No Regrets, Coyote Read online

  I was aware of my antipathy toward Dad, but I didn’t know where it was coming from. Maybe the autumnal tone of the portrait was depressing me. Then I realized Chafin Halliday reminded me of my cousin Archie Lambert, whom I have no taste for. Didn’t make any sense that I should transfer my hostility for Archie to the late Mr. Halliday, of course. Archie was and remained a bully and a selfish lout who had never said a pleasant word to me in his life. One time when we were eight or nine, Archie stood on my head in a wading pool and would certainly have drowned me if my aunt Roxy hadn’t pulled him off. Archie’s a high school principal these days somewhere in Maryland.

  I lifted the picture off its hook, carried it to the living room, and set it on the table. I sat and tried to imagine the family’s life in this tidy and austere house. The boys are sitting beside each other at the table wearing their matching blue pajamas, eating quietly, and stealing the occasional glimpse at Mom and Dad. Mrs. Halliday dabs at her lips with a paper napkin and then wipes the egg yolk off the edge of her plate. Mr. Halliday chews his food vehemently, rolling his tongue along his gums, sucking his teeth, looking at no one. He grips a knife in one hand, a fork, tines down, in the other. The girl, in pink, kneels on her chair and sings to herself as she arranges her food on the plate so that the fried egg does not touch the ham or the buttered toast and is oblivious to the tension in the room that the rest of them feel. Something was said in the darkness the night before, something that an apology will not expunge. The phone rings. No one moves. The boys stare at their plates. The girl sings about a man who jumps off a roof with a cat in his arms and lands on his feet.

  I thought about Halliday’s vanishing right hand in the portrait, wondered why he had let it drop, what it might be up to and what he might have been up to in the life he lived outside this house. I suspected that family life mattered to him only to the extent that it represented a simulacrum of affable domesticity and the perception of order and decorum. He was regulated in his domestic life so that he could be violent and wild in his secret life. But what was that secret, and had it allowed this horror to visit the innocents at home?

  Carlos and I stood in the sloping driveway in the Halliday front yard. Neighbors in robes and slippers gave on-camera interviews to newscasters. “You never think something like this can happen in your own neighborhood.” “A nice, quiet family.” “My boy Alex played with their kids.” “We called them the Happy Hallidays.” A hexagonal green and white sign by the lantana said the house was protected by Everglades Home Security. On the roof of the house, an inflatable Santa Claus sat in his sleigh and waved to us. Carlos said, “What do you think?”

  I turned away from the flashing lights of the police cruisers. “I think Mr. Halliday lived his real life somewhere else.”

  “Do you think he did this?”

  “I can’t say, but let’s suppose he didn’t. What if someone wants us to think that he did?”

  “Whoever that was did a convincing job.”

  “It’s easier to comprehend insanity than malevolence, I suppose.”

  “It is if you’re not a cop.” Carlos took out a small pump bottle of Purell and squirted some in his hand and then in mine. “And maybe it is what it seems to be.”

  “But nothing ever is.”

  “Who would want to kill the children?”

  “Maybe it was random.”

  “You’re not making sense, Coyote. Do you think our Mr. Halliday could have done it?”

  “Why would a man go through all of this gift-giving, all this holiday cheer, why would he buy lottery tickets, if he were planning to slaughter his family?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t planned.”

  Three people with filtered respirators, blue hazmat suits, and yellow chem-spill booties ducked under the police lines. Carlos said, “What the hell is this?” and yelled, “Sully, who called Mop ’n’ Glow?” He held up his hand and asked the cleanup crew what they thought they were doing.

  One of them said, “What we were told to do.”

  “Wait right here till I get the okay. What’s the rush?” He asked Sully to check on the cleanup with Lieutenant Romano.

  I said, “Find out who had the doctor’s appointment on the ninth.”

  Carlos said, “Brianna’s annual checkup.”

  “Who’s Pino?”

  “Working on that.”

  “The officer inside …”

  “Which one?”

  “The steroid case.”

  “I didn’t hear that.” He looked back at the house. “You mean Officer Shanks.”

