Triptych

Robin wasn’t the reason John had gotten in to work early this morning, showing up even before Art. Moving from one place to the other wasn’t a big deal. John had tossed his clothes into the cooler and used it as a suitcase as he walked the six blocks over to Mr. Applebaum’s house. Once John was settled in, he went back to Ashby Street one more time and dug up the knife where he had buried it under a tree for safekeeping. He’d sweated all the way on the bus, scared he’d be caught with a weapon. At the car wash, John had dropped it in the vacuum canister and sat on the retaining wall under the magnolia tree until Art had driven up in his Cadillac, asking, “What’s with you, Shelley? You bucking for a promotion?” as he locked his car door.

John was trying to think logically, figure out what to do next, but as much as he tried to concentrate, all he could feel was a burning anger. Michael had put that knife under his mattress in the flophouse just like he’d stashed the kitchen knife, the so-called murder weapon, in John’s closet all those years ago. What the hell did the guy have against him? What did John ever do to Michael to bring this down on his head? Not just John’s head, but on his entire family.

It was one thing to set up John all those years ago, but to keep it up, to use his identity while he was locked away in prison… that was some kind of sick obsession. Michael hated him. You didn’t hold on to another man’s name for all these years unless you really fucking hated the guy. And the prick had obviously used his position on the police force to reach out to Ms. Lam, trying to get her to throw John back into Coastal with the pedophiles and rapists. It wasn’t enough to frame him. He wanted John to suffer.

John had adjusted to his loss of freedom over the years, letting himself believe on some level that he belonged with men like Ben Carver. He had been a bad kid, a bad son. Richard Shelley could have testified to that. Even without his father’s damning testimony, in John’s own court of opinion, he did not come out completely blameless in Mary Alice’s murder. He had invited her to the party. He had been stoned. He had given her the alcoholic drink. He had gone back to her house, sneaked into her bedroom. He had snorted the speedball that knocked him on his ass. He had let it all happen.

But knowing it was Michael, his own cousin Woody, who had butchered Mary Alice made John sick with rage. He couldn’t be angry for his own sake, but he could be angry for Mary Alice, livid as hell that Michael had not just raped the girl, not just killed her, but ravaged her like a rabid animal.

The crime scene photographs in the courtroom had been shocking, but John had been there, had seen her body with his own two eyes. The bite marks on her small breasts. The dark bruises and deep lacerations on her i

That fucking bastard. That God damn sick bastard.

It didn’t stop with Mary Alice, though. Michael was still out there, still doing whatever the hell he wanted to do in John’s name. And he was a cop. A cop! He could jam up John anytime, was probably sitting on his ass right now thinking of yet another way to put John in the frame for his own sick crimes. The thought of last night, the tips of John’s fingers touching the folding knife, almost getting caught with a weapon in his hands, made him break out into a cold sweat. Michael could do anything. He could arrest John right now and there was nothing John could do about it.

And maybe John deserved it. Maybe after what he had done to Michael’s neighbor, he deserved to be tossed back in jail with all the other sick bastards. He had mutilated a child. He had used his own hands to defile that girl. It didn’t seem right that he should get away with such a thing.

The way things were looking, he probably wouldn’t.

The dryer stopped and John started folding the towels, piling them up in a rolling sixty-drum trashcan so they could move them around the cars as they worked. He needed to talk to Ben again. John had grown up in prison, but he thought like a prisoner, not a criminal. He needed someone to tell him what to do.

“Are you John?”

The woman in front of him was slim, about five-eight or -nine. Her black hair was in a pixie cut and she wore a close-fit cropped jacket over her tight blue jeans.

“Can I help you?” he asked, looking for the telltale bulge under her jacket. She didn’t look like a cop to him, her jacket was too nice, but John had never been good at spotting the bad guys.

“You’re John Shelley?” she asked.

He glanced over her shoulder. Ray-Ray was sucking on a lollipop, but John could see his eyes were taking in the scene.

John asked, “Do I know you?”

“You moved,” she said. “I thought you lived on Ashby Street.”

He tried to smile when what he really wanted to do was drop the towels and run. “What’s going on?”

She had her hands on her hips, and he thought about Ms. Lam. He couldn’t help himself. He looked right at the metal cap screwed onto the vacuum tank.

“I’m Kathy Keenan,” she said. “A friend of your sister’s.”

He dropped the towels. “Is Joyce-”

“She’s fine,” the woman assured him. “You just need to talk to her.”

“I…” He looked down at the pile of towels, then back up at the woman. He didn’t know who she was or why she was here, but she was crazy if she thought she could make Joyce do anything she didn’t want to do.

John knelt down to scoop up the towels. “She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“I know she doesn’t,” Kathy said. “But she needs to.”

“Who are you?”

“I told you. I’m a friend of hers.”

“You can’t know her very well if you think this will work.”

“I’ve shared her bed for the last twelve years, John. I think I pretty much know her better than anyone on earth.”

So, Joyce was gay. John wondered what Richard thought about that. One child a convicted rapist and murderer, the other queer as a three-dollar bill. John couldn’t help but smile at the probable magnitude of Richard’s disappointment.

Kathy had asked, “Does it bother you that your sister’s a lesbian?”

“I really don’t think I have room to talk,” John had admitted, all the while thinking, God, Richard must have been livid when he found out. His perfect Joyce was batting for the other team.

Kathy drove a black Porsche, the kind of car John could only see from his hands and knees as he cleaned the trash out of it. She had driven him straight up Piedmont Road, taking a right on Sidney Marcus and ending up parked in front of a small building on Lenox Road right up from the interstate. The sign outside read Keener, Rose and Shelley in fancy gold script. The car beside them, a graphite gray BMW, was parked in the space reserved for Joyce Shelley.

Joyce worked less than two miles from the Gorilla. She might have even passed him every day on her drive in.

“She’s handling a closing right now,” Kathy said. “She won’t be long.”

John’s knees popped as he rolled himself out of the low-lying car. Time and again, he had to remind himself that he was almost forty years old. For some reason, he still felt fifteen, like Coastal had happened to another John, his mind going there while his body stayed on the outside, not aging, waiting for him to come back and claim it.

“We’ll wait in her office,” Kathy suggested, leading him through the building. The receptionist’s eyes followed John as he walked past her desk, and he imagined that but for the janitor, she wasn’t used to seeing his kind strolling through these pristine corridors.

“Back here.” Kathy had grabbed some notes from a cubbyhole with her name on it, and she read through these as they walked down the hall.