WIDOW (24 page)

The woman simply stared at him, incredulous, her lips parting and letting out a sibilant hissing sound, “. . . Beating to death?”

“Yes. Calloway died of his injuries. He was beaten with baseball bats.” This wasn't the easiest way to tell a parent the news, but she had forced him.

“Ric-key!” She screeched his name and now she was fumbling behind her with one hand to feel for the edge of the sofa where she immediately sat, slumping forward. “Rick-ey!”

A tall gangly teen—blond hair cut short, piercing blue eyes, a boy who would°look at home on a surf board on a Venice, California beach—came striding into the room. He halted when he saw a stranger with his mother. “What is it, mom?” His mother did not answer. She pointed a shaky finger at their guest.

Mitchell turned to the boy. “Son, I'm Detective Mitch Samson, HPD homicide division. I have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of George Calloway.”

“Huh?” The youth stepped back, his face showing an identical look of alarm to the one on his mother's. “Whadda ya mean?”

Mitchell read him his rights, stepped forward, and took his arm. “Turn around and put your hands behind you.”

He had the cuffs out when he heard the first horrible high-pitched scream from Mrs. Darnell. He turned instantly, the hair rising on the back of his neck. She was coming for him, her eyes wild and crazy, both hands held up and made into claws. He ducked to the side, put out an arm to keep the woman from falling. “Wait a minute . . .”

“Nonononono,” the woman moaned. “He didn't do it!”

She made another pass and Mitchell knew she was out of her mind at this point, her little sterile world crumbling before her eyes, her son being taken from her for a heinous crime he was sure she knew about due to the coverage it had gotten on the television news.

“Look,” he said in a loud voice to get her attention, “the boy's under arrest and if you don't get a hold of yourself, you may occupy a cell next to him. Now calm down and think about it. You might want to call your lawyer. Ricky doesn't have to talk to us without representation. I suggest you stop wasting my time and do something that might actually help your boy.”

Ricky stood penitent, hands behind his back, waiting for the cuffs. He stared at the floor, saying nothing.

Mrs. Darnell paused and lowered her crabbed hands. The shock still commandeered her features, but a semblance of sanity had already come back into her eyes. “Lawyer,” she said, repeating after him.

Mitchell cuffed the boy and led him toward the door.

“Mom?”

Mrs. Darnell was crying silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ricky. . .”

“Mom, call Dad!”

Mitchell had to get the boy to the car before the woman lost it again and caused some real trouble. He stopped in the entrance hall long enough to slip a card from his shirt pocket and drop it into a brass tray on the hall table. “Here's a number you can call. We'll need both you and your husband to come into the station to take care of the boy's things.”

Rickey Darnell was the one Mac had identified as leading the band of boys on their killing rampage. He was the one who took the first swing. Mitchell didn't even like touching the kid. It made him itch to hurt him, and he couldn't do that. He never did that. Hardly ever, he amended.

Hurting this kid would have felt good, but it could ruin the case against him too, if his attorney found any marks on him. That would never do. This one wasn't getting away so easily, not on stupid technicalities and fumbled procedure.

On the way to the station for booking, he talked to the kid in the back seat. “Big strong heterosexual boy like you, big smart rich boy got everything you ever need, and what do you do? Go on some flicking crazy joy ride with your friends and a trunkful of baseball bats. Man, that's about the stupidest flicking thing I ever heard of. You like cracking open that guy's head? You don't have nightmares about it, you stupid little bigoted asshole?”

The boy didn't protest. He didn't say anything, in fact, for the entire forty minutes it took Mitchell to drive him from the Woodlands area, north of the city, to the downtown station.

Mitchell gave him an earful and he liked doing it. And if the kid had said anything back to him, he would have been hard pressed not to turn in his seat and swat him in the mouth, attorney or no attorney, just for the general principle of the thing.

