In The Forest Of Harm (2 page)

TWO

What can I get for you, hon?”

Lou Delgado smiled up at the waitress, who stood with both her left breast and order pad poised above his right ear. “The usual, Marge. How's it going?”

“They come, they eat, sometimes I get a decent tip out of the deal.” Marge cracked a wad of gum.

“You aren't referring to me, are you?”

Chuckling, Marge gave him a wink, then retreated to the counter. Lou settled back in the booth, appreciating the rhythmic jiggle of her bottom against the snug blue polyester of her uniform. All in all, the Copper Pot Diner was not a bad place to meet clients. The corner booth stayed empty in the late-night hours, the fluorescent lights allowed him a full view of the front door, and the waitresses knew how to keep their mouths shut if any cops came nosing around. Not a bad place at all, considering.

He drummed his fingers on the table and checked his watch. His next client should come walking through the door any minute. A young man, Lou thought, remembering the call from Perry that afternoon. Perry was an attorney who always sent Delgado his dirtiest jobs. Usually he was up-front about what needed to be done, but today the old shyster had been tight-lipped, saying only the new client was “someone you might recognize.” Lou enjoyed coyness about as much as a root canal, but he had agreed to meet the guy. What the hell, he decided. He could use the money. Private dicking in Dixie was not the most lucrative of professions.

Headlights flashed across the front window as Marge placed a mug of coffee and a piece of pecan pie on the table. Delgado forked up his first bite as the door of a black Porsche opened. As a figure emerged from the car, Lou relished the warm, sticky sweetness that filled his mouth, then turned his dark eyes intently to the door.

A man wearing khaki trousers and a pale blue button-down shirt entered. The newcomer stood well over six feet, with broad shoulders and a thick neck. Ex-high school quarterback, Delgado guessed. Too tall for a wrestler. Not the right color to play hoops. His dark blond hair was combed back from his forehead, and he wore his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal the taut muscles of his forearms. Pumps iron, too, Lou decided. The young man scanned the diner like a lunchroom bully looking for his next victim, then nodded at Lou and strode toward the booth.

“Mr. Delgado?” The young man extended his hand.

“Right.” Lou tried not to wince as powerful fingers mashed his fleshy paw.

“Mr. Perry sent me.”

“Have a seat.” Lou nodded at the other side of the table.

The young man slid into the booth and pulled a pack of Camels from his pocket. He flicked one out of the pack, touched what looked like a solid gold lighter to one end, and dropped both lighter and cigarettes back in his pocket, every movement precise as a close-order drill. He inhaled as if pulling the nicotine all the way down to his toes. Marge bustled back over, order pad in hand.

“You need a menu, sugar?”

He barely glanced at her. “Bring me a glass of water. With lots of ice.”

Lou studied the young man as Marge went back to the counter. He looked familiar, like one of those actors in a late-night infomercial. The Porsche in the parking lot and the Rolex strapped to his wrist spelled money, but he was too young to have accumulated that kind of wealth on his own. Daddy's got dough, Lou decided. Junior's in some kind of trouble and Daddy's going to grease the slide.

“Okay.” Lou started with his dependably disarming smile. “Tell me why a guy like you needs a guy like me.”

“I need to find out someone's habits.” He blew a plume of smoke toward Lou.

Delgado grinned. “You got a girl who's running around on you?”

“I wouldn't need a private detective to take care of that, Mr. Delgado,” the young man replied curtly, pulling a newspaper clipping from his pocket. “I want to find out about this woman, here.” He shoved the article across the table.

Lou looked down at the paper. The girl leaving the Deckard County Courthouse looked attractive, in a crisp, I-mean-business way. Long legs, nice tits, but all subdued behind an expensive black suit and a leather briefcase. He recognized her before the kid's fingers left the page. Mary Crow. Lou knew people who cursed this woman on a daily basis.

“So what did the famous Ms. Crow do to you? Not get all your speeding tickets dismissed?” Lou kept his voice light as Marge set a tall glass of water down on the table, ice tinkling.

“She just convicted my brother of murder.”

