His Last Wife

by Grace Octavia

  Tears came to Kerry’s eyes and she tried to look off, ashamed at how desperate she was sounding.

  “I’m trying. I really am. I just don’t know. You know?” Kerry cried, crumbling under the pressure of her own questions of mental strength and clarity.

  Val thought to reach across the table to grab Kerry’s hand to comfort her, but she didn’t. She just watched her crumbling. This was the woman who’d once laughed at Val. A woman who, no matter what she did or how she did it, would still be more respected than Val. In those seconds, watching those tears come down Kerry’s cheeks, Val’s friendly focus was clouded with something that tasted like revenge at the back of her tongue.

  “I need more money,” she said suddenly and thus getting to the point of her visit.

  Kerry stopped consoling herself to lift her head and repeat, “Money? For what?”

  “The case.”

  “But Lebowski’s been paid. He’s not expecting more money until next month.”

  “I’m thinking of getting a detective,” Val explained.

  “Lebowski has his own detectives on it. Right?” Kerry pointed out.

  “You’re the one who questioned if he’s working hard enough.”

  “And you’re the one who said everything was fine. You said you trusted him.”

  “Fine,” Val said flatly. “If you don’t want to do it, we don’t have to.”

  Kerry wiped her cheeks to remove any traces of tears before the guards came to take her back to her cell.

  “How much?” she asked, frustrated. “How much do you need?”

  “Just ten thousand now,” Val offered, giving the minimum amount she’d promised to pony up for Coreen when she’d spoken to her again in an angry telephone exchange following the Buckhead Diner meeting. “That’ll be enough to get us started. We’ll talk about more later.”

  Soon the guards came to get Kerry and after a quick and detached embrace, Val was left sitting in the room, alone. As she reached for her purse, she spread her prospects before her like a deck of playing cards. Weighing options. Predicting scenarios. While she was feeling a little twinge of guilt about what she was doing, she reminded herself that the promise she was keeping with Kerry was pleasure. And then there was business.

  When Val walked out of the jail, her phone was out of her purse and pressed against her ear.

  “Coreen. Let’s meet. I have the money,” she said after a nondescript voice informed her that the person she was trying to reach wasn’t available and instructed her to leave a message on the voice mail.

  She moved the phone from her ear and exhaled before putting it back into her purse. She kept telling herself that these were the kinds of decisions she had to make. The kinds of things she had to do. Val had to look out for Val.

  When she stepped off the sidewalk at the head of the parking lot to walk toward her car, every street-smart sense Val had told her someone was watching her. She looked back over both shoulders and then just stopped walking altogether to survey her surroundings. There was nothing out of place or out of the ordinary: A mother walking toward the jail with a baby in a stroller. A bus loading passengers at the back of the parking lot. People getting in and out of cars. Val finally told herself it was nothing, but as soon as she took a new step a car sped to the front of the lot where she was and stopped behind her. It was one of those black Chargers police officers had started driving in the city years ago.

  Val got angry quickly and was about to slap the hood of the car to let the officer know he’d almost run her over. But then the window came down and Leaf, the agent who’d worked undercover with Jamison, poked his head out.

  “Leaf?”

  “Get in the car. Get in right now,” Leaf said.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been calling you.”

  “Just get in the car,” Leaf ordered then, rushing and looking over his shoulders.

  Val was never one to be rushed or to ignore her own suspicion. Seeing the worry in Leaf’s eyes, she pulled her purse in closer to her body and considered what he might be searching for over his shoulders.

  “Trust me,” Leaf offered evenly, trying to steady the nervousness in his voice. “Just get in the car.”

  “Fuck,” Val cursed, rushing to the passenger-side door.

  When she got in, Leaf pressed his foot to the gas pedal with such force, Val looked out the back window to see if someone was chasing him.

  “What are you doing? Where are we going?” Val asked as the car raced out of the parking lot and into traffic.

