The Devil’s Redhead

here.”

Waxman sighed and looked away. “Argument of convenience.”

“No. No, Wax.”

Abatangelo began pounding the steering wheel. To the right he saw through a walnut orchard what he believed was the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Akers’ stockade. It encouraged him. They were on their way out.

“So it’s on my head, then,” he said. “I might as well have shoved him through the door. Is that what you’re going to say?”

“Say to whom?”

“To your public. To the guys in Homicide you enjoyed so much last night.”

“Is that what you think? I’m in league with those detectives?”

“You know what Tony Cohn told me? He said you’d betray me the first chance you get.” He turned to Waxman, glaring. “Well? How about it?”

“If I was going to betray you,” Waxman responded, “I would not be in this car.”

Abatangelo turned back to look out through the windshield. They entered a clearing beyond which he spotted the ranch house.

“I appreciate that,” he said finally.

“I know you do.”

As they came abreast of the outbuildings, Waxman pointed to the house and said, “Pull up at the gate. I’ll use the phone in the kitchen.”

Abatangelo’s jaw dropped. “Here?”

“Why not?” Waxman buttoned his coat in preparation for the cold outside. “Even if they trace the call we’ll be gone by the time they get a car out here. Besides, I know where the phone is.”

Waxman opened his door and got out. Abatangelo, deciding to follow, put the car in park and left it idling. They hurried toward the back porch through the growing wind and a faint mist. They ducked under the yellow crime scene ribbon draped across the stair. Abatangelo reached inside the door pane he’d shattered the night before and threw the lock.

The tape outlines of where the bodies of Rowena and her son Duval had been discovered remained from the night before. The bloodstains seemed to have aged considerably in just the few hours they’d been there. The door frames and cabinet edges and countertops all wore the coarse black dust left by the fingerprint examiner. There were pencil markings left here and there on the walls, the tabletop, the floor, with the initials of the trace specialist circled alongside. For all that, the room seemed as utterly indifferent to human concern as a raided tomb.

Waxman made his way along the wall to the phone. He lifted the receiver and dialed 911. As he waited for the operator his eyes rose to the message left in red on the wall: FRANCISCO. THE LADY WAITS. COME SEE.

The operator answered finally, a woman, and Waxman said, “I’m sure you’ve heard by now. There’s been an explosion out near the Akers’ property.”

The operator responded, “Who is this calling, please?”

“There’s a man at the scene,” Waxman continued, ignoring her. “He’s dead. His name is Frank Maas. He’s a suspect in the murder of the Briscoe twins. He was going to retrieve something. That’s what he said, at any rate. Something hidden out in an abandoned building. But when we got there he broke and ran. The door was rigged. A bomb of some sort.”

The operator broke in, “I need to have your name, sir.”

Waxman returned the receiver to its cradle. Unable to move at first, he stood in place, rereading the message above the phone, written to a dead man. Finally, taking the same path along the edge of the room as before, he joined Abatangelo at the far side as they headed together back out to the car.

Abatangelo got behind the wheel. “Frank said he thought Shel might be out at this Mexican’s hotel.” He put the car in gear. “Let’s find ourselves a place to clean up a little.”

Chapter 21

They took a room in the first motel they found along the freeway. Waxman went to hunt up some clothes while Abatangelo stayed behind to shower. Too tired to stand, he sat in the tub, lathering himself, the shower spray pattering against his skin. As he sat there, the scene came back to him, the dash uphill, the look in Frank’s eyes- vacant, terrified, ecstatic- as he brought the rock down. The crash of pain and then Frank’s silhouette scurrying on. The sudden wash of light. The terrifying instant of pressurized silence.

The more he revisited it, the more certain he felt that Frank’s suicide was not the result of some random impulse. It was an act of atonement. He found himself envying that.

The worst of it was, the whole thing just kept shifting on him. Every fact came freighted with a counter-fact. Every insight emerged with its opposite in tow. It was maddening, like a sudden loss of gravity. And in that weightless derangement the one phrase that kept coming back to haunt him was Cohn’s: Do you have any idea how many guys come out of the joint totally fixated on doing damage to the clown who shacked up with the little woman?

He put his head in his hands. It wasn’t that he thought it was true, he just couldn’t convince himself it wasn’t true, and that felt close enough to guilt to settle the point. Regardless, he had a pretty fair idea that Shel would never forgive him. Not completely. There’d always be that doubt- You wanted it. Sure, he could tell her, tell himself, that he was only keen to save her, he was desperate, his intentions were, if not entirely pure, at least clear. But that didn’t explain the vaguely sadistic relief he’d felt, the satisfaction flickering at the edge of his horror as he’d snapped picture after picture of Frank’s smoldering, piecemeal remains. I wouldn’t cry too hard if he ended up on the bloody end of a stick.

So this is the way one learns, he thought- like Faust, like Bluebeard’s bride- there is no greater curse on earth than a gratified wish.

He increased the hot water, edging back the cold, until his skin scalded red and it hurt to sit there. He lifted his head back. The guilty are so sentimental, he thought, fingering his scapular. He pictured Shel as he’d last seen her and shortly he was unable to breathe. He put his face in his hand and the fingers came away with a melting thread of blood. He pulled himself up, stumbled, turned the water off and listened to the drain.

Yes indeed, atonement would most definitely be preferable to this.

In the mirror his eyes seemed fathomless points. On the way to the motel, he and Waxman had stopped at a drugstore to buy a tube of Unguentine. The name reminded him of a high school algebra teacher, Sister Norbertine. Named for the patron saint of soothing ointments. His hand trembled as he put the stuff to his skin.

Waxman returned with a sack of clothes and some toiletries. As Abatangelo pulled the fresh shirt and trousers from the sack, Waxman spread out on the bed a local newspaper and a map of Solano County he’d bought. He sat there staring at them, then said, “While I was out, I made another call to the police.”

Abatangelo froze. “And?”

“I had to, you realize. It was wrong, my just leaving the scene like that.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, hands clenched in his lap.

“You told them it was a suicide.”

“I gave them my name. I confirmed I was the one who’d called earlier, and said I would be contacting them later tonight or early tomorrow with a lawyer to discuss at length what happened out there. But yes, I also told them it was a suicide. I verified that.”

He looked up, his eyes a misery.

Abatangelo said, “Thank you.” Nodding toward the maps and newspaper, he added, “What’s the reading material?”

“That party I mentioned,” Waxman said, turning to open the paper, “the one for Moreira’s daughter. Turns out it’s tonight. There’s a little piece about it here in the Socials. It’s called a quinceanera, a sort of coming-out party for Mexican debutantes.” He checked the map. “From the description they give of this place, it looks like we cut through farmland, then turn south around here, near a place called Bird’s Landing.”

Abatangelo, removing pins from the shirt Waxman had bought, said, “Call your editor, Wax. You’re going to want someone to know where you are, why you’re there, and what to think if you don’t come back.”