A Kiss Gone Bad

33

Claudia returned to her office; Gardner was talking low on the phone, serious and somber, just saying yes or no. She felt a mix of worry and anger toward Whit. He was in some kind of trouble, she was sure, but he wasn’t about to let her help him. Men. Thought they could do everything themselves. Truth be told, he was probably bedding Faith Hubble and that ruling was just a pure favor to her, cleanly sweeping a doubt-riddled case under the rug.

Do you really think so little of him?

Gardner finished his conversation and left without a word. He had barely spoken to her after their exchange. A pink message slip lay on her desk, David pestering her about the party for his grandfather. Perhaps a party would do her good, even if it was full of David’s relatives, who seemed to regard her as clinically insane for leaving their darling boy and even being held at a nursing home, the kind of place that inevitably depressed her.

She opened the Ballew file, desperate to take her mind off Whit and Eddie and Pete Hubble. Maybe a reread would prompt her mind to look at the Ballew problem in a new way.

Wait a second. Speaking of nursing homes, Marcy had worked at one. The Encina County deputies had called the home in Louisiana and garnered nothing useful from the staff regarding Marcy’s disappearance. Inspiration struck. She and David had concentrated on the flimsy connections between Marcy’s wrestling interest and Port Leo, but what if there was a professional connection? She phoned the director of Port Leo’s home, Placid Harbor, a snip-voiced woman named Roselle Cross.

‘Ms Cross, have you ever heard of a nursing home in Deshay, Louisiana, called Memorial Oaks?’

‘No.’

Claudia drummed a pencil. ‘Y’all ever have much contact with the staff at other nursing homes?’

‘Well, the administrators do, if there’s a transfer. Buddy Beere usually handles that.’

‘I’d like to talk to him.’

‘Sure. He’s usually around.’

‘Thanks.’ Claudia gathered her notes and the Ballew file and headed for the door.

The boat still smelled of death.

Whit closed the door behind him. Real Shame had not had its windows opened to the air since Pete had been found, and the atmosphere felt as oppressive as a wool blanket in summer. The Deloaches would soon take back possession of their boat and scrub away all traces of unpleasantness. He suspected that Real Shame would sail within days, away from police scrutiny in Port Leo.

He went down to Pete’s stateroom. The air still smelled, slightly, of human waste and blood. The mattress still lay bare. The closets were empty. The diver Claudia recruited had found no trace of Pete’s laptop and no sign of discarded diskettes or papers.

Whit figured Pete had not destroyed his research as a sad pre-suicide gesture. He had either shipped it off to someone else for safekeeping or the killer had taken it or destroyed it. Unless Pete had hidden it – and the boat still seemed the most likely place. And where had the supposed half million in cash gone? If Whit had either of those, he might have enough information to protect himself and his family. Or enough to get them all killed.

He rooted around the boat for an hour, finding nothing. No more tapes of Pete exploring scenes for his Corey movie, no computer diskettes squirreled away in couch cushions, no notes outlining the past. He was pawing through the small cabinets in the head when a phone rang. Not his cell phone in his pocket.

Whit followed the ringing to a bedside table. In a drawer was another cell phone. Its readout announced CALLER ID BLOCKED. He clicked the phone on.

‘Hello?’ he said.

‘Hello? Pete?’ A woman’s voice.

‘Yes,’ Whit said, simultaneously thinking, What the hell are you doing, dumbass?

‘Why aren’t you answering your other phone?’

‘Lost it,’ Whit improvised.

‘Look, some cop in Port Leo’s been calling here and leaving messages. I had to fucking disconnect my number. I want to know what’s going on.’

‘Nothing.’ He made his voice tired, indistinct.

‘I’m still waiting on my money, sweetness.’

‘Your money… okay,’ Whit said. ‘Let’s get that to you.’

Silence hung like a blade in the air. ‘Who is this? Where’s Pete?’

‘He can’t come to the phone right now…’ Whit tried lamely. ‘Who am I speaking with?’

She hung up.

Whit clicked through the menu options on the cell phone. There were no unheard or archived messages, no numbers listed for speed dialing, no numbers listed in his phone book, no numbers listed in his call log. Pete had covered his tracks. Whit cursed.

But it had sounded long-distance, and the woman’s voice was a soft, throaty drawl, definitely Southern, not one of Pete’s California starlets. And she was expecting money. He pulled out his own phone and called the police station. Claudia was out and he had no intention of talking to Gardner or Delford. But he got Nelda, the dispatcher, to go look in the Hubble file and tell him that the phone number in Missatuck, Texas, the one that Claudia had been unable to get an answer from, was registered to a Kathy Breaux. He tried the number: disconnected, and no new number given in its place. He could force the phone company to give him the number. But chatting on the phone would accomplish nothing.

