Rest for the Wicked

by Ellen Hart

  Slowing her pace, Jane edged her way through the crowd and waved to Nolan. Taylor, a black man wearing a heavy wool topcoat, motioned for an officer to let her through.

  “Ms. Lawless,” said Taylor, nodding slightly as she moved under the tape. “Nice to see you again.”

  Based on their last encounter, she doubted his sincerity. “Is it your nephew?” she asked Nolan.

  He gave a curt nod. “There’s a wound just below his left shoulder and one in the stomach. If someone had found him sooner—” He choked on the words and couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Forensic workers had set up lights and were diligently taking photographs and documenting the scene. Jane guessed, by the looks of all the Dumpsters lined up against one wall, that the battered door toward the back probably led to a kitchen. With the temperature in the high thirties for most of the week, and only a few degrees cooler now, the alley stank of garbage. Nolan’s nephew had sunk down against a brick wall. His leather jacket was open, the dress shirt underneath soaked with blood. Bloody footprints led away from the body and disappeared into the snow at the edge of the sidewalk.

  “Those prints look like they came from an athletic shoe,” said Jane.

  “This guy,” said Taylor, rubbing the back of his neck in contemplation, “made a mess of it. Makes me think it wasn’t premeditated, that it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. The way I see it, Moore probably came out that door to make that call to you. That’s when he was attacked.”

  “By someone who saw him leave?” asked Jane.

  “Would be my guess. I need to hear that cell phone message.”

  She took her phone out of her back pocket and set it up. The sergeant listened to the message twice before handing it back.

  “You have no idea what he was calling about? This private matter he referred to?”

  “None,” said Jane.

  “Have you found the murder weapon?” asked Nolan.

  “I’ve got men canvassing the area, and I’m about to head inside and start the interrogations. Far as I know, nobody saw it happen. We’ll apply some pressure, see what we can shake loose.”

  “Would you call me when you find the guy?” asked Nolan.

  “Of course. My sincere condolences. Will you call his family, or would you like me—”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Nolan, his eyes fixed on his nephew.

  On the way to back to the truck, Jane asked Nolan if they should spend some time looking into DeAndre’s death themselves.

  “No reason,” he said, his voice heavy with resignation. “The police are good at what they do. They’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  * * *

  Nolan urged Jane to leave as soon as they got back to his house. She followed him into the kitchen, where he dumped some ice in a glass and poured himself several inches of bourbon. When he sat down in the living room, he continued to urge her to go home, and yet little by little, he began to open up and talk about his nephew, about the phone call he dreaded making to his sister in the morning.

  DeAndre Moore was twenty-nine years old, unmarried, and living in St. Louis, where he worked as a security guard at an office complex near the airport. He’d been the foster child of Nolan’s younger sister, Fannie Lou Moore. When DeAndre was thirteen, Fannie Lou and her husband, Henry, had adopted him. Nolan said the boy was as close to a musical prodigy as anyone he’d ever known. He’d been focused on jazz since he was in his teens and had worked hard to become a jazz pianist. He was beginning to make a name for himself at jazz clubs in and around St. Louis. Nolan said he’d talked to him over Christmas and he was in great spirits.

  DeAndre’s early childhood had been troubled. His biological mother had been an alcoholic and addicted to OxyContin, which meant he’d been subjected to some pretty intense abuse, both from his mom and from a series of vicious boyfriends. The abuse was the main reason he’d been taken away and put in foster care. Nolan said that DeAndre had never known his father and that his mother had died several years after he’d been removed from her custody. His world had changed for the better when, at age eleven, he’d first come to live with Fannie Lou and Henry. Nolan underscored the fact that DeAndre was a survivor, that he wasn’t interested in looking back, only in moving forward. He claimed that DeAndre took virtually no time at all to fit himself into his new family and that he had thrived under Fannie Lou and Henry’s loving care. He’d grown up to be a good, clean kid. He had a bumpy relationship with his girlfriend, but even so, he’d confided to Nolan that he hoped to marry her one day. His life was on track, going well. That’s why what had happened was so inexplicable.

