Keeper (36 page)

“How?”

“Call the Two-six,” she said. “See what you can find on the murder of Melanie Baechler. Paul Grant and she were going out.” She spelled out “Baechler” for him.

“And?”

“Baechler was murdered ten days ago,” I said. “Katie knew her.”

We were in the box with Rich. On the table in front of him lay the photograph that Francine had taken of Grant and Baechler at the Yankee game. Beside it were photographs of Baechler’s body at the crime scene, and a copy of the autopsy report. The photographs showed ugly bruises around her neck. The left rear portion of her skull was caved in.

Rich sniffed the air. “Now that smells like gasoline.” He looked at each of us, then settled on me. “Have an accident, boy?”

I pictured what his eye would look like with a pencil through it and smiled.

“Look at the photographs, Sean,” Fowler said.

He did, then asked, “Who’s the bitch?”

“Melanie Baechler. She’s dead,”' Fowler told him. “Grant beat her to death.”

Rich shrugged.

“You know why he killed her?”

“Tell me,” Rich said.

“He beat her to death because she aborted his baby,” Scott said.

Rich looked at Bridgett. He smiled. “Sound like the gash got just what she deserved.”

Bridgett cuffed him at the back of his head. Her eyes were like glacial ice. “Be polite, Sean,” she said softly.

“Funny thing, though,” Scott said. “Melanie wasn’t even pregnant.” He tapped the autopsy report. “See? Says so right there. Wasn’t pregnant, no sign of an abortion.”

Rich’s smile stayed on his face. “Then the report’s a lie, but that isn’t a surprise, now, is it? All them doctors are in it together, changing the facts and spreading lies.”

“No lie, Sean,” Bridgett said. “She never had an abortion.”

“You say.”

“Grant murdered her,” Fowler said. “And he murdered Katie Romero, and he wants to murder Felice Romero. With your help.”

“He still might,” Rich said. His eyes were on me. “You don’t have this guy, do you? Whoever he is?”

“He won’t be able to do it,” I said.

“He’s not alone. The army still marches on.”

“You mean Barry? Crowell?” Bridgett asked.

Rich kept looking at me. “Like that.”

“Barry is dead,” Fowler said. “Got himself shot at Mr. Kodiak’s apartment.”

Rich’s smile flickered.

“He was about as good with demolitions as you are,” I said. “Hope you didn’t need that Semtex.”

“It’s easy to get.”

“Not where you’re going.”

He sniffed the air again and I felt my anger start to rise. “Well, maybe Clarence didn’t need the Semtex? Your apartment? What happened, boy, did he torch it? Is that why you smell like a truck stop?” He leaned forward in his chair. “Did he torch your little nest, boy? Did you lose again, like you lost when the retard got capped?”

I was over the table before Fowler or Bridgett could move, driving Rich out of his chair and back into the wall with both my hands on his neck. I was pulling back, preparing to start slamming his skull against the concrete, when Fowler caught my arm, and then Bridgett had her arms around me, pulling me back.

Rich was laughing.

The door to the box flew open and Lozano came in, grabbed me, and with Bridgett, got me out of the room.

The look Fowler gave me as I went through the door was one of disgust.

Rich kept laughing. I heard it all the way out into the hall. I heard it when Lozano told me to go home and get some rest. I heard it when Bridgett and I got our gear back, and again when she disarmed the alarm on the Porsche.

Sisters of Mercy screaming on her tape deck did little to shut it out.

We had stopped for groceries and to buy me clean underwear, and after we unpacked, Bridgett told me to stay out of her way, she was going to make dinner. I sat on the old couch and tried to watch the television. A framed photograph hung over the bureau, a picture of a lighthouse with the mother of all waves crashing about from the far side. In the photograph you could see a person, either a man or a woman, it was impossible to tell, standing in the little doorway of the lighthouse. The wave threatened to swamp him or her, to wrap around the pillar of light and toss the little person off into the maelstrom. It was a beautiful picture, though sad, and I stared at it, trying to understand what I was feeling.

