At seven-thirty p.m. I ordered lamb Torinese at Sorrento’s. We’d driven to the restaurant in Susan’s car, Thomas at the wheel, Susan beside him, me in the backseat. In my pocket, I had David Fowler’s home address, which I’d gotten online. Rain was falling steadily but the restaurant was bright and airy, the walls painted a pale pink that made the place look like it belonged by a sunny Mediterranean beach.
‘You’ve got to stop this now,’ Susan said quietly. ‘Otherwise I’m leaving.’
I cut a bite of lamb chop and put it on Thomas’s plate. I cut another and put it on hers. ‘The lamb’s excellent,’ I said.
Susan stared at the meat as if it were a scrap left over from a surgery. ‘I’m taking Thomas with me,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said and looked at Thomas. ‘How do you feel about that, Champ?’
He said, ‘Mom’s more dependable than you.’
‘Yes she is.’ I drank some wine.
‘Why can’t you stop?’ Susan asked. It was a question she’d asked before, first when I’d ridden with Charles after the rape and killing of the six-year-old boy, again eight years ago when I’d ridden with him once more.
I answered as I’d always answered. ‘I don’t know. I wish I could.’
‘What was jail like?’ Thomas asked. As soon as I’d arrived at prisoner intake, Daniel had called to tell Susan that they’d picked me up. The call had stopped her from scolding Thomas, who’d just returned from a seventy-mile cruise around town.
‘It smelled bad,’ I said. ‘Like the stale sweat in a public bathroom after homeless people have been cleaning themselves.’ I ate another bite of lamb and he watched me chew. I drank more wine.
‘That’s it?’ he asked.
‘That’s it.’
We drove home in the early darkness. The rain had eased to a mist but as we pulled into the driveway, thunder roared overhead and it fell hard again.
Thomas kicked off his shoes and disappeared into his bedroom and Susan and I stood together in the kitchen. ‘I’m serious about leaving,’ she said.
‘You’ve been gone for fifteen years.’
‘You know that’s not true.’
‘I know how I feel,’ I said.
She came to me and put her arms around me, her head to my chest. I put my hands on the small of her back. I said, ‘You know that I won’t stop, right?’
She held me closer. ‘I know.’
‘So this is it?’
‘I think so,’ she said.
We stood together for a while, though no matter how long we held each other the pain of being apart wouldn’t diminish.
She said, ‘I need a drink. You want one?’
‘I could use another.’
She went to the refrigerator and I stared across the counter at the back door and the darkness beyond it. At the same moment I noticed that one of the quarry-clay bowls was missing from the counter, Susan screamed and stumbled back. On the middle refrigerator shelf, in front of a carton of eggs, Fela’s head sat in the missing bowl. Her eyes were as white and opaque as congealed milk. One ear was bent inward. Her feline teeth were as sharp as pins.
Thomas heard Susan scream and he ran into the kitchen. When he saw the head he tried to stop but ran into me. I held him but he pulled away, went to the sink and vomited his spaghetti. Then he wiped his mouth on his forearm and returned to look in the refrigerator.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said as if I were to blame for Fela’s death.
He said, ‘If you stop now I’ll never talk to you again.’
I looked at Susan and she shook her head, then said, ‘I’m leaving and I’m taking him with me.’
I went to the phone and called Charles. ‘I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes,’ I said and hung up.
Thomas came to me and I pulled him close in a hug. For the first time in two years he hugged me too. Susan glared. I went to her, held her head in my hands and pulled her to my lips. She didn’t want my kiss but then it seemed she did and when I let go she said softly, ‘You bastard.’
‘I know,’ I said, and walked outside into the rain.
The electronic gate at the end of Charles’ driveway was open and when I pulled in front of his house he was standing under the porch light waiting for me. He stepped into the rain and climbed into the car. His calico cat was nowhere to be seen.
Charles shook the rainwater from his hands and said, ‘Fuck of a night.’
‘In many ways,’ I agreed.
‘What’s up?’
