Invisible (33 page)

I thought I had a lot more worries about the dog than he did, but I opened the door and eased my feet onto the glass-strewn ground. The dog snarled, and Benny said, “Git back.” I hoped the dog knew what the words meant.

“What’re you doin’ here?” Benny demanded. “I thought you left.” He sounded indignant, which I found somewhat encouraging. At least he was asking questions before letting go with both barrels of the shotgun.

“I . . . uh . . . haven’t found the poodle yet.” True. I smiled and tried my best to look grandmotherly. I was willing to go for eccentric if need be. Even senile.

“Look, we don’t allow no bag ladies campin’ out in here for the night. You’re gonna have to move on.”

Bag lady? Fine by me. I was also more than willing to move on. I bent over to retrieve my now tooth-pocked purse, but both Duke and Benny had other ideas. Benny, with another threatening “Git back,” won.

I headed toward the front gate. A bolt of lightning lit up the sky. A junkyard full of metal did not strike me as a desirable place to be in a lightning storm. I walked faster. I wasn’t going to worry about the purse. Let Benny and Duke fight over it.
Lord, were you waiting for me to exhibit some good sense here tonight . . . and I blew it?

We passed the sliding door to the shop. Another sharp bolt of lightning cracked, close enough to make my scalp prickle, like the time Thea left a home perm solution on my head too long. I tried to act as if I were casually exiting a mall.
Thanks, Benny, I appreciate this. Have a nice day.

“Hey, not so fast,” Benny said. He jerked the shotgun barrels toward the office. “We’re going in there first.”

I thought about making a run for the gate, but I knew what my chances were at outrunning Duke. I suspected he was looking for any excuse to chomp down on any available portion of my anatomy. I turned in at the office. The lights were already on. Benny must have turned them on when he ran back in to get the shotgun. One of the overhead fluorescent bulbs sizzled. Benny snapped the chain onto Duke’s collar. He set the shotgun on the desk, then dumped the contents of my purse beside it.

He went straight for my wallet, flipped it open, and studied the windowed contents. Driver’s license. Two credit cards. AARP membership card. Medicare card. Library card. Dirk’s Subs & Salads punch card, buy ten, get one free. Old photo of Thea and me, another of Colin. I couldn’t say why, but I was glad I’d removed that incriminating sketch of Drake Braxton that Dix had made.

Benny looked a long time at the driver’s license, his gaze flicking from photo to me and back again. He studied each of the other cards with equal care, then went back to the driver’s license. It gave the most information, of course, including birth date and address. The intensity of his interest was making my palms slippery with perspiration. I wiped them on my pants leg.

“Please keep whatever cash is in the wallet,” I said brightly. I knew there were two twenties, a ten, and four ones in there. I usually know exactly how much I have, especially toward the end of the month. I was willing to eat grits until the next Social Security and interest checks came, if I could just get out of here. “For all the trouble I’ve caused you.”

He didn’t respond. He picked up the purse again and checked the other compartments. That netted him a couple of old packets of taco sauce, my little red New Testament, a “Cathy” comic strip clipping, and miscellaneous scraps of paper. Plus the photo of Kendra in her exotic dress and the photocopy of Ray with his Mustang. The temperature in the cluttered office seemed to plunge about twenty degrees when Benny spotted those items. I shivered, not blessing my tendency to leave everything in my purse now.

Benny grabbed the phone on the desk and punched in numbers. He turned his back to me, revealing a pink bald spot in his mousy colored hair, but I could hear him plainly enough. “I think you better get over here. We got a visitor. I stayed late because that ’01 Malibu was coming in, and I caught her hidin’ out back. Driver’s license says she’s Ivy Malone.” Brief silence while the person on the other end of the line said something back to him. Then, “Yeah. That one. From the house on Madison Street.”

That one. From the house on Madison Street.
I didn’t like the sound of that. It singled me out as someone not unfamiliar to both Benny and the person on the other end of the line.

We waited. I asked if I could sit down. Benny kicked a chair in my direction. Duke retired into a dog bed barely big enough for his heavy body. He’d lost interest in me, the chain apparently signaling to him that he was off duty. I clasped my hands together and pushed back the cuticle on my right thumbnail with my left thumbnail. All trace of the blood blister was gone now. The storm seemed to have moved on, rumbles receding into the distance, but the air still felt humid and heavy. Benny didn’t stare at me, but he kept sending me speculative glances.

