The Whisperers (25 page)

Jimmy was right about Earle. Despite his bulk, and the impression he gave that his family tree still had members hanging from it making
ook-ook
noises, Earle was not an insensitive man. The routine of the bar gave an order to his life that allowed him to function with the minimum of unwanted complexities, but also gave him time to think. His role was to lift, carry, threaten, and guard, and he performed all of these tasks willingly and without complaint. He was paid relatively well for what he did, but he was also loyal to Jimmy. Jimmy looked out for him, and he, in turn, looked out for Jimmy.

But, as his boss had guessed, Earle had been brooding in recent days. He didn’t like being reminded about Sally Cleaver. Earle was sorry for what had happened to her, and he felt that he should have acted to prevent it, but it wasn’t like it was the first domestic that had ever broken out in the Blue Moon, and Earle was smart enough to know that the best course of action on such occasions was simply not to get involved but to move the feuding parties off the premises and let them sort everything out in the privacy of their own home. It was only when Cliffie Andreas had come back into the bar with blood on his fists and face that Earle had begun to realize his attitude amounted to an ‘abdication of responsibility,’ as one of the detectives had later put it, indicating that, in a just world, Earle would have spent some time behind bars alongside Cliffie for what had happened. Deep down, which was deeper than even Jimmy might have allowed, Earle knew that the cop was right, and so every year, on the anniversary of Sally Cleaver’s death, Earle would leave a bouquet of flowers in the garbage-strewn, weed-caked lot of the Blue Moon, and apologize to the shade of the dead girl.

But Jimmy had never ascribed even partial blame to Earle for what had occurred, even though it had led to the closure of the Blue Moon. He made sure that Earle had the best legal representation close by when there was talk of charging him as an accessory to the crime. They had only ever discussed Earle’s feelings about those events on one occasion, and that was on the day that Jimmy had told Earle he was not going to reopen the bar. Earle had assumed that this meant he would be looking for employment elsewhere, and that Jimmy was washing his hands of him, just like a lot of people said he should, because around town Earle’s name wasn’t worth the spittle it would take to say it. Earle had begun to apologize again for allowing Sally Cleaver to die, and as he did so, he found that his voice was breaking. He kept trying to form coherent sentences, but they wouldn’t come. Jimmy had sat him down and listened as Earle described going outside and seeing Sally Cleaver’s ruined face, and how he had knelt beside her as her lips moved and she spoke the last words that anyone would ever hear her speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, as Earle, not knowing what else to do, laid one of his huge hands on her forehead and gently brushed her bloodstained hair from her eyes. At night, Earle told Jimmy, he saw Sally Cleaver’s face, and his hand would reach out automatically to brush her hair from her eyes. Every night, Earle said. I see her every night, just before I fall asleep. And Jimmy had told him that it was a crying shame, and all he could do to make up for it was ensure that it never happened to another woman, either on his beat or off it, not if he could do anything to prevent it. The next day, Earle had started working at the Sailmaker, even though there was already barely enough custom for old Vern Sutcliffe, the regular bartender. When Vern died a year later, Earle became the sole bartender at the Sailmaker, and thus it had remained ever since.

Now, after ruminating for hours on how he might broach the subject, Earle had come to a conclusion. He placed the last bottles of beer in the cooler, collapsed the box, then made his way tentatively to where Jimmy was sitting. He laid his fists on the bar and said: ‘Anything wrong, Mr. Jewel?’

Jimmy emerged from his reverie, looking slightly shocked.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, “Anything wrong, Mr. Jewel?”’

Jimmy smiled. In all of the years that he had known him, Earle had probably asked no more than two or three questions of a remotely personal nature. Now here he was, his face filled with concern, and only minutes after indicating that he’d lay down his life for his employer. If things went any further, they’d be booking a church for the wedding and moving to Ogunquit, or Hallowell, or somewhere else with too many rainbow flags hanging from the windows.

‘Thank you for asking, Earle. Everything is fine. I’m just mulling over how to handle a certain matter. When I’ve figured it out, though, I may ask for your help.’

