Death Grip

by Elaine Viets

  Angry heat flooded my veins. ‘Who are you to tell me when my mourning is done?’ I raged.

  ‘Me!’ Katie shouted. She pressed her foot down on the gas and the old truck flew past empty fields, lonely farmhouses and the distant lights of truck stops.

  ‘I earned that right! I’m your best friend! I deal all day with death and so do you. You of all people know how quickly a life can end. Yesterday you saw a young man cut down in his prime and another one crippled for life. Now you have a handsome hunk who adores you. You have a chance to enjoy life with him. Instead you waste your precious time moping around the morgue.’

  ‘I like my job!’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I know. You are thoughtful, thrifty, honest, trustworthy – all the Boy Scout virtues. But you’re still in love with a dead man.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ I felt the tears stinging my eyes, but tried to hold them back. I needed to make my friend understand what was wrong. Katie had to hear me out.

  ‘When I went out with Chris I enjoyed my time with him, but he didn’t make my heart sing.’

  I was angry and embarrassed. What the hell? I thought. Where did that come from? Did I really say ‘he didn’t make my heart sing’? Why was I sounding like a cut-rate romance novel?

  ‘How could he?’ Katie said. ‘It’s too shriveled to let anyone else in.’

  I took a deep breath and felt a little calmer. I spoke slowly, but my unsteady voice betrayed me. ‘All I’m saying is Chris is no match for Donegan.’

  ‘Of course he isn’t,’ Katie said. ‘Donegan’s dead, and grows more perfect with every passing year. Live men burp and fart and scratch their ass. Even the best of them. They leave their socks on the bedroom floor and shaving stubble in the sink. They can be as annoying as hell. But they still make life worth living. I knew Donegan and I know he wouldn’t want you living like this.’

  I felt my temper explode. ‘Where do you get off speaking for Donegan?’ I said. ‘Now that he’s gone, everyone offers me advice and says “Donegan would have wanted it that way.” How do they know? How do you know? Maybe he’s happy that I’m down here withering on the vine until I can join him?’

  ‘Because Donegan wasn’t selfish, Angela, that’s how I know. Like the poem says, “The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.”’

  ‘Andrew Marvell,’ I said, feeling somewhat calmer. ‘“To His Coy Mistress.” It was one of Donegan’s favorites.’

  We’d pulled off the highway. Katie passed an all-night diner and truck stop, and we were driving through Harland, a town of four streets, one stoplight, a post office and two churches. Katie turned left past the Methodist church.

  ‘Oh, was it now?’ Katie said. ‘That was Donegan’s favorite poem? So you know about the part that says:

  “But at my back I always hear

  Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.”’

  I finished the rest of the verse for Katie:

  “‘And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast eternity.”’

  ‘I rest my case,’ Katie said. ‘In case you need that poem interpreted, nothing happens after you die.’

  We pulled into the rutted parking lot of our last stop, Earl’s Alibi Room. It was almost midnight and I felt like I was going to turn into a pumpkin soon.

  ‘This crowd may be a little more upscale,’ I said. ‘I see some Jeeps and an occasional new Toyota, Cadillac and Beemer in the parking lot.’

  ‘Keep your fingers crossed,’ Katie said. ‘Let’s hope you’re right and Bellerive went hunting here.’

  Earl’s was rocking, even at that late hour on a weeknight. It was an old white clapboard two-story roadhouse, probably built sometime in the 1920s. A neon Bud beer sign buzzed in the window like an angry mosquito. A flashing sign promised Wet T-Shirt Contest Every Wednesday! Free Beer and $25 for the Winner!

  Waylon and Willie were singing, ‘Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.’

  I followed Katie into the big, smoky cave with the blaring jukebox. A sign by the door proclaimed: Avoid hangovers! Keep drinking!

  Most of the customers seemed to be following that advice. A sign over the long bar read:

  Earl’s Alibi Charges. If any angry wives or girlfriends phone, our answering charges are:

  He just left – $5

  He’s on his way – $10

  He’s not here – $20

  WHO did you say? – $25

  In with the usual mix of shaggy-haired, cowboy-hatted dive bar denizens was a slicker kind of customer: men with sixty-dollar haircuts, designer jeans and Ralph Lauren chambray shirts with little polo ponies.

