about that night, when the three bikers were shot and killed. And how Merker, and his friend Leo Edgars, somehow managed not to get killed, saying they weren’t there at the time. How, after that, Merker bailed on his share of the drugs and prostitution, how he let the Comets run things, take over his share of the market. What happened, Trixie? Did Merker cut some sort of deal with the competition? Wipe out his buddies? Was that easier than trying to get them in on the deal, too? Did you see something? Are you a witness?”
Trixie listened in quiet amazement. She was taken aback at how much I knew, I could tell that by the look on her face.
“Is that why Merker’s after you? Because of what you know? And something you took from him?”
Trixie got up, walked over to the row of hangers by the back door, fished something out of a jacket, and came back to the table. It was a piece of paper, folded over. She unfolded it.
“This was the note that was left for me, in the basement, when we found Martin Benson.”
I remembered her finding it, how she wouldn’t let me see it.
“It’s not all as simple as it seems,” she said, pushing the note across the table to me.
It read:
It wasn’t signed, but given that its author had mentioned “Leo” in the letter, it might as well have been. And just because someone wasn’t a master criminal didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.
Reading from the letter, I said, “‘I want all of it plus interest.’” I looked at Trixie. “What’s that all about?”
She took a long breath. “I ripped him off,” she said quietly. “To the tune of about half a million bucks.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “You took five hundred thousand dollars off this guy?”
“Not all at once. A little bit at a time, so he wouldn’t notice. It was my going-away money.”
“Is that the only reason he’s after you?” I asked. “Just for the money? It doesn’t have anything to do with those three bikers getting shot?”
The Bennets exchanged glances.
“Oh, I think he’d like to talk to me about that too,” Trixie said.
27
“SOMETIMES,” Claire said, “I blame myself.”
“Oh, stop,” said Trixie. “This has nothing to do with you.”
Claire shook her head, dismissing her sister. “You taking off with five hundred thousand dollars? Okay, I’m not saying I specifically blame myself for that. But your life. How it’s turned out for you. I blame myself for that.”
“Claire, we’ve been over this before,” Trixie said. Claire sniffed and looked away, and I thought maybe she was going to cry. “Aww, come on.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Don told his wife. “You did what you had to do. You had to protect yourself. You had to get out of that situation.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. Looking across the table at Claire, I said, “What do you mean you blame yourself?”
Claire sniffed again, took a deep breath. “Miranda’s my baby sister,” she said, and smiled. “When you’re the big sister, you’re supposed to be there, you’re supposed to be looking out for the younger one. But I left. Our father was a-he was a monster. And our mother was a drunk. He beat her, he took the belt to us, and…that wasn’t all.”
“Claire,” Trixie said, reaching across the table to touch her sister’s hand.
“When I was eighteen, I got away. I left. I couldn’t take any more,” she looked down at the table, took a moment, and raised her head, “of the night visits. I wasn’t going to let him touch me again. I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have anything, but I knew I had to get away. I figured I’d either kill him or I’d kill myself if I didn’t leave. I couldn’t count on my mother to protect me. She had her bottle to protect her, and who could blame her. It was the only way she knew how to deal with the pain. The only one who could help me was me. So one night, I packed up what I had, which wasn’t much, and at four in the morning, I slipped away and never went back.” She looked at her husband and reached over for his hand. “Don took me away.”
But then her eyes shifted to Trixie. Her face started cracking. “And I left without my sister.”
Don slipped his arm around her. “Come on, honey.”
“If I had taken you with me,” she wept, holding Trixie’s hand, Miranda’s hand, “maybe your life, maybe things could have been better for you.”
“I got out too,” Trixie said.
“But not right away. You were only fifteen. You had to live with…you had to live with that for almost two more years.”
Claire Bennet grabbed a couple tissues, dabbed at her eyes. “Every night I thought about you, cried myself to sleep worrying about you, praying that you’d leave too.”
“I did, Claire.”
“But you went from one bad environment to another. Bikers, strip clubs, drugs.”
“As bad as it was, it was better than what I left behind,” Trixie said, although she didn’t say it with much conviction. “I didn’t exactly have what you might call a high opinion of myself. I didn’t believe I deserved anything good. I felt worthless.” She was holding back tears of her own. “But something changed when I had Katie.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“I’d seen how Claire had managed to survive, to pull her life together,” Trixie said. “She met Don, this wonderful, wonderful man.” He couldn’t keep himself from blushing. “They got an apartment, they got a house, and finally they got this house, they have a life. A normal, decent, life. A safe life. And I thought, that’s what I want for Katie. I didn’t want her to have a life like mine. She was barely a year old when her father died, was murdered, by a man he thought was his friend. These were the people I was associating with, these were the people I was working with day in and day out. And this was the world I was going to bring my daughter up in?
“And so I began to plan my way out. When I started working at the Kickstart, I was dancing. Shit, stripping. That’s what I was doing. But I’ve always had a head for numbers, and gradually I worked my way off the stage and into the room upstairs, showed them I could do a lot more than shake my titties.”
Claire glanced in the direction of the living room, assured herself that Katie was occupied with the television.
Trixie continued, “Wasn’t long before they valued me more for what I could do with their books than what I could do onstage.”
She told me a tale of fraud, setting up dummy accounts, faking invoices, skimming from here and there, covering her tracks, trying to gather together enough money to make a life for herself and Katie.
Claire said, “You haven’t told them what else they did.”
“Claire,” Trixie said, caution in her voice. “Everything in time.”
“What?” I asked.
“Later,” Trixie said.
“Then, when the thing happened, when the others got killed, I had to get away right away. That night, I disappeared, with Katie.”
“And ended up on our doorstep,” Don said. There was no resentment in his voice, no sense that Trixie was a burden to them.