  “Nowhere. I’m just trying to make sure no one’s tailing me.” Leaf effortlessly whipped the Charger between lanes of traffic.

  “Why would anyone be tailing you?” Sitting upright and facing Leaf, Val ignored the blare of the signal in the car instructing her to put her seat belt on. The collar of his business shirt was up and open and the sides of an undone tie flanked his shoulders. His hair was wet with what was obviously sweat, as Val could see droplets trickling down the back of his right ear.

  Leaf ignored Val’s questioning and zipped through lanes until he sped right through a red light at a busy intersection, where other drivers honked their horns in protest of the risky move.

  “See anyone?” Leaf asked.

  “No! No!” Val looked out the window, though she wasn’t really sure what she was looking for. “No!”

  Leaf drove a mile at top speed and turned onto a one-lane, cobblestone side street.

  “Look, I know this cops-and-robbers shit turns on some of the girls you date, but it’s not for me,” Val joked as the car slowed. “Besides, I thought you were the cops, Leaf. Are we looking for the robbers?” Val added, looking at Leaf who was still searching over his shoulder.

  “I need to tell you something. And I need to know that what I’m saying will stay between us.” Leaf pulled into a space in front of a closed-down shoe store.

  “What’s it about? Jamison?”

  Leaf looked at Val and nodded. She’d changed so much since he’d met her when he started working undercover as Jamison’s assistant, just before Jamison married Val. Then, she was all fake nails and fake hair. Had an unapologetic bitterness about her and her ways that made him think she’d be nothing but trouble for Jamison. He was right. She was trouble. But she’d tried so hard not to be. He watched. She really did try. But she wasn’t the kind of person who could be successful at escaping drama. All the cases he’d worked in all his years at the Bureau, he knew her type; he knew her well. As such, Leaf had preferred not to bring his news to Val. But with Kerry, his old ally, behind bars, he didn’t have many other ears willing to listen and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could go poking his head around in places and files where it shouldn’t be without getting caught . . . or worse.

  “Of course, you can tell me. Come on. You know where I’m from. You know how I get down. I won’t—”

  “Just promise me. Just promise me you’ll at least keep things secret until the time is right to make a move.”

  In Leaf’s panicked words, Val discovered the depth of the information he was prepared to share, and so she looked out the window again for an anonymous foe.

  “I promise,” she said soberly.

  “Kerry’s being framed.”

  Halfway through a plate of pepper ribs at Daddy O’s with Delgado the other day, Leaf had heard himself “talking.” Leaf realized he was giving information to someone who wanted him to expose, to reveal said information—in the Bureau, they called that “talking.” In the Academy, he learned that there were three ways to get someone to talk: force, interview, talk. His lunch date had employed the latter tactic; Delgado was talking to Leaf to get Leaf to talk. But why? For what?

  Leaf noticed the predicament when Delgado asked if he’d heard anything from Kerry. If she was making friends in jail. Talking to anyone about what happened. How she’d killed Jamison. These questions struck him, because while no one would suspect it, the other agents often indulged each other in the ongoings of
each other’s cases, almost as if they were soap opera narratives. However, Delgado seldom engaged. In fact, as Leaf spoke, he considered that he couldn’t ever remember Delgado chatting him up about one of his cases. He was always talking about his family or some new BBQ joint, his high blood pressure, and his many exploits cheating on his wife. He also noted that Delgado was just insisting that Kerry killed Jamison. No agent in the Bureau could or would look at the public information out about the case and make such a finite judgment call. That meant Delgado was on the inside and likely sharing and trying to push an idea those on the inside wanted those on the outside to believe: Kerry was guilty.

  Leaf didn’t bother telling Val about all of this. Another thing civilians wouldn’t ever suspect about agents was how often these kinds of internal infractions occurred. An agent’s loyalty was to the department and the department alone. Not his comrades. Not his government. Not his country. Not his president. His mother, father, wife, son, or daughter. The department was where his truth began and ended and he could turn on any of the people beneath it and in the name of it at any time. Delgado getting him to talk was hardly a secret to share. It was the job.

