Andrea loved fireworks with the passion of a ten-year-old girl. Their Fourth of July party had grown over the years from a few close friends chucking firecrackers at tin cans and knocking back cheap beer, to a few dozen acquaintances indulging in ever more impressive pyrotechnic displays and ever-more-expensive booze.
A thud shook the floor and roused Keith from the sofa. He traced the string of curses that followed to the kitchen and Andrea’s biggest client, Barry Larson. Barry’s long arms draped atop the refrigerator’s wide-open double doors. He hung his head inside, another party casualty.
“Epic party, Keith.”
That Barry, a thirty-eight-year-old professional who craved all the finer things money could buy, chose to talk like he imagined an unemployed twenty-year-old surfer would irritated Keith as much as the knowledge that without Barry’s business, Andrea would lose hers. He was one of her first clients and three years later was still her most lucrative. That didn’t mean Keith had to like him.
Past Barry, the window above the sink perfectly framed the backyard destruction. Singed paper confetti, plastic rockets, cardboard mortar tubes. A parachute swung from the rain gutter. Andrea’s “launch pad,” a piece of plywood balanced on two saw horses, had fallen askew, a hole the size of Keith’s fist burned in the middle where she’d lit her massive nightworks display.
How much did you spend this year?
Don’t be such a spoilsport, Keith.
I thought you’d grow out of it by now.
Grow out of patriotism?
Keith snorted. Patriotism had nothing to do with his wife’s addiction to the flash and the bang.
“Coffee, man. You guys have some, right? I need caffeine like whoa.”
Barry rifled through the cabinet to Keith’s left, the smell of stale beer and cheese dip on his breath strong enough to drive Keith back against the opposite counter. A pyramid of soda cans toppled and clattered down beside two bourbon bottles—the cheap stuff he bought for parties and the good stuff he reserved for himself—both empty.
As the last can hit the floor, the door to the guest room swung open and Andrea’s best friend, Tiffany Glen, emerged, disheveled and green. Keith looked from her to Barry and back again. It appeared their party had entered new territory: facilitating hookups between Andrea’s business partner and one of their biggest clients.
Tiffany caught his eye and shrugged.
A thick shroud of post-party gloom sucked the air from the kitchen. Keith left Barry and Tiffany to their hangovers and regrets and stumbled to the door. Fresh air would help him clear his head, if not the fuzzy coating on his tongue and the taste of bile at the back of his throat. Maybe by the time he returned, Barry and Tiffany would be gone.
The stench of smoke and gunpowder assaulted him as soon as he stepped out the back door. He sidestepped the beer bottles and paper plates that littered the porch and dragged a trash can toward Andrea’s launch pad. Cleanup. His party specialty.
Through the burned-out hole in the middle of the launch pad, Keith glimpsed a jumble of cardboard boxes, plastic wraps, and depleted artillery shells. He moved the ruined plywood aside.
And discovered his wife, half covered by the remains of the fireworks she loved, a gaping bloody hole in her chest.
Keith stumbled to the edge of the woods and vomited beside his favorite redbud tree.
*
Reality played tricks on Keith.
Tiffany appeared at his side, her mouth an O of shock and disbelief.
Barry attempted to embrace him in a clumsy one-armed man hug.
A wind-whipped parachute landed on his foot.
The backyard filled with strangers in uniform while he cradled his wife’s body close to his chest.
“Mr. Walton?”
A gray-haired cop in a suit put a hand on Keith’s shoulder. He’d been speaking for some time, Keith realized.
“I’m sorry. I…”
The cop—detective, he supposed, because of the suit—led him toward the house and into his library, where he sat stiff-backed in one of the black leather barrel chairs that flanked the fireplace. Someone put a glass of water in his hand. Someone else pulled the shades, plunging the room into darkness and blocking his view of the backyard.
