The Last Tomorrow

SIX

1

Look at this man wearing nothing but a pair of tattered underpants and one argyle sock. Look at him with his pale white belly gone soft. Look at him with his stick legs lined with blue veins and his once-muscular arms now wasted. Look at the gray hair on his head thinning at the temples and the dry riverbed wrinkles in his face. Look at the purple smears like bruises under his eyes.

Look at the pale band of skin on the ring finger on his left hand.

He snores quietly, lying on top of the green wool blanket stretched over his narrow, sagging mattress. If he’s dreaming it doesn’t show. His face is still and without expression, and, being expressionless, free of the scowl he puts on daily, like a hat, before stepping into the morning sunlight. In sleep he looks innocent. It would be a shame to wake him, to bring reality back to that face, to the brown eyes now lidded, to the weary mind behind them.

A knock at the door.

The man shifts in his sleep but the shutters of his eyes remain fixed.

Another knock. A woman’s voice speaking his name.

Carl Bachman opens his eyes and sits up with a curse. He stares at the blank wall. He clears his throat, crawls out of bed, pads to the door. He says what. He’s told there’s a phone call for him. He says okay and pulls open the door, squinting at his heavy-set landlady, Mrs Hoffman. She looks away from him, clearly embarrassed by his lack of clothing. He scratches himself and yawns. She says you shouldn’t be getting calls at this hour. House rules say no phone calls after nine o’clock. You should respect the rules, being a policeman. He says he didn’t exactly call himself and won’t be held responsible for other people’s actions. Besides, he says, this is probably police business. He pushes past her, walks down the hallway in his stained underwear to the telephone stand, picks up the telephone and says ugh. Captain Ellis, Homicide Division, sounding like he was just awakened himself, speaks into his ear, telling him there’s been a murder. You and Friedman are next in the rotation so you probably want to catch the scene. He says okay, writes down the address on a pad of paper which rests on the telephone stand, hangs up.

He feels sweaty and sick in his stomach. His legs feel cramped. He rubs his face, walks back to his room, grabs a clean pair of underwear. He looks at the brown paper bag in the top drawer of his dresser, tucked in beside his underclothes, but tells himself no, don’t, not right before a job. You have to keep this in check. You can’t let yourself lose control. He pushes the drawer closed, tries to massage the cramp out of his left thigh.

Ignore it.

He grabs a towel from the back of a chair where he set it out to dry and walks down the hallway to the second-floor bathroom. His landlady walks behind him telling him no showers after nine o’clock, it wakes the other tenants. He tells her your running mouth is more likely to wake them than running water, so why don’t you clap your trap. Then he walks into the bathroom and closes the door in her face. He turns on the shower and waits for the water to get hot. While he waits he pulls off his underpants and kicks them into the corner. He steps into the shower with one sock still on his foot, curses, pulls it off his foot, throws it over the curtain rod. It hangs there, dripping water onto the floor.

He washes himself quickly — armpits, asshole, face, and feet — steps out of the shower, dries off. He wipes the mirror and looks at himself, deciding he doesn’t need to shave. He puts on his clean underwear and pads back to his room. He slips into blue slacks, a white shirt, a holster, a red tie, a coat. He runs his fingers through his wet hair and puts a fedora onto his head. He clips his badge onto his belt.

The telephone in the hallway rings again.

He walks out and picks it up himself.

‘Captain?’

‘Friedman.’

‘Shit.’

‘Nice to hear your voice, too, Carl. You mind picking me up on the way?’

‘It’s not on the way.’

‘You mind picking me up not on the way?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Will you do it anyhow?’

‘You need to get yourself a more reliable car.’

‘This week. Will you pick me up?’

‘Yeah.’

He drops the phone.

Locks his room door.

Heads down the stairs to the front of the house.

