Blue Avenue

by Michael Wiley

  ‘Christ, BB. He’s working. You can get him at the station or on his cell.’

  Phil Lingren’s head tipped to the side and for a moment I thought he was alive but his body was only giving itself to the gravity that would pull it deep into the ground.

  ‘You still there, BB?’ Patty asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘This will seem like a strange question but what kind of cars do the two of you drive?’

  She sighed. ‘It’s two in the morning.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘A Honda Pilot and a Buick LaCrosse.’

  ‘What color is the Pilot?’

  ‘BB …’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Blue. They call it blue pearl.’

  ‘Is that a greenish blue?’

  ‘No, BB, it’s blue. Pearl blue, whatever that means. I’m really tired.’

  ‘Just one other thing,’ I said. ‘When Daniel comes in, do me a favor and ask him about his trip to Jamaica.’

  Her voice came awake and angry. ‘You know something? You’re a damned hypocrite, BB.’

  ‘You already know about Jamaica?’

  ‘It’s none of your business what I know.’ She hung up.

  Why had the man in Lingren’s pantry run away instead of attacking me? Why had the shooter at Melchiori’s house allowed me to escape? I wondered about Daniel’s involvement. He’d been at Melchiori’s last party. He’d called me right after a homeless man found Belinda dead on an empty lot on Blue Avenue. He’d played me in and out. Had Daniel set me up to fall from the beginning? When I wasn’t working out as a fall guy, did he set up Terrence? And now that he had problems with Terrence, was he setting me up again?

  I dialed Daniel’s cell number. When he answered I said, ‘I know you were in Jamaica.’

  He said, ‘You know nothing, BB. Come in now and you won’t get hurt.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Try to figure you out,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah? What’s to figure?’

  ‘With all the people who’ve died after attending Melchiori’s party, why are you still alive?’ I asked.

  ‘I was hoping you would tell me,’ Daniel said. ‘Maybe you’re afraid to go after a cop. Maybe you’re my friend and can’t get yourself to kill me. Maybe another reason altogether. Why don’t you come in and talk about it?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘Who were the other men at the party?’

  ‘I don’t like your games,’ he said.

  I’d known Daniel for most of my life and I listened to his voice for signs that he’d turned vicious or worse but I heard neither innocence nor guilt. ‘I’ve got pictures of everyone who was there,’ I said. ‘Phil Lingren was one of them.’

  ‘Yeah, Phil was there.’

  ‘Melchiori too, and David Fowler and you. And one other man. You tell me who that other man is and I’ll tell you something interesting about Lingren – unless you know it already.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Who was the other man?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ve got his picture too?’

  ‘In my pocket.’

  ‘His name’s Steve Perkins,’ he said.

  ‘If you really think I’m responsible for the killings, why would you tell me that?’

  ‘With his picture you could identify him anyway.’

  ‘Or you’re setting a trap to bring me in,’ I said.

  ‘Or I know that Perkins is already in hiding and safe.’

  ‘Could be,’ I said. ‘D’you know where he lives?’

  ‘What’s this about Lingren?’

  ‘You sure you don’t already know? You can find him in his backyard shed. He got hung by his neck from a steel bar with a plastic bag over his head.’

  ‘Jesus, BB! Did you …’ His shock sounded real.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t. But I’m thinking that you might’ve.’

  ‘You there with him?’

  ‘Regrettably.’

  ‘Wait there for me,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, right.’ I hung up.

  Flies were buzzing around Lingren’s mouth and eyes. A couple of mosquitoes were making a strange Eucharist of his cheeks and forehead.

  As I stepped out of the shed Thomas’s phone rang. I flipped it open, thinking Daniel was calling back. ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘BB?’ It was Susan. She sounded confused.

  ‘Yeah. Hey. What’s up?’

  ‘Why do you have Thomas’s phone?’ she asked.

  ‘I borrowed it from him.’

  ‘Is he with you?’

