Nightbird (15 page)

“Was Trey Winters there when she put the dress on?”

“She said he was there earlier, and he left. That’s all I know.”

“Did she say he might be coming back?”

“She said he was a prick.”

Faye raised the beer bottle to her mouth. She didn’t hold the top of the bottle against her upper lip, as he’d seen many women
do; she put it entirely in her mouth. Head back, she drank. It was not a dainty sip.

Ryan said, “Did she ever say that there was anything sexual between them?”

“I didn’t mean a prick that way.”

“I know that. I was just thinking that maybe she confided in you. Sisters tell each other about their love lives, don’t they?”

“Some, I guess,” she said, and touched the bottle against her forehead, as if seeking relief from a fever.

“But not you two.”

“Blame that on our mother. Maybe if we had grown up together, we could have talked like that.”

“We have a witness who says she saw Winters sneaking into her apartment on a regular basis.”

“There you have it. You don’t need me.”

“You’re not helping, acting like this.”

“I thought you came here to see me. I thought we were simpatico.”

“We are,” he said. The beer tasted creamy smooth going down his throat, better than any beer he could remember. His taste
buds were wired, seemingly intense enough to delineate the malt from the hops.

“You have no idea how I feel,” she said.

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Of what, your deep hurt? Your pooch got hit by a car?” Then, after a deep, resigned sigh, she said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t
mean that.”

Ryan ignored her. “Gillian argued with Winters before she called you, we know that.”

“She said he was supposed to be on her side, but he wasn’t. She said he was a prick because he was making her take a drug
test, and she didn’t trust what was going on.”

“I thought you said she wasn’t worried?”

“She wasn’t. She said it was an insult.”

“Somebody is lying, Faye. They found cocaine in her apartment today.”

Ryan waited; the air was stale and difficult to breathe.

“No!” she screamed, and threw the bottle at Ryan. It smashed against the far wall. “No, no, no! That’s a fucking lie.”

Faye swung her fist at him, and he caught it as he was getting up from the chair. She pulled away, then flopped on the bed
and rolled onto her side.

“I agree with you,” Ryan said softly.

She lay there quietly, rubbing her right wrist, her black hair across her face. He remembered the first time he saw her sister,
her face was covered by her hair. Ryan sat back down.

“You have to talk about it,” he said. “Talking about it will make it easier.”

Faye was still. Except for the deep contractions of her chest she could have been dead.

“Then you start,” she said, her voice muffled. “You say what hurts you.”

The smell of spilled beer rose from the carpet. Ryan wondered if there was air enough for the grief of two.

“My son died a year ago,” he said with surprising ease to this woman he hardly knew.

“Oh, Jesus,” Faye said. She got off the bed and knelt in front of Ryan. She folded her arms across his thighs and leaned in
until she was inches away from his face. “I’m sorry. So sorry. Tell me what happened, please.”

He tried to lift her by her elbows.

“Please, please,” she said, pushing his hands away. “Please, help me. I don’t know how to deal with this. Just tell me I’m
not a freak.”

She smelled of cigarettes and a perfume that seemed astringent, more chemical than natural.

“You’re not a freak,” he said. “My son died in a hang-gliding accident in Utah last year. It still eats me up inside.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Did you hurt him? Was he mad? Not speaking, or something?”

“No. We got along fine.”

“Then why do you feel so bad?”

“Like you said about your sister. It’s about the things I missed. He missed. The things I didn’t say or do. I feel guilty
about that.”

“But you didn’t hurt him. You were a good father to him, right?”

“Not as good as I should have been.”

She leaned into him, and Ryan had to hold her to keep from falling backward. Her hair smelled of a fruity shampoo, the same
as her sister.

“Like what?” she said. “How were you bad to him?”

He didn’t have to think hard; he was a nightmare multiplex, a dozen horrors playing at all times. He told her about a Sunday
morning when his son was eight years old and getting ready for his first mass as an altar boy. Ryan had stopped going to church
years before, but he was dressed and ready to go this day. Then the phone rang. He answered it in the upstairs bedroom. It
was Joe Gregory, hot on the trail of something he couldn’t even remember anymore. What he did remember was pushing aside the
bedroom curtains and looking down into the backyard. His son was looking up at the window, his hair slicked down, his face
so shiny it glowed. He stood there, waiting. Looking up. Holding his black cassock and starched white surplice high, so it
wouldn’t touch the ground. With those skinny arms. Those big brown eyes. He saw those eyes in his sleep now. Hopeful, imploring,
frightened, but still loving him without condition.

