The Truth Hurts

by Nancy Pickard

  The Howard County prosecutor and I have been carryin’ on for more than a year, but we only went public a little while ago. Very public, as it turned out, complete with articles in glossy magazines and tabloids, although why they’re so interested in either of us escapes me. People magazine called us “the glamorous best-selling writer and her handsome true crime chaser.” Puhleeze. Yuck. The phone calls I got after that one! I got teased by people I hadn’t heard from since high school. “Marie! Where’d you get him ?” They did everything but squeal oo la la. That was all right. The worst part was that unbeknownst to us at the time, a couple of publications snapped photos that included the children. I can still recall the unpleasant jolt I felt when I opened a magazine and saw that! We would never have approved of it if they’d had the decency to ask first—which is why they didn’t ask first, of course.

  Bringing Arthur and Diana into our relationship is proving to be a slow, delicate process, even without invasive photos appearing all over the world. Franklin’s little boy likes me, judging from the way he flings himself at me whenever he sees me, yelling, “M’re! M’re!” But Diana is holding back, suspicious and resentful of this woman who is not her mom. Whatever limited natural charm I may have, it sure isn’t doing the trick with her; I’m at a loss for ideas about how to win her over, or even if it’s right to try. Maybe we made a mistake in bringing the kids into the middle of our romance. Maybe it was too soon, at least for Diana. On the other hand, it’s possible there will never be a good time for her.

  Sometimes I worry—what if we all get attached to one another—the kids and I—and then Franklin and I break up? I’m already besotted with Arthur. The thought of never seeing that cutie pie again—never mind his father—makes me tear up. As for Diana, all I can really ever do is be myself and let her be however she needs to be toward me. One of us has to be the adult, I guess, and since she’s six years old, that pretty much leaves it to me. Damn.

  “Time,” Franklin advises me. “Patience.”

  I thought I had plenty of time, but now I wonder. . . .

  “No!” I give the overnight bag a fierce zipping up. “You won’t hurt us.”

  My Mercedes is in the shop. Without Deb here to give me a ride, I’ll have to call a taxi. My plan is: I’ll pick up my car and drive on down to the Keys from there. And then Franklin will know what to do. He’ll eat this guy like guacamole with chips. We’ll find this bastard and we’ll add 140 years onto whatever sentence he is already serving.

  10

  Marie

  “You know, Marie,” says the owner of the foreign car shop as he hands over my keys, “the Germans actually do make Mercedes that are younger than you are.”

  “No!” I exclaim, feigning disbelief. “Really, Ernie?”

  Joking with Ernesto Perez outside his garage makes me feel better; gazing into his well-worn face, I feel safer. The day turns almost normal again. The anxiety about “Paulie Barnes” recedes. It’s almost certainly a hoax, I decide again—a prank, much ado about nada.

  Here, just off noisy I-95 near the Bahia airport, the air smells like burnt oil, as it always does. I feel a hot breeze lift the hair at the back of my neck, and I need sunglasses merely to look at my blinding white car. Ernie’s shop qualifies for a drought exemption, which is a good thing, as it would kill this man to turn a dirty car back over to its owner. For just a moment, standing in the sunshine shooting the bull with Ernie, I let myself relax into a seductive illusion, one that Florida weaves better than any other state. It’s the fantasy that here, if nowhere else in the world, the sun always shines, and none of us have anything to worry about except how to find the shortest way to the nearest beach.

  I’m so glad to get my car back; she’s been gone three days.

  In a wild impulse born of a passion for a white Mercedes 280SL that I saw in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, I located a car just like it—a vintage two-door sports coupe with both a hard and soft convertible top. A few months ago, I traded in a sensible sedan to get it. The other price I pay for it is the amusing crap I take from this man who is old enough to be my father and who treats my automotive baby like a pampered grandchild.

  “Most people,” Ernie says now, warming to his theme, “most people, they drive cars that were born after they were. Not that this isn’t a beautiful car, Marie. I certainly agree with you there. I think it’s the prettiest car that comes in here, except for those old Jaguars, but they’re crap, they’re only good for using as caskets or planters.”

