Though the bar would be open for several more hours, and the sound system was pumping the two Pistons CDs into the atmosphere, many of the dressy attendees were already filtering out into the night. She dropped in with them, having something to do.
From the recession of a doorway of the closed Dreams boutique across the street, she watched as Donna Jonsen, having walked down from Grape Minds, crossed Main. Donna went up the exterior wrought-iron staircase to her apartment above the Corner Stop, which at one fifteen was closed and pretty well emptied out.
After another five minutes, the watcher crossed the street, picking a moment of scant traffic and no one exiting the bar, and ascended the stairs. It took only two knocks for Donna to answer with a smile and a raspy laugh.
“Been expecting you,” the short, but sturdy woman said.
In that Corner Stop T-shirt and jeans and bare feet, her permed dishwater blonde hair a kind of fright wig, Donna was one tough-looking, working-class female, defiantly so. At one time, this had been a cute little groupie who could make a short skirt sing, and even now, if you looked hard enough, she had a certain appeal. Perfect for Phil, her musical bartender boyfriend.
Who would not be home till three or after.
“Why were you expecting me?”
Donna laughed the raspy laugh again, even more obnoxious than before. “Because I set the bait, didn’t I? Come in, come in.”
The gracious hostess opened the door and gestured, and the expected guest who had figured on being unexpected stepped inside.
Donna was saying, “I practically yelled my head off telling our police chief’s old man I wanted to talk to him.” The door shut, a lock clicked. “I imagine you know he’s consulting on these possible Pistons murders.”
“I do.”
That was when Donna brought out her right hand from where she’d tucked it behind her back to reveal the gun in her fist. Small and black, but an attention-getter.
Donna’s smile was confident, yet some fear was bubbling under there, or at least anxiety. This was not the usual thing even in the life of a hard-bitten bar-owning woman like this. “You don’t mind if I take a small precaution?”
“Why a precaution?”
Donna beamed. “Oh, I see. We have to play pretend first. Okay. I understand. You got to get your bearings. Sit. Sit.”
They were in Donna’s kitchen, which had been remodeled around 1975. A smallish captain’s table had an ashtray and a pack of Camels on it; also a bottle of Blue Moon. The open doorway into the next room indicated another boxcar affair, no hallway, just one room opening into another and then another, as was so often the case in these long, narrow ancient buildings.
Donna sat and then so did her guest.
Waving the gun a little, its snout a scolding finger, Donna said, “Hand your purse over, honey. Slow and easy.”
She did, sliding it across the empty tabletop.
With her left hand, Donna opened the purse, which was brown and somewhat oversize, and went through it, quickly, apparently checking for a gun. No pill bottle in there, either. No weapon at all.
Donna pushed the bag back across to her, and said, “Put it on the floor.”
She did.
With her left hand, Donna raised the Blue Moon bottle to her lips and guzzled. About a third of it was already gone. How many bottles, she wondered, had Donna had at the Grape?
Donna licked some foam off her lips. The gun in her right hand was propped on the table. “You know, seeing you brings back memories. Some are pretty good memories. A lot of fun in those days. Those boys were good. Sexy devils, the Pistons. But I don’t remember you and me hitting it off so good. More like . . . tolerated each other.”
“That’s fair.”
Donna shrugged. “I mean, you knew Rick was into me, that him and me had something special. But you went after him anyway.”
“How special could he have been, if you divorced him?”
Donna shuddered. “Oh, he was a horrible human being. Terrible. Gave tomcats a bad name. Spread more STDs than half a dozen heavy metal bands put together. Selfish bastard. I’m fine with him being gone.”
“Are you.”
Another shrug. “I’m fine with you taking him out, too.”
“. . . Dating him you mean? Back then?”
“No! Killing his ugly ass.”
“Is that what I did.”
“We both know it. And both know why.”
“Do we?”
“I saw that tape.”
“What tape?”
Donna grinned. “Really? I saw it back then. I don’t think Rick showed it to anybody but me, at the time. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
“What what is about?”
