Racing the Devil (10 page)

“When you say ‘unhappy’ . . .”

“Her doctor called it depression. Personally, I think it was a simple case of marrying the wrong man.”

“You don’t think much of Mr. Hartwell?”

“Calvin. If you ask me, that’s a case of a man whose head is too big for his britches.”

I smiled at the mixed metaphor. “Mrs. Drafon . . .”

“Please, call me Birdie.”

“All right. Birdie. Do you think he might have been the one who . . . ?” I stopped, mid-question. There was no way to mention what had happened without reminding her that she’d just lost a friend—and that I was the one who was supposed to have killed her.

“No,” she said. “I shouldn’t think so. But I wouldn’t put my marker on it. He’s a cold man, at the core.”

“And that’s what made her so unhappy?”

“That, and other things.” She paused, tracing patterns in the frost that was rapidly melting on her glass. “She didn’t talk about her childhood much, but I had the feeling it wasn’t a very happy one. And then there was the church. Do you know anything about the Church of the Reclamation?”

I frowned, trying to recall. Then I remembered the minister I’d seen back at the jail. “Reverend Avery, right? He’s their pastor?”

“That’s the one. Those folks make the Southern Baptists look like hedonists. Amy didn’t mind most of the rules—she didn’t smoke or drink or dance—though what, exactly, is the matter with a little dancing, may I ask? Why, Henry and I could cut quite a rug, and I don’t think that made us bad or sinful.”

“Dancing is a sexually stimulating activity,” I explained. “At least, that’s what they told us Nazarenes.”

“Son,” she said, stifling a chuckle, “breathing is a sexually stimulating activity, if you’re with the right person.”

I lifted my glass in a toast. “Amen to that, Sister Birdie.”

She returned my toast. “Now, what was I saying? About Amy?”

“The Church of the Reclamation. The depression.”

“Oh. Yes. Well, I think they were related. You see, Amy was a lovely girl. Not beautiful, in the traditional sense, and a bit full in the hips, but lovely nonetheless. And bright. But she was only seventeen when she married Calvin, and I can tell you it was no nine months before Tara was born.”

“Tara?” I frowned. “I thought Katrina was the older girl.”

“Katrina is Calvin’s by his first wife. Don’t ask me about her. They never talk about her. As I understand it, she just packed her things one afternoon and left. And no one’s heard from her since.”

One wife dead, one vanished. Calvin, it seemed, was batting a thousand.

Ms. Birdie clucked her tongue against her teeth and went on. “Poor Amy. Here she was, seventeen years old, with a brand new baby and a five-year-old who wasn’t even hers. No wonder she was overwhelmed.” She plucked at her blouse, which puffed out where it tucked into her skirt. “When it got to be too much, Amy used to bring those little girls over here to stay with Henry and me. The girls would dress up in their little costumes and perform for us. Which, naturally, Calvin said was a sin. Let me tell you something, Mr. McKean. A man like that, the kind who sees evil everywhere? Well, that’s a man with sinning in his heart.”

I nodded without answering. The words were flowing, and I didn’t want to interrupt.

“It was hardest on Katrina, I think. She was always a lonely little thing—old for her age, if you know what I mean—and Amy . . . well, I think she always felt Katrina was a little bit of a stranger. Not that she was unkind. Just . . . distant.”

I nodded, feeling a surge of pity for a little girl who’d been abandoned by one mother and rejected by another. A child who might be vulnerable to a kindly-looking predator with candy and a camera.

“When the girls were both in school, Amy thought she might like to go to work, but Calvin wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted her at home, and that was that. If she felt unfulfilled, he said, she could use her talents to create a perfect pot roast.” She shook her head in disgust. “Pot roast. I was a good wife, Mr. McKean, but if Henry had tried that with me, he would have been buried with that pot roast firmly lodged in his backside.”

“I take it Amy didn’t see it that way.”

