"Understanding isn't a word I'd associate with Crummler. Talking, either, really. Prattling is more like it. He babbled and jabbered gibberish non-stop before we transferred him. Gave the guy in the cell next to him the crawling heebie jeebies, this drunk British silverware rep from Briscane County we nabbed on the turnpike doing triple digits. You should have heard Crummler carrying on about ten thousand leagues of evil swamps in dark orders of ocher nights, fighting the dwindling obsidian empires. Dragons and knights kissing and fighting."
"I have heard him. I like listening to it. He mixes in fragments of the truth, sometimes. Bits and pieces."
"Maybe. Sometimes. But can you tell the differences?”
“On occasion something sings out."
"If that's singing, it must be a Wagnerian opera. Along the lines of 'Twilight of the Gods.'”
It impressed me that he knew Wagner, and I could hear a soft, angry rattle in his throat because he knew I was impressed. Listening to that rattle coming from him made my scalp prickle. It became startlingly clear to me that one of these days Lowell would probably beat the shit out of me over something like this.
"Do you think he did it?" I asked.
"I'm not convinced he didn't," Lowell said. "You're not either. Either way, something else is going on. Crummler may have had cause, but that will never come out."
The guilt had been hanging on my back since I'd first raised my hand to Crummler. I had to make a choice.
There are times when the hedging is over and you must make a decision despite confusion. You've seen blood and sharpness coming up at your face, and you react without thought, and the rest follows the way it must, with the shadows already cast.
If I'd handled it differently, if I hadn't struck first but in-stead danced with Crummler for a little while, calming and reassuring him, I might know who was dead and who had committed murder. My fear had forced my hand.
I had to put my faith back in him. I couldn't effectively work to free him if I didn't wholeheartedly believe he was innocent.
"Crummler didn't do it," I said.
"You just keep telling yourself that, Jonny Kendrick."
And that was it; there wasn't a sound on the other end but I could hear Lowell shut down completely and pull away. He hadn't gone this far out for no reason. He knew how it looked to the outside eye, and how it would play out in front of a judge and jury. Crummler would be buried in court, incapable of even giving his own testimony. Nick Crummler had been right, the system just couldn't wait to get a hold of a man like his brother.
"By the way," Lowell said. "We got a complaint on you.”
“On me? From who?"
"Alice Conway."
I guessed that Brian Frost put her up to it, and wondered what that meant.
I pulled up in front of Devington's house.
Watched her.
"Yeah, well, you're about to get another one."
Some folks, when they retire, take up a perch in their front windows and wait with the stony patience of the Sphinx for something to happen. Mrs. Devington was such a person, set like a guardian over a king's crypt, with only her diligent, scornful face visible through the parted velour drapes. She spotted me and her eyes filled with expectation and excitement. She drew back and her bottom lip began to quiver.
She was already freaking me out, this lady.
The drapes folded shut and she ran through the house shouting for Arnie. I waited on the front lawn and glanced around at the overgrown bushes and untrimmed trees, the dilapidated garage that looked like it would fall over any second. A rusted tool shed with a corrugated metal door appeared eager to slice a finger off anyone stupid enough to try to get inside. There were a lot of shingles scattered across the grass, and a sizable amount of mold and ivy crept up the brick and crumbling gingerbread trim.
Last I'd heard, Arnie had gotten married and relocated to the Midwest for a couple of years, then returned after a bad divorce and moved back into his parents' house just before his father died. The old man had apparently taken with him whatever love for the place there'd ever been. Arnie's disdain for his home was evident. Perhaps its poor condition proved a testament to his laziness, or merely confirmed his self-disdain.
Mrs. Devington burst from the door in such a flurry of motion that I nearly dove for cover.
Arnie came charging out on her heels and pleaded with her for a minute, trying to get a hold of a skirt the way a five-year-old would. He'd gone even further to fat than I'd thought, with male pattern baldness leaving him with only a horseshoe of fluff that he let grow too long so he could feel something dangling down the back of his neck. "Ma, go on inside, I'll handle this. C'mon, go on back inside."
Rounding in at about two-eighty, I thought Arnie's mother could thrash me and Arnie both without breaking a sweat. If she were a thin woman, one might've noticed the rabbit teeth first, but with so much ballast to her and a nose like a dollop of wet clay, she was more like an enraged wild boar. I wished Oscar Kinion were here with one of his high caliber rifles.
"You!" she shrieked, pointing at me. "You always been trouble from the first, now get off our land!"
She said "land" like we were out on the Ponderosa and I was trying to rustle a hundred head of cattle, instead of standing on a quarter-acre of crabgrass covered with wind-blown trash and uncleared brush.
"Sure," I said. "Right after your son and I discuss the finer points of civil conduct."
"What's that? What'd you say?" She made a face I don't think I've ever seen on a human being before, and doubted I'd ever see again. A few beads of cold sweat rolled down my back. "You, always thinking you're so superior to everyone else."
Arnie kept trying to get a grip on the situation, alternately scowling at me and working hard to calm his mother. He put his hands on her broad shoulders and tried to shove her back up on the porch. She wobbled a bit, and the meat under her beefy arms swung back and forth. Eventually she decided to just stand and glare, and my old football teammate Arnie Devington stomped on over.
Devington's younger sister, Kristin, pushed through the screen door and pressed past their mother. I'd dated her a couple of times in high school, and had even taken her to her junior prom. Margaret Gallagher, Katie's aunt who'd owned the flower shop before her, had let me go a few bucks on the corsage and boutonniere.
Though Kristin and I had never really connected I'd always enjoyed her company. There was something about her I found solemn and intriguing, even after that final game when her whole clan had come after me like crazy hill folk. She'd badmouthed me a little for a couple of years but eventually let it drop. I knew she did it more out of some loyalty to her family than any real deep-seated hostility on her part.
She watched us both closely now and I could see the way she worried her bottom lip. She worked the makeup counter at McGreary's discount store and used an attractive vermilion on her mouth. She'd missed out on nearly all her mother's physical characteristics, but I could see some of the same fleshiness in her face, the softening of her chin. On her it almost looked good, though, the gentle humanity rising in her eyes as she watched me and Arnie on the lawn, each of us harboring resentments that went back to a decade-old football game, knowing something was about to end completely and something else might get kick-started back into motion. She'd root for him, I thought, but I had no real trouble with it.
He said, "Get the hell off my property, you shit heel."
"I accept your offer of the olive branch."
"The hell you talking about, you bastard?"
"Arnie," I said. "You can growl and glower at me all you like, I really don't mind. But if you bother my girl again we will no longer be able to remain amicable."
My peripheral vision filled with the wide shadow of his mother stalking closer again.