Somebody's Fool, page 38
“Or,” Peter said, smiling back, just as smugly, “he changed his mind.”
“Which? If you had to guess.”
“But I don’t have to. I can just ask him when I see him. In the meantime, though, how about I ask you a question?”
Again, Delgado glanced over at his colleague. Do you believe this guy?
“Why am I being interviewed? Am I suspected of something besides negligent parenting?”
Delgado shrugged. “Just trying to understand why your son behaved like he did. He visits dear old dad after all these years and later that same night drinks himself into a coma. But you say you didn’t quarrel.”
“Because we didn’t.”
“I understand he was asked at some point if he had relatives here and he said no. Why would he do that if the two of you were getting along?”
“I have no idea,” Peter said. “When exactly did this interview take place?”
Neither man seemed inclined to answer. When Peter’s phone pinged with a text, both men heard it. In another situation he would have apologized for interrupting a conversation to look at his phone, but not now. The text, no surprise, was from J.J.: RE: DELGADO. Of all the dirty Schuyler cops, this guy’s the dirtiest. Long history of violence particularly in the North Side. He’s the one who broke the car windows.
Returning the phone to his pocket, Peter continued, “So, Mr. Delgado—”
“Lieutenant Delgado,” the man corrected.
Peter waved this away. “Whatever. Am I to understand that you were involved in both last night’s incident at the tavern and my son’s arrest this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Would you describe that as unusual? Being at the tavern where Thomas was drinking last night, and then being the arresting officer this morning? I only ask,” he said, glancing over at Bobby now, “because it strikes me as unusual. Possibly even fucked up.”
Both men stiffened, but Delgado remained calm. “I wouldn’t say it was that unusual,” he said. “How about you, Bobby? Would you say it was unusual?”
“Fuck, no,” Bobby said. “Not at all.”
“I understand you broke all the windows in my son’s car this morning,” Peter continued, pausing to see if Delgado would deny this. He didn’t. “Would you describe such behavior as typical or atypical of the police here in Schuyler Springs?”
“You know what?” Bobby said. “Fuck you.”
Delgado just smiled and leaned back in his chair, locking his fingers behind his head. He studied Peter for a long beat. “You’re one cool customer, Mr. Sullivan. Most people are nervous when questioned by the police. But you? You feel free to mock us. Do you mind if I ask what you do for a living?”
“Not at all,” Peter told him. “I’m a professor at SCCC. I also edit Schuyler Arts, a local magazine.”
Bobby snorted at this. “Never heard of it.”
Peter smiled at him. “The magazine or the college?”
“See what I mean, Bobby?” Delgado said. His small eyes had gotten even darker, a place where light went to die. “More mockery. I think what Mr. Sullivan is really saying here is that he makes more money than we do. That’s why he’s not scared of us.”
“Or that I’m smarter,” Peter offered. “I might be saying that.”
Bobby, who this whole time had been leaning against the filing cabinet, now stood up straight.
“Or,” Peter continued, really channeling his mother and grandfather now, “I might just be saying that I have an excellent lawyer. I might be saying all of those things.” He paused here for a long beat. “But then again, you could just be imagining it.”
“What do you think, Bobby?” Delgado said, swiveling now in his chair. “Are we imagining Mr. Sullivan’s mockery?”
“Seems pretty real to me.”
Was it Peter’s imagination, or had some of the wind gone from both men’s sails?
“Anyway,” Peter said, rising to his feet. “It’s time I went to the hospital to see what sort of injury you’ve done to my son. Before I go, though, would you mind giving me the name of the other arresting officer?”
“He’s no longer a member of the department, actually.”
“He was this morning but not now?”
“That’s correct.”
Peter nodded. “This whole thing might make an interesting article. That magazine I mentioned earlier? We’re thinking about expanding our focus to include in-depth local news. You know. Race relations, corrupt politicians, sadistic cops. That sort of thing.” Opening the office door, he paused in the entryway. “Open or shut?”
“Close it, please,” Delgado said. “Gently.” As if he suspected Peter intended to slam it. Peter did as instructed, but once outside, instead of heading back up the corridor, he lingered by the door. It was Bobby who finally broke the silence inside the office. “You know what, Del?” he said. “The way I see it, this can now officially be classified as a shitshow.”
More
WHEN HER CELL PHONE rang and she saw that it was Del calling again, Janey happened to be staring at Roger Thorne’s tenth-grade photo in her high-school yearbook and thinking about what her mother said earlier—that there was such a thing as being too late. Was it possible, she wondered, that these two seemingly unrelated activities were somehow linked? She decided not. Was it too late to sell Hattie’s? Probably. The time to do that was before the recession took hold, back when there was still a place called North Bath. Now she’d basically be giving it away. Her mother was right, though. She was exhausted all the time, and bad decisions were often born of exhaustion. The problem was that if she sold, like Del wanted her to, she would likely descend even further into what she’d come to think of as Del World. She’d have to find a cheap apartment in Schuyler and pick up waitressing shifts at the Green Hand until something better came along, which might never happen. She was pretty sure she and Del weren’t going to last much longer. Still, even if her mother was right about her need to start making changes while she still could, there didn’t seem to be a way to do so incrementally. Once the dominoes started falling, there’d be no stopping them. She’d lose her work, her home and the only man in her life, with no clear plan for replacing any of these, at least not in the near future.
