Bad Blood (18 page)

“Doesn’t matter. If you don’t keep your focus, you lose.”

“Oh, is that detective stuff?” she asked archly. “Well, if you have to stand around in the cold all the time waiting for some asshole you don’t even know to show up, it’s a pretty shitty job.” She started to move around the car toward me.

“Stay where you are.”

“Oh, give me a fucking break,” she snapped, but she stopped.

Gun still on her, I walked around, peered into the car that wasn’t mine. It was as empty as the night around us.

“You’re afraid I brought somebody?” Close enough now to read each other’s faces, I could see amused contempt in her smile. “Is that what real detectives do?”

“It sometimes helps.” I holstered the gun; I felt stupid, alone out there in the huge night, holding a gun on a tiny fifteen-year-old girl. “Did you know I was looking for you? Is that why you’re here?”

She frowned up at me. Although there were no stars, no moon, the gold of her hair seemed to shine. “Looking for me? How do you know who I am?”

“Detective stuff,” I told her. “You’re Ginny Sanderson, and your father’s worried about you.”

“Oh, him.” Impatience and disappointment equally filled her words. “You work for him?” The idea didn’t seem at all to surprise her. She slouched against my car and scowled.

“He wanted me to,” I said, “but I don’t.”

She glanced up at that, and I saw her eyes glow, like the sparkling of the stars and the snow and the air itself on the coldest of winter nights.

“You crossed my dad? You won’t last long up here. What did he want you to do?”

“Find you. Where’s Jimmy Antonelli’s truck?”

With a laugh she pushed herself up to sit on the hood of my car. As she moved she brushed close to me, and I caught the scent of her perfume, a heady, complicated fragrance, rich and old-fashioned, not what I might have expected of such a young girl.

“I get it,” she said, swinging her legs against the wheel well. “That’s a dumb detective trick, right? You say something out of nowhere to confuse me?”

“Do you have it?”

She pointed to the Trans-Am parked between my car and the road. “That’s my car. I’m not supposed to drive at night until I’m sixteen, but it’s mine.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Sure it is. Besides, you should like that car. My dad
gave
it to me. But he won’t give you one. He’s not that nice to his employees.”

“I told you I don’t work for him.”

“Maybe you think you don’t. Everyone around here does, whether they know it or not.”

I pulled a cigarette out of my jacket. She held out her hand automatically, unthinkingly. I gave her that one, took out another for myself. She waited for a light; I did that, too.

The match was a brief flare in the darkness, reflected in her hair, her eyes. I shook it out, threw it away. “A man was killed Monday night by someone with the keys to that truck.”

“Yeah. Wally.” She pulled deeply on the cigarette. “Dumb little shit.”

“You knew him?”

“Oh, sure. I know all those guys.” She tossed her head, elaborately uninterested. “What kind of stupid cigarettes are these?” She looked at the Kent I’d given her, threw it away. She reached under the baggy sweater, brought out a filterless Camel, waited without speaking for another light.

The still-burning cigarette she’d abandoned lay among gravel and dry leaves. I crushed it with the toe of my boot, then lit for her the one she was holding.

“Shit!” she snapped, brushing ash from my own cigarette off her sweater, where it had fallen. “Watch it! This is my mom’s.”

“Your mom’s?” I said, then stopped myself. Her family’s troubles weren’t my business.

“Yeah, you know all about it, right?” she said scornfully. “Everybody around here knows all about it. So she walked out on my dad, so what? Who wouldn’t? Fucking jerk-off. Anyway, when she comes back, she’s gonna want her stuff.” She hugged the soft black sweater around her, looked away as she smoked.

I watched her in the empty night. She brushed again at the spot where ash had fallen. I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be an asshole!” she hissed. She might have been about to say something else, but the bar’s door opened, spilling light, music, and four laughing people out into the night. They stood briefly in the lot, ending the evening together, the men’s voices loud, the women’s harder to hear. Car doors opened and closed, engines growled, and two sets of headlights swept past us onto 30.

Ginny Sanderson jumped lightly off my car, moved beyond it to where the headlights didn’t reach. “Nobody better see me here,” she said.

“Why not?”

