by Barr, Nevada
Anna’s radio grumbled, reminding her she wasn’t paid to sit around having coffee. After weaseling an invitation to come play with Flicka anytime she wanted, she took her leave.
Driving south, she considered her conversation with the two women. Had Tabby targeted Todd because he “would leave her”? Lynette targeted Hammond for flirting with septuagenarians? Or was the one that got away, Norman Hull, the intended target? Motive was a stumbling block when the identity of the intended victim was up for grabs.
Love was a respectable motive for murder, well represented in fact and fiction, but it wasn’t Anna’s favorite for this type of crime. Love, the kind that could get one killed, was passionate, immediate, dramatic—at least a majority of the time. In crimes of the heart there was often, quite literally, a smoking gun.
Murder by sabotage or—if Wayne had his way—by incompetence, breathed cold.
In some evil recess of her mind Anna was pleased it had happened on her shift. Presuppression was deadly dull. Taken from a purely heartless point of view, a murder investigation was downright entertaining.
Anna laughed at the wickedness of the thought and was instantly punished by an echo of pain from behind her left ear. Abruptly her mood changed, reality setting in with a vengeance, reminding her to stay alert lest her demise prove amusing to someone else; someone she owed one hell of a headache.
CHAPTER Sixteen
ON THE NORTH end of the island were the Cumberland Mountains—hillocks not nearly so majestic as the dunes—left behind when the sea severed the island’s tip. Across a causeway, that tip still existed, privately owned. Because it was inaccessible and therefore mysterious, Anna was fantasizing about swimming the narrow channel and exploring it. Of course she never would. There were ten standard firefighting orders. Had there been an eleventh, it might have said that the instant a firefighter left her station there was bound to be a call-out.
“What time is it?” Dijon asked.
“Two minutes later than last time you asked.”
They lay side by side on the hood of the truck, their backs against the windshield. Having finished their sack lunches, they’d declared siesta appropriate, and as long as Guy didn’t catch them at it, it would be. Neither worried; stealth and all-terrain vehicles were mutually exclusive.
“We could go feed the baby alligators,” Dijon suggested.
“I am shocked,” Anna said mildly. “Maggie-Mary would get us. Besides, it’s against Superintendent’s Orders.” Feeding wild animals human food was seldom healthy for them, and feeding wild animals that could grow up to feed on you, unwise at the best of times.
“Pissing in the wind,” Dijon defended himself.
As oblique as the comment was, Anna understood. Tourists, island dwellers, fishermen—everyone—had hand-fed the little gators since they were hatchlings. Now the babies, all fourteen of them, were a couple of feet long. Whenever a human approached the pool they lived in, they all came crowding around like pigeons in the park. But with pointier teeth.
So far Anna had kept to the moral high ground and not given in to the temptation to feed them, but she watched Rick and Dijon do it and enjoyed the show, which was just as bad. Hypocrite, she reproved herself, but there was no power behind the thought. The day was too warm, the clatter of cicadas too soothing, and the baby gators too much fun to watch for her to get up a strong case against herself.
Her mind wandered off the glittering Atlantic and onto earthier things. Alice Utterback had located the aircraft logs at the office at the St. Marys airport where Hammond had his mechanic work done. They were all in order and up-to-date. The Beechcraft had been given its hundred-hour check two weeks prior to the accident. At that time everything had been in order and signed off on. The mechanic, an older man and a staple in St. Marys, not only had the recommendations of his peers but had no idea who owned the airplane when he worked on it, or who might or might not be flying with Hammond in the future. That left sabotage, intentional and deadly.
“What do you know about either of the guys killed in the crash?” Anna asked. She was aware that she avoided the use of their names. She didn’t want to make it personal.
“Sleuthing, eh?” Dijon said in a passable English accent. “Why not. I’ve been to law enforcement school and I could pass for Denzel Washington.”
“In your dreams.”
“Most of what I got’s from Lynette,” Dijon said. “Hearsay. Not admissible. I got an eighty-two on that exam.”
“Bully for you.”
“Lynette had the hots for Hammond. You’d think the sun rose and set in his pants.”
