She Talks to Angels

by James D F Hannah

  He looked better than he had a few days prior at the meeting. He was clean-shaven, his hair combed, and he wore an untucked T-shirt and jeans and sneakers. His eyes were bright and alert. They were the same green as the redhead’s.

  Deacon said, “What are you doing here, Henry?”

  “I came by to talk to Robert Charles,” I said. I waved a finger between Deacon and the redhead. “You two are brother and sister?”

  “Twins. Fraternal.” He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him. She kept an intent stare of distrust on me. “Dagny, this is my AA sponsor, Henry.”

  I extended my hand. She gave it a perfunctory shake.

  “You’re in AA?” she said.

  “That’s what sponsor means. Unless your brother’s in a softball league.”

  She didn’t laugh. Didn’t smile. Didn’t even show a tooth.

  Deacon said, “What business you got with the old man?”

  “An old case, that’s all,” I said. “Someone asked me to look into it, and I thought your father might be able to help me.”

  Dagny raised a well-sculpted eyebrow. “Are you a cop?”

  “Retired,” I said. “So where are you off to?”

  “Clarksburg,” Deacon said. “Dagny’s good enough to drive me around until I get my license back.”

  “That’s kind of her,” I said. “You’re lucky to have such a good sister.”

  He looked at her with sincere adoration. She looked at me as if she caught me taking a piss through the front gate and waving at cars as they drove by.

  As I drove away, I glanced at the rearview mirror. Dagny gave me a death stare that held as she and Deacon got smaller and smaller in the reflection.

  10

  Woody’s most recent rescue case was a seventy-pound boxer named Daisy who believed she had to drape herself across my lap as soon as I sat down. The rest of Woody’s cadre of secondhand pooches scattered across the living room as if left behind by a toddler, but Daisy had suctioned herself to me once I pulled up outside of Woody’s farmhouse.

  From his ragged La-Z-Boy, Woody said, “You took the money?”

  “I did. It was a lot of money. To me, it’s a lot of money. To my new bestie Bobby Charles, it’s a week somewhere with a beach and drinks with chunks of fruit in them for breakfast.”

  Woody swallowed some coffee. “He’s in the news, your bestie Bobby.”

  “What for?”

  He picked up a copy of the local rag, the Parker County Herald-Tribune, and handed it to me. “You should try and read the goddamned newspaper.”

  “They stopped running ‘Hints from Heloise,’” I said. “I didn’t know how to get coffee stains out of my tablecloth using seltzer water anymore.”

  Robert Charles was the lead on the front page in a story about his bank working with an outfit called GRP Development, trying to buy a big chunk of Parker County called MacGuffin Valley. The land itself didn’t seem like much—nothing but old houses on them full of people waiting to die—but Charles and his group were getting pushback from owners who weren’t in a mood to give up their land, and Charles was asking to have eminent domain declared so the land could be bought by the county and then by GRP. Charles said the plan was to level everything and turn the whole thing into a golf resort. Because what was needed in a county with a 16 percent unemployment rate was a golf course and overpriced condos.

  “I wonder if Bobby can get me a discount on a membership,” I said.

  “You golf?”

  “I’ve watched golf; I am a middle-aged white man, after all. I like the commercials for investment firms and impotence medications. My relationship goals involve holding hands with someone in side-by-side bathtubs in the middle of nowhere after a four-hour erection.”

  “You’re a dreamer, Henry.”

  I set the newspaper aside and scratched Daisy on top of the head, right between the ears. Woody watched me with that neutral expression he wore like armor.

  “You made a promise to Katie Dolan,” Woody said.

  “I did indeed.” I handed the check to Woody. “And that’s what Robert Charles gave me for making a promise to him.”

  Woody wolf-whistled when he saw the check. “He didn’t ask you to blow him for this kind of cash?”

  “For what he was offering, it would have been considered.”

  “You’re falling well short on the Chandler idyllic of the knight errant,” Woody said. “A man who is ‘neither tarnished nor afraid.’ Chandler said, ‘He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge.’”

