Leather Maiden (20 page)

30

After work I went over to Belinda's and we made love and lay in bed talking, sniffing a candle that this time smelled like fresh-baked bread. I had to get me some of those candles. Maybe they would cover up my dead rat odor. Most likely I would just sit around the house hungry. I wondered if they had a chili candle, an enchilada candle. French fries maybe.

“How did Oswald take it?” Belinda asked. Between thinking about candle possibilities, I had been telling her about my meeting with Timpson, the fact that the boss had put me on the murder and kidnapping case.

“Like I had planned it. He was pissed.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I like writing the columns, but this kind of stuff has its dark sort of charm.”

“It's a big thing for our little paper.”

“Yep.”

“Cason. Something is bothering you. And even in my profound insecurity, I don't think it's me. Is it Gabby? Caroline? The stuff with her and your brother?”

“You know, funny thing is, I haven't thought about Gabby all day. That's the first time she's come to mind in a while, and only because you mentioned it.”

“Me and my big mouth.”

“No…No. I think I'm getting better. Far as she's concerned anyway. As for the rest of the stuff, yeah, I'm thinking about it. I have also started counting things again. There are eighteen thousand little black marks in your ceiling tile.”

“I hope you weren't counting them while we were making love.”

“Only when you were on top.”

“Ha. Ha.”

“No, you took a little nap after we finished, either because you were so deeply satisfied with my manly abilities, or because you were bored, and that's when I counted them. It's something that hits me now and again when I'm stressed: the urge to count, to know exact numbers. I can't explain it. But I want you to know, I did think about you a lot in between the dots.”

Belinda shifted in bed so that her pelvis was touching me. I could feel her pubic hair on my leg. “Anything else on your mind?” she said. “Now that you've got the dots out of the way.”

“World peace.”

“You shit.”

“Actually, something just came to mind when you moved like that, and in favor of honesty, I have to say it wasn't world peace. It was another kind of piece.”

“You know what I mean,” she said, slapping at me. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

“And you know what I mean. But, yeah, there is something else. Belinda, I may be an idiot, but I do have something to talk about, and I know it's probably rude to say it, but I tell you this, you got to promise it stays between you and me. For now. Maybe forever. You know part of it, but I want to tell you the whole of it.”

“Is this a big moment in our relationship?”

“I think it is.”

“Then great,” she said. “Sure. What is it?”

I told her all of it. About Ernie and Tabitha, the DVDs, how they tried to blackmail Jimmy, about us taking the DVDs away from them, the fact that I hid them. I told her about being in the murder house. I told her about Jimmy planning to take Trixie out of town, have my parents meet them at the lake house. The only thing I held back was where I put the DVDs. For some reason, I thought that was something she ought not to know.

When I finished my story, I said, “I'm not even sure I should be seeing you, Belinda. Someone has my number, and anyone around me could be in trouble.”

“I'm not scared…Well, not that scared. I'm not going to stop seeing you.”

“Go slow,” I said. “I'm trouble on the hoof, even when I don't mean to be.”

“I'm here as long as you want me around. Tell me what we need to do, and I'll do it.”

“Timpson may not like it.”

“Timpson can go screw herself,” Belinda said.

“My, aren't you rowdy. Come to think of it, she said I could use whatever resources I needed at the paper, suggested I take Oswald.”

“I bet he doesn't have bread-scented candles.”

“I bet you're right,” I said. “I think Timpson will go for it. She can get someone else to work the front desk.”

“When do you tell her?”

“Immediately.” I shifted and pulled her to me. “Well, almost immediately.”

31

I went into Timpson's office and asked if Belinda could be my assistant, a reporter in training. Timpson put both hands on her desk and leaned forward and gave me a severe look. She stayed that way for so long I thought for a moment she had died.

“She's gonna flop for you,” Timpson said, “tell her to do that on her own time, will you?”

I tried to look somewhere between shocked and mildly surprised at her comment, but I'm certain the best expression I managed was somewhere between being caught with my pants down and extreme constipation. When I spoke, all I could come up with was, “That's not a nice thing to say.”

