Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (24 page)

Kathryn suddenly realized that she was standing and that her voice had inadvertently risen to a shout. Half the room had grown silent, watching, and several couples now stood motionless on the dance floor. As if in response to the change of atmosphere, the music segued to a slower beat.

She sank awkwardly into her chair again and sat staring at her reflection in the amber bottle closest to her. There was a long, long silence—so long that Kathryn began to wish that Nick would shout or scream or even throw something—anything would be better than the awful silence.

“You know,” Nick said suddenly, “I believe I’d like to dance after all.”

He rose and stepped a few paces away from the table, then turned and held his arms out for Kathryn. She sat stunned, blinking in disbelief, her mouth gaping open—until she noticed her reflection in the bottle. She slowly rose from her chair and stepped toward him. She stopped a few feet away and held her own arms out, almost with a shrug, as if to say, “It’s your move.”

Nick stepped forward and slid his right arm around her waist, pulling her closer than she expected. He held her right hand against his chest and put his cheek almost against hers, his lips just a few inches from her right ear. They began to move with the music, far more smoothly than Kathryn would have imagined possible—for someone of his species.

Minutes passed.

“So you’re convinced that the sheriff couldn’t have done it,” Nick said softly.

“I’m absolutely sure.”

“Then the next time you see him, will you ask him something? Ask him why, after nine years of silence, he suddenly chose to make your friend’s cocaine habit public knowledge.”

“He only told one person,” she reminded him.

“Yes. But he told the right person.”

Kathryn thought about his words. “All right. I’ll ask him.”

Nick spotted the waitress working her way toward them across the dance floor. He stopped and looked into Kathryn’s eyes. At this distance, his eyes seemed truly enormous.

“Promise? The next time you see him?”

“I promise.”

“Your ride is here,” the waitress said to Kathryn.

“Hope you don’t mind,” Nick said. “I have a few things to take care of.”

“Thanks for thinking of me.” She patted him on the chest.

She turned and headed toward the door. Halfway there she recognized the figure of Peter St. Clair standing by the entrance, grinning, holding a handwritten sign that said, KATHRYN GUILFORD.

Kathryn spun around and glared back at Nick, but Nick had already turned away, busily studying two angry young men hustling one another out the side door.

Looked like quite a party back there.” Peter smiled without taking his eyes from the road. A burst of static and an indistinguishable voice broke through momentarily on the police scanner. He reached down and switched it off.

“It wasn’t a party,” Kathryn said, her eyes transfixed by the endless telephone poles blinking past her window. “It was work.”

“You needed a ride home from work? You got a better job than I do.”

“I didn’t need a ride home,” she said irritably. “This was Nick’s idea.”

“So now it’s Nick.”

Kathryn looked at him for the first time since she got in the car. His face flashed lean and angular in the stark headlights of each passing car, and his eyes sparkled like blue ice in the glare of the cold halogen beams.

“How is Jenny?” she asked softly. “You never say.”

Peter paused. “She’s fine.”

“She’s fine,” Kathryn repeated. “That’s all men ever say. This is fine. That’s fine. I’m fine, thank you very much. ‘She’s fine’ just means, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ ” Kathryn paused and looked at him again. “How are you two doing?”

Peter turned and looked at her. “Fine.”

She shook her head, and they sat in silence for several minutes.

“Do you love her?”

Peter said nothing.

“I saw you dancing with the doc,” he said lightly. “Looks like you’re keeping your employees happy.”

“That was his idea,” she lied. “We had an argument, and I think he was trying to patch things up.”

“An argument about what?”

This time Kathryn said nothing.

“I thought we were going to cooperate on this investigation of yours. How come I’m not invited to these ‘work sessions’?”

“It’s Nick. He likes to work alone.”

“He didn’t seem to want to work alone tonight.”

Kathryn winced.

“So when am I going to hear something? After all the hours you two have spent together, you must have come up with something.”

