N
ot five minutes after I’d walked into my house, the doorbell rang. I expected anything—the police, a hit man friend of Rook’s, perhaps Cassandra Payne herself. It was David.
“I saw you drive up,” he said, coming inside. “Where have you been?”
“Here and there,” I said.
“It’s Bryan. He died last night in the hospital.”
Another dead body. I sat down. I didn’t know how to react. I guess I knew that Bryan was right—he wasn’t going to make it. People were dying all around me and I was taking it in stride.
“Ellen’s taking it pretty bad,” David said.
I reminded myself of the promise I had made to Bryan.
“I went to see Cassandra,” I told him.
“I know. I talked to her on the phone. She said you’d be coming back, and that you knew the truth.”
“What do you mean you talked to her?”
“She called me.”
“She—called you?”
“It’s what she wanted!” he started blathering. “I thought I was doing her a favor. I thought … I thought … I thought she’d love me for it.” He looked at me. “She told you everything?”
“No,” I said. I started putting it together. The way he acted the day at my barbecue …
“You were fucking her, too?” he said.
“No,” I said. Why hadn’t I noticed the clues? Why hadn’t Bryan? The way he acted when we talked about her; how he’d been keeping a low profile after Payne’s murder; his reactions to Cassandra when she came to the ball game …
Had she come to the game to see him, or me?
“How long had you been … seeing her?” I asked.
“Three or four months. I’m not even sure how it happened. It just did,” he said. He now sat down, across from me.
I knew what he meant.
“She didn’t want to see me anymore,” David went on. “She said because of her husband, if he ever found out, all a bunch of crap. I suggested that maybe if he were to disappear, maybe we could be together. ‘Maybe,’ she said. I said I’d kill him for her. She didn’t think I was serious. But I was serious.”
“So you did it.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I bought a gun. I waited for him at the airport. I followed the cab. I pulled up alongside the cab … I was crazy.”
Part of Bryan’s theory was right.
“You did all this for that woman?” I said. “For—”
“Didn’t
you?”
He had me there.
We were silent for the longest minute.
“So what now,” he said.
“What now,” I said, holding up my hands.
“Will you turn me in?”
“I’m done with this whole fucking thing,” I told him. “You do whatever you feel is the right thing to do.”
“I should turn myself in,” he said.
The truth is, I wanted to kill him. I wanted to jump up, grab him by the neck, and take his life for the mess he’d caused. He started the ball rolling. If he hadn’t killed Payne, many people would be alive, including Jessica and Bryan.
I didn’t have it in me to even move.
“Do what you feel is right,” I said.
David nodded and left.
He never turned himself in. He drove out to the Anza-Borrego desert, a good sixty miles from the city, and put a bullet in his head, with the same gun he’d used to shoot Payne. His body wasn’t found for weeks, but the police didn’t put it together. He left a note in his car. It said:
Jellyfish.
Who knew what that meant. The cops decided it meant nothing.
I could’ve solved everything for the cops, but I had too much to risk. I was connected to a lot of dead bodies in Las Vegas. I’d have to answer too many questions, I’d have to reveal too many secrets. After a while, Vegas seemed too weird to be real, and I started to become skeptical about the accuracy of my memory.
I just wanted to be done with all this.
The following days
I spent enduring the untidy, ugly, and sad business of saying good-bye to the dead. First, there was my daughter’s funeral. Tina wore black, her face veiled, and Matthew wore a black suit. Neither one of them spoke to me. This didn’t surprise me, and it didn’t hurt. I was a hollow thing. Members of both our families didn’t ostracize me—for which I was both thankful and weary of. Had Tina said anything to anyone? Did anyone know that I was with someone else while my son set the fire and my daughter ran into the street? The day after we buried Jessica, I was served with divorce papers by Tina’s lawyer. I called the lawyer (thankfully it was someone in my former profession that I didn’t know) and told him I wouldn’t give a fight, I wanted to make it a clean divorce, Tina could have whatever she wanted. The lawyer, pleased to hear this, told me that Tina only wanted half of our money and property, and wanted me to foot the bill for Matthew’s psychiatric care. I said fine. He also informed me that a wrongful death suit had been filed against the city regarding Jessica’s death, and he was certain the city would quickly settle, and that Tina didn’t want me to make a claim on whatever money she collected from that settlement. I said this was fine as well.
Bryan’s funeral was next. Tina was there, again in black, and again, she did not speak to me or acknowledge my presence.
