A Kiss Gone Bad

42

The one true suicide note composed that October in Encina County read as follows: I deeply regret the things I have done and left undone. I murmured that at church each Sunday for the past sixteen years and each time it felt like a bee’s sting near my heart and God knew I was a rotten liar. If I make it to heaven I’ll know He’s forgiven me. I take full responsibility for what happened to Corey Hubble and in turn what happened to Pete Hubble. I heard as a boy that love made you do great things, but I never figured good love would make you do evil. I write this not as explanation but as apology, and because regretfully Lucinda will not tell one moment’s truth. Lucinda and I became lovers before her husband died. His death from cancer was long and drawn-out, and the love between them faded long before he got sick. We were very careful and discreet, but Corey found out about us after Lucinda’s election to the state senate. I don’t know how, maybe he started following his mother and spotted us at one of the motels we used. He delivered flowers for spending money, so perhaps he saw us where we shouldn’t be. While we were staying at a friend’s house in Houston, Corey surprised us. He burst into the upstairs bedroom with a shotgun and we fought. I got the shotgun away from him, but then he grabbed for my service revolver and I grabbed it back and it fired twice, once hitting him in the head. He was hurt, but he didn’t die. Lucinda’s an RN. She stabilized him but refused to take him to a doctor because she was worried about the scandal. I began to cease to love her then. What kind of woman does that? A kiss can fool you. But I went along with her idea, scared shitless of losing my career, and we drove the boy to Texarkana, where she knew of a nursing home where she could cut a deal. She’d been doing legislation on nursing home reform, so she knew which homes were crooked and might cut her a deal and would benefit most from her protection. Lucinda greased some palms and he got care at the home. We thought he would quietly die but he didn’t. We returned to Port Leo late that Saturday, me driving Corey’s car, Lucinda driving mine. I took command of the investigation into Corey’s disappearance, and I stamped out any evidence that could point to him having fallen victim to violence. I am sorry to the people of Port Leo for betraying their trust, but I was young and foolish and scared. I have read a lot on head and brain injuries, and they are confounding, unpredictable things. Corey hovered over our lives, not alive and not dead. He haunts me even now. The administrator at the home (Phil Farr) was a goddamned crook, and he’d done Medicare fraud before, creating clients that never existed. After we took Corey there Lucinda protected this home against agency investigations. Farr and this clerk made Corey into John Taylor. This clerk was a creepy little bastard who was suspected at one point of smothering a lady patient at the home, but nothing came of that. Now we know that clerk became Buddy Beere and followed Lucinda eventually to Port Leo, and now he has killed some poor young women. I take blame for that as well. I thought Lucinda had killed Pete, or perhaps his ex-wife Faith. I did not want a murder investigation centering on the Hubbles. I behaved badly. I am sorry to the people I have hurt. I am not sorry to Lucinda Hubble, and the people of the Coastal Bend should not suffer her one moment longer. I apologize to the people who have suffered so because of my mistakes, including Claudia Salazar, who I wrongfully terminated and should have her job back. Claudia, don’t hate me. I always loved you more than a little. God forgive me my wrongs. – Delford Morton Spires

He hanged himself with a stout length of rope. His service revolver lay on the floor below his feet, polished and oiled, next to his gleaming badge and his carefully folded uniform.

Claudia and Whit stood on the slope of land leading away from Buddy Beere’s cabin, watching the work crew spear the ground with their shovels. The men dug slowly, carefully, methodically unearthing the land around Buddy’s house, looking for the mortal remains of Marcy Ballew and the women from Brownsville and Laredo. Claudia stood on crutches, her leg heavily bandaged, her hair pulled up from her eyes. Whit leaned against an old laurel oak. He held blank autopsy orders, ready to fill out in case the searchers found human remains.

Whit watched her. Her face was emotionless. ‘You sure you want to be here?’

‘It’s okay. You got to look the beast in the eye, Whit.’

‘You gonna bring David here when’s he released?’ Whit asked. David was recuperating at a Corpus Christi hospital, having suffered severe bone and nerve damage in his back and chest from the shotgun blast. He was out of immediate danger, but the road to rehabilitation looked to be long and winding.

‘If he wants to come,’ she said, not looking at him.

‘You haven’t talked about David much.’

‘David… needs me right now. Badly.’

Claudia said nothing for a long while, watching the dirt slowly pile.

