The Anything Goes Girl (A Brenda Contay Novel Of Suspense Book 1)

by Barry Knister

  As police would later think, Caprice Thibodeau had come home from the mall and tested the synthesizer. Lindbergh considered the scene. Even well-dressed women wore no nylons in such a climate, and her skirt had already hiked up.

  He turned over the plastic keyboard. Running its length was a heat sink, a metal strip to dissipate heat during use. He flipped the keyboard right side up and dropped it across the woman’s bare legs. With his rubber-soled wingtip, he pushed her bare ankle into contact with the chrome leg of the étagère, completing the circuit.

  He picked up the letters and turned away. For the next several minutes Lindbergh read. Yes, very personal. And she was right about Soublik, something he hadn’t noticed with Fox’s letters. Soublik couldn’t spell.

  Pulling out the accent light’s plug, he checked her pulse and re-socketed the cord. He then went into the kitchen, stepped around the dinette set, and parted the door wall’s curtain. The neighbor’s children were playing in a kiddy pool.

  He waited, irritated. Working before dark always posed problems. The phone rang once, the machine came on. A girlfriend asked Caprice to call. Ten minutes later, the children next door were called in to lunch. They would eat in their own kitchen, at the back.

  Returning to the front room, he gently tipped the étagère over on the body. He checked the front window before letting himself out, and walked to his car.

  As he drove away, Lindbergh turned on the air conditioning and settled back, feeling uncomfortable. He got his sunglasses from the console and put them on. They were too hot and he put them back. Too much stress. He pulled down the tie and undid his collar button.

  You’re thirty-two, he thought, driving. Living out of suitcases, with nothing but low lifes in Reno for friends. When you’re supposed to be a Bureau field agent, with a mortgage and a dog.

  “Come in.”

  Holding the door open the following morning, Mrs. Soublik stood tall and pretty, dressed in white shorts and a navy polo. Her gray hair was cut short and gave her oval face a youthful look. The face was unsettling, too much like the one in the Davison yearbook.

  Brenda stepped in and followed her through the living room. Smells of last night’s dinner lingered in the air, something with tomatoes and garlic. Family dinners, she thought. What can we talk about?

  Arriving home from the Pooles’, she had pulled out the Davison yearbook and leafed through, stopping to study action shots and team photos of Vince Soublik. They brought back memories of his vitality and boyish good looks, his sleek swimmer’s body. She had not thought of him since that night. Feeling guilty, Brenda had called and asked to come pay her respects.

  Mrs. Soublik led her out onto a screened porch. White wicker chairs and a couch with floral cushions were grouped around a glass table.

  “Coffee?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  Mrs. Soublik stepped back inside, and Brenda sat. She studied the backyard. A perfect lawn, tidy beds of impatiens around tall trees. Everything spoke of order and planning, of middle-class, solid citizens.

  Before coming, she had called Corps’ Washington office. Identifying herself as a reporter with W-DIG in Michigan, she had asked for background on Vincent Soublik, the Michigan Volunteer who had died in the Pacific. When the information officer for the Pacific Rim came on, he repeated the Pooles’ minimal account. Hanging up, Brenda had decided the Peace Corps wasn’t lying. They had gotten word and sent a plane for the body. Only then had they learned there wasn’t one. End of story.

  Mrs. Soublik came back with a carafe and two mugs. She poured and handed the coffee to Brenda.

  “Thank you.”

  “You said you were at the Pooles’ last night?”

  “Dr. Poole was a professor of mine. I knew your son at Davison, before he transferred to Michigan.”

  Pouring herself a cup, Mrs. Soublik sat opposite. She was smiling, but all her grief still came through. “Vince didn’t take a course from Gordon. He felt funny about it. Being a neighbor, growing up next door. He also said Gordon had a reputation for being tough.”

  “I won’t stay long,” Brenda said. “I just felt sorry and wanted you to know. Vince and I weren’t close, but I loved watching him compete.”

  “It’s good you came, Brenda. It means Vince lives in people’s thoughts.”

  “What led him to join the Peace Corps?”

