Angie pulled onto Fourth Street and we drove through what appeared to be a slum, lots of people lounging on the porches in the heat, waving at flies, kids huddled in groups along the corners, half the streetlights knocked out.
I placed the bag on my lap and unzipped it. I stared inside for a full minute.
“Drive a little faster,” I said to Angie.
“Why?”
I showed her the contents of the bag. “Because there’s at least two hundred thousand dollars in here.”
She stepped on the gas.
19
“Jesus, Angie,” Jay said, “last time I saw you, you looked like Chrissie Hynde taking fashion tips from Morticia Addams, and now you look like an island girl.”
The jail clerk slid a form over the counter to Jay.
Angie said, “You always knew how to smooth-talk a girl.”
Jay signed the form and handed it back. “No shit, though? I didn’t know a white woman’s skin could get that dark.”
The clerk said, “Your personal effects,” and emptied a manila envelope onto the counter.
“Careful,” Jay said as his watch bounced on the counter. “That’s a Piaget.”
The clerk snorted. “One watch. Pi-a-jay. One money clip, gold. Six hundred seventy-five dollars cash. One key chain. Thirty-eight cents in coins…”
As the clerk checked off each of the remaining items and slid them across to Jay, Jay leaned against the wall and yawned. His eyes skipped from Angie’s face to her legs, rose back up over her cutoff jeans and ripped sweatshirt with the sleeves shorn off at the elbows.
She said, “Would you like me to pivot so you could ogle the back?”
He shrugged. “Been in prison, ma’am, you’ll have to excuse me.”
She shook her head and looked at the floor, hid her smile in the hair that fell around her face.
It was odd to watch them occupy similar space, knowing what I did now about their past together. Jay always wore a certain wolfish look around beautiful women, but rather than take offense, most women found it innocuous and a bit charming if only because Jay was so blatant and boyish about it. But there was more to the look tonight. Jay’s face held a melancholia I’d never seen before, an aura of bone-deep fatigue and resignation as he glanced at my partner.
She seemed to notice it, too, and a curious curl formed in her lips.
“You okay?” she said.
Jay pushed himself off the wall. “Me? Fine.”
“Mr. Merriam,” the clerk said to Jay’s bail bondsman, “you’ll have to cosign here and here.”
Mr. Merriam was a middle-aged man in an off-white three-piece suit who tried to give off the air of the genteel southern gentleman, even though I picked up traces of New Jersey in his accent.
“Be mah pleasure,” he said, and Jay rolled his eyes. They signed the papers and Jay scooped up the last of his rings and his wrinkled silk tie, placed the rings in his pocket and the tie loosely under the collar of his white shirt.
We walked out of the station and stood in the parking lot to wait for a cop to bring Jay’s car around front.
“They let you drive here?” Angie said.
Jay sucked the wet night air into his nostrils. “They’re very courteous down these parts. After they questioned me at the motel, this old cop with a real polite way about him asked me if I’d mind following him down to the station for a few questions. He even said, ‘If ya’ll got the time, we sure would ’preciate it, yes sir,’ but he wasn’t really asking if you know what I mean.”
Merriam stuck a card in Jay’s hand. “Sir, if you ever require mah services again, why it would—”
“Sure.” Jay snapped the card from his hand and looked off at the soft blue circles that pulsed around the yellow streetlights fringing the parking lot.
Merriam shook my hand, then Angie’s, then walked with the stilted steps of the constipated or the practicing drunk to his Karmann Ghia convertible with the dented passenger door. The car stalled once on its way out of the parking lot, and Mr. Merriam kept his head down as if mortified before he got it going again and pulled out onto the main road.
Jay said, “If you guys hadn’t shown up, I would have had to send that guy to the Greyhound station. You believe it?”
“If you jump bail,” Angie said, “won’t that poor guy get ruined financially?”
He lit a cigarette, looked down at her. “Don’t worry, Ange, I got everything figured out.”
“That’s why we’re bailing you out of jail, Jay.”
