by J. A. Kerley
“Wait here, darling,” I said. “I want to take a quick shower. But first let me get your drink.”
“Oh, God, pleash hurry,” she said, and I wondered if she was referring to the shower or the booze. I brought her another thermonuclear blast of vodka.
I sat on the toilet seat and ran a cold shower for several minutes before climbing in myself. Fifteen minutes later she was sprawled and snoring. When I tugged the cover up to her neck, my knuckles touched the warmth of her lips, and I let them rest there. I had so far seen two Ava Davanelles, the first a joyless, brooding ghost, alert to slights and quick to anger, the second a sun-bright dazzle of the delicious, all smile and wit and sweet, laid-back laughter. Were both no more than fables from a bottle? If so, where between the extremes resided the true Ava Davanelle?
Was it the woman I saw in the hall outside Willet Lindy’s office, her fists knotted tight and her face a white horror of conflict and struggle?
I should have felt anger and betrayal, not by the woman whose breath warmed my hand, but by myself. My self-serving need to understand and battle discord had drawn me to a place where I lacked knowledge or solution. I could not understand the situation, but since it had crossed into my life, I could not in good conscience turn and retreat.
Or could I? None of this was of my making.
I oversaw Ava’s sleep for twenty minutes, then went to the deck and watched the stars assemble until their noise overwhelmed me and I went to bed.
CHAPTER 12
I once found Bear on his knees in front of the toilet, hand jammed in his mouth and tickling the back of his throat to jump-start the retching that pushed the hinge-toxins from his stomach. At 6:30 I awoke to the same sounds behind my bathroom door.
I knocked tentatively. “Ava? Are you all right?” “Give me a few minutes,” she said. “I’m I’m ill.” A muffled moan. More gagging. I put bread in the toaster in case she needed something in her stomach. Five minutes passed before the door opened, last night’s ethanol glow replaced by the starchy pallor I’d seen at the morgue. Her eyes were wet and red. Beads of sweat covered her forehead. I’d opened the windows and the sound of the Gulf poured in.
“I, um, I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “I must have the flu or something. I guess the drinks must have gone to my head.” She pushed strands of hair behind her ears with shaking fingers.
“You were pretty gone.”
“Flu,” she said. “It’s been going around at work.”
“Sure.”
“Uh, did we that is …”
“We were the epitome of propriety. You got tired, I steered you to the bedroom. I took the couch.” I hoped my collar hid the bite marks she’d sucked into my neck as I’d wrangled her to the bed.
Relief dropped her shoulders a full inch. “I’m sorry to put you out, I I don’t remember much. Didn’t I just have two drinks?”
Groping through the blackout.
“Maybe three,” I said. “Are you sure it’s the flu?”
“I what do you mean?”
“I got the impression that you had a few pops before you arrived.”
“What?” A show of surprise. Moi?
I shrugged my shoulders “An impression.”
“Are you saying I showed up drunk?” An edge to the question. I noticed her color was returning.
“I’m saying you got pretty blitzed for a couple light-light drinks, Ava.”
“Maybe they weren’t as light as I asked for.”
Nobody does defensive better than a guilty alky. Her voice was getting stronger and her shakes were gone. “I thought it was the flu,” I said.
She’d stopped sweating. Her eyes were clearing. They flared at me. “Maybe that’s just part of it. Maybe you got me plastered. Maybe you “
“Maybe I’m the one who planted that stash of vodka in your car.”
Her eyes went saucer-wide. “You looked in my …” Guilt and anger fought in her face and anger won. “I think you’re a bastard,” she hissed, grabbing her purse from the table. She blew by me and I saw wobble in the legs, smelled sweat and vomit and an astringent tang in her wake. The door slammed shut and seconds later came a grinding of sand as she fishtailed away.
