“No!” His scream echoed off the white walls, the tile floor. It bounced around the room Alison Widley would never come back to.
“Okay, look, let me talk to her parents.”
He shook his head.
“Her sisters or brothers? Children?”
“We don’t have kids.”
He might as well have been holding his hands over his ears or singing loud to keep out my words.
“Where’s she from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Family?”
“I . . . don’t . . . know.” The big white nearly empty room seemed to echo his frustration, his desperation.
“She must’ve said something—”
“She didn’t!”
“Didn’t you ask her?”
“Ask what?”
“Where did she grow up? Where’d she go to school? Did she have brothers? A sister?”
His feet were apart, his knees bent and he swayed slightly side to side as if angling for a way out of danger.
“She came here on vacation. Where’d she come
from?
”
I might as well have been expecting him to query her about the color of her alimentary tract. I took a step toward him, catching his gaze and holding it. “Matt! You must know . . .”
He shook his head.
I was inclined to believe him. She wanted to keep her secrets; he wasn’t inquisitive. A marriage made in heaven.
“She’s dead?”
“I’m sorry. Really.”
“How can she be dead?” he moaned.
“Here, sit.” I motioned to the sofa. “Tell me about her. How did you meet?”
He walked like he must have after he’d been slammed into the forty yard line, then dropped full-weight onto the sofa.
I sat beside him. Everything about him screamed
comfort me!
But the bruises on my shoulders still ached. “You met her when things were rough for you,” I prompted.
He slumped forward, rocking side to side over his knees.
“Tell me, Matt,” I said softly.
“That night, in the casino, it almost didn’t happen. There were lots of people who kept hanging around after I was cut, people who wanted to hear secrets, see how much I could bleed. But she wasn’t one of them. I saw something in her eyes. We were in the casino. I went up to her. She was polite but scared; she made some excuse and went over to play the slots. I had a drink and made another move. She shifted away again, but she didn’t leave. I didn’t dare try again, you know? I wasn’t ready to be blown off again. I got another drink and stood against a post for a long time, just watching her, not threatening or anything, just looking at how gorgeous she was. Then she came over. We went out for breakfast and we were never apart again. Until now.”
Was I wrong? Maybe Karen had had a good life here. A good life till she played her husband for a fool like she had John . . .
“She was so beautiful. I saw other guys eyeing her, this gorgeous blonde in a sexy silver dress. She was like one of those crystal statues my mother kept in a cabinet in the living room so we kids wouldn’t break them. Of course, we did.”
So her transformation had been before then. But that didn’t explain how she’d gotten there. Straight from Alaska, from that job hauling fish up the cliff, or whatever had come after that.
“We ate omelets. It was two in the morning. I expected her to order black coffee and a pastry, not a full plate of eggs and hash. But she did. She ate it all, but we were there hours, her in her silver dress sitting in this greasy spoon.”
“What’d you talk about?”
“Me. I was full of me then, but she cared. She was like that with everyone, always interested in them, never carrying on about herself.”
So as not to reveal anything?
“She wanted me to face up to who I’d been, what I’d done, the choices I made, that I should be honest with people, with myself. She kept saying to me back then, ‘Stat Widley doesn’t exist anymore; you’re not him now. Be who you are
now,
Matt.’ She told me, ‘It’s like you’ve spent your life climbing a pole and now you find out the pole’s rotten. You’ve got to step off it. Stepping off’s hard, but it’s your only chance.’”
The hundred-foot pole!
“Where’d she get that analogy? It’s a Zen koan. Was she a Buddhist?”
He shrugged. I might as well have asked if she were a Martian. “She meant I had to let go of football and being a star, and even let go of being pissed about the whole drug thing. It was almost impossible. I didn’t think I could; I didn’t really want to. I wanted to be pissed.”
Was that how she’d done it herself? “Because?”
