Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

“Fag bags,” said Jeff, then the two flaming wits high-fived each other.

Russell suddenly realized that one of his hands had reached over and gripped a mop handle. Don’t do it, Russ, don’t you dare, they’re not worth it. “Think whatever you want. I don’t care.” He turned away from them in time to see a bright blue van pull up behind the police cruiser. A small satellite dish squatted like a gargoyle on top of the van, and Russell could see through the windshield that Ms. Tanya Claymore, Channel g’s red-hot news babe, was inside.

“Oh shit,” he whispered.

One of the reasons he’d agreed to help out tonight — the money aside — was so he wouldn’t have to stay at home and hear the phone ring every ten minutes and answer it to find some reporter on the other end asking for Mr. Russell Brennert, oh this is him? I’m Whatsisname from the In-Your-Face Channel, Central Ohio’s News Authority, and I wanted to ask you a few questions about Andy Leonard blah-blah-blah.

It had been like that for the last three days. He’d hoped that coming out here tonight would give him a reprieve from everyone’s constant questions, but it seemed—

— put the ego in park, Russ. Yeah, maybe they called the house and Mom or Dad told them you’d be out here, but it’s just possible they came out in hopes of getting inside the house for a few minutes’ worth of video for tomorrow’s news.

Mutt smacked the back of his shoulder much harder than was needed just to get his attention. “Hey, yo! Brennert, I’m talking to you.”

“Please leave me alone? Please?”

All along the murky death membrane that was Merchant Street, porch lights snapped on and ghostly forms shuffled out in bathrobes and housecoats, some with curlers in their hair or shoddy slippers on their feet.

Mutt and Jeff both laughed, but not too loudly.

“What’s it like to cornhole a psycho, huh?”

“I—” Russell swallowed the rest of the sentence and started toward the house, but Mutt grabbed his arm, wrenching him backward and spinning him around.

One of the tattered specters grabbed her husband’s arm and pointed from their porch to the three young men by the van. Did it look like there was some trouble?

The ghosts of Irv and Miriam Leonard, accompanied by their grandchildren Ian, Theresa, and Lori, stood off to the side of the house and watched as well. Irv shook his head in disgust, and Miriam wiped at her eyes and thought she felt her heart aching for Russell, such a nice boy, he was.

On the porch of the Leonard house, an impatient Jackson Davies waited while the officer ripped down the yellow tape and inserted the key into the lock.

“Jackson?” said Pete Cooper.

“What?”

Cooper cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “Do you remember what you said about no reporters being around?”

“Yeah, so wha—” Then he saw the Channel 9 news van. “Ah, fuck me with a fiddlestick! They plant a homing device on that poor kid or something?” He watched Tanya Claymore slide open the side door and lower one of her too-perfect legs toward the ground like some Hollywood starlet exiting a limo at a movie premiere.

“Dammit, I told you bringing Brennert along would be a mistake.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hindsight. Let me worry about it?”

Cooper gestured toward the news van and said, “Aren’t you gonna do something?”

“I don’t know if I can.” Davies directed this remark to the police officer unlocking the door. The officer looked over his shoulder and shrugged, then said, “If she interferes with your crew performing the job you pay them for, you’ve got every right to tell her to go away.”

“Just make sure you get her phone number first,” said Cooper.

Davies turned his back to them and stared at Tanya Claymore. If she even so much as looked at Russell, he’d drop on her like a curse from heaven.

Down by the trash barrels and buckets, Mutt was standing less than an inch from Russell’s face and saying, “All right, bad-ass, let’s get to it. People’re savin’ that you maybe knew what Andy was gonna do and didn’t say anything.”

“I didn’t,” whispered Russell. “I didn’t know.”

Some part of him realized that Tanya’s cameraman had turned on his light and was taping them, but he was backed too far into a corner to care right now.

“Yeah,” said Mutt contemptuously. “I’ll just bet you didn’t.”

“I didn’t know, all right? He never said... a thing to me.”

“According to the news, he was in an awful hurry to get you out before he went gonzo.”

For a moment, Russell found himself back in the car with Mary Alice, turning the corner and being almost blinded by visibar lights, then that cop came over and pounded on the window and said, “This area’s restricted for the moment, kid, so you’re gonna have to—” and Mary Alice shouted, “Is that the Leonard house? Did something happen to my family?” And then the cop shone his flashlight in and asked, “You a relative, ma’am?” and Mary Alice was already in tears, and Russell felt something boiling up from his stomach because he saw one of the bodies being covered by a sheet, and then Mary Alice screamed and fell against him and a sick cloud of pain descended on their skulls—

“ I had no idea, okay?” The words fell to the ground in a heap. Russell thought he could almost see them groan before the darkness put them out of their misery. “Do I have to keep on saying that, or should I just write it in braille and shove it up—”

“—you knew, you had to know!” The mean-spirited mockery of earlier was gone from Mutt’s voice, replaced by anger with some genuine hurt wrapped around it. “He was your best friend!”

You need the money, Russell.

“Two of ’em was always together,” said Jeff, just loud enough for the microphone to get every word. “Everybody figured that Brennert here was gay and was in love with Andy.”

Three hundred dollars, Russell. Grocery money for a month or so. Mom and Dad will appreciate it.

It seemed that both of his hands were gripping the mop handle, and somehow that mop was no longer in the bucket.

He heard a chirpy voice go into its popular singsong mode: “This is Tanya Claymore. I’m standing outside the house of Irving and Miriam Leonard at One-eighty-two Merchant Street, where—”

“You wanna do something about it?” said Mutt, pushing Russell’s shoulder. “Think you’re man enough to mess with me?”

Russell was only vaguely aware of Davies coming down from the porch and shouting something at the news crew; he was only vaguely aware of the second police officer climbing from the cruiser and making a beeline to Ms. News Babe; and he was only vaguely aware of Mutt saying, “How come you came along to help with the cleanup tonight? Idea of seeing all that blood and brains get you hard, does it? You a sick fuck just like Andy?” But the one thing of which he was fully, almost gleefully aware was that the mop had become a javelin in his hands and he was going to go for the gold and hurl the thing right into Mutt’s great big ugly target of a mouth—

Three hundred dollars should just about cover the emergency room bill—

Then a hand clamped down so hard on Mutt’s shoulder that Russell thought he heard bones crack.

Jackson Davies’s smiling face swooped in and hovered between them. “If you’re finished with this nerve-tingling display of machismo, we have a house to clean, remember?” Still clutching Mutt’s shoulder in a Vulcan death-grip, Davies hauled the boy around and pushed him toward one of the barrels. “Why can’t you use your powers for good?”