Deeper Than the Grave (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-one

Eddie had a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label in his drawer, my father's special-occasion drink back when drinking was a special occasion, before it became his life and a two-hundred-dollar bottle of scotch wouldn't have made it through the weekend. Cat left it untouched and pulled down a bottle of Maker's Mark, however.

“Lucius was big trouble,” she said, tipping a half-finger of the liquor in a highball glass. “He thought he was smarter than everyone else. And he was.”

“How?”

“Not book smart. Clever smart. Smart like a rat that could chew out of any trap. He liked cons. He liked angles. He dropped out of high school, so people thought he was dumb.” She laughed and popped her feet on top of Eddie's desk. “He liked that too. He could turn on that corn pone when he needed to, play good ol' boy the whole day long.”

Cat struck me as the same kind of person—willing to play dumb if it suited her purposes, willing to turn on the accent if it charmed a mark. Only she was talking to us now. Were we being charmed? Should we have both hands on our wallets and an eye on the door?

Trey didn't need reminding. He had his back to the wall next to the exit, eyes on every opening, every curtain flutter, every piece of paper that shifted. He was a wolf, his nose turned up and his ears pricked and his haunches flexed.

I swirled the bourbon in my glass. “Anybody in particular get conned? Somebody who might not have liked the experience?”

“You mean enough to kill him?” She tapped Trey's yellow pad with a black-polished fingertip and grinned. “Y'all are gonna need a bigger notebook.”

“How about you? Did he con you?”

“He conned everybody one way or another.”

“Including you?”

She shrugged. And looked at Trey.

I slipped a glance in his direction too. He was doing his quiet evaluation of her, filtering her words and facial expressions into the inexplicable machinery of his brain. Cat tried to look nonchalant, but she was sizing him up in return. Trey had that presence—part truant officer, part priest—that made you feel like your skin was suddenly transparent and that he could see every beat of your sinful heart. It was working on her now, I could tell, but the fact that he hadn't confronted her meant that she was on the up and up. That, or she was a dangerously professional liar of sociopathic skill, and we were in more trouble than I thought.

I tried to sound reassuring. “Trey's not here to take you in. He's not a cop anymore.” I swiveled in my chair. “Isn't that right, Trey? We're here for information, not to get her in trouble.”

Trey shot me a look that I recognized too. If she confessed, he would absolutely call the authorities on her. He would do it before she could get her feet off the desk. I scraped my chair back, stood, then moved right in front of him.

I dropped my voice. “I need you to wait outside for ten minutes.”

He folded his arms. “No.”

“You can stand right outside the door.”

“I—”

“She's got something to tell me and she's not going to do it with you standing there.”

He glared some more. But he unfolded his arms. “Ten minutes. Exactly.”

“Thank you.”

He turned and left. I regretted asking that of him—I'd been counting on his cranial lie detector as my ace in the hole—but it was a good call. Cat's demeanor relaxed the second the door shut behind him.

She cleared her throat. “Lucius dragged me into some nasty shit.”

“Like what?”

“Drugs. Mostly doing, but a little dealing. I didn't have anything to do with the hard stuff either way. Weed was it.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“He was a thief. Shoplifting, pickpocketing, taking stuff out of people's cars. I saw him steal a Mennonite kid's hat once, at the farmer's market. But shoplifting was his favorite. Stupid stuff—bottles of laundry detergent, candy bars.”

“Detergent?”

She shrugged. “He stole all kinds of things.

“But detergent? Like you wash clothes with?”

“Lucius called it the ‘five-finger final exam.' He said only a true professional could sneak a jug of that stuff out of a store. And he could. I couldn't. I got arrested. Probation, time served. That was when my dad officially ditched me. Tough love, he said. I tough loved him back and moved in with Lucius. I thought maybe my dad would come looking, but he didn't. I guess he decided good riddance. I haven't seen him since.”

I felt a jab in my heart, the echo of an old bruise. “He should have come after you. That's on him, not you.”

Her eyes went hard. “You said you wanted to talk about Lucius.”

“I do. I'm simply trying—”

“So let's talk about Lucius. He was a thief, and a liar, and a criminal. Every single credit card he stole, every single number he scammed, he traded it for drug cred.”

