Gray’s brows furrowed and he shook his head. He ejected the tape from the VCR, then slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
“Okay. I’ll take this back with me and see if the feds can figure anything out. They’ll send it up to Philly and see if this is what we think it is. Nick didn’t travel outside of Philadelphia to make his tapes, did he?”
I shrugged. “I just don’t know. I had no idea he was taking pictures, so I suppose he could’ve traveled to Alaska and I wouldn’t have known about it. He was never gone overnight, that I can remember.”
Gray nodded, then pulled me closer. “I hate to leave you,” he said, “but I’ve got to follow up on this. Listen, I think the less said about the tape, the better. Okay?”
“What about the men you arrested? Do you think one of them is the killer? None of the ones I’ve run into looked like that, but why else would they want the tape? Won’t they think I still have it?”
Gray’s eyes met mine. “It’s a risk,” he said. “I’ll have plain-clothes people sitting on this place, just in case. You could stay with your parents for a few days, but I know you don’t want to bring them into this, so count on my people watching this place during the day and me covering you at night.”
My stomach turned cartwheels at his last words. I could just imagine how he’d cover me. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the rest of his statement. To his credit, he didn’t seem to think that he was the only person in the universe capable of protecting me. He knew he had good officers working with him. He had to know that Pa, Joey and the old guys were looking out for me, too.
“Hey, you guys done?” Joey asked, appearing in the doorway.
“Yeah,” I said, attempting a smile that both Joey and Gray had to see for the sham it was. “You got food ready or what?”
I broke the hold Gray had on my shoulders and took his hand, pulling him along with me downstairs into the bright kitchen and away from dealing with any more issues. After he’d gone I stood on the front porch considering how the pieces of the puzzle fit together and thinking about what my next course of action should be. While Gray and the old guys had the best of intentions, they couldn’t provide an iron-clad guarantee of protection. I needed to do my part to insure that no one else I cared for was hurt by the by-product of Nick’s perverse activities.
The afternoon heat scorched New Bern, searing the narrow street in front of my house, shimmering off the metallic surfaces of cars and tin roofs, and layering a thick blanket of muggy, humid warmth over every surface. I wiped a sheen of perspiration from the back of my neck and watched Della labor in the garden.
She moved in slow motion, her rail thin body a mere stick inside the oversize clothing that hung on her frame. Durrell had retreated to the relative shelter of the magnolia tree, preferring to lie under a low hanging branch rather than following his mistress as she slowly cleared weeds and brush.
Darlene joined me, her eyes following my gaze and watching Della, with a tight, closed expression on her face.
“You’re feeling sorry for her,” my sister said in a hushed tone. “Don’t. She’s the one who picked this line of work.”
I closed my eyes and tried to will Darlene’s bad attitude away. “I am not feeling sorry for her,” I lied. “It’s just so damn miserable out there. I thought she might take a break soon or something.”
Darlene sighed. “I’m sure you offered and she martyred herself and turned you down.”
That was exactly what had happened, but Darlene probably watched the entire interaction from the living room window, so it wasn’t as if she suddenly had clairvoyant insight.
“Give her a break, Darlene.”
She looked at me. “Sophie, you are not open to messages from the other side. I am. I can read people because I have help. Others share their wisdom with me. That’s how come I know Nick was really here and not a dream.”
I shook my head. “Darlene, you weren’t there. It was a dream. Nick is dead and that is that. My unconscious had been working on possible answers to what Nick could have hidden and where, and my dream merely helped me see that.”
She smiled her irritating I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile and stared past me, past Della and beyond the houses across the street. She probably wanted me to believe she was sharing a joke with the more enlightened ghosts and beings of the afterlife. Behind us, Ma, Joey and Angela came out into the driveway, laden down with bags. Joey’s three kids followed them, each carrying plastic containers carefully balanced as they trailed after the adults.
