The Storm

by Blake Banner

  “She kept trying to talk to you. She kept trying to tell you that what she wanted was the park. But you, in your growing blindness, steamrolled her. You didn’t listen. Instead, you and Wilberforce told her how it was going to be. And day by day, she watched her dream slip away from her, knowing that it would never become a reality. I can imagine that she felt completely powerless before you and that ass Wilberforce. The only option you left her, the only person she could turn to for support, was her sister.”

  Now it was Hirschfield who was nodding. “Hence,” he said, “all the correspondence granting Carmichael the license to act as though the property was his starts to peter out about four months ago.”

  I nodded. “That is when things started to get complicated. Because, as Sarah and Simone were thrust together by circumstance, and by loneliness, so old feelings long repressed in both women began to reawaken.

  “We will never know, but I imagine that Sarah was probably never fully conscious of her feelings. Or if she was, she buried them. But Simone, with your freer background and your interest in psychology, you became aware of your feelings many years ago, probably in your teens.”

  She smiled. It was a sad expression. “On my sixteenth birthday. When she hugged me and kissed me, and gave me my birthday present. In that moment, I knew I loved her.”

  Carmichael spat the words at her, “You fucking, twisted pervert!”

  “You have to wonder,” I said to Simone, “at the kind of mentality that considers sex a perversion, and murder an acceptable expedient.”

  He glared at me like I was the one who didn’t get it.

  I pushed on. “Whatever the ethics or morals of the case, the simple fact was that Simone’s love for Sarah flowered. She helped Sarah to become more assertive, she began to teach her to paint, encouraged her to use the house on Solitude Road as her studio, to place some distance between herself and her husband, to go out and listen to jazz without him. Each small step toward her own independence, could have, and should have, alerted you, Carmichael, to rescue your marriage. Instead, it became a nail in the coffin of your relationship.”

  I sighed and took another sip. My cigarette had burned down. I stubbed it out in the ashtray and lit another.

  “Even at this stage, I think it might have been possible to avoid total catastrophe. But something happened then that pushed everything beyond the point of no return. Originally, Simone, you had encouraged Sarah to go out alone. She was known and respected in this town, and James could always deliver her and pick her up. She was not at risk. But eventually, you started going out with her. She would pick you up and deliver you home afterward. That wasn’t smart. In your mind, in your feelings, it was almost like you were dating, like you were a couple. And after a few drinks, with the good feeling of companionship, of conspirators contra mundum, you both began to enjoy it.

  “And then one night, it became too much to control. You made a pass at her. If she had not shared your feelings, that is probably where it would have ended. She would probably have sunk into depression, and back into her husband’s control, and your relationship would have dwindled, become a cool, distant friendship.

  “But that wasn’t the case. She did love you, but had lied to herself for years about the nature of her feelings. Your pass…”

  She interrupted me suddenly. “It was more than a pass. We kissed. Then she panicked and ran. We were several days without speaking to each other. Then she telephoned me. She said she was going crazy and needed my help. As a psychologist.”

  I nodded. “This isn’t my field. I am just a soldier, but from what you told me, and from what I can put together, she went on a kind of sexual rampage, trying to prove to herself that she was not a lesbian. She slept with one man after another, never more than one or two nights, and then she moved on to the next man. She didn’t care who they were, they just needed two characteristics—they must be aggressively male, and they must be black.”

  Simone had covered her mouth with her hands and tears were running down over her fingers. “I was too close. I didn’t realize what it meant at first, but then it dawned on me. She wanted to prove that she was hungry for men, but in choosing only black men, she was sublimating. In her unconscious, she was sleeping with me.”

  Carmichael snarled, “Psychobabble bullshit!”

  I drew on my cigarette. “It didn’t take long for the rumors to get back to Carmichael. Who told you? Was it Jackson? Or was it Ivory at one of your poker games, where you and the local WASPs got together to feel like real men, with whiskey and whores at the Full Moon?”

  “They both told me.”

  “But the crazy outburst was short-lived, wasn’t it, Simone? Less than a month, probably. Because she was beginning to admit her feelings to herself, and to you. And as she realized how she felt, and what she had to do, she changed her will. Perhaps she had an intuition of what was going to happen, or perhaps it was symbolic. Whatever the case, she wrote a new will and filed it with her attorney, making Simone her sole heir. Did she tell you, Carmichael? Or did she just tell you she was planning to do it?”

  “She threatened me. The ungrateful whore threatened me. If I didn’t halt the theme park project, she would alter her will and leave everything to this unnatural slut.”

  He jerked his thumb at Simone. I nodded.

  “So you spoke to Ivory. You needed the situation taken care of, and you sentenced your wife to death. He knew about her spree of sleeping with black guys and so he started frequenting the Blue Lagoon. It wasn’t hard for him to hook up with her. He was dangerous and exciting, and exactly what she was fantasizing about. Now two things happened. The very thing that excited her about Ivory was also what brought her to her senses. He was too much, too dangerous, and ultimately not what she was looking for. I suspect that was when she finally admitted to herself that she was in love with Simone. And that was when she finally altered her will.”

