Foursome (23 page)

Vandemeer retreated a couple of steps, bringing the biceps of his sleeve up to rub across his nose and sniffle a few times. That plus the blinking eyes told me his idea of recreational drugs didn’t stop at alcohol.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude.”

“Why don’t you just call me ‘Detective,’ Nicky, and that way I won’t get mad at you.”

More sniffles, another pass with the sleeve. “I got permission.”

“Permission to break into your neighbors’ house?”

“I didn’t break in, all right? I … They like gave us a key.”

I motioned him toward the living room. “Why don’t we sit down, talk about it.”

His parents had decorated the living room in a colonial style, camelback couch and love seat and easy chairs with a meadow print, burled wood showing along arms and backs. Nicky had redecorated in junk food memorabilia, with stained pizza boxes and greasy chicken buckets and square Styrofoam clamshells on tables and carpet, empty beer bottles like groupies around each container.

I said, “You have a room that doesn’t look like the town dump?”

Vandemeer plopped himself into the couch, tried to regain a little ground. “Yeah. The downstairs shithouse.”

I picked up one of the bottles, Coors Extra Gold. “You drink all these?”

“What if I did?”

“What if I ram one of these where the moon don’t shine?”

Vandemeer straightened on the couch. “The fuck are you talking about, dude?”

“Detective.”

A few seconds, then another pass with the sleeve across the nose. “Detective.”

I walked over to him with the bottle, trying to remind myself that the kid’s parents had been murdered two weeks ago. “That’s better. Now we’re going to have a nice talk, okay?”

“Hey, I already told you, they like gave—”

“Us a key. I heard you. Now, what were you doing over there?”

“None of your business.”

I raised the Coors bottle an inch. “Again.”

Vandemeer sniffled, then licked his lips. “It was just me and my babe, having a little fun.”

“You usually have sex with your girlfriend in your neighbors’ house?”

“No, Detective,” laying hard on the word. “Usually I fuck her here.”

“Now that your parents are gone.”

A sarcastic laugh. “That’s really excellent, you know? When Hale and Viv were around, they’d have turned like totally red, anybody knew this, but they let me fuck her here.”

“Your parents … ?”

“Let me have Blanca up in my room, Detective. I told them, ‘Look, dudes, you got a choice. Either I have the babe up here, or I go into the city with her, and then you don’t know where I am. Your move.’ ”

“And they caved.”

Vandemeer smiled. Perfect teeth, but somehow not a pretty sight. “They had like these images of me on a mattress, the floor of some tenement, getting seriously stabbed by a crackhead. Awesome, huh?”

The salsa music came to an end, but Vandemeer seemed not to notice.

I took a chair. “So you got along pretty well with your folks.”

“Hale and Viv? They were major jerks, but they lived here, too, you know? Had to make allowances.”

I nodded, feeling cold. “Allowances.”

“Yeah. I mean like … take Hale. Here he’s this mega-successful doc, but he can’t keep his dick out of Sandy’s pants.”

I didn’t feel any warmer. “Your father was having an affair with Sandra Newberg?”

“I don’t know what you’d call it, Detective. I just know he was punching her like a speed bag, offing his seven angry inches every time Viv drove over to the mall. They even did it up in Maine once.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, Viv took me to New York, like maybe a month ago. When I got back, Hale had four hundred miles on his car that I didn’t hear him tell Viv about, and that’s like from here to there and back.”

“What made you check his odometer?”

“I used to do that once in a while, maybe get some serious leverage on him, who knows?”

Hale and Sandy, trysting at The Foursome’s lakeside retreat, adding insult to injury and one more motive nail to my client’s coffin.

Nicky said, “Can’t really blame old Hale, though. Sandy was an excellent piece, if not real fresh. I would’ve jumped her myself, I didn’t have better.”

It wasn’t so much talking to a different generation as a different species. “Do you think Steven Shea suspected anything?”

“Suspected? He like knew.”

“How do you—”

“I told him. Hale seriously pissed me off one day, and I see old Steverino getting into his four-wheel-drive pseudo truck, and I fill him in.”

“When was this?”

“Like I told the other cops, it was maybe a month ago, too.”

Lovely. “What did Shea say?”

“Say? Old Steverino didn’t like
say
anything. He kind of looked like a bug hitting the windshield, though. Hey, what does that mean, anyway?”

“What does what mean?”