  Nolan eventually tired of the conversation and told Jane he had to go to bed. She made him promise to call her if he needed anything, and then, with a heavy heart, she left, driving home through a midnight blizzard, thankful for the four-wheel drive. Glancing around at Mouse in the backseat, she said what she hadn’t said to Nolan. “I think that’s a wonderful story. But that’s all it is. A story.” It may have taken on the status of family dogma, something they all believed in, but the truth about DeAndre’s life after he was adopted had to be more complex.

  Pulling into the driveway next to her house, Jane cut the motor and sat for a few minutes listening to the whirlwind beat against the windows. It felt like sitting inside a snow globe.

  Turning back to Mouse, she said, “It’s not every day you get a call from a dead man, you know?”

  Mouse thumped his tail against the backseat, his dark brown eyes fixed soulfully on hers.

  “Come on, boy,” she said, holding up his leash. “Let’s get out of here while we can still find the front door.”

  3

  The next morning, Jane stood at her dining room window, drinking from a mug of coffee and thinking how truly Currier and Ives the world looked after a blizzard. It was a pleasant thought, followed by a less appealing image of herself spending the next few hours, if not days, digging out.

  “Ah, Minnesota” was all she could dredge up, smiling over her shoulder at her dog, who was chewing on his favorite green tennis ball under the arch that led from the dining room into the front foyer. It had taken her a good ten minutes to get the screen door on the back porch open so she could shovel a patch for Mouse to do his morning ablutions. He came back inside with a fat clump of snow perched on top of his muzzle, about as frisky as she’d ever seen him.

  The day had dawned with a brilliant blue sky and sunlight glinting off a world covered in billions of glittering diamonds. Those glittering diamonds had buried her CR-V up to the wheel wells in the front and nearly erased the rear under a four-foot drift. Her one-stall garage was already filled with her Mini, so the SUV, of necessity, had to be parked outside. After a good old-fashioned Minnesota blizzard blew through, the wind generally died down and the temperatures plummeted. The weather woman on the morning news had urged everyone to get their snow removal done early because the high for the day would be a balmy twelve degrees. By nightfall, the temperature would be in the minus fifteen range, with wind chills close to thirty below.

  Jane didn’t want to repeat herself, but she couldn’t help it. “What a wicked glorious place to live,” she said, this time with a little more sarcasm than vigor. “All I can say is, I’m glad it’s Monday.” Both her restaurants were closed on Mondays, which made it easier for the snowplow service she used to do a decent job of cleaning out the parking lots. Squinting at the road that ran in front of her house, she was pretty sure one of the city plows had already come through. Minneapolis had snow removal down to as much of a science as was humanly possible.

  “You know, Mouse, I should teach you how to use the snowblower.”

  He looked up from his tennis ball long enough to yawn.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no thanks.’”

  On her way to the kitchen, her landline rang. The answering machine said, “Call from Abilene Mar.” It repeated the message one more time, cutting off the last part of Abilene’s last name, which was M
artell. Jane leaned her hip against the kitchen counter and picked up the receiver. “Guess we won’t be doing dinner tonight.”

  “Umm, no,” said Abilene, “guess not. Actually, there’s another reason we won’t be having dinner.”

  “And that is?”

  “I’m in Aspen. I flew out yesterday, right before the storm hit. I need some downtime in my life, Jane. Okay, so you told me you were a workaholic before we started dating. I’ve dated workaholics before. I figured, hell, not only have I dated workaholics, I am one. But you … you’re world class.”

  Jane was sick of hearing the criticism. If Abilene wanted to date someone with a lot of free time, she should have found herself a nice dental hygienist.

  “I didn’t come here alone, Jane. Carrie’s with me.”

  “Carrie? Your new producer, Carrie?”

