The Best of Sisters in Crime (35 page)

I got up at
seven, ran the dog over to Belmont Harbor and back and took a long shower. I
figured even if I put a half hour into grooming myself I wasn’t going to look
as good as Brigitte, so I just scrambled into jeans and a cotton sweater.

It was almost
ten minutes after eight when I got to the diner, but Brigitte hadn’t arrived
yet. I picked up a
Herald-
Star
from the counter and took it over to a booth to read with a cup of
coffee. The headline shook me to the bottom of my stomach.

FOOTBALL
HERO SURVIVES FATE

WORSE
THAN DEATH

Charles “Jade”
Pierce, once the smoothest man on the Bears’ fearsome defense, eluded offensive
blockers once again. This time the stakes were higher than a touchdown, though:
the offensive lineman was Death.

I thought Jeremy
Logan was overdoing it by a wide margin but I read the story to the end. The
standard procedure with a body is to take it to a hospital for a death
certificate before it goes to the morgue. The patrol team hauled Jade to Beth
Israel for a perfunctory exam. There the intern, noticing a slight sweat on
Jade’s neck and hands, dug deeper for a pulse than I’d been willing to go. She’d
found faint but unmistakable signs of life buried deep in the mountain of flesh
and had brought him back to consciousness.

Jade, who’s had
substance abuse problems since leaving the Bears, had mainlined a potent
mixture of ether and hydrochloric acid before drinking a quart of bourbon. When
he came to his first words were characteristic: “Get the f— out of my face.”

Logan then
concluded with the obligatory run-down on Jade’s career and its demise, with a
pious sniff about the use and abuse of sports heroes left to die in the gutter
when they could no longer please the crowd. I read it through twice, including
the fulsome last line, before Brigitte arrived.

“You see, Jade’s
still alive, so I couldn’t have killed him,” she announced, sweeping into the
booth in a cloud of Chanel.

“Did you know he
was in a coma when you came to see me yesterday?”

She raised
plucked eyebrows in hauteur. “Are you questioning my word?”

One of the
waitresses chugged over to take our order. “You want your fruit and yogurt,
right, Vic? And what else?”

“Green pepper
and cheese omelet with rye toast. Thanks, Barbara. What’ll yours be, Brigitte?”
Dry toast and black coffee, no doubt.

“Is your fruit
really
fresh?” she demanded.

Barbara rolled
her eyes. “We don’t allow no one to be fresh in here, honey, regardless of sex
preference. You want some or not?”

Brigitte set her
shoulder—covered today in green broadcloth with black piping—and got ready to
do battle. I cut her off before the first “How dare you” rolled to its ugly
conclusion.

“This isn’t the
kind of place where the maitre d’ wilts at your frown and races over to make
sure madam is happy. They don’t care if you come back or not. In fact, about
now they’d be happier if you’d leave. You can check out my fruit when it comes
and order some if it tastes right to you.”

“I’ll just have
wheat toast and black coffee,” she said icily. “And make sure they don’t put
any butter on it.”

“Right,” Barbara
said. “Wheat toast, margarine instead of butter. Just kidding, hon,” she added
as Brigitte started to tear into her again. “You gotta learn to take it if you
want to dish it out.”

“Did you bring me
here to be insulted?” Brigitte demanded when Barbara had left.

“I brought you
here to talk. It didn’t occur to me that you wouldn’t know diner etiquette. We
can fight if you want to. Or you can tell me about Jade and Corinne. And your
cat. I had a visit from Joel Sirop last night.”

She swallowed
some coffee and made a face. “They should rinse the pots with vinegar.”

“Well, keep it
to yourself. They won’t pay you a consulting fee for telling them about it.
Joel tell you he’d come around hunting Lady Iva?”

She frowned at
me over the rim of the coffee cup, then nodded fractionally.

“Why didn’t you
tell me about the damned cat when you were in my office yesterday?”

Her poise
deserted her for a moment; she looked briefly ashamed. “I thought you’d look
for Corinne. I didn’t think I could persuade you to hunt down my cat. Anyway,
Corinne must have taken Iva with her, so I thought if you found her you’d find
the cat, too.”

“Which one do
you really want back?”

She started to
bristle again, then suddenly laughed. It took ten years from her face. “You
wouldn’t ask that if you’d ever lived with a teenager. And Corinne’s always
been a stranger to me. She was eighteen months old when I left for college and
I only saw her a week or two at a time on vacations. She used to worship me.
When she moved in with me I thought it would be a piece of cake: I’d get her
fixed up with the right crowd and the right school, she’d do her best to be
like me, and the system would run itself. Instead, she put on a lot of weight,
won’t listen to me about her eating, slouches around with the kids in the
neighborhood when my back is turned, the whole nine yards. Jade’s influence. It
creeps through every now and then when I’m not thinking.”

She looked at my
blueberries. I offered them to her and she helped herself to a generous
spoonful.

“And that was
the other thing. Jade. We got together when I was an Alabama cheerleader and he
was the biggest hero in town. I thought I’d really caught me a prize, my yes, a
big prize. But the first, last and only thing in a marriage with a football
player is football. And him, of course, how many sacks he made, how many yards
he allowed, all that boring crap. And if he has to sit out a game, or he gives
up a touchdown, or he doesn’t get the glory, watch out. Jade was mean. He was
mean on the field, he was mean off it. He broke my arm once.”

Her voice was
level but her hand shook a little as she lifted the coffee cup to her mouth. “I
got me a gun and shot him in the leg the next time he came at me. They put it
down as a hunting accident in the papers, but he never tried anything on me
after that—not physical, I mean. Until his career ended. Then he got real, real
ugly. The papers crucified me for abandoning him when his career was over. They
never had to live with him.”

