The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels

‘Oh, Ward,’ she said, her voice sounding cracked and very old. I sat up straight in my seat then, in the vain hope that faux readiness, last-minute rigour, would somehow limit the weight with which this hammer was going to fall.

‘What is it?’

‘Ward, you’d better come here.’

In the end I got her to tell me. A car crash in the centre of Dyersburg. Both dead on arrival.

I’d known immediately it would be something like that, I suppose. If it hadn’t involved both of them then it wouldn’t be Mary on the phone. But even now, as I stood with her in the graveyard looking down upon their coffins, I was unable to truly understand a sentence framing their death with its full weight. I also could not now return the call that my mother had left on my machine, a week before. I just hadn’t gotten round to it. I hadn’t expected them to be erased from the surface of the earth without warning, and put below it, down where they couldn’t hear me.

Abruptly I realized that I didn’t want to be standing near their bodies any more. I took a step back from the graves. Mary dug in the pocket of her coat and brought out something attached to a small cardboard label. A set of keys.

‘I put out the trash this morning,’ she said, ‘and took a few things out of the refrigerator. Milk and such. Don’t want them smelling it up. Everything else I just left.’

I nodded, staring at the keys. I didn’t have any of my own. No need. They’d been in, on the few occasions I’d visited. I realized that this was the first time I’d ever seen Mary somewhere other than my parents’ kitchen or living room. It was like that with my folks. You went to their house, not the other way round. They tended to form a centre. Had tended to.

‘They spoke of you, you know. Often.’

I nodded again, though I wasn’t sure I believed her. For much of the last decade my parents hadn’t even known where I was, and anything they had to say concerned a younger man, an only child who’d once grown up and lived with them in a different state. It wasn’t that we hadn’t loved each other. We had, in our ways. I just hadn’t given them much to talk about, had checked none of the boxes that make parents prone to brag to friends and neighbours. No wife, no kids, no job to speak of. I realized Mary was still holding her hand out, and I took the keys from her.

‘How long will you stay?’ she asked.

‘It depends how long things take. Maybe a week. Possibly less.’

‘You know where I am,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to be a stranger, just because.’

‘I won’t,’ I said quickly, smiling awkwardly. I wished I had a sibling who could have been having this conversation for me. Someone responsible and socially skilled.

She smiled back, but distantly, as if she already knew this was not the way things worked.

‘Goodbye, Ward,’ she said, and then set off up the slope. At seventy she was a little older than my parents, and walked awkwardly. She was a lifelong Dyersburg resident, an ex-nurse, and more than that I didn’t know.

I saw that Davids was standing by his car on the other side of the cemetery, killing time with his assistant but evidently waiting for me. He had the air of someone ready and willing to be brisk and efficient, to tidy loose ends.

I glanced back once more at the graves, and then walked heavily down the path to face the administrative tasks created by the loss of my entire family.

Davids had brought most of the paperwork in his car, and took me to lunch to deal with it. I don’t know whether this ended up being any less unpleasant than doing it in his office would have been, but I appreciated the courtesy from a man who knew me barely at all. We ate in historical downtown Dyersburg, at a place called Auntie’s Pantry. The interior had been slavishly designed to resemble a multi-level log cabin, the furniture hand-hewn by elves. The menu offered a chilling variety of organic soups and home-made breads, accompanied by salads largely predicated upon bean sprouts. I know I’m out of step, but I don’t regard bean sprouts as food. They don’t even look edible. They look like pallid, mutant grubs. The only worse thing is cous cous, of which there was also plenty on offer. I don’t know of any aunt on this planet who eats that kind of shit, but both staff and patrons seemed about as happy as could be. Almost maniacally so.

After a brief and somewhat stilted wait we scored a seat by the front window. This annoyed a spruce young family behind us, who’d had their eye on the table and didn’t understand how being first in line entitled you to certain benefits. The woman outlined her dissatisfaction to the waitress, loudly observing that the table had space for four people and we were only two. Normally this kind of thing brings out the very best in me, particularly if my foes are all wearing identical navy blue fleeces, but right then the well was dry. The husband was no competition, but the two children were blond and solemn and looked like a pair of judging angels. I didn’t want to get on their bad side. The waitress, who was of the genus of tan, pretty but rather hefty young women who flock to places like Dyersburg for the winter sports, elected not to get involved, instead staring brightly at a patch of the floor approximately equidistant between the two sets of combatants.

