“You’ve been so helpful,” she said to me and Lawrence, “that I thought you should have the opportunity to enjoy this. But I don’t know the first thing about this machine. Can you replay the calls?”
“Of course,” Lawrence said, and proceeded to work his magic with the device he’d hooked up to the Hollands’ phone by attaching it to a laptop. “This shows you’ve had three calls since we were here.”
“It’s the last one. The first was from the town clerk, the second a call from my daughter in Argentina. Play the third one.”
“Okay,” Lawrence said. “Here we go.” Everything was digital, with no actual tape to rewind, but Lawrence was still hitting Rewind and Play buttons on the laptop screen with his mouse.
Alice Holland: Hello?
Man: Mayor Holland?
Alice: Yes, this is the mayor.
Man: You haven’t got much time left to do the right thing. The parade’s only a few hours away.
Alice: Who is this?
Man: This is the voice of reason, bitch. Are you going to get those perverts out of the parade or not?
Alice: What if I don’t? What do you propose to do?
Lawrence nodded approvingly at the way Alice had kept her caller talking.
Man: Something awful might happen to you. Is that what you want? All so a bunch of queers can walk in the parade?
Alice: You know what? I’ll bet even the lesbians in that parade have more balls than a guy who phones people up anonymously and threatens them. Have you looked in your shorts lately? Is there anything down there at all?
Man: You bitch! How dare you—
Voice: (from afar) Hi, Mr. Henry!
Man: Shit! (hangs up)
Lawrence looked at me and I smiled. Lawrence smiled. Alice Holland smiled. Only her husband George still looked angry.
“Fuck me,” said Lawrence.
I said, “Now, is this where you use your years of police training and honing your deductive skills to try to figure out who the caller is?”
Now Alice was laughing, and Lawrence was starting to laugh. Even George was starting to loosen up, unclenching his fists.
The voice in the background had sounded like a teenage girl. Alice, imitating the voice, said, “Hi, Mr. Henry!”
Now I was starting to laugh, and pretty soon, all of us were clutching our stomachs, clutching the kitchen counter to keep from collapsing.
“Oh God,” said Alice. “This is too much.”
“I think I’ve figured it out,” Lawrence said, deadpan. “But I have to hear it one more time to be sure.”
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.”