Bad To The Bone (18 page)

"So he didn't give you an address or
anything?"

She shook her head and I hid my
disappointment.

"I can try and get an address for you if he
calls back," she offered timidly.

"He won't call back. They've moved on to
threatening someone else. By now they've figured out that without
the photos there's nothing they can do to you. You won't have to
pay them a penny more."

"You think?" she asked dully, her eyes on
the envelope in her lap. "What if they tell anyway?"

"They won't," I promised. "They've got other
problems. And if the man ever does call back, just tell them you've
got the photos now. They'll know how you got them, and they'll
leave you alone."

She looked dubious—and who could blame
her?

"Is there anyone else you can think of who
might be able to tell me about this woman?" I asked. "Do you know
anyone else she may have done this to?"

She shook her head. "I know she came on to a
couple of other people, but I don't think she went home with anyone
else. At least, not that I know of."

No. She wouldn't. She had found the perfect
victim in Francine.

"But she did come back here to the bar?" I
said, remembering the owner's story about throwing Tawny out for
fighting.

Francine nodded uncomfortably. "A little
less than a month ago, when she asked me to meet her here with the
money I borrowed from my Visa account. I gave her all I had, but
she wanted to know why I couldn't open up some new credit card
accounts. That was when my friend lost her temper. They got into a
fight. I guess Roberta told you the rest."

I nodded. "What about the other woman Tawny
saw for a little while?" I asked. "The one she met here? Roberta
described her as a housewife type. Could Tawny have been
blackmailing her as well? Roberta said she disappeared suddenly. It
would have been a while ago."

Francine furrowed her brow, trying to
remember. "She might have been involved with someone before me. I
didn't really notice. If it was when I was still with my
girlfriend, I wouldn't have been looking."

"Okay, thanks for your help. And don't worry
about Tawny. It's over."

"Good." She stared at her beer. "I can't
decide what would be worse—the straight world finding out I was gay
and my losing my job, or people finding out how stupid I was to let
someone like her back me into a corner like that."

"Don't beat yourself up because she's a
scumbag. If you do that, she wins."

Francine seemed to be thinking it over.
"You're not gay, are you?" she asked in a faintly hopeful
voice.

"Not yet," I admitted, sneaking a peek at
the cute bartender before checking out the now-crowded main room.
It had filled with women moving to the music. I was willing to bet
that there were more rat tails bobbing up and down on that dance
floor than you'd find in the entire New York City subway
system.

"To tell you the truth, after hearing your
story about Tawny," I confessed, "I think I'll stick with men. At
least men can be controlled."

She nodded, agreeing. "Take it from me.
Women are nothing but trouble."

I woke late the next morning with a
pugnacious hangover. Over coffee, I suffered murky flashbacks of a
churning dance floor, followed by a ride home from some diesel dyke
who could have driven her truck through the gap in her front teeth.
I didn't remember any groping or goodnight kisses, thank god, but
I'd have given up a lot more than that as thanks to anyone sensible
enough to make sure I avoided driving when I was drunker than a
Kentucky skunk after Derby Day.

The walk back to my car in the cold morning
air did nothing for my disposition. Where the hell had I left it? I
finally located the damn thing in a municipal parking lot. Someone
had draped multicolored metallic tinsel over its radio antennae and
it stuck out from a surrounding sea of sedans, looking like the
party guest discovered on the host's sofa the morning after. The
bumper was still badly dented from my run-in with Jeff a few nights
before. Worse still, I detected a rear-end shimmy on the drive to
Raleigh—a memento of the banging my ex-husband gave it. I knew how
that car felt.

My hangover was so bad that I barely made it
to Raleigh without having to pull over on I-40 and puke my guts out
all over the median strip. That would teach me to accept free
drinks from some vixen of a bartender without at least arranging
for a way to sweat it out when I got home. I was starting to
realize that sex has a purpose after all—to sober you up before
sleep.

All in all, I arrived at the office spoiling
for a fight. Bobby D., as disgustingly cheerful as ever, was busy
digesting a shopping bag's worth of breakfast biscuits. He was
unsympathetic to my plight.

