“Dwight Sweeney has quite a colorful background, enough to rival that of the girl’s.” He pulls a pack of Camels from his vest pocket. “The name thing was a tip-off. It just ain’t
He lights the cigarette in his hand. “Turns out Mr. Sweeney did a couple of stints at my alma mater in Huntsville.”
Jay gets a bad feeling about the guy almost instantly.
He remembers the bruises on Elise’s neck, her cries for help.
Rolly turns the pages upside down, trying to read his own handwriting. “Let’s see, we got a couple runs for extortion here, a time or two for battery and making criminal threats, blackmail, the works. Plus, my man did seven years for taking money from an undercover officer, all in a scheme to suppos edly get rid of the guy’s wife.” Rolly looks up from his notes, his expression quite serious. “You ask me, the dude sounds like a pro.”
“What do you mean?”
“He sounds like a hired gun.”
Jay remembers the description of a struggle in the car, a crystal-clear picture forming in his mind. He mumbles it softly to himself. “He came after her.” He rented the car the day before, invited her to dinner. It was all a setup, Jay realizes. She walked right into a trap. “He came after her,” Jay whispers.
“And he didn’t know she was packing,” Rolly says, shaking his head to himself. “Fatal mistake, man.”
Jay sits at his desk, somewhat dumbfounded.
Here it is, a piece that finally makes sense. A new way of look ing at this whole thing. And still he’s confused. “I don’t under stand,” he says out loud. “Why not tell the cops he attacked her? Why would she keep that a secret?”
“Scared, probably.”
Which, to Jay, would explain why she’d been hiding out in Sugar Land.
“Just ’cause she took out the dude,” Rolly says, “don’t mean the dude who hired that dude ain’t still at large. Maybe she thinks it’s best to keep her fucking mouth shut.”
“Why the hell would her lawyer go along with that?” Jay asks. “When he’s got a good shot at a self-defense angle with this thing?” Of course, as soon as the words are out of his mouth, Jay thinks he has the answer. “Unless her lawyer’s planning to get the whole thing thrown out of court,” he says, thinking of Char lie’s petition to get the contents of the police search tossed.
“The real question,” Rolly says, “is why someone wanted to put a hurtin’ on her in the first place. ’Course, a girl like that, you know, been around the block once or twice . . . it could be anybody.”
“Which Dwight Sweeney or whoever hired him must have known,” Jay says. “The guy tried to choke her and leave her in an empty field. The cops were supposed to find an ex-prostitute out there, a throwaway crime that might be traced to anybody.”
Rolly scoots forward, to the edge of his seat all the way, sitting himself eye to eye with Jay. “Look, can I offer something here, man, some advice?”
“Yeah.”
“If she don’t want to tell the police about you, and
That was of course Jay’s entire plan. To stay out of it.
What he has, so far, not been able to do.
“This don’t have a goddamned thing to do with you, man.”
Jay sits on that a second. “I’m beginning to think you’re right.”
“And let me tell you what else, whoever put Mr. Sweeney on the girl, I’m guessing he don’t want it known,” Rolly adds, look ing around the office, snooping with his coal-black eyes. “The reason for your sudden windfall, I imagine.”
Jay understands the logic now. The real reason for taking his gun. All of it just to scare him away. And he, of all people, fell for it. He, of all people, had made the perfect mark. Rolly looks across Jay’s desk. “My feeling . . . I mean, whatever this is really about . . . it’s bad, man, real bad. I’d let it alone, Jay.” An hour later, the sight of his wife is breathtaking.
In a bright yellow sundress, tight across her belly, she’s bare foot, sitting on the Boykinses’ aging porch swing, using the meat of her big toe to push herself back and forth. She’s holding a glass of iced tea, watching Jay come up the walk.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Waiting on you,” she says, sipping her tea.
He was a fool, he thinks, to ever let her out of his sight. He can hear voices inside the house, the clinking of silverware
and plates. He smells garlic and fried onions, stewed tomatoes and collards brewing on the stove. But he is in no hurry to leave this spot, this moment with his wife.
“You’re late,” she says.
“I know.”
“Everything all right?”
He knows he will not lie to her, not ever again.
“I don’t know, B. I don’t know.”
Bernie rests the glass of iced tea on the swell of her belly. “I’m
tired, Jay.”
