Red Leaves

SIXTEEN

Leo Brock called me at the shop at eleven the next morning. "Quick question," he said. "Does Keith smoke?"

He heard my answer in the strain of a pause.

"Okay," he said, "What brand does he smoke?"

I saw the face of the pack as Keith snatched it from his shirt pocket. "Marlboro," I said.

Leo drew in a long breath. "And he told police that he never left the house, isn't that right?"

"Yes."

"For any reason."

"He said he never left the house," I told him. "What's happening, Leo?"

"My source tells me that the cops found four cigarette butts outside the Giordanos' house," Leo said. "Marlboro."

"Is that so bad?" I asked. "I mean, so what if Keith went out for a smoke?"

"They were at the side of the house," Leo added. "Just beneath Amy's bedroom window."

"Jesus," I breathed.

In my mind I saw Keith at the window, peering through the curtains of Amy's window, watching as she slept, her long dark hair splayed out across her pillow. Had he watched her undress, too? I wondered. And while doing that ... done what? Had he gone to the water tower in search of similar stimulation? Before that moment, I would probably have avoided such questions, but something in my mind had hardened, taken on the shape of a pick or a spade, prepared to dig.

"So they think he was watching her," I said.

"We can't be sure what they're thinking."

"Oh come on, Leo, why would his cigarettes be there, at her window?"

"Not his," Leo cautioned. "Just the brand he smokes."

"Don't talk to me like a lawyer, Leo," I said. "This is bad and you know it."

"It doesn't help things," Leo admitted.

"They're going to arrest him, aren't they?"

"Not yet," Leo said.

"Why not?" I asked. "We both know they think he did it."

"First of all, no one knows what was done," Leo reminded me. "Remember that, Eric. Whatever the police may be thinking, they don't know anything. And there's something else to keep in mind. Keith didn't have a car. So how could he have taken Amy from her house?"

I made no argument to this, but I felt the water around me rise slightly.

"Eric?"

"Yes."

"You have to have faith."

I said nothing.

"And I don't mean that in a religious way," Leo added. "You have to have faith in Keith."

"Of course," I said quietly.

There was a pause, then Leo said, "One final ... difficulty."

I didn't bother to ask what it was, but only because I knew Leo was about to tell me.

"Keith ordered a pizza for dinner that night," Leo said. "The pizza guy delivered it at just after eight. He said that when he arrived, he didn't see Amy, but Keith was there, and he was on the phone."

"The phone?"

"Did he call you that night?"

"Yes."

"When did he call?"

"Just before ten."

"Not before?"

"No."

"You're sure about that," Leo said. "You're sure that Keith only called you once that night."

"Only once," I said. "At around ten."

"And that's when he told you he'd be late and that he wouldn't need a ride, correct?"

"Yes."

"Because he had a ride?"

"No," I said. "He said that he could get a ride."

"But not that he had one?"

"No, not that he had one."

"Okay," Leo said.

"So who was he on the phone with?" I asked. "When the pizza guy was there."

"I'm sure the police have the number," Leo said. "So it won't be long before they tell us."

We talked a few minutes longer, Leo doing what he could to put the best light on things. Still, for all his effort, I could sense nothing but a spiraling down, a room closing in, slowly dwindling routes of escape.

"What happens," I asked finally, "if they never find Amy?"

"Well, it's awfully hard to convict when there's no body," Leo answered.

"I wasn't thinking of that," I told him. "I mean, Keith would have to live with it, wouldn't he? The suspicion that he killed her."

"Yes, he would," Leo answered. "And I admit, cases like that, without any definite resolution, they can be painfid to all concerned."

"Corrosive," I said softly, almost to myself.

"Corrosive, yes," Leo said. "It's hard, when you can't get to the bottom of something."

I had never known how true that was before that moment, how little whiffs of doubt could darken and grow menacing, urge you forward relentlessly, fix you in a need to find out what really happened. "Otherwise your whole life is an unsolved mystery," I said.

"Yeah, it's just that bad," Leo said. "You become a cold-case file."

A cold-case file.

I remember thinking that that was precisely what I was becoming, and that for the rest of that day, as I dealt with customers, framed a few pictures, I felt a fierce urgency building in me, a need to know about Keith, the life he might have hidden from me, the terrible thing I could not keep myself from thinking that he might, indeed, have done.

Just before I closed, I called Meredith and told her what Leo Brock had earlier told me. I expected her to be irritated that I hadn't called before, accuse me once again of refusing to confront things, but instead she took the latest development without surprise, as if she'd been expecting it all along.

