Chat (26 page)
He glanced quickly at Leppman, who seemed almost catatonic by now. “So, you had to act on your own,” Joe suggested helpfully. “Is that why you left him in the motel room instead of taking him somewhere else, like you did the first guy?”
Gartner nodded. “Yes. It all happened at the last minute. Wendy came with me, but then she wouldn’t get out of the car. She was supposed to open the man’s door, carrying the cookies. She’s so much prettier than I am—and younger, of course, which was the whole point. Fortunately, that part didn’t matter. He was so hot and bothered, I could have talked him into anything.”
“What did you say to him?” Joe asked. “He was expecting a fourteen-year-old.”
She looked straight at him and smiled sadly, her head slightly tilted to one side, as if mystified by every aspect of her own tale. “I offered him one—I showed him Gwennie’s picture and told him she was waiting for him.” She paused and leaned forward in her chair, her body language seeking confirmation. “And she was, wasn’t she?”
He was hard-pressed to argue, while at the same time wondering how many people might have seen her ploy as victimizing Gwennie all over again. It wasn’t lost on him that at the very same moment, Wendy had sat in the car, traumatized and guilty, feeling that she had let mother and sister down, alike. “I guess so—as things turned out.”
John Leppman, however, was having no more of it. Mirroring the apparent family tradition of impulsive rashness, he suddenly stirred from his torpor, pushed himself up from his chair, and launched onto his wife, flailing with both fists and knocking them both onto the floor in a struggling heap.
Gunther pushed backward in surprise, smacking against the wall behind him, and scrambled to his feet, trying to circle his desk to intervene.
Almost predictably, the gun went off as he was halfway there. There was a startled cry from Leppman, and he rolled off his wife, clutching his left upper arm, just as Joe arrived over them both.
Sandy Gartner, her eyes wide, focused suddenly on Joe and brought her gun to bear on him next. He struck out with his right foot and caught her straight on the wrist, sending the pistol skittering across the floor.
With a yelp of pain, she curled into a ball, striking a curious counterpoint to her husband, who was doing much the same thing a few feet away.
His adrenaline pumping and his own gun out by now, Joe stared at them both for a few moments, wondering what might happen next, even glancing at the door once to see if their one remaining daughter might not be standing there with a shotgun.
But all was finally at rest.
“Jesus” was all he could summon up in the end, reaching for the phone. “What a bunch.”
JMAN:
hey – Mandi144 u out ther?
LoneleeG:
don’t no Mandi, but im here
JMAN:
kool. ASL
LoneleeG:
15/f/Burlington
JMAN:
Vermont? Wurks 4 me
J
oe switched off the table saw and examined the edge of the board he’d just pushed through the blade.
“No blood?” a voice asked from behind him. “I would’ve thought by now you’d be missing a thumb at least.”
Joe put the board down and dusted his abdomen free of sawdust. “Hey, Willy. Slumming in the neighborhood?”
Kunkle shrugged, looking around the small barn that his boss had converted into a woodworking shop attached to his house. “Something like that.”
“You stand a cup of coffee?” Joe asked. “I made it an hour ago, and I’m having some anyhow.”
“Sure,” Willy answered, pointing at the table saw with his chin. “What’re you making?”
Joe laughed, removing the thick apron he wore. “If I’m lucky, an end table for Lyn’s daughter, Coryn. Her apartment is supposedly like a sixties college museum of stacked bricks and orange crates.”
They left the shop for the living room next door and the kitchen beyond. Joe lived in what might have been a gatehouse had it not been stuck onto the back of a Victorian monstrosity fronting the street. In any case, it was also inexplicably and oddly proportioned, so that anyone taller than five and a half feet looked shoehorned into the place.
“You two still tight?” Willy asked.
“With Lyn?” Joe responded, taking out a mug. “So far, so good. I take it you’re asking because Sam just threw you out.”
“Fuck you,” Willy said without emphasis. He watched Joe pour out the coffee in silence. Only after he accepted the mug did he add, “We just had a fight. I left. She wanted to talk—as usual.”
Joe poured his own mug and sat on a stool near the counter. “You do talk sometimes, though, right?”
Willy took a sip and answered, “Yeah, Mom. We talk. I wasn’t in the mood this time.”
“It’s tough,” Joe commented vaguely, knowing his audience. “The price we have to pay for companionship. Still worth it to you?”
Willy stared a moment into the depths of the mug. “I guess.”
A thumbs-up, given the man, Joe thought.
“How’s your brother doin’?” Willy asked, changing the subject.
“Close to good as new. Using a cane only, driving on his own. He’s even back at work half days.”
“That was a weird deal.”
“You mean Dan Griffis going after him?” Joe asked. “Yeah. I never thanked you properly for doing what you did, by the way, getting close to E. T. In the long run, that probably saved all our bacon the night Dan came hunting for me and mine.”
Willy nodded. “No sweat. Got me to hang out in a bar again. I always liked bars, even if what they had in them didn’t like me.”
Or liked him too much, Joe thought.
“E. T. was a good enough guy, though,” Willy continued unexpectedly. “A fucked-up dad, maybe, but okay in the end. Did you ever get together with him after?”
Joe shook his head. “The night he called, I could tell it was about all he had left in him. The local scuttlebutt has it he hasn’t left his house since—not to see Dan in jail, not to run the business, not even to have a drink. From what I hear, the lawyers are gathering to figure out all his businesses.”
Willy laughed. “Any lawyers left over after the Leppman-Gartner clan got through hiring?”
“Good point,” Joe agreed.
Willy put his coffee down and gazed at his host. Joe had rarely seen him in such a contemplative mood. “This family shit is so weird.”
Joe smiled at him. “How so?”
“I don’t know. Getting ticked off at Sam tonight and driving around, I got to thinking. Seems like all we do is piss and moan about breaking up or sticking together, and when we’re not doing that, it’s family, family, family. I mean, what do you get out of that whole deal with Gartner using the death of one daughter to screw up the other? Or E. T., for that matter? He puts Andy in jail to spare Dan and then has to drop the dime on Dan because the bastard’s about to kill a cop and his entire family. How messed up is that? How wrong can you get it?”
Joe absorbed all this, knowing that an answer wasn’t requested. But it did make him think of Lyn and her family, half destroyed by the sea; of his own mother and brother, almost lost through capricious malice; and of how fragile and tenuous even the best of bonds could become, through no fault of one’s own.
None of which considered the other, more willful human dynamics that Willy was talking about: divorce and abandonment, revenge and paranoia, murder and mayhem.
“How bad is it with you and Sam?” he asked.
Willy made a dismissive face. “Just a pissing match. No big deal.”
Joe nodded and gazed out the darkened window for a while in silence. “I guess we just do the best we can,” he finally said, “and keep our fingers crossed.”
Willy took a final sip, put his mug down, and slipped off his stool. “Okay, Obi-Wan. I’ll go home now. Thanks for the java, if not the bullshit.”
Joe nodded. “Take care, Willy. I’ll see you tomorrow.”