All Mr Jones wanted was his twenty-five gees and his own bed. But that’s not what he got. He didn’t get his money, or his own bed. What he got was a shared room with two queen-sized beds – just like a hotel room, he thought – and Mr Brown.
‘Why we staying here? I really want to go home,’ Mr Jones said to Mr Brown.
‘Shut up,’ Mr Brown said, and began looking around the room.
‘What are you doing?’ Mr Jones asked, following Mr Brown.
‘Jesus! Will you sit down?’ Mr Brown snarled, shoving Mr Jones down on one of the beds.
Mr Jones bounced right back up. ‘Don’t you go shoving me!’ he said to Mr Brown, shoving him on the other bed.
Mr Brown bounced back up. The beds both had very good springs.
‘You don’t lay a finger on me, asshole! Never! You understand me?’ Mr Brown shouted, his index finger digging into Mr Jones’s chest.
In Mr Jones’s defense, he’d had a rough couple of days. And it was really just a reflex that made him grab that index finger and bend it backward until he heard it snap.
Mr Brown’s eyes grew wide; he grabbed his broken finger with his other hand, and sank to his knees. His mouth was open, but no sound was coming out, as he fell face first onto the lovely Oriental rug that covered the bedroom floor, out like a light. Mr Jones decided that Mr Brown actually had a very low pain threshold. Who’d have thought it?
Mr Jones, being basically a nice guy, pulled down the covers on the bed he designated as Mr Brown’s – closest to the door, in case anyone came in shooting – and picked up Mr Brown and laid him on the bed. He took off his shoes and socks, although he did regret taking off the socks, and tucked him in.
Then he, Mr Jones, began to peruse the room. He checked out the one window, as a possible escape route. It was nailed shut. Mr Jones wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t like that. Not a bit. He had a Leatherman tool in his pocket, found a pry bar-type instrument, and proceeded to dig out the nails. Then he unlocked the window and attempted to raise it. With a little nudge from someone as large as Mr Jones, it began to come up, although it was sticking in places. Mr Jones had already taken note of the taper candles in cut-glass sticks on the dresser. He grabbed one and greased the inside frame of the window liberally with candle wax. He continued his work until the window was all the way up and would go up and down smoothly and without a sound. Then he shut it and went to the nearest bed, which he had designated as his own, and sat on it, wondering what Mr Big had in store for the rest of the day.
We left and headed the rest of the way to the police station. It was a rainbow collision the few blocks it took us to get to the police station. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and all assortment of Middle Easterners. Never seen so many foreign-looking people in my whole life.
I gotta say this D.C. police station wasn’t what I expected. The only thing I know about police stations is what I see on TV, and this surely didn’t look like that place on NYPD Blue, which is as close as this lady has ever been to a police station. I’ve had to bail E.J. out of jail a time or two, but I’ve always done that over the phone. This place in the country’s capital was not what I expected. It was modern. Well, modern when I was a young lady anyway. Very 1950s. Light wood and Formica, vinyl tile floors, and fluorescent lighting. It was very noisy and hectic. People in uniforms rushing around, some of them dragging handcuffed people with them, a lady sitting in a chair screaming for no apparent reason, two little children jumping up and down on visitors’ chairs.
‘Who should we ask for?’ Gerald asked me as we approached the window. ‘Missing persons or homicide?’
‘Let’s call it what we know it is,’ I said. ‘Homicide.’
When the man on crutches in front of us left the window, we stepped up.
‘We’d like to speak to someone in the homicide department,’ Gerald said.
The woman behind the window was looking at a computer screen, not at us, and said, still without looking, ‘Has someone been murdered?’ in a dead monotone.
‘Well, we think so,’ Gerald said.
‘No thinking about it!’ I interjected. ‘She’s dead all right.’
The woman looked up. ‘Well, which is it?’ she asked. ‘Real dead or just a little bit dead?’
‘A friend of ours is missing and we have reason to believe foul play is involved,’ Gerald said.
‘How long this friend be missing?’ the woman asked.
‘Two days,’ Gerald said.
‘Elevator’s over there. Take it to the third floor, see missing persons. Next!’
