“My name’s Henry,” I said. “I’m Deacon’s sponsor.”
She took another drag on the cigarette. “I’m Brooklyn. Deacon’s stepmother.” She knocked some ash onto the marble countertop. “Are you the latest attempt to keep Deacon from killing himself?”
“I’m just here to help him stay sober.”
“Have a good time with that. You’ll have a better chance of selling swamp land in Arizona. We’re just waiting for the day they find him dead in a ditch somewhere. I’ve got the dress picked out for the funeral already.”
I dumped coffee into the French press and filled it from the kettle and set the lid in place.
“Why don’t you use the Keurig?” she said. “It’s simpler.”
“A friend told me that anything good is never simple or easy.”
She blew a little smoke. “You’d be shocked how good something easy can be.” She pushed her chest out, and her hands adjusted the nightgown. She let it fall open again, and she parted her legs more.
Coach Lou Pinella. Catcher, Joe Oliver. First base, Todd Benzinger . . .
Brooklyn Charles drank some whiskey. “If you’re anything like Deacon, maybe I should still be worried you’ll steal the silverware.”
“I’m a drunk,” I said. “Not a thief.”
“Right, because they never steal shit. My husband’s a drunk, too, and he stole my soul.”
I glanced at the French doors that exited out onto the patio and the back yard. I wondered if I could take a running leap and bust through the glass and make it back to my car before my knee gave out on me. It seemed less painful than where this conversation was going.
I pushed the plunger on the French press, straining the grounds away from the coffee, and filled a mug. It was a solid cup, and I was grateful for it, for giving me something to do that didn’t involve Brooklyn Charles.
“So,” she said and flicked at the lipstick-stained filter of her cigarette with her thumb, knocking ash onto the marble. “If you want me to suck your cock, it’ll cost a hundred bucks.”
Coffee blowing through your nose burns like a motherfucker, in case you were ever curious about that. The acids and the grounds surged through my nasal passages at a velocity akin to a rocket breaking the bonds of gravity. I coughed and sputtered as liquid spewed out of my nose and back into the cup. I set the cup aside and reached for a paper towel to wipe off my face and used the back of my hand to push away the tears.
In the meantime, Brooklyn Charles sat without a word and smoked her cigarette. I took a few deep breaths, sucking back a mixture of coffee and snot down my throat, and I acknowledged in my head that this would be the only thing I could smell for a while.
“Henry?”
Through a mist of tears, I made out the form of Dagny in the kitchen doorway. When she saw Brooklyn, she regarded her the same way you would if you found a rat sitting on top of the dining room table devouring the Christmas turkey.
I waved at her. “Evening.”
Dagny looked at Brooklyn again. “I see you’ve met my stepmother. And you’re dressed for company, Brooklyn. That’s wonderful.”
“Thanks, sugar. I’m getting the heel to my thigh-high boots fixed, though.”
“I can’t imagine it being broken since your shoes spend most of their time in the air.”
Brooklyn blew smoke in Dagny’s direction. “Don’t you have a dollhouse you could play with? Or I bet your brother needs diapered. Why don’t you get on that?”
Dagny remained stone-faced. Brooklyn’s eyes toyed with a casual joy teetering on cruelty. Tension spread through the room like carbon monoxide poisoning. The coffee wasn’t good enough to make me want to watch two women hash through a few decades of mutual animosity.
I said, “So I think I’m going to haul ass out of here before anything happens that requires me to give a witness statement.” To Dagny, I said, “Is Deacon upstairs?”
“He’s asleep on his bed, still dressed.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” I said. “We talked about a fair amount of emotional stuff tonight. It can be draining.”
Brooklyn stood up. “You two have fun trying to save the doomed.” She went to the cabinet and took a bottle of whiskey, holding it between her arm and chest as she walked out of the kitchen. “Wonderful to meet you, Henry,” she said without looking back. “Next time you visit, bring cash.”