"I have to work late tonight," she said. Her voice struck me as oddly wistful, like a woman who'd once lived in a perfect world, known its beauty and contentment, a world that was no more and would never be again. "I should be home by eleven."

I was on my way to my car a few minutes later when I noticed Warren's truck parked outside Teddy's bar. I guessed that he was probably drinking earlier and earlier, his usual pattern before plunging into a full-blown binge. In the past, I'd never been able to prevent his periodic dives, and because of that I had more or less stopped trying. But suddenly, faced with my own family problems, I found that I could see his more clearly. The contempt my father had so relentlessly heaped upon him had stolen away any shred of self-confidence he might otherwise have grasped, then the tragedy of Jennys death, and after that, my mother's fatal accident. Perhaps, I told myself, he was not so much one of life's pathetic losers, as simply a man who had lost a lot.

He was sitting in the back booth, his paint-spattered hands wrapped around a mug of beer.

"Hey, Bro," he said as I slid into the seat opposite him. He lifted the beer. "Want a frosty?"

I shook my head. "No, I don't have much time. Meredith's working late, so I have to get home, make dinner for Keith."

He took a sip of the beer. "So," he said. "How's tricks?"

I shrugged. "The same."

"And this thing with Keith?"

"I have the feeling the cops are focusing on him." I added no further details, and typically, Warren didn't ask.

Instead he said, "They jump to conclusions, the cops. It only takes some little thing." He laughed. "But, that's the way we all are, right? Obsessed."

"Why do you say that?"

"You know, the way some crazy idea won't stop nagging at a guy."

Warren often spoke of himself in the third person, as "a guy."

"What crazy idea is nagging at you, Warren?" I asked.

I thought it was probably something about Keith, but I was wrong.

"For some reason I keep thinking about Mom," Warren said. "You know, how upset she was toward the end."

"Well, why wouldn't she be?" I said. "She was losing her house."

"That wasn't it," Warren said. "She never liked that house."

"She never liked the house?"

"No, she hated it," Warren said. He took a sip of beer. "It was too big, she said, too much to take care of."

"I didn't know she felt that way," I said.

"The house was for Dad," Warren said. "Part of the show. He wanted it because it made people think he was a big important guy." He glanced away, then back to me. "You seen him lately?"

"I see him every Thursday."

Warren smiled. "Dutiful," he said. "You've always been dutiful with Dad."

He made duty sound oddly disreputable. "I don't want him to feel abandoned, if that's what you mean."

Warren took a hard pull on the beer. "I dropped in on him this morning," he said. He looked at me with a bitter grin. "He said he never wanted to see me again."

"What? Why?"

"Because of what I told you, that insurance guy."

"Dad doesn't want to see you again because of that?" I asked unbelievingly.

"Yup," Warren said, now trying to make light of it. "Funny world, huh, Eric?"

I waved my hand. "He'll get over it."

Warren shook his head adamantly. "No, he won't. Not this time. I really pissed him off."

"But it was nothing," I argued.

"Not to Dad," Warren said. "He got in a real lather about it."

I recalled the look on my father's face when I'd broached the same subject with him, and suddenly I realized that the part of me that wished to avoid things, the part Meredith had long recognized, was dead. My suspicion had begun with a subtle itch, but now it was a raging affliction, a thousand bleeding sores I couldn't stop digging at.

"What's he hiding, Warren?" I asked bluntly.

Warren's eyes fell toward his hands.

"Warren?"

He shrugged.

I leaned toward him. "You were there that summer," I said. "What happened?"

Warren looked up shyly. "Dad thought she did something," he said. "Mom." He glanced about as if to make sure no one else was listening. "Something with this other guy. "You know what I mean."

"Mom?" I was astonished. "What other guy?"

Warren took a sip. "Jason Benefield. The family lawyer, remember? Used to come over with papers for this or that."

I recalled him as a tall, well-dressed, and very courtly man with a great shock of gray hair, handsome in the way of old boats, rugged, worn, but graceful.

"Do you think it was true, what Dad thought?" I asked.

"Maybe," Warren said. He saw the surprise in my face, how little I'd believed it possible that he noticed anything. "I'm not stupid, Eric," he said. "I can see things."

"What did you see exactly?"

