A Fistful of Rain (13 page)

CHAPTER 17

They let me use the phone at one of the detective desks, and I dialed Chapel while my guardian officer stood by, just far enough to stay out of earshot if I kept my voice low, but close enough to stop me if I decided to make a break for it. There were other cops around, too, other people I assumed were detectives, and they each took their turn staring at me.

The clock on the wall said it was twenty-seven past six, and the lightening gray out the windows confirmed that it was in the morning. I had to call Chapel’s office, because that was the only number I could find, and I got an answering service, and the guy who took the call asked if he could take a message.

“No, actually, you can’t,” I said. “You need to call him and say that Miriam Bracca’s been arrested.”

The answering-service guy told me he would do just that, and I hung up, thinking that it wouldn’t be long before Chapel called back. The officer moved me from the desk to a cheap plastic bench on the other side of the room to wait. Hoffman and Marcus went to their desks and proceeded to ignore me.

The clock read three minutes to seven when Chapel walked through the door. His hair was wet, either from his morning shower or the still falling rain, and he was wearing a suit today, and it fit him perfectly. He made straight for me, and he didn’t look happy at all, and Hoffman and Marcus saw him enter, and moved to join us, but he beat them to it.

“How long have you been here?” Chapel asked me.

“I’m not sure, maybe six, seven hours.”

“Dammit, Mim, why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“She couldn’t,” Hoffman told him. “She was drunk off her ass.”

“Repeat that outside of this room, it’s slander,” Chapel told her.

“Actually, Mr. Chapel, it isn’t,” Marcus said. “I’ll swear out an affidavit to that effect, if you like.”

“I’ll let you know if it’s necessary,” he said. “Is she under arrest?”

Hoffman shook her head.

“Splendid. Now I’d like to speak to Miss Bracca alone, if you don’t mind.”

“Be our guest,” Hoffman said.

Chapel and I talked for most of an hour, with me laying out every damn thing, including my reason for storming over to Mikel’s and the large quantity of Jack Daniel’s I’d consumed on getting home. I fumbled some of it, and he made me go over those parts again, and when I had to describe finding Mikel, it made me want to start crying, because it was finally sinking in.

“I didn’t tell them about the pictures,” I said. “I don’t suppose it matters now, but I didn’t.”

“No, it really doesn’t,” Chapel said. “I’m going to have to tell them about that.”

I nodded.

“All right, I’ll talk to them now. You just sit tight.”

I nodded again, feeling my exhaustion.

It took another fifteen minutes, at the end of which all three of them came back.

“Let’s go,” Chapel told me.

“We’re done?”

“For now,” Marcus said. “We know how to reach you if we need you.”

We were in the elevator going down to the garage when Chapel said, “You can’t go home.”

“But—”

“Mim, the media’s going to climb on this like nobody’s business. They’ll be camping outside of your place, they’ll be dogging you everywhere you go. Unless you want that, and my read on your personality is that you really don’t, you can’t go home.”

“I could stay with Joan.”

“Joan’s your lover?”

“God, what is it with you? Joan’s my foster mother!”

He shook his head. “The press can find her, it won’t be secure enough. I want to check you into a hotel.”

“I don’t want to go to a hotel.”

“It’s either that or meet the press.”

The elevator stopped, and we were in the garage. Chapel led the way to his TT, popping the locks with his remote. He put me in the passenger seat and told me to buckle up, then went around to his door.

“What hotel?” I asked.

“The Heathman.”

At least it was a nice hotel.

“Duck,” he said.

We were on the exit ramp, about to hit the street, and I didn’t get it, just looked at him blankly.

“Duck, dammit,” Chapel said again, and he reached over with his free hand and took my head and shoved me down, and then I got it.

“You’re shitting me,” I said, more to the floorboard than to him.

“Wish I was. All local affiliates have vans, and I’m seeing multiple photographers. Stay down.”

“I don’t have anything,” I said, feeling miserable. “I don’t have clothes or anything for a hotel.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I need to change clothes.”

“Give me your sizes, I’ll have someone pick you up some things.”

“But my guitars are at home.”

