More Than Less by Donald Dewey

The superfluous detail was a Kubel family trait. Kubel’s brother Ray couldn’t tell a story without taking biographical detours on everyone he mentioned. Older sister Regina was incapable of setting the table without procrastinating over which fork best suited her son, daughter, and husband. Younger sister Shelley couldn’t admit her latest beating without identifying the liquor her boy friend had been drinking or the book she had been reading when he had exploded against her. All were aware of the foible and could laugh at it in themselves when they weren’t being criticized for it with impatient sighs and scowls. As a library researcher, Kubel liked thinking he was the most practical symptom of the family disease in at least converting it into a paycheck. He had lost count of the people who had thanked him for revealing the relevance of tiny footnotes or appendix additions for the project on which they were engaged. And when he was feeling especially philosophical, he could also fancy the notion that he, his brother, and his sisters were on some cosmic assignment to encompass as much reality as there was to gather, neither the directly pertinent nor the excruciatingly tangential escaping their vigilance, all of it to be forwarded to some intergalactic laboratory for sorting out in the study of the human species.
     But then Shelley was strangled by her boy friend, and Kubel didn’t feel like being philosophical.
     Within the wake of shock, mourning, insinuating questions from the police, cryptic questions from the district attorney’s office, and crass questions from TV stations and newspapers, Kubel kept at his job, telling himself his hatred for Shelley’s boy friend had to be sublimated for his own sanity into his daily tasks at the library. He considered it fortuitous that his workload suddenly became heavy in the minutiae of such repugnant subjects as the Nazis, Stalin’s labor camps, and the bloody consequences of Britain’s divide-and-conquer tactics for one-time Empire possessions. Rarely did he have to labor to find a particular that satisfied his thirst for fury: It was usually right there in the first old journal or water-logged folio he ferreted out from the shelves of the dank library basement. The vengeance he wanted for Shelley had been a comprehensible option for entire peoples throughout history, and he subsided professionally within their tribulations. If only in passing for a conceit he had decided was inappropriate, he wondered if the intergalactic laboratory he, his brother, and sisters had been serving had provided these precedents for him so he could go home at the end of the day more weary than furious.
     Instead of a fantasy about an intergalactic laboratory, his brother Ray and sister Regina had only their rage about what had happened to Shelley, and the more open they were about it, most often in guilty shrieks and tears that they hadn’t intervened to help her when there had still been time, the more uncomfortable Kubel became. At the funeral and for weeks afterward, while they seethed with what they would do to the killer of their sister if given the chance, he found himself sitting silently or walking out of rooms when they erupted. He understood their readiness to go on shows to support campaigns for the death penalty, or even just to tell the public about a Shelley who had lived her 26 years unknown to it, but he couldn’t share their zeal. At the end of his workday he was exhausted by brutalized Jews, Russians, and Malayans, and didn’t see how his visible fatigue could contribute anything to Ray and Regina’s radio and TV appearances. On weekends he preferred to stay at home with his cat Brandy than to continue with the semi-rituals of going to a bar with Ray on Saturday night or to Regina’s for dinner on Sunday afternoon. In his most morose moments the apprehension crept over him that, more than just Shelley, he had also begun to lose a brother and another sister when a drunken psychopath had choked a girl friend to death for not explaining why it had taken her an hour to pick up orange juice, peach frozen yoghurt, and a box of Shredded Wheat at Key Food.
     Little was said explicitly, of course. There was still always that fraction of a second of joy at hearing their surviving voices when he phoned Ray and Regina or they phoned him. It took whole instants for everyone to remember they were supposed to be edgy with one another for not having reacted identically to what had happened to Shelley. Only past those instants did the new aloofness settle, Kubel hearing some of his own caution in his brother and sister for avoiding conversational land mines. He despised Shelley’s boy friend for introducing so much superficial tact into the family.
