Fire and Rain

by Katy Munger

  I wondered what those large expenses could be. It was a modest house and clearly, mega-furniture aside, they were not materialistic.

  Mr. Tinajero answered my unspoken question. “We have a son with special needs,” he added stiffly. “It became impossible to meet his needs at home as he grew older. He’s been living at special schools since he turned sixteen. Roxy and Candy are the only way we can afford the fees.”

  That explained a lot of things, except for the fact that Roxy and Candy actually had hearts. Candy, maybe, but to hear that Roxy was a generous contributor to her brother’s well-being took me by surprise.

  “Isn’t he a handsome boy?” Mrs. Tinajero hopped down and took a photo from a side table cluttered with framed family images and handed it to me. Now that was one striking family portrait: all the men were very tall; all the women were very short. Everyone looked pretty much like they did now, which told me the portrait was fairly recent. The Tinajero boy was nearly as tall as his father, but he stared at the camera with a wholly uninterested expression, as if smiling had not occurred to him.

  “His name is Robert, Jr. but we call him Robbie,” Mrs. Tinajero explained. “Isn’t he handsome? He looks just like his father.”

  I did not know how to broach the subject of his special needs. Instead, I asked, “Does Robbie stay in contact with his sisters?”

  Mr. Tinajero was no slouch. He knew at once what I was getting at. “They visit him regularly. His facility is near Asheville. But Robbie is not capable of sustaining a correspondence. Certainly not one along the lines of what you have described to us. He could not have sent those threatening letters.”

  Mrs. Tinajero looked offended. “Now, dear, I am sure she never thought our Robbie would ever do such a thing.”

  “I have to cover all the bases,” I explained gently. “And that includes looking at family. Which is why I need to ask you some questions about Roxy and Candy’s past. The language used in the letters, the kinds of threats— it’s very personal. I’m not a psychologist, but it seems to me the threats are coming from someone who might know them quite well. Someone very emotionally invested in their lives.”

  The Tinajeros exchanged a glance I could not read. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Mrs. Tinajero insisted. “Honestly. I was just... alarmed.”

  I let it go, but I did not hold back on more questions. I asked about old boyfriends, church members who might condemn the girls for their dancing, former neighbors, teachers, rejected suitors, everything I could think of. I went over just about every era in their lives and, by the time I was done, I had learned that, for a pair of little people raised in rural North Carolina, Candy and Roxy had been given an upbringing that was pretty damn normal. They had not exactly been cheerleaders, but they had attended public schools, gone to church with their parents, joined a youth group at that church, volunteered to help the elderly, pulled down okay grades, and never been arrested. At least not that their parents knew of.

  Neither girl had dated anyone seriously until they left home. Much to their mother’s distress, they had then drifted toward men from the fringes of society.

  “Because those kinds of people accept them for who they are,” Mr. Tinajero explained. I suspected it was more for his wife’s benefit than mine. His tone told me he had his doubts about why his daughters were so popular. “Yes, the men they date look a little rough around the edges. But they see Roxanne and Candace for who they are, not what they are.”

  “Well, you would say that, dear,” Mrs. Tinajero interjected. They exchanged another secret glance. What was up with these two?

  “Am I missing something?” I asked loudly.

  Mr. Tinajero looked startled. “Lavonia is referring to my work counseling drug addicts. It requires me to come into contact with unsavory people sometimes. My wife may blame me for putting the girls in contact with unsuitable suitors.”

  Mrs. Tinajero opened her mouth in protest, then clamped it shut, letting her pious silence speak for her.

  I did not state the obvious: that it was the topless dancing that brought the girls in touch with “unsuitable suitors.” Instead I asked, “When do they see your clients? Do you meet with them here?”

  “Oh, no. I work at a recovery facility down the road a bit. I just meant that might be a connection.”

  It seemed a tenuous connection, but I let it go. “Any problems in the past with boyfriends?” I asked.

