23
Brady arrives home well before noon with all his problems solved. Old Mr. Beeson from across the street is standing on his lawn. “Didja hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Big explosion somewheres downtown. There was a lot of smoke, but it’s gone now.”
“I was playing the radio pretty loud,” Brady says.
“I think that old paint fact’ry exploded, that’s what I think. I knocked on your mother’s door, but I guess she must be sleepun.” His eyes twinkle with what’s unsaid: Sleepun it off.
“I guess she must be,” Brady says. He doesn’t like the idea that the nosy old cock-knocker did that. Brady Hartsfield’s idea of great neighbors would be no neighbors. “Got to go, Mr. Beeson.”
“Tell your mum I said hello.”
He unlocks the door, steps in, and locks it behind him. Scents the air. Nothing. Or . . . maybe not quite nothing. Maybe the tiniest whiff of unpleasantness, like the smell of a chicken carcass that got left a few days too long in the trash under the sink.
Brady goes up to her room. He turns down the coverlet, exposing her pale face and glaring eyes. He doesn’t mind them so much now, and so what if Mr. Beeson’s a neb-nose? Brady only needs to keep things together for another few days, so fuck Mr. Beeson. Fuck her glaring eyes, too. He didn’t kill her; she killed herself. The way the fat ex-cop was supposed to kill himself, and so what if he didn’t? He’s gone now, so fuck the fat ex-cop. The Det is definitely Ret. Ret in peace, Detective Hodges.
“I did it, Mom,” he says. “I pulled it off. And you helped. Only in my head, but . . .” Only he’s not completely sure of that. Maybe it really was Mom who reminded him to lock the fat ex-cop’s car doors again. He wasn’t thinking about that at all.
“Anyway, thanks,” he finishes lamely. “Thanks for whatever. And I’m sorry you’re dead.”
The eyes glare up at him.
He reaches for her—tentatively—and uses the tips of his fingers to close her eyes the way people sometimes do in movies. It works for a few seconds, then they roll up like tired old windowshades and the glare resumes. The you-killed-me-honeyboy glare.
It’s a major buzzkill and Brady pulls the coverlet back over her face. He goes downstairs and turns on the TV, thinking at least one of the local stations will be broadcasting from the scene, but none of them are. It’s very annoying. Don’t they know a car-bomb when one explodes in their faces? Apparently not. Apparently Rachael Ray making her favorite fucking meatloaf is more important.
He turns off the idiot box and hurries to the control room, saying chaos to light up his computers and darkness to kill the suicide program. He does a shuffling little dance, shaking his fists over his head and singing what he remembers of “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead,” only changing witch to cop. He thinks it will make him feel better, but it doesn’t. Between Mr. Beeson’s long nose and his mother’s glaring eyes, his good feeling—the feeling he worked for, the feeling he deserved—is slipping away.
Never mind. There’s a concert coming up, and he has to be ready for it. He sits at the long worktable. The ball bearings that used to be in his suicide vest are now in three mayonnaise jars. Next to them is a box of Glad food-storage bags, the gallon size. He begins filling them (but not overfilling them) with the steel bearings. The work soothes him, and his good feelings start to come back. Then, just as he’s finishing up, a steamboat whistle toots.
Brady looks up, frowning. That’s a special cue he programmed into his Number Three. It sounds when he’s got a message on the Blue Umbrella site, but that’s impossible. The only person he’s been communicating with via the Blue Umbrella is Kermit William Hodges, aka the fat ex-cop, aka the permanently Ret Det.
He rolls over in his office chair, paddling his feet, and stares at Number Three. The Blue Umbrella icon is now sporting a 1 in a little red circle. He clicks on it. He stares, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the message on his screen.
kermitfrog19 wants to chat with you!
Do you want to chat with kermitfrog19?
Y N
Brady would like to believe this message was sent last night or this morning before Hodges and the blond bimbo left his house, but he can’t. He just heard it come in.
Summoning his courage—because this is much scarier than looking into his dead mother’s eyes—he clicks Y and reads.
Missed me.
And here’s something to remember, asshole: I’m like your side mirror. You know, OBJECTS ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.
I know how you got into her Mercedes, and it wasn’t the valet key. But you believed me about that, didn’t you? Sure you did. Because you’re an asshole.
I’ve got a list of all the other cars you burglarized between 2007 and 2009.
I’ve got other info I don’t want to share right now, but here’s something I WILL share: it’s PERP, not PERK.
Why am I telling you this? Because I’m no longer going to catch you and turn you in to the cops. Why should I? I’m not a cop anymore.
I’m going to kill you.
See you soon, mama’s boy.
Even in his shock and disbelief, it’s that last line that Brady’s eyes keep returning to.
He walks to his closet on legs that feel like stilts. Once inside with the door closed, he screams and beats his fists on the shelves. Instead of the nigger family’s dog, he managed to kill his own mother. That was bad. Now he’s managed to kill someone else instead of the cop, and that’s worse. Probably it was the blond bitch. The blond bitch wearing the Det-Ret’s hat for some weirdo reason only another blonde could understand.
