“How’d you know Hill?” I asked.
Joe sniffed. “Kind of embarrassing. Sold me some vitamins a few years ago. Not vitamins exactly, but this blue-green algae stuff. Supposed to give you energy.”
“Whoa. I thought he was a totally different type, not some bogus supplement pusher.”
“He wasn’t very good at it. A good salesman is usually a little more fun. Makes you think you’ll have fun too if you buy whatever he’s selling.” Then he said, “Let’s just say that I didn’t buy his algae because of some great sales pitch.”
I told him I’d need a great sales pitch to buy algae. “He must’ve had a different job by now. He looked well-off.”
“Trust fund, probably,” Joe said. I can’t count how many times he and my dad have muttered about trust-fund kids who showed up to go to college and were able to lead charmed lives around here without having to work their butts off.
We left the scene. His big fat police car barreled down the grassy alley where me and my dad lived. In the rain there wouldn’t likely be anybody back there, rummaging through the garbage cans or curling up next to a shopping cart in a dirty sleeping bag.
He pulled up behind our place, which was not one to be appearing in House Beautiful anytime soon. It was a converted garage. Our door looked makeshift, like it had been hastily screwed onto the hinges after a home invasion, and there were mangy gray bushes growing around the windows, filled with cobwebs and feathers that we never bothered to clean out. Let me add that we were lucky to have it — after our last eviction, my dad made the whole thing happen by befriending Connie, the owner, a one-legged widow who’s the bookkeeper at the Pick ’n Save in Watsonville. This was the fifth or sixth rental we’d had since my mother died, which goes to show that we were either a pretty undesirable duo or that the world is cruel. Probably both.
Joe said he had to take my official witness statement, but I needed a shower and told him to wait. I went inside, turned on the wall heater and the lights, then ripped off my damp clothes in the bathroom and stood under the hot water in the narrow stall, shivering. Coming off the back of my arm, a streak of blood went down the drain.
Eventually I waved Joe in, and he made me describe what I’d seen while he took notes. My meeting with Ronald Hill was off the record. Joe, who’s been a detective for almost ten years, regular cop for ten before, didn’t want to raise eyebrows in the department for sending work to me. Anyway, he always says it’s the spirit of the law that counts, not the letter of it.
“You’re worried about something, aren’t you?” Joe said.
“Yeah, I guess. Something seems strange. Like, sure, it could be a coincidence that this paranoid guy gets run over right after he’d decided to take action on his paranoia, but maybe not.”
He looked at me, I’d like to think, with a small bit of respect. “Anything solid to base that on? Because this looks strictly like an accident at this point.”
“I don’t have anything yet. Maybe it’s nothing,” I told him.
“Let me know if anything strikes you. I’ll call your dad for you, let him know what happened,” Joe said, getting up to go.
“No, don’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want him driving upset.”
“You sure? You gonna be okay here till he gets home?”
“I’m gonna be okay. Listen, Joe, could you run a check on Kyle Wilkins?”
“The boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“Seriously? You think it matters?”
“It’s what Hill came to talk to me about, in the last minutes of his life. So yeah, I think it matters.”
“Okay, okay,” Joe said. “Let me see what I can do.”
After he left, I sat for a while. Didn’t move a muscle. I was lost in a bunch of random, jumping thoughts and didn’t feel very good, so I did what I usually do at night before my dad gets home: I poured about half a cup of vodka into a glass of orange juice, drank that down, felt the heat move through my shoulders and neck, started to relax a little. And then I started to sob.
I guess I was sobbing about seeing a person get run over, but there was self-pity, no denying it. My dad used to be a long-distance truck driver before my mom died, and now he’s a short-distance truck driver so he can be around. The work’s hard, delivering boxes and pallets of stuff, climbing in and out, clattering down on the lift gate with his dolly, up and down stairs. He has big callouses on his hands from clutching the wheel and I’m always seeing hemorrhoid ointment boxes in the trash. He has one of those antigravity machines in the corner that he’ll get on first thing when he gets home to stretch out his back before having a huge vodka and tonic and sitting in front of the TV. He takes about ten ibuprofen a day. As long as I read books at home, he could care less how I do in school; he just wants me to grow up to be a cynic.
It must have been around nine before he called to let me know how messed up his day had been, and that he wouldn’t be coming home because of a five a.m. start the next day. No big deal. I never complain because it’s nothing as bad for me as it is for him.
Tonight I wanted to tell him, By the way, today I saw a guy get run over and killed. But I couldn’t, because then he’d for sure kill himself driving home to be with me.
Instead, I made another drink and fell onto my mattress in the corner. All I could think of was poor Teddy hearing the news about his father. Now that Ronald Hill was a dead blue-green algae salesman, he didn’t seem so fancy. Little did he know while we were sitting there talking that he was about to be dead. There he was, watching me guzzle down my yogurt, worrying about some guy showing his kid and his ex a good time and feeling all left out and stuff. Two minutes later, dead.
No more worries. No more feeling left out.
Case closed.
Just after two a.m., I got up from the floor, ran to the bathroom, and barfed. It happens. I washed my face with cold water, rinsed out my mouth, brushed my hair, and thought, There’s no way I’m going to sleep tonight, so why even try? The rain had stopped. I’m not sure what was driving me to get dressed and go outside and pull out my bike and take off down the alley and through the wet streets, except maybe the fifty-dollar bill that was still stuffed in my pocket.
Compensation is a strange thing. I’ve seen it firsthand, how in the absence of someone, others will start filling in to make up for what’s lost. I saw my dad change after my mom was gone. I saw him try to learn how to cook and even start filling in forms from my school with his big clumsy hands. I saw him start to worry about me in a way he never used to when my mom was around to worry. Now that Ronald Hill was no longer around to worry about Teddy, I was starting to.
I had the address Hill had given me of Teddy’s place — where, these days, Kyle Wilkins was also living. The sky was clear and bright, stars blazing, the streets extra quiet. It could give a person a superior feeling to be out on a night like this, the world to yourself while everybody else is snoring away. My mood picked up, and I cycled to Bay, turned at King, then climbed the steep hills to Teddy’s neighborhood, where, just a few years ago, street repair workers found an Indian burial ground. Maybe that’s why I’ve always had the feeling the neighborhood’s cursed. The bluff is crowded with ranch-style houses, roads to nowhere, cul-de-sacs. It’s the kind of neighborhood where people keep their dirty laundry inside, and there’s plenty of it. I’ve helped Joe uncover a few scary “family” men, suicides, ODs, and one time, a psycho housewife who was poisoning cats.