Redemption (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 3) (37 page)

Perry's car was gone. Before Burgess could explode, Kyle said, "I told him to get the heck out of here, go home, and wait for us."

"He damned well better do it," Burgess said. "I lost years off my life just now, waiting for that big gorilla to shoot or for his demented honey to call the locals. Does he understand what happened in there?"

"I hope so."

"You and me both." He bent down, hands on his knees, suddenly shaking. "Jesus! I wish
I
did!"

He stayed there, grabbing air and letting the wind cool his sweat-soaked skin, until Kyle said, "Clock's running."

He straightened. Only a few minutes before the Gorilla reappeared. "Let's roll. We'll go by, explain things yet again to young Stanley. About getting everybody killed. Maybe suggest castration? Then, if you're up for it, I've got a line on Joey Libby. Maura says Claire has a cottage out on Long Lake. Joey's probably staying there. A rainy night seems like an excellent time for a visit."

"You don't want to see Goodall first?" Kyle said.

Burgess considered. He was hot to go after Joey before he moved again, but Goodall was a missing piece of the puzzle, one that might give them some answers. He nodded. "You're right. Goodall first. Give Stan some time to calm down." Give himself time to calm down, make it less likely he'd take Stan's head off. "Let's see what the drug guys found on his boat."

"I'll call Sage. He was going in with them. And let Michelle know I'll be late." Kyle got in his car and pulled away.

As he reached the corner, Burgess looked in the rearview and saw the Gorilla come out, still naked, his immense cock flopping like a donkey's tail. He trotted to the truck, got the gun, and pointed it toward the Explorer, grinning as he pulled the trigger.

* * *

Nick Goodall didn't look anything like the handsome rebel artist in his photographs. His long, greasy hair was gathered in clumps, like he'd been holding it in clenched fists. Dark circles underlined his eyes and a raw, red scrape scored one cheek like he'd been dragged over gravel. He glanced at their ID cards and walked to his couch, collapsing onto it with an air of utter defeat.

They followed him in. Took chairs facing him. It was a single, open room, loft-style, with high ceilings and exposed brick walls. A smoky fire burned in the large fireplace. The place was dusty, the counter piled with unopened mail, no sign of a muse looking after Goodall's creature comforts.

"Is there anyone else here?" Burgess asked.

"She left," Goodall said, shaking his head. "She just couldn't take Star anymore." He spoke as though they were aware of his domestic arrangements.

"I never meant for any of this to happen," he said. "Things just got completely out of control. Which, my crazy freak of an ex-wife Star being involved, I should have expected." His big scarred hands dangled between his knees, clasped like a penitent's. He had mad artist's eyes, a startling shade of peridot green rimmed with black, deep concentration lines fanning out at their corners, and a mobile, full-lipped mouth. A big, handsome rogue of a man come to grief. He wore black jeans and t-shirt, an unbuttoned black shirt and the unhealthy pallor of a man who's been drinking too much and eating too little.

Two empty Jameson's bottles on the coffee table flanking an open third, and the reek of sweated-out alcohol in the air suggested what his recent diet had been. Burgess wondered if the scrape was from a drunken fall or a fight. He thought Goodall would tell them soon enough.

"She said he needed to go in for treatment and wasn't cooperating. She said that we needed to help him, to force him to go because he wouldn't go on his own. She said that we were doing this for Reggie."

He said "she" the way you'd speak of something detestable and feared. "I'll get him to meet me for lunch, Nick, she says, and then you pick him up. You know Reggie will do anything I ask. And now—" His hand swept out and grabbed the bottle.

Burgess was instantly alert, Kyle beside him shifting to the edge of the chair. You had to watch the hands and the bottle. A bottle could be nasty.

Goodall poured a shot into his empty glass, drained it, and slammed it back down. He didn't offer them a drink. He wasn't their host. They weren't guests. As the penitential hands suggested, they were hearing confession. "Now he's dead and that cold bitch acts like nothing in the world is different."

