Late Rain (30 page)

“Did Jamison ever talk about him to you?”

“
Jamison
,” she snorted. “The only time Jamie came over was if he was out of beer or money and thought he could charm me out of one or the other. Or both. Jamie was always running his mouth. Didn’t take me long to learn to tune him out. That kind of stuff might work on Missy, but not me.”

“What about Missy then? She ever say anything?”

Marilyn Keane studied herself in the compact mirror, frowned, and then shifted the liner to her left eye. “Missy was too tranked out most of the time to have anything resembling a conversation. She might have said something once or twice about she thought he was kinda cute. The Clay guy, I mean. Not Jamie.”

“This Clay,” Ben said, “did he have gray hair?”

“I don’t know.” She dropped her hand to her hip. “Look, what color do you want it to be? I told you the guy was short and around a lot, and I have a date. You want someone to drop this on, tell me the color of his hair, the style too, and that’s what I’ll say they were. Then you can leave before you scare the sitter off.”

“Think for a minute,” Ben said. “What color was his hair?”

Marilyn Keane slipped the eyeliner into the back pocket of her black jeans and then fished around in the front and pulled out a tube of lipstick. Inside the house, the baby continued crying.

“He might have,” she said finally. “It was light-colored, I remember that. To tell you the truth, I didn’t pay that much attention. I mean, I was going through all this divorce stuff, and besides, he really wasn’t my type.” She paused and looked over at Ben. “I’m petite. That doesn’t mean I like my men to be.”

The little girl got up from the couch and returned a moment later with two juice boxes. She put the two boxes back to back and then twisted the plastic straws, entwining them, so that she could drink out of both cartons at the same time and went back to watching television.

Ben tried to tune out the sound of the baby crying. “When was the last time you saw Jamison Blake?”

Marilyn Keane twisted a nub of lipstick above the edge of the tube. The red was about two shades brighter than her hair.

She wet her lips, then said, “I guess probably the day before the fire and him and Missy getting shot. He came over after work. Surprise, surprise, he was out of beer. His arms and neck were sunburned, and he was complaining about that and working outside and the fact Missy had forgotten to buy beer. I gave him two cans just to shut him up, and then he went back over.”

“Any place Jamison liked to hang out?”

“That’d be Mac’s Shack,” Marilyn Keane said without looking at him. “Corner of Third and Sentinel. If he wasn’t home, he was there. It was one of the few places around here that would still let him run a tab. He was asshole buddies with the guy that owns it.”

“Do you know his name?”

“T. C.” She turned and pointed the lipstick tube at him. “No need to ask me. That’s all I ever heard him called.”

“Ok,” Ben said. Something had been quietly bothering him ever since Marilyn Keane opened the door. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t place the when or where. The woman, the crying baby, the little girl with the juice boxes. They wouldn’t let go of Ben, but he didn’t know why.

The harder he tried, the further the details retreated and the more uneasy Ben felt. It took him a moment to understand why.

This is the way Jack Carson must feel all the time, he thought. Slippage. Everything retreating.

“See anything you like?” Marilyn Keane asked. “You sure been taking your time checking out the merchandise.” She gave him a freshly lipsticked smile. “Not that I exactly mind you browsing.”

Ben snapped back to the porch. In this case, he figured the truth was as good as a lie. “I keep thinking we’ve met before,” he said.

A tilt of the head. Another smile. “Not exactly original, but I’ve heard worse.”

Ben saw the opening and wanted to keep it that way. He wrote down his name and phone number and tore the page from his notebook and handed it to her. “Anything else you think of about Jamison or Missy or the other man, would you give me a call? Like I said, it’s important.”

She glanced down at the paper, then up again. “Ben, huh? Well, Ben, you just never know when this little old red head of mine might remember something.”

“I’ve been by before,” he said. “This is the first time I caught you at home.”

“Well, that,” Marilyn Keane said. “I took the kids and was staying at my cousin’s across town for a while, you know, until all this divorce stuff settled. My ex didn’t take the news so good, and she, my cousin, I mean, let me stay with her and her family until it became official.”

The baby was still crying.

“Any case, you know where to find me now,” Marilyn Keane said. “I got the papers two days ago. I’m a free woman again.”