Two steps from the exit door, his stomach goes sour. He turns around, walks to the first-floor bathroom (which none of the tenants are supposed to use, but he isn’t walking back upstairs), unsnaps his belt, hooks his thumbs in, and pulls down his pants and underwear in one motion. He sits on the toilet just in time. He’s been constipated for two days and now diarrhea. While he’s there he checks his pockets for cigarettes, finds a crumpled packet of Chesterfields, slips one between his lips, lights it. He takes a deep drag. When he’s finished with his shit he wipes twice, pulls up his pants, buckles his belt. He checks his stool for blood, but finds none. He always expects blood in his stool, but there never is any. Sometimes he’s disappointed, sometimes relieved. Depends on his mood. He flushes, takes another drag from his cigarette, heads once more toward the front door.

This time he makes it through, pulls it shut behind him, trudges across the lawn to a black Ford parked at the curb.

It takes three attempts to get it started, but finally the engine rumbles to life.

He rolls down the window and inhales the chill night air. He takes another drag from his cigarette and steels himself for what’s coming.

He likes the puzzle aspect of being murder police, likes fitting together the pieces till he has a picture of what happened, but the blood and loss he hates. The dull shocked expressions on the faces of those left behind. The swollen eyes. The question there’s no answer to: why. You try to wall yourself off from that part of it, crack jokes (as long as survivors aren’t around), pretend you don’t care, but you can’t block it all out. It simply can’t be done.

Still, you try.

He’s become, in the last several months, better at it than many.

He puts the car into gear and gets it rolling.

Despite what he will have to deal with at the scene he’s glad to have a case. It might distract him from everything else that’s going on in his life right now. Something outside himself and his own bullshit. Even someone else’s pain would be better than his own, and he’ll do his best to avoid even that. He’ll focus instead on how the pieces fit together. If you think of human troubles, you’re thinking human thoughts, and those just get in the way. Human emotions get in the way. The trick is to feel nothing. The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

He drives in silence through the night, stopping only once between the boarding house and the murder scene. His partner Zach Friedman is already in front of his house when Carl pulls to the curb. He’s standing on the porch sipping coffee from a red cup.

He pulls open the car door and gets inside.

‘Thanks for picking me up.’

‘You’re buying breakfast when we get done with this.’

‘Deal.’

Fourteen minutes after pulling away from one curb they pull up to another. Carl brings the car to a stop behind a row of police vehicles. Wooden sawhorses stand in the street, cordoning off a large area, and uniformed police officers stand with them, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from thermoses. Other cops are already knocking on doors, asking questions. And the crime lab boys are going about their business flashing bulbs and taking swabs.

Carl and Friedman push out of the car and walk toward Captain Ellis, who stands smoking a cigarette and watching the madness.

To no one in particular Carl says, ‘What do we got?’

Sam Avery from the crime lab says, ‘White male between thirty-five and fourty years old. About five foot ten, one ninety-five. Supine on the street beside a motor vehicle. Gunshot wound to the left temple, another to the crown of the head. Five-pointed star carved into the forehead. Doesn’t look like he put up a fight. Gunman must’ve took him by surprise.’

‘Interesting,’ Carl says.

The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

2

Candice leans against the outside wall, hugging herself, shielding herself against the night. Vivian stands silent beside her. Candice’s favorite thing about Vivian is that she knows when not to speak. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, you wouldn’t think she’d know two plus two, her large eyes seeming lifeless as empty fishbowls more often than not, but she can be surprising in her intelligence, and in how she’s intelligent.

Most people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.

Candice watches the chaos. Several police cars, a coroner’s van, sawhorses, cops knocking on doors, voices overlapping one another. Do you know what time it is? I don’t care if you are the police. Has anyone told you what his wife does for a living? That poor little boy. And below the voices she imagines she can hear the steady grinding sound of the world turning on its axis, a sound like a great stone rolling.

And Neil is dead. Her husband of four years is dead. The only man who’d ever stuck around once he learned she had a son. He’s dead in the street while the world continues to turn and somewhere someone’s laughing. There is no justice.

She finds a man, a man with a decent job, a man who loves her, a man willing to be a father to her son after his biological father decided to take a powder, and he gets murdered in the street.

She’s not a regular churchgoer, but she believes in God, she believes He’s looking down on the world, and right now she hates Him for what He allowed to happen. She knows it’s wrong, she knows there’s a reason for everything, but she hates Him anyway. Because right now she doesn’t care what the reasons are; she doesn’t care about reason at all. Right now all she sees in God is meanness, set-a-cat-on-fire cruelty. One moment Neil was alive and now he’s dead and God allowed it to happen.

