To the Devil, My Regards

by Anthony Neil Smith

  I swallowed a cry of pain and twisted in his grasp, kicked out with my good leg. The heel of my shoe caught him solid on the point of his chin. His lip ripped, and blood splattered. His eyes rolled back, and he melted to the floor.

  I limped to the coffee table and retrieved the automatic. I kept him covered as I sat on the edge of the table.

  He rubbed his chin, dabbed the blood with his sleeve. He looked at me, at his gun in my hand. “How embarrassing.”

  “Now we’re going to play the question-answer game,” I said. “But first thing’s first. Empty your pockets. Nice and slow.”

  FIVE

  The contents of the expensive black suit’s pockets: a checkbook, thirty-six bucks (a five, a ten, a twenty and a one), some loose change (forgot to count it), a torn matchbook flap with my address and physical description on it, a silencer, a receipt from Denny’s (what, keeping it for his expense account?), and the keys to a Mitsubishi SUV (I asked, he told me, and told me where he’d parked it, too).

  Guy actually had a driver’s license on him. It was probably a fake, but a damn good fake, and just what I needed to slip away for a while. The name on the card was “Uri Bishop”. I looked up from the grim photo towards Bishop’s face. We were similar physically, it seemed, even if the faces were different. But that wasn’t going to be a concern.

  I pointed the gun at him. “Take off the suit. We need to change clothes.”

  The relaxed manner disappeared. His eyes flitted around the room, looking for an easy distraction and way of escape. He said, “That’s not a good omen.”

  I pointed the gun at him even more. “No, it’s not. But what choice do you have?”

  “What if I don’t?”

  I sighed. “Then I figure out a way to kill you without messing up the suit.”

  He pushed himself to his knees, sat cross-legged on the floor and sneered at me, rolled his tongue behind his teeth. “Not much hope of that. And I don’t think you want to risk it. So maybe we can trade information.”

  I grabbed the silencer, spun it onto the barrel, and stalked right up to the smug bastard. It was all a front. The last thing I wanted to do was kill a guy in my apartment. Besides, I needed him to help me disappear. His suit, his car, his wallet, while he’d be tied up in the back, ready to play my older brother if needed. It was a good plan.

  Too bad he didn’t see it that way. He made a leap for my legs, and I jumped out of the way just in time. He hit the tile face first, then let out something like a bark and jumped to his feet. He lunged at me, but I wedged the gun between us, let off a round that obliterated his nose and most of an eye. He fell dead at my feet.

  Nuts.

  Instead of my older brother, he earned a new role: the remorseful and suicidal Z. Z. DelPresto. After thinking that one up—had to be quick so it wouldn’t look post-mortem—I shoved the silencer between his upper lip and teeth, wrapped his right hand fingers around the pistol grip, slipped his finger over the trigger, then fired upward. The bullet mauled the rest of his face before shooting out his forehead into the wall. It was disgusting, horrible, bloody. I had to keep reminding myself that I wanted people to think he was me.

  Look, he would’ve killed me if the tables hadn’t turned, and then gone on to kill more people, whoever he was paid to whack. Could’ve been your kids, your husband, your wife. You.

  I pulled a garbage bag from the cabinet and covered his head and neck with it. It’s a bitch undressing a dead guy, trying to keep the blood off the suit—a tailored British number, finest I’d seen. I got the slacks and jacket off, then pushed his legs into a pair of my khakis. I took the bag off his bloody head and shoved it into another bag I would ditch outside. The suit fit a little loosely after I put it on, but that was a welcome relief. Most of my stuff is one size too tight.

  I took half the cash from my wallet, then tossed it onto the table. This corpse could be Z. Z. DelPresto for a while until I sorted things out. Uri Bishop would be my hiding place. After scooping the guy’s things back into the suit pockets, I took a look around my apartment one more time. What a dump. I couldn’t find anything so vital that I needed to take it with me, and that made me feel a little dizzy and sad. I’d come this far in life, but had nothing to show for it. No family, no kids, no prized possessions, no photo albums, no love letters or videotapes. Maybe a few albums that I had kept swearing I was going to switch to CD, but after checking the stack in my closet (Molly Hatchet, April Wine, Journey, The Tubes, a later Cars, a Redd Foxx comedy album), I felt more depressed. I grabbed the trash bag and left quickly.