Ben walked back to his car. The last of the afternoon light was breaking up, and sunset had begun flaring along the line of the horizon. He called Anne on his cell, but it went straight to voice-mail. He left a message, saying he was on his way and would see her soon.

The Salt Box was one of a number of old neighborhood restaurants and shoppes that lined the west shore of the inlet in north Magnolia Beach. Most of them had been, or still were, mom-and-pop operations that had been rehabbed to preserve their retro-charm. The city council had underwritten a series of low-interest loans for renovations when the tourist boom had first begun to sound, and the inlet area was thriving and enjoying its new status.

Ben parked and cut across the lot, bypassing the entrance to the Salt Box, walking instead to the rear of the building and the first of three large tiered pine decks that had been built into the slope and were joined by a wooden
Z
of railed stairs. Similar sets of decks and stairs ran from the rear of the other shoppes and restaurants and ended at a wide unfinished plank walkway that followed the contours of the inlet’s shoreline.

Ben waited for Anne to finish talking to a crew of busboys and servers gathered at the back of the restaurant. The wind had picked up, overly warm for the time of day and season, and ruffled the waters in the center of the inlet. A mass of clouds flat on the bottom but whose top mushroomed in thick folds trapped what remained of the sunset and burned pink and orange.

Ben watched Anne approach. She was wearing the standard uniform for the Salt Box—white Oxford shirt, jeans, and athletic shoes. The wind caught and tossed stray strands of hair across her cheek, Anne absentmindedly reaching up to tuck them behind her ear.

She stood next to him at the railing, a little more space than Ben would have liked between them, but he chalked it up to workplace etiquette.

“You got your hair cut,” he said. “It looks good.”

“Thanks for noticing,” Anne said. “I had it done four days ago.”

She brushed by Ben and moved down the stairs to the Inlet walkway. Ben followed. The tide was out, and armies of terns and egrets and gulls and cranes were working the mud-rich flats. Anne stopped and leaned into the railing. Across the inlet, on the northern peninsula, a new condo complex was under construction, its face hung with scaffolding and the small wavering dots of the work lights for the crews putting in overtime.

“Why are you still in uniform?” she asked. “I thought you were working first shift.”

Ben gave her a quick run-down of the off-the-clock hours he’d been putting in, starting with the booking photos of Corrine Tedros and her probable connection to Wayne LaVell and giving her a hit-and-run overview of his talk with Vicki Grant and Marilyn Keane and anyone in the Sentinel Avenue neighborhood who resembled anything close to a reliable witness in the shootings of Jamison Blake and Missy Newton.

“Something’s there, but right now, I don’t know what connects,” Ben said, “and what doesn’t.”

“I could say the same thing about my father,” Anne said. “He’s disappearing right before my eyes. I don’t have the luxury, though, of running around off-shift as a daughter or mother in order to hide from myself and my life.”

“Wait a minute,” Ben said. “You honestly think that’s what I’m doing?”

Anne looked back up the slope toward the restaurant as if someone had called to her.

“I can’t carry you anymore, Ben,” she said. “I already have two people in my life that need everything I can give them. I’m not ready to turn that into a trio.”

“What do you mean
carry
?” Ben asked. “I don’t understand.”

“I was lonely, not desperate, Ben. There’s a difference.”

“You sound like you’ve been rehearsing.” Ben saw, in his peripheral vision, a knot of tourists making their noisy way down the stairs to the walkway. They carried drinks in to-go cups and were all laughing and talking at once.

“Someone has to see things for what they are Ben. We rushed into a mistake.” The wind caught her hair again, but this time she didn’t bother to tuck it behind her ear. “I’ve packed up your things. I’ll drop them by your apartment tomorrow. If you’re not there, I’ll leave them at the main office.”

Ben fought to keep his voice down. “Why? Give me one clear reason for any of this.”

Anne looked out over the inlet to the east toward the Atlantic where the clouds had broken and thinned, and a half-moon had risen. “Reason or motive, Ben? Can you even tell the difference anymore? All your talk about dots and connections that aren’t quite connections. You ought to hear yourself sometimes.”

“You still didn’t give me a reason.”

