The second floor had four large rooms and a linen closet. Two were guestrooms with attached baths. The cabinets and dressers in them were empty though Melchiori had put a drinking glass and a new bottle of Glenlivet on the dresser in one room and a glass and a bottle of Grey Goose in the other. The third door led to an exercise room with a StairMaster, an old Cybex weight machine and a widescreen television.
The last door led to Melchiori’s bedroom suite. A second fireplace, with decorative gas logs inside it, sank into one wall. A walk-in closet, filled with casual clothes and a dozen business suits, smelled of musky cologne. The bathroom had a large Jacuzzi tub. In the medicine cabinet I found a vial of Ambien and another of Lunesta, sleeping pills for a man who, it seemed to me, deserved a rough night’s sleep.
I went to the dresser. There were socks, underwear and T-shirts that smelled of the same cologne as the closet. In the third drawer from the top I found a box of forty or fifty photos. They were party photos. The scenes in them could’ve wrecked the careers of a small group of local politicians and businessmen if they’d become public, but they showed enough wear and creasing that I guessed Melchiori kept them for private use.
The ones on top were oldest. Melchiori looked forty or so, seven or eight years younger than he was now. He was thinner then but already a big man. He was screwing a woman, also about forty and also big, from behind. They were outside on a pool deck with dark green tropical plants surrounding them, the sun shining on their sunburnt skin. They smiled into the camera with oily eyes.
The next photos showed a variety of women and girls, some younger than Tralena Graham had been when she died. In two of the pictures I recognized Ashley Littleton from a time before her final fall into drugs and twenty-buck sex. The men in the pictures were strangers to me, all except two of them. One was Melchiori, who mugged for the camera as he screwed women and girls. The other I knew only from a framed picture that I’d seen on top of Belinda’s dresser when Charles and I searched her house. But in the photo that came from this box, Jerry Stilman wasn’t staring with cold, dignified eyes at a portrait photographer. He was getting a blowjob from a girl who couldn’t have been older than fourteen.
I paid little attention to the photos that followed until I reached the final six. All were from the party where Tralena Graham had died. All included a naked, dark-skinned girl with long straight hair and large black eyes, almost as wet as tears. Tralena Graham, I guessed. In all of these photos Belinda also was present, along with a couple of men and, in one, Tonya Richmond. Belinda was always close to Tralena, kissing her breasts and slipping a bag over her head with an odd intimacy, as if they’d made a strange, deep connection that drew them together, and as I stared at the photos I wondered if Belinda had noticed what I was seeing now. Belinda, at seventeen, had resembled this girl. She’d had the same thin body, the same soft face, the same desire in her eyes.
The six photos from that party might enable Daniel to arrest Belinda’s killer. One of the men in them might be the killer himself. But the photos also showed Belinda in a way that felt intensely private to me and giving them to Daniel would tear something vital from inside me. I took them to the bathroom, ripped them and dropped them into the toilet water where they floated in a chaotic mosaic. I flushed and watched Belinda and the sixteen-year-old girl disappear into the whirlpool.
I returned the other photos to the box and put it in the dresser drawer. When I came downstairs Charles was entering the foyer from a room that looked like a study.
‘What did you find?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’
He held up a white package tightly wrapped in cellophane. ‘Coke. Found it in the desk in his office. Probably a half pound. Could be for personal use if he held a whole lot of parties.’ He cocked his head and looked at me. ‘You all right?’
I didn’t feel all right. I said, ‘Let’s go see Melchiori in the hospital.’
We pulled down a drive lined with palms trees and into the University Hospital parking garage at ten-fifty p.m. Visiting hours in the intensive care unit had ended at nine. After checking at an information desk in the atrium, we rode an elevator to the third floor and went to the nurses’ station. A solitary nurse in her late fifties sat at the counter doing a crossword puzzle. She looked up and asked if she could help us.
‘We’re here to see a friend,’ Charles said. ‘Don Melchiori.’