“Traded?”

“Yeah, online. You know. Through his connection.”

“Online?”

She gave me that look again, the one reserved for hopeless old fogeys. “Everything's online. Duh.”

I suppressed the old fogey urge to tell her to watch her mouth. “So Lucius had some tech savvy?”

“Hell no. He was smart, but not computer smart, so he found somebody to help him out with that part of it.” She looked uncomfortable. “I never did any of that stuff. But I didn't exactly…you know. Stop him.”

I swirled the bourbon, my head buzzing from one too many shots, and thought about the story so far. Cat put up a tough front, but she really wasn't a hard case. Not like Lucius. I was beginning to think I might have wanted to kill him too.

“Was there anybody who wanted Lucius dead?”

“There was Fishbone.”

“Fishbone?”

“Yeah. His real name was Marcus, but everybody called him Fishbone because of the tattoo. Fishbone thought he was a straight-up street dealer—he was always talking about the face-to-face—and his product was legit, true enough, but he didn't have the balls to kill anybody for real. He made noise about taking down Lucius, but that was just talk.”

I got another zing, like a nibble at the line. “He threatened Lucius specifically? Why?”

“Said Lucius owed him money. There was something bigger going down between them, but I never found out the details. Something about turf and connection, sketchy stuff.” She shrugged. “By then, I was with Eddie and totally outta there.”

I picked up my pen. “Fishbone still around?”

“Last I heard, he was living in his brother's shop in Stone Mountain. He runs with the Concrete Kings now.”

“Is that a gang?”

She skewered me with that look. “It's a skateboard club.”

I scrawled “Fishbone Stone Mountain shop” on the back of my hand just as the door creaked open an inch. Trey stuck his head in. “Your ten minutes are up.”

“I'm coming.”

“Now.”

“I heard you!”

He closed the door, leaving a half-inch sliver, and I shook my head at Cat. “My boyfriend. He's a stickler.”

“Eddie is too. I swear sometimes.”

We both pretended to be annoyed. It was a small spot of camaraderie. Outside in the bar there were two men—one keeping an eye out for me, the other keeping an eye out for her, both of them grumpy and worried and overly protective. Both of them with reason to be. But both of them willing to stand by while we did our thing, said our piece, had our way.

“The cops are probably going to drop by regardless,” I said. “Lucius didn't leave town—he was killed—and they take that seriously downtown.”

“I figured.” She shook her head. “Dead, huh? I always had this idea he would eventually get caught and I'd see him on the news, or maybe on one of those cop shows, getting hauled to jail. I didn't see this coming.”

I remembered the skull in the woods, matted decaying leaves, the rictus grin. The rest of him ripped apart and tossed like broken toys. I was pretty sure Lucius hadn't seen this coming either.

Cat rubbed her forearm. “Of course, if the bastard hadn't run off, I mighta killed him myself.”

“Why?”

She turned sideways and stretched out her arm. The snake tattoo coiled and uncoiled as she flexed her bicep, lengthening with the muscles and sinew like a live thing. The black serpentine lines were more than artful ink—they were the skillful covering of scar tissue.

“Fucker stabbed me with a fork, right in the middle of the Waffle House. Said I was cheating on him.”

“Were you?”

She grinned. “Uh huh. With Eddie. But Lucius was cheating too.”

“With who?”

“You don't know?”

I shook my head. She grinned wider, obviously savoring the answer.

“Shit. I thought everybody knew that. He was dipping his wick uptown with the Amberdecker bitch. Chelsea. So if you want to know who wanted to kill him, I suggest you look thataway.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Back at the shop, Trey insisted on checking things out before he left. I was used to this. As I unlocked the door, he watched over my shoulder, so close I could see the mist of his breath right beside my cheek.

“You should get the locks changed,” he said.

“Why? Because a corpse had the old keys?”

“Because you don't know who else had the keys.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and accessed the security feed. “You should also tell Detective Perez what you discovered tonight.”

I flipped on the lights. “Tell her what? That Lucius' ex-girlfriend said he'd been sleeping with Chelsea Amberdecker? I have only Cat's word on that, unverified by you.”

