I wondered, “Why didn’t he sell the bar and give the money to Sechrist? Why scheme to defraud the insurance company?”
“Kid,” said Trix, “he did try to sell it. I remember that. Your mom thought it was a good idea. I guess no one wanted to buy it right now, though. Bill put the pressure on him. I need that money, buddy. What could he do?”
Minerva suggested, “He probably decided to let Sechrist do the arson, then somehow he’d pay the insurance company back.”
I shook my head. “That’d be a stretch.” But something was starting to resonate.
“Lillian,” said Minerva, “your father—”
“My father was an honorable man.” It mattered to me to tell Trix and Minerva that, here in this cruddy tavern. “As an adult, I look back and feel that maybe his sense of honor had a…utilitarian side. I think he understood that things—principles—aren’t always crystal clear. Morally speaking.” Trix and Minerva listened. “I guess I’m realizing that sometimes in order to fulfill an obligation…you have to take on a new one.”
“You said it,” said Trix.
Minerva said nothing but looked at me with softness in her eyes.
“Go on,” I said to Trix.
“Well, then I went and talked to Robert. I said, I’ve got an interesting opportunity for us. Bob was working like a dog for dogshit pay, driving a dump truck. We had a dream. Get rich, go to live someplace nice like Las Vegas. I thought Las Vegas was the cat’s ass.”
“I remember.”
“Yeah. And I thought I was lucky, I thought I could work my luck so that I’d have it good someday, have it easy. So I told Robert…” She lowered her eyes.
I waited.
“I told him to take out a life insurance policy on me. Then I die, but I don’t die, and we get the money, we blow this donkey-butt town, we have a ball in Vegas. Double that bankroll! That’s what I thought. I actually thought we could walk into a casino and double that money in an hour. Break the bank if we stayed all night.” She laughed nastily at herself. “Somebody told me it takes money to make money. I thought that’s all there was to it. You know, I wasn’t that much older than you, Lillian.”
“I know it.”
“You were a smart kid. You’ve prob’ly done well in life. Haven’t you? Prob’ly a good job, or a good husband. A husband who isn’t a drunk, or a fucked-up gorilla. Nice house, I bet. Kids? You got kids?”
“No, Trix.”
“Hmp. Well anyhow, I sell Robert on going along with it. I mean, he never knew Bill. He never knew anybody in this…Not your dad, nobody. All he knew was, the bar where I was working was gonna be burned for insurance, and I was gonna pretend to be burned up in it, and we’d take our insurance money and take off. All’s I’d have to do’d be hide out awhile until the insurance company paid off.”
“I see,” I said. “Bill didn’t know Robert, and Robert didn’t know Bill.”
“Bill knew I was married. But I was fed up with Robert.”
“So…I’m not following.”
“So my plan was, as soon as Robert got the insurance money on my life, I’d get my hands on it, and beat it to Florida with Bill. What could Robert do at that point? Tell the police? He was in on it too, right with me. Bill helped me with that part too.
“So Robert took out a policy on me. Fifty thou. Same as your dad had on the Dot. I was surprised the Dot was worth that much, actually.”
I put in, “Well, it was the whole building.”
“Yeah, that’s right. So Bill—boy, he planned it. He got rid of the kid, took him to camp.”
“Why didn’t he murder Duane too?” I asked grimly.
“That’s a good question. I think Bill had hopes for the kid. I dunno. Then, that night, he drove back home with the wife. He got her plastered—fed her her medicine, you know, only more of it. And booze. He knew how to do it. He’d practiced on her. She never knew it. He was a good thinker, Bill was. He could hold so many different facts in his mind at one time, it would amaze you. He thought it all through, how she’d need to breathe smoke in order to die right, how she’d need to be burned almost totally up in order to be me. He thought of all that in advance. ’N’ then the fryer was my idea. I said I’ll break the thing so it catches on fire. I knew how it worked. When the guy came to install it he told me what would happen if this or that broke. Those things are dangerous, you know, they’re really dangerous. You know that? I told Bill, ‘Then you help things along, you give it a boost with some lighter fluid maybe, then flash your Zippo at it, and you get the hell outta there.’ I gave him my wedding ring.”
