A Cup Full of Midnight (16 page)

“Oh ye of little faith,” he said, and went inside.

I hadn’t been able to reach Dennis Knight, so the next morning, on the off chance he was home, I drove over to the run-down duplex he shared with his mother. The other half of the building housed an Asian family whose five children played Mother-May-I as I picked my way through the dismembered Barbies and half-buried matchbox cars littering the lawn. On the stoop next door, an Asian woman sat watching the children.

“Dennis Knight live here?” I asked.

They looked up. The oldest child, a girl of about eight wearing pink stretch pants and a fuzzy blue parka, pointed a grubby finger toward the left side of the duplex.

“Thanks.” I started toward the door. Then, on impulse, I went over to the woman on the stoop. She scooted away a few inches and frowned up at me.

“You looking for good time, you go see
her
.” She nodded toward the Knights’ door.

“I’m not looking for a good time. I just wondered if her son and his friends ever play a game here on Fridays.”

She sniffed. “Play game, make noise. Drink beer. Very noisy. Keep little ones awake.” She put the tips of her fingers against her lips and made a spitting sound. “Ptu, ptu.”

I looked back over my shoulder toward the house. “You see her here about three Fridays ago?”

“No, no.”The woman shook her head fiercely. “Not home Friday. Two year, I live here. Never home Friday.”

I thanked her and went next door. Took the porch steps two at a time and knocked at a warped wooden door with peeling paint.

A thin woman answered. Her hair was pulled back and piled high on her head, a few loose tendrils spilling out around her face. In the background, some raucous game show blared.

“Ms. Knight?” I asked. Then I remembered the police report and said, “Tara Knight?”

“Who wants to know?” She stepped out onto the porch, an unfiltered cigarette dangling from her fingers. The nails were long, fake, and very red, with sharp outlines where they’d been glued on.

I handed her my license and watched while she studied it.

She was thirty-three, according to the police report, a single mother who had given birth at the age of seventeen. I imagined she’d been attractive once, but now she just looked exhausted.

She handed my license back. “Private detective?”

“I’m working with Absinthe’s attorney.”

“Oh.” She gave me a long, appraising look and stepped aside to let me in. “She’s an okay kid. Hope you don’t mind if I smoke.”

“It’s your house.”

“So it is.” She gave me an amused smile, took a long drag from the cigarette, and led me to the living room. There was a sour smell in the air—kitty litter, fried fish, and stale smoke. On the TV, a blonde woman in a sequined dress gestured to the stereo system today’s lucky contestant might win.

Tara flopped into a tan recliner across from the TV and turned down the volume with the remote. “I guess you came to talk to Dark Knight.”The nickname sounded odd, coming from his mother. “He can’t help you. He was here the day Razor was killed.”

“You knew Razor?”

“I know all my son’s friends.” She pushed herself out of the chair, stepped into the kitchen and returned with a glass of ice, which she filled to the brim with bourbon. “I just can’t understand why anyone would want to kill Razor. He was a beautiful man, just beautiful. Eyes like an angel.”

“If you say so.”

She sucked in a lungful of smoke, held it in for a moment, then blew out a bilious cloud. “Razor was a very complicated man. He always said it was his destiny to be misunderstood.”

I said, “I read the police report. You said Dennis . . . Dark Knight . . . and his friends were role-playing here the day Razor was killed. You were here the whole time?”

“Every minute.”

I looked her in the eye, and she slid her gaze away. The lie didn’t surprise me. Frank had thought she was a doper, and dopers always lie.

“Can I see Dark Knight anyway?” I said.

“Suit yourself.” She waved me toward the back of the house and turned the volume back up on the TV.

Dark Knight’s room was easy to find. It had a big-eyed girl from some Japanese cartoon plastered on the door. I tapped on it once, then pushed the door open. The room was cramped, the walls covered with comic book posters and movie memorabilia.
Nosferatu, Night of the Living Dead, Spiderman, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
A couple of posters from bands I’d never heard of. A tattered Batman kite pinned to the inside of the door by a crooked thumbtack.

