Blackbird (16 page)

‘Where’d they get together?’

‘Here, Ben’s place. Deb designed-in a whole separate suite for herself when we built this house. I think Ben did something along the same lines. They were really into it.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I’m gonna get a beer. You sure you don’t want something?’

‘I’m good.’

He walked into the kitchen, where I heard the sound of the refrigerator door opening and closing, followed by the snap of a pop-top. He walked back into the room carrying a can of Bud, took a long swallow and sat down. He said, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, I’d figure you for a jock back in the day.’ He burped. ‘No offence, man, but you’re pretty busted up.’

I didn’t respond.

‘Anyway, you don’t seem like the type for this kind of work.’

‘What’s the type?’

He shrugged. ‘Y’know, a hard-ass like in the movies, tossing off lines, slamming guys up against the wall, all that shit. You look like you could be dangerous all right, but you’re not really scary, just kind of ready-looking. You’re married, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I keep wondering if that whole idea isn’t all a huge mistake, you know, like cigarettes. Millions of people telling themselves it’s okay, but it’s killing them. Us.’

‘I’m the wrong guy to ask about marriage, Andy.’

He shrugged. ‘Am I in trouble here? I mean, I got a hundred people can tell you I was in Dallas.’

‘Nobody’s a suspect right now,’ I said. ‘But there’s a couple of things I want to know more about, like you being Dr Gold’s patient before the two of you hooked up.’

He looked away. ‘Yeah. I went in with Jackie when she asked me to. We were having some trouble and she thought counselling would help.’

‘Did it?’

‘Depends how you define it, I guess. It didn’t help the marriage.’

‘So you and Jackie saw Gold professionally for a while – how did it get from there to you divorcing Jackie and marrying Gold?’

He took another swallow of beer and looked thoughtfully at the can. ‘That’s the funny thing – I don’t really know. There were a few sessions when Jackie and I went in for separate visits, then after a while Jackie kind of dropped out. Deb said she thought the marriage was over, counselling or no counselling. But I ought to keep coming, it might help me, I still had issues, whatever. I guess it
started from there. Next thing I know we’re going up to the Arlington or to Shreveport for dinner or down to the casino boats. Then we’re talking about moving in together, rings, all that shit. I don’t know, it just seemed to evolve its own momentum.’

‘What was the age difference between you and Dr Gold?’

‘Almost ten years.’

‘Was that a problem?’

‘Not really, at least not for me. Deb worried about it all the time, though. She was always implying she was younger than she was, getting things nipped and tucked, trying diets. You know how they are.’

‘They?’

He looked at me. ‘Women.’

‘How’d you feel about your wife taking over your company?’

He blinked, and a muscle roped up in his jaw. ‘Where’s that coming from?’

‘You know how people talk.’

‘Well, I don’t know what the hell anybody expects a guy to feel about getting his nuts cut like that. But it’s true, she pretty much had it sewed up. Guess it’s general knowledge by now.’ He looked down at his tanned toes against the pale mauve carpet, belched quietly.

I said, ‘I probably don’t have to tell you what a weird story it makes, you signing off on something like that.’

He reddened, drained the Bud, looking at me. ‘My signing off never had a hell of a lot to do with what happened between Deb and me, man. The deal with the business was, Deb busted me. Simple as that.’

‘Busted you for what?’

He grimaced, reached for another cigarette, lit it and dragged down smoke. ‘Little bimbo I was seeing. Deb walked right into the Lagniappe down in the parish one night and caught us with the bimbo’s hand in my shorts.’

‘So where’d it go from there?’

‘It was funny, she didn’t really blow up like you’d expect. Just went cold and tight. Lasers coming out of her eyes. Started throwing around words like “betrayal” and “violation”. Said it was “an elephant in the living room”, whatever the fuck that means. Made a mockery of our commitment to each other. So, cut to the shootout, now she didn’t have any choice but to keep me in her sights. Take a more active role in the company, be around more, if she was ever going to rebuild her trust in me. Shit. Trust. Next thing I know, every other week here comes Jeff Feigel with more goddamn papers for me to sign, all this shit about laddered distributions and comp packages and no net loss of income, it’s the only way I can hold on to anything out of the business, on and on.’ He laughed harshly, shook his head again. ‘Only night that year I took the girl down there.’

