The Deader the Better (21 page)

As for me, I was never going to look good in shorts again. I’d
left a big hunk of shin meat somewhere on the floor of the Explorer.
They’d taken two-hundred-some-odd stitches, and done the best they
could, but there was no way to replace the divot. They said I’d
probably have the scab for a year. My head…well, it was like she
said. I had another forty stitches about an inch back in my hairline.
At least in what used to be my hairline before they shaved it back
into its present mental-patient cut. So as not to scare small
children, I’d taken to wearing a baseball cap at all times. Funny
how people respond to things. I hadn’t necessarily expected Rebecca
to treat me like a hero or anything. I’m a firm believer that
people do what they have to, but I sure as hell hadn’t expected her
to blame me for the incident, either. Go figure.

I can practically smell something unsaid. I grew up on it. It was
my pabulum. Whatever had torn my parents apart had hung like Spanish
moss in this house for most of my childhood, so I knew what was going
on between Rebecca and me. It’s just that I didn’t have any idea
what to do about it. So we’d canceled all of our holiday plans and
limped our way through the last week and a half, making and keeping
our separate appointments and allowing the curtain of antagonism that
hung between us to go unacknowledged. And then Claudia Springer
showed up this morning, on the day before Christmas, with some good
news, an armload of presents and the straw that broke the camel’s
back.

“Guess what? I got an attorney,” she said. “And the city of
Stevens Falls has made me the same offer for the property that they
made Mr. Bendixon. It closes the seventeenth of January.”

I was happy for her. It not only cleaned up her legal problems, it
made her a wealthy young woman. She jumped to her feet to administer
hugs. We ooohed and aaahed and directed her to those portions of our
anatomies that could safely be fondled.

Rebecca, of course, immediately began to tender investment advice,
which inadvertently segued into the subject of today’s escalation
of hostilities. When Rebecca mentioned the need to be conservative
and not go hog wild just because you’ve come into the better part
of eight large, Claudia’d agreed wholeheartedly.

“Right now, there’s only one thing I’m going to spend some
money on.”

“What’s that?” Rebecca asked.

I figured a new car. A house in the ’burbs. Nope.

“I want to hire Leo to find out who killed J.D.”

Rebecca’s first reaction was to laugh. “Oh…Leo can’t
possibly—”

“Why?” I asked Claudia.

“Why do I want to hire you?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She sat back on the couch and ran it through her circuits.

“What am I going to tell the kids?” she asked after a moment.
“When they ask me what happened to their daddy, what am I going to
say? That he was killed by person or persons unknown? That I don’t
know what happened to him? And that I just, like…let it go at
that?”

“Four out of ten homicides are never solved,” I said. She
wasn’t going for it. “Somebody knows,” she said.

“Somewhere in that valley, somebody knows who did that to J.D.”

Rebecca moved slowly toward the stairs. “If you’ll excuse me,”
was all she said, but the vibe hung in the air like the smell of
blood. Claudia picked up on it.

“Oh…,” she stammered “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to—”

I held up a hand, and we watched in silence as, with great
deliberation, Rebecca mounted the stairs and disappeared from sight.

“Have you thought this through?” I asked Claudia, before she
got a chance to start apologizing again. “Neither the local law nor
the state police think there’s any chance of apprehending J.D.’s
killer. You could end up spending a lot of money and not know any
more than you know now.”

Her jaw was set. “Is that what you think?” she asked.

“I think that from their standpoint that’s probably true. I
don’t think conventional investigation techniques will do a darn
thing,” I said.

“I thought you of all people would—”

“I didn’t say it couldn’t be done,” I interrupted.

“You just said—”

“I said it couldn’t be done by conventional means.”

“But you think it could be done…I guess, then, by
unconventional means.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Like what?”

I shook my head. “From your standpoint as the client, it’s
better that you don’t know the specifics. If what I’ve got in
mind somehow goes haywire, you’re going to need to be able to say
that you merely hired me to do the job and that the specifics were a
complete mystery to you.”