She looked at me with a nasty smile. “Because if my dad knows you found me and didn’t bring me home you’ll be in really deep shit. He’ll probably fuck you up anyway if you don’t find me, but this would really piss him off. He said that, right? That he’d fuck you up?”

I didn’t answer, but whatever she saw in my face made her nod. “That’s him,” she said. “He never just asks you to do something. Like it never occurs to him you might want to anyway, or you don’t but if he paid you or something you would. He always has to tell you how bad he’s going to fuck you up. That’s why my mom ran away. You
know
,” she said, fast, as though to prevent me from speaking, “you’re some dumb detective. You never even asked me what I’m doing here.”

“You want something,” I said.

“Well, duh! If you’re so smart, what do I want?”

“I don’t know. But I want something too: I want Jimmy’s truck, and I want the things that were stolen from Eve Colgate’s storeroom.”

Her eyes widened quickly; then she laughed. “You used that one already, saying something to confuse me. Are you supposed to be a good detective?”

“Probably not. But I get the feeling you’re not such a good kid, either.”

She snorted. “Different meanings of ‘good,’ Mr. Bigshot. Don’t do that shit with me. I’m in Honors English.”

“Not anymore this semester, from what I hear.”

“That was bullshit!” She glanced at me sharply.

“That’s what your father told me, too. Not his innocent little princess.”

“He’s an asshole,” she couldn’t help saying. “But anyway, now I can go somewhere else next year. Maybe Europe or something. I hated that dump anyway.”

“If I tell Sheriff Brinkman you’ve been fencing stolen property, you might not be going anywhere.”

“Who, Robocop?” She was scornful, unimpressed with my threat. “You think my dad would let him anywhere near me? Besides”—she leaned back against my car, blew a stream of smoke into the sky—“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She eyed me thoughtfully. With a well-bred, ladylike smile, she inquired, “Who fucking cares? Anyway, forget that crazy lady and her shit. I thought you wanted to know who killed Wally.”

I dropped my cigarette to the ground, crushed it. “Do you know?”

She shrugged. “Everyone says it was Jimmy.”

“Was it?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know? But Jimmy’s in deep shit, huh? Do you know where he is?”

“That’s what you were looking for me for? You want to know where Jimmy is?”

“Hey, you figured it out! You
are
a great detective!”

“Why do you want him?”

Her voice became coy. “I can help him.” She waved her cigarette casually in the darkness. “You’re not the only one who knows smart lawyers and shit like that. I can help Jimmy more than you can. Only I bet you don’t even know where he is.”

“Why would you want to help him? You walked out on him.”

“He told you that?” she asked slyly.

“Everyone knows,” I countered.

She shrugged again, temporarily out of dumb detective tricks. “So what? I can still want to help him.”

“Then tell me who has the truck.”

“Okay,” she said teasingly, “if you tell me where he is.”

“Did you use the truck when you robbed Eve Colgate?”

As I spoke, a car cut around the curve of 30, swept us with headlights as it pulled into the lot. Ginny Sanderson
stepped
into the shadows again. When Antonelli’s door had shut behind the driver and the night was ours again, she threw her cigarette away, still burning, like the one before it. “Oh, fuck this shit,” she said. “I’m getting the fuck out of here. This is a drag.”

She brushed past me to her car, pulled open the door, slid behind the wheel. As the engine roared to life and the loud bass thump of the stereo began to pound, she lowered the black-glass window.

“If you want to know where the fucking truck is, just tell anyone at the Creekside you want to see me.”

She reversed hard, close to me, then tore onto the road. Her red tail lights whipped around the curve much too fast, and were gone.

The drive to Eve Colgate’s wasn’t long. The bare branches of the trees were being tossed violently now, and dead leaves scraped across the road in front of me. I drove carefully, my mind on other things.

Leo came charging to the doorbell, barking loudly. I heard Eve reassuring him as she shot the bolt and drew the door open.

She smiled, stood aside to let me pass. I walked through out of the cold wind into the warm, neat room, where the odor of damp earth was replaced by a rich confusion of herbs, garlic, tomatoes, meat. Steam fogged the windows. The table was set with woven mats, wineglasses, white china. There was music, not Schubert anymore, but Chopin, a nocturne I used to play. Hearing it now, I couldn’t remember why I’d stopped.

