Death by the Riverside (19 page)

“I get such a thrill doing this right under Granddad’s nose,” I heard Karen say. “He had a lot of nerve kicking me out of his will for being queer. I
am
getting married, after all.”

“Oh, yes, oh, harder, harder,” was Cheryl’s reply.

I noticed a patch of yellow under one of the rags. I picked it up. A half-empty tube of horse liniment. Equus Ben-Gay. No, I couldn’t do that. Not even to Karen Holloway.

“Oh, yes, faster, faster,” Cheryl’s voice said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be hard and fast. I’ll pretend you’re that dyke who fancies herself Nancy Drew. This would all be mine now, if it weren’t for her.”

“Don’t get distracted, Karen,” Cheryl whined, “I’ll lose my concentration. Besides, you got to do it with her. She’s kind of cute.”

Cute? Me? I’m too tall to be cute. She obviously hadn’t seen me up close.

“I’m sure you can do it, too. She has no standards,” Karen said, finally going harder and faster and cutting off whatever reply Cheryl was going to make. “She and her boring little set of do-gooder friends. Her best friend is the daughter of a bait-catcher out of the bayous. Black, no less.”

Cheryl’s response was to come in a loud spurt.

I’m a big girl. I can take insults, even being called cute. But don’t mess with my friends. I had to get out of here. I started prowling through the cardboard boxes. Christmas decorations. Tinsel, tiny Santas, reindeer, and the like in the first box. The next box contained a Christmas tree baking pan, a mind-boggling number of holiday cookie cutters, and other baking things, none of which would get me out of the barn. But then I found something that could make my stay here a bit more interesting.

Karen shrugged off her dress and handed the dildo to Cheryl.

“Cordelia would shit if she knew I was doing this. ‘Scares the horses,’ she would say. She wants to save the world. What a bore.” Cheryl put the dildo to use, but Karen still continued, “I even invited her to my big party, since we’re cousins and she’s rich, but she declined, saying she had to work in that crappy little clinic. How she can even go to that section of town is beyond me.”

Food coloring was my discovery. Red, blue, yellow, green. Green. I decided to change Karen’s bush from winter wheat to a springtime forest. Springtime is for love, after all. There was a crack between bales wide enough for me to put my arm through and get within squirting distance of the bag. I squeezed a generous dollop of green into the lubricant. In fact, I emptied the bottle.

“Did you lube that up good? It’s catching on my vag,” Karen complained.

Let’s hear it for poetic justice. Cheryl rolled the dildo over the now adulterated bag, then put it back into Karen and started working it vigorously in and out.

For about a minute nothing happened, except for the boring routine of sex. Then Karen chanced to look down. I covered my ears to protect them from her screaming and cursing. It took Cheryl a while to understand that this was not excitement.

“Get that thing out of me. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Karen yelled.

When Cheryl finally pulled the dildo out, Karen, still cursing a blue, or rather, green, streak, grabbed the lantern. She focused it between her legs, and started assessing the damage.

With the ladder now in darkness and the level of noise extremely high, Karen accusing and Cheryl defending, it was time to make my escape. I tiptoed around the dim side of the bales and was down the ladder in a moment.

I was on the floor of the barn, Karen and Cheryl still audible, when another evil thought occurred to me. No, I said, you can’t do it, but I had already gotten a good grasp on the ladder and was silently pulling it away from the edge of the loft. This should definitely prove that I and my friends weren’t all do-gooders. Particularly me. I laid the ladder down on the floor, then found my shoes and headed for the door.

I did not want to be there when Karen noticed the ladder was moved. Cordelia was wrong about the horses, they didn’t look scared, just very annoyed. Exit barn left.

The cool night air felt good. It would be chilly in a few hours, but it was still a mild night for February.

I saw a figure in the darkness heading in my direction. Some other nonparty person preferring horses to people. Unfortunate that Karen and Cheryl would get rescued so quickly.

“Hello,” the figure said. “Why did I think you might be at the barn?”

It was Cordelia.

“You’ve recognized my basically misanthropic nature. And that I always vote for Mr. Ed for President,” I replied.

“Sounds good to me.”

“You don’t want to go in there. Karen and consort are in a highly volatile mood in the hayloft,” I warned.

