by Jeff Abbott
‘I thought judges were all supposed to be big poker players. You don’t got a poker face. I can tell by the way you look at me you think Pete and I are trash.’
‘I don’t have a negative opinion of you.’ He paused. ‘I want to help you.’
She unfolded and refolded her tissue. ‘Who found the body?’
‘A young woman. We think she’s a runaway, although she’s apparently a few days past eighteen, so I guess you turn into a vagrant then. Um, I saw a video camera set up in the bedroom.’ She could draw her own conclusions, Whit supposed.
‘That’s not how you make a movie,’ she snapped. ‘You got at least two cameras, not just one, you got better lights than you’d have on that boat, you got a makeup girl. No way was Pete making a movie with that little-ass camera. He was professional.’
‘But moving on to a new career?’
‘Porn had worn him out. It’s hard work, you know. He wanted to come home to research and write this script. And he wanted me to direct it once it was done.’
‘So he gave you a chance to make a real movie?’
Her stare was acidic. ‘Excuse me. Have you seen my movies? They are real movies, butthead. I’m the Spielberg of porn. I have plots and characterization and depth and everything.’
Whit suspected it was the everything part that raked in the profits. ‘But this film about his brother had no adult-movie elements,’ he said. ‘Right?’
‘Of course not. I wanted to try a different kind of project. You know, that’s allowed if you’re creative. Shakespeare wrote comedies and tragedies. It’s only small minds that jam you into one freaking hole forever.’ She turned back to the window. ‘So where are you dumping me after I give this statement?’
‘I suppose Pete’s mother isn’t an option,’ Whit ventured.
‘She’d cut my throat in my sleep and bathe in the blood.’
‘You’re sure you don’t have any friends in town?’ Whit asked.
‘I don’t want any friends here, thank you kindly.’
‘Then I guess we’ll get you to a motel. You got several choices: the Excellent, which isn’t, the Port Leo Inn, the Gulf Breeze. A bunch of B and Bs. There’s also a Best Western and a Marriott Suites, too.’
‘I can’t believe Pete is dead and I have to stay at a Best Western.’ She managed a sniffle and a slight smile, friendlier than just a moment ago. ‘Any room at your inn? I’m awful quiet and I don’t take up much space.’
‘You don’t want to stay with me. I’m a dork who lives with his dad,’ he said.
‘But at the Best Western I’ll be alone. I don’t do alone real well. I need a Plan B.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You got a phone in here?’
‘Yeah, a cell phone. Here.’ Whit dug among the tapes and CDs in the storage unit between the seats and handed her the phone. He clicked on the interior light so she could see to dial. Another bit of brightness caught his eye. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a pair of headlights jouncing, rapidly gaining on them.
Velvet dialed and waited. ‘Anson? Oh, good, you’re in town. Huh? Oh, okay. This is Velvet. Let me talk to Junior.’ A pause. ‘Junior, listen. I got real bad news. Pete’s dead.’ A longer pause. ‘I’m not kidding. He was shot. I’m okay. I’m holding up. I cried for a bit and now I am getting ready to cry some more. Then I’m gonna kick me some police ass if they keep saying he killed himself.’
Whit ran through his mental Rolodex of Port Leo, trying to place an Anson or a Junior. Velvet had mentioned a Junior Deloache as the boat’s owner.
‘I’m not leaving town till we know what happened. Judge Mosley says there’s gonna be an inquest. What? I gotta go to the police station. Pete was on your boat and it’s a crime scene and I’m booted. So I need a place to crash. Can I stay at your condo?’ She listened and hung her head slightly. ‘No, I don’t know when you get your stupid boat back. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, sure, I understand. Sure. I’ll just grab me a hotel room. Yeah, thanks for the generosity.’ She clicked off the phone. ‘Those bags.’
Whit glanced in the rearview mirror. The headlights behind grew larger.
‘No luck?’ he asked.
‘I hate that greasy little Junior Deloache. He’s this piggy-eyed stain, thinks he’s a stud. Yeah, with a dick stretcher and a case of Viagra, maybe.’ She shrugged. ‘I can’t get into their condo. They’re in Houston but are coming down tomorrow, so I guess I’ll hotel it.’
