Skies of Ash

by Rachel Howzell Hall

  “We are,” Colin said, throwing me a glance.

  “Because Ben, that son of a bitch, thinks he’s above it all,” Melissa ranted. “He thinks that no one knows who he really is. But I know him. Asshole.”

  “And who is he?” I asked.

  She turned her head in defiance, and the cords in her neck stood out.

  “I can wait,” I said. “The trial will be an incredible time for sharing and discovering.”

  But she couldn’t stand my feigned indifference—she knew so effin’ much. “He’s a liar and a cheat. Got kicked out of the state bar once and… and… Just ask him about the paralegal and about Martha’s Vineyard 2003. Shady asshole through and through. Anyway, Juliet thought Christopher was a schmuck. Can you believe that? This smart, accomplished man a schmuck? We’d go to lunch together, Juliet and me, and she’d always complain: Christopher’s touching me, Christopher’s talking to me, Christopher’s whine-whine-whining me. Honey, you want some cheese with that whine?”

  The Dachshund darted to the dining room, stuck its butt near the wine rack, and took a dump.

  “Snowy, I’m gonna spank your little tuches.” Melissa made a face, but she didn’t move to clean up Snowy’s poop.

  And now the stink of dog crap rode atop the tobacco and fried-bologna fumes.

  “When did Christopher pull back from your friendship?” I asked, this close to vomiting.

  “About a month ago,” she said. “He told me that he wasn’t ready for a relationship, that I wasn’t ready for a relationship. My ex has totally made me crazy. I mean, look at me. Look at all these stupid boxes of crap I don’t need. Look at this house.” She motioned to the air. “Ron has totally destroyed me. Ruined my life. Sapped me of my strength.”

  I’d never let Greg destroy so much of my motivation that I’d let dog shit stay on the carpet. I was not a member of that Traveling Pants Sisterhood.

  “Christopher was totally heartbroken over Juliet’s betrayal. He pleaded with her on the phone right out there.” She pointed to the front door. “And he told her that he needed her, that being with her would help him survive the worst moment of his life.”

  The smile on her face faded. “I was so pissed off because look at him. The man’s a living god. And after she rejected him yet again, he drove back to the Bellagio and swallowed a handful of pills.”

  Ice filled my veins. “Pills? Like to… kill himself?”

  Melissa nodded solemnly and whispered, “He wrote a note and everything.”

  “You see the note?” Colin asked.

  “No, I didn’t see the note,” Melissa spat, all how could you ask such a thing?

  “Who told you there was a note?” he said.

  “Christopher did,” she said. “And obviously it didn’t take. The suicide, I mean. He said it was fate, that he was meant to live. He told me how he never wanted to leave his wife and kids. I hate to talk bad about the dead, but Juliet was such a dragon.”

  I turned a page in the notebook. “Let’s talk about the money. On the phone this morning, you claimed it was a gift.”

  Melissa offered a sheepish grin. “Not exactly.”

  “Okay. How exactly?”

  She scratched her freckled forearm. “I came into some money through an investment made by Ron and me. We’re partners in a sports bar that kept opening and closing. Permit issues. Anyway, it took four years for the bar to make a profit—by then, Ron had forgotten about it. So when Shamrock’s got in the black, we finally got a check from our business manager. Ron and I, we were going through the divorce at the time, and I didn’t want him to know about the money because he’d want half. So I gave the money to Christopher, and he set up an account that didn’t have my name attached to it.”

  “How much are we talking about?” Colin asked.

  “About a hundred thousand dollars,” Melissa said.

  The deposit Colin had discovered while reviewing the Chatmans’ banking records: $100,000.

  “It’s my play money,” Melissa continued, dabbing at her glistening forehead. “And it would come in handy right now. The plumbing in this piece-of-shit house is atrocious. The roof leaks. The garage floods when it rains and—”

  “You haven’t bugged Mr. Chatman for the money?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’ve asked him,” she said. “I’m not scared of him, not that he’s that type anyway. I’ve left him a million messages since last week. At first, he wouldn’t call me back, but I told him I would come to LA and ask for it in person if he kept ignoring me.”