We thought about this in silence for a minute.

Finally I said, ‘You’re telling me you got set up?’

‘What the hell do I know? All I can tell you is it’d sure as hell be Deb’s style.’

‘Now that she’s gone, does control of the company come back to you?’

He crushed out the cigarette half-smoked and stared at it for a beat before looking up at me. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

Driving back to Tri-State, I got out the little plastic evidence sleeve containing Jamison’s gum, made sure the
slide lock had sealed, and dropped it back in my shirt pocket. I hardly ever got that lucky, but a match with the sample from the murder scene could save a lot of time and trouble, and you never know.

SEVENTEEN

The next body, burned too badly for immediate identification, was discovered that evening. Leaving Three, I’d made a U-turn outside my office door, taken the stairs to duck a clump of reporters hanging around the elevators, and driven out to the Hungry Gator to pick up a couple of crawfish pizzas for Jana and the girls. Dropping the food off with a two-litre bottle of cola, I got back to Lanshire in time to catch a re-run from an old series about a boy-girl team of FBI agents who seemed to be on the road all the time, never smiled and disagreed about everything – UFOs above all. Tonight they were on the trail of a serial killer who appeared to have super-powers, and conflict was brewing. I sat back in the recliner and crossed my ankles.

As the agents were moodily examining a mangled female corpse on a dark, completely deserted street that looked wet even though it wasn’t raining, Mutt appeared from somewhere, jumped to the arm of the chair and then to my lap, working himself into the shrimp position just above my knees. He sighed, closed his eyes, and in a couple of minutes was chasing dream-rats, or whatever was scurrying around in his neurons, his whiskers and feet twitching occasionally. But then suddenly he was wide awake, his head coming up
sharply as he oriented to the driveway and gave a short trill with a questioning inflection at the end. He seemed to be staring through the wall just to the left of the door.

This was his standard reaction to hearing me fill his food bowl, but right now it could mean only one thing: LA was here.

I went to flip on the outside lights and open the door. She was already out of her white Nissan with a small commuter suitcase in one hand and a dark blue garment bag in the other. She wore jeans and red lacers and an old leather bomber jacket over a cream-coloured cotton sweater. In the entryway she set the suitcase down and laid the bag over it. Putting her hands on my shoulders and rising to her tiptoes to plant a kiss in the middle of my forehead, she said, ‘I watched you on TV, Bis. You’re a dogged nemesis.’

‘Next time I’m going for catted.’

Ignoring the echoing emptiness of the house, LA closed the door behind her, tossed her jacket on the couch, said, ‘Pee first, then talk,’ and headed for the bathroom. As she walked away I noticed a couple of dust bunnies under the edge of the couch, bent down and grabbed them, then spent a minute or so trying to throw them in the wastebasket. Finally giving up on that, I went into the kitchen to wash them off under the tap.

When LA came back we brought the rest of her things in from the car and stowed them in the front bedroom. Then she sat me down on the couch and took both my hands in hers, gauged their temperature, gave them a visual once-over and looked closely at my eyes. ‘Catch your crucifiers yet?’

‘Working on it.’

She told me to stick out my tongue, looked at it critically, then placed the fingers of one hand against my left carotid. ‘Still not smoking?’

‘Nope.’

‘How’s your BP?’ she said.

‘One-thirty-five over eighty.’

‘When?’

‘Last month.’

She nodded, not entirely pleased, then picked Mutt up and set off on her diagnostic tour of the house, which would have to be completed and debriefed before we moved on conversationally. First the kitchen. Mutt hanging contentedly over her arm like a dish towel, she looked into the fridge, frowned, closed the door and checked the cereal cabinet. She glanced back at me. ‘You actually eating any of this stuff?’

I said, ‘Yes,’ with a fairly clear conscience. I did eat cereal sometimes.

‘Uh huh.’

She walked through my bedroom and into the adjacent bathroom, inspected the soap and shaving gear and the contents of the medicine cabinet. Emerging from the bathroom, she looked at the bed and what was on the night-stand, which included a squeeze bottle of nose spray, the Nick Cave novel I was halfway through and a little antique glass Coca-Cola ashtray containing a dozen or so coins.