After booking, Mitchell volunteered two more detectives from Homicide and the three of them, in separate cars, went out to the Woodlands again, this time to round up the other four suspects. None of their parents gave them grief, not physical grief anyway. All of them were like Mrs. Darnell in that they were stupefied with shock and disbelief. Their little boys? Murderers?

No one made a move because it was a lot harder to come on tough against three cops than it was against one. And Mitchell, a man without a suicidal bone in his body, didn't want to chance a replay of Mrs. Darnell, her of the clawed hands.

It wouldn't be nice to have to shoot down some rich housewife-mommy or respectable scientist-daddy on a Monday afternoon.

 

Twenty

 

Big Mac lay on her side, making it easier for her to breathe. Mitchell sat in a vinyl chair pulled up close to the bedside. He watched Mac sleep.

Her face was pasty white and he could hear her rattling breath from where he sat, hands in his lap. She did not wake while he was there, and at ten p.m. a nurse came by to whisper that visiting hours were over, he'd have to leave.

Outside the hospital, he looked at the night sky peppered with stars. His stomach felt queasy and he realized he had not eaten any dinner. Too busy booking the kids from the Woodlands. Too busy worrying about Mac.

He drove down Elgin toward the Montrose section of the city. Knowing it was not just to find something to eat. He needed a few hours drinking Irish coffees and watching the girls dance. Would Shadow be on stage?

He ate two bean-and-red-chilli burritos at a Mexican street cart, washed them down with a Corona beer with a slice of lime floating in it. Probably give him indigestion on an empty stomach, but the spicy food followed by the tart cooling quench of the Corona made him feel better all the same.

He sat alone in the club where Shadow danced, waiting for her to perform. Finally, when it was after midnight, he asked the waitress, “Shadow on tonight?”

“She quit.”

“What?

“I hear she's dancing at one of the places down the street, if you want to find her.”

Mitchell immediately stood up, depositing a larger tip than he usually left on the table, and walked out into the cool night. Where could she have gone?

He had to find her.

~*~

He couldn't find Shadow. He discovered what club she was dancing in, the Blue Boa, by asking club managers all up and down the street. But the cadaverous man with the pockmarked face running the Boa said she wasn't scheduled tonight.

Mitchell thought it just as well. He had had one or two too many whiskies-and-coffee. His stomach boiled like a pot of water left on the burner too long.

At home, Pavlov jumped him from behind the door when he got it opened, covering him with slobbery kisses and planting huge front paws on his chest. “Down, boy. Whoa, slow down.”

The house smelled closed-up. Doggy. And something else, like the inside of an empty can of liver dog food. What the hell. It was home. It wasn't much, but it was home.

He dropped his keys on the end table and locked the front door. He hadn't yet turned on a lamp and thought he wouldn't bother. It would hurt his tired eyes. They felt like sandpaper.

Pavlov couldn't be quieted. He kept butting his master with his back-end, swinging around in that silly semicircle dance.

Mitchell let his right hand drift down and trail along the dog's broad head as he made his way through the dark to the bedroom. When he had his clothes off and stripped to his shorts, he climbed wearily into the unmade bed. Pavlov bounded onto the mattress, circled once, and lay down next to him. Mitchell was too tired to give a damn, though he never let the dog sleep with him. The old saying came to mind, just as he was reaching out for sleep. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

But then that was fine with him—fleas being better than some things a body could take on after a night in bed with certain kinds of beasts.

~*~

Shadow killed the third man at about the time Mitchell fell into a deep sleep next to his dog.

His name was Wilson. Chap Wilson, he said, moved recently to Houston from Peoria. Shadow picked him up at the back entrance of the Blue Boa. It was her night off at the new club and she never met the men far from where she worked.

“Is this a man-hating thing?” he had asked in the moments before his death.

By the time she had pondered out a reply, it was too late. “It might be,” she admitted to the open glazed eyes. Certainly it was hating this man that had proved his death. He might be the most perverse man in America, though how she could know for sure was something else that would take some steady, uninterrupted thinking.

