A Welcome Grave

banister and use it as a shield. Doran was in front of me now, and I took one small step backward. I wanted to be out of his field of vision if I saw an opportunity to make a move.

“Is that true?” Doran said. “You kill her?”

“No.”

“Wrong answer.”

Brooks tried to avoid the blow entirely this time, stumbling backward up the steps, but Doran grabbed him and pulled him down and cuffed him twice across the back of the head before shoving him to the floor. There was hair on the barrel of Doran’s gun now, and a ragged line of blood began to show along the base of Brooks’s skull.

“Perry here agrees with your boy. Thinks you killed her.”

Brooks shifted his eyes to me, trying for shock but offering only anger. “Are you insane?”

Even on the floor, with blood on his perfect aftershave-commercial face, he oozed a haughty arrogance.

“Probably be best to tell the truth tonight,” I said.

“I have no idea—”

Doran swung on him again, and Brooks moved with surprising speed, ducking the blow and scrambling free. He was on his feet, halfway back to the kitchen, hands held up to ward Doran off.

“Admit it!” Doran screamed. “Say you did it. Say it!” He sprayed spit when he screamed, and his knuckles were white against the stock of the gun, his whole body trembling with fury.

“I didn’t—”

Doran fired. The gun, that big revolver he’d had at the trailer, bucked in his hand, and the bullet buried itself in the wall just behind Brooks, who shouted at the sound and ducked.

“Admit it,” Doran said, his voice calm again, as if the shot had soothed him.

Brooks was cowering. He’d backed up against the wall but still had his hands lifted as if he thought they might be able to protect him if Doran fired again.

“I did it,” he said. His voice was a whisper, so soft I wasn’t sure he’d actually spoken at first, even though I’d watched him say it.

“What?” Doran said.

“I did it.” Louder this time. “I killed the girl. Monica Heath.”

It was almost a full minute until Doran spoke, and then it was just a single word. “Why?”

Brooks cocked his head, his mahogany hair flopping across his forehead.

“It wasn’t intentional. I mean, I didn’t want to . . . she’d started fighting me. We’d been fooling around a little. We were out on the deck. I reached under her skirt and pulled her underwear down and she started to fight me. Then she got loud. She was almost shouting, really. And there were all those people outside of the house, my father and all of those . . .”

Doran stood with the gun lifted, still aimed at Brooks, but he seemed not to breathe. He reminded me of a statue from a war memorial I’d seen somewhere, a frozen moment of imminent violence.

Brooks broke the silence. “I didn’t want to kill her, I just wanted her to shut up. She was trying to walk away from me, and I grabbed that towel and just came up from behind and took it and used it to quiet her down. I didn’t want to kill . . .”

He stopped again.

“You sent me to prison,” Doran said. “I did five years for you. Five years because you didn’t want to be embarrassed by a girl who didn’t want to have sex with you.”

Brooks didn’t say anything.

“Why me?” Doran asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t pick you.”

“Why me?”

When he said it again, Brooks paused, mouth open. Then he said, “Because you were there. It wasn’t personal. You were just there.”

“I was just there. I was just there, and it wasn’t personal,” Doran echoed. “Good. That means a lot. Those five years I did inside, they weren’t personal.”

“You want money?” Brooks said. “All of you? Fine. Name a price. Anything. You pick a figure, and I’ll make it yours.”

I actually moved toward Doran when Brooks said it, I was so sure he was going to fire. So sure that he wouldn’t be able to bear what Brooks had just done, trying to quell Doran with money, to control this situation in the same way he had the murder of Monica Heath, the way Doran had ended up in prison. Doran didn’t fire, though. He smiled.

“Money,” he said. Rolled the word out slow, as if he were enjoying its flavor. “You can give me some of your money?”

Brooks nodded. His nose was still bleeding, splattering the blue robe. “I can give you more money than you’ve ever imagined. More money than you can believe.”

Doran looked down at Gaglionci, still on the floor, then back up to me. I couldn’t read his eyes. They didn’t seem to be seeing me, or anything in the room.

“How much money can you give me tonight?”

Brooks frowned. “You mean cash?”

Doran tilted his head and studied Brooks, still with that remote expression on his face. Then he shook his head. “A check. I think I’d like a check.”

Brooks stared at him. Then he nodded. “Okay. A check. All right. Yeah, I can write one. As a down payment, right? And then we can get you more. We can get you more later.”

“Sure,” Doran said. “As a down payment.”

For a moment Brooks just stood there, still nodding, and then he pointed down the hall to his right. “In my office. The checkbook is in my office.”

“Then we should go there,” Doran said. His voice wasn’t his own anymore. It was relaxed, almost amused, as if he were on a different plane of the conversation and we couldn’t follow it. The voice bothered me.

Brooks started down the hall, and Doran looked back at me and waved his gun. “Come on, Perry.”

“Leave,” I said.

“What?”

“Get out of here, Doran. Take the van and go.”

He smiled at me. The blood on his lips was dry now. “I don’t think so.”

I walked down the hall behind Brooks, and Doran followed. Nobody said a word to Gaglionci; we just left him bleeding on the fancy hardwood floors with the handcuffs on. Brooks hadn’t turned a light on, and it was dim in the hall. There was an extravagant wine rack along the wall, probably fifty or sixty bottles in it, the white wines reflecting the faint light and the reds blending into the shadows along the wall. Brooks was walking fast, hands at his sides. He turned into the first door on the right and hit a light switch. We were in his office now, an expansive room with windows that would look out on the deck and the trees and lake beyond during the day. Now, at night, the dark glass simply showed the room.

Doran stepped past me and stood in front of the desk while Brooks sat down in the chair. He didn’t look away from Doran while he pulled a black checkbook across the top of the desk and set it in front of him. He flipped it open and found a blank check, then reached out and patted his chest just over his heart, searching for a pen. I tensed when he did it. It wasn’t a genuine gesture, there was something heavy and false about it, but I didn’t understand why.

“Now just let me get a pen,” he said, and he pulled open the drawer on the right side of the desk.

“Don’t,” Doran said, but Brooks already had his hand inside the drawer, and Doran fired.

The shot hit Brooks, shattered his collarbone and blew through his body and the chair behind it, but he’d gotten his hand on the gun in the drawer and he pulled the trigger. A hole opened in the desk with a cloud of splinters and then its twin bloomed red in the center of Doran’s stomach.

Doran got off one more shot, and this time the bullet caught Brooks in the middle of the throat, tore a bloody fissure through his neck and slammed his head back against the chair. Blood burbled in the open wound as he tried to take one last breath that never came.