Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 1. Whole No. 797, January 2008

Neighbor Lamour by John Goulet

John Goulet is a short-story writer and author of the novels Oh’s Profit (William Morrow) and Yvette in America (University of Colorado Press). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the London Times Literary Supplement. A recent review in Sewanee Review placed Yvette in America in the ranks of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. The following story is Mr. Goulet’s EQMM debut.

My friend Eugene and I remembered when Lamour moved into the three-bedroom ranch across the street fifteen years ago — sharp red car, tailored suits. Eugene remembered a BMW, but I said Jaguar. Big parties that would go late into the night and clog up Pinecrest Lane. We knew he was a lawyer. Office in downtown Milwaukee. A trial lawyer, we heard, with various connections, some of them shady. Fortyish back then, maybe five years older than Eugene and I. Friendly enough to wave, say hello.

We used to kid that if we ever murdered anyone, we’d know who to call on to defend us.

A year after he’d moved in, we weren’t exactly surprised to see Lamour’s name listed for the defense in the Albert Coniglio murder trial. Coniglio was high up in the Milwaukee mob, and the news of the trial was splashed across the front of the Express. For a while, black limos glided in and out of Lamour’s driveway. A touch of sleazy glamour on Pinecrest Lane, which apart from Lamour was L.L. Bean chinos, Weber grills, and Packers bumper stickers.

The stupid little war between Lamours and O’Dells that started around then didn’t have anything to do with Harry being involved with the mob. No, it was his kid, Junior, who started it by pulling up my mailbox — it was on a post out by the road, like all the Pinecrest Lane boxes. The morning I found it lying on the ground, I went across the street. The kid was whittling on a stick in his backyard. He was about fourteen then, skinny as a dagger, with poured-resin hair, and eyes too big for his head. “Junior, I don’t know for sure who pulled up our mailbox, but I think it’s you. If it happens again, you’re going to be in trouble.”

My friend Eugene worried a little about it. That night we took our wives to the movies. Afterwards, he pulled me aside. “Are you forgetting our neighbor’s connections?” he asked me, only half kidding.

Well, I didn’t think Milwaukee’s gangland was going to put out a contract on a music teacher at a small Catholic college because he’d objected to Harry Lamour’s son tearing down his mailbox.

Of course, neither did I think that Harry Lamour’s son would, over the next few years, make a hobby of pulling out my mailbox. Each time, I’d call the cops. The cops would come and examine my mailbox, and walk across the street to talk to the Lamours, and make the rounds of the neighborhood looking for witnesses. Fat chance someone was going to volunteer to testify against a family with mob connections. And I didn’t have any physical proof, of course.

Lamour Senior cornered me in my garage one day and demanded that I get off his son’s back. “My boy can be a little impulsive, but bringing in the cops just makes things worse.”

“If he keeps it up, I’ll catch him at it,” I said. And I told him to get off my property.

By that time the friendly waves and neighborly Hi’s had already come to an end; the war had begun. Eventually, it would go beyond mailboxes — way beyond.

After the next time, I sank the post in cement.

Tire tracks on my lawn — Junior had his license by now — told the story of his subsequent attack. He’d looped a chain between his back bumper and my mailbox and pulled the whole thing out, cement and all. It was complicated enough that I was pretty sure he had help from his father. That they’d formed a team.

My solution, after the cops had performed their useless ritual: more cement.

Team Lamour’s response: enough firecrackers loaded into the box to send aluminum shrapnel fifty yards.

Soon after, the birch tree out in front was toilet-papered, and a few months later the amusing expression I AM AN ASSHOLE! was printed in big block letters on my garage door.

More cops, even a little local news coverage, more “lack of proof.”

I don’t want to give the impression that the war was nonstop. It wasn’t. Junior’s last semester in high school, he was too busy banging a cute little brunette to worry about his across-the-street neighbors. And when he started commuting to the community college in the next county, that slowed him down. Plus, Senior’s life had started to come unraveled. But for a while back then I never knew when I’d find the mail glued to the box, or covered with red paint. Or I’d open the mailbox to find it full of dried dog shit. Nails sprinkled on the driveway. Garbage cans tipped over, the garbage spilled out onto the lawn. Newspapers gone missing...

Margie wanted to move.

