Pillow Stalk

by Diane Vallere

  “I called him,” said Andy. “He was here the morning your boyfriend got Pamela. He’s the one who’s going to catch the bastard.”

  My eyes shifted back and forth between Andy and Tex.

  “Can Madison stay? And Andy?” Alice asked tentatively.

  With the slightest of movements, Tex shook his head no.

  “Alice, I have to check on Rocky.” I turned to face Tex. “I’ll be right back.”

  When I returned to the locker room Andy and Alice were sitting side by side on the wooden bench and Tex was facing them, perched on top of a folding metal chair with a misshapen frame. Andy’s arm was still around Alice, comforting her.

  “And that’s where I found the note, Lieutenant.”

  “Ms. Sweet, I think I have everything I need.”

  “I’m taking her out of town for a couple of days,” Andy said. “She needs to get away from here. She needs to be safe.”

  “I think that’s okay,” said Tex.

  Rocky strained against his leash, trying to get closer to his new friend, but I kept him in check. Tex wasn’t reacting the way I thought he’d react and I wondered what was going through his head. Whatever it was, it was masked below the kind of poker face that probably won a lot of hands.

  “You need to reach her, you call me. Here’s my number,” the old man rattled off a phone number that Tex jotted down in his notepad. “Alice, let’s get that breakfast.”

  “I think you’re forgetting something, Andy,” I interjected. “She needs time to change out of her bathing suit and that means the two of you have to go.”

  I waited in the locker room while Alice showered and dressed. Her yellow cotton blouse and matching skirt were more festive than the mood of the morning. She must have been looking forward to that breakfast. I didn’t say anything while she primped but noticed that her hands were shaking as she patted her curls into place.

  “Madison, what did Andy mean when he said he saw your boyfriend here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Alice.”

  “Be careful. Don’t let your guard down. I don’t want to be next but I don’t want you to be next, either.” She hugged me tightly and left.

  The chlorinated water had dried on my skin. I wasn’t in the mood to shower and change at the pool anymore; I wanted to go home. I spun the dial on the padlock that secured my locker and jumped when Tex’s voice sounded behind me.

  “You decent, Night?”

  “What do you want now?” I asked.

  He entered the locker room and swept it with a broad gaze. “Why are you standing there?”

  “I’m trying to unlock my locker. I want to get my stuff and go home.”

  “Which one’s your locker?”

  “The one with my hands on it.”

  “Night, I’m not kidding. Is that yours?” he pointed to the blue metal door.

  “Yes. Watch this and I’ll prove it to you.” I spun the dial to the left and back to the right, hitting the combination on the first attempt, and popped it open. A small corner of torn white paper fluttered down to the floor.

  “Shit.” Tex picked the scrap up and measured it against the note Alice had found on top of her towel.

  “What?” Even from where I sat I could see that the two edges of paper were a perfect fit.

  “Your locker was directly above where the old lady’s bag sat. That note wasn’t meant for her, Night, it was meant for you.”

  “Shit.”

  Tex followed me back to my apartment. I asked him to wait in the parking lot with Rocky while I showered and dressed. It was just a matter of time before he discovered I was watching Hudson’s cat, but for the moment I wanted to keep that to myself. If there was one innocent party in all of this, it was Mortiboy. And without me, the black ball of fur had no one to look after him.

  It looked like there was no way out of Tex’s companionship now, even if I wanted to shake him. And the way things were going, I wasn’t so sure that was still the goal.

  When I emerged from the back of the apartment building it was in crisp blue jeans that were cuffed to mid-calf, black penny loafers, and a red and white gingham checked cotton shirt. I tied a red and white bandana in my hair to keep my short hair off my face.

  Rocky sat on the hood of Tex’s Jeep, swatting at the lieutenant’s hand. Tex scanned me from head to toe and let off a low whistle. “Even when you’re butch you’re sexy.”

  “I’m going to ignore that.”

  “Let’s get out of here. I think I make your neighbors nervous.”

