Conley caught him by the arm. “Not so fast. Let’s check around back.”
He gave a martyred sigh. “You’re going to make me do something illegal, aren’t you?”
“You could just stay right here and be the lookout,” she said.
“If we get caught breaking and entering, that’s called aiding and abetting.”
“You don’t remember our motto from when we were kids?” she asked.
“‘Drink all the beer, smoke all the cigs’?”
“That, plus ‘Don’t get caught.’”
* * *
The cat was barely more than a kitten, black with a white-tipped nose and handsome tuxedo markings. It was waiting for them at the screen door, rubbing its face against the screen. They could see the hook-and-eye latch.
“Hey, kitty,” Conley said. “I bet you’re missing your Buddy.”
“I bet she’s missing her dinner,” Skelly said, taking a step backward.
“Give me your credit card,” Conley said, holding out her hand.
“I’ve never handed over a credit card to a woman I wasn’t engaged to,” Skelly said.
She snapped her fingers impatiently. “Cut the comedy. The cops will be here soon.”
Conley slid the Visa card through the gap in the doorjamb and easily nudged the hook upward. They stepped inside the apartment, and the cat started yowling even louder, rubbing up against Conley’s legs.
They were standing in one main room, probably less than five hundred square feet, that had been divided up into areas for kitchen, living, and sleeping. The kitchen consisted of a tiny, two-burner stove and dorm-size refrigerator. There was a microwave and a sink. Everything was scrupulously clean.
The living room consisted of a sofa that looked like a curb rescue, and a small flat-screen television balanced on top of a plastic milk crate. There was a bed, which had been made, and a minuscule bathroom.
Three more milk crates and a medium-size suitcase were stacked in the middle of the room, along with a cat carrier. Two of the crates held record albums, the third held some books and papers.
She riffled through the albums. Santana, Allman Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor. More albums from eighties and nineties. “Guess he didn’t think much of contemporary music,” she said. “The time machine stopped in 1998 for Buddy Bright.”
Conley knelt and unzipped the suitcase. All the clothes inside were black. “He was getting ready to run again,” she said with a stricken expression on her face. “But he didn’t get the chance.” The cat came back, mewing and rubbing against her legs.
She went into the kitchen and opened one of the cabinets.
“You can’t just ransack a man’s house, even if he’s dead,” Skelly protested. “Even if he’s a fugitive from the law.”
“This isn’t ransacking. I’m looking for the cat food,” she explained. The cupboards held little other than some canned soup, Kraft mac ’n’ cheese, and a package of ramen noodles. She opened the cupboard under the sink and found a bag of Friskies.
The cat’s bowl was beside the fridge. She poured in the food, and the cat pounced on it.
“Poor thing,” she said.
“Okay, you fed the cat—now can we leave?” Skelly asked.
She sat down on the floor near the milk crates and began removing a handful of file folders. “Now I’m ransacking,” she told her unwilling accomplice.
“I don’t like this,” Skelly said. He went to the window and looked out, expecting a caravan of armed police to come blazing up at any moment.
“Okay,” Conley said. “Go sit in the car. I’ll be out in, like, five minutes.”
“My mother warned me about girls like you,” he said.
She was riffling through a file of old black-and-white headshots. They were all of a younger Buddy, or Robert, or whatever his real name was, and they were a time capsule of the last half of the twentieth century, with a baby-faced Buddy sporting a Beatles bowl cut, to a seventies ponytail and sideburns, to an eighties mullet and porn-star ’stache.
“Hmm?” she said.
“She warned me about messing around with girls with questionable morals,” he added.
“My morals aren’t questionable,” she said. “They’re absolute. I don’t sleep with married men, or steal, or cheat. I only lie if it’s absolutely necessary.” She held up the photos. “These are all from different radio stations. He called himself Robby Breitweis or variations of that everywhere he went. The last headshot is from a radio station in Detroit.”
“Now we know his real name. Can we go?”
