Billy Straight: A Novel (Petra Connor)

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The purchase of love? Same old story? Petra felt sad, then reminded herself not to judge. If her own phone rang on a particularly lonely and/or horny night and it was Nick on the other end, saying, “Hey, Pet,” what would she do?

  Hang up on the selfish fuck and wish she could make his ears bleed.

  Back to Malibu. Tides crashing, tender reminiscence, the nudge toward intimacy.

  Ramsey makes his move.

  But Lisa changes her mind, resists, shuts him down.

  Ramsey seethes, feels like slugging her. But remembering the way she went public, he keeps his rage to himself.

  Stays cool, drives her home.

  Malibu to Doheny Drive Hills would mean Pacific Coast Highway to Sunset or the freeway through the Valley, then down one of the canyons. But instead of hooking south, he continues east, maybe Laurel Canyon down Hollywood Boulevard, up Western to Los Feliz, then over to Griffith Park.

  That hour, not much traffic. He drives to the parking lot. Lisa knows something’s wrong, tries to escape.

  He holds out for one last embrace.

  Then a steel kiss.

  No sexual assault, because he’d had a blood orgasm.

  It felt right to Petra.

  It also depended on Gregory Balch lying straight-facedly about Ramsey’s alibi.

  She’d have to learn more about Balch, too. Eventually.

  Along with Ilse Eggermann and Karlheinz Lauch. A similar—unbelievable. She imagined Schoelkopf’s grin, the disgusted look on Stu’s face. When she’d left, he hadn’t looked up, just muttered a halfhearted good-bye.

  The library-book thing, so out of the blue. Stu was compulsive, mega-organized. Maybe it wasn’t his marriage; maybe it was career anxiety—the chance to apply for lieutenant suddenly coming up and he found himself stuck with a big-time loser whodunit? For Petra, just another case. For him, do or die?

  Would he bail on her? Sacrifice her if he needed to?

  For eight months, they’d ridden together, eaten together, worked side by side, Stu spending as much time with her as he did with Kathy, sometimes more, and he’d never laid a hand on her, never made a suggestive comment, not even the slightest hint of double entendre.

  She’d thought she knew him, but eight months wasn’t very long, was it?

  She and Nick had been together over two years. About the same as Lisa and Ramsey.

  Men and women . . .

  Once, when she was fifteen, home for summer vacation, she’d woken up at 1 A.M. on a long night in Arizona, hearing imaginary things, finally realizing it was the hot desert wind scraping the side of the house. Itchy, jumpy, she’d walked out to the hallway, spied the familiar splinter of light under the door of her father’s office, knocked, entered the tiny, dim, detritus-clogged room.

  Dad was sitting low in his oak chair facing his Royal manual, blank sheet in the roller. He saw her, gave a slack smile, and when she came closer, she smelled the Scotch on his breath, saw the dullness in his eyes, and took advantage of it as only a teenager can. Getting him to talk about what he hated talking about—the woman who’d died birthing her.

  Aware that it would cause him pain, but damnit, she had a right to know!

  And talk he did, in a low, slurred voice.

  Anecdotes, remembrances, how gawky Kenneth Connor and gorgeous Maureen McIlwaine had met on the Long Island Ferry and found true love. The same old stories, but she thirsted for them, could never get enough.

  That night she sat at his feet on the warped hardwood floor, motionless, silent, afraid any distraction would cause him to stop.

  Finally, he did grow quiet, staring down at her, then slapping his hands over his face and holding them there.

  “Daddy—”

  The hands dropped into his lap. He looked so sad. “That’s all I remember, sweetheart. Mother was a wonderful woman, but . . .”

  Then he began crying, and had to hide from her again.

  Men hid when they cried.

  Petra came over and hugged his broad, bony shoulders. “Oh, Daddy, I’m so—”

  “She was wonderful, baby. One in a million, but it wasn’t perfect, Pet. It was no storybook situation.”

  He opened a desk drawer and peered down at what had to be the bottle.

