Somebody's Fool, page 31
Spying him in the doorway, she said, “Finally. You’re here. Do you mind?”
Did he mind what? That David Proxmire was alive after all? Of course not. True, Peter had always found the man to be a crashing bore, but he’d never wished him dead. As he made his way toward them, Proxmire remained preternaturally still, showing not the slightest interest in Peter’s arrival. That was because the man was, in fact, dead, just as Birdie had reported.
“Do you mind?” Birdie repeated. “Put your hand right there?” She indicated the spot on David Proxmire’s shoulder where her own hand rested.
“Why?” Peter asked. Having concluded earlier that she’d been attempting to comfort the man when Peter entered, he found the inference difficult to surrender. He himself felt no need to comfort a dead man.
“Because,” Birdie explained with some irritation, “I need to pee.” When this only deepened Peter’s confusion, she grabbed his wrist with her free hand and placed his where she wanted it to go. “You got him?”
Only when she removed her own hand and Peter felt the man’s weight did he understand what she was asking of him. At some point after she’d hung up with Peter, the deceased must have begun to list on his stool. For the last twenty minutes, then, she’d been preventing him from toppling onto the floor.
When the kitchen door swung shut behind her, Peter was left alone with what had been a living human being, and was now…what, exactly? He was no longer alive, but perhaps because of his circumstance—the fact that he was seated on a barstool, his elbows resting comfortably on the bar, as if he might at any moment strike up a conversation—he didn’t seem to quite qualify as a corpse. He wouldn’t become that until the ambulance arrived and he was loaded into it. Until then, for as long as he required someone to keep him upright on his barstool, David Proxmire was somehow neither here nor there.
What struck Peter—and not for the first time—was that his present situation, ludicrous in the extreme, was the fault of one Donald Sullivan. That the dead man should be perched on Sully’s barstool felt entirely appropriate. Somehow his old man was still calling the shots. Peter hadn’t objected when he was given that list of people to check in on after Sully was gone, the one that included Rub and Ruth and Carl Roebuck and Tina and Birdie. The problem was that the list kept expanding. All these people had lists of their own, lists that overlapped. Take Birdie. Peter was fond of her and didn’t mind keeping an eye on her. Nor had he minded investing in the Horse (okay, it was Sully’s money, but still) to keep both it and her afloat. The problem was that keeping his promise to his father inevitably trailed unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences. Who could’ve predicted, for instance, that Sully’s fondness for Birdie meant that it would one day fall to him to keep David Proxmire upright on a barstool until the ambulance—Where the hell was it?—arrived? When Peter thought about it, how much of what had befallen him since his return to North Bath had he actually signed up for?
When his cell phone vibrated in the back-left pocket of his jeans, Peter, whose left hand was on David Proxmire’s shoulder, tried his best to fish it out with his right, but that proved impossible. When he switched hands, David Proxmire let out a soft moan, and the air was suddenly redolent of fresh feces. Was it Peter’s imagination, or did the man now look both dismayed and apologetic? Finally managing to extract the phone from his pocket, Peter pressed ANSWER and put the device to his ear without bothering to see who was calling. “Have I caught you at a bad time?” said Carl Roebuck.
“You could say that,” Peter told him.
“Where are you?”
“At the Horse. Where are you?” Because there was street noise in the background—men shouting, metal grating and another sound he couldn’t quite place, though it seemed oddly familiar.
“Schuyler. I’m with your buddy Rub. He needs a lift back to Bath.” Peter started to ask why Rub would be in Schuyler Springs, but then he remembered that on Sundays Rub worked for the very man Peter was keeping upright on his father’s barstool. “He’s been in an accident,” Carl was saying. “That’s him blubbering. Can you hear?”
Apparently Carl was holding his phone up closer to Rub now, because the sound Peter hadn’t been able to identify earlier was now clear. Rub had a very distinctive blubber. “Is he okay?”
“Define okay.”
“Is he injured?”
