Someplace to Be Flying (15 page)

She’d inherited her grandmother’s looks, a genetic blueprint that had somehow bypassed her mother. But then she’d inherited Nettie’s spirit as well—an old-fashioned, sweet-natured simplicity that had also skipped a generation. It wasn’t that Nettie had lacked in either intelligence or wit. She’d simply considered a preoccupation with looks and social standing a poor substitute for looking after the well-being of others and the land that sustained them. She’d preferred creative expression to small talk and the disguised spite that masqueraded as gossip. The thing that Kerry remembered most about her was how she seemed connected to something deep and mysterious. And wonderful.

“We’ve got an old blood,” Kerry remembered her saying once. It had been one of the last times she’d been able to stay with her grandmother—“the senile old fool,” as Kerry’s mother called her. “We’ve been walking this land for a long time. You can see it in our eyes and our skin.”

“You mean like Indian blood?” Kerry had asked, intrigued.

“Sure, we can call it that.”

“What’s it do?”

Nettie smiled. “I remember telling your mother the same thing, for all that the coloring passed her by. ‘What’s it good for?’ she wanted to know.

” ‘What’s it good for?’ I said. ‘It’s not good or bad, it just is.’

“She looked at me and shook her head. ‘I don’t want it,’ she told me and I remember thinking, that’s a good thing because who knows what you’d do with it.” Her grandmother had regarded Kerry for a long moment then and asked, “Do you have any idea what I’m talking about, sweetheart?”

Kerry, eleven years old at the time, could only shake her head. “Sort of, I guess, but … no,” she’d had to admit. “Not really.”

“That’s okay. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Only there hadn’t been. Kerry’s parents had moved to Long Beach that August, taking her with them, of course, and she’d never seen her grandmother again. They hadn’t even come back for the funeral.

Kerry sighed and set the photograph up in the middle of the window seat. Nettie, she’d later come to realize, had been a true eccentric. Artist, regional writer, environmentalist—all things that her daughter, Kerry’s mother, couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. Kerry knew that her life would have been so different if she’d been brought up by her grandmother. In her grandmother’s world, she would have been normal.

“I’ve got to hand it to you,” a too-familiar voice suddenly said, startling her out of her reverie.

It came from somewhere near the piano, but Kerry refused to turn and look. Please, she thought, trying to still the rapid tattoo of her pulse. Just go away.

“I didn’t think you had it in you, but you proved me wrong. This feels like a good place—a nice old building, lots of history, and close to some pretty funky parts of town. More like the kind of place I’d pick.”

Kerry sat with a stiff back and looked out at the shadowy bulk of the elm tree on the other side of the windowpane. That was real, she told herself. The elm. This house. The chair underneath her. The voice wasn’t. She was only hearing it again because she’d been thinking about Nettie, about what-might-have-beens. This was only another what-might-have-been.

“Please, Kerry. Don’t tune me out. Don’t let them win.”

The initial cheeriness was gone from the voice now. A sadness had crept into it, a familiar wistfulness that tore at Kerry’s heart. She swallowed thickly, wanting to turn now, but not daring to. She’d worked too hard to give in at this point.

“They’re the ones that lied to you,” the voice tried. “Not me. I’d never lie to you. Why won’t you believe me anymore?”

Because you’re impossible, Kerry wanted to say, but answering was part of believing and she didn’t dare believe. Think of something else, she told herself. Think of—

She heard movement. The rustle of cloth, a creak on the floorboards. She held her breath. The cover for the keys was lifted and then there was the sound of the piano. Rachmaninoff. One of the
Études-Tableaux.
She listened to the familiar music, nodding her head in time, until she realized what she was doing.

“Don’t!” she cried then.

The music stopped in midbar.

“Just … just leave me alone,” Kerry said.

The voice made no reply. The only sound in the room was Kerry’s own breathing and the last echo of the unfinished music, hushed and fading. She couldn’t stop herself. She had to turn. But there was no one by the piano now.

When would it stop? she asked as she faced the window once more. She burrowed deeper into the corner of the chair and clutched the pillow. When would it finally stop?