She closes her eyes, tells herself not to cry. When she opens them again she sees two men walking toward her. They’re not uniformed officers but they’re both clearly cops. They have that cop walk. They’re both wearing suits and fedoras, but they remove their hats as they approach, one revealing wavy black hair, the other thinning gray hair.

The older of the two puts out his hand and says, ‘Detective Bachman, ma’am. I’m very sorry for your loss. This is my partner, Detective Friedman.’

Candice shakes his hand. He has a firm grip, but his palm is sweaty.

‘I understand your son was home when it happened.’

‘He was asleep.’

‘I’d like to speak with him, if I may.’

‘He doesn’t know anything.’

‘Just the same, I’d like a few words with him.’

‘What for?’

‘Ma’am, I understand your loss, I understand you being angry, but I’m trying to find out who killed your husband. I think speaking with your son might get me closer to that end. May I speak with him?’

Candice believes him when he says he understands her loss. It’s in his eyes. Though his face is expressionless the eyes are red and rheumy with sadness. He looks directly at her without blinking.

After a long moment she nods.

‘He’s inside.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

The two detectives, whose names she’s already forgotten, step through the front door and into the house.

She follows them in.

3

Carl believes someone in this house knows what happened. He believes someone in this house is responsible for what happened. He isn’t sure why he believes that, but he does. Maybe it’s the fact that most murders are done by people who know the victim, or maybe he instinctively understood some piece of evidence he isn’t even aware he saw, but his gut tells him the answer is right in front of him, and he’s a man who pays attention to his gut. Always has been. He’s already told Friedman he should wander away as soon as possible, look around the house, see what he can see. Carl will talk to the boy, watch how the mother reacts to the exchange. Between the two of them they should find at least one loose thread worth pulling on.

As the two men step through the front door Carl sees a wallet on the floor next to a table. It shouldn’t be here. If the man was killed in the street, killed on his way home from a bar, killed before his feet passed over the threshold, it shouldn’t be here. It should be in his hip pocket, or his inside coat pocket. Carl can imagine the dead man drunkenly walking through the front door, tossing his keys onto the table and his wallet, only his wallet misses and falls to the floor. He had to be alive for that to happen. So how did he end up back outside — and dead?

Carl turns to look at the blonde woman, the decedent’s wife. He wonders if she was the one who pulled the trigger. Goodbye, bad marriage. He wonders if her friend is simply covering for her, giving her an alibi. It’s possible.

‘You told my captain that your husband left the nightclub about an hour and a half before you did.’

She nods.

‘People at work can confirm this?’

‘Of course.’

‘Did he, by chance, get free drinks?’

‘Nobody got free drinks, why?’

Carl shrugs noncommittally, turns back to the living room, sees a small boy sitting on a couch, hugging himself defensively. A pale boy with freckles dotting his cheeks. His lips are chapped. His eyes are large and glistening with fear.

Carl walks toward him, says, ‘Mind if we talk a minute?’

The boy licks his lips. ‘Okay.’

‘Maybe at the dinner table?’

The boy nods and pushes himself off the couch. He walks to the dinner table, feet dragging on the carpet, pulls out a chair, sits down. He puts his hands on the table and clasps them, then pulls them apart and puts them in his lap.

He looks sick.

Carl wonders what’s happening behind the eyes.

Then Friedman touches his shoulder and nods toward the floor behind the couch. Two dents in the carpet where the couch was sitting prior to its recently being moved. Maybe it has nothing to do with the murder victim outside, or maybe the couch was pushed forward to cover something. Coincidences that look like evidence happen, of course, but not as often as you’d think. He nods.

Walks to the dinner table. Sits across from the boy.

The boy’s mother sits down as well.

The other woman stands by the door, looking in, silent.

Friedman wanders off, meandering toward the hallway before silently disappearing into it. No one else seems to have noticed.

Carl looks toward the boy and says, ‘This must be hard for you.’

The boy nods.

‘Were you and your stepfather close?’

‘They weren’t real close, but they got along okay.’

