When the Thrill Is Gone (23 page)

All she wore was an oversized violet T-shirt.

I reached down through the neck, cupping her breast, as I kissed her neck. She returned the passion by pressing back against me.

“What’s for breakfast?” I whispered into her nimbus of hair.

“If you don’t move your hand it’s gonna be you in that chair over there.”

I kissed her again and moved back six inches or so.

She looked me up and down, took a deep breath through generous nostrils, and smiled.

“That was very nice last night,” she said. “Sometimes you need something and you don’t even know what it is.”

I sighed and nodded.

She gestured toward the chair that she’d recently threatened me with.

My eyes asked a question.

“Don’t worry,” she replied. “I’ll feed you first.”

I went quickly to the chair and she laughed.

“Whole wheat waffles, shirred eggs, and hickory-smoked bacon,” she said, and then went about making those words into reality.

She served me black coffee and offered hot milk, which I declined.

Watching her cook, I was silent. She didn’t hum, but that was about the only thing missing. I realized that I had fallen for my reluctant client when she smiled upon hearing Fatima’s voice. I was enamored by the love she felt for another.

“What?” she asked when I smiled at my flittery, yellow butterfly of a heart.

“Come sit,” I said.

She brought the breakfast on a butter-colored tray and served me.

I was experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of embarrassment.

After a few minutes of awkward silence she said, “Talk to me, Leonid McGill.”

“At first,” I said and then swallowed to get some moisture in my voice. “At first I was thinking that you should have some of your steel canvases on the walls. Then I saw that the rooms, the way they’re laid out and painted, are pieces of art in themselves.”

Chrystal smiled and I felt like a child who’d given his mother the right answer.

“I always knew that I was going to be an artist,” she said, reaching across the table to touch my hand. “And not any watercolorist or etcher, either. I was going to work hard, and with dangerous materials. I was going to make what was hard soft and what was soft impenetrable.”

“You thought these things when you were a kid?”

“I didn’t have the words back then but the ideas haven’t changed since I was four years old.

“I didn’t marry Cyril because he was rich,” she said. “It was because when I came to his house the first time I saw the long hall that led to his office and told him I wanted to paint it hot pink. I said that if he let me do that to his house, then he could do whatever he wanted with me.”

“That’s why you married him? Because he let you paint two walls?”

“After we finished fucking, we talked . . . for hours. I didn’t like the sex, but he was able to talk without competition, and to love without lust or dominance.”

Our eyes met with these last words and I wavered. This also was a new feeling. It made me wonder at something I might have missed, some kind of violation and settlement in a relationship that I had not previously experienced.

“Cyril told me that he believes that he has a power, a cursing power that operates without his volition,” she said. “His psychic, a man named Marlowe, had apparently confirmed this as a fact, and even though I don’t believe in that stuff—his wives are still dead.”

My mind was wandering down that long pink hallway. I wanted to linger there for a while to comprehend the meaning she imparted.

But I had a job to do.

“So you think he killed them?” I asked.

“I think he thinks he did, and I’m an artist—my whole life is imagination.”

“Shawna told me that Cyril has moved to another bedroom and talks all night to a woman on the phone.”

“He’s always had his own bedroom,” she said. “Our sex life was never the center of the relationship. But he has been distant, and he did talk on the phone late at night. He lost weight and sometimes went away for weeks at a time.”

“And is that why you came here?”

“I sold the necklace and went away. I told Cyril that I thought he was turning sour on me and that I didn’t want to go the ways of his previous wives.”

“What he say to that?”

“He swore that he wasn’t upset with me and he just wanted a few months to get his mind straight. I told him fine, and that I’d call him in the fall.”

“Was he okay with that?”

She hunched her shoulders and came over to straddle my lap.

I kissed her and asked, “But then why did you send Shawna to me?”

“I didn’t.” She shook her head and I kissed her.

“What sense does it make for her to come to me on her own? And who would kill her?”

