Blood of Angels (35 page)

THE SCAR
,
SARANDOKOS ASSURES ME
, is something he can make nearly invisible. He says he can use inside sutures to bring the fresh skin together in a thin line, and he's willing to do this for me gratis. He says I should think about how I'll look with my shirt off, like at a swimming pool. He believes that kind of thing is pretty much life and death, especially for single guys like me. I turn him down politely. I have nothing against an exterior scar generally, and this one is only an inch and a half long. It's the interior scars that concern me, both physical and otherwise.

It's two weeks before I can bend over without a sharp pang shooting through my side, and two more before I can put my weight into anything. But I'm lucky in that what Bridges did to me was reparable. His blade nicked my splenic vein, but a piece of synthetic fiber patched it up, good as new. I was unconscious for the irony when my life was saved by a quick-thinking EMT—a man with the same occupation as the one who tried to kill me—who recognized my internal bleeding and pumped fluid into me with three IVs, but I appreciated it after the fact.

Meanwhile, I have spent quiet weeks healing. September has almost passed, and October is preparing to land gracefully in the Cumberland Valley with orange, yellow, and gold on its wings. The poplar and birch trees in my backyard have turned, and the rains have come back at last. The evenings have cooled into jacket weather, and I take long walks.

Fiona has taken a small apartment in west Nashville, near Tennessee Village. She ministers now on her own, because the Tennessee Synod of the Presbyterian Church in America finally had enough of her. In the end, it wasn't her stand on Moses Bol that caused her to be cast out. It was the discovery that having already turned most of the church's failing assets into food and shelter for the city's poorest citizens, there was no longer enough left to pay the church's many creditors. The slow-moving gears of bankruptcy law finally caught up with her, and the Synod sent a representative to try to salvage what was left. At Fiona's last service she preached, unbowed and unrepentant, for nearly an hour. Eleven people attended.

Sarandokos made good on his promise to take his family to Greece, and after more than a month, they will return in another week. In the meantime, I drive to Fiona's small apartment a few nights a week, usually to find it filled with Kurds or Laotians or, as ever, her beloved lost boys. When I see the light in her eyes with them, I know she doesn't need any official permission from a church to know what her life is about.

It's early on the morning of September 29 that the doorbell rings and I see a young woman standing in the rain outside the house. The woman is a short-haired brunette. She's not wearing the short-shorts and bra-less T-shirt she did the first time I saw her, when she answered the door at Jason Hodges's house. Now she's wrapped up in a dark, plastic raincoat, her bare legs sticking out below. The soft tissues around her left eye are puffy and purple, the aftereffects of what looks like a serious shot to the face by a fist. There's another bruise on her left jaw, and her upper lip is swollen.

I push open the glass storm door; she steps inside and stands in the entryway. She peels off the raincoat, revealing a short, garish nightgown of pink Lycra. Both her arms are covered in dark bruises. The thigh of her right leg has a welt on it, like it's been struck with a belt. “J and me had a fight,” she says. Water drips off her onto the floor.

“Stay here. I'll get you something to put on.” I go to the bedroom and pull out a pair of gray sweatpants and matching sweatshirt. She stands waiting in the entryway, shivering a little. I point to one of the two back bedrooms. “You can change in there. Do you drink coffee?”

“Um hmm.”

“Cream and sugar?”

“Sugar. Lots.”

I go to make coffee. By the time I come back, she's in my clothes, standing in the living room, looking around. “This is nice,” she says.

I give her the coffee, and she pulls out four packets of sugar from my hand. She tears off the tops with her teeth and pours them into the coffee. I hand her a bottle of aspirin. “You look like you could use a couple of these.” She drops five tablets out of the bottle and washes them down in a gulp.

“Damn, that's hot,” she says. “Thanks.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I snuck out early. J's still asleep. I didn't put on clothes or nothing. I just went for the door in a run. I called my girlfriend. She dropped me off.”

“Jason Hodges did this to you?”

“J can be mean. But he went off this time real bad.”

“What happened?”

