Late Rain (13 page)

Richard began combing out her hair. Even wet, it still held the three strains of blond that had been there since she was a child, thick competing layers of honey, pale wheat, and sun-bleached silver.

Corrine was comfortable and drowsy. There’d always been something about salons that encouraged a soft-focus reverie in her, a feeling that she was safe and untouchable, and she listened to the methodical click of the scissors backdropped by Richard’s soft voice, expecting to hear his customary monologue on the lives of the other customers and their army of affairs, illnesses, money and child problems, but today his voice pulled Corrine back into her own life, breaking the spell she had slipped into.

“Everybody’s been talking about it,” Richard said. “Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your husband.”

“Thank you,” Corrine said with effort.

“It’s scandalous that your husband had to put up the reward,” Richard said. “The police should be doing their job.”

Corrine closed her eyes, waiting for Richard to change the subject, but she knew it was too late to recapture her earlier mood. Buddy’s announcement of the reward at the close of the Chamber of Commerce testimonial dinner for Stanley had caught her completely off guard. Buddy had made no previous mention of it whatsoever. She was waiting for him to wear out his grief and revert to the man she’d married. The new, resolute Buddy, like the reward itself, Corrine hadn’t seen coming.

She had called Raychard Balen who told her not to worry, that the odds were very long that a tip for the reward would produce a lead of any substance. Balen, himself, had been in contact with Croy Wendall and told him to low-profile it for a while. Balen had also checked up on the witness to the murder and confirmed he was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s.

Even if by some chance Jack Carson managed a description, Balen said, he would make sure nothing would hold up in court.

When Corrine pointed out that it could still lead the police to Croy, Raychard Balen had paused, then reminded her that Croy Wendall’s status as a sentient being could always be renegotiated if necessary.

“Hold still now,” Richard said. “Yes. Lovely. I’ll be finished soon. You sit tight.”

Despite Balen’s assurances, Corrine felt as if something were about to be taken from her. She’d known that feeling all her life. It was part of the immense emptiness that had opened up around her as a child when her mother would disappear for days at a time without warning.

It was an emptiness that would swallow you and everything in the world unless you swallowed it first.

At twelve, Corrine had learned how to do just that. She was living in Bradford with her grandparents by then.

She’d been changing out of her school clothes when she noticed Mr. Pawls, their next-door neighbor, standing outside her bedroom window.

Corrine took a step toward him, but something in his expression made her stop. Mr. Pawls worked at the post office. He was round-faced and balding and unfailingly polite and pleasant, and in Corrine’s eyes, interchangeable with most of the older adults in the community.

He was not a tall man either. His head and the top part of his shoulders were framed in the lower portion of the window.

Corrine stood in the middle of her bedroom, facing him. She’d taken her shoes off and her good jeans for school.

She bent over and took off her socks.

When she straightened again, Corrine came to a decision without quite knowing she had. She did not look at Mr. Pawls again, at least not directly, Corrine only dimly aware of him on the periphery of her vision as she began to move around her room, doing exactly what she would have done on any other day after coming home from school, but as she did, Corrine noticed a change in herself, her movements and gestures slowly becoming more deliberate and stylized, Corrine more aware of the body that had begun to outrun her, the shift and heft of breasts under the T-shirt she’d pulled over her head, the blond explosion that followed removing the band from her ponytail and shaking her head, the flex of calf and thigh as a leg slid into her old jeans, the shiny red of her nails as she zipped and buttoned them.

When she was done dressing, Corrine glanced over at the window. Mr. Pawls was gone.

Impaled on one of the lower branches of the hemlock that had shielded him from the eyes of anyone passing by was a five dollar bill.

It was two days later before Mr. Pawls appeared again, and Corrine repeated the after-school ritual of a girl changing her clothes and lounging about her room.

Over the next six months, Mr. Pawls showed up on the average of three times per week, standing outside Corrine’s bedroom window while she changed from her school to home clothes and leaving a five dollar bill stuck on a hemlock branch and pale trails of semen on the side of the house.

