Hunter threw his arms in the air. “Nobody gives a fuck who you married!” He whirled on me, his eyes blazing. “You knew she was Chris Crowel’s sister, and you didn’t tell me?”
“If I’d told you earlier, you would have ditched me. Look, I didn’t know she existed until I went to New Orleans. And, yes, maybe I should have told you sooner about the connection between the woman we were following and a friend of Adalida’s—”
Hunter snorted. “Friend! That’s a good one!”
Tina’s brow furrowed. “Adalida Thibodaux? What does she have to do with all this?”
“Her father was the one shot in the alley,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”
At first, she looked genuinely shocked. But then her face contorted with undisguised fury. “Jake Thibodaux? He’s the man who was shot? Well, you can count me out! I won’t help you find the shooter unless I get to give him a trophy!”
I pulled back from her, my mouth gaping open, trying to process the shock. Finally, I shook my head, stammering, “Whoa, hang on. What—?”
She jumped to her feet. “He deserved to die! That bastard murdered my brother!”
“That’s bullshit!” Hunter advanced on her. I stepped between them, stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Jake was no murderer!” he said, tone full of bile. “He wouldn’t kill anyone without a reason, not even that shithead brother of yours!”
“Bastard!” Tina shouted.
I put my other hand out toward Tina, trying to calm her down while still maintaining a steady pressure on Hunter’s chest. “Don’t do this. What’s going on?”
His breathing was labored against my palm. His eyes focused like daggers on her; her own shone bright with defiance. “I know the little puke finally kicked off,” he said. “And about time, too. It was taking all of Jake’s money to keep him alive.”
Tina screamed, “I hate you!”
“Oh, sister, you’re breaking my heart!”
“Enough, both of you!” I turned to Hunter. “Just tell me, okay?”
At first he said nothing, just breathed through his nose like an enraged bull. But then he stepped back. “The fag was Adalida’s boyfriend.”
“Don’t you call Chris that!” Tina yelled, stamping her feet on the ground
“That’s right,” he said, his tone mocking. “Technically, he was AC/DC.”
Affronted, I put my hands on my hips. “What did you say?”
“He liked it both ways. Drilled any hole he could get into.”
“I know what it means! For God’s sake, have a heart. He was her brother.”
“And Jake is my friend! And that bitch,” he said, raising to full height and pointing down at her as if he could loose lightning bolts from his fingertips, “that bitch wants him dead? Well, fuck her! Fuck her feelings! And fuck you! I don’t give a shit how she feels! She wants Jake dead? Well I’m glad her faggot brother is dead!”
Tina bellowed and rushed him. Hunter grabbed her by her arms. I slammed into Hunter with all of my weight. The pain caused me to yelp like a wounded puppy, but my momentum did the job. Hunter lost his grip, and he and I tumbled to the floor. He got tangled in the legs of a small plant table as he fell, which kept him down momentarily. Seizing the opportunity, I jumped to my feet, grabbed Tina and practically flung her into the chair. “Sit!”
Tina glared at Hunter. He stood slowly, small table in hand. The deadly look in his eyes made my gut clench. I stepped between them, swallowing hard. “So, what part of the lesson is this? Tell me how this helps get the job done? Huh? You’re the teacher. What do I do now?”
His furious gaze shot to me, and my body jerked instinctively. After what seemed like a second short of an eternity, his anger seemed to subside, a little anyway. He put the table down.
Taking a shuddering breath, I went to him and touched his arm. “I know you’re hurting.”
His arm flew out, tossing my hand to my side. “Don’t you dare try to get into my head! I won’t make that mistake again.”
“Oh, for crying out loud. You don’t want to let me in? Fine. But we still have a job to do. Just help me understand, okay?” I shook my head, grinding my teeth together. “I care about Jake too, you know. And I care about those people who died.” Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, “And I damn sure care about who’s trying to kill me. So, will you please get off your high horse and tell me what you know about Chris’s death?”
“What’s to know? The kid was sick, he died. End of story.”