“Maybe she went directly to Cyril,” Chrystal speculated.

“And you think that he’s capable of murdering her?”

She stood up and went back to her chair, making me want to stop talking about the case at all.

“I don’t know,” she said after a long, thoughtful pause. “I’ve never been afraid of Cyril. I feel the violence that formed him, but it never seemed to have motility.”

Her use of this last word shocked me. I was made suddenly aware of the complexity of Chrystal. She was the odd combination of the hood and a postdoctoral student, of a merchant marine and a woman who lives in perfect equanimity as long as no one brings a hot color into her line of sight.

“You say ‘the violence that formed him’?”

“His father was a brute,” Chrystal said. “He beat him and his brothers, and his mother, too. The only way that Cy could get back at his father was to pretend, in his mind, to have killed him.”

“How does the inheritance play out?” I asked.

“I made him do a prenuptial agreement separating our monies before we were married, but on our fourth anniversary he tore up his copy of the agreement. He said that he loved me and trusted me.”

“Seven years, right?” I said, referring to the length of their marriage.

She nodded.

“He hired me to give you a message,” I said.

“What?”

“ ‘
I love you and would never be upset about anything having to do with your actions or oversights.
’ ”

The inept wording brought an ever-so-slight smile to Chrystal’s lips.

“I have to ask you something,” I said.

“Will it keep me from climbing up on you again?”

“Probably.”

“That’s a talent,” she said. “It’s harder to turn a woman off, you know.”

“You don’t seem shocked about the possibility of Shawna’s death.”

“You’re a talented man, Mr. McGill.”

“What was it about Shawna?” I asked.

“Is she really dead?”

“I think so.”

Chrystal took a moment to ponder the lifelong relationship between herself and the woman her mother called a wild creature.

“Instead of working with steel, my sister wrought art on her own body and mind,” the postdoctoral ghetto sailor proclaimed. “She made babies and enemies and never took the easy way, not once in her life. I loved her but I’m not surprised if she’s dead.”

I nodded because there was nothing to say about the artist’s sober view of life, love, and death.

“I’ll take the train back this morning,” I said. “The kids will be with you by tonight.”

“No,” she said. “If Shawnie’s dead, then I need to find her and bury her and take Fatima and them someplace safe.”

“You’re probably safer away from New York.”

“Maybe, but I’m not worried about that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I have you, don’t I?”

39

WE WERE ON the road in the yellow Prius, well on our way to the train station, when my phone made the sound of a growling bear. The Bluetooth was already in my ear because I had called to get my messages. So all I had to do was reach into my pocket and press a button to make the connection.

“Hello,” I said.

Chrystal touched my shoulder.

“Mr. Mack-gill?” a woman said.

“Yeah?”

“This Seema.”

“Why . . . hello, Seema,” I said with forced sangfroid. “What can I do for you?”

“Did you mean what you said yesterday?”

“Every word.”

“Can you come get me right now?”

“It might take an hour or so, but I’ll get there sooner if I can. Where are you?”

“I stoled his money,” she replied, giving me a way out, I supposed.

“You mean the money you collected by asking strangers for a train ticket to nowhere?”

“I guess.”

“Then it’s really your money.”

“I’m at a laundromat on Phillips called Dusty’s.”

“That’s an odd name for a place to clean clothes.”

“That’s the name of the woman that owns it,” Seema said with no humor whatsoever. “She was a friend’a my mother’s.”

“Does Brody know where you are?” I asked.

“You remebah his name?”

“Does he know where you are?”

“He thinks I’m out shoppin’ fo’ food, but if he looks in his money draw he gonna know what I did.”

“Give me the address and I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

I disconnected the call when I had what I needed, handed the phone to Chrystal, and asked her to enter the address in my GPS.

“Where we going?” she asked with no distrust that I could glean.

I explained about Seema and Brody.

“Hm,” she grunted.

“What?”

“Most people would have just waved that girl on and gone about their business.”