  The secret Leaf did tell Val was what he discovered when he decided Delgado’s digging would require his own.

  “The FBI had been watching Kerry way before we started our case on Jamison. Had files on her, taps on her phones, video. Some surveillance even included my initial meetings with her,” Leaf said, informing Val of what his contact had discovered when he paid him to hack into Delgado’s computer, break into his office, and search his files. “I didn’t know we were being taped. I didn’t know there was a separate investigation going on.”

  “An investigation? About Kerry? You have to be kidding me,” Val said, covering her mouth in surprise. “What’s in the file? Pictures of her having tea at Mary Mac’s?”

  “It started with her mother. She hired a hit man.”

  Val had lowered her hand, but there it was back up at her mouth again in surprise. “What?”

  “Thirjane Jackson had contacted an undercover agent to have him kill Jamison. The Bureau has evidence to back this up and they were about to arrest her, but just before she was about to confirm a price and a date and time for the services to take place—the confirmation of intent we needed to make an arrest—she pulled out. Just like that. Stopped answering the agent’s calls,” Leaf explained as he mentally reviewed each of the copied files he’d been forwarded. “The agents thought they’d lost her. That she wasn’t going to go through with it. But they kept up surveillance. And then weeks later, she hooked up with another guy.” Leaf turned to Val. “And he didn’t work for us. He isn’t an agent. She hired him.”

  “She had Jamison killed?” Val felt like she’d been dragged down a really long and dark tunnel and then suddenly thrust into daylight. On many drunken nights, Jamison had told her about how much Thirjane hated him. That she was the one who vowed his marriage to her daughter would never last. That she’d been the one to whisper in his ear during a dance at their wedding, “You’re her first husband.”

  “Actually, no, Thirjane did not have Jamison killed,” Leaf said to Val. “Well, she thinks she did, but someone else got to it before her guy could. He’s a real screwball, this guy. Took her money and has her thinking he was the one who did it, but he wasn’t anywhere near the day of the incident.”

  “How do you know that? How do they know that?”

  “He was in jail. Got picked up for driving with a suspended license, of all things. We wanted to hold him, but by the time he posted his own bail, Jamison had already been thrown from that roof.”

  “So you’re telling me Kerry’s mama thinks she had Jamison killed by some hit man, when he didn’t even do it? He didn’t finish the job?” Val laughed tensely at the absurdity and then sat in thoughts of Thirjane’s constant frown and perfectly manicured, wrinkled hands. “So how did Kerry end up in jail? Do they think she did it?”

  “No way. From what I can see looking at her surveillance, Kerry hasn’t made a move indicating it was even possible.”

  “Then how’d she end up behind bars?”

  “Isn’t that the question we’re all asking?” Leaf looked out his rearview mirror and said softly, “Many ways of reading it. Many possibilities. None of which has to be that she’s guilty.”

  “What?”

  “It could be that they’re waiting for Thirjane to turn herself in to get Kerry off. Maybe she hired someone else who went under the radar.”

  “For three months? They’ve been waiting for three months? Had this woman in jail that long? I mean, isn’t it obvious at this point that if Thirjane was involved, she’s not exactly about to give herself up for her daughter?” Val remembered how distant Thirjane had been about Kerry’s case. She’d hardly spoken to the attorney and refused to go speak with media outlets to plead for Kerry’s release, which was the lawyer’s first suggestion and what he believed worked.

  “Then there’s the other possibility.” Leaf turned to Val. “That it’s a cover-up.”

  “For what?”

  “Well, that’s not exactly going to be in the file. That’s going to require more . . . information gathering. Could be Governor Cade. Could be a number of things. Jamison had his hands in many places. Some I knew about and some I didn’t. I’m realizing that now.”

  A black car with black tinted windows rolled past slowly and Val and Leaf’s eyes were set on it until it was well up the street and stopped to let a woman and her dog out on the corner.

