At Risk wg-1

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Didn’t mean to startle you.” He smiles, goes to the couch, and kisses her cheek.

  “My darling,” she says, clasping his hands.

  He picks up the remote control from a table covered with more crystals and magical trinkets and stones and her deck of tarot cards. He turns off the TV and makes his usual assessment. Nana looks all right, her dark eyes alert and bright in her sharp-featured face, a face very smooth for her age, beautiful once, her long, white hair piled on top of her head. She’s wearing her usual silver jewelry, bracelets practically up to her elbows, and rings and necklaces, and the blaze-orange UT football sweatshirt he sent her a few weeks ago. She never fails to put on something he gave her when she knows she’ll see him. She always seems to know. He doesn’t have to tell her.

  “You didn’t have your alarm on,” he says, opening his gym bag, setting jars of sourwood honey, barbecue sauce, and bread-and-butter pickles on the coffee table.

  “I have my wind chimes, darling.”

  It occurs to him that he left the bottle of bourbon in the faculty club cloakroom. He didn’t remember, and Lamont didn’t notice that he didn’t have it when they left. That figures.

  “What did you bring me?” Nana is asking.

  “I don’t pay the alarm company all that money for wind chimes. Some local stuff, made right there in Tennessee. If you’d rather have moonshine, I’ll bring that next time,” he teases, settling in a worn-out chair she keeps covered in a purple afghan one of her clients crocheted for her a few years back.

  She picks up her cards and says, “What’s this about money?”

  “Money?” He frowns. “Now don’t go doing your juju on me, Nana.”

  “Something about money. You were just doing something that had to do with money.”

  He thinks of “Money” Monique Lamont.

  “That boss lady of yours, I suppose.” She slowly shuffles through her cards, her way of having a conversation, and she places a moon card next to her on the couch. “You watch out for that one. Illusions and madness or poetry and visions. You get to choose.”

  “How are you feeling? You eating something besides whatever people bring you?”

  People give her food for readings, give her all sorts of things, whatever they can afford.

  She places another card faceup on the sofa, this one a robed man carrying a lantern, and the rain has picked up again, sounds like a drumroll, tree branches scraping against window glass, wind chimes a distant, frantic clanging.

  “What did she want with you?” his grandmother says. “That’s who you were with tonight.”

  “Nothing for you to worry about. The good thing is, I get to see you.”

  “She keeps things hidden behind a curtain, very troublesome things, this high priestess in your life.” She turns another card faceup, this one the colorful image of a man hanging by one foot from a tree, coins falling out of his pockets.

  “Nana.” He sighs. “She’s the DA, a politician. She’s not a high priestess and I don’t consider her in my life.”

  “Oh, she’s in it, all right,” his grandmother says, looking keenly at him. “There’s someone else. I’m seeing a man in scarlet. Ha! That one goes in the freezer right away!”

  His grandmother’s way of taking care of destructive people is to write their names or descriptions on scraps of paper and tuck them in the freezer. Clients pay good money to have her consign their enemies to her old Frigidaire, and the last time he checked, her freezer looked like the inside of a paper-shredder basket. Win’s phone vibrates and he removes it from his jacket pocket, looks at the display, the number blocked.

  “Excuse me,” he says, getting up, moving closer to a window, rain flailing the glass.

  “Is this Winston Garano?” a man asks in a voice that is obviously disguised, a really bad fake accent that almost sounds British.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I think you might want to have a coffee with me, Davis Square, the Diesel Café, where all the freaks and fags hang out. It’s open late.”

  “Let’s start with you telling me who you are.”

  He watches his grandmother shuffle through more tarot cards, placing them faceup on the table, thoughtful and at ease with them as if they are old friends.

  “Not over the phone,” the man says.

  The murdered old woman suddenly enters Win’s mind. He imagines her purplish-blue swollen face, the huge, dark clots on the underside of her scalp, and the holes punched into her skull, bits of bone driven into her brain. He imagines her pitiful, brutalized body on a cold steel autopsy table, doesn’t know why he’s suddenly thinking about her, tries to push her away.

