King Maybe (28 page)

29

Strung Too Tight

They were there almost three hours. Outside, the helicopters multiplied miraculously as the TV news operations sent theirs to rattle through the dark sky. Must have been a slow news night.

Even given the sound-amplifying echo chamber of the elevator shaft, the search downstairs faded in and out of earshot as they worked toward the back of the house and along the wings. I used the time to flick on the penlight and open Suley's purse, which contained her wallet, complete with her driver's license and all her other identification.

I experienced a brief surge of unholy joy, imagining Granger foaming at the mouth in his eagerness to get the cops up the stairs to the second floor and the world-altering shock he'd feel when he saw those neat little pink shoes in the hall and went into that clean, empty drawing room, as silent and peaceful now as a room behind glass in a fancy dollhouse. I envisioned him standing right there in the middle of the room, gazing at the bright, shining candlestick centered on the table, his heart pierced by a sharp icicle of fear, as the cops gave the room a cursory look and went down the hallway to the bedrooms. And came back to say he needed to check out his wife's room, that it seemed like she might have taken off.

Sitting there, hunched over in the dark with my legs dangling into the darkness, I wondered how long it would take them to ask him where she kept her purse and could he check to see whether she might have taken it with her? And him, wanting to scream that she couldn't, that she was
dead
, and knowing even then that the purse wouldn't be there.

But missing wife or not, the burglar alarm
had
gone off, and he
was
Jeremy Granger, so they gave it a good, solid try. Twice I had to pull my legs out of the way as the elevator glided by, taking a bunch of them up to the third floor and back down again while, I imagined, a phalanx of cops took the stairs to cut off that possible exit route. Most of the sound-absorbing material was underneath me, so I heard them shuffling around above, heard voices but not actual words, the cops, professional and not very interested, Granger's voice slightly sharp, like a violin that's been strung too tight. I imagined the speed at which his mind had to be racing and leaned back on the soft bank of cellulose and enjoyed it. Time passed.

At some point, I guess, I sat up again, because that's the way I found myself, looking down the shaft, when I said, “Goddamn his soul to hell.”

“Don't take it so hard,” she said. “You're takin' it harder than I am.”

I turned to see her sitting behind me. My flashlight was in my pocket, but I could see her clearly. The ribbon tied around her wrists was a deep, gleaming red, the same color as the blood on her neck and shoulders, which was as fresh as it had been when I found her. The bones of her face were too close to the surface and looked as fragile as glass, and her thinness had made her eyes enormous, but she was still beautiful. Her eyes were the phantom ice green of the sea in Garlin Romaine's painting of the coast of Verdinha.

I said, “How else can I take it?”

“You know,” she said, “when it
came
tonight, when it finally came, all I could think was, better to git it over with. Better not to spend ever' day waitin' on the first slap, the first ‘You stupid bitch,' the first thing that'd stop my breakfast where it was, half swallowed. Sure, he caught me unaware tonight. I was all wrapped up reading about them brave girls, and he come up on me quiet, but he wasn't any bigger than a minute, was he? I probably could have pushed him down, probably could have run away from him, but where? Wasn't like anybody gave a shit.”

“Someone did.”

“Who? Oh, you mean Garlin. Yeah, Garlin cared, God love her, but what could she do?”

“She's making a painting that's got the color of your eyes in it.”

“Nice to know. She mixed up the paint a bunch of times while I was just sittin' there, trying not to blink. She was just swearin' and scrumblin' paint around, trying to find the color. But I figured she'd forgot all about it by now. She told me a hundred times, while she was workin' on that paint or makin' her pictures, she told me not to . . .
you
know, with Jeremy. Said he'd eat me alive and spit me out again. Said I wasn't strong enough, I was just a skeeter he'd swat.”

I said, “I didn't know you came from the South.”

“I didn't. You're
making
me talk like this, probably thinking about that girl, that Casey, you fixed up with Garlin.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “How did you really talk?”

“Like you, I guess,” she said. “Is it okay if I do that now?”

“By all means.”

