Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 01 - Last Call

by Rob Cornell

  “I will make sure you are not blamed for this,” I said. “I will find who did it.”

  “I already know who did it, motherfucker.” He bit his lip, fighting tears back. “Seen the bitch pull out of my driveway right as I was coming down the street.”

  I lowered my hand, not sure I heard him right.

  “You saw who did this?”

  “Didn’t see her do it, but like I said, I saw her drive away in her little Neon. Thought she might have been Jehovah’s Witness or some shit until I came inside.”

  My chest seemed to implode.

  “A white Neon?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sam said. “They’ll think I did it, think I made the blonde bitch up, and they’ll put me away.”

  “No they won’t.” My heart beat so hard it hurt. “I have pictures of this woman.”

  Chapter 19

  Sam and I sat at his kitchen table. The door to the bedroom was closed. The shotgun lay on the coffee table in the living room. I had returned my own gun to the small of my back in my belt loop. My hair was wet from rinsing the cut on my scalp under the kitchen faucet until the bleeding had stopped.

  “You sure it’s the same woman?” Sam asked.

  “You sure about your description?”

  “I told you, she pulled out of the driveway right as I turned the corner. Bitch looked right at me when I passed her, like she knew where I was going and wanted to rub it in.”

  “Then I’m pretty damn sure it’s the same woman.”

  I stared at the table and drew my thoughts out on its surface, trying to see the connection between Doug’s supposed mistress and Sam’s girlfriend.

  “What does it mean?” Sam asked.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “This woman is the chick Autumn’s husband was cheating with?”

  “That’s what I used to think.”

  “Why would she kill Eliza?”

  Eliza. It was the first time Sam had said her name.

  “I don’t think she meant to kill Eliza.” The words rolled out my mouth before thought, but once said, my brain caught up. “If someone came here not knowing about your change …”

  Sam propped his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. “She could have thought Eliza was me.”

  My gaze never left the table. I imagined complicated diagrams that meant nothing. I sensed a connection right in front of me, but my mind walked around it, not ready to deal, or not willing.

  “This… none of this makes sense anymore.”

  We both fell silent. In the silence, I finally found the connection.

  “What?” Sam asked.

  I looked up from the table.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You didn’t have to. There’s a vein in your forehead about to pop.”

  I stood too fast and knocked my chair over. “I have to go.”

  Sam glanced toward the closed bedroom door. “What about Eliza?”

  “You’re going to have to disappear for a while.”

  “I can’t just leave her in there.”

  “You don’t have a choice. There’s nothing else I can do.”

  Sam grabbed my wrist. “I’ve got nowhere to go. Eliza was all I had.”

  I tried to push away the idea that came to mind. Hadn’t I stuck my neck out far enough? Wasn’t it time I thought about myself, my own safety? But how could I abandon Sam after what he’d been through? Especially when my investigation may have led a killer to his door.

  I pulled my wrist free from Sam’s grip and dug my keys out of my pocket. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” I slid one key off the ring. “You have a car?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Tank full?”

  “It’s full.”

  I offered him the key.

  “I have a cabin about an hour and a half north of here. It’s a good place to lay low. You stick there and I’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible.”

  Sam stared at the key, eyes narrowed. “You’ll do this for me?”

  “Why not?” I said. “The place is finally getting some use.”

  He took the key. I drew him a map showing how to get to the cabin.

  After Sam left, I searched the trailer. The lock on the door appeared jimmied, but other than that I found nothing of interest. I wiped any surfaces I may have touched with some paper towel and spray cleaner I found under the kitchen sink. A half an hour later I dialed nine-one-one on Sam’s phone, left it off the hook without saying anything, and exited the trailer.

  I drove north for a handful of miles, pulled into a fast food burger joint, stalked into the men’s bathroom, locked myself in a stall, dropped to my knees in front of the toilet, and threw up. My stomach was empty from not eating for almost a day straight, so I got to the dry heaves pretty quickly.

  When I finished, I sat on the stall floor trembling. I lost track of time. I didn’t hear anyone come in or out of the restroom until eventually someone pounded on the stall door.

  “Are you all right in there?”

  I snapped out of my trance, stood, brushed off the seat of my jeans. When I opened the stall door, a short man with squinty eyes stared in. His eyes went wide at the sight of me. I hadn’t looked in a mirror recently, but I probably still had blood crusted around my ear from my cut scalp, and over the past week my face had become an anthology of bruises.

  The man wore a red and white striped uniform with the restaurant’s logo embroidered on the front pocket of his shirt. His name badge labeled him as Ike.

  “Got a couple complaints you’ve been taking up the stall a long time. Bathroom’s for paying customer’s only.”

  I pulled out my wallet, withdrew two hundred dollar bills, and tucked them into Ike’s shirt pocket.

  “I’ve paid.”

  He clapped a hand over his pocket as if he meant to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “Now fuck off,” I said.

  He hurried out the door without another word.

  I rinsed my mouth out at the sink, splashed cold water on my face, and looked at myself in the mirror. I did not recognize the bruised, bloody, and frightened face staring back at me.