“He caught me with another man.” She pauses. “Not a customer.” She sits down on the sofa. “J's psycho. He's got a real sweet side to him, but when he goes off, you got to watch it. He went too far this time, though. I thought he was gonna kill me.” She looks up at me. “What I'm sayin' is that I can't go back there.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I seen you that day with J on the porch. That's the only time I seen him back down. He hit me after you left, just to make himself feel better.”

“I'm sorry.”

She shrugs. “Some a that, it's the business. But I decided right then, if J got outta control on me, I'd come to you.”

“I'll call social services for you. They can get you in a halfway house.”

She shakes her head. “I ain't goin' to no halfway house. Anyway, it's the first place J'll look.” She glances around the living room. “I could stay here,” she says, her voice low. “With you.”

“We'll find you something. But I can help you with Jason if you're willing to testify he beat you.”

“And six months later, he gets out and kills me. No, thanks.”

“You have to make a stand for yourself sooner or later, Tiffany.”

She looks up, surprised. “You remember my name.”

“I'm good with names.”

She looks down. “That's nice.” She sips the coffee. “Of course,” she says quietly, “if he went away for fifteen years or so, that'd be different.”

“I can't get him fifteen years for assault and battery, Tiffany.”

“How much for murder?”

“Excuse me?”

She looks at me sweetly. “J killed Tamra Hartlett. I can prove it.”

 

FOUR HOURS LATER
, Tiffany Murphy, aka Tiffany Amber, aka Amber Murphy, sits opposite me at a large, metal table in the New Justice Building. I had Fiona pick her up a modest dress at T. J. Maxx and some matching flats, paying for them out of my own pocket. She had a shower, and she put makeup on her bruises, but she still looks like hell. With us at the table are two senior homicide detectives. A legal transcriptionist sits separately, her hands folded demurely in her lap.

“Can I get a Coke or something?” Tiffany asks. “My mouth's real dry.” I nod, and one of the detectives slips out. He comes back with a can, which she pops open and downs a quarter of in a gulp. “I can't smoke in here, right?”

“No.”

“Not that I have any cigarettes.” She looks at the detectives. “You got any cigarettes, baby?” One of the detectives pulls out a pack and hands it to her. “Thanks,” she says, palming the pack. “You all are real sweet.”

“So,” the detective says. “You ready to get started?”

“Umm hmm.”

She's sworn in and answers questions in a detached voice, as though violence has been a part of her life since before she can remember, which, I have no doubt, is true. She has lost her capacity to be shocked by human behavior, sexual or otherwise. “J killed Tamra,” she begins. There's no particular inflection in the statement. She might have been talking about the weather. “He said he'd do the same with me if I ever crossed him.”

“Did he tell you how it happened?” the detective asks.

“Um humm. He caught Moses and her together that night.” She shrugs. “Moses hadn't paid. Tamra liked Moses.”

“Liked him?”

Her eyes darken. “She said he was special. There was somethin' about him. I ain't sayin' she loved him. But maybe she did. Anyway, he was crazy about her.”

“So they had a relationship.”

“Um hmm. There wasn't no way she could admit that anywhere around the Nation. But she took to him real good.”

“But they were arguing before she died.”

She nods. “He was against what she was doin'. He didn't like to see her workin' like that. He said it was a shame to her.” She looks away. “Which it was, I guess.”

“So Jason was telling the truth when he said Bol was angry because Bol didn't want to share her,” I say.

She shrugs. “That's J's way to put it. But J didn't give a shit about Tamra, one way or the other. He sure as hell hated Moses, though.”

“Because?” I ask.

“Because Moses finally talked Tamra into quitting the business. She told J, and he blew a fuse.”

“What happened?”

She shakes her head. “Tamra was real scared. She called Moses that night. Said she was leavin' J for good. Moses was real happy. He came right over. They was gonna make some plans. But J watches out for what's his. He busted in on them, found them together. He told me exactly how he did it. He knocked out Bol.” She touches her head, right where we found the bruise on Bol. “Tamra was in the bathroom, takin' a bath. They'd been…you know,
intimate.
”

“I understand.”

“J had a key to Tamra's place. He came in, busted up Bol, and went after Tamra. She locked the bathroom door, but J broke it down. He killed her with the pedestal. Dropped her right back down into the bathtub. Then he fixed things to look like Moses did it.”

