Funeral Hotdish Page 8

  There wasn’t a man in that cluster that didn’t share Earl’s rising blood pressure.

  “And if that still doesn’t do it, we’ve got to do something.”

  “We can’t let him get away with it again.”

  It wasn’t an idle threat, but it wasn’t a lethal one, either. As every one of these men would eventually swear to their wives, “We just wanted justice. That’s all.”

  Chapter Seven

  Wednesday, October 20—Sunday, December 12, 1999

  The longer he stayed stoned, the more Darryl “Crabapple” Harding convinced himself everything would be alright.

  He’d been scared enough to run that Friday night, when he first watched Johnny stiffen and fall to the floor, hitting hard on the wooden planks of the hayloft. Seconds later, he’d seen Amber crumple like a rag doll whose stuffing had been sucked out. Shit. What went wrong? Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Crabapple never liked to be around when things weren’t good.

  He was the first one down the wooden stairs, running to his pickup and stopping only briefly at his house to pick up a few clothes and his stash before hightailing it to his cousin’s apartment in Minneapolis. During the four-hour drive, he kept telling himself, “There’s nothing really wrong. There’s nothing really wrong. They just had a bad reaction. Everything’s going to be okay. Just hang low a couple days. That’s all.”

  But there was this gnawing pain in his gut, because this felt too much like all the other bad breaks he’d had his whole life. If Crabapple’s life were a poker game, he never got a full house. Even in the rummy games he used to play with his grandma, he never got a wild card. He was a boy who didn’t know the softness of love—Grandma had tried, but she was so old and so tired when she got saddled with him. He never had a lot of friends. He never had idle time because he’d supported himself since he was a kid.

  Girls weren’t drawn to him, although if you looked closely, he had a cute crooked smile. But his eyes were too watery blue and his hands too dirty. He smelled of motor oil and didn’t own a decent suit. Except for the attention he got selling drugs, he wasn’t a kid most paid any mind to. He’d gotten used to the loneliness. Wasn’t so bad. He had his Schlitz and drugs, his hunting and fishing. He got a real high when he pulled a big walleye out of the Baker slough or bagged a deer. Those were the kinds of things a man had to do on his own anyway.

  Crabapple arrived at Ben’s apartment in the wee hours of Saturday, finding the Friday night party wasn’t yet over. A half-dozen folks were sprawled around the one-bedroom apartment littered with beer cans, empty whiskey bottles, ashtrays overflowing. A few warbled while a guy tried to play a guitar. Others were making-out. Ben was sitting on the kitchen counter, trying not to fall off. One couple was having sex in the corner.

  Man, Crabapple thought, they don’t party like this in North Dakota!

  His cousin welcomed him. “Sure,” he could stay for awhile. Nobody bothered asking why he was here or what was wrong because it made no difference. What counted was Crabapple came with a fresh stash, which ignited the party all over again. If he’d been sober, he’d have been dismayed at his profits going up in smoke or in a quick swallow, but he’d been popping Ecstasy all the way here to keep himself awake, so sharing seemed like the right thing to do.

  It wasn’t until two days later that anything resembling sobriety showed up.

  Crabapple found himself on Monday in a filthy, seedy apartment that smelled of weed and dirt.

  Minneapolis is a beautiful community that lives up to its name—a combination of the Dakota word for “water” and the Greek word for “city.” As it grew out and up from the Mississippi River, its boundaries filled with parks and lakes and neat neighborhoods that could have starred in “Father Knows Best.” It attracted exquisite high-rises and acclaimed architecture and a state fair that is legendary. It was a place where a girl could “turn the world on with her smile,” and when actress Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat into the air in the heart of the city’s business district, she wasn’t the only girl who dreamed this city held her future. Maxine back in Northville had that same mental image.

  But all that had nothing to do with the ugly neighborhood around the Greyhound bus depot in downtown Minneapolis, where Ben Harding rented a one-bedroom apartment.

