No Regrets, Coyote

  NO

  REGRETS,

  COYOTE

  John Dufresne

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK • LONDON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

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  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

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  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Also by John Dufresne

  1

  My friend Bay Lettique, a sleight-of-hand man, does close-up magic. You can shuffle a deck of playing cards, spread them facedown on the table, and he’ll pick them up in order, ace to king, by suit or by rank, your choice. He once asked me to think of a card—not to mention it, just to picture it—and he not only identified the card, he did it by asking me to open my wallet and pull out the five-dollar bill that had the rank and suit of the card written on Lincoln’s shirt collar in red ink. Nine of diamonds. He can make a parakeet fly from his iPhone to your iPhone and from your iPhone to his shoulder. I’ve seen him slice a banana in half with a card he threw from ten feet away. At least I think I saw it. Bay says close-up works this way: I tell you I’m going to lie to you, and then I lie to you, and you believe it. Because you want to believe.

  Bay used to run an illegal poker game out of a rented apartment at the Cypress Ocean Club here in Melancholy and would ask me from time to time to sit in on the game whenever he suspected someone was cheating. Could I tell him who it was? Which really meant could I corroborate his hunch. Usually I could, but too often the cheat was an off-duty Everglades Sheriff’s Office deputy or an Eden Police Department officer, which meant Bay would have to call the sheriff and make a donation to the Police Benevolent Association in order to make the cop go away without Bay himself getting busted and shut down in the process.

  Now that the Tequesta Tribe has opened the Silver Palace Casino, Bay spends most nights in their poker room separating tourists and senior citizens from their money. When I remind him that those old folks might be squandering their pensions, he says he, too, wishes they wouldn’t be so reckless, but his job at the table is not to coddle them but to intimidate, infuriate, and devastate them. “I take their money or someone else does. There’s no room for sympathy in poker.” Bay is full of enthusiasms and contradictions. I worry about him. He says he can’t not be sitting at the poker table. I tell him that’s not healthy. It’s not even about the money, he says. It’s about what pumps the blood.

  Last Christmas Eve, Bay and I sat at a sidewalk table at the Universe Café on Dixie Boulevard in Eden, drinking the last of several holiday martinis. Bay performed some magic for our waitress, Marlena. He did Four Queens, Three Ways; Maltese Crosses; Ambitious Card; and Jack Under the Plate. Marlena told us she was from Bucharest and was about to be evicted from her room at the Dixiewood Motel because she’d fallen behind on her weekly rent, fallen behind because she scalded herself in the restaurant’s kitchen and had to go to the walk-in medical clinic on Main. The Universe covered the visit but not the Vicodin. She pulled up her sleeve to show us the angry red scar. Bay asked her if she was all set for pills. Truth was she could use a couple, she said. Bay lifted his napkin to reveal two pale yellow oval tablets. Percocets okay? he said. And then he wrote her a check for the past-due rent. Marlena kissed him and wept.

  When she went back to get our bill, Bay suggested that Marlena would be in need of cheering up later on. We can’t let her sit alone in a squalid motel room on Christmas Eve. This is America, for chrissakes! My cell phone played “Oye Como Va.” The call was from my friend Detective Sergeant Carlos O’Brien of the Eden Police Department, requesting my immediate services. He had a situation in the Lakes. Five bodies, one weapon, one suspect, much blood. “I need you here, Coyote. Now.” He gave me the address.

  I checked my watch. Eleven-fifteen. “Ten minutes,” I told him.

  I’m not a police officer. That evening I’d be a volunteer forensic consultant. Carlos would get my pro bono counsel, and I’d get some excitement in my unruffled life and a chance, perhaps, to see that justice was done. Sometimes I work for lawyers who are trying to empanel the appropriate jury for their clients. Sometimes I sit in my office and help my own clients shape their lives into stories, so that the lives finally make some sense. A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety. And that’s when I call myself a therapist. And that’s what it says on my business card: Wylie Melville, MSW, MFT, Family and Individual Therapy. Carlos used me, however, because I could read minds, even if those minds weren’t present. He said I read minds, but that’s not it, really. I read faces and furniture. I can look at a person, at his expressions, his gestures, his clothing, his home, and his possessions, and tell you what he thinks, if not always what he’s thinking. Carlos liked to call me an intuitionist. Bay said I’m cryptaesthetic. Dr. Cabrera at UM’s Cognitive Thinking Lab told me I have robust mirror neurons. I just look, I stare, I gaze, and I pay attention to what I see. I’m able to find essence in particulars, Dr. Cabrera said.

