A Kiss Gone Bad wm-1

by Jeff Abbott

  ‘Here’s where he was found.’ She stepped aside so Whit could enter the tiny stateroom.

  The dead man lay naked on the bed, lying on his back, arms and legs spread, the sourness of death-released waste scenting the close air.

  ‘I haven’t seen him in fifteen years,’ Whit said. ‘But that’s Pete Hubble.’ He did not add that Pete Hubble had skinny-dipped with Whit’s older brothers and once you saw Pete naked you were unlikely to confuse him with someone else. ‘It might be best to get a formal ID from family or friends.’

  Eddie Gardner, another police department investigator, stood in the corner of the bedroom, snapping photos. An evidence-collection kit lay open at his feet.

  ‘You were supposed to wait for Judge Mosley to get here,’ Claudia said.

  ‘Sorry.’ Gardner shrugged. ‘Just taking some photos. I didn’t disturb anything for the judge.’ Gardner made judge sound like dog turd. He wore his thinning hair pulled in a short ponytail, aiming for and missing the surfer dude look. He was a recent hire from Houston and had tried too hard to go coastal with the flowered shirts and baggy shorts.

  ‘Why don’t you get started on searching and cataloging the rest of the boat?’ Claudia suggested in a patient tone. Gardner went up the stairs with his smirk.

  ‘Houston know-it-all,’ Claudia muttered.

  ‘Eddie’s got to stop those public displays of affection for me,’ Whit said. He pulled on latex gloves and switched on an overhead light. A bit of bedsheet was wrapped awkwardly around Pete’s upper torso, a gun loosely gripped in his right hand, his mouth a gaping hole. His eyelids stood at half-mast, rimmed with blood.

  ‘This just sucks,’ Whit said.

  ‘Did you know him well?’ Claudia asked.

  ‘He was friends with a couple of my older brothers. I knew his brother Corey better than him.’

  Claudia cocked her head. ‘Corey. He went missing, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. About fifteen years ago.’

  A hoarse voice called down to Claudia. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said.

  Whit probed – gingerly – Pete Hubble’s throat for a pulse. Nothing, obviously. He poked the paling skin: cool but not cold, and rigor mortis had not yet begun.

  The windows were shut in the cabin, but the boats at Golden Gulf were docked in neat succession. Surely someone would have heard the fatal shot. He raised the blinds on the windows. The two berths next to Real Shame were empty. On the other side was the open bay and the long pall of night.

  Whit opened his notebook to a blank scene-of-death form. He heard more officers boarding the boat, into the galley and living area, Claudia greeting them, dividing responsibilities. Whit wrote: Oct 12, 10:45 p.m. Peter James Hubble, male, age ~40, brown hair, brown eyes, six-six, around 220 pounds, nude except for gold chain with lion’s head on it around neck, red-and-green dragon tattoo on right forearm, lying face up on bed, sheet wrapped partially around chest, 9mm Glock in right hand, bullet wound in mouth, blood spray on face.

  Whit peered inside Pete’s broken mouth, bringing his flashlight to bear on the damage. The tongue, the back teeth, the palate, the uvula, the smooth pink walls looked exploded. The back of the mouth was a gruesome tunnel boring to the brain. Pete had his lips wrapped neatly around the barrel when the gun went off.

  ‘Ate the gun, didn’t he?’ Eddie Gardner asked conversationally. He had returned with his camera.

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Sheriff’s deputies are helping Claudia, so you and I can get the body done.’ He spooled film into the camera, still smirking. ‘Love the shirt. Parrots are you.’

  Whit ignored the jab, leaning close to the gun. ‘Odd. The safety is on.’

  ‘I pulled the gun out of his mouth so I could click on the safety. Standard procedure.’ Gardner explained this in a tone usually reserved for addressing toddlers. ‘Wouldn’t expect you to know.’

  Great. A Buddy Beere supporter. ‘Did you take a picture first, with the gun in his mouth?’

  ‘No. Forgot. Just trying to secure the scene, Judge.’

  Whit wrote in his notebook: Gardner didn’t take requisite pictures, mention THAT in the inquest report.

  ‘So you knew this guy?’ Gardner asked.

  ‘Ages ago.’

  ‘There’s a whole bunch of adult movie videos in a cabinet by the television. And this guy’s picture is on some of the covers.’

  Whit stared at him. ‘Please be kidding.’

