Playing Dead (3 page)

Wade frowned. “I can’t deal with this damn hippie crap right now, Tommie. This is what your father wanted. You keep dawdling and we’ll lose two million dollars like
this
.” He snapped his fingers, leaning over the desk, a little too near my face. “You can’t decide based on a few courses in psychology and a bunch of cancer kids and gimps and four-legged animals. That ain’t how you make business decisions.”

He used
ain’t
to underscore his irritation, since we both knew Wade was a literate cowboy with a master’s in agribusiness from Texas A&M. But in his mind, the only kind of satisfactory therapy involved a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle whiskey and an hour to kill with a gun and a bull’s-eye.

“The Big Dipper is a beautiful piece of land,” I told him. I bit back that I was finally only a couple of months from my Ph.D. “Untouched. There aren’t that many properties with natural running water from streams and the river.”

“It’s recreational property,” Wade countered. “People aren’t paying for it anymore, not a prime piece like this.”

We’d never sell that piece. I stared at him steadily. He was deliberately missing my point. I was deliberately missing his.

Grief for Daddy poured out of both of us, seeping into the cracks in the floorboards where blood used to run.

I knew that Wade fished with his twenty-five-year-old autistic son every Saturday, a promise he never broke. Wade’s cowboy boots were custom-made at Leddy’s down the street because of a
limp that he’d never talk about. With that limp, he insisted on carrying my mother out of the house the day she left it for good, a rag doll in his arms.

He was mostly a good man, a smart man. I knew it. I just didn’t like him.

“Get out,” I said, because I didn’t want him to see me cry.

“Yes, ma’am. Call when you need me. It’s going to be sooner than you think.” He gestured to the wooden file cabinets that lined the walls, to the mail stacking up on the desk, to the Apple computer that had yet to reveal its secrets, and my heart sank because I knew he was right: I would need him.

Wade turned with his hand on the doorknob.

“Tommie, you’re going about this dead wrong. But I will say, it’s nice to see a little fire in you. I thought that side of beef stomped it out of you for good.” His face softened. “I hear you’re still wicked on top of a horse. Maybe we should take a ride and works things out.”

He shut the door quietly.

My eyes roved over the walls, tears gradually softening the edges of the cattle drivers and whores and gamblers, historic photographs of Hell’s Half Acre that Daddy picked up one at a time out of dusty boxes in antique shops.

I stopped at the picture of Etta Place, the beautiful, unfathomable girlfriend of the Sundance Kid. Nailed in a place of honor over the doorframe, one of Daddy’s favorite pictures, a Christmas gift from Mama pulled out of a shiny silver box.

Long, dark hair piled up, gray eyes, a slim, lithe body. Etta didn’t look wild or cruel but they swore she was.

Why did no one know her real name? Was she really a prostitute when she met the Sundance Kid? And where did she vanish to? How do you live a life without a beginning and an end?

As a child, I would sit cross-legged on the hard floor directly in front of her, craning my neck up, willing Etta to speak, to spill her secrets just to me, until Daddy finally glanced over from his desk and said:

“She’s a mystery, honey. A goddamn mystery.”

F
ive minutes after Wade left, I decided to turn the page and allow the plucky, foolish heroine to plunge ahead.

I wondered what it meant that I was now thinking idiotically of myself in the third person and using words like
plucky
. My colleagues would offer up the fancy term
disassociating
. Sadie would say
not wanting to deal
.

Rosalina Marchetti could be a con woman, I told myself. Or a stalker. Emotionally unbalanced. Dangerous.

I had to know
.

My fingers leapt over the keys of Daddy’s computer, suddenly alive after a week of crippled hesitation. It took just thirteen minutes before I found the right Rosalina Marchetti in the
Chicago Tribune
archive. And, when I say right, I mean wrong, so wrong.

