Better Than This (41 page)

“Sally is with Marcus,” she said.

I had no feeling inside but my grip involuntarily tightened on the phone. It was several seconds before I could trust myself to speak. “How long has it been going on?”

“I’m not sure. I figured it out a while ago.”

Things started tumbling into place like the pieces of a puzzle. It was all suddenly so obvious. All the charged looks and tension when the four of us were together made sense as I imagined Sally and Marcus terrified their secret would come out.

“That’s why you went to live on the boat?”

“Yes. After you came back from Mendocino I thought it was over between them. Marcus told me it was. He said that Sally and you were going to make a go of it. I would have said something if I’d thought they were seeing each other again. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

How could I have been so blind I wondered? How could I not have seen what now was so obvious. A hundred fleeting moments came back to me. Looks Sally and Marcus had exchanged. The odd tension I’d sensed between her and Alice the night we’d met to talk about the program. How the hell could I have been so stupid when it was right there before my eyes the whole time?

“That’s why Marcus agreed to sell the program to Morgan isn’t it?”

“Yes. I threatened to tell you about him and Sally if he didn’t.”

“And at Marios. When he agreed to carry on with our plan after Dexter turned up. Damn it!” I pounded my fist on the wheel. How could I have been so fucking blind?

But if I thought nothing worse could happen I was wrong.

“Nick, I have to see you,” Alice said. “We need to talk. There’s more.”

“More?” I echoed dumbly. I didn’t know how there could be.

“Brinkman’s dead,” she said. “It’s in the paper.”

The boat where Alice was living was moored in the marina at Sausalito. It was in one of the last basins north of the town. I knew where to find it because I’d been there often enough. Before Alice had arrived on the scene we would go out regularly for the day or the weekend. Sometimes Marcus would have a girlfriend along, other times it was just the three of us. It was a forty-two foot launch called Temptation, equipped with a powerful engine and a comfortable interior fitted out with soft leather seating and ingenious hidden cupboards and folding tables designed to maximize the space. There were three cabins below deck, and two steering stations, one inside and another up top on the flying bridge. Marcus had always owned boats. He compromised the house he lived in to afford the drain on his finances, since they are an expensive hobby, what with mooring fees, gas and maintenance. But we’d had some good times. Swimming at night in some secluded cove where we’d dropped anchor. Barbecuing on the beach, eating fish we’d caught ourselves the same day, getting drunk beneath a velvet sky and lying on the sand staring up at the stars waxing philosophically about life and love and the meaning of it all.

I thought about those times we’d had as I walked along the dock, and my new-found knowledge curdled my memories. Everything would be that way from now on, I realized. Anything that reminded me of Marcus and Sally would be tainted, and since our lives had been so entwined for such a long time that was going to be almost everything. A fleetingly remembered image came back to me. One summer a few years back the three of us had gone away for a couple of days. We anchored in a bay down the coast near San Simeon and sat around on the stern deck drinking cold beers from the bottle and eating from a big platter of spaghetti and clam sauce.

It had been a hot muggy night and we were chugging through the beers. We were in good spirits, and Marcus brought out a little pack of grass and we passed around a couple of joints. It was mild stuff. Sally got the giggles the way she always did when she smoked, and we looked on in a benevolent fuzz when she decided we should all go for a swim. She said she wanted to go skinny dipping, which was something we never did. She often sunbathed topless, but she still retained enough of her small town upbringing to think that was as far as it ought to go. All at once she stood up and shucked off her top and unzipped her skirt and stepped out of it then quickly peeled off her panties. She looked terrific. Her breasts were tanned, the slope of her belly smooth and taut. It was a pleasantly, languid, sensuous moment, helped of course by the effects of the dope. I thought she was beautiful and I was proud of her and overcome with a kind of warmth that I could feel so comfortable with Marcus that I didn’t mind him seeing my wife naked.

We watched as she went to the edge of the boat and dived smoothly into the water. I’d always thought of that night as something intimate shared by friends. In a way asexual. But now I wondered what Marcus had been thinking. Was that when he’d first begun harbouring a secret lust for her? The memory was suddenly sordid and I banished it from my thoughts.