Earle looked relieved. He’d already come as close as he had ever done to expressing his affection for Mr. Jewel, and he wasn’t sure that he could cope with any further intimacy. He lumbered away to add the crushed box to the recycling pile, leaving Jimmy alone. Jimmy took a series of photographs from beneath the newspaper, and examined once again the images of the jeweled seals. The gems alone were worth a fortune, but combined with the artifacts themselves, well, Jimmy had no concept of how much the right person might pay for such an item.

Now Jimmy knew that Tobias and his buddies were not smuggling drugs; they were smuggling antiquities. Jimmy wondered what else in a similar vein they might have in their possession. He had spent a day trying to work out the angles, figuring out a way that he could profit from what he had learned, and at the same time expand his knowledge. His only regret was that Rojas was involved. Rojas had let slip that he had begun trying to sell on some of the gems and gold, promising Jimmy a cut of twenty percent as a finder’s fee, as though Jimmy were just some rube to be palmed off with a chump’s cut. Rojas couldn’t see the big picture. The trouble was, neither could Jimmy, but unlike him, Rojas wasn’t prepared to wait until it was revealed.

Jimmy twisted the saucer with his finger, causing the cold coffee in the cup to ripple slightly. He wasn’t hurting for money, but he could always do with more. The downturn in the economy, and the hiatus in the development of the waterfront, meant that he had cash tied up in buildings that were depreciating with every passing day. The market would bounce back – it always did – but Jimmy wasn’t getting any younger. He didn’t want it to bounce back just in time to provide him with a bigger headstone.

He shivered. There was an unseasonably cool breeze coming in off the water, and Jimmy was highly susceptible to cold. Even in the height of summer he wore a jacket. He had always been that way, ever since he was a little kid. There just wasn’t enough meat on his bones to keep him warm.

‘Hey, Earle!’ he called. ‘Close the goddamn door.’

There was no reply. Jimmy swore. He walked through the office and past the storeroom to where a door opened on to the bar’s small parking lot. He stepped outside. There was no sign of Earle. Jimmy called his name again, suddenly uneasy.

His foot slipped as he stepped into the lot. He looked down and saw the dark, spreading stain. To his left was Earle’s truck. The blood was coming from beneath it. Jimmy squatted so that he could see under the truck, and looked into Earle’s dead eyes. The big man was lying on his belly on the far side of the vehicle between the passenger door and the garbage cans by the wall, his mouth open, his face frozen in a final grimace of pain.

Jimmy stood, and felt the gun nudge his skull, like death’s first tentative touch.

‘Inside,’ said a voice, and Jimmy couldn’t hide his surprise at the sound of it, but he did as he was told. He glanced at the truck as he rose, and caught a glimpse of a masked figure reflected in the window. Then the blows rained down on him for having the temerity to look. Kicks followed, driving him along the hallway and into the storeroom. The assault ceased as Jimmy crawled over to the liquor shelves, looking for some kind of purchase so he could raise himself. He could taste blood in his mouth, and he had trouble seeing out of his left eye. He tried to speak, but the words came out as hoarse whispers. Still, it was clear that he was begging: for time to recover, for the blows to stop.

For more life.

One of the kicks had broken a rib, and he could feel it grinding as he moved. He slumped against the shelves, drawing ragged breaths. He raised his right hand in a placatory gesture.

‘You killed a man for a hundred and fifty dollars and change,’ said Jimmy. ‘You hear me?’

‘No, I killed him for much more than that.’

And Jimmy knew for sure that this wasn’t about the money in the safe. It was about Rojas, and the seal, and Jimmy Jewel understood that he was about to die as the black mouth of the suppressor gaped like the void into which Jimmy would soon pass.

He gave away everything after the first shot, but his interrogator had fired two more anyway, just to be sure that he wasn’t holding anything back.

‘No more,’ said Jimmy, ‘no more,’ his wounds bleeding onto the floor, and it was both a plea and an admission, a rejection of further pain and an acceptance that all was about to come to an end.

His interrogator nodded.