  “Officer Shanks stole a watch.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s wearing two.”

  “I’ll talk to him.” Carlos read a text message on his phone. “So what are your Christmas plans?”

  “Going to Venise’s.”

  “She taking her meds?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Inez’s not going to be happy about this. Another holiday ruined.”

  “If I could get a look at some home movies or a photo album or something, it might help. Didn’t see any.”

  Officer Shanks called to Carlos to come inside. I said good night and shouldered my way through the crowd. A fiftyish reporter with preposterously red hair and cat’s-eye glasses grabbed my arm, asked my name, and wrote it down. She handed me her business card: Perdita Curry, True-Crime Novels. Could it be? I thought. Factual and made-up at the same time? “I’d like to talk to you,” she said.

  “That makes one of us.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “So you aim to see that justice is done, Ms. Curry?”

  “I could pretend to want that if it makes you happy, but, actually, I just know a good story when I smell one.”

  At home I switched on the floor lamp in the living room and listened to my voice mail while I poured myself a snifter of cognac. My sister, Venise, said she needed me to pick up a tube of buttermilk biscuits for the dinner tomorrow, and I wondered where I’d find a store open on Christmas morning. “Make that three tubes,” she said. “And a can of Johnson’s baby powder.” Bay called to say that he and Marlena were drinking rum runners at Nitti’s and feeding french fries to the catfish. My client Wayne Vanderhyde said he desperately needed to see me on the twenty-sixth, as early as possible. I called him back and said we’d have to make it Monday the twenty-eighth, but if he needed me before that, he could call. I sat in my reading chair and read through my script.The canard is dry, the jambon stringy, the béarnaise is thin, the quiche is runny, the lapin gristled, the boeuf is “toeuf,” the poisson I don’t even want to talk about. I was playing the waiter in the Eden Playhouse production of Les Deux Gamines. I said, My dream is to be an electrician. But right now I’m stuck in my father’s dream. I used to sit here and rehearse with my cat on my lap, but Satchel died on Columbus Day of lymphoma. It may have been the saddest day of my life. Dr. Rafferty and I sat in Room 5 at the Eden Animal Hospital, crying and patting little Satchel, and I scratched his orange head and said we should get this over with. I watched her inject the solution and saw Satchel deflate when the barbiturate reached the bloodstream. I’d spent $5,000 on his hospital care and medications and would have spent $5,000 more. I still kept his empty cat bowl by the fridge and his photo on my desk. I was trying to decide if I should get another cat. But not a marmalade one. Pretty soon I’d be growing despondent, remembering Christmases past, so I poured myself another cognac. I put on some Mozart clarinet quintets. And, yes, I remembered Christmases past.

  My mother, Biruté Paulauskaitė, was born in Lithuania. Her parents, her brother, Vytautas, and several friends from the local crafts school, along with seventy other political prisoners, were tortured and killed by the NKVD (the Soviet Secret Police) and the retreating Red Army in a forest near Telšiai in June 1941. She watched the massacre from the fortunate cover of juniper bushes twenty yards away in a stand of birches. And that is all she ever told us children about that day. She did tell us
that the man who oversaw the slaughter, Nachman Dushanski, was alive and well and living in the USSR. When he fled to Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union, an arrest warrant was issued, and Lithuania requested his extradition. It was denied. Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation. My mother could not understand how any decent human being, how any supposedly freedom-loving country, how the Jews of all people, could allow this monster to go unpunished. Dushanski escaped justice and died a free man in Tel Aviv in 2008, two years after my mother swallowed a lethal dose of Fentanyl.

