My throat made a choking sound, and Charles came from behind me.
He heard all he needed to know. ‘That’s not good,’ he muttered.
I ran through the hall to the bathroom, my body sweating, my stomach turning as if I had something inside me that needed out or I would die too. I ran cold water over my face and held my cold hands over my eyes. When I managed to stand and look in the mirror, my reflection seemed for a long moment to be that of a man I didn’t know, as though the shock of seeing the dead woman could change my lineaments inside and out.
I went into the hall. Charles was inside the dead woman’s room and I stood for a while outside her door, unwilling to look in, unwilling to see again what I had already seen, listening to Charles moving around the body, opening and shutting drawers and closet doors. The picture I’d dropped was at my feet and I picked it up, folded it into quarters and crammed it into my pocket.
When Charles stepped out of the bedroom he looked at me carefully, assessing the damage, then walked toward the kitchen. ‘Nothing in her room,’ he said. ‘At least nothing that means anything to me.’
I followed him out the back door on to the stairs. The dog lay near the fence, watching us. Sunlight glinted off the metal banister and heat radiated from the walls of the house.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket.
‘What’re you doing?’ Charles said.
‘Calling Daniel Turner,’ I said.
Charles shook his head. ‘What good’ll it do? He already thinks you’re in this too deep.’
I opened the phone and dialed.
He said, ‘I’ll let the police know and keep you out of it.’
‘Yeah?’
He nodded.
‘Fine.’ I snapped the phone shut and we went down the stairs and to the gate.
‘Hold on,’ Charles said. He went back to the stairs, picked up the two dog bowls and disappeared inside. A minute later he came out with water and refrigerator scraps – salami, a chunk of cheese, a clump of congealed noodles. He set the bowls on the concrete and the dog came from the fence and circled, its eyes fixed on Charles, until Charles stepped away. Then it approached the dishes and lapped at the food.
‘That stuff’ll make a dog sick,’ I said.
Charles headed to the gate. ‘Not on my conscience.’
EIGHT
Thunder rang in the roof beams. I steadied my beer bottle and lifted it to my lips.
As I’d driven home, a storm had blown in over the river, dropping splinters of lightning into the wind-whipped water. The rain had started suddenly, pelting the windshield and blinding me to the world, and I’d wondered if it wasn’t better this way but I’d flipped on my wipers and headlights like a good man. In the driveway I’d sat in the car with the engine off, cocooned in water that was streaming over steel and glass, until the heat inside rose and I’d gotten out and sprinted the fifteen steps between car and front porch. Now I sat on a kitchen stool with a Coors on the counter, my clothes heavy and cold with rainwater, our cat Fela sitting on the counter, watching me, and I wondered if I gave a damn.
Charles didn’t. I knew that for certain. He did what he did because it was all he knew. He fixed what needed fixing. He broke what needed breaking. He thought about nothing else.
Outside, a gust tore through the oak tree, scattering leaves and Spanish moss and tossing a branch into the swimming pool. Rainwater poured off the roof and collected on the patio.
Charles first came to me after I attacked the men who were beating up the Honduran kids. I’d bonded out of jail and gone home to my dad who’d said little and stared at me as if I were a stranger in his house. For ten days an ankle monitor kept me inside until the newspapers declared me a hero and my lawyer convinced the judge I presented no risk. I offered to help at the service stations but my dad gave me the cold stare as if to say you’re none of mine so I spent my days golfing or at the beach. Whenever I went out, a red Mercury Capri followed me. I wasn’t surprised. For every letter to the editor supporting me, another said I should be hung by my neck. The TV news had reporters tracking my behavior. The parents of the man who’d died had filed a civil suit, which my lawyer said would mean investigators watching everything I did so I needed to be good.
I was eating lunch at Worman’s Deli when a man, somewhere between seventy and eighty, got out of the Capri. Charles. He walked into the restaurant and sat across from me at my table. He said, ‘You fucked those boys up good.’
I ate a bite of hamburger and pretended he wasn’t there.
He said, ‘Not a lot of guys who can take down five men, kill one and break another’s neck. Takes a special kind of guy to do that. It’s not about strength but I suppose you already know that. It’s not about being a great fighter either. It’s about focus.’
The waitress came to the table and Charles said, ‘Give me what he’s having.’
I took ten dollars from my wallet and gave it to her. ‘For my bill.’
When she left, Charles said, ‘You can’t run away from it. God knows I tried.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes you do,’ he said. ‘You know it and it scares you. It scared me too when I first discovered it in myself.’ He leaned across the table. ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve told no one else. It scares me still. But that doesn’t mean I can run from it.’
I looked at the fat red scars that descended from his eyes. ‘What happened to your face?’
‘A whole lot of crying,’ he said.
‘Looks like someone raked you with a knife.’
‘Could’ve been that too. By the time you’re my age you’ll look like me or worse.’
He was angering me but I was determined not to show it. ‘Why do you think you know me?’
‘Because I do.’
I laughed at him. He was a lunatic.
He shrugged and said, ‘Some men are born forsaken.’
