Bad To The Bone (22 page)

Clarissa Jones had made mincemeat out of a
girl from the country like me. She'd honed in on my weak spots and
tortured me with them, dragging me to dinners at the country club
where my manners and clothes could not even match those of the
waitresses. She'd perfected a stare that started at my cheap shoes
and ended at my home-bleached hair, never mind that her own shade
would have looked phony on a woman two decades younger than
herself. Everything that Jeff loved about me, she recast as a
fault. I wasn't free-spirited, I was irresponsible. I wasn't
spontaneous, I was loud. And instead of being smart, I was
manipulative. But the one thing she couldn't argue with was that I
was a hell of a lot younger than she was. And maybe that's why she
really hated me. Because she had never stopped tearing me down.

Why in god's name was I winging my way
willingly toward this dragon? Did I really want to nail Tawny
Bledsoe that bad?

Yes, I thought as the plane began descending
near Tampa, I suppose I did.

I drove by my in-laws on the way to the
motel. It was every bit as gaudy as I remembered. Jeff was the son
of a self-made millionaire who had traded good sense for big bucks.
Just before we married, Jeff's parents had moved into a white brick
monstrosity that my mother-in-law insisted was called Dutch
Renaissance. The house looked like a cross between Tara and
Camelot, meaning it was mighty damn ugly in a turreted sort of way.
It fronted Tampa Bay and had set them back zillions, but then they
had zillions to waste.

Jeff's father had been the first farmer in
his rural county to sell out to developers—after quietly buying up
farmland for a decade before the boom came. He got rich and got
out, which was just as well since his neighbors stopped speaking to
him after he ruined their towns and took advantage of their
friendships. Jeff's mother had assumed the role of socialite after
they moved to Tampa, but she had never quite been able to conceal
the desperation in her eyes. She tried too hard, and she knew it.
This knowledge made her mean. Specifically, it made her mean toward
people like me. I guess I reminded her of where she'd come
from.

The house loomed large and
white, like the ghost of a mountain in the deepening twilight. A
party was in full swing. Porsches, Jaguars and BMWs jammed the
circular driveway. I sat in my rental car staring at the well-lit
mansion and wondering how much time Jeff had spent there since we
split. His father didn't like him at the house, I
knew
. They'd been fighting about Jeff's long hair
for a good twenty-five years by now.

I was just about to leave when I noticed a
dark sedan parked down the street, facing the house. It was the
only curbside car on the entire block. A tiny red ember moved
inside the darkened interior as an unseen person smoked. The cops,
maybe, watching to see if Jeff tried to come home to Mom and
Dad?

Well, no matter who it was, I couldn't just
sit there in front of the house being conspicuous. I pulled out a
map and studied it, pretending to be lost. Then I started the car
again and slowly cruised past the sedan. Two men sat in the front
seat, both of them lean with dark, brushed-back hair. They were as
sleek as a pair of otters. The men stared at me with blank
expressions as I drove past. I was looking as much like a befuddled
tourist as I could, but suspected it wasn't enough. I stopped the
car, backed up and rolled down my window.

"I'm lost," I told them. "I'm trying to find
the bridge to St. Pete."

"That way," the driver said, his voice
tinged with an accent that didn't match his vaguely Hispanic
coloring. He sounded like he was from the deep South. He jerked a
thumb up and pointed it behind him without bothering to look, then
dismissed me by rolling up his window. I waved my thanks and drove
on, turning back only to memorize their license plate number.

The two men were not good news. They had
eyes like sharks, flat, black and lifeless. I sped away, invisible
spiders scuttling across the back of my neck. Not cops, I thought.
Not cops at all. At least, not good ones.

"What the hell are you trying to prove?"
Bobby's bellow cut through the static of his portable phone. I
hadn't heard him that upset since the downtown Hilton announced
they would no longer serve their All-You-Can-Eat Sunday Brunch.

"I know what I'm doing," I
said, annoyed at his fatherly concern. Since when did Bobby worry
about my ability to take care of myself? I was sorry I had told him
where I
was going.