“But that’s nothing,” Faye said. “He forgave you, right? He knew you really loved him.”

“When I got home that night he ran outside and jumped into my arms. Telling me all about it. When I put him down he kept holding
on to my leg. Hugging it, really squeezing. I looked down at him, and he had his eyes closed. That’s the way he always hugged,
even when he grew up, with his eyes closed.”

She put her head against Ryan’s chest and closed her eyes.

“Gillian made me promise not ever to tell this,” she said. “It was our secret. She told me that Trey Winters was her lover.
I didn’t want to betray her.”

“You didn’t betray anything,” Ryan said.

“Do you have a picture of your son?” she said.

He took the picture from his wallet. Rip about twelve, wearing a Baltimore Orioles warm-up jacket, the impish smile, winking
into the camera, his mouth full of the bubble gum he called his “chew.”

“He looks happy,” she said. “The big baseball player.”

“Biggest Oriole fan in New York.”

“You miss that, right?” she said. “Doing all the dad things, like I missed the sister things. I bet you played catch, stuff
like that.”

“Even when he was older. We shot baskets. Played golf. Went to ball games.”

Faye jumped up and ran into the kitchen. He heard her behind him, opening cabinet doors. She came back and stood in front
of him, holding a half-empty loaf of Wonder bread, the open end tied in a knot. She handed the bread to Ryan, then picked
up the signed Bobby Bonilla baseball bat. With one big step she bounded onto the unmade bed and faced him, swinging the bat.

“Pitch it,” she said.

“No, Faye. Don’t. You’ll break something in here.”

“I don’t care.”

“This is thoughtful, really,” Ryan said, getting to his feet. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

He reached out for the bat and took it as carefully as if it were a loaded gun. He put it against the wall. She jumped down
and snatched the bread from his hands, then she walked backward, stumbling over the covers on the floor. When she got as far
as the window she threw the bread. He caught it and held it.

“Wait,” he said.

“No, no,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Please don’t stop. This is good for both of us. Play catch with me.”

Ryan threw the half-empty bag of bread back to her. She caught it with her hands way out in front and threw it back with a
big, roundhouse motion. At first he thought it was silly, then he decided he would go along, because it would stop her from
questioning him about his son. Stop her from breaking his heart. It felt strangely good. A simple game of catch. The bag in
the air, yellow and blue circles on the wrapper floating like birthday party balloons, as it passed through the flickering
candlelight.

In the quiet of the room the only sound was the pop of a half-empty loaf of bread, caught and then thrown across an open bed
by a sad, aging cop and a young woman, in a frayed black slip, who’d been found and lost again.

W
hen the red-eye from JFK landed in Phoenix before dawn on Saturday, the pilot announced the temperature was 103 degrees. Summer
in the desert, he added, what else can you expect? Danny Eumont followed his fellow travelers through the wee-hour solitude
of Sky Harbor Airport. The terminal was silent except for the hum of vacuum cleaners running over Indian-blanket carpet.

“I can’t believe you didn’t bring sunglasses,” Lainie Mossberg from Tempe, Arizona, said. “You’d better buy a pair.”

Lainie Mossberg had boarded the flight in Denver, fresh from a taping session for a rock band she managed. In her late thirties,
she was the type of woman who’d come into a bar and take a seat under the TV, so men would look her way.

“I’m not buying sunglasses for one day,” Danny said. “Because I’m certainly not wearing them back in New York. Look like some
hipster doofus back there. Some West Coast wannabe.”

“You’re going to regret it,” Lainie said.

“I got your regret right here.”

“Let’s see it,” she said.

They were both light travelers. Lainie carried her purse and a small pink duffel. Danny’s only luggage was a black canvas
briefcase containing an electric razor, toothbrush, tape recorder, two notebooks, a change of socks, underwear, and a tin
of Altoid mints. Not even an extra shirt. He’d booked a room in the Phoenix Hilton but figured he might not even stay the
night.