  Carlos told me that the neighbors heard what sounded like fireworks or like gunshots around seven o’clock that evening. Pop! And then pop!-pop!-pop! And then pop! All the neighbors came out to investigate, except the Hallidays, who lived … had lived here. Mr. Enzu Salazar from 723 across the street came over and rang the bell. And then he called 911. “We found this note on the kitchen table.” Carlos handed me a typed letter, and I tried to remember what I’d been doing at seven.

  To whom it may concern:

  To start off about this tragic story, my name is Chafin Halliday,my wife Krysia, my boys Brantley, 9, and Briely, 8, and my daughter, my precious angel, Brianna, 4. People have put obstacles in my way and no who they are. I am not insane. But this is no way to live like this. I have let my loved one’s down. I have failed at fathership. I had to die I deserved it but to love them like I do and to live without them is to hard to bare which is why we are dead and why we are together on the other side. I could not leave my babies with strangers.

  Your’s truly,

  Chafin R. Halliday

  My first thoughts were, Here is an arrogant and sentimental man who is either paranoid or under emotional siege, a man of simple and unexamined faith whose received values fit him like a comfortable old shirt, and here is his seemingly superfluous confession, but not his explanation or apology. He can’t spell or punctuate and is curiously formal—the impersonal salutation and that affected middle initial—but not particularly insightful. Which concerned readers did he imagine he was addressing? And why on earth would he type and not write a murder-suicide note? Why no signature above the name? And that disingenuous closing that ineffectually insinuates sincerity—truly, indeed. This is a person who may have read about letters in a business English class, which he must have flunked, but who had never previously written one.

  If you’re going to bother to leave a note, and you’re even going to type it up, if you’re going to take the time, wouldn’t you also take the opportunity to clarify the confounding events referred to? Instead, the writer of this note obscured rather than illuminated. He alluded to a story but omitted the first two acts. He called the killings a tragedy and not acts of senseless savagery and obscene cruelty. He muddied his motivation. He did not identify the alleged obstacles in his way or tell us who put them there. He did not explain why he thought h
e deserved to die or in just what way he had failed at fathership. And who uses the word fathership anyway? Hood not ship, right? Fathership sounds like the lead vessel in some intergalactic starfleet. Here’s how you write a proper suicide note:

  Dear A.

  As much as it hurts me to say this, I cannot join you on Saturday. When a guy doesn’t know what to say to his girlfriend anymore, then she is not his girlfriend anymore. I am leaving you the engagement ring so that every time you look at it you can think about what you stole from me.

  T.

  T. was a client of mine. Twenty-one when she jumped off the Cypress Avenue Bridge and hit the foredeck of a passing Bimini yacht.

  Carlos told me the CSI team would finish up shortly, and then I could poke around the house. The medical examiner had come and gone before Carlos had gotten here. The bodies were already at the morgue, which was fine with me. I asked Carlos what they’d found in the victims’ pockets.

  “The kids wore jammies; Mrs. Halliday was in a sweat suit without pockets. She did have a tissue crunched up in the sleeve of her sweatshirt. We found loose change and a wallet in Mr. Halliday’s slacks. Eighty-four bucks, all the bills in order from ones to twenties and all facing the same way. A man after my own heart. But no ID.”

  “What pocket was the wallet in?”

  “Good question.” Carlos turned to the officer dismantling a camera tripod. “Sully, which pocket was the wallet in?”

  “Back.”

  “Left or right?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Right, I guess.”

  I said, “You’re right-handed.”

  “I am.”

  “No ID?”

  “It was more a billfold than a wallet, really.”

