“She’s still up,” Carmen said. I could see Carmen’s breath in the dark car. South Bend was colder than Indianapolis. I inhaled a little more deeply than usual to try to taste Carmen’s scent. Failed.
“Watching Leno,” I said.
“Letterman,” she corrected.
I smiled, turning my head and parting my lips, letting Carmen see my teeth. It was an effort at modeling. “Yeah, you’re right, probably Letterman. He’s from Indiana, too, right? What do you think, should we go over, pound on her door, tell her about Sterling, ruin her evening?”
“She’s not going to be happy to see us, Sam.”
“Nope,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I find most people aren’t happy to see me at times like this.”
“It is pretty late.”
“Murderers work all kinds of hours.”
“You really think he’s going to kill her tonight?” she asked.
“ ’Course not. But are you a hundred percent sure he isn’t? This could be one of those times when being a little wrong has serious consequences.”
Carmen yawned. “Why do I get the impression that you go through partners the way I go through panty hose?”
“Lucy’s been my partner as long as I can remember.”
“Is she a saint?”
“No. Lucy has issues, too, just like me. The rocks in her head fit the holes in mine almost perfectly.”
Across the street Holly Malone killed the TV, and the light in the dormer died along with it.
Carmen noticed the change in scenery the same second I did. She said, “I guess we have a decision to make.”
“Coming here was your idea, Carmen. It was a good idea, or I wouldn’t be here with you. I think whether we ruin Holly’s holiday tonight or tomorrow morning is up to you. I’ll back you up either way you want to go.”
She gave the puzzle fifteen, twenty seconds of thought. “We passed a motel a few blocks back. I vote that you and I go get some sleep, and we talk to her tomorrow morning when she’s chopping celery and onions to stuff into her turkey.”
“Okay, that’s what we’ll do.” I started the car. “Tell me something, Carmen. Are you a Raiders fan?”
“What?”
I pulled a U-turn in the intersection before I switched on the headlights.
“Football? You a Raiders fan?”
“As I matter of fact, I am. How did you know?”
“Intuition. Did you have tickets when you lived up north?” What was I guessing? I was guessing that she had season tickets and that she owned a good-sized wardrobe of Silver and Black.
“Yes, I did.”
“Thought you might.”
“What else do you know about me?”
You like disco and the Oakland Raiders. That’s about it. Don’t necessarily like what I know, but I don’t know as much as I’d like.That’s what I was thinking.
I decided to circle Holly Malone’s block one more time, slowly, searching for any sign of Sterling Storey. Why? Criminals almost always end up proving themselves to be a lot smarter or a lot dumber than people give them credit for. I was still hoping that Sterling was a lot dumber. That was why.
Halfway around the block I finally responded to Carmen’s question. “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t know anything else about you. You have kids?”
“One. She’s a freshman at UC Santa Cruz. She’s spending Thanksgiving with her boyfriend’s family.”
I did the math, figured Carmen was maybe a little older than me. “I have one, too. He’s a sophomore in grammar school. He’s spending Thanksgiving with his grandparents.”
She laughed before she said, “I know.”
She knew.
“You married?” I asked. I didn’t think about asking, I just asked. I don’t like it when my mouth gets ahead of my brain. It doesn’t happen often. Usually my mouth is pretty slow, my brain a little faster.
“No,” she said, without explanation.
She didn’t ask me if I was married.
She knew.
Or did she?
I sucked in my gut, knowing damn well the act did nothing to disguise my man-boobs.
What did I spend the next few blocks wondering? I spent the next few blocks wondering what it would be like to get one room at the Days Inn instead of two.
FIFTY-ONE
We got two.
I hoped I hadn’t been obvious when the woman at the desk had asked, “One room or two?” I’d hesitated a beat too long-I knew I had. I was waiting for Carmen to say “two,” but she didn’t. Or hoping she’d say “one” or something. It might have been my imagination, but I thought she was waiting to hear what I was going to say.
After that beat-too-long passed, we both blurted, “Two.”
My room had littleNO SMOKINGsigns just about everywhere I looked, but it had recently been occupied by a smoker, no doubt about it. The fetid air caught in the back of my throat with each slow breath I took.
I took a minute to call Alan on my cell to let him know that Carmen, and therefore the Boulder Police Department, knew about the woman in South Bend and that they seemed to have a conduit that ran straight into his office by way of the Crime Stoppers program.
He sounded dismayed at the news. I felt bad for him. The guy’s plate was pretty full.
Carmen and I had been assigned rooms right next to each other; they even had a pair of those odd connecting doors between them, as though the desk clerk thought it might be fun to tempt me with trespassing all night long.
She sang soulful songs as she prepared to sleep. Except for my shoes I was still fully dressed, and I lay on the bed as motionless as I could so that the bed wouldn’t squeal and I wouldn’t miss a muted note. I was almost certain that I’d never heard any of the songs she was singing before in my life.
That, I thought, was fitting. It seemed that all the melodies I’d heard since she sat down opposite me in the Marriott were composed of fresh notes.
Except for the disco.
