The Snake Tattoo (19 page)

He kept shaking his head gently from side to side. He had a red mark on his temple that was going to make quite a spectacular bruise. Goddamn amateurs. They can cut your throat by mistake.

“So.” I picked up the chair and settled it on the floor, keeping the gun aimed at the part in his blonde hair. “If you weren't going to hurt me,” I asked, “just what the hell kind of charade are you playing?”

The man bowed his head and stared at the floor as if he were looking at something else, something gruesome and terrible. I hoped he wasn't going to throw up.

I put the gun down on the desktop, well within grabbing range although I didn't think he was going to give me any more grief, and sat down. My knee felt funny. Both knees, actually.

I sucked in a deep breath and raised my hand to my neck. There was a scratch, so faint and fine I could barely feel it. No blood.

“So who the hell are you?” I said to the guy. He hadn't moved a muscle, except for one at the corner of his mouth that was twitching on its own accord. “Oh yeah, Reardon kept your photo in his desk drawer. You must be a friend.”

The guy looked up at me. “And what's that supposed to mean?” he said.

“Look,” I said, “let's not get all sensitive. I don't care what kind of relationship you and Reardon shared—”

“We were
brothers
,” he said. “I'm Stuart Reardon.”

“Shit,” I murmured. The one Ms. Stoner had marched off to notify.

He said, “You assumed a little different, right? Just because Geoff was—”

“I'm sorry,” I said. The two men were superficially similar, same height, same coloring. I wouldn't have picked them as brothers.

He waited a while, then said, “
Sorry
. Is that all you are?
Sorry?
”

“What am I supposed to say? Is this little script in your head?”

There was a sudden burst of pounding from upstairs. Stuart shook his head and murmured, “I never even thought there'd be somebody else in the house. I never even thought about it.”

He kept mumbling to himself. Amateurs.

“You make a great criminal mastermind,” I said. “Go ahead. Talk.”

“You don't seem to get it, do you?” he said. He tapped his chest with his left hand. “I know. I know you went to see him. And then … he killed himself.” He whispered the last three words as if they were too awful to say out loud.

“I visit a lot of people, and believe me, not all of them expire.”

“You were hired to screw things up for him at the Emerson. I mean, it wasn't bad enough he was hounded out of Wellfleet. I want to know who you were working for. Just tell me that.”

“And you'll go stick your knife in them? Sure.”

“I'll find out.”

“Look,” I said, “I'll make it easy. I never worked for anybody from Wellfleet. I don't even know anybody in Wellfleet. I don't know anything about Reardon's juicy past, although I admit you intrigue me. I went to see him because one of his students ran away. That's it.”

Stuart shook his head some more, trying to clear the fog. He opened and closed his eyes. Next, I thought, he'll pinch himself.

Very slowly, he said, “And Geoff knew that? He knew you just wanted to talk about some stupid runaway?”

“Yep,” I said. “I left my card on his desk. Then we talked the next day.”

“I don't believe you,” he said.

“You want a drink?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You got any more knives you're gonna pull if I leave you for half a minute?”

He shook his head, and I believed him. I believed him, but I stuck the gun in the waistband of my jeans before heading for the kitchen. I figured if I left it lying on the desk, he'd guess it wasn't loaded. Maybe not. He looked shell-shocked.

I probably looked worse.

I don't keep much in the way of whiskey, but Roz likes her scotch, so I poured a lot into a glass, hurried back to the living room, and gave it to him. He downed it like club soda. I had a gulp myself, straight from the bottle. It burned all the way down.

“Why don't we start over,” I said, back in the desk chair.

“Okay.”

“You're Reardon's brother,” I said.

“I'm a tech writer at Digital,” he said. For a minute I thought he was going to stick out his hand so I could shake it, but he thought better of it and stared at the floor.

Fooled by appearances again. I'd assumed he was the male model type, not a respectable computer company employee.

