Suspects (11 page)

“It isn't an
idea
of ours,” Moody said genially. “We're just exploring possibilities.” He enjoyed using the high-sounding phrase, though he knew LeBeau was probably suppressing a snicker. “Let me ask you something, Mrs. Bissonette. Is your husband aware of your intimate friendship with Lawrence Howland?”

She lowered her feathery eyelashes. “That takes some explaining. I doubt he knows of Larry. That I go to bed with other men than he, Paul is well aware. I admit I have felt a little guilty in Larry's case, because he works for Paul. Not that Larry and I have ever talked about that. Well, he probably would have if I let him, but I haven't. It wouldn't be right. It's just by chance.”

“What is?” asked LeBeau.

“That Larry happens to work for Paul!” She smiled distantly. “It was purely by chance that I met him. He didn't even know who I was at the time.”

LeBeau continued, “You've never told your husband, because he wouldn't like you being intimate with an employee of his? But what about if Howland
didn't
work for him? Would it be okay then?”

She nodded solemnly. “I don't see why not.”

Moody clasped his hands. “Your husband doesn't mind you going to bed with other men?”

Mrs. Bissonette gazed at him for a while. “This will remain confidential?”

“We can't promise anything like that. But if it's something that doesn't affect the case—but we'll have to be the judge of that.”

She included LeBeau. “I'm going to trust you. Paul is a homosexual. He would never have been taken on by Glenn-Air in the first place if they had known the truth, and even nowadays he couldn't have gone as far in the company as he has without a wife. So that's my job, and it's as good as any other so far as I'm concerned, and I am not apologizing for either of us. I do have needs, and I do what I must to satisfy them. I purposely avoid men I might find attractive enough to threaten my marriage. A deal's a deal.”

Moody's feelings were in something of a turmoil. Had he not been a veteran professional at his trade, he would certainly have asked whether she and her husband had ever desired the same man—and if so, had ever both had him. But what he really said was, “We'll want to talk to your husband. We won't dwell on his sexual preferences unless we have to. But you understand, if you're sleeping with another man while that other man's wife is being murdered…I can't make any promises. And we'll probably want to talk to you again, so if you don't mind letting us know if you have any travel plans.”

“I'll be right here,” said Gina Bissonette, with the languid kind of smile that could mean anything.

The detectives pressed her for every detail of her activities on the day of the murder and then widened the area of inquiry to include the history of her affair with Howland and her acquaintanceship, if any, with his wife, child, and brother. She stated she had never seen any of them, and never even heard of the last-named.

On leaving, Moody gave her his card, which she accepted with the fine tips of two long slender fingers and brought slowly before her limpid eyes for an inspection which, for all that, looked indifferent.

LeBeau drove the car. He waited until he had turned the corner before glancing at his partner. “How about that?”

“Classy woman.”

Dennis snorted priggishly. “Not exactly the words I'd choose.”

“You think she's cheap?”

“What I'd say is cold and calculating.”

Moody shook his head, which caused it to throb slightly owing to his usual hangover. “That would be true only if she was sneaky. But she's not. She came right out and said it.”

LeBeau was driving carefully, obeying the stop sign posted at every corner, unlike Moody's practice. “But what kind of woman would make a deal like that? That's what I'm talking about. What about love? She's some kind of pervert.”

“You're looking at everything through your own eyes.”

“Whose else have I got?”

“I mean, it takes all kinds. What do I know? You actually like
liver
, for God's sake.” Moody turned it into a joke because he was taken with Gina Bissonette, the kind of woman he had no hope of ever getting.

* * *

For half an hour Lloyd thumbed cars and got no takers, then despite the
NO RIDERS
sign at the corner of its windshield, he tried a big tractor-trailer, and with much aspiration of brakes it pulled to a ponderous stop.

He made the considerable ascent to the cab. The driver was a not fat but rather thickset young woman who looked about his own age. Her round pink face gleamed beneath a smudged red baseball cap. She put the big rig in motion again with much shoving of the gearshift levers and kicking of pedals with her heavy work shoes, meanwhile introducing herself as Molly Sparks.