“Were you at all afraid?” I asked.
She paused. “Can’t say that I was. It was—it was like a prank or something. It was exciting. So that night I busted the fryer, all I did was take a fork and jimmy a little pipe on it, and that made it heat too high. And I made sure to leave it on while me and Marty were cleaning up. You go on up, I’ll let myself out,’ I told him. So I let myself out, then an hour later I sneak back in. I seen a light in the upstairs—I thought, Marty thought of everything. I assumed everybody was gone. I leave the door unlocked and I beat it again. As soon as I’m gone Bill brings in the wife—holding her up like she’s drunk, see, which she basically was—”
“Juanita.”
“Huh?”
“Her name was Juanita.”
“Oh.”
“Where did you go?”
“To a motel in Sterling Heights. I just picked one. Robert gave me some cash. And Bill did it. He pulled it off.” Trix gazed at her second glass of beer, then at me. “It went just fine. Except for one thing.”
I said, “He did it on the wrong night.”
“It was the wrong night, oh gawd, it was the wrong night! Gawd help me. Gawd have mercy. I don’t know what happened. Bill told me which night to be ready. I told Robert which night to be ready…ready for the police to come and tell him.
“Marty—your dad—he was supposed to take the family out for the night, you and your mom were supposed to be gone. Gone, gone somewhere, over to you uncle’s or someplace. I had no idea you and your mom were upstairs the whole time.”
“We were playing cribbage and drinking pop.” I heard my voice tremble.
Trix wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Oh Lord, oh gawd. I don’t know, I never knew what went wrong. Bill carried out the plan like he thought they’d agreed to. He positioned the body. He did it all just so, and he lit the hot fat, and he left. He had no idea until the next day that…that—”
“That he’d killed my mom and dad.” I felt Minerva’s hand come to me under the table. She placed it on my thigh and I covered it with mine. I felt steadier.
Trix murmured, “He had no idea.”
“I think he did.”
“What?”
“I looked at the news pictures. His car was parked down the alley at least as long as it took a newspaperman to get there to take pictures of the burning building. Then a little later the car was gone.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“He could have raised an alarm when he heard my mom and dad screaming.”
“Well, I don’t know. He sure didn’t want your dad to die. Your dad was gonna give him that insurance money. No Marty Byrd, no insurance money. He was gonna skip out on your dad, I mean, that goes without saying. He had no intention of paying him that money back. But he wasn’t gonna kill him. Didn’t wanta kill him, for gawd’s sake.”
“What happened afterward?”
“Well, I stick around this motel in Sterling Heights. I change my hair and how I look. I go shopping. I eat at a restaurant. Watch TV in the room. Robert came to see me a couple of times. Bill came to see me quite often. I got nervous they’d run into each other. This was while the kid was at camp.”
“Duane, that would be Duane.”
“Yeah.”
“The boy whose mother you helped murder.”
“No, no, I wasn’t even there when she died.”
Su
dden rage blurred my vision. “You stupid puke! You helped kill her and then you helped cover it up!”
I felt Minerva’s hand tighten in mine. I wanted to smash Trix’s face in. But I got ahold of myself because, more than that, I wanted her to keep talking to me. In a calmer way, I said, “You were, in fact, an accessory before and after the murder of Juanita Sechrist.”
Trix considered that. “I guess so. I guess I feel like I had something to do with it, even if I wasn’t right there.”
Minerva’s grip grew even firmer.
I said, “The only thing that kept me from dying too was luck. And the Detroit Fire Department.”
“I’d say it was mostly luck,” Trix reflected. “It usually is in these types of things. If you really think about it, Lillian, you’re an extremely lucky stiff. Luckier than me.”
