Killer Move (25 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

T
en minutes later we were driving fast back up toward St. Armands Circle. She’d made me wait in Cass’s apartment while she went out onto the walkway and made a call. I heard her raise her voice. I gave it another minute and went out. She was gripping the railing, looking down over the entropy spreading over the courtyard below.

“I don’t need this shit,” she said. “I could just vanish, right now.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Expiation,” she said. “Heard of the concept?”

“No.”

She smiled in a sour, unattractive way. “Not much call for it in the condo-selling business, I guess.”

“You want me to Wikipedia the word? Or you could just drop the condescension and talk in straightforward sentences. We asshole Realtors can do that at least.”

“I’m done with this,” she said. “I thought I’d be okay with it, but I’m not. It’s wrong. And for that, and for other sins to be taken into consideration, I have not yet done what I should have, which is bug the fuck out.”

“So just tell me what the—”

“I’m not telling you shit. I’m going to kick you up the chain of command, and then I’m done.”

S
he parked on the Circle, in one of the spaces around the central park. She started to walk away, and I, good local citizen that I am, noticed that she hadn’t remembered to pay for parking even though there was half an hour before restrictions ended. I told her so.

She smiled in possibly her most patronizing way yet. “I have immunity,” she said.

I’d assumed that once we got here we’d be heading to the Columbia (perhaps because I’d seen the place in the picture the man with the gun had shown me), but in fact she set off across the central area.

“Jonny Bo’s?”

She didn’t answer. She strode across the road and straight over to the restaurant. She didn’t enter the sidewalk café area, however, but went around the side, toward the staircase up to the restaurant—where Steph and I had our anniversary celebration what seemed like a month before. There was a young woman standing behind the welcome desk at the top. She appeared not to recognize the woman I was with, at first, and started fretting about reservations. The woman just pushed right past her.

“Hey—”

“Drop it, babe.”

“Hang on, shouldn’t you be
working
here tonight?”

“I resigned. Didn’t I say?”

It was early yet for the first sitting, and the restaurant was only half-full—couples looking at menus and trying not to whistle between their teeth at the prices. The person I still half thought of as a waitress, Jane Doe, whatever her name really was, wove straight across the room and into the corridor leading to the restrooms. She walked past both without slowing, however, making for a door at the end, which I hadn’t even noticed before. There was no marking on it, not even a sign saying private, which figured. Say nothing, and most of us are too dumb to question anything. There was a little keypad on the side panel, painted in the same color as the wall. The woman rapidly tapped out a six-figure number, and the latch clicked.

On the other side was a narrow staircase, turning sharply to the right. I followed her up, but abruptly stopped halfway when I saw her reach into the back of her jeans and pull a handgun out from under her shirt. Something happened to her posture, too, becoming looser, rangier, as if readying for sudden decisive action. I let her go up the last set of stairs by herself.

She got to the top, where the wall stopped, making space for a half-height divide in expensive-looking wood. She turned, looking into a space I couldn’t see, holding the gun low in her hand where it couldn’t be seen by whoever was on the top floor. She glanced down at me, gave an upward nod, and disappeared from view.

I went up the remaining steps, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to turn around, go find my car, and drive back to the house to grab anything that seemed necessary to starting a new life somewhere else.

But I didn’t want a new life.
I wanted my old one back.

That meant I could not run.

At the top I stuck my head cautiously up over the divide. I saw a big open space that ran the length and width of the building. A handful of couches, shabby chic, angled for discretion. A few dining tables with pert little chairs. A couple of big skylights made it light and airy. Artfully battered floorboards, paintings that were well above the usual local standard. At the back was a waitress station, to one side a discreet dumbwaiter.

The fabled upper dining room, I guess. And at the far end, three people I recognized. The Thompsons and Peter Grant—my boss.

They turned to look at me as if I were a low-echelon waiter bringing an undesired check.

P
eter Grant watched me walk up. A week ago it might have seemed cool, encountering my boss in this locale. The guy who would have found it so felt like a previous incarnation of me, however, one long dead and unevolved for the present circumstances.

“Sir,” I said.

His gaze was cool and unreadable. Not unfriendly, exactly. But not friendly, either.

“I still think this is a bad idea,” he said, not to me, and then left. Nobody said anything to cover the sound of his feet going down the wooden stairs.

Meanwhile the woman I’d come with took up a position on the side of the room. Her feet were planted apart, her hands together at her waist. Her gun had gone back to where it had come from, but I didn’t think it would take her long to retrieve it should the need arise.

“What does he look like?” Tony asked me.

“Who?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Marie said. “I agree with Peter. I don’t think this conversation should be taking place. Rise to the occasion or we’ll kick you out right now.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“What does he look like?” Tony asked again. He appeared to have ignored the entire exchange.

