The Lillian Byrd Crime Series

by Elizabeth Sims

  At the last instant Trix swung her steering wheel to her right, and the car blew past us on a trajectory into the rock-strewn desert. A roostertail rose behind the Mustang as Trix forced it to go faster over the dusty earth.

  “OK, hold on,” I said with calm grimness, and committed my vehicle to the same path, bringing it around to eat up Trix’s dust. As soon as I got her in my sights again, I swung out to her flank. Both cars jounced wildly over the jagged ground. Minerva braced herself against the dashboard with both hands. The Mustang dodged a clump of brush that I chose to crash through. The dry bushes gave way easily, blowing into a million fragments.

  “Well, she’s not going far,” commented Minerva over the revving of our engine. “She’s knocked out her oil pan.”

  Sure enough, I perceived a thick trail of black goo drizzling behind the Mustang.

  I let up on the gas. “She’s not going anywhere now,” I agreed. “Might as well just keep her in sight. Then we’ll have the advantage of a running car.”

  “Won’t be long. She’s likely to shred more tires too, the way she’s going.”

  I steered carefully now around brush and rocks. Trix was punishing the Mustang, forcing the engine to keep going or blow completely.

  And in fact, the chase ended in about two more minutes. The Mustang veered sharply to avoid a tall boulder but then caromed hard off another one, the driver’s door taking the brunt of the hit. The car lost power and rolled to a stop. Gray smoke poured from beneath the hood.

  “That engine’s burned out,” I noted.

  “Yeah, it’s on fire,” said Minerva. “She’s got flames now.”

  I pulled the Mercedes to a stop a hundred yards away. We were perhaps a mile off the main road. I jumped out.

  “Careful now,” said Minerva.

  I moved quickly around to her door and helped her out. Even in my haste I tried to hold her arm carefully; she seemed so delicate after all. And right now she wasn’t quite steady on her feet.

  We watched the burning car. Even in the bright daylight I saw orange flames licking out from the grille. The smoke changed from gray to black. Big wide heat shimmers rose from the car and blended into the little quick ones hovering everywhere in the desert that afternoon. Flames engulfed the hood, the very metal now catching fire.

  “Why isn’t she getting out?” With my hand clasped around her arm, Minerva took a step forward, dragging her leg. “Why isn’t she getting out?” she repeated. “Oh, God.”

  “She needs to get out of that car. The gas tank.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Lillian!”

  I dropped her arm and dashed forward.

  18

  Trix was sitting upright in the driver’s seat, clawing at the door latch with both hands. The instant I reached the car, a jet of fire shot up from the hood and blew back toward the passenger compartment. Trix continued to tear at the latch. I saw that the door had been dented inward at the latch point—evidently when the car glanced off the last boulder. The outside door handle was smashed. The side airbag had deployed and deflated, apparently confusing Trix, whose eyes were locked on me in total panic. She opened her mouth and screamed; her scream barely pierced the roar of the fire. The heat was cataclysmic. Sour smoke stung my nose.

  I ran around to the passenger side, pulling off my wig and wrapping it around my hand. Using it as a potholder, I threw open the door, lunged inside, grabbed Trix by the sweater, and pulled her out. She clattered to the ground like a sack of sticks. The synthetic fibers of the wig bonded to the hot metal door and hung there like a dead thing.

  Digging the heels of my Weejuns into the barren desert dirt, I pulled and dragged her by the shoulders, yelling, “Come on! Hurry up!”

  She couldn’t get up while I was dragging her, but she kicked her feet to help. When I got us away from the huge horrible heat, I dropped her.

  Minerva met us. “It’s not safe yet!” she yelled. “Come on!”

  Somehow we all tottered to the Mercedes.

  I looked back at the Mustang, now engulfed in fire from front bumper to rear.

  “The gas tank’s not blowing,” Minerva said.

  “Not enough gas in it,” Trix coughed, sinking into the dirt. “I’ve been driving around on empty for a week.”

  She was shoeless, sweater torn, black slip ripped, her legs bleeding from scratches and scrapes. “Oh, Lord, the money,” she moaned.