‘Oh my God,’ whispered Jimmy, ‘I am heartily sorry—’

The final bullet came. He did not hear it, but only felt the mercy of it.

It would be days before his body, and that of Earle, were found. Summer rains came that night and washed away Earle’s blood, sending it flowing across the sloped surface of the lot, through the wooden pilings that supported the old pier, and into the sea, salt to salt. Earle’s truck was left at the Maine Mall, and when it was still there after two days mall security took an interest, and subsequently the police arrived, for by then it was clear that Jimmy Jewel had fallen off the radar. Calls were going unanswered, and beer could not be delivered to the Sailmaker, and the drunks who worshipped there missed its cloisters.

Jimmy was discovered in the storeroom. He had been shot through both feet, and one knee, by which point he had presumably told all that he knew, and therefore the fourth shot had taken him through the heart. Earle lay at Jimmy’s ruined feet, like a faithful hound dispatched to keep its master company in the afterlife. It was only later that someone noticed the correspondence of dates: Earle and Jimmy had died on June 2nd, ten years to the day since Sally Cleaver had breathed her last at the back of the Blue Moon.

And old men shrugged, and said that they were not surprised.

17

K
aren Emory woke to find Joel gone from their bed. She listened for a time, but could hear no sound. Beside her, the clock on the night table read 4:03 a.m.

She had been dreaming, and now, as she lay awake trying to discern some indication of his presence in the house, she felt a kind of gratitude that she was no longer sleeping. It was foolish, of course. In less than three hours she would have to get up and get dressed for work. She had decided that she would keep working for Mr. Patchett for the moment, and had told Joel so when she came home and found him returned from his trip, a dressing on his face that he wouldn’t explain. He hadn’t objected, which had surprised her, but maybe her arguments had made sense to him, or so she thought at first: that work was hard to come by; that she couldn’t just sit around at home or she’d go crazy; that she’d give Mr. Patchett no further cause to go looking into her affairs, or Joel’s.

She needed to sleep. Soon, her legs and feet would be aching from hours of service, but then her feet always hurt. Even with the best shoes in the world, which she couldn’t have afforded anyway, not on her pay, she still would have experienced the ache in her heels and the balls of her feet that came from standing for eight hours a day. Mr. Patchett was a better boss than most, though, better, in fact, than any boss she’d ever had before, which was one of the reasons that she wanted to remain at the Downs Diner. She’d worked for enough sleazebags in her time to recognize a good soul when she encountered one, and she was grateful for the hours that he gave her. The diner could easily get by with one less waitress, and as one of the most recent employees she would be among the first to be shown the door, but he continued to put regular work her way. He was looking out for her, the way he looked out for all of the people who worked for him, and at a time when businesses were letting staff go left and right, there was something to be said for a man who was prepared to shuck a little profit in order to let people live.

But Mr. Patchett’s concern for her was a problem, especially since the private detective had started ‘nosing around,’ as Joel put it. She’d have to be careful what she said to Mr. Patchett, just as she’d tried to be careful when the detective came to the house, even though she’d ended up saying more than she should have.

It was Joel who had first spotted the detective. Joel had a kind of sixth sense about these things. For a man, he was very perceptive. He could tell when she was sad, or when there was something preying on her mind, just by looking at her, and she had never encountered a man like that before. Maybe she’d just been unlucky with her choices before Joel came along, and most men were as attuned to the women they were with, but she doubted it. Joel was unusual in that way, and in others.

And yet Karen hadn’t wanted to tell Joel about the detective’s visit. She couldn’t have said why, exactly, not at first, except for a vague sense that Joel wasn’t being straight with her about parts of his life, and because of her own fears for his safety, which was why she’d let some stuff slip to the detective when he came by. She had watched how the deaths of Joel’s friends had affected him: he was frightened, even though he didn’t want to show it. Then he had come home yesterday evening with the Band-Aid on his face and the wounds on his hands and wouldn’t speak of how he’d hurt himself. Instead, he’d retired to the basement, moving stuff in boxes down there from the truck, wincing sometimes when a box touched against his injuries.

And when he eventually came to bed . . .

Well, that hadn’t been so good.