Racing the Devil Page 7

  I thought of the photos Frank had found in my truck and wondered.

  Not long after, a silver Cadillac DeVille pulled up, and a woman with strawberry blond hair blown big like a Charlie’s Angel climbed out. Her black sheath dress rode high on her thighs and hugged the taut curves of her hips. She was muscular and lean, and there was something both sensuous and feral in the way she moved.

  The girls hung back as the woman gave Hartwell a stiff hug. Then all four of them climbed into the Hartwells’ Buick Park Avenue. Nice car. Nice house, a vine-covered Victorian with arched glass panels on the second floor. The yard was landscaped with perennials, flowering shrubs, and grass so plush and green a dandelion would have been ashamed to grow there. Someone had put a lot of care into that yard.

  With the family gone, I turned my attention to the neighbors. They’d probably seen me on TV, but most people have a hard time placing faces in unexpected contexts. It’s why you sometimes fail to recognize a co-worker you meet in the grocery store.

  Besides, most people think once you’ve been locked up, you stay locked up until you’ve been convicted or found innocent. They wouldn’t expect me to be out on the streets. For once, I was glad it didn’t work that way.

  I started with the house across the street. The name on the mailbox read, Mitchell. By the time a woman in her mid-to-late forties answered the door, sweat streamed down my face, and not just from the heat. I held up my Private Investigator’s license with my thumb partially covering the face and said, “Hello, Ma’am. I’m a private investigator looking into the death of . . .”

  The door slammed. I knocked again.

  “Go away,” said a muffled voice from behind the door. “We’ve already talked to the police.” “Ma’am, if you’d—” “Go away!”

  I went. I didn’t know if she recognized me, or if there’d been so many cops and reporters around that she was tired of talking. Or maybe it was because I still looked a little like I’d been mauled by a rhinoceros. I took a chance it was one of the latter two and moved on to the next house.

  There was no one home at the next two houses. At the third, an elderly man offered me a glass of iced tea and said he didn’t know the victim well, but that she always spoke politely to him. The little girls were well behaved, and the husband seemed to work long hours. They went to church on Sundays and on Wednesday nights, but he didn’t know where they attended. He wished he could be of more assistance, but he kept to himself and didn’t get involved in gossip. I thanked him for the information and the refreshment and moved on.

  The fourth door I knocked on flew open, and a middle-aged woman with a disheveled red mane leveled a Beretta 9mm at my forehead. With the clarity that often accompanies impending death, I noticed that the barrel looked immense, a yawning hole from which the bullet would come hurtling toward my forehead. To a man about to have his brains blown out, it looked more like a cannon than a handgun. I forced myself to look beyond the barrel, where a pair of hazel eyes glared back with a wild-eyed, panicked sheen.

  I took a slow, deep breath and tried to sound calm and congenial. “Ma’am, I’m—”

  “I know who you are,” she said. “I saw you on the news. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m investigating Mrs. Hartwell’s murder.”

  “Liar! I could blow you away right now, and not a soul would blame me.” The weapon bobbled slightly. My bowels clenched.

  “Ma’am, that may be true. But until the prosecutor proves me guilty, I have the right to try and clear myself.”

  Her mouth twisted. “Not here, you don’t. Not in this neighborhood. If you’re not out of here in ten seconds, you won’t have to worry about going back to jail.”

  I tried to look nonchalant as I backed slowly down the porch steps. I suppose I could have gone for the Colt, but there was no point getting into a gunfight if I could help it. Besides, a shootout in real life is nothing like a shootout in the movies. The bad guys don’t always miss, and the good guys aren’t bulletproof. Just my luck, the crazy bitch would shoot me, and then where would

  I be?

  The barrel of the gun followed me. “If you step foot in my yard again,” the woman said through gritted teeth, “I’ll kill you.”

  I noted the name on the mailbox as I left—L. Falcone—and sauntered toward my car as if I didn’t give a moment’s thought to her and her 9mm. There was an itch between my shoulder blades where I half expected to feel the impact of a bullet. I’ve known guys who say being shot doesn’t hurt at first. It’s only later that it feels like someone’s set your flesh on fire. Others say it hurts like hell. I don’t know which is right, or what determines which way it happens.

