WIDOW (29 page)

He had had a wife, but she left him when he couldn't buy her a new car.

He had no children. He liked kids, though, and was a Big Brother to a little fatherless Mexican boy. He talked about taking the child to the zoo and the movies.

She came to like John pretty well, after all, and whatever he had said at the Blue Boa that got her to thinking he might be a prime candidate for poison vanished from her thoughts. There was just one thing left to test him over.

“Listen,” she said. “I think I've changed my mind about the game. And about going to bed with you. I like you just fine, but I made a mistake. I'll drive you back to your car now.”

If he protested too vehemently or if he tried to take her against her will, she'd kill him. She would. Because no man had the right to force her to do anything. Never again.

John looked disappointed, but he said with a sigh, “Oh, that's all right. I'm not really sure we know each other enough anyway. I just thought you were a real knockout and maybe I got carried away at the club. You know how it is in those places. I'm ready to go, if you are.” And he stood, a fly who was free of her web—a man who would walk out the same way he walked in, on his own two feet, the first man to pass her test.

She gave him a brief hug then opened the door —and caught Charlene standing outside; just standing there staring down the hall toward her bedroom door. She smiled at her. Saw Charlene's eyes widen when the man stepped out behind her. Saw her hurry inside her room again to hide from view.

It was after four in the morning when she returned home after dropping John at his car in Wendy's parking lot. She didn't see Charlene when she came up the stairs.

Good thing. She was too tired to talk, to explain. Sleep sounded good to her.

Letting them live was more troublesome than killing them, it seemed. It sure took more time.

~*~

After visiting Big Mac in the hospital, Samson dropped off to see if Shadow was working. He was depressed. Big Mac was getting better. A little better, but she still needed the hospital. He knew she was better because she argued with great vigor that she was perfectly all right and that she hated staying in bed and the damn IVs were such a bitch when she tried to sleep. Samson assured her she would be well enough to leave soon, but she pretended not to believe him.

“I'm going to die in this place,” she said. “How would you like it if a nurse had to help you to the bathroom to take a piss? How would you like eating Jell-O and pudding every meal? I bet you wouldn't let them come stick you for blood samples every few hours!”

He tried to laugh and jolly her out of the extremely bad mood she was in, but she was touchy, and his laughter only made her worse.

“Sadists work in this place, Samson. Did you know that? They must have recruited them from a place where torture is expected of a hospital staff.”

“Now, Big Mac, now now.”

“Don't you ‘now’ me! I'm a grown woman here. I am an independent and free woman! I don't have to take this shit.”

Samson got tough then. “If you try to leave, it might kill you, Mac. You're still running a fever. Your lungs aren't so hot, either. They're still infected and there's still drainage. You want to bellyache over a few pinpricks and go out in this summer heat and die? That what you want? It's a hundred and two in the shade out there. The heat might climb today to a hundred and five. It'll kill you.”

She sulked. She turned over on her side, groaning while trying to pull the IV lines with her across the bed.

Samson sat still, waiting for a long time without talking again. When she wouldn't speak, he finally touched her on the shoulder and said, “I'm leaving now. I'm sorry I raised my voice.”

She said nothing.

“I'll be back tomorrow. Aren't you even glad we got those kids in the slammer? Doesn't that cheer you right the hell up?”

Nothing.

Samson sighed and left. Mac was worth saving, but damn if she wasn't a handful the minute she started getting better. He hoped she wouldn't try to leave the hospital when he wasn't there. He'd kick her old sagging ass all the way to Puerto Rico and back if she did.

He found Shadow, alone at a table, sipping a Coke. He sat down, took out his wallet, slipped two twenties across to her.

“You look tired,” she said, taking the money.

“Got this friend in the hospital. She's giving me fits.”

“Lady friend?”

“She's an old bag lady. Supplies me with info from the street. She was down with double pneumonia, dying, when I talked her into the emergency room. She's crazy as hell, but I like her.”