“And Jake did nothing about it,” Tina said, her voice laced with impending sobs.
“It was his money keeping the kid alive!” Hunter bellowed.
Tina turned to me. “Jake was there the night Chris stopped breathing. The nurse said he might have lived if Jake had gotten help right away. But he didn’t. That’s as good as murder!”
“Bull!” Hunter said. “Jake told me that the kid died while he was asleep in a chair. He never had a chance to call anyone.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?” Tina said, her lips curling in disgust.
“I don’t care what you believe! Jake wouldn’t have killed the kid. Hell, he bankrupted himself to pay for hospice. He sold his house, his car, and most of the land that had been in his family for generations, all to take care of that cheating brat. He ended up with nothing, driving that piece-of-shit car. And he hired you,” Hunter said, nodding at me, “which he couldn’t afford to do. If he’s guilty of anything, it’s caring about worthless people.”
“Don’t start that again.” I turned to Tina. “I knew Jake for six months, and he never told me about Chris, or that he was taking care of him.”
“It was none of your damn business.” Hunter radiated resentment. “What happened between Chris and Adalida shamed him. And, unlike women, men don’t go blubbering out their problems every time the moon rises. Or, maybe Jake didn’t trust you. Maybe you weren’t as goddamned important to him as you seem to think.”
His words hit me hard. He was right, though. However much I trusted Jake, he clearly didn’t trust me the same. I’d been such a stupid child, thinking a savvy, street-tested man like Jake could take a geek like me seriously. My blood burned with resentment toward Hunter. “Oh, yeah? Well, he left behind the goods on you, didn’t he? What does that say?”
What I saw next made my heart fall heavily into my chest. In Hunter’s face, in the flush of his cheeks and the flinch of his gaze, I saw the same doubts in him as I had in myself. After all, Jake was Hunter’s best friend. And, yet, Hunter had played the same role with Jake as I had: an extra set of hands, a distraction, and a sounding board. Comic relief. Had he, too, tried so hard to gain as much trust as he gave, only to fall short and, despite his riches and success, still and always lost in Jake’s shadow? I peered intently at him, thinking that I could see, in the firm set of his jaw and sad downcast of his eyes, pain and uncertainty. Jake had left something behind that could hurt him, and I wondered, yet again, could such anguish manifest in murder?
I looked away, unable to give a name to the swirl of feelings in my head. “It looks like neither one of us had the monopoly on Jake’s trust, doesn’t it?” I braced my back and turned to Tina, trying to trade emotional disorientation for cool analysis. “Hunter has a point. After sacrificing so much, why would Jake let Chris die?”
“You’ve never been around someone who’s dying a slow death before, have you?”
“No.”
“Well, you don’t want to be. It’s hard, watching the life drain out of someone you love. Watching them shrivel up into something that doesn’t even look like the person you knew. And every day it gets harder. Even for someone like Jake, who didn’t give a shit about my brother’s suffering, it would’ve been hard. After a while, you pray for them to die. You just pray for it.”
Hunter stared at the floor. Was he thinking about his wife and of her long, painful death? I thought back to the video I saw at Miss Livy’s, remembering the genuine affection in Jake’s voice wh
en he talked to the kids. “I’m sorry you went through that,” I said. “But if you think that Jake would just watch someone die, you’re wrong. I know in my heart that he wouldn’t.”
Tina shrugged. “That’s your opinion.”
Hunter sighed. “This is going nowhere. She’s admitted to a motive, and she had opportunity. I’d say we got ourselves a prime suspect.”
Tina leapt to her feet. “I didn’t do anything! You said you believed me!”
“I lied!” he snarled.
I stepped toward him. “Hunter, come on. You saw how surprised she was when she found out that it was Jake who was shot. I know you don’t think she did it.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Maybe not, but I’ll tell you what I suspect.”
“This should be entertaining.”
“I think Chris’s death was a tipping point, something that drove someone over the edge after three years of waiting. Tina, do you know of anyone who might have been so upset over Chris’s death that they might want to kill Jake for revenge?”
