Cul-de-Sac (7 page)

“Listen, asshole,” Camel finally told him. “She’s a child, you’re an adult. Doesn’t matter what she does, you’re the one responsible.”

He was nodding. “I know that, yessir I know that. I know what I did was wrong in the eyes of the law but—”

Wrong in Camel’s eyes too. “While you’re in prison I hope you get fucked up the ass on a regular basis.”

This fairly took the man’s breath away. When he finally was able to speak he told Camel, “You’re a hard man.”

People were always saying that about him.

The summer Camel first met Annie when she was a girl and he was a man, the eleven people staying at the beach house slept on cots and couches, in bedrooms and sleeping bags. Married couples were granted bedrooms, the three older boys tripled up, Annie shared a bed with the youngest boy who was hardly more
than a toddler, and Camel took a sleeping bag and mosquito netting out onto the porch.

The last night of the long weekend, three
A.M.
and Annie was suddenly all elbows and knees next to him.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Charlie has stinky feet.”

Camel laughed.

“He does! I hate stinky feet. I told him to wash his feet before he came to bed but he didn’t and now the whole bed stinks like his feet, I’m not sleeping there.”

“You’re not sleeping here either.”

“You got stinky feet too?”

Camel laughed again and started pushing her out of the sleeping bag but his hand slipped to grasp by accident a breast bud, hard and small like a golf ball. Annie reacted by locking her legs around him and becoming very still, waiting for what came next … Camel’s voice turning cold: “Get out of here.”

“What?”

“Go back to bed with Charlie or find somewhere else to sleep, you can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Go on now,” he insisted, demonstrating with stony voice that he didn’t intend to make this into a game.

“You didn’t kiss me goodnight.”

“Get out of here.”

“You kissed me goodnight last night, in front of everybody … why can’t you now?”

“Go on, get out of here.”

“Give me a kiss and I’ll leave.”

He tossed aside the sleeping bag and stood.

“You afraid of me?” she asked.

In a way he was. “I’m going to find your mother, let her deal with you.”

“Okay,
okay
.” Annie got to her feet too.

Camel was holding the mosquito netting aside for her when,
passing in front of him, she went up on tiptoes to kiss him quickly on the lips. And said, “I love you.”

“Go to bed.”

“I know what that is,” she said, touching him.

He pulled on the netting to make it come down between them. “I hear or see you again tonight,” he warned, “and I’m waking up your mother.”

“Tattletale.”

“Get out of here.”

“Grouch.”

He listened to her bare feet padding across the porch and into the house, then Camel lit a cigarette and thought assiduously of older women he’d known, women who rouged their faces and drew their eyebrows as arches not found in nature, who laughed cigarette-husky and drank whiskey neat, women with slack bellies and breasts that sagged from weight and time, whose brambles grew thick-black from thigh to heavy thigh.

The next morning as everyone was getting ready to leave he debated telling Annie’s mother what had happened but Annie and her mother were already in their car … Annie rolling down a window and throwing him a big kiss the way Dinah Shore did at the end of her television show. He didn’t throw one back, he just waved.

Although Camel remained friends with the people who owned the beach house he didn’t accept any of their subsequent invitations and eventually forgot about the girl.

Eleven years later she called. He couldn’t place her name. She repeated it several times then became so angry she hung up on him. But called right back. “
Annie Locken
goddamn it I had a crush on you.”

Then he remembered.

Annie explained she was in charge of inviting people down to the beach house this summer … would Teddy come? He begged off. She persisted: teasing, flirting, assuring him there’d be lots of people there for protection.

“Protection?” he asked.

“In case I try to crawl in bed with you again, I’m twenty-one now,” she pointedly informed him.

“Which still makes me fifteen years older.” He was speaking to a grown-up voice but picturing a ten-year-old girl.

“Things have changed.”

Camel didn’t realized how much until he arrived at the beach house and discovered he was the only person Annie had invited.

Clouds came in low, dark, thick enough to awaken hundreds of sodium-vapor lamps well before their usual hour, Teddy Camel standing at the window of his office looking out across those acres of ugly yellow orange illumination. When he heard Annie in the other room he went to the connecting door, knocked, gave her time to collect herself, then went in.

