What Dies in Summer
“Do you think they’ll catch him?”
“I think he will catch himself, mein lieber. He will see to his own destruction.”
She sighed, her eyes fluttering and closing.
It was hell watching Dr. Kepler die, but there came a day when she made it much harder for me. It was a Friday afternoon, and it had been raining all day. In Dr. Kepler’s room time had slowed almost to a standstill, the air around us seeming to listen for something. She lay still on her bed, her breathing barely noticeable.
“James,” she whispered, “have you ever given any thought to what life really is?” Her voice making me think of the wind in winter grass.
“No ma’am,” I said, unsure what she meant.
“The thing itself, life—what is it? Is it more than just having a pulse and curiosity and lust?”
I tried to think this through fully, because Dr. Kepler would never settle for less. I’d heard life called different things, like a gift or a trial, but those seemed like religious ideas that wouldn’t satisfy anyone with a mind like Dr. Kepler’s. Finally an inspiration came to me. “It’s a responsibility,” I said. “Like a job.”
“Bravo,” she answered in a faint voice. I thought of the changes the doctor had made in her medications yesterday, wondering if that was why she seemed so used up today. Her face was sort of carved away like desert rock, and her legs were like sticks under the covers. When she looked at me, I felt a kind of unreal heat from her eyes. She said, “And when our job is accomplished, what then?”
Having no real idea how to answer, I said, “I guess we’re done.” Feeling goose bumps on the backs of my arms. Fighting off an image of myself turning in some cosmic resignation letter at an unmanned desk on my way out the door and disappearing into endless darkness and silence.
Dr. Kepler pressed her head farther back into the pillow and stared up at the ceiling with a daydreaming look. She said, “I loved Sol Kepler almost every day for twenty-six years and eight months, James. He was a solid, honest house of a man, and, like you, noble without knowing it. When the storms blew him away, nothing was left but worthless ground that could never be built on again. Our two daughters dead before us, two amputations of the heart without anesthesia. I taught other people’s children all I could about how to think clearly and how to love nature. Now I’ve said goodbye to that and to all of them, and I believe I am finished. Do you understand that, James?”
“Yes ma’am,” I lied.
“You know,” she said softly, “I lived forty-seven of my years before you were born. Almost half of this monstrous century. Nevertheless, I consider you my compeer and true friend. I’m going to ask you to do something for me, a little thing to help me finish with my assignment.”
“Anything you need,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “All right, then, James, here is what I want you to do. Go into the kitchen and open the cabinet to the right of the sink. Find the bottle with the large round white tablets, the ones with grooves on the side. Take at least a dozen of them and crush them into a powder in one of those little blue bowls that I use for desserts, and mix the powder with some applesauce from the top shelf in the refrigerator. Bring the bowl to me with a spoon, then get the brandy from the pantry and pour me a glass of it. Can you do that?”
I stared at her and swallowed, my heart banging against my ribs. The room was so quiet it hurt my ears. I thought of all the things I’d messed up in my life, of how I hadn’t been able to help Gramp, or stop Dad from dying or Jack from moving in with Mom and beating her up. There’d been nothing I could do to help L.A., and Dee was dead because of me. What the hell was my life but a junkyard of failures? The word responsibility glowed in my mind as if spelled out in buzzing red neon. I stood up slowly from the cane chair beside Dr. Kepler’s bed, setting aside the book I’d been reading to her earlier. “Yes ma’am,” I said. “I can.”
I went into the kitchen and opened the cabinet. The tablets were at the front of the shelf. I counted out twelve of them and put them in a bowl I found in the next cabinet. I took a heavy bread knife from the silverware drawer and used its thick handle to smash the pills into a coarse powder, visualizing Tricia Venables’s dead face in the grass as I worked. Rain tapped against the window and trailed its weak fingers down the glass as I got the applesauce from the fridge. I carried the jar to the counter and spooned some of the applesauce into the small bowl, then mixed the powder into it with shaking hands. I took a water glass from the cabinet, set it by the sink and went over to get the brandy bottle. I unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow, coughed and took another, the liquor burning all the way down to the center of me. I poured some into the glass and carried it and the applesauce back to the bedroom.
