Blackbird (32 page)

‘I’m not a rancher,’ I said. ‘This is all I’ve ever really done.’

‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘You do what you do because that’s how the cards fell. But don’t forget you managed the Flying S at a profit for a whole year while Mom and Dusty were chasing around Europe to all those fertility clinics, right after you got back from TCU. And Dusty knows you can do it again or he wouldn’t have made the offer.’

‘So what are we saying here?’

‘I’m saying you’re never going to find anybody who loves you more than Jana does, but she’s not great at showing it, and she’s damn near as prideful and stubborn as you are. And she can’t turn back the clock for you, Bis. She can’t repair history and she can’t be the wife who only watches and waits.’ LA ate a bite of snow pea and said, ‘Not living up to the Flying S has never been your problem, Bis.’

‘What, then?’

‘It’s the stories you live by. The endings you believe in.’

No answer that seemed worth the breath occurred to me.

‘Do you really want to know the beginning of this story? I mean enough to pay the price?’

‘What price?’

‘Beginnings cost almost as much as endings.’

‘Are you hypnotising me again?’

‘Think you need that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then it doesn’t sound like anything to waste any worry on, does it?’ LA said. ‘Try to clear your mind, relax, focus away from here and now.’ She pinged the rim of her glass with her fingernail. ‘It’s the week after Homecoming. Let yourself remember. Where are you? What are you doing?’

‘
Aleha ha-shalom
,’ Kat said softly, touching the glass covering Dr Kepler’s image. ‘
Baruch dayan emet
.’

Before I could ask what this meant she pulled my mouth down to hers and kissed me again, her breath coming faster.

‘Five minutes,’ she said, and disappeared into the bathroom.

I heard the shower come on, and a second later the bathroom door opened and she stuck her head out. ‘When I come out of here I’m going to be naked as a baby,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t make me feel all alone.’

Undressing and sliding between the sheets, I lay waiting, my heart slamming in my chest. When Kat said, ‘Ready or not,’ and stepped out of the bathroom in a cloud of steamy air that smelled of Lifebuoy soap, nipples darkly erect, looking slim and white and perfect as a dream, my throat constricted almost to the point of asphyxia. I held the covers back for her, and after striking a little pose for a second
she smilingly joined me, saying, ‘I used your toothbrush – I’ll get you a new one.’

Then her mouth, sweet with Pepsodent, was on mine and she was tight against me, her hands almost hot where they touched my skin. I slid my own hand down the long smooth curve of her side and pulled her leg over mine as we kissed. She reached between my legs, saying, ‘You’re so ready. Come on.’

But I couldn’t let it be over that soon.

I moved down to kiss her breasts and her navel and her stomach, then gently pulled her sideways to the edge of the bed, spreading her legs and slipping off the side of the bed to kneel between her knees.

‘Oh God,’ she said, her hips lifting to meet my tongue. Moaning softly, she locked her legs behind my shoulders, and I held her thighs with my hands. Swimming down deep under a silent sea older than time, I kissed her and kissed her until finally she said tightly, ‘Oh, oh my God,’ her back arching, her heels digging into my back. I didn’t stop, just slowed down, letting it happen, holding her tight as she climaxed, tasting her salty wetness, staying with her until her body finally relaxed and her gasping breath returned.

A minute later, lying beside her again, I touched her nipples lightly with my thumbs as she turned on her side to kiss me. ‘Your turn,’ she breathed. She smoothly pulled me over, onto and into her. We found an easy rhythm, as natural as the dancing, and I began to lose my awareness of everything but the feel and taste and smell of her. Knowing I couldn’t hold back much longer, she took my face in her hands, blew softly against my skin and whispered, ‘Come in me, baby, come in me now.’

*     *     *

I heard a tiny crystal bell somewhere far away and felt my chest being crushed by an unbearable weight of grief and loss.

LA said, ‘Just give yourself a minute – it’ll pass.’

Struggling to catch my breath, trying to fight back the tears, I said, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’

‘You think your job is where you were meant to be,’ LA said. ‘But belonging is much bigger than that. You’re lost, troop.’

‘Lost?’

‘Lost in your own story,’ she said. ‘And stories don’t end until they end.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘I know. But you will.’

‘When?’

