Hornet's Nest (8 page)

West was wet as she hammered, with tool belt on. She held nails in her mouth and vented her spleen, as Denny Raines, an off-duty paramedic, opened her new gate and helped himself to her property. He was whistling, had jeans on, and was a big, handsome guy and no stranger to this industrious woman. She paid him no mind as she carefully measured a space between two boards.

“Anyone ever tell you you’re anal-retentive?” he said.

She hammered, which was suggestive of what he felt like doing to her the first time they met, at a crime scene, when he could only suppose she had been called from home since she was in charge of investigations, and the victim was a businessman with the weird orange paint over his parts and bullets in his head. Raines took one look at the babe in brass and that was the end of his rainbow. She hammered, eating nails, in the rain.

“I was thinking about brunch,” he said to her. “Maybe Chili’s.”

Raines approached from the rear and wrapped his arms around her. He kissed her neck, and found it wet and a little salty. West didn’t smile or respond or take the nails out of her mouth. She hammered and didn’t want to be bothered.
He gave up and leaned against what she was building. He crossed his arms, and studied her as water dripped off the bill of his Panthers baseball cap.

“I take it you’ve seen the paper,” he said.

He would bring that up, and she had no comment. She measured another space.

“This is an affirmative. Now I know a celebrity. Right there. This big on the front page.” He exaggerated with his hands, as if the morning paper with West in it was ten feet tall. “Above the fold, too,” he went on. “Good story. I’m impressed.”

She measured and hammered.

“Truth is, I learned stuff even I didn’t know. Like the part about high school. Shelby High. That you played on the boys’ tennis team for Coach Wagon? Never lost a match? How ’bout that?”

He was more enchanted with her than ever, roaming her with his eyes and not getting charged a dime a minute. She was aware of this and feeling ripped off as she tasted metal and hammered.

“You got any idea what it does to a guy to see a good-looking woman in a tool belt?” He finally got to his fetish. “It’s like when we roll up on a scene and you’re in that goddamn uniform. And I start thinking thoughts I shouldn’t, people bleeding to death. Right now I got it for you so bad I’m busting out of my jeans.”

She slipped a nail from between her lips and looked at him, at his jeans. She rammed the hammer into her belt, and it was the only tool that was going to be intimate with her this day. On Sunday, without fail, they had brunch, drank mimosas, watched TV in her bed, and all he ever talked about was calls he had been on over the weekend, as if she didn’t get enough blood and misery in her life. Raines was a doll, but boring.

“Go rescue somebody and leave me alone,” she suggested to him.

His smile and playfulness fled as rain fell in a curtain from heaven. “What the hell did I do?” he complained.

W
est stayed outside in the rain alone, hammering, measuring, and building her fence as if it were a symbol of what she felt about people and life. When her gate opened and shut again at three
P
.
M
., she assumed it was Raines trying again. She slammed another nail into wood and felt bad about the way she had treated him. He had meant no harm, and her mood had nothing to do with him, really.

Niles could have done with the same consideration. He was in the window over the kitchen sink, looking out at his owner in a flood. She was swinging something that looked like it might hurt Niles if he got in her way. Niles had been minding his own business earlier, walking in circles, kneading the covers, finding just the right warm spot to settle on his owner’s chest. Next thing, he was an astronaut, a circus acrobat shot out of a cannon. It was just a darn good thing he could land on his feet. He stared through streaming water at someone entering the yard from the north. Niles, the watch cat, had never seen this person, not once in his ancient feline life.

• • •

Brazil was aware of a skinny cat watching him from a window as he trespassed and West hammered, calling out to someone named Raines.

“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” she was saying. “I’m in this mood.”

Brazil carried three thick Sunday papers wrapped in a dry-cleaning bag he had found in his closet. “Apology accepted,” he said.

West wheeled around and fixed him in her sights, hammer mid-swing. “What the hell are you doing here?” She was startled and taken aback and did her best to sound hateful.

“Who’s Raines?” Brazil got closer, his tennis shoes getting soaked.

“None of your damn business.” She started hammering as her heart did.

He was suddenly shy and tentative in the rain as he got closer. “I brought you some extra papers. Thought you might . . .”

“You didn’t ask me.” She hammered. “You didn’t give me a warning. Like you have some right to investigate my life.” She bent a nail and clumsily pried it out. “Ride around all night. The whole time you’re a spy.”

She stopped what she was doing to look at him. He was soaked and dejected, wanting her to be pleased. He had given her the best he knew.

“You got no fucking right!” she said.

“It’s a good story.” He was getting defensive. “You’re a hero.”

She went on, enraged and not certain why. “What hero? Who cares?”

“I told you I was going to write about you.”

