Home Free

by Sonnjea Blackwell

  In the truck on the way home, he said, “I like you, Alex. I’ve liked you ever since the first time we did it in the orchard.” He grinned. “Seriously, though, I don’t want to get in the middle of anything, so if there’s something going on between you and Salazar, you need to let me know.”

  Hunh. First someone was going to have to let me know. “We’re friends, I think. I hadn’t seen him for years till the other day. He’s in this mess with my brother, and obviously I think they’re both innocent, but other than that, there’s nothing.”

  Big fat liar.

  When we pulled up to my house, my brother’s motorcycle was gone, but Pauline’s car was still parked on the street. Jack parked in the driveway and helped me lever myself out of the Ford. I had already made up my mind I wasn’t going to invite him in again. I’d asked once, and he had declined. If he wanted to come in, he was going to have to do the asking this time. I may have been desperate, but I sure as hell wasn’t ready to be a charity case. I pulled the key from my purse, but before I could put it in the lock, Jack took it, unlocked the door and opened it. He hesitated.

  “Does the offer still stand?”

  I thought about it, but only for a second. Hell, it was a big damn truck.

  “Absolutely.”

  Jack kissed me on the neck when he left at five the next morning. I stretched and thought I might purr. Sex with Jack was like conversation with Jack -- easy, comfortable and pleasant. Maybe nothing to write home about, but a damn sight better than the shower massage.

  The next time I looked at the clock, it was eight-thirty. Some ideas had percolated to the surface of my brain sometime during the night, and I was eager to check them out. The main thing that was bothering me was Lonnie Chambers. Jimmy C had said the cops were going with the theory that Chambers had stumbled into the arson in progress, and had simply been shot to keep him quiet. But what if it was the other way around? What if somebody wanted Chambers dead and then just set the fire afterwards as a distraction, or to destroy the evidence?

  I threw on a robe and padded into the kitchen and started a pot of decaf coffee, then fixed myself an egg white omelet. I don’t usually do the health food thing, but after the hot dog and pizza yesterday, I thought it prudent to take a cholesterol break. I took my cup and plate into the office and checked my phone for messages. Debbie had returned my call, and there were two hang-ups. I turned on the computer and looked outside while I waited for it to boot up. Pauline’s car was gone. The gray Escort was nowhere in sight. A man in a baseball cap jogged by, looking at my drought-bedraggled landscape. I sat down and checked my email. The Garden Tour people had requested one minor change. I got some offers to buy Viagra over the internet, and something about farm girls. I deleted those, since I knew several farm girls and wasn’t keen to see them in a whole new light. I made the change to the poster before I had a chance to forget and sent the file off. Then I went back to the online white pages. I had to try a couple different searches, but I finally found what I was looking for. I copied the information down on a piece of paper, finished my eggs and went to shower.

  Twenty minutes later, dressed in jeans, a red tank top and red Converse sneakers, my wet hair in a ponytail and wearing no makeup, I was out the door. The cat from hell appeared out of nowhere, twisting its oversized body around and between my ankles. I gave it a shove with my foot, and it purred. Retarded, I thought. I walked around it to the car and had my hand on the door handle when I heard Debbie’s voice behind me.

  “Oh, Alex, is everything okay? I called you back as soon as I got home from work, but I never heard back from you. Are you all right?”

  God, she was worse than my mother when I got home late in high school. Missing curfew isn’t a good idea when your mother is an ER nurse. Or, evidently, when your neighbor has no social life. “I’m fine, Deb. Is that giant black cat one of yours?”

  “Oh, only Boots and Socks are mine. The rest are strays. I just put food out for them so they don’t starve.”

  What did she think cats did before Purina came along? “So the black hellcat isn’t Gloves or Mittens, then?”

  “Boots and Socks. No. It must like you, though. I’ve seen it on your porch a few times. It never went to your house when the other people lived there.”

  “No, it doesn’t like me. It left me a message yesterday. I think it’s threatening me.”

  “A message?”

  “It killed a mouse and left it on my front porch. Who does that? Maybe it’s a mob hit-cat.”