She sang three songs, paused, I guessed, to brush her teeth, and then sang one more tune, something so full of lament that it brought tears to my eyes about Simon and Sherry and the holidays and my heart. I thought of Lauren and the fears that enveloped her, and even of Gibbs and what her life was going to be like when the dust settled, and I shed a tear for her as well.
I fell asleep right like that with my clothes on and woke at one-thirty, stripped in the dark, brushed my teeth, and fell back into bed. I listened for a while to the silence, pretended I could hear the soft percussion of Carmen’s breathing through the walls, and replayed the songs I’d heard only once a short while before, and they worked for me once again like lullabies. I was back to sleep before two and stayed that way until she pounded on my door at a quarter to eight.
When Carmen busted me awake, she’d torn me from a dream about the Wolf sisters and their mostly cooked turducken. The details of the dream evaporated instantly, but I woke thinking that if I inhaled deeply enough, I would be able to smell the intertwined birds roasting in an Ochlockonee, Georgia, oven. A deep breath and a quick look around the room brought me back to the reality that all I was smelling was the stale smoke of some inconsiderate fool’s Marlboros.
I chided myself for my juvenile romantic fantasies all through breakfast. What had I been thinking?
Whatever intimacies I had imagined the night before had disappeared with the darkness. If we’d been flirting at midnight, we weren’t flirting anymore. Carmen played nothing but business at breakfast, and I ran along next to her, trying hard just to keep up. I returned to the buffet line in the motel’s little breakfast room a couple of times, not just to get more food, but also to get a break from her intensity. The meal wasn’t bad; I ate yogurt and fruit and Cheerios with nonfat milk. After two cups of decaf I switched to regular coffee. If the morning was any indication what our day was going to be like, I was going to need some rocket fuel to match her pace.
My cardiologist would just have to understand.<
br />
“What do you know about Sterling and Holly? Their relationship?” Carmen asked me when I indicated I was done eating by pushing the plastic cereal bowl and the plastic spoon away from me. I thought that her saying “Sterling and Holly” was particularly ironic; it managed to make the two of them sound like they were the cute couple that’d been crowned king and queen at the Homecoming Dance.
But Carmen’s question caused me take a sharp breath, too. Or maybe it wasn’t the question; it was the answer I was about to give. “They were having an affair,” I said. Which was exactly what I’d been thinking about doing the night before. I tasted hypocrisy with my next sip of coffee.
I don’t like hypocrisy in others. I hate it in myself. Hate it.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough. When I talked to her yesterday, she was obviously upset that I knew about her and Sterling. If all the two of them did was mess around a couple of times, why would she be so upset? She’s not married, so what did she do that was so wrong, other than show some bad judgment by sleeping with a married guy? That particular sin is committed about a million times a day in this country.”
It couldn’t have been clearer if she’d been shouting at me. Carmen was announcing to me that she’d almost made the exact same mistake eight hours or so before and that she wasn’t feeling particularly good about how close she’d come to yielding to the temptation.
But I didn’t see the issue she was describing with Holly Malone. “I don’t know that it’s that confusing. She’s Catholic. She’s Irish. She has a young kid. She lives in a small town. Maybe she’s the guilty type, or maybe she’s just afraid of scandals. Most people don’t like to be reminded of their indiscretions. Or-wait, better-she met him through her work, right? Maybe there’s a Fighting Irish Sports Information Office prohibition against sleeping with people they’re doing business with. She’s scared of losing her job.”
“That’s possible. It sounds Catholic enough. But I think there’s something more than that going on.”
“Why does there have to be something more than that?”
“There doesn’t have to be, Sam. There just is. I feel it. Who did you call last night?”
“What?”
“The second you stepped into your room, you made a phone call. Why? What was so important? Who was it?”
I sat back and felt my man-boobs jiggle beneath my shirt. It was clear that I wasn’t making much progress on the man-boobs segment of my self-improvement program. I tried to look her in the eyes, but I couldn’t quite corral her gaze. “Are we on those kinds of terms, Carmen? Where you can ask me who I call on the phone?”
She sat back, and her boobs jiggled beneath her shirt a little bit, too-although it was an altogether different phenomenon. “You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry.”
She had been asking me something, but she had been telling me something, too. What did I conclude? I concluded that she was telling me that her songs the night before had been a private concert just for me. I chewed on that. “The shrink who called you about the Storeys? The one you met in Boulder? He’s a friend of mine.”
“I know,” she said.
She knew a lot about me.
She hadn’t looked back at me since her intrusive question about the phone call. I said, “I called him. He has a… problem. I had an idea that I thought might help him with it. So how do you want to play this with Holly later this morning?”
She finally looked back up at me. She smiled. “If you’re up to it, I’d like you to talk to her. Yesterday didn’t go too well on the phone with me and her. You can start fresh. Is that okay?” My eyes were locked on her smile. There was nothing wrong with her teeth. They weren’t crooked. They weren’t yellow. They were just fine.
“That’s okay,” I said.
FIFTY-TWO
She was talking to herself more than she was talking to me.
