Burn

by Nevada Barr

  “I don’t go with girls,” the schoolgirl whispered timidly as if Anna would take a belt to her for the rebuff.

  “You ought not go with nobody,” the gaunt woman said. “That’s why you’re getting fatter and fatter.” To Anna she said, “I’m Star. This is Delilah,” she nodded to her partner. “And this baby here is Candy.”

  “I’m not a baby,” Candy said.

  “Tanya might be interested, but I doubt it,” Delilah said.

  “Not sex,” Anna said. “Information.”

  “Sex is cheaper,” Star said. The three of them laughed, though Anna wasn’t sure Candy knew what she was laughing at. In such close proximity, she looked younger than she did under the harsh lights of the stage. If she was of legal age, Anna would have been surprised. The skin of her face and breasts was flawless, the flesh around her eyes plump like that of a child, and her hair was baby-fine. At a guess, Anna put her at no more than fourteen, maybe as young as eleven.

  Delilah offered Anna the joint. She took a hit to prove she wasn’t a narc, but the smoke exploded in her chest and she went into a paroxysm of coughing, much to the amusement of the strippers.

  “Sorry,” she gasped when she could catch her breath. “Out of practice.”

  “When were you in practice?” Star asked.

  “When they came in lids and were fifteen dollars apiece,” Anna said.

  “Historical,” Delilah said. “Hold on to your head. This isn’t your grandma’s weed, Grandma.”

  “You got that right,” Anna admitted. The drug was already hitting her, and she wondered if she would remember anything she learned here. If she learned anything here.

  Taking the joint from Anna, Star passed it to Candy, who pinched it expertly between thumb and forefinger and, narrowing her eyes against the smoke, took a hit.

  Star watched Anna watching Candy suck marijuana smoke into her—and thus the fetus’s—lungs. Anna returned her stare and shrugged infinitesimally. Candy’s baby had so much going against it, Anna’s ruining one toke wasn’t going to get the poor little bugger into Harvard.

  Evidently that giving over of judgment was what Star was looking for.

  “Tell us what you want to know and we’ll tell you what it’ll cost,” she said. “What we don’t know, we’ll make up.”

  “What if she’s a cop and starts asking about . . . things?” Delilah asked. Anna’s one choking drag from the joint had not impressed her overmuch.

  “Then we lie,” Star said easily. “So, what do you want to know?”

  Breathing in the confines of the smoking-room-cum-toilet was getting Anna high. The feeling wasn’t one she particularly relished. Too close to crazy, too close to out of control. Claustrophobia was licking at its heels, and Anna had to force herself to concentrate.

  Why had she come? What was it she was so all-fired desperate to know that she’d put on a cat mask, then paid twenty bucks to a pole dancer and twenty more for a lukewarm Pepsi? In the john of a shabby strip club, filled with a brand of courage and a flavor of despair she couldn’t quite come to terms with, one creepy little bartender putting pigeons in garbage cans and freaking out over her catching his terrier didn’t seem to matter much in the scheme of evil.

  Before she could talk herself into saving her lungs and what was left of her cash, Anna remembered Laura and the look Jordan had burned through the window of the voodoo shop when he’d seen her playing with her prince and princess dolls.

  “What do you know about the guy tending bar tonight?” Anna asked.

  “Oooh, you’re interested in that little pissant motherfucker,” Star said scornfully.

  “He’s not,” Candy protested.

  “Yeah, right,” Delilah said as she tore open a bag of gummi bears with her long blue acrylic nails. “And the pope’s not Catholic. Believe me, Jordan is truly a pissant motherfucker. Listen to your wise Auntie Star on this one, baby.”

  “You’re just jealous because he only likes me and doesn’t care about your new boobies.”

  “Yeah,” Star said, smiling at her girlfriend. “For what we paid for those beauties, any cock that doesn’t stand up and salute when they come out oughta be buggy-whipped.”

  “She is, too, jealous,” Candy insisted. “Jordan likes me a lot. He takes care of me. We’re like boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “That’s what got you in trouble in the first place,” Star said. “This boyfriend stuff got you a baby. You got to get rid of it; you know that, baby doll. Ain’t no way you can be bringing up a kid.”