Dr. Kepler’s eyes were closed, and I thought she might be asleep. I stood by her bed and held the bowl. “Ma’am,” I said, my tongue a clumsy paddle in my mouth.
She slowly opened her eyes. She seemed to be coming back from some far place, and she took a long time to recognize me, looking almost surprised to find me there beside her bed. Her eyes went to the bowl, then came back to my face. Her lips moved slightly, as if she were going back over the words we’d spoken earlier. After what seemed like a long time, she suddenly said, “Oh, NO, no no no! What could I have been thinking? Where is my mind? Oh, James, forgive me, please! I was so wrong to have asked this of you.”
I set the brandy and applesauce on the table, sat down in my chair at her bedside and hung my head.
“I was so mistaken,” she said. “I ask—I beg—your pardon.” Her hand was thin and cool as a bird’s foot as she reached across to touch my fingers and then my knee.
Long minutes ticked away.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said, not even trying to stop the hot tears falling down onto my stupid useless hands.
11 | Police Work
GRAM AND L.A. seemed unimpressed, but to me the outside of the municipal building downtown on Harwood looked kind of monumental and dangerous at close range, with its huge white columns and curlicued ledges and squadrons of pigeons clattering around the top. On the other hand, the interior, at least downstairs, was ho-hum, like a collection of assistant principals’ offices. The squad room upstairs was more interesting, with a few lazily rotating ceiling fans above maybe two dozen desks placed in pairs back to back, and the smell of cigar smoke, leather and old coffee in the air. There was a businesslike, slightly menacing feel to the place, but the walls looked like they hadn’t been painted since Cochise was a kid.
Don met us as we got off the elevator, his sleeves rolled up and a gold badge clipped to his belt. He looked very different here, as if the surroundings had chemically transformed him from just Diana’s father to the guy in charge. The change wasn’t in his actual appearance, being more a matter of things like people unobtrusively keeping track of what he was doing and saying, and men older than he was addressing him as “sir.” When he asked Gram if she’d like coffee or anything, two detectives were moving toward the break room to get it before she even finished saying, “Yes, thank you.”
A chunky, busy-looking red-haired cop named Sperry took Gram into a deskless office where there was an old tan leather couch and a coffee table. Coffee and fixings were brought for both of them and Gram, being her usual self, had Detective Sperry filling her in on the policing business in no time: how many men worked here, how many secretaries were there, where did they keep their records and what sort of filing system did they use, where were the criminals brought in and on and on.
L.A. wanted to see the interrogation rooms, and Don showed us one with a dinged-up little table, three folding chairs and nothing else in it. The room was smaller than I would have expected, with no windows, dirty-looking light green walls and brown worn-out linoleum on the floor. I looked for the bright light hanging low over the suspect’s chair, but there were only the buzzing fluorescents overhead. The air in the room seemed to hum with desperation, and it occurred to me that I might confess to pretty much an
ything to get out of a place like this. But then that raised the question of where I’d go from here, which was not an encouraging thought either.
Don showed us how the two-way mirror worked. L.A. checked out both sides, then put her face to the glass and shaded her eyes with her hands. “You can see through it a little bit this way,” she said. “Do something, Biscuit.”
I stuck my finger in my nose.
She laughed. A rare occurrence.
Don and another man brought us Cokes and sat us at a long metal table stacked with several big books full of pictures of different men’s faces. I couldn’t see the words “Mug Book” on any of them, but there was no doubt that’s what they were. It was the first time I’d ever seen any in person, and unlike the interrogation room, these looked exactly the same as the movie versions. The only difference I noticed was that in the movies and on TV they never brought out more than one.
