[2010] The Violet Hour

by Daniel Judson

  “Maybe he’ll think I got her and left town,” Heather said. “If not, at least he’ll know I’m onto him. At least the fucker will know he’s not as smart as he thinks.”

  Leaving East Hampton Village, they took Montauk Highway back toward Bridgehampton, riding together in silence. For the first few miles Heather kept looking back to see if they were being followed, but then she seemed satisfied that they weren’t and gave up, focusing on her sister beside her.

  Cal, though, kept his eyes on the rearview mirror the entire way. He didn’t allow himself to feel any relief at all till the Citroën was parked in that middle work bay and the door was closed and locked and the alarm system was set.

  Five

  He sat on the edge of his bed and watched his hands shake. He couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened had Heather’s husband not been prevented from taking those last few steps. Aaron wasn’t afraid of the man, had always made that clear, but Cal was. No doubt that he could have taken Pamona down to the ground, if he landed the leg dive right, which, of course, he would have. Big guys were easy to take down when you got their knees together and turned them into an upside-down pyramid. But what then? He had grown up in a house where there were guns. His father’s guns, but Aaron knew where they were kept. When Aaron was old enough to drive, they’d even taken one to the pine barrens beyond Westhampton and had taken turns shooting off a few rounds. Cal still remembered the feel of the gun in his hand, the weight of it, the menace. And he remembered the sound of the shots being fired, too—so loud, like a clap against both ears. Would he really have been able to wrestle Pamona in the dark for control of his gun? If he did get control of it, again, then what?

  He wondered, watching his hands, what exactly he was capable of.

  He was nowhere near an answer when, from his open doorway, Heather whispered, “You okay?”

  He snapped from his thoughts and looked at her. “Yeah,” he said. “How is she?”

  Heather was still wearing his motorcycle jacket. “The same.” In her hand was the vial of liquid Cal had found in Amanda’s purse.

  “Any idea what that is?”

  “It’s morphine,” Heather said.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you think she’s addicted?”

  “It’s oral morphine. I checked, and she doesn’t have any track marks or anything. I don’t know what to think, exactly. If she is addicted, then the next few days aren’t going to be much fun.”

  “Taking her to the hospital is out, right?”

  “Yeah. Not much they could do for her there anyway. My guess is the morphine was the bait to get her out there. It was Ronnie’s recreational drug of choice.”

  “Is that why she’s out of it tonight?”

  “No. Someone must have given her a heavy tranquilizer.” Heather paused, looked at Cal for a moment, then removed his jacket. Stepping into the small room, she handed it to him. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” He laid the jacket on the foot of his bed.

  She was standing over him, looking down at him. “If you hadn’t gone back like you did ...” She didn’t finish the thought, didn’t have to.

  “I figured something was going on. It didn’t add up, you know.”

  “He wanted you scared, so you’d come running back here. That’s why Angstrom said what he said.”

  Cal nodded. “I guess, yeah, but there were some weird things going on there. Everyone dressed up like religious figures, plus what the ferry guy told me.”

  Heather didn’t say anything at first, then, “There’s a side of Ronnie no one knows about.”

  She left it at that. Cal didn’t press the matter. Besides, there were more important things they needed to talk about.

  “When I was pulling out of that parking lot, Angstrom was watching us drive away. Later on your husband said something to him about running plates.”

  Heather understood what Cal was getting at. “Who does that car belong to?”

  “A guy in Southampton.”

  “His address is on the registration.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ronnie could get it from the DMV.”

  “And he could find out from the owner where his car was tonight.”

  Heather nodded, said nothing.

  “I know that the owner’s out of town for a while,” Cal offered. “We’re storing it till he gets back.”

  “How long?”

  “Till the middle of next week.”

  “So much for having three months to figure things out.”

  “Who’s to say the owner of the Citroën is going to just tell your husband where his car was.”

  “Ronnie has a way of getting what he wants. Plus, he might already know the guy.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “You said the party was supposed to go all weekend, right?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “So we have one advantage he doesn’t. We know where he is.”

  “What good does that do us?”

  “Maybe none.”

  “We could tip off the cops, have them raid his party. I’m sure there were drugs there. And I know there were prostitutes.”

  Heather shook her head. “I’d have to swear out a statement before they could get a warrant. That would leave me exposed.”

  “Wouldn’t they have to protect your identity?”

  “I don’t necessarily trust the cops.”

  “Why don’t I do it? I mean, I’m the one who was there, saw and heard things. I don’t even have to mention your name. I could go right now.”

  “It’s too much of a risk. Besides, Angstrom got a good look at you, right? So did the ferryman. That’s two people too many. I doubt Ronnie remembers you, but...” Again, she didn’t finish her thought.

  “This was close, wasn’t it?” Cal said after a moment.

