Mortal Sin (27 page)

A few minutes past eight, a vehicle pulled into her yard, its rumbling loud enough to pass for the trumpets of glory. Setting down the newspaper, Sarah got up and went to the window to find out what was making such a god-awfui noise.

It was a blue pickup truck, circa 1975, with one red fender and a dented grill. A battered wooden toolbox was situated just behind the cab, and an aluminum ladder hung out the back. The vehicle looked like something her white-trash daddy would have been too embarrassed to drive.

The engine shuddered to a stop, the driver’s door opened, and the future homicide victim himself stepped out of the cab. Sarah clamped both hands hard on the edge of the countertop as relief flooded her. Why her knees were shaking, she couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t as though she’d really believed the man was dead by the side of the road. And it didn’t seem quite kosher to be this happy to see a man she’d planned to murder.

Hell’s bells. Homicide was a messy business, anyway, not to mention illegal here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It looked like the good Father would live to breathe another day. But that didn’t mean she had to make it easy on him.

She flung open the front door and he stopped dead in his tracks on the other side, looking about as contrite as a man could look. Grimly, she said, “So you’re alive, after all.”

The morning was ripe with birdsong. A passing breeze lifted a strand of his hair and then dropped it. “Sarah,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“What you are,” she said, “is late. By about twelve hours, at last count.”

He tucked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans and rocked back on his heels. “Something came up. I couldn’t help it.”

“Ever hear of a little invention called the telephone?”

His chest rose and fell with his breathing. A little too deep, a little too hard. Underneath his open jacket, he wore a navy blue T-shirt that left his throat bare. Without the Roman collar, his neck looked young and vulnerable. That amber gaze locked on hers, and he swallowed. Hard. “I thought I’d be just a few minutes late. And then I got caught up in things and… I forgot. By the time I remembered, it was past midnight.”

She raised a brow. “That hole you’re digging yourself, Father, gets deeper with every word that comes out of your mouth.”

It was gratifying to see him squirm like a worm on a hook. “I had an emergency.”

“You’re just like every other man on the planet, aren’t you? Full of lame excuses. What kind of emergency?”

Color rose in his face. “It’s not an excuse. It’s the truth.” He swung around toward the truck and beckoned. The passenger door opened, and Jamal clambered out. “This,” Clancy said as the boy climbed the steps to the porch, “is my emergency. Apologize to the lady, Jamal.”

The boy shuffled his feet and stared at the floor. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“He got himself arrested,” Clancy said. “I rescued him. Now it’s payback time.”

“That seems fair.” She made a sweeping examination of the old rattletrap parked in her driveway. “Nice truck,” she said. “Did you trade in the Saturn for it?”

She thought she saw a twitch at the corner of his mouth, but she couldn’t be sure. “It belongs to the church.”

“Looks like you’d better take up a collection to buy a new one, sugar. That thing is ready for the crusher. What’s that you have in your hand?”

He lifted a fistful of oblong cardboard strips. “Paint samples. It’s part of payback. Jamal and I are going to scrape your house, and then he’s going to paint it.”

“Hot-diggity-dog. Is this all part of a scheme to solicit my forgiveness for last night?”

He tilted his head to one side and gave her a lopsided smile. “That depends. Will it help?”

She hadn’t intended to let him get to her. But that smile drove itself like a fist into her heart. “I was planning to strangle you,” she said darkly, “if you weren’t already dead. I can’t remember the last time. I was stood up like that.”

“Jamal,” he said, without taking his eyes from hers, “go get the ladder and the tools out of the truck. The gray toolbox.”

“Yes, Massuh.” The boy, who’d been following their conversation as though it were a tennis match, heaved a gigantic sigh and shuffled off, dragging his size thirteens all the way.

“I can see he’s really into payback,” she said.

His eyes warmed, softened. “Deeply and sincerely. Sarah, let me make last night up to you.”

She raised an eyebrow, took a step backward, and crossed her arms. “Wait just a minute, sugar. Let me be sure I have this straight. You want to make up for your absence at last night’s dinner table by giving me a second chance to cook a meal you probably won’t show up for?”

