Back on Murder (46 page)

“What are you doing?” Charlotte asks as I pull my clothes on.

“I’ve gotta go.”

She’s been married to a homicide detective long enough to accept sudden departures. She rolls back over, then grabs my pillow to shore her head up.

“Since you’re leaving,” she says.

Past midnight the landscape of Houston changes, which is another way of saying there’s a lot less traffic. I roll the window down, letting in a blast of humid air, my foot heavy on the accelerator, my heart tight in my chest. The blocks fly past and I’m racing down Interstate 10 until it melts into the Loop, the lighted glass and steel buildings along Post Oak and the towers hedging the Galleria all shimmering in the hazy night. I exit onto Highway 59, impatient in spite of the brisk driving, a sense building inside me that I’ve overstepped. That the error I planted by enlisting Carter Robb will reap a black harvest.

When I reach the address – a modest, drive-up affair with tiny fenced balconies on both levels, perhaps a dozen units in all – I find to my surprise a red logo-covered van from Cypress Community Church parked on the curb just a block away. The man knows nothing of subtlety, but then who would suspect a church van of containing a set of watching eyes?

The complex is not one of the access-controlled empires favored by the gangs, but just a brown, run-down and rusted rental property dating from the 1970s, the kind of place I would have driven past without notice if I hadn’t been looking for it. And if there wasn’t a church van out front. One thing I’m sure of: this address was not on our list.

The number Robb gave me is upstairs, so I ascend the metal steps, keeping my footfalls light, not knowing what to expect. A dusty, spider-webbed grill sits next to the door. The bulb in the fixture beside the entrance is burned out, but the peephole glows dimly, letting me know somebody’s home. I draw my pistol, tucking it down beside my hip, then give the door a light rap.

It opens slightly, straining against a security chain, and I get a glimpse of Carter Robb’s face, pale, damp with sweat, eyes bulging a bit, before the door slams shut. He releases the chain and throws it open wide. His skin has a noticeable pallor, as if he hasn’t eaten in a long time and might be feverish. He wears dark jeans and a black T-shirt that reads VIVA LA REFORMACION in red letters, with a posterized man dressed like he’s going to the Renaissance Festival taking the place of Che Guevara.

“You called,” I say, casting a wary glance over the apartment.

The living room is filled with matched furniture straight out of a thrift shop, upholstered in nubby, synthetic-looking blue tweed. A stack of magazines, mostly checkout counter fare, is centered on the coffee table with the TV remote on top. Posters tacked on the wall. In an armchair, a basket of laundry consisting of towels and socks and T-shirts and women’s underwear, still waiting to be folded. Plastic cups are discarded everywhere, some of them empty, others still with liquid stagnant inside.

Robb wobbles on his feet, taking a step back to steady himself. I reach out, then notice what’s hanging from his left hand.

“You want to give me that?”

He blinks, then glances down at the Ruger .22 caliber pistol, almost as if he didn’t realize it was there. With the barrel down he hands it over. I strip the magazine out, ejecting a round from the chamber, then tuck it into my waistband for safekeeping.

“Now, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“I better show you,” he says.

He points down the hallway, toward the bedroom presumably, and I see there’s blood on his hand, and more wetting his dark shirt. His knuckles have the bruised and scuffed look of a man who’s thrown some punches without knowing how. We walk toward the hallway, Robb pausing over the laundry basket. He lifts a wadded shirt, leaving a smear of blood on the fabric.

“This was Evey’s.” He turns it this way and that, then lets it drop. “I was just about to leave, like you said, and as soon as I turned the engine on, there he was. He knocked on a door – not the one from your list – and talked to some guy. They exchanged something. I think he sold the guy drugs, because he had a wad of cash in his pocket. I followed him, and this is where he went.”

He leads the way to the back bedroom, with me trailing a few feet behind, dreading what I’ll find on the other side of the door. I remember the saintly spasm of Octavio Morales’s death agony, the startled expression on Joe Thomson’s face in his final gasp. The security guard, Cropper, coiled up in a pool of blood, dead by my hand on the warehouse pavement. And Salazar, his body small and crumpled under the hospital sheets, that death also down to me.

