I stayed. That was the job. Victor stumbled up the stairs, blood-soaked and delirious. I stayed. I could no longer feel my own hands. Victor could have walked up on me with a gun and I’d never have noticed. Victor ran the water. He whistled. I stayed.
Red Man, silent, came downstairs again. He stood in front of the hanging man. The only sound was a high whine through a constricted throat. Red Man bowed his head. He might have said a prayer. And then he raised his gun and shot the man between the eyes.
He turned around when it was done. Stared straight at my window, and I stared straight back. I was nearly invisible there. He should never have seen me. I never knew if he did.
He nodded once. He lifted the dead man down.
11
We sleep together and it is relief inexpressible. It is Pea’s head on my shoulder and my arm draped over her torso. It is easy.
I smell smoke. Cloying, like burning trash. My fingers twitch: a warning.
Wreathed in a happier dream, I don’t heed it until my palms are burning. By which time Bobby Junior is walking with killer purpose across our living room. He releases the safety of his father’s heirloom 5mm Bergmann.
Pea is half-asleep. I drag her upright and she follows me behind the couch. Not enough protection, but thankfully Junior’s first shot goes wide. The bullet ricochets against the marble mantlepiece and buries itself in the wall just behind his head.
The shock of that widens his puffy eyes. “Bitch,” he mutters.
Pea stares at me. She heard that vicious echo. A shiver of a ghost passing through. And we might just join him in a few moments—she’s left her knives out of reach. We’re both half-naked. The nearest potentially deadly object is the fireplace poker. Bobby Junior shoots again. The bullet tunnels through the couch and buries itself in the wood beneath.
“It’s you,” I whisper. I point to the French windows.
She blinks slowly. Bobby Junior is muttering something, approaching us again. We’re only still alive because of his shaky aim, but he was raised hunting. He’ll steady if we give him the opportunity.
Pea takes both my hands, kisses me hard, and pushes me away. I stand with her momentum and run.
I scream Walter’s name as I hurtle for the French windows. They open outward. There’s a chance I can jump through and take cover outside. I plan for it, even though I fully expect one of Junior’s bullets to rip through my back.
The next three seconds pass like pebbles through water. One, I’m halfway to the windows. Two, Bobby Junior says, “Murdering bastard.” I am terrified he means Pea. Three, he shoots. I drop to the floor.
Four, five, six: the vase of colored glass falls from the mantlepiece and fractures. The poker clatters to the floor. A moment later, Junior’s head thuds softly against the rug.
“He didn’t hit you,” Pea says. She kneels, two fingers pressed against his neck.
“No,” I say, rolling onto my back. I had felt her movement behind me and known it would be safer to drop in place than go for the window. “You’d had enough time.”
She gives me a brilliant smile. “Oh, baby, imagine what we’d have been together.”
I could tell her that I’d never have killed the people she did. But that isn’t what she means. And besides—I might have.
“Bastard’s still alive,” she says. And then, “Turn around, Walter, let me get my robe.”
Tamara freezes behind him. “Fucking hell, Phyllis, what’s that white boy doing on the floor?”
“Tried to shoot us,” I tell Tamara. I climb wearily to my feet. I need to sleep for weeks. To not be on the wrong end of a gun for at least a decade.
“Will he wake up, Pea?” Tamara asks.
“In a few hours. He probably needs a doctor.”
Walter sighs. “You should have either killed the bastard or left him healthy enough to talk.”
“He was shooting at Dev.”
Tamara shakes her head in a vigorous denial of reality. “Sugar, this is terrible. Thank goodness we came, Walter! I told you something was wrong, and look, it’s hotter here than the Village in July.”
Walter looks between the two of us. He is, as ever, calm and impassive in judgment. I haven’t been afraid of Walter for years, but his focused attention unsettles. All too often what follows is his violence, merciless and precise. After nearly a minute he inclines his head.
“Something to drink, Dev?” he says. “Let’s keep an eye on the mayor’s boy and see what we can work out.”
