Late Rain (21 page)

He did some numbers in his head while he worked.

Later, when he stepped out into the hallway because he had to go to the bathroom, the television was down very low. Croy poked his head around the corner and saw Jamie and Missy lying together in the chair. He thought they were asleep until he saw Jamie’s hand slowly rise and stroke Missy’s back, and then Missy started whispering.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Look, I was sitting right next to the guy at the bar. He said it was a pocketwatch, a gold one. That’s what the police kept out of the papers after the guy was killed.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Missy said.

Jamie’s hand moved back and forth. “One phone call, honey.”

Croy went back to his room. He looked at his model for a while. Then he got down on the floor and reached under the box springs for the plastic bag with the gun he’d taken off the policeman in the parking lot of the Passion Palace.

Croy walked down the hall and into the living room and shot Jamie and Missy.

He went back to his room and put some underwear, sodas, and T-shirts in a tan canvas bag. He thought about the model but decided it wouldn’t fit right, and that left a sad place in him, but he told himself he had to hurry, and so he got some snacks from the kitchen to put in the bag and some things from the medicine cabinet, and then all that was left to put in was the money he’d saved from doing crimes and planting flowers.

When he looked for it though, the money wasn’t there. The box was, but not the money that was supposed to be in the box.

Croy wished he could make Jamie alive again. Then he could ask Jamie what he did with the money before Croy shot him another time.

You needed money when you ran away, Croy thought, and now he didn’t have any except for what he had in his pockets.

There was a noise in the kitchen.

Croy found Missy crawling across the linoleum toward the back door.

He squatted next to her and asked about the money, but all Missy would say over and over was “please” which was not helpful, and so Croy put his knee on her neck and counted in his head, and then he stood up and went to the shed in the back that had the broken lawn mower and two five gallon plastic containers of gas and carried them into the house because he was thinking of where his fingers had been and how many times, and Croy threw some gasoline on the television and the rug and then on Jamie and Missy and went around the house pouring until both containers were empty.

Croy started up the matches and tossed them and grabbed his bag and ran very fast to his car, and then he drove away.

CORRINE TEDROS went through the house room by room and turned on every light in each. Then, barefoot, she went downstairs and through the living room to the two large sliding glass doors, opened and closed them behind her, and walked into her backyard.

Dusk was leaving the sky, the stars beginning to break out. The grass was brittle beneath her feet. Like everyone else, she could not remember the last time it had rained. Spring had dried up from the inside out.

She turned and studied her house blazing with light. It looked like a doomed cruise ship.

Up the street, a dog barked. Someone, with a window open, began listening to music. A car started. A door slammed. Corrine Tedros wanted to hold on to each as if it were a life preserver. End of the day sounds. Simple and unassuming and emptied of menace.

She moved to the middle of the lawn and the wooden picnic table there, using the seat as a step and sitting on its top. Buddy had put it together from a kit he’d bought at one of the area home improvement stores, laboriously and patiently assembling it so that he could eventually present it to Corrine and Stanley like a bone, some proof of his prowess and happiness as a homeowner and husband.

Buddy had just applied the first coat of white paint when Stanley was killed. The paint had already thinned out against the wood. It looked like patchy frost on a dirt road.

Nobody got what he deserved
. Corrine had never been sure if that were an indiscriminate curse or an equally indiscriminate blessing.

Or if, in fact, there was any difference at all between the two.

She was on Wayne LaVell’s clock. Corrine wondered if it had ever been otherwise, if she had not somehow heard its tick even as she was riding in her mother’s womb, if she had not, in fact, mistaken that tick for her mother’s heartbeat.

The new, resolute Buddy, the Buddy with a backbone and iron-clad principles, the man now determined to honor his uncle’s memory, was at the office working late on the presentation he would make to a group of investors in Charlotte. He still believed Stanley’s plan was workable and he could run Stanco Beverages himself, but Buddy needed help funding the development and expansion of the present distribution lines for Julep. That would be his pitch to the Charlotte people.

