by Lynn Kostoff
Balen paused and added, “You, yourself, are included in that number, Mrs. Tedros.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” When she placed the call, Corrine had hoped to catch Balen off guard. She had not expected him to go on the offensive.
“It means thanks to you husband’s misguided zeal in posting rewards for information concerning his beloved uncle’s murder,” Balen said, “I have been busting my ass trying to locate Croy Wendall. It seems an associate of Croy’s was about to turn him in, so Croy dispatched the associate and his significant other posthaste to the Hereafter.” Balen paused. “The upshot being, Croy Wendall is on the loose.”
“Oh shit,” Corrine said. “I thought you told me Croy did what you told him to.”
Balen sighed. “Croy does do what he’s told, but unfortunately I have to be in contact with him in order to relay those wishes. Our one conversation literally dissolved into thin air when the cell phone connection broke up. I have yet to hear from him again, though I fervently hope to do so in the very near future.”
Corrine tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “What about that cop, Decovic? He’s still shacking up with Anne Carson.”
“While I can’t say that I’m happy over Officer Decovic’s choice of mattress-mates, rest assured I have gone on and made some calls.”
“Meaning?”
“Decovic’s got a Boy Scout complex. You push too hard, you create more problems. I’ve talked to some people in the department. Our friend Decovic has found himself temporarily reassigned from Patrol to Beat. A busy man is the next best thing to a dead man.”
Outside her window, block after block of chain restaurants, car dealerships, and the clutter of small businesses. A car with out-of-state plates pulled up behind, then alongside her. It was filled with students. The driver hit the horn twice. The others yelled and blew her kisses, flicked their tongues, and toasted her with cans of beer and sodas.
“Buddy hasn’t, by any chance, changed his plans, has he?” Balen said.
“No,” Corrine said. “He’s supposed to meet with the Charlotte investors Thursday and Friday morning and then fly back that afternoon.”
“The arrangements are in place. I talked to James Restan yesterday. On Thursday, your husband will find the Charlotte investors interested and receptive to his proposal to run Stanco Beverages himself and oversee the new distribution lines. By Friday, he’ll find the deal they broker to underwrite those plans completely untenable,” Balen said. “Perhaps he will then be sufficiently discouraged and reconsider Restan’s buy-out offer.”
“He’s grieving,” Corrine said. “He can’t get past it. Buddy’s got it in his head that running the company is something he owes Stanley’s memory.”
Balen cleared his throat. “Corrine, if you’ll excuse the bluntness, I think you’d find the present situation brightened by more than a few kilowatts if you’d spend your time and energy employing your not inconsiderable charms, physical and otherwise, on making your lawfully wedded husband forget that grief. Sexual athleticism has a way of short-circuiting grief and memory. I truly believe such activities will further your ends more expeditiously than the desperate and frankly stupid moves you’ve attempted to run on me of late.”
Corrine glanced in the rearview mirror and waited a moment before saying she didn’t know what he was talking about.
Raychard Balen laughed. Over the cell phone, it sounded like a fire quickly running through dry leaves.
“I’m referring to you trying to circumvent the very clear terms of our original arrangement, Corrine. During the course of the conversation concerning Buddy’s upcoming Charlotte junket, James Restan informed me you had repeatedly tried to contact him, this despite the unambiguous agreement that any communication between Restan and you would be through yours truly.”
Balen paused, waiting a moment, before quietly adding, “If I were inclined toward paranoia, Corrine, I might believe you were trying to enlist James Restan’s aid in finding ways to squeeze me to protect what you perceive as your own best interests.” Corrine started to protest, but Balen interrupted. “I want to emphatically assert such a maneuver would not be in your best interests, Corrine.”
Corrine looked up and saw that she’d missed her exit. The frontage road and the mall blurred by. She didn’t bother taking the next exit. She kept the car in the passing lane and moving south.
“Let me hazard a guess,” Raychard Balen said, “as to the reason behind your attempts to contact Restan. Is it perhaps connected to my luncheon guest at the Palmer and the admittedly overenthusiastic reunion scene on his part?”