  I have to laugh. I’ve known a few owners of those.

  With every passing second, my worries about “Paulie Barnes” feel increasingly surreal. Out here in the real world, the only attack I have to fear is from salt air and pollution on my precious paint job.

  Ernie continues, “And not that I don’t like ordering parts for you—”

  “I guess not, Ernesto,” I shoot back, “since your markups on my replacement parts probably paid for that fancy new sign you’ve got out front.”

  “Not quite,” he says happily, running a finger over his right eyebrow, “but close. What I like best is when we have to order parts to be specially tooled for you because Mercedes doesn’t make them anymore. Then there’s overseas shipping, always a pretty penny, franc, or sou, and we have to add a little bit of a surcharge for handling all that repressive paperwork—”

  “Oh, that is hard on you, Ernesto.”

  “But listen, Marie, I got a bone to pick with you.”

  “You do? I swear I haven’t neglected an oil change.”

  “You’d better not.” Like a magician with a rabbit, he pulls a glossy magazine out from behind his back and then stubs his right forefinger at it. Thank God it’s not the tabloid. “This is you, isn’t it?”

  I make a show of leaning over to peer at the photographs he means.

  “Sure looks like me.”

  “How come you never told me this was you?”

  “What do you mean I never told you?” I tease him. “You know my name. It’s attached to my bills and I pay them. Who else could I be?”

  “But you never told me you’re a famous author!”

  “Oh, right, like I want you to know that, Ernesto. Now you’ll probably charge me even more for spare parts.”

  He rubs his chin, looking judicious. “I don’t think it would be possible for us to charge you any more than we already do.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a relief,” I joke.

  Ernie laughs with all the pleasure of a man who knows he makes a nice net profit, but then he waves the magazine at me again. “It says here you write those true crime books. How can you stand to write about that awful stuff?”

  “You mean, what’s a nice girl like me doing writing about serial killers?”

  “Yeah, why do you do that?”

  I smile at him. “I have to, to be able to afford you, Ernesto.”

  “Right,” he snorts. He points to the magazine pictures again. “This is your boyfriend, huh?”

  I tense, feeling that maybe we have just arrived at the real point of this conversation. “Yep.”

  “People ever give you problems about that, Marie?”

  “You mean because Franklin’s black and I’m not?”

  “No,” he says, scornfully, “I mean because he’s a lawyer. Of course, because he’s black! People ever say things to you, either of you?”

  “Not really,” I tell him, cautiously. “Why? Are you going to?”

  He gives me a disgusted look. “I got a black son-in-law.”

  “You do?”

  That earns me a second disgusted look. “What do you think I am, a bigot, or something? Hell, I got no prejudices, I’ll even work on British cars! Marie, I got two grandchildren with the prettiest skin you ever saw. They look like they were made of butterscotch. I could just eat them up. Wanna see a picture?” At my encouraging nod, Ernie drops the magazine to the ground at his feet and digs into his back pocket for his wallet, from where he flashes a small
photograph of adorable children.

  “Oh, Ernie!” I gush.

  He beams for a second, but then he says, as he puts his wallet back in his pocket, “I just worry sometimes, is everybody going to be nice to them? That doesn’t make me a bigot, does it?”

  “Not in my book, Ernesto. But, listen, is everybody always nice to you?”

  He thinks about that, then laughs. “Hell no.”

  “Anyway, the world’s changing.”

  “You think?”

  As proof, I point at my own picture on the ground. “Looks that way.”

  “Bet you get some nasty mail though.”

  I feel a painful inner flinch, as if he has applied a tiny electrical shock to my heart. In the second afterward, I feel sick. I have to swallow bile before asking, “Why do you say that, Ernesto?”

