by Julia Keller
“Stipulated.” She was disappointed, and grunted her good-bye accordingly.
Chapter Fifteen
Bell hadn’t realized how hungry she was until, two hours later, she heard Lee Ann Frickie opening a package of peanut butter crackers in the outer office. The come-hither crackle of tearing cellophane was enough to lure Bell right out of her chair. She looked plaintively at her secretary. Lee Ann instantly capitulated and divvied up the contents.
“This,” said Lee Ann, stacking three round brown crackers in Bell’s palm, “does not constitute a proper lunch, Belfa.”
“Point taken.”
With a grin that combined sheepishness and gratitude, Bell returned to her desk. She had one more meeting and then she could call it a day. She had set it up the previous afternoon, making the call and getting Tommy LeSeur’s voice mail—which was what she’d expected. She preferred it, in this case. She wanted to be clear. It was easier to state your business when you were leaving a message, when there was no chance of being interrupted by the other party.
“This is Belfa Elkins, Raythune County prosecutor,” she’d said. “I’d like you to come by my office tomorrow at four thirty P.M. If you have a problem with that, I’ll be happy to discuss it with your parole officer.” That, she knew, would guarantee his attendance; an extra hassle with a parole officer was not the sort of thing that any ex-con relished.
At 4:37 P.M.—Bell glanced at her watch when Lee Ann called her extension from the outer office—Tommy LeSeur showed up. Bell looked through the half-open doorway. The owner of the bar bearing his name was a big man with a belly gone slack. He wore a long black leather duster and a black cowboy hat set far back on his head, giving him a look of aggressive nonchalance. His facial hair, mostly gray and white, was arranged in a sort of lazy goatee, more abstract scraggle than defined shape.
“Come on in,” Bell said.
LeSeur grunted and moved forward. Behind him, Lee Ann twisted to one side in her desk chair, catching Bell’s eye. Did she want the door open or closed?
With a slight shake of her head, Bell gave the signal: Keep it open. It had nothing to do with her being afraid of Tommy LeSeur; the point was that he shouldn’t get the idea he was that important. A closed-door meeting with a prosecutor was a privilege. He was a bum. Bell wanted him to know that. He wasn’t worthy of a closed-door session. He was just another ex-felon with whom she had to deal. Didn’t even rise to the level of requiring privacy.
“Yeah,” LeSeur said. That was his version of hello. After casing the place with a brief lick of a glance, he emptied himself into the metal chair that faced Bell’s desk at an angle. Immediately he slouched even lower, scooting his butt forward and setting the scruff of his neck against the top of the chairback. He didn’t bother removing his hat. Bell wondered why the hat didn’t fall off, with his head tilted so severely, and she decided to chalk it up to the adhesive properties of sweat.
“You had some trouble out at your place on Saturday night,” she said. “I was there, right at the end. Saw the guy on the floor. Helped out Deputy Sturm.”
He squinted at her, as if trying to recollect her face, then shrugged. No go. She wasn’t the kind of woman he’d remember, anyway. She wasn’t blond, she wasn’t buxom, and she didn’t giggle when he tongued a fingertip and then ran it slowly across the front brim of his hat with insinuating lasciviousness, which was what he did before replying.
“Yeah,” he said. “So?”
“You’re on parole, Mr. LeSeur.”
“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know, lady.”
“Fine line.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what you walk. A fine line. Your parole officer tells me that you’re allowed to run your bar, because it’s the only way you know how to make a living, but you’re required to refrain from any association with other ex-felons or with anyone who has a history of engaging in criminal enterprises.”
“Yeah.” He stuck out his chin, making it easier to scratch. “So.”
“So there was a murder at your place.”
“Yeah.”
“Not a good sign.”
“They caught the guy, lady, okay? Jed Stark just messed with the wrong piece of tail. Pissed off some jealous asshole. Case closed.” LeSeur smacked the handrests with his palms, ready to haul himself up and out of the chair. “That it?”
“No.”
He waited. His hands stayed put.
