Mischief 24/7 (19 page)

“Tarin White’s funeral, or so it says on the disk. He doesn’t look so good, does he? I mean, I’m not sure I ever really
noticed,
you know? I guess kids don’t. We just see what we want to see. He was so handsome. I think some of my friends in junior high had secret crushes on him. When did it all change? He was sad, that I knew—we all always tried to make him smile, make him laugh. But he was also a troubled man, wasn’t he?”

“He was a complicated man,” Court said, resting his hand on Jade’s thigh, the move meant to comfort. “Teddy didn’t have an easy life.”

“And he had a harder death,” Jade said quietly, hitting the play button on the remote once more. “I think Jess was trying to protect me. That’s why
she didn’t let me know about this DVD. I sort of wish she was better at hiding things.”

“Then let’s turn it off,” Court suggested, giving her thigh a gentle squeeze. “I’ll go tell Mrs. Archer that we’ll need an early dinner, definitely for three, hopefully for five if Jess and Matt show up in time, and then we can go see Joshua Brainard. And then—” he wished he didn’t sound so pathetically hopeful “—maybe this will all finally be over. Jade?”

She sat forward, stopping the DVD and then reversing it. She scanned forward, frame by frame, and then stopped the action again. “This is film of Teddy’s funeral. Look beyond the priest’s head, Court. Way back, all the way to the line of trees. Do you see him?”

“I see something,” Court said cautiously, getting to his feet and walking close to the TV screen. “Okay, all right. There’s somebody standing there. But he’s all in shadow from the trees. Tell me what you think you see.”

She was beside him now, her head pushed forward on her shoulders as she squinted at the large screen. “Look at how tall he is, Court. His head is all the way up to the first split of the branches.”

She touched a fingertip to the screen. “And
look at those wide, hunched shoulders. Look at the way he’s standing there, his hands in his pockets, sort of leaning on one leg. Come on, Court, when was the last time you saw shoulders like that, somebody who stands like that? Like he wishes he was smaller than he is, more able to hide.”

“This morning, at the car wash. That’s Jermayne,” Court said, knowing that his life had just gotten more complicated again. “You said you didn’t see him at the funeral. You said he’d told you he had to work and couldn’t come. But he was there.”

“There, but not there. Hiding,” Jade said, still staring at the dark outline of Jermayne Johnson’s distinctively tall, muscular body. “Why? Why wasn’t he at the church? Why did he hide? Why didn’t he join us at the grave? Why did he lie and say he wasn’t there?” She stepped back, turned to Court. “There has to be a reason, there’s always a reason. So why, Court?”

“Much as I really don’t want to say this, Jade, I don’t have the answers to those questions. You’d have to ask Jermayne. Which,” he said, watching as she fished her cell phone out of her slacks pocket and flipped it open, “seems to have already occurred to you.”

Jade held up one finger to silence him and then turned away, walking to the far end of the room as she waited for Jermayne Johnson to answer.

Court ejected the disk and turned off the DVD player, privately hoping the disk wouldn’t one day be labeled Exhibit A in Jermayne’s murder trial. He wondered if
Jade had considered that and decided she hadn’t.

“He didn’t answer,” she said, joining Court again. “I left a message and gave him Sam’s address. I told him I had something for him, something of Teddy’s I wanted him to have to remember Teddy by—a gold pocket watch—and asked him to come here as soon as he could.”

“Dangling bait?”

“No, not really,” Jade said as they walked to the foyer and she turned for the stairs. “All right, maybe. I also told him I wouldn’t go at him anymore about going to school, that I respect his decision, and that I’m leaving town at six o’clock tonight for a job, driving down to Florida for the next month or so. I just wanted to meet with him one last time before I left. To give him the watch, to give us both closure.”

“You packed a lot of lies into one short phone message. Have you been taking lessons from Jessica? Tell me, did Teddy even own a gold watch?” Court asked, following her up the stairs.

“He did once. His father’s. Mom took it with her when she left, and either she or Teddy’s brother probably hocked it. But Jermayne doesn’t know that.” She paused on the landing and sighed. “God, I hope he shows up. I really need to know why he lied to me. I mean, there was no reason to lie to me, right? Not unless Jermayne was hiding something, hiding
from
something. I might even let Matt flash his badge, question him.”

