Jake nodded, not entirely understanding what she meant, but letting it go. He sat up a little straighten Melanie adjusted the neckline of her blouse over the swell of her breasts. Paradise lost. Jake slumped back into the chair. Might as well be comfortable. He said, “Da situashun’s unna control?”
“The dishwasher’s been acting up.” Melanie gave him a slow smile. “But that’s about the extent of my problems, really.”
“No crazy talk about a honeymoon, one-way trip ta da Bahamas, anyt’ing along dem lines ...?”
Melanie shook her head. A few drops of wine spilled over the rim of her glass and plummeted to Jake’s lap. Jake willed her to go to work on him with her napkin. To no avail.
An associate had told Jake he knew a stock promoter, Harold Wismer, who’d had a deal go sour on him, was looking desperate. Jake had invited Harold over, told him he had some cash needed laundering. Harold, talking nonstop, had come up with a dozen wildly lucrative scams. Jake had introduced him to the backyard Dobermans, explained in gory detail what would happen to Harold and his entire family, generations past, present and future, if he tried to screw Jake around. Harold had turned so pale you could almost see right through him.
But he hadn’t tried to back out of the deal. Jake, sucked in by the prospect of doubling or even tripling his net worth, had emptied his vault into Harold’s lap. Harold had given him a time frame, and exceeded it. Jake was growing increasingly distraught. Pissed, even. Where were his triple-digit profits, or even his fuckin’ original investment? Melanie was doing her best to find out. Or so she said. Jake looked down at his pants. The wine stains were the diameter of .45-calibre bulletholes.
Jake rattled his ice at Steve, who snatched the glass out of his hand and trotted over to the sideboard and was back with the refill in jig time. Jake sipped at his Turkey. He said, “Guy ain’t been onna phone ta his travel agent, lookin’ at pictures a palm trees, nuttin’ like dat?”
“Believe me, you’d be the first to know.”
Jake patted her knee. “No, baby. Ya my early warnin’ system and ya’d be da first ta know. Thas why ya doin’ wha’ ya do. Excuse my Portuguese, but tha’s ya fuckin’ job.”
Melanie slurped half her glass. Jake watched her cheeks bulge as the wine sloshed around inside her mouth. If she spat at him he’d do something awful, he just knew it.
Melanie’s throat moved. She dabbed at her lips with her napkin. The front door was opened and shut. Butch’s collar rattled as the dog came racing up the stairs, dragging Marty along behind as effortlessly as if he were a human-shaped helium balloon.
Marty took note of the whipped, chickenshit look in Steve and Axel’s eyes. He let Butch get close enough to the chair to have a no-touch sniff at Melanie. Jake was crazy about Butch, but that could change quicker than the weather. Butch was a little on the rambunctious side. She’d already chewed up a couple of grand’s worth of furniture, and had a tendency to knock stuff over and not even notice. It was kind of funny, when vases shattered. It hadn’t been the least bit funny when, two days before, she’d knocked Jake flying.
The old killer had reacted instinctively. Screaming with fear and rage, he’d yanked Marty’s pistol out of his shoulder rig. He’d fired three times before finally getting his trigger finger under control. The first shot drilled the fireplace mantel. The second shattered a picture Marty had always liked. The third and last shot punched a hole in the picture window.
Butch, sensing she was in mortal danger, hunched her back and messed the carpet.
First things first. Marty had retrieved and reloaded his pistol, got Axel busy cleaning up, and then put on a tie and jacket and followed the trajectory of Jake’s last shot to the house across the street. To his untutored eye the house had several major design elements in common with the starkly white church that squatted on the corner of Cypress and West Twelfth.
The house was set a hundred feet back from the lot line, at the end of a gravel driveway. Nobody answered when Marty rang the bell at the gate. He climbed over the gate and walked down the driveway until the sound of the rock crunching underfoot started to get to him, then cut diagonally across the emerald-green lawn.
A family of bronze deer, an eight-point buck and a doe and a cute little speckled Bambi-type fawn, grazed in the lee of the rose garden. Marty thought it would be kind of neat if Jake’d shot one of them, but it was not to be. The house had an empty feel to it. The curtains were drawn. There were no cars in the driveway or newspapers on the porch, or any sign of life at all, that he could see. He followed a narrow, pink concrete sidewalk around the side of the house to the cedar-fenced and gated backyard. A shot from Jake’s window would have gone straight down that same path.
