Black Cat Weekly #94

Chapter 7

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byI was sitting in a lawyer’s office for the third time in twenty years. This one was a young, scrawny guy in a shiny suit. He opened an envelope and pulled out a piece of paper. “Not it,” he read. Then he turned the paper around so’s we could see. “NOT IT” in my sister Brenda’s handwriting.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” my brother Donny said. He ran his hands over the top of his head, like to fix his hair if he’d had any left.

The lawyer coughed and said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand the significance of this message.” You could tell just by looking at him that he was the type that didn’t like cursing. Used to set Ma off when we’d curse, which was a f*****g joke seeing the mouth she had on her.

“Don’t worry about it,” Donny said to the guy. “It’s an inside joke.”

Me and Donny paid the lawyer and went across the street to a little hole-in-the-wall bar. It was empty except for us and the bartender—an old lady who was eighty if she was a day.

We took a seat in the back.

“I gotta say, Paula, I’d’ve laid odds ten to one on it being Brenda. But you…” He shook his finger at me. “You were always a dark horse.” He reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He had one halfway to his mouth before he remembered you can’t smoke inside no more.

“You think I killed Ma?” I asked.

I“Who else? You and me’s the only ones left. Brenda said she didn’t do it. You saw. It sure as hell wasn’t me. Wait a minute…” Donny’s mouth c****d into a sorta sideways smile. “Ah, you’re f*****g with me. You almost got me.”

Lemme stop and tell you a couple things you oughta know. When we were little, there were five of us kids living in a two-bedroom apartment with Ma. When Ma got shot, Brenda was sixteen. Eddie was a year younger than Bren. Then came Donny, then me—I was nearly eleven—then little Angelo.

Even though we were packed in the place like sardines, we didn’t hardly talk to each other back in them days. Brenda was always a quiet one, and Angelo, he was just a baby. Donny and Eddie didn’t stay at home much back then, but they were there that night. We were all there the night Ma died.

Round midnight, we heard BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG.

I woke up and ran out in the hall. Found Ma looking real surprised-like, with her mouth puckered open. She slumped against the wall with blood smeared behind her all down that ugly blue wallpaper. She didn’t have nothing on underneath her robe, so you could see her whole chest and count the four holes.

Ma was a fanatic about locking the door and windows, used big padlocks on ’em. As if the danger came from the outside and not from her. Anyways, the place was locked up like Alcatraz that night, which is how we knew it had to be one of us that killed her. Nobody else coulda got in.

Donny or maybe Eddie asked who done it and where they got the g*n. Everybody said it wasn’t them. Brenda told them to leave off, there was no point in knowing. She said we should just be grateful. Maybe God himself rained them bullets down on Ma from above cuz she deserved it.

Ma getting killed made us kids tight. It was like a pact—we had to protect whichever one of us did it. After she died, Eddie and Donny dropped out of school and got jobs to keep some money coming in so’s the social-services people wouldn’t get wise. Brenda stayed home. Now Bren, she was a good mother to us. Made us frosted cupcakes on our birthdays. She never raised her voice, much less her hand. And of course all of us watched out for little Angelo.

heWe all got married, got jobs. We put it behind us. That was sixty years ago.

About twenty years ago, more or less, the doctors told Eddie that he had a tumor the size of a sewer rat in his stomach and he better make his peace. He died maybe three months later. They got us together to read his will out loud, which was bizarre, since neither Eddie or the rest of us ever had much more than two nickels to rub together. But pretty quick we understood why he’d wanted us all there. There was a bit he put in the will that said, “I want my brothers and sisters to know it was not me.”

I remember Eddie’s wife looking around real confused when the lawyer read that out. We were all sitting there with our jaws hanging open, like we were trying to catch flies. Angelo piped up and told her it was an inside joke. She bought it, and nobody said nothing more about it. The night Ma got killed wasn’t something we talked about.

A few years later, when Angelo was getting put into the ground after he had a stroke, same kind of thing was in his will. “It wasn’t me either.”

So the rest of us went out and got wills done too, so every time one of us died, we’d have that bit in there. We knew it’d be worth the wait when the one of us who did it finally went. Like waiting for the punchline of a joke.

Anyways, out of all those kids, me and Donny were the only ones left now. And here was Donny saying he thought it was me who killed Ma. I looked at him hard, trying to figure him out.

He leaned back in his chair. “I probably should’a known it was you. What’d Ma do to you that night anyways? I remember you screaming.”

I was surprised he asked. Like I said, we never talked about that night. Never. “You really wanna know?”

“I asked, didn’t I?” he said.

“Burned the backs of my arms on the electric stove.” My fingers traced along the old scars. I had a s**t ton of scars. We all did.

