He cued up the call again, played the last part of the exchange between Alice and the caller again.
“Hi, Mr. Henry!”
“Stop it,” I said. “I’m gonna die.”
Slowly, we all pulled ourselves together.
“Oh man,” said Alice. “Whoo.”
“Okay,” said George, who had completely regained his composure. “Now let’s go kill him.”
We took two cars. George Holland led the way in theirs, taking us back through Braynor, past Henry’s Grocery and the phone booth just down from it, then a left down a street of boring, boxy brick houses that were probably built in the sixties. George put on his blinker and turned into the driveway of a two-story red brick house, blocking in a black Ford Taurus sedan. Lawrence pulled over onto the shoulder and we all got out.
As we walked up the drive, Lawrence, small briefcase in hand, glanced into the back windows of the Taurus and said, “Hello.”
“What?” I said.
“Check it out,” he said, and opened the back door on the passenger side. He reached down behind the seat to the floor and brought up a container of eggs.
“Odd place for eggs,” I said.
Alice and George watched with interest.
Lawrence opened the top of the cardboard container. Five of the dozen eggs were missing. “Now, I could see forgetting some of your groceries in the car when you came home, but I can’t see taking your eggs into the house one at a time.” He handed me the carton to carry.
Alice went on ahead and rang the doorbell. An over-weight frizzy-haired woman opened the door, and when she saw who it was, said, “Oh, hello, Mayor.”
“We’re here to see Charles,” she said.
The woman looked back into the house. “Chuck!” she screamed. “Visitors!”
By the time Braynor grocery store magnate Charles Henry was at the door, all four of us were standing there, looking, I suspect, fairly intimidating.
“What’s this about?” he said nervously, half standing behind the door. You could tell, just looking at him, the way he was sweating already, that he knew the jig was up.
“I thought maybe you’d like to talk to the bitch in person,” Alice said.
“What? What’s that supposed to mean? Alice, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lawrence held up his case. “We’ve got it all, man. You want to hear it? The last part, where the kid shouts ‘Hi, Mr. Henry!’? You have to hear that for yourself. You’ll bust a fucking gut.”
George moved forward. “I ought to take your head off, you miserable little worm.”
Henry tried to close the door but George shoved it back and walked in, the rest of us following. Down at the end of the hall I could see Mrs. Henry in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. Two girls, about eight and ten, ran giggling from the kitchen, down the hall and up the stairs.
“Maybe we should play it for them,” I taunted Henry. “Here’s how Daddy talks to grown-up girls.”
“Shhhh,” he said, running a hand over the top of his head. “Just, just come downstairs.”
He led us down into a rec room that didn’t appear to have been changed since the 1960s. Brown shag carpeting, dark paneled walls, a pool table covered with boxes of Christmas decorations that had evidently been sitting there for months. With Christmas only a few months away, there wasn’t much point putting them away now.
“Chuck?” his wife shouted downstairs. “What’s going on?”
“Shut the damn door!” he shouted at her. The door slammed shut. He said to us, “What do you want?”
Lawrence found a corner of the pool table on which to rest his laptop, opened it up, and played the recording of his call to Alice Holland’s house, finishing with “Hi, Mr. Henry!”
Henry shook his head. “Goddamn that Violet.”
“Violet?” I said.
“Cashier,” said Alice, who clearly knew everyone in town. “Grade 12 student, works part-time for Charles. She see you at the pay phone after her shift?”
Charles Henry said nothing.
“First thing I want is,” said Alice, “I want you to own up to what you’ve been doing.”
I held up the egg carton from the car. “And we’re not talking just the phone calls. You’ve been paying some visits to the comics store in Red Lake.”
It was cool in the basement, but Charles Henry was still sweating.
“I don’t know anything about any comics store.”
“Really?” said Lawrence. “What do you think will happen when I give this carton of eggs to my friends at the forensic lab, and they compare the DNA of these eggs to the DNA of the eggs splattered all over Stuart Lethbridge’s store?”