“Oh, honey, please!” Apparently Donna had partaken of a good number of Blue Moons, which prompted her singing a few bars of “Honey, Don’t!”—a rockabilly tune the Pistons used to do, but wasn’t on the reunion list.
“If there’s a point to this, Donna, maybe you should get to it.”
She gestured with the gun-in-hand. “Sure. Glad to. I’ve not only seen the tape, I have it. A copy. You probably got the original from Dan before you . . .” She crossed her throat with a finger and made an appropriate “snick” sound effect.
“And I should believe you why?”
Donna took a Camel from the pack and lighted it up with a Bic, then spoke out of the corner of her mouth as she got the smoke going. “Because I’ll give it to you. The tape. I mean . . . you’re the only reason I even knew I had it!”
“I don’t follow.”
“Sorry. Sorry. Years ago, lifetime ago, Rick showed me that tape. Well, it made an impression. I was jealous, I was disgusted, I was a lot of things, but not paying attention wasn’t one of them. It was a party tape to remember. And I did. I do. When Rick died in a hot tub . . .” She made a rude sound with her lips. “. . . I didn’t think anything much, except good riddance.”
“Your onetime husband. Good riddance.” The people in this world.
“Right, but murder didn’t come to mind. Guys like Rick must drown or have heart attacks in hot tubs, oh, every day. But then Dan hanging himself like that? That didn’t feel right. That didn’t sound right. He was full of himself, Dan. He thought he was smarter than the rest of us, real special, and I have to tell you . . . Honey, mostly I’m a live-and-let-live girl, but I was raised in a church and the perverted lifestyles of certain type people don’t make it with me. I just don’t go for it. I never did.”
“I see,” she said, thinking, What an awful person!
Donna leaned forward, the gun still trained. “But it got me thinking. It brought that tape to mind. I thought to myself, I saw that thing around here somewhere! I don’t mean watched it, I mean ran across it. Well, I have a box of Rick’s crap that he never picked up, never took back, clothes that didn’t fit him, skin magazines, dirty paperbacks, some old Rolling Stones . . . not any mentioning him, those he kept . . . but I got rooting around in there and bingo! There it was. A tape. Your name on it.”
“Is that right.”
She had a swig of Blue Moon. Shook her head. “Now, honey, don’t worry. I didn’t make any copies of it. I wouldn’t know how—don’t have the old-time equipment it’d take to play it. Who does? And I can’t send out something filthy like that to get duplicated professionally. But I figure . . . this must be something you’d like to have.”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
Donna’s eyebrows went up. “It’s what you were looking for, at Dan’s place, right? See, that’s the other reason—the real reason—that got me looking for that tape. Krista Larson, our trusty teenage chief of police, came around talking about maybe Rick and Dan were murdered . . . how maybe the other original members of the band were in dutch, too . . . maybe. Her old man seems to think so, anyway. Hell, maybe he put the idea in her head. I dunno.”
“Your point?”
Donna waved that off with her free hand. “I gotta come at this another
way. I’m not a bad person. I’m not a blackmailer. I don’t wanna bilk you dry.” She sat forward. “But I have an opportunity, you know. My lease comes up this year, and now the building is up for sale. If I don’t buy it, the Corner Stop is as dead as Rick and Dan.”
“Expensive piece of real estate.”
Donna’s eyes got wide. “Tell me about it! I knew this might come up some day and I have been putting dough away for years. I have quite the nest egg. Maybe even enough to start over. But I got a good business here. And I like it. I don’t wanna start over. If I can raise fifty grand to put next to what I’ve saved up over time, I am golden. Golden!”
“Fifty thousand dollars for a tape.”
Donna scowled. “No, no, no. You misunderstand. Weren’t you listening? I got no copies! I can’t guarantee those other two don’t have their own copies, but I’m not looking for a payoff.”
“You aren’t.”
She shook her head, hard. “I’m looking for a partner. You’d have twenty-five percent of this place . . . co-owner of the building and the business! It’s a damn good investment.”
