Midnight Rambler jc-1

by James Swain

  “Hey, Jack, come here,” Cheever called out.

  Closing the bag, I walked down the hallway and entered the bedroom. Cheever sat on a water bed with a collection of Winnie the Pooh teddy bears at its head. A suitcase lay on the floor, stuffed with winter clothes. Cheever was going through the suitcase and glanced suspiciously at me.

  “Looks like Melinda was planning to take a trip,” he said.

  “She was going to Aspen,” I said.

  “She tell you that?”

  “I arranged for her to stay at a house there. She was afraid of Skell coming after her once he got released.”

  “Were you going with her?”

  “No, I wasn't going with her.”

  “You sure you're not fucking her, Jack?”

  “Positive, Claude.”

  He patted the bed for me to sit down. The expression on his face was no longer that of a friend. He was wearing his cop face, and it was cold and unflinchingly hard.

  As I sat the water bed shifted beneath me. It was an unsettling feeling, as were the words that next came out of Cheever's mouth.

  “My guess is, you are fucking her, Jack, and don't have the courage to admit it. The two of you were going to leave town, only Melinda got cold feet, and she went on Neal Bash's show and spilled her guts. Then she split, and now you can't find her.

  So you called me, hoping I'd run her down. Well, I'm not going to do that. In fact, I'm not going to do another fucking thing until you come clean with me.”

  I was down for the count. I needed Cheever in my corner or I was finished.

  “I'm not doing her, Claude,” I said. “But she is my friend, just like plenty of other women I've helped who were living on the street.”

  “Ever fuck one of them?”

  “Not a one.”

  “How about Joy Chambers? Melinda said you were seeing her on the side.”

  “For the love of Christ.”

  “Answer me.”

  “I never fucked Joy Chambers.”

  “You're a better man than me,” he said.

  I wasn't going to argue with Cheever there. Married with two kids, he had engaged in more cheap affairs than anyone I knew. It was astonishing that he was grilling me about adultery, but he was wearing the badge.

  “You've got to help me find Melinda,” I said. “Her testimony is the only thing that will keep Skell in prison. With her gone, the state has no case.”

  Cheever pulled at his walrus mustache.

  “What do you think happened to her?” he asked.

  “She was abducted by a pair of cable repairmen. They cut the cable outside her house, and she called for it to be repaired. They came this morning and took her. These same cable guys cut the cable outside Julie Lopez's house, and when they were called in for a repair, they dug a grave in the backyard and put Carmella Lopez's body in it. I saw these guys this morning and chased them on 595. They pumped three bullets into my car and tried to kill me.”

  “Where did you first see these guys?”

  “On the street outside of Julie Lopez's house.”

  “She's a hooker, isn't she?”

  “That's right.”

  “Were you fucking her, too?”

  My eyes fell to the floor. Cops get a lot of free tail thrown at them, and many take advantage of it. But my conscience never let me. I rose from the water bed, and Cheever sank. It was as if we'd been riding a seesaw, and I'd decided to get off.

  “I'll take that as a yes,” Cheever said.

  There was nothing left to say. We left the apartment. The super was waiting outside, and locked the door after we came out. Gladys stood at her front door, biting her nails.

  “Is Melinda okay?” she asked.

  “Melinda Peters isn't here,” Cheever said.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  We went to my car. Cheever peered through the glass at the bullet holes in the upholstery, and I could almost hear the gears shifting in his head. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and beg him to reconsider, but I was afraid he'd take it the wrong way. There was no trust left between us.

  “How close were they when they shot your car?” he asked.

  “Five or six feet. They were in another car.”

  “That's awfully close.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning they might have been trying to warn you to stay away from Julie Lopez's house. Her boyfriend is also her pimp, right?”

  “That's right,” I said.

  “Think he has friends?”

  “I'm sure he does.”

  “Maybe he asked his buddies to watch Julie's house and make sure she didn't bang anyone on the side while he was cooling his heels in jail. And when they saw you, they decided to send you a little message.”

  “That's not what happened.”

  “I'm just looking at the evidence, Jack.”

  “Do you think I'm lying?”

  “You're telling me one story, and the evidence is telling me another.” Lying to a cop was a crime, and Cheever had every right to arrest me. I decided to test him and got behind the wheel of my car. As I started the ignition he knelt down, and I lowered my window. His eyes locked on to my face.

  “I need to ask you something, Jack.”

  “Fire away,” I said.

  “When you resigned from the force, whose side did you go on?”

  The question stunned me.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “You don't act like a cop anymore, and if your lifestyle is any indication, you're not a crook,” Cheever said. “You're living in some gray area, making up the rules as you go along. I can't make heads or tails of it, and neither can anyone else on the force.”

  I wanted to yell at him at the top of my lungs. Eight women were dead and another one was missing, but no one seemed concerned about anything except my fucking behavior.

  “I'm on my side, Claude,” I said, throwing the car into reverse. “It's the only one that makes sense anymore.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I left the apartment complex with my head spinning.

  I needed to prove Melinda was lying. That wasn't going to be easy, considering that it was her word against mine. But if I could punch holes in her story, people might stop believing her and start listening to me.

