“Oh, you mean when we visited.”
“Uh…”
“Back when you were telling all those tales. About Priss’s
landscape
business.”
Salty’s eyes widened and he tried to step around her, but Stella nimbly blocked him. “Not so fast. I think we should have us a talk. I was hoping to get some construction tips from you. I hear it can be a bitch to get a permit for one of those sheds like you’re putting in. I’d hate to get halfway in and then … bam, some concerned neighbor calls it in and shuts me down.”
Salty’s ruddy face took on a deeper shade. “That shed’s none of your business, Stella.”
“I’m not saying it is. Come on, take a walk with me, we can change the subject, I promise.”
Salty wavered, looking longingly at the gym, through whose large picture window a variety of ladies in coordinated exercise outfits were lunging and hopping to some unheard beat.
“Ten minutes,” he finally said.
They set out down the street, turning into a neighborhood of neat brick bungalows. “So you weren’t completely honest with me,” Stella scolded. “That wasn’t any kind of
landscaping
you were doing up in Kansas City with our girl Priss.”
“What’d she tell you?”
Stella noted with interest the sudden change in Salty’s composure. The flush in his skin took on more of a blush-type quality.
“She, ah, has fond memories of your skills,” Stella ad-libbed. “You were one of her favorite, um, gentlemen employees.”
Salty didn’t say anything for a few moments. Stella didn’t push him, but she managed a few covert glances and watched the storm clouds build up in his expression.
“I
ought
to be her favorite,” Salty fumed. “I was her
first.
The whole escort service? It was my idea, you know.”
“Really? She didn’t mention that.” Stella didn’t bother pointing out that Priss hadn’t, in fact, confided any details at all about the call boy operation.
“Hell yes. I used to go up there and visit her while she was in business school, did she tell you that part? Guess those MBA-type guys didn’t have what it took in the sack to keep her happy. She always was a, you know, passionate one.”
“So you’d go up there for booty calls? She’d go a few rounds with you and send you home so she could get back to her studies?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Salty protested, but Stella could tell by his dismay that it was, indeed, exactly like that. “I could of gone to school up there myself. We used to talk about what she was studying, her classes, all that shit. I got an entrepreneurial mind, she always said. Only I got, you know, my roots here.”
“Uh-huh. So why’d you move there?”
“We both wanted it,” Salty said a little defensively. “To be together more. I was working construction down here, good money and all, but nothing that I was really, you know,
passionate
about. And things were getting serious between us.”
Salty didn’t look at her when he said that, and Stella figured there was more than a little wishful thinking going on. She murmured a gentle
mm-hmm
to keep him going.
“She did one a them things, from Harvard? Them case studies where you look at where some company screwed up and figure out what they should of done instead? And she had one on this escort service, a legit one, and we got to talking about how you could add just a few massage services on the side and there you go, profits through the roof. There’s like hardly any setup costs.”
“I don’t know,” Stella said dubiously. “I’m not sure if I’d call a full menu of sensual delights ‘a little on the side,’ Salty.”
“But that wasn’t how it was supposed to be,” he said, getting frustrated. “My thing was, give ’em a
little
romance. A little kissing, hugging, maybe—
maybe
—just a friendly grope or two. Make it about the fantasy, you know? That’s what women really want—just the
illusion
of romance.”
“You really believe that, Salty?” Stella demanded, surprised. It sure as hell wasn’t true for her—a bouquet and a Whitman’s Sampler sure as shit wasn’t about to scratch the itch she got when she thought about Goat.
“Yeah, it’s scientific, women are just
wired
different, they wouldn’t even
have
sex if it wasn’t for procreating the species and all. It ain’t their fault.”
“Mmm,” Stella said, aiming to keep her tone neutral. Violent disagreement had no place in a stealth interrogation.
“Anyway, we were building a client base, we got a few leads among the business women community, lonely-hearts gals who wanted to spend time with a good-looking guy who
understands
them.” He kicked at a flattened can, sending it skittering down along a curb. Overhead, the sky had darkened to a gloomy slate. “If she would a just stuck with my thing, we would of had it made.”
