The Last Dead Girl Page 27

  “Nice day,” I said.

  She looked up, more at the weather than at me. “Supposed to be a storm later.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s what I heard.”

  I moved a step closer. “Mind if I sit?”

  She looked up again, took me in this time. Her expression told me she would tolerate my company, even if she didn’t welcome it. I sat down.

  “I might move my grandmother here,” I said.

  “It’s a good place.”

  “Seems nice. I’ve been looking around.”

  “You go to the office, they’ll give you a tour.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  We spent a quiet moment together. I thought she might leave; she had recovered from her walk up the path. But she stayed and watched me with her hands folded on the table. She had beautiful hands, the nails shaped and painted. A lot of care had gone into those hands. And into her hair as well: it was done up in tightly woven braids. Her face looked as heavy as the rest of her, but there were strong bones underneath. I could see intelligence in her eyes, along with caution and reserve.

  “We have a mutual acquaintance,” I said. “Frank Moretti.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Have you known him long?”

  “He’s a regular.”

  “I was surprised to see him today. I didn’t know he came here. That girl he’s visiting, she’s young.”

  “She surely is.”

  “Is she his daughter? I didn’t know he had a daughter.”

  The woman in green didn’t answer. Her eyes were steady, her mouth a long neutral line.

  “I’d ask him myself, but it might be awkward,” I said. “I don’t want to give him the impression that I’m prying into his private life.”

  “That would be awkward,” she said, “to give him that impression.”

  “Right.”

  “Of course, you could just not pry at all.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Leave everybody with a better impression.”

  She had smile lines around her eyes, but by then it was clear that she wouldn’t be smiling for me. It didn’t matter. She didn’t have to like me. I brought my wallet out.

  “I need to know about the girl,” I said. “Maybe we could help each other.”

  I got a smile after all. A weak one. “What’s your name?” she said.

  “Napoleon Washburn.”

  “That’s a hell of a name.”

  “Some people call me Poe.”

  “What are you offering me, Poe?”

  I opened my wallet. Laid two twenties and a ten on the table.

  The smile went away. Her expression turned stony.

  “That’s not so much. You know who that man is—Mr. Moretti?”

  “I know,” I said, adding another twenty to the pile.

  She made no move to take the money. “You ever gamble, Poe?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know what gamblers do?”

  “Tell me.”

  “When they’re serious, they go all in. You willing to go all in?”

  I pulled the rest of the bills from my wallet, showed her there was nothing left.

  “All in,” I said.

  She unfolded her beautiful hands and stacked the bills in front of her. She didn’t count them. She didn’t put them away.

  “What do you want to know?” she said.

  “What’s the girl’s name? How old is she?”

  “Her name is Erin. She’s twenty-one.” She took a bill from the top of the stack, tore it in half. “Ask me something else.”

  I watched her toss the pieces over her shoulder. They landed in the grass. No change in her stony expression.

  We were playing a different game now, not the one I’d counted on. But I needed to see how it ended.

  “Is she his daughter?” I said.

  “I never saw her birth certificate,” said the woman in green. “I know she calls him Daddy. I know he comes here almost every day. I know she draws him pictures. The pictures are in crayon. They look like the work of a talented three-year-old. Because that’s what she is now.”

  She tore another bill and tossed it in the grass. “Ask me something else.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Car accident. She was seventeen. Happened after midnight on the highway. Car she was riding in crossed over the median, hit a big truck just about head-on. She was in the passenger seat. She was paralyzed from the waist down, suffered a brain injury. Two weeks in a coma.” She tore another bill. “Ask me who was driving.”

  “Who was driving?”

  “One of her teachers. Ask me why he was cruising around after midnight with a seventeen-year-old girl.”

  Her voice had been carefully controlled all along, but now I could hear the anger in it.

  “I don’t need to,” I said.

  “I guess not,” she said. “He died instantly. She’s the way she is. She doesn’t remember him, most days. She always remembers Mr. Moretti. She misses him when he’s not here. Cries every time he leaves.”

  “Where’s her mother?”

  The woman in green gathered the rest of the bills. “She used to come here too, the first year or so. Then it sank in that her daughter wouldn’t get any better. Girl was three and would always be three. That’s hard. Too hard for Erin’s mother. She ran herself a bath and opened up her wrists.”

  The woman tore through the bills once, twice. The pieces went over her shoulder and littered the grass.

  She said, “Does that answer your questions, Mr. Malone?”

  No emphasis on my name. She used it casually.

  “Yes, it does,” I said.

  “Good. Because that’s as much as Mr. Moretti wants you to know. Anything more, you’d have to ask him yourself. And I know he doesn’t want to talk to you. You’re not his friend.”

  “No.”

  She looked around at the garden. Nothing blooming yet but a few crocuses. “I believe I’m his friend,” she said. “He treats me that way.” She looked back at me and her voice fell—a way to make me pay attention. “He’s the gentlest man I’ve ever met, but I don’t like to think what might happen if you came here again, if you tried to approach Erin or speak to her.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Or if you did anything at all that might disturb her life here, or expose her to unwanted attention.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good. You can go now.”