Once Brooklyn was gone, Dagny said, “Lovely, isn’t she?”
“I hope you’ve had her spayed.”
Dagny noticed the pile of ashes on the countertop and blew an exhausted sigh before taking cleaner and paper towels from underneath the sink. “She’s a menace to society, and a danger to herself and others.” She wiped up the ashes and tossed the paper towels into a garbage can. “Did she offer to suck your dick?”
“For a hundred bucks.”
“She must think you’re cute. The asking price used to be two hundred.”
“Perhaps she’s just powerless to my irresistible charms.”
“Or it’s just the simple economic truth that you can’t charge as much to spend time in a dilapidated property.”
I dumped the rest of my coffee down the sink and Dagny led me back to the front door. As we walked, she said, “How goes the investigation?”
“There are leads. I am following said leads, and other detective things.”
“That’s incredibly vague, Henry.”
“It’s part of my veil of mystery.”
“I’m not paying for metaphor, Henry; I’m paying to find out who killed my sister.”
“I’ll try to give you the best value possible for your mystery-solving buck.” I stepped outside.
“Goody. I wanted a dollar-store private eye,” she said and closed the door in my face.
15
The drive out to April Bevins’s house wasn’t quite the descent into the bowels of hell that Wallace Maynard implied it to be, but no one should have been holding their breath waiting for Southern Living to show up for a photo shoot, either.
The house was a Cracker Jack box two-story with a postage stamp’s worth of front yard framed by a chain-link fence and being devoured by dandelions and crabgrass halfway to the knees. Yellow paint peeled away in strips from the house, and coal dust–encrusted shingles clung to the ceiling out of determination and little else. A rustic-looking wooden sign on the front door wished visitors a merry Christmas. It was August. They were either planning ahead or were lazy as fuck.
No one answered when I knocked, so I tried the doorbell. It sounded like the buzzer from an Operation board game. The tone would have made me dread visitors.
A female voice muttered, “Goddammit!” and a few seconds later the door opened. April Bevins had aged worse than church picnic potato salad left in the sun. She was twenty-something going on fifty, constructed like an overfilled ice cream cone, all of her weight gathering from the waist up and tapering from the hips down until she seemed in danger of toppling over. Her stretched-out tank top showed a massive tattoo on her left shoulder, a litany of roses and vines that crept along an increasing expanse of flesh. Her skin was freckled and leathering from tanning, deepening creases in her face that added years. The fried blonde hair and the cigarette in her left hand did her no favors, either.
She looked at me with eyes as dead as a bloated raccoon. “Can I help you?” she said in a tone that implied even if she could, she didn’t want to, and she’d prefer I’d just go to hell instead.
I turned on my most charming smile. “I hope so. My name’s Henry Malone, and I’m looking into the murder of Meadow Charles, and—”
She huffed a hit from her cigarette. “That motherfucker who killed her’s already in jail. What’s there to look into?”
“That’s why I hoped if you had a few minutes—”
“What do you want to be dragging up that shit for, anyway? They should have cooked that motherfucker in the electric chair.”
A little boy, about two, with
skin the color of coffee with cream, and black hair wound in tight, dark ringlets, toddled his way next to April and tugged on the hem of her too-short velour shorts. She swatted at him like he was a fly.
“Not now, Reno,” she said. “Mommy’s talking.”
I turned the smile on a little harder. It wasn’t getting any easier. “Reno?”
“Yeah. Reno Maverick.”
I tried not to let the sigh be audible. I didn’t understand people naming their kids like they were characters in the worst Western ever. Did they not appreciate they had resigned their children to a life of bad jokes and a wardrobe full of camo, because no one in the real world would take someone named Maverick, Winchester, or Reno seriously?
Consider “Doctor Reno.” Do you want your colonoscopy performed by Dr. Reno? No. Reno is who you go to if you need a gang of varmints run out of town, not to check for polyps.