  This is the part of town most people never see, the people raising families and doting over grandchildren and proud of their sports teams. Most in Minneapolis spend the summer going to the Minnesota Twins games, the fall with the Minnesota Vikings and the winter with the Minnesota Timberwolves—Okay, more time in playoff games than championships, but fans are loyal anyway. Summers are spent between home and a lake somewhere—the state boasts ten thousand to chose from—and churches of every denomination are full on Sunday mornings.

  Nobody goes to church in the bowels of the city where down-and-outers hang out and where even the city’s street sweepers are tardy.

  Ben normally slept in the only bedroom, but not always, depending on who else was around and if there was money to be made by passing on the female who shared his bed at the moment. Right now it was a girl who called herself “Poodle,” and with her shaggy white hair and skinny legs, fit the name.

  There was a couch in the only other room of the apartment, the second-best place, usually snatched by whoever was spending the most money. That left space on the floor and whatever bedroll or blanket could be found to soften the linoleum. There was a galley kitchen under the windows that overlooked the street below, barely visible through the grease and grime that clung to the glass. It was supposed to be a kitchen, but cooking was hit and miss. No one did any dishes or picked up the mounds of takeout food wrappers that cluttered the floor.

  Crabapple knew he didn’t have much of a palace at home, but it was a palace compared to this. He hadn’t been here in a year or so, and he didn’t remember it being this bad. Phone conversations with his cousin gave him the impression things were going well, with drug sales up and Ben enjoying the “good life” of a low-level drug dealer. Now the real truth was obvious: sure, Ben dealt a lot, but he used up all his profits on himself or his friends. From what Crabapple could tell, the only “good life” Ben had was a Nokia cell phone.

  Crabapple borrowed the phone early Monday morning to leave a message for Huntsie, calling when he knew the old man wouldn’t be in the shop yet. In his mind, he left a coherent, believable message that he was called out of town for a family emergency and would be back when he could. In reality, his message went like this: “Huntsie. Um, this is Crab…Darryl…um, I’m here in…I’m away…had to go…my family, yeah, my family…emergency…somebody died…I…um…will be back after things cool…I’ll be back later. Don’t give my job away, okay? (He laughs.) See ya, buddy. Oh yeah, this is Darryl.”

  Once that was over, he relaxed again. Poodle looked tasty and she traded him for three Ecstasy pills. Things had to be getting better back home, and things here were just fine, as he swam in a fog of sex and pills.

  Crabapple had been there a whole week when he used the phone again to call a buddy back home. “So, how’s everything going?” he asked in a breezy tone.

  The shocked, angry voice on the other end arrested that attitude in a second. “How’s it going? Are you fuckin’ nuts? They buried Amber last week. Johnny’s still in a coma. How do you suppose it’s going? Everybody wants your head.”

  Crabapple demanded a repeat because none of those words made any sense. Amber was dead? DEAD? Johnny was STILL in a coma? What coma? “How’d she die?” He was astonished. “Why is Johnny in a coma?”

  The friend on the other end of the line snorted into the phone, as if Crabapple was being obtuse on purpose. “Oh, come on, it was those pills you sold him. She died of an overdose.”

  “You don’t overdose on Ex,” Crabapple chided, as though the friend were a dunce. “It had to be something else. Besides, who says I sold him anything? Th
is ain’t my fault. How the hell is this my fault?” By now, he was screaming into the phone.

  “Man, everybody’s blaming you,” the friend insisted. “They know you sold them the drugs. People are pretty hot here. I’d stay away, man.” And then, in a quick exit that told Crabapple this one couldn’t be counted as a friend anymore, his buddy signed off. “Gotta go. Take care of yourself.”

  Crabapple had never heard of anyone dying from a pill of Ecstasy. This stuff was supposed to be safe and cheap and a real moneymaker. Crabapple was buying up pills for ten dollars apiece and selling them for twenty to thirty dollars, depending on what the traffic would bear. Ben had turned him onto the new drug, and one fabulous hit—the euphoria, the heightened senses, the unlimited energy, the profound sense of fearlessness, the desire to hug everyone—made it a sure thing.

