“Just playing Nancy Drew,” Emma said. It was time to shake the tree a little and see what fell out. Maybe Bayard was involved, and maybe he wasn’t, but he was too high on the totem pole to be completely in the dark about anything that went on in his tired little town.
“You already gave a statement to one of my officers,” Bayard said. “So’s there something else I can help you with?”
“Making sure you don’t cut any more corners, I guess.”
Bayard’s lips flattened, cutting a perfectly straight seam across the bottom of his face. “Uh-huh. I see.” He leaned down, forearms on the edge of the door. “You told my officer you were just passing through when you found Rabbit, but that’s a big shovelful of hot horse shit, now isn’t it?”
“Would you rather I’d told him the truth?” Emma said, backing her face away from his hands.
“So it was discretion, then? That it?”
“If you like,” Emma said.
“And for whose sake would that be?”
“Hey, Chief!” somebody yelled from the alley. “You want us to leave this tape up?”
Bayard turned and yelled across his shoulder, “Can’t you see I’m goddamn busy?” He turned back to Emma. “I’m waiting.”
“Really want me to answer that?”
“I can take a pretty good guess what you were doing in that alley, Ms. Shane.” He stepped back, his hands grabbing the edge of the door now, thick fingers drumming slowly. “But I don’t like guessing. So why don’t you just tell me—were you looking for Rabbit?” He looked at Guppy, whose gaze was straight ahead. “How ’bout it, Gup? Was she looking for Rabbit?”
Guppy looked sideways, giving Bayard the corner of one eye. Shrugged. “How should I know? Lady just wanted a ride to the theater. They call, I drive. That’s the business.”
“Okay.” Bayard nodded, unamused. His face had pulled into a scowl. “I thought I made myself clear yesterday. Now, I was trying to be nice, but—”
“He was the last person to see Molly alive the night she died. Isn’t that right?” Emma interrupted.
“And where’d you hear that?” Bayard said, eyes narrowing. “His identity wasn’t public knowledge. That’s privileged information.”
“Remember?” Emma said, grinning. “This is a small island. Word has a way of getting out.”
“We’re not going any further with this,” Bayard said. “No more. You got it?”
Emma didn’t back down. “He was the witness—”
“He was also an addict,” Bayard snapped, cutting her off, his eyes deepening with anger.
“And now he’s a dead witness,” Emma finished. “So that’s two murders on your hands.”
Bayard stood straight and tall, crossing his arms. His massive frame eclipsed the window almost entirely. He glanced behind him, then back at Emma. “Rabbit? So now Rabbit’s been murdered too? With a needle in his arm? That’s what you’re saying?” He laughed without amusement and shook his head. “If anyone murdered Rabbit, it was Rabbit. And your sister? Jesus…. The way I see it, two people—two sick people— took their own lives. It’s sad, but that’s all it is. See a grief counselor.” Bayard turned away to leave.
“I saw the medical examiner come and go. Dr. Lang, isn’t it? Think there’s gonna be a post-mortem on this one? Or is that one of those corners that’ll get cut?”
Bayard stopped and turned back. “Really?”
“You said Rabbit was an addict. Was he a known heroin user? Have a record of drug use? With that sort of behavior, there’s gotta be a recorded history of it. Something besides your say-so.”
“Dougie Jepson was no stranger to us.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Emma said. “I asked if he was known to use heroin. Someone like that, in a small town like this, the police tend to know their habits. They make it their business to, I’d even say. If I asked a handful of your guys, would they be familiar with his drug use? I’d think they should be.”
“Ms. Shane, if I were you, I’d choose my next words carefully.”
“How’d he cook that last shot that killed him?” Emma said. “That’s all I want to know.”
“What’re you talking about?” Bayard said, showing a genuine look of puzzlement.
“You have to cook heroin to get it in the needle.”
“I know how it works.”
“So there should be cook paraphernalia. Usually a spoon and a piece of cotton. Maybe the bottom of a can… even a bottle cap. I didn’t see any of that when I found him. Did you?”
“You sure do know a lot about drug use.”
“Knowing something a crime? You yourself just said you know how it works. Although it doesn’t really seem to me that you do.”
Bayard didn’t respond. He looked at her with his calculating eyes. He looked like a man who had come to a decision on something.
Emma hadn’t intended to go as far as she had, basically accusing Rockcliffe’s chief of police of being a dirty cop to his face, and she had to admit that it had gotten away from her a little. Sure, she had wanted to do away with subtlety—but to shake the tree, not chainsaw the damn thing down, douse it in gasoline, and light it on fire. Although she supposed it would yield a similar result, but she would have to wait and see.