One thing he is sure of: this house is no longer safe. Hodges is probably gaming him about being close, but he might not be. He knows about Thing Two. He knows about the car burglaries. He says he knows other stuff, too. And—
See you soon, mama’s boy.
He has to get out of here. Soon. Something to do first, though.
Brady goes back upstairs and into his mother’s bedroom, barely glancing at the shape under the coverlet. He goes into her bathroom and rummages in the drawers of her vanity until he finds her Lady Schick. Then he goes to work.
24
Hodges is in Interrogation Room 4 again—IR4, his lucky room—but this time he’s on the wrong side of the table, facing Pete Huntley and Pete’s new partner, a stunner with long red hair and eyes of misty gray. The interrogation is collegial, but that doesn’t change the basic facts: his car has been blown up and a woman has been killed. Another fact is that an interrogation is an interrogation.
“Did it have anything to do with the Mercedes Killer?” Pete asks. “What do you think, Billy? I mean, that’s the most likely, wouldn’t you say? Given the vic was Olivia Trelawney’s sister?”
There it is: the vic. The woman he slept with after he’d come to a point in his life where he thought he’d never sleep with any woman again. The woman who made him laugh and gave him comfort, the woman who was his partner in this last investigation as much as Pete Huntley ever was. The woman who wrinkled her nose at him and mocked his yeah.
Don’t you ever let me hear you call them the vics, Frank Sledge told him, back in the old days . . . but right now he has to take it.
“I don’t see how it can,” he says mildly. “I know how it looks, but sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.”
“How did you—” Isabelle Jaynes begins, then shakes her head. “That’s the wrong question. Why did you meet her? Were you investigating the City Center thing on your own?” Playing the uncle on a grand scale is what she doesn’t say, perhaps in deference to Pete. After all, it’s Pete’s old running buddy they’re questioning, this chunky man in rumpled suit pants and a blood-spotted white shirt, the tie he put on this morning now pulled halfway down his big chest.
“Could I have a drink of water before we get started? I’m still shook up. She was a nice lady.”
Janey was a hell of a lot more than that, but the cold part of his mind, which is—for the time being—keeping the hot part in a cage, tells him this is the right way to go, the route that will lead into the rest of his story the way a narrow entrance ramp leads to a four-lane highway. Pete gets up and goes out. Isabelle says nothing until he gets back, just regards Hodges with those misty gray eyes.
Hodges drinks half the paper cup in a swallow, then says, “Okay. It goes back to that lunch we had at DeMasio’s, Pete. Remember?”
“Sure.”
“I asked you about all the cases we were working—the big ones, I mean—when I retired, but the one I was really interested in was the City Center Massacre. I think you knew that.”
Pete says nothing, but smiles slightly.
“Do you remember me asking if you ever wondered about Mrs. Trelawney? Specifically if she was telling the truth about not having an extra key?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What I was really wondering was if we gave her a fair shake. If we were wearing blinders because of how she was.”
“What do you mean, how she was?” Isabelle asks.
“A pain in the ass. Twitchy and haughty and quick to take offense. To get a little perspective, turn it around a minute and think of all the people who believed Donald Davis when he claimed he was innocent. Why? Because he wasn’t twitchy and haughty and quick to take offense. He could really put that grief-stricken haunted-husband thing across, and he was good-looking. I saw him on Channel Six once, and that pretty blond anchor’s thighs were practically squeezing together.”
“That’s disgusting,” Isabelle says, but she says it with a smile.
“Yeah, but true. He was a charmer. Olivia Trelawney, on the other hand, was an anti-charmer. So I started to wonder if we ever gave her story a fair shot.”
“We did.” Pete says it flatly.
“Maybe we did. Anyway, there I am, retired, with time on my hands. Too much time. And one day—just before I asked you to lunch, Pete—I say to myself, Assume she was telling the truth. If so, where was that second key? And then—this was right after our lunch—I went on the Internet and started to do some research. And do you know what I came across? A techno-fiddle called ‘stealing the peek.’”
“What’s that?” Isabelle asks.
“Oh, man,” Pete says. “You really think some computer genius stole her key-signal? Then just happened to find her spare key stowed in the glove compartment or under the seat? Her spare key that she forgot? That’s pretty far-fetched, Bill. Especially when you add in that the woman’s picture could have been next to Type A in the dictionary.”
Calmly, as if he had not used his jacket to cover the severed arm of a woman he loved not three hours before, Hodges summarizes what Jerome found out about stealing the peek, representing it as his own research. He tells them that he went to the Lake Avenue condo to interview Olivia Trelawney’s mother (“If she was still alive—I didn’t know for sure”) and found Olivia’s sister, Janelle, living there. He leaves out his visit to the mansion in Sugar Heights and his conversation with Radney Peeples, the Vigilant security guard, because that might lead to questions he’d be hard-pressed to answer. They’ll find out in time, but he’s close to Mr. Mercedes now, he knows he is. A little time is all he needs.
He hopes.