“Turn left in fifty yards,” commanded a woman’s voice from my phone.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right about that,” I said, to Chrystal, not the phone.

“Is it some kind of sickness with you?” She might have been serious.

“Can I drop you somewhere while I take care of this?” I replied.

“No.”

“No?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

“It might be a little risky.”

Her grin might have been mine in the mirror.

DUSTY’S COIN-OP LAUNDROMAT was a dingy little place with a big exhaust pipe over the front door letting out great gouts of steam.

“You have arrived at your destination,” the GPS woman said.

When I drove past the establishment, Chrystal said, “It’s right there.”

“We’ll go around the block.”

Everything looked all right. Brody was nowhere to be seen and there weren’t any lookouts waiting in the recesses or doorways on Phillips Avenue.

There was an alleyway behind the little laundry. A pass through there showed me a back door.

I drove around the block again, finally parking across the street and at the far end from Dusty’s.

“Got anything that needs cleaning?” I asked Chrystal.

“Just my mind.”

“Well, come on, then.”

“You’re not going to ask me to stay in the car?”

“You’re safer with me.”

DUSTY’S COLORING MATCHED her name. Her skin was grayish brown, like some mouse fur, and her eyes glinted an unhealthy yellow hue. Seated behind an old teacher’s desk, she was my age but looked older.

The establishment was a long, slender aisleway with doublestacked washing machines and solitary dryers down the right side and wooden benches on the left. There were no customers in sight, but five or more of the machines were running.

I supposed people dropped their clothes off with Dusty and she washed them, charging by the pound.

“You got laundry?” she blurted.

“It’ll just take a minute,” I said.

“No funny business in here, mistah.”

“Just lookin’ for a friend.”

“This ain’t no bar,” she said, “ain’t no ho’ house.”

“It’s okay, DD,” a voice called from behind a big chrome washing machine that stood like a sentry guarding the rest of its machine brothers and sisters. The huge unit had a round glass door throwing up flashes of red and orange inside the frothing of dirty suds.

Seema poked her head around the side of the vibrating chrome-and-glass monster. Her eyes fixed instantly on Chrystal.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“The friend I came down here to visit,” I said simply. Every word was true, even if there were some temporal disconnections.

Seema was suspicious, still wearing the dowdy clothes she’d had on the day before. The only additions to her ensemble were a little red cloth bag, clutched in both hands, and a swollen, discolored left eye.

“So?” she said.

“That’s what I should be asking you, girl. Here we are. What do you want?”

“I need to get outta here,” she said. “I need to get away from him.”

Saying this, she glanced at Chrystal, and I realized that she was thinking that I had been offering to take her on in some romantic or maybe business capacity. This was a revelation, because I was distracted by the ill-advised dalliance with my client.

“You got family?” I asked.

“Not that I wanna see. An’ anyway, Brody know all my people.”

“You ever been to Eastern Light?” Chrystal asked.

“You mean the church ovah past the seaport?”

“It’s a retreat,” Chrystal said to the both of us. “The people who run it are Hindu, but they don’t practice or proselytize.”

“Huh?” Seema said.

“Brody out there,” Dusty warned.

There was a sea-green ’80s Chevrolet driving past the front door of the store. I reached into my pocket laying my hand on a gun I had no license to carry in Maryland. I could feel my back muscles bulging and had to take a deep breath to ease my natural impulses.

“Let’s go out the back,” I said to my charges.

They knew to take direction at a moment like that.

THE BACK DOOR of Dusty’s led into an alley that smelled of maggots and human feces. The lane was wide enough for a small car, and there were various denizens reclining in doorways, crevices, and other nooks and niches. I kept my hand on the pistol as I led the women.

We came out on Allen Street and walked the half block to Phillips. As we crossed the avenue toward my sunny little car, I saw Brody, followed by two other men, walking into Dusty’s. At that moment he glanced in my direction, looked right at me. Seema was on the other side, hidden by my bulk. Brody didn’t recognize my suit or frame.