“Geoff was my only family,” he continued, glancing at his empty glass with regret. I refilled it from the bottle I'd placed strategically on the desk. “I mean,” he continued, “we weren't always that close, but lately, it's been better. He was there for me and I was there for him, you know? And now—oh, shit.”

His outburst prompted the parakeet to one of her infrequent speech attacks. “Oh, shit,” she squawked. “I'm a pretty bird. Fluffy's a pretty bird.” She hasn't got her name straight, but at least her vocabulary is getting spicier. Just as I decided to lower the cover on her cage, lest I get a fit of inappropriate giggles, she subsided. She can tell when I've had enough.

I turned my attention back to my blonde friend. “So let me get this right. You thought you knew why your brother killed himself.”

“It was the only thing that made any sense.”

“See if it makes sense to me,” I said.

“Geoff's a teacher. He's been a teacher—God knows—forever. He shouldn't have been. He should have been rich, you know? So he could have been a playwright, a full-time playwright, maybe a screenwriter. It's tricky, being a high school teacher, being gay. Bi, really. I mean, I know some people say there isn't any such thing as a true bisexual, but Geoff was damn close. He used to tell me it was perfectly okay for the big husky male teachers to hit on the little twelve-year-old girls. That's fine. That's ‘normal,' but Geoff—well, he always had to be on the defensive.”

“This is the eighties, right?” I said.

“Yeah. That makes it worse. AIDS. The paranoia is incredible.”

I nodded.

“Could I have a glass of water?” he asked. “If I keep on drinking this stuff—”

“Yeah,” I said, “you might do something crazy.”

He actually blushed, and I did the routine with the kitchen and the gun again.

After he drank some water, which comes out of my tap an interesting yellowish shade, his voice got stronger.

“Six years ago,” he said, “maybe seven. Geoff got arrested on the Cape, in Wellfleet, at some kind of trumped-up raid on a gay bar. He was never convicted. The whole thing was just designed to throw a scare into the bar owner, to make him move out. Geoff was teaching at a school in the same town, and they fired him. It's in the contract: ‘Moral Turpitude.' Geoff didn't fight it. I mean, he could have, because it was just an arrest, not a conviction, and ‘Moral Turpitude' is not exactly a clear legal concept. He did hire a lawyer and the lawyer hammered out this agreement with the school board, that they couldn't talk about his arrest, couldn't mention it. I mean, they didn't give Geoff a recommendation, but they let him resign. It was a technicality, but it meant he could still teach, still earn a living.”

“I understand,” I said.

“He was a damn good teacher. He'd never touch a student. He wouldn't dream of touching a student. Sometimes if a kid was gay, and he asked, Geoff would tell him, just tell the poor kid he wasn't the only gay person in the world, because it gave the poor kid some hope, you know, that there was somebody else like him, somebody who was making it. Outsiders pay a high price at the Emerson. Everybody's got to be cut from the same cookie cutter. Geoff was different. He was a wonderful person, and a fine writer. He shouldn't have had to work so hard.”

Stuart drank the rest of his water. I waited.

He said, “I thought you'd gone there to tell him his teaching career was kaput. I thought some wacko on that school board had decided to wreak vengeanace on homosexuals and tell the Emerson all. And that Geoff couldn't face starting over again, with no seniority, no nothing …”

“That wasn't it,” I said.

He sat there for about three minutes with his face working. Then he said. “I don't understand.”

“You're telling me he had no reason to kill himself,” I said.

“I could make sense out of it if he was gonna be fired. I mean, not really sense, but—”

“He wasn't sick?” I said.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Depressed?”

“Hell, no. When Geoff was down, he danced. The adrenaline picked him up. He worked. He wrote. He had friends.”

“Did he talk to you about quitting his job?” I asked.

“No. Never. He liked it there.”

“What about getting his play produced? Did he say anything about that?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“And when was the last time you talked to him?”

“Maybe three weeks ago. We had dinner sometimes. Our apartments are real close, and like, Thursday night, I just stayed at his place. I've got a key.”

