Change of Heart

by Jenna Bennett

  “No,” Grimaldi agreed, and waited until the waitress had deposited her sandwich and my salad in front of us before she continued, “that isn’t my impression of him. Sally said he wasn’t a regular at Chaps. She’d never seen him before.”

  “She had seen Beau. Did she tell you?” I lifted my fork and picked at the salad.

  Grimaldi nodded, reaching for the ketchup to squirt her fries. “Good thinking on your part, showing her the pictures.”

  “Thank you.” The salad looked great, but I found I had no appetite. I forked up a slice of strawberry anyway, and put it in my mouth. It tasted like cardboard, and was hard to swallow. I don’t think the fault was in the berry, however. “I can’t imagine Beau letting anyone hurt him, either.”

  “There were no marks on him either,” Grimaldi confirmed, attacking her sandwich. “My impression is that he liked to be seen, but he wasn’t into anything kinky.”

  I hadn’t thought he was. He made his living by being beautiful, and he was too proud of that admittedly gorgeous body to want to risk bruises or any other kinds of marks.

  “So maybe the two of them—Tim and Beau—hooked up for some fun.” I could see that happening. They were both young, healthy, beautiful. They’d probably get along swimmingly, assuming Beau swung both ways. “And Brian Armstrong invited himself along. To Tim’s place. Or maybe Beau’s place. Have you checked it for blood?”

  “The CSI team is going over it as we speak,” Grimaldi said, around a bite of sandwich. “I didn’t notice anything, though.”

  I poked at my salad some more. Moved some shreds of lettuce around and balanced a candied almond on my fork for conveyance to my mouth. It rattled, so I imagine my hand wasn’t too steady. “Maybe things got out of hand once they got there. Maybe Brian got rough.”

  “Maybe one of them had had a fling with Armstrong at some point,” Grimaldi said, swallowing, “and he didn’t like that they were together. Possessive.”

  Maybe so. “One of them stabbed Brian, maybe in self-defense, and they helped each other cover it up.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “That’s as good a hypothesis as any other, and one I’m going forward with.”

  “So you’re thinking that Beau couldn’t handle the guilt and ended it all?”

  “It could happen.”

  It could. I couldn’t quite consolidate it with the Beau I had known—been acquainted with—but it did make sense, at least in theory. “How did he die?”

  “Poison gas,” Grimaldi said.

  Excuse me? “Where did he get his hands on poison gas?” That isn’t something someone can go to the store and buy, is it?

  “You’d be surprised how many dangerous substances most homes boast,” Grimaldi said.

  I thought for a moment. “Did he close himself in the garage and let the Mini run?”

  Grimaldi shook her head. “He closed himself in the bathroom with ammonia and bleach and a bottle of drain cleaner.”

  “That’s enough to kill you?”

  “Not under most circumstances. Most people have the sense, when the chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid and chloramine starts wafting, to get the hell outta there. It stings and burns and makes it hard to breathe. But he didn’t leave. He stayed in the bathroom until he passed out. There were some sleeping pills involved too, we think. Not enough to kill him, but in combination.”

  “So... maybe he didn’t suffer, at least?”

  “Perhaps not,” Grimaldi conceded. “There was an empty container of sleeping pills in the trash can, along with the empty bottles of household cleaners. We think he took the sleeping pills so he wouldn’t be tempted to change his mind, and then he mixed up the chemicals and went to sleep. Hopefully he didn’t feel much pain.”

  God. I put down my fork. I’d only managed a few bites of food, and they were threatening to come back up. “Did he live alone?”

  Grimaldi nodded. “Parents in Michigan. One sister. Calling them with the news that he was dead put the cherry on my morning.”

  “I’m sorry.” My own discovery had been traumatic, certainly, but nothing compared to having to tell a family that their son and brother was dead.

  “I hate that part of the job.” She didn’t meet my eyes, but kept her own on the fry she was dragging through the ketchup. It was perhaps the very first time she’d opened up about anything even halfway emotional or private, and I held my breath so I wouldn’t jinx it. I’d been crying on her shoulder about Rafe for months, but she’d never returned the favor.