I dropped to a crouch. Reno clutched his mother’s shorts and looked at me with suspicious eyes, half hiding behind his mother’s thigh. He smelled like cigarette smoke. I smiled at him. Maybe he’d be charmed by it.
April started to close the door. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have time—”
A man’s voice called out, “April! Who’s at the goddamn door?”
April froze and yelled back into the house, “No one! They’re leaving right now!” Her face slipped into a panic, and her voice dropped low. “Mister, you need to—”
“How they leaving if there ain’t no one at the door?” A hand grabbed Reno by the top of the head and shoved him aside. “Get the fuck out of my way, kid.” Someone pushed April out of the way, and in her place was one of those guys you know has spent all his life equating the fact he’s big with the idea he’s a badass. His blond hair was cropped short, his beard a shaggy, tangled mess, and he wore a weathered Nickelback shirt and cargo shorts, He kept his shoulders square and his chest out like he’d watched two minutes of a National Geographic special on apes and had decided he’d go through life looking like the chief of the tribe.
“Who the fuck are you?” he said in a way that meant there wasn’t a right answer.
“Would you be interested in learning more about the good word of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?” I said.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Fuck you.” He looked back at April, who I couldn’t see anymore. “Who is this fucker?”
“I told you, Tre, that he was getting ready . . .” Her voice was smaller, less confident, more than a little scared.
“Tre—” I said.
He ignored me. “This old sack of dog assholes someone you fucking?”
I said, “Did you call me a sack of dog assholes?”
“No, baby,” April said. Her tone struggled to be soothing. “I don’t know what he wants.”
“Tre,” I said again.
“What did I tell you—I found out you were fucking around on me. Not enough I’m raising that half-nigger kid of yours. I—”
Tre hit her. The smack was a sonic boom. His hand drew up and back and across her face, and I heard her scream and stumble and collide with the wall.
Surprise, Woody has told me, is your most powerful weapon. You can do real damage to someone in the time it takes them to realize what’s going on. It was why Tre didn’t have much to say when I grabbed him by his shitty rock band T-shirt and yanked him through the doorway and across the porch, and threw him into the yard.
He landed with a thud, clearing out a Tre-shaped space amid the dandelions and weeds. I came down and kicked him in the gut before he had time to realize what had happened. He groaned and took a swipe at me, grabbing my leg and yanking it out from underneath me, and put me on my ass. I hit hard enough I thought my spine shot through the top of my skull.
Tre got to his feet and loomed over me. “Fucker, I—”
So I punched him in the nuts. It’s a dick move—literally—but it’s effective as fuck, and I could see the white-hot pain sheen across his face. I didn’t pull the punch, either. I hoped to crack something. He grabbed his business and hit his knees and wretched and puked into the grass.
Still sitting on my ass, I punched him in the face a few times. The angle was lousy, and the impact not what it was when I popped him in the jimmies, but it got the point across. He wobbled for a second, then fell backward, unconscious.
By the time I was on my feet, April was standing on the front porch. Reno was next to her, holding onto her leg like he was trying not to drown. A bruise was already taking shape and color on her face. Her eyes were dry; I felt like she had stopped crying about all of this a long time ago.
She said, “What the hell did you do that for?”
I dusted dirt off my ear. “You can do better than an asshole popping you and calling your kid names.”
She shrugged and lit a cigarette. She was not unaccustomed to seeing Tre get his ass handed to him. “I didn’t ask you to show up, making problems, trying to save me.”
“You let a guy stand around and beat you, and your boy sees that, what do you think it tells him? How long you think it’s gonna be before he either takes it on his own accord to make Tre stop hitting you, or he decides it’s okay to smack around his girl?”
“Don’t come knocking on my door, telling me how to raise my kid. I’ve got a pile of shit to deal with, and motherfuckers like you—”
I looked up at her. “You really think Eddie Dolan killed Meadow?”
“Don’t know. Not something I lose sleep thinking about.”
“Eddie had no reason to kill Meadow. We both know that. I’m asking for five minutes. Tell me what you know.”