I felt that if I were really clever I could coax all sorts of incriminating information about Thrif-Tee out of Benny. But I wasn’t that clever. And I was afraid I knew too much for my good health already.

“May I have a drink of water?” I finally croaked. My throat was so dry that swallowing my fear had ceased to be an option.

He jerked a thumb toward the restroom. My legs felt both stiff and wobbly as I walked over to the tiny room. I found a lone plastic glass there. Neither it nor the sink looked as if they’d been cleaned in this decade. I decided I wasn’t thirsty after all, but I ran the water anyway and came out trying to look refreshed. Insulting Benny about the state of his restroom did not at the moment seem a prudent thing to do.

Twenty minutes later headlights flared outside the office. Benny hadn’t gone out to open the gate, so the person apparently had a key to open the padlock. There was enough delay after the car lights showed that I realized he was taking time to close the gate again. For some reason, that felt distinctly ominous.

The office door opened. By then I was fully expecting Drake Braxton. I’d been doing some heavy-duty thinking, and I thought I had it figured out. The reason my name and address were familiar to Benny was because he and Braxton had been there when they trashed my house over the cemetery deal. Now I was about to learn that Drake Braxton not only owned a building and land development company, he also owned Thrif-Tee Wrecking and Bottom-Buck Barney’s.

Wrong.

Not that I didn’t recognize the tall, lanky, black-haired man who swaggered inside. I did. The man who had almost bowled Thea and me over one night. Kendra’s maybe-married boyfriend.

Harley used to love to play pool, and my brain now felt like a pool table with the colored balls chunking into the pockets as things fell into place. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Debbie had come here to start up a relationship with an oh-so-respectable boss who liked bimbos. To find out who killed her brother. She’d done it, and paid for the knowledge with her life. And the killer she’d uncovered was right now staring down at me.

My life felt precarious too. A spinning eight ball poised on the end of a cue stick.

But one colored ball didn’t click neatly into any pocket. Benny. If he worked for this guy, what was he doing at the cemetery with Drake Braxton?

The first thing Benny did was shove my driver’s license and the photos over to the angular-faced man. The guy studied them carefully, without comment, then used one bony forefinger to poke carefully through the contents of my purse as if he felt something might contaminate him. He latched on to an item Benny had ignored. A matchbook from the motel in Little Rock. I always pick up free matchbooks. Not because I collect them. You just never knew when you might want to start a fire.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked.

A truthful answer wasn’t going to help my case. I detoured with, “I wasn’t hurting anything. I was just sitting in the backseat of one of the cars, until your watchdog . . . objected.”

“That’s his job.”

“He does it well.” I stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, it is rather past my bedtime, so I should be getting home—”

“You’re not going anywhere.” He appraised me as if I were a used car. Maybe one he was considering chopping up for parts. He flipped the matchbook open. He struck a match, and all three of us watched it burn down to a stub. I wasn’t sure what the symbolism was, or why the tiny flame was so mesmerizing, but it scared me right down to my guzzles, as Colin used to call them. My throat twitched in a non-swallow, and I sat down again.

“What were you doing in Little Rock?” the guy asked.

Did he know that Debbie Etheridge, masquerading under the name Kendra Alexander, had come from Little Rock? Probably. I gave him another string of non sequiturs. “I’m very fond of my niece, who lives in Arkansas. By a lovely lake just outside Woodston. Their twins are starting college this fall.”

He frowned at my snow job of irrelevant information. “You live on Madison Street. Not far from where a . . .” He paused and then spun the photo toward me. “A young woman named Kendra used to live.”

“Yes. She’s dead, did you know?” I said, hoping to suggest that no suspicions of him lurked in my mind. “It’s been most upsetting. Especially since I also just lost my very best friend, Thea, and now we’ll never be able to celebrate our birthdays together again. We always went to Victorio’s Seafood. Have you ever been there? Their lobster is awesome.”

He frowned again. Or maybe that was his permanent expression. “What do you know about Ray Etheridge?”