He slumped back on the couch, head bowed. Abject. Defeated. "What the hell was I thinking?" A long pause. An exhalation of boozy breath. The hard-used hands knotted between his knees again. Wringing. Turning. "Shit. Christ. Oh my God, how in hell do I explain this? I did it because I liked him. I liked Reggie. And now he's freaking dead, man. Dead. Like forever dead." Goodall jumped up and started pacing, large feet in black motorcycle boots stomping along worn, wide-pine planks.

Before Goodall could speak again, Burgess did what he hated to have to do. He said the words that risked stopping the man in his tracks before he told them what they'd come to hear. The caution Constitutional law and tricky defense attorneys imposed on them. Technically, this was neither custody nor interrogation, but technically could get tied up in a million knots. If Goodall said something important here, he didn't want to lose it.

Decades of miserable experiences on the witness stand had taught him the questions that would be asked. You had a witness who told you what? And when? Had Mr. Goodall been drinking? Did Mr. Goodall seem upset? Intimidated by a late-night visit from two police detectives? Did Mr. Goodall understand the implications of what he was about to say?

Cautious as a man walking on eggs, he went through Miranda, and got the sheet signed and tucked away, Goodall as impatient as he to get this out of the way. Then Burgess pulled in a lungful of the boozy air and, trying to sound mild and unthreatening, said, "Are you confessing to Reggie's murder?"

Goodall whirled, fixing Burgess with crazy eyes in a ravaged face, looking like he was about to cry. "No. Yes. No. Hell, I might as well be. Jesus, Detective..." His voice rose to an anguished roar. "I don't know! I'd been drinking. I—" He kicked at a large, round stone sitting by the fireplace, sending it spinning across the wood floor to crash into the opposite wall. "I mean, I freaking set him up for it, didn't I? Me and my goddamned good-guy attempts to help him. I know her, dammit. I know her. How could I ever have believed her?"

"Can you tell us what happened?" Still in the low, gentle voice. A prompt to get Goodall going again.

"I was at the studio. Out behind our old house. It means I have to deal with her, but I still work there. It's cheap and it's a good space for the kind of work I do. So Star comes meandering out of the house as I'm parking. I'll tell you, Detective—"

He broke off. "You guys got names?"

"Joe Burgess," Burgess said, "and this is Terry Kyle."

"Joe," Goodall said. "Terry. You guys met my ex?"

"I have," Burgess said.

"Piece of work, isn't she." Goodall didn't wait for confirmation. "So Star comes out and she's all wide-eyed sweetness, which is how she gets when she wants something. If I don't say yes, it gets real easy to believe that she is a witch." He stopped, looked curiously at Burgess. "You didn't let her feed you anything, did you? Or give you coffee?"

"I did."

Goodall rolled his eyes. "There ought to be a warning sign. So she says to me, Nicky, you know my cousin Reggie... well, Reggie's not doing so good and he won't go and get himself some help. She says she's got things set up so Reggie can go to this clinic for help, only we've got to bring him there—"

Suddenly his fist slammed down on the coffee table, making the bottles jump. The empty glass rolled onto the floor and disappeared under the couch. "I'm such a goddamned wimp I make myself sick," he said. "But I was at the point where I would do anything to keep Star on an even keel. I wanted it to work out with me and Beverly. I wanted to be able to do my work without her hovering around. To sleep without her damned endless phone calls. To go somewhere with Bev without Star showing up and making a scene. After Star tried to poison her, Bev finally got a restraining order. Hell of a lot of good that did. Even the goddamned cops are scared of Star. Like she really could stick pins in a doll and work some voodoo on them."

His big hand knotted in his hair again, twisted, and then dropped to his knee. "Four freaking years we've been divorced and she still won't give up. She's just mean as a snake and evil to the core. She's waiting for me to come to my senses, she says."

He fished under the couch for the glass, refilled it, and drank. "I came to my senses when I left Star. I'd have been a far sight better off if I'd also left my studio, but I couldn't afford to. Still can't because of the money it takes to support her." He scrabbled around on the coffee table, looking for something, didn't find it, and looked over at Burgess. "Ever meet anyone like that?"