After giving his own real name, Lloyd nodded toward the sign in the windshield and said he almost did not put up his thumb.

“Yeah,” said Molly. “I keep it there so I can pick my company. A girl on her own, you know.” She glanced at him. “Not that I always been right by any means. Couple months ago, out in Illinois, this kid, college kid, he gets too friendly right while I'm at the wheel, for God's sake. I don't know what was wrong with him. I gave him a good shove”—she demonstrated, with a thick straight-arm—“and I says, ‘I don't know what ails you but you'll have to get out if you don't behave.' Turned out he wasn't the worst kid you ever saw, but he had a goofy theory about interstate truck drivers: he thought a girl behind the wheel would be the same as a guy. Guy would pick up a girl hitcher for one reason, therefore so would a girl driver. I says, ‘You din't learn much in that college, I'll tell you that, if you din't learn girls and guys are totally different. Something's wrong with anybody doesn't know that.” She glanced again in Lloyd's direction, her smile showing a hint of tip-of-tongue. “So he ups and apologizes. Nice kid. He learnt something, I guess. I hope.” She chuckled now. Hefty though she looked, she did not have a double chin. The plaid work shirt was stressed at the button line down the center of her bosom. “How far you going?”

“I don't know yet,” Lloyd said. “I ran out of opportunities here. I think I'll try someplace else.”

“What kind of work you do?”

He surprised himself with his candor. “Anything that doesn't call for much in the way of ability.”

Molly kept her eyes on the road. “You're pretty good at knocking yourself to somebody just met you. That's one talent you got, anyhow.”

He thought for a moment about what she said, something he rarely did with anybody but Donna. “Sorry. I guess I never considered it that way. I say stuff like that about myself, but usually
to
myself. If anybody beats me to it, I get mad.” He was in a weakened state after the big drunk, not so much in physical condition—he had steadily recovered from the hangover symptoms since the initial shock of waking up that morning in a pool of urine—as in a sense of identity. It was not like him to have been so passive with the policemen at the variety store. He had lost his spirit.

“You got that scratch on your face,” Molly said. “Look under the seat. There's a first-aid box there, with some antiseptic spray. It won't hurt. They put something in it that numbs you, you know.”

“I think it'll be all right. I got it shaving. I took care of it.” The subject made him uneasy, and he sought to distract her. “Do you talk much on that CB?”

“Not really, except to get road conditions. I'm not all that sociable when I can't see who I'm talking to. What my dad hates is if I pick up somebody off the road, like with you. See, he owns this rig and would still be driving it if he hadn't gotten hurt. He says, ‘I could care less about you, Moll, but where'd I get another rig if some hitcher took that one off you?'” She produced a peal of laughter. “You got to know my dad. He's comical. He's not kidding about it, though, in one way: insurance rates are so damn high for these things, he takes a lot of deductibles to keep down the cost, but then if something happens he's got to eat the losses.” Meanwhile she had brought the truck cacophonously up through the gears to speed and what felt like well beyond. Suddenly there was no nearby traffic except that going the other way on the opposite side of the four-lane highway.

“You get to see a lot of the country, I bet,” Lloyd observed, peering down at the road from a higher elevation than he had ever experienced in a vehicle. The truck was mountainous. To control it was no small thing. No wonder the men who drove them exuded a certain arrogance, but a girl was something else. Yet for all her bulk, Molly seemed completely feminine, even attractive.

“I could see more if my dad let me. We could get lots of loads for California if he'd take them. He used to drive as far as Oregon in the old days, before he got hurt, but he don't want me that far from home, so I don't argue when it comes to that. If it was just him worrying about me being in danger, though, I wouldn't go along with it.”

Lloyd unaccountably found himself representing her father's case. “I guess he's right about how dangerous it is. There are real bad people roaming around who probably can't be handled like you did that college kid.”

