A Stiff Critique (24 page)

Carrie opened her mouth as if she were going to argue with me, but then just closed it again and wrote a few more words on her pad.

“Well, that’s motives,” I said, just to pretend we had accomplished something. “If no one has an alibi, everyone has opportunity. How about means?”

“I would imagine anyone can swing a dumbbell given enough adrenaline,” Carrie said quietly.

“So what do we have?”

Carrie looked back over her notes and then pronounced the verdict. “Zip.”

“Zero?”

“Nothing.”

“Nada.”

“Shall I get a thesaurus for more synonyms?” she asked finally.

I shook my head miserably, thinking of her and Travis, then leaned back in my chair. My feet must have moved as I did. Basta snuffled and shifted his weight. I withdrew my right foot and rested it on top of him. The foot was asleep, and I was tired of the missionary position anyway.

“Is there some other approach we should be taking?” Carrie asked just as feeling began prickling back into my newly released foot. Her voice sounded uncharacteristically subdued.

I didn’t say anything aloud as I thought about talking to Barbara’s boyfriend, Felix the pit bull reporter. He did occasionally give out good information as well as take it. But I dreaded the pain of the process. My chest tightened just imagining him yelling and wheedling until he’d sucked me dry of information. Talking to Felix was like having a date with a vampire. Except that Felix wasn’t as attractive as vampires are supposed to be.

“We don’t know much about the backgrounds of the group members,” I said finally. That was a safe statement.

“Do you think their backgrounds could be relevant?”

I shrugged, but even as I did, I was thinking. “Maybe someone has a police record for assault. Maybe someone went to college with Slade. Maybe someone…Jeez, I don’t know.”

“So how do we find out about people’s backgrounds?” Carrie asked slowly.

“I could talk to a reporter I know,” I offered without enthusiasm. I tried to breathe some air into my tight chest.

“But?” Carrie said.

“But he’s…he’s…obnoxious, hideous, grotesque—”

“Maybe I should get the thesaurus after all,” Carrie said, chuckling. “Is he worse than old Mrs. Stuckey at the hospital?”

Old Mrs. Stuckey was a patient who had delighted in leaving open jars of Vaseline in the other patients’ nightstands, the nightstands we stuck our hands into to clean out every morning. And sometimes it wasn’t just Vaseline. But still.

“Felix is worse,” I concluded, then looked across the table to share a laugh with Carrie. But Carrie wasn’t laughing anymore. She wasn’t even smiling.

“Perhaps I’m wrong,” she murmured. She threw her arms out in a gesture that reminded me of Travis. “It is certainly possible that Slade’s murder had nothing to do with the critique group. Maybe it was an interrupted burglary after all.”

“Maybe,” I agreed cautiously. I pulled my left foot out from under Basta and shoved my right foot back into the gap. Basta didn’t object. He must have been as asleep as my left foot. “Slade knew other people too, people who weren’t in the group. His ex-wives and kids just for starters. Maybe we could find out more about these guys.”

“How?”

Ugh, we were back to Felix. Or we could talk to the police. Or hire a private detective. Or talk to Russell Wu. I would have bet he knew a lot more than he was saying.

“I believe I’m ready to give up,” Carrie announced quietly.

It took a second for her words to sink in. When they did, my heart gave a little skip of relief. But then I saw the sadness in her eyes.

“Let’s not give up completely,” I offered. “Let’s just think about it for a couple of days and then talk again.”

And that’s how we left it. Carrie drove me home, gave me a hug and another “Thank you, Kate,” that made me feel even guiltier about abandoning our investigation. And finally, I was back at my desk doing Jest Gifts paperwork.

By the time I got to my sales tax form a few hours later, I realized that I didn’t want to give up on our investigation. I wanted to know who had killed Slade Skinner. And not only for Carrie’s sake.

By the time I had finished filling out the tax form, I was ready to resume reading
Cool Fallout.
It was getting late. And the manuscript might contain a clue. Even if it didn’t, I wanted to know what happened next. I picked up the manuscript from the bedroom, where I’d left it, and carried it into the kitchen.