Dennis Knight sat cross-legged on his bed playing an electronic martial arts game, fingers flying at the controls as his video persona leaped and whirled. He played with his whole upper body, bobbing and twisting in concert with his avatar. His hair was a mass of dark, greasy curls. His pale skin was stippled with pink pimples across the forehead and in the crevices around his bulbous nose. The thick lenses of his heavy, black-framed glasses made his eyes look oversized and startled. The kind of kid who gets picked on in gym class, but Absinthe had blushed when she talked about him.

I showed him my license. “I’m working on Absinthe’s case.”

“That crazy bitch.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Are you kidding? Saying she killed Razor?”

“You don’t think she did it?”

“You seen her room? Stuffed animals. Teddy bears.” He gave his head a disgusted shake, but a smile crept across his lips. “She hasn’t got the guts.”

“I thought she was a friend of yours.”

He shrugged. Turned his attention back to his game. “She’s okay, I guess. For a poser.”

“A poser?”

“A wannabe. She pretends she’s part of the scene, but it’s like Razor said. She doesn’t have the stuff.”

I walked past a bookshelf filled with plastic Warner Brother cartoon figures and sat down at a desk cluttered with half-finished drawings and scraps of overwrought fiction.

“Hey,” he said. “Who gave you an invitation?”

I said, “I’d think you’d want to help get Absinthe out of this mess. Keep her from going to prison for the next forty years. Seeing as how you’re friends and all.”

“It’s her mess.” He shook his hair out of his eyes and turned back to the screen. “But go ahead and talk.”

“The ritual of Transformation,” I said. “Who was there? You and Barnabus. Medea. Absinthe. Any others? Alan Keating?”

“That asshole. He wouldn’t even’ve been allowed to come around if he and Razor hadn’t known each other from way back.”

“What’s your beef with Keating?”

“Always passing judgment, always trying to psychoanalyze everybody. But he was no angel. Razor told me about some shit they pulled back in college.”

“They went to college together?” I didn’t know why that should have surprised me, but it did.

“Vandy.” He smirked, whether at me or at the villain on the screen, I couldn’t say. “They were both psych majors.”

“Razor get his degree?”

“B.S. Started on his Master’s. Then he and Alan got into some kind of trouble. Alan weaseled out of it and got to stay in school, and Razor got the ax.”

“Funny. He didn’t seem the kind to forgive and forget.”

“Guess Alan got a special dispensation.” He tapped a button on the game, and the screen went dark. He pushed it away from him. “What you said. About Absinthe and prison and everything.”

“What about it?”

He got up and picked up a Bugs Bunny figure from the shelf. Turned it over in his hand and set it back a few inches to the left of where it had been. “I know who wanted Razor dead,” he said.

“Seems like everybody wanted Razor dead.”

“No, I mean, for real. Those people who lived a couple doors down. Hewitt. He’s a nutcase. Him and his buddy, Igor.”

“Elgin.”

“Same difference. Big fucking bastard.” He scrubbed at the dingy carpet with the toe of his sneaker.

I said, “Look, if you know something—”

“I’m getting to it,” he snapped. “Anyway, she got herself into this. Why should I have to be the one to get her out?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” I said. “Absinthe’s your friend, and she needs you.”

I wasn’t sure it would work, appealing to his better nature, but finally, he ducked his head and mumbled, “Hewitt’s wife.”

A bad feeling nestled in the pit of my stomach. “What about her?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. Push her around some. Show her our knives. Maybe cop a feel.” He had the decency to look ashamed. “We were just supposed to scare her.”

“But it didn’t go down that way.”

“Barnabus was getting all stirred up. And Medea kept egging things on.” He scratched at a chip in the wooden shelf. “It just got out of hand.”

Heat crept up the back of my neck. “Razor raped her?”

