Dirtbags (14 page)

Rogers nodded. He laid his file folder on the table and rubbed his finger along the tab. “Did you ever contact her? Or she contact you?”

“We talked some on the phone.”

“What did you talk about?”

“About Jason, mostly. About her being sorry for what she done. About her wanting money for this or that and how I wouldn’t give her none because she’d just use it for more drugs. About that kind of stuff.”

The younger one watched him. “And how long did you say it took you to drive down to Dallas and get your son?”

“Sixteen hours there,” answered London. “Little longer to get back, on account of my son being with me.”

“You must have been driving fast.”

“You would, too.” London picked up his coffee but found he’d already drained it. Lorne brought him another.

“Where were you Tuesday last?” Rogers asked.

London stared at him. “Same place I’ve said I was plenty often enough.”

“Tiger game,” said Lorne. “You said you went to the Tiger game.”

“That’s right.”

“You have season tickets?”

“Not this season,” London said. “I been meaning to get them. I’m waiting for the price to go down.”

Lorne chuckled. “It won’t happen while Nelson’s still playing, let me tell you.”

Rogers continued: “So where’d you get the tickets?”

“Got them from Bill Higgins.” He looked around the room. The young guy took notes. “I swapped he and his wife a dinner for them. He had to leave town. Look, what does this have to do with—”

“Where are Bill Higgins’ seats? He got good seats?”

London shrugged. “I don’t know. Fifth row, sixth row. Something like that.”

“Fourth row,” Agent Rogers said. “Fourth row, seats double-G and double-H. Does that sound right?”

London said nothing. Stared at the FBI man.

“Right next to Aughie Linden and his wife,” Rogers continued, “and
they
have season tickets. Did you see them at the game?”

London said nothing.

“Probably not,” Rogers said, “because they didn’t see you. Neither did Al Lipton in the row behind you, nor the kids that used Gordon Graham’s tickets, just one row up from you. Cyrus Matthews hasn’t returned our call yet, but I think we’re on the right track.”

London’s face burned. He felt his goose getting cooked. He wanted to jump and scream, something for grand effect, but instead kicked the table across the room. Water and coffee splashed the younger Fed, who jumped from his chair.

“What the hell are you getting at?” he demanded. Lorne and Rogers urged him to calm down, take his seat. He made more than enough a show of it, then let them coax him back into his chair. “This is bullshit.”

Rogers slid the table back between them. He opened his file folder and showed him a photograph of a man who’d long been dead. Blood on his face, eyes staring into nothing, long gone cloudy. Face pale and bloated. London looked at it, then looked away.

“Do you know this man?” Rogers asked.

“Can’t say as I do.”

“Look at it again, Tom,” Lorne said.

“I don’t have to,” London said. “I don’t know the man. I’ve never seen him.”

“You sure?”

London gave him a look that said he was damned well and sure. Rogers showed him a couple more before London realized he was being shown crime scene photographs from Corrina’s murder. He stopped the detective at the picture of the “2” crudely carved in the man’s chest. The cuts, jagged and primitive, got the job done. Whatever that job was, it was most certainly done.

“The man is Phillip Krandall,” Lorne said. “He’s a local boy. From Lake Castor.”

Rogers nodded. “Now I want you to look at his photograph again.”

London licked his lips and looked. Had he seen him before? He’d most certainly spoken to him on the telephone, but couldn’t place having seen him in person. Poor bastard had bloated up so much it was no use in trying to identify him. He had no idea what happened between Krandall and Calvin Cantrell and wanted to feel relief that the man he believed to be the dumber of the two was the one still up and running. But he didn’t. He felt no relief whatsoever.

“I ain’t never seen him,” London said.

When he’d taken the call, he’d been cleaning steaks and thought twice about answering it. The man on the other end had his attention immediately.

“Mister London,” he had said, “you don’t know me, but I know you. And I have some very valuable information.”

London had let him speak. He told him about Calvin and how they’d met Corrina, and she’d been working at the clinic, not a patient. He told them about how Calvin had gone to kill her but instead fell in love, and the two of them had been cooking something up. He talked about how all he wanted was the money for getting it done, and maybe he would be doing it alone.