“Soon,” she promised.
“Can I ask what you’re looking for?”
“Answers.”
A minute later, she stood up, dusted off her pants, and grabbed the cat carrier. “Got it,” she said.
“What?”
She showed him a yellowing newspaper clipping from the Detroit News, dated 1998, which she carefully folded and placed in her pocket. “Grab the cat, and let’s get out of here,” she said.
“The cat?” Skelly looked officially appalled. “We’re not stealing the poor guy’s cat.”
“He’s dead. The cat’s hungry. It’s the least we can do.”
“Can’t you grab the cat?” he asked.
“I can, but what’s the problem?”
“I’m kind of cat-phobic,” he said. “It’s a Kelly thing. Going back generations, all the way back to County Armagh. We are not cat people.”
“For God’s sake,” she groused. “Get the bag of cat food, okay?”
Having finished its meal, the cat was curled up in the middle of the bed. She picked it up and placed it gently in the cat carrier.
“Now we go,” she told Skelly, walking out the back door with the carrier tucked under her arm.
She turned and taunted him over her shoulder. “Fraidycat.”
“Burglar.”
“Despoiler of young girls,” she countered.
The insults carried them all the way back to Skelly’s car.
“Seducer of middle-aged men,” he said, taking the carrier and placing it in the back seat.
“You can’t be middle-aged,” she told him.
“Why not?”
“Because that makes me middle-aged, and I’m not ready for that yet.”
“Fair enough. Strike that. You’re a cat burglar.”
“I’m good with that.”
* * *
“What’s our next stop?” he asked as they drove away from Oleander Trail.
“I think you’d better take me back to G’mama’s house. I can get my car and my laptop and go over to the office to start making some phone calls.”
“You promised your sister you were going to get some rest,” Skelly reminded her.
“And I will. Just as soon as I make some phone calls. I want to try to track down somebody in Detroit who knew Buddy, or Robert, when he worked there.”
“And then you’ll go back to Felicity Street and sleep. Promise?”
She shuddered. “Not Felicity Street.”
“Can I ask why? Is it Poppell?”
Conley closed her eyes. “Yeah. Well, partly.”
“What else?” he asked. “Something’s bugging you. I can tell.”
“It’s not really Poppell,” she admitted. “Last night, after he called the last time and told me I was going to die, after I called the cops, I went into every room, flipping on the lights. I figured if somebody was out there, they’d think I wasn’t alone. And when I got to my dad’s old bedroom, I just … froze.”
“It’s hard,” Skelly said. “Mama won’t go in Dad’s office, still.”
“I found him,” Conley said. “That day. I’m the one who found the body. Nobody else was home. It was supposed to be a surprise. I walked all around the house, calling his name, and then I went upstairs, thinking, well, maybe he was sleeping.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and the next minute she was sobbing. “He was dead! He wasn’t supposed to be t
he one to die. She should have died! She was so selfish, and he loved her so much, and she killed him. She did. When she left the last time, she took everything with her.”
Skelly pulled the car over to the curb, put his arms around her, and let her cry. After five minutes, he handed her a tissue and she blew her nose. “I’m horrible, I know. But I’ll never forgive my mother for what she did to him. Grayson and I, we had G’mama and Pops, and Daddy, of course, but he was so damn lonesome without her. G’mama said he grieved to death.”
“Your dad was a great guy,” Skelly said.
She nodded and took a deep breath. “He didn’t really die of a heart attack, you know.”
“I know.”
“How?” She clutched his wrist. “I never told anybody. G’mama knew, of course, but we never talked about it, and we never told Grayson the truth.”
“I filled his prescriptions,” Skelly said. “He’d been seeing a new doctor after my dad retired. He was on some pretty heavy-duty antidepressants, which he didn’t like. Said they made him feel like a zombie. And he was taking sleeping pills too. I warned him, the last time he got a refill, about mixing the meds. He made some joke about ‘the big sleep,’ but I didn’t think anything of it.”
