Angela Lafferty turned and smiled, but Nola could see immediately how tired the smile was, how the corners of her neighbor’s mouth twitched as if it took effort for her to do even this. “Hello, Nola,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. She had stopped fishing for her keys in her purse and seemed like she wanted to talk, but she didn’t say anything more. Her husband must have been giving her even more hell than usual. Perhaps she didn’t want to talk so much as just delay going back inside with him.
Quickly, because it was on her mind, Nola said, “Someone left something at my door yesterday evening and didn’t include their name. I was wondering if you saw anyone around the building around seven-ish, someone you didn’t recognize coming or going?”
Normally, this would have launched Mrs. Lafferty in about a dozen different conversational directions, but now she simply blinked several times as she considered Nola’s question. “You know, I believe there was someone waiting outside the building around that time.”
“Waiting . . . for someone to come in or out so they could get past our high-tech security system?”
Nola was gratified to see a wider smile on her neighbor’s face. The Laffertys’ apartment was right over the building entrance and Mrs. Lafferty frequently reported to Nola just how many people waited to “piggyback” off others to get in. Most of the time it was the residents themselves, who had forgotten their card keys or had their arms full and didn’t feel like fishing them out. “Gary Goodman never once used his card key this week, and I know he hasn’t lost it,” she would say, shaking her head. “I rather doubt he knows how to use the thing.”
Now she nodded and said, “Yes, that’s certainly what it looked like, and sure enough, the Petros went out for their usual Sunday supper right about then.”
Nola felt her heart pumping harder again. She really would have to hit the gym more often and do more cardio if she was going to continue this detective stuff. “Can you describe the person you saw?”
“I only got a glimpse—I was watching the Petros. I think she’s pregnant and hasn’t told him yet. All I know is that it was a woman.”
6
As she had told Lynette, digging into Culver Bryant’s disappearance was not going to be easy despite her connection to the detectives in charge of the case. She hadn’t appreciated just how difficult it would be until now. The files were not accessible, and she could hardly show up at, say, Maureen Bryant’s door asking questions without arousing suspicion. Even if Maureen Bryant or Vincent Kirke or whomever else she talked to accepted her as part of the investigative team, they were unlikely to tell her anything new or useful, and what’s more, Mutt and Jeff and Dalton would almost certainly find out. Bye-bye, tracist career.
There was one person Nola knew she could talk to who might give her, if nothing else, a little background information on Culver Bryant’s business, and there would be no problem if anyone found out. Her father, Steven Lantri, had worked in construction all his life, which in Redfort necessarily meant working for Bryant. If she’d had a different kind of upbringing, she might have felt guilty about not seeing or speaking to her father for nearly three months and then only going to him when she needed something, but the truth was, that was how things worked with them. Her father would not feel miffed. He’d put on a big show of being happy to see her, of course, but then he did that every time he went to the grocery store and got his beer and hot dogs checked by a cashier he recognized, too.
As she made her way across town—the part inhabited by divorced men who weren’t as rich as Vincent Kirke—she wondered for the millionth time how her parents had ever gotten it into their heads that they’d make a suitable couple. A lot of people asked the same questions of their own folks, of course, but that didn’t make the Lantri marriage any more fathomable. What’s more, the Lantris’ incompatibility didn’t stem from the things most people would have thought would cause conflict. Even though Nola’s mother was a librarian, there had been nothing priggish about Emma Lantri’s upbringing, as she had been the sixth of eight children of factory workers; meanwhile, Steven Lantri, a construction worker, was an avid reader. But having to sit at the dinner table every night for years listening to them talk, Nola could not imagine two people less in sync. Her father seldom listened and her mother seldom spoke. Her father antagonized with words and her mother with silence. In conversations, her father was like an actor, taking on some larger-than-life persona or another. Sometimes he was trash-talking foul-mouthed construction guy, other times he was suave and charming ladies’ man, still others he was boyish smartass. Nola’s mother, by contrast, was like someone from outer space.
