Murder One (17 page)

Loving released Matthews. “We were just having a little chat, boys. That’s all.”

Matthews’s lips curled. “He snuck up behind me and tried to jump me. Let’s show him what happens to people who mess with the force!”

Loving didn’t look scared. “You know, Matthews, you’re a lot braver now that you’ve got three other guys backing you up. A minute ago, you looked as if you were gonna piss your pants. In fact, I think maybe you did.”

“He was trying to rough me up,” Matthews informed his friends. “Scare me off.”

Loving rolled his eyes. “The only thing I’m tryin’ to do is investigate. Which technically is the job of the police. But since you didn’t do it, I have to.”

Matthews was incensed. “Are we gonna put up with this kinda talk?
Are we?
”

Loving turned toward the others. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to Joe McNaughton. What really happened. I’d think you boys might be interested in that, being friends of Joe’s and all. But I guess you’re more interested in railroading some little teenage girl. Or her attorney.”

“That attorney tried to make us look like idiots,” Callery said.

“That attorney just did what he’s supposed to do. This business of puttin’ the Squeeze on him is idiotic. Just because you’ve got one angry moron over here doesn’t mean you all have to be angry morons.”

“Are we gonna listen to this?” Matthews bellowed. “Are we gonna let this scumbag talk to us this way?”

“You’re, really desperate for a fight, aren’t you?” Loving lowered his voice a notch. “Well, I tell you what, you little twerp. Maybe, just maybe, you’re gonna get your wish. Except it ain’t gonna be you and three buddies. It’s gonna be you and me. Period.” He smiled broadly. “Now that’ll give you something to dream about at bedtime, won’t it?”

Loving turned his attention to the others. “What I said before still goes. I know you know what’s been goin’ down. You ought to come clean. It’s the right thing to do, and some of you owe it to Ben to do the right thing.”

“You’re full of crap,” Matthews growled.

“Oh yeah? Well, I know this. If Kincaid knew something that could help you—any of you—when someone had trumped up charges against you, he wouldn’t hesitate a second to come forward. No matter what the cost. If he could help you, he would.” He paused, giving each of them a sharp look “It’s a pity none of you courageous do-gooders quite rises to his level.”

Without warning, Loving swung around and jabbed the sole of his shoe into Matthews’s backside. Matthews screamed, clutching his rear.

“Consider that payback,” Loving said. He started moving away before any of the others felt honor bound to intervene.

“That hurt like hell!” Matthews shouted, still holding himself. “What are you wearing?”

Loving lifted his foot and turned his heel up so they could see. “Cleats, you sorry son of a bitch. Didn’t I tell you I was on my way to a baseball game?”

“L
EARNING ANYTHING?”

Ben felt delicate fingers light on his shoulders and give him a tender squeeze. “Christina, I’m glad you’re—”

He turned. The woman standing behind him was not Christina, but his client, Keri Dalcanton.

He immediately stiffened, embarrassed. “Sorry. Didn’t recognize your voice.” He closed the Catrona file, which he’d been pouring through since he returned to his office.

He pushed away from the conference table. “I didn’t know you were here. Kind of late, isn’t it?”

She gave a little shrug, which did interesting things to her close-fitting white T-shirt. “I don’t know. I guess I was feeling lonely and … well, worried. Thought I’d see how the case was going.” Her eyes were hooded and her voice strained. She struck Ben as being troubled, and unhappy, and … vulnerable.

Ben reached out sympathetically. Like a typical lawyer, he sometimes got so wrapped up in the difficult and time-consuming business of preparing a case for trial that he forgot there was another person to whom the case was more important than it ever would be to him—the defendant. “This must be awfully rough for you.”

She didn’t argue. “I—I just miss having someone to talk to.” Was it fear, Ben wondered, or uncertainty, or simply pervasive sadness—the strain of carrying an almost impossible burden for far too long. “You know I lost my job, and after all the publicity, none of the girls wanted to have anything to do with me. They were afraid the cops might go after them if they stood behind me, which was a real possibility. My parents are dead and Kirk has disappeared and I don’t know my neighbors and … and … it gets lonely sometimes.”

