Late Rain (36 page)

After Mr. Balen left, the nurse came in with Croy’s pills. She took his temperature and blood pressure and adjusted something on the bag connected to one of the tubes that ran into his arm.

Then the nurse left, and Croy was by himself. He watched the bright green numbers on the machines and thought about the cabin and the river and about prison and about the hospital and about how all the smells inside it were layered, and then he thought about what he was supposed to forget, and did.

THE TELEVISION IN THE CORNER of the bar at Monroe’s was on, but the volume was turned down, and Ben Decovic worked on a cold draft and watched the mayor and chief of police mime their way through the press conference that had been scheduled for late in the day in the lobby of the new City-County Complex. The color on the set needed to be adjusted, the mayor’s suit wavering between a watery blue and a bright green and his face shading back and forth from an apoplectic red to a hamburger pink.

Ben lowered his head. He watched himself shoot Corrine Tedros.

Her blood had appeared black in the moonlight.

A disable, that’s what he’d wanted to go for, a disable, but Corrine Tedros was forever turning and lifting her arm, and he was forever a second off in reaction time after he’d seen it was her shoe and not the gun she’d dropped on the hood of the Mustang, and in the end, which felt like a forever too, Ben had been reduced to pure reflex and placed the shots without thinking, one at the base of Corrine Tedros’s throat and the other in the center of her chest.

Ben heard someone step up behind him.

“Thought I recognized your car out front,” Ed Hatch said. He took the stool to Ben’s right, lifted two fingers, and signaled the bartender.

“Monroe’s used to be a cop bar,” he said, “back when the department worked out of East Queensland. Wall to wall blue in here, end of every shift. Now, with headquarters at the Complex, they’ve shifted base of operations to Schmidt’s over on Heritage.”

The bartender brought over two beers. Hatch gave him a ten and waved away the change.

They watched the mayor shake hands with the chief of police. “Heard you were officially cleared,” Hatch said.

“The fires,” Ben said. An in-house review had determined that his leaving the patrol sector before permission was granted and the subsequent shooting of Corrine Tedros were warranted by the circumstances, the proliferation of wildfires in the region and the danger they’d posed to the residents causing the delays in backup and communication.

“Heard the prosecuting attorney paid you a visit today,” Hatch said.

Ben looked over. Hatch wore the same brown off-the-rack suit Ben had seen him in every other time. Add the buzz cut and black-framed glasses, and Hatch looked more like central casting’s idea of a middle school science teacher than a homicide detective.

“You,” Ben said. “I wondered who’d slipped me a copy of Croy Wendall’s confession.”

Hatch sipped his beer. When he set it back down and turned his head, the press conference was reflected in miniature on each lens of his glasses.

“The whole confession was cooked,” Ben said. “It’s one long lie.”

Hatch loosened his tie and looked back at the screen.

Croy Wendall’s confession had been a simple, uncluttered line of motive. Corrine Tedros, its alpha and omega. Everything had been laid off on her. There’d been no mention of Raychard Balen or Wayne LaVell in the entire transcript.

Everything fit except the truth.

“What did the PA say when he met with you?” Hatch said.

“What do you think? His office is ready to move on an indictment. It didn’t bother him that all the other principals,” Ben said and ticked them off on his fingers, “Corrine Tedros, Sonny Gramm, Jamison Blake, and Missy Newton, are all dead and can’t contest any of the details in Wendall’s account.”

“Nothing to connect the vandalism at the Palace and Gramm’s house?” Hatch said.

Ben shook his head. “Croy Wendall was the one who attacked me in the parking lot. I know it. The PA, though, had the file and kept pointing out that the two men were wearing masks.”

Ben picked up his beer and then set it down again. “Even my gun,” he said.

According to Croy Wendall, Jamison Blake had bought it on the street. Neither Blake or Wendall had been on or near the premises of the Passion Palace on the night Ben had it taken from him.

Any ties to Raychard Balen and Wayne LaVell squeezing Sonny Gramm had disappeared. Ben had not been able to get the prosecuting attorney to look beyond Croy Wendall’s statement.