  Abilene hosted a local radio show on KBLW, an unfortunate series of call letters, known more crudely around town as K-Blow by those who didn’t like her liberal politics.

  “Yes, my producer.”

  “Are you two—”

  “We are. As for you and me, we’re over.”

  Jane wasn’t sure they’d ever really “begun.” To be honest, she was more surprised than hurt—and when she thought about it, not all that surprised. Always the matchmaker, Cordelia had introduced the two of them at a theater party and then pushed Jane to call for a date, saying that Abilene was smart, attractive, and available, the dating trifecta in Cordelia’s humble opinion.

  “Good wishes to you and Carrie,” said Jane, pouring herself more coffee.

  “I thought you’d be more upset.”

  “Well, I mean … I am.”

  “Really.”

  “But if you’re in love with Carrie—”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Jane was handling this all wrong, and she knew it. She considered herself highly competent in most areas of her life, but when it came to women, she felt as if, somewhere along the line, she’d lost the knack for commitment. She also regarded with more than a little suspicion people who tried to make her feel guilty for the way she lived her life. “I only want what’s best for you.”

  “Right. So, I guess this is good-bye, then.”

  “I guess.”

  “Maybe I’ll call when I get back. No reason we can’t be friends.”

  “None at all,” said Jane.

  “Okay, then. Don’t get stuck in any snowdrifts.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Oh, I don’t. You’re about as self-sufficient as they come.”

  After hanging up, Jane sank down on one of the kitchen chairs. She knew that was exactly how people saw her, especially those who didn’t get the emotional rise out of her that they wanted. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about Abilene; she simply wasn’t in love with her. She was beginning to wonder if she’d been burned so many times that she wasn’t capable of falling in love anymore.

  “Wouldn’t be the end of the world,” she murmured.

  What she was beginning to understand—to admit to herself—was that that special something, a frisson, a deep connection, had been absent from all of her recent relationships. She hadn’t felt that special rush of emotion for so long that she was beginning to think it was a chimera. In many ways she’d been playing at being in love. She knew how it was supposed to feel, so she tried to convince herself that, with whomever she was involved with at the time, it wasn’t just physical attraction but something deeper. She’d overlooked the lack in herself, tried to ignore it, or attempted to convince herself that she loved the people who said they loved her. It hadn’t worked, no matter how much she cared about these women, no matter how much she wanted the feelings to be more serious.

  Perhaps, in the end, the hand she’d been dealt in life didn’t include more than one passionate love. Her first partner, Christine Kane, had died ten years into their relationship. Jane still thought of her as her one true love. Add to that the fact that she was middle-aged, possibly too set in her ways, too used to her solitary life to let anyone in, and her inability to form a lasting connection made more sense. Still, the entire subject made her squirm like nothing else. In a world that seemed to be delimited by couples, her single status suggested inadequacy, selfishness, or worse. So she did what she usually did these days when her self-reflection took her into this personal bog. She changed the subject.

  “Mouse, time to brave the elements.” A little physical exertion always put her in a better mood.

  * * *

  Rubbing away the cocaine from under his nose, Vince Bessetti strode down the back hall from his office to a rear door that opened onto the nightclub floor. He’d spent the night on his office couch, preferring it to the chaos at home. His wife, Shelly, had recently admitted to an affair. She’d picked, of all nights, Christmas Eve to drop the bomb and plead for forgiveness. By Christmas morning, her tone had changed and the recriminations had begun.

  This was a delicate situation. Shelly’s father, Klaus Rappenborg, owner and CEO of DTL Industries, was the man who had made Vince’s dream come true. He was the main money guy, the one who’d underwritten the biggest part of the expense of getting GaudyLights up and running. Although unstated, Shelly had been an integral part of the deal.