  ‘This could be the right place,’ I whispered to Katie. ‘That dude in the two-hundred-dollar chambray shirt looks like he wouldn’t know a backhoe from a backgammon board.’

  ‘Check out the servers,’ Katie said. I heard a note of hope in her voice. ‘They look like Briggs’s type.’

  A pale, skinny server who looked like she wasn’t old enough to drink was expertly carrying a foaming pitcher of beer through the crowd without spilling a drop. Katie waited until the server had delivered the pitcher to a table and politely asked, ‘Miss?’

  ‘Yes? May I help you?’ The girl had natural blonde hair down to her waist and small delicate features, like a china doll. Her name tag said Crystal.

  ‘We’re looking for a table,’ Katie said.

  ‘I’ll find one for you,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’

  We followed her swaying hair and round rump through the crowd to a table for two behind a pillar. ‘Sorry it’s so cramped,’ Crystal said. ‘It’s the best I can do tonight. What can I get you ladies?’

  ‘Two Buds, no glasses,’ I said.

  ‘Be right back,’ she said, and five minutes later, she delivered our drinks. I handed her thirty dollars. ‘Keep the change, Crystal.’

  ‘But the beer is only three dollars each.’

  ‘I know. You can keep it. I wonder if you could help us.’ I showed her Briggs Bellerive’s headshot. ‘Do you know this man?’

  Crystal shook her head. ‘Sorry, wish I could help, but I don’t have a good head for faces. It’s a real drawback in this job. He just looks like another old rich dude.’

  To someone as young as Crystal, thirty-one-year-old Briggs would be old.

  ‘The person you want to talk to is LeeAnn, sitting at the table by the restrooms,’ Crystal said. ‘She’s on her break now, but she won’t mind talking to you. She never forgets a face. And, uh, she could use the money. Tell her Crystal sent you.’

  She smiled at us and went back to work.

  Through the shifting crowd, we caught a glimpse of LeeAnn. She could have been Crystal’s older sister. Her features weren’t quite as delicate, but her skin was pale and her long hair was a delicious shade of raspberry. Was she ‘the girl with the pink hair’ that Rosanna the housekeeper had written about? Only one way to find out.

  Katie and I picked up our beer bottles and wove our way through the crowd to LeeAnn’s table. She was drinking a Coke out of the bottle. Her clothes were inexpensive and a bit worn, but well put together. LeeAnn wore a black satiny long-sleeved top, tight red velvet pants and scuffed red heels. She had a red satin scarf wound around her neck.

  ‘Crystal sent us,’ I said. ‘We need your help.’ I put forty dollars down on the table.

  ‘I don’t do three-ways,’ LeeAnn said.

  ‘Not interested,’ Katie said. ‘We just have a couple of questions.’

  ‘You two aren’t cops, are you?’ LeeAnn’s pretty face was suddenly suspicious, hard and much older.

  ‘Nope.’ Katie produced Briggs’s headshot along with another ten-dollar bill. ‘Do you recognize this man?’

  LeeAnn’s face answered before she did – she flushed deep red and her brown eyes sparked with anger. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because I’m married to the bastard,’ Katie said. ‘I’m trying to divorce him and I wanna take him for every
nickel. I’m the one with the money in this miserable marriage, and he’s got a prenup. When I cut him loose, I have to give him a hundred thousand dollars. But if he’s been seeing other women, I don’t have to pay him one red cent!’

  ‘Hah!’ LeeAnn said. ‘Seeing other women? He’s more a hands-on type of dude. Look what he did to my neck!’

  She whipped off the red satin scarf and revealed a shocking necklace of bruises on her fragile white skin.

  THIRTY-TWO

  LeeAnn’s slender neck was circled with ugly yellow-green bruises. Deeper, purple ones disfigured the sides of her neck, below her ears. A thin, scabbing cut sliced a straight line across the skin, right at the level of her Adam’s apple. She had long, scabbed scratches on her neck.

  ‘Oh, my lord,’ I said. ‘You poor thing.’

  ‘Ugly, aren’t they?’ she asked. ‘And they’re better now. I can show you the photo I took two days after he beat me up. It’s even worse.

