Lone Wolf

28

LAWRENCE WAS JUST COMING INTO THE CABIN as Orville stormed out to his patrol car. Lawrence caught the screen door before it slammed shut, then beckoned me with his index finger. I excused myself from the table.

“What is it?”

“Alice Holland called my cell,” he said. “It broke up a lot, the reception’s lousy up there, but her secret admirer got in touch again.”

“Did she say whether she recognized him?”

“She said we had to hear it for ourselves. She was sounding, I would have say to the word is ‘bemused.’ ”

“Bemused?”

“Bemused.”

“I’ll be out in a second,” I said.

Dad and Lana were sitting quietly at the table. She was on her second or third cigarette, and Dad had opened a bottle of red wine and filled to the rim a glass that once held peanut butter.

“Thanks for telling me,” I said. I looked at Dad. “I had it figured all wrong. I’m sorry.”

“I couldn’t have cared less if you thought less of me. I didn’t ever want you to think badly of your mother. But it was taking too much effort to keep this a secret any longer.”

“I’m gonna go,” Lana said. “I’ve got a feeling Orville will drop by later, to talk about this, and I want to be there in case he does.”

“Sure,” Dad said.

“I’ve gotta take off, too,” I said. “Lawrence and I have to go see the mayor.”

“Alice?” said Lana. “You say hi to her for me.”

I grabbed my jacket, and grabbed the can of bear spray by the door as I went out, slipping it into the inside pocket.

When I went outside, Lawrence was sitting in his Jag, the motor running. I got in, closed the door. We drove out to the highway, neither of us saying a word. Finally, Lawrence said, “So, what’s up with your brother? He didn’t look very happy at the news when he left.”

I almost smiled. “I feel a bit numb.”

Lawrence nodded slowly. “You gonna have to start sending Orville Christmas cards now?”

“I thought I had it all figured out,” I said. I filled Lawrence in. “I imagined Dad was this two-timing son of a bitch, but he’s not. In fact, I don’t know who the hell he is, exactly. I find out he’s not the bastard I suspected, and now I have to consider that he may be a better person than I ever realized.” I paused, thinking back. “He said to me a couple of days ago that he and Lana were a lot more forgiving than I’d ever know. Now I understand what he was talking about.”

“And Orville? His reaction?”

“He’s a bit disappointed to learn that his new big brother is a major asshole.”

Lawrence mulled that one over. “Yeah, that would be hard to take.”

We drove through Braynor, turned down the mayor’s road, and as we pulled up behind her house she opened the door. It was just getting toward dusk, and she flicked on the back light.

“Welcome back,” she said. “I hadn’t expected to call you quite so soon.”

George was pacing in the kitchen, his hands made into fists. When he saw us come in, he said, “Alice, we don’t even need their help now. We know who it is. I want him. I want to rip his fucking head off.”

“You know who it is?” I said.

“You’ve been so helpful,” she said to me and Lawrence, “that I thought you should have the opportunity to enjoy this. But I don’t know the first thing about this machine. Can you replay the calls?”

“Of course,” Lawrence said, and proceeded to work his magic with the device he’d hooked up to the Hollands’ phone by attaching it to a laptop. “This shows you’ve had three calls since we were here.”

“It’s the last one. The first was from the town clerk, the second a call from my daughter in Argentina. Play the third one.”

“Okay,” Lawrence said. “Here we go.” Everything was digital, with no actual tape to rewind, but Lawrence was still hitting Rewind and Play buttons on the laptop screen with his mouse.

Alice Holland: Hello?

Man: Mayor Holland?

Alice: Yes, this is the mayor.

Man: You haven’t got much time left to do the right thing. The parade’s only a few hours away.

Alice: Who is this?

Man: This is the voice of reason, bitch. Are you going to get those perverts out of the parade or not?

Alice: What if I don’t? What do you propose to do?

Lawrence nodded approvingly at the way Alice had kept her caller talking.

Man: Something awful might happen to you. Is that what you want? All so a bunch of queers can walk in the parade?

