expensive, and more so every year. Developers will pay a lot of money for five hundred acres in Columbia County right now. That made Holly even crazier- the idea that the money would pay for Daddy’s care.”
I nodded. “You argued with Holly about it?”
“We didn’t talk.”
“You didn’t see her when she visited your father?”
Disgust became anger on Nicole’s face. “If I could’ve arranged it, I wouldn’t have let her visit. The way she carried on with him, with those questions and taping everything- going on about Mother, how what she did to herself was Daddy’s fault…As far as I was concerned, Holly was abusing him with all that. Nobody agreed with me, but I certainly wasn’t going to stand around and watch it.” She turned to Deering again and held the gun in front of her, in both hands. My grip on the Glock tightened. I watched Nicole’s fingers and concentrated on keeping my arm loose.
“No, it wasn’t Holly I argued with about the property,” Nicole said. “It was him. And now I know why.”
I thought about the video I’d seen last night- the footage on the unmarked disk- and thought that I knew why too. But I needed to hear them say it. Slowly, so as not to spook Nicole, I rolled my shoulders and worked the kinks from my neck. Nicole brought the gun to bear on me again.
“Why does Herbert care about the property?” I asked.
Nicole’s weathered face darkened. She drew back her lips and looked at Deering. “Why don’t you tell him, Herbert? Go ahead- tell him why.”
Deering tried again to sit up, but a wave of pain washed across him and he slumped lower in the chair. His eyes wandered awhile before they found me. When they did, they were forlorn.
“Tell him!” Nicole shouted. Her shrill voice echoed off the glass.
“She forced me,” Deering said. His voice was barely a whisper now, barely more than rustling leaves. “Holly forced me.”
“Forced you how, Herbert?” Nicole said, as if she were speaking to a very slow, very trying child.
Deering closed his eyes. “She’d made a video. She said I had to convince Nikki not to sell Redtails, and that if I didn’t- if I couldn’t- she’d show it. She’d show it to Nikki.”
“Tell him what was on the video, Herbert.” She pointed the gun in encouragement.
Deering slumped lower, and his head lolled to the side. “It was a video of me and Holly. We were…in bed.”
I nodded slowly. Having seen the video last night, I understood how Herbert Deering might be driven to distraction- might be driven well beyond- by the thought of his wife watching it. I also understood why he’d offered such a pallid description of the footage: “in bed.”
I’d begun to think of the video as Holly’s test reel, because it incorporated so many essential elements of her later work: graphic, edgy sex, themes of dominance and submission, and a wrenching, punitive interrogation at the end. But there were differences, too. The technical ones were comparatively minor- brighter lighting, murkier sound, the use of a single camera. The important distinction was in the lack of anonymity: the fact that Deering was unmasked- face and voice- throughout, and the fact that he and Holly knew each other outside the confines of the hotel room. So, besides the vivid renderings of Deering’s lust for Holly, the video also documented his many declarations of love for her, his lengthy discourses on Nicole’s sexual deficiencies- on her deficiencies in general- and, near the end, his proposal of marriage to his sister-in-law.
Nicole chuckled grimly. “Of course, Herbert couldn’t give away water in the desert, and all his babbling to me about Redtails-‘Let’s hang on a little longer, it’ll be worth even more next year’- just made me angry. It made me push the deal along faster.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
Nicole looked at Deering. “Go on, Herbert- tell.”
He shook his head. “No, Nikki-”
“You do as I say, you prick!” she said, and she took aim squarely at Deering’s head. He squeezed his eyes shut, and Nicole looked at him with fresh disgust. “You tell him, or I swear to Christ I will shoot you again!”
Deering kept his eyes closed, and his words were nearly lost in the dry rasp of his breathing. “I went to see her, down in the city. I went to explain that Nikki wouldn’t…that I couldn’t convince her. I went to ask her- to beg her- not to do this. I-”
Nicole interrupted with another harsh laugh. “But you brought the gun along, didn’t you, you prick? You stole Daddy’s gun from me and brought it with you.”
He nodded weakly. “It was nighttime and we walked near the water, and Holly was in a bad way. Something happened, an accident or something, and she was bruised. And she was in a terrible mood- angry. I tried to explain about Nikki, but she wouldn’t listen. She yelled and threatened- said she’d send Nikki the video that night. And she called me names- stupid, useless, an ape…
“And then I hit her. I hit her with the back of my hand. I didn’t plan it- it just happened, and she fell down. I tried to help her, but she pushed me away, and when she got up, she was holding a brick. She cursed at me and threw it and it almost hit me. Then she picked up something else, a broken bottle, and she was screaming at me and calling me names, and…” Deering’s head dropped and his shoulders shook.
“Christ, just say it, Herbert- say what happened next.”
He didn’t look up, but he said it. “I took out the gun…and I shot her.”
I let out a deep breath, and something unwound in my gut. Nicole stared at her husband, like a bluejay at a worm. “What happened after that?” I asked.
“I took her things…her clothes…and I threw them in a storm drain. I put her…her body…in the river. Then I went to her apartment, to look for the disk, but I couldn’t… It was a mess, torn apart, so I got out and went home.
“You came by the next day, and ever since, I’ve been…crazy. I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight.” Deering pressed his right hand harder against his side, and folded around his wound. The pool beneath his chair was larger now.
Nicole snorted. “Hell of a guy, isn’t he?” she said. There was a wild light in her blue eyes.
I looked at her. “Let me call an ambulance, Nicole- for your sake as much as his. If he dies-”
She ignored me. “I knew Holly. I knew what she was like, how selfish she was, how self-indulgent and sick, that there was nothing she wasn’t capable of. Holly didn’t surprise me. But him…” She turned to Deering and brought the gun up again, in a two-handed grip. “You surprised me, Herbert. I thought I knew what you were about- not Superman, maybe, not the brightest bulb, but not a guy who’d fuck my evil sister, either. It turns out you were full of surprises. Live and learn, I guess.”
“Let me make a call, Nicole- for you. You don’t want to sit here and watch him bleed out.”
She laughed, an unlovely, crazy sound. “You sure about that?”
“He’s not worth it, Nicole. Come on.” She looked at me and sighed, and let her hands fall to her lap. She took a deep breath and a shiver ran through her. Her face seemed to collapse on itself, and she looked a thousand years old. “Come on,” I said again.
She ran a hand across the back of her neck, and what was left of her ponytail was gone. Her hair fell forward in a tangle, and caught the winter light, which brightened it and made it somehow richer. For an instant, as she turned her head, it looked like Holly’s hair, and she looked more than a little like Holly. Nicole found a calm, exhausted smile. Her voice was quiet and even.
“You’re right- I don’t want to watch him bleed out,” she said. “It’s taking too damn long.” Then she shot him twice, and blew his chest apart.
39
“I’m sick of looking at you,” Leo McCue said, and he ran a thumb over his mustache, and closed the door of the interview room. I started to say something and Mike kicked me under the table. McCue made us a quorum: me, Mike Metz, Rita Flores, Tina Vines, and the fat man himself, gathered yet again at the Seventh Precinct station house. It was early enough on Thursday morning that we were all drinking coffee and rubbing sleep from our eyes. McCue was right: we’d seen entirely too much of each other lately.
