A Cup Full of Midnight (12 page)

“What?”

“That’s how we handle combat. Rock, paper, scissors. Whoever wins the rock, paper, scissors wins the combat.” He led me toward the area marked
Biker Bar
, where two men, both in jeans and leather jackets, had squared off chest to chest.

“Your insolence offends me,” the taller man said with a menacing glower. “In fact, your very existence offends me.”

The other man, heavily bearded and mustached, sneered. “Talk is cheap, General.”

“Oh, I’ll do more than talk.”The General cracked his knuckles loudly. “I intend to kick your hirsute Philistine ass.”

Then they waited for a mediator to arrive, whereupon they did indeed engage in a round of rock, paper, scissors. The hirsute Philistine was the victor (rock smashes scissors), and the General stalked out of the bar while the others congratulated the winner. Once out of the biker bar area, the General dropped his sour demeanor and drifted toward the snack table.

“See?” Josh grinned. “No bloodshed.” He was more animated than I’d seen him in months. I let him chatter, enjoying this rare glimpse of the kid I’d taught to play cops and robbers.

“It’s pretty complex, isn’t it?” I said.

He seemed pleased. “Yeah, it is. Lots of politics and stuff. Mostly, it’s just people standing around and talking to each other, pretending to be other people.”

“How is all this different from what Razor did?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “Razor wasn’t playing. He ran a game for awhile because it seemed like fun, and the rest of us liked to play it, but the whole vampire world to him . . . it wasn’t about pretending to be a character. He
was
the character.”

“You believe that? That he was a vampire?”

He couldn’t meet my gaze. “He had some kind of power. Maybe it was just charisma.”

We wandered from area to area, listening to snippets of conversation. When he was sure I wasn’t going to drive a stake through anybody’s heart, Josh drifted away to join the artistic types and I slipped out for a breath of fresh air. The predicted snowfall had begun, and a patina of fat flakes glistened on the hood and shoulders of Marta Savales’s parka. She stood with her back to the wind, blowing into her gloved hands so the steam from her breath warmed her face. Of the half-dozen protesters, she was the only one left.

I touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Why don’t you go home, Ms. Savales? The roads are getting worse.”

“I’ll leave when they leave,” she said.

“I don’t think you’re going to stop anybody from playing tonight.”

“Those people are dangerous, Mr. McKean,” she said. “That
game
is dangerous.”

“Why do you say that?”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a billfold, which she opened to a photograph of a dark-haired boy who looked to be in his middle teens.

“This is my son,” she said. “His name is Benjy.”

I studied the photograph. Unruly brown hair. Crooked smile with the corner of one front tooth overlapping the other.

“He looks like a good kid.”

“He is. Or . . . I think . . .” She tilted her head back, eyelashes wet with snow or tears. “Maybe he
was.
”

“You think he might be dead. And you think this game has something to do with that? So why’d you spit on Alan Keating?”

“Keating is an idiot. Or a devil. Did he tell you about Chase? No, of course not.” A drop of moisture trickled from her nostril. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and handed it to her. She dabbed at her nose. “Thank you.”

“Who’s Chase?”

“Chase Eddington. He was one of Razor’s victims—and one of Mr. Keating’s patients. His parents didn’t know about Keating’s connection to Razor.” She twisted the Kleenex into a corkscrew and closed her gloved fist around it. “When they found out who Keating was, they got Chase a new therapist. A few weeks later, the boy killed himself.”

I thought of Josh, of the splash of blood on white porcelain. Pushed the thought away. “You knew him? Chase Eddington?”

“No, I met his mother—Hannah, Hannah Eddington—at a meeting for bereaved parents. And—this is terrible, I know—all I could think was that at least she knew what had happened to her son.”

I touched her forearm lightly with my fingertips. She gave me a bleary smile and I withdrew my hand. “Tell me about Benjy.”