“I’ve never met anyone named Ray Etheridge.” True.

“You’re carrying a picture of him.”

“Oh. Him.”

“Why were you flashing this picture of him around Bottom-Buck Barney’s?”

Oh dear. So that’s what had gotten me sucked into all this. “I didn’t know who the young man in the picture was. I found it in Kendra’s apartment and thought he might be the person who’d killed her.”

“She knows a whole lot more than that or she wouldn’t be here or carrying those pictures,” Benny cut in, squeaky voice rising almost to dog-whistle range. “Even if we didn’t find anything in her house—”

“Shut up, Benny.”

I looked at Benny with shocked realization. Drake Braxton hadn’t trashed my house. The destruction had nothing to do with the cemetery. Benny and this guy had done it. Someone at Bottom-Buck Barney’s had told them I’d come in with that picture of Ray. Then they’d used the phone number on the back of the picture to track me down so they could search the house for any other connection to Ray Etheridge.

The thought struck me that when you’re being a busybody in more than one area, it’s harder to know who’s out to get you.

I also wondered which one of them had been the artist on my bedroom mirror. Benny, I decided. Not that it mattered at the moment.

“You know Kendra wasn’t her real name, don’t you? That she was really Debbie Etheridge. Ray’s sister.” The lanky guy’s tone was soft, speculative, even mild. Which somehow made it all the more ominous. Like a rattlesnake quietly coiling for a strike. I doubted he’d be discussing this with me if he intended to let me stroll out the front gate.

I wasn’t about to admit to anything, however. “My neighbor Thea and I thought she was a very sweet young woman.”

“Sweet?” He laughed cynically. “Conniving little schemer, that’s what she was. Leading me on, making me think—” He broke off abruptly. “What did she tell you?”

“About you?”

“About anything.”

“Nothing! Kendra was a very . . . private person. She kept things to herself.”

“How’d she get here?” He spoke to Benny now, but his head jerked toward me and his eyes never left my face. “I didn’t see a car.”

“I dunno. I never saw a car either. I thought she was just some bag lady looking for a place to spend the night until I found the name on the driver’s license. And those pictures. Then I figured she must be on to something and snoopin’.”

“How’d you get here?” the guy demanded of me.

I didn’t think his knowing my Thunderbird was parked two blocks away would help my situation. He could dispose of a vehicle easily enough. He’d apparently done it with Kendra/ Debbie’s red Corolla. “If you’re asking how I’m going to get home, you needn’t concern yourself about my transportation.” I made my tone lofty, as if I could quirk a finger and summon a limousine on a moment’s notice.

He was not impressed. “Kendra leave anything with you? Papers or anything?”

So that was why they’d gone through my place! A search disguised as vandalism. He thought Kendra may have made a written record of everything she’d uncovered, and left a copy with me for safekeeping. Oh, if only she had!

I tried a bluff. “What would it be worth to you if she had?”

That brought a laugh from him. “You trying to blackmail me?”

For the first time I noticed a heavy sag in the pocket of his light jacket. He was packing something more lethal than a purse, I was sure of that. Could I make him think I had incriminating evidence against him stashed somewhere? And would it be helpful, or a death sentence, if he did think that?

I didn’t know, so I opted for lofty again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

A sharp blast of thunder made us all jump. Even Duke looked up. The storm had circled around and returned. The thunder sounded as if all those junked cars out there had come to life and were advancing on the office.

“What’re we gonna do, Bo?” Benny asked, his voice hitting plaintive now. He repeated what he’d said before. “She knows somethin’ or she wouldn’t be here. This ain’t good.”

The guy named Bo repeated himself too. “Shut up, Benny.” He touched the sag of the gun in his pocket, his angular head tilted thoughtfully. “Go bring your pickup over to the door. I don’t want to use my car this time.”

This time. Not like last time, when he’d used his car to dump Kendra’s body?

“Maybe we oughta—”

“Just get the pickup,” Bo growled.

I swallowed hard. Did he mean to shoot me here and carry my body out to the pickup? Or were we going for an end-of-the-line ride in the pickup?

Benny disappeared out the door.

“Get a rope too,” Bo called after him, and for a split second his eyes weren’t on me. I dashed for the door to the shop.