‘No, we want homicide—’ I started, but the lady interrupted me. ‘Then show up with a dead body. Next!’
I was muttering under my breath as Gerald took my arm and led me to the elevator. ‘We’ll see what they have to say,’ he said.
‘Hmph,’ I said.
There was another window when we got to the missing persons department and we told the lady there – who was about twelve and didn’t seem all that bright – about our problem. ‘Have a seat,’ she said. We did, and watched her. She didn’t get up to go tell somebody we were sitting there; she didn’t use the phone to tell somebody we were sitting there; all she appeared to be doing was texting on her cell phone. I tried to talk myself into believing she was texting somebody that we were sitting out there. I didn’t fall for it.
Finally, after about fifteen minutes, another woman came to stand behind the girl at the window and actually looked at us. She said something to the girl, who glanced at us and blushed.
The other woman opened the door to the side of the window and said, ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been kept waiting,’ and came out to greet us. Me and Gerald stood up and we all shook hands. ‘I’m Melissa Vernon. I’m a missing persons detective. How can I help you, Mr and Mrs?’
‘Oh, no, ma’am,’ Gerald said quickly. Maybe a little too quickly. ‘This is Mrs Vera Pugh, and I’m her friend, Gerald Norris.’
‘OK, Mr Norris. Mrs Pugh, is it?’
I nodded.
‘Why don’t you come back to my desk and we’ll talk,’ Melissa Vernon said, and held open the door for us.
She led us through a bullpen of sorts. All the desks were facing one direction, to the right as you come in the door – nine of ’em, three to a row, about five of ’em occupied at that moment. At the back of the room was a desk sitting all alone, turned toward the others. This was the one she led us to. There were two chairs flanking this desk – I noticed the others only had one chair each.
She was a pretty woman in her late forties, early fifties, maybe, about twenty to thirty pounds overweight, with graying blonde hair, amber-colored eyes, a strong chin, and a crooked overbite. She was wearing those high-top boy’s tennis shoes with a nice polyester pantsuit in a muted lavender.
We got settled, denied the offer of refreshments, and then finally got down to business.
Graham burst into Megan’s room. ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ he yelled at her.
‘Don’t you come barging in here screaming at me! What are you talking about?’
‘Telling those twins our family business!’ Graham shouted.
Megan’s shoulders fell. She understood now that she’d done a bad thing, but it hadn’t even crossed her mind that she shouldn’t tell the twins. She told them everything. ‘Sorry,’ she said, then stuck her nose back into her iPad.
Graham slapped the iPad out of her hand. ‘Sorry’s not gonna cut it!’ he said, his words soft and kind of scary.
He’d left the door open and Alicia and Bess rushed in.
‘Graham, please don’t!’ Alicia said, grabbing his arm. ‘It just happened. I know she didn’t mean any harm by it.’
‘Ha!’ he said, staring daggers at his sister. ‘Don’t bet on it. She’s not stupid, but she is mean.’
Megan burst into tears, which made Bess run to the bed and put her arms around her. ‘Graham! You leave her alone!’ she shouted at her brother.
‘I’m not mean!’ Megan wailed. ‘And I am too stupid!’ She hid her face in Bess’s hair.
‘Graham!’ Alicia said, tears starting up. ‘Don’t do this! I won’t come between you and your sisters! I won’t! I swear I’ll leave!’ And she burst into tears, and with Bess already crying because of Megan, that meant Graham was standing in front of a bed full of crying women.
‘My God, boy, what did you do?’ said Willis from the doorway.
Graham turned to his father with wide, fearful eyes. ‘Not enough to cause this,’ he half-whispered.
‘I just hope you didn’t break them.’
‘Dad!’
‘Girls!’ Willis said upon entering Megan’s room. ‘What’s going on?’
Megan, between sobs, said, ‘Graham hates me! And I deserve it!’
‘No you don’t!’ Alicia, also between sobs, said. ‘You couldn’t help it!’
‘Yes, she could,’ Bess said, drying her eyes.
‘Bess!’ Alicia wailed, and Megan began to cry harder.
Their dad asked, ‘OK, Bess, what’s going on?’
She stood up and headed for the door. ‘It’s not for me to tell, Dad. This is between the three of them. I’m outta here.’ She went down the hall to her room, and they could hear her door slam shut.
