That seemed to do the trick. The woman reluctantly stood up.
I decided to press my luck. “Why don’t I buy you some breakfast?”
“No, I must get home right away,” the babe said adamantly.
I waited until she was buckled in her seat and I’d been given directions, before asking any more questions. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”
The blond hesitated. “Tatyana,” she finally murmured.
“Pretty name,” I commented, beginning to wonder just what the hell was up. “Have you been in America long?”
Tatyana shook her head.
Okay. Evidently, the trick was not to ask any yes or no questions. I pulled two Hershey bars from my pocket, and offered her one. She quickly stashed it in her purse.
“So, how do you know Sergei?”
“From home.”
“And how did you end up in Memphis?” I continued.
Tatyana nervously looked away. “With Sergei’s help,” she answered evasively.
Ooh, yeah. Our tête-à-tête was going really well. I decided to skip the chat and get right down to business.
“The man that you left Sergei’s with last night, is he also a friend?”
My inquiry was met by total silence. I knew that trying to push her further would do no good. Instead, I allowed the stillness to gather, until the sound of a quiet whimper caught me off-guard. Suddenly, it was no longer just Santou that I was worried about.
“Did that man do something to hurt you?” I asked anxiously, bombarded by apprehension, anger, and jealousy.
Tatyana quickly wiped away a tear. “No, no. He did nothing. He only wanted to talk. Please don’t say anything about this to Sergei.”
“Then tell me why you’re crying,” I insisted.
Tatyana turned her tearstained face defiantly toward me. “Because he asked me too many questions. Just like you.”
This was the first spark of life she’d shown, but it just as quickly disappeared.
“I am very sorry, but I’m tired. My house is over here.”
I pulled up in front. Tatyana’s home was a ramshackle place, with black tarpaper slapped over paneless windows. Tic-tac-toe patches haphazardly dotted the screened-in porch. A little girl opened the front door and shyly peeked out. She had dark hair and big brown eyes, and I guessed her to be around eight years old.
“Is that your daughter?” I asked.
But Tatyana had already jumped out and was running toward the porch. She shooed the little girl inside and quickly closed the door behind them.
Fifteen
Mavis had yet to return my calls, and I was beginning to worry. I seriously doubted the Memphis police would put out an APB on a woman last seen wearing one yellow shoe, which meant some snooping around on my own would be necessary. I placed another call to her junk shop and hung up after the tenth ring. It was time to head to Mavis’s home.
The Central Gardens District was a far different world from the one where I’d dropped Tatyana off earlier. Stately old mansions tranquilly sat on quiet, tree-lined streets, each a crown jewel. It’s a neighborhood where people of good breeding reside, among them some of the oldest and most prestigious families in all of the South. So what was Mavis Newcomb doing there?
Her house was a two-story Tudor on Belvedere, the prettiest street in the District. Her red Mercedes wasn’t parked in the drive. I rang the side bell anyway and, receiving no answer, decided to try the doorknob. Well, whadda ya know? It just happened to be unlocked. Mavis didn’t strike me as the trusting kind, and I walked in to see what was up.
The door opened directly onto the kitchen. Either Mavis was one hell of a lousy housekeeper, or she’d had unexpected company. The sink was piled with dishes that obviously hadn’t been washed for days, their surfaces dry and crusty. A bucket of fried chicken lay uncovered on the floor, where a gang of roaches were feasting on it. My eggs Benedict began to rebel, and I quickly left.
I walked into a living room that could have been decorated by a Spanish matador. Every piece of furniture was covered with cheap velour of toreador-red. Hung on the walls were black velvet paintings depicting bullfights in all their gory splendor. By the look of things, a bull had jumped off the velvet and torn through the place. Every knickknack lay broken on the floor.
I picked up a photo and gazed through the shattered glass at a man as short and rotund as Mavis. The only visible difference between them was their hair. A few wisps had been carefully combed across the man’s bald pate, and a thick stogie was jauntily stuck in his mouth. He exuded the demeanor of a good ol’ country boy with a heart as big as the South. This was probably the poor sucker that Mavis had set up on a deer hunt and then knocked off.
