“I’D LIKE TO DROP IN on Gary Merker’s mother,” I told Cherry as we walked back to his pickup.
“She’s a treat and a half,” Cherry said. “You might want to go in and talk to her alone. I don’t think she’s very fond of me.”
I glanced over at Cherry as he hit his remote key and unlocked his truck. “And that would be why?”
Cherry opened his door and waited till I had the passenger side open and was getting in before he said, “This would be, like, ten years ago, I guess. I had to arrest him once, at home. Hauled his ass out of the kitchen just as he was about to sit down to his momma’s lasagna. Stolen cars or something. Guy’s eating with one hand, picking his nose with the other. Anyway, he kicks up a fuss as I’m taking him through the living room, and I have to shove him up against the wall, and his forehead, it kind of makes a hole.”
“In the drywall?”
“Yeah. Not a huge one, you know, maybe like a good-sized yam. Like that. He was okay, though. Just the wall that looked like shit.”
We drove about ten minutes and Cherry slowed in front of a small, one-story white house, the only one with an empty garbage can out front, like Mrs. Merker never got around to bringing it in after trash pickup. The house, which looked to have been built sixty or more years ago, sagged in the middle. The streetlights were bright enough to reveal shingles that had curled, and rot had settled into the boards around the windows.
“There a Mr. Merker?” I asked.
“Naw. Run off when Gary was a little guy. Must have known what the little shit would grow up to be, figured get out while the getting was good. No father-son picnics for those two. See if she’s patched the wall. As you go in, it would be on the right side.” He smiled, eager to know.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll park a ways down the street,” Cherry said. “You have fun now.”
I got out of the car, and had only taken a step when my cell phone rang. I reached for it, flipped it open, and saw my home number displayed.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hi, Dad.” Angie. “How’s it going?”
“Okay,” I said. “Finding out some things. How’s it going there?”
Angie didn’t speak for a moment. “Mom cries.”
I swallowed. “Does she say anything?”
“Nothing. Not to me or Paul. She goes into the bedroom, figures we can’t hear her, but I stood outside the door, and she was crying.”
“Is she there? Can I talk to her?”
“She went out. She said she had to go to the mall or something, but I think she’s probably just driving around. Which, actually, sort of sucks, because I wanted the car tonight. I think she’s scared, Dad.”
“Scared?”
“Yeah, like, about a whole bunch of things. I think she’s worried about you, about what you might be getting mixed up in, and she’s scared her job is falling apart, and I think she’s scared that you guys are headed for the dumper.”
I felt a lump in my throat. “I don’t want that to happen.”
“Yeah, well, like, neither do I. And I don’t think Paul’d be all that crazy about it either.”
“How is Paul?”
“He’s okay, I guess. That reminds me, somethin’ kind of weird. This woman came to the door, like, she could have been a football player or something. And there’s a car in the drive, there’s another one exactly like her behind the wheel, and this really ugly woman in the passenger seat.”
Who the hell would that be? Not Mrs. Gorkin and her daughters?
“Anyway, the one that came to the door, she asks is Paul there, and I say no, because he wasn’t, right? And so she hands me this envelope, has a hundred bucks in it, and she says, ‘This is for work,’ well, actually, she says, ‘Dis iz for verk.’ She has this kind of accent, you know?”
“Okay.”
“She tells me to give it to Paul, that he should remember they did the right thing. These were the burger ladies, right?”
“Yeah.” I felt cold, standing outside Mrs. Merker’s house. “She didn’t threaten you or anything, or say anything about Paul?”
“No, nothing like that. Well, except, she said, tell Paul, he was wrong about the freezer. That the meat was okay.”
I breathed some cool night air in through my nose. “Honey, if she ever shows up again, or there’s any trouble, call the police. Or Lawrence. His number’s in my book.”
“Okay. When are you coming home?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to stay in Canborough overnight, then head on to the Groverton area in the morning. Maybe tomorrow night, I’ll be back.”