Alice: You know what? I’ll bet even the lesbians in that parade have more balls than a guy who phones people up anonymously and threatens them. Have you looked in your shorts lately? Is there anything down there at all?

Man: You bitch! How dare you-

Voice: (from afar) Hi, Mr. Henry!

Man: Shit! (hangs up)

Lawrence looked at me and I smiled. Lawrence smiled. Alice Holland smiled. Only her husband George still looked angry.

“Fuck me,” said Lawrence.

I said, “Now, is this where you use your years of police training and honing your deductive skills to try to figure out who the caller is?”

Now Alice was laughing, and Lawrence was starting to laugh. Even George was starting to loosen up, unclenching his fists.

The voice in the background had sounded like a teenage girl. Alice, imitating the voice, said, “Hi, Mr. Henry!”

Now I was starting to laugh, and pretty soon, all of us were clutching our stomachs, clutching the kitchen counter to keep from collapsing.

“Oh God,” said Alice. “This is too much.”

“I think I’ve figured it out,” Lawrence said, deadpan. “But I have to hear it one more time to be sure.”

He cued up the call again, played the last part of the exchange between Alice and the caller again.

“Hi, Mr. Henry!”

“Stop it,” I said. “I’m gonna die.”

Slowly, we all pulled ourselves together.

“Oh man,” said Alice. “Whoo.”

“Okay,” said George, who had completely regained his composure. “Now let’s go kill him.”

We took two cars. George Holland led the way in theirs, taking us back through Braynor, past Henry’s Grocery and the phone booth just down from it, then a left down a street of boring, boxy brick houses that were probably built in the sixties. George put on his blinker and turned into the driveway of a two-story red brick house, blocking in a black Ford Taurus sedan. Lawrence pulled over onto the shoulder and we all got out.

As we walked up the drive, Lawrence, small briefcase in hand, glanced into the back windows of the Taurus and said, “Hello.”

“What?” I said.

“Check it out,” he said, and opened the back door on the passenger side. He reached down behind the seat to the floor and brought up a container of eggs.

“Odd place for eggs,” I said.

Alice and George watched with interest.

Lawrence opened the top of the cardboard container. Five of the dozen eggs were missing. “Now, I could see forgetting some of your groceries in the car when you came home, but I can’t see taking your eggs into the house one at a time.” He handed me the carton to carry.

Alice went on ahead and rang the doorbell. An over-weight frizzy-haired woman opened the door, and when she saw who it was, said, “Oh, hello, Mayor.”

“We’re here to see Charles,” she said.

The woman looked back into the house. “Chuck!” she screamed. “Visitors!”

By the time Braynor grocery store magnate Charles Henry was at the door, all four of us were standing there, looking, I suspect, fairly intimidating.

“What’s this about?” he said nervously, half standing behind the door. You could tell, just looking at him, the way he was sweating already, that he knew the jig was up.

“I thought maybe you’d like to talk to the bitch in person,” Alice said.

“What? What’s that supposed to mean? Alice, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lawrence held up his case. “We’ve got it all, man. You want to hear it? The last part, where the kid shouts ‘Hi, Mr. Henry!’? You have to hear that for yourself. You’ll bust a fucking gut.”

George moved forward. “I ought to take your head off, you miserable little worm.”

Henry tried to close the door but George shoved it back and walked in, the rest of us following. Down at the end of the hall I could see Mrs. Henry in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. Two girls, about eight and ten, ran giggling from the kitchen, down the hall and up the stairs.

“Maybe we should play it for them,” I taunted Henry. “Here’s how Daddy talks to grown-up girls.”

“Shhhh,” he said, running a hand over the top of his head. “Just, just come downstairs.”

He led us down into a rec room that didn’t appear to have been changed since the 1960s. Brown shag carpeting, dark paneled walls, a pool table covered with boxes of Christmas decorations that had evidently been sitting there for months. With Christmas only a few months away, there wasn’t much point putting them away now.

“Chuck?” his wife shouted downstairs. “What’s going on?”

