“You saw Beau?” Jett demanded. “Was he still alive?”
That caught Stella up short a bit. “Um … yeah,” she said slowly. “Any particular reason he wouldn’t be?”
“He didn’t return our calls since yesterday,” Maverick said.
“So you automatically assume he’s dead?”
“What sort of business did you have with him, anyway?” Rock said, getting a little agitated with the gun again.
Stella gave the question a quick thought and came to a decision—she couldn’t see any reason it would hurt to tell these boys what was going on, at least in broad strokes. “Priss has a flash drive I would dearly like to get my hands on.”
“Oh ho,” Rock said, comprehension flooding his broad, handsome features. “You’re on one of them tapes of Turk’s.”
“I didn’t say—”
“How many of you did they get to anyway?” Maverick said, shaking his head sadly. “How many will be made to suffer? How many times are we going to let that bastard get away with that?”
“I’m not—”
“Lady, what I don’t understand is why y’all line up to pay for that. It’s not—not—well, it’s not what nature intended,” Maverick said, his face flushing a deep red, while his friends shuffled their feet and looked off in opposite directions.
They were just overcome with envy, Stella realized with astonishment. Whatever it was that Turk could do—and took video of to prove it—it was rare enough that none of his colleagues—trained professionals, every one—was up to the job.
She’d meant it when she told Chrissy she didn’t need to know, but now her curiosity was starting to wear on her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said carefully, “but maybe, in the interest of full disclosure, you could, um, describe—”
Rock raised the gun a few inches off his thigh, where he’d been resting it, and Stella was afraid he was going to put on another marksmanship display.
“Right,” she said quickly, “forget I asked.”
“Quit playing games here,” Rock ordered. “Our friends are being killed. Slaughtered. Now, I’m sorry that there’s embarrassing footage out there, but we have bigger things to worry about, like if we’re gonna wake up dead tomorrow.”
“Are you by any chance referring to a dead guy Priss might have been hauling around in her trunk?” Stella guessed. “Was he, uh, one of you?”
“Keller McManus—God rest his soul,” Jett said, his voice breaking with emotion. “One of the best.”
“And you think Priss killed him.”
“Priss? Why would she kill him?” Maverick demanded. “She loved him—as much as that coldhearted woman could love anyone.”
“Moved him in with her,” Jett agreed.
“Kicked Walsy out,” Rock sighed. “Which is why he killed him.”
Stella’s head was starting to spin. “Wait up here. You’re saying Priss wasn’t seeing Addney here anymore.”
“Not in six months or so. And he never did get over it—did you, Walsy,” Rock muttered, giving the man a sharp kick in the shin, which produced a sort of shriek, though it was considerably muffled due to the rubber ball in his mouth.
“Only where’s it going to get you to come after us?” Jett demanded, sounding genuinely aggrieved. He shook his head sorrowfully. “Bloodshed ain’t the answer to bloodshed.”
“His daddy’s a preacher,” Maverick confided.
“Oh, Christ,” Stella said. “I’ve just about had it with all of you. Look here, I’m gonna undo the man a little. You just hang on to that gun there, Junior. You can shoot me in half an hour if you’re still itchy, but I think I can get things moving here a little quicker than the three of you.”
She undid the knots holding the makeshift gag in place, but before she popped it out of Walsingham’s mouth, she grabbed his hair and gave it a yank, forcing him to look at her. “You ain’t gonna make any trouble now, are you?”
He shook his head as much as he could, given her grip on him.
“You’re just going to answer my questions calmly and quietly.”
Vigorous nodding.
“You got my permission to shoot him somewhere if he yells,” Stella told Rock. “Somewhere nondeadly.”
Rock assented grudgingly.
Stella hooked a little finger in Walsingham’s mouth, grimacing at touching his saliva. She’d mastered removing gags without any danger of getting bitten, but she surely hated getting drooled on.
The ball popped free and rolled on the floor. As promised, Walsingham stayed mostly silent, except for a faint mewling.