“One of these days,” I promised her, “I’ll catch them.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

Then I got serious: I installed one of those remote cameras; motion-sensitive lights; I even wired an alarm to the mailbox. That did it — the dirty tricks stopped. A little later, Junior dropped out of college and disappeared, leaving Pop without an ally to carry on the war. That was about ten years ago. Peace descended on Pinecrest Lane, at least until last year, when Lamour’s wife died and Junior came home for the funeral.

My friend Eugene made his living on prostates — enlarged ones, that is. If anyone in town could pare your prostate to a reasonable size without affecting your hard-on, he was your man. More than once I’d heard “he’s the best in town” from people who didn’t even know Eugene and I were best friends.

Of course, Eugene was careful about his reputation. What’s more important for a physician? Lamour Senior must have taken that into account last year when he decided to reopen hostilities. That and the fact that Eugene was my friend, and scamming him would be a way of getting back at me, another stage in our stupid little war.

He decided Dr. Eugene Mead would have an accident.

The “accident” took place on July 3rd, although Eugene and I didn’t hear about it until three days later. That’s when I opened up my mailbox and found a letter from Harry Lamour. “Dear Mr. O’Dell,” it began. “I am very disappointed that neither you nor Dr. Mead chose to respond to my letters of July 4th concerning the automobile accident that occurred at 11:48 P.M. on July 3rd.” Lamour went on to describe the accident, which, he claimed, he had witnessed from his bedroom window. Eugene, backing out of my driveway, had supposedly struck Lamour’s car, which had been parked at the curb in front of his house.

I looked out the kitchen window over at Lamour’s driveway. His car was gone.

“I expected Dr. Mead would stop in order to inspect the damage he caused to my vehicle. When he drove on instead, I expected I would hear from him the next day.”

The night of the third, as usual, the Meads and the O’Dells had watched the fireworks at Lake Park. We’d sat at Eugene’s low folding table, with a white tablecloth and a vase with a pink rose, and nibbled our way through a hamper full of goodies, including a layered vegetable terrine and salmon mousse on water crackers, and a bottle of Chandon Etoile. Eugene hadn’t been tipsy on the way home. The fact is, Eugene’s not the type to ever get tipsy — except once, apparently, a long time ago.

Anyway, after dropping us off, Eugene had backed down our driveway. And yes, Lamour’s car had been parked on his side of the street. But if there’d been an accident, I’d have heard something, surely. The crunch of Eugene’s back bumper as it struck.

But I’d heard nothing.

The letter went on to explain that if Lamour didn’t hear from Eugene in twelve hours he was going to file a hit-and-run report with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I had to laugh as I folded up Lamour’s letter. The war was to be carried out on a different level now. Goodbye, torn-up mailboxes. Hello, insurance scams. And it wasn’t just O’Dells who were targeted, it was enough to be a friend of O’Dells.

When I got ahold of Eugene on the phone, he’d opened his Lamour letter.

“You don’t remember hitting anything, then?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

I said that Margie and I hadn’t seen any evidence of an accident — broken glass, that kind of thing.

Eugene said, “That sleazeball thinks he’s going to get his car fixed at my expense.”

I laughed again. “I think you’ve been drawn into a war.”

“What do you mean?”

I explained.

“You didn’t think it was funny when Junior used to pull out your mailbox,” Eugene said.

He had me there.

Lamour’s luck had been going downhill for years. There was the Albert Coniglio case, which he lost. Then the big parties came to an end. The sharp cars grew less sharp. Then downright modest. Finally, Lamour took the rap for some local mob screwup.

It was Eugene who informed me our neighbor was going to jail. (Eugene keeps on top of things like that.)

It was summer, about seven years ago, and we were sitting around in Eugene’s newly landscaped backyard, complete with red-gravel paths snaking past raised beds of spikey crimson salvia. Blood seeped out of the sirloins on the gas grill. Eugene tossed his fancy new corkscrew at me. “Dick, this time, see if you can get the cork to pop out instead of in.”

Eugene’s sense of humor used to get to my wife. I told her he was just teasing.

“Jail?” I said. “How do you know?”

“Trust me.”

He was right, of course. Lamour did go to jail. His beater sat in the driveway oozing rust for maybe two years while his wife went about her business in her beater. On our evening walks Margie and I would come across little bits of the beaters that had sluiced down the driveway — lacy rosettes of metal, bolts whose threads were only a dim memory, chrome chips, fragments of rubber tubing that reminded me of Eugene’s line of work.