And this one is, too. Even if Robb pulled the trigger, it’s my sin to carry, just as much as if I’d put the gun in his hand and told him to shoot. I’d deputized him, appointed him an instrument of vengeance, and probably destroyed the man in the process. I can tell by the way he’s moving, the jerking, twisting shuffle, the thousand-mile stare. He’s been gutted, his soul carved out, astonished to find himself capable of such bestiality.

I pause in the dark hallway, just outside the light spilling through the bedroom door, imagining Frank Rios as I last saw him, picturing him spread out on the bed like Morales, hands lifted stiffly heavenward, the blood cooling, settling in his extremities. But when I enter, it isn’t a beatific corpse waiting for me.

Rios sits on the edge of the bed, his wrists lashed together with an extension cord, its opposite end secured to the bedpost beneath him, between his legs, forcing him to hunch forward, to tilt his battered head up in order to see. He looks at me through one eye, the lid swollen, his face puffy and scratched, blood dripping from his mouth and nose. It takes a moment for him to recognize me, and then he tugs on the cord violently. He spits to clear his mouth.

“You gotta help me, man,” he whispers.

Robb goes to the mirrored closet, leaning back against the door, his knees buckling under him. As he slides down, he leaves a wet trail on the glass. I kneel beside him, pulling at the T-shirt. A seeping washrag is duct-taped to his side. Underneath, a tiny hole oozes blood.

“Put pressure on this.” I replace the rag, moving his hands to cover it. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

“Wait,” he says, reaching toward my hand. “Make him tell you what he told me.”

“You’ve been shot, Carter. We’ve gotta get you to the hospital.”

“It doesn’t matter. Make him tell you.”

I pull free, walking out into the hallway. There’s no way I’m going to let him bleed to death on the carpet while I chat with Frank Rios. The emergency operator scrambles ambulance and police and then it’s back into the bedroom, where both men look up, both appealing to me. From the bathroom I grab fresh towels, then bend over Robb to try and staunch the flow of blood. Over my shoulder, Rios coughs sloppily and spits some more.

“You don’t get it,” he hisses, addressing Robb, not me, continuing a conversation I must have interrupted with my arrival. “Not you, not that other one – Murray. You talk, but it’s not inside you like it was in her.”

“Shut up,” I say.

Robb shakes his head weakly. “Let him talk.”

“I knew,” Rios says. “I could tell looking at you. Talking. That Murray thinks he’s so smart, quoting all these philosophers he’s never read. But he’s not. You’re not. This” – he shrugs against the cable – “it means nothing.”

I don’t want him to talk. I don’t want to hear his side of the story. Some killers, when they realize it’s over, they want to tell their life story. They have pronouncements to make, as though taking life gives them some heightened insight into living it. I’ve sat through enough of these lectures, even been entertained by a few, but not this time. Not him.

“You murdered Hannah Mayhew,” I say.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like, then?”

He drops his head, showing me the top of his skull, his matted hair, a target to lash out at, to crush. I feel it in me, that desire to hurt him, to make him suffer, to put him down like a rabid dog. The lives he’s destroyed, the anguish, the senseless brutality – no one would begrudge me doing it, and there are plenty who’d consider it my duty. There are some men not worth bringing in alive, not if you can help it. I have the means, and coursing through me like a high, like a toxin in my system, I have the motive, too.

“I loved her,” he says. He does more than say it. He wails the words, filling them with a repellent self-pity. “I tried to stop them from hurting her.”

“Evey, you mean. You abandoned her. I know what happened to Evey. I saw the aftermath firsthand.”

His head shakes. “I sent them to save her, but they didn’t. You know what they did? He told me. Tony told me. They dumped her, man. They put her in the water like she was just garbage. And they were gonna do that to me, too, if they ever caught me.”

I can hardly stand it. “So you’re the victim here.”

“Everybody’s the victim. I work for the police, man. The good guys. I pass along whatever they need to know. And they supposed to help me. That’s what he says. Tony. They gonna help me with the money I owe. They gonna square everything in time. Only they don’t, so then I gotta do it. Except . . . Except . . .”

The emotion in his voice is real enough. I can believe, in his own sick and self-centered way, that he loved Evangeline Dyer, just like Coleman said. But hearing him say so, hearing his words thicken with grief, pollutes her memory. I see her face in Thomson’s photo, on the many pages of his sketchbook, in the picture folded over and tucked in my notebook, Evey and Hannah saying goodbye before the Dyers left for Louisiana. Even though I never knew her, even though I pursued her blindly, just a body tied to a bed, I feel she belongs to me in some way she doesn’t to him, the man she ran away with, the man who left her to her fate.

