SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Son had to hold his breath and suck in snatches of air as he pulled the body up by the arms and dragged it to the trunk of the car. He unlocked the lid, stowed the man inside.

  He went back for the wine bottle. He saw there was vomit and bloodstains on the tarmac of the alley.

  He drew the flat cardboard box over to cover the place where the body had lain. Who would look? Who would care? Bums threw up back here all the time. And the blood could have come from anywhere, even a cut finger, or an animal or rodent, or from some wino with perforated ulcers. There wasn't enough of it to worry about.

  The trip to Seabrook was uneventful. Son drove back to the spit of land next to the channel. He sat in the car a while, waiting to see if there was any life over at the closed bayside restaurants or any boats coming through for night trolling.

  After a few minutes without movement, he went to the trunk. He got the man's clothes off him—after much cursing and sweating labor—and threw them back in the trunk for disposal later. He'd stuff them in with the trash for the weekly pickup.

  He carried the man over his shoulder, head and arms dangling down behind him. Son was careful not to touch the man's bare buttocks. He might have bugs on him, body lice, crabs, something creepy crawly that would leap off onto Son to plague him. He held him by the backs of his grubby knees.

  He knew the police could pick up fingerprints from flesh, but his would be gone after the body was in the water a while. Besides, he had never been fingerprinted. They wouldn't have his prints on record to find anyway.

  He walked to the bulkhead and stood between two thigh-high creosote-treated posts. He carefully tipped the body's weight toward the water. It fell with a loud splash that sent cold salt water spray up and onto Son's clothes.

  This body would be found soon. By morning, maybe. Would they notice how soon after death it was found floating?

  It didn't matter. What really mattered was that he had done it. He had carried it off without a hitch. He had been able to watch the dying of the light in the eyes. He had felt the thunder in his brain after so long a time without it. And the other one, the real one, the murderer he copied, would know.

  She would know.

  And wonder.

  Son clapped his hands as if applauding the sea. The white body below him bobbed, floating face down out from the bulkhead. The audience of one watched the curtain call of the flabby human body as it sank without a sound of protest beneath the dark brine.

  ~*~

  The next day a child visiting the land spit across from Kemah's restaurants pointed out to his mother something strange bobbing in the water near the bulkhead.

  That night the TV and radio news carried the story, with the television carrying pictures of a body bag being lifted into a waiting ambulance.

  “Spooky how many men are being found down near the bay.”

  “Yeah. Me, I'm not going swimming in Galveston for a long time. And I am not eating seafood at Kemah restaurants! Can you imagine finding one of those guys all bloated up?”

  The dancers were discussing the news as Shadow exchanged her street clothes for a green G-string and matching bra. She heard them and froze. Her eyes unfocused.

  Body? Found in the bay? That wasn't possible.

  She came back to herself, turned to the other women. “Maybe this one was a drowning off a fishing boat.”

  “You didn't see the news? Guy was naked as a jaybird. The police haven't confirmed he was poisoned, but of course he was. No one's reported a man overboard on any of the fishing boats. Not no naked man, anyway.”

  Shadow moved toward her locker to finish dressing. She wouldn't talk about this. They were mistaken. It had to be a fisherman, or maybe someone went swimming in the nude and drowned.

  Her fingers slipped as she tried fastening the bra's complicated front closure. She kept trying. Could she dance tonight, thinking about this?

  She glanced at herself in the long mirror along the counter. No. She wouldn't dance. She would get into one of her hostess dresses and work the tables.

  The two girls who had been in conversation left the room. Mom came in. She was big, black, and motherly to the dancers. Hence her name. She had not been working the Blue Boa long. She supplied them with any kind of cosmetics they needed, eye shadows in every color, eye liners, blemish covers, body paint, lipsticks, blushers, mascaras. And costume jewelry. She even did hair if she was tipped well. The club paid her a pittance. She made her living off the girls' tips.

