A Sudden Silence (9 page)

The narrow path up the bluff was bright with geraniums and purple ice plant. I ran till my heart hurt. The parking lot was filled with cars now. I stopped suddenly when I saw him, leaning against the rear brick wall, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing the black nylon jacket, black pants, and white tennis shoes. On duty in the parking lot. No wonder he hadn't been at the surfing contest! He'd been working.

He spotted me when I was about fifty feet away and heading toward him. Immediately he dropped the cigarette and began running.

"Hold it right there," I yelled, but he cut around me and galloped down the path with big, hungry strides. He ran diagonally across the grass.

The volleyball game had stopped. I sensed the sudden interest as I raced after him, still yelling. A girl was making giant soap bubbles with some kind of wire loop thing. I knocked over her bucket of detergent, saw for a second her startled, angry face.

He was in the soft sand now, weaving between the sunbathers, bumbling through a little kid's sand castle, heading on down to where the tall apartment buildings front the beach. I wasn't gaining on him. The wooden steps here are private and most of them have a gate. He'd spotted an open one and he was racing up the steps, three at a time. He'd be out on the sidewalk then, in the crowds. He could dodge into one of the shops and be gone and I'd have lost him again. Unless he went back to the Windmill. He wouldn't, though; he'd be gone. A dog came barking excitedly at my heels, slowing me more. I was at the bottom step; he was halfway up.

If the woman hadn't decided at that second to come out of her apartment and start down to soak up a few rays I'd have lost him for sure.

She was a big woman in a yellow sundress and she carried a beach chair and a fringed umbrella. She blocked the steps all the way across and when he tried to push past her there wasn't an inch to spare unless she chose to turn sideways for him. She didn't. "What's going on here?" she demanded. "These steps are private. Are you a tenant?"

The guy tried again to shove her aside, but it was like pushing past Mount Rushmore. He turned, looked at me, at the few steps that divided us, then leaped over the stair railing into the bank of ice plant and sand below. I heard the thud as he landed one half second before I jumped on top of him. We lay there, the wind knocked out of both of us. It felt as if the struggle had been knocked out of him, too.

Above us the woman hung over the wooden bar. "I've a good mind to go back to my apartment and call the police. We don't need this kind of hooliganism."

"It's all right," I called. "Nothing to worry about."

I got the guy's arm twisted behind him as he lay on his stomach. He didn't resist.

She came down the rest of the steps, muttering as she struggled through the soft sand. I moved then so I was straddling his back, still keeping my tight grip on his forearm. No way was I going to lose him now.

"It's not a bad idea to call the police," I said, "unless you'd rather talk to me."

"I'll talk to you," he said. "And you can let go of me. I'm not going anyplace. Sooner or later I knew you were going to find me."

I still held him, though, as he staggered up, wriggling his arm and shoulder, stomping his right foot on the sand. There was something beaten about him. But I kept alert anyway.

"You killed my brother, didn't you?" Unbelievable how even and reasonable my voice was. I could have been talking about the weather.

"I don't know." His breath smelled foul. Old, stale beer and tobacco.

"You don't
know?
" I dragged him across to the bottorn step and pushed him down. "Sit! How can you not
know?"

"I just can't remember, man. I might have. I don't know."

"You wouldn't forget a thing like that! God, we're talking here about my brother's
life.
" My cool was going fast and my voice was beginning to shake. I leaned over and grabbed the guy's shoulder. "You did it! You killed him. You were drinking and..." I was shaking him so hard that his neck jerked forward and back, like a rag doll's.

"Quit it, will you? I was there. I admit it. But I don't know if I killed him. That's what I'm trying to say."

I stopped shaking him and stared down. "What do you mean?"

"I..." He spread his hands. "I don't suppose you have a cigarette."

"No. And never mind about a cigarette. Start at the beginning, the beginning of the night Bry was killed."

"I was working, parking cars. I got off at eleven. I went down to the Marina and I had a bottle of bourbon and a six pack in my trunk and I sat in my car and had a few and..." He looked up, shaking back his long, straight hair. The sand clotted in it sprayed out like water. "Look, could I just go down to those guys and see if I can bum a cigarette?" He jerked a thumb toward a group of surfers.