I pretty much knew what I’d find before I went to the cabinet. I shook the vodka bottle and watched it bubble abnormally and heard a hiss as I unscrewed the cap. Watered. I checked the bathroom wastebasket and found a crumpled Dixie cup hidden at the bottom. It smelled as expected, making her morning passage easy to map: she awakened with the craving, pulled a cup from the bathroom dispenser, and tiptoed to the liquor cabinet to fill it. She replaced the removed vodka with water and returned to the bathroom to alternately drink and vomit until she absorbed enough alcohol to start the buzz. When the door opened she was already getting straight, if that’s what you’d call it shakes leaving, eyes clearing, mind defogging. Right now she was working on the vodka under her car seat. Hair of the dog that bit you, it was humorously called. But I knew this dog. It didn’t bite; it ate you whole, and there wasn’t a damn thing funny about it. I gave Ava twenty-five minutes and phoned her home. No answer. I gave it another heart-pounding five before re dialing.
“Hello?” she chirped a little too loudly, but pleasant and controlled. Juiced again, but at least she was home. I gave silent thanks to whoever pulls the levers and gently hung up.
Harry and I headed toward downtown to interview a woman who’d known Deschamps both personally and professionally. I was in a funk and lying in the backseat with my arms tight over my chest, a doleful mummy.
Harry shook his head with regret. “That pretty little doc, a drunk. Sad.”
Like me Harry didn’t use the word drunk as a pejorative; we both knew too many recovering alcoholics AA folks, mainly who easily referred to their drinking selves as drunks, alkys, booze hounds or whatnot. I figured it for a badge of courage, the guts to look in the mirror and tell the truth. Then get healed if you stayed honest with your reflection.
“When she gets found out it’ll be her job,” he said. “And she’ll get found out.”
Harry was right; when Ava’s alcohol abuse was discovered she’d be sent to a rehab program and reassigned to a lesser position, like filing. Another pathologist would be hired. Ava’d eventually get eased out the door like a bulldozer eases aside a sapling. It’d be a fast track to the street Clair wasn’t long on sympathy.
Harry spoke over his shoulder. “What you figuring on doing about it, Cars?”
“Why would I be doing something about it?”
“You got a feeling for the girl, don’t you?”
“I barely know her, Harry.”
He swung the car down a side street and jammed on the brakes. I felt the front tire bang the curb, roll up over it, fall back down. Harry parking.
“Come and sit up front, bro.”
I got out and switched seats. We were in an old neighborhood and the street was bordered by spreading oaks and tall pines thick with cones. I figured some of the trees predated the War Between the States. The antebellum houses sat distant from the pavement behind azaleas, magnolia, red tips and myrtle, as if hiding in the past and eavesdropping on the present.
Harry said, “We got a full plate, what with the murders, Squill hijacking the PSIT. It could turn into a king-hell political mess, eat us alive. If that little lady’s got the alcohol sickness, and you got a feeling for her, you can get ate up from that side too.”
“You telling me leave it alone?”
He smiled with a touch of sadness and shook his head. “You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do. I know it, you know it, and all the angels above know it. I’m just saying to watch out for yourself.”
I stared out the window. Down the street a frail and elderly woman watered her flower garden. She looked like an ornament, she was so still.
Harry said, “You keep pretty tight inside yourself, Cars. Nothing wrong with it. But you find those old wires tightening around you, don’t go nowhere but to me, right?”
His phrasing struck a disconcerting note in my head. “What old wires? What are you talking about?”
He looked away, put the car in gear.
“Don’t get yourself tore up, that’s all I’m saying.”
Harry drove the final few blocks to the next address on our shoe-leather list. We got out in front of Les Idees, an art gallery on Mobile’s near-south side, a slender yellow New Orleans style two-story with scrollwork iron on the balconies and plum-colored shutters. There were flower boxes. A cobblestone walk. A small trickling fountain. The place was precious. Harry eyed the coffee shop across the street; the coffee smell was thick in the air.
“Go grab a cup, bro,” I said. “I think I can handle the interview.”
Harry crossed the street, looking relieved.
