Death Was in the Picture (30 page)

Dean might have said more on this—I’m pretty sure he had more to say—but we could hear the sound of many feet, some of them flat, approaching down the hall.

I was glad when the ambulance people arrived right behind
the cops. Before they moved Rhoda, the nurse leaned over, wide-eyed because there was a lot of blood, and examined her quickly. Then the nurse and driver transferred Rhoda to a gurney. I noticed all of this medical activity only at the periphery of my consciousness because I was focused on what was going on with Dean and the cops.

I wasn’t terribly surprised to see O’Reilly and Houlahan again. They seemed to have been assigned to us and whenever a cop was called, the two of them would pop up like bad apples. I was kind of getting used to them by now. With them was a fresh-faced kid the other two called Kesterson. They ordered him around like a lackey.

“Is he injured?” said O’Reilly, putting rough hands on Dean. “There’s blood on him, but he seems okay.”

“Check his hand,” Dex supplied. “The twist he hurt bit him pretty good.” He indicated where the still unconscious woman was now being wheeled out of the office on her gurney.

“Bit
him?” this was Houlahan. “Well I never. From the looks of her she was tryin’ to get a meal into her. Can’t imagine the fat boy would be too tasty, though. Well, cuff him anyway, kid,” he said, addressing Kesterson. “He may be injured, but he’s a big ‘un, too. We don’t want him getting away.”

Dean grimaced while Kesterson cuffed him gently, but he didn’t holler. He knew things could get worse and he was past the point of making any trouble.

“So he’s the one killed the girl? Not Wyndham?” Houlahan said.

“He says not,” Dex said.

“Ah, he’d probably say his mother was a call girl, too, if he figured it would save his neck.” Houlahan again.

“But I didn’t kill her,” Dean spoke up for himself now. There was a desperate edge to his voice. I could have told him to save his energy. I could have told him desperation wouldn’t help him with these bulls. It would only make them meaner.

“Think about it: why would I have killed her?” His eyes scanned from the three cops to Dex, Mustard and me. He was testing his audience. I could feel it. He was testing which way we were gonna go. It didn’t matter. I could have told him that, as well. He could be as convincing as anything. He was going to get a free ride down to their clubhouse whether he liked it or not. And I had a sawbuck leftover from my shopping trip to Blackstone’s said he wasn’t going to like it much.

Once the cops had bundled Xander Dean off to put him under glass, Dex asked me to call Sterling. To tell him what had happened. He wanted me to set up an appointment for him and Mustard to see both Wyndham and his lawyer at Number 11.

“I’m coming with you,” I informed Dex. The office was strangely quiet in the wake of cops and ambulance attendants and Chicago mobsters with their broken molls.

“‘Course you are, Bright Eyes. But you’re going to be making the appointment. I figured you’d take care of that part on your own.”

I smiled at him. My best smile.
Course I was.
He sometimes acted like a souse and, when pressed, could be a bit of a louse, but there were worse bosses than Dex Theroux.

Even though it was eleven o’clock at night, I got Sterling on the phone in no time. I heard Mustard talking with Dex in the background. He wasn’t surprised. “He’s a shyster, ain’t he? A lip. He don’t need no sleep. They gotta keep moving or they die.”

Sterling listened while I briefly told him what had happened, then reiterated Dex’s desire for a meeting at Lincoln Heights.

“If what you’ve said is true,” Sterling said, the beginning of jubilance coloring his voice, “maybe we should hold off for a few days. With this man in custody, I should be able to secure Laird’s release in no time.”

“I only know Mr. Theroux requested a meeting with you and Mr. Wyndham tomorrow, Mr. Sterling. Shall we say ten in the morning?”

“Well, that’s done,” I told Dex when I got off the phone. “But he didn’t go easy.”

“Course he didn’t,” Dex said, looking satisfied; like something had been confirmed. But he didn’t explain.

Mustard drove me home that night in the Sixteen, but we didn’t talk much. We were tired. More than tired. It had been the kind of day that sucks the goodness from your soul.

When I got in, the house was in silence and I was glad. It was possible I heard the radio going in the living room, maybe Marjorie and some of the boarders were listening to a late program, but I didn’t peek in to see. I went to the kitchen and prepared a small plate of “kippers” and a few crackers and a glass of milk to take up to my room, creeping through the house as quietly as I could. I didn’t want to disturb anyone, sure. But, more than that, I really just wanted to be alone with my thoughts.

