"This is Jack Leeds. I'm at 1404 Mimosa," he said. "The man living here, Gerry McClanahan, a police officer, has been killed."
I could hear the squawk of the dispatcher over the phone. I pushed myself up and leaned over the steps at the back porch, which was covered by a roof. There was a light switch. I flipped it up, and the backyard was flooded with a generous amount of light.
Gerry was on his stomach, and underneath his head was a thick pool of blood.
"Yes, I'm sure he's dead," Jack said, circling his thumb and forefinger to thank me for turning on the light. "No, I won't move him."
Jack pressed "end" on the phone and tossed it back to me. Cliff, big burly Cliff, was crying. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, staring down at the body on the ground beside him, his face contorted with strong emotions. I couldn't figure out which feeling would get the prize for dominant, but I figured shock was right up there. There was a hole in the hedge to allow passage between the yards, and in that hole lay another white garbage bag cinched at the top.
"I came out to put the garbage in the can," he said, his voice thick with tears. "I heard a sound back here and I came to look."
"What's happened to him?" I felt I should know.
"There's a knife in him," Jack answered.
"Oh my God," Cliff said, his voice no more than a whisper, and the night around us, the pool of light at the back of Cliff's house, became alien in the blink of an eye, as we all thought about a knife and the person who'd wielded it. I have a particular fear of knives. I found myself crossing my arms across my breasts, huddling to protect my abdomen. I was feeling more vulnerable, more frightened, than I had in years. I thought it was because my hormones were bouncing up and down, perhaps, unbalanced by my lost pregnancy, a word that still gave me a jolt when I thought of it.
I made myself straighten up and walk into the dark front yard. Looking up into the sky, where there was a hole in the clouds through which I could see an array of stars, I realized that I wanted to go home, lock the door, and never come out again. It was a feeling I'd had before. At least now, I wanted Jack locked in with me. That was, I guess, progress. I could hear the sirens growing closer. I slipped back to my previous post.
"Where's Tamsin?" I heard Jack ask Cliff.
"She's inside taking a shower," Cliff said. "Oh God. This is just going to kill her."
I was horribly tempted to laugh. Tamsin wasn't the one who was dead, her biographer had died in her place. Instead of writing the last chapter in Tamsin's story, Gerry McClanahan had become a few paragraphs in it himself! Was that poetic justice? Was that irony? Was that the cosmic balance of the universe or the terrible punishment of a god?
I had no idea.
But I did know taking a shower would be a good idea if, say, you had bloodstains on your hands.
I was glad that I hadn't exposed Alicia Stokes to Claude, because he certainly needed her that night. One of his other detectives was on vacation and the third was in the hospital with a broken leg, suffered that very afternoon at the home of a man arrested for having a meth lab on his farm. The lab had been set up in an old barn, one with rotten places in the floorboards, as it turned out.
Alicia's dark face was even harder to read in the dramatic light provided by the dead man's back porch fixture. I wondered if she would automatically assign guilt to Tamsin Lynd. Her suspicions had well and truly infected me.
When Jack and Cliff had been ordered away from the heap on the ground, I had seen more than I wanted to see of what was left of Gerry McClanahan. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he lay in a heap, a terrible wound in his throat. From it protruded the wooden handle of a knife. He had no wounds on his out-flung hands, or at least none that I could see. There were no weapons in his grip. As we stood there in the tiny backyard, the rain blew in again. The sky was a solid dark mass of clouds. They let go their burden, and soon our hair was again wet and plastered down. So was the red hair of the corpse. It was too bad about the crime scene; though plastic tents were put up as quickly as possible, I was sure if there were any small clues in the hedge and the yard, they were lost. A portable generator powered lights that exposed every blade of grass to a brilliant glare, and people up and down the street began coming out of their back doors to watch, despite the rain.
It was very lucky I'd told Jack I'd come with him, since Jack would have made a dandy murder suspect, given the mood he'd been in after he'd learned Gerry McClanahan's other identity. Claude had thought of that, too. I could tell from the way his eyes kept returning to Jack. The two men liked each other, and they were well on their way to being as good friends as Carrie and I were - but I'd always known Claude recognized the wild streak that more than once had led to Jack's downfall.