“Let me guess. Business wasn’t picking up at a pace she could live with.”
“Hah. She could be—well, you know. Priss always wanted everything all at once. And then
he
came along.”
“Who?”
“Walsingham.”
Salty practically spat the name out. “Addney fucking Walsingham, this queer-boy fairy she met at school.”
“Another business school student?”
“No, a goddamn hippie ex-instructor or some shit. The only thing he had on me was he was
old.
”
“I’m lost.”
“Priss and me, we’re young, and believe it or not, that limits the client base. I mean how else do you explain the resistance we were meeting up with? And Addney, he’s like forty, Priss gets it in his head they’ll tell people he’s
fifty,
you know, go after women in their fifties?”
“Oh, I think I see where you’re going,” Stella said. Not bad, really. Pretty darn brilliant. “You tell folks he’s really well preserved, and the ladies believe they’re with a man their age. Was he good looking?”
“I’m a
guy,
” Salty said with a wounded tone. “How the hell should I know?”
Right.
Excellent
looking. “So the long and short is, Addney starts pulling in all kinds of business and suddenly Priss isn’t so hot to have you around. Is that right?”
Salty didn’t say anything, but his chin sank down and his lower lip jutted as they strolled along. “She asked me to move out,” he finally muttered. “Told me Addney was moving in. Gave me twenty-four hours.”
“Ouch. That’s kind of harsh.”
“She can have him. She can have that old wrinkle-dick poseur professor, for all the good he’ll do her. I’m better off—I’m taking good care of myself these days, you know, valuing myself for who I am. I got a
family
—what’s she got?”
“She, uh, appears to be living alone these days,” Stella said gently, watching for a reaction. Could Salty be carrying around enough hurt to still have a grudge against his replacement? Could the man who died—Keller—have been the same person as this Walsingham?
But if Salty wanted to kill Keller, why would he wait all this time? “You left Kansas City three years ago. Have you kept in touch with Priss the whole time?”
Salty stared at the ground and didn’t answer.
“Come on—construction permits aside, all I’m trying to do is find her,” Stella prodded. “I’ve got nothing against you unless you get in my way.”
“What do you care, anyway?” Salty said. “I don’t guess this is in your usual area of expertise.”
Like nearly every citizen of Sawyer County who lived in the murky depths below upright citizenship, Salty appeared to know a thing or two about her reputation.
“Favor for a friend. So what gives? You talked to her?”
“We talk. Sometimes.”
“You call her.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You go up for quickies.”
“No!”
Stella tried to gauge whether his adamant denial was genuine or not, and couldn’t decide.
“Okay … she doesn’t call you back.”
“She does. Sometimes. Just to
talk.
Priss is sensitive—she needs a man who respects her, who’s willing to go slow, listen, like that.”
Doubt it,
Stella thought. Oh, some men—when it came to love, their feelings were like tender little shoots under the snows of spring, so vulnerable. It certainly beat the angry, cocky, beat-the-crap-out-of-you brand of boyfriend, but Stella herself couldn’t imagine putting up with a mooning sap like Salty.
Man up,
she wanted to say.
She didn’t think Salty had killed anyone. But she’d be the first to admit that some of the darker reaches of humanity were way beyond her understanding. There was just no telling what a man was capable of when he’d had his feelings hurt.
“When’s the last you talked to her?”
“New Year’s Eve,” Salty said a little too quickly. “Got her on her cell. Called her from a bar—she thought I was someone else.”
“And after that?”
“I’ve, you know, tried a few times.”
“Leave messages?”
Salty shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe one or two. I don’t remember.”
They had circled around through the neighborhood and were back at the strip mall. A few icy flakes blasted out of the sky with force, stinging Stella’s cheeks.
“Well, I guess I shouldn’t keep you from your workout,” she said. She was beginning to think she understood why he came to this gym. Salty was the kind of guy who wanted to be admired—
needed
—by a woman. But at the same time, he wasn’t strong himself, but he was attracted to strong—
bossy,
even—women.
