WIDOW (4 page)

It was barely light—the city hunkered down in a fog-shrouded dawn, freeway lights blinking out—when he drove the Maxima south of Houston into Pasadena and parked it in the end slot at the Laguna Liquor Mart. The air reeked with the rotten-egg scent of chemicals from the oil-refinery plants, but he took a chest full of it as if it were sweet honeysuckle air.

He made it home before the freeway work-traffic crush, before six a.m.

Suffused with adrenaline, he was able to pass the day without sleep or mishap. And through all the long hours of this sleepless day he walked around patting his belly, snapping his fingers, smiling to himself. He was a full man, replete, confident and radiant, thrilled at his accomplishment that no one would ever know or guess.

No one except the serial killer he had one-upped. Another fool of a man who could never speak of the treachery done him.

 

Three

 

Detective Mitchell Samson walked down the block in the inner city neighborhood watching all the shadows. Neon flicker from the many club signs along the sidewalk did little to alter the dark night's dangerous possibilities. Grotesque shapes loomed in the alleyways and staggered toward him, their faces limned in sulphurous yellow, emerald and vermilion. Mitchell kept his head down, but his attention sharp. It was not a good place to be late at night.

He saw Big Mac leaning against a telephone pole on a street corner at about the same time the bag-lady snitch saw him. Homeless, broke, unemployable, Big Mac lived on handouts and by trading street news with the cops. Mitchell felt in the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a bill. He had it folded and waiting just in case he saw her. There but for the grace of God, he often thought. She could be me. I could be her. We're old friends.

“Hey, Samson, how's life treating you?”

Where'd you get that t-shirt, Mac? I didn't know you went in for headbanging music.” Mitchell reached out and stuffed the folded twenty into the woman's hand.

“Aww, I don't like nothing like that. Some kid gimmee this shirt. Pretty colors, though, ain't it?” She pulled the oversize t-shirt out from her emaciated chest and looked down at the wild collage of colors spraying out from the faces of a band she had never heard of before. “I kinda like it.”

Mitchell moved on down the sidewalk, Big Mac at his side. The woman ate all her meals at McDonald's, and Mitchell believed that was why her color was as pale as oyster shell. Her arms were stick-like, her knuckles thick with arthritis, but she possessed a jittery energy, the kind someone dancing on the edge of survival needed to keep herself dry, warm, and fed.

“Heard anything on that gay bashing happened down here last week?” Mitchell asked. He didn't really expect to get anything for his money. He just knew Big Mac needed a hamburger. She looked wolfish, under deep strain, the lines in her face digging woeful trenches toward underlying bone.

“Might've been some kids outta the neighborhood. Seen a carload of ‘em down here about that time. Waving bats out the car windows. Calling people faggots and names like that. Not that there ain't some flaming fags here, but, you know, what's the problem with that? Cain and Abel might have been fags, what do we know, right?”

“Any idea where the kids came from, what part of town?”

“Some say they're from up north, maybe the Woodlands.”

That surprised Mitchell. The Woodlands was a planned development built with nature in mind, houses surrounded by trees, research, university, and corporate buildings hidden behind massive green forests. The domain of the wealthy, the educated.

Made them feel ecology-conscious living in a place named one of the top three designed communities in America. Could it also be the breeding ground for skinhead fascists? Or maybe it was just a few boneheads out for joy rides. Too much beer. Too few brains.

“Well, you see that carload of kids again, you give me a call. We need to keep an eye on people carrying ball bats.”

Big Mac began angling across the sidewalk in front of Mitchell, pushing her shopping cart ahead of her. She stepped into the street. McDonald's beamed yellow bright across from where they walked. “I'll do that, Samson. Thanks for the dough. I was so damn hungry, I thought I was gonna start eating shoe leather. If I had any.” She glanced down at her worn rubber-soled sneakers and laughed.

Mitchell tipped an imaginary hat and kept walking.

He slipped in the door of the Hot Spot at fifteen after eleven. It was a weeknight, Tuesday, and the clientele were few. One drunk sat hunkered over a draft beer in the corner booth.