  Downstairs, I heaved the bag into a dumpster. Maybe I should have written a suicide note. God knows it would have been sincere. The suit felt good but warm in the afternoon heat, the shoes uncomfortable. I wondered how long until they realized the guy wasn’t me. How long before they would find me in his SUV and clothes? Or would they get the link to Nania Woolf first? As I walked in the direction of the where the SUV was parked, something kept sticking in my mind. Something she said on the tape. I patted my pockets, and thankfully had retrieved the tape and player in my rush to escape. What was it she had said—“This is for what you did to Rachel, and what you were going to do to me…” When she first said that about Rachel, I wasn’t thinking about the murder, since I didn’t do that, but about, well, shagging her. That’s what we were doing, fucking like porn stars for a few weeks, ever since Rachel had found me tailing her mother. Took her less than a day to figure me out, which made me question my abilities. She pleaded with me to give it up, that it would only make things worse. Now there’s a sad thought: Maybe she was fucking me for the family’s sake, when all this time I thought she had fallen for me. No, no, she had eyes for me, had to be. It just had to be. But I shook that away. But what did Nania Woolf mean by “what you did to Rachel”? The killing or the sex? And this wasn’t the class of people who usually shelled out their dough to hire a private assassin when the courts would do the same job for free. Sure, I had been released for the moment, but surely the cops had explained to the Woolfs that they had to gather more evidence, and I was sure to be back in prison within days to await my Capital Murder trial.

  I eased into the parking garage where the SUV was parked. Cool shadows and weak florescent lighting gave me a slight shiver. Several big Fords and GMCs, a few high-end Cadillacs and BMWs. I climbed the stairs to the next level as an Acura pulled around the corner, running lights blinding me a second. I crouched on reflex, but the car kept on. My paranoia keeping me too careful, that would be the end of me. I’ve made enough mistakes at full power lately, so I didn’t need to second-guess my instincts. When the car’s engine noise faded, I beeped the auto opener on the key-chain, heard an answering tone two rows over. I waited four minutes, then sprinted for the Montero. A black one with leather seats, all the gadgets. I’d only test driven stuff like this before.

  I hopped into the driver’s seat and locked the doors. The motor cranked right up, smooth like in my dreams. I checked the glove compartment—Thank the Lord for a dumb hit man. Another gun, a .38 S&W snubnose. (If he’d been smart, he would have only had one and left it at the scene. At least I handled the second part for him) Finally, I could feel a little better about my chances against the world. Not much of a gun, but it would kill if you pointed it right.

  As I pulled out of the spot and started down the ramp towards sunlight and, hopefully, freedom, the other problem with Nania’s tape hit me. How could she know what I had been asked to do to her? One call, disguised voice, I turned them down, and yet Nania is tossing it in my face as an excuse to kill me? Something about that was just all wrong. But I needed to talk to a few more people in order to fill in the blanks.

  At a red light, I searched through Bishop’s checkbook again, found a hotel room keycard behind the license. A room at one of the luxury joints in Gulf Shores, the resort town on the Alabama Gulf Coast across the bay. I’d been there many times for fun and business, but had never stayed at this place—Shore Break Towers
, on a beautiful stretch of beach. Way off my price radar.

  It was a start. I could relax, and by the time word of “Z. Z. DelPresto’s death” hit, I guessed some answers would have come to me—or me being Uri. At least as a phone call. Maybe as a big fat wad of cash for a job well done. In the meantime, I needed sleep and a sub sandwich. If I had to be dead, might as well be dead on the beach.

  SIX

  I had one stop to make before I pointed Bishop’s Mitsubishi toward the Gulf.

