Three Can Keep a Secret (15 page)

“Detective,” the doctor said, nodding. He turned to me and pinched his lips together, taking in my tattoos, bed head, and Harley T-shirt. “Family?”

“Practically,” I said.

Willard nodded. “She deserves to know.”

The surgeon looked skeptical, but talked anyway. “He’s going to be okay.”

I hit my fist into my palm, making the doctor jump a few inches backward. Then I remembered Bart’s religion and crossed myself on his behalf. The surgeon swallowed and kept talking, looking only at Willard.

“Most of the damage is non-life-threatening. Broken nose, a few broken teeth, lots of bruising and split skin. We put in multiple stitches, but we’ll wait for a plastic surgeon until the patient can express his own wishes.”

“He’ll love some scars,” I said.

“The worst injury,” the doc continued, ignoring me, “is the knife wound. Missed his heart and aorta both by about an inch. He’ll have quite a time recovering, but we’re going to be able to put him back together most satisfactorily. We’ve still got some work ahead of us, but I wanted to let you know as soon as possible what his prognosis is.”

Most satisfactorily.
Quite different words from when Howie had been in the same ER.

“If I didn’t have sleep breath,” I said to the surgeon, “I’d kiss you.”

He took a step away, then scuttled back into surgery. I squinted at Willard, who was grinning like a kid.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” He grinned some more. “Nothing at all.”

Chapter Thirty-one

When I got home, my headlights flashed across the drive, revealing Lenny’s bike in the darkness. So he was still there. I hopped down from the truck, wincing slightly at the pain in my side, and walked briskly up the walk, eager to tell Lenny that Bart was going to be all right.

I remembered just in time not to slam the side door. It would take some getting used to, having to be careful about noises at night. I was sure Tess and Lucy would have to suffer through many mistakes before I got this living-together thing right. I hoped it wouldn’t last long enough I’d get too used to it.

I found Lenny in the living room, crashed on the sofa. His mouth hung open, and he emitted soft snores. The blinds were all drawn and the room was shrouded in darkness. I turned on a lamp to see his arms crossed over his chest protectively.

“Len,” I said. I shook his shoulder.

He started, his eyes opening wide and fearful. When he focused on my face, he sat up. “How—”

“He’s okay, Len. Bart’s going to be fine.”

Tears welled in his eyes, and his face tightened, his mouth quivering. I patted his shoulder until he got himself under control. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his eyes and blow his nose.

“Thanks, Stella. Oh God, I never would’ve forgiven myself.”

“I know. But now maybe it’s time to tell Detective Willard what you know.” I didn’t add that a few words the other night might have saved Bart this attack.

“I don’t know, Stella. We’ll see.”

“See what? How soon they come after you? Don’t be an idiot. At least tell me. Who are these people? Why are they after you?”

He turned his face away, and I fought the desire to slap him. “Fine,” I said. My voice sounded wooden. “What now?”

Still looking away, he asked, “What time is it?”

“Quarter after three.”

He rested his head on the back of the couch, and his face, gray from worry and fatigue, sagged.

“Just stay here, Len,” I said. “No reason for you to make the ride to your place. What’s one more person in this house, anyway?” I tried out a laugh, but it didn’t quite work.

He lay down on the couch, resting his arm on his eyes. I couldn’t imagine the guilt he must be feeling.

But I could feel the anger building in me. Anger at Lenny—he should’ve told Willard what he knew; anger at the assholes who plunged their knives into Bart; and anger at myself. I knew a lot of what Lenny knew. I should’ve told Willard the night those jerks entered Lenny’s house. And now, because of my silence, Bart lay bleeding and broken in the hospital.

I vowed that the next day I would either convince Lenny to spill his story to the detective, or I would do it. So to hedge my bets, I’d do some investigating to find out what Lenny wasn’t telling me. It’s not like one or two hours of sleep were going to do me any good, anyway.

I grabbed my keys from where I’d tossed them on the counter, and headed back out to my truck.

When I got to Lenny’s house I did a ride-by, checking out the vehicles parked along the road. All foreign jobs, and no bikes. If his biker enemies were there, they hadn’t ridden. And no outlaw would drive anything but American. My stop at the curb was far from graceful, and I hoped my tires had survived the bump.

I strode up the walk, but when I reached the front door I remembered I didn’t have a key.

“Dammit,” I said out loud.

I had to walk around the entire block to get to Lenny’s garage, and I hesitated before entering the alley that ran behind the rowhomes. For the second time that night, I broke out in a sweat. The alley would be a prime spot for someone to hide.