Bayard finally opened his mouth and took a deep breath as if about to deliver a big line, but he let it all go with a sigh. Instead, in a calm voice, he said, “We’re done here. Have a good evening, Ms. Shane,” and patted the top of the cab. Then he turned around, walked toward an SUV cruiser parked ahead of the cab, and got in.
A moment of shocked silence began to bloom inside the cab, but Guppy popped it like an overfull balloon. “Holy shit,” he said, then turned and looked at Emma.
“Couldn’t play dumb forever,” she said.
“Guess not. Any of that stuff about the drugs true?” Guppy said. “Or you just stirring the pot?”
“It’s true,” Emma said. “The whole thing was staged. And poorly.”
“You really think Bayard…” He looked at the cruiser in front of him, then back at Emma and lowered his voice as if Bayard could hear him. “You really think he has something to do with Rabbit being dead?”
“I don’t know. He’s a tough read. Maybe he knows what’s going on but isn’t in control of it. The fact that it was staged poorly could mean one of two things: whoever did it either didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t care because they knew it didn’t matter.”
“As in Bayard would make it go the way it needed to go,” Guppy said.
“Could be.”
“That’d mean he was in someone’s pocket.”
“It would.” She turned her face to the open window and let the cold air prickle her skin a moment before rolling it up. A waft of car exhaust snuck in on the heels of the last breeze. “So who’s the boss’s boss?”
“That’d be the board of selectmen. Of which Brian Pelkey is the chairman.”
“Pelkey?” Emma said. The name was starting to feel like a connecting thread. “Any relation to—”
“He’s Clarence Pelkey’s brother… and uncle to the kid you scared the bejesus out of earlier today.”
“So the Pelkeys have some weight around here, too, then,” she said as she began to paint some broad strokes out loud. “You got Clarence Pelkey, who runs the town’s biggest business. You got his brother, who chairs the board that runs the town itself and by extension the police department. Then there’re the Winthrops, who own most of Rockcliffe’s commercial real estate. I have that right?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s the players.”
“So’s there a connection between the Pelkeys and the Winthrops?”
“Yeah. Both got too much money.” Guppy laughed. It was a joke, but it wasn’t.
“No shared business interests?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said. “No connection that I know of.”
“Then maybe there isn’t one,” Emma said. “Or maybe there is and we just don’t know it. Maybe nobody knows it.” She started tapping her teeth with the tips of her fingers again and speaking in a reflective voice. “The problem is, we’re searching blind. Connecting dots blind. Dots that might not even be dots. Everything blind.” She let out a frustrated sigh.
“What do you mean?” Guppy asked, interrupting her unfiltered stream of thought.
“I’m in the dark.”
“And I take it that’s not a good thing.”
“It’s all effect and no cause.”
“Well, that clears it up.”
“What I mean is, I need to stop focusing on what happened to Molly and figure out why it happened.”
Then it hit her. Perhaps it had taken hearing herself say it out loud to put it into perspective. She had been so adamant that her sister hadn’t killed herself. She’d repeated it like a chorus as often as possible, wielded it like a defensive weapon. Even before she’d known anything about what happened, she’d taken a stance: My sister wouldn’t kill herself. Yet that was what she had been trying so hard to prove since she’d shown up, undermining herself in the process. She’d been attempting to validate her mantra, trying to establish some piece of definitive proof, uncover some kernel of knowledge, to grant her a solid footing on which to stand. But in doing so she had lost sight of the clearest path to the truth.
So why have I been focusing on the wrong thing?
The answer, she supposed, was obvious: she needed to be sure because she believed that her sister was in fact capable of killing herself, and that terrified her. Because Emma herself had considered it so many times. Because every time she popped a pill in her mouth, she knew the escape wouldn’t last, and that the next day she would have to do it all over again. And the next day. And the next. And eventually the pills would stop working, and she would be cornered. Eventually she would have only one way out. Maybe Molly had been cornered. Maybe that was what she had been running from. Literally. Running through a storm, salvation in hand, toward the only escape she could find.
No! a voice screamed in her head. You don’t believe that!
“Isn’t that what you been doing?” Guppy said.
Emma stopped tapping her teeth and looked away from the window. She thought, I thought I was, but I haven’t been, because I’ve been too afraid of what I might find.
“I’ve been looking at Rockcliffe, when I should’ve been looking at Molly,” she said. “I need to go back to her house.”
4
Clarence Pelkey stared at his son with bright, teasing eyes. “That solves the mystery of the marathon showers, dudn’t it, sport?” He laughed and then shoveled another forkful of mashed potatoes—or podaters, as he called them—into his small, grinning mouth.
