Home Free (21 page)

“You want to stay for dinner?” I asked
Angela.

She looked at her watch and smacked her hand
to her forehead. “I lost track of time! I’m supposed to be at the
pizza place at five-thirty.” It was five-twenty now.

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride.” We threw the
bike in the back of my SUV, Lucifer staring at us, and I ignored
the speed limits so she wouldn’t be late. The Element handles
better than you’d imagine given its boxy shape. I squealed around
the corners, but the car hugged the ground and didn’t feel tippy at
all. I was impressed. Angela was green.

“I don’t get in that much trouble if I’m
late,” she said.

We pulled up to the front door at five
twenty-nine. I gave her a smug look, and she scowled.

“What? We’re here, you’re on time, and I’m
starving. It’s obviously a sign.”

She rolled the bike into the restaurant,
disappearing behind a door marked
Employees Only
, only to
reappear behind the cash register wearing her red Main Street Pizza
apron and beret. I stood in line behind a family of six, thanking
God and modern science for birth control and wondering what the
French hat had to do with Italian pizza.

“Can I have a medium pepperoni and pineapple,
to go, please?” I asked Angela, politely, in case she was still
perturbed.

“Extra cheese?” she offered.

I paid and waited for my dinner, then drove
home like a normal person, only about five or ten miles over the
speed limit and obeying most stop signs.

I sat on the barstool and ate my pepperoni
and pineapple pizza at the counter, wondering how people thought up
recipes. Which led me to wonder how people knew to open the prickly
pineapple to find the good part.

I found these thoughts less disturbing than
thinking about killers and weirdos leaving me mysterious notes, so
I didn’t fight them. When it started getting dark, though, I had a
harder time keeping my mind in non-scary territory. I sat on the
couch in the living room, watching non-scary sitcoms and closing my
eyes and hitting mute on the remote anytime a commercial for a
crime show came on. I cursed Jack and Kevin and Pauline for not
coming over when I actually wanted them to. I cursed Debbie for not
baking me any more cookies. I cursed Angela as I double-checked the
locks on the doors and windows for the third time. I cursed Danny
for not finding me irresistible enough to at least merit a friggin’
phone call. I finally dropped into bed with all the lights blazing.
Somehow, I found the glass French doors in the bedroom less
appealing tonight, and I cursed Mikey out loud for scaring the crap
out of me.

I had crazy dreams about dancing pineapples,
and I woke with a start when the phone rang at two in the morning.
I answered it without looking at the display.

“What?”

A small voice on the other end said,
“Alex?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Angela. Alex, Sherry’s house is on fire. I
thought you might want to know.”

Holy fucking shit. “Are you okay? You’re not
outside, are you?”

“Hunh-uh. I didn’t see anything, I just woke
up when I heard the sirens. I looked outside and saw the
flames.”

“Sherry?” I was afraid to ask.

“There’s an ambulance here, and they brought
her out on a stretcher. She was moving her arms around, so I don’t
think she’s dead.”

I agreed. I’d never heard of a corpse
flailing their arms around. “Stay inside your house. Don’t open the
door to anybody, unless it’s the cops or the firemen asking
questions. Don’t come over here tomorrow, either. I don’t know what
the hell is going on, but I may not the safest person to be
around.”

“Okay.” She sounded disappointed.

“Thanks for calling, Angela. We’ll get this
straightened out soon, and then you can come over and work on the
computer some more.”

“Good, ’cause I had another idea I wanted to
try about the raisins. Bye.”

“Bye.” I hung up and sat back against the
pillows and felt the tears streaming down my cheeks. I didn’t know
when they’d started. What the hell was going on? Brian and Mikey
had both warned me to stay away from Sherry’s, and it looked like
they were right on that count. But why?

A disturbing thought drifted through my
brain. Nobody had harmed Sherry until I told them that I was going
to visit her again. Shit. Now I wasn’t just annoying people, it
looked like I was jeopardizing their lives. I hoped it was just a
phase.

I called the hospital, claiming to be
Sherry’s sister. She had smoke inhalation and some minor burns, but
she was in good condition and would probably be released the next
day. That was a relief.