  “I’m gonna get rid of it,” Candy said. To Anna she looked scared. Not sad at the loss of her child, but scared of what it was going to take to lose it.

  “How long has Jordan worked here?” Anna asked.

  “Not long. Maybe a week, ten days.”

  “And he likes you best,” Anna said to Candy.

  “Better than Star or Delilah or even Tanya, and she’s real pretty.” If either of the other women in the dressing room minded Tanya being called the pretty one, it didn’t show. “He doesn’t call me a baby. He likes it that I’m not old.”

  “Motherfucker,” Star muttered.

  “Short eyes,” Delilah said succinctly. “He’s been asking everybody where you can find that sort of thing.” She wasn’t being coy or evasive by not spelling it out, Anna realized; she was being sensitive to Candy’s feelings. Another wise old auntie, she guessed. Candy could be worse off.

  “We told him to fuck off and die,” Star said. “But we said it real nice.” Both she and Delilah laughed. Candy laughed, too, and this time Anna knew why she joined in; she wanted to belong.

  Star held the roach out, now in a gaudy beaded clip, offering Anna the last toke.

  “No thanks,” Anna said. “I’m trying to cut down.”

  Star took the last hit and dropped the last bit into the ashtray. Candy retrieved it and popped it into her mouth.

  “Then he falls for our Candy girl,” Star said. “And he’s all interested in where she’s been and if there are other girls like her but younger and if any of her ‘little friends’ are in the business and where they might be working and shit like that.”

  “It’s not shit!” Candy said. “He’s interested in me. He likes me.” She was about to cry.

  Star said, “I know he does, baby girl. You’re an interesting person. Jordan might be a pissant motherfucker, but he’s got good taste. We just think you’re too good for him, that’s all, baby. Don’t you cry, or Delilah’s going to have to do your makeup all over again, and there ain’t time before your next act.”

  Delilah shook a Marlboro Light out of a pack, lit it, sucked in a lungful of smoke, and then blew it out slowly. Anna felt like she was about to pass out from lack of air and space.

  “You guys know where he’s from? What his last name is? Where he worked before he came here? Anything like that?” Anna asked.

  “Nope,” Star said.

  “And don’t care to,” Delilah said on another stream of smoke.

  “How about you, Candy? Does Jordan tell you about his family or his home?” Anna asked.

  “He’s got a dog,” Candy said. “He let me pet it. I like dogs a lot.”

  Anna wasn’t going to get anything more—or, even if she was, she doubted she could survive in this alien atmosphere long enough to make use of it. She took the money clip out and emptied it onto the board that served to hold their cosmetics and ashtrays.

  “Forty dollars is all I’ve got,” she said. “Thanks a million. Have a good night. Uh, break a leg, I guess,” she said as she weaseled her way back through the naked limbs to the bathroom door and out.

  The club smelled of sweat and beer and cigarette smoke and, where she was, stale urine. Still, it was a breath of fresh air after the ladies’ lounge, and Anna breathed deep of the lesser miasma.

  As she began to walk toward the dim light at the end of this particular tunnel, a hand closed hard on her upper arm, and she swung around ready to clock some guy. It was Deli
lah holding her bicep in a pincer grip. Fighting the urge to deck her and run, Anna stopped docilely in the black-walled fun-house hallway and waited.

  “Don’t go getting your panties in a wad and telling anybody Candy’s knocked up, not eighteen, and not Einstein. Guy owns this place is okay. She’s got nobody. Nobody. She was hooking at ten bucks a fuck to anybody who came along. Which was at least ten bucks more than she got from her last joint. Here all she’s gotta do is dance, and she likes it. It makes her feel important and cared for. You tell some agency, and they take her, and she’s going to run away and be back on the streets or dead.”

  “You and Star look after her?” Anna asked.

  “We try.”

  “Will you keep Jordan away from her?”

  “Shit, there’s always a Jordan. You can’t keep them all away. If it makes you feel any better, we’re pretty sure he’s not fucking her.”

