by Jeff Abbott
‘I’m going to have a background check made on Pete Hubble, see if he has a record in California. I’m going to check Velvet, too,’ Claudia said. ‘I’d like to visit Jabez Jones. His name keeps cropping up.’
‘Take me with you, but I’m booked up until this evening with the joys of court,’ Whit said.
Claudia said, ‘I’ll call and see when we can meet with him.’
‘Fine. I’ll call you as soon as I know details that are forensic and meaningful,’ he said.
‘Fine. Bye,’ she said, still feeling peevish. She had a lot of phone calls to make, computer searches to do. She picked up the sheaf of pink messages left for her by the dispatcher. Two from Patsy Duchamp at the Port Leo Mariner, no doubt looking for a quote. One from her mother, no doubt to berate her for divorcing Deputy Wonderful. And one, surprisingly, from the Reverend Jabez Jones.
She reached for her phone.
15
Heather Farrell spent a damp night in a grove of bent live oaks near Little Mischief Beach, surrounded by bluestems that stood tall and thin and kept her hidden. Lying on her back, the limbs of the oaks were fingers of a gnarled claw pointing away from the bay, shaped by the ceaseless wind. At night the trees looked frightening, transplanted from the forest where Hansel and Gretel roamed. When she awoke she peeled a scrawny orange and ate, watching the few pleasure boats plying the waters on a brisk autumn morning. She got out her notebook and began to sketch the boats: the prows cutting the water, the foaming curl of wake left in their path, the hard angles of stern and bow and flying bridge.
She hummed as she drew.
She hoped Sam would come. His father was dead, and Heather knew propriety demanded Sam be at home. He was no doubt upset. But she hoped he might prefer the solace of the beach rather than his frostbitten mother and egocentric grandmother. He might prefer her.
Heather wished for a shower; she had settled for a quick sponge bath at the police station. She rubbed toothpaste on her teeth and gums with her finger and rinsed and spat with a gulp of water from her oversize water bottle she kept in her knapsack. She emerged from the oak motte and headed down to the shores of Little Mischief Beach, and found Sam there, watching the waves inch against the sand.
Heather came up behind him, wanting to touch the cool skin at the nape of his neck and feel his hair, the same color as his father’s. Instead she gently touched his back.
Sam Hubble turned. The wind had reddened his smooth cheeks. Red lines webbed his eyes. A dribble of snot clung to one nostril.
‘Hi you,’ he said.
‘Hi yourself.’ She kissed him shyly on the cheek. She dug a tissue from her jeans pocket and dabbed his nose. ‘It’s okay. It’s all okay.’
‘We shouldn’t be seen together,’ he said softly. ‘And one of my grandmother’s jerks will probably be out looking for me. I’m supposed to be at home, inconsolable with grief.’
Heather loved that Sam used big words like inconsolable – he sounded so smart. Smart guys were sexier to her, but she didn’t know many. She’d get him a little tattoo, maybe of heather in bloom, when they got to New Orleans, and then he’d just be to die for. ‘So we sit tight?’ she asked.
Sam shrugged and sniffed. ‘Probably for the next week or so.’
‘And then we can go? We can get out of here?’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘But you’ll be a runaway. No way is your grandmother going to let you go.’
‘I got that covered. There won’t be a stink – she and Mom won’t come looking for me. That’s a guarantee. They can tell people I’ve gone off to boarding school in Houston.’ He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘If they don’t let us go, then I start talking.’
Heather heard the resolve in his voice, but it didn’t ease the churn in her guts. She leaned away from him and with her fingernail drew a heart in the soft sand. Their plan seemed utterly impossible, but she wanted in her heart to believe it would work. That they could be together, free of Pete and Lucinda and Faith. Me, the smiley-girl optimist. There’s a switch.
‘I want to believe this will work… that we’ll be safe from them,’ Heather said.
He didn’t respond, staring out at the bullet-gray bay.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
Sam shrugged. ‘He was a two-week dad. What’s that, two weeks out of my whole life, Heather? Shit, I don’t even want to figure out the percentage. I’ve been to summer camps that lasted longer.’