I couldn’t sleep in the house, I couldn’t even stay another second. It was going to be put up for sale anyway. I was going to rent an apartment, or maybe just a room somewhere downtown.
If the police suspected Cassandra of anything, I would never know. They did investigate Bryan’s murder—asking me questions about the man who’d shot him. I knew other investigations were going on in Nevada. Would they eventually piece it all together? I expected the police—or the FBI or the Treasury Department—to show up and haul me away one of these days. They’d found the Mustang and Rook’s body, as well as the body of a young woman and two men, and Boyd’s body in the motel room … all connected to the bodies of five federal agents in an abandoned casino … all connected to a dead banker and cab driver … connected to a dead ex-cop and a little girl … and finally me.
They never came. Not then, and not to this day.
The only thing I can figure, someone cleaned up the mess in Las Vegas.
What I did get was a letter from Cassandra Payne. It read:
Take the money, save it, and send your son to college, do something useful with it.
Enclosed was a cashier’s check for thirty thousand dollars. The same amount she’d spent to have her husband removed from her life. The check was issued from a bank in New Jersey, the envelope postmarked from New York City.
Eventually, I cashed the check. I placed ten thousand in a trust fund for Matthew. He wouldn’t be able to touch it until he was twenty-one, unless he was enrolled in college. That was my stipulation. It was so very far in the future, I realized.
As for the rest, it was a good sum with which to try and start my life over. I talked myself into believing that I deserved the twenty thousand, and that Cassandra Payne owed it to me to help me begin a new life, since she was instrumental—whether she acknowledged her part or not—in destroying my old one.
I called my
lawyer acquaintance, Ray McCann, and asked him if he recalled our conversation at the barbecue party, when he was drunk, offering me a job doing paralegal or investigative work.
“Well, um,” he said, “ah …”
“Don’t worry, Ray. I’m not calling for a job. I was wondering if you knew any good private investigators.”
“Oh,” he said, “there’s a couple I’ve worked with.”
“I need to hire one.”
“Oh. Well, yes. I can refer you to this one fellow.”
I hired a young private eye named Desmond Bell. I gave him all the information I had on Rachel Vaughn—last known residence in Chicago, twenty-nine or thirty years old. This was all Bryan had given me. The PI conceded that it wasn’t a lot, but he’d give it a try. He found her in two weeks. She was living in Portland, Oregon, where she worked as a waitress in a diner.
I went to Portland.
I sat in
the all-night diner. It was 7 P.M. I had a hamburger, was nibbling at it. My waitress’s name tag read RACHEL. She was a little plump, with dyed red hair pulled back. I could see Bryan’s features on her.
She gave me my check.
“Rachel.”
“Yeah.”
“Would you sit down with me? Can we talk?”
“Don’t waste your time,” she said. “I just got divorced and I’ve sworn off men.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you about your father.”
She frowned. “Say what?”
“Bryan Vaughn. He was your father?”
“Who the fuck are you?” She raised her voice, took a step back.
“It’s all right,” I said quickly. “I was a friend of your father’s. We were—neighbors. He passed away two months ago.”
She opened her mouth. She didn’t say anything. Her eyes got big and several tears fell down her face. She sat across from me.
“He’s dead?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How?”
“He was shot.”
“In the line of duty?”
“No. He was retired from the force.”
“How did he get shot?”
“It’s a long story.”
“How do I know you’re not lying? What’s my mother’s name?”
“Ellen. She’s a librarian.”
Rachel nodded.
I said, “Your father, before he died, wanted me to find you.”
“How is my mother?” she asked.
“She’s okay,” I said, although I knew she wasn’t.
“I get off in an hour,” Rachel said. “Will you wait for me? We’ll go get a drink and talk.”
I watched her finish her shift, moving zombielike, an automaton filling coffee cups and taking orders. I wondered what she was thinking, what was going on inside her? I felt very sad.
We went across the street to a bar. She had a beer, I had water. We sat in a small and dark booth. There weren’t very many people in the bar.
I told her the story—not the whole story, of course, but what she needed to know.
She listened, and looked sad in a hard kind of way. I could see a lot of pain pushed back on her face. Not just the pain of the news but other pain.