“Assuming you mean the guy who hauled me out of The Breakers, he’s . . . just a guy. Dark hair with touches of gray. When I saw him he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Early, midfifties. But I don’t know.”

“He’s fifty-three,” Tony said absently.

“You know him.”

“Yes, we did.”

“He appears to feel more warmly about you guys. He actually seemed very keen to renew your acquaintance.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He showed me a picture.”

“A picture?” Marie’s beady eyes were on me through a drifting cloud of smoke. The cigarette looked like it was held in a large bird’s claw, but I noticed for the first time just how thin the wrist supporting it was.

I nodded through the big window. “Outside the Columbia. You plus the Wilkinses and Mr. Grant. And David Warner. Looked like you were all having a high old time.”

Tony kept pushing methodically forward. “Jane says he killed Hazel Wilkins. That you saw her body.”

I glanced back at the woman at parade rest on the side of the room. She kept looking straight ahead. “She’s really called Jane?”

“I have no idea,” Tony said.

“Yeah, he killed Hazel. He admitted it, though he didn’t seem proud of it. He had the body there, in the corner. And he’d done something to David Warner, too.”

This had them both far more interested. “Done what?”

“I don’t know. The place where he took me had blood on the floor, and a broken chair. But he said Warner had escaped.”

“Did he mention anyone else? Names of the people he’s working with? Accomplices or partners?”

“He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who needed any.”

The Thompsons looked at each other.

“No,” Marie said firmly. “It can’t just be him on his own. He was a loser. Was then, will still be now. He can’t be doing all this by himself.”

She turned back to me. “Anything else? What else did he say to you?”

“Not much, but he showed me something. About his body. Someone had carved a word on it.”

“We’re done here,” Marie said, turning away.

I was aware that Jane whatever-her-name-was had started to listen more closely.

“He woke one morning with no recollection of what had happened the previous night,” I said. “The night that photograph outside the Columbia was taken. And the cops turned up at his house soon afterward and arrested him for murder.”

“Take him away,” Marie said to the other woman. Jane didn’t move. “Did you hear me?”

“I heard.”

“So—are you going to do it?”

“No. I want to hear you answer his question.”

“He didn’t ask one.”

“Yeah, he did,” Jane said. “I’ll repeat it for the hard of thinking. It went something like: ‘What the fuck?’ ”

“You’re fired,” Marie said.

“Excellent,” Jane said. The gun was back in her hand now. “That means I don’t have to be polite to your beat-up old face anymore, or do what you say, or put up with you acting the grand Southern belle the entire time. And now that I’m here on my own reconnaissance, let’s put it another way:
answer the fucking question, bitch
.”

“Jesus,” Tony said distractedly. “Marie, we don’t need this right now.”

His wife turned her head smartly toward him, but suddenly it was Tony who seemed the stronger of the two. Marie looked old and a little frightened.

Tony moved his hand out toward hers. It didn’t reach, but something passed between them.

Marie blinked, disengaged from the argument with Jane as if it had never happened.

“Bill,” Tony said, “we’ve got a situation. You’ve gathered that. You’re a bright guy. David Warner has been a, well, not a friend of ours, but an acquaintance, over a long period of time. Now he’s disappeared, or is dead, and we’re hearing disquieting things about a cellar under his house.”

“What kind of things?” I asked, aware that—wrongly, as it turned out—this was a house I’d thought I was going to help sell.

“It’s not relevant,” Tony said. “The key matter is that we’re running a little scared.”

“Join the club,” I said.

Tony smiled thinly. “I guess you’ve hit on it there.” He breathed out, rubbed his temples. “I’m going to tell you this because I’m done with it, and because I think you’re owed. It can’t go any further. Understand?”

“Tell me what?”

“It was just a game.”

CHAPTER FORTY

“P
hil and I knew each other since we were kids,” Tony said. “We were born here when it was known for fruit and Ringling and squat else. Phil went to college up in Tallahassee. I traveled, tried a bunch of different things before I went into construction. Phil became one of those management guys, always moving on, trouble-shooting a company and then jumping onto the next thing. We kept in touch and would meet up every now and then and chew the fat. I came home before he did, started my business. Eventually Phil made enough money and headed back, too. Marie and I were getting initial development for The Breakers up and running. He helped put some of the financing in place, and he and Hazel decided that instead of getting some big house they’d buy into our resort. They bought three condos, and we started hanging out again. Peter Grant was an old friend, too, which is how he wound up handling sales. It tied together. We all made a lot of money. Then some night, I don’t even remember when, we . . . started playing again.”

“Playing what?” I asked.

“We’d had this thing we did in high school, with bits of paper, leaving clues around the place. Telling a kind of story. Like those Murder Mystery weekends, where you go to an old house and some actors put on a show, with a script that’s part worked out ahead of time, part improvised, and the guests try to figure out who killed Professor Whoever in the library with a wrench. When we were all back in town together, it just kind of started up again. Marie would plan some scenario, see if the others could work out what was happening.”

