Somebody's Fool, page 27
“Okay, so we start small,” J.J. suggested. “Maybe one investigative piece a month. Gradually work our way up to one a week. Can we at least discuss it?”
“It will be on tomorrow’s agenda, I promise,” Peter assured him.
“Yeah, but will you support it? The timing is right. We won that award last year. Our circulation is bigger than the Dumb-o-crat’s.”
“We’re free.”
“If we expand into news, we could put them out of their misery. The town could be ours.” Which of course was always J.J.’s true endgame: to be a mover and a shaker.
“From what I’m hearing,” Peter said, “they may go out of business regardless.”
“So?” J.J. countered. “Like I said. An opportunity.”
“Yeah, to lose our shirts. You say the timing is right, but actually it couldn’t be worse. The whole newspaper industry is on life support. Ad revenue is migrating online.”
“Then we go digital ourselves.”
“I don’t really know that model. Do you?”
“We could learn.”
“I’m pushing sixty,” Peter reminded him. “And you’re no spring chick yourself.”
“We bring experience,” J.J. insisted. “Wisdom.”
“Really? You feel wise?”
He started to reply, but before he could, Peter’s cell rang. Good, he thought, until he saw that the caller was Will. Had something else occurred to him about Thomas’s visit? Or was there more troubling personal news he’d decided to come clean about? “Umm…I need to take this,” he told J.J., hoping the other man would take the hint, pack up his laptop and leave. Fat chance. Pressing ANSWER to prevent the call from going to voice mail, Peter said, “Hang on, okay? I’ll call you back in two seconds.”
Outside, thanks to the thick blanket of wet snow, the street was preternaturally still. To Peter it felt almost like a living thing that had taken a deep breath a moment earlier and was waiting to exhale, though of course it was Peter himself who was holding his breath. Waiting for the call to go through, he was visited by the same sense of foreboding he’d felt yesterday when he’d pulled up in front of the house and saw Thomas sitting on the porch, looking like retribution personified. “Sorry about that,” he said when Will answered. “I was in a meeting.”
“It’s him,” Will said simply. “I did another Google search.”
Peter swallowed hard. “You’re sure?”
“There’s a photo. You’re right. We do look a lot alike.” When Peter didn’t know how to respond to that, his son continued, “I think you need to take this seriously. His showing up, I mean. He’s been in all kinds of trouble. Drunk and disorderly. Assault. Resisting arrest.”
“Okay, I appreciate the heads-up, but I doubt there’s anything to worry about,” Peter said. “By now he’s probably halfway back to West Virginia.”
“What if he’s not?”
“If he’s still around, it’s because he plans to come by again. If he does, I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“Be careful.”
“Are you saying I should be afraid of him?” As he’d actually been, just last night?
“I’m saying you don’t know who he is.” Or what he’s become. No need to actually put that into words.
“Okay, but whose fault is that?”
Suddenly there was a loud thud, concussion-like, that seemed to originate in downtown Schuyler. Was it Peter’s imagination, or had the ground actually vibrated? He looked around to see if anybody else had noticed, but he was the only one in the street.
“Dad?” Will was saying. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” he said.
“Should I come home? We could look for him together.”
“Absolutely not. Like I said earlier, your mother and I made this mess a long time ago. If it needs cleaning up, that’s on us, not you.”
“Okay, but Dad? What I said before? It wasn’t the whole truth. I really hated him. If you never went looking for him, it was probably because you knew I would’ve begged you not to.”
“You were just a kid,” Peter reminded him. “Look, I’m going to say it again. None of this is your fault.”
What his son said next wrong-footed him completely. “I cheated on her, Dad. That’s why Clare left me.”
He didn’t respond immediately. “Okay, but how is that related to your brother?”
“Maybe it isn’t,” Will admitted. “But when she left? I remember telling myself that this was the first time I’d ever done something really bad, something that couldn’t be undone. Trying to make myself feel better, I guess. Except that wasn’t true. Hating Wacker, wanting to be free of him forever, my own little brother? That was worse. A lot worse.”
“Is it too late to fix things with Clare?”
“I don’t know? Do you think I should try?”
“Do you want to?”
“Yeah? I guess?”
“Will,” Peter said. “Are you going to make me quote your grandfather?”
Though he was on the other side of the world, Peter, in his mind’s eye, could visualize son’s sad smile. “Do some fucking thing, even if it’s wrong?”
“Right,” Peter said. “If it doesn’t work, do something else.”
“Okay,” Will replied. “I’ll let you know how that works out. And if my brother shows up again, you’ll let me know.”
This latter was phrased as a demand, not a question. “Deal.”
