Fatal Shadows

by Lanyon, Josh

  “I had rheumatic fever as a kid. The valves of my heart are damaged.”

  “Yeah, so he said. But he said normal physical exertion isn’t so much the problem for you as sudden shocks. You don’t react well to surprises; that I’ve seen.”

  “He didn’t rule out the possibility of my stabbing someone to death,” I concluded.

  Riordan smiled that crooked smile. “He said it would be a strain, but he didn’t rule it out; no.”

  That meant zero. Lisa had a string of doctors who could testify I was practically an invalid. “Isn’t it true that for every expert witness the prosecution presents, the defense can find an equally credible witness to challenge?”

  “Sure. But we’re not going to trial, English. We’re trying to find out who actually killed your old — er — pal. See, I’d just as soon arrest the right perp to start with. Saves the taxpayers money.”

  “How noble.” I drank from my beer. Beer and Muselix. It’s what’s for supper.

  “Hey, you may find this hard to grasp, but I believe in the system. It works, so long as everybody does their job.”

  I said dryly, “You’re going to tell me cops never make a mistake?”

  “Not as often as the movies would like you to think. Our legal system may not be perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than anything else going.”

  I met his eyes briefly, considered those rough, masculine good looks, considered a nose that had obviously been broken more than once — and no wonder.

  “Robert owed a lot of people money — including me.”

  “You think one of Hersey’s creditors called in his loan? Not a very profitable way to do business.”

  I set my beer aside, turned, rinsed out my cereal bowl. I turned off the water. Through the sink window the moon hung in the night smog looking old and tarnished. From the other room Basil in the role of Lord Rockingham was purring threats in that wicked public school accent, filling the silence between us.

  Riordan said idly, “Chan thinks you killed Hersey. Chan has pretty good instincts.”

  “So arrest me.”

  “I would if we had enough to convict. Right now I don’t need the ACLU breathing down my neck.”

  I turned to face him, asked flat out, “Do you think I murdered Robert?”

  Riordan shrugged. “I’ve been wrong before. Not often.” He scraped at the label on the beer bottle with his thumbnail. “For the record, you’re right about the money angle. Hersey owed big time. Credit cards, child support and some of the less — conventional — money stores.”

  “Loan sharks?”

  His lip twitched at my tone. “Uh huh. We are pursuing that angle.”

  “But you don’t think maybe some street thug —?”

  “Like I said, it’s not a profitable way to do business. You generally don’t start by killing the borrower. First you loosen a few teeth. Break a few bones.”

  I got Riordan a second beer. He didn’t seem to notice. No doubt used to being waited on hand and foot by doting females.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said slowly. “Robert was seeing someone. Not just a pickup stick. There were flowers in his apartment. Roses. Hustlers don’t bring you flowers. Rob wasn’t the kind to buy himself flowers. Find the guy Robert went to meet that night and I think you’ll nail whoever killed him.”

  “Unfortunately there was no card,” Riordan pointed out. So much for thinking the police might have missed this. “You could have sent Hersey those flowers for all we know.”

  That reminded me. I pushed away from the counter, pulled the box of flowers out of the trash and threw them on the table.

  “Gee, this is so sudden,” he drawled.

  I ignored him. “These arrived today. There’s a card somewhere.” I returned to the trash bin, rifling around ’til I found the card between the empty cans of Tab and frozen food boxes. I slid the paper rectangle across the table to Riordan. “I tried to tell myself there was a mix-up at the florists.”

  He picked it up. Read it. Shrugged. “You could have sent these to yourself.”

  “You could at least go to the florist and find out.”

  “What am I finding out? You want me to believe there’s a connection here?”

  “I don’t know. I just have a feeling. …”

  “Feminine intuition?”

  “Fuck you!”

  Riordan pushed his chair further back, precariously balanced, as immune to civility as he was to gravity. “Temper, temper.” He raised those reckless brows. “Ready to start reaching for the kitchen knives?”