The waitress returned with my change and a receipt and put them on the table.
I asked Charles, ‘What do you want from me?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not what I want from you. It’s what you want from me. I can teach you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I don’t need your help.’
‘Yes you do,’ he said. ‘It’ll be clear when you no longer need me.’
‘Yeah? How’s that?’
‘That’ll be the day that you try to kill me.’
I stood. ‘I’ve got enough trouble already without you following me around, all right?’
I was willing to wait for an answer. He took my receipt, printed on it with a ballpoint pen and slid it across the table. It said Charles Tucker and included a phone number. ‘Call if you need me,’ he said.
I said, ‘I never will.’
Susan came in as lightning struck with a crack that sounded like something had broken in the sky and land. The kitchen lights flickered. Susan was wearing a yellow cotton dress and though her hips had widened in recent years I wanted them still. ‘Come here,’ I said and she came. I held her and kissed her forehead.
She said, ‘What have you done?’
A bead of perspiration had formed above her lip and I felt an impulse to kiss it away. ‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Don’t lie to me.’ She pulled away, got a beer for herself and left the room.
I poured a pool of beer on the counter in front of Fela. She sniffed it, jerked her head away, sniffed it again and lapped it up. When she was done she purred and looked at me for more.
Thunder rumbled across the sky.
I wondered if I gave a damn.
The phone rang, rang again. On the third ring I answered it.
It was Daniel Turner. He said, ‘Hey, BB, guess where I am?’
‘I don’t play guessing games.’
His voice was shaky with anger or fear or both. ‘I’m standing in the house where Ashley Littleton lived. One of the neighbors called and said a couple of hours ago two men were in the yar
d acting suspiciously. I thought I should check things out and when I did I found Ashley Littleton’s roommate dead. Same as Ashley Littleton, Tonya Richmond and Belinda Mabry. And guess what else? The neighbor wrote down a description of the car that the two men got out of. A white Lexus. He got the tag number too.’
‘Shit,’ I said.
‘I know enough about a dead body to tell you this girl didn’t die in the last couple of hours,’ he said. ‘But I sure as hell would like to know why you were in her house and I sure would like to know if you’ve ever been here before.’
‘First and only time,’ I said. ‘I went to see if the roommate could tell me anything about Belinda’s killer.’
‘You’re a fool, BB.’
‘I know that without you telling me.’
‘The neighbor said you were with an older man.’
‘That’s true.’
‘You riding with Charles Tucker again?’
I admitted I was.
‘Jesus Christ! I thought you were done with that eight years ago.’
‘I thought so too.’
He said nothing. The rain drummed on the roof.
‘Daniel?’ I said.
He sighed into the phone. ‘This is going to be messy,’ he said. ‘You’d best come into the station, make yourself available, tell your story, do it without a lawyer.’
‘You think that would be best, huh?’
‘I do, BB. I do.’
‘Then I’ll come right in,’ I said and hung up.
We kept a laptop computer plugged in on a shelf under Susan’s cookbooks. I typed into it, finished my beer and went back out through the rain to my car.
Christopher had been in and out of my life, mostly out, since the autumn when he attacked Bobby Mabry. I’d last seen him four or five summers earlier at a Suns minor league game. We’d been polite, the way you can be a couple of decades after a terrible pain, and he’d introduced me to his wife, a mousy woman he’d married after he’d cleaned himself up. The latest word was that they’d divorced and he’d remarried and moved to the beach. Google put him in a new housing development between the Intracoastal and the ocean.
The company that built the development had put up rows of white two-story stuccos, each with a two-car garage and a matching mailbox at the curb. The lawns were well tended and the palm trees looked fresh from the nursery. I walked through the rain to Christopher’s door a little before six and pushed a bell that sounded like the chimes of a grandfather clock.
A blonde thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl answered and called for Christopher, who came to the door in white shorts and an unpressed Oxford cloth shirt. He didn’t look surprised that I’d shown up. ‘BB! It’s great to see you. Come in – get out of the rain, for God’s sake.’
I stepped into an overly air-conditioned front hall and followed him into a living room. The girl who’d answered the door went to the next room and started practicing on a piano.
‘What’s up?’ Christopher asked. His face had filled and fattened with time and had the uneven glow of a man who’d spent too much time in the sun or with a bottle, or both. He hung his bottom lip open in a smile which made him look friendly and a little slow. I didn’t remember him doing that when we were kids.
I asked, ‘You hear about Belinda Mabry?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Saw it on the news. Terrible.’
A blonde woman came into the room. She wore jeans, flip-flops with bright red toenails and a Hawaiian shirt. His face lit up when she entered. ‘Linda, this is BB – William Byrd – a childhood friend. He also knew Belinda Mabry.’
She smiled, said she was glad to meet me and acted like a woman who’d escaped in life without a lot of damage. I wondered how Christopher had ended up with her. ‘Have a seat, BB,’ she said. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’
‘I’d love a beer,’ I said and she left us alone.
Christopher’s stepdaughter hit a wrong key and started again. ‘So what can I do for you, BB?’ he asked.