‘I thought you called a local number.’
‘It’s call-forwarding.’ She blinked at the bright headlights that dazzled behind them. The lights began to flash from dim to bright and dim again. ‘Somebody’s in a tear-ass hurry.’
Whit glanced back in the mirror. ‘He can go around me if he wants.’ The car stayed uncomfortably close. Then the lights flashed, dim, bright, dim.
‘He wants you to pull over.’ Velvet handed Whit the phone in the headlights’ glare.
‘No, thanks.’ Whit floored the accelerator. He pulled away from the car, and the pursuer dropped back dramatically to a more reasonable speed.
‘Asshole,’ Velvet commented. Whit checked the rearview mirror several seconds later and found the car was nearly gone.
‘My office is right across from the police station,’ Whit said. ‘I can give you a ride to the hotel after you give your statement.’
Velvet misunderstood his charity. ‘Look, I don’t do thank-you fucks just because someone shows common human decency.’
‘I can promise you I wasn’t asking for one.’
‘Why? You think I stink? Do you know how many guys have hit on me since I got here?’
‘Probably lots,’ Whit said.
Velvet hunkered down in her seat. ‘Lots is half right,’ she finally pronounced. ‘Tons is closer.’
Whit turned onto Main Street and pulled up in front of the Encina County courthouse. It was a sprawling, grand oddity, shaped by the Moorish architecture popular on the coast a century ago, three stories of heavy Texas granite, designed to survive storm surge and hurricane. The Port Leo Police Department stood across the street, a cracker-box of boring plain brick. They crossed the empty street together. The wind rustled in the drooping palms, and the clouds had dipped low, pregnant with rain.
‘They aren’t going to arrest me, are they?’ Velvet asked suddenly, stopping halfway across the street.
‘Did you kill him?’ Whit asked.
‘No. God, no.’
‘Then don’t worry. Tell them what they need to know. These are good people. They’re not going to hang you out to dry. I promise you that.’
She crossed her arms, bowed her head, and the tears came in shudders, and she bleated Pete Hubble’s name. Whit didn’t dwell on niceties or politics. He took her into his arms and let her cry against his shoulder, like old friends consoling each other in the terrible reality of sudden grief. He couldn’t stand there like a wooden post while a woman sobbed. She got his tropical-print shoulder wet and snotty, and when the shaking stopped Whit steered her into the brightly lit doorway of the police station.
7
The Blade watched his Darling and that goddamned good-for-nothing lecher of a judge embracing in the street. He tried to slow his breathing. He had drawn close to Whit Mosley’s Explorer and retreated when his headlights, and the Explorer’s interior lights, showed Velvet holding a cell phone. That wouldn’t do to have them announce they were being chased or to have a stranger on a cellular connection overhear the Blade doing his best work. He followed them into Port Leo’s town square and slowly parked, a block away in front of the black glass of the Gulfstream Bookstore, his headlights cut.
Watching them touch – watching Whit Mosley touch a woman that belonged to him – sickened the Blade. He cupped the knife against the round fleshiness of his palm, feeling the bite of its edge. He took calming breaths and tried not to cry in frustration. Patience was beyond a virtue. It was the most basic rule of survival, and to bend patience meant mistakes. Mistakes were n
ot affordable. He had read, in the literature of his own kind, of the most abominable errors: John Wayne Gacy inviting the police keeping him under surveillance to join him for breakfast right when the odd smell floated from the crawlway; Dennis Nilsen showing the first policeman who knocked on his door the grisly plastic bags in his London closet. The Blade decided long ago that he would not lie down and die. So he fell back, and he watched, and he turned on the tape player, and the reedy Beach Boys tape that had been the player’s sole occupant for the last three years sputtered into life and the Boys, volume turned low, demanded he be true to his school. He prayed that his Darling would be true to him, singing along under his breath, taking the harmony line.
Mosley and Velvet went into the police station, and the Blade waited. A few minutes later, Mosley sauntered across the street to the courthouse.