  “That’s great in theory, but I bet Chandler was never waiting for the brakes to give out on his car. Or the transmission. Or the AC.”

  “Perhaps you should consider a better ride.”

  “Perhaps. Plus, I’m not taking any money dishonestly. Katie Dolan wasn’t paying me; this was just more horseshit for Jackie to drag me into. I’ll tell Katie Dolan I can’t do it. Besides, not what I’m really worried about. I’m not sure what to do about Deacon.”

  “The fact that Deacon is Charles’s son?”

  “Duh,” I said. I’m sure Chandler would have been more clever. Oh well. “Do I keep sponsoring him?”

  “Is the concern because you’re Charles’ employee now?”

  “I’m not Robert Charles’s employee.”

  “Brother gave you a shit-ton of money to do a job. That’s being an employee, I don’t care how you slice it.”

  “Actually he gave me a shit-ton of money to not do something.”

  “Semantics. The point is, no, I don’t think there’s an issue with you continuing to sponsor Deacon, or get started with it at least.”

  I sipped my coffee. “Doesn’t it strike you as a hell of a coincidence, in a world this size, that the happy idiot you set me up to sponsor happens to be the half-brother of a girl whose murder I get asked to look at? I think if I read that shit in a book, I’d be pissed as hell.”

  “It’s a big fucking world with an infinite supply of smaller and smaller classes, units, and subcultures. If you want to consider this connection among eight billion people on the earth, then yes, that’s an incredible coincidence. But we’re talking about the coinciding of drunks in Parker County with tragic murders in Parker County. You can’t imagine about how much that Venn diagram overlaps.”

  Daisy made a small groan and leaned her head toward me. I rubbed her ears. She settled her head on my knee and snored.

  11

  Back home, I stuck Robert Charles’s fat-ass check to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like the TARDIS from Doctor Who. The rest of the day, I found excuses to walk back in and look at it, making sure it was real. The check, not the magnet. I’d owned the magnet a while, so I knew it was real.

  I was dreading the moment I deposited the check because once it was in the bank, it wouldn’t be real anymore. Sure, the money would be real; I would spend the living shit out of it then, but now what I had were zeroes and dreaming, and sometimes that’s more powerful than reality. In my head were all the possibilities of what the money could buy. Exotic, extravagant things like a car that wasn’t ready to die at any moment, or a PS4 and a seventy-inch flat screen, or replacements for the blues albums a skinhead had destroyed.

  You could argue I needed to dream a little bigger, I suppose, but those were my dreams, so screw you. Get your own dreams.

  The sun settled low into the sky, Jaws played on the TV, and Izzy slept next to me on the couch. There was a knock at my front door. It was Dagny Charles. Her hair was windblown and her cheeks tinged with pink.

  “There something wrong with Deacon?” I said.

  She shook her head and all that red hair with it. It was a nice way to spend a few moments. “We need to talk.”

  We walked into the kitchen, and I put on a fresh pot of coffee. I hosted the occasional drunk in need of conversation, and that almost always meant coffee. Maxwell House constituted a large chunk of my grocery
bill.

  Dagny Charles took a seat at the kitchen table. I got out a pair of mismatched cups and leaned on the counter while the coffee brewed. She fished through her purse until she produced a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.

  “Please, by all means,” I said. I snatched a cereal bowl from a cabinet and set it in front of her.

  She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “My father’s a health nut. Tennis, swimming, running, you name it. It’s exhausting to know him. He wouldn’t be happy if he knew I was smoking again.”

  “It’ll be our little secret.”

  The coffee finished brewing, and I filled the cups. She said she took hers black. I added sugar and milk to mine and took a long sip.

  “I suppose I should ask what brought you to the wrong side of the tracks?” I said.

  She knocked a half-inch of ash into the cereal bowl. “Tell me what you were talking to Daddy about this morning.”

  “We covered that in your driveway,” I said. “What we discussed is confidential.”

