Goodbye Sister Disco

by James Patrick Hunt

  That was how Terrill and Maggie realized that the thing had not gone as smoothly as they had thought.

  They were watching the television alone, upstairs in Maggie’s room, when the six o’clock news came on and there it was: Mickey Seften, sketched in charcoal, a nice little portrait of his hair, eyeglasses, and intense expression. Their rules prohibited people from watching television without permission. Maggie and Terrill controlled the flow of communication, the access to media.

  Maggie sighed.

  Terrill said, “I knew it.”

  Maggie said, “These runs to White Hall for food and cigarettes, has Mickey gone on those?”

  “Yeah, he’s gone.”

  “Then you know that it’s just a matter of time before someone from White Hall calls the police.”

  “It’s possible,” Terrill said. “It doesn’t mean it’s probable.”

  “It’s more than possible, Terrill. We have to move,” Maggie said. “Sooner than we planned. When did you tell Penmark we would release her?”

  “I said within two hours.”

  “And that was how long ago?”

  Terrill shrugged. “About six hours ago.”

  Maggie seemed to think it over. She said, “We can do the next one in Chicago. Maybe we ask for more next time.”

  And Terrill was thinking, More what? They had two million dollars with them now. It had just been a figure before, but now they had it. It was real and they had it. And now Terrill was finding that he was actually intimidated by it. What does a person do with two million dollars? If he wants a car, does he walk up to the car lot and just start counting it out? Well, no, because any exchange over ten thousand, the dealers were supposed to report. Laws intended to keep drug dealers in check, though the laws didn’t seem to deter much. He and Maggie had drilled these people for so long with all their talk of revolution and pigs and anarchy and the Man and had said that they would use the proceeds of the kidnapping to finance their mission. But now the money was here and the mission no longer seemed that clear. They had accomplished the mission, hadn’t they? They had gotten the fucking money. If that wasn’t striking back at the establishment, it was hard to say what was.

  Maggie was saying something to him now.

  “… Terrill.”

  “Huh?”

  “Terrill.” Maggie spoke in a low voice now, scooting her chair closer to him. They were alone in the room, but Maggie was worried about people listening outside the door.

  “What, Maggie?”

  “I’m a little concerned.”

  “About what?”

  “Did you notice what happened earlier?”

  “What?”

  “When you brought that money back, everyone was looking at it. Didn’t you feel funny?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All of them,” Maggie said. She was referring to their comrades, eyeing the money as if it were scraps of food, eyeing it like wolves around a deer. “All of them wanting it. Except for that idiot, Lee.”

  Terrill said, “I think you’re imagining things.”

  Maggie tried to maintain patience, wondering now if Terrill was starting to believe his own publicity. “Terrill,” she said, “Ray and Mickey are going to want that fucking money now. Do you not see that?”

  “Hey, Mickey had a chance to run off with it himself before, and he didn’t.”

  “Okay, he didn’t. But before, Toby was watching him, and while Toby was alive Mickey was watching him.”

  “Maggie, you’re losing me.”

  “You know what I mean. Anyway, time’s gone by and I assure you Mickey’s not feeling the same way he did this afternoon. Listen to what we’re doing now, Terrill, listen to the conversation we’re having. Don’t you think maybe Mickey and Ray are having a conversation of their own? Or Mickey and Jan? Or all three of them?”

  “All right, then,” Terrill said, getting upset now. “We split it up in the morning and then we don’t have to think about it anymore.”

  Maggie Corbitt was experienced at hiding her thoughts. What she was thinking now was, Evenly? An even split? She said, “Baby, I know you mean well. But do you think that’s right? After all the work you did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re too generous, Terrill. You always think of others first, it’s your nature. But, baby, we’ve got to be realistic about things. We’ve got big plans.”

  “I know that.”

  “I know you know. But if you split that money up with those guys like we’re just a gang of thieves, they’ll take it and run. They’ll go blow it. And how long do you think it will be before they catch up with Mickey? A day? Maybe two or three days?”

