Blackbird

  We thought about this in silence for a minute.

  Finally I said, ‘You’re telling me you got set up?’

  ‘What the hell do I know? All I can tell you is it’d sure as hell be Deb’s style.’

  ‘Now that she’s gone, does control of the company come back to you?’

  He crushed out the cigarette half-smoked and stared at it for a beat before looking up at me. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  Driving back to Tri-State, I got out the little plastic evidence sleeve containing Jamison’s gum, made sure the slide lock had sealed, and dropped it back in my shirt pocket. I hardly ever got that lucky, but a match with the sample from the murder scene could save a lot of time and trouble, and you never know.

  SEVENTEEN

  The next body, burned too badly for immediate identification, was discovered that evening. Leaving Three, I’d made a U-turn outside my office door, taken the stairs to duck a clump of reporters hanging around the elevators, and driven out to the Hungry Gator to pick up a couple of crawfish pizzas for Jana and the girls. Dropping the food off with a two-litre bottle of cola, I got back to Lanshire in time to catch a re-run from an old series about a boy-girl team of FBI agents who seemed to be on the road all the time, never smiled and disagreed about everything – UFOs above all. Tonight they were on the trail of a serial killer who appeared to have super-powers, and conflict was brewing. I sat back in the recliner and crossed my ankles.

  As the agents were moodily examining a mangled female corpse on a dark, completely deserted street that looked wet even though it wasn’t raining, Mutt appeared from somewhere, jumped to the arm of the chair and then to my lap, working himself into the shrimp position just above my knees. He sighed, closed his eyes, and in a couple of minutes was chasing dream-rats, or whatever was scurrying around in his neurons, his whiskers and feet twitching occasionally. But then suddenly he was wide awake, his head coming up sharply as he oriented to the driveway and gave a short trill with a questioning inflection at the end. He seemed to be staring through the wall just to the left of the door.

  This was his standard reaction to hearing me fill his food bowl, but right now it could mean only one thing: LA was here.

  I went to flip on the outside lights and open the door. She was already out of her white Nissan with a small commuter suitcase in one hand and a dark blue garment bag in the other. She wore jeans and red lacers and an old leather bomber jacket over a cream-coloured cotton sweater. In the entryway she set the suitcase down and laid the bag over it. Putting her hands on my shoulders and rising to her tiptoes to plant a kiss in the middle of my forehead, she said, ‘I watched you on TV, Bis. You’re a dogged nemesis.’

  ‘Next time I’m going for catted.’

  Ignoring the echoing emptiness of the house, LA closed the door behind her, tossed her jacket on the couch, said, ‘Pee first, then talk,’ and headed for the bathroom. As she walked away I noticed a couple of dust bunnies under the edge of the couch, bent down and grabbed them, then spent a minute or so trying to throw them in the wastebasket. Finally giving up on that, I went into the kitchen to wash them off under the tap.

  When LA came back we brought the rest of her things in from the car and stowed them in the front bedroom. Then she sat me down on the couch and took both my hands in hers, gauged their temperature, gave them a visual once-over and looked closely at my eyes. ‘Catch your crucifiers yet?’

  ‘Working on it.’

  She told me to stick out my tongue, looked at it critically, then placed the fingers of one hand against my left carotid. ‘Still not smoking?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘How’s your BP?’ she said.

  ‘One-thirty-five over eighty.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last month.’

  She nodded, not entirely pleased, then picked Mutt up and set off on her diagnostic tour of the house, which would have to be completed and debriefed before we moved on conversationally. First the kitchen. Mutt hanging contentedly over her arm like a dish towel, she looked into the fridge, frowned, closed the door and checked the cereal cabinet. She glanced back at me. ‘You actually eating any of this stuff?’

  I said, ‘Yes,’ with a fairly clear conscience. I did eat cereal sometimes.

  ‘Uh huh.’