She’d put the blue dress back on but not her shoes, Annie sitting on the edge of the bed looking embarrassed like a woman who’d gone home drunk with a man whose name she couldn’t recall.

Camel asked how she was feeling, she said fine but she spoke in a very small voice.

Going over to sit next to her he almost asked what she meant when she said, right before passing out, that she was sorry about their baby … Annie had gotten pregnant that summer they spent together fourteen years ago when she was twenty-one and he was thirty-six? And never told him? That’s what all those phone calls were about, the calls he never returned? But instead of going into any of that he said he had some information on Cul-De-Sac. “You feel like talking just yet?”

She slipped off the bed and walked to the sink, washed her
hands and face, dried off with paper towels, then turned around. “I have to call Paul, see if he’s okay … tell him where I am.”

“Why don’t I borrow your truck, drive to Cul-De-Sac, get your husband, bring him back here, maybe we can thrash it out what he and that other guy are up to.”

“Thrash it out?”

“Talk it out.”

“No I think you meant what you said the first time, you can thrash the truth out of anyone can’t you?”

Why was she mad at him? “I could try to get to the bottom of it, yeah.”

Annie checked her watch. “It feels a lot later than five.”

“Overcast. So what do you think, bringing your husband here?”

“I’m not sure how to explain you to Paul.”

“Is he jealous?”

“He’s a man.”

“I meant—”

“He gets jealous, yes. When we were first married he wanted to hear about my old boyfriends.” Paul would actually get sick to his stomach listening to her but still kept insisting Annie tell him everything.

Teddy wondered what she had told her husband about that summer fourteen years ago.

“I have to call him right now.”

“The phone’s in the other office.”

Annie went to make the call but returned almost immediately, the line was busy. She sat next to Camel as he laid out what he’d learned about the homicide at Cul-De-Sac seven years ago. Camel asked her how long she’d known her husband.

“It’s our third wedding anniversary, I met him about a year before we were married.”

“Do you know where he was living seven years ago, what he was doing?”

“Paul wasn’t connected with any murder if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Your husband—”

“His name is Paul.”

Camel stood. “Well you think Paul is involved in something criminal … but you also think he’s not the kind of man who’d break the law, that’s what you said, a super-straight arrow—”

“Don’t interrogate me.”

He looked surprised then nodded … Annie was right, without noticing it he’d slipped into his old role as homicide detective, ferreting lies.

“The only criminals Paul has ever met are the ones he worked with in a prison program called Our Brothers’ Keepers.” She explained what she knew about the program, run by a religious organization and dedicated to helping former convicts make a fresh start.

Camel said it could be a connection. “Say he meets a prisoner who knows the Cul-De-Sac killer, finds out something was stashed in the building and—”

“That man last night, could he be the killer?”

“I don’t think so, Growler’s still in prison and according to the description I got there was nothing unusual about his teeth.”

“Who?”

“Donald Growler.” Camel pronounced it Grow-ler. “He’s the one who killed his cousin in Cul-De-Sac, you ever hear your husband mention that name?”

“No.”

A knock on the hallway door, Annie coming off the bed to stand behind Camel who was sufficiently roused by her frightened reaction that he drew a .357 magnum revolver from the holster on his belt. “Yeah?”

“Teddy it’s me.”

Camel put the revolver away and turned to Annie. “Ed Neffering … from downstairs.”

She said she remembered.

Camel opened the door, Neffering giving Annie a big smile. “How you feeling honey?”

“Embarrassed.”

“Don’t be silly.” Then to Camel, “I didn’t know your friend was
still here, I was going to ask you to take the stakeout tonight.” He looked back at Annie. “We got a flasher bothering women in our parking garage, I’ve been working on a pattern when he hits and I think he might be due again tonight. The stakeout wouldn’t take but an hour.”

“Teddy could do that while I do some shopping.”

Camel started to say no but Eddie spoke first, “It’s all right, we’ll catch him next time. I’d do the stakeout myself except—”

“You and Mary are having dinner with Mike and Kathy.”