  His mouth arcs down again, only this time with no humor in it. “World may be changing, but there are still plenty of jerks in it. Those jerks see pictures like that of you and him they might think it’s their job to pull the world back to uglier times when they liked things better. Aw, listen to me, a philosopher with a lug wrench. I don’t know anything about that, but I’ll tell you what I do know, Marie.” He waves a hand over my car without touching it. “Pretty soon you won’t even be able to claim this as an antique car. It’ll be so completely overhauled, not even the doors will be original equipment.”

  “Then I’ll sell it as new.”

  The joke is older than the car, but he chuckles at it anyway.

  Ernie gallantly opens the driver’s door of my little convertible and bows low to me as I drop in behind the wheel. Because of the drought, I haven’t raised either top in weeks. Rain is rare as an empty beach; sometimes I’m afraid that rain has become extinct in Florida, like fifty-eight kinds of tree snail already are. Still, I have to admit that, like a teenager, I love driving with the top down. I even got my hair chopped short so it can ruffle in the hot wind without whipping into my eyes.

  “Happy trails to you, Marie,” Ernie sings, his usual farewell, “until we meet again.”

  “Which probably won’t be long,” I sigh, for his amusement.

  “I’m counting on it.”

  We grin at each other and then I flip him a wave as I pull away.

  “The hell with you, Paulie Barnes,” I declare as I turn my coupe south toward the Keys. I feel better now. I reach over and adjust the visor on the passenger’s side to block the sun that’s now on my right side. “I’m on vacation and you’re not invited. Crawl back under whatever rock you call home.”

  Oh, my car runs so nice. The steering wheel, covered in tan leather, feels so good and familiar under my fingers.

  “Bless you, Ernesto, and all of your grandchildren’s children.”

  Half of Florida must be going to the Keys this weekend, judging from the traffic on the highways. I jockey for a place in the seemingly endless line of vehicles heading south. Franklin, Diana, and Arthur expect me to arrive at our rental condo on Key Largo by four-thirty for an early dinner. From only brief experience, I already know that the nervous systems of children are wired for regular feedings. Delay that and you pay a stiff price in whining. Since their father will be the only adult with them until I arrive, he’ll be the one to suffer if I’m late. Out of sympathy for him and for their stomachs, I choose the straightest—if not the prettiest—shot into the archipelago known as the Florida Keys.

  The one I’m headed for is Key Largo, an island at the top of the scorpion’s tail that ends at Key West. Once on the Keys, which are a series of islands connected by the spectacular Overseas Highway, there are only two roads going north if you need to escape ahurricane, or get to the mainland in a hurry. There’s no hurricane or even a tropical storm in the forecast, unless I count the symbolic “storm” that Paulie Barnes thinks he’s brewing in our lives. In these circumstances, I can’t say that I’m crazy about the idea of going where it can be difficult to leave, but I know that if all else fails, we can always rent a boat and sail away.

  That would mean leaving my car, though. I’d be really pissed about that.

  Traffic is bumper to bumper, a huge clot of rush hour and weekend travelers going nowhere fast. Too late, I realize I made a mistake by leaving my car top down. At this speed there’s no breeze, the heat’s ferocious, and it’s no pleasure to idle behind semitrailers and be deafened by motorcycles streaking between lanes. I feel as if I’m eating exhaust as well as inhaling it. What was I thinking? I wasn’t, apparently. “This is your fault, too,” I grumble to the pseudonymous Paulie Barnes. “You distract me and make me do crazy things.” I reach over to the glove box and fish around until I find an old but edible mint to pop in my mouth and a floppy-brimmed hat to plop on my head to shade my face and the back of my neck.

  Most sane people would hate these conditions, but as a true Florida fanatic, I am no more than slightly annoyed by the state’s drawbacks, by its tourists, its flying cockroaches, its traffic. I’d be willing to put up with much worse than that for the privilege of living in this state where I’m never more than a few hours away from sunshine, or a few miles from the water.

  But even I have to admit it doesn’t look so beautiful here and now.

  Around Homestead, the smoking remnants of brush fires have turned the air acrid and the scenery bleak. Everywhere I look, dead, blackened trees pierce a smoky sky. Only last week, a fifty-mile stretch of both of the roads into the Keys was closed off and on for three days by fires that burned out of control until they sizzled themselves into the Florida Bay.