And my thoughts. What did I think that night? It’s hard to pinpoint now. I know this: I felt a hollowness of soul I’d seldom felt before or since. A kind of emptiness where a happy fullness most often is. I know that I believed in evil on that night. I believed in all the great evil in the world. And I saw it in places where it’s normally invisible. I saw it reaching for me in spots that were usually safe.

Despite my exhaustion, that night it took the sandman a long time to send me over. Several times as I reached the bridge that leads from consciousness to sleep, I felt a hand reach for me. And I stepped back.

When I finally slept, it was a deep, dark sleep. I didn’t dream at all.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Dex, Mustard and I were uncharacteristically quiet. There was none of the joking and horsing around that usually marked Dex and Mustard’s relationship. And none of the cheerful reprimands from me while trying to keep them in line.

Dex and I were having coffee at our own desks when Mustard came in. Out of habit, he made himself a cup, then left most of it steaming on Dex’s desk when we got underway.

The mood continued on our ride to Lincoln Heights, then in the building as we passed through the gauntlet of flatfoot desk jockeys on our way to meet with Wyndham and Sterling. It was exactly the same path Dex and I had taken more than once. But it was different today, something had changed. Neither of us said it, but we knew. We would have been hard pressed to say exactly how.

Wyndham and his lawyer were altered, as well, in quite different ways than the three of us. There was a delicious joy to them both and they did a lot of back clapping and made many congratulatory sounds. For my part, I was surprised to feel myself recoil when Wyndham touched my hand.

No one noticed.

Neither of them saw how subdued the three of us were or that our interactions with them were not quite what they’d been. I couldn’t fault them that. To be honest, at that moment it would have been difficult for me to pinpoint what was different. But different it was.

“Thank you both for seeing us,” Dex said when the back clapping was under control and we’d found seats around a scarred
table in the farthest corner of the room. Even so, their bright mood earned scowls from several inmates chatting softly with their own visitors. There was an unwritten code around visiting at a jail. I’d gleaned that. No matter what the inmate was charged with, and how they likely behaved in other areas of the jail, in the visiting area, everyone was quiet, respectful, on their best behavior. Visits for most were so rare that it wasn’t a privilege anyone wanted to risk. If there was a code, Wyndham was breaking it. I doubted that he cared.

“Well, of course, we were happy to see you.” Wyndham said, beaming. “After all, what else do I have to do? Though Sterling here is confident all will be finished with this nightmare in just a few days time. Perhaps I can take you three for dinner then? Or out on my yacht. Gosh, but I’ve missed the water!”

Dex ignored him. He dispensed with any preamble, going straight for the core of the matter. I envied him his nerve.

“Laird,” he said, “I asked you once—the very first time we met, right here—I asked you straight out if you killed that girl. And now, I’m asking you again.”

“What?” The confusion on Wyndham’s face would have been comical if I hadn’t known just how serious Dex was about his question.

“You heard me,” Dex said.

“I heard you. Yes. But I guess I can’t believe what I heard.” Laird Wyndham wasn’t smiling now.

“Yes, yes,” Sterling said, his usually calm demeanor ruffled. He reminded me of a park pigeon getting the bum’s rush from a free meal. “What’s the meaning of this? These matters have all been dealt with. You told me yourself: they have the killer in custody now. It’s all been resolved.”

“Well, they certainly have a guilty party in custody. But what’s he guilty of? Not murder,” Dex said. “I’m pretty sure of that.”

There it was; out in the open. The thing neither Dex nor Mustard nor I had said yet out loud. The thing we’d all felt in our hearts. We
believed
Xander Dean, as unlikely as it seemed. We knew what he was and we suspected what he was not. He was capable of many things. Hell: he might even be capable of murder. But did he kill Fleur MacKenzie? We did not think he had. That, of course, left the question: if not him, then … who?

“See, it’s all in the timing,” Dex said. “As you know, I saw Rhoda Darrow approach you at the party. She made sure of that. Her job was to catch you in a compromising situation. There would be scandal and outcry. Maybe you’d even lose your contract with the studio. People would stop going to your films. Only nothing went according to plan, did it?”

