I rolled onto my side. Doria said something, but I pretended to be asleep, and soon enough I didn't have to pretend anymore.
8
Coffee was brewing as I walked into the kitchen. Doria stood at the sink wearing a blue silk robe cinched at the waist, long enough to cover her ass, short enough to give an enticing hint of curve. She spun around with a large red coffee cup in each hand, cigarette hanging from her lips, a gray circle of smoke encircling her. She set the cups on the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room and pulled the cigarette away and leaned across the bar to kiss me on the cheek.
"Mornin', sunshine," she said. She motioned toward the coffee pot at the end of the counter. "Got sugar there and milk in the refrigerator close to still being good."
I filled my cup and took a seat at the dining room table.
Doria dumped massive amounts of sugar and milk into her cup and poured in enough coffee to turn the whole mixture paper-bag brown before sitting down.
I stared at my coffee. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to say something.
"You mean to tell me this is where you get quiet on me, cowboy," she said.
"I'm out of practice," I said.
"Don't do many one-night stands?"
"I didn't know if this was a one-night stand."
She smiled. "What do you want it to be?"
I sipped my coffee. "You got an extra cigarette?"
She slid the pack in my direction. The picture on the front was an Indian wearing a head dress.
"American Spirit?" I said.
She shrugged. "They're all natural. They're supposed to be better for you. No rat shit and whatnot."
I lit the cigarette. "It's not like there's vitamin C in 'em. You'll still get lung cancer and die."
"I hope this isn't your idea of morning-after sweet talk, because you suck at it."
"Well, I'm a rock star at everything else."
She laughed. "You keep telling yourself that, cowboy. Tell me how it goes for you."
"Since I'm still here and you haven't thrown me out yet, it must be working out for me so far."
"I try not to throw my sexual partners out of the house until I finished my first cup of coffee." She drank her coffee, working hard to make an emphasis she'd reached the bottom. "And goddammit, it would seem that I just finished."
I took another drag from the cigarette before crushing it out. "A fellow can take a hint, don't you worry." I came to my feet. "I'll get dressed—"
Doria reached across the table and grabbed hold of my wrist. "Don't tell me you're this fucking stupid." She narrowed her eyes at me. "Honey, I'm 40. I've got a kid in college; ex-husbands I can sit down and hold conversations with without wanting to kill; 17 months until I own this luxurious abode; and I'm waiting for that inevitable day where my tits sag so that my nipples point to my toes. When you put all of that in the mix, I possess neither the time nor the patience to bullshit. If you're so inclined, then sure, this can be two grown ups doing grown-up things, or we can keep this keep talking and maybe bother to learn one another's middle name."
I couldn't act like it wasn't appealing. My ego and sense of self-worth had gone to shit in recent years, and there was something ego-affirming in a woman like Doria wanting me.
Doria's eyes went soft, and she smiled and said, "Whatcha thinking there, cowboy?"
I glanced at my watch. "I'm wondering what time it is you've got to be at work."
"And why are you wondering that?"
I smiled and Doria nodded.
"I've got sick time," she said as she laced her fingers between mine and pulled me down the hall toward the bedroom.
9
I was in the parking lot for McGinley and Kurt bright and early the next morning, drinking coffee and eating an egg and cheese biscuit from Tudor's. Tudor’s, for the uninitiated, is a fast-food chain all across West Virginia, tasked with keeping Mountaineers fat and full of gravy, and our cholesterol high. It does its job well, with biscuits bigger than newborns. They are greasy little slices of heaven, wrapped in yellow paper that will forever stain any clothing it touches. They’re extraordinary, and I recommend them highly should the opportunity arise.
I was working my way through this carb bomb I was calling breakfast when Richard Walters drove up in a red BMW convertible, looking every inch of a man who ruled his universe. I recognized him from his picture from the firm’s website, discovered when I’d visited the local library to research him. I had spent an hour next to a sweaty fat guy wearing a T-shirt that may have once been white who was playing online poker and laughing to himself about jokes apparently only he got.
Walters had dark hair getting strategically gray, a December tan, and wore a thousand-dollar suit with a two-hundred dollar tie. I hated him on sight. It may have been shallow of me, but I was okay with that.
I lacked for much in the way of options here. If I'd still been a cop, with a gun and a badge and an uniform, I'd have just shown up at Walters' office and laid the fear of God down on him and have made him tell me what he knew. I would have gone to a judge and subpoenaed phone records and emails, gotten search warrants, and made his life miserable to the point he’d have admitted he wore his wife's underwear to get me to go away.
But that wasn't an option. What I had came down to "Hey, let's go poke a badger with a stick." Which was fine since I wasn't much of a planner anyway.
As Walters got out of his car, I wadded up the Tudor’s wrapper and threw it on the floorboard with a dozen or so of its cousins, wiped the grease off of my mouth with a napkin, hopped from the Aztek, and crossed the parking lot in record time. Walters had just hit the door locks on his key fob before I was standing next to him.
He looked at me with the wide-eyed surprise of a person confronted with a clown coming out of a strip club. He took a step back. "Can I help you?"
