11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  “Keep your voice down,” I said.

  He put my gun in his belt—exactly where I had imagined I’d put it, once I’d shoved through the hedge and into the Dunning backyard—then poked the bayonet toward my eyes. It took willpower to keep from flinching back. “Don’t you tell me what to—” He staggered on his feet. He rubbed first his stomach, then his chest, then the stubble-rough column of his neck, as if something were caught in there. I heard a click in his throat as he swallowed.

  “Mr. Turcotte? Are you all right?”

  “How do you know my name?” And then, without waiting for an answer: “It was Pete, wasn’t it? The bartender in the Sleepy. He told you.”

  “Yes. Now I’ve got a question for you. How long have you been following me? And why?”

  He grinned humorlessly, revealing a pair of missing teeth. “That’s two questions.”

  “Just answer them.”

  “You act like”—he winced again, swallowed again, and leaned against the back wall of the garage—“like you’re the one in charge.”

  I gauged Turcotte’s pallor and distress. Mr. Keene might be a bastard with a streak of sadism, but I thought that as a diagnostician he wasn’t too bad. After all, who’s more apt to know what’s going around than the local druggist? I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to need the rest of the Kaopectate, but Bill Turcotte might. Not to mention the continence pants, once that bug really went to work.

  This could be very good or very bad, I thought. But that was bullshit. There was nothing good about it.

  Never mind. Keep him talking. And once the puking starts—assuming it does before he cuts my throat or shoots me with my own gun—jump him.

  “Just tell me,” I said. “I think I have a right to know, since I haven’t done anything to you.”

  “It’s him you mean to do something to, that’s what I think. All that real estate stuff you’ve been spouting around town—so much crap. You came here looking for him.” He nodded in the direction of the house on the other side of the hedge. “I knew it the minute his name jumped out of your mouth.”

  “How could you? This town is full of Dunnings, you said so yourself.”

  “Yeah, but only one I care about.” He raised the hand holding the bayonet and wiped sweat off his brow with his sleeve. I think I could have taken him right then, but I was afraid the sound of a scuffle might attract attention. And if the gun went off, I’d probably be the one to take the bullet.

  Also, I was curious.

  “He must have done you a hell of a good turn somewhere along the way to turn you into his guardian angel,” I said.

  He voiced a humorless yap of a laugh. “That’s a hot one, bub, but in a way it’s true. I guess I am sort of his guardian angel. At least for now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s mine, Amberson. That son of a bitch killed my little sister, and if anyone puts a bullet in him … or a blade”—he brandished the bayonet in front of his pale, grim face—“it’s going to be me.”

  9

  I stared at him with my mouth open. Somewhere in the distance there was a rattle of pops as some Halloween miscreant set off a string of firecrackers. Kids were shouting their way up and down Witcham Street. But here it was just the two of us. Christy and her fellow alcoholics called themselves the Friends of Bill; we were the Enemies of Frank. A perfect team, you would say … except Bill “No Suspenders” Turcotte didn’t look like much of a team player.

  “You …” I stopped and shook my head. “Tell me.”

  “If you’re half as bright as you think you are, you should be able to put it together for yourself. Or didn’t Chazzy tell you enough?”

  At first that didn’t compute. Then it did. The little man with the mermaid on his forearm and the cheerful chipmunk face. Only that face hadn’t looked so cheerful when Frank Dunning had clapped him on the back and told him to keep his nose clean, because it was too long to get dirty. Before that, while Frank was still telling jokes at the Tracker brothers’ bullshit table at the back of The Lamplighter, Chaz Frati had filled me in about Dunning’s bad temper … which, thanks to the janitor’s essay, was no news to me. He got a girl pregnant. After a year or two, she collected the baby and scrammed.

  “Is somethin comin through on the radio waves, Commander Cody? Looks like it might be.”

  “Frank Dunning’s first wife was your sister.”

  “Well there. The man says the secret woid and wins a hunnert dollars.”