  While I’m idling behind stalled traffic, I try again to raise Franklin by cell phone.

  Surely they’ve had time to reach Key Largo by now.

  All I get is his recorded voice, so they’re either still in the car going somewhere, or maybe they’re out swimming.

  “They’re fine,” I tell myself.

  But it makes me want to be with him. Right now.

  What could feel safer than being in the company of the Howard County state attorney? Franklin will know what to do next, and he’ll do it. How should I know what to do about a psycho pen pal? I’m just a writer, even if I do know a bit more about crimes and solving them than most writers do. But still, I’m only a writer. Franklin’s the one who will know how to handle this situation: God knows, he’s in charge of practically everything else involving criminal activity in Howard County. Personally, I can’t even imagine bearing so much responsibility for so many people, and yet he carries it off with panache, if not always with pleasure.

  Feeling a strong need to hear his voice, I try his cell number again and again, like a teenager with a crush, but I just keep getting the recorded message.

  I don’t leave one of my own, except to say, “I’m on my way.”

  What else can I say, to a recording machine that he might play out loud for anyone to overhear? “Hi, honey. We’re being stalked by a psycho maniac killer who has threatened your children if I don’t do what he says. See you soon. Bye. Love, Me.”

  Yeah, right. What I want to say to his recording is, “Dammit, where are you guys? Aren’t you there yet?”

  I will not worry about them, I try to convince myself.

  But the rush hour traffic is giving me way too much time to imagine terrible things happening to Franklin and his kids. Plus, I get spooked when strange men in other cars throw appraising glances at me, and then feel foolish when they drive on by. Not only do I have too much time to think, I obviously have way too much imagination. I use it to picture how very silly I’m going to feel when I have to call Deb’s friends and family to say, “I thought we were in danger. I panicked. It was nothing.” I also have too much time to wonder if Ernie was right; maybe there is a racial motive to the E-mails in my suitcase. There hasn’t been a single hint of that in the messages. But, still, maybe that recent spurt of publicity has triggered this nutcase to write to me—

  “Enough already!”

  I feel confident that no one around me will
pay the slightest attention to a woman yelling at herself and slamming her steering wheel with the palm of her hand. If they notice me at all, they’ll think it’s road rage, and avoid me.

  I’m sick of worrying the problem to death in my mind.

  “I need music. A talk show. Something to distract me. Anything.”

  I glance down at the old-fashioned dashboard that Ernie’s guys have delicately reconfigured to accommodate more modern appurtenances, though it horrified the antique car purists among them. Nevertheless, I got my way and now I have a CD player, a pushbutton radio, a tape deck.

  I push On, expecting to get National Public Radio.

  A man’s voice, deep and somber, reverberates out of the speaker closest to me.

  “Cape Fear,” the voice says. “By John D. MacDonald.”

  If the traffic weren’t already at a dead halt, I’d be slamming on my brakes at the shock of hearing those words coming out of nowhere.

  “What?”

  That’s no radio program and it’s no “coincidence,” either.

  Wildly, with my heart beating overtime, I punch buttons, searching for Eject. The radio/tape/CD system in this car operates so that if there’s a cassette in the slot, that’s what comes on when you push On. If there’s a CD in it, that’s what you hear. Otherwise, you get the radio. So this has got to be a tape or a CD that somebody has placed in my car, and they’ve pushed it all the way in so that when I punched On, it would instantly begin to play.

  Damn him, he has jumped out of the bushes again!

  Sure enough, a tape slides out of the slot.

  This time, though, even with my adrenaline racing, Iremember: fingerprints. Before I grab it, I get a tissue out of my purse and use that to protect the surface of the cassette.

  I hold up the tape to try to read its label in the glaring sunshine.

  In my haste, I fumble and nearly drop it.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

  Just then, the traffic begins to move again, and I have to look away from the tape in order to keep up with the other cars. Finally, by maneuvering my steering wheel with one hand and the tape with the other, I’m able to read the label on it.