Lou's face brightened. Suddenly it all fell into place. He
had
seen this guy on television. Not commercials, but the news. Every station in Atlanta had shown him sweating like a pig on the witness stand at his brother's trial. He didn't have the movie-star good looks of his killer brother, but the hair, the eyes—and the arrogance—were the same.

“You're that Whitman kid's brother,” said Lou.

The young man nodded. “I'm Mitchell Whitman. Son of old Cal the real-estate king and brother of handsome Cal the killer.”

“Sorry.” Lou shrugged. “It seemed like a pretty airtight case.”

“They set it up to look that way. My father has made a lot of money in his life, and a commensurate number of enemies. The only way they could get to him was through my brother.”

“And the prisons are filled with innocent men.” Delgado sighed. How many times had he heard that? “Just tell me how I figure into this.”

Whitman drained half the glass of ice water, then set it down. “Like I said, I want to know as much about Mary Crow as you can tell me. Where she goes, what she does, who she does it with.”

Lou choked out a little laugh. “Look, kid, I'll tell you right now I don't mess with officers of the court. And I sure as hell wouldn't mess with Mary Crow. I saw her going after you on TV. She squeezed your balls pretty hard.”

“Nobody's asking you to mess with anybody.” Whitman ignored Delgado's testicle remark. “I'm only interested in information.”

Lou frowned down at the newspaper article. “So what terrible things do you figure she does on the side? Pose for porn? Fuck the mayor?”

“I don't know, Mr. Delgado. That's what I would be paying you to find out.” Whitman bypassed the ashtray on the table and flipped his cigarette on the floor, grinding it out on the linoleum with the heel of his hand-sewn boot.

Lou gave up on his pecan pie. For some reason this Mitchell Whitman made him feel like he was sitting next to someone flicking matches at a half-empty gas can. Better to just get this over with, he thought, and be gone. “Okay. So I tail Ms. Crow. Then what?”

“Then report back to me. I'm sure this isn't anything you haven't done before.”

Lou looked at Whitman for a long moment. Something told him there was a lot more to this, but something else told him it was better not to ask what. Suddenly an idea occurred to him.

“Okay,” he said confidently, trying to regain control of the conversation. “You put five grand down on the table right now and you'll have me for twenty-four hours. Then I'm out of it, totally.” Lou grinned. Rich people were the cheapest skates of all. A price tag like this would kill the deal cold.

Instead, Mitchell Whitman reached for his wallet and pulled out a blank check. Without blinking, he uncapped a fountain pen from his pocket and scrawled in: five thousand dollars.

Lou looked at the check as Whitman slid it across the table. It was already signed by Bill Perry and drawn on the Perry & Hendrix account. Thanks to Daddy's money, no trouble would ever come back to lie in this kid's crib.

“To be so young, you know the ropes pretty good,” Delgado said.

“I'm a graduate student in applied computer science at Georgia Tech, Mr. Delgado. In six weeks I'm going to be installing a computer-operated hydroelectric dam on a small, very beautiful little island off the coast of Chile. I've spent the past three months helping my family wade through this pile-of-shit persecution. I would do most anything to leave the country without having to worry about my brother and the overzealous Mary Crow.”

For the first time Mitchell Whitman smiled. Involuntarily, Lou stiffened. Whitman had a cold kind of mirth Lou had seen only once before, on an old man in Chicago who'd claimed to be the Führer's personal skinner-of-Jews.
Jesus
, he thought.
Who is this kid?

“So have we got a deal?”

“Meet me here, eight o'clock Saturday morning. You'll get a twenty-four-hour slice of Ms. Crow's life. But I'm warning you, if she makes me, or any of my people, then I'm outta there and you and Perry are out five grand.”

“Not a problem,” Whitman said as he slid out from the booth and stood up. Delgado saw that his thighs were thick as small trees, and that he looked over the diner as if assessing how much firepower he would need to turn the whole place into a pile of greasy, smoking rubble.

“Saturday morning, kid. Then we're history.”

Delgado watched as Whitman walked out into the night, the neon lights of the diner making the back of his neck glow a sick shade of green. He hopped into his car, the Porsche's lights came on, and Mitchell Whitman roared off, tires squealing against tarmac.

“Jesus.” Delgado shook his head. “If that kid's engineering the future, then we're all fucked.”

