Dexter's Final Cut d-7

by Jeff Lindsay

  I went back to my post by the refrigerator, rather pleased with myself. Now I knew why Jackie had been killed. Because if you have an Apple smartphone and an Apple computer, you synch them, so all the data on the phone goes onto the computer. And Jackie had turned on the computer, seen the appointment, and been killed for it.

  But if Kathy had kept up with her updates, all that data would have been copied into the cloud, too, which meant that it should still be up there, incriminating appointment and all. But Kathy’s cloud account couldn’t be accessed by anybody else, not without her password. And by taking away the laptop, the killer had made sure that the information was out of reach.

  I did not quite pat myself on the back, but I was very pleased. I had figured out almost everything-except, of course, the one tiny, unimportant detail of who the killer was.

  I tried to make Renny fit again, and he really did, almost. But finally, I could not believe that anybody with a Passenger could throw up after the simple, relaxing, and often pleasant act of killing somebody.

  On the other hand, if I eliminated Renny, who did that leave? Maybe Renny had thrown up because he’d eaten some bad oysters. It had to be Renny-there was nobody else who fit at all. In any case, I certainly had to poke around into his immediate past and see whether he fit. Maybe get Deborah to check into it, and …

  Deborah. Apparently she was still not speaking to me, for the most part, and she would not be any easier to approach now, with Anderson leading his clown parade all over everything and flinging her out the door. It seemed unlikely that her ejection from the scene had softened her up so she was ready to forgive and forget.

  Still, I had a lead she could use, and she was a cop down to the very marrow of her bones. She wanted to solve this thing-even more since it was Anderson’s case. And it was at least possible that she would want to shove Anderson’s face in the mud more than she wanted to avoid me. It was worth a try.

  Of course, I could not try as long as I was standing here beside the refrigerator waiting for Anderson to come back and intimidate me. I needed to be out and about, and so I thought about my curious new position as a Person of Interest. Nobody had actually told me to stay put, don’t leave town, retain an attorney. I had simply stayed around out of the reflexive urge to be useful somehow. Clearly, that was not going to happen-unless giving Anderson something to glare at is considered useful. So I looked around to see if anybody was watching me; nobody was, and I slipped nonchalantly out the door of the trailer.

  Deborah was pacing back and forth outside, and she paused to watch me come down the three steps. For a moment I thought she was going to say something, and maybe she did, too. But she didn’t speak. She just shook her head and turned away to resume her pacing.

  “Deborah,” I said to her back.

  She stopped walking and her shoulders hunched up toward her ears. Then she turned and looked at me with a much more convincing version of the hostile look Anderson had attempted. “What,” she said.

  “I think I know who killed Jackie,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Go tell Anderson,” she said.

  “I’d rather tell you,” I said. “So maybe some good will come of it.”

  She looked at me with her head tilted to one side. “You’re not going to bribe me into some goddamn forgive-and-forget Kodak moment, Dexter. You fucked up big-time, and now because of you Jackie is dead and Rita is-what?” she said, and her words got hotter as she spoke. “Did you kill her yet, Dexter? Because that would make sense to you, wouldn’t it?”

  “Deborah, for Christ’s sake-”

  “It makes more sense than walking away and leaving her alive to fuck things up later, doesn’t it?”

  “I didn’t kill-”

  “And if you didn’t, now what? You still leave Rita and your three kids, now that you shit all over your brand-new bed? Or do you crawl back and try to pretend it never happened? Because she may take you back-but I don’t know if I will.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll go tell Anderson.” And because I can play the game, too, I added, “And he will fuck it up, and a killer will get away because you’re too busy having a hissy fit to do anything about it.”

  I was very glad to be ten feet away from her, because judging by the look on her face, if I had been close enough, she would have committed a felonious assault on my person, possibly resulting in serious injury. Even from ten feet away I could hear her teeth grinding together.

  “Spill it,” she said at last, her teeth still locked tight.