  “I think you’ve already checked out the cutlery.”

  He grinned, unperturbed. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Monday when you pretended to be looking for prowlers in my closet.”

  He laughed. “Hey, it’s not much of a closet is it?”

  “No. It’s not. I don’t like closets. Life’s too short to spend hiding in the dark.”

  He stuck the florist’s card in his shirt pocket and said, “Tell you what. I’ll check out this flower shop. You do me a favor. Tell me about Claude La Pierra.”

  “Great. Now you want me to rat out my friends.”

  “If he killed Hersey, he’s no friend. Are you and La Pierra lovers?”

  “No.” I must have shown my surprise.

  Riordan said, “You took a helluva chance going after those letters. That is what you were after in Hersey’s pad, wasn’t it?”

  “I told you why I went there.”

  “Uh huh. And then you suggested we swing by La Pierra’s so you could warn him we’d already found them.” He laughed at my expression. “You’ve got balls, English. I’ll give you that.”

  “Look, Claude’s one of the kindest, most generous —”

  “Blah, blah, blah. Did you know La Pierra a.k.a. Humphrey Washington has a juvenile arrest sheet as long as your arm?”

  That stopped me cold. It took a moment to recall my argument. “I thought juvenile records weren’t admissible?”

  “Like I said, nobody’s on trial yet. I’m just telling you that homeboy has done time for assault with a deadly weapon. He carved his initials in a playmate’s buttocks.”

  For some reason I wanted to ask, which pair of initials? The ones he was born with or the set he chose? Instead I said, “People change, right? That’s the point of prison.”

  “Not always. That’s the point of the death penalty.”

  His face was hard. Not a guy with much sympathy for weakness. I said, “People grow up.”

  Riordan rolled his eyes. “Did you happen to read any of what he wrote your friend Hersey? And I quote, ‘To say goodbye to the thing that was peeled back and pulpy like a grape. And I press my mouth and unpeel your moans, and my tongue flicks out switch blade fox red tongue, and I kill the thing I love. Love the thing I kill.’”

  I blinked. “Okay. So he’s not Robert Frost.”

  “Or how about this gem? ‘Harvest in the midnight of your body, betrayed and fucked by a smile you practice in the bath of your urinal. I carve the entrails from your ego, bleating bleeding mouth.’ ”

  “The scariest part is you memorized this stuff.”

  “No, the scariest part is what Hersey looked like when La Pierra, or someone who thinks like him, got finished.”

  I swallowed hard. “Bad poetry is not a crime. Not that you can prosecute anyway. I don’t think you understand the — um — creative temperament. A guy like Claude gets the violence out of his system by writing.”

  “And what lovely writing he has — depending on the medium.”

  Chapter Six

  Bad dreams. That’s one of the downsides of living alone: Waking in the middle of the night with no one to reach for. No warm sleeping body to snuggle against. No reassuring snores from beside you. Nothing but queen-size 500-thread cotton percale solitude.

  I don’t remember what I dreamed, but I woke drenched in sweat, my heart banging away like a broken shutter. It took a moment or two to realize where I was; t
hat the tangle of sheets was all that held me prisoner, that the threatening rumble was only rain drumming on the roof, gurgling in the rain gutters.

  I sat up, switched on the bedside lamp. The light from the pink glass shade was soft and mellow, illuminating the heavy walnut furniture I’d inherited from my Grandmother Anna’s Sonora horse ranch.

  My grandmother was a kind of family legend. Back in the ’30s when divorce was still a scandal, she had left her husband and gone off to breed horses in what was, in those days, desolate country. She wore pants, smoked cigarettes, and could throw a lasso and shoot a rifle like Annie Oakley. I used to spend summers there, to the chagrin of my mother, tied to her husband’s family by the purse strings. When I was eight my grandmother died and left her money to me. The ranch was mine too, but I had never been back.