Today her father was being smart-funny dad, the way he used to act when she was a child and kids from school or the neighborhood came over to the house so they’d all think Nola had the coolest dad. Sometimes this backfired. Once when Nola was nine she bragged about how cool her father was and Karen Vanessi retorted, “Your dad’s so lame.” Another time, slightly older, she mustered the courage to join in with a bunch of girls complaining about their fathers by grumbling that hers always said the most embarrassing things in public. Gretchen Phelps gave her a withering look. “Your father is a saint compared to mine.” Olivia Zablonski chimed in scoldingly, “He’s so nice, Nola. He never hit you in his whole life, I bet.” No, her father had never hit her, or her mother, or done any of the things those girls claimed their fathers did—getting wasted, getting high, stealing, cheating, running off. The divorce, the one thing she could hold against him, was, she believed, in the long run a sensible course of action that benefited them all. She did wonder sometimes how much this belief had contributed to her own inability to have a serious, successful relationship. At those times, she’d remember those girls from her childhood and tell herself to shut up. It was pointless to sit around your whole life blaming your folks.
And this time she hoped she might actually get something useful from this particular parent. She called to say she would be on his side of town; could she stop by? The call was a pointless formality. She knew he’d say “Sure!” even if half the time he’d be out.
This time he was in and making enough dinner for both of them, though it looked an awful lot like breakfast: coffee and eggs. “That’s my dad,” she said, giving him a quick hug as she entered his apartment.
“That’s my Nola!” he said. “How’s my girl?” Without waiting for an answer, he nodded his head toward the kitchen table. “Finished that Dennis Lehane. You can have it back. Good read. Got something else for me?”
She lifted the book she’d brought along. “P.D. James.” Her father went through books crazy fast. She probably should have brought at least a dozen, since she probably wouldn’t see him again for another couple of weeks.
“Great. Omelets ready in a bit. Coffee ready now.”
She followed him into the kitchen and set the murder mystery down on the dining table. Seeing the giant bottle of Tabasco sauce he kept alongside the salt and pepper shakers, she picked it up and set it next to his coffee cup. “I’ll have my coffee black. You’ll have yours red, of course.” Her father would put Tabasco on everything, soup to nuts to breakfast cereal. People always thought she was kidding about the breakfast cereal, but she wasn’t. Steven Lantri liked his shredded wheat spicy.
“Red coffee sounds damn tasty,” he said good-naturedly. “Think of red-eye gravy. And, hey, the Aztecs put chilies in their hot chocolate. Why not?”
“Number one, this is coffee. Number two, you aren’t Aztec.”
“Go back far enough in the family tree, I bet one of the Lantris sired a little Aztec bastard. A Bastec.” He chuckled and set two plates of eggs on the table. “So, what’s new with you, my Aztec princess?”
“Not much,” she said, savoring her first bite of omelet, gooey with cheese. It was one of only two things her father knew how to make—the other was spaghetti Bolognese—but he did both to perfection.
“Work going OK?” Her father knew she did some kind of co
nsulting work for the police, which she explained vaguely as having something to do with her “training” in psychology. That was detailed enough for him.
“Work’s good. Actually, I’m working on something new for the cops. It involves Culver Bryant. You know Bryant, don’t you?”
“Talked to the guy a couple times. Wouldn’t say we’ve become bowling partners since then.”
As casually as she could, Nola continued. “A . . . friend of mine, someone who knows Bryant well, described him as a man who wants to do right by everyone. That seems hard to believe.”
“Scobie,” her father said.
When her mother uttered what seemed like non sequiturs, Nola’s strategy was nod-head-and-ignore, since there was little point in continuing to try to get Emma Lantri out of her own head and into the world. When her father did it, Nola felt more at liberty to act out. “Dad. Complete sentences maybe? Ones that make sense?”