It was gambling time.

Whit pocketed Pete’s phone and left the boat, hurrying to his car. He headed home, a loose plan he’d formed earlier taking solid shape. He called Velvet’s hotel room, got no answer, left a message for her to call him on his cell phone. He left a vague note for Babe and Irina, packed a bag, tossed it in the back of his Explorer, and headed out of town. He didn’t notice the flooring company van following him from the marina, idling on the other end of Evangeline while he stopped at home, and he didn’t notice the van and another car staying a good distance behind him when he roared north onto State Highway 35, aiming toward Houston and the East Texas piney woods beyond.

Claudia hated nursing homes because she suspected she’d slobber her last in one someday. Probably a well-meaning niece or nephew would shuttle her ass into a Medicare bed, tsk-tsking the whole time about poor old Aunt Claudia.

Placid Harbor wasn’t bad as nursing home facilities went. The word placid suggested residents in a drug-induced fog. But the view across St Leo Bay and Little Mischief Park was postcard pretty, and many of the residents were mobile and articulate, and management kept it clean. Not so bad for an iceberg to die on.

Roselle Cross’s office was modest, furnished with a Victorian desk, memorabilia from local Port Leo girls’ Softball teams on the walls, and photos of cheery and plump Roselle hugging residents. The decor in the photos showed these lovefests happened during Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, St Patrick’s Day. Every day a holiday at Placid Harbor.

Roselle returned to the office. ‘Buddy called in sick today, but I checked our files. We haven’t had any transfers from any homes in Louisiana.’

‘Where have you had transfers from recently? Say in the past year?’ Maybe she could delve further into the Ballew girl’s employment history, see if there was another connection through another home.

Roselle Cross kept a patient, holiday-quality smile and vanished into the front office. She returned five minutes later, armed with documents. ‘Well, in the past year we’ve had three from Corpus, two from San Antonio, one from Aransas Pass, one from Port Isabel, and one from Austin.’

‘What about transfers out? People leaving Placid Harbor for someplace else?’

She scanned her papers. ‘One to Brownsville, one to Laredo, two to Corpus.’

‘When these people transfer, how do they get here?’

‘Well, with the close-by cities, like Aransas Pass or Corpus, usually it’s an ambulance service that moves them. Or family members. Depends on the client’s condition.’

‘And what about the more distant towns?’

‘Again, the family often brings the client. Or, for a charge, we can take or fetch them ourselves, depending on the client’s condition,’

‘So who would do this?’

‘Buddy or more likely someone working for him. And a nurse or nurse’s aide, if needed.’

‘And nothing on Deshay, Louisiana?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Okay, thanks.’ She stood to go. ‘I understand there’s a party here this weekend for my ex-husband’s grandfather. Mr Power?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s a delight.’ Roselle Cross managed to say this without the barest hint of sarcasm. Claudia liked her better immediately.

Claudia paid a guilt trip to David’s Poppy, ready to shrug off blistering blame for making David unhappy if David had gained a spine and told his grandfather about their divorce. But luckily, Poppy was asleep, snoring in his bed with wild abandon, his mouth slack, lips pale with age. His roommate, watching a Spanish-language soap opera, turned up the volume higher and told Claudia in strident Spanish, ‘You live your life for all these years and then you got to worry about roommates. Roommates, like you’re in college. And me with a Purple Heart.’

Velvet awoke slowly. Clambering toward wakefulness required enormous effort; her limbs weighed like stone. The darkness around her was oceans deep, so dark that it was not an absence of light but light’s very opposite.

She breathed and fabric blocked her mouth and throat. Her tongue, dry as sand, wriggled against the plug and felt rough texture of cloth and masking tape.

She strained to move. Cords bound her wrists and ankles. In her confusion she remembered a silly flick she directed two years ago, Fit to Be Tied, and mostly, she and the cast laughed and giggled through the scene. They had found nothing enticing and erotic in bondage, lacking few restraints themselves. Pete starred in the movie and groggily she called for him, but the mouth plug turned her plea into an inarticulate moan.

She ached – her head, her jaw, her stomach – and she became aware that thick, dense silk covered her eyes. She could see no light creeping in around the blindfold’s edges.

Fear rose in her, sudden and sour as bile. She wrenched hard against the cords. They did not slacken.

She tried to remember where she had been.