  “Cats do that when they like you. They bring you things to impress you. It could have eaten the mouse, but then you wouldn’t have been impressed.”

  “Impressed? I would have been fucking thrilled if the dumb-ass thing had eaten the Ebola-infected rodent instead of leaving it in a stinking dead heap on my goddamn welcome mat.”

  Debbie looked appalled. I wasn’t sure if it was my language or my lack of respect for the feline-American community or both. I didn’t much care.

  “Ebola?”

  “Plague, whatever.”

  “Well, if a cat decides it’s yours, there’s nothing much you can do about it.”

  “I’m not a cat person,” I growled.

  “Apparently it doesn’t think so,” Debbie answered, angling a nod towards my feet, where Lucifer was again attempting to tangle me until I fell on my ass. I jerked the car door open and jumped in, slamming it shut before the beast could sneak in. I gave Debbie a perfunctory wave and backed out with a lurch. I didn’t feel a sickening thump. Damn.

  I made my way through the inversion layer-induced haze that had settled over the streets already, clicking the knob on the AC one notch higher every quarter mile. Five notches later, the system was on max and I was sitting in front of a broken down bungalow on Cherry Street, around the corner from the DMV. It was a neighborhood that was hostile when I was a kid and hadn’t gotten any better. Yards were hard dirt and, more often than not, surrounded by chain link. Windows were barred. The sun’s ultraviolet rays were extra intense because there were no trees to block their trajectory. The residents were depressed, destitute, drug-addicted or very likely all three. I checked the number on my pad again. Forty-two eleven was more of a shack than a house, the wood siding hanging off in sections, one banister missing from the porch steps, litter in the yard and an off-kilter screen door that looked like it had been slammed one too many times. There was a beat-up Toyota Tercel parked in the driveway, and I guessed the odds of there being indoor plumbing were no better than fifty-fifty. According to the internet, this was Lonnie Chambers’ house.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to say if someone answered the door. “Hello, what did Lonnie do to get himself killed?” seemed a little crass. I figured I’d think of something when I got there. I angled myself out of the Element and locked it with the gizmo. There was a teenage girl sitting on the front porch of the house across the street, rocking a stroller back and forth and watching me impassively. The house was poor but better maintained than the others on the street. The girl had dark skin and wavy black hair, and I guessed she was probably Mexican, although from this distance I couldn’t tell for sure. I hoped she was babysitting, but I knew that was naive. I nodded in her direction and received no response. I made my way up to Lonnie’s front door and knocked.

  A woman answered the door. She looked vaguely familiar. I thought she was probably around my age, although she could easily have been ten years older. She had straggly, colorless hair that might have been washed a week or so ago, the remnants of a black eye and the vacant expression that I’d seen any number of times on Max’s drug addicted brother. Even so, she looked like she had been pretty, back before the drugs and the domestic abuse had started, though it would take more than one makeover shows to get her there again. If she was Lonnie’s wife, I would have to presume she didn’t miss him much.

  “Yeah?” Inside, the shades were drawn, cutting down on the glare and those pesky probable-cause searches.

  I ex
tended my hand. “Hi, my name is Alex. I’m sorry to intrude. I was hoping you could give me some information about Lonnie Chambers.” That sounded reasonable to me.

  She looked at my hand like I was handing her a plate of dogshit, nose wrinkled and mouth a half sneer. “He’s fucking dead.” Slam.

  Hunh. Well, that was certainly information about Lonnie Chambers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the information I needed. I stood there like a doofus, staring at the door for a minute, trying to think of what to do next. I was too embarrassed to knock again. Finally I turned towards my car. I spied the girl across the street still watching me. What the hell, I thought, at least she can’t slam the door in my face.

  I crossed the street and ambled up the walk, trying to seem unthreatening. It wasn’t hard, since the girl had seen me make an ass of myself and appeared to be enjoying my discomfiture. She was watching me, a smirk on her face, and I prepared myself to be humiliated by a teenager. She looked to be about fifteen and had a world-weary countenance that suggested she had seen more in her decade and a half than I had seen in twice that time.