I tiptoed through the minefield of slivered porcelain and glass to venture upstairs into Mavis’s bedroom. Clothes were strewn all over the floor, but more disturbing was her doll collection. Each doll’s dress was roughly pulled over its head—those that still had heads left. The place had apparently been the target of a whirlwind search-and-destroy mission.
A cushioned ledge was stretched in front of an old bay window, and I sat down to think. The street below appeared as serene as an unruffled lake; there was scarcely a sound. It made the scene before me all the more macabre.
I leaned against the window, pulling away from the brooding sense of violence that still filled the room. The wood squeaked beneath me. I squirmed and it happened again. Either termites were eating away at the house, or I was sitting on a storage space. Standing up, I uncovered a hinged window seat. I lifted the lid and began to rummage through it.
Out came an assortment of odds and ends, including a hammer, a baseball bat, and other goodies. I kept going until I hit rock bottom, where one final item waited to be excavated—a blue cardboard box dotted with pink roses. Opening it, I discovered the box was filled with old photos.
I sifted through black-and-white snaps, finding pictures of Woody in his younger days, before he’d developed his paunch. Though he wore overalls, a shirt was neatly tucked underneath, and a lovely young woman hung on his arm. “Woody and Tammy II” was written on the back.
The next batch featured a happy and much slimmer version of Mavis, in the company of a tall man with a devilish expression. I recognized the upturned nose and the bristly hedgehog hair; it was Virgil staring back at me through space and time.
I dug some more. My reward was a number of photos in which Virgil was impeccably dressed as a woman. Others captured Virgil and Mavis with their arms flung around each other, looking like two giddy girlfriends—except that one of them was a man on the lam. I quickly moved through the rest until I came to one that appeared to have been taken at Reelfoot Lake. It featured Virgil standing next to a fishing cabin. Turning it over, I read the inscription: “Home Sweet Home on Black Bayou.”
I returned the photos to their vault, and once again thought of the yellow high heel I’d uncovered at Virgil’s. I felt ever more certain that Mavis’s disappearance was linked to the man. Closing the lid on her coffin of mementos, I lowered it back inside its grave. An uneasy feeling stayed with me long after I made my way out of Mavis’s house.
Sixteen
I was deep in thought as I drove down the road, when my cell phone rang.
“Hey, Bronx. I gotta tell you that our deal with Mavis Newcomb is off.”
Damn! That could mean only one thing. The top brass in D.C. had learned what I was up to and were shutting us down.
“What happened?” I asked warily.
“Newcomb’s car has been pulled out of the Mississippi. Some fisherman thought he’d hooked himself one helluva big one.” Hickok snorted. “Goddamn if he didn’t stick on a diving suit and go down to see what it was. Probably peed in his pants, hoping he could keep the Mercedes!”
“Was Mavis inside?” I managed to ask. The muscles in my throat had become tightly constricted.
“Nope. But she might turn up as a floater in a coupla weeks.”
A giant prim
eval soup, the Mississippi is the stuff of legends. It’s impossible to see what’s lurking beneath the river’s murky surface, which is why it’s called the Big Muddy. The Mississippi is used as a dumping ground for everything from pesticides to PCBs to raw sewage to dead bodies.
“Where was her car found?” The lump in my stomach began to burn hot around the edges. Now I really was one of the guys—I’d have killed for a slug of Mylanta.
“In the water off Chickasaw Bluffs.”
Not far from Virgil’s place.
“Keep your nose out of this one, Bronx,” Hickok instructed. “This is police business. Have I got your word on it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, keeping my toes and fingers crossed.
I pulled into the nearest Piggly Wiggly, where I bought some Mylanta and drank it straight from the bottle while standing at the register. Clearly, any possible evidence would have vanished by the time the boys in blue got around to investigating Mavis’s disappearance.
Though lunchtime was nearly over I felt sure Virgil would still be busy at the bar, which meant his house would be empty. I pointed my vehicle toward Chickasaw Bluffs, knowing in my gut who Mavis Newcomb’s killer was.
