by Jeff Abbott
Linda’s hazel eyes misted. “Poor Freddy. I guess he won’t get to annoy any more women. Old sweet thing never did get flirting down right. And poor sugar thought this Intraglobal deal was his lucky ticket. He kept hinting about how much money he’d make, even after poor Mr. Callahan got killed.” I sipped at my coffee. It tasted slightly smoky and stale. I tasted the peach pie-perfection: sweet and sticky and crisp.
“Did you spend much time around Callahan?” It was a simple question, but it seemed to require ample consideration from Linda and several chomps of pie. “I didn’t see too much of him-he was Freddy’s pet project. Freddy had this image of getting some huge commission off the land sales and didn’t want me horning in.” She coughed, as though attempting to dislodge further information from her throat. I pulled.
“I thought there was something shady about him, too, Linda.” It didn’t require much of a yank to get her talking again. She leaned forward, as though the remains of the peach pie might have ears. “Not as much shady as lecherous. I think he was stirring up a mess at the Loudermilk place.” I bit my bottom lip. It had been obvious during the fire that Jenny and Dee Loudermilk were both unusually distraught, and Parker had seemed angry with Dee, telling her to keep her mouth shut.
“I thought something was going on between all of them when the Mirabeau B. was burning down,” I confided. “Parker seemed awful mad at Dee, but I didn’t know why.” My tidbit sparked Linda’s interest. She toyed with a slice of peach on her plate. “Well, he ought to be mad at that daughter of his, too. She’s nothing but a conniving little slut.”
“What, you mean Greg was chasing after Jenny and Dee?” I forgot to lower my voice, and although the office was empty, Linda shushed me.
“Chased and caught, I do believe. But I’m not certain.” “Wait a second, Linda, he wasn’t even here that long. And he wasn’t even that good-looking.” I was still irked that Lorna had taken Greg for a lover, so my memories of him were not kind ones. “How on earth did he seduce a mother and a daughter in that short time?” Linda shrugged.
“Well organized? Or well something. I don’t know. I just know that I caught Freddy admonishing him to stay away from Dee and Jenny if he didn’t want to sour the land deal.” I slumped. “Well, that’s hardly evidence of an affair, Linda.” “Give me more credit than that, Jordy.
Callahan was using the phone plenty to sweet-talk Jenny Loudermilk. I, well, accidentally”-the word was ever so slightly emphasized-“picked up line four when I was trying to hit line three last Monday morning and heard Greg asking Jenny to meet him.” “How do you know it was Jenny?” “He kept calling her Jen babe. As soon as I heard that petulantly whiny voice, I knew it was her.” “And what were they meeting for?” ‘To talk.” Linda made it sound like it was illegal. “And they had to be careful so they didn’t get caught, he said that in particular.” I mulled this over; Linda took my silence as judgment.
“Look, I don’t usually eavesdrop. I was just protecting this agency. I didn’t like Freddy being so involved with Greg anyhow-we hardly knew anything about him. He seemed too polished, too perfect in how he presented himself. Not a wart on the man.” She sniffed. “I mean, you could ask Jenny or Dee. They might know if he had any warts.” “Have you told all this to Junebug?” I asked. Linda glanced down at the remnants of her peach pie. “Yeah, but he didn’t seem too interested in it.” I leaned back in my chair. Assume, I told myself, for one moment that what Linda says is true. Greg sleeps with Jenny. Greg sleeps with Dee. Does either woman know about the other’s involvement? And what about Parker? What would he do if he thought either his wife or daughter had been seduced by this Yankee interloper? And if Freddy found out about Greg’s alleged misconduct with the ladies Loudermilk, could that give Parker a motive to silence both men? Freddy had said he’d make money even after Greg was dead. I remembered Parker Loudermilk’s dark eyes, the consuming blaze dancing in the black ballroom of his irises, his comment on the fire’s momentarily satisfying beauty. And I felt a chill in my heart.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jenny Loudermilk answered the front door and no one could lean more provocatively into a doorway than she did. She seemed determined to live up to Linda’s image of her. She was real pretty, like her mother, except darker like her dad. A lock of luxuriant brown hair hung down over one eye. She was wearing a T-shirt one size too small, and beneath the fabric, the swell of breasts looked perfect.