  We were standing in the immaculate living room. Mexican tile floor, brown leather sofa, matching armchair and ottoman, a slate-topped coffee table on a sage-colored floral rug. On the coffee table a stone pitcher with a bouquet of red carnations and a chipped white enamel colander filled with artificial oranges. Over the sofa a framed print of a British sailing ship reaching port in a furious storm. No TV. No magazine rack. The room was a stage set. It was the first room you saw when you entered the house. So this was the Hallidays’ presentation self, as it were. This was who they wanted you to believe they were. Ordered, neat, handsome, tasteful, and well off, comfortable but not ostentatious.

  “Mrs. Halliday was shot in the back of the head by her husband as she was taking a batch of cookies out of the oven,” Carlos said. He led me to the windowless kitchen, where we watched a technician, kneeling by the faint chalk outline of the victim, scrape what I hoped was charred cookie dough off the wall of the oven with a putty knife. She slid her evidence into a plastic bag. On a bulletin board, someone had tacked a reminder to call Pino.

  “Then he walked to the den, where the kids were already opening their gifts. The TV was still blasting away in there when Officer Shanks arrived. The kids wouldn’t have heard that first gunshot. And then Dad shot his children one, two, three. They were blindfolded. I guess he told them he had a surprise for them, and they played along.”

  “How were they blindfolded?”

  “He tied linen napkins around their heads.”

  “Or someone did,” I said.

  “And then he ate the gun.” Carlos put his finger in his mouth and cocked his thumb. “Put a bullet through his soft palate and into his brain. Blood all over his right hand, his arm, on his sleeves. Looks like murder-suicide.”

  “Where are the napkins?”

  “At the lab. The door to the backyard was unlocked, but we went over the pool area with a fine-tooth comb—no footprints, no evidence anyone jumped the fence. The family was here alone.”

  “So why ask me what I think?”

  “Because you have an open mind, and maybe we missed something. Maybe you can convince me otherwise. And like you say, we always want to know why.”

  “You don’t think the killings could be drug-related?”

  “If they were, the victims would have been tortured and decapitated, and their heads would have been lined up on the mantel like bowling trophies. They would have flayed Chafin’s face and glued it to the lampshade.”

  Carlos showed me photos of the deceased on his iPhone. Mrs. Halliday sat on the floor, her back against a cabinet, and her head against the open oven door. A veil of blood from the exit wound obscured her features. She wore a green silicone Kermit the Frog oven mitt on her left hand. The killer must have eased her body off the oven door—with his foot, most likely. But why would he?

  The children’s blindfolds had been removed. Carlos said, “I’ve got pictures with the blindfolds on or off.”

  “These’ll do.”

  The three children lay faceup, shoulder to shoulder, the younger boy’s left arm out straight, a finger seeming to point to the Christmas tree. He died with what appeared to be a smile on his face and with his eyes half open. The girl looked to be lost in sleep. The spray of blood on the wall and carpet behind the older boy’s head was extensive, like maybe he’d bolted up in alarm as he took the bullet. Each child had a small, raw hole in the middle of the forehead.

  Chafin had been standing when the bullet tore through his skull and splattered blood and gray matter on the eggshell wall and on the popcorn ceiling. His body folded at the waist and dropped to his right. He landed face-first on the crèche. Blood spilled from his nose and mouth. Beside Chafin’s head, three plaster magi proffered gifts, and shepherds knelt before the now-decradled infant.

  The tech told us she was finished. There were a yellow saucepan and a blue teakettle on the gas range and a rack of cookies on the granite counter. Two or three missing. Would Dad have stopped to eat after the first fatal shot? Hungry cops? Four measuring spoons, each on its own hook, hung side by side on the wall like ascending musical notes. Black and white checkerboard tiles on the floor, white cabinets, stainless steel fridge. No children’s drawings on the fridge door. Then I remembered: At seven o’clock, when these five lives suddenly ended, I’d been on the phone with my father, reminding him who I was and telling him I’d pick him up at eleven in the morning. Yes, tomorrow. Christmas dinner at Venise’s. Your daughter.

  Carlos said, “Halliday owned a restaurant on the Boardwalk that caters to our French-Canadian snowbirds. La Mélange. You heard of it?”