  “I’m bettin’ he called you back,” Colin said.

  She nodded. “On Monday. And then the fire happened, and I haven’t had a chance to bring it up again. The man’s family just died, you know?”

  “When on Monday did you two talk?” I asked.

  “Around noon. I recorded part of our conversation.”

  Colin and I glanced at each other.

  She blinked rapidly. “Perfectly legal. There’s an app for that.”

  “Why did you record the call?” I asked.

  Those green eyes of hers darkened. “In case I needed… backup. You wanna hear it?”

  Colin and I nodded.

  She reached beneath the nest of napkins on the coffee table and produced a cell phone. She scrolled through something on the screen, then set the phone back among the trash. Her recorded, nasally voice filled the room.

  Melissa: “I need about fifty thousand dollars. My toilets won’t flush.”

  Christoper Chatman: “When do you need it by?”

  Melissa: “Sooner rather than later. I’ve been calling you and calling you.”

  Christopher Chatman: “I know, and I’m sorry for not getting back to you.”

  Melissa: “Where have you been?”

  Christopher Chatman: “At the hospital, trying to get healthy.”

  Melissa: “Back east?”

  Christopher Chatman: “Yeah.”

  Melissa: [gasp] “The cancer’s back? Oh no.”

  Christopher Chatman: [chuckle] “No, it’s not back. Just one last checkup. And I forgot my phone at home, and when I got back to LA, I couldn’t find it.” [chuckle] “Cody put it in the microwave.”

  Melissa: [sigh] “I’m sorry.”

  Christopher Chatman: “No, I’m sorry. About everything.”

  Melissa: “If I were insecure, I’d think you were tryin’ to avoid me.”

  Christopher Chatman: “Never. You mean too much to me.”

  Melissa: “Go away with me. Just for a few days. We won’t have to do anything. We’ll just… be. I still have the cabin in Tahoe.”

  Christopher Chatman: “My sick leave is ending, and I’m supposed to go back to work the first week in January. Hey, let me call you back.”

  Dial tone—he had ended the call.

  “And the rest is history,” Melissa said with a sad shake of her head.

  “What did you do about the plumbing?” Colin asked.

  “Had Ron pay for it,” Melissa said. “Is he okay? Christopher, I mean.”

  “He’s managing,” I said, my voice hard. “What, with his family dead and everything.”

  “So let’s talk about this.” Colin slipped a witness statement on the coffee table.

  Melissa glanced at the form and her shoulders slumped. “Should I attend the funeral? Does that seem kosher? Mourning the wife of the man I…?” Her bloodshot eyes begged for an answer, for direction.

  I pointed to the form. “We’d really appreciate it if you could fill this out.”

  She blinked at me, and a teardrop tumbled down her rouged cheek.

  Hard for me to feel sorry for her. In my own life, there had been too many Melissa Kempers driving up to virtual Tahoe with my husband, women who thought that I was a dragon, frigid and angry and not to be mourned.

  Screw ’em.

  And screw Melissa Kemper.

  42

  ONCE MELISSA HAD SIGNED HER WITNESS STATEMENT, COLIN AND I RUSHED OUT OF that crap-trap and into the
fresh, dry air with its normal city-desert smells of dust, pig farms, and spilled beer. I wanted to shower and then change into a fresh set of clothes. Colin wanted to wander off the road a bit and onto the Strip to play a few hands of blackjack, then grab a prime-rib dinner and a burlesque show at the Tropicana.

  “I can enjoy the ladies,” he said, slipping behind the Kia’s steering wheel, “and you can holler at those Australian strippers.”

  “Thunder from Down Under?” I checked my phone: two text messages.

  Greg: Umm. We supposed to go to dinner before Lena’s thing?

  Lena: Where RU????? U still coming????

  I tapped my response to Greg: Just finished. Will be home soon. To Lena, I sent a simple yep.

  “Well?” Colin asked, bright-eyed.

  “As tempting as gorging myself on meat and men sounds, we need to get back to LA. We have festivities tonight, or have you forgotten?”

  “Never been to a pole-dancing recital,” Colin said as he drove toward the entry gates.

