The Most Wanted (15 page)

“It’s not.” It seemed important to give Stuart correct information. I stood up for emphasis. “It’s a Venetian Nipple.” Stuart grinned with half his mouth, which always made me think he looked like Steve McQueen, and eased me back down into my chair.

“It looks pretty effective.”

“Oh, it is,” said Jeanine. “Join us.”

Tarik came in then, dressed, as always, like a
GQ
model, in soft heather-colored slacks made of some kind of slightly iridescent material. How he could afford to dress this way on a death row lawyer’s salary was beyond me. “Rich relations,” Stuart suggested once.

“What kind of relations?” I had asked him. “A sugar daddy?”

“Or a sugar mama?” he’d retorted.

Neither of us had ever known Tarik, whose looks were as model perfect as his clothes, to date anyone, male, female, mineral, or vegetable.

The two of them sat down and ordered longnecks, and we got some chips and salsa and a plate of bean burros to share. Stuart kept staring down into the neck of his beer bottle as if seeking an oracle, and I really didn’t want to ask, I really didn’t, but I finally had to say, “Honey, what’s up?”

“It’s Kim McGrory,” he said.

“That’s the guy who killed everyone after Thanksgiving dinner,” Jeanine put in brightly.

“He’s my client,” Stuart said. “My client.”

“He got a stay,” Tarik explained. “A psychiatric evaluation—”

“He poisoned everyone, right?” Jeanine persisted. “Am I thinking of the right guy? He said it was botulism—”

“He didn’t say it was botulism,” Stuart explained weakly. “He didn’t say anything. He was in the hospital for two weeks. Somebody poisoned that meat—”

“No, Stuart, I read about it,” Jeanine said. “They said he was abusing his granddaughters, and what he took himself turned out to be an overdose of aspirin or something. He didn’t really try to kill himself—”

“Well, Jeanine, I wouldn’t ever presume to argue facts with the press. He did, however, really try to kill himself today.”

“What?” I asked. “You just said he got a stay—”

“He doesn’t really want a competency hearing. He doesn’t want another psychiatric evaluation,” Stuart continued softly. “His mother was in and out of institutions his whole life. She set fire to the house when he was six, and his grandmother got custody of him. But she made him live in a horse box—”

“These stories are all so touching.” Jeanine smiled, toasting Tarik with her second Venetian Nipple. Stuart and Tarik shrugged, silent, their tension stiffening the very air around them. I could feel the friction between their despair and Jeanine’s bleary wit. I sent her a mental E-mail: Flirt with Tarik now. Leave this alone. She wouldn’t, though. She was in the mood to pick at something. “The children in that family who died when Kim cooked dinner—I’m sure their stories were pretty bleak too.”

“Actually, they were, Jeanine,” Stuart said. “Abuse is a gift that keeps on giving, generation after generation.”

“Well, he took care of that for future generations.”

“You should have been his defense attorney, Jeanine,” Stuart said thinly. “Kim’s lawyer was such a moron, he just about said the same thing.”

“He’d have to have been a moron to defend a guy who poisoned his whole family, not to mention the neighbors.”

“But you know, Jeanine, because you are a well-informed citizen,” Stuart went on, “Kim never confessed to any crime and was never really proven to have killed anybody. And now he actually might not need to get the poke, after all. Because he’s probably taken care of the job himself.”

“A huge loss to the commonwealth.”

“Well, cheer up, Jeanine. Now he’s in a coma. Nobody knows how long he was hanging from one of those rubber exercise bands in his cell. Folks tend not to notice prisoners on death row—especially when they’re just hanging around like that, you know?”

“Stuart . . . ,” I began, pleadingly.

“Oh, Anne, I don’t have to listen to this bullshit—”

Jeanine cut in. “Why don’t they spend money on trying to give kids a better start so they don’t turn out to be serial killers, instead of trying to save—”

“Where’s the cutoff? Which generation should we start with? Is thirteen too young? Is seventy too old?”

“You’re such a tedious liberal, Stuart.” Jeanine plonked her glass and her elbows down on the table, nearly upsetting our pyramid.

“You have such a strong, powerful sense of social justice for a social worker, Jeanine,” he said.

“Shut up,” I told them both. This spat wasn’t helping my digestion. The congealing beans and tortilla chips looked as appealing as haggis, though I knew I should eat something. The tower of glasses winked and subdivided before my eyes.

Then all of a sudden, Stuart was banging open the door and gone.

“He’ll be back,” Tarik said.

“Maybe not,” I said morosely. “I can hope for the best.”

But I knew the only choice I had was to follow him out. To tell you the truth, though, I wouldn’t have minded right then getting hold of Kim McGrory’s exercise band and using it on him and Jeanine both. Tarik started to say that he’d get Jeanine home, but I assured him we’d just walk around the block and cool off. Outside, the night was what makes people put up with Texas—tropic, lush as a red fruit but without the wet dullness of summer. You didn’t have to wear a sweater, but a little ribbon of cool from somewhere made you appreciate the fact. From the gloom of a deep gallery, someone was playing the old song “Por Un Amor” on a guitar. I took Stuart’s arm, making noises about how everyone had had a hard day. Actually, even I had had a hard day, a circumstance I began to describe, when a wide-eyed look from Stuart simply shut me up. His mishegas was always worse than my mishegas. His was life; mine was usually quality of life. I always felt I had to apologize for that. Besides, though I wasn’t drunk, the motion of my arms and legs didn’t seem quite in synch. So I just stopped. And I looked up.

And there was this house.