I told him about getting picked up by Daniel’s officers and about his warning. I told him that Aggie was missing. I told him about Fela’s head. I told him that Susan was leaving me.
‘Yep, a fuck of a night,’ he said, as though these troubles only confirmed what the rain had already told him. ‘What did David Fowler say?’
‘He’s scared,’ I said, and I filled him in on all that Fowler had told me about Tralena Graham’s death and the role that Belinda, Melchiori and the others had played in it, as well as the drug-trafficking rumors about Tralena’s father.
When I finished, Charles nodded. ‘It might be a fuck of a night but you just pulled this thing together.’
‘Not all the way. We still don’t know who’s doing the killing.’
Charles said, ‘Let’s go see David Fowler.’
I pulled the address from my pocket. ‘I thought you might like to talk with him.’
He shook his head. ‘The hell with talking.’
Fowler lived in an old, pale blue, wood-frame house on Powell Place. A single light was on in a front room and the driveway was empty. I parked on the street and we ran through the rain to the front steps. When I knocked on the door no one answered. Without saying a word, Charles went to work on the lock.
A minute later we stepped into the front hall. Fowler had spent a lot of time and money rehabbing the place. The wood floors gleamed and he’d painted the baseboards and ceiling-molding light colors to set them off from the walls. The furniture in the front room was modern with a lot of brushed nickel and bright fabrics.
I called, ‘Mr Fowler?’
No one answered but something bumped against the floor in the back of the house.
‘Hello?’ I said louder.
Again, no one answered.
I turned for the door as soft footsteps approached from the hallway, but Charles stood where he was, then stooped and held a hand palm up toward the darkness. An old beagle with gray muzzle whiskers, its tail wagging low between its hind legs, plodded into the light and sniffed Charles’ hand.
‘Hey, boy,’ Charles said gently, ‘where’s Fowler?’
The dog finished sniffing, plodded to a wall and lay down against it.
We searched the house thoroughly. Fowler seemed to live alone. The furnishings suggested that he had more money than he would make as a city events coordinator but nothing indicated that he’d gotten the money illegally. Nothing even indicated that he’d ever done anything that would embarrass him. We found no porn DVDs. We found no souvenir bag of pot from Jamaica. It seemed unlikely that anyone lived so clean.
‘He scrubbed his house because he expected someone to search it,’ Charles said.
Then he got two slices of bread from the refrigerator and fed them to the dog and we let ourselves out.
‘What next?’ he asked.
‘D’you want to look around Melchiori’s house?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
As we drove I asked, ‘Did you talk with your friend at the DEA?’
He nodded. ‘The lady I know says Jerry Stilman cooperated with them at least some of the time for the last three years that he was in Chicago and continued to help when he and Belinda moved here. She also says that when he left Chicago he cut himself out of most of the trafficking business but he never left it completely.’
‘The DEA let him keep dealing?’
‘If he wasn’t in the game he couldn’t tell them who the other players were.’
‘Can you ask her if Godrell Graham was one of them? Did Stilman know him?’
‘Sure thing,’ he said.
‘Did she say whether Belinda was involved?’
‘They had nothing on her.’
‘Terrence?’ I asked.
‘Him either.’
‘Did she tell you anything else?’
‘She said Jerry Stilman’s heart attack wasn’t natural.’
‘What do you mean?’
He said, ‘Someone shoved a shank through his chest while he was sleeping in bed.’
A few minutes after ten p.m. we broke through Melchiori’s front door. A security alarm blew an electronic whistle until Charles tore the plastic facing from it and disconnected the wires. I followed him to the living room. Melchiori’s blood and mine had stained the white carpet, and the room smelled of Charles’ urine. Charles went to the marble fireplace and removed a steel poker from the fireplace set. He swung it and smashed the mirror that hung above the mantle. He carried it to a double set of built-in bookshelves and smashed a glass clock, a ceramic statue of a laughing Buddha and an empty vase. He inserted the tool end of the poker behind a row of books and swept them to the floor. He did the same with two more rows of books. Then he raised the poker over his head and swung down, demolishing one of the wooden shelves.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
He flung the poker at the fireplace. Its spear end penetrated the fireplace screen and the handle protruded into the room.