It was a pitch, like the one Buddy had made to the Atlanta people, that would inevitably fail. Corrine already knew that because she had already put in the call to Raychard Balen who in turn had relayed the information to James Restan who’d have things fixed so that Buddy’s plan would initially sound promising but would inevitably go nowhere.

Corrine wondered how many times they’d have to go through the routine before Buddy gave up once and for all.

She eased herself down on the top of the wooden picnic table and folded her arms beneath her head for a makeshift pillow. The night air was cool on her bare legs. She closed her eyes for a moment and ran through the names.

Betsy Jo Horvath. April Rayne. Corrine Keyes. Corrine Tedros.

At one time or another, she’d hidden in each of them.

She’d been Betsy Jo Horvath when her mother abandoned her at her grandparents’ place in Bradford, Indiana. Beneath an immense Midwestern sky, Bradford huddled like a mouse under a hawk’s wing. Everything about the town was small. She could walk from the eastern to western city limits in less than twenty minutes. Life in Bradford was sky and weather. For Betsy Jo Horvath, life there had been one endless impatience.

She tried to run away three times.

The first had been with her high school chemistry teacher, a tall pale man who’d told her over and over they belonged together, but when they ran off, they got not no further than Chicago and a Holiday Inn where after a long weekend of unimaginative and unspectacular sex, he suffered a predictable crisis of conscience and loss of nerve and decided to return to his family.

The second time, Corrine had taken off on her own, making it to the outskirts of Kansas City before a Statie picked her up and returned her to Bradford.

The third time, Corrine had taken off with Billy Watts, a local pot dealer with overinflated and movie-driven notions of the big score awaiting him in Phoenix. Once there, it had taken less than a month before Billy got burned on one of his sure deals, and when the buyers administered a fine-print beating as a coda to the business proceedings, Billy Watts had decided, like her chemistry teacher, that Bradford, Indiana wasn’t such a bad place after all.

If you were a young attractive female on your own in Phoenix with no visible means of support, you sooner or later met Wayne LaVell. It was inevitable. You found him, or he found you.

Wayne LaVell stepped in and posted bail and paid for the attorney who represented Betsy Jo Horvath after she had been busted for solicitation at the Mid-Line Hotel and Restaurant downtown on North Catalina.

She had not been hooking, at least not technically. She made a casual circuit of some of the high-end lounges during lunch and happy hours. She was young, and she was pretty, and it never took too long for her to get noticed and invited for a drink. She never directly asked for money, but made sure during the conversation that she inserted a hard-luck anecdote that usually resulted in the man offering to “help out” after she’d slept with him. She’d steal, whenever possible, from those who didn’t offer or in a few cases mention she’d noticed his wedding ring and pointedly ask about his family.

She was careful not to show up at the same place too often. She’d already been popped twice for shoplifting, pleading out each time with a fine.

It didn’t take long for the Vice cop to make her at the Mid-Line and bust her, however. She didn’t understand until much later, after she was already working for Wayne LaVell’s escort service, that LaVell had sicced the Vice cop on her in the first place because the Mid-Line was one of his properties, and Wayne LaVell make sure he had a piece of whatever action took place there.

After the solicitation charges were fixed, she became April Rayne and had gone to work for LaVell’s Valley of the Sun Escorts. Wayne LaVell had developed a system in which each part fed another. Corrine never saw any money from her escorts because they paid in advance. LaVell paid her a flat, base salary, plus bonuses if she went over her monthly quota of dates. The men took her out for dinner and drinks at one of LaVell’s restaurants, and they later fucked her in one of his hotels. She had a small place of her own, as did the other girls working for LaVell, in an apartment complex in Tempe. The complex was one of LaVell’s holdings, and he deducted her rent and utilities from her salary. He supplied recreational drugs for the girls, deducting their cost as well as monitoring their use. In the end, you were left with a comfortable life that went nowhere, a long-term limbo owned and maintained by Wayne LaVell.