Ignoring that and keeping control, I said, “And then Robert double-crossed you.”
“Yeah. He got the money in his name. Who else’s, right? The insurance company was suspicious, but they couldn’t find any evidence of anything. They gave him the money, and he put it in an account right away. When I got in touch with him, he said he’d decided to keep the money all to himself. I thought it was a joke. I can still hear him laughing at me.”
“He double-crossed you before you could double-cross him.”
Minerva exclaimed, “A triple cross!”
“Yeah, that was a good joke,” I said. “There would’ve been no way for you to get the money. Same exact problem he would’ve had. Couldn’t cry foul and run to the police.”
“No, no way. I trusted that bastard to play fair with me. That’s what comes from being too trusting.”
I’d have laughed myself sick if we’d been talking about a crime other than homicide. I said, “So neither you nor Bill Sechrist got anything off those two $50,000 insurance policies.”
“That’s right. What a couple a chumps, huh?”
“I would use a different word.”
“Well, we got away with it, at least.” A touch of pride came into her tone. “You can say that much for us.” She sighed wistfully. “Your uncle got the fire insurance money for you, and I guess there was life insurance too.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t hurt for anything growing up, then.”
Control. Control. I said, “I always had clothes and enough to eat.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“What happened in Florida then?”
“Another fiasco. Bill’d always wanted to go to Florida. So that’s where we met up. The kid was an inconvenience.”
“Duane.”
“A real inconvenience. That period of time in Florida was tough. You know, we fucked up big-time. But I was willing to stick with Bill Sechrist. I don’t know what happened. I thought we’d do Florida for a while, maybe figure out something else to do to recoup that money we never got. There’s a lot of money around Miami, you know? Then too, I thought we’d maybe give Vegas a try. But we never did get to Vegas together.”
“What happened to Bill?”
Slowly, Trix said, “Well, I don’t know. That’s a mystery to me, I think prob’ly the biggest mystery of my life. What happened to Bill? One day he said he had to go see a man about some work. Some man told him he could earn a bucket of money doing practically nothing. It was dirty work he wanted done. That’s what it sounded like, anyhow, when Bill told me about it. He was excited. Ten grand for one night’s work, he kept saying. I think my luck’s finally turning. He went out at midnight to meet this guy. Wouldn’t tell me where he was going. He never came back. I never saw him again.”
I found that a very interesting story.
Trix said, “The kid was already out of control. When a swishy kid like that hits the streets and starts to turn tricks, you’re gonna have trouble. And then when Bill disappeared, it was like…well. Looking back on it, I’d have to admit that kid had a pretty tough time of it.”
“No shit.”
“No shit. Well, the kid took off, God knows where. And then, finally…” She paused and scanned the barroom.
A scrim of smoke hung in the air. A chair scraped. The bartender laughed at a joke. The desert sun beat in through the slits around the shades.
Trix inhaled, long and deep. “And then, I finally made my dream of being in Las Vegas come true.”
20
I had heard of high rollers at Las Vegas hotels, people who get free suites and gourmet dinners and obsequious personal attention, who in exchange drop hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars per year at the tables in pursuit of the thrill of chance. The people at the Las Vegas Hilton treated Minerva LeBlanc as such a VIP, but I hadn’t known she was a gambling woman.
“You didn’t know that?” Minerva said. “But I gamble every day of my life.”
I appreciated that.
The room service steward had just closed the door noiselessly behind himself, and I turned to Minerva with a smile.
“Know what I mean?” she said.
“I think so. Will you go down to play in the casino on this trip?”
“Probably not. They’re glad to see me, and they know I’ll be back soon.”
“What’s your game?”
“Craps. I love to throw those bones.” She rubbed her hands over the feast the steward had laid out on the suite’s dining table for us. There was a mound of caviar the size of a meat loaf, a platter of frighteningly tiny roasted birds lined up in a row, seared vegetables in a fragrant sauce, raw ones that smelled of rain and sun, a silver bin of toast points, along with butters and things caramelized, reduced, rouladed, truffled, and gilded.