‘I don’t particularly like this man,’ he said.
‘It seems to me you’re using more energy than he deserves.’
He shrugged. ‘Seems to me just right. You want to search upstairs and I’ll search down?’
‘As long as you don’t destroy the stairway while I’m up there.’
The second floor had four large rooms and a linen closet. Two were guestrooms with attached baths. The cabinets and dressers in them were empty though Melchiori had put a drinking glass and a new bottle of Glenlivet on the dresser in one room and a glass and a bottle of Grey Goose in the other. The third door led to an exercise room with a StairMaster, an old Cybex weight machine and a widescreen television.
The last door led to Melchiori’s bedroom suite. A second fireplace, with decorative gas logs inside it, sank into one wall. A walk-in closet, filled with casual clothes and a dozen business suits, smelled of musky cologne. The bathroom had a large Jacuzzi tub. In the medicine cabinet I found a vial of Ambien and another of Lunesta, sleeping pills for a man who, it seemed to me, deserved a rough night’s sleep.
I went to the dresser. There were socks, underwear and T-shirts that smelled of the same cologne as the closet. In the third drawer from the top I found a box of forty or fifty photos. They were party photos. The scenes in them could’ve wrecked the careers of a small group of local politicians and businessmen if they’d become public, but they showed enough wear and creasing that I guessed Melchiori kept them for private use.
The ones on top were oldest. Melchiori looked forty or so, seven or eight years younger than he was now. He was thinner then but already a big man. He was screwing a woman, also about forty and also big, from behind. They were outside on a pool deck with dark green tropical plants surrounding them, the sun shining on their sunburnt skin. They smiled into the camera with oily eyes.
The next photos showed a variety of women and girls, some younger than Tralena Graham had been when she died. In two of the pictures I recognized Ashley Littleton from a time before her final fall into drugs and twenty-buck sex. The men in the pictures were strangers to me, all except two of them. One was Melchiori, who mugged for the camera as he screwed women and girls. The other I knew only from a framed picture that I’d seen on top of Belinda’s dresser when Charles and I searched her house. But in the photo that came from this box, Jerry Stilman wasn’t staring with cold, dignified eyes at a portrait photographer. He was getting a blowjob from a girl who couldn’t have been older than fourteen.
I paid little attention to the photos that followed until I reached the final six. All were from the party where Tralena Graham had died. All included a naked, dark-skinned girl with long straight hair and large black eyes, almost as wet as tears. Tralena Graham, I guessed. In all of these photos Belinda also was present, along with a couple of men and, in one, Tonya Richmond. Belinda was always close to Tralena, kissing her breasts and slipping a bag over her head with an odd intimacy, as if they’d made a strange, deep connection that drew them together, and as I stared at the photos I wondered if Belinda had noticed what I was seeing now. Belinda, at seventeen, had resembled this girl. She’d had the same thin body, the same soft face, the same desire in her eyes.
The six photos from that party might enable Daniel to arrest Belinda’s killer. One of the men in them might be the killer himself. But the photos also showed Belinda in a way that felt intensely private to me and giving them to Daniel would tear something vital from inside me. I took them to the bathroom, ripped them and dropped them into the toilet water where they floated in a chaotic mosaic. I flushed and watched Belinda and the sixteen-year-old girl disappear into the whirlpool.
I returned the other photos to the box and put it in the dresser drawer. When I came downstairs Charles was entering the foyer from a room that looked like a study.
‘What did you find?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’
He held up a white package tightly wrapped in cellophane. ‘Coke. Found it in the desk in his office. Probably a half pound. Could be for personal use if he held a whole lot of parties.’ He cocked his head and looked at me. ‘You all right?’
I didn’t feel all right. I said, ‘Let’s go see Melchiori in the hospital.’
