Dust in the Heart

by Ralph Dennis

  “What do you make of it?”

  “It all flew past me.”

  Wilt thanked Goodman for his overtime work. He sat and stared at the wall. The information from New York meant something, but he didn’t know what that was.

  He was still stewing about the gaps, the holes, the blank places in Raymond Thorpe when the outside, private phone number was dialed. He caught it after the first ring.

  “I do remember.” Her voice was hoarse, throaty.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Don’t change the subject. I do remember.”

  “That you’re a great lay?”

  “The other. Don’t you try to play with me.”

  He laughed. “What do you remember?”

  “I won’t say it. I’m going to make you say it to me again.”

  “When do I see you?”

  “Tonight.” It was a fact the way she said it. There was no hesitation.

  “Stay out of the rain. Don’t get wet. The fever’ll go away and you’ll be rational in no time at all.”

  “I do remember.”

  “Is that right?”

  “And your robe smells like you. Tobacco and booze and sweat.”

  “All those wonderful odors that all women love and can’t live without.”

  “Yes.” She giggled like a schoolgirl and hung up on him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Wilt stood it as long as he could. He was as gentle as he could be when he lifted her arm from his shoulders and moved it. His left leg was cramped all the way from the hip to the ankle. The pain, when he moved the leg, set his teeth into a clenched position. His eyes watered.

  Diane murmured something. He leaned toward her but she didn’t repeat it. He eased his legs over the side of the bed. The pain was even worse then and he bit into his bottom lip and waited to see if it would ease or go away. A minute or two passed. The pain didn’t change. It remained constant.

  He leaned forward and pushed himself to his feet. He stood there, swaying slightly, until he found his balance.

  He limped to the window and drew the drapes away so that he could look down at the street. He leaned on the window sill. The street was empty. Not even a car passed. There was a stillness of the early morning and he tried to guess the time. There was no hint of light and it was a darkness that could have been two a.m. or four a.m. It was dark as an armpit.

  In the bed behind him Diane stirred. Her hand patted his side of the bed. Searching for him. he knew. An animal sense told her he was missing, that his warmth was gone.

  They were in his bedroom. That was the main argument they’d had the night before. Where they should go. The rest of it was a foregone conclusion. He’d only won and taken her to his apartment because they struck a bargain.

  “I don’t care where we go,” she said, “as long as you say to me what you said last night.”

  “All I did was ask if you were warm enough.”

  A shake of her head, “No.”

  “After I had my will of you, I said you were great in bed.”

  A more impatient shake from her head.

  “Okay. When we get there, I’ll say it in the dark. That way, you won’t know if I’m lying.”

  “You weren’t lying. Not last night.”

  “What do you remember anyway?”

  “That you put me in your bed. That you stretched out on the bed next to me, on the outside of the covers. And you said something important to me.”

  “Important or important to you?”

  “Don’t chop up words with me, buster.”

  “You’re trying to lead me.” Wilt said. “You don’t remember and you’re trying to trick me into saying it again so you’ll know what I said … if I said anything.”

  “Mule.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, admitting it.

  “You’re a wrongheaded mule.”

  He grinned at her.

  But later in his bedroom he said it for her.

  “I love you.”

  Her face flushed with a new color. A warmth touched him, all the way to the pit of his stomach. An emptiness had been there for years and now he was full.

  He said it a second time, just to see if she could be even more beautiful and he saw that she was. The amazement grew and choked him and he turned away and tried to control himself while he poured the wine, a Muscadet, a glass for her and one for him. By the time they finished the glass of wine, the old furnace had huffed and groaned and warmed the room. They undressed facing each other.

  In bed, when he reached for her, she stopped him. “Let me see the merchandise.” But she meant the hip. She crouched over him and studied the puckered scar and said, “That must have hurt, Wilt.” She rubbed a cool hand over the scar. “I wish this was a healing touch.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “And this is healing too.”

  They made love. And it was love. Two kinds, the violence, the harsh need, because she wanted him and her appetite was strong. And there was the want that had been growing in him from the first time he saw her.

  Later, there was a time for gentleness, a slow dance to a kind of music that floated somewhere in the back of his mind. And the way she moved with him, he knew that she heard the same music.

  Breath back to normal, raised on elbows, his hand on her hip. There was an impish way about her. “Now that you’ve had your way with me, what exactly is your intention toward me?”

  “To continue to have my way with you.”

  A mock sadness. “And nothing more.”

  “Certainly not anything less,” he said,

  “It’s a lot but it’s not enough.”

  He put his arms around her and drew her to him. Soft warm skin the length of him. He stroked her hair. “That and everything. Everything in the world.”

  “That’s too fancy. Maybe you’d better calm me again.”

  “God, I love you.”

  “That doesn’t calm me,” she said.

  “Tell me your thoughts, Wilt.”

  He kept a hand on the window sill to steady himself and turned. She was awake now, sitting with pillows behind her head.