“Because I didn’t want to admit I was a jerk. It’s easier to have been fooled by someone else than to have done it to yourself. But she kept at it. She kept saying I had to be a new person, not like in religion, but like I’d never played football. She had a rule that we had to do something new every day—go to a foreign movie, wake up before sunrise, rent a tiny car, the kind I’d never choose, lead with the left foot, go to that place that makes waves like you’re at the ocean, go to Juarez and walk across the border to Mexico. We never went to the grocery without buying something we’d never eaten.” He smiled. “We had some awful meals.”
Ah, pop psychology!
“You kept doing that, new things every day?”
“Not after I got into the kids’ pickup games. You know in Vegas people move into town, and in a month they’re gone. Schools barely know who their students are. A lot are illegal. Something like a third of a school class comes or leave in a year,” he said, straightening up as if transported back to being interviewed by some radio or TV reporter. “I saw some kids hanging around and figured: Why not some flag football?
But Alison pushed me to do soccer—another new thing. It’s not like soccer is brain surgery, but still I had to learn the rules. You can’t coach or referee unless you know them cold. If you’ve gotta stop and think, you’re dead. So I set up simple soccer games, just so the kids would have something. And, you know, I had something. I was doing something. Just like Alison figured.” He almost smiled.
Pop psych that worked.
“Yeah. But see”—his mouth shook and suddenly he had the desperate look of one grabbing for a safe memory to forestall the truth—“the soccer games were low key, but then, somehow, I realized I could do more. I’d pimped myself, done golf weekends as the attraction. Turns out”—he shrugged—“I was more of a pull than if I’d played out my career and retired. Money guys were curious. Didn’t I know all along that the injections were illegal? Where’d the team doctors get the drugs? I mean, like I’d saved the insider secrets all those years just to whisper it to them on the seventh hole. My point is I knew the money types. Most of them coulda cared, you know, but a couple helped out with supplies. And then things got more organized and I made news as ‘reformed,’ and that meant more chances to raise more money. For kids’ sports.”
“So you were good at fundraising?”
“What?” he snapped. “What do you mean?”
“Just asking.”
“Never mind. It’s just that Alison kept asking that, like she didn’t believe it, like she kept thinking Graham Munson and the others were using me. Of course, they were. I knew that. I had my lights turned out a few times, but I’m not the idiot people think I am. I told her, but she still didn’t believe me. She figured I was blocking out something, like I’d done with the drugs.”
“What would these guys get out of using you?”
“Not much. That’s what I told her, too. Tax write-off and a bit of sleazy glory.”
“But still she was suspicious?”
“Yeah, makes no sense, does it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyway, that’s why she kept pressing me to move out of Vegas. She was worried about me being controlled. Graham lined up a feature writer to do a piece on us and the charity, and that did it for Alison.”
“A piece on you and Alison and the charity?”
“Mostly me.”
“Mostly? But partly about her and she objected to that?”
The front door opened. “This her, Matt?” he said.
What was going on?
The man yanked me up.
I chopped his arm. “Don’t even think about touching me again!”
He was nowhere near the size of Widley, but bigger than me. Behind him a woman, a discount version of Karen Johnson, was yelling, “Get out of here! It’s private property! You’re trespassing!” Matt Widley said nothing, continued to just sit there.
“So, call the police!” I said to the newcomers.
The man jolted back. Then he was in my face. “Out now!”
“Don’t either of you care what happened to Alison?”
“Alison”—the woman moved next to him—“is my friend. She doesn’t want to be bothered by vultures like you.”
I moved back. “You’re her friend? Prove it! What’d she like to do?”
“Like?”
“What’d you do together?”
“Shopped. We lunched. We picked up my kids. I don’t know, the usual stuff.”
Karen Johnson had laughed at the idea of going shopping with me. “Where’s she from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shut up, Melia!” And to me: “You’re out of here!” Her husband reared back, like a wave about to break.
“Munson!” Matt muttered, in a voice that said he should be concerned but wasn’t.
“No marks, Graham, honey! Be careful! You’re going to leave marks on her.”
