Late Rain (5 page)

OFF SHIFT AND LEAKING insomnia like a slow wound, Ben Decovic prowled his apartment at the White Palms.

It was 3:07 AM.

He’d tried reading. Television. The radio. The internet.

Nothing sufficed.

Three AM set its own terms.

The Poes
, that’s what he’d come to call these interludes. It felt like Edgar Allen himself was calling the shots. Time slipped from its mooring, and neither
late night
or
early morning
fit the clock. For Ben Decovic, three AM was a nameless zone overcrowded with interlocking regrets and a bottomless yearning, all fueled by a waking nightmare logic.

Three AM was a place where you lost and found yourself whether you wanted to or not.

He checked the underside of his left wrist, counting the inked hash-marks.

He was still within limits.

He prowled his apartment.

He eventually started thinking about his wife’s kisses.

The Math: he’d been married for a third of his life.

Ben told himself he had passed beyond the standard-issue responses to her death. He’s had his ticket punched by grief. What he was left with was something more nebulous and frightening.

All the old certainties had evaporated.

He’d been a natural, a virtual artist of the eye, when it came to reading a crime scene or homicide, but all that changed after Diane’s death.

He eventually resigned from the Homicide Division of the Ryeland, Ohio Police Department, jettisoning a promising fast-track rise through the ranks and moving South to Magnolia Beach in what he told himself was a clean break.

But nothing was clean, and everything broken, at three AM.

For example, the names.

Nicholas. Meredith. Emily. Laura. Andrew.

Then a few moments later, the others eventually crowding in.

Karl Metz. Suzanne Raschella. George Gearhart. Thomas Linneti. Diane Decovic.

What was there and not.

He was left finally with the memory of his wife’s kisses.

The way her hair curtained when she inclined her head, the taste of lipstick, the soft press of flesh upon flesh, the warmth of her breath disappearing into his, fifteen years of kisses, Ben replaying them in his head, closing his eyes and trying to hold on to something as fundamental and deep as marrow.

Without those kisses and the weight of their memory, he was left in a perpetual three AM freefall through crime-scene images of his wife bleeding out late one afternoon in the parking lot of Central Dry Cleaners in Ryland, Ohio and a hit parade of postmortem shots of the subsequent autopsy.

THE VERBS WERE THE FIRST TO GO.

Jack Carson had always been a man of few words. Like many men of his generation who’d been taught to speak through action, he also had a deeply-embedded respect for language, for the power of words and what they could do. His silence was simply a way of acknowledging that power. He’d learned early on to choose his words carefully.

Like many men of his time, Jack Carson also married a woman whom he came to believe could speak for the both of them, a woman with music in her voice, who could read his silences and flesh out what he was feeling or thinking whenever they were together.

He still had every love letter she wrote him.

There were days when he heard a voice he didn’t entirely recognize recite passages from those letters verbatim, and he would then belatedly come to realize that it was him speaking.

There were days he remembered his wife had been dead for over thirty years. Days he recognized the attractive young woman moving around the house as his daughter, Anne, and days when he could summon up his granddaughter’s name, Paige, which sounded like something you opened a book to.

Most days, though, he fought against a different type of silence from the one he’d been taught spoke louder and truer than words, a silence that did not shadow what he felt and thought but rather stole them from him, an immense silence into which things disappeared.

It had been that way with the verbs.

Jack Carson had been standing in the kitchen of the house he shared with his daughter and granddaughter, and his daughter had been turning the faucet over the sink on and off and pointing out a persistent leak, and he had nodded to her and said, “I can...,” and that’s when it had started, the verb suddenly deserting him, the main verb breaking off from its helper and spinning and falling away into that new silence, and Jack Carson had stood there and started the sentence, “I can...,” over and over again, but had not been able to summon up “fix.”