“An uncontested lay-up,” Ben said. “That’s what he called the case. Wendall is going to plead out a straight guilty.”

Ed Hatch frowned, his mouth set as if he’d taken a bite of something disagreeable. “I was hoping to get another shot at Wendall,” he said.

“The guy’s lying,” Ben said. “He left out Balen and LaVell. They were part of the mix from the beginning. No way they’re clean.”

“One loose thread,” Hatch said. “I thought maybe you’d spot something in the transcript I could use.”

Ben scratched his cheek. “I wish there’d been. Believe me, I looked.”

“I can’t get his voice out of my head,” Hatch said. “I hit Wendall hard, came at him from every direction I could think of, but he never tripped up.” Hatch paused and shifted his beer on the bartop. “That flat monotone. An answering-machine voice. Wendall giving me the confession back word for word each time. Never deviating on a detail. It spooked me. I mean, I’ve handled enough suspects who’ve been coached by their lawyers or who are arrogant enough to believe they’re fully alibied-out. They’ll usually trip up sooner or later if you keep going at them. They’ll give you something to work with. Not Wendall though. He’s a whole new species.”

Ben looked up at the television. The press conference was ending. The mayor was smiling.

“Time to mow the lawn,” Hatch said. He picked up his beer and checked its level.

“Sometimes that’s all you can do,” he said. “You go home and mow the lawn. Then you eat supper with the wife and kids, maybe watch a little television afterwards. The next day you get up and go back to work.”

The bartender walked over. “I’m going to turn it up, ok? Frank wants to hear this.” He nodded toward a guy in his late fifties sitting further down the bar. The guy waved a thanks in Ben and Hatch’s direction.

An
Inside Look
segment on the Tedros case started.

The anchor’s lead had barely begun before Ben turned to Hatch and said, “It appears our honorable mayor decided to selectively leak details from the press conference early to some of his favorite affiliates.”

“He knows he has to answer to the tourist bureau,” Hatch said. “They’re the ones with the behind-the-scenes clout come reelection time.”

Ben tipped his beer toward the television screen. “Well, that ought to please them.” The take on Stanley Tedros’s murder would not threaten tourists or the town’s image. There was nothing in it to keep anyone from booking a hotel reservation or buying into a vacation package.

Inside Look
had played up and off the ethnicity angle, turning the events behind Croy Wendall’s confession into an updated Greek tragedy, Stanley Tedros, the soft-drink king and scion, reigning as a rich and powerful patriarch over a troubled family; Corrine Tedros, the beautiful and scheming woman with the dark past and wife of the heir apparent; Buddy Tedros, the prince of a man blinded by his love for both his wife and uncle; Croy Wendall, the unwitting agent and arm in the murder which eventually opened and emptied the bag of tricks that fate, luck, or the universe held over us all.

In the end, justice was not so much served as served up.

The segment ended and was replaced by a commercial for hand soap and later an update on the three wildfires. They were now contained, but the estimate was still out on property damage. The anchor added that a suspect had been taken into custody.

Hatch cleared his throat.

The guy down the bar said, “Jesus. What kind of parents would do that?” He pointed to the screen. “Hanging a moniker like that on their own kid. Stuff like that’s not funny.”

Hatch cleared his throat again and rapped the bartop in front of Ben.

Ben looked over at Hatch.

“I admit I was mightily pissed when you went at Corrine Tedros unauthorized,” Hatch said. “We were up to our neck in bad tips, and the chief was pushing the drifter angle for the perp, and I didn’t need any more complications.” He paused and rubbed his jawline. “Your instincts about Corrine Tedros were on the money though. I owe you an apology on that one.”

“No,” Ben said. He finished off his beer and signaled for another. “After today, it’s Corrine Tedros we owe the apology to.”

JACK CARSON LOOKED out the bedroom window. The light was shading to gray. He was late. Normally, he’d be on the job before the sun was up.

His clothes were laid out. He got dressed and walked through the house to the kitchen.

He looked around for his wife, but figured Carol was already in her classroom getting ready for her third-graders.

He ate a bowl of cereal.

He hunted down his work cap.