“He watched. He was into it, that he could just say do it and we . . .” He looked away. With his index finger, he nudged Bugs Bunny a millimeter to the right.

“Go on,” I said in a brittle voice I hardly recognized.

“When we . . . when it was over, Razor told her he had an army of people who’d do whatever he told them to, and if she called the cops or told anybody, he’d send them to her house and they’d kill her and Hewitt.”

Anger took me two steps forward before I stopped myself. “And what did you do? Stand by and watch it happen? Take a turn? Hold her down?”

“You think I’m proud of what happened? You think I don’t think about it every single day?”A whine crept into his voice. “You don’t know what it was like, being around Razor.”

He picked up a Marvin the Martian figure and toyed with it. Our gazes met, and while I watched, the shame in his eyes turned to anger. I wasn’t surprised. Anger is easier.

I said, “Explain it to me.”

He placed Marvin the Martian carefully between Darth Vader and the Tasmanian Devil. “He made good things seem bad and bad things seem good,” he said. “It was like he turned the world inside out.”

“So the world was inside out when you helped Barnabus rape Judith Hewitt.”

“You’re so fucking curious,” he said, mouth stretched in a humorless grin. “Why don’t you ask your nephew? He was there.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I
didn’t believe him. Refused to believe him. To even entertain the thought was a betrayal.

Dennis Knight had forgotten the chip on his shoulder long enough to want to help Absinthe, but he’d also wanted to draw my attention away from his own part in Judith Hewitt’s rape. I had no reason to trust Dennis Knight.

I knew Josh. He was incapable of rape.

I barreled through the afternoon traffic, fighting the impulse to haul Josh out of class and ask him what he knew about the assault. A dull throbbing started in my temples. I loved Josh like a son, but if this was true, I would never see him with the same eyes. And if it wasn’t true, if I confronted him without just cause, he would never see me the same way either.

I forced myself to back off the tail of the car in front of me, cut off a guy in a red Subaru and swore under my breath when his horn blared. Skidded into the Hewitts’ driveway and pounded on the door. Cursed when no one answered, and scrawled a note for them to call me. I waited in the driveway for half an hour, then, too restless to sit still, drove over to Vanderbilt’s campus to talk to Razor’s little brother. Philosophy and Religion, Keating had said.

Vanderbilt University and Medical Center sat on three hundred and thirty-three acres in the heart of Nashville. Declared a national arboretum in the late nineties, it was home to at least one of every tree and shrub native to Tennessee. A beautiful place, even in the dead of winter, but I was in no mood to enjoy it. Instead, I found a parking spot three blocks from campus and bulled past medieval-style buildings with arched doorways and an oak tree that had been around since before the American Revolution.

I stopped at the library and got directions to the right department, then asked around until a campus police officer gave me directions to the classroom where I could find Heath. I planted myself outside the room until the door burst open and a stream of chattering students bubbled out.

Heath was at the tail end of the stream, standing to one side as if to avoid the rush. He spotted me and frowned. Then he sighed and came over.

“You were at my brother’s funeral,” he said. He moved away from the other students, jerked his head for me to follow him.

“That’s right.”

“You were there with your nephew. Said he was one of Razor’s friends.”

I nodded, my throat gone tight at the mention of Josh.

“So, what are you doing here? Come to offer me your condolences? Or maybe it’s some sort of payoff you’re after.”

“Payoff?”

His laugh was bitter. “Mother may be naïve enough to think Razor was mentoring good-looking teenagers out of the goodness of his heart. I know better. Did you file charges?”

“Josh wouldn’t testify.”

“They never do. And—let me guess—no physical evidence, by the time you found out. Same old story. Legal shenanigans, a little bit of hand-waving, and the shyster lawyer Mother always hires has him out on the street again by evening.”

“Exactly how many times has this happened?”

“If you knew, it would make you sick. And to top it off, he never even paid a dime in legal fees. Never worked a day in his life, in fact. She poured money into him like it was water.”