  This bedroom suite had been her own: no Bombay Company knock-offs; the four-poster bed and clawfoot dresser with green marble top were built back in the days when one’s furnishings outlasted generations of one’s family — and in this case a couple of world wars. Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself.

  I shook out the blankets and sheets, punched up the pillows. The clock said 2:02 a.m. The street lamps outside the rain-starred windows glowed dimly. It was very quiet. This mostly commercial part of the city was like a ghost town after business hours. I lay back and tried to convince myself I could go back to sleep.

  As Riordan would say, uh huh.

  When I was younger I used to lie awake listening to my heartbeat, breaking into a sweat when it seemed to skip or double beat. Fortunately I’ve got over that, developing what Mel called a “healthy fatalism.”

  A hot drink would be nice, I thought. But the idea of cold wooden floors and the dark beyond my locked bedroom door was discouraging.

  To distract myself I started mentally blue-penciling the sequel to Murder Will Out. I realized I was increasingly dissatisfied with my series protagonist, Jason Leland. I wished now I had made him bigger and blonder and a little rougher around the edges.

  That was when the phone rang.

  The shrill of bells went through my nervous system like an electric shock. After a second I hung over the side of the bed, fishing underneath for the phone. I found it, knocked the receiver off, found it again and dragged the phone out.

  “Hello?” I rasped.

  Silence.

  No, not silence. The line was live, and faintly I could hear breathing.

  I opened my mouth. Then I closed it. I waited.

  I could hear him — her? — breathing.

  How long? A few seconds? A minute? It felt like forever before, eerily, the person on the other end giggled and hung up.

  I finally fell asleep with the phone off the hook and the lights blazing.

  Sunday passed without incident.

  I called a few of Robert’s friends, trying to get a lead on who he had been seeing. Nada. If Rob had been involved, it must have only been very recently. I knew he would not have confided in his family, who still refused to believe he was gay.

  On Monday I called the West Hollywood office of Boytimes and was informed they had never heard of Bruce Green.

  I was still chewing over that one when Tara showed up with the kids. As usual they looked like a picture out of Family Circle. Perfectly groomed and color-coordinated.

  “I want to apologize again for the things I said to you on the phone. I don’t know why I said them,” she said.

  There was an awkward pause while we both considered why she had said them. Before I could respond she added, “We’re flying back to Sioux City tomorrow. Before I go I wanted to give you this. It was Bob’s. It must have meant something to him. He asked me to send it to him a few weeks ago.”

  She handed me the book she had under her arm.

  I took the yearbook , examined gold print on blue. West Valley Academy.

  “These are your memories too, Tara.”

  “No. This was Bob’s junior year. My family didn’t move to California until that following summer. You were still in the hospital.”

  “That’s right. I’d forgotten.”

  “All Bob’s friends forget that.” She smiled oddly. “I used to think it was because I fit in so well; like I’d always been part of the group. Now I realize it was because I made so little impression on his friends. In his life.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Of course it is,” she said impatiently.

  The girl, Hannah, pointed at the Tab I held and said, “Coke. Want.” Bobby Jr. nudged her in warning.

  Relieved at this interruption I fled upstairs, grabbed a couple of Cokes, brought them down and handed them out. Tara looked slightly exasperated but set about popping tops and mopping the instantaneous spills off her pristine children and my hardwood floor.

  When she got back to her feet, she said deliberately, “The fact is I was always a little jealous of you, Adrien. Even before I really knew about you. Sometimes I think that if you hadn’t gone off to Stanford, Bob wouldn’t have married me.”

  “Rob never did anything he didn’t want to.”

  Was that supposed to cheer her up? She wasn’t dumb. She knew what I wasn’t saying.

  Tara said, “A couple of years at JC. The job at IBM. Then the move to Iowa. He couldn’t settle into anything.”

  “He couldn’t settle here either.”