“What I’m interested in,” said Don, “is if either of you might have seen any of these players anywhere, maybe looking out of place somehow, cruising the street or trying to start a conversation with you or your friends. Or trying to follow somebody or just generally giving you a funny feeling.”
L.A. plunged right into this, and she was the perfect witness because she absolutely never forgot anybody’s face. She looked at each man for a second, photographed him mentally, then moved on to the next one. Every so often she’d stop to take a sip of her drink, then go back to the photographs. I knew that if she ever met one of these men, even years later, she’d recognize him instantly.
But I didn’t have an orderly bone in my body. I was a browser, and I caught myself getting interested in these people, wondering about their histories and making up stories in my mind about them. Some of them looked so sad and broken down that it made my heart hurt. But there were others who seemed to have invisible fire spiking from their eyes, and their expressions told you they could never possibly hurt you enough to be satisfied.
Don sat at the end of the table, occasionally taking sips of coffee from a tan mug that had his name painted on it in red fingernail polish. His left hand, with its wide gold wedding band, lay on the table without moving. He’d watch L.A.’s eyes for a while, then glance off across the room, or sometimes just look at the clouds outside the window. It was hard to say exactly how, but he gave a clear impression that it would be no problem for him if this took all night.
Once in a while somebody would come to ask him a question or get him to sign something, but the typewriters and all the other action around us seemed to pull back and go on without us so that it felt like we were closed into our own private bubble of time and space. I had started concentrating on a picture of a young dark-haired shirtless guy who reminded me of Hubert a little, except for the long whelp of scar tissue under his chin. I was wondering if somebody had cut his throat, and if so why that hadn’t worked, since I’d always understood throat-cutting to be lethal, when I heard L.A.’s Coke can bang on the table.
“Here!” she said, jabbing her finger down on one of the faces.
Don snapped his own fingers once and pointed at one of the men across the room, who grabbed a tablet as he came over to stand behind L.A. and look down over her shoulder at the book. I moved around the table to get a better look myself, Don and another man joining me, all of us focused on the tip of L.A.’s finger and the picture under it.
“We know this one,” she said.
I stared at the face and saw that she was right.
It was Hot Earl.
“Okay!” Don said, slapping one hand down onto the table. “This could be Break One. Tell us about him, hon.”
While L.A. gave Don the story about how we met Earl—leaving out the parts about the five-dollar bills and me smoking pot with him—the other detectives were getting organized to catch him. “Earl Vester Wiggins, also known as Earl Williams or Vester Peoples,” someone said.
“Priors for theft, forgery, indecency with a minor—guest of the governor for two and a half at Huntsville,” said another voice.
“Jerry, what’ve we got for a last known address?”
Phones were dialed and notes were scribbled. It was terrific, like a huge engine cranking up. Gram came out with Detective Sperry, sniffing the excitement in the air.
“We identified Hot Earl,” L.A. reported with satisfaction.
“Who?” said Gram.
“Hot Earl. He’s a murderer, and we met him. He’s in the book.”
“Well, he’s somebody for us to talk to anyway,” said Don. “But we’re proud of our investigative consultants here.” He put his arm around L.A.’s shoulders.
This is when I would have seen it if I had been half as smart as I wanted to believe I was. But I wasn’t and I didn’t.
Just then Dr. Ballard and Mrs. Bruhn walked into the squad room. Mrs. Bruhn was wearing a dress suit like the one I’d seen her in at the hospital, except this one was light brown. Dr. Ballard wore a gray skirt and a peach-colored blouse with the sleeves pushed up. Her hair was light brown and kind of rolled at the back of her head, her little glasses hanging in front of her on a thin gold chain. She took L.A.’s hands in hers and smiled at her. There was another female eyelock, this one softer and not quite as loaded as the one at Gram’s.
Dr. Ballard said, “Ready?”
L.A. nodded.
