Gail Etheridge met me outside several minutes later and treated me to a grudging smile. ‘You’re beautiful, David. You really are.’
‘You think they’ll ask her?’
Gail shook her head and lit a cigarette. ‘Not a snow-ball’s chance in hell, but I guarantee you this, you’ll be the talk of campus by sunset.’
Chapter 15
‘Is he or isn’t he?’ Walt shouted when he came back to the apartment that night. He was tuned up. I was already roasted. We turned it into a hell of a night.
On Saturday Walt invited a select crew of debauched professors from across campus, male and female, to join us. Foregoing the usual stages, Walt’s Go to Hell Party, thrown in my honour, was a raunchy affair from the start. Before the night was out, I believe everyone tried to take me into the bathroom for a little look-see, strictly in the cause of truth, of course. I’m not sure how I answered the various inquiries and solicitations, but I had the feeling, shortly before I passed out, I might well face fresh charges come Monday morning.
Barbara came by the apartment at nine o’clock the following morning interrupting a particularly nasty hangover. Walt, so inured to the feeling he hardly noticed, blushed like a schoolboy and started trying to pick the place up. As it turned out I was the reason Barbara was there. Neither Walt nor I had his cell phone turned on, and Molly had asked Barbara if she could drive by and tell me to call Molly’s cell phone.
At my look she explained. ‘Something happened to the dogs.’
I found my phone under a pile of pizza boxes and called Molly a few seconds later. ‘What’s the matter?
What happened?’
‘Someone poisoned the dogs, David.’
By the time I got to the farm the animal control unit had packed all seven carcasses into the back of its panelled truck, and Molly was signing something so they could take off. ‘You’ve got the animals?’ I asked. The driver could see I was as upset as Molly.
He answered apologetically. The sheriff’s people wanted them to examine the animals. They wanted to know what kind of poison was used.
I shook my head. I said I wanted to bury the animals on the farm. ‘It’s our business,’ I said. ‘They’re just dogs. We’ll take care of it. I don’t care what kind of poison it was, and neither does she.’ The man looked at Molly, then spoke to the deputy investigating the case. Finally, he got the bodies out.
They were stiff with rigor and came out of the panelled truck like so many logs. Only the eyes and the fur and the remnant animal smell of them recalled anything of their sad lives. I carried all seven, one at a time, off the hill and down to an area in the pasture where we had buried different animals over the years.
We had two cats that had died on us, Pollock and Picasso, and a hamster named Susie. There were two stray dogs already in the earth. They had got hit before we could adopt them: Gilgamesh and Ulysses. I buried the murdered dogs deep in the earth in seven separate holes. Molly left me alone until I had finished. I was tamping down the last, Melville’s grave, when she came out to join me. She smiled at my work, which we both knew was partly for Lucy’s benefit and partly for my own.
‘Lucy hasn’t come out of her room since she found them this morning.’
‘She found them?’ I had been hoping it had been otherwise.
Molly nodded.
‘She got home around midnight. She says she didn’t hear the dogs, but she didn’t think anything about it.’
I understood how she could miss it. The racket they made, had made, was so familiar you didn’t really hear it. It was the silence you noticed. But I understood why Lucy had missed it.
‘So they were dead by midnight? Weren’t you around?’
‘I heard them barking. I thought it was the wind upsetting them.’ Molly began shaking her head as tears formed on the rim of her eyes. ‘They were just mutts!
They weren’t hurting anyone!’
I didn’t bothering responding. I was thinking about Buddy holding his gun against my face, the words he spoke. ‘You and me… we’re going to have some fun before I’m finished with your ass.’
Before I left, Molly showed me the work she had done on Lucy’s apartment. Over coffee she told me someone had made an offer on one of our rentals.
When we had finished with business there was nothing left to say, so I went upstairs and knocked on Lucy’s bedroom door.
She was on the phone and took a minute before she let me in. When she did I told her I had identified each grave, but I wanted her to paint the names on the stones, the way we had done it with the others. That was when she started crying. She cried just like her mother, wiping the tears away, half in embarrassment, half in fury.
I asked her about the night before. She had been at a party. Home at midnight? Pretty much about then, she said. There was no mystery to chase down, except the motive, and Lucy couldn’t help me with that. ‘Have you talked to your mother about the grass, kid?’ I studied her face. This was standard operating procedure. Silence drilled her conscience.
‘I’m careful, Dave. I mean I don’t do it all the time like some kids. And I don’t like lose control.’
‘You need to come clean with your mother. Knowing her, she’s probably just waiting for you to show her you’re honest with her.’
‘What if she grounds me?’
I shrugged indifferently. I’d love to be grounded. I’d take any excuse to move back in with the two of you.
‘Does it matter that much? I mean… are you seeing someone?’
‘No.’
Between lying salespeople and lying customers eager to promise me anything if I would just let them go home and think about it, I had developed an excellent feel for liars. The standard assumption in the industry was summarized in the acronym APAL: All People Are Liars. The trouble with such universal cynicism is sometimes people will let the truth slip out when they’re not careful. You need to know how to separate the gold from the brass. The look-you-in-the-eyes effect was the general method for most amateur liars. With Lucy, who was not a very good liar, the eyes darted first and then they stayed frozen on me.
If she was seeing somebody it was all right. She was seventeen. At seventeen that’s what you do. But she was lying to me about it. Or not sure herself.
‘But you might want to?’
She smiled. ‘Maybe.’
‘You see him last night?’
‘It was a party. He was there.’
‘And he smokes grass?’
‘He’s not a pothead, Dave. He’s a nice guy.’
‘We’re all nice guys, Lucy. That’s how we get to be with nice girls. What’s his name? How old is he? What kind of grade point average does he have? Does he know I have a couple of shotguns in my office and I’m not afraid to use them?’
Lucy sneered. ‘I’m not even going out with him!’
‘Yet.’
She smiled prettily, a girl with a lot of hope. ‘He’s just a guy, Dave. Give me a break.’
‘Talk to your mother. Tell her about the pot.’
As I was leaving she called to me. ‘Are the horses going to be all right, do you think?’
I looked at the doorjamb and thought about it: Jezebel with a tendon cut, Ahab’s neck slit open. ‘I don’t know, Lucy. If they wanted to hurt the horses I guess they could have last night.’
‘Why would somebody kill the dogs? If they wanted to hurt us why not the horses?’