  “Mr. Frati said she took the baby and ran out on him. Because she got enough of him turning ugly when he drank.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he told you, and that’s what most people in town believe—what Chazzy believes, for all I know—but I know better. Clara n me was always close. Growin up it was me for her and her for me. You probably don’t know about a thing like that, you strike me as a mighty cold fish, but that’s how it was.”

  I thought about that one good year I’d had with Christy—six months before the marriage and six months after. “Not that cold. I know what you’re talking about.”

  He was rubbing at himself again, although I don’t think he was aware of it: belly to chest, chest to throat, back down to the chest again. His face was paler than ever. I wondered what he’d had for lunch, but didn’t think I’d have to wonder for long; soon I’d be able to see for myself.

  “Yeah? Then maybe you’d think it’s a little funny that she never wrote me after her n Mikey got settled somewhere. Not so much as a postcard. Me, I think it’s a lot more than funny. Because she woulda. She knew how I felt about her. And she knew how much I loved that kiddo. She was twenty and Mikey was sixteen months old when that joke-tellin cuntwipe reported em missin. That was the summer of ’38. She’d be forty now, and my nephew’d be twenty-one. Old enough to fuckin vote. And you want to tell me she’d never write a single line to the brother who kep Nosey Royce from stickin his wrinkled old meat inside her back when we was kids? Or to ask for a little money to help her get set up in Boston or New Haven or wherever? Mister, I would have—”

  He winced, made a little urk-ulp sound I was very familiar with, and staggered back against the garage wall.

  “You need to sit down,” I said. “You’re sick.”

  “I never get sick. I ain’t even had a cold since I was in sixth grade.”

  If so, that bug would blitzkrieg him like the Germans rolling into Warsaw.

  “It’s stomach flu, Turcotte. I was up all night with it. Mr. Keene at the drugstore says it’s going around.”

  “That narrow-ass ole lady don’t know nothin. I’m fine.” He gave his greasy clumps of hair a toss to show me how fine he was. His face was paler than ever. The hand holding the Japanese bayonet was shaking the way mine had until noon today. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  “Sure.” I snuck a glance at my watch. It was ten past six. The time that had been dragging so slowly was now speeding up. Where was Frank Dunning right now? Still at the market? I thought not. I thought he had left early today, maybe saying he was going to take his kids trick-or-treating. Only that wasn’t the plan. He was in a bar somewhere, and not The Lamplighter. That was where he went for a single beer, two at the most. Which he could handle, although—if my wife was a fair example, and I thought she was—he would always leave dry-mouthed, with his brain raging for more.

  No, when he felt the need to really take a bath in the stuff, he’d want to do it in one of Derry’s down-and-dirty bars: the Spoke, the Sleepy, the Bucket. Maybe even one of the absolute dives that hung over the polluted Kenduskeag—Wally’s or the scabrous Paramount Lounge, where ancient whores with waxwork faces still populated most of the stools at the bar. And did he tell jokes that got the whole place laughing? Did people even approach him as he went about the job of pouring grain alcohol onto the coals of rage at the back of his brain? Not unless they wanted impromptu dental work.

  “When my sister n nephew disappeared, them n Dunning was livin in a little rented h
ouse out by the Cashman town line. He was drinkin heavy, and when he drinks heavy, he exercises his fuckin fists. I seen the bruises on her, and once Mikey was black n blue all the way up his little right arm from the wrist to the elbow. I says, ‘Sis, is he beatin on you n the baby? Because if he is, I’ll beat on him.’ She says no, but she wouldn’t look at me when she said it. She says, ‘You stay away from him, Billy. He’s strong. You are too, I know it, but you’re skinny. A hard wind would blow you away. He’d hurt you.’ It wasn’t six months after that when she disappeared. Took off, that’s what he said. But there’s a lot of woods out that side of town. Hell, once you get into Cashman, there’s nothing but woods. Woods n swamp. You know what really happened, don’t you?”

  I did. Others might not believe it because Dunning was now a well-respected citizen who seemed to have controlled his drinking a long time ago. Also because he had charm to spare. But I had inside information, didn’t I?