  He couldn’t remember how many pills Johnny had bought, but not that many. Crabapple figured the guy had pooled money from his friends and bought enough for one each—so, what…ten, twenty? Hell, Crabapple had taken half that amount himself and here he was, living and breathing like always. Everyone else had come through, too, with no problems. Sure, Crabapple had a hangover, but he wasn’t sure that was from the Ecstasy or all the junk he’d been adding to his drug stew. How in the hell did somebody die? DIE? How did Johnny end up in a coma?

  Shit, oh shit, oh goddamn shit. This was a mess.

  Then his brain started doing some fancy editing. “They know you sold them,” the pal had said, but how did they know that if Johnny was still in a coma? Sure, they suspected it was Crabapple, but he’d only sold to Johnny, so the rest was speculation. They couldn’t prove anything unless Johnny talked. And maybe Johnny would never talk. Damn, he didn’t want Johnny to die, but he didn’t want anyone hanging a drug charge around his neck, either. Maybe Johnny wouldn’t admit anything because he’d be in trouble, too. Maybe there’d never be anything to tie Crabapple’s little side business with this mess.

  He sat there for a moment, trying to sort all this out, still befuddled that there was even a chance that the harmless pill had hurt someone. Fuck, it wasn’t like he was selling heroin or even meth. No, Crabapple stayed away from that junk. What he sold was a momentary high—like drinking a six-pack—and nobody thought it was wrong that you could buy all the six-packs you wanted and that was legal. But buy a little baggie of pot, or buy a couple Ex pills, and that was illegal. Crabapple wasn’t the only one who thought that hypocrisy was ridiculous and unfair.

  He shared the awful news from home with Cousin Ben.

  “Man, that’s a bummer,” he said, in what Crabapple thought was a totally inadequate response.

  “It couldn’t have been the Ex, could it?” Crabapple asked, begging to get an answer to exonerate him from this situation.

  “Not really,” Ben came back. “Think I heard of a kid in Europe that died, but you don’t hear about it around here. That shit is safe, man. How many times you done it? I’ve been doing it for a couple years. We’re still here! It probably wasn’t the Ex. They probably had some other problem and who knows what went wrong. Don’t worry about it, man. It’s not your fault.”

  But just when he began feeling consoled, Ben looked at him with suspicious eyes. “Where’d you get those pills, anyway?”

  “From you!” Crabapple spit back. “It was that batch out of Arizona. What, were they bad or something?”

  Ben slowly shook his head like he wasn’t getting caught in this trap. “Now come on, cuz, you know better than that. There was nothing wrong with those pills. They’re righteous. Come from a big outfit that runs pills all across the country. No way they’d be passing off a bad batch.”

  Ben now started asking the kind of questions that assure a cover-your-ass moment. How many pills did he sell? How many guys bought them? Ben started a long, slow, self-assured smile when Crabapple told him about the single buy by the high school bigshot.

  “Man, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Ben said. “You say the kid is still in a coma? And when he comes out, what’s the chance his memory will be good enough? Or he’ll fess up to buying drugs? Man, don’t worry about it. Circumstantial evidence.” Ben was sounding like he had a law degree.

  “But I tell you one thing, cuz, none of this can get back to me and my contacts in Phoenix. You hear? We’d both have a lot bigger problem if that ever happened, because I hear the ring out there is run by a big Mafia guy. Those boys don’t fuck around, you know. Are you hearing me?”

  Crabapple nodded, but Ben demanded a verbal promise and Crabapple promised he’d never tell where he got the pills. That’s all he’d need—those hotheads at home and then some Mafia guy out of Arizona. Holy crap, what a mess.

  Ben crooked his finger at Poodle and she sauntered over. “I think our boy here needs a little mind-bending recreation, so why not be good to him?” Poodle took Crabapple by the hand into the bedroom, shutting the door behind them.

  Crabapple stayed as stoned as he could, using up the stash he hadn’t shared, taking some from others who came to party. Things were pretty loose here, and it wasn’t hard to stay lit up, especially if you were Ben’s cousin. Sometimes he’d realize he’d gone a whole day without eating. Sometimes he’d flounder himself on McDonald’s hamburgers. He lost track of when he slept and who he slept with, and one day melted into another.