     By the time the murder trial started, Kubel had to be urged by the assistant district attorney to show up at the courtroom in a demonstration of united family anguish. He knew the man was right for practical reasons, but he wouldn’t have minded a little bit more persuasion that this was an accurate description of his feelings. Grief he certainly felt for Shelley’s death and — work or no work in the library basement — the kind of loathing Ray and Regina had for Shelley’s boy friend. Did grief and loathing add up to anguish? He supposed it did, but he wished the assistant district attorney, more experienced in such matters, had spent a few more minutes winning him over to the idea. He was also taken aback by the alacrity of his boss to give him the morning off to attend the opening of the trial. He had barely gotten the request out of his mouth before the woman jumped up from her desk with a lot of of course this and of course that, making a bad job of diverting his attention from the tabloid on her desk with Shelley’s college photo on the front page. He didn’t like his growing impression that everybody in the city seemed to know how he should have been behaving before he did.
     When he arrived at the court building, he found reporters already gathered on the front steps around Ray, Regina, and the assistant district attorney. With their backs to him, he thought he could slip into the courtroom without being seen, but he had barely started for the far side of the steps when one of the prosecutor’s aides spotted him and steered him into the circle. When Regina clasped his hand, he didn’t know if she was giving him sisterly solidarity or just warning him not to blurt something stupid.
     He got through the press conference without having to answer any questions, but was disconcerted to discover that the three seats reserved for him, Ray, and Regina in the courtroom were in the front row directly behind the prosecution table. He had seen countless TV dramas where the relatives of the victim had been seated in less conspicuous places and he was annoyed with himself that he hadn’t gone over that point with the assistant district attorney before agreeing to show up. He couldn’t have been the only one who had watched Law and Order, Matlock, The Good Wife, and all those other lawyer programs. Didn’t their popularity over so many years suggest that people from the district attorney’s office had to have watched a few episodes of them, too? What had they been thinking to put him, his brother, and sister on such display? Were they supposed to sob for the cameras on cue?
     The boy friend Shelley had still insisted on calling “Ronny” when she had been talking about her beatings, as if he had retained his rights as a familiar person in spite of acting like an animal, came through the side door with two lawyers who were half his height and twice his age. All three of them wore pinstripe suits, the one on “Ronny” blue, the other two gray. Kubel had first met “Ronny” at Regina’s at a surprise birthday dinner for her husband and had tried to get him to talk about his brokerage house job. But “Ronny” had fenced off his curiosity, laughing that Kubel needed to take time off from researching facts that had no meaning for him and then turning to Regina’s husband to talk about football. Shelley had sidled over to him to tell him not to get mad, that “Ronny” had just been joking. Now, though, as “Ronny” made a screeching noise pulling his chair out from the defense table and tried to look comical about it, Kubel was astonished to recall how much he had always detested the man, even before what he had done to Shelley, and wondered how he could have forgotten that. Had “Ronny” also put on a funny face listening to Shelley’s last gurglings on their living room floor?
     Kubel chided himself for being slow to get to his feet at the entrance of the judge. He was sure the newspaper people in the courtroom had noticed and he could see the next day’s headline: KUBEL TOO DISTRAUGHT TO STAND UP FOR JUDGE. And then he made it worse by also being the last one to sit down again. He saw the second headline: DISTRAUGHT KUBEL ALSO TOO UPSET TO SIT BACK DOWN. It was as if the assistant district attorney had paid him to do the anguished thing.
     The judge, a big man with a layer cake of a head of bushy salt-and pepper hair, pushed his microphone away from his face, and that was a mistake because his voice wasn’t as strong as he assumed it was. Not even the sight of Regina having to lean forward to pick up what he was mumbling got through to the man: He rambled on about what could just as well have been the morning news as the procedures he would be presiding over. Kubel guessed that once upon a time the judge had either been criticized for barking too loudly into the mike or complimented for being naturally equal to courtroom electronics, and, offended or flattered, had never gotten over the observation. One way or the other, he didn’t like so much vanity sitting in judgment of “Ronny.” The empty seats in the jury box seemed twice as empty at the prospect.
