Zipper Fall (41 page)

“Okay, Reyna. Thank you. That’s… disturbing. No… no, I won’t drink anything. Don’t worry… and let Auguste and Tim know I thank them for the intel.”

I clicked the phone shut, only to see Risby and Jack sitting on opposite ends of my oatmeal-colored sofa, staring at the television.

The Channel 11 news broadcast was down to those regional, juicy tidbits with a bit of humor and local color. Now the funny news of the day revolved around a group of cheerleader drag queens stuck in an elevator. Risby’s amused smirk was a direct counterpoint to Jack’s appalled glare as the newsreel showed me coming out of the elevator wearing a purple-and-white pleated skirt and a skimpy top, my long, black wig slightly askew. Reyna strutted behind me, looking like sex on wheels with her sultry glare and long crimson hair spilling down her shoulders. Tim Nolan came across as the punk he probably was; serious on the outside, mischievous on the inside, while Chico sauntered out with a toss of his polished, black hair and swaying hips: catwalk time.

“Uh… does it show much?” I asked the reporter while on camera, looking stunned in the arresting glare of all those bright flashbulbs, with strobing emergency lights outside still lighting up the street.

Jack took the remote from Risby’s hand and clicked the television off. Then he stood up and faced me, his extra height suddenly more apparent. His eyes were solemn in that kind of stiff, controlled way that always told me he was keeping a tight grip on his short fuse. “Care to explain that, Wyatt?” His level voice betrayed a hint of fear and immediately I was transported to a tough conversation we’d had what seemed like ages ago.

Do you realize that I’m violating my probation by consorting with a known felon? That’s you, sweetheart. By not turning you in like I ought to, I’m aiding and abetting. You’re screwing up your life and taking me down with you. And for what? A few lousy bucks?

Our big fight—the one right before Ernie shot me in the ass. Jack still had several years of probation left; I’d tried to be good, I really had, but this was different.

“The gang and I had a small mission. Don’t worry about it. Here, dinner’s on the table.”

“Small mission?” Risby spat as he drew himself to a height that towered even Jack’s. His face reddened in anger and his eyes narrowed. His tone was nothing short of incredulous. “Then how the hell do you explain these?” He fished inside his plaid shirt pocket with sinewy fingers and eventually and produced several long strands of purple-and-white plastic.

Pom-pom dandruff.

“I don’t know. I haven’t handled anything like that. What is it?”

“It’s part of your cheerleading uniform, just like on TV,” he said with a sarcastic bite to his voice. “You and your buddies broke into my place and tossed it. You made an effort not to make a mess, but some things were put back the wrong way, and somebody dropped these under the table. You have a bit of explaining to do.”

I sat in a chair, where good food was going cold on the table. Both men stood, one on each side of me, glaring at one another and then at me as though they couldn’t decide whom to yell at first. “All right. I’ll tell you what went down, but only after dinner. Please sit down.”

Jack cleared his throat and his hands gripped the back of his chair so hard I saw his knuckles go white. “I won’t sit down to eat or drink with the man who murdered my sister.”

I nodded. “I know. I wouldn’t expect you to, Jack. Won’t you please trust me on this, just this once? What we found—all those things—Risby didn’t
murder
Celia. He failed to prevent her death by accident, and her death was engineered, but it was done by a third party. We’re still digging for the details in that respect.”

I saw Risby’s eyes widen; their charcoal gray glistened a bit and he looked away, not meeting my eyes, and not looking at Jack, either.

“Risby, won’t you please sit down?” My voice sounded like paper ripping. I hated having to beg these guys. To my surprise, his shoulders slumped upon a forced exhale, and with his head bent, he pulled out the chair to my right and settled upon it with care, as though it might break under him.

“Jack—I swear, there is solid evidence. He didn’t do it. Won’t you sit down with us?” I met my lover’s gaze straight on. There was a barely contained fire behind his impossibly blue eyes, and his shoulders were stiff with suppressed rage—a rage that had been brewing for almost a year now. Grief comes in stages, I’d been told, but those stages rarely come in their preordained sequence and on a schedule. Anger was one of those stages, and it seemed Jack wasn’t entirely done with it.

I watched his nostrils widen. Bad sign—my stress level skyrocketed.