  I punched the air-conditioner button all the way to “roar.” “Won’t be as memorable as our meeting with Melissa Kemper. Suicide attempt at the Bellagio? And I guess cancer is the illness Stacy the receptionist was talking about?”

  “But what about the teaching gig at UNL—?” He tapped the car’s brakes. “Hey—”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Head south on the fifteen.”

  So we wandered off the road. Twenty minutes later, Colin and I crowded the frigid office of Moses Sokolski, the dean of the economics department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

  Sokolski, a white-haired goblin of a man, had more pressing matters at hand, and as he spoke at us, he did not look away from his computer monitor. “There are no Christopher Chatmans in this program. Visiting, adjunct, or tenured. I should know: I’ve taught here for twenty years.”

  Colin and I returned to the car. For a long time, we didn’t speak.

  College boys hurtled past the car on bikes and skateboards. Pods of young women in shorts and tank tops wandered back and forth, talking to each other while simultaneously texting or gabbing on their cell phones.

  “Men lie to women all the time,” Colin explained. “And women believe the lies men tell all the time. It’s like flowers and sunshine. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

  “First of all,” I said, “the sun doesn’t need flowers to exist, so, no, it’s not symbiotic but very one-way. And, second, when you lie to Dakota, do you think she actually believes that you still truly love her and that’s why she flew all the way from Colorado Springs and drove up from Orange County? Because you wanted to talk to her about getting back together? And do you actually believe that she believes that you aren’t as shallow as she thought? That you aren’t screwing her simply because of biology and not because she doesn’t have cold sores and won’t steal shit from your wallet when you fall asleep afterward? You think she actually believes your bull?”

  He started the car. “Look: I’m not gonna ding Chatman for lying to Melissa Kemper. You’re supposed to lie to your hoe.”

  I pulled my phone from my bag. “You’re so full of shit that it’s now falling out of your mouth.”

  “Who you callin’?” he asked.

  “Dixie don’t need no stinkin’ warrant to do what I’m about to ask her to do.”

  “Think she’ll help?”

  “If that means MG Standard not having to pay out Christopher Chatman’s claim, hell yeah, she’ll be happy to help.”

  “You got ten minutes,” Dixie grumbled, not sounding happy at all. “I’m meetin’ Marcus at El Torito.”

  “Which one is Marcus?”

  “Desk sergeant over at Hollywood.”

  “Dark-skinned? Thick-necked? Does MMA on his time off?”

  “Hallelujah. You got nine minutes now—what do you want?”

  “I’m in Vegas working the Chatman case. What’s a hospital with the initials MSK?”

  “Ain’t nothing here in Los Angeles,” she said. “But in New York, it’s Memorial Sloan Kettering.”

  “Well, could you call Memorial Sloan Kettering and see if Christopher Chatman received cancer treatment there?”

  It took less than five minutes for Dixie to learn that Christopher Chatman, Social Security number ending in 9717, born on June 21, 1963, had never been a patient at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

  “Keep going since I still have four minutes,” I told her, even though blood was now in the water and she needed no further encouragement from me. “Who is their health insurance company?”

  “Blue Cross,” Dixie said. “Let me make a few more calls.”

  En route to the airport, Colin pulled into a Sonic drive-in for a quick preflight meal.

  Before I took a bite from my chili dog, Dixie called back. “UCLA, no Christopher Chatman. No Christopher Chatman at USC, Stanford, or Fred Hutch. City of Hope had a Christopher Chatman, but he died from leukemia back in nineteen eighty-seven.”

  My stomach growled, and I stuck a piece of bun into my mouth. “What about community hospitals, university hospitals, cancer specialty places, shamans…?”

  “Okay, so you trippin’ now,” Dixie said. “I can’t call every hospital in the world, and I ain’t callin’ every hospital in the world. Especially on a Friday night, with a fine-ass kickboxin’ cop and a strawberry margarita waitin’ for me. We friends but not like that, boo.”

  “So?”

  She sighed. “So you need more people.”

  After finishing half of my hot dog, I called Syeeda.

  She gasped. “You’re actually asking—?”