We pulled down a drive lined with palms trees and into the University Hospital parking garage at ten-fifty p.m. Visiting hours in the intensive care unit had ended at nine. After checking at an information desk in the atrium, we rode an elevator to the third floor and went to the nurses’ station. A solitary nurse in her late fifties sat at the counter doing a crossword puzzle. She looked up and asked if she could help us.
‘We’re here to see a friend,’ Charles said. ‘Don Melchiori.’
Her smile was pleasant, sympathetic. ‘You’ll need to come back in the morning. The last visits were two hours ago.’
‘Officially, yes,’ Charles said, also pleasantly. ‘But we’ve driven for five hours because we heard about Don—’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘The doctors have been very strict in—’
Charles leaned across the counter and an edge of menace entered his voice. ‘We understand,’ he said. ‘But my friend here needs to see Don Melchiori tonight.’
The sympathy fell from the nurse’s eyes and she reached for her phone. I guessed she was calling security. Charles seemed to guess the same. His hand shot across the counter and held her wrist. ‘We don’t all have to see Don. If it’s more convenient my friend can talk to him alone.’ Then he smiled. ‘Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?’
‘You’re breaking the law,’ she said but she stood and he maneuvered her around the counter and through a swinging waist-high gate.
‘Thank you,’ he said to her, pleasant and polite once more. He turned to me. ‘We’ll have a quick cup. Ten minutes be enough?’
‘More than.’
He steered the nurse down the hall toward a sign that said Lounge and Vending Machines.
Melchiori’s door was open and he was propped up in bed, his face bruised under his eyes, an IV tube running from his arm, a heart monitor tracking the steady pulse of his blood and a large pad of cotton gauze bandaged to his shoulder where he’d taken the bullet. He was watching television as the eleven o’clock news started.
I stepped into the room without knocking and he glanced up as if he expected a nurse. He looked unhappy to see me instead.
‘You sonofabitch,’ he said. ‘How’d you get in?’
I closed the door. ‘I walked past the nurse’s station, turned left at the corner and here you were.’
‘Well, you aren’t staying.’ He reached for the emergency call button.
‘I saw the photos in your dresser,’ I said.
His hand froze and he grimaced. He glanced at the television and hit the mute button on the remote. ‘You realize, don’t you, that you’re a dead man,’ he said. ‘There’ll be nothing left of you after I’m done.’
I said, ‘I thought about that last night when I was lying on your floor and you were kicking me. And yet today you’re the one who’s lying in the hospital, and I’m the one who has the pictures of the party where Tralena Graham died, pictures that also include Belinda Mabry, Tonya Richmond and Ashley Littleton.’
If he was surprised that I’d learned what happened to Tralena Graham he didn’t show it. ‘The girl was an accident,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘She was at the party because she wanted to be there. She did what she did because she wanted to do it. No one made her do anything.’
‘She was sixteen years old.’
‘The age of consent in Jamaica is sixteen,’ he said. ‘It was an accident.’
‘That’s why you threw her body in the ocean?’
‘That was a mistake. But her death was an accident and nothing you’ve got in those pictures suggests it wasn’t. No one was having a better time than she was.’
‘You’re a sick bastard,’ I said. ‘You’re going to jail for Belinda and the others.’
The councilman sighed. ‘You don’t get it. I didn’t kill them. No one at the party did.’
‘The pictures tell a different story.’
He shook his head. ‘Listen, talk to Belinda Mabry’s boy.’
‘Terrence?’
‘You want to see a sick bastard, look at him. He comes to Little Vegas, picks up one of my girls, takes her to a motel and does things to her that shock me – and I think you know how hard I am to shock.’
‘Why would he want to kill them?’ I asked.
A bitter laugh escaped him. ‘Why not? The kid has—’ Something on the television screen caught his eye. ‘Ah, piss!’ he said and reached for the remote.