"No. Keep talking."

"I guess ... I guess I drove home, after. My car was outside in the morning. I'd parked it in the middle of the road." He tried a small laugh. "Good thing I woke early. Four
A.M
." He leaned over and I tensed, but he just pulled a piece of ice plant and began shredding it between his fingers. "I had to push it out of the street. Dead battery. I'd left the lights on." His voice trailed away. "Then I read about your brother. That's the way I would have come home." He glanced up at me, then back at the ice plant. "I went to the place where it happened ... where they said it happened. You know. You saw me. But I couldn't remember anything. If I did it, I'd have remembered back there, wouldn't I?" He was pleading with me, but I was the last person in the world he should have asked for understanding.

"Do you remember throwing his shoe?"

He cowered back a little. I guess I sounded fierce all right. "His shoe? I never saw no shoe."

He had the skinniest neck and I wanted to get my fingers around it. I shoved my hands in my pockets.

"The thing is," he said, "once before I found a big dent in my fender in the morning and I couldn't remember how I got it. And another time I was home and I had no car and I didn't know where I'd left it. That's why, you know..."

"But you don't quit drinking, do you? You don't quit driving?"

He didn't answer, trying instead to snap his ice plant stem, which bent like rubber. In the silence we could hear kids yelling in the surf. A sand crab scuttled under the bottom step.

"Where's your car now?" I asked. "Do you remember that much?"

"Sure. It's up in the lot, in employee parking."

"Let's go."

We climbed the forbidden steps. Fourth of July flags drooped from the lamp posts that lined the sidewalk. A guy on stilts, dressed as Uncle Sam, offered us a leaflet. Farther along I could see the front of Dad's car and I wondered if Chloe was OK. But I couldn't let myself worry about her now. The streets that lead to the beach are short and narrow. We turned down one of them, Broadway, and cut across the sand. The guy was limping bad but I didn't slow my pace.

"What's your name?" I asked.

He hesitated.

"You might as well tell me," I said. "You'll never get away from me again."

"It's Plum," he said. "Joseph Plum."

I nodded. We climbed the path between the geraniums. He was fishing keys and a handful of loose change from the pocket of his pants, heading for a beige Honda in the corner of the lot. It was the same car I'd seen him get into that morning. He walked around the front and laid a hand on the hood. "See? No dents, no dings, nothing. That made me feel better, you know, when I read about the kid. I mean..."

"You mean my brother."

"These little foreign jobs, they bust a gut if you even look at them. If I'd hit somebody..."

"You could have had it in a body shop since then."

"No. I swear. And what body shop do you know that would do a job this good on a car this old?"

I stood at the back. It wasn't rounded. There was nothing round and white.

"Did you take something off of here? A decal? A sticker?"

He looked puzzled. "No, man! Nothing."

I bent down to look at the tires. They were almost bald. No way could these have left those deep marked tracks. The car was the wrong color. The wrong size. The wrong shape. It was the wrong car.

"Maybe you borrowed a customers car to go drinking at the Marina."

"Uh-uh. Two other guys work with me. I couldn't get away with that. Besides, I remember driving there. In my own car. Getting out the bottle. I keep one under a blanket."

"Great," I said. "Good going."

He fumbled with his keys, carefully not looking at me.

"It wasn't you," I said.

"It wasn't?" His face was slack, the jaw hanging open. "You know that for sure? I mean, God!" The eyes had no understanding.

"I'm telling you, it wasn't you," I said again.

He leaned his arms on the hood and bent across them, head down. His shoulders heaved.

"Not this time, you punk," I said, and turned away before I'd give in to the temptation to smash his head down on the hard metal. "You'd better get help, buddy," I said over my shoulder. "You're death waiting to happen."

In the window of the Honda I saw my distorted reflection, my cold, angry-eyed face. Maybe I needed help myself.

I
TOOK
C
HLOE HOME.

"So that's it," I told her when I finished my report about Plum. "Zilch."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I'm sure. Now I've got nothing ... except..." I didn't want to, couldn't bear to explain about the shoe, so I rushed on, "And whatever stupid thing is buried in my head and won't come out."