“I can imagine. I remember when I first moved to Tulsa. Didn’t have a place to stay, didn’t know anyone. Couldn’t stand my job, not to mention most of my coworkers. I was pretty lonely. I only had one friend. Fortunately, it was Christina, and she came over about three times a day.”

Keri smiled a little. “What’s with you two anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Are you … close?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Intimate?”

“Me? And Christina?” Ben pressed a hand against his chest. “Oh, no. Just friends. Very good friends. We’ve been through a lot together.”

“Is there … someone else in your life?”

“Sure. There’s my mother, and my sister, my staff, my tenants …”

She laughed, then sat down in the chair beside him. “You know what I mean.”

It felt to Ben as if the temperature in this small conference room was rising sharply. He decided to change the subject. “How did you end up in Tulsa?”

“Oh, you don’t want to hear about me. It’s so boring.”

“You’re wrong. I do. Please.”

Keri cast her lovely blue eyes up toward the ceiling. “Well, you know I came from Stroud originally. You know where that is?”

“Sure. I see the signs every time I cross the turnpike.”

“Just a little flyspeck, compared to Tulsa anyway, but that was my hometown. My parents were killed in a car wreck while I was still in high school.”

“That must’ve been horrible for you.”

“It was. My daddy and I were close. I loved my mother, too, but—she was not like other mothers.”

“How do you mean? “

“She had a—a—mean streak, and for some reason, she always took it out on me. She liked to do cruel things to me. Even—nasty things. Ugly. Even when I was barely old enough to walk.”

“Keri—I—”

“It’s all right. It’s been a long time. Anyway, after they died, my brother Kirk and I got a job at the outlet mall. Probably half the town worked at the outlet mall.”

“Till the tornado came.”

“Right. I guess you’ve seen the pictures.”

Ben had. They looked as if a giant hand had swept down from heaven and ripped the guts out of the entire mall. He had never seen such horrible damage from a natural phenomenon.

“I guess we’re just lucky the tornado didn’t come during working hours. After that, there were no jobs anywhere in Stroud. I didn’t have anything to live on and neither did my brother. So we made our way to the ‘big city.’ Tulsa. Packed up everything I had in one suitcase and boarded a Greyhound. Except, as it turned out, there weren’t many jobs in Tulsa, either. Least none my daddy would’ve approved of.”

“How did you end up in that, um, gentlemen’s club?”

“Well, it seemed better than becoming a hooker, which is what happens to most of the sweet young things that come to Tulsa and can’t find work. I’d rather be bumping and grinding in a nice air-conditioned building than turning tricks on Eleventh Street.”

“Good point.”

“And to tell you the truth, I’ve always liked dancing, though I would’ve preferred to keep my shirt on. I love the music, the lights. It’s exciting.”

I’ll bet it was, Ben thought. Especially when you were on the stage.

“The guy who ran the joint was basically a sleaze, as you might expect, but at least he kept his hands off the girls. And he paid regular. I got a tiny place on the south side where Kirk and I could live. He’d fallen in with some church group, which was fine for him, but it didn’t bring any money home, so I was basically on my own.”

“Till you met Joe McNaughton?”

Her eyes turned downward. “Yeah.”

“How did you meet him?”

“Oh, pretty much like that cop was saying in court. He came to the club one night with a bunch of his buddies.”

“Must’ve been a rowdy bunch.”

“Oh, me and the girls always liked cops. They do tend to hoot and holler, but they don’t get vulgar and they keep their hands to themselves and they tip well. Especially if you let ’em slip it under your G-string.” Her face suddenly colored. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Relax. I’m your friend.” Ben placed his hand reassuringly on the side of her face and felt the warm smooth flow of her silvery hair. “So you met Joe at the club? “

“Outside, technically. After the show, after closing, he was waiting for me by the back door. I was almost out when I saw him in the alley.”

“What did you do?”

“I slammed the door shut and locked it, that’s what I did. Some of the other girls had had problems with stalkers, creeps who fall in love with them during the show and follow them around everywhere. I didn’t want to end up on a slab at the morgue.”

“But you must’ve changed your mind later.”

