The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  A scattering of crumbs still littered the surface when we went back to the table to sit, mostly where Sean had been sitting. I brushed the offending specks into one of the napkins. Oh, for one of those nifty crumb sweepers possessed by waiters at fine restaurants everywhere.

  Jamie looked almost prayerful as he sat with his arms extended in front of him. He could be praying. Jamie still went to church. I could feel sadness in him, something pressing hard. It made me anxious.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  He wasn’t. He knew I knew, and the silence that followed was awkward. In the quiet, I could hear Maddie and Sean’s sweet voices floating down from upstairs, where they were getting ready for bed.

  “Maddie looks like Mom,” I said. “She does that thing with her mouth, where it pulls down at the corners as if she’s about to tell you a secret or a joke or …” I rummaged around for the words to capture my mother’s face, but I didn’t need the words. He already knew.

  “You’re the only other person who could see that.”

  “I saw it at dinner,” I said. It had reminded me of her voice. My mother’s voice that used to tease me for being so serious.

  Gina came down the stairs and scoped out the clean kitchen. “You two are awesome. You can wash dishes in my house anytime.”

  “Just don’t let Jamie near the gravy boat,” I said.

  “Gravy boat?” She gave her husband a cunning glance, and I sensed an opportunity.

  “Jamie, you never told her about the gravy boat?”

  “No.” His voice was dull, and he didn’t look as if he wanted to tell her now, but Gina hustled over and settled in with us, pulling one foot up on the chair with her.

  “Tell me,” she said. “I never get to hear the family stories.”

  I leaned in. “It was Christmas night after we’d had this big dinner. Jamie and I were helping Mom wash the dishes,” I said. “How old were you?”

  “Five.”

  “He was five, so I was ten. We’d had people over for this big extravaganza. They were members of my father’s family whom we didn’t really know. Now, my mother was wonderful, but she wasn’t the greatest cook. She could never get organized, and she was really nervous about this dinner. She wanted so much to make a good impression, so she pulled out the one and only gravy boat from her set of good china. It was a wedding gift.”

  “From someone at the dinner,” Jamie said.

  “Is that true?” I hadn’t remembered that.

  “Aunt Bobbie. She was married to the guy who wore the sweater vest and smelled like cigars, so I guess she was technically a cousin, or cousin-in-law, but she wanted us to call her Aunt Bobbie.”

  “Right, right.” I thought back on the evening, trying to see the house in my mind. It was one that we didn’t live in for long, so I had to reach for the details. “So, everyone is lolling around in the living room, gorged and half in the bag from drinking wine all afternoon. Everything is quiet, until Jamie reaches up to put something on the counter and bumps the gravy boat. I was across the kitchen,” I said, “but I saw the whole thing. It teetered on the brink just for a second, before it went over. Everything switched into slow motion. It was like a John Woo film. There should have been doves flying.”

  Gina was delighted. “And long coats flapping.”

  “Exactly. It’s important to appreciate that the floor in that kitchen was tile. It was like a gravy bomb had gone off. There was gravy on the cabinets, on the walls, on my mother’s dress, on my new shoes.” I felt an ancient twinge of regret, remembering how I’d had to throw those gravy-drenched shoes away. “We were finding gravy boat pieces well after Easter dinner, at which, of course, we couldn’t have any gravy, because, well…”

  Gina laid her head against her knee and peeked around it at Jamie. “Someone broke the gravy boat.”

  He shook his head. “Everyone came running in. Dad was yelling and screaming about why was I in there to begin with. I’m standing in the middle of all this mess, crying, thinking … I ruined everything.” He looked down into his coffee cup. He reached up and rubbed his thumb across his eyebrow. “Mommy got down on the floor with me, right down in the gravy, and gave me that look like …” He nodded to me. “Like the one you were talking about on Maddie. She told me to take five deep breaths, and she would tell me a secret.”

