Malevolent (22 page)

“Sure,” she mumbled. “I’m leaving.”

Of course she was mistaken. The cheap bracelet was certainly
similar
to her mother’s, but didn’t every American tourist come back home with a green bracelet masquerading as jade?

“Dr. Valdez,” her guard mumbled as she straightened up, obviously trying to tell her that his orders were to take her directly to the good doctor without detouring through someone’s private room.

“Yes, okay,” she said, forcing herself to glance once more at the bed on her way out, if only to apologize to the poor woman whose suffering she’d ogled.

And then her head exploded and the lump-size growth in her breast beat with a pulse of its own. The bed stood rumpled and abandoned. The bags contained no nourishment and dangled from empty tubing. There was no whooshing or beeping machinery, just empty silence. No shape under the scattered covers. No beckoning hand with bracelet.

It had all slipped away as rapidly as Melinda’s mind seemed to be slipping from its moorings.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The precinct police station was housed in a brick building that didn’t appear to have as much square footage as the parking lot outside. He expected to be confronted by a scene out of any urban police drama—sullen career criminals sprawled handcuffed to chairs while gum-chomping hookers swore at rumpled cops as they hunted and pecked at electric typewriters. He’d hear phones ringing and young hoods and the token innocent guy wailing for mothers or justice or vengeance. The smells of urine and puke would bring tears to the eyes.

Jesus, he wasn’t looking forward to this.

He opened the door to find himself in a small waiting area with two low tables, empty but for two women talking in Spanish. Across the room was a wall posted with safety messages and a service counter, beyond which he could see a little activity. Very little. A uniformed cop on a phone who kept getting interrupted by a second cop, the first cop having to repeatedly put his hand over the mouthpiece and wave off his friend.

The cop doing all of the interrupting sat at the desk behind the counter and just kept talking while he shuffled through papers. He looked up. “Help you?”

“Vincent Applegate? I’m here to pick up William Tatum. I called ahead.” Sounding like he was claiming a hotel reservation.

The cop behind the counter kept shuffling his papers. He mumbled something to the cop on the phone behind him, but Vincent couldn’t hear it. The cop on the phone didn’t seem to either.

Vincent hadn’t known what to expect when William had called. It had been about twelve thirty on Thursday evening—no, make that Friday morning—and everyone in the Applegate household had been sound asleep. It hadn’t made much sense, the call, beyond the fact that it would cost William five hundred dollars he didn’t have if he didn’t want to spend a second night in jail. At that point, Vincent had asked to speak to someone in charge.

“I talked to someone awhile ago,” he said now. He held up a credit card as if it might explain everything.

It didn’t. The cop’s face remained impassive.

“Whoever it was said I could use Visa.”

The cop said, “Tatum,” but whether it was a question or a statement was unclear.

Vincent thought there must be something more to say, but he’d only been awake for the last half hour or so, so he set the credit card down on the counter and waited.

The old cop grunted. He grabbed the plastic, then began to peck away at the computer at his desk. He grunted something else to the younger cop with a phone still attached to his ear. The younger cop nodded, maybe to his partner, maybe to whoever was on the other end.

Vincent stepped away from the counter and plopped down on a stiff vinyl couch. He stared with glassy-eyed disinterest at framed photos of current or past police captains that decorated the walls.

He had time to memorize all of those faces before the door swung open and the old cop plowed toward him. “Tatum,” he barked. “William Tatum. Sign here.”

As if his cue was the calling out of his name, a very weary-looking man dragged himself into view behind the cop.

Vincent signed everywhere he was told and reclaimed his credit card.

“Tatum,” the cop growled again, as if the word was the only one in his vocabulary.

Vincent drove in stony silence, confident that his extreme annoyance was justified and that it was his passenger’s responsibility to get the conversation rolling. As a result, their silence went unbroken except for road directions—“Take the next right”—all the way to the Tatums’ apartment on a dead-end street off of West 25th in Ohio City.