  Simone said, “She told me she had done it. She was going to file for divorce so that we could move in together.”

  Carmichael spat something about twisted bitches. I ignored him and continued.

  “At the same time, Ivory had decided he needed a fall guy. He’d heard from Harry about the English jazz player who’d been in special ops back in the UK. He had been one of the guys chosen by Sarah, and both of those facts together made him the ideal candidate. So he set up the elaborate visit that night, in which Bat was tricked into putting his prints on the gun. It was a win-win situation. If he accepted the contract, they had a professional hit man for Sarah. If he didn’t, they had his prints on the weapon, and the investigating detective as a co-conspirator. It was, as I was told repeatedly, a slam dunk.

  “But here was where it got complicated.” I shook my head. “Here was where things just stopped making sense.”

  Hirschfield stirred. He stood and made his way to the decanters. “Can I refill anybody?”

  Bat stood from where he was sitting on the windowsill. “I wouldn’t say no. Simone?”

  She nodded and smiled and handed him her glass. Carmichael stared sullenly into the fire. As he poured, Hirschfield said, “The blood?”

  I shook my head. “That was part of it. There was too much of it, which suggested very strongly to me that, A, she hadn’t really been killed there, and B, logically, it was not her blood. That raised questions which were crazy to say the least: why would you kill somebody and then go to all the trouble of taking them home and dousing their bed with somebody else’s blood? But there were other things.

  “The grouping of the shots in the murder was good, whoever shot her was a good marksman, yet the shots downstairs were wild. You have a Marine gunnery sergeant and a good marksman shooting it out in the living room, with the lights on, at twenty feet from each other, and the shots are going all over the place.” I smiled. “And this was when my suspicions were first aroused against you, Carmichael, with all that wild shooting going on, every shot managed to miss all those priceless works of art. The m
ost valuable thing damaged in that room, packed with treasures, was your stucco. It was very far from conclusive, but it was a red flag.

  “And then there was what I found at Solitude. Either somebody else had been killed there, or Sarah had been killed there and moved to the house. But again the crazy question, why dump the mattress, all the bedding, and the mat from under the bed into Sara Bayou at the foot of the garden, but take the body all the way back to the house? Especially knowing, as everybody did by then, that Hurricane Sarah was coming, and whatever was in the bayou was going to end up in the Gulf of Mexico within a few days.

  “And then there were the blood samples. Jackson was just a little too keen to keep me off the case, and too determined not to listen to what I had to say about Bat. It was clever to employ me, and seem to be at odds with Jackson. I almost bought that. But the amount of blood on that bed was nagging at me, so I got Hirschfield to request a sample from the DA so that we could run our own tests, and to be on the safe side, I got a sample of my own when I had a look at the room.

  “When I had them tested, the result blew my mind. It turned out that either the DA, or some intermediary, had switched the sample, and the official one showed up as Sarah’s blood—or at least human blood. But the real sample, the one I had collected myself, that proved to be pig’s blood.

  “And I remembered what James had told me, that on the night of the murder, at around eleven o’clock, he had heard a pig screaming in the corrals at the back of the house. So it was clear what had happened. Sarah had been murdered at Solitude, her body had been brought home and dumped in her bed. Her killer had then gone and slaughtered a pig, collected the blood, and doused the bed and the body with it, so that if the sheriff, uniforms, or the press got a look at the scene, they would see that the murder had taken place right there, in her bed.

  “He had then gone downstairs and fired some carefully placed shots and left by the back door. All this time—or practically all of this time—Carmichael was conspicuously at a restaurant in town. He got home only in time to disturb the killer and get shot at.”

  Bat was frowning. “It don’t make a lot of sense.”

  I shook my head. “No, it didn’t. It gave me a real headache. Not only did it make no sense that he would bring the body to the house and go to so much trouble to make it seem she was murdered here. It also made no sense that, having been so careful and methodical in his planning as to get your prints on the murder weapon, he is then so ham-fisted as to murder her somewhere where he has to take the considerable risk of moving the body. Why not simply kill her at home? Surely that would not be a difficult thing to do.

  “And then something happened that changed my whole thinking.”

  I stood and went to refill my glass. Then, I went and stood by the window beside Bat. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed the crazy dance of the trees was perhaps a little less wild, and the rain clogging the earth perhaps a little less dense.

  I turned to face them. “It was something you said right at the beginning, Carmichael. Remember that, until this morning, I was still unsure whether you had conspired in your wife’s murder or not. But then it dawned on me. You had said that the reason you did not pursue the intruder was that you ran upstairs to check on your wife, and you found her dead.” I smiled and shook my head. “It was so simple, yet I had not seen it. You went to the wrong room. Simone had told me, and you had confirmed it, that you and Sarah were sleeping in separate rooms. So why did you go to the master bedroom?”

  I shrugged. “Of course, you didn’t. Because you already knew she was there, dead, but your story was that you ran to the room you shared and found her there, murdered. In your arrogance and your stupidity, you ignored the fact that gossip was rife that you and Sarah were no longer sharing a room. You needed the world to believe that you still owned her—your treasure.

