Blackbird (17 page)

‘Nothing. As far as she was concerned it was on her. Wouldn’t tell the cops who he was. Called it a better deal than a lot of drunks make for themselves. “And I’m still here to whine about it”, was how she put it.’

‘She couldn’t take the money with her,’ I said. ‘What was it for?’

‘Me. For college and the dive training.’

We sat for a while, thinking about it, saying nothing,
my mental representation of Rachel slowly transforming itself like origami, unfolding into new dimensions.

Finally I said, ‘It just doesn’t sound like the Rachel I know.’

‘It wasn’t,’ said LA. ‘The Rachel you know is sober.’

I thought about Rachel and her life before Dusty and the Flying S, and about my office window at Three. About disconnects between realities. I said, ‘You use hypnosis with your patients, right?’

‘Sure, why?’

‘Could somebody be hypnotised or conditioned somehow to set up their own murder?’

‘A remote – I mean
really
remote – possibility if the circumstances were just right, say you were able to make somebody believe it was the only way to save their first-born’s life or something like that. But in a situation like this I’d have to say probably no.’

‘Any odds you can give me?’

‘No, but call it ninety-nine to one.’

I picked up the phone, punched Danny Ridout’s home number, LA watching curiously.

‘Yo,’ he said.

‘It’s me,’ I said. I could hear the TV in the background. ‘What are you watching?’

‘Clint Eastwood. We’re at the part where they paint the town red.’

‘You buy that?’ I said.

‘Hell, it’s a western, boss. What’s not to buy?’

‘Good point. But listen, I’ve been thinking – ’

‘Uh oh.’

‘Right. Anyway, first thing in the morning I want you and M to run a check into whether Gold might have set up
her own killing. I’m talking about insurance, depression, some kind of physical illness nobody knew about, stuff like that. And find out if she was seeing any kind of hypnotist.’

‘You funnin’ me, boss?’

‘This is straight. It’s an outside shot, but I want to eliminate the possibility. Indulge me.’

‘Okay, you got it. But M’s gonna think we’re nuts.’

‘I wouldn’t call CNN with that,’ I said. ‘She thinks all white people are nuts. Most days, how are you gonna argue with her?’

LA set her glass down, got up and walked to the stereo cabinet to look through the disc caddies – rock in the middle, classical on the left, jazz and miscellaneous stuff like Leon Redbone and Bobby McFerrin on the right. ‘When are you gonna put all this on a drive?’ she asked rhetorically.

I didn’t answer.

After flipping through discs for a while she settled on Puccini and slipped it into the slot. ‘Un bel di vedremo’ swelled to fill the room, and, as always with Puccini, I felt myself gradually relaxing, distancing a little from the day’s entanglements.

‘This stuff’s good for the spirit,’ said LA.

I swallowed the last of my Dos Equis. ‘Does it really make hens lay more eggs?’

‘That was Mozart.’

The phone rang and I picked up as LA turned down the volume.

It was Dispatch. ‘Sir, we’ve got a deceased under suspicious circumstances, and Crime Scene said you’d want to know about it.’

EIGHTEEN

The ‘circumstances’ turned out to be a residential fire off north Sterling, half a mile or so from the Jamison-Gold place, one single-family dwelling completely involved, and one body so far. No ID yet, but the property belonged to Benjamin Frix.

I listened to the dispatcher’s summary: the body found in the den, face-down, soft tissue too degraded for immediate identification. The 911 call had come from neighbours and an Oak Hill pumper had been on the scene inside nine minutes, units from Caddo Parish, the Tawakoni station and the Arkansas side arriving a couple of minutes later. With no hope of saving the house, the primary effort had been to prevent the fire from spreading to other homes.

I hung up and turned to LA, saying, ‘Make a run with me?’

Her car was parked behind the Ford, so we took it.

On the way she said, ‘That thing you do with your eyes when you’re thinking makes you look kind of like a sleepy koala. What’s going on in there?’

‘Left at the next light,’ I said. I told her about Frix, the sex group and the fact that I’d been planning to talk to him.
‘He comes up on the radar and less than a day later he’s dead, if this is him.’

‘Gold and now Frix?’ said LA. ‘Another murder, you think?’

