Wayward

by Gregory Ashe

  They followed him to the living room: the leather furniture, the foosball table, the stag’s head. The glass eyes seemed to vibrate in the trailer’s overhead fluorescents. Daniel dropped into a chair, head in his hands, and Somers and Dulac sat on the sofa. Hazard stood in the passageway that led to the kitchen.

  “Donna May Plenge was found dead today,” Somers said. “I understand you were friends. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  A single, shivering sob went through Daniel, and he nodded.

  “I know you’ll understand how important it is to move quickly in an investigation like this.”

  Daniel wiped his cheeks with both hands and nodded again. “Yeah. I know, I just—oh my God. Ok, ok. I really fucked up, though. I heard, you know, because people were talking. And I started drinking. I knew I shouldn’t. I knew that was a bad idea. But I really fucked up.”

  “What do you mean?” Somers said. “How did you fuck up?”

  Daniel waved his hand; the gesture could have meant anything. “Oh fuck. I loved her, you know? I loved her. She could say dumb shit, but I loved her. One time, I was going to tell her, and I was taking too long, and she said she didn’t have time to wait around for beaner cock when she had a white boy just up the road. And I should have just brushed it off and told her, you know, but I was pissed. And now I’m so fucking drunk.” The speech seemed to exhaust him; he slumped in the chair, head rolling back.

  “Mr. Minor,” Somers said, “we need to ask you some questions.”

  After a long moment, Daniel nodded without lifting his head from the chair.

  Somers ran through the same questions: what do you remember about that night, where were you, what happened at the bar, what happened after, can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Donna May. Daniel’s answers conformed, more or less, to the story that the others had told.

  “Nobody would want to hurt her. Nobody. She was the best person in the whole world.”

  Hazard repressed a snort; he remembered Donna May standing at a microphone, screaming for a man to be murdered.

  “Did Donna May know about the relationship between Josh Dobbs and Melissa Hall?” Somers asked.

  Daniel had to think. “No. I mean, I knew. It had been going on for a while. But it was usually when Donna May was gone, and—” A flush darkened his cheeks. “You know, Donna May and I had a thing sometimes. I guess I didn’t feel too bad about it because Josh was screwing around behind her back too.”

  “How do you think Donna May would have reacted if she found out?”

  “Huh?” Daniel worked to sit up. “What do you mean?”

  “I’d just like to hear how you think she would have reacted if she had learned about that.”

  “She would have lost her mind. I mean, she went crazy at the Maniacs that night, when all that stuff came out about Courtney and Josh. If she’d known about Melissa, known it had been going on for years behind her back, she would have lost her mind. Is that what happened?”

  “Right now, we’re just trying to get a complete picture of what was happening at the time she disappeared.”

  “No,” Daniel said, the word thick with booze but still clear. “No way. You asked me that for a reason. But—it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, she wouldn’t kill herself if she found out about Josh and Melissa. So you . . .” His strong features twisted in outrage. “You’ve got to be kidding. You think Josh did this? Or Melissa?”

  “Mr. Minor—”

  “What the hell is wrong with you? Josh loved her. And Melissa—Melissa’s a therapist. She’s, like, the kindest person I’ve ever met. She loved Donna May; she was helping her. We all loved Donna May.”

  From where he stood, Hazard could see the flicker on Somers’s face, and he knew what the other man was thinking: Melissa, the kindest person Daniel had ever met, saying, People will forget that you enjoyed a cock stuffed up your ass.

  The rhythm of the interview had been broken; Hazard recognized it, saw Somers scrambling to recover, and stepped in. “That’s an interesting thing to say. When you say you loved her, what do you mean?”

  “I loved her. I loved her. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That’s not what you said when we spoke the first time.”

  Scrubbing at his buzzed hair, Daniel looked around the room. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you. She’s dead; the stuff I was complaining about, that was petty, stupid stuff. We all loved her. I’d take it all back if I could.”

  “You loved her,” Hazard said, pulling out his phone. “You keep saying you loved her, even though you couldn’t wait to tell me what a bitch she was earlier. She said she didn’t have time to wait around for your beaner cock, is that right? But now you love her. What does that mean? Fucking?”

  “You know what? I heard all the stories about you. I heard about you sucking off every kid on the football team, just fucking coated in jizz. I heard about all the shit you pulled on the force, the drugs, the blackmail, how you cut yourself some kind of fucking deal. So don’t come in here, acting like you’re better than me, just because—”

  “I am better than you,” Hazard said, and he pressed play and held out the phone.

  Donna May’s tortured pleas emerged from the speaker.

  Under his olive skin, Daniel went pale. He reached out half-heartedly, but Hazard held the phone out of reach, and then Daniel shook his head. “Turn that off.”

  “You don’t like watching yourself work?”

  “Turn it off.”

  “You do a lot of jackrabbiting,” Hazard said, voice neutral, like they were breaking down game footage. “If you used your full range of motion—”

  “You piece of shit,” Daniel said, lurching out of the chair. “Turn it off, turn it off.”