  There wasn’t anything more to come, though. She popped the fry in her mouth and chewed.

  “Any sign of Tim?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “There’s some evidence that Riggins had company in the past few days, though. We’ll be testing hair samples and taking prints.”

  “Yesterday morning, Tim told me he was staying with a friend.”

  “Yesterday morning, Riggins was still alive,” Grimaldi said. “He died sometime later in the day.”

  So before I’d gone to Chaps. Not that me going to Chaps had anything to do with anything.

  “Are you sure he did it to himself?”

  “At this point,” Grimaldi said, “I’m not sure of anything. The investigation is ongoing.”

  For a second neither of us spoke, and then she added, “You do realize that if he didn’t do it to himself, your buddy Briggs is a prime suspect?”

  I hadn’t thought about it. I daresay I should have. But now that I did, yes, I could see why my buddy Briggs would be a prime suspect. If the friend he’d been staying with was Beau, and if he and Beau had killed Brian Armstrong and tried to cover up the murder, then eliminating the only other person who knew what he’d done, would seem like a good move on Tim’s part.

  “Are you any closer to figuring out where he is?”

  Grimaldi shook her head. “There’s an APB out on the car. And the uniforms drive by his house once an hour or so just in case he decides to show up at home. But I don’t have the manpower to put someone there fulltime.”

  “Family?”

  “Estranged. Parents are religious and seem to think this is the just reward for sin. They wouldn’t take him in.”

  Sheesh. People are entitled to their religious beliefs, but it was hard to sympathize with parents so hardnosed that they’d cut off their own son for the crime of being gay.

  Not that I had much room to talk. I was cutting my own family off because my mother was bigoted and unaccepting of my boyfriend. And at the same time, I was depriving her of the chance to get to know him, and to change. Was that any better, really?

  I made the decision that I was definitely going to Abigail’s birthday party on Friday, with or without Rafe. And then I turned my attention back to the conversation again. “Friends?”

  “None we’ve been able to find,” Grimaldi said. “I’ve gone through his Rolodex and little black book, and I didn’t get a buzz from anybody. I have someone calling motels and hotels.”

  I pushed the salad bowl away. It had barely been touched, but I couldn’t force any more of it down. Grimaldi eyed it, but didn’t comment. “You want a box to take that home?”

  “It’ll be soggy by tonight. I should have ordered the dressing on the side.”

  “You didn’t know you wouldn’t be able to eat it,” Grimaldi said and signaled for the check. While we were waiting for the waitress to bring it, she added, “What will you be doing for the rest of the day?”

  I honestly didn’t know. Going home had zero appeal, just in case Rafe showed up there. Sitting there waiting and have him not show up... I wasn’t sure whether that would be worse or better.

  “I’ll probably just go back to the office,” I said. “Nobody else is there, and someone ought to be. And I can sit there and do nothing as easily as I can do nothing at home.”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “I’ll let you know if I hear anything from Tim. Or about him. As of this morning, he hadn’t contacted the office again.”

  “I
don’t imagine he will,” Grimaldi answered, “now that he knows you’re looking for him.”

  We parted ways outside the restaurant. Grimaldi headed back toward MNPD headquarters on James Robertson Parkway—she’d walked the four blocks to the restaurant—while I made my own way back to the parking lot and the Volvo.

  I passed her on the corner of Third and James Robertson, where she stood waiting for the light to change, and tooted my horn at her. She lifted a hand in greeting and then I zipped past, between the brown brick of the police building and the white marble of the courthouse, and headed across the bridge to East Nashville.

  I passed the corner of Fifth and East Main on the way, and glanced up at the double balcony doors of my apartment on the way past. There was nothing to see, and also no sign of Rafe’s Harley parked at the curb. Not that that meant anything: he could equally well have pulled it into the parking garage under the building and left it there. I doubted he was home, though. He had more important things to do. He was probably holed up somewhere with the busty blonde and the toddler.