  ‘These bruises have really cut into my business. I’ve got other bruises you can’t see. First thing the johns do is whip the scarf off to see the merchandise. They have to be awfully drunk or really twisted to want a girl who looks the way I do now, and I’m too afraid to go with those dudes.’

  ‘How did you get those bruises?’ I asked.

  ‘Randy gave them to me. The man in the picture.’

  ‘He said his name was Randy?’ I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ LeeAnn said. She was crying now.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I put down another ten as an apology, and LeeAnn grabbed it and stuffed it in her big black purse, the kind many working girls carry.

  Katie handed the girl a tissue and said, ‘His real name is Briggs Bellerive. Will you tell us what happened?’

  LeeAnn wiped her eyes and said, ‘Randy, or Briggs – and what kind of name is Briggs?’

  ‘A rich guy name,’ Katie said.

  ‘Well, whatever his name is, he came here one night on a Wet T-Shirt Wednesday. That’s one of our busiest nights and I do a lot of BJs in the parking lot. Not out in the open. Only drunk skanks do that. I go to their cars, so it’s private-like.’

  ‘We get the picture,’ Katie said, her voice kind and soothing.

  ‘Randy offered me two hundred bucks to go to his house. He seemed nice, and he was clean – his nails were manicured and there was no dirt under them. He smelled like expensive aftershave. I never smelled anything like it. When we got to his place, I looked in his bathroom cabinet and it was something called Creed. The box had the price tag on it – four-hundred-fifty dollars! That’s almost my rent for a month.

  ‘When Randy said he’d give me two hundred, I told him I’d think about it. Then he offered me three hundred dollars. Now I couldn’t afford to turn him down. I told him I’d need a ride home and he said he’d pay for the Uber ride, too.

  ‘He drove me to his place in a real nice Beemer. He didn’t talk much, but that was OK. I was enjoying the quiet and the leather seats. It was the nicest car I’d ever been in. We went to the Forest, where all the rich people live. When we got to his house it was a good thing I was sitting down. It was humongous – a real mansion, bigger than the county courthouse. Kind of looked like it, too.’

  I flashed back to my memory of Briggs’s house – its staggering size, the huge white pillars and the endless walk up those stone stairs.

  ‘We parked in the front and he told me to keep quiet: his housekeeper was a real bitch. I imagined she was some nosy old biddy, like my landlady Mrs Duckett. Anyway, when we got inside I took off my heels. His house looked like a fancy hotel with real oil paintings on the walls.

  ‘We went up this big marble staircase to his bedroom, which was bigger than this place.’ LeeAnn waved her thin arm to take in the vast, smoky expanse of Earl’s Alibi. ‘It had these huge Oriental carpets and furniture like you see in a museum – the stuff with gold all over it named for one of those French kings, Louie something.’

  LeeAnn must have seen me smile. I didn’t mean to be condescending, but she got defensive when she couldn’t remember which French king. ‘I’ve been to a museum, too. I went to the art museum in St. Louis on a field trip once when I was in school, and they had a whole room full of the same stuff.’

  ‘We believe you,’ Katie said.

  ‘I told him I had to tinkle and he let me use his bathroom. I swear, it was big enough for a family of four. I snooped in his medicine cabinet, but he didn’t have any interesting drugs, just some allergy medicine. No Viagra, either. If they use that, I have to spend a lot of time jump-starting them. My hand gets sore.’

  I bit down on my lip so she wouldn’t see me laughing.

  ‘He had a whole room, just for his clothes,’ LeeAnn said. ‘I had a hard time taking it all in. I was looking at all the gold and fancy stuff and he said, “Hey, I ain’t paying you to wander around here with your mouth open. Get your ass over here.” It sounded like he wanted to get down to business right away.

  ‘So I got businesslike, too. “Where’s my money?” I said, and he put three Benjamins on this fancy gold and wood cabinet he called a commode, but it didn’t look like no toilet to me. I shoved the money in my bag and he said, “Take off your clothes.”’

  ‘Did he offer you a drink or any drugs?’ Katie asked.

  ‘Not even a sip of water. At first, he did, you know, regular stuff.’ She looked at Katie and said, ‘If you’re married to him, you know he’s nothing special in the equipment department. A couple of pumps and it was over.’