  I glanced across the parking lot to the Mexicans. They were rearranging paint cans in the bed of their truck, not making eye contact. I blew off the opportunity to make a joke at both Tex’s and their expense.

  “Let’s go to the Metro and get some breakfast. Hop in.”

  “Rocky can’t go into a diner, and I don’t feel good about leaving him tied up outside. Hold on,” I said and carried the little dog back into the building. Effie agreed to puppy sit while I went about my day.

  The scenery, grey buildings and green lawns, blurred past my window as Tex drove us to the diner. Silence carried us from his Jeep to the interior of the diner, to a booth between a couple of high school kids and a family of five. Tex shook his head and gestured toward a more secluded booth along the back wall. The waitress dropped a couple of menus and two plastic tumblers of water on our table. The silence remained until she walked away.

  “So Night, I’m only going to ask you this once. Why are you covering for Hudson?”

  I slapped the plastic menu down on the table. “You’re only going to ask me that once? Funny. Because that’s the fifth time you’ve only asked me that once.”

  “If you’d just work with me instead of against me this could all be over.”

  “I tried that. Remember? And look what happened. How about you answer some of my questions instead?”

  “We’ve been over this,” he said in a low voice.

  “I’m not talking about your investigation, which you’re not even supposed to be conducting. Why don’t you tell me about the Halloween party? What you and Sheila Murphy fought about before she ran off and got herself killed?”

  The words popped out of my mouth unedited. Tex’s eyes bore holes into me, but I matched his stare with the same intensity. I would not allow him to manipulate me into feeling guilty for asking about that night, not after the way he’d used me to try to catch Hudson.

  Abruptly, he stood. The plastic tumbler on the table bounced and water sloshed onto the menu. He strode toward the front door, leaving me alone. I wasn’t worried. His code of honor was too great to leave me behind.

  The waitress came back to the table. I ordered two cups of coffee and two blue plate specials. Eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, and potatoes. Enough food to distract an angry cop if he returned to the table. Enough to feed a small dog and cat in my apartment if I ended up taking it to go.

  The food arrived on the table before Tex came back. I waited for half a minute, letting it cool down while I wondered if it would be rude to start. Hunger dictated the answer. I bit into a piece of bacon then followed it with a forkful of scrambled eggs.

  “Damn, Night, you got a hell of an appetite.”

  I turned around and looked up at him. He snatched a triangle of toast from the small ceramic plate, then slid back onto his side of the booth.

  I wasn’t sure if his return required words on my part. He speared a sausage link and bit into it, while I nibbled on a second piece of bacon, pinched between my fingers. We finished three quarters of our food in silence. He seemed to have picked up on my theory of us getting along better when we didn’t talk. When the waitress came by with our check, he snatched it before I had a chance to reach out.

  “What’s my share?”

  “It’s on me.”

  “No, I’ll pay my half. This isn’t a date, Tex.”

  “You think I don’t know this isn’t a date? It stopped being a date the minute you brought up my
ex-girlfriend.” He pulled a couple of bills out of a well-worn leather wallet and tucked them under the sugar shaker. “Besides, when we go on a date, it’s not going to be to a diner and you’re going to wear one of your little cotton numbers.”

  “‘When’?”

  “I don’t know when. Soon.”

  “No, I’m not asking when. I’m questioning your choice of ‘when’ versus ‘if’.”

  “Oh, it’s a when. But there’s a couple of things we have to figure out before I get around to asking. I don’t like having this thing between us. Let’s get out of here. We gotta talk.”

  “Lieutenant, if you think a greasy meal at a diner is going to make me turn against a friend, then you’re mistaken.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you, I was talking about me. It’s time I talked to someone outside of the force about what happened with Sheila that night.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Go to my studio. We can talk there,” I instructed. We were close enough that it was a good idea and Tex knew it.