“I can live with that,” she said. “I don’t suppose this is
very nice, but I really don’t care how you do it.”

Something about the last line sounded a bit too cavalier for the
earnest girl I’d known, so I pressed her. “What else?”

Her first instinct was to go ditzy. “I don’t
understand…whatever do you…?”

I waited patiently until she was finished. “You through?”

I asked.

Her big blue eyes filled with tears. “At the end…the last few
months…J.D. was distant…it was like he wasn’t there.”

“He had a lot going on,” I said.

She closed her eyes and nodded. I used my thumb to wipe at a tear
that ran down her cheek. “I didn’t want to say anything,” she
whispered. She squeezed her eyes harder and spit it out like a
chicken bone. “I thought there…for a while I thought that…maybe
he had…he was seeing another woman. Something in me just knew it.”
She swallowed a sob and began to shake.

I stifled the urge to say something.

“I don’t know where to hold him in my heart, Leo,” she said.
“I’m not sure what to feel.” She put her head in her lap and
began to cry like she was never going to stop. I mentally auditioned
a couple dozen soothing phrases but settled for rubbing her shoulder
while she worked it out of her system. After that, we’d cut a deal.
My fee plus expenses. I told her the truth: It was likely to cost
quite a bit. She made it a point not to ask what for, just wrote me a
check for ten grand and hugged me Merry Christmas in the doorway. I
told her to give Adam a hug for me, and she said she would.

“I’m sorry if I…I mean you and Rebecca…,” she said
before leaving.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with you,” I assured her.

It was true. Rebecca and I had been living alone together ever
since we got back from the peninsula, so the rest of the afternoon
was pretty much status quo. I made the obligatory attempts at
conversation and was rewarded with a couple of amazingly unresponsive
monosyllables. So I unplugged the downstairs phones and settled into
the den with a six-pack of Rolling Rock, a large can of cashews and
an unending succession of college football games.

Around seven, I heard a horn in the driveway. Got up to check. A
cab. She was going to her mother’s for Christmas Eve. Yeah, Merry
Christmas to you, too. On the way back to the den, I snagged the
afghan from the couch.

JED HELD A BOTTLE OF RÉMY MARTIN LOUIS XIII. COMESin a crystal
decanter at a mere thirteen hundred bucks a fifth.

“A drink?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

He crossed the room to the built-in bar and poured us each a
hundred bucks worth.

Around ten, I’d gone for a drive. The streets had been deserted.
Nobody out but me and the losers with no place to go. Around
eleven-thirty, without consciously willing it so, I’d found myself
parked in Jed’s driveway, so I’d figured, what the hell…might
as well knock on the door. The maid answered. “Oh,” was all she’d
said. Jed appeared over her shoulder. “Leo,” he said, taking the
door from her hand.

“Come in.”

Sarah, the girls, the hubbys and the new granddaughter were all
tucked in their beds, presumably experiencing those visionary sugar
plums of song and story. Jed ushered me into the den, while Marie
headed back for the kitchen. I stuck my nose in the oversized snifter
and took a tendollar whiff. A golden chain pulsed across the surface
of the rich amber liquid. I looked around. The table on my right held
one of those clocks in a glass dome. The golden balls twirling
silently in one direction and then stopping and twirling back the
other.

The den was Jed’s domain and, as such, had been spared the
holiday treatment. He used the long butane lighter to get the gas
fireplace going. We all used gas these days. Hell, these days, you
had to drive seventy-five miles to get somewhere you could cut wood.
Not to mention that none of us even knew anybody with a pickup truck
anymore. He retrieved his brandy from the mantel.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I just happened to be in the
neighborhood.” I checked my watch. “At eleven-forty-five on
Christmas Eve.”

“That’s what I figured. Nice to see you getting out, though,
by the way.”

“Wouldn’t want to get mansion fever.”

“Certainly not,” he agreed.