She looked down at her hands, where a sprinkling of snow and white tissue fibers dusted her gloves. “Sometimes I tell myself he’s dead, and it would be better just to accept that and let him go. But then I think, well, if there’s no body . . . You see how it is?”

“If there’s no body, he isn’t dead.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering, and nodded. He was a good boy, she said. She hadn’t worried about the role-playing, because her older boys had both been Dungeons & Dragons aficionados, and they’d grown up to be well-adjusted, moral men. Benjy seemed to be following in their footsteps.

Then he met Razor.

“He was confused,” Ms. Savales said. “Was he straight? Was he gay? He’d never thought he was gay, but if he wasn’t, then what was he doing with Razor?”

I stared out at the snow swirling across the parking lot and unclenched my teeth. “He told you all this?”

“We were very close. I told him he had to stop seeing this man, that it was bad for him.”

“Let me guess. He wouldn’t stop.”

“No. He said he would. A few days later, I came home from work and found a note saying he needed to pick up some things of his from Razor’s house. He said he’d be right back.” She gave a hiccupping laugh. “He never came home. His car turned up at the bus terminal downtown. He was so proud of it, he’d just gotten it for his birthday. If he was running away, why would he leave his car and take a bus?”

She dabbed at her eyes with the ruined Kleenex. “I’m sorry. I can’t talk about it anymore.”

I asked for a number where I could reach Chase’s parents. She gave it to me, then tucked Benjy’s photo back into her purse.

“I’ll find your son, Ms. Savales,” I said.

“I hired a detective once. He couldn’t find anything. There was nothing to find.”

“There’s always something to find.”

I went back inside to find Josh and spent another hour watching the game. Chuck drifted from group to group, mediating and filling in gaps in the story line. Affable guy. Smart. Smart enough to stage a crime scene like Razor’s?

When things broke up a few hours later, Marta Savales was still outside, lips clenched over chattering teeth, meeting the hostile glances of the gamers with quiet defiance. Josh and I walked her out to her car, wrenched open the door, which had frozen shut, and scraped the ice from her windows.

“One more thing,” I said, holding the door as she climbed inside. “How well do you know Alan Keating?”

She made an angry gesture, like swatting at an invisible fly. “I went by his office a few times to ask him about Benjy. He said he didn’t know anything.”

“You don’t believe him.”

“Benjy once said that Alan Keating was the only person in the world Razor would confide in.”

“Patient-doctor privilege?” I asked.

“Maybe. I used to think of psychologists as being a bit like priests in that way.”

“The confidentiality of the confessional.”

“That’s Alan Keating for you.” She gave me a bitter smile. “The Devil’s confessor.”

Josh and I watched her drive away, then bundled into the Silverado and inched our way home as snow spattered against the windshield and ice crusted on the streets.

By the time I dropped him off at Randall’s place and made my way home, it was almost midnight. Getting ready for bed, I laid my wallet on the beside table and thought of the phone number I’d tucked inside.

Too late to call Elisha now.

I wasn’t sure if I felt disappointed or relieved.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
he next morning, I spent an extra thirty minutes chipping ice out of the horses’ troughs, then drove to the office on snow-covered streets. The red light on the answering machine was flashing. Messages from two potential clients. A skip trace and a cheating spouse surveillance. Easy money, but not wanting to commit to anything but Josh, I called both back, explained that my slate was full, and referred them to one of my competitors, a former football player named Lou Wilder. Lou and I had our differences, but he did good work.

I pulled out Razor’s file and sank down in the leather chair behind the desk Frank hated. Scratched and riddled with bullet holes, the massive oak piece dated from the Civil War. One side had been scorched during a Yankee raid. Its owner, a physician, had taken it by wagon train to Arizona, where it held vials of drugs and jars of liniment until the doctor passed away and his son, the local sheriff, appropriated it. Over the years, it passed from family member to family member like an unwanted foster child, until it finally made its way to Tennessee, where a client of mine gave it to me in lieu of payment.

As it turned out, I loved the thing. It made me feel like Wyatt Earp.

