In the Night of the Heat (18 page)

Police tape strung in the adjacent hall showed the way to the den, but I veered upstairs.

The first two bedrooms were the children's, with a jack-and-jill connecting bathroom. There were bunk beds in each room with slides and ladders, and they were both stuffed with toys that looked new, some of them still in their boxes. Clearly, T.D. had done his best to spoil them into feeling at home, but there were no books, no homework pages on the desks, and only church clothes in the closet. For his children, T.D.'s house had been far from home.

T.D.'s bedroom retreat, down the hall, was decorated in basic black, from the bedspread to the black marble fireplace to the faux black marble dresser and nightstands to a huge silk-screen wall hanging above the bed. Most of the bedroom was dedicated to T.D.'s wall-sized entertainment center. A huge plasma TV was attached to a movie theater's worth of hardware. Photographs were conspicuously absent.

It felt like a place to sleep, that was all. Obviously, it had taken a long time for T.D.'s new house to feel like home.

T.D.'s walk-in closet was the size of a small room, ordered with military precision; rows of color-coordinated suits, shirts, and T-shirts. A line of sneakers sat on the shelves above, with another row of shoes still in their boxes. A striped tie had fallen to the closet floor, probably while T.D. was dressing for church the day he died. I peeked into the black wicker clothes hamper, which was half-full of dirty socks and
underwear and smelled like none of my business. But I was wearing gloves, so I rifled through. If someone else had been there, they might have left blood. People in a panic do stupid things.

Melanie's eyes were watchful while I examined the clothes. I couldn't blame her: T.D. Jackson's dirty underwear would be a hit on eBay. Especially if it sported…how can I say this delicately? Genetic material, perhaps.

In the bedroom, I opened T.D.'s bottom bureau drawer first. Bingo. I found his porno collection—DVD covers picturing classic porn-star blondes with Double-D's, and a few all-black compilations with names like
Brown Sugar
and
Chocolate Anal Party.
Aside from one DVD featuring midget women, entitled
Li'l' Fuckers,
and one with a three-hundred-pounder called
Bad Mamma Jamma,
it was pretty standard. The drawer above it was dedicated to his sex toys: lubricants, flavored condoms, and lots of leather.

When Melanie realized what I'd uncovered, she left the room to wait in the hall. She was probably making a note to confiscate the collection and destroy it at her first chance. One last favor for her cousin.

The sight of a leather gag with a red ball brought back memories of the desert; I'd worn an almost identical gag while two cops with guns were ready to execute me. Not my first time in a gag, but definitely my last. The rest of the drawer was crammed with leather straps, shackles, and a bullwhip that looked like it could draw blood.

I didn't see blood on the whip, or on any of the accessories, so I closed the drawer. I would have to see Mother soon to find out if she knew anything about T.D.'s tastes and histories. She might even know the two blondes. I couldn't keep putting it off.

“Did he have a lot of women here?” I called to Melanie.

When she saw that my sex tour was finished, she ventured back into the room. “Of course he did. He was a single man after fifteen
years of marriage. Those two blondes at the fund-raiser were his favorites, but I doubt that their real names are Luscious and Lovely, so I haven't been able to track them down.”

“What about his girlfriend? Is she the jealous type?”

“Girlfriend? Please. Chantelle was the first woman he invited me to dinner with, so I knew he was going to marry her right then. For T.D., women were a sport just like football.”

“Carlyle would know more about T.D.'s women.”

“No doubt. I hear they were quite a tag-team.” Her voice was laced with disgust.

The longer Carlyle was missing, the more his absence bothered me. Donald Hankins or Miguel Salvador might be more obvious suspects on principle, but they hadn't gone AWOL. I'd left a message for Carlyle on the cell phone number Melanie gave me, reminding him that we'd met at the fund-raiser, but I wasn't holding out much hope that he would call a stranger.

“Can you try him later?” I said. “He's more likely to call you than me.”

“I'll try now,” Melanie said, and whipped out her cell.

