Life's Work (12 page)

"I'm sorry, Laurel," I said guiltily. "I was looking for Parks."

Her face shook when I mentioned his name. "Oh, God," she said. "Oh, God. I don't know what to do."

I wiped the tears from her eyes with my fingertips.

"It's going to be all right," I said. "Whatever happened, I'll take care of it." I glanced over her shoulder at the open apartment door. "Do you want to go inside?"

She gasped. "God, no. I've been sitting in there for two hours."

"Then let's go out."

Laurel stared fearfully down the stairwell.

"My car's right in front. Everything will be fine."
She nodded weakly. "Okay," she said in a tiny voice.
 
 

We got to the car without any trouble, although from the way Laurel was acting I thought we might be attacked at any moment. She was so distraught that I had to remind myself that this was no teenager, scared of her own shadow. This was a tough, streetwise hooker, who'd been making her own way in a very hard world. Whatever had her so frightened must have been pretty goddamn unpleasant. And to be honest, the prospect of finding out what it was chilled me, too.

I put Laurel in the front seat of the car, got in myself, and started back up York toward the red lights. The bustle and glare of the clubs seemed to calm Laurel down a bit. By the time we got to Fifth Street, the color had returned to her cheeks and she'd stopped shaking so violently.

I turned west on Fifth toward the suspension bridge. "Where are we going?" Laurel said in a faraway voice. "To my apartment," I said. "You'll be all right there." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I guess we better go to C.W.'s place first," she whispered.

"Why?"

"I guess there's something you'd better see."

"What?" I said. "What happened tonight, for chrissake?"

Laurel held up a hand, as if she couldn't bring herself to talk about it yet. "Just don't ask me any more questions for a while. Okay?"

I looked over at her. She was wearing her version of a game face. She was living it out -whatever it was.
I did as she asked and let her alone.

Once we'd crossed the bridge into Cincinnati, Laurel told me to turn west onto River Road. I followed her directions, taking Sixth Street to the underpass and then dipping down toward the Ohio. To the south I could see the city. lights, guttering like windblown candles in the deep black river current. Then the row houses started up on either side of the road, dark and boarded up, most of them, with spaces between the rows where the river lights made the only light on the street. We kept heading west, through Riverview to Anderson Ferry. By then we'd gone better than five miles out of the city, and Laurel had had a chance to calm down.

"How much farther?" I said to her.

"Just outside Harrison -about fifteen more miles."

"And what are we going to find there?"

"I don't know," Laurel said. "I mean, I don't know what we're going to find. I didn't stay long enough to see."

"You went out there tonight?"

She nodded. "After you let me off." She gave me an apologetic look. "I had to talk to her, Harry. She's my friend. And I felt guilty for telling you all that stuff without explaining it to her first."

"You could have waited, Laurel," I said wearily, "like I asked you to do. You could have gotten yourself killed tonight."

"I think somebody already did," she whispered.

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and stared grimly at the dark road unfolding before us.

"I guess you better explain this," I said after a moment. "I don't want to walk into a murder with my eyes shut."

Laurel sat back on the seat, stretching her legs to the floorboards as if she wanted to push herself right through the cushion into another life. "I thought you could help them," she said in a tiny voice. "I didn't know Bill had left camp until you told me. C.W. never said anything about it. I thought maybe if you could put Bill back on track with the team, he might ease up on C.W. about the other things."

"What other things?" I asked.

"They'd been fighting all week. About the baby, mostly. It wasn't growing right or something. And that pissed the shit out of Bill. I guess 'cause he never wanted a kid in the first place. And then Bill's mom started jumping all over C.W.'s case. And Bill's agent started telling him all sorts of bad things about C.W."

"What things?"

"I don't know. Just bad-mouthing her, I guess. Saying that she was bringing him down, sapping his strength. It got to the point on Monday where C.W. said that Bill wouldn't even stay in the same room with her. He'd just sit up all night, alone, doing exercises in the mirror and popping pills. The last thing she needed was to have Bill blame her for his troubles with the Cougars too."

"Did you talk to C.W. tonight?" I asked.

She shook her head. "She didn't answer the door. I went around back to make sure nobody was home, 'cause sometimes they can't hear you knock if they're in the kitchen. The back door was open, so I went in."

Laurel began to tremble. "Something terrible'd happened, Harry. I mean, there was stuff all over the floor ... everything broken . . . and there was this knife. And there was blood," she said, with a thrill of horror in her voice. "Christ, so much blood! I-I just ran. I drove home and called you."

I pulled her toward me.

"I think she's dead," Laurel said, leaning heavily against my side. "I think the bastard flipped out and killed her."

"We'll take a look," I told her.
 
 

We hit a patch of river fog somewhere south of Saylor Park, and for a few minutes I had to concentrate completely on the road, on the reflectors and signs glittering in the headlights. In a way it was a relief to turn my mind to something other than the ugly mayhem that was waiting for us at the end of the trip. Whatever we found at C. W. O'Hara's house, I figured that Bill Parks was probably going to be out of my hands by dawn and back where I supposed he had always belonged -with the cops. That part was all right with me. I didn't know how it was going to sit with Otto or with Hugh Petrie. But, frankly, I didn't want to confront the son-of-a-bitch. In fact, the thing that worried me was the possibility that Parks might still be waiting in C.W.'s home, sitting all alone in the dark, practicing curls in front of a mirror.

The fog lifted about three miles south of the I-275 turnoff. Laurel directed me onto the expressway and then off again onto a jagged state route, and from there to a two-lane highway running north above the Little Miami River. A tree-covered hillside rose up on the left of the roadbed and fell away, in a talus of roadside rubble, toward the river on the right. We passed a couple of deserted shacks, then Laurel put her hand on my arm and whispered, "Slow down."