“Your bar is in Collier County, Mr. LeSeur, which puts it out of my jurisdiction.”
“Yeah.” A pleased gleam in his watery eyes. “Yeah, I was getting ready to point that out. You got no call to be hassling me.”
“But when you were picked up several years ago for possession of narcotics with intent to distribute—that was well before my time here, Mr. LeSeur, but you’d be amazed at how good record-keeping can be these days—the arrest took place in Raythune County. Not Collier. So it turns out that I do have a dog in this fight.”
The gleam faded. “Okay, lady. What do you want from me?”
Bell drew a small photo from the middle of a stack of papers on her desk. She’d brought it in with her that morning. She slid it across the desktop. LeSeur had to sit up and lean forward to see it. One look, then he slouched back in his chair again, unimpressed.
“Who’s that?” he said.
“My sister. Shirley Dolan.”
“You want me to give her a job at the bar or something? That it?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
With two fingers, Bell dragged the snapshot back across the desk and tucked it under a book. He hadn’t touched it. Had he tried to, she would’ve slapped his hand away.
“Next time that woman shows up at your bar,” Bell said, “you’re not going to let her in.”
He looked amused. “I’m not?”
“No.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I say so.”
LeSeur licked his bottom lip. Lip and tongue were an identical shade of gray.
“Lady,” he said, “you ain’t scaring me.”
“Not trying to scare you. Trying to educate you.”
He pondered this. “Look, I wouldn’t know her from Adam, okay? How am I supposed to keep an eye on everybody who goes in and out of my—?”
“No idea,” she said, interrupting him. “That’s your problem. But if I find out that she’s been in your bar again, Mr. LeSeur, I can make a lot of trouble for you. The kind of trouble you don’t want.”
Once again, the pondering look came into his eyes. “I ain’t done nothing,” he said. There was an aggrieved quality to his voice, a practiced one. “I could report you for harassment, calling me in like this. Threatening me.”
“You could.”
They regarded each other levelly across the cluttered expanse of desktop.
“She’s your sister, huh?” LeSeur said.
Bell gave a single nod, dipping her head without breaking eye contact.
“And you think—wait, now, lemme guess,” he said. “Hanging out in my place is gonna turn her bad or something.” The nasally snicker caused his head to jerk. “Like it’s measles and you can catch it.” Now he laughed outright. Thirty-five years of smoking cigarettes and anything else he could find to smoke had turned his laugh into a soupy, clotted bray. “Got news for you, lady. Anybody who comes in my bar finds just what they’re looking for. Nothing more, nothing less. And they go out the same way they come in.”
Except for Jed Stark, Bell wanted to say, but didn’t. Not the time.
“Whatever,” she said. “Just don’t let Shirley Dolan in. Ever.”
He sat up even straighter and let his head swivel around the room: tall leaded window, brown drapes, glass-fronted bookcase. Across the shelves of that bookcase, the solemn march of lawbooks. Row after row of black leather binding. The leather looked as if it had sopped up centuries of serious thought. LeSeur squinted, silently reading the titles through the glass. Or trying t
o, Bell thought. Pretending to. The literacy rate in these parts was depressingly low.
He would capitulate—she knew it, and he knew it, too—but first he had to make her wait. His dignity required this brief delay. For all their macho bravado, for all their swagger, drug dealers—and Tommy LeSeur was a drug dealer first, last, and always, no matter what he called himself, no matter what fairy tale he told his parole officer—were a tender sort, Bell knew. Acutely sensitive to slights and insults. Like third-graders.
“Fine,” he declared. “One question, though.” When Bell didn’t speak, he went on. “What’s sis gonna say about all this? Next time I head her off at the door, I mean?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.”
“She ain’t gonna like it none.”
“Lots of things that I don’t like, either,” Bell said. “But I have to put up with them.” She tried to put some extra flint into her stare, hoping he would take her meaning, realize he’d been insulted. At no point in the conversation had she taken her eyes away from LeSeur’s pitted gray face. Looking away was a sign of weakness, and she knew how important it was not to look weak in front of the Tommy LeSeurs of this world.
