Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

Raymer realized he was frowning. “It’s just…I don’t know. Should you be telling me this?”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Isn’t it sort of…confidential?”

“I was under the impression you already knew.”

“His sister, Charice”—he looked down, flushing again—“works for me. She’s worried about him.”

“How about you, Chief Raymer? Are you worried about him?”

“Sure.”

“I ask because he believes you hate him.”

“Well,” Raymer sighed. “I kind of do. He was having an affair with my wife.”

“And when did you discover this?”

“This afternoon.”

“He says you’ve been tormenting him for weeks. Trying to get him to confess to the affair.”

“Tormenting him how?”

“Calling him in the middle of the night.”

“I can’t remember the last time I called Jerome.” Only when she gave him an odd look did it occur to him that the statement could yield more than one interpretation. “Not counting today, I mean.”

“He claims you know exactly when he falls asleep. And you call him then.”

“How could I know when he falls asleep?”

“He says you’ve installed secret cameras in his condo.”

“Really?”

“When he leaves, you sneak in and go through his things. Pick them up and put them back in the wrong places.”

“And you believe this?”

“ He believes it.”

“How do I get in?”

“Through the garage.”

Raymer was about to say this was crazy when he remembered he’d done precisely this earlier in the afternoon. Seeing the garage door open just as he pulled up at the curb, he’d assumed Jerome had set it in motion, but now, in light of all that transpired there, he knew better. Using the sharp edge of the remote to dig at his wound, Raymer himself, albeit unwittingly (Dougie, the sneaky little prick, somehow taking over crucial functions), had been the one making the demonic door go up and down. Had some part of him suspected Jerome of being Becka’s boyfriend before today? Well played, Dougie had said when Jerome finally confessed. Was it possible he actually had been tormenting him for weeks without knowing it, as this woman was suggesting? Or had Jerome come untethered all on his own, a victim of grief and conscience?

“No, I don’t think I did anything like that,” he told Dr. Qadry.

“You don’t think you did?”

“Normally, I’m not a cruel person,” he explained. Could the same be said for Dougie, though? After all, that asshole instinctively intuited the worst in everyone. “Though it’s true…”

“Yes?”

“That lately I haven’t been…well.”

“Would you like to tell me about it?”

He considered the offer, but not for long. “No,” he told her. “I don’t think I would.”

She nodded, apparently not surprised. “You mentioned Mr. Bond’s sister? Charice? Would you like to talk about her?”

She’d followed the ambulance in her car, pulling into the emergency room lot just as he and Jerome were being wheeled inside. Raymer remembered wondering which of them she’d stay with, thinking that her decision would tell him everything he needed to know. As it had. When Jerome’s gurney was wheeled off in one direction, his own in another, their eyes had locked for a brief moment, then she went after her brother.

Could there be any doubt she’d known all along? Her behavior over the last few weeks, at first so puzzling, was at last beginning to make sense. How she’d tried convincing him that the garage remote didn’t mean anything, arguing that it wouldn’t prove anything, that even if he could find a door it would open, it would prove nothing. At every turn, he now realized, she’d tried to get him to abandon his search for Becka’s lover. She’d made it appear as if his own mental health was her primary concern. For his own good, it was time to move on. But it was her brother she’d been trying to protect. It was Jerome’s fragile grip on sanity, his emotional well-being, not Raymer’s, that worried her. Much as he hated to admit it, Dougie — asshole though he was — had been onto Charice from the start, and Raymer would’ve been smart to heed his warnings.

The question that plagued him now was, besides Charice, how many other people knew that Becka and Jerome had been lovers? Two? Two hundred? Had the whole town been laughing behind his back? For the longest time he’d been asking himself, Who? Who? Who? As if the man’s identity would satisfy all his need to know. But in fact, knowing who had provided no relief at all, only more questions. Beyond Who, there was How long, not to mention How and When? Had they met at Adfinitum one of those nights when Becka went there with her theater friends? Had Jerome come over and reintroduced himself as Raymer’s best man? Or had she recognized him, a tall, elegant black man sitting alone at the bar, and invited him to join them? How many times did they meet like this before it became clear to others in the group that they were a couple? Did they leave together in the ’Stang or, for the sake of appearances, separately? How frequently did she use that garage remote to slip unseen into Jerome’s condo?

Almost as disconcerting was this: what did it say about Raymer that he never once suspected Jerome? “Damn, Dougie, you’re marrying up !” had been the first words out of his mouth when Raymer had introduced them. Was it because they were friends that Raymer hadn’t suspected, or because Jerome was black? How were you supposed to tell? Most people seemed to agree that it was impossible to be certain what was in someone else’s heart, but surely that didn’t apply to one’s own. Or was it even more true of one’s own?

“I thought Charice and I were friends,” he told Dr. Qadry. “I even thought…”

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“And now you think you aren’t friends?”

He shrugged.

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

“But probably not.” She’d followed Jerome’s gurney, not his.

“Okay, I can see how uncomfortable this is making you,” she said, and he took this as permission to rise. “It was good of you to spare me a few minutes. I hope you won’t try to communicate further with Mr. Bond.”

She stood as well, offering her right hand, then remembered and, embarrassed, held out her left. “Failure of imagination,” she apologized. “Amazing how often it comes down to that.”

At the door it occurred to Raymer that there was one thing he wanted to ask. “Have you ever treated anybody who’d been struck by lightning?”

She blinked, then shook her head. It pleased him to see her so completely wrong-footed. “Why?”

“I just wonder what something like that would do. What effect it would have?”

“Well,” she said, “human beings are mostly water and electrical impulses. A sudden surge like that, even if it didn’t…fry you?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, there’s nowhere in the body the current wouldn’t go.”

“Do you think it could put something inside you that wasn’t already there?”

“Like what?”

“Like thoughts that aren’t yours?”

“Doubtful.”

He nodded. “What about afterward? Would things go back to normal, eventually?”

He was surprised to see how seriously the woman was regarding him. “You’ll have to let me know,” she said.

—

LEAVING THE HOSPITAL, Raymer heard a metronomic banging sound coming from the parking lot but paid it no mind. A cab was idling out front, so he got in and gave the driver Jerome’s address. Once he fetched his car, he’d drive back to Bath, check in to one of the interstate motels and catch a few hours’ sleep. In the morning, semi-rested, he’d decide how to proceed. The longer he thought about it, the more inclined he was to just leave everything and make a clean getaway. If there was such a thing.