She threw her hands up in frustration. “No, I don’t know.”
“Maybe someone in your family?”
“We didn’t have much family left, only Lissa and her husband. I mean, Lissa’s husband … he had … issues with Chris’s lifestyle, too. But, no, neither of them would go that far.”
“Maybe one of Chris’s friends, girlfriends or, um, well, boyfriends?”
She looked at Hunter and then at me. I got the impression that she wanted to say something but wouldn’t in front of him. She shook her head.
I inched close and nudged Hunter. “Why don’t you let us have a few moments alone?”
He scowled.
“Trust me,” I murmured. “She’s got something she wants to say but not in front of you.”
He pulled his cell phone from his suit jacket. “You’ve got ten minutes. I’ll call Voltaire and have him send people to the sanitarium where the kid was kept. We’ll find out what really happened. And I fucking guarantee you that we’ll find that Jake’s no murderer.”
“Come on,” I said to Tina. “Let’s get you packed.”
Tina and I went into the bedroom. A well-worn black leather piece of luggage sat on the bed. I watched her gather toiletries from the bedroom and dump them into the bag.
Could she really have hated Jake enough to kill him? She clearly didn’t have the most stable of temperaments. She’d nearly run off a cliff, almost gotten herself killed by her own panic, and then attacked the man who’d saved her life. But was she clever enough to have lured Jake into a trap? Could she have calmly shot a man from across a city street? Detonate a bomb and kill innocent strangers? And did she kill her lover to keep him quiet? Or was her grief real?
And what, if anything, did this all have to do with Chris and Adalida? I exhaled in exasperation. In a mere forty-eight hours, I’d been shot at, almost blown up, and nearly drowned, and I’d killed a man—I took a deep breath and willed away that sight. Not to mention strong-arming one very powerful man into bankrolling me. But with all of that, I felt like I was still in the alley, scared and helpless, staring down at Jake’s body, wondering what the hell to do next.
Tina went to the closet and pulled an old shoebox off a shelf above the hangers. She sat on the bed, put the box on her lap, and then looked up at me. “This is all I have left of him.”
I sat down next to her. “Of Chris?”
She sniffed. “Yeah,” she said, becoming again the grieving sister.
I fought the urge to rip the box out of her hands. “May I see it?”
“Sure, I guess.”
She handed me the box that had once housed a pair of men’s Nike court shoes, size 11. As nonchalantly as I could, I sorted through the contents. Inside were old pictures: a few of Chris and Tina; one of him and Adalida; and one of an older couple, probably parents from the resemblance. Several locks of hair, tied up in ribbons, littered the box. One bunch of strands, woven together in a tight, neat braid, looked to be Adalida’s color.
Tina reached for the slim braid. “It’s so delicate, isn’t it? When Chris first told me about making hair jewelry, I thought it was gross.”
“But his work is certainly beautiful.” I reached down into the box, fingering the half-a-dozen locks of bound hair. “All of these were from people who meant something to him?”
She held up a mule-brown lock. “This one’s mine. Yuck, huh? That’s why I keep dying it. I thought about going natural again, but stores don’t carry mud brown.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Easy for you to say. Yours is beautiful. Did you get it from your mom?”
“Mom’s makes mine look like a cheap wig. Whose is this?” I picked up a graying specimen.
“That’s my mom’s, before she died.” She grinned and added. “Obviously, before.”
I grinned back, even as a slimy feeling crept up my spine. Truth was, I didn’t like Tina. Yet here I sat, acting as if I cared. To do Jake’s job, I’d have to smile at people I didn’t like, feign sympathy, use them, and possibly even betray them. Did a good cause make it all right?
I fingered a long, red braid intricately tied into a necklace, then put the box down. “Do you know anything about friends Chris met that summer?”
“You mean the guy he shacked up with?”
“It was a guy then, a man?”
She grimaced. “When I say guy, I mean man or woman. I don’t want to talk about it.”
