Blind Fall (19 page)

Suddenly John was no longer in the Soledad Room. He was back in his trailer, listening to these very same words come out of Ray Duncan’s mouth. He had heard the sentiment before, dozens of times, about blacks, Mexicans, even the Army, but Charlotte’s phrasing had been almost identical to Ray’s. Had he mentioned Duncan’s name yet? No. He hadn’t wanted to come off as a complete loony from the get-go by trying to convince her that a real cop was tied up in all this.

“Is that all you wanted?” she asked.

“Just about.”

“Well, if you do find him, there’s something else he should know, something you might be able to tell him that would convince him to stop all this nonsense.” John responded to her dramatic pause by raising one eyebrow. “He’s about to inherit fifteen million dollars.” She let this sink in as she took a sip of her drink.

“His grandmother is ill, as I told you, and Alex is named as the secondary beneficiary on her life insurance policy. Alex’s father was the primary of course, but given that he died first, all that money goes to Alex. And maybe to you as well—if things work out, of course.” She gave him a mock toast. “Congratulations, Mr. Houck. It looks like you’ve married quite well.”

“Does Alex know this?”

“Of course not. He’s too ashamed to come back here, too ashamed to visit his grandmother on her deathbed.”

“But you aren’t. You visited her just today, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“That must mean there’s something in it for you, too.”

“My mother died when I was thirteen. Suzanna Martin is the only mother I’ve ever had.”

“And let me guess: you’re the third beneficiary.”

“I am. But I’ll never see any of—” She stopped speaking instantly, as if she had been struck with a small stroke, but everything about her composure remained intact until she cocked her head to one side, as if John had told a riddle.

“Your son is implicated in first-degree murder right around the time he is supposed to inherit fifteen million dollars. Are you not putting this together? How many of those goddamn drinks have you had, lady?”

Charlotte snorted and shook one hand at him, the prim schoolteacher once again. “Mr. Houck, if you’re going to imply that I’m playing some kind of—”

“How much time have you spent in Owensville?”

“My husband used to keep a place there. Plenty of time, I’d say.”

“Ask me again.”

“Excuse me?”

“Ask me again who I think is trying to frame your son for murder.”

She didn’t comply, but she stopped stroking the side of her glass with her index and ring fingers.

“Ray Duncan,” John said.

She gently closed her eyes and sucked in a short breath through her nose. Stripped of the title of captain, the name was still familiar to her. A laugh caught in her throat.

“Ray?” she asked incredulously. But her use of the man’s first name and her strained attempt at humor only further convinced John that he had landed on the right track.

Slowly she placed both hands on the tablecloth in front of her and rose to her feet. She collected her raincoat off the seat next to her, then her umbrella from where it was leaning against the edge of the table. John didn’t move as she walked past his chair, down the empty aisle between empty tables, taking her time fastening the buttons on her raincoat, her head bowed as if the act required every bit of her concentration.

John continued. “He’s missing a piece of his thumb, isn’t he? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a blister or maybe it’s something more permanent. He hasn’t been able to use his right thumb for a while. That’s all I’m saying. It gives him a distinctive handprint, especially when he’s got blood on his hands. Was it some kind of accident? Maybe he tried to get your pants off too quickly?”

She stopped walking, her back to him, continued fastening the buttons on her coat. John got out of his chair and started closing the distance between them. He expected her to start moving again when she heard his footsteps, but she had gone stock still, so still he wondered if when she turned to face him again she would have another person’s face.

“What did my son do to deserve you?” she asked.

The hard edge had left her voice; he saw an opportunity to break her, if he didn’t move too fast. He said, “Your son gave up everything for something he believed in. At first I thought he and Mike were hiding out up there on that mountain, and maybe they were. But I think they wanted to be someplace where they could be…good to each other. I used to be like you. I used to think men like Alex and Mike just took whatever they wanted. But Mike and Alex tried to
build
something together. And I have no choice but to respect that.”

She turned to face him, looking genuinely astonished by this speech. “And how exactly are you respecting that, young man? It sounds like you’re the one who broke up their little marriage.”

“I’ve never had a sexual thought about another man. You just assumed that, and I let you because apparently you can’t understand that anyone would care about your son without wanting to fuck him.”

“That’s a lie,” she whispered.

