The Truth Hurts (10 page)

9
Marie

Just before I finish chapter 1, I hear the chirp that alerts me to new E-mail. Immediately, I divert into that program to see if any help has arrived—a private eye on her white horse, or a criminologist on hers.

Yes! Here’s one from my private investigator, Erin McDermit.

In person, Erin doesn’t look like anybody’s stereotype of a female private eye. It’s true that she’s athletic—nearly six feet tall in the black running shoes she always wears with her trademark black pantsuits (even in the subtropics)—but she’s a thin woman, a blonde with a cover girl complexion who doesn’t look as if she could possibly be as strong as her résumé hints she is. It lists her years as a police officer, several black belts in a martial art, exceptional firearms prowess, and degrees in law and accounting. I originally hired Erin because she struck me as being as smart as the computer jocks who staff her office for corporate investigative work and as tough as most of the ex-cops she hires to do her dirty work, now that she can afford to remain above the fray and just administrate. I don’t know if she’s honest, if all of her methods are legal, or ethical. When it comes to PIs, I’m a don’t-ask, don’t-tell kinda gal. I do know her firm is one of the best in south Florida, in a highly competitive, sometimes even lethal business. If she has ever overcharged me, it would take an accountant who’s smarter than I am to prove it, and even then, I’d probably still feel she gave me my money’s worth.

It’s an air of latent violence in Erin, a feeling she inspires that here is a woman who would do literally anything to accomplish her ends, that makes me wonder about her. To be frank, it’s also why I keep hiring her.

I’ve rarely seen Erin McDermit in the flesh; we conduct most of our business electronically. But I believe I could spot her anywhere, even from a long city block away, because of her height, her long stride, and that Johnny Cash outfit, not to mention the old-fashioned pageboy, and the way she sticks her hands deep into the pockets of her suit jackets, as if she’s got guns in both of them. There’s a definite Wyatt Earp flavor to Erin. The few times I have been around her, I’ve always been struck by how when she sits down she habitually turns her face to the person who’s doing the talking, but she turns her legs toward the nearest exit. Now there’s a telling detail I’ll put in a book if I ever need to include a description of her.

Not surprisingly, when she talks, it’s blunt.

As I peruse her E-mail, it’s what she says, not how she says it, that takes me aback.

“What an asshole!” her E-mail begins.

Hey, it’s probably just some harmless idiot getting his rocks off, but let me see if I can trace anything from the E-mail. Do you want me to assign somebody to watch your house 24/7? No charge. My pleasure. You’ve given me lots of business doing all those background checks for your books.

I’ll get back to you asap on the E-mails.

In the meantime, personally, if it were me, what the hell, just to be on the safe side, I’d do exactly what the little shit head says.

Cheers, Erin

Well,
shit,
to quote Erin. She was supposed to tell me it’s all baloney, not offer a twenty-four-hour watch on my house as if this might all be legit! Damn!

Maybe there will be better news in the next E-mail, from Dr. Aileen Rasmussen. As I start reading, I can picture Aileen vividly, too—seventyish, letting her hair go gray, carrying thirty pounds more than are good for her five feet four inches and looking deceptively motherly. She’s a “mother,” all right, but not in that glorified sense of the word.

The good Dr. Rasmussen’s E-mail is equally succinct, but unlike Erin’s it makes the blood pound in my head from annoyance.

Marie. Male. Control freak. Intelligent. Organized. Determined.

She has a phony, staccato way of communicating that makes me want to scream, “Subject, verb, object! Aileen! Try it sometime!”

Her E-mail continues:

Cold-blooded enough to display a sick sense of humor. Sexually focused on you. Angry at you for some reason. A grievance? What did you do to him? Combination of all that worries me. Don’t you have any idea who he is? My advice? Take him seriously. Be very careful in regard to the children. See me. Soon as poss. When?

Aileen

Right, like I haven’t thought about being careful with the children. Do I have
moron
tattooed on my forehead? Thanks so much for that useful tip, Aileen. And, don’t I “have any idea who he is?” Well, gee, if I did, I might have mentioned that in my E-mail to you, don’t you think so? “What did you do to him?” Oh, yeah, thanks, Aileen, blame the victim.