  She nodded. “Yeah. Too close. I knew he wouldn’t give up. He won’t be discouraged by what happened tonight, either. If anything, he’s really mad now, and he’ll try even harder next time. I wouldn’t mind seeing the look on his face, though. When he sees his tracking device sitting there on the front seat. I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

  Cal said nothing. He’d never loved anyone long enough to see that love get twisted into hate. He’d seen it enough to know that it was something that did happen; he just didn’t know what it felt like.

  “We need to be extra careful from now on,” Heather said, “and we’ve only got, what, a few days to figure out what to do.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s not getting his hands on my child, that I know for certain. He probably thinks that, whoever you are, you and I are together, which means all kinds of fantasies of killing you are running through his head right now. I’m telling you, if I had any luck at all, he’d get hit by a bus or something.”

  Again, Cal said nothing. For a moment he regretted not having tackled her husband when he’d had the chance, not having battled with him for the gun—but that was, he knew, foolishness.

  Heather leaned down and laid the vial on top of his jacket.

  “Keep this for me, okay? In case we need to give her some. Weaning her off it might be better than just stopping cold turkey. It depends how badly hooked she is.”

  Cal looked at the vial. He knew enough about morphine from having observed Aaron’s on-again-off-again girlfriend to know both its pleasures and its dangers.

  It was, in fact, according to the police, Aaron’s attempt to obtain morphine for her—the drug buy somehow gone bad—that had gotten him killed.

  Glancing past Heather, toward his bureau, Cal said, “Your phone’s there.”

  “Get rid of it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Ronnie has that number. I don’t even want to touch it now. I’ll go into town tomorrow, get a new one.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “I might need you to stay here and
watch Amanda.”

  “Okay.”

  She reached down, took his hand, held it for a moment.

  Her own hand was warm, her fingers, intertwined with his, strong.

  It took all he had to hide the severity of his reaction to this touch.

  “Thanks, Cal. Really. Things would be very different if you hadn’t done what you did. Mr. Fix-it strikes again.”

  “Of course. You know the rule. Anything for Heatherlicious.”

  She smiled at that—a bit sincere, a bit forced, but he’d take it. She left his room and went back to hers to tend to her sister. Watching his hands for a moment more, Cal then checked his watch. It was almost eleven.

  Time to work.

  He made headway on the last stages of the engine rebuild. It was difficult to avoid flashing back now and then to certain moments from the hours before—Ronnie Pamona just inches away on that dark path; Amanda in fishnet stockings and nothing else on the front seat of the Citroën; Heather taking his hand and holding it for a moment. It was difficult, too, to avoid listening for sounds—a car in the distance, footsteps outside, any indications that someone might be approaching. Eventually, though, Cal was able to settle down and focus on his work. Several hours passed, and he was maybe a little over halfway through when the solemn silence of the garage was broken by a ringing phone.

  The office phone, the garage’s landline.

  He hurried to the adjacent office—an extension was upstairs, in the living room, and Heather was, he hoped, sound asleep by now. Still, he paused to look at the caller ID and saw not a number but the words OUT OF AREA.

  His first thought was that this could be Heather’s husband, that somehow he had tracked them to here already. Was that even possible? Then he thought it might be Lebell calling to check up on him, from God knows where, drunk and looking maybe to make one last attempt to tempt Cal to come out. Or maybe he had come across some piece of information about Carver that Cal needed to know right away. He’d said he’d call if that happened.

  In the end, Cal answered so that Heather wouldn’t be disturbed. He picked up the receiver at the tail end of the fourth ring.

  From the other end of the line came a female voice.

  “Is Lebell there?”

  He didn’t recognize the voice, nor did he understand why a woman would be looking for Lebell here, and at this time of the night.

  “No,” Cal said. He felt—and sounded—a little guarded. “He’s not.”

  “I need to talk to him.” Her voice was quiet, emotionless. She had an accent that Cal couldn’t place. Spanish, maybe, but not exactly.

  “I’m sorry, he’s not here. Who’s calling?”

  “It’s important.” Her tone didn’t alter in the slightest.

  Cold, calm.

  “I can take a message,” Cal offered. Something about the quality of the connection told him that whoever this woman was, she was calling from a cell phone. Something about her voice, too, told him that she was a young woman. Well, not old.

  “Do you know where he might be?” she said.

  “No, I don’t.” Cal paused. Something wasn’t right about this. “Who is this?”

  A long silence, and then, abruptly, the line went dead.

  He lingered in the dark office after hanging up, wanted to be within quick reach of the phone in case she called back. She might have been drunk—maybe that was what hadn’t sounded right to him—so he could imagine her trying again right away. When the phone didn’t ring after a good minute, Cal thought of calling Lebell’s cell phone but decided against it; chances were the guy was with a woman, and chances were the woman he was with was another man’s wife. His compulsion. Cal began to think that maybe the call just now was from an ex-lover of Lebell’s. A late-night call, born from sleeplessness or longing, or both. There’d been many a night, alone in his narrow bed, that he had wished that he could just call someone. But he couldn’t remember ever having met or even heard of a woman with such an accent. Though Lebell was secretive about his past, he was not at all discreet about the women he pursued in the here and now.