“Both Channel 5 and Channel 11 ran the press
conference. In its entirety. Including you sticking your damn
tongue out. You're going to get shot," Bobby predicted. "If this
dame is what you say she is, why are you going out of your way to
piss her off?"

"I have to find out where she is," I said.
"I can't do that unless she feels the pressure and starts to screw
up."

"Have you forgotten that she has her kid
with her?" Bobby asked in a voice that reeked of disappointment.
"Remember that when you push her to the wall."

"I know," I admitted, not wanting to think
about it. "But she would never harm her own daughter."

"I hope to hell you're right," he said. "How
long are you going to try this boneheaded scheme?"

"I'll be here for a couple of days. I'm
going to visit my in-laws tomorrow."

Bobby let out a breath. "Seeing as how I
can't stop you, any way I can help?"

"Run a license check for me?" I asked.

"Why?"

Bobby is pig-headed, not stupid. There's no
sense in trying to put one over on him. I explained about the two
men watching the house and he exploded again.

"That's it. You have no idea what you're
getting into. Come back immediately. I'll hook you up with someone
who can back you up and the two of you can—"

"Bobby," I interrupted. "This is a girl
thing. Woman-to-woman. Trust me. I'll call you tomorrow."

I hung up and flipped on CNN. You never
know. I might end up with the most famous tongue in America. After
Gene Simmons, of course. 

I woke the next morning to Florida sunshine.
Over country ham and grits with red-eye gravy, I thought about a
strategy to take with my former mother-in-law. I decided on the
direct approach. I'd torture her, stick bamboo shoots under her
fake nails and poke pencils into her liposuction scars if she gave
me any shit.

It was past noon before a woman, instead of
a machine, answered the phone at Clarissa's house. She had a soft,
accented voice. But, of course—Clarissa had probably gotten a
couple of Mexican maids, matching pool boys and a cabana boy as
accessories for her ever-growing wealth.

After being informed that Mrs. Jones was
having a massage and could not be disturbed, I hung up and headed
to the house.

The day was obscenely bright, with sunlight
flooding every nook and cranny of the monstrosity they called a
mansion. The harsh sunlight illuminated the weather stains seeping
through the white-painted bricks, making them look like teeth with
creeping cavities. Inner decay heading outward.

A maid answered my knock within half a
minute and I was inside the front door a few seconds later.

"You cannot come in," she protested. "Mrs.
Jones is occupied."

"I'm her daughter-in-law," I announced,
heading for a vast pink-carpeted stairway that wound around to the
second floor. Clarissa had a bedroom as big as a barn up
there—probably with livestock to match—and a pink-marbled bathroom
spacious enough to accommodate a good-sized harem.

The maid gave a series of squeaks and
scurried after me, protesting in broken English. She was cute and I
wondered if Jeff had put the moves on her. Then I remembered that
he was a scum-sucking pig—and that it didn't matter to me anymore
even if he had.

Though I hadn't intended to make a dramatic
entrance, the door to Clarissa's dressing room flew open with a
bang when I pushed on it. It took me a moment to understand what I
was seeing: the Incredible Hunk bending over my former
mother-in-law, his hands firmly gripping her buttocks. He was
wearing a silver thong bathing suit and matching muscles. And it
looked to me like I'd just caught Clarissa with her hand heading
for the cookie jar. Both looked up with frozen, automatically
guilty expressions.

I was amazed. Clarissa had not aged a day in
the past fifteen years. Her plastic surgeon was a maestro. She
still looked like a cross between The Joker and Carol Channing, her
tautly stretched face dominated by a broad, rigid smile. No wonder
she was so skinny. She probably couldn't put her teeth together
enough to chew.

"Who are you?" she demanded in her phony old
money accent, then stopped, staring in horror as she recognized me.
She gaped like the country bumpkin she was beneath all her
store-bought looks. "You," she sputtered. "Who the hell do you
think you are?" This time the accent was pure Panhandle
cracker.

"Me, indeed," I said cheerfully as the
masseuse quickly pulled a sheet up over her backside. He pivoted on
his heels without a word and seemed to melt out the door. It's
tough to look dignified when you're wearing eight inches of silver
lamé and sporting a boner, but the guy came pretty damn close.