Her smile was pleasant, sympathetic. ‘You’ll need to come back in the morning. The last visits were two hours ago.’
‘Officially, yes,’ Charles said, also pleasantly. ‘But we’ve driven for five hours because we heard about Don—’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘The doctors have been very strict in—’
Charles leaned across the counter and an edge of menace entered his voice. ‘We understand,’ he said. ‘But my friend here needs to see Don Melchiori tonight.’
The sympathy fell from the nurse’s eyes and she reached for her phone. I guessed she was calling security. Charles seemed to guess the same. His hand shot across the counter and held her wrist. ‘We don’t all have to see Don. If it’s more convenient my friend can talk to him alone.’ Then he smiled. ‘Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?’
‘You’re breaking the law,’ she said but she stood and he maneuvered her around the counter and through a swinging waist-high gate.
‘Thank you,’ he said to her, pleasant and polite once more. He turned to me. ‘We’ll have a quick cup. Ten minutes be enough?’
‘More than.’
He steered the nurse down the hall toward a sign that said Lounge and Vending Machines.
Melchiori’s door was open and he was propped up in bed, his face bruised under his eyes, an IV tube running from his arm, a heart monitor tracking the steady pulse of his blood and a large pad of cotton gauze bandaged to his shoulder where he’d taken the bullet. He was watching television as the eleven o’clock news started.
I stepped into the room without knocking and he glanced up as if he expected a nurse. He looked unhappy to see me instead.
‘You sonofabitch,’ he said. ‘How’d you get in?’
I closed the door. ‘I walked past the nurse’s station, turned left at the corner and here you were.’
‘Well, you aren’t staying.’ He reached for the emergency call button.
‘I saw the photos in your dresser,’ I said.
His hand froze and he grimaced. He glanced at the television and hit the mute button on the remote. ‘You realize, don’t you, that you’re a dead man,’ he said. ‘There’ll be nothing left of you after I’m done.’
I said, ‘I thought about that last night when I was lying on your floor and you were kicking me. And yet today you’re the one who’s lying in the hospital, and I’m the one who has the pictures of the party where Tralena Graham died, pictures that also include Belinda Mabry, Tonya Richmond and Ashley Littleton.’
If he was surprised that I’d learned what happened to Tralena Graham he didn’t show it. ‘The girl was an accident,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘She was at the party because she wanted to be there. She did what she did because she wanted to do it. No one made her do anything.’
‘She was sixteen years old.’
‘The age of consent in Jamaica is sixteen,’ he said. ‘It was an accident.’
‘That’s why you threw her body in the ocean?’
‘That was a mistake. But her death was an accident and nothing you’ve got in those pictures suggests it wasn’t. No one was having a better time than she was.’
‘You’re a sick bastard,’ I said. ‘You’re going to jail for Belinda and the others.’
The councilman sighed. ‘You don’t get it. I didn’t kill them. No one at the party did.’
‘The pictures tell a different story.’
He shook his head. ‘Listen, talk to Belinda Mabry’s boy.’
‘Terrence?’
‘You want to see a sick bastard, look at
him. He comes to Little Vegas, picks up one of my girls, takes her to a motel and does things to her that shock me – and I think you know how hard I am to shock.’
‘Why would he want to kill them?’ I asked.
A bitter laugh escaped him. ‘Why not? The kid has—’ Something on the television screen caught his eye. ‘Ah, piss!’ he said and reached for the remote.
I looked at the screen and saw a picture of David Fowler. The volume rose and caught the reporter mid-sentence, ‘… crossing Duval Street at six o’clock this evening when witnesses say a car struck him. Police say the driver neither slowed nor stopped. Fowler was unresponsive when emergency services arrived and was declared dead at the scene. Fowler worked for the mayor’s office for the past three years and twice ran unsuccessfully for city council. Police are asking anyone who saw a green Toyota or Honda SUV near the scene of the accident to contact them.’
‘Piss!’ Melchiori said again. ‘He was a friend of mine.’
‘I know,’ I said quietly.