“Wouldn’t give you the time of day?”
“You got it. And to resist me you have to admit she must’ve had it bad.”
Anna laughed. “Rick teaching you how to brag?”
“If it’s true, it ain’t bragging. Lynette seemed kind of down, so me and Rick dropped by her place last night with a couple of six-packs.”
Anna’s guess that Lynette wouldn’t suffer for broad shoulders to cry on had been right on the money.
“Rick and Lynette got pretty smashed—”
“Not you?”
“Me? You kidding? The stuff has no effect on me anymore.”
“Anyway . . .” Anna prompted.
“What do you mean anyway? You’re the one keeps interrupting, lousing up the flow.”
“Sorry.”
“Could you grovel and beseech me?”
“Not that sorry.”
“Anyway,” Dijon went on amiably, “it pretty much turned into a pity party, which was okay by me. Women cry, you get to hold ’em. Beats sitting around staring at you old farts all night.”
“You have a heart as big as all outdoors,” Anna said dryly.
“I do, don’t I? She’d met Slattery a few years back—before she got on permanent she was a seasonal up in Alaska somewhere. They went at it hot and heavy, then he started screwing around on her. Lynette didn’t say that. ‘Betrayed my trust,’ is how she put it.”
“Screwing around,” Anna agreed.
“Hey, you are old, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been around the block.”
“Before I was born.”
Anna let that pass. She couldn’t think of an adequate rejoinder. Besides, it was true. “So he comes here and they start up again?”
“Lynette’s story is that he’d seen the light, found God, been washed in the blood of the lamb. Lynette’s big into Jesus, did you know that?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither. She seems so cool.”
“Maybe the one doesn’t preclude the other,” Anna said.
Dijon snorted. “She says Hammond came crawling back on his belly all drippy with true repentance and talking diamond rings and picket fences and having her babies.”
A break in the conversation followed that neither of them bothered to fill. The sounds of summer were sufficient to banish silence with quiet.
“He wanted to get laid,” Anna said after a minute.
“In a bad way,” Dijon concurred. “Nothing against Lynette, but the whole story was just too perfect: hearts and flowers and crap. Guaranteed to make them drop their drawers.”
“Are you going to give it a try?”
“Whatever works . . .”
“Maybe Slattery ‘betrayed her trust’ one too many times,” Anna suggested.
“You mean . . . Naw.” Dijon pushed himself up off the windshield and stared out across the causeway. After a moment he shook his head. “No. I don’t see it.” Then: “You think?”
“Take it easy.” Anna laughed. “I don’t think anything. We’re just talking.”
Dijon leaned back. “Boy, that would be a twist, wouldn’t it? Lynette icing her lover? I like it.”
If Dijon had any idea how his innocence showed through a hundred cracks in his armor, he would have been mortified. Anna stored that thought away in case she needed it for self-defense at some later date.
“What else
you got?” he asked.
“Not a whole hell of a lot,” Anna admitted. “Tabby knocking off Todd?”
“Never happen. That woman couldn’t unhook her own bra. Without Todd, she’s falling apart.”
“What if he was going to run out on her?” Anna told him the story of their midnight contretemps in the meadow.
“Still can’t see it,” he said, settling his cap more comfortably over his face. “She’d crawl—not kill—if her man was walking out.”
“I don’t know,” Anna said. She was thinking of the burned fingers and the needle punctures. “She’s tearing herself up over something.”
“Grief.”
There was more to it than that, but since she didn’t know what, Anna kept the thought to herself. “How about Norman Hull? He was supposed to be on that flight. Maybe he knew better.”
Dijon considered that for a while. “No,” he said finally. “Too big a pain in the butt to fill Todd’s position. Who’d take it? There’s diddly-shit to do. You’ll have to do better than Hull.”
Anna told him about Slattery Hammond’s lawsuit against Alice Utterback.
“That’s it,” he said languidly. “A woman carrying that much brass is unnatural. Ball-busting bitch nails middle-class white guy. I bet it happens all the time.” He was trying to get a rise out of Anna, but with his youth and transparency, he only succeeded in being kind of cute.