  “Thoughts about you. All good thoughts. But I won’t tell you.”

  “But they’re all good?”

  “Good and beautiful.”

  “Then why are you out of my bed?”

  “My bed,” he corrected her. “I guess it’s something I have to get used to. I’ve been sleeping alone too long. It’s hard to adjust.”

  “Poor badass,” she said.

  “When you’re a teenager you spend all your days and nights dreaming about sleeping with a beautiful woman. And when you’re older, you discover you feel that somebody invaded your territory.”

  “The first man I’ve wanted to go to bed with in years and I find he doesn’t want to sleep with me. That’s disappointing.”

  “We’ll work it out.” He padded into the kitchen and got two cans of Bud from the refrigerator. He opened one and had a long swallow. He carried them back into the bedroom and pulled the tab on hers. “Thirsty?”

  She gulped the beer. “All that wine …”

  He kissed her. She tasted of sleep and the sourness of the wine.

  He took a deep breath and felt the pain going away. Perhaps there was something to the healing touch, though it was slow-acting.

  “I talked to Was tonight,” she said, “just before I met you.”

  He waited.

  “Don’t you want to know what he said?”

  “You’ll tell me,” he said.

  “He said if I was going to waste my life on some man, I could do worse than you. That you’d been to the top of the mountain and looked at what was on the other side.”

  “Nice of him. But the truth is that there’s nothing there. There’s nothing to see on that side of the mountain.”

  “Me?”

  “No.” He wrapped an arm around her and put his face deep in her hair. “You’re on this side of the mountain.”


  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  Wilt held the receiver to his ear while he waited for Susie to place the call to Judge Baldwin’s office. Joe frowned down at half a cup of coffee across the desk from him.

  “I’m tired of pussyfooting around Thorpe,” Wilt said.

  “Past time.” Joe looked rested and fresh.

  Wilt had his guess that Joe hadn’t spent the night with Charlotte Winters. A second bit of proof: there was a glow to Joe’s skin and that meant he’d had his early morning workout.

  The call went through. The Judge’s secretary said he was due in court in half an hour. Was this so important that it couldn’t wait? If it couldn’t wait, could it be handled in five minutes?

  “I need a search warrant,” Wilt said.

  “How soon can you be here?”

  “Three minutes,” Wilt said.

  The secretary said the Judge would expect him.

  Judge Jason Baldwin was thin and short and dapper. He had an out-of-date pencil thin mustache and wore his hair combed over so that it partially covered a bald spot on top of his head.

  He was University of North Carolina and Harvard trained and there was, often, a confusion about which accent he wanted to use.

  “This Raymond Thorpe, you have reason to believe he is involved in the death of the Dobbs child and the Moore child?”

  Wilt argued the patchwork, circumstantial evidence he had. Even as he rushed through it, he saw clearly how thin it really was.

  Judge Baldwin listened politely, his head canted to one side. “It doesn’t sound like you have much to go on.”

  “I know that. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t mind if Thorpe knew that we were thinking about him.”

  “Wouldn’t that have the adverse effect of warning him?”

  “Maybe that’s what I want. Let’s say we scare him. It might keep him away from school bus stops until we have a case against him.”

  “This goes against my grain, Wilton. I don’t want this to be a fishing expedition.”

  The secretary, a dowdy woman with her hair in a painful tight bun and with a sour pursed mouth said: “Ten minutes, Judge.”

  “I want it specified what you’re looking for,” The Judge said.

  “Women’s underpants, unworn.”

  The Judge nodded but looked confused.

  “Also children’s underpants, worn, belonging to Cathy Dobbs and Dana Moore.”

  “You think the killer kept them?”

  “Maybe. They’re missing. And we want to look for false identification, credit cards, driver’s licenses, social security cards in any name other than Raymond Thorpe.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I wish I could say ‘and anything else that helps.’”

  “You can’t.” The Judge’s head was down. He scribbled on a pad and turned and handed the pad to his secretary. He paused at his desk to sign the search warrant. “Miss Marsh will type in the particulars.”

  Five minutes later, Wilt and Joe were on the highway headed for Old Oak Terrace Road and the Plowden estate.

  Missy Plowden was upset after she read the search warrant. She followed them to the cruiser, still arguing. She was dressed in riding pants and tight brown boots that reached her knees. The riding pants were a mistake, Wilt thought. In them, she looked like she had a rear-end like a draft horse.

  They’d stopped at the main house to get a key to the guest house. She rode with them the quarter mile to the house where Thorpe lived. She wanted them to hold off their search until she called Thorpe and he arrived from Raleigh. Wilt insisted that it was not necessary for Thorpe to be there while the search was conducted. They were, he said, on a tight schedule and they couldn’t spare the time for Thorpe to drive over from Raleigh.

  That settled, Missy relaxed. She would go with them and oversee the search. With the anger and outrage dying, she appeared to notice Joe Croft for the first time. From the passenger seat in front, Wilt saw the calculated interest and he considered how he could use it.