  “I don’t meet strangers for coffee when they don’t tell me who they are or what they want,” he says into the phone.

  “Vivian Finlay ring a bell? I’m pretty sure you want to talk to me.”

  “I’m not seeing any reason at all why I should talk to you,” Win says as his grandmother sits calmly on the sofa, going through cards, placing another one faceup, this one red and white with a pentacle and a sword.

  “Midnight. Be there.” The man ends the call.

  “Nana, I’ve got to go out for a while,” Win says, pocketing his phone, hesitating by the rain-splattered window, getting one of his feelings, the wind chimes a discordant banging.

  “Watch out for that one,” she says, picking another card.

  “Your car running?”

  Sometimes she forgets to put gas in it, and not even divine intervention keeps the engine from quitting.

  “Was last time I drove it. Who’s the man in scarlet? You find that out, you tell me. You pay attention to the numbers.”

  “What numbers?”

  “The ones coming up. Pay attention.”

  “Keep your doors locked, Nana,” he says. “I’m setting the alarm.”

  Her 1989 Buick with its peeling vinyl top and rainbow bumper stickers and beaded dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror is parked behind the house beneath the basketball hoop that’s been rusting on its pole since he was a boy. The engine resists, finally gives itself up, and he backs all the way out to the street because there is no room to turn around. His headlights flash in the eyes of a dog wandering along the roadside.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Win says loudly as he stops the car and gets out.

  “Miss Dog, what’cha doing out here, girl?” he says to the poor, wet dog. “Come here. It’s me, come on, come on, that’s a good girl.”

  Miss Dog, part beagle, part shepherd, part deaf, part blind, a name as stupid as her owner, creeps forward, sniffs Win’s hand, remembers him, wags her tail. He strokes her wet, dirty fur, picks her up, and puts her in the front seat, massaging her neck as he drives her to a run-down house two blocks away. He carries her to the front door, bangs on it for a long time.

  Finally, the woman inside yells, “Who is it?”

  “I’ve got Miss Dog again!” Win yells back to her.

  The door opens, the ugly, fat woman on the other side wearing a shapeless pink robe, has no bottom teeth, stinks like cigarettes. She turns on the porch light, blinks in the glare, looks past him to Nana’s Buick parked on the street, never seems to remember the car or him. Win gently puts down Miss Dog and she darts inside the house, gets away from the ungrateful sloth as fast as she can.

  “I told you, she’s going to get hit by a car,” Win warns. “What’s the matter with you? This is how many times I’ve had to bring her home because she’s wandering the damn street?”

  “What am I supposed to do. I let her out to potty, she doesn’t come back. Then he came over tonight, left the door open, not that he’s supposed to be here. You can blame him. Kicks at her, mean as a snake, leaves the door open on purpose so she’ll get out because that stupid dog gets killed it will break Suzy’s heart.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “My damn son-in-law the police keep arresting.”

  Win thinks he might know who she’s talking about, has
seen him in the area, drives a white pickup.

  “And you let him on the property?” Win says severely to her.

  “Just try to stop him. He ain’t afraid of no one, nohow. It’s not me who’s got the restraining order.”

  “You call the cops when he showed up earlier?”

  “No point in it.”

  Through the open door, Win can see Miss Dog flat on the floor, cowering under a chair.

  “How about I buy her from you,” Win says.

  “There’s no amount of money,” she retorts. “I love that dog.”

  “I’ll give you fifty dollars.”

  “Can’t put a price on love,” she wavers.

  “Sixty,” he says, and that’s all the cash he’s got, his checkbook in Knoxville.

  “No sir”—she’s thinking hard about it—“my love for her’s worth a whole lot more than that.”

  4

  Two tufts kids with green hair and tattoos clack pool balls not far from Win’s table. He watches them disdainfully.