Hell. It was important not to look weak in front of anybody, period.
He lifted his shoulders and dropped them again. No telling if he’d caught her drift. “That it? That’s all I gotta do?”
“That’s it.”
His capitulation came with a sneer. “Don’t matter none, anyways,” he said. “I got plenty of business.”
And then it was over, the negotiation that wasn’t a negotiation at all, because in this realm—the realm of daylight, of glass-fronted bookcases—she was in charge. There were other realms, Bell understood, where it would not have gone so smoothly, realms in which Tommy LeSeur would have had the whip hand.
He had a little trouble getting up, on account of how low he’d sunk in the chair while they talked, trying to look cool. She realized, with a smile she didn’t bother to hide, that Tommy LeSeur was middle-aged. He might try to look young and cool, his body draped in long black leather—he took an abrupt step toward the door for the obvious purpose of causing the ridiculous garment to swing out behind him and then fall back dramatically into heavy, ponderous folds—but he was fast becoming an old man, dry and fat and used up, his joints stiffening and cramping if he sat too long. He was ordinary. He was a seedy, small-time hood who’d spent his life preying on other people’s weaknesses, and now here he was, getting weaker himself by the day, his body spreading out, breaking down, right on schedule. His vanity was pathetic. Tommy LeSeur was a show-off. A loser. A joke. And yet—Bell knew this all too well, knew it just as surely as she knew that you must never turn your back on certain species of wild animals, even though they seem to be thoroughly tamed and domesticated—under no circumstances should he ever be underestimated.
* * *
Bell was almost home when her cell rang. The ringtone—it was Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 anthem “I Will Survive”—tipped her off that it was her ex-husband calling.
“Hi, Sam,” she said. Cordial, but just barely. His transgressions since their divorce ranged from mildly annoying to borderline unforgivable. Bell didn’t waste her time or her emotional energy by hating him; instead, she felt a sort of general distaste at the prospect of a conversation with him. Bottom line: He was Carla’s father, and that meant, like it or not, he would always be in Bell’s life.
“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”
This was suspicious. Sam didn’t make casual calls.
“Fine,” Bell said. She had paused at a four-way stop, waited her turn, then surged forward, punching the accelerator with more force than was strictly necessary.
“Okay. Well, I just thought I’d check. Heard from Aunt Thelma again. She knows the Frank family pretty well. Jesus, Belfa. What’s going on back there? Two unsolved homicides, one right after the other? How are you holding up?”
“Did you need something, Sam?”
“Like I said. Just checking in.”
“Okay. You checked in. Has Carla made a start on her packing? Listen, if she doesn’t want to haul a big suitcase on the plane, you can just ship her clothes and anything else she wants to have here. Might be easier.”
“Uh—sure.”
There it was again: something odd in his voice. Bell didn’t care enough to figure out what it was. But a thought occurred to her: Sam was being cordial. God only knew why—but she could take advantage of it. He worked at the fancy end of the legal profession, the end filled with Audis and escargot. It was drastically different from her end—the world of Ford Explorers and peanut butter crackers.
Sam, she realized, might be able to satisfy her curiosity about the business card in Jed Stark’s pocket.
“Hey,” she said. “Ever heard of a New York City law firm called Voorhees? Guy named Sampson J. Voorhees?”
“Sure, I know him. By reputation, I mean. He’s not really a lawyer, though. More like a slimy, bottom-feeding—wait, let’s make that ‘ethically challenged’—fixer.”
“Fixer.”
“Yeah. There are a few outfits like that here in D.C., too. The ‘law firm’ part is pretty much window dressing. They’re muscle. Security. Plus some semi-legal private investigator work.”
“Such as?”
“Such as—well, let’s say you’re a Fortune 500 CEO and you think your wife is bumping uglies with the golf pro at your country club. You want pictures, you want transcripts of wiretaps, you want copies of e-mails—but discreetly. Under the radar. Because what you’re really after is leverage. Blackmail bait. Voorhees and his ilk keep pretty busy, let me tell you.”