Damn, again.
Victim ?
That would be me.

I take the repeated, calming deep breaths I often have to take before replying to Aileen Rasmussen. Just to be on the safe side, so I won’t say anything overly snide to her, I write back to Erin McDermit first, telling the private investigator, “Yes, thanks, I’d like you to source the E-mails and to stake that watchdog outside my house. Wait until Monday to do it, since I’m going to be gone until then anyway.” (If I were Aileen, I’d probably insult Erin McDermit by advising her to make sure her operative stays invisible, as if a pro needs to be instructed like a student in Private Investigation 101. One of these days, I’m really going to let Aileen Rasmussen have it between her smug eyes. If I ever find somebody better. Please, God.) “You’re awfully kind to offer to do it for free, Erin, but I’ve got to turn that down. This is a bigger job than I deserve to get for free. I also want you to put a watchdog, your very best, on my assistant, Deborah Dancer. . . .” I give her Deb’s vitals. “You’ll have to be the one to tell Deb we’re doing this, since I don’t dare contact her directly right now.” Then I write, “In fact, I’d like you to relay messages between us,” but I immediately delete it. Maybe this computer is secure—Erin’s own experts did that for me—but what if it isn’t? I’ll take that chance for myself, but not for Deb. If Erin says to do what he wants, and what he wants is to separate me from Deborah, then I’ll stay completely away—unless and until I find an absolutely foolproof way to get around him.

I finish by saying, “Ain’t this a hell of a way to spend your time & my money?

“Thanks.

“Marie.”

My heavily self-censored E-mail to Aileen Rasmussen reads like this:

We’re taking the kids away with us this weekend. Should be safe. “Paulie Barnes” says he won’t hurt anybody as long as I follow his instructions, so that’s what I am doing. I think we’ll be all right for a while, don’t you? I do want to see you when I get back. Is Monday okay? Send me a time that works for you, and I’ll show up then. Thanks, Aileen.

Marie

There. Why do I keep going back to this woman for my research into criminal psychology if she aggravates me so much? Okay, she’s good, but wouldn’t
half
-good do almost as well? Or maybe I just like being repeatedly poked with a stick.

While I’m still pissed off from the effort of writing politely to Aileen, I return to the task of putting the finishing touches on the first “chapter” of my “assignment.” By the time I finish and come out of the writer’s trance, I find that the ice has melted in my glass of tea. The sun is almost directly overhead, and I am sweating in my open house. I see through my screen door that a seagull is swaggering on top of my patio table, leaving me souvenirs as he scavenges for crumbs.

It’s one o’clock and Franklin hasn’t called me back yet.

“Isn’t he out of court?” I ask his secretary when I call again.

“Oh, that devil.” Arvida laughs. “I heard he slipped out as soon as the gavel came down. I guess he knew if he came back here I’d hand him more work to do. Y’all are going to the Keys today, right?”

Great. And who else knows ?

I tell her yeah, and she tells me to have fun.

There’s no answer, next, on Franklin’s cell phone, but then if he is already in the car with Diana and Arthur, he won’t pick it up. His ex-wife forbids him to use a phone when he’s driving them.

I’m sure they’re fine. I’m sure of it.

But I’d like to see for myself. There’s just enough time left for me to eat lunch, pack for my trip to the Keys, and hit Send. When I do, I feel a welling up of helpless rage in me.

“How
dare
you, Paulie Barnes.”

Forget “how dare he.” Who
is
he?

Years ago when my first book came out and I got my first obscene letter, I took it to a cop. “Hang on to this stuff, Marie,” he said, “so you’ll have evidence if you need it.”

“I don’t want to hang on to it,” I protested. “I want to burn it.”

“I know. Listen, most of these guys, they’re creeps who don’t have the balls to do what they say, but there’s always the stray psychopath you have to watch out for.”

