The Bastard Hand (15 page)

I sat back down at the table, and Tassie said, “I thought that would get your attention. Jeez, I should’ve just walked up to you in the beginning and said that. It would be at least two thousand for each of us, and an investment of maybe ten or fifteen minutes. And no guilt—the marks are crack dealers.”

I looked at her face, studying it for any signs of deceit, then realized that even if she was lying, she was far too good at it for me to see through.

I ordered another round, then said, “Okay. Tell me about it.”

We left the bar together twenty minutes later, and no one waited outside to jump me. Tassie said, “So Wednesday night, right? Be at the house at ten o’clock and we’ll go from there,” and I said, “Okay,” because at some point during our conversation, I don’t know exactly when, I’d decided to do it.

She kissed me on the mouth—no tongue this time, but still a warm and familiar kiss—and then skipped off away from me up Madison. I watched her go, her lean legs moving quickly, her slender arms swinging, and only then did it hit me that I was certainly walking into a world of trouble with her.

We—that is, Tassie, Vinnie, Bone, Stoker and me—were going to hit a crack house. Why? Because they would have more money there that night than a bank. Tassie told me they weren’t interested in stealing the crack; that would make the job just a bit too complicated. But, if everything went smoothly, stealing the money would be a breeze.

I’d asked her about how heavily armed the house was, and she’d been straight—the crack dealers were always armed to the teeth with Uzis and nine-millimeter handguns. But we would be equally armed, and we would also have the advantage of surprise. She asked me then, “Ever killed anyone, Charlie? ’cause, if worse comes to worse, you may have to.”

I didn’t answer her. The truth was I had killed before but it wasn’t really deliberate. I wound up in the hospital because of it. But I thought about what sort of burden a dead crack dealer would be on my conscience, and decided it wouldn’t be anything I couldn’t live with.

I asked her if she’d ever taken a life, and she smiled. “Only once. Bastard had it coming, though. But my friends, they’re another story. Between the three of them, the body count is eleven. Most of those are Stoker’s.”

That didn’t surprise me.

It was Stoker’s body count I mulled over as Tassie walked away. He worried me more than any crack dealers we might butt heads with.

Tassie disappeared around the corner. I looked at my watch. Ten after eight.

I still had to see Elise Garrity that night, and it would take at least an hour and a half to get back home. I hurried back to the car.

During the long drive back to Cuba Landing, I had plenty of time to think over the pros and cons of the job. Evening was coming on by the time I crossed over into Mississippi, infecting the western sky with impressions of purple and blue and red, and the Malibu’s new tires hummed serenely on the blacktop.

The sky’s colors had bled together into a dark gray by the time I hit Cuba Landing. It was nine-thirty when I drove up Main, and, as usual, night found the streets empty. I drove on past the park, with its flickering shadows and cool darkness, past the church where I lived, and another two miles through ever-thinning suburbs until I came to Swan Road.

The mansion was well kept, with a neatly trimmed front lawn and nicely weathered-looking stone lions on the porch, at either side of the wide oak doors. Vines crawled up the sides of the white stonework, tangled at a second-story balcony, where French doors were thrown open to the night breeze. It could easily have been ostentatious with just a few more frills. But it wasn’t.

I knocked on the huge double doors.

A long moment of silence. I was about to knock again when one of the doors swung open and the butler peered out at me. He said, “Yes?”

He had two inches on me in height, but was much slimmer—sharp shoulders and elbows jutted underneath his butler outfit. Hair blond and thinning, slicked neatly back on his large head, and blue eyes, cold and frosted like an Alaskan husky. No eyebrows, or if there were, so blond as to be invisible.

I identified myself, and the attitude he’d been preparing suddenly died. “Oh, Mr. Wesley. Please do come in. Miss Garrity has been waiting for you.”

He stood aside for me to enter. Walking past him, I said, “Sorry I’m so late. Got held up in Memphis.”

“As far as I know, sir,” the butler said, “Miss Garrity was not expecting you at any particular time.”