“How's she giving you fits?”

“She wants to leave the hospital. She does, she'll get sicker, and probably die.”

“If she's on the street, she will. It's hotter than blazes now.”

Then he talked about Mac and the street, about the boys who killed the gay banker, and how Mac had witnessed it. He talked about police work and old cases he'd solved, old cases he hadn't. He talked about living alone with a boxer he called Pavlov. He talked and talked and she listened. Then he saw her attention had wandered and he realized how long he'd been going on about himself. His life. His problems. He was abashed.

She apologized for daydreaming and he would have given his next paycheck to know what her “daydreaming” involved, but he couldn't ask her that. He'd made up his mind that he couldn't really ask her anything, not anything personal anyway, and what was left? Wasn't everything personal?

What was that word that meant people believed the whole world revolved around them? Concentric? Egocentric? He couldn't think. Damn. It was a word that had a pejorative meaning, but he couldn't think of it. He could think of pejorative, but that was as far as his vocabulary would take him tonight. He figured everyone thought like that, though, believing the world revolved around them. Only natural.

So while he was hung up on Big Mac and his cases and his work and his life, Shadow was probably lost in thoughts of her own, about her life. He did not blame her. Maybe she was thinking about her husband's suicide. Or about buying a new dance outfit. Or sleep. Whatever it was, he finally noticed he'd lost her, and she readily admitted that he had.

He had to go anyway. He had the three murder files to read over for about the hundredth time. He carried them around with him in the car. He studied them while having lunch, while at home scratching Pavlov's head, while sitting on the john. He read them until the three men ran together, became one. He was losing perspective.

The Post-it note had been written by Deputy Joe Dappo. Samson had taken him out for burgers the night before at a little twenty-four-hour cafe that made the best burgers in the southeast side of Houston. He asked Joe about the note and how he had come to his conclusion. Joe was a nineteen-year-old, green from the academy, but he was bright, brighter than many an old detective Samson had known. It was Joe who tracked down the men's movements the days before their deaths.

The first one, the one that had been stabbed and who was on parole violation for sexual assault—rape—was the hardest to find out about. He had wandered around Pasadena, staying first with this ex-con, then with that one. It seemed the con had not been in Montrose before his death. But the other two, the poisoned ones, they had been. Friends and relatives informed Joe Dappo that the men hung out down in Montrose when they could afford it. Both were into the strip clubs, or rather the girls in their G-strings, and that answered for Samson what kind of bars they frequented. And didn't that obsession ring a bell?

No one knew exactly which clubs they went to, but all agreed it was the strippers they liked best.

Samson now had more than one reason to hang around Shadow and the Blue Boa. Not to mention all the other strip clubs. His stomping ground. His home away from home. Same as for the dead men, which gave him no small pause.

It wasn't certain, of course, that the two victims who'd liked Montrose clubs died because of anything to do with their whereabouts beforehand. That was just Samson's wild supposition. Unsupported. No, wait—there was the victim's car found in the Burger King lot. That did support the theory. But Montrose was the only connection between them. And it might take him weeks, months, to even find out where they were the night before their deaths. But eventually, he would. Someone knew something.

He just had to find that someone.

Not that he'd done such a good job of it tonight. He'd spent his entire time at the Blue Boa getting things off his chest, thanks to Mac and her frame of mind. That wasn't going to help his investigation.

When he kissed Shadow, he smelled her scent, the one coming off her skin, not one put there by perfume. He didn't think she wore perfume. If she did, he hadn't detected it. As he kissed her lightly on the cheek, he was reminded of the region of West Texas around Abilene. There was a sunbaked cactus-flower scent about her that he found both unusual and attractive. He had never thought a woman could smell like a place before. An open, sunny, windy place.

Boy, he had it bad. He knew that. The more he was with Shadow, the more he wanted to be with her. It wasn't a good thing. There were good things and bad things—and she might not be so bad for him, at least as a temporary obsession, but she definitely wasn't good either. What was he doing getting involved with a stripper?