The hogs took an interest in my presence as I pulled up next to their pen and parked. They looked up and wagged their little corkscrew tails before sticking their snouts back in the slop. But nothing could dispel the funereal pall that hung like a black magic spell over the grounds. Virgil’s car was nowhere in sight, so I got out.
I passed a deer carcass lying in the dirt near the pigpen. It seemed a strange way to treat meat he planned to eat—not that I cared what Virgil stuck in his gullet. Apparently, neither did he.
There were any number of areas to look, so where to begin? Since the shed was where Virgil slaughtered things, that seemed a good place to start.
I approached the slaughterhouse and found a board lodged across the door. Lifting the plank from out of its holders, I laid it on the ground. Then I pulled the wooden door toward me, unleashing whatever demons lay within. It groaned forebodingly at my intrusion. I let my eyes adjust to the dark, and slowly entered the room.
A ray of sun became impatient with my lagging pace and raced ahead, reflecting off a shiny surface. A cleaver; probably the one Virgil used to slaughter his hogs. The knife lay on a primitive altar, where an ominous shadow hovered over the shrine. I looked up and my blood froze into tiny daggers of ice. An enormous black cross was nailed to the wall, awaiting a sacrifice.
A voice inside my head screamed for me to leave. Go to the trailer, go to the Sho Nuf Bar. Just get away from the Grim Reaper, drawing steadily closer within his tattered robe. My breath came in searing gasps as bony fingers of death tightened around my throat. It was as if an unseen force had control over my body. My limbs refused to move, and the air around me grew cold.
I turned on shaky legs to bolt, only to discover an even scarier presence blocking the doorway. It was Virgil, looking like Bob’s Big Boy gone berserk. The quills of his hair stood straight up on end, as if fed by an electrical current, and his pale blue eyes unwaveringly focused on me. My Grim Reaper was no phantom in a hooded cloak, but a hormonal freak in bib overalls. As Virgil’s scowl slowly transformed into a sneer, I realized the black cross hanging from his neck was a miniature of the one that loomed behind me.
“Whatcha lookin’ for, Porter?” His voice slithered through the air, like the black plague.
I knew I’d be a goner the moment I showed the least bit of fear. I could tell he was sizing me up even now, figuring out what kind of fight I’d put up, calculating how long it would take to subdue me.
I stared the man down. “Hey, Virgil. I was wondering if you’ve seen Mavis lately. I appreciate the information you passed on, but I can’t find her.”
Virgil grotesquely licked his bottom lip. “You know how Mavis and me met? She came rubbin’ up agin’ me like a cat in heat. She was almost yowling, she wanted it so bad. So I gave it to her, Porter. Right then and there. Women, they do things like that. Mainly it’s the devil gets in them, so they got no control. Once that happens, the only way to get rid of that kind of wantonness is through a cleansing.”
I stared dumbstruck at the man, wondering what planet he was from.
“How ’bout you, Porter? You got some evil in you that needs to be washed out? Could be it comes from spending too much of your time with Sergei’s hookers.”
A surge of adrenaline kicked my warning system into an all-out alert. Was Virgil the menacing presence I’d been feeling around me? “What kind of crap is that, Hardy? You don’t have a clue what women want. And what’s more, how do you know who I have and haven’t been seeing?”
Virgil’s answer was to shut the door behind him. A few rays of sun slipped through the wooden slats, giving the room a dreamlike quality.
“You got a tendency to go from zero to bitch in no time flat. That’s something you should learn to control. I just might be able to help you with that.”
“Open the door, you bastard!” I hissed, standing my ground.
Virgil’s sneer turned into a leer as he drew closer. “That must be why you’re standing in front of my cross. God knows you’re impure, so He sent you here to me. It’s also why He brought me home just now. Sometimes you first gotta have a taste of hell before He can save your soul.”
Virgil’s arm lashed out, revealing a cleaver in his hand. I whipped the .38 from my waistband in response and aimed it at his head.