‘OK, Graham,’ Willis said. ‘What did you do?’
‘I didn’t do jack-shit, Dad!’
‘Obviously you did something! We have two crying women here.’
Megan stood up, almost knocking over Alicia. ‘He didn’t do any-thing, Dad,’ she said, still sobbing, ‘I … I did! I … did a terr … ible thing, Daddy,’ she said, and fell into her father’s arms.
Looking at Graham, Willis said, ‘Call your mother up here. Now,’ as he patted Megan’s back and then said, ‘There, there,’ a lot.
It hadn’t gone all that well with the missing persons lady, Melissa Vernon. She’d taken down the information all right, but I felt like she just thought we were a couple of senile old coots who, if they ever actually had a friend named Rachael Donley, had simply misplaced her. We left the police station, both of us depressed because we knew we’d get no help from them.
It was getting on toward late afternoon, but the sun was still out and it was warmish, so we found a little park on the way to the metro, and decided to rest our feet when, really, I felt we were resting our souls.
‘Well, that was disappointing,’ I said.
‘She did seem to be a bit patronizing, didn’t she?’ Gerald said.
‘A bit,’ I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
‘What do we do now?’
I shrugged. ‘Don’t rightly know,’ I said. ‘I guess I could call E.J. again.’
‘Well, now, Vera,’ he said, ‘she’s all the way back in Texas, and we’re here in the nation’s capital. I think we need to figure this out for ourselves.’
‘And how do you propose we do that?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, frowning deeply. ‘We got any suspects?’
‘Only Brother Joe,’ I said.
‘Why do we suspect him?’ Gerald asked.
‘Because he was fiddling with her,’ I said.
‘And why would he want to kill her for that?’ Gerald asked.
I looked him in the eye. He wasn’t being mean; he actually wanted to know.
‘Got a lot of possible reasons,’ I said. ‘One: she was breaking up with him; two: she wouldn’t break up with him; three: she was gonna tell the deacons that he was a fornicator and an adulterer; four— Well, I don’t have a four.’
‘Four: maybe she found out something she shouldn’t oughta have,’ Gerald said, the frown gone from his brow.
‘You got a five?’ I asked him, grinning.
‘Yes. Five: maybe they knew each other before,’ he offered.
‘OK,’ I said, standing up. ‘Which one of those should we tackle first?’
I heard Graham call me and went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘What?’ I said, slightly irritated. I hate it when the kids scream at me from upstairs rather than just come down and speak to me directly.
‘We need you up here,’ Graham said, standing at the head of the stairs.
That’s when I heard the crying. Oh, shit, I thought. What now?
I made it upstairs and into Megan’s room, where I found Megan clinging to her father and crying, and Alicia prone on the bed, also crying.
‘Where’s Bess?’ I asked Graham. Where there were two crying girls, there was usually a third.
‘She got disgusted with the scene and went to her bedroom,’ Graham said.
Between Megan’s sobs I could hear my husband saying, ‘There, there,’ as he patted her on the back. ‘Go,’ I said, shoving Graham toward the stairs. ‘You, too,’ I said to Willis, detaching him from a weeping Megan. ‘Shut the door on your way out,’ I said and pulled Megan to the bed.
I got Alicia in a sitting position, still sobbing, and sat between the two, one arm over each. I let them cry it out. Then, as the crying became less heated, I said, ‘Somebody needs to tell me what’s going on.’
Megan let out a shuddering sigh. ‘It’s all my fault,’ she said.
‘Megs, don’t!’ Alicia said, her lower lip quivering.
‘It is, Alicia.’ She turned to me like I was a French revolutionary and she was Marie Antoinette. ‘I did a terrible thing. I told the twins about Alicia and Graham, and D’Wanda’s a big gossip and it’s going to get all over school, and everybody will think Alicia’s dating her brother, for God’s sake, and then she’ll get ostracized and it’s all my fault! I wasn’t thinking!’ At which point she fell on my lap, bawling.
‘It won’t be that bad,’ Alicia said, her lower lip quivering a bit more than it had earlier.