‘Not if we’re lucky.’

‘This just keeps getting more and more interesting,’ she said. ‘I need to get out of the office more.’

‘Then there’s Gold’s husband, if you need something to sink your mental fangs into,’ I said. I described Jamison’s apparent no-problem attitude over his wife’s involvement with the group. ‘How believable is that?’ I asked.

‘Any indication he’s gay?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Hard to say for sure. I’m guessing not.’

‘Then I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Passive guy, into his own reindeer games – not impossible.’

I told her the rest of what I knew about Frix, including all the stuff nobody had been able to prove over the years.

She heard me out, then said, ‘Somebody whacked him.’

‘I hope you’re wrong.’

We found room to park the Nissan half a block down on the other side of the street and walked back to the smouldering remains of the house through a blaze of red and blue lights nearly as bright as day.

I held up my shield to get us inside the tape. By now nothing was left of the house but ashes and a couple of vertical structural remnants sticking up like long mummy fingers against a hellish smoke-filled sky. To our left the burned out hulks of a small convertible and a big off-road vehicle of some kind sat almost buried under the blackened debris of the garage roof. I saw the chief walking over to meet us, recognising him from a couple of conferences we’d
both been to, a tall silver-haired guy named Earl Morning Singer, his eyes and teeth impossibly white against his soot-blackened face. After I introduced him to LA he said, ‘We still got the body
in situ
over here if you want to take a look.’

‘How come he’s not bagged yet?’ I asked.

‘Tell you about that in a minute,’ he said. ‘Walk behind me through here; I’ll try to keep y’all as clean as I can.’

The blue-black body lay prone in what looked like a comfortable sleeping position, the head lying on the left forearm, the mouth gaping wide in imitation of a yawn. The features were unrecognisable.

‘If it’s Ben Frix, I knew him,’ I said. ‘Did you find any jewellery on the body?’

‘Didn’t notice anything,’ Morning Singer said. ‘What are we lookin’ for?’

I used the blade of my pocket knife to clear the ashes away from the right hand, exposing a gold signet ring with an embossed horseshoe wrapped around an engraved F.

‘This is Frix,’ I said. ‘Or at least this is his ring. And have them check his collar bones. There was a piece in the paper a couple of years ago about him breaking one of them when he ran his four-wheeler into a tree or something out at the lake.’

Morning Singer bent down for a closer look at the ring, then got out a little notebook and scribbled something in it. ‘Now, the reason the body’s still here,’ he said. ‘Look over there at the back of the slab and tell me what you see.’

Under a crisscross of charred wall studs and other debris I could see a black cubical shape about four feet high and what looked like a low steel door still in its frame but leaning back at a forty-five degree angle.
Behind that were the blackened barrels and actions of a dozen or more guns lying at random angles, the stocks burned away and some of the barrels visibly warped by the heat of the fire.

‘Some of those were automatic weapons,’ Morning Singer said. ‘And there was a lot of gold bars and other stuff that made us think we needed to get the feds out here for a look. Which means – ’

‘Zito,’ I said.

‘Right.’

‘When’s he coming?’

‘By the dawn’s early light, I imagine.’

I took a last look around, seeing nothing else I recognised as meaningful. LA and I shook hands with Morning Singer, thanked him for the walk-through and picked our way back out along the trail we’d come in on.

Back in my living room, I got Dispatch on the phone and told them to find out what kind of vehicles were registered to Frix, then listened as somebody whose voice I didn’t know came on with the information. ‘Okay, thanks,’ I said when she’d finished. ‘No, nothing new.’

Ending the call, I turned to LA. ‘A Miata and a Land Cruiser,’ I said. ‘That must have been them in what was left of the garage. Only two spaces in there and nothing parked in the driveway. So it’s Frix, and he was probably alone in the house.’

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Let’s leave the whole group thing out of it,’ I said. ‘And forget the fire for a minute. Unfortunately for us that still leaves the kind of guy who gets murdered – never gonna be citizen of the year, has accomplices and enemies but no friends, doesn’t trust anybody, keeps most of his money in
gold coins and bullion in a vault at his house. Along with his automatic weapons.’