He probably came here and watched attractive women working out, maybe chatted a little, maybe offered to spot them or adjust the machines for them. Maybe most of them didn’t give him a second look, with his neat, pressed gym clothes and his bland combed-over hair and his hopeful expression.
Maybe he was even looking for Priss’s replacement, another woman to fulfill his fantasies of helping out, of being useful. Doraleigh, Stella was willing to be, didn’t fit that bill. She seemed like she’d be great at the ordering-around part—not so good with the grateful part. Priss—no matter how calculating she was, no matter how ice-cold her heart—well, she was the kind of woman who’d pour on exactly the right amount of whatever it took to grease a fella’s wheels: she’d simper, and sigh, and squeal with fake gratitude—and Salty would have been putty in her hands.
And the thing about that kind of a man was that the entire rest of the world could be standing around on the sidelines hollering at him to grow a pair, to stop being her poodle, and he’d just keep on defending her. Because once that type of man got himself smitten, it didn’t get undone easy.
“Look,” Salty said, twisting the handle of the gym bag in his hands nervously. “I heard what everybody else did—that Liman disappeared while Priss was visiting. Tell you what I think.”
“Okay.”
“I think she came down to visit and maybe gave him a little bit of cash. Like, you know, maybe it was his birthday? And they got to drinkin’ and all, and she didn’t want to drive her car, so she called up and got a friend to come get her. On account of Liman would have got ugly with her, ’cause no matter what she did, it was never enough for them. Priss used to tell me about it, how her family was always hounding her for cash.”
Stella found that hard to believe, since she’d often seen elderly Mrs. Porter in the FreshWay with her food stamps, still wearing that old housecoat. Oh, she and Liman may have asked Priss for money—but Stella would bet the answer was a big fat no.
“Wait,” she said. “Back up. You’re saying she would have called a friend from Kansas City to drive down and get her, over an hour each way, and she was going to just leave an eighty-thousand-dollar automobile sitting on the driveway?”
“Well, she would of come back for it.” The effort of keeping his preposterous scenario going was causing Salty to bounce anxiously on his toes. “She didn’t know you all were going to have it towed. And now she’s got to figure out how to get it without the sheriff and them going up to the city and poking around her business. You know, the escort business—now that Walsingham went and took it down to the gutter level with all that illegal shit.”
So Salty—and presumably the rest of the town—had no idea what had been found in the trunk. Stella was relieved that news of the blood evidence hadn’t leaked.
“Go on,” she said skeptically.
“So when Liman figures out she’s leaving, he gets all pissed off, she won’t give him any more money, right? And maybe he calls the cops, you know, to make out like it was some sort of abuse thing, his sister whaling on him or some such. Only her friend showed up and they left. And then I bet he got it in his head to cut his losses. Take the cash she already done give him, and left. He’s probably on a bender now, down at the lake.”
“Nice theory,” Stella said after a few moments, once she’d processed all the layers of idiocy. “Only how do you suppose he went? Seein’ as his vehicles are all still on the property.”
Salty shrugged. “He could have had a friend come. Maybe a lady friend. You know, call her up—hey, honey, I got ahold of some cash, pack you a nice dress and we’ll have us a weekend.”
Stella resisted shaking her head in dismay at the level of dumbassery concentrated in Salty Mingus. Or maybe it was just the sheer power of lovelornity. Never mind that Liman was known to have no special lady friends. Or, for that matter, any friends.
“So both Priss and her brother, in your view, are off somewhere with friends, not bothering to check on their personal property or address the complaints made against them or check in with the authorities who have opened a case against them or, you know, return for a fresh change of underwear,” Stella said. “And you’re not concerned. That about it?”
A storm cloud to rival the ones scudding across the late afternoon sky passed over Salty’s expression. “Uh. Yeah.”
“Well, all right, then. You have a nice workout. I guess I’ll be getting back home.”
She made for her Jeep, holding her coat tight to her neck against the biting wind.
“Stella,” Salty called, and Stella turned to see him standing rooted to the spot, one hand raised in a half wave.