A Time of Torment (33 page)

She read the name on the papers.

Dead King.

The rustling stopped.

She was gone.

S
am stirred in her sleep, and opened her eyes. Jennifer stood at the end of her bed. She had not been there for long, Sam thought. The crackle of static electricity that she usually brought with her was absent. Sam could neither feel it, nor smell it in the air.

Sam raised herself up on one elbow.

‘What is it?’ she asked. She was tired, and had a spelling bee the next morning. She resented being disturbed.

‘Our father is hunting the Dead King,’ said Jennifer. She sounded concerned, even frightened.

Sam thought for a moment or two.

‘Good,’ she said, and returned to sleep.

N
orah Meddows took delivery of eight bags of clothing and two boxes of shoes from the Salvadoran immigrant named Hector, whom she employed to pick up consignments from homes in an increasingly wide radius of Columbus. This represented the cream of the week’s donations as determined by Hector’s wife, who had a good eye for fashion and was, Meddows believed, reasonably honest, at least to the extent of not stealing too obviously from her employer. Actually, Meddows had no evidence to suggest that Elisa Rios Silva had ever stolen anything in her life, from Meddows or anyone else, but since she was herself dishonest she naturally ascribed a similar or greater degree of dishonesty to everyone she encountered.

Meddows was breaking the law, of course, but not in any way that harmed folk, although she wasn’t sure that the Attorney General’s Office, which regulated charities, would see matters the same way. Meddows used Hector and his family to distribute flyers seeking donations of good used clothing which would either be sold to aid poor families in Latin America or, in the case of items not suitable for sale to the discerning U.S. consumer, sent directly to those most in need. Those with clothes to donate were invited to leave them on their doorsteps on a given day, when they would be collected without fuss and put to good use.

Meddows made sure to target only relatively well-to-do neighborhoods: she didn’t want any old JCPenney shit, even if she inevitably got more than her fair share of the kind of attire which, curiously enough, many poor citizens would have been grateful to receive, and not only south of the border but closer to home. No, Meddows was seeking designer items – or clothing that could be passed off as designer in the absence of the real thing – aided by the labels of real but obscure European fashion houses which Hector’s wife produced using a series of templates supplied by her employer. The rest she sold by the pound to people even less scrupulous than herself, and did pretty well off it, all things considered, to the extent that she had been forced to rent a unit off Route 23 in which to store and sort the donations, a task with which Hector’s extended family was happy to assist for a few bucks an hour and their pick of the cheap stuff. Really, Meddows would have been lost without Hector. She couldn’t understand why so many of her neighbors complained about immigrants. Without Hector and his kin, she’d have been forced to do all these shit jobs herself.

Now she began sorting through the bags in the back room of Old and New by Sue, her ‘vintage clothing boutique’ off Neil Avenue near Ohio State. She was proud of the store’s name, having come up with it herself. Sue, she told customers who asked, was her middle name, even though it was really Alison. But by this point, Norah Meddows was so mired in fraud and deceit that even she could no longer conclusively tell the difference between what was true and what was false, and wasn’t particularly troubled by the distinction anyhow.

She placed the clothing on the tailoring table in the back room. The donations had already been washed and folded by Elisa’s sister, Elisa having first applied some eye-catching designer labels where required. The third bag contained a nice little windfall, though: a Sasha Kanevski shirt that looked like it had never been worn, and a guipure lace print stretch cotton dress by Oscar de la Renta that had probably retailed for close to a thousand dollars when new. Meddows cast an expert eye over it, and only on the third examination did she discern the repair job carried out by Elisa on a nasty triangular tear under the left arm. She made a mental note to slip Elisa an extra twenty bucks at the end of the week – such good service should not go unrewarded – while simultaneously giving thanks for the excesses of consumer culture. Better still, according to Elisa’s note on the bag, the dress was part of a consignment from Hector’s run to Cincinnati the previous month, so there was little danger of its original owner stumbling across it in the boutique. Even were such an unlikely circumstance to arise, Meddows had a get-out clause. On the wall against which the front door of the store opened, and therefore almost invisible to any but the most eagle-eyed of customers, was a small sign advising that a percentage of the store’s profits went to support charitable causes in Latin America, that percentage varying between negligible and zero depending on Meddows’s income and mood.

A buzzer sounded, indicating that someone had entered the store. Meddows had installed cameras in two corners, but they were just dummies designed to discourage the cruder breed of shoplifter. Hers was largely a one-woman operation, so there was nobody to check monitors in any case, and Meddows was more than capable of keeping an eye on her own stock. She had designed the layout of the store herself so that it had almost no blind spots, and every item was secured to its hanger by a plastic tie. It meant that Meddows had to cut the ties in order for women to try on clothes, but it represented only a little trouble and less expense, and enabled her to keep count of the items in a customer’s possession at any one time. She had been in the business long enough not to be surprised at the willingness and ability of even the most prosperous-looking of women to steal if given the opportunity. Forget all that bullshit about such acts of theft being a cry for help: the poor sometimes stole because they had to, but the wealthy stole because they could.

Meddows stepped into the store and was only slightly surprised to find a man standing before the counter. Men occasionally came in looking for designer bags for their wives, or unusual scarves. Some were hoping to pick up something that looked impressive for a fraction of its retail price. One or two were simply seeking directions to someplace else. This man, though, had the demeanor of one who didn’t enter through a door until he knew that there was at least one other way out. His eyes were gray-blue, or greenish-blue, depending on the light, with a kind of wintry warmth to them. He was wearing a nicely cut black jacket over jeans, and a small-collared white shirt open at the neck. He wasn’t tall – not more than five-ten at most – and not handsome exactly, but you’d notice him if he entered a room.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘You can if you’re Ms Meddows,’ he replied, and she instantly grew wary. He didn’t look like a cop, but he had something of the cop about him. She thought again of the attorney general: if required, she had enough doctored records to give even the best of accountants a headache. The flyers distributed by Hector gave no clue as to the ultimate destination of the donations, and the small print at the bottom made reference to codes and licenses, with some random figures thrown in to fool the unwary.