  “You worthless bitch,” I said. “Get in the car.”

  _____

  We heard sirens coming from the city, so I drove carefully to the road and continued west into the desert. Minerva produced her pocket revolver and covered Trix as I drove. “You don’t need that,” Trix told her. “I’m not going anywhere, believe me.”

  After a few minutes she began to whimper, desperately, in the backseat. “Oh, gawd, you guys are gonna kill me. Just kill me now, OK? Just shoot me once, real good in the head, because I can’t stand pain, I really can’t. Oh gawd, I lost the mob’s money. I lost your money.”

  “What about the bundle you stuffed down your bra?” I asked.

  Trix slapped her chest. “It’s gone! It’s gone!” she wailed. “It must have fallen out!”

  Minerva said, “To hell with the money. Keep driving.”

  “Trix,” I said, “you’re gonna talk to us.”

  “But I don’t know where Bill Sechrist is! Oh, gawd, I don’t know where the son of a cocksucker is! I haven’t seen him in twenty years! Thirty years! Oh, gawd.”

  “I knew it,” I said. “Shut up. Calm down. Trix, we’re all in the same boat now. Don’t be afraid.”

  We came to the piedmont, such as it is, of the Spring Mountains, and there I pulled over in the shade of a weird little oasis. There was a gas station and a mini-mart, a shitass motel, and a bar.

  “We’re gonna go in that bar,” I told Trix, “and you’re gonna clean up, and we’re gonna sit down and talk. And we’re gonna figure out what to do next.”

  Trix said quietly, “OK.”

  “It’s happy hour,” Minerva observed.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Their happy hour starts at 2 P.M., the sign says.”

  “Oh, goody,” I said. “Well, nobody gets a drink until we do some talking.”

  Minerva returned her weapon to its quick-draw pocket in her purse and we went into the Palace of Palms Bar.

  It was a cavelike, stale place: typical and crummy, and to me, comfortable. Yes, speaking for Trix and myself, we fit the demographic just fine. A pair of slutty, disheveled tavern rats. Minerva might pass for our accountant, I supposed.

  The few heads in the bar turned when we walked in, but soon enough went back to their afternoon draft beers. What I mean to say is, this was the kind of bar where a barefoot woman in a torn slip attracts men’s gazes but doesn’t necessarily raise their eyebrows. A couple of guys were playing pool, and we heard the clack of the balls.

  Minerva seated herself at a table in a corner while I accompanied Trix to the ladies’ toilet. I washed up and combed water through my hair with my fingers while she used the toilet, then I peed fast while she cleaned up at the sink. We didn’t speak.

  We joined Minerva, who was surrounded by six glasses of beer.

  Sweetly, she explained, “The bartender came over, and the vibe wasn’t right for me to just order water or something.”

  Patiently, I asked, “But why six beers?”

  “Happy hour!” I hadn’t known of this naughty side of hers.

  Trix and I pulled up chairs. Our eyes adapted to the darkness. We all reached for a beer. I took a slug, and it sure tasted good down my hot throat. The wooden tabletop was sticky. Trix’s hand trembled.

  I put down my glass and drilled my eyes into Trix’s. I said, “You know me, Trix Hawley.”

  Trix stared at me slow and hard. Her eyes filled and her lip trembled. “Oh. Dear Jesus gawd. Oh, dear Jesus gawd.” She blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater.

  “Lillian Byrd,” she
snuffled. Her breath came hard. “Dear Jesus gawd. Oh, you poor kid.”

  Minerva watched us.

  I said, “I’m not a poor kid. Pull yourself together. I’m not with the mob. I met up with Bill Sechrist’s boy about a week ago and we got to talking. Duane. Remember Duane?”

  “Oh gawd. I’m in it now, I’m in it all the way up to my orchid now.”

  I’d never heard that expression. “Look. Trix. One night the Polka Dot burned down. I was there. My mom and dad died screaming. Duane’s mom disappeared. A burned-up body wearing your wedding ring was found in the bar. That much I know. When Duane and I talked, I realized that body wasn’t you.”

  Trix opened her mouth.