“That’s some snack,” I remarked. “Are you really that hungry?”
“Famished.” She lifted a lid and inhaled. “Mm, this, I believe, would be the conch chowder. Come on, let’s eat.” She lowered herself into one of the smoothly upholstered dining chairs.
“Conch chowder? That soup they serve in Key West?”
“Mm.”
It seemed obscene to fly saltwater mollusks 2,000-plus miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the desert so that a chef could spend half a day with them in order to make a customer say “Mm.” On the other hand, the stuff sure smelled good. I had to smile again.
“Have some. There’s champagne, too. See?”
“Actually, I’m in the mood for a cup of coffee and some of this fish roe.” I helped myself generously.
“Ugh. Caviar and coffee.”
We sat at the table together. She was genuinely hungry; I watched as she worked her way through ninety percent of the food. The steward had opened the wine and poured a glass for her, and she sipped it.
I wanted to know if she knew what had happened to her when she blanked out in Trix’s trailer.
“Oh, yes,” she said unhappily. “Since my accident I’ve had seizures.” Her accident, she called it. “Stress or thrills can bring them on. I had them a lot, for a while. Not the big ones with convulsions and tongue-biting, just moments when something goes funny in my head. I started on medication for them right away, and the stuff worked. I was seizure-free for a couple of months. I’m disappointed.”
“So that one came out of nowhere, sort of?”
“Yeah. I felt it coming but couldn’t stop it. I regret that.” Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe I was getting more and more used to her, but it seemed she was speaking totally normally.
I said, “Dear God, Minerva, what you’ve been through.”
She paused. “I know you might not accept this, Lillian, but it’s all right. Everything is really all right.” She smiled at me in a way that made me believe it. And wonder. We went back to eating.
I enjoyed the caviar, which I applied thickly to buttered toast points, and ate slowly. The glistening black spheres made small, succulent explosions on my tongue, tasting of the sea, of dark depths and secrecy. I thought the coffee went perfectly well. The combination would make a luxurious breakfast.
Far from making her logy, the food a
nd sips of champagne energized Minerva. I saw her revive, the light in her eyes strengthening. We had taken (separate) showers and I’d washed out my dusty clothes and hung them to dry. I felt revived too.
I poured coffee for Minerva as she rang for the empty dishes to be taken away, which shortly they were.
“Oh, that was good,” she sighed. “I’m comfortable with you, Lillian. You know?”
“Yes. I feel the same way.”
Then we talked about our remarkable day. I was experiencing a strong, bottled-up, sorrowful feeling. A whole raft of feelings, to tell you the truth.
A few hours ago we had driven Trix back to her slut hut. Minerva counted a thousand dollars out of her wallet and handed it to her.
“This’ll help,” said Trix as she got out. She ducked her head back in and addressed me. “I want to tell you something.”
I waited.
She looked very tired. But her eyes smiled faintly as they met mine, and she reached to touch my hand. “You know, I always got a boot out of you, kid. You had a funny way about you.”
I made no reply.
Softly, painfully, she said, “Kid, I’m sorry.”
_____
Now, as Minerva and I talked, I felt sadness creeping over me, stronger and stronger. The shock I’d felt since talking with Duane at his kitchen table in Indian Village and finding out the things I did, had ebbed. To let the sadness flow in, I supposed. I was much less confused than I’d been. Yet I didn’t feel any more peaceful.
Minerva and I moved over to the wide couch with our cups and saucers.
She said, “I wondered earlier today if you’d feel a sense of finality about things after talking with Trix. Do you?”
“I was hoping I would.”
“But you don’t.”
“Not really.”
“How do you feel about her now?”
“Oh…ambivalent. At best. It’s just so strange. She was rather a significant figure for me. We really got to know each other.”
The Lillian Byrd Crime Series Page 58