  ‘You’ve just described my honeymoon,’ Katie said.

  I tried to turn my laugh into a cough.

  Katie glared at me and said, ‘But he hasn’t bothered me in a while.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ LeeAnn said. ‘I thought I could go when he finished, and I started to get up, but he grabbed me by the arm and said, “Oh, no, bitch, you’re going to earn your three bills.” He got on top of me. He’s a big guy. I could hardly breathe and I sure couldn’t move.

  ‘He reached into some kinda nightstand and took out this green string, like the kind you tie tomatoes with, and he put it around my neck. I screamed, “No!” I told him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He kept pulling it tighter and tighter and I thought I was gonna die. I scratched at my neck to get some air and he let up a little bit. I was gasping for breath and telling him to stop. Problem was, strangling me gave him a boner like you wouldn’t believe. I didn’t think he’d ever get off me.

  ‘The night lasted forever. Sometimes he used the string and sometimes he’d use his hands to strangle me. I passed out twice, but he slapped my face to bring me back. I was sure I was gonna die. There was blood all over the sheets – my blood. I screamed for help, but nobody heard me. Then I figured out he got off on me screaming, so I tried to stop, but sometimes I couldn’t. He hurt me bad. I was getting tired and worn out. I wondered how long I could hang on.

  ‘He reached out to strangle me again and this time I bit his hand. Hard. Right on the fat part of his thumb. I was like a pit bull. He started punching me – my tits are black and blue – and yelling, “Let go! Let go!”

  ‘When I let go, he pushed me off the bed and I hit the floor. He kicked me a couple of times in the ribs, and told me to get dressed. His hand was bleeding and he wrapped it in a pillowcase and went into the bathroom. I got dressed as quick as I could – I was shaking so bad I could hardly get into my clothes. I kept a sweater in my bag and I used it to hide the bruises on my arms.

  ‘He didn’t come out right away, so I got out my cell phone and took pictures – of the room, the bed, and me. I made sure I got the blood and the bruises on me.’

  Katie leaned forward. ‘You still have those photos?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. They’re on my cell phone.’

  ‘LeeAnn, we need to talk further. Have you eaten yet today?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘The money all went on rent and bills.’

  ‘Would you lik
e to go to the all-night diner by the highway for dinner? Our treat?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m so hungry.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  At one-thirty in the morning, the diner was nearly empty, except for a couple of truckers chowing down in a distant booth. The florescent lights had that odd greenish glow they get very late at night. The old diner had big red leatherette booths, a revolving pie stand with six different pies, and the daily specials on a chalkboard. The air smelled of hot coffee and fried grease.

  Sandie, a cheerful older server in a pink dress and frilly apron, showed us to a generous corner booth.

  ‘I love your pink hair, hon,’ Sandie said to LeeAnn. ‘It would be a good match for my uniform.’ Sandie’s hair was a tightly sprayed gray helmet, and I thought her style would look like cotton candy in pink.

  When we sat down, Katie reminded us, ‘This is on me, so everybody eat up.’

  LeeAnn ordered the chicken-fried steak special with two veg. Katie had apple pie, and since the new day had started, I ordered a breakfast of pancakes and eggs. Sandie brought us a big insulated pot of strong coffee and three thick china mugs. I can always count on truck stops for good coffee.

  Once Sandie had delivered our food, LeeAnn started eating like she hadn’t had a good meal in a week. I demolished the pancakes and eggs in short order, and Katie methodically worked on her pie, starting at the tip.

  When LeeAnn finally came up for air, Katie asked if she wanted dessert and LeeAnn said, ‘Oh, yes, could I? One of them pies, please.’

  Sandie delivered a slice of lemon meringue pie, and cleared away some of our empty plates. LeeAnn finished her pie quickly, then delicately wiped her mouth with her napkin and said, ‘Thanks. I was real hungry.’

  ‘Will you show us the photos now?’ Katie asked.

  ‘Let me tell you about these photos,’ Lee Ann said, as she opened her cell phone. ‘If you’re a working girl like me, one who sometimes makes house calls, you’ve got to take care. Take precautions. I mean, besides the usual.