Death Before Facebook (39 page)

Smaller.

She didn’t know how to answer Neetsie. What did you say when your life disappeared chunk by chunk over the course of a week? When you realized the husband you loved had turned you into a drug addict? Worse still, that you had willingly collaborated.

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to think about it..

I knew he killed Geoff. I must have known, as soon as I heard about the TOWN, and the flashbacks. But I was so out of it no one talked to me about it. I could keep quiet and I could sleep most of the time so I never had to think about it.

Now she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

It’s my fault. It’s all because I insisted on his coming over that night. Why did I do that? Was I crazy?

But she knew she wasn’t, really. She was just young and in love and rebellious. And the times were right for illicit love and daring trysts.

Yet how stupid. What a waste.

Not of Leighton’s life. He was a small-minded sadist whose very unacceptability had attracted her—that and his cruelty, perhaps. There were things she wanted to explore then, things she had long since left behind.

It was a waste of her life, and Mike’s. She had married Mike out of desperation and fury at Cole and out of guilt on Geoff’s account.

But it should never have happened. It was a mistake for all three of them.

She had tried often to imagine what would have happened if she hadn’t insisted that time, Miss Sexual Revolution spinning out of control.

Or was that what she was? Maybe she was Mrs. Leighton Kavanagh hoping to get caught.

If that was it, it didn’t have to happen that way. She could have been indiscreet in some other way, some less dangerous way, and Leighton would have divorced her, and in the ensuing scandal Kit would have divorced Cole and that would have been it. No fuss, no muss. They would simply have changed partners.

Yet even now, even as guilt and contrition pounded within her like a headache, she could remember the pure excitement of that night, the thrill of waiting in bed for Cole, decked out in a black lace camisole and silk stockings. She had even worn high heels to bed. But that was too silly. She had taken them off before he got there and she and Cole had laughed about it later.

She wasn’t laughing at the time. She was in another world, so clouded with her own desire that if Geoff had gotten up she couldn’t have dealt with it. The sensation was so strong it was almost painful. Actually it did have an element of pain, a constriction in her pelvis that begged to be eased.

And later, the sculptured outline of Cole’s arms and shoulders in the candlelight—then Leighton. She hadn’t heard anything, not the key in the lock, not his footsteps, not anything except his voice: “What the hell is going on here?”

She knew what he would do if he caught an intruder in his home, had heard him say it a thousand times: “Shoot him on sight.” Cole was the worst kind of intruder, the kind that needed shooting most.

She had to get to Leighton, she had to get his gun. She had had her eyes closed, and had opened them when she heard his voice, and then all she saw was the way the room had become darker, as his body blocked the candlelight. But she knew he had his gun.

She got off Cole so fast he groaned; somehow or other she must have hurt him. She hit the floor, stumbled on one of the high heels, and went down on one knee. A vise grabbed her elbow—Leighton’s left hand.

“Who the fuck is this?” he said, and drew his gun with his other hand.

Her head was almost at his hip level. She watched the gun leave its holster, saw him point it at Cole, all in one smooth motion. And she bit his thigh. Not hard, she thought now (or the autopsy would have shown tooth marks), but as hard as she could through his uniform pants.

He screamed—a man’s scream, something like “Aaaaaaa”— and kicked at her, squeezed harder on her elbow.

Cole rose up from the bed, using his locked hands as a bludgeon, catching Leighton square on the nose. She didn’t see that, but he told her later, as they were straightening the room.

What she knew was that Leighton lost his balance and stumbled, letting go of her elbow. She pitched her body into his, and was almost instantly sandwiched between Leighton and Cole, who had grabbed Leighton’s right hand.

She bit her lip in a savage effort not to scream, so as not to wake Geoff. Terrified, she slithered down between the two men and, once more on the floor, saw her opportunity. She stuck her shoulders between Leighton’s legs, which were now braced, feet somewhat apart, put one hand on each leg, and pushed. She didn’t feel him start to fall, even to shake or seemingly to notice, until she heard the shot and he fell backward, away from her.