He didn't know anything. Not about his feelings which seemed to be leading him back again and again to this dancer, not about the files he carried around, worrying over them.

With the murders, all he could do was wait for another victim. This left him helpless and stirred a well of anger that lay festering in his gut.

With Shadow, all he could do was wonder about her, and see how close he could get before she either bit him or ran. That also left him helpless and angry. Because at this point he was afraid he cared just as much about what happened to the budding relationship with the dancer as he did about solving his case load.

What a dangerous combination that was. It was inexplicable and he couldn't change it, but it was definitely a hazardous mix.

 

Twenty-Four

 

It had been two weeks since Samson had been able to slow down. Big Mac recovered enough to be released from the hospital, provided she took an antibiotic prescription, and looked after herself, which meant not letting herself get rained on or cold and damp in the open elements.

“I never been so happy to see the back-end of a place.” She spit on the sidewalk just before rising from the wheelchair to enter Samson's car.

“I have a proposition for you, Mac.” Mitchell shut the car door and circled round to get into the driver's seat.

“Like what?” she asked suspiciously.

“I think you ought to move in with me.” He had both hands on the wheel with the motor idling. He looked directly into Big Mac's eyes so she'd know he meant it—this was no joke, cruel or otherwise. He had thought about it for a long time, ever since she fell ill.

“Move in with you? You gotta be nuts.”

“No, I'm serious. Look, I'm a bachelor. I don't get time at home much so the place needs somebody to take a broom to it now and then. And I have a dog, a big dog, who needs company.”

“You know I don't take handouts of that sort, Samson.”

“It's not a handout. It might be a hand-up. Or a hand needed to steady me. I think I might be getting a little squirrely, living alone. I talk to myself.”

“So who doesn't?” Mac's eyes twinkled merriment. She was in a good mood, but she really wasn't buying his offer, he knew that.

“I think it would be an all around good thing, Mac. You need a place to stay, I need a housekeeper and a companion. What do you say? I could pay you.”

Mac looked out the window at the rows of cars in the parking lot's hot sunshine. “I don't need a place to stay. If I needed a place to stay, I'd get my own place.”

Samson sighed and sagged as he did so, his hands loosening on the steering wheel. “I wish you wouldn't be so goddamn stubborn. I'm asking you politely to help me out here.”

Mac turned on him. “Like hell you are! You got Pity City written all over your face. You think I could take that? You think I need your charity? I don't need nothing! Now will you drive me down to where you kept my stuff or do I have to walk all the way through town?”

Samson gave it up. He drove her to the station and told her to wait in the car while he got her shopping cart and personal possessions.

“You kept it in the police station?” she said in disbelief.

Samson grinned mischievously. “It's logged in with the stolen property. They had the room, they didn't mind.”

He came out a side door from the building, pushing the cart before him. It teetered, piled high with bags and clothes. He popped the trunk and stored it all there. The lid wouldn't close over the shopping cart, so he tied it securely with a rope. Back inside the car, with the air conditioning running full blast, he wiped his face of sweat. “That shit's heavy.”

“That shit's my shit and I'll thank you not to call it shit.”

He drove according to her directions down into the Montrose area and let her out on a corner. He had to double-park to unload her things. “You sure you won't change your mind?”

“I got no reason to sit in some man's house all day playing with no dog.”

“If you change your mind, you know where to call me.”

He drove away, keeping her in his rear-view mirror, watching while she stood in the gutter, pawing through her things jumbled in the cart. He didn't understand the world, he realized. He thought he did, he pretended he did, but he didn't know spit about what made people turn down a home, what made a woman want to live on the street instead. She was a little off in the brain department, sure, but she wasn't a basket case. Why couldn't she just come home with him and latch onto a real life, with a roof over her head? It wasn't like he was going to imprison her, for chrissake's.