He fell silent. Heather ached to take his hand, but instead she kept her palm pressed against the damp cool of the sand.
He cried. Heavy, big tears for his father, and she hugged him close. He surrendered to hard, racking sobs, and Heather thought: He couldn’t cry like this in front of his mother or grandmother. Not allowed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped. He was fifteen, three years younger than her, and their being together was utterly insane. But the world was insane, so why couldn’t they succeed? He leaned toward her as she wiped his cheek clean of tears and he kissed her, hard, and they leaned back in the sand, smearing the heart she had drawn.
Whit’s day typified the joys of the justice court. He first magistrated into the county jail a sobbing carpenter from Darius, a small fishing community on Encina County’s northern tip, who had blackened his wife’s eye and broken her nose during a morning argument over burnt toast.
‘Don’t put me in jail, please,’ the man pleaded. He was not much older than Whit, but he mewled and cried like an ashamed child. His wife’s blood still splattered his T-shirt. ‘I’m claustrophobic. I’ll go apeshit, Judge. Please, please.’
‘Listen, Mr Reynolds.’ Whit wished he could refer to him in open court as you sniveling little dick. ‘I don’t want to hear one bit of whining, complaining, or bitching from you. Are you listening to me, sir?’
Big sniffle from the oversized baby. ‘Yes, Judge, sure am.’
Whit informed the accused of the charges against him, his right to retain counsel, his right to remain silent, his right to request appointment of counsel if indigent – all the Miranda warnings the man had heard when he was arrested by the Encina sheriff’s deputies. Big Baby blinked a lot, as though his brain were clogged, so Whit – carefully and calmly – walked him again, in plainest English possible, through his rights. It was his first arrest for family violence assault. Whit set bond at ten thousand dollars, the maximum.
‘That’s more money than Momma’s got,’ Big Baby wailed, forgetting Momma would have to pony up a percentage, not the whole amount.
‘Such concern for a lady,’ Whit said, ‘is very touching. But wrong lady.’ He stared at Big Baby. ‘I’m also serving you with an Emergency Protective Order, Mr Reynolds, at your wife’s application. That means, after you make bail, you can’t go near her for sixty days.’
‘But I love her,’ Big Baby sniffed.
‘Then you got sixty days to let your heart grow fonder. You go near her, you’re gonna be right back in front of me and I will get medieval on your ass, Mr Reynolds.’
Big Baby was led out of the courtroom, bawling afresh, saying he sure hadn’t meant to hurt his sweetie pie. Whit silently wished castration were back in judicial fashion. But he put his smile on and turned to the next case.
That morning, Pete Hubble tucked in the back of his mind, Whit signed arrest warrants for four hot-check writers (two of whom were sisters who had apparently gone on their overdrawn jaunt together, which made him a little sad); set a forty-thousand-dollar bond for a chronic burglar who had been captured driving away from his just-burgled ex-girlfriend’s house with cash, electronic equipment, and all his sugar’s lingerie; and heard guilty pleas from and sentenced six minty-breathed minors in possession of tobacco to twelve hours of community service each and a tobacco awareness class. Whit thought the class sounded worse than the public service, which usually consisted of tidying the beaches. The puffers’ parents grimaced at him as though he were sentencing their little darlings to rock splitting, and he thoug
ht, There’s a dozen votes lost. He saw Buddy Beere, his opponent, sitting in the back row of the courtroom, watching him with all the warmth of a spider approaching the squirming fly.
Grabbing a quick lunch at his desk, he ignored three phone messages from his father. He returned four phone messages from the newspapers in Corpus Christi and Houston, telling them that Pete Hubble had apparently died from a gunshot to the head and he was awaiting autopsy results before releasing cause of death. He’d never rated a phone call from the Houston paper before, and the rising prominence of the case made him nervous.
After lunch, Whit interviewed from the bench a Port Leo woman who had told her sisters and neighbors over the past week that President Kennedy was living in their attic, hiding from the Cuban missiles, and dallying with an aged Marilyn Monroe. The assassination in Dallas and suicide in Hollywood never happened and Kennedy, now with a shaved head and a beard, had been fishing along the bays of the Texas coast ever since with his blond companion. The woman claimed she employed them as a gardener and maid on occasion. For their protection and hers, she had taken to carting around a loaded pistol that was a family heirloom.