THREE

Good grief, Alex. We're spending two nights in the Nantahala National Forest, not scaling K-2.”

Mary stood in the parking lot of her condo, skeptically eyeing the contents of Alex's red BMW. The bright October sun sparkled off the open trunk, revealing a bulging teal backpack crunched in between a folded tent, a giant cooler of food, and a gas stove that looked like an early Russian space satellite.

Alex pushed the tent to one side. “Charlie had all this stuff and insisted we take it. I couldn't turn him down. He even packed us a lunch.”

Mary set her backpack down on the bumper. “Charlie had all this fancy gear?” Charlie Carter, a lanky, gregarious veterinarian who had hiked most of the Appalachian Trail in a pair of worn-out Keds, was Alex's boyfriend. They'd met the morning she'd brought her dog Daisy in to be spayed, and by the time Daisy's stitches had healed, Charlie and Alex were officially a couple. Since Alex had always tried to rehabilitate every hurt and abandoned animal she saw, Mary thought Charlie a perfect choice for her friend. She'd never seen Alex happier with a man.

Alex rearranged the stove. “He bought this stuff to do Bryce Canyon with his old girlfriend, but she got the cramps and couldn't go.”

“Hadn't she heard of Midol?”

Alex squinted one eye. “I think they had some other issues.” The ends of her blonde hair brushed against the collar of an orange safety jacket she was wearing over her favorite red plaid shirt. “Anyway, he even bought us three of these jackets, just so we wouldn't get shot by deer hunters.”

“Greater love hath no man than to buy his honey a safety vest.” Mary didn't have the heart to tell Alex that they would be hiking far too high in the mountains to even see a deer, much less a deer hunter. “What's Charlie going to do while you're gone?”

“He's giving a paper next week at a veterinarian convention in Toronto.” Alex laughed. “ ‘New Advances in Flea Control.' Charlie's a major player in fleas.”

Mary smiled, concealing a small pang of loneliness as they shoved her backpack in the trunk. It had been a long time since she'd had a man willing to buy her a safety vest and pack her a nice lunch. Most of her lovers spooked quickly—unnerved by the grisly evidence files stacked on her dining room table or saddened by the small shrine of family photographs on her bedroom dresser. Rob Williams, the last man she'd been serious about, had voiced it perfectly when he kissed her between her breasts and murmured, “Sorry, babe. That broken heart just doesn't have enough room in it for me.”

Alex peeled off her Day-Glo vest and tossed it in on top of the camp stove, then she saw the small metal tool-box Mary held in her hand. “Hey, isn't that your old paint box from college?”

Mary nodded. “I thought I might do some sketching.”

She balanced the box on the fender of Alex's car and snapped open the lid. Inside was a neat array of pencils, a palette knife, a couple of tubes of aging oil paint and a small sketch pad. Also nestled amid the art supplies were two tattered ticket stubs to
Dances with Wolves
and a photograph of four college girls grinning from a bright red London phone booth.

“Look!” Alex pointed at the photo. “That's us and the Willis twins! I haven't seen them in years . . . this paint box goes back a long way.”

“
We
go back a long way, Alex,” Mary reminded her, closing the box and shoving it between the tent and the sleeping bag. “I've lost count of all the crazy trips we've taken together.”

“Which reminds me.” Alex frowned. “You want to tell me why we're going camping in North Carolina? We haven't camped since college.”

“Why shouldn't we go camping? It's a wonderful way to spend a vacation.” Unconsciously, Mary fingered Wynona, tucked deep in the pocket of her jeans.

“Mary, I know you. I know what you like to do on your vacations. Your idea of fun is art galleries and book-stores and having hot coffee rolled in on a cart from room service. In all the years I've known you, never once have I heard you yearn to go sketch the piney woods of North Carolina.” Alex slammed the trunk and turned to face her. “So. What's up?”

Mary looked at her oldest friend standing tall—shading her china-blue eyes against the sun, fully utilizing the lighthouse beam of a gaze she'd perfected in law school. She sighed, knowing that she was standing before the one person who could read her like an eye chart. Finally, she took a deep breath and said, “I want to go back to Little Jump Off.”

