Lady Midnight (12 page)

“But they didn’t re-release the movies that Connie had made. It seems like they passed on the chance to make a lot of money. That doesn’t make sense. What did they do once they found out?”
 

Randy shrugged, and sipped his beer. “That’s when Connie dropped out of sight. That’s when I called that private eye, Bowman—the one that got himself killed. That part of my story was true. I was worried about my sister.”
 

A sudden strange suspicion came my way. Considering what I had uncovered, I had begun to doubt many of the things that I’d been told by Senator Patrick. One thing in particular had left my conscious mind, but now it came back as a detail of great importance. On a sudden impulse, I said to Randy Cross, “Tell me about your grandfather, Randy.”
 

“Come again?”
 

“Claude Ettinger.”
 

“Claude was Connie’s grandpa, not mine. You know that. He was Connie’s mother’s dad, not mine.”
 

“So the old man didn’t care for you? Even when you were still welcome around the Senator’s house?”
 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Longville. The old man died when I was just a kid. I barely remember him.”
 

Chalk up another big lie for Senator Patrick, I thought to myself. So much for the recently-dead grandfather and Connie’s inheritance story.
 

Suddenly Randy was tired of talking. He sighed heavily, the great rush of energy spent. “You know as much as me, mister, and that’s a fact. Now, I’ve said it all. I can’t tell you one more thing.”
 

“Can’t tell me because you don’t know anything else, or won’t tell me because you’re afraid to tell me any more?”
 

Randy smiled again, but it was hard and forced. He tried to drink some more of his beer but it dribbled down his chin.
 

“Why don’t you go ask that junkie bitch, Nookie?” He tried to say it in a flip tone, but his voice cracked when he said her name.
 

I leaned a little closer to him. “My, my, but you’re hard on her. But it doesn’t sound like you always were.”
 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
 

“Don’t I? Let’s see, then. According to your own stories you had her over here, lots of times, didn’t you, Randy? Shared your drugs with her and loaned her money to buy her little boy presents.”
 

“So what?”
 

“So, I think just maybe that you’re in love with her, and bitter because she doesn’t feel the same about you.”
 

Randy was silent for a moment then his face drew taught. His knuckles gripped white around the beer bottle. “Get out of here, mister. Don’t come back, either. I’m through talking to you.”
 

I ignored his edict. “I think you know that your sister is in danger, too. Have Vince and Big Daddy threatened you? Is that it? Maybe you’re afraid they’ll hurt her, hurt Nookie too? Is that why you act like you hate her? Because I don’t buy it.”
 

“I said get out. I mean it. Now.”
 

I looked hard at Randy Cross. It was impossible for me not to feel sympathy for the young man. He had been wasted one too many times, and wounded in one too many ways. I knew that he cared for his sister, but I realized that he was just as lost in his own way as she was. There was something else playing out behind the scenes here, that much was obvious, something very well-hidden, but by what mechanism, I still couldn’t tell.
 

“Whatever you want, Randy. I guess that I’ll just have to find Connie without your help.” Randy didn’t speak again as I turned to leave. He drank from his beer furiously and turned his face away.
 

As I walked out of Cross’s apartment building, the clouds that had gathered overhead on my way there let loose with a slow, cold rain. I walked through it to my car and decided to go see Nookie Uberalles again. One thing was obvious, she was much more a part of the history of the Patrick Family’s sorry situation than she was letting on. It was also obvious that she was the only one around Atlanta who liked him enough to talk to me anymore, anyway.
 

Cocaine. I shook my head. That drugs were at the bottom of all Connie’s troubles didn’t surprise me. I had taken that for granted, on some level. Because maybe there was more than a little truth in the statement that one drug opened the door for another, not just in the life of a person, but out in the dirty streets, where you could hear people laugh at the old drug of choice, because there was a new drug of choice, and heroin and cocaine had long ago given way to crack and crystal methamphetamine. Even now, some scheming bastard was cooking up something ten times more deadly than either of those poisons, which would be the affliction of the next generation, in a widening gyre of destruction that yawned over the dark and bottomless pit that had already swallowed so many.
 

It never ceased to amaze me that people could see the doom they were marching toward, and fool themselves into thinking that it was going to be different for them, once they hit that pipe or plunged that needle in for the first time. But they did it anyway, every day, just the same—and the end surprised nobody but the user. No one was immune. It just took longer for some, but they got there, all right. I’d seen it far too many times to fool myself about that.

Chapter 17

Nookie wasn’t in when I buzzed at the door of her apartment building. I spotted a little coffee shop across the street, and decided to duck in there to await her return. It was starting to rain a little harder, and sitting in my car didn’t seem like such an appealing idea. It was getting late in the afternoon, and I figured she would be back before too long, to prepare herself for whatever festivities her night held in store.
 

As I walked into the coffee shop, it seemed like I would have the place mostly to myself. It was a clean, trendy-looking place, with wall booths and big picture windows, like something out of that Edward Hopper painting. It wasn’t Sally’s Diner, I reflected, but it would do nicely.
 

A waitress, a light-skinned young black girl just out of her teens, had just brought me a cup of coffee when a man entered and walked silently to the corner booth. He sat down, facing me, then whipped out a newspaper and peered over the top of the page at me, though he glanced immediately down at the newspaper when he saw me looking his way.
 

I instantly recognized him. He was a white man, and tall, with longish graying hair. He was wearing the same blue raincoat that he had been wearing when he had shot Bowman to death, on another rainy day outside of Sally’s Diner. His blue raincoat was beaded with clear pearls of icy water.
 