  “Wait,” I said. “Trix, I want you to understand something. I want to talk to you. I want you to talk to me. That’s all I want here. I don’t think I can make you go to jail, though I know you were involved. The police have other things to do.” I spoke deliberately, so that through her mounting hysteria she could easily understand me. “I don’t know how much involved you were. For my whole adult life I thought the fire was an accident. You might think I want vengeance on you. But I don’t. All I want from you is the truth. All I want is to know why it happened, and how.”

  Trix shook her head and gulped her beer. She said, “My nerves are shot.”

  Minerva let out a startled laugh. “Your nerves.”

  I said, “Trix, not that you have a whole fuckload of choice here, but you owe me an explanation. You owe it to me to willingly tell me what you know.”

  She adjusted her butt in her chair, settling in. Weakly, she said, “All right.”

  “Good.”

  “How’d you know I was alive?”

  “Duane reminisced about his stepmother, the woman Bill Sechrist met in Florida after he uprooted Duane from the neighborhood in Detroit. He spoke of you rather fondly.” She nodded, flattered.

  I went on, “All it took was for him to recall how you talked. What did it was I didn’t know whether to shit green or go blind.”

  “Are you shitting me? You’re not shitting me.”

  “Have you ever in your life heard anyone else say that?”

  Trix thought. “Well, my Aunt Flora said it.”

  “Then when Duane said you told his dad You couldn’t pour piss out of a boot, that more or less nailed it. When he told me you dyed your hair dull brown and had red roots—”

  “There ya go,” she said thoughtfully. “Then how in the hellja find me?”

  “I paid a call on Robert Hawley, your surviving spouse.”

  “You mean he—”

  “No. His wife showed me your letters. With return addresses in case he decided to send you any money. She intercepted them, you know, after the first one.”

  “I thought she might’ve done that.” She studied me. “My gawd, you were just a kid. I didn’t think I’d ever…” She stared off into the dim room.

  “Kids grow up,” I said. “Listen, you want a cigarette?”

  Gratefully, she said, “Yeah.”

  Minerva offered, “I’ll get them.”

  “Newports,” said Trix. “The machine’s down the hall.”

  “And some Camel Filters while you’re at it, please,” I requested. This appeared to amuse Minerva, who moved off to ask the bartender for change.

  “Matches!” called Trix. “And how ’bout a few more beers?”

  I said, “It was her money that just got burned up in your car.”

  Sadly, she said, “All that money.”

  “Do you know who she is?”

  “No.”

  “She’s Minerva LeBlanc.”

  “Really? Minerva LeBlanc that writes books? Butter my muffin! Really?”

  “Really.”

  “She’s my favorite! I love her books. I didn’t recognize her.”

  “You read?”

  “Yes, I read!”

  “Well, we’ll have to get her to give you an autograph.”

  “Yeah!”

  Minerva returned with the smokes and two books of matches.

  “My God, she is Minerva LeBlanc!”

  Unappreciatively, Minerva said, “Lillian.”

  “Wow,” said Trix. “Wow. Hey, I’ve got some stories to tell you. I could tell you these stories and then you could write them, and then—” she broke off. “Didn’t, like, something happen to you?”

  Minerva said, “Have you realized yet that Lillian saved your life by pulling you out of that car?”

  Trix reached for her pack of Newports. “Yeah. For whatever it’s worth.” She looked at me, and a new clarity came over her. “You must hate my guts.”

  19

  “I don’t hate your guts,” I said, unwrapping the Camel Filters. “I want to talk.” We lit up simultaneously. Minerva abstained. I said, “Let’s keep talking about our particular story, OK?”

  Trix took in a deep mentholated lungful, savored it, exhaled, and began.

  “First of all, speaking of saving lives, did you know that Bill Sechrist saved your dad’s life? In the Navy?”

  “Yeah, I knew that.”

  “So Martin Byrd owed Bill Sechrist big time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that was Bill’s way into the whole thing. See? He and I got friendly. That wife of his, unhhh…”

  “She was a piece of work,” I agreed encouragingly.