“Twenty-two pounds. Dinner’s at four. I’d like the bird out of the oven by three, maybe a little after. Eighteen to twenty minutes a pound-that’s because it’s stuffed, otherwise it would be only fifteen. That means five hours, give or take, so I need to get this in the oven-oh my God!-in the next few minutes. Aaaagh.”
Holly Malone was kind of cute. She would be the darling kid in the sitcom-the one you really liked, the one with the charm. Pretty, but not the kind of drop-dead-beautiful that made me nervous. Like Gibbs.
I was enjoying watching her flit around her little linoleum-tiled kitchen searching for utensils and roasting pans and ingredients that it was apparent she hadn’t laid a hand on in months. Or longer. But she possessed enough enthusiasm for an entire cheerleading squad, and her positive energy was better for my heart than anything I’d run across recently.
I was also enjoying being in a kitchen on Thanksgiving morning, getting the opportunity to be a spectator at an event that I’d been privileged to witness almost every year of my life since I was old enough to remember. I was surrounded by tradition; the countertops in Holly’s kitchen were upholstered with celery and onions and broth and butter and parsley and dried bread crumbs and a big fat naked turkey, and for a moment all was right in my world.
I looked at the clock that hung on the wall by the door that led from the kitchen to the living room, which was where Carmen Reynoso was waiting while I was doing my best to bond with Holly. The clock read ten-fifty. I did some arithmetic, considered for a moment the consequences of keeping my mouth shut, and said, “Relax, Holly. Dinner won’t be until six-thirty or seven. Maybe later. You have all day.”
“What are you talking about?” she said playfully. She thought I was teasing. “Everyone’s coming shortly after two. Dinner’s at four, promptly. My sister’s husband Artie would have a fit if he thought his meal would be even a minute tardy.” Holly had a trace of an accent of some kind that caused her to elevate the last syllables of her words as though she really, really liked them. The accent was cute, too.
I was having a very good time.
Reluctantly, I explained the turkey dilemma. “Twenty-two pounds at twenty minutes a pound is exactly seven hours and twenty minutes of cooking time, not five hours give or take. That sounds like a long time to me, but what do I know about turkeys? If you stick it in the oven right this second-and you and I know that’s not going to happen-then that bird won’t be coming back out of the oven until almost six o’clock this evening.”
She froze and stared at me as though I had screamed at her not to move, she had a tarantula on her nose. I could tell she was using the interlude to check my facility with numbers.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God!”
“What can I do to help, Holly?” I asked. “Chop something?”
Her shoulders dropped. She put a devilish look on her face and said, “Can you go and arrest Artie for something or other? Throw him in the slammer for a while? That’d slow him down.”
Half an hour later the bird was finally in the oven, and Holly and I were sipping fresh coffee at her linoleum-topped, chrome-framed kitchen table.
“This is going to be the kids’ table later on,” she told me. “This and an old card table from the basement.”
“I like the kids’ table,” I said. “Conversation’s usually better.”
She sighed and looked at the clock. “I was a math major at Williams. I swear I was,” she said.
I assumed that Williams was one of those eastern colleges that I was supposed to recognize by reputation. I didn’t. I’d gone to St. Cloud State and didn’t hang a whole lot with kids who didn’t.
I said, “Thanksgiving meals never happen on time. It’s part of the whole tradition. Don’t worry. If Artie gives you any trouble about it, he’s a jerk. Dinner will be wonderful.”
“Artie is a jerk. I don’t know what the heck my sister was thinking. She has this thing for anal men.”
I saw my opening. “Don’t be so hard on her. We all make decisions in relationships that we’d like to do over
. I know I’ve made a few. I bet you have, too.”
She was staring into her mug. “Yeah,” she said, “I have.” She stood, walked over to the oven, and peered in on the bird. She and I both knew it was just as pale as it had been ten minutes before. And she and I both knew that she was getting some distance from me. We were getting a little too close for Holly’s comfort.
I pulled the photo of Brian Miles from my pocket. “You know this guy?”
She took a serious look at it before she said no.
My first reaction was that I believed her. I reminded myself that that didn’t mean she was telling the truth.
“Sure? He hasn’t been around?”
“I’m sure. Who is he?”
“Not important.”
She moved some things around on the counter. Finally, she said, “This is where we talk about Sterling, isn’t it?”
“Stuffing’s made, turkey’s in the oven, the first round of dishes is done. Coffee’s hot. Guests won’t be here for hours. It’s probably as good a time as any.”
“I should check on my son.”
“He’s fine. Detective Reynoso loves kids.” Or she hates kids. Or she can take or leave kids. I didn’t know. All I knew was that she’d managed to keep one alive until the kid was in college.
“You’re sure?”
“I am.”
“Is Sterling dead? The papers say he’s dead.”
“I was down in Georgia a couple of days ago. They think he’s dead. Me? I’m not convinced.” I went into a long explanation about the Reverend Prior and the Wolf sisters, the precise order they all arrived at the bridge over the Ochlockonee during that terrible storm, and I even slid into a little digression about the turducken that had already been in the Wolf sisters’ oven for over half a day.
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