Delusion (2 page)

The chords on “You Win Again” went E, B7, E, A.

“We’re a nonprofit legal advocacy group,” Susannah said, “dedi-cated to freeing the innocent.”

“No innocents in here,” Pirate said.

Susannah blinked. “But you, Mr. DuPree, you’re in here.”

“Yup.”

Susannah gazed at him for a moment, then cradling the phone between her shoulder and chin, she leafed through the folder with his name on the cover; a thick folder.

“I don’t have any money,” Pirate said.

“Money?”

“For lawyers.”

“No money needed,” Susannah said. “We’re funded by private donors. All expenses associated with your case will be taken care of.”

“My case?”

“That’s what brings me here,” Susannah said. “There’ve been some exciting developments—all on account of Bernardine, which is the weird part.”

D E LU S I O N

5

“Bernardine?” Pirate knew no one of that name, never had.

“The hurricane, Mr. DuPree. In September.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Pirate, trying to recall the details. Bernardine had passed over the prison—a hundred miles inland, maybe more—at night; he hadn’t heard a thing.

“You’re aware of the extent of the damage?” Susannah said.

“Damage?”

“Down in Belle Ville. Half the town got flooded, including Lower Town and the whole business district.”

“Yeah?” Pirate said. “Princess Street, too?”

“I think so,” Susannah said. “Why do you ask?”

“I had a job on Princess Street once,” said Pirate. Bouncer at the Pink Passion Club, a good job, possibly the best job he’d ever had, partly because of the tips the girls gave him, never less than twenty dollars, but more because of the good feeling he got protecting them.

Pirate had been jacked in those days, ripped. He was still big, but the jacked, ripped part was gone.

“What kind of job?” Susannah said.

“Just a job.”

Susannah nodded. “In answer to your question, Princess Street got flooded, too. Everything south of Marigot was under six feet of water for days and days, including the courthouse, police headquarters and the state offices. The cleanup’s still going on, but FEMA found something—we’re still not sure exactly when—that pertains to your case. And that’s putting it mildly.”

Pertains
meant . . . ? Pirate had no clue. “Something from when I worked at the Pink Passion Club?” he said.

Susannah shook her head. “This goes back to the night of the murder.”

“What murder?”

“The murder of Johnny Blanton,” said Susannah. For a moment her voice faded, the connection going bad even though they were in touching distance. All calls were recorded; Pirate knew that, had temporarily forgotten. “Why you’re here,” Susannah added.

Pirate no longer denied he’d killed Johnny Blanton. Not that he confessed, or made any kind of admission; he just no longer denied
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it. What was the point? That way lay turmoil; he was at peace.

Susannah shuffled through her papers. “Do you remember why you didn’t take the stand at your trial?”

Mr. Rollins’s orders: something about how his criminal record—including a robbery where no one got hurt but resembled the Johnny Blanton case in other ways—made it a poor idea. Pirate shook his head. His memories from that period were blurry; long ago, and he’d been coming off two or three years of booze and drugs. The only really clear trial memory he had was the length of time the jury had been out—twenty-three minutes. “Just long enough to polish off the dough-nuts,” someone, maybe a reporter, had said as they’d led Pirate away.

“Tell me about your alibi,” Susannah said.

Pirate didn’t feel like doing that. “Why?”

“Since you didn’t take the stand,” Susannah said, “your alibi entered the record only in the state’s direct examination of the detective—what was his name?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Pirate said. He yawned; normally this was nap time.

“And evidently Mr. Rollins didn’t see fit to cross,” Susannah said,

“meaning it was never presented in its best light.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Your alibi.”

Why all this talk about his alibi? It was a piss-poor alibi; Pirate had known that from the start. “No one to back it up,” he said. “No witnesses.”

Susannah smiled again, a quick little smile. “Run through it for me anyway.”

Pirate shrugged. He ran through it, his puny alibi, a night alone in his apartment, drinking, drugging, watching TV, passing out till the middle of the next day. When they’d asked him what he’d watched on TV, he hadn’t remembered a single show. The man he’d been was puny, too. He was much better now.

“This was your apartment at 2145 Bigard Street? Number four A?”