London’s mind had raced in different directions, most of them leading to the cell phone records, and his stomach lurched. He said nothing. He reckoned himself thirty-one different flavors of screwed no matter what he did. He figured it couldn’t get worse than it already was. He was wrong and he knew it, but that didn’t stop him from finally speaking.

“Kill them both,” he had said, “and you can have it all.”

He’d hung up, but knew it wouldn’t matter. He knew it when he said it back in his prep room, and he knew it sitting there in the sheriff’s station. That’s why the cop had so much fun fiddling with the file folder. That’s what the cop couldn’t wait to say.

They had the dead guy calling him on a cell phone and his alibi all kinds of rotten. London considered acting huffy again. He fancied screaming and fussing and raising one hell of a ruckus, but knew it would do no good. He knew the only way out was to tell the truth—not
the
truth, mind you—but a truth that he didn’t want to tell nobody but knew it was all that stood between him and a deeper investigation. One he didn’t want. He closed his eyes, and all he could see was Corrina having one hell of a last laugh.

“I wasn’t at the Tiger game that night,” London said slowly.

“Where were you, Tom?” asked Lorne. He put that hand back to his shoulder.

London looked to each man. He felt everything slipping from him. “I was with my mistress,” he said.

“Your mistress?” Lorne looked just as surprised as anybody.

London nodded. “Rhonda Cantrell. Manager at my restaurant.”

“You’ve been screwing your manager?” Rogers took a breath and glanced back at his partner. “And you were with her Tuesday? Where were you?”

“Depending on the time of the murder,” London said slowly, “we were either in the backseat of her car or in her trailer on the couch.” He thought a moment. “Or in her bedroom.”

Rogers nodded to his partner who furiously scribbled in his file folder. He took the new information in slowly. London liked removing the ammo from the agent’s case so much, that he kept at it.

“And yes, I received a call from Krandall that night,” he said. He had all their attention. “He called and said he wanted money. He said he had Corrina, and he would kill her if I didn’t pay him. He dared me to try him. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You should have called me,” Lorne whispered.

“I would have, sure. But you know what I heard?” He looked again to each man in the room. “I heard her laugh. Through the phone, I heard her laugh then get quiet all sudden, as if somebody told her to shut it. But sure as day, I heard her laugh. She didn’t do it much when we was together unless she was high as a kite, then you’d hear it all the time, and that’s the kind of laugh I heard. Like she was high as a kite and pulling yet another one over on old Tom London.”

To cap it off, London dropped his head into his hands and broke into sobs. No one stopped him. The young one even quit writing.

“So I told him he could stick it,” London said. “I told him Corrina London weren’t taking me for a ride no more. I told him I didn’t care what he did to her, and I meant it. At least, I did back then. Now I think of my son growing up without a mother, and I get sick to my stomach.”

He sobbed uncontrollably, and Lorne stood. “That’s enough, gentlemen.” He pulled London’s chair back for him. Rogers or Roger shook his head. London stood and walked with Lorne toward the door. Neither agent said a word as London left, but he reckoned he would never hear them even if they did. Not over the guilt and regret and fear and even what he could only imagine was Corrina London, laughing well beyond the grave over what havoc had she wreaked.

12

Each time the boy cried, Tom London felt another chunk of his heart ripped free from his body. Jason had cried plenty over the past weeks. He would pout some, then get angry and lash out at something, anything. Teachers at the Catholic school figured it best for him not to return until everything stabilized but, way things were going, that looked to be a ways off yet.

Jason cried like the dickens there in the edge of the tobacco field, a county or two past their home. He refused to get out of the car, preferred instead to sit there, arms crossed, in the child’s seat he had long grown out of. London opened the door and ordered him to get out.

“No!” screamed the boy. He kicked against the back of the passenger’s seat and wouldn’t budge.

“Don’t you want to say goodbye to Fritz?”

The boy went into hysterics, and he put his head down and wiped at tears with his tiny fists. He soon gave out, as he usually would. London unbuckled the safety straps and Jason slumped, defeated and gassed. He still whimpered as London took him by the arm and lowered him from the back of the SUV.

