Bedbugs (30 page)

“Well, I told you over the phone, and I’ll tell you again, you don’t have to worry about a thing, son,” Dwight said. “My lawyer’s taking care of your release. We’ll have you out of here before noon. As for that chemistry exam you missed this morning as a result of this—” He wrinkled his nose. “—this unfortunate incident. Well, I’m sure we can arrange for you to take it at another time.”

 
“Sure, Dad,” Tom said softly.

“I think it’s an outrage that they arrested you in the first place!” his father went on. To think that they’d even
consider
the possibility of murder in what was so—so obviously a case of suicide!”

“I’m all right, Dad,” Tom repeated, as if that was the only thought in his mind. Any concerns he had—even for his own situation—were erased by the stark horror of finding Sarah dead in the bathtub.

—Just like she found Karen
, he thought over and over.

“You know,” his father continued, not even listening to Tom, “it’s these damned small-time campus cops. Their idea of police work is checking student I.D.s at the pub and ticketing cars without campus parking stickers. When they come up against anything real, they can’t begin to cope with it.”

“It’s no problem,” Tom said weakly.

He shifted on the edge of his cot and glanced at the wall beside him. He was thinking that it hadn’t been necessary for his father to drive all the way up to Orono just to straighten out—what was the phrase he had used?—this “slight misunderstanding.”

Sarah’s dead, and he sees it only as an
inconvenience!

Tom supposed it made sense that the police would at least suspect him of murder. When they arrived, alerted by a neighbor who heard him screaming and sobbing, they had found him, sitting beside the bathtub with Sarah’s head cradled in his arms, rocking back and forth.

Clumps of dried blood had smeared all over his hands and face. Even after he was cleared of any criminal charges, he was sure there would be weeks, possibly months of questioning.

“Well, there’s no reason for you to be here in the first place,” Dwight said, scowling. “And once we have this cleared up, maybe I’ll consider filing some charges of my own.”

Tom looked away from his father, cocking his head at an awkward angle. His throat was raw from all the screaming he had done, and his eyes were still stinging and brimming with tears as he stared at the institutional green painted walls.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how upset your mother is by all of this, either.”

His father’s voice took on an irritating drone as Tom stared intently at the prison cell wall, no longer even registering what he was saying.

At first he thought what he was seeing was an illusion, merely two lumps in the concrete wall which, once painted, had bubbled up and now cast a shadow from the overhead lights that made them
look
like a pair of eyes. But as Tom shifted on his cot and stared intently at them, they became more clearly defined.

A trace of a smile flickered across his lips, unnoticed by his father.

“At first, I thought it best not to even mention any of this to your mother,” his father said. “You know how upset she gets. But then I realized that there was no way we could keep it out of the newspapers. Sooner or later, she’d find out.”

“Tell Mom that I—” Tom started to say, but then he fell silent as he stared into the steady, unblinking gaze of the eyes that were forming on the wall.

He recognized them.

Karen’s eyes!

“I’ll tell her this will all be over, soon!” his father said firmly. “That’s what I’ll tell her.”

“Sure . . .” Tom said, his voice no more than a whisper. “It will all be over soon.”

On the prison wall, Karen’s eyes continued to resolve, taking on depth and detail.

Tom could see, now, the faint trace of a mouth below them that was smiling coldly at him. Then, ever so slowly, the left eyelid lowered and winked at him. He understood what he would have to do as soon as he had the opportunity.

A
bigail was feeling nervous, and she was very tired.

For the last three nights, she’d been awake for most of the night . . . ever since she received that “official” letter from Louie Phillips.

Louie the Scumbag
, as she always thought of him. As if “Scumbag” were his God-given last name. Not far from the truth. Talking to Louie over the phone was always bad enough, but on this January morning, Abigail had to go up to the office and deal with him, face-to-face.

That was never easy.

The office of Caribou Ranch Records was a small corner room that looked out over Congress Street from the third floor of the Canal Building. It was sparsely furnished with a battered desk, a rusted file cabinet, a beat-up couch, a couple of chairs, and a storage case behind the desk that was covered with several tape and CD players. The instant Abigail entered, she thought that the room was much too cold.

Cold as a witch’s tit
, she thought, and had to bite down on her lower lip to stifle a ripple of nervous laughter.

Shivering, she sat down in the chair in front of Louie’s desk but had to look away from him when he leaned across his desk and smiled widely at her.

She couldn’t
stand
to see him smile like that. She’d always thought his teeth looked too large for his face.

All the better to bite your ass with, my dear
, she thought bitterly, thinking that it was the perfect look for a slime-ball record producer like Louie.

Lacing her fingers tightly together in her lap, Abigail glanced out one of the office windows where thick wedges of ice, stained brown by the city air, clung like ruined spider webs to the corners of the panes. Off in the distance, she could hear the warbling wail of a police car or ambulance going by.

Yeah, and they’ll be calling for an ambulance for you soon, Mister Scumbag, if I have my way.

It took a great deal of determination and effort, but Abigail turned and looked at Louie.

“So . . . you do have the master tape with you, I assume,” Louie said.

His voice slid up the scale, dragging out the last word as if it were something that tasted irresistibly delicious. He ended with a not-so-subtle
I’ve got you by the ‘short- ‘ncurlies,’ honey, and you know it!
grin.

Once again—as she always did whenever she had to deal with Louie face-to-face—Abigail thought about how big his teeth were. They looked like tiny dinner plates . . . or little white shovels that could just chomp and chomp and
CHOMP!

Just like what you’re doing to my music career
, she thought, and the bitterness of the thought was a palpable taste on the back of her tongue.

