Prayers For Rain

flank, instead of head-on, destroy her fragile world for siccing Bubba and me on him.

Cody, I determined, would need a second visit.

First, though, I wanted to talk to the cops investigating Karen’s death, see if they’d tell me anything that could help keep me from dropping in on Cody half-cocked.

“Detectives Thomas and Stapleton,” Devin told me. “I’ll reach out, tell ’em to talk to you. Give it a few days, though.”

“I’d love to make contact quicker.”

“And I’d love to take a shower with Cameron Diaz. Neither’s going to happen, though.”

So, I waited. And waited. I eventually left a few messages and bit back on my urge to drive over to Cody Falk’s and beat answers out of him before I knew the proper questions to ask.

In the middle of all the waiting, I got restless and copied down Karen Nichols’s last known address from her file, noted from the newspaper accounts that she’d been employed in the Catering Department of the Four Seasons Hotel, and left the office.

Karen Nichols’s former roommate was named Dara Goldklang. While we spoke in the living room she’d shared with Karen for two years, Dara ran a treadmill facing the windows as if she were in the final lap of a track meet. She wore a white sports bra and black spandex shorts and kept looking back over her shoulder at me.

“Until David was hurt,” she said, “Karen was barely here. Always over at David’s. Pretty much just picked up her mail here, did some laundry, took it to David’s for another week. She was moony over that guy. Lived for him.”

“What was she like? I only met her once.”

“Karen was sweet,” she said, then followed that almost immediately with: “Does my butt look big to you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t look.” She puffed her cheeks as she ran. “Come on. Look. My boyfriend says it’s getting big.”

I turned my head. Her ass was the size of a crab apple. If her boyfriend thought it was big, I wondered on which twelve-year-old he’d seen a smaller one.

“Your boyfriend’s wrong.” I sat back in some kind of red leather beanbag thing supported by a glass bowl and base. It may have been the ugliest piece of furniture I’d ever seen. It was definitely the ugliest I’d ever sat in.

“He says I need to tone up my calves.”

I glanced at the muscles in the backs of her calves. They looked like flat stones bulging under the skin.

“And get a boob job,” she puffed. She turned back toward me so I could glimpse the orbs under her sports bra. They were about the size, shape, and firmness of two regulation baseballs.

“What’s your boyfriend do?” I asked. “Physical training?”

She laughed, and her tongue fell over her lower lip. “Puh-lease. He’s a trader on State Street. His body is for shit, like he’s got a little Buddha under his abs, stringy arms, ass starting to sag.”

“But yet he wants you to be perfect?”

She nodded.

“Seems hypocritical,” I said.

She held up her hands. “Yeah, well, I make twenty-two-five as a restaurant manager, and he drives a Ferrari. How shallow of me, right?” She shrugged. “I like the furniture in his condo. I like eating at Cafe Louis and Aujourd’hui. I like this watch he bought me.”

She held up her wrist so I could see it. Stainless steel and sporty, and maybe ran a grand or more, all so you could be perfectly accessorized while you worked up a sweat.

“Very nice,” I said.

“What do you drive?”

“An Escort,” I lied.

“See?” She wagged a finger over her shoulder at me. “You’re cute and all, but your clothes, that car?” She shook her head. “Ah, no. Couldn’t sleep with a guy like you.”

“Wasn’t aware I’d asked.”

She swiveled her head back in my direction, stared at me as fresh dots of perspiration broke out on her forehead. Then she laughed.

I laughed back.

What a hoot it was in there for thirty seconds or so.

“So, Dara,” I said, “why’d Karen lose her place in this apartment?”

She turned away, stared back out the window. “Well, it was sad, right? Karen, like I said, was sweet. She was also kinda, well, naive if you know what I mean. She had no practical reality touchstones.”

“Practical reality touchstones,” I said slowly.

She nodded. “That’s what my therapist calls them-you know, the things we all have that ground us, and not just people but tenants and-”

“Tenets?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Tenets,” I said. “Tenants are people who live in your building. Tenets are principles, articles of faith.”

“Right. That’s what I said. Tenets and principles and, you know, the little sayings and ideals and philosophies we hold on to to get us through the day. Karen didn’t have any of those. She just had David. He was her life.”

“So, when he got hurt…”

She nodded. “Hey, don’t get me wrong, I understand how traumatic it was for her.” Her back had picked up a sheen of perspiration that made her skin glow in the afternoon sun. “I was filled with sympathy. I cried for her. But after a month, it’s like, Life Goes On.”

“That would be a tenet?”

She looked over her shoulder to see if I was fucking with her. I kept my gaze even and empathetic.

She nodded. “But Karen, she just kept sleeping all day, walking around in yesterday’s clothes. Sometimes, you could smell her. She just, well, she just fell apart. You know? And it was sad, broke my heart, but again, like, Get Over It.”

Tenet number two, I figured.

“Okay? I even tried to hook her up.”

“On dates?” I asked.

“Yeah.” She laughed. “I mean, okay, David was great. But David is a vegetable. I mean, hel-lo! Knock all you want, nobody’s home anymore. There are other fish in the sea. This ain’t Romeo and Juliet. Life is real. Life is hard. So, I’m going, Karen, you got to get out there and see some guys. A good lay maybe would have, I dunno, cleared her head.”

She looked back over her shoulder at me as she pressed a button on the treadmill console several times and the rubber belt below her feet gradually slowed to the pace of geriatric mall-walker. Her strides became longer, slower, and looser.

“Was I wrong?” she asked the window.

I let the question pass unanswered. “So, Karen’s depressed, she’s sleeping all day. Did she miss work?”

Dara Goldklang nodded. “That’s why she got shitcanned. Blew off too many shifts. When she did go in, she looked wrung-out wet, if you know what I’m saying-split ends, no makeup, runs in her stockings.”

“Heavens to Murgatroid,” I said.

“Look, I told her. I did.”

The treadmill wound down to a full stop, and Dara Goldklang stepped off, wiped her face and throat with a towel, drank some water from a plastic bottle. She lowered the bottle, lips still pursed, and locked eyes with me.

Maybe she was trying to get past my clothes and the car she thought I drove. Maybe she was looking to slum, clear her head via the method to which she seemed accustomed.

I said, “So she lost her job, and the money started to run out.”

She tilted her head back and opened her mouth, poured some water in without her lips ever touching the bottle. She swallowed a few times, then lowered her chin, dabbed her lips with a corner of the towel.