  I smiled. “Hi. I’m Alex. What’s your name?” I didn’t extend my hand this time, since there was evidently something disturbing about it.

  “Alex a dude’s name,” she said, rocking the stroller and meeting my gaze without blinking.

  “It’s short for Alexis. You can call me that, if you’d rather.”

  “Whatever. I’m Angela. That a fucked-up looking car.” She gestured towards the metallic orange Element.

  I’d noticed when I was in college that a lot of my fellow art students tended to like unusual-looking things simply because they were unusual-looking. I guess I fell into that category, because I thought the Element was bitchin’. I’d resisted the art-school compulsion for tattoos and piercings, limiting my rebellious self-expression to weird hair colors and funky shoes and occasionally going without underwear. The Element was like funky shoes. And I wanted it before I realized how much Max hated it. Really.

  “You don’t like it?” I asked Angela. “I think it’s pretty cool.” I didn’t know if cool was a cool word to use to a teenager. It was so hard to keep up. Cool, hot, bad, dope, rad, gnarly, sick, sweet. Once I watched an extreme sports championship on television. I could never figure out from what the pubescent broadcasters were saying if a contestant had just set a new world record or had fucked up royally, so I didn’t know who to root for. I switched to a Steelers game. At least then I knew who to hate.

  “Didn’t say I didn’t like it, just it’s fucked-up is all. What you want with Miz H? Don’t look like you buyin’.”

  “Miz H? She’s not Mrs. Chambers?”

  The girl shook her head. “Nunh-uh. He her old man, but they ain’t married. Her name Henderson. Sherry Henderson.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sonofabitch, that’s why she looked familiar. “You know Lonnie got shot, right?”

  Angela nodded.

  “You know anyone who would want to do that?”

  “Prob’ly plenty a people. Nobody like him much.”

  “Why?”

  She gave me a bored look. “He take his belt to his old lady a lot. Prob’ly he owe people money.”

  “For what, drugs?”

  She shrugged, noncommittal. I couldn’t think what else to ask, so I thanked her and handed her one of my new business cards. It said, “Alex Jordan Designs” and listed my phone number and email address. There was no mailing address because I hadn’t gotten around to getting a post office box, and I didn’t think advertising my home address was a great idea, considering I lived alone.

  “If you think of anything else about Lonnie or Sherry, would you call me? Please?”

  “What you design?”

  “Those cards, stuff like that.”

  “Hunh. That’s cool.”

  I shuffled back to the car, my energy sapped by the heat and the meanness of the street and the ugly thoughts running around in my brain. I beeped the door open, got in and started the engine and the AC, then drove off. I didn’t know where I was headed, but I figured with the way my luck was going so far, I’d get there anyway.

  I found myself at the motorcycle shop. Kevin had a Hog in about a million pieces on the floor, and it looked like a hopeless mess to me. When he saw me, he stood and wiped the grease off his hands with a shop rag, and we went to sit at the grimy plastic table in the lunchroom. If anyone came in, they would ding the little bell for service. Of course, if anyone came in, we’d hear the roar of their pipes a good quarter-mile away, and the little bell was probably superfluous.

  “What’s up?”

  “You remember Sherry Henderson?” I asked.

  He gave me a blank look for a minute, and I could see the wheels turning. “Blond, cheerleader, maybe?”

  “Danny’s girlfriend your senior year.”

  He nodded. “Right. She was hot.”

  I thought of the disaster I’d seen this morning and grimaced. “Well, not anymore. You know if she and Danny ever saw each other since Danny moved back here?”

  “Jeez, Alex, this is what you’re bothering me at work for? Some crazy jealous shit?”

  “She was living with Lonnie Chambers when somebody put that bullet in his head.”

  Kevin let his head sink slowly to the table, then pounded it a couple times. “Holy fucking crap.”

  My sentiments exactly.

  “So what do you think, that Danny was jealous? That makes no fucking sense. Lonnie was a fucking night watchman at a fucking body shop, for crissake. Danny was a fucking professional baseball player.” Kevin tended to swear more when he got upset. Evidently he was a little agitated at the moment. “If he had wanted Sherry back, there’s no fucking doubt he could have had her.”