"I could call Brown-Wynne Funeral Home," he
offered. "They got some specialists down there who might be able to
make you look human again."

"Fuck off," I mumbled, grabbing one of his
biscuits.

His indignant shout followed me back to my
office. I pawed through my first-aid drawer, searching for aspirin
and a can of warm Coke. This was not a good day to feel like shit.
I was planning to visit Robert Price.

A munching sound in my doorway distracted
me. Bobby held a sausage biscuit in one hand and a newspaper in the
other. "Prepare to be even more pissed off," he advised, handing
over the N&O. It was folded open to an inside page.

I saw what he meant at once. A follow-up
story on the Boomer Cockshutt murder featured a slightly blurry
photograph of Tawny Bledsoe—my photograph of Tawny, to be precise,
one I'd taken when she'd handed me her bullshit story about being
beaten by her hubby. The cuts and bruises reproduced nicely in
black and white. She looked like she'd lost a fight with a meat
grinder. The caption contained a word-for-word account of the
statement she'd had her lawyer read on television two nights
ago.

"The N&O doesn't actually say Price beat
her up," Bobby pointed out. "If that makes you feel any
better."

"Like it has to say anything at all," I
groused. "This photo is the visual equivalent of asking a man when
he stopped beating his wife." I stared at it, hatred welling in me.
"How did the N&O get this?"

"Got a call in. I can find out for you." His
voice was so sympathetic, I looked up at him suspiciously. There
had to be a catch.

"What's going on?" I asked. He wanted
something. I could smell it.

"Maybe you're working too hard," he
suggested. He squeezed into my visitor's chair, sending it one week
closer to a new home at the town dump. "Let me be frank. I'm
worried about you, babe."

"It's just a hangover. I'll be fine."

"I mean with this case." He drummed his
sausage-like fingers on his thighs, avoiding my eyes. "You don't
maybe kind of think that perhaps you're letting your personal
feelings interfere with your professional judgment on this
particular case, do you?"

"No, I don't maybe kind of think that
perhaps I'm letting my personal feelings interfere with my
professional judgment." I glared at him. "Spit it out."

"Obviously this dame has got her claws into
your ex-husband. Maybe it hurts a little to think of him with
another woman?"

"Robert Dodd, you listen to me and you
listen closely." My tone of voice was deadly. "I don't give a shit
about Jeff Jones. He can rot in hell. Or end up on the bottom of
the Everglades, courtesy of whatever drug dealers are after his
sorry ass. I don't care. But Tawny Bledsoe is another matter."

"What is it with you and this dame?" Bobby
grumbled. "So she's popular with guys? If there was a law against
having hot pants, you and me would be out of business, babe. What
hard evidence do you have that she really had anything at all to do
with this guy's murder?"

"I don't need hard evidence right now. I
have enough to know she's guiltier than shit. And, for your
information, I do have direct evidence that she is a blackmailing
piece of scum who preys on the weakest, saddest, most fearful
people she can find, including her own daughter. Think of it—a
four-year-old kid being jerked around so this lady can garner
public sympathy while she avoids the cops. Plus, she used me to put
an innocent man in jail and now she's using my ex-husband to do her
dirty work. That's like prodding a mentally retarded elephant with
a stun gun to get it to march faster."

"Surely he's not all that bad?" Bobby asked
faintly.

"Jeff is so easy to
manipulate, it's pathetic," I explained. "All you have to do is
wave a pair of panties in front of that man's face and he's yours
for life. If you want him
for life. Which
I don't." I said this last sentence very distinctly and Bobby
looked away, uneasy.

"Jeff is not the point," I added. "This
woman needs to be brought down. For starters, she turned her back
on her own parents, two good people whose only crimes are being
poor and being sick. How could a person do that? If I still had my
parents, I'd get down on my knees and thank god I could take care
of them. I wouldn't give a good goddamn if they lived in a shack or
a shithole."

Bobby started to say something, saw my face
and stopped. I kept going.

