by Archer Mayor
He knew that deserved some response, a one-liner designed to make the jagged edges less painful. But for the life of him, he couldn’t come up with it, not to his own satisfaction.
“I don’t see blame going anywhere,” he said, not liking how that sounded.
But it seemed to work. “You were always very sweet that way,” she said.
He wasn’t sure he had been, or even exactly what that meant.
Mercifully, he heard some feeble electronic sound in the background of her phone, a bell of some sort, that prompted her to say, her voice defeated, “I have to go. Thanks for talking. You sound good.”
“You, too,” he lied. “Knock ’em dead.”
He replaced the phone, checked his rearview mirror, and returned to the road.
Time to get back to something he knew how to do.
“I never liked that look,” Willy said, glaring at her from the passenger seat.
Sam stared at him. “Is that what’s been bugging you all the way over here? My hair?”
“That, the tight jeans. You look like a hooker.”
She laughed at him. “No hooker you ever knew. What I look like is fashionable. These are sixty-dollar jeans. And the blond hair works like a charm to open guys up. You just don’t like how other men appreciate me,” she added in a teasing, lilting voice.
He shifted his gaze to the scene outside. They were parked on a side street in Bennington, not far from Piccolo’s, the bar that their local PD contact, Johnny Massucco, had told them was a likely watering hole for men like Mel Martin.
“They don’t appreciate you,” he said sullenly. “They just want to jump your bones.”
“And you don’t?” she asked.
“Not the same.”
She watched his profile, knowing what was bothering him. Her change in appearance wasn’t new. She’d used it before, once when she’d masqueraded as a ski instructor, and again when she’d pretended to be a drug dealer in Holyoke, Massachusetts. On both occasions, he’d become surly and aloof. Over time, she had come to understand both his insecurity and his deep conservatism, and how they combined sometimes to wind him up tight. It was a pain—he was difficult enough to live with when he was feeling fine—but given her own quirky needs in a mate, she’d actually come to see his moodiness as sweet . . . some of the time.
“Well,” she told him, “you sure won’t have the same problem in that getup.”
He swung back to face her. “What? I look normal.”
She poked him. “Normal for a bum.”
With a flash of anger, he reached for the door handle and yanked it open. “Let’s get going.”
She caught hold of his arm. “Whoa, hang on. I don’t want to lose sight of you.”
“Fat chance of that. You’ll be in the middle of an admiring crowd.”
She didn’t let go. “Willy.”
He caught her change of tone and was quieter in his response. “What?”
“I’ve stuck by you this long, haven’t I?”
Willy wasn’t overequipped with moments of grace, but he did have them, as both Sam and Joe knew. They came fast and vanished faster for the most part, but when timed right, they could linger.
As an example, in a gesture scented with faint but reliable virtue, he quickly ducked his head, kissed her fingers, and said, “Come on, babe, we ain’t got all night.”
They headed off in slightly different directions after leaving the car separately, blending into a section of town at once bruised and polished. Bennington was full of such contrasting overlays, with haves and have-nots virtually sharing the same fences. This area featured low-income housing down one street, a fancy restaurant and a state-of-the-art fire station up two others, and one of the town’s busiest commercial strips one block over.
Piccolo’s appealed to customers of all stripes, being a place where the younger, slightly rough-edged gentility might go for a nightcap after the evening had officially concluded—to where the hard-core drinkers had been hanging out all night. It wasn’t a classic biker bar—those tended to be short-lived in towns like this—but it was definitely working class.
It was also a place where Sam and Willy each could reach a combat-ready comfort level. As with those few soldiers who discovered that the adrenaline of battle afforded a certain simplified clarity, so these two had found that slipping disguised into the twilight between the good guys and the bad freed them to act more spontaneously, without fear that their bosses were one citizen’s complaint away.
Cops, especially those in uniform, were more conscious of maintaining the badge’s reputation than they were of the gun most civilians stared at. It was the claim of misconduct, whether real or imagined, that dogged them most, not the misuse of a weapon they rarely fired. For these two, therefore, there was a paradoxical sense of liberation in their identities being hidden.
So Sam and Willy, several minutes apart and via two different entrances, came into Piccolo’s looking cheerful and glum respectively, supposedly in search of either company or respite, but in fact as keen as dogs on the hunt, ready for anything and on the scent for Mel Martin.
Mel Martin, not surprisingly in a town this size, was a couple of streets from Piccolo’s at that very moment, sitting in the cab of the truck he’d bought from Newell Morgan. He was watching the front of the oddly named Green Mountain Vista Lodge Motel—a fleabag with no vista of anything except the traffic on Route 9.
The Vista, as it was colloquially known, was C-shaped in the traditional manner, surrounding its own parking lot on three sides. All the rooms led onto two stacked walkways, the upper one belted in by a balcony, a row of cars hemming in the lower one like sucklings lined up against one gigantic, sleeping pig.
Mel’s point of interest was the door to number 32, on the second floor, slightly closer to the right-hand staircase. It was indistinguishable from its neighbors—brown, battered, and accompanied by a tiny, occluded window to one side—but Mel stared at it as if seeking enlightenment.