“No,” Anne said, “I didn’t. You don’t want that.”

“One reason,” Ben said.

Anne shook her head and didn’t look in Ben’s direction, and she spoke quietly, so quietly in fact that Ben wasn’t sure he’d heard her start, the words soft and low and torn by the wind. Then he heard what sounded like
I’m not here
or
I’m not her
, and it took him a while to finally understand what she was saying.

“I didn’t ...,” Ben said. “You made a mistake. The names are close.”

Anne still didn’t look in his direction. “It happened more than once, Ben. It’s not like I wasn’t there.”

“No way. I know the difference,” Ben said. “And I didn’t.”

“Two syllables,” Anne said. “Not one.”

Ben tried once more to convince Anne that he had not called her Diane, his dead wife’s name, when they had been making love.

Below them, a turtle floated in the shallows of low tide, and two gulls picked through an exposed oyster bed. Stands of Spartina grass crackled in the wind, and the half-moon burned through what remained of the clouds.

Ben put his hands on top of the railing fronting the inlet walkway. “Don’t do this, Anne. It’s not right. Tell me what’s really going on here.”

“I need to go,” she said. “I have to get back to work.” Anne waited a moment before adding, “And my life.” She stood on tiptoes and gave Ben a quick kiss and then ran up the stairs and back into the restaurant.

Ben watched her go.

He drove back to his apartment, the half-moon following in the upper right corner of his rearview mirror.

He made something approximating a meal.

Ben was initially sure that Anne had been lying to him, but he couldn’t figure out why or to protect whom.

The evening sagged, then collapsed around him.

All the old and new certainties began to flee.

Two syllables. Not one.

He had what his old partner, Andy Calucci, had called a Biblical-sized thirst. It was immense and unruly.

Later that evening, when Ben dropped onto the bed, he realized he had forgotten to change out of his uniform.

He looked over at the bedside clock but could not bring the time into focus.

When he closed his eyes and headed for his dreams, Ben was sure he would find Diane or Anne in them.

Neither, however, showed.

SONNY GRAMM was hollowed out. It didn’t take Corrine Tedros long to see that.

The flesh on his face sagged and was creased like a sheet of paper that had been crumpled into a tight ball and then hastily smoothed again. His eyes were watery, and his attempts at shaving had been less than successful. His shirt looked as if it hadn’t been changed in a couple days.

He reminded Corrine of men she’d seen in Bradford, Indiana, men who life had used up but not gotten around to tossing away yet. There was little or no vestige—except for the defiant pompadour—of the man she’d known when she’d been waitressing at the supper club, the Sonny Gramm whose earthiness and appetites had been filtered through Old South manners and licensed by a local social standing based on family name, if not quite fortune anymore.

He sat slump-shouldered at his desk in the office at the rear of the Passion Palace, a bottle of rye whiskey like an extra appendage at his elbow. Various combinations of hurt, dismay, and anger played across his features when he looked at Corrine. She’d just delivered Wayne LaVell’s offer on Sonny’s properties.

“Why?” He asked. “Why you?”

“That’s not important.” Corrine slid the shot he’d poured her back in the middle of the desk, untouched.

“The offer’s low-end and an insult,” Gramm said, balling his fist.

“LaVell bought out your debts, Sonny,” Corrine said. “He’s not going to offer you more. You ought to know that by now.”

“He can’t do this to Sonny Gramm. I’m not going to lie down and let him walk away with everything that’s mine.”

The bass-line from the music in the club pounded in the walls. Corrine let Gramm rant a while longer before she interrupted.

“Wayne LaVell will kill you, Sonny,” she said. “Believe it.”

Gramm lurched from his chair and stood up. He looked around the office. “He can try. LaVell might just find out Sonny Gramm’s not as easy to take out as he thinks. I’m not alone in this either. I hired me a new bodyguard, the kind I needed from day one. He’s not like the other ones. He does exactly what he’s told.”

Corrine watched him pour another drink. He saluted the Confederate flag thumbtacked to the wall behind the desk and tossed back the shot. The gesture was hopeless as it was doomed and as doomed as it was ludicrous. For a moment, Corrine almost felt sorry for him.