In T.D.'s master bedroom, a towel slung across the toilet was evidence of the shower he'd taken the night he died. I tried the bathroom drawers, where I found rolling papers and a roach clip next to the toothpaste tubes and razors, but no other drugs. The police report had mentioned several grams of cocaine under the seat of his car; apparently, T.D. liked his drugs mobile.

I heard Melanie's voice pleading with Carlyle's voicemail: “…I know you're broken up, C., but you better pull yourself up out of whatever bottle you crawled into and call me. You need to man up, C. Just let me know you're okay. I don't need to be worried about you, too…”

His disappearance might be suspicious behavior, or it might be a
tough guy falling hard. When I was a kid, a cop friend of my father's told me that men could put a shell around their hearts, but if something ever got caught in the soft tissue, it was hard as hell to cope. In retrospect, I think he was trying to explain Dad's daily grief over my mother's death. Tough guys weren't used to grappling with something they couldn't master. Maybe love turned inside out had driven Carlyle to kill his best friend, just as T.D. might have been driven to kill Chantelle.

“I know he's checking his messages,” Melanie said after she hung up.

“How do you know?”

“The mailbox would have filled up by now. He must be getting a million calls.”

Smart lady,
I thought. She was probably right.

“Ready for the den?” I said.

“I was ready to go there first. I'm still ready.”

In the den, Melanie flicked on the overhead light, and a ceiling fan whirred a lazy twirl. I heard her sigh, and I could see why. The den was where T.D. had really lived.

“He called this The Jungle,” Melanie said. “He had a room like it at his old house. He modeled it so it's almost identical. This one's just bigger.”

The crime-scene photos hadn't done the room justice.

The den was the size of a studio apartment, with a thirteen-foot ceiling and rafters overhead artificially aged to look like relics from a medieval church. Near the doorway, tall potted palms sat between old-school pinball machines and arcade games I used to play when I was younger, Galaga and Pac-Man. They looked like museum pieces. Galaga's space fighters dipped and fired, and the Pac-Man chomped on, waiting for someone in a playful mood. The whole setup took me back a long way.

The television in the den was bigger than the one in the bedroom, mounted on the wall like a movie screen. Speakers hung on the walls no doubt added plenty of sound. A less-than-new cream-colored leather sofa hugged the wall in front of the television set. One half of the room was strictly entertainment, and the other side was home to T.D.'s corner desk, leather office chair, and file cabinet.

On the office side, I finally saw evidence of whose house I had entered: T.D.'s SoCal State and '49ers jerseys were framed on the wall above his desk. Above them, too high to see clearly, hung a panorama-style team photo from SoCal State taken at Spartans Stadium. Still, there was nothing like the shrine I'd seen in his father's study.

The office chair where T.D. had shot himself was pulled out from the desk, farther than it had been in the crime-scene photo. It was also facing a different direction, away from the desk and corner wall, toward the television side of the room. I ran my gloved hand across the chair, carefully avoiding the dried bloodstains I was sorry Melanie was there to see.

There had been plenty of blood from the side of T.D.'s head. The bullet's exit wound had been much bigger than the entrance, as would be expected. I tried not to imagine what it would feel like to see a chair stained in the blood of someone I loved.

“Do you mind?” I asked Melanie quietly. “I'd like to move this back where it was.”

She nodded. “Just leave everything the way you found it.”

Working from memory, I pushed the chair two yards closer to the desk. It rolled nearly silently across a bamboo floor mat. I turned the chair until Melanie was behind me. There.

“I'm going to sit,” I said. Melanie didn't answer, but she didn't object.

Slowly, I sank down into T.D. Jackson's plush chair cushion,
keeping well clear of the bloodstains. The leather hissed beneath me. Instead of facing the desk, the chair faced a wall with a leather recliner, a reading lamp, and a palm tree in need of water and light.

As I sat there, I looked at the den through T.D.'s eyes. Gun in my hand, contemplating my last sights. My eyes traveled upward, and I saw a large framed portrait of Tommy and Maya on the wall above the recliner. The photo might have been taken at about the time their mother was killed; two to three years ago. Their bright faces and eyes shone from the frame. His children were lovely, and their faces were a revelation.

