Stone Rain (17 page)

Payne comes over and grabs her by the arm, pulls her out of the chair, starts dancing with her. She says, “No thanks, really,” but then he’s got her pushed up against the wall, his mouth pressed up against her ear, saying, “It must be tough, huh, Candy? Eldon gone, no one to meet your needs,” and then everyone’s hootin’ and hollerin’ and turning up the music and then she’s on the floor and she can’t stop them and they’re holding her down and someone says, “Whoa, remember these? Haven’t seen these since you were onstage, what the fuck we got you up here doing the books for?” And they go one after the other, all except Leo, who’s off in the corner, sounds like maybe he’s whimpering, until finally Gary tells him to go downstairs, have a piece of pie or something. The Doobie Brothers sing, “The rain that fell upon my stone, Like tears you cry I shared alone.”

Afterwards, they’re very quiet. Someone says maybe they should get Candy a cab.

The next day, she doesn’t come to work. She hurts.

The day after that, Gary comes by the apartment. She comes to the door holding Katie. He’s got a “Come Back to Work Soon!” card he bought at the drugstore, and there’s cash in the envelope. It’s $110. This is the part Miranda can’t figure out. A hundred, maybe, but what’s the extra ten for?

He says the guys are sorry, they got carried away, but they really need her back soon, you know? She’s so good and all. But if she wants, take an extra day. He won’t dock her pay or anything.

And she goes back.

And works with them.

And pretends to get over it.

Because she’s not done yet.

Not by a long shot.

I PUT MY TOILETRIES
into my bag, zipped it up, and bounced down the stairs. I had a lot on my agenda. Grab a cab to meet Sandler of the health department, hit the car rental agency, drive to Canborough to see what I could learn there, then head further east to Groverton. I was doing a last-minute check. Cell phone? Check. A map? Check. The photo of Trixie from the
Suburban
? Check. A bit of cash? I checked my wallet. Forty-eight dollars. Check.

I had a go for liftoff.

I slung the strap of the bag over my shoulder, opened the front door to leave, and came face-to-face with Detective Flint.

He had his fist suspended in midair, or mid-knock, and I guess we both surprised each other, taking half a step back.

“Detective Flint,” I said, catching my breath.

He smiled kindly, lifted his fedora a tenth of an inch in greeting, and set it back on his head. I looked over his shoulder, and there, at the curb, was Trixie’s GF300. A man got out the driver’s side, walked halfway across the yard and tossed the keys to Flint, got into the passenger side of an unmarked car parked in front of it.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’re done with it,” he said, tipping his head toward Trixie’s car. “Forensics went over it, didn’t find a thing. She took your wheels, so go ahead and use hers.” He dangled the keys in front of me and I took them warily.

“Thanks,” I said, pocketing them. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”

“Don’t go thinking I made a special trip. I have more questions. First one being, you taking a trip?” His eyes were on my overnight bag.

“Uh, just an overnighter, I suspect,” I said.

“Little vacation?”

“No, it’s for an assignment. An out-of-town assignment, a feature I’m doing,” I said.

Flint nodded. “You mind if I come in?”

“No, of course not,” I said, admitting him to the house and tossing my bag onto the floor as we eased into the small living room at the front of the house. Flint, clearly a man of manners and breeding, took off his hat once inside, and held it in his right hand by the brim.

“What sort of assignment?” he asked.

“Well, actually,” I said, “I can’t really discuss assignments I might be working on for the paper, with the police. I’d have to speak to my editor about that.”

“The reason I’m asking is, it’s my understanding that you’ve been suspended.” He gave me that friendly smile again. I said nothing. “So I don’t understand how you could be going off to do an assignment for the paper if you’re not actually working for the paper at the moment.”

I was starting to sweat. Flint didn’t even have me under the hot lights in an interrogation room yet. I was here in my own home, and I could feel beads of perspiration on my forehead. I could see how bad this looked. Found with a dead guy one day, discovered hitting the road with bag packed the next.