“You’re right, Munson. I’m outta here.” I shook free again and strode through the hot night to Cass’s van, got in and gunned the engine. My shoulders ached and so did my head. Our voices had been loud but no neighbors had stepped out to help or to watch. I wanted to get clear of here; I needed to get the van back to Cass. But I couldn’t, not yet.
The streets were darker now, but just as empty. I drove slowly, as if pacing, thinking about Karen. I kept trying to sketch, retrospectively, a good life for Karen, but this sure wasn’t it. Even if Matt cared as much as he said, even if he wasn’t a walking concussion now. These people, her friends . . . My hands were clenched. I made myself stop and take a long breath. Were they lying about knowing nothing? Or were they just that self-absorbed? Or, well, both? I’d been with her less than an hour and I knew more. They made it easy for her to hide her past.
Where was I? I peered out the window for a street sign, not that that was going to be much help. I closed my eyes and reran the drive from the moment I’d followed Matt into this tract, the way I do after a new stunt—the first plant, so the next time I do the gag I’ll have a mental track to rerun. Now I could feel, rather than see, myself running the red light and hanging a left, then a right, then . . . what? Another left
. . . I was going to have to find that signal and drive, doing the rerun all the while.
It took two attempts, but that didn’t matter. When I got back to the house, the Munsons’ car was pulling away. The lights inside were off. I didn’t know if Matt had gone out to a bar with them, or gone to bed. I reached for the van’s door handle.
Cass!
I’d promised to be back by now. I pulled out my phone and punched in her number. “Cass, I’m sor—”
“Are you okay? I’ve been scared—where are you?”
“Sorry. I’m fine. Time got away. I’ll tell you when I see you.”
“Which’ll be what, fifteen minutes?”
“Longer.” Broder’d be plenty pissed I’d skipped. He’d be watching the airports, anxious to grab me as a snare for John. I couldn’t go back home empty. Not when all the answers had to be here, here where she’d lived. Who Karen Johnson really was, why she gave up this life, who killed her—it was all right here. Had to be. “Another hour, okay.”
“It’s your neck.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll try to get through to the police again, Darcy, but no promises. I shouldn’t have let you go after Matt Widley, not the way he was. When you didn’t come back, I waited as long as I could, then I called the cops. I couldn’t tell them you went off chasing him. So I reported the van stolen, maybe a hostage in the back.”
“A hostage? Are you crazy?”
“I had to tell them
something
to get them looking. A stolen vehicle might as well be litter in the street.”
“Gotta go then.”
“I’ll raise bail.”
“Real funny.” I clicked off and headed toward the dark house where Matt Widley might or might not still be.
Breaking and entering is one thing, burglary’s another. And breaking into a house when the homeowner’s there can get you shot.
I’d compromise. I’d just go around back and see if there were lights on in the house. I’d do it quick before the cops might get lucky and spot the van.
25
I JOGGED ACROSS the street at the corner, down the pavement as if I was out for a pre-bed run, cut sharply up next to the driveway, on the dirt, and cut around back. Las Vegas is desert. There’s more greenery here than there should be, but not enough for good cover.
A six-foot high wooden fence blocked the backyard. The gate was next to the garage. Gates can squeak; gates can have alarms. Fences can be topped with rows of spikes. But not this one. I hoisted myself over and lowered, oh so softly, to the ground.
The “yard” was almost all pool and pool house—the latter glassdoored and night-lit, showing a good deal less of the panoply of machinery I’d have expected of an ex-jock. Just the basics: Stairmaster, bike, free weights, and butt machine, the devices responsible for Karen—Alison—being in such great shape. The dim light gave the gym a funereal air; it sparkled on the wavering surface, not so much illuminating the pool as creating a shimmering shield over what might be hidden beneath. Water sloshed hopefully over the edges and oozed back in.
On the other side of the pool, the house itself was black. Wind rustled in the distance, in the trees, grasses of far yards, perhaps. Gusts that might have been born in the Sierra crackled dried leaves, twigs, pebbles against stucco block, and cement. Matt Widley could be inside now, snoring
softly. If I’d had a phone number, I could have called. Now there was no way to tell.