Caesar steps over to the car and sits down, making even that movement look graceful, his back against one of the tires. “I need an ambulance,” he says.
Blood is running down my right arm, the right side of my head, and my left hand, but somehow I disentangle myself from my sister and manage to get my phone out of my pocket. “Call nine-one-one,” I tell Susannah, thrusting the phone at her. As she does, I take a better look at Donny. The back of his head is bloody where Caesar hit him. I glance at Caesar, who is looking at me. “Why were you in prison?” I ask.
He blinks slowly. “This is what you need to know right now?” he says. “While I bleed to death in your driveway?”
“Just before the police come,” I say.
He looks at me for another moment or two. “My sister’s husband was beating her,” he says. “So I threw him out a window.”
I nod. “So if you killed … Donny here,” I say, stumbling over Ponytail’s actual name, “that might be problematic for you, from a legal perspective.”
Caesar looks at me. “It was self-defense,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “And it is much appreciated. But you have a record.” I crouch down and pick up the brick that Caesar dropped. “So when the cops come, I’m the one who hit him.” I look down at Donny, lying still on the concrete, his skull crushed. I think I see his eye twitch. I can’t be sure.
Caesar frowns. “They’ll be able to tell that you didn’t—”
I raise the brick and bring it down hard onto Donny’s head. The impact shocks my arm up to the shoulder and I drop the brick, but now Donny’s blood is on my hand, and there’s another gash in the back of his skull, and his eye is definitely not twitching now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The following night is Saturday, and I’m sitting at home, stitched up like the creature in Frankenstein and watching Saving Private Ryan, when my phone rings. I pause the film and see who’s calling this time—Frankie, or my uncle, or Johnny Shaw, or Detective Panko, who has already left a message about meeting first thing tomorrow morning to talk about Sam Bridges and Donny Wharton. When I see it’s my sister, I answer and say, “I’m watching your most favorite war movie.”
“Bitch,” Susannah says at the other end.
I smile. “You moved in okay?” She’s living in a halfway house near Birchwood for now. Baby steps.
“I’m all good,” she says. “How’s your neighbor?”
Tony was less than thrilled that Donny had stolen his BMW and locked my sister inside it, and when he was certain the police no longer needed access to it for evidence, he was going to sell it and get a new Tesla. But mostly he was glad that we were alive and okay.
“Tony and Gene brought me cookies and wine,” I say. “I think they’re a little excited from their brush with real-life crime, although they’ll never say so. I thanked Tony for keeping roadside flares in the trunk of his car.”
“Glad they weren’t hurt. Hey, I think I left a bag over there—can you look around for it later?”
“I’m not bringing your stuff to you. I’m recovering.”
“Okay, Gimpy. Dinner next week?”
“Only if you’re buying,” I say.
We hang up, and I automatically look over at Wilson’s bed to see if he needs to go outside. Then I remember, just as I have a dozen times every day since, and a terrible sadness punches me in the heart. Wilson has vanished with no sign. I’ve combed the neighborhood, walked the woods behind my house, even looked in the storm sewers. It’s as if Donny Wharton spirited him away, one last fuck you from beyond the grave.
I sit there for a few moments, letting the sadness wash over me, and when it recedes a little I pick up the remote and continue watching the movie, although now it’s not distracting me as much as it was before.
DETECTIVES PANKO AND Klingman look dour when I arrive for our meeting downtown, but I’m curiously unconcerned. Maybe escaping death at the hands of Donny Wharton has made me feel invulnerable. Or maybe I’m just done feeling anxious about something I know I didn’t do. Johnny Shaw sits next to me in his gray seersucker suit but doesn’t say much other than to restate my constitutional right to have a lawyer present.
Panko and Klingman both hammer away at me about talking to Bridges at the monastery and then my online meeting with Gardner. Of course, they especially want to hear about Donny. I rest my injured hand, wrapped in gauze and an Ace bandage, on the table between us like a piece of evidence. We go over Bridges and Gardner and Donny again and again, and I tell the truth about everything except Marisa’s phone and how Caesar really hit Donny in the back of the head, not me. It’s essentially a long oral quiz, and just as boring.
The only interesting bit comes near the end of our interview, when Klingman stretches and grudgingly asks me if I’d like some coffee. When I decline, he grunts. “What I’m still surprised by,” he says, “is how you knew to talk to Gardner and Bridges in the first place.”
“Marisa mentioned their names at some point,” I say. “I put two and two together.”
Panko raises an eyebrow. “That’s some good math.”
I shrug. “Google is a fabulous thing.”
I know at this point, based on what Caesar said before, that the police must have access to Marisa’s phone records and have in all likelihood read her texts to me. Once again I am thankful that I never replied to her.
“It’s a funny thing,” Panko says, looking at me. “We never did find Marisa’s phone.”
I say nothing. Johnny Shaw looks like he’s taking a nap.
“Can’t locate it through apps or cell towers, either,” Panko continues. “My guess is somebody destroyed it.”
I look straight back at