I slowed to a crawl and glanced nervously from side to side, searching for the next turn-off.

"There's a gravel driveway about a hundred yards up the road on your left," Laurel said.

Almost at once, my lights caught on the gravel, as if someone had tossed a handful of it at the car. I turned left off the road onto a hillside drive. There was a rusted mailbox on a post at the foot of the driveway, with a name painted on the flag -O Hara. I stopped beside it, putting the transmission in Park, and stared up the gravel lane. It climbed the hill at a steep angle for about two hundred feet, then disappeared into a thick dark woods.

"How far does this go before we get to the house?" I said to Laurel.

"A couple hundred feet," she said.

I could tell from her voice that she was very frightened. "Is there any other way up or down?"

"No."

"Can you turn around up there? Or do you have to back out?"

"There's a turnaround by the garage," Laurel said.

I took a deep breath and glanced at the girl, who was staring intently through the windshield at the gravel driveway. "It would be much better if you weren't here, Laurel. In fact, you could go to the cops right now if you're convinced a murder has been committed."

"I don't know," she said nervously. "I didn't see a body. Just the blood."

"You could still go to the cops with that."

"But what if he just beat her up or something?" she said. "He's done that plenty of times before. C.W.'d kill my ass if I called the cops on Bill."

"All right," I said. "Are you sure you want to go up there with me? You sure you don't want to wait somewhere else while I take a look?"

"I guess I've got to know for sure," she said. "Anyway, I don't want to be anywhere by myself."
I reached over to the glove compartment and pressed the button. The door fell open above Laurel's knee. I groped around inside and pulled out the Colt Gold Cup.

Laurel gave me a terrified look, as if she were afraid I was going to turn the weapon on her.

"He might still be in there, Laurel," I said, cocking the piece, putting on the safety, and sticking the pistol in my belt. "You sure about the cops?"

She nodded. "I don't want to get involved with cops."

She laughed, a little hysterically. "I don't want to be involved in this, at all. It's a terrible thing to say, but I don't. If she is dead in there, Harry, you've got to promise to keep my name out of it. You gotta promise me, Harry."

"She's your friend, Laurel," I said, giving her a look.

She stared back at me defiantly. "Yeah, and I'm here, trying to help. Which is the last place on earth I want to be, believe me. But if C. W. is dead, it's not going to make a bit of difference to her what I do." She looked scared to death and fiercely belligerent at the same time. "I've still got plans. I've still got my dreams and my life. If the wrong people find out I was connected to this ..."

I felt like lecturing her on the bloody idiocy that her friend had probably brought down on her own head by trying to realize the same dreams. But I didn't do it. There wasn't enough time, and she didn't want to hear it anyway. "Okay, Laurel. I'll try to keep you clean. Just one thing, though. When we get up there, you do exactly what I say. You hear me?"

"Yes," she whispered. "I promise."

I clicked off the headlights, flipped on the parking lights, and started up the gravel drive.
 

There was a ranch house at the top of the drive, surrounded by the thick woods of the hillside. I stopped the car on the gravel about twenty yards away from it and backed around so that the Pinto was facing down the driveway. After dousing the lights, I turned the engine off and got out. Laurel got out on her side, and for a moment we stood there, staring silently at the house.

There was enough of a moon beaming down to light up the shingled roof of the ranch and the unpainted pine-board garage to its right. There was no other light coming from the building or from the woods. Once I shut the car off, there was very little noise either, just the woodland sounds of the crickets and of the hot summer wind in the pines. Somewhere off in the trees a branch creaked suddenly, like someone turning over in bed. Both Laurel and I jumped.

I pulled the pistol from my belt, unlocked the safety, and got a good firm grip on the butt.

"How do we get in there?" I said in a whisper.

Laurel pointed to her left, where a gravel path made its way between the ranch house and the garage.

"That goes to the kitchen," she whispered.

"All right. Stay behind me. Keep your arms at your sides. And try to be quiet. If anything happens to me, go straight to the car and drive away. I've left the keys in the ignition. Don't look back. Don't think about it. Just get the hell out of here and call the cops as fast as you can."

"Harry," she said shakily. "I'm really scared."

I said, "It's going to be all right."

I started walking across the yard and Laurel fell in behind me, so closely that I could feel her press against my back as if we were riding double on a motorcycle. When we got to the path between the outbuilding and the ranch, I stopped, and Laurel bumped up against me.

"Where's the kitchen door?" I whispered.

"About twenty feet up ahead," she whispered back. "On your right."

With my back to the ranch house wall, I worked my way slowly down the path, both hands on the pistol. A bit of dawn light was beginning to spread through the woods enough of a glow so that I could see a white frame screen door in front of me. The screen door was hanging open above a one-step concrete stoop. The kitchen door looked as if it was open, too. Just the way, I assumed, that Laurel had left them.
 

"There's a light switch to the left of the door," Laurel whispered.
"Stay where you are," I whispered back. "I'm going inside."

I crept up onto the stoop, knelt down, and eased around the doorjamb, holding the pistol close to my body. Inside, I could see the silhouette of an overturned kitchen table, its aluminum legs sticking up like the stiff, splayed legs of a dead horse. There was a lot of broken crockery on the floor -shards of porcelain and glass. The room looked as if it were tiled with glass.

It wasn't until I was actually through the door hunched on my heels, back against the doorjamb, gun arm extended- that I got my first whiff of blood. That stale, coppery smell, like the taste of pennies on the tongue.