“It was just a dumb game,” Marie said again. She sounded defensive. “It would have stayed that way, too, except for that asshole Warner.”

“How does he fit into your group?” I said. “He’s much younger than you guys, surely.”

“He is,” Tony said. “He grew up here, too, but none of us knew him from before. He’d been out West for ten years, came back with a lot of money, and started to push his nose into the condo business. We were always going to run into each other. He’s not hard to get on with. At first. We introduced him around. He fit. And after a while we let him know about the game, and he was all about taking it to another level. It was him who had the idea of pulling the games off paper, changing it from being just a long bullshit session over bottles of wine into something that actually happened out in the world. He was the guy who made it real.”

“How can you make a game real?”

“By introducing real people. First time, we just messed with some guy a little—a nobody who worked in a restaurant we went to over in town. It’s closed now. It was arranged that some cash went missing in such a way it could only be this guy. He lost his job. We put some other temptations his way. He took them.”

He saw me staring at him. “Yeah, I know,” he muttered. “David came up with ideas and we went with them without thinking too hard about the implications for the person whose life was being modified. We got too wrapped up in the game, even back then, the first time.”

“Plus, you know,” Marie said, “it was fun.”

“Fun,” I said, staring at her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of fun. It’s what people can do when they don’t have to waste all their time worrying what everyone thinks of them.”

“It was just small, though,” Tony said hurriedly. “After the guy started to spin out of control we pulled the plug, smoothed everything over. It was Hazel who bailed first.”

“Always thought she was better than the rest of us,” Marie said acidly. “Had her moral high horse saddled up and ready to go.”

Tony held up his hand to head her off. “I found the guy a job in my company afterward, much better paid than he had been before. He worked for me for seven years before he moved upstate to be with his kids. We let him know what had happened. He actually helped us out on a couple of later games. There was no harm done.”

“Really?” I said. “Like there’s no harm done if people think you’ve sent racist e-mails, or if wives think you’ve ordered porn or taken photos of coworkers.”

“There’s . . . some harm done, I admit that.”

I walked to the window at the end of the room, looked down over the Circle. Every time I’d done that in the last five years, I’d been looking at it hungrily, as a place I wanted a piece of. Right now it just looked dry and hot, a mirage on a barren sand bar.

“How does Hunter fit into this?” I asked. I couldn’t fail to listen, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon on what was becoming obvious.

“We were playing a game a year,” Tony said. “Each time someone would get their . . . well, they’d get stirred around. Hunter was just this guy on the fringes. He’d been in town about nine months. A handyman type, jack-of-all-trades. He did jobs for Peter on a few of the properties that Shore managed. Thing was . . . David had this old girlfriend. A woman he’d known when he was young, anyway. Did some waitressing, bar work. Smoked a lot of weed, drank too much—you know the type, the keys are full of them. I’d seen her around over the years, propping up this bar, serving behind that one, slumped over a table with a pitcher of beer—and I was real surprised when it turned out she and David had a connection. I was having a drink with him one time in Bradenton when she came in. The look she gave him was kind of . . . weird. But he went right up and said hi, and she was on the edge of the group after that.”

“Because you all wanted to fuck her,” Marie said.

“I did not want to fuck her,” Tony said mildly.

“This going to take much longer?” I asked. “See, my wife’s in the hospital. And I’m not enjoying being around you people.”

“Hunter and Katy met, somehow. David didn’t like it. He started to stir us up over it, did a little digging. Eventually it turns out Hunter’s not everything he appears. Ran with a bad crowd when he was back in Wyoming, was maybe involved in a few burglaries, including one where an old woman died. It was natural causes, apparently, but it happened under duress. He was never tried for it, and had straightened out his life since, but . . . he just seemed like a good target for modification. Or so David said. To get him out of town.”

Tony hesitated. “But then one afternoon David told us something that was a lot more worrying. He said Katy was trying to blackmail him. Not just him, either—the whole club. She’d been around us for a couple of years by then, and this was back in the eighties. We were younger, played harder. Drank a lot, did a lot of cocaine, had parties where . . . stuff happened. We weren’t as discreet as we should have been. Then one afternoon Katy buttonholed Marie.”

“She was drunk,” Marie said. “She came right up to me on the street. She said she had tape recordings of the group talking about the game, had been carrying a Walkman around for the last couple months. That she also had photos of our . . . recreational pursuits. She thought she’d been real smart. She became abusive. It was very embarrassing. She evidently believed that we were going to bankroll her and her white trash boyfriend so they could go off and start a new life.”

“I said we should pay her off,” Tony said. “Phil and Hazel said the same. But . . . David had another idea.”

I turned from the window. Tony and Marie were standing at an angle to each other, as if to not hold some past event between them. Jane was watching now.

