Lowell tracked across the lawn, flipping a small notebook shut. "You're going to freeze out here not moving around," he said. "Let's go inside."
"I prefer to stay here."
"I don't. I've been going from a pizza oven to a refrigerator all day long and I can feel a goddamn head cold coming on."
"Too bad."
He breathed deeply and shook his head and put his notebook in his coat pocket. "You want to freeze your ass off, that's your business. Mine is to settle this."
"Hell of a job you've done so far," I said.
I wanted to snipe at somebody and now I'd done it to my friend, and it sure as hell didn't make me feel any better, especially when you considered the fact that he might break my arms now. The calm I'd seen drop over him at the Bubrick house in the afternoon descended once more like an avalanche. It was a bad thing to snipe at somebody who could look down death and not flinch, and I promised myself to remember it. I suddenly felt like I was standing on an ice floe shattering beneath me, and a careless step in any direction would dump me in the bottomless ocean. He stood rigid as a statue of a Roman war god. An enraged bull wouldn't move him, or a tractor trailer or an air strike. Nothing except for one more wrong word from me, and then I'd need serious attention from the EMS.
"All right," I told him. "I'm sorry."
"Pull it together, Johnny," he said. "I don't need you in pieces. I'm not even sure I need you at all. You look like shit and you've been falling apart this whole time around, and now you're really starting to get on my nerves."
"Okay, okay, I already said I was sorry. What happened to her?"
He took off his hat and slapped it against his thigh, wiped sweat and snow off his forehead and put his hat on again. "Small caliber, maybe a twenty-two. In the ear."
"Christ."
"She was murdered someplace else and dumped here."
"It's becoming a regular habit for somebody."
He turned and looked at the other deputies checking the sewer drains and under nearby bushes. "She couldn't have been dead for more than a half hour. The bullet took out part of her head, but there's no sign of skull fragments or brain tissue in the vicinity. She might've even been shot right in the car and then thrown out. Blood was still running; it pooled beneath the body."
The body. Karen Bolan used to have a body, and now she simply was one—the body. No more ecstatic rubbing and hugging and overly loud and excited laughter; a lot of guys would miss out on her friendly flirting, her long legs drawing their attention. The widest cheesey smile was now gone forever, and I didn't have any idea why in the hell it had happened.
"Has anyone told Willie yet?" I asked.
"He's on a business trip in Houston, just flew down this afternoon, we checked first thing. Roy called there and got him out of bed and said the poor guy nearly fainted right on the phone. He's taking the first flight back, should be coming in at around eight this morning if the airport's not shut down by the blizzard. I'll meet him at the airport." Lowell clopped his boots against the porch stairs. "Goddamn awful way to find out. Now he'll feel wrong about it, guilty he wasn't here to watch over her."
"Hell, yes."
"Last night was the first time you've seen her in how long?"
"At least a year. Maybe longer. I think ... I think it was at the winter carnival last year."
"How well did you know her?"
"As well as you. Probably less since I moved. What kind of question is that? I'm not up on recent events in her life, if that's what you mean, but she seemed the same as usual. You know what she's like."
"Yeah. She there when you had the fight with the guy with the crew cut?"
I nodded. "Like I said, I talked to her and Willie and Lisa and Doug Hobbes. Then I went looking for Tons Harraday, got caught up with the crew cut, and while we beat the crap out of each other she was there watching."
"She give any sign she knew this guy?"
"No."
He rubbed his eyes, turning it over in his head. There was nothing else you could do, wrapping yourself up in the knots and still finding that none of it made sense.
"Those implications I told you about are becoming even more scattershot."
"You aren't kidding." I reviewed the questions—watching her there on the ground and waiting for her to move. "Where does Karen fit into all this? Does the guy with the crew cut tie her to this, and did he kill her, and Richie? Was the whole thing a set-up? Why?"
"I went to Jackals last night and asked around about the crew cut."
"Raimi's," I corrected. "And they sell Schlitz."