He closed the door behind me, and, as if he’d grown accustomed to the duty, gave me a moment to take in my surroundings. The front hall of the mansion gleamed with white tile and white painted walls. The only furniture, an end table with a Victorian-looking lamp, and a cozy chair next to it. Above the table and chair, a wide staircase with a hand-carved wood railing led to the second floor. On my right, French doors led into another room.

At the far end of the hall, a short, plump maid came through a single glass door, causing a fuss in the air with a feather duster. She glanced up, made a little show of surprise at seeing a stranger standing there. “Oh, hello,” she said.

I nodded. Her body strained at the seams of her black clothes, but the face that smiled at me was pleasantly cherubic. Sort of a Hardy to the butler’s Laurel.

“Stella,” the butler said, “Would you be good enough to go upstairs and tell Miss Garrity her visitor has arrived?”

She lumbered off up the stairs, wood creaking under her, and Louis turned to me. “Miss Garrity should be right down. Would you care to wait in the sitting room?”

He led me through the French doors and into a cozy little room with a wood floor and walls lined with books. A mini-bar sat in one corner, and he immediately made his way to it, saying, “A drink while you’re waiting, sir?”

I sat down in a cushy armchair and Louis brought my drink to me on a tray. He said, “I shall be just in the other room, sir, if you need anything at all. Please don’t hesitate to call on me.” He didn’t have a British accent, but he may as well have had.

He left the room and I stood up, drink in hand, to peruse the books. Mostly volumes on theology and religious history, with a few old classics thrown in. A thin layer of dust clung to the upper shelves.

I was just about to pull one down when Elise came in. Smiling, she said, “I was starting to think you weren’t going to show.”

“Hi,” I said, hastily putting the book back where I found it. “Yeah, sorry about being late. I went up to Memphis and took awhile getting back.”

She said, “You can look at that book if you want to.”

“Naw, just killing time. You look absolutely stunning.”

“Well, thank you, Charlie Wesley.” There she went with the first and last name thing again.

She really did look great—her gold-red hair flowed loose over her shoulders, and a pair of wire-frame reading glasses rested delicately on her small nose. I’ve always had a weakness for girls with glasses, so the effect wasn’t lost on me. Faded blue jeans and a man’s white shirt and no shoes. She said, “I see you already have a drink. Mind if I join you?”

“You have to ask?”

“What are you drinking?”

I told her, and she said, “That sounds like exactly what I want,” then went to the bar and made one.

I was unexpectedly ill at ease. Just coming to the house in the first place was presumptuous of me, even though I’d been invited—there was always the off chance that she’d spoken out of turn, and, in light of the news about her mother’s heart attack, regretted asking me over.

I said, “What’s the news on Mrs. Garrity? I hope she’s doing better.”

She paused with the vodka bottle in her hand, glanced up at me. A pained look in her eyes, but I couldn’t be sure if it was pain for her ill mother, or pain at my mention of her. “She’s in stable condition,” she said. “I spent most of the day in Oxford with her, and the doctors say she’s doing as well as can be expected. It’s going to be touch and go for a few days.”

“It’s lucky your man Louis was here.”

“Yes. Mother was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich, and just collapsed, apparently. Louis found her. Captain Forrey drove her to the police station, and a helicopter from the hospital in Oxford took her from there. She’s conscious now, but she can’t speak.”

Her words faltered, and she took a quick sip of her drink.

“If there’s anything I can do . . .”

She smiled. “That’s very kind of you. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”

“Listen, if you’d like to make this another time—”

“Oh, no, not at all. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you. I could use the company.” Then, sensing the need to change the subject: “What do you think of my new mini-bar here? Bought it just after Jathed’s funeral. A little freezer down here, and stocked with just about anything you could drink.”

“Nice,” I said. “But I thought Southern Baptists didn’t drink.”

She threw a couple ice cubes in her glass, said, “Well, they don’t. They don’t do a lot of things, officially. But every Southern Baptist I know has at least one vice that’s technically a sin—smoking, usually. Sometimes drinking. Once in awhile, it’s even worse than that.”

“To the Freewill Baptist Church.”

She came around and clinked her glass against mine, and we drank. She said, “Aren’t you a Baptist, Charlie?”

“Now that I’m hooked up with Reverend Childe, I guess I am. And what the hell? It’s as good a denomination as any.”