“You can buy a new guitar, Mim.” He checked his mirrors. “Okay, you can come up for air, now.”

I sat up, craned around in my seat. We were already a block away, but I could see the vans. He hadn’t been exaggerating. I also saw that we weren’t headed for the Heathman, but instead for the Hawthorne Bridge.

“You’re going the wrong way.”

“I’m making certain we’re not followed.”

That seemed to me to be overly paranoid, and I said as much.

“You really have no idea, do you?” Chapel said, reaching over to the mobile phone that was sitting in a cradle on the dash.

“I have idea, I have plenty idea,” I said.

“Barry,” Chapel told his phone, and the speaker came on and the tones of the number began to fill the car. While it was dialing, Chapel said, “No, I don’t think you do. I think you left on tour a year ago and you were a musician, and sometime during the past year, you became a celebrity, and nobody sent you the memo. You keep on pretending your life is normal, all you’re going to do is keep getting into trouble, Miriam.

“You are no longer normal, and it would serve you well to remember that.”

There was a click from the speakers, and a man’s voice came on. “Yes?”

“Barry, it’s Fred. We’ve got a situation, you’ll hear about it as soon as you turn on the news. I need you to get a couple things together for me and take them over to the Heathman for a guest, name of Lee.

“I need your sizes,” Chapel said to me.

I gave him my sizes.

“Anything in particular?” Barry asked.

“She likes jeans and T-shirts. She’ll need underwear, toiletries, all those good things. Shoes, too. What size are your feet?”

“Seven.”

“You hear that, Barry?”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“That’s it.”

“I’ll have it by eleven,” Barry said, and hung up.

We crossed the river back to the east side, then turned north and up to Burnside, then west again and back across the river. Chapel drove calmly, eyeing his mirrors. I didn’t say anything for a while, lost in my thoughts.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know how to be a grown-up.

With my mother, there hadn’t even been a memorial, and the body had eventually been disposed of by the State of Oregon in some way or another that to this day remains a mystery. Once they had put her in the ambulance, I never saw her again. I didn’t even know where she’d ended up, if she’d been buried someplace, or cremated, or what.

“I can’t go to a hotel,” I said suddenly. “I can’t go to a hotel, I have to plan the funeral. That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? He has to be buried, and I have to plan that, and I have to call his friends and tell them he’s dead and I have to call the paper and do the obituary and all of it. That’s what happens now, doesn’t it? I have to do all that.”

“Don’t worry about it right now,” Chapel said.

“But I have to do it, Tommy won’t do it, God, they don’t even know where Tommy is—”

“Your father’s being held right now, it looks like they’re going to charge him.”

“They’ve got him?” I asked, stunned. “They had him the whole time, that’s what you’re saying?”

“He’s under arrest, they picked him up early last night at your brother’s place.”

I digested that, and it seemed good, but then it didn’t, because in a way it only made things worse.

“Then I have to go to the condo,” I said. “Mikel’s condo, I have to go there and get his things and . . . and what do I do with his things? I mean, he doesn’t have a will, I’m sure he doesn’t even have a will, why would he, twenty-nine years old and shot dead, how could he see that one coming, huh?”

“Mim, just relax.”

“I have to handle his estate. No, settle his estate, that’s what it’s called, right? You’re an attorney, you know. It’s called settling the estate, right?”

We’d stopped in front of the Heathman, and I wasn’t certain how long we’d been parked. The engine was silent, and the uniformed doorman was coming to help me out of the car.

Chapel put a hand on my arm.

“Mim, you’ve got to calm down. Just wait here. Don’t get out of the car.”

He waited until I nodded, then his hand slid from my arm, and I heard him take his keys from the ignition and get out of the car. The doorman was portly, black coat, black hat, red stripes, with a bushy beard and mustache, and after Chapel entered the hotel he turned back to me, curious. I looked away hastily, up the street, to the Portland Center for the Performing Arts and the Schnitz and the movie theater on the corner, its marquee listing all the films currently being shown.

The Black Tarot
topped the bill.

Then my door opened, and I gasped, relaxed when I saw it was Chapel. He helped me out of the car, into the hotel, to the elevator, and then down the hall and into the suite.