Hector, in turn, was under strict instructions to plead ignorance and lack of English if questioned by anyone who might appear to know what he or she was talking about, before running for the hills. In the event of the police becoming involved, he was to keep his mouth shut except to call the law firm of Painter-Maynes, which also acted for the Croatians who bought Meddows’s cast-off clothing, and was connected to the offices of Daniel Starcher in Lewisburg, West Virginia. They would have Hector back on the street in time to enjoy that evening’s meal of beans and rice, or whatever the hell else he and his family chose to eat in the confines of the apartment rented to them by Meddows, which was another reason for Hector to embrace silence and discretion if the law became involved.

Thankfully, that situation had yet to arise, Hector having an innate ability to sense the proximity of the forces of the state, a consequence of several branches of his extended family having been wiped out by the El Salvadoran National Guard during his country’s extended civil war. That same National Guard – including, according to Hector, some of the same individuals, but now in higher positions – had raped and murdered three American nuns and a Catholic laywoman back in 1982, an outrage that caused the U.S. government to discontinue military aid to the Salvadoran regime for a whole six weeks. Hearing about this had made Norah Meddows even happier about screwing over the IRS. After all, she didn’t want her tax dollars put to that kind of use.

And now here was a man with a certain authority, asking after her by name. She smiled brightly, giving him the full two rows, newly whitened, and confirmed that she was indeed Norah Meddows.

He took his wallet from his pocket and produced a business card.

‘My name’s Charlie Parker,’ he said. ‘I’m a private investigator.’

He passed the card to her, and she read its contents carefully, right down to the cell phone number at the bottom, while giving herself some time to think.

‘Maine,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’

‘I used to live in Maine.’ If he was standing in her store then he already knew this, but she thought it made her appear more open.

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘I suppose that’s why you’re here. If you’ve come from Maine, then it must be about my ex-husband. I can think of no other reason why you’d have made a trip all the way to Ohio.’

‘Did you know that he’d been released from prison?’

‘No. I figured he must be due for release sometime soon, but I didn’t know when, exactly.’

‘He got out last week.’

‘Oh.’

Just oh.

P
arker took in the woman before him. She was good-looking without being attractive, her features lacking the animation and character required to earn more than a passing glance. Only her eyes had any real life to them, but it was the gleam of avarice. She looked like a hungry doll.

‘Has your husband been in contact with you since his release?’ he asked.

‘No. Why would he be?’

‘Because you were once married to him. Because someone who has been in prison for five years won’t have many friends on the outside, and will usually turn to old ones instead.’

‘My husband and I aren’t friends. He’s a deviant. I want nothing to do with him. That’s why I divorced him. Look, what is this about? Did he hire you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘He claimed to be innocent of the crimes for which he served time. He was convinced he’d been set up.’

She laughed, and shook her head in pity at the man before her, as though anyone could be so dumb.

‘You can’t be much of a detective,’ she said, ‘if you believe every hard luck story that a convict puts before you.’

Parker smiled back.

‘I don’t believe every hard luck story,’ he said, ‘just the ones that ring true.’

‘My god, you’re serious! Look, he had child pornography on his computer. He had photographs that he kept hidden in a box in the basement. I saw some of them. The police showed them to me. They were appalling, just the worst things I’ve ever had to view. I’d lived with this man; I’d taken his name. He pretended to be a loving husband, but in reality he was someone who got off on looking at pictures of naked children – and worse: kids being sexually assaulted in every possible way you can imagine. He should have died in jail.’

‘He didn’t die, at least not in jail, but he suffered a lot.’

‘Good.’

It didn’t appear to be a reflex response, or a glib effort to shield herself from any residual affection she might have felt for her ex-husband. Parker doubted she had any affection at all, residual or otherwise, for Jerome Burnel. He wondered if she ever did. She must have had some reason for marrying him, but who could say what it might have been? Boredom, perhaps, or a lust that burned itself out in the years after the vows were exchanged. It might even simply have been a matter of money and security. That would not have surprised Parker in the least: with her shiny magpie eyes, her pinched cheeks and slightly pursed lips, Norah Meddows was almost vampiric in aspect.

‘Before these images were found, had he ever given any indication that he might have an interest in pornography of that nature?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Do you think I’d have stayed with him if I suspected?’

‘People sometimes do.’

‘Not people like me.’

No
, thought Parker,
definitely not people like you
.

Meddows was self-aware enough to recognize that the man before her was immune from whatever allure she might have believed herself to have possessed, and sufficiently clever to realize that his arrival at the store presaged no good for her.

‘If you’ll forgive me,’ she said, ‘I’m very busy. I have a lot to do.’

She indicated the door behind him, and waited for him to leave. She didn’t want to turn her back. She wanted to be sure that he was gone, and then she would lock the door and close up for the rest of the day. She could slip out through the office, and return for her car later. He probably knew where she lived, though: if he’d tracked her to the store, he could just as easily find his way to her home. She might go to a movie for the afternoon, or even check into a motel for the night, in the hope that he grew tired of hanging around.

But it was as if she had not spoken, and he appeared heedless of her obvious unhappiness at his continued presence. She, in turn, decided to dispense with any attempt at civility.

‘Look, why are you here?’ she asked.

‘Your ex-husband is missing,’ said Parker.

‘He just got out of jail. How can he be missing?’

‘He didn’t appear for a scheduled meeting with his probation officer. His clothing, and whatever possessions he took out of storage, are still at his apartment.’