  “Yeah. Well, eventually Bill and me got serious, real serious, and he figured out a way to make all of our troubles go away. He was crazy about me, he really was. No man was ever crazier about me.” The combination of cigarettes and beer settled Trix’s nerves satisfactorily. She stopped to take another gulp. She raised the cold-beaded glass to her forehead and nuzzled her temple into it. The gesture reminded me of the way Adele Hawley had rolled her beer bottle across her forehead. She said, “You know, for a long time…for forever…I’ve wanted to tell somebody about this. And I thought someday I would tell it all to somebody. But I never thought it’d be you.”

  I nodded.

  She went on, “See, Bill and I wanted to elope. I’d never eloped before, and I thought it’d be fun. Plus, I was so sick of Robert. You said you met Robert.”

  “I did.”

  “Well then.”

  “Yeah. Why,” I asked, “not just run away, then?”

  “That’s what I said. Bill said, That’s not my style. Bill Sechrist doesn’t run away from trouble. He thought his wife would be better off dead. He felt, deep down, that he had, like, an obligation to…get rid of her. She was making his life a hell on earth, plus she was a miserable weird person in the first place. He didn’t want her to be after him for the rest of his life. And so he had an obligation to end all that pain and everything. He had a hold on me, I tell you. I never met his wife. To me she wasn’t real, really. It was like a TV show. Oh, I loved that man. He was a rock-hard military man. A fighting man. I used to play with his dog tags, that always got him excited. The thing was, Bill Sechrist was the only man who ever valued me for myself. For what was inside me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He gave me things.”

  “Things that proved his love?” I suggested.

  “Yeah. To me they did. And he did things for me.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he’d burn himself with cigarettes. He’d hold a cigarette to his arm or he’d pull up his pants leg and hold the cigarette to his leg and he’d say, This is for you. He’d pull bits of skin off himself with a pliers, saying the same thing.” Trix gave a short laugh. “Isn’t that unusual?”

  Minerva and I exchanged glances.

  Trix was warming up. “But it showed me something,” she said, “you know? Anyhow, I went along with him. He told me every step of it. He went to your dad and said he was in trouble and needed money. He said he’d done a bad thing and gambled away some money he didn’t have. Some union boss’s money—you know—that he’d offered to deliver somewhere. He took it to the track, thinking he’d make something for himself
on the sly, but he lost it. That was his story, and your dad believed it. Bill was big in the union over at Dodge Main.

  “A pile of money, fifty thousand. Your dad didn’t have it to give him, he knew that. He went to work on your dad. He reminded him how he’d saved his life. He said, They’re gonna come after my wife and the boy. They told me that, Marty. And he brought up the idea of burning down the Polka Dot for the insurance money. Your dad was careful, he had insurance. Bill told your dad, ‘Look, me and my family’s gonna be dead if I don’t come up with that money. I’ll pay you back, honest Injun! I’ll take care of everything, I’ll do it right, the bar goes, you all go to live with…’ uh, Marty’s brother.”

  “Uncle Guff.”

  “Yeah. And he says, ‘You give me the insurance money when you get it, and then in a few months I pay you the money back. I swear I will. You find a nicer bar, nicer home for your family—you happy about your little girl growing up in a place like that? Maybe you wanta get out of the tavern business anyway. Open a garage. Or a grocery store.’”

  Trix lit another cigarette off the butt of the first. “Your dad, he wanted to help his friend. I think he tried to think of another way to do it, but finally he agreed.”

  “He agreed,” I said.

  The three of us sat thinking about that.

  Bill Sechrist had floundered through the ship’s flooding galley, reached underwater, and grabbed my dad by the belt and hauled him out. My dad was struggling there in the water, thinking, This is it. This is it. And then Sechrist’s determination and brute strength changed the world. Sechrist gave my dad a gift beyond price.

  In wartime men do hideous things and they do saintly things. That was about as much as I knew about war.

  You might not think that the life of a tavern keeper is inherently honorable. My dad served beverages that gave comfort, but they also unleashed demons. He liked it when people drank. But I must insist on this point: Martin Byrd was an honorable man. I never knew him to show fear of anything, and he had never given me occasion to be ashamed of him. This is why I say he was honorable.