  Joy Chambers was one way to do that. Joy was a local prostitute who'd dated several cops. I wasn't one of them, but I had done her a favor and helped her locate a child she'd put up for adoption years before. I knew a lot about Joy, including where she lived, and her real name, Joyce Perkowski. If I asked her to contact the newspapers and say we weren't sleeping together, I felt certain she'd do it.

  I called Joy's number, and she didn't pick up. She lived in Tamarac, and fifteen minutes later I pulled into her driveway. Her gray clapboard house was eclipsed by the tangle of brush covering the front lawn and a veil of vines creeping down from the roof. It was an eyesore, which was how she liked it.

  I banged on the front door, then tried the buzzer. It wasn't working, and I went around to the back. The kitchen door was open, and I tapped on the glass.

  “Joy? Are you home? It's Jack Carpenter. I need to talk to you.”

  There was no answer. I entered the kitchen with my dog. It was spotlessly clean. Joy kept the interior of the house immaculate. She did not bring her johns here, or any of her suitors. Just a few trusted friends.

  I went down a hallway to the front of the house. The living room had brand-new nice furniture and looked like a department store showroom. In the corner was a TV with lines of static running across the screen. A remote lay on the glass coffee table. I picked it up and pressed the Cable button. Nothing happened.

  Buster let out a yip. I followed the sound to the master bedroom on the side of the house. Joy lay on the bed, stripped naked, her head twisted at an unnatural angle. Her face was ashen, her mouth wide open as if it were frozen. Buster stood beside the bed, licking the fingers of her outstretched hand.

&
nbsp; I made my dog lie down, then studied her corpse. The position of her body indicated she'd been dragged into the room, tossed on the bed, and had her clothes torn off. Her attacker had straddled her-the imprints from his knees were still on the sheets-and strangled her. The purple bruises ringing her neck said he'd used his hands. He'd left quickly, not bothering to cover her body or close her mouth. It had happened fast, which I supposed was a blessing.

  I knelt down beside the bed. Joy had been a fighter, and I could not envision this happening without some struggle. I looked at her hands. The left was clenched into a fist; the right wide open. The knuckles of the left were bruised. Joy had punched her attacker as he'd killed her, and left her mark on him.

  “We'll get him,” I told her.

  I rose from the floor. I wanted to cover her but was afraid of contaminating the crime scene. I went into the kitchen to call 911. As I punched in the numbers an envelope on the kitchen table caught my eye. It was addressed to me.

  I dropped the phone into the cradle, then picked up the envelope and tore it open. Inside was a handwritten letter. It was from Joy, dated two days earlier. She was breaking off the affair we'd never had. My hands began to tremble. Her killer had made her do this.

  As I slipped the letter into my pocket a numbing realization swept over me. Joy had been killed in an effort to set me up. That setup included Melinda Peters telling Neil Bash that Joy and I were having an affair. As hard as it was for me to believe, Melinda was part of this.

  I searched the house for anything else linking me to Joy. Finding nothing, I wetted a paper towel in the sink and wiped down everything I'd touched. This included the phone, but only after I dialed 911 and heard the call go through.

  It was dark when I returned to the Sunset. The new TV was sitting over the bar, and the Dwarfs couldn't stop commenting about the sharpness of the picture. I bellied up to the bar and motioned to Sonny. He came over, and I handed him ten hundred-dollar bills to cover my double tabs and my rent. The sight of the money made his jaw drop.

  “You don't have to pay me all at once,” he said.

  I was tempted to take some of it back.

  “Keep it,” I said.

  Sonny slid a cold can of Budweiser toward me. “A reporter called for you earlier, said she wanted to talk about Melinda Peters. I've got her number in the till.”

  I groaned, and everyone in the bar looked at me.

  “Shitty day,” I said.

  I killed the beer, then started to leave.

  “Remember what the prophet said, Jack,” Whitey called out.

  I stopped in the doorway. “What's that?”

  “In the land of the blind, a one-eyed man will be king.”

  “Hear, hear,” several of the Dwarfs said.

  Climbing the stairs to my room, I wondered if Whitey was right. Perhaps I was a one-eyed man, seeing only those things I chose to see.

  Joy's murder was going to haunt me. Russo would want to question me about her murder. If he didn't like my answers, he'd arrest me as a suspect. Since I couldn't post bail, I'd go to jail for a few weeks, or even longer.

  Melinda's lies were also going to haunt me. Not only was Skell going to walk, but the Midnight Rambler case would be reopened. This time, the scrutiny wouldn't be focused on Skell. It would be on me, and how I'd handled the investigation.

  I entered my room and switched on the light. I was in a world of trouble. So much so that I found myself counting the people I could ask for help: Kumar, Sonny, my wife, and my daughter. Not a big group, but better than nothing.

  My cell phone rang. I dug it out of my pocket. Caller ID said it was Jessie. I sat on the bed and kicked off my shoes. Then I answered it.

  “How's the world's best basketball player?” I answered.

  My daughter was sobbing. It made my mind return to that horrible day on Hutchinson Island.