"That Mom was ... that she liked this guy," Warren answered. "And that he felt the same way about her." He finished the drink and waved for another. "At first I didn't know what to think about it, you know? Mom and this guy. But then I knew how Dad treated her, like she was nothing except when his cronies came over. And so I just thought, Well, okay, good for Mom, you know?"

Peg arrived with Warren's beer. He smiled at her, but she didn't smile back.

"Bitch, huh?" Warren muttered after she'd stepped away. "But then, they all are, right?" He gave a quick self-mocking laugh. "At least to me."

"What made Dad suspect her?"

Warren ran his fingers through what was left of his hair. "Somebody tipped him off."

"Who?"

He hesitated, and so I knew I wouldn't like the answer, but comfort no longer mattered to me. "Who?" I repeated sternly.

"Aunt Emma," Warren answered. He took a long drink, glanced into the dying foam, then looked at me. "She saw Mom and Jason together. I mean, not in a bad way. Like in bed, or something like that. Mom would never have done anything, you know, at home. But one day Aunt Emma came over to bring some tomatoes from her garden. She heard Mom and this guy talking." He shrugged. "You know, the way people talk when there's something between them. You don't have to hear the words."

"And Aunt Emma told Dad?"

Warren nodded, returned his gaze to the glass, remained silent for a moment, then looked up. "He beat the hell out of her, Eric. I knew it was coming, so I took off. When I got back, Dad was sitting in the living room, drinking. Mom was upstairs. She didn't come down until the next morning. That's when I saw what he'd done to her." He seemed to return to that grim day. "I got real upset. I wanted to hit him. Like he hit her. I wanted to beat the shit out of him." He shook his head. "But I didn't do anything. I didn't even mention it." His eyes glistened slightly. "I never had any nerve, Eric. All Dad had to do was look at me, and I crumbled."

I shook my head. "I had no idea about any of this."

Warren nodded. "You couldn't have done anything, anyway. Nobody could do anything with Dad. Besides, he was good to you."

"Yes, to me," I admitted. "But you had to—"

Warren waved his hand to silence me. "Oh, don't worry about me and Dad. Then or now. Hell, I don't care if I never see him again." He took a long pull on the beer, one that left no doubt that it was my father's anger that had hurled him off the wagon. "Water under the bridge."

Except that it wasn't. At least not for me.

"I keep thinking about things, Warren," I told him. "I know it's because of this thing with Keith. But I keep going back to our family, too."

Warren laughed. "Why bother? They were gone before you grew up. Mom. Jenny. You were still a kid when they died."

"But I don't want to be a kid anymore," I told him. "I want to know what you know. About everything."

"I told you what I know."

"Maybe there was more," I said.

"Like what?"

"Like that insurance man you told me about. Why would he have come around the house, asking questions about Mom and Dad?"

Warren shrugged. "Who knows?"

"Dad told me there was no insurance on Mom," I said.

"Then I guess there wasn't any insurance." He took a sip of beer. "Jesus, what difference does it make, anyway?"

"It makes a difference because I want to know."

"Know what?"

The words fell like stones from my mouth. "If he killed her."

Warren's eyes grew very still. "Jesus, Eric."

"Fucked with the car some way. The brakes."

"Dad didn't know anything about cars, Eric."

"So, you don't think—"

Warren laughed. "Of course not." He peered at me as if I were very small, a creature he couldn't quite bring into focus. "What's the matter with you? Dad kill Mom? Come on, Eric."

"How can you be so sure?"

Warren laughed again, but this time, mirthlessly. "Eric, this is nuts."

"How do you know?" I repeated.

"Jesus, Eric," Warren said. "This is weird."

"What if he killed her?" I asked.

Warren remained silent for a moment, his gaze downcast, as if studying the last small portion of beer that remained. Then he said, "What good would it do, even if you found out he did?"

"I don't know," I said. "But as it stands, everything seems like a lie."

"So?"

"I don't want to live like that."

He drained the last of the beer. "Eric, everybody lives like that." He grinned and the grim seriousness of our former discussion simply fell away from him. "Lighten up, Bro—everybody's fake."

I leaned forward and planted my elbows on the table. "I want to know the truth."

Warren shrugged lightly. "Okay, fine," he said wearily. "Knock yourself out. Hell, Dad's a pack rat. Kept everything in that old metal filing cabinet, remember? Wouldn't throw it away, or anything in it. Heavy fucking thing. Remember the trouble we had moving it into your basement?" He drained the last of the beer and looked at me drowsily. "If he had a policy on Mom," he said, "that's where it would be."