"I've met
her
," Burgess said. "Can you tell us what happened on Friday?"

Goodall buried his head in his hands, speaking to them through the fence of his fingers. "Star said she was meeting Reggie for lunch and I was supposed to go down there with this guy she knew, Kevin something, and help them get Reggie in the truck. That was all. They were going to take him to some clinic she knew about." Goodall's shoulders heaved. "Just supposed to help get him in the truck."

"Where did you meet her?" Burgess prompted.

"Down on the waterfront. I was waiting in the truck with Kevin. When we saw them come out of the restaurant, we pulled up, stopped, and got out. I called to him. I said 'Reggie, it's okay. It's me. We just want to help you.' He sees me, and he's starting to smile when he sees the other guy. He turns and starts to run."

It didn't quite match up with Benjy's story, but there was plenty of overlap. Questions could wait until they had Goodall's version.

The sobs were steady now, deep, ugly sounds that wracked Goodall's chest and set his shoulders heaving. "I was trying to hold Reggie, trying to calm him down, and he looked at me, real lucid, and he said, 'Don't let them take me, Nick. Jesus, please don't let them.' I told him that they, that we, were all just trying to help. That was when the guy—Kevin—came over and said, real mean, for Reggie to shut the fuck up and get in the truck. I could see that Reggie was scared of him."

Goodall fingered the scrape on his face. "We were standing right by the door, and it was open. This Kevin guy shoved Reggie into the truck, Star was there by then, in the truck, helping to drag him in. So I said, 'Hey, wait a minute. Reggie's not comfortable' and this guy Kevin says to me, 'I'll show you comfortable.' He slams me in the jaw. I go face-down onto the sidewalk. By the time I'm back on my feet, Kevin's holding Reggie and Star's driving away."

He ran a shaky hand through his shaggy hair. "I won't ever forget that last look Reggie gave me. He's being shoved into the truck and I'm sprawled out on the ground, and he had this awful scared look on his face like he was going to his execution."

Goodall's voice dropped to a shaky whisper. "And he was, by God. He was!"

Burgess looked away, shifting his eyes around the room, trying to find something, anything, to fix on while he quelled the urge to throw this whimpering, self-pitying bastard through one of his own windows. He settled on the big stone, squeezing his own hands together until his knuckles were as white as Goodall's.

"So you never got in the truck?" Goodall shook his shaggy head. The sobbing continued. "You didn't go with them to this clinic? You let Star and Dugan do that?" Goodall didn't answer.

"Joe?" Kyle said.

He slid his eyes toward Kyle. Kyle was right on the edge of the chair, watching, trying to read his anger meter and judge how close he was to exploding. Kyle raised his eyebrows and Burgess shook his head. He only
wanted
to pound the guy; he wasn't going to. "Why didn't you come and talk to us?" he said.

"Because I'm a pathetic excuse for a human being."

Burgess couldn't have agreed more. "Okay," he said, "I've got some pictures I'd like you to look at, see if you recognize anyone. Then we'd like you to take us through it again so we're sure we've understood."

He held out his keys to Kyle. "Will you get my file with the pictures?"

Kyle took the keys, but he didn't move. "Maybe you should go, Joe. You know right where they are." As though Kyle didn't. He just didn't want to leave them alone together.

"In my briefcase behind the driver's seat. We'll be fine, Ter."

Kyle pulled on his coat, and headed for the door.

Goodall sat hunched and rocking, so wrapped up in self-pity he missed the interplay between them. If the victim had been a stranger, Burgess wondered, would he have been more sympathetic to this man's story? Probably not. He didn't have a lot of patience with self-pity or weeping drunks. With the cowards who witnessed or contributed to crimes and then refused to come forward. Goodall had probably been maintaining a fair level of intoxication since Kyle had said they'd be coming to see him, just so he could liberate his tongue and cushion their censure.

In a moment, Kyle was back with the folder. "Still raining like a bastard out there," he said. "Nasty."

As Kyle hung his dripping coat over the back of the chair, Burgess took out the picture of Kevin Dugan and showed it to Goodall. "Is this the guy?"