She had to take one of her pills before she was finally able to go to bed and actually fall sleep.

The county jail was an imposing squat stone structure overlooking the Kickaha River just north of where Lee Street crossed MacNeil in Upper Foxville. Seventy years ago it had been on the outskirts of the city proper, but through the postwar years it had slowly been enfolded into the city until eventually it was surrounded by thriving factories and tenements. There was talk at one point of closing it down, relocating someplace where it wouldn’t be in such close proximity to law-abiding, taxpaying citizens. But those same citizens fought the millions in tax dollars that the move would cost and over time the neighborhood degenerated.

Now the jail stood on the western border of the Tombs, an old horror of a building, still set apart from the surrounding architecture by its tall stone walls, topped with barbed wire. These days it was differentiated more because it was the only legally occupied building in a no-man’s-land of squatters and transients, rather than by the character of its inmates.

“That is one ugly building,” Anita said as she pulled the cab up near the curb on the far side of the street from the gatehouse. When Hank didn’t respond, she turned to where he sat on the passenger’s side. “Bringing back memories?”

Hank nodded. “But they’re old ones.”

He was turned out in a white shirt and tie, dark blue suit, hair combed back, carrying a briefcase that held a copy of Sandy Dunlop’s file. Anybody that might have known him from the old days would have had trouble recognizing him.

Anita looked out the window again. “Do you want me to wait for you?”

“I don’t know how long this’ll take,” Hank said. “I’ll call if I need a ride.”

Marty had phoned ahead so they were expecting him at the gate. One of the guards took him across the yard and handed him off to another at the front door. A familiar empty feeling settled in the pit of his stomach as the massive door closed behind him, but his face remained impassive. This was temporary, he told himself. Anytime he wanted,
he
could step out of here.

He was walked through a metal detector, someone went through his briefcase, and then he was left waiting in a small room furnished with only a wooden table and two chairs. There was an ashtray on the table, aluminum painted a sickly pink and so small he doubted it would hold more than three butts at a time. He laid the briefcase in front of him on the table and sat down, patient, using the time to distance himself from the familiar weight of the building as it pressed in on him.

A few minutes later the door opened and a guard brought Sandy Dunlop into the room.

“Thank you, officer,” Hank said.

The guard gave him a friendly nod, then left. He was no more an officer than Hank was, but it didn’t hurt to stroke the ego. The way Hank saw it, nobody became a prison guard or a traffic warden because it was a calling. They were in it because it was the only way they could feel empowered.

Sandy stood behind her chair, hands on the back, looking at him. She had a bruise under her left eye that looked about three, maybe four days old. Without makeup, her features were plain, almost washed out. Her blonde hair was showing dark roots and hung limply to her shoulders. The assets that had got her the job at Pussy’s weren’t evident, hidden under baggy trousers and an oversized sweatshirt. Hank knew the drill. When you were the new kid on the block, you didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention from your cellmates. You went for tough first, fought if you had to, and you packaged yourself in something unappealing so that maybe no one would get the wrong idea in the first place.

“So how’re they treating you?” Hank asked.

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“I work for Marty.” Hank stood up and offered his hand. “I’m Joey Bennett.”

She didn’t shake, but she sat down. Hank took a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and slid them across the table to her. She hesitated a long beat, then took one, nodding her thanks when Hank lit it for her. Taking a long drag, she gave him a crooked smile and pushed the pack back toward him.

“Keep them,” he said.

“Thanks.” She regarded him through a veil of smoke. “So what do you do for Marty?”

“Find things.”

She nodded, tipped the end of her cigarette into the ashtray. “What’re you looking for today?”

“What’ve you got?” he said.

Again the crooked smile. Another drag on the cigarette.

“More trouble than I know what to do with,” she said.

She was good at tough. If Marty could get her off, maybe she’d come through this okay.

“Why don’t you walk me through what happened,” he said.

“I’ve been through this, like, a million times already.”

“But not with me. Humor me. I’m here to help.”

She studied him for a long moment. “Okay. Where do you want me to start?”

“How about the last time you saw Ronnie.”