When she asked him one of her listed questions:

“Have you ever hurt a woman or a child?” he answered, “Lots of them.”

She raised her gaze from the yellow legal pad lying on the dresser and turned to him. “Who?” she asked. “And why?”

He smiled at her and wriggled in his bonds, flexing his fingers. He was slightly built, not much larger than Shadow. He had a dark growth of beard that grew to a point on his chin, making him appear more sinister than he would have looked without it. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Anywhere.”

“They asked for it,” he said in a morally superior tone.

“Did they? Children asked to be hurt?”

“Even them.”

She returned to the chair and sat close to the bed. Her mind tried to slip away to remember Scott, but she would not let it. “Tell me.”

“If you'd like.” He spoke of his exploits the way a mountain climber might tell cronies of his journeys around the world to scale the highest peaks.

Her face never betrayed her. The club nightlife and the dancing had taught her how to camouflage her thoughts. She sat quietly, listening without commenting until he was done. It took more than two hours and her thoughts did not wander from him even once.

Depravity. He reveled in it. If he told the truth—and she knew he had, who would admit to oral sex with a six-month-old if it was not the truth?—then he was lower than a slug, lower than the demons stoking the fires of hell.

She gave him the highball glass of doctored whiskey.

A man-hating thing? Was that what this was all about? Just that and nothing else? Did she need to be back in the state hospital, Missed out on drugs, for thinking she should clean the city of its brutal men?

Or did this man, and the other two she had killed, need to continue walking the earth and getting away with their crimes against women? Was she going insane or was she simply growing more sane? She thought of Charles Bronson in the Death Wish films and felt a kinship with the vigilante character he had portrayed. At one time she had thought his movie character over-simplified and his motives too elementary. Now she thought just the opposite. Revenge was perfectly suitable and ridding the world of evil perfectly acceptable to her mind.

But this was no movie.

This was blood and vomit and the most deadly poison.

It still bothered her to play the game. It took nerves of steel, a clear mind, true courage. Murder took the most courage of all, even more than coming back to herself had taken when she had been lost in the fog that year in the hospital. If she made a mistake . . . If she killed someone who didn't deserve to die . . .

But that wouldn't happen. She shook her head now, slowly, and reached out to untie Chap Wilson from her bed.

This man could never have left the Shoreville mansion alive or she would have been responsible for loosing a monster back into the world to commit more crimes against children. Babies. Little innocent . . .

Her mind slipped a gear and her hands paused in the untying of a scarf. A memory floated to the foreground of her thoughts. She saw her mother, tall as the ceiling it seemed, which meant Kay must have been less than five years old. Her mother was being struck by her daddy. He knocked her to the floor with one backhand blow to the face. Kay ran to her and sat down beside her on the kitchen linoleum. She could feel the cold come through her knees. She could smell mama's sweat and the background scent of garbage in the pail, dishes unwashed in the sink. She brushed back mama's curtain of black hair and touched her hands covering her face. “Mama? Mama!”

The hands fell away and there was a red welt rising, closing off her mother's left eye. Kay looked up at her father, his raised voice booming like thunder above them.

“She ain't hurt. Get away from her, girl.”

His hand clamped around her forearm and lifted her aside as if she were a sack of potatoes. Then his hand closed over her mother's arm in the same place and lifted her, too, into a standing position.

Kay struggled to wedge herself between them when he raised his hand again to hit her mother. Kay pushed his legs. They were hairy legs sticking out of big white boxer shorts, the firm, muscled legs of a young man. Rock beneath her small hands.

Then the vision faded away and Shadow understood something she had never known about herself. She had not consciously known that scene from her childhood existed. It was a revelation, since her father was gone before she was really old enough to remember him well, and her mother had never mentioned those times when he must have beaten her.

“Oh, mama.”

Why didn't she miss her mother now? Why hadn't she called her since her release from the hospital?