  I told her about the phone, and about the computer, and how that meant the same person killed both Jackie and Kathy, and she listened. She didn’t suddenly burst into bright smiles and embrace me, but she listened. When I finished, she looked at me for a moment, and then said, “Okay. So who did it?”

  “Renny Boudreaux,” I said. “He had some kind of altercation with Kathy, and she yelled that she would tell everybody next time.”

  Deborah looked at me, and then she sneered. I mean, really, an actual sneer, the kind you give somebody pathetic who is beneath your contempt but for whom you feel contempt anyway. “Renny Boudreaux is in New York,” she said. “Doing the morning shows to promote his special. He left yesterday.”

  “What?” I said, and I admit I was at least partially stunned.

  “New York,” she said. “Everybody on set knows it, and you’d know it, too, if you had read the production schedule instead of spending all your time humping Jackie.”

  It seemed like a very low blow, but she wasn’t finished with me yet. “And in the meantime,” she said, moving effortlessly from the sneer back to a very good snarl, “while you dick around and waste my time with stupid bullshit, you still haven’t found Astor.”

  I did not actually reel in shock, but her body shots definitely left me a bit wobbly and uncertain. “Well,” I said feebly, “but-”

  “Find your girl, asshole,” she said. “Leave this alone. You’ve done enough damage.” And she turned away and stalked toward the far end of the trailer. I stood and watched her, but she paced by me without a glance, as if I was some kind of common and rather dull plant life. I didn’t want to leave this alone. I wanted to grab Deborah by the shoulders and shake her, and tell her it wasn’t my fault; Patrick was dead, and somebody else had killed Jackie and ruined the only shot I’d ever had to climb out of the ooze and into the genuine gold-plated sunshine. And then I wanted to find Jackie’s killer and tape him snugly under my knife and give him a very long time to reflect on what he had done. And I would; I would not leave this alone, forgotten and fumbled away by Anderson’s stone-brained incompetence and Deborah’s bureaucratic indifference.

  But as much as it nettled to admit it, Deborah was right about one thing: I did have to find Astor, and that was a more immediate problem than my revenge.

  All right: Where should I start? Robert’s trailer was the obvious place, but I had already looked there. Still, that had been almost an hour ago. It was at least possible that they had returned, and if only to carry out my due diligence, I should check it again.

  Deborah stalked by one more time without looking at me, and while she was still at the far end of her neurotic sentry march, I crossed over her path and headed toward Robert’s trailer.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Robert’s trailer was still unlocked, and as I pushed the door open I saw that it was still dim inside, too. Once again I paused just outside and peered both ways, and once again I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. I stepped through the door and looked around; still nobody home. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed. I looked in all the corners and closets anyway, because thoroughness is a virtue every bit as important as neatness, and I found exactly the same amount of Nothing as I’d found earlier.

  And now what? Astor was still missing, Deborah was still not speaking to me, and Jackie was still dead. The world was not at all the happy place it had seemed to be so recently
, and for just a moment there no longer seemed any point to pretending. All the purpose, all the anger and resolve and need to Do Something drained out of me, and I collapsed onto the edge of the couch in Robert’s living area. It had all looked so bright and beautiful this morning, and now the world had snapped back into its true form, gray and pointless and mean-spirited, and even though that was certainly a better fit for Dismal Dexter, I didn’t like it. I wanted things back the way they were. Like a little boy trapped in a dark and dreary adventure, I wanted to go home.

  But I was not a little boy, and even worse, I was home. This was it, this dismal, painful, senseless trudging through sludge. This was where I lived; back in ugly old reality again. And there was nothing I could do about it, nothing at all, except to find Astor and drag her back home and start up the same old shadow show.

  Home: back to dirty socks on the floor and screeching at all hours and Rita’s endless, pointless, disjointed monologues. Rita: the one person still talking to me, and I didn’t really want to talk to her and couldn’t understand what she said. And thinking of Rita, I remembered that my phone had bleated at me while I was being grilled by Anderson. It had to be her; nobody else was left.