  She glanced over my shoulder and beckoned to someone there. I turned to see the guy with the shaved head walking toward us. The linebacker.

  “This is Karl,” said the woman in green. “Karl, this is David Malone. His visit is over. He’s leaving.”

  She didn’t rise. A breeze came up and drifted the torn bills over the lawn. Down on the platform by the stream, Frank Moretti was reprising his routine with the toy bear. I went with Karl. He had four inches on me and about thirty pounds. He didn’t take me by the arm, but I knew he was there.

  He kept silent until we reached the edge of the parking lot. Then he said, “I owe you an apology.”

  “What for?”

  “If I’d known who you were, I could’ve warned you to take off. Saved us all some trouble. But I believed what you said, about your grandmother.”

  “Sorry.”

  He ambled along beside me. “My grandmothers are gone. Both of them.”

  “One of mine is still around,” I said. “In her seventies. Not ready yet for a place like this.”

  “It’s kind of shitty then. Lying about her.”

  He had a point.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We reached my borrowed car. Karl lingered, rubbing a palm over his bare scalp.
<
br />   “You need to go and stay gone,” he said. “Do I have to tell you?”

  “I’ve been told.”

  I got the keys out of my pocket and turned away from him to unlock the door. A mistake. Karl put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me against the car. Then he hit me fast, one time, off center in the small of the back below the rib cage. A kidney punch.

  I’ve never been gored by a bull, but it can’t be much different. My lungs emptied and my knees gave way. I slid down the side of the car. Ended up on my hands and knees on the ground. I thought I would throw up, waited for it to happen, drool trailing out of my open mouth. It didn’t happen.

  I raised my head and the movement made me dizzy. I sat on the ground. Saw Karl standing over me, shaking his right hand, flexing the fingers.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” he said. “I went easy on that one.”

  He got a grip on my arm and tried to haul me up. I swatted at him. He bent his knees and lifted, tried to brace me against the car. The small of my back touched the side mirror and I groaned and almost went down again, but he held me up.

  “You’re okay,” he said. “Just breathe.”

  I tried to push him away and stand on my own. Too soon. I would have fallen, but he didn’t let me.

  “Take it slow,” he said. “You’ll be fine. I had to make sure you listened. There’s being told, and then there’s listening. You get that, right?”

  I nodded once to let him know I got it. After a while he helped me into the car.

  37

  A strange thing had begun to happen to K. He wasn’t sure what it meant. He had started seeing Jolene in different spots around the city.

  Not the real Jolene, of course, but copies, clones, Jolene types.

  Blond, athletic, good legs—those were the basics. But it was more than a physical type. There were swarms of leggy blondes roaming the quads of Bellamy University, but they didn’t remind K of Jolene. They lacked a certain quality. Some people would have called it damage; K thought of it as vulnerability.

  A woman selling sunglasses at a kiosk at the mall, bored to death. A shy girl with a pockmarked face working the cash register at the place where K got his hair cut. A woman stranded on a roadside at night, anxious, waiting for a tow truck. K saw Jolene in all of them.

  He saw her again, late Friday afternoon. A crumbling street in south Rome—definitely Jolene territory. A hardware store next to a liquor store next to a laundromat. K walked out of the hardware store and saw her in an empty lot across the street. A near-perfect match, down to the short skirt and the tight top. She was even holding a red Solo cup.

  K stopped to watch her. She lit a cigarette and sat on a graffitied concrete wall. The wall separated the lot from a train yard. West of the lot stood an abandoned building that had once been a skating rink. All the entrances were boarded over.

  As K watched, a tall, skinny kid with a patchy beard walked along the front of the skating rink. Ripped jeans, black T-shirt, late twenties. If he had been cleaner and more prosperous, you could have described him as bohemian.

  He joined the girl in the lot—the near-Jolene. They sat together on the wall. He bummed a cigarette. K got the impression they knew each other, but not well. After a minute or two the skinny kid reached into his pocket. Something passed from his hand to the girl’s. They got up from the wall and went off together, disappearing behind the skating rink.

  Time to leave, K thought. The girl was a distraction. He didn’t need distractions. He needed to stay in control. He knew that.

  But he didn’t leave. He walked into the liquor store, bought a cold six-pack of beer, made the clerk put it in a paper bag. He took it across the street and found a spot to sit on the concrete wall, a few yards down from the spot where he’d seen the girl. He twisted the cap from a beer and took a drink. Put the bag on the wall and hid the bottle behind the bag so no one would see it from the street.

  Before long, near-Jolene and the skinny kid reappeared from behind the skating rink. The skinny kid went on his way—head down, fast clip—and near-Jolene walked to the wall. A tiny hitch in her step when she saw K, an unfriendly glance, and then she lit another cigarette. She still had her red Solo cup.