“Seems to me that was a threat.” She turned back to her fence and hammered. “And I didn’t believe you meant it.”

“Why not?” He didn’t understand any of this and didn’t think it was fair.

“No one has before.” She hammered again and stopped again, trying to stay mad but not doing a good job of it. “I wouldn’t have thought I was all that interesting.”

• • •

“What I did is good, Virginia,” he said.

Brazil was vulnerable and trying not to be. He told himself that what this hammer-wielding deputy chief thought didn’t matter in the least. West stood in the rain, the two of them looking at each other as Niles watched from his favorite window, tail twitching.

“I know about your father,” West went on. “I know exactly what happened. Is that why you run around playing cop morning, noon, and night?”

Brazil was struggling with emotions he didn’t want anyone to know about. West couldn’t tell if he was angry or close to tears as she chipped away at him with her own investigation into his past.

“He’s plainclothes,” she said, “decides to pull a stolen vehicle. Number one violation. You don’t do that in an unmarked car. And the asshole turns out to be a felon on the run, who points his gun close range. Last thing your father said was, ‘Please God no,’ but the fucker does it anyway. Blows a hole in your daddy’s heart, dead before he hits the pavement. Your favorite newspaper made sure Detective Drew Brazil looked bad in the end. Screwed him. And now his son’s out here doing the same thing.”

Brazil sat on the swampy lawn, staring hard at her. “No, I’m not. That’s not the point. And you’re cruel.”

West didn’t often have such a powerful effect on guys. Raines never got this intense, not even when she broke it off with him, which she had done three times now. Usually, he got mad and stormed off, then ignored her as his phone didn’t ring until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Brazil she did not comprehend, but then she had never known a writer or any artist, really. She sat next to him, both of them in a grassy puddle and drenched. She tossed the hammer and it splashed when it landed, its violence spent for the day. She sighed as this young volunteer-cop-reporter stared at drops streaking past, his body rigid with rage and resentment.

“Tell me why,” she said.

He wouldn’t look at her. He would never speak to her again.

“I want to know,” she persisted. “You could be a cop. You could be a reporter. But oh no. You got to be both? Huh?” She playfully punched his shoulder and got no response. “You still live with your mother, I got a feeling. How come? Nice-looking guy like you? No girlfriend, you don’t date, I got that feeling, too. You gay? I got no problem with that, okay?”

Brazil got up.

“Live and let live, I always say,” West went on from her puddle.

He gave her a piercing look, stalking off. “I’m not the one they call gay,” he said in the rain.

This did not threaten West. She had heard it before. Women who went into policing, the military, professional sports, coaching, construction, or physical education were oriented toward same-sex relationships. Those who succeeded in any of these professions or owned businesses, or became doctors, lawyers, or bankers and did not paint their nails or play round-robin tennis in a league during office hours were also lesbians. It did not matter if one were married with children. It mattered not if one were dating a man. These were simply facades, a means of faking out family and friends.

The only absolute proof of heterosexuality was to do nothing quite as well as a man and be proud of it. West had been a known lesbian ever since she was promoted to sergeant. Certainly, the department was not without its gay women, but they were closeted and full of lies about boyfriends no one ever met. West could understand why people might assume she was living the same myth. Similar rumors even circulated about Hammer. All of it was pathetic, and West wished people would let their rivers flow as they would and get on with life.

She had decided long ago that many moral issues were really about threats. For example, when she had been growing up on the farm, people talked about the unmarried women missionaries who kept busy at Shelby Presbyterian
Church, not far from Cleveland Feeds and the regional hospital. A number of these fine ladies had served together in exotic places, including the Congo, Brazil, Korea, and Bolivia. They came home on furlough or to retire, and lived together in the same dwelling. It never occurred to anyone West knew that these faithful ladies of the church had any interest beyond prayer and saving the poor.

The threat in West’s formative years was to grow up a spinster, an old maid. West heard this more than once when she was better than the boys in most things and learned how to drive a tractor. Statistically, she would prove to be an old maid. Her parents still worried, and this was compounded by the nineties fear that she might be an old maid who was also inclined elsewhere. In all fairness, it wasn’t that West couldn’t understand women wanting each other. What she could not imagine was fighting with a woman.

It was bad enough with men, who slammed things around and didn’t communicate. Women cried and screamed and were touchy about everything, especially when their hormones were a little wide and to the right. She could not imagine two lovers having PMS at the same time. Domestic violence would be inevitable, possibly escalating to homicide, especially if both were cops with guns.

After a light solitary dinner of leftover spicy chicken pizza, West sat in her recliner chair in front of the TV, watching the Atlanta Braves clobber the Florida Marlins. Niles was in her lap because it was his wish. His owner was at ease in police sweats, drinking a Miller Genuine Draft in the bottle and reading Brazil’s article about herself because it really wasn’t right to be so hard on the guy without taking a good look at what he had done. She laughed out loud again, paper rattling as she turned a page. Where the hell did he get all this stuff?