  Mom moved to the counter and straightened everything. She kept it neat, all the items in little open Tupperware containers. She tsk-tsked as she worked. “Messy girls, bad messy girls.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  The black woman turned. “Didn't know any of you was left in here. You want Mom to fix up your hair for you tonight?”

  “No thanks.” Shadow slipped a tight, short black dress over her head and pulled it down over bust and hips. It fit her curves beautifully. It paid to buy good clothes.

  “Why's they call you that name, girl? You don't seem like no cold person.”

  “Ice Queen? You heard them call me that?” Shadow sat down before the mirror. “I guess they think I'm a prude. I don't sleep with the clientele.” Not for money, she thought, remembering Mitch, and the stolen time they had spent in her bed. She touched a lipstick to her lips. Remembered his lips on hers. Put the lipstick down again and stared at her reflection.

  Mom shook her head. She picked up some of the eyeshadow containers and closed their lids, depositing them into the proper Tupperware bowls. “These girls are real slobs, you know that?”

  Shadow held her silence, thinking of the man floating in the channel.

  “You a different one, all right.”

  Shadow brought her attention back to the present. “I am?” She glanced at Mom reflected in the mirror.

  “Got some age on most these girls. How old'r you, twenty-four, twenty-five?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Goodness! Thirty. You don't look that old.”

  “You're doing a helluva job on my self-esteem, Mom.”

  “Aw, honey, I ain't putting you down none. You look good as any these girls here. Bet you make just as much too. I just don't see too many women working this job. They get old, they find another line of work.”

  “This is the only line I could find. You really think I don't look thirty?” She shouldn't have asked that. Who the fuck cared what Mom thought? It was what the men thought that counted.

  Mom put a big hand on her shoulder. “You a pretty woman. Real pretty. And sweet, too, I can tell.”

  The thought of the new body in the bay made her frown. Not so sweet.”

  “You coulda fooled me. I think you just fine.”

  I did fool you, she thought. I fool everyone. I'm a regular fool when it comes to deception.

  Mom moved down the counter to pick through the jewelry, probably to make sure it hadn't been borrowed without her permission. Shadow took up the lipstick again and carefully finished applying it. She fluffed her hair with her fingers, feathering it around her face. Should she line the bottom lids of her eyes with black khol pencil?

  “Think I need to underline my eyes?” she asked Mom.

  The woman came closer. “Uh uh. Those eyes are dark enough without liner. Real pretty.”

  Dark, deadly dark, calculating, lying eyes. Maybe pretty, but definitely not sweet, Shadow thought, eyeing herself in the mirror once more. There was no point in lying to herself.

  She left Mom to clean and tinker with the beauty supplies. The smoky club wrapped its ambience around her as she entered it. The music was loud, the girls young, ripe, sexy. Fraudulent, wasn't that the word Mitch had used?

  She noticed Frank sitting at a table alone and moved toward him.

  Frank. The nice respectable guy with money. She might as well make the night pay.

  “Hi, can I join you?”

  He had watched her cross the room to him. He stood now and said, “Please d
o. I was hoping you were working tonight.”

  She sat and watched him place bills in the center of the table. She took them and began to fold the money. She told the waitress to bring her a Coke.

  “I don't really see you hanging out in places like this,” she said.

  Frank looked away from her. “You either.”

  She waved that away. “I belong here, I definitely belong, but you, you're not the type I see around.”

  They talked about Nolan Ryan pitching for the Rangers and him in his late forties before retiring. They talked about movies. Frank liked comedies. He even liked the old Abbott and Costello films, and the few Laurel and Hardy ones he had seen. His favorite present-day actor was Steve Martin. He had a fondness for the Chevy Chase Vacation films and did a fair imitation of Chevy bobbing his head when his wife in the movie asked him to look at the Grand Canyon.

  They talked about Shadow's roommate, Charlene, and about cats, and about dancers, comparing the good with the bad ones.

  Shadow realized, only after Frank had left, and she sat alone at the table, that not once during the hour they talked did she think about the naked body found floating in the bay.