So an hour before dawn Walter, Pea, Tamara, and I build up the fire again and share the last bottle from my last liquor run. Junior rests in state between us. He scowls even in unconsciousness. Pea and I take turns with the story of recent events in Little Easton.
“The strange thing is,” I say, “that Junior tried to kill Pea. Alvin told me he was convinced Junior wanted to kill him.”
“Walter, Phyllis—don’t you get a funny feeling about that boy?” Tamara asks. She has slid down the couch until she is nearly recumbent. One hand rests on my thigh, her head lists against my shoulder. She sniffs the dregs of her third glass of cognac. It could break my heart to see her like this—still afraid of violence, but determined to get drunk enough to hide it.
“Alvin’s afraid of something. But I wouldn’t trust…” Pea trails off. Junior has begun to snuffle like a warming engine. His eyes roll frantically beneath closed lids.
I lean forward. “Pea?”
“Do you—” Walter says, at the same time that Pea and I stand.
“Someone’s coming,” she says.
We all go outside. It’s a patrol car, shining white and blue in the limpid light of a new sun. I register the insignia of the state troopers instead of the Hudson patrol that occasionally passes through.
“I think, I’m afraid—Phyllis, baby, I’m going to vomit.”
Pea grabs Tamara around the waist and holds her hair back while she gets sick. The state trooper climbs from the car. White, about the same age as Walter, balding though he thinks the comb-over hides it. I haven’t spoken to Finn since I told him I’d consider calling Valentine.
I never called Valentine.
My old handler nods to me. His lips twist when he sees Walter, and he shakes his head. His disappointment is clear as his headlights. He won’t say anything in front of Walter, he won’t sign my death warrant this morning. But he won’t trust me again.
“Mr. Patil, Mr. Finch.”
There’s no way to describe my loyalties that would make sense to him. Finn’s cleaner than most, dirtier than some. But he still believes that fundamental lie—that the worst of us are better than the best of them.
“You all had better come with me.” Something in his voice makes me look back at Pea. She’s taken Tamara a few feet away, so she can finish her business in the azaleas. If I’m no longer an officer in Finn’s eyes, I might have lost all of my leverage to protect her. His manner is cold and professional to Lower Manhattan’s most powerful mob boss. The same boss that Valentine and Dewey are supposedly itching to bring down. Could they be close? My gaze meets Pea’s over Tamara’s back. She shakes her head. She smiles.
“What’s this about?” Walter is careful, bland, his most frightening.
Finn judges his words. He shifts his weight forward, then back. “Ben Craver is in the hospital, shot and left for dead, nearly bled to death. Looks like the same someone killed Mayor Bell an hour before. That’s when they called us in. No one can find his son. Our prime suspect is missing and you two were the last ones seen with him.”
It sharpens the cold of the morning. I take a step back and sink into a muddy puddle. Walter lifts a hand and settles it by his side.
But Pea is at her most essential. She hauls Tamara upright and points at the house with her free hand.
“If you’re looking for Bobby Junior, he’s in there,” says the woman I was once ashamed to love. “Along with the gun he shot at us with.”
* * *
Robert Bell, the fifth
of his family to serve as mayor of Little Easton on Hudson, has lost the back of his head. The gun was fired at close range. There are scorch marks around the dimpled hole on his forehead and splintered bone edging the bullet’s exit. The eggshell color of his skin is mottled blue and gray around his left arm, where they say he fell.
No one imagines that any of us held the gun. But we are who we are, and we were among the last to see him alive. They assume that we must have been involved.
A reasonable assumption, in their circumstances.
“You were all in that house?” Finn repeats. He hasn’t looked at me once since we arrived. “All night?”
“Until the dead man’s son tried to kill us, yes.” Walter’s tone is particularly dry. If Finn had any sense he’d stop pushing. But he just nods thoughtfully and licks his lips. It’s become personal for him. We’ve been here for an hour. Long enough to see the body and refuse the watery coffee. To wait on officers conversing in low voices in the hallway.