  I knew that was true. “So you don’t know if they’ve had any contact?”

  “No fucking clue. Sorry.”

  “You said Danny lives in the condominiums on McKinley Street?”

  “Yeah, Vista something.”

  “Thanks.”

  I left the bike shop and drove down Orchard Avenue. There’s a great little Thai restaurant on the corner of Orchard and Grant, and I detoured into their parking lot. There’s no sign or anything, just small white print on the door that says “Super Thai.” The inside is crammed with blue formica tables and plastic benches with fake wood grain, a large television, the order counter and, on the wall over the cash register, a small altar with a picture of someone who I always assumed was the King of Siam. I never thought to ask. I ordered Pad Thai noodles and Kang Panang, a spicy red curry dish with beef, plus steamed Jasmine rice and two Thai iced teas.

  I had to make two trips with the food. I took the drinks out and arranged them in the cup holders with napkins under them so the condensation wouldn’t sweat all over the car. I went back inside, collected my change and my large lunch bag, and headed back out. Just then, a woman stepped out of the nail salon next door, and I plowed into her. She squeaked and held her hands up, waving her crimson fingertips and examining them for damage.

  “Jeez, sorry.”

  She stared at me. “Alex Jordan?”

  Crap. I nodded. Not a hint of recognition. I was clearly missing that part of my brain. Or maybe I really did have a brain tumor, and I had just forgotten about it.

  She began enunciating exceedingly clearly and speaking in the loud voice I reserve for communicating with my nearly deaf, ninety-eight year old great-grandmother. “I’m Rory Blankenship.” It came out, “I’M! RO-RY! BLANK-EN-SHIP!”

  I blinked and nodded, stunned.

  “HOW! ARE! YOU! FEELING?!”

  Worse by the minute, Rory. “Okay?”

  She looked at my enormous feedbag and forgot to enunciate. “I’m surprised the chemo hasn’t taken away your appetite! When my aunt had cancer, she couldn’t eat a thing!”

  Hunh. I’d assumed the rumors, except for the one about me and Murphy, which technically had wandered into the realm of veracity as of last night,
had been put to rest. Apparently, in some circles, I still had not recovered. Rory’s name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place her, so I didn’t know exactly which circles those would be.

  “Well, I love Thai food, and now I can eat as much as I want since I just barf it all up anyway,” I told her.

  She wrinkled her nose, peering at my scalp. I’d put my hair in a ponytail this morning without benefit of the hair dryer, so I knew there was a good chance it had frizzed at the ends and was looking rather baked. “I see the radiation has started making your hair fall out! My aunt has some lovely wigs, if you’d like to borrow one! I know she wouldn’t mind!”

  “This is a wig,” I said.

  Rory’s turn to blink. “Oh, I see, well of course, so it is! Very nice! Now, if you need any help with your boys, you just be sure and give me a call! I’m in the book!” She had evidently decided I was delusional and possibly a danger, because she began backing away from me, furtively looking over her shoulder in an attempt to locate her car. She beeped the alarm doo-dad and looked to see where the sound came from, relief flooding her face.

  “Thanks, Rory, I may just take you up on that.” I knew she probably meant my mythical children, but I thought Kevin and Jack would appreciate a nice, home-cooked meal. They sure as hell weren’t getting any from me. “By the way, I should warn you, since I see you were at the nail salon.”

  “Warn me?”

  “Yeah, the doctors think my brain tumor was a result of exposure to chemicals in acrylic nails and nail enamel.”

  The blood drained from her face, and I felt a little bit guilty. For all I knew, we were friends.

  “Don’t worry,” I hurried on. “I’m sure it was just a freak thing, I was predisposed to it or whatever. But, you know, better safe than sorry.” I turned and got in the Element, leaving her standing in the parking lot, staring at her fingernails in anguish.

  I merged with the flow of traffic, convinced I was going to hell and worried that God would give me a nail-polish-induced brain tumor as punishment. I dialed Pauline.