  ‘No, of course not. What’s going on?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he’s gone. I woke up and he wasn’t here. He took my car.’

  ‘Damn.’ The news shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d left the house hundreds of times when I should’ve stayed locked in my room and he’d watched me go. Now he’d left in the middle of the night and the thought of it terrified me.

  ‘He’s worried about you,’ Susan said. ‘He wants to be with you.’

  ‘I’m the last person he should want to be with.’

  ‘Come home,’ she said. ‘Let him find you here.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘He’s your son, BB.’

  ‘Call me if he comes back.’

  ‘BB …’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  I hung up. Thomas would have no idea of where to search for me. He would have no idea what to do. But I knew too well the urge that got a man out of bed in the middle of the night and made him drive through dark, empty streets whether or not he knew where he was going.

  I cut across the lawn, around the side of the house and on to the gravel driveway. Daniel had talked as if I was the killer. He could probably make a case against me. Thanks to him, forensics would be able to show that I’d been to the site where Belinda’s body was found. I’d also been to the house where Ashley Littleton’s roommate died, in the room where Aggie had taken a beating, in Melchiori’s house when he got shot, and now in Phil Lingren’s shed.

  The insects buzzing in the bushes seemed to mock me. I yelled, ‘Fuck,’ and the sounds stopped but there was no echo and by the time I reached my car they started again with new urgency.

  I called 411. They had numbers and addresses for three men named Steven Perkins. No one answered at the first number, and at the second the man’s voice sounded too old for weekend orgies in Jamaica. At the third the man sounded fatigued but right and so I hung up and drove toward his house.

  Perkins lived in a neighborhood of neat single-story bungalows with well-tended lawns – houses that rested back in the shadows as if they were hiding from the glare of the streetlights. I parked in Perkins’ driveway behind a silver Prius, my headlights shining on a brick house with a red door. A wooden fence extended from either end of the house and circled into the backyard. Despite the rain, an irrigation system was on in the yard next door, the sprinkler heads hissing as they sprayed the lawn. The sound of semi-trailer trucks rumbling over a highway a half mile away drifted through the still air.

  It was a quarter to three in the morning and Perkins’ house was dark when I climbed the front porch stairs. A glazed pot of plumbago stood on each step. A wreath of dried wildflowers hung on the door. The place looked like a cardboard cutout of a kind of happy normalcy that I’d never known personally, and standing on the porch sent a tremor of discomfort through me.

  A voice answered my knock immediately. ‘Yes?’ I’d awakened no one.

  ‘Mr Perkins?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I need to talk to Steve Perkins.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Jamaica.’

  Several seconds passed, then two lock bolts clicked and the door swung halfway open. The lights remained off inside and out.

  ‘Come in,’ the voice said.

>   I stepped over the threshold and a pistol barrel pressed against my jaw. I was shoved to the side and frisked from front and back. ‘Come on,’ the man said. He led me into a windowless kitchen, closed a door and turned on a light. As I expected, he was the man in Melchiori’s party photos. He was about thirty, a little short of six feet tall, and had the build of an ex-athlete who’d eaten and drunk too much. He held the pistol firmly and had a second gun tucked into his belt. A bottle of Smirnoff, the cap off, about a third full, stood on the counter next to three butcher knives.

  Perkins went to the counter, lifted the bottle to his lips and asked, ‘Why are you here?’

  I glanced around the kitchen. On the refrigerator, magnets held photographs of two blonde-haired girls, about three and five years old, and the crayon art that the girls had made. A large, framed professional portrait of the Perkins family – Steve himself, a blonde woman and the girls, all dressed in jeans and red shirts – hung on the wall between a spice rack and another wildflower wreath, this one shaped into a heart. The inside of the house, like the outside, felt clean and corrupt.

  I scratched my cheek and said, ‘My name’s William Byrd. People call me BB.’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Then you know why I’m here. Did you know that Phil Lingren died tonight?’