“You’ve known the truth all this time?” she asked, her voice quavering. “And you never said a word.”
“It wasn’t my truth to tell,” Skelly said, touching her face lightly. “But that’s an awful secret for you to carry around all this time, isn’t it?”
“I guess.” She sniffed and wiped at her face. “Grayson keeps guilt-tripping me about never coming home. I couldn’t tell her about Dad. I couldn’t tell her how the dread just washes over me every time I think about that night. And then I was in the funeral home, and yesterday, during Robinette’s funeral—in the church where Dad was buried from? I think I was having a panic attack. Being in his old room last night?” She shuddered. “I’m not going back to Felicity Street, Skelly. Not after last night.”
The cat meowed softly from the back seat.
Conley turned around. “It’s okay, kitty. You’re not going to Felicity Street either.”
“Is it okay for your oldest friend to have an opinion on this stuff?” Skelly asked.
“I guess.” She sniffed loudly.
“Maybe you should talk to your sister. Like you just did to me. Get this big, dark secret out in the open, and it won’t be so awful.”
“I can’t,” she said, tearing up again.
“You told me,” he pointed out.
“You’re different. You’re Skelly. I can tell you anything.”
He kissed her forehead and sighed. “Anything except the one thing I want to hear.”
Skelly put the car in gear and drove back to Felicity Street. The police cars were gone, but the front yard was ruined. The lawn was crisscrossed with deep tire ruts, shrubs had been knocked over, and a wrecker was in the process of winching the ruined Corvette off Lorraine’s front porch.
Conley’s stomach churned. “I think I’m gonna hurl.” She threw the car door open, bent double at the waist, and vomited in the street.
“I’ll go inside and get your stuff,” Skelly said. “I’ll put it in your car and back it out of the drive. Will you be okay out here?”
“Yeah,” she said, panting. “My keys and stuff are in the backpack, upstairs in my room. Can you please find what’s left of my phone? I need the SIM card.”
“It’s taken care of,” he said.
59
Michael was on the phone and typing a mile a minute when she walked into the newsroom. His eyes widened at the sight of her. “Are you okay?” he mouthed.
“Fine,” she mouthed back.
She sat at her desk and unloaded her backpack, setting up her laptop, taking out her notebooks and pen, and retrieving the newspaper clipping from her pocket.
LOCAL ROCK JOCK ARRESTED IN DUI DEATH was the headline in the Detroit News.
It had been a big story. Robert “Robbie” Breitweis was the morning-drive-time deejay, back in the day when big-market deejays were a big deal in a town like Detroit. According to the newspaper, he’d had the highest ratings in town. Never married but always a fixture at the hippest new bars and clubs in town.
His fall had been fast and hard. She opened the browser on her laptop and began searching for more of the original news coverage. After forty minutes, she had the hard facts. The victim, a pretty teenager, the name of the car dealership where he’d been doing the remote broadcast, quotes from witnesses who said he’d been covertly drinking all afternoon.
They gave Conley a snapshot of the crime and the sentence, but she still didn’t know much about the Buddy Bright who’d ended up in Silver Bay, Florida.
She found the name of another deejay, a woman named Kady O’Keefe, who’d worked with him at his next-to-last job at a station in Madison, Wisconsin. After another ten minutes of searching, she found a reference to a Kady O’Keefe who worked at an NPR affiliate in Columbus, Ohio.
“No chance in hell she’s working Sunday,” Conley muttered, but she made the call anyway, grateful for once for the Beacon’s landlines.
She got the expected recorded message, with the instructions that she could leave a message for a station employee by typing in the employee’s name on a touch-tone dial.
“Hi,” she said. “My name is Conley Hawkins. I’m a reporter for a newspaper in Florida, and I’m calling Kady O’Keefe to ask her about a former coworker named Robert Breitweis. It’s kind of urgent, so I’d really appreciate a callback.” She left the paper’s number and went back to work hunting for clues.