“Let’s go mess with Marty Schlessinger,” Anna said suddenly. “He lied to me about hearing the shot that hit that Austrian kid.”
“God, I hate it when people lie to me,” Dijon said.
“You’re in for a miserable life then,” Anna told him. “Everybody lies all the time just for the hell of it. By the way, you’ve got a tick on your neck.”
“Jesus Christ!” Dijon yelled, and scrambled from the hood to wrench the side mirror out to where he could examine himself. “Shit. There’s no tick.”
“See what I mean?”
“Anna, I wish you had balls. Then I’d know what to do with you.”
“I do,” she said as she fired up the truck’s engine. “A whole collection mounted on the wall of my study.”
Marty Schlessinger lived in a shack. The house, the hog pens, the outbuildings, stuck out of the forest floor like a rejected set from The Grapes of Wrath. If the buildings had ever been painted, sun and salt air had stripped them bare again.
The house was built in the southern tradition Anna had heard referred to as a “shotgun shack.” The rooms were arranged in a line, one after the other from front door to back. Presumably, one could fire a shotgun through the entire structure without doing too much damage. The screen on the front door was blasted outward as if someone had tested the theory. Most of the window screens were torn or missing. The shake siding had been broken in several places as if a truck had backed into the house and the damage had never been repaired. Gouts of tar paper flagged the holes.
The hog pen was ten or fifteen feet from the house. Fence and shelter were the same weathered gray. Repairs had been made with whatever came to hand. A rusting dozer blade shored up a stretch of fence line. The door of an automobile, yellow upholstery still clinging to the side, had been used to stop a hole dug beneath the wire.
Being clever creatures, the pigs were sleeping through the heat of the day. Under the rude and crumbling shelter, Anna could see a sow with eight or a dozen piglets, all of whom had fallen asleep suckling. Cumberland Island’s pigs were unlike any she’d ever seen. In most ways—eyes and ears and snouts and tails—they were thoroughly swinish, but their markings were odd. Dark hash marks the length of the pig ran down their tawny backs from nape to rump. They weren’t the stripes of a zebra but the stylized markings she was used to seeing on the backs of chipmunks. Island life must have made for creative couplings.
Schlessinger’s ATV was parked in the remains of a shed adjacent to the sty. The wide door lay on the ground several yards from the building. Long pointed hinges, rusted the color of dried blood, were attached to the wood.
“Looks like he’s home,” Anna said. “Shall we?”
“What’ll we say we’re here for?” Dijon asked, suddenly shy.
“Just being neighborly.”
“You do the talking,” he said, and climbed from the truck. He took a last glance in the side mirror. Still looking for the tick.
The biologist had to know they were there. Not more than a vehicle or two passed his place on any given day. And Anna and Dijon had waited in their truck the requisite few minutes required when paying calls south of the Mason-Dixon line, but Marty hadn’t come out on the porch to greet them. Schlessinger forced everyone to do things the hard way.
Walking several yards apart, Anna and Dijon approached the ratty dwelling as if John Dillinger waited within. Schlessinger had that effect on people.
“You knock,” Dijon said. He was whispering.
Anna had to force herself not to follow suit. Rapping on the doorframe, she called: “Hi. Anybody home?”
“Yeah,” came a sharp voice. Anna took that as an invitation and pulled the screen open.
Marty’s home wasn’t air-conditioned and, though his windows were open, the shades were all drawn. The air was close and heavy with innumerable odors, all of them vile: rotting animal parts, formaldehyde, grilled cheese, dirty laundry, coffee, mildew.
Anna covered her nose with her sleeve, then, realizing it was the height of rudeness, lowered it and tried to breathe normally.
Clad in dingy sweatpants cut off at the crotch, a bottle of Nestea in one hand, the biologist sat in an overstuffed chair tucked back in a corner. Stuffing showed through on both the arms where the fabric was worn away, portions of his anatomy spilled out the leg of the cut-off sweats. He didn’t move when Anna and Dijon came in. His eyes were narrowed against the light. He looked as if he dared either one of them to comment on his wardrobe or his lifestyle.