Thinking of that advice now, I pull out that file of nasty mail and put it in a canvas briefcase. To that, I add paperback copies of each of my books so we can review who’s in them. Maybe there’s a disgruntled relative in there or, more likely, a killer who hates the way I portrayed him. Next, I stick in three file folders packed with information about murder cases I have considered but rejected as book ideas. I haven’t looked inside a couple of them for so long that they give off that old-file smell of dust and mold. It is not beyond the realm of strange possibility that some egotistical murderer in there feels unfairly “left out” of my true crime hit parade.

“Egotistical murderer,” I grumble. “Now there’s a redundancy if I ever heard one.” Finally, I slide into the briefcase the “evidence” I’ve wrapped in plastic. In my mind, I keep wrapping the word
evidence
in quotation marks because I’m not even positive that any crime has been committed against me. I know it’s a federal offense to make threats through the mail, I don’t know about E-mail or package delivery services, and I don’t want to take the time to look that up, not when I’ve got my own personal prosecutor to ask.

Once all that’s done, I start tossing clothing and toiletries into an overnight bag. I won’t need much in the Keys—clean underwear, shorts, T-shirts, a swimsuit, sunscreen and deodorant, and that’s about it. At the last minute, I fold in a pearly, silky bathrobe that’s pretty but modest. With the children there to see us, Franklin and I won’t be able to run around naked anymore.

“Great.” In a spasm of self-pity, I grumble some more. “I was already nervous enough about spending a whole weekend with them, and now I have to worry about this, too.”

The Howard County prosecutor and I have been carryin’ on for more than a year, but we only went public a little while ago. Very public, as it turned out, complete with articles in glossy magazines and tabloids, although why they’re so interested in either of us escapes me.
People
magazine called us “the glamorous best-selling writer and her handsome true crime chaser.” Puhleeze. Yuck. The phone calls I got after that one! I got teased by people I hadn’t heard from since high school. “Marie! Where’d you get
him ?”
They did everything but squeal oo la la. That was all right. The worst part was that unbeknownst to us at the time, a couple of publications snapped photos that included the children. I can still recall the unpleasant jolt I felt when I opened a magazine and saw that! We would never have approved of it if they’d had the decency to ask first—which is why they didn’t ask first, of course.

Bringing Arthur and Diana into our relationship is proving to be a slow, delicate process, even without invasive photos appearing all over the world. Franklin’s little boy likes me, judging from the way he flings himself at me whenever he sees me, yelling, “M’re! M’re!” But Diana is holding back, suspicious and resentful of this woman who is not her mom. Whatever limited natural charm I may have, it sure isn’t doing the trick with her; I’m at a loss for ideas about how to win her over, or even if it’s right to try. Maybe we made a mistake in bringing the kids into the middle of our romance. Maybe it was too soon, at least for Diana. On the other hand, it’s possible there will never be a good time for her.

Sometimes I worry—what if we all get attached to one another—the kids and I—and then Franklin and I break up? I’m already besotted with Arthur. The thought of never seeing that cutie pie again—never mind his father—makes me tear up. As for Diana, all I can really ever do is be myself and let her be however she needs to be toward me. One of us has to be the adult, I guess, and since she’s six years old, that pretty much leaves it to me. Damn.

“Time,” Franklin advises me. “Patience.”

I thought I had plenty of time, but now I wonder. . . .

“No!” I give the overnight bag a fierce zipping up. “You
won’t
hurt us.”

My Mercedes is in the shop. Without Deb here to give me a ride, I’ll have to call a taxi. My plan is: I’ll pick up my car and drive on down to the Keys from there. And then Franklin will know what to do. He’ll eat this guy like guacamole with chips. We’ll find this bastard and we’ll add 140 years onto whatever sentence he is already serving.

10
Marie

“You know, Marie,” says the owner of the foreign car shop as he hands over my keys, “the Germans actually do make Mercedes that are younger than you are.”

“No!” I exclaim, feigning disbelief. “Really, Ernie?”

