His laugh sounded like a hiss. “I know, dude. You’re lucky.”
Charlie turned around, his ponytail whipping over his shoulder. His bare neck exposed a tattoo of a black panther with its fangs bared. I tried to imagine the pain of ink needles dancing around the top of my spine.
He turned back around, an old metal toolbox in his hand. He set the box on the cart and opened it up. He rummaged through what looked to be thousands of keys. Old, new, shiny, rusted, big, small.
“Heard Carter was in the hospital,” Charlie said, moving some more keys around.
I tried not to look surprised. “Yeah. Actually, he is.”
He hissed or laughed or whatever it was again. “That dude gets in more shit.”
“He’s gonna be alright.”
“Good to hear.” He stared at a particular key he’d pulled from the toolbox, then at my key. “That’s it.”
“What?”
He held up my key. “This goes to one of them rental lockers. Put a quarter in and pull the key out and it’s locked, you know?”
“Yeah. Like at the airport.”
He shrugged. “Or Sea World. Or wherever.”
“Is it possible to tell where it came from? I mean, exactly.”
Charlie held the key up and flipped it around with his fingers, then nodded. “Probably.” He smiled at me.
“For a price,” I said.
His grin grew. “Right on, brother. Something with a one and a couple of zeros in it.”
I pulled four twenties, two tens, and one of my cards out of my wallet and handed them over. “I need to know as soon as possible.”
He shoved the money in his pocket and examined my card. “An investigator. Like Magnum, dude?”
“Just like him.”
“Cool,” he said, nodding his approval. He folded the key in my card and slid them into the front pocket of his jeans. “I’ll call you.”
“When?”
He smiled. “When I know, Magnum.”
I walked away wondering if I was the only normal friend that Carter had.
53
I drove home, not knowing what else to do, and unexpectedly found Liz waiting in front of my door.
I waved. “Hi.”
She wore faded blue jeans and a sleeveless navy blouse that buttoned up the middle. Her hair was swept over to the left side of her face, her sunglasses resting atop the mane. The thick-heeled sandals made her a couple inches taller than normal.
“Hi,” she said, a reluctant smile on her face.
“Just couldn’t stay away,” I said, walking up to her.
“I got your message yesterday,” she said, ignoring my comment. “Tell me more.”
I motioned for her to follow me in to my place. We sat on the sofa, and I told her about my conversation with Charlotte Truman.
When I finished, she shook her head. “Randall is one cool guy.”
“Sure-if by cool you mean an arrogant, self-important, spineless asshole.”
She folded her arms across her chest and crossed her legs. “Alright, alright. I admit he’s not as innocent as I originally thought, but I still think Costilla’s the guy, Noah. Randall has an alibi and this Truman lady doesn’t sound like much. We’ll talk to her, but you said yourself she didn’t seem like a suspect.”
“No, I don’t think Charlotte did anything other than make a poor decision,” I said. “But all this crap keeps leading back to Randall.”
“Alibi is airtight,” she said. “He was at the hospital. We already checked it out.”
“Doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved,” I said.
“How so?”
“Could’ve hired someone, I don’t know. But he just seems wrong.”
“A lot of guys cheat on their wives. Doesn’t mean they want them dead.”
Her arms were lean and toned, her shoulders tan. I tried not to stare.
“I’m gonna tell you something and I just want you to listen for a second,” I said. “Okay?”
“I get nervous when you say things like that to me,” Liz said, shifting her weight on the sofa.
“What if I told you that Kate covered for him when she was arrested? That the heroin was his, not hers.”
She looked at me like I was the one with the drug problem. “What?”
I told her what Ken and Randall told me. She listened quietly, biting her bottom lip a couple of times.
“Noah, come on,” she said when I finished. “You really buy that? She was a user, a junkie. Lying is a way of life.”
“Ken was convinced and Randall confirmed it. He admitted that it was his.”
“Ken is her father. He’s always going to place the blame elsewhere.”
“How do you explain Randall then? Why tell me it was his if it wasn’t?”
Liz’s look was skeptical. “I don’t know why he’d say it, but what does that really give us? Even if that’s true, how does that give him motive to kill her? Jesus, if anything, Randall probably is living with the guilt complex to end all guilt complexes. Maybe telling you all this is a way for him to try and absolve himself.”
“What if Randall was afraid she’d turn on him? Recant her story and tell everyone the drugs were his,” I suggested. “Maybe going undercover and working with Costilla were harder than she imagined, and Randall saw that and started worrying that Kate couldn’t hold up her end of the deal.”
Liz leaned forward, tapping her fingers on her knees. “I know you’re having trouble with this, Noah.”
“This?” I said, annoyed that she wasn’t buying into my logic.
“Yeah, this,” she said, widening her eyes. “Kate was different. It wasn’t the same Kate. You can’t seem to grasp that, which I understand. I do. But, Noah, clean or not, she was different. You didn’t know her anymore. You had no idea about her drug problem or what was going on with her marriage. And, somehow, you’ve got it screwed into your head that you could’ve saved her.”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, nodding her head. “You think that if you’d stayed in her life, everything would have been different. And maybe it would have, but the chances that you could’ve prevented her from experimenting with heroin, marrying an asshole, and digging a legal hole for herself are slim. Slimmer than slim.” She paused, fixing her eyes on me. “And you need to deal with that.” She cleared her throat, and her look softened. “I’m sorry she’s dead, but Randall didn’t do it. I’m pretty confident on that.”
I stood up and walked over to the patio door, mulling over what she’d said. Outside, the gray sky put a silver tint in the water and there was a noticeable lack of runners and skaters, thanks to the cloudy weather. I wasn’t sure if Liz’s thinking was colored by the guilt she felt at letting Kate slip through her protection. I knew she wanted to nail Costilla. She had a lot more invested in him than I did.
But she had a point. It wasn’t so much that I thought I could’ve really saved Kate. My reasons for wanting to figure out Kate’s death were more selfish than that. I wanted to save the memories I had of her before all of this occurred. For so long, she had been the only good thing in my life. I never knew my father and my mother was a relentless drunk, incapable of providing me with the one thing that I didn’t know my life was missing until Kate had given it to me.
Love.
I had always associated that emotion with Kate, as she was the person who showed me how it felt to be cared about and to be loved for the first time. I didn’t want that memory ripped out of my life by the things that happened when we went our separate ways.
But maybe I didn’t have a choice.