Acting out didn’t always work, of course. “Scobie. Graham Greene, Heart of the Matter. Most depressing book ever written. Goddamned Catholics.”
Nola was also used to her father’s cursing out the Catholics despite the fact that he was one, or at least had been raised one, as she had been up until the year her parents divorced. “I somehow missed reading that one, Dad. Enlighten me?”
“Scobie was a good guy. Heart of gold. Tried to help everyone and ended up screwing everything up. Bryant isn’t a screw-up—you don’t get to be richer than God by screwing up—but your friend has a point about Bryant wanting to do right by people. He’s a lot less of a son of a bitch than most of those rich assholes. Though he did screw up that new housing project.”
Nola looked up. “What do you mean? How’d he screw that up?”
“Wasn’t his fault directly, but someone somewhere screwed up, and he’s the big boss, so it’s his mess in the end. He’d made this big damn deal about how they were going to use top-quality materials and the best contractors and all that. Somewhere along the line, that all got pitched. Those houses are shit.”
“Is this a known thing, or is it something only you and your pals would know?”
“Most people don’t know, because most people don’t pay attention. You can’t hide a whole subdivision. Anybody could go out there and look at those houses, but only ‘me and my pals’ would know from looking at them—and what we’ve heard—that they’re crap. But folks are going to find out eventually, and then golden boy Bryant will be fucked.”
Nola figured her father had it about right. Investors would think they’d been deceived, and people who’d wanted to buy the homes might have second thoughts. More significant, if Bryant had budgeted for high-priced materials and hadn’t ended up following through, where had the extra money gone?
“What do you know about Vincent Kirke?” she asked abruptly.
Her father made a sound like he was spitting. “That SOB? He’d be nothing without Bryant. He’d be working for me. And I’d fire him!” He laughed for nearly a whole minute and then stopped and picked up the paper again.
“Um, why? Why’s he an SOB, Dad?”
He bent down a corner of the paper and peered at her as if trying to remember they’d been having a conversation. “I’ve never met him. That’s why he’s an SOB. He’s nobody from nowhere, but because he hangs with Bryant, he doesn’t bother with the likes of me.”
“Would he . . . do you think he would double-cross Bryant if there was enough money in it?”
“Wouldn’t put it past him.”
This was becoming a very useful visit after all. She decided to push her luck. “What about Mrs. Bryant? You ever met her?”
Her father shrugged. “Saw her once with Bryant. Nice-looking gal.”
That he had so little to say about Culver’s wife struck Nola as being significant in itself. Her father was a man who always had something to say about any given person, male or female. How was it Maureen Bryant had left so little impression on him when he could go on and on at length about her husband and Vincent Kirke? He didn’t know any of the three people particularly well, but lack of formal acquaintance had never stopped him from forming a judgment about someone before. What’s more, Nola considered him a fairly good judge of character and prided herself on having some of that judgment, or at least hoped she’d inherited or learned it from him. Even his questionable choice of companion, Nola’s mother, was not a lapse in this regard. Nola could recall his grinning affectionately at his wife and teasing her, “Earth to Planet Emma!” and then pulling her close and whispering something Nola wasn’t meant to hear. Sometimes her mother smiled. Sometimes the smile even seemed connected to what he was saying. Most times, though, she seemed to be reacting to a private joke of her own—a joke he wasn’t in on. Her husband knew when this happened. After a while he stopped making it happen.
Nola finished her omelet and coffee. She’d finished her information-gathering as well, and once again she experienced one of those moments in which she realized she had almost nothing to say to this person, one of two people who had known her all her life. Neither of her parents had the vaguest idea what her job was like, who her friends were, whom she dated, or even if she dated, and Nola felt no compulsion to change any of that. This happened to a lot of people, she knew, but it still saddened her unexpectedly. Even if they didn’t have personal conversations, couldn’t they once in a while have serious ones?
“Dad, are you afraid of death?”