“You're riding in her saddle, aren't you?”

I tried to look shocked. “Where did you get such an idea?”

“All the people who know me, who have seen you two around town together, they told me. And they've seen your car parked over at her house late at night. I suppose you could be helping her lay carpet, but my guess is you're laying something else.”

I studied the old bat for a moment. “You're a little too smart and connected for your own good,” I said. “But okay. That's on our own time. Always has been.” That was partly a lie, but it was close enough. “I like her. She likes me, but it won't affect our work.”

“Relationships never affected mine.”

I almost said I could believe that, but held back.

“It's not a problem,” I said.

“Not for me it isn't. Do your job, and like I told you before, I don't care what you do as long as it doesn't cause the paper trouble. Same for Brenda.”

“Belinda.”

She and the chief needed to get together. They could rename the town population. Might as well, they were going to call people by whatever name they wanted anyway. Considering one was a policeman, the other an editor, you had to wonder why they couldn't remember names correctly.

“Very well, then,” Timpson said. “Get on it, and take her with you. Besides, I've been thinking of moving her to reporter anyway.”

“That's great,” I said.

“Got to see how she performs while she works with you. That will make my determination. When I refer to performance, I'm talking about the reporter part.”

I ignored that little jab, said, “She deserves the reporter job.”

“Not really, but I'm thinking Oswald might quit, and that way I got a replacement. He seems kind of pissy around me lately.”

I was thinking it might be all her nifty references to the colored, but I decided not to mention it.

         

First thing I did was go home and get the DVDs out of their hiding place; spent the morning going through them until I found Ronnie on disc with Caroline. They were a beautiful pair, and the way they went at it, it was like watching some very smooth porno film directed by a woman instead of a man. It was slow and sensuous, and I found myself getting aroused. I felt guilty about that, knowing there was a good chance Caroline was dead. I focused on that possibility, and became more clinical. I took in every aspect of Ronnie's face offered to me. She was almost as beautiful as Caroline. In fact, they looked somewhat alike, except Ronnie was dark-haired and Caroline was blond. There was also something about Ronnie that was different. She didn't quite have the unearthly beauty that Caroline had, but the way she moved, and smiled, she seemed warmer, sexier, more real.

I remembered what Belinda had said about Caroline borrowing personality and charm from her memory banks, and it occurred to me when you got past that incredible beauty of hers, the sexuality that was there because of her looks, there was in fact something missing. She moved her mouth in a passionate manner, but her eyes were as flat and uninteresting as the backside of a cardboard cutout.

I turned the DVD off. I had Ronnie's image in my mind. I knew who I was looking for. I put Ronnie's DVD with the others, packed up the ones I had looked through to find hers, took the one of Jimmy from between my books and put it with the others, then placed the box back in the closet hideaway.

I checked the notes I had on Ronnie, information that was in the stuff Mercury gave me. There was an address. I picked up Belinda and we drove over there. It was a duplex and Ronnie's address was on the top floor. I walked up and knocked. A woman answered. She wasn't Ronnie Fisher. She was good-looking, older than Ronnie would have been, said her name was Sharon Duran. I asked about Ronnie and she shook her head. Never heard of her.

I asked the name of her landlord, and got his number and called him. I asked him about Ronnie. His name was Leon Cripson, and when he talked, he sounded distracted, like he might be watching TV on mute, or perhaps checking his pubic hair for lice.

“Yeah, cute gal,” the landlord said, “moved out a while back.”

“How many months ago?” I said. I was sitting in the car with Belinda at the wheel. We were parked out front of Ronnie's former duplex.

“Hell, I don't know. You sure you're a reporter?”

I gave him my name and told him who my boss was. I could almost hear him considering things over the line. “Must have been, oh, seven, eight months ago,” he said.

“Mr. Cripson, did you know Ronnie knew the girl who disappeared?”

“What?”

I gave him a brief explanation.

“Oh, yeah. I remember that. I remember because Ronnie was in the paper, saying something about it.”

“About some fines the missing girl owed.”

“That was it. I remember because the girl, what was her name again?”

I told him.