Fingers and lips. The spill of hair over a shoulder. The sock that momentarily caught on your instep when you bent to take it off. A languid hand straying through thick blond hair. Corrine came to inhabit each gesture.

She kept the five dollar bills in an empty coffee can she’d secreted away in the basement.

The emptiness didn’t seem so bad anymore.

Corrine eventually discovered something else though.

Mr. Pawls had been at his usual station at her bedroom window, and Corrine had just changed out of her school clothes. She stood in the center of the room in her bra and panties and slowly lifted her head and made eye contact with Mr. Pawls.

Corrine held his gaze while she went on to do something she had never done before. She reached back and unhooked her bra, then slid her panties down her legs and off.

The air in the bedroom was cold. Corrine felt her nipples grow hard.

She cupped her breasts and slowly moved her fingertips to her nipples.

She dropped her right hand between her legs. It was warm there.

She looked at Mr. Pawls. His face was red and his lips tight, and then he made a strangled sound and slowly came to rest his forehead against the window.

Afterwards, he left two five dollar bills on the hemlock branch.

He never showed up at her bedroom window again though, and it was years later, Corrine already having run away from her grandparents and Bradford, before she fully understood what had happened that afternoon. By that time she was living in Arizona and already in the jam that she had yet to find a way out of, and it was a lesson she would learn many times after that, one she took with her to Myrtle Beach and Sonny Gramm’s supper club and then to the altar with her husband, Buddy Tedros.

The truth, like the emptiness, served nothing but itself.

It got you nowhere.

There was another kind of truth though, one that Corrine had seen in Mr. Pawls’s face that afternoon and in the faces of the men who’d followed him over the years, a truth that lay behind the lies that men told to protect themselves and their needs. They all carried that bedroom window inside them and were willing to pay any price to look through it as long as it held what they wanted to see.

And as long, too, as you were willing never to look them directly in the eye.

“Beautiful,” Richard said from behind her. He’d finished combing out her hair. “Absolutely beautiful.”

BEN DECOVIC HAD NOT BEEN SURPRISED to see the direction the Tedros murder investigation was taking, but he had not expected in the aftermath of Stanley Tedros’s death to find himself in the Publix at the intersection of Hawthorne and Queensland buying groceries for four.

Ben could not exactly say for sure how that had come about.

But it had.

He was sleeping with Anne Carson.

Proximity and Frequency
. When Ben had started in the Ryland Police Department, the phrase had doubled as a motive for most home invasions and burglaries, the phrase a convenient shorthand for why most break-ins occurred, and Ben figured it worked equally well as an explanation for how he’d ended up in Anne Carson’s bed.

Their lives kept unexpectedly crossing and recrossing each other.

Since joining the force and beginning Patrol, he had gotten into the habit of dropping by the Salt Box for lunch or dinner, and more often than not, Anne was there in her role as assistant manager, and their customary small talk had over time grown large and gained a weight neither of them had anticipated or fully understood.

At one point, Anne Carson had stopped and put her hands on her hips. Something that was a cross between a smile and frown passed across her face.

“Are you flirting with me?” she had asked.

“I think so,” Ben said after a moment.

She’d given him a long look, then walked off.

Nothing else had happened between them until Jack Carson inadvertently witnessed Stanley Tedros’s murder.

Off shift and on impulse, Ben had stopped by a few times on his way home to check on Jack and to see if he’d remembered anything.

The evenings had the quality of a tableau. Paige at the kitchen table doing homework. Jack in his green plaid recliner watching television. Anne cooking the evening meal.

Ben found his spot in the tableau, and suddenly there was an extra place set at the table.

Then, with Paige and Jack in their rooms for the night, the house quiet, Ben and Anne on the couch, a couple of deep glasses of wine and Merlot-tinged kisses, and Ben and Anne followed the one thing that always led to another, but what that
another
was, Ben could not say for sure because Anne and he never quite got around to talking about it. For now, things felt right and good between them, and that was enough, more than enough in fact.

