want to be helpful you can close the door from the outside. If you can't figure out how it's done, I'll call security and they'll be glad to help you.'
'How'd it go?' Harry asked when I dropped into the passenger seat.
'What's that big-ass river in Egypt?' I asked, shutting my eyes against a too-bright sun.
'De Nile,' he said, not missing a beat.
Abbot's friend's friend was named Monica Talmadge. She was in her mid-thirties and lived in an expensive brick home in West Mobile with a perfectly manicured lawn and a canary-yellow Beamer in the drive.
Monica was not happy to see us.
'I've never heard of Peter Deschamps. You've got to believe that.'
She wore open-toed high heels, lavender jeans, and more makeup than midafternoon generally required. Her bra made the most of small breasts, the tight, scoop-neck pink shirt not hurting either. Auburn waves of hair hung halfway to the out swooping of her derriere, as round and succinct as an orange.
'Look, guys, officers, whatever, my husband's going to be here any minute.'
Harry looked at his watch. 'Maybe he can help us with the Deschamps question.'
'No! I mean, he doesn't know anything.'
'Doesn't know anything or doesn't suspect anything, Mrs. Talmadge?'
Harry asked softly.
Monica looked down like memorizing her toes for a test. I could have given her the answers: perfectly tanned, pedicured, and pinkly lacquered. I knew she was debating whether or not to tell the truth.
When she looked up her face held harder eyes and harsher shadows.
'Peter and I went out a few times, a friendly kind of thing.'
Harry said, 'Discreetly friendly?'
There was a long silence and her eyes narrowed.
'Look, my husband's what they call a man's man. That means when he ain't in fucking Montana or Canada with a bunch of other men hunting for mooses or beavers or whatever, he's out fishing the blue water for days at a time. When he's not being the American Sportsman, he's halfway across the world selling generators. I grew up in a single-wide in Robertsdale and I like all this a lot' she gestured around her, meaning the car, the house, the neighborhood 'but there are a few other things I like too. I'm just trying to keep a little balance in my life, y'know? So when Peter answered my ad '
I said, 'Your ad?'
'I put an ad in that ratty paper, NewsBeatf Personals. Semi-attached woman looking for a semi-attached man. Someone for intelligent, adult fun, no strings and no tales.'
A vehicle approached and Monica froze. When she saw it wasn't her husband she released her breath. Harry said, 'What happened after the ad ran?'
'I got a bunch of responses. More than I ever thought I'd get. Peter enclosed a photo, and he looked and sounded nice. It fit perfect he was engaged and had to be careful too. We had a few dates, nothing serious, just good fun, you know?'
'Did you get the impression this, uh, dating was something he'd done before?'
'No. I think he wanted a final fling before getting married. He as much as said so. Made sense to me.'
'Did you get any sense Mr. Deschamps might have orientation other than heterosexual?
'God, no,' she said. 'He was very masculine. You're not telling me he
'
'No. But in any murder we have to ask all sorts of questions.'
'I cried when I heard about it. Such a good guy. Great body. I feel so sorry for his girlfriend.'
'Why'd you break the relationship off?'
'We both sorta did. I think we just ran out of things to say.'
I heard the roar of a big diesel engine. Her eyes looked past us to the street. 'Oh, my God, it's Larry. Please don't say anything about this, please, please, please.'
I saw a black truck gearing down for the driveway, eyes glaring through the windshield.
'Smile and shake your head, Mrs. Talmadge,' I said.
'What?'
'Smile real wide but shake your head no.'
She caught on and did it, adding a little tinkle of laughter lost in the shuddering engine sound at our backs. I winked at Harry and we waved farewell to Mrs. Talmadge. We turned to see her husband leap from a dual-tracked 3500 Dodge Ram diesel with a tailpipe like a howitzer muzzle. What wasn't painted was chromed. Lettering on the door proclaimed,
Atlas Industrial generator sales, your independent power company. Larry left the door open and the engine running. He went an easy six three, two fifty, with a neck to match Harry's. Clouds of graying hair puffed from the collar of his Polo shirt. His face was red, his chest expanded in full turf-protection mode; we were probably walking places he'd pissed.
'Hey,' he bellowed, 'what the hell you guys doing?'
'Thanks again, Mrs. Talmadge,' I called over my shoulder. 'Sorry to bother you.'
'I asked what you're doing here?' Larry growled.
I smiled, Nice doggy. 'You must be the mister,' I said politely, flipping open my badge wallet. 'We had a bad hit-and-run in the Bankhead Tunnel yesterday. A witness got a partial tag number and said it was a yellow sports car ' I talked loud enough for Monica to hear me.
'You wouldn't believe how many yellow vehicles have similar numbers,'
Harry said, sounding exasperated. The Harry and Carson show.
My turn. 'We're going to all possibles looking for damage to the right front fender. Obviously' I looked at the Beamer 'it wasn't your wife's vehicle.'
'Well… damn right,' Larry huffed.
We drove away as Larry pulled suitcases from the monster truck. Monica and I shared a glance. She mouthed, 'Thank you,' then turned a warm and welcoming face to man's-man Larry, home from the hills and home from the sea.
CHAPTER 13
Save for me, the Church Street Cemetery was deserted. Behind Mobile's main library on Government Street, the small cemetery was a place to walk slow beneath ancient trees, ponder headstones, and count the passing of years. Harry'd needed to drop a couple books at the library, and I'd been drawn to the cemetery's hushed commitment to the past.
When the Adrian case was an explosion of sirens in my head, rats and fires and the burned-out cinders of a young girl's eyes, I often came to sit beneath the trees and listen to the quiet. The death of Tessa Ramirez had been unspeakably violent, yet the graves here seemed so peaceful, as if Death paused in its journey between whatever worlds it traverses to let the chosen cast off the memories of dying, gathering themselves in cool shade and simple surroundings. Though Tessa had been buried in Texas, I felt one graveyard was all graveyards, conjoined beneath or beyond the ground. I'd hoped the Church Street dead called the petite dark-haired girl to their midst; perhaps this was where they mentored her, gave her understanding.
There must be understanding, I thought; why else for the universe to utter us into existence than to allow our individual voyages of discovery detection, if you will with the threads of all passages finally woven into the Ultimate Understanding, a great cosmic cooing of 'Yes. Why didn't I figure it out? How elegant. How simple.'
Or maybe it's all random. Our most brilliant lies are those we reserve for ourselves.
'Invisible lines everywhere,' Harry said, jolting me from a reverie about reverie. He was back from the library and bending to study a grave laid thirty years into the nineteenth century. Invisible lines was Harry's term for lines connecting seemingly unrelated events in homicide cases. Invisible at the onset, they gradually revealed themselves until we saw we'd been tripping over them all the time.
'It's in the words on the bodies,' I said. 'They're messages with meaning and purpose.'
