The Bad Kitty Lounge (28 page)

“So are you going to do it?”

“That's why I'm here.”

“Me? I can't even figure myself out.”

“That's why I figure you're the one I should talk to.”

“Hmm. So what do you want to talk about?”

She looked at me long. “Dinner. I'm hungry.”

“That's not going to help you mentally.”

“If you don't feed me, you'll really see crazy.”

“Come inside.”

We walked through the alley to the back of the house. The night was black and bitter cold. The elm tree hung overhead in the dark like an old, bent tower from a time before men made buildings of steel.

We went up the back steps and into the house. The kitchen was bright and smelled like slow-cooking meat, roasting vegetables, and baking bread. It smelled like a place where no one has ever heard of guns, and people spend cold October days bringing in the harvest and eating themselves fat. Mom sat at the kitchen table with Jason, playing cards. She acted like she didn't hear us come in. Jason looked up and smiled. I nodded at him, and Lucinda gave him a little two-fingered wave.

We put our coats on the counter and washed our hands and faces in the kitchen sink. Lucinda had on a ripped, bloodstained shirt and had a thick bandage on her arm. Her face was bruised where Robert and Jarik had hit her. Her eyes were wild and hungry. I figured I looked about the same.

A pot of
bigos
simmered on the stove next to a loaf of warm bread. That and a tumbler of bourbon, filled to the brim, no ice, would have sent me to heaven. I poured a glass of water for Lucinda, one for me, ladled
bigos
into two bowls, and brought the bread to the table.

Mom slapped down her cards, looked at me, looked at Lucinda, and looked back at me. Anger and worry spread across her face. “What happened to you?”

I tore a chunk of bread, dipped it into the broth. “Lucinda got shot in the arm. I took a couple knocks on the head.” The heat and salt of the bread soothed me like no medicine could, easing a weight in my chest and in my head. I looked at Lucinda.
She was lost in the food, too. I stabbed a piece of sausage with my fork and tipped it toward her. “The best therapy,” I said.

She smiled as she chewed.

Mom glared at me. “You invited me for dinner at six. It's a quarter to ten.”

I tried again. “Lucinda got shot. I—”

“If you'd been here for dinner, no one would have shot her and no one would have hit you on the head.”

Her glare broke me every time. “I'm sorry, Mom.”

“Okay then,” she said. She got up and made an ice pack for my head and searched my closet for a shirt to replace the one Lucinda was wearing.

“We saw you on TV again,” Jason said, like I'd become a rerun of a favorite show.

“You shouldn't watch so much TV,” I said. “There's nothing good on.”

Mom looked at me, concerned. “Is it over now?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it's over. All but the funerals.”

Mom nodded, content, and crossed herself. “May they all rest.”

Jason squirmed but then brightened. He turned to Mom. “Did you know that a single aphid can have five million babies in a summer?”

She laughed. “God bless her, that must hurt. I hope they're all daughters.”

At 10:30, Jason went to his room to get his overnight bag. He would spend the weekend at Mom's house. I would spend it nursing my head.

After I got them into Mom's car, I went back into the kitchen. Lucinda was cleaning the dishes.

I got close to her. “How are you doing?”

“Better,” she said. “Not great, but better.”

I watched her rinse a bowl and smiled. “You look like a mess.”

She grinned. “You too.”

“I feel like it.”

We looked at each other for a while, quiet. Then I held my hand out, inviting her to come to me.

She stayed where she was. “I froze because you were standing near him,” she said. “I was afraid I would hit you.”

“Thank you.”

“But I wouldn't have hit you. It was a safe shot but I couldn't take it.”

“You took the one that mattered.”

“I don't like what you do to me. You make me freeze. Damn it, I can't be in the same room with you without feeling like I might freeze.”

I reached for her. But she pulled away from me, grabbing her coat.

I said, “You make me freeze, too.” Like it was an excuse, an apology—like it was the most romantic thing I could come up with, my way of saying I wanted her.

She dropped her coat on the floor. “Damn it, Joe!” She came to me. She said, “We could be happy together, the two of us.”

