Blood on Their Hands

by Lawrence Block

  “Of strip joints?”

  “Of exotic dancing?”

  “Neither.”

  “Well, let me try to explain Tara’s dancing, then. Man to man.” Nolan clasped his hands in front of him, bizarrely like a minister about to preach a sermon. “One of the finest British novelists once wrote, ‘it was like meat and wine and the air one breathed and whatever else was essential to existence.’”

  “W. Somerset Maugham.”

  Nolan perked up. “Name the book.”

  “Of Human Bondage.”

  “Very good, Rory. But how...?”

  “I played pro tennis in a lot of countries where the used bookstores carried only the classics in English.”

  “I wish I’d had a student in the last ten years who’d know that Maugham quote without my teaching it.” Then Nolan blinked. “But back to cases, eh? Tara was grace incarnate. Joyful as well. She really wanted the audience before her to have a good time, also to appreciate a certain...artistry about her work.”

  “Tara was top of the line.”

  “Tara was her own line. Young, unspoiled—oh, I know I’m laying it on a bit thick, but truly, she had no parallel in any other club I’ve ever visited.”

  “You’ve been in enough places like Cottontail’s, your students never spotted you?”

  A wise smile. “The beauty of South Florida, Rory. After the first few weeks of a semester, the only students in the exotic clubs are the ones visiting Lauderdale from afar.”

  I assumed he meant the residual spring-breakers. “Okay, Tara’s the best. Lacey?”

  “Ah, youth may not be everything, but sometimes it’s enough. And she has the energy of a pony. ‘Rookie fire,’ I believe the baseball pundits call it.”

  “But not the...artistry.”

  A sad smile. “Please, Rory. Don’t mock me for trying to help you, eh?”

  Nolan had a point. “How about Monica?”

  “Monica, Monica. I felt badly for her. I’d often stand a drink for her on nights when Tara wasn’t performing.”

  “You mean Monica would come to your table.”

  “Yes. And we’d talk, but only a bit. I’m afraid Monica’s natural endowment had fallen from between her ears to between her elbows. However, she was...‘poignant,’ I’d put it. Like the last glass from yesterday’s bottle of wine.”

  “You wouldn’t be suggesting that she’d...breathed too long?”

  “Why, Rory, what a nice turn of phrase,” said Jason Nolan. “We may make a novelist of you yet.”

  “Hey, hey. If you’re selling, I might actually buy something.”

  Jason Nolan proved right: Lacey Peevers had a certain energy about her. She was about five-six and a little to the stocky side of solid, with blonde hair, brown roots, and a flat tone that sounded Midwestern. Her “flatness,” though, ended at the voicebox as her breasts jounced under the T-shirt and over the baggy shorts she wore answering the bell to her apartment.

  “Ms. Peevers, I’d like to talk with you about Tara Tate and Monica Lewin.”

  The sunny expression faded, but only a little. “Oh, bummer. But, yeah, why not.”

  I followed her into a small living room strewn with toys. A toddler with sandy hair and his mother’s features was sitting in the middle of them, chewing on a plastic duck.

  “Hey, C.C., we got ourselves a visitor.”

  I looked down at the kid, who was smiling and giggling. “See See?”

  “The initials. When I got pregnant, I wasn’t absolutely sure whether the sperm who made the big swim was from this guy ‘Chuck’ or this other guy ‘Craig.’ Since I wanted to, like, keep my options open, I used both of their initials.”

  As I sifted through that, Peevers plopped herself into a worn but large couch. I took the chair opposite it.

  “So,” she said, “what can I do you for?”

  “Let’s start with who you think killed Tara Tate.”

  I wanted to hit Peevers with it, just like that, gauge any reaction. Instead of shock, though, there was only a frown and some nibbling on her lower lip. “Tara’s husband. I’d say.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Barry’d always carry on about why she couldn’t be around more now that Tara wasn’t on the road anymore.”

  “Around?”

  “To help with his mom. She’s kind of like this invalid. Not exactly a coma, though she slips in and out quite a bit, leastwise the times C.C. and I went over to baby-sit.”