Spring-loaded hinges squeaked discreetly as he pushed open the gate. He stepped into the backyard, eased the gate shut. The swimming pool was right in front of him, a perfect circle about fifty feet in diameter, which looked like a huge blue eye. On the far side of the pool there was a stand of bamboo, and hard by the bamboo a glass-topped patio table with white-painted tubular steel legs, four tubular steel chairs with pastel cushions. A longhaired wig lay on the table, limp as a freshly-skinned pelt. In the chair most directly facing the pool sat a naked, somewhat anaemic middle-aged man.
An open package of Player’s cigarettes covered the man’s genitals. An unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth. A dark green Bic disposable lighter and several loose cigarettes lay scattered on the tiles at his feet. The man’s eyes were open. He seemed to be staring straight at Marty, squinting into the sunlight, the glare of the pool.
Marty saw right away that there was no point in introducing himself. He walked over to the table, tilted the man’s head back. The bullet had left a small dark hole about an inch above the eyebrow. It had not exited the skull. The chair was clean. There was hardly any blood at all, nothing but a thin, dark red line that ran vertically from the fatal wound to the eyebrow, where it made a sharp left across the bridge of the nose and trickled into the eye.
A fly circled, slow as a blimp. Marty punched it to the tiles. Stepped on it and felt it crunch.
He took the cigarette from the dead man’s mouth, lit up with the solid gold Ronson Jake had given him for his twenty-first.
The back door was open. He went inside. There was a foot-high stack of mail on a table in the entrance hall. The stamps on the envelopes at the bottom of the pile had been cancelled a little over two weeks ago. The machine in the den had spouted yards of fax paper. He checked the dates, read a few messages, deduced that the home’s owner and his wife were on a round-the-world cruise, had been gone a month and weren’t due back for another week or so.
He continued his exploration of the house. The dead man lived over the garage. His name was Tim Grant. His expired Irish passport was in the bottom drawer of his dresser. He was fifty-eight years old. Next-of-kin was his mother, Colleen Grant. There was a Belfast address. Poor Tim. A single guy, so far from home.
In an envelope hidden beneath Tim Grant’s thin mattress, Marty found a plain brown envelope fat with hundreds.
He put the passport in the envelope and stuffed the envelope in his pocket.
He called a glazier he knew, who was a pal of Jake’s. When darkness fell, he and Steve went back across the street, wrapped the corpse in a plastic drop-sheet and stuffed it in the back of Marty’s ’96 Pathfinder. Bright and early the next morning the two of them drove north for hours. Marty found a disused logging road, followed it deep into the bush. He stopped, slung Tim Grant’s corpse over his shoulder and walked a quarter-mile into a clearcut. Steve did the spadework. The clearcut had already been replanted. The area would be logged again in about twenty years.
Back in the city, Marty had mailed the passport and cash across the green waters to poor Colleen.
Jake said, “Hey, where ya been?”
Marty blinked away the memory of the clearcut. He said, “Butch had an appointment with the vet to get his teeth cleaned. Guy called my cellphone on the way.
Had to cancel because of an emergency. A cockapoo got whacked by a Jeep. I rescheduled for next week.”
Jake frowned. “Butch gonna be okay till den?”
“Yeah, sure.” Marty smiled. “Look at her, she’s got teeth like a brand-new chainsaw.”
Jake’s hand slithered across Melanie’s luscious hip. “Wanna stay for dinner, baby? Chow down ta a nice plate a Marty’s special homemade ravioli wit a delicious fillin’ a leeks, brazil nuts an’ cashews?”
Melanie smiled across the room at Marty. Her long nails, red as chili peppers, stroked Jake’s smooth skull. “Is he kidding me?”
“We’re gonna start with cold zucchini soup,” said Marty. “Followed by stuffed artichokes. Brown bread ice cream for dessert.”
“Yeah?” Melanie licked her lips. She said, “You can cook?” She kept stroking Jake’s bald head but held Marty’s eye.
“I can cook up a storm,” said Marty.