Like many men of his generation, Jack Carson had had an English teacher who had forever marked him. In his case, a Mrs. Allen in the seventh grade who’d taught him the parts of speech, and Jack Carson had learned how to build a sentence and appreciate the fit and function of its parts just as, years later working as a contractor, he could see a quiet and pervasive beauty in the precise lines and proportion in a set of blueprints.

He knew, for example, that verbs expressed an action, occurrence, or state of being.

Verbs told time.

And time, like the verb
fix,
which had deserted his tongue and gone spinning off into an immense silence when he’d faced the leaky faucet and asked for his tools, was something that Jack Carson had come to suspect he’d lost the blueprint for.

JAMES RESTAN had the kind of mustache you saw on aging gunfighters in old black and white Westerns, a Palm Springs tan, and clear, hawk-like eyes that never seemed to blink. His hair was carefully cut and was a half shade lighter than his charcoal-gray polo shirt. Corrine judged him to be in his mid to late fifties.

They were sitting in a quiet section of the restaurant in the Marriott near the regional airport. Most of the east wall was a bank of windows softly refracting the pale rays of a noon sun. Restan had a scotch and soda in front of him. Corrine ordered an iced tea.

“I appreciate you agreeing to meet,” she said.

“Unexpected, but still a pleasure. I have a late connecting flight and nothing pressing. I figured to get in a round of golf. Try out that new course the mayor and tourist bureau’s so proud of.”

“In that case, I appreciate it even more.” Corrine tore open a packet of artificial sweetener and sifted it into her tea. “I wanted to talk to you about the buy-out offer.”

James Restan cocked his head and smiled. Corrine saw that the mustache was a decoy, a front for a thin-lipped smile that held no warmth. She could easily imagine Restan in bed, knew the type, a lover who prided himself on technique, confident that he knew just what to do with his hands, mouth, and cock. He would be a lover whose self-regard masqueraded as generosity, sexual passion always something he negotiated, a transaction that would leave him secure in his belief that he’d earned his orgasm.

“I’m not sure how much we have to talk about,” Restan said. “Stanley Tedros did not strike me as being open to any further discussions. And frankly, right now, I feel the same way.” Restan paused and squared his scotch and soda in the center of his napkin. “So why exactly are you here, Ms. Tedros?”

“I want you to consider an extension on the buy-out offer.”

Restan cupped his chin with his left hand and waited, watching Corrine, before he responded. “The American public has a short memory and insatiable appetite. Right now, it’s convinced itself it wants Julep. That’s a plus, Ms. Tedros, but in itself means nothing. What counts is the American public still desiring Julep three, five, or ten years from now. What’s imperative is breaking down that infamous short memory and lodging Julep in the psyche of the American consumer. And that requires time, commitment, and not a small amount of money.”

Restan picked up his scotch, sipped, and replaced it in the center of the napkin. Corrine reined in her impatience, told herself to let him talk. They would get to where they were headed soon enough.

“Long before I ever met with Stanley,” Restan went on, “I had my marketing and research and development people working on how Julep fit with our anchor sodas and doing detailed projections about its future place in the line. I knew what a major soft drink company, like mine, could and could not realistically do with a product like Julep, Ms. Tedros, and I knew what my competitors could and could not do with it, but what I did not know, and should have, was just how stubborn and foolish Stanley Tedros would be when we brought the offer to the table.”

Restan signaled the waiter for more drinks and then turned back to Corrine. “You know, Stanley will end up running Stanco Beverages into the ground if he tries to market and distribute Julep on a nation-wide basis himself. It can’t be done, not given his present resources.”

“I know,” Corrine said.

“Which brings me back to my original question,” Restan said. “Why this meeting and a request for an extension? My offer’s not going to change. It’s fair, more than fair, and the total package is better than what my competitors offered.”

The waiter brought the drinks. Restan waved away the offer of a lunch menu.

He sat back and made a show of taking Corrine in. “One thing I’m curious about,” he said. “Who sent you? Buddy or Stanley? I’m betting Stanley. Another is, am I first on the list? Or have you already slept with the other two reps?”

