Hornet's Nest (34 page)

As if Brazil were not in enough trouble already, Axel ordered a tin bucket filled with iced-down bottles of Rolling Rock beer. This was going to work just fine, the music critic was sure of it. Brazil was a puppy and could be trained. Axel was stunned to suspect that the guy might never have been drunk in his life. Incredible. What did he grow up in, a monastery, the Mormon church? Brazil was wearing another pair of slightly too small jeans left over from high school days, and a tennis team tee shirt. Axel tried not to think about what it might be like to get those clothes off.

“Everything here’s good,” Axel said without looking at the menu as he leaned into candlelight. “Conch fritters, crab cakes, Po-Boy sandwiches. I like the baskets and usually get fried scallops.”

“Okay,” Brazil said to both Axels sitting across from him. “I think you’re trying to get me drunk.”

“No way,” Axel said, signaling for the waitress. “You’ve hardly had a thing.”

“I don’t usually. And I ran eight miles this morning,” Brazil pointed out.

“Man,” Axel said. “You’re sheltered. Looks like I’m
gonna have to educate you a little, pull you along.”

“I don’t think so.” Brazil wanted to go home and hide in bed. Alone. “I don’t feel too good, Tommy.”

Axel was insistent that food would prove the cure, and what he said was true to a point. Brazil felt better after he threw up in the men’s room. He switched to iced tea, waiting for his internal weather to clear.

“I need to go,” he said to an increasingly sullen Axel.

“Not yet,” Axel said, as if the decision was his to make.

“Oh yes. I’m out of here.” Brazil was politely insistent.

“We haven’t had a chance to talk,” Axel told him.

“About what?”

“You know.”

“Do I have to guess?” Brazil was getting annoyed, his mind still in Dilworth, really.

“You know,” Axel said again, his eyes intense.

“I just want to be friends,” Brazil let him know.

“That’s all I want.” Axel couldn’t have agreed more. “I want us to get to know each other real well so we can be great friends.”

Brazil knew a line when he heard one. “You want to be better friends than I want to be. And you want to start right now. No matter what you claim, I know how it works, Tommy. What you’re saying is insincere. If I told you this minute that I’d go home with you, you’d go for it
like that.
” He snapped his fingers.

“What’s so wrong about it?” Axel liked the idea quite a lot and wondered if it were remotely possible.

“See. A contradiction. That’s not called being friends. That’s called being laid,” Brazil enlightened him. “I’m not a piece of meat, nor do I care to be a one-night stand.”

“Who said anything about one night? I’m a long-term kind of guy,” Axel assured him.

Brazil could not help but notice the two guys with bulging muscles and tattoos, in greasy coveralls, drinking long-neck Budweisers, glaring at them as they eavesdropped. This didn’t bode well, and Axel was so obsessed he wasn’t picking up on the stubby fingers drumming the table and toothpicks agitating in mean mouths, and eyes cutting as plans
were being made for the dark parking lot when the fags returned to their vehicle.

“My feelings for you are very deep, Andy,” Axel went on. “Frankly, I’m in love with you.” He slumped back in his chair, and dramatically threw his hands up in despair. “There. I’ve said it. Hate me if you want. Shun me.”

“Puke,” said Rizzo, whose visible tattoo was of a big-breasted naked woman named Tiny.

“I gotta get some air,” agreed his buddy, Buzz Shifflet.

“Tommy, I think we should be smart and get out of here as fast as we can,” Brazil suggested quietly and with authority. “I made a mistake and I apologize, okay? I shouldn’t have come over and we shouldn’t be here. I was in a mood and took it out on you. Now we’re going to make tracks or die.”

“So you do hate me.” Axel was into his crushed, you-have-deeply-wounded-me routine.

“Then you stay here.” Brazil stood. “I’m pulling your car up to the front porch, and you’re going to jump in. Got it?” He thought of West again, and anger returned.

Brazil was looking around, as if expecting a gunfight any moment and ready for one, but aware of his limitations. There were rednecks everywhere, all drinking beer, eating fried fish with tartar and cocktail sauces and ketchup. They were staring at Axel and Brazil. Axel saw the wisdom in Brazil getting the car by himself.

“I’ll pay the bill while you do that,” Axel said. “Dinner’s my treat.”

Brazil was completely cognizant of the fact that the two big boys in coveralls were this very second out in the poorly lit parking lot, waiting for the two queers. Brazil wasn’t especially concerned by their erroneous impression of him and the choices he made in life, but he was not interested in having the shit beat out of him. He thought fast and tracked down the hostess in the raw bar, where she was parked at a table, smoking and writing tomorrow’s specials on a chalkboard.

