Late Rain (28 page)

“It just might be better that way,” Ben said slowly.

“I gotta ask,” Andy said. “You drinking down there?”

“A beer. Occasional glass of wine,” Ben said. “Not like before. Nothing like before.”

“So you’re telling me, things are under control?” Andy paused, and that was followed by the click of his lighter. “I fax this stuff to you, you’re not drinking and going to do anything stupid, like cowboying it and trying to use it as leverage and somehow ending up shooting the Tedros woman or her husband or yourself because you let things and you get turned around?”

“Nothing like that, partner,” Ben said.

“I’m not down there, so this time I can’t bail you out.” Andy paused. “Why you doing this at all? I thought you liked Patrol.”

“It’s just a hunch, Andy. Probably won’t lead anywhere.”

“Oh man,” he said and hung up before Ben could say anything else.

It was at least two full minutes before Anne broke away from the kitchen window and returned to the table. The radio was playing Dusty Springfield. Anne poured what was left of the wine into her glass. Ben noticed her hand was shaking a little.

He waited.

Anne lifted her glass, then set it down. “I heard you say
Tedros
. Which one? Buddy? Corrine? Stanley?”

Ben said Corrine in a tone that he hoped would discourage further questions, but Anne nodded one too many times and then went on to ask why Ben needed his former partner in Homicide to check up on Corrine Tedros.

“Has Buddy ever mentioned someone named April Rayne?”

“No,” Anne said.

“He ever talk about how he met Corrine? Her past?”

“Yes, sometimes Buddy talks about his wife,” she said. “He talks about how much he loves her. He talks about how devoted they are to each other. He’s there for her. She can count on him.”

Ben waited a moment before asking, “Does it work the other way too? Can he count on her?”

“They’re in
love
, Ben,” she said. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”

“Look,” he said.

She finished off her wine, then sat back.

“Corrine Tedros is hiding something,” Ben said. “I already caught her in one lie. I have the feeling it won’t be the last.”

“Maybe Corrine Tedros has her reasons,” Anne said.

Ben looked at her in surprise. “I don’t get you. It sounds like you’re defending her.”

“People have reasons,” Anne said. “That’s all I mean. Not all of them have to be criminal. Though you don’t really seem happy unless they are.”

Anne abruptly got up and crossed the kitchen and living room, heading for the hallway and bedroom. Ben sat at the table and finished his wine, then turned off the radio and the lights and sat back down. He listened to the night sounds the house made.

THE ITCH OF OLD AMBITION.

Ben Decovic, off shift and on his own clock.

A thin rind of a quarter-moon in the center of his windshield. A restlessness underwritten by a passel of questions that were bigger than the answers he had on hand tonight.

Sentinel Avenue. The heart of old south Magnolia Beach. The place where everyone’s luck stalled or dead-ended. Block upon block of matchbox houses and shacks. Chaotic trailer courts. Failed tenement projects. Discount liquor stores. Bottom-end pawn shops and check-cashing services. Storefront beauty shops, tattoo parlors, and churches with hand-painted signs in their windows. Backyard barbecue joints. Clubs and bars like the Blue Zone, Skinny Lee’s, and Smooth Rudy’s, all of which generated their own private crime waves every Saturday night.

Ben parked across from the Milforde Hotel, five stories of crumbling bricks and foundation shifts and fire code violations, and started canvassing, and over the next hour, the residents of Sentinel Avenue lived up to their reputations among police circles, Ben running into the same locked doors, hostilities, evasions, and outright lies that Jackson Towne in Homicide had predicted he would.

No one Ben talked to seemed particularly distressed or surprised or interested that Jamison Blake and Missy Newton had been shot.

The itch of old ambition had been with Ben that morning too when he checked the faxes that Andy Calucci had sent on. Though the photo was smudged, there’d been no doubt whatsoever that April Rayne had been an earlier incarnation of Corrine Tedros.

Ben had studied the accompanying booking sheet and played a hunch, impatiently waiting out a three-hour time difference before putting in a call to Andy’s friend Joey Rommata and asking him about the lawyer named Vince Noldern who had represented Rayne after the booking. Ben had stretched the truth a little with Rommata by implying that Andy was busy and had suggested Ben call Joey himself.

