بخش 03 - فصل 15

15

When Brady gets home after several hours of aimless cruising, it’s late and there’s a note on the back door: Where you been, honeyboy? There’s homemade lasagna in the oven. He only has to look at the unsteady, downslanting script to know she was seriously loaded when she wrote it. He untacks the note and lets himself in.

Usually he checks on her first thing, but he smells smoke and hustles to the kitchen, where a blue haze hangs in the air. Thank God the smoke detector in here is dead (he keeps meaning to replace it and keeps forgetting, too many other fish to fry). Thanks are also due for the powerful stove fan, which has sucked up just enough smoke

to keep the rest of the detectors from going off, although they soon will if he can’t air the place out. The oven is set at three-fifty. He turns it off. He opens the windows over the sink, then the back door. There’s a floor fan in the utility closet where they keep the cleaning supplies. He sets it up facing the runaway stove, and turns it on at the highest

setting. With that done he finally goes into the living room and checks on his mother. She’s crashed out on the couch, wearing a housedress that’s open up top and rucked to her thighs below, snoring so loudly and steadily she sounds like an idling chainsaw. He averts his eyes and goes back into the

kitchen, muttering fuck-fuckfuck-fuck under his breath. He sits at the table with his head bent, his palms cupping his temples, and his fingers plunged deep into his hair. Why is it that when things go wrong, they have to keep on going wrong? He finds himself thinking of the Morton Salt motto: “When it rains it pours.”

After five minutes of airingout, he risks opening the oven. As he regards the black and smoking lump within, any faint hunger pangs he might have felt when he got home pass away. Washing will not clean that pan; an hour of scouring and a whole box of Brillo pads will not clean that pan; an industrial laser probably wouldn’t clean that

pan. That pan is a gone goose. It’s only luck that he didn’t get home to find the fucking fire department here and his mother offering them vodka collinses. He shuts the oven–he doesn’t want to look at that nuclear meltdown–and goes back to look at his mother instead. Even as his eyes are running up and down her bare

legs, he’s thinking, It would be better if she did die. Better for her and better for me. He goes downstairs, using his voice commands to turn on the lights and his bank of computers. He goes to Number Three, centers the cursor on the Blue Umbrella icon . . . and hesitates. Not because he’s afraid there won’t be a message from the fat ex-

cop but because he’s afraid there will be. If so, it won’t be anything he wants to read. Not the way things are going. His head is fucked up already, so why fuck it up more? Except there might be an answer to what the cop was doing at the Lake Avenue condo. Has he been questioning Olivia Trelawney’s

sister? Probably. At sixty-two, he’s surely not boffing her. Brady clicks the mouse, and sure enough: kermitfrog19 wants to chat with you! Do you want to chat with kermitfrog19? YN Brady settles the cursor on N and circles the curved back

of his mouse with the pad of his index finger. Daring himself to push it and end this thing right here and right now. It’s obvious he won’t be able to nudge the fat ex-cop into suicide the way he did Mrs. Trelawney, so why not? Isn’t that the smart thing? But he has to know. More importantly, the DetRet doesn’t get to win.

He moves the cursor to Y, clicks, and the message–quite a long one this time–flashes onto the screen. If it isn’t my falseconfessing friend again. I shouldn’t even respond, guys like you are a dime a dozen, but as you point out, I’m retired and even talking to a nut is better than Dr. Phil and all those late-night infomercials. One more 30-

minute OxiClean ad and I’ll be as crazy as you are, HAHAHA. Also, I owe you thanks for introducing me to this site, which I otherwise would not have found. I have already made 3 new (and non-crazy) friends. One is a lady with a delightfully dirty mouth!!! So OK, my “friend,” let me clue you in. First, anyone who watches CSI could figure out that the Mercedes Killer was wearing a hairnet and

used bleach on the clown mask. I mean, DUH. Second, if you were really the guy who stole Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes, you would have mentioned the valet key. That’s something you couldn’t have figured out from watching CSI. So, at the risk of repeating myself, DUH. Third (I hope you’re taking notes), I got a call from my old partner today.

He caught a bad guy, one who specializes in TRUE confessions. Check the news, my friend, and then guess what else this guy’s going to confess to in the next week or so. Have a nice night and BTW, why don’t you go bother someone else with your fantasies? Brady vaguely remembers some cartoon character–

maybe it was Foghorn Leghorn, the big rooster with the southern accent–who would get so mad first his neck and then his head would turn into a thermometer with the temperature going up and up from BAKE to BROIL to NUKE. Brady can almost feel that happening to him as he reads this arrogant, insulting, infuriating post.

Valet key? Valet key? “What are you talking about?” he says, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a growl. “What the fuck are you talking about?” He gets up and strides around in an unsteady circle on legs like stilts, yanking at his hair so hard his eyes water. His mother is forgotten. The

blackened lasagna is forgotten. Everything is forgotten except for this hateful post. He has even had the nerve to put in a smiley-face! A smiley-face! Brady kicks his chair, hurting his toes and sending it rolling all the way across the room, where it bangs the wall. Then he turns and runs back to his Number Three computer,

hunching over it like a vulture.

His first impulse is to reply

immediately, to call the

fucking cop a liar, an idiot

with fat-induced early-onset

Alzheimer’s, an anal ranger

who sucks his nigger yardboy’s

cock. Then some semblance of

rationality–fragile

and

wavering–reasserts itself. He

retrieves his chair and goes to

the city paper’s website. He

doesn’t even have to click on BREAKING NEWS in order to see what Hodges has been raving about; it’s right there on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. Brady follows local crime news assiduously, and knows both Donald Davis’s name and his handsomely chiseled features. He knows the cops have been chasing Davis for the

murder of his wife, and Brady has no doubt the man did it. Now the idiot has confessed, but not just to her murder. According to the newspaper story, Davis has also confessed to the rape-murders of five more women. In short, he’s claiming to be Turnpike Joe. At first Brady is unable to connect this with the fat excop’s hectoring message. Then

it comes to him in a baleful burst of inspiration: while he’s in a breast-baring mood, Donnie Davis also means to confess to the City Center Massacre. May have done so already. Brady whirls around like a dervish–once, twice, three times. His head is splitting. His pulse is thudding in his chest, his neck, his temples.

He can even feel it in his gums and tongue. Did Davis say something about a valet key? Is that what brought this on? “There was no valet key,” Brady says . . . only how can he be sure of that? What if there was? And if there was . . . if they hang this on Donald Davis and snatch away Brady

Hartsfield’s great triumph . . . after the risks he took . . . He can no longer hold back. He sits down at his Number Three again and writes a message to kermitfrog19. Just a short one, but his hands are shaking so badly it takes him almost five minutes. He sends it as soon as he’s done, without bothering to read it over.

YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT YOU ASSHOLE. OK the key wasn’t in the ignition but it was no VALET KEY. It was a spare in the glove complartment and how I uynlocked the car IS FOR YOU TO FIGURE OUT FUCKFACE. Donald Davis did not do this crime. I repeat, DONALD DAVIUS DID NOT DO THIS CRIME. If you tell people he did I will kill you altho it wouldn’tr be killing much as washed

up as you are. Signed, The REAL Mercedes Killer PS: Your mother was a whore, she took it up the ass & licked cum out of gutters. Brady shuts off his computer and goes upstairs, leaving his mother to snore on the couch instead of helping her to bed. He takes three

aspirin, adds a fourth, and then lies in his own bed, wide-eyed and shaking, until the first streaks of dawn come up in the east. At last he drops off for two hours, sleep that is thin and dream-haunted and unrestful.