The door to the hospital room burst open. A security guard charged in, followed by the nurse and Charles. The guard looked from me to Melchiori and back as if he’d expected to find me strangling the councilman. ‘What’s happening here?’ he said.
Melchiori gazed at him evenly as if the guard had just disturbed a private business meeting. ‘We were having a talk.’
The guard looked confused. He glanced at the nurse. ‘Visiting hours are over,’ he said.
I looked at Melchiori. ‘We’re done anyway,’ I said. ‘Get well fast, Don.’
He nodded. ‘Be seeing you,’ he said and I wondered if anyone else heard the threat in that.
The guard and the nurse stayed in Melchiori’s room and Charles and I walked down the hall to the elevators, past walls scuffed by gurneys, under the cold fluorescent light.
‘Sorry about that,’ Charles said. ‘Security decided to take a coffee break too. The nurse flagged him down.’
I said, ‘A green SUV ran down David Fowler this evening. It was on the TV news.’
‘Shit,’ Charles said and thought about it for a moment. ‘He dead?’
‘At the scene.’
‘Sonofabitch,’ Charles said.
‘Melchiori’s pointing his finger at Terrence,’ I said. ‘Not just for Fowler. For everything.’
I dropped Charles at his house a little after midnight and turned toward home. But Susan had said she was leaving and taking Thomas with her. She probably wouldn’t go until morning, though I didn’t think I could bear watching her pack and drive away. I knew I couldn’t bear watching Thomas go with her.
So I didn’t go home.
The lights were off in Lee Ann’s house and the wet azaleas that lined the front path clutched my legs as I walked past but she answered the door quickly as if she’d been expecting me. The front room was warm and dry and smelled like cinnamon. She took my hand and led me through the dark hallway to her bedroom.
She kissed my neck and whispered, ‘You smell like bad sweat.’
‘It’s been a bad day.’
She kissed me again and said, ‘Shower for me.’
I stood for a time in her hot shower and felt the rotten skin of heat and pain shed from me, then I dried myself with an old pink towel that smelled like Lee Ann. When I walked back into her bedroom she was lying naked on top of the bed sheet, a single bedside lamp shining dimly, the soft blonde curls of her pubic hair catching and tricking the light like electrical filaments.
I sat by her on the bed and she touched the cut on my forehead where Melchiori had butted me. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
As an answer I kissed her.
She pulled her lips from mine and put her mouth on my neck, my shoulder, my chest. She touched the bruises on my ribs where Melchiori had kicked me and didn’t ask about them but kissed them softly as if her lips could suck the poison out of my life.
Then with the rain pounding the roof above us and the single dim bedside lamp burning we made love. Gently at first and then hard. And sometime during the rush of blood and muscle and skin, I wrapped my hands around her neck and she smiled a wicked smile. I tightened my fingers and a flush spread across her face and neck, so I tightened more and more until her eyes showed fear.
‘I … can’t …’ she rasped.
‘I know.’ I tightened my grip.
Her face reddened. She bucked under me, struggling to get free. Her fingernails clawed at my back. Her fists pounded against me. But I was inside her and held her by the throat and as she bucked I went in deeper and deeper until she screamed an asphyxiated scream of pleasure and pain greater than any I’d ever heard, as if she were dying from an orgasm so thorough that it was splitting her in two.
Afterward she lay panting, returning to herself. ‘Jesus, that was great,’ she said hoarsely and put a gentle hand on my chest. ‘But never do that again. Never. Not if you want to be with me.’
SEVENTEEN
I woke at eight-thirty the next morning in Lee Ann’s bed. Sunlight fell through the slats of the window blinds. I’d been dreaming of grackles, the black birds that crossed the south each fall in flocks of thousands and descended noisily on clusters of live oak trees, ate the acorn fruit and moved on. In my dream I’d been alone in my house and the grackles had darkened the sky and lowered like a suffocating blanket over the roof and walls. I’d screamed but the sound of my voice had dissolved in the Gah, Gah, Gah cry of the birds.