Snug jeans finished her wardrobe. Her feet were bare and her toenails were immaculately painted a shade of dark scarlet. The whole stance had the air of not-so-subtle calculation. “Hello, Miss Loudermilk. Are your folks at home?” She regarded me with a bored eye. “Mom’s out back, throwing a pot. Daddy’s not here, though. You’re the library fellow, right?” “Yes, that’s right. Jordan Poteet.” I offered her my hand. She took it limply, gave it a shake, and then trailed her fingertips along my fingers when she let my hand go. My fingers felt itchy, but I kept them still. “I was just having a drink. You want one?” I thought she meant drink of water, but I realized with a jolt that she meant alcohol. The glassiness of her eyes looked like it had been poured from a bottle of wine. “I don’t think that I should drink with you. I doubt your parents would approve.” I’m sure I sounded like a total prude, but what else was I supposed to say? Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t hold with teenagers getting drunk in the middle of the day. And I would hazard a guess that drinking with my boss’s daughter is not de rigueur in Mirabeau government. (Yes, I’m a hypocrite. I drank beer as a teenager, but I only did it while sitting in the back of a pickup truck. I certainly didn’t invite folks in for cocktails.) She opened the door wider. “What would you know about what they approve of? Believe me, there’s not much.” She turned and walked away, her gait slightly unsteady. I stepped inside the foyer and shut the door behind me. My first sensation was of antiseptic; even the air smelled as if it’d been scrubbed. The Loudermilk place was big;
Parker’s construction company was one of the most successful in the tri-county area, and Loudermilk money was old money. The foyer I stood in had a fancy, swirled marble floor in gray and white, and the wallpaper of gray, black, and silver stripes looked expensive. One entryway opened into a living room that hadn’t seen much living; it was decorated with glazed pots of all shapes and sizes, no doubt the product of Dee’s hands and wheel. She’d painted them with all sorts of figures-stylized antelopes in graceful leaps, Egyptian letters (I recognized the ankh, the symbol of life), and Native American totems.
Lifted from other cultures, I thought, without a single symbol from her own heritage. Maybe our culture was just uninteresting to Dee, I reflected. Not even a pot with the Fighting Bees of Mirabeau High on it. I’d stepped away when I noticed the shards in the corner, one of the pots had fallen, smashing into bits on the hardwood floor. It was a shame; it looked like it was a real pretty one, with geometric shapes in red and green painted on it. I wondered why no one had cleaned it up, in this immaculate house. Jenny saw my eyes staying near the shattered pot. “What can I say?” She shrugged. “I’m a klutz.”
I glanced elsewhere; the other entryway opened into a formal dining room with an impeccably tasteful cherry dining table and a huge china and silver cabinet. “You coming or you just gawking?” Jenny Loudermilk bleated back at me. I cut through the dining room and found her in a spacious kitchen. It gleamed white-the appliances, the floor, the lights. Jenny perched on a bar stool, elbows leaning on the spotless Formica kitchen counter, a fashion magazine open in front of her. A tall, clear drink with ice and a fat wedge of lime sat in front of her, sitting in its own puddle of condensation. I picked up the glass and sniffed it. Gin and tonic, and good gin from the smell. “Aren’t you a little young for Tanqueray?” I asked, trying to sound jovial but undoubtedly sounding like a stern nerd. She shrugged. “I’m a little young for a lot of things, but that never stopped me.” She took the glass back from my hand and sipped, pretending not to watch me over the rim. “I’m very impr
essed with how adult you are,” I said. She ignored the sarcasm, or maybe she just didn’t give a shit what I thought. That seemed a distinct possibility for this little poseur.
