Ice on the Grapevine

by R. E. Donald

  Waiting for lights out, Sharon tried to sit still but she couldn't. She had already paced up and down the cell for nearly two hours, until she literally felt like climbing the walls. She was so wired, she felt like her head was ready to explode. But what she wanted was to calm down so she'd be able to slip into the sweet oblivion of sleep as soon as the lights went out, so she forced herself to sit down on her bunk and try to read.

  Almost against her will, she looked up. The witch was sitting cross legged on her bunk, and when she caught Sharon looking, she licked her lips and patted her crotch. "Taste of honey, Princess. I'm savin' it for you."

  Sharon's jaw stiffened and her breath started coming fast and shallow.

  "It's you and me, Princess," she sang in a lascivious voice, then cackled like the witch she was. "Forget about your old man. I'll be your honey pot and you be my hungry little bear. It's you and..."

  Sharon lunged across the cell. She didn't want to touch the disgusting creature with her bare hands, so she swatted her across the face with her paperback, once, twice. It took her surprised cellmate a few seconds to raise her hands to her face, and when she did, Sharon tossed the book away. It hit the cell bars and dropped to the floor, but Sharon had already picked up the woman's pillow and begun whacking her about the head and shoulders. The woman was still cackling, screaming in delight as if this had been part of her plan, and Sharon realized the pillow wouldn't hurt her enough to shut her up.

  Sharon began screaming back at her. "Shut up! Shut up, witch! Shut the fuck up!" She was only dimly aware of clanging and cheering coming from the other cells. "Shut up!" she screamed, her voice beyond her control, and grabbing the pillow firmly at each end, she lunged again at her cellmate, driving the woman's head back against the wall. It hit with a dull thud and Sharon pinned her there, her knees across the woman's bony thighs. The woman squirmed and Sharon felt the bony hands first flailing at her chest, then grabbing at her arms. Suddenly and without warning, a thick arm circled Sharon's neck and she felt herself being dragged backwards, and the pillow being yanked out of her hands.

  "Cool it!" a deep female voice bellowed into her ear as she was hauled back to her bed and made to sit down. "Cool it!" She didn't struggle, and the guard's grip on her gradually relaxed.

  Sharon started to sob.

  "It's okay, honey," the guard said, her voice almost gentle. "I won't hurt you. You just take a deep breath. Calm down and it'll be okay."

  "That... that... woman... she's..." Sharon had to stop to take three or four deep breaths. "I just..."

  "I know, honey. I know. She's pretty disgustin', I know that. But she ain't gonna hurt you if you don't let her."

  Another guard was standing over Sharon's cellmate, talking to her in a low voice. "Keep your hands to yourself, Prentice, and don't provoke her, hear? You want to get out of here in one piece, you don't mess with your neighbor, hear?"

  "Can't you move me?" pleaded Sharon. "Can't you get me away from her?"

  "Prentice is a little crazy, but she ain't gonna hurt you. You got to grin and bear it, honey. This ain't a long term thing here. It's just temporary. So just grin and bear it, and don't make more trouble for y'self by causing a stink over it, understand?"

  The guard handed her the paperback, and cautioned her one more time before she closed the cell door. "Just take it easy, don't make trouble for y'self."

  The door clanged shut, and they listened in silence as the guards' footsteps receded down the corridor.

  "Hee, hee," said her cellmate.

  "Oh, for God's sake! Will you SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  Russell's head felt like it was stuffed with steel wool. He blinked against the sunlight flooding his hotel room, wishing he'd had the foresight to close the drapes the night before. He lifted his arm to shield his eyes, noticed that he still wore his shirt. He lifted the bedspread, realized that he hadn't even had the foresight, or whatever it took, to undress, or to even take off his shoes. "Fu-uck," he groaned, and closed his eyes. His tongue worked sluggishly against his coated teeth.