Pea straightens suddenly. “This is ridiculous,” she says. “You know we couldn’t have done this. Arrest us or let us go.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Finn says. He looks at her as he would a cockroach. As if it’s faintly offensive she can even speak. I clench my fists at my sides.
“As Bobby Bell Junior has yet to wake up,” he says, “we only have your side of the story for what happened.”
Pea raises a delicately incredulous eyebrow. “The bullets from his gun weren’t enough to convince you he was shooting at us? And something tells me that they are the same bullets that got Craver. That’s an unusual gun. So what are you proposing, that we somehow provoked Junior into shooting Craver and then finishing us off?”
Finn grimaces. “The boy, Alvin Spalding, was reportedly at your house as well.”
Pea’s face gives nothing away. She breathes just as easily. But she’s afraid. “We took him back home. I don’t know where he’s gone.”
“We think he’s run. Innocent men don’t do that, Miss LeBlanc.”
“Scared men do. You can’t think he shot Mayor Bell.”
“We—the investigation is ongoing.”
So they aren’t sure. There is something peculiar about the case that he isn’t telling us. Walter leans forward and taps his fingers lightly on his knee.
“That man was shot point-blank, wasn’t he, Phyllis?”
Pea smiles. “I’d say so, Walter.”
“He was a big man, Mayor Bell. It’d be hard for such a small boy to get close enough to a big man like that. And it was an even shot. No signs of struggle, am I right?”
I finally see where he’s leading us. “But he wasn’t asleep,” I say. “Which means someone he trusted enough to get close.”
“Which is not,” Pea says, “Alvin Spalding.”
I stand. “Officer Finn, can I have a word?”
Finn jerks. He’s gotten thinner since the second divorce. His salt-and-pepper beard is now pure snow. He looks at me like he’d rather slug me. The feeling is mutual. But he nods silently and leads me out into the hallway and another interrogation room.
“You bastard,” he yells as soon as he closes the door. He pushes me against the table. “You goddamn bastard! You want to announce to that pair of killers that you’re a cop? That we know each other? Want to put a bull’s-eye on my forehead?”
I grab Finn’s wrists and swing him into the wall. Harder than I need to—it punches the breath from him. His eyes widen.
“Should have guessed…” He gasps. “… when Valentine didn’t hear from you. Never would have pegged you to turn dirty, kid. Not back then.”
“Life changes you, Finn.”
I release him. He sags against the wall. “That it does, kid.”
“I just can’t—not to Walter. I don’t expect you to understand. But he doesn’t know a thing about you. I can still do the job.”
“Too damn well. You could double-agent for the devil.”
It would have been a compliment, ten years ago. Now it’s thickened to shame. Not only to have committed evil, but to have done it so well.
Finn nods. “I won’t arrest you all now—”
“You wouldn’t dare. Not Walter. And you don’t think we did it anyway.”
“Not with your own hands.”
“Finn. What aren’t you telling me?”
He’s still breathing hard. His face is flushed. He squints like he’s in pain, and I regret how hard I threw him.
“Are you even an officer anymore, Patil? Or are you one of Red Man’s gang?”
A familiar hand clamps my heart and then, suddenly, lets go. I say it. “Both.”
He shakes his head. But he puts his hands on the table and meets my eyes. “The gun, Officer Patil,” he says. “The gun that Bobby Junior used on you and Ben Craver also killed Mayor Bell.”
The pieces slide into place. “The boy,” I say.
“The boy,” he agrees. “Access to the house. Sneaky hands like yours. Either that or we believe that Junior killed his own father.”
“You’ll let us go?”
“If they have anything to do with this, I know you won’t tell me. And Dewey wants Red Man. One last trophy before he makes his run on Albany.”
“He won’t get him. You have to know that.”
Finn smiles thinly. “You aren’t the only good agent on the city beat, Patil. We might just surprise you.”
* * *
Walter goes back to the city.
“I’ll call when I’ve taken care of that letter,” he says.
“You’re a real friend.”
“Vice has someone else at the Pelican. High, I suspect. I’ll need you to find out who it is.”