LA spoke, but I heard the voice of Kat Dreyfus: ‘Soon.’

FORTY-ONE

The next day, buzzed and restless, agitated – by being so far from the action, I told myself – I paced around the docks while LA sat drinking lemonade with Matt Jory and Dan-something, a middle-aged veterinarian couple from Little Rock, on the rear deck of their houseboat, the
Dog Star
. She’d run across the two animal doctors in the gift shop and hooked up with them on the grounds that they were both TS Eliot fans, had wicked senses of humour, had been in therapy and liked shrinks.

I turned for my fifth trip past the boat as Dan was launching into a story about a schizophrenic Jack Russell terrier. I glared at my phone and wondered about the cell coverage in this part of the Ouachitas. I had between two and three bars, but for some reason that wasn’t always a reliable guide up here. I gave the phone an experimental shake, and the ringer sounded. It was a patrol officer named Jenns who’d been detailed to let me know if the GL Owen lead had paid off.

The signal quality was lousy but the news was good: ‘ . . . tenant, Investigator Mouncey tried earlier but . . . the voicemail cue so she told me . . . eep trying until I got . . .’. In short snatches he gave me a rundown on the suspects:
two brothers, Bobby Wayne ‘Nature Boy’ Jewell and Rayford Dougliss Jewell, the latter a motorcycle outlaw known variously as ‘Matt,’ ‘Bone’ and ‘Catfish’, and a skin-head fall partner of theirs by the name of Stonewall Jackson Merritt. The latter two were army vets who’d been associated with Aryan Nation prison gangs during stretches for methamphetamine manufacture and distribution, commercial burglary and armed robbery, and Jenns’ description of Rayford Jewell convinced me he was the Harley-Davidson man. All three had extensive work histories in commercial building construction, usually on slab crews, where they routinely handled concrete hardeners and sealants.

With all the media attention and so many people working the case, things were coming together fast. A pad of sticky notes matching the sheet on which the lab guys had found the word
glowen
and the Welsh code impression had been found in Nature Boy’s pocket. Dr Gold’s earrings turned up in a jewellery box that belonged to the elder Jewell’s girlfriend. The Ruger .44 Magnum that had killed Frix had still been in the glove compartment of Merritt’s pickup. The Crime Scene crew found traces of DNA that turned out to be Gold’s in a low-end home food hydrator from his garage.

I said, ‘Where’d you bust them?’

‘ . . . arrested . . . off north Rockland working on a slab crew . . . Hart wants to arraign Thurs . . . ’

Then I lost the call altogether. I tried a couple of times to get Jenns back but had no luck. Jamming the phone in my pocket, I walked back toward where LA and the vets were sitting, gave her a small fist-pump and refocused on the dog story at the point where the terrier had just stolen a hooker’s push-up bra from a laundromat. A minute or so
later, as Dan was setting up the punch line, my phone rang again. It was Jana.

I said, ‘You ready to sleep in your own bed again, Jay?’

‘I sure as hell am,’ she said. The reception had improved, but not much. ‘Does that mean you caught them?’

‘Just got the call,’ I said. ‘How’re the girls?’

‘Getting . . . little antsy by now. Not unlike their mother, if you want to know the truth . . . get them back to . . . as long as you’re sure it’s safe, Jim.’

This was when I spoke possibly the most mistaken words of my life: ‘Everything’s fine, babe,’ I said, smiling across at LA, who was laughing along with the other vet at Dan’s story. ‘Come on home.’

As LA and I walked back to the marina office to settle our bill, my attention wandered off over the river and through the trees.

But kept coming back to what hadn’t happened.

There was a small television on the shelf behind the counter, and it was displaying a file shot of Mark Pendergrass’s puckish face against a scholarly-looking background of bookshelves and certificates. An ugly coldness took possession of my chest, and I looked at LA, who shrugged. The voice-over from the TV reported that the Traverton psychologist, forty-one and a divorced father of two, had been found dead this afternoon in the den of his Lakewood townhouse on the Arkansas side. The face of Joe Holder, a homicide detective I knew from task-force conferences, appeared on the screen. Someone off-camera said, ‘So it was definitely foul play, Detective Holder?’ and stuck a microphone in Holder’s face.