  The Tinajeros looked at me expressionless, shaking their heads.

  “I did not approve of the smoking and drinking, of course,” Mrs. Tinajero said in a faint voice as she fondled her gold cross. “The girls were not raised that way.”

  No, they were raised to rip their clothes off and grab fistfuls of cash from drunken yahoos anxious to ogle their tits. But this was getting me nowhere. Like so many parents, the Tinajeros lived in a different world from their offspring and were unlikely to be much help.

  “Okay, thanks,” I said as I rose to go. “I’ll let you know if we find out anything. In the meantime, please know that Candy and Roxy are in good hands.”

  “Will you give them our love?” their mother asked, clutching the gold cross at her throat again. I had noticed she grabbed that cross every time she spoke of her girls and I wondered just how much she really accepted their exotic dancing. Talk about a bargain from hell. To provide for one child, you had to risk the mortal souls of two others? They must really love their son. Or, they had found an unimpeachable way to justify an awkward moral situation.

  “Thank you for coming,” Mr. Tinajero said with the same formality that had characterized his demeanor since I entered his home. “I will certainly call you if we think of anything else.” He tucked my card into his shirt pocket then unexpectedly beamed at me. There was something about that grin that intrigued me, some innate playfulness that hinted at long forgotten wild times. I tried to imagine him with long hair, his face relaxed and his mood rakish, but I failed. It was just too hard. I could not imagine this stiff Poindexter in black glasses and polyester high waters who was standing in front of me ever being carefree.

  They walked me to the door and waved a goodbye duet, two utterly respectable people, one tall, one very short, holding down the fort of a modest prefab home in the middle of barren Eastern North Carolina fields. Benign. Respectable. United.

  Too respectable, maybe? Atoning for something?

  It was hard to say.

  ●

  I was sitting in the parking lot of the Bojangles down the road, still wondering just how long the Tinajeros had been living their good Christian life, when my cell phone rang. The moment I saw it was Bobby D., I knew it had to be trouble. My stomach sank and I put down the chicken biscuit I was eating. Bobby never called unless it was an emergency.

  “Candy Tinajero is missing,” Bobby barked into the phone. “Looks like the threats were real. You need to get over here now. I’m at the club. Her dressing room is trashed and her sister just arrived. It doesn’t look good. Candy said she was coming in to work on costumes before the show tonight, but there’s no sign of her anywhere. Her tote bag and keys are on the counter in the dressing room, which, I’m telling you, someone tore apart good.”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Oh, yes. And they’re calling her parents now. But there’s more.”

  The way he said it made me hesitate. “What else is going on?” I asked.

  “It’s bad, Casey. It’s real bad. You need to get down here now. Your buddy Bill Butler is here and he’s not too happy. We need you. Right now.”

  Bill? Bill worked Homicide.

  “Who is it?” I asked. He told me. My heart sank.

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” I promised.

  When it had to, my old Porsche could fly.

  Chapter Three

  Rats was dead. Dear, sweet, loyal, sleazy Rats was dead. His meager dream of a Pink Pussycat empire was over.

  I stared down at his body, curled in on itself, h
is hands clutching his stomach, trying to stem the bleeding from the gunshot wound that had killed him. He was lying in a pool of blood in the hallway, his eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling above. He seemed so small in death. His skin was grey and his eyes were frozen open in pain. Those eyes. I could not look away.

  “Is that him?” Bill Butler asked me. His voice was soft. He’d put his hand on the small of my back to steady me after letting me into the club. I guess he was used to the dead, at least more than I was.