  “To this day, I’m not sure,” Mrs. Soublik said. “It certainly surprised us. He worked for his dad after graduating, but kept his apartment in Ann Arbor. We own a medical supply business. One day he came home and told us he’d applied.”

  They both drank coffee in silence. Mrs. Soublik wasn’t really here now. She was with her son, talking to him about where he was going. Asking about diseases, anti-American resentments.

  “The Pooles told me there was a mix-up getting the news to you,” Brenda said. “Do you think you’ve been told the truth?”

  Mrs. Soublik put down her mug, folded her hands in her lap and looked out on the yard. After a moment she nodded.

  “Now, yes. Not at first. I overreacted then. I wanted someone to be responsible. It’s pointless to feel cheated because you can’t bury your son, but that’s how we feel. It took away our chance to come to terms, somehow. We wanted him home, if you can understand that.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference, does it? He’s gone, but you want him here. Some place you know, not just missing. When I see those old MIA bumper stickers, I now understand how the families must feel.”

  “Was there anything in his letters? Any mention of being sick?”

  “Nothing. He said the people on his island were very healthy. They had a scare with wasps, but after that he mostly helped out at the school, teaching English.”

  Mrs. Soublik smiled again and looked down at her hands. “He was funny about the wasps,” she said. “He wrote us everyone looked like they had chicken pox. A researcher on the island was doing some kind of study. Calvin Moser. His company sent out the wrong bugs and everyone got stung. I have a picture.” She got up and went inside.

  Wasps. Living on some desert island, with nowhere to hide. She imagined crowds running in all directions, slapping themselves, yelling. There was a strange clarity to the scene.

  Mrs. Soublik came back out and offered her the photo. “That’s Nauko with him,” she said. “His girl. They worked together at the island school.”

  The photo showed Vince in shorts and sandals, standing beside a young woman who just reached his shoulder. She was dark, with refined features and straight black hair almost to her waist. They were smiling outside a thatched-roof house, faces dabbed with white lotion.

  “When was this taken?”

  “A year ago last May. Just after he got there.”

  The front door slammed. Mrs. Soublik looked toward the living room. “Bethy?” She got the carafe and poured more coffee. “My daughter,” she said. “My husband’s playing golf, to get his mind off it. He hates the game.” She looked again to the yard. “I think about Nauko all the time now. I wish I could talk to her.”

  A girl of about sixteen appeared in the entry. Unlike her mother, she didn’t look like Vince. She was deeply tanned, small and blond, dressed in a leotard and cutoffs.

  “Bethy, this is Brenda Contay. She knew Vince.”

  Beth Soublik did not come forward. “I know who she is.” She stood rigidly, hands in fists. “I saw the stupid logo on her car. Why’d you let her in?”

  “Honey, there’s no need, Brenda heard—”

  “Don’t you know she’s The Lightning Rod? She only does stories on crazies. She’s perverted.”

  “Elizabeth, that’s enough.” Mrs. Soublik stood. “You don’t talk to anyone in this house that way.”

  “She’s just here to get a story. She wants us to cry and roll around like looneys.” Beth Soublik glared at Brenda. “That’s right, isn’t it? Someone dies, you run right over to get the gory details. You’re a joke and you’re n
ot messing with my brother.”

  “Honey, she’s not here for that. She knew Vince.”

  “You believe her?” The girl saw the photo and grabbed it off the table. “This is great, Mom, this is perfect. She can show his picture and make up some big lie about wasps killing everyone.”

  “Beth—”

  Clutching the photo, Vince’s sister turned and ran through the house. Brenda could hear her pounding up the stairs.

  “I’m sorry, they were very close,” Mrs. Soublik said. A door slammed on the second floor. “I’m afraid we’re all looking for someone to punish.”

  “No apology needed.” Brenda collected her purse and stood. Much worse abuse no longer got to her. Nothing does, she thought as she followed Mrs. Soublik through the living room.

  Brenda stepped outside and turned. “Tell your daughter there’s no story. That’s a promise.”

  ◆◆◆◆◆

  She took the Reuther Expressway back to her Southfield high rise. The end of July was hot and sunny. Haulaways loaded with engines and new models rocked her car as they passed. The motion felt like Beth Soublik pounding up to her room.

