20
Three miles away, at 49 Elm Street in Northfield, Brady Hartsfield can’t sleep. His head thumps. He thinks: Frankie. My brother, who should have died when he choked on that apple slice. Life would have been so much simpler if things had happened that way.
He thinks of his mother, who sometimes forgets her nightgown and sleeps raw.
Most of all, he thinks of the fat ex-cop.
At last he gets up and leaves his bedroom, pausing for a moment outside his mother’s door, listening to her snore. The most unerotic sound in the universe, he tells himself, but still he pauses. Then he goes downstairs, opens the basement door, and closes it behind him. He stands in the dark and says, “Control.” But his voice is too hoarse and the dark remains. He clears his throat and tries again. “Control!”
The lights come on. Chaos lights up his computers and darkness stops the seven-screen countdown. He sits in front of his Number Three. Among the litter of icons is a small blue umbrella. He clicks on it, unaware that he’s been holding his breath until he lets it out in a long harsh gasp.
kermitfrog19 wants to chat with you!
Do you want to chat with kermitfrog19?
Y N
Brady hits Y and leans forward. His eager expression remains for a moment before puzzlement seeps in. Then, as he reads the short message over and over, puzzlement becomes first anger and then naked fury.
Seen a lot of false confessions in my time, but this one’s a dilly.
I’m retired but not stupid.
Withheld evidence proves you are not the Mercedes Killer.
F*ck off, a*shole.
Brady feels an almost insurmountable urge to slam his fist through the screen but restrains it. He sits in his chair, trembling all over. His eyes are wide and unbelieving. A minute passes. Two. Three.
Pretty soon I’ll get up, he thinks. Get up and go back to bed.
Only what good will that do? He won’t be able to sleep.
“You fat f*ck,” he whispers, unaware that hot tears have begun to spill from his eyes. “You fat stupid useless f*ck. It was me! It was me! It was me!”
Withheld evidence proves.
That is impossible.
He seizes on the necessity of hurting the fat ex-cop, and with the idea the ability to think returns. How should he do that? He considers the question for nearly half an hour, trying on and rejecting several scenarios. The answer, when it comes, is elegantly simple. The fat ex-cop’s friend—his only friend, so far as Brady has been able to ascertain—is a nigger kid with a white name. And what does the nigger kid love? What does his whole family love? The Irish setter, of course. Odell.
Brady recalls his earlier fantasy about poisoning a few gallons of Mr. Tastey’s finest, and starts laughing. He goes on the Internet and begins doing research.
My due diligence, he thinks, and smiles.
At some point he realizes his headache is gone.
POISON BAIT
1
Brady Hartsfield doesn’t need long to figure out how he’s going to poison Jerome Robinson’s canine pal, Odell. It helps that Brady is also Ralph Jones, a fictional fellow with just enough bona fides—plus a low-limit Visa card—to order things from places like Amazon and eBay. Most people don’t realize how easy it is to whomp up an Internet-friendly false identity. You just have to pay the bills. If you don’t, things can come unraveled in a hurry.
As Ralph Jones he orders a two-pound can of Gopher-Go and gives Ralphie’s mail drop address, the Speedy Postal not far from Discount Electronix.
The active ingredient in Gopher-Go is strychnine. Brady looks up the symptoms of strychnine poisoning on the Net and is delighted to find that Odell will have a tough time of it. Twenty minutes or so after ingestion, muscle spasms start in the neck and head. They quickly spread to the rest of the body. The mouth stretches in a grin (at least in humans; Brady doesn’t know about dogs). There may be vomiting, but by then too much of the poison has been absorbed and it’s too late. Convulsions set in and get worse until the backbone turns into a hard and constant arch. Sometimes the spine actually snaps. When death comes—as a relief, Brady is sure—it’s as a result of asphyxiation. The neural pathways tasked with running air to the lungs from the outside world just give up.
Brady can hardly wait.
At least it won’t be a long wait, he tells himself as he shuts off his seven computers and climbs the stairs. The stuff should be waiting for him next week. The best way to get it into the dog, he thinks, would be in a ball of nice juicy hamburger. All dogs like hamburger, and Brady knows exactly how he’s going to deliver Odell’s treat.
Barbara Robinson, Jerome’s little sister, has a friend named Hilda. The two girls like to visit Zoney’s GoMart, the convenience store a couple of blocks from the Robinson house. They say it’s because they like the grape Icees, but what they really like is hanging out with their other little friends. They sit on the low stone wall at the back of the store’s four-car parking lot, half a dozen chickadees gossiping and giggling and trading treats. Brady has seen them often when he’s driving the Mr. Tastey truck. He waves to them and they wave back.
Everybody likes the ice cream man.
