“Not really.”
“I’m worried that you’re a danger to my husband, Slim. I’m worried that you’re going to get in the way of the police investigation. If that happens, you could get Guy killed.”
They were good points, all of them. I sipped some of my coffee and set the mug on the table. The coffee was hot and strong but didn’t taste like poison. Maybe Susan liked me after all. Maybe we were dating now.
I said, “Fair enough. Truth is, I don’t want to be here. Just between you, me, and Susan—who I assume has her ear pressed to the door right now—I don’t think much of your old man’s scheme, either. Your appraisal of my skills is sound, and I won’t argue with it. On the other hand, I don’t plan on getting in anyone’s way, especially the police. I’ve got no reason to think they’re doing anything but a bang-up job, and as far as I’m concerned they can keep doing it. Frankly, I just want to be able to report something to Mr. Luster and get my pension.”
She gave me a look.
“Your . . . pension?”
“Yup.”
“That’s what he promised you?”
“All wrapped up like a newborn baby and stashed away somewhere warm and safe.”
“Well, isn’t that a little . . .”
“What?”
She blew out a breath and said, “I don’t know. Desperate?”
“Ouch.”
For the first time, she smiled a little. She seemed embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really don’t know how to act right now.”
“No harm,” I said. “As for desperation, I guess it depends what your aspirations are. Mine’s college for my daughter and an occasional haircut for myself.”
Temple sighed quietly, then stood and paced behind the sofa. “Fine,” she said finally. “Let’s get it over with then. Ask your questions.”
“Thanks,” I said sincerely. “Let’s start with what you think might have happened.”
“I think Dwayne was murdered. I think my husband’s disappeared. More than that . . .”
“I’ll need to know about your marriage. What it’s been like. Whether you’ve been happy with Guy.”
She laughed at that. Kind of bitterly, too. But even her bitterness was like art. Her head went back and her ponytail poured over her shoulder like a vein of molten copper and curled up at the full swell of her breast. She was good-looking, all right. Peggy would turn me inside out with a butter knife to hear me say it, but there was something otherworldly about Temple Beckett, something that had to do with more than money.
I said, “Mrs. Beckett . . .”
“Temple,” she said, interrupting. “I want to be called Temple. And none of this is about my husband and our marriage or our happiness.”
“Well, wait a minute now. Why aren’t you happy with Guy?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t.”
“You didn’t, but your face did.”
“My face?”
“Your expression. Your mouth, mostly. The way the corners flex when you talk about him. Not a happy look, Mrs. Beckett.”
“Temple.”
“There’s that, too.”
She gave me a Susan look. Not gladsome. She came back around the couch and flopped down, as though exhausted.
“You’re married?”
“Not anymore.”
“But you were.”
“A long time ago.”
She said, “Then you know that no marriage is perfect.” But I got the sense that hers was less perfect even than that. “And I’m telling you, you’re on the wrong path. You’re thinking I was unhappy with Guy, for one reason or another. Deeply unhappy. Maybe you think he was having affairs. Maybe you think I was. Or both of us. Maybe he drank or knocked me around or just called me a cunt once too often or whatever. Anyway, you’re thinking that maybe I had an affair with Dwayne and that Guy found out about it and killed him.”
I said, “I admit the possibility crossed my mind. But my guess is that’s usually how these things turn out. The simplest solution is usually the right one.”
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “I’m not interested in murder.”
“I’m not, either. Tell me about Dwayne Mays.”
She nodded her head. “I wondered when you’d get to that, but frankly there’s not much to say. He and Guy came up together and went to school together. State school, nothing fancy. Neither of them could ever afford fancy. Dwayne’s parents had a farm out near Union City, I think, and Guy’s family never had two nickels to rub together. I went away to better schools but came back in time to be a kid with them. They were thick as thieves, but rivals, too, in that way men have. I learned to dislike Dwayne over time, the way he was always getting Guy into trouble, but Guy never saw it. Or wouldn’t. Later, they worked together. Dwayne was rambunctious, egotistical, eternally horny, fanatically dedicated to his work, and principled to a fault.”