  “I do not want to know what happened to you.”

  I stood on Sheila’s front porch. Though it was mid-afternoon, enough rain clouds had gathered to trick her automatic porch lights into turning on as if it were night. She peered out at me through her screen door.

  I noticed the luggage gathered nearby.

  “You’re really leaving, huh?”

  “I told you I was.” She glanced down at the luggage. “My flight leaves in a few hours.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I came by. Can I come in?”

  “You won’t talk me out of leaving.”

  “This bruise here?” I pointed at the approximate place on my face where Sam had smashed the butt of his shotgun. “I talked the person who gave it to me out of committing suicide.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “I wish I could convince myself you are joking.”

  “It’s been one hell of a week.”

  She pushed the door open and waved me inside.

  I stepped around her luggage, and came upon a stack of cardboard boxes in the center of the living room. Most were taped closed and labeled with black marker. One box sat by itself, away from the stack, and I read my own name written on the side.

  I pointed at it. “Shouldn’t I be the one giving you a going away present?”

  “It isn’t a gift. The contents belong to you.”

  I gave her a confused look.

  She fluttered a hand toward the box. “Go on and satisfy your curiosity. But don’t get all weepy on me. There’s no hidden meaning.”

  The box was about the size of an average television. Rather than taping the box, Sheila had tucked each of the flaps under the other to keep it closed. I crouched next to it and, without any idea what to expect, pulled open the flaps, revealing the contents.

  I looked from th
e box to Sheila.

  “Now I have to ask if you’re joking?”

  “While in some circles it might look funny, trust that I did not intend to make you laugh.”

  “This is all from the bar?” The entire box held nothing but unopened bottles of liquor. “You took all of this?”

  “Be glad that I didn’t drink it all.”

  “You’d be dead if you tried.” I counted the bottles. Twenty-three in all. “Did you think you would need all this?”

  “Thinking had nothing to do with it.” Gazing at the box, Sheila wiped her lips with her fingertips. “There’s another I packed in the kitchen. It was too heavy for me to lift.”

  I stood. “What’s happened, Sheila?”

  “A great many things.”

  “Everything feels like it’s crumbling.”

  She looked down at the box by my feet. “Don’t you think we brought much of this on ourselves?”

  Through an open window I heard wind chimes jingling, their song growing frantic as the wind picked up. The smells of rain and booze met in the living room. Since the bottles in the box were all closed, I had to assume the alcohol scent came from Sheila.

  “You said there was no hidden message behind the box’s contents. That mean you’re still drinking?”

  “Like it’s going out of style.”

  “Then you should stay—”

  “Don’t.” Sheila lifted a hand, palm out. “Don’t try and save me too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means.”

  Autumn, of course. I bowed my head, trying to think of what to say next. The need to convince her to stay welled up inside me like a sob. Talking her out of leaving seemed like the right thing to do, the thing my parents would have wanted me to do. But Sheila wouldn’t even listen.

  “When do you have to leave?” I asked.

  “These days they say you should arrive two hours before departure. I’m not sure I can stand the airport for that long.”

  “You want me to give you a lift?”

  Her gaze dropped to the box again. “Will you close that for me please?”

  I tucked the flaps back how I found them.

  “And no,” she continued, “I’ve already called a taxi.”

  “Call them back and cancel.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “Trouble me? Jesus, Sheila. Things may have been strained between us lately, but you… I have an aunt and uncle floating around somewhere in New York, I think, but you’re really the only… you know what I mean. Don’t make me get all cheesy here.”

  A crack of thunder startled us both silent.

  “I know what you mean,” Sheila said after a moment. “But I don’t want to stretch it out, make it more difficult.”

  I kicked the box of booze. The bottles inside rattled and clinked. “You suck, you know that?”

  She smiled. “Why don’t we sit out on the porch swing and watch the storm come in? You remember doing that as a kid?”

  With so many acres between houses, sometimes you could watch the rain close in like a gray curtain pulled across the horizon. I used to reach my hand out beyond the porch awning and, as the storm neared, try to guess when I’d feel the first drop of rain. A few stray drops would kiss my skin right before the full force of the storm rolled over the house. I would yank my hand back under cover and sit between Sheila and my mother on the porch swing while rain poured down around us, the sound like a stampede on the roof.

  “For fifteen years I thought every memory I had of home was a bad one,” I said. “Now I’m back, and I keep remembering times where everything seemed all right. We weren’t dysfunctional or anything. They just didn’t understand that I was different from them.” I laughed. “You think maybe I overreacted?”

  “Let’s sit outside.”

  We sat on the porch swing. The chains needed oiling and squeaked as we gently rocked forward and back. A split in the storm clouds suggested we might not get any rain after all.

  Sheila looked off at the horizon. “Tell me about this mess you’ve gotten into.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

  “I’m willing to listen, if you agree to stop trying to get me to stay.”

  “That’s a shitty deal.” I threw up my hands, admitting defeat. “You ready for this?”