  “Mickey helped bust me out.”

  Maggie’s face was a hard shell. She said, “He did that because I told him to.” Her expression adding, And don’t you forget it.

  Terrill opened his mouth to defend himself, to say something back to her, but she was looking at him in that determined, reproachful way of hers and he was chastened. Finally, he said, “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  Her expression softened, just. She said, “Baby, you were beautiful today. Just beautiful. I don’t know anyone who could have done what you did. Directing around Gene fucking Penmark like he was a toy soldier. You were stunning.” She put a hand on his leg. “But this is just the beginning.” She reached up to stroke his hair now. It could have been a lover’s touch or a mother’s. She said, “Splitting the money … we can talk about that later. But Mickey—Mickey’s going to be a problem.”

  “I know,” Terrill said, “I’ve been thinking about that since this afternoon.” Would you recognize the cop if you saw him again, Mickey? Yeah, I guess I would. Well, great, dumb shit, that means he’d probably recognize you too.

  Maggie said, “I don’t like talking about these things. But he did run and leave Toby alone with the cop. If he had stayed, he could have helped Toby and killed that fucking pig and then we wouldn’t have this problem.”

  “I’ve thought about that too,” Terrill said.

  “After all,” Maggie said, “we have to think of what would be right for Toby too.”

  “Yes. We do.”

  “We owe him that,” Maggie said. She took Terrill’s hand and placed it on her breast. “Don’t you think?”

  Terrill was looking at her, stirring now. With Maggie, sex was always so intense, so purifying. She gave of herself sparingly—sometimes weeks would go by during the intervals—but when she did make herself available, it was like no other girl he’d ever been with and it was like the first time he’d been with her. A gift, an opportunity to fulfill himself that no other girl could offer him.

  They embraced and kissed, but only for a moment. Briefly as young people do, and then she stood and led him by the hand to the bed.

  * * *

  When he and Maggie met, Terrill had been little more than a small-time criminal. He stole cars and stereo equipment and sold little bags of marijuana and lived off young girls who fell in love with him. And there were plenty of those. Terrill was a tall man with wide shoulders, yet the girls always talked about his eyes. Hazel eyes and dark hair, a black Irish beauty. Terrill was aware of his looks, aware of his presence. He was aware of his allure for men and women. Though heterosexual, he liked to tease and, ultimately, humiliate gay men. He had a hypnotic effect on them as well and he knew it. For him, seduction was an easy art.

  Except when it came to Maggie. He had not seduced Maggie. Indeed, he had not even tried. When he first met Maggie, he thought her a little too boyish for his taste. With her short dark hair and her sharp face, she didn’t seem worth the bother. But then he saw the weight in her face, the way she looked when someone said something stupid, the way she could reduce people to stammers, and it changed him. He approached her not with the goal of seducing her but rather to impress her. Impress her so that she would allow him to be with her while she spoke and he listened. She was three years older than he and he ha
d never had a sister. Nor had he ever truly respected a woman. Certainly, he had never feared one. But no one had ever seemed as smart as Maggie, as powerful, as natural a leader. As their friendship developed, she began to teach him about politics and art and history. Things he thought he had thought about, but really hadn’t. She told him that he had it in within himself not to be a bullshit person, that he had marvelous potential, that he was a natural disruptor of the bullshit scene, but he needed to learn to channel himself. She told him that when they met, she knew right away that they thought and felt alike. Maggie was smart and she did not tell Terrill all these things in one session. Rather, it was over a series of get-togethers. Usually when they were together, she would give him LSD to make him more suggestible. Maggie would take it too, but always in smaller doses. It left her with the control. Control was important to Maggie.

  She grew up in relative poverty. The daughter of an Assembly of God minister, her formative years were in northwestern Arkansas. Her father and mother had to work full-time jobs apart from the church because the church was too small to pay a salary. Her mother was not cruel or mean-spirited, but she was stupid and weak, and by the time Maggie was a teenager she had come to despise her mother as she would most weak people. Maggie had a little brother named Bobby. By the time he was two, the parents realized he was autistic.