  Vince’s sister wasn’t wrong about how it would play. First, the photo of Vince and his native girl stung by wasps—a handsome interracial couple, great visuals. Then, doctored file footage from some other story, bloated bodies covered with bugs to keep people watching as the voiceover explained the irony of it, everyone’s favorite All-State freestyler who drowned. End with the nighttime mailbox shot, then cut to commercial.

  Fifteen minutes later, when her elevator shunted to a stop at the eighth floor, the bump underfoot felt like a door slamming. Brenda moved down the hall, let herself in, and walked down her own hall to her bedroom.

  The closet door stood open and she crossed to it, unbuttoning her dress. The closet’s cedar paneling still held the scent of Sam Towland’s cologne. She pulled off her slip, seeing Beth Soublik’s angry face.

  Her own brother Morris was in law school, at Rutgers. Imagine Morris standing up for you over anything, Brenda thought. Or you for him.

  MONDAY, AUGUST 3

  FAIRLANE TOWN CENTER MALL

  Freddy Song backed the van into a parking space. Leaving the engine on, he adjusted the air conditioning and settled back to wait. Less than a minute later, the redhead passed. He watched her move down the row of cars, on her way to the Lord & Taylor entrance. With her was a man in baggy pants and a wild shirt, carrying a bag. That would be Ned Chambers, her cameraman.

  Since Friday, Song had learned quite a bit about Brenda Contay. Besides her press pack, collected Saturday at the studio, Song had discovered most of what he now knew from the terminal in the back of his van. Early Sunday, Professor Poole had logged on to read his e-mail, and Song had hacked into the Davison Polytechnic mainframe. Once in, it had been easy to access Brenda Contay’s transcript, residential and personal files.

  She had grown up in Larchmont, New York, gone to public schools, and graduated late after two disciplinary suspensions. Her SAT scores were mixed, poor in math but a strong 720 on the verbal. Her father had been born in Canada, mother Jewish. According to the Counseling file, she had gained a reputation at Davison for loose behavior. She had dropped out for the second time in her junior year.

  The university’s psychologist viewed Contay’s dangerous sexual conduct in the age of AIDS as stemming from unresolved grief related to the death of her father. The mother still lived in Larchmont, and Contay had a younger brother. In her last year at Davison, she had shared an apartment with Renee Cappelli, a chemistry major now teaching in the Upper Peninsula.

  Song worked his shoulders before reaching back to the Styrofoam cooler to get a Coke. Popping it open, he thought of the voice of his contact in Phoenix. It was female and familiar, and he wondered again where he had met her. He flipped through a mental Rolodex of company conferences and workshops, conventions, retreats.

  Neff Industries ran many such programs. Probably she had figured at one. If they liked you at Neff, they took pains to bring you along. If they liked you a lot, they enlisted you in what was known as Minot’s Marines.

  You made the cut to Marine—to Neff Industries’ fast track—if you were smart in a certain way, with fire in the belly. All Minot’s Marines had survived hard times growing up, but as far as Song knew, there were no other Vietnamese boat people like himself. Just four when taken off an overloaded tramp steamer in the South China Sea, he had been sent with other Amerasian orphans to Corpus Christi.

  A decent foster home, good grades, scholarships. With a new degree in math and computer science from Texas State, he had received an invitation to lunch. Not from a recruiter, not from Neff’s Human Resources department—from Russ Minot himself.

  Holding the telephone in his dorm room that day, Song had frozen. One of the ten wealthiest men in America was calling him. As long as he lived, Song would remember it. The call, the corporate Gulfstream jet to Tucson, and lunch one-on-one at the longest dining table Song had ever seen.

  Mostly, Mr. Minot had talked about the country and its future, about how that future was precariously perched on a Black Diamond downhill run.

  “You don’t know what that is, do you?” he said. “A Black Diamond is the most dangerous, demanding ski slope you ever saw, Freddy. Boulders, trees—think of all that as foreign competition. And this downhill run has tank traps, too, put up by Big Government. Excessive taxes, regulations to frustrate creativity and initiative. All that makes it even tougher for American business to get down that slope.