  And so with a heavy sigh and a sense of returning to painful duty, I dragged out my phone and looked at the screen. Yup: Rita. She’d left a message, naturally-why pass up an opportunity to blather? I went to voice mail and listened.

  “Dexter,” she said. “I know you must be looking for her. For Astor? Because it’s been a long time now and you didn’t-And anyway, I thought of something, and I was going to-I know you said she might come home, and I thought, that’s right, she might, but maybe not-and so anyway, I’ll just be gone for twenty minutes. Oh. And I’ll call you when I get back, in case.” I heard her take a breath, as if she was going to go on, but instead she disconnected.

  I glanced at the time. The call had come in fifty-eight minutes ago. I had been to college, so I knew that fifty-eight minutes was more than twenty minutes, but she hadn’t called back.

  I called her number, but it rang and rang until it went to voice mail. I disconnected. I couldn’t believe Rita had left the house, and it was even harder to believe she’d gone somewhere without her phone. But apparently she had, and I would just have to wait until she got back.

  In the meantime, Astor was not in any danger; she was with Robert, and she was quite probably someplace nearby, learning makeup tips. She would not want to be found, which would make things harder, but Robert would be much easier to locate. If he wasn’t hovering nearby at the edge of the excitement, somebody would know where he was-Victor, the director, would be a great place to start.

  I found Victor in his trailer, just two doors away. I could tell he was in there because as I started to walk past, Martha, the assistant director, came rushing out of the trailer as if she was pursued by killer bees. Before I could even frame a question to her, she sprinted past me, muttering, “Shit shit shit shit shit,” and then vanished around the end of Trailer Row.

  I went up the steps and knocked. There was no answer, but I could hear a voice inside, raised in passionate agony, so I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  Victor sat at the table, white-knuckled hand pressing his phone against his face. A large glass of water stood in front of him. He was listening to someone on the other end, shaking his head and whining, “No. No. No, impossible, fuck, no,” and as I stood there watching he picked up the glass and drained the water.

  And then he reached behind him for a large blue bottle, which I recognized as a popular brand of vodka, refilled the glass, and took another healthy drink. I didn’t think he had filled the vodka bottle with water. He looked up at me without seeing me, and suddenly exploded in rage at whomever he was talking to on the phone.

  “Well, goddamn it, what would you do? We got half a pilot in the can and a dead star, and the network is all over my fucking ass to fucking do something, and I can’t do shit without her and I can’t fucking raise the fucking dead!” He listened briefly-very briefly-and then snarled into the phone, “Well, then, call me back when you do know something.” He slapped the phone to disconnect and then slammed it onto the table.

  “Rewrite,” he muttered angrily. “Fucking rewrite around a dead woman … Asshole …” Victor reached for his glass of “water” again, and then appeared to notice me for the first time. “What,” he said, and he did not sound like he was going to invite me to join him for a drink.

  “I’m looking for Robert.” He just stared at me. “Robert Chase?” I said helpfully.

  Victor screwed his face up and turned bright red, like he was going to give me a dose of the kind of bile he had unleashed on the phone, and I was in no mood for it. So it probably wasn’t the nicest thing I could have done, but I was past caring. “He has my little girl,” I said. “She’s eleven years old.”

  All the color drained out of Victor’s face. It was an amazing thing to watch; one moment he was puffed up like a big red balloon, and the next he was a greenish-white thing with cheekbones poking through sagging flesh. “Oh, Jesus fuck, I’m dead,” he whispered, and he reached for his glass with two hands, lifting it numbly to his face and draining it.