Though Deschamps was primarily a commercial artist, he relaxed by painting watercolors, mainly seascapes. Francoise Abbot was the proprietor of Les Idees. She’d exhibited Deschamps’s works for several years and occasionally socialized with him in a group situation, before and during his engagement.
Abbot was a slender fiftyish woman dressed in a red velvet wrap just west of where caftan meets kimono. A smoker, she affected an ebony cigarette holder, a device I’d considered passe to the point of antique. Her black hair had one of those abbreviated anti cuts that sent shaggy sprigs flailing in all directions. She led me to several Deschamps watercolors, workmanlike, but lacking the insight to spark illustration into art. I thought they’d have made decent covers for blank-page New Age journals with titles like My Daily Reflections or Notes From a Life.
Madame Abbot’s low voice matched her conspiratorial demeanor and she punctuated phrases with an elastic assortment of facial displays. I suspected someone once told her she looked cute when wrinkling her nose and she’d decided to diversify. Customers were absent and we sat at a small ornate table in a back corner. I said, “Everyone I’ve spoken with considered Mr. Deschamps next in line for beatification, lacking only in that he was Baptist. Is that your impression, Ms. Abbot?”
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” she stage-whispered with a flaring of nostrils that segued into a squint. “Surely you know what that means.” She gave me three quick expressions that bet I didn’t.
“Of the dead speak nothing but good,” I replied. “That’s inexact but sufficient.”
She dropped her jaw and wiggled it, followed by a wink and a thumbs-up. She pointed the suck end of her cigarette holder at me. “That’s excellent, Detective Ryder.”
I said, “It’s a phrase often connoting ill that might be revealed, but is left unspoken.”
Abbot winked and wrinkled her nose. “Really?”
“Perhaps Mr. Deschamps didn’t quite lead the straight-arrow life I’m being led to believe.”
She shot her brows and pursed her lips. “For the most part I think he did.”
“What about for the least part?”
Abbot went through another series of facial contortions meant to convey, if I’d had to guess, some form of consternation. She said, “Two months ago a friend of mine double-dated with a friend of hers over in Orange Beach. A friend of my friend’s, that is. Her friend. And guess who my friend’s friend brought along as her date?”
While I unlinked the chain of friends, Abbot produced a facial display of such distracting variety I had to turn away to think.
“Was it Peter Deschamps?”
Abbot looked side to side as if crossing a busy street and leaned toward me. “This was two months after he’d proposed to Cheryl.”
“Friends out for an innocent night together.”
“It’s possible.” She winked three times and smiled.
“You believe it was more than that?”
“My friend’s friend is, how shall I put this, an energetic woman, physically energetic.” Abbot batted her eyelashes. “Does that say it?”
“Someone who … celebrates her libido?”
Abbot winked, nodded, pursed her lips, grinned, grimaced, and frowned. I took it as a yes.
“We heading over to see this ‘friend’s friend’?” Harry asked.
“Stop at the morgue first?”
Harry didn’t say a word. He U’d the car to a cacophony of horn blowing while I shut my eyes and gripped the door handle. He pulled up to the morgue a few minutes later.
“I won’t be long,” I said, closing the door and walking away.
“Carson?”
I turned. Harry had his thumb in the air. “Good luck,” he said.
Ava was at her desk doing paperwork. I stepped into her office and shut the door.
“Get out,” she snapped. Her eyes were bagged and bloodshot.
“I’d like to take you to lunch or to supper. If you’re busy today, how about tomorrow?”
She scribbled on a form, pushed it across her desk, grabbed another.
“No way in hell.”
I moved forward to the edge of her desk. “We should talk about Friday evening.”
She started to initial a form but the pen tore the paper. She threw the pen into the wastebasket and glared at me.
“There’s absolutely nothing to say.”
I said, “I’m scared.”
“You’re what?”
“Maybe worried’s a better word. Listen, Ava, I consider you a friend “
“And I consider you a snoop and a meddler. I suppose you’ve already told half the town.”
“I’ve told no one. It’s not their business.” I didn’t mention Harry; telling him was like writing her secret on a slip of weighted paper and dropping it into the Marianas Trench.