  “And there it was, the reason why her body could not be found at Solitude, the reason it had to be brought back at so much risk, because of the damage it would do to your reputation if she had been murdered at her love nest. Because the myth must be preserved that you were both deeply in love. Not just for your ego, but also to support your challenge against the new will.”

  Hirschfield heaved a heavy sigh.

  “That is very satisfactory, and well supported by all the evidence you have gathered. My compliments, Lacklan.”

  I shook my head. “Not quite, Hirschfield. There is one other point.”

  THIRTY

  Simone stood up abruptly and went to stand at the window with her arms crossed.

  “Do we have to do this? You have your killer. Can’t you just leave it at that?”

  I shook my head. “No. You know we can’t.”

  Bat was frowning from me to Simone and back again. “What’s this?”

  Carmichael snarled. “Yeah, go on, Walker, tell the whole damned story! Tell it how it really was!”

  Hirschfield sank back into the sofa. “Are you sure about this, Lacklan?”

  I nodded. “It has to be told. If these people are to move on, there can be no skeletons left in the closet.”

  Simone sighed. “Fine, go ahead.”

  “It was the one thing that I just couldn’t get to fit. If Ivory had planned the murder in advance, and meticulously enough to entrap Bat into putting his prints on the gun—and gone to the extreme of taking latex copies of those prints to leave in the bedroom, as he clearly had—the big question remained: why did he not simply kill her at home, in her bed? Why did he not do it the way he made it seem he’d done it?”

  Hirschfield was frowning. “And?”

  “That night, Sarah was due to go out to hear Bat play at the Blue Lagoon. It was Bat’s night off, but he was going to go in anyhow because…” I smiled at him. It was not a happy smile. “Because you had a big soft spot for Sarah, didn’t you?”

  He nodded and smiled at Simone. “It was hard not to.”

  “But things were reaching a crisis point between Sarah, her lovers, Carmichael, and above all Simone. She went to Simone’s to pick her up, but they got talking. I imagine, Simone, that she had recently confessed to you how she felt…”

  She spoke to the window, as though we were not there, and she were reciting the words for the storm outside. “I begged her not to go to the club, not to pick up any more men. She agreed. She said she was tired of the whole charade. I asked her to spend the night with me. She said she couldn’t, that before she took that step, she had to end it with Charles. It made me crazy that she could fuck these men, night after night, without it meaning anything, without it troubling her conscience, but she could not be with me, with the woman she truly loved. And all because of her respect for this piece of human excrement, who had been abusing her and exploiting her for years!”

  “So you decided to confront him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You persuaded her to come with you. It was still early at this stage, probably no more than eight or eight-thirty in the evening, at the latest.”

  Carmichael went crimson suddenly and screamed at me, “These bitches threatened to kill me! Me! After everything I had done for her! After all the love and care I had given her! I adored that woman! I loved her! And they threatened to kill me! Me!”

  He folded over and buried his face in his hands. He looked suddenly very old and tragic, convulsing in his chair, making ugly noises in his throat.

  “You pulled your .22 on him, didn’t you?”

  She nodded. “I told him it was over, to stay away from her. She begged me to stop. She believed that we could solve the whole thing by talking, by being nice to each other, that we could all end up being friends.” She snorted with contempt. “After all the years she had been married to this monster, she still didn’t realize what kind of a man he was. I knew that he would never let go of her, that he would never leave us in peace, unless he was in fear for his life. I told him to leave us alone, or face the consequences.”

  “But you miscalculated, didn’t you, Simo
ne? You misjudged him, you misjudged his influence in this town, and you misjudged her, too. He went for you. He pulled a gun on you—on both of you—and you had to run for your lives. You believed still that he didn’t know about Solitude, because you didn’t know that Ivory was in his employ. So you went home, to wait for Carmichael. You hoped he would turn up to confront you, and you would have the opportunity to kill him and claim self-defense. And Sarah made the last of a long string of fatal mistakes. She needed to get away from you all, and she went to spend the night at Solitude.

  “But Carmichael, out of his mind with rage, called Ivory and told him to do it then, that night. To find Sarah and kill her. Ivory called her on her cell and asked where she was. Who knows if she told him to come over and keep her company or not. People behave in strange ways when they are afraid. The way it looked in the house, they had sex that night. Then he killed her, with the gun he had prepared with Bat’s prints, loaded the body into his truck, and brought it here. Once in the bed, he shot her again, through the quilt. And that explained another thing that mystified me, why the bullets had gone right through and penetrated the mattress. Of course, her belly had already been perforated with the first shots.” I shrugged. “The rest we know already.

  “Carmichael pretended to find the body, reported it to his friend Jackson, and a few days later, Bat was arrested and placed in the frame.” I paused a moment. “One of the things that confused me for a long time was the way that, even though you hated Carmichael, Simone, you were careful at first not to incriminate him. Then I realized why. Because if you incriminated him, you also incriminated yourself.”

  Hirschfield nodded. “Very nearly a perfect murder.”