“Amy didn’t know how to say no.” She sighed and smoothed her skirt across her thighs. “Then about six months ago, they joined this new church. It must have been Calvin’s idea, because it’s all about how women are supposed to be subservient little doormats and how they’re all—
we’re
all—Jezebels, tainted with the sin of Eve. Never mind that Adam committed the same sin, and proved he had no backbone to boot.”

“Jezebels, huh.” I wouldn’t touch that one with a ten-foot pole.

“Anyway, Amy went along with it. But she just kept getting sadder and sadder, until finally, her doctor put her on some kind of medicine for it.”

“Do you know what kind of medicine?”

“It’s that one I keep reading about in the news.”

“Prozac?”

“I think so. But she stopped taking it.”

“Really. What happened?”

Her eyes glistened, two jet beads in a face as wrinkled as a withered apple. “She went out and got herself a job at a travel agency. Windrider Travel. It wasn’t about the
work
. It was about him not thinking she was anything of value. Calvin just about hit the ceiling. I mean, sparks flew out of that house. Amy was in tears when she came over here the next day, and I told her, ‘Honey, you are worth more than this. When the good Lord set us here, he made Eve for a helpmeet, not a doormat.’ And she said to me, ‘Ms. Birdie, you are right.’ ”

Her eyes brimmed, and a tear rolled down her nose and hung trembling from the tip. “I loved that child, Mr. McKean. She had her problems, but she was a good person.” She leaned toward me and half-whispered, “I don’t know this for a fact, but I think she might have been planning to divorce him.”

“Ms. Birdie, this is a hard question,” I said. “But I have to ask it—”

“I know.” She heaved a deep sigh. “Was she seeing anyone? Well, I don’t know for certain, but I know there was a man at work she was partial to. Ben Something-or-Other. I think she would have told me if anything had come of it, but perhaps not. She might have been ashamed, you know. But anyway, that’s how I knew you weren’t the one who did it. Because she’d told me who she was interested in, and it wasn’t you.”

She reached across the arm of the love seat and patted my hand with cool, papery fingers. “Besides, killers are like crocodiles. You ever see a crocodile’s eyes? Flat and cold and empty. People say Ted Bundy was a charmer, but he had crocodile eyes. Your eyes aren’t empty, Mr. McKean. You’ve got caring eyes.”

My cheeks warmed at the compliment. “Ms. Birdie, I hope you won’t be letting strangers into your house based on what’s in—or isn’t in—their eyes. Because I don’t want
The Tennessean
writing headlines about how some lowlife with the right eyes came in here and killed you.”

“Pooh,” said Birdie. “Drink your lemonade.”

Before I left, she told me what she knew about the rest of Amy’s family. That her parents were both dead. That she had a sister, Valerie Shepherd—the woman in the black sheath dress—who was the soloist for the church’s Sunday morning radio show. (“Not that she’s a believer,” said Birdie. “But she does have a beautiful voice.”) Valerie was involved with a man who had done six years in prison before he straightened out his life and joined the church, where he now did all the mastering for the radio show.

Same old song. Went to jail, found Jesus.

Not that I didn’t believe in the transformative power of prayer. I did. Mostly. But I’d seen enough jailhouse conversions to take this one with a grain of salt.

I asked, “How were things between Amy and her sister?”

“Oh, like sisters everywhere, I imagine,” she said airily. “Close as nits, and fought like cats and dogs.”

“What about?”

“Who knows? They were sisters, and sisters fight sometimes. Brothers, too, if my boys were any example.”

I thought of my brother, of all the meaningless arguments we’d had throughout the years. I thought of how his loss would rip through my soul like a black hole.

“I’ll come by sometime next week,” I said, “and put a peephole in the front door.”

“Pooh,” she said. “No need.”

“What if I’d really been a murderer? I could have forced my way inside and had my way with you before you even had a chance to scream.”

She smiled a beatific smile. “I’m too old for you to have your way with, and I don’t need a chance to scream.” She untucked her billowed blouse to reveal a little silver-plated, snub-nosed .38. “All I have to do is stay in close and pull the trigger.”

I grinned back at her. “Yes, Ma’am, I guess that’s true. But you could put all the hurting in the world on him, and what good will it do you if he kills you for it?”