I said, "I was with Jack every second until we heard Cliff yelling."
"I believe you, Lily," Claude said, his voice deceptively mild. "But I know why you were coming over here in the first place. This man could've caused you no end of trouble."
"That's why Jack got the call," I said, feeling as if I'd just seen a piece of machinery crank up smoothly.
"What?"
I told Claude - and Alicia Stokes, too, since she drifted up at that moment - about the anonymous call Jack had gotten at his office in Little Rock. It was hard to tell if Detective Stokes believed me or not, but I made myself assume that Claude did. It was a pretty stupid story to tell if it wasn't true, since Jack's phone records could be checked.
Stokes seemed more interested in questioning Cliff Eggers. Someone who was spying on Tamsin would naturally be in Cliff's bad graces, but Cliff gave no sign of realizing that the policeman had been leading a double life. It was a piece of information Claude seemed to be keeping under his hat, at least for the moment. It would have to come out soon. Most often, writers aren't celebrities the way movie stars are, but Gibson Banks had very nearly attained that status.
Cliff was telling Alicia (for the third time) he'd just come out to put two bags of garbage in the can when he'd heard a moan, or anyway some kind of sound, in the backyard catty-cornered to his. That noise, of course, had prompted him to investigate. If I had been the object of as many vicious attacks as Cliff and Tamsin had, I am not sure I would have been so quick to find out what was making the noise.
Just as Cliff wound up his explanation, Tamsin emerged from the house wrapped in a bathrobe with wet hair. The bathrobe and hair made her look faintly absurd when she crossed the backyard under an umbrella. Predictably, she crumbled when she learned why we were all out in the rain. Stokes showed her the knife, encased in a plastic bag. "I never saw it before," she said.
"Did you know Officer McClanahan?" Stokes asked, her voice cold and hard. Did Stokes know, yet, about Officer McClanahan's secret identity? I thought not.
"Yes, we'd talked over the hedge. It made me feel so much safer to have a policeman living so close!" Tamsin said, which struck me as the height of irony. I could feel my lips twitch, and I had to turn my back to the group clustered in the yard, a group at that moment consisting of Alicia, Claude, Cliff, Tamsin, and a deputy I didn't know.
Stokes sent Tamsin over to stand by me to clear the way for the hearse. Tamsin was shivering. "This is so close to home, Lily. First Saralynn gets killed at my office, and now this Officer McClanahan gets killed right behind my house. I have got to start carrying something to protect myself. But I can't carry a gun. I hate them."
"You can get some pepper spray at Sneaky Pete's up by Little Rock," I said. "It's on Fontella Road." I told her how to get there.
After all the recent rain, the heat of the night made the atmosphere almost intolerable. The longer we stood in the steamy night, the less inclined we were to talk. I could feel the sweat pouring down my face, trickling down the channel between my hips. I longed for air conditioning, for a shower. These small concerns began to outweigh the far more important fact that a man had died a few feet away, a man I'd known. I closed my eyes and leaned against the house, but the aluminum siding still felt hot from the day and I straightened back up. Tamsin seemed to have control of herself and she pulled a comb out of her pocket and began trying to work it through her hair.
She spoke once again before Jack and I were allowed to leave. She said, "I don't know how much longer I can live like this. This... terrorism... has got to end."
I nodded, since I could see the strain would be intolerable, but I had no idea what to reply. You couldn't stop it if you didn't know the source.
Jack came over to me and held out his hand. Though it was almost too hot for even that contact, I took it, and with a nod to Tamsin, went back to his car with him. We were glad to get home, take a blissful shower, put on clean things, and stretch out in the cool bed, to lie there close to each other with sufficient air conditioning to make that pleasant. I don't know what Jack was thinking about, but I was acknowledging to myself how glad I was that Gerry McClanahan wouldn't be writing his book now. Jack and I could lead our lives again, and we would not be exposed. Tamsin, at least for a while, would be spared some scrutiny, though if it were ever discovered who was stalking her, there was sure to be some newspaper articles about her persecution. As of now, she and Cliff had come out of it well, too. Only Gibson Banks and his publisher were permanently inconvenienced.