  When the glass was empty, Victor put it back down on the table. His hands were shaking and the glass rattled briefly before settling to a stop in front of him. He stared at the glass and then, finally, looked up at me with eyes that were nearly as dead as Jackie’s. “They said it was just gossip,” he said, and there was a slight slur to his words. “I never … I mean, you know. Richard Gere and the hamster. Tom Cruise is gay. All that shit. Just backstabbing bullshit Hollywood gossip.” He lifted the glass, saw it was empty, and put it back down again. “I swear, I never thought … I didn’t really think …”

  Victor closed his eyes and slumped forward until his face was almost touching the tabletop. “Fuck,” he said. “Why me? Why is it always me …?” He began to shake his head, slowly and rhythmically. “I’m dead. It’s all turned to shit on me and I am soooo … fucking … dead.…” And he stopped shaking his head, and stopped breathing, and just sat there slumped into a pale green heap.

  I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but his face had actually turned even greener, and he sat there for a long moment, motionless. Then he jerked upright, snapped his eyes open, and took a deep breath.

  “You got to understand, Chase wasn’t my idea,” he said. “I wanted somebody younger, but the network needs a star. They got a list; it tells everybody’s TVQ-”

  “Their what?” I said.

  He gave me an impatient, irritated look. “TVQ. How popular they are. How many viewers they can get to watch something.” He held up a hand, then let it flop back down helplessly. “Robert’s is very high.”

  “Right,” I said. “He’s popular.”

  Victor nodded. “He’s popular. A star. And people always make up awful shit about stars. It’s … Everybody says stuff like that, you know, about anybody who makes it. It’s a mean, bitchy business, but if I thought it was really true about Chase and little girls-”

  He stopped and looked down at the table again. “Fuck,” he said. “I woulda cast him anyway. He’s got a really high TVQ.” He stared at his hands for a moment, and then lurched sideways and grabbed the big blue vodka bottle and began to pour his glass full again.

  I watched him, and I felt small and icy fingers tickling at the back of my neck. “What did you mean,” I said, “about Chase and little girls?”

  He wouldn’t look at me. “It’s just a rumor,” he said, and he didn’t sound like he even convinced himself. He put the cap back on the vodka, and as he bent to put the bottle back on the floor I sat next to him and picked up his full glass. “What the fuck,” he said, and I slowly and carefully poured the entire glassful onto his lap.

  Victor didn’t try to stop me. He just stared at the puddle of booze as it soaked into his slacks, his mouth hanging slightly open, and then he looked up at me, and I smiled. “
And what is the rumor, Victor?” I said. “About Robert Chase and little girls?”

  He looked at me and his Adam’s apple slid up and down, and then he finally closed his mouth and looked down again. “He likes them,” he said in a soft and husky voice. “Really likes them.” He glanced up at me briefly, then swallowed again. “He likes little girls.”

  I slid closer to him and put an arm around his shoulders, feeling him tense up as I touched him. “And when you use that word ‘like,’ ” I said, “what does it really mean to you, Victor?”

  “He has sex with them,” he said in a whisper. “Robert Chase is a pedophile.”

  I thought about my days with Robert, and his wistful talk of kids. I thought it unconvincing and it was-but not because he didn’t like kids; it was because he really liked them. And the family portrait he left hidden on my desk. His immediate and complete interest in Astor when they met, and the way he instantly got her alone in the makeup room-and even Robert’s weekend in Mexico at a “special private resort,” which probably meant a place that catered to men with his tastes; it all added up, fit together so perfectly that in retrospect, only an idiot could have missed all the obvious clues. And I was an idiot. A true and total dolt. I had thought he was gay, and because I am a fatuous conceited idiotic dolt I had even thought he had a crush on me. And all along, it had been the kids after all.

  There was no longer any doubt about it. Wave after wave of contempt for my complete stupidity washed over me, and I sat there for a very long time, just letting the waves lift me up and crash me down on the rocky shore again.

  Of course Robert liked little girls, girls just like Astor. And being the Child of Darkness that she was, of course Astor would have played along, loving the sense of power and control as a full-grown man, a Star, focused all that flattering attention on her. That Saturday at Wardrobe, moments after they met, she had rushed off with him right away, down the hall to the little dressing room.…