C.C. appeared magically the moment my foot touched the kitchen linoleum, yowling for food. I fed her as fast as I could and cut a couple of slices of jalapeno soy cheese to eat with my rice crackers. I wasn’t all that hungry for dinner after lunch with Carrie. Then I spread Slade Skinner’s manuscript out on the table as if it were the real feast.

I skimmed the last chapter I’d read, jumping back to the sixties, remembering Jack Randolph, the charismatic leader of Brightstar and his lover, Patty Novak. Was Patty really Nan in disguise? Absolutely, I decided, and not even that well disguised. And Warren Lee quietly forging passports in the background was unmistakably Russell Wu. I couldn’t spot any living counterparts for the other characters, though: ex-Catholic Kathy Banks who panics and shoots the sheriff, or Peter Dahlgren, the wheeler-dealer who leaves Brightstar in tears. But after a while, I forgot I was even searching for clues as Slade took me through the collapse of Brightstar and back home into the nineties.

I was in Peter Dahlgren’s office as he answered the phone.

He was a banker now, wheeling and dealing from his leather executive’s chair. But someone’s been calling him, someone who wants his services. Someone who wants the services of all the previous members of Brightstar.

Who is it? Peter Dahlgren doesn’t know. And it isn’t for the want of trying. He has two private investigators trying to track the caller. I watched as he answered the phone. The caller asks how long Peter thinks he could keep his job if his past with Brightstar were revealed. Peter’s upper lip begins to sweat. But even as he listens in fear, he feels a reluctant surge of admiration for the skill with which his caller has researched and leveraged his former life. He has already decided that he will do what the caller asks if he can’t find out who it is.

Jack Randolph doesn’t feel any admiration, though. He doesn’t feel much of anything anymore but sick. He is dying, dying of AIDS. He remembers the days at Brightstar as the best days of his life. He conveniently forgets how he abandoned ship at the end. Cash is his price. His family fortune was gone years ago. He needs cash to die in comfort.

Cash is Patty Novak’s price too. She’s a real estate agent in the Caribbean now. She’s making money but she can always use more. A lot more.

Kathy Banks is the only one who won’t give in. She’s a Catholic nun now, devout in her faith. She’ll go public if she has to. She’s already confessed her sins to God. She’s ready to confess to the world. And of all of them, she’s the one who should be the most afraid. She was the one who shot the sheriff.

Peter Dahlgren knows how each of the former Brightstar members is reacting. Though his detectives haven’t traced the caller, they have found Kathy Banks, Jack Randolph and Patty Novak for him. He has talked to them all by phone, for the first time in decades. It makes him feel strangely excited, stimulated in a way he hasn’t felt in years.

The only one Peter’s detectives haven’t been able to track down is Warren Lee. And that worries Peter, because Warren should have been the easiest. Peter had once seen Warren himself in the intervening years, almost five years ago. Warren had been a museum curator then, as quiet as ever. Was Warren Lee in hiding? Dead? Or maybe he was behind the whole scheme.

Peter couldn’t decide. But if Warren was behind the scheme, whatever it was (so far, no one had filled him in on what the Brightstar alumni were supposed to do), Peter had to hand it to him. He’d done a good job. A quiet, meticulous job.

Was it Warren? I repeated the question as I turned the page. And if it was Warren, did that mean that it was Russell Wu? And if so, just what was it that Russell/Warren had been planning? Was there a current living counterpart to the scheme in
Cool Fallout
?

The phone rang. Damn. I still had two hundred of the six hundred manuscript pages to go. I stood up and approached the phone reluctantly, listening as the answering machine picked up the call.

“Just called to say I missed you, Kate,” the low, rough voice said. Reluctance turned to excitement. “Hope you’re out enjoying—”

I grabbed the phone and shouted, “I’m really here!” into the receiver. Wayne. I settled into my comfy chair as if I were settling into his muscular arms. “Damn, it’s good to hear from you,” I told him.