As much as it hurt to do so, she sighed and nodded. She patted the large gray tape case that rested on her lap.

“You know,” she said, her voice almost breaking before she sucked in a quick sip of air. “You . . . don’t have any right to . . . to
do
this . . . to force me to turn the tape over to you.”

As often as she had rehearsed that particular line on her way over to Louie’s office, it came out halting and unconvincing, even to her own ears. A scumbag like Louie, who was used to screwing people to the wall on a daily basis, surely wasn’t going to be intimidated by the likes of her.

“Oh, is that so?” Louie said, leering all the more at her. His wide, flat teeth gleamed like shiny porcelain in the diffused light of his office.

“Well, then, I suggest you take another look at your contract, sweetie. I paid for the studio time, and that tape belongs to me!”

Abigail cringed away from the vulpine look in his eyes. She wanted to, but didn’t dare, to tell him that, while the master tape might belong to him legally, every damned song on it was hers, and hers alone!

Louie smiled, his lips parting even wider to expose both top and bottom rows of his teeth all the way to the pale, pink gum lines.

“And you signed that contract, baby. Nobody made you sign it. You
wanted
the record deal, so you damned well better learn to
live
with it.”

Squinting slightly, Louie sniffed laughter through his nose. A foamy bubble of saliva formed in the corner of his mouth, but he wiped it away without a thought.

“Otherwise,” Louie went on, still smirking at her, “I’d just have to have my shark call your shark. We could thrash the whole thing out in court, if that’s what you’d like.” Squeezing and wringing her hands together, Abigail looked down at the tape case in her lap and slowly shook her head.

“No?” Louie said with a hearty laugh. “Did you shake your head no? Well, I didn’t think you’d want to go that way because—frankly—you and I both know that you don’t have the . . . shall we say the ‘necessary resources’ to go that route with me. Do you?”

Lacing his hands behind his head and looking self-satisfied, Louie leaned back in his worn leather chair, making it creak beneath his shifting weight. It sounded like a rusty nail being slowly pulled from a piece of wood, and set Abigail’s teeth on edge. Louie’s smile widened all the more, and Abigail couldn’t help but wonder if his mouth could possibly stretch any wider.

Maybe it will spread all the way around to the back of his neck, and his fucking head will pop off!
she thought; but instead of seeing the humor in that thought, it filled her with a grim sense of satisfaction and expectation.

“So-o-o-o,” Louie said after a lengthening moment, letting the word drag out slowly. “Are you going to give it to me or not?”

Abigail grasped the cloth handle of the tape case tightly and cleared her throat.

Catching her hesitation, Louie arched one eyebrow, leaned forward even more, and said, “Yes, my dear . . . ? You have something more to say. . . ?”

Abigail could see how much he was enjoying this, and she hated him all the more for it. Biting her lower lip, she nodded her head curtly.

“Yeah . . . well . . . I should . . . probably tell you that I . . . I worked on it—on the album—a . . . a little more.”

“You
what?
”

Bright purple lines of broken blood vessels spread like a ladder of flame across Louie’s cheeks. “I hope to hell you don’t think
I’m
paying for any more studio time!” Louie snarled. “I’m telling you right now, sweetheart, if you screwed with this—”

“Oh, no . . . no. It’s still the same record,” Abigail said, fighting hard to keep her voice steady. “Every song’s exactly the way it was. I just . . . redid a bit of the vocals, is all. I . . . I wasn’t satisfied with them.”

“Whaddayah mean, you weren’t
satisfied?
” Louie bellowed.

The color rose higher in his face, and all Abigail could do was hope that he’d bust a blood vessel and drop dead on the spot. No loss there.

“Well
I
was satisfied with it the way it was!” he shouted. “And as far as I’m concerned, that’s all that counts!”

Clenching his fists, he suddenly leaned forward across the expanse of his desk toward her. Raising one hand, he shook a chubby forefinger under her nose.

“And I swear to Christ, if you screwed with that material, I—I’ll sue your lily-white ass from here to Fiji!”

“They’re my songs,” Abigail said, surprised that she could speak at all. Her hands were shaking and slick with sweat as she gripped the sides of the cloth tape case.

“That very well may be,” Louie said with a snarl, “but it’s
my
record, and it’s going to be put out on my label, and I have the performance copyright on the material, so only
I
have final approval! If you don’t believe me, just read clause eight in your contract.”

“I didn’t mess with it. Honest,” Abigail said, trembling inside. “Go ahead. Listen to it for yourself.”

With a quick nod of her head, she indicated the array of tape decks and speakers on the shelf between the windows behind Louie.

“I just over-dubbed a second vocal track on the first song to . . . to punch it up . . . to tap it a bit more depth.”

The tape case felt like it was made of lead as she held it out to him. Louie snatched it from her so fast her finger got caught on one of the metal clasps and broke a nail. Wincing, she looked down at her finger and smiled thinly when she saw the dark red bead of blood well up from her cuticle.

Louie didn’t seem to notice or care. He was too busy opening the case and taking out the master-ready tape. His face was still flushed with anger, and his fat hands were shaking uncontrollably as he turned around and threaded the leader tape through the machine’s tape head.

With barely a glance over his shoulder at her, he said, “I promise you, baby-cakes, if you’ve altered this tape in any way, I’m gonna sue your ass for
all
the studio and promotion costs plus all my expenses!”

Abigail’s breath was caught like a burning cinder in her chest. Unable to speak, she simply nodded at him and stared past him at the tape deck.

Still growling under his breath, Louie jammed down the
play
button.