  “Are we gonna do this or not?”

  “Let’s.”

  “You still have your person in the insurance world?”

  “Yep. Who do you want info on?”

  “First,” I said, “this is so off the record…” I squeezed the bridge of my nose. “Sy, I can’t have even a suggestion of this printed until two years from now when I give you an exclusive.”

  “I vow on our friendship,” she said solemnly.

  I gave her Christopher Chatman’s name and Social Security number.

  “I’ll call you back,” she said.

  I pointed at Colin. “You didn’t hear that.”

  “Hear what?”

  “When?”

  He smiled and winked.

  I finished the second half of my hot dog in time to take Syeeda’s call.

  “Blue Cross hasn’t paid any cancer-care costs for the Chatman family. Looks like Maria Kulkanis, M.D., billed them for a diagnostic ultrasound on December sixth, but that’s it.”

  “Is their policy up-to-date?”

  “Yeah, and the premium is paid to the end of this year. They’re still listed as primary.”

  “Maybe his secondary paid?”

  “My girl didn’t see a notation that there is a secondary health insurance policy. Juliet Chatman went to Dr. Kulkanis on December sixth, last week. And Christopher Chatman went to Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital back in August for his back.”

  Surprise spiked my heart. “His back? But not for cancer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you call her back?” I asked. “Juliet had been prescribed Valium by Dr. Kulkanis. Ask her if Blue Cross was billed for that prescription after July.”

  Two minutes later, Syeeda called back. “No scrip filled in June or July. But she filled it in August, September, October, November, and December.”

  “Thanks, friend o’ mine.”

  “See you tonight?”

  “Yep.”

  After I had ended the call, Colin asked, “What did she say?”

  “Someone was getting Valium,” I said.

  His face blanched. “It’s still possible that Juliet started popping pills again.”

  “True,” I said. “Sy also said that there are no cancer treatments in Christopher Chatman’s Blue Cross records. No cancer diagnoses, either.” I cocked an eyebrow. “Acceptable lies to his hoe, or is Chri
stopher Chatman crazy with an extra side of crazy?”

  Colin tapped the steering wheel but didn’t respond.

  “At this rate, I bet that suicide attempt was fiction, too.”

  “Okay,” Colin said, “he’s a pathological liar. But who started the fire?”

  I slumped as much as I could in that tiny front seat.

  My partner’s gaze fixed on a distant point within Sonic.

  Who started the fire?

  I shook my head and whispered, “I don’t know.”

  43

  COLIN AND I CLIMBED ABOARD OUR AIRPLANE AT TEN MINUTES TO SIX O’CLOCK. I longed to close my eyes and take a quick catnap, and maybe lose myself in a dream like the one I’d had on the flight to Vegas. But my conscious mind refused to relax, leaving me rigid in the middle seat, eyes wide, mind pinging between the Chatman case and Greg’s pissy text message.

  Colin slept, mouth open, head occasionally falling to rest on my shoulder.

  Annoyed, I pushed him away a few times and growled, “Get off of me. You’re snoring.”

  He muttered something, then leaned in the opposite direction.

  A little after seven o’clock, the plane landed at LAX. As we taxied to the gate, I turned on my phone: Dixie had left a voice-mail message. “Girl! That motha-clucka canceled on me. He thinks I’m stupid. That I didn’t hear his babymomma in the background shoutin’ at one of them nappy-headed kids. I’m so pissed off right now that I’m still at work. Call me.”

  I rushed off the plane with the phone to my ear.

  Colin, still trying to wake up, shambled behind me through the crowded terminal as though his legs and feet had been dipped in peanut butter.

  “Now which babymomma is this?” I asked Dixie. “He got three.”

  “The Filipino chick, the one in Dispatch.”

  “I heard she got that nasty woman’s disease,” I said. “Which means Marcus does, too. Which means you dodged a bullet and three weeks of penicillin.”

  After trying to determine if Christopher Chatman had received cancer care and not finding any evidence that he had, Dixie had reviewed his medical history—lower back pain, therapy, anxiety disorder…

  “When did he see the shrink?” I asked.

  “September 2005.”