  Before she could worry about it, another man came over and asked to sit with her. She said, “Have a seat. What are you drinking?”

  The night wore on this way until she had the amount of money she required and—sighing that she had not seen Mitch for a few days, had he dumped her?—she left for home. On the drive she turned on the radio to a talk station and waited for the news recap.

  It was not good.

  Twenty-Eight

  Mitchell stood on the catwalk overlooking the swimming pool, his hands on the rail. “Do you ever swim in it?”

  Shadow stood next to him, nervous as a schoolgirl on her first real date. She had not been with him in over a week and now it seemed that their one night together was a dream she vaguely recalled. “Once in a while. I like running to keep in shape over swimming, but with this terrible heat . . .”

  From the corner of her eye, Shadow saw a movement, and turned her head. She saw Charlene appear and disappear from the hallway in the main body of the house. Watching us, she thought. How do I explain Charlene to him?

  “Why doesn't she come out so I can meet her?” Shadow flinched. He had seen her too. “Charlene's . . . she's . . . well, she's been sick.”

  “Is she sick now?” He still faced the pool, still studied the big blue bowl of water below them. Yet he never missed anything. He probably even noticed her nervousness around him and wondered about it. He had not asked again about whether she had children or not. She knew he thought about that, too. But there was a difference between sleeping with a man and getting deeply, intimately involved with him. A difference as wide as the world.

  Shadow nodded her head slightly. “She's still sick,” she admitted. “We were together in the state mental facility in Austin.” She had said it and she was glad. If he wanted to leave now, that was perfectly fine with her.

  He drew his gaze away from the pool and stared at her. She couldn't look him in the eye. No matter how many people tried to argue that having mental problems carried no stigma, it was a damn lie. It was still shameful. It still hurt to confess to weakness.

  “When did you get out?” he asked quietly.

  Charlene took that moment to magically appear and disappear again. Shadow shut her eyes and tried to relax in the darkness behind her lids. “It's been a year. Charlene's been having more and more trouble lately. I hardly know what to do anymore. She hears voices, she tunes out the world, she's hard to reach.”

  “How about you?”

  Yes, how about her? How was she doing, that's what he wanted to know. Was she insane now? Slipping toward insanity again? Had the disease spread from Charlene to infect her too? If only he knew. . .

  “I'm fine,” she lied, remembering the fugue states where her mind clicked off like a parking meter throwing up the red violation sign.

  She opened her eyes. Turned to face him. “I told you my husband killed himself.” And my children, she thought, but did not say. “I couldn't handle that. They say I didn't talk for months. If it hadn't been for Charlene I might never have talked again. She was always there, Mitchell, watching out for me, protecting me from other women there, talking to me as if I could hear her.”

  “She's a good friend then.”

  “The best. Now, though, she's been slipping, and it's hard to know how to help her.”

  “Should she return to the hospital?”

  “Maybe. But I couldn't do that to her. She never abandoned me.”

  Mitchell looked down at the pool again. “I have someone like that in my life too.”

  “Oh?”

  “Remember the bag lady I told you about? I've been watching out for her for years. I recently asked her to come and live in my house and I'd support her, but she's too independent. Or too crazy. She won't leave the street.”

  “It was good that you offered, though. Not many people would.”

  He kept silent. She reached out along the rail and covered one of his hands with her own. He turned to her then and drew her to him. She let herself be folded into his arms. How long had it been since she trusted a man this way? It seemed like a lifetime. She lay her head against his chest, heard his heartbeat, felt the pulse in his throat, smelled the sunshine smell emanating from the cloth of his shirt.

  If only she could stay like this forever, held close and secure. If only she didn't fear betrayal and disaster waiting just around the next corner, ready to pounce.

  “Let's go find your friend.” He let her go, but took her hand. “I think she's curious about me.”

  Curious to know why you're still alive. Shadow reluctantly stepped away and led him into the house calling, “Charlene? C'mere a minute, I want you to meet someone.”