     He had been surprised when Ray had told him it would be a bench trial. Apparently, “Ronny” didn’t trust jurors to understand how he could have been so “emotionally distressed,” as the defense claimed, that he had been powerless not to throttle Shelley for good one last time. Maybe his lawyers were afraid of a juror who had suffered his own emotional distress listening to the investment advice of a brokerage house. But what did a bench trial imply about the judge? The plaque in front of him said he was Barton Pitt, almost like Brad Pitt, the actor living with Angelina Jolie. Kubel had heard worse names for a kid growing up. What else could Barton Pitt’s schoolmates have taunted except “Here comes the Pitts, here comes the Pitts!”? As schoolyard teasing went, it fell a little short of the traumatic. He decided Barton Pitt had been lucky: If he had suffered for anything at all as a kid, it had been for his double-tiered head. Kubel imagined a strawberry filling between his ears and the black-and-gray ringlets on top.
He pulled his attention back as Barton Pitt looked over at him, Regina, and Ray. Whatever he was going on about had driven Regina back into her chair and Ray into more of a glacial expression than usual. There was sadness in the man’s eyes as he addressed them, and “Ronny” seemed doubly intent on studying his hands in his lap. Kubel figured the judge was extending his sympathy to the family of the deceased, and probably also throwing in a warning that this didn’t give them license for any outburst. He didn’t want to hear it, so he nodded quickly in agreement. But Barton Pitt continued to mutter at them behind full eye contact. Kubel wished Regina and Ray would also nod so they could all move on. The man’s stare was embarrassing, made Kubel’s throat itch. He coughed to get rid of the tickle, and one of the defense lawyers looked back at him as though coughing was outside trial protocol. That made him feel better about the itch.
     As the judge finally began reading the indictment, Kubel was amazed to see how threadbare the right knee of his suit pants had become. Had one of the machines at the cleaner’s gotten stuck on that patch of material? He would have had to be a gardener or nun to be down on his knees as regularly as the worn area insinuated. But then he remembered an article he had once looked up on the haberdashery trade, something about how the knee area wasn’t threaded as densely as the rest of the leg in order to allow for greater give. That had made sense when he had come across it in the library basement, but now it made for the cost of a new pair of pants. Fortunately, they were slacks and not part of a suit, or he would have been even more out of pocket. One way or the other, though, he was going to have a little talk with Mrs. Rosen at the cleaner’s.
     At long last Barton Pitt shut up, and the assistant district attorney got to his feet. Kubel didn’t understand the necessity of opening remarks when there was no jury. Surely, Barton Pitt must have already heard about the fingerprints around Shelley’s throat that had been matched to “Ronny” and about the next-door neighbors who had heard Shelley screaming her boy friend’s name just before a last sound of a body being thumped on the living room floor. And if he had heard all that, he must have also anticipated what the two defense lawyers were going to say. So why did Barton Pitt have to hear it all over again?
     Kubel’s grunt of disgust was so loud the assistant district attorney stumbled in his speech to look at him, accusation in his eyes. Kubel stared ahead to the flags behind the bench until the prosecutor went back to talking for the record. He knew what the man was up to — wanting to remind Barton Pitt he wasn’t sitting in judgment over a corpse found on a living room floor, but over a savaged woman named Shelley Kubel who had once inhaled and exhaled as naturally as he did and who hadn’t known she would be dead seconds before she was. Kubel felt the itch coming back to his throat, certain by now that it was some kind of allergic condition he had picked up in the library basement. What was the purpose behind reanimating Shelley for a stranger like Barton Pitt, only to remind everyone, as he had to, that Shelley really couldn’t be reanimated? There was a cruelty in that, a procedural conspiracy to kill Shelley all over again.
The low sniffling to his left wasn’t from Regina, but from Ray; his brother’s eyes were watery red even as the rest of his face remained rigid. The assistant district attorney just kept talking, more gratuitously with every word. There had been so many details from Shelley’s life he was eager to cram in because Ray and Regina had passed them along to him and his secretary and he didn’t intend for that information to go to waste on a steno pad. Shelley had grown up with her older brothers and sister in a house that was really a bungalow with airs, had liked drinking milk from old jelly jars, had played in a community soccer league, had led a group of teenagers in a street protest to reopen a municipal pool during a heat wave, had obtained her B.A. in English Literature, had gone to work at a shelter for single mothers, had signed up for every marathon organized against disease. Kubel almost gave in to an urge to cackle out his suddenly overwhelming sense of futility. Where could he have started? When had he become the brother of Mother Teresa? The truth was that Shelley had never lacked for the smart crack or the arrogant push. She had even borrowed money as her due. Their own mother had said more than once that Shelley might have been the youngest but could take care of herself better than any of them.