  Fear flashed in his eyes but he said calmly, ‘I’m not surprised. Killed the same way as the others?’

  ‘Close enough. You’re one of the last alive. You and Daniel Turner.’

  ‘I have the feeling I’m next on the list,’ he said.

  ‘Whose list?’

  ‘The girl’s father said he’d get us.’ He drank again from the vodka bottle.

  ‘Godrell Graham?’

  He nodded. ‘When everyone else left Kingston I stayed for an extra day because I couldn’t change my flight. Graham came to my hotel room with a couple of men. He threatened me. I told him I didn’t touch Tralena. I was there when it happened but it wasn’t me and I couldn’t stop it. I said I had daughters too.’

  ‘Did you tell him the names of the others at the party?’

  ‘I had to. He said he’d kill me.’ He spoke with a deep sadness but no guilt that I could hear.

  ‘You deserve to die then,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got two girls. I was thinking of them.’

  ‘You put them on the line the moment you got on the plane to Jamaica.’

  ‘I know.’

  I asked, ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘I sent them with my wife to her mother’s house up in Savannah.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ll kill Graham if he comes after me,’ he said.

  ‘He’s not coming himself,’ I said. ‘He arrived in town two days ago. He must’ve hired out the killings.’

  ‘To who?’

  ‘Daniel Turner?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Daniel also has a wife,’ I said. ‘He might think he has no choice.’

  The idea seemed to worry him. He said, ‘Twenty minutes before you arrived there was someone else outside. He tried to come in the front door but I said I had a gun.’

  ‘I saw no one,’ I said. ‘Did you call nine-one-one?’

  ‘To say what? Someone’s trying to kill me because I saw a sixteen-year-old killed in Jamaica?’ He drank from the Smirnoff bottle. It was nearly empty. He offered it to me.

  I shook my head and said, ‘You need to get out of here.’

  ‘I’m not running away.’

  ‘If you stay, you’ll die. That won’t do your daughters any good. Check into a motel in Gainesville for a few days. Go to Alabama. But don’t stay here.’

  ‘How about you? What good are you doing anyone?’

  I tried to smile. ‘I’m already past hope.’

  Without much more persuasion, Perkins turned off the kitchen light and went to assemble a travel bag. When he returned he had a third pistol.

  We went out the back on to a patio. A clothesline stretched from the patio to a fence, and a plastic playhouse stood in the moonlight like a magic cottage. Next to the fence, there was a sandbox with pails.

  We stayed in the shadows and worked our way around the house, Perkins carrying a pistol in one hand and his travel bag in the other. When we reached the fence gate to the front yard I stepped into the moonlight.

  A gunshot rang and a bullet slapped into the gate.

  I ducked to the wall.

  Another gunshot rang.

  ‘Shoot your gun,’ I said to Perkins.

  He was wild-eyed. ‘I can’t see him,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Shoot it.’

  He pointed his pistol over the back fence and pulled the trigger four times and in the fury of sound I opened the latch and yelled, ‘Run.’

  We pushed through the gate and sprinted across the front lawn. Gunshots trailed us.

  We got into my car and I pulled back on to the street and shifted into drive. As we drove away, a large SUV that had been parked against a curb two houses down flipped on its headlights and a set of blindingly bright post-mounted spotlights. As the SUV closed on us, I stepped on the accelerator. In the rearview mirror, through the brilliant light, I recognized the silhouette of the driver.

  It was Charles.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The SUV followed a half block behind us, never closing the gap. When we accelerated, it accelerated. When we slowed, it slowed. When we crossed through an intersection as a stoplight changed, it rolled through the red as if it were green. A newspaper delivery van pulled from behind a stand of crepe myrtle trees on a side street and the SUV cut casually into the oncoming lane and back behind us as if an invisible tether held us together. The post-mounted spotlights glared in the humid night air, two terrible balls of brilliance.

  What happens when the monster you know becomes a stranger?