Vincent found a parking space on the curb. He shut off the engine and listened to it tick. The night air was cool and drizzly enough to have required a few swipes of the wipers. The two men sat in silence and watched the glass fog over with a rain so fine they couldn’t see it fall. It looked like the glass was sweating.

The last thing Vincent wanted was to be sitting long after midnight in this questionable neighborhood. Not with Sandy and the kids home alone, a thought that brought Vincent around to his sleeping wife and their half-empty bed.

“Thanks.” That said, the door opened and his passenger slipped out and closed the door after him.

The hell?
thought Vincent as he watched William Tatum plod wearily toward a narrow, high house. Vincent just watched until the man in his financial custody was nearly out of sight, then he let out a breath of exasperation and climbed out of his car to follow.

William must have heard him, the two of them taking the exterior metal stairs to the second-floor apartment, but William didn’t react. However, he left the door open for Vincent as he clicked on an overhead light.

The front room was rather neat, but that had less to do with the housekeeping than with the fact that it was nearly cleaned out. A cooler occupied the center of the floor and served as a stand for a small lamp without shade or bulb. There were no drapes on the windows, and the one bookcase stood empty under the landlord’s-special, avocado carpeting. Vincent could also see into the next room, where clothing was folded and piled neatly against a wall.

“She’s not here, is she?” Vincent said. Meaning Candy.

William plopped cross-legged on the floor next to the cooler. He smiled, shook his head and removed the lamp from its lid so he could reach in.

Vincent could hear water that had once been ice sloshing around in there before William pulled out a dripping can and gently shook off excess moisture. He snapped the tab and sucked deeply. When he’d drained what must have been half the can, he opened the cooler once more and cocked an eyebrow at Vincent.

His first instinct was to turn him down. Drinking beer more than a half hour after you’ve been to sleep struck Vincent as being nearly as wrong as having it for breakfast. But he also saw it as an opportunity to talk, so he nodded, accepted a beer can and grimaced as he let his long body slide to a sitting position on the thinly carpeted floor. His back ached and ass throbbed almost immediately.

As a social worker trying to find employment for ex-cons in an impossible economy, Vincent was hardly a virgin at pulling clients out of the clutches of the law—even in the middle of the night—but he couldn’t remember ever feeling so grumpy about it. Maybe he was just getting too damn old for this.

Or maybe all of the previous times he’d left his bed in a hurry he’d trusted that his side of it would remain empty.

Which was paranoia speaking, he knew. But just because you’re paranoid, someone had famously said, doesn’t mean they’re
not
out to get you. He forced his dark thoughts aside to focus on the man squatting across from him and digging into the cooler for yet another brewski.

Vincent had wasted enough time waiting for him to speak. He opened his own can and took a couple delicate swallows. “I take it you and Candy had a fight and she left.”

William’s expression broke into a grin or a grimace. Little of both. “Gone. Left when I called her yesterday from the police station. Just like she tole me she was going to do.”

Vincent thought about this. “If they picked you up yesterday, why didn’t you call me right after Candy turned you down?”

“Because you’re the last person I wanted to see.”

Vincent watched the man’s long jaw almost break into another grin, but not quite make it. There was another emotion jockeying for position on his face. It took Vincent a few seconds to identify it as fear. He set aside his own hurt feelings at the other man’s remark and said, “When you called, I didn’t quite understand what the charges were. Can you go over it again?”

Beating out a quick pattern with his long fingernails on the aluminum can, William said, “Filing a false police report,” shrugging as though his intent was obvious.

He grinned his big grin at Vincent’s blank-eyed stare. “Candy’s mama said the relationship would come to no good, and damn if she wasn’t right. That was even before I got sent to Lucasville on the coke charges. The irony is, all while her mom was telling Candy to stay away from me, Candy was warning me away from her own brother, Andy. Said
he
was only going to get me in trouble.”