“Yeah, she was so pretty, and I thought Ronnie was pretty too. I remember thinking it wasn't surprising they knew one another. Them good-lookers run in packs.”

“Did you ever see Caroline with Ronnie?”

“No. I don't think so. I'd remember if I did, if that newspaper picture did her any credit.”

“Did Ronnie leave your duplex around the time that the girl went missing? Could it have been then?”

There was a brief pause. “She did. She went owing me some rent. I don't know exactly when she got out of Dodge, but it was around then. All I know is she didn't pay me and didn't pay me and didn't pay me, and I went over and finally had to open the door and put all her stuff in storage. I called her cell number over and over, but nothing. I called up the college. They said she dropped out and went home.”

“And left all her stuff?”

“Don't know she left it all, could have taken some things with her, but she left a lot of it behind.”

“Do you remember where Ronnie's home was, the place she went back to?”

“No. I don't.”

“So you have her stuff stored?”

“It's in a storage stall. I should have already gotten rid of it, and I'm going to, soon as I can get around to it. Have Goodwill come cart it off after I sell what I can sell. It's costing me more to store it than it's worth.”

“Is there any way we could come look through it? We think she might know something about the missing girl, and there could be something that connects her to Caroline.”

“Really?” he said.

“It's a thought,” I said.

“You mean it might help with a murder investigation?”

“It's possible. Can we come look?”

“I guess so. But it has to be on these terms. You empty out the storage building. That's the deal.”

“I can't afford to buy her stuff.”

“Hell with that. I've decided to get rid of it all. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said.

32

I rented a U-Haul truck and Belinda followed me in my car over to the address the landlord had given me. I called just before we got there and he gave me the gate code.

There were rows of storage buildings inside a fence, and there was a little outfit by the gate with buttons on it. I pushed the buttons Cripson had told me to push. The gate clicked open and swung back on its hinges.

In front of the building with the number Cripson had given me was the big black SUV he told me to look for.

Cripson got out of the SUV when we drove up. He was a short, fat, bald guy who wheezed when he walked, like a huge basketball leaking air. He was pulling a little tank on wheels and he had tubes hooked up to his nose that ran back into the tank.

I got out of the van and Belinda got out of the car and we moved through the summer heat like we were moving through gelatin; the heat rose up from the cement in wavy lines that made you feel dizzy.

I shook hands with Cripson. He didn't offer to shake hands with Belinda, but he gave her an up-and-down look that no one could really blame him for. She was wearing blue jeans today and a simple top, but those jeans fit her as close as baby oil.

“Here's the key,” Cripson said. “You unlock it. This emphysema wears me out if I so much as vigorously wipe my ass.”

I unlocked the storage shed and peeked inside. There were all manner of dusty boxes. The air was still and heavy and stunk of mildew and something spoiled. It was hot.

“What's that smell?” I said.

“Now and again, animals crawl up under the back, get in there and are too stupid to get out,” Cripson said. “Possums, armadillos, rats. They die. Ain't nothing stinks worse than a dead rat.”

“I can vouch for that,” I said.

“Hence, the saying: I smell a rat,” Belinda said.

“What's that?” Cripson said.

“Nothing,” Belinda said. “I was entertaining myself.”

“Well,” Cripson said, “whatever. It's all yours. Dig in. Get it all. That's our deal. And when you leave, push the padlock in place. Give me the key now.”

A moment later Cripson wheezed back into his SUV and was gone in a puff of dust, leaving Belinda and me inside the storage shed looking around.

“It's so hot I feel as if I'm going to swoon,” Belinda said.

I felt the same way, so we went at it easy, a little at a time, took a break and hung the padlock in place without locking it, went back to Belinda's house to eat a sandwich, then returned to work before we got so comfortable we couldn't force ourselves back.

It took most of the morning and into the early afternoon, and the stink got worse as we went along. It was coming from somewhere amidst the garbage. We didn't find out what the stink was right then, but got everything loaded and over to Belinda's place, where we put it in her garage.

