‘Two weeks – why?’ he said.
Two weeks brought him to Florida just before the killings started.
‘And what do you drive when you’re in the States?’ I asked.
He said, ‘I have a driver. Why?’
‘Does he drive a green SUV?’ I asked.
‘What’s this about?’
‘What does he drive?’ I said.
‘A limousine.’
I said, ‘A place called Blackeye’s Fish Camp, a couple miles from the port, has a restaurant. Can you meet me?’
‘I can be there at two,’ he said. ‘Bring the pictures of my daughter.’
I hung up.
An ugly job awaited me in the kitchen. Susan had made her bed and adjusted her shades but she hadn’t dealt with the real mess. I figured she must have seen Fela’s severed head as a fair reminder of what I’d done to our family.
When I opened the refrigerator, the gamey smell of rancid meat poured into the room. I picked up the bowl but Fela’s blood had softened the unfired clay and the sides crumbled in my fingers, so I scooped up the pieces as well as I could and ran into the backyard, past the pool and down the slick grass to the quarry pond. I dropped them on the mound where I’d buried Fela’s body. Then I returned to the kitchen, unloaded the refrigerator of milk, juice, a bag of oranges, a slice of pizza – everything that the stink of Fela’s rotting head could contaminate – and carried it all outside to the garbage.
The morning sun was high and hot but a cool breeze crossed the quarry pond as I shoveled Fela’s head and the pieces of clay bowl into a second hole. Afterward, I scrubbed my hands and arms in the shower, though I knew that the stain was deep. I didn’t get dressed. I climbed into bed naked and lay with my eyes wide, staring at the white ceiling, shaking with a guilt and sadness worse than cold.
I needed to decide whether to call Charles before going to see Godrell Graham. When I’d told him about my conversation with David Fowler he’d said that the information Fowler had given me pulled this thing together. But I’d still been a long way from knowing what had happened or why. Melchiori’s Jamaica pictures explained a lot. Belinda had died because she was at the party. Someone was angry about what had happened to Tralena, or someone wanted to get rid of the women who had witnessed her death, or Tralena’s death had tipped someone’s mental balance and turned him into a killer. If I followed Melchiori’s hints and the implications of the cut-and-pasted pictures that fell from an S&M magazine, that someone was Terrence.
What if Godrell Graham gave me information that pinned the killings on Terrence? Would I kill Terrence? Would I hurt him? My own son? I didn’t feel the blood between us, not as I felt it with Thomas. But still I was uncertain what I would do.
Charles wouldn’t hesitate to kill or hurt him though. If I called Charles now and Graham made us believe that Terrence had killed Belinda and the others, Terrence would be dead or so badly injured he’d never fully recover. Not because Charles loved or cared for Belinda. But because there simply was no alternative for him. He fixed what needed fixing, broke what needed breaking.
Eight years back, when I’d suspected Susan was having an affair with that real-estate agent, I’d called Charles and asked him to help find out whether I’d lost her for good. We’d followed the man to work. We’d watched him meet Susan for lunch. We’d sat in Charles’ car as they stood together in a park. Then one morning while we waited for him outside his house, Susan arrived and went inside.
‘Go in after her?’ Charles asked.
‘No,’ I said.
We waited for two hours and Susan came out again and the man, wearing a bathrobe, walked with her on to the driveway. They stood together and Susan looked happy in a way I hadn’t seen since before Thomas was born and they kissed and then she got into her car and drove away.
The man stood alone on his driveway, enjoying the breeze – happy, too, as far as I could tell – and so I got out of Charles’ car and went to him.
He seemed to recognize me – Susan must have shown him pictures – but he didn’t seem to fear me. I could have killed him then. I felt the strength in myself to do it. But I talked to him instead. I told him he needed to end the affair. I might have threatened him but I didn’t touch him.
He looked at me calmly. He was shorter than I was and thick around the middle, a friendly-looking man. ‘OK,’ he said.