“Stay,” said Jake.
“Okay, but if I drink too much, Marty’s got to drive me home ...”
Marty shrugged. “That’d be Jake’s call, not mine.”
Melanie swung her legs around, kicked off a sparkly high-heeled shoe and languidly rubbed her foot against Butch’s chest. The Rott leaned into her. She took the dog’s head in her hands, tugged at her floppy ears and then tilted up her massive jowls and blessed her with a lingering kiss. Butch’s stubby tail swept the carpet. Melanie lifted up her flews and clicked a fingernail across her sharp white teeth.
Jake sat there, quiet but tense.
Marty and Steve and Axel stood around him in a semicircle. All of them trembling a little, like blades of grass in a hot and capricious wind.
22
Willows took the Ronald LeGrand file home with him. He plodded through it as he sat at the dining-room table. The big pot of water he’d put on the kitchen stove a quarter-hour ago had just reached full boil. The rich, mouthwatering scent of Annie’s spaghetti sauce leaked out of the microwave.
In the kitchen, Parker dropped a thick handful of spaghetti into the pot, stirred it with a fork.
She popped the cork on a bottle of red wine.
Jack looked up from the file as she came into the dining room carrying the open bottle and two glasses. He shut the file and pushed it away from him, poured the wine and handed her a glass.
Annie, seated opposite him, looked up from her French text. She said, “Ronald LeGrand. File ninety-six dash eleven. Who is he?”
“A stock promoter.”
“Was he murdered?”
Willows nodded.
“Can I look at his file?”
Willows shook his head.
“Just for a minute? If I promise not to look at the pictures?”
“Forget it, Annie.” Willows sipped at his wine.
Parker said, “Chilean. Ten bucks. Like it?”
Willows nodded. He’d have preferred a Cutty on the rocks, but nobody likes a whiner. Plus, he and Claire had agreed without wasting a lot of time talking about it that he was putting too great a strain on his liver, that it would be a good idea if he cut back a little. Unfortunately, they had very different ideas about what “a little” meant.
He drank some more wine, a measured, self-conscious sip. Parker put her glass down on the table untouched. She said, “Back in a minute.”
Annie said, “Want some help with dinner?”
“No thanks, honey.”
Willows put his own glass down. He followed Parker into the kitchen. “Anything I can do?”
“Slice the bread, if you don’t mind.”
There was a twisty loaf of French bread on the counter. Willows got the knife and cutting board and went to work.
Parker carried the spaghetti pot over to the sink, poured the spaghetti into a colander and rinsed it with water that had been brought to a boil in the kettle and left to simmer.
The microwave beeped. Willows abandoned the bread, went over to the microwave and swung open the door. Annie’s sauce bubbled volcanically in a clear glass bowl.
Parker said, “I’ll get that.” She brushed past him and lifted the bowl from the microwave. Willows shut the door. What was it that he found so irresistibly sexy about crocodile oven mitts?
Parker said, “The bread, Jack.”
Willows cut up a little less than half the loaf, arranged the slices on a plate and put the rest of the loaf into a plastic bag. As was often the case, he found these routine domestic chores oddly soothing.
Parker picked up two steaming plates and announced that dinner was ready. Willows trailed along behind her, carrying Annie’s plate and the bread, feeling satisfactorily useful. They sat down at the table and Annie, as had become her habit, offered up a prayer of thanks. Willows listened to the words with half an ear. Should God receive a note of appreciation for the food on the table when Sean lay in the hospital, recovering from a serious gunshot wound? He guessed the key word was recovering. The prayer ended. He reached for the bread, snatched up the crusty heel. Devil take the hindmost.
As they ate, Willows and Parker took turns asking Annie all the standard questions about school, and received all the usual answers. As Willows mopped up the last of his sauce with his third slice of bread, he said, “How’s Lewis? You two still an item?”
Annie gave him a cool look. “Excuse me?”
“The last few days, it’s been Lewis this and Lewis that. Lewis, Lewis, Lewis. But tonight, nothing. I just wondered, what happened to him? Did a piano drop on him? Was he snatched off the planet by an alien spacecraft ...?”
Annie’s face was pink. Willows faltered. He glanced at Parker, silently enlisted her aid.
