It was a variation on the classic Mexican standoff … Camel and Gray each holding a side arm but neither man pointing his weapon at the other, their respective handguns kept down at their sides ready to be brought up and fired if it came to that.
“What’re you doing here huh?” Gray asked with a sour expression, as if Camel owed him a lot of money from a long time ago.
“Where’s Annie?”
“She’s safe.”
“Safe where?”
Parker Gray shook his head and worked his mouth like he was biting the insides of his cheek … Camel had seen men looking and acting the way Gray was now, men who were suspects in a felony crime and obviously worried about being charged but you could see their minds were still scrambling, they were still thinking I can beat this.
“Destroying evidence?” Camel asked, indicating the gas can at Parker’s feet … another can, presumably full, at the end of the corridor.
“Doing what I should’ve done a long time ago … this place has been the ruin of me.”
Camel remembered the phrase from an old song. “ ‘The House of the Rising Sun.’ ”
“What?”
“It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy.”
“What’re you talking about huh?”
“Before your time I guess … where’s Annie?”
“I told you she’s safe.”
“You stashed her someplace, then came here to burn down this building?”
Gray didn’t answer.
“Hoping those pictures get destroyed in the process.”
“All the trouble I got, you Sherlocking my ass on top of it. Why don’t you just leave huh?”
“Tell me where Annie is and I will.”
“I could arrest you right now for violating bail.”
“Charges against me have been dropped, you’re on suspension … your whole world caving in because of those photographs.”
“Jesus you’re asking for it,” Gray warned, his right arm tensing as he weighed the chances of raising that 9mm and shooting Camel before Camel shot him.
“Seven years ago you were screwing that girl, Hope Penner, and you got caught on film, got blackmailed into covering up for whoever really killed her … or was it you Gray? Killed that little girl and then butchered her to make it look like Growler—”
“I didn’t kill her!” Gray’s arm tensed again then relaxed, he wasn’t going to shoot Camel … or burn Cul-De-Sac either. His mind had stopped scrambling for a way out of this, there was no way out except dead. “She wasn’t a little girl.”
“Seventeen—”
“Seventeen going on forty.”
Camel said nothing.
“I know what that sounds like, some asshole on a statutory. But the truth is I was twenty-nine years old and Hope was seventeen but she was twice my age in maturity. You want to hear how pathetic I was with that girl?”
“I want to know where Annie is, is what I want to know.”
“Hope was beautiful … and smart and talented. She spoke three or four languages, a master at chess, played the piano, when she wanted to she could make you feel like you were the only man left alive on earth, like everything you said was wisdom and …” Gray’s memories flew around in that dreamland for a few moments before falling onto a hard reality. “Of course I didn’t know she was fucking everybody else along with me, didn’t know she was taking pictures of it, didn’t know that whole side of her. I’d seen Hope a little drunk on champagne and I thought that was the extent of her wildness, getting tipsy on champagne, I didn’t know she was into blow, God knows what else. So here’s how pathetic I was with her, Camel … I asked Hope to marry me. Said I’d divorce my wife, wait until custody arrangements were made with our kids, wait until Hope turned eighteen, then Hope and I could get married. You know what she says to me huh? She holds my head on her chest and says, ‘You’re so sweet.’ There I was, been a trooper for almost six years, just made detective, married nine years, three children … and this seventeen-year-old girl was comforting me like I was the lovesick kid and she was the older woman. An older woman who … I don’t know, who was charmed and a little amused that this puppy was proposing marriage to her.”
“So she turned you down and you killed her.”
“No … asshole. I loved her, I would’ve never—”
“Her uncle killed her and blackmailed you into—”
“You’re not all that good as a detective are you huh?”
“McCleany.”
“How many guesses you get?”
“You covered for your partner.”