“Because you made me stand in the hall.”

“She wouldn't have spilled it otherwise.”

Trey didn't argue—he'd seen that as clearly as I had. And he'd heard me tell Cat she had to tell the police her story, which she'd agreed to do. I put her photograph back into the Lucius stack. The rest of the photographs lay on the floor, half in my scattered piles, half in Trey's neat stacks.

“I wonder if Richard knows about Lucius and Chelsea. He described her as having a taste for ‘wild game.' If he knows, maybe he can tell us that story, because I've seen neither hide nor hair of Chelsea herself.”

Trey stood in the middle of the front room, verifying that each camera worked. “Has he returned your call yet?”

“No. I wonder if he even knows they've made an ID on the skull. They camp out in the middle of some private woods. No cell phones allowed.”

He stood under the deer head, switching the channel on and off with his phone. Every time he logged in, a little red light flickered behind the creature's eyes. He shot me an accusative look.

I smiled. “Just my way of making sure I know when you're spying on me.”

“I don't spy.” He returned his phone to his pocket, and the light blinked off. “You should also tell the authorities about…what did you say his name was?”

“Fishbone.”

“No, his real name.”

“Marcus something, Cat didn't know the last name. But don't worry, I'll tell Detective Perez all about him.”

Once I find out a little something about him myself,
I thought, deep in my head where Trey couldn't see it.

He peeked over the edge of the box at the ATF paperwork, still unorganized. “Are you sure—”

“It's under control.”

He harrumphed. “At least let me install the new monitor.”

“I'll do it myself tomorrow morning. It's past your bedtime, and you know how you get.”

He headed for the back. “I want to recheck the security door first.”

I bit my lip and stopped arguing. Checking things was the Trey Seaver version of self-medication. He had to do something to bleed off the excess energy from our night of fending off pseudo-bikers and quizzing reluctant witnesses, or his brain would fry itself.

“Did you have any messages from the Amberdeckers?” I called after him.

He knelt in front of the door. “It doesn't work that quickly. Marisa makes my assignments. It's a complicated process.”

“But it can be expedited. I've seen your schedule turn on a dime when some big shot requested you.”

“True. But as you pointed out yesterday, the Amberdeckers have more pressing concerns right now.”

“You mean like a valuable exhibit's opening weekend? A daughter's upcoming wedding to one of the most powerful sons of industry in the U.S.? A trigger-happy old lady, surrounded by treasures ripe for the stealing? Those seem exactly like Phoenix concerns.”

“It's—”

“Complicated. I know.”

He opened and closed the new security door twice, which seemed to give him immense satisfaction, even if he frowned at the casement window. As if he were surprised to see it still up there, all treacherous and transparent and non UL-rated.

He came back into the main room. “Tai?”

“Hmmm?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“This what?”

“This…investigating. The bar, the History Center. I know it's not because Detective Perez asked you to.”

I propped myself against the counter, covered now in materials from the Amberdecker exhibit. I'd asked myself the same thing. And I knew the answer had something to do with the fact that every month—almost every month, anyway—I'd managed to drag the shop kicking and screaming into the black. But if Dexter's reputation got destroyed, then Brenda wouldn't have to lift a finger to ruin me. She could simply watch it happen from the safety of her shop.

“I'm doing it for Dexter,” I said. “Because he would have done it for me. And because no matter what it looks like, he wasn't involved in Lucius' death.”

Trey kept his eyes on the file boxes. “What if you learn that he
was
?”

“He wasn't.”

“Are you sure?” Trey's voice was soft, non-accusatory. “You told me he was in a difficult situation after your aunt's death. Under such circumstances, people can—”

“Not Dexter.”

“Nonetheless, I need you to understand—”

“That if we discover he was involved, and I don't tell the authorities, you will.”

Trey hesitated, then nodded. “I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. I understand. Dexter's innocent regardless.” I faced Trey over the patchwork of pamphlets, the detritus of my investigation. My case. “The real question is, are you going to help me prove it?”

He straightened a folder with his finger until it lined up exactly with the counter's edge. “Of course I am. You know that.”