“Yeah, I did. Stupid me, huh?” She looked down, and Ben saw a glistening in the corner of her eyes. “He talked to me through the door, assured me he didn’t want to harm me. I opened the door a crack and he showed me his badge. Said he just wanted to get some coffee and talk. Said he’d meet me at the coffee shop if that would make me feel safer. Basically, he told me everything I needed to hear. Except for the minor detail that he was married.”

“He left that out?”

She nodded. “That was my big mistake, see. I thought he wanted a girlfriend, maybe even a wife. But what he really wanted was …” She turned away and didn’t finish her sentence.

“So you met him at the coffee shop?”

“Yeah. Denny’s, actually. Gross, I know, but nothing else was open.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh, he spun me some stories. Joe was a slick talker when he wanted to be. Knew how to charm a lady.” She almost smiled, but the impulse faded.

“What did he tell you?”

“Oh, you can imagine. Said I had a lovely smile.”

Yes …

“Told me I had the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen.”

Which, actually, you do …

“Said I had a perfect figure. Perfect! Can you imagine?”

Ben felt the inside of his mouth go dry. He’d had the same thought himself on many occasions.

“And here I was, still just eighteen, listening to all this sweet talk, seeing how strong and handsome he was, knowing he had a good job, knowing the thing I needed more than anything in the world was just—just a friend, you know? Someone I could … be with. So I wouldn’t be alone all the time.”

Ben felt an aching in his heart. All those lawyers, all those reporters, all those who had spilled so many words about this case—none of them had the slightest idea what this case was really about, or who Keri Dalcanton really was. She wasn’t a shady harlot or a manipulative hussy or any of that crap. She was a poor lonely girl forced out on her own who made the mistake of trusting someone who was not worthy of her trust.

“How long before you started seeing him … regularly?”

She lowered her head. “Not long. He didn’t make any bones about the fact that he wanted a—a—physical relationship. You know. And he wasn’t talking about holding hands, either.”

Ben’s eye twitched.

“He explained to me that he was a special man, and a special man had special … tastes.” She spoke the word as if it left an unpleasant residue in her mouth. “And slowly but surely, he started introducing me to his world of kinky sex. He liked it rough. Rough and weird. Raw. He wanted all the perverted stuff he couldn’t get from his wife, although I didn’t know about her at the time. Bondage. Whips and chains. Black leather.”

She had to avert her eyes to continue talking. “And what did I know? I was just a little girl from Stroud. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. I kept wondering: Is this what everyone does behind closed doors? He’d set up little plays, you know, and we’d act them out. Like, we pretend we’ve never met each other before. Or we pretend we’re in some exotic locale. Didn’t really matter—they all ended up the same place. I’d be the master and he’d be the slave. He’d be on his knees in front of me, begging for mercy. And I wouldn’t give him any. We’d pretend that he’d been bad and had to be punished. That was the part I hated most. But he loved it. He needed it. It was the only thing that got him …” She closed her eyes. “You know.”

Ben leaned closer. “Keri, you don’t have to tell me this …”

“No, I want to. Really. I’ve kept so much locked up for so long, it feels good, in a strange way. To get it all out. To try to make someone understand. Those reporters and the D.A., they insinuated that I was the sex fiend, like I led him down the road to degradation. But it wasn’t me. I hated wearing those costumes and … doing those things.” Her head fell, and it seemed to Ben as if all the life had gone out of her. “But I loved Joe. I needed him.”

“When did he finally tell you he was married?”

“He never did.”

“What? But he must’ve—”

She shook her head. “I didn’t find out until his wife, Andrea, showed up at my door.”

Ben looked aghast. “No.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” A silver tear trickled down her cheek. “I had no idea it was coming. I was just watching television, doing my daily exercises. Believe me, when you have to take off your clothes in front of a crowd of guys every night, you have serious motivation to exercise. I went to the door and there she stood. Andrea. Full of fury and outrage, ready to tear me apart—and I didn’t even know who she was or what she was talking about. She came over wanting to fight me, started hitting me and hurling insults, and all I could do was stand there and cry. Just stood there like a little baby and cried. I felt so betrayed, and so … used. Used up. She really wanted to hurt me, but she soon saw there was nothing she could do to me that would hurt me any worse than what Joe had done. Nothing in the whole world.”