“Maybe I had better head her off, before she causes a scene,” Cordelia said, annoyance in her voice.

“She’s not going anywhere,” I answered. Cordelia gave me a questioning look. “She’s up in the hayloft and the ladder’s on the ground.”

Cordelia burst out laughing. She had a deep, warm laugh that tempted me to stand on my head or do anything to keep her laughing. “Good for you,” she said. I started to demur, but she continued, “You’ve made my night. Come on, let’s walk down to the river. I want to talk to you.”

She took my arm companionably. We walked across the unlit lawn, the warm bustle of the lanterns off to one side and the moonlit gray of the river in front of us.

I saw Frankie at the far edge of the light. He was standing by himself, waiting, it seemed.

“You’re working, aren’t you?” Cordelia said, catching my distraction.

“I was earlier, but I’m off duty now,” I replied.

Frankie was in the hands of the FBI, the NOPD, and who knew who else. A lot safer than stashed with my cousin Torbin. I looked toward the river. Something nagged at me and I looked back at Frankie. He was standing just inside the light nearest to the driveway. I was getting paranoid. I was expecting some big dark hand to reach out and grab him. Not here. He was safe here.

Barbara Selby was in the hospital. At that thought, I knew I wasn’t going to take a walk along a moonlit river with the striking Cordelia James.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Sorry, I need to check on someone,” I said, turning away from the river and to the light that enclosed Frankie. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Can I help?” she asked, walking with me.

“You don’t need to. It’s boring.” I didn’t think she would want to prowl around the yard until my paranoia relaxed. “Sorry, sometimes we detectives aren’t fun to be with.”

“It’s okay. I’m a doctor, I understand. I do what you’re doing all the time,” she replied.

“I don’t…” But I stopped to make sure I heard it. A motorcycle.

I started walking faster. It’s nothing, Micky, I told myself. Just a servant with a special order bottle of bourbon. The motorcycle came into view. A man in black with a black helmet and visor that obscured his face. You don’t wear a black visor at night unless you don’t want people to recognize you.

I started running. Cordelia was still beside me somehow, catching my urgency.

The sound of the motorcycle got louder and louder as we all converged on one point. The motorcycle got there first, its roar apexing with the thunderous blast of a shotgun.

I grabbed Cordelia’s hand and pulled her along as fast as I could. Frankie needed her now more than he needed me.

What’s black and white and red all over? A scared young man, in a set of tails, with a shotgun wound in his chest.

Cordelia and I reached him first. We seemed to be the only people in motion, everyone else was frozen in time. The two of us and the blood pouring out of Frankie’s wound.

Cordelia started working on him immediately, barking orders for someone to call an ambulance and to get her black bag.

I cradled Frankie’s head, trying to tell him it would be all right, that the finest doctor in New Orleans was working on him. Blood was coming out of his nose and mouth. I wiped it away, trying to let him breathe without the wet pull of the blood. But it wasn’t the blood in his mouth that was causing his labored gasps, but the blood in his lungs.

“Micky,” he wheezed.

“Don’t talk,” I said. “Later. Talk later.”

“No, it’s okay,” he said slowly in gasps. “The informer,” he coughed up blood.

“Shh,” I cautioned.
I don’t give a damn about the informer. Stay alive, Frankie.

“Don’t know name, but…” He gasped for breath. “But wounded in action, likes jazz, Billie Holiday, and R in name. And…the leader…the real leader. I heard his voice…he’s here.” He coughed again, spitting blood. “Can’t do more.” He stopped talking, his breath shallow and rapid.

“Frankie,” I said. He stopped breathing. “Do something,” I yelled at Cordelia. She ignored me. She was already doing all she could.

“Frankie,” I said again. Cordelia looked at me and told me to try mouth-to-mouth. I had already begun.

I concentrated on forcing air into his lifeless body. I could hear the sickening wheeze of my breath slipping out of his punctured lungs.

I kept on breathing for him until I felt Cordelia’s hand on my arm. I looked at her. She shook her head no.

“Frankie,” I said one more time. But no one was there.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t let go and leave Frankie on the cold February ground. Someone finally lifted me away from him. It was Cordelia. The other onlookers stood back, keeping the blood and gore away from their expensive formal clothes.

