Natalie's Revenge (13 page)

Rojas tensed and his mouth tightened. “Yes.”

“Eight years ago he died under, shall we say, mysterious circumstances.”

No longer relaxed and comfortable, Rojas said nothing.

“How well did you know Natalie Brixton?”

“Is that what this is about? Natalie?”

“I talked to some people and they said you two were friends.”

“In high school we were, yes.”

“When did you last talk with her?”

Rojas examined his fingernails as if some alien form of life had taken up residence there. “I haven’t talked to Natalie in years. After her high school graduation she left Pecos.”

He’s lying
. “Do you know where she is now?”

“Detective Renzi, I told you I haven’t talked to her in years. How would I know where she is?”

“Maybe she sent you a postcard. Where was she the last time you talked to her?”

“I need to say goodnight to my boys.” Rojas abruptly rose from the couch and left the room.

He knows something, Frank thought, something about Natalie Brixton.

Five minutes later Rojas returned and sat on the couch, not looking cooperative now, more like belligerent. “I can't help you, Detective Renzi. I haven't seen Tex Conroy in years. Same with Randy Brixton.”

“Where do you work?” A diversionary softball to mollify the man.

“I own my own business. I design videogames."

Frank gestured at the well-furnished room. "Looks like your business is doing well."

"It was rough at first, but then one of my games took off." With obvious pride, Rojas said, "Six years ago I hired two software engineers and moved my business to Odessa to be nearer the airport. Now that we have a website, we ship worldwide. Last year we grossed twelve million. This year looks even better. Our next generation of games will be out in time for Christmas.”

“Good for you. Everyone in Pecos speaks very highly of you. I talked with Ellen Brixton today. She said you were Natalie’s only friend.”

“Ellen.” Rojas frowned. “How’s she doing? I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“She’s working at Longhorn Jack's. She’s got a son. But no husband.”

“Ellen had it rough.”

“Is that what Natalie told you?”

“Yes," Rojas snapped, "that’s what Natalie told me. We were good friends in high school. It was not a romantic relationship.” He paused, seemed to struggle for control. “The Brixtons took her in after her mother was murdered. But I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that.”

“I think you know some things that you’re not telling me.”

“Maybe I do. Try this. Randy Brixton was making his sister give him blowjobs.”

The gut-punch revelation made his skin crawl. “Did Ellen tell you that?”

“No. Ellen told Natalie. Natalie told me.”

He thought about what Ellen said when he asked if she missed her brother.
Not really. Randy was a shit.
And Tex?
Good riddance to both of them
. If what Rojas said was true, Randy was worse than a shit. He was a rapist. One who’d died under mysterious circumstances.

And the person with him at the time, Natalie Brixton, had chosen a motto that said:
Freedom and justice for all
.

But that didn’t prove she pushed Randy off the cliff.

He took out a business card and gave it to Rojas. “If you think of anything helpful, call my cell phone anytime. And if you hear from Natalie, tell her I’d like to speak with her. Wherever she is.”

He got back angry eyes and a clenched face. “I don’t expect to be hearing from Natalie.
Wherever
she is.”

Maybe Rojas knew where Natalie was and maybe he didn't. But Frank was certain of one thing. Rojas had lied when he said he hadn’t heard from Natalie since high school. He’d take that to the bank.

NATALIE

199
5
1996

The summer before my senior year I got a job at Longhorn Jack’s. It was hard work lugging trays of steaks dinners and cocktails around, but the tips were good. I saved as much as I could. I still didn't know who killed my mother, but I figured I’d need money to find out. And do something about it.

Randy went out drinking with his friends every night to pick up girls, so on my nights off I got to watch
N.Y.P.D. Blue
. I still liked the cop shows best. In June the girls in my class got excited when Reba McEntire won a Country Music Award. Big deal. She's not half as good a singer as Joan Jett.

Ellen gave me a graduation present, a true-crime book,
The Journalist and the Murderer
by Janet Malcolm. Sometimes I think Ellen is smarter than she lets on. Gabe took me to the graduation party and told me about the videogame he was designing. We had a great time.

One night in July when I ate dinner at home on my night off, Jerry said UPS was sending him to Dallas for five days to learn how to be a supervisor. “Then I’ll be making more money,” he said. Faye's face got that pinched look. Maybe she thought Jerry was taking his lover with him to Dallas.

Later I got on my laptop and checked the weather forecast. The first four days he'd be gone it was supposed to rain, but Saturday was supposed to be sunny and hot. The next day I told Faye I wanted to treat her and Randy and Ellen to a picnic while Jerry was away. Because they’d been so nice to me all these years. It killed me to say it, but I put on a happy face like I’d learned in acting class and said, “I know a great place. Randy can drive us.”

On Saturday I bought a big order of Popeye’s fried chicken and stopped at a bakery for an apple pie. Randy loved fried chicken and apple pie. At 4:30 I had him drive us to the place where Gabe and I had our picnics near the bluff above the Pecos River. It was hot but we sat at a redwood picnic table under a shade tree and ate dinner as the sun went down.