I make myself swallow. “You can’t yourself?”
“I could.”
He waits for me. Red Man stillness, its faint whiff of ironic detachment. I could refuse. And he could let the draft swallow me whole.
“Give me—until things calm down here,” I say. He just nods and closes the Packard door.
Tamara stays the week.
Alvin stays gone.
Bobby Junior comes to and claims self-defense. He blames Alvin for murdering Bobby Senior. Says that the boy told him Craver had hired Pea to kill him and his father. When he found Senior dead, he went after us without asking more questions.
“Sounds more like revenge than self-defense,” is Pea’s dry response. But they only charge him with one count of attempted manslaughter. Craver might still die. Pea and I, of course, don’t count.
Alvin is their prime suspect, mostly because it costs them nothing to accuse a runaway Negro boy. It would cost them a great deal to investigate a man like Bobby Bell, with the powerful enemies he had accrued in a lifetime of politics. Still, Alvin had plenty of reasons to hate the Bells. Even more to fear them. His scheme, then, had been to position us as a barrier between himself and the anger of the two most powerful men in town. And maybe we were even meant to be his fall guys. Pea doesn’t believe he killed Mayor Bell. Me? I think Alvin is just as capable of evil as the two of us. I just don’t know why he would have left Junior alive.
I think Pea has seen him. I think she has fed him a few evenings when she claimed to go shopping in town. She hasn’t told me for the same reason I haven’t told her about my letter from the president. We are holding our trouble close, hoping it goes away. But we hold each other closer.
Tamara helps Pea cook extravagant dishes and touches me too much when Pea can see, and not at all when we’re alone. It’s her way of being fair. She doesn’t mention her man, though missing him hurts her like a bullet in the ribs.
“Pea,” she says, on our last evening together. We’ve emptied a bottle of wine over a dinner of acorn squash and coq au vin and fresh-baked rolls. Tamara’s freshened up for dinner, but Pea is still at her most country. Blue headscarf, a gingham apron that smells of vinegar from the watermelon rinds they spent the day pickling. “Pea, let’s go dancing.”
Pea pulls the cork from the se
cond bottle and points it in my direction.
“Dev doesn’t dance.”
“Sure he does! We danced plenty of times, didn’t we, sugar?”
I laugh. “I think once or twice I even did it without stepping on your feet.”
We take our glasses to the salon. By the record player, Tamara selects a fast Beiderbecke number and holds out her hand to Pea.
They dance lindy, dissolving into laughter when one or the other takes the lead. Joyous in each other’s presence. I had wondered how it would be to touch and smell my old lover again. But we fit, as we have always been meant to.
Pea finds and uncorks our last bottle of wine, an unknown local variety. It’s thick and sweet and slides down the glass’s curved side in Ws and Vs. I stare at the liquid that looks nothing like blood.
“Dev?” Pea says.
“Let me get my cards,” Tamara says. Her voice fades out as she wanders out of the room. Pea takes the glass from me and drains it in a gulp.
“What do you need, Dev?”
She smiles that way she does. That self-lacerating crescent. I take her hand. Its scars, for the moment, mark nothing more than mistakes we have made. I stand unsteadily.
“Dance with me?”
Surprise and laughter and a low-throated murmur in my ear, “Don’t even try to lead.”
The feel of our bodies sweating and moving in rhythm. The smell of her hair when the scarf falls to the floor. I don’t even realize Tamara is watching until the needle scratches the end of the record.
“You’re … Anyone want to ask the cards something?”
She holds up her old deck wrapped in an ivory silk handkerchief, monogrammed with some old lover’s initials. There’s envy in that sweet face. And desire. It suddenly comes clear—it’s not only for me.
We turn down the lights and share the last of the reefer Walter left with us.
Tamara unwraps the deck and starts shuffling, tossing the cards from her left hand to her right at a rapid clip. Pea watches her in silence for a moment and then snatches a card from the air. She balances it on the end of her index finger and then throws it back into the deck that Tamara hasn’t stopped shuffling.
Trouble the Saints Page 18