I made a fist around my keyring, arranging the key points between my fingers, so anyone jumping me would get a face full of metal. I took my first step in, wondering if I should go back and get the wrench from the glove compartment of my truck, when a gate from a backyard flew open. A man in an undershirt flung a garbage bag into a can, rattling it loud enough to wake any sleeping neighbors. He didn’t see me, and turned right around and went back into his yard, his gate slapping closed behind him.

Once my heartbeat returned to normal, I eased through the rest of the alley. I made it to Lenny’s garage without further incident, and found the house key in the nail drawer. As long as I’d known Lenny I’d never had to use his key. I couldn’t even remember why I knew it was there.

The house was silent and smelled stuffy, as if it had been closed for weeks instead of part of a day. For a moment I felt guilty invading his home, but then remembered somebody was out to get him, and was hurting others in the process. It was time to find out what was going on, and if Lenny wasn’t going to tell me, I was going to hunt it down myself.

I wandered into his living room, not sure what I was looking for. Where would Lenny keep details about his past or whatever was haunting him? I couldn’t imagine him keeping a journal, writing secret, innermost thoughts every night before going to sleep. I also couldn’t imagine an address book listing potential enemies. If he wanted to find somebody, he’d probably just start a chain reaction by telling one person, and soon the sought-after would show up at his door.

The room looked like any bachelor’s living room. A TV and DVD player at one end, a stereo surrounding it, and a very sat-on sofa taking up most of the space. At one end of the sofa was a little table for necessities—a lamp, and a coaster for cold drinks. All that hung on the wall were a Harley-Davidson calendar—the kind without the bimbos, thank God—and a few photographs of Lenny and Bart at the Biker Barn.

I drifted into the next room, which was a kind of office. He didn’t have a computer, but there was a desk and a filing cabinet, and not much else. I got through the top drawers of the filing cabinet—utility bills, insurance information, mortgage papers—and sensed I was looking in the wrong place. This was just paperwork, not anything meaningful. I stood up, stretched, and went back into the living room.

I dug around the entertainment center, finding only the things that should be there—DVDs, CDs, TV schedules from the newspaper—and turned to the end table, which had a cabinet in the bottom part. I opened the door and sucked in my breath. Just as in Howie’s safe, here was a stash of photos. I pulled them out and sat on the sofa.

The first print on the pile showed Lenny with a woman and a little girl, probably about two years old. Lenny and the woman were standing on opposite sides of a bike with the little girl on the seat between them, looking terrorized by the flash. The woman, giving something resembling a smile, sparked some feeling of recognition in me, but I couldn’t place her. It kind of gave me the creeps, though, looking at her.

But the person that was supposedly Lenny gave me the biggest shock. He was scraggly and unkempt, his bulk looking more like the unhealthy kind than just the big kind, his current build. He wore black jeans, an unrecognizable black T-shirt, and a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off, which looked like it had never been washed. The hair on the back of my neck rose. Outlaw clubs were notorious for their unwashed colors. Initiation into the ranks was accompanied by a mess of vomit, urine, and other disgusting things, and washing your vest was a serious enough offense to cause expulsion from the club.

What really got me was that underneath the filth and grime there was something I hadn’t seen in him before. Something I wasn’t sure I would have recognized if I hadn’t seen Howie’s picture of me with my father and mother when I was a toddler.

Family pride.

I sat back, feeling lightheaded. Lenny was a father?

Shaken, I took away that photo to look at the one beneath it. This photo was again of the woman and girl, but without Lenny this time. They were sitting on the steps of a front porch somewhere. It didn’t look like this row home. While Lenny’s current house was stone, the one in the picture was clad in what looked like dark, shabby asbestos siding. The picture was a little overexposed, so details weren’t very clear.

After that there were several pictures of Lenny and his biker buddies, surrounded by a surprising amount of beer bottles. Surprising because as far as I knew, Lenny never touched the stuff. But in these pictures his hand often clutched a cold one, and he didn’t look real steady.

I recognized a face halfway through the stack and realized it was Mal Whitney—Sweetheart—looking twenty or so years younger, about Lenny’s present age. His left arm was draped around a woman, presumably the wife he had mentioned, with his right arm cranked up and around Lenny’s neck. The guys grinned like crazy people, but Mal’s wife could’ve been a poster child for endurance. Huh.

At the bottom of the stack lay another picture of Lenny and the woman. This one was close and clear and made a shiver run down my spine. I sucked in my breath, and suddenly realized why the woman looked so familiar. She looked exactly like the nasty biker chick Lenny and I saw at the Biker Barn the other day.