“Ma’am,” he said to her. “I wonder if you could help me with a serious problem.”

She looked skeptically at him, her demeanor changing somewhat. Guys said similar words to her every night after they’d been through buckets of beer. The problem was always the same thing, and so easy to remedy if she didn’t mind slipping off behind the restaurant for maybe ten minutes and dropping her jeans.

“What.” She continued writing, ignoring the jerk.

“I need a pin,” he said.

“A what?” she looked up at him. “You mean something to write with?”

“No, ma’am. I mean a pin, a needle, and something to sterilize it with,” he told her.

“What for?” She frowned, opening her fat vinyl pocketbook.

“A splinter.”

“Oh!” Now that she understood. “Don’cha hate it when that happens? This place is full of ’em, too. Here you go, sugar.”

She fished out a small sewing kit in a clear plastic box that she’d gotten from the last hotel some rich guy took her to, and she slid out a needle. She handed him a bottle of nail polish remover. He dipped the needle in acetone and bravely retreated to the porch. Sure enough, the two thugs were prowling near cars, waiting. They lurched in his direction when they spotted him, and he quickly stabbed his left index finger with the needle. He stabbed his right index finger and thumb. Brazil squeezed out as much blood as he could, and smeared it on his face, which he then held in his hands as if he were reeling.

“Oh God,” he moaned, staggering down steps. “Jesus.” He fell against the porch railing, groaning, holding his disgusting, gory face.

“Shit.” Rizzo had gotten to him and was completely taken aback. “What the fuck happened to you?”

“My cousin in there,” Brazil weakly said.

“You talking about that fag you was sitting with?” asked Shifflet.

Brazil nodded. “Yeah, man. He’s fucking got AIDS and he threw up blood on me! You believe that! Oh God.”

He staggered down another step. Shifflet and Rizzo moved out of the way.

“It went in my eyes and mouth! You know what that means! Where’s a hospital around here, man? I got to get to the hospital! Could you drive me, please?”

Brazil staggered and almost stumbled into them. Shifflet and Rizzo ran. They leapt into their Nissan Hard Body XE with its four-foot-lift oversized tires that spun rocks.

T
he next night, Monday, Blair Mauney III was also enjoying an agreeable meal in the Queen City. The banker was dining at Morton’s of Chicago, where he typically went when business called him to headquarters. He was a regular at the high-end steak house with stained-glass windows, next to the Carillon and across from First Presbyterian Church, which also had stained glass, only older and more spectacular, especially after dark when Mauney felt lonely and in the mood to prowl.

Mauney needed no explanation from the pretty young waitress with her cart of raw meat and live lobster waving bound claws. He always ordered the New York strip, medium rare, a baked potato, butter only, and the chopped red onion and tomato salad with Morton’s famous blue cheese dressing. This he downed with plenty of Jack Black on the rocks. Tomorrow he would have breakfast with Cahoon and the chairman of corporate risk policy and the chairman of the credit corp, in addition to the chairman of USBank South, plus a couple of presidents. It was routine. They’d sit around a fancy table in Cahoon’s fancy Mount Olympus office. There was no crisis or even good news that Mauney knew of, only more of the same, and his resentment peaked.

The bank had been started by his forebears in 1874. It
was Mauney who should be ensconced within the crown and have his black and white portrait regularly printed in the
Wall Street Journal
. Mauney loathed Cahoon, and whenever possible, Mauney dropped poison pellets about his boss, spreading malicious gossip hinting at eccentricities, poor judgment, idiocy, and malignant motives for the good in the world Cahoon had done. Mauney requested a doggie bag, as he always did, because he never knew when he might get hungry later in his room at the luxurious Park Hotel, near Southpark Mall.

He paid the seventy-three-dollar-and-seventy-cent bill, leaving two percent less than his usual fifteen-percent tip, which he figured to the penny on a wafer-thin calculator he kept in his wallet. The waitress had been slow bringing his fourth drink, and being busy was no excuse. He returned to the sidewalk out front, on West Trade Street, and the valets scurried, as they always did. Mauney climbed into his rental black Lincoln Continental and decided he really was not in the mood to return to his hotel just yet.

He briefly thought of his wife and her endless surgeries and other medical hobbies, as he cataloged them. What he spent on her in a year was a shock, and not one stitch of it had improved her, really. She was a manikin who cooked and made the rounds at cocktail parties. Buried somewhere deep in Mauney’s corporate mind were memories of Polly at Sweetbriar, when a carload of Mauney’s pals showed up for a dance one Saturday night in May. She was precious in a blue dress and wanted nothing to do with him.