  Maybe he isn’t from money, didn’t get sixteen hundred on his SATs or compose a symphony or build a robot, but at least when he applied to the schools of his dreams, he was respectful enough to buy a khaki suit (on sale) and new shoes (also on sale) and get a haircut (he had a five-dollar coupon) in the event he was invited by the dean of admissions to tour the campus and talk about what he wanted in life, which was to become a scholar and poet like his father, or maybe a lawyer. Win was never called for a campus tour or an interview. All he got were boilerplate letters that regretted to inform him…

  He watches everything and everybody inside the Diesel Café, looking for a man he is supposed to meet about a murder that happened twenty years ago in Tennessee. It is almost midnight, still raining, and Win sits at his small table, sipping cappuccino, watching scruffy students with their horrible hair and grungy clothes and coffees and laptops, watching the front door, his temper heating up by the moment. At quarter past midnight, he angrily gets up from the table as some pimple-faced, thinks-he’s-an-Einstein punk clumsily racks pool balls, talking loud and fast to his girlfriend, both of them oblivious, self-consumed, hyped up on something, maybe ephedrine.

  “No there isn’t,” the girl is saying. “There’s no such word as sodomitical.”

  “The Portrait of Dorian Gray was called a sodomitical book.” Clack. “In some of the reviews back then.” A striped ball wobbles into a pocket.

  “It’s Picture of Dorian Gray, not Portrait, genius,” Win says to the pedantic, body-pierced punk now twirling the pool cue like a baton. “And it was called a sodomitical book during Oscar Wilde’s trial, not in book reviews.”

  “Whatever.”

  Win starts to walk off, catches mulatto fag.

  He walks back, grabs the pool cue out of the punk’s hands, says, “My turn to break.” He snaps the pool cue in half over his knee. “Now then. You said something to me?”

  “I didn’t say anything!” the punk exclaims, glassy eyes huge.

  Win tosses the broken halves of the pool cue on top of the table, strides off, ignores the girl behind the counter, who has been staring at him ever since he got here. She’s blasting steam into a big coffee cup and says excuse me as he reaches for the door. Sir? she calls out above the noise of the espresso machine.

  He walks over to the counter and says, “Don’t worry. I’ll pay for it.” He pulls a few bills out of his wallet.

  She doesn’t seem interested in his pool-hall vandalism, says, “Are you Detective Geronimo?”

  “Where’d you get a name like that?”

  “I take that as a yes,” she replies, reaching below the counter, retrieving an envelope, handing it to him. “This guy came in earlier, asked me to give this to you when you were about to leave.”

  “How much earlier?” He slips the envelope into a pocket, mindful of who might be watching.

  “Maybe a couple hours.”

  So the man with the fake accent called Win after the letter was dropped off here, never intended on a meeting.

  “What did he look like?” Win asks.

  “Nothing special, kind of old. Had on tinted glasses, a big trench coat. And a scarf.”

  “A scarf this time of year?”

  “Shiny, silky. Sort of a deep red.”

  “Of course.” A man in scarlet, just like Nana said.

  Win walks out into the rain, and the dampness of the night makes him feel sticky and wilted. His grandmother’s car is a dark-finned hulk on Summer Street, in front of the Rosebud Diner, and he walks along the wet pavement, looking around, wondering if the man in scarlet is nearby, watching. He unlocks the car, opens the glove box, finds a flashlight and a stack of napkins from Dunkin’ Donuts, wraps several of them around his hands, and slits open the envelope with one of the keys dangling from the steering column. He slips out a folded piece of lined paper, reads what’s neatly printed on it in black ink.

  You’re the one AT RISK, half-breed.

  He dials Lamont’s home number and she doesn’t answer. He tries her cell phone. She doesn’t answer. He doesn’t leave a message, changes his mind and tries again, and she answers this time.

  “Hello?” Her voice doesn’t have its usual energy.

  “You want to tell me what the hell’s going on!” He cranks the engine.

  “No need to be upset with me,” she weirdly says, sounds strained, something off about her.

  “Some wacko with a wacko fake accent just called me about the Finlay case. What a coincidence. Somehow the guy has my cell-phone number, another amazing coincidence, and coincidentally said he’d meet me and didn’t show up, left me a threatening note. Who the hell have you been talking to? You send out a press release or something…?”

  “This morning,” she replies, and a muffled male voice in the background says something Win can’t make out.