A pair of FBI agents came out of the cabin, notepads open, arguing. Buddy’s belongings had been boxed and catalogued and no doubt would be sent to Quantico for the criminal psychologists to purr over. All the evidence they would need to scribe their papers on Buddy Beere, add him to the literature of the compulsive killer. Patsy Duchamp, given a meaty story, had delineated most of the facts in the paper, and Whit had read the account with a greasy kink in his stomach: Buddy was born Darren Burdell in Milwaukee, with a hophead mother who disciplined her tot with blades and lit cigarettes. Little Darren killed his mother at age thirteen when she tried to castrate him. He decapitated her an hour after her death, which gave the social workers pause. He spent time at a juvenile home and mental ward, seemed to improve, worked odd jobs. Fell out of sight and headed south, apparently killing the occasional prostitute or runaway. One pundit quoted on television opined that Buddy preferred work at nursing homes since he would get to see people expire on a fairly regular basis. This might also explain his desire to be a rural JP. Serving as coroner, inspecting dead bodies, would have been delightfully stimulating for him. Credit-card receipts showed he had visited Deshay at least twice a year – perhaps treating Corey as a trophy, an example of his cleverness, paralleling the serial-killer fixation on visiting hidden remains of victims. A check of the human resources files at Placid Harbor showed that Buddy, armed with a master password, had altered the personnel records three times to indicate he was present at the nursing home when he was not. The dates were the dates when Marcy Ballew, Angela Norris, and Laura Palinski all vanished.

Claudia watched the federal agents walking around the cabin. ‘I wonder why he didn’t bury Heather if he buried the others,’ she said in a dead voice.

Whit inched onto the thin ice. ‘You couldn’t have saved Heather, Claudia. You couldn’t know she was in mortal danger. Neither did she.’

‘I could have convinced her to stay in a safe place.’

‘Stop it,’ Whit said. ‘She was a co-conspirator in murder. No way was she going to get close to you or let you help her. You saved Velvet and David and anyone else Buddy would have killed along the line. That has to be enough.’

‘Delford could have told me.’ She suddenly shivered. ‘He could have turned himself in. He had years of outstanding service on his side. He could have cut a deal, testifying against Lucinda.’

‘You want pearls with your hair shirt, Claudia?’ Whit said. He put an arm around her, and she leaned against him, old friend to old friend.

They watched the work crew begin to dig on a fresh stretch of land, between the oaks. Fifteen minutes later the crew found bones. Claudia stayed in the shade of the trees while Whit completed the autopsy authorizations.

Four days later Whit came home to find Faith Hubble, out on bond, sitting on a deck chair by his father’s pool, waiting for him. She wore jeans, a dark blouse, a ball cap, dark glasses. The uniform of the incognito.

‘I assume I’m not in violation of some restraining order,’ she said, not lowering the glasses. ‘I’m behind on reading my mail.’

‘You’re not,’ Whit said. ‘But if my father spots you here I imagine he’ll say you’re trespassing.’

He couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses. ‘I suppose you will say you were just doing your job,’ she said. ‘Destroying my son.’

‘Me? Look in the mirror. Faith.’

He saw her hands tremble. ‘My mother always said I had dreadful taste in men. I think you and Pete proved her point.’

‘Go see your son at the jail. Faith. While you can. They don’t arrange visits between prisons.’

‘You’re a cruel bastard.’

‘I spent about five seconds feeling sorry for you,’ Whit said. ‘Lucinda dragged you into the cover-up, made you dirty your hands instead of her. But you did it, willingly, for years, Faith. If you hadn’t, Sam never would have had a reason to kill his father.’

‘You don’t know thing one about my life… what my life has been like…’

‘No, I don’t. I can’t comprehend it.’ He felt a tremor of revulsion that he’d ever touched her.

She stood. ‘We have very, very good lawyers. And I promise you, when justice is served and our names are cleared’ – a straight reading from their press statement, he thought – ‘you’re done in this town. You won’t be able to get a job scrubbing toilets.’

‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling you’ll have filled that position.’

Selected election results from the November 7 election: Texas Senate, District 20, (Encina County tally only): Aaron Crawford (R): 11,587 Lucinda Hubble (D)*: 939* Hubble formally withdrew from race 10/24 Justice of the Peace, Precinct One, Encina County: Buddy Beere (D)**: 12 Whitman Mosley (R): 5,347** deceased but not removed from ballot

Whit could only suppose those twelve voices of democracy did not read the newspaper or voted strict party lines, death and felonies notwithstanding. Whit watched the results with a somber Irina and Babe, gave Patsy Duchamp a neutral comment for the paper, and went to bed.

You don’t act like a judge and you end up getting elected, he thought before sleep claimed him. Politics is just strange enough for you to stay.