  By all outward appearances, Maggie Corbitt was a good girl through her childhood and early adolescence. She read her Bible daily. She helped her mother with Bobby. She did well at school.

  She was never a pretty girl. But she was an attractive one, with a cute figure. Even as a young teenager her face seemed more like a woman’s than a girl’s. And this was something that men noticed. When she was sixteen, she had her first sexual experience. It was with a local police officer who was assigned to the school. The young cop was in his early twenties and was married and had the maturity level of a sixteen-year-old himself. Consequently, it did not occur to him that having intercourse with Maggie was a crime or even a sin. As he saw it, he and Maggie were on the same wavelength.

  Maggie Corbitt was by no means dumb. But the environment in which she was raised was not one that encouraged frank discussion about sex or its consequences. Still, when she missed her period, Maggie was vaguely aware that she was going to have a baby.

  When she told her parents, her daddy slapped her and called her ugly names. At one point, he said, “I knew it.” Like it was something he knew she’d do to him one day, and she did. Maggie remembered the sting of that. Her mother didn’t defend her. She just sat stupidly in her chair, her hands shaking. Her lips were moving silently and Maggie realized that she was praying. Praying to the Lord and doing nothing while her husband called her little girl a slut and slapped her around.

  They put her on a bus to Texas the next day to live with an aunt. Maggie presumed that she would stay with her aunt until she had the baby and then she would be allowed to come home. But her folks never called. Two months later, she had a miscarriage. She telephoned her parents to tell them that it was over. Her father would not speak to her. Her mother kept saying, “Well, I don’t know.” Even when Maggie asked her if they wanted her to come home.

  When she was seventeen, Maggie hitched a ride with another girl to St. Louis. Life got rougher then, living in the underground. Drug-dealer boyfriends, roommates without last names, strippers calling themselves dancers, Internet pornography, and so forth. But Maggie had already developed a hard shell before she got there. And in the next few years she forged a persona quite separate from the one she had in northwestern Arkansas. Her accent became submerged, her clothes urban, her politics hard-edged and pitiless. It was as if somewhere along the way, she had decided that she would act like a certain kind of person and after playing that role long enough, she would become that person. In this, she succeeded. And by the time she met Terrill Colely, the preacher’s daughter had long since been buried.

  Now she lay in bed with Terrill. Terrill was sleeping, sleeping like a baby. He usually slept afterward. She slipped out of bed and sat on a chair and lighted a cigarette. She looked at him. He was beautiful, even in sleep.

  Earlier, Terrill had defended Mickey by saying that Mickey hadn’t run off with the money when he had the chance. Jesus. Of course he didn’t, Terrill. Mickey’s a faggot and he wouldn’t do anything to displease his black prince. God, the things Terrill could forget. Maybe he’d smoked too much dope over the years. Well, what did it matter? Tomorrow, she’d direct Terrill to take care of Mickey and the Penmark girl and he would do it. And after that, she would figure out how to deal with the rest of them. Maybe starting with that idiot child Lee. Not that Maggie was jealous of Lee. Not by a long shot. But if she had to hear Lee say “Terrill” with her lovelorn eyes one more time, she’d throw the bitch down the stairs.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Klosterman pressed the buzzer at the A&W hamburger stand and a voice came back on the squawk box. Klosterman said he would take a deluxe cheeseburger value meal and a Coke. The voice said was Pepsi okay? Klosterman said no, but he would take a Dr Pepper. He turned to Hastings and said, “What do you want?”

  Hastings’s stomach had become sensitive over the years. He liked the taste of fast food, but his system wouldn’t abide it. In contrast, Klosterman could eat anything.

  “Just coffee,” Hastings said.

  “Come on,” Klosterman said. “You’ve had an injury. You’ve gotta eat something.”

  “Just coffee. I’ll get a sandwich later.”

  Klosterman sighed resignation and ordered coffee.