Junior Deloache’s condo. After that numbnuts Whit ruled for suicide, Junior had invited her over for a drink. To calm down and think over the next move, he said. Like he was suddenly Pete’s advocate, the jerk, talking about the army of lawyers his father could command. But she had not wanted to be alone. She would have preferred having a glass of wine with Claudia Salazar, trying to persuade her to keep the case open somehow. A female friend, a tart in arms, would have been nice to have. She wanted to slap Whit; he had said he was on her side and God he was a liar. Kangaroo fucking court is what it was. But Junior was there, being kind.

Kindness had always mattered.

She remembered, coming out of the fog, a scream forming in her throat.

They’re at Junior’s condo, drinking whiskey. Anson’s not around, thank God. He gives her the shivers, creeping around in that wheelchair. Velvet gets quickly and angrily drunk. Junior paws her breasts and mutters about film speeds and money shots.

‘Let’s do a movie,’ he says. ‘Right now. C’mon.’

She shrugs off his hand and pours more bourbon, thinking he’ll be too drunk to get hard and too little to notice and suddenly he belts her, harder than she’s ever been hit before. She realizes she spoke her thought aloud. The world devolves into a spinning circle of stars, and she fights as Junior yanks down her jeans, rips her thong in half, pulls loose her sweater, snaps off her brassiere. The Sig’s still in her purse and she clambers toward it, but he punches her once, twice, and she’s lying on the carpet, stunned, bleeding. Through the foggy haze of pain she sees Junior setting up a camera, aiming it toward her, then shucking his Houston sports team clothes.

‘Gonna make a movie now, bitch,’ he says, ‘The working title is Fuck Velvet Hard. Already planning the sequel. Gonna call it Velvet Tells Me Where the Fucking Money Is.’

‘Stop it. Stop, Junior, this isn’t funny.’

He is erect and he jabs a button on the camcorder. ‘I’m not gonna get screwed over anymore. I’m a businessman. I’m gonna get to be in a fuck film, and I’m gonna get my money back.’

She stumbles to her feet, intent on getting that gun and shooting him, where’s her damned purse, but he hammers her again, his fist bouncing off the back of her head, and she falls to the floor. She pukes up the bourbon and…

Then what?

She breathed around the mouth plug. God, this wasn’t the movie, was it? Her head ached.

‘Junior?’ she tried to say.

… she hears the doorbell ring. Not the condo elevator door creaking open, not Anson wheeling back, but the other entrance, the stairs, and she hears Junior cuss softly.

A chair creaked, next to her. A finger, callused, ran along her cheek.

‘No, darling. Junior’s not here.’

She held herself very still.

The voice was low, a man’s, a little gravelly. ‘Would you like the gag removed, darling?’

She nodded.

‘You should understand – no one can hear you, but I won’t tolerate you screaming. At least not for now.’

A metal point inched down her leg. It stopped at her knee and pressed, gently.

‘Owww,’ she groaned.

‘If you scream, darling, we’ll get right down to my fun. I’ll dig open those tits and we’ll see if they’re real.’

Velvet held perfectly still, not even daring to breathe.

‘Nod once if you understand.’

She nodded.

The knife point left her knee. Gently the hands caressed her face. She heard a lock snap – Jesus, he has this thing locked on my face! – and the mouth plug was pried loose from her lips. A finger, wrapped around a damp cloth, cleaned out her mouth, dribbled welcome water over her tongue. She resisted the urge to bite down and take the finger off.

‘There you go, darling,’ the man said.

She wetted her lips with her tongue. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m your new lover.’

A sick chill goose-pimpled her skin. ‘Will you take off the blindfold?’

‘Not for a while. More fun this way.’

Fun. That word again. ‘Where am I?’

‘Heaven.’

‘Where’s Junior?’

‘Hell. Where he belongs.’

She offered a fake, soft laugh. ‘No, really.’

‘Junior isn’t going to bother you anymore. I took care of him for my sweet darling.’

‘Why am I here?’

‘I need you,’ he said.

Her tongue felt dry as dirt again. ‘Yeah, baby, I can sure understand that. We all need. Perfectly natural.’ She used her film voice, coy, trying to keep from shaking. ‘But I can’t give you what you need all tied up, baby.’

‘Quiet now,’ he said, brushing her hair with his fingertips.

‘I have a name, baby. Velvet.’

He hummed, low in his throat.

‘You untie Velvet, hon, you let me go, I’ll give you what you need.’

She felt a finger run along her naked breasts, her stomach, the cup of her navel. She suppressed a shudder.

‘What’s your name, honey?’ she asked.

She heard the chair shift. She could smell his breath, reeking of garlic and fried shrimp. He nibbled her ear and ran his tongue along its edge.

‘What’s your name?’ she tried again in a whisper, her voice cracking.

‘My name is Corey,’ he whispered back. ‘Corey Hubble.’

Then he climbed on top of her. She began to scream.