We didn’t mourn Lamour’s fate. Eugene had us out regularly to his new summer place on Lake Meewaulin, which was only a half-hour from Pinecrest Lane. Beautiful place, with picture windows on the lake side so the four of us — after a day of fishing or lounging around — could sit sipping a nice Beaujolais, watching the sunset. There were times Margie would complain about Eugene holding forth about his patients and operations and stuff. But what the hell, that was Eugene.

Somewhere in there, Eugene and I took up golf. Despite Margie’s complaints about the cost, I got into the Lake Meewaulin Club — actually, it was a provisional membership, based on Eugene’s recommendation. The way Eugene explained it was, Lake Meewaulin didn’t have anything against music teachers, it was their crummy salaries that was the problem.

I had to laugh.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When Lamour came back from jail that winter, he looked older, thinner, grayer. Just like you’re supposed to, coming out of “the slammer.” He dressed in khaki pants and a blue jacket with a nylon fur collar, and he left the house every morning at seven-thirty, and returned at four-thirty.

Eugene had heard that Lamour was in some kind of probationary work program. A halfway house, something like that.

Funny coincidence, Lamour’s wife died about a month after he’d gotten home. We saw the van roll up for the body, and then later, in the paper, we read about it. Junior showed up for the funeral. Long-absent Junior, looking like he’d spent some time in institutions himself. We expected him to take off after his mother was in the ground, but he hung around instead. Then spring came around, and every evening he’d come out onto the driveway and practice karate kicks. He wasn’t so skinny anymore, but his eyes were still too big for his head.

The day after I picked Lamour’s letter out of my mailbox, Eugene and I were sitting in Eugene’s new golf cart, waiting for the foursome in front.

Out of the blue, Eugene said, “There’s always hormonal treatment.” He grabbed an imaginary cleaver from above his head and arranged his imaginary patient and whacked off a pair of you-know-whats, which is what hormonal treatment means to a urologist. “That’s what I’d like to do to our neighbor,” he said. He raised the cleaver in the air and whacked off at least ten or twelve more of Lamour’s testicles while I watched.

“I know what you mean,” I said. But it turned out I didn’t. Not really.

That evening I got around to showing Lamour’s letter to my wife.

She stood beside me and looked out the kitchen window at Lamour’s place across the street. I looked at it too. The driveway was still empty — no beaters, red (Senior’s) or blue (Junior’s). Just a big Rorschach oil stain where one or the other was usually parked. Probably it was at some repair shop being revitalized from stem to stern.

“What’s Eugene going to do?” she said.

I said he was getting in touch with his insurance agent.

“Why does Lamour say he didn’t call the police?”

“The idea is that Eugene was drunk, and by not calling the police Lamour saved his ass.”

“Blackmail,” my wife said, and sort of laughed.

“I think they picked on Eugene because he’s our friend.”

“You think it’s starting up again — the war?”

“Could be.”

“But there’s no proof,” she said.

“Maybe there doesn’t need to be.”

“What do you mean?”

I told her what I knew about Eugene’s accident when he was in his twenties, the girl in the front seat killed. The beer cans spilling out when the cops pulled him out.

“He’s worried that will come out.”

She looked at me. “How long have you known that?”

“Awhile.”

Junior came out a little later in the afternoon in his faded black shorts and beat-up running shoes. He ran through some warmup exercises, then into the kicking, his feet slashing out. I could hear his grunts. He stayed at the top of the driveway, above the oil stains. He stopped for a moment and I thought he’d spotted me. Without taking my eyes from him, I slowly backed up and found the light switch, and turned off the lights. I kept watching him from deep within my kitchen.

For a while my wife watched with me.

“Will we be involved?” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Written testimony.”

She wasn’t smiling now. “We should have moved years ago. Next time maybe it won’t be our mailbox.”

“Maybe it’ll be the garage,” I said. “Maybe Junior’ll pull down the garage.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” she said.

A couple of days later Eugene and I were out at the Lake Meewaulin Club again, playing a quick nine after dinner. It had been a cool summer so far, but tonight it was hot, and the mosquitoes were feeding on Eugene, who’s one of those pale Nordic types. By the fourth tee, his arms were bloody from where he’d slapped at them. He hit a long drive that spilled into the woods. His mulligan sliced into the next fairway.