And I said, “Yeah, I think so.”

“What about Corrine?” she asked.

“I don't know. What about Corrine?”

“What are you going to do about her?”

“I don't know,” I admitted.

“You'd better figure it out quick.” And she kissed me.

I pulled her toward me but she didn't come. She removed her lips from mine and stared at me. I thought I saw pain and desire in her eyes. She must have seen them in mine.

“Figure it out real quick,” she said. She picked up her coat and put it on.

“Where are you going?” I said.

She said nothing.

“Don't go,” I said.

She went.

 

AFTER A WHILE, I
slept. I dreamed of falling towers. I ran from strut to strut, propping them with bricks and boards. The bricks and boards slipped like gravity meant to flatten everything that was standing or had ever stood. I propped the towers until I was dead exhausted and then I stood to the side and watched them fall.

I woke in the dark. My mom had asked if it was over and I'd said it was. But I knew that wasn't true. I fished for the phone and dialed.

“What?” Lucinda answered.

“Get up.”

“Why?”

“Let's go talk to Greg Samuelson.”

“It's a quarter after two.”

“Yeah. Let's finish this.”

“What the hell?”

“He has Judy Terrano's copies of the Bad Kitty papers.”

“How do you know?”

I didn't. Not really. I said, “As Judy Terrano's assistant he could have seen the land title every time he went to her file
cabinet. When he realized that the Stones were building on the Bad Kitty plot he saw a chance to get rich. He told them he had the deed and would expose the Bad Kitty history if they didn't pay him a price. So David Stone shot him in the mouth—a warning shot, telling him to keep quiet about the Bad Kitty. They couldn't afford to kill him, though—not if he really had the deed.”

Lucinda was silent. Then she said, “I'll be dressed in five minutes.”

WE DROVE WITHOUT TALKING
through cold, empty streets to Samuelson's condo. The clouded sky was heavy and unmoving. Cars, parked along the curb, looked like the steel carcasses that would remain in the dark at the end of the world. Lucinda shivered and rubbed her hands in front of the heater vent like it was the last ember. I put a hand on her thigh and felt the heat grow through her jeans. I wondered if that heat could warm the world with or without the sun.

She put a hand on top of mine and I decided there was hope.

It was 3:10
A.M
. and only one light was on in the condo complex. It was in Samuelson's condo, like he was expecting us.

I rang the buzzer and we waited for the intercom to crackle.

There was no answer.

I figured Amy Samuelson was at the Stones' house, comforting Eric as he cried into an overstuffed pillow for his dead brother. I figured Greg Samuelson was high on painkillers, sitting in his kitchen like one of the living dead.

I hoisted myself over the security gate, dropped onto the
brick walkway outside the condo, and let Lucinda in. We climbed the stairs to Samuelson's door. Someone had tacked a piece of plywood over the glass panel that I'd punched out when I'd come to visit the last time. A gentle tug removed it. Lucinda reached inside and the door swung open without a noise.

We drew our guns and stepped into the front hall. The light came from the kitchen deep inside the condo. So did a soft sound, a chair moving back from a table. We moved silently toward the sound.

Then Lucinda stopped, grabbed my arm, and pulled me into the living room. Slow, heavy footsteps were approaching. Lucinda hugged the wall, out of sight, her gun raised so close to her face she could have kissed it. I hugged the wall behind her, the same.

A tall man in a black overcoat and sunglasses stepped past us in the hall. William DuBuclet. In his right hand he held a nine-millimeter, in his left a manila folder. Without looking at us or breaking his slow pace, he said, “Good evening, Mr. Kozmarski, Ms. Juarez.”

We stepped into the hall, our guns pointed at his back. “What are you doing here?” I asked, though I figured he'd come for the same reason we had.

He continued toward the door. “An old man like me—I hardly ever sleep,” he said, as if that was an answer. He reached the door.

I trained my gun on the cross formed by his spine and his shoulder blades. “Stop,” I said.

He opened the door. “You're not going to shoot me,” he said.