Ben left before Jack or Paige woke up. Anne wanted them to have a little more time to get used to his presence in their lives.

At the Publix, Ben worked his way department by department through the grocery list. He supplemented almost everything Anne had put down. It hadn’t been hard to read between the items to the least-common-denominator lifestyle of a single mother with limited resources taking care of a daughter and father. No more than it would be for anyone to spot the none too quiet desperation behind the contents of Ben’s kitchen cabinets at the White Palms apartment. Each time Ben dropped something into the cart, it felt as if he were throwing out a lifeline. He wasn’t sure if it was to Anne or himself or if that mattered at all right then.

In the checkout line, Ben scanned the front pages in a rack of newspapers. While Stanley Tedros’s murder might have temporarily fallen off page one of the national papers, on the regional, state, and local levels, it was still receiving saturation coverage. The story continued to rampage through the tabloids too.

Ben had seen it happen before, a homicide investigation sidetracked and then finally run by local politics and the media.

He was seeing it again with the Stanley Tedros case.

Despite all the promotion by the Greater Magnolia Beach Tourist Bureau and the mayor, the city was basically a small town at its core, defensive and overly protective of its ethos and image in the way all small towns were. Magnolia Beach tenaciously clung to and celebrated its down-home, family-friendly idea of itself, a place that offered middle-class Americans leisure uncluttered by culture. You came to there to golf, shop, eat, have a few drinks, and lie in the sun and didn’t have to apologize or feel guilty for doing so. To the rest of the country, Magnolia Beach promised a safe, PG version of hedonism. It did not have room for the murder of old men who’d been stabbed thirty-nine times in the stomach, especially if the old man in question was the originator of a soft drink that the rest of America seemingly could not get enough of.

A special task force had been set up devoted solely to working Stanley Tedros’s murder, and Ben was afraid any real progress would be lost in bureaucratic in-fighting and duplication of efforts chasing down leads that went nowhere but produced enough activity to make good copy in press conferences and news releases.

The department had Buddy Tedros to thank for that.

His announcement at the close of a memorial supper hosted by the chamber of commerce virtually guaranteed that the case would only go one direction. Buddy, while praising the force and its work, wanted to assist in the swift apprehension of his uncle’s murderer and put up a reward of ten thousand dollars for any information leading to an arrest and conviction.

By the end of the next day, over one hundred and twenty tips had been logged in.

Under the media’s eye, the mayor had immediately authorized overtime funding.

Stanley had been dead for a week, and Ben and the rest working Patrol had been assigned split shifts, half spent on maintaining regular patrol routes and half given over to following up on tips from citizens. Today Ben had dutifully checked up on eight of them, among them, a man in the Willows Trailer Park who claimed that his seventy-eight-year-old wife was responsible for the killing. As evidence, he had Ben watch him count the steak knives in the silverware drawer, triumphantly stopping at nine in a set that originally came with ten. Ben had then talked to a woman who maintained the Vatican and its minions were behind Stanley’s murder and another who believed Stanley had been murdered by the CIA.

The few leads that had possessed any degree of credibility had quickly bottomed out, each potential suspect having a solid alibi for the time in question.

What the reward assured was more tips and somebody who would eventually take the fall for Stanley Tedros’s murder. You started turning over rocks, and sooner or later, you’d come across a loser who was mean or stupid enough to give you something to hang him with, whether he had anything to do with Tedros’s death or not.

After paying, Ben put the groceries in the trunk of his car, then stopped for gas and headed back to Anne’s. He automatically slowed when he passed Stanley’s house, though there was nothing to see. The driveway was empty, the windows dark, and the front door still crisscrossed with yellow crime scene tape.

Ben was bothered by how quickly the Homicide people had cleared Buddy Tedros and his wife. He knew it wouldn’t be the first time that a murderer or someone who’d hired a murderer offered up a reward to deflect attention elsewhere.