Del was wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and a cracked- leather Goodwill jacket with a fake- sheepskin collar. “Who’s dead?” he asked.
“Guy named Roy Carter,” Lucas said. “Also a guy named Dick Ford and a girl named Frances Austin.”
“Know about Ford and Austin.” Del handed the glasses back to Lucas. “I didn’t hear about Carter.”
“He was just a couple of hours ago,” Lucas said. He took two minutes to tell the story, then asked, “What do you think?”
“Well, there’s a lot of choices. You think the Fairy did it?'
'She knows about it,” Lucas said, looking out into the night. “So she’s at least an accomplice.'
'I think so.'
'From what you say, Frances sounds like she was playing Goth, but was gonna wind up as an executive somewhere. Not really into the poverty lifestyle. So if you don’t find a Fairy, or if she didn’t do it, you’ve really got to think about the possibility that you’ve got two separate things going on here. Austin, and the others.”
“Be easier if it was all one thing,” Lucas said. “The world isn’t easy,” Del said. He finished his coffee and pitched the cup toward an oversized plastic wastebasket, and missed. Clarence Carter went away and Jefferson Airplane came up, “Plastic Fantastic Lover.”
“It’s not two things,” Lucas said, after a while. “They’re connected. We don’t have Frances’s body, but the lab says there was a lot of blood. Just like Ford and Carter. They could have yelled, their throats weren’t cut, but nobody heard them yell because, probably, by the time they thought of it, they were already going.”
“Unless the knife went up into the diaphragm,” Del said. “Jesus, though, that’d take some expertise-a doctor or something.”
“There’s that.'
'And from what you say, there’s other big differences,” Del said
“When they killed Frances, they went to all the risk of moving the body and getting rid of it. Since it hasn’t popped up yet, they did a pretty good job. But Ford and Carter, they leave out on the street, like calling cards. Right out there in public, like advertisements.”
“Advertisements for what?'
'You’re the detective,” Del said. Lucas slurped on the coffee, which tasted sort of brown, like a cross between real coffee and the paper sack it came in. “If they’re advertisements, there’ll be more of them. And now that you brought it up, another question about Frances. People were going to miss her pretty quickly, so why bother to move the body at all?”
Del shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe to shift time, to give themselves an alibi. Maybe to shift the place, so you wouldn’t look at people who had keys to the Austin house. But then, if you’re right, and the cases are connected, why does the fairy let herself be seen now? Doesn’t she care? There are probably what, a half- dozen people who’d recognize her now?”
“Maybe she just doesn’t give a shit,” Lucas said. “You know what it adds up to?” Del said. “Either you’ve got two separate things, or she’s nuts. She lets herself be seen, then she runs and hides. It’s like a game to her.”
Across the street, Heather got up, stretched, loafed into the kitchen, got something out of a cupboard-black corn chips, Lucas thought, and a bottle of salsa. They watched her carefully fixing the snack. “Is salt okay at this point? In the pregnancy?” Del asked. “Those chips have got a lot of sodium.”
“Dunno.” Lucas said, after another moment, “There’s something else going on, too. Austin-Alyssa-says her husband might have been sleeping with his assistant. Smart, pretty, big boobs; that’s Alyssa’s description. Alyssa said she didn’t care too much.”
“Bullshit,” Del said. “… because on other levels, the marriage was still okay. They had a solid partnership.'
'Wasn’t okay. Another woman gets to her husband in a way she can’t? That’s never okay,” Del said. “If she tells you that, she’s lying.” Lucas shrugged. “All I can do is tell you what she said.'
'Did you check the plane crash?'
'Not personally. I read some paper on it. Supposedly, he’s at a fly- in fishing place up in Canada. He’d been there before, had gone up by himself, meeting some pals. On the day he’s scheduled to leave, he takes off, had a power problem when he’s a hundred feet up, tries to turn back down the lake, dead stalls, and goes straight into the ground. The Canadian investigators didn’t find anything particularly suspicious. Happens a few times a year up there. This was an old rebuilt plane, a Beaver. And boom. Alyssa was back here; the daughter was back here.”
“What about the guys up there? His pals? Alyssa didn’t have anything going with any of them?”
“You’re a suspicious motherfucker,” Lucas said. And, “I’ll check that.”
“Wup- wup- wup…” Del said, pointing across the street. Toms was running toward the kitchen and Lucas put the glasses on her. “Phone call,” he said. He looked at his watch and noted the time. She spoke for ten seconds then hung up.
“Quick call,” Del said. “Setting up a meet?'
'Dunno.” Toms walked back through the visible rooms, then disappeared down a hall that led only to the door. “Somebody coming up?”
“Didn’t see anybody going in the front.'
'I think somebody called her from the door.” They sat cocked forward on the folding chairs, tensed up; Toms was gone for another ten seconds, then reappeared, pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. “Ah, shit,” Lucas said. “It’s her mom.”
“You know anything about Goths?” Lucas asked. Del did. He’d even dated a couple of them, twenty years earlier, during their initial efflorescence. Much of the Gothic trip was a deliberate, ironic, self- conscious pose, along with a genuine interest in the subject of decadence and the transcendent. Most of the Goths he knew, Del said, were smart. If they’d had a scientific bent, instead of a literary bent, they’d have become geeks.
“I’ve always been more on the industrial side myself,” Del said, “but there were crossover clubs that had both things going at the same time. Sort of Gotho- Industrial.”
“I understand all the words you just said, but none of the concepts,” Lucas said.
Del said, “Yeah. See, there’s this alternative non- jock universe that you wouldn’t know anything about…”
They talked about Goth for another fifteen minutes and came back to the murders only at the end. “How much money did Frances get?” Del asked.
“According to her mother, a little more than two million. Some carefully calculated amount that she could get without anybody paying taxes. I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it.”
“Okay. Two mil,” Del said. “Lots of people have been killed for a hell of a lot less. Maybe Mom’s a money freak.”
“She says she doesn’t care about the money.'
'Oh, bullshit. How many rich people you know who don’t care about money?” Del asked. “How about you? You’re rich. What would you do if somebody said, ‘Uh, shit, we just lost all your money in the market’?”
Lucas grinned. “Well, hell… it’d be a shock.'
'Yeah. You like your money.'
'Alyssa may like the money, but she didn’t kill the kid,” Lucas said
“If you’d seen her, Alyssa, you’d know how this whole thing has gotten on top of her. She is seriously fucked up.”
“So she didn’t kill the kid.'
'I don’t believe so,” Lucas said. “She could be a psycho killer, and then it’s all up for grabs. But to me, she just looks like a hippie chick who did good for herself. And then everybody around her went and got killed.”
“A quick nasty argument about Daddy-maybe the kid found out something? — one of them picks up a knife, there’s a struggle, the kid gets stuck…”
Lucas shrugged: “Anything’s possible. But if that’s what it is, why is Alyssa campaigning to get more cops on the case? The whole case was dead in the water. And if she killed the kid, and if I’m right about all three being killed the same way, by the same person, then why did she kill the other two?”
“Maybe somebody else figured out the connection?'
'Aw, come on, man. A bartender and a twenty- something Goth?” Del nodded. “Okay. But I’ll tell you what, I