“I need that folder.”

He turned and faced us, his gun hanging loose at his side, the most relaxed man I'd ever seen. “This folder is mine,” he
said. “It's mine to take care of my dead son's child and perhaps change the world he lives in a little bit.”

“What's in the folder?” I said.

DuBuclet hesitated, then said, “A will, a letter, and a deed.” He gave a bitter smile. “Being of sound and disposing mind and memory, Judy Terrano gave ten percent of her assets to the programs she'd set up to sell chastity to unsuspecting girls. The remaining ninety percent would go to her one and only child, Anthony DuBuclet Jr. That is, unless her will disappeared. Then who knows what would have happened? Someone else, like the Stones, might have stayed rich or, like Samuelson, gotten rich.”

“The letter?” I said.

“Signed by Judy Terrano, David Stone, and David's father, Bartholomew. Dated January 12, 1970. It tells a story about a bad night when a building burned down. David and his father went into the building with cans of kerosene. David's mother sat in a car outside. David was arrested that night. For keeping the rest of the family out of it, Judy, who saw it all, got four thousand dollars a year. Not much even then, but the Stones hadn't made their money yet. She also got title to the land where the building had stood. Probably no big loss to the Stones at the time and just a point of principle to Judy. The deed transfers the ownership of the land to Judy, but with a provision—ownership would revert to the Stones if she ever spoke publicly about her relationship with them.”

I said, “Samuelson stole these from Judy Terrano before she died and was blackmailing the Stones?”

DuBuclet shrugged. “She would have been killed anyway. They'd started construction using the titles on public record and wanted the land back. Judy was in the way.”

Lucinda said, “So now you'll get the land?”

He shook his head. “My grandson will.”

She shook her head, too. “With you as guardian, deciding how the profits get spent.”

“Naturally.”

I thought about the cash hidden in Judy Terrano's room and the cash DuBuclet had Robert and Jarik deliver to me and realized that I'd been wrong about the nun taking payoffs. She was doing the paying and DuBuclet had passed some of her money along to me. “Judy Terrano supported her boy for years, didn't she?”

DuBuclet gave a single nod. “Some years better than others.”

“And she supported you, too?” Lucinda said.

DuBuclet didn't deny it. “Judy Terrano was a great woman. The best I've ever known.”

“So was or wasn't she extorting the Stones when she got killed?” I asked.

DuBuclet sighed. “As far as I know, Judy never in her life extorted anyone.”

“But you just told us what was in the letter,” I said.

He flashed a quick, impatient smile. “She wouldn't call that extortion. She spent her life finding people who had too much power and reallocating it to those who had too little. What you call extortion, she would call fairness.” Another flash of the smile. “I personally would have to agree with her.”

“Because it put power and money in your pocket,” Lucinda said.

Again, DuBuclet didn't deny it.

I asked again, “Samuelson stole her papers and was going after the Stones' money for himself?”

A single nod. “But I think the money may have been of secondary interest to him. He started blackmailing them only after his wife began her affair. Call me old-fashioned, but I think love and jealousy got him started. And a fierce anger.”

Lucinda gave him a smile of her own. “And what kept
you
in this? Money?”

He nodded again. “The money is rightfully my grandson's. As for me, I'm only trying to take care of the people who matter to me.”

I pointed my thumb toward the kitchen. “Is Samuelson—?”

“Dead,” DuBuclet said without feeling.

“Did you kill him?”

“He was already dead.” He stood for a time, waiting for us to ask other questions. When we didn't, he turned away and stepped outside into the cold, adding, “I believe he died a long time ago.”

Lucinda and I listened to his footsteps go down the stairs from Samuelson's condo. Then I nodded toward the kitchen. “Do you want to see?”

She shook her head no—little shakes, little more than a tremble. “You think we should?”

“No,” I said, and we let ourselves out.

In the dusty heat of my car, under the dull glow of streetlights, Lucinda asked, “Did DuBuclet kill him?”

“I don't know,” I admitted.

“Do you want to do anything about it?”