Davids glanced briefly across at the matriarch. He’s of my parents’ age, tall and gaunt with a good-sized beak, and looks like the guy who God calls on when he really wants Hell to rain down. He opened his briefcase and drew out a lot of documents, making no effort to conceal the kind of event they pertained to. He laid them out in front of him in a businesslike way, picked up the menu, and started to read it. By the time I’d finished watching him do these things, the family was all studiously looking elsewhere. I picked up my own menu, and tried to imagine why what it said was of interest to me.

Davids was my parents’ attorney, and had been since they’d met him after moving from Northern California. I’d spoken to him on a couple of previous occasions, Christmas or Thanksgiving drinks at their house, but in my mind he was now simply one of a number of people with whom my acquaintance was about to draw to an abrupt close. This bred a curious mixture of distance and a desire to prolong the contact, which I was unable to translate into much in the way of conversation.

Thankfully, Davids took the lead as soon as the bowls of butternut and lichen soup arrived. He recapped the circumstances of my parents’ death, which in the absence of witnesses boiled down to a single fact. At approximately 11:05 on the previous Friday evening, after visiting friends to play bridge, their car had been involved in a head-on collision at the intersection of Benton and Ryle Streets. The other vehicle was a stationary car, parked by the side of the road. The post-mortem revealed blood-alcohol levels consistent with maybe half a bottle of wine in my father, who had been the passenger, and a lot of cranberry juice in my mother. The road had been icy, the junction wasn’t too well lit, and another accident had taken place at the same spot just last year. That was that. It was just one of those things, unless I wanted to get involved in a fruitless civil litigation, which I didn’t. There was nothing else to say.

Then Davids got down to business, which meant getting me to sign a large number of pieces of paper, thereby accepting ownership of the house and its contents, a few pieces of undeveloped land, and my father’s stock portfolio. A legion of tax matters pertaining to all of this were efficiently explained to me and then dispatched with further signatures. The IRS stuff went in one ear and out the other, and I gave none of the papers more than a cursory glance. My father had evidently trusted Davids, and Hopkins Senior hadn’t been a man to cast his respect around willy-nilly. Good enough for Dad was good enough for me.

I was listening with less than half of my attention by the end of it, and actually enjoying the soup – now that I’d improved the recipe by adding a good deal of salt and pepper. I was watching the spoonfuls as they came up toward my mouth, savouring the taste in a studious, considered way, encouraging the flavour to occupy as much of my mind as possible. I only resurfaced when Davids mentioned UnRealty.

He explained that my father’s business, through which he had successfully sold high-priced real estate, was being shut down. The value of its remaining assets would be forwarded to any account I cared to nominate, just as soon as the process was complete.

‘He wound up UnRealty?’ I asked, lifting my head to look at the lawyer. ‘When?’

‘No.’ Davids shook his head, wiping round his bowl with a piece of bread. ‘He gave instructions that this should take place upon his death.’

‘Regardless of what I might have to say?’

He glanced out of the window, and rubbed his hands together in an economical little motion that dislodged a few crumbs from his fingers. ‘He was quite clear on the matter.’

My soup had suddenly gone cold, and tasted like liquidized pond weed. I pushed the bowl away. I understood now why Davids had insisted that we go through the papers today, rather than in the period before the funeral. I collected up my copies of the papers and shoved them into the envelope Davids had provided.

‘Is that it?’ My voice was quiet and clipped.

‘I think so. I’m sorry to have put you through this, Ward, but it’s better to get it over with.’

He pulled a wallet from his jacket and glared at the check, as if not only distrusting the addition but taking a dim view of the waitress’s handwriting. His thumb hesitated over a charge card, pulled out some cash instead. I logged this as him electing not to allot the cost of lunch as a business expense.

‘You’ve been very kind,’ I said. Davids dismissed this with a flip of his hand, and tipped exactly ten percent.

We rose and left the restaurant, weaving between the tables of chatting tourists. I meant to look away as we passed the table occupied by the nuclear army in blue fleece, but then suddenly they were in front of me. Mother and father were bickering mildly about where to stay in Yellowstone; the little boy meanwhile was using his spoon and soup to approximate the effect of an asteroid landing in the Pacific. His sister was sitting with a plastic beaker clutched in both hands, contentedly staring at nothing in particular. As I passed she looked up at me, and smiled as if seeing a large dog. It was probably a cute smile, but for a moment I felt like removing it.

Outside we stood together for a moment, watching well-heeled women roving up and down College Street in hungry packs, charge cards on stun.

Eventually Davids thrust his hands in the pockets of his coat. ‘You’ll be leaving soon, I imagine. If there’s anything I can do in the meantime, please be in touch. I can’t raise the dead, of course, but on other things I might be able to help.’