Joking with Ernesto Perez outside his garage makes me feel better; gazing into his well-worn face, I feel safer. The day turns almost normal again. The anxiety about “Paulie Barnes” recedes. It’s almost certainly a hoax, I decide again—a prank, much ado about nada.

Here, just off noisy I-95 near the Bahia airport, the air smells like burnt oil, as it always does. I feel a hot breeze lift the hair at the back of my neck, and I need sunglasses merely to look at my blinding white car. Ernie’s shop qualifies for a drought exemption, which is a good thing, as it would kill this man to turn a dirty car back over to its owner. For just a moment, standing in the sunshine shooting the bull with Ernie, I let myself relax into a seductive illusion, one that Florida weaves better than any other state. It’s the fantasy that here, if nowhere else in the world, the sun always shines, and none of us have anything to worry about except how to find the shortest way to the nearest beach.

I’m so glad to get my car back; she’s been gone three days.

In a wild impulse born of a passion for a white Mercedes 280SL that I saw in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, I located a car just like it—a vintage two-door sports coupe with both a hard and soft convertible top. A few months ago, I traded in a sensible sedan to get it. The other price I pay for it is the amusing crap I take from this man who is old enough to be my father and who treats my automotive baby like a pampered grandchild.

“Most people,” Ernie says now, warming to his theme, “most people, they drive cars that were born after they were. Not that this isn’t a beautiful car, Marie. I certainly agree with you there. I think it’s the prettiest car that comes in here, except for those old Jaguars, but they’re crap, they’re only good for using as caskets or planters.”

I have to laugh. I’ve known a few owners of those.

With every passing second, my worries about “Paulie Barnes” feel increasingly surreal. Out here in the real world, the only attack I have to fear is from salt air and pollution on my precious paint job.

Ernie continues, “And not that I don’t like ordering parts for you—”

“I guess not, Ernesto,” I shoot back, “since your markups on my replacement parts probably paid for that fancy new sign you’ve got out front.”

“Not quite,” he says happily, running a finger over his right eyebrow, “but close. What I like best is when we have to order parts to be specially tooled for you because Mercedes doesn’t make them anymore. Then there’s overseas shipping, always a pretty penny, franc, or sou, and we have to add a little bit of a surcharge for handling all that repressive paperwork—”

“Oh, that
is
hard on you, Ernesto.”

“But listen, Marie, I got a bone to pick with you.”

“You do? I swear I haven’t neglected an oil change.”

“You’d better not.” Like a magician with a rabbit, he pulls a glossy magazine out from behind his back and then stubs his right forefinger at it. Thank God it’s not the tabloid. “This is you, isn’t it?”

I make a show of leaning over to peer at the photographs he means.

“Sure looks like me.”

“How come you never told me this was you?”

“What do you mean I never told you?” I tease him. “You know my name. It’s attached to my bills and I pay them. Who else could I be?”

“But you never told me you’re a famous author!”

“Oh, right, like I want you to know that, Ernesto. Now you’ll probably charge me even more for spare parts.”

He rubs his chin, looking judicious. “I don’t think it would be possible for us to charge you any more than we already do.”

“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” I joke.

Ernie laughs with all the pleasure of a man who knows he makes a nice net profit, but then he waves the magazine at me again. “It says here you write those true crime books. How can you stand to write about that awful stuff?”

“You mean, what’s a nice girl like me doing writing about serial killers?”

“Yeah, why do you do that?”

I smile at him. “I have to, to be able to afford you, Ernesto.”

“Right,” he snorts. He points to the magazine pictures again. “This is your boyfriend, huh?”

I tense, feeling that maybe we have just arrived at the real point of this conversation. “Yep.”

“People ever give you problems about that, Marie?”

“You mean because Franklin’s black and I’m not?”

“No,” he says, scornfully, “I mean because he’s a lawyer. Of course, because he’s black! People ever say things to you, either of you?”

“Not really,” I tell him, cautiously. “Why? Are you going to?”

He gives me a disgusted look. “I got a black son-in-law.”

“You do?”