“Ms. Patterson told me her mother was in a nursing home about thirty miles from here—Sunny Acres. She offered to go up there with me and make the introduction. So I could ask a few questions.”
“Why would she do that?” Isabelle asks.
“Because she thought we might have jammed her sister up, and that caused her suicide.”
“Bullshit,” Pete says.
“I’m not going to argue with you about it, but you can understand the thinking, right? And the hope of clearing her sister of negligence?”
Pete gestures for him to go on. Hodges does, after finishing his water. He wants to get out of here. Mr. Mercedes could have read Jerome’s message by now. If so, he may run. That would be fine with Hodges. A running man is easier to spot than a hiding man.
“I questioned the old lady and got nothing. All I managed to do was upset her. She had a stroke and died soon after.” He sighs. “Ms. Patterson—Janelle—was heartbroken.”
“Was she also pissed at you?” Isabelle asks.
“No. Because she was for the idea, too. Then, when her mother died, she didn’t know anyone in the city except her mother’s nurse, who’s pretty long in the tooth herself. I’d given her my number, and she called me. She said she needed help, especially with a bunch of relatives flying in that she hardly knew, and I was willing to give it. Janelle wrote the obituary. I made the other arrangements.”
“Why was she in your car when it blew?”
Hodges explains about Holly’s meltdown. He doesn’t mention Janey appropriating his new hat at the last moment, not because it will destabilize his story but because it hurts too much.
“Okay,” Isabelle says. “You meet Olivia Trelawney’s sister, who you like well enough to call by her first name. The sister facilitates a Q-and-A with the mom. Mom strokes out and dies, maybe because reliving it all again got her too excited. The sister is blown up after the funeral—in your car—and you still don’t see a connection to the Mercedes Killer?”
Hodges spreads his hands. “How would this guy know I was asking questions? I didn’t take out an ad in the paper.” He turns to Pete. “I didn’t talk to anyone about it, not even you.”
Pete, clearly still brooding over the idea that their personal feelings about Olivia Trelawney might have colored the investigation, is looking dour. Hodges doesn’t much care, because that’s exactly what happened. “No, you just sounded me out about it at lunch.”
Hodges gives him a big grin. It makes his stomach fold in on itself like origami. “Hey,” he says, “it was my treat, wasn’t it?”
“Who else could have wanted to bomb you to kingdom come?” Isabelle asks. “You on Santa’s naughty list?”
“If I had to guess, I’d put my money on the Abbascia Family. How many of those shitbags did we put away on that gun thing back in ’04, Pete?”
“A dozen or more, but—”
“Yeah, and RICO’d twice as many a year later. We smashed them to pieces, and Fabby the Nose said they’d get us both.”
“Billy, the Abbascias can’t get anyone. Fabrizio is dead, his brother is in a mental asylum where he thinks he’s Napoleon or someone, and the rest are in jail.”
Hodges just gives him the look.
“Okay,” Pete says, “so you never catch all the cockroaches, but it’s still crazy. All due respect, pal, but you’re just a retired flatfoot. Out to pasture.”
“Right. Which means they could go after me without creating a firestorm. You, on the other hand, still have a gold shield pinned to your wallet.”
“The idea is ridiculous,” Isabelle says, and folds her arms beneath her breasts as if to say That ends the matter.
Hodges shrugs. “Somebody tried to blow me up, and I can’t believe the Mercedes Killer somehow got an ESP vibe that I was looking into the Case of the Missing Key. Even if he did, why would he come after me? How could that lead to him?”
“Well, he’s crazy,” Pete says. “How about that for a start?”
“Sure, but I repeat—how would he know?”
“No idea. Listen, Billy, are you holding anything back? Anything at all?”
“No.”
“I think you are,” Isabelle says. She cocks her head. “Hey, you weren’t sleeping with her, were you?”
Hodges shifts his gaze to her. “What do you think, Izzy? Look at me.”
She holds his eyes for a moment, then drops them. Hodges can’t believe how close she just came. Women’s intuition, he thinks, and then, Probably a good thing I haven’t lost any more weight, or put that Just For Men shit in my hair.
“Look, Pete, I want to shake. Go home and have a beer and try to get my head around this.”
“You swear you’re not holding anything back? This is you and me, now.”
Hodges passes up his last chance to come clean without a qualm. “Not a thing.”
Pete tells him to stay in touch; they’ll want him in tomorrow or Friday for a formal statement.
“Not a problem. And Pete? In the immediate future I’d give my car a once-over before driving it, if I were you.”
At the door, Pete puts an arm over Hodges’s shoulders and gives him a hug. “I’m sorry about this,” he says. “Sorry about what happened and about all the questions.”
“It’s okay. You’re doing the job.”
Pete tightens his grip and whispers in Hodges’s ear. “You are holding back. You think I’ve been taking stupid pills?”
For a moment Hodges rethinks his options. Then he remembers Janey saying He’s ours.
He takes Pete by the arms, looks him full in the face, and says, “I’m just as mystified about this as you are. Trust me.”