“No. I’d like to make it up to you by taking you out to dinner.”

Her heart, the traitorous son of a dog, began to beat faster. This wasn’t going the way she’d planned. Not at all. “Don’t you care what people will think?”

“People will always think what they want, no matter what the situation. If I want to have dinner in public with a friend who happens to be a woman, that’s precisely what I’m going to do. I have nothing to hide.” Behind him, Jama) hefted the aluminum extension ladder out of the pickup bed. The boy struggled with it, lost his balance, and dropped the ladder with one hell of a clatter. Clancy winced. “This is a character-building exercise,” he said. Then added, “I have information for you.”

“Information,” she said sharply. “What information?”

From the driveway, Jamal glanced over at them, yanked his cap lower on his head, and hefted the ladder back up over his shoulder. “Make me a cup of coffee,” Clancy said, “and I’ll tell you.”

“I’ve come up with a plan.”

He set his coffee mug on her kitchen table and tore off a piece of cinnamon roll. “If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed,” he said, “then Mohammed will just have to go to the mountain. I’m tossing down the gauntlet.”

Sarah scraped her fingers through her hair. She was dog-tired, and the news he’d brought her about Rio’s little enterprise wasn’t good. She’d seen a porno movie or two in her time, had witnessed the degradation those women underwent for the sake of titillating a large audience of overgrown boys. But the women she’d seen were fully grown, and capable of walking away from the industry when they tired of it. Kit was a sixteen-year-old girl, and it made her blood boil to think that some man might subject her to that kind of treatment.

Outside, Jamal had set up the ladder against the side of the house and was busy scraping paint. Every so often, she could see the top of his head bobbing outside the window over the sink. “What’s your plan?” she said wearily.

“I don’t seem to be having much luck tracking down Rio. So I’ve decided to turn it upside down and make him come to me.” Clancy lifted his coffee mug and took a long, slow hit. “I had Melissa make up more flyers yesterday afternoon.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to her. It was identical to the last flyer, except that in bold print across the bottom, the new version read:
Last Seen With A Man Named Rio, aka Roger Seward. If You Have Any Information About Kit Or Rio, Please Call The Above Number Immediately
.

“Tomorrow morning, I’ll start calling all my contacts, put out the word that I’m looking for him. Then I’m going to distribute these flyers on the street. To prostitutes, junkies, street people. Somebody out there knows him, and somebody will make sure he gets one of these. I’ll put the word out, then we’ll wait to see what happens.”

Her mind raced in unending circles as she studied the flyer. It was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she said.

“You have reservations?”

She set down the flyer. “You have no idea, sugar, how much I want to get my hands on this son of a bitch. The very idea that he might put Kit into some sleazy porn movie makes me want to rip off his testicles and watch him bleed.”

He took another sip of coffee. Dryly, he said, “Remind me to stay on your good side.”

“But I’m afraid we’ll make the wrong move. You already got this guy pissed off at you once—”

“We don’t know that for sure. According to what I learned yesterday, it could very well have been the guy from Puritan who sent the muscle.”

“But it could also have been Rio.”

“Yes,” he conceded. “It could also have been Rio.”

“You could be stirring up trouble. I want his ass fried, but I don’t want Kit paying for our sins.”

“No. Neither do I.”

Outside the house, Jamal moved the ladder with a heavy thud. “I know this is a silly question,” she said, “but has it occurred to you to go to the police with what you have? What this guy’s doing is illegal.”

“I’ve already tried. I’ve been in touch with a Vice detective named Paoletti. He says it’s not enough to go on and, he reminded me, not for the first time, that I should back off and leave the detecting to him.”

“So we’re really on our own with this.”

“We’re really on our own.” He set down his coffee mug and tapped his fingertips against the table. “I think we have to take the risk. We don’t have any alternatives at this point.”

She thought about it, realized he was right. With a sigh, she said, “Shit.”

“I think it’ll flush him out of hiding, if only for the ego boost he’ll get from thumbing his nose at us. And on the slim chance that Kit isn’t with him, it will give him an opportunity to clear himself.” He scraped his chair back from the table, shot a quick glance at the window, and picked up his coffee mug. Carrying it to the sink, he said, “Try to remember one thing.”