‘Still don’t need an alarm clock,’ she concluded, knowing from a lifetime’s experience that if I was going to need help it would be getting to sleep, not waking up. Back in the living room she put Mutt down on the couch, checked to see what channel the TV was on and pushed her finger against my stomach.

‘No real depression yet, but your serotonin’s down about half a click,’ she pronounced. ‘Nothing we can’t fix.’ She brushed her uncontrollable hair back from her face with her hand and gave me a strict look. ‘But there hasn’t been a woman in here for months.’ The unspoken ‘you said three weeks’ hung in the air like leftover smoke.

I started to protest but stopped myself when I saw the scorn in her expression. ‘I usually go to her place,’ I said.

She grunted, apparently satisfied for the moment.

‘Hungry?’ I said.

‘No, thirsty.’ She sat on the couch beside Mutt, who’d curled up on her jacket and gone back to sleep, and got out her cigarettes and a little gold lighter. She looked at them for a second, then laid them on the coffee table.

I went to the kitchen and reviewed my beverage stores. ‘Coke, ginger ale, two-per-cent, apple juice,’ I announced, leaving out the vodka, CC, Dos Equis and Shiner. I waited.

‘How about some ginger ale over ice?’

Letting my breath out, I poured the ginger ale, grabbed myself a beer and returned to the living room. We sipped our drinks in comfortable silence. Finally I said, ‘Things getting any better between you and Rachel these days?’

LA watched the bubbles in her glass, silent for so long that I began thinking about her wordless first weeks at Gram’s when we were kids, and then about how little some things change with time. But finally she said, ‘History can be a bitch, Bis.’

I took a swallow of beer, thinking about history, and about what a bitch LA’s had been. ‘Second that,’ I said.

She glanced at me, saying, ‘Yeah, you and Leah – the same but not the same.’

‘Rachel’s on a different road now,’ I said.

LA shrugged. ‘She ever tell you she tried to kill herself?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘When?’

‘That summer when I came to live with you and Gram. The year she bottomed out.’

‘Before she got in AA I heard her talk a couple of times about being fed up with everything, everybody’d be better off with her dead, that kind of stuff. She said, “If my life was a fish I’d throw the fucker back.”’

LA smiled crookedly into her ginger ale. ‘Sounds like her, all right.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She finally told me about it when she was working the steps, doing amends. What she did was talk some guy into snuffing her.’

‘Into
killing
her? How the hell do you do that?’

‘He was some hardcore SM guy she found, into asphyxiation games or whatever. She more or less seduced him into taking it up a notch, but when the time came he couldn’t make himself go through with it.’

‘A notch?’ I said. ‘Jesus, that’s a hell of a notch, LA.’ There was a silence as I tried to assimilate this. I couldn’t imagine Rachel surrendering to anything. I said, ‘I’m having a hard time with the idea of her wanting to die.’

‘She didn’t.’

‘Wait a minute, what are you telling me?’

‘It was strategic – she made up her mind to get dead,’ LA said. ‘Not the same thing at all.’

‘Then why?’

‘It sounds crazy – actually I guess you’d have to say it was – but she found out somehow that with the right contacts a snuff film, a real one, would bring at least a million bucks in Bangkok. The split was going to be fifty-fifty. She
auditioned a bunch of possibles until she found somebody she thought she could count on.’ LA poked the ice cubes in her drink around for a minute with the tip of her finger, then said, ‘He messed her up pretty bad, Bis.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You sure you want to hear all this?’

‘I’m sure I don’t,’ I said. ‘But now I’ve got to.’

‘There was a lot of localised tissue damage,’ LA said. ‘But the plan was for her to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, so the guy sees no reason to hold back, and he doesn’t. The deal was for him to do anything he wanted to her, for as long as he wanted, but the finale had to be her dying. Then he loses his nerve and can’t finish her off. She lost a lot of function, and she couldn’t get pregnant after that, among other things.’ She studied the rim of the glass for a minute. ‘Kind of like me.’

‘Lost what function?’

‘Like the women in some of those African tribes, for one thing – not enough left of her to come.’

‘Ever?’

‘Yeah.’

I said nothing, trying not to imagine the scenario, the moment actually seeming to move and rustle with its own vile energy. Eventually I said, ‘What happened to the guy?’