The tears had subsided, but I couldn’t let go
of the fear that someone had tried to make sure Sherry didn’t talk
to me. I reminded myself about jumping to conclusions. Maybe the
fire wasn’t even deliberately set. Coincidences happen all the
time. Once, Max and I went to Las Vegas on vacation. There was a
pool boy convention going on, and we ran into Raoul from our condo
in the bar at the Luxor. What a coinky-dink.

I sighed. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be
able to let it go. I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Salazar.” Grumpy. I’d forgotten it was the
middle of the night.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hey yourself. What are you wearing?” Less
grumpy.

“Somebody just torched Sherry Henderson’s
house.”

“Goddammit, Lex -- ”

I cut him off before he could turn grumpy
again. “Jeez, Danny, I’m not suggesting you did it.”

“You spent the night with my brother?” Danny
asked, his jaw a little tense. We were sitting at my kitchen
counter, sipping hot chocolate with mini marshmallows. I’d filled
him in on my visit to Sherry’s house and the license plate and
breaking into Mikey’s office and my conversations with his brother
and mine and everything I knew about the body shop murder.

I groaned. “Not
with
him, stupid. On
his couch. In a drunken stupor.”

He glared a minute longer, then dropped it.
“There are probably plenty of people besides our brothers who had a
motive for killing Chambers, Lex,” he said. “And there really are
coincidences, you know.”

“So you think the fire was a
coincidence?”

He made the
who the hell knows?
face.
“It very well may have had to do with the body shop. But I think it
was most likely a coincidence in terms of my brother telling you
not to go over there.” I noticed he didn’t say anything about my
brother. “I’ll go by in the morning and check it out, see if it was
intentionally set. You should get some sleep now.”

“You think my brother is involved, don’t
you?”

“I think he lied. You know he was at Sherry’s
house, yet he claims not to know her. And he definitely didn’t want
you to go see her. That’s weird, but not criminal. But the idea
Mikey proposed, about Chambers maybe skimming from the boss... I
don’t know. You think Brian might be moolighting?” I snorted and
Danny shrugged and went on. “You asked me once if I thought Mikey
could kill someone and let me take the blame. What about Brian?
Could he kill someone and let Kevin take the blame?”

I thought about that. Picturing Mr. Wonderful
killing someone was absurd. It would look bad, for crying out loud.
But if I could get around that, it actually wasn’t too hard to
imagine him letting Kevin take the fall. Brian’s biggest regret in
life was not being an only child.

“You don’t want it to be your brother,” I
said.

“And you don’t want it to be yours. But the
reality is, every bad guy out there is somebody’s brother or son or
father, you know?”

That was a depressing thought. He stood and I
walked him to the door.

“Are you okay here by yourself?”

I was scared shitless, but I figured if I
pretended not to be, I might feel better. I nodded.

“Because I could always stay, you know,” he
offered in the depravity-inducing voice.

I rolled my eyes. “You’ll check on the fire
in the morning?”

“First thing. I’ll call you as soon as I know
something.”

“Okay. Hey, Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“How do you think people knew to peel a
pineapple to get to the good part? You don’t have to peel an
apple.”

“Lex, you are one weird chick.” He kissed me
on the forehead and left.

My mind wandered the rest of the night, but
it wasn’t occupied with the mysteries of fruit. It occurred to me
that I didn’t know my brother at all. Brian was all about
appearances, the appearance of being a fine, upstanding pillar of
the community, the appearance of being a faithful family man, the
appearance of being above reproach. I honestly had no idea what
went on under that façade of perfection. I thought about the
suggestion that maybe Chambers was skimming from his supplier. I
tried to envisage Brian as a drug dealer, but I kept thinking of Al
Pacino in
Scarface
, and the juxtaposition was so
preposterous that I gave up. There had to be another
explanation.