“Haven’t you been able to interest anyone else?”
Donna made a face. “No, but . . . well, I probably could, it’s just . . . people want a say.”
“A say?”
“People want a say in running the business. About how I do things. I don’t need that kind of partner. I’m looking for a silent partner.”
“Is that right.”
Donna gestured at her with the gun. “And isn’t that what you need? A silent partner who won’t let anybody know you killed those two? And why?”
She nodded, and kept nodding awhile, then said, “All right.”
Donna’s head went back. “All right?”
Another nod. “But I have a few conditions.”
“Such as?”
“We use my lawyer. We are strictly aboveboard. This is an investment I’m making. Legal and binding. No grocery bags of money in the middle of the night.”
Donna was the one nodding now. “Yes, yes. A real partnership. Two women who don’t take any crap from anybody.”
“And I’d like that tape now.”
Donna was frowning. “Oh. No. No, I can’t do that. I’m no fool, honey. We have to have our deal, as you say, legal and binding.”
“Right.” She smiled a little. “Can’t blame a girl for asking . . . Could I have one of those? A Blue Moon, not a gun.”
Donna laughed. “Sure.”
The hostess got up, taking her gun along of course, and went to the refrigerator, her back briefly to her guest, who dipped a hand into her purse on the floor and quickly removed something from a zipper compartment just inside. She had only a moment, but she made the exchange.
Donna came back with a Blue Moon, handed it across the table, and sat back down. While the woman being blackmailed had a nice swig of the cold beer, Donna took the cigarette from the pack of Camels, extended enough to make it the obvious one to select, as if a magician had forced a card, and lighted it up.
The woman who had brought along a cigarette carefully doctored to contain a powdery overdose of succinylcholine watched as the other woman took two long satisfying drags, then exhaled smoke. It had taken tweezers and several botched tries, removing tobacco, dropping in the drug, replacing and tamping down the tobacco without damaging the cigarette in any noticeable way. And she had no way of knowing if she’d used enough sux, and whether inhaling the drug in this fashion would do the trick.
She’d know soon enough.
Donna bolted to her feet, but didn’t go anywhere, and while she still had the gun in her hand, it was lowered to her side and she couldn’t move it, couldn’t move at all except in that one ghastly way—the now familiar twitchy dance that preceded paralyzation, a dance that didn’t last long, although the suffocation that followed did, even if the victim revealed no more change of expression than a department store dummy.
Waiting for Donna to die wasn’t necessary, although the expected unexpected guest did pluck the gun from her petrified fingers, just for safety’s sake, and took it with her into the apartment.
She moved through a bedroom and into the living room, these quarters similar to those of the late Daniel Davies, for whom Donna Jonsen had felt such casual contempt. The furniture was strictly secondhand store—Donna seemed to have been living frugally, perhaps to save up to buy the building—with the only wall art a few framed rock ‘n’ roll posters of national acts that had appeared at the Corner Stop, although one was a vintage Hot Rod & the Pistons placard, from a 1983 Col Ballroom appearance.
She had to work fast. It was already a quarter till two and Phil would be home around three. In her garden gloves, she (to use Donna’s word) trashed the place, until she found the tape. It was in a drawer of a bureau devoted to Donna’s live-in boyfriend’s clothes, tucked inside a stack of sweatpants put away for summer.
Had Phil seen the tape? Or did he know of it, at least?
And hadn’t Donna said, I can’t guarantee those other two don’t have their own copies?
Maybe her work wasn’t done.
EIGHTEEN
On this first night (or actually early morning) of the Great Experiment—Keith upstairs in the guest room with Rebecca, Krista downstairs with Brian—things had proceeded minus any awkwardness or melodrama. As if nothing were more natural in life than a father going upstairs to bed with his girlfriend and his much younger daughter going to bed downstairs with her boyfriend.