“Here’s what I got to ask,” Stella said. “I mean, I want to know who-all you been killing and all, but before we get to that, what the hell is all this union shit about?”
“I never said unions,” Walsingham said stiffly. He worked his jaw as though it had cramped up on him. “It’s a matter of philosophy. I tried to explain it to Priss. You’d think with her training in economics, she’d realize the dangers of exploitation of the proletariat, but she just wouldn’t listen.”
“Prole-who?” Stella interrupted. “Is this some kind of Marxist bullshit?”
Walsingham glowered, while the boys nodded along. Whether they were agreeing with him or with her, Stella wasn’t sure.
“Marxism can be a jumping-off point in the discussion, sure,” Walsingham said, warming to his subject. “Why not? His labor theory of value applies—we workers have no choice but to produce more and more output under conditions we don’t control. All’s I ever did was, I was an advocate for collective self-liberation.” He waved his hands in a semicircle to include himself and the other men.
“Now when you say output…,” Jett began, confusion knitting his brow.
“Figure of speech,” Walsingham said, not unkindly.
“So what does all of this have to do with you killing Priss’s boyfriend?” Stella asked. “I would think that with all that collective-thinking nonsense, you’d be into sharing.”
“Damn commie,” Maverick observed, glowering.
“I did not kill Keller,” Walsingham said, looking wounded. Stella squinted and tried to figure out whether, if the man wasn’t trussed up and sweating, she would find him attractive. He wasn’t as muscular as his younger colleagues, and his grooming was a little less precise. Still, she supposed he had a sort of … professorial charm about him that some women might like.
The judge, for instance—Stella would have guessed a highbrow gal like that might have gone for the kind of guy who looked like he could spout Sartre while greasing your wheels. But that just went to show a person, didn’t it—love, in all its infinite variety, was a mysterious thing. Who knew what lay behind the attraction of one person to another? Did it really come down to nothing but hormones, those pesky little pheromones doing their best to stir up trouble everywhere they went? Was it the accumulation of small moments, long-forgotten experiences that set patterns into memory, so that a towheaded first crush led to a lifelong love of blonds, or a gone-wrong fling with a fellow with a Bronx accent permanently put a person off anyone else who talked that way?
“So what kind of woman takes a shine to you, generally, would you say?” she asked Addney thoughtfully.
“What—don’t you want to know if I killed anybody?”
“You just said you didn’t.”
“Wait one damn minute,” Rock said, gesturing back and forth between them with the gun. “You’re gonna believe him, just because he said he didn’t do it?”
“Not because he said it,” Stella said. “But the way he said it.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Stella sighed. She knew she couldn’t put it into words, because she had tried before, when she was training Chrissy. Over time, her sense of whether a man was telling the truth had become fine-tuned, and as her confidence in herself grew, so did her perceptive skills. She figured it was some combination of facial expression and tone of voice and gestures, but when she tried to
break it down and find the patterns, it all fell apart. It only worked when she let her mind empty out and just kind of put her brain on … receive, that was the only way to put it. Let it absorb what she was seeing and hearing, and then her brain mixed it all up and did its thing and she had a pretty clear idea of whether a guy was telling the truth or not.
She hadn’t been wrong in a long while.
But trying to explain it like that wouldn’t get her very far with these yokels.
She made a snap decision. “What I am, is a human polygraph,” she fibbed. “I work for the cops, the feds, whoever—I’m an independent contractor. But under the radar, see? They can’t pay me through the regular channels, the public wouldn’t have it.”
“They pay them police psychics,” Maverick said. “They got ’em on Montel all the time.”
“That’s PR, is all,” Stella lied patiently. “They got a whole budget for that. It’s to make the public feel like they’re doing something.”
“They are doing something, lots of times it turns out they’re right,” Maverick said.
“Yeah,” Jett agreed. “It’s a real science. I get feelings sometime. You know? Déjà vu. Like when you just know something’s gonna happen. Yesterday I had a feeling they’d have Mini-Wheats on sale. I don’t ever buy them full price ’cause—”
“This is bullshit,” Rock said. Stella had a feeling that he was the brightest of the three, not that that was saying much. “If you were working for the cops, they’d be keeping tabs on you, and I ain’t exactly seen them busting in here helping you out.”