“Come one step closer and I’ll blow your brains out,” I warned. “I swear to your God and mine on that!”
The cleaver hung suspended like a guillotine, as a jarring brrriiing fractured the air. I kept my gun trained on Virgil as I reached down and plucked the cell phone off my belt.
“Hello?” I tersely answered, hoping it wasn’t Terri calling to ask if I’d tried the new moisturizer he’d bought.
“Rachel! Have I caught you at a bad time?”
It was Galinov. I’d never been happier to hear from anyone in my life.
“Hi, Sergei. No, your timing is fine. I’m here with Virgil in his shed,” I promptly informed him.
Giving Galinov that information should make Hardy think twice. My logic proved correct. Virgil’s eyes flashed a warning as he lowered the cleaver, opened the door, and slunk off in the direction of the hog pen.
“I’d like for you to come to my house for dinner tonight. We can talk business and get to know one another better.”
His invitation presented the perfect way to advance myself into his inner circle.
“I’d love to.”
“Shall we say around eight o’clock?”
“I’ll see you then,” I confirmed, my gun still aimed at the door.
After I hung up, I realized my hands were shaking. I got my nerves under control, then walked out with the .38 by my side in plain sight.
All I wanted to do was get in my Ford and leave. What stopped me cold was the gruesome sound of Virgil’s cleaver hacking through bone. He methodically dismembered the deer carcass and threw it, limb by limb, in to the hogs. I stared in disbelief, never having seen swine ravenously eating flesh before.
Virgil spied the look on my face, and a bloodcurdling laugh erupted from his massive form.
“Surprised, Porter?” he asked, his blue eyes now as dark as thunderstorms. “Hell, these ol’ hogs of mine’ll eat anything. Bones, hair, flesh—even clothes in no time flat.”
I stood in a fog, unable to pry my gaze away as they tore into the deer’s corpse with terrifying squeals and grunts. Their snouts bristled in rage as they fought over every single morsel, setting the very air aquiver with the sound of their insatiable gorging. Everything around me began to spin as the frantic porkers merged into a formless sea of colliding bodies and masticating jowls, until I was afraid I would pass out.
I hurried toward my vehicle, propelled by Virgil’s maniacal laughter racing behind me. The next thing I knew, I was tearing down the road. Only afte
r Virgil and Chickasaw Bluffs were well out of sight did I slam on my brakes, open the door, and throw up.
I now had a good idea of Mavis’s fate, and why only a single shoe had been found in the pile of slop. Shivers gripped me until my teeth chattered. I slammed the Ford’s door and headed home, vowing to make Virgil pay for what he had done.
Seventeen
I walked into my loft, where Dog greeted me with a storm of wet kisses. Then she barked, letting me know I’d been away for too long.
“Sorry. I guess it’s been a lousy day for both of us.”
I picked up the pooch and gave her a hug, aware that we each could use one.
“Anybody home?” My question was greeted by silence. “Let’s go see what Terri’s up to, shall we?” I asked the brown ball of fur, knowing where he most likely was.
I knocked on Vincent’s door.
“Entré!”
Vincent was garbed in an outfit that was part wrestler, part Bette Midler, his legs encased in black tights embellished with red flames shooting up toward his groin. The black hood over his head was adorned with the same fiery pattern, topped by a pair of horns. The studded collar epitomized his nickname, Mad Dog Vin. Terri was spraying every inch of Vincent’s bare, magnificent torso with a light coating of oil, as if Julia Child had taken possession of him.
“So, what do you think? I designed it myself.” Terri gave the wrestler’s chest one last spritz. “I’m doing costumes for his students after I finish next season’s line for Yarmulke Schlemmer.”
“The students are gonna eat this stuff up,” Vincent said happily. “Speaking of which, I hope you’re hungry. I’ve got an organic rib roast with mousseline potatoes cooking in the oven.”
“Actually I have dinner plans.”
“A date with anyone I know?” Terri asked hopefully.
“No, it’s business. But I have to dress for the occasion. Any suggestions?”
“Wear your black dress,” both men answered in unison.
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