  Anna did feel better, at least till Delilah added matter-of-factly, “Not yet, anyway.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Clare had heard the phrase “her heart turned over in her chest” and thought it merely a case of undeserved poetic licensing. When the Cajun said, “Somebody’s here,” she realized it was an anatomical reality. Whatever muscle worked its magic beneath the left side of her sternum twisted. Breath, intentionally hushed, whistled between her teeth. Blood banged in her ears, so loud it was surely audible outside of her skull.

  “Did you get to the toilet or just . . . Jesus effing Christ. Check the goddam toilet and we can get out of here,” the Cajun said.

  In the sere corners of Clare’s eyes, new tears formed. Terror, fatigue, guilt at being alive and at wanting to stay that way, turned to saltwater and flooded to lash line.

  “Look, dickwad, if you didn’t puke, somebody else did,” the Cajun explained as if his companion were an idiot.

  “Who’d do that?” Dougie asked, proving the Cajun right. “This isn’t like Grand Central Station or nothing.”

  At the mention of the New York landmark, it struck Clare how in congruously close a Brooklyn accent was to Dougie’s speech pattern. Close but not the same. To a trained ear the Cajun-French cadence was marked.

  New Orleans.

  The French Quarter.

  Bourbon Street.

  The Bourbon Street nursery.

  They were taking the little girl to the “Bourbon Street nursery.” Clare doubted these two were the child’s godfathers. Why did they have a four- or five-year-old girl with them in the first place? What had David done to condemn her own children?

  With a fierce spike of need, Clare prayed to the dark gods that the charred corpse from the house fire was not her husband. She wanted to kill him herself, wanted it in a way she’d never wanted anything in her life: a visceral need, a druglike jonesing for the feel of her teeth ripping into the flesh of his throat.

  “There’s a wife.” The Cajun cut into the false euphoria of Clare’s revenge fantasy. “The wife wasn’t in the house. It was the middle of the damn night. Where was she? Doing the lawn boy while he does the nanny? Maybe she’s got a key to this place. Maybe she knows everything. Maybe she’s in on it.”

  “He got a wife?” Dougie brightened at the mention of a woman, but not by much. Evidently living females were not to his taste.

  Footsteps whispered over David’s white-on-white vomit-on-blood-and-brains carpet. Clare cringed, her very bones feeling as if they telescoped with her wish to disappear. Curling down over Mackie’s head, she wept for herself. Beneath her chin, the dog’s silky neck hairs stiffened, and he emitted a faint and ludicrously dangerous growl.

  The Lhasa, all sixteen pounds of his short-jawed puppy-fuzzed self, was willing to do battle with armed men to save her. His courage shamed her. Shame’s heat dried her tears. She was to be slaughtered cowering and whimpering in her philandering husband’s claw-foot tub by the men who had butchered her babysitter and burned her house to the ground. That they might also have murdered her children was not a concept she could factor in and stay sane. The pain, the rage—the helplessness—would melt her very bones, freeze her soul.

  Strength born of the desperation said to give mothers the power to lift tractors off of infants coursed through her with such force she was surprised she did not levitate. Before she had lowered the brave terrier to the porcelain tub bottom this superhuman power had gone, but a bony courage remained. “Hush,” she whispered. Mackie obeyed, sitting in the middle of the tub. Looking around the tiny space for a weapon, she stepped silently from behind the shower curtain.

  “Shit,” she breathed with unthinking irony and snatched up the toilet brush. In his quest for purity or, as she had long suspected, his quest to suck the life out of Life, David had installed stainless steel accoutrements in their home, his office, and here. One of the rare moments of genuine merriment he had afforded her was when, on surveying a kitchen he had robbed of humanity, he’d said with all sincerity, “Accessorizing is so important.” Her amusement was short-lived. David did not like being laughed at.

  With two killers on the far side of a flimsy door, Clare finally appreciated her husband’s love of heavy metal. In the great pantheon of weaponry a toilet brush might seem absurd, but at least David Sullivan’s had heft. Filling her mind with Sammy Sosa, Babe Didrikson, and Geena Davis in A League of Their Own, she widened her stance, straightened her spine, choked up on the handle of the brush, and waited.

  Lines, ever floating in the actor’s personal cyberspace, spat out three words: “Go down swinging.”

