by Lynn Kostoff
At one time or another, she’d hidden in each of them.
She’d been Betsy Jo Horvath when her mother abandoned her at her grandparents’ place in Bradford, Indiana. Beneath an immense Midwestern sky, Bradford huddled like a mouse under a hawk’s wing. Everything about the town was small. She could walk from the eastern to western city limits in less than twenty minutes. Life in Bradford was sky and weather. For Betsy Jo Horvath, life there had been one endless impatience.
She tried to run away three times.
The first had been with her high school chemistry teacher, a tall pale man who’d told her over and over they belonged together, but when they ran off, they got not no further than Chicago and a Holiday Inn where after a long weekend of unimaginative and unspectacular sex, he suffered a predictable crisis of conscience and loss of nerve and decided to return to his family.
The second time, Corrine had taken off on her own, making it to the outskirts of Kansas City before a Statie picked her up and returned her to Bradford.
The third time, Corrine had taken off with Billy Watts, a local pot dealer with overinflated and movie-driven notions of the big score awaiting him in Phoenix. Once there, it had taken less than a month before Billy got burned on one of his sure deals, and when the buyers administered a fine-print beating as a coda to the business proceedings, Billy Watts had decided, like her chemistry teacher, that Bradford, Indiana wasn’t such a bad place after all.
If you were a young attractive female on your own in Phoenix with no visible means of support, you sooner or later met Wayne LaVell. It was inevitable. You found him, or he found you.
Wayne LaVell stepped in and posted bail and paid for the attorney who represented Betsy Jo Horvath after she had been busted for solicitation at the Mid-Line Hotel and Restaurant downtown on North Catalina.
She had not been hooking, at least not technically. She made a casual circuit of some of the high-end lounges during lunch and happy hours. She was young, and she was pretty, and it never took too long for her to get noticed and invited for a drink. She never directly asked for money, but made sure during the conversation that she inserted a hard-luck anecdote that usually resulted in the man offering to “help out” after she’d slept with him. She’d steal, whenever possible, from those who didn’t offer or in a few cases mention she’d noticed his wedding ring and pointedly ask about his family.
She was careful not to show up at the same place too often. She’d already been popped twice for shoplifting, pleading out each time with a fine.
It didn’t take long for the Vice cop to make her at the Mid-Line and bust her, however. She didn’t understand until much later, after she was already working for Wayne LaVell’s escort service, that LaVell had sicced the Vice cop on her in the first place because the Mid-Line was one of his properties, and Wayne LaVell make sure he had a piece of whatever action took place there.
After the solicitation charges were fixed, she became April Rayne and had gone to work for LaVell’s Valley of the Sun Escorts. Wayne LaVell had developed a system in which each part fed another. Corrine never saw any money from her escorts because they paid in advance. LaVell paid her a flat, base salary, plus bonuses if she went over her monthly quota of dates. The men took her out for dinner and drinks at one of LaVell’s restaurants, and they later fucked her in one of his hotels. She had a small place of her own, as did the other girls working for LaVell, in an apartment complex in Tempe. The complex was one of LaVell’s holdings, and he deducted her rent and utilities from her salary. He supplied recreational drugs for the girls, deducting their cost as well as monitoring their use. In the end, you were left with a comfortable life that went nowhere, a long-term limbo owned and maintained by Wayne LaVell.
The clientele for Valley of the Sun Escorts were screened and were comprised almost exclusively of businessmen and politicians from the region and the out-of-towners connected to Phoenix’s year-round convention trade.
It had been the stories more than the semen that the men left in her that she resented most.
All that fear and loneliness and anger that their stories attempted to hide. Every one of them wanted to tell his story whether he understood that or not, and Wayne LaVell, for a price, offered a willing and beautiful and rapt audience for a night or two.
As April Rayne, Corrine could not remember a single face from her dates distinctly. They were men in suits who took her out to dinner and wanted to be seen in her company, and they talked about themselves, almost always in terms of their careers, their triumphs and trials in the marketplace or in office politics, and in the end, each story was the same story because they were all run on need.
Later, in the hotel room, in bed, the men wanted to be liked or feared or sometimes both, and they brought their need to her and put it in her, and her body and words gave them back the only thing they wanted, which was to have their stories and their places in their stories confirmed. They paid to fuck her so that for a little while they could be exactly what they said they were.
They were always undone by their orgasms though.
When she felt them getting ready to come, she made sure she kept her eyes open, and she watched their stories and their faces collapse as they spent their need, and no matter what the men had done or said earlier, she knew at that moment, with their eyes squeezed tightly shut and their expressions breaking under the weight of their orgasms, she saw all of them for what they were and what they spent their lives trying to cover up and hide from.
When they came, they looked like scared little boys fighting back tears in the dark.
Five years, and then by accident, April Rayne found her ticket out of Valley of the Sun Escorts.
A perk. That’s what Wayne LaVell called her when he sent April Rayne out to meet Larry Delmae, a Zoning Commissioner with deep generational roots in Phoenix.