“‘Steverino.’ ”

“It was a nickname for a variety show host back in the fifties.”

A laugh. “I figured it must have been something fad like that. Jesus fucking Christ, yeah, Steverino was kind of like a host.”

“How do you mean?”

“Aw, he was …” Vandemeer blinked some more, but not from the light. “Hey, the other cops that talked to me. They already asked me about The Foursome, but not like this. Not like what I thought of people. The fuck does this have to do with me and Blanca going next door?”

“The officers who talked to you first had an idea of who did the killings up in Maine. I’m here to round out the investigation, ask the questions they didn’t think they had to. Now, what do you mean about Shea being a host?”

Vandemeer worked on things for a minute. Then, “He was just like, I don’t know, always joking around, trying to make everybody happy. You’d go over there for a barbecue, he’d make like you’d have to have the most awesome time of your life or he’d fucked up somehow.”

“You ever go up to the lake place?”

“Coupla times, with Hale and Viv. Now that was seriously stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, like he buys this place out in the woods, right? Only, it’s not like a cabin or an A-frame or something different. It’s like he builds his house down here up there all over again. Totally fucking stupid.”

“So you didn’t enjoy it up there?”

“Hey, Detective, I like grew out of that phase, going places with my parents.”

Given Nicky Vandemeer’s attitude so far, I didn’t feel badly asking the next question. “You ever see the crossbow?”

“The ‘murder weapon,’ you mean?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Oh, yeah. Like Hale, he couldn’t wait to take it out, show Viv how he was gonna surprise Steve and Sandy with it, next weekend.”

“You saw it down here, then?”

“Yeah. Right in my own backyard. Last summer, Steve and Sandy were already up at the lake, taking a vacation week, and Hale and Viv were going up to spend like the second weekend with them. You should have seen him, Detective. Hale the Mega-doc, trying to put an arrow into a piece of paper tied to a tree so he wouldn’t mess up the target thing that came with it.”

“Your father practiced with the crossbow here?”

“Yeah. He was always into that.”

“Into what?”

“Kind of … Like pushing Steve to do something a little cooler than the last thing. Like if Steve said ‘Let’s go water-skiing,’ Hale’d say, ‘Let’s go Jet-Skiing.’ He got off on like pushing Steve over the top.”

“How did your dad and your uncle get along?”

“My unc—Oh, you mean Hubadub? Hah, let me tell you, I don’t think the old King of the Road liked being partners with the King of the Dick.”

Evenly, I said, “Why not?”

“Aw, you’d have to know Hub. He’s your basic loser persona, the man who could weave straw out of gold. He gets himself in the hole to his manufacturers like seriously big-time, comes around with his hand out. Old Hale gives him some money, but with a coupla strings on it. Those strings start to get tight around the balls.”

“Your father was pressing your uncle for repayment?”

“Aw, Detective, I don’t know the details. I just know the strings are still there, because old Hub is like sucking up to me, trying to get appointed my fucking guardian, you can believe it. Like I need a guardian.”

I looked around the room. “Yeah.”

Vandemeer gave me a fuck-off look, but didn’t put it into words.

I said, “So what happens now?”

“Now?” The perfect smile again. “Now I get the insurance money from Hale and Viv, plus a partnership with old Hub, who if he thinks he’s getting like another dime for his shitcan business, he’s fuck out of luck.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I hired my own lawyer, and he tells me I can call back what old Hub owed Hale because now he owes me.”

“That might mean closing down your uncle’s dealership.”

“So maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Cars, they like seriously pollute the earth, you know?”

“How did your uncle and your mother get along?”

“Hub and Viv? No chemistry there, least not from Viv’s side. Hub, on the other hand, if he didn’t sell cars, he’d be out sniffing the seats on girls’ bikes, you know?”

At the same moment, Nicky and I heard a key in the lock on the front door. It opened quietly, and somebody juggled what sounded like a paper bag as the door closed again. A girl moved across the entrance to the living room, then stopped when she saw us.

She was about five-three and drop-dead lovely, with dreamy Hispanic eyes and ruby lips. Long black hair was pulled up on the right side of her head, cascading onto the shoulder so that you almost thought a little animal was perching there. In her left ear she wore a single gold hoop earring. The off-white blouse was wide enough at the neck to show a gold chain necklace and one bra strap, her slacks some kind of glossy pink material, a little pink box at the waist. She wore basketball sneakers on her feet and carried two Dunkin’ Donuts bags in her left hand while jingling a key ring in her right.