She dropped down into the cushy chair I’d been sitting in, said, “Well, I’ve done pretty good by it. Grew up in the Baptist church, but I sort of went astray for a long time. Until Jathed took up the collar. He led me back into the flock, so to speak.” Taking a sip of her drink, she said, “Did you grow up with the church?”

“My family went to church on Easter and Christmas and that’s about it. We were Catholic by name, but my parents were never very hardcore about it.”

“Lucky you,” she said. “You know what Mother used to say about Catholics? ‘You stay away from them, Elise. Them Cath’lics is a cult!’ ”

“Well, your mother was absolutely right. We are a cult. We’ve just been pretending to be Christians for the last two thousand years, is all.”

“A-ha. I suspected as much.”

We drank another toast to the Catholic Conspiracy and Elise said, “You must be sick to death of talking about religion, Charlie. I reckon being the new pastor’s assistant, that’s all folks want to talk to you about.”

“I don’t mind,” I said, and I didn’t. So we talked a considerable time longer about religion, about Baptist customs compared to Catholic customs, and about Judaism compared to Christianity. We even touched on Hinduism, but backed off when we realized that neither of us knew anything about it.

But, inevitably, the conversation turned back to her missing brother. Elise said, “Jathed had some remarkably enlightened views about world religion for a Baptist minister. He’d read a lot of Jung, you know, the whole collective unconscious thing? To him, that was proof of God’s existence. The fact that everyone, all over the world, had a perception of God, and they worshipped that perception. Sometimes God was represented in several forms, but basically, it was all the same at its root. I think the idea was that everyone is born with a need for a God, something like that. And your idea of God is shaped by where you’re born or what environment you grow up in.” She caught my puzzled expression, and hastily added, “Don’t get me wrong. Jathed still believed that Jesus was the one true way—he would hardly have been a Baptist minister had he thought differently—but he believed that we were all cut from the same spiritual cloth, if you know what I mean. He held out hope for all the, I don’t know . . . unbelievers?” She took another drink of her vodka and tonic, leaned back in the chair. “He was a good man. He had a good heart.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I said nothing. Elise stared at the mini-bar, then said, “It was a bit of a shock last night. Just when I was getting used to the idea of him being dead, Mother has a heart attack. The thought of really being alone . . . it’s sobering.”

“I’m sure.”

“I don’t know. I keep thinking about how Jathed would feel right now, or what he would do. And I keep thinking that he should have been here. He shouldn’t have lit out or died or whatever it was. Maybe you won’t understand this, but the truth is it’s easier in some ways. Do you know what I mean? It’s easier to think Jathed is dead than it is to think he abandoned the family. Does that sound horrible?”

“No.”

“My little bar here. I told you I bought it after Jathed’s funeral? My little revenge, I reckon, for him not being here anymore. Jathed, of course, never allowed any drinking in the house. He would’ve been staggered if he knew I even drank at all. But some afternoons, when he was busy at the church, I’d drive down to Oxford and just sit in the bar in the Square and slam down whiskey and sodas and pray that he’d come walking in somehow and find me.”

“You wanted him to catch you drinking?”

The ice crackled in her glass. “I reckon part of me did. I don’t know. Not really, I guess. Granted, he wasn’t my boss or anything, and what did I care if he caught me drinking, right? What was he going to do? But being his sister brought certain restrictions, and I loved him enough to go along with most of them. But occasionally I’d get a rebellious bug, usually about stupid things. That bar, for instance. Silly, really. . . .” She stopped, took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose, then laughed self-consciously. Taking a sip of her drink, she said, “I’m sorry, Charlie. Listen to me go on! I didn’t mean to do that.”

I took the glass from her hand, said, “Want another?”

“Yes, please.”

She spoke about what it was like growing up in Cuba Landing, lingered on the memories she had of her brother, wild stunts they’d pulled as kids, touching moments they’d shared as teenagers, traumatic episodes they’d worked through together as adults. She smiled as she talked, not looking at me, caught up in the sticky webs of memory. About a million light years removed from the cool, seductive woman I’d met at the church. I kind of liked her better this way, but I suspected that once she had the urge to talk out of her system she’d revert back to type.