You dirty little freak. You’re nothing, not worthy to touch her, know her tears. I’m not the nothing. You’re the nothing.
Mosley fiddled with the courthouse door and ducked inside the darkened building. A light flickered on a few minutes later in a first-floor office behind lowered blinds.
Perhaps Judge Mosley didn’t lock up after himself.
He ran to the courthouse steps and tried the door: locked. Damn.
But no, he told himself. Not now. He shivered. One death by violence in Port Leo tonight was remarkable. Another the same night would bring the police out in droves. He walked away from the courthouse. Let Whit Mosley continue to breathe – for now – and let him rule that Pete Hubble died a suicide. He congratulated himself on his self-restraint.
The momentary pride evaporated when he saw the flyer hanging in the bookstore window. Only the dim shimmer from the streetlight illuminated the girl’s face, printed on light blue paper taped to the inside of the window. The Blade blinked, his guts coiling like a frightened snake.
The eyes of his last Darling watched him from the flyer. She was smiling broadly. He had not seen her smile, from the time he had abducted her from a faraway parking lot to when he’d laid her in the shallow dirt behind his house.
HAVE YOU SEEN HER? the flyer asked, with MARCY ANN BALLEW written below the question. It gave the young woman’s statistics of age, description, height, and weight, and when she was last seen: leaving work at the Memorial Oaks Nursing Home in Deshay, Louisiana, September 30. Her car had been recovered from a nearby Wal-Mart.
He read on, his throat feeling coated with sand. Her wallet had been found two miles outside Port Leo, along FM Road 1223, a week ago. Anyone with information as to her whereabouts was requested to call the Encina County Sheriff’s Department or the Port Leo police. A reward was mentioned.
The Blade mentally replayed his time with his most troublesome Darling. When could her wallet have gotten out on the road? he wondered, and with a sick wrench he remembered. As he approached his enclave hidden away from the eyes of other men, she roused from the stupor he’d forced on her with the Valiums and she kicked open a window. He’d veered off the road, whirled to grab her, and belted her hard four times in the face, breaking her cheekbone and nose and knocking her unconscious. He was furious, having to hurt her before his fun; and the broken bones meant he’d never gotten to see her smile. He traced her smile on the paper with his finger: lovely. He missed her.
She must have thrown her wallet out the window before he punched her, trying to leave some clue of her passage. Now the police in Louisiana – and here – must know that she had come through off-the-path Port Leo, Texas.
He swallowed the swell of panic. The police would no doubt be questioning everyone who lived along FM 1223, between here to the county line. How hard would they look, and how hard would they look at him? Capture always lingered in the back of his mind, an unwelcome companion but one as steady as his shadow. Now it loomed as a distinct possibility, and he had not claimed his most precious Darling yet.
He could not take her now. The police would be watching her. But in a few days, especially if Pete was judged a suicide… then she would be ripe, a plum oozing with juice, to be plucked from the tree. Tonight was Monday. He could take her, he believed, by the end of the week. Friday or Saturday.
They could have a deliciously lost weekend together: movies if she were good, dinner, death. Then back to work on Monday.
The Blade began the somewhat arduous process of hatching a plan. What had he overheard Velvet call such contingencies in the grocery store? He remembered and smiled: Plan B.
8
The interview room at the Port Leo Police Department resembled a supply closet more than an interrogation facility. In one corner tottered a stack of old computer monitors. The department had upgraded their seven-year-old systems recently and no one wanted the old standbys. A box of shredded documents, ready to be recycled, was shoved against the wall. Two plastic containers of office supplies filled another corner. An old wooden table occupied the center of the room, marred with circles from water cups and soda cans.
Heather Farrell, the young woman who’d found Pete’s body, watched Claudia Salazar with mulish eyes. Police Chief Delford Spires sat next to Heather, quiet, letting Claudia take the lead in getting the statement. Claudia noticed, with affection, that there was a crumb of cake caught in his mustache, but she didn’t want to point that out with the tape rolling. He had just returned from telling the senator her son was dead. She turned to the witness.
‘Okay, Heather, this won’t take long,’ Claudia said. ‘For the record, do you have some identification?’