  Dulac shot up, but Hazard waved him back. Daniel clipped the coffee table, sending a spray of magazines across the floor. He caught himself, tried to come around, but he planted his weight on one of the glossy copies of Us Weekly and it slid out from under him. He came down hard, sliding into an impromptu split, and he let out a sob of pain and frustration.

  “Stay down,” Dulac said. “You don’t want to do something stupid.”

  Daniel was crying. “Turn it off, please. Turn it off.”

  Somers made a slicing motion with his hand; Hazard stopped the video.

  From outside, the squeal of old brakes underlined Daniel’s sobbing.

  “I don’t get why you’re so upset,” Hazard said, pocketing his phone. “You sure enjoyed it while you were doing it to her.”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” Hazard said. “You’re a fucking liar. Look me in the eyes and tell me that wasn’t you.”

  With what looked like supreme effort, Daniel raised his head. His mouth quirked once; for a second, Hazard thought it was a grin.

  “Get out,” Daniel said. “I want a lawyer, and I’m not talking to you. Get out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  MARCH 28

  THURSDAY

  6:10 PM

  HAZARD TOOK THE STAIRS down from Daniel’s trailer two at a time.

  “That went well,” Dulac said.

  Somers made a noise in his throat.

  The Oaks were busier than Hazard had ever seen them; cars moved along the main thoroughfares, drifted up the side streets, a confetti of headlights and taillights. A lot of the cars were much more expensive than Hazard had expected: Escalades, Corvettes, trimmed-out muscle cars. Men and women coming home from work, maybe at the Tegula plant or maybe on one of the farms or ranches. Men and women spending their hard-earned money in stupid ways. Well, they weren’t the only ones; Hazard had seen people do worse.

  But all the traffic gave him an idea.

  “Come on,” Somers said. “I want to check in on the Vegas.”

  Hazard nodded. “Go ahead. I’ll meet you there.”

  Somers blinked. “What? Why?”

 
“I want to check on something.”

  “No,” Somers said. “We’ve done this rodeo before. My case. I get to know.”

  “I want to know if anyone remembers Donna May coming home that night.” Then he turned and walked down the block.

  “Ree, it’s not a bad idea,” Somers said, jogging after him. “But, I mean, it was almost a month and a half ago. Do you really think someone’s going to randomly remember her coming home or not?”

  “Only one way to find out. You go ahead and check on the Vegas.”

  With a sigh, Somers shook his head, and then he whistled and made a circle-up gesture to Dulac, who was waiting by the car. “No, we’ll help.”

  “Great,” Hazard said. “You start here; I’ll work my way from the other end of the block.”

  Once they had separated, Hazard didn’t even bother with a pretense of approaching each trailer, knocking, and asking for information. Instead, he went straight to where he knew he should start.

  His phone buzzed as he walked, and Hazard glanced at it. He recognized the number as belonging to the reporter, the one from the Washington Post, who had tried to interview him a day or two ago. He dismissed the call and focused on the job at hand.

  As he approached the trailer, the aluminum blinds rustled, their chiming faint at a distance. Last time Hazard had seen movement behind the blinds, it had sent him into overdrive, his whole body reacting to an imaginary threat. Now he knew to expect it; this trailer belonged to the old man who loved to watch everyone—the one Courtney had called Mr. Warner. And she had mentioned, too, that he had a particular grudge against Donna May.

  When Hazard knocked, a voice spoke from the other side of the door: “Who is it?”

  “Emery Hazard. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  “You’re the one they caught diddling those little boys and they kicked off the police force.”

  “I sure as fuck am not. Open up. I need to talk to you about Donna May Plenge.”

  This time, there was a pause. “Who?”

  “The Vega girl from the down the street. The one who tore down your Bright Lights banner, plays loud music, revs her engine just to get you bothered.”

  “What about her?”

  “Will you open the door, please?”

  The door opened an inch; a security chain dangled, the bronze-colored metal glittering as the streetlights came on. Inside, the trailer was dark; the smell of Salisbury steak and microwaved mashed potatoes turned Hazard’s stomach. Walking into that trailer would be like walking into a TV dinner, the stench was that strong.

  Warner was a small man, barely five feet, with thinning gray hair. He was the kind of old man who wasted away until they were mostly shoulders and elbows and knobby knees, like an ugly second adolescence.

  “What about her?” Warner asked.

  “Can I come in?”

  “No. You diddled all them boys. You might try something.”

  “I didn’t do jack fuck. Wait. You’re worried I’m going to rape you?”

  Warner bristled, all five feet of him, and stuck out his jaw. “What about that girl?”

  “We’re trying to confirm—”

  “Yes, sir. She’s the one. I got it all written down.”

  “You’ve got what written down?”

  “She steal something? Hurt someone? You know those brown girls, they sell snatch like there’s a trade embargo. That what she did?”

  It took Hazard twenty seconds to catch up. “I can’t go into the details,” he finally said. “But I know the police are very interested in her movements from a few weeks ago.”

  “God damn it, I knew it. I knew it. I could smell that dirty snatch all the way up here. She wanted me to, you know? The way she’d stand on the porch in nothing but a nightie, spreading her legs. She wanted me.”