Which, in one sense, he was. He’d witnessed a blade-thin young man, street-named Banger, enter the room twenty minutes earlier, intending to conduct a minor piece of business in the illegal drug trade, and he was awaiting his reappearance.
Mel knew what was happening behind that door. He’d even caught a glimpse of the young couple who had opened up to Banger’s knock. They’d be sitting around feigning coolness, feeling each other out on issues of quantity and price, and either doing a deal and parting company or joining together in a group indulgence where Banger consumed most of his profit on the spot. Whether sex entered into it often depended on a crucial few creating the right mood. Mel remembered times when he’d woken up atop a naked woman with no memory of what might have gone on between them.
The source of his fascination, however, had nothing to do with such reminiscences, or even any yearnings to relive them. Mel was more interested in where he’d picked up Banger’s tail—the same address High Top had given him just before dying.
Which made of this innocuous encounter inside a faceless motel a beacon toward Mel’s major score. Of that, he’d convinced himself.
Banger worked for the mysterious two cousins who had captivated Mel’s imagination the way the lottery drives others to gamble away their life savings. And just as he had snuffed out High Top to get a simple address, so he was now willing to do whatever was necessary to extract the next level of knowledge from this source. His first knowledge of the elusive cousins had created something akin to a quest in him, based less on their reality than on the dream they represented.
In truth, Mel had no idea if Banger’s suppliers made any more money than he did conducting his much ballyhooed raids. The mere rumors that they did were good enough. And, perhaps incongruously, his sacrifice of High Top for so little was not a reflection of any concerns about insolvency. He was far more careless than that—if a single influence could be blamed for his growing thirst for violence, it might just as easily have been boredom.
He had killed before. High Top had been the third. The first had been an inebriated bum in an Albany alleyway one night when he’d been in his early teens. That had been mostly experimental—and a disappointment. He’d come upon the passed-out old man by accident, on his way from having broken into a hardware store only to find the till empty. On a whim, he’d closed off the bum’s mouth and nose, hoping for some paroxysm of death he could then add to his mental scrapbook. All he’d received for his efforts was a cessation of breathing. Presumably, the guy had been so drunk, he was already at death’s door.
The second time had been a slight improvement, if dissatisfying in other ways. Too much booze, an argument, a handy baseball bat. He didn’t remember much beyond feeling the bat’s reverberation as it contacted the other man’s skull. He’d stumbled away from that one, making no effort to avoid capture. But while there had been cops and an investigation, they’d touched him only peripherally, the victim having led a complicated life too full of potential lethal enemies. The whole affair had slipped away like the stupor that had given it birth.
High Top had been the best one yet, even though merely the result of a spontaneous urge. Still, Mel had been sober, and his victim had responded well, the obnoxious little shit.
Mel shifted in his seat, growing impatient. Apparently, Banger was hitting it off with his customers—either that or they’d knocked him off and made their escape through the bathroom window.
The thought made him uncomfortable. Had he brought Ellis into this, he would have had someone watching the back—a maneuver he’d certainly used in the past to good effect.
But he didn’t have Ellis. He hadn’t wanted him. Ellis was getting weird on him, changing in a way that made him uneasy. He’d once been the perfect student—cooperative, appreciative, submissive, and willing. He’d never challenged Mel’s primacy, never come up with ideas of his own, never done anything other than be the textbook sidekick. He was strong, obedient, held his liquor, and was good in a fight.
But not since they’d all moved to Bennington.
The Three Musketeers. That’s what Mel had once called them, but whatever that had meant then, it was no longer true.
Which made him think of his wife, another pain in the ass. The list of disappointments with that one was growing daily, and he knew in his heart that before much longer, the habit of having her around notwithstanding, he’d have to dump her.
Or maybe do something more creative . . . He smiled in the darkness of the cab, considering the possibilities.
There was movement by the door of number 32—a reflection from the distant streetlights as it swung open. Against the dim glow of the room inside, a shadow appeared briefly before vanishing just as fast. For a moment, watching Banger’s dim outline slipping along the balcony, Mel regretted that his plan hadn’t been simply to kick into the place and work all of them over, like in a movie, maybe even threatening them with one of the M–16s.
But even he had enough tactical sense not to do that. Too many unknowns. Plus, he wouldn’t have gotten away with it, not for long. Burying a little toad like High Top was easy enough—nobody to miss him, even with Ellis wringing his hands. But a roomful of people?
Best to stick with the plan—just as with High Top, go after the nobodies, the people who, in the eyes of those who knew them, were just as prone to go wandering as to go missing.
Mel slipped quietly out of the truck, his eyes on the shadow working its way down the stairs, his heart beating to the call of his own primordial lethal urge.
Chapter 18
Joe rose from his plastic seat as a tired, heavyset woman entered the employee break room and blinked at him without curiosity. She was wearing a brightly colored vest adorned with a large sticker announcing, “Hi, I’m Lilly, I’m Here to Help.”