Rosalina Marchetti née Rosie Lopez, more poetically known in her stripper days as Rose Red, married Chicago mobster Anthony Marchetti on January 27, 1980. A month after that, Marchetti stood before a judge and received a life sentence, convicted on six counts of first-degree murder and unrelated charges of embezzlement and bribery. The sentence seemed light. Anthony Marchetti belonged in hell. He’d viciously murdered an FBI
agent, his wife, three children, and an agent guarding them at a safe house. But the court left a chance for parole.

Marchetti stared coolly out of his wedding announcement, a dark and charismatic stereotype. He looked as if he would be equally comfortable attending the opera or chopping off body parts in a back room. The glowing woman is usually the star of these kinds of photos, but his new bride, Rose, hung back shyly, her face in shadow. It was ridiculous to think that either of these people had anything to do with me.

Their melodrama didn’t end there. A little more searching confirmed that Rosalina’s story held up. She’d given birth to an unlucky little girl six months later. I say unlucky because the child was kidnapped three days after her first birthday. My stomach hurt as I kept reading, one of the “hot reads” on a true crime site with 136,000 hits. Days after the abduction, the kidnapper had sent Rosalina her daughter’s finger. I looked down to confirm that my fingers were still attached. Why didn’t Rosalina ask about the finger in her letter?

Details were scarce after that. I fought off another little chill after finding the girl’s name—Adriana Rose Marchetti—still active on the FBI’s missing persons list. She’d never been found.

Rose Red now lived in a lavish, gated Italian-style villa on Chicago’s North Shore. Anthony Marchetti still sat in prison. She’d never divorced him. According to various society columns, she was a generous contributor to AIDS causes, missing persons organizations, and library charities.

But I could find only her name. After the wedding photo, there were no more pictures.

My eyes glazed a little. I hadn’t slept more than four hours a night in two weeks, not since Sadie’s pre-dawn phone call saying Daddy was gone.

I should go. This would be the first night I’d spend at the
ranch instead of at Sadie’s, and there weren’t sheets on a single bed or anything in the fridge but Miller Lites and Cokes for Daddy’s friends who dropped by the ranch to hunt. Daddy asked our longtime housekeeper to shut down the house six months ago, and Daddy had worked here, showered here, and slept here, unless he took a suite at the downtown Worthington.

It was at least a forty-five-minute drive home. Maybe the Worthington was a good idea for tonight.

I could see nothing but inky black out of the windows that lined the west wall, not even the brick of the building next door, so close I could touch it if I leaned out. The other offices in Daddy’s building—an insurance agency, an orthodontist, and a law practice—had emptied by 6 p.m., so I was alone with the ghosts. The air-conditioning clunked on and my heart did a little frog jump.

Still, one more nagging thought.

It took only a few more strokes to find out where Anthony Marchetti wound up.

Twenty days ago, he had been moved from the Level 1 maximum security prison in Crest Hill, Illinois, to a jail cell in Fort Worth, Texas. Marchetti was up for parole. And he was about a five-minute drive away.

Someone was messing with me, either up there or down here.

My tired eyes processed movement, a blur of green.

Someone was in the room, at the door.

My right hand automatically took hold of the Beretta M9 my father kept in a special holster attached under the desk and I whipped it up, evening it directly at the head of a man I’d never seen before. This took approximately three seconds. Good muscle memory.

A long time ago, Sadie and I taught our little hands this move with a squirt gun. The object then: to get the other player wet
and to wipe up the floor before Daddy returned from his conference room.

“Whoa.” The stranger stopped short, about a foot in.

This guy had to be a lost tourist. Not bad-looking, but not my type. An aging frat boy. He wore a lime-green polo shirt like a flag from another country, with a tiny pink pony on his left bicep. His ripped $150 jeans were made to look as if he’d worked a lot of cattle, but had instead been beaten and distressed by slave labor in Vietnam.

He was a pretender.

As a Levi’s devotee, who’d worked cattle since age six, I counted this as the first strike against him. There were other strikes, like short hair moussed into an unnatural state.

“Are you lost?” I asked carefully. “This is a private business.”