The spell was cast. He had to have her that moment. Still, Polly was busy, hard to find, and cared not. He started calling twice a day. He showed up on campus, hopelessly smitten. Of course, she knew exactly what she was doing. Polly had been mentored thoroughly at home, at boarding school, and now at this fine women’s college. She knew how men were if a girl acknowledged their attentions. Polly knew how to play hard to get. Polly knew that Mauney had a pedigree and portfolio that she had been promised since childhood, because it was her destiny and her entitlement. They were married fourteen months after their first meeting, or exactly two weeks after Polly graduated cum laude with a degree in
English which, according to her proud new husband, would make her unusually skilled in penning invitations and thank-you notes.

Mauney could not pinpoint precisely when his wife’s many physical complications began. It seemed she was playing tennis, still peppy and enjoying the good fortune he made possible for her, until after their second child was born. Women. Mauney would never figure them out. He found Fifth Street and began cruising, as he often did when deep in thought. He began getting excited as he looked out at the night life and thought about his trip tomorrow afternoon. His wife thought he would be in Charlotte for three days. Cahoon and company believed Mauney was returning to Asheville after breakfast. All were wrong.

While family traveled from the distant airports of Los Angeles and New York, the bereft chief and her sons went through closets and dresser drawers, carrying out the painful task of dividing and disposing of Seth’s clothing and other personal effects. Hammer could not look at her late husband’s bed, where the nightmare had begun as he got drunk and fantasized about what he could do to really hurt her this time.
Well, you did it, Seth. You figured it out
, Hammer thought. She folded extra-extra-large shirts, shorts, underwear, socks, and placed them in paper bags for the Salvation Army.

They made no decision about Seth’s valuables, such as his four different Rolex watches, the wedding band that had not fit him in more than ten years, the collection of gold railroad watches that had belonged to his grandfather, his Jaguar, not to mention his stocks and his cash. Hammer cared nothing about any of it and frankly expected him to zing her one last time in his will. She had never been materialistic and wasn’t about to begin now.

“I don’t know the details about any of his affairs,” she said to her sons, who cared nothing about them, either.

“That figures,” said Jude as he removed another suit from
a hanger and began folding it. “You would think he might have discussed his will with you, Mom.”

“Part of it is my fault.” She closed a drawer, wondering how she could have endured this activity alone. “I never asked.”

“You shouldn’t have to ask,” Jude resentfully said. “Part of the whole point of living with someone is you share important things with each other, you know? Like in your case, so you could maybe plan for your future in the event something happened to him? Which was a good possibility with his rotten health.”

“I’ve planned for my own future.” Hammer looked around the room, knowing that every molecule within it would have to go. “I don’t do so badly on my own.”

Randy was younger and angrier. As far as he was concerned, his father had been selfish and neurotic because he was spoiled and made no effort to think about others beyond what function they might have served in his wasteful, rapacious existence. Randy, especially, seethed over the way his mother had been treated. She deserved someone who admired and loved her for all her goodness and courage. He went over and wrapped his arms around her as she folded a Key West shirt she remembered Seth buying on one of their few vacations.

“Don’t.” She gently pushed her son away, tears filling her eyes.

“Why don’t you come stay with us in L.A. for a while?” he gently said, holding on to her anyway.

She shook her head, returning to the business at hand, determined to get every reminder of Seth out of this house as fast as she could, that she might get on with life.

“The best thing for me is to work,” she said. “And there are problems I need to resolve.”

“There are always problems, Mom,” Jude said. “We’d love it if you came to New York.”

“You know anything about this Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain?” Randy held it up. “It was inside the Bible in the back of this drawer.”

Hammer looked at the necklace as if she had been struck.
The key was hers, from Boston University, where she had enjoyed four very stimulating years and graduated near the top of her class with a double major in criminal justice and history, for she believed that the two were inexorably linked. Hammer had grown up with no special privileges or promise that she would amount to much, since she was a girl amid four brothers in a household with little money and a mother who did not approve of a daughter thinking the dangerous thoughts hers did. Judy Hammer’s Phi Beta Kappa key had been a triumph, and she had given it to Seth when they had gotten engaged. He wore it for a long time, until he began to get fat and hateful.

“He told me he lost it,” Hammer quietly said as the telephone rang.

West felt terrible about bothering her chief again. West apologized on the cellular phone inside her police car as she sped downtown. Other units and an ambulance roared to the heart of Five Points, where another man from out of town had been brutally slain.

“Oh Lord,” Hammer breathed, shutting her eyes. “Where?”

“I can pick you up,” West said over the line.

“No, no,” Hammer said. “Just tell me where.”