I opened my eyes, startled to find myself away from my own bed. Outside the window, a steady drip of rainwater from last night’s storm fell from a branch or a roof eave and plinked against something metal. No birds cried or sang.
Lee Ann lay beside me. Her face had the soft fleshiness of sleep and death. She opened her eyes when she felt mine on her and she smiled sleepily. ‘Since when do you spend the night?’
‘Since Susan left me.’
Her eyes opened wider. ‘Did she?’
I gave a half nod.
‘Did she cut your forehead and kick you in the ribs on her way out?’ she asked.
‘She took Thomas with her.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ We lay for a while and listened to the plink of water on metal and I wondered how many minutes or hours we could lie in bed before the dripping stopped. ‘What does this mean for us?’ Lee Ann asked.
I thought about it. ‘It means I can spend the night sometimes.’
‘I’m not sure I want you to,’ she said. She smiled sadly and kissed me, got out of bed and went into the kitchen. This is what the world must come to when the love of one’s life died, I thought – the solitude of lying alone in a strange bed that reeked of sweat and sex but not love. For some reason, that thought comforted me, as if I’d lived my whole life moving toward this inevitable moment, and now it was here and it was bearable, or nearly.
We drank coffee at the kitchen table, the windows open to the storm-cooled morning, and Lee Ann said, ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’
‘What?’
‘All of this. What’s been happening the past few days.’
‘It’s my whole life,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you want it?’
‘I’ll stop you if I don’t.’
I told her about the past four days and about the moments that had led to them and I felt like I was confessing but that the confession wouldn’t lighten the burden, and when I finished I said, ‘I’ve told other women I loved them but Belinda’s the only woman I’ve ever really loved. I know that makes me a bastard.’
‘I don’t know what it makes you,’ she said.
We ate breakfast together silently and when I stood to go she said, ‘Come back tonight.’
Susan’s car was gone from the driveway and the house was empty when I let myself in. I wandered into the sunroom. She’d made her bed and cleaned the room before leaving, stacking magazines on the bedside table, lowering the blinds halfway. I resisted an impulse to tear the covers from the bed and ravage the room and instead wandered thro
ugh the house to Thomas’s bedroom. He’d taken clothes, his laptop computer and his stash of comic books. He hadn’t made his bed. But he’d left a gift for me. Tacked to the wall above the bed was a new drawing. A female character stood against a white background in leather lace-up boots, her thin muscular legs rising to short shorts, her breasts bulging from a bustier. She raised her arms above her head. One hand shot sparks into the air and in her other hand she held the severed head of a cat. A word bubble that rose from her mouth said: Kill the asshole!
‘Well,’ I said, and wandered back through the house.
A quick search on the computer brought up the phone number of the Consulate General of Jamaica in Miami and a call to the Consulate redirected me to the Jamaican Embassy in Washington. The Embassy gave me a United States phone number for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The woman I talked to at the Ministry, sounding more British than Caribbean, said that Godrell Graham was on a business trip but gave me a cell phone number where I could reach him.
One of Graham’s assistants answered my call. He hesitated when I asked to speak with his boss until I said that my call concerned a party that Don Melchiori hoped to hold in his honor.
Graham picked up the phone and asked angrily, ‘Who is this?’
‘My name’s William Byrd, Mr Graham,’ I said. ‘I think we share some concerns.’
‘What’s this about Don Melchiori?’
‘He’s one of the concerns,’ I said. ‘I know what happened to your daughter. I’ve seen pictures of the night she died. I know who was there.’
He was quiet for a moment. ‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. Just to talk.’
‘About what?’
‘A friend of mine was also at the party where your daughter died,’ I said. ‘My friend’s dead too.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Where are you?’ I asked.
‘Why?’
‘I’d like to meet with you and talk.’
‘We’re checking Florida port facilities. I’ve been in Miami but we’re heading north to JAXPORT this morning.’
‘I can meet you by the port,’ I said. ‘How long have you been in Florida?’
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