“No, just upset. He’s convinced his boss is going to blame him for the accident.”
Peter glanced over his shoulder at David Proxmire. “Tell him not to worry,” he said, though the dead man’s expression did seem to have changed subtly, his earlier dismay having morphed into something darker. He now had the look of a man who had foreseen this eventuality, just not how to prevent it. “So…,” Peter said, again turning away from the dead man. “What happened, exactly?”
“The vehicle he was towing burst into flames.”
“How is that possible?”
“Who knows?” Carl said. “Shit happens. Anyhow, the flames somehow ignited the wrecker’s gas tank.”
Was that the boom that Peter had heard when he was standing outside the coffee shop?
“The fireball was fucking impressive,” Carl said. “We’re damn lucky we weren’t both killed.”
“Time-out,” Peter said. “The two of you were together?”
“I ran into him at our place,” Carl explained.
Momentarily forgetting that Carl now lived with him on Upper Main, he started to say, Our place? but caught himself in time. “What was he doing there?”
“Looking for you. My impression was that he wanted to tell you something.”
“What?”
“How would I know? Anyhow, I told him you weren’t home and he offered me a lift, didn’t you, Rubberhead? He’d just dropped me off, when…boom!”
None of this made any sense. If Rub had come looking for Peter after putting a vehicle onto the wrecker, he would’ve immediately returned that vehicle to the yard. There’s no way he would’ve offered Carl a lift in the opposite direction. Which probably meant that Carl had bullied him into taking him there. Had Carl’s presence somehow factored into the accident? Because yes, shit did happen, but in Peter’s experience it was much more likely to happen when Carl was nearby. “You say the vehicle just burst into flame.”
“Boom!” said Carl. “Whooosh!”
The blubbering stopped now, and Peter heard Rub wail, “It was your fault!”
“Hey, now!” Peter heard Carl say. “How about a little gratitude? Who pulled you out of that cab just in the nick of time?”
Rub howled something else now, but Peter couldn’t make it out.
“Don’t pay him any attention,” Carl advised. “He’s just in a tizzy. But explain something to me. What the hell happened to his stutter? Why isn’t he claiming that it was all my fuh-fuh-fault.”
Peter was fast losing patience. “Carl. Whose fuh-fuh-fault was it?”
“I guess I’d say whoever owns the vehicle that caught fire was mostly to blame,” Carl stated, as if he were giving the matter serious thought. “I mean, come on. Who drives around with five full gas cans in the trunk? It also could be partly the city’s fault. We hit a couple potholes on the way here and maybe one of those popped the trunk open. Hard to say for sure. Call it the convergence of several factors.”
“Were you one of those factors?”
“Me?” Carl said, indignant now, which made Peter more suspicious, not less.
“Carl.”
“Okay, fine,” Carl sighed, “it kind of was my cigarette. I was going to just drop it on the pavement, you know, but then I thought, Why litter?”
Peter closed his eyes tightly. “That would be an unselfish thought, and we both know you don’t have those.”
Carl ignored this. “I noticed the trunk of the Caddy was wide open and—”
“Hold on,” Peter said. Suddenly, he had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Caddy?”
“Right. The car on the wrecker.”
“What color was it?”
“Yellow, though I don’t see the relevance—”
“Did it by any chance have out-of-state plates?” Because that would explain why Rub had come by to see him.
“For some reason I want to say West Virginia,” Carl replied. “I noticed because—”
This time it wasn’t Peter who interrupted Carl Roebuck but rather the thunderous crash. “Jesus,” Carl said. “What the hell was that?”
Birdie, returning through the swinging door a split second later, was clearly about to ask the same thing, but then she saw that the barstool David Proxmire had been sitting on was now empty.