Stella kept her features placid. “It’s just reconnaissance so far. I got a few different directions I’m going. All I was planning was a casual chat with Mr. Walsingham here.”
“Well, I still think he did it,” Maverick said, pouting.
“One easy way to find out,” Rock said, and leaned forward and jammed the end of the barrel gently into Walsingham’s crotch. “Don’t go making any abrupt moves there, cowboy. I’m kinda nervous today.”
“I didn’t kill him, I didn’t kill him!” Walsingham squeaked, trembling and staring down at the gun in horror. Stella felt almost sorry for him. “All I did was challenge him to a duel.”
“A what?”
Walsingham swallowed hard. “Could you just stop—?”
“Ease up on him, pardner,” Stella advised Rock, who reluctantly sat back in his chair, keeping the gun leveled on Walsingham, who looked both immensely relieved and ready to cry.
“What the hell do you mean, a duel?” she demanded.
“It was a common way to settle disagreements in the nineteenth century,” Walsingham sniffed. “I am an experienced fencer, so I offered Keller a choice of sidearms.”
“Sidearms? What, you all were just going to shoot it out?”
“A sidearm can refer to a sword or other dueling blade,” Walsingham said, his tone getting all stuffy and academic. “I told him I’d let him use both my rapier and smallsword and I’d use my little dagger, to even things up.”
“Now, this just makes me mad,” Stella exclaimed. “How about letting the woman decide? A gal says she’s moving on—what makes you think that stabbing the crap out of her new guy’s gonna convince her any different? I mean, I’m no fan of Priss’s, but she’s got a right to pick who she wants to … um.” Had a right, she meant, though maybe there was some advantage to keeping Priss’s demise to herself. Besides, there was no telling what that bit of news would do to this already explosive situation.
“I was defending her honor,” Walsingham said tightly. “No man has a right to speak openly of his private … consorting with a woman.”
“You got to be kidding me,” Stella said.
“Keller liked to talk quite a bit,” Maverick explained. “You know, over a beer or whatnot.”
“He was a technique man,” Rock sighed. “Really dedicated.”
“Hang on a sec, here,” Stella said. “You’re telling me y’all get together and … what, talk about the workday? Kind of like a bunch of, I don’t know, phone company linemen or something?”
“You learn stuff,” Jett said. “When I was new, they really taught me a lot, helped me figure out how to handle things.”
“I’d think you’d be into that,” Maverick said stonily to Walsingham. “You and your commie worker comrade shit. All for one and one for all, and so forth.”
Stella was pretty sure that last bit was from The Three Musketeers, not Marx, but she let it slide.
“So, to summarize,” she said, “Keller was telling everyone about how he was doing your ex-lover, who was also the boss, including all the juicy details, and that made you mad, so you dragged him out in the alley and told him to put his money where his mouth was, and you beat the shit out of him but didn’t kill him—”
“Well,” Walsingham said uncomfortably. “The duel was to be traditional. I mean, there’s conventions one follows. And he wouldn’t. I offered to explain it all to him but—I mean he was crazed, just utterly crazed, coming at me like a—like some kind of a thug, like a two-bit tough, he dropped all pretense of observing protocol and just took a swing at me—”
“Well, yeah,” Stella said, “some idiot comes at you with a broadax I would think you’d get to defending yourself pretty quick—”
“Naturally, I defended myself but Priss was, ah, adamant that we stop—”
“Wait a minute, she was there?” Stella demanded.
“Priss thought she could talk us out of it. She never understood how fiery my passion for her is,” Walsingham said regretfully, shaking his head.
“So you’re going at each other on the street—”
“At the waterfowl sanctuary, actually, that the city put in down by Willow Lake. On account of it’s usually deserted.”
Stella guessed that made sense—not too many people were probably in the mood to tramp around looking at ducks in the middle of winter.