  “Yes,” I said, staring at the body. “That’s Sammy Templeton. He was my friend.” My voice cracked and I looked away. I've seen a lot of crime scenes, but only a few that involved people I knew, much less friends. Rats looked so insignificant and helpless in death. That got to me. I clamped my lips together and tried to hold back my tears. The hallway started to move and I had to steady myself against a wall to keep from going down. Bill put a hand on each of my shoulders and I took a deep breath. Poor Rats. There was a lot he had hidden from the world and only confided in those of us who understood, those of us who’d had similar struggles. He had come from nothing, had spent his childhood watching his father struggle against addiction and his mother fight the poverty it brought with it. Rats had dropped out of school in tenth grade so he could go to work and keep his mother from having to depend on his abusive, cocaine-dealing father. Yet, despite the odds, Rats had never stopped working toward something better for himself and his family. And, eventually, he’d done it. He’d given his mother a new life, and the free time to enjoy it, and he’d done well for himself. He’d brought honor to the sleazy world he lived in and he had worked so hard to get there.

  Who had taken it all away from him?

  “This is ugly,” Bill said as a team of crime scene techs swarmed about us. “This man bled to death in extreme agony.” He glanced at me, anger rising in his voice. “I’ve seen a lot of murder scenes, but this man’s suffering is deliberate. The gunshots that killed him were planned. He couldn’t call for help because someone shot him in the throat and then in the gut to make his bleeding out as slow and painful as possible. What the hell do you know about it? I got your earlier call and something tells me this is not a coincidence. I don’t want you holding back on me this time. I mean it.”

  “I tried to tell you,” I said, backing away, suddenly afraid I had not been invited in as a professional guest, as I’d thought, but maybe even as a suspect. “I called you about the threats to the Tinajero sisters. You never called me back.”

  “I’ve been up all night. A pair of peckerwoods shot each other down on Saunders Street and took out a pedestrian in the process. But this?” Bill shook his head. “This pisses me off. Where the hell is the other sister? The one who didn’t get grabbed?”

  “Out back with Bobby D.,” I said. “I passed them on the way in. Her name is Roxy. She’s pretty broken up, so you might want to cut her some slack. She wasn’t even here when it happened. She was in her hotel room. Her sister is missing, you know.”

  Bill glared at me some more. “I know. But that’s not my case. You will have the pleasure of working with the state boys on that one. But this murder? This is my case.” He smiled deliberately and his teeth seemed as ominous as a shark’s.

  “They’re the same case,” I said hesitantly. “I know they are. What do you want me to do? Just tell me what to do.”

  “I want every threatening letter they received. Today.”

  “Done. What else do you want me to do?”

  The techs were starting to stare at us. Perhaps it was time to take it private.

  “I want to talk to the sister,” Bill said grimly. “But she’s refusing to talk to me. Set it up.”

  I promised to try.

  ●

  Roxy Tinajero was huddled in Bobby D.’s car, unwilling to even go back inside the club where Rats lay dead.

  Bobby D. had been eating a hoagie in the front seat as I approached, but he silently decamped when he saw me coming, leaving a trail of shredded lettuce behind him. He knew how much Rats’ death had upset me and he also knew what I got like when I was really upset. He wanted to be out of the line of fire.

  “You’ve got to talk to the detective,” I explained as I climbed into the back seat with Roxy. “You don’t have a choice.”

  “What about my act?” Roxy asked. “I have to think up something solo now.”

  I knew she was on auto-pilot and not as callous as her comment made her sound. People say weird things when they’re in shock. But her self-absorption still angered me.

  “Forget the act,” I said loudly. “The club is not opening up tonight, got it? Your sister is missing. Rats is dead. And he was my friend. Got it? And as much as you may want to find your sister, I want to find out who killed Rats more.” My voice broke and I fought back tears.

  Roxy had no such control. She burst into tears. Tough-as-nails Roxy burst into huge, wailing sobs that filled the interior of Bobby’s Cadillac.

  I didn’t know what to say or do. I’m not much good at comforting people. My forte is pissing them off. But right now, I was pissed off royally myself. Rats was dead. Who was this woman laying claim to tears over her sister, a sister who might still be alive and could even have had something to do the death of my friend? I was the one who had the right to be upset.