She never knew whether that bit of distraction had made the difference, whether he’d lost mental equilibrium if not physical. Her entire face was sore with the effort not to scream.

She had gone right away to check on Geoff, as soon as she could get something on, leaving Cole to cope with what had happened. The boy was awake, but only barely. She told him the noise was upstairs, one of the neighbors had dropped something heavy.

He was a boy who watched a lot of television; even at four, he knew what a gunshot sounded like. He probably didn’t believe her.

She knew why Cole killed him, killed her only son twenty-seven years later, and it hurt almost more than the fact that he did it. It was the real reason she never balked at taking the pills, why she wanted to sleep all the time.

Leighton’s killing was done in self-defense. She was the only witness and she knew that Cole wasn’t going to jail even if Geoff remembered seeing him there, remembered how he and Marguerite covered up what had happened.

But he might have been dragged down to the police station, might even have been arrested and had to stand trial, would almost certainly have been subjected to public scrutiny.

What’s wrong with me? How could I have been so passive? How could I have let it happen?

But she knew why. She could only face it now because that morning there weren’t any pills. Last night there had been some, she was almost sure….

Oh, Jesus. He gave them to Lenore!

She had found the diary. Feeling more energetic than usual, she had picked up in the kitchen a little, and discovered it under some newspapers. It meant nothing to her, she’d noted only that Geoff was trying hypnotherapy with Kit and thought how odd that was, considering Cole had once been married to Kit, and she wondered if Geoff knew that.

All day she’d felt odd. She was probably in withdrawal, now that she thought of it. She’d felt uneasy and angry. Then when the cop had come and dragged her off, she’d directed her anger at her, at the cop.

Cole took her home and left. Left her after what she’d been through! And he didn’t even say where he was going.

Then Neetsie came over to see how she was doing. They’d gotten to talking—about too many things. Had she told Neetsie what happened that night in 1967? She didn’t know.

She did know that somehow, somewhere, in that conversation, her veil against the world had finally dropped, that she had admitted to herself that Cole killed her son.

And Neetsie knew too.

She’d been clinging to that Baton Rouge thing, telling herself that it couldn’t have been Cole because he was away.

That seemed ludicrous once she said it out loud.

It was only an hour there and an hour back—Cole could have been back in bed at his hotel by seven-thirty, even allowing half an hour for Geoff to wake up and try to rescue the cat.

It was Neetsie who figured out that Kit was in danger, Neetsie who’d taken her to the hospital, had known about Kit’s private place, the solarium in the old leper ward.

But Marguerite was firm—she’d insisted the girl stay out of the room with Cole. Her father.

Marguerite realized something strange on the way to the hospital—that Neetsie knew Kit well, and she loved her. In some odd way, Cole’s ex-wife, a woman she had no use for—in principle, anyway—was a mother of sorts to her daughter.

She was hunkered down now, wishing she didn’t know that or any of it—wishing for the pills. How to answer when her daughter, who was all she had left, asked her if she was all right?

She had touched Neetsie’s shoulder to make sure she was really there and not in the past like Geoff and Cole. Neetsie must have taken it as a good sign. She had hugged her mother, something she hadn’t done in years, not even the day Geoff died.

She knew what Neetsie knew. She had been a mother one last time, when she had forbidden her daughter to enter the solarium, but in the end she had failed, and Neetsie had had to face down her own father. Marguerite had exhausted her strength. Neetsie was
her
mother now.

CAPPELLO HAD COME to Skip’s aid. She had gotten her out of there and into a car with no one except the two of them, and had asked her if she was okay, if she needed some coffee before they went back to headquarters.

“No, I’m fine. Let’s go right over.” In fact, her adrenaline was pumping, and she was dying to get there, to go into action again.

“I don’t think you realize what just happened to you. I want you to take five.”

“No, really.”

“Humor me. Just walk around the block with me.” She parked in the garage and led Skip outside.

The wind in Skip’s face was a caress.

Cappello shivered. “I’m freezing.”