Whit nodded solemnly through her recitation of her reality. She’d shaved her eyebrows and she often ran a finger along the hairless, ghostly arches, as though twisting the reels that played for her mind’s eye.
The woman said, ‘Mr President adores the water, but he just couldn’t show his face on the East Coast again. And the rest of the Gulf Coast is closer to Cuba.’ She lowered her voice. ‘West Coast, too many cameras. And they shot Bobby there. That’s why Jack stayed here. And that’s why I keep the gun handy. Protection.’
‘That’s considerate of you,’ Whit said. Her two sisters stood to one side, crying quietly. The woman smiled serenely as Whit signed the warrant to detain and transport her to a medical facility for a psychiatric review. Whit – as gentle as a summer breeze – explained to the woman that she would go to see some doctors at Port Leo Memorial. She smiled, determined to indulge him in this silliness. The constable led the woman and her sisters away. Traffic court didn’t seem so bad then.
Court concluded, he walked down the private hall back to his small office, shrugged out of his robe (wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and Birkenstock sandals underneath), and hung it carefully on its hanger. He’d made three phone calls to the Nueces County medical examiner this afternoon, quick breaks between cases, and they hadn’t cut into Pete yet. To make matters worse, a downtown drug deal had soured last night in Corpus Christi and three twenty-year-olds had shotgunned each other into oblivion. A woman had been found strangled over in Ingleside, and apparently Pete Hubble, senator’s son, warranted no special rank to break ahead in the line of corpses. The deputy medical examiner, Liz Contreras, promised she would call him as soon as she had some details.
A musical, double-knuckled knock rapped at his door. ‘Hey there, Whit!’ Buddy Beere stuck his head in, with miles of smiles for his esteemed opponent.
‘Hello, Buddy. How can I help you?’
You could vacate this office for me in a couple of weeks was the answer Whit imagined flitting across Buddy’s mind, but instead Buddy offered Whit a friendly hand. ‘I wanted to invite you. To a debate. Between you and me.’
Whit shook the proffered hand and Buddy sat down, uninvited. He reminded Whit of a teddy bear gone to seed. He was more stocky than pudgy, in his early forties, with brown hair straggling across his head. In campaigning he smiled a lot, as though grinning were as expected as breathing, crowing an ill-defined platform he termed ‘real judicial fairness,’ as though Whit managed the justice court with all the probity of a Salem witch trial.
‘What exactly would we debate, Buddy?’ Whit asked. ‘Would you sign arrest warrants differently than me?’ Probably would. With a little happy face drawn next to his signature.
Buddy shook his head. ‘No. I mean on the critical issues facing voters. No offense, Whit, but your daddy, bless him, sort of waltzed you onto the bench and the voters don’t know much about you.’ As if that was Buddy’s responsibility to fix, and as soon as he did Whit’s unrobed ass would hit pavement. ‘Other than your fondness for too-casual apparel.’
‘Don’t know me? I’ve lived here most of my life, and my family’s been here since Texas was part of Mexico. What’s to know?’
‘Well, I was sitting in the back of the courtroom earlier. Observing. You sentenced those teenage smokers to community service. You could have given them a two-hundred-dollar fine.’
‘Those kids are all from families living out at Port Leo Country Club, and community service will make a bigger impression than scribbling a check. They ought to get their hands slapped and a little dirty.’
‘Well, we could debate the rightness of that real easy,’ Buddy said with satisfaction.
Whit watched Buddy eyeing the black robe hanging in the corner. ‘Buddy, don’t you already have a good job down at the nursing home?’
‘Sure do.’ Buddy was an administrator at Port Leo’s one nursing home, down in a crook of St Leo Bay.
‘Well, then why do you want my job? It can’t possibly pay you as well as the nursing home does.’
Buddy’s florid mouth worked. ‘I want to make a difference in people’s lives.’
‘Buddy, I frankly don’t know what we would debate about. I sentence to community service – you’d do a fine. Big effing deal.’