  Gardner grinned. ‘Not kidding at all. You could hold a blue film festival with all the porn up there.’ He pointed at the dead man’s prodigious organ. ‘Jesus, a horse would be jealous. Makes sense he might make some money off of that.’

  The son of a prominent state senator starring in porn films. The imagined headlines took a greasy turn in Whit’s mind. He wondered if Faith knew.

  He watched Eddie Gardner snap photos of seemingly every square inch of the bed, excepting the square inches that had landed Pete in movies.

  ‘Eddie,’ Whit said, ‘please photograph the gun. I’m going to need those for the inquest.’ Gardner took several shots of the pistol from different angles. Neither man spoke for a minute until Gardner finished the roll.

  ‘You thinking suicide. Judge? Looks that way to me.’

  ‘Why?’ Whit asked.

  ‘Big-built guy, no signs of struggle. It’s hard to stick a gun in the mouth of a guy this big.’

  At one corner of the bed stood a sleek video camera, mounted on a tripod, aimed at the bed. Gardner watched Whit examine the camera.

  ‘Shit, maybe he was shooting a home movie with that little gal out there and things got rough,’ Gardner said.

  ‘Little gal?’

  ‘Girl that found him. Looks like she’s spent her last dime and got no place to go. Dirty, strung out.’ Gardner laughed. ‘She might have screamed bloody murder if she saw that dick coming at her.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Whit said. Gardner had all the appeal of head lice, but he had a point. Whit remembered a tidbit he’d read in a forensics book about bodily fluid residue. He carefully inspected the dead man’s genitals with his latexed fingers; the massive penis appeared dry. There hadn’t been immediate predeath sex, he bet, but them medical examiner in Corpus Christi could properly make that determination.

  Gardner watched him probe the organ. ‘If it gets hard, yell.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I will.’ Whit felt uneasy embarrassment again. No doubt Gardner would gossip back in the police station: Jesus, Mosley felt up the dead guy’s dick, can you believe it?

  Whit noticed a frame turned down on the bedside dresser, and he righted it. It was a photo of a young boy, on the verge of the teenage years, with a scattering of freckles and mischievous brown eyes. Hints of Pete Hubble lay in his face: the square jaw, the crinkled smile, the brown hair. Signs of Faith Hubble were the small ears, the slink of the raised eyebrow. It was an old photo of Sam Hubble, Pete and Faith’s son. Sam was now fifteen, a bright kid Whit had always liked. He wondered how on earth the boy would take this news.

  ‘The only suicide I’ve worked,’ Whit said, ‘the fellow turned every family picture to the wall before taking the big gulp.’

  ‘Another vote for suicide.’ Gardner loaded another roll of film. More flashes filled the room.

  Still wearing his gloves, Whit flipped open the video camera’s housing. No tape inside.

  ‘Was there a videotape in here Claudia took?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t believe so.’

  ‘Did you take it?’

  Gardner frowned. ‘Nope.’

  Whit shut the case. Discarded clothing lay piled in the corner of the room. Still wearing the gloves, Whit picked through the mound. In the pile were faded men’s jeans, a cowboy belt still threaded through the loops; a white T-shirt; and men’s black briefs that must have clinched the family jewels in a vise grip. Nestled with the shirt were a pair of cotton women’s panties, decorated with little intertwining violets. Whit hooked the panties with one gloved f
inger and raised them toward Gardner.

  ‘Looky, looky, there must’ve been nookie.’ Gardner glanced behind him to make sure Claudia Salazar hadn’t returned to the room. ‘Ought to check to see if the girl’s got her delicates. I’ll volunteer.’

  ‘A hero in her darkest hour,’ Whit said. ‘What has the witness told you?’

  ‘Her name’s Heather Farrell. Got that scared-goat look of a runaway. We’re running a check on her to see if she’s got a record. She said she met Hubble on the beach over the course of the last week, and he asked her to come over tonight.’

  Whit studied Pete Hubble’s face. Little of the boy he had known remained in the dead man’s looks. A memory bubbled up: Whit, barely twelve, hanging at the edges of one of Whit’s brothers’ birthday parties, full of raucous teenagers, and Pete sneaking Whit – youngest of the six Mosley boys – slugs of prime bourbon. He’d thrown up at the party’s end, on the shoes of his oldest brother’s date, and gotten the last whipping he’d ever received from his father. Pete. Mr Fun. At least before his brother vanished.