She was so caught up, she had forgotten to pet Niles for fourteen minutes, eleven seconds, and counting. He wasn’t asleep, but merely pretending, biding his time to see how long this might go on that he might add it to her list of infractions. When she ran out of indulgences, there was that porcelain figurine on top of the bookcase. If she thought
Niles couldn’t jump up there, she had another think coming. Niles could trace his lineage back to Egypt, to pharaohs and pyramids, his skills ancient and largely untested. Someone hit a home run and West didn’t notice as she laughed again and reached for the phone.

Brazil didn’t hear it ring at first because he was in front of his computer, typing, possessed by whatever he was writing as Annie Lennox sang loudly from the boom box. His mother was in the kitchen, fixing herself a peanut-butter sandwich on Sunbeam white bread. She slurped another mouthful of cheap vodka from a plastic glass as the phone rang from the wall. She swayed, grabbing for the counter to steady herself, and got a drawer handle as two blue phones on the wall rang and rang. Silverware crashed to the floor, and Brazil jumped up from his chair as his mother managed to grab at her double-vision of the phone and bump it out of its cradle. It banged against the wall, dangling from a snarled cord. She lunged for it again, almost falling.

“What?” she slurred into the receiver.

“I was trying to reach Andy Brazil,” West said over the line, after an uncertain pause.

“In his room going.” Mrs. Brazil made drunken typing motions. “You know. Usual! Thinks he’ll amount to Hemingway, something.”

Mrs. Brazil did not notice her son in the doorway, stricken as she talked on in fractured, bleary words that could not possibly make sense to anyone. It was a house rule that she did not answer the phone. Either her son got it or the answering machine did. He watched in despair, helpless as she humiliated him yet again in life.

“Ginia West,” Mrs. Brazil repeated as she finally noticed two of her sons coming toward her. He took the phone out of her hand.

West’s intention had been merely to confess to Brazil that his story was rather wonderful and she appreciated it and didn’t deserve it. She had not expected this impaired woman to answer, and now West knew it all. She didn’t tell Brazil a thing other than that she was on her way. This was an order. West had dealt with all types in her years of police
work and was undaunted by Mrs. Brazil, no matter how vile, how hateful and hostile the woman was when her son and West put her in bed and made her drink a lot of water. Mrs. Brazil passed out about five minutes after West helped her into the bathroom to pee.

West and Brazil went for a walk in darkness broken by an occasional lighted window from old Southern homes along Main Street. Rain was gentle like mist. He had nothing to say as they drew closer to the Davidson campus, which was quiet this time of year, even when various camps were in session. A security guard in his Cushman watched the couple pass, pleased that Andy Brazil might finally have a girlfriend. She was a lot older than him but still worth looking at, and if anyone needed a mother figure, that boy did.

The guard’s name was Clyde Briddlewood, and he had headed the modest Davidson College security force since days when the only problem in the world was pranks and drunkenness. Then the school had let women in. It was a bad idea, and he had told everyone he could. Briddlewood had done his best to warn the preoccupied professors as they were hurrying to class, and he had alerted Sam Spencer, the president back then. No one listened. Now Briddlewood had a security force of eight people and three Cushmans. They had radios, guns, and drank coffee with local cops.

Briddlewood dipped Copenhagen snuff, spitting in a Styrofoam cup as Brazil and his girlfriend followed the brick walk toward the Presbyterian church. Briddlewood had always liked that boy and was sorry as heck he had to grow up. He remembered Brazil as a kid, always in a hurry somewhere with his Western Auto tennis racket and plastic bag of bald, dead tennis balls that he’d fished out of the trash or begged off the tennis coach. Brazil used to share his chewing gum and candy with Briddlewood, and this touched the security guard right down to his boots. The boy didn’t have much and lived with a bad situation. True, Muriel Brazil wasn’t hitting the sauce back then as bad as she did now, but her son had a lousy deal and everyone at Davidson knew it.

What Brazil didn’t know was that a number of people
who lived in the college community had plotted behind the scenes for years and had raised money from wealthy alumni, even dipping into their own wallets to make certain that when Brazil was college age, he was offered an opportunity to rise above his situation. Briddlewood himself had put a few bucks in the pot when he didn’t have much to spare, and lived in a small house far enough away from Lake Norman that he couldn’t see the water but could at least watch the endless parade of trucks hauling boats along his dirt road. He spat again, silently rolling the Cushman closer to the church, keeping his eye on the couple, to make sure they were safe out here in the dark.