Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

prescription filled in the hospital pharmacy, went directly home, swallowed two Tylenols, stretched out on the sofa, and watched his hands do a spastic dance on his sternum.
    He had always prided himself on his high pain threshold, but that threshold seemed to have shrunk to a pitiful nothing. The medication was giving him no relief; the agony kept looping in his hands like some gruesome CD track programmed to endlessly repeat itself.
    Turning on the TV , Brewster muted the sound and stared blankly at the screen. The local news was just concluding when he heard the Janaceks out in the corridor shrilly arguing over which one of them had been responsible for paying a bill. Their door clapped shut with a gunshot-like crack.
    He lay there urging himself to get a grip, get his ass off the sofa, and hustle up something to eat, but anything besides lying there and riding out the pain felt beyond him.
    Next door the dispute was escalating, the volume rising.
    “Please, Melvyn. Please, Dina, not tonight, kids,” Brewster murmured. “Give it a rest.”
    Melvyn was telling Dina how he was going to fuck her up but good if she didn’t shut her mouth. Dina was daring him to
Go ahead, big man. Do it, just do it
.
    Melvyn did it. Something collided with the wall that separated the two apartments with enough impact to send Brewster’s print of Scafell Pike, a souvenir of a walking tour he had taken in the Lake District thirty years ago, crashing to the floor.
    He snatched up the phone, dialed information. They had no listing for any Janacek at that address. He called the building superintendent but got no answer, only his voicemail. All avenues of redress blocked, he staggered to his feet and roared, “What in the name of Christ is going on over there!”
    And received Melvyn Janacek’s prompt reply: “Mind your own business! Fuck off!”
    He called 9-1-1. Ten minutes later the police arrived, a male corporal and a burly female constable. Brewster explained to the officers that he suspected Melvyn Janacek of bouncinghis wife off walls. With each bit of incriminating evidence he provided, the policewoman fondled the nightstick slung in her belt a little more eagerly.
God bless you
, thought Brewster,
you’re itching to use that billy club, aren’t you? Here’s hoping he tells you to fuck off too. Here’s hoping one thing leads to another and that he finds himself on the receiving end of a righteous smackdown
.
    The cops left to question the Janaceks. Twenty minutes later they were back. The corporal informed Brewster that Dina Janacek had assured them that everything was just fine; she couldn’t guess what their neighbour had thought he had heard. Her husband hadn’t touched her.
    “Well, I’m no expert on the psychology of this, but isn’t that typical of a victim of abuse? Isn’t that what women often do? I mean, protect the abuser?”
    “I saw no indications of physical harm. Constable Ramage here took Ms. Janacek aside and questioned her privately and she repeated her claim that she had not been subjected to violence.”
    “Okay, what about that?” Brewster was now appealing directly to Constable Ramage, hoping to get a more sympathetic hearing from a female ear. Stabbing his finger at poor Scafell Pike, forlorn on the floor and surrounded by splintered glass, he said, “If he didn’t toss her into the wall, what knocked that down?”
    Constable Ramage hooked her thumbs in her belt. Brewster suddenly realized that now she was annoyed with
him
. “I have no idea. But there’s something else that came up when we were interviewing Mr. Janacek. He said somebody keyed his car. Said to ask you about that.”
    “Jesus,” Brewster barked, astonished. “Why the hell would I key his car?”
    “He said that you two had had a misunderstanding. Something to do with an incident concerning the elevator one morning.”
    “The business with the elevator wasn’t
one morning
, it was
this
morning. Which means I had no time to