“Okay. Be careful?”
“I will, honey.” I thought a moment, and said, “Tell your mother, when she comes home, that I love her.”
“You tell her, Dad,” Angie said. “Bye.”
I closed the phone, slipped it back into my jacket, and collected my thoughts before completing my journey to Mrs. Merker’s door.
I knocked three times. Old flyers advertising sales long since past were littered about the shrubs. There was a dim light, probably from a television, visible through the front door blinds.
I heard a bolt slide back, then the door opened six inches. A wizened old woman, slightly hunched over, peered through the opening over her smudged reading glasses. “Fuck you want?” she asked.
“Mrs. Merker?” I said.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I don’t suppose Gary’s around, is he?” I was pretty confident that he wasn’t, that this was a good way to break the ice with his mother, but suddenly I felt a wave of panic, that maybe he might actually be there. I didn’t feel I was quite ready to speak one-to-one with him yet.
“He hasn’t fucking lived here in years,” his mother said. “What you want him for?”
“Well,” I said, realizing that I was making this up as I went along, “I was hoping to get a message to him.”
“A message? What fucking message?”
“Could I come in just for a moment? I’m very sorry to bother you, to drop by unannounced this way.” Like maybe, if I’d given her a call, she’d have had a chance to put on a pot of tea for me. Maybe make some scones.
She opened the door wider, and I realized I’d have had to give her a lot of notice if she’d wanted to pick up a bit before company arrived. The room could have been a newspaper-recycling depot. Yellowing papers and magazines were piled high on nearly every available surface, even on the plaid couch. There was a spot opened up, at the end, where Mrs. Merker must have been sitting to watch the television, which was tuned in to an old episode of Fear Factor.
“I love it when they eat fucking bugs!” she cackled.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Those are the best.”
She had her back to me and was headed for what I guessed was the kitchen. “I’ll be back in a second. I was just going for a cracker when you knocked.”
“Sure,” I said.
As she disappeared into the kitchen I glanced at the right wall. About halfway along, there was a large, garish painting of a seaside, in a thick gold frame. It was the kind of art you saw sold out of vans at major metropolitan intersections. Tentatively, I took hold of the bottom corner and tipped the painting away from the wall, peered underneath, and saw the hole in the drywall.
“You a friend of Gary?” she said from the kitchen.
“Well, not real close, but, you know,” I said, letting the picture settle back against the wall.
She reappeared with a red box of saltines, her blue-veined hand rooting through the cellophane to get hold of one. She took one out, bit off half of it. “I like crackers,” she said. She chewed a few times, crumbs spilling out from the corner of her mouth. “These are pretty fucking stale.” She tossed the other half in, chewed.
“Have you heard from Gary lately?” I asked.
“Oh, talked to him a few days ago,” she said.
“How’s he doing? He get back up this way much?”
“Sometimes, yeah, the little fucker. He does a lot of important business, of course. He was in Chicago not long ago, he was telling me.”
“Love Chicago,” I said.
“So what you say your name was?” Mrs. Merker asked, squinting in my general direction.
“Zack,” I said. “He probably never mentioned me.”
She was thinking. “I think he mighta. You used to hang out at the Kickstart?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was probably me.”
“Well, he’s not here.”
“What’s he up to?”
“Like I say, he’s a businessman. Doesn’t run that hotel anymore, doesn’t hang out with those motorcycle friends of his, ’cept for Leo, that dumb, pitiful son of a bitch.”
“Yeah, Leo,” I said. “Edgars.”
“I guess Gary missed having a little brother, so he adopted Leo. When they was handing out brains, that boy was out getting a sandwich.”
“Does he keep in touch with the old gang, the customers?”
Mrs. Merker reached into the box for another cracker, shrugged. “Not too much. One called here the other day, though, wanting to pass on a message.”
“Oh yeah? Who was that?”