Larry Delmae, himself, filled in the rest of the story later in the evening back in the hotel room. During and after the meal, he’d had too much to drink and made two very unsuccessful attempts to undress her. April had covered for his ineptitude by guiding him to the edge of the bed and sitting him down and then doing an impromptu strip, taking her time and talking it out as if it were something that she was doing for him and only him, and by the time she was naked, Larry felt the need to return the favor and show April that he was a worthy recipient of her flesh and beauty and time, that he was, in fact, an important and powerful man, and he brought over the briefcase that he’d been carrying when April first met him that evening and then set it on the bed and opened it.
“Guess,” he said, leaning in and cupping a breast.
She looked at the bound bills, the denominations, and ran the numbers through her mind.
“Thirty thousand,” she said.
“Jesus, honey,” Delmae said, stepping back. “You’re good. There’s thirty-five thousand there. Tax-free, courtesy of your friend and mine, Wayne LaVell. Ten grand an acre, a three-and-a-half acre package up soon for a new rezoning configuration, and all I got to do is talk to a couple people. And hell, they’s people I’ve been knowing since we been kids. Easiest money I ever made.”
Larry Delmae was snoring less than five minutes after his orgasm.
She grabbed the briefcase. She did not even consider going back to her apartment for any of her things.
She went to ground. She put in a call to Tim Farrell.
Tim Farrell was the brother of one of the girls at Valley of the Sun Escorts, and April had met him briefly when he visited his sister. She later told her what Tim did for a sideline, and April had filed that information away.
Tim Farrell could cleanse you of history.
Farrell so completely inhabited the stereotype of the computer geek that at first she had assumed it was a put-on, but Farrell, tall, gawky, pale-skinned, and slack-muscled, seemed oblivious and immune to irony. He presented his hacker credentials with an adolescent mix of diffidence and pride and told her he could give her a new identity that would stand u
p to some serious scrutiny for fifteen thousand dollars.
April lied and said she only had ten thousand. Tim Farrell said he’d settle for the ten since she was a friend of his sister, then paused, not meeting her eyes, and added if she would be willing to take the rest out in trade for one night.
She agreed.
He called her back four days later.
He introduced April Rayne to Corrine Keyes from Charlotte, North Carolina. Tim Farrell produced a birth certificate, social security card, high school diploma, driver’s license, employment record complete with references, and two street addresses for former residences.
Farrell had done freelance work for various state and federal agencies and stole or pirated whatever forms he needed for reconstruction. Her social security number came from his practice of combing the archives of various city halls for those who had died far enough in the past to escape digital upgrades, and the street addresses fit homes that eventually were sold and torn down in Charlotte’s development frenzy. A third grader, he told her, could hack into the school system’s files. The references for the companies Corrine Keyes had supposedly worked at were friends of Tim’s who would vouch for Corrine’s work record if they were ever contacted.
She paid him the ten thousand dollars.
Her mistake had been in agreeing to sleep with him. Given the persona he projected, she’d figured him for a squirter, a premie, who could be dispatched in short order, and so she hadn’t paid the attention she should have when they were back at his apartment and he offered her a drink. By the time the fourth cut from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon came on, she knew he’d put something in the drink when she tried to move her legs and couldn’t.
She woke the next morning in a slow-motion panic. Little by little and in no particular order, pieces of memory of what Tim Farrell had done after he’d drugged her started crowding in, and with effort, Corrine wastebasketed the images and dressed and managed to leave before Farrell awoke, and by that afternoon, Corrine Keyes was on her way to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She wanted a place full of tourists for groundcover.
She eventually landed a job waitressing at one of Sonny Gramm’s supper clubs.
Four months into the job, Corrine Keyes worked a bachelor party in the banquet room and met Buddy Tedros. She married him three and a half weeks later.
That should have been it, a close-enough to a happily ever.
Except Stanley Tedros wouldn’t accept her as part of the family, and he wouldn’t accept James Restan’s buy-out offer.
And now Wayne LaVell could with one phone call hold Corrine hostage to her history by threatening to resurrect April Rayne and turn her loose in Corrine’s life.
Corrine had no intention of letting that happen.
The evening air had grown cooler, but Corrine remained where she was, lying on her back on top of the picnic table and looking up at a cloudless night sky and wide swathes of stars, and she almost prayed; but if that’s what it was, the words had dissolved on her lips before she had the chance to speak them, and she was left with what Betsy Jo Horvath, April Rayne, and Corrine Keyes had always known too, whether they liked it or not.
If you looked at anything long enough, you’d end up seeing right through it.
THIRTY-NINE
THE REMOTE WASN’T ONE. Jack Carson thought that’s what he’d been holding and pointing at the television, but instead it was something else entirely, a tape recorder, one that was compact and thin and expensive.
He wondered how it had ended up in his shirt pocket.
The television was off, and it was strange to be in the living room because the television was always on when he was there.
In the afternoon quiet, he listened to the house, its shifts and creaks, the rush of water through pipes, the occasional squeak of a ceiling fan in its rotations.
Jack smiled.
He liked the feel of the house and the afternoon. Jack had always thought working construction was like having a conversation with whatever he was building.