“Good. Then pick up that phone right there and call the Hanrock County Sheriff’s Department and tell them that you have been having sex with Captain Ray Duncan.” Her open hand caught him across the jaw. She went to pinwheel her other arm but he managed to grab her wrist in his left hand and hold up his cast for protection. They stumbled backward for a few steps like dancing partners that had knocked into another couple. Then John’s butt hit the edge of a table and stopped their momentum enough for him to get his balance back.

“How long?’” John asked her. For a while she didn’t answer, just struggled to catch her breath, then swept her bangs back from her forehead. “How long have you been sleeping with Ray Duncan?”

“I kept it away from the house!” she shouted. “Alex shit in our own backyard, but I kept it away from the house!”

A long time
he realized—long enough that revealing the affair to anyone would jeopardize her standing in her mother-in-law’s will, make her seem like a hypocrite in front of her only son, to say nothing of the Sisters of Light charity luncheon the following morning, which could go on without a hitch if everyone believed Charlotte’s only son had willfully left his mother’s positive influence years before and wandered down a deviant path.

“You have an obligation to tell the Hanrock County Sheriff’s Department about your affair.”

“I have an obligation to
my life
! The life I built on my back under men who couldn’t remember my name. Henry had his women. They usually worked for him, and I never
asked
for their names. And no matter what hell Alex chooses to put himself through, he will never have to make the sacrifices I did to get us
here
.” She threw her arms out to indicate not just their opulent surroundings but also the entire town. “He thinks he is so strong, and so brave, to have held up under the weight of my disapproval. That’s because he has never had to face anything worse than disapproval in his entire life!”

“He’s facing it now!” John shouted. “He’s out there, on the run, alone, while you’re standing here making speeches about a fucking beach community, lady!”

She shook her head violently, waved both hands in front of her face. “My obligation to my son was fulfilled long ago. He walked away from everything I gave him. Everything!” He let the aftereffects of her fury linger in the room. When she heard them, she seemed to weaken. She went for the nearest chair, then held its back in one hand, as if sitting down in it would have been an unacceptable form of surrender.

“Does Ray know about the life insurance policy?”

For a while she just stared at him, shaking her head slightly, her eyes full of tears. “This is a fantasy,” she whispered. “Ray’s not capable of any of this. You’ve brought me a fantasy, and you’re trying to ruin my life with it. You don’t even know me, and you aren’t fucking my son. Why would you do this to me?”

“Does Ray know about the fifteen million dollars?”

This time the question hit closer to the target. She covered her face in her hands, sagged against the back of the chair. A show for his benefit? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. What he knew was that he needed to take decisive action, and cutting through this woman’s layers of self-serving bullshit would take him another decade. She knew the truth and she wouldn’t divulge it, and she was rich enough to float high above men like John on a magic carpet of influence and first-rate legal representation.

Charlotte stopped her piteous sobs when she saw that John was headed for the host stand. Then he put his hand on the phone, and she let out something between a shriek and a groan. She lunged at him, but he managed to grab the collar of her raincoat in his left hand before she made impact. He shoved her backward, and she almost fell over before grabbing the chair she had been holding earlier for support. Her eyes were huge, as if the threat of violence offered some sort of unexpected reprieve from her own self-loathing.

John called the prepaid cell phone Patsy was carrying. She answered after the first ring. “Get out of town. Now. Go back to where we came from and stay there.” He hung up on her, as she started shouting.

Then he dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered, he said, “My name is John Houck. The police will be able to find me on the lawn below the Alhambra Hotel in Cathedral Beach. My right arm is in a cast and I’ll be wearing a black raincoat. I’m not armed and I would like to turn myself in.”

“What are you turning yourself in for, sir?”

“The murder of Mike Bowers.”

He hung up on her. Charlotte let out a short startled breath. He nodded at her and started for the stairs. She was behind him in an instant. “What the hell is this?” she said. “Are you trying to teach me a lesson? Is that it?” She stopped at the top step as he started down the stairs to the seventh-floor hallway. “Oh, so you’re a regular martyr, is that it? What does that make me, John Houck?
Answer me,
you white-trash piece of shit!”

At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped where he was and turned to look up at her. Her head had been turned into a silhouette by the chandelier directly overhead. “Lady, there are too many words for what you are, and not enough for what you don’t have.”