I looked at the screen and saw a picture of David Fowler. The volume rose and caught the reporter mid-sentence, ‘… crossing Duval Street at six o’clock this evening when witnesses say a car struck him. Police say the driver neither slowed nor stopped. Fowler was unresponsive when emergency services arrived and was declared dead at the scene. Fowler worked for the mayor’s office for the past three years and twice ran unsuccessfully for city council. Police are asking anyone who saw a green Toyota or Honda SUV near the scene of the accident to contact them.’
‘Piss!’ Melchiori said again. ‘He was a friend of mine.’
‘I know,’ I said quietly.
The door to the hospital room burst open. A security guard charged in, followed by the nurse and Charles. The guard looked from me to Melchiori and back as if he’d expected to find me strangling the councilman. ‘What’s happening here?’ he said.
Melchiori gazed at him evenly as if the guard had just disturbed a private business meeting. ‘We were having a talk.’
The guard looked confused. He glanced at the nurse. ‘Visiting hours are over,’ he said.
I looked at Melchiori. ‘We’re done anyway,’ I said. ‘Get well fast, Don.’
He nodded. ‘Be seeing you,’ he said and I wondered if anyone else heard the threat in that.
The guard and the nurse stayed in Melchiori’s room and Charles and I walked down the hall to the elevators, past walls scuffed by gurneys, under the cold fluorescent light.
‘Sorry about that,’ Charles said. ‘Security decided to take a coffee break too. The nurse flagged him down.’
I said, ‘A green SUV ran down David Fowler this evening. It was on the TV news.’
‘Shit,’ Charles said and thought about it for a moment. ‘He dead?’
‘At the scene.’
‘Sonofabitch,’ Charles said.
‘Melchiori’s pointing his finger at Terrence,’ I said. ‘Not just for Fowler. For everything.’
I dropped Charles at his house a little after midnight and turned toward home. But Susan had said she was leaving and taking Thomas with her. She probably wouldn’t go until morning, though I didn’t think I could bear watching her pack and drive away. I knew I couldn’t bear watching Thomas go with her.
So I didn’t go home.
The lights were off in Lee Ann’s house and the wet azaleas that lined the front path clutched my legs as I walked past but she answered the door quickly as if she’d been expecting me. The front room was warm and dry and smelled like cinnamon. She took my hand and led me through the dark hallway to her bedroom.
She kissed my neck and whispered, ‘You smell like bad sweat.’
‘It’s been a bad day.’
She kissed me again and said, ‘Shower for me.’
I stood for a time in her hot shower and felt the rotten skin of heat and pain shed from me, then I dried myself with an old pink towel that smelled like Lee Ann. When I walked back into her bedroom she was lying naked on top of the bed sheet, a single bedside lamp shining dimly, the soft blonde curls of her pubic hair catching and tricking the light like electrical filaments.
I sat by her on the bed and she touched the cut on my forehead where Melchiori had butted me. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
As an answer I kissed her.
She pulled her lips from mine and put her mouth on my neck, my shoulder, my chest. She touched the bruises on my ribs where Melchiori had kicked me and didn’t ask about them but kissed them softly as if her lips could suck the poison out of my life.
Then with the rain pounding the roof above us and the single dim bedside lamp burning we made love. Gently at first and then hard. And sometime during the rush of blood and muscle and skin, I wrapped my hands around her neck and she smiled a wicked smile. I tightened my fingers and a flush spread across her face and neck, so I tightened more and more until her eyes showed fear.
‘I … can’t …’ she rasped.
‘I know.’ I tightened my grip.
Her face reddened. She bucked under me, struggling to get free. Her fingernails clawed at my back. Her fists pounded against me. But I was inside her and held her by the throat and as she bucked I went in deeper and deeper until she screamed an asphyxiated scream of pleasure and pain greater than any I’d ever heard, as if she were dying from an orgasm so thorough that it was splitting her in two.
Afterward she lay panting, returning to herself. ‘Jesus, that was great,’ she said hoarsely and put a gentle hand on my chest. ‘But never do that again. Never. Not if you want to be with me.’