"She destroyed the first daughter she had.
You should see that poor kid now: fat, unhappy, slash marks on her
arms, hates herself and, I guarantee you, drugs and sleeping with
drug dealers are next. And god knows what Tawny's done to her son,
I wouldn't want to guess. I'm sure he's paying, only in a different
way.

"As for men, I'd say she marches through
husbands like Sherman marching through Atlanta. The only difference
is that she wears a silk teddy while she does her dirty work and
Sherman, so far as I know, didn't. She deliberately targets married
men, Bobby. She takes photos of them having sex with her and then
bleeds them dry for money."

"They're adults," Bobby said. "They take
their pants off willingly."

"She's just getting started, Bobby," I
predicted. "She's blackmailing school teachers, for godsakes. She's
ruined a perfectly nice woman whose only crime is that she's
trying, against all odds, to be herself. Who knows who else Tawny
is taking advantage of right now or what she'll do next? There is
no longer any question in my mind about whether this lady will step
over some mythical moral boundary. She's doing the Texas two-step
over it, with a big smile on her face." I paused for effect. "And
you know why? Because she likes it. She gets off on doing things
the rest of us would never dare try. That means she's going to get
worse. Like some junkie who finds one hit isn't enough, this lady
will need more."

"That's just a theory," Bobby protested,
sweating, as he always does, in the presence of my anger.

"I'll get the evidence." I shook my head,
disgusted. "What everyone keeps forgetting is there's a man sitting
in jail whose life has been ruined. His daughter's been taken away
from him. He may get the death penalty. Don't count on common sense
or lack of evidence to save him. I don't care what anyone says—he's
a black man and it is easier for a jury to send a black man to
death row. If he were poor to boot, I'd say he was toast."

"You make him sound like Martin Luther
King," Bobby grumbled.

"Robert Price is someone who has done the
right thing his whole life. He was still trying to do the right
thing when he left Tawny and tried to protect his daughter from
her. For all we know, this whole thing is about Tawny getting back
at him for dumping her and wounding her pride. I wouldn't put it
past that bitch to kill Cockshutt just to hurt Price."

"But that's what bothers me," Bobby
insisted. "I don't buy her going that far just because of pride. So
what's her motive? Why would she kill Cockshutt?"

"I don't know. But I'm going to find
out."

"If there is anything to find out," he said,
still skeptical.

"What is it with you men?" I asked,
exasperated. "Is it so hard to believe that just because someone
looks good in a pair of jeans she isn't capable of the foulest,
most selfish actions a person can take? Because I am here to tell
you that there's not a woman in America who doesn't know that women
like Tawny Bledsoe exist. We can tell when one of our kind is bad.
And this woman is bad to the bone."

Bobby had listened to enough. "Whatever you
say," he said, wiggling out of the chair. "I'm sorry I brought it
up. But I think you're too involved, and I think you're making a
mistake. Besides, if she really is what you say, then you need help
on this one. Help I can't give you. You know I'm not good as backup
when the going gets rough. I'm a lover, not a fighter. You better
call Butler. You need someone like him on this one."

I couldn't tell Bobby that I'd already
involved Bill Butler without revealing his trouble with Tawny. So I
just shrugged. "I appreciate your worrying about me," I told him.
"But I know what I'm doing."

"I hope so," he said as he left.

I arranged to visit Price later that
afternoon, then hung up and was contemplating swallowing another
handful of aspirin when my phone rang.

I'd hardly mumbled hello when the caller
unleashed a string of profanity that would have turned a sailor's
ears purple.

"Why, if it isn't herself," I said. “To what
do I owe this pleasure?"

"You bitch," Tawny Bledsoe screamed into the
phone. "Stay out of my house or I'll have you arrested for breaking
and entering."

"That's a good one. Why don't we march down
to the police station right now and talk about it?" There was only
one person who could have told her I was there—Jeff. Any doubts I
had about his involvement were gone.

"Don't fuck with me." Her voice rose even
higher. "You think you're so smart, don't you? Well, you have no
idea who you're dealing with, you overweight, low-class piece of
trash."