Mrs. Robinson allows Barbara to make these trips once or twice a week (Zoney’s isn’t a drug hangout, a thing she has probably investigated for herself), but she has put conditions on her approval that Brady has had no trouble deducing. Barbara can never go alone; she always must be back in an hour; she and her friend must always take Odell. No dogs are allowed in the GoMart, so Barbara tethers him to the doorhandle of the outside restroom while she and Hilda go inside to get their grape-flavored ice.
That’s when Brady—driving his personal car, a nondescript Subaru—will toss Odell the lethal burger-ball. The dog is big; he may last twenty-four hours. Brady hopes so. Grief has a transitive power which is nicely expressed by the axiom shit rolls downhill. The more pain Odell feels, the more pain the nigger girl and her big brother will feel. Jerome will pass his grief on to the fat ex-cop, aka Kermit William Hodges, and the fat ex-cop will understand the dog’s death is his fault, payback for sending Brady that infuriating and disrespectful message. When Odell dies, the fat ex-cop will know—
Halfway up to the second floor, listening to his mother snoring, Brady stops, eyes wide with dawning realization.
The fat ex-cop will know.
And that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Because actions have consequences. It’s the reason why Brady might daydream about poisoning a load of the ice cream he sells the kiddies, but wouldn’t actually do such a thing. Not as long as he wants to keep flying under the radar, that is, and for now he does.
So far Hodges hasn’t gone to his pals in the police department with the letter Brady sent. At first Brady believed it was because Hodges wanted to keep it between the two of them, maybe take a shot at tracking down the Mercedes Killer himself and getting a little post-retirement glory, but now he knows better. Why would the f*cking Det-Ret want to track him down when he thinks Brady’s nothing but a crank?
Brady can’t understand how Hodges could come to that conclusion when he, Brady, knew about the bleach and the hairnet, details never released to the press, but somehow he has. If Brady poisons Odell, Hodges will call in his police pals. Starting with his old partner, Huntley.
Worse, it may give the man Brady hoped to goad into suicide a new reason to live, defeating the whole purpose of the artfully composed letter. That would be completely unfair. Pushing the Trelawney bitch over the edge had been the greatest thrill of his life, far greater (for reasons he doesn’t understand, or care to) than killing all those people with her car, and he wanted to do it again. To get the chief investigator in the case to kill himself—what a triumph that would be!
Brady is standing halfway up the stairs, thinking hard.
The fat bastard still might do it, he tells himself. Killing the dog might be the final push he needs.
Only he doesn’t really buy this, and his head gives a warning throb.
He feels a sudden urge to rush back down to the basement, go on the Blue Umbrella, and demand that the fat ex-cop tell him what bullshit “withheld evidence” he’s talking about so he, Brady, can knock it down. But to do that would be a bad mistake. It would look needy, maybe even desperate.
Withheld evidence.
F*ck off, a*shole.
But I did it! I risked my freedom, I risked my life, and I did it! You can’t take away the credit! It’s not fair!
His head throbs again.
You stupid cocksucker, he thinks. One way or the other, you’re going to pay, but not until after the dog dies. Maybe your nigger friend will die, too. Maybe that whole nigger family will die. And after them, maybe a whole lot of other people. Enough to make what happened at City Center look like a picnic.
He goes up to his room and lies down on his bed in his underwear. His head is banging again, his arms are trembling (it’s as if he has ingested strychnine). He’ll lie here in agony until morning, unless—
He gets up and goes back down the hall. He stands outside his mother’s open door for almost four minutes, then gives up and goes inside. He gets into bed with her and his headache begins to recede almost at once. Maybe it’s the warmth. Maybe it’s the smell of her—shampoo, body lotion, booze. Probably it’s both.
She turns over. Her eyes are wide in the dark. “Oh, honeyboy. Are you having one of those nights?”
“Yes.” He feels the warmth of tears in his eyes.
“Little Witch?”
“Big Witch this time.”
“Want me to help you?” She already knows the answer; it’s throbbing against her stomach. “You do so much for me,” she says tenderly. “Let me do this for you.”
He closes his eyes. The smell of the booze on her breath is very strong. He doesn’t mind, although ordinarily he hates it. “Okay.”
She takes care of him swiftly and expertly. It doesn’t take long. It never does.
“There,” she says. “Go to sleep now, honeyboy.”
He does, almost at once.
When he wakes in the early morning light she’s snoring again, a lock of hair spit-stuck to the corner of her mouth. He gets out of bed and goes back to his own room. His mind is clear. The strychnine-laced gopher poison is on its way. When it arrives, he’ll poison the dog, and damn the consequences. God damn the consequences. As for those suburban niggers with the white-people names? They don’t matter. The fat ex-cop goes next, after he’s had a chance to fully experience Jerome Robinson’s pain and Barbara Robinson’s sorrow, and who cares if it’s suicide? The important thing is that he go. And after that . . .