It was a rambling red-brick Revival of Everything pile, with every cliché from a B horror movie well represented. “This place has more wings than a Saturday night in Buffalo,” Stuart said, relaxing a little under the embrace of the sweet night air.

Whoever designed the house had really kitchen-sinked it. There were yards of crumbling gingerbread lattices over carved lintels, wrought-iron rails overgrown with trumpet vine that reached out from the arms of a huge, shedding pecan tree. The front garden looked like an EPA site; Stuart would later say he’d expected to find a car buried in the yard. A series of abused mailboxes of various vintages lined the front walk.

“Someone evidently went postal,” Stuart said. I punched him on the shoulder. “Why do you have such bad friends?” he asked.

“I don’t have bad friends,” I replied. “Why do you have such bad manners?”

“She’s just typical of . . . everybody, Anne. ‘Why don’t
they
spend money on children instead of convicted killers?’ As if it were a genuine set of equal options—you know, just like adoption, not abortion.”

“Stuart, she
is
typical of everybody. Everybody doesn’t give a shit whether somebody who killed his whole family also has a sad history.”

“Do you know just what this place looks like?” Stuart asked me, looking up at the house again and shrugging off my explanation like a wet shirt.

And I, feeling suddenly as though a question had just been answered by telegram, said, “Yes, exactly.”

“It looks like the big old house in
It’s a Wonderful Life
.”

“Yes, it does. Exactly. Mary and George were coming home from the dance and they threw stones at the windows and the one who broke the first pane got his wish . . .” Stuart had already picked up a little rock. He had a good arm, from years of high-stake lawyer’s softball teams, but he came nowhere near any of the six or seven thousand still-unbroken panes in that house. He was picking up another stone when I said, “Now, wait. That’s not fair. I get to try first.”

At first Stuart looked at me as though I weren’t quite there. It dawned on me that he hadn’t fully entered into this re-creation of the sacred Capra romantic moment; he was pissed, pissed like a kid, and just felt like breaking something. Right then, the moon shrugged a cloud and shone directly on a huge pair of eight-paneled windows fronting what I realized I’d just decided would be my bedroom. Stuart was a good sport; he grinned and handed me his stone and reminded me to use my shoulder, not my wrist. And I put it right through a pane that couldn’t have been more than five inches by five, which would later cost me nearly a hundred bucks to replace, and I turned to Stuart and slapped my hands on my thighs and said, “And that is how that is done. I get my wish.”

I only got to gloat for a minute.

Stuart was gazing over my shoulder, alarmed.

“What?” I whispered, whirling around and almost colliding with the lap of a big blond guy carrying a big pointed stake. My forehead hit him at about waist level. I looked up and up, reaching back blindly for Stuart’s hand, before I realized with relief that the guy probably wasn’t really a hobo defending his jungle with . . . yes, a sledgehammer. He was actually carrying a lettered sign. And wearing painter’s overalls. And a feed cap. Just a big, blond Texas guy.

He said, “You shouldn’t bust out the windows. It’s not nice.”

Is this, like, Lenny? I thought, and righted myself. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “We were being foolish. We just . . . I’ll gladly pay for it.”

The blond guy looked up at the overhang of the eaves. “I don’t know who you’d pay, ma’am. The owner . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, she’s dead, ma’am,” he answered, beginning to pound a For Sale sign into one of the few unmailboxed spaces in the yard.

“Are you her son?” I asked stupidly, trying to piece things together.

“Nope. I just do a lot of repair work and stuff around the neighborhood. People have some beautiful gardens—I care-take a few of them. This lady had some nice plantings. You hate to see it all ruined. Somebody’s going to spade all this up and put a damned hedge in here or something.”

Still alert, but recovered, Stuart asked, “How long has this place been abandoned?”

“I don’t know,” said the blond man. “What? Five years? The old lady for sure still lived here when I was in college. Maybe it’s more like eight or nine years. A house won’t hold up long in this climate with nobody to mind it.”

“Didn’t she have . . . family?”

“Not that I ever saw. I guess somebody finally decided to sell it to one of those brokers who takes on vacant houses. It’s really beautiful inside. And under here”—he pointed to the heap of mailboxes—“there’s this gorgeous perennial garden.” Even in the deepening dark, I could see his smile grow eager. “Hibiscus and cacti and . . . well, that’s a Rio Grande abutilon, that orange flower. And see that tree with the trunk the same green as the branches? That’s paloverde. Evening primrose all over. My house is two blocks away. Gardens are kind of a passion of mine, but even I don’t have this nice a garden. Or the space for it.”

“I could imagine having this garden,” I said then. Stuart stared at me. “Well,” I said, standing erect with some effort. “I think I’ll buy this house. Stuart, don’t you think I should buy this house? How much is it?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. It might be . . . well, it can’t be much. I was just out here this afternoon sort of doing the rounds and I ran into the real estate agent—he was on his way to his kid’s softball game—so I said I’d stick this in here for him. . . .”

“Real close neighborhood,” Stuart muttered; unkindly, I thought.

“Judging by my house,” the man went on, “I’d say . . .
maybe
sixty thousand. Or not even. It’s . . . ah, it needs a lot.”

“Well, we could—”

“We?” Stuart asked. “That’s not what you said. You said
you
might buy this house.”

“I meant
we,
” I said. “Stuart, want to buy a house? With me?” I turned back, craning my neck to look eye-to-eye with the blond giant, and asked, “What sort of house is this?”

“This,” he said, pushing back the brim of his denim baseball cap, “is a Queen Anne.”

“See?” I said to Stuart. “There you have it!”

“See what, Anne?” he asked me.

“Well, look at the address. It’s forty forty . . . what street is this?”