Alice was waiting anxiously for me on the deck when I arrived. She looked as if she hadn’t slept much and worry lines were etched in her normally smooth features. Her usually cool eyes darted nervously beyond as if any moment she expected squad cars to screech to a halt at the end of the dock. There was nobody around. A lot of the yachts and launches here were barely used from one year to the next. The parking lot was empty save for my own and three other vehicles and a line of boats parked on trailers. It was sunny and the bay across to

Raccoon Strait between Tiburon and Angel Island was ruffled with whitecaps from a stiff breeze. Gulls strutted up and down the dock, and others screeched in the wind. We went below out of sight, and she gave me that morning’s Examiner where Brinkman’s demise had made the inside front page with a quarter page piece that included a photograph of him that must have been taken a few years ago. In it he looked younger and considerably slimmer than I remembered.

Alice hadn’t told me much on the phone, but the way she’d sounded had left me in no doubt that she was worried out of her mind. Once I read the article I knew why. Brinkman lived in a leafy residential street on the slopes of Cow Hollow bordering Pacific Heights. The report stated that he was divorced and lived alone, and that his two kids lived in the Sacramento area, presumably with his ex-wife. A neighbour had discovered his body in the garage of his house when he had called by to return something that he’d borrowed. Brinkman had been tied to a chair with electrical cord, and he’d been tortured with a power drill. The exact cause of death hadn’t been established at the time of going to press, according to the report, which made me wonder what kind of damage had been inflicted while Brinkman was still alive that made that difficult to ascertain. Neither had a motive for the killing been established, though first reports suggested he’d been dead for a couple of days and the time of death was estimated as being sometime around Tuesday morning.

“Jesus Christ,” I breathed when I’d finished reading. I dropped the paper. Though the details given by the police were sketchy there was enough for a vivid picture of Brinkman to flower in my mind. Fuelled by images from a lifetime of witnessing extreme forms of violence portrayed in movies and on TV I imagined his sagging body held in place by its bonds, his head lolling against the chest, a dirty rag stuffed in his mouth to stifle his screams, and blood running across his torso from wounds in his face and chest and groin, pooling around his feet. The household drill would be lying on the floor carelessly discarded.

Alice and I stared at each other. I was no doubt now as pale as she was. Neither one of us wanted to voice the fear that had sprung to both our minds, but Alice had the advantage of having had longer to think about this.

“You don’t think it has anything to do with… ?”

I finished the sentence for her. “The program?” I wanted to tell her no. It was just a gruesome coincidence, but my capacity to accept coincidence had become vastly diminished of late. Instead I went to the TV and turned it on, and flicked through the channels until I found the news. I was turning over what we knew at the same time.

“The report says no motive has been established,” I reasoned. “That means it probably wasn’t a robbery because they’d know that right away. But there’s no reason to believe there’s any connection with us.”

“What if Brinkman told somebody,” Alice said.

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know. But we don’t know that he didn’t.”

“What if he did?” I countered. “That doesn’t mean whoever he told would want to kill him.”

She thought about that, biting her lower lip nervously. “I suppose.”

Neither of us were convinced, however. Deep down we both knew that Brinkman’s death was inescapably connected with the program and therefore us. We just didn’t want to face it yet.

“Look at what’s happening to my nerves.” Alice held out her hand, and there was a barely perceptible tremor. “I need a drink.” She looked questioningly at me.

It was still early in the morning, but I didn’t hesitate. I had an insatiable craving for strong liquor. She went to a concealed cabinet and poured out a couple of half tumblers of vodka, which isn’t normally my drink but on this occasion I wasn’t about to be picky. I tossed off half of mine in one swallow. It burned all the way down my throat and I waited for the accompanying glow in the pit of my stomach. Alice watched me, then knocked off a good slug of her own. I still had one eye on the TV when something caught my eye. Brinkman’s face, the same picture that the paper had used, stared back at me from the screen. I turned up the sound as the anchorwoman talked to the reporter at the scene.