  The guest house was a single floor. It wasn’t huge but it wasn’t small either. It was a bit larger scale than what a single man or woman got in a studio apartment or a one-bedroom place.

  There was an expensive oriental rug on the living room floor and a leather-covered couch near the fireplace. The living room had windows on three sides and thick, heavy drape that shut out the light. Chairs placed here and there and an entertainment center with closed wooden doors that enclosed a color TV and a tape deck.

  Wilt sent Joe to search the living room and the kitchen. He would do the bedroom. His calculation was that Missy would remain with Joe, trying to seduce him away from Charlotte, and he would be left alone to turn the bedroom inside out if he wanted to.

  He was right.

  Wilt started with the closet. He didn’t expect to find anything. A sly man knew that was where the search began and made sure there was nothing to be found. There was a full rack of clothing, several suits and expensive jackets in tweed and flannel. A dark raincoat and a light-colored one. Perhaps two dozen pairs of trousers. He checked the clothing. He found a few coins. Next, he checked the suitcases. Empty except for some shirt wrappings and a plane ticket stub for a flight from New York. He replaced the suitcases and checked the closet shelves. Nothing but dust and a pair of shoes that needed new heels and half soles.

  On to the small bookcase. He shook each book to make sure nothing was hidden there. Next the dresser. He found stacks of shirts and boxer shorts in one drawer. Socks and starched handkerchiefs in a second. He checked everything but took care not to disturb the order.

  The bathroom was next. The usual articles in the medicine chest. Shaving things, razors, lotions and a couple of prescription drugs. Aspirin. Bromo. As a final, foolish gesture, he lifted the top from the toilet water tank. He found nothing but rusting water.

  He returned to the bedroom. The night table first. He raked through the contents of the table drawer. A couple of packages of rubbers. The ones with ribbed tips. A roll and a half of breath mints. An opened package of Turns. A plastic bag with what was probably half an ounce of grass in it. A pack of rolling papers next to that. He replaced the grass. It wasn’t on the search warrant and there wasn’t any reason to worry about it. Any hassle about the grass could only bring up the possibility that the search had gone past the limits set by the warrant.

  The floor was highly polished wood. Another oriental rug, used like a throw rug, was beside the bed. He lifted it. Nothing.

  He stood in the center of the bedroom and felt the failure and the disappointment and just a bit of anger.

  Now what? Fuck it. He attacked the bed and tore the covers from it. The heavy bedspread, the blanket, the top and the bottom sheets. He tossed them one after the other into a pile on the oriental rug.

  Wilt started on one side of the bed and ran his hand between the mattress and the box springs. He lifted the mattress as he went. Then his hand touched something. A push and the mattress was raised.

  It was pair of women’s underwear. They looked unused.

  He left the panties where they were and went to the door that led to the living room.

  “Joe, come here.”

  Joe entered and stood beside him.

  Wilt lifted the mattress and pulled out the single pair of panties. “You’re a witness where I found these.”

  “I see them, boss.”

  Wilt lifted the mattress and flipped it over and away from the box springs. Nothing else. He was disappointed. He wanted to find the children’s underwear. That would tie a knot in Thorpe’s tail.

  Missy Plowden stood in the doorway. “What did you find?”

  Wilt held up the woman’s panties.

  “Oh …” One look and she whirled away from the doorway and went out of sight, into the living room.

  Wilt checked the waistband. “Same brand, same maker, same size.”

  “Still not enough,” Joe said. “Not enough so he’s got a choice between electricity and a lethal
injection.”

  That was true. “You find anything?”

  “Nothing. No false I.D. or credit cards.”

  “Was Missy helpful?”

  “Only to my ego. I must be the greatest stud since sliced bread.”

  “That’s a mixed metaphor.”

  Joe shrugged. “You know what I mean.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  Wilt had lunch at the Corner Cafe, a soup and sandwich shop. He didn’t taste the bean soup or the tuna salad sandwich. Head down, he kicked the facts around in his mind like a soccar ball. But there were no goals and the score was zip to zip when he left and headed back to the Station.

  As soon as he entered the lobby, he knew something was wrong. Susie was flustered. Wilt stopped at the switchboard and leaned on an elbow.

  Susie’s voice was a breathless whisper. “There’s a man in your office to see you.”

  “In my office?” That was against the rules. His first law was that no one got admitted to Wilt’s office while he was out.

  “Joe’s with him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I think he’s a Federal man,” Susie said.

  “He give a name? He say who he’s with?”

  “Not to me. Maybe he told Joe.”

  Wilt straightened up. He tucked his shirttail in. “A Bureau man?”

  “I don’t think so. Usually they tell you right away who they are. This one … well, this one is different.”

  “Let’s have a look at him.” Wilt winked at her and marched into his office.

  Joe looked up when he entered. A look that might have been relief washed across his face. He stood and pushed back Wilt’s chair. They passed each other as Wilt circled the desk and stopped behind it.