  Adrenaline, maybe.

  The arrow in my chest had hurt a lot, though. I had no desire to add a bullet wound for comparison.

  The house I’d parked in front of was a gray stone cottage with a peaked and gabled roof. What my mother used to call a gingerbread house.

  Glancing back, I saw that Ms. Falcone had vanished back into her lair. What the hell, I thought. Live fast, die young. I turned up the walkway to the cottage and knocked on the front door.

  At first, I thought I’d struck out for the umpteenth time.

  Instead, the door cracked open and an odd, persimmon-shaped face with a wide, thin-lipped mouth, small bump of a nose, and eyes like oversized black currants peered out. An unruly mass of white hair, most of which had been twisted into a loose bun, gave her the look of a finely coifed cotton-top marmoset. The top of her head barely reached my chest.

  “Yes?” Her reedy voice hardly carried across the porch.

  “Good afternoon, Ma’am,” I said. “I’m . . .” I looked into those wizened eyes and faltered. “I’m investigating the murder of your neighbor, Amy Hartwell.”

  “Are you a policeman?”

  “No, Ma’am,” I said. Impersonating a policeman is against the law. “I’m a private investigator.” “Let me see your license.”

  I showed it to her, not flashing it as if I had something to hide, but not leaving it out for her to linger over.

  “McKean.” Her dark eyes glittered with something that might have been fear, but her voice never wavered. “Isn’t that the name of the man the police think killed her?”

  Brave. Spunky. I liked her immediately, with her little monkey face and her bright eyes. “Yes, Ma’am,” I said. I am a reasonably good liar, but not to little old women who look like somebody’s great-grandmother. “They think I did it. But I didn’t, and that’s why I’m here. To prove that. I don’t mean anybody any harm, Mrs. . . .”

  “Drafon. Birdie Drafon.”

  “I don’t mean you any harm, Mrs. Drafon. I just want to find out what happened to Mrs. Hartwell and why whoever did it wanted me to get the blame.”

  I didn’t have to try to look sincere. I meant every word. Mrs. Drafon looked at me with those black currant eyes as if she could see clear into my soul and said, “Of course, dear. Come right in.”

  I’M AFRAID MOST of the neighbors wouldn’t be able to tell you anything, even if they wanted to.” Mrs. Drafon poured fresh-squeezed lemonade into a pair of frosted glasses. “It’s not like the old days when everybody knew everybody and we all got together after church on Sundays. Back in those days, anybody could have told you almost anything about anyone. Nowadays . . .” She pursed her lips. “A person could be dead a week and nobody would know until the stench reached the street. I hope you like a twist of lemon. Henry always liked a twist of lemon in his drink.”

  She gestured toward the picture of her late husband, Henry Drafon, whom I had already learned more about than most folks know about their daddies.

  “A lemon twist is fine,” I said.

  She set our drinks on coasters on the coffee table and sat primly on the edge of her chair. “I always say, there’s nothing like an ice cold lemonade on a hot day.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Of course, Henry always preferred beer. Still, he did like his lemonade.�
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  “Yes, Ma’am.” I suppressed a smile. “So, tell me. Did you know Mrs. Hartwell very well?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She lifted her bony shoulders. “I’m not sure anyone knew her very well. But I think you could say we were friends. Yes, you could say that.”

  “When you say ‘friends’ . . .”

  She wrapped her simian fingers around the frosted glass and sipped at her lemonade. When she had swallowed, she said, “Not the kind of friends who go out shopping or to restaurants together. But the kind of friends who share a cup of coffee and a bit of gossip. She was very unhappy, and I think she needed someone to confide in. You know how it is. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe men don’t need that sort of thing.”

  “When you say ‘unhappy’ . . .”

  “Her doctor called it depression. Personally, I think it was a simple case of marrying the wrong man.”

  “You don’t think much of Mr. Hartwell?”