Faye and Ellen didn’t eat much but Randy ate like a pig, as usual. He also polished off a six-pack of beer. Faye drank the OJ cocktail she’d brought in her thermos. Nobody was talking and thinking about what I planned to do made me nervous. The fried chicken sat in my stomach like a lump of lead.

After Randy pigged out on apple pie, I took out my camera. “Wow, look at that beautiful sunset. Let me take your picture, Randy.”

“Here?” he said, and scrunched up his face like an idiot.

“No. Over by the bluff.”

I left the table and waved for him to follow. Randy kept grumbling that he was hot, but I kept walking until we went around a bend. When I looked back, Faye and Ellen were out of sight.

I pointed to a clump of bushes up ahead. “That’s the best spot.”

The best spot to do what I had decided to do, the place where you could look over the bluff and see the jumble of rocks piled up beside the river.

“Stand over there near the bluff and look handsome.”

What a joke. His Harley-Davidson T-shirt had yellow sweat stains in the armpits, and his legs were fat and hairy below his cutoff jeans.

But I had to get him in the right position.

He went over to the bluff and faced me.

“Closer to the edge, so I can get the sunset and the river in the picture.”

He backed up three paces. Better but still not close enough.

I let the camera dangle from the strap around my neck and took the .38 Special Gabe got me out of the pocket of my jeans. It's small and easy to hide and it felt good in my hand. Especially when I thought about the day Randy broke Muffy's neck and felt the iceberg, cold and hard, inside me.

“What’s that, you little gook? You got yourself a pea shooter?”

Randy looked nervous—he'd left his gun in the glove compartment of his car—but not worried. Yet. I gripped the gun with both hands and aimed it at his chest. “You killed Muffy.”

That wiped the smile off his face. “Cut the shit, Natalie.”

“Back up, Randy.” Now he was two feet from the edge of the bluff

“You’re crazy. I always knew it. Your mother was crazy too.”

I wanted to shoot him, but that would be a mistake.

And I didn’t intend to make any mistakes. Not today.

“Does it make you feel important when you make your sister give you blow jobs?”

“Shut up, you gook bitch. I never made—”

“Yes you did. She told me. You’re disgusting, Randy. Back up.”

“Put the gun away.” He clenched his fists and took a step forward.

I pulled the trigger. He yelped and grabbed the lower part of his leg. I hadn't intended to hit him, but I had to make him understand that I'd shoot if he didn't do what I said.

“Back up or I’ll shoot you in the heart.”

Now there was real fear in his eyes. He held up his hands, palms out. One had blood on it. “Don’t shoot. I didn’t mean it.”

“Yes you did. You meant to hurt me when you killed Muffy and you meant to hurt me when you told your friends my mother was a prostitute. And what you did to Ellen was worse. You made your own sister give you blow jobs.” All the while I kept the gun aimed at his heart. “Back up or I’ll shoot.”

He backed up a step. Now his heels were at the edge of the bluff, no place to go but down. “Please,” he said. Now he looked terrified.

I loved it. Now I was in control.

I fired a shot over his head to scare him and it worked just the way I'd planned. He lost his balance and windmilled his arms to keep from falling.

But he couldn’t. He screamed as he fell over the bluff.

My hands were shaking and my heart was beating faster than it did after a taekwondo workout. I crept to the bluff and looked down.

Fifty feet below me, Randy lay on the rocks. I had hoped that he would bounce off the rocks into the river and float away. He hadn’t, but I was pretty sure he was dead.

And I was glad.
Justice for Muffy and Ellen.

I did one of my taekwondo spin moves and hurled the gun out into the fast-flowing river. Then I ran back to Faye and Ellen.

When I got to the picnic table I was gasping for breath.

“Randy fell!” I shouted. “He fell over the bluff!”

Bleary-eyed from her vodka-and-OJ cocktail, Faye looked at me, mystified. Finally she said, “I think I heard shots.”

Ellen looked at me with her pale gray eyes. Her dead eyes.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” she said.

____

Three men from the Reeves County Sheriff’s department questioned me for hours, asking the same questions six different ways. But I stuck to my story. I told them Randy was fooling around near the edge of the bluff and he’d had a few beers (which was true) and he slipped and fell over the edge. Then I squeezed out some tears and they let me go.

Faye didn’t seem too upset about Randy. I think she was glad he was dead. I know Ellen was. I don't know how Jerry felt. Texas men don’t cry so Jerry kept up appearances at the funeral. He never asked me what happened. I figured the cops told him what I’d said.

A week after Randy's funeral I quit my job at Longhorn Jack's and brought my laptop to Gabe’s house. He says that even if you delete files on a computer, people can retrieve them. I told him I was leaving and gave him the laptop and asked him to make sure the hard drive got erased.

He said he would. Then we got in his car and went out for a beer.

Gabe looked sad, but I think he’d always known that I would leave Pecos someday. When I asked how his courses were going, he shrugged, like that wasn’t something he wanted to talk about right now.