  The muffled footfalls came to a stop. Dougie’s voice, closer now, two or three feet from the bathroom door, slewed in Clare’s ear as he turned back to address his companion. “We gotta get back. That little wiggler’ll be as dead as those first two. Smother her own self,” he yelled. The Cajun must have gone into the other room.

  “Smother her own self,” the Cajun repeated snidely, his voice low yet clearly audible through the walls. “You never do nothing, do you, Dougie? Guns ‘go off,’ things ‘happen,’ kids smother their own selves. You’re not responsible for nothing, are you?” He waited as if for a reply, then sighed as if he’d been a fool to do so. “Did you go to the toilet or did you just—” His voice trailed off wetly as if he gagged on his own thoughts. “Fuck. Just check the toilet. Jesus. Fuck.”

  Clare rolled her head, trying to relax, to focus. “It’s showtime,” Bob Fosse from All That Jazz whispered in her ear.

  “No, no, I did. I mean I checked the toilet,” Dougie said, and Clare wondered why he lied. He wasn’t scared, she was pretty sure of that. Then it came to her. He lied to make Blackie think better of him, like him a little bit. Sure, he did unspeakable things to the corpses of women he’d bludgeoned to death, but he really did take a leak when he said he would. And he lied because he could, because it made him bigger than the fools who believed him. Lies were power and currency to the world’s Dougies.

  Another thing the Dougies had in common: They could never leave well enough alone. He hurried on, “You see, it was like this, I did take a piss, see, then I was coming back quick as a bunny and she’s laying here legs all spread like some kinda whore—”

  “She’s dead, you fuck.” Another dull thud, knuckles on bone and the ubiquitous “Fuck,” Dougie’s head evidently proving harder than the Cajun’s fist.

  “Move.” A crash. “Move.” The sound of a body stumbling into something. “Move.” The Cajun was herding the pervert from the front room with kicks to various parts of the latter’s anatomy. The apartment door slammed open. Smashed shut. A metallic swallowing sound came as the dead bolt slid into place.

  They were leaving. They’d left. Clare didn’t have to fight for her life with a toilet brush. She wouldn’t be beaten, raped, clubbed to death.

  She didn’t lower her erstwhile weapon, nor did she relax her vigilance.

  These men, these monsters, had a key to her husband’s pied-à-terre; murderers, smotherers of children, had a key to an apartment David’s own wi
fe didn’t have a key to.

  David’s business partners? David’s friends?

  “Fuck,” she quoted the Cajun. Still she didn’t move. Finally her faint imaginings of their footsteps in the hall, on the stairs, passed. Secure in what his nose was telling him, with a hitch and scrabble, Mackie bounded out of the tub. Clare loosed the toilet brush. Her joints had stiffened, welding her fingers into the shape of the handle. She shook them, working out the tension the way she did each night before going onstage.

  Mackie headed for the door. Remembering the macabre happenings that had driven her into the bathroom in the first place, Clare scooped him up before he made good his escape and, dog in lap, sat on the seat of the commode.

  Heart rate and breathing quickly returned to normal—the rewards of half a lifetime of practicing yoga, meditation, dance, fencing, and half a dozen other disciplines that might, or might not, help an actress remain gainfully employed. Fear still clawed at her belly and brain, but this fear tasted a bit different. In her forty-two years she’d seen exactly two dead bodies. One was her ninety-seven-year-old grandmother, vain to the end, who’d insisted on an open casket so the Dior gown she’d been hoarding against that day for twenty-odd years could be shown off to best effect. The other was a young woman the paramedics had laid out beside the scene of an automobile accident. Clare had driven up just as they covered her face.

  Today she had seen four. Two she’d believed to be her own children. Today she had wished and prayed that she, too, would die—but she had lacked the nerve to do it herself and had chosen to wield a toilet brush rather than let someone else do it for her.

  Hence Clare Sullivan was alive.

  Clare Sullivan was going to be tried for the murder of her daughters, her husband, and his mistress.

  While Clare Sullivan was in jail, the men responsible for the carnage were going to get away with the murders and with the small dark child, the child who had whispered “alive” in Arabic. Maybe they were getting away with Dana and Vee. And Clare Sullivan wasn’t going to be able to do one damn thing about it.