  A vague memory surfaced. Chad Williams in the hotel bar. He had come back to his room to call Jennifer, and finally left a message for her to call back. While he was waiting to hear from her, he opened the mini-bar and ate a jar of roasted nuts. Then he'd made himself a drink, and ate a chocolate bar, and phoned her again. And again. By the time he got hold of Jennifer it was two a.m. and his mini-bar was half empty and he was drunk. "Fuck," he said again, as the memory sharpened. He'd made an ass of himself, big time, and he didn't know if he'd be able to fix it with her. She'd been working long hours, she said, then made it clear that she didn't want to see him this weekend at all.

  He stripped off his shirt and balled it up to stuff in his suitcase, then folded his slacks carefully and hung them on a towel rack in the bathroom. He stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, as hot as he could stand it, in an attempt to steam the wrinkles out of his slacks, then followed up with five minutes of cold, trying to clear his head. When he emerged to dress, he heard the fading beep of his dying cell phone. He'd left it on and forgotten to put his other spent battery on the charger. "Fuck," he said one more time. Downstairs, he forced himself to eat a fruit plate for breakfast and inhaled three cups of black coffee before ordering a rental car. He walked outside into the sunlit parking lot and set about studying the map they supplied. He had no intention of depending on anyone else for transportation today, not the RCMP, and especially not that trucker.

  His first stop was Greg Williams' home. It didn't look very far on the map, but the lights and traffic along Kingsway, plus the minor detours he had to make in order to locate the right street, stretched the drive into more than half an hour. Teresa Jagpal had been expecting him, having been contacted the day before by Al Kowalski by way of introduction. She met him at the front door, a pliant brown-skinned girl with big dark eyes, and although she suggested sitting in the living room, he asked if they could sit at the kitchen table. He felt more in control at a table, somehow. The chairs were moveable, and the situation simulated the interview rooms he was used to.

  There was another woman standing at the stove, waiting for a kettle to boil. She ignored them both until Teresa asked Russell if he would like some tea. He asked for coffee.

  "Do we still have that coffee, Hellen?" Teresa said to the woman with the kettle. The woman turned around. She had short spiky hair - hennaed, he thought - and lipstick of a similar shade, stark as a raw wound against her pallid skin.

  "There's a jar of cheap instant - cheap and old - if you want," the woman said directly to Russell. Her voice was as garish as her lips. "We don't do caffeine."

  "You live here, too?" asked Russell.

  While the woman seemed to be searching for an answer - a disdainful one, judging by her smirk - Teresa spoke. "Yes. The house belongs to Hellen's aunt."

  Russell introduced himself and offered his hand. The woman let him take her fingers, then let them fall away. "Good old L.A.," she said, and turned back to the stove.

  Russell snorted softly. Affected boredom bored him. He motioned Teresa to take a chair, then pulled out one for himself, moving it close to her with only a corner of the table between them, and with his back to the other woman. He leaned forward and spoke softly. "As I believe Corporal Kowalski told you, Teresa," he began, "we think we have the persons in custody who are responsible for the death of your husband, Greg. I'd just like to go over some things with you, see if there's anything you can tell me about your husband that will reinforce or refute the theory we've developed." Russell resisted the urge to attribute the theory to himself alone. A 'we' would carry more authority, he reasoned.

  Teresa Jagpal squirmed in her chair, seemed about to say something when the woman behind him slammed a cupboard door. Russell frowned, trying to look troubled rather than irritated, and it seemed to work, because Teresa said, "Perhaps we can wait until Hellen is finished. Are you nearly done?"

/>   The woman named Hellen banged two mugs on the counter and replied, "Do it yourself, then," before breezing into the other room. Russell heard the small rustling noises of her sitting down and turning pages, and although he knew she could still hear them, he was glad that she was gone.

  He guided Teresa Jagpal through a description of her husband's last days, his habits, and his friends. Everything she said pretty much tallied with what he'd already heard from the RCMP, but he felt more comfortable getting it right from the horse's mouth. The guy lived for his music. His wife was a fan, but was not a musician herself, nor a drinker, so she seldom went to his studio or went to his bar gigs, unless they were close by. He'd left her no money, no insurance, and no will.