April’s mouth went straight and her eyes flat. Her hands shook with the slightest of trembles as she brought her cigarette to her lips, and she blew streams of smoke through her nostrils. She pried Reno loose from her shorts and said, “Go play with Gran-Gran for a minute, honey. Mommy’s talking to this man, okay?”
Reno continued to view me with caution, but eventually he walked away. April pulled the front door shut. I walked back up onto the porch and we sat down beside one another. It gave us a good spot to watch Tre snore in the dirt.
She took one last drag on the cigarette and flipped it toward the yard. It bounced off Tre’s chest and into the grass.
I said, “You not worried about starting a fire?”
“Best thing that could happen to me would be all of this shit to burn down, let me have an excuse to leave. Probably what I should have done when I had the chance was run away from home.”
“Go and join the circus?”
“Some shit like that. Me and Meadow, we tried that.”
“Joining the circus?”
“Left home.”
“How’d that work out?”
“I’m still fucking here, ain’t I?”
For a moment, April let her defenses drop, and what remained was a tired young woman staring down at the realization that the dreams she had made to herself, they weren’t ever going to come true, and she had to face the laundry list of the promises she’d broken to herself. That’s like seeing the roadmap of your life roll out in front of you where you can see where you wanted to go and just how far you’ve gone off course.
“What was going on, April?”
“I shouldn’t say nothing. It’s the past. Ain’t all of that dead and buried now?”
“Past isn’t ever dead, April. It’s always hanging out, waiting on us.”
She lit a fresh cigarette. “We were blowing people. Making money to buy heroin.” She laughed but not because she thought anything was funny. “It was that summer me and Meadow left Parker County. There was a few months, we were the hottest pieces of tail in Charleston. Everyone wanted a taste of our tender little asses.”
16
“You do not get how tough it is being poor white trash in this goddamn town,” April said. We were still on the front porch watching Tre not move a goddamn muscle. “Everyone expects you to be stupid and be an easy lay when their girlfriend won’t put out
. I got tits before most other bitches in school, and I got my period early, too. Boys, they are like goddamn sharks; they can smell blood. I cannot count the number of assholes with pickup trucks and rich parents who’d blow my cell phone up on weekends, 1 a.m. in the goddamn morning, asking me if I wanted to ‘hang out.’”
She threw in air quotes, so I understood what she meant. I nodded. I was cool. I dug it.
“Why you?” I said.
She made a dismissive shrug. “I was dumb my freshman year, fucked a guy. Football player. I thought he liked me, figured out all he wanted was to get off. Fucking three-pump chump anyway, and the next goddamn day, everyone’s calling me ‘Easy A.’ Your rep goes to shit after that, and not a goddamn thing you can do about it.”
“How’d you meet Meadow, then?”
She smiled. “I made the cheerleading squad. Don’t ask me how that shit happened. I tried out for a laugh, but fuck if I didn’t do it. Whole thing was like driving a race and you’ve got two flats. I wasn’t pretty like those other bitches, and they’d buy new uniforms out of pocket, write checks for trips, and never give two shits about what it cost. My folks, they put every penny they had into making me into something I wasn’t. Most of those sluts, they weren’t about to let me forget that shit, either.
“Meadow, though, she was all right. She’d invite me to stuff on weekends, when the rest of the bitches, they’d say, ‘Oh, didn’t so-and-so tell you?’ You needed something, Meadow helped you out. She’d share lipstick with me. Girl shares her lipstick—that’s a thing.”
“You and she doing heroin together?”
“Yeah. After that asshole Wallace broke it off with her and she couldn’t cope. She said she didn’t know what to do to make it stop hurting. And her mom, she was a drunk anyway, and that made her nervous, that she didn’t want to end up like her.”
“Heroin was the better idea?”
“Never said you make the smartest decisions when you’re a kid. Nothing else, you look for the worst option possible.”
She Talks to Angels Page 7