That earns me a second disgusted look. “What do you think I am, a bigot, or something? Hell, I got no prejudices, I’ll even work on British cars! Marie, I got two grandchildren with the prettiest skin you ever saw. They look like they were made of butterscotch. I could just eat them up. Wanna see a picture?” At my encouraging nod, Ernie drops the magazine to the ground at his feet and digs into his back pocket for his wallet, from where he flashes a small photograph of adorable children.

“Oh, Ernie!” I gush.

He beams for a second, but then he says, as he puts his wallet back in his pocket, “I just worry sometimes, is everybody going to be nice to them? That doesn’t make me a bigot, does it?”

“Not in my book, Ernesto. But, listen, is everybody always nice to you?”

He thinks about that, then laughs. “Hell no.”

“Anyway, the world’s changing.”

“You think?”

As proof, I point at my own picture on the ground. “Looks that way.”

“Bet you get some nasty mail though.”

I feel a painful inner flinch, as if he has applied a tiny electrical shock to my heart. In the second afterward, I feel sick. I have to swallow bile before asking, “Why do you say that, Ernesto?”

His mouth arcs down again, only this time with no humor in it. “World may be changing, but there are still plenty of jerks in it. Those jerks see pictures like that of you and him they might think it’s their job to pull the world back to uglier times when they liked things better. Aw, listen to me, a philosopher with a lug wrench. I don’t know anything about that, but I’ll tell you what I do know, Marie.” He waves a hand over my car without touching it. “Pretty soon you won’t even be able to claim this as an antique car. It’ll be so completely overhauled, not even the doors will be original equipment.”

“Then I’ll sell it as new.”

The joke is older than the car, but he chuckles at it anyway.

Ernie gallantly opens the driver’s door of my little convertible and bows low to me as I drop in behind the wheel. Because of the drought, I haven’t raised either top in weeks. Rain is rare as an empty beach; sometimes I’m afraid that rain has become extinct in Florida, like fifty-eight kinds of tree snail already are. Still, I have to admit that, like a teenager, I love driving with the top down. I even got my hair chopped short so it can ruffle in the hot wind without whipping into my eyes.

“Happy trails to you, Marie,” Ernie sings, his usual farewell, “until we meet again.”

“Which probably won’t be long,” I sigh, for his amusement.

“I’m counting on it.”

We grin at each other and then I flip him a wave as I pull away.

“The hell with you, Paulie Barnes,” I declare as I turn my coupe south toward the Keys. I feel better now. I reach over and adjust the visor on the passenger’s side to block the sun that’s now on my right side. “I’m on vacation and you’re not invited. Crawl back under whatever rock you call home.”

Oh, my car runs so nice. The steering wheel, covered in tan leather, feels so good and familiar under my fingers.

“Bless you, Ernesto, and all of your grandchildren’s children.”

Half of Florida must be going to the Keys this weekend, judging from the traffic on the highways. I jockey for a place in the seemingly endless line of vehicles heading south. Franklin, Diana, and Arthur expect me to arrive at our rental condo on Key Largo by four-thirty for an early dinner. From only brief experience, I already know that the nervous systems of children are wired for regular feedings. Delay that and you pay a stiff price in whining. Since their father will be the only adult with them until I arrive, he’ll be the one to suffer if I’m late. Out of sympathy for him and for their stomachs, I choose the straightest—if not the prettiest—shot into the archipelago known as the Florida Keys.

The one I’m headed for is Key Largo, an island at the top of the scorpion’s tail that ends at Key West. Once on the Keys, which are a series of islands connected by the spectacular Overseas Highway, there are only two roads going north if you need to escape ahurricane, or get to the mainland in a hurry. There’s no hurricane or even a tropical storm in the forecast, unless I count the symbolic “storm” that Paulie Barnes thinks he’s brewing in our lives. In these circumstances, I can’t say that I’m crazy about the idea of going where it can be difficult to leave, but I know that if all else fails, we can always rent a boat and sail away.

That would mean leaving my car, though. I’d be
really
pissed about that.