  The thought hurt, so I squashed it down and focused on something else instead. And because thinking of Beau Riggins hurt too, I concentrated on something I could actually do something about. Maybe.

  Brian Armstrong had died Friday night or early Saturday morning.

  If Grimaldi was right, and Tim and Beau had been to blame for Brian’s death, then Tim had ditched the body in Shelby Park Saturday morning, while Beau had spent the time scrubbing Tim’s guest room to within an inch of its life. But Tim’s house was a crime scene, so Tim wouldn’t have wanted to stay there. He might have gone home with Beau, and the two of them had spent the past three or four days together at Beau’s place. I could see that making sense. Until yesterday afternoon, anyway, when Beau died.

  Whether Tim had had something to do with that or not, he would have had to move on at that point. He couldn’t go home, since I’d told him the police had been at his place and he had to expect they were looking for him. He couldn’t bunk at the office, for the same reason. Per Grimaldi, he couldn’t appeal to his family. She’d talked to his friends and hadn’t gotten a “buzz” from them, whatever that meant. And she was currently in the process of calling hotels.

  What was left?

  I pulled the car into the parking lot behind the office and let myself in the back door. It was quiet as the grave, with only the low buzzing of office equipment and florescent lights to be heard, and I felt a frisson run down my back as I walked down the hallway to Brittany’s desk in the reception area and dumped my stuff.

  There was no new message from Tim in email, and no voicemail from anyone of any consequence. I leaned back in Brittany’s office chair and chewed the newly applied lipstick off my bottom lip.

  If Tim couldn’t go home, and he couldn’t go to his parents’ house, and he couldn’t stay at the office, and if he’d been staying with Beau but now Beau was dead... where would he go?

  He was running out of options, and that meant Heidi Hoppenfeldt was a possibility. I had no idea where to find any of Tim’s friends, so there was nothing I could do to track him down there, but I had Heidi’s address. Or I’d have it, once I checked the employee roster.

  Brittany kept it in her desk drawer, so it wasn’t hard to find. I made a note of Heidi’s telephone number, but I figured I’d accomplish more by actually driving out to where she lived to knock on the door. If Tim was there, at least I wouldn’t warn him of my approach.

  Unfortunately, the list was months out of date. It had Brenda Puckett’s address on Winding Way listed, and she’d been dead for more than six months. Clarice Webb had been too, and her address in Sylvan Park was there as well. Not to mention Walker Lamont’s former spread in Oak Hill. I’d been there once, for a company barbeque over the summer, but Walker had been languishing in Riverbend Penitentiary since mid-August. He’d been considered a flight risk, and a danger to himself and others—to me, specifically, since I was the one who had put him there—so the authorities had locked him up and thrown away the key.

  Anyway, I hoped the listed information was still accurate for those of us who were among the living and the free, and who were still working for the company. Mine was. It listed my apartment in the complex on Fifth and Main that I still lived in.

  Thinking of the complex on Fifth and Main brought to mind Rafe, and since I was sitting in front of someone else’s computer, I threw caution to the wind and Googled Benny’s Booby Bungalow.

  It had a website, of course. Everyone has a website these days. I have one myself. Although mine isn’t full of pictures of semi-naked women.

  Then again, I run a respectable real estate business, not a nudie show.

  The nudity took some getting used to, but after a minute or two I was mostly able to ignore the breasts staring me in the face and focus on the faces instead. And lo and behold, there was Rafe’s girlfriend, strutting her stuff.

  Lantana DuBois, the caption said, which couldn’t possibly be anyone’s real name.

  Nonetheless, I put it into Google and got a few more hits. Lantana had a Facebook fan page, as it turned out. All her fans were men, naturally, and some of the comments they’d left on her page were quite explicit. One of them was named Desmond Othello, which didn’t seem like it could be anyone’s real name either, and he listed his employer as the Montgomery County Jail. License plate production, no doubt. The way he went on and on about what he wanted to do to Lantana when he got out of prison was almost enough to make me feel sorry for the girl.