“I talked to some people where you work—well, where you worked,” Flint said. He tossed his hat onto the couch so that he could reach into his jacket for his notebook. He turned over a couple of pages, squinted to get a better look at his own handwriting. “You know a woman named Frieda, I think it is?”

“Yes,” I said.

“She runs the housing section at the paper?”

“Home,” I said, without the exclamation mark. Flint would have wondered what was wrong with me had I shouted it at him.

“You got moved there, according to Mr., hang on…Mr. Magnuson?”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, I had a little chat with him. You got moved out of your feature-writing job because of this difficulty with Mr. Benson, the deceased, this business about trying to get him not to write about Ms. Snelling.”

“That was his interpretation. I never told him not to write about her.”

“Yeah, well, unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to ask him about that at the moment.” I felt a droplet of sweat run down my neck and under my shirt collar. “So,” Flint continued, “you went to work for Frieda, and she said things didn’t work out very well there.”

“Not really. But I didn’t have much of a chance to settle in.”

“She told me you were upset about a lot of things, including your troubles with Mr. Benson. She said, and just hang on a second here, I wrote this down. Okay, here it is. She said you referred to him as a ‘dipshit’ reporter. Does that sound right?”

I swallowed. “It does sound like something I might have said.”

“And that you also said you’d be happy if he got caught in a, hang on, got caught in a ‘Wal-Mart cave-in.’ Does that sound like something you said?”

“I was,” I said carefully, “a bit upset.”

Flint nodded again. “I guess you were. I mean, who wouldn’t be, right? Benson, he complains to his boss, his boss is an old friend of your boss, they get talking, and you get demoted.”

“That’s pretty much what happened.” I happened to glance at the clock on the mantel. I had forty minutes to get to my meeting with Sandler. At least now I had transportation.

“I see you looking at the clock there,” Flint said. “Am I holding you up from something?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“So tell me again, where are you off to? It’s clearly not an assignment. I guess you sort of lied to me about that, what with you being suspended and all.”

“My wife and I,” I said, “we’re having a bit of a rough time. We need a bit of space.”

Flint frowned. “That’s too bad. My wife and I, we’ve had our ups and downs too, over the years. Kind of goes with the territory, this kind of job, you know? Long hours, working nights, that kind of thing. But we worked through it.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“So what would make you imagine a Wal-Mart cave-in?”

Flint was giving me a case of mental whiplash. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just have that kind of mind, I guess.”

“Creative,” Flint said, helping.

“I suppose.”

“Because I remember, you write science fiction books, right?”

“I have. Not lately. My last one was a sequel to
Missionary
, but it didn’t get a whole lot of attention. That, and getting back into a mortgage, since we moved back downtown from Oakwood, meant getting a job at the
Metropolitan
.”

“That’s a shame, not being able to realize your goals and all.”

Don’t let him mess with your head
, I told myself.
Just let it go
. “Sure,” I said.

“I mean, not that you aren’t doing okay. A good job with a big paper, until, well, yesterday, when you got suspended. They still paying you while you’re suspended?”

“Yes. At least, I think so.”

“You got a union?”

“Yes.”

“You should talk to them.”

“I probably should. There’s been so much going on, I haven’t really had a moment to think about it.”

“So you really don’t think your friend, Ms. Snelling, had anything to do with Mr. Benson’s death?”

It was like watching a one-man ping-pong game. Flint had the ball moving so fast I could barely keep track of it.

“I, I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, even if Trixie had wanted to kill Benson, the time to do it would have been before his story and the picture of her ran in the paper.”

“What do you suppose he was doing there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for an even better story. An exclusive on Trixie’s basement.”

Flint gave a satisfied nod, like this was his line of thinking too. I tried not to be obvious as I took another look at the clock.

“You sure you don’t have to be someplace?” Flint asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s fine.” God, I’d barely glanced at it.

“So, that’s quite the basement Ms. Snelling has,” Flint said.

“I suppose,” I said. “I think, if I had that kind of space in my basement, I’d build a model train layout.”

Flint actually chuckled. “Yeah, I love those. With the flashing signals, the crossings that come down. Did Ms. Snelling ever do anything to you in that basement of hers?”

“No. You asked me this before. We’re friends, that’s all.”