She sucked on a piece of ice, then dropped it back into her glass. “So why do you want to see my mom? She overdue with those Dr. Seuss books she borrowed for me?” “Actually I was curious as to how you were doing. You seemed awful upset at the fire last night.” I pulled up a stool and sat down. She examined the free-floating morsels of lime pulp in her drink. “It was upsetting, seeing that beautiful old house burn down.” “I didn’t think you were the type to care much about antebellum architecture.” It was the wrong thing to say. “What the hell do you know about me, anyhow, Mr. Poteet? Where do you get off coming in and telling me what I care about? Jesus, I get enough from the King and Queen!” Her dark eyes flared in outrage, flinting like struck stones. I raised a hand in pretend surrender. “Hey, look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.” Jenny snorted and sipped at her drink again. “I thought maybe you were still upset about Greg Callahan,” I ventured. Or your mother and Greg Callahan, I added silently. Her fingers had been sliding up and down the cool wet length of the cocktail glass and they braked. She stared at her hand and did not look at me. “What is any of this to you?” “I don’t want my friend Lorna getting hurt. Whoever killed Greg and Freddy might come after her next. You’d gotten to know Greg Callahan, right? Someone here killed him and we have to find out who.” She was quiet again, as silent as a statue. “Look, Mr. Poteet, just leave it alone. Okay? I’m not going to weep anymore for him. I-” “Weep for him? What was he to you?” The words tasted terrible in my mouth, but I had to know. “He was just a friend, a business associate of Mom’s. He wanted to buy Mom’s land.” “And you got all worked up over a man you hardly knew?”
“I-I cried because I’m just not used to death, okay? It shocks me.
Older people get jaded about it, but us kids, we’re different.” It nearly rang true; I remembered my first funeral, my grandmother Schneider’s when I was twelve, and fighting back unexpectedly hot tears simply at the sight of her closed coffin. But a tone in Jenny’s voice was too calculated; she would not have made for a good actress, despite her poses. “Your father didn’t seem too upset.” I remembered the excited glow in Parker’s eyes as he watched the fire. “He likes burning.” Jenny shrugged. “He gets a boner lighting a fire in winter.”
If it was intended to shock, it did. I didn’t go around talking about my folks’ sexual responses much when I was a teenager, I was too interested in my own. I suddenly didn’t want to be around Jenny Loudermilk anymore. She looked unutterably sad to me, sitting alone in this huge, cold house, a little girl drinking hard liquor to show how mature she was, trying to engage in witty repartee that she was sadly ill-trained for. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go have a word with your mother.” I stood and pushed the stool underneath the counter. “She won’t like being interrupted when she’s throwing pots,” Jenny warned me, coming a little unsteadily off her stool. “You better not-” “I think I better. And I think you better go sleep off this little afternoon drunk you’ve enjoyed.” I went out the back door toward a small potting shed, decorated on the side with fanciful paintings of children gathering mushrooms. Bright beds of wildflowers surrounded the shed, bestowing a rustic charm they usually only talk about in magazines. As I knocked on the door I could see Jenny Loudermilk watching me from the curtained breakfast nook. I rapped again on the door. I could hear a gentle humming noise from within, and then Dee Louder-milk’s hard-edged drawl: “Come in.” I entered the dark pottery studio. Dee Loudermilk sat hunched over a whirling wheel, shaping a mound of clay into something that looked like a cross between a vase and a lozenge. Her hands moved with infinite patience up and down the spinning clay, and I saw they were very like her daughter’s hands moving up and down on the glass of cold gin. I stared spellbound, and Dee, one lock of light hair hanging in her face, glanced past her errant strand at me. “Shut the door, please, and push the hair out of my face, if you don’t mind,” she said, and I obeyed. It was an oddly intimate moment as I gently moved her hair back behind the delicate shape of her ear. I stepped back, uncomfortable with the sudden closeness between us. She wasn’t bothered. “Thanks, Jordy,” she said with a workman’s bluntness. “I usually wear a kerchief, but I couldn’t find mine today.” The humming I’d heard was the whirr of her potter’s wheel, powered by electricity rather than her sandaled feet. I watched in respectful silence as she finished molding the small pot, its gentle curves taking shape under her clay-smeared fingers. Finally, when it had spun long enough, she slowed the wheel to a stop then pried the new vase free with a flat-edged knife. She stood and began to wash her hands at a soapstone sink that sat in a corner. “How is Ms. Wiercinski holding up? I heard