State’s Evidence Read online

  “Nope.”

  “Was she upset when Frankie died?”

  “Sure. He was her husband, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Any men in her life after that?”

  “Not serious. Not in Vegas.”

  “When did you and she come back to El Gordo?”

  “Couple of months later.”

  “Why?”

  “It was Teresa’s idea. She said we’d been around town too long. She said we weren’t fresh anymore, and Vegas didn’t like stale women any more than it liked stale luck. She was right.”

  “What about James Blair?”

  “What about him?”

  “How does Teresa feel about him?”

  She shrugged again. “I told you all I know about that at the club.”

  “Did she run on Frankie the way she does on James Blair?”

  “Not once. Not even after he was sent up. Everyone in town wanted her ass, too. Some very high rollers, some very big stars.”

  I paused before my next question. “Where do you think Teresa is now, Tancy?”

  She looked back at me with lifeless eyes, as lifeless as the thrust of her answer. “I think she’s dead.”

  “You mean murdered?”

  “I guess. I guess that’s what I mean.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, love. I just think it, that’s all. You spend time in Vegas, it comes natural. Now leave me alone. If Teresa’s alive she can take care of herself. If she’s not, well, R.I.P. Hey. Who’s been following me around, anyway? The cops?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The day after you showed up at the Racquet Club some car started tailing me. A blue Ford. I don’t like cops, Tanner. Call them off.”

  “I don’t think it’s cops.”

  Her lips trembled, then slowly stopped. “Somehow I was afraid you were going to say that. Christ. They promised to keep me out of it. I knew this would happen. God damn it to hell.” Her words were wrapped in the thick wax of fear. She looked toward the door as if she expected Capone himself to walk through it.

  “What do you want out of, Tancy? What are you and Teresa mixed up in? Come on, Tancy. It’s important.”

  “Ha. My face is important. My legs are important. They’re the only chips I bring to the game. I’d like to keep them looking the way they do now.”

  “Who are you afraid of?”

  She shook her head. “Listen, love. I got to get dressed. There’s a guy coming by for me in fifteen minutes. He likes me to be on time.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Her face slacked at the relief of a new subject. “To hear Woundz. They’re punk. You know them?”

  “Should I?”

  “They’re very big.”

  “So are roller skating and group sex.”

  “You don’t approve, love?”

  “It’s not that I don’t approve, it’s that I don’t participate.”

  Tancy Verritt’s lips curled like burning paper. “You’re moral as hell, aren’t you, Tanner? You just sit around all day and restrain yourself, I’ll bet.” Her words were intended as a low and crippling blow.

  I smiled. “Gives me something to do till the cartoons come on.”

  She got up and walked to where I was sitting, her face as fixed as a fist. “Have you ever had a woman walk up and ask you to fuck?”

  “No.”

  “Ever dream about it?”

  “Not since my face cleared up.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “You are what?”

  “Asking you to fuck.”

  Tancy Verritt was blazingly attractive, and no more morally repulsive than half the planet. In an ideal world I suppose I would have rejected her taunt, her offer of a contest, but my world is far more desperate than ideal, and more so all the time.

  I reached for the rope that held her gown against her body and pulled one fringed end of it. The rope streamed softly to the floor and the gown parted, a satin sesame, to reveal a tanless breast, a queerly clipped pubis, a depthless navel. My eyes searched the red-sheathed column of flesh, its sun-browned shadings, its fuzzy and dimpled textures. When I got to the smile on her face, it was the smile of Alexander, the smile of Xerxes, the smile of conquerors. I lifted the gown away from her shoulders and spilled it to the floor and took her soft and heavy breasts in my hands.

  “I want it rough,” she whispered as she pressed her hand to my groin. “Rough and fast. You can hurt me if you want.” She pushed me back onto the spongy bed and I took her down with me.

  Because it was the way she wanted it, I didn’t do it that way at all. It was a contest, after all, and in all contests the way to win is to do the unexpected. With tips of tongue and pad of finger, breaths of air and pats of palm, kiss and suck of lips, I began a conquest of my own. The ceiling crumbled our bodies and scrambled them.

  “The doorbell will ring in a minute,” she said at one point. “Ignore it.”

  The bell rang. Again, and then again. Tancy Verritt’s thrashing, moaning labors were an attempt to make our coupling an achievement, an epiphany, a thing it could not be. On the fourth ring I rolled away from her and fixed my clothes.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  “But only that,” I answered.

  Chip was standing outside the door, cradling posies instead of rackets. I patted him on the rump as I went by.

  13

  It was half-past eight and some straggling rays of the sun were still skipping inland off the ocean when I pulled to the curb across from the Blair and Martin houses. Lights glowed golden behind Kathryn Martin’s curtained windowpanes. I turned off the engine and slumped in my seat and pulled out my copy of Montaigne to help me wait for something, I wasn’t sure quite what.