I smiled and extended a hand and whipped out whatever charm I possessed. "Mr. Walters? My name's Henry Malone. I'm looking into Bobbi Fisher's disappearance. She's the young woman who used to work for you."
Walters turned on his charm. It kicked my charm’s ass. It was all smiles and bright eyes, and I bet he charmed the fuck out of little old women on jury duty. "Oh, that's right. I heard you came by the office the other day. How is the investigation going?"
"It's going. I'm following up on any leads."
"That’s commendable of you, Mr. Malone. Must be hard, one man taking on a job where the state police failed."
"I wouldn't say they failed --"
“Did they find her and no one's shared the good news?”
“They have not, but—”
Another smile. "In my line of work, when you don't do what you're getting paid to do, that's considered failure."
"Lucky for me, I'm not getting paid."
"You’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart?"
"I'm hoping to earn a merit badge," I said. "I thought we could talk about Bobbi."
"If that's your desire, can I recommend you call my assistant and set up an appointment, and not come at me out of nowhere in our parking lot?"
"I understand that, Mr. Walters, and I appreciate your willingness to talk, though I'm wondering if when I make that appointment, should I mention to your secretary—sorry, your assistant—that you were fucking Bobbi Fisher?"
Walters’ smiled cracked slightly, and his eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I like what you’re implying, Mr. Malone.”
“I’m not implying anything,” I said. “I’m flat-out stating you were banging Bobbi Fisher, and that seems like something people would want to know when they’re looking for a missing woman.”
All the practiced charm melted off of Walters’ face like wax in July sun. His body tensed and he moved forward, working to squeeze into my personal space. "What game are you playing, Malone?"
“No game,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “But my guess would be the police would be interested, since it could be seen as a factor in her d
isappearance.”
When he smiled, it was all shiny white teeth, the sensation of a pure predator. "I give. I was fucking her. Good for you. Show me another attorney in this town who isn't fucking some piece of cracker cunt in his office. I just happened to be unlucky enough that my slice of white trash ass went and got herself killed."
Walters adjusted his tie, grabbed his briefcase. "Find another way to spend your spare time, asshole. Build ships in bottles, or sew quilts. Whatever, so long as I don't see you again. If I do, I can guarantee you won't enjoy what happens next."
Walters walked away, heading into the law offices. Midway there, another attorney approached him, and he immediately shifted back to the consummate schmooze artist. Laughing and joking and unconcerned about me. The two men entertained each another as they headed into the building.
10
My trailer rested on land Billy bought back in the sixties when he'd been a checkweighman and a union steward in the coal mines. The trailer was a doublewide I paid six grand cash for, a beat-up repo job with green algae creeping up the sides and windows with gaps I stuffed with newspaper to keep the wind out.
I didn't care, since I didn’t do much in the way of entertaining, and just needed a roof over my head. Billy offered to let me live with him when I came back; he owned a four-bedroom modular with a foundation, central air, and a satellite dish. I'd declined, because I didn't want to be the guy going back to live in his old room with Whitesnake posters still on the wall, and also because there was enough shame in moving back to Serenity. I could see his house from my living room window. That was enough.
I still dropped by a few nights a week, greeted at the door by the smell of fried potatoes and pinto beans, or beef stew and corn bread, meat loaf and green beans, and we'd eat together. Tonight it was country-fried steaks and mashed potatoes.
Billy manned the stove, wearing in a T-shirt, bleached blinding white, and blue jeans. He was 70, still combing his hair with Wild Root, sporting a trimmed white mustache and thick black-framed glasses and a hearing aid. I suppose he'd have been considered at fighting weight if 70-year-old men were inclined to get into fights. He flipped the steaks one last time before pulling them off the skillet with a fork, setting them on a piece of chipped dinnerware he and my mother bought with green stamps at the A&P, carrying them to the table.
I got a Coke out of the refrigerator and took a seat at the dining room table. It was the same table he had owned since I was a kid. I used to sit underneath it, playing astronaut while dinner cooked. On weekends my aunts and uncles and miners who worked with Billy would gather around the table and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon before it became a cool thing to do. They would play poker and listen to the country station out of Clarksburg since it was the only one that broadcast after midnight back then. The poker games were nickel and quarter bets, never anything serious, and sometimes they'd deal me in a few hands. I have more memories in my childhood of playing five-card draw with Billy than I do playing catch.
Billy set the plate on the table and walked into the living room and turned down the stereo where "Bitches Brew" was blasting from vinyl on the same Montgomery Ward stereo that pre-dated my appearance into the world. Over time I had been nudging Billy to lay off the vinyl collection, all these LPs he'd accumulated over the years, first pressings of stuff from Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, the Hollies, the Who, guys like that. My argument was that he should switch over to digital and save the albums since they would have been worth mucho dinero to the right folks.
"If I'm the one that owns them," he'd told me as he laid a needle to "Eat a Peach," "then I'm the person to figure out what they're worth, and they ain't worth anything if I can't listen to 'em. I already got 'em like this, so why spend money to buy 'em all over again?"
Once he was back at the table, he dumped food onto his plate, the chicken-fried steaks crispy and brown, the mashed potatoes nice and lumpy. He didn't make gravy, though, which seem like sacrilege to spare a meal like this a thick coating of peppery goodness. He said he never liked how he made it, that it had always been something Mom did better than him. I didn't argue the point with him; I fucking knew better.