‘Ma’am,’ Carl says, glancing toward the boy’s mother, ‘I don’t mind if you sit here, but I need your son to answer the questions himself.’

For a moment it looks as though the woman will protest. Something flickers behind her eyes and she opens her mouth to speak. But before any words get out she closes her mouth once more and nods. But she’s tough. If she hadn’t just lost her husband, if she was fully herself, he doesn’t think he’d be sitting here at all, much less telling her how the conversation would go — not without a fight.

She’s tough like his wife was tough.

But now’s not the time to think about such things.

He looks to the boy.

‘Son?’

‘I don’t think he liked me.’

‘Why not?’

The boy shrugs.

‘A shrug isn’t an answer.’

‘He was mean.’

‘All the time?’

‘Most of the time.’

‘Then you must have tried to avoid him whenever you could.’

‘I guess.’

‘I bet your spent a lot of time alone in your room just so you wouldn’t get in his way.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How was dinnertime?’

The boy licks his chapped lips. ‘It made me feel sick.’

‘Because you didn’t know what might set him off.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Because if you chewed too loud, he might hit you. Or if your knife scraped the plate wrong. Or if he just didn’t like your posture.’

‘Yes, sir.’ His eyes are moist with tears.

Carl glances at the mother, sees that the boy’s emotion has put a crease into the center of her forehead. She hadn’t known how bad it was for him, what turmoil it created within him. All she knew was that after her husband walked out she was alone with a mortgage payment and a son, struggling to make ends meet. All she knew was that there was a fellow with a job and an engagement ring who was willing to lighten her burden if she said I do, and she said I do. And all she saw in his behavior was a man trying to be a father to her son, and her son didn’t have a father.

People see what they want to see, or what they need to see. Sometimes they’re the same thing.

‘Was he meanest when he was drunk?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you must have really paid attention if he’d been hitting the bottle.’

The boy nods.

‘But you didn’t hear anything when he came home?’

‘I was asleep.’

‘That’s what your mother said. But I had a father like your stepfather when I was growing up, and I think I would have woken up if I heard the car pull up. I would have woken up and listened, made sure he wasn’t on a rampage, made sure he wasn’t looking for someone to take something out on, made sure I didn’t have to hide in the closet or crawl out the window. I was a light sleeper when I was a boy, listened for any hints that trouble might be near. I noticed your bedroom screen was missing. Do you sometimes sneak out the window like I used to do?’

‘He was killed outside, detective,’ the boy’s mother says. ‘I don’t like where these questions are going.’

‘I don’t much like it either, ma’am. But your husband’s wallet is on the floor by the front door and he would have needed it if he was buying drinks tonight. I’d like to know how it got there if he was killed outside.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’ The boy’s face is pale, full of fear.

‘Also, the couch has been moved. There are dents in the carpet.’

‘What does that have to do with anything?’ the boy’s mother says.

‘I’d like to know why the couch was moved, that’s all.’

‘Sandy,’ the boy’s mother says, ‘did you move the couch?’

The boy shakes his head.

‘Why’d you move the couch, son?’

‘I didn’t.’

Carl gets to his feet and walks to the couch. He pushes it back, revealing stained carpet. He leans down and touches one of the dark stains. His fingers come away red.

‘Is this why you moved the couch, son?’

‘I didn’t move it, I swear.’

‘Bachman.’

He looks up, looks toward the hallway entrance. Friedman is standing there with a shoebox in his hands. He pulls a zip gun from inside.

‘From the boy’s room.’ He sniffs it. ‘It’s been fired.’

Carl turns to the boy.

‘You weren’t being completely honest with us, were you, son?’

‘I don’t know how that got there.’

Carl can’t help but feel for him. Part of it is the fear in his eyes, the sheer terror, but only part of it. Truth is, there were times growing up when he wanted to kill his own father. He thinks he understands what drove the boy to do what he did. There are things that happen in relationships that people can’t see from the outside. Little things that accumulate one by one. A tree gets chopped down one swing of the axe at a time, but eventually it falls. And sometimes it falls on the person who did the chopping.

Carl leans toward the boy, catches his eye, and says, with kindness, ‘I’m afraid we’re past the point where lying will do you any good, son.’