Pirate nodded, although he’d forgotten the apartment number and the address, too; only a memory of the building itself remained, brick, with an odd yellow stain down the front.

D E LU S I O N

7

“Approximately two blocks north of Nappy’s Fine Liquors at the corner of Charles?” Susannah said.

Pirate nodded. He remembered Nappy’s all right, with its tiny slit windows, like a fort.

“I’ve got something to show you,” Susannah said. She reached into the folder, took out a blown-up photograph, held it to the glass.

Pirate gazed at the photograph, a close-up of a young man, midchest to the top of his head. The young man looked angry about something, his mouth open like he might have been shouting. In fact, he was a mean-looking son of a bitch, with hostile eyes and a snake tattoo wound around one of his huge biceps. Pirate had a tattoo just like that, now faded by the passage of so much . . .

And then it hit him, who this was. He glanced at—what was her name again?—Susannah; he glanced at her, saw how she was watching him, the way you watch someone unwrapping a present when you know what’s inside, and then looked back at this picture of himself, his much-younger, two-eyed self. He gazed at that pale blue right eye—an angry eye, the pupil dilated as though he’d been on something, but there, intact, whole.

Pirate’s eye, his only eye, shifted back to Susannah.

“Well,” she said, “do you see?”

“See what?” Pirate said.

“What this means.”

Pirate stared at the picture. He noticed that this younger self of his was holding up something, a card or . . . a driver’s license. His driver’s license: he could just make out the tiny picture of himself, a still-younger version, last year of high school.

“No,” Pirate said. “I don’t know what it means.”

“Check the bottom right-hand corner.”

Pirate checked the bottom right-hand corner. He saw one of those time codes, in computer-style lettering:
12:41 AM July 23
. And then the year, twenty years before. All these numbers swam around in his mind, then clicked together in a way that made his steady, plodding heartbeat speed up a little. He was looking at a photograph from the night of Johnny Blanton’s murder. Pirate turned slowly to Susannah.

“It’s a still taken from a security video camera over the front door
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PETER ABRAHAMS

at Nappy’s Fine Liquors,” she said. “The store was closed at that hour, of course, but you wanted in. You even showed proof of age.”

“I . . . I don’t remember.”

“The way we figure it, you woke up in the night, perhaps not very sober, went out for more to drink, came back home, blacked out.”

“I just don’t . . .”

“That’s the beauty part,” Susannah said. “It doesn’t matter whether you remember or not. According to the trial testimony, Johnny Blanton was murdered between twelve-thirty and twelve forty-five. It might even have happened at that exact same minute, twelve forty-one.”

Pirate stared at her. He got that squinting feeling in his non-eye, stronger than ever before, strong enough to hurt. For a moment, he thought he was actually seeing out of it, out of an empty socket. The beautiful skin on her face dissolved and the bones underneath appeared, clear as day, very fine. Yes, he was seeing out of his former eye.

“As you may recall,” Susannah said, “the murder took place at the Parish Street Pier on the Sunshine Road bayou, not far from Magnolia Glade. That’s six point three miles from Nappy’s—or rather, from where Nappy’s used to be. I measured it myself, Mr. DuPree. Do you see what this means? No one can be in two places at the same time.

You didn’t do it, end of story.”

Tell me something I don’t know.
Pirate kept that thought to himself.

“Time’s up,” said the guard.

C H A P T E R 2

Light slanted down through the gently heaving water in sunny columns, one of which illuminated a little fish swimming near the base of the reef, purple and gold, like a jewel on the move.

Nell breathed deeply through her snorkel, filling her lungs, and dove straight down with slow, powerful kicks, her upper body still. Near the bottom, she stopped kicking and glided the rest of the way, hovering over the fish. A fairy basslet, or possibly a beaugregory, but Nell had never seen either one with gold so bright, purple so intense. It looked up at her, tiny eyes—most colorless of all its parts—watching her, void of any expression she could define. The fish was hovering, too, its front fins vibrating at hummingbird-wing speed, filagreed fins so close to transparent they were almost invisible. And—this was amazing—the two front fins didn’t match: one was purple, the other gold. Nell, transfixed, lost all track of time until she felt pressure starting to build in her chest. She checked the depth gauge on her wrist: fifty-five feet. Nell was a good breath holder. She turned back for a last look at this special fish, perhaps one of a kind. It was gone.