‘And Graham hates me!’ Megan said to my nether regions. ‘He came in here and I thought he was going to kill me, literally!’ She lifted her face to look into mine. ‘Mom, I was really scared!’
‘He would never hurt you—’ Alicia started, grabbing Megan’s arm.
Megan pulled away and removed herself from my lap. ‘Oh, hell he wouldn’t!’ she said. ‘Anybody messes with his precious Alicia can just forget about it!’
Alicia stood up, too, wiping her eyes. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Then that’s how it is.’ Looking at me, she said, ‘Mom, if I can borrow some money, I’ll go stay in a motel tonight, and I’ll move all my stuff out over the weekend.’
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I asked her.
‘I have friends I can stay with,’ she said.
‘Name them,’ I said.
‘What?’ she said, frowning.
‘I want the names and addresses of these friends’ – and, yes, I used air quotes – ‘you’ll be staying with.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, walking to the door and opening it.
As she left the room, Megan looked at me. ‘I wonder sometimes how differently my life would have turned out if the Lesters hadn’t lived next door,’ she said.
‘Yeah, you and me both,’ came from the door, where Bess stood.
‘Girls—’
They both turned their backs on me.
I left Megan in her room, shutting the door behind me at her request. The doors to all three girls’ rooms were closed. The door to Graham’s room was open, and I peaked in. Graham was not in attendance. I stepped inside and sat on his bed, my head in my hands. How had the Graham/Alicia drama come back to the Lesters? Hell, it always did. Everything always came back to the Lesters.
I always thought Willis and I had done the right thing, keeping an open and free discussion about Bess’s birth family going all these years. But maybe it had been a mistake. Then again, how could we have kept what happened a secret? The whole world – well, our world – knew about it. ‘Massacre on Sagebrush Trail’ had been the headline of the Codderville News Messenger. It had been in the paper for weeks, and in spite of our protests they had printed Bess’s name.
We’d found the people responsible for the deaths of Bess’s entire family – the Lesters – her parents and her brother and sister. I’d found out who’d killed my best friend, Terry, Bess’s mom, and Willis had found out who killed his best friend, Roy, Bess’s dad. It had been the very worst and hardest time in my life, but strangely enough a few good things had come out of those black days. I had met Luna, who was in charge of the investigation, and who, in her own surly fashion, has remained my friend to this day; and I had become closer to my mother-in-law, Vera, when she showed up the day after the bodies had been discovered with a gallon of bleach, scrub brushes, and a mop and pail. But the brightest, most sparkling thing to come of it was Bess. She became our daughter, just as surely as Megan was and just as surely as Graham was our son. We’d adopted her when she was five, so she’d been with us for twelve years, legally ours for eleven. But she and Megan had always been best friends, then sisters. I started to cry. I was losing my babies. In so many ways.
It had been a quiet ride. A very long, very quiet ride. Clarissa Mayfair liked to talk, but not around Davis DeWitt. DeWitt had three switches when it came to any response to a comment of hers: one, the scoff; two, the challenge; or three, the patronizing über-male bullshit. So she learned to just keep her mouth shut around him. She had decided long ago that this relationship wasn’t like in the movies. There was no chemistry, no sexual magic that was going to change the fact that they despised each other and have them hopping in bed three-quarters of the way through. Nope, she couldn’t stand the man. And because of that, she found nothing about him sexually appealing. Except for the fact that, like most men, DeWitt would screw anything, she doubted he found her sexually appealing either. One of these days the lieutenant was going to get serious about her weekly request for a change of partner.
They drove straight to the home of James Unger. As DeWitt turned off the car and started to open his door, Mayfair said, ‘We need to check in with the Houston police. Did you call the loo?’
‘Fuck that. We’re just going to talk to her. We’re not going to arrest her.’
‘What if she’s sitting there with a picture of herself pushing her husband off the garage roof ?’ Mayfair said.
DeWitt just looked at her, one eyebrow raised. Mayfair returned the look with a big, toothy, phony smile.
They opened their doors simultaneously and headed to the front of the house. And it was a nice house. Upper-middle-class nice. Maybe five thousand square feet. Two-story white brick with black shutters, and a double front door painted bright red. They rang the bell. The door had slim, beveled glass windows on either side. When no one came to the door, each took a window to look through.