  I was in the middle of the essay on Vanity, at the point where Montaigne speaks of placing legal restraints on silly and useless writers, when I heard a noise reminiscent of street sounds of my youth. It was Davy, Kathryn Martin’s son, skateboarding nonchalantly down the road toward his house. Head helmeted, hands gloved, knees and elbows padded, he crouched like a Seminole atop his board, weaving across the slanting street as though it was a flaccid, insubstantial thing instead of a skull-smashing concrete slab.

  I got out of my car and watched with admiration as Davy rolled my way. When he saw me, he somehow stepped off his board, popped it into the air, and caught it as easily as an infield fly, all in one motion. I applauded and he twisted with embarrassment.

  “You’re pretty good at that, Davy,” I said.

  “I know,” he replied without inflection, as comment not as boast. “The cut-back still gives me trouble,” he added after a moment, eager that I not misread his skills. With his free hand he pulled his helmet off his head and cupped it under his arm. His T-shirt read Ski Incline. His hair was long and tousled. He might have just landed from one of the planets that had just begun to shine in the eastern sky.

  “You remember when I visited your mom the other day, Davy?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Did she tell you what we talked about?”

  He shook his head, and when I didn’t say anything, he spoke, nervous for the first time. “Mom and I don’t talk much,” he explained. “Why? You gonna marry her or something?”

  The question shocked me, and my denial was more encompassing and immediate than it should have been, and it hurt the boy. “I’m married to someone else,” I added quickly, lying totally and with cowardice. He nodded silently.

  Davy shifted his helmet to his other hand, which caused me to look again at his shirt, which caused me to remember what my phone friend had told me, which caused me to remember Kathryn Martin’s abrupt loss of interest in Teresa Blair’s whereabouts, which caused me to remember Brutus Therm and his pulsars of rocks and sky and snow and water. “New shirt?” I asked the boy.

  He looked down to recall what he was wearing.

  “Yeah.”

  “Get it up at Tahoe?”

  �
�Yeah.”

  “That’s right.” I snapped my fingers. “Your mom went up there the other day, didn’t she? Did you go with her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You get to skip school?”

  He smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Did you find Mrs. Blair all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s a nice lady, isn’t she?”

  “She’s all right.”

  “She staying at a pretty nice place up there?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “What was it called, now? Your mom told me but I forgot.” I extrapolated from another one of Brutus Therm’s pulsars. “Something ‘Lodge’?”

  “Lakeview.”

  “That’s right. Mrs. Blair’s in room twelve, isn’t she?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Did she say when she was coming home?”

  He shrugged. “I was out at the horse place most of the time. Mom never lets me stay around when she and Mrs. Blair are having one of their talks. Besides, Mom told me not to tell anyone about going up there.” His eyes began to shine.

  “It’s all right, Davy. She told me the same thing. Just to be safe, though, let’s not tell her we talked about it, okay? Maybe you shouldn’t even tell her you saw me.”

  “Okay. I wouldn’t tell her, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, whenever I say anything about anything, she starts crying and acting all gross and everything. She’s still bummed out about my dad leaving, I guess.”

  His thin and puzzled voice pained me. “How about you, Davy? Are you bummed out about it?”

  “No way.”

  That’s what they all say, the kids who are left behind. The millions of them.

  Davy dropped his board to the ground and put one foot on it and began to scoot off toward his house. “See you, Davy,” I called.

  “See ya.”

  When the grinding sound of his wheels had faded into the high whisper of the redwoods, I got back in my car and tossed Montaigne in the back seat and started the engine. As I began to pull away from the curb, I noticed that a car parked a hundred yards or so up the road behind me had started up as well and was headed my way. It wasn’t a car I had seen before. I waited for it to pass but when it came abreast it angled to the curb just ahead of me, cutting me off. The driver hopped out without shutting off either his engine or his lights. When he began to trot toward where I was sitting, I got out to meet him. He was not anyone I expected or wanted to see.

  He was large, though his bulk was soft and spillable, the result of disuse. His white loafers gleamed in the focused lights of the cars like tap shoes on a burlesque runway. The digits on his thick wrist glowed dimly in the approaching darkness. His face was beefy and square, its features loose and indistinct. The meaty hands that hung at his sides opened and closed in powerful spasms. I closed a hand of my own, just in case.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Not without cause. I just want to get a look at you, so I’ll know when you come around.”

  “Why? Is it a contest?”

  “Taking a man’s only child from him is your idea of a joke, I guess,” he said heavily. The words were stiff and agonized. I knew then who he was, and shared a bit of his agony myself.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, to get him talking.

  “I know what she hired you to do, she and that bald-headed lawyer of hers. Bad enough you listened to her slander me, but then you had to go to the Blairs’ as well, tell them all about it, too, as if they didn’t know enough already. Probably told the whole street, didn’t you? Well, it’s not going to work. Believe me, mister. I’ll fight you till I die.” He choked on the words, as though driven to complete his threat.

  “What’s not going to work?” I prompted.