  “Calvin. If you ask me, that’s a case of a man whose head is too big for his britches.”

  I smiled at the mixed metaphor. “Mrs. Drafon . . .”

  “Please, call me Birdie.”

  “All right. Birdie. Do you think he might have been the one who . . . ?” I stopped, mid-question. There was no way to mention what had happened without reminding her that she’d just lost a friend—and that I was the one who was supposed to have killed her.

  “No,” she said. “I shouldn’t think so. But I wouldn’t put my marker on it. He’s a cold man, at the core.”

  “And that’s what made her so unhappy?”

  “That, and other things.” She paused, tracing patterns in the frost that was rapidly melting on her glass. “She didn’t talk about her childhood much, but I had the feeling it wasn’t a very happy one. And then there was the church. Do you know anything about the Church of the Reclamation?”

  I frowned, trying to recall. Then I remembered the minister I’d seen back at the jail. “Reverend Avery, right? He’s their pastor?”

  “That’s the one. Those folks make the Southern Baptists look like hedonists. Amy didn’t mind most of the rules—she didn’t smoke or drink or dance—though what, exactly, is the matter with a little dancing, may I ask? Why, Henry and I could cut quite a rug, and I don’t think that made us bad or sinful.”

  “Dancing is a sexually stimulating activity,” I explained. “At least, that’s what they told us Nazarenes.”

  “Son,” she said, stifling a chuckle, “breathing is a sexually stimulating activity, if you’re with the right person.”

  I lifted my glass in a toast. “Amen to that, Sister Birdie.”

  She returned my toast. “Now, what was I saying? About Amy?”

  “The Church of the Reclamation. The depression.”

  “Oh. Yes. Well, I think they were related. You see, Amy was a lovely girl. Not beautiful, in the traditional sense, and a bit full in the hips, but lovely nonetheless. And bright. But she was only seventeen when she married Calvin, and I can tell you it was no nine months before Tara was born.”

  “Tara?” I frowned. “I thought Katrina was the older girl.”

  “Katrina is Calvin’s by his first wife. Don’t ask me about her. They never talk about her. As I understand it, she just packed her things one afternoon and left. And no one’s heard from her since.”

  One wife dead, one vanished. Calvin, it seemed, was batting a thousand.

  Ms. Birdie clucked her tongue against her teeth and went on. “Poor Amy. Here she was, seventeen years old, with a brand new baby and a five-year-old who wasn’t even hers. No wonder she was overwhelmed.” She plucked at her blouse, which puffed out where it tucked into her skirt. “When it got to be too much, Amy used to bring those little girls over here to stay with Henry and me. The girls would dress up in their little costumes and perform for us. Which, naturally, Calvin said was a sin. Let me tell you something, Mr. McKean. A man like that, the kind who sees evil everywhere? Well, that’s a man with sinning in his heart.”

  I nodded without answering. The words were flowing, and I didn’t want to interrupt.

  “It was hardest on Katrina, I think. She was always a lonely little thing—old for her age, if you know what I mean—and Amy . . . well, I think she always felt Katrina was a little bit of a stranger. Not that she was unkind. Just . . . distant.”

  I nodded, feeling a surge of pity for a little girl who’d been abandoned by one mother and rejected by another. A child who might be vulnerable to a kindly-looking predator with candy and a camera.

  “When the girls were both in school, Amy thought she might like to go to work, but Calvin wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted her at home, and that was that. If she felt unfulfilled, he said, she could use her talents to create a perfect pot roast.” She shook her head in disgust. “Pot roast. I was a good wife, Mr. McKean, but if Henry had tried that with me, he would have been buried with that pot roast firmly lodged in his backside.”

  “I take it Amy didn’t see it that way.”

  “Amy didn’t know how to say no.” She sighed and smoothed her skirt across her thighs. “Then about six months ago, they joined this new church. It must have been Calvin’s idea, because it’s all about how women are supposed to be subservient little doormats and how they’re all—we’re all—Jezebels, tainted with the sin of Eve. Never mind that Adam committed the same sin, and proved he had no backbone to boot.”