  We drove on residential streets lined with oaks and magnolias. In another two hours the sun would rise, cars would fill the streets and the sidewalks would come alive with people walking their dogs or jogging through the neighborhood. But now the moon was setting and the deepest dark of night blanketed the city.

  Perkins sat nervously beside me, hunched forward, glancing over the headrest at the SUV, cradling a pistol in his lap.

  I asked, ‘What was Belinda Mabry like?’

  He leaned toward the passenger’s side window, peered in the rearview mirror and answered distractedly. ‘She was insane.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He looked at me. ‘I never met her before the party but that was enough. She put the bag over Tralena Graham’s head and wouldn’t take it off even when the girl started screaming. Fowler and I tried to pull her away but she locked on to Tralena and wouldn’t let go. They had a weird connection the whole weekend. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.’

  ‘Belinda killed her?’

  ‘We all did, I suppose. Belinda put the bag on her head and held it until Tralena stopped kicking and screaming and fighting. But we were all together.’

  We rolled through a stop sign and, a block later, rounded a corner toward the Five Points district of restaurants and shops. The SUV followed a half block behind.

  If the monster that you depend upon turns on you, then what?

  Perkins rolled down his window and peered at the SUV.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ I asked.

  He raised the pistol to the window. ‘I’m going to shoot this guy.’

  I hit the brakes and we slammed to a stop. ‘Out!’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  The SUV closed on us and stopped too.

  ‘Out,’ I said. ‘No shooting from my car.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said and put the gun down. ‘Go!’

  The lights from the SUV brightened the interior of my car. I looked in the rearview mirror. The driver’s door of the SUV swung open.

  ‘Go!’ Perkins yelled.

  I did.

  ‘You’re insane too,�
�� he said.

  ‘You don’t realize how easy it is to kill a man like you,’ I said. ‘You’re all dressed up with your three pistols – and you’ve got butcher knives on your kitchen counter, for God’s sake. But the man in that SUV knows exactly what you are. He’s toying with you and when he’s finished he’ll break your neck. I’ve half a mind to do it myself.’

  Perkins looked at me nervously and his hand floated back toward his pistol.

  ‘That would be a bad idea,’ I said, and he rested his hand on his knee.

  In Five Points we rounded a corner by a Mexican restaurant. The SUV followed us. I floored the accelerator to widen the gap and we swung into a nearly empty parking lot shared by a grocery store, a barbershop and a pizzeria.

  A wide alley ran along the side of the grocery store and connected with a side street behind it. We slipped into the alley as the SUV entered the lot. Halfway along the store, for a space of three car widths, the wall jutted inward toward a loading dock. I hit the brakes and we backed into the space. A moment after I flipped off the headlights, the SUV spotlights shone into the alley and on to a chain-link fence and a trash dumpster across from us.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Perkins asked.

  ‘Shut up,’ I said.

  The spotlights approached. If I’d parked far enough behind the corner of the wall we wouldn’t be visible until the SUV was nearly past us.

  ‘I’m getting out,’ Perkins said.

  ‘Another bad idea.’

  He reached for the door handle as the SUV lights flashed upon us and I revved the engine and took my foot off the brake. We shot across the alley.

  The front end of my Lexus smashed into the side doors of the SUV. The SUV veered and slammed into the dumpster.

  I yanked the gearshift into reverse, backed away, shifted into drive and hit the gas. The SUV remained dead against the dumpster as we rounded the corner from the alley into the parking lot. We sped up, cut to a side street and turned again.

  We left the SUV behind us but I thought I heard Charles’ laugh.

  It wasn’t an evil laugh. It was a laugh of surprise and pleasure, the kind you hear from a teacher whose student has shown a moment of accidental brilliance that the teacher had never imagined possible.

  We cruised toward downtown under the glare and shadows of streetlamps. I said, ‘I can take you to the airport but they won’t let you on a plane with the guns.’