The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  We stepped into the hall, our guns pointed at his back. “What are you doing here?” I asked, though I figured he’d come for the same reason we had.

  He continued toward the door. “An old man like me—I hardly ever sleep,” he said, as if that was an answer. He reached the door.

  I trained my gun on the cross formed by his spine and his shoulder blades. “Stop,” I said.

  He opened the door. “You’re not going to shoot me,” he said.

  “I need that folder.”

  He turned and faced us, his gun hanging loose at his side, the most relaxed man I’d ever seen. “This folder is mine,” he said. “It’s mine to take care of my dead son’s child and perhaps change the world he lives in a little bit.”

  “What’s in the folder?” I said.

  DuBuclet hesitated, then said, “A will, a letter, and a deed.” He gave a bitter smile. “Being of sound and disposing mind and memory, Judy Terrano gave ten percent of her assets to the programs she’d set up to sell chastity to unsuspecting girls. The remaining ninety percent would go to her one and only child, Anthony DuBuclet Jr. That is, unless her will disappeared. Then who knows what would have happened? Someone else, like the Stones, might have stayed rich or, like Samuelson, gotten rich.”

  “The letter?” I said.

  “Signed by Judy Terrano, David Stone, and David’s father, Bartholomew. Dated January 12, 1970. It tells a story about a bad night when a building burned down. David and his father went into the building with cans of kerosene. David’s mother sat in a car outside. David was arrested that night. For keeping the rest of the family out of it, Judy, who saw it all, got four thousand dollars a year. Not much even then, but the Stones hadn’t made their money yet. She also got title to the land where the building had stood. Probably no big loss to the Stones at the time and just a point of principle to Judy. The deed transfers the ownership of the land to Judy, but with a provision—ownership would revert to the Stones if she ever spoke publicly about her relationship with them.”

  I said, “Samuelson stole these from Judy Terrano before she died and was blackmailing the Stones?”

  DuBuclet shrugged. “She would have been killed anyway. They’d started construction using the titles on public record and wanted the land back. Judy was in the way.”

  Lucinda said, “So now you’ll get the land?”

  He shook his head. “My grandson will.”

  She shook her head, too. “With you as guardian, deciding how the profits get spent.”

  “Naturally.”

  I thought about the cash hidden in Judy Terrano’s room and the cash DuBuclet had Robert and Jarik deliver to me and realized that I’d been wrong about the nun taking payoffs. She was doing the paying and DuBuclet had passed some of her money along to me. “Judy Terrano supported her boy for years, didn’t she?”

  DuBuclet gave a single nod. “Some years better than others.”

  “And she supported you, too?” Lucinda said.

  DuBuclet didn’t deny it. “Judy Terrano was a great woman. The best I’ve ever known.”

  “So was or wasn’t she extorting the Stones when she got killed?” I asked.

  DuBuclet sighed. “As far as I know, Judy never in her life extorted anyone.”

  “But you just told us what was in the letter,” I said.

  He flashed a quick, impatient smile. “She wouldn’t call that extortion. She spent her life finding people who had too much power and reallocating it to those who had too little. What you call extortion, she would call fairness.” Another flash of the smile. “I personally would have to agree with her.”

  “Because it put power and money in your pocket,” Lucinda said.

  Again, DuBuclet didn’t deny it.

  I asked again, “Samuelson stole her papers and was going after the Stones’ money for himself?”

  A single nod. “But I think the money may have been of secondary interest to him. He started blackmailing them only after his wife began her affair. Call me old-fashioned, but I think love and jealousy got him started. And a fierce anger.”

  Lucinda gave him a smile of her own. “And what kept you in this? Money?”

  He nodded again. “The money is rightfully my grandson’s. As for me, I’m only trying to take care of the people who matter to me.”

  I pointed my thumb toward the kitchen. “Is Samuelson—?”

  “Dead,” DuBuclet said without feeling.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “He was already dead.” He stood for a time, waiting for us to ask other questions. When we didn’t, he turned away and stepped outside into the cold, adding, “I believe he died a long time ago.”

  Lucinda and I listened to his footsteps go down the stairs from Samuelson’s condo. Then I nodded toward the kitchen. “Do you want to see?”

  She shook her head no—little shakes, little more than a tremble. “You think we should?”

  “No,” I said, and we let ourselves out.

  In the dusty heat of my car, under the dull glow of streetlights, Lucinda asked, “Did DuBuclet kill him?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “Do you want to do anything about it?”

  I thought for a while. “No,” I said. “You?”

  She shook her head.

  We sat for a while, quiet.