  I had. “Poutine, Montreal smoked meat, guédille.”

  “They should call the place Heart Attack and have nurses waiting tables.”

  The tech snapped her suitcase shut and wished us a Merry Christmas as she left.

  Carlos said, “With the economy like it is, restaurants are going under left and right. Must be stressful. We’ll be checking on his finances, of course.”

  I said, “He wrote that note on a typewriter, it looks like.”

  “I’d say a Smith Corona portable, but it’s not in the house.”

  “Are you wearing patchouli?”

  “Who wears patchouli anymore?” Carlos told me he needed to talk to the press outside, and I should meet him out front when I finished.

  I went through the junk drawer. What I thought was a book of matches turned out to be a clever little notepad from Chef Remy’s. Twisties, pill splitter, birthday candles, a refrigerator lightbulb, assorted clasps, a meat thermometer, toothpicks, and packets of Lactaid chewables. I found the holiday Butterball turkey in the fridge and wondered what would happen to all this food. Someone must come and toss it all away. There were several plastic containers of take-away food from La Mélange. Multivitamins, Metamucil. There was a bowl of business cards on the counter by the Mixmaster. Truly Nolen, Maids to Order, Wok This Way, Style and Substance Salon, the Lawn Ranger. A new issue of Saveur (“French Bistro Cooking”) on the granite counter along with a stack of utility bills. A crucifix over the door and a calendar from Phuong Nam Market with December 9 circled and drs appt written at the date.

  There were two small steel desks in the boys’ room, two wheeled backpacks beneath th
e desks, bunk beds, a globe, a dresser, and a neatly organized closet. On the wall by the door hung a wanted poster of the boys wearing cowboy hats and villainous scowls. A $500 reward was offered for the pair who were “caught serving God with their whole heart,” although I assumed they were not sharing a heart. In Brianna’s room a three-foot stuffed unicorn standing on a Disney toy box stared out the window. I found a Bible and a pair of spongy purple earplugs in the drawer of Mrs. Halliday’s bedside table and a TV remote in Mr. Halliday’s. I turned the TV on. truTV: “Not reality. Actuality.” Tru as in not quite true. Chafin Halliday had a dark oak mission-style desk and matching chair in his office. On the desk, a banker’s lamp and a leather cup with four sharpened pencils, points up. In the desk drawer, a ballpoint pen and a pad of sticky notes. The walls were bare, the wastebasket empty except for a to-do list: Bank, PO, flash drive, those insoles, hot peanuts, hot peanuts, hot peanuts. Was the absence of evidence, evidence of Halliday’s absence in the home? Or was it meant to seem so?

  I peeked into the den in time to see a uniformed officer pull up his sleeve and admire his two watches—one with a gold band, the other a black sports watch with what looked like a clipped price tag still attached. I saw a small, unwrapped, and empty gift box under the Christmas tree. I said, “Excuse me.”

  He turned. “Who are you?”

  I told him.

  “Seen anything interesting?”

  “I have.”

  “I’ll get out of your way.”

  The Christmas tree was strung with garlands of popcorn and cranberries and draped with tinsel. Some of the children’s gifts were opened and sprayed with blood: a velvet-curtained puppet theater, a karaoke machine, snow skis, and video games (Killzone 2, WrestleMania, Country Justice: Revenge of the Rednecks). The Christmas stockings were hung on the mantel of the gas fireplace, lotto tickets sticking out the top of Mom’s. A studio portrait of the family hung on the paneled wall. A mottled brown backdrop matched Dad’s brown sport coat. Mom and the kids wear white sweaters, Dad a white turtleneck. He sits behind his wife, his visible arm at his side, his hand disappearing beneath the frame. Brantley stands behind Dad, his right hand clutching Dad’s right shoulder, as if he were keeping Dad from floating away. Briely’s left hand is tentatively placed on Mom’s left shoulder. Mom’s smile is bright and wide-eyed. Brianna’s in Mom’s lap and is the only person looking at what I expect is an assistant’s smiling face and not at the palm of the photographer’s raised hand.