Life Sentences (2 page)

She smiled reluctantly, then took
the flask and tipped her head back, wincing as she swallowed something
bitter and strong.

"For God's sake," he said
with a delighted smile. "You look like you're twelve years
old."

She enjoyed this mindless flattery.
She was pleased that he'd singled her out. They had a unique relationship
in the lab, a close student-mentor bond. He hyped her efforts, and she worked
five times harder than anybody else.

"Your wife must be worried,"
she said now.

"Julia? She doesn't
worry."

"Never?"

"Nah. She sleeps like a
baby." He eyed her curiously. "What about you, Daisy? Do you sleep
like a baby?"

"Ha." She tilted her head
to drink again, feeling a warmth in her belly. TB sleep when I'm dead."

"Would you sleep with
me?"

"You're an outrageous
flirt, you know."

"Are you shocked?"

"Nothing you do shocks me anymore,
Truett."

"Liar. I think you're deeply
shocked."

"Right. I'm such a prude. I have
no life, remember?"

His look was stern. "Such a
waste."

She gave an involuntary shiver.
She handed back the flask, and their fingers touched briefly. There was
something raw and dangerous about his gaze, and she wanted him to stop.
He was making her feel vaguely threatened. She edged his coffee cup closer
and said, "Drink up."

With a mischievous grin, he put
the flask away and took a sip of black coffee. "Mm. Terrible."

She smiled.

"Go home, foolish girl,"
he said softly. "Before I devour you alive."

"You've got a pretty high opinion
of yourself, don't you?"

"Go home before I say something
I’ll regret." He fished his car keys out and promptly dropped them on
the floor. "Ugh." He leaned over and reached for them but kept
drunkenly missing.

'Truett," she said,
"you're in no condition to drive."

He looked up.

"I'm taking you home."

With a heavy sigh, he staggered
to his feet. "Your wish is my command."

As they drove across town, Truett
breathed deeply be-side her, looking old. She could feel butterflies
in her stomach as she thought about the line he had crossed. Still, she could
forgive him. He was drunk. He would probably have no memory of it tomorrow.
The tree boughs sagged with snow on this blustery March night, and the moon
had disappeared behind the clouds. The parking Spaces in Boston were
so hard to come by that people dragged old armchairs or cardboard boxes
over to the curb in an effort to save their places, and a dusting of snow
gave these items a ghostly glow.

"Daisy," he said, sliding
her a look, "what are you thinking about?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? You look so damn
sad."

"I'm not sad."

"Your eyes have that faraway
look."

"I'm not sad, Truett."

"Daisy… you leave your unhappiness
behind you like the wake of a canoe."

She didn't like where this was going.
The streetlamp cast mutating shadows across the snowdrifts while the
car's chains rattled over the slippery road. She swung into the circular
driveway of
Truett's
expensive Colonial, her
high beams illuminating the cat-poop-studded snow. Truett and Julia owned
several cats, whereas Daisy didn't have any pets. She didn't own a goldfish
or even a house-plant. It was true what he'd said about her-she had no life
outside the lab.

While the car idled in the driveway,
he turned to her and said, "Look at you. Now, there's a whole lot of
lovely in one place."

"Truett…"

He raised her chin with his finger.
"Pleasure and pain are this close right now. Do you understand what
I'm saying?"

She shook her head.

He leaned forward and kissed her.

His kisses were sweet and sour.
His Ups were the lips of an older man, and for the first time in her life,
Daisy felt sorry for him. He smelled of the lab, of his boring Conference
in New Mexico, of his hatred for Claude
Bagget
and his desperation for government money.

She drew back. "Good night,
Truett."

He got out and slammed the door,
then stumbled up the porch Steps.

She didn't understand what had
just happened. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking as she pulled out onto the
road, where elusive shadows darted from her headlights' glare.

Detective Jack Makowski stood in
the hot sun in front of a nondescript Southern California bar with a
shingled roof and desert-tan stucco facade and wondered what had happened
to his latest missing person. Two days ago, forty-five-year-old Computer
programmer Colby
Ostrow
had left this defeated-looking
establishment sometime before it'd closed for the night, never to be
seen or heard from again. They'd found his Buick parked around back with
the doors locked and no key in the ignition; Colby's car keys had apparently
disappeared right along with him.