“Something big,” he says as he pulls on a pair of jeans and a plain white tee. “A blaze of glory.” Just what the blaze will be he doesn’t know yet, but that’s okay. He has time, and he needs to do something first. He needs to demolish Hodges’s so-called “withheld evidence” and convince him that he, Brady, is indeed the Mercedes Killer, the monster Hodges failed to catch. He needs to rub it in until it hurts. He also needs it because if Hodges believes in this bogus “withheld evidence,” the other cops—the real cops—must believe it, too. That is unacceptable. He needs . . .
“Credibility!” Brady exclaims to the empty kitchen. “I need credibility!”
He sets about making breakfast: bacon and eggs. The smell may waft upstairs to Ma and tempt her. If not, no big deal. He’ll eat her share. He’s pretty hungry.
2
This time it works, although when Deborah Ann appears, she’s still belting her robe and barely awake. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her cheeks are pale, and her hair flies out every whichway. She no longer suffers hangovers, exactly, her brain and body have gotten too used to the booze for that, but she spends her mornings in a state of soft focus, watching game shows and popping Tums. Around two in the afternoon, when the world starts to sharpen up for her, she pours the day’s first drink.
If she remembers what happened last night, she doesn’t mention it. But then, she never does. Neither of them do.
We never talk about Frankie, either, Brady thinks. And if we did, what would we say? Gosh, too bad about that fall he took?
“Smells good,” she says. “Some for me?”
“All you want. Coffee?”
“Please. Lots of sugar.” She sits down at the table and stares at the television on the counter. It isn’t on, but she stares at it anyway. For all Brady knows, maybe she thinks it is on.
“You’re not wearing your uniform,” she says—meaning the blue button-up shirt with DISCOUNT ELECTRONIX on the pocket. He has three hanging in his closet. He irons them himself. Like vacuuming the floors and washing their clothes, ironing isn’t in Ma’s repertoire.
“Don’t need to go in until ten,” he says, and as if the words are a magic incantation, his phone wakes up and starts buzzing across the kitchen counter. He catches it just before it can fall off onto the floor.
“Don’t answer it, honeyboy. Pretend we went out for breakfast.”
It’s tempting, but Brady is as incapable of letting a phone ring as he is of giving up his muddled and ever-changing plans for some grand act of destruction. He looks at the caller ID and isn’t surprised to see TONES in the window. Anthony “Tones” Frobisher, the grand high panjandrum of Discount Electronix (Birch Hill Mall branch).
He picks up the phone and says, “It’s my late day, Tones.”
“I know, but I need you to make a service call. I really, really do.” Tones can’t make Brady take a call on his late day, hence the wheedling tone. “Plus it’s Mrs. Rollins, and you know she tips.”
Of course she does, she lives in Sugar Heights. The Cyber Patrol makes lots of service calls in Sugar Heights, and one of their customers—one of Brady’s customers—was the late Olivia Trelawney. He was in her house twice on calls after he began conversing with her beneath Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, and what a kick that was. Seeing how much weight she’d lost. Seeing how her hands had started to tremble. Also, having access to her computer had opened all sorts of possibilities.
“I don’t know, Tones . . .” But of course he’ll go, and not only because Mrs. Rollins tips. It’s fun to go rolling past 729 Lilac Drive, thinking: I’m responsible for those closed gates. All I had to do to give her the final push was add one little program to her Mac.
Computers are wonderful.
“Listen, Brady, if you take this call, you don’t have to work the store at all today, how’s that? Just return the Beetle and then hang out wherever until it’s time to fire up your stupid ice cream wagon.”
“What about Freddi? Why don’t you send her?” Flat-out teasing now. If Tones could have sent Freddi, she’d already be on her way.
“Called in sick. Says she got her period and it’s killing her. Of course it’s f*cking bullshit. I know it, she knows it, and she knows I know it, but she’ll put in a sexual harassment claim if I call her on it. She knows I know that, too.”
Ma sees Brady smiling, and smiles back. She raises a hand, closes it, and turns it back and forth. Twist his balls, honeyboy. Brady’s smile widens into a grin. Ma may be a drunk, she may only cook once or twice a week, she can be as annoying as shit, but sometimes she can read him like a book.
“All right,” Brady says. “How about I take my own car?”
“You know I can’t give you a mileage allowance for your personal vehicle,” Tones says.
“Also, it’s company policy,” Brady says. “Right?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
Schyn Ltd., DE’s German parent company, believes the Cyber Patrol VWs are good advertising. Freddi Linklatter says that anyone who wants a guy driving a snot-green Beetle to fix his computer is insane, and on this point Brady agrees with her. Still, there must be a lot of insane people out there, because they never lack for service calls.
Although few tip as well as Paula Rollins.
“Okay,” Brady says, “but you owe me one.”
“Thanks, buddy.”
Brady kills the connection without bothering to say You’re not my buddy, and we both know it.