It was a Van-quality room, nicer than I was used to. There was a sitting area with a couple of armchairs and a desk and a couch, and nice abstract paintings on the walls. A sliding partition at one side was open, leading to a raised king bed. The furnishings were wood and looked expensive, and there was an electric kettle on a table, and a miniature French press coffeemaker, and two tins of ground coffee. There was a minibar with a basket of treats and three bottles of Oregon wines, and two televisions, and three telephones, and two bathrooms, and flowers in a vase on a nightstand.

Chapel went to the closet and pulled it open, taking down one of the complimentary robes for me and draping it over the back of a chair. I looked at it and at him.

“You should shower and get some sleep,” he said. “You’re going to need your health and your rest.”

I nodded, dropped into a chair, thinking to hell with my health, what I wanted was a drink and a smoke.

It was like he was reading my mind. “How drunk were you when the cops picked you up?”

“Drunk,” I admitted.

“Blackout drunk?”

“Not that drunk.”

“I couldn’t ask you this at the station, so I’m asking you now. Did you kill Mikel?”

I came out of my chair and tried to punch him. He blocked it easily, pushing my arm away, and I tried to swing at him again, calling him a list of names, beginning with the basic profanities and working up to the multitiered ones. He was shouting back at me to calm down, and he blocked again and then gave me a shove, sending me back into the chair. I had to flail for the armrest to keep from falling.

“You motherfucker—”

“Did you?”

“No! Jesus fucking Christ, what
are
you? How can you even ask that?”

He drew his lips back, pinching them together, breathing through his nose.

“How can you even ask that?” I repeated.

He crossed to the window in the sitting room, looked out, then closed the blinds. The blinds, like the other furnishings, were wooden, too. Once he was satisfied that we couldn’t be spied upon, he moved to the nearest easy chair.

“I had to ask.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did, because the police are asking it, too. You’re the one who said it could have been Mikel who was responsible for those cameras in your house. It’s possible you went over there and confronted him and things turned violent.”

I just shook my head, wouldn’t look at him.

“You have to look at it from the cops’ point of view.”

It sunk in. “They don’t really think it was Mikel selling those pictures of me?”

“They have to consider it.”

“But he’s the one who told me about them! That makes no sense!”

“It’s the way they work, they have to consider it. They have to consider Tommy, too.”

“It wasn’t Tommy.”

“Oh?” Chapel raised an eyebrow. “I’d think he’d have been at the top of your suspect list.”

“I’m not saying he didn’t kill Mikel. I’m saying he’s not responsible for the pictures. Look, he came to my house Thursday, and just . . . there’s no way he could do that. He’s too pathetic. Crime of passion, sure. But install cameras in my house? That’s just not him, no way.”

Chapel thought, barely nodded.

I asked, “How long do I stay here?”

“Next forty-eight hours, at least. This will get bad, Mim, and I want you as far out of it as possible. The media’s going to go nuts, if they haven’t already. Your brother dealt drugs, your father’s a convict, you’re a celebrity . . . reporters wait their whole lives for this kind of thing. Throw in that you’re the subject of someone’s commercial voyeurism, and we have what we refer to in the legal profession as a fucked-up mess. I don’t want you leaving these rooms. I don’t even want you calling for room service. Don’t use the phone at all, unless it’s to call me. If someone comes to the door, you hide in the bathroom. I don’t want anyone knowing where to find you.”

“The police—”

“They want you, they’ll come to me,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Time for me to earn what Graham and the label and you have been paying me for. I’ll handle the press, the police. I’ll arrange for your brother’s funeral. You leave all that to me.”

“I should be doing something.”

“You stay sober. Can you stay sober, Miriam?”

I nodded.

“Really? Or should I get the wine out of the room?”

“You going to remove the minibar, too?”

“I’ll be keeping the key.”

I twisted on the chair, uncomfortable, and wanting him to shut up. “I’m out of cigarettes.”

“I’ll have Barry get you a carton.”

“I don’t want to be alone.” It sounded more plaintive than I wanted it to.

He nodded. “Who do you want to stay with you?”