  Whatever the case, whatever her story or problem, it wasn’t any of Cal’s business.

  Back in the first bay, he resumed his work, managed eventually to get lost in it, the precision of the engine, the solemn silence broken only by the clanging of tools and the occasional grunt as he tightened down a bolt.

  Just a few miles south, in her room in what was left of the Hotel St. James, Evangeline Amendora lay the prepaid cell phone on the table next to her bed. Still cold to the core, her hair still frozen and her solid body trembling uncontrollably, she stood by the small electric heater, absorbing what little warmth it gave off, and prepared herself for what she was going to do next.

  She needed a plan. I have failed, yes, but I am on top of things, will take care of this, please understand that. She had to think this through, apply all that she had learned—all that he had taught her—and come up with a way to complete the job.

  She knew that the number she had dialed could be used to obtain the location of the friend that Militich called most frequently, the man to whom she had just spoken. That was where she would start. If this particular friend—closest friend, certainly—didn’t, as he had claimed, know where Militich was, then he might know where he might have gone.

  It couldn’t have been far, not in the condition he was in, not after the cuts she had made before he slammed the heavy glass against her cheek and bolted for the door.

  Stepping away from the heater, Eve grabbed her tank mechanic’s bag. There was plenty of room in it now that the dress and the wig and the padded bra were gone. At the bottom of the bag, along with the .357 and the other tools of the trade she’d brought with her, was a second cell phone that, from this place, was her only connection to the man for whom she had killed many times before.

  For whom, she was determined, she would kill once again.

  He would need to know that Militich—the man who was calling himself Lebell—was still alive. She would have to tell him that she had failed.

  This phone was already powered up. The room had warmed a little, but she was trembling nonetheless as she entered his number and waited for him to answer.

  PART TWO

  October 31

  HALLOWEEN

  Six

  Cal finished around dawn but needed to take the ’62 Benz for a test ride before he’d be able to call the job done. Backing the vehicle out of the garage, then heading back inside to activate the security system and close and lock the door, he carefully studied his surroundings in all possible directions, saw, though, nothing out of the ordinary.

  There were advantages, he realized, to being in the middle of nowhere: any car, either passing or parked along the edge of Scuttlehole Road, particularly at this hour, would stand out, have no chance of appearing as part of normal traffic or blending in with the vehicles that normally parked at the curb for the night, which would have been the case if he, like Lebell, lived in a village.

  There was nothing to see or hear now, simply the morning’s first vague shadows forming at the foot of the trees. It was calmer than it had been the night before, less gusty, but the briskness remained, an autumn chill that made it clear winter was coming.

  Taking Scuttlehole north to its end, he turned around and headed back—just a ten-minute round-trip run was all he needed to know that his work was at last done. As he rode, though, looking in the rearview mirror every now and then, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being on dangerous ground. If he were to cross paths with Pamona—or the man who worked for him, the man in the suit—there would be no one around to hear or to see, and no place, this time, to run to or hide.

  He felt better when the garage came into view, felt better still when he was back inside with the doors closed. He knew that Heather and her sister—what was it Aaron had called her, way back when?Demanda?—would still be asleep, so he entered his apartment as quietly as he could, crossing the drafty
living room to his bedroom.

  Once his work boots and coveralls were removed, he stretched out on his bed in his jeans and T-shirt and told himself that this disruption in his routine was close to being behind him now. If he had gone out drinking with Lebell, it was likely he would be just getting home around now anyway—a few hours’ sleep, as usual, to let the tequila clear from his blood, and then he’d be free to drift, to the degree he ever allowed himself to drift, till Monday. Since there was no tequila in his blood to process this morning, he would then sleep till noon, when the owner of the Benz was due to arrive, take care of that piece of business, and then be at last back on schedule. With the exception of Amanda’s presence, there would be, he expected, no real difference between this Saturday and any other—any other since Heather had arrived, at least.

  There was even a part of Cal that hoped Lebell had learned nothing from George the bartender regarding Carver’s recent problems. Better yet, maybe Lebell had forgotten to even ask. Maybe some beautiful woman had come along early in the evening and distracted him from his promise to find out what he could.

  The problem of Heather’s husband—they had only days now, not months, to figure something out—was enough to worry about.

  It took Cal a while to relax, but sleep didn’t seem to want him. He was too wound up, too riled.

  He realized after a while that part of the problem was that he was expecting the phone to ring—Lebell had said he would call in the morning and see if Cal needed help. He was always good about calling when he said he would, so Cal decided that the thing to do was to stretch out on the couch in the living room, be within quick reach of the phone should it actually ring.

  He grabbed his blanket and his alarm clock and entered the living room. Settling down in the couch, the phone on the coffee table just a few feet away, he wound the clock and set it for a quarter to twelve.