"It'll always be Jackals no matter how much money they sink into that hole. Only name for a bar that ever fit." He rested his massive hands on the porch railing, and I could hear his shoulders crack as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. Snow clung to the edges of his face so that he looked like a Yeti. "The team had some good times there, though."
Some bad times too, I thought, but for once kept my mouth shut.
"Nobody knew the guy," he said. "Bartenders had never seen him in there before. Except for the crew cut and the smashed beer mug, nobody could really remember anything about him. They had their eyes on you because of the blood."
"That's a nice thought." I couldn't recall much either beyond the calm, crazy look in his eyes and my own heady rage. It had happened so fast. "He was nondescript," I said. "No outstanding features. He looked tough and mean in that calm insane way, written into his face. Had a perpetual sneer. He punched me in the forehead before I had a chance to really size him up, and then I was seeing stars more than anything else."
"But you would've taken him if he hadn't run."
I shrugged. Lowell glanced at the kitchen window and watched Broghin's shadow walk past the stove. I told him about my visit to the back hills and talking with Tons and Deena and hunting around Richie's room.
"Yeah, I saw the rubbers, too," he said. "Kind of throws a new curve on it.”
“Tons swears his brother never did enough so he would actually need a partner.”
“I believe it. He was a real Momma's boy, Richie was, except he had no mother. Left him on a pretty short path.”
“Was Margaret's jewelry ever found?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said. "We gave them back to her niece."
Two neighborhood kids had gone around through the park and were having a snowball fight across the street. Cops shooed them off but they didn't go far and started pelting one another with snowballs again, laughing, loudly, the way Karen would have. She was starting to freeze.
The snow fell harder, blanketing the areas where the ice had melted this afternoon. It was like watching somebody doing a paint-by-numbers where every number was white, covering over the haphazard patches. The wind returned, gusting across the skeletal branches of the canopy trees. The kids squealed and finally the cops shouted down the block to the parents and an embarrassed man in a ripped overcoat came and took the children home.
"Broghin's still a part of this," I said.
"Let's not start again.”
“It's time to ask him some point-blank questions.”
“Shooting at grizzlies will get you nowhere."
I burst out laughing. It hurt like hell, as if I'd forgotten how—and the stitches pulled—but I couldn't help it. Lowell didn't join in. The other cops stared. "Cripes. And you make fun of my lines."
He sighed. "Okay, it sounds dumb. But analogies aside, it's the truth. You get into his face and he'll get into yours. You want that? Anna has a lot more on the ball than you, Johnny, most of the time, and knowing her she's talking to him as his friend. She's got a better chance to learn what's been on his mind than either you or me. And I still don't think in the end it'll matter much. You don't trust him but I do, and that's the way it's got to be at the bottom line." A cruiser slowly pulled out into the street and blue light covered Lowell's face. "Shit, at least I didn't say 'you can catch more flies with sugar than vinegar.'”
He turned and spoke with the
other deputies and ten minutes later Broghin came out and they all helped put Karen's body in Keaton Wallace's ME wagon. Then everybody left and I sat there and waited. I didn't know what I was waiting for. The wind tore a branch from the tip of a tree and it sailed across the rim of the thickets like a miniature witch's broom. The cops' tracks began to disappear. Before long the last trampled traces of where Karen's body had been were covered and filled in. The sky lightened with yellow and red. It kept snowing.
I kept waiting.
~ * ~
When I got out of bed it was nearly noon and my nose was running. I had a deep-rooted chill and shivered right through a twenty-minute hot shower. The swelling had gone down and the shiners were already fading. I had a date with Katie tonight and I wanted to look fairly presentable and take her someplace where they didn't sell Schlitz.
I called the store and got the answering machine. Debi must have had late classes, and if she didn't want to pull so many extra hours working, that was fine. I left a brief message and told her not to do anything vulgar with her boyfriend in front of the Brontë sisters. Hopefully, they were not already in the midst of such acts.