I took a sip of the cognac and looked around the sumptuous room.
“You ever wonder about all of this?” I asked. “I mean, like who
we were when we first met and who we are now, and like how in hell we
got here?”

“No more than a dozen times a day,” he said.

“I mean, you and I are sitting here drinking liquor that costs
more than the cars we were driving when we first met.”

He raised his glass in salute. “
Viva la France
,” he
said. We’d known each other for more than twenty years. When I’d
first met him, he was fresh from New York and a job as the ACLU’s
top litigator. We’d met in jail, where he was cooling his heels on
a contempt charge and I was looking at an assault rap, for defending
myself against an irate transit cop on whom I’d served a subpoena.
In those days, Jed drove a beige Gremlin and worked out of a ratty
little office on Third Avenue, right where the new symphony hall
stands today. He’d taken on every lost cause that walked in the
door and won most of them, until he’d become the bane of the DA’s
office. Well-known judges took unexpected fishing vacations when Jed
James’s name appeared on their dockets. Now, James, Junkin, Rose
and Smith occupied the whole thirty-eighth floor of the Rainier
Building, which in Seattle was about as uptown as things get. It
costs five grand to sit down and discuss fees with him, and he was
talking with the local Democratic party about running for King County
judge whenever Wendel Woods either stepped down or dropped dead. He
sat in the brown leather chair opposite me and began rolling the
snifter between his palms.

“So…Leo, I’m going to draw upon my years of legal training
and go out on a limb here and figure that, it being Christmas Eve and
all, this is probably about you and Rebecca?”

I thought about telling him that was how come he was making the
big bucks, but swallowed it instead. “I don’t think living
together is turning out to be what either of us imagined.”

“How long has it been?”

“Just over a year.”

“That would sound just about right for having some second
thoughts.”

“It’s not the little things, either. It’s deeper than that.”

“Like what?”

“It’s like all of a sudden, she wishes I was a CPA.”

“Instead of…”

“What did she say I do?…Oh yeah…I dabble at being a private
detective until my trust fund comes due.” I threw up my hand. “I
always thought she liked what I did. Now all of a sudden—”

“That’s the cliché isn’t it?”

“What?

“The same stuff they used to love about you ends up being
exactly what drives them crazy?”

“Yeah. I guess it is.”

Jed retrieved the cognac, gave me one more finger than he’d
given me the first time and then did the same for himself.

“In your defense, Leo…”

“I was hoping we’d get to that part.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever been shy about your plan to move
directly from adolescence to retirement. And I don’t think you
dabble. I don’t know anyone more committed to what they’re doing
than you are, but that’s not the point, now, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You really think whatever is going on between you two is about
what you do for a living?”

“No,” I admitted. It was more than that. I told him about how
it wasn’t even a question of where we were going but more of how we
were going to get there. How, lately, I kept finding myself at dinner
with other couples our age whose exclusive subject of conversation
was the state of the stock market in general and their own 1(k) plans
in particular. I raved about how it seems like you can’t turn on
the tube without some mutual fund reminding you that sleeping under a
bridge is just around the corner, and about how all of it absolutely
bored the shit out of me.

“That’s the rub, then, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“You’re not traveling the same path as most of your peers.”

“Have I ever been?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“I feel like when I married my first wife Annette. I married
into this huge Sicilian family. First non-Italian to marry in. Her
father always called me
desgratiado
. It means the disgrace.”

“Because you weren’t Italian.”

“No…not really. Actually he and I got along pretty good. What
he held against me was that I didn’t wish I was Italian. Heredity,
he was willing to forgive me. My attitude about it, he was not.”

“So you’re saying…”

I thought it over. “Let me ask you a question. Suppose I didn’t
have my trust fund looming on the horizon. You think I’d be doing
what everybody else is doing and planning for my retirement?”

No hesitation. “Absolutely not,” he said. “You’d be doing
exactly what you’re doing now. It’s what I love about you.”

“Me, too,” I said.

We worked our brandies. Except for the hissing of the fire, the
room was silent.

“That was quite a trauma you two had.”