Malevolent (7 page)

“So hungry,” her sister was saying, repeating it over and over like a mantra. For reasons that might be known only to her, Dolly had gone to elbows and knees on the hardwood floor.

Vincent chuckled. He pointed to Dolly’s rather large posterior sticking into the air and stretching her shorts fabric to new limits. “It looks to me like a fast wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen to some here.”

Germaine wordlessly looked away from Dolly’s exposed view.

Vincent touched her arm and, my, that felt good. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you or insulted your sister. I have very deep feelings for both—” He stopped and swept the room with his arm, now taking in Mama dozing in her recliner. “For all
three
of the Marberry women. I promise you that everything will work out fine. Just…be strong.”

Germaine caught movement from the corner of an eye, Tampa Jack leaping to the headrest of Mama’s chair. She watched the cat run its pink tongue along her mother’s earlobe like an affectionate dog. Then, a flash of white teeth, a sharp cry and a splash of red blood. Germaine jumped to her feet, her vision clouding with the effort. She sputtered a curse that was never meant to be heard by the holy man next to her, but it sent the tall cat off the headrest and up the stairs in a blur of yellow motion.

“It’s all right, Jenny,” the minister soothed as he embraced the groggy elderly woman.

She whimpered in his arms. “He bit me,” she said, clutching her ear. Twin drops of blood spilled from between her fingers. “He’s never done that before,” she wept.

Germaine went for a rag and disinfectant while Dolly, who had actually managed to fall asleep in her awkward pose on the floor, broke into dreamy sobs.

“Vincent, how much longer?” Germaine asked as she swabbed out the meat of her mother’s ear. “It’s not so bad for me, but Mama’s old, Dolly doesn’t understand, and those cats…they don’t take hunger well.”

“You needn’t worry, Germaine, dear. I’ll be sure to tell you when penance is done.”

He touched her again, very gently on the back of her hand. Germaine Marberry had never known such warmth from any man as she felt from Vincent Applegate when he turned his most radiant smile on her.

Chapter Ten

On Thursday night, Bob Seger was headed to Katmandu and the Beer Belly Saloon was going ballistic.

It was nights like these, the beer flowing, the women moist with sweat and expectation, and the music as hot as the stale air, that assured Tim he’d dedicated his life to the right cause. Nights like this kept him going when the money was slow and Patty was unsparing with her critique of his career direction. Hell, could he even call it a career? He was having too damn much fun to call it a job.

Charlotte Taft sneaked up behind him, trapped him in her formidable pillow-tit embrace and planted a wet one on the base of his neck. “Goddamn, you’re right on the money tonight, kid. Keep it up and we’ll both retire young.”

Tim turned and grinned. Charlotte had gotten it right. Every selection was the right one tonight, each segue perfect, the dance floor thudding under the weight of too many writhing bodies.

He leaned in closer to Charlotte’s wide and sweaty face, trying to get a word in edgewise against Seger. He dodged a falling ash from the bar owner’s dangling cigarette and moved in again. “I got this vision of purgatory and it’s a lot like tonight,” he screamed.

She scrunched up her face. “Purgatory. That’s short-term hell, right?”

He shook his head. “Not in my mind. It’s part heaven, part hell. Kind of a way station where you get to hang out with dangerous characters who’re a lot more fun than the school librarians you hope to end up with long-term.”

“Uh huh,” said Charlotte. “Dancing makes ’em sweat, and sweat makes ’em drink beer. So in my mind, it’s all heaven tonight, son. Now haul your tail back there.”

Tim yelped as the hefty woman pinched his ass before moving on.

Seger finally made it to Katmandu, then Carly told the hot, swaying crowd about some guy who walked into parties like he was walking onto a yacht, and somehow it all sounded like one song, one endless seventies beer blast for the benefit of men and women dancing and drinking off their first or second foolhardy marriages.