“You’ve had time to think about this.”
“I’ve thought about it,” she said.
“Let’s talk some more about the eternally horny thing.”
“For . . . for men. Dwayne was gay.”
“And your husband . . .”
“Wasn’t,” she said. “Not even half.” She breathed out a sigh and looked at the watch on her perfect wrist. You could take a picture of that wrist and hang it in a museum and folks would come from all around to see it. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ve been more than fair with my time. I’ve got a hard afternoon ahead. I’ve got to talk to my father . . .”
“About me.”
“About you. And then I’m meeting with the detectives in an hour. The real detectives.”
“Sheriff Wince.”
“You’ve met him?”
“No, but I’ve met some who have. My understanding is he’s chewing on a theory that your husband and Mays ran into danger working their latest story.”
She nodded. She said, “The meth story.”
Well, that took me aback. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Meth story? Not the Knight Hawk’s safety practices?”
It took her an instant. Then she glared, but there was fear behind it. The piercing eyes pierced deeper. “You sonofabitch. You have no idea how dangerous what you’re saying is. To me. To my husband.”
“Mrs. Beckett, do you have any idea who they might have been looking at? Chances are, if they’re at the Knight Hawk, I know them.”
“Get out. Now.”
“Temple . . .”
“I said now.”
She raised her voice enough that the door swung open immediately and Susan reappeared. I was right; she’d been there the whole time. I guess you couldn’t fault her loyalty. I sighed and stood up to go, folding my towel.
“I hope everything works out,” I said.
She didn’t answer. Either it would or it wouldn’t. She turned her back to me and faced the bank of windows along the western wall, down toward the waters of Crab Orchard Lake.
I followed Susan back through the house and the runway-hallway beneath the skylight. I had hoped the weather would be slowing some, but it was raining even harder now, and the glass was dark and loud with it. I’d have to find an overpass to park beneath until it let off.
Susan opened the door. She indicated the folded towel. I was still holding it.
“I don’t guess you were planning to walk off with that,” she said.
I handed it to her. “It is awfully fluffy,” I said. “The ones we have at home are like sandpaper.”
“Everybody’s got a problem.”
“Just one? That sounds so nice. Hey, one thing . . .”
“Don’t bother.”
I ignored her. “Dwayne Mays. I ran out of questions before I could get his address.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Besides, you can get the address anywhere.”
She was right about that. But I waited, looking at her. Truth was, I was starting to like her. I know that sounds weird, but it was true
. She was the kind of person, when you met them, all you wanted to do was drown them in the nearest body of water, but then six weeks later you were BFFs. She wasn’t bad looking, either, in a hard-bitten kind of way. She reminded me a bit of a dispatcher I’d had a fling with once, a tough bird who could drink just about any man under the table and who was so good with a knife she could shave the hairs off a flea’s nuts without waking the dog.
At last, Susan sighed. Her wrinkled eyes flooded with the day’s dark light. She said, “Crainville. North of town. He rented a place there.” She gave me the address. “But if you go, beware.”
“Too much curb appeal?”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m not paid to be.”
“There’s no other way to say it: The place is a rat trap. Actually, I’m not even sure I can imagine rats living there,” she said.
“So you’ve seen it?”
She sneered. “Clean your thoughts. I went there with Beckett sometimes, or dropped off negatives when Beckett couldn’t get free.”
“You mean photo negatives? I thought they did all that with computers these days.”
She said, “Beckett couldn’t stand them. He thought that digital cameras were ruining the art. Or”—she waved a contemptuous hand and changed her voice to what I guessed was an imitation of Beckett—“diluting it. Something like that. He insisted on using film. Dwayne transferred everything to a computer.”
“This Mr. Beckett sounds like an interesting fella.”