The clientele for Valley of the Sun Escorts were screened and were comprised almost exclusively of businessmen and politicians from the region and the out-of-towners connected to Phoenix’s year-round convention trade.

It had been the stories more than the semen that the men left in her that she resented most.

All that fear and loneliness and anger that their stories attempted to hide. Every one of them wanted to tell his story whether he understood that or not, and Wayne LaVell, for a price, offered a willing and beautiful and rapt audience for a night or two.

As April Rayne, Corrine could not remember a single face from her dates distinctly. They were men in suits who took her out to dinner and wanted to be seen in her company, and they talked about themselves, almost always in terms of their careers, their triumphs and trials in the marketplace or in office politics, and in the end, each story was the same story because they were all run on need.

Later, in the hotel room, in bed, the men wanted to be liked or feared or sometimes both, and they brought their need to her and put it in her, and her body and words gave them back the only thing they wanted, which was to have their stories and their places in their stories confirmed. They paid to fuck her so that for a little while they could be exactly what they said they were.

They were always undone by their orgasms though.

When she felt them getting ready to come, she made sure she kept her eyes open, and she watched their stories and their faces collapse as they spent their need, and no matter what the men had done or said earlier, she knew at that moment, with their eyes squeezed tightly shut and their expressions breaking under the weight of their orgasms, she saw all of them for what they were and what they spent their lives trying to cover up and hide from.

When they came, they looked like scared little boys fighting back tears in the dark.

Five years, and then by accident, April Rayne found her ticket out of Valley of the Sun Escorts.

A perk
. That’s what Wayne LaVell called her when he sent April Rayne out to meet Larry Delmae, a Zoning Commissioner with deep generational roots in Phoenix.

Larry Delmae, himself, filled in the rest of the story later in the evening back in the hotel room. During and after the meal, he’d had too much to drink and made two very unsuccessful attempts to undress her. April had covered for his ineptitude by guiding him to the edge of the bed and sitting him down and then doing an impromptu strip, taking her time and talking it out as if it were something that she was doing for him and only him, and by the time she was naked, Larry felt the need to return the favor and show April that he was a worthy recipient of her flesh and beauty and time, that he was, in fact, an important and powerful man, and he brought over the briefcase that he’d been carrying when April first met him that evening and then set it on the bed and opened it.

“Guess,” he said, leaning in and cupping a breast.

She looked at the bound bills, the denominations, and ran the numbers through her mind.

“Thirty thousand,” she said.

“Jesus, honey,” Delmae said, stepping back. “You’re good. There’s thirty-five thousand there. Tax-free, courtesy of your friend and mine, Wayne LaVell. Ten grand an acre, a three-and-a-half acre package up soon for a new rezoning configuration, and all I got to do is talk to a couple people. And hell, they’s people I’ve been knowing since we been kids. Easiest money I ever made.”

Larry Delmae was snoring less than five minutes after his orgasm.

She grabbed the briefcase. She did not even consider going back to her apartment for any of her things.

She went to ground. She put in a call to Tim Farrell.

Tim Farrell was the brother of one of the girls at Valley of the Sun Escorts, and April had met him briefly when he visited his sister. She later told her what Tim did for a sideline, and April had filed that information away.

Tim Farrell could cleanse you of history.

Farrell so completely inhabited the stereotype of the computer geek that at first she had assumed it was a put-on, but Farrell, tall, gawky, pale-skinned, and slack-muscled, seemed oblivious and immune to irony. He presented his hacker credentials with an adolescent mix of diffidence and pride and told her he could give her a new identity that would stand up to some serious scrutiny for fifteen thousand dollars.

April lied and said she only had ten thousand. Tim Farrell said he’d settle for the ten since she was a friend of his sister, then paused, not meeting her eyes, and added if she would be willing to take the rest out in trade for one night.

She agreed.