“You think this is some kind of goddamn joke, Raychard?” Corrine said. “Some kind of game? Why don’t you just tell me what the hell’s going on then?”
“Mr. LaVell is an old friend in town for a visit. He is thinking of buying a summer house, and I’m assisting him in looking into some development opportunities as well.”
“Cut the bullshit,” Corrine said.
“I think it necessary to point out,” Balen said, “you’re letting your emotions do your thinking for you and making unwarranted assumptions.”
“Fuck you and unwarranted assumptions,” Corrine said. “I know Wayne LaVell. What does he want from me?”
“I explained what Mr. LaVell wants,” Balen said. “I also took the opportunity to explain at length to Mr. LaVell during the course of our lunch at the Palmer that mistaken identity, like déjà vu, is a very common and mundane phenomenon in the course of everyday life, and I strenuously counseled that one should take pains not to put too great a stock in such things.” Balen paused for a moment, then continued. “I’m pleased to say that Mr. LaVell came to share my view, and we then went on to discuss other matters.”
Corrine had almost reached the city limits and took the exit for the regional airport, intending to turn around and get back on Old Market Boulevard. Instead she ended up following the access road and pulling into short-term parking and killing the engine.
“You’re saying Wayne LaVell is going to leave me alone, Raychard?” she asked. “And you really expect me to believe that?”
“Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship,” Balen said. “I have matters under control. As I suggested earlier, Corrine, in order to bring our business to a happy conclusion, you can do yourself the most good by working to realign your husband’s attitude concerning James Restan’s buy-out offer. The rest will take care of itself.”
“That’s it, then?”
“Patience, Corrine. You’ll see.”
“Right.” Corrine shut down the call.
She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. Her stomach hurt.
She opened her eyes a few moments later and watched a turboprop commuter pass the control tower and then bank and begin its descent through a bright, cloudless blue sky, the plane growing in size and definition at each stage of its approach, its landing gear dropping and locking, the plane coming right at her, the wings tilting and righting themselves, the buzz and whine of the engines slowly increasing in volume as it prepared to leave the sky and touch down.
FORTY-FOUR
SPRING BREAK ERUPTED AGAIN.
The massive PR campaign, buttressed by the slogan Magnolia Beach: A Paradise Waiting To Be Discovered, and approved by the mayor and underwritten by the city council and tourist bureau had done its job. There were students everywhere. The slick website, the mass mailing of flyers, and a couple of strategically placed commercials on MTV and ESPN had drawn wave after wave of students from the Eastern seaboard and the Midwest.
The anomalous mid-April weather brought them down too. There’d been a couple short segments on the national news about the record temperatures and lack of rain.
The town’s hotels and motels were booked solid. The overflow were sleeping in their cars or on the beach.
Ben Decovic had pulled foot patrol again. The shifts were an exercise in bottled water and sorely taxed patience.
He was worki
ng Atlantic Avenue, which ran parallel to the beach and was basically two lanes sandwiched by hotels and condos and bars and restaurants and souvenir shops, a long cluttered stretch that was broken by narrow walking lanes between buildings and public access stations, small niches with gravel aprons for parking and a plank walkway to the Atlantic.
During spring break, the locals were pretty much staying off the Avenue. With all the foot traffic and the parade of muscle cars and customized pickups inching their way through the crowds spilling over the sidewalks, it could take as much as an hour to make five blocks.
Magnolia Beach, this spring, had discovered the classic double-standards of any popular beach town or resort. The locals resented the intrusion but wanted the students’ money, and the amount of money changing hands depended on giving the students what they wanted. What the students wanted was to raise hell and get laid. The students called it having fun. Having fun meant anything goes. Anything goes meant property damage and racking up misdemeanors. However, getting charged with a misdemeanor meant a crimp in your fun and a tendency to keep the wallets closed. A closed wallet meant a significant dent in the locals’ profit margin. The locals, therefore, expected the police to help them keep that cash crossing the counter by not putting too fine a print on the students’ extracurricular activities except those, of course, resulting in property damage, and the students, for their part, expected the police to be absentee babysitters, only stepping in if the fun got out of hand and they needed rescued or excused. For a cop, spring break was like trying to dance to two different songs playing at the same time.