Heather Farrell dug in her dirty jeans and produced a tattered driver’s license, one that had expired. The birth date indicated that she was two weeks past eighteen. The address on the card indicated she was from Lubbock, in west Texas, far more than spitting distance from Port Leo. Claudia read the information off the driver’s license into the tape, then handed the laminated card back to Heather, who proceeded to tidy her nails with the edge of the plastic.
‘Your family still in Lubbock, Heather?’ Claudia asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Why did you leave Lubbock?’
‘Dirt sucks,’ Heather said.
‘That’s a good reason,’ Claudia said pleasantly. ‘Any others?’
‘I’m an artist. Lots of artists here.’ Heather shrugged. ‘I thought for sure those galleries would want to give me a big-ass fancy show. Strange it hasn’t happened yet.’
‘You haven’t updated your driver’s license,’ Spires said.
‘Don’t drive much these days.’ Heather gave Delford a caustic look. ‘Gunk’s in your mustache, mister.’
Delford groomed out the offending morsel. ‘Thank you, Heather.’
‘Where are you living now, Heather?’ Claudia asked.
The girl shrugged with a lazy roll of shoulders. A willfulness – either born of stupidity or of hard use – tugged her face into a constant, wary frown.
‘Here and there. I camp out at the park down by Little Mischief Beach sometimes.’
‘Do you have a permit to camp?’ Claudia already suspected the answer.
Heather shifted in her seat. ‘Darn, I lost it yesterday. I haven’t found a friendly ranger to give me a new one.’
Claudia nodded toward the backpack in the corner. ‘Those pretty much all your belongings?’
‘Yep. Travel light. I don’t believe in U-Hauls.’
‘So you brought everything you had in the world along with you to meet this guy on the boat.’
‘I guess,’ Heather said with no energy in her voice.
‘You moving in with him?’
‘No. I just don’t like leaving my stuff lying around.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘Yeah. Pete Majors.’ Heather took a swig of the tepid cocoa Officer Fox had fetched for her. ‘He said he was from Los Angeles.’
Majors, not Hubble. Big Pete Majors was his nom de cinema, gleaned from the videotapes on the boat. Claudia saw a thin sheen of sweat on Delford’s brow, despite the cool of the
room.
‘Did Mr Majors tell you why he was in Port Leo?’ Claudia asked.
‘He was writing a movie about his brother’s death. But he was awful depressed about it. I think that’s why he killed himself.’
‘Where did you meet Mr Majors?’ Claudia asked.
‘At Little Mischief Beach,’ Heather answered. Claudia jotted a note on the pad in front of her. Little Mischief was an aptly named, scrabbly beach north of Port Leo, a few miles from the Golden Gulf Marina, known as a kids’ hangout, with a small park attached, dense with live oaks and red bays. A good necking spot, but there were better around the county.
Heather brushed fingers through her hair. ‘The light’s good at Little Mischief. I like to sketch the birds, the waves, the old folks walking on the shore.’
‘Dopers love Little Mischief,’ Delford interjected. ‘Am I gonna find some weed in your knapsack, young lady?’
‘No,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘I don’t do drugs.’
Claudia steered them back on track. ‘What was Pete doing down at Little Mischief?’
‘He’d come down there with a notebook computer, to write or just chill out and throw pebbles in the surf.’ She wiped a hand across her lips. ‘Quiet but nice. He gave me money for food.’
Claudia made a note. ‘This money he gave you. Any strings attached?’
A flash of resentment crossed Heather’s face. ‘Of course not. What do you take me for?’
More to the point was what Pete Hubble had taken Heather for. Claudia remained silent for a full thirty seconds, and Heather began to fidget. ‘I’m not a whore, okay? He was just being nice.’ She paused. ‘Maybe he didn’t need the money, since he was gonna kill himself.’
‘So he gave you a loan. What happened next between you?’ Claudia asked.
Heather Farrell finished her cocoa and began to tear the rim of the foam cup into strips. Specks of wet, powdery chocolate smeared onto her fingertips, but she didn’t notice. ‘Nothing happened. He seemed real sad. Lonely. Like he’d gotten bad news.’
