The Voice Inside

30

Frost found Phil Cutter’s house on the southern fringe of the city in the Crocker-Amazon area, near the border with Daly City. The two-story house was an eyesore on a street where most of the homes around it were small but well maintained. The yellow siding hadn’t seen paint in years. The windows were shaded by misaligned horizontal miniblinds. A sad little boulevard tree needed water. The only other thing alive on the postage-stamp front yard were tall weeds that had squeezed out the grass.

The house’s garage door was open, and the interior was crowded with so many boxes and so much rusted junk that no one would have been able to fit a car inside. A dirty black Cadillac from the ’90s was parked on the street, blocking the driveway. Frost took a quick look inside the car, which was littered with old newspapers and crumpled fast-food bags. An air freshener in the shape of an evergreen tree hung from the mirror.

He climbed the steps and banged a fist on the house’s front door. Phil Cutter answered with a bottle of brandy in his hand. His clothes drooped on his tall, skeletal frame, and so did his gray skin. He was in his early fifties and looked seventy.

“Easton, right?” the man said with a raspy voice that ended in a cough. He smoothed down his wispy dark hair.

“You know me?”

“Sure, I figured you’d be here sooner or later. A couple other cops already stopped by a few hours ago. Don’t you guys talk to each other?”

“This isn’t an official visit,” Frost said. “I just want to chat.”

“Just a chat, huh? Okay, come on in.”

Frost followed the man into the house. It had the smell of someone who hadn’t showered recently, with a layer of cigarette smoke on top of the body odor. Phil had an impatient, wiry walk, which was more athletic than his appearance suggested. In the living room, which faced the street, the man dropped into an armchair near the windows, and his knee bounced like a tic. Rows of shadows from the blinds fell across his face. Frost didn’t want to sit on any of the musty furniture, so he stood.

“You look tired, Easton,” Phil said. “Don’t you get enough sleep? Alarm clocks keeping you up or something?”

The man’s weathered face bent into a ghost of a smile.

Frost got the joke. He also realized the cigarette smoke in the house had a familiar bitterness. “It was you? You broke into my house. You sent me on a chase to find the watch.”

Phil retrieved a smoldering cigarette from a tin ashtray. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who really found the watch?” Frost asked him. Phil looked like a man who could follow instructions, but it was hard to imagine him connecting the dots to the street thug who’d mugged Melanie Valou and stolen her watch. Rudy would have needed a private investigator for that.

“Like I said,” Phil repeated, blowing out smoke and reaching for his brandy bottle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Frost studied the small room. The wallpaper was heavy and dark, and it was peeling away at the ceiling. An old Doberman — as skinny as its owner — slept on the floor. It hadn’t even barked when Frost arrived. He examined a few photographs hung on the walls and recognized younger versions of Rudy and Phil Cutter among the people in the pictures.

He turned back to Phil.

“Where’s your brother?” Frost asked.

“No idea.”

“Last night, he murdered a close friend of mine.”

“That cop? I heard about that. But you won’t pin that on Rudy. He was here with me when that woman got killed. He came here straight from the Fillmore.”

“That’s your story? We had a police car on your street. The officer didn’t see a thing. Nobody came or went.”

Phil shrugged. “Rudy came in the back.”

“Climbing fences? Sneaking through yards? Why would he do that?”

“He’s done it since he was a boy. He was always good at coming and going without our parents knowing about it. So was I. We made a good team.”

Frost studied the man in the chair. He had bags under his eyes and a two-day beard on his face. His forehead was high and furrowed with long lines. He looked lost, like one of those men who falls behind early in life and never catches up to the rest of the world.

“Why do you cover for him?” Frost asked. “You know what he does.”

Phil was silent. His jaw moved, as if he were trying to dislodge food from his teeth. Then he said, “You got a brother?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should understand.”

“I wouldn’t protect my brother if he killed someone,” Frost said. “I wouldn’t lie for him over something like that.”

“It’s easy to say that if you’ve never faced it.”

“All those years, you knew what Rudy was doing, and you never said a word to anyone. I don’t know how you live with that, Phil.”

“What I know is that Rudy is everything I’ve got, and he always has been. For thirty years, it’s been him and me. Longer than that if you go back to when we were kids.”

Frost didn’t push him. He wanted to plant a seed of guilt, and that was all. He pointed to a photograph on the wall that showed two young boys with their parents. The background looked like a Giants game, and he figured the picture had been taken at the old Candlestick Park.