Eddie asked Camel how he knew but Camel just smiled that strange, pained smile of his … Eddie finally shrugging. “It’s up to you about the stakeout, if you decide to do it you know the drill.” Then to Annie, “Hope to see you again honey.”

After Neffering left, Camel relocked the door.

“You go do your stakeout,” Annie said. “I need some time anyway. I have to buy a few things, a change of clothes, maybe when I get back we’ll have a chance to eat something too, then you can go get Paul. I’ll keep calling Cul-De-Sac so I can explain to him you’re coming. I’ll pass you off as an old friend of my mother’s.”

“Yeah.”

“Teddy? Telling him about all my old boyfriends? That didn’t include you, I keep you in a separate room … no one else gets to go in there.”

Camel nodded.

Annie smiled for the first time since awakening. “Did I hurt your feelings when I said I could pass you off as an old friend of my mother’s?”

He shook his head.

“
Teddy
.”

“A little.”

“Good.”

For half an hour now state police associate superintendent Parker Gray and his ex-partner Gerald McCleany, retired, had been sitting in a car parked across the street from a bungalow owned by Lawrence and Judith Rainey. Gray wore a dark suit, the pants showing a powdered sugar stain above the left pocket, McCleany dressed like he was heading for the golf course.

“Maybe they’re taking a nap,” McCleany said, producing a cigar, taking off the cellophane, sticking the cigar three-quarters in his mouth then drawing it out between fat wet lips in a manner both loving and obscene.

When the match struck, Parker Gray who’d been making a point of not looking at his old partner finally glanced over. “This car has never been smoked in.”

McCleany held the match just in front of the cigar and sucked in with rapid puffs until the tip of the cigar itself began spouting flame. “Has now.” Then laughed like it was a great joke.

Gray rolled down his window. He genuinely hated McCleany … was embarrassed by him when they worked together, had avoided him since McCleany was forced into retirement, and hated him all over again now that Growler’s release from prison had thrown them back together.

“Tell me again about this asshole got Growler out,” McCleany said puffing thoughtfully on the cigar.

“Paul Milton, belongs to a prison ministry group called Our Brothers’ Keepers, they work with the parole board and when a prisoner is identified as a likely candidate he’s paroled to the care of someone from this program who’s supposed to be responsible for—”

“Jesus Parker I don’t need to hear the whole goddamn annual report … what’s Milton’s
angle
?”

“I don’t know, he might be legitimate except—”

“Yeah and I might be number one on the seniors tour this year … but I seriously fucking doubt it. Milton’s from where?”

“North Carolina. Growler is supposed to be down there with him so Milton can keep an eye on—”

“Supposed to be my ass. Growler’s back here, I can feel it in my nuts.”

Gray rubbed his eyes. “You and Kenny Norton.”

“What?”

“I told you, Norton is convinced it’s Growler who’s been asking around about him, trying to find out where he lives—”

“Norton … skinny Kenny Norton getting all squishy how we owe him protection, I should go over and pop one in that artsy-fartsy fucking fairy’s head.”

Crude bastard, Gray thought … I wish to God I’d never met you.

“Raineys’ number in the phone book?” McCleany asked while puffing on the cigar, producing enough smoke to fog the car’s interior.

“Yes.”

“But Norton’s unlisted?”

Gray nodded. “He said he keeps a low profile, moves around a lot, never leaves a forwarding address—”

“If you were half the detective I tried to teach you to be you’d figure it out … Growler comes back here to knock off everybody who testified at his trial, he has to go around looking for Norton
but to find the Raineys all he has to do is open the fucking phone book.”

“You think he’s already got to them huh?”

“And Norton’ll be next.”

“Then us,” Gray said.

“Yeah I hope that bastard shows up at my door some night.”

“No I mean this whole thing we did, it’s going to come back and bite us in the ass after all these years isn’t it?”

“Not if I bump into Growler first.” Saying this, McCleany got out of the car without waiting for Gray or explaining where he was going … just like the old days when Gray was always being forced to second-guess his senior partner.