I filled my plate, and we ate, not saying anything to one either, just shoveling food into our mouths and washing it down with our beverages of choice. Billy was drinking milk. Whole milk. Fuck fat and cholesterol; that was my father's credo.
I mentioned that Billy's my father, right? I mean, you're bright folks; I'm sure you'd figured that out by now. You didn't? Sorry about your fucking luck, then. I'll talk slower from now on.
Once we were finished and there was nothing left but dirty dishes, I gathered everything up and hand-washed it all in the sink as Billy sat at the table, chewing on a toothpick and reading the newspaper.
"Goddamn county commission wants to annex that land out by Denny Farmer's place," he grumbled as I rinsed soap off of the plates and set them in the drainer to dry. "Money-grubbing bastards, don't want nothing but being able to tax it. Fucking shame man works his whole life and all he's got to show for it is nothing but a bunch of bills and liens and papers from the bank."
Something new pissed him off every time he turned a page. The volunteer fire department had its hat in hand, asking for money for a new pumper truck. A group from out of town didn't think the school should have a live nativity scene. Churches were asking for donations to help during the holidays. None of it seemed to make Billy happy.
I dried my hands off and walked to Billy and patted him on the shoulder.
"I'm gonna go let Izzy out," I said. "Thanks for dinner. Good seeing you."
"Yeah, yeah," he said, shifting himself around and away from me as I headed for the door. "Good talking to you."
11
I wanted to get drunk, but that was a shitty idea. I wanted to see Doria, and possibly get laid, and maybe that wasn’t a hot idea either, but it seemed preferable to the options.
I chose to go back to my place, give Doria a call, check if she was busy. Izzy was asleep at the front door. I knew this because as I tried to open the door, I was met with a heavy thud and an unhappy grunt and the door only opened partway and I squeezed through the gap at the doorway to get in.
She didn't move when I walked in. If not for the snoring, I'd have thought she was dead. I crouched beside her and petted her on the head. Izzy was the world's shittiest watchdog, but she still was a better person than most people I knew. I'd gotten her from the shelter when I came back to Serenity. I'd been running low on things that loved me, and once I saw her, there wasn’t a chance I was leaving without her.
I locked the door and walked into the kitchen.
A skinhead leaned against the sink, drinking one of my beers. He was tall, rail-thin, shaved head, a white V-neck T-shirt underneath a black jacket. The SS lightning bolt on his neck was fresh ink, gleaming in the kitchen light.
He didn't say anything, as though being in my house and drinking my beer was the most normal thing on earth. He took a long swallow and chucked the bottle at me.
I ducked to the right and dodged it, and then something hit me from behind, right at the base of my skull, and everything turned deep and warm and black.
"This motherfucker's cable package ain't worth shit," someone said.
Someone else said something, but I couldn't understand what. I swam upstream through the murkiness of head trauma. What I heard resembled Neil Young feedback, with the occasional Lou Reed white noise thrown in for not-so-good measure. The black faded slowly, turning into a heavy haze, life viewed through cheesecloth. I made out the figure of a racist asshole on my couch, flipping through channels on my TV.
There was a shattering noise. I blinked and saw another shadow, on the farthest side of the living room, next to my record player. The tuning on my vision came through and there was another human shape, going through my record collection, removing albums from their sleeves and smashing them against the wall.
"Sorry, I don't have any Celine Dion, if that's
what you're looking for." I was confident that was my voice just then. It surprised me until I realized it was an attempt to be a smart ass. Of course it had to be me.
The music critic ignored me, and took another LP and drove his knee through it, splitting it in half. The floor was littered with a dozen or more albums reduced to shards of black plastic.
"Nigger music," he said. He was working through the blues collection Billy had given me for Christmas a few years ago. First pressings from obscure Chicago labels, stuff that had long since gone out of print and would never find its way onto CDs.
He broke another album. "It's nothing but the corruption of true American music," he said. "Bluegrass, country. The music of white people. This shit here is nothing but ignorant nigger hollering."
I groaned. "If this is how this is going to go, knock me the fuck out again." I shook my head and immediately regretted it. I burped acid and a twist pushed up from the bottom of my stomach. I cranked my head to the side and puked. I gagged and retched and vomit dribbled down the side of my face.
I realized I was flat on my back. I moved to right myself up and couldn't. The stink of vomit, the warm slickness across my face, made me retch again, and I panicked, trying to sit up. They had tied my arms behind my back. I struggled to get free, and the bounds cut deeper into my wrists.
"Get him up before he chokes," the music critic said. The TV critic muttered something I didn't quite understand because I had a chunk of undigested dinner in one ear. There was a sudden jerk on the back of my shirt and a push and I was leaning against the wall.
The TV critic, the one who had pulled me upright, was the one I'd caught in the kitchen. He stood over me with a dead-eyed look on his face, arms crossed over his chest. On the knuckles of one hand he had tattooed "SIEG." It didn't a huge leap to figure out what was on the other hand.
Midnight Lullaby Page 4