4

Sandy can’t believe what just happened. He’d thought he might get away with what he did, but knows now there was never any chance of that. His construct fell apart so quickly, so easily. A few jostles and it collapsed, leaving behind a mere heap of rubble. He looks from the detective to his mother, but can’t stand to see what he sees in her eyes, disbelief and horror combined, so he looks back to the detective. There’s sympathy there at least. He’s understanding, if merciless.

‘We’re going to have to go over this step by step, son.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

But that, of course, is a lie. He knows plenty. He knows he’s caught. He knows it’s over. He knows lying further is pointless. But he can’t let it go. He can’t put the words into the air that he needs to put there.

The detective is silent a moment. He scratches his cheek. He looks to the corner a moment, then back to Sandy, eyes full of understanding.

‘Would this be easier if your mother wasn’t in the room?’

For a long moment Sandy doesn’t move. But finally, knowing there’s no way out of this, he nods.

‘Okay,’ the detective says.

5

‘Do you mind, ma’am?’

‘Do I. .’

Candice looks from her son to the detective. She feels dizzy. This is like a dream. This is the sort of thing that happens to other people. This is the sort of thing you read about in the paper. You shake your head at such horrible goings on, the world’s just spinning out of control, isn’t it, and you sip your coffee, and it’s sad, very sad, and it’s so distant from where you are that you can actually afford to feel sadness. Being in the middle of the experience she feels nothing but a kind of shocked disbelief, a strange unbelieving numbness. This simply isn’t happening.

She looks again toward Sandy but can’t see murder in his face. She should be able to see it on him, some horrible red blotch like a birthmark on his face, but when she looks at him she sees only her boy, her baby, whom she loves more than life, and she thinks of holding him in her arms, of nursing him, of his infant mouth on her nipple, of his infant tongue against it, pulling — not of death, not of murder, not of a black hole in her husband’s temple from which the life has oozed — so he couldn’t have done it.

He could not possibly have done what they say he did.

‘Ma’am?’

‘I’m not leaving him alone with you.’

‘Ma’am, we just want to talk to him.’

‘He couldn’t have done what you think he did. He couldn’t have.’

‘I think it would be easier to do this here. I can take him down to the station and do it there, I can do that, but this is better. For him.’

‘He didn’t do it.’

‘Ma’am.’

‘He didn’t.’

‘If you don’t step outside for a few minutes while we talk to your son, we’ll have you escorted out.’

‘This is my house. You can’t kick me out of my own house.’

Vivian, who till now has been standing silently by the door with her arms crossed, walks to Candice, puts a hand on her shoulder, and says her name. Candice looks up and sees her friend’s kind eyes glistening with empathy.

‘They’re just gonna talk to him, hon.’

‘They think he murdered Neil. I can’t leave him alone with them.’

‘We’ll be right outside.’

She helps Candice to her feet, and even though Can-dice doesn’t want to leave, even though she’s thinking no, I should stay, I should stay here with my son, her body rises, and she finds herself being led outside, led into the dark April morning, and was her biggest problem two hours ago that Neil had taken the car and left her without a way home? Is that really possible?

6

Carl pushes the front door closed behind the women and turns around to face the room. He looks at the boy but the boy doesn’t return his gaze. Instead he stares down at the table, looking sick. Carl knows the feeling. His stomach is cramped. The sweat beading on his face feels slick and oily. He can smell his own armpits, the awful stink of ill health. And an itch at the back of his brain that only one thing can scratch.

But he shouldn’t think about that. He can’t think about that. He needs to think only about what’s happening with this case.

He takes the box with the gun in it from his partner and walks back to the table at which the boy is sitting and once more takes a seat himself. He sets the box down on the table between them. He glances into it. As well as the gun there are several comic books, a Slinky, and three spent bullet casings.

There are only two bullet holes in the man on the street. Probably the boy missed with one, his hand shaking, the gun not having a rifled barrel.

‘I guess you know it’s over,’ he says.

The boy is silent. He swallows. Carl sees the thoughts behind his eyes passing like the shadows of clouds over a green earth as he tries, one last time, to think his way out of this, but he must realize there’s no way out because, after a while, he only nods.