“If by interesting you mean patronizing misogynist, then yeah. He was interesting.”
“You’ve got quite a vocabulary for someone who opens doors for a living,” I said.
“And what do you do for dollars? You work in a hole, right?”
“Touché,” I said. “So, if I’m hearing you correctly, the name Guy Beckett doesn’t lift your heart.”
“No, it does not. My gorge maybe.”
I raised my chin back toward the house. “He didn’t hit her,” I said. “Her father would have him cut into pieces and melted the bones in a coking furnace. Drinking? Or drugs?”
“No more than the usual.”
“I’m thinking it’s women, then.”
“It’s women,” she said. “Beckett has a weakness.”
“A lot of men do.”
“Not like him,” she said. “He’d stack ’em five high at a time.”
“He ever make a grab at you?”
“If he did, he didn’t do it more than once. But everyone else was fair game. And this was a guy with some hustle. Book clubs, church groups. Name it. He’d join anything if there were women there. Even our local environmental club. Crab Orchard Friends, something like that.”
“Saving the earth is not his thing, I guess?”
“Not his thing. Guy Beckett cares about Guy Beckett and his needs, period, full stop.”
“And what do you care about?”
“More or less the same thing. But at least I’m honest about it.”
“And here your mistress thinks you’re loyal to her.”
She glared at me. If she could, she would have unhinged her jaw and swallowed me whole.
“This is loyalty. This is what loyalty does. It raises its voice, and it tells a fool that she’s running headlong down a dark tunnel toward an oncoming train.”
“Beckett?”
She nodded. “Ruin on two feet. Believe me, she’s better off without him.”
“Well, someone must miss him. Family?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, friends, then. There’s got to be someone.”
“I don’t know, really. Except for Dwayne, I rarely saw any friends. The ones I did see were mostly work people, but they never seemed to like him much, either.”
“Sounds kind of lonely.”
“I don’t know that he ever noticed.”
“Okay,” I said. I stepped out onto the front porch. “One last thing.”
“My God, what?”
“You said ‘was’ before.”
She was confused. And as stern-looking as a chainsaw sculpture. “What?”
“A minute ago. I said Beckett sounds like an interesting character, and you said, yes, he was.”
She said, “You can always hope.”
She closed the door.
I drove back through the Estates. I stopped at the check-in box and thanked the old guy once more and got his name—besides Lilac, I mean—something I forgot to do the first time. I tried to imagine what I could do next. I’d asked my questions and learned something about Guy Beckett and his sad story of domestic disquietude. I guessed that, in the best case, he’d just run away from home. That seemed unlikely, but at least it was a possibility.
I’ll tell you, though, the more likely angle, the meth-trade angle, wasn’t something I was going to touch with a fifty-foot barbed pole. Hell, a pole of any kind. This isn’t some nice, clean drug business with imported suits and orderly accounts like they show on TV. These people were animals; you come between them and their fix or their dollars, they’ll kill you dead and lick your bones clean.
I didn’t want my bones licked clean. I wanted more coffee. I found a place a few miles up the road and drank a hot cup and made idle chat with a former longwall operator who wanted the government to keep out of his Medicare. I made a couple of polite attempts to explain the situation, but he was impenetrable. After a while, I gave it up and paid for his coffee. I told him I hoped the government kept out of it, but he just sighed and shook his head. Like Susan said, everybody’s got a problem.
A half hour later, the rain finally slowed down, till it was nothing more than a light mist, and I got on the bike and rolled east on IL-13 toward 148. Crainville was along the way, but Dwayne Mays’s house would still be sealed off, most likely, so I decided to leave that for another day. Or never. Honestly, my real plan was to stall for time and hope the cops worked the whole thing out. Either Beckett would show up dead, or he’d turn himself in for the Mays murder, or he’d get caught. Less likely, he’d stumble home with a hangover and a crotch full of rot and a paternity suit. However it happened, I’d collect what had been promised me and that would be the end of it.