She thought about letting Del’s call just go to voice mail, but he’d just call back a few minutes later, and if she still didn’t answer, he’d probably come looking for her, and she wanted to see him even less than she wanted to talk to him. “Del,” she said, finally picking up on the eighth ring, and not bothering to sound happy that he was calling.
Nor did he bother to sound anything but miffed. “Where are you?” This question, she knew all too well, was not born of curiosity. His point was that she was not with him, not where she was supposed to be, which rendered where she actually was irrelevant.
“Home,” she told him.
“I thought we were going to meet up tonight.”
Immediately, her hackles went up. “Why?”
He didn’t answer right away, which probably meant that he was segueing from miffed to aggravated. From there he’d slow burn his way through his narrow, all-too-predictable range of negative emotions, from upset to riled up, to incensed, all the way to infuriated. Hacked off would also be in there somewhere.
“We discussed this when I called you earlier,” he reminded her.
“I had a restaurant full of customers,” she told him, though this wasn’t true. By then the morning rush was over, just a few stragglers at the counter chatting over the dregs of their third free coffee refill. “I said I’d think about it. You said by then you might have another date.”
“That was a fucking joke and you know it.”
“It sounded like a fucking threat.”
“Look,” he said, “can we stop with the bullshit?”
And whoa! Just like that, she’d made her decision. Here again, though she hated to admit it, her mother was right. It was time to quit doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. “I don’t want to see you tonight, Del,” she told him. “In fact, I don’t think we should see each other at all anymore.”
“And just where the fuck is this coming from all of a sudden?”
Okay, she thought. Forget the slow burn. In a matter of seconds the never completely cold embers of his anger had flared into a blaze. She wondered yet again if it was only a matter of time before he hit her. “It’s not all of a sudden,” she told him.
“Bullshit. We fucked each other’s brains loose last night.”
This was kind of true, but also not. Their sex—what she remembered of it—had been energetic but otherwise unexceptional. Okay, he’d scratched an itch, give him that much. But fucking Roy had scratched that same itch, which suggested there wasn’t a whole lot of skill involved. Maybe the time had come to take a page from her own daughter’s playbook. Learn to live without a man in her life, at least for a while. Maybe get a dog. They were a lot less trouble. Surely she’d be able to find one that wasn’t as pitiful as Jacks. “Look, Del,” she said. “No hard feelings, okay? We had a few laughs. But I’m not in love with you and I know you’re not in love with me. Half the time I don’t think you even like me.”
“I like you fine except when you’re being a cunt.”
“Which you think is pretty much all the time, right?”
“You said that, I didn’t.”
“So why would you even give a shit if we stopped seeing each other?”
“Tell me why. Last night everything was fine. Now it isn’t. Who have you been talking to?”
“Myself.”
That seemed to bring him up short, but only for a second. “And that’s supposed to mean what, exactly?”
“It means when I wake up in the morning after being out with you, I don’t like myself.” No need to mention how much she hated the way he ground his teeth when he was asleep, especially after they had sex, as if dreaming about it pissed him off. “I mean, really. Last night? We tossed a guy who might’ve been seriously hurt into the fucking trunk of your car. And then later? Bungeeing the poor guy to that trolley and wheeling him inside?”
“I don’t recall you objecting.”
“That’s my point, Del. Doing crazy shit like that always seems kind of funny at the time, but the next day I think, What the fuck? I’m sorry, but I don’t like who I am when I’m with you.”
“Sounds like your problem is you.”
She ignored this. “And I don’t like the stories you tell. They’re all about humiliating people.”
“They’re about being a cop.”
She ignored this. “And what I really don’t like,” she explained, “is that I laugh at them because I don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t think they’re funny.”
He was quiet then for a long beat. Finally, he said, “It was you, wasn’t it.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“What did you tell him?”
“Tell who?”
“Do not fucking bullshit me, Janey. It wasn’t one of my crew, so it had to be you.”
“Del,” she said. “What the fuck are you talking about?” Though she had a pretty good idea.
“That ‘poor guy’ we bungeed to the trolley? His name was Sullivan. Thomas Sullivan. His father was just in here. He knew all about last night at the Hand.”
“That’s because he and my mother are friends.”
“And how did she know?”
“Because I told her.”
“And why would you do that?”
“Why wouldn’t I? She asked me if I had a good time at the Hand last night and I gave her a recap. What was I supposed to say? Mind your own business?”
“So what exactly did you tell her?”
