He droned on, pouring out the details, which seemed to give him satisfaction. He probably liked to bitch, reciting his grievances in order to justify his ill treatment of other people. His irritation was contagious, and I could feel my temper climb.
I cut into his monologue. “Hey, I didn’t do this, Chester. You can rant and rave all you want, but the place was fine when I left. I locked up and put the key back through the mail slot like Bucky suggested. Ray Rawson was here. If you don’t believe me, you can ask him.”
“Everybody’s innocent. Nobody did nothing. Everybody’s got some kind of bullshit excuse,” Chester groused.
“Dad, she didn’t do it.”
“You let me take care of this.” He turned and looked at me narrowly. “You trying to say Ray Rawson did this?”
“Of course not. Why would he do this when he’s hoping to move in?” My voice was rising in response to his, and I worked to get control.
Chester’s attitude became grudging. “Well, you better have a talk with him and find out what he knows.”
“Why would he know anything? He left the same time I did.”
Bucky interceded, trying to introduce a note of reason. “Pappy didn’t have a pot to piss in, so there’s nothing here to take. Besides, he died in July. If burglars thought there was anything of value, why wait until now?”
“Maybe it was kids,” I said.
“We don’t have kids in this neighborhood as far as I know.”
“True enough,” I said. Ours was primarily a community of retirees. It was always possible, of course, that a roving band of thugs had targeted the apartment. Maybe they figured that any place this crummy looking had to be a cover for something good.
“Nuts!” Chester said with disgust. “I’m going down and wait for the police. Soon as you two crime experts finish your analysis, you can get the place cleaned up.”
I gave him a look. “I’m not going to clean the damn place.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” he said. “Bucky, you and Babe get busy.”
“You better wait for the cops,” I said.
He swung around and stared at me. “Why is that?”
“Because this is a crime scene. The cops might want to dust for prints.”
Chester’s face seemed to darken. “This is bullshit. There’s something not right about this.” He made a motion in my direction. “You can come on down with me.”
I glanced back at Bucky. “I wouldn’t touch anything if I were you. You don’t want to screw around with evidence.”
“I hear you,” he said.
Chester gestured impatiently for me to pick up the pace.
On the way down the steps, I glanced at my watch. It was 1:15 and already I was tired of taking crap from this guy. I’ll take crap when I’m paid for it, but I don’t like doing it without compensation.
Chester clumped into the kitchen and went straight to the refrigerator, where he jerked open the door. He took out a jar of mayonnaise, mustard, bottled hot sauce, a packet of bologna, and a loaf of Wonder white bread. Had he ordered me to come down here so I could supervise his lunch?
“I apologize if I was rough, but I don’t like what’s going on,” he said gruffly. He wasn’t looking at me, and I was tempted to do a double take to see if there was someone else in the room. He’d dropped the imperious attitude and was talking in a normal tone of voice.
“You have a theory?”
“I’ll get to that in a bit. Grab a chair.”
At least he had my attention. I took a seat at the kitchen table and watched in fascination as he started his preparations. Somehow in my profession I seem to spend a lot of time in kitchens looking on while men make sandwiches, and I can state categorically, they do it better than women. Men are fearless. They have no interest in nutrition and seldom study the list of chemicals provided on the package. I’ve never seen a man cut the crusts off the bread or worry about the aesthetics of the “presentation.” Forget the sprig of parsley and the radish rosette. With men, it’s strictly a grunt-and-munch operation.
Chester banged a cast-iron skillet on the burner, flipped the gas on, and tossed in a knuckle of butter, which began to sizzle within seconds. “I sent Bucky out to live with his granddad, which turned out to be a mistake. I figured the two of them could look after each other. Next thing I know, Bucky’s hooked up with that gal. I got nothing against Babe … she’s a dim-wit, but so’s he … I just think the two of ’em got no business being married.”
“Johnny didn’t warn you?”
“Hell, he probably encouraged it. Anything to make trouble. He was a sneaky old coot.”
I let that one pass, leaving him to tell the story his way. There was an interval of quiet while he tended to his cooking. The bologna was pale pink, the size of a bread-and-butter plate, a perfect circle of compacted piggie by-products. Chester tossed in the meat without even pausing to remove the rim of plastic casing. While the bologna was frying, he slathered mayonnaise on one slice of bread and mustard on the other. He shook hot sauce across the yellow mustard in perfect red polka dots.
As a child I was raised with the same kind of white bread, which had the following amazing properties: If you mashed it, it instantly reverted to its unbaked state. A loaf of this bread, inadvertently squished at the bottom of a grocery bag, was permanently injured and made very strange-shaped sandwiches. On the plus side, you could roll it into little pellets and flick them across the table at your aunt when she wasn’t looking. If one of these bread boogers landed in her hair, she would slap at it, irritated, thinking it was a fly. I can still remember the first time I ate a piece of the neighbor’s homemade white bread, which seemed as coarse and dry as a cellulose sponge. It smelled like empty beer bottles, and if you gripped it, you couldn’t even see the dents your fingers made in the crust.
The air in the kitchen was now scented with browning bologna, which was curling up around the edges to form a little bowl with butter puddled in the center. I could feel myself getting dizzy from the sensory overload. I said, “I’ll pay you four hundred dollars if you fix me one of those.”
Chester glanced at me sharply, and for the first time, he smiled. “You want toasted?”
“You’re the chef. It’s your choice,” I said.
While we chowed down, I decided to satisfy my curiosity as well. “What sort of work do you do back in Columbus?”
He snapped back the last of his sandwich like a starving dog, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin before he responded. “Own a little print shop in Bexley. Offset and letterpress. Cold and hot type. Brochures, flyers, business cards, custom stationery. I can collate, fold, bind, and staple. You name it. I just hired a guy looks after the place when I’m gone. He does good I’ll let him buy me out. Time I did something else. I’m too young to retire, but I’m tired of working for a living.”
“What would you do, come out here to live?” Chester fired up a cigarette, a Camel, unfiltered, that smelled like burning hay. “Don’t know yet. I grew up in this town, but I left as soon as I turned eighteen. Pappy came out here in 1945, which is when he bought this place. He always said he’d be in this house until the sheriff or the undertaker hauled him out by his feet. Him and me never could get along. He’s rough as a cob, and talk about child abuse. You never heard about that in the old days. I know a lot of guys got knocked around back then. That’s just what dads did. They came home from the factory, sucked down a few beers, and grabbed the first kid came handy. I been punched and kicked, flung against the wall, and called every name in the book. If I got in trouble, he’d make me pace until I dropped, and if I uttered one word of protest, he’d douse my tongue with Tabasco sauce. I hated it, hated my old man for doing it, but I just thought that’s the way life was. Now all you have to do is pop a kid across the face in public, you’re up on charges, buddy, looking at jail time. Foster home for the kid and the whole community up in arms.”
“I guess some things change for the better,” I remarked.
“You got that right. I vowed I’d never treat my kids that way, and that’s a promise I kept. I never once raised a hand to ’em.” I looked at him, waiting for some rueful acknowledgment of his own abusiveness, but he didn’t seem to make the connection. I moved the subject over slightly. “Your father died of a heart attack?”