  I know I’d told her bits of it here and there, but I couldn’t remember what. And after finding Sam’s girlfriend dead and learning Doug’s mystery woman was involved, much of the context had changed as well. So I started from the beginning, with Autumn coming into the High Note, my following Doug and taking pictures of the woman, answering Autumn’s call and finding Doug dead. I even told her about the gas station owner with the huge gun. As I laid it out for her, I looked for new angles, thinking I might have missed something, but by the time I got to the part about Sam’s girlfriend, I was more confused than when I started. Only one thing remained constant.

  “The only connection between Sam and this woman,” I said, “is Autumn. I keep coming back to that, but I don’t know what it means.”

  I caught my breath, my voice hoarse from talking for so long. Sheila waited, sensing I had more to say.

  “Obviously, this woman is more than meets the eye. I should have figured something was up by the way she took Doug down, and how she lost me when I tried to tail her, like she knew what she was doing.”

  “How could you know?” Sheila asked.

  “At the very least, she was a loose end. I should have done more to try to find her. She’s probably the one that killed Doug, though I have no idea why? I keep thinking maybe Autumn hired her to kill Doug. But then wouldn’t she have made sure she had an alibi. No point in hiring a hit ma—woman if you incriminate yourself.”

  “She could have made a mistake.”

  “She had a perfect alibi waiting for her. She was supposed to be at some yoga class that night. Why not go, make sure you’re around people who can vouch for you? Besides, why would Doug meet with the person hired to kill him? See? I keep getting twisted up every time I try to follow the connections. Nothing makes sense.”

  “There has to be a right answer. There’s some sense to be found.”

  I puffed my cheeks and blew out the air. “I’ll be damned if I see it.”

  Sheila started to speak, stopped, and shook her head laughing.

  “What?”

  “You’ll think I’m an old windbag.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Whenever your mother used to get stuck working on her lyrics, she would always moan and groan to me how awful of a songwriter she was, how foolish she was to think she could do this for a living. Mind you, she kept doing this long after she’d made several millions with your father.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Anyway, after boosting her ego a little with examples of all her success, I would always tell her to go back to the beginning. It’s what I did during my short stint as a defense attorney—”

  “You were a defense attorney?”

  “Long before you were born, Ridley.” She patted my knee. “But reexamining the beginning seems to tell you something about what comes later. I think it works because without a beginning, there’s nothing. A beginning holds in it all that follows.”

  “It sounds nice,” I said. “But I’m not sure where to find the beginning.”

  “Sometimes there’s more than one. Where did this all begin for you?”

  “I guess when Autumn showed up at the High Note.”

  Sheila planted her feet on the porch and stopped the swing. “Have you ever considered why, out of all the options at her disposal, she chose you to investigate her husband?”

  I opened my mouth, but Sheila cut me off.

  “Before you answer, think. It’s clear your relationship was never properly resolved. Coming to you could only complicate things.”

  “Maybe she regretted marrying Doug. Maybe she wanted to get back with me. I
s that what you want to hear?”

  “If that’s the case, if she wanted to be with you, why did she leave you in the first place?”

  “She said …” I stopped. Had Autumn ever given me a straight answer? I didn’t remember one.

  Reading my thoughts, Sheila said, “Perhaps you should ask her.”

  My head itched and I went to scratch it, forgetting about my cut scalp until the claw of pain through my skull reminded me. Beads of light swirled across my vision.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, wincing, “but what does any of this have to do with Doug’s killer?”

  “Maybe nothing. All I’m saying is that you should go back to the beginning.” She looked up, hearing the tires on the dirt drive before I did. “My taxi.”

  The cab crept up the drive slower than necessary, as if the driver wasn’t used to anything but paved roads. A cement approach led from the porch to the driveway, and he pulled up right to the approach and honked his horn even though it was obvious we could see him.

  “Mr. Patience,” I said.

  Sheila’s eyes watered as she scanned the horizon. “Some city folk can’t stand all this space.”

  She took my hand and turned my palm up. Next thing I knew, I had a set of keys in my hand, and Sheila closed my fingers around them.

  “Take care of the house until I find a buyer, will you?”

  My stomach dropped. I realized she had kept me talking until it was too late to continue the debate over her leaving.

  “You still suck,” I said.

  The cabbie honked again.

  Sheila went inside and retrieved her luggage, tugging along one bag on wheels behind her and carting another in her free hand. She looked at me after struggling out onto the porch.

  “Aren’t you going to be a gentleman and help me with my bags?”

  I stayed seated on the swing, crossed my arms. “You want to leave, you’re on your own.”

  Sheila laughed, set her bags down, and came over to me. “You’ll at least say goodbye.”

  I stood, and we hugged, Sheila rubbing my back. The reek of alcohol oozed from her pores, but I ignored it. Nothing I said now would change a damn thing.

  “I’ll miss you,” I said.

  “Even all my nagging?” She held me at arm’s length, smiled with her mouth but not her eyes. “What about you? I know you have things here yet to settle. When all that is done with, have you decided what you’ll do?”