“Put it in the back seat,” Ma ordered. She turned and watched, directing the placement of her parcels and seeming to be impatient with the length of time it was taking to load her car.
“Dinner’s at six,” she barked. “I want everybody there. We got things to discuss.”
Joey extricated himself from Ma’s overloaded car and looked around. When he spotted Darlene and me watching the show from the porch, he made a face at us.
“Right, Ma,” he said, quickly recovering as he felt her attention turn from the car’s interior to him. “We’ll be there.”
Ma, the woman voted by us kids as being most likely to actually have eyes in the back of her head, spun around and looked at the two of us standing there.
“Dinner,” she said. “Be there.”
“Yes, Ma,” Darlene cooed. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
I started to say something about how I couldn’t be there but Ma stopped me short.
“Don’t start, you,” she said. “Bring my boy.”
Darlene turned to me and sighed. “My car’s parked behind hers,” she said in a low voice. “She’ll drive over it if I don’t move it. Let’s go somewhere. We need a break. Let’s ride down Middle Street and get some ice cream.”
She was off, without waiting for me to answer her. She expected me to fall in behind her. After all, in Darlene’s world, who wouldn’t want ice cream?
“Let me grab my purse,” I called after her.
She waved one hand over her shoulder and kept on moving. Knowing Darlene, she probably didn’t even have money to pay for the treat. I stepped back into the house, grabbed my pocketbook from the living room and flew back out onto the porch, shutting the front door firmly and waiting to hear the lock catch.
Darlene was sliding behind the wheel of her car while Ma gunned the engine of her Taurus and looked impatiently in the rearview mirror.
“Ma,” I called, “she’s waiting for me. Don’t get yourself all hot and bothered. We’re going!”
Ma wasn’t listening. She had the windows rolled up. The air-conditioning was blasting and the radio booming Sinatra. Ma was oblivious. Joey was walking toward his car, followed by his family. It looked as if I was finally going to have some time to get ready for Gray’s arrival without a riot of family members all wanting to know the details. If I was lucky, I’d return and find only Pa and the old guys on duty, but then luck hadn’t been my long suit lately.
Darlene’s car was a nightmare of New Age music and scents. Even with the windows rolled down, the patchouli smell was unbearable. I was sneezing before we left the driveway.
“Why don’t you trade this tin can in on a real car?” I asked her. “You don’t even have air in here.”
Darlene ignored me and turned up the volume on her cassette player. She knew I hated her music. How can anyone listen to something that sounds like whales calling to each other? Or worse, choirboys singing just out of earshot, so you’re forever straining, trying to figure out what the words are only to realize it’s really just high-pitched wailing. It drives me right up the wall. Darlene says it’s relaxing. I say it’s probably some form of subliminal hypnosis and she’s been given the suggestion to buy as much stupid music as she can find. In fact, the same people who made that tape probably sell the patchouli incense Darlene burns.
We drove down the road with me half hanging out of the passenger-side window and her humming along with the beached whales. By the time w
e reached the ice cream shop, I was a near basket case and Darlene was at peace with her universe. Neither one of us noticed the black car before then or knew how long it had been following us. I didn’t become aware of it until it pulled out around us and had almost passed from sight.
“Darlene,” I said. “Look!”
She was busy executing her fanatically perfect parallel parking job. By the time she turned her head, the taillights were winking out of sight.
“What?”
“That car, it looks like the one that hit me last night. The same one that’s been driving by the house, the one from the restaurant.”
“What restaurant?”
It was hopeless. Darlene’s head was up on her astral plane and there was no reclaiming her brain.
It was pointless to try and bring Darlene down to earth, so instead I went on high alert. Black cars were common, but lately, black cars had signalled impending disaster. If it came back, I’d need to be ready.
I let Darlene lead me into the ice cream shop, but my attention remained focused on the street outside.
When I ordered a scoop of chocolate chip, Darlene almost curled her lip in disgust. “That is so pedestrian,” she said, her tone haughty with distaste.