“I told her what happened, okay? That there was a guy at the bar who got so shit-faced, he fell off his stool and we ended up dropping him off at the police station on our way home.”
“And from this she figured out who the guy was?”
“No, she recognized his car. She knew Peter Sullivan’s son was in town and he was driving an old yellow Caddy with West Virginia plates.”
“Great. So now, as if I didn’t have enough problems, I have to deal with this.”
“The reason you have problems is because you do stupid shit, Del. You and your dumb-ass cop friends.”
“Okay, fuck this. You’ve got thirty minutes.”
“To do what?”
“To get your ass out to the Hand. You’re going to tell me every single thing you said to your mother, and I’m going to tell you every single thing you’re going to say to the cops if they want to talk to you.”
“I’m not fucking lying for you, Del. I’m not.”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Or what, Del? What happens then?”
“Thirty minutes,” he repeated, and then the line was dead.
Probably just as well, or he would’ve heard her tell him to go fuck himself.
* * *
TINA PICKED UP on the first ring. “Wow,” she said. “We’re talking twice in one day.”
“Yeah, I know,” Janey said. “I don’t know what to make of it myself.”
“You sound kind of…”
“Kind of what?” she said, because whatever she was sounding like, she was trying not to, and here was her daughter, emotional tuning fork that she was, picking up on it.
“Not like you,” Tina explained.
“I’m fine,” Janey lied, she hoped, convincingly. “Have I caught you at a bad time?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Janey said, then stalled. Where to begin? “I’m thinking about selling the restaurant.”
“Wow,” Tina said again. Her daughter was the only person Janey knew who could say that word without conveying a lick of excitement or surprise.
“I guess I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the subject.”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m exhausted all the time. It’s barely breaking even. I guess the real question is who’d want to buy it.”
“Do you want me to?”
Jesus, Janey thought. Earlier she’d offered to buy her a new car. Now the restaurant. “You could really do that?” she said, dumbfounded, though she shouldn’t have been. “Just decide to buy a restaurant without having to think about it?”
“If you want me to.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Okay.”
Janey could almost hear her daughter thinking the obvious question she wouldn’t give voice to: Then what do you want? “It’s just that your grandmother thinks I should make some changes in my life while there’s still time. She’s right, I guess. I’m definitely in a rut. I just don’t know how to go about getting out of it, you know?”
Silence. She didn’t know. How would she?
“Actually,” Janey continued, “since talking to you this morning, I’ve been wondering how you do it.”
“Do what?”
Live, she seemed to mean. Face the unending days. Put one foot in front of the other. “You just seem so…together. So self-contained. Like you have everything you need.”
“What do you need?”
God, Janey thought, the conversation wasn’t going anywhere. What had possessed her to think it would? “Actually, I called to get Roger Thorne’s phone number. Do you think he’d mind me having it?”
Tina recited the number, and Janey tapped it into her phone. Though her daughter hadn’t asked for an explanation, Janey decided to offer one anyway. “Your grandmother told me this completely ridiculous thing about him earlier and I want to ask him about it.”
“Okay.”
Okay? Janey wanted to scream. Who could hear the phrase completely ridiculous thing and not want to know what that thing was? “All right,” she sighed. “I’ll let you go.” Though she didn’t want to. There were all sorts of other things she wanted to say, a whole litany of questions she wanted to ask, but even if she could remember what they were, they’d all get one-word responses, and they’d make her want to cry. In fact, she was on the verge of tears right now. “One last quick question, okay?”
“Okay.”
Again, she stalled. How to ask it? If she sold Hattie’s and moved to Schuyler and found a job there, they’d be that much farther apart. Would Tina care? Would she even notice? Finally, she said, “Would you like more of me in your life or less?”
Her daughter didn’t hesitate. “More,” she said.
“Okay,” Janey said, the tears coming fast now. “Okay.”
* * *
THE OLD HIGH-SCHOOL yearbook still lay open on her lap, and though she still didn’t see what fifteen-year-old Roger Thorne had to do with the dilemma of whether or not to sell the restaurant and otherwise extricate herself from the rut she was in, she decided they must be connected somehow or she wouldn’t have asked Tina for his number.
“Hey,” Roger said, when Janey identified herself. “Are you crying?”
“No,” Janey said, then thought, What the hell. “Maybe a little.”
“Something wrong?”
“Not really,” she told him. “I just got off the phone with Tina, is all. She makes me cry, sometimes.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I can understand that.”
Really? He could? “I was wondering if maybe you might want to go out for a beer sometime.”
“Like when?”
“How about now? Your job would be to cheer me up. Do you think you’re up to that?”
“I could try,” he said. “Where?”
“Someplace close, given the weather,” she said, then immediately felt like an idiot because she had no idea where Roger lived. If he lived in the boonies, where the roads probably weren’t plowed yet, getting into town might be a chore. “The Horse maybe?” On a Sunday night the place would be slow and quiet. Birdie would be pleased to see them.