Holy cow. That chick was Lenny’s daughter.

Our conversation from the ice cream stand suddenly came back to me, and I felt like an idiot for not putting it together that day. Lenny had been asking if I remembered my father. He wasn’t concerned about me. He’d been remembering his own daughter, and wondering if she ever thought of him. She obviously hadn’t been a part of his life for many, many years.

I looked back down at the picture of Lenny and the woman. The photo cut off the woman’s right arm at the biceps, but I saw what was probably the very top of a tattoo. A familiar one. My pulse pounded in my throat as I scrabbled back through the piles of photos until I came to one that showed her whole arm. I turned on the lamp, stuck the picture in the bright light, and squinted. The shiver in my spine came back.

I closed my eyes, picturing where I had last seen the fierce snake with the blood red tongue. It didn’t take me long to remember. The nasty chick’s boyfriend had a tattoo exactly like it.

I stood up. There had to be something else in the house to give me some answers. Lenny wouldn’t have just these few pictures and nothing else.

I walked back into the office and pulled open more file drawers. Perhaps I was wrong about this room. Perhaps there would be something helpful.

All I could find in the files was business stuff. Nothing to do with Lenny’s personal life. Just taxes, work expenses, and other boring papers. The drawers of the desk were just as fruitless, and there wasn’t any other place in the room to hide anything. I abandoned the office and headed up to the second floor.

When I got to the landing, I hesitated. This was getting really personal now, violating the man’s bedroom. But I stepped into the room anyway, and looked around. The bed was unmade, the sheets tangled and the blanket thrown onto the floor, along with a ratty comforter. The one pillow was scrunched into a little ball. Drawers on the dresser were half open, socks and underwear fighting for space, while the closet revealed a couple of shirts on hangers and several pairs of boots in a heap on the floor. A nightstand held an actual ticking clock, and a pile of change lay scattered across its top. The floor was a black and white mess of laundry—clothes, towels, and handkerchiefs.

“Good grief,” I said out loud.

I stood for a moment longer before wading through the mess to his closet. The shelf was a big fat zero, as was the wall at the back. I had to check, seeing as how Howie’s closet had produced the wealth of family pictures. I picked through the boots and came up with nothing except some disgustingly smelly socks.

His dresser was just as unhelpful—nothing but what should be there. I shoved the clothes into the drawers and somehow got all the drawers to shut.

It was in his bedside table I found what I’d come looking for.

A mess of yellowed newspaper clippings occupied the drawer, and I stared at them, not sure I wanted to know what was in them. The first headline I saw screamed, “Two Bikers Die, Two Injured, in Fatal Blast.” I forced myself to read the whole article even though I felt like throwing up.

The article detailed how the clubhouse for the Serpents motorcycle club had exploded the night before, killing the president and the secretary/treasurer. Lenny Spruce, along with Mal Whitney and a guy named Scott Simms, had been taken in to “help the police with their inquiries,” being prominent members of another local club. The Priests.

I shoved the entire stack of clippings into one of Lenny’s pillowcases, and practically ran out of the house.

I was ready to climb into my truck when a woman stepped out of the bushes holding a rolling pin.

“Hold it right there!” she said, waving the implement. Her flowered housecoat flapped about her legs, and wild, sleep-flattened hair ringed her head.

If the situation hadn’t have been so serious, I might have laughed. But the last thing I needed was a dent in my head, and I recognized the woman as a friendly face.

“Whoa, lady,” I said. “It’s Stella Crown. Remember? Lenny’s friend? We talked the other night when the cops were here?”

She shone a flashlight in my face and I covered my eyes.

“Take your hand away from your face,” she said.

“Lower the flashlight, then.”

She tipped it so it lighted up my stomach, and I looked at her. She dropped it the rest of the way.

“Sorry,” she said. “I heard your truck out here, and wanted to stop whoever it was. Lenny’s been through enough the past few days.”

I gestured toward the house. “Just checking on things for Lenny. His partner was…in an accident, and Lenny’s crashed at my house right now.”

“I’m sure it’s fine you’re here. But I’ve seen those bikers out back a couple of times this week and I figured you were them again.”

I froze. “What bikers?”

“A guy and girl, if you want to call them that. Scummy folks. Not like you and Lenny.”

“When exactly did you see them?”

“Well, let’s see.” She crossed her arms and the light from the flashlight played on the side of my truck. “A couple days ago. I guess it would’ve been Sunday night. I figured they were friends of Lenny’s, so I didn’t say anything. Then I saw them again yesterday while Lenny was gone. They went into the house and came out again after just a few minutes.”