He looked at her, then at me, and laughed. It was a short, hard sound, more bark than anything. “Jesus, Patrick, she give you this much shit on a regular basis?”
“You’re looking rough, Jay. Bad as I’ve ever seen you.”
He stretched his arms out, cracked the muscles between his shoulder blades. “Yeah, well, I get me a shower and a good night’s sleep, I’ll be good as new.”
“We have to go somewhere and talk first,” I said.
He nodded. “You didn’t come fourteen hundred miles just to work on your tans, marvelous as they are. And they are marvelous.” He turned and looked at Angie’s body openly, his eyebrows raised. “I mean, my God, Ange, I gotta tell you again, your skin, I mean, it’s the color of a coffee-regular at Dunkin’ Donuts for Chris-sakes. Makes me want to—”
“Jay,” she said, “will you just quit it? Give it a fucking rest, for crying out loud.”
He blinked and leaned back on his heels. “Okay,” he said with a sudden coldness. “No, when you’re right, you’re right. And you’re right, Angela. You are right.”
She looked at me and I shrugged.
“Right is right,” he said. “Right is definitely right.”
A black Mitsubishi 3000 GT pulled up with two young cops in it. They were laughing as they approached, and the tires smelled like they’d just had some rubber burned off.
“Nice car,” the driver said as he got out by Jay.
“You like it?” Jay said. “It handle well?”
The cop giggled as he looked at his partner. “Handled just fine, buddy.”
“Good. Steering wasn’t too tight when you were doing your doughnuts?”
“Come on,” Angie said to Jay, “get in the car.”
“Steering was just fine,” the cop said.
His partner stood by me at the open passenger door. “Axles felt a little wobbly, though, Bo.”
“That’s true,” Bo said, still blocking Jay from entering the car. “I’d get a mechanic take a look at your U-joints.”
“Sound advice,” Jay said.
The cop smiled and stepped out of Jay’s way. “You drive her careful, Mr. Fischer.”
“Remember,” his partner said, “a car is not a toy.”
They both laughed at that one and walked up the steps into the station.
I didn’t like the look in Jay’s eyes, or his whole demeanor since he’d been released. He seemed paradoxically lost and determined, adrift and focused, but it was an angry, spiteful focus.
I hopped in the passenger seat. “I’ll ride with you.”
He leaned in. “I’d really prefer if you didn’t.”
“Why?” I said. “We’re going to the same place. Right, Jay? To talk?”
He pursed his lips and exhaled loudly through his nostrils, looked at me with a burned-out gaze. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “Sure. Why not?”
He got in and started the car as Angie walked over to the Celica.
“Buckle up,” he said.
I did, and he slammed the gearshift into first and nailed the gas, dropping into second a split second later with his wrist flexed for another quick push into third. We cleared the small ramp leading out of the parking lot, and Jay shifted into fourth while the wheels were still in the air.
He took us to an all-night diner in downtown Bradenton. The streets around it were deserted, devoid of even the memory of human life, it seemed, as if a neutron bomb had hit an hour before we arrived. Blank, dark w
indow squares in the few skyscrapers and squat municipal buildings around the diner stared down at us.
There were a few people in the diner, night owls by the look of them—a trio of truck drivers at the counter flirting with the waitress; a lone security guard with a patch for something called Palmetto Optics on his shoulder reading a newspaper with a pot of coffee for companionship; two nurses with wrinkled uniforms and low, tired voices two booths over from our own.
We ordered two coffees and Jay ordered a beer. For a minute we all studied our menus. When the waitress returned with our drinks, we each ordered a sandwich, though none of us sounded particularly enthusiastic about it.
Jay placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth and stared out the window as a clap of thunder ripped a hole in the sky and it began to rain. It wasn’t a light rain or one that grew heavy gradually. One moment the street was dry and pale orange under the streetlights, and the next, it disappeared behind a wall of water. Puddles formed in seconds and boiled on the sidewalk, and the raindrops hammered the tin roof of the diner so loudly it seemed the heavens had dumped several truckloads of dimes.