“So why isn’t there any contact info on his business card? How does he do business?”
“He doesn’t want your business,” Sam said, and he said the sentence slowly, spacing out the words to give it an exaggeratedly remedial feel, as if she’d asked him a simple math problem that even a kindergartener ought to be able to figure out. “He works strictly on referrals. It’s like the old story about the guy who applies for a job with a Chicago politician. The politician says, ‘Who sent you?’ and the guy says, ‘Nobody.’ And then the politician says, ‘I don’t want nobody that nobody sent.’ Voorhees doesn’t want to be contacted—unless you already know how. If you’re not part of the elite network of deals and favors that those guys live by, he’s not interested. So naturally there’s no information on his business card. But I can probably dig up a number somewhere.”
“Great,” Bell said. She was sitting in her driveway by now, engine off, listening intently. She’d arrived home a few minutes ago but didn’t want to interrupt him.
“Why are you asking?”
“Too complicated to explain. Gotta go, Sam.”
Chapter Sixteen
By high noon on Friday the sun was a pale white blister in an even paler sky. That sun had turned the blacktopped parking lot of the Raythune County Medical Center into a sink of misery; today it was crowded with people, not cars, and in the shimmery heat-haze, the solid black rectangle with the bright yellow stripes seemed tentative, insubstantial, as if the edges might give way at any minute and make an instant river of scalding tarry goo. The hospital itself comprised two stories of topaz-tinted brick with, at one end, a perky, inviting-looking lobby entrance finished off with ornamental grasses, and at the other end, a grimmer, more serious-looking set of double doors with EMERGENCY stenciled in red block letters across the glass. It was ten years old, yet still was one of the newest buildings in the county.
The occupants of the lot looked both afflicted and exhilarated. They seemed to be engaged in a long, slow, inevitable melt, like crayons left on a radiator, but their eyes gleamed with anticipation. There were old women wedged into the plastic lawn chairs that they’d carried in and opened up and locked into position with a violent snap; old men in wraparound sunglasses and baseball caps sitting proudly athwart motorized scooters with American flag decals slapped acr
oss the shiny maroon flanks; small children sitting cross-legged in little red wagons, arguing over who was entitled to the last suck from the juice box; and at the outer rim of the crowd, skinny teenagers in cutoffs and tight T-shirts, pecking at their cells with alternating thumbs, even though the recipients of those texts were standing right beside them; plus an appreciable number of dogs whose pale pink tongues fell out of the sides of their mouths and stuck there, stiff as sticks. The aggressive PA system sent too-loud music thumping out of two tall black amplifiers, along with a constant garnish of static.
Bell had arrived here twenty minutes ago, having hitched a ride from the courthouse with Deputy Harrison in the black Chevy Blazer, one of two that the county owned. The other was assigned to Sheriff Fogelsong. Harrison was a petite woman, barely five feet two, as solid as a bridge abutment—and even less talkative. But she had compensatory skills: She could outrun just about any man in the county. Outshoot him, too.
Moments after parking the Blazer, Harrison nodded to Bell and abruptly departed; she began her patrol along the crowd’s outer edge, looking improbably cool even in her brown polyester uniform and flat-brimmed brown hat and black boots. She tucked her thumbs in her belt as she walked, but unlike her colleague Charlie Mathers, there was no belly fat to dig through in order to reach it. Harrison was lean and sleek. The lump of the black leather holster on her hip was the only rounded part of her.
Bell’s eyes swept the sweltering lot. A few people recognized her and waved; dutifully, she waved back. Faces looked as if they were being glimpsed underwater, the features blurry and distorted by smearing curtains of sweat. Bell felt the heat rising from the blacktop through the soles of her shoes, and she could feel it coming from the other direction as well, pressing on the top of her head. Even the applause was hijacked by the heat; it sounded halfhearted, boxed in, a dry rattle that crossed the packed space each time there was a twitch of activity that might signal commencement of the ceremony.