Impersonal Attractions (19 page)

Annie protested faintly and then began to fold. The shock, fatigue, and bourbon were taking over. She followed Sam to bed.

“Besides which,” Sam said as she pulled a pale yellow down comforter up over Annie and handed her a glass of water and two aspirin, “you’re not the sleuth in this twosome anyway. I am.”

“I know.” Annie smiled up her. “That’s what I’m counting on.” And then she was asleep.

*

Bright sunshine creeping around the edge of the green chintz shade startled Annie into consciousness. The orange-and-white clock on the bedside table said two o’clock. How could that be? It was two the last time she woke up. Besides, it wasn’t light at two. Slowly it registered. Two in the afternoon. Preposterous. The only time she slept like that was when she had the flu.

Then she remembered and slumped back under the covers.

Lola was dead.

“Sam,” she called. There was no answer.

“Samantha,” she yelled. The flat was quiet.

There was a note taped to the top of the coffee maker where half a pot of French roast was warming.

“Hope you slept late. I’m having lunch with Sean. Okay, I’ll see what I can find out.” It was signed with her familiar
Xs
and
Os
.

*

When Annie arrived back at her apartment there was another note. Taped to her door, it was an invitation from Angie to come across the hall to dinner.

She didn’t want to, but she knew she ought to eat. And she didn’t really want to be alone. Once seated at Angie’s table, she usually found that everything looked a lot better.

Nibbling on salami and peppers, she told Angie and Frank about Lola’s murder. They’d both wanted to meet her. Too late for that now.

“It’s terrible—all this violence that’s out there.” Angie gestured with one hand while pushing up her glasses with the other. She was a small tornado when riled. “That’s all you read in the paper these days. A gang killing here. A murder there. And what about all these damned Klan meetings? Where the hell are we living, anyway, southern Mississippi?”

“Angie, you’re getting paranoid. You didn’t want to talk with the insurance man last week when he mentioned that he lives in Pinole. Just because you read that there’s a lot of Klan activity there. That doesn’t mean the whole town is rotten.” Frank laughed in his soft, slow way. “I’m the one who’s black, baby. And I’m not worried.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not exactly true, is it? What did you tell me just the other night?”

“Awwwh, Angie.” Frank gestured with hands that could hold a basketball like a grapefruit. “That’s just because it was real late at night.”

“What?” asked Annie.

“It was nothing. I was just telling Angie that when I had to go in to work at night last week I felt a little scared waiting for a bus on the corner at midnight. But who wouldn’t?”

“Why should you have to be scared? Isn’t this supposed to be a safe neighborhood? If not, what are we paying all this rent for? And if
you
feel scared, Frank, what about women like me?”

“You mean midgets?”

Angie slapped at him. “Come on, this is no time for jokes.” But she couldn’t stop her grin. Frank could always make her laugh.

Then she got serious again. “Well, it has to stop. This isn’t Mississippi, Tennessee”—she waved at Frank when she mentioned his home—“the South Bronx. Didn’t we
leave those places and come here to get away from all that crap?”

“That’s the same thing I said to Sam.”

“Come on.” Frank put a hand on Annie’s shoulder. “You and I know those people we grew up with back home. You can’t change those people’s minds.”

“I don’t want to change his mind. I want to make him stop.”

“Who’s he?” Angie asked, looking at Annie strangely. “Who are you talking about?”

“The bastard who killed Lola.”

“What are you going to do? Go after him with a shotgun? Why do you think we have cops?” Frank said. “Anyway, how are you going to find him?”

“I know who he is,” Annie answered.

“What!” Angie choked.

The little hairs on the back of Annie’s neck began to prickle. It wasn’t until she’d said the words that she realized that she felt them somewhere deep down inside her gut.

She paused, lighting a cigarette. “I don’t mean I really know…exactly…who he is. I can’t explain it. I just have this funny feeling.”

Frank started to interrupt her.

“I know. Don’t say it. You’re going to start about psychic bullshit. This is not in the same category as Angie’s astrologer.”

“What
about
my astrologer?”

“It’s something else. And whatever it is, I’m going to follow it. I’m going to get that bastard cold.”

She said the same words to Sam an hour later on the phone. Then, “Go ahead and tell me I’m crazy. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“Sam, are you there?”

Sam was very serious. “I talked with Sean today…” She paused.

“And?”

“Hush. Now, this goes no further.”

“Right.”

“The rose they found with Lola…”

“Yes.” Annie squeezed her eyes tight. She wanted to block the mental picture she had of that scene.

“There wasn’t just one. There were more in the kitchen in a florist’s box. And a vase was out, as if she were about to arrange them when…” Sam let the thought trail off.

“Sean says they’ve been there, the roses, at all four murders.”

“Roses. White roses. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” The adrenaline started pumping. Annie was pacing back and forth with the phone in her foyer.

“It’s awfully coincidental, isn’t it? John Sharder in his Porsche with those roses. And the one he brought to my doorstep. I told Sean about him.”

“What did he say?”

“He thought it was strange enough to have him checked out. Sean says he looks clean. He’s having second thoughts now. But he’s having second thoughts about lots of people.

“When there’s a maniac loose like this there are all the prior offenders to track, all the phone tips. People come out of the woodwork—turning in their brother-in-law because they’re pissed about a bad debt or their upstairs neighbor who’s been giving them a hard time. It’s time-consuming and maddening. Especially when you come up empty and the guy’s still out there.”

“So they just keep looking.”

