Day Six - Benny Abbott
Benny Abbott
Day Six
I’ve been pacing the Glendale Memorial waiting room for six hours when Keller finally returns my call.
“I got your messages,” she says. I hear voices in the background, the slamming of a car door.
I gesture for Sarah to follow me into an empty beige-tiled hallway beside the elevators and put Keller on speaker. “So will you question them again? Ted and Emil?”
“Where are you right now?”
“The hospital.” Technically, the ER. I glance down at my fingers, stretched to the point of shininess, like greasy cooked sausages. “I may have broken my hand.”
“Your hand.” She doesn’t sound surprised. “Why were you at Joy’s house last night?”
I haven’t mentioned the surveillance camera yet, nor will I until I’m reunited with a working SD card reader. I brought one with me but my laptop rejected it on the way to the ER, and Sarah refused to turn around. “I was just grabbing something for Potsie,” I lie. “Did you talk to Ted and Emil?”
“I did, yes.”
“And? What did they say?”
The line dampens, like she’s covered the microphone. A muffled conversation ensues. Sarah hugs herself, back pressed to the wall.
“Detective?”
“I’m gonna have to call you back.” The line goes flat.
The elevator dings and a man pushing an empty wheelchair steps out. He nods at me and then quickly turns away, as if embarrassed. I wonder what I must look like. Sarah continues hugging herself, but I can see the gears shifting behind her eyes.
I’m about to ask what she’s thinking when a nurse steps into the hallway. “Abbott?”
“HOW’D THE OTHER guy fare?” the technician asks as he coaxes my hand into a semi-flat position on the X-ray table.
I don’t respond. The pain is so intense I can hardly breathe.
“Hold that pose,” he says, going behind a wall.
The doctor, an older man with voluminous ear hair, meets me in the examination room an hour later.
I’ve fractured the fifth metacarpal bone but I won’t need surgery.
Ice, pain medication, splinting, rest. “Never hit hard on hard,” he says.
“Only hard on soft or soft on hard.” He narrows his eyes beneath bushy brows, giving me a not-so-subtle once-over.
“Better yet, don’t hit anything at all.”
“I didn’t…” I start, but it’s not worth it. I stare at his ear hair and thank him for his wisdom. Soon Sarah and I are back in her car.
Sarah relies on the navigation app instead of asking for directions, and we’re quiet for most of the drive. Only as we climb the hill into Mount Washington does she break the silence. “I get that everything is terrible right now, but I have to tell you—it isn’t healthy the way you’re coping.”
“I know, I know. I’ll take a nap when I get home.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I regard my sister from the corner of my eye. “Then what do you mean?”
“This is coming from a place of love, okay? I just think we should talk about it before things go any further.”
She chews at a fingernail, and I wonder if she’s about to ask something delicately preposterous, like whether I might have, possibly, forgotten to mention that I murdered Xander. I wait until I can no longer stand it. “Spit it out.”
“You really scared me last night.”
I glance away, out my window at the passing houses. Halloween is in full force now, yards peppered with ghastly ghouls and pumpkins and tombstones. “You can put Dr. Sarah away now. It was just a bad night.”
“A bad night is food poisoning. It’s sitting on hold with your internet provider for four hours because your router stopped working. It is not landing yourself in the hospital with a broken hand because you picked a fight with your neighbor.”
“Are you serious? You were there. You know I didn’t start it.”
“I know things got tense. That part wasn’t on you. But let’s remember the sequence of events, Benny. No one laid hands on anyone until you grabbed Ted’s camera.”
A hundred snarky responses come to mind, but what I say instead is, “What would you have done? There’s no handbook for this. What would you be doing if you were me?”
“Do you want Dr. Sarah or not? Is this the Joe Schmoe question again? Because I have a better answer this time.”
I exhale. “Fine.”
“All right, Joe. If you were my client, I would remind you that some things are out of your control. And because you’re probably blaming yourself for this, just as you did with your mother’s death, I would sternly remind you that you are not at fault now, just as you weren’t at fault then. And even though—”
“But what if it is my fault?”
“Benny.”
“What if it is? Mom wouldn’t have died if I’d taken a different flight.
That’s a fact. That’s simple cause and effect.
So how can you say the same isn’t true for Joy?
Because I can think of a lot of things I could’ve done differently.
Like maybe not opening my stupid mouth and getting myself kicked out the night she went missing.
Or not being so goddamn blind when she sent me her memoir.
The clues were right there. Right in front of my face.
And not just for the memoir—for all of it.
If I’d read between the lines just once, just once… ”
She turns onto my street. “Benny…”
“Stop, okay? Just stop.” My voice cracks. I focus on my splinted hand. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’ve had enough of Dr. Sarah for now.”
“No, Benny—”
“I said stop!”
“No, look.”
Reluctantly, I follow her gaze. “Oh.”
The crowd of reporters has doubled. Tripled. They race toward us, and we slow to a crawl as they shout out questions, lenses tapping the glass of my window. Did you kill Xander, Benny? Where are you hiding Joy? What have you done with Joy?
I exchange a terrified glance with Sarah. “Why are they saying that?”
“This can’t be good.”
There’s no way to get past without going through.
“Try backing up,” I say.
“I can’t.” Sarah white-knuckles the wheel. “If I run over them I’m the bad guy, right?”
“I think that’s usually how it works.”
We inch forward. At the pace we’re going, it’ll take an hour to cover half a block. But then someone shouts for everyone to clear the way, and the crowd begins to part.
“Oh, thank god,” I say.
The relief lasts for exactly five seconds.
“Benny?” Sarah says. “Why are there so many policemen here?”
There are three cruisers—no, four. My front door is open, uniformed officers tramping in and out of my house. Keller is waiting at the curb.
“Benny Abbott,” she says when I step out of the car, “you are under arrest for malicious destruction of property and concealment of evidence.” She says more but I can’t process for the pain in my hand as she pulls my arms behind my back.
I yelp as she snaps cuffs onto my wrists. “Please don’t,” I rasp, “it’s broken.”
She holds a piece of paper in front of my face and explains that they have a warrant to search my home. The angle at which my arms are fixed is awkward. The pain is excruciating. “Please,” I say. “Please. It hurts.”
She nods at another officer, who rests a hand on his gun as she unlocks the cuffs and repositions my arms to the front of my body. It’s no better. There are so many spots floating before my eyes I can barely see.
“Enjoy the ride.” She pushes me down into the back of a cruiser and slams the door.
This time, I get a lawyer.