His powerful, long-fingered hand picked up his plate with the food on it and hurled it across my whole apartment, right into my front door.

I relaxed, feeling the hint of a smile tease the corners of my mouth.

Risby jumped from his seat, wild and startled. An unshed tear detached from the outside corner of his eye and rolled down, unfelt and forgotten. “What are ya doin’?” he demanded, his voice still clouded over.

I watched Jack look around, his eyes skipping from object to object.

“Hold on,” I said quickly, forestalling action on Risby’s part. Ducking into the kitchen, I removed a stack of seven dinner plates from the cupboard and placed them on the table before Jack. They were old and smaller than the modern ones he just broke; their baby blue forget-me-not garland decorations had almost washed off, along with the bits of ancient gold trim. Several were chipped; one had a hairline crack that wasn’t going to survive the dishwasher anyway.

“What’s this?” he said and his voice was so choked up, he was barely able to speak.

“I got these at a thrift store for you. There’s more. Go right ahead.”

Jack’s breathing slowed as he eyed the stack of old, beat-up fancy china being sacrificed to him and his temper. From just the corner of my eye, I saw Risby fix his gaze on a point far, far ahead, not seeing and not reacting, and definitely not laughing out loud as he wanted to do right then.

Risby knew Jack well, it seemed.

Jack hefted one of the old plates. His eyes glazed over; he put it down and sat in his chair with eyes downcast.

“Will you eat now?” I asked.

He nodded.

I took the topmost plate, shoving the remaining six next to Jack in case he had a need for them later. Then I loaded the remaining chicken thigh and beans onto it and placed it before him. I lifted my glass in a toast. “Guys. Here is to strength, to love, and to new beginnings.”

They both looked at me with bewildered eyes; on their best behavior, they lifted their wineglasses and we all clinked together and drank.

Then we ate.

I suppressed a smile. It had taken me two days of hard-core hunting before I managed to locate a set of old china even vaguely reminiscent of Celia’s old Limoges serving platter. The way to make Jack actually feel his grief, it seemed, was through old china with bits of painted flowers, glistening with wee bits of gold.

When our meal was over, I cleared the table and handed a second bottle of inexpensive Chardonnay to Jack, who opened it with the same absent air with which he had eaten his dinner. With our drinks topped off, he leaned back and ran his hand over his face and through his hair. “Okay, Wy. Spill it.”

I needed to let them know what we had found, but I was still synthesizing the information I’d gotten from Reyna less than half an hour ago.

“Let me start at the beginning so we all have the same information. Risby, when Jack and I were going through Celia’s old things, we found her climbing gear. It was the same gear she used when she was with you last.”

I saw Jack observe Risby with rapt attention. His former colleague and now his doorman looked pained at the reference, but nodded.

“Don’t go any further,” he said. “You discovered that the rope was too thin.”

“Yeah,” I said.

There were few beats of silence, and Risby slammed his fist into the table, making the old china and our wineglasses jump. “Fuck! Just, fuck it all. If only I hadn’t had a stick up my ass over assisted climbing, I’d have bothered to educate myself on whatever new gear was coming out. And had I bothered to learn what other people were using up there, I’d have known she gave me her updated, better GriGri and kept the old one for herself. And had we switched those, she’d have been okay.” Risby’s shoulders were tense and his powerful, rock-climber’s fingers threatened to snap the stem of his wine glass in two.

“Risby.” I attempted to take the glass away from him. He looked at me and then through me with his wild, dark eyes. He stood up, took the top plate from the stack, and sent it soaring through the air. It shattered against my front door with a bright, cheerful sound. Its porcelain pieces clattered onto the tile below, adding to the pile of stoneware shards, green beans, and a cold chicken leg.

We waited for Risby’s breathing to even out.

He sat and looked Jack in the eye. “I will never forgive myself. And I don’t expect you to forgive me, either.”

Jack twirled his glass between his fingers; then he took a diminutive sip and nodded. “Go on.”

“That stupid rope. I never use those color-coded ropes. When I do use ropes, which is almost never, I use camo ropes so they don’t stand out like a sore thumb. So it didn’t occur to me it felt a little thin.”

“Where did that rope come from, Risby?”