Joey Rommata was able to connect some basic dots. Ben’s hunch had paid off. Bill Manning in Phoenix Vice arrested young runaways or homeless women for solicitation. Manning then contacted Vince Noldern, the lawyer who worked for Wayne LaVell. Manning got a nice little kickback for doing so. Noldern got the girls off. They then ended up working in one of Wayne LaVell’s massage parlor franchises or in his Valley of the Sun Escort Service.

According to Joey Rommata, there was no shortage of young lost women in Phoenix.

Tonight, two blocks from the Milforde Hotel, he approached the rubble and char of what had been Jamison Blake’s house. He thought he’d already put all the ambition and desire for closure behind him. His sense of direction, however, had been off. It wasn’t behind him. It was right in front of him and always had been, and he had fooled himself into believing otherwise. It had taken Stanley Tedros’s murder and the shootings on Sentinel Avenue to show him that. Despite his wife’s death and all the dead-end circumstances surrounding it, Ben still wanted to believe in motive.

At bottom, Jamison Blake and Melissa Newton were dead. They had been shot with his service Glock.

Ben moved curb-side and ducked under the yellow tape surrounding the remains of Jamison Blake’s house. There wasn’t much left beyond the all too easy bathos of a crime scene: a charred hairbrush, a pile of melded CDs, the blackened frame of a dining room chair. Ben stepped among the damp ashes and rubble and tried to summon up the layout of the rooms.

He put Blake and Newton in them.

Then he dropped in the short white guy.

Whether the short man had lived there or been a frequent visitor, the house was a tight fit. It was a place that would not hold secrets or charged emotional states well or for long.

The house to the east of Jamison Blake’s was abandoned, its front porch roof collapsed and windows gone. Beyond it was a trash-strewn lot and more tightly packed houses, a bump up from a bungalow. Running among the houses was a labyrinth of backyard wooden privacy fences, all in various stages of disrepair.

The house next door to the west was still dark. Ben had tried earlier in his canvassing but had come up empty, and it was no different this time. He checked the notes he’d taken from his meeting with Detective Jackson Towne. The occupant’s name was Marilyn Keane. Two kids. Unemployed. She’d mentioned a man who’d hung at Jamison Blake’s place.

Ben shelved his frustration. He needed to talk to her. If not the man’s name, she could at least tell him the guy’s height and color of his hair. Ben was betting under five-six and prematurely gray.

Ben continued moving through the rubble. Fragments of clothing. A blackened alarm clock. Scorched kitchen utensils. The fried intestines of an entertainment system. A heat-twisted toothbrush.

He kept returning to the one thing he was sure of. Blake and Newton had been killed with his semi-automatic.

The gun he’d lost after he’d been ambushed in the parking lot of the Passion Palace when he’d come across a thin man in a cheap Halloween mask vandalizing the owner’s Mustang.

The man who’d ambushed him had been short, white, and gray-haired.

Who may or may not have been the one hanging out at Blake’s and Newton’s house.

The Passion Palace was owned by Sonny Gramm, who refused to cooperate with the police after the vandalism of his car and the follow-up vandalizing of his home, but who still kept hiring and firing bodyguards.

Sonny Gramm who had made an absolute mess of his financial affairs and was now afraid he was about to lose everything.

Sonny Gramm who fueled on desperation and a steady diet of Jim Beam had become paranoid enough to cast around for any available scapegoat to lay off his troubles on.

Someone like Wayne LaVell, who would fit any paranoid’s delusions.

Or the Wayne LaVell who could also give any sane person a reason to be more than a little paranoid.

Wayne LaVell who just happened to be in town looking at investment opportunities.

Wayne LaVell who’d been eating lunch at the Palmer with Raychard Balen when he spotted Corrine Tedros and called her April Rayne.

Wayne LaVell who counted among his Phoenix holdings the Valley of the Sun Escort Service.

Which April Rayne had more than likely worked at.

April Rayne who was eventually incarnated as Corrine Tedros.

Who had lied unnecessarily when Ben had interviewed her after Stanley Tedros’s murder.

A small lie, unnecessary and unimportant, which had nevertheless resulted in a phone call to Ed Hatch in Homicide and some pressure from Raychard Balen.