I thought about calling my parents or my brother or Alison, letting them know what had happened, but I didn’t.

Bridgett brought two bowls of soup over to the coffee table, and a bottle of beer for each of us. “Fresh from the can,” she said. She sat in the chair by the couch, took her bowl into her lap and then put her feet up on the coffee table. Her shoes were off. She knocked over a stack of magazines, mostly periodicals but one or two literary journals, too, and I saw
Time, Harper’s, The Advocate,
and
On Our Backs.

We watched CNN and ate the soup. They ran a short piece about the fire, without identifying Barry as a member of SOS, then followed it with a seemingly unrelated piece about the bomb scare at Common Ground that afternoon. They ended with a reminder that no arrests had taken place in the search for Katie Romero’s murderer, but that the FBI had someone who was “assisting in their inquiry.”

“That Rich, he’s so helpful,” Bridgett said.

By the time they started talking sports, we’d finished our soup and beer. I took the dishes into the kitchen, washed the bowls, then washed the pot Bridgett had made the soup in.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“I know.”

“You want a drink? There’s Scotch in the far cabinet. You drink Scotch, right?”

“Scotch is good.”

“Pour me one, too.”

She had a bottle of Glenlivet, so I poured two glasses, then returned to the couch. Bridgett flipped channels, and I looked around the apartment some more. On the wall by the bathroom door were two pictures, one of a young woman that I took to be Bridgett, her black hair cropped short. The other was of Bridgett looking much like she did now, her arm slung around the shoulder of a man in his fifties, and a woman of roughly the same age. All were smiling.

“Who’s that?” I asked her.

She followed my finger and said, “That’s my ma and da.” She pointed at another framed photograph, this one by the door to her office, and said, “And that’s my baby sister.”

Her sister looked to be about Bridgett’s height, maybe a little shorter, but there was no practical reference in the photograph to really give scale. She was very beautiful. She was wearing a heavy winter coat in the photograph and a stocking cap, and was looking out of the frame at something that made her laugh.

“What’s her name?”

“Cashell. You have siblings?”

“A younger brother. Alex. He’s in grad school.”

I looked around for other photographs and didn’t see any that looked to be of friends or relatives. She had an Ansel Adams shot of Half-Dome in a black frame, but that was about it. I looked back at the picture of her parents. “What does he do for a living?”

“He was a cop,” she said. “A Good Irish Cop. He died two years ago. Lung cancer. And Ma was a Good Irish Cop’s Wife.”

She opened a tin of Altoids and sucked on one. She smiled to herself, one of those smiles that you know means whoever is doing it has gone inside and is amused by what they see there. She sipped her drink, then shook her head and said, “Two tastes that don’t mix well at all.” She swallowed the mint, then set her glass back on the table and looked at me. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m tired.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” I said. “I wanted to rip his throat out with my hands, Bridgett.” I emptied my glass, looked at it. “He went right for my buttons and I took off like a rocket. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I don’t know what’s going on in my head. Since before Katie died . . . I’ve been having nightmares.”

“About the shooting?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. In one of them, I’m on a killing spree, I . . . it’s the same feeling I had when I saw Crowell at the hospital, the same feeling as when I was holding Barry’s gun. And now Rich, and he’s nothing, he’s fucking nothing, and I let him set me off like that.”

“Some of it may be fatigue,” she said softly.

“Yeah.”

“You want a refill?”

I looked at the glass again, thought about nodding. She went and retrieved the bottle, refilled my glass, refreshed hers.

“I’ve got no home,” I said. “I keep thinking about how I’m guilty, here, how I’ve done this to myself. I couldn’t protect Katie. I pushed Barry too far and I didn’t need to push him at all.”

“Barry was waiting for an excuse,” she said. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

I finished my drink and stared at the glass. Eventually she got to her feet and turned off the television.