  Hazard wondered if he should be grateful he’d given Somers make-work; he didn’t know if this would have been better or worse with someone else to witness the insanity. What he said was, “We’re trying to track her movements on February 13th. Do you remember—”

  “I’ll get the binder.”

  Warner practically sprinted away from the door, leaving it hanging on the chain, and was back in another moment. He was huffing, and the color in his cheeks was hectic, but he displayed a massive vinyl binder with a grin. “Got it all here, mister. Just like the reports I send in on her every week.”

  “Every week?” Hazard said, holding out a hand for the binder.

  “They laugh at me. I know they do. But now look at them: coming around here, begging for my help. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “Sure,” Hazard said. “The thirteenth. When she got home—”

  Warner was licking a shriveled thumb and turning the pages; the way he did it, running his fat, gray tongue across the ball of his thumb, made Hazard’s stomach flip. “Came home at 21:07. Left again at 21:12. That’s military time.”

  “Thank you,” Hazard muttered.

  “Home again,” another gratuitous thumb-licking, “at 00:27. That’s on the fourteenth.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Mister, I know that girl. I can smell that dirty snatch, I know—”

  “Something that’ll hold up in court, you perverted old fucker. Did you see her? How did you know it was her?”

  Warner stared at him, his jaw working. “Now listen—”

  “Answer my fucking question before I stomp this shit-can into tin foil.”

  “She flashes her lights,” Warner said in a weak voice. “Every time she uses that car at night, she flashes them at me. When she leaves. When she gets home.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “And,” Warner said, his voice getting stronger. “I saw her. See?” He displayed the binder. The time was marked in one column; in another, spidery script read, Strumpet fully displayed in whorish attire, luring all Good Christian Men into the endless Flames of her SEX. “She stood right there, right in front of the trailer, flashing those goddamn lights at me. She went inside for a minute. And then she walked down the block. To see that Mexican deputy, I’ll bet you.”

  “Thank the good fucking Lord,” Hazard said, still studying the page, “that I’m not straight. You people are fucking insane.”

  “Those boys you diddled—”

  “You sent a copy of this to the police?”

  “Every week.”

  “Give me that page.”

  “I can’t—”

  Hazard reached through the door, grabbed the page, and ripped it free of the binder. “You’re going to be a witness, Mr. Warner. Don’t die before then.”

  He hurried down the street; Somers was walking back from a trailer, his shoulders slumped, and Dulac stood with his hands on his hips.

  “This is fucking ridiculous,” Dulac said. “We’re never going to—”

  “Got it,” Hazard said.

  “What?” Dulac swiveled toward Somers and then back. “How?”

  “He cheated,” Somers said.

  “I don’t cheat,” Hazard said.

  “What’d you find?”

  Hazard displayed the page.

  “Did you show him the picture?” Somers asked.

  “Didn’t need to. He knew exactly who I was talking about,” Hazard said. “They’ve got a feud going; even at that distance in the dark, he knew it was her.”

  “Shit,” Somers said. “In whorish attire?”

  “Who the hell talks like that anymore?” Dulac said.

  “It was the middle of February,” Somers said. “What was whorish? Her coat was slightly unzipped?”

  “Regardless,” Hazard said, taking back the page. “Now we have confirmation that she came home just after midnight on the fourteenth. And instead of going inside the trailer, she walked down the block. I guess she had a regular destination, because even Mr. Warner guessed where she was going.”

  “Daniel’s,”
Somers said.

  “Let’s go talk to him,” Dulac said. “Tell him as soon as his lawyer is here, we’re going to fuck him open at the station.”

  “Let’s not phrase it like that,” Somers muttered.

  As they reversed course, heading toward the end of the Vegas’ street, the door to the Vegas’ trailer swung open, clapping hard once against the aluminum siding before wobbling back. Courtney burst out into the evening, dressed in a halter top, a skirt that had about the same dimensions as a napkin, and four-inch heels. She came down the stairs wobbling almost as badly as the trailer door; apparently the paint on her nails was fresh because she held her hands up, fingers spread, not daring to use the handrail.

  “Whorish attire,” Hazard said drily.

  “Dude,” Dulac said.

  “Leave it,” Somers said.

  “No, that’s slut shaming.”

  “He was just joking,” Somers said.

  “I was making an incisive comment that alluded to a previous conversation.”

  “Yeah,” Somers said, rubbing his forehead. “That’s a joke.”

  “Courtney,” Hazard called as she reached the sidewalk. “We’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  She came to a wavering halt, glanced over at them, and then clip-clopped toward them. “No. No way, Mr. Hazard. I’m done with men. You’re all pigs. Daniel was over here earlier, drunk as a skunk. He tried to kiss me, but I said no, sir, not like that. He messed up my whole room, throwing stuff around, grabbing things, crazy as you can get, and then he ran out of here like a bat out of hell. He wanted to talk about Donna May. Everybody wants to talk about Donna May. I am so tired of that . . . of that b-word getting all the attention, ok? She ruins everything. She’s always ruined everything. I want one thing for myself, one thing, and every time it looks like I’m about to get it, Donna May is there, swooping in like a . . . like an f-bomb. She ruins everything.”

  In the streetlight’s flicker, her tears sparked and went dark, again and again.