When we were finished, Belinda said, “I can tell you this much, Cason. Ronnie didn't just decide to skip out on her rent. She left in a real hurry, because she left her jewelry and her makeup, some awfully nice dresses and slacks, and a lot of shoes. I don't think she'd do that. I wouldn't do that, not unless I had to. Not unless I had to run quick.”

“Maybe Ronnie knew more about Caroline than overdue library fines.”

“And all those boxes,” she said, “I don't know what's in them, but that's where the stink is coming from. My guess is Cripson hired someone to move all this stuff, and they unloaded her refrigerator and stuck the stuff in boxes and put it in the shed. The bottom is about to come out of a couple of them. Would she have gone off and left a whole refrigerator full of food?”

“Sometimes people do that.”

“Okay. But what's her rush? And again, there's the makeup, jewelry and clothes.”

“It's a little curious,” I said.

We looked in the boxes, and sure enough, it was old rotten food that seemed to have mutated and become one with the boxes it was in. You couldn't tell what kind of food it had been, but it was certainly a lively creation. We bagged all of that up in plastic bags and stuffed it in trash cans.

We poked around in the other boxes, looking for what we in the newspaper business like to call a big ole goddamn clue. I was prowling through a box of books, mostly cookbooks, and one book on sexuality that had some nice pictures, which I examined closely, just in case it might contain information we might need. Like certain sexual positions that required peanut butter and jelly. I was looking this over when Belinda said, “Put that down, Cason.”

I did.

“I got some letters here,” she said. “They are kind of curious.”

I went over and looked at them with her. They were letters from a Mrs. Soledad who lived in Cleveland, Texas.

“I don't know they mean anything,” she said, “but it might not be a bad idea to look through them. It might give us some home information about Ronnie, where to find her. You can find anyone on the Internet these days.”

“We can try that. Anything else curious?”

Belinda shook her head. “Not really, and that's pretty much all of it. We been through everything. Of course, if you need to examine that book a little more closely….”

“Nope,” I said. “Got it memorized.”

“Perhaps you could show me some of the points of interest later.”

“I can almost guarantee that,” I said.

We bundled the letters together, and I drove the moving van back to the rental company, Belinda following in my car, then we went back to her place. We had the letters with us the whole trip, and as I drove us back, Belinda looked through them. When she was finished, she bundled them together again and we carried them into her place.

It was really cool inside, especially after we'd been out in the heat all day, and we put the letters on the coffee table and got something to drink. We sat and drank and didn't look at the letters. We soon found ourselves in the shower, where it was necessary to use the soap bar on each other so we could get to all those hard-to-reach spots. The water was warm but it wasn't warm like the outside air. It was pleasant and we spent a long time in there, then rinsed in cold water until we shook.

We toweled off and lay in the bed under the covers. I told Belinda some things about that sex book I had been looking at in the garage, but neither of us was particularly inspired; the heat had sapped us. Without meaning to, we fell asleep.

         

When I awoke the room was dark. Night had fallen. I got out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Belinda. Still nude, I padded into the living room and sat down on the couch and took the bundle of letters off the coffee table.

I looked through them. Caroline was mentioned in them. A lot. The letters were obviously Mrs. Soledad's response to letters written by Ronnie. Just being on the receiving end, not having Ronnie's letters, I wasn't exactly sure what some of it meant. But I could tell this: Ronnie was worried about Caroline and so was Mrs. Soledad, up to a point. I got the feeling maybe Mrs. Soledad didn't miss Caroline as much as Ronnie did.

I read through the letters a couple of times. A lot of them weren't about Caroline and were just hometown things. From the letters I understood that Soledad lived outside of Cleveland, Texas. That was about two hours from where we were.

I turned on Belinda's computer and looked up Cleveland, and I looked up Mrs. Soledad's address. It was there, easy as could be to find. There was even an aerial view of her house.

I was looking at the aerial view and thinking about some of the things in the letters when a hand clapped down on my shoulder and I jumped.

Belinda said, “Looking up porn sites.”

I turned. She hadn't bothered with clothes either. I said, “Hey, I'm living one. Why look it up?”

She smiled at me. “What you got there?” she said.

“An address. Now all I need is a phone number.”