  “I think he snapped. I think he came home drunk and she said the wrong thing, maybe something completely innocuous—”

  “Inocku-what?”

  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.”

  He grinned. It was an unsettling expression on that pale, sweaty, stubbly face. “Ole Chazzy ran like hell, but they caught up with him. There was a ravine about twenty yards past the goalposts at the south end of the field, and they pushed him down into it. Would you be s’prized to know that Frankie Dunning was one of em?”

  I shook my head.

  “They got him down in there, and they pantsed him. Then they started pushin him around and takin smacks at him. I yelled for em to quit it, and one of em looks up at me and yells, ‘Come on down and make us, fuckface. We’ll give you double what we’re givin him.’ So I ran for the locker room and told some of the football players that a bunch of yeggs were bullyin up on a kid and maybe they wanted to put a stop to it. Well, they didn’t give a shit about who was gettin bullied and who wasn’t, but those guys were always up for a fight. They run on out, some of em not wearin nothin but their underwear. And you want to know somethin really funny, Amberson?”

  “Sure.” I took another quick glance at my watch. Almost quarter of seven now. In the Dunning house, Doris would be doing the dishes and maybe listening to Huntley-Brinkley on the television.

  “You late for somethin?” Turcotte asked. “Got a fuckin train to catch?”

  “You were going to tell me something funny.”

  “Oh. Yeah. They was singin the school song! How do you like that?”

  In my mind’s eye I could see eight or ten beefy half-dressed boys churning across the field, eager to do a little post-practice hitting, and singing Hail Derry Tigers, we hold your banner high. It was sort of funny.

  Turcotte saw my grin and answered with one of his own. It was strained but genuine. “The footballies baffed a couple of those guys around pretty good. Not Frankie Dunning, though; that yellabelly saw they was gonna be outnumbered and run into the woods. Chazzy was layin on the ground, holdin his arm. It was broke. Could have been a lot worse, though. They woulda put him in the hospital. One of the footballies looks at him layin there and kinda toes at him—the way you might toe a cow patty you almost stepped in—and he says
, ‘We ran all the way out here to save a jewboy’s bacon?’ And a bunch of em laughed, because it was kind of a joke, you see. Jewboy? Bacon?” He peered at me through clumps of his Brylcreem-shiny hair.

  “I get it,” I said.

  “‘Aw, who gives a fuck,’ another of em says. ‘I got to kick some ass and that’s good enough for me.’ They went on back, and I helped ole Chaz up the ravine. I even walked home with im, because I thought he might faint or somethin. I was scared Frankie and his friends might come back—he was, too—but I stuck with him. Fuck if I know just why. You should have seen the house he lived in—a fuckin palace. That hockshop business must really pay. When we got there, he thanked me. Meant it, too. He was just about bawlin. I says, ‘Don’t mention it, I just didn’t like seeing six-on-one.’ Which was true. But you know what they say about Jews: they never forget a debt or a favor.”

  “Which you called in to find out what I was doing.”

  “I had a pretty good idea what you were doin, chum. I just wanted to make sure. Chaz told me to leave it alone—he said he thought you were a nice guy—but when it comes to Frankie Dunning, I don’t leave it alone. Nobody messes with Frankie Dunning but me. He’s mine.”

  He winced and went back to rubbing his chest. And this time the penny dropped.

  “Turcotte—is it your stomach?”

  “Naw, chest. Feels all tight.”

  That didn’t sound good, and the thought that went through my mind was now he’s in the nylon stocking, too.

  “Sit down before you fall down.” I started toward him. He pulled the gun. The skin between my nipples—where the bullet would go—began to itch madly. I could have disarmed him, I thought. I really could have. But no, I had to hear the story. I had to know.

  “You sit down, brother. Unlax, as they say in the funnypages.”

  “If you’re having a heart attack—”

  “I ain’t havin no fuckin heart attack. Now sit down.”

  I sat and looked up at him as he leaned against the garage. His lips had gone a bluish shade I did not associate with good health.