Kathryn hesitated. “Nick says he wants to wait until he’s sure.”

“C’mon, Kath, this is me. I know when I’m being stonewalled. I expect that kind of runaround from the doc, but not from you.” He reached over and squeezed her arm.

Kathryn looked out the window again.

What’s wrong with me? Why am I hesitating? Nick suspects everyone—he said it himself. Why am I allowing him to plant doubts in my mind about Peter, of all people?

“Peter, I need to ask you something.”

“Go for it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Jimmy’s cocaine habit?”

Peter sighed. “Put yourself in his place, Kath. Life isn’t going the way you wanted. You got baggage from the past, you got a sister who belongs in the loony bin, you even got dumped by the girl you wanted to marry.”

“Thanks.”

“One day you find yourself in the middle of some nameless desert, about to fight the Mother of All Battles. They say you could get nuked or gassed or infected with who-knows-what. You could use a little confidence. I suppose that’s how it started for Jim.”

“But the war wasn’t as bad as everyone thought it would be.”

“That’s right—so when it’s over, you feel a little silly about the whole thing. Never again, you tell yourself. You’ll just stop—nobody has to know—you’ll beat this thing all by yourself. So you quit. But then you do it just one more time—in a moment of weakness, maybe on a bad day. So what? You beat it before, you can do it again. And you do—until the next time. You beat it for a couple of years, and you tell yourself it’s over. Then you can only hold out for a few months. Pretty soon you can only go a week, but every time you tell yourself that you’re in charge, you can handle it. Fact is, you can’t handle it—but you’re not about to admit it to anyone. You won’t even admit it to yourself.”

“I don’t get it. I would have told someone. I would have asked for help.”

“You’re not Jim,” he said. “Call it a guy thing.”

“Then how did you find out?”

“From Andy. They were in the same unit, remember? Andy walked in on Jim one day. Caught him in the act. If he hadn’t, believe me, Jim would never have told anyone.”

“But why didn’t you tell anyone else?”

“I did what Jim wanted me to do. I did what I would have wanted him to do for me.”

“Couldn’t you have at least told me?”

Peter glanced at her. “Think about it, Kath. He asks you to marry him. You say no—so he figures for some reason he doesn’t quite measure up in your eyes. But maybe he can do better, maybe he can make you wish you had said yes—and then you hear that he’s got this little drug problem? I couldn’t do that to him. The thought of having a second chance with you is what kept him alive.”

Kathryn smiled at him and took his hand. “You’re always protecting someone, aren’t you, Peter? Andy and Jimmy and now me. Most of all me.”

“Just doin’ my duty, ma’am.” He smiled. “We aim to serve.”

Kathryn hesitated. She felt foolish, she felt faithless asking her next question—but she had to ask. A promise is a promise.

“You didn’t even want me to know,” she said softly. “So why did you tell Ronny? Ronny told Denny—Denny, of all people. Now everybody knows.”

Peter slowly shook his head. “You don’t believe Jim killed himself. I do. All the evidence points that way, especially when you figure in the cocaine—but nobody knew about the cocaine. So along comes your Bug Man friend, and he starts to stir things up, starts people talking. Maybe Jim didn’t kill himself, maybe it was murder, he says. He talks to Amy, he talks to Ronny and Denny and Wayne. He tells the coroner he didn’t do his job—next thing you know, maybe I didn’t do my job. I wanted to put an end to it—so I let people know the rest of the equation.” He paused. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“No, you shouldn’t have—not until we find out the truth.”

“The truth.” Peter rolled his eyes. “Is that what you and the doc are finding? Admit it, Kath, all you’ve got is questions. You’ve got no answers.”

Kathryn studied his face carefully and took a deep breath.

“Peter,” she whispered. “Jimmy’s body was moved.”