Without thinking, she lifted a hand, touched the bruise under her eye.

“Ronnie do that?”

“Any bad thing that ever happened to me in the last two years came from that sorry piece of shit.”

“He can’t do anything to you anymore.”

She made a small motion with her hand, trailing smoke. “What do you call being here?”

Hank nodded. “So the last time you saw him?”

“I was getting ready to go to work—you know where I work?”

“Strip joint.”

“Yeah, except I was working the tables.” She took out another cigarette, lit it from the butt of the first. “Anyway …”

Her story played out pretty much the way Marty had told it. There was more detail, more commentary on all the “assholes” in her life, from Ellis through to the D.A.‘s prosecutor—“Talk about being uptight. That man desperately needs a night of serious hard-core”—but essentially, it was the same.

“How come you’re not taking notes?” she wanted to know at one point.

Hank tapped his temple. “I am. You just can’t see them.”

She gave him a quizzical look, then shrugged and went on with her story, smoking, talking, looking at the table mostly, or just over his shoulder. Only occasionally would she meet his gaze. But as he listened to her talk, Hank came to the same conclusion Marty had. She hadn’t done it. She wasn’t a Pollyanna, not by a long shot, but she hadn’t killed Ellis. That left only one real suspect—so far as they knew. Philippe Couteau. Trouble was, he was dead, too.

“So this guy you were with during your break,” he said. “He wasn’t a regular?”

“I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to their faces, but I think I would’ve remembered the tattoo.”

“Think any of the other girls would know him?”

“You’d have to ask them.”

“What about your friend Chrissy. Any idea why she took off? Where she might be?”

She shook her head. Lit another smoke.

“People come and go in my business,” she said. “You know how it is. It’s not like we keep a list of people to send Christmas cards to or anything.”

Hank nodded. He knew how it was all too well.

“What can you tell me about Philippe Couteau?” he asked.

“The Frenchman?”

Hank nodded.

“Cold. I never saw anybody as cold as him.”

“Ronnie was having problems with him?”

She gave him her crooked smile. “Christ, haven’t you been listening? Ronnie had problems with everybody.”

“So it could have been anyone?”

She shrugged. “Could’ve been. But it was all small-change crap. Piss you off at the time, but not the kind of thing you’d kill somebody over.”

Hank took in the bruise below her eye, thought about the casual way she’d referred to Ellis beating her when she’d been telling her story earlier. It wasn’t what he’d call small-time, but he held his peace, let her speak.

“It’s funny, you know. Ronnie was like my Prince Charming when I first met him. This guy I was seeing, Louie, he was beating the crap out of me in the parking lot of a diner and Ronnie just stepped in and took care of him for me. Put Louie in the hospital.” She shook her head, remembering. “They had to sew him back together, like, fifty stitches—something like that.”

She lit another cigarette, chain-smoking, stubbed out the one that was done. The ashtray was overflowing now with five butts stuffed into it.

“Ronnie treated me like I was gold, you know? I could do no wrong. He moved in with me and it was like a fairy tale.”

Hank wondered which fairy tale it was that had Prince Charming pimping his girlfriend.

“So where did it go wrong?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Who knows? He had one hell of a temper, I’ll tell you that, but he always made up after. You could tell he was truly sorry. He’d bring flowers, sometimes. Maybe we’d do a few lines. Things’d be good.” She sighed. “For awhile anyway.”

Hank wanted to get back to Couteau, but he knew from experience that sometimes you learned more just letting a person talk.

“Thing is, I loved Ronnie. I think maybe I still do. So what does that make me?”

“Confused?”

“I guess. I think about the way he treated me and I’m not sorry he’s dead, you know? But then I keep expecting him to walk in the door and say, ‘Okay, babe. Everything’s been fixed.’ And then we’re walking out of here and everything
is
okay.”

She was staring at the ashtray as she spoke. Tipping the end of her cigarette against one of the butts, she watched the ash fall onto the table.

“You must think I’m such a loser,” she said, not looking up.

“I don’t judge people by who they’ve been,” Hank told her. “Only by who they are.”