Shimmer

by Hilary Norman

‘At least till you find out what’s going on,’ Grace said. ‘Or she calls me again.’

  Mildred could not easily have explained why she hadn’t wanted to speak to those two cops. Neither of them were strangers to her, after all, but then she’d always – even while Donny had still been alive – been picky about who she chose to spend time with.

  Time being the only commodity she had to barter these days.

  Samuel Becket was different. Before him, there’d been that pleasant young Officer Valdez, and she’d had no objection to passing the time of day with him on occasion, but her relationship with Detective Becket was something else altogether.

  ‘That’s it, precisely,’ she said to her dead fiancé. ‘We do relate to each other.’

  Not that Detective Martinez had ever disrespected her, or that nice enough red-headed young woman who had been with him this afternoon.

  But Samuel Becket had given her a telephone.

  Samuel Becket had wanted her to go to a hotel, had wanted to pay for that out of his own hard-earned money so that she could be safe. And not just – she was sure about that – because he thought she might be some kind of eye-witness.

  No one since Donny had truly given a damn about Mildred Bleeker.

  ‘Not that I’ve allowed them to,’ she told him now. ‘To be fair.’

  A boy aged about fourteen, in foolish-looking baggy pants and a baseball cap, passed by the trees where she was still hiding in case the detectives came back, saw her talking to herself and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Weirdo,’ Mildred heard him say.

  And then she realized, suddenly, the real reason behind her reluctance to talk to Becket’s colleagues. It was because she was afraid of exactly why Samuel had not been out there, as usual, with his partner.

  She was scared that something bad might have happened to him.

  ‘Neurosis,’ she told herself, because he might just have influenza, or be working on some other case, or even simply be taking a day off.

  But Samuel Becket had asked her, just this morning, if she’d be around later.

  And then he had kissed her on the cheek.

  So neurotic or not, Mildred was anxious that there might be some bad reason for his not having been here with Detective Martinez this same afternoon.

  And the truth was she didn’t want to know what that reason might be.

  Not until she had to.

  58

  ‘I’m at O’Hare,’ Sam told Grace at 4.05 p.m., moving fast through the arrivals concourse towards the exit.

  ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘No news here.’

  ‘I’m almost at the cab line,’ he said. ‘Be there soon as.’

  ‘Have you called the Sheriff’s office yet?’

  ‘Jury’s still out on exactly when I tell them I’m here.’

  Outside it was grey and windy, a heck of a lot cooler than Miami, but still pretty humid. The line was shorter than it might have been, and Sam positioned himself behind a group of four businessmen discussing their dinner plans for the evening ahead.

  ‘Are you sure that’s such a good idea?’ Grace said.

  ‘I’m not forgetting my history,’ Sam assured her. ‘But if no one opens the door to me at your dad’s house, I want the option of finding my own way in. Get in and get Claudia safely out – then call for back-up if necessary.’

  ‘I love you,’ Grace said, trusting his instincts and too damned grateful for his motives to risk any argument. ‘So much.’

  The line was moving swiftly, plenty of cabs flowing in and out, and the talk ahead of Sam was still of slabs of baby-back ribs, though nothing, he knew, was likely to spark any appetite in him until he had good news for his wife.

  ‘You try and stay calm,’ he told her. ‘Kiss the baby for me.’

  ‘You just stay safe,’ she told him back.

  South of Franklin Park, a couple of miles from his destination, Sam’s cell phone rang, startling him out of the kind of blank zone that the drab semi-suburban cab ride had seemed to damp over his brain.

  ‘Do me a favour, man,’ Martinez said. ‘No craziness this time, OK?’

  ‘None planned,’ Sam told him. ‘Any ID from Miami-Dade on the new victim?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ said Martinez. ‘And nothing from Mildred yet either. Riley and I went to find her, but if she was around, she wasn’t coming out to play.’

  The cab pulled up at a red light intersection.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ Sam said, ‘and try again later.’