  "We weren't married, Greg and I," she said. "We never thought of ourselves as husband and wife, so it's hardly surprising he would ... um... that he wouldn't leave me anything." She seemed embarrassed by this statement, and wouldn't meet Russell's eyes. She was hardly the bitch that Chad Williams had described. He wondered why the burly cop had felt so threatened by her, especially in relation to his dead brother's estate. "Well, he didn't have much anyway. Greg was very talented, but it takes time to build a reputation in the music business, you know? He needed to meet the right people, make the right connections before the money got better. It was just a matter of time, he always said." She raised her eyes briefly, looked away again. "Greg didn't have much," she repeated.

  Thinking of what Williams had said about the recording studio, he asked "What about the equipment in the recording studio? Isn't that pretty valuable stuff?"

  Teresa shrugged, looking confused. "I don't know anything about equipment. I know he went to the studio a lot to practice. I don't think it was his own equipment." More quietly, almost to herself, she added, "Was it?"

  Russell frowned. "Did he keep any papers here? Receipts, bills of sale, that type of thing?"

  She offered him a strained smile. "His desk is outside in the carport. I don't really know what's in it." She led Russell out the door, across a weedy lawn and into a cluttered carport, explaining that she'd had the neighbor help carry Greg's things outside, and was waiting for the Salvation Army to pick them up. Lumpy black garbage bags surrounded a small wooden desk, painted rusty brown. A waterbed frame leaned up against the carport's weathered posts.

  "After the break-in, all the drawers were empty and there were books and papers scattered all over the floor. I just scooped them up and put them back in the desk, but I didn't really look at them." She said the police had given them a cursory examination, but hadn't shared any conclusions with her.

  "That's because they didn't have any," said Russell, opening a drawer and riffling through a sheaf of mismatched papers, mostly handwritten notes with what were presumably song lyrics, mixed in with photocopied pages of performance contracts with the name of the booking agent at the top. Russell noted the amounts, shook his head. According to these, the guy was working for peanuts, never grossing more than a couple of hundred dollars a week. Flat on the bottom of one drawer was a manila envelope, which he pried out with a fingernail. He shook it and a stack of papers slid out, the first a bill of sale from an electronics store with Greg Williams' name on the top line, for a piece of recording equipment worth over $3000. Scrawled at the bottom was 'Paid in Cash'. There were at least half a dozen such invoices, for varying amounts, some considerably higher in value. Russell whistled softly. "Your husband have an inheritance last year? Savings from a previous job? Where'd all this cash come from?"

  Teresa leaned closer to read the receipts. She shook her head, looking bewildered. "He mostly got paid in cash at the gigs, but he never had that much." She looked away, obviously uncomfortable. "He didn't... I don't understand... why didn't he tell me? Why didn't I know about this?"

  "You were supporting him?" Russell asked gently.

  "Well, temporarily," she said, but her breath quickened. "He... he was waiting for a break, like I said. I knew he'd pay me back one day." She looked in his eyes briefly, then away again. "Greg contributed what he could," she added, but they both knew that she could no longer believe that.

  Russell shook his head, examining the bills of sale.

  "Maybe the whole band chipped in," Teresa suggested.

  Russell smiled. As if a group of musicians would trust one of their number to register a purchase this size in his own name. Maybe, being "artists", they didn't know any better, but Russell doubted it. "Did Greg have a bicycle?" he asked.

  She hesitated, a pained looked on her face. "He never told me about that, either. Did he buy a bicycle, too?"

  Teresa followed him back to the house. The woman with spiky hair still sat in the living room, ignored them as they returned to the kitchen. Teresa sat back down at the kitchen table, her back stiff, her mouth closed but lips working silently while he wrote a few things in his notebook, then he referred back to his previous notes.

  "What can you tell me about Hanratty Meats?" he asked.

  She raised her wide eyes to his face. "Hanratty Meats? I don't understand," she said, looking briefly toward the door to the living room. "I don't understand what Hanratty Meats would have to do with Greg." He opened his mouth to speak, but she didn't wait for a response. "I know he was found in a trailer full of meat, but I don't understand why he would be, or why he would have gone there. Greg wasn't like that."