‘You’ll end it?’
He nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘OK,’ I said and went back to Charles’ car and climbed in. ‘He said he would end it,’ I told him.
‘I’m unconvinced,’ Charles said.
‘He said it.’
‘And I’m unconvinced.’
He reached into the backseat and got out of the car with a wooden bat. He went to the man and swung it so hard against the man’s knees that they buckled backward and the bat shattered. The man screamed with the purest pain you would ever want to hear.
Charles climbed back into the car as the man lay broken on his driveway. He started the engine and said, ‘Now he’ll end it.’
‘That was unforgivable,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘That’s why I did it.’
I would go see Godrell Graham alone, I decided. I shaved and got dressed. My meeting with Graham wouldn’t start for another two hours but everything in the house spoke to me of all that was gone or leaving, so I got my keys and stepped out the front door.
Charles’ Dodge Charger was parked at the curb. Charles was getting out of it. I forced a smile. ‘Hey … Good morning.’
He glanced at the sky as if he hadn’t noticed. ‘You didn’t answer your home phone when I called. Or your cell.’
‘I was burying Fela’s head,’ I said, ‘and then I showered. What’s up?’
‘I found your hooker friend, Aggie.’
‘Where?’
‘Come on,’ he said and climbed into his car.
We drove to a stretch of Philips Highway lined by cheap motels. Rusting late-model cars stood in the sun-bleached parking lots. Charles pulled into the lot of the Luego Motel, a dirty-brown two-story strip with an attached diner.
‘Luego. What kind of name is that for a motel?’ I said.
‘It’s a good name. Hasta luego. Makes you want to come back and stay again.’
‘It doesn’t make me want to come back.’
Charles parked at the far end and went up a set of concrete stairs to the second-floor landing and stopped outside the first door.
‘Is she alive?’ I asked.
‘Depends on your definition of alive,’ he said and opened the door.
The room was a wreck. A metal chair was bent, the seat torn off. An easy chair that looked as if it had been in bad shape to begin with was toppled over, its cushion gone from the room. The television, ripped from its metal mount, lay face down on the carpet. The covers and sheets were stripped from the bed. Aggie was in the middle of the bare mattress, naked, her knees pulled to her chin. Her back had cuts from her shoulders to her thighs – thin lines of blood, as if someone had sliced her carefully with a razor blade. She didn’t move. As far as I could see, she didn’t breathe.
I asked, ‘Is she …?’
‘Not quite,’ Charles said and nodded at a couple of syringes and a rubber tourniquet on the floor. ‘But whoever did this to her pumped her up with so much coke and heroin that she’s not feeling a thing.’
‘Who did it?’
‘He was gone by the time I got here.’
‘What did he cut her with?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t. He whipped her.’ He pointed to a long strip of plastic next to the bed. ‘With the electric cord from the TV.’
I looked around the room. There were no large plastic bags and there was no clothesline. This didn’t look like the work of the man who’d killed Belinda and the others.
‘What do you want to do with her?’ Charles asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘D’you want to get rid of her?’ he asked.
‘I want to get her to a hospital.’
‘She could cause problems,’ he said.
‘What kind of problems?’
‘The police already connect her to you.’
‘I was with you when they say the man forced her into his car.’
‘Sorry, but they won’t see me as a very good alibi.’
‘Let’s get her to the hospital,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I’ll take her. But I’m dropping you off first. You don’t want to be around.’
We wrapped the bed sheets around her as well as we could, carried her downstairs to Charles’ car and squeezed her into the backseat.
‘How did you find her?’ I asked as we pulled on to the highway.
‘Same way I find anyone. I asked questions and asked them the right way.’
EIGHTEEN
I’d exaggerated when I’d told Godrell Graham that Blackeye’s Fish Camp had a restaurant. It was a roofed-in bait-and-tackle shop that also sold cold sandwiches that you could eat at the picnic tables they kept out back. Pauly, the owner, kept a shotgun behind the counter though he said he’d only shot it once and that was at a mullet jumping near the riverbank on a drunken afternoon. You could launch a boat or for a dollar a day you could fish from the pier. My dad had taken me there to catch redfish when I was a boy and I’d taken Thomas to do the same.