Someone handed Cordelia several tablecloths, which she evidently had asked for. She used a big one to cover up Frankie’s body. Then handed one to me. I stupidly held it, staring at the blood creeping through the cloth covering Frankie. What was left of him. Cordelia was wiping off the blood with a tablecloth. I finally started to do the same.

“Come with me,” she said and took my arm for the second time that evening. She led me around the corner of the house and to a back staircase. I heard a woman scream when she caught sight of us. We must have been drenched in blood. Cordelia ignored her.

She led me up the stairs to a bathroom on the second floor. It was huge, probably half the size of my whole apartment. It must be nice to be rich, I thought. And to have servants to clean up any bloody mess.

Cordelia was running water and washing herself off with the efficiency of someone who washes off blood every day.

I sat down. I guess there were several chairs in the bathroom. I hadn’t noticed them before, but I was sitting in one of them. I felt sick. I wanted to throw up or to cry. I couldn’t decide which, so I did neither.

“Stay here,” Cordelia said. She had finished washing up. “I’ll be back.” She left, shutting the door behind her.

I heard a siren in the background, voices on the lawn yelling and screaming, a cacophony outside my silence.

“How many more?” Ranson’s voice echoed in my head. How many others would die because I touched them? Why the hell did I think I could change the world? Maybe Aunt Greta was right. I fucked up everything that I did. Not that she ever said
fuck.
She was always very polite when she told me what trash I was.

I looked at my arms. The florescent light of the bathroom turned the drying blood a brutal purple. I could feel the damp stickiness of the blood everywhere, covering my arms, speckling my face and hair, soaking my dress. Torbin’s dress.

I started laughing hysterically; somehow the thought of his dress led to the red dress and our promise that we would wear them to the next family Christmas. I had an image of myself walking, for the first time in over ten years, back into Aunt Greta’s house. In a red dress that dripped blood. And the whispers of my family. “That Michele, always in trouble. Look at her, she doesn’t have the common courtesy to bleed in private. Well, what do you expect of a bastard child like that. Always a bloody mess. She’s not really family.”

That was how Cordelia found me when she came back in. Laughing hysterically and staring at my bloody arms.

“Come on, stand up,” she said, taking hold of one of my arms and helping lift me. She unzipped my dress, then pulled it over my head.

“I’m sorry, your dress is ruined,” she said, tossing it into the bathtub.

“That’s okay. It’s Torbin’s and he doesn’t want it anyway.” I realized how strange that sounded. “Good thing I didn’t wear the red one. He wanted that one back.” I started laughing again. I was out of control. I couldn’t cry, so I was laughing.

Cordelia tossed the rest of my clothes into the bathtub with the ruined dress. Then she got a washcloth, wet it, and began washing the blood off me. I noticed that she had changed clothes and was now wearing a sweatshirt and old jeans.

“Here, I can do that,” I said, taking the washcloth from her, attempting to regain some of my control. I used the cold washcloth to wipe the blood off my arms, my face, and my chest and stomach where it had soaked through the dress. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened to me,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cordelia said. “Shotgun wounds are gruesome. You’re doing okay for having seen one that close.”

I stopped. Nausea took over. I started throwing up. Cordelia put a wet washrag on my neck as I hunched over the toilet.

This wasn’t the first time I had seen what a shotgun does to a man’s chest. When I was ten years old, I had seen a man shot in the chest with a shotgun.

“Take it easy,” Cordelia was saying.

My stomach was empty. There was nothing more to retch up. I still hunched over the toilet, not knowing how to face her. She handed me some water and I washed out my mouth.

“Can you stand?” she asked, gently brushing the damp hair off my forehead.

I nodded and slowly stood up.

“I’m sorry, Micky.”

“It’s okay. I’m all right,” I said, wanting it to be so.

She put her arms around me, holding me tight.

I didn’t move. The man twenty years ago with the shotgun hole in his chest was her father. And if she knew that, she wouldn’t be standing here holding me.

Someone opened the door.

“Cordelia, I’ve been looking all over for you. I…oh,” Thoreau said. He was seeing his fiancee embracing a naked woman behind a closed door.