  She glared at me for a moment, then some of the rigidity left her face. “Thank you for saying that.” She seemed to be looking past me into the distance. “It’s so weird. I remember when I transferred into West Valley. Bob seemed so — so — together. I could never have imagined how it would all turn out. Everyone liked him. He was on the tennis team and the school paper. He belonged to all those clubs. Really, he barely had time for me, but I still loved being with him. Well, he wrote me songs, poems. That was part of it: he was different from other boys.”

  This is the point where Riordan would have snickered.

  I said, “He was a good friend.”

  She smiled that funny smile. “You would say that. I remember how he was always taking off to see his sick friend. The rich kid with the heart condition. And I liked that about him. I thought that showed the kind of person he was.”

  “That was the kind of person he was,” I said. “Rob was the only guy who came to see me in the hospital. When I got home he used to bring my classwork over, library books, whatever I needed. He used to sit there and talk about the tennis tournaments and who was boffing who, and Mrs. Lechter’s wig falling off in biology.”

  Those were things I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Remembering them, I thought that maybe that was one reason, despite all that had come later, that I had never stopped loving him. When I had been sick and scared and lonely he had been there with the dirty jokes and the Tears for Fears CDs.

  Her gaze zeroed in on mine. “Did he talk about me?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t remember most of it. It was a long time ago.”

  Tara said shortly, “He didn’t talk about you either. He cut classes, he forgot our dates, but he never missed going over to your house. You two must have been laughing behind my back the whole time.”

  “No, we weren’t. I didn’t even know about —” I thought better of that. “We didn’t even realize we were — we didn’t admit it anyway.”

  “I guess it should have occurred to me. Just the fact that he never pushed for more. My God, I was naïve!”

  Well, she was past the denial stage. Maybe it was a good thing.

  I said, “Tara, I’m not sure what you want. Why are you belittling what you two shared? He married you, you had a family together. Robert had a lot of problems. I don’t know that they even had anything to do with his being gay.”

  She flinched at the word. Looked automatically to the kids. Hannah was dribbling Coke down her pink overalls. Bobby Jr. stared at me with those tilted green eyes that reminded me of Robert.

&nbs
p; Her laugh was brittle. “You must be a terrible writer. You always want a happy ending. Well, there isn’t one. I can’t forgive him.” For a moment tears glittered in her eyes. She blinked them away. “At least … I’ve been talking to my therapist.” She drew a deep breath. “We’ve agreed that I need to move on. To let go. That’s why I’m here. To close this chapter. To do that I have to set it right with you.”

  Closure. Who couldn’t understand that? But I wasn’t the one she needed to make peace with; I was just the only one available.

  We hugged, another one of those minimal body contact embraces. I realized it was probably the last time I would see her or the kids.

  “Let me know how you get on, Tara,” I urged.

  She smiled, made some vague reply. I understood that I was just something else she wanted to close the book on.

  On her way out, kids in tow, Tara paused and wrinkled her nose. “You know, Adrien, you might want to check for mice.”

  * * * * *

  At noon Angus asked if he could take the rest of the day off. As still as he was, the shop seemed uncannily empty without him. Every creak, every rustle had me looking over my shoulder.

  The phone rang twice. Hang-ups both times.

  Around three in the afternoon I poured boiling water into one of those Styrofoam cups of Nissin noodles for a late lunch. By then the shop was busy again, and when Claude called I was in the middle of adding up credit for two boxes of 1960s paperbacks coated in layers of nostalgic dust that had me sneezing my head off.

  “Can you talk?” Claude demanded.

  “No, I’ll have to call you back.”

  “Listen, I remember where I know him from!”

  “Know who?” I tried to cradle the phone between my shoulder and cheek while I continued calculating.

  Claude mumbled something I assumed was gutter French ending in, “— dick-head!”

  “Are you addressing me?”

  “Oui. I’m addressing you about that dick-head, Reargun, or whatever his name is. The dude’s a freaking faggot. He’s as queer as a Susan B. Anthony dollar. He’s —”