  Klaus’s only daughter, the jewel in his crooked crown, was a successful businesswoman in her own right. She was smart and intense but had an unfortunate tendency to make even the simplest of decisions overly complex. Thanks to that, and a mulish, uncompromising stubbornness, she was, at the ripe old age of forty-one, wholly unsuccessful in the husband department. Vince was seventeen years her senior, a confirmed bachelor, although he was also a pragmatist. He knew a good deal when he saw one. He understood her desperation and self-loathing from the inside out. Together, they were a perfect mix of Calvinist pessimism and modern acid cynicism. If putting an MRS in front of her name meant that much, he figured they could work the other angles and both get something they wanted.

  Vince and Shelly had been married in a Presbyterian church in Wayzata. When one of her self-help books fell out of her flight bag on their honeymoon in Santorini, Vince was beginning to see that he’d made a deal with the devil. Shelly was gunning to change him into the man of her dreams. He would be the clay and she would be the sculptor. Until the honeymoon, he hadn’t fully appreciated the zeal with which she approached this new task.

  He’d first met Shelly Rappenborg when he was working at Baylor Hotels International, a hotel chain headquartered in the Twin Cities. As the senior vacation planner, he could stay for free at any of the properties all over the world. Shelly was attractive in a youngish Kathy Bates sort of way, a good conversationalist and obviously sexually desperate, so on a whim, Vince offered to take her to Edinburgh for a weekend. When they came back, she invited him to her home for dinner. He wasn’t all that interested in seeing her again but decided to go anyway, more out of boredom than anything else. Little did he know that this date would open the door to his future.

  Shelly lived with her father in a palatial home on Lake Minnetonka. Daddy was thrice divorced and liked cigars, single malt Scotch, Swedish cars, and, by the looks of the pictures on the wall of his den, loose blondes. The two of them struck up a conversation about an idea that Vince had been toying with—a new gentleman’s club in downtown Minneapolis. One thing led to another. Within the month, Vince found himself engaged to be married and signing on the dotted line for a property on Washington Avenue. The building was an old DeSoto dealership. That had been five years ago. Last year, the business had turned a significant profit. This year, however, with a second recession in full bloom, or perhaps the first one had never really gone away, receipts had been down. He needed another infusion of capital but knew that this time around he couldn’t go to Shelly’s dad for it.

  Walking through the cavernous main floor, chairs upended on the tabletops, Vince bent down to pick one of the girls’ garter belts. Seeing the slipshod way the floor had been cl
eaned, he kicked a pink Day-Glo bikini bottom halfway to the catwalk. He had to constantly be on top of these things or the club would disintegrate to the level of the tacky corporate-owned cat clubs. GaudyLights customers weren’t supposed to feel as if they’d walked into some sleazebag’s creepy basement.

  Vince’s entertainers were mostly young and good-looking, and they knew—or were taught—how to squeeze every possible dime out of the customers. The vibe was part hard rock urban sheik, part neon and glitter, but the hustle was and would always be hardcore. The lack of cleaning last night was probably due to the cops closing down the place early. The head cop, a man named Taylor, had paid special attention to Vince, suggesting several times that he must know more about the murdered man than he was willing to let on. Although cops were some of his best customers, he loathed their swagger and general sense of entitlement. Taylor, with his curled lip and self-righteous manner, was worse than most. When he spent nearly half an hour talking privately to one of the black strippers, a few of the other girls started giving each other knowing glances. The guy had to be negotiating the price of a bed dance.

  Climbing the wide, open factory stairs to the second floor, Vince ducked into several of the private VIP rooms and found that each one needed work. In the VIP lounge, also known, in keeping with the car motif, as the Service Bay, the bar was covered with used napkins and dirty plates and glasses. His frustration ratcheting into high gear, Vince began collecting all the dishes and dumping them into a bus pan. On his way downstairs carrying the filled pan, he was startled by a scraping sound. He’d been positive he was the only one in the building. Thinking that the noise had come from the kitchen, he pushed through the swinging doors and set his load down on one of the stainless steel tables, glad to see that at least the kitchen was clean.