He was trying to act nondescript, the man in the Famous Blue Raincoat, which told me two things: one, he didn’t know that I had watched him kill Bowman; and two, that whoever had sent him didn’t know it either. Because he’d been sent, that much was obvious. I guessed that someone had given him a call on his cell phone to come over and intercept me. I wondered just what it was that I was close to learning. Whatever it was, was clearly dangerous knowledge.
 

Had Randy Cross called this man? I didn’t think so. More likely, Randy’s change in attitude towards me indicated that he’d talked with someone else, and that person had gotten in touch with Raincoat, and that Randy had known, or at least suspected this, upon my last visit. No doubt he had been afraid. I thought about Randy’s sudden insistence that I leave, and looked at the man in the blue raincoat. I studied him openly.
 

Underneath the blue plastic sheath of the raincoat itself, he was the best-dressed killer that I had ever seen. He looked like he was yet another member of the Yacht Club of Death, to which Baucom and the dead Bowman belonged. He wore an expensive suit, also blue, and a watch that was a close approximation of the Rolex that I had noticed on Bowman’s wrist on that fateful day. The manicured hands that bracketed the newspaper attested to a life free of manual labor. He had a healthy tan, was about six foot one, and looked like he worked out.
 

He also looked like a man who had an office somewhere, one who spent the first half of his day exchanging telephone calls and e-mails about where he and his friends were going to eat lunch, and the last half chatting with those same friends at the place they decided on. But not to underestimate him; I had seen him blow Bowman’s man’s brains out under the pretense of having a friendly chat. I was willing to bet he’d do the same for me.
 

I was almost through with my coffee when I saw a bright green VW bug pull up in front of the building across the street. Nookie hopped out, a magazine over her head to protect her hair from the misting rain, and ran up to the front door. I put some money on the table and went out, giving the man in the raincoat a slight nod. He smiled politely, and serenely nodded back.
 

I went over to my car and sat in it for a minute. The man in the raincoat didn’t move; he just sat in the corner booth, pretending not to watch me. I retrieved my .45 from under the seat and pretended to talk on my cell phone. Then, I got out of my car and went up to the door of Nookie’s building and pushed the intercom button to her apartment.
 

“Hello.”
 

“Nookie, it’s Roland.”
 

“Hah. I knew you couldn’t resist my charms.”
 

“Could you buzz me in?”
 

“I thought you’d never ask.”
 

I stepped inside the foyer of the building and shot a glance back through the glass. Raincoat was on the move, walking casually out of the coffee shop.

Nookie’s apartment was on the third floor. I went up the two flights of stairs and stopped on a landing. From below came the faint sounds of the lock rattling. The man in the raincoat was picking the lock to the front door of the building.
 

I slowly pulled the .45 and waited. Above me I heard Nookie open her door and step out. “Roland, what’s taking you so long?”
 

“Nookie, go back inside,” I called to her, waving the girl back into her apartment. She saw the gun in my hand and her eyes widened. She gasped and stepped back inside her apartment. And just then I heard the man in the blue raincoat come through the door. I took a quick look and saw him hesitate for a moment, gun in hand. Then he started charging up the stairs.

He wasn’t expecting me to be standing there, waiting for him. His eyes met mine and widened in alarm.
 

“Drop it,” I managed to say before the other man’s gun came up, firing once, twice, and for a moment there was that serene feeling that only sudden, utter terror can bring, when time slows to a miserable crawl and the bullets spin through the air like honeybees in a sunlit meadow, harmless motes, except for the fact you are slowed down too and cannot slap them from the air to fall harmlessly away from you, and if one of them finds its way to you it will burrow into you like a carpenter’s drill and the life will spring forth from you in a warm arterial spray, leaving you dead like people they find in forgotten rivers, or those who die in expensive cars parked outside crowded restaurants on certain rainy days.
 

I fired without knowing if I’d been hit myself, in that red blinding second you have to shoot and stay calm even if it means making yourself a better target, because you had one or two seconds to take the other man out before his training and practice got the better of the situation. I steadied my gun hand by cradling it in my left, took half a breath, and emptied my gun at the man who stood below me on the stairs, shooting up at me. My trigger finger also pulled the switch that sped time back up to its normal pace. I saw the man below me go down on his back. He slowly slid back down the stairs, his unseeing eyes looking up at the ceiling of the stairwell.
 

I went down there and checked his throat for a pulse. There wasn’t any. My .45 had put four neat holes in his chest, and nobody but nobody shrugs off four slugs from a .45. I parted the man’s coat and saw that he’d been wearing a bullet-proof vest. Bullet resistant, I corrected myself. Well, this one hadn’t resisted very well, luckily for me. I got up and went up the stairs to Nookie’s apartment and pushed the door open.
 

Nookie was cringing on the couch in the far corner of the room. She was shaking and she looked nearly hysterical. I went over, took her gently by the shoulders and made her look me in the face.
 

“Calm down. It’s me, Roland. No one is going to hurt you. It’s over.”
 

“Oh god, that man out there, is he dead?”
 

I nodded and sat down beside her on the couch. “Who was he? Did you know him?”
 

She nodded slowly. “Yes. I met him once before. His name was Pitman.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“I saw him at Big Daddy’s place once. He was with another man, someone named Grant.”
 

“What were they doing there?”
 

“They were talking about getting money. A lot of money they said they were going to get from Connie’s old man.”