I heard someone come in the front door at
about six in the morning. Logic told me it was Jack, but fear
gripped me anyway. I cowered in bed until I heard water running in
the kitchen and the refrigerator door open and close. I guessed bad
guys probably wouldn’t come over to make breakfast, so I got up and
pulled a robe over my underwear and nightshirt and went to
investigate. Coffee was brewing and Jack was reading the paper at
the counter, eating blueberry yogurt from a plastic cup. My last
blueberry yogurt, actually.

“Morning, sunshine.”

“That’s my last yogurt.”

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” He offered me the
half-empty container. “Want the rest?”

I waved it away and went to forage. I settled
on a granola bar. “Can I have the front section?”

He slid the paper across the counter, and I
poured us coffee. It occurred to me that we were like an old
married couple, comfortable and compatible. I could do worse. In
fact, I had done worse. Jack and I had only slept together once,
but that was more than the whole last year of my marriage to Max,
not to mention Max and I lacked the companionability I shared with
Jack. I shoved his coffee at him and flipped through the paper,
looking for news about the fire. Nothing. Must have happened too
late to make it into the morning edition.

“Didn’t see you yesterday.”

“Busy day. You?”

Let’s see, I was playing detective, which may
have resulted a woman’s house being torched, leaving her flailing
and smoke-choked. I almost had a cardiac episode thinking about
Danny, and I considered going back to school to study botany and
the inscrutability of fruit. “Nah, nothing much.”

I took my coffee with me to the bathroom,
showered and did my hair. Last night’s lack of sleep was obvious in
my face, so I did the best I could with concealer and foundation,
then added red lipstick to draw attention away from the bags. I
pulled on a pair of khaki cargo shorts over a pair of string
bikinis that said
maybe
in red embroidery. Then again, maybe
not, I sighed. I put on a bra and slid a black t-shirt over my
head, trying not to smash my hair, and laced up the red
tennies.

I went to the office for my purse, then
decided to make a phone call before I went out. I dialed the
non-emergency number for the police department and asked to be
connected to Jimmy C.

“Alex, what can I do for you?” he offered
when he came on the line.

“I was wondering if there’s anything new on
the body shop investigation.”

“The police department does not comment on
on-going investigations.” He wasn’t alone.

“I understand. Meet me in the park in an
hour?”

“That’s correct. Thank you for calling.”

There was an envelope on the front porch, and
I picked it up absently, sliding the paper out as I beeped the
Element open. I hadn’t seen Jack again, but the monster truck was
still parked in the driveway, dwarfing the odd SUV, and Lucifer was
perched on the hood. I gave him a scratch behind the ears as I
walked by. I slid on my shades and slid into the driver’s seat and
pulled away, waving to Debbie as I drove. She was setting out
little bowls of nuggets for the strays before she left for work. I
still held to my opinion that men were better, but I guessed the
cats hadn’t eaten her last yogurt this morning. I glanced at the
note. One word again. WHORE. That’s just rude, I thought. More
sparkly rainbow sticky letters, but clearly the tone had changed.
The message concurred with Brian’s assessment of my reputation, but
no matter how far I stretched my brain, I couldn’t see Scarface
with sticky letters and confetti.

“Who has time for this shit?” I asked the
steering wheel, backing out of the driveway. It offered no opinion,
and I gave it a good hard smack.

I slowed down as I approached Cherry Street.
I pulled over a block away from Sherry’s house and looked around.
No sign of Danny’s car. There was a fire department pickup parked
in front of Angela’s house. I got out and walked the last block.
There was still the hint of charred wood smell in the air. The roof
and two of Sherry’s exterior walls were gone, the other two
blackened and crumbling. I could see clear through to the backyard,
and there didn’t seem to be anything left inside except a bathtub
and toilet. They were avocado green, and if anything in the house
deserved to be burned, it was them. Two firemen in yellow turnout
pants and navy Minter Fire Department t-shirts, but no jackets or
helmets, were making notes on clipboards.

“Oh my god, Sherry!” I gasped.

One of the firemen looked up and put his hand
on my arm. “It’s okay, ma’am, she’s fine. You can check on her over
at Mercy, but she wasn’t seriously hurt.”

“Thank goodness. What happened?”

“Faulty wiring. These places around here are
just thrown together. Fire traps.”