Andrea was dead. How? Keith searched his bourbon-broken memories. Hot artichoke dip bubbling in the oven. Bunting and flags on the front porch. The dining room table laden with chips and dips, olives, red-white-and-blue cake.
“Mr. Walton?” The gray-haired detective sat in the opposite chair, notebook open on his lap. “What time did the party break up?”
Keith rubbed his temples. He hadn’t felt this alcohol-sick in a decade.
“I came inside at dusk, I think. Andrea and her friends were about to light the nightworks. She’s usually so careful. I don’t understand how this could happen.”
“Her friends?”
“Our friends, I guess.”
The detective wrote in his notebook. The library smelled sweet-sour, of sweat and alcohol and leather. The low table in front of the sofa held two rocks glasses and another half-empty bottle of bourbon, a rare, handcrafted brand. A contribution from one of Andrea’s wealthy clients, no doubt.
“You didn’t watch the fireworks?” The detective kept his tone neutral but Keith felt the jab just the same.
“My wife says I worry too much. I imagine the worst.”
“The worst.”
“Fingers blown off, burns, that kind of thing. I never imagined… How did…? What kind…?” He didn’t know how to ask which one of Andrea’s beloved fireworks killed her. The explosive must have malfunctioned, to hit her squarely in the chest.
The detective rose and pulled aside the curtain on the window that overlooked the backyard. He stared outside for a long minute, then turned back to Keith.
“You came in here for a drink?”
Keith nodded slowly. He must have. The proof was on the table.
“Who drank from the other glass?”
Keith had been trying to pull that fragment from the shattered remnants of his memories since he saw the second glass. Nothing surfaced.
The detective raised one eyebrow a fraction of a centimeter.
“I…” Keith snapped his mouth shut. He couldn’t say that he didn’t have an explanation, that none of the guests would have joined him in here when the action was outside, that the library was his personal sanctuary where he retreated, alone, to avoid the crowds of people who were not really his friends because he never made the effort to be friendly.
The sourness of the room suffocated him.
“That’s my glass, detective.”
Tiffany stood just inside the open door, her hands wrapped tightly around a twisted piece of bunting. Her knuckles glowed white against the red-and-blue plastic decoration.
The detective looked from Keith to Tiffany and back. Keith squeezed his eyes shut against the suspicions he saw plainly written on the detective’s face. But when he opened them again, nothing had changed.
She curled onto the sofa, feet tucked under and head in hand. “You were already pretty far gone when I came inside, Keith.”
Her voice held a note of something intimate and secret. It turned Keith’s stomach.
He slouched in his chair and struggled to make sense out of the senseless. Andrea was dead. Dead. He saw again the hole in her chest. And the two empty glasses beside the bottle of bourbon. He raked trembling fingers through his hair. Why couldn’t he remember what happened last night?
Barry stumbled into the library and plopped onto the sofa beside Tiffany. Annoyance flickered across the detective’s face, but a more interesting emotion arced between Andrea’s number one client and her business partner—anxiety tinged with lust.
The detective folded his notebook closed. “I’ll need a list of your guests, Mr. Walton.”
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t anyone call for help? There must have been thirty people here last night.”
“For god’
s sake, Keith.” Tiffany broke in. “Isn’t it obvious? Andrea didn’t have an accident. Somebody killed her.”
Her words hit Keith in the gut.
“You mean accidentally,” he said. “Carelessness or…”
His voice trailed off. The detective stared hard at him, judging his reaction, but he was past reacting.
*
The three of them—Keith, Tiffany and Barry—sat together at the kitchen table under the watchful eye of a uniformed officer while the detective supervised a search of the house.
“Dude, this is messed up,” Barry said. He drummed nervously on the table, faster and faster until Keith thought the table would shake apart.
Tiffany lit a cigarette, something she never would have done when Andrea was alive. Keith watched the smoke rise toward the ceiling. He felt his indifference as an affront to his dead wife’s memory.
“What happened to you, Keith? You used to love this as much as I do.”