His shoulders slumped. “Biggest mistake of my life. Among the other ten million things I didn’t know about Hope, she was fucking that fat slob McCleany too. How could she?” Gray’s eyes were wet. “J. L. Penner hired us, McCleany and me, to do security work for him, not strictly kosher but Penner paid well, liked having cops around, on his payroll, that’s how McCleany and I got to know Hope. We were here at Cul-De-Sac for something, turned into an all-night party, I got drunk and passed out, McCleany got drunker but didn’t pass out, instead he shows up in Hope’s room and figures he’s going to knock off a piece … Jesus.”
“Hey Parker why don’t we—”
He held up his left hand, the one not holding the pistol. “Except this particular morning Hope wasn’t in the mood to get pawed over by that drunken slob. As charming as Hope could be, she could be ten times as mean if you pissed her off. She said some things that put McCleany over the edge, plus he was drunk enough … he said he hit her just once but that it killed her.”
“Houdini.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“Truth be told I don’t think McCleany ‘accidentally’ killed her with one punch, I think he was in a rage and beat her head against the floor … but however it happened he killed her, comes to me and says we’re going to pin it on the weird nephew, Donald Growler. I said bullshit … I never liked McCleany to start with, I could’ve killed him myself for what he did to Hope, but he’d already been in conference with J.L. who knew about the secret camera rig. I guess J.L. and Hope used to look at the pictures for yuks … and when McCleany started showing me the photographs, all those men Hope was fucking, the things she was doing with all those men, things she’d done with me … I went a little crazy.”
“Felt she’d betrayed you.”
“Played me for a fool. And I’d asked her to marry me? I kept thinking how she and her uncle must’ve got a big laugh out of that one.”
“So you and McCleany framed Growler for the killing.”
“McCleany wanted to do it for obvious reasons, so he wouldn’t get charged with Hope’s murder, and J.L. wanted to do it so he’d inherit Hope’s share of Cul-De-Sac … and I went along with them because they said they had all kinds of pictures of me and Hope.”
“They said?”
Gray nodded. “At first it seemed easy, Growler this weird twenty-six-year-old who was still a kid the way he acted, who kept a collection of animal heads in his room, had a lot of strange friends, he was either queer or bisexual. The frame seemed a natural. McCleany did the actual …”
“Cut off her head.”
Gray wasn’t able to answer aloud, had to nod.
“McCleany put her head in Growler’s room.”
Another nod, then Gray found his voice again. “J.L. promised he would destroy all incriminating photographs but obviously that was a lie. We made so many mistakes … found out after the evidence was planted that Donald wasn’t even at Cul-De-Sac, he spent the night with a friend of his.”
“Kenneth Norton.”
“Yeah. So we were forced to come down on Kenny’s nervous ass, he had a boyfriend at the time, an underage kid, and we threaten to arrange hard time for Norton unless he withdraws as Growler’s alibi … we told Norton a bunch of mumbo jumbo, I don’t know if he believed it or not, he was mainly just scared of us … we told him Growler had really killed Hope but the time of death had been screwed up by the medical examiner and Growler was going to get off on a technicality unless Norton cooperated.”
“Perjure himself.”
“We ran the same line by the Raineys, a couple who worked for J.L., got them to establish that Donald went into Hope’s room around the time of the murder. I never thought it would fly. Really. I was convinced the whole frame would just collapse, I was planning to kill myself. But fuck me if it didn’t hold together.”
“Until now.”
“Until everybody and their frigging brother comes crawling out of the woodwork … Growler, the Milton couple, you.”
“Where’s Annie?”
“She’s locked upstairs, a room on the second floor.”
Camel hadn’t tipped to it, that Annie was here. When Gray said he’d put her somewhere safe Camel assumed that was somewhere else. “You son-of-a-bitch you were going to burn this building with Annie in it?”
Gray looked a little surprised too as if just then owning up to himself the consequences of what he’d intended to do.
Camel told him to drop the goddamn automatic.
Gray stared eye-to-eye for an uncomfortably long time, more than six seconds, Camel sensing a decision being made … something serious coming his way. “Don’t—”
But Gray already was … bringing up the 9mm, forcing Camel to do the same with that shiny .38 in his hand: cowboys.