“Hi, Dr. Ballard, Miz Bruhn,” said Don, shaking hands with both women. “We’ve got a room ready, and the steno and policewoman are on their way up. Let me know if there’s anything I can get you.”
A stiff-looking skinny woman about Mom’s age carrying an armful of notebooks, and a short friendly blond policewoman with dewberry engraved in white on her blue name tag, walked up to us. Don introduced everybody, and then all the women trooped off down a hall.
Reading the wanted posters on a bulletin board in the waiting area, I learned that crooks were generally referred to by all three of their names, like a kid who’s in trouble with his mother, that they tended to go by a lot of aliases that were usually kind of alike, and that they always had tattoos. Also a lot of scars, which gave the impression that being a criminal must be a pretty rocky business. These characters were called Fugitives from Justice, the words making me think for a second of desperate men crouching in ditches as hounds bayed in the distance.
A lot of these guys were to be considered Armed and Dangerous, which I visualized as having large pistols on your hips, ammunition belts across your chest and a fierce expression on your face. But in real life I had never seen an ammunition belt like the ones I was picturing, which got me thinking about where crooks got their equipment in the first place. They used specialized gear like lockpicks and blunt instruments, and they bludgeoned people, which meant there must be places where you could get this kind of stuff. I wondered how much a bludgeon would cost and whether they came in different weights and sizes, or maybe in light, regular and heavy-duty models. There was also the question of how you’d choose the right lockpick, or know a good-quality blunt instrument from a shoddy one. But then the whole concept of blunt instruments sounded contradictory to me; I imagined bins full of them, shiny and looking something like surgical tools, but heavier and without sharp edges or points.
Did all this come from a specialized hardware store, maybe with dirty old windows painted up past eye level like a pool hall and a hand-painted sign reading CRIME SUPPLIES over the door, suspicious characters looking furtively back over their shoulders as they came and went? I assumed clerks who worked there would have to be experienced criminals themselves to be able to answer the customers’ questions intelligently.
On the other hand, I wasn’t sure how the idea of intelligence applied to crooks, because the guys in these pictures didn’t look very sharp to me. Mostly they seemed dazed, with their hair sprigged up like they had just that minute been jerked out of bed and stood in front of the camera. It made me tired just thinking of all the trouble and effort it must take to be a criminal, and I wondered if it wouldn’t be
easier to just go ahead and clean up and find a regular job.
Gram would never expect them to do that, though. “Never try to teach a pig to sing,” was how she put it.
Don looked at it pretty much the same way. “Takes three or four perps to make a halfwit,” was his philosophy.
I walked over to a corner where there was a green plastic-covered couch, a shaky-looking coffee table and four or five chairs that looked like they’d been chucked out in the alley behind some school cafeteria in the poor end of town. In one of the police magazines I found on the table there was an article about the killing power of different bullets, something I’d never thought about until that minute, assuming bullets killed you according to where they hit you rather than on account of differences in the bullets themselves.
My eyes were getting tired, and I thought about putting the magazine down and leaning my head back just for a minute—
—Hot Earl stood in the middle of the street in Dodge City, not far from Marshal Dillon’s office, where there was a wanted poster on the bulletin board beside the door with a drawing of L.A. on it. Where her mouth should have been, there was a big black X. Hot Earl was wearing heavy six-guns on his cartridge belt and had a snow-white bandanna with bright drops of blood on it around his neck. On his chest hung a placard reading, “Making them wait is the best part.” Then his face lost focus so that I couldn’t make out his features.
An armed posse was riding up the street, but the faceless man couldn’t run because of the smelly old mattress he was chained to. He dragged it desperately through the dust, his pants unzipped, his hair scragged up in every possible direction. As the riders closed in all around him, he drew his guns one after another to shoot at them, but each time the barrels fell off when he pulled the trigger. The deputies all had nooses in their hands.
As they grabbed him, he turned to me and in a girl’s voice said—