Mrs. Merker was swallowing some cracker and winced. She coughed, tried to clear her throat. “Fucking dry cracker,” she muttered, and turned to go back into the kitchen. I listened to the familiar pish! of a beer can opening. A moment later she was back in the doorway, tipping back a Bud.
“What?” she asked.
“You say someone called a few days ago for Gary?”
She nodded, took another sip. “Did you want anything?”
I thought she meant a beer, and shook my head no, I was good.
“No, I mean, why’d you come here?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’d heard, one of the guys was saying, that there was this girl from the Kickstart, that Gary was always wondering what happened to her, and if we ever heard anything, we should give him a shout, or get in touch with you, and you could pass it on.”
“This about that cunt?” Mrs. Merker said. “Candy?”
I tried to keep the surprise off my face. “Actually, yeah, I think so,” I said.
“That’s what that other boy called about,” she said. “He called about that cunt too.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Said to tell Gary he thought he knew where she was.”
“No kidding?” I said. “Where was that?”
“Shit,” said Mrs. Merker. “I wrote it down somewhere.” She looked about the room. “I think I wrote it on a piece of newspaper.”
Terrific.
Of course, I had a pretty good hunch what this caller had said. But if the answer was, indeed, Oakwood, it would mean that things were starting to fall together.
Mrs. Merker put beer and crackers on top of a newspaper pile and began wandering the living room, peering at the white edges of various newspaper stacks. “I scribbled it down someplace, so I could tell Gary when he called. He calls me every couple of days. He don’t get home much, but he cares about his mother. I hope you call your mother regular.”
I smiled sadly to myself. “I would if I could,” I said. “But I’m in touch with my dad more these days.”
Mrs. Merker scoffed at that. “Gary’s fucking father, I hope the son of a bitch is dead someplace and has been for a long time. He was a no-good cocksucking bast-Hang on, here it is, I think.” She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “Yeah, this friend phoned and said to tell Gary that cunt was in Oakwood.”
“Oh yeah,” I said.
“I guess he lives down that way, saw her picture in the paper, remembered Gary was looking for her.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Guess I made this trip here for nothing. I was going to pass on the same information.”
“No harm done,” she said, taking a seat on the small clear spot on the couch. She pointed to the television. “That crickets they’re eating?”
I looked. “Maybe.” She cackled. I asked, “So what’s Gary been looking for Candace for, anyway? He kind of got a thing for her?”
She let out a laugh. “Ha! I don’t think he’ll be dipping his dick in that pussy!”
“Then why does he want to find her?”
“Well, if some bitch stole something from you, wouldn’t you want it back?” She looked at me like I was some sort of an idiot.
“So that’s why he wants to find her?” I said. “Because she stole something? Not because, I don’t know, for revenge?”
“Revenge?” The old woman cocked her head at an odd angle. “I suppose. If you stole something from me, I guess I’d want revenge. That what you gettin’ at?”
“I was just thinking back to that time. When Gary’s three friends got shot.”
“Oh, that,” she said, and waved dismissively. “He got over that. Only real friend Gary’s ever had is that retard Leo.” She turned her attention to the TV, where contestants were working up the nerve to swallow tiny wiggling things. “For fifty thousand dollars, I’d put anything in my mouth,” she said, and laughed.
She barely noticed as I slipped out the front door and walked down the sidewalk to Cherry’s truck. I felt, in some small measure, slightly relieved about what I’d learned.
“Well?” Cherry said as I pulled the door shut.
“Someone, some old friend of Merker’s, called his mom, told her to tell her son that this woman he’d been looking for, that her picture had turned up in the newspaper in Oakwood. So he knew where she was, where to look for her. And, I’m just guessing here, he ran into Martin Benson by mistake, and ended up killing him, maybe trying to get some info out of him about Trixie, or Candace, or whoever the hell she really is.”
Cherry waved his hand impatiently. “I don’t mean that shit,” he said. “Is the hole still in the wall?”
I paused. “Yes,” I said.
Cherry banged his fist on the steering wheel and let out a whoop. “Fucking awesome,” he said.