Parker said, “Is something wrong, Annie?”
“He’s studying for a chemistry exam.”
“Aha!” said Parker.
Annie’s fork clanged against her plate. “Why are you cross-examining me like this? Are you accusing me of doing something wrong?”
Parker’s smile faded. Annie was genuinely angry; she looked as if she was about to burst into tears.
Willows said, “No, of course not.” But why was she behaving like this? He reached out, intending to give her hand a reassuring squeeze. She pulled away, shrank back in her chair to avoid him.
Parker said, “We didn’t mean to upset you, honey ...”
Tears welled up in Annie’s eyes. She pushed back her chair and fled wailing to her room.
Willows stood up. His paper napkin tumbled to the carpet.
Parker touched his arm. “Sit down, Jack. Give her a few minutes to compose herself. Then I’ll go talk to her, okay?”
“Fine,” said Willows. He was surprised to see he’d emptied his glass. He poured himself another, tilted the bottle inquiringly towards Parker.
“No thanks, I never drink and parent.”
Willows cleaned up the dishes, scraped the leftovers into the garbage and ran the plates under the tap before putting them in the dishwasher. When he went back into the dining room for the glasses, Parker was no longer at the table. He lurked at the bottom of the stairs, listened for a moment to Parker’s quiet murmur, Annie’s bitter, grudging response. Dialogue. Slightly reassured, he went back into the kitchen, and finished loading the dishwasher. He turned the machine on.
He got down on his knees and prayed for Sean’s continued recovery.
His bets hedged, he helped himself to the evening’s last glass of wine and went outside and slumped into one of a pair of green Adirondack chairs crowded onto the back porch.
The clump of thirty-foot-tall white birch trees by the garage swayed gently in the evening breeze. Thousands of pale-green, spear-shaped leaves shimmied and shook. A robin trotted across the lawn almost directly below him. The bird stopped suddenly, tilted its head as if listening ...
Barney, the marmalade stray that had sneaked into Willows’ unmarked car and subsequently shouldered himself into Willows’ life, slipped stealthily through the picket fence at the lane. The cat flattened itself against the grass a
nd crept slowly towards the unsuspecting robin. The way Barney held himself indicated that he’d finally learned to hunt without jingling his bell.
The robin stiffened. It’s beak jabbed at the lawn, withdrew. The bird had a firm grip on a large earthworm. But part of the worm was still fixed in the earth, and the worm wasn’t letting go.
Barney crept closer.
Tripod, the most recent feline addition to the household, lurched along the peak of the garage roof and then angled clumsily down across the shingles towards the gutter.
The worm suddenly gave it up. The robin staggered a little. The leaves of the birch trees twitched and shivered. Barney hurtled across the lawn. The robin uttered a panicked shriek and rose up into the air with a wild beating of wings.
Tripod leapt. The cat’s left front leg had been amputated, but his right leg was fully extended, claws unsheathed.
Willows was on his feet, shouting. The chair tumbled down the steps.
Barney screeched in shock and terror as Tripod thumped down on him. A blur of snarling, mottled orange resolved itself into two terrified cats speeding in opposite directions. Barney leapt over the neighbour’s chain-link fence and vanished into a flowerbed. Tripod’s claws scrabbled on the concrete walk as he tore around the side of the house. The robin had vanished, but for a few pale feathers that drifted across the lawn.
Willows searched for his wine glass and found it in pieces at the bottom of the steps. He hunted down the shards, carried them in his cupped hand to the garbage can by the lane. Somewhere not far off a radio played faintly. On the far side of the lane, the neighbour’s laundry hung from a drooping line. Willows looked away, but too late. He found himself making idle comparisons. Claire had once inadvertently left the price tag on a pair of silk bikini panties, and Willows had marvelled at the cost. What, he wondered, would be the tariff on Mrs. Larson’s spinnaker-size sweet nothings.
Smiling, he made his way back to the house, followed the drone of the television into the den.
Annie and Claire were watching “The Price Is Right.” Parker made room on the sofa and Willows sat down beside her, with Annie on his left. Annie’s eyes were red, but she gave him a nice smile, leaned her head against his shoulder for a moment, and squeezed his arm.
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