She waited for his reaction … there was none. Not a word, not a questioning glance, not even the rapid blink of a startled eye. He sat rigid, staring straight ahead, as if the words had never been spoken. They had been spoken, and he had certainly heard them—but whatever Peter St. Clair thought of those words he was not about to reveal it.

“What do you mean moved?” he said slowly. “Moved how?”

“Do you know what ‘fixed lividity’ is? Do you know about that?”

Peter nodded, then glanced at her. “Do you?”

“I do now. Jimmy’s right leg was different—not the way it was supposed to be. Nick says he died with his leg like this.” She lifted her foot onto the seat and pulled it tight against her thigh. “But everyone agrees that when they found him, his leg was flat out again. That means that somebody moved him.” She longed to add, “And that means somebody killed him”—but she remembered Nick’s constant admonition to say only what you know.

Peter groaned. “That could be explained a hundred ways.”

“For instance.”

“Maybe the leg just stayed up on its own.”

“It can’t do that.” She shook her head. “Try it yourself.”

“Then maybe something held it up.”

“What? Did you find anything? Everybody else says there wasn’t anything around. If there was, somebody had to move it. Who would do that?”

Peter grew more impatient with each of Kathryn’s questions.

“Do you know about rigor mortis?” he said irritably. “Where the body stiffens up? Did the doc tell you about that too?”

Kathryn frowned. “I’ve heard of it.”

“It usually takes a few hours to set in—but there’s a thing called ‘instant rigor mortis’ too. It happens when the victim is exhausted just before death, and when the death is real sudden—like in a suicide,” he said pointedly. “The whole body goes into an instant spasm—it locks up on the spot. I’ve seen it happen on the battlefield. A guy takes a bullet to the head and you have to pry his fingers off his rifle.”

“That can’t be it.”

“Why not? Tell me.”

“I don’t know why. It just can’t, that’s all!”

Peter pulled the car into Kathryn’s driveway, shifted into park, and turned off the ignition. They sat side by side in the silent shadows for an eternity. Kathryn performed the crucial task of wiping dust from the creases of the dashboard while Peter
squeezed and relaxed his grip on the steering wheel in rhythm with his pulse.

Peter turned and reached into the backseat. “You’ll want these,” he said, handing Kathryn the crumpled cigar box. “Jimmy’s things.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Just what I thought I’d find,” he said. “Just what you see there.”

She opened the lid and removed a small bundle of paper. There was a torn and ragged birth certificate, a Social Security card, and a few outdated and irrelevant financial records. There was a yellowed clipping from the
Courier
proudly announcing that no less than three of Rayford’s finest had enlisted together at Fort Bragg, and that the world was sure to be a safer place as a result. There were faded letters from Amy during the deployment in the Gulf. There were two letters from Kathryn as well—just two—and the sight of her own handwriting stabbed her through the heart. It seemed pathetic that a human life could be ultimately reduced to such a tiny collection of memorabilia.

She looked at Peter. “What are you thinking?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do.”

“I was wondering why you always seem to prefer the dead to the living.”

Kathryn turned away.

“First it was Andy,” he said. “I know you loved him—I mean, I know how hard it must have been to lose your husband.”

“No you don’t. You can’t know.”

“Maybe not. But I tried to help in every way I could think of. I was there for you every day—in person, in the flesh. I’m the soldier who came home,” he said, “but you wanted the one who didn’t. I knew it would take time for you to get over Andy—but I hoped that … over time …”

“We talked about this, Peter,” she said awkwardly. “It was hard to let go—not knowing what happened to Andy. It’s like he was never really gone. I never felt free.”

“That was almost ten years ago, Kath. Aren’t you free yet?”

She said nothing.

“Now it’s Jimmy. Now you spend all your time trying to figure out what happened to him. I think I got sore about this investigation of yours because it started to look like Andy all over again! I was sorry about Andy—and now I’m sorry about Jim. But life goes on, Kath. They’re dead—we’re alive. It’s time to stop living in the past and start looking ahead.”