“There’s clean towels in the bathroom,” she said. “I bought you a toothbrush. Go take a shower and I’ll make up the bed.”

She had a good shower, plenty of water pressure, and the head was high enough for me to stand under without stooping. There was a bar of oatmeal soap in the dish in the shower, and I used that and managed to get the smell of burning out of my nose and mouth. Her selection of shampoos was generous, and I sampled the organic one made in Australia. It made me smell like a mango, but that got the gasoline stench out of my hair.

The mirror was covered with condensation when I shut off the water, the clouds of steam hanging in the room, sticking to the plaster and tile. I turned on the overhead fan, realizing I should have done so before taking the shower, and dried myself off with one of the thick, clean, fresh towels. My ankle throbbed when I touched it.

I put on my glasses and looked at my face, and it brought me down. Pale brown eyes and too-long hair and a shadow of stubble and lines starting to find permanent homes about my mouth, eyes, and forehead. The bruise on my cheek was turning yellow-green. And I thought, I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’m in the wrong line of work.

I opened the new toothbrush and cleaned my teeth, and then, with the towel wrapped around me, I left the bathroom, heading back to the couch where Bridgett had made a very passable bed. It was a long couch, and it would hold me. She came in from the kitchen and looked me over. Then she said, “Sit down,” and went into the bathroom. I heard her rattling around and took the opportunity to put on a new pair of boxers.

She came back out with an Ace wrap and tape and told me to lean back on the sofa. She began to wrap my ankle. She sat on the couch to do it, her back to me, leaning forward to my legs. Each time she touched me I felt it, a little stroke, the caress of her hair, and it made me think about her, it made me very aware of her.

When she finished she said, “That better?” and I said, “Yes,” and she nodded and moved into me, one hand lightly on my shoulder, the other slowly tracing its way up my neck, and I put my arms around her, lost my fingers in her hair, and we kissed.

She tasted of her mints and the Glenlivet, and her first kiss was kind. Her second was safe and reassuring, gliding into a rising passion at the third that I fell into gratefully. Her grip on me tightened, and she fit into me, her skin pleasantly hot, and we moved slightly. I brought my mouth from hers, and with her hands now in my hair, she guided me to her neck, and I tasted her skin at the hollow of her throat.

That was all I could do.

I stopped, and she held me against her, and I could feel her heart beating against my chest, feel my breath as it bounced back from her skin. We lay like that, neither of us moving, just my breathing and her heart, and then the sounds of traffic. She began to stroke the back of my neck.

“I can’t,” I said.

She kept her hands in my hair and on my neck, moving them gently. For a while my mind fumbled for more words but then just gave up, gave out, unable and unwilling to work to label emotions that wouldn’t keep in line and that I couldn’t properly articulate.

Bridgett slid her hands to my shoulders, and I brought my head back to face her. She brushed my lips with hers and then shifted off the sofa, standing, her hands still on me. “Lie down,” she said. When I did, she covered me with the blanket and took my glasses off my face and set them on the coffee table. I watched her walk away, heard water running from the bathroom, the sounds of her brushing her teeth and washing her face. They were enduring noises, and they lulled me closer to sleep, and my eyes closed and shut out the light. I opened them when the water stopped, hearing her move from the bathroom to her bedroom, and I shut them again, thinking that was all.

But she came back, and I opened my eyes to see her looking at me lying on her sofa, and now she wore a man’s nightshirt that fell to the middle of her calf and made her legs seem very long, blue-and-white pinstripes with an old-fashioned short collar, and the stripes blended into one shimmering smear. She pulled the blanket back and lay down against me, and somehow we fit on that little sofa, and that was how we slept, together, the first time.

Barry is a blackened corpse, with an insane grin from the contraction of his muscles during the fire that ate him alive. He’s standing beside Rich, at attention, and both are wearing uniforms that look like a cross between something the Klan wears to rallies and desert fatigues. They have military insignia on their collars, and their left breasts are laden with medals, pips for meritorious service.