I touched her on the arm and she looked back at me. “Please. I need your help.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “He had a fling. It didn’t last long, and it was over when I moved in with him. He was upset about it, although, honestly, mostly because Adalida was. Whatever that ass in there thinks, Chris loved her. It’s just that he, well, he loved everyone. At least once,” she added sardonically. Then she looked, pleadingly, at me. “He had this knack for making people feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any borders, so he palled around with all types, good and bad. But he never intentionally hurt anyone.”
I took in what she said, mentally comparing it against the guileless, high school boy I’d seen on the video whose mere presence had lit up faces, male and female. So maybe he meant no harm with all his dalliances. But meaning no harm and doing no harm are not the same thing. “Tina, don’t let Hunter get to you. It’s how he was raised. It’s no excuse, but that’s how it is.”
“It’s not that. It’s that … Chris was, well, he was what he was. And I hate to say it, but it did bother me. I didn’t want it to.” Her eyes shone with anguish. “The way we were raised … you don’t do that kind of thing. But he was my baby brother, and I loved him!”
“So concentrate on that.” I felt a growing impatience but fought it off, trying to remember I had to gain her confidence. Taking a breath, I said, “Tina, I need to find this ex-lover.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know who it was; I didn’t want to. I liked Adalida and wanted them to be together. In fact, nobody knows this, but …” She glanced over her shoulder. I met her eyes as she looked back. “They were going to get married after that summer.”
I took a breath. “Married?” Miss Livy’s first instincts were right. And that’s why Adalida was so upset when she left Chicago. She’d gone all the way to the city to be with her fiancé, only to find out that he’d been cheating on her. “But you never knew this other person?”
Tina shrugged. “I found out accidentally when I saw his phone bill. I jumped on him over how big it was, and he let it slip that they were hers. So I knew he hadn’t been alone.”
“Wait a minute! He was with a woman then?”
“I don’t know! He called his lovers ‘she’ for my sake; I called them guys for his.”
I clucked my tongue, frustrated. “I see. Go on.”
“When I found out he’d been shacking up that last time, I lit into him big. Adalida was such a great girl. Makes you
wonder how her father could have been such an asshole.”
I clenched my jaw and said nothing.
Sadness covered Tina’s face. “My brother never meant any harm to anyone. He couldn’t imagine someone wanting to hurt him. So, sometimes he ended up with dangerous people.”
“How did Adalida find out about Chris’s affair?”
“Her father. At first, Adalida wouldn’t even see Chris to let him explain.”
“Well, if I found out my boyfriend had been cheating …” I gave her a look that said Chris had largely brought this on himself.
She met my eyes and nodded reluctantly. “I know, but … Yes, you’re right.”
“And you and Jake never spoke when he moved Chris to Chicago? Didn’t you have to give your permission to get Chris into the hospice?”
“I signed some papers. But I couldn’t stand the sight of him—Jake. It was because of him they did what they did. I couldn’t afford to take care of Chris myself, and he owed Chris!”
“I really believe Jake felt the same way.”
She shifted on the bed, clearly unwilling to cede the point. “Chris and I loved Chicago. And I thought it would be great once I met Tav. He was good to me. We had fun.”
“Is that what sneaking into the alley was about?”
She nodded, almost shyly. “We’d slip in the back door at work, so we could do it on my boss’s couch. The guy was such an ass and a real prude. We were just, you know, messing around.” Her face fell. “But now everything’s ruined.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “I know it’s hard to believe, but it’ll work out.”
“I hope so.” She reached for the shoe box. “But not if that jerk out there is involved.”
“He’s not really that bad.”
“Don’t tell me you like him!”
“Not even! But he is … complicated. And he knows things I don’t. For me, that’s an aphrodisiac.” Tina gave me a “what kind of geek are you?” look. “Sure, he frustrates and confuses me, but he intrigues me, too. He’s a challenge. But, yeah, I think he might be a decent person deep inside. Deep inside. Really, really, deep inside. Possibly at the subatomic level.”
The Last Best Lie Page 23