William tucked his head and chuckled in a way that didn’t show any of his mouth. He stared at the cooler, and burped long and low. “I hung out with him anyway ’cuz he was the only one in the goddamn family who’d accept me. He was fun too, I gotta admit. We’d go out drinking. Just the two of us, me ’n Andy, and Candy’d be laying there in bed, all cold and silent, when I got back. We were living together by then, which meant none of her family would talk to any of us. ’Cept Andy, of course. Lucky me.”

William stared again at the cooler, but this time reached in and grabbed another. He wiped it dry on his shirttail before opening it. “Me ’n Andy, we did a little coke and then a little more, and I got to coming home later and later and sometimes not at all.”

Vincent waited for more, but that seemed to be the end of it. William making years of bad choices and endless regrets sound as easy as that.

Vincent shifted uncomfortably, longing for his bed as he watched the other man either staring into his own lap or dozing off. He figured he could tiptoe quietly out of that depressing and mostly empty apartment, but he had to know.
Had
to know.

He cleared his throat. “You didn’t go to prison for three years just for snorting coke, right?”

William looked up, startled, like he’d forgotten he had a visitor. Vincent assumed he hadn’t slept well during his latest stay in jail. “No.”

William wiped his nose with the back of a finger as if a memory impulse. He said, “Man, those was horrible times, and I want ’em back sometimes, so bad. That’s what that shit do to you.”

His genuine grief cut through Vincent’s impatience with the man. “So it wasn’t a user’s quantity they caught you with,” he said softly.

“Good
 
ole Andy,” William murmured. “He thought of hisself as some kind of businessman dealer, but all he did was sell enough to earn him a set of mag wheels for his classic Trans Am, buy drinks for everyone in the bar and date the ladies. Rest of his earnings went straight up his nose.”

“You were dealing with him,” Vincent said, prodding the story along.

“Not really. Sometimes I’d pass along packages to his friends as favors ’cuz he was giving me my shit for free. That’s what happened the night I got caught.” William rubbed a hand across his face. “There was a party somewhere. I was drunk, I was high, don’t even know all the shit I took. At some point I remember Andy calling me over and handing me a plastic packet. You know, those resealable pouches you put leftovers in? Only this one had blow. When the cops stopped me for weaving, there it was, right there on the passenger seat. Tell the truth, I’d forgotten it was there. Ain’t that something?”

The way he talked, it sounded more like a stupid stunt gone wrong than felony-weight possession, which is what it obviously turned out to be.

“What about now?” Vincent asked, anxious to get back to present day. “What got you in trouble this time?”

William leaned an elbow on the cooler lid and stretched out so he lay almost supine. “Well, me and Andy got together, of course.” Like it had been inevitable.

“Andy didn’t go to prison when you did?”

“One thing I ain’t is a snitch.”

Which would explain the hard time.

“I wasn’t too surprised Candy left,” said William, the floodgates of conversation seemingly having opened. “She stuck by me in prison, even married me in there. Our wedding night was actually a wedding hour in a cell with guards snickering on the other side. Every girl’s dream, huh? But the one thing she did say was, ‘you hang around with my brother again, I’m outta here.’” William looked around the cleaned-out apartment. “Wasn’t bluffing, was she?”

Still more background,
still
not getting them much closer to recent events. “So, the other night,” said Vincent.

“We went drinking, what else? I was the one calling him, so I can’t blame him for making contact. Thing is, I really do like the bastard. I never had a brother and neither did he.”

“But you didn’t get in trouble for drinking, did you,” Vincent prodded.

“No. It was when some goddamn Arab at a convenience store on Clark Avenue refused to sell us any more beer. That’s when the trouble began. You ever hear of a Arab who won’t sell you beer just ’cuz you’re hammered? Me neither. But this Arab tells us he’s gonna call the cops. So Andy gets this idea, since Mohammed there wants the cops so bad, why don’t we get them for him?”