I could live with that.
Chapter Eleven
I went to Little Rock with Jack the next morning. I couldn't stand another day in the small house doing nothing.
I had to promise Jack I wouldn't do anything too vigorous. I was absolutely all right, and I was chafing a little more each day under the weight of his protectiveness. Since I was just going back to surveillance on Beth Crider, it was easy to swear I'd limit my exertions.
I was beginning to hate Beth Crider.
Jack dug in at his office to begin clearing up backlogged paperwork and returning calls. I organized my campaign and drove to Crider's neighborhood yet again. Maybe we should just buy a house close to her. Maybe when Jack was pushing my wheelchair down the street she might slip up and discard her walker.
Today I'd come prepared. I'd brought a hand vacuum, a load of cleaning materials, and a bucket, plus some Sneaky Pete paraphernalia. I parked in front of a house with a For Sale sign in the yard, about three doors west of Beth Crider's, and I got out.
After I got everything set up, I began to work. In no time at all, sweat was trickling down my face and I was fighting an urge to pull off my socks and shoes. Jack's car had never been cleaned more slowly and thoroughly. When I needed water, I got it at the outside faucet. I was lucky they hadn't had the water turned off, since I had to go back and forth several times refilling the bucket.
I received my reward when Crider came out of her front door, with envelopes in her hand. It didn't take a genius to figure out she was going to put some outgoing letters in her mailbox. In this neighborhood, they were on posts by the ends of the driveways. With my back to her, I watched her progress in the passenger-side rearview mirror, while I polished it with a rag and glass cleaner. I reached inside the car to turn on the movie camera I had set up, loaded and ready. It came inside a stuffed panda. I had the panda propped and positioned to cover just that area, since Beth normally mailed her letters at about this time.
She slid her letters into the box, shut it, and raised her red flag. Then she hesitated, and I could see she was looking at the ground.
"Come on, bitch," I whispered, polishing the rearview mirror yet again. "Fall for it."
She looked back and forth, up and down the street. I was the only person out, and I had my back to her.
Down she squatted, supple as you please, to pick up the ten-dollar bill I'd torn and stuck to a tattered Arkla bill next to the curb. I'd tossed this out the window on my way down the street. I'd hoped it would seem as though the stiff morning breeze had picked up some of the trash from the car, and lodged it in front of her home on the ground.
Beth Crider straightened and walked back to her house, only remembering to resume her halting gait when she was about five feet from the steps. I knew the camera would catch the transition from robust to rehabilitative. Inside, I laughed my ass off.
And Jack's car was clean, too.
He looked up when I came in the office, having his own little transition from businessman and detective to my lover. I had the panda tucked under my arm.
"I did it," I said, knowing I sounded proud but unable to keep it out of my voice.
"Yes!" He was up like a shot and hugged me. "Let's see!"
Together we watched the film of the temptation of Beth Crider.
"So what will happen now?" I asked.
"Now, United Warehouse will approach Beth and ask her to drop her suit. She'll probably accept. United will give her some cash, she'll sign some papers, and that'll be it."
"She won't be prosecuted?"
"Staying out of court saves money and time and publicity."
"But she cheated."
"Saving time and money is more important than vindication, in business. Except in very special circumstances, when public punishment will ward off more troublemakers."
I wasn't as happy any more. "That's not right," I said, not caring if I sounded sullen.
"Don't pout, Lily. You did a good job."
"Pout?"
"Your bottom lip is stuck out and your eyes are squinted. Your hands are in fists and you're swinging your legs. You look like I'd just told you about Santa Claus. That's what I call pouting."
"So, United Warehouse will pay you lots of money?" I said, reforming my mouth and unclenching my fists. I opened my eyes wide.