  He paused, and I remembered him standing there when he was five years old, trying so hard to stop crying when he felt so bad, and my mother with her hands on his shoulders.

  “Then she whispered so I would have to stop crying to hear. She said she never liked that gravy boat anyway and that my help was worth more to her than a hundred gravy boats.”

  Gina reached over and grabbed hold of his thumb. “I wish I’d known your mom,” she said. “She sounds cool.”

  I stared down at the tablecloth, where a renegade crumb had managed to remain on the loose. “She was,” I said. “Our mom was very cool.”

  Gina kissed Jamie on the forehead. She came around the table and gave me a hug. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Then she went back upstairs to the kids, leaving Jamie and me alone again.

  “Are you sure you’re—”

  “I’m fine.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and checked his watch, which prompted me to check mine. It was only seven forty-five, but it seemed later because it was already dark outside. I was thinking of going out to the car to get my overnight bag, when I heard the muted call of my cell phone. It was in my backpack, which was in the other room at the bottom of the stairs. I got to it before it rolled to voice mail. The spy window said it was from an out-of-area caller.

  “Hello.”

  “What did you tell her?” There was panic in the voice and a solid infusion of cold, hard anger but nothing at all that was familiar.

  “Who is this?”

  “Monica Russeau. What did you tell Angel?”

  The elusive one emerges. Of all the people I might have expected to hear from, she might have been the last. “What do you want, Monica?”

  “What did you tell her, you goddamned bitch? I need to know now.”

  I checked the hallway and the top of the stairs. There was no one around to listen, but I still felt vaguely dirty taking this call in Jamie’s house while his kids were upstairs listening to bedtime stories. I wandered into an unfurnished room, where the only light came from a streetlamp shining through a bay window.

  “I didn’t tell her anything about you, although I guess there is a lot to tell.”

  “Then why is she trying to kill me? Huh? Why is she trying to kill me?” I could just see her pacing wherever she was, going back and forth with her palm to her forehead. That’s how she sounded, anyway.

  “The last I checked, a lot of people were after you. I met some of them personally.”

  “Artie doesn’t want me dead. Besides, he told me that was taken care of.”

  Taken care of by me, thank you very much, and what was she doing talking to the man she’d been trying to blackmail? “That’s nice for Artie, but what about all the other men?”

  “What other men? Did you tell her there were others? Goddamn you. What did I ever do to you? Is that what you told her?”

  “Where are you, Monica?”

  “Quit… will you quit answering my questions with questions and just tell me what she knows so I can decide what to do? She’s coming to kill me. Do you get that, you stupid, fucking, lying bitch?”

  This was getting old fast. When I had needed Monica, she was nowhere to be found. I didn’t much feel like taking her abuse. “Monica, if Angel found out what you were doing, it wasn’t from me. If she is after you, you need to go to the police and get help.”

  “She told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “She sent me a message saying she was going to kill me, and it was because of you.”

  More Angel games, no doubt. “It’s not because of me, and if you have a message like t
hat, print it off, and take it to the police. If you tell me where you are, I’ll send someone over to help you.”

  She was silent for a few seconds. All I could hear was the static, and I thought she might accept my offer. “I hope you die of cancer,” she hissed. Nope. Not accepting. “I hope you get AIDS. I hope someone cuts off your—”

  “It’s for you, Za.” I spun around to find Jamie lurking behind me, cordless phone in hand. “It sounds like a party going on somewhere. Do you want to call her back?”

  I took the cordless from him, held it to my other ear, and listened. He was right. There was some kind of an organized ruckus going on at the other end.

  She must have heard me breathing.

  “Is that you, sugar?” Angel’s voice was like an ice cube dropped in my ear. “Did you hear the news?”

  “Hold on.” I turned to see if Jamie was still there. He wasn’t. I put the cordless under my arm, covering the mouthpiece, and got back to Monica. “Are you still there?”

  “Who is that? Is that her? You’re tracing this call, aren’t you?”

