the long way to go, not the short way, but the last time he had checked, written in his book, this had been a pretty safe place.
He walked along the familiar route and came to the liquor store and stopped in front of it. He looked at his watch. The store closed in fifteen minutes.
Sometimes you had to break the rules.
He walked inside the store and the counterman looked up, said, “Hey, haven’t seen you in a while.”
“I know.”
“I was thinking you gave it up.”
“No.”
“What’s it gonna be?”
Harry stood his ground, looked around. All the bottles were so bright and inviting; it was like he expected to find a genie inside, one that could grant him the wish of oblivion.
One with the universe. Yeah. He got a few beers in him, that’s exactly how he’d be. Tad was wrong. He had been one with the universe when he was drunk. It was the sober part that fucked him up.
Harry picked up a six-pack of Bud and put it on the counter and took out his wallet. There wasn’t much inside. A few bucks. Enough for this, though. He looked up and the counterman smiled at him. He didn’t know the man’s name, but the man knew him, knew what he wanted. Over the counterman’s shoulder, he saw his reflection in a mirror on the wall.
He looked frantic. His tongue was sticking out of his mouth a little and his face was flushed, and the grin that was around his probing tongue looked to him to be the grin of an idiot.
“One with the universe, my ass,” Harry said.
“What?” said the counterman. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Harry left the beer, turned, and went out and back along the sidewalk. He went a way he knew that led toward a little street that passed between a grove of pecan trees. He went that way because it was a shortcut that had always been safe, nothing horrible in any sound he had ever found.
Went along knowing that the street connected to another that would lead him to Tad’s.
Tad was the man. Tad had some answers.
Kayla unlocked the door to her little house on the shadowy end of the street, hoping that damn dog Winston wasn’t loose in the yard. He was big, a Great Dane, and he loved to stick his nose in her ass, as well as stand on her car. Anyone’s car or ass, for that matter. He must have thought he was a cat. If she didn’t like the silly dog so much, she’d turn in his owner for not keeping him on a leash.
Winston didn’t show.
She went inside, moved slowly through the dark. She didn’t need a light. There wasn’t much to figure out. Furniture was minimal.
When she got to the den, which she had transformed into an office, she turned on the light. There was a clutch of darts sticking up in a block of wood on top of a large carved wooden bear. The bear had been her father’s. He bought it for her when she was ten. They had been driving along on their way to visit relatives in Houston, and there it was, along with a bunch of other chain saw–carved critters. She had squealed so loudly he had pulled over and bought her the bear, right there on the spot, had to rent a truck later to come back and get it.
The block of wood fit right between the bear’s ears.
Kayla picked up the block, pulled the six darts out of it, put the block back between Harry’s ears. That’s what she had named the bear. Harry.
After all these years she hadn’t forgotten Harry, and of course he remembered her too. A little. Had asked for her number. Just to be friendly, most likely. A sort of I’ll call, we’ll do lunch. That wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. It wasn’t the way she dreamed things would be. She thought she would grow up and see Harry again and he would fall madly in love with her and they would marry.
Two interlocking pieces of the same great puzzle. Hadn’t that been the way they talked that time so long ago?
Tonight hadn’t quite been the vision she had imagined.
Course, she had a lot of other things in mind, and nothing had come of any of those either. Like solving her father’s murder for one.
Suicide they called it, not murder.
Well, strictly speaking, no one back then thought it was a suicide. Autoerotic accidental death. That’s what was thought. But her dad had been a cop, and the police force didn’t want that out, the stuff about the autoerotic business, and they spared her and her mother from having that in the paper.
Suicide.
That’s how it read.
It wasn’t.
And it was no accident either. She didn’t care what the cops thought or what it had said in the paper.
It was murder. She was sure of it.
There was a target on the door across the way and she threw the darts one by one at it. Three of the darts stuck in the door. She was going to have to replace that door pretty soon. It was pocked with holes. The landlord found out, he’d be pissed. Maybe, she thought, I can get some cork board, cover the whole door, that way I miss, no damage.
She collected the darts, tried again from a closer distance. She hit the board five out of six times. A couple of them landed in the general vicinity of the bull’s-eye.
When she gathered them up a third time, she picked up the block of wood, stuck the darts in it, replaced it between Harry’s ears.
So much for sports.
She turned on some music, doo-wop, her favorite.
She fixed a cup of instant coffee, heating it in the microwave. It tasted dreadful. She sipped it, standing at the kitchen sink, thinking about the events of the night, about what Harry had said about a redheaded guy, thinking this while she listened to the Tokens sing about the lion in the jungle.
She sat down at her desk in the den with her cup and used a key under her chair cushion to unlock the central desk drawer.
She took files out of the drawer, placed them on the desktop, shuffled them open. She looked at the photocopies of the crime photos inside.
Her father. Hanging. Wearing lipstick, a bra, lace panties, and fishnet stockings with leg hair poking through.
You couldn’t tell it in the photos, but the panties were pink. They really didn’t go well with his skin color, and they certainly didn’t match the bra, which was white and rather loose-fitting.
Nope. Didn’t look good. Loose bra. Hair poking through the stockings. And those frilly pink panties. Just didn’t work. Especially in the bug-smeared light of his garage. Bad atmosphere.
It was an atmosphere she remembered very well.
She was the one who found him.
43
Harry found Tad’s door wide-open, and when he went cautiously into the house, turned on the light, he smelled something that he recognized immediately.
Liquor. Alcohol. A lot of it. You could have given about fifty fat people a full-fledged rubdown with just the smell alone.
Damn, thought Harry. Damn.
Tad’s feet were poking out from under the kitchen table, cans and bottles were spread all over. Two empty bags of honey-roasted peanuts lay ripped open nearby.
