clearing’s edge.
The door opened. D’Alessio ducked in. “Carpenter,” he said.
“Our time’s not up.”
“One minute.”
In the hallway, he looked around to make sure no one was listening. “We got a call from the state police,” he said, his voice edged with irritation. “They want our assistance in case they have to make an arrest.”
“Yeah?”
“They wanted your place of residence, Gus.”
Superior. That’s what a company that sold a lot of discounted cars to the state police could do. My watch said I still had more than an hour before I had to give up my source’s name. “OK,” I said.
“I don’t know what the hell you got going with the state boys, or why the sheriff would care, but he told me to tell you. Now you know.”
I sat back down with Soupy. “So what about this suicide pact Blackburn and Leo supposedly had?” I said.
Soupy shook his head. “That’s bullshit. Why would Leo make a deal like that? He wasn’t doing any of the shit in the billets.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t working the camera?” It came out before I could stop it.
“What camera?” Soupy said.
“Shit,” I said. I told him what I’d seen. “I found them totally by accident.”
“Did you watch them by accident too?” Soupy said.
“Soup, nobody else has seen them, so far as I know. Obviously Blackburn, but he’s dead.”
“Fuck it, man, don’t worry about it.” Soupy shoved his chair back. “Everybody’s probably seen those things.”
“Everybody who?”
“Every twisted fucking pervert who goes for that shit.”
“How?”
“Blackburn. The motherfucker was selling them, making money off them.”
So Soupy knew all along.
“No,” I said.
“How do you think he afforded all those houses, Trap? He was a goddamn air-conditioning guy. He was selling those films. To whoever buys that kind of shit.”
“How do you know?”
“Leo. Jack cut him in when he first got started. You know Leo; he went along. He was a great guy, but that porn shit got to him, man, he got to love it, like a drug. He finally went to a shrink. Took him a while, but he got better. He tried to get Jack better too, but Jack just pretended. He was a hopelessly sick fuck. He was still fooling around with Champy after Leo thought everything was cool. Then when Leo found out that night at the fire, they blew up like they did. Leo never told me what happened after I bolted that scene. But these last couple of years, he was trying to help me find those films.”
“How?”
“The new way, man. The Web.”
“The Internet? You can do films on the Internet?”
“Nah, but they can pick stills out of them. And of course all the slimeballs who crave this shit can communicate real fast and easy without leaving much of a trail. Anyway, Leo thought we might be able to track down my films, or maybe the guys who had them, and maybe buy them up. It was pretty stupid. Like we were going to buy up every little piece of me out there. Never did find me. But there was plenty of porn. Little boys. Little girls. Cats. Dogs. Ducks. Pigs. Fucking pigs, man. The whole world is a goddamn porn freak show now.” He stopped and thought for a moment. “Leo got hooked on that shit all over again. He said it wasn’t a problem. But it was a big problem. I wish I’d thrown his damn computer in the lake with Blackburn.”
So all that happy blather pasted over Leo’s workbench had nothing to do with alcohol, but pornography. Maybe he had been behind the camera in the billets. Maybe he had expected that everything he had on his computer would have come out in the courtroom. Maybe he had killed himself out of pure suffocating shame.
“Leo never told you what happened?”
“Never.”
“Come on.”
“Nope. Neither one of us ever said a word. Even when we were hunting around on his computer, we acted like that night never happened.”
“So you always knew the snowmobile accident was bullshit.”
“Yep. And that pisses you off, doesn’t it, Trap? Sorry, man. You got your job, I got mine. Leo saved my goddamn life. I couldn’t take a chance on getting him in trouble. Turns out I did anyway.”
It infuriated me that I had no choice but to understand. “What about that other voice you heard that night? Was it Leo?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I was half blind.”
“So there might’ve been somebody else out there? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know. Why do you keep asking that?”
“Somebody…I heard there might’ve been somebody else.”
“From who? Boynton?”
“No.”
“Well then, hell, Trap, maybe it was Boynton out there. Maybe he just showed up late with the marshmallows.”
“You know,” I said, “maybe it was. He certainly seems to have known a lot about all this stuff. Enough to blackmail you and get Leo in trouble with the cops. I wonder if he tipped them off to the computer. Would he have known about that?”
“Ah, fuck, man,” Soupy said. “Listen.”
The night before the state title game, Blackburn had Soupy and Teddy leave the rest of the team in the billets and come to his house. Over cocoa in the kitchen they argued about how we would cover Billy Hooper. Soupy insisted that only he was fast enough to stay with Hooper. Coach said he thought Teddy could handle it. Teddy sat there smiling, letting Coach do his talking. Coach said he’d sleep on it. He told Soupy to go back to the billets and get to bed, Teddy would be along soon.
Soupy fell asleep listening for Teddy to come in.
The next morning, Teddy sat next to Soupy on the bus to the rink. Soupy looked out the window. Teddy leaned over and whispered: “Guess what I watched last night?”
“So he knew everything?”
“Pretty much. And he loved it. He told me if I ever fucked with him, he’d tell the whole world.”
The films flickered in my head. “Blackburn had to have been pulling the same stuff on Boynton, Soup,” I said.
He chuckled bitterly. “Maybe I was just jealous.”
“Why didn’t you tell somebody?”
“Why do you think, dipshit? You think I was proud of it?”
“It wasn’t your fault, Soupy. Why didn’t you tell someone?”
“I told my fucking father, OK? And, as you can imagine, he was so understanding. First he wanted to hear all about Tillie’s tits, then he told me to stop making things up. I never brought it up again.”
“What about your mom?”
He shook his head.
“Have you told anyone else any of this?”
“Nope.”
“Not even Flapp?”
“Not much.”
“Well, what the hell are you thinking, Soup? Are you thinking you’re going to go to prison for Leo? Leo’s dead and you aren’t bringing him back.”
