Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Insert shot: Two emergency medical technicians carrying a small black body bag down the front porch steps.

Shot 4: A thirtyish woman in an aerobics leotard saying, “I felt that he was always a little too nice, you know? He never got... angry about anything.”

Insert shot: A black-and-white photograph of Andy taken from a high school yearbook. He’s smiling, and his hair is neatly combed. He’s wearing a tie. The voice of the woman in shot 4 can still be heard over this photo, saying, “He was always so calm. He never laughed much, but there was this... smile on his face all the time...”

Shot 5: A little girl of six, most of her hidden behind a parent’s leg, saying, “I heard the house was haunted and that ghosts told him to do it...”

Insert shot: A recent color photograph of Andy and Russell Brennert at a Halloween party, both of them in costume. Russell is Frankenstein’s monster, and Andy, his face painted to resemble a smiling skeleton, wears the black hooded cloak of the Grim Reaper. He’s holding a plastic scythe whose tip is resting on top of Russell’s head. The camera moves in on Russell’s face until it fills the screen, then abruptly cuts to a shot of Russell in the foyer of the Leonard house. He’s on his knees in front of the massive bloodstain on the wall. He’s wearing rubber gloves and is pulling a large sponge from a bucket of soapy water. A caption at the bottom of the screen reads: “Russell Brennert, friend of the Leonard family.”

He squeezes the excess water from the sponge and lifts it toward the stain, then freezes just before the sponge touches the wall.

He is trembling but trying very hard not to.

Tanya’s shadow can be seen in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. She asks, “How do you feel right now?”

Russell doesn’t answer her, only continues to stare at the stain.

Tanya says, “Russell?”

He blinks, shudders slightly, then turns his head and says, “Wh-what? I’m sorry.”

“What were you thinking just then?”

He stares in her direction, then gives a quick glance to the camera. “Does he have to point that damn thing at me like that?”

“You have to talk to a reporter eventually. You might as well do it now.”

He bites his lower lip for a second, then exhales and looks back at the stain.

“What’re you thinking about, Russell?”

“I remember when Jessie first brought Theresa home from the hospital. Everyone came over here to see the new baby. You should’ve seen Andy’s face.”

Brennert’s voice begins to quaver. The camera slowly moves in closer to his face. He is oblivious to it.

“He was so... proud of her. You’d have thought she was his daughter.”

He reaches out with the hand not holding the sponge and presses it against the stain. “She was so tiny. But she couldn’t stop giggling. I remember that she grabbed one of my fingers and started... chewing on it, you know, like babies will do? And Andy and I looked at each other and smiled and yelled, ‘Uncle attack!’ and he s-started... he started kissing her chubby little face, and I bent down and put my mouth against her tummy and started blowing real hard, you know, making belly-farts, and it tickled her so much because she started giggling and laughing and squealing and k-kicking her legs...”

The cords in his neck are straining. Tears well in his eyes, and he grits his teeth in an effort to hold them back.

“The rest of the family was enjoying the hell out of it, and Theresa kept squealing.. that delicate little-baby laugh. Jesus Christ.. he loved her. He loved her so much, and I thought she was the most precious thing... she always called me ‘Uncleruss’ — like it was all one word.”

The tears are streaming down his cheeks now, but he doesn’t seem aware of it.

“I held her against my chest. I helped give her baths in the sink. I changed her diapers — and I was a helluva lot better at it than Andy ever was... and now I gotta... I gotta scrub this off the wall.”

He pulls back his hand, then touches the stain with only his index finger, tracing indiscernible patterns in the dried blood.

“This was her. This is all that’s... that’s left of the little girl she was, the baby she was... the woman she might have grown up to be. He loved her.” His voice cracks, and he begins sobbing. “He loved all of them. And he never said anything to me. I didn’t know, I swear to Christ I didn’t know. This was her. I — oh, goddammit!”

He drops down onto his ass and folds his arms across his knees and lowers his head and weeps.

A few moments later, Jackson Davies comes in and sees him and kneels down and takes Russell in his arms and rocks gently back and forth, whispering, “It’s all right now, it’s okay, it’s over, you’re safe, hear me? Safe. Just... give it to me, kid... you’re safe... that’s it... give it to me...”

Davies looks up into the camera, and the expression on his face needs no explaining: Turn that fucking thing off.

Cut to: Tanya, outside the house again, standing next to the porch steps. On the porch, two men are removing the broken bay window. A few jagged shards of glass fall out and shatter on the porch. Another man begins sweeping up the shards and dumping them into a plastic trash barrel.

Tanya says, “Experts tell us that violence never really ends, that the healing process may never be completed, that some of the survivors will carry their pain for the rest of their lives.”

A montage begins at this point, with Tanya’s closing comments heard in voice-over.

The image, in slow motion, of police officers and EMTs moving sheet-covered and black-bagged bodies.

“People around here will say that the important thing is to remove as many physical traces of the violence as possible. Mop up the blood, gather the broken glass fragments into a bag and toss it in the trash, cover the scrapes, cuts, and stitches with bandages, then put your best face forward because it will make the unseen hurt easier to deal with.”

The image of the sheet-covered bodies cross-fades into film of a memorial service held at Randy Hamilton’s grade school. A small choir of children is gathered in front of a picture of Randy and begins to sing. Underneath Tanya’s voice can now be heard a few dozen tiny voices softly singing “Let There Be Peace on Earth.”

“But what of that ‘unseen hurt’? A bruise will fade, a cut will get better, a scar can be taken off with surgery. Cedar Hill must now concern itself with finding a way to heal the scars that aren’t so obvious.”

The image of the children’s choir dissolves into film of Mary Alice Hubert standing in the middle of the chaos outside the Leonard house on the night of the shootings. She is bathed in swirling lights and holds both of her hands pressed against her mouth. Her eyes seem unnaturally wide and are shimmering with tears. Police and EMTs scurry around her, but none stops to offer help. As the choir sings, “To take each moment and live each moment in peace e-ter-nal-ly,” she drops slowly to her knees and lowers her head as if in prayer.

Tanya’s voice-over continues: “Maybe tears will help. Maybe grieving in the open will somehow lessen the grip that the pain has on this community. Though we may never know what drove Andy Leonard to commit his horrible crime, the resonances of his slaughter remain.”

Mary Alice dissolves into the image of Russell Brennert kneeling before the stain on the foyer wall. He is touching the dried blood with the index finger of his left hand.

The children’s choir is building to the end of the song as Tanya says, “Perhaps Cedar Hill can find some brief comfort in these lines from a poem by German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Who weeps now anywhere in the world, without cause weeps in the world, weeps over me.’ ”