Art
THE SUICIDE’S BODY had been removed the day before, so the Sans Souci was again locked up tight, which meant a stop at the town manager’s office for a key. Bert Franklin, no surprise, was reluctant to hand one over to someone who had no official standing in Schuyler Springs. Raymer explained that he was assisting Charice in trying to identify the dead man, but this only made Franklin more skeptical. “Okay, but what exactly are you hoping to find out there, Doug? Everything’s been bagged and tagged, right?”
Which, of course, was precisely the objection Raymer had been hoping Franklin wouldn’t raise. “It’s possible we missed something,” he said weakly.
“Charice authorized this?”
“Call her, if you don’t believe me,” Raymer suggested, hoping that Franklin wouldn’t. He hadn’t wanted to bother Charice, who had no idea he and Jerome meant to go out there. She’d back him up, of course. She was counting on him to keep her brother occupied and out of her hair, and returning to the Sans Souci would fall under this general rubric. Actually, Raymer had a reason of his own to return to that eerie ballroom. Something he’d seen there—he couldn’t say exactly what—had been nagging at him all morning. A second visit might drag whatever was lurking in his subconscious to the front of his brain where he could examine it.
Franklin, a puzzled expression on his face, was peering out his office window at Raymer’s vehicle at the curb. “Is that Jerome out there?” he wanted to know.
“It is.”
“Huh. How long has he been back?”
“A while,” Raymer said.
Franklin cocked his head. “He doesn’t look right. What is going on with his hair? He looks like that guy in Pulp Fiction.”
“He’s going through a rough patch,” Raymer admitted.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Franklin said, returning his attention to Raymer. “I always liked Jerome. Not easy being a Black man in these parts.”
“So he’s been telling me.”
Reluctantly, Franklin went over to the key cabinet, where he located the right one. “I’m glad you’re giving Charice a hand,” he said, handing it to Raymer. “She’s surrounded by men who aren’t nearly as smart as she is. It’s hard to do your job right when you’re constantly putting out fires.”
“I keep hearing about this Conrad Delgado?” Raymer said, hoping the other man might tell him something he didn’t already know.
“He’s one of the arsonists, no question,” Franklin said, then made a zipping motion over his lips to indicate he wasn’t at liberty to say more. “You need me to come out there with you?”
“No, we’re good,” Raymer said, immediately regretting the use of the plural pronoun, which revealed that Jerome, who had even less standing in Schuyler than Raymer, would be accompanying him.
Clearly, Franklin picked up on it. “You both used to be cops,” he said when they reached the door, “so I don’t need to remind you not to remove anything from the premises, right?”
“Gotcha,” Raymer said as the two men shook hands. After all, it was unlikely that either he or Jerome would find what they were looking for.
Only when Raymer was outside did what Franklin had just said sink in: he used to be a cop. Which meant he wasn’t one anymore.
* * *
TWENTY MINUTES LATER he and Jerome were standing in the dark lobby of the old hotel. Raymer had flicked the light switch, to no avail. The electricity had been turned on late yesterday afternoon to help with the investigation, but now it was off again. Jerome, who had the book he’d purchased at the strip mall under one arm, had the look of a man who understands what he needs to do but not where to begin. “What exactly are we looking for?” Raymer asked him.
“Not what,” Jerome replied. “Who.”
“Okay, who?”
“Her name is Posey Gold,” Jerome informed him unhelpfully. “She’s an artist from the Harlem Renaissance.”
“Harlem had a renaissance?”
Jerome just stared at him.
“What?” Raymer said. Unless he was mistaken, another lecture was quivering on the horizon. He just hoped it would make more sense than the one about Black time and white time.
“Dawg,” Jerome said. “Langston Hughes. Paul Robeson. Josephine Baker. Zora Neale Hurston.”
A couple of these names rang faint bells, but Raymer made a circular motion in the air for Jerome to keep going.
“Louis Armstrong?”
“Him I’ve heard of.”
“Count Basie? Duke Ellington?”
“Those too.”
“Billie Holiday.”
“Hmmm. Second baseman?”
“Singer. She was a singer.”
“Oh.”