We shook hands, and he walked rather quickly away up the street, his face carefully blank. And only then did I realize, unforgivably late, that Davids had not just been my father’s attorney, but had also become his friend, and that I might not have been the only person who’d found the morning difficult.

I walked back to the hotel with my hands clenched, and by nine I was very drunk. I had the first boilermaker in both hands before the hotel doors had shut behind me. I knew as I took the first swallow that it was a mistake. I knew it all the way home, had known it in the cemetery and from the moment I’d woken that morning. I wasn’t falling off some painfully-scaled wagon, rejecting my higher power and committing myself to waking up in Geneva with two wives and the word ‘Spatula’ tattooed on my forehead. But getting drunk was like having a one-night stand because your partner had been unfaithful to you: an act that could achieve nothing except pain, meanwhile diminishing a moral high ground which, for once in your life, you were actually entitled to. The problem was, there didn’t seem to be any other intelligent response to the situation.

At first I perched at the bar, but after a while I moved to one of the booths by the long window. A large preemptive tip had ensured that I didn’t have to wait, or indeed move, in order to keep my glasses full. A beer, then a Scotch. A beer, then a Scotch. A solid and efficient way of getting drunk, and the smooth-faced barman kept them coming like I’d asked.

I pulled the documents out of Davids’s manila envelope and spread them in front of me, my mind fixated on one point in particular.

In all the time I was growing up, I was aware of one thing about my father. He was a businessman. That was what he did and who he was. He was Homo sapiens businessmaniens. He got up in the morning and shoved off to do business, and he came back in the evening having by-God done some. My parents never talked about their early life, and rarely about anything of consequence, but I knew about UnRealty. He’d worked for a number of years at a local firm, then one night took my mother out for a fine dinner and told her he was going it alone. He actually used those words, apparently, as if appearing in an advertisement for bank loans. He had talked to a few people, made some contacts, engaged in all the textbook corporate heroics that entitled you some day to stand at the bar of a country club and say ‘I did it my way’. It can’t have been easy, but my father had a certain force of will. Car mechanics and plumbers, meter maids and check-in clerks, all took one look and elected not to fuck him around. When he walked into a restaurant, the word went round the staff that it was time to stand up straight and stop spitting in the soup. His company, and its history, was the most real thing I understood about him.

And yet, in his will, he had stipulated that UnRealty be wound up. Instead of leaving it to his son to make the decision, he had calmly imploded twenty years’ work.

As soon as Davids had told me this, I knew it could only mean one thing. My parents hadn’t wanted me to take over the business. In many ways this was explicable. I have sold many, many things, shifted many and varied commodities, but never an expensive house. I knew about them, however. Did I ever. I knew about Unique Homes magazine, about the DuPont Registry and Christie’s Great Estates. I knew about conservation easements and dude ranches, was familiar with the value of old-world craftsmanship, views of the 15th fairway, end-of-the-road privacy where serenity abounds. I couldn’t help but be. It had seeped into my blood. I even did two years of an architecture degree, before I sidestepped out of college via an unfortunate incident and into a different line of work. And yet he either hadn’t wanted me, or hadn’t trusted me, to take over the business. The more I thought about it, the more hurt I got.

I kept drinking, to see if things got any better. They didn’t. I kept drinking anyway. The bar remained quiet throughout the early part of the evening. Then at ten o’clock there was a sudden influx of men and women in suits, sprung from some ball-breaking corporate flipchart-fest. They milled about in the centre of the bar, networking rabidly, excited as children at the prospect of going berserk and having a couple of Lite beers. By this stage my brain felt very heavy and cold. The noise started loud and got worse, as if I was surrounded by people shovelling pebbles.

I held my ground in my booth, glaring virulently at the invaders. A couple of the men rakishly removed their jackets. One fellow even loosened his tie. Underlings sidled up to their bosses and hung about like sandpipers, pecking for Brownie points. I’d cope. I’d weather the storm. These people might know how to run spreadsheets and asset-strip, but if it came to a bar endurance test, they were wearing water wings. I was confident. I was in the zone. I was also, in retrospect, even more drunk than I realized.

Three men came in the door. They stopped, looked around.

The next thing I knew there was screaming, and the suits were diving for cover. At first I felt frightened, and then I realized it was me they were running from.

I was swaying in the middle of the floor, clothes wet from upturned beer. I had a gun in my hands and was pointing it straight at the men in the doorway, barking a long, incoherent series of contradictory instructions at them. They looked scared out of their wits. This was probably because when a man points a gun at you, you want to do what he asks. But it’s difficult when you can’t make out what he’s saying.