P. Tracy - Live Bait

Jack shrugged and started drinking it himself, even though he held his own glass in his other hand.

‘Did you call Becky to tell her where you’d be?’

‘Becky, my wife?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Well, gee, Marty, that would be like calling Mr Filcher at the butcher shop and telling him where’d I’d be, and he’d say what the fuck do I care? So if you want me to call somebody just to listen to that, I think I’ll go for the butcher.’

‘You’re not making a lot of sense.’

‘Probably not. Half a bottle of scotch’ll do that to you. The way I figure it, I’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning in about ten minutes, and shooting me will be redundant.’

‘Not funny.’

‘Sure it was. Lighten up. The thing is, Becky gave me the one-finger salute last night – and that was before the gunfight at O.K. Corral. Sayonara, fuck off, see you in court. Wouldn’t even let me in the house, so I slept in the pool house, took a shower with the garden hose.’

Marty blew out a breath and reached for one of the partially full glasses Jack was juggling. ‘Sorry.’

‘No prob. I hated that house anyway. Faggot designer Becky hired did the whole master bath in a frog motif. Can you believe that? S’like trying to take a shit in the middle of a Budweiser commercial.’ He drained his glass, filled it again. ‘You want me to top that off for you?’

‘No. I want you to tell me why Morey went to London.’

Jack looked at him. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Or Prague. Or Milan. Or Paris.’ He tossed over Morey’s passport, and Jack jumped when it hit his lap.

‘What the hell is this?’

‘That’s Morey’s passport. I found it in a tackle box in a closet.’

‘Dad had a passport?’ Jack opened it up and squinted hard. ‘God, this is small print… Is this Paris or Prague? Goddamn Frogs can’t even use a stamp without blurring it…’

‘It’s Paris. He was there for a day. Not much longer in any of the other places. Since when was Morey a world traveler?’

Jack kept drinking as he flipped through the pages. ‘Jesus. He went to Johannesburg ?’

‘Are you telling me you didn’t know about those trips?’

‘These?’ Jack tossed the passport on the cushion next to him. ‘Nope. Didn’t know about them. Is that it? Can we get out of here now? It’s hotter than hell with the door closed.’

‘Why would Morey hide his passport in a tackle box? Why would he make a bunch of overseas trips and then turn around and come back the next day? What the hell was he doing in all those places, Jack?’

‘I knew it. I knew this would happen. Was I right? You can take the man out of the cop, but you can’t take the cop out of the man, and now you’re doing all that detective shit. So what now, Marty? Are we going to play interrogation again? You want to move to the equipment shed? We got a bulb hanging from a wire in there. You could swing it back and forth, do the movie thing…’

Marty closed his eyes and took a sip out of the glass without thinking. ‘I was thinking maybe we could skip all the crap and you could just tell me the truth, Jack. I know it’s not normally done in this family – hell, maybe not in any family – but I tried it on Lily the other night and it turned out okay.’

Jack giggled. ‘Oh yeah? What truth did you tell her?’

Marty looked straight at him. ‘That I thought about killing myself.’

Jack’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. ‘Jesus, Marty. Because of Hannah?’

‘Not exactly.’

That seemed to surprise Jack more than anything. ‘Well then why, for chrissake?’

Marty took another drink, then set the glass on the desk and pushed it out of reach with one finger. The alcohol was still seductive. Prison would cure that, he thought with a grim smile. ‘That’s a really big secret, Jack. Quid pro quo. A truth for a truth.’

Jack set his own glass on the floor and hunched forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. ‘I should have been there for you. I let you down, buddy. On the list of a hundred regrets I’ve been piling up over the past couple years, that one goes on the top.’

‘The truth, Jack. What do you know about who killed your father?’

Jack smiled at him without moving. ‘Truth isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, you know, Marty?’

‘Whoever did it is killing other people, Jack. You’ve got to help.’

‘Nah. He’s finished. ’Cept for me.’

‘And how the hell do you know that?’

Jack looked down into his glass, took a breath, then blew it out hard. ‘I think I have to start this at the beginning.’

Sometimes you spitfired questions, hammered them home fast, non-stop; but there was a time in every interrogation when you stopped asking and just went quiet. Marty kept his hands still on the arms of his chair, kept his eyes on Jack, and waited.

‘I kind of hate to do this to you, Marty. I know what that old bastard meant to you.’

‘He was a good man, Jack.’

‘This is going to be like Elvis.’

‘You lost me.’

‘Well, do you remember what it was like when you found out the King was a drug addict? I mean, here was this guy, the one true King, and what does he turn out to be? Some potbellied, pill-popping junkie. Man, the idol crumbles, and that just rocked my world. You ready for that?’

‘Jack…’

‘Pop put a gun in my hand for the first time on my ninth birthday. Did you know that? You have to be ready, he said, and every Saturday morning from then on he took me out to the Anoka Gun Club and we did some target shooting. Ma thought we were going to McDonald’s for some father-son bonding, and I wasn’t allowed to tell her different. Boring as hell. I hate guns. But I was a dumb kid. As long as I was with him, it was great.’ He picked up his glass again and leaned back against the cushions. He took a long drink, then smiled. ‘I’m a hell of a shot, Marty. But I was nothing compared to Pop.’

Marty stared at Jack’s white legs sticking out of his shorts, the little potbelly, the sunburned arches on his forehead where hair had once been. While the idea of Jack as a good shot scared the hell out of him, the image of a gun in the good and gentle hand of his father-in-law was absolutely unbelievable. ‘Is this going somewhere, Jack?’

‘Sure it is.’ Jack’s head wobbled a bit as he tried to bring him into focus. ‘You want to know who would want to kill Pop, right? ’Cause he’s this great guy, loved everybody, everybody loved him… Shit, Marty. I spent the last couple years ruining my life so I wouldn’t have to tell anybody, and now you just want me to spit it out.’

Marty heard the rumble of distant thunder. ‘Whatever it was, the cops will put it together eventually.’

Jack giggled. ‘Those bozos aren’t ever gonna figure it out, and if they did, they wouldn’t believe it anyway.’

‘Figure out what?’

Jack tried to think and keep Marty in his line of sight all at the same time. It was almost too much for him. ‘That somebody finally caught up with them, that’s what. Only it wasn’t the cops, ’cause we’d all be on Jerry Springer right now. But you can’t get away with that kind of thing forever without pissing somebody off, right?’

‘What kind of thing?’

‘Christ, Marty, pay attention, would you? Killing people, of course. Near as I can figure, a couple a year for a long time.’

Marty didn’t bat an eye. ‘You are so full of shit, Jack.’

Jack nodded, a dangerous move in his condition. ‘Yep. I am that. But not about this. This, I know for a fact.’ He leaned forward to grab the bottle of Balvenie off the floor and filled his glass right to the top, spilled some when the thunder clapped a little closer. ‘ ’Bout six months before Hannah died Pop took me up to Brainerd one weekend – said he was going to take me fishing, get me away from the office for a while. When we got to this big old lodge a couple other cars pull up, and there’s Ben Schuler getting out of one, and Rose Kleber out of the other.’