Arriving at the big house on Quality Hill some time after midnight, both couples had bid each other brief goodnights (the longest of these being Keith’s, “Your dad is smiling right now,” to Brian) and gone off to their separate quarters.
Keith, in black cotton pajamas, and Rebecca, in pink silk p.j.’s, shared the double bed on their backs, pillows propped a little behind them as they stared at the ceiling, each with hands folded at the base of their sternums. But for their modern nightwear, they might have been a couple in the 1800s on their honeymoon, both of whose parents had neglected to tell them the facts of life.
Keith, however, was not thinking about sex, or at least his conscious mind wasn’t. He was too busy feeling guilty for sending the guys in the band off on their late-night jaunt to a Dubuque bar minus their bodyguard.
Without turning to his bed partner, he said, really to himself, “They’ll be fine. I’m sure they’ll be fine.”
“Who will?” she asked.
And he came to a crossroads.
Even when he’d taken Rebecca along to the Tick Tock Motel, a trek made specifically to talk to Steve Pike about the possible murders of two of the drummer’s bandmates, Keith had not brought Rebecca up to speed about any of it. He had kept to himself everything he and Krista had been kicking around about the hovering threat to the Pistons—including his role as roadie-cum-bodyguard.
That was not to protect Rebecca from the thought that he, Keith, might be in danger himself. No. Nothing quite so altruistic. Rather, he knew the lovely woman in bed with him, her almost-blonde hair spilling like spun gold onto the pillow next to him, was first and foremost a reporter.
Not only was it premature, getting her interested in the suspicious deaths of Rick and Dan, but doing so might hamper Krista’s efforts . . . and his own . . . by injecting into the already complicated proceedings unwanted, unwise media fuss. Which was just the kind of press attention that the city of Galena did not need for their music festival.
Keith just hoped he and Krista weren’t the mayor of Amity trying to keep the beach open.
“Who,” Rebecca repeated, “will be fine?”
He looked into those big blue eyes and, like the weakest suspect who had ever sat across from him in an interview room, he spilled. He told her everything that he and his daughter suspected, putting the two deaths into a killing context, and even shared his suspicions of what might be behind it all, based largely on the apartment of Daniel Davies being searched—no, shaken down.
>
The crossroads had been crossed.
She was on her side, propped on an elbow, much of that hair hanging down to one side of her fashion model face like a shimmering gilded waterfall. Such are the thoughts of a man not entirely aware of just how much in love he is.
Oddly, Rebecca’s reaction to his narrative was to smile a little, almost smirking, and saying, “I thought something was going on in back of those Paul Newman eyes, lately.”
Such were the things a woman might actually say aloud when she is not entirely . . .
Keith said, “I just didn’t want you worrying.”
Her eyebrows went up. She was openly amused now. “About you? Going around with a gun on your hip, helping elderly rockers?”
He couldn’t help but smile himself. “Elderly’s a little harsh.”
She shrugged. “I could have called you elderly, but I didn’t.”
“You told me you liked being with an older man.”
“Because that’s what an older man likes to hear.”
“How many older men have there been in your life?”
“Going back how far?”
There was something feral about her smile, and something devilish in her eyes, so he leaned over and kissed her.
Fifteen minutes later, on their sides in bed facing each other under a sheet and a skimpy blanket, two pillows under each of their heads, she said, “Where were we?”
“Going back how far?” he asked.
She laughed. “You weren’t really trying to keep me from worrying. You were trying to keep me from covering this story.”
Tiny shrug. “Well, maybe that was part of it.”
She waggled a friendly finger. “You didn’t want the media hanging around, getting all in your way, sensationalizing it. I mean, it’s a hell of a story, Keith. The Pistons are a one-hit-wonder band, sure, but people know that one hit—it’s on every oldies radio station.”
He knew that was so. The New Wave channels on Sirius XM all played “The Girl Can’t Help It” right next to “Pump It Up,” “She Blinded Me with Science,” and “One Way or Another.”
Girl Can't Help It: A Thriller (Krista Larson Book 2) Page 17