  ‘Goes without saying,’ Martinez said. ‘You told the Sheriff you’re there?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Sam said. ‘I’m on leave, remember.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Martinez said. ‘Day off with the family.’

  The lights turned to green, and they were moving again.

  ‘Do you know,’ Sam said, ‘that I never even met my father-in-law before?’

  ‘Sure I know,’ Martinez said. ‘And from the sounds of him, you didn’t miss much, though it’s always beaten the hell out of me how a man like that could get himself a daughter like Grace.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Sam.

  David and Saul had just arrived at the house on Bay Harbor Island.

  ‘Sam didn’t need to tell you,’ Grace said. ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘Enough,’ David said, ‘about your so-called stepbrother.’

  ‘Still,’ Grace said, ‘this really wasn’t necessary, I’m perfectly fine.’

  ‘You won’t be perfectly fine,’ David said, ‘till you know Claudia’s OK.’

  ‘And Sam’s home again,’ Saul added.

  She hugged them one at a time.

  ‘Glad to have you,’ she said. ‘As always.’

  Sam had his cab driver drop him off at the end of the street.

  It looked nicer than he’d anticipated – though he’d had no good reason to expect drabness, since the misery of the young life that had coloured Grace’s personal descriptions of Melrose Park had happened, for the most part, in another house on another street.

  Here, the sidewalks were well-maintained, and the houses too, with cared-for front yards, plentiful trees and flowers.

  Sam paid off the driver, pulled out his phone, waited till the car had moved away and then called Grace again.

  ‘Almost there,’ he said.

  ‘Your dad and Saul are here. You didn’t need to tell them.’

  ‘I didn’t want you being alone.’ Sam started strolling. ‘Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while.’

  ‘Even a sniff of trouble,’ Grace said, ‘swear you’ll call for help.’

  ‘No heroics, sweetheart, I swear.’

  He ended the call, went on up the road.

  ‘How long should we wait, do you think,’ Grace asked David, ‘before we call the Sheriff’s office?’

  Saul was on the floor in the den, playing with Joshua.

  Plenty of laughter happening.

  ‘He hasn’t even gone inside yet,’ David said. ‘Let’s not look for trouble.’

  ‘Jerome Cooper is trouble,’ Grace said. ‘I was wrong not to let Sam arrest him here.’

  ‘We don’t even know if the guy’s there,’ Saul pointed out. ‘He’d have had to have been following Claudia nonstop, which is a stretch, surely?’

  ‘Maybe she knew he’d already gone back,’ Grace said. ‘Maybe that’s why she went there to confront him.’ She dropped down on to her knees, and her son gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Anyway, our father might have been a bastard, but he’s sixty-five years old now, and I can’t picture him or his wife as enough of a threat to have had Claudia sounding so scared.’

  ‘Probably this Jerome character then,’ David said.

  ‘Who you said is just a creep,’ Saul said. ‘Which means Sam can probably handle him with one hand tied behind his back.’

  ‘Probably,’ Grace said, miserably.

  ‘I say we need to give Sam an hour,’ David said.

  ‘I don’t think I can possibly wait that
long,’ Grace said.

  ‘Grab a cuddle with this little guy,’ Saul said, and tickled his nephew’s belly.

  Grace glanced at her father-in-law, noticed for the first time how tired and pale he looked. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘I got a little head cold starting, nothing much.’

  ‘Can I get you something for it?’

  ‘I took already,’ David said.

  ‘You should go home,’ Grace said. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘You should know by now,’ David said, ‘we’re not that easy to get rid of.’

  The house was the plainest in the street.

  A squat, two-storey structure with a pitched roof, its walls clad in dull brown and grey timber. The kind of house whose frontage resembled a face and abruptly put Sam in mind of the spooky house in the old Amityville Horror movie poster.

  He shut the thought right off, threw a glance up at the iron-grey clouds while considering, one more time, the wisdom of calling the cops now, then decided yet again that it would be premature, time-wasting and, more than likely, pointless.