  They found her sitting on the sofa in the big formal living room. She sat with her ankles crossed and her hands lying quietly in her lap, a schoolgirl on her best behavior. She contemplated the cold marble fireplace until Shadow said, “Charlene, this is Mitchell Samson. Mitch, meet Charlene Brewster, the woman who saved my life.”

  “Hi, how are you?” Mitch stepped forward and held out his hand.

  Charlene looked at him a moment and then she gave him her hand to shake. “. . . Uh . . . hi. . .”

  Shadow watched, amused and relieved, while Mitchell put Charlene at her ease, even enticing her to talk a little. Soon Charlene was rattling along, calling Mitchell “honey” and inviting him into the kitchen for a dish of pecan pie with vanilla ice cream on top. The three of them ate the dessert at the kitchen table. Charlene and Mitchell hit it off and were like two old friends before a half-hour had passed.

  When Shadow walked Mitchell to the door as he was leaving, she said, “She really likes you.”

  “It's mutual. Anyone who saved you for me is going to be my best friend too.” He leaned forward and kissed her. “Meet me when you finish work at the Blue Boa tonight?”

  “Ummm . . .”

  “Go with me to my house, spend the night?”

  “We'll talk about it.”

  He smiled. “God, I love a tease.”

  “I never would have guessed,” she said.

  He laughed and she wanted to kiss him again, kiss him passionately. Instead she reached up and gave him a peck on the cheek. She watched as he skipped down the steps to his car in the circle drive. His car stirred dust into the air as he drove down the lane to the road. Then she heard someone breathing behind her, the hair on the nape of her neck rose, and she turned straight into Charlene's face. “Oh! You scared me.”

  Charlene moved back to arm's length. “You're not going to kill him, are you?”

  “No!”

  Charlene released air from her lungs. “I'm so glad to hear that. I like him a lot. He tells funny stories.”

  “He's a cop, Charlene. In Homicide with the Houston police.”

  “Isn't that . . . dangerous? Having
him around, I mean?”

  Shadow shrugged. “It might be. But I'm not worried. No one will ever find out anything.”

  Charlene looked unconvinced, but she didn't protest. She must have known it wouldn't do any good.

  ~*~

  Charlene was cleaning the closet in her bedroom, bent over from the waist straightening shoes, when she heard on the radio news of another floater found near the channel. She stiffened, listening. A man, naked, washed up near the bulkhead on the Seabrook side of the channel. Authorities suspected another murder.

  She backed from the closet like a crab, on her heels, moving so fast she fell backwards to land on her bottom. She hurriedly came to her feet and ran to the door, swinging herself around the doorframe and into the hallway.

  “Shadow! Shadow!”

  Shadow came from her own room. She was nearly ready to leave for the club when she heard Charlene calling her. “What is it?”

  “Who did you kill? When did you do it? Why didn't you tell me?”

  “Hey, slow down.”

  Charlene let Shadow take her by the arms and hold her still, even though she felt like running around the mansion, pitching a fit. How could Shadow do this? How could she keep it a secret from her?

  “They found another man”—she was breathless—“in the bay down near the bulkhead. You did it and didn't tell me!”

  “Now, listen, Charlene, I didn't do it. Do you hear me? That was reported on the news yesterday and it upset me too. I didn't do it. Do you understand? It wasn't me.”

  Charlene furrowed her brows. “But how could . . . ? What does that . . . ?”

  “I don't know what it means. They say he was found nude and they suspected he'd been poisoned, like the others. But I swear to you, it wasn't me.”

  “Not you,” Charlene repeated.

  “No. I didn't do it. Someone else did. It's like—what do you call it?—a copycat thing, I think. I know it's crazy, but that's the only explanation I can think of.”

  “Why didn't you tell me?”

  “I was going to, really, I would have told you. I heard the girls at the club talking about it, then I listened to the news on the way home last night. I've been trying to puzzle it out ever since.”