When I pulled into the parking lot at a quarter to two a black stretch limousine was idling by some empty boat trailers.
I knocked on the driver’s window and a young black man in a white cotton shirt and a black chauffeur cap rolled it down. ‘Are you with Mr Graham?’ I asked.
He stared at me with amused slate-green eyes. ‘You’re late. He’s already inside.’
I went into the shop. It was packed with fishing rods, reels and lures, and you could buy fresh baitfish and shrimp from coolers by the cash register. I got a Miller and a ham sandwich out of the refrigerator case and took them to the counter. ‘Hey, BB,’ Pauly said and rang up the total.
‘You know if there’s a Jamaican man who might be looking for me?’ I asked.
‘Three of ’em. In back.’
I went outside to the river. Two large men in navy-blue suits stood watching the water from an embankment of sand, broken concrete and tar paper that had blown off a nearby roof when the remnants of a gulf-coast hurricane had blown through. The men were Graham’s bodyguards, and I wondered how a mid-level Foreign Ministry employee justified them to his bosses. Graham, in a charcoal suit, was short and thin with graying hair and was as soft-featured as his daughter had been. He stood by the building, talking on a cell phone which he hung up as soon as he saw me. The bodyguards eyed me, seemed to decide I was no threat and went back to watching the water.
‘Mr Byrd?’ Graham extended a hand to shake.
I nodded. ‘You don’t want a sandwich?’
He curled his lips for a moment as if I was telling an unfunny joke.
We sat at a picnic table in the afternoon sun.
‘Show me the pictures,’ he said.
‘I don’t have them any more,’ I said.
‘What happened to them?’
‘I destroyed them,’ I said. ‘I didn’t like what was in them.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘As I said this morning, a friend of mine was at the party with Tralena. She was in the pictures too. They were terrible pictures. I destroyed them.’
His eyes sparked with anger but his voice remained calm. ‘Then what are you trying to sell me?’
I unwrapped my sandwich and took a bite. ‘I found the pictures in Don Melchiori’s house,’ I said. ‘They’re probably also on his camera or on his computer. If you want them you can send your men for them. All I want is to know what you’re doing about Tralena’s death. She died four months ago and you told me you’ve been in Florida for two weeks. That’s when people around here started dying.’
‘We grieve in our own ways,’ he said and folded his hands on the table. ‘I understand business, Mr Byrd. Give me numbers and I’m in heaven. I find comfort in such things. If I can buy an answer to what happened to Tralena, I’ll do so. The other work I’ll leave to the police and men trained to handle this kind of thing.’
‘I’ve heard you were a regular at Don Melchiori’s parties,’ I said. ‘Who else was there?’
He smiled faintly and I suspected he was covering anger. ‘Did Don tell you I was a regular?’
‘Does it matter?’ I asked. ‘Who else was there?’
He looked annoyed. ‘You say your friend is dead? Was that Belinda Mabry?’
I nodded.
‘I knew Belinda,’ he said. ‘She was an attractive woman and very smart. Her husband and I did business.’
‘Cocaine.’
He laughed at me and said, ‘I wasn’t surprised when I heard that Belinda was at Melchiori’s party with my daughter. Belinda was adventurous. But my daughter wasn’t. She was sixteen years old. Still a child. They got her high and assaulted and killed her. Belinda Mabry, this smart and attractive woman who still apparently holds power over you, did that to Tralena. There’s nothing you can do to change that.’
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘Then please explain again what it is you want from me.’
I asked, ‘How well did you know Belinda and her husband?’
‘Well enough. Stilman had family. I had family. We invited them and their boy down to visit twice in the last year that they lived in Chicago.’