Anna was reading in the living room; I couldn't make out the title of the book because she'd taken the dust jacket off to keep from ruining it. Anubis trotted forward and stepped on my feet and urged me to take him for a walk in the park. I shoved him away and he shoved back, and we waltzed around like that for a while.
"Later," I told him. He gazed studiously at me as if he did not quite believe me but was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. He hunkered down beside Anna, and she said, "Good morning."
I sat on the couch close to my grandmother and asked, "How are you?"
Anna smiled sadly. "I should be asking you that, dear. I didn't know the poor girl and you did. I'd ask you to tell me something about her but I fear that sounds too much like an interrogation at the moment. How do you feel?"
''Fine," I said.
She frowned and reached over and took my face in her hands the way Katie had yesterday morning. I liked when lovely women did that for me. "Your face is doing much better today. By the end of the week the bruises will be completely gone. Is your chest all right?"
I nodded. "Yes."
She shifted in her wheelchair and said, "Please save the pat answers, Jonathan. We Kendricks are known for our stubbornness, not insensitivity, and especially not with each other. I saw you sitting on the porch last night alone and watchful like some dutiful soldier. In that terrible snow. It was nearly four-thirty when I went in to bed, and still you stayed. I've been worried about you."
"Anna, it's not that ..." She made a hush sound. I suddenly wondered when I'd stopped calling her Grandma and why.
"I can only imagine what you were feeling all that time while they took so long examining your friend without even touching her. Good lord, so many pictures, the photographer must have taken hundreds. What do they need so very many for?"
I really hadn't considered what I was feeling, or what I wasn't feeling; the chill remained. Karen and I hadn't been close—never lovers or even truly good friends but she was someone from my life, and to have her killed and thrown out on my lawn like a piece of trash... it struck at something in the same way it would everyone who knew her. Richie's death might've deserved my time and interest, but Karen's death deserved more. I wasn't certain what that was, or what I could do about it.
"I'm not sure," I said.
"I understand. As involved as we were in this before, the poor girl's murder . . ."
"Her name was Karen Bolan," I said.
Anna dropped her gaze and reached for a cup of tea on the bookstand. She knocked her book over and it fell between Anubis's paws. He drew back his head and peered down at the page so that it appeared he'd just read a story by Hemingway and was having trouble with the subtleties. I picked up the book and put it back on the stand. It was The French Powder Mystery by Ellery Queen.
"I know her name," Anna said. "I didn't mean to intimate that she had no identity."
"I know, I've just been taking semantics a bit too hard lately." I realized the abruptness of my remark. "I'm sorry." It seemed like I was apologizing a lot lately—and couldn't be sure if that was because I was letting my emotions get away with me or for the opposite reason. "I'm pissed off. I want to find the bastard who keeps using our yard like his own private cemetery. If it's that bastard with the crew cut I'm going to have to finish what he started." Anubis raised his head and jammed his nose beneath my hand. "I want to figure out if he's involved with these murders, and if so, why. If it's not him, I want to stop whoever keeps dragging us through this blood."
Anna saved her breath and simply said, "Yes.”
“But I don't know how to do it. This one isn't like the others. This is striking too close to home, like with Mom and Dad. It's unnerving."
She took it in stride; my grandmother has an inexhaustible well of resolve. Unlike me, she never wavered, not in her beliefs or precepts. Self-doubt was as foreign to her as the far side of Venus.
"Do you believe Karen and Richie might have been directly or indirectly connected?"
I shrugged. "Connected? How so?"
"Involved," she said.
"Lovers?"
"It's a consideration."
Karen Bolan sleeping with Richie Harraday? I tried to picture it—the girl with the golden smile and the kid with sideburns using up his condoms. She certainly had the flirtatious nature for at least entrancing him into such a relationship. Could they have been screwing around in Willie's bed while he was away on business, or would Richie have taken her fishing at the river like a couple of infatuated young sweethearts, or would Karen have taken him shopping at Victoria's Secret?