“What?” Alex looked as if she'd just been doused with a bucket of cold water. “That store where your mother was killed?”

Mary nodded. “I need to see it again.”

For a moment Alex stood speechless, all the joy drained from her pretty face. “But why?” she finally asked. “All that happened so long ago.”

Mary shrugged. “I just need to do it, okay? It's like until I come to terms with all that, I'll stay stuck
here
.”

Alex studied the strong, confident woman who stood before her and remembered the Mary Crow she'd met twelve years ago, when an elegant older lady in a linen suit had literally pushed a trembling, denim-clad teenager with a battered white suitcase into her college dorm room. “Why, hello, dear,” the old lady had said in that soft Atlanta drawl that bespoke money and power and roots that stretched back to when Oglethorpe founded the colony. “I'm Eugenia Bennefield, and this is my granddaughter, Mary Crow. You two are going to be roommates!”

Oh, no we're not
, Alex had thought. At the time she had been unable to imagine rooming for ten minutes with this quaking Mary Crow. Today she couldn't imagine living her life without her. Since that moment they'd met in their dorm room, Mary's quiet, unassuming
groundedness
had become an emotional safe harbor that she sailed into on a regular basis.

“Did you tell your grandmother you were going up there?” she demanded, lifting an eyebrow.

Mary shook her head. “I didn't want to get Eugenia riled up—she reads too many mysteries as it is. Anyway, Alex, I just want to look around. After we go to Little Jump Off, I'll totally devote myself to having fun.”

“Promise?”

“Scout's honor.” Mary raised her right hand.

“Well, okay.” Alex sighed, only too aware of how stubborn Mary could be. “I've never been able to stop you from doing anything else you were determined to do.”

“Thanks.” Mary smiled.

“Can I ask just one more question?”

“What?”

“You're not planning on reopening any old murder cases, are you? Joan's edgy enough about this trip. She wanted to take us to New York to see
Tosca
.”

Mary laughed. “My only plan is to forget all about Cal Whitman and enjoy the woods.”

They drove to another of the thousand condos that ringed Atlanta, where Joan Marchetti sat perched on the bumper of her car, cutting the price tags off a new, black all-terrain fleece-lined anorak. An equally new black backpack lay on the ground, resting beside her barely broken-in black boots, while a new black camp watch marked the time from her left wrist. Joan's only garment over two weeks old was a battered black Yankees cap that shielded her eyes from the sun.

“Wow!” Alex hooted as she pulled the BMW up beside her. “New York goes Primitive.” She got out of the car and sniffed the air extravagantly. “But you still smell like the perfume counter at Saks.”

“Thank God.” Joan brushed cigarette ash off her black jeans. “I could've bought three new pairs of shoes for the money I spent on this camping gear.”

“You look terrific, Joan, but you're supposed to wear old ratty clothes when you camp,” Mary told her. “Not go out and buy new ones.”

“Oh, yeah?” Joan wrinkled her nose at Alex's tattered flannel shirt. “Well, I guess my wardrobe doesn't extend to ratty.”

“That baseball cap looks pretty ratty,” said Alex, turning and unlocking the trunk of the car.

“It may look ratty, but it's my lucky cap.” Joan had stuffed her dark curly hair under the cap, exposing a slender neck the color of fresh cream. “My dad sent it to me the first time the Yankees beat the Braves in the World Series.”

“Sounds like you're ready to camp to me.” Mary hoisted up Joan's new backpack and put it in the trunk.

“But I wasn't ready to spend so much money.” Groaning, Joan climbed in the backseat and waggled the anorak's price tag. “This better be a great weekend, you guys.”

“When have our road trips ever not been great, Joan?” Alex laughed as she lowered the top of the convertible. “You're too much of a homebody. If it wasn't for Mary and me, you would just hole up in this condo every weekend, reading briefs and baking lasagna.”

“I need to read my briefs. And I like baking lasagna. I especially like having Hugh Chandler over to eat it!” Joan protested ferociously, but she knew that Alex was right. Even though she'd lived in Atlanta for nearly nine years, she still felt intimidated by the hot, sprawling city with its honey-drip accents and countless Peachtree streets. Were it not for these two women, she probably would spend most of her time cocooned with Verdi and Puccini in the icy cool of her apartment.