Two younger men, blue-collar types dressed in jeans and plaid short-sleeve shirts, sat together at the long bar sipping whiskeys and calling out to the dancer when they thought she needed more encouragement to swing her bare tits.

Mitchell took his usual table and ordered an Irish coffee. The bartender already had the pot brewed, waiting. Mitchell regularly hit this place on Tuesday nights. He always ordered Irish coffees. He stayed until twelve or one in the morning, until after a dancer called Jezebel came on, and then he moved on to the next topless bar on his list, one right down the block where the dancers were younger and firmer and earned quite a bit more money for dancing in a G-string for horny men.

The coffee came steaming with whipped cream on top. Sometimes bartenders dropped in a sprig of mint, but not here at the Hot Spot. What did he want, class or naked women? He wanted the naked women. He did. His day wasn't complete without them.

He stirred the light cream into the liquid, savoring the smell, wondering for the hundredth time if maybe he wasn't getting too infatuated with the drink, the way he had become enamored of the dancing girls. This was a worry. If he turned into a lush, his job might fall into danger. Or was it already in danger? How would he know something like that?

He shrugged, took a small swallow of the doctored coffee, and felt it go down real smooth, like honey that coated the tongue and swelled the taste buds. Before he reached home tonight, he'd be half drunk. So be it. There were a lot worse things to be half of than drunk. Like hungry and having to depend on handouts.

The girl in the pink spotlight center stage was no longer a girl, but she could move. The platter-player, the DJ, called her “Babycakes.” She was nobody's baby, but she'd make a helluva birthday cake surprise. She could move like a boa constrictor, and did so, sinuously, wrapping her long white legs and arms around a center pole in the dance stage floor. She rocked to the beat of an old blues song, humping at the pole, leaning back all the way until her head reached the floor. Her breasts—not young, not that large, but real, not silicone injected biscuits—slipped up her ribcage, nipples standing, teetering on their mounds of flesh. God! There had to be a God, given nipples like that.

She looked right at Mitchell and he looked back, sure she knew his game. He wished to hell she'd tell him what it was. He'd be most grateful for that.

She lifted her torso oh so slowly and unwound from the pole. She did a few dance steps, a few bumps and grinds for the boys at the bar who gave her appreciative whistles, and then she moved to the back of the runway and, peeking with a smile from the curtain, disappeared as the last strains of music died.

Mitchell drank the coffee, asked for a refill. His waitress was the girl he watched dance on Friday nights. She now wore a red babydoll pajama top over her G-string, but it did nothing to camouflage the voluptuous figure. You could see all the way through the material as if it were gauze, or a red spider web. That was a jolly thought. Imagine those legs on a spider. Those tits. That ass.

Every time she brought him a drink he tipped her another dollar. Off him she made a dollar every twenty minutes or half hour. Not good. Not bad. But it was acceptable. He wasn't rich, they knew that. They even knew he was a cop, a clean one, which explained why he wasn't rich. The whole damn street knew he was on the force. But they didn't fear him. He wasn't out to bust anyone. He was just another one of those guys who liked to watch the female body undulate to the music. He didn't proposition them. He didn't even make any remarks. He just watched.

And that was his secret—The Secret, as Mitchell Samson thought of it. His buddies at the station didn't know about his late-night encampments in Houston's inner city sleaze joints. They probably would have been stunned, if not properly indignant. Mitchell? Got a thing for the topless girls? Not Mitch, Jesus no. Not good old dependable quiet laid-back Mitchell, gimmee a fucking break. The only cops who knew were from Vice. And they didn't care one way or the other. If they happened by a place where he was, their gazes slid over him without pause. Girls were his thing, they didn't give a damn.

But Mitchell's precinct homeboys didn't know, and if he had anything to do with it, they never would. Also, Patty didn't know. His fiancée. Though he wasn't quite sure how that had come about—that engagement business. He had been married once, and once was all one man should have to try to find out he wasn't the best marriage material on the planet Earth. But nevertheless, some way, he had proposed. Kind of. And Patty had accepted. And she thought he was bringing her an engagement ring one of these days. Just as soon as he could remember to go to a jewelry store to shop for one. What with all his time taken up with his work, she might give him a little time, a little leeway to produce the package.