“When did you get to his apartment?”

“Real late. Practically Friday morning. I've been working crazy overtime, and I thought we'd have breakfast together.”

“I'm the one who called asking for him.”

“Did I answer?”

“Yeah. You told me he was at the Emerson.”

“I don't remember.”

“But you weren't worried when he didn't come home.”

“Nah. I figured he was staying with somebody.”

“He had a lover.”

“Usually. Nobody regular. I mean, with Geoff you couldn't even hazard a guess—male or female. He got off on beautiful people.”

“What about a student?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I don't think so.”

“Did he ever mention a girl named Valerie?”

“I don't think so. I don't know.”

I wondered where Valerie had been the day Geoff Reardon died.

Stuart pushed his hair back off his forehead, grimacing at the pain in his shoulder. Then he said, “This is going to sound dumb.”

“Be my guest,” I said.

“You investigate things, right?”

I held out my business card. “Right.”

“Can I hire you to investigate Geoff's … this?”

“You mean if I decide not to turn you in for attempted murder?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I ought to,” I said. “It was incredibly dumb, as stunts go. I could have killed you. You could have fallen on the stupid knife.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm really sorry.”

“‘Sorry' doesn't stitch wounds.” I said. My mother used to say something like that. “Sorry doesn't fix a broken vase,” I think it was.

“Yeah,” he said, fingering his temple. “Shit. I can't do anything right. You might as well turn me in. I can't believe it. I can't believe Geoff killed himself, but I can't believe he was murdered or something. Maybe I should talk to the cops.”

“Maybe you should hire me,” I said.

“Huh?”

“That's what you were asking, wasn't it?”

“Hire you to investigate a … murder?”

“Look, the Lincoln cops don't think it's murder, and I don't think it would do you any good to mention the possibility. If it's murder, I'm out of it. A private cop can't meddle in that kind of stuff in this state. But if it's not murder, I might be able to help you. I could find out what your brother had on his mind. I could check if he'd had any heavy financial losses. Find out if he was seeing a shrink. That kind of stuff.”

“Is it expensive? I mean. I've got the funeral to take care of—”

“Look, I'm interested in this case from another angle,” I said. “That brings my fees way down. And you might be able to help with something. That brings 'em down even lower.”

He said, “Oh, yeah?”

“Your brother had a drawerful of class diaries in his desk a few days ago. I'd like to see them. One of them, anyway.”

“Diaries? In his desk at work?”

“Notebooks his drama class kept, the class he called the misfits.”

“You want me to get them?”

“They're not at his office now, not the one I want anyway. It could be at his apartment.”

“I can't go back there. Not yet. Really. I'm sorry.”

I took one of my contract forms out of the top drawer of the desk. “But you have a key, right?” I said. “And if you sign one of these, give me a buck for a retainer, and lend me the key—I can.”

CHAPTER 22

The mailman came up my front walk as Stuart Reardon, holding his wadded handkerchief against his temple, staggered down. I hadn't offered my assailant any cold towels or ice cubes. As a matter of fact, I hoped his head hurt like hell.

T.C. got bills, circulars, a copy of
Mother Jones
, and a sales pitch from a Hong Kong tailor who didn't carry his size. I was about to dump the whole lot in the waste basket when I noticed the Colombian stamp.

I slit the envelope with Reardon's knife.

Dear Carlotta
—

She'd used regulation airmail stationery and drawn faint lines to help keep the letters straight.

I skimmed it to see if she said when she'd be back.

Dear Carlotta
—

How are you? I want to come home. Have you ever heard of a man named Carlos Roldan Gonzales? My mother and the man they say is my grandfather fight all day
.

I hate it here. I'm going to run away. Maybe I can stow away on a boat and come back to you
.

Love ya
,

Paolina

Terrific, I thought. Another runaway. I stuck Reardon's knife in my top drawer, thinking how upset and angry Paolina would be if I let some jerk kill me while she was away. She was always scared something would happen to me while I was a cop.