The morning after the encounter with Carter in front of my house I woke up with what Red Eye called an “anvil” hangover—one where your head feels like someone reshaped it on an anvil with a ball peen hammer. At least I slept through the night. That hadn’t happened since the day I found Prudence in the pool.
I tried vodka and tomato juice, the hair of the dog. It got me drunk right away. The second one worked even better. As I poured the third, Red Eye rang the bell. He’d won $1,500 betting on Thai kickboxing the night before. He wanted to celebrate.
“I’m not quite ready,” I said. “I need another vodka and TJ.”
“Add some Worcestershire,” he said, “to clear the head.”
“Carter was here again yesterday,” I told him while I tracked down the Worcestershire. Luisa had reorganized the kitchen cupboards the day before. When she did that, I couldn’t find anything. She had a system, I just kept forgetting what it was. My method was to just line everything up in neat rows of the same size, spices, tuna, evaporated milk. She said my approach made no sense. Estúpido, she called it.
“Carter knows about my meeting with Jeffcoat,” I told Red Eye. “Our little financial wizard must have called the cops.”
“Or maybe they’re best buddies?” Red Eye suggested.
“Yeah, right. Cops and tycoons always hang together.” Red Eye was my homie but sometimes he just connected the wrong dots.
I kept looking for the Worcestershire, finally found it hiding behind a bottle of vinegar. The brown paper wrapper was still intact but the liquid at the bottom had dried out.
“How much did that broad mean to you?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Anyway, it’s not about her, it’s about me.”
He took the Worcestershire bottle and added a little hot water to the dregs at the bottom.
“It’ll give you a taste anyway,” he said.
“Carter’s a lame,” I said.
“He’s a cop. What’s new, homeboy?”
When Red Eye started using that “homeboy” stuff on me, things were getting serious. Prison slang was almost as hard for him to give up as his tattoos. He could try for a while but the minute the pressure came, Red Eye’s convict self resurfaced. That’s what made him a very special human being.
“I want to try one more thing,” I said. “Can you still pick locks?”
“Can priests still stick it to little boys?”
“I think Mandisa’s hiding something. We need to get into her place.”
“Okay, but this is my sayonara, the swan song of Red Eye, the house breaker. I’m retiring. Let me stick to my gambling. There’s more money in it and it’s less risky.”
“So you’re quitting the day job? Then you better learn something about those weird little sports of yours instead of just betting on red.”
“Red is the best,” he said. “You can’t go wrong with red.”
Who could argue with Red Eye? He’d never stop betting or picking locks. He thrived on the excitement, the buzz. Maybe when he hit sixty he’d slow down. But then I doubted he’d ever hit sixty. Guys like Red Eye weren’t built for the long haul. Neither was I.
He took less than a minute to open Mandisa’s door.
“Apartments are candy,” he said.
The place looked different. The extra furniture was gone, there was only one lonely blender on the kitchen counter. Mandisa had been wheeling and dealing, but she’d kept her word about the clothes. The bags were still tied up in the closet. I guess she expected me to look through them under slightly different circumstances. Maybe I should have just asked.
“Let’s dump this shit out and go through it,” I said.
“Whatever.”
Red Eye pulled out a massive black-handled hunting knife to slash open the plastic bags.
“Hold on,” I said, “we’ve got to leave this place like we found it.”
By that time I’d undone the knot in the plastic. Red Eye tucked his knife back into his belt. The first bag was blouses and skirts, nothing solid. Most of the blouses didn’t even have pockets where something could be hidden.
“What do you expect to find?” he asked.
“Don’t know. You said to rely on gut feelings. My gut tells me there’s something here.”
“I need a smoke,” he said.
Red Eye liked the breaking in part of the job but he didn’t have the patience to sort through piles of clothes.
“If you’re getting bored,” I said, “go and watch TV. Probably a beach volleyball tournament or something on now.”
“Lumberjack contest from Idaho,” he said. “Got to see ‘em chainsaw the big ones.”
“Just keep the volume low.”
“Makes me nervous,” he grumbled. “I like to get in and get out.”
The second bag was all underwear. I skipped that one. Feeling my way around her bras and undies was a little too twisted.
The third bag held shoes, some still in their boxes. I dumped them out on the carpet. Two of the boxes were closed with rubber bands.
Red Eye had decided against the lumberjacks. He grabbed the two boxes with the rubber bands on them. The first held five videotapes, the other contained four. Maxell C-120s. No one used these things any more but I still wanted to have a look.