No way,
I thought.
He couldn't shoot himself staring at them.

My eyes traveled back down to the empty recliner. Had someone else been sitting there? It was about six feet from his chair, but not too far for conversation. Clearly, that was why the chair was there in the first place, since it was on the wrong side of the room for a view of the television set. A reading chair.
A guest chair.

Carlyle had told police that T.D. kept his gun in his far right desk drawer—which was equally distant between T.D.'s chair and the guest chair. Both T.D. or a guest might have reached it. But how many guests knew it was there?

“Wait,” Melanie said suddenly.

I was ready to stand, thinking she didn't want me in T.D.'s chair after all. But Melanie's eyes were gazing up high on the wall above T.D.'s desk, at the SoCal State team photo. She squinted, walking closer to his desk. She stood directly over me. She'd forgotten the blood.

“That's not right,” she said.

“What?”

“His team photo. It shouldn't be that high. All of them are too high. The jerseys, too.”

“Maybe he moved them?”

Melanie wrapped her arms around herself; she looked like she'd felt a chill. “He was so obsessed with getting it right, just like they were at Chantelle's house. He asked me a million times, ‘How's it look? How's it look?' I can still hear him…” Her voice withered.

“How much higher?”

“Two feet, maybe.”

Two feet was a big difference. My hunch wasn't yet fully formed, but I knew something was there. My heart began pounding as I replayed the stoner kid's voice in my memory:
And I heard this sound, pow, like you said. Then I heard it again, right before I left. Pow.

Carefully, I took off my shoes. “I'm gonna stand on the desk, take a closer look.”

“Be careful,” she said. “Don't knock anything over.”

T.D.'s desktop was mostly bare, but I had to navigate around his computer monitor and a large office caddy bursting with pens, highlighters, and used Post-its I would rifle through later. I felt oddly off-balance, so I braced myself against the wall. The unsteady feeling probably had to do with my ear, I realized. Hearing was related to balance.
Fuck.

Once I caught myself against the wall, I reached for the jersey.
SOCAL STATE SPARTANS
—13, white with purple numerals and trim. Up close, the jersey gave me a charge. Anyone who liked college football had seen T.D. Jackson play in that jersey. I'd taken my father to the bowl game where SoCal beat USC. I heard the deafening sound of a crowd's roar; an eerie sensation, until I remembered that it was only my ear.
Fuck fuck fuck.

Gingerly, I gripped the frame from the bottom and lifted it toward me, only two inches. It swayed, but it didn't fall from its hook. Even without my flashlight, I could clearly see the small holes in the wall
where it had originally been hung. They were directly at my eye-level. Since it had been moved up, the frame covered the holes from sight. T.D. hadn't lived in the house long enough for the wall to show discoloration.

“You're right,” I said. “I see where it was.”

“Why would he move it?” Melanie said.

By now, I thought I knew why. But I didn't say anything. I wanted to be sure.

I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach the team photo high above the jerseys. I was slightly off-balance when I grabbed it, so a tug brought its full weight unexpectedly into my hands as it fell.
Nineteen-Ninety-Two Spartans
, said the inscription that fell against my nose. I was lucky not to drop it; it was much heavier than it looked.

“Shit,”
Melanie said. “I said to be—” Mid-sentence, she gasped. “What's that?”

Once I'd steadied myself and the photo enough to glance up at the wall, I knew right away. A hole from a bullet is much larger than a hole from a nail.

T.D. Jackson might have fired his own gun twice, but why would he bother to hide the hole? I tried to think of a gentle way to tell Melanie that we had found exactly what she thought she wanted: evidence that T.D. probably hadn't been alone the night he died. Evidence of a confrontation. Melanie figured it out without my help.

“Those motherfuckers!” Melanie screamed, startling me from below. “Those sorry, lazy-ass
motherfuckers
. They're supposed to be the police—how did they miss that?”

A kind of rapture crossed her face, and then a pain that looked physical. “I knew it…” she finally whispered in a ghost's voice. “I knew it…I knew it…I knew it…” Her legs folded beneath her, and she was on her knees.