  Avalon Estates was an upscale neighborhood near the Mobile city limits. The houses were generally two-story, modern. Each home perched semi-regally on an acre patch of green, green grass. New money had developed the little community, and new money had purchased the homes there. Smack dab in the middle was a golf course, and smack dab in the middle of that was the country club which served as the hub of all Avalon social activity. It was here that wives and daughters sipped umbrella drinks and eyed cabana boys while Daddy cruised to the office and pretended to work for an hour before glad-handing his way to a four-martini lunch.

  It just looked like hell with valet parking to me.

  It was at the country club where Pfieffer had first spotted Nania Woolf and decided she’d make a juicy plaything. It was at the long, mahogany bar in the club’s lounge that Pfieffer had given me an envelope full of Franklins to do a dirty job. It was in the club’s cloakroom that Rachel had gone to her knees to show a lazy gumshoe a trick she’d learned at camp.

  But I wasn’t there to visit the club. I was there to take a look at a home. The Woolf home.

  The house looked like some gay architect had gotten drunk and watched Gone with the Wind. The house had big-ass white columns and a front porch you could land a plane on, a row of rocking chairs to make you feel like you were in a lemonade commercial. But the bulk of the house was a faint pink, an attempt at some sort of Caribbean motif maybe. Maybe some people thought it looked nice, but the yellow police tape spoiled the effect, the whole place wrapped up like a macabre birthday present.

  I parked about a half block down, sat for a little while and watched. When I was more or less satisfied it was clear, I went inside.

  The house was hot and stuffy within. Nobody had been there for a couple of days, and the air was off. I schlepped around downstairs avoiding the one place I knew I’d have to investigate. I didn’t have any particular idea what I was searching for, but I was tired of standing around having events fall on top of me. Time to take an active part in deciding my own fate.

  Living room, dining room, kitchen, den, office: nothing.

  I climbed the stairs.

  The Woolfs must have been neat freaks. They had separate bedrooms, both neat as a pin, everything folded in drawers or stacked with drill sergeant precision in the enormous walk-in closets. Maybe they had a staff of maids. Maybe it was Mr. Woolf, and the old cliché about homosexual tidiness was true.

  But I was stalling.

  I found Rachel’s room, exhaled raggedly and went in.

  I searched, but halfway through I started to feel sick, memories of Rachel flooding back. I closed my eyes tight, waited for the feeling to pass, trying not to think of us together in her bed.

  I opened my eyes, still a little sick again after my trip down memory lane. Okay, Z. Z., old Pal. Get your fucking act together. Try to be professional for once in your sad, ineffectual life.

  I went through the room by the numbers, and I found a lot of little girl stuff, things that should have clued me in she was only a kid if I hadn’t been paying so much attention to her ass. A high school yearbook. Stuffed animals. A Ricky Martin poster on the inside of her closet door.

  Nothing.

  I found Robert’s room, started the whole process all over again. Zip. Then I moved on to Nania’s room. Searched. Jackpot.

  I found the little cameras.

  They were far too small to ever be found by accident. Not even the size of my pinky-finger. High tech and expensive. One was in the light fixture directly over the bed. The other had been made to look like part of the windowpane. It pointed right at the bedroom door and caught anyone going in or out. If there were more, they were too well concealed to be found by me.

  I yanked at the one in the light fixture. It came loose a little, and I discovered a braid of wires that ran up and into the ceiling. I found the entrance to the attic in the hall, a trap door, the kind where the ladder slides down when you pulled it open. Up I went.

  The attic was cramped and hot. I bent over to walk. I found the area directly over the Nania’s room. A metal box the size of a cigar box sat there sporting the words Packard Bell. The wires came through the floor and plugged into its side. Two more lines led away from the box, a thick black power cord and what appeared to be a phone line. The power cord was linked to an extension cord which plugged into a nearby outlet. The phone line went all the way to the wall and disappeared downstairs again.

  Naturally, I thought of Pfieffer again right away, millionaire computer whiz, voyeur and prick. He certainly had the know-how to hook all this stuff up. He could watch the whole show on his laptop. But why? Was he so jealous of Nania that he had to keep track of her even in her own house?

  Probably.

  Questions, questions, questions. Later.