Fritz was already out of the car. He lay where London had left him: at the back bumper, leash still around his neck. The dog’s purple tongue pulsed as it lay limp in the dirt, its breathing subdued and oddly rhythmic. Its eyes, fully alert, looked this way and that, and the grey, speckled eyebrows arched expectantly as the young boy rounded the car.

He fell atop Fritz, forgetting that he’d been admonished to mind the dog, be gentle with him. He wiped his hands against its fur, stroking his side and back and scruffing his head. Over and over, he whispered how much he loved the dog into his floppy ears.

“Why do we have to leave Fritzie?” Jason whined.

“I told you already,” London said. “Fritzie’s too old. He’s too sick.”

“But why can’t he stay with us?” the boy asked. “Why can’t we help him get better?”

London had answers, but none he could give to Jason. It wouldn’t be proper for him to bend down, elbows to his knees, and explain to his son that his step-mother was throwing them out of the house and that none of the motels in town would accept a dog, sick or not. Could he translate that the issues with fourteen year-old Fritz went well beyond anything London was willing to pay? Would the boy understand simple economics at such an early stage?

Probably not, so instead he said: “Right now, what Fritz truly needs is to be outdoors, where he can be happy.”

London would never bear to have the dog put to sleep and didn’t relish that conversation, either. To bury the dog would so further Jason’s tortured soul well past the point of repair, especially after the week they’d had. A week of goodbyes, each worse than the last.

First, after London had been cleared, he'd taken Jason to Dallas for Corrina’s funeral. London would rather be a million places than in that church—front row with her mother and father—and  only six feet separating him from the closed casket. Closed, he remembered, because she’d been mutilated beyond the skills of the mortician. Jason, dressed in a nice suit Reyna put him in. Though she wasn’t attending Corrina’s funeral, Reyna preferred the family to think that Jason was better off out of his mother’s reach.

The grandparents clutched the boy for dear life and wiped his tears and promised him that his mother was in a better place. They stood with him graveside, beneath bare cottonwoods that reached into the sky like craggy claws grasping at nothing. They held him tight and, although they probably wanted to punch and beat and shout at Tom London, dared not, perhaps for fear that he would never allow them in their grandson’s life. No, Corrina was dead and gone and couldn’t help them now; they had only the boy to think of.

London made promises this way and that while standing at her grave. Sure, he said, they would be welcome to visit. Make it sometime when the restaurant wasn’t so busy. And they would make it back up to lay flowers at Corrina’s grave, sure. Jason would visit often. Maybe a summer trip, when not in camp or on family vacation, or the other things that get in the way. He swore up and down he wouldn’t hold Corrina against them, but they probably thought he was lying. Maybe he meant what he said. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. They would assume that Jason was good as gone.

“Fritz can’t come with us because he’s going to a better place,” London said. One hand was on the dog’s coat, the other on his son’s back.

“Like Mommy?” Jason asked. “He’s going to heaven to be with Mommy?”

London bit his tongue. He’d read so many pamphlets over the week over how to discuss death with a child Jason’s age. Actually, Reyna had read them, but he understood plenty from what she’d described and thought it best to spare the boy the rancor. Instead, he cupped Jason’s cheeks and chin with his hand and said, “Yes, son. Fritz is going to heaven like your mommy.”

The past week had been a doozy even by London’s standards. He’d been a bad way around work. No one talked about the food any more. He’d become surprised with the uptick in customers who would come through the restaurant, but had never been able to convince himself that it was for his fine cuisine. No, rather they dropped in for the freak show, wanting to watch the man whose ex-wife had been carved up by some deranged killer. To see how he was holding up, if he was bound to crack.

Could Corrina London be some sort of boon, he wondered? He found himself invoking her wretched name in the oddest of times. When he checked on the seafood order one morning, the driver told him he couldn’t extend credit anymore. This would be the last delivery until he paid his balance.

“Are you kidding me?” London demanded. “You mean to tell me after five years of business, you have the nerve to give me shit because of . . . how much?”