Angels Burning (32 page)

“The girl who does my hair,” I explain. “She's friends with her. Jessy, right? When I told her I was meeting someone here tonight she said Jessy has a thing for the hot bartender at the Rusty Nail. I assumed that's you.”

The stroking of his ego works. He drops his defenses for a moment.

“I might know her,” he concedes. “I wouldn't call us friends, though.”

“What would you call her? The mother of your child?”

His glib exterior cracks into a million pieces of panic. “Hey, whoa.”

He lowers his head and leans across the bar. I do the same.

“Where did that come from?” he whispers to me.

“I'm the chief of police,” I whisper back.

I reach for my creds and place them on the bar in case he doesn't believe me. It happens all the time, because I'm a woman and I don't resemble the eighties stereotype of a gym teacher or an Eastern European athlete; I also look exceptionally good tonight.

“Are you kidding me?” He keeps his voice lowered. “Is she getting the police involved? Can she even do that? I told her I'd give her some money but I'm not paying child support and I'm not changing diapers.”

I think about my own dad having this same conversation with my mother. Or did he? I only have my mother's version of what went on between them as told to her mother, and she didn't provide many details. I also have no way of knowing how much of it was true. This is one of the biggest regrets of my life: having the master plan of my creation and the question of my desirability be in doubt. I don't care what Miranda Truly says about my paternal grandmother's feelings toward my mother and me. She could be lying, too.

“Legally, if Jessyca wanted to pursue this matter, you'd have to pay child support if the child is yours,” I tell Kirk. “But that's not what I'm here about.”

I fall silent for a second and let him stew.

“You don't seem to have any doubt that you're the father,” I observe.

“I don't know for sure,” he says, “but I figure why would she come and tell me this kid is mine if she wasn't going to shake me down or try and get me to marry her? She said she just wanted me to know I had a kid. That it was the right thing to do. So I figure she's probably telling the truth. But if she tries to get me to pay up, we're getting a DNA test.”

“You're a real stand-up guy.”

“It wasn't my fault,” he insists angrily.

He walks away but returns almost immediately.

“I don't have to talk to you. Do I?” he asks.

“Nope,” I reply. “How about another beer?”

This time, he doesn't rush back. He busies himself with other customers,
laughing with a few of them, trying to seem blasé, but I know my presence here at the end of the bar is killing him.

He finally returns and sets another bottle in front of me. The lime wedge is missing. I know he did this on purpose.

“Why wasn't it your fault?” I ask him, and give him a sympathetic pout. “Did your daddy never have the sex talk with you? Were you absent the day they explained how babies are made in health class?”

“She lied to me,” he says, lowering his voice into a whisper again and leaning into my face. “She told me she was on the pill.”

“But you still used a condom?”

“She asked me not to. She said it felt better. I'm not going to argue with that. Why am I talking to you?”

He stands up and stalks off again but boomerangs back. His type needs constant vindication.

“You have no idea what it's like being a guy.”

“You're right. Educate me.”

“You want to have sex, right?”

“I'm with you so far.”

“But every time you do you could end up with a kid.”

“How is that any different from being a girl?”

He glares at me. I move on to something more relevant.

“You say you and Jessy don't have any kind of relationship, but last time she saw you, she wanted to hook up with you. What do you think that was about?”

“She didn't want to hook up with me. She wanted me to babysit.”

“Did she say why?”

“She had somewhere to go and she didn't want to bring the baby along. She said it was going to be emotional or something like that. She said it could get messy.”

“ ‘
It could get messy
'? Those were her exact words?”

“She was upset about something. She even started crying. Then the baby started crying. Then they left.”

“Upset about what?”

“I wasn't paying attention.”

“So she wasn't with you this past Friday between the hours of five and eight?”

“I saw her for fifteen minutes, maybe.”

I lean back on my stool, take a long swig from my beer, and give him my best disapproving stare. It doesn't take long for him to wilt under it.

“I had good intentions,” he feels the need to explain. “She's not bad-looking but she's got some extra poundage going on. I was kind of doing her a favor.”

“A favor?”

“I'm not a loser. I'm going to school. I got student loans to pay. I'm working. My whole life should be flushed down the can because I had pity sex one night?”

I've lost all patience with this jerk.

“Maybe you could try looking at having a child as a good thing instead of a bad one. Lots of people do. It's not all about bills and responsibilities. There are rewards.

“And if you were able to get it up, pity isn't what you were feeling, jackass.”

I stare him down again.

“Now get me my lime.”

I should leave. There's no reason for me to stay, but I do it anyway just to cramp the style of Mr. Pity Sex.

I'd like to tell him if what I've heard is correct, he shouldn't feel any pity for Jessy. She got exactly what she wanted. Her only interest in him was as a sperm donor. He did do her a favor but not the way he thinks.

Jessy shouldn't have even been in this bar or any bar. She was eighteen when she got pregnant. Even now she's still shy of twenty-one.

They're serving minors in here. I make a mental note to have one of my men look into this, then I make another note to stop being a cop and enjoy the rest of my beer.

I only last for one more beer before the noise gets to me. I'm ready to leave when a woman sits down beside me. I almost faint.

“What are you doing here? You hate bars,” I say.

“You've been weird lately. Stressed out. I thought you might want some company.”

Neely looks all around her, gets her bearings, then motions at Kirk who pretends not to see her.

“You mean you were worried I was going to get shitfaced and do something stupid,” I correct her. “Those days are long past. I get drunk on two shots now and I'm so sick the next day I want to die. Where's Mason?”

“At your house, a couple blocks away, with Smoke, watching TV.”

“I guess he's safe. The only guard I'd feel safer with would be Nolan, and that's only because he has opposable thumbs.”