When we went out to his car, I hugged him. “I love you, Gabe.”

“I love you too, Nat. I’ll miss you.”

His voice was husky and his eyes were wet. Mine were, too.

“We’ll always be best friends,” I said. "I'll email you.”

Gabe nodded, but I could tell he was working hard not to cry.

He didn’t ask where I was going. And he didn’t ask about Randy.

The next day I got on a Greyhound bus bound for New York City.

_____

199
6
1997

Two weeks after I got off the bus I took a one-week class at an exotic dance studio: Pole Dancing, Exotic Dance and Lap Sinsations. When the class ended I asked the teacher (her name was Val) if I could take the Professional Program. I said I was running out of money and I needed a job.

Val put her arm around me and said, “Honey, you are gonna be HOT.”

Like we were girlfriends. I was amazed. I’d never had a girlfriend. The next day Val took me shopping. I bought two pairs of 5-inch stiletto heels and a bunch of glittery pasties and G-strings and took the Intensive Professional Course. My bra size was 36-D now, but my breasts were small compared to some of the girls. When I mentioned this to Val, she winked and said, “Honey, it’s what you do with ‘em that counts.”

At the end of August she helped me get a job at an entry-level club. “Not a dive," she said, "a club where you can get experience and make decent money.”

And did I need money. I was renting a room at a boarding house and my savings were almost gone. I auditioned for the manager of Cheetahs, a club in Manhattan near a subway stop, and got a job dancing topless from three to seven. After my dinner break I danced from nine until two a.m. I called it dancing in the dark.

Dancing topless in front of strange men didn't bother me.  I was proud of my body. It was strong and supple, and my legs were slim and muscular from taekwondo. My long hair was an asset, too. I draped it over my breasts to make my strip sexier. The tips were good: lots of dollar bills, fives for a good dance, ten for a lap dance.

Val warned me never to go home with a client. I think she worried because I was young. Val was twenty-eight. I was eighteen, but I told her I was twenty-one. She also warned me not to get into drugs. As if I would. I had to stay healthy and strong and focused. Mom had been waiting eight years for me to avenge her. Every October on the anniversary I did my Veneration of Elders ritual. I'd light an incense stick and sit in front of Mom’s picture and chant my taekwondo oath:
I shall be a champion of justice and freedom.

Then I'd
promise Mom that I'd find her killer and punish him.

I sent Gabe an email from an Internet Café to let him know I was okay. I didn’t say where I was or what I was doing. At the end I wrote: I LOVE U, IRS. Our private joke. My birthday is April 15th, tax day. I wondered if he'd finished designing his videogame. I missed Gabe a lot.

The boarding house where I lived had a kitchen, but it stank of stale food so I ate at a cafeteria two blocks away. That’s how I met Darren. One Sunday it was crowded and he asked to sit at my table and we got talking. We started meeting for breakfast every day. Darren was an actor, but he didn't get many acting jobs. To support himself, he modeled for clothes catalogs. He showed me his page in a Sears catalog. He had dirty-blond hair and an average face, but he looked great in a suit. I don't know if he was a good actor or not, but he took a lot of auditions. The second week he asked me out to a movie.

I liked him. Not as much as Gabe, but he was fun to talk to, so I went. Darren loved foreign movies. We saw
The Full Monty
. It was hilarious; a bunch of unemployed Brits turned themselves into male strippers. Afterwards we ate pastrami sandwiches at a deli, and I told Darren I worked at a strip club. He didn’t seem shocked. “We do what we gotta do to survive,” he said.

I was thrilled when Dennis Franz won an Emmy for
N.Y.P.D. Blue
. He's great. He takes no shit from anyone. That's what Gabe said about me:
You take no shit from anyone, Natalie
. 

In October Darren invited me to his apartment. I knew what that meant, but I was eighteen and tired of being a virgin. I didn’t know what to expect. I mean, I knew how it worked, but Mom never got a chance to talk to me about sex. I still missed her terribly. I couldn't tell her about Gabe or Darren, couldn't ask her advice about how to dress. Or what to do when I was about to lose my virginity. I figured I'd just close my eyes and endure it, but Darren was gentle and considerate. He seemed surprised that I was a virgin but didn’t question me about it.

His apartment was tiny, but it didn’t stink of food. The next time I went there I asked how much the rent was. When Darren told me, I mentally divided it in half to see if I could afford it. I could, but I wanted him to suggest it. Six weeks later I moved in. It worked out great. Darren was cheerful and affectionate and very clean. He didn't leave hairs in the bathroom sink and he loved movies. On Thanksgiving we went to see
LA Confidential
. Kim Basinger played a call girl and two cops fell in love with her. I wondered if any of Mom’s customers had fallen in love with her.

I also wondered if anyone would ever fall in love with me.

Darren was nice, but I wasn’t in love with him. When we saw France Nuyen in
Angry Café
I didn’t tell Darren she was my idol. I didn’t want him asking about my heritage. Joan Jett was still my idol too. After I got the job at Cheetahs I bought a Walkman so I could listen to her CDs.