“Mr. McKean,” she said, “I trust the Lord and Misters Smith and Wesson to protect my virtue and my life. And I refuse to live in fear. I’ve lived eighty-two good years, and I believe I am as good a judge of human nature as ever walked down the pike, and if I should one day misjudge someone, why then I’ll be with Henry and the good Lord all the sooner. And when I get there, we’ll dance us a jitterbug, Mister Calvin Hartwell and his Church of the Reclamation notwithstanding.”

“I’m still coming by to put in the peephole.”

She pursed her lips, but her dark eyes twinkled. “I won’t stop you.”

I DROVE BY THE FIRST EDITION
on the way home, on the off chance that the woman who had set me up was there. No such luck. It was Saturday, but it was still early, and the only customers were a couple of guys playing pool in the back. Dani was behind the bar, swabbing the counter with a damp cloth. I ordered a beer and asked her if she’d seen Heather around.

“Heather?” She frowned. “That the lady you took home the other night?”

“Yeah. That’s the one. You remember her, then?”

“Sure I do. That girl was a mess. She asked about you. Said you looked like a nice guy. She wanted to know if that was for real or if you were some kind of nut job.”

“What did you tell her?”

Her grin was crooked and extremely cute, but there were two gold rings on the fourth finger of her left hand, which meant she was married, or wanted folks to think so.

“I told her you were crazy as they come.” She laughed, presumably at my expression. “Naw. I’m kidding you. I told her you were the quiet type, never made trouble. Told her I would trust you with my little sister.”

“Your sister?” I raised my eyebrows.

“Honey . . .” She held up her left hand with the two gold rings. “Not that you’re not gorgeous, but I’m off the market.”

“Story of my life,” I said, and slid a twenty across the laminated wooden bar. “Do me a favor, will you? If she comes in here again, give me a call.”

“Look, darlin’, she don’t want to see you, it’s not my place to get involved.”

My jaw tightened. “Oh, I guarantee she doesn’t want to see me.”

“What’d she do, run off with your wallet?”

“I wish she’d settled for my wallet. If you see her, give me a call.” I handed her my card before she could process what I’d just told her. “Work number’s at the top, home number’s at the bottom. There’s a fifty in it for you.”

“My son wants some shoes that cost a hundred.”

It was steep, but not impossible. Besides, I liked her. “Okay. A hundred, if you get me here before she leaves.”

Her hazel eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to hurt her? ‘Cause it looked like she’s had her share of that already.”

“Never hurt a woman in my life,” I assured her. “I don’t plan to start.”

“I’ll think about it.”

I wasn’t sure she’d do it, even for the hundred bucks. I wasn’t even sure Heather would come back. I wouldn’t, in her place. Still, a long shot was better than no shot. She hadn’t given me a last name, so the First Edition was the only link, however tenuous, I had with her.

I thanked Dani, stopped to pick up some files at the office, and got home in time to watch
Happy Days
and
I Love Lucy
reruns with Jay. After three trips to the kitchen—water, beer, a bag of corn chips—and another to the bathroom, I gave up, exchanged my boots for running shoes, and drove downtown to the riverfront. With the sweat drying on my skin and the smell of the river in my nostrils, I ran like I was racing the devil.

In a way, I was.

T
HERE HAD BEEN NO WORD
from Mr. Perfect, and Jay was like a pendulum, swinging between devastation that Eric hadn’t called and the certainty that he would.

“He’s an artist.” Jay sat on the sofa, legs curled beneath him, gnawing at his thumbnail. “You know how artists are. No sense of time.”

I nodded noncommittally.

“He’s probably in the middle of a sculpture.”

“Jay . . .”

“I know, I know.” He sighed and ran a hand through his short, straw-blond hair. “He isn’t going to call.” His laugh was sad, bitter. “I sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t I?”

“I’m sorry, man,” I said. “I know how much this meant to you.”

“Oh well.” He unfolded himself from the couch and gave me a wan smile.
“Que sera, sera
. I think I’ll turn in early tonight. I’m not feeling very well.”