Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Thirty-seven

At six o’clock the next morning, they moved Leo out of intensive care, to a bed by the window in a semiprivate room. The guy in the bed by the door looked to be eighty pounds and dying of cancer, but he seemed in better spirits than Ma and Endora when they saw me come past the curtain. They gave me the kind of look nuns give to child molesters and turned back to whispering to Leo. I backed out of the curtained area, leaned against the doorjamb, and started chatting with the cancer patient. By unspoken agreement, we kept the conversation away from plans either of us had for the future.

After an hour, Ma and Endora left to get coffee. Neither looked at me as they walked out. The cancer patient noticed, and shrugged as best he could with tubes running into his veins.

“C’est la vie,” I said.

“What?”

“Vie: that’s French, for ‘life’. I just said ‘that’s life,’ in French.”

I think he laughed. “I’m about out of vie”

I walked around the curtain.

“You look horrible,” I said to Leo-and he did. His pale body, all one hundred and forty pounds of it, had been beaten into shades of greenish yellow, purply blue, and, for brightness, a few spots of vivid red that had not yet dried to maroon. Still, there was but one tube running into his arm, and only two white bandages on his skull where he’d been stitched. Then again, I was desperate to see positives.

He motioned with his untethered hand for me to come closer. “You should see the other guy,” Leo slurred, through bruised and swollen lips.

“You saw the other guy?”

“Nah.”

“Hear anything?”

“Just your voice, afterward, saying you were sorry you’ve always been such a jerk.”

Screaming at 911 in my cell phone, I’d run, as best I could, across the high snow on the spit of land and my own little street to drop to my knees at the timbered door. I’d been too afraid to lift his head out of the blood on the snow, so I held his hand and prayed to every God I’d ever heard of, until the ambulance came. Then I’d prayed in the Jeep on the way to the hospital.

Now he pinched my arm with his fingers, tugging me closer.

“You called that cop in Iowa?”

“Right after they wheeled you in. I called Dillard in Michigan, too.”

“A couple of Rivertown coppers, by the names of Malloy and Cruck, stopped by with photos of Mother Kovacs’s sons.”

“I talked to them in the hall.”

“I’ll bet they were impressed by your planning, how you laid this super trap to catch the missing bank robber. They probably begged you to join their department.”

“They love me like Ma and Endora do.”

“I heard. It sounded like ice hardening.” His lips twitched. He was trying to smile.

“Listen, Leo…”

He attempted to lift his head, gave it up after an inch, and sank back into his pillow, somehow smaller.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

I didn’t. “Tell me,” I said instead.

“I’d ordered nourishment, my special concoction-”

“I recognized the pizza guy by the clothespin clipped to his nose.”

“It was magnificent, but I was only halfway through when I heard a rustling sound from down below. I thought it was you, come to share the gourmet experience, so I left the pizza and went downstairs. And then, nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Almost nothing. The guy uttered, ‘Shit,’ and then coldcocked me from the side as I got close to the bottom step.”

“That was it? Just the one word?”

“Your man Kovacs isn’t much for discourse. The fact that he continued beating me, though, after I lost consciousness means he was expressing disappointment that I wasn’t you.”

“You saw nothing?”

“I’d turned on the lights downstairs, as we’d planned, and slipped a hundred-watt bulb in the outside light. Like I told the cops, the guy came at me from under the stairs.”

“I don’t know that those guys will do much, Leo.”

“Malloy and Crack?” This time he made a whole smile with his damaged lips. His teeth were pink with blood. “They’ll go have coffee cake. They were humoring your Michigan cop’s request, bringing by those pictures. We can forget them. Word is, they do their own breaking and entering, on city time. They don’t have time for anybody else’s B and E.”

I’d heard the same rumors. The Rivertown squad was not known as crime stoppers.

Leo mumbled something.

“What?” I asked.

“Was the guy there to kill you, or was he looking for that numbered key?” he murmured.

“Looking for the key. He took a chance, coming in when somebody was there.”

“Dek?” He was fading, his voice becoming inaudible. “You said that Kovacs was driving up.”

“He couldn’t have made it that fast in a car. He must have taken a flight.”

“He didn’t get his key,” Leo said. “You should get out of Rivertown for a few nights. Go stay with Amanda in her armored condominium.”

“She’s not returning my calls.”

“Bring wine, bang on her door.”

Ma and Endora loomed at the edge of the curtain.

I started to turn to leave.

Leo motioned with his good arm. I bent back down.

“I told the cops that, as greasy as those Kovacs brothers looked in the police photos, with their oily hair, and boils and pimples, jeez…” He stopped, searching for the word. “He smelled fresh. That’s it: fresh. That’s it,” he said, his voice barely audible now. “There was something fresh about the bastard, like spring.”

“What do you mean, fresh?”

“Tired,” he murmured, and then he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

The dumbest man on the planet took a long time to straighten all the way up. His head was suddenly, and hugely, heavy with all the wrong assumptions he’d made. He concentrated on making his feet work as he stepped around the gloom that was Ma and Endora. The cancer man said something, but the dumbest man on the planet didn’t want to hear anything above the clacking of his shoes on the glossy tile floor.

He knew the smart play: Call Dillard in Michigan, Patterson in Iowa, tell them of the man from Michigan, the brother from Iowa. Have the two cops conference in federal authorities to dispatch manpower and make arrests. Then sit back. The wise plan was obvious.

But the wise plan would do nothing for the furies in the dumb man’s heart. It would do nothing for the memory of the woman, haunted and hunted, fleeing to Michigan, only to be murdered and burned. And it did nothing for the pain of the good, trusting fellow who lay beaten on a hospital bed, trying to wisecrack his way through a body full of pain.

The wise plan did nothing for revenge.

The dumbest man on the planet checked his watch. It was eight o’clock. There was barely any time at all, and the dumbest man on the planet had a lot to do.