‘
Full
automatic? Real machine guns,’ she said, bringing her index fingers into firing position, ‘like Dillinger?’

‘Pretty much. But he was a collector, not a hunter or competitor, hung out at gun shows and all that. Had an arrest for videotaping women in the restroom at his office with a hidden camera. He never went to trial for it, but I’m sure he was selling the tapes. I don’t know what all that adds up to psychologically.’

‘Adds up to a very hostile, undeveloped man.’

‘What do you call a guy like that technically?’

‘Narcissistic, paranoid. What Freud called a phallic character – overly competitive and vain, obsessed with status and power. Sexually immature, voyeuristic. Couldn’t stand to be wrong.’

‘Sounds like the ex of every divorced woman I know.’

LA shrugged, picking up her glass.

‘I don’t want this to be connected,’ I said.

‘Forget it.’

‘A burglary that went wrong.’

‘Put your money where your mouth is,’ LA said.

I looked at her, trying to remember when I’d last won any kind of bet against her, if I ever had. Wayne hadn’t thought this was an incidental killing either. Or a smoking accident or bad wiring. He wouldn’t have asked Dispatch to call me if he had.

‘What are we betting?’

‘Dinner at whatchacallit, that place with the good chateaubriand.’

‘The Chanticleer.’

‘That’s it.’

She was one of the few people I knew who still used a chequebook, and she brought hers out now. She wrote
Chanticleer
on the Pay To line, then signed the cheque in the same goofy way she always had, stringing the initials and last name together with no upper-case letters:
larowe
. I had asked her once why she did that but she’d just shrugged – another LA mystery. She tore the cheque out and smacked it down on the coffee table, saying, ‘Ante up, cowboy.’

A brief pinprick of light flared somewhere out in the mental wilderness of things I should’ve realised but hadn’t, then vanished without explanation. I got out one of the two debit cards I carried – the one I was pretty sure had two hundred dollars or so behind it as of today – and laid it on the cheque. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But coincidences do happen, LA. You can’t deny that.’ My last desperate shot.

She hmm’d non-committally as she sipped ginger ale. I walked over to boost Puccini back up to therapeutic volume, LA watching me and thinking her own thoughts.

NINETEEN

Benny’s offices were off Rockland, painted and carpeted in cooperative, cheery colours, nice ficus and umbrella plants in the corners, big Caribbean watercolours on the walls, comfortable-looking furniture. The magazines were slick, bright and mostly recent.

I heard goings-on in the small kitchen and break room down the hall, and smelled just-brewed coffee. A second later Benny appeared from his office and hustled out to greet me.

‘Jim, it is very good to be seeing you!’ He was round, kinetic and full of smiles but as always wore a serious suit and snugly knotted tie even at the end of a long day. He seemed to shake off an impulse to go for the
abrazo
, stuck out his hand instead and showed me back to his consulting office where we sat in big tweedy chairs arranged around a teak coffee table away from the desk. Andrea brought in coffee, tea and fixings along with three kinds of cookies.

‘Hi, Lieutenant,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way out. If you need anything else, Dr B can show you where it is.’

Benny and I reassured each other about our health, disapproved of the weather and politicians, and traded
generic family news. Then he tutted, saying, ‘These terrible deaths that are happening.’ He shook his head.

‘Did you know Frix?’ I asked.

‘No, I have never met him personally,
pero que lastima –
he was anyway a human being. My friend, the world is too ugly.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ I said, picking up a cookie with something that looked like apricot jam in the centre. ‘What about Dr Gold?’

‘
En realidad
, I am not so sure how well I knew her. We never had the social relationships. Sometimes we consulted.’

‘How’d that go?’

Benny looked pained. ‘I would not be able to say she was very good with people.’

‘Sounds unhandy in this line of work.’ I drank some iced tea. ‘Are you talking about talent, training or attitude?’

‘Probably we should say it is the personality. Dr Gold was intelligent, no question at all, but she was very difficult and critical in her talking of her peers. Always the troubles, many chasings of the patients, many complaints to the boards. Many lawsuits.’ He spread his hands. ‘Nobody is resting at peace.’

‘What do you know about her relationship with Mark Pendergrass?’