  When he turned back to Petra, his eyes were dry and he was smiling, but it wasn’t any of the smiles Petra knew—not the warm, protective one or the wry, sarcastic one or even the soft-around-the-edges drunk one that used to bother her but no longer did.

  This was different—flat, hollow, frozen as statuary. In her tenth grade English class they had learned about tragedy, and she was sure this was it.

  Defeated, that smile. As terrifying as a glimpse of eternity.

  “Daddy . . .”

  He scratched his scalp, shook his head, hiked a droopy sock up a pale ankle. “The thing is, Pet, no matter what . . . I guess what I’m saying, sweetheart, is men and women are really two separate species. Maybe that’s the anthropology talking, but it’s no less true. One little scrap of DNA separates us—here’s something funny: The X chromosome’s really the one that counts, Petra. The Y doesn’t seem to do much but cause problems—aggression—understand what I’m getting at, sweetheart? We men aren’t really worth that much.”

  “Oh, Daddy—”

  “Mom and I had our problems. Most were my fault. You need to know that so you don’t romanticize things, expect too much out of . . . demand too much from yourself. Understand, baby? Am I making sense here?”

  Taking hold of her shoulders, the light in his eyes almost maniacal.

  “You are, Daddy. Yes.”

  He let go. Now the smile was okay. Human.

  “The point is, Petra, there are big questions out there, cosmic questions that have nothing to do with stars and galaxies.”

  Waited for her response. She didn’t know what to say and he went on:

  “Questions like, can men and women ever really know each other or is it always going to be one stupid, clumsy dance around the interpersonal ballroom?”

  He flinched, suppressed a belch, sprang up, went into his bedroom, and closed the door, and she could hear the latch turn and knew he’d locked himself in.

  The next morning her brother Glenn, the only one still living at home, got to the breakfast table first and said, “What’s with Dad?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s gone, went out on a field trip, must have been before sunrise. Left me this.” Waving a piece of notebook paper that said, Out to the desert, kids.

  “Just one of his bone hunts,” said Petra.

  Glenn said, “Well, he took his camping stuff—that means a long one. Did he mention anything to you? ’Cause yesterday we were talking about going over to the Big Five and getting some hockey stuff.”

  “Actually, he did,” she lied.

  “Great,” said Glenn. “That’s just great. He tells you but never mentions it to me.”

  “I’m sure he meant to, Glenn.”

  “Yeah, right, great—fuck, I really need a new stick. Do you have any money I can borrow?”

  She phoned seven more detectives, endured seven more you’ve-got-to-be-kiddings, no more similars.

  From the far end of the room, the fax machine started humming and she jumped up and was there in a second, snatching papers out of the bin. Moving so quickly, a couple of the other D’s looked up. But not for long; they were busy, too. This room, this city—the blood never stopped.

  Karlheinz Lauch was big—six-foot-four—and ugly. Small, dark, squinty eyes popped like raisins in a pasty, misshapen crêpe of a face. The merest comma of a lopsided mouth, a mustache that looked like a grease squirt. Straight, fair hair—the stats called it brown, so probably dishwater—styled in that modified shag some Europeans still wore.

  To Petra, he appeared a grubby loser.

  The photo was from a four-year-old Vienna mug shot, lots of fifty-letter German words and umlauts. Sorensen’s typed note said Lauch had been busted for assault
in Austria the year before Ilse Eggermann’s murder—barroom brawl, no time served.

  In the photos, Lauch looked mean enough for anything. Wouldn’t it be something if the bastard had come to L.A., cruising for good-looking blondes, somehow connected with Lisa?

  Wouldn’t it be amazing if Lauch stuck around so they could pick him up? A nice easy solve so Stu could get his promotion and she could add brownie points to her file.

  Fantasies, kid.

  She studied Lauch’s face some more and wondered how someone like him could get Lisa to put on a little black dress and diamonds.

  On the other hand, he had gotten close to Ilse Eggermann, who, by Phil Sorensen’s account, was also a looker. But a stewardess wasn’t the ex-wife of a TV star who’d experienced the good life.