  “Jezebels, huh.” I wouldn’t touch that one with a ten-foot pole.

  “Anyway, Amy went along with it. But she just kept getting sadder and sadder, until finally, her doctor put her on some kind of medicine for it.”

  “Do you know what kind of medicine?”

  “It’s that one I keep reading about in the news.”

  “Prozac?”

  “I think so. But she stopped taking it.”

  “Really. What happened?”

  Her eyes glistened, two jet beads in a face as wrinkled as a withered apple. “She went out and got herself a job at a travel agency. Windrider Travel. It wasn’t about the work. It was about him not thinking she was anything of value. Calvin just about hit the ceiling. I mean, sparks flew out of that house. Amy was in tears when she came over here the next day, and I told her, ‘Honey, you are worth more than this. When the good Lord set us here, he made Eve for a helpmeet, not a doormat.’ And she said to me, ‘Ms. Birdie, you are right.’ ”

  Her eyes brimmed, and a tear rolled down her nose and hung trembling from the tip. “I loved that child, Mr. McKean. She had her problems, but she was a good person.” She leaned toward me and half-whispered, “I don’t know this for a fact, but I think she might have been planning to divorce him.”

  “Ms. Birdie, this is a hard question,” I said. “But I have to ask it—”

  “I know.” She heaved a deep sigh. “Was she seeing anyone? Well, I don’t know for certain, but I know there was a man at work she was partial to. Ben Something-or-Other. I think she would have told me if anything had come of it, but perhaps not. She might have been ashamed, you know. But anyway, that’s how I knew you weren’t the one who did it. Because she’d told me who she was interested in, and it wasn’t you.”

  She reached across the arm of the love seat and patted my hand with cool, papery fingers. “Besides, killers are like crocodiles. You ever see a crocodile’s eyes? Flat and cold and empty. People say Ted Bundy was a charmer, but he had crocodile eyes. Your eyes aren’t empty, Mr. McKean. You’ve got caring eyes.”

  My cheeks warmed at the compliment. “Ms. Birdie, I hope you won’t be letting strangers into your house based on what’s in—or isn’t in—their eyes. Because I don’t want The Tennessean writing headlines about how some lowlife with the right eyes came in here and killed you.”

  “Pooh,” said Birdie. “Drink your lemonade.”

  Before I left, she told me what she knew about the rest of Amy’s family. That her parents were both dead. That she had a sister, Valerie Shepherd—the woman in the black sheath dress—w
ho was the soloist for the church’s Sunday morning radio show. (“Not that she’s a believer,” said Birdie. “But she does have a beautiful voice.”) Valerie was involved with a man who had done six years in prison before he straightened out his life and joined the church, where he now did all the mastering for the radio show.

  Same old song. Went to jail, found Jesus.

  Not that I didn’t believe in the transformative power of prayer. I did. Mostly. But I’d seen enough jailhouse conversions to take this one with a grain of salt.

  I asked, “How were things between Amy and her sister?”

  “Oh, like sisters everywhere, I imagine,” she said airily. “Close as nits, and fought like cats and dogs.”

  “What about?”

  “Who knows? They were sisters, and sisters fight sometimes. Brothers, too, if my boys were any example.”

  I thought of my brother, of all the meaningless arguments we’d had throughout the years. I thought of how his loss would rip through my soul like a black hole.

  “I’ll come by sometime next week,” I said, “and put a peephole in the front door.”

  “Pooh,” she said. “No need.”

  “What if I’d really been a murderer? I could have forced my way inside and had my way with you before you even had a chance to scream.”

  She smiled a beatific smile. “I’m too old for you to have your way with, and I don’t need a chance to scream.” She untucked her billowed blouse to reveal a little silver-plated, snub-nosed .38. “All I have to do is stay in close and pull the trigger.”

  I grinned back at her. “Yes, Ma’am, I guess that’s true. But you could put all the hurting in the world on him, and what good will it do you if he kills you for it?”