I looked at Lawrence.
“Oh my God,” Henry said, clearly overwhelmed by what science apparently could do. “Okay, okay, I egged the place. And I’m really sorry about the phone calls.”
George Holland made a snorting noise. “He’s fucking sorry.”
“You’re sorry you got caught,” Alice Holland said. “This is what I want you to do. I want you to call Tracy over at the Times. Tell her you’re withdrawing the petition. Tell her you think it’s time to let things calm down. Tell her yeah, people have differences of opinion about who should and shouldn’t be in the parade, but tempers are flaring, and it’s time for people to cool off.”
Charles Henry nodded, swallowed. “Okay,” he squeaked.
“The Times’s next edition doesn’t come out for a few more days,” I said. “You need to get the message out now.”
Alice nodded. “Charles, you’re going to call Andy at FL Radio and offer him an interview that he can get on the next newscast. Tell him what you’re going to tell Tracy. You can tell them you don’t want gays and lesbians in the parade, I don’t care, but make it clear that the parade needs to be peaceful, that this is an issue that can be taken up at a later date.”
Henry looked hopeful. “We can still have discussions about this?”
Alice leaned in close to Henry, forcing him up against the pool table. “Not you, Charles. Never. Your opinion in this town counts for nothing from this day forward. You give me one moment’s trouble, and I’ll give that recording not only to the police, but the radio station. I’ll put it on a loudspeaker and drive around town playing it at full volume. Let people find out what you’re really like. That you’re a little, little man.”
Henry seemed to shrink.
“I have some questions,” Lawrence said. Alice stepped aside and Lawrence moved forward. “What do you know about what’s going to go down at the parade tomorrow?”
“Huh?” Henry said, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“If you know about anything that’s going to happen, something bad, you better tell us now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Lawrence turned to George. “You know how you were asking for ten minutes alone with this guy?”
George brightened. “Yeah.”
“This seems as good a time as any.”
“No! No!” Charles Henry whined. “I swear, I don’t know anything!”
“What about the Wickenses?” Lawrence said. “Timmy Wickens and his crew?”
“Timmy Wickens? Are you kidding? That guy’s crazy! Him and those boys, his wife’s two? They’re a bunch of psychos!”
Well. Something we could all agree on.
We were all quiet for a moment. For a few seconds, all we could hear was a dishwasher running upstairs, and Henry’s rapid breathing.
“I don’t think he’s in on anything else,” Lawrence said.
“I’m not! Honestly!”
“I don’t think he’s got the balls for it,” Lawrence said. “A little man like you, dirty phone calls and eggs, that’s about all you’re capable of.”
“I think you’re right,” Alice said.
“Does this mean I can’t have some time alone with him?” George asked.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Alice said, patting her
husband on the arm.
As we were heading back to the car, I said to Lawrence, “Match the DNA from the eggs on the comics store with the eggs still left in the carton?”
Lawrence opened his door. “I couldn’t believe I was actually saying it. Sometimes I get swept away in the moment.”
29
BY THE TIME LAWRENCE AND I got back to our cabin, it was dark.
He went into his bedroom and opened the top dresser drawer, where he’d carefully tucked his clothes earlier, and pulled out a black, long-sleeved pullover shirt with a high, almost turtle-like neck.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m getting changed,” Lawrence said. “You might want to do the same.”
“What? Spying on the Wickenses, this is a formal affair?”
Lawrence was stripping off his slacks and pulling on black jeans, tucking in the black shirt. He pulled at the shirt, tenting the fabric. “This kind of thing,” he said. It occurred to me that even his surveillance clothes looked more expensive than the stuff I wore in to the newsroom. “Dark clothes? So you won’t be seen? You’re new at this, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t exactly pack for hiding in the forest,” I said. “In fact, I didn’t get a chance to pack at all.”