You couldn’t make something without leaving a little bit of yourself behind.
Jack looked at the tape recorder in his hand. He cleared his throat.
The windows were open and the screens gridded in soft light, and Jack caught the smell of the tide rising, and he started building the sentences in his head that answered what his daughter and Buddy Tedros had kept asking him. The question was like a job he’d been hired to do, Jack painstakingly taking the words and lining them up and then moving them to where they belonged and then building another sentence that followed the last one—Jack seeing them in his head, each word in each sentence like a line of cement blocks for a foundation of a house someone had contracted him to build—and Jack ignored the sound of an old man’s voice haltingly speaking in fits and starts and concentrated instead on what he was doing because, finally, that was how any job got done, and along the way Jack Carson found the clarity and grace he’d known as a young man when he’d backed his words with good work.
FORTY
EARLY APRIL WAS A HUSK.
By late afternoon each day, the sky took on a jaundiced cast, and the wind carried a fine, constant sanding of pine pollen that coated everything it came in contact with a pale green. Weather reports were an exercise in redundancy, the temperatures spiking and breaking records, and there was no sign of rain. Competing winds moving in from the plains and the Gulf broke and scattered whatever storm cells developed.
Everything baked.
Tempers were short and grievances long.
The first wave of students for spring break receded, and the city braced itself for the second.
Reverend Redd Benton, taking the weather as a sign, had come into town for an End Times Revival.
Ben Decovic’s shift had been a petri dish of petty complaints and grudges that kept feeding on each other, and his reserves of patience had been sorely taxed by the time the white boat of a Continental ran the light at the intersection of Gilchrist and Ashe and he pulled it over a half block later.
The driver powered down the window as Ben walked up. He was a small man in an ill-fitting summer-weight suit. His black hair appeared frozen, and there was a thin lopsided isosceles triangle of a mustache running to the corners of his upper lip. On the passenger side was a heavyset man with an unfortunate comb-over and a wide round face, his cheeks blotched and filigreed with broken capillaries.
“Problem, Officer?” the driver asked.
“The last light,” Ben said, “you ran the red.” He asked to see license and registration.
“It was yellow,” the driver said.
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, sir,” Ben said. “It was red before you reached the intersection. You’re lucky to have avoided an accident.”
“I know my primary colors, Officer. It was yellow.” Ben asked, once again, for license and registration.
“We’re on the way to a meeting with the mayor,” the driver said, “and I am a close acquaintance of a number of your fellow officers, including Chief Newell.”
“It’s nice to have friends, sir,” Ben said.
The driver unlocked the seat belt and rummaged for his wallet. The heavyset man on the passenger side touched the knot in his tie and watched Ben with eyes that gradually emptied of all expression.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” the driver asked.
“I will as soon as you hand over the license and registration,” Ben said.
The driver did.
Sandwiched between the license and registration card was a folded one-hundred dollar bill, a sharp crease bisecting Franklin’s face.
The driver pointed at Ben’s uniform shirt. “You take blue and add yellow,” he said, “and I think you’ll find you get green.”
Ben handed back the bill, license, and registration and said, “Not always, Mr. Balen. I think you’ll find it depends on the shade of blue.”
Raychard Balen laughed. He turned to the heavyset man. “I think we have o
urselves a Boy Scout here, Wayne.”
“Appears so,” the man said.
Ben started writing out the ticket.
“Your name, Officer,” Balen asked. “I want to be sure to mention you specifically next time I get together with Chief Newell.”
Ben handed him the traffic citation. “It’s on the bottom line, Mr. Balen.”
Balen glanced down and laughed again, harder this time. “Well, well, well,” he said. “It appears, Wayne, not only do we have a Boy Scout here, we have an ambitious Boy Scout, one who likes to vacation outside his job description.”
Balen paused and tilted his head, studying Ben. His smile was small and yellow. He began slowly waving the ticket back and forth between them.
“Maybe running that light wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” Balen said. “Now, Officer Decovic, I have a face to put with the name.”
“Yes sir, you do,” Ben said. “And now, so do I.”
FORTY-ONE
THE CALL CAME THROUGH, but not the one Corrine Tedros had been expecting. Anne Carson, not Wayne LaVell, was on the other end of the line, and she was asking to speak to Buddy.
“I tried the office,” she said, “and then thought he might be at home.”
“He’s out of town for the day,” Corrine said. That was another sore spot. She’d not been able to steer Buddy and get both feet moving in the direction of James Restan’s buy-out offer. Buddy was still going forward with idea of implementing Stanley’s plans to oversee production, distribution, and marketing of Julep himself. In the meantime, people all over the country continued to drink Julep and clamor for more.
“It’s important,” Anne said. “Have him call me please as soon as he gets back.”
Something in Anne Carson’s voice put Corrine on alert, and she had the feeling she already knew the answer before she went on to ask, “Is this about your father?”
“Yes. He remembered. Can you believe it? He gave a description of the man he saw kill Mr. Tedros. It’s all on the tape. I wanted Buddy to know right away.”
Anne Carson sounded like a schoolgirl anxiously awaiting praise from her favorite teacher.