Leo followed me, wagging, looking up; I reached down to pet him and he sniffed my hand expectantly. “Oh,” I said. “Sorry, old buddy. Nothing for you.”

“It’s just as well,” Eve said. “You were spoiling him.” She took my jacket, hung it in the vestibule next to the yellow slicker. I shrugged off my shoulder holster, slipped it over another hook.

Her eyebrows raised slightly. “You don’t have to,” she said.

“It makes you uncomfortable.”

She moved around me into the kitchen. “I just wonder how it must feel to live with what it means.”

“You get used to what protects you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

She lifted the cover from an enameled steel pot on the stove. A cloud of steam rolled up as she added wine from an open bottle.

“Sit down,” she said. “It’ll be another few minutes.”

I stood on the polished floor by the ivory wool couch like a tractor at Tiffany’s. “Let me clean up first.”

“There’s a bathroom under the stairs.”

I went and used it, scrubbing rock dust from my hands, my arms, my face. I examined the face critically in the mirror as I dried off on a thick, soft towel. Dark eyes, too deep and too tired; the etched lines that smokers get, on the forehead, around the eyes and mouth; crooked nose and a lumpy jaw. Dark hair, rapidly graying. And the new addition, a collection of scratches and bruises in the ugly colors of healing on the left cheek. Clean, the face was better, but it would never be good.

Back in the living room, I chose the chair, whose dark upholstery gave it a fighting chance to handle the dirt I hadn’t been able to brush from my clothes.

“Do you want wine?” Eve asked. “I haven’t got anything else except brandy. But this is good.”

She brought over the glasses from the table, handed me one, poured a garnet-colored wine into it and into the other. I tasted it. It was liquid silk and it had no argument with Tony’s bourbon.

Eve settled on the end of the couch nearest the chair. Her clear eyes swept over me, face, hands, dirt, everything. She said, “Shall we talk business before dinner?”

I put my wineglass down. “The blond girl,” I said. “When I called you before, it was because I thought I knew who she was. Now I’m sure, I’ve seen her. It could be a problem for you.”

She said nothing, watched my face.

“Her name is Ginny Sanderson. She’s Mark Sanderson’s daughter.”

“He’s a powerful man,” she said after a moment. “Is that what you mean?”

“Only part of it. I also think she’s mixed up in this murder, the guy in Tony’s basement. If she is, your robbery may be, too.”

She sipped her wine while Chopin’s ambiguous tones flowed around us.

“Why do you think that?” she asked quietly.

I told her about Ginny, and about Wally Gould and Frank Grice and who Frank Grice was. I told her about the blue truck waiting outside the antique shop for Ginny
Sanderson
, and about the keys that I’d found on the concrete floor by Wally Gould’s body.

“The keys were to that same truck? How do you know that?”

“I don’t, not for sure. But Jimmy Antonelli owns a blue four-by-four. It’s been missing for a couple of days. The keys I found were his.”

“Oh,” she said softly. “Poor Tony. Does he know that?”

“That the keys are Jimmy’s? Yes. But I haven’t told him about Ginny Sanderson and the truck.”

Eve’s lined face seemed paler than before. Leo nuzzled her hand and she scratched him absently, sipping wine, thinking her own thoughts. She said, “You say you spoke to her . . .?”

I nodded. “She claims she doesn’t know anything about your robbery. I’m pretty sure she’s lying, though I guess it’s possible she’s just fencing things and doesn’t know where they came from. But, Eve, if she’s got the truck, it could connect her to both crimes. If that’s true I don’t know how long I can keep your robbery a private problem.”

She searched my face. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

I thought about Jimmy, alone up at the quarry, and nodded again. “But it wouldn’t help.”

She surveyed her own living room minutely, intensely. It was something she must have done a million times.

“Is there something you want me to do?” she asked me finally.

“No. Give me more time. I’ll try, Eve. I know how
important
it is; that’s why I didn’t push Ginny when I saw her tonight. I wanted to talk to you first. If there’s any way I can keep it from coming out, I will. But I wanted you to know.”

Eve was silent. Dragged by the wind, branches scraped across her roof. The approaching storm weighed on the air.

“All right,” she said, standing. “If things have to change, will you tell me first?”