11/22/63

I peered through the hedge into the backyard. Beyond it, a woman passed the kitchen window and was gone. In casa Dunning, dinner was served. Would they be having dessert? Jell-O with Dream Whip? Ritz cracker pie? I thought not. Who needs dessert on Halloween night? “What I’m saying is that he killed them. Isn’t that what you think?”

“Yeah…” He looked both taken aback and suspicious. I think obsessives always look that way when they hear the things that have kept them up long nights not just articulated but corroborated. It has to be a trick, they think. Only this was no trick. And it certainly wasn’t a treat.

I said, “Dunning was what, twenty-two? Whole life ahead of him. He must have been thinking, ‘Well, I did an awful thing here, but I can clean it up. We’re out in the woods, nearest neighbors a mile away… ’ Were they a mile away, Turcotte?”

“At least.” He said it grudgingly. One hand was massaging the base of his throat. The bayonet had sagged. Grabbing it with my right hand would have been simple, and grabbing the revolver out of his belt with the other wouldn’t have been out of the question, but I didn’t want to. I thought the bug would take care of Mr. Bill Turcotte. I really thought it would be that simple. You see how easy it is to forget the obduracy of the past?

“So he took the bodies out in the woods and buried them and said they’d run off. There couldn’t have been much of an investigation.”

Turcotte turned his head and spat. “He come from a good old Derry fambly. Mine come down from the Saint John Valley in a rusty ole pickup truck when I was ten n Clara was eight. Just on parle trash. What do you think?”

I thought it was another case of Derry being Derry — that’s what I thought. And while I understood Turcotte’s love and sympathized with his loss, he was talking about an old crime. It was the one that was scheduled to happen in less than two hours that concerned me.

“You set me up with Frati, didn’t you?” This was now obvious, but still disappointing. I’d thought the guy was just being friendly, passing on a little local gossip over beer and Lobster Pickin’s. Wrong. “Pal of yours?”

Turcotte smiled, but it looked more like a grimace. “Me friends with a rich kike pawnbroker? That’s a laugh. You want to hear a little story?”

I took another peek at my watch and saw I still had some time to spare. While Turcotte was talking, that old stomach virus would be hard at work. The first time he bent over to puke, I intended to pounce.

“Why not?”

“Me, Dunning, and Chaz Frati are all the same age — forty-two. You believe that?”

“Sure.” But Turcotte, who had lived hard (and was now getting sick, little as he wanted to admit it), looked ten years older than either of them.

“When we was all seniors at the old Consolidated, I was assistant manager of the football team. Tiger Bill, they called me — ain’t that cute? I tried out for the team when I was a freshman and then again when I was a sophomore, but I got cut both times. Too skinny for the line, too slow for the backfield. Story of my fuckin life, mister. But I loved the game, and I couldn’t afford the dime to buy a ticket — my fambly didn’t have nothin—so I took on bein assistant manager. Nice name, but do you know what it means?”

Sure I did. In my Jake Epping life, I wasn’t Mr. Real Estate but Mr. High School, and some things don’t change. “You were the waterboy.”

“Yeah, I brought em water. And held the puke-bucket if someone got sick after runnin laps on a hot day or took a helmet in the nuts. Also the guy who stayed late to pick up all their crud on the field and fished their shit-stained jocks off the shower room floor.”

He grimaced. I imagined his stomach turning into a yacht on a stormy sea. Up she goes, mateys… then the corkscrew plunge.

“So one day in September or October of ’34, I’m out there after practice all on my lonesome, pickin up dropped pads and elastic bandages and all the other stuff they used to leave behind, puttin it all in my wheelie-basket, and what do I see but Chaz Frati tear-assin across the football field, droppin his books behind him. A bunch of boys was chasin him and—Christ, what was that?”

He stared around, eyes bulging in his pale face. Once again I maybe could have grabbed the pistol, and the bayonet for sure, but I didn’t. His hand was rubbing his chest again. Not his stomach, but his chest. That probably should have told me something, but I had too much on my mind. His story was not the least of it. That’s the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the least opportune moments.

“Relax, Turcotte. It’s just kids shooting off firecrackers. Halloween, remember?”

“I don’t feel so good. Maybe you’re right about that bug.”

If he thought he might be getting sick enough to be incapacitated, he might do something rash. “Never mind the bug just now. Tell me about Frati.”