  “You’re neither a lawyer nor a licensed private detective, Mr. Malone. Don’t give me ‘client confidentiality’ as a bullshit excuse.” Her eye line shot to the refrigerator door. “I recognize that check pattern. My father paid you for a reason.”

  I snagged my emergency pack of Marlboros from my junk drawer, lit myself one, and sat back down. “Someone asked me to investigate your sister’s murder. Your father asked me not to.”

  “And that check is his way of asking?”

  “It is. Your father’s a persuasive negotiator.”

  She crushed the last of her cigarette into the bowl. “The man who claims to have killed Meadow is in prison. Who asked you to investigate?”

  “The man’s sister.”

  “Do you intend to follow through with her request?”

  “She’s paying me significantly less than what your father is paying me.”

  “How much is she paying you?”

  I made a zero sign with the thumb and middle finger of my right hand.

  She lit a fresh cigarette. “You offered to pry open a closed murder case out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “It gets me the last badge I need before I can be an Eagle Scout.”

  “A shame you were bought off rather easily.”

  “I’d argue the amount involved shows a modicum of effort on your father’s part.”

  “How much?”

  I told her.

  She brought out a checkbook from her purse. “I’ll pay you double that if you’ll still investigate,” she said.

  I rose to my feet. “Let me get you a pen.”

  “You don’t think Eddie Dolan killed your sister?” I said.

  “Half-sister,” Dagny Charles said. “Meadow was my father’s and my stepmother’s.”

  We were on our second cup of coffee each, though she had slowed on hers, and mine was half gone and I eyed the pot for a third.

  Dagny lit a new cigarette. I lit one also, so she wouldn’t feel alone. “My mother passed away when Deacon and I were five,” she said. “Uterine cancer. Daddy married Meadow’s mother six months later.”

  “I didn’t see your stepmother when I came by.”

  “She was likely sleeping it off somewhere. A good afternoon for Brooklyn Charles is a hangover and wondering where she left her underwear the night before.”

  “I’m going to venture a guess the two of you are not close.”

  “The bitch can die in a car fire, and I won’t shed a goddamn tear.”

  “Mother’s Day must be a joy at the Charles house.”

  She smiled. Jungle cats smiled the same way before ripping an antelope apart. “She’s a drunk who’s done nothing but use my father for years,” she said. Then she caught what she had said and twisted her mouth up to one side. “No offense on the ‘drunk’ thing.”

  “None taken. We are assholes. It’s in the programming.” I refilled my coffee cup. “How was your relationship with Meadow?”

  She relaxed in the chair and stretched her body out. She was long and lean and probably in good shape underneath her pale green silk blouse and cream-colored linen slacks. At the cuff of her pants, a tattoo—a length of vine—extended out around her ankle.

  “We got along fine,” she said. “She was seven years younger than me, and I lacked patience for her. I was a jealous brat and here was this mewing creature stealing my father’s attention. Oh, and from my brother. But mostly me. I don’t share my toys well. It’s a terrible character flaw I struggle with. I’m not going to change it, mind you, but I struggle nonetheless.”

  “You never viewed Meadow as the doll to play with? Isn’t that what young girls do when a baby shows up?”

  “Don’t fool yourself with ideas like that, Mr. Malone—”

  “Henry,” I said. That check scored her a high level of informality.

  “I took enough psychology classes to know when expectations are bullshit, Henry. I didn’t like Meadow for many years, and I didn’t have an issue saying so. Robert and I butted heads about it, and Brooklyn was never shy about throwing fuel on that fire, instructing Robert whose side he needed to take.”

  “What changed?”

  “I grew up. There was college and all the requisite hits one takes when one is on their own. By ‘on their own,’ I mean ‘with Robert’s money paying the bills.’ I didn’t suffer. Robert sent me to the University of Connecticut to study psychology, which qualified me to come home and join the family bank. But I learned how to plow through my anger, so I could be the adult that room desperately needed. By the time I came home, the roof hadn’t fallen in, but it sagged mightily.”

  “With Meadow?”