“Who’d Trevor send down here with you?” Jay said.
“Graham Clifton,” I said. “There’s another guy, too. Cushing.”
“They know about you coming to get me out of jail?”
I shook my head. “We’ve been shaking their tails since we arrived.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like them.”
He nodded. “The papers release the identity of the guy I supposedly killed?”
“Not that we know of.”
Angie leaned across the table and lit his cigarette. “Who was it?”
Jay puffed on the cigarette, but didn’t withdraw it from his mouth. “Jeff Price.” He glanced at his reflection in the window as the rain poured down the pane in rivulets and turned his features to rubber, melted his cheekbones.
“Jeff Price,” I said. “Former treatment supervisor for Grief Release. That Jeff Price?”
He took the cigarette from his mouth, tapped the ash into the black plastic ashtray. “You’ve done your homework, D’Artagnan.”
“Did you kill him?” Angie asked.
He sipped his beer and looked across the table at us, his head cocked to the right, his eyes swimming from side to side. He took another drag off his cigarette and his eyes left us and followed the smoke as it pirouetted from the ash and floated over Angie’s shoulder.
“Yeah, I killed him.”
“Why?” I said.
“He was a bad man,” he said. “A bad, bad man.”
“There are lots of bad men out there,” Angie said. “Bad women, too.”
“True,” he said. “Very true. Jeff Price, though? That fucker deserved a lot slower death than I gave him. I guarantee you that.” He took a good-sized slug from his beer. “He had to pay. Had to.”
“Pay for what?” Angie said.
He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, and his lips trembled around it. When he placed the bottle back on the table, his hand was as tremulous as his lips.
“Pay for what, Jay?” Angie repeated.
Jay gazed out the window again as the rain continued to clatter against the roof and boil and snap in the puddles. The dark hollows under his eyes reddened.
“Jeff Price killed Desiree Stone,” he said and a single tear fell from his eyelid and rolled down his cheek.
For a moment, I felt a deep ache bore through the center of my chest and leak into my stomach.
“When?” I said.
“Two days ago.” He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.
“Wait,” Angie said. “She was with Price all this time, and he just decided to kill her two days ago?”
He shook his head. “She wasn’t with Price the entire time. She ditched him three weeks ago. The last two weeks,” he said softly, “she was with me.”
“With you?”
Jay nodded and sucked at the air, blinked back the tears in his eyes.
The waitress brought our food but we barely looked at it.
“With you?” Angie said. “As in…?”
Jay gave her a bitter smile. “Yes. With me. As in, Desiree and I were falling in love, I guess.” He chuckled but it only half left his mouth; the other half seemed to strangle in the back of his throat. “Hilarious, ain’t it? I come down here hired to kill her and I end up falling for her.”
“Whoa,” I said. “‘Hired to kill her’?”
He nodded.
“By whom?”
He looked at me like I was retarded. “Who do you think?”
“I don’t know, Jay. That’s why I’m asking.”
“Who hired you?” he said.
“Trevor Stone.”
He looked at us until we got it.
“Jesus Christ,” Angie said and hit the table with her fist so loudly the three truck drivers turned in their seats to look at us.
“Glad I could bring you both up to speed,” Jay said.
20
For the next few minutes, none of us spoke. We sat in our booth as the rain spewed against the windows and the wind bent the row of royal palms along the boulevard, and we ate our sandwiches.
Nothing, I thought as I chewed my sandwich without really tasting it, was as it seemed just fifteen minutes ago. Angie had been right the other night—black was white, up was down.
Desiree was dead. Jeff Price was dead. Trevor Stone had hired Jay not just to find his daughter, but to kill her.
Trevor Stone. Jesus Christ.
We had taken this case for two reasons—greed and empathy. The first was not an honorable motive. But fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, particularly when you haven’t worked in several months and your chosen profession isn’t known for its workmen’s comp bennies.