"Goodness," I said, pulling up a prissy
French Provincial chair and plopping down in it. It shook beneath
my weight. Clarissa winced. "Does your better half know about
Bruno?"

She glared at me. I was threatening about
eight thousand dollars worth of antique wood. "His name is not
Bruno, and Norman could care less. What are you doing in my life
again?" She bit off each word and spit them at me like watermelon
seeds.

"Jeff is in trouble," I said. "Big trouble.
I'm surprised he hasn't called you to bail him out." I was sure
that he had. What surprised me was that Clarissa had not taken care
of his drug dealer problems for him. Maybe his true occupation was
one little fact that Jeff had to keep from his mother. If so, it
was a first.

Clarissa Jones had bailed out Jeff more
times than I could count over the past thirty years. None of her
rescues had ever done her son the slightest bit of good. She had
started out by smoothing over his schoolyard fights, greasing his
way into college, bribing his professors to give him good grades,
arranging abortions for his girlfriends and throwing money at all
the right causes so that he could meet and woo moneyed young ladies
of appropriate standing.

Marrying me was the first time Jeff had ever
opposed his mother and the price he paid was a big one. We'd been
married in front of a justice of the peace with only my grandfather
in attendance. We'd also been forbidden to visit their house at all
for the first year, and when Clarissa finally relented and realized
she had to acknowledge me, she pointedly excluded me from as many
invitations as possible—or made sure to humiliate me if my presence
could not be avoided. Eventually, Jeff broke down and started
believing what she said about me. That was the beginning of the end
for us.

But what Clarissa Jones hadn't counted on
was the effect that her interventions would have on her son. Jeff
had never learned to accept responsibility for his actions, was a
master at weaseling out of taking the blame, was incapable of guilt
and viewed women with a peculiar mixture of distrust and
desperation, all courtesy of his doting momma.

She hated me because I knew what she had
done to him. Of course, there was also the small matter of my
having a prison record. Clarissa still didn't believe the cocaine
had been Jeff's. In her mind, I was the reason he had gone bad.

What I wanted to know now was just how bad
Jeff had gone—and how much Clarissa knew about it. Find Jeff. Find
Tawny.

"Well?" I said. "Has Jeff phoned you for
help?"

"That's none of your business," she snapped.
She was trapped facedown on the massage table, forced to choose
between literally exposing herself to me or toughing it out. She
toughed it out. "Get out of my house," she ordered me. "Or I'll
have Anna call the cops. One look is all I need to tell me that
you're still nothing but trash. The happiest day of my life was
when my son divorced you. I don't have to put up with you anymore
and I won't. Get out."

"For starters," I said, marveling at the
sudden calm that filled me. "I divorced your son, not the other way
around. Secondly, you and I both know that I kept him out of jail.
All I had to do was open my mouth and he'd still be behind bars to
this day. So you owe me, and I'm calling in the marker. I know what
he's been doing. Don't pretend he's gone straight. He told me
everything."

"You're lying." She angrily propped herself
up on her arms, giving me a peek at her ten-thousand-dollar boob
job. She saw me looking and snatched a towel from a nearby chair,
jamming it down her cleavage with a snarl.

"He came to see me three weeks ago in a lot
of trouble," I explained. "He's wanted by the cops, and by people
who are a lot worse than the cops. Now he's gotten mixed up with a
murderer and he's gotten you mixed up with one, too."

I could have told her about the guys
watching her house, but I was hoping they were IRS agents. I'd pay
good money to see her get busted like that.

"I haven't the faintest idea of what you're
talking about. Jeff sells cabin cruisers. He's the top salesman at
his company."

When I started laughing at that whopper, she
sat up, clutched the towels around her, jumped to the floor and
marched over to a closet. She ripped a kimono from its hanger and
threw it over her body, tightening the sash with angry tugs.

"Jeff is mixed up with a woman who killed a
man," I said. "The woman you agreed to hide for him. She's gone
underground because the cops are looking for her, not because she's
abused. I know what she probably told you, but she's lying. She's
using you."