Back behind his console, he jived between songs, switching effortlessly from sly innuendo to flat-out trash, to match each song’s tempo. He twisted volume and treble knobs and balanced speaker output to shape every song to the precise dimensions of the room.

Damn, he was good.

Patty could never understand this part of him. She saw him as some guy lugging around big speakers and turntables and electronic shit and crates of CDs and vinyl albums and a laptop with thousands of MP3 files. Her way of looking at things—he shlumped his stuff a few nights a week, in a van her day job had bought him, and played records like a schoolgirl from the fifties.

She rarely saw him like this, when he
was
the music. When he was an architect crafting melodious building blocks into walls of sound. A mathematician inventing a new geometry that reduced creation to rhythm, heavy on the bass.

Of course, he’d also had a fair amount of free beer.

Now Paul, John, George and Ringo were headed “back to the US, back to the US, back to the USSR,” their jet screaming at near-speed-of-sound decibels that brought raw, bleeding, ecstatic pain to the eardrums and hearts of the swaying masses.

Here’s to that next impending divorce, guys and gals.

He was grinning stupidly when the woman tapped his shoulder. He didn’t recognize her immediately. She wore an apologetic smile that said she’d been trying to get his attention and wouldn’t have touched him if she could have made contact in a less personal manner. It was the smile that fooled him.

“Hi,” he eventually shouted. “You’re…”

She pointed to one of his ears and then a 30-watt speaker, and grimaced.

“Just a second,” he said, hoping she could read lips. He cued up the long-playing “Run Through the Jungle” from CCR’s
Cosmos Factory
, then motioned her to follow him out the door to the back

When the steel door crashed shut, it was just them and the Dumpster.

“What a difference a door can make,” she said, smiling.

The sudden silence lent a flat tone to the timbre of her voice and the crunch of their feet on the gravel and cigarette butts.

He grinned, shrugged and moved from foot to foot. The Dumpster and the head-high cedar fence demarcated the Beer Belly property line. The brick building itself formed two high walls to seal them into their own small, private courtyard with an underlying odor of stale beer, nicotine and refuse.

“Sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

He thought a moment. “For this.” He waved an arm. “For the loud music. For having forgotten your name.”

“Melinda Dillon.”

“Detective, wasn’t it?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Did I really come across that formal yesterday morning?”

“I think the last time I was that intimidated by a woman, I was losing my virginity.”

“Good. I mean, that I affected you that way.” She looked around as if seeing their surroundings for the first time. Tim watched her shift, not minding at all the way the new pose accentuated one hip.

“Oh…someplace to sit.” He gestured to a picnic table partially encased in shadows where the single bulb over the steel door didn’t reach.

When they’d taken bench seats with the table between them, she said, “You know this place like a host. You work here regularly?”

Tim cocked his head in the rough equivalent of a shrug. “Couple nights a week for about the last five years, but with long stretches of nothing. Charlotte goes through these kicks where she’s gotta have a live band. Or it’s stand-up or even karaoke. But she always comes back to me. For one thing, there’s the economy. I’m cheaper than live.” He shrugged it off. “It’s been about a month steady this time. Thursdays and Fridays. She’s thinking seriously about adding country music on Wednesday nights. Not the white-hat, urban cowboy crap. The real thing. Which is why I’m trying to add to my music library. I’ve got almost nothing country.”

Tim paused for breath and found himself grinning self-consciously.

“What?” she asked him.

His roving fingers found the tabletop scars of countless cigarette stubbings. “I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that your visit has nothing to do with my Wednesday night plans.” He didn’t wait for an answer. He sprang to his feet and said, “Wait here.”

In one fluid motion, he jumped to the rim of the open Dumpster and propelled himself over the top of the fence, free-falling to the alley on the other side. Jogging to the front entrance of the loud bar, he squeezed in ahead of three moms in tight jeans and cued up a song.