  K drank his beer. He finished a bottle, pulled another from the bag. He checked in on near-Jolene now and then, but he didn’t stare at her. He stared at the laundromat across the street or at the weeds growing through a crack in the pavement at his feet. He thought she might come over when she ran out of whatever she had in the red cup. He was right.

  “Hey, Steve,” she said.

  She stood before him, one bare leg in front of the other, putting herself on display. Medium smile. Teeth ever so slightly crooked.

  He said, “How’d you know my name was Steve?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I like to guess. It’s fun. You try me.”

  He tilted his head, pretending he had to think about it.

  “Jolene.”

  “Jesus, Steve. It’s like you’re psychic.”

  K reached into the bag and brought out another beer. Twisted the cap and started to pour it into her red Solo cup.

  “I can drink from the bottle, Steve.”

  He kept pouring.

  “Or whatever,” she said.

  He moved the bag off the wall and out of the way. She sat beside him.

  “What are you up for, Steve?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  She flicked her used-up cigarette onto the pavement.

  “You can tell me,” she said, toasting him with the cup. “We’re buddies.”

  “I want to spend some time with you.”

  “You’re reading my mind again, Steve.”

  “Let’s go somewhere.”

  She nodded in the direction of the skating rink. “There’s a place nearby we can go, if you want it quick. Or I know a hotel. If we go to the hotel, it’s more. But you get more. Know what I mean?”

  K felt himself frowning. “Maybe we could slow down.”

  “Slow. Absolutely. We’ll go as slow as you want.”

  “I don’t like the way you make it sound—like it’s cheap.”

  “Oh, it won’t be cheap, Steve.”

  “I want to talk first.”

  “Absolutely,” she said, digging in her purse for a fresh cigarette. “We’re talking now, aren’t we?”

  “I mean about real things. Important things. Like what you wanted to do, before you started doing this.”

  She tapped the unlit cigarette against her thigh. “Oh god,” she said. “Are you one of those?”

  “One of what?”

  “Are you gonna try to rescue me? Save my soul?”

  K laughed. “No, no.”

  “’Cause that’s not my thing.”

  “It’s not mine either, Jolene,” K said. “I just want to go for a drive.”

  Her body language changed. She’d been leaning toward him, intimate, but now she leaned away. She lit her cigarette and dropped the lighter in her purse.

  “I don’t go for drives,” she said. “I don’t get in anybody’s car, unless it’s a friend.”

  “But you said we were friends, Jolene.”

  “I said we were buddies.”

  “I want to go for a drive,” K said. “And then get out and take a walk.”

  “Sounds like we want different things.”

  “It’ll be nice. A walk along the water. What do you say?”

  “I say I’ll have to pass.”

  She started to get up, but K took hold of her left wrist.

  He felt her muscles tense. She glared at him. “That’s not cool, Steve.”

  “We’re going for a drive.”

  She tried to pull away. He knew he shouldn’t try to stop her. Someone might see. He should get himself under control. But he felt h
is grip on her wrist tightening.

  “You can finish your beer,” he heard himself say. “Then we’ll go.”

  “You’re hurting me, Steve.”

  “Don’t try to fight me, Jolene. I have a gun. Finish your beer.”

  Her beer was sitting on the wall. She didn’t reach for it. She took a hit from her cigarette and let the smoke run out between her lips. In a soft voice she said, “My name’s not Jolene.” Then she twisted around suddenly and jabbed the tip of the cigarette into the back of his hand.

  A pure shock of pain and the sound of his own flesh sizzling. K jerked his hand away and his whole body jerked with it, throwing him off-balance. The girl followed through with a solid shove—the heel of her palm against his sternum—and the force of it sent him backward over the wall.

  Dirt and weeds on the other side. K landed hard on his shoulder and rolled. Sprawled on his back for a moment—everything hurting, nothing broken—then scrambled to his knees. He stood up with the Makarov pistol in his hand, the one he’d taken from Simon Lanik. Not sure how it got there, because he’d been carrying it around on his ankle. He didn’t have a holster; the gun had been stuffed in one of his socks and held in place with a couple of thick rubber bands. Now he had it out, his finger on the trigger.

  You could call it good reflexes—except that he was facing the wrong way, his back to the wall. He whirled around, brought the gun up, found the girl. She was walking fast, not running, but she was already at the street. He aimed the pistol at her back.

  Daylight. Witnesses. A woman loading laundry into her hatchback. Two young kids passing on bikes. The girl who wasn’t Jolene yanked open the door of the laundromat and went inside. K came to his senses and moved his finger off the trigger. He sank down behind the wall. Returned the pistol to his sock.

  Reckless, he thought.

  After a few minutes he got up and looked around. There were people on the street, but none of them paid any attention to him. He climbed over the wall, picked up his bag of beer, and left the lot.

  • • •

  The water calmed him.

  He had gone for a short drive, and then for a walk—just as he had planned, only without the girl. Now he squatted on the bank of the Mohawk River, not far from the neighborhood where he grew up. He listened to the water gurgling over a fallen tree; he watched a family of ducks floating downstream. He held his right hand under the water. The cold felt good.