Holder, evidently not trying out for Public Information Officer this year, gave the reporter an odd look, saying,
‘Yeah, I’d say when you got a man butchered like a beef it’s fair to call that foul play. Most definitely.’

‘Cause of death?’

Holder shook his head, and I heard a distant male voice in the background. I thought it said, ‘Jesus Christ, Larry, did you get a look at – ’ before the sound was cut off.

FORTY-TWO

Back in Traverton I met Wayne at John Boy’s. He was carrying copies of the preliminary reports the Arkansas guys had sent him on Pendergrass’s death.

‘Got all this on my phone,’ he said as he handed me the folder, ‘but you can’t make out half of it on that little screen.’

I flipped through the pages, learning that the psychologist’s body had been discovered by his golf partner, bound spread-eagle and face-up on his pool table with sisal rope and duct tape. He’d suffered a number of cuts, contusions and abrasion, but the cause of death was unrelated to that. He’d died as the result of brain trauma sustained when a ten-inch bridge spike had been used to nail a ‘foreign object’ to the centre of his forehead, the spike penetrating to the rear of his skull.

‘Cold bastards,’ said Wayne. ‘Do that, then show up the next morning for work like nothing happened.’

I tossed the folder back onto the table. At this hour John Boy’s was nearly empty, and we had the back corner of the dining room to ourselves. I’d decided to come back to town right away, not because I was stupid enough to think the arrests would put an end to Hazen’s campaign against me
but because separation from Jana and the girls and the action was getting less tolerable by the minute. Thinking like perpetrators and fugitives everywhere, I imagined that even though I could feel the hot breath of the process-servers on the back of my neck, I understood how they worked well enough to stay clear of them.

Making it back from Dallas half an hour behind me, Jana had called from the outskirts of town to tell me they were going straight home to the A-frame, but she wanted to see me a little later after she’d had time to shower and change. With the bad guys, particularly the Harley-Davidson man, locked up I was beginning to relax.

‘“Foreign object”?’ said Wayne. ‘What’re they talking about?’

I was thinking about the rope, spike and tape the Arkansas detectives had recovered. There was no doubt in my mind that they were going to match the samples Wayne had taken from the Gold scene. I drank some of my iced tea and set the glass down, thinking of something else I had no doubt about. I said, ‘It was Deborah Gold’s tongue.’

Wayne looked at me quizzically, saying, ‘Damn. Where’d you get that, Lou?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. ‘Just picking up the gestalts, I guess.’

I looked up into the bar at the neon beer signs, remembering the photograph of Mark Pendergrass’s family I’d seen in the psychologist’s office. They’d probably been notified by now. I wondered how they’d taken it.

I said, ‘Did you offer Feigel protection?’

‘Happenin’ even as we speak,’ said Wayne.

Wayne took another sip of coffee. ‘Hell of a way to do police work, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘Playin’ hide and seek with
ourselves. Hope them two heroes we got coolin’ off downtown get talkative before too long.’

There was an ice-cold silence.

‘Two?’ I said.

Nature Boy and Merritt had been picked up without incident but the elder Jewell had somehow gotten word of the arrests and hit the wind before the investigators made it to the commercial building site where he’d been working. This fact had been lost in one of the gaps in Jenns’ report.

The Harley-Davidson man was still out there.

I reached for my phone to call Jana. There was no answer.

Wayne was saying, ‘ – job-site supervisor told me Jewell’d been talkin’ for days about “the asshole that got his baby brother killed”.’

I said, ‘What baby brother?’

Zito had wandered in and now joined us at the table.

‘Let me pull it up,’ he said, flipping open his laptop. ‘We talkin’ Texas, Louisiana, or what?’

‘Start with Texas.’

He worked the keyboard and cursor. ‘Okay, here it is,’ he said. ‘The Jewells did have a half-brother, quite a bit younger, different last name. He died in the joint a while back, I think, name was Jeremy Tidwell.
Hey
, wasn’t that the guy – ?’

My expression must have been answer enough.

Zito closed the laptop and looked at me.

‘Jewell say anything else?’ I asked Wayne, standing up, redialling Jana’s number.

‘Just something about hitting the son of a bitch where he don’t live. Then he jumped in his van and blasted out toward town. Don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.’