  Biruté loved my father, Myles, and often spoke with him in hushed tones behind the closed door of their bedroom. But she didn’t talk much to her children. She spent Christmases alone in her room with her photographs while the rest of us tried to have a festive time in the living room. What I remembered best about Mom, besides her silence, was her ratty chenille bathrobe and her pink Dearfoam slippers. Whenever she thought I was lying, she’d tell me to stick out my tongue, said that if I was lying, it would be black. It was always black, even those times I was sure I was telling the truth. Then she’d wash my mouth out with Lifebuoy soap or spoon horseradish on my tongue and make me swallow. Cameron called her The Beast. Cameron, my identical twin, who looked exactly like me, people said, but was somehow more handsome, who always knew what I was thinking and could make me laugh at the drop of a hat, who was exuberant where I was languid, was brilliant where I was indistinct, who was quick-witted, resourceful, and blessed with talents, and who fell into a life of drug addiction, robbed my parents blind, and died in Room 201 at the Buccaneer’s Inn here in Melancholy, beaten to death by his playmates with a studded mace and a stone war club when we were thirty-four.

  I wasn’t fooling myself: I wouldn’t sleep through the night. But I set the alarm for seven-thirty just in case, lay down on the couch, closed my eyes, and I heard all this applause and looked up to find myself a contestant on a game show, Two Lies and a Truth, hosted by Perdita Curry. I was looking good—I’m always young in my dreams—in a stylish charcoal-gray suit I didn’t remember ever owning. The three masked Halliday children were telling me three versions of what really happened in their home, and when I chose Child #1 as the truth teller, he took off his mask, and it was Cameron, and the joke was on me, and the audience laughed like crazy, and the phone rang, and it was Pino calling with vital information. I said, Pino who? He said, Noir. And I said, Are you trying to be funny? And he said to meet him at Mélange à Trois at noon, and I agreed and hung up, but then I remembered the family Christmas dinner, so I hurried to call him back, and I checked caller ID, but I got his Social Security number, and I scrolled down a file of other Social Security numbers, and I figured there had to be a button to push to reset the ID numbers to Phone, not Social, but if there was, I didn’t know it. And then I woke up, and the cell phone was in my hand, and I thought I should call Carlos and tell him to meet Pino, but I saw by the clock it was 2:44, and I realized I’d dreamed the Pino call anyway. I checked the recent calls on my cell to be sure, and saw that I had a text message from my ex-wife, Georgia—her annual greet-and-gloat: “Merry Christmas from Barbados, Georgia, Tripp, and the kids.”

  2

  The phone rang at six A.M. I let the machine pick up and tried to hold on to the dream I was having about being alone at a party where there’s an Italian greyhound sitting in the middle of the room wearing an aluminum-foil costume. Bay said he wanted to be the first one to wish me a Merry Christmas, and then he and Marlena sang the first verse of “Blue Christmas,” and then he told me that Marlena was making cozonac for breakfast. “Supposed to be better than sex,” he said. He hung up, and I stared at the revolving ceiling fan and thought about this elderly man I’d seen at the airport a month ago. He was frail, ashen, and slumped in his wheelchair in the preboarding area at Gate C-9. His wife—she stood beside him reading a chunky paperback—had draped her handbag and several strapped carry-ons around his neck. I expected to see alarm or consternation, at least, on his face, resentment, maybe, for being treated like a packhorse. What I saw, however, was equanimity.

  The phone rang. My father asked me where I was. “I’ve been waiting outside for forty-five minutes.”

  I said, “Dad, I told you eleven o’clock, not seven. I’ll be there at nine. You have any tubes of biscuits over there?”

  “You ever listen to yourself?”

  Dr. Milton Hamburger had diagnosed Dad with Alzheimer’s. Dad said he was merely closing up shop. At least he hadn’t yet lost his ability to make a metaphor. And he did have his lucid moments. He was in and out of it, however, and he was hard to read. His expressions were often without nuance or blend. He could remember what he had for breakfast on June 15, 1944, in Guam (lemon gumdrop candy, two sugar cookies), but not that he just turned on the gas stove without lighting the pilot. Which was why I had to move him into an all-electric assisted-living facility, Almost Home at Sylvan Gardens.

  Dad and I were at the Buy-N-Bye on Palm—the A-rab store, he called it—when Venise rang my cell and wanted to know where the hell we were. I stepped outside and stood beside the MIDLEAST food sign in the window. I pointed out it was only ten and told her I’d managed to snag the last two cans of buttermilk biscuits in Everglades County and the baby powder. I thought she’d be pleased. She told me Oliver could inhale a can of biscuits by himself. Oliver Withstanley’s her husband. I peeked in the window and saw Dad doing his last-minute Christmas shopping—lottery tickets and phone cards for everyone. I said, “Merry Christmas, Venise.”