  Lucinda asked, “If Terrence shot the person who killed him and the wound was bad enough to leave a trail of blood down the back stairs, why was there no blood on David Stone when you ran into him in the apartment?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why would he put the ashes of Louise Johnson’s photographs in her mouth?” she asked. “Why would he strip off her pants? Why would he pull up Judy Terrano’s dress and scribble on her stomach? None of that feels right.”

  Stan Fleming had asked the same questions. I gave Lucinda the answer I’d given him. “He was a monster.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you? Monsters aren’t real.”

  “Then what is real?” I asked.

  She looked at me with the eyes I’d seen when I’d told her I wasn’t sure if Corrine and I were through. Hurt eyes. Eyes that looked a little crazy. “Anger is real,” she said. “Jealousy is. Love is.”

  “I know where you can find all that,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  I nodded. “In someone willing to crush anyone who threatened what was hers.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  THE HIGHWAY FELT LIKE a ghost road with long empty stretches and then twenty-ton trucks blasting through the cold and dark. It took us to a suburban off-ramp and smaller ghost roads, minus the trucks.

  At the Stones’ house, the lights were on but I knocked hard enough to wake the sleeping.

  No one was sleeping. Eric Stone opened the door, wearing jeans and a sweater, looking haggard. Amy Samuelson hung onto his arm.

  “Yeah?” Stone said like he’d never seen me before.

  I didn’t break the news about Greg Samuelson to his wife. I stepped into the house, Lucinda behind me. Stone made no effort to stop us.

  We walked past the front-hall fountain. It pulsed like an open artery. We went through a series of rooms to the living room. Cassie Stone sat on the couch in a little yellow dress, haggard, too, smoking a cigarette, two empty wineglasses on the table in front of her.

  “Where’s your grandmother?” I asked.

  “Can’t you leave her alone?”

  “No,” I said.

  She reached for one of the wineglasses and sighed when she saw it was empty. She turned her eyes on me. “In the pool,” she said.

  Swimming at 4:20 A.M. on the night that her son died.

  Lucinda and I went through more rooms to the breakfast nook and opened the glass door to the pool. Soft lights showed a Plexiglas ceiling and poolside tropical plants in pots.

  Mrs. Stone swam in the pool, wearing a black swimming suit. Lucinda and I stood by the side and watched her. At eighty years old she was an extraordinar
y swimmer. But she was a wounded creature. Torn skin hung from her left shoulder, emerging pink from the water, reddening when it touched the air, and submerging again. Terrence had managed to shoot her before he’d died. David had come in later to pick up after his mother.

  Mrs. Stone touched the pool end, turned, and started back. If she felt pain, she didn’t show it.

  We went to the close edge of the pool. When she approached, she reached for the pool gutter and lifted her head into the air. She caught her breath, started to pull herself out of the pool, and grimaced. Lucinda reached for her but she said, “No.” She struggled but managed to get herself onto the pool deck. She stepped close to me, the water running off her and her blood darkening her shoulder, sliding down her breast, streaming into her swimsuit.

  She looked at me like I’d done her a wrong. “No one wanted the land,” she said. “No one but Judy. She wanted nothing else. My husband insisted that we give her money, too, because he thought we should, because it seemed like the right thing to do. She only wanted the land. So we gave it to her. But as you can imagine, when the area began to revitalize, I needed to have it back.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t imagine killing for that.”

  Her eyes glinted. “Not for fifty million dollars? Not a woman who’d seduced the person you loved most in the world? Not a woman who sent your child to jail?”

  I didn’t know the answer but I said, “No.”

  She laughed at me. Blood and pool water staining her skin and streaming down her legs onto the pool deck, she laughed like I was a liar. “I did nothing you wouldn’t do,” she said. “Judy and Louise needed to be exposed for what they were.”

  “And Terrence?” I said. “The priest? What did they do?”

  Her toughness broke but only for a moment. “They shouldn’t have gotten in the way.”

  LUCINDA WENT WITH HER to get her dressed. I sat in my car and waited.

  I wondered if Mrs. Stone was right. If a bag of money so big that it could light up the sky for the rest of my life hung over my head, what wouldn’t I do for it? What would I do if someone took away a person I loved the way Judy Terrano had taken her husband from her bed and her son from her house? I’d warned William DuBuclet what I would do to Robert and Jarik if they hurt Lucinda, and I wondered if I meant it.

  I stared out at the dark. Morning was still an hour to the east, brightening the waves on the cold Atlantic, glowing on other cities.

  Something tapped the windshield more lightly than a fingertip. Another tap. Another. Snow had started falling. Quieter than death. Whiter than stars and gentler.