I helped him locate the ball in the woods. On the edge of the fairway, he dropped a ball, took out an iron. Addressed the ball even more stiffly than usual and took a big gouge out of the turf.

“Not my night,” he said, and set his jaw.

The next hole, our drives landed side by side. On the way Eugene said, “I talked to my insurance gal again today.”

“And?”

“I said I wasn’t aware of hitting him, but maybe I did.”

“You didn’t hit him, Eugene,” I assured him.

“You say that, but you can’t be absolutely sure,” he said.

“We would have heard something, seen something.”

“Why should I worry about saving American Family a couple of thou?”

I’d seen it coming, of course. He was going to cave in order to avoid any trouble.

“She’s going to do some more checking around. She’ll probably call you.”

“Fine.”

“It was dark, it was late, we’d had a little wine. Maybe I did crease him.”

“You didn’t touch him,” I said.

I took out a three-iron and knocked the ball on the green — it was the shortest hole on the back nine.

“What’s wrong with you, Dick?” Eugene said.

I shrugged.

I knew before Eugene hit the ball it was going into the trap.

For a couple of holes then he wouldn’t talk to me. Finally, as we’re going up to the ninth green, he said, “If American Family is willing to fix up his beater, so be it.”

“I’ll tell her what I know,” I said.

“Use your head for a change, Dick,” he said. “This is little stuff. It happens all the time.”

Eugene’s insurance agent called the next day; she got me in my office at St. Stephen’s. I was talking to a student who was having a hard time controlling her diabetes. She was a lovely redhead with a small red scar on her forehead, and as I talked to Eugene’s insurance agent my eye kept wandering to the scar.

The agent was personable enough, and — once I’d answered her questions — fairly free with information she’d managed to collect. Lamour was claiming that his car was totaled; its worth estimated at eighteen hundred dollars.

Her tone of voice made it clear she’d discovered Lamour’s criminal record and was convinced the “accident” was a scam.

Half an hour later the phone rang again. It was Eugene, checking on what I’d told his agent. I was on my way out to lunch.

“I said I saw no evidence of an accident.”

The other end of the line was silent.

“What could I say, Eugene? I couldn’t lie.”

“What did she say?”

I thought about the conversation I’d had with his agent. “She said I’d helped her make up her mind.”

“If it gets into the paper,” Eugene said, “it’ll be unpleasant.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

But Eugene wasn’t finished. “I got a call this morning from someone who claimed to be a reporter.”

“A reporter investigating a fender-bender?” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Maybe Lamour put him up to it. Maybe he wasn’t even a reporter. What do I know?”

I knew where he was going with this, and I was short of time. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this, but I’m not going to lie,” I said.

Eugene called back later. He’d gotten ahold of Lamour and arranged a meeting for that night at Lamour’s house. He sounded better than he had earlier, but still a little shaky. The shakiness was the side of Eugene that my wife hadn’t seen.

“I want you to come,” Eugene insisted.

Meeting with Lamour seemed like a crazy idea to me. I asked Eugene what he hoped to accomplish by it. Eugene said he thought Lamour could be persuaded to back off.

“You’re going to buy him off,” I said.

“Maybe.”

I said, “I don’t think I can make it.”

Around eleven that night, the phone rings. It’s Eugene. “I’m sitting in your driveway,” he says. “I need to talk to you.”

Margie’s watching a Julia Child rerun. “Who’s calling at this hour?”

I’m lacing my shoes, zipping up my fly. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll be right back.”

The dome light doesn’t go on when I climb in Eugene’s front seat.

“How’d it go?”

“Terrible.”

“How so?”

“Dick, I need your help.”

“I’m listening.”

“Lamour’s dead.”

I get a scooped-out, nauseated feeling in my chest.

It takes a couple of minute for the details to come out. “I brought money. He said it wasn’t enough.”

“Damn,” I say. “Dead.” I couldn’t believe it.

“Dead,” Eugene says.

“For two thousand... three thousand bucks.”

“The son of a bitch pushed me.”

“And you?”

“Pushed back. We were in the kitchen. He hit his head on the edge of the sink.”

Eugene says he did everything he could to save the bastard.

Where was Lamour now?

“Lying on his kitchen floor, wrapped in a tarp.”