  She walked through my bedroom and into the adjacent bathroom, inspected the soap and shaving gear and the contents of the medicine cabinet. Emerging from the bathroom, she looked at the bed and what was on the night-stand, which included a squeeze bottle of nose spray, the Nick Cave novel I was halfway through and a little antique glass Coca-Cola ashtray containing a dozen or so coins.

  ‘Still don’t need an alarm clock,’ she concluded, knowing from a lifetime’s experience that if I was going to need help it would be getting to sleep, not waking up. Back in the living room she put Mutt down on the couch, checked to see what channel the TV was on and pushed her finger against my stomach.

  ‘No real depression yet, but your serotonin’s down about half a click,’ she pronounced. ‘Nothing we can’t fix.’ She brushed her uncontrollable hair back from her face with her hand and gave me a strict look. ‘But there hasn’t been a woman in here for months.’ The unspoken ‘you said three weeks’ hung in the air like leftover smoke.

  I started to protest but stopped myself when I saw the scorn in her expression. ‘I usually go to her place,’ I said.

  She grunted, apparently satisfied for the moment.

  ‘Hungry?’ I said.

  ‘No, thirsty.’ She sat on the couch beside Mutt, who’d curled up on her jacket and gone back to sleep, and got out her cigarettes and a little gold lighter. She looked at them for a second, then laid them on the coffee table.

  I went to the kitchen and reviewed my beverage stores. ‘Coke, ginger ale, two-per-cent, apple juice,’ I announced, leaving out the vodka, CC, Dos Equis and Shiner. I waited.

  ‘How about some ginger ale over ice?’

  Letting my breath out, I poured the ginger ale, grabbed myself a beer and returned to the living room. We sipped our drinks in comfortable silence. Finally I said, ‘Things getting any better between you and Rachel these days?’

  LA watched the bubbles in her glass, silent for so long that I began thinking about her wordless first weeks at Gram’s when we were kids, and then about how little some things change with time. But finally she said, ‘History can be a bitch, Bis.’

  I took a swallow of beer, thinking about history, and about what a bitch LA’s had been. ‘Second that,’ I said.

  She glanced at me, saying, ‘Yeah, you and Leah – the same but not the same.’

  ‘Rachel’s on a different road now,’ I said.

  LA shrugged. ‘She ever tell you she tried to kill herself?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘When?’

  ‘That summer when I came to live with you and Gram. The year she bottomed out.’

  ‘Before she got in AA I heard her talk a couple of times about being fed up with everything, everybody’d be better off with her dead, that kind of stuff. She said, “If my life was a fish I’d throw the fucker back.”’

  LA smiled crookedly into her ginger ale. ‘Sounds like her, all right.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘She finally told me about it when she was working the steps, doing amends. What she did was talk some guy into snuffing her.’

  ‘Into killing her? How the hell do you do that?’

  ‘He was some hardcore SM guy she found, into asphyxiation games or whatever. She more or less seduced him into taking it up a notch, but when the time came he couldn’t make himself go through with it.’

  ‘A notch?’ I said. ‘Jesus, that’s a hell of a notch, LA.’ There was a silence as I tried to assimilate this. I couldn’t imagine Rachel surrendering to anything. I said, ‘I’m having a hard time with the idea of her wanting to die.’

  ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘Wait a minute, what are you telling me?’

  ‘It was str
ategic – she made up her mind to get dead,’ LA said. ‘Not the same thing at all.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘It sounds crazy – actually I guess you’d have to say it was – but she found out somehow that with the right contacts a snuff film, a real one, would bring at least a million bucks in Bangkok. The split was going to be fifty-fifty. She auditioned a bunch of possibles until she found somebody she thought she could count on.’ LA poked the ice cubes in her drink around for a minute with the tip of her finger, then said, ‘He messed her up pretty bad, Bis.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You sure you want to hear all this?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t,’ I said. ‘But now I’ve got to.’

