The Jealous Kind (25 page)

She didn't move.

“You don't trust me?” he asked.

“How do you know my car won't start?”

“If you could start it, you would have driven away from those bums. That's what they are. Bums. They're going to pay a price.”

“They were dressed like police officers. They could have pulled me over. I might have a tank full of gas. There's no way you could know that someone punched a hole in my tank or damaged my fuel line.”

He smiled. “I'm getting confused here. I offered to take you home because I figured you were a little shaken up and didn't want to be driving. I'm getting wet. You want a ride or not?”

“How did you know where I was?”

“Because I was coming to your house,” he said. “Because I wanted to tell you I heard somebody was going to do something bad to you. Can I get in the backseat? I'm getting soaked. I felt bad about what happened at the Balinese Club. That's not my style.”

“Yes, it is. You're a criminal.”

“Jesus Christ, are you nuts? I saved your life. Those are bad guys. I'm getting in the back. You don't like it, that's tough.”

She tried to lock the back door, but he pulled it open and got inside before she could push down the door button. He took out a handkerchief and blotted his face and hair. “Those guys are freelancers. You wonder who sent them after you? Probably Grady. You heard the guy—they wanted to scare you so you'd run back to Grady.”

“Grady wouldn't do that.”

“You study psychology? He was strapped on the pot too long. He'll do anything to get his way. His old man got him discharged from the Marine Corps so he wouldn't have to go to Korea.”

“All right, you saved my life. Now please get out.”

“Do you have brain damage?” he said, tapping the side of his head. “I'm your friend. Look, you need a ride somewhere, call me. I'll send a car service for you. You got guys bothering you, call me. I'll put them out of business. You ask, you get.”

“I'm going to walk home now. Please don't follow me.”

He leaned forward and cupped his hands on her shoulders. His breath was moist on her ear. He seemed to be gathering his words, his thoughts, before he spoke, as though about to say something he had never said and did not want anyone to hear him say again. “I got a thing for you. You're like nobody I ever saw or met. I'm just a reg'lar guy. That means I'm not a bad guy, even though I look different and other people say I'm a bad guy. I'm not like my father. He hurts people because he likes it. I defend people. I stand up for myself and my friends. I'll defend you. I'm different from other people. That's all I wanted to say, Miss Valerie.”

The smell of the gasoline was overwhelming, dense and wet, clinging to the inside of her head and lungs. She couldn't begin to sort out his words. She thought she was going to faint. She felt his fingers sinking into her shoulders. He shook her as though waking someone from a nap. “Talk to me.”

“Thank you, Vick,” she said. “But you must let me alone.”

He pressed his face into her hair. The rain was slacking, the windshield clearing. Then his breath left the nape of her neck.

“I'll take you home now,” he said. “You can call the cops, or you can trust me to take care of what happened here. I hear your father is a war hero. Maybe he's got some ideas of his own, the same kind I got. Hop in my car. Don't dishonor what we got here.”

What we got here?

She opened the door and got out, her purse and her book bag gripped to her chest. Her blood had pooled in her legs; her body had turned to lead. He was getting out of the backseat, unable to hide his male arousal, his hair as slick as sealskin, his teeth showing behind his disfigured lip, his visible eye glimmering like a stone at the bottom of a dirty fish tank. “Hey, where you going? I'm not an ogre! Don't treat me like this!”

She began running toward the intersection, gaining the curb, running along the edge of the vacant lot toward the lighted houses on the next block. She heard him open and slam the door of his car, then start the engine, pressing on the gas while in neutral. The moon had broken through the clouds, flooding the sidewalk and the vacant lot and the oaks and the yards with a glow the color of pewter. She ran into the lot so he couldn't follow her with the car; she jumped across weed-spiked piles of building debris, a moldy mattress with a used condom on it, a pile of broken glass, the carcass of a dog whose skin had turned to a lampshade. She passed a horse shed built of slat wood and RC Cola signs and gained another sidewalk and ran across a lighted intersection into a neighborhood thick with live oaks and magnolia trees, the wide front porches hung with flower baskets and gliders and wind chimes, all the iconic images that should have offered reassurance and sanctuary but tonight did nothing of the sort.

She had given herself over to her worst imaginings, but she didn't care. They were preferable to the memories that three men had just visited upon her and from which she would never escape. She didn't look back until she had rounded the corner of the next block and saw her house. There was no traffic anywhere, nor anyone on the sidewalks or front porches or even in representation on a window shade, as though the earth had been vacuumed of humanity and turned into a stage set.

I
TOOK OFF FROM
work and stayed with her the next day. A tow truck pulled the Epstein car to the shop. Mr. Epstein talked to some uniformed cops, then to a plainclothes detective. None of them seemed convinced of Valerie's account. Vick Atlas had a penthouse apartment in the Montrose district but had not been seen by anyone in three days. The father's lawyer said he was in Mexico. No one answered the phone at the family compound in Galveston. Two days after the fake cops had terrorized Valerie, Detective Merton Jenks showed up at her house while I was there. I hadn't thought I would ever be happy to see Merton Jenks again. When he knocked on the door, the living room shook. I answered the door. He took one look through the screen and said, “I should have known.”

“That doesn't seem quite fair, sir,” I said.

“Where's the girl?”

“Her name is Valerie.”

“Go get her. Her old man, too.”

“He's not here.”

“Great,” he said in disgust. He opened the door and came in without asking. “Where is she?”

I called upstairs. Jenks's eyes kept boring into my face, the source of his agitation a mystery, at least to me.

“Nothing I say to you kids seems to get across,” he said. “There's not a lot of sympathy for you downtown. The consensus is trouble either follows you or you go out and find it. Right now I'm the only friend you've got.”

“Sir, they almost set her on fire.”