  ‘I wonder how many fuck films he made,’ Gardner said.

  ‘Don’t go broadcasting details of that career around town just yet.’

  ‘Not a chance in hell that’s gonna be kept quiet,’ Gardner said. ‘I guess all the pussy in the world can’t make a boy happy. Think of all the women he must’ve had doing the movies.’

  ‘Think of all the venereal disease.’

  Gardner pondered this. ‘Might suck the wind out of your sails.’

  Whit opened the small closet that faced the bed. A small collection of men’s clothes hung loosely on hangers: pants, sweatshirts, a stacked collection of baseball caps, captioned with ADULT ENTERTAINMENT AWARDS and HOT AND BOTHERED PRODUCTIONS and, oddly, UCLA FILM SCHOOL. On the opposite side of the closet blouses, women’s T-shirts, sweatshirts, and jeans were neatly folded across hangers. Below was a box of loosely stuffed papers. On the floor a leather bustier, designed to rein in a majestic-size bosom, and a collection of hot-pink thong underwear lay in an untidy heap.

  ‘A woman’s been staying here.’

  Eddie Gardner shrugged. ‘Imagine. A guy who fucks for a living keeps a lady handy.’

  Whit returned to the combined galley/sitting area. He heard Claudia and another officer detailing and bagging the evidence out on the deck, which was most in danger of being affected by the threatening weather.

  Opposite the couch was a brand-new television, and videotapes were wedged into an open cabinet. Whit pulled up a tape from one stack. Cleopatra’s Love Slaves featured an elfin-faced platinum blonde in a golden, vaguely Egyptian costume. She was about to lick a rubber asp caught in her cleavage. Behind her loomed an oiled, chesty fellow in a toga with a lusty stare: Pete. A list of performers covered the left side of the tape cover: Dixxie St Cupps and Rachel Pleasure and Love Ramsey. After several female names were listed ‘Big Pete Majors’ and another man; the casting wasn’t split evenly by gender. But then, men generally weren’t the main attractions. Velvet Mojo was credited as the producer and director.

  Whit pawed through the rest of the cassettes: Mixin’ Vixens, More Lovin’ Spoonfuls, Oral Arguments XI. ‘Big Pete Majors’ was listed as a performer on every tape. Velvet Mojo was listed on all of them as producer and director, all under the Hot and Bothered label. Whit counted twelve tapes and noticed they were all done in the past year. Pete and his harem believed in hard work.

  Whit sat in shock. He wondered if Pete’s mother, the senator, knew of her son’s career. Or Faith, who never mentioned her ex. Two extraordinarily bright, accomplished women – the shame would burn them both like acid. Personally. Politically.

  He noticed books piled on the sofa. There were several books on screenwriting basics, dialogue, technique. Porn didn’t require much in the way of story structure, Whit thought, but the books looked well worn.

  The other collection of tapes – twice the size of the porn collection – was a world away from the adult tapes, and Whit recognized some titles only because he’d taken film appreciation years ago at Tulane for an easy A. City Lights, one of Charlie Chaplin’s masterpieces. The Battleship Potemkin, a long-ago classic of Russian cinema. Abel Gance’s Napoleon, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Gone With the Wind. Films by Alfred Hitchcock, by John Ford, by Stanley Kubrick. And a bevy of obscure foreign cinema, films from Australia and Sweden and Italy that Whit had never heard of. Combine the two stacks and you would have the world’s most bizarre film festival.

  Whit peeked into the VCR and found a tape already in the drive. Still wearing his gloves, Whit powered up the television and the VCR.

  4

  The tape snapped into sudden focus. Pete Hubble walked along a curve of rural road, sauntering backward, talking into the handheld camera with the earnest patter of a tour guide. The time stamp in the corner of the screen indicated the footage had been shot ten days ago.

  ‘Here’s where my brother’s car was discovered,’ Pete said in his rumbling baritone. The camera panned over a clutch of small white frame houses with a private, ratchety pier jutting into the water. ‘Before this was just beach and field, and kids parked here.’

  ‘I’m sure you never did,’ a woman’s smoky voice commented, off-camera. She apparently was operating the camcorder.

  Pete smiled. ‘I was too shy.’

  ‘You triumphed over your phobia.’ A pause. ‘Were the keys in his car?’

  ‘No. Never found.’