  “To baby-sit Barry’s mother.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s why he got pissed at Tara. Barry couldn’t see why his own wife couldn’t help out.”

  I thought about it. “Why do you suppose Tara wasn’t around?”

  A naughty smile. “I think she was doing a little more than letting some customers bromsky her tits.”

  “Bromsky...?”

  “Her tits.” Peevers lifted her forearm to her mouth and blew out a breath to make a farting sound last five seconds. Her son giggled some more. “Yeah, C.C., you know that noise, right? Dumpy dumpy.”

  The kid shrieked in joy now, his mom slaying him.

  “So, you think Tara was turning tricks?”

  “Yeah. Oh, not hooking exactly. More like providing service to a small circle of friends. But she really was gorgeous and all, so she could, like, have her pick.”

  I decided to test Peevers. “Some of the people I’ve talked to think you might have killed Tara.”

  A hurt look, then the sunny expression again. “Well, I can see their point, I guess. You put Tara and me on stage together, I’d sure look like Miss Fifth Runner-up. But I learned from Tara, and I would’ve learned from Monica, too, she didn’t go and hang herself.”

  “You think that’s what happened?”

  “Monica committing suicide?” A confused expression. “That’s what the papers and all said.”

  Time to test Lacey a different way. “Would you be interested in making a little money beyond...a bromsky?”

  Now a hard look, one I wouldn’t have predicted Peevers had inside her. “Thanks anyway, but C.C. needs me more than I need that.”

  “Lacey, I appreciate your time.”

  A sadder look as Peevers rocked from the couch down onto her knees and pushed a different toy into her son’s face. “Rory, you hadn’t gone and brought money into it, you could have had a lot more than my time.”

  Barry Cardiff’s address also was an old house, but that’s where the comparison to Jason Nolan’s place ended. No jungle of shrubs out front, just some scrub pine and weeds. The clapboard exterior needed paint, and the left rear tire of the old Chevy in a tacked-on carport needed air.

  I headed up the overgrown path from the street, being careful not to cause any more damage to the crumbling front stoop. A knock on the front door brought a male’s “Hold on a second” from somewhere inside.

  When he appeared behind the wire mesh, I thought Barry Cardiff looked more like a bear than a man. He wasn’t wearing a shirt above some tattered blue jeans, and his chest, arms, and shoulders were matted with hair. Maybe thirty, his face had the battered look of somebody who’d been to war and couldn’t quite lose the memories of it.

  Given his mother and his wife, maybe he’d been more victim than victor, too.

  Cardiff said, “I don’t know you.”

  I decided to vary the opening a little. “My name’s Rory Calhoun. I’m a private investigator looking into the death of Monica Lewin.”

  “Monica? You mean the bitch that killed my wife.”

  That seemed to establish our ground rules. “Can I come in?”

  A resigned shake of his head. “I suppose.”

  To the right of the door was a shabby living room that gave the impression of being less abused and more just unused. Cardiff didn’t turn into it, continuing instead through the kitchen. A smell of something medicinal hit me as he entered a back bedroom.

  Lying on some soiled sheets was a woman who could have been anywhere from sixty to seventy-five. She
seemed shrunken, with noticeable black whiskers around the mouth, and hair half as thick as Cardiff’s on her arms. Both eyes were closed, and her breathing was ragged, occasionally overpowering the hum of a small, oscillating fan standing on a night table inside the open window. Some videocassettes lay jumbled on the table’s lower shelf, but I didn’t see a VCR or even a television.

  “My mama,” said Cardiff.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? She’s been like this for near two-and-a-half years now. I took her to three doctors, and they sent her to three hospitals, and nobody can figure nothing about what to do for her except ‘keep her comfortable as possible.’ Only, Mama don’t get better and she don’t die neither.”

  I’d been in the room less than a minute, and already it felt oppressive. I wondered what I’d be capable of doing from desperation—or even just frustration—in Cardiff’s shoes.

  “Why do you think Monica Lewin strangled your wife?”