He walked to the stairs and hit on the banister with his fist. “We need you down here, Miss Epstein. Let's go.”

“Why don't you show some respect?” I said.

“You'd better shut up.”

“When you guys get scared, you take out your anger on people who have no power,” I said.

“When's Goldie going to be here?”

“Mr. Epstein?”

“Who do you think?”

“He's at work,” I said.

I realized he wasn't looking at me anymore. He was staring up the stairway at Valerie. She was wearing jeans and sandals and a tan cowboy shirt with rearing horses sewn on the pockets.

“I'm Detective Merton Jenks,” he said. “I want to get a confirmation of your account and ask you a few questions. It won't take long, miss.”

“Did you find Vick Atlas?” she said.

“Not yet,” Jenks said.

“Then who is going to believe my story?”

“I'm not sure what your story is. That's why I'm here.”

We sat in the living room under the ceiling fan, and she went through it again in detail.

“Atlas couldn't explain how he knew you had run out of gas?” Jenks said.

“That's right. How did he know those phony cops didn't pull me over? They had a spotlight on the driver's side like police cars have.”

“You think Atlas set up the situation?”

“That's what I'd like to believe.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise they intended to burn me to death.”

“You spat in one guy's face?”

“The one with the overbite.”

He removed a manila folder from his coat pocket. “I have two sets of mug shots here. Do these men look familiar?”

She took the photos from his hand and looked at them. She pointed at the profile of a man whose upper teeth extended over his lower lip. “This is the one who handcuffed me. I can't be sure about the other one. His friend called him Seth.”

“That's Seth Roberts. He was in Huntsville and Raiford in Florida. The guy you spat on, the one with the matches, spent nine years in the Nevada state prison for suffocating his common-law wife. I'm going to show you two more photos. The purpose is not to disturb you or to satisfy any desire for revenge that you might have. The purpose is to
make sure the men in the second set of photos are the ones who handcuffed you and poured gasoline inside your car. Maybe your father will object to me showing you these pictures, but that's the way it is.”

“Please show me the photos, Mr. Jenks,” she said.

“It's Detective Jenks.”

The photos were eight-by-tens. The two bodies in them were naked and curled up inside a ditch. The hands had been cut off. The gunshot wounds were in the ear, the mouth, and the forehead.

“I recognize the man who handcuffed me,” she said. “I don't know about the other one.”

“That's Seth Roberts.”

“Who killed them?” she asked.

“Vick Atlas said he was going to square things for you?” Jenks said.

“He didn't use those words.”

“But he was going to get even for you?”

“That's what he said.”

Jenks put the photos away. “How you feeling?”

“Guess,” she replied.

“You're a brave girl,” he said.

“Do you believe Vick Atlas killed those men?”

“He's twenty-one years old. He looks forty. His old man is a sociopath. If I had a son like Vick, I'd have my genitalia surgically removed and buried in concrete.” Jenks shook his head and rubbed his palms on his knees. “I don't know who killed them.”

“What are you not telling us?” I asked.

“Vick Atlas doesn't decide who dies and who lives. His father gives the orders. If the old man has somebody tagged, it's about money. This isn't about money.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“I don't. If I had to guess, I'd say Vick Atlas created a setup where he'd be your savior, Miss Epstein. Then somebody else got involved.”

“Who?” I said.

“Somebody with no conscience at all,” he said. “Have you seen a woman named Cisco Napolitano around recently?”

T
HAT AFTERNOON I DID
something I would not have dared think about a few months before. I called the information officer at the Houston Police Department and told him I was a reporter for the
Houston Press
doing a feature on several outstanding members of the department.

“He was with the OSS, right?” I said. “That's something else, isn't it?”

“Yeah, but you ought to talk to him about that,” the officer said.

“That's okay. I have most of what I need. I forgot the number of years he was in law enforcement in California. Or was it Nevada?”

“It was Nevada. Five years, I think. Check with him. What's your name again?”

“Franklin W. Dixon,” I replied.

“Who?”

I
COULD SEE MY
mother slipping away by the day, maybe even the hour, convinced that her public humiliation of Mr. Krauser had caused his suicide. The western sky could be strung with evening clouds that looked like flamingo wings; rain might patter on her caladiums and hibiscus and hydrangeas and roses and fill the air with a smell out of
The Arabian Nights
, the book that probably saved her sanity as a child. But no matter how grand a place the world might be, my mother's eyes had the hollow expression of someone staring into a crypt. My father and I took her out for Mexican food at Felix's, and as I looked at the misery in her face, I knew that voices no one else heard were speaking to her and soon our family doctor would have her back in electroshock, a rubber gag in her mouth, her wrists strapped to a table.

At that moment in the middle of the restaurant, I made a decision to lie or do whatever else was necessary to keep her from descending into the madness that the Hollands carried in their genes and the scientific world further empowered in its own hothouse of quackery and ignorance.

“I talked to one of the detectives who investigated Mr. Krauser's death, Mother,” I said. “The detective says Mr. Krauser may have been abducted and thrown from the roof of the building.”

She ate with small bites, her gaze fixed on nothing. I waited for her to speak. My words seemed to have had no effect. Then she looked at me, her eyes empty, focused on a spot next to my face. “Why would they do that?”

“Maybe Mr. Krauser was mixed up with people who send homeless boys to indoctrination camps,” I said.

“He did that?” she said.

“No one is sure,” I said.

My mother took another bite, chewing slowly. My father watched her as he would someone walking a wire high above a canyon. The only time my father ever drank in front of my mother was when the three of us were at a restaurant, as though a geographical armistice had been declared between the forces of his addiction and my mother's intolerance. Tonight he had not ordered a beer with his dinner. It was the first time I had ever seen him not do so, and I suspected it had not been easy.

“Listen to Aaron,” he said. “I think he knows what he's talking about.”