  He raised his right hand, rapped twice on the green door.

  Got no reply.

  He took a few steps back and checked out the path that led around to the rear of the house – saw nothing but a low fence and some shrubs to keep him out – and then he moved back to the door and rapped one more time.

  The door opened.

  59

  Cal was writing in the Epistle.

  Cal the Hater. Never more so.

  He remembered hoping, when he first bought Baby, that his very own boat would sail him into a better future, out of pain and bitterness and hate, of others and of himself.

  He’d learned differently.

  He was calmer now than he had been earlier, though his back and shoulders and the wounds on his chest still hurt like hell, and he wished he had more gin, but somehow, seeing the cop and the old woman together, the kiss and all, had sent him hurrying back to his dump without even thinking of buying another bottle.

  Have I ever written about where I got my liking for gin?

  Same place I got my name.

  And my Joy-Boy get-up.

  From Jewel, of course.

  He had time to go on writing a while longer, because sunset was not until after eight, and he couldn’t do what came next till after dark.

  No doubting that he was going to have to do it.

  Though he wasn’t exactly sure yet how.

  But it would happen, one way or another.

  It had to.

  60

  ‘Claudia,’ Sam said.

  She stood just inside the doorway, half of her face obscured by shadow, the visible half tense and pale in the poor light from within.

  Sam tried to read the eye he could see, but it was hard to decipher. Except, that was, for the fear.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  She took a breath, then exhaled it in a small sigh.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather come outside?’ Sam asked.

  Since that was what he wanted most, and had promised Grace: to get her sister out of this house.

  ‘Please,’ Claudia said. ‘Come in.’

  Nothing so easy then.

  ‘Sure,’ Sam said.

  He stepped over the threshold into Frank Lucca’s home, and the smell hit his nostrils, made him hesitate.

  He almost saw the figure as the door shut behind him.

  Just a fragment of an impression, no more than that, no time for more.

  Because the corner of a heavy old gilt lamp struck him, hard, on the right hand side of his head.

  And all the lights went out.

  61

  ‘I think I should call him,’ Grace said.

  They’d moved into the kitchen a while back. David and Saul sat at the table, drinking coffee; Joshua sat in his playpen, gazing at Woody, who lay in his bed near the doggy door watching Grace as she paced back and forth over the stone tiles.

  ‘It’s been no real time at all,’ David said.

  ‘You have to give them a chance to talk,’ Saul said.

  ‘First meeting for them, after all,’ said David.

  ‘But if they’re just talking,’ Grace said, ‘and Claudia’s fine, then why hasn’t Sam called me by now to let me know?’

  Father and son looked at each other.

  ‘Maybe no one’s home,’ Saul said.

  ‘No one answered when the police called,’ David said.

  ‘So Sam’s probably not even made it inside yet,’ Saul said.

  ‘Would you both stop,’ said Grace. ‘We all know something’s wrong.’

  ‘Nothing Sam can’t cope with, I’ll bet,’ Saul said.

  ‘I’m going to call,’ Grace said, and picked up the phone from the table.

  ‘You might interrupt a delicate moment,’ David said. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Dad’s right,’ Saul said.

  ‘I know it’s hard,’ David said.

  About to snap at them, Grace stopped herself, knowing that they were very probably right. Because whatever Sam might have walked into, he was, after all, an experienced homicide detective, and the last thing he needed in the middle of something was his damned fool wife calling to check on him.

  ‘I just wish he’d call,’ she said lamely.

  ‘You’re not alone there,’ David said.

  62

  ‘Sam.’

  The voice sounded as if it was coming at him through fog.

  ‘Sam!’

  He told himself to open his eyes, found that he was lying on his back on a linoleum floor in a narrow hallway, and even in the dim lighting, he could see that the ceiling overhead was stained, perhaps by nicotine; though the stench in his nostrils was not cigarette smoke, neither fresh nor stale.