Corrine Tedros who also knew Sonny Gramm, had in fact been waitressing at one of Sonny Gramm’s supper clubs in Myrtle Beach when she met her future husband, Buddy Tedros.

Buddy, the nephew of Stanley Tedros, the generic soft-drink king, who’d hit it big with Julep and, if the rumors reported in the papers were accurate, had turned down some very large-scale buyout offers from the major soda companies.

Buddy Tedros who had gone to high school with Anne Carson.

Whom Ben was sleeping with.

And whose father, Jack, had been the sole witness to Stanley Tedros’s murder and was unable to remember a single detail from it.

A collection of connections that never quite connected.

Nothing more than the improbable tangle of coincidences that daily life served up all too often to mock our hunger for order. The ground clutter from a group of people whose past and present lives crossed and recrossed each other’s.

If you colored between the lines, everything became circumstantial and could be explained away.

Like the fresh start a marriage offered, and the past a woman wanted to keep from her future husband in order to have a chance at happiness.

Like the washers Jack Carson had been holding in his fist at Stanley Tedros’s murder scene. Which belonged or didn’t belong with the rest of the odds and ends his pants pockets had held.

Which may or may not have matched those from the sockful of washers the short white man had hit Ben with in the parking lot of the Passion Palace before taking his gun.

Or like the fact that Ben’s gun had eventually been used on Jamison Blake and Missy Newton but not on Stanley Tedros, who’d been stabbed thirty-nine times instead.

Connections that weren’t quite.

Except
.

That
except
was at the heart of what had once made him a good cop. He took his time. He had the eye. He had believed the dots eventually connected.

Maybe they would this time too.

Ben ducked under the yellow tape and started back to his car. The night sky was empty of clouds, the air dry. Above the Milforde Hotel, the moon was a thin slice of light. From down the block came the sound of glass breaking, then laughter.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

That’s what Wayne LaVell called it after Corrine had driven five miles west of the city limits to the DeSoto Motor Lodge. The DeSoto was a throwback to the early sixties, a single-story line of rooms facing the road and a cluster of adjoining bungalows, all flanked by small mushroom-gray satellite dishes and tired palmettos, the whole place painted an anemic white and trimmed in bright red and run by a family of Pakistanis, the clientele mostly transient construction workers who paid by the week or month.

Inside bungalow A-8, Corrine Tedros dabbed the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin and then redid her lipstick while Wayne LaVell crossed the room to a built-in desk where he had set out a bottle of gin, two plastic cups, some lime slices, ice, and tonic.

“Degradation becomes you, April,” he said. “You’re positively glowing.”

“I told you. Corrine. My name’s Corrine.” She dropped the wadded napkin in the wastebasket.

LaVell handed her a drink. “Absolutely,” he said. “Pardon my manners.”

“Are you still trying to sell the idea that your showing up in Magnolia Beach is a coincidence?”

“In your case, that’s true.” LaVell toasted her with his cup.

“I find that hard to believe, Wayne.”

“In many respects, that’s always been your problem,
Corrine
.” The smile was gone now.

“I’ll get you your money,” she said.

LaVell plucked the plastic cup from her hand and went to fix another round. “I don’t think so,” he said, his back to her. He grabbed a handful of ice cubes and dropped them into the drink.

“What do you mean? I told you, I need a little time, but you’ll get it.”

LaVell handed Corrine her drink and sat down and then nodded Corrine toward the chair opposite him. “Not interested in the money. I need something else.” He paused. “Two things actually. Then we’ll call it even between us.”

Corrine quickly stood up, but before she could say anything, LaVell told her to sit back down.

“Raychard Balen told me about your little outburst in his office and that you included me in your threat.”

“I was upset. That’s all it was.” Corrine felt the sides of the plastic cup start to buckle and eased her grip.

“I hope so,” Wayne LaVell said. “I think it prudent that Balen, you, and I maintain some common ground among us. We each have some interests to protect, and there’s no reason not to keep them mutually beneficial.”

“I told you, I was upset.” Corrine lifted the cup and took a long swallow.

“Then it’s time to move on to new business,” LaVell said. He sat farther back in the chair, crossing his legs at the ankles. “I understand you used to work for Sonny Gramm.”