  “She doesn’t deserve this,” Roxy choked out through her sobs. “Candy is really sweet. She’s the good one. They should have taken me.”

  So she had some self-awareness after all. I imagined someone trying to kidnap Roxy. “I guess they figured she’d be a lot less trouble than you,” I said unkindly.

  “It’s all my fault,” Roxy sobbed.

  No, it wasn’t. It was probably my fault for not taking the threats seriously enough, for being so slack that I was willing to take their money and run around half-assedly investigating without arranging for their safety first. But I was never one to sit around feeling sorry for myself and I didn’t have the patience to go through the whole “it’s not your fault” routine. It’s not that I lack empathy. It’s just I am way more focused on actually getting shit done, especially when I was needed to make things right. I had not taken the threats against the Tinajero sisters seriously enough. I owed it to them both to get Candy back intact and I had no time to waste. More than that, if I found out who had taken Candy, I was pretty sure I’d have whoever had killed Rats, too.

  I fumbled around for something that would help Roxy stem the saltwater tide. I had no handkerchief, because who the hell under the age of ninety-five carries one these days? I found nothing on the seat to help me. I finally climbed into the front and opened the glove compartment in desperation. It was stuffed with lady’s underwear.

  Seriously? Apparently, Bobby D. kept his love souvenirs in his car. I sorted through the collection and recognized at least four decades worth of different lingerie styles, from one enormous pair that made granny panties look downright racy in comparison all the way to a thong big enough to fit Rush Limbaugh.

  I thought I knew what was going on: these were relics of a bygone era, when he’d actually fit into the back seat of his land boat, well before he’d landed the sweet but rotund rich girlfriend he now had. His girlfriend Fanny never rode with him. She always picked him up in her chauffeured town car. They practiced a ritualistic courtship consisting of dinners out and jazz concerts and who knows what afterward. This was the safest place for his collection of past conquests to be stored. Fanny would never find his hoard of trophy panties here.

  Me? I was not so lucky. I’d found the motherlode.

  I pawed through a pile of black and red silk, finally locating a pair of white cotton bloomers. They looked an awful lot like a handkerchief. Did I dare?

  Naw. Even I have my standards.

  I put them back in the glove compartment and clicked it shut. “Look,” I said loudly. “You’ll just have to put a cork in it.”

  That tough Tinajero cookie stopped on a dime.

  “Why?” she asked
in a trembling voice.

  “Because we need to find your sister and you need to help me out. The cops will want to talk to you very, very soon. You need to talk to me first.”

  “Why?” she asked again.

  “Because this whole mess is my fault, not yours. I should have taken the letters more seriously. I should have done a lot of things differently.”

  Roxy stared at me, possibly even with respect. “What do you need to know?”

  “What’s the story on your sister’s, um, close personal friends?”

  “She doesn’t have any,” Roxy offered, getting right to the point.

  “What?” I asked. “None?”

  “She has trouble finding someone who doesn’t see her as a freak. So she doesn’t really seem to get involved with anyone. My parents think we both date bikers, but Candy only lets them think that to take some pressure off of me. The truth is she never goes out with anyone. She's afraid people just want to be with her because they want to prove how accepting they are or something. Or for the freak effect. She feels different all the time around normal-sized people. She can’t handle it like I can.”

  I sighed. We humans are a judgmental lot, especially when it comes to ourselves. We go through life feeling we are too fat, too short, too tall, too smart, too stupid, too poor, too weak, too old, too something. It was contagious. And if so-called normal-looking people felt that way, I couldn't imagine how bad it must be for Candy and Roxy. No wonder Roxy was as touchy and unpredictable as a tiger cub.

  “She doesn’t have any friends?” I asked skeptically.

  Roxy shrugged. “She only has one friend I know of. A girl she went to high school with. Or at least they were friends back then, but the girl turned out to be a lesbian or something and moved away from our town. Can’t say I blame her. You can imagine how that went over with the church crowd.”