  Then again, Lisa had opted out of the good life. And some women, even beautiful women, liked to bottom-fish, turned on by whatever was crude and brutish, a man below them on the social ladder.

  Beauty and the beastly? Lisa taking risks with rough trade and paying for it?

  Petra kept staring at Lauch’s photo. The thought of allowing his flesh to come into contact with hers turned her stomach.

  She liked her men intelligent, considerate, conventionally handsome.

  Probably because her father was an intelligent, nice-looking, gentle man. For the most part, a gentleman.

  What was Ilse Eggermann’s father like?

  What was Dr. John Everett Boehlinger like when he wasn’t crazed with grief?

  Enough with the psychoanalysis. She’d taken it as far as she could for the moment.

  She inserted the Eggermann-Lauch data in Lisa’s murder book, crossed the room to the Nehi-orange lockers, opened hers, and took a Snickers bar from the bag she kept on the top shelf, above her gym shoes and sweats and the cheap black sweaters she kept handy for cold nights and messy corpses.

  Death mops, she called them.

  Acrylic that looked like acrylic. Attention, Kmart shoppers, our full-style cardigans now on sale for $13.95 in a wide range of colors. She bought five at a time, always black, threw them out the moment they got gory.

  In eight months, she’d been through ten.

  She hadn’t worn one to Lisa’s crime scene because the call had been an off-schedule surprise.

  She hadn’t been stained by Lisa’s corpse.

  Hadn’t gotten close enough.

  CHAPTER

  21

  “Move, move, move—keep moving, you little bastard.”

  Hiss-whispering in my ear, they squeeze me, poke me, push me.

  She’s the angry one; he sounds afraid, nervous. He even trips a couple of times.

  “Come on!” She sticks the gun in my ribs, and when I cry out she sticks me harder and says, “Shut up!” Not nervous at all.

  She’s in charge.

  As we get closer to where all the buggies are parked, I start to pray for some zoo person to be there this time, but there’s no one. Should I scream? No, the gun is up against me; it wouldn’t take much for her to pull the trigger and blow up my insides—now we’re at the fence. The lock is on—and it’s clamped!

  “Do it,” she orders as she looks in all directions. She keeps the gun on me, and he takes a key out of his pocket and opens the lock.

  They know this place.

  They’re prepared. They will rape me.

  He comes back, grabs me, breathes into my ear, and suddenly my stomach starts turning over and over, hard, fast, painful, like I have to go to the bathroom.

  They push me forward again. It’s like I’m drifting along in some movie, playing a part, and now I realize the fear is gone and something else has taken over my mind—it’s like being asleep and awake at the same time, like being in a dream but knowing you’re in one, and you can control everything if you just concentrate, make it come out the way you want.

  Maybe that’s what it’s like after you die.

  We go through the gate and start climbing up, into the trees. He’s making these low wet grunting noises.

  “You,” he says, squeezing my arm harder. Like I’ve done something wrong.

  I keep my head down, seeing my shoes, his.

  “Okay, come on, come on,” she says, waving her hand as we walk into the fern tangle, through the same path I took down, what I used to think was my secret.

  They keep pushing me, telling me to move faster, lead me toward a big tree, not my eucalyptus, another one, also with low branches.

  We go past it. Walk a ways till we’re in front of another tree and it’s so quiet, no one’s around, even if I scream no one will hear me.

  She stands to one side, still aiming the gun, looks at her camera case. Holding on to my arm, he takes out her camera and gives it to her.

  “Okay,” she tells me.

  I don’t know what she wants, so I don’t speak or move.

  She walks up and slaps me hard across the face and my head spins around, but it still doesn’t hurt as much as it should.

  “Do it, you little shit!”

  “What?” I say, but it sounds like another kid’s voice. Like I’m out of my body, watching myself move around in some robot movie.

  She raises her hand to hit me again, and I try to protect my face with my arm. He knees me in the back and that hurts.

  “Off with the pants, Streetsmarts—let him pull ’em down, honey.”