“You can have Hugh Chandler over next weekend, Joan,” promised Mary. “This weekend is Mother Nature's gift to girl attorneys who labor in the trenches of the law!”

“All right, already.” Joan rolled her eyes. “Let's go!”

Alex pulled out of the parking lot and drove north. The morning begged for escape. The hot muggy fist of summer had loosened its grip on Atlanta, leaving behind a dry warmth that would linger until the first cool damp of fall inched its way down from Canada. With the CD player blaring, the three women sped along a chalk-colored interstate until it became U.S. 19, the ancient two-lane that connects the red clay hills of upper Georgia to the mountains of North Carolina.

The women drove on, Alex and Joan singing along to a Lucinda Williams CD. Mary smiled, listening as Joan's voice soared while Alex croaked along, struggling to stay in the right key. As their ears began to pop from the altitude, they crested a steep hill at the little town of Dahlonega, and the Grange-calendar landscape abruptly vanished. The clipped-green farms and sloe-eyed cows suddenly gave way to hazy blue mountains that rose before them, beckoning and forbidding at the same time.

“Are those our mountains?” asked Joan from the backseat.

“That's the beginning of them,” Mary replied. “The Old Men, we call them.”

“Gosh, I thought they'd be rocky and topped with snow,” Joan said. “They look hazy. Soft, somehow.”

Oh, but they're not
, thought Mary. The same tiny chill she'd felt in the courtroom rippled through her as she scanned the deceptive-looking peaks.
Soft is the last thing
the Old Men are.

As the road traversed one of the few patches of flat ground, Alex spotted a lopsided billboard that commanded one corner of a small cow pasture.

“Hey, Joan.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “Y'all have anything like that in Brooklyn?”

The billboard asked, in flaming red letters,
Where Will
You Spend Eternity? Heaven or Hell???
Wavy lines had been drawn around hell to indicate heat and an appropriate Bible verse was lettered underneath in smaller, more sedate script.

Joan frowned as the weathered sign flew by. “Jeez, I thought Sister Mary Xavier was nuts. Who on earth would put up a billboard about the afterlife?”

“Oh, the same folks who drink strychnine and kiss rattlesnakes,” Alex teased. “Didn't Mary warn you? They eat Catholics for dinner up here. Roast 'em on spits in their backyards.”

Joan started to object, but Mary turned around and gave her a wink. “Don't worry, Joan. The worst thing people eat up here is possum. And that's only when they can catch one.”

“Oh, yeah? For a minute you had me worried. You know it's not too late to catch a flight to La Guardia. If we turned around now, we could be at the airport by three. We could eat calamari at my dad's restaurant tonight and see
Tosca
tomorrow.”

“You're such a wuss, Joan,” said Alex. “You know you've always wanted a walking tour of Hillbilly Heaven. Think of what you can tell the folks back home.”

“Right.” Joan fumbled in her purse and pulled out another cigarette. “I spent a thousand dollars to go sleep outdoors with my two crazy friends.” She lit the cigarette and hunched forward. “Hey, Mary, show me again where we're going. I called my mother this morning and I couldn't even remember the name of the place.”

Mary pulled a map from her purse and pointed to a tiny dot on the North Carolina–Tennessee border. “There. Santoah.”

Joan frowned. “No kidding? I told my mom it was Nanook or Nirvana or something. She's already started lighting candles to the Blessed Virgin.”

“It's in the Nantahala National Forest.” Mary pointed to a pale green blob. “This shaded area here.”

“But that must be a million acres.” Joan traced the sprawling green outline with her finger. “It goes on over into, uh, Tennessee.”

“Right. It's the Cherokee National Forest there,” explained Mary. “But it's the same big stretch of trees.”

“And this is where you grew up?”

Mary nodded. “We lived in Atlanta until my dad was killed in Vietnam, then my mom came back home.” She tried to picture her father, but she had been only four when he died. She remembered the tautness of his cheek against hers, a laundry-starch smell, his voice singing her a lullaby in the dark,
Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, all
the pretty little horses
. . .