“Fats Waller,” Jerome continued. “Jelly Roll Morton.”
Whatever this game was about, Raymer was already weary of it. “Right. Both hockey players.”
Jerome sighed mightily. “Damn,” he said. “I can’t tell.”
“Can’t tell what?”
“If you really think they were hockey players.”
“I know they weren’t hockey players,” Raymer assured him. “Do hockey players even come in black?”
Jerome ignored this. “How about Billie Holiday? Did you really think she was a baseball player?”
Raymer decided to tell the truth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But doesn’t that sound like a baseball player’s name to you?”
“No!” shouted Jerome, unable to contain his outrage. “It sounds like the name of the greatest jazz and blues singer of all time.”
“Jerome,” Raymer said, not really caring if his own exasperation showed through. “I’m white, okay? I’m sorry, but that’s what I am. How am I supposed to know who all these people are?”
Jerome massaged his temples. “The same way I know who Charles Dickens was.”
This, Raymer gathered, was in reference to the copy of Great Expectations he’d purchased back at the bookstore. He’d started to put it back on the shelf but then thought again and brought it up to the register.
“The same way I know who James Bond is,” Jerome continued.
“What do you want from me?” Raymer said. “I’m sorry I don’t know the same things you know.”
“That’s not the point, Dawg. The point is that it’s part of your privilege to not know who these Black folks are. I, on the other hand, am supposed to know who Dickens is. You get to skate on Langston Hughes and nobody busts your balls.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Raymer said. “Aren’t you in fact busting my balls for not knowing what you know?”
Jerome paused to consider this possibility. “It’s true I’m busting your balls,” he admitted, “but it’s the why that’s important. What I’m saying is that you’re incurious.”
This might, Raymer had to admit, be a valid criticism. Miss Beryl had accused him of much the same thing back in eighth grade, concerned that he never read anything that wasn’t assigned and not all of what was. His world, she’d insisted, needed to grow. At the time, since none of his other teachers had offered the same complaint, he decided not to worry about it. Did his purchasing Great Expectations earlier mean that he was finally coming around to her (and Jerome’s) point of view?
“It’s okay that you don’t know who these people are,” Jerome was explaining. “What’s not okay is that you see no need to.”
Raymer had to laugh. “Do you know what your sister told me this morning?” he said. “That it would be a challenge getting you to talk.”
“And here’s the sad part,” Jerome continued, as if Raymer hadn’t spoken. “Deep down, you really want to hear about Posey Gold.”
Raymer shook his head. “You just finished accusing me of being incurious. Now you claim to know that deep down I want you to enlighten me. Which is it?”
“What I’m saying is that lack of curiosity is a habit of mind, Dawg, and habits can be broken. Broke a few myself, lately. You see the result before you. A whole new man.”
“Okay, but do you mind my saying I kind of miss the old one?”
“Long gone,” Jerome said sadly, as if he missed the old Jerome, too.
“Are you sure?” Raymer said. “I bet he’s still in there somewhere.”
“Nope,” Jerome insisted. “He’s vacated the premises. Vanished without a trace. No forwarding address.”
“Let’s find out,” Raymer suggested. “Repeat after me. The name is Bond.”
Jerome just stared at him.
“Jerome Bond,” employing the emphasis the old Jerome had favored.
“Gone,” Jerome insisted.
Raymer sighed. “Okay, you win. Tell me about Posey Golden. I’m all ears.”
“Posey Gold,” Jerome corrected. “Her parents were working class, but they believed in education. Made sure she went to college. She would’ve majored in art, but back then if you were a woman, you couldn’t. You had to major in art history so you could become a teacher. She got around these restrictions by cozying up to male artists who saw she was talented and agreed to work with her. She started out as a painter, but as a child her mother had taught her to sew. She decided that sewing could be art, too. She also made what she called soft sculptures, using foam and rubber and fabric. What really changed her life, though, was visiting West Africa, where her ancestors were enslaved.”