“Is that blazer wool?” Lainie said, grabbing the sleeve of Danny’s jacket.

“Why, the old cattle rancher mentality? I don’t want to start a range war or anything.”

“You’ve got a lot to learn, Eumont.”

She said she’d give him his first lesson on the ride home, a ride he hadn’t offered or considered. But when she puckered her
pouty lips into a promise, he was putty. At that moment Danny thought he understood why young men went west.

At the Avis counter, Lainie held on to Danny’s arm while her breasts got acquainted with his elbow. Although he enjoyed the
soft pummeling, he wondered why everyone on his flights always chose the same car rental company he did. The young woman behind
the counter was far too helpful, patiently describing various auto options to a French couple, who were oblivious of the etiquette
of the American queue. The clerk kept squealing, “I love your accent. So cooo-ell.”

She apparently didn’t dig the inherent hipness of the New York accent because her smile disappeared when she handed Danny
his contract and keys. She told him he’d find Soto outside. Soto would point him to the Chrysler LHS he’d just rented.

Danny and Lainie stepped arm in arm through automatic doors and out into the exhaust fan of hell. A pure physical shock. The
heat was an actual living, breathing thing. Breathing fire. Danny’s shirt immediately attached itself to his ribs. Lainie
told him to quit whining, a little spritz of heat never hurt anybody.

They found Soto of Avis sitting in front of a kiosk in a chaise longue. Soto was a tiny bowlegged man wearing a sweat-stained
straw cowboy hat, long-sleeved denim shirt, and Kmart jeans stuffed in dusty cowboy boots. He was listening to
tejano
music and squeezing water from a sponge onto the back of a huge lizard. He introduced the lizard, whose name was Mañana.

“Americans think
mañana
means tomorrow,” Soto explained, lubricating his leathery pet. “All it means is not today.”

“And maybe not anytime in the near future,” Danny said, suddenly impatient.

They followed Soto along a line of rental cars parked under a metal overhang. “Not good to hurry in this heat,” Soto said.
“One fifteen yesterday. Maybe one seventeen today.”

“But a dry one seventeen,” Danny said.

Lainie tossed her pink duffel in the backseat and fumbled in her purse. She told him not to take the freeway but stick to
Washington Avenue, a dark wide street lined with factories and car repair shops. Fewer eyes this way, she said. She leaned
into the dashboard and inhaled the white powder she’d formed into a straight line. Then Lainie Mossberg’s entire body flew
back from the dash as if she’d been shot out of a cannon. It scared the hell out of Danny. Her head bounced off the roof and
slammed back against the headrest, and kept bouncing. “Whew!” she screamed, her head bouncing as though it were on a spring.
“Whew, whew, whew.”

“I gotta get you home,” Danny said.

“Don’t be so impatient. Whew!”

“No, seriously,” he said. “You need to be home.”

“Don’t you want to know why they call me twin forty-fours?”

Lainie yanked the sleeveless sweater over her head and proved her breasts were large-caliber. In the flicker of the streetlights
they seemed unworldly, too shiny and milk white, the skin stretched dangerously thin. Lainie blinked and rubbed her nose.
Then she rolled over onto her left side and threw herself across the center console, her head banging into his sore right
shoulder. Danny checked the rearview mirror. Lainie unbuckled his belt.

“Let’s wait until we get you home,” he said.

“Can’t,” she said, lowering her head. Her hands felt ice cold sliding down into his shorts.

“I can’t drive like this.”

“Pull over,” she said.

Danny swerved toward the curb, then swerved back. Lainie didn’t seem to notice that she’d banged her head against the steering
wheel several times. Confusion reigned as cold hands and warm breath descended. Fully facedown, Lainie squirmed to get into
position, her legs outstretched, the back of her feet thudding against the underside of the glove compartment.

“Let’s wait until we get you home,” Danny said. “More room to stretch out.”

“My husband hasn’t left for work yet,” she said.

“Your husband,” Danny said. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and bent her head backward. Her eyes opened, and she looked up
at him.

“That’s my hotel, straight ahead,” Danny said. “Right there, next corner. See it? We can go nuts in my room.”