     So why was she the only one dead?
     Kubel didn’t know. Nobody around him did. The courtroom was a crowd scene of ignorance; with its venerated rituals, but of ignorance nevertheless. More frustrating was that the person closest to knowing why Shelley was alone in being dead was “Ronny,” now trying to look like an interested but dispassionate observer as the balder of his two lawyers got to his feet to address Barton Pitt. Only “Ronny” knew what nobody, not even his mother, had figured out about Shelley.
     Kubel tried to take in nothing but disconnected words as the bald lawyer went on and on. He counted the letters in the Latin motto on the shield behind Barton Pitt and divided them by four to see if they would fit evenly into his four front teeth; they didn’t. He waited for the stenographer to come up for air, to notice anything at all around her, but she didn’t and she didn’t. He wanted to see the court guards throw a greedy look at “Ronny,” give away how they thought of him as their meat, but they were on bland innocent-until-proven-guilty behavior. Finally, the bald lawyer stopped talking and the morning session ended.
     Kubel managed to regain the street without being trapped by Regina for lunch and without saying anything to the TV news people waiting for him in the corridor. His boss looked astounded when he stopped by her office to say he was back for the afternoon, but he closed the door between them again before he had to hear the sound version of the protest forming on her face. Only when he reached his desk in the basement and saw his project files still waiting for him did his heartbeat slow down. At least his work hadn’t been farmed out to others on the assumption he would be gone all day.
     The top file was from a university professor asking about the novels written during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union. The one under it was from a soap company vice-president needing information about bathroom sinks. Kubel didn’t know why the professor’s campus library didn’t have the Soviet novel material and the soap executive didn’t have enough subordinates to spend the day surfing the Internet for what he wanted. For some time, in fact, he had been surprised in arriving for work in the morning that institutions or corporations needed his help for anything. Aside from assisting individuals coming in off the street for documents that could be sent to them upstairs immediately for consultation, he couldn’t see his position lasting too much longer. If his job wasn’t on the endangered species list, as he had joked to Ray one night at their favorite saloon around the corner from Ray’s house, it was only because the list hadn’t yet been posted on the Internet.
     The professor’s request had no deadline delivery date on it, so Kubel assumed the information needed was for some book still being written, maybe only at a planning stage. He slipped that file to the bottom of the pile and looked more attentively at the request from the soap company executive. Did the library have any materials tracing the first use of soap dishes as an accessory for bathroom sinks? He was sure the library did, and probably within one of the numerous volumes in Section GH on the history of domesticity and household conveniences, but again he was stumped on why the soap man hadn’t found that information on his own. At times, it seemed like the word had gone out to keep the poor researcher named Kubel busy, no matter how redundant he had become.
     Kubel felt a frizzy warmth spread throughout his chest at the idea. Only now did he realize how cold — even bloodless — he had been back in the courtroom listening and not listening to what everyone was saying about Shelley. Simply put, he had been out of his element, defending himself against all the lawyer talk, trying to play the anguished role the assistant district attorney had assigned him. If Ray and Regina wanted to play along, fine. But he would produce his own anguish, thank you, and not just for public consumption. In the meantime he still had work to do.
As he suspected, the history of soap dishes was hidden away in a book on bathroom accessories on the second shelf of Section GH. He wondered if Shelley remembered how, in her everything-is-disgusting teenage years, she had reamed him out for leaving a bar of Ivory soap caking in bubbles in the dispenser. It was as though he had responsibility for every fragment of soap even when he hadn’t used it to wash his hands.

Donald Dewey has published twenty-eight books of fiction, drama, and nonfiction, as well as scores of stories for monthly publications.