Traffic is bumper to bumper, a huge clot of rush hour and weekend travelers going nowhere fast. Too late, I realize I made a mistake by leaving my car top down. At this speed there’s no breeze, the heat’s ferocious, and it’s no pleasure to idle behind semitrailers and be deafened by motorcycles streaking between lanes. I feel as if I’m eating exhaust as well as inhaling it. What was I thinking? I wasn’t, apparently. “This is your fault, too,” I grumble to the pseudonymous Paulie Barnes. “You distract me and make me do crazy things.” I reach over to the glove box and fish around until I find an old but edible mint to pop in my mouth and a floppy-brimmed hat to plop on my head to shade my face and the back of my neck.

Most sane people would hate these conditions, but as a true Florida fanatic, I am no more than slightly annoyed by the state’s drawbacks, by its tourists, its flying cockroaches, its traffic. I’d be willing to put up with much worse than that for the privilege of living in this state where I’m never more than a few hours away from sunshine, or a few miles from the water.

But even I have to admit it doesn’t look so beautiful here and now.

Around Homestead, the smoking remnants of brush fires have turned the air acrid and the scenery bleak. Everywhere I look, dead, blackened trees pierce a smoky sky. Only last week, a fifty-mile stretch of both of the roads into the Keys was closed off and on for three days by fires that burned out of control until they sizzled themselves into the Florida Bay.

While I’m idling behind stalled traffic, I try again to raise Franklin by cell phone.

Surely they’ve had time to reach Key Largo by now.

All I get is his recorded voice, so they’re either still in the car going somewhere, or maybe they’re out swimming.

“They’re fine,” I tell myself.

But it makes me want to be with him. Right now.

What could feel safer than being in the company of the Howard County state attorney? Franklin will know what to do next, and he’ll do it. How should
I
know what to do about a psycho pen pal? I’m just a writer, even if I do know a bit more about crimes and solving them than most writers do. But still, I’m only a writer. Franklin’s the one who will know how to handle this situation: God knows, he’s in charge of practically everything else involving criminal activity in Howard County. Personally, I can’t even imagine bearing so much responsibility for so many people, and yet he carries it off with panache, if not always with pleasure.

Feeling a strong need to hear his voice, I try his cell number again and again, like a teenager with a crush, but I just keep getting the recorded message.

I don’t leave one of my own, except to say, “I’m on my way.”

What else can I say, to a recording machine that he might play out loud for anyone to overhear?
“Hi, honey. We’re being stalked by a psycho maniac killer who has threatened your children if I don’t do what he says. See you soon. Bye. Love, Me.”

Yeah, right. What I want to say to his recording is, “Dammit, where are you guys? Aren’t you there yet?”

I will not worry about them, I try to convince myself.

But the rush hour traffic is giving me way too much time to imagine terrible things happening to Franklin and his kids. Plus, I get spooked when strange men in other cars throw appraising glances at me, and then feel foolish when they drive on by. Not only do I have too much time to think, I obviously have way too much imagination. I use it to picture how very silly I’m going to feel when I have to call Deb’s friends and family to say, “I thought we were in danger. I panicked. It was nothing.” I also have too much time to wonder if Ernie was right; maybe there is a racial motive to the E-mails in my suitcase. There hasn’t been a single hint of that in the messages. But, still, maybe that recent spurt of publicity has triggered this nutcase to write to me—

“Enough already!”

I feel confident that no one around me will pay the slightest attention to a woman yelling at herself and slamming her steering wheel with the palm of her hand. If they notice me at all, they’ll think it’s road rage, and avoid me.

I’m sick of worrying the problem to death in my mind.

“I need music. A talk show. Something to distract me. Anything.”

I glance down at the old-fashioned dashboard that Ernie’s guys have delicately reconfigured to accommodate more modern appurtenances, though it horrified the antique car purists among them. Nevertheless, I got my way and now I have a CD player, a pushbutton radio, a tape deck.

I push On, expecting to get National Public Radio.

A man’s voice, deep and somber, reverberates out of the speaker closest to me.

“Cape Fear,”
the voice says. “By John D. MacDonald.”