  ‘Any sign of foul play?’

  ‘No. Mom made Corey work for the car. I couldn’t believe he’d just abandon it.’

  ‘They find anything in it?’

  ‘A gas receipt, from Port Lavaca, was under the seat. So we know he or someone had been driving the car and had been up the coast.’ Pete shaded his eyes against the sun. ‘No prints in the car that weren’t Corey’s. Everyone thought at first that somebody kidnapped Corey. But never a note, never a call.’

  ‘So start theorizing. Then we’ll go slam some coffee.’

  ‘Corey dumped his own car because it would have been traced too easily and he wanted to disappear,’ Pete said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To make my mother suffer.’ Pete shrugged into the camera lens. ‘I don’t know how to make that part work in the screenplay without Corey looking like a bastard.’

  ‘Don’t make him a saint if he wasn’t one, Pete,’ the woman said.

  Pete shook his head and the tape fuzzed to blue, then resumed with Pete standing in front of a sign, JABEZ JONES MINISTRIES.

  ‘Visual notebook, part two, still scouting locations for the shoot.’ Pete pointed up at the sign. ‘Here’s where muscle-bound morons come to wrestle with their sins.’

  ‘I remind you,’ the woman’s voice said, ‘my daddy was a preacher. Be nice.’

  ‘Jabez declined to be interviewed for my movie. It makes you wonder,’ Pete said. ‘I have a feeling he’s just waiting to see the movie and sue big-time.’

  ‘Let him sue your ass,’ the woman counseled. ‘Free publicity.’

  Pete grinned. ‘Like I’m gonna have to worry about publicity. I’m gonna be front page on every paper in the country.’

  ‘Yeah. Right. Whatever,’ the woman said. Annoyance dripped from her words, as though there was a secret she wasn’t privy to and wanted to be.

  The tape jumped again. Pete stood on a stretch of jumbled heavy granite blocks, a fishing jetty near Port Leo Park. The surf surged in and the waves slammed hard against the pink and gray stones, spraying droplets into the air. Wind whipped Pete’s hair; the time stamp said this was filmed a week ago.

  ‘Hand me the flowers,’ Pete ordered. From out of the frame came a woman’s hand, covered with jangling bracelets, offering a large bouquet of daisies and carnations, the kind found in the grocery checkout lines, wrapped in green paper. Pete tossed the bouquet into the waves; the flowers churned in the tide, bounced, vanished, churned again. The camera panned up to Pete’s face.

&n
bsp; ‘There’s no grave for my brother, but we used to fish off this jetty. It’s the best I can do.’ He began to cry, softly.

  A few moments of silence. ‘I think I’m gonna bring Sam here,’ Pete said, and the woman said, ‘Oh, Jesus, you got to listen to reason,’ and the film went black.

  He looked over his shoulder, ejected the tape, and stuck in one of the adult offerings – Johnny Ampleseed. The new tape had only been rewound midway. It took less than twenty seconds watching Pete and two bleached blondes kneeling in an orchard to confirm Pete Hubble was indeed a celluloid sleaze. His timeless lines consisted of ‘Oh, yeah,’ ‘Do it, baby,’ and ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  Whit felt sick. For Faith, for Lucinda, for Sam. Another part of him wondered: so what was living that life like?

  Whit put the first tape back in the machine and powered off the television. Pete had been making a film project about his brother’s disappearance. Going legit with a film career after working in porn, unless he had decided to inject adult themes into his family’s tragedy. Whit thought probably not.

  Whit went up to the deck. He spotted Claudia Salazar talking to a sheriff’s deputy along the gangplank. Another deputy carefully packed a few bagged and tagged items into a large cardboard box. The ambulance had departed, replaced by a mortuary service hearse, ready to transport the body when Whit gave the go-ahead.

  Whit waited for Claudia to head back to the boat. ‘I’m pronouncing him dead as of 10:45 p.m.,’ he said. ‘I’m authorizing the autopsy and ordering an inquest. It’s all right to transport the body now.’ He scribbled details on an authorization of autopsy form, signed it, then Claudia witnessed his signature. ‘Is it you or Prince Charming that’s in charge of the investigation?’

  ‘Delford’s given me the case. You thinking suicide?’

  ‘Before we get to that question… he’s a porn star.’

  Claudia blinked, her face paling in the marina lights. ‘Your shirt’s funny, but you’re not.’