  “Monica, I’ll try to find out what’s going on, but you have to tell me how to get in touch with you.”

  She hung up.

  I dropped the cell on the floor and grabbed the cordless. “What do you want, Angel?”

  “That’s no way to greet a friend. Especially since I’m calling with news. I was taken out of service. But you already knew that. You knew it before it happened, didn’t you?”

  She had called my brother’s home phone, hoping, I was sure, to rattle me. She had. I went to the window and stared out at the street. Even in the dark, the neighborhood looked cozy and peaceful.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It wasn’t too hard to realize who the fox was in my henhouse. But don’t you worry. We’re having a little party to celebrate our reinstatement.”

  “Reinstatement?”

  “We were back before we were even gone. I told you before I’d be ready, didn’t I?”

  She paused for a response, but if what she was saying were true, there weren’t any words that came close to what I was feeling.

  “Are you there? I know you’re there.”

  “What do you want with Monica?”

  “You’ll know soon enough. Was that your brother who answered? I’ll bet he’s a cutie. Cute little brother with a cute little family and a—”

  “Angel, why are you calling me?”

  “I wanted to tell you myself that we have not finished our business just yet. Not by a long shot. Keep a close eye on your e-mail. You’ll be hearing from me in case you haven’t already.”

  “We have nothing left to say to each other.”

  “There are still a few things I can teach you. Here’s a good lesson to always keep in mind. When you poke at a hornet’s nest, you’re not the only one who’s likely to get stung. Buzz, buzz, doll.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Jamie’s office was yet another spacious room in the mansion, this one tucked toward the back of the house. It had warm cherry paneling, abundant overhead lighting, and wall outlets of all varieties. So far, there was only a desk in the middle of the hardwood floor. Temporary, he’d said, until he could find the one he really wanted. The framed picture of his family with Mickey Mouse down in Orlando was one I also had at home. The heavy clay paperweight that looked to be some kind of hedgehog was from Sean. It said so right on the bottom. “To Daddy from Sean.” Only the n was really tiny because he’d run out of space.

  I had checked it all out while my laptop made its scratchy way to the Internet. I was in now and checking the unread messages in my box. It was mostly spam. One had a blank space where the address should have been, which usually meant spam, but it also had a subject heading that could be from only one person.

  all men are pigs

  When I saw that a video file was attached, my mouth went dry. I clicked on the download icon, and my jaw started to quiver, but nothing else happened. My clicker finger, stiff and jerky with adrenaline, would not work right. I concentrated, tried again, and got it started.

  It was a big file, so I had plenty of time to sit and wonder what Angel would send me and why. She had a reason for everything she did, and as the seconds ticked away and the file loaded, I found that I couldn’t stay in my seat. It was taking a long time, but there was no speeding it up. I watched the progress monitor as the file built. Ten percent. Twenty-five. It seemed to stick for a while around forty percent. When it got to ninety-eight percent loaded, I took my seat. When it was all finally there, I scanned for viruses, pulled up the media player, and waited again. I could barely stand all the waiting. But then I started to dread what was coming, and by the time the image hit the screen, I was almost afraid to watch.

  Something bad was coming.

  The picture was high-resolution and in color. There was no doubt about what was on the screen: a man and a woman, naked on a bed, having sex. The woman was on top doing all the work I didn’t have to see her face to know it was Angel. Besides her bleach job and her wide, muscular shoulders, I could have recognized her from the way she devoured her partner.

  Angel was a hooker. This was what she did, which meant she was showing me the man. But all I could see of him were his fingers splayed across her butt. His gold wedding band gleamed against the pale pillows of flesh, and a sick, shaky premonition wormed up through my gut and tried to find a place to break through.

  The two of them ground out the familiar rhythm, complete with a guttural sound track of maximum sexual exertion. He tilted his knees slightly, the better to thrust. She leaned forward and braced her hands, palms down, on either side of him, and they started chugging, faster and faster, muscle on muscle, flesh slapping flesh—as they climbed toward the pinnacle of mutual carnal satisfaction. I couldn’t turn away for any reason, and I couldn’t bear to watch, because I knew it was coming, this thing that was bad.