Not surprisingly, her father answered without hesitation, as if she’d asked his prediction for the Super Bowl. “You know, the older I get, the more tired I get and the more I just want to lie down and not get up again no matter how noisy it gets around me. Nope, death doesn’t scare me. I could use the sleep. Same time, I’m not looking to go down just yet. When I do, though, Nola darlin’, all this is yours.” He gestured to the cheap DIY furniture with a bark of a laugh.
Nola laughed, too. So much for serious. “Thanks for the meal,” she said, getting up.
“Thanks for the book. And the company. You get prettier all the time,” he said, giving her a loud kiss on the forehead the way he used to when she was five.
“You, too, pretty boy.”
“I have to beat ’em off with a tire iron.” He saw her out the door with a wink.
Nola knew her father would go back to his eggs and his book and it would be just like any other night for him, whether his daughter had been around to see him or not. She was well beyond the age of ignorance about the fact that her parents lived large portions of their lives completely unconnected to her, but it did sadden her just a little that here was one more person in Nola’s life who would always remain at a distance. It was starting to seem like everyone she knew fell into that category.
As she pulled out of the parking lot, she thought about Grayson Bryant again. Sometimes she thought it was better to keep people at a distance, but if she really believed that, she wouldn’t have accepted Grayson’s offer.
She had accepted it. And that meant she had another strange meal coming her way tomorrow night.
7
There were times when the mindlessness of her job was depressing as hell. Court transcription required her to shut off her brain entirely and reduce herself to ears and fingers. Whenever people remarked, either sincerely or just to be polite, that she must have some great stories about interesting court cases, she had to admit that she hardly remembered anything most of the time. One day soon, voice recognition software would be sophisticated enough to replace her entirely, and though she’d be jobless at that point with years of irrelevant work experience, she doubted she’d feel terribly bereft. Today, though, the mindlessness was welcome. She didn’t want to have to think, because the only thing on her mind was seeing Grayson that evening.
When evening finally came, they met at Fuji Sushi, a popular restaurant downtown. She had insisted on driving there by herself, a decision he had accepted with a shrug and a rather infuriating smile, as if he found her mistrust delightfully naïve
. She had been instructed not to get a table if she arrived first but rather to wait for him outside, though as she pulled into the parking lot she could see he was already there.
“This is a private dinner, by invitation only,” he said by way of explanation. “And believe it or not, there’s a special door we have to enter around the back.”
“Hope you know the secret handshake,” she said lamely. She felt unaccountably too on edge to make anything resembling a truly witty remark.
He chuckled anyway. “That and the password should get us in, but if not, you look smashing, so dazzle the doorman with a smile.” He took a second approving look at her red silk dress and silver sandals.
She smiled at the compliment, though she hated to recall how much time she’d spent trying to make herself look “smashing” for this—date? What in the world was this, anyway? He had called it an “experiment.” It could have sounded ominous except that it struck her as comical, like they were two teenagers about to try drugs and sex for the first time. And really, what could happen in a packed restaurant that would be so terrible?
She tried not to imagine the possibilities.
There was no secret handshake or password. Grayson merely gave their names to the man at the back door and they were ushered in, up a winding wrought-iron staircase and to a small room that was mostly kitchen. Two other couples were already seated at the bar where they apparently were to sit as well, but Nola didn’t register much about them other than the fact that they were all well-dressed and all wore looks of anxiousness mingled with excitement struggling to be contained under an unsuccessful veneer of blasé. As soon as Nola and Grayson were seated, and without any explanation or fanfare, the dinner began.
Nothing about the preliminaries suggested anything remotely related to Japanese cuisine, so Nola felt even more uncertain of what was to come. There were ordinary cocktails to start, followed by beautifully crafted appetizers made from easily identifiable foodstuffs—perhaps, Nola reflected, on purpose, giving them all a false sense of security before the snakes and spiders and severed fingers appeared. She thought about making some kind of Fear Factor joke but had the distinct feeling it would not go over well with this bunch.
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