‘Overturned furniture,’ Mayfair said, her hand on her gun at her side.
‘Here, too,’ DeWitt answered, also touching his gun. ‘I’m gonna break down the door.’
‘Yeah? Well, I’m gonna call the Houston PD.’ She pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911.
DeWitt said, ‘The wife could be bleeding out in there,’ and applied his heel to the lock mechanism of the door. It actually worked, since the dead bolt had not been thrown. DeWitt stepped inside, gun drawn.
Meanwhile, Mayfair was trying to explain to the 911 operator who she was, why she was in Houston, and what was going on at the home of James and Elizabeth Unger. She finally ended the call by saying, ‘For God’s sake, just send some detectives out here!’ And then followed her partner into the Unger home.
I wouldn’t tell just anyone this, but Kelvin, Willis’s father, and I were sexually ahead of our time. That is to say, Kelvin had a way about him that had me actually liking that part of marriage. I remember my mama telling me on the morning of my wedding that all I had to do was lie there and try not to cry. That never became an issue. I’m only telling you this because I have to admit here that I was beginning to think of Gerald the way I often thought of Kelvin. But then I’d stop myself, knowing that I could never know two men in my life that would make that worth the trouble. And wouldn’t it be embarrassing if I seduced Gerald and he was bad in bed? Then I’d have to change churches and I’d been going to the Codderville First Baptist since before I could walk. But the more time I spent with him, the more times he slipped his hand into mine, the more I thought about it. I think, at heart, maybe I’m a trollop.
But the job we had before us was not frivolous. We had a murder to solve, or a body to find, or, hopefully, both. So we found a small room off the lobby called the library, where nobody ever went, and sat in there to talk. There was a computer in there, and we looked at each other and both grinned.
‘This is gonna be a piece of cake!’ Gerald said.
‘We’ll just Google Rachael’s name, and then Brother Joe’s name. See what we come up with?’ I suggested.
‘Sounds like a plan,’ he said, and sat down in front of the computer. I was a little miffed about that. I mean, this was my investigation. He was my helper, not the other way around!
I just sighed – loudly – and pulled up a chair next to his.
He turned to look at me. ‘I’m sorry, Vera. Did you want to do this?’
‘No, no, that’s OK,’ I said. ‘You’re here now, let’s just do it.’
He Googled Rachael’s name and came up with absolutely nothing. ‘Donley’s her married name, right?’ I said. ‘Maybe we can find something under her maiden name.’
‘What’s that?’ Gerald asked me.
I shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Tomorrow’s Saturday. Linda’ – the church’s secretary – ‘comes in a half day on Saturday. She should have that.’
‘What would we give as a reason for asking?’ Gerald asked.
‘We’ll think on that. Now, do Brother Joe,’ I said.
Gerald put in the name Joe Logan, got nothing, put in Joseph Logan, got nothing – and by ‘nothing’ I mean not our Joe Logan. Just lots of people who weren’t our Joe. Then we decided on Joe Logan, Baptist Preacher, got nothing at all, then tried Minister. Ditto.
‘Facebook!’ I said.
‘You think he has an account?’ Gerald asked.
‘I know he does. I’m friends with him,’ I said.
Gerald shook his head. ‘I don’t have Facebook,’ he said. He stood up. ‘You do it.’
We changed places and I pulled up my Facebook account. I hadn’t checked it for more than a week, but Brother Joe’s profile picture wasn’t hard to find. I double-clicked on it and pulled up his page. I’m not sure what I expected to find. A confession? A declaration of undying love for Rachael Donley? There wasn’t much there. I was vacantly staring at the page when Gerald said, ‘What’s that?’ and pointed at something on the screen. It was the ‘where you’re from’ question, and in that space were the words: ‘Bethesda, MD.’
‘He said he never lived outside Texas,’ Gerald said.
So I typed in ‘Joseph Logan, Bethesda, MD.’ Still nothing. You heard of channeling? Shirley MacLaine does it. I think I sorta channeled a TV cop show. I typed in ‘Joseph Logan, Deceased.’
There were three, and one was from Bethesda, Maryland.