I heard her shift a little in the seat. "Don't lose hope, Jesse."

I'd never liked my name, Jesse. When I was little I thought it sounded like a girl. But I liked it now, the way she said it.

"Yeah, well. And there's still Sowbug."

We drove in silence.

"It's weird, Chloe," I said. "I'm beginning to feel kind of sorry for Plum. He cried. I was so mad at the time ... but now, knowing he didn't do it..."

"Don't feel sorry for him," Chloe said fiercely. "He could stop with this drinking and driving. There are places that his family and friends have probably been begging him to go to get help. He doesn't want to, that's all. Don't give me this poor-guy stuff. Bry's dead. You wouldn't be so cool about that creep if he had killed Bry."

"You're right," I said.

"You bet I'm right. The creep!"

My father keeps a box of Kleenex in back; I heard the soft rusde as she pulled one out. In the mirror I saw her rub her eyes then rest her head against the back of the seat. "I hate liquor." She sounded tired all of a sudden. "I swear, I hate it more than anything. It destroys and destroys."

"Don't think about it anymore now," I said quietly. "Try to rest. I'm sorry you had to wait for me so long."

"Don't worry. A meter man came, though. I showed him my foot and told him there was nowhere for you to park and that I needed pain pills, which was certainly no lie."

"Chloe! I shouldn't have left you. I'll find a drugstore right now and get..."

"Uh-uh. I just want to be home."

I squirmed through the traffic, making as much safe time as I could. At her house I left her in the car while I ran up and rang the bell. It was her mother who opened the door. She was all dressed up in something silvery and she smiled her tight carefiil smile and said, "Hello, there," then looked past me. "Is that Chloe? Oh, no! What happened?"

"She hurt her foot but we've been to the emergency room and it's OK." I was having a horrible flash of déjà vu. Me, coming to another door like this, the cops with me, and Dad asking, "What's wrong? Where's Bry? Has something happened to him?"

Chloe's mother was running down the steps to the driveway, calling back, "Harry. Come quickly. Chloe's hurt," and I was running after her, but more slowly, my mind filled with the memory of my father's face that awful night.

"Don't get crazy, Mom." Chloe stood, holding on to the door of Dad's car, and now her father was running past me. He wore a white dinner jacket and black pants.

I stood back while the two of them helped Chloe up the steps. Mrs. Eichler had on some sort of glittery stockings and her diamond ankle chain threw off its little sparks of light.

As soon as they got Chloe settled on the couch, I offered to go out again and get her prescription, but her dad said they'd phone it in and have it delivered right away. I guess that's the way super-rich people operate. He thanked me for bringing her home and asked if I'd had to help pay for anything in the emergency room.

Chloe said, "No, I had my credit card. Don't worry, Dad. You'll be getting the bill."

A good thing, too, I thought. The ten bucks in my wallet wouldn't have helped pay for much.

It took Chloe a few minutes to remember her car, and when I offered to drive her dad back to pick it up he said he'd appreciate that and it would be a good idea to do it quickly, given the situation over at the beach.

"We'll cancel the dinner party at the club," he told Mrs. Eichler. "The others will understand."

"I don't need you to stay home because of me," Chloe said quickly. "I've just got a cut foot. I'm not dying."

"Weren't you supposed to be going out with someone, too, tonight?" her mom asked.

"I can call. It was no big deal."

I wondered who the someone was. I wondered why I felt as if I'd been punched in the chest.

"You and Dad go to your dinner party," Chloe said. "All I want to do is go to bed anyway."

Her parents looked at each other. "We
could
find out if Josie could come over," her mom began.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Mom..."

"I'll stay." Had I said that? I must have because they were all looking at me. And I had a quick sure feeling her mother didn't want me to stay. Probably afraid of leaving me alone in her house with her daughter. Date rape. Maybe I should back off, but I didn't want to.

Chloe shook her head. "You don't have to stay, Jesse. I've been enough trouble all day."

"No, you haven't. And I have no plans. This isn't exactly your every year, typical Fourth of July for my family."