“Don’t do that, Jade,” Court said, following her into her bedroom, following her like a puppy, damn it, like Sunny, eager for some attention.

“Don’t do what? Bring Matt in on it? All right, maybe that’s pushing it. But Jermayne never really answers me. He keeps avoiding any real answers.”

“No, Jade, I don’t mean about Matt. I mean, don’t do this to yourself. Don’t go building up your hopes again. Because that is what you’re doing. Teddy wanted Jermayne to go to school, and you’re going to keep trying to do what Teddy wanted. I think Jermayne should go to school. I agree with you that he’s going nowhere fast as it is, and that his life would have been very different—better—if his brother had lived. But Teddy couldn’t fix the world, sweetheart, and neither can you. You can only get hurt.”

Jade looked at Court for a long time, her expression unreadable. “You think he did it, don’t you? You think Jermayne killed Teddy.”

“No. I think it’s
possible
he killed Teddy. He was strong enough to wrestle the gun from Teddy, turn it on him.”

“Teddy was drunk that night, maybe even passed-out drunk. Anybody could have taken advantage of him like that, not just Jermayne. Besides, where’s Jermayne’s motive?”

She turned away from him, rummaging in a chest of drawers and coming out with a silky nude-beige bra and matching panties.

“Motive? Come on, Jade. We live in a world where people kill other people for cutting them off on an exit ramp. We’ve gone from honking the horn to flipping the finger, to beating them to death with a baseball bat we keep under the front seat, all in the past ten or fifteen years. We’re a violent society. I don’t know why Jermayne might kill Teddy. You said the case Teddy kept his gun in was there, right on his desk. We don’t know why it was on his desk, why Teddy had it out at all. But it was there and if Jermayne was there and Teddy pushed him one too many times about going to school, maybe the kid just snapped.”

“But that would mean that Joshua Brainard
killed his wife, but never planned to frame Teddy for the murder. That the whole thing was coincidence. Two crimes, two killers, one night. No, Court, I don’t think I can buy that one.” She headed for the walk-in closet and emerged a few moments later with a thin, silvery blouse draped with a very interesting V-neckline, and black slacks hanging over her arm.

The bias cut of the blouse, the simple lines of the slacks—both were severely tailored, without frills, and could have had Jade’s name written all over them, so suited were the pieces to her refined, sophisticated look. Court had seen the pieces and brought them home from Italy. He’d given the outfit to her for her birthday, two months before their breakup.

Another woman would have thrown the outfit away. He wondered if Jade had considered that, and then decided to be practical. He wondered if she remembered that he had given her the pieces.

He decided to give it a shot.

“I’ve always liked that outfit on you,” he said when she looked at him, one eyebrow raised, as if to say,
I’m going to take a shower now, you know, so what are you still doing here?

“It’s very comfortable. Court? It’s after four o’clock. I want to take a shower.”

“You used to like baths. Bubble baths. You used to invite me to share the tub with you. I’d have to take a shower afterward to get the scent of your bubble bath off my skin, but it was worth it.” He walked closer to her. “One night I didn’t bother with the shower. We’d had…more important things to do… and we overslept the next morning, so I had to just dress and leave for the office. Do you remember that, Jade?”

“Court…”

“Do you remember Kristine, my secretary? She teased me all day about it. She said the last time she’d been around a man who smelled that good was when her cousin Billy May—just May to his friends—came to town to announce his sex-change operation.”

“You told me,” Jade said quietly. “I remember. Then you told me Kristine was making that up.”

“She gave me a bottle of bubble bath as a gag gift for Christmas. An entire gift basket, as a matter of fact. I hadn’t told anybody yet that you’d left me. You see, I was still so sure you’d come back.”

“Court… I’m sorry. We were upset, under some considerable pressure. You said things…I said things.” She laid the clothing on the bed and kept her back to him. But he could tell that she was
rubbing her hands together, her posture more protective than dismissive. “We… it just wasn’t working out.”

“So like the horn honk that turned to flipping the finger that grew into the baseball bat kept under the front seat—the argument turned to stupid ultimatums and then, bam, the big bat came out. The lawyer. Who hired him, Jade? It was Teddy, wasn’t it? And then the ball just kept on rolling.”