Lawrence made a face. “How long you been wearing these clothes?”
I shrugged.
Lawrence sighed and tossed me an extra dark shirt. “Your jeans will be okay,” he said. “This shirt’ll help, but I don’t know what we’re going to do with that Ivory Snow face of yours.”
I unbuttoned the shirt I was wearing, slipped into Lawrence’s, which smelled of fabric softener or something. “This smells nice,” I said. “You do your own laundry?”
“What of it?”
“Okay, tell me this,” I said. “Can you iron?”
“You working up to some sort of gay joke?”
“No no,” I protested. “I just wanted to know whether I could add ironing to the list of things you can do that I can’t. With beating the snot out of people at the top, and ironing at the bottom. God knows how many things in between.”
Lawrence buckled his belt. “Let’s talk about the dogs,” he said.
“Well, you saw them this aft. There’s two. Gristle and Bone. And I’m not even sure, technically speaking, that they’re dogs. They may be very short velociraptors. All muscles and teeth. And from what I’ve seen, as deranged as they are dangerous. The other day, they tried to eat through one of the cabin doors. If your plan is to get into the Wickenses’ house to plant some bugs, you’re out of your mind.” The very thought was making my skin crawl, although that might have been the high neck on the shirt Lawrence had lent me.
“I mean, think about it,” I said. “If the dogs are outside, roaming about the property, you’ll never make it from the fence to the house, and if the dogs are in the kitchen there, where they eat and sleep, there’s no way you’re going to get inside the house.”
Lawrence said nothing.
“And,” I continued, “if it’s your plan to poison the dogs, which, even though I am not the sort of person who condones the murder of house pets, in this case I’d be willing to make an exception, that’s going to arouse their suspicions, don’t you think? Their dogs turn up dead, they’re going to be asking some questions, and I imagine the first people they’re going to ask are me and Dad, and now you, since you’ve made such a terrific first impression on them. And Timmy Wickens does not seem to be the kind of guy who asks questions nicely, even though he didn’t make a fuss about how you got the drop on his boys. Hello? You’re not saying a lot. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Am I coming through?”
Lawrence nodded. “Yes,” he said.
“Tell me you’re not going to poison the dogs.”
Slowly, and thoughtfully, Lawrence said, “I am not going to poison the dogs. If I have to, I’ll shoot them.” My eyebrows went up. “But that’s not my plan at the moment.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Lawrence led me into the main room and opened up his cases filled with surveillance gear. He pulled out a gadget I’d noticed earlier, at the mayor’s place, that looked similar to a gun, but the entire barrel was covered in a soft, black, spongy material.
“Shotgun microphone,” Lawrence said. “You point at something, off in the distance, it picks up those sounds. But I don’t know just how effective it will be. Whether they’ll have their windows open at all. Whether they’ll come outside.”
Then Lawrence picked up those button-like microphones I’d spotted earlier. Each one was about as thick as three pennies, one side smooth, the other dense mesh.
“These are bugs?” I asked.
“Yeah. New model, pretty effective, they advertise that they can withstand moisture, pick up sounds through walls, but the walls have to be pretty thin, in my experience.”
“So, what, we stick it to the outside of the house, hear what’s inside?”
Lawrence shook his head. “No, I don’t think it would be strong enough to work through an outside wall. But I’m wondering…”
“What?”
“If we got one or two of these into the kitchen…”
“Lawrence,” I said, exasperated. “Were you listening two seconds ago? That’s where the dogs stay. You’re not going to get into that kitchen with those dogs there. And besides, there are six people living in that house. Maybe, just maybe, if I got to know May Wickens better…No, even though she wants to get herself and her son away, that doesn’t mean she’d be willing to plant a bug on her own father, and it’s pretty hard to get near her anyway, her dad’s watching her pretty closely.”
“What if,” Lawrence said, “we could use the dogs?”
