Low Pressure

them I wasn’t a weenie-wagger. The point is, Denton Carter got crosswise with somebody.”

“You think it was Moody?”

Van Durbin turned his question around. “What do you think?”

Rupe thoughtfully settled against the back of his chair. “I don’t know. If one of them is bearing a grudge against the other, it should be Dent. Moody came down hard on him, and, if not for Dent’s alibi, he would have been tried for the crime.”

“Wait,” Van Durbin said, sitting forward. “Are you saying it could have gone either way? Dent Carter or Strickland?”

Rupe didn’t answer, letting the writer draw his own conclusions and hoping to Christ he would catch Rupe’s drift without being so smart as to see through the manipulation.

Lowering his voice to a confidential pitch, Van Durbin said, “Doesn’t that kinda contradict what you said earlier about second-guessing Strickland’s conviction?”

“I said Strickland’s fate was in the hands of the jurors.”

“But their verdict was based on what you told them, and you told them he was guilty.”

“My arguments to that effect were founded on what came from Moody’s investigation. Was everything factual? At the time, I accepted it as such.”

“Maybe it was.”

“Maybe.”

“But you’re not one hundred percent sure?”

“Moody was under a lot of pressure from his superiors to nail that girl’s killer. He’d already put forth one suspect that fizzled. He’d’ve been made to look like a bumbling fool if his case against Strickland had fallen apart, too. The man was determined to see Strickland convicted.”

“By whatever means necessary?”

Again Rupe avoided giving a straight answer. “All I’m saying is that Dale felt the squeeze from city hall, the PD, the almighty Lystons, and Joe Q. Public.”

“So he bent rules to produce a culprit.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But if he’s got nothing to hide, why did he attack you?”

Rupe looked pained. “My thought exactly. It’s hardly the action of a man who is entirely innocent of wrongdoing. He also threatened me against speaking about this. To you. To anyone. But saying nothing smacks of a cover-up, and I want no part of it.”

Van Durbin’s ferret nose was practically twitching. As though composing the opening sentence of his next column, he said, “Moody nailed the wrong man, and that innocent young man died bloody in prison.”

“You’ve put words in my mouth that I didn’t say, Mr. Van Durbin. If you print that, I’ll demand a retraction and sue your newspaper. I hope to God that justice was served,” he added piously. “However—”

“There’s that word again. It gives me a hard-on.”

“If you want an exclusive quote from me, here it is. And this is all I will ever say on the subject: I swear on the heads of my beautiful wife and children that I did my job as prosecutor to the best of my ability, with integrity and a burning desire to see that Susan Lyston got the justice she deserved. I can’t speak to the motives or actions of former detective Dale Moody.”

“You would have been disappointed.”

Dent looked over at Bellamy where she sat in the right-hand co-pilot’s seat. She had been quiet throughout most of the flight, and he’d left her to her own thoughts. He figured she was reflecting on her dad’s declining condition and how his death would impact her.

But obviously he’d somehow factored into her thoughts, and they were compelling enough for her to have put on the headphones so she could share them with him now.

“Disappointed?”

“If we’d gone through with it last night, you would have been in for a letdown.”

“I was let down.”

“Yes, but not like you would have been if we’d continued.” She faced forward again, but he knew that her mind wasn’t on the view through the cockpit window. “When I described my marriage to you, you remarked on how boring it sounded.”

“I was being a smart-ass.”

“Of course you were. But you were right. Except for one thing. My husband wasn’t to blame, I was. Through no fault of his own, he became bored with me.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why did he get bored with you?”

“I have issues with intimacy.”

“With fucking.”

She winced. “That’s an aspect of it.”

“What’s the other aspect?”

She didn’t answer, leading him to believe there was no other aspect, but even if there was, this was the one that had caused her marriage to fail, the one that had caused her to freak out on him last night, so this was the aspect that interested him.

“What kind of issues?” he asked. “Other than the use of the word. You don’t like it. A lot of people find it offensive, but they still do the deed. So what sent you into orbit last night? I had bad breath? My feet stank?”

“It wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. I’m to blame. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“No, let’s not.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then why’d you bring it up?”

“To tell you again that I’m sorry it happened.”

“Apology accepted. Now tell me why I would have been disappointed. Which I think is total bull crap, by the way. But what makes you think I would have been?”

“Now’s not the time to talk about it.”

“It’s the perfect time. I’ve got to fly the airplane. So no matter what my reaction is, I can’t act on it. You’re safe to say anything.”

She wrestled with indecision for nearly half a minute, then said, “When Susan—”

“Aw, jeez. I had a feeling this was going to come back to her.”

“Everything comes back to her.”

“Only because you let it.”

“We’re discussing this at your insistence. Do you want to continue or not?”

He motioned for her to continue.

“The manner in which Susan died left a lot of people thinking that she had it coming. Even if they didn’t say so out loud, it was implied. By the media. The same with close friends. Condolences were sometimes tinged with a reap-what-you-sow undertone. We all sensed it. Daddy, Olivia, Steven, and me.

“One day during the trial, Allen Strickland’s defense lawyer came right out and stated that if Susan hadn’t been sexually promiscuous, she would still be alive. Rupe Collier objected. He and the defense lawyer got into a shouting match. The judge sternly reprimanded the lawyer, ordered that the comment be stricken from the record, and instructed the jury to disregard it. But the damage had been done.

“Up till then it had only been an insinuation which we—the family—had publicly ignored. But once it was put into actual words, we could no longer pretend that each of us hadn’t entertained similar thoughts.

“And owning up to such disloyalty toward Susan was painful for all of us. Olivia broke down and sobbed for hours. Daddy drank heavily that night, and that’s the only time I’ve ever seen him overindulge. Steven withdrew to his room without saying a word to anyone.

“And I…” She paused and took a deep breath. “I also locked myself in my room where, after hours of tearful contemplation, I concluded that the source of all this grief was Susan’s sexuality.

“She didn’t deserve to die because of it, but none of us would be suffering as we were if she hadn’t given in to sexual impulses. Ergo, they had to be bad. Dirty. Destructive. That’s the conclusion I reached.”

She smiled wryly. “This at a time when I was going through puberty and beginning to experience the kinds of mysterious and uncontrollable yearnings that had cost Susan her life. I thought I would be destined to end like her if