Eyes on the Beretta, he plopped himself in the leather chair facing me. He set a small digital recorder on the desk and a briefcase on the floor.

“I’d feel better if you put that thing away,” he told me. “I’m from
Texas Monthly
magazine. We have a mutual acquaintance. Lydia Pratt? I didn’t mean to scare you but I thought I’d try to catch you here and set up a time for us to meet. Here’s my card. You weren’t answering your cell.” He tossed the card across the desk.

His story rang a few true notes, but the man himself set my nerves screeching like teenage cheerleaders. I lowered the gun, returned it to its safe place under the desk, and picked up his card.

Jack Smith. Senior reporter.
Texas Monthly
magazine. Two phone numbers and a fax number with an Austin prefix, and an email address.

“Call me Jack,” he said, grinning, sticking out a hand I didn’t take.

Get out
. The words screamed in my head. I glanced down at my cell phone and considered a less lethal move. Two missed calls from a cell phone with an Austin prefix. So he probably wasn’t lying about that, either.

“And?” I asked.

“And I’m working a story about the success of horse therapy with kids who have aggressive or antisocial behavior. Lydia said you two were doing research together. I badgered her to give me your cell number.”

True. Lydia Pratt was a former mentor and professor of mine at UT and a long-distance research partner.

“How did you get in the front door downstairs?” I asked. “The computer security system locks it automatically after five.”

He shrugged. “It was open.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“I’m a reporter,” he said, like that explained everything. “I interviewed Lydia in Austin on Friday. She mentioned you were in Fort Worth. I flew in to work on another story and you and I happened to be in the same place at the same time. The guy I interviewed today said your father had an office down here.”

“Who is that? The guy you interviewed?”

“I gotta protect my sources.”

This guy was annoyingly glib, like he was speaking lines in a movie. “This isn’t a good time,” I said abruptly. “And my part of the research is focused more on treating kids who’ve experienced a devastating trauma. The suicide of a parent, the death of a sibling. Horse therapy is only part of my research. You need to leave.”

“Think about it,” Smith insisted, not moving. “I’m sure you could add something interesting. A story could help you get more funding for your research. I won’t take much time. I’m at Etta’s Place until Monday night.”

Etta’s Place. This had to be some kind of huge cosmic joke. I
forced myself not to glance up at her picture. Etta’s Place was the downtown inn that thrived on the slim possibility that after the Kid died, Etta masqueraded in Fort Worth as a boardinghouse matron named Eunice Gray. Or, if you were reading something other than the slick hotel website, Eunice ran a brothel. I’m sure she didn’t charge the website rate of $150 or more a room, no matter what salacious service was offered.

Sadie would call this serendipity. A sign, probably from Etta herself. An artist, my sister believed in magnet healing, braless summers, alien abductions, and that Granny’s psychic bloodline ran through our veins.

As for funding, mine was plenty deep and directly from my trust fund.

Jack Smith uncrossed his long legs and stood up. I followed him, through Melva’s office, down the narrow hall and stairs to the lock on the front door.

“I just want to check it,” I remarked sweetly. The lock appeared to be in perfect working order.

“How about that?” His grin widened. “Must have been a little glitch with the computer.” I didn’t reply. Daddy had told me the security company vowed the special feature was as reliable and about as technically complex as an alarm clock.

“What’s the other story you’re working on?” I asked. “The one that brought you to Fort Worth?”

Smith’s lips curled back up into that irritating grin.

“I know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried,” he said, and sauntered off, leaving that hanging in the hot air.

Our building’s entrance opened onto a side street, away from the tourists and bars and the daily cattle drive. The city had been chintzy with the lighting here, so Smith turned into a walking shadow until he hit the end of the block. The streetlight illuminated his shirt like a neon glow stick before he disappeared
around the corner. I waited until I was sure he wasn’t coming back. Then I took the pistol out of my waistband, where I’d tucked it when he wasn’t looking.