Wyndham didn’t move at all. He did not blink. His hand betrayed no tic. We looked at him, all of us, waiting for his answer. Finally it came.

“I guess not.” It came out a whisper, but it seemed to echo in the space between us.

“Tell us what you found.” Dex’s voice was gentle now. A father talking to an errant son. A friend. A lover. Someone who cared and would never hurt him. “Tell us,” he said again, even softer this time.

“The girl ….” Wyndham stopped. Ran the insides of his fingers across a stubbled chin. Began again. “The girl was dead.” He ran his eyes over each of us in turn. He was looking, I think, for understanding. I can’t imagine what he found instead.

“Dead?” Dex said, as though surprised, but I could tell he was not. Who was acting now? “But how could
that
be? If she was dead, wouldn’t you have cried out? Called for help? Why would you just have left her there?”

Wyndham didn’t say anything now. Just shook his head, somewhat helplessly, I thought.

“All right,” Dex picked up the thread again, “you don’t know? I’ll help you out, because I
do
know … you didn’t say anything, because you knew who did it.”

“I think this has gone far enough.” Steward Sterling suddenly seemed like a child to me. A child playing dress-up in his lawyer father’s clothes. It was something in the helplessness I heard in his voice, despite this attempt at subterfuge, at bravado. There was a rub in the timbre; a quaver, though not a break. And there was something loose and suddenly hopeless, though this might be imagining on my part. “My client doesn’t know anything about anything. Haven’t we been telling you that all this time?”

Dex kicked back in his chair, the very picture of confident comfort. I wondered how much of it was an act. “Oh, I know what he’s been saying. And I know what you’ve been saying, too, Sterling. Now I wanna hear the truth.”

“I think you’d better leave,” Sterling said, beginning to rise.

“You’re going to kick me out of jail? That’s rich. But no.” Dex’s voice was suddenly cold. “Sit the hell back down. We’re gonna talk this out.”

To my surprise, Sterling took his seat.

“Now I’m gonna tell you a story,” Dex said, once again the picture of relaxed comfort. He might have been sitting in his own office chair. He might have been reclining in his apartment, holding forth to the rats and the cockroaches, tipping back a bourbon and saying what was what. “And the two of you? You’re gonna listen up. Here we go: once upon a time, there were two men. Maybe, for a little while, they fell in love. Or maybe—just maybe—one of them did. And the other, well maybe he was never capable of it in the first place.”

I looked at Dex, really looked at him. What was he saying? I looked at Mustard: his face held the same expression I imagine mine did. Neither of us said anything. No one did. We just wished Dex would get on with it. We wanted to see where this was going.

“But that don’t come into it for a while. Here’s what does: the one man—the one in love—he gave everything he had to give, and it was a lot. The other man, he didn’t reject the first man’s love. He took it. But he took love from everywhere. It was never enough. He took it from other men, from women, from crowds of people who went to see him in the pictures and read about him in movie magazines. Everyone loved him.”

Wyndham was now eerily quiet. Nothing moved about him. But I noticed he had closed his eyes.

Sterling, on the other hand, looked like a man close to breaking. I felt sorry for him, though it’s hard to explain that. Given the circumstances. Given what I know, what I figured right then.

“The two of you fought that night,” Dex’s voice was quieter now. We all had to strain to hear him. “I don’t know what about. I think it was about women, about how Steward needed more from Laird and Laird could only give less. You’d fought and Laird, you went to the party. But Steward, you lurked around, not sure what to do with yourself. You wanted to make it up with Laird—even tried to call him a few times—but he didn’t even seem to care.

“You were outside the bungalow when the girl was brought into the room. You saw her through the window. You saw her naked. Waiting. You knew what her purpose was there: knew she was there to have sex with your lover.”

Lover.
The word thudded into the room like an elephant. Laird and Steward had been lovers. Had, in fact, been in love. Of course they had. I’d never thought of it myself, but now that Dex had said it, it all made so much sense. Laird had chosen a wife who would not encumber him, who would allow him to continue to feed his appetites. And his appetites had been
wide.
Steward hadn’t understood that, not really. He’d fallen in love with Laird and had thought Laird returned the feeling. But Laird probably never had. Not really. Steward
had, for Laird, been one of many. But for Steward, Laird had been
the one.