“Some friend. Leaving you handcuffed in the same room with a corpse and all. You got any extra friends like that I could have?”

“I guess she had her reasons.”

“You ever check out all the equipment she has in that basement? Straps and whips and all that stuff?”

“I certainly saw it hanging on the walls, but it’s not like I did an inventory.”

“Some men, they get off on being tortured, spanked, that sort of thing.”

I said nothing.

“But you wonder, how far would some guys like for Ms. Snelling to go?”

“I don’t think anyone would want to have his throat slit, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No,” Flint said, his voice drifting off. “What I was wondering was, would anyone ever want to be electrocuted?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, shocked. Have a few volts shot through their system.”

I shook my head. “I can’t imagine anyone getting their jollies that way.”

“Well, me neither. But I was wondering whether you ever noticed, did Ms. Snelling have a stun gun?”

“What?”

“A stun gun. You know, the kind some police forces have. You shoot a guy, you put fifty thousand volts into him, tends to slow him down a bit.”

“No,” I said. “I never saw anything like that. What makes you ask?”

“Well, you see,” Flint said, “we found something interesting on Mr. Benson’s body. Looked like a couple of bee stings at first. Right on his torso, just to the left of the navel, these two spots, a few inches apart.”

“Maybe he’d been stung.”

Flint shook his head. “No, no trace of any sort of bee venom in his bloodstream. No, these looked like the marks that are left when someone gets zapped with a stun gun.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. See, what I’m thinking is, maybe Ms. Snelling, or maybe somebody else if we accept your version, that she didn’t do this, zapped Mr. Benson with a stun gun, and while he was incapacitated, strapped him to that big wooden cross, and finally cut his throat open.”

I tried to make some sense of this. “Don’t you think, if Trixie had done this, she wouldn’t have had to use a stun gun on him? She could have lured him onto the device, promised him a bit of fun, made a game out of it, but then, once she had him strapped down, killed him. That’s if she’d done it. But someone else, someone who wasn’t into the whole role-playing thing, they’d have to use a stun gun on him first to get him up there.”

“They?”

“A couple of days ago, these two guys, they did a presentation for the city police, not Oakwood, not your department, but downtown, of this new kind of stun gun. Wanted to get the cops to buy a bunch of them. I did a story on it, for the paper. When Trixie saw the story, saw a picture of these guys, she freaked out. Like they were the very ones she’d never want to see her picture in the paper. And then her picture runs, and now there’s a dead guy in her basement, and you say he was shot with a stun gun.”

Flint scratched his forehead. “That’s quite a story. Here’s another one. Martin Benson came to Ms. Snelling’s house, still determined to get the whole story on kinky sex in the suburbs, wants to see her basement, maybe he actually breaks into the house to get a look at it. He’s a moralistic son of a bitch, and would never be persuaded to get on that cross for entertainment purposes. Ms. Snelling has a stun gun on the premises, uses it on Mr. Benson, straps him down and kills him.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I nodded in the direction of Trixie’s car. “I take it you searched that for a stun gun.”

“That we did,” said Flint. “No such luck.”

Flint flipped his notebook closed and slipped it into his pocket. “Well, I can see you have places to go, people to see,” he said, picking up his hat and putting it on.

“Sure,” I said.

We both went outside, and I locked the front door behind me.

“You have a nice little time away, and I hope things work out with your wife,” Flint said. “She seems like a real nice lady. Too bad about her getting busted down a rank or two at work too.”

There seemed nothing he didn’t know.

“You got a cell phone number where I can reach you if I need to?” Flint got out his notebook and wrote down the number I gave him.

“You have a nice day now,” Flint said, walking down to the curb and getting into his unmarked car.

I SWUNG TRIXIE’S CAR
into Bayside Park ten minutes later than I’d promised to get there. The heavily treed park was on a high parcel of land overlooking our Great Lake, and when I pulled up alongside a nondescript silver Buick, the view beyond my windshield was blue-gray to the horizon line. There was a light wind, and some chop on the water, and a freighter was moving slowly from west to east, heading back up the seaway.