She didn’t follow him any farther, and as he moved down the seventh-floor hallway to the staircase Franklin had brought him up an hour before, he heard the low, distant thumping of an approaching helicopter.

By the time he reached the lawn below the hotel, sirens were wailing in the distance and a searchlight was traveling toward him through the veils of mist that still hung over the cove. Then he was blinded by its halo as the San Diego PD helicopter banked hard and started circling above him. The first officers to leap from their cars did so with revolvers drawn, and as they moved in on him he looked up to see the police helicopter’s searchlight strobe the plate-glass windows of the Soledad Room.

Charlotte Martin looked down on the entire scene like just another hotel guest who had been awakened by a roar in the middle of the night.

The small motorcade went north on the 5, pursued by several news helicopters. Their searchlights blazed through the interior of the car every few minutes, turning the two cops in the front seat into ghostly silhouettes. Five cars in all, two in front and two in back of the one John rode in. Their bridge lights were on but their sirens were silent.

He had spent three hours in the Cathedral Beach sheriff’s station. He had been read his rights, but no one had questioned him. No one had even spoken to him or engaged him in a way that had required him to play the role of cold-blooded killer. Silence and an interrogation room, until a deputy had informed him that he was being transported to Boswell.

Two more news helicopters joined the swarm as they rode through Los Angeles, then fell away just north of Santa Clarita as they traveled up into the mountainous section of the 5 known as the Grapevine. John felt fear for the first time, as if the sudden darkness of the surrounding landscape were a great sea and he was being pulled farther from shore, away from the courage of his convictions and closer to Captain Ray Duncan.

In the hours before dawn, the city of Boswell was desolate, a tiny cluster of stubby concrete-and-glass high-rises surrounded by the uninterrupted night darkness of the San Joaquin Valley. Somewhere to the west were the mountains that cradled Owensville, but there was no making them out at this hour of the night, and this dusty, scorched industrial town seemed to bear no relation to that woodsy idyll.

He was fighting to stay awake when a heavyset man came into the interrogation room alone and introduced himself as Detective Barkin. A uniformed sheriff’s deputy had already been in to set up a small camcorder and tripod. Barkin took a seat right next to it so he was safely out of the frame and John was the star. The detective was about one hundred pounds overweight, his immense girth splitting his denim, silver-buttoned long-sleeved shirt. His bushy salt-and-pepper mustache matched the fringe of hair around his bald head.

“Where’s Ray Duncan?” John asked.

“I’m sorry. You were expecting him to be here?”

“I owe him an apology,” John answered. “The night I killed Mike, I tried to convince him that someone else had done it, and he believed me. He even let me go without charging me with anything. I figure if I’m coming clean about everything…” He allowed himself to trail off, lifted his eyes from the table to the detective. “I’m sorry. Were you not aware that Ray Duncan questioned me that night?”

The detective gave him a weak smile, flipped back some sheets on his yellow legal pad, and studied chicken scratch notes. He could clearly sense that John was baiting him, and he was in no mood for it. “Let’s roll it back a bit, shall we?”

So John did just that. Staring down at the table as if he were working to remember each event he described, he told the detective how he had driven to Mike’s house in Owensville that night to give him a gift for having saved his life in combat and having been one of the best Marines he had ever met. He described how he had been forced to ask for directions, described the female gas station attendant in detail, and saw the detective listen more intently as he did so. Then he described how he found the driveway to the house and walked up it. He described how he went to one of the front windows, peered through, and saw something that sickened him to the point of rage.

John paused for effect.

“What did you see, John?”

“At first I couldn’t tell what it was. But I kept looking in, and that’s when I saw—Bowers was on his back on the couch, and this other guy—Alex—”

“Did you know that at the time?”

“Know what?”

“That it was Alex Martin.”

“Hell, no. I’d never seen Alex before in my life.”

Barkin nodded and gestured for him to continue. “They were fucking. He was just fucking him in the ass, right there on the living-room couch—” He forced himself to see the scene he had confronted when he walked into his younger brother’s room that day: Oster’s freckled, hairy ass, and his brother’s legs spread in the man’s hands. He forced himself to forget what he had learned about this scene and drew it back to him just as it had played out in his mind for almost a decade. A rape, a violation. “I couldn’t believe it. It was…it didn’t look human.”