  “This morning? Before I even got to town! And you couldn’t bother to tell me?” he exclaims.

  “That’s fine,” her non sequitur follows.

  “It’s not fine!”

  The person Lamont is with — some man at almost one o’clock in the morning — says something and she abruptly ends the call, and Win sits in the dark inside his grandmother’s old Buick staring at the lined piece of paper in his napkin-wrapped hands. His heart pounds so hard he can feel it in his neck. Lamont alerted the media about a case that’s now supposed to be his and didn’t ask his permission or even bother telling him. She can take her At Risk shit and shove it.

  I quit.

  See what she does when he tells her that.

  I quit!

  He has no idea where to look for her. She didn’t answer her home phone, only her cell phone. So she probably isn’t home. Well, it’s hard to say. He decides to cruise past her Cambridge house anyway. In case she’s there. The hell with who else might be there, and he wonders who Lamont sleeps with, if she’s one of these alpha-dog women who doesn’t like sex or maybe the opposite. Maybe she’s a piranha, eats her lovers to the bone.

  He roars away from the curb, fishtails — damn rear-wheel drive — skids on the slick pavement, and the windshield wipers drag loudly across the glass, driving him crazy because he’s already feeling crazy, as if he’s in the middle of something crazy that he was crazy to get in the middle of, dammit. He should have refused to fly back up here, should have stayed in Tennessee. It’s late to call Sykes. It’s rude. He’s always doing this to her and she always lets him. She won’t mind, and he enters her number, remembering it’s Tuesday night, and usually on Tuesday nights at this late hour, the two of them are dressed like preppies, listening to jazz at Forty-Six-Twenty, drinking fruit-infused martinis and talking.

  * * *

  “Hey gorgeous,” Win says. “Don’t kill me.”

  “Figures the one time I was actually sleeping,” says Sykes, an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and an insomniac, her hormones hateful these days.

  She sits up in bed, doesn’t bother with
the lamp. For the past six weeks she has spent a lot of time talking to Win on the phone, in bed in the dark, alone, wondering what it would be like to talk to him in bed, in the dark, in person. She listens for her roommate through the wall, doesn’t want to wake her up. The funny thing is, when Sykes drove Win to the Knoxville airport, she said to him, Well, for once our roommates will get a full night’s sleep. Since she and Win began their training at the National Forensic Academy, they’ve talked the nights away, and since the student apartments don’t have thick walls, their roommates get the raw end of that deal.

  “I think you miss me,” Sykes says, joking but hoping it’s true.

  “Need you to do something,” Win says.

  “Are you all right?” She switches on the lamp.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine. What’s going on?” She gets out of bed, stares at herself in the mirror over the dresser.

  “Listen. An old lady was murdered in Knoxville twenty years ago, Vivian Finlay. Sequoyah Hills.”

  “Let’s start with why the sudden interest.”

  “Something damn weird’s going on. You were in Tennessee back then. Maybe you remember the case.”

  Sykes was in Tennessee, all right, yet another reminder of her age, and she looks at herself in the mirror, her silvery blond hair sticking up everywhere, like Amadeus is the way Win once described it. If you saw the movie, he said. She hadn’t.

  “I vaguely recall the case,” she is saying. “Rich widow, someone broke in. An unbelievable thing to happen in Sequoyah Hills in the middle of the day.”

  The mirror is especially unkind at this hour. Her eyes are puffy. Too much beer. She doesn’t know why Win likes her so much, why he doesn’t seem to see her the same way she does, maybe sees her the way she used to be, twenty years ago when she had creamy skin and big blue eyes, a tight, round butt, and perky boobs, a body that flipped the finger at gravity until she turned forty and gravity flipped the finger back.

  “I need the original police file,” he is saying over the phone.

  “By chance you got the case number?” Sykes asks.

  “Only the autopsy case number. Just microfilm print-outs from that, no scene photos, no nothing. Got to have that file too if we can ever find it in the Bermuda Triangle of storage. You know, when the old morgue moved. Or at least Lamont said it did. I’m assuming she’s right.”