The shot changed to show a typical three-storey house with basement garage and bay windows on the first floor. The kind of place that typically goes for anything up to a couple of million or more in Cow Hollow these days. The garage door was open but it had been screened with black plastic, and crime scene tape encircled the property to keep back a mob of reporters and curious onlookers. The reporter regurgitated the facts we’d read in the paper, adding little more except some extra detail about Brinkman himself. It was clear he didn’t know much more so they filled the piece in with an interview with a neighbour who lived along the street, who also didn’t add much of interest but talked as if he had been Brinkman’s best buddy in the world. He was enjoying his moment in the spotlight. Brinkman, it seemed, had been a model citizen. The neighbour couldn’t understand why anyone would want to hurt such a terrific guy, let alone torture him. They were animals, he said, whoever had done this. He hoped when they were caught the sobs got the death penalty. He only wished he could be the one to throw the switch because as far as he was concerned murderers had no place in the world.

Alice glanced at me when he said that, and I knew what she was thinking. He was talking about me too. It hadn’t occurred to me before then but if I was caught and tried for Dexter’s murder that guy might be talking about me. San Quentin was less than a fifteen minute drive from where I was sitting. An image of the massive ugly squat building that lies on a spit of land in sight of the Richmond Bridge filled my inner eye. How often had I passed it, eyed its forbidding presence, never dreaming that one day I might be a resident.

The anchorwoman asked a couple of questions of the reporter, trying to establish motive and more details about the nature of Brinkman’s death, but the police were keeping a lid on what they knew. However, one piece of information at the end of the report made me sit up with a start.

“Do the police have any clue whatsoever about who the perpetrators might be, Alan?” the anchorwoman asked.

“Well, Trish, at the moment the police don’t appear to have any solid leads to go on. They’re still going over the scene with a forensic team and I guess they’ll be waiting to see what they can learn from the results of that analysis. However, they are still conducting interviews with local residents to see if anyone saw or heard anything over the weekend that might be helpful, and so far the police have told us they are interested in tracking down a vehicle that was seen in the area. Right now they’re not certain of the make or model, but a dark green car, possibly a mid eighties Ford Mustang, was seen parked along the street on Saturday morning which is around the time they think Mr. Brinkman may have been killed. Eyewitnesses said the vehicle was noticeable because it had wide wheels and darkened windows, and I guess that isn’t the kind of car that you normally find in an area like this.”

I froze in the act of raising my glass. I thought back to the car that I’d seen the day I went to see Morgan. That had been green too. And the one that played chicken with Sally and me on the way to Marios that night. I glanced at Alice, but her eye was glued to the screen. Of course I hadn’t mentioned the car before, because it hadn’t seemed important. But now I wasn’t so sure. Another coincidence? I told myself the police didn’t even know this car was connected to Brinkman’s death, and even if it was, there were millions of green cars on the road. But ones with wide wheels and darkened windows? That was stretching credibility a little too far. The report ended, and Alice turned off the set.

“What is it?” she said, suddenly noticing the way I looked.

I finished my drink. “Nothing.” I couldn’t see any point in worrying her unduly.

She looked at me quizzically, but before she could ask me anything else her cell phone suddenly rang. We stared at each other, then she picked it up.

“Hello?” she said cautiously. She listened for a second, then turned to me and mouthed the word Marcus. I got up and took the phone from her.

“Where’s my wife you bastard?” I demanded.

Marcus was surprised when he heard my voice. While he struggled to gather his thoughts I let fly with a stream of threats and recriminations. I thought about all the times I’d felt guilty over the damage I’d done to our friendship. I thought that I had betrayed him, and all the time he’d been screwing my wife. The more I cursed him the angrier I became. I was losing control, practically shaking with fury. I was tired and strung out from everything that had happened over the last few days. The only thing that mattered to me at that moment was confronting Sally and Marcus together. I demanded repeatedly that he tell me where they were. I don’t know what I planned to do. I don’t think I had a plan. Through it all Alice hung back. I think she was a little afraid of me.