  The food came and they stayed in the car, like the guys in the Sonic commercial, only older and a little less self-aware. Hastings sipped the coffee and felt the heat travel up to his head, jump-starting the cortex. Wincing, but he would be okay.

  Klosterman said, “It went okay, I think.”

  Hastings said, “Back there?”

  “Yeah. The ASAC was being an asshole, but those other guys seemed okay.”

  “They probably are.”

  “You think they’ll be able to get an ID on those guys?”

  Hastings sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He wasn’t too optimistic though and it showed on his face. He said, “I’ve got to get back out to the Penmarks. Can you do something for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Talk to Rhodes and Murph and have them check out Edie Penmark. The sister.”

  Klosterman was holding the cheeseburger, some of it sticking out of the wrapper. “Why?” he said.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Hastings said. “Yesterday, I interviewed her and she came on to me.”

  “Really?” Klosterman was not smiling. He knew it was not an adolescent subject.

  “Yeah. Kind of creepy, actually. She may be unstable.”

  “You think she had something to do with this?”

  “No, not necessarily. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she were into some pretty bad shit.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “I didn’t ask her that directly. If I had, she wouldn’t have answered. I got the feeling she was hitting on me to throw me off. To distract me.”

  “The only worse thing than a bad girl is a bad girl with money.”

  “Well, what I’m wondering is, is this bad girl connected to bad people? Who are not rich?”

  “If she’s buying, she may be,” Klosterman said. “Yeah, we can check her out.”

  “Thanks. Hey, will you drive me to Laclede’s Landing? That’s where I left my car.”

  “You think you can drive?”

  “Yeah.” Hastings gestured to his head. “Like hitting your head on the ceiling.”

  “If you say so.”

  * * *

  The security guard let Hastings by and when he pulled up to the drive, he saw an unfamiliar Mercury Marauder there that he suspected belonged to Jeffrey Rook. Not an official police car, but resembling one enough to give the illusion of s
ecurity and authority. Hastings saw that and sighed. He knew what waited for him inside, but his comfort was secondary.

  And sure enough, there was Jeffrey Rook, waiting in the front hall, standing a few feet in front of Lexie Penmark, his patroness. Hastings felt his anger set on slow boil now, the fright of being nearly stabbed to death not quite out of him yet and now he had to tell himself not to deck this big piece of shit.

  Jeffrey Rook, an authority figure in his own mind, had his hands on his hips like a school principal, but performing for Lexie Penmark, maybe hoping to get in her pants, and he said, “Would you mind explaining what happened?”

  Hastings stopped and briefly looked the big man up and down, as if just noticing him. Then he walked past him to Lexie Penmark. Hastings said, “Where’s your husband?”

  Lexie Penmark looked back at Rook, surprised that he had been ignored. He had spent so much time and effort building himself up and the lieutenant had simply ignored him. She said to Hastings, “He’s in his study.”

  Hastings nodded and walked off.

  * * *

  Gene Penmark sat behind his desk, his hand on his face. It stopped Hastings. He had never seen Penmark this way before. Vulnerable, frightened, human. Who could say what it was? All he had been through and still there was no word, no sign, that his daughter had been released. They had not let him know that they would keep their word or that they would not. He had done everything they had asked him. He had given them the money, unmarked, nonconsecutive bills. And yet he had no word about Cordelia. His wife was standing with another man in another part of his house, wanting to somehow control the situation. But she wasn’t standing with him.

  Gene Penmark did not wonder if he was the first man of power and wealth to trade in a wife. It was not his nature to think about things like that. He was, in his way, a brilliant man and an innovator and a huge success. But he was not worldly. Nor was he given to honest introspection. Lexie Lacquere was aware of these defects in his makeup and she did not hesitate to exploit them. Gene had an ego and it took little to assuage it. Compliments, flattery, self-deprecating remarks about her own ignorance. She timed these things and she did not overplay them. As a result, Gene Penmark never really asked himself whether Lexie loved him or his children. Indeed, he did not stop to ask himself if he was lucky or unlucky to have her in his life. The way he saw it, he was entitled to someone like her.