Buddy’s smile tightened at the brush with profanity. ‘How about debating moral fiber?’
‘Moral fiber? I’m opposed to it. Unless it fights colon cancer.’
‘I’ve heard you’ve been keeping company with a woman of less-than-sterling repute.’
‘Are we talking about Pete Hubble’s friend?’ God, not Faith, he thought.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I heard,’ Whit said, ‘that you were keeping company with Pete and his friend Velvet as well.’ A junior high refrain: I heard she heard you said they said.
Buddy’s smile died a natural death. ‘You better not be spying on me.’
‘Is it true?’
‘Why not just have me testify at the inquest?’ Buddy asked, and Whit smelled a stinky political ploy.
‘Buddy, I’m not subpoenaing you when we’re running against each other.’
Buddy tugged at his lower lip, like a reluctant tattletale. ‘Well
… I was out campaigning and Pete stopped me. He wanted to know how he could get close to his family again. He had been a disappointment to them and he wanted to make amends.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘To leave town. No one wanted him here at all.’
16
State Senator Lucinda Hubble kept a collection of heads on the top shelf in her study. Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton represented the presidents; for the governors of Texas she had George W. Bush, Ann Richards, Mark White, Bill Clements, and Dolph Briscoe. All grinned like decapitated clowns, rubbery skin sagging without bones. Their false-lipped mouths gaped, caught between mirthful smile and slackened grimace. Lucinda also had one of herself, complete with trademark puffy red hair and big azure-framed eyeglasses.
Whit had arrived ten minutes ago, a little past four. The housekeeper, a dour Vietnamese sparrow of a woman, told him Faith was out, Lucinda was on the phone, and would he mind waiting in the senator’s study? Anything to eat or drink? she offered. The kitchen and dining room tables creaked under the weight of the collected casseroles and salads and pies brought by neighbors and churchwomen and by the Democratic power elite. But only a few mourners stood gathered, nodding with awkward sympathy.
He wondered if the truth about Pete was leaking, like a slow hiss from a balloon. Faith had stood him up, perhaps off conducting damage control. What would people say to Lucinda? Sorry your son’s dead or sorry he turned out so badly? The Democrats in the living room looked fretful. He followed the housekeeper and sat, studying the study.
Underneath the political gallery of plastic mas
ks stood an old pinball machine themed BIG SPENDER, with a fat cat tossing bills to an admiring crowd of 1920s zoot suiters and flappers. Prominently behind her desk were her framed nursing certificates, yellowing with age. On the wall hung an array of photos: Lucinda Hubble with President Bush, with President Clinton, with Willie Nelson and Ann Richards, with a steady parade of Texas celebrities. In each picture Lucinda gave a thumbs-up, as though marking another successful conquest. Lucinda’s office was almost too relaxed for a politician.
Warm, friendly. Where the senator could meet with the common folk, show she was just a good old gal.
There were no pictures of her sons. A couple of Faith and Sam, both formal portraits, the kind given as Christmas gifts in gold frames. Faith smiled, but only like she’d just passed a CPA exam. Sam looked like he’d wandered out of a National Honor Society meeting, serious and bespectacled and boring. The perfect political grandson. Certainly the two sons had been failures in that regard.
A small stereo sat in the corner, playing soft solo piano music. Whit wandered over to the stereo, picked up the CD’s jewel box. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould.
‘I find Bach a great comfort,’ Lucinda Hubble said from the doorway. She looked sunken and diminished. She wore a faded olive-green cardigan and a pair of old khakis, as though she might be loafing in a library or tending winter pansies in her flowerbeds.
‘Hello, Senator,’ Whit said. ‘I’m so very sorry about Pete.’
‘Thank you, honey.’ She cleared her throat and dabbed her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief. ‘These wells have just about run dry. I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but that was the governor and his wife on the phone.’ She said this with only the slightest hint of superiority.
She came and stood by Whit, her fingers playing air piano. ‘Do you hear Gould? He hums and breathes along as he plays. All that careful structure Gould builds, note by note, each one a key brick in a musical house, each note, each rest, played to his own exactitude, but still he can’t contain the passion he feels for the music.’ She switched the music off.