“Okay, you’re beating the shit out of each other in some nature park. He swings at you, you retaliate, you cut him up some, Priss gets mad, and then what?”
“Well, she, um, made us stop.”
“She made you stop.”
“She yelled at us.”
Stella let that settle for a moment. Thought of a couple of responses. Figured they’d be lost on the current company.
“Let me guess. You probably brought your own cars, and she told you to leave.”
Walsingham nodded. “But look here, if you’re thinking I killed Keller, I mean, all I did was cut him a little, only superficially, you know?”
“How much?” Stella demanded. “How much blood?”
When Walsingham hesitated, Rock encouraged him again, and he blurted out, “Those superficial wounds can bleed like crazy.”
“A cup? A bucket? What? Get specific.”
“He, ah … he was pretty bloody. His shirt, his pants, his, um, face…”
And then he’d somehow gone from alive and bloody to dead and bloody in Priss’s trunk. Maybe Walsingham had hit some vein or artery and didn’t know it, though that was doubtful—you’d think a person would notice arterial spray.
Walsingham was an idiot, and the rest of the Elegant Company team assembled in his apartment were a bunch of numbnuts, and Stella figured she wasn’t much closer to figuring out who’d killed McManus or, for that matter, Priss and Liman. And she sure as hell wasn’t any closer to getting her flash drive back.
“Look here,” she said. “This has been fun and all, but I’m tired. I got family to get home to, I just want to put my feet up and watch the Charlie Brown Easter special. I’m leaving now, and I suggest y’all untie Mr. Walsingham here once you’ve finished having your fun with him and forget all about this. ’Kay?”
No one tried to stop her.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The drive home was surprisingly pleasant. The snow stopped swirling, and the weak sun warmed up the inside of the Jeep to a toasty yellow. Willie Nelson crooned “Uncloudy Day,” an
d Stella caught up on her gratitude, which she’d neglected for a few days.
Dear Big Guy, she started, Thanks for watching my back in there.
After that, she got stuck on specifics.
She was a person of interest in a murder case. Additional incriminating evidence was still in circulation somewhere on one of Priss’s hard drives. Another entire year had passed without her getting laid. Her daughter seemed headed for an epic heartbreak. She could barely afford to keep Johnnie in the cupboard, much less fix everything that was broken around the house.
Still, there was plenty to be thankful for, wasn’t there? As she drove past the winter-plowed fields, melting snow leaving the furrows looking like chocolate brown frosting stripes on a giant vanilla sheet cake, she thought about all the ways that this Easter was going to be better than any in recent history. There were the Easter-morning cinnamon rolls she would bake from her mother’s recipe, and the biggest chocolate bunny she could find for Tucker. Noelle was too old for Stella to buy her a frilly hat, but maybe they could shop for something cute to wear to church. Church! Stella hadn’t been in ages, and the thought was surprisingly inviting.
By the time she pulled into her driveway, her outlook had warmed considerably—but it was still somewhat startling to see Noelle holding a ladder up against the sugar maple while teetering near the top rung was a curvaceous gal with a pile of bleached-blond curls and a tight top and even tighter sweatpants with the word PRINCESS stitched on the rear.
“What on earth are you-all doing?” Stella demanded, leaping out of the car practically before it stopped rolling. Roxy bounded over and plowed into her with joyful abandon.
“We’re putting up the eggs, Mama,” Noelle said, and gave her a lovely big smile that showed off her dimples while holding tight to the ladder. Only then did Stella notice that her daughter was wearing a sassy little pair of fuzzy rabbit ears on her head, and looking happier than she had in weeks.
Well, she had a pretty good guess what that meant. At least someone was getting some attention around here.
Stella ran her hands through her hair and pinched her cheeks to get a little color in them as Noelle’s new friend climbed carefully down the ladder, wiping her hands on her sweats. The Rubbermaid totes full of giant plastic eggs and pastel lights had indeed been brought down from the attic and were lined up on the lawn. The lights were spread out in a tangled mess on the thin layer of snow.
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