“Darlene, it’s not vanilla. Give me a break.”
Darlene looked at me. “Yeah,” she said, “chocolate chip is what vanilla lovers order when they feel self-conscious about ordering vanilla. You wanted vanilla, admit it. I know you. All your life you’ve ordered vanilla. You’re just trying to be something you’re not…different.”
I pulled back, stung by Darlene’s sudden attack. Her face registered shock, as if she were hearing the words from a stranger instead of hearing them come out of her own mouth.
“I’m sorry, Sophie,” she said. “I don’t know where that came from.” She stood in front of the ice cream counter, her rainbow sundae dripping down the side of her hand. Tears welled up in her eyes and began spilling over onto her cheeks.
How had this happened? I wondered.
I threw a five dollar bill onto the counter and led Darlene to a corner table. The tiny shop was almost deserted. It was midafternoon, midweek, and the tourists and business people were too sensible to be out in the midsummer heat.
Miserable, Darlene sat watching her ice cream melt and run down her hand. When she finally looked up at me, her eyes were bright with tears.
“Sophie, it’s not easy being the oddball,” she said. “Don’t you think sometimes I’d like to be just plain old vanilla?”
She seemed to realize how this sounded, because she brought her free hand up quickly to cover her mouth, and tried to rectify the matter with more words. “I didn’t mean you were plain, or even old, it’s just that—”
“I get what you’re saying,” I interrupted.
Darlene sighed and dug out a spoonful of her multicolored ice cream. “I’m not like anybody else I know,” she said. “I don’t think like you and Joey. I think about other things, and most of the time that’s fine with me. I like my life. It’s just that, sometimes I wish I could be normal. You know—vanilla.”
This was not Darlene, not my sister, not the in-your-face, New Age, come-as-you-are believer in the cosmos. Something was wrong. I waited, knowing that with Darlene, no secret could remain hidden for long. I tried to divide my attention between my sister and watching the road outside.
“Wendell’s daughter is just out of rookie school,” she said, and stuffed her mouth full of ice cream, sprinkles and whipped topping.
I wasn’t sure where we were headed with this, so I smiled inanely and said, “That’s nice. So, she’s following in her dad’s footsteps.”
Darlene nodded glumly. “And her mom’s. Her mom was a sheriff’s deputy before she got sick.”
“Really?” I murmured, still puzzled.
Darlene shrugged. A flash of black caught my eye and my attention strayed to the view from the plate glass window. The black sedan, tinted windows and all, was driving slowly past the front of the shop. For one horrified minute, I imagined the car window rolling down and a hand sticking out, aiming a gun at us as we sat, exposed in the ice cream shop. I shifted slightly in my seat, preparing to lunge across the table and throw Darlene to the ground should the situation warrant action. But the sedan passed the storefront window.
“I wouldn’t know if it’s nice for her or not,” Darlene was saying. “Wendell won’t let me meet her.”
“What?” My attention shot back to my sister’s miserable face. “What do you mean, he won’t let you meet her?”
Darlene spooned more ice cream into her mouth, swallowed and went on, oblivious to the outside world and the passing of the black car.
“Oh, it’s not like he right out says it or anything. He just changes the subject.”
I looked at Darlene and frowned. “Well, honey, maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Maybe he and his daughter don’t get along. Maybe he’s afraid to introduce her to anyone because she might feel he was trying to replace her mother.”
Darlene rolled her eyes. “No, no, no. That’s not it. The woman died five years ago. His daughter sounds like a practical person, not possessive or emotional. I bet she’s just like her father. No, I don’t think that’s the problem. I think Wendell’s afraid because I’m so different from his wife and daughter.”
“What do you mean?”
My sister looked at me, giving me her best eye roll paired with a headshake of disgust. “Please,” she said. “I’m thirteen years younger than Wendell. I look like a hippy because, hell, I am one. I talk about feelings. I am—” here it comes, I thought “—a professional therapist.”