“Who are you?” she said, a lilting voice with just a slight accent.

Vandemeer gave her a superior smile. “Cop. We were just talking about my seriously dysfunctional family.”

I said, “Blanca, nice to meet you.”

She looked from me to Vandemeer to me again. “Nicky, you know him from town?”

Vandemeer looked at me, too. “No. He just came like knocking on the door.”

Blanca tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. “He show you any ID?”

Smart girl. She saw my old Prelude on the street and didn’t think things added up to official status.

Vandemeer said, “Sure he—wait a minute. No. No, he sure as fuck didn’t.”

Blanca said to me, “Let’s see it.”

“Fresh out of badges this morning.”

At that point, a shrill chirp came from the little pink box at her waist. Blanca looked down at it, using the key hand to silence the chirp. “I gotta go, Nicky. Don’t tell this guy anything else.”

“You gotta go? What the fuck—what about breakfast?”

Blanca left the bags on the floor and took off toward the front door.

I got up and followed her.

Vandemeer yelled from behind me, “The fuck is like going on here?”

A
S
I
CAME OUT
the Vandemeer front door, Blanca was backing down the driveway. In a gold convertible that, except for color and no trailer hitch, was the twin of the one Hub Vandemeer drove up to his dealership. When she reached into the passenger’s seat to rearrange a gold warm-up jacket, I stepped behind an evergreen a little taller than I am. As Quintana fishtailed into the cul-de-sac, she glanced up toward the door, but gave no indication of seeing me. Then she changed gears and headed away.

I ran to my car and started after her. I caught sight of the convertible just as it reached a major road leading to 128.

Blanca took the beltway south, her left hand on the wheel, the right one pushing buttons down on the console where the radio would be. Her head bobbed as she seemed to sing along with the music. Traffic was light, and she drove conservatively, so it was easy to stay with her from three or four cars back in the flow.

Quintana put on a turn signal for the exit to Route 9 east, staying on 9 until it became Huntington Avenue. She took a right onto Tremont and a left onto Columbus Avenue, staying with that as it became Seaver before another left onto Humboldt. We were getting deep into one of the toughest neighborhoods in Roxbury, the predominantly black and Hispanic geographic center of Boston. Much of the retail space was burned out or boarded up or both. What remained functioning were largely corner groceries, take-out joints, and hair salons. It was a little early for the gang kids to be on the street, but I still found myself sensing the absence of weight a gun adds to the back of my belt.

Blanca suddenly began looking hard into her rearview and sideview mirrors, making me. Without using the turn signal, she wheeled right onto a narrow street. I sped up and did the same.

And got trapped.

Quintana had spun her car sideways, blocking the street. As I hit my brakes, half a dozen girls with gold warm-up jackets and a single gold hoop through the left ear scurried out from behind the parked cars. They surrounded the Prelude, leveling assorted firearms like fire hoses, their eyes unreadable behind dark, Terminator-style sunglasses. The tallest of the girls carried no weapon and wore no sunglasses, but had her hair up like Blanca’s and the same dreamy eyes. There the comparison stopped being favorable, given the livid scar that traveled from just off the left eye down almost to her chin and the two teeth missing from her upper jaw as she smiled.

The tall girl leaned down toward my window, a traffic cop about to give a ticket. She said, “My sister Blanca, she been telling us all about you on her car phone there, you know it?”

“So, Mr. Private Eye, how you like our clubhouse, huh?” They’d taken the blindfold off but left both hands tied behind my back. Even though the room was barely lit, it still took a minute for my eyes to adjust. The tall girl was lying on a velveteen BarcaLounger, reclined about halfway, what looked like my wallet in her lap and my ID in her hand. The room had wall-to-wall shag carpeting on which I was sitting and an attractively proportioned dining alcove and kitchen. The only other furniture consisted of a twenty-seven-inch color TV, assorted throw pillows, and a beat-up Formica table. Several of the girls lazed on the pillows indifferently, still wearing the sunglasses, sniffling once in a while. Two others stood, their weapons—an Intratec Tec-9 grease gun and a big black semiautomatic pistol—pointing at my chest from about eight feet away. Blanca also stood, next to her sister on the lounger, one hand resting near her sister’s head.