“Don't I know it,” said Molly, flashing a white grin his way. “For those guys I got me a three-fifty-seven mag.”

Lloyd felt the slightest hint of fear, as he always did when guns were mentioned. His mother had hated them so much that he was not even allowed to own toy versions as a child, which lack embarrassed him greatly with such playmates as he had. He asked, “Got a license for it?”

Molly set her jaw. “It's for self-protection.”

Lloyd felt he had lost face by the question. As if he had a personal interest in public regulation. “You're right. … I know you got into driving through your father, but how would somebody do it from scratch?”

“You see those schools advertise on TV? I guess they might work. But the only real way is learning the road, mile after mile. I started out when I was pretty young, riding shotgun with my dad. My mom passed away when I was twelve. When my dad was driving, which was most of the time, I had to live with my aunt and uncle. Because of school I could only go on short runs until summers came. But I missed a lot of school too, which is why I'm so ignorant. I'm not proud of that, but what are you gonna do?”

She had turned the subject back on herself, but Lloyd did not mind. She was doing him a favor. “What do you mean, ‘ignorant'? You can operate this big thing.”

“I'm not dumb. I just don't know a lot of things. Half the time I don't have any idea what they're talking about on the TV news. I couldn't find a lot of countries on a map of the world, I'll admit that.”

“I barely got through high school myself,” Lloyd told her, exaggerating a little.

Molly was amazed. “You sure don't talk like it.”

“My mother believed in correct English.”

“I guess they felt sorry for me, letting me graduate. It's a small town, where everybody knows you. Still, school was wasted on me, I guess.” She tossed her head. “But somebody smart like you doesn't even try.”

“Why am I smart?” asked Lloyd. “Just because I don't say ‘ain't'?”

“It's just a feeling I get.”

They were overtaking some traffic on their own side, most of which stayed to the right, but a little red sedan was immediately ahead on the left and going much more slowly than Molly. She made two melodious but strident blasts of the multiple horns, and the red car found a space in which to insert itself into the right lane.

“I guess you always know where the cops are,” Lloyd said when the road was their own again.

“You drive a lot, you store up information, like where they put the radar. For example, it won't go through a hill from the other side. Some place it might be is in a supposedly disabled car, pulled off onto the shoulder. There are areas where they use helicopters. You get to know those and the times of day they are up. And there's usually some kind of markings along particular stretches of road, so they can time you from the air, where they don't use radar. And so on. Now there's laser, too, but you get on to the tricks of the trade. You compare notes with other drivers at truck stops. It's like any other job, probably. As you go along you keep learning and you get better at it.”

“I rarely have stuck at anything long enough to reach that stage,” said Lloyd.

“You have to find something that appeals to you. It's no mystery.”

“You sound like somebody else I know.”

“Your mother.” She smiled benignly at the windshield.

“Someone else. My mother's been dead for a while.”

“I'd be lost without my dad, I know that. I've always missed my mom, but I never wanted any substitutes. I hated any woman I thought he might be interested in. I know that might be unfair, but what isn't? Of course now, with me on the road, he's got to have some help around the house, with him in the wheelchair, but
I'm
the one who hires them.” She grinned at him. “I been on the road since five A.
M
. It's almost eleven now. Time for my lunch. There's a truck stop in a couple miles. You can come along if you want or you can wait, but not in the cab, which I got to lock up, no offense. I just wanted to get that out of the way first. And another thing: the food here's not very good, and it costs too much. It's not true you get a good cheap meal where truckers eat. My dad told me there was something in it thirty, forty years back, but too many people found out about it. But drivers still go to such places because you get to know the folks who work there and then you see your friends in the same line.” She sniffed. “Then for the men, there's the hookers who hang around. I don't mind ‘em, because they keep some of them jerks offa me. Be surprised how many of those guys are horny early in the day. Damned if I get it, but then I'm not a man—nor want to be, it might surprise you to hear.”