Barkin grunted slightly—almost sympathetically, it seemed.

Then he described how he sneaked inside the house after Mike went upstairs to the bathroom to clean up. He described how his first plan had been to murder Alex for violating his buddy. Then he described how he watched Alex discover a plastic bottle of something on the kitchen counter, how he smelled it and jerked it away from his face and hid it in a lower cabinet. He described how he waited for Alex to leave the room, and went for the bottle, realized it was GHB, which he had once taken during a wild weekend. He described how he poured some into Alex’s drink, knowing full well the combination of liquor and the drug would knock Alex flat in a few minutes, leaving him alone with Mike without having to get his hands bloody first.

He described how he hid in one of the back rooms after he spiked Alex’s drink, listened to the sounds of the two men passing each other on the stairway, waiting until he heard the thud of Alex collapsing in the living room. Then he described how he went for the stairs just as the sound of Alex collapsing drew Mike from the master bedroom.

“He was coming out of the bedroom when I got him,” John said, staring at a spot on the wall just past Barkin’s right shoulder.

The memory of what he had actually seen in that messy bedroom collided with the fictional version he was trying to sell, and he fell silent, trying to drive down any genuine emotion that might come into his voice, drive it down where he could harden it into something that sounded merciless and cold.

His eyes on the table, he described how he had panicked as the blood from Mike’s chest had poured down his naked torso, how he came out of his rage and realized what he had done. Then he scrambled to get the body out of the house, wrapped it in the sheets that were on the bed and carried it to a woodshed he had spotted next to the gravel path that led to the house. He wanted to make sure he cleaned the scene down as best as he could before he loaded everything into his truck and left. He went back to the house and was barely finished wiping up the bedroom when he heard Alex at the bottom of the stairs. He’d awakened much earlier than John had expected him to, so John flipped out and pulled the gun on him, chased him out into the woods, and was planning on killing him as soon as he caught up with him, but he didn’t want to start popping off shots that would draw the attention of the neighbors.

He described how they fought in the creek, then on the slope, how Alex begged for his life, kept asking for Mike, kept asking where Mike was. He described how he lost his nerve at that moment, described how he realized Alex didn’t have the slightest idea what John had done.

When he realized he had cleaned the scene, he saw a way out. He saw a way to try to make it better, so he marched Alex back to the house, harassed him as if he were guilty of Mike’s murder, claiming ignorance as to who Alex truly was. Then the rest of what he described was what had actually happened, how Alex had showed him the photographs on the wall of Mike sitting in the middle of a gay bar. He described how Duncan had brought him in for questioning and then released him to his own vehicle. At best, his account made Duncan sound like a sloppy small-town cop who didn’t want any inconvenience in his town.

When John stopped, when enough silence passed between the two men that the detective realized that John was finished with his version of the story, Barkin rocked back in his chair, tapped his pen against the pad, and chewed his lower lip.

“So you drive all the way to your buddy’s house in the middle of the night just to give him a present,” Barkin said carefully.

“Then when you see him and Alex going at it, you stand there and watch the whole thing. How long did you stand there?”

“I don’t know,” John said, purposefully sounding annoyed. He hadn’t expected this part of the story to be believed—that was part of his plan.

“Yeah, well, me neither. ’Cause, see, what I’m sitting here thinking is that you weren’t acting like a guy who was just mad, John. You were acting like a guy who was jealous. Now, who you were jealous of, I’m not quite sure. Are you?”

“Jealous?” John asked, as if he had never heard the word before, as if it had no place in the story he had just told. He shot a nervous glance at the camcorder, intended to convey the anxiety of someone who had just realized that a half truth wasn’t going to be enough.

“Yeah, John.
Jealous
. Jealous like maybe you wanted to be doing what you saw those two doing on the living-room couch.”

“Bullshit!” John hissed through clenched teeth, but he was staring at the table, sucking breaths through his nostrils, doing his best to look cornered and terrified.