The Honorable Whit Mosley savored the beauty of the late January afternoon as the borrowed Don’t Ask puttered out of St Leo Bay and beyond Escudo and Margarita Islands. Before him lay the wide-open Gulf of Mexico, the sea gunmetal gray, the waves whipped by just-right wind. January had been warmer than usual, the breezes sweet, the sunlight healing. Gorgeous, the fresh air like vitamins sucked straight into his lungs.

‘You let me know if you get seasick,’ Whit called to Velvet. She sat in a chair, face tilted toward the sun. She had returned from L.A. for Sam’s trial, starting in two days, and had been quiet since Whit picked her up at the Corpus Christi airport. She had hugged him fiercely but said little, nodding when he suggested spending an evening out on the Gulf and out of the reach of the reporters.

‘Just don’t steer this leaking contraption like a drunk man.’

‘Speaking of drunk,’ Whit said, ‘where are these legendary margaritas you promised?’

‘I knew you’d put my ass to work.’ Her first laugh.

He dropped anchor and followed her down into the spacious cabin. She was dressed in casual jeans and rugby shirt, her hair pulled back into a modest ponytail, and skin lightly touched with makeup. This was the Velvet, he thought, that might have been if the cameras never rolled. The Velvet that still might be.

‘What can I do?’ Whit asked.

‘I don’t trust you to mix the booze right, but you can juice me some limes while I work my tequila magic’ She inspected the bottles in Gooch’s bar. ‘I’m gonna kick Gooch’s ass if there’s no Grand Marnier in here.’

‘I strongly suspect Gooch’s boat is Grand Marnier-free.’

‘Shows what you know.’ She raised a half-empty bottle in victory from the cabinet. ‘Just hiding back here, waiting for me.’

She began to rinse out a blender. He sliced the limes. They worked in amiable silence.

‘I should hate Sam and oddly I just feel sorry for him,’ Velvet said suddenly. ‘He doesn’t deserve it, but I do.’

Whit poured the lime juice into the cleaned blender she had set next to him. ‘I thought I knew what family tragedy was. I didn’t.’

Velvet poured liquor into the blender and turned it on. Whit moved behind her and hugged her, carefully. She leaned back against his shoulder. He felt the flutter of her sigh.

She finished the drinks and he tasted. ‘God, that’s good,’ he said.

‘A tart margarita is my specialty.’ She blinked. ‘That used to be a joke.’

He smiled. She didn’t smile or laugh much; he couldn’t blame her. They took the blender up to the deck. The two of them drank and played at fishing, caught nothing, and listened to a strange mix tape Gooch had made: Smashing Pumpkins, Italian opera. Patsy Cline, Jimmy Buffett. Sad songs but somehow not so sad they hurt. They sang along with Margaritaville, and Velvet leaned back against Whit’s chest.

The sun sank into the horizon. They cooked steaks, and Velvet blended another pitcher of margaritas. The night air was crisp but not damp, the breeze a constant caress. They talked as the moon rose, Velvet reminiscing about growing up in Omaha, Whit telling tall tales on his brothers, thinking. This is it, this is life, this is fixing her.

Sitting on the deck, Velvet and Whit watched the stars glimmer over the Gulf and finished the hearty dregs of margarita. Whit was drunk, pleasantly and amiably so, for the first time since coming back from Louisiana. Velvet leaned back against his chest, her hair scented with the tang of lime juice. The stars, away from the smears of light crowding the coast, were like virgin light glistening in their first night. Velvet started to count them.

‘Each one’s a wish you get to make,’ she said.

Whit let her get to a hundred before he kissed the side of her throat.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

He stopped. But she didn’t pull away from his arms, his lap.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought…’

‘I know, Whit. You want to make… what happened to me right. I love you for that. I’m not gonna let what that bastard did to me dictate the rest of my life.’

He was quiet, listening to the water lap against the hull. ‘But you don’t want me.’

She shook her head, turned to face him. She traced his jaw with her fingertip.

‘I got a Plan B. I’m going back to Omaha when Sam’s trial is done. No more movies for me.’

‘I’m glad. Very glad. But…’

‘And so, I’m kind of taking life slower. If you and me… well, it would just be for the short while before I left. I don’t want that anymore, Whit.’ She laughed softly. ‘I went so long not saying no, and now I say no to a guy like you. I got no brains.’

He kissed her once, softly, letting the boat rock them like a cradle, and finally she fell asleep against his shoulder. She slept in his arms until the morning, and he watched over her, counting the stars for them both.