“Huh?” I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“The dogs are our biggest problem. Why not make them part of the solution?”
“I still don’t get you. What, we hook them up with a Dog Cam? Like on Letterman? Sure, why don’t you do that. I’m sure they’d hold still while you rigged them up.”
Lawrence shook his head. “Nothing that obvious. What if we got some of these little guys”—he held the button-sized mike up between his thumb and index finger—“into the dogs?”
I smiled. “You’re kidding me.”
“I’ve never tried something like this before, but what the hey, it might be worth a shot. We give the dogs something to eat, we shove the mikes into the food, hope they swallow them whole. Dogs go lie down in the kitchen, bugs in their tummy, we listen in.”
“You’re serious.”
Lawrence smiled. “I’ve never been more so.”
I couldn’t conceal my admiration. “You know, at this very moment, I find you very hot.”
Lawrence studied the mike in his hand. “I’ve told you before, you’re not my type.”
“How many of these are you going to need? How many do you have?”
“I’ve got a half dozen of them. We get some Alpo, slip it into bowls and set it over the fence, they’re bound to sniff it out. We hide the mikes in the dog food, we might get lucky.”
“You know,” I said, “I can get something those dogs like better than Alpo.”
It took me a while to find the fish guts burial ground in the dark, but when the trees opened up and my flashlight caught the cottage shutter on the forest floor and the pile of dirt with a shovel already sticking out of it, I whispered to Lawrence, “Welcome to my new job.”
We’d found two metal galvanized pails back in the open garage that was attached to the workshed, tucked in behind Dad’s souped-up lawn tractor. I flipped the shutter off the hole, and about two feet down a layer of dirt covered the last load I’d dumped in. I’d gone first to the can of fish guts down by the lake, but recalled that I had emptied it earlier in the day, and when I lifted off the lid I saw there was nothing in it but a single filleted perch. It had been, evidently, a lousy fishing day at Denny’s Cabins. Not hard to understand, given that we’d lost
one guest fleeing a bear, and Bob was probably too traumatized to do anything but sit in his cabin. Betty and Hank Wrigley just weren’t able to pick up the slack.
I yanked the shovel out of the dirt pile and drove it into the top layer of dirt. There was a soft, squooshy noise. I brought up a couple shovels full of dirt, then the main event.
“Oh my God,” Lawrence said as I displayed for him the array of guts and fins and scales and eyeballs on the shovel blade. “That is, without a doubt, just about the most horrible mess I have ever seen in my entire life, except for maybe Eyes Wide Shut. You see that movie?”
“Hold out the buckets.”
“Fuck no. I’ll set them down here. You fill ’em up. I think I’ll just wander over there and vomit.”
The guts slid off the shovel and into the first pail.
“You’re telling me these dogs love this stuff?”
“Like candy,” I said.
I worked the shovel into the hole again, got a load for the second bucket, and dumped it in.
“Alpo would’ve worked fine,” Lawrence said. “And it wouldn’t have stunk anywhere near as bad.”
“This stuff’ll slide right down their throats like Jell-O,” I said. “They won’t even have to chew it.”
“I really don’t feel well,” Lawrence said.
“Drop the mikes in.”
Lawrence tossed one into each bucket.
“They expensive?” I asked.
“Don’t even ask.”
“And you say they’re moisture resistant?”
“Supposed to be. Although I doubt the prototypes were ever subjected to this kind of test.”
“If it works, how long do you think they’ll be useful?” I asked.
In the moonlight, I could see Lawrence shrug. “How long’s it take for something to go through a dog?”
“Twelve hours maybe? I hate to tell you, but the Wickenses don’t strike me as stoop-and-scoop people. You’re not gonna be getting these back.”
“Your loss. I was going to give them to you.”
Once I had a couple of inches in guts in each pail, I shoved the shovel blade back into the dirt pile. Lawrence was being so squeamish, I didn’t bother to ask him to grab the pails.