  He parked the Jeep behind the storefront. I climbed out and a beam of pain shot through my knee when my feet hit the ground. I stopped for a second, closed my eyes, and fought to get the pulsating intervals under control before I continued moving. Tex headed to the building without me. When he reached the back door I stood straight up and followed. Even though he knew about my torn ACL, I fought the pain. It had become a matter of pride to hide my injury from the lieutenant even though we both knew it had happened.

  I unlocked the doors and we went inside and sat down on a long, low turquoise and lime green chenille sofa that was framed in silver chrome. It was nine feet long and I was able to put my leg up on the cushions and face Tex without coming close to touching him. I waited. He wanted to talk and he knew I wanted to listen. It was his responsibility to start.

  “I’ve been over that night so many times I don’t know where to begin. I’m missing something, I know that much. But it doesn’t make sense.”

  He rubbed his thumb and index finger along his forehead just below the front of his hair. He’d taken to wearing the cowboy hat while driving his Jeep and his hand knocked the brim back, like James Dean in a thousand promotional photographs. The only things missing were the reed of straw between his teeth and the devil-may-care attitude.

  “Who knows? You might see what I’m missing.”

  His words surprised me. With that one sentence, he gave me respect. He was no longer a cop looking out for a potential victim, and whether or not I wanted to see it that way, that was the relationship we had. But the way he related to me now, sitting in my studio, thinking back over a night that had set into motion a chain of events that couldn’t have been, still couldn’t be predicted, he was letting me into his thought process, his memories. He was hoping I’d see things more clearly than he did. He was treating me like an equal.

  “I’ll try, but I can’t help if you don’t start.”

  “Okay. We were kids. I was in the academy. She and I’d been dating for a couple of months.”

  “Exclusively?” I asked, instantly regretting the interjection.

  He looked up and focused his eyes on me for a moment. “Yes.”

  I nodded. “Sorry. Keep going.”

  “We went to a costume party at a house by the lake. A couple of friends of hers threw the party and wanted people to come as their favorite movie couple. She wanted to go as Rock Hudson and Doris Day. I guess her mom was an extra in a Doris Day movie once and had a lot of clothes that fit the bill. Sheila ransacked the closet and put together an outfit. All I had to do was put some black stuff in my hair and wear a suit and skinny tie and we were set. I picked her up at her mom’s house but she was in a bad mood when we left. She said she and her mom fought about the costume, about her taking things from her mom’s closet without asking. When we got to the party Sheila went straight for the bar.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt again, but did you know Thelma Johnson? Did they have a good relationship?”

  “I met her a few times but I was a twenty-year old kid. I wasn’t into hanging out with parents. Sheila was a bit of a wild child, so her mom liked the idea of her dating me, you know, since I was in the academy. Thought she was safer that way.”

  I didn’t comment on the elephant in the room, the fact that it was on his watch that she was murdered.

  “So she hit the bottle pretty hard as soon as we got to the party. I tried to tell her to slow down and she got pissed. She told me she didn’t need another parent. She started flirting with the other guys, which made it an awkward scene since everyone there was half of a couple. I didn’t want to stick around and be humiliated but I didn’t want to leave her there in that condition. She wasn’t making good decisions. The last time I saw her we fought on the front porch of the house. She said we were through. She went out back with another guy, someone I’d never met. That’s it. That’s the last time I saw her alive.”

  “You left?”

  “Some of the guys started up a poker game and I stuck around for awhile. It wouldn’t have been a good idea for me to get in a car and drive. Half of me thought it would blow over, like it always did. We had a volatile relationship. Heat. Fire. Passion.” He shrugged. “When you’re young that seems like all you need.” He stared into his hands.

  I didn’t say anything. I watched him press his right thumb into the center of his left hand. He cupped his hand around the thumb, closing in on it. It was like he was trying to make something fit, to find a pressure point that would erase the memories that spilled out of him. The clarity with which he spoke defined how often he’d been over this same memory himself. Just like Hudson. Tex was fighting against a different emotional jail cell. I’d do what I could to help him break free, but again I felt pulled in two directions.

  “Go back to when you drove her to the party. She must have said something about the fight between her and her mom?”

  “They’re women. They fought about clothes.”