But it was still greed. And if you accept a job because you’re greedy, you can’t really bitch too much when your employer turns out to be a liar. The pot calling the kettle black and all that…
However, greed wasn’t our only motivation. We’d taken this case because Angie had looked at Trevor Stone with sudden recognition—the recognition of one griever upon meeting another. She’d cared about his grief. I had, too. And any lingering doubts I’d had disappeared when Trevor Stone showed us the shrine he’d erected to his lost daughter.
But it hadn’t been a shrine. Had it?
He hadn’t surrounded himself with photos of Desiree because he needed to believe she was alive. He’d filled his room with his daughter’s face so his blood could feed off his hate.
Once again, my perspective of prior events was reshaping, transmogrifying, reinventing itself until I felt increasingly stupid for ever trusting my initial instincts.
This case, I swear.
“Anthony Lisardo,” I said to Jay eventually.
He chewed his sandwich. “What about him?”
“What happened to him?”
“Trevor had him whacked.”
“How?”
“Laced a pack of cigarettes with coke, gave it to Lisardo’s friend—what was his name, Donald Yeager—and Yeager left the pack in Lisardo’s car the night they went to the reservoir.”
“What,” Angie said, “the coke was laced with strychnine or something?”
Jay shook his head. “Lisardo had an allergic reaction to coke. He’d collapsed once at a college party when he was dating Desiree. That was his first heart attack. And that was the first and only time he was stupid enough to try coke. Trevor knew about it, laced the cigarettes, the rest is history.”
“Why?”
“Why’d Trevor kill Lisardo?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “Man had a problem sharing his daughter with anyone, if you know what I mean.”
“But then he hired you to kill her?” Angie said.
“Yup.”
“Again,” Angie said. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” He looked down at the table.
“You don’t know
?” Angie said.
His eyes widened. “I don’t know. What’s so—”
“Didn’t she tell you, Jay? I mean, you were ‘with’ her these past few weeks. Didn’t she have some idea why her own father would want her, oh I dunno, dead?”
His voice was hard and loud. “If she did, Ange, she didn’t want to talk about it, and now she’s sort of beyond the point where she can.”
“And I’m sorry about that,” Angie said. “But I have to have a little more sense of Trevor’s motives to believe he’d want to kill his own daughter.”
“The fuck do I know?” Jay hissed. “Because he’s crazy. He’s whacked and the cancer’s in his brain. I don’t know. But he wanted her dead.” He crumpled an unlit cigarette in his palm. “And now she is. Whether by his hand or not, she’s gone. And he’s going to pay.”
“Jay,” I said softly, “back up. To the beginning. You went on that Grief Release retreat to Nantucket, and then you disappeared. What happened in the interim?”
He kept his glare on Angie for another few seconds, then let it drop. He looked at me.
I raised my eyebrows up and down a couple of times.
He smiled and it was his old smile, his old self for a moment. He looked around the diner, gave one of the nurses a sheepish grin, then looked back at us.
“Gather round, children.” He rubbed crumbs off his hands and leaned back in his chair. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
21
The Grief Release retreat for Level Fives was held in a nine-bedroom Tudor on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound. The first day, all Level Fives were encouraged to join in a group “purging” session in which they’d try to shed their layers of negative aura (or “malapsia blood poisoning,” as Grief Release termed it) by talking in depth about themselves and what had led them there.
In the session, Jay, using the David Fischer alias, immediately identified the first “purger” as a fraud. Lila Cahn was in her early thirties and pretty, with the sinewy body of an aerobics junkie. She claimed to have been the girlfriend of a small-time drug runner in a Mexican town called Catize, just south of Guadalajara. Her boyfriend had ripped off the local consortium of drug lords, who had taken their revenge by kidnapping Lila and her boyfriend off the street in broad daylight. They were dragged by a gang of five men to the basement of a bodega, where her boyfriend was shot once in the back of the head. The five men then raped Lila for six hours, an experience she described in vivid detail to the group. She was allowed to live to serve as a warning to any other gringas who might think of coming to Catize and getting mixed up with the wrong element.