Restan picked up his drink and saluted her. “Not that you’re not quite a piece, Ms. Tedros, and very likely more than adept in the bedroom, and certainly more appealing than another round of golf, but a little between the sheets action is not going to change my offer. Tell Stanley he’s overreaching on this one.”

“Is that what you think? Stanley sent me here to fuck you?”

“Not exactly an original idea,” Restan said, “though I’m sure it’s worked admirably well on other occasions.”

Corrine shelved her anger and shook her head no. “You have it all wrong.”

“I do?”

“Yes.”

“Then why?” Restan asked, smiling. “Why are you here, and why are we having this conversation?”

It was the question Corrine had been waiting for, and she thought she was prepared to answer it.

She was conscious of Restan watching her and of a slow change taking place, as if his pupils were adjusting to a different light than the one streaming through the bank of windows.

Corrine felt something lurch inside her.

She slid back her chair and got up. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” she asked, then turned and walked quickly across the room.

In the restroom, a woman on the long side of forty stood before the mirror adjusting the lines of her lipstick. Corrine found the first available stall and just managed to lift the lid of the toilet before she threw up. She’d barely finished before she dropped to her knees and started all over again. It felt as if her insides were being ripped out. She went through one more cycle before she was completely empty.

She heard the woman ask if she were all right, then move toward the door and leave. Corrine lifted her head and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and got up.

Her throat burned, and she blinked back tears.

For a moment, she’d forgotten where she was.

She leaned against the inside of the stall. Her forehead and underarms were damp, and her heartbeat raced and stuttered. She lowered her head. The inside of her mouth tasted like a burnt match.

Corrine understood
empty
. How
empty
fed an unruly mix of fear and anger that inevitably led to a moment like this one, a moment as small and tightly confined as the bathroom stall itself.

She could just leave. Go back home, play wifey, and wait for Stanley to die. Hope to win the tug of war she and Stanley were waging over Buddy and that Stanley didn’t make good on his pronouncement that the marriage wouldn’t last eighteen months.

Corrine cradled her stomach and closed her eyes.

She thought about Julep, the string of zeroes in the buy-out offer.

She thought about
empty
.

About how a zero was a circle and a circle the symbol of perfection and completion.

James Restan’s question still hung in the air.

Corrine left the stall and moved to the sink. She rinsed out her mouth and lifted handful after handful of water to her face, not caring what it did to her make-up. By the time she’d dried her face, she’d replaced making a decision with a bet, throwing everything to chance, and keeping its terms simple.

She would step outside the bathroom and look across the restaurant. If James Restan was still sitting at the table, she would join him and go on to answer his question. If Restan had already left, she would drop the whole thing.

Yes or No.

As simple as that.

No middle ground.

BEN DECOVIC dropped into the quiet. The air around him was layered with the smell of old incense, like the aftermath of fireworks on a damp summer evening.

He had just signed off first shift and was still in his uniform.

He sat in the nave of St. Katherine’s, the Greek Orthodox Church off Medloe Avenue.

He wanted the quiet and dark.

God was optional.

Ben Decovic figured the feeling was mutual.

Directly above him was an oval dome set in the ceiling, a painting of Christ occupying its center like the sun and banked with concentric rings of angels.

All around Ben were more frescoes and icons and mosaics: the serpent and Eve and the apple; Abraham and Isaac and the ram in the thicket; Jonah and the whale; Mary with Child; the Last Supper; Christ kneeling at Gethsemane; the crucifixion at Golgotha; the empty tomb and Christ’s Ascension, all buttressed by an army of saints and martyrs whom Ben didn’t recognize and couldn’t name.

Behind him, the door to the narthex opened, and in his peripheral vision, Ben saw Father Amarantos enter. He paused in passing and nodded, briefly reaching over to rest his hand on Ben’s shoulder before continuing through the nave to the paneled wall fronting the sanctuary. Ben thought he remembered Father Amarantos calling it the iconostasis.