“Thank you. I was starting to feel like I was in the Grand Ole Opry.”

I said, “But how do you know about Casey?”

She looked at me reproachfully. “If
you
know about it,” she said patiently, “
I
know about it.”

“Sorry,” I said again.

“Garlin was the closest thing I had to a mother, those last three or four years. Maybe the closest thing I had to a friend, ever.”

“Why didn't you go to her? She would have taken you—”

“He'd have destroyed her. He said he would, and he meant it. Wherever I went, he would have ruined it.
You
should know, you met him. He doesn't lose. He doesn't ever lose.”

I said, “We'll see about that.”

“Tough talk,” she said. She leveled the ice-green eyes at me. “You know it's
hard
to kill people, unless they just don't care.”

“Some people,” I said, “are easier than others.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “Change of subject. Listen, it's nice that you're worried about leaving me here. When you get out, I mean. But you realize, same as I do, that I'm not really here. What's here isn't me.”

“I'm not leaving you,” I said.

She sighed and said, “Men,” and someone screamed below, so I turned back to the darkness of the shaft.

It was a real throat shredder, and a moment later he screamed again, and this time I could make it out. He was screaming,
“Suley!”
Something crashed and broke, and he screamed it once more.

But I wasn't looking down the shaft anymore; I was flat on my back in the blown cellulose, looking up through the dark at the pale phantoms of the beams above me. The voice echoing up the elevator shaft was followed again by some sort of violence, perhaps furniture being thrown against walls. From the sound of it, he was in his office, directly below.

He screamed again, “Suley, goddamn you!” If he was calling her, the cops were obviously gone.

A door slammed, and I sat up and waited but heard nothing. I envisioned him wandering the house in a red haze of anger and alcohol. I'd learned, when I was living with my father, to hear what too many drinks did to a voice, not so much how words were pronounced, because my father grew ever more precise as he got drunker, but the way the voice was produced, lower in the throat, a kind of swallowed sound, like talking through a folded towel.

Below me, Jeremy Granger was raging through his house, drunk beyond caring and screaming for the wife he had killed. And it came to me, in finely tuned color and high-definition detail, that this would be an excellent time to break his neck.

I looked to where Suley had been, but of course she wasn't there; she was where I'd put her, around on the far side of the elevator shaft, resting between two-by-twelves beneath a blanket of cellulose. I supposed, as she'd made clear during our chat, that she wasn't really
there
either, of course, but I wasn't in a metaphysical frame of mind. I was in a neck-snapping frame of mind.

The elevator was down on the ground floor, meaning I was going to have to go down a longer stretch of rope than I would have liked. I said, out loud, “Tough,” and began to lower the rope. And then the door to the office below me hit the wall with an impact that actually traveled up the house's supporting beams and vibrated beneath me.

I stopped paying out the rope.

Silence. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out slowly. Then the shouting started.

I only got a bit of it, mostly scrambled, but I heard “old asshole” and other terms of endearment, and then Granger's voice scaled up into the soprano range, and I heard “. . . know where he is, you motherfucker,” and all at once it was clear.

He was on the phone, talking to Jake Whelan. He'd finally remembered he knew someone who might be able to find me. More screaming, something else heavy hitting the floor, and then the door banged again, and there was silence. I had just gone back to lowering the rope when I heard an engine catch. It revved a few times and then got pushed into the shrillness of the tachometer's red zone, culminating in a neighbor-awakening screech of tires. I waited, thinking it might just conceivably be a trick to draw me out if he thought I was still here someplace, but the sound of the engine decreased and fell off and then died out, a victim of distance. He was gone.

It was 1:57
a.m.
by the blue numerals of my watch, so I'd apparently gone to sleep at some point. I sat for a minute or two, following several possible starting points to their most likely conclusions, and then I pushed the button for Ronnie.

“You're all right?” She sounded wide awake.

“So far. How fast can you—Wait a minute. Are you willing to commit a Class A felony with me?”

“Is a girl allowed to ask what it is?”

“Unauthorized transport and burial of a murder victim.”