  “I resent that.”

  “If you had a daughter who went into your closet and took some clothes for a costume party, how would that make you feel?”

  “Hard to say. I don’t know what it would be like to have to relate to a daughter.”

  We stared at each other, now both aware of the holes in each other’s lives. I broke the silence.

  “I like to think that someone would ask first whether they’re related or not. Just seems polite. I also like to think a fight over borrowed clothes might be a fight over something bigger than borrowed clothes, because that seems a little petty.”

  “Sheila was mad at her mom because of the man she was dating. Sheila’s dad had passed away when she was thirteen. She didn’t have a father figure, and as soon as she could, she sought out male attention. Her mom started dating when Sheila started dating and I don’t think that was a great thing for either one of them.”

  “Did she say anything specific about the fight? She must have.”

  “When she came downstairs, her mom almost passed out. She asked Sheila where she got the outfit. Sheila said it came from her wardrobe. Thelma grabbed her wrist and dragged her into the next room, the one with the green and blue floral wallpaper. I think she didn’t want me to hear what she said.”

  “Did you?”

  “Stupid stuff. Lecturing a child. She said she had something valuable in her wardrobe and she couldn’t take a chance—” Tex’s answer was cut off by his pager buzzing from his hip. He unclipped it and looked at the small display, then glanced at the yellow donut phone on my desk.

  “Use it if you need to. It works,” I offered.

  “I’m not sure I can conduct police business on that phone.”

  “Do what you have to do.”

  He picked up the top half of the circle that made up the donut and dialed the number from his pager.

  “Allen. You paged?” He paused for a moment. “I’m in the neighborhood. Be right there.”

  He put the phone back on t
he cradle and walked out of the room. I wasn’t sure if he expected me to follow or not. A few seconds later he came back to the door.

  “You coming?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Thelma Johnson’s house. There’s been a break-in.”

  Thelma Johnson’s neighbors were aware of the break-in long before Tex and I arrived on the scene. Three cop cars with lights in full swing were parked in front. Two along the sidewalk and one in the driveway. Kids and parents stood in their front lawns at a couple of neighboring houses, watching the action with interest. I had to admit, I was interested, too. Tex’s story was incomplete, but something was nagging at the back of my mind. I just wasn’t sure what it was.

  Tex hopped out of his Jeep and approached the front door where the uniformed officers stood in a group. One of the cops was Officer Nast.

  I hesitated. I didn’t know my place here, arriving in Tex’s car, whether I was a trophy or a decoy. Could be I was neither. The suspicious nature of my thoughts indicated I might want to learn a thing or two about how normal people relate to each other when this was all over.

  “Night! Get over here,” Tex called to me. His invitation, née command, clarified a few things. I walked up to the group of cops.

  “Hi officers,” I said, trying to be friendly. “Nice to see you again.”

  “It’s not a party, Night. Listen,” Tex shoved the cowboy hat back on his head. “When’s the last time you were here?”

  I waited a couple of seconds before answering, not sure if he expected me to lie. Too much was at stake for that.

  “A couple of days ago.”

  “How did you get in?” asked Officer Nast.

  “I found a spare set of keys in the back under the Dracaena tree in the blue pot.”

  “You still have them?” Tex asked.

  “No. I left them here the day I ran out.”

  “So the place has been unlocked for days? Good job,” said Officer Nast. Her attitude toward me had eroded since our first meeting.

  “Listen,” I said, taking a half a step forward and positioning myself directly in front of her. “I thought I was here legitimately, conducting my business. It’s while I was here that I discovered someone was hiding in the attic. I fled because I was instructed to flee by your superior, Lieutenant Allen. If the Dallas Police Department was aware that someone was here, then the Dallas Police Department should have followed up with that and made sure the perpetrator was found. That is not my fault. As far as I can tell, you’re the officer in charge of this investigation, and if you intend to imply that I somehow interrupted the rather sloppy job that you’re conducting, then I’ll be sure to clarify that when I speak to your police chief.”