“I feel great.”

“I’ll bet you do. You were in that tunnel with all your dead relatives beckoning.”

Skip was surprised. “I guess I was. I was too mad to notice. That asshole could have hurt somebody, you know that?”

Cappello hooted, but Skip was impatient, in no mood to join in.

They didn’t walk around the block, just to the corner and back, and they made it to the office before the others had found parking places. Joe met Skip at the door with his arms open wide. “Baby, don’t you ever scare me like that again.”

Joe was Mr. Professional. He never called her pet names and never hugged the detectives. She guessed she must be suffering from shock—everyone seemed a good deal more upset than she was. She was more or less flying.

She had put together most of the remaining pieces on the ride back, but what she didn’t know, she thought she could get from Kit, who’d arrived to give her statement before she and Cappello had. She called Kit into a room.

“Are you doing okay?”

“I feel like I’ve been up about seventy-two hours.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“I thought you might still be at the hospital.”

Kit grinned. “Fortunately, the asshole gave me capsules. They dissolve slowly enough that all I had to do was throw up. Since I was in a hospital, they knew just what to do.”

“I’m glad you’re okay.”

“You want to know about the hypnosis, don’t you?” She shook her head. “I really thought I could help him. A lot of good work is being done with hypnosis these days.”

“For heaven’s sake.Kit! Why in hell didn’t you mention it?”

“Because I’m not licensed—or certified. Whatever you have to be.”

“You don’t even know?”

“It’s got to be something. I didn’t want to end up in some kind of legal trouble.”

Skip sighed. Similar fears probably caused more witnesses to clam up than lawyers did.

“And because ethics prevented my talking about a client.”

“Your client was dead.”

“And because I didn’t learn anything that could possibly help.”

“No?”

“No. Not even in retrospect. Not one single thing.”

Skip considered. “Okay, thanks.” She stood up.

“I can go?”

“Sure.” Skip smiled at her, aware that it was the first time she’d smiled in hours, days maybe. “I’m sorry if I was hard on you. I’m feeling a little… wired, I guess.”

“Oh, forget it. You’ve been through a lot.” She looked down at her folded hands. “We all have.” She paused. “It’s all so crummy. Something good has to come out of this. It just has to.”

“Yeah.” Skip thought it was just like a person who believed in witchcraft to say something like that.

* * *

It was only after she got home that she could really think about what had happened, and the thing that chilled her, the thing that absolutely paralyzed her, was not how close she had come to death but how close she’d come to killing Cole.

Jesus. I would have dumped him off that roof if I could have.

No, I wouldn’t have. I’m not that kind of person.

Don’t do that. You would have. You went crazy up there.
You’d better talk to Cindy Lou.

Steve was who she really wanted to talk to. Thinking of Steve made her think of Darryl—could she talk to Darryl about it? She didn’t know, didn’t know him well enough. If Cindy Lou was right, she couldn’t—a butterfly man wouldn’t stand still for it.

And anyway, he hadn’t called.

Let’s get real, Skip—you’ve had lunch with him once and then when he didn’t call, you called him. He hasn’t called since then. Is that a man you can rely on?

He hasn’t had time.

He isn’t interested.

It didn’t matter; she knew perfectly well it didn’t matter.

She wanted Steve.

Where was he?

He must be staying with Cookie Lamoureaux, the friend they had in common. She called Cookie and Steve answered. “It’s Skip.”

“Yes.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“My flight leaves in two hours.”

“I’ll come get you. I’ll take you to the airport.”

“Cookie’s taking me.”

“Stay there. I’m on my way.”

He was waiting in the living room, his coat already on, and he didn’t smile when he saw her.

He had always been so quick to smile, so accommodating, so easygoing. This was a new Steve, this sullen, quiet one.

One that I made.

When they were in the car, she said, “Listen, I think I made a big mistake.”

“No. I’m the one who did.”

“Look, I’m really sorry I couldn’t talk to you at lunch. You surprised me, that’s all. It’s been an awful day and—”