Rarely had Joe seen a person more in need of what she was professing to offer.
He approached her with his hand held out. “Mrs. Morgan?”
She didn’t smile, and her hand was soft, moist, and cold in his. “I go by Kimbell.”
He hesitated. Not only did this differ from what he’d been told, but it made him wonder what might be going on in the Morgan household to have prompted it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was misinformed. No offense, I hope?”
“I just changed it back,” she said, standing before him like an upended duffel bag.
He stepped back and swept his hand over a scattering of chairs adorning the otherwise empty room. “Would you like to have a seat?”
The faintest sign of a smile appeared. “I may never be able to stand up again.”
Still, she sat, surprisingly daintily, on the nearest chair.
“Can I buy you a soda from the machine?” he offered.
“I’m fine.”
Joe sat opposite her, a synthetic table between them. The room was a display of bland colors and polymers. Joe assumed that every aspect of it, from the acoustic tiling to the fake wood paneling to the rows of robotlike vending machines, was the result of either a metal press or a plastic molding machine.
He introduced himself, slipping a business card across the table to her. “Do you prefer to be called Lilly?” he asked.
She took the card but didn’t even glance at it, holding it instead like something she’d found on the floor and didn’t know how to throw away. “No. They call me that here.”
“Ms. Kimbell, then?”
The faint smile returned. “That sounds nice.”
“Great. I guess you know why I’m here.”
The smile faded. “Michelle, I suppose.”
He sat back and crossed his legs, hoping to introduce an element of friendliness into an otherwise sterile environment. “Yeah, that’s right. I heard she and Archie were very much in love.”
The approach caught her off guard. She stared at him for a moment, nonplussed, before answering, to his own surprise, “I guess that’s right. I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Really? Why not? Wasn’t it true?”
“I think it was.” She seemed to be considering it for the first time.
Joe didn’t say anything, letting the silence work for him, as he often did.
“We didn’t talk about them much that way.”
“You and Newell?”
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t like her much?”
This time she actually produced a noise like a laugh. It was her only response.
“Was that always the case?” Joe asked. “I mean, I know it was after Archie died and Michelle wasn’t paying any rent, but how ’bout before?”
Lillian Kimbell tightened her lips before saying slowly, “There was always some tension.”
Joe thought back to his one visit to the Morgan house on Gage Street, and to the disparity between the grubby TV set-chair combo and the rest of the room, jammed with delicate figurines and kitschy bric-a-brac, all dust free and neatly arranged. Tension, indeed.
“How about you, Ms. Kimbell? How did you feel about Michelle?”
Her expressionless eyes settled on his for a long, measured moment while she appeared to weigh her options. Joe considered the possible reasons behind her taking back her maiden name and hoped that one of them might play in his favor now.
“I liked her,” she finally said, adding, “right up to the end.”
He tried tipping her a little further. “Your husband wouldn’t like hearing that.”
“Screw him.”
It was said softly, almost tentatively, but Joe burst out laughing anyhow, creating the happiest expression he’d seen on her yet.
“That must’ve been tough on you,” he said then, “being so at odds with Newell.”
“I’m always at odds with him,” she said, this time bitterly. “First with Archie, then with Michelle. Now with everything.”
“Is that why the name change?”
She nodded without comment.
He paused before suggesting vaguely, “The thing wit
h Michelle really did something, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” The word was said so quietly, it almost vanished in the hum of the overhead lighting.
“Marked an end?”
“I guess it did.”
“Are you going to leave him?”
She hesitated before admitting, “That’s not what women like me are supposed to do.”
“But you’re thinking of it.” He said it as a statement.
“I guess so, yes.”
Now that he had her on the threshold, he tried opening the door wider. “Why?”
The potential was there for her to close down and ask him to leave. She’d never met him before, he’d been asking strange questions, and the entire point of the interview remained as unclear as ever. And yet, not only had she kept pace with him, not challenging the reasons behind his visit, but she seemed to be warming to the age-old comfort of confiding to total strangers what you’d hesitate to tell your closest friend.
It clearly wasn’t easy for her. Joe watched as his business card was unconsciously reduced to a small lump between her kneading fingers. She studied the tabletop, forming her thoughts, before she finally said, “Something happened—changed.”
“Between you and Newell, or him and Michelle?” Joe asked pointedly.
“Both. All of it. He got so angry.”
“At her?”
“Yes. It was more than the money. We’re not that bad with the money. There’s enough.”
Joe leaned forward, suddenly tense, fearful that now would be the very moment when a coworker would come barging in and destroy the mood. “Ms. Kimbell, I hate to pry here. This is all so terribly personal. But it means a great deal to me to really understand exactly what happened. Did you ever think your husband’s fury at Michelle might have been for another reason? I don’t want to be insensitive here, but I also don’t want to tiptoe around—do you think he might’ve made a pass at her?”
To his relief, she took it in full stride. “I wondered that. If he did, I don’t think it worked.”
“Is that why you said you liked her up to the end?”