  ‘There was a lot of localised tissue damage,’ LA said. ‘But the plan was for her to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, so the guy sees no reason to hold back, and he doesn’t. The deal was for him to do anything he wanted to her, for as long as he wanted, but the finale had to be her dying. Then he loses his nerve and can’t finish her off. She lost a lot of function, and she couldn’t get pregnant after that, among other things.’ She studied the rim of the glass for a minute. ‘Kind of like me.’

  ‘Lost what function?’

  ‘Like the women in some of those African tribes, for one thing – not enough left of her to come.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I said nothing, trying not to imagine the scenario, the moment actually seeming to move and rustle with its own vile energy. Eventually I said, ‘What happened to the guy?’

  ‘Nothing. As far as she was concerned it was on her. Wouldn’t tell the cops who he was. Called it a better deal than a lot of drunks make for themselves. “And I’m still here to whine about it”, was how she put it.’

  ‘She couldn’t take the money with her,’ I said. ‘What was it for?’

  ‘Me. For college and the dive training.’

  We sat for a while, thinking about it, saying nothing, my mental representation of Rachel slowly transforming itself like origami, unfolding into new dimensions.

  Finally I said, ‘It just doesn’t sound like the Rachel I know.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ said LA. ‘The Rachel you know is sober.’

  I thought about Rachel and her life before Dusty and the Flying S, and about my office window at Three. About disconnects between realities. I said, ‘You use hypnosis with your patients, right?’

  ‘Sure, why?’

  ‘Could somebody be hypnotised or conditioned somehow to set up their own murder?’

  ‘A remote – I mean really remote – possibility if the circumstances were just right, say you were able to make somebody believe it was the only way to save their first-born’s life or something like that. But in a situation like this I’d have to say probably no.’

  ‘Any odds you can give me?’

  ‘No, but call it ninety-nine to one.’

  I picked up the phone, punched Danny Ridout’s home number, LA watching curiously.

  ‘Yo,’ he said.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. I could hear the TV in the background. ‘What are you watching?’

  ‘Clint Eastwood. We’re at the part where they paint the town red.’

  ‘You buy that?’ I said.

  ‘Hell, it’s a western, boss. What’s not to buy?’

  ‘Good point. But listen, I’ve been thinking – ’

  ‘Uh oh.’

  ‘Right. Anyway, first thing in the morning I want you and M to run a check into whether Gold might have set up her own killing. I’m talking about insurance, depression, some kind of physical illness nobody knew about, stuff like that. And find out if she was seeing any kind of hypnotist.’

  ‘You funnin’ me, boss?’

  ‘This is straight. It’s an outside shot, but I want to eliminate the possibility. Indulge me.’

  ‘Okay, you got it. But M’s gonna think we’re nuts.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call CNN with that,’ I said. ‘She thinks all white people are nuts. Most days, how are you gonna argue with her?’

  LA set her glass down, got up and walked to the stereo cabinet to look through the disc caddies – rock in the middle, classical on the left, jazz and miscellaneous stuff like Leon Redbone and Bobby McFerrin on the right. ‘When are you gonna put all this on a drive?’ she asked rhetorically.

  I didn’t answer.

  After flipping through discs for a while she settled on Puccini and slipped it into the slot. ‘Un bel di vedremo’ swelled to fill the room, and, as always with Puccini, I felt myself gradually relaxing, distancing a little from the day’s entanglements.

  ‘This stuff’s good for the spirit,’ said LA.

  I swallowed the last of my Dos Equis. ‘Does it really make hens lay more eggs?’

  ‘That was Mozart.’

  The phone rang and I picked up as LA turned down the volume.

  It was Dispatch. ‘Sir, we’ve got a deceased under suspicious circumstances, and Crime Scene said you’d want to know about it.’

  EIGHTEEN

  The ‘circumstances’ turned out to be a residential fire off north Sterling, half a mile or so from the Jamison-Gold place, one single-family dwelling completely involved, and one body so far. No ID yet, but the property belonged to Benjamin Frix.