  His hands were tied behind his back, and his eyes were stinging, and he badly needed to cough, to rid himself of the stink that was in his throat too.

  Pain when he coughed, in his head and right across his chest.

  ‘Shit,’ he said in protest, then coughed again. ‘God damn.’

  ‘Sam, are you OK?’

  Same voice. Female. He turned his head, peered through the semi-darkness and saw his sister-in-law on the floor about a dozen feet away, trussed up to a radiator.

  ‘Thank Christ,’ Claudia said. ‘I thought she’d killed you.’

  ‘She?’ Sam struggled for a moment, trying to gather his scrambled thoughts, then remembered, abruptly, exactly where he was and remembered the figure, too, just before the pain.

  ‘Roxanne,’ Claudia said. ‘She’s gone. A while ago.’

  Sam’s mind sharpened up a little. ‘What about Jerome? And your dad?’

  ‘I never got to see either of them.’ Claudia’s eyes grew fearful. ‘I don’t even know if they’re here. I only saw her.’

  ‘Nice woman.’ Sam listened for a moment, heard nothing, hoped that meant the house was empty, then tried sitting up and groaned with the pain. ‘Not big on welcomes, is she?’

  Claudia began to cry. ‘I’m so sorry, Sam. When she let me in, she seemed a little hostile, but she was wearing this old robe, and she just didn’t look dangerous. I never dreamed . . .’

  ‘It’s OK.’ Sam tried sitting up again, made it this time.

  ‘She took me into that room –’ Claudia nodded towards a closed door to Sam’s right – ‘and I told her about Jerome, and she told me to wait while she got my father.’ Her tears were still flowing. ‘And I had a feeling something wasn’t right, so I phoned Grace, but then she came back and she was dressed, and she had a big knife, and she dragged me out here and tied me up.’ She spoke rapidly, afraid of someone coming. ‘But then when you got here, she untied me and said that if I didn’t get you to come inside, she’d kill me and then go after Grace and that she wouldn’t stop there.’

  Sam tucked down his chin, needing to check himself out, saw that his shirt had been ripped open and that there
was blood all over his chest, told himself quickly that however much it hurt, the damage couldn’t be too bad because the bleeding was just oozing, not pumping.

  Yet that was where the acrid stench was coming from, from his goddamned chest. ‘What the hell did she do to me?’

  ‘Sam, I’m so sorry,’ Claudia said again.

  He fought to make sense of what was going on, to take some kind of control of the situation. ‘Are you all right?’ He screwed up his eyes to get a better look at her, saw that despite her pallor and fear she appeared uninjured. ‘Did she hurt you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Good,’ Sam said.

  First things first.

  He listened for another moment – still nothing – then shuffled across the linoleum until he was as close as he could get to Claudia, and saw that she’d been bound with some kind of twine, probably the same stuff that was tied round his own wrists. ‘Can you turn a little, so I can try to get you free?’

  Claudia tried, but found she’d been tied up too tightly to move. ‘If you get your hands up a little way,’ she suggested, ‘maybe I could try untying the knots with my teeth.’

  ‘I don’t know if—’

  ‘Grace and I both have strong teeth,’ Claudia said. ‘Our mom did, too.’

  Sam couldn’t recall Grace ever having so much as a filling. ‘Go for it.’

  It took some time, cost her some pain and a few more tears of frustration before the twine was loose enough for Sam to extricate his hands.

  ‘Good job,’ he said, rubbed them swiftly, then set about freeing her from the radiator pipe.

  ‘Can we get out of here?’ Claudia said. ‘Please.’

  Sam glanced back down at the mess on his chest, tentatively touched one of the bloody wounds – and knew, suddenly, exactly what the stench was.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, totally thrown.

  Which was when they both heard the sound.

  Moaning.

  63

  ‘That’s it,’ Grace said. ‘Not a minute longer.’

  No one was arguing.

  She picked up the phone. ‘If Sam doesn’t answer, I’m calling the Sheriff’s office.’