  "Wasn't like what?"

  "Wasn't an activist. He was a musician. That's all he really cared about. He'd never get involved in protests or meetings or anything."

  "Meetings?"

  "You know. Animals rights groups or save the whales or... things like that." She spoke the last words at the end of a breath. Minutes seemed to pass before she inhaled again.

  "You're familiar with Hanratty Meats then?"

  "As far as I know, Greg never had anything to do with Hanratty Meats." She frowned and sighed. "Not that he ever told me," she added then, emphasizing the word me.

  Russell studied her curiously for a moment, debating whether to pursue this line of questioning further. She was being evasive, in her quiet way, but she'd still told him what he expected, and wanted, to hear. He, too, didn't believe Hanratty Meats had anything to do with the reason why Greg Williams died. He pulled Ray and Sharon Nillson's mug shots out of his jacket pocket and laid one of them on the table for her to see.

  She leaned over the picture for a few seconds, then looked up at him. "I don't know this man," she said. "Is he...?"

  "Look again," he said. "Have you ever seen him before?" When she shook her head, he put Sharon's photograph on top of Ray's. "How about this woman? Have you ever heard of Watson Transportation?"

  Again she shook her head. "No. No, I don't remember seeing either one of these people. Are they the ones who...?" She didn't finish the question, and Russell ignored it, instead arranging the photographs side-by-side and motioning for her to look again.

  "I... I don't know these people," she said. "If they did it... I don't know why. I don't know why anyone would want to hurt Greg." She buried her face in her hands. "I don't know. Why is there so much about him I don't know?"

  After the detective from California left, Teresa excused herself with a headache, told Hellen she was going to lie down. She stayed in her room until she heard Hellen leave the house, then peered through a crack in the blinds to make sure Hellen was really gone, watched her get in her car and drive away. When Hellen's car had turned the corner out of sight, Teresa went to the back door, parted the curtains in its little window to look out at the yard. It had rained during the night, and the grass was still wet, as if with heavy dew.

  What other secrets had Greg kept from her? If he had thousands of dollars to spend on equipment for his studio, why had he always looked so embarrassed and ashamed when he told her he was broke, thanked her with tender kisses when she picked up his share of the rent, seemed so truly grateful for her financial support? Could he lie to her so easily? What else had he hidden from her? She thought again of
his nighttime excursions into the back yard, and the burglar who had torn the house apart but taken nothing. Could Greg have stashed something outside?

  Teresa walked barefoot across the unmowed lawn, taking simple pleasure from the feel of the soft wet grass beneath her soles and around her toes. She touched the rough bark of the plum tree, let her hand slide down its length as she bent to examine the roots, and around its circumference as she circled the tree. No hiding places there. She stood on tiptoe and thrust her fingers into the V between the branches, again worked her way around the tree to look and feel from all sides. There was nothing there, either.

  She cast a glance around the yard and then focused on the old doghouse where the little gray cat liked to play. The carpet, she thought. She put one hand on the mossy roof as she knelt to peer inside. The front of the carpet was still wet from the rain and she was loathe to touch its mildew blackened edge. She reached inside and felt the surface for any lumps or bumps. It was smooth and even to the touch. She leaned her shoulder inside the dog sized door and began to feel along the underside of the roof, jerking her hand away as it came across the sticky threads of a spider web inside. Perhaps if she tipped the doghouse on its end, she could examine the inside from without. She did so – it wasn’t as heavy as she thought it might be – but didn’t have to look inside. Duct taped to the plywood underside of the doghouse was a square of green plastic.

  Teresa let the doghouse fall and spun around to see if anyone was watching. When she saw no one, she tipped up the doghouse, ripped the duct tape off the plywood, then settled the doghouse back down into exactly the same spot, taking care not to trap the long grass that surrounded it underneath its base. She looked around her again before running back to the house, the plastic square tucked close against her chest.

  Greg had kept too many secrets from her. Now it was time for him to share.