Finally she turned on him. “Why? Why would you only ask that now, Court? Why did you just let it all happen?”

“Because I was hurting. Because I was jealous. Because I wanted to come first in your life, and I’d just realized I didn’t, because I’d fought that war and I’d lost it, just as he’d warned me I would. Because I’m a goddamn idiot who let pride make me do things I regretted the moment I’d done them, but by then it was too late. I thought you knew that, Jade.”

Jade’s eyes were bright with tears. She pressed her hands against her mouth, but not before she moaned quietly, “Oh, God… oh, my God…”

“And now he’s dead, and any chance I had of giving us both some time, and then maybe we could try again, might have died with him,” Court said,
wishing he could stop talking. But he couldn’t.

Maybe it was seeing Teddy on that DVD, maybe it was seeing the plaque the man had put up for Terrell Johnson, maybe it was everything he’d been hearing about the enigma that had been Teddy Sunshine for the past two weeks all stirred in together with everything he’d known about the man that he’d never shared with Jade. The veiled threat, the way Teddy had set himself up as Court’s competition.

“Yes, Court, and now he’s dead. That much is certainly true.”

“And the rest of it? Because now he’s Saint Teddy, isn’t he, Jade? I thought it was bad before, but it’s even worse now. Saint Teddy? Tell me Jade. I love you. I always have and always will love you. But how in hell do I compete with
that?”

Court turned to leave the room, to go somewhere and either get himself under control or figure out a way to beat himself up for his lousy timing and worse words.

“Court, wait! Damn it, Court Becket, you come back here!”

He kept his back to her as he shook his head. “No, it’s all right, Jade. I didn’t mean for us to have a postmortem right now on our dead
marriage. I was out of line. Go take your shower. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

But before he could move again she was behind him, her fingertips digging into his left shoulder as she tried to turn him around to face her. “Don’t you leave me like this, Court. Don’t you dare leave me like this. Everybody… everybody always leaves.”

Court turned, took hold of her arms as he watched the first tears run down Jade’s too-pale cheeks. “Everybody, Jade?”

She lowered her head, avoiding his gaze. “Wow, where did that one come from?” She looked up at him again. “I… I don’t know why I said that.”

He led her over to the bed and they sat down next to each other. “Your mother left, Jade. She left your father.”

“She left all of us,” Jade said, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. “We weren’t enough for her.”

“And then your sisters left, right?”

She looked at him, her expression incredulous. “My sisters? What does that have to do with anything? They grew up, they went to live their own lives.”

“After what you did for them, after everything you sacrificed for them. Jolie, off to Hollywood to chase her dream. Jessica, chasing her own
dream. After you’d given up
your
dream for them. You gave, they took.”

“They…nobody knew I wanted to go to medical school. I worked with Teddy, even while I was still in high school. They knew I would stay with him.”

“Leaving them free to go.”

“Their mother left them. Jessica was barely in her teens. Somebody had to take care of them.”

“Teddy
had to take care of them, Jade. Not you. You weren’t that much older than Jolie. Yet she got a free pass, didn’t she? You grew up, so she didn’t have to. You gave her and Jess not only their childhood, but yours.”

“It wasn’t like that. I think Jolie missed our mother the most. I think Mom’s leaving hit her harder than it did either Jess or me. I mean, if Mom had a favorite, it was Jolie. She encouraged her dream, made sure she had dance and voice lessons, that sort of thing. I don’t think Jolie noticed when Mom began to look at her differently. As if she envied her, maybe even disliked her for being so beautiful, so talented. I really worried about Jolie, about the day she’d figure out that Mom had begun to hate her. Instead, Jolie cried for months after Mom left.”

Court didn’t think it was time to point out to

Jade that her mother hadn’t just left
her
physically all those years ago, but she had left her emotionally years before that, in favor of her younger sister. In fact, it could almost be said that Jade had always been a motherless child.

Who sought approval, acceptance, more than a child looking for love? Jade had needed to be needed, and her sisters had needed her. Teddy had needed her.

Teddy had made her feel indispensable to him, and Jade had been more than happy to play the role that had been given her. He loved her, he loved all three of his daughters the best Court could tell, but he had also slotted them into convenient categories: Jessica, the baby; Jolie, the dreamer; and Jade, the responsible one who took care of everyone.