“Is this you and Rudy and your folks?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Are they still alive?”

“You know they’re not,” Phil replied. “They died when Rudy and I were in our teens. Car accident. Truck driver lost control on 280 and nailed them both. This was their house.”

“Do you work?” Frost asked. “Other than breaking and entering, that is. I know about your record.”

“I was an electrician for BART. I got injured on the job a decade ago.”

“So how do you spend your days?”

“What does it look like?” Phil asked, holding up the bottle.

What it looked like was a man who was committing slow-motion suicide.

Frost stared at the photograph again. He figured that Rudy Cutter must have been twelve years old at the baseball game. He mugged for the camera the way kids do. There was nothing in his face to suggest the man he would become. It would take decades for the evil to emerge.

“Help me understand your brother, Phil,” Frost said.

“Why should I?”

“Because deep down, you know he’s sick and he has to be stopped.”

“You want to stop him? Go find a watch and hide it in the ceiling like your friend did. She did it right here, you know, at the top of the stairs. She slipped it in behind the smoke detector.”

“I’m not defending what Jess did,” Frost replied, “but what Rudy did to her was a hell of a lot worse.”

“I already told you. Rudy was with me.”

Frost shook his head. He couldn’t shake the man’s lies. “If you won’t tell me about Rudy, then tell me about Hope. I know what she did to their daughter. I can only imagine how that affected Rudy.”

Phil hissed between his teeth. “Hope. What a freak show.”

One of the other framed photographs on the wall showed Rudy holding a baby in his arms. Half the picture had been torn away, leaving a white space inside the frame. Frost suspected that Hope had been in the picture and that Phil had excised his sister-in-law from his memory.

“You didn’t like her?”

“She was trouble. Like Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. You never knew what you were going to get with Hope. One minute she’d be juiced, running around with so much energy you just wanted to unplug her. Then she’d go into a dark place, and nothing could pull her out. When she got like that, she was a witch. I mean, she’d scream at Rudy. Ugly, ugly stuff. She’d hit him, too. She slashed him with a knife once, right across the chest. He still has the scar.”

“A knife,” Frost said. “Knives come up a lot with them.”

Phil was cool, not reacting to the verbal jab. His rheumy eyes didn’t blink. He kept smoking.

“I don’t know why Rudy picked her,” he went on after a long silence. “Rudy was a good-looking guy. Still is. He could have done better than Hope. You ask me, she manipulated him. She knew how to pull his strings. If he ever talked about divorce, she’d go crazy, crying about how she couldn’t live without him. You talk about husbands abusing wives? This was a wife abusing her husband. She was an awful piece of work. Freaking psycho.”

“And Wren?”

Just like that, tears gathered in Phil’s eyes. He was an uncle who still missed his niece. “Aw, Wren, she was an angel. I’m telling you, that little girl had sunshine in her face. I don’t care what you think of my brother or what you think he’s done. He loved that girl. If she needed blood, he would have slit his own wrists to save her.”

“So what really happened?” Frost asked.

Phil’s face hardened. His eyes had a grim, faraway look. “Docs said Hope had a bad case of PPD. Bipolar, too. They’ve got lots of buzzwords, but if you ask me, she was just evil. She was jealous of Wren. Jealous of this sweet, beautiful girl, not even a year old. The baby got all the attention from Rudy. Hope just wanted to take her away from him. That was all it was. She couldn’t stand to see Rudy happy. So she smothered her own daughter and then killed herself like a coward.”

The dog on the floor roused from his slumber and growled. Phil snapped his fingers to quiet him.

“At 3:42 a.m.,” Frost said.

“Let’s just say it was the middle of the night.”

“What happened to Rudy after that?” Frost asked.

“Rudy? He stopped.”

Frost was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Life stopped for Rudy that day. Time stopped. Everything stopped. It was like he was frozen, you know? He quit his job. He was an underwriter, and he was good at it — the guy is wicked smart — but he couldn’t stomach it anymore. All the people who knew what had happened, all the sad stares, it was too much. He got some nothing job in data entry at B of A, where no one knew about his background. He moved in here with me. He just — stopped. He never started again. Not for years. Not until—”

Frost stared at him. “Not until?”

Phil didn’t say a word, as if he’d already said too much. It didn’t matter. Frost knew exactly when Rudy Cutter had come to life again.

“Not until he met Nina Flores,” Frost said.