Hanging up, Peter glanced up the street, half expecting Thomas’s yellow Caddy to roll into view, his son, made criminal by Peter’s neglect, grinning at him from behind the wheel. But it also occurred to Peter that he and Will might be worried about the wrong thing. Yes, it was possible that Thomas had come for retribution. But couldn’t retribution also manifest as absence? What if Thomas had come by to see if he still had any feelings for his father, or, equally important, if his father had any lingering feelings for him? What if he’d come to offer Peter one last opportunity to be his father? What if, instead of retribution, he’d been hoping for a heartfelt embrace, an expression of brokenhearted regret for how things had worked out? And received instead a tour of the house he hadn’t had a chance to grow up in, an offer to “hang out” there for a couple days? What if, when Thomas left this time, he was gone for good?
The door to the coffee shop opened then, and J.J. emerged, his laptop bag slung over his shoulder. “Sorry,” he said. “My scanner just went off. There’s been some sort of explosion downtown.”
“I heard it, actually,” Peter told him.
“You want to tag along?”
“Not really.”
“I’m telling you,” he said, already heading across the street to where his car was parked. “Hard news is where it’s at.”
Back inside, Peter gathered his things. What he needed, he decided, was some spirited racquetball, something to not just exhaust his body but also take his mind off Thomas and, yes, Will, too. He was on his way out the door when his phone rang in his pocket. Dear God, what now? Thankfully, it wasn’t Will again, but rather Birdie at the Horse.
“Can you come by?”
“I guess?” he sighed. “I was just on my way to play racquetball.”
“Okay,” she said, but her voice didn’t sound right. Outside, a fire truck raced by, siren blaring.
“Is something wrong?”
“You remember David Proxmire?”
“Harold’s brother?”
“He just died.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“No, I mean here. Just now.”
“At the Horse?”
“I’m looking at him. He’s sitting in your father’s stool.”
Though it didn’t seem to be, he had to ask, “Is this a joke?”
“He was showing me the latest CT scan of that thing in his skull. He kind of stopped midsentence and this little trickle of blood came out of one nostril.”
“Jesus, Birdie. Did you call 911?”
“I just hung up with them.”
“So, the ambulance hasn’t arrived yet?”
“No.”
Outside, right on cue, an ambulance raced by, though if it was headed to the Horse it was going in the wrong direction.
“All right, I’m on my way.”
“Peter?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think maybe this is a sign?”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we should close?”
“Look,” he said. “Just sit tight, okay?”
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing, isn’t it,” she replied. “Where would I go?”
Mission Creep
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you lost him?” Charice wanted to know. “How do you lose a six-foot-five-inch Black man in lily-white North Bath during a snowstorm?”
Well, it was embarrassing, Raymer had to admit. “We stopped at Play It Again Electronics, thinking they might have a charger for the BlackBerry,” he explained. “Jerome wasn’t wearing boots, so he decided to stay in the car. When I came back out, he was gone.”
“Gone,” she repeated.
“Well, not from the planet. I doubt he was abducted by aliens. He’s just no longer in the car.”
“How long were you in there?”
“Ten minutes, max,” he told her, though it was hard to say exactly how long he and Larry, the shop’s owner, had spent going bin to bin in the labyrinth of rickety shelves, pulling out nests of cords and chargers. Part repair shop, part outdated technology museum, Play It Again had doubled in size since Raymer’s last visit, taking over the vacant space next door. The shop next to that was also vacant, and Larry said he had his eye on it as well. Who knew? Maybe he’d end up with the whole mall.
“And this place is where, exactly?”
“You know the little strip mall on the way to Performing Arts? There used to be a travel agency and a Chinese restaurant? The Happy something? Lucky something?”
“Is there a coffee shop there? Jerome likes his espresso.”
“There’s no coffee shop,” he assured her. “Except for Play It Again, there isn’t much of anything. Most of the storefronts are vacant.” Except for one other vehicle at the far end of the mall, the entire parking lot was empty.
“So, this Larry person?” she said. “Did he have a charger for the BlackBerry?”
“He found a couple that might work. Apparently there are several different models. I’ll check them out later.”
“Did you have some sort of argument?”
“Why would I argue with Larry?”
“No, with Jerome. Did you argue with my brother?”
Raymer allowed himself an audible sigh. “I told you before. We were getting along fine.”
“Well, something must’ve set him off. What were you talking about?”
“Lots of stuff. Why white women find him irresistible. His excellent vocabulary. His sartorial choices. The evolutionary purpose of plumage. Also slavery and lynching and the difference between white time and Black time.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Apparently. He explained the whole thing to me with spoons and a water glass. Everybody in the restaurant turned to watch.”
“I bet.”
“We also talked about you.”
“What about me?” Was it Raymer’s imagination or did she suddenly sound anxious?
“How, when you were young, you spent more time worrying about him than about your own happiness.”
“Jerome said that?” Her voice had become thick with emotion, and when he let her question sit in silence, she changed the subject. “Have you tried his cell?”
“Straight to voice mail. Do you think maybe he called a cab?”
“To go where?”
“The airport? Maybe he changed his mind again and decided to leave.”
“Did you say anything that would make him feel unwelcome?”