“Sean does want to talk with us. He wants us both to go over everything we remember about John Sharder and he wants to talk with you about Lola. They found the letters from the
Guardian
ad in her apartment and they have some questions about them.

“They think maybe there’s some connection between the ads and the murders.”

Just exactly what Annie didn’t want to hear.

THIRTY-ONE

Everything had gone along great for the boy that year, his senior year, the year he’d found the place he belonged. Until the night with Missy Cartwright. Then it fell to pieces. It was all her fault.

It had been a cold evening, a cold snap like they often had after a spell of warm spring weather that would bring all the flowers into bloom.

There was a Friday-night basketball game at school. He had wheedled Pa’s grudging permission, doubled up on chores, swapping two for one with Lem, who would always be known for driving a hard bargain, so he could stay in town for the game.

That morning, after carefully dressing in his best blue shirt and jeans, he’d clipped a bouquet of roses from his mother’s side garden and left the house. Yellow, white, red, and pink, tight and covered with dew, they’d be good
till evening wrapped in wet newspaper and carefully propped in the corner of his locker.

Two days before, after almost six months of following Missy, late to his classes as he’d trailed her to hers, the break he had been waiting for finally happened. Right beside him, she’d dropped her books.

“Damn!” she said and then looked around with those big blue eyes to see if anyone had heard her.

And he had been right there.

“Oh, thank you.” She’d smiled as he handed her the books. Then she winked at him and turned into her classroom as the bell rang.

He hadn’t cared that he would be late again, that old Mrs. Hedgepath would yell at him.

Missy had winked at him! He was smiling like a fool as he bounced up the stairs.

Sitting in Hedgepath’s class, he’d come up with the plan.

Now, clutching the roses in their newspaper as he sat in the bleachers alone, he wasn’t so sure it was going to work. Even if it didn’t, it was great to watch Missy as she and the other cheerleaders twirled and twisted in formation on the gym floor before him.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. That sweet mouth opened wide to shout, dimpling now as she stomped her foot in a routine. That body, round in the right places, with that tiny little waist. How could girls be so little in the middle? he wondered. How do they eat or breathe?

Just as he’d feared, at the end of the game there was no chance to give her the flowers. He’d seen on TV how sometimes when performers were really good someone came out and gave them flowers. He’d thought how impressed Missy would be, how proud, to get flowers like the ladies on TV. But there was no chance; she was surrounded by the other girls, whirling and twirling as the game ended, their team winning by twelve points.

He hadn’t paid much attention to the game. It was his school too. But he didn’t care anything about basketball, not the way the city boys from the north side of town played it, anyway. A bunch of candyasses running up and down the court patting each other on the behind.

When he and his brothers played one-on-one they didn’t have any hardwood floors to run up and down, no pretty girls yelling their names, no fancy jockstraps, but they didn’t pat each other on the behind either.

So Missy had disappeared before he could give her the flowers, swept up in a blur of pom-poms and smiles and big sweaty boys in blue and gray satin.

But he had another trick up his sleeve.

He stood across the street from her house, watching in the dark, waiting for her to get home from the game.

But the day had been such a long one, starting with the chores, that finally even the cold couldn’t keep him awake. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep when he was awakened by the sound of Missy’s voice.

“Okay, Ma, I’ll be in in just a few minutes.”

Her voice had come from the dark of the front porch, and then, as the moonlight shot from behind a passing cloud, he could see the gleam of her blonde hair.

How did she know? he marveled. It was like a dream. She was waiting out on her porch for him to come calling, to give her her prize.

He’d trotted out of the shadows, across the street, and straight up her front steps, his path as clean and pure as the love for her that flowed from his heart.

“Missy, I brought these for you.”

There was giggling and shuffling and only then, as he extended his hand and his heart, did he realize that Missy wasn’t sitting on the porch swing alone.

Bo Hendricks, the captain of the basketball team, was there, too, with one big hand resting on Missy’s shoulder and the other covering the letter on her chest.

Then he realized with a stab of humiliation that he was handing Missy flowers while Bo Hendricks was diddling her boobs.

As he dropped the roses and turned, Bo challenged, “Hey, Bubba, what you got there? You come calling on Missy?”

“Hush, Bo,” Missy had hissed as she struggled her sweater free from his hand.

“Who are you?” she’d called to his retreating back. “I can’t see you in the dark. Who’s there?”

“Nobody,” he’d yelled back over his shoulder as he ran the first block of his ten-mile trip back home. “Nobody, nobody, that’s who.”

THIRTY-TWO

T
hey met Sean for lunch downtown at John’s Grill, the perfect spot to talk about murder. The dark, men’s-club atmosphere was infused with the spirit of Dashiell Hammett. There was a Maltese falcon on display, as well as first editions and manuscripts from the writer whose detectives had tracked some of their most hard-boiled murderers on the back streets of San Francisco.

Annie could see why Sam found Sean attractive. Tall, well-built, with thick auburn hair, he had a gentle, understated manner that ran at odds with the stereotype of a third-generation Irish cop.

“I put a good man on him and he checked out clean,” he was saying as he cut into a lamb chop. “This roses business is screwy, but John Sharder has no monopoly on roses and weird behavior with women. I’d like to hear what you can tell me about him, though.”

Annie and Sam ran through it. Sam’s encounter with him on the freeway. His standing her up at the Square. (Sean smiled. Lucky for him.) His appearance at Sam’s door with the rose. Halloween. And the phone calls since then.

“Just calls, as I told you,” Sam said. “I’ve refused to see him. But I know he’s been following me.”