  I listened to the dispatcher’s summary: the body found in the den, face-down, soft tissue too degraded for immediate identification. The 911 call had come from neighbours and an Oak Hill pumper had been on the scene inside nine minutes, units from Caddo Parish, the Tawakoni station and the Arkansas side arriving a couple of minutes later. With no hope of saving the house, the primary effort had been to prevent the fire from spreading to other homes.

  I hung up and turned to LA, saying, ‘Make a run with me?’

  Her car was parked behind the Ford, so we took it.

  On the way she said, ‘That thing you do with your eyes when you’re thinking makes you look kind of like a sleepy koala. What’s going on in there?’

  ‘Left at the next light,’ I said. I told her about Frix, the sex group and the fact that I’d been planning to talk to him. ‘He comes up on the radar and less than a day later he’s dead, if this is him.’

  ‘Gold and now Frix?’ said LA. ‘Another murder, you think?’

  ‘Not if we’re lucky.’

  ‘This just keeps getting more and more interesting,’ she said. ‘I need to get out of the office more.’

  ‘Then there’s Gold’s husband, if you need something to sink your mental fangs into,’ I said. I described Jamison’s apparent no-problem attitude over his wife’s involvement with the group. ‘How believable is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Any indication he’s gay?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Hard to say for sure. I’m guessing not.’

  ‘Then I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Passive guy, into his own reindeer games – not impossible.’

  I told her the rest of what I knew about Frix, including all the stuff nobody had been able to prove over the years.

  She heard me out, then said, ‘Somebody whacked him.’

  ‘I hope you’re wrong.’

  We found room to park the Nissan half a block down on the other side of the street and walked back to the smouldering remains of the house through a blaze of red and blue lights nearly as bright as day.

  I held up my shield to get us inside the tape. By now nothing was left of the house but ashes and a couple of vertical structural remnants sticking up like long mummy fingers against a hellish smoke-filled sky. To our left the burned out hulks of a small convertible and a big off-road vehicle of some kind sat almost buried under the blackened debris of the garage roof. I saw the chief walking over to meet us, recognising him from a couple of conferences we’d both been to, a tall silver-haired guy named Earl Morning Singer, his eyes and teeth impossibly white against his soot-blackened face. After I introduced him to LA he said, ‘We still got the body in situ over here if you want to take a look.’

/>   ‘How come he’s not bagged yet?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell you about that in a minute,’ he said. ‘Walk behind me through here; I’ll try to keep y’all as clean as I can.’

  The blue-black body lay prone in what looked like a comfortable sleeping position, the head lying on the left forearm, the mouth gaping wide in imitation of a yawn. The features were unrecognisable.

  ‘If it’s Ben Frix, I knew him,’ I said. ‘Did you find any jewellery on the body?’

  ‘Didn’t notice anything,’ Morning Singer said. ‘What are we lookin’ for?’

  I used the blade of my pocket knife to clear the ashes away from the right hand, exposing a gold signet ring with an embossed horseshoe wrapped around an engraved F.

  ‘This is Frix,’ I said. ‘Or at least this is his ring. And have them check his collar bones. There was a piece in the paper a couple of years ago about him breaking one of them when he ran his four-wheeler into a tree or something out at the lake.’

  Morning Singer bent down for a closer look at the ring, then got out a little notebook and scribbled something in it. ‘Now, the reason the body’s still here,’ he said. ‘Look over there at the back of the slab and tell me what you see.’

  Under a crisscross of charred wall studs and other debris I could see a black cubical shape about four feet high and what looked like a low steel door still in its frame but leaning back at a forty-five degree angle. Behind that were the blackened barrels and actions of a dozen or more guns lying at random angles, the stocks burned away and some of the barrels visibly warped by the heat of the fire.

  ‘Some of those were automatic weapons,’ Morning Singer said. ‘And there was a lot of gold bars and other stuff that made us think we needed to get the feds out here for a look. Which means – ’