Her phone rang less than five minutes later. She snatched it up. “Silver Bay Beacon. This is Conley Hawkins.”
“I’m calling for um, Connie, something.” The woman’s voice was deep and throaty and reminded her of Stevie Nicks.
“This is Conley. Are you Kady?”
“Yes. What’s this about Robbie? Has he finally turned up somewhere? I always figured he was long dead by now.”
“Were you a close friend?” Conley asked.
“We were an item for a few months, but Robbie was an item with every woman he met back then,” she said, laughing. “He screwed anything that moved. Come to think of it, I guess you could say the same thing about me. Not anymore, of course,” she said hastily. “I’ve got grandkids, if you can believe it, so don’t quote me on the sex stuff.”
“I won’t,” Conley promised. “But you hadn’t been in touch with him in recent years?”
“Nobody that I know of has been in touch with him since he went to prison,” Kady said. “Why don’t you just come out and tell me what this is all about?”
“I’m afraid he is dead, but it only happened this morning,” Conley said.
“You’re shitting me! Where was this? Someplace in Florida? How the hell did he end up all the way down there?”
“That’s what I’m hoping to find out,” Conley said. “He was working at a small local radio station here, using the name Buddy Bright. The station owner said he just showed up a few years ago, and he hired him on the spot.”
“And he didn’t think to check to see if he had a record? I mean, I think it was a big deal when he walked away from that prison detail. There were billboards with his picture on the interstate.”
“As I said, it’s a small station in a small town, and we’re a long way from Detroit. We’re, I guess you’d say, quirky.”
“You mind telling me how he died?”
Conley gave her an abbreviated account of the early-morning events.
“Wow,” Kady said. “That’s, like, mind-blowing. So are you saying he died a hero?”
“I guess I am,” Conley said. “I’m trying to put together a story on him. I know the stuff about the hit-and-run, but I’d really like to get some understanding of who he was before the accident.”
“He was your typical rock jock,” Kady said. “This was before political correctness. Cocky, sexy, full of himsel
f. He could be a lot of fun, but he could be mean too. You never knew which Robbie you were gonna get. Although I will say he had a certain sweetness if you stayed around long enough. Hey, did he still drive a white Corvette?”
“Yeah,” Conley said. “The station owner said he treated it like it was his baby.”
“That was Robbie. I think he was driving a Vette when he hit that girl. Not the same one, obviously. And did he still dress in all black? I never said anything, but come on, calling yourself the Man in Black? How hokey was that?”
“Still dressed in black,” Conley said. “I guess that was his trademark. That and the Vette.”
“You can’t say the guy wasn’t predictable.” Kady chuckled. “But then, what man isn’t totally predictable?”
Conley thought about Skelly and how he managed to surprise her almost every time they were together. “Right,” she said for the sake of agreement. “Is there anything else you can think of to tell me about him? Like, did he have family?”
“None that he ever talked about. I think he thought his listeners were his family. That wasn’t just bullshit either. He really thought like that.”
“Well, thanks so much for talking to me about him,” Conley said. “You’ve been a big help.”
Michael had turned around in his desk and was wildly waving to get her attention.
“Can you hang on for a sec, Kady?”
“Okay.”
She put her hand over the receiver. “What’s up, Mike?”
He held up the receiver of the phone on his own desk. “This is a producer from NBC. She says she’s been trying to reach you all morning.”
“Selena Kwan?”
“Yeah. What should I tell her?”
“Tell her to hold. I’m almost done with this call.” She continued, “Hi, Kady. Anyway, I really appreciate your talking to me. If you think of anybody else who might remember Robbie, can you give them my number?”
“What about the cat?” Kady said abruptly.
“Cat?”
“Robbie loved cats. He always had one. Whatever market he’d get a job in, first thing he’d do, he told me, was go to a shelter and adopt a stray. But they always had to be black. You know, ’cuz he was the Man in Black.”
Hello, Summer Page 42