“Shut the damn door!” he shouted at her. The door slammed shut. He said to us, “What do you want?”

Lawrence found a corner of the pool table on which to rest his laptop, opened it up, and played the recording of his call to Alice Holland’s house, finishing with “Hi, Mr. Henry!”

Henry shook his head. “Goddamn that Violet.”

“Violet?” I said.

“Cashier,” said Alice, who clearly knew everyone in town. “Grade 12 student, works part-time for Charles. She see you at the pay phone after her shift?”

Charles Henry said nothing.

“First thing I want is,” said Alice, “I want you to own up to what you’ve been doing.”

I held up the egg carton from the car. “And we’re not talking just the phone calls. You’ve been paying some visits to the comics store in Red Lake.”

It was cool in the basement, but Charles Henry was still sweating.

“I don’t know anything about any comics store.”

“Really?” said Lawrence. “What do you think will happen when I give this carton of eggs to my friends at the forensic lab, and they compare the DNA of these eggs to the DNA of the eggs splattered all over Stuart Lethbridge’s store?”

I looked at Lawrence.

“Oh my God,” Henry said, clearly overwhelmed by what science apparently could do. “Okay, okay, I egged the place. And I’m really sorry about the phone calls.”

George Holland made a snorting noise. “He’s fucking sorry.”

“You’re sorry you got caught,” Alice Holland said. “This is what I want you to do. I want you to call Tracy over at the Times. Tell her you’re withdrawing the petition. Tell her you think it’s time to let things calm down. Tell her yeah, people have differences of opinion about who should and shouldn’t be in the parade, but tempers are flaring, and it’s time for people to cool off.”

Charles Henry nodded, swallowed. “Okay,” he squeaked.

“The Times’s next edition doesn’t come out for a few more days,” I said. “You need to get the message out now.”

Alice nodded. “Charles, you’re going to call Andy at FL Radio and offer him an interview that he can get on the next newscast. Tell him what you’re going to tell Tracy. You can tell them you don’t want gays and lesbians in the parade, I don’t care, but make it clear that the parade needs to be peaceful, that this is an issue that can be taken up at a later date.”

Henry looked hopeful. “We can still have discussions about this?”

Alice leaned in close to Henry, forcing him up against the pool table. “Not you, Charles. Never. Your opinion in this town counts for nothing from this day forward. You give me one moment’s trouble, and I’ll give that recording not only to the police, but the radio station. I’ll put it on a loudspeaker and drive around town playing it at full volume. Let people find out what you’re really like. That you’re a little, little man.”

Henry seemed to shrink.

“I have some questions,” Lawrence said. Alice stepped aside and Lawrence moved forward. “What do you know about what’s going to go down at the parade tomorrow?”

“Huh?” Henry said, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“If you know about anything that’s going to happen, something bad, you better tell us now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Lawrence turned to George. “You know how you were asking for ten minutes alone with this guy?”

George brightened. “Yeah.”

“This seems as good a time as any.”

“No! No!” Charles Henry whined. “I swear, I don’t know anything!”

“What about the Wickenses?” Lawrence said. “Timmy Wickens and his crew?”

“Timmy Wickens? Are you kidding? That guy’s crazy! Him and those boys, his wife’s two? They’re a bunch of psychos!”

Well. Something we could all agree on.

We were all quiet for a moment. For a few seconds, all we could hear was a dishwasher running upstairs, and Henry’s rapid breathing.

“I don’t think he’s in on anything else,” Lawrence said.

“I’m not! Honestly!”

“I don’t think he’s got the balls for it,” Lawrence said. “A little man like you, dirty phone calls and eggs, that’s about all you’re capable of.”

“I think you’re right,” Alice said.

“Does this mean I can’t have some time alone with him?” George asked.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Alice said, patting her husband on the arm.

As we were heading back to the car, I said to Lawrence, “Match the DNA from the eggs on the comics store with the eggs still left in the carton?”

Lawrence opened his door. “I couldn’t believe I was actually saying it. Sometimes I get swept away in the moment.”