  They burst together upon the summit of completion with a throaty chorus of groans and cries that could spring only from the thing they were doing. They rolled across the pinnacle and down the other side, losing momentum slowly until they were finally still, the man dearly exhausted, Angel still draped across him like a tablecloth.

  She was the first to move. Rolling back up to a sitting position, she dropped her head back. The way her hair swept across the bare skin of her back reminded me of the backless evening gown she had worn that first night when I had taken her picture in Pittsburgh, when she had turned in my direction, and I had seen in her face that look of a predator’s pure bloodlust.

  On the screen, she reached one of her long arms down to the side of the bed and pulled a pillow from the floor to tuck under her partner’s head. She dismounted, turned full on toward the camera and, with her partner’s face revealed, smiled at me.

  His favorite pie was custard. He liked green apples but not red. He was allergic to cats. The large bone in his right forearm was softly curved from the time he pitched off his skateboard and broke it.

  These were some of the things I knew about my brother. I knew in the way we always know things about our families. Some of them are hardwired into our genes. Some are absorbed over the years of living under the same roof, folding each other’s underwear, and eating from the same ice cream carton. There were enough details to let me believe I knew him, when, in fact, what I knew about him, the things I remembered, made up an infinitesimal slice of whatever it was that made him who he was.

  One of the things that fell squarely on the side of stuff I didn’t know about my brother was how he could be in bed with a prostitute.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Jamie had gone into the den to watch TV, only he’d never turned it on. He sat stiffly on the couch, staring at a blank screen. When he noticed me in the doorway, it must have been in my face, because he knew. His face looked the same as it had the day I’d showed up at his school unexpectedly.

  He had known that day, too.

&nb
sp; “She passed.” That’s what the counselors and teachers had whispered to each other about my mother that day, as if she’d been a car in the next lane or a horse coming up on the backstretch. Passed what? Passed go? Passed counterfeit bills? To this day, I hated that gutless euphemism. She died. She’d been dying for a long time, her breath rattling around in her chest, sounding as if she were trying to breathe underwater. Sometimes lucid, sometimes not, but always dying. Jamie was eight, but he knew that, and he knew there was only one reason I would show up at his school in the middle of the morning, and when he walked into the room and took in the scene, he immediately erupted, crying hard and heavy just from the sheer terror of what I might say. He cried so hard it scared me. The counselor tried to move in, but I shoved her aside and put my arms around him. We sank into a pile on the floor, and it smelled like bananas in that room, because some kid had left one in his desk and the rain outside poured as it often does in Seattle in March, as if it were falling from tipped buckets, and I said it in his ear so they wouldn’t all hear.

  “I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.”

  Bananas and rain and Jamie crying with so much anguish I would have done anything to make the thing that was hurting him stop.

  But we weren’t in a classroom. We were in his house in Westchester, and it seemed to me he knew now, just as he had known then, that his world was about to crash down, and I was the one wielding the ax.

  “I need you to see something.”

  I could barely make myself move, but I turned and went back down to his office. When he showed up, I closed the door. I walked over and clicked the start button, and the show began. Jamie watched, blinking a lot, looking as if he’d awakened from a deep sleep and opened his eyes into the glare of a bright light.

  His face turned ashen. His lips parted just enough to let all the air exit his body. When he tried to grab the mouse, he knocked it off the desk. It swung by its cord until he captured it with both hands and returned it to its pad. By then, his motor control was so far off he couldn’t manipulate the cursor. He tried and tried, but he couldn’t get it, and his fumbling failure was like a key that opened a door inside me. My eyes filled, and I tried to stop the tears with the heels of my hands, but they slipped out anyway and ran down my face. I took the mouse away from him and stopped the video.