She was panting
with emotion by the time she finished. “And Corinne shared the papers’ views?”
I asked gently.

She nodded. “We
had a bad fight on Sunday. She wanted to go to a sleepover at one of the girls’
in the neighborhood. I don’t like that girl and I said no. We had a gale-force
battle after that. When I got home from work on Monday she’d taken off. First I
figured she’d gone to this girl’s place. They hadn’t seen her, though, and she
hadn’t shown up at school. So I figured she’d run off to Jade. Now . . . I don’t
know. I would truly appreciate it if you’d keep looking, though.”

Just say no,
Vic, I chanted to myself. “I’ll need a thousand up front. And more names and
addresses of friends, including people in Mobile. I’ll check in with Jade at
the hospital. She might have gone to him, you know, and he sent her on
someplace else.”

“I stopped by
there this morning. They said no visitors.”

I grinned. “I’ve
got friends in high places.” I signaled Barbara for the check. “Speaking of
which, how was the vice president?”

She looked as
though she were going to give me one of her stiff rebuttals, but then she
curled her lip and drawled, “Just like every other good old boy, honey, just
like every other good old boy.”

Back to table of contents

Lotty Herschel,
an obstetrician associated with Beth Israel, arranged for me to see Jade
Pierce. “They tell me he’s been difficult. Don’t stand next to the bed unless
you’re wearing a padded jacket.”

“You want him,
you can have him,” the floor head told me. “He’s going home tomorrow morning.
Frankly, since he won’t let anyone near him, they ought to release him right
now.”

My palms felt
sweaty when I pushed open the door to Jade’s room. He didn’t throw anything
when I came in, didn’t even turn his head to stare through the restraining
rails surrounding the bed. His mountain of flesh poured through them, ebbing
away from a rounded summit in the middle. The back of his head, smooth and
shiny as a piece of polished jade, reflected the ceiling light into my eyes.

“I don’t need
any goddamned ministering angels, so get the fuck out of here,” he growled to
the window.

“That’s a
relief. My angel act never really got going.”

He turned his
head at that. His black eyes were mean, narrow slits. If I were a quarterback I’d
hand him the ball and head for the showers.

“What are you,
the goddamned social worker?”

“Nope. I’m the
goddamned detective who found you yesterday before you slipped off to the great
huddle in the sky.”

“Come on over
then, so I can kiss your ass,” he spat venomously.

I leaned against
the wall and crossed my arms. “I didn’t mean to save your life: I tried getting
them to send you to the morgue. The meat wagon crew double-crossed me.”

The mountain
shook and rumbled. It took me a few seconds to realize he was laughing. “You’re
right, detective: you ain’t no angel. So what do you want? True confessions on
why I was such a bad boy? The name of the guy who got me the stuff?”

“As long as you’re
not hurting anyone but yourself I don’t care what you do or where you get your
shit. I’m here because Brigitte hired me to find Corinne.”

His face set in
ugly lines again. “Get out.”

I didn’t move.

“I said get out!”
He raised his voice to a bellow.

“Just because I
mentioned Brigitte’s name?”

“Just because if
you’re pally with that broad, you’re a snake by definition.”

“I’m not pally
with her. I met her yesterday. She’s paying me to find her sister.” It took an
effort not to yell back at him.

“Corinne’s
better off without her,” he growled, turning the back of his head to me again.

I didn’t say
anything, just stood there. Five minutes passed. Finally he jeered, without
looking at me. “Did the sweet little martyr tell you I broke her arm?”

“She mentioned
it, yes.”

“She tell you
how that happened?”

“Please don’t
tell me how badly she misunderstood you. I don’t want to throw up my breakfast.”

At that he swung
his gigantic face around toward me again. “Com’ere.”

When I didn’t
move, he sighed and patted the bedrail. “I’m not going to slug you, honest. If
we’re going to talk, you gotta get close enough for me to see your face.”

I went over to
the bed and straddled the chair, resting my arms on its back. Jade studied me
in silence, then grunted as if to say I’d passed some minimal test.

“I won’t tell
you Brigitte didn’t understand me. Broad had my number from day one. I didn’t
break her arm, though: that was B. B. Wilder. Old Gunshot. Thought he was my
best friend on the club, but it turned out he was Brigitte’s. And then, when I
come home early from a hunting trip and found her in bed with him, we all got
carried away. She loved the excitement of big men fighting. It’s what made her
a football groupie to begin with down in Alabama.”

I tried to
imagine ice-cold Brigitte flushed with excitement while the Bears’ right tackle
and defensive end fought over her. It didn’t seem impossible.

“So B. B. broke
her arm but I agreed to take the rap. Her little old modeling career was just
getting off the ground and she didn’t want her good name sullied. And besides
that, she kept hoping for a reconciliation with her folks, at least with their
wad, and they’d never fork over if she got herself some ugly publicity
committing violent adultery. And me, I was just the baddest boy the Bears ever
fielded; one more mark didn’t make that much difference to me.” The jeering
note returned to his voice.

“She told me it
was when you retired that things deteriorated between you.”

“Things
deteriorated—what a way to put it. Look, detective, what did you say your name
was? V. I., that’s a hell of a name for a girl. What did your mamma call you?”

“Victoria,” I
said grudgingly. “And no one calls me Vicki, so don’t even think about it.” I
prefer not to be called a girl, either, much less a broad, but Jade didn’t seem
like the person to discuss that particular issue with.

“Victoria, huh?
Things deteriorated, yeah, like they was a picnic starting out. I was born dumb
and I didn’t get smarter for making five hundred big ones a year. But I wouldn’t
hit a broad, even one like Brigitte who could get me going just looking at me.
I broke a lot of furniture, though, and that got on her nerves.”

I couldn’t help
laughing. “Yeah, I can see that. It’d bother me, too.”