  She said, “We need to get the food in the oven.”

  “No, we don’t,” I said. “I’m bringing a HoneyBaked ham. Slice and serve.”

  “You idiot! Ham is for Easter. Goose is for Christmas. Or turkey. Or duck.”

  “But we all love ham, Venise.”

  She screamed, “I will not eat cold meat on Christmas!”

  A lanky old man on a squat, fenderless bicycle rode by. He wore a Santa hat and waved hello. I said, “I want you to make yourself a drink, Venise. Turn on some Christmas carols and relax. I’ll be there in a jiffy, and I’ll take care of everything.”

  When we arrived, Oliver was still in his gray flannel pajamas. He snatched the baby powder from the plastic sack, thanked me, and excused himself. Venise put the ham on a cookie sheet and slipped it into the oven. I explained that the heat would only dry the ham out. She told me I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. The first floor of Venise’s house is a large open area, the kitchen separated from the dining area by a counter. The living room begins with the couch and carpet. The couch, the La-Z-Boy, and the upholstered armchair face a flat-screen TV set on a glass coffee table. Travertine-tile floor and rose-colored walls. Venise had covered the living room couch with clear, fitted vinyl, something she did whenever Dad visited. He’d had accidents in the past. I sat him down on the couch and turned off the TV.

  Venise said, “Turn that back on. I was watching Bad Santa.”

  I said maybe we could put on some holiday music.

  “I said turn it back on!”

  I did. Dad took a nickel from his shirt pocket and scratched away at a losing lotto ticket. He dropped the ticket on the end table. “That one was yours,” he said.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “Gimme gadabber and a bing banger.”

  “How about a beer?”

  “And a VO chaser.”

  “You got it.”

  Venise and Oliver lived in the house he grew up in. His bedroom had remained exactly as it was on the day he left home for college, which was not so much different than it had been when he was in elementary school. Twin bunk beds, framed photos of Hopalong Cassidy, Mary Hartline, and Albert Einstein on the wall, along with a dartboard and a paint-by-number portrait of a collie. His toys were all in their original boxes and stacked neatly on his bookcase. The same pine dresser and mirror, the same Roy Rogers alarm clock, and the same lamp with cattle brands on the shade. Oliver slept in his bedroom. Ve
nise slept across the hall in Oliver’s parents’ old bedroom, which was okay with her because, she told me, Oliver’s navel, his reproductive apparatus, and his armpits smelled all rank and yeasty (no, I told her, that didn’t seem typical), and was okay with Oliver because Venise had sleep apnea, snored like an asthmatic horse, and suffered from night terrors. If she was startled awake by dreams, noise, or touch, she’d flail about and scream. I should tell you that Venise weighed three hundred and some pounds. She’d had her stomach stapled two years earlier, but seemed to eat as much as ever. I wasn’t sure how that was even possible unless the staples had lost their purchase. Oliver ate plenty but managed to stay fairly slim, and that drove Venise wild.

  The doorbell rang. Venise and Oliver had invited his cousin Patience Firestone to dinner as, I suspected, a possible romantic interest for me. Venise was unsettled by my living alone. She considered solitude egotistical and unnatural. Patience was petite and blue-eyed. Her straight black hair was cut in bangs and streaked with gray. She wore a white sleeveless blouse with the collar turned up, a turquoise skirt, black socks, and white running shoes. Her right arm was tattooed wrist to shoulder in an intricate Islamic geometric pattern of stars and diamonds. I took the casserole dish from her and set it on the table. We shook hands and introduced ourselves. Patience reminded me that we’d met at Venise and Oliver’s wedding. She said, “You seemed very depressed, as I remember.” She gave Venise a big hug and a bouquet of white roses. Patience said sure, she’d love a Bloody Mary, so I made us two. I introduced her to Dad, who said that at his assisted living facility there were lots of patients. He handed her a lotto ticket and a nickel. Another loser.