  “You’re trying to prove I’m unfit to have Davy even for the summers. You’re trying to help her keep me away from him entirely. My own son,” he added, as though the declaration would reestablish his paternity, perhaps even his humanity. “Did you see him just now?” he went on. “On that skateboard? He’s so darned smooth. Takes after his mother in that. In everything, I guess. That’s what everyone always said.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Martin. Wayne Martin. I’m the guy she told you about when you were over here before.”

  “How did you know I was here before?”

  “I’ve been watching. I watch all day every day, and most of the night.”

  “Why?”

  “To see Davy. To make sure they’re both all right. To see what she’s going to do to me next.”

  “What about your job?”

  “What job? Watching Davy is my job now.” Martin’s eyes widened, then suddenly rolled. His irises disappeared momentarily, giving him an otherworldly, ghoulish aspect. He staggered a few steps, caught himself, then sagged once more. “Sit down before you fall down,” I told him.

  Martin nodded dumbly, then tottered to the curb and lowered himself to it slowly. I went over and sat beside him, two kids ready for the parade. The rumbling car engines that rolled their owners up the hill gave the air a noxious bite.

  Martin mumbled softly. “I haven’t slept in weeks.” He squeezed his eyes with his lids; wrinkles radiated from their corners like the grease marks of clown makeup. “My brain’s on fire,” he continued. “I can’t put it out. I’m going nuts, I guess,” he concluded, more curious than frightened at the prospect.

  “Maybe you should get some help.”

  “You mean a shrink?”

  “Why not?”

  “You ever meet anyone who got anything but broke from seeing one?”

  “A few. It’s someone to talk to.”

  “Yeah. You’d think a man who lived forty years in the same town would have someone to talk to, wouldn’t you? Well, you know who I got?”

  “Who?”

  “A bartender. Which is funny because I don’t even drink anymore. I just go there to talk. Larry keeps some milk on hand just for me. See, the people I work with, in the Crusade, they aren’t interested in my problems. I guess they think as a reborn Christian I shouldn’t have any, you know? And if I’m not truly reborn, well, they don’t want me around then, either.”

  “Catch Twenty-two,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You know what happened to him?”

  “Who?”

  “The bartender. Larry.”

  “What?”

  “Arrested. Embezzlement. Had his hand in the till for years, so they say. Took a hundred thousand, minimum. Can you believe it?”

  “Happens every day. Don’t go into the bar business unless you know a lot of people you can trust or have a lot of money you can lose.”

  “I suppose she told you about the cross,” he said, a non sequitur to everything but his life. “She told her lawyer so I suppose she told you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I wouldn’t have made him wear it,” he went on. “Not to school. I know what the other kids would have done. Oh, yes. The fathers of those kids just got me fired down at the office. Because I lectured them, supposedly. Lecture. That’s what they call it when I ask them not to take the Lord’s name in vain.” He shook his head and frowned. The world had become a stranger to him, and perhaps he was a stranger to himself. He was as alone as anyone I’d ever encountered. I decided, cruelly, to let him continue to believe I was hired to be his enemy.

  “I didn’t get a chance to talk to your neighbor, Mrs. Blair, the other day,” I said casually. “Have you seen her around lately?”

  “Why should I help you? You’re trying to destroy me.”

  “No, I’m not. I just look for data. If she had good things to say about you, I’d report them. It’s the judge’s job to say who gets the boy. Not mine.”

  “Teresa Blair won’t say anything good about me. She hates me. She convinced Katie to throw me out. No, I’m not significant enoug
h for her to hate. Despises, is more like it.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I made a pass at her once. Or, that’s what she thought it was. And I guess she was right. I was drunk. I was drunk a lot then; that’s why I opened my life to Christ.”

  “When did you see Mrs. Blair last?”

  “Who remembers? Five, six days ago. I was out back there, where I could see in our kitchen, watch Katie make dinner, you know? Then a bunch of men came over to the Blairs’. Policemen, some of them. They tramped all over the place. I had to hide behind a bush to keep them from spotting me. Then they went away and a little while later Mrs. Blair came out and drove off. Had a suitcase with her.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Some man picked her up. She hopped in his car and off they went.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “They all look the same to me.”

  “What color? Green? Blue?”

  “White.”

  “License?”

  “Nevada, come to think of it.”

  “What did the man look like?”

  Martin shrugged. “Davy came home about then. I quit watching Mrs. Blair and her friend. I wouldn’t have made him go, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Davy. To that school in South Carolina. It’s just that I was scared. Davy’s only twelve, but already they’re finding drugs in the lockers at his school. And we hear of everything from sex parties to gang fights at the junior high he’ll go to next year. I guess my imagination got carried away, but really all I wanted was to make sure he didn’t ruin his life before he realized that’s what he was doing. Is that so wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Is it wrong to worship the Lord?”

  “No, not if you leave it at that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You and your friends try to tell people how to live.”

  “But the Bible tells us to praise the Lord, to say unto the cities of Judah, ‘Behold your God.’”

  “It also tells us to forgive those who trespass against us. There’s a difference between evangelism and theocracy, Mr. Martin. A lot of people are confusing them these days. What’s worse, a lot of people aren’t. They know exactly what they’re doing.”