  He looked ready to spit. “Jealousy. Tara was a beautiful girl, just beautiful. And Monica was drying up like Mama here, only Monica could see it every time she went by a mirror.”

  “Jealous enough to kill, though?”

  Cardiff’s eyes came up to me. More rolled up to me, really, as his head barely moved. “Tara and me got married before Mama here took sick. I was out of work, so Tara decided she’d make us some extra by dancing in a club. I didn’t like it, and told her so, but somebody had to look after Mama, and that meant somebody else had to put food on our table. So Tara started her ‘career.’” He said the last word like it was a cuss.

  I said, “And began traveling?”

  Another spit look. “All the way to hell and back. Gone a month or more at a time, near killed the car with the miles she put on it. And put on her, too.” Cardiff rolled his eyes up again. “Tara was fine the way she was, didn’t need no...surgery. But she had it anyways, make her a ‘better’ dancer. Mister, I’ll tell you it was like they disfigured her. The scars, the stretch marks, the way her skin...shined. Doctors couldn’t help my mama, but they could hurt my Tara.”

  I fought the air in the room, the medicinal smell beginning to choke me, and I thought I could see why Cardiff’s wife would want to travel as much as possible. “But then Tara came home, right?”

  “Couldn’t take the road no more. Too lonely, she said. Nobody to talk to who wasn’t coming on to her. Nobody to joke with or hold her at night. Hell, that was my job, but she wouldn’t let me do it.” Cardiff looked to the bed. “I couldn’t leave Mama, and Tara wouldn’t stay here.”

  He was wandering, so I repeated my question.

  Cardiff shook his head. “Yeah, Tara come home, all right, if you mean here to Lauderdale. But she’d still be out more’n half the nights. The best shifts are at night, she said. The biggest tippers. But I needed her here sometimes, too. For me and for Mama.”

  I decided to risk a fight. “There’s some evidence your wife was prostituting herself.”

  Cardiff didn’t jump up, he didn’t even look up. He just reached a hairy hand over to the lower shelf of the night table and slid a videotape from the stack. “Found these yesterday when I was cleaning out Tara’s closet. Don’t matter, maybe, now she’s dead. But it’s the reason I can’t even mourn her proper.”

  I took the cassette from him, the name “Frank” in curlicue handwriting on the label. “Mr. Cardiff, thank you. And I’m sorry.”

  This time he reached for his mother’s forearm, squeezing it. And then Barry Cardiff began to cry.

  That night, I ran “Tara Does Frank” through my own VCR. I didn’t recognize the man. And while I’m no expert on production values, it seemed the camera stayed stationary, capturing the two of them but without “Frank”—if that was his real name—seeming aware he was starring in a low-budget epic. Of course, given how genuinely beautiful and sexually enthusiastic Tate appeared to be, Frank might just have been blinded by ecstasy.

  I thought about going to Cottontail’s, see if I could spot Frank in the crowd. Or even asking Roxanne Devereaux or Lacey Peevers to watch enough of the tape to identify him for me. Except that, for all I knew, Tara had filmed it on one of her road trips.

  So I decided to sleep on it.

  However, the next morning I felt hollow inside, partly the result of talking with Barry Cardiff, but mostly from watching the tape. Or more accurately, from realizing Tara Tate’s probable purpose in making it and maybe others like it.

  To clear my head, I picked up Don Floyd at his unit, and we walked to one of the back courts, a bucket of balls slung handles up over my shoulder the way Monica Lewin had carried her handbag the one and only time I’d met her.

  Floyd said, “Rough night, Rory?”

  “And a rough day before it, too.”

  He just nodded.

  When we got to Court 19, Floyd took a seat under the awning on a little knoll so he could watch me practice. Over the years, I’d found that when my serve went down the toilet, the best cure was to break it down to its component parts, with another pro watching for telltale errors.

  I started by folding a facecloth in fours, then setting it down inside the baseline about sixteen inches forward and between my lead left foot and my trailing right one. Then, holding the racquet in my right hand and a ball in my left, I practiced bouncing the ball and rocking my body until the rhythm felt right.

  Only problem was, I couldn’t get the case out of my mind.