Carol had left the front door unlocked again.

Jack crossed the landing and walked down the stairs. At the end of the driveway, he paused and looked back at the house.

A girl stood framed in the front living room window. Jack frowned and waved.

She closed the curtains.

Jack looked at the sky and frowned a second time.

Something about the light bothered him.

The wind ran into his face.

Jack started walking to Bob Burnett’s house. Bob lived a couple streets over on Tilton and handled a lot of the roofing jobs for Jack. Jack had loaned Bob his truck to pick up a load of shingles for a renovation that Carson Construction was doing on a rundown beach house for a family from Charlotte.

There were street signs on each corner, and he read their names as he walked past, but after a while, the street names were like the ones at the house when he opened a kitchen cabinet, and there were shelves upon shelves of boxes and bottles, and all those names came rushing down at him at once like a swarm of bees.

The light had shaded to a deeper gray. Jack looked toward what he was sure was east, but the light didn’t quite match the direction.

He walked some more. Then he didn’t.

He remembered his wife was dead. She had died during childbirth.

He tried, but her name would not arrive.

His left knee was stiff.

A horn sounded behind him, and someone said, “Hey, are you all right?”

Jack looked around. He was standing in the middle of the street.

A pickup rolled slowly and stopped next to him. The truck was a bright glossy red and had a long silver antenna sprouting from the hood. A teenage boy in a blue shirt was driving. There were more teenagers in the cab with him and another group riding in the back. There was music playing, and then there wasn’t, and the boy leaned partway out the window.

“Man, those dark clothes, this time of evening, you need to be careful,” the boy said.

Jack looked down at what he was wearing. They were dark, all right, and on top of that, they looked like old man clothes. He couldn’t remember putting any of them on.

He flexed his fingers. He thought he’d been carrying something too.

“Look, you need a lift?” the boy said. “We’re headed for Old Mill Beach.”

“Party Time,” someone said from the back of the truck, and then a girl laughed. Jack liked the sound of the laugh. It was pretty, and it rippled.

“Ok,” he said. He walked over to the tailgate, and the ones in back helped him climb in. He sat down across from a young girl. He could see her nipples pressing against her shirt.

Then the truck was moving, and they had the music playing again, and the teenage boys and girls in back were yelling to each other, and sometimes they yelled things to Jack, but he had a hard time following what they said because the wind ripped their words apart as soon as they said them, and the movement of the truck left him a little dizzy and light-headed, like the way he felt when he hadn’t eaten for a while.

There were two large coolers in the back and a jumble of rolled sleeping bags and next to them, a pile of logs and some bundled kindling.

The girl’s breasts moved under her shirt every time she did.

And then Jack was remembering. No, not quite remembering. Partially developed snapshots. Images that refused to hold long enough to fit in time and become a memory.

Blips on some internal radar screen he couldn’t read anymore.

The truck took a corner fast, and before Jack could get his hand up, his cap was ripped from his head. He watched it sail away and then land in the middle of the road.

His knee was stiff.

After a while, there were tall stands of pine trees lining the side of the road and pieces of the sky missing light.

Jack was hungry. He tried, but couldn’t find the words to explain that.

His hands were resting in his lap. His ring finger and thumb twitched, and then one of the muscles in his neck did too.

He was hungry, and then he wasn’t or didn’t think he was, and he couldn’t find the words to explain that either, and after a while, feeling hungry and not exactly feeling hungry felt like the same thing.

There were more pine trees and some dogs barking far away, and then the truck stopped, and Jack Carson was looking at the ocean.

When the wind gusted, he could taste the waves.

Two cars and three other trucks were parked on the beach, and there were people moving around a bonfire and voices rising and falling and overlapping and music playing.

Jack heard someone yell, “Hey, you forgot to drop off the old guy. He’s still sitting in the back of the truck.”

Jack was looking at the ocean. He could smell it too. Everything else was wind.

When he turned his head, a teenager in a blue shirt squatted next to him. Two others stood by the tailgate. One had black hair, and the other had black hair with its tips streaked blonde.

Jack had no idea who they were or what they wanted with him.