"I'm having a hard time with that one," I said. "Karen openly flirted with everyone. She may have had lovers on the side, I wouldn't be surprised, but Lowell said Richie was more or less a Momma's boy. Karen's playful, aggressive forwardness probably would have scared him off. Not that they would have ever traveled in the same circles to begin with."
"No one thought the boy could burglarize a home, either."
"Deena told me he had his secrets."
"Even after his demise," she added.
And what were Broghin's? "What did the sheriff have to say last night?"
"Pertaining to this case, very little."
"Exactly how little is little?"
"He asked the questions that were to be expected," she said. "If I had heard anything, if I knew the deceased, etcetera. We drank a cup of coffee and he spoke at length about Clarice and his children. He certainly is in love, though I'm curious as to what prompted him to go on in that vein, considering last night's circumstances."
A black thought creeping towards me finally sprang. Broghin had been acting so unglued and weird lately that I wondered if, after dealing with the underside of a sleepy town and seeing the rot that infected it beneath its pretty gingerbread borders, the gate to his own ugly side had lifted, and he was committing these murders himself.
Anna's gaze tangled with mine. "You're right to be suspicious, but whatever has been bothering Sheriff Broghin, I can assure you he is certainly not who we are looking for."
"You can't guarantee that."
"I can adamantly—"
"There are no assurances."
She knew I was talking about Phillip Dendren, whom we had both loved. She shook her head testily, looked up and scanned the various frames on the wall for my parents. The photographs were more than family, friends, and the past; the collage stood as a testament to a world when the illusion of implicit trust still existed.
"Broghin said nothing else?" I asked.
"Hardly."
"Doesn't he have any leads at all? Suspects? Anything? I figured you would have squeezed him for all the information you could have."
"One would think." She smiled pleasantly. "Perhaps I've become too convivial in my later years."
"He's a part of this, Anna."<
br />
“Hm.”
"He knows more than he's telling."
"I will agree to that, but I don't believe that constitutes his being personally involved in this case. He's afraid of something, and it is that fact, in itself, that disturbs me more than anything else thus far. There may be no assurances in life, but I have known him for much of my life, and he deserves more than a modicum of respect."
Lowell wasn't giving me the help I needed, and I wasn't getting anywhere fast by myself. Miss Marple and Ellery Queen would've found a bloody dagger, a piece of string, a burnt match in an ashtray, and the case would be solved quite conveniently. They would round up a short list of suspects and make them all sit in the library while they proceeded to expose the culprit. The killer would be revealed, and at that point make a brief struggle before confessing and being politely escorted out. There would be no hard feelings.
My stupid list didn't have so much as a name on it anymore. I decided to tell Anna about the note—the letter which may or may not have been written by Broghin's wife, and which may or may not have been left on Richie's Harraday's corpse—who may or may not have been murdered—depending on which cop you spoke to, and when, and whether or not you had ever thrown a chair at his head.
She reacted the way I expected her to. Her silver eyebrows arched demonically in a respectable imitation of Jack Nicholson. I explained about the dry spot on Richie's leg, Lowell's misgivings, and then his sudden turnaround. She nodded sagely and her features hardened. I could take a lecture, but I didn't want to hear one precisely at this moment. Her hand found Anubis's snout and her fingers brushed back and forth across his nose until he went into a sneezing fit.
"Why didn't you mention this to me sooner?”
“Because I'm still not sure what it means, if it means anything at all."
"But you feel it does. And rather than bring it to my attention and discuss this aspect of the case you decided to remain silent."
Case. I was really starting to hate that word. "Lowell says—"
She gave an exasperated huff. "Deputy Tully is obviously having a personal conflict, split between his loyalties and his honor. Anyone can see he's a man who deeply loves his job, his fellow officers, and his neighbors, and is not always capable of placing one in front of the other, as his duty calls for." She spoke as if she knew him well, and could easily break down his personality into the sum of his traits; but Lowell wasn't a man you could claim did much by way of the obvious. "You chose to keep me unaware of the note because you wanted to protect me."
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