  But a good high also makes a man bold. Makes him think he’s king of the hill. Makes him smart and clever. The stoned world is a world of fabulous self-delusion. That’s one reason it’s so hard to kick—you feel ten feet tall, like you’re the center of the universe. When you feel wonderful, you believe you’re wonderful.

  Crabapple didn’t dare call Huntsie again and he could no longer remember anyone else’s phone number, and besides, he didn’t really want to know what was going on. Things were going to be okay. This was fun. Why not have fun now and then?

  If anyone had told Crabapple Harding that he would hide out at his cousin’s for two months, that he’d spend almost sixty days in a stoned haze and lose ten pounds, he’d have sworn it couldn’t be true. Naturally, it was a great surprise when he finally sobered up enough to realize what had happened.

  “Damn it, I missed deer season,” he said on December 12, when someone mentioned the date. At first he was sure that wasn’t right—they had to be joshing him—but someone brought in a newspaper and yes, indeed, deer season in North Dakota was already closed. Crabapple felt real regret and loss. His deer rifle was waiting, he had a new daylight fluorescent orange vest, he knew the fields he wanted to walk. None of that mattered now, because he’d been living in a stoned haze for so long that his most favorite time of the year had passed. No deer sausage for him this year. No feeling like a rich man with a freezer full of fresh-killed meat.

  Hell, he’d have to hurry to make the pheasant season that closed in early January. He couldn’t miss that, too. He loved pheasant the way his grandma made it, baked with cream of mushroom soup. Give him baked pheasant or deer sausage and he was a happy man. Those thoughts bounced around his head as it cleared from the drug haze.

  He decided it was time to go home.

  Ben spotted him twenty dollars for gas and wished him luck. Crabapple headed off, sure that whatever waited for him wouldn’t be so bad. He’d faced bad scrapes all his life. This was simply the latest one.

  “I’m just not lucky,” he said, and everyone agreed he was right.

  But he had gotten lucky when he found that the clean-cut kids in Northville liked to break out now and then, and he could make extra money selling weed. When the casino went in, the Indian kids had money to join the party and his business had boomed. Then along came these wonderful little pills, and for once in his life, he was sure he was holding a full house. Until, shit, that went south, too.

  He stopped at Burger King on his way out of town, treating himself to a malt along with burger and fries, and talked to himself al
l the way home—promising he was done with the drug trade and vowing he’d deny everything and it would go away. He’d convince Huntsie to take him back and he’d work his ass off at the shop. Someday he’d own his own place. Be his own boss. That would be great. He’d find himself a girl—not like Poodle, but a real nice girl—and he’d get married and have kids and he wouldn’t run out on them or treat them bad.

  Life didn’t have to be a toilet. He could change that. He could clean up. He could sober up. He could leave the bad hand he’d been dealt behind him and chose from a clean deck.

  As Darryl “Crabapple” Harding pulled onto Interstate 94, he was full of piss and vinegar and sure that everything would be okay.

  Chapter Eight

  Wednesday, October 20—Sunday, November 21, 1999

  The fifth floor of the Phoenix Police Department’s headquarters is a hallowed place. The floor houses the homicide division. The floor where all important police briefings are given. The place where the medical examiner meets every Wednesday morning with officers to go over the priority of forensic tests. The room where wiretaps are monitored. In short, this is the heart of fighting crime in the nation’s sixth-largest city.

  Joya had never been allowed up here before, not even when she was investigating the morgue. Stepping off the elevator today, she expected to see more than gray metal desks overflowing with file folders, battered chairs in the conference room, and a coffee-stained carpet. Even so, she felt glad to finally reach this inner sanctum. She almost didn’t make it.

  There had been hell to pay when Rob revealed what had happened to his superiors. Officers could hear the police chief screaming behind the closed door and more than one thought it might cost Rob his job. Joya was summoned—she smiled to herself, imagining how she’d tell the chief she was too busy that day to come over for a visit. Maybe she would have tried it, except she knew it would hurt Rob.