  The Nashville real estate database has rental listings, so those of us trying to drum up business can mass market to those people who rent, to try to get them to consider home ownership instead of spending their money to pay someone else’s mortgage. I put Lantana’s name into the database, but of course I didn’t get any hits there. It couldn’t be her real name, so why would she rent an apartment in it? Desmond Othello was a guest of the Montgomery County Jail, so there was no sense in looking him up. I did it anyway, and found zilch.

  Typing in Rafe’s name was an impulse. I certainly didn’t expect anything to come up for him. I hadn’t put him on my lease, and he shouldn’t have had another, since he lived with me.

  Imagine my surprise when his name showed up on a rental in Antioch, south of town.

  For a few seconds I just sat there, staring at it.

  He had an apartment apart from the one he shared with me?

  How far did this double life extend?

  But maybe it was left over from his previous life. When I first hooked up with him, back in August, he’d told me he was renting a room south of town. Maybe this was an old listing, and it just hadn’t been updated after he moved out. Or maybe it was part of his TBI cover, and the TBI just hadn’t gotten around to reeling in all the loose ends.

  Under other circumstances, I would have called and asked him about it. At the moment, I was damned if I’d call him ever again. If he called me, I might answer—might—but no way was I contacting him.

  Instead, I wrote the address on the same piece of paper as Heidi’s address, and shut down Brittany’s computer. And then I grabbed my coat and my purse and headed out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I drove by Rafe’s apartment first, for several reasons.

  First, it was farthest away, so it seemed a good place to start. That way I could work my way back to town.

  Second, I didn’t think I’d be able to concentrate on anything else until I had.

  And third— Well, thirdly, I just wanted to know.

  The address turned out to be a brick duplex in a not-so-fantastic neighborhood off Murfreesboro Road, south of the airport. It wasn’t anywhere I would have chosen to live, but I could see why it might suit Rafe. It was the kind of neighborhood where nobody owned property and everyone rented. There was probably a fair amount of turnover all the time, and no real sense of community. I imagined nobody cared overmuch what their neighbors were up to. It was perfect for someo
ne who wanted to keep a low profile and go unnoticed.

  The house itself looked just like the ones surrounding it. Low-slung brick, with a chain-link fence around the back and a narrow driveway leading up behind the house. The grass was dead and the landscaping gray and spindly instead of green. Not that that was anyone’s fault in February, but it added to the general unwelcoming feel of the place.

  The Harley was parked in the driveway. That came as a bit of a surprise, I admit. I hadn’t expected him to be here.

  Once I realized he was, the white Toyota was less of a surprise.

  Upsetting, sure, but not surprising.

  I drove past, feeling numb. And at the end of the street, I turned around and drove back. The bike was still there, in the driveway. So was the Toyota.

  I was half a block farther by the time my phone rang.

  I thought about not answering. I really did. But in the end, I couldn’t resist. Honestly, I just wanted to hear his voice. And part of me hoped he would apologize. And explain.

  I should have known better.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded, without any kind of greeting.

  “Driving away,” I told him, and I’m pleased to say my voice was steady.

  “How d’you find us?”

  That “us” hurt, I admit.

  “Your name is on the lease,” I said.

  He was silent for a bit. I continued driving. “It isn’t what you think,” he told me eventually.

  “Sure.” And my name wasn’t Savannah Martin, never to be Collier. “You know, that’s exactly what Bradley said, when I asked him about Shelby.”

  I hung up without waiting for him to answer, and then I turned the phone off and continued to drive away.

  I reached Heidi’s apartment just under fifteen minutes later. I had resisted the urge to turn the phone back on to see if he’d tried to call back. I didn’t want to know, or so I told myself. I almost believed it, too.

  Heidi lived in a little complex of townhouses just off I-65 South in the Brentioch area: between Brentwood and Antioch. It was the same area where St. Jerome’s Hospital was located, where my late sister-in-law, Sheila, had run into trouble back in November. It was also the area where Aislynn, half of my buyer-couple of Aislynn and Kylie, worked at a small café called Sara Beth’s, where Sheila had had lunch before going to St. Jerome’s.