I sat behind it with Razor’s file in front of me and jotted the names and numbers of the coterie members onto the back of a business card. Tried the first number, Dark Knight’s. No answer. Dialed the number Barnabus shared with Medea, and the answering machine informed me, in a cheesy Bela Lugosi imitation, that I could leave a message at the shriek. I told Bela who I was and asked for a call back.

I pulled out the number Marta Savales had given me, leaned back in my chair and thought of Chase Eddington, the boy who had killed himself. Just by dialing the number, I would scrape these people raw.

But my nephew needed answers, and more important, the detectives who suspected him of murder needed answers. To save Josh, I would scrape the whole world raw.

I dialed the number.

The woman who answered had a pleasant voice, like a kindergarten teacher. When I told her who I was and what I wanted, she gave a little gasp and said, “Oh. I don’t think . . . What could we possibly tell you?”

“It shouldn’t take long,” I said. “I could be there in thirty minutes.”

Silence.

“You can call Frank Campanella at the West precinct house. He’ll vouch for me.” I gave her the number.

Another pause. Then, “All right,” she said. “This afternoon. But I’m afraid you’ll be wasting your time.”

They lived on a quiet street in Inglewood, a few blocks from the river, in a ranch-style brick house with rust-colored shutters and two front windows, each with a peaked gable above and a long white flower box below. Nice house, not too expensive, in a nice, not-too-expensive neighborhood, an oasis of middle class coziness in a part of town slowly going to seed. A basketball hoop hung from the garage door, a ragged net dangling from one side.

I thought of Chase and his father shooting hoops in the driveway and felt a pressure behind my eyes.

The yard was small, but it seemed to take a long time to cross it. The snow had melted and refrozen, and with each step, my boots crunched through an icy crust.

I hesitated on the front porch. Not too late to turn around and leave these people in peace.

Instead, I rang the bell.

No answer.

I rang again, then strolled around to the backyard, where a blocky man who looked to be in his early fifties and a woman maybe a decade younger stood feeding strips of cardboard into a bonfire. She was shivering in khakis and a forest-green sweater that looked like it wouldn’t be much use against the cold.

An overweight black lab peered out from behind the woman’s legs, tail wagging, a ribbon of drool dangling from its tongue.

The man picked up a branch and prodded at the fire. Sparks swirled up like fireflies. An ember landed on the shoulder of his jacket, and he swatted at it with a calloused hand. The woman brushed her fingertips across the spot where it had been.

I moved into their line of vision. “Doug and Hannah Eddington?”

They both looked up, her eyebrows lifting, his joining in a heavy black ‘V.’ They were a handsome couple, not beautiful, but they looked good together. Her chin-length bob was frosted with gray, and a web of fine lines etched the corners of her eyes. She had a fleshy angularity around the hips, the kind skinny women often develop as they age. Her waist was slim, her stomach small and round, like half a grapefruit.

Her husband was darkly tanned, with a square-jawed face going to jowl and a forehead creased with worry lines. The sleeves of his shirt were bunched at the elbows, revealing hairy forearms heavy with muscle.

“We’re trying to get on with things,” he said. “Yesterday, my wife laughed at a joke she heard at the Piggly Wiggly. Now here you come to pick off the scab.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, moving closer to the flames. “That’s not my intention.”

“What is your intention?”

“I don’t know. Just fishing.”

Hannah’s smile was small, half-frozen. She rubbed her upper arms with her hands and said, “It’s too cold out here for fishing. Maybe we should go inside.”

Doug gave her a long look, then sighed and turned back to the fire. Prodded the blackening cardboard. It crumbled into a maelstrom of sparks and ashes. “Just about done here, anyway.”

He walked over to a faucet at the back of the house and came back with a shiny green garden hose. Water hissed inside it as the pressure built. Then a spray of ice and water shot from the end and spewed onto the flames. When nothing was left but a steaming pile of ash, Eddington put a crimp in the hose to staunch the water flow.