“Them burns she used to do hurt like a son of a b***h. Worse than any amount of smacking, or getting hit with the belt buckle even.” He took a swig from his Michelob. “Did you know she actually bit Eddie once?”

“For real?”

He nodded. “Bit him right on his hand, like she was a dog.”

“Dog? Pft. b***h, you mean.”

Pft.He choked out a little laugh. “You remember how we all slept till noon the day after it happened and missed school?”

“Schools didn’t give two f***s back then,” I said.

“You got that right,” he said. “Different times. My Melissa forgot to call the school last week when her twins had chicken pox, and the school was on her a*s about it by twenty past eight.”

I picked at the layers on the edge of the paper coaster. The drips off the highball glass had made it go soft. Then I looked up at Donny. If we were reminiscing, I had a couple questions too.

“How’d you and Eddie get rid of Ma anyway? Bren told me to stay in the bedroom with Angelo and listen to records while you got her outta there and cleaned up.”

“We hoisted her into the attic with some ropes Eddie rigged up,” he said. “Dragged her across the boards up there, and then let her down through the ceiling into the empty apartment next door. The way those places were built, the attics were connected all along the row. You could walk on the joists from one end to the other.”

“You could walk all the way across up there?” I asked.

“Yeah. That’s how me and Eddie used to sneak out sometimes. No fire codes in them days. Anyways, we used a hacksaw on her, and bit by bit, we threw out the hunks with the trash till she was gone. Eddie was real smart about it.”

“That was Eddie,” I said. “He was always the brains.”

“And I was always the muscles.”

Donny took out a cigarette. Then he remembered again about the ban and tucked it behind his ear. “Funny we never talked about none of this before now, ain’t it? For sixty years?”

“What else is funny is nobody missed her. You’d think somebody’d come by looking.”

He shrugged. “Eh, Ma never kept much company. Far as I know, only time anybody said something was that mean bastard who lived down the hall asked me how my ma was. I told ’em she got a boyfriend and left. He said, ‘Yeah, I bet she did. Maybe I’m her boyfriend.’ Laughed his head off. Crazy fuck.”

I’m“That redheaded bastard with the dogs?”

“Those f*****g dogs.” Donny shook his head, remembering. “Tough guy like that with all those yappy little dogs. Ma kicked one of ’em once and he went ballistic.”

“Yeah, I remember. That was maybe a week before she died.”

I kept the smile on my face, but it took work cuz I also remembered how that same redheaded bastard got pinched for shooting a Puerto Rican guy in our building who’d looked at him sideways. Cops found the bastard’s fingerprints, but never figured out how he got into the Puerto Rican’s apartment—it was locked.

“Hey, Don, gimme one of them cigarettes, would ya?”

“Thought you quit?”

“I did.”

He looked at the No Smoking sign, but he didn’t argue.

“If you say so.” Donny lit one up too.

The old broad behind the bar looked over at us, but she didn’t say nothing, just went back to watching Judge Judy on the set attached to the wall.

Judge Judy“Still can’t believe it was you.” He shook his head. “Wish they could all be here so’s we could’ve found out together.” His eyes got soft and wet. “I’m glad you did it, Paula. Grateful. You saved us.”

I kept on smiling, pressing my lips together like I was trying to out-smile the f*****g Mona Lisa.

“What’d you do with the g*n anyways?” he asked.

I took a drag on the cigarette. Breathed in the smoke. Held it in till my lungs burned. For sixty years we covered up for each other. That was our bond. Now come to find out that we were most likely covering up for some low-life piece of s**t from down the hall. I could picture his greasy pink face peeking down from the attic hatch, pointing his g*n at Ma. Would we have looked out for each other like we did if we hadn’t thought it was one of us? Hell, no. The weight of that pressed down on my chest like sandbag.

Then I remembered what Brenda said that night, and I decided she was right. To my mind, it was God that killed Ma. One way or another, it was God. Let Donny think it was me. Let him take that idea to his grave. Or to mine, if I went first. That was something I needed to take care of. First thing tomorrow, I’d change my will, make up some bullshit about how I did it and where I hid the g*n. Donny had to think it was me. He needed it. That lie would be my parting gift to my brother.

hadI smiled, for real this time. “Never you mind about the g*n, Donny Boy. You’ll get the rest of your answers when I’m pushing up daisies. I promise, it’ll be worth the wait.”

Mindy Quigley is the author of two cozy mystery series, and her short stories have won awards, including the 2018 Artemis/Lightbringer Prize. Her non-writing career has been stranger than fiction—she worked as the personal assistant to the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep and as project manager for a research clinic founded by J.K. Rowling. She now lives in Blacksburg, Virginia. See: mindyquigley.com