“Cedar Street past the stadium,” West said as she shot through a yellow light. “The abandoned buildings around there. Near the welding supply company. You’ll see us.”

Hammer grabbed her keys from the table by the door. She headed out, not bothering to change out of her gray suit and pearls. Brazil had been driving around in a funk when he’d heard the call on the scanner. He got there fast and now was standing beyond crime-scene tape, restless in jeans and tee shirt, frustrated because no one would let him in. Cops were treating him as if he were a reporter no different than others out foraging, and he didn’t understand it. Didn’t they remember him in uniform, out with them night after night and in foot pursuits and fights?

West rolled up seconds before Hammer did, and the two women made their way to the overgrown area where a black Lincoln Continental was haphazardly parked far off Cedar
and First Streets, near a Dumpster. The welding company was a looming Gothic silhouette with dark windows. Police lights strobed, and in the far distance a siren wailed as misfortune struck in another part of the city. A Norfolk Southern train loudly lumbered past on nearby tracks, the engineer staring out at disaster.

Typically, the car was rented and the driver’s door was open, the interior bell dinging, and headlights burning. Police were searching the area, flashguns going off and video cameras rolling. Brazil spotted West and Hammer coming through, reporters moiling around them and getting nothing but invisible walls. Brazil stared at West until she saw him, but she gave him no acknowledgment. She did not seem inclined to include him. It was as if they had never met and her indifference ran through him like a bayonet. Hammer did not seem aware of him, either. Brazil stared after them, convinced of a betrayal. The two women were busy and overwrought.

“We’re sure,” Hammer was saying to West.

“Yes. It’s like the others,” West grimly said as their strides carried them beyond tape and deeper inside the scene. “No question in my mind. M.O. identical.”

Hammer took a deep breath, her face pained and outraged as she looked at the car, then at the activity in a thicket where Dr. Odom was on his knees, working. From where Hammer stood, she could see the medical examiner’s bloody gloves glistening in lights set up around the perimeter. She looked up as the Channel 3 news helicopter thudded overhead, hovering, its camera securing footage for the eleven o’clock news. Broken glass clinked under feet as the two women moved closer, and Dr. Odom palpated the victim’s destroyed head. The man had on a dark blue Ralph Lauren suit, a white shirt missing its cufflinks, and a Countess Mara tie. He had graying curly hair and a tan face that might have been attractive, but now it was hard to tell. Hammer saw no jewelry but guessed that whatever this man had owned wasn’t cheap. She knew money when she saw it.

“Do we have an I.D.?” Hammer asked Dr. Odom.

“Blair Mauney the third, forty-five years old, from
Asheville,” he replied, photographing the hateful blaze orange hourglass spray-painted over the victim’s genitals. Dr. Odom looked up at Hammer for a moment. “How many more?” he asked in a hard tone, as if blaming her.

“What about cartridge cases?” West asked.

Detective Brewster was squatting, interested in trash scattered through briars. “Three so far,” he answered his boss. “Looks like the same thing.”

“Christ,” said Dr. Odom.

By now, Dr. Odom was seriously projecting. He continually imagined himself in strange cities at meetings, driving around, maybe lost. He thought of suddenly being yanked out of his car and led to a place like this by a monster who would blow his head off for a watch, a wallet, a ring. Dr. Odom could read the fear the victims had felt as they begged not to die, that huge .45 pointed and ready to fire. Dr. Odom was certain that the soiled undershorts consistent in each case was not postmortem. No goddamn way. The slain businessmen didn’t lose control of bowels and bladder as life fled and bled from them. The guys were terrified, trembling violently, pupils dilated, digestion shutting down as blood rushed to extremities for a fight or flight that would never happen. Dr. Odom’s pulse pounded in his neck as he unfolded another body bag.

West carefully scanned the interior of the Lincoln as the alert dinged that the driver’s door was ajar and the lights were on. She noted the Morton’s doggie bag and the contents of the briefcase and an overnight bag that had been dumped out and rummaged through in back. USBank business cards were scattered over the carpet and she leaned close and read the name Blair Mauney III, the same name on the driver’s license Detective Brewster had shown her. West pulled plastic gloves out of her back pocket.

She worked them on, so consumed by what she was doing that she was unaware of anyone around her or the tow truck that was slowly rolling up to haul the Lincoln to the police department for processing. West had not worked crime scenes in years, but she had been good at it once. She was meticulous, tireless, and intuitive, and right now she was
getting a weird feeling as she looked at the clutter left by the killer. She lifted a USAir ticket by a corner, opening it on the car seat, touching as little of it as possible as her misgivings grew.