He couldn’t tell her it had all been a lie, an illusion he’d created to make his youthful self more interesting to her. In the two decades since they’d married, the effort of maintaining the illusion became too much under the weight of adult responsibilities.
When had he last talked to his wife? Really talked? He almost smiled when he remembered. Sunday, over brunch. He’d ordered tomato juice. She ordered a mimosa. He considered every item on the menu before settling for his usual, two poached eggs on toast. She ordered the special without even asking what it was. A metaphor for their life together. Keith, measured and steady. Dull. Andrea, passionate and daring.
Only they hadn’t really talked, had they? She had talked, while he read the business section of the Sunday paper, muttering “yes” and “I see” when it seemed appropriate. Now, with his wife murdered, his guilt gave that last one-sided conversation an outsized importance. He pulled at his hair as he tried to remember.
He’d put the paper down when his eggs came. By then, she’d fallen uncharacteristically silent. She barely touched her banana bread French toast drizzled with chocolate raspberry cream. He had the feeling he’d missed something significant.
“What does Tiffany say?”
He remembered asking the question. She had paused, mimosa halfway to her lips, and scowled.
“You haven’t been listening. It’s all about money to her.”
“Maybe she’s right.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
The detective emerged from the library and for the second time that morning, Keith’s utterly predictable world shifted on its axis. The detective held a gun in his gloved hand. Andrea’s gun, which she always kept locked in the gun safe in the basement.
Tiffany’s eyes darted from the gun to Keith to Barry, then settled on Keith.
“My god, Keith.”
Blood rushed to his face as all three of them stared at him. Another wave of nausea slammed over him at the realization that they all thought he’d killed his wife.
Barry shook his head sadly. “Dude.”
*
Keith felt trapped. For a fleeting moment, he imagined giving in to his desire to run from the kitchen and keep running. How far would he get before one of the cops brought him down? And how guilty would he look?
“What happened last night, Mr. Walton?” The detective handed the gun to a uniformed officer.
For the first time in years, Keith wished he’d stayed at Andrea’s side for the duration of the party. If he had been with her, if he’d stopped after one glass of bourbon, if he hadn’t sequestered himself in the library. If. If. If.
“Next year will be different. Just a few friends. No clients.”
Another fragment from Sunday’s brunch fell into place. Keith had been dismissive when Andrea said she wanted to return to their party’s roots—“it’s too late this year, unfortunately”—sure she’d change her mind.
“Did your wife have any enemies? Trouble at work? Anyone she was concerned about?”
Other than you, his tone implied. Keith stumbled over what to say. Yes, she’d been concerned about something on Sunday. And he’d ignored her. He rubbed his temples as if the pressure could uncover the truth.
“You never pay attention, Keith. You don’t even try to understand.”
The uniformed cop who had taken the gun away returned and whispered in the detective’s ear. The tension in the room became as brittle as the bourbon-and-Coke coating Keith’s mouth earlier. The detective reached for a pair of handcuffs and moved toward him.
“Come with me, Mr. Walton. You’re under arrest for the murder of your wife.”
Keith swallowed hard against the bile rising in his throat. He knew how it looked. The gun, the booze, the sketchy memories of the party. But he would never hurt his wife. He had to make the detective understand that.
The detective pulled his arms behind him and fastened the cuffs around his wrists.
“What if I told you I’d stumbled across something about one of our clients, something bad?”
“Wait. Wait.” Keith pulled back when the detective tried to strong-arm him out of the room. He almost had it. Another broken memory skated just outside his reach. Barry’s face twisted in anger, an emotion so uncharacteristic that Keith thought it must be part of a bourbon-fueled nightmare.
“The right thing to do would be to cut our ties with him immediately, before he pulls us down with him.”
Two uniformed officers appeared and grabbed Keith’s arms, pinning him between them. He twisted, but their grips dug tighter into the flesh of his arms.