Something Donna Mayhew said comes back to me. I didn’t know her, but now I feel like I’ve found her. Only I’ll never find Evey, down at the bottom of the Gulf. She’s lost for good, and this is as close as I’ll ever get.

“You left her,” I say.

“I sent help.”

“And what about Hannah? She didn’t deserve to die. She didn’t deserve to have her body dumped, either, but that’s what you did.”

At the mention of her name, his demeanor shifts. He twists his head up, looking at me through the hooded eye. “That girl, she wouldn’t stop calling. She had to talk to Evey, wouldn’t stop until I put her on the phone. But how could I do that? I tried putting her off, but she knew something wasn’t right. She wouldn’t let go of it. And I thought, this girl could get me in a lot of trouble – or maybe I wasn’t thinking. I was afraid.” He spits again. “Afraid of them finding me, afraid of anyone knowing.”

“So, what, you kidnapped her?”

“I agreed to meet her. Told her Evey and me would be at the mall. That’s where we used to meet, before Evey went home to the Big Easy. Hannah, when she showed up, I told her she had to stop calling me. I said Evey went back again, but she could tell it was a lie. And I went, ‘This has gotta end.’ ”

“Then you killed her.”

He shakes his head. “I was just trying to scare her, man. But she got real angry and was like, ‘What you done to her?’ And she says she’s gonna call the police. Under the seat, my cousin Tito, he keeps a loaded gun.” He turns sideways to look at Robb, who hasn’t moved in a while. “He’s got the gun, man. You better watch out.”

“I have the gun,” I say, then hunching over Robb: “You okay? Help’s coming, so just hang on.”

“Is he okay?” Rios says. “What about me? Look what he done to me!”

“He could’ve done worse.”

A sticky laugh escapes his red lips. “No, he couldn’t. Not after what I told him.”

He stops talking, now that I want him to. But there’s no way he can keep it up. Not everybody talks, but everybody wants to, I’m convinced of that. The hard men, the professionals, they know to keep their mouths shut. But it doesn’t come naturally. Like killing, you have to overcome a lot of instinct to stay quiet, whether you’re guilty or not. The effort on its own is sometimes enough to give the game away. So I know he’s going to open up.

“Told him what?”

Under the circumstances, though, he could admit to anything and get away with it. It won’t take much of a lawyer to argue any confession made in this room is coerced. But I don’t need him to confess to anything. All I need him to do is exist; all I need is his body so that justice can be executed upon it.

“Told him what?” I ask again, giving him a nudge.

“Don’t touch me, man.”

I push him again, and he rears back.

“What did you tell him that was so important?”

“Go on,” Robb says.

Rios starts nodding, a nod like a train coming over the horizon, slow at first, hardly perceptible, then it gains momentum, quickening to the point that his head bobs back and forth, his intention arriving. “It was her fault. She saw the gun and the stupid girl reached for it. It went off, and she’s sitting there in the passenger seat, looking surprised, like she never saw that coming.”

He looks up at me, gauging my reaction, then he chuckles. Telling the story is like committing the crime again, only this time with an audience. We’re helpless bystanders, Robb and I, witnesses. Forced to hear, powerless to stop him.

“She was trying to save her friend,” I say, because I can’t say nothing. “A girl you supposedly loved. And you killed her.”

My anger leaves him unfazed. “She didn’t react at first, but then she kind of cried out. I dragged her back between the seats, put her on the floor of the van, you know.” He closes his eyes, remembering. “I never did that before, never shot someone, and it kind of surprised me she didn’t die right there. Maybe the bullets were too small. She started crying then, laying in back. I started driving, ’cause I was afraid somebody heard the shot.”

I recall the parking lot, standing in the space where Hannah’s car was found. He’d shot her, and when she didn’t die, he threw her in back and drove around, waiting for her to bleed out.

“So I’m driving,” he says, “and I look back and there she is, crawling up to the front again.”

The more he speaks, the calmer he gets, like his energy is channeled entirely into the story and he’s almost proud to tell it. There’s a pleasure he takes in describing the scene, like a kid at a campfire describing the weirdest thing that ever happened to him.