  There was still the one place I had to take a look, and I went downstairs, out the kitchen door, out to the carport at the side of the house, lead in my feet, butterflies the size of California Condors in my gut. It was the same route I’d walked the night Rachel was killed, and the scene replayed in my head with graphic horror.

  *

  I knock, but nobody answers. I try the knob, turn it, and the door swings open.

  Maybe Rachel can’t hear my knock. Sometimes she has the music up in her room. Strange taste in tunes, all over the map. Backstreet Boys and Warren Zevon.

  It’s okay, I remind myself. Her folks are out. Nania is tucked in for the night at Pfieffer’s house. Mr. Woolf has a small apartment in town near his office. He’s been staying there a lot lately. And I know my way around. I go upstairs. I’m already tugging at my tie as I push open Rachel’s bedroom door. I feel the warm stirrings of anticipation, blood flowing to all the right places.

  I walk in. Only one light on, the desk lamp. The room is dim, and it takes me half a second to adjust to what I’m seeing. I can’t think right because I’m trapped in a cloud of my own rum fumes.

  She’s not there. Disappointment. We were supposed to meet. Do I have the time wrong?

  Wait. She likes to swim at night. Outside, the backyard. The pool. I retreat back down the stairs, out through the kitchen. The light out here on the carport is bad, but I see a shape sprawled across the metal trashcans. I step forward, intuitive anxiety tightening my chest.

  She’s lying on the cans naked, legs tangled in the trash bags that overflow the cans, young breasts pointing straight up, hair spread out behind her in the garbage like waves of fire.

  But I still don’t get it. I take a step forward. My shoe bumps something, and I bend down to pick it up. A slipper, a feathery pink thing they call a mule. It’s sticky and smears my palm red.

  Oh, hell.

  I approach the pile of trash. Blood soaks everything, seeps from the small of Rachel’s back. It trails down her leg to her foot where it dripped from the heel which hung over the edge of the pile. A thick puddle on the cement. A single drop of blood still hangs from the heel, poised to fall.

  My heart kicks into passing gear, pumps hot rum through my system, up to my brain. My knees go woozy and suddenly I’m on the floor, still clutching the mule, my other hand in the soup of blood on the cement. I pull back, try to stand and end up on my ass. My face is wet. Tears. I wipe at them and Rachel’s blood streaks my face.

  Sobs wrack my body. I sit there a long time.

  When I can make myself, I get up and go to her. I can’t stand to see her in the garbage. I pull her up, only then noticing the knife still in her chest, buried to the hilt. I clamp a fist arou
nd the hilt, ready to pull the damn thing out, but I hesitate. What will happen? Gushing blood?

  Headlights blind me, a car screeching to a halt on the carport. A siren. Camera flash. Men tumble from the car. Grab me. Hands cuffed behind my back. I try to talk, try to explain. I’m crying again and sick. I empty my stomach hot and wet onto the floor of the police car.

  *

  I didn’t search the carport. I didn’t care. I returned to the SUV and left Avalon estates and all the hard reality behind me.

  Forget it, I told myself. Get with the program, Z. Z. old sport.

  I had some detecting to do. I wanted answers.

  And I still needed a meal.

  *

  I let the parking attendant have the SUV and walked into the lobby of the Shore Break Towers. The place was fancy-schmancy. Costumed bellhops scurried to do the bidding of wealthy patrons. The carpet was so thick it felt like walking on a cloud. The chandelier in the main hall hung like the Death Star. The front desk clerk lived to serve me.

  “How can I assist you, sir?” He was well groomed. His nametag gleamed the word Brad at me.

  I handed him the key-card. “Are you sure this thing works? I can’t get in my room. Maybe it’s the wrong one.”

  He swiped the card. His fingers danced over the computer keyboard. “You’re in room 607, Mr. Bishop?”

  “Right.” 607, 607, 607. Thank you, Brad.

  “It seems to be working,” said Brad. “Let me send up a bellhop to check it for you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m probably just swiping it wrong. I’ll try again.”

  “Can we do anything else for you today?”

  “Have a bottle of rum and a roast beef sandwich sent up,” I said. “And an order of onion rings.”

  “Certainly, sir. Anything else?”