“So?”
Darlene had disposed of her rainbow sundae and now had a blue-and-red tongue and purple lips. She wiped the lower half of her face with a tiny square of napkin and sighed.
“I’m just not your Southern conservative,” she said. “I’m not even close. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that’s one of the reasons Wendell likes me so much, but now he’s faced with introducing me to his family and all of a sudden he doesn’t know what to do.” Her eyes welled up again. “I think he’s ashamed of me,” she whispered.
My heart broke right in half. How dare that Wendell hurt my sister with his own insecurity? I wanted to march right down to the police department and whip his tail for even hesitating. How could anyone love Darlene the way he seemed to and be ashamed of her at the same time?
I reached for Darlene’s hand, but she was already moving back from the table and rising to her feet.
“Let’s blow this pop stand,” she said. She had pulled the emotion back in, tucking her hurt away inside herself and trying to act like good old Darlene, the unaffected Queen of Karma.
“I’m with you,” I said, pushing my chair back.
“Besides,” she added, “that black car has been by three times, or haven’t you noticed? We’re just a little bit exposed, don’t you think?”
Darlene sailed out of the shop and onto the sidewalk. I stared after her for a moment. If Wendell Arrow was too insecure to claim his diamond in the rough, then Darlene didn’t need him.
“Like a fish needs a bicycle,” I muttered under my breath, and hurried to catch up.
Darlene was scanning the street when I joined her. “No sign of them,” she said. “Let’s get while the getting’s good.”
We climbed back into Darlene’s tin can and took off down Middle Street, past gift and antique shops, past the tinted windows of businesses, and around the corner toward my house. There was no black car hot on our trail.
“I’m going to swing by the library,” Darlene said. “I need to drop off a book.”
I nodded, about to jump out of my skin with impatience but aware it would do no good to rush her. As Darlene approached the book drop, my cell phone rang.
Gray didn’t waste time on pleasantries. His voice, deep and familiar, was tight with energy and he sounded completely focused on the task at hand. Thi
s was Gray the Cop calling, and he was all business.
“Just thought I’d let you know the tape’s in Philadelphia,” he said.
“Good. What’s the story?”
Darlene, barely curious, reached between us for the book that was buried somewhere in her back seat.
“I couriered the tape to the FBI field office in Philadelphia and they confirmed Nick’s story. It seems Nick accidentally took pictures of a mob hit on an undercover FBI agent. The murder happened over two years ago, and while the feds pretty much knew who was responsible, they didn’t have any proof until now.”
I felt my pulse quicken and my hands grow icy cold despite the heat. “So Nick was right—it was a mob hit?”
Darlene drew back from the book drop and whipped around to stare, openmouthed, at me.
“Oh, that’s not the worst of it,” he added. “Apparently Nick thought he could blackmail the guy the cops think is responsible for the hit.”
“So the two goons who rammed me wanted the pictures. They killed the FBI agent? Who were the guys in the other car?”
Darlene’s eyes were huge. She had turned sideways in her seat and was mouthing the question, “What? What?”
I shook my head at her and strained to listen as Gray went on. “No, the agents in Philadelphia think a crime boss named Tony Lombardo ordered the hit after he found out that the victim had infiltrated his ‘family.’ Lombardo sent his top enforcer, a guy named Benny Deal, or Benny the Nose, to do the job.”
I sighed. “So was it Benny in the picture?”
An impatient soccer mom driving a vanful of little boys honked at Darlene, wanting her to move away from her spot in front of the book drop. Darlene waved a hand out the window and pulled forward on the street. I looked at my surroundings as Darlene settled us into a shady spot under the spreading arms of a huge pin oak. It was all too surreal.
I was sitting in historic New Bern, surrounded by freshly painted old homes and flowering gardens, with brick sidewalks and smiling people, but I was discussing a mob hit that had put my life in danger.
Sophie’s Last Stand Page 23