Right. Here it was again, right on schedule, what loathsome Dougie had warned him about from the beginning, that when push came to shove, Charice would always side with her brother. “You know what? Here’s an idea. Let’s have him fitted with an ankle bracelet. That way you’ll always know his precise location.”
A long, apologetic beat of silence followed. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I didn’t mean to blame you.”
“Actually,” he told her, “the last thing I said to him was not to worry, that everything was going to work out. I guess I was trying to cheer him up.” Except that wasn’t really true, was it? What had led to that momentary surge of optimism was the fact that Jerome had unexpectedly confided in him that when Becka was alive, he’d thought of Raymer as a friend, which implied that they weren’t anymore.
“Cheer him up about what?”
“He seemed to want me to understand what being Black felt like. As if I might wake up Black one day myself and be grateful to know how to proceed. He seems to think he’s got a target on his back.”
“That’s not entirely crazy.”
Raymer would have liked to disagree but decided to hold his tongue. In truth, his and Jerome’s conversation at Hattie’s unsettled him more than he cared to admit. The old Jerome (The name is Bond…Jerome Bond) had been determined to be seen and acknowledged. In his own way he’d been as cool and composed as the secret agent he riffed on. It was an act, of course. Raymer had always understood that. But it had been a good one, entertaining to observe precisely because it was difficult to take seriously, though it was entirely possible that Jerome did. Becka’s death had shattered that pose, sending the man into a psychotic spiral from which he’d been lucky to emerge. Still, with Charice’s and, yes, Dr. Qadry’s help, he had emerged, his lost mojo gradually returning until he’d felt confident enough to go back to North Carolina and begin a new life there. What happened between him and the art therapy woman, so far as Raymer knew, had been nothing more than a breakup, but for some reason it had affected Jerome even more profoundly than Becka’s death. Had he arrived at some sort of snapping point? Was he peering into the abyss? Though Charice hadn’t said so in so many words, she clearly feared that her brother’s steroidal anxieties had morphed into full-blown clinical depression, that this time, as she put it, he’d simply given up. And maybe she was right. This morning Jerome had explained why he found it necessary to attract less notice as he navigated the world, but Raymer couldn’t help wondering if what the man really had in mind was to disappear completely. If so, at least for the moment, he seemed to have succeeded.
They were both quiet until Charice said, in a voice he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard before, “You promised.”
“Promised what?”
“You’ve only had him one morning. You can’t give him back.”
Raymer looked out across the unnecessarily large parking lot of the failing strip mall, as if Jerome might magically appear in the middle of it. “I’m not giving him back,” he assured her. “I’ve just…temporarily misplaced him.”
What did worry him, though, was that he might become a victim of what the military called “mission creep.” The job he’d signed on for was looking after Jerome while Charice took care of things at the station. And sure, having lost his charge, it was Raymer’s job to find him again. That much was fair enough. More disconcerting was his sense that the Jerome Charice wanted him to find wasn’t the one who’d gone missing fifteen minutes ago, but rather the brother she remembered before his breakdown. Earlier, listening to the man explain how he saw the world and his place in it, Raymer had wondered if his own best (perhaps only) chance of finding his way back into Charice’s affections was through her brother. But what if she was really asking Raymer to get to the bottom of what ailed Jerome and fix him, something she herself had been trying and failing to do since his return from North Carolina? What if when Raymer assured Jerome that things would work out, it was really himself he’d been attempting to cheer up?
“I don’t know. Maybe you should just go home,” Charice suggested. “If he’s headed there on foot, you’ll beat him.”
“And then do what?”
“You’ll think of something. Look, I’m in the middle of a shitstorm here.”
“More Delgado?”
“Call it Delgado-adjacent.”
“He was at Hattie’s this morning, actually. He aimed an imaginary gun at me and pulled the trigger.”
“Like…in a menacing way?”
“No. At least that’s not how I took it. More like a brothers-in-arms thing. I made him as a cop as soon as he walked in. He apparently did the same when he saw me.”
“I doubt that. Nobody ever makes you as a cop.”
“Thanks.”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
“So, what’s going on now?”
“There was a problem at the station this morning. Some asshole from the drunk tank went ballistic on the desk sergeant. Punched him in the face. Broke his nose and knocked out a couple teeth. Just what the poor guy needed, two months from retirement.”
“Is the assailant back in custody, at least?”
“He will be when he gets out of the hospital. I’m told it was not a gentle arrest.”
So that’s where Delgado had been headed when he left Hattie’s in such a hurry.
“Apparently, the whole thing started last night. The guy was pounding shots at the Green Hand until he blacked out and fell off his barstool. Delgado was the one who brought him into the station and tossed him in the drunk tank to sleep it off. Now he’s claiming the guy’s injuries came from falling off the stool, not from his arrest this morning.” Raymer heard a knock on the door, then, and Charice’s voice became muffled, her hand over the phone. “Look, I gotta go,” she said. “Apparently, some car exploded in the middle of Main Street.”