“Ah….” He took a gulp of wine and eyed the stack of five antique, chipped plates the late Celia would have loved to use. “My former boss, Toussey, he used to climb. He was getting rid of gear he no longer needed. Cleaning house, he said.” He spat the words, barely opening his narrow lips.

“And Toussey didn’t like whistle-blowers, did he?” I said, my voice breaking the silence.

“No. No, he did not.”

“I remember Toussey,” Jack said. “A stuck-up jackass. He’d talk a good talk, but his actions…. He did some bad shit to people. I wonder where he is now?” Jack’s eyes gleamed with the need to lock onto a new target for his needed revenge.

Risby merely shrugged. “Who cares? Karma’s a bitch. It will all catch up with him eventually.”

I stood, letting my chair scrape and make a loud noise against the beat-up linoleum floor of my kitchen area. “It already has. Toussey, the former Vice President of Operations of Provoid Brothers, now lives in a nursing home. He’s blind. He also seems to have lost a lot of his mental capacity—apparently he liked drinking all kinds of exotic things.” I glanced toward Risby. “It seems that he drank some moonshine and it was a bad batch. It almost killed him.”

Risby’s eyes were drawn to mine like a compass needle to the North Pole.

I betrayed nothing. “Drinking that stuff is risky,” I said in an off-handed manner as I turned toward Jack. “Anyway, he tried to kill your sister and frame Risby for it. If we had solid and untainted evidence, we could take it to the police, but we don’t. Whatever happened, happened. Toussey paid a heavy price for his greed.”

I reached for the last of the wine and divided it equally among our three glasses. Then I raised mine. “I’d like to propose a toast, guys. It’s a toast to life, to love, and to moving on.”

We didn’t touch glasses this time; we only drank.

“And I’d like to say one thing.” Jack cleared his throat, his blazing blue eyes burning holes into Risby. “I never knew. We may never have the details, but… shit happens. Celia was deep into a dangerous sport. She knew this could happen; hell, she wrote about things like this happening to other climbers. I… I do not fault you….” He closed his eyes and thought for a while, as if making sure he said what he truly meant. “I no longer fault you for murdering her, ’cause you didn’t. I fault you for lying to her just to get laid. Had she known you were as good as you think you are, she’d have never used that type of gear and this situation might have never even happened. And where would the two of you be now? Hawaii?”

“Alaska,” Risby said. “She became obsessed with Alaska. Totally fell in love with it. She even bought a claim up there—what, you didn’t know? Yeah… a cabin with no electricity, less than two hours away from the nearest village by snow-machine. There’s a creek—there used to be gold in those parts. Mostly, the hunting’s good and she… ah, never mind. It’s all over now.” A dark shadow passed over his high brow.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of it. “I’d like to read more of your poetry, Risby,” I blurted out, unwilling to have him hide from what was, what is, and from what will be. “I’d like you to write again—new stories, new material. I’d like to see your work published.”

Like Celia encouraged you to publish….

He looked away. “I better get goin’.” That thick accent crept into his speech again, a cover-up for his exceptional talent, a camouflage that had allowed the rest of us to pretend that he was an ordinary corporate suit, a common doorman, a beginner climber of limited talent and imagination.

“Okay,” I said, getting up to walk him to the door. “Make sure to stop by again. Here, or at Jack’s.”

A large hand settled on my shoulder; Jack’s heat warmed my back. “Yeah. Do come up, Risby. Seriously. You an’ I…. Celia would have wanted us to drink together as friends.”

The tall poet turned to us and let his hand fall on Jack’s shoulder, his strong, climber’s fingers giving him a tight squeeze. “Thanks, Jack.” Then he turned to me and stroked my hair—the tender gesture took my breath away. “Keep ’im outta trouble, will ya?” His thin, wide lips canted in a crooked grin, and then he was gone. Only the broken plates and cold chicken leg remained, shoved to the side by the door, the green beans forced to lie in parallel as a salute to his passing.

M
Y
STARK
, black-and-white room felt cold that night even with Jack spooning me from behind. His heat wasn’t enough; arctic wind ripped through my soul every time I thought of the haunted look in Risby’s eyes.

I turned around to face Jack and slipped my arm over his torso, my leg between his legs, and pulled in tight to maximize contact.

Jack’s quiet voice broke the uneasy silence. “He’s innocent.”