  “With everyone. Deacon, God love his heart, has never been one able to hold his shit together. After he flunked out of WVU, Robert threw him into community college, sent him to rehab, tried everything he could to straighten him out, and nothing seemed to take. I think it’s part of why it was so difficult for Robert when Meadow fell apart, because it felt like a repeat of what he’d already gone through with Deacon.”

  “How’s Deacon doing with the most recent round of rehab?”

  “Better, but I wouldn’t trust him with loose pocket change. Not that I don’t love my brother, because I do. We share an unhealthy amount of genes, but he’s an industrial accident of a human being. And I’m sorry, but is this line of questioning supposed to help you with the situation I’m paying you for, or because you intend to remain my brother’s sponsor?”

  “Everything is connected. Didn’t you know?”

  “How unexpectedly holistic of you, Henry.”

  “I’m a New Age sort of guy. What about Deacon and Meadow? Did they get along?”

  “Fantastically. They were bucks up together, much more so than I ever was. As Deacon got older, he pulled further and further away from everyone, including me. I stopped being a sister and became a caretaker. I make sure he attends meetings, that he sees his therapist, that he has money enough to cover his needs but not enough to cover his wants. He can’t be trusted on his own.” She sat up straight in the kitchen chair. “I doubt you appreciate the level of responsibility that comes with dealing with the Charles family, Henry. We can be quite the burden to bear.”

  “The money helps, I’m sure.”

  “Money buys you time and opportunity, Henry, not solutions. My father was consumed with being Robert Charles, plus what to do as Deacon spiraled out of control. I did what I could, but I couldn’t give both situations everything I had. Brooklyn was drunk off her ass, so Meadow, she slipped through the cracks. Robert thought he could save her, but she was determined to flame out bigger than Deacon. Robert realized he risked losing a second child, so he shipped her to a rehab in Connecticut where I had done clinicals. They were discreet, which was important for the business of being Robert Charles. Deacon was already a public shame, but he didn’t want Meadow tainted any further than she had been already.”

  I drank more coffee. It had cooled, and it hadn
’t been very good hot anyway, so I dumped it down the sink. “She was clean when she died.”

  “Which made the final arrest with the heroin and the syringe a kick in the mouth. She had worked so hard to pull her life back together, and she denied she was using again. She talked and talked around the whole thing until we gave up and hoped for the best with the prosecutor. Even then, we kept hope. Until the very end.” She checked her watch, stood up. “I should head home. What do you need, Henry?”

  “Suspects would be glorious,” I said. “I’m at a loss for anyone who would have wanted to have killed her.”

  “I guess you’ll have to find suspects. That’s why you’re getting paid the big bucks.”

  “And big bucks they are. Thank you for every one of them.”

  “Spend them wisely, Henry,” she said.

  “Where’s the fun in that?”

  12

  Meadow’s ex was a guy named Wallace Maynard. Google showed me he’d never left Serenity. Color me surprised; prying Appalachians from their hometown was a gesture of futility. You might spend four years in college, but you almost always came home, no matter how shitty home might be.

  The garage where Maynard worked was downtown, a two-bay with an attached office, the interior of the office plastered with vintage cheesecake shots of Bettie Page in various stages of undress. The photos weren’t scandalous by today’s measure; they offered just enough tease to make you miss the days when there was a tease.

  The guy in the office gave me a hard and suspicious look when I walked in and said I wanted to talk to Maynard. He gave a grunt and stuck his head into the work area and yelled out Maynard’s name. From the bay there was a country station playing on a tinny radio, metal clanging together, the hiss of an acetylene torch, men struggling to be heard over the racket.

  Maynard walked over, wiping grease off his hands with a rag that didn’t look as if it had the capacity for more filth. He was shorter than I expected for some reason, thick in the middle and narrowing in the other directions. He moved as though he’d been in shape once, and that he missed that time, but he didn’t have the desire to recapture the past. A blond beard and a receding hairline couldn’t hide a baby face that hinted at better times long ago.