  He lets go of me as she keeps the gun on me. I touch my pants but don’t pull them down. He pulls his down, lets them fall around his legs. He’s wearing baggy white boxers and now he reaches into the fly hole—I turn away.

  “What?” She laughs. “Something you haven’t seen before? Yank ’em down, show us your good side.”

  I don’t move. She slaps me again. If she didn’t have the gun, I’d stomp her face, twist her head off.

  She laughs again. “Obey and it’ll all be over before you can say ouch. A little owie, that’s all.”

  She makes kissy noises, and he does too.

  “Sure,” that other kid’s voice says. “Sure, I know what you mean. Only . . .”

  “Only what?” She moves closer, puts the gun up against my nose. It feels cold and it smells like a gas station.

  The corner of my eye sees that his boxers are all the way down, but still around his ankles, like he doesn’t want to really take everything off. He’s moving his arm back and forth—

  “Only,” the kid says. “I . . . it . . . like I—I can do it. Sure, okay, but you—it—like now—first I’ve got to . . .”

  “Got to what?” The gun waves in front of my eyes.

  “You know.”

  “I don’t know! What?”

  “Got to . . . shit.”

  Silence.

  “Hear that?” she says to him.

  “Yeah,” he says, very quietly, and I’m thinking, Oh no, does he like that even better, did I just make a big mistake?

  She turns and looks at him and for a second I think of running for it, but then her face is back right in front of mine and I don’t know why I think this, but the way she looks, she could be a teacher, someone’s mother or grandma, it’s not my fault—

  “So?” she asks him.

  “Um . . . not today.”

  “Okay, trash,” she tells me. “Go ahead and do your thing—use your shirt to wipe your ass, then you’re gonna show us your good side.”

  I pull down my pants, and even though it’s a warm day, a beautiful day, a lemonade and corn day, my legs feel like stone.

  “So white,” he says.

  “C’mon, go, go.” Her voice is thick, and I understand: His sickness is doing it to kids; hers is being in charge. Watching.

  “Undies off, goddamn you—off, off, come on, finish up.”

  I pull down my shorts. Bending down, I manage to move a little farther away from her, but only inches. All around it’s so quiet, so green, even the leaves don’t move. It’s like the three of us are part of one big photograph or maybe this is the last moment before Go
d destroys the world, and why shouldn’t He?

  “Get going or I’ll kill you!” The gun and the camera are aimed at me. She’s going to take pictures of everything. I’m her souvenir.

  The problem is, before I had to really badly but now I can’t; it’s like my organs are blocks of ice jammed up against each other.

  “Do it or I’ll shoot it out of you!”

  The sound of her voice, the thought of being shot, gets my stomach going again and I do it.

  Then I reach behind with one hand to catch it.

  Gross, I hate doing it, but I tell myself it’s just digested food, stuff that was already inside me—

  “Look at that,” she says. “You disgusting little animal.”

  “Disgusting,” he says. But he means something else.

  I look up at her and nod. And smile. She’s surprised, wasn’t expecting a smile, and for a second she looks away.

  I reach back, and even though I was never good at sports, I aim and throw.

  Bam! Right in her face and all over her camera, over her blouse.

  She’s screaming and stumbling back and slapping at herself and he’s tripping over his shorts, confused. He straightens up and charges me, but she’s the one to watch, because she’s got the gun. She’s still screaming and slapping. I yank up my shorts and pants, and even before they’re completely in place, I’m runrunrunning, through branches that scratch my face, through space, through green, green that never stops, time that never stops, running, tripping, flying.

  Floating.

  I hear a loud hand clap, don’t stop, nothing hurts, I’m okay or maybe I’m not I don’t feel it, can’t feel anymore, that wouldn’t be bad, that wouldn’t be bad at all.

  I throw myself through green.

  Thank you, gorilla. If I could breathe, I’d laugh.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Just as Petra was about to call Empty Nest Productions for Darrell/Darren, another fax came through: Lisa’s last phone bill.