Schemers

8

SCHEMER

He sat on the edge of the motel tub, burning the last of the Henderson snapshots.

The cracked, leather-bound album lay spread open on his lap. The door was closed, the rattling fan switched on to clear away the smoke and keep it from setting off the smoke alarm. There were only a handful of snaps left in the album. He’d burned the rest over the past several days, a few each day.

He removed one of the last from its plastic sleeve, looked at it for a time. Lousy, like all of them. Poor composition, bad use of light and background. Cheap camera, probably. Amateur shit. He turned it over to read what was written on the back-“Hayden and George, Aug 1998”-and then spun the wheel of his lighter and touched the flame to one corner. It burned slow at first, then fast. When the heat began to sear his fingers, he dropped the charred remains into the toilet with the others.

Unexpected find, this album. He hadn’t been looking for anything like it, anything at all the afternoon he’d slipped into Damon Henderson’s garage. Bold move, going in there in broad daylight. Proof that he could breach their lives any time and any place he wanted to, that he owned them now whether they knew it yet or not. No real risk involved. Getting into the garage had been ridiculously easy. Wear a khaki shirt, carry a flashlight and a clipboard, wear a badge that looks authentic, act like you belong in the neighborhood, and people take you for a meter reader or a workman and pay no real attention to you.

Sifting through all those boxes and then finding the trunk with the albums in it-that had been almost as much of a rush as Sunday night’s visit. Bad few seconds when Henderson came blundering in, spoiling the planned acid bath for his CPA records and his car, but the rest of it had turned out real well. Hitting him with the tire iron, straddling him, whispering to him, hitting him again and hearing him scream… oh, yeah! He’d had to fight himself not to use the tire iron a third time, split Henderson’s skull wide open, but it wasn’t the right place or the right time. Henderson wouldn’t have suffered enough. And there hadn’t been enough time to tell him why he was suffering. That would come later.

He looked at and burned two more photos, taking his time. The last one was in color, a posed shot, poorly centered and badly filtered so that the background was muzzy and the images not sharp. But they were clear enough for identification, even without what was written on the back: “Cliff, Damon, and Dad, Oct 2000.” He lifted the snapshot close to his mouth and spat on each of the images before he set it on fire. Held it longer than any of the others, watching it burn, savoring the blackened destruction of the images until the flame reached his fingers and made him let go. Some of the ashes missed the toilet bowl. He scraped them into his hand, brushed them in.

Then he stood, unzipped his fly, urinated onto the ashes.

Spat one last time on the yellow-black mess and flushed it away.

At the sink he washed his hands. They still felt unclean when he was done, so he washed them again. Better. He used the towel, making sure his palms and wrists were completely dry. Then he switched off the fan and went out into the main room.

Typical cheap motel room, designed for anonymity. The perfect hideout. He smiled at the thought of “hideout” and sat down on the lumpy bed.

The spiral-bound notebook was in his briefcase, along with the five-by-seven color portrait and the digital snapshots he’d taken at the cemetery. He unlocked the case, took them out, lay back with his head propped against the headboard. He looked at the portrait first, looked at it for a long time. Familiar face, but clouded by time-a kid’s memory. But he’d gotten to know it well from the portrait, as well as he ever would. Each time he looked at it he felt a great tenderness well up inside. She’d been so pretty. Not the plastic, Hollywood kind of prettiness-genuine, the girl-next-door kind. High cheekbones, small nose, small cleft in the well-shaped chin. And not just attractive outside, but good inside. You could see the goodness shining in those soft brown eyes.

After a time he put the portrait down and again read the last few notebook pages, shaping each sentence with his lips, lingering over the important passages. Sad, bitter, painful. Full of love and sorrow and desperation. Full of pleading-a tacit plea to him, now, because there was nobody else.

Testimony.

Damning testimony.

Wet filled his eyes. He used a clean edge of the pillowcase to dry them, then returned the notebook and the portrait to his briefcase. The rage was in him again, strong and driving. It made the blood beat loud in his temples.

Another face popped out of his memory-thin, wrinkled, not pretty at all. “Damn you,” he said aloud, “why didn’t you read what she wrote? Didn’t you suspect, didn’t you care? And why didn’t you give me the notebook while that son of a bitch was still alive? He’d have been the one to suffer then. I’d have made him suffer!”

He lay still for a time until his pulse rate slowed and the rage started to fade. No use blaming her. She’d only done what she believed was right for him. But she shouldn’t have waited, shouldn’t have let him find out the way he had, so long afterward, when it was too late.

He picked up the cemetery photos, shuffled through them. Not too bad. Decent composition considering the darkness and the digital camera. The urn, the ashes, the monument… all clearly defined. The vapors from the acid made a neat wavy pattern on the one of the headstone. Mementos he could enjoy for years to come.

The anger was gone now, but his eyes had begun to sting. The pillowcase hadn’t been properly laundered after all. His face, his hands… itchy, dirty. He hurried into the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, and stood under a scalding hot shower to make himself clean again.