As lead investigator in Charge
of this dog detail, Jack's track record was beginning to worry him. Last
year a grandmother of three had vanished from De Campo Beach under similar
circumstances, and the case had gone cold on his desk. De Campo Beach
was a little hole-in-the-wall beach town, its population hovering around,.
Thousands of people went missing in California every year, and even though
De Campo Beach had been annexed to Los Angeles, the people who lived
there didn't consider themselves part of a metropolis. It was a small
oceanfront town, where neighbors took in each other's mail and chatted
in the supermarket Checkout lines. People didn't go missing here.

Now he caught a glimpse of his
reflection in the window and didn't like his hair in this heat. It was
collar-length and curly, like rigid surf. He brushed it back with his fingers,
then stared deep into his
hungover
eyes. At thirty-eight,
Jack Makowski was an average-size man with blue eyes and graying brown
hair who reminded himself more and more every day of his middle-aged mother-he
had her slightly sagging jowls, same violet circles under the eyes, her
propensity for self-pity. Jesus, he felt like this building. Not yet falling
into ruin, but be-ginning to. Just beginning to.

Back in her day, his mother had been
beautiful, and Jack was just vain enough to be thankful that he took after
her side of the family and not his
trollish
dad's.
Dick Makowski had been a wealthy man, a TV producer of several successful
cop shows who secretly yearned to direct Bergman-like films. Years ago,
Jack had stood in front of a bar a lot like this one, on a day as hot as this
one was, watching his father shoot Freddie the Fuzz on location. Freddie
was a big hit back in the s. It was blazing hot, and the actor playing Freddie
carried around a pocket fan wherever he went, since his makeup was continually
dripping down his face. On this particular day, the street looked like
something out of a disaster movie, since a bomb was supposed to have
gone off. The crew ran around lighting fires, cluttering the street
with glass and debris and blowing smoke from a smoke machine. During one
of the takes, Freddie's hair caught fire, and everybody panicked. Nobody
knew what to do, except for the rent-a-cop who'd been assigned to direct
traffic. He raced over, put out the fire before it could do any damage,
then went back to directing traffic again. The odd thing was, everybody
acted as if nothing unusual had happened. People barely acknowledged
the cop or his heroic deed. Freddie was fine. Disaster averted. Let's
move on. Relight! Only Jack thought it was a big deal, because that was
the moment he decided to become a cop-not an actor playing a cop, or a
producer making cop shows, but a real live cop. One of the good guys.

Now he opened the door of the Broken
Spoke and paused to take in the bar's atmosphere. He liked the sense
of anonymity you got from a bar when you first entered it-a nightclub
wanted you to show off, but a bar wanted you to disappear. He took a moment
to study the eclectic collection of tables and chairs, the rock-and-roll
memorabilia collecting dust on the walls, the long-forgotten
piflata
hanging from the rafters. All it did was make
him thirsty. Los Angeles was in the middle of a severe drought, and these
high temperatures were unusual for March. Water had gotten so scarce
the city fathers were considering building a desalination plant.
Maybe they should take all that money and buy everyone a beer.

He spotted the bartender and,
crossing the floor, flashed his badge. "LAPD. We spoke earlier."

The tall, ashen-faced man gave a
curt nod of acknowledgment, then went back to his bartending duties.

"This guy." Jack showed
him a photograph of Colby
Ostrow
.

"Comes in pretty regular, yeah,"
the bartender said. He had a receding chin and misaligned teeth, and
he was chewing on a stick of gum. "Colby something."

"When did you see him
last?"

"Two or three days ago."

"So Tuesday? Wednesday?"

"Wednesday. I remember thinking
it was super-busy for a Wednesday night."

Jack nodded. "What time did
he leave?"

The bartender shook his head as
he poured another blended drink, his jaws working overtime. According
to
Ostrow's
doting middle-aged sister, Colby was
the quiet type, a lonely bachelor, practically invisible. She'd called
it in yesterday when he failed to show up for work. A thorough search of
his apartment had ruled out robbery as a motive.