‘When I think about who might’ve wanted to hurt Belinda, you come to mind.’
He looked at me with friendly amusement. ‘You’re still whipped on her, aren’t you? It’s been twenty-five years, BB.’
‘You don’t need to tell me how long it’s been.’
‘I moved on,’ he said. ‘I figured you did too. I’m sure she did.’
‘How would you know that?’
‘I could tell,’ he said. ‘I had dinner at her house when she moved back. She was living a different life.’
It made no sense that she would’ve invited him to dinner. ‘How did that happen?’
‘What? My going to her house? She called and asked me.’
I shook my head. ‘Not after what you did to Bobby.’
‘I grew up, BB. Belinda did too. That’s what most of us do. We grow up.’
My talk with him was souring my stomach and I wanted to be away from his new house and new life. ‘No one gets over something like that,’ I said. ‘That’s not part of growing up.’
He looked at me hard and I resisted the impulse to turn away. ‘The day before she and her family moved to Chicago she came to my house. Did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘She had a knife. Nothing very serious. A kitchen knife. When I opened the door she tried to stab me.’
‘I believe that.’
‘I took the knife from her but she got me in the shoulder,’ he said. ‘I still have the scar.’
‘You earned that scar and more.’
Again he looked at me hard. ‘And then I fucked her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I fucked her. We were both pretty miserable.’
‘You raped her?’
‘No.’
‘She let you – after what you did to Bobby?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She helped me clean my shoulder and then I fucked her on the bathroom counter.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
He had a sadness in his eyes. ‘I’ve always been grateful to you.’
‘For what?’
‘She said she asked you to kill me. You didn’t do it.’
‘I probably should have.’
‘Probably.’
His wife brought us a couple bottles of Miller Lite and sat on the couch next to me. In the next room his stepdaughter played the piano. I knew I’d made a mistake in coming. Everything Christopher said confused me. He gave his slack-jawed smile to his wife and said, ‘It took me a long time to get my head together. My first marriage was one step. Linda’s been another. You know what? I’ve been blessed.’
I asked, ‘What was Belinda’s husband like?’
‘Flashy clothes and a lot of gold. You know the type. I didn’t much like him but she looked happy. What do you think, Linda?’
‘Mmm,’ she agreed.
‘They made their money in real estate?’ I asked.
His slack-jawed smile stayed. ‘That’s what they said.’ He glanced at Linda and again at me. ‘But before I cleaned myself up I spent plenty of time around people who got rich fast, usually on drug money. Belinda’s husband had that look. Their house did.’
‘Belinda too?’
‘Maybe. I’m not saying that’s how they got their money, just that they had the look.’
‘You think that’s why someone killed her?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t have any idea. I figure it was random. The other two women who were killed, Belinda wasn’t like them.’
‘Listen to the news tonight. There’s been another killing – the roommate of one of the other women. D’you think that’s random too?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said, ‘and to tell the truth my thinking about it won’t do a lot of good.’
There was something aggressive in his slack-jawed smile. I stood, downed the last of the beer and set the bottle on the coffee table. ‘Thanks for the beer, Linda,’ I said.
She smiled up at me. ‘Come by any time, BB.’
Christopher walked with me to the front door and we stepped outside. Light rain was falling and heavy clouds had brought an early-evening darkness. The air smelled of cut grass and the sharp, salty rot of vegetation in the swampy marsh at the edge of the subdivision. Christopher held out a hand to shake. ‘It’s good to see you, BB.’
I shook it and asked what I knew I shouldn’t. ‘When you saw her, did Belinda mention me?’
He looked at me evenly. ‘No.’
I stepped into the rain and looked back at him standing barefoot on the front step. ‘It’s a nice house,’ I said.
He gazed up at it as if he was surprised to find himself there. ‘It’s Linda’s. Colleen got ours when we split so I moved in here. Furniture’s Linda’s, pictures on the wall are hers, ice cream in the fridge is hers.’ He laughed. ‘I’m a tenant. It’s not so bad though. Neighborhood’s nice. There’s a community pool.’ He pointed at an identical house across the street. ‘They’re Pakistanis and so are the people next to them. The family to the left is Mexican and next to them is too. You’ve got to drive a block and a half before you find an American. Not that I’m complaining.’
‘You’re blessed,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I tell myself that every fucking day.’
NINE
When I pulled into the driveway, the front porch light was on and the house was quiet. The evening sky was violet, the clouds breaking apart. As I got out of the car, I looked up until I found Venus, then breathed deep and felt the tension ease in my chest. So Belinda had called Christopher when she’d moved back. So twenty-five years ago in a fit of anger and confusion they’d had sex. So she’d lived a life that I hadn’t imagined. It made no difference. I was who I was. I would do what I would do. A frog trilled in the holly bushes as I climbed the porch steps.
There was a puddle of something slick on the porch tile in front of the door – slick and red with a cluster of white globules. Blood. And whatever the white stuff was. My heart raced. I fumbled with the house key and shoved it into the lock.
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