Ben cut across the Avenue between a cherry-red Camaro and a black pickup sitting atop a set of tires that looked like they belonged on an earthmover. Waves of music came at him from all directions, from the sound systems of the cars and trucks, from the balconies of motels, from storefronts and bars and restaurants. Country, rock, rap, R&B, hip-hop, grunge, heavy metal, all pounding the air, overlapping with each other.
The sun baked everything. Ben passed a Beach Body T-Shirt outlet and a deli, and moved slowly in the direction of Screaming Jay’s Arcade, which lay at the heart of Atlantic Avenue. He worked his way through the crowds, the young women in thongs, bikinis, tight one-pieces, hip-huggers and halter tops, most of the men in baggy shorts and shirtless, or wearing Tshirts bearing the logos of trendy local clubs or silkscreened advertisements for the owners’ sexual prowess and organ size.
The students either looked through him or away from him or smiled and nodded as they would to any authority figure who had the power to wet-blanket their fun. Others cracked wise, showing off. Some of the women flirted, putting a little extra sway in their hips or slowly lowering their sunglasses and sizing him up, one of the straps on their bathing suits slipping off a shoulder when they stepped up and made a pretense of coyly asking for directions.
His thoughts kept returning to Anne Carson. When she was the age of these students, her father Jack had lost his construction business and moved to Magnolia Beach, and she had already given birth to Paige.
Lately, things had become a little confusing between Anne and him. A change; small, but still there. It was as if she had decided to take a step not exactly away but back from him, and she was watching, waiting for something to happen. Anne seemed more tense than usual, but didn’t want to talk whenever Ben brought up the subject, so he didn’t push things.
Instead, things had a way of pushing them.
After an interval when things had seemed good and solid between Anne and him, there were nights when Ben was not sure where his words or touches would lead. Anne might unexpectedly abandon herself to her body, giving herself over to its demands, all hunger and urgency and tightly-wrapped limbs, nights when desire overran the boundaries of the dark and the bodies they moved in. At other times, their lovemaking was tentative and awkward, taking on the furtive groping and confusion of a high school romance, of clumsy and desperate backseat trysts. At others, it was as if Anne retreated completely but left her body behind, a corporeal ghost
Jack’s periods of disorientation were also getting longer and more tangled.
Anne was still having to juggle her work schedule and long after-school meetings two or three times a week with Paige and the guidance counselor.
For his part, Ben was exhausted from having to deal with the hormonal chaos of Spring Break and chasing down the increasingly baroque tips from the Stanley Tedros case.
Ben worked his way down Atlantic. More bodies. The smell of sunscreen. Music that Ben felt a decade too old for.
He passed Fat Larry’s Bar and Grill, then Mama Evelyn’s Tattoo and Piercing, another Beach Body outlet. On each street corner were palmettos planted in pre-cast concrete containers. Ben paused and watched three students drunkenly try to work an ATM.
A half block away was the entrance to Screaming Jay’s Arcade and just beyond that, the north end of the boardwalk running for four ocean-side blocks. The crowd of students was at its thickest here, spilling into and eddying in the street.
As Ben approached, a small break in the milling students opened, and in that instant, Ben spotted him.
He stood eating a vanilla cone in the middle of the sidewalk. A short man with oversized arms and shoulders. Hair the color of weathered tin. A white T-shirt with I Mean Business across his chest.
And then, in a blink, the crowd closed.
Ben started after him, taking his time, not wanting to spook the guy.
He couldn’t say for sure the guy was the one who’d ambushed him in the parking lot of the Passion Palace, but the momentary glimpse in front of Screaming Jay’s had mimicked the glimpse Ben had gotten when he’d pulled aside the Halloween mask of the man who’d appeared from behind the Taurus and hit him with the sockful of heavy-gauge washers.