She told me it had never been her intention to stay out of touch with her parents this long. She didn’t want to look back, she wanted to reshape her life, her history, forget that she had a policeman for a father, a weak woman for a mother, and a sister that had killed herself. She wanted to call home, or go home, but the past ten years had been one failure after another—she’d been married and divorced twice, had one stillbirth, and had been a heroin addict for two years but was now clean. She was thirty and barely supporting herself waiting tables. She was ashamed, she told me; she didn’t want her parents to know what a pathetic life she’d led.
“I understand,” I said.
“The hell you do,” she said.
“I do,” I said.
She studied my face. “I think you do.”
I decided to have a beer. I told her about the months during which her father and I would drink beer and sit around and chat. I told her Bryan loved her, had always love her. I told her that her mother needed her.
“Wait, stop,” she said, holding out a hand, looking away. “This is too much for me. Okay? This is too much right now.”
I walked her home. She had an apartment ten blocks away. It was starting to rain. She invited me inside. Now that we were not in a public place she started to cry, to really let it out. I held her to me, I let her cry onto my chest.
S
even weeks later, I moved up to Seattle and rented a house. Rachel moved in with me. We had taken a trip back to San Diego, where she was reunited with her mother. I think Ellen knew what was going on between us, and I think she was happy. A year later, when we told Ellen we were getting married, she gave us her blessing.
We had a quiet wedding, with Ellen and a few friends in Seattle attending.
We moved to Tallahassee, Florida. I don’t know why. Maybe to get away from all the rain. Maybe because the weather was like San Diego. Rachel got a job at a real estate firm, and I took—and passed—the Florida State Bar. I was an attorney again. I got a job at the public defender’s office, just like I’d done the first time around.
Rachel was pregnant in our third year of marriage. We had a daughter and named her Brianna.
As for Matthew, despite therapy, he continued to set fires. He set a big one, and was placed in a juvenile detention center. When I told Tina I was getting remarried, all she said was, “Be good to her. Don’t fuck around on her like you did to me.”
I wanted to tell Rachel the real story, the whole story. But I knew she wouldn’t believe it. And after a while, I didn’t see the point. I wouldn’t have believed it either.
Two years later
—five years after Las Vegas—I chanced upon Cassandra Payne at the JFK Airport.
I was in New York to depose a witness; it was a high-profile case in Florida that could make or break my career as a defense attorney. I was waiting for my flight, and in one of the bars I saw a woman—from the corner of my eye—who looked like someone I knew.
I approached her. She was at the counter, drinking a bourbon on the rocks. She wore a long dark skirt with a high slit on one side, and a white blouse. Her black hair was the same, parted in the middle. Her perfume was the same—and I felt five years younger, and I was scared.
Oh yes, I was scared.
“Cassandra?”
She turned. She smiled. “Well, Mr. Lansdale.”
I didn’t know what to do—hug her, kiss her on the cheek. What would be the proper move? I didn’t do anything. I found myself staring at her thick, dark eyebrows, and remembering more: feeling things I didn’t want to feel.
She wasn’t the least bit fazed by my presence. “What brings you to New York?” she said.
“Business, leaving,” I replied.
She looked just the same, but I was different—ten pounds heavier, receding hairline. At least I had a Florida tan.
“I’m leaving too,” she said.
“But you live here now? In New York,” I questioned, recalling the postmark on the letter she sent.
She didn’t acknowledge that. She asked, “How have you been?”
There was so much I wanted to tell her. I’d thought often of this day, when I could report to her what my life had become after our experience together, the use that I’d made of the money she sent, that I had another daughter now (a day didn’t go by that I didn’t think of little Jessica, and the plastic dinosaurs she loved so dearly).
Before I could utter a word, we were joined by a tall, handsome man with slicked-back dark hair. He looked to be in his mid-twenties. His teeth were very even and white. He wore a sharp pin-striped suit, the kind you’d expect a stockbroker or banker to wear.
“Dear,” she said to the man, “this is Mr. Philip Lansdale. We used to know each other—we used to be next-door neighbors once, believe it or not.”
“Oh,” he said. “A weird coincidence, meeting
here
, I bet.” He had a New York accent. I had a feeling he
was
a stockbroker.
“It happens sometimes,” she said.
“Synchronicity?” he asked her.
“That has to do with events,” she told him. “This is a chance encounter.”
“Joe Greynard,” he said to me. “Cassandra’s husband.” He held out his hand. I shook hands with him, and looked into his pretty blue eyes. I understood that he didn’t know a thing.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Well, we should get going,” he said to his wife. “Our plane’s boarