A Fistful of Rain (16 page)

CHAPTER 22

I’d left the porch light on, and it was her, and I shut off the alarm and let her in, saying, “Did you speed?”

“Why else become a cop?” Hoffman said. “For the perks.”

“The perks?”

“I get to shoot people, too.”

“Oh.”

I peered past her at the street, not seeing much but Hoffman’s car—it was a VW Passat, either black or blue or green, I couldn’t tell—and my trees. I stepped back in and locked up once more, but didn’t bother with the alarm, this time. After all, she had perks.

“We towed the Chevy, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Hoffman told me.

“No. Just keeping an eye out for reporters. What’d you do with the car?”

“Evidence of a crime, we brought it in, had the lab go over it. It was the receiver base.”

“So now you guys have voyeur video of me.”

“We should be so lucky. All of the storage devices had been removed from the car. If you’re on tape, you’re on tape somewhere else.”

“You know who owns it? The Chevy?”

“It was stolen out of Roseburg back in May.”

I nodded as if this was significant information, and we went into the kitchen. I parked at the table with an empty cereal bowl for an ashtray. Hoffman had come over wearing a coat and hat, one of the black watch cap ones, and she removed them both before sitting down. She had on a Lewis & Clark sweatshirt, and a turtleneck beneath that, black. She was wearing faded Levi’s, and short black boots, and she had that aura that some PNW women get, the very healthy ones who are fit and stay fit and spend summer weekends windsurfing in the Gorge and winter ones skiing or snowboarding Mount Hood.

“Bet you rock climb, too,” I said.

“Do I have granola in my teeth?” She smiled at me, and I understood she was making an effort to get us started on good terms, both with her manner and her words.

“Call it a lucky guess.”

I waited for her to take the seat opposite me, expecting her to get out a pad and a pen. She draped her coat over the back of the chair, after stuffing the cap in a pocket, then sat down.

“You’re not going to take notes?”

She tapped her forehead. “Like a steel trap.”

“You want a cigarette or some coffee or something?”

“No, I’m fine.”

I shrugged and lit one for myself. She looked me over as if trying to find clues, then pushed the bowl a little closer to me, so I wouldn’t have to reach. Her fingers were long, like Joan’s. On her right thumb was a ring, a simple silver band with an inlaid and intertwined repeating symbol. I stared at it a second before recognizing the letter as Greek.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I get it now. You’re a dyke.”

She arched an eyebrow at me. “Sure. Aren’t you?”

“What? No!”

Hoffman’s head came back a little bit, and her expression plainly was asking me to give her a break.

“I’m not,” I said.

“You speak queer.”

“Passing queer. Pidgin queer. Not fluent queer.”

“I’m not here to out you.”

“I’m not gay. God, Chapel thinks I’m gay, too. I’m not, see, what I am is
single
. You’re confusing images. I’m the Quiet One. Van’s the Sexually Adventurous One, the Possibly Bi One, the Maybe a Confused Lesbian One.”

“Van’s not gay,” Hoffman said, matter-of-factly. “Everyone who is knows she isn’t. There are people in the Black Hills of South Dakota who haven’t come out to themselves yet, they know Van in Tailhook is straight.”

“So I’m the Gay One?”

“I know a lot of women who will be very disappointed if you’re not.” She looked me over, as if appraising. “Or see it as a challenge. Don’t tell me this is news to you.”

“It is news to me. You’re telling me that I now not only have to fear that every man I meet has seen naked pictures of me, I’ve got to include women, too?”

“Not all women. One in ten to one in four, depending whose study you believe.”

“That makes it so much better.”

“You’ve got a huge lesbian following, you didn’t know that? I thought you celebs tracked things like that, where you’re getting coverage. You practically have a column devoted to you in
Curve
.”

“Now you’re just yanking my leg.”

“Maybe a little. But you do know what
Curve
is.”

“I know what
Soldier of Fortune
is, too, that doesn’t make me a mercenary.”

She smiled again, then said, “You still willing to answer some questions for me, Miss Bracca?”

“Mim. One dyke to another?”

“That had been my intent, but I’ll settle for closeted dyke to out dyke, if you like.”

I blew some smoke off to a side, shaking my head. “Go ahead.”

“Do you have a drug problem, Mim?”

I was getting tired of having to answer that question, and maybe that was why I surprised the hell out of myself by saying, “Yeah, I drink too much.”

“That’s all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Alcohol is legal.”

“If I tell you about the illegal stuff, you gonna slap cuffs on me?”

She shook her head. “You don’t do coke or heroin or anything like that?”

“None of those things. Chapel asked me this stuff, too, when I went to see him about the pictures.”

“He was asking for a different reason. He was asking to spare you embarrassment, maybe to anticipate possible blackmail. You’re saying you’ve used?”

I held up a hand and ticked off controlled substances. “I’ve done coke, pot, X, shrooms, dropped acid, and even eaten opium. That was when we were in Hawaii.” I brought the hand down. “Once each for all of it, and only ever on the tour. Look, I know what you’re thinking, and I’ll say it again. Mikel never sold me drugs, never gave me drugs. He hated the fact that I drank, and he didn’t like me smoking.”

“Both your parents drink, or just your father?”

It was like being in the Larkins’ dining room all over again, except this time there was no Mikel, and Wagner was being played by a woman. I didn’t answer, but she waited me out.

“Both,” I said.

She leaned back in her chair, thinking. I finished my cigarette and crushed it out. Her eyes were on something past my shoulder, and I guessed this was what detectives looked like when they were trying to crack mysteries.

“Can I ask you something, Detective?” I said.

She came back. “Tracy.”

I needed a second, and then another, before I started laughing. “Detective Tracy?
Dick
Tracy? A lesbian Dick Tracy?”

She smiled, more amused at me than at the joke. She’d probably heard it a lot before.

“Sorry,” I said.

“What were you going to ask?”

“Is Tommy still a suspect?”

“Yes, he is.”

“Are you looking at any of Mikel’s friends?”

“We’ve talked to his friends. Their alibis check.”

“If you think it’s Tommy, why’d you let him go?”

“We didn’t have enough to charge.”

“So you don’t have evidence that he did it, but you think he did.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Mim. I’m saying he’s still a suspect, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because your father’s got three hours he can’t account for, roughly from the time your brother was murdered until the time he called in the nine-one-one.”

This was news. “Tommy’s the one who reported it?”

“He called from the condo to say his son had been shot. The first unit found him there, took him into custody. He was drunk, he blew a point one-nine on the Breathalyzer. To put it in perspective, you blew a point one-three when we picked you up.”

“I told you he’d been drinking—”

“No, you told us you thought he had, because your brother didn’t, and you’d seen bottles and cans throughout the condo.”

“You’re saying that my father shot my brother, then left long enough for me to come by and discover the body, and then he came back, got drunk, and called the police?”

“If I thought you were lying about the bottles, yes. But I know you’re not. That’s where it falls apart.”

“Only there?”

She ignored that. “We didn’t find a weapon anywhere, we didn’t find gloves, and Tommy’s GSR test came back negative.”

“GSR?”

“Gunshot residue.”

I remembered that they had swabbed my hands after they’d brought me in, too. Then I wondered how seriously they’d looked at me for my brother’s murder.

She turned in the chair, showing me her profile and raising her right hand, as if shooting my microwave. With her other hand she made sprinkling motions over her right hand and forearm. “When you fire a gun, traces of the charge get absorbed into the skin. The test is very simple, very accurate. Both you and your father tested negative.”

“And no gloves means what?”

“Either he ditched the gloves, along with the gun, or he didn’t do it. We’re still looking for the gun.”

For a long time I didn’t say anything, and it was like that morning, when I’d read in the paper that Tommy had been released. Surprise at what I was feeling, and relief, and more, and I didn’t know why I even cared. It bothered me that Hoffman was sitting there, telling me that Tommy was still a suspect.

“Why would Tommy kill Mikel?” I asked. “Mikel had been nice to him, Mikel was taking care of him. If he was going to kill one of us, it would’ve been me.”

“What if he learned that his son had been selling naked pictures of his daughter on the Internet?”

This time, I got really angry. “People keep saying that! Mikel didn’t do it!”

“Fine, give me proof.”

“I don’t—”

“Mikel had access to your home the entire time you were away,” Hoffman interrupted. “He knew enough about computers to set up the system here. He sold drugs, and apparently he did it only for the money, not for the product. Why not try to make a little extra off his sister?”

“There are so many things wrong with that, I don’t know where to start! He was my brother, don’t you get that? He would never do that to me, he was always trying to protect me. And as for money—Jesus, all he had to do was ask.”

Hoffman didn’t say anything for a moment, giving me time to calm down.

“It wasn’t Mikel who took the pictures,” I insisted. “And it wasn’t my father who killed him.”

And as soon as I’d said it aloud, I discovered that I believed it. Tommy had committed a great many sins, but he could never have taken a gun and shot his son. It didn’t matter how drunk he might’ve been, it didn’t matter how provoked he might have felt. It never would happen. And if he wasn’t drunk, if he was sober when he did it, then we were talking about a level of premeditation that was beyond him. He wasn’t a planner. He was like me; life happened to us, we didn’t do things to life.

I sat there, and I thought about it and thought about it, and the only thing I discovered was that the more I thought about it, the more certain I became. Maybe it was utter bullshit, maybe there was no reason or logic to it.

But if the cops pinned the murder on Tommy, either because he was a drunk or a bastard or had one murder to his name already, it meant that the son of a bitch who
had
killed my brother would get away with it. I couldn’t let that happen. If not for Tommy’s sake but for Mikel’s, there was no way in hell I could let that happen.

Hoffman gazed at me, and it was disconcertingly close to the looks she’d shot at me in the interrogation room three nights before.

After a second, I said, “Tommy knows what happened. He didn’t do it, but he knows what happened. He says he doesn’t remember, but I think he’s lying.”

“And you know this how, exactly?”

“Because I know how that works.”

“That’s not really something that’ll stand up in court.”

I fidgeted with my pack of smokes, trying to use my hands to keep my brain quiet. “My brother’s been murdered, you’re accusing him of pimping my image. You’re saying my dead brother is responsible for some asshole in ass-crack Dakota beating off to my picture every night.”

Hoffman considered, just watching me. I hated the look, because I had no idea what was going on behind it. I got out a new cigarette, lit it, blew smoke. It was like she was hardly breathing.

“What?” I finally demanded.

“I’m just trying to figure you. You go on stages around the world, and you play guitar, and you sing, and jump and run and sweat and dance, and you have thousands of people watching your every move when you do that.”

“Van,” I said. “Not me.”

“Van more often, sure, but you, too. And television, you go on television, and millions—literally millions—of people watch what you do. Those people, they’re watching your body as much as hearing the music, they’re objectifying you just as much, they’re sexualizing you just as much.”

“You’re saying that the pictures shouldn’t bother me? Isn’t that like telling me I was asking for it?”

Hoffman shook her head vigorously. “No, hell no. What’s been done to you, it’s a kind of rape, and I wouldn’t dare diminish it.”

I threw up my hands, frustrated, not getting it, not getting her.

“It’s you,” she said. “It’s you, your body, and if it were me, I wouldn’t be ashamed, even if I could afford to be. I’d sure as hell be angry, I’d be boiling, but I wouldn’t be ashamed.”

“Well, you weren’t the one humiliated.”

“It’s only humiliating if you let it be, if you give it that power.”

“You know what? I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“You’ve got to own it—”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I repeated, slower and clearer, to make sure she understood.

She did. “You’re used to getting your own way, aren’t you?”

“Ah, here we go. This is the part where you call me a bitch rock-princess again, is that it?”

Hoffman slid her chair back and rose, pulling her coat free. “No. You’re a bitch because you’re pretty blatantly miserable. The rock-princess part, that’s just frosting.”

“I’ve got a reason to be miserable.”

“Sure. But maybe you just like it.” She had the coat on, adjusting it. She took the cap from her pocket and set it on her head, tucking stray hair beneath it. “Hell, you’re an
artist,
you’ve got to suffer, right?”

“And it was going so well,” I said. “Yet here we are, back to the fuck-yous.”