As he sipped the second Irish coffee, Mitchell figured he could hold out on the ring thing for another couple of months at least. Who could afford a diamond anyway? Had Patty ever looked at those price tags? He thought she probably had. Some women knew these things demanded sacrifice, monetary and otherwise, and wanted them made. Have to secure the Goddess's favor, whatever the cost. Not that he blamed her for that. They all wanted the same things anyway. Was she supposed to be different?

As for getting married, really tying the knot, well, he'd have to see. Patty was sweet and all, hell, she was top notch, any man's catch. Smart, three diplomas hanging on her wall, on her way up at the Housing Authority, on a first name basis with the mayor, but . . .

But what, he pondered? Every time he turned around there was a but. Life was just chockfull of them. But for the grace of God he was not homeless and beaten down. But for his misgivings, he might really marry again. But for the sake of his old dog, Pavlov, he might sometimes even admit to fleeting bouts of true loneliness. But, but, but.

Jezebel came onstage and all those anxious thoughts swiftly vanished from his mind. Jeze was something else again. Not as full-bosomed as his waitress, not as young and firm as the girls he would see at his next regular hangout, but damn she was a man's kind of woman. Legs, man would you look at those legs, they made his eyes want to fall from their sockets. Beautiful ankles, the dip between foot and calf just right, the curve behind her knee smooth and pure as French vanilla ice cream, the thighs thick but luscious, the hips like magnolia blooms, milky, soft-looking without appearing loose. Waist not more than twenty-two inches around, he'd have to swear. And eyes. Dark, liquid, suggesting darker nights and darker deeper sex than he had ever experienced.

Oh, he knew it was illusion and lie. All of it. From the flesh to the paint, from the lust in the sometimes dilated, drugged-out pupils to the swish of the unclothed buttocks, but it was the best lies and the best illusions and it caused him to swell where he sat, which is what he was supposed to do, which is what her dance was supposed to accomplish, and accomplish it did. Magnificently.

He smiled, a gentle curving upward of his lips, enjoying the titillation overwhelming him. Jezebel. The reason he came here on Tuesday nights. So untouchably beautiful and full of promise, so ethereal that she might be an angel with tattered wings dropped onto the stage, soaked through with aquamarine spotlight, her gaze casting about in the dim club for a man's look, any man, to judge if her performance was getting through.

He did not sip the coffee while she danced. He hardly breathed. He ignored the men at the bar who thought, as he did, that she was really something, really special. And when she finished her set, having drained from him whatever tension it was that brought him back week after week to watch her, Mitchell Samson stood from the table, dropped another dollar beside his cup, and wandered outside into a limpid midnight world. He had to adjust his erection. It was too painful the way it lay, though now the blood and fantasy feeding it were slowly washing away, sand from a shore.

He still had two hours to kill at Chez Tigress. Where the girls were younger, though no more beautiful than Jezebel.

And the bartender never failed to drop the sprig of mint into his Irish, whatta guy.

 

Four

 

The wind outside the window rustled a mass of green bushy hydrangea leaves against the window pane. The woman in the bed turned off the radio and listened, decided what made the noise, and spent some time looking at her empty water glass.

“Son? I hate to bother you, Son, but could you refill my water pitcher?” Her voice was high and a little breathless as she called out from the back bedroom of the house.

Son squeezed shut his eyes. He reached up and massaged his temples before raking his hand down over his face. His lips silently mimicked his mother's words. Son? Fill my water pitcher? Will you, Son? Being a gifted mimic, his voice would have sounded almost identical to his mother's had he been speaking out loud.

He swiveled the office chair around from the computer at his desk, and stood up. “I'm coming, Mother.” I'm coming, I'm coming, he breathed into the dimly lighted room, looking around, orienting himself so that his anger might leak out enough to allow him to pass inspection when he went to her assistance.