“See, I’m thinking the reason you were at that house in the middle of the night is ’cause—well, you thought someone was lying to you. Isn’t that why we show up places after hours? I mean, it’s not like I’d blame you, John. There’ve been times when I’ve left the house and waited just down the street for a few minutes just to make sure my wife was really going to the grocery store like she said she was. Right? I mean, everybody’s real big on trust when it’s not someone they actually care about, when it’s not someone they’re afraid to lose, right?”

John was determined to tell a story that would send the homicide detectives in the direction of the truth, a story that didn’t put one false word in Alex’s mouth, a story they could tell Alex in a room down the hall and probably have him believing it if they were convincing enough, because it didn’t contain anything that contradicted Alex’s experience. He could think of no other way to protect the man for the time being, but to do that he had to drag Mike’s name down into the mud with his own. So finally he had arrived at a decision. That repaying his debt to Mike meant protecting Alex no matter the cost.

Forgive me, Bowers,
he prayed.
Please forgive me, but I can’t see a way out of this without dragging your name through the goddamn mud. But I’m doing it for what I think you would have wanted. I’m doing it for what you tried to build for yourself.

He looked up at the detective with the most pathetic expression he could muster, and the man furrowed his brow and cocked his head slightly to one side in a false pose of sympathy. John whispered, “He said he was waiting for the money.”

“Who was waiting for the money?”

“Mike.”

“Whose money, John?”

“He told me he didn’t love him,” John muttered. “He told me that he knew something Alex didn’t. Alex thought his family had cut him off, but it turned out his grandmother had named him as the second beneficiary in her life insurance policy.”

“How did Mike find this out if Alex didn’t know?”

“Alex wouldn’t go back to visit his grandmother because he didn’t want to have to deal with his mom. But one time his grandmother called the house, when she first got sick, and she told Mike about her policy, because she thought it would get Alex to come.”

It was the first lie he told that involved anyone besides a corpse, but it didn’t matter if Charlotte disputed it, because this lie would lead the detectives to a paper trail that was closer to the truth than the bullshit story he had used to get into their custody.

The detective said, “Did it, John?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Because Mike never told him. Mike never told him he was about to become a millionaire.”

“But he told you, didn’t he?” Barkin asked. John pretended to hesitate, stared down at his lap. “John?”

“He said if he could get his hands on that money, we could be together.”

“But you didn’t believe him?”

John shook his head, stared down at the table, tried to force tears but they weren’t fast in coming, so he gave up lest he should betray his true motives. “No, I didn’t. I had to see them together. I had to see the way Mike acted around him.”

“And you saw a lot that night, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I did. I saw they were in love.”

It was the only true sentiment he had expressed since he had sat down, and the detective reacted to the power in it by wiping at his lips with one hand and allowing a silence to pass. “Why didn’t you kill Alex first?”

John pretended to need a few moments to summon his answer. Then he met the detective’s eyes. “Because he likes Marines, that’s why.” The detective didn’t get it, so John helped him along. “And after what Mike had put me through, I thought I should get paid.”

“I don’t follow, John.”

“When I realized Alex hadn’t seen the body, I saw that I could use it all to convince him that he needed me to protect him. I just had to pretend like I was straight so he wouldn’t suspect anything about me and Mike. And if that worked, if he really thought he needed me, if I did my best to protect him against Mike’s
killer
—well, then I might just get paid for all the pain Mike caused me.”

The detective nodded gravely, like a sympathetic teacher. He got to his feet, asked John if he wanted anything to drink. John declined, and he left the room. John prayed he was going to check on the specifics of Alex’s grandmother’s life insurance policy.

He had no idea how much time had passed before a different man entered the room. This one had a deeply lined face and a shaggy toupee and rheumy blue eyes. He set his plastic coffee cup down on the table, out of John’s reach, and said, “How’s it going, Sergeant Sodom?”

John averted his eyes as if this were an actual insult. “So, you’re a real bona fide pansy-ass faggot, are yah? Tell me. What size anal beads do you prefer? Large, extra-large, or Big Gulp?”

John looked to the camcorder. “Is that thing on?”

“Hey, I’ve weathered my fair share of discrimination suits in my day, son. But I must say that those suits involved people who were actually members of the minority they accused me of discriminating against. You, on the other hand, have cooked up some cock-and-bull story—pardon the pun—for reasons I can’t comprehend. So I’m going to take a different approach with you, Mr. Houck. We’re going to start by talking about where you dumped the body.”