I sit back, fitting together the details.
The phone call. The sexual evidence. No forced entry to the apartment. The broken-down door to the bathroom. The bruise on Bol's head. It was all there.
“Why didn't he kill Bol?”

“Because he needed him to take the rap for Tamra. He knew the cops always look at the boyfriend first on that kind of thing.”

I nod. “Why didn't Bol tell the police what happened?”

“J got to him first. J said he and his crew would pick off them lost boys one by one if Moses told. That's why he fucked up that friend of Bol's the day before the trial. J wanted to make sure Moses knew he was dead serious.”

I glance at the detectives. “The timeline's correct. Bol confessed the next morning.”
So Bol went to prison to protect the others. The
Benywal
to the end.

Tiffany nods. “J got a real mean streak. He don't like people to mess with what's his.” She sits still, her expression hard. “I tried to leave a couple a times, myself. But he made me pay.” She looks up at me. “So you all gonna get him now, right? I mean, he can't do nothin' to me anymore?”

The detective looks at me. “Gentlemen, I believe it's time to swear out a warrant for the arrest of Jason Hodges.”

Tiffany smiles and relaxes back into her chair. “Good,” she says quietly. “That's real good.”

I shake the detective's hand, but my thoughts are already with Fiona.
Moses Bol is coming home.

THE THIRTY
-
SIX
-
FOOT BOAT
cuts a clear path through the water, the frothy wake trailing off behind it like twin, billowing clouds. The twin diesels thrum away belowdecks, pushing the vessel through the brine with ease. The boat is used but clean, maintained by a conscientious captain who moved up to a bigger vessel. It's more than I can afford, but for the time being, my credit is good. I see a marker ahead and sight it with binoculars.
R39. That's the one. The snook are supposed to run around here this time of day, at least according to the guy who sold me this boat.
I ease back the throttles, and the boat gently settles down off plane, lowering itself down into the water like a body onto an air-filled mattress. There's a gentle bobbing, and she comes to rest, her bow pointed slightly to the east. I shut down the motors and stand in the small pilothouse, a smile on my face. I pull a rod and bait it up with a one-and-a-half-inch lure, a slippery, silver thing with wicked hooks in three places. I walk out to the back of the boat and hop up onto the fishing chair. The water is azure, clear as glass. It laps against the side of the boat, gentle and peaceful. The sky above Key Largo rises blue from the horizon, dotted with pale, high clouds. There's a breeze, warm and inviting, like a caress. I lift the rod and flick it back and forth, getting the feel of its heft. I tilt up my face into the sun, feeling its cleansing heat. I whip the rod hard, releasing the line into a long, sweet arc across the water. The lure plops into the ocean thirty yards away.

I look behind me, at the empty chair beside the helm. I've imagined her there, many times, over the last few days. Her hair is tied back, the ponytail falling between her tanned shoulder blades. She's wearing shorts, a bikini top, and the little circlets of color on her wrist that she never takes off. But there are no refugees here to help, no causes to give a life to, except to watch the weather and to find the rhythm of how the fish run. In the end, only one of us knew who he or she was, and it wasn't me. But I'm happy, somehow secure that I am finding myself at last. I call her sometimes, and we have good talks. She's taken a job with the Nashville Peace and Justice Association, and she sounds excited about her work. I tell her about the snook, and about how my first paying customer, who brought home a nice-size tarpon six miles off the coast of Key Largo, tipped me a hundred bucks. She gets a week off for Christmas since the government agencies she deals with pretty much shut down then. I tell her it's warm down here that time of year, and she says that's definitely something to think about. If she comes, I'll have to juggle it with time with Jazz, who comes first.

I fish for a while, but the snook are elusive this day, refusing the temptations of my bait. It doesn't matter. I'm learning, discovering a new life. I don't know how long it will last. Maybe a year, maybe ten. The boat shifts with the wind, gently turning with the tide. I put away my tackle and fire back up the sweet-running diesels. I push the throttles forward, steering the boat until the stern faces west and the sun glints off the boat's sleek bustle, illuminating her name:
Becker's Way.