“What’s that, sugar?”

He set the mug in the sink, filled it with cold water, and turned to look at her. “I have God on my side.”

Over dinner, Rio promised that if she found the nude photos objectionable, he’d incinerate them, and that would be the end of it. “I forgot to mention,” he said casually as he speared a meatball and cut it in two, “I have a special project shoot coming up in a couple of days.” He studied her over the table. “Want to come along and be my assistant? It would be a great experience for you, a chance to start getting familiar with the filmmaking industry.”

If he was trying to mollify her, it was working. “You’re making a movie?” she said. “What kind of movie?”

“Nothing too fancy, Princess. Low budget all the way. It’s no
Schindler’s List
, but technique is technique, whether you’re shooting high drama or a car commercial.”

She’d never heard of
Schindler’s List
, but from the title, it sounded dull as dirt. And she didn’t care if he
was
filming a car commercial. Just being there on the set as his assistant sounded way cool. It was a fantasy job she would have paid him to let her do, and she agreed before he had time to change his mind.

The shoot took place at a seedy motel in Peabody that made Aunt Sarah’s house look like the Ritz. The single-story concrete block building reminded Kit of some of the places she and Daddy had stayed while they were on the road. Rio pulled around to the back side and parked between a row of shrubbery and an anonymous-looking blue panel truck. He turned to her, cupped her chin in his hand, and kissed her hard on the lips. “Remember, kitten,” he said, “you’re here to watch and learn. That means you stay out of the way, do what I ask, and keep your mouth shut. You got that?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Inside the motel room, a dark-skinned guy with a ponytail and a pitted face was setting up a trio of spotlights directed at a chair set in the middle of the room. The bedding had been removed from the bed, all but the bottom sheet, and draped over the room’s single window. A video camera sat on a tripod next to the chair. Rio walked over to it, knelt and looked through the viewfinder. He made a minor adjustment to the camera, then stood back up. Glancing at his watch, he said, “Where’s Terry?”

“Beats me,” ponytail said. “I got here a half hour ago, and I ain’t seen nobody.”

“Damn it. She’d better show up pretty soon. Our client’s due in twenty minutes.”

“She’ll show.”’ the other guy said. “She always does.”

A moment later, there was a knock at the door. Rio opened it, and a lanky black girl sauntered in, a small overnight bag swinging from her shoulder. Rio eyed her long and hard, then said, “Cutting it kind of short, aren’t you, Terry?”

“You said seven-fifteen, it’s seven-fifteen. And here I am.”

“Get ready,” he said, then swung around to Kit. “Go in the bathroom with her,” he ordered. “Help her get dressed.”

Kit had experienced his disfavor once, and once was enough. She scurried to obey. Terry shut and locked the bathroom door behind them. The tiny room held a faint odor of urine. “Pee-yew,” Terry said, waving her hand. “This place is the pits.” She dropped the overnight bag on the floor, walked to the window behind the toilet, and opened it. Then she lowered her lanky body onto the toilet seat. Crossing one long leg over the other, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from the overnight bag and lit one.

“So you’re the flavor of the month,” she said, eyeing Kit critically as she exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “I heard Rio had a new cookie. What’s your name?”

“Kit. What do you mean, flavor of the month?”

Terry took another long draw on the cigarette. “There’s been a long line of girls before you, sweet thing, and there’ll be a long line behind you after you’re gone.” She leaned forward, elbows braced against her knees. “You look familiar. We ever met before?”

Coolly, Kit said, “I’m sure I’d remember if we had.”

“A little big for your britches, aren’t you? What you doing with that no-good son of a bitch outside? The one with the movie camera?”

She felt a flush climb her face. “I happen to be in love with Rio. And he loves me.”

“Jesus, are you for real? Why do you think he brought you here today?”

“I’m an actress,” she said, raising her chin. “I’m here to learn about filmmaking.”

“Right,” Terry said. “And I’m the queen of Sheba. He got you brainwashed, girl. There ain’t no way to go from here except down. And if anybody can take you there, Rio can.”

“If you think he’s such a creep,” she said hotly, “what are you doing here?”