  “That’s why you’re here, son,” Russ Minot told him. “You’ve already climbed a good many mountains in your life. No chair lift for you. How’d you like to take on that Black Diamond with me? Come onboard and help me spot all those traps and boulders, son, you won’t be sorry. That’s a promise.”

  In the eight years since, he had worked twelve-hour days, six days a week. Promotions, personal notes of encouragement—family. Song knew a division managership would figure by thirty-five. He also knew that his work in Michigan was the biggest test yet on his own Black Diamond downhill run.

  ◆◆◆◆◆

  “What do you think?”

  “Why ask? You’ve lost it. You’re crazy.”

  “I mean the dress.”

  It was tan raw silk, short-sleeved, with big wooden buttons. Standing before a three-sided mirror in Lord & Taylor’s Better Dresses, Brenda studied her cameraman’s betrayed expression in the right mirror. At his feet were shopping bags full of new shorts and boat shoes, khakis, cotton blouses. Ned had taped as she shopped and talked to clerks. He had said it would make a nice tie-in when they edited her Rio pieces. Putting on the dress in the changing room, she had decided it was time to tell him.

  “How about a little support here?” she said. “I’m going off to the Heart of Darkness, you won’t even give me a play?”

  “You’re crazy,” he said again. “They’ll fire your ass in a New York minute.”

  “I need a sabbatical.”

  “From what? Me?”

  “Please don’t pout, it won’t work,” she said. “I need the time.”

  Ned shook his head. “Tickets, hotels, contacts. Julio’s waiting on you, and you don’t show.”

  Brenda looked back at herself and liked what she saw. Who knew? It could be Masterpiece Theatre out there. Lawn parties, polo. She might need a dress like this. She raised it at the shoulders, let it drop, turned left and right.

  “Sending me off to the library,” he said. “Telling me it’s research.”

  “If I told you what it was for, would you go?”

  “No.”

  She had spent Saturday afternoon online, reading about Micronesia. There wasn’t much to it, just specks of coral and volcanic rock spread out over four or five million square miles of ocean. She had also called a travel agent. How would someone get to Pirim atoll, in the Eastern Caroline Islands? A half hour later, the agent had called back. Well, you had to
go to Pohnpei first, and you didn’t just hop a jet, have some chicken Kiev and step off there. You took three or four flights, depending on schedules. With luck, you might reach Pohnpei in twenty-four hours.

  “It’s really unprofessional,” Ned told her.

  Brenda stepped away from the mirror. “You forget, I’m not a professional.”

  “All these clerks,” he said. “They remember this story, that one. Specific stories we’ve done. Some of them months ago. What are you going do, open a cheese shop?”

  She laughed at the idea.

  “You think it’s funny.” Ned was not smiling. “Let me tell you, I have bad vibes about this. What’s in Micro-hoozits, for Christ’s sake?”

  All day Sunday she had sat on her apartment balcony, working it out. Amid sounds of freeway traffic, and planes making their approach into Metropolitan Airport, she kept seeing the photo of Vince and his girl. And Vince’s sister, angry at the thought of her dead brother being turned into another sleazy tabloid story. By late afternoon, Brenda had made up her mind. It was time to get out. Past time.

  She looked again to the mirror. Arms folded now, Ned was staring down at her packages. She stepped behind his chair and began kneading his shoulders. “Relax,” she said, looking at their reflection. “We have stuff in the can for at least three weeks. Or they run a ‘Best Of.’” That would give him time to let go. “And if they drop me, we’ll take our dog and pony to NEWS 2.”

  “What makes you think I’d go?”

  “Because you love me.” Waiting until his eyes met hers in the mirror, still massaging, she vamped for him and shimmied her shoulders.

  “Yeah, well, The Lightning Rod won’t travel,” he said. “W-DIG owns it.”

  “Fine. We’ll do snow mobiles and jet skis at 2. We’ll work a seasonal angle. The Frozen Flash Meets the Wet T-Shirt. As Jerry would say, I love it already.”