  Monica Lewin comes to see me. She’s upset, but more angry than depressed over being a murder suspect. That night, though, she dies at the end of her bathrobe sash, Detective Kyle Cascadden is convinced—for political as well as police reasons—that it’s suicide.

  Floyd said, “Might want to try some tosses now.”

  I tried to clear my mind, then rock in rhythm while tossing the ball from my left hand straight up, but not swinging at it, just seeing if it landed on the facecloth. One, two, three...all on the folded square.

  Then, when I visit Roxanne “Rocky” Devereaux at her club, Cottontail’s, I get a little better feel for the three people Lewin thought could have killed Tara Nancy Tate. The only problem is, each of them has a different idea on who murdered Tate. Professor Jason Nolan thinks it was dancer Lacey Peevers. Peevers thinks it was husband Barry Cardiff. Cardiff thinks it was my almost-client Monica. Which brings me back to where I started.

  Floyd said, “Okay, now try to hit a first service, flat and down the middle.”

  I shook off the case facts, tried to put one eight inches inside the T of the box on the other side of the net. First two tries were long. Next two, into the net itself.

  At least a couple of the people I speak with think Tara Tate might be moonlighting by turning tricks, though. Which makes sense, if the “retirement plan” she’d discussed with Rocky Devereaux was to come true. And if Tara wanted to speed up that plan, she might have used videos like the one of “Frank” as blackmail. The problem there would be who else fit into Tate’s “small circle of friends,” and how she’d been able to finesse past her husband the providing of—

  Floyd said, “Rory, when I can’t ever get the first one in, I generally try to focus on the second service.”

  I stopped with my racquet halfway through its arc, the ball just hitting the court. Or the facecloth, since there was no bounce. Then I stared up the knoll and under the awning.

  “Rory, are you all right?”

  It made sense, it was consistent. Only I had no proof.

  Floyd stood. “Did you maybe pull something in your shoulder?”

  Which didn’t mean I couldn’t run a bluff.

  “Rory?”

  “Sorry, Don, but I have to practice something other than my serve.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Somebody else’s handwriting.”

  Don Floyd just scratched his head.

  It was a well-kept campus, if a little too new compared to the place I’d attended up north. The registrar’s offi
ce told me where the class I wanted was being conducted and when it would end, so I just sat with my brown paper bag on a bench under a gnarly banyan tree that looked as though it was the only living thing to survive the bulldozer twenty years before.

  Within half an hour, Professor Jason Nolan came out the front door of the classroom building, a couple of groupies coat-tailing him. Shifting a loose-leaf notebook and text of some kind to his other arm, he noticed me, then turned to the students before all three nodded in a “see you next time” way.

  Nolan walked toward my bench as warily as he had from behind his house the day before, the mane of hair standing up a little from his movement. “Rory, taking me up on that ‘novelist’ comment?”

  “I know, Jason.”

  He faltered a little, then drew close, but stayed standing over me. “Know what?”

  “About you and Tara Nancy Tate.”

  “Of course you do. I told you all about—”

  “Tate was an exotic dancer, but she was also a...service provider?”

  Nolan frowned. “What Tara did on her own time could hardly—”

  “I’m guessing you and she started in around the time she started up, first at a club where Rocky Devereaux was the ‘house mom.’ Only Tara decided to go on the road, maybe to make more money, maybe just to get away from the conditions at her own home.”

  “I’m sure her mother-in-law’s illness must have been a—”

  “Only thing is, you’d gotten used to having her regularly, and then had to adjust to a more occasional, irregular schedule. But she was worth it, wasn’t she?”

  “I don’t think I care to be insulted on my own—’’

  “However, when Tara got sick of the loneliness of being on the road, she came back. And you expected the schedule to revert to what it had been before. Only Tara had come close to achieving her ‘retirement plan,’ and she even figured out a way to...accelerate things.”

  When Nolan didn’t reply to that, I brought the video cassette out of the bag. It was the one with “Frank” depicted in it, but I’d copied Tate’s handwriting onto the new “Jason” label pasted over it.