In my mind it’s a blue tarp, who knows why. I ask Eugene if anyone saw him, coming or going.

He hesitates. “I don’t think so.”

“What about Junior?”

“I don’t know. Out of town, I hope. Listen, Dick...”

“I’m listening.”

Eugene laughs, a little weirdly. “I’ve got a plan...”

“Okay.”

He gets into it. He’s going to sneak back to Lamour’s and clean up — luckily, there hadn’t been much blood. Then around two, when everybody on Pinecrest was asleep, I’d come over. Together, we’d throw Lamour into the trunk of Eugene’s car and take him to the Meewaulin quarry. “What do you say?”

Suddenly there are lights behind us, and a car pulls up practically on Eugene’s back bumper, locking us in. Before Eugene can think to lock the doors, the back door opens and somebody gets in. I twist the rearview mirror to see who.

“Yo, neighbors.” It’s dark in the backseat, but Junior Lamour’s eyes haven’t changed. Too big for his face, they have the ability to look sleepy and malevolent at the same time.

I have this ominous feeling that the war between the Lamours and O’Dells has reached its final stage.

Eugene pulls down the door handle, but Junior says, “You don’t want to do that.”

A phrase like scared shitless takes on new meaning at a time like this.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see something dark and shiny pressing against the back of Eugene’s neck. In a pinch, it seems, even a karate expert wants to have firepower on his side.

“He wasn’t a bad man, my dad,” Junior says.

I pull on the passenger-side door handle, and immediately feel something cold against the back of my neck.

“Stay where you are, Mailbox Man.”

“I had nothing to do with your father’s death,” I say.

“Sure, and I never touched your freaking mailboxes.”

Eugene looks at me.

I shrug.

“I tried to save your dad,” Eugene says. “Believe me, I did everything possible.”

“Yeah, after you killed him.”

“It was an accident,” Eugene says.

“When I blow your freaking brains out that will be an accident.” The cold object is no longer pressed against my neck.

“He fell... he hit his head,” Eugene says.

The gun — again focused on Eugene — makes a clicking noise, loud as a cannon in that small space. Cocked, I guess.

“You gain nothing by killing me,” Eugene says.

“I gain satisfaction,” Junior says. “My dad made mistakes, but you two — all you cared about was your mailbox and snooping and spreading rumors and calling the cops and playing golf... Call yourself neighbors? Neighbors?” He starts to laugh.

Right after that the gun goes off, spraying the contents of my friend’s head around the interior of the Lexus.

And right after that — although I wasn’t aware of it at the time — Junior Lamour, making his escape, hits my mailbox with his back bumper, wiping it out for the last time.

I don’t mind admitting it, it takes awhile to recover from losing your best friend.

A year later I still get these ringing sounds in my head, which is a problem for someone in my line of work. My wife jumps a mile every time a truck backfires — she’s gained a ton, too. I have bad dreams, take medication. (My therapist says I’ve got some kind of post-traumatic stress condition.) And of course, since my provisional membership ran out, it’s goodbye golf at the Lake Meewaulin Club.

And I’ve got nobody to sue.

The neighborhood’s different now, with Meads and Lamours gone. Junior gone, too, as it turned out, having managed for a few days to avoid capture but not, finally, death (ramming his beater into the back end of a semi full of Chinese imported toys). A guy who’s in insurance bought Lamour’s place, but only after it had been on the market for six months. Eugene’s is still for sale — we don’t know where Marie’s gone.

The insurance couple seems nice enough, but — as Margie points out — with three kids they’re not at the stage of life we are. And maybe we’ve been snake-bit when it comes to friendship. Fact is, I don’t know about friendship. You get close to people — you get invested in them. You think you understand them. Spend all that time together — going out to dinner, vacations, et cetera. Trust them entirely. And then after twenty years, they do something crazy. They screw up and they want to involve you in their screw-up. Not that I don’t miss Eugene — I do. All the good times we had together. It’s just that, well, Margie and I agree, it’s going to be a long time before we’re able to trust anybody again. I mean, for me — now — the whole concept of having a best friend is, I don’t know, tainted.

Anyway, Margie wants to move, she says she’s had it with Pinecrest Lane, too many bad memories. Not me, I tell her, now that the war between the Lamours and the O’Dells is finally over.

(c)2007 by John Goulet