“She knew something about him,” he thrust his chin toward Barry. “She knew. She tried to tell me but I didn’t listen. Oh, god. I didn’t listen.”
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be.” The detective actually looked bored.
“Please.” Keith locked eyes with his wife’s business partner and best friend, the only person in the room who could save him. “She must have talked to you. Tell him.”
Tiffany shot him a look of such loathing that he almost missed the relief etched at the corners of her eyes.
“What if I told you I’d stumbled across something about one of our clients, something bad?”
“What does Tiffany say?”
“It’s all about money to her.”
The detective and the other officers faded into the background until the only people Keith could see were Tiffany and Barry. His wife’s best friend. His wife’s best client.
“You were in on it together,” his voice cracked into a whisper. “You set me up. Which one of you pulled the trigger?”
The memories came faster now. Barry, proud, showing off the fancy bourbon. The three of them toasting to the future.
“Now, wait a minute. You’re not going to pin her murder on me.” Barry’s mild-mannered surfer dude persona disappeared, replaced by desperation and fear.
Tiffany lit another cigarette with shaky fingers. “I’m sorry, Keith. I should have seen he was just using me, setting me up as his alibi.”
“You came on to me.” Barry looked as sick as Keith felt.
Tiffany’s eyes turned to steel. “Andrea knew about your past, Barry. She told me about the embezzlement, but I wanted more proof. I should have believed her.”
“Tiffany only cares about the money.”
Her story didn’t ring true, didn’t match his memories, dark and disturbing, that now flashed in rapid-fire succession.
An inept splash of brown liquid in a crystal glass.
A hand wrapped around his, pressing his fingers against cold, gray metal.
The library spinning.
So much blood.
“The right thing to do would be to cut our ties with him immediately, before he pulls us down with him. After the party, I have to end it. I can’t live with this on my conscience.”
The horrific images, the half-remembered conversation. Keith retched. He knew. He saw the whole thing as if he had been there. Andrea and Tiffany stayed in the yard lighting
leftover fireworks long after all the other guests left. Andrea tried to convince Tiffany to drop their star client, to save their business. They argued. Andrea would have insisted on going to the authorities.
“I can’t live with this on my conscience.”
Tiffany—she only cares about the money—saw her life begin to crumble. Desperate to hold on, she left Andrea alone in the yard with her fireworks. She stopped in the library and insisted on one last toast with Keith and Barry, to friendship and the future. Then, she retrieved her best friend’s gun from the basement safe and, as the last burst of red-and-blue sparks faded from the night sky, she pulled the trigger.
“Next year will be different, Keith. Just a few friends. No clients. Uncomplicated. I miss the old days, don’t you?”
Don’t Let the Cop into the House
O’Neil De Noux
The woman with the bag of ice pressed against the side of her face won’t look at me. The bald-headed man with the phone pressed against his ear turns to the woman and says, “No answer.”
I move out of the way of the SRT commander, our Special Response Team leader Lt. Lenny Schanbein—I went through the academy with Lenny—as he moves through the kitchen to a small den where one of his men holds binoculars to his face and stares out a back window. Schanbein and his men are in all-black, thick flak-vests over their uniform shirts, black helmets on their heads. They look like enraged insects. Beyond the officer with the binocs stands an officer with a sniper rifle.
We’re in a small brick house in Lakeview, one that flooded during Katrina and has been pasted back together. The windows where we stand overlook a small back yard with no fence. I see the rear of the house everyone’s looking at. There’s a sliding glass door that’s open. Mike Agrippa sits just inside on a sofa facing the open doorway. He’s in an undershirt and has a stainless steel revolver pressed to his right temple.
Sgt. Mike Agrippa is the range officer at the police academy. Never liked me much, but he is efficient, a stickler for safety, which is paramount at a pistol range. Don’t know why we’ve never gotten along, but some cops just don’t jell together.
Flash and Bang Page 7