  “Val, is there anything you noticed about Jamison’s actions before he died, any information you have that you haven’t shared with me or anyone else that you can think of?” Leaf asked. “And it could be anything. Something small that seemed odd, but could be explained away. Even something that’s come up since his death.”

  Val scratched her temple and attempted to rub away tension gathering in her brow.

  “You know how he was with me. You saw.” She looked away from Leaf. “Always held me out so far. He was so secretive. Always. I can’t say if those were the signs of a man hiding something. Or someone who just wasn’t in love.”

  Had the situation been different and the lie Val wanted to believe about her marriage been true, Leaf might have reached over the console, grabbed her hand, and told her she was wrong—Jamison really did love her. But there could be none of that. There just wasn’t anything nice to say. No comforting words.

  Leaf actually leaned away before he repeated, “It could be anything” and gave Val some time to think.

  “Nothing,” Val said after a long while, where she rediscovered how little she’d really known about the man she’d loved so desperately. He’d let her in a little and then locked her all the way out, where she’d stand thirsting for any little bit of him until he saw fit to open the door again.

  “Well, you can think about it some more and let me know,” Leaf said. “In the meantime, I’m going to start looking into some other things. I just figured that maybe you’d know something. None of us are as mysterious as we think. We always leave clues. It’s just a matter of paying attention. And I know you were. I know you—” He paused and patted Val on the shoulder awkwardly, but also earnestly. “I know you loved him,” he said.

  Leaf drove Val back to her car as he explained his next steps and clued her in on why he’d had to speak to her. He sensed some fear or desperation in Delgado’s voice at lunch. That meant he didn’t have everything he needed, but needed to close in on something soon. Val’s name was mentioned in some of his notes. Delgado had been watching her. Leaf didn’t want her to get caught up in the dragnet when things went down. If she helped him, if he could get her on his team, maybe he could make something happen to keep everyone safe, to get Kerry off and burst the case wide open. Get all the angles out in the open. Find out who or what the big boogeyman was behind the thing. And all of this could be for a good cause. To save the world. Or save someone. He’d grown close to Kerry
when he was working with her undercover and even at least understood Val for what she was. It should be for them. But it wasn’t. Deep down on Leaf’s scorecard there was a check he needed to settle. If something wasn’t right with this case, then something couldn’t be right with his conclusion. It meant his resolution, his solution, and ascension were all a lie. He wasn’t the kind of man who could sit in that and just be okay with it. Not if the lie was on his scorecard. He could be loyal to the Bureau, but if the Bureau wanted him to settle on a lie, then the Bureau wasn’t being loyal to him. So then all bets were off.

  Chapter 8

  The same big, black truck that had been parked outside of Jamison’s home was sitting in the driveway when Val got home. She jumped out of her car and stormed over to the door, so angry she could spit on whoever was sitting inside, but there was no one there.

  Val switched her spiky stare from the car to the front door of the house and stomped up the walkway with the keys in her hand, pointed forward like a sharp knife ready to do some cutting.

  Inside, she heard talking and laughing coming from the kitchen. It sounded like something delightful was happening and every echo of noise struck a sorrowful chord in her gut. It felt like she was being cheated. Like something inside of her was being stolen away.

  Mama Fee was sitting at the kitchen table in an orange-and-tan caftan with a matching head wrap atop her head. She looked like a high priestess or maybe a genie. Her legs were crossed and she was holding a cup of steaming tea in her hand. One pinky pointed up. Smiling, grinning at who was seated across from her.

  The man who drove the truck, who begged to sleep one more night in Val’s bed and kept his promise of not seeking sex, was hunched into the table toward Mama Fee, talking like he knew who this woman was, like he was supposed to be there and this was a ritual. A cup of steaming tea was sitting on the table in front of him.

  Val stood in the threshold and surveyed this picture. She knew they sensed her standing there. But they kept talking and laughing, trading these little intimate stares that let on that the visit wasn’t brand new.