“Who is she?” asked Charlotte as she watched him grab a couple cold ones from the cooler behind the bar. “She’s kinda cute, in a mature way. Cute like me, kid. Keep that in mind.”

Tim winked. He knew how Charlotte felt about Patty. The divorced bar owner was always pushing him at waitresses Frannie and Kim, or half-seriously trying to keep him for herself.

Back outside, Tim again apologized, this time for the sudden departure and left the bottles on the tabletop between them.

She shook her head. “Hate to sound like a total Girl Scout, but I can’t drink on the job.”

“So that’s not just a cliché, huh?”

“Nope.”

He wasn’t sure why he felt a little empty. What else would have brought her here tonight, except duty? He made a show of twisting off just one cap and raising the bottle in a salute. “That’s the great thing about having a position with no redeeming social value. You get to drink on the job.” He hurled the cap over his shoulder and heard it clink into the Dumpster.

Whatever the reason for her visit, he was glad she was here. It wasn’t sexual, exactly. Oh sure, he appreciated her tight little body, her slim nose and intelligent eyes. The set of her jaw. Even the subtle creases when she smiled and the few strands of gray at her temples to interrupt the sandy blondeness of her stylishly cut hair. And he certainly enjoyed the idea of being approached by an attractive woman in a sweaty bar while the music surged.

To fill what was on the verge of becoming an uncomfortable silence, Tim said, “Is there any news on that rape?” Thinking,
It’s what we’re gonna talk about anyway.

Melinda Dillon seemed to study the unopened bottle condensing into a puddle between them. She touched a finger lightly to its smooth neck, then drew her hand back. It was a nice hand, narrow, the fingers slim, nails just long enough to lend length and grace.

“It’s why I’m here, of course.” Her eyes flashed up at him for an instant before again finding interest in the beer bottle. “Although I’ve enjoyed our conversation so far.”

A little patronizing, maybe, but he didn’t think she meant it that way. “No problem.” He listened to an insistent bassline under his feet and tried to guess when the song would run out, but he was having a hard time concentrating.

“There are plenty of witnesses who saw the victim lying on the sidewalk with her skirt up, panties down.”

Tim blinked, not really wanting to hear this. After a little light banter, the evening seemed to have gone heavy awfully fast. He wondered if he was supposed to comment, but she continued.

“What we lack are witnesses to the act itself. Anyone who can tell us they saw another figure on her or running away as she screamed.”

Tim thought about that. “You’re saying…it might not have ever happened?”

She glared at the label of that unopened beer bottle. “The state lab in Richfield can find no vaginal bruising, no semen deposits on her body or clothing.”

“So. It never happened.”

“Maybe,” she said quietly, somehow making the single word about four syllables long. Then she flashed him another look. “That is highly confidential.”

“Got it.” He heard—or felt—the bassline fade out.

“Do me a favor,” she said suddenly, pinning him with those know-everything eyes. “Let Griffin Solloway be your friend.”

The intensity of her gaze gave light to the darkness. He couldn’t think of a thing to say. Could only wait for her to explain.

She leaned hard on her braced elbows and came close enough to Tim for him to smell soap and shampoo, no perfume. “I
know
people. The victim—I can’t give you her name—lives with her mother and a mentally challenged sister. Freud would have a field day in that house, but she’s not crazy. The victim, I mean. The others…” Melinda rolled her shoulders. “The others in that family I’m not so sure about, but the victim isn’t the type to hike her panties down just for attention. If you ask me how I know, I’d have to say it’s just instinct. And I’ve been wrong before.”

“But you said there’s no sign of—”

“No sign of rape. And for that reason, as well as the general oddness of that home, I was ready to write the whole thing off earlier.” She stared at the capped beer bottle on the table between them and seemed to consider picking it up. “But there’s something nagging me to stick with it awhile longer. What if someone—your friend—
was
involved? Somehow. Didn’t rape her, probably, but got the job started before getting scared away by the screaming.”