"Give it a shot," Jack said.
"Was it midnight? Closing time?"

"That I do not know."

"Did you see anybody with
him?"

"It was super-busy, like I said."

Jack nodded. "You from the
East Coast?"

"Yeah. How'd you guess?"

"Everybody from the East Coast
chews gum."

"Look, I'd like to help you
out, Detective. But that's all I’ve got."

"Relax. Fm passing out migraines
today. So what else can you tell me about Colby
Ostrow
that night? Was he in a good mood? Bad mood? What?"

"You're talking about a guy
with zero personality. He comes in pretty regular, like I said. Sidles
up to the bar. Says things like 'Nice weather we're having.' One of those.
Last Wednesday, he orders three, maybe four Bloody
Marys
.
That's all I remember. Like I said…"

"It was super-busy, I know.
You didn't see him leave? Alone or with another person?"

The bartender shook his head and
started rinsing glasses. "Eve Garrett talked to him."

"Eve?"

"She's over there. Next to the
Jukebox."

"Thanks."

Eve Garrett had a head of brittle,
overbleached
hair. Her extra-wide hips were
squeezed into a lime-green miniskirt, and her breasts strained against
the fabric of her embroidered peasant blouse. Deep into middle age,
she was one of those sad, unrepentant hookers who'd lost their assets a
long time ago but who couldn't stop the habit of trolling the street for
customers. "Excuse me, Ms. Garrett?"

"Call me Eve. Like in the garden."
She kicked out a chair. "Take a load off."

"Fm investigating the disappearance
of this man." He showed her the photograph of Colby
Ostrow
.
"He look familiar?"

She squinted at the picture.
"Yeah, I met him a few nights ago."

"He a regular customer of
yours, Eve?"

"No." She laughed. She
had a scary, asthmatic laugh. "I let him buy me a drink."

"Was he alone?"

"More alone than you."

Jack winced. "What's that supposed
to mean?"

"Whatever you want it to, sweetie."

He shifted uncomfortably in his
chair. The sense of melancholy was strong in here. "The bartender
saw you two talking. Did you leave together?"

She rested her hands on the table.
"Look, okay. He might've suggested that we go someplace."

"Someplace like where?"

"Like his car. But I had to pee
real bad, so I told him to wait for
nie
by the
exit."

"Front or back?"

"Wouldn't you like to
know?"

"Eve…"

"Back exit." She drew on
her cigarette.

"So you went to the ladies'
room and then what?"

"I was in there five minutes
maybe. It's so pleasant in there, you know? Graffiti all over the place.
'Crabs jump twelve inches.' 'A hard man is good to find.' Such terrific
advice from the bathroom walls. Things to live your life by."

"Five minutes?"

"I took my time because…
let's face it. I know who ' I am. I know what they call me. Eve Two Bags. I'm
Spam, okay? But you work with what you've got. And so I put on some lipstick
and combed my hair and whatever. I was five minutes tops, but when I get
back outside, the little bastard's gone."

"What time was this?"

"Ten… ten-fifteen."

"He just disappeared?"

"So I sit back down." She
took out a comb and parted her hair to one side, then pulled it back with
a metal clip. Frank Sinatra was crooning from the Jukebox. "It
hap-pens sometimes," she said.

He felt sorry for her. Her bland acceptance
of her awful life made him want to punch somebody's lights out. Exactly
who was to blame for this train wreck? "Did you see him with anyone else?"
he asked. "Did he talk-however briefly-to anybody in the bar that
you remember?"

"No. He came right over and
sat down next to me, far as I know. Seemed really awkward, like he wasn't
used to picking up girls. I don't know. Maybe that's just an act."

Jack handed her his card. "If
you think of anything else,
gimme
a call."

She took his hand, turned it over.
"Where's your wedding ring, Detective?"

He looked at the pale band of
flesh on his tanned hand where the ring had once been. "You know what
they say about marriage, don't you, Eve?"

"Enlighten me."

"First comes the engagement
ring, then comes the wedding ring… then there's the suffering."

She smiled. "That's what Prostitution
rings are for, baby."

Jack chuckled and headed out.