Ben was thinking too of the Glock the man had taken from him and the ballistics report on the murders of Jamison Blake and Melissa Newton.
Below the boardwalk, both Ben and the gray-haired man were hemmed in by the crowd. The street was jammed with a line of customized pickups, sound systems blaring, students dancing in the truck beds. Along the railing of the boardwalk was a long wall of bodies shouting and jostling each other, a knot in the middle waving open containers and toasting the crowd and each other.
One of them tossed an empty over the railing into the street.
The gray-haired man looked up. Then over his shoulder.
Nothing in his face suggested he’d recognized Ben.
A couple seconds later, though, he bolted.
More yelling. Bodies dominoed.
The guy jumped onto the hood of one of the pickups and then off onto the opposite sidewalk.
More falling bodies.
Ben followed the best he could. He radioed the two other foot patrol working the south end of Atlantic. Talbert responded first. She was near Bluecrest Street, a block to the west of Ben. Brewer was two blocks away. Ben alerted them to the general direction the gray-haired man was taking and warned them he might be armed. He then called in to the cruisers in the vicinity.
The gray-haired man’s size made him hard to track. Ben had to count on following the cursing and fallen bodies in his wake.
He thought he saw the man duck into the entrance of Fun City.
Once inside, though, Ben again lost him. Fun City was a sprawl of amusements. Tiered miniature golf courses. Serpentine go-cart tracks. Ranks of batting cages and basketball goals. A large carousel and Ferris wheel. Water slides. Bungee jumps. Fast food outlets and picnic areas. Another video arcade.
The place was jammed.
Someone called Ben’s name. He spotted Brewer making his way toward him. Brewer shook his head and thumbed-down the question on Ben’s face.
Ben scanned the crowd.
Nothing.
He and Brewer split up and began working their way toward the Bluecrest entrance to the park.
Talbert radioed in. She’d spotted the guy near the parking garage on Everest. Ben told her
to keep him in sight but not to approach until he and Brewer or further backup got there.
Ben and Brewer moved as fast as the crowds would allow, pushing their way to and clearing the west entrance of Fun City and then sprinting up Bluecrest.
Near the parking garage, as they ducked around a shirtless group of young men all wearing crimson and black USC caps, Brewer yelled to Ben that he couldn’t raise Talbert on the two-way.
Less than a block later, they heard the screams.
Talbert had been thrown through the window of the Gulf Stream restaurant. She lay between two vacated tables amidst a fan of broken glass and an overturned miniature ficus, her face cross-hatched with lacerations and an artery in her neck geysering.
Ben yelled to Brewer to call EMS and more backup and knelt beside Talbert and worked on pressure-pointing the artery.
Talbert looked up at him and choked out something that sounded like hot or hat.
Ben kept his index and middle fingers pressed against her neck and his voice soft, as reassuring as he could make it, but he floundered for a moment, drawing a blank on Talbert’s first name.
“Ginger,” Brewer said from the other side of the broken window. “It’s Ginger.”
“Ok, Ginger,” Ben said, “slow now. Slow and easy. You’ll be all right, a while longer, that’s all, so slow, that’s it, slow.”
The artery jumped and throbbed. His fingers were red and slick. He could feel shards of glass cutting into his knees.
Ginger Talbert looked up at him. She tried to say something. Then her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Where are those people?” Ben shouted. “I don’t even hear sirens yet.”
Brewer leaned through the window and looked over Ben’s shoulder. “Oh man,” he said.
“This is bad,” Ben said.
“Oh man,” Brewer repeated. He leaned further through the window frame and pointed.
“Her holster’s empty,” he said.
FORTY-FIVE
WHEN THEY GOT BACK to the room in the Sandpiper Motel, Croy Wendall put his shirt on again and gave the one named Roy the crimson and black USC cap back, and then Croy pretended to drink the beer Jay handed him. There were seven other guys in the room besides Jay and Roy, but Croy couldn’t remember their names. They were all wearing the same caps and no shirt.