  “How could you?” she wailed.

  “How could I what?” I asked.

  “I was in my dorm watching CNN, and they showed your photo and a photograph of some stripper. They said you were screwing her and had fabricated evidence and all sorts of horrible things. How could you do this to me and Mommy?”

  “It's all lies,” I said emphatically.

  “Then why are they showing it on TV?”

  “It must be a slow news night.”

  Jessie didn't see the humor and screamed at me. I tried to explain, but she refused to listen. Finally I hit my tolerance point and jumped in.

  “Lower your voice, or I'm hanging up this phone,” I said.

  My daughter grew quiet, and I continued. “Whatever you might think of me at this moment in time, I'm still your father, remember?”

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  “Good. Now, let me ask you a question. When have I ever lied to you?”

  My words were met by a short silence.

  “Never,” she replied.

  “That's right. Never, ever have I lied to you.”

  “Not that I know about,” she chimed in.

  “Never, ever,” I said. “What you heard on the TV was a pack of lies.”

  “But that stripper said you had an affair with her, and another woman as well.”

  I could hear my teeth clench. I didn't give a rat's ass if the rest of the world thought I was slime, but with Jessie it mattered.

  “None of it is true,” I said.

  “You need to talk to Mom,” my daughter said. “She heard it on the news in Tampa. She's awfully upset.”

  “I'll call her right now.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes, I promise. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Daddy.”

  I ended the call. Then I spent a minute gathering the courage to call Rose.

  I'd always blamed myself for our breakup. My wife was from Mexico and deeply religious. In her faith, the spirits of the dead hung around long after the body was gone. Many times she'd told me that Skell's victims were clinging to me and that she couldn't compete with them. Like a fool, I didn't argue, so she left me.

  I punched her number into my cell phone.

  “Hey, Rose,” I said when she answered.

  “Who is this?” she asked suspiciously.

  “It's me. Jack.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To apologize.”

  “It's too late for that.”

  “No, listen. Everything you heard on TV is a bunch of crap.”

  “I don't believe you.”

  “You have to believe me.”

  “No, I don't.”

  I put my hand over my eyes. “Rose, please, listen to me.”

  “I'm filing for a divorce.”

  “What? No. Please don't do that.”

  “Tomorrow. First thing in the morning. I already have a lawyer. I'll send you the papers. Now I have to go to bed.”

  My heart felt ready to break. I could not let her go.

  “You can't give up on me,” I said.

  “Give me one good reason why.”

  “Because I need you, and because I love you.”

  I heard my wife's sharp intake of breath.

  “Go to hell, Jack Carpenter,” she said.

  I had no answer for that, and heard her hang up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  At four a.m. my alarm clock went off. I dragged myself out of bed and rousted Buster. My dog rolled over, expecting to get his tummy scratched. Instead, I tugged on his hind leg.

  “Road trip,” I said.

  Five minutes later we pulled out of the Sunset's parking lot. Tampa was three hundred miles away, and my goal was to reach my wife's place before she left for work, and beg her for another chance. We'd been married for twenty years, and I wasn't going to let it end with a phone call.

  Driving through the streets of Dania, I found myself wondering if I'd ever return to south Florida. I'd never run away from a fight before, but this fight was destroying me. I needed to regroup and come up with another strategy. Then I would
come back.

  But before I did any of those things, I needed to see Rose.

  A1A took me to 595, which led to the Florida Turnpike. My car was old enough to have a tape deck, and I popped in a collection that I fondly called the soundtrack of my youth. It included songs by the Doors, the Allman Brothers Band, the Eagles, Crosby Stills Nash amp; Young, the Grateful Dead, and Led Zeppelin performing at New York's Madison Square Garden.

  I reached the Vero Beach exit in two hours thirty minutes and got off. The sky was clear and there was a chill in the air. I took Highway 60 through Yeehaw Junction, a redneck burg of truck stops and squawking chickens strutting on the highway. Forty-five minutes later I stopped at a McDonald's in Bartow and ordered breakfast. As I pulled up to the take-out window, a teenage girl opened the slider.

  “Two sausage biscuits and an OJ?” she asked.

  “Not me,” I said.

  She stared at her computer screen. “One egg biscuit and a small offee?”

  “Wrong again.”

  “You'd better repeat your order. My computer's messed up.”

  There were no cars behind me in the take-out line, and I wondered how her computer could be placing orders for customers who didn't exist.

  “Large coffee and hash browns,” I said.

  I was back on 60 sipping my drink when my cell phone rang. Central Florida used to be one giant dead zone, but modern technology changed that. Caller ID said Unknown.

  “Carpenter here,” I answered.

  “Jack, this is Veronica Cabrero.”

  “How's my favorite prosecutor?”

  “I'm afraid I've got some bad news.”

  Bartow was famous for its speed traps, and my foot eased up on the gas pedal.

  “What's wrong? Don't tell me your case against Lars Johannsen went south.”

  “Lars was found dead in his cell this morning,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “He slit his wrists. The police think his wife slipped him a razor in court yesterday.”