“Oh, I’ll bet. I’ll just bet.”
“Listen, Ava, I know some people who’ve had experience in things like this. Good people. Maybe you could use a little assistance with “
She stood with such force it rocketed her chair backward to the wall. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about with this ‘assistance’ business, Detective Ryder. Maybe I had too much to drink the other night. It was a mistake and it’ll never happen again. I didn’t like your insinuations then and I like them less now. We have to work together professionally, I can deal with that. But I want nothing from you on a personal level and that means conversations, insinuations, prevarications, advice, or lunch. If you really want to be helpful you can close the door from the outside. If you can’t figure out how it’s done, I’ll call security and they’ll be glad to help you.”
“How’d it go?” Harry asked when I dropped into the passenger seat.
“What’s that big-ass river in Egypt?” I asked, shutting my eyes against a too-bright sun.
“De Nile,” he said, not missing a beat.
Abbot’s friend’s friend was named Monica Talmadge. She was in her mid-thirties and lived in an expensive brick home in West Mobile with a perfectly manicured lawn and a canary-yellow Beamer in the drive. Monica was not happy to see us.
“I’ve never heard of Peter Deschamps. You’ve got to believe that.”
She wore open-toed high heels, lavender jeans, and more makeup than midafternoon generally required. Her bra made the most of small breasts, the tight, scoop-neck pink shirt not hurting either. Auburn waves of hair hung halfway to the out swooping of her derriere, as round and succinct as an orange.
“Look, guys, officers, whatever, my husband’s going to be here any minute.”
Harry looked at his watch. “Maybe he can help us with the Deschamps question.”
“No! I mean, he doesn’t know anything.”
“Doesn’t know anything or doesn’t suspect anything, Mrs. Talmadge?” Harry asked softly.
Monica looked down like memorizing her toes for a test. I could have given her the answers: perfectly tanned, pedicured, and pinkly lacquered. I knew she was debating whether or not to tell the truth. When she looked up her face held harder eyes and harsher shadows.
“Peter and I went out a few times, a friendly kind of thing.”
Harry said, “Discreetly f
riendly?”
There was a long silence and her eyes narrowed.
“Look, my husband’s what they call a man’s man. That means when he ain’t in fucking Montana or Canada with a bunch of other men hunting for mooses or beavers or whatever, he’s out fishing the blue water for days at a time. When he’s not being the American Sportsman, he’s halfway across the world selling generators. I grew up in a single-wide in Robertsdale and I like all this a lot” she gestured around her, meaning the car, the house, the neighborhood “but there are a few other things I like too. I’m just trying to keep a little balance in my life, y’know? So when Peter answered my ad “
I said, “Your ad?”
“I put an ad in that ratty paper, NewsBeatf Personals. Semi-attached woman looking for a semi-attached man. Someone for intelligent, adult fun, no strings and no tales.”
A vehicle approached and Monica froze. When she saw it wasn’t her husband she released her breath. Harry said, “What happened after the ad ran?”
“I got a bunch of responses. More than I ever thought I’d get. Peter enclosed a photo, and he looked and sounded nice. It fit perfect he was engaged and had to be careful too. We had a few dates, nothing serious, just good fun, you know?”
“Did you get the impression this, uh, dating was something he’d done before?”
“No. I think he wanted a final fling before getting married. He as much as said so. Made sense to me.”
“Did you get any sense Mr. Deschamps might have orientation other than heterosexual?
“God, no,” she said. “He was very masculine. You’re not telling me he “
“No. But in any murder we have to ask all sorts of questions.”
“I cried when I heard about it. Such a good guy. Great body. I feel so sorry for his girlfriend.”
“Why’d you break the relationship off?”
“We both sorta did. I think we just ran out of things to say.”
I heard the roar of a big diesel engine. Her eyes looked past us to the street. “Oh, my God, it’s Larry. Please don’t say anything about this, please, please, please.”