“We didn’t say yes,” Marie said.

“But we didn’t say no.”

“And Katy died,” I said, “and it got pinned on John Hunter, and he went to jail.”

“David handled all that,” Tony said quickly, as if relieved not to have to recount the event itself. “We had nothing to do with it. And this was
the only time
anybody died. Until then it had just been messing with people. Spreading rumors. Planting stuff, to see what happened. It was entertaining, that’s—”

“ ‘Entertaining’?” I said, feeling my fists bunching at my sides. I looked at Jane. She didn’t meet my eyes, looking down at the floor instead.

“I know how it seems,” Tony said. “And we all knew it was
wrong,
we all got that—but by then it was too late. Hazel talked about going to the cops, but we knew that couldn’t happen. We couldn’t go down for something we hadn’t done. So we talked her out of it.”

“But you stopped playing the games?”

“For a while. But David . . . David just kept pushing. He loved the ones where we got inside someone’s head. He got off on messing with people’s lives.” Tony shut his eyes momentarily. “David was fucked up, bottom line. It became more and more clear. That’s why Katy had been wary of him, and thinking back, I knew that’s what the look she gave him in the bar that first time had meant. She knew him when they were teenagers, maybe knew things about him that we didn’t. I didn’t understand a lot of this until it was too late. We said there could be no more deaths. And there weren’t. But David kept ramping it up, year after year. The games had become the main thing he cared about. And each time it happened, the games got bigger and more complicated. David started to bring in hired hands to run the show in the background, like your friend over there.”

I glanced at Jane again.

“She’s not my friend,” I said.

“There were larger casts each time. Longer lead-ins. More and more ornate. It got . . . it got a little out of control. And . . . look, Bill, maybe you’d have been the same if you were part of the group. You’re an operator, right? I’ve seen that in you. You know what you want, you’re going for it. You’re all about trying to bend the world to fit. You’d have enjoyed the games, too.”

“No,” I said. “I wanted to be someone, yes, but I’m not like you. And so now one of the people whose life you
fucked up
decided to come back and make you all pay, right?”

“That may be so.”

“Good. I wish I’d known all this when I met him. I’d’ve shaken his hand. So—is that all? We done?”

Tony shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”

“You don’t think you deserve what’s coming to you?”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “There’s a death on my conscience, always will be. Katy was a waster, but she didn’t deserve to die. But I mean
that’s not what’s going on right now
. That bottle of wine you gave me, and the one your wife drank. How long ago did you buy those?”

“I can’t remember,” I said. “A month. Probably closer to six weeks when my post went up asking around about it. Why?”

“It wasn’t part of the game.”

“What do you mean?”

“We don’t know who set that up. We weren’t even started on this year’s game six weeks ago, and the scenario was always initially sketched out by Marie. You’d been picked as the target, but nothing else had been put in place. And a month ago Hunter was still in jail.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“There’s something else going on,” Marie said. “As soon as David went missing, we pulled the plug. Called Jane, told her to cease and desist. But it didn’t stop. Someone else is playing a different game.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know. My guess is Warner.”

“Why would he? I thought you guys were close.”

“We were,” Tony muttered. “But the last couple years, it seemed like he was getting tighter and tighter wound. I started to distance myself. There’s a chance he found out about a big condo deal Peter and I cut him out of. Marie’s theory is that he decided to pull us into the game ourselves, in revenge for going behind his back. Personally, I think he just did it for . . . fun.”

“So who killed Cassandra? You or these alleged other people, the ones playing to Warner’s new script?”

He frowned. “Who the hell is Cassandra?”

Marie looked equally confused.

“You didn’t tell me this because you think I’m owed, or because you feel bad,” I said. “You told me because you’re scared to death and you’re wondering if I made an arrangement with Hunter, or Warner, to hand you guys up. This isn’t about me. It’s still about you.”

“Did you make a deal?”

“No. But why me? What did I ever do to you? I
worked
for Peter Grant. I was
selling
your condos. I wanted to be somebody, but I was making money for you guys in the meantime. What did I ever do to make it ‘entertaining’ to screw up my life?”

“I’m sorry it happened. We can work things out.”

“No. This game’s over, Tony, and now someone’s coming for you. I don’t know who they are, and I don’t care, but good fucking luck to them.”

I turned and stormed away.

I heard Jane’s footsteps following. My legs were stiff. My head felt empty. I knew that if I didn’t get myself out of there then bad things were going to happen. A lot of me wanted to stay and let them happen, but I knew my life was fucked up enough.

As we got halfway down the stairs, I heard a voice call out above.

“Bill.”

It was Marie. She was standing at the top.

“This isn’t over yet,” she said. Her face was pinched. “There is no limit to what Warner will do. None at all. Go back to your house, get what you need, and then go. Go as far as you can, and go fast.”