‘What did you think of Terrence?’ I asked.
‘What about him?’ For the first time I thought I heard the calm in his voice break.
‘Did Stilman involve him in his business?’
‘I don’t think he trusted him,’ he said.
‘It sounds like you didn’t either.’
‘The last time they visited was three and a half years ago,’ he said. ‘Terrence was twenty-one. Tralena was twelve. She saw this good-looking young man from Chicago and she liked what she saw. Terrence didn’t put her down. He treated her like her love was real but never crossed the line. That’s what I thought. But one afternoon, my wife came home and found him in bed with Tralena.’ His voice was level again though I heard the strain in it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘That’s how it sometimes happens. But no, I don’t trust him.’ A motorboat cut toward the fishing camp dock, banked and ran back toward the middle of the river. The wake lines swelled behind it and washed slowly toward shore. ‘If you want to know what real obsession looks like you should’ve seen Tralena when they left. She was crazy for that boy. Crazy. And Stilman told me his son was crazy for her too.’
‘Do you think Terrence found out how Tralena died?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Melchiori thinks he’s responsible for the killings here.’
He eyed me with interest. ‘I wouldn’t know about that. I’m a quiet man. I do my business without hurting anyone. But God knows Jerry Stilman could be violent when he needed to be. Living in a house like his, Terrence would have learned violence.’
‘He seems soft,’ I said.
Graham shook his head. ‘Nothing soft about that boy.’
I looked at the river. A single palm tree threw a shadow that intersected the embankment. I said, ‘So your daughter dies and you’re just going to let things play out however they do?’
‘Seems like the problem’s taking care of itself, I think.’
‘So far, three women who were at the party and one of their roommates have died and a man who didn’t even want to be there has been run down by a car. If Terrence is doing this, why wouldn’t he go after Melchiori and the other men first?’
‘Maybe he did. I hear that Melchiori got shot.’
Graham didn’t need to know the details. ‘But he’s still alive,’ I said.
‘When they put the bag over my little girl’s face, she didn’t die right away. She had time to become afraid. Time to
know that she was dying. If Stilman’s boy is doing this, he might want Melchiori and the others to have time to be afraid too.’
When Graham and his bodyguards drove away in his limousine, I called Charles.
He answered, ‘Hey, where are you?’
‘I decided to go fishing.’
‘Ha.’
‘I tracked down Godrell Graham,’ I said.
‘Good for you. What did he tell you?’
‘He’s definitely tied to Melchiori and the parties. I think he knows who’s behind the killings and he’s probably encouraging him. But he’s not the killer himself.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The killer is Terrence.’
‘Huh?’
‘Aggie woke up and started talking,’ he said. ‘She was ripped up pretty bad but I could understand what she was saying.’
‘Terrence did that to her?’
‘None other.’
A chill ran down my back. ‘I want to go after him on my own,’ I told him.
‘You sure?’
I was never less sure of anything. He was my son, and I felt his closeness to me as though he’d been an unseen ghost whose presence I’d never sensed until he’d suddenly materialized and told me he’d been haunting me all my adult life. ‘He’s mine,’ I said. ‘He needs to be.’
‘I guess so. If you want help you know how to find me.’
‘Thanks, Charles. Did you get Aggie to the hospital?’
‘No. Too complicated with her talking like that.’
‘For God’s sake, Charles. Take her to the hospital.’
‘Too late,’ he said.
Another chill ran down my back. ‘What do you mean “too late”?’
‘Jesus Christ, don’t be an asshole. What do you think I mean?’
NINETEEN
I didn’t know what to do with Terrence. Kill him? Turn him in to Daniel Turner? Save him?
There was no saving him, no more than there was saving myself.
Kill him? This part of me that I hadn’t known about for twenty-five years and had appeared in my life as a fiend. This man who had destroyed a woman I probably had never fully understood though I’d loved her ever since I’d met her and she’d made my blood course even in her absence. Could I kill him?
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