“Probably the family picnic,” I told Red Eye, “Little Johnny’s birthday party.”
“Just leave it,” he said, “let’s went, amigo.”
“A quick look, maybe Johnny had a stripper in the birthday cake.”
The tapes had date labels in Prudence’s writing. The most recent was two months old. The first two cassettes were blank.
“I told you,” he said, “let’s get out of here.”
The beginning of the third tape had an episode of The Bold and the Beautiful, Prudence’s favorite.
“I’ll go ahead and fast forward real quick,” I said, “if there’s nothing …”
“Whatever, homeboy,” he said, “I’m gonna put on some coffee so the cops have something to keep them warm when they get here. Should I throw in a pizza? Domino’s can get here in ten minutes. Pepperoni okay?”
The shot of the naked Prudence mounting Jeffcoat halted the flow of Red Eye’s pizza jokes. The film was shot in the bedroom where we found the tapes. No wonder Prudence was moving out of my house. She had a business going on here.
“Jesus,” was all Red Eye could manage. The pepperoni could wait.
I tried to play the detached detective, fast-forwarding deeper into the tape as if it was a talking head of a police investigator explaining the details of crime scene findings.
The next tape was a virtual carbon copy only this time Newman was the costar. Things didn’t get better as we moved through tapes three, four, and five. There was licking, sucking and thrusting, punctuated by cries of ecstasy from all cast members. I hoped Prudence’s were fake.
“Do you know these guys?” he asked.
“It’s the two I interviewed. The white guy with the hairy back is Jeffcoat. His office is something out of Donald Trump. He said he and Prudence were ‘business associates,’ that he loaned her money.”
“If those two distinguished gentlemen didn’t know they were porn stars,” said Red Eye, “these films could have kept money flowing into Prudence’s pockets forever, especially if these guys are married.”
“They are,” I said. “Very respectably.”
Tapes six, seven, and eight were different sessions with the same players. I ran through them as quickly as possible. Prudence’s beauty was lost on me.
I’d spent all that time and money on her and never touched her boobs or even her lips until I tried to save her life by the pool. How did I let a girl from Africa outfox me? I deserved better. Here I was risking my ass trying to find out who killed her. What did I owe her? Not a goddamn thing. I could end up back in prison behind this. The only people lower than her were the assholes she was humping. I just didn’t think I could forgive her, as if forgiveness mattered to a dead woman.
The ninth and final video of this excruciating series held a change of pace. Something was wrong with the film. The lighting was dim. By now I could recognize Prudence in any lighting at all, but the man was a new partner. Could have been black or white, but too rotund to be Jeffcoat or Newman. Maybe this was the infamous Peter Margolis.
As I emptied the VCR, Red Eye summoned me into the closet.
“Come here, Cal,” he said. I went and stood next to him. Just above the closet door someone had sloppily patched and painted over a hole in the wall. “That’s where the camera was mounted,” he said.
We stepped inside the closet from where we could see screw holes and the outline of a metal bracket on the other side of the patched spot. We now had a motive and three suspects. My gut feeling was right. There was something in this apartment. A lot more than I bargained for.
“What does this other African chick know?” Red Eye asked.
“Mandisa?”
“Yeah, the broad who lives here.”
“I don’t know but we’re going to find out.”
“If I was her I’d be scared shitless right now,” he said, “unless she was in on the murder.”
“Or doesn’t know a thing,” I said.
“Anyway,” he said, “we can use these tapes to flush out the killer.”
I didn’t want to contemplate what Red Eye meant by “flush out,” but he was right. Those tapes gave us some leverage to get some answers.
I took the tapes home and put them in my stash under the bedroom floorboards. Now the investigation would get interesting. Red Eye said he might be able to hang on for one or two more breakin jobs just to solve the case.
“A personal favor for my homeboy,” he said. “These guys are dirt,” he added. “The respectable types always turn out the slimiest of all. Probably in church every Sunday, pumping the pastor’s hand and congratulating him for a wonderful sermon on the evils of lust.”
“All right,” I said, “I got the point.”
I didn’t need Red Eye’s philosophy. I wanted to indulge my desire to waste the two men I’d just watched fucking the hell out of my wife. I was debating whether to use a chainsaw or a machete. I’d had such urges before but they always passed. This I time I wasn’t so sure they would.