Two hours of conversation later, I had forgotten about
Cool Fallout,
forgotten about Brightstar. I’d even forgotten about murder. All I could think of was Wayne as I burrowed into my lonely side of the bed. Funny how just talking to him, hearing his rough-gentle voice, could leave me this aroused. Funny how just thinking of his unhandsome face and handsome body made it all the worse. And remembering the texture of his skin— Not funny at all, I told myself, and then thought again of Carrie and Travis. We’ll find out, I promised Carrie sleepily and wrapped my arms around Wayne’s pillow. It would have to do.

*

Carrie didn’t call me Monday morning. If she had, things might have turned out differently. Judy called me from the Jest Gifts warehouse instead.

“Jean’s geeky brother is here again,” she whispered. “The mush-for-brains won’t listen when I ask him to leave. Now he’s going on about how Jean’s parents wouldn’t be getting a divorce if all their kids were good Christians. Hell’s bells, Jean’s just as good a Christian as him any day. And I told him so. But he just goes on and on. And Jean’s just crying and crying. And I dunno—”

“I’ll be there as fast as I can,” I told her and hung up.

It was a long way from my house in Mill Valley to the Jest Gifts warehouse in Oakland. I tried to limit my trips there to once a week, but it would be at least two this week. As I pulled onto the Richmond Bridge, I began to wonder how far my role as business owner would take me. I’d played therapist to my employees, played mother, even played marriage counselor, but I’d never had to play bouncer before.

I glanced in my rearview mirror and pulled over a lane. A beige Honda a few car lengths behind me pulled over too. My heart thumped. I told myself it was just a coincidence, that I was getting paranoid about beige Hondas. Still I couldn’t resist switching back to my original lane just to see what happened. I flicked on my blinker and turned the wheel. The Honda followed suit within seconds. Damn. My heart thumped even louder.

Was that Russell Wu? I wasn’t close enough to see an actual face in the rearview mirror. But I could imagine him staring silently in my direction all too well. Russell Wu/Warren Lee, the fictional and real blended in my mind. I slowed down. The Honda slowed down. The thumping of my heart speeded up.

No more fear, I ordered myself. I signaled and steered all the way over to the emergency lane, then carefully slowed to a stop, remembering that I was at the very edge of the bridge. The water was a long way down.

But the Honda was a lot closer. It had pulled into the emergency lane only a few yards behind me.

- Nineteen -

I threw my door open and sprinted the distance between the two cars on a wave of adrenaline.

Russell Wu was climbing out of his Honda when I got there. As he straightened up, I saw a hint of concern in the curve of his eyebrows over the top of his tinted glasses.

“Are you okay?” he asked gently.

“What?” I demanded. Somehow I had expected something more sinister out of his mouth.

“I saw you stop,” he explained in a low, classical music announcer’s voice. “I was afraid something had happened to you.”

“Oh.” The adrenaline was wearing off. The sweat I had worked up during the sprint was cooling in the breeze from the water below. But I was still shaking. I tried to muster up some righteous indignation. He was making his presence sound reasonable, for God’s sake!

“Were you following me?” I demanded hotly.

Russell nodded slowly, keeping his gaze steady in my direction. Not that I could actually see his eyeballs. His tinted lenses were more opaque than ever out here on the bridge. He might have been crossing his eyes at me for all I knew. But in spite of the tinted glasses, he didn’t look even remotely guilty at that moment.

I tried again. “Why are you following me?”

“Just making sure you’re all right,” he answered quietly.

“Are you trying to tell me you’re following me to protect me?”

Russell nodded again. This time he smiled ever so tentatively, his eyebrows curving over the top of his glasses again. He not only looked innocent then, he looked downright vulnerable. He certainly didn’t look like a murderer to me anymore.

“I don’t need any protection,” I told him. I had meant my voice to be firm, but it softened a little at the end when I saw his smile disappearing.

I didn’t know what else to say, so I said “goodbye” and got back in my car and drove. I checked for Russell in my rearview mirror a few times as I finished my drive over the bridge, but I didn’t see his Honda Civic. Maybe he was waiting to start his car again until I was far enough ahead not to feel threatened by his presence.