Blind from the sunlight, Anna saw everything, including the half-naked biologist, as mud brown. The house was kept worse than the pigsty. Every surface was covered in chunks of shell or bone. Papers littered the floor and were piled haphazardly among books and magazines. Trays and dissecting equipment, smelling as if they’d not been cleaned since the last adventure in marine pathology, were pushed to one side of a wooden table just outside the cooking area. Through a wide arch was a bedroom, also furnished in Early Junkyard, and the back door.
Schlessinger had his feet propped on a lobster trap with two one-by-twelves nailed across it. Open and unopened mail was piled on this makeshift coffee table. More spilled from the shelves of an unstable bookcase next to the front door.
“Hey, Marty,” Anna said pleasantly.
Undone by the display of genitalia, Dijon mumbled something and became instantly engrossed in reading the spines of the books.
“Are you lost?” Schlessinger asked. His attitude was the only cool spot on the island. Sweat was starting and Anna felt it crawling through her hair.
“No. Just on patrol and thought we’d drop by.”
Schlessinger took a swig of his tea and said nothing.
Anna’s eyes were adjusting to the dimness. Marty’s face was pale. His blue eyes looked unnaturally large because the pupils had shrunk to pinpoints. His feet, elevated on the coffee table, tapped the air rapidly as if keeping time to a hot jazz beat in his brain. Hostility radiated from him. He didn’t seem frightened or nervous, just swelled with ambient anger, like a pit bull looking for somebody to chew on.
Clearly this wasn’t going to be passed off as a social call. Interest piqued, Anna began her questions with a feeling akin to excitement. Maybe cops smelled emotional violence the way fire horses scented smoke: pulses quickened, hooves stamped to be in on the chase.
“We had a few minutes,” Anna began, as if Marty had welcomed them with open arms, “and I thought I’d pop by and see if you remembered any more about those shots you heard.”
“Shots?” Marty echoed, and Anna believed he’d genuinel
y forgotten. Then the biologist’s face hardened with returning memory and he said, “What shots?” like a bad actor.
Anna outlined the roadside report Marty had given, just as if Schlessinger’s question had been an honest one.
“That’s not how I remember it,” Marty said when Anna had finished. “I asked you if you had heard anything. You weren’t listening.” He took his feet from the lobster trap and leaned forward, elbows on knees, legs spread. Tufts of wet hair curled from his armpits. Without even wanting a peek, Anna was afforded full view of the family jewels, all deep brown. Marty clearly wandered around his decrepit yard in the nude. Schlessinger’s eyes followed Anna’s to his crotch, apparently noticing for the first time that he was only half dressed. The realization seemed to amuse him.
“Now that’s settled, maybe you should get back to work. That’s what you’re here for, aren’t you? Work? Or is that concept too complex for government employees?” The pale eyes fixed on Anna’s face. Uneasiness began somewhere in the vicinity of her heart and was pumped out along her arteries like poison.
“Yeah,” Anna said, rising from the edge of the chair where she’d perched. “Thanks for your time. We’d better get—”
“Hey,” Dijon interrupted. “I used these things all through college. No wonder I got C’s.”
They had forgotten Dijon. While they conducted their tête-à-tête he’d continued his perusal of Schlessinger’s bookshelves.
“What?” Anna said.
Dijon held up a letter, obviously mass-produced with lawyerly letterhead and a to-whom-it-may-concern look to it. “They recalled the Lewin electron microscopes. Major flaw. The readings are warped on about ten percent of them.”
“Put. It. Down.”
Schlessinger’s voice was so deadly cold Anna backed a couple steps toward the door. The biologist was standing, his thinning hair, free of its braids, fell over his chest like spiderwebs.
Frozen in his tracks, Dijon continued to hold on to the paper.
“You barge into my house”—Schlessinger stepped over the mess of the coffee table with the awkward gait of an adolescent—“you badger me with bullshit”—he stalked across the narrow room toward the paralyzed firefighter—“and you snoop through my mail.” With that, he grabbed the letter from Dijon’s fingers. “Out. Get out.”