She kicked her way back up.

Nell broke the surface, blew through her snorkel, sucked in the rich air. Bahamian air: it had its own smell, floral and salty, her favorite smell on earth, and this was her favorite place. She turned toward Little Parrot Cay, a coral islet about fifty yards away: from this angle, tropical paradise pared down to the simplest components—white
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PETER ABRAHAMS

sand beach, a few palm trees, thatched hut—all colors bright, as in a child’s version. In fact, hadn’t Norah, her daughter, now in college, once come home from school with just such a painting? Nell was trying to remember the details when something down below grabbed her leg.

She jerked away, a frightened cry rising up her snorkel, a cry she smothered when her husband burst up through the surface, a big smile on his face.

“Clay,” she said, pushing her mouthpiece aside, “you scared me.”

He put his arms around her, sang a few off-key notes she took to be the shark theme from
Jaws.

“I mean it,” she said.

Clay stopped singing. He glanced down. “Hey, what’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“On the bottom.”

Nell dipped her face into the water, gazed down through her mask.

She saw something black lying on the sand, something man-made, maybe a box. She turned to Clay. That big smile was back on his face.

She noticed he’d had way too much sun; this was the ninth day of vacation, their longest in years, maybe ever.

“Too deep for me,” he said.

Nell got the mouthpiece back between her teeth, dove down. Yes, a box, not big, not heavy. She carried it back to the surface.

“What’s inside?” Clay said; still that big smile.

Nell raised the lid. Inside, wrapped in waterproof plastic, she found another box, this one blue, the word
Tiffany
on the top. She opened it, too.

“Oh, Clay.”

“Happy anniversary,” said Clay.

“But it’s months away.”

“I couldn’t wait.”

They bobbed up and down, the swell pushing them closer together.

The sand beach on Little Parrot Cay pinkened under the late-afternoon sun. A flock of dark birds rose out of the palms, wheeled across the sky and headed north.

D E LU S I O N

11

. . . .

“I don’t want
to go back,” Nell said.

“Maybe one day we won’t,” said Clay.

“When?” said Nell. “Be specific.”

Clay laughed. “June,” he said.

“June?”

“The thirty-third.”

She laughed, too, pretended to throw a punch. He pretended to block it.

They ate dinner on the patio of the house on the back, rocky side of Little Parrot Cay—spiny lobster, speared by Nell, conch fritters, cooked by Clay, white wine. The lights of North Eleuthera shone in the east, a fuzzy glow like a distant galaxy. Clay’s lobster fork clinked on the glass table. A shooting star went by—not an uncommon nighttime sight on Little Parrot Cay, but this one was very bright.

Nell caught its reflected path in Clay’s eyes.

“Life is good,” he said.

Their bare feet touched under the table.

Little Parrot Cay belonged to Clay’s friend—their friend—Duke Bastien. Nell and Clay spent one or two weekends a year on the Cay, free weekends, if Duke had had his way, but Clay insisted on paying.

He’d researched Out-Island hotel prices, paid Duke the top rate. That was Clay, at least the professional side: by the book. In other parts of life he could be unpredictable—the shark episode, for example; and sometimes in bed.

Like tonight. They’d been married for almost eighteen years, so it wasn’t surprising that he’d know her body. But to know things about it that she did not? After, lying in bed, the ocean breeze flowing through the wide-open sliders, Nell said, “How do you know?”

But he was asleep.

Nell slept, too. She’d had the best sleeps of her life on the Cay, un-troubled visits to some deep, rejuvenating place. And she was on her way when Johnny appeared in her dreams, stepping out from behind a coral reef, but somehow dry. He wore pin-striped suit pants—Nell
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PETER ABRAHAMS

remembered that suit—was barefoot and naked above the waist. The red hole over his heart was tiny, almost invisible. So long since she’d seen him, in life or in dreams: she wanted to lick that tiny red hole, make it go away, but the scene changed.