I thought it over for the next mile or so. I rehearsed it a couple times in my mind, the way you do when you’re satisfied with yourself for outwitting the world. I passed the lake and its troubled waters. Some fool was out in a fishing boat, and the boat had gotten swamped and filled nearly to the gunnel, and another boat was on its way out to save the day. Probably he’d get swamped, too, and then they’d have to send another one. Life was like that sometimes. The only thing worse than the accident was the rescue. I didn’t want that to be true of this thing I’d gotten involved in. I wanted what was best for my daughter and the family I was trying to build, sure, but there was a line I wouldn’t cross—and places even my father’s name wouldn’t get me out of. I was still philosophizing about that, and life, and Guy Beckett, when my rearview mirrors winked red and blue at me, and I glanced back to find myself being pursued by a sheriff’s department prowler.
Well, I wasn’t speeding. It was too wet for that, and I’m always cautious on my bike. Illinois is one of these states that honors your right to severe brain damage in the name of personal liberty. But despite the lack of a helmet law, I always wear one, and I’m never one of these dummies you see riding in shorts and sandals or whatever other nonsense they dream up on their way to third-degree burns. A motorcycle is lethal in all kinds of ways, but weather and other motorists are the real risk. So I wasn’t speeding. Maybe my brake light was out. I’m usually good at my pre-ride checks, but you never knew when something was going to go wrong and fuck you over. I pulled off 13 and onto the wide neck of Greenbriar Road where there’s nothing but a dark cut of forestland and some empty fields. I switched off the bike, put down the stand, pulled off my helmet, and sat there.
Cops usually make you wait while they call in the stop, but this one kicked open his d
oor and marched directly over. He was a tiny thing, five foot six at most, with a round face and a gut that would swallow punches like jellybeans. He was wearing the tan-and-brown and widescreen shades, despite the lack of sunshine, but everything was too small on him. His uniform hugged him like a second skin and revealed far too much of his manly side for my liking, like it’d been cut down to size to fit him but cut down too far. His pale wrists hung out of his sleeves a good two inches, and the temples of his sunglasses spread almost flat across the expanse of his face.
“Taillight?” I said.
For a moment he looked confused, or startled, that I’d spoken. Then he gathered himself again and shook his head and said, “You Slim?”
I said that I was Slim just as it dawned on me that he shouldn’t know that yet.
It was too late. He said, “Okay. Good. This is for you, you sonofabitch.”
“Wait,” I said, but he wasn’t paid to wait, I guess. His hand swept up and hit me upside the head with something hard. A baton, maybe, or a bank safe. I dropped sideways off the bike and hit the street and rolled down the hill and right into a ditch, where I belonged.
FOUR
The ditch water was filthy and reeked of rotting vegetation and road muck washed over by the rain. Good stuff. Worse, someone had dumped a deer carcass there. That was pretty common: They’d bag a buck or doe and field butcher it and dump the rest in some lonely place, the way you’d throw away an apple core. This one was skinned and dressed, and its exposed insides were as pink and bloody as a newborn. My mouth sucked up some of the swirling, greasy blood.
I spat it out. I tried to spit out my tongue, too, but it was still tied on. Behind me, I could hear the little bastard sliding down the grade on grass that had bowed over with the weight of the rain. Soon, though, he lost his footing and fell on his ass and shouted out in anger. I took that moment to attempt to pry myself from the mud pie, but it wasn’t any good. Nothing was working. Arms, legs, brain. Nothing. The bank safe had done its work. The little dude clambered to his feet. He swore again and swatted in irritation at the mud on his clothes. Maybe he was worried about losing his deposit at the costume shop. I don’t know. He came the rest of the way down the hill, and he was fuming. He’d suffered a professional setback, and he wasn’t the least happy about it. The sunglasses were cockeyed on his face. He seized me by the scruff and spun me over and punched me in the mouth.
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