5 ~ Requiem for Max
“Would you like to tell me what you think you’re doing?”
The couch had broken Nordine’s fall. He sat there and rocked back and forth, flexing the fingers of his right hand, the hand that had held the gun. I had the gun now, and it was pointed at his solar plexus.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Only that Max is-”
“You saw him,” I said, wondering whether it had been smart not to tell Spurrier everything, swine though he was.
“Oh, my God,” Nordine said, blinking back tears. “It was, it was like Friday the Thirteenth or something. Poor Max, poor sweet old Max. And I thought, I guess I just went crazy, I thought, well, you’d been there-”
“So had you,” I said.
“But after he was dead,” Nordine said. He raised both hands, as though I’d put the gun to his head. “Wait, wait, you don’t think that-”
“The cops do.”
“Well, of course they do,” Nordine snapped. “What would you expect? Why do you think I called you instead of them?” He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day before, and I couldn’t see anything wrong with them.
“Listen, Christopher, they’re going to be hard-nosed about this. There are guys with guns looking for you. You had means, motive, and opportunity. And don’t tell me about how much you loved him. I’m tired of hearing about people loving each other. Open your coat.”
“What?”
“Open your coat. I want to see your shirt.”
“Oh,” he said flatly. “How thorough of you.” He unbuttoned the jacket and held it wide. The shirt was damp with sweat but unstained. I gestured for him to button up.
“How’d you do that?” he asked sulkily.
“Do what?”
“You were supposed to come in over there.” He waved a hand in the direction of my front door.
“I smelled your cologne,” I said. “So I went around the side of the house and climbed up onto the sun deck, and threw a folding chair over the roof toward the front door. When you got up and faced the door, I came in behind you.”
“You threw a chair over the roof?”
“It’s not a very big house.”
“No,” he said, giving it an unaffectionate eye, “it isn’t. It’s not very nice, either.”
“Did you kill him, Christopher?”
“Do you honestly think I could kill Max?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“Max was the best human being I ever met.” He sounded like he was about to cry.
“So somebody else killed him.”
“Well, of course they did. One of those walking trash heaps he was always picking up on the street.”
“Okay,” I said, popping the clip out of the gun and emptying it: seven rounds. I pocketed the bullets and held the gun out to him. “Get out of here.”
He gazed at the gun without taking it. “But wait. You have to help me.”
“Why do I have to do that?”
“Because they’re looking for me.”
“You should have called them in the first place.”
“No,” he said. “I couldn’t.” He shook his head, and the joints in his neck popped. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s just made it worse for you.”
“That means you told them about me.”
“Christopher,” I said, as though to a five-year-old, “I had to explain why I was there.”
He stared up at me, white completely surrounding the irises of his sunken eyes. “You told them everything?”
“I didn’t tell them about the will. I didn’t tell them what you said about the voice-print.”
“Thanks for nothing,” he said. “They’ll find out about the will in fifteen minutes, and that’ll be it. Do you know what those guys are like? About gay people, I mean? They’ll treat me like I’m Typhoid Mary. Gloves and masks and I don’t know what all.”
The kidney Spurrier had slammed sent off a little skyrocket of pain. With the pain came a sudden, overpowering conviction that I was sick and tired of other people’s lives. “I’ve got to sit down,” I said.
“It’s your house.” He was back to a sulk.
“Do you want some water?”
“I already took some.” He leaned over the edge of the couch, and I started fumbling in my pocket for the bullets, but all he came up with was a half-drained bottle of Evian.
“Good,” I said, sitting in the only other chair in the room. “But don’t do that again.”
“Do what?”
“Bend over and pick up anything I can’t see.”
He put a hand to his chest. “Oh, my God, you still think it was me.”
“I.” It was involuntary.
“You? Oh, I see. You’re correcting my grammar. How-”
“Old-fashioned,” I suggested.
“I was going to say how anal-retentive.”
“I’m almost as tired of that,” I said, “as I am about hearing people talk about love.”
“You really must be hurting,” he said, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of Evian. “Oh, I remember. ‘The fondness comes and goes.’ Gone at the moment?”
I was tired, and my left kidney was sending out painful little pulses, blasts of cold air aimed at my back. “Leave me alone. When I want analysis, I’ll pay for it.”
He drank. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to be detached when you’re peeling off the bucks to a shrink. That’s half the problem with psychiatry, the money.”
“What’s the other half?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“There’s that,” I acknowledged.
He sat back, wedging the bottle between his legs. “I had analysts all over the South. Max was the only one who ever helped me, even a little.”
“Throw me the water.” He tightened the cap and tossed it to me underhand, like a softball, and I drank half of what was left. It tasted like warm plastic. “Okay,” I said. “Tell me how Max helped you.”
He grimaced. “Is this necessary?”
“No. You could just leave.”
The deep eyes fastened on mine and then cruised the room, settling on one of the darkened windows, and he sighed. “We always want to be the hero,” he said.
“We want a lot of things,” I said.
He gathered his lips together and let out another sigh, one with a big P at the beginning of it. “I was just a total waste,” he said. “A mess. I hurt people and stole from them. I told lies day and night. I lied about who I was and what I’d done and when I’d gone to the bathroom last and how tall I was. It didn’t matter what, I lied about it.”
Outside a coyote yowled protest at the heat, and Christopher Nordine sat bolt upright at the sound. “Why?” I asked.
His eyes remained fixed on the window. “Why does anybody lie? Because the truth isn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. I was a nobody. I hadn’t done anything, and I didn’t think I ever would. I was a little ball of