she was staying at your place.” She kept her back to me and I could appreciate again what a fine figure of a woman she was, attractive in her dirty chambray shirt and argil-smeared black jeans, with the smell of wet clay and light sweat about her. It wasn’t hard to see why Greg might’ve liked her. “Yes, she’s there. She’s holding up well.” “I hope she’s more likable than Callahan,” Dee said, still soaping her hands clean. “Didn’t you like Greg?” One bubbled hand found the faucet and turned the water on higher. She didn’t look up at me. “I didn’t know him very well. He tried to get me to sell him land, but I wasn’t interested.” “How often did he meet with you about your land?” I asked, sitting on an empty stool. “Now, why would that be any of your business?” Dee asked, reaching for a clean towel. Her hands, free of dirt and soap, looked as though they had been freshly sculpted from some rare pink stone. I didn’t feel like pushing Dee Loudermilk. She’d tell me in no short order to get the hell out if I stepped over the line. I tried not to fidget on the stool, stared into her dark blue eyes, and decided on the direct approach. “Gossip around town suggests that Greg Callahan was chasing after you. Did you know that?” I decided to leave Jenny’s name out of it for the moment. “Funny, I used to enjoy gossip. I don’t find it nearly as interesting these days.” Dee leaned against the gray soapstone sink, surveying me with eyes that betrayed nothing. “I don’t usually listen to rumor, either. But someone has killed two people here, Dee, and they were both on one side of the riverfront development deal. My friend Lorna might be the next target. If you know anything about Greg Callahan or anyone who might have wanted him dead, and you’re not telling, I’ll have Junebug over here so quick your head’ll spin faster than your potter’s wheel.” She surprised me by laughing. “My goodness. Threatening the boss’s wife? You’ve got more guts than I gave you credit for.” “I’m not trying to be impertinent, Dee. I figured you’d appreciate me not beating around the bush.” She smiled. “Does Candace know you feel so strongly about protecting Lorna Wiercinski? She might keep a closer eye on you if she did. Look, I barely knew Callahan.” “He’d already offered you money for your land, right? In the area of fifty thousand?” I guessed that her land, close in size to Bob Don’s lot, would fetch the same price.
“Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t going to be enough to make me sell.”
“And how did Mr. Callahan take that?” “I didn’t tell him my decision.
He was dead before I got a chance to.” Dee stared away from me, at the smears of white clay on her workbench. She moved away from the sink and got out some liquids and brushes. Pulling a stool over to the workbench, she began to apply a glaze to a bowl. She glanced back up at me. “I don’t know why you’re wasting time here. None of us had a reason to kill Greg Callahan. You should be off talking to that nutty Miss Twyla or that oaf Tiny Parmalee. They’re the ones who were against him.” “You don’t know anything about Freddy’s death, either?”
“No, I do not,” Dee answered in a measured, nearly soft tone I had to strain to hear. The sweep of her brush made a delicate mark on the bowl’s surface, like an angel’s fingerprint. “You seemed terribly upset at the fire.” “That’s a stupid comment, Jordy; we
all were upset at another bombing taking place.” She glanced at my arm in its sling.
“I mean, when we think we nearly lost you to that lunatic.” Her tone didn’t sound like my loss would be a grief for her. “Parker seemed to enjoy watching Chet’s house burn.” Her brush hesitated over a dark crescent of watery glaze she’d just applied to the pot. “Parker has a strange sense of humor. You really shouldn’t pay him mind.” She completed her glazing and went over to another workbench with a cabinet next to it. “Jenny seemed terribly upset as well.” “She’s a teenager,” Dee answered, pulling on a heavy pair of rugged work gloves, “and she gets upset easily.” Hexing her fingers inside the gloves, she opened the cabinet and rummaged inside. I was about to tell her how upset-and drunk-her daughter was, when Dee turned back to me, her hands spread apart like she was measuring a caught fish, and metal sparkled like stars between her palms, the length of silvery barbed wire glinting in the bright sunlight from the studio’s window.
“Isn’t it lovely, Jordy?” she asked, a half smile on her face. I stood quickly, nearly falling over and toppling the stool, staring at the strand of death in her hands. It was just like the wire in Greg’s throat. “Don’t be afraid, silly. God, but you’re jumpy, just like Parker.” She moved over to the pot she’d thrown, sitting down again. I stayed on my feet. “Where did you get that?” I managed to ask. “At the store, just like everyone else,” Dee answered. She began to wrap the wire around the pot itself, pressing the barbs into the material so the wire held. “That’s-that’s an odd decoration for a pot,” I croaked.