“Screw his thumbs. People are more afraid of a snarling German shepherd than they are of an old cop. Besides, why does Mason need a guard? What do you think is going to happen while you're gone? Aren't you the chief of police of this town? Don't you pride yourself on how safe it is?”

“It didn't turn out to be very safe for Camio,” I say dejectedly, my three beers starting to make me feel sorry for myself. “And I don't like Lucky skulking around.”

Neely makes a sour face and waves away the thought of Lucky with her extended middle finger.

“So how'd it go?” she asks. “I can tell you talked to the bartender by the way he's avoiding us.”

“Helpful. I think. Camio's sister might've been with her when she died or right before. Same for her uncle. Same for her grandmother. They're all lying. I don't know why. I don't know how much they're lying. I still don't see any reason for any of them to kill her.”

“Family members kill other family members all the time,” she says.

“But not simply because they're family. There's always a specific motive. Something that the killer needed or wanted or set him off. Let's change the subject.”

“Hey, kid,” Neely says to Kirk in her best instructor voice. “Bring me a Jack and Coke. Now.”

He looks her way and obeys, no differently than Sammy the golden doodle.

“The last guy I slept with I met at this bar,” I announce as it occurs to me.

I'm not counting Nolan. I never count him.

“The guy who owns the sporting goods store in Hellersburg?”

I nod.

“How was it?”

“Eh.”

“Why do you do it then?”

“Because I want to have sex.”

“Don't you want to have good sex?”

“Of course. But good sex isn't always available.”

“And eh sex is an acceptable substitute?”

“No.” I sigh.

Kirk brings Neely her drink, asks me if I want another beer, then asks someone behind me what he's having. Neely and I turn around and find Lucky standing behind us.

“Speak of the devil,” I say.

Neely hasn't seen him for more than thirty years. It takes her a minute to place his face. He knows her instantly.

“The high-and-mighty one,” he coos, his voice sounding as oily as his hair looks. “Princess Neely. Too good to give me the time of day except for her bitchy little comments when her mama wasn't listening.”

Neely turns around on her stool.

“Don't you talk about my mother.”

“I'll talk about your mother all I want. She was the love of my life and somebody killed her and you're going to tell me who.”

Neely gets off her stool and gets in his face. He's wearing a lot of cologne, and she blinks her eyes against the smell.

“We're not going to tell you anything,” she says in a low, calm voice. “Dove says you've been running around threatening us and saying you're going to sue us. You even went and harassed Grandma. No one's
impressed. You don't scare us. You can't prove anything, and you don't have the balls to try and hurt us.

“Come on, Dove,” she says to me.

I'm pretty sure he's wearing the same shirt as when he came to see me five days ago but it's been laundered. Mingled with his noxious cologne is the cloying flowery scent of some kind of fabric softener.

I don't know where he's staying or how he's getting by. Life isn't easy for an ex-con and definitely not for one pushing seventy. I picture him living in a single rented room, empty except for a lumpy mattress on an old iron bed frame and a dresser topped with an amateurish flea market painting of a basket of kittens on black velvet, with one belt buckle and one going-out shirt to his name.

I start to get off my stool and he grabs me roughly by the arm.

“You stole my life. You think I'm just going to let it go?”

“You don't have a choice.”

I meant for the words to come out sounding fierce and final, but they sound defeated and full of regret.

Neely pulls his hand off me and gets between us.

“I'm going to tell you this one time and one time only. You leave Dove out of this. I'm the one who convinced her to lie. I'm the one who came up with the whole idea.”

He gives her a leering smile full of graveyard gaps and stained teeth like old headstones.

“Then you're the one who should buy me a drink.”

“Let's go,” Neely commands.

I reach into my purse for my wallet.

“Don't you dare,” she warns me.

“I'm paying for ours.”

She leaves first. I throw three twenties on the bar and hurry after her, not waiting to see Lucky's reaction.

I join my sister outside the bar.

“It had to be done,” she says.

I'm not sure which crime she's talking about. I agree the first was
necessary, but maybe we didn't need to falsely accuse Lucky. I tell her as much.

“We had to lay it on someone,” she reasons, “and he was the best candidate. If the police had kept looking they might have found out the truth.”

Neely is not a physically demonstrative person with people. I could probably count on one hand the amount of times we've embraced during our lives. Even now she doesn't hug me. She reaches out and cups my face with her two hands the way a mother does with a young child who she's trying to soothe.

“I know you think it was selfish but it wasn't,” she says. “You didn't do it for yourself; you did it for me. There was no way I would've survived if they caught you.”

I look into her eyes, our mother's eyes, and marvel at how I can't live without someone who so resembles someone I killed.

I MANAGE
to keep my emotions in check until we get back to my house and I'm alone in my bedroom. When I start crying it's because I'm overwhelmed once again by my sister's loyalty. I've never been able to cry over what I did to my mother. I've felt sorrow, rage, shame, and disgust since that night but I've never shed a tear or experienced a moment of regret. I don't know what this says about me. I do know what it says about her.

I found out about Gil and Champ innocently enough and have often looked back on that day and thought how easy it would have been for me to have not discovered what was going on and also how I had failed my little brother by not discovering it sooner. I don't know which feeling has been worse: the guilt over my dereliction of duty or the twinges of self-preservation that make me wish I'd never known.

I came home unexpectedly from school. After a dentist appointment downtown, I walked home instead of going back for my last few classes. My plan was to grab a bite, then convince Mom to let me borrow her car to drive back later for basketball practice. It turned out she had gone shopping. I saw Gil's big cranberry Buick in the driveway but thought nothing of it. He came and went from his places of business whenever he felt like it. He was the boss.