“Yours?”

“No.”

“Wouldn't've mattered if it was. Thirteen, fourteen minutes.”

“I have to make a couple of other calls. You tell me when you make the turn into Granger's street, and I'll open the gates.”

“Is it . . . uh, he, she . . . very big?”

“No,” I said. “She's tiny.”

Ting Ting hadn't
been sleeping either. He listened while I talked and then said, “I can do.”

I was saying thanks when he added, “We coming back now, from bury Jejomar. Almost home.”

“Sorry to make you turn around again. I'll let you know when I'm a few minutes away, and you can open the gate to the parking level, and we'll switch the Town Car for the van. Is that okay?”

There was a brief wrestling match on the other end of the phone. “Is
what
okay?” Eaglet said.

“Your sweetie helping me bury someone.”

“It is not.”

“And you coming with us to help.”

“Why in the world would I do that?”

“I assume you don't want to put two new graves in one place, so you'll come along to keep him from driving around up there in the Angeles Forest with the headlights on until we all get pulled over and booked as accessories to murder.”

She said, “I could learn to hate you.”

“I really liked your chicken,” I said.

In a completely different voice, she said, “Sure, sweetie, no problem. Could you go in and make us some coffee?” A moment later she said, with the brass back in her voice, “You're going to owe me.”

“Relax,” I said. “I've already figured out how to pay you back.”

I thought about
calling Jake to warn him, but then I figured the hell with him. He'd set me up, sold me out, even if he didn't know what the actual game was. Besides, I thought, it was only eight, ten minutes to Jake's place. If I warned Jake, if Jake turned Granger away and Granger didn't respond by driving through Jake's gate, he could get back here while Ronnie was still sitting in the car out front. I didn't mind running into him myself, but I didn't want Ronnie around.

So I blew Jake off and called Garlin Romaine instead.

To my surprise, Casey answered. When she put Garlin on the line, I said, “I'm not looking to upset you, but if I didn't tell you, you might be
more
upset. Suley's dead.”

“Him?”

“Yeah. A few hours ago. I'm getting her out of the house now. I'm going to bury her illegally in the Angeles National Forest, and I was wondering whether you'd like to be a member of the burial party.”

“Hell yes, that son of a bitch. How much time do we have?”

“We?”

“Casey and me. She's a good one, Junior.”

“Maybe half an hour.”

“Good. We can use the time to pull some things together. That'll make it about two thirty. We'll have to hurry to get there before the sun's up.” I heard her light a cigarette. “Did he get away with it?”

“For now,” I said, “but not for long.”

I had her
down in the entrance hall by the time I buzzed Ronnie through the gates. Suley
was getting harder to carry, and my knee was stiffening, and I had to ease her into the trunk with care, like something breakable. We went straight from Granger's to Garlin's and found her and Casey waiting for us in the dark, on the asphalt in front of the old repair shop, Casey with her hands on the back of Garlin's wheelchair as though she'd been guiding it forever. She smiled at me when we pulled in, but Garlin was working on something in her lap, a big piece of paper or plastic, and between her ankles on the footrests was a litter of stuff in a box and what looked like a coffee can full of water. Casey and Ronnie gave each other the two-second eye and then grinned simultaneously, and Garlin wheeled herself over to the rear door so Casey could pick her up and put her in. Once she'd gotten Garlin belted in, she collapsed the wheelchair and eased it between the front and back seats, up against Garlin's knees, and climbed in beside her.

No one spoke much on the way out to Santa Monica, just the four of us in the big black car, the relatively empty freeway gray and oily-looking under its ugly lights, and Suley silent in the back. From time to time, Garlin would ask Casey for a brush or a cloth or some water, correcting her only once. I called Ting Ting as we got off the freeway, and by the time we arrived, he was standing in front of the garage with the gate open, waving us in. With him helping me, we had Suley in the back of the van in a few seconds, the sight of the ribbon-bound wrists protruding from the blanket quieting everyone, even Eaglet. The only sound was a quick, ragged intake of breath from Garlin.