The Bad Kitty Lounge (29 page)

I thought for a while. “No,” I said. “You?”

She shook her head.

We sat for a while, quiet.

Lucinda asked, “If Terrence shot the person who killed him and the wound was bad enough to leave a trail of blood down
the back stairs, why was there no blood on David Stone when you ran into him in the apartment?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Why would he put the ashes of Louise Johnson's photographs in her mouth?” she asked. “Why would he strip off her pants? Why would he pull up Judy Terrano's dress and scribble on her stomach? None of that feels right.”

Stan Fleming had asked the same questions. I gave Lucinda the answer I'd given him. “He was a monster.”

“Didn't anyone ever tell you? Monsters aren't real.”

“Then what
is
real?” I asked.

She looked at me with the eyes I'd seen when I'd told her I wasn't sure if Corrine and I were through. Hurt eyes. Eyes that looked a little crazy. “Anger is real,” she said. “Jealousy is. Love is.”

“I know where you can find all that,” I said.

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “In someone willing to crush anyone who threatened what was hers.”

THE HIGHWAY FELT LIKE
a ghost road with long empty stretches and then twenty-ton trucks blasting through the cold and dark. It took us to a suburban off-ramp and smaller ghost roads, minus the trucks.

At the Stones' house, the lights were on but I knocked hard enough to wake the sleeping.

No one was sleeping. Eric Stone opened the door, wearing jeans and a sweater, looking haggard. Amy Samuelson hung onto his arm.

“Yeah?” Stone said like he'd never seen me before.

I didn't break the news about Greg Samuelson to his wife. I stepped into the house, Lucinda behind me. Stone made no effort to stop us.

We walked past the front-hall fountain. It pulsed like an open artery. We went through a series of rooms to the living room. Cassie Stone sat on the couch in a little yellow dress, haggard, too, smoking a cigarette, two empty wineglasses on the table in front of her.

“Where's your grandmother?” I asked.

“Can't you leave her alone?”

“No,” I said.

She reached for one of the wineglasses and sighed when she saw it was empty. She turned her eyes on me. “In the pool,” she said.

Swimming at 4:20
A.M
. on the night that her son died.

Lucinda and I went through more rooms to the breakfast nook and opened the glass door to the pool. Soft lights showed a Plexiglas ceiling and poolside tropical plants in pots.

Mrs. Stone swam in the pool, wearing a black swimming suit. Lucinda and I stood by the side and watched her. At eighty years old she was an extraordinary swimmer. But she was a wounded creature. Torn skin hung from her left shoulder, emerging pink from the water, reddening when it touched the air, and submerging again. Terrence had managed to shoot her before he'd died. David had come in later to pick up after his mother.

Mrs. Stone touched the pool end, turned, and started back. If she felt pain, she didn't show it.

We went to the close edge of the pool. When she approached, she reached for the pool gutter and lifted her head into the air. She caught her breath, started to pull herself out of the pool, and grimaced. Lucinda reached for her but she said, “No.” She struggled but managed to get herself onto the pool deck. She stepped close to me, the water running off her and her blood darkening her shoulder, sliding down her breast, streaming into her swimsuit.

She looked at me like I'd done her a wrong. “No one wanted the land,” she said. “No one but Judy. She wanted nothing else. My husband insisted that we give her money, too, because he thought we should, because it seemed like the right thing to do. She only
wanted the land. So we gave it to her. But as you can imagine, when the area began to revitalize, I needed to have it back.”

“No,” I said. “I can't imagine killing for that.”

Her eyes glinted. “Not for fifty million dollars? Not a woman who'd seduced the person you loved most in the world? Not a woman who sent your child to jail?”

I didn't know the answer but I said, “No.”

She laughed at me. Blood and pool water staining her skin and streaming down her legs onto the pool deck, she laughed like I was a liar. “I did nothing you wouldn't do,” she said. “Judy and Louise needed to be exposed for what they were.”

“And Terrence?” I said. “The priest? What did they do?”

Her toughness broke but only for a moment. “They shouldn't have gotten in the way.”

 

LUCINDA WENT WITH HER
to get her dressed. I sat in my car and waited.

I wondered if Mrs. Stone was right. If a bag of money so big that it could light up the sky for the rest of my life hung over my head, what wouldn't I do for it? What would I do if someone took away a person I loved the way Judy Terrano had taken her husband from her bed and her son from her house? I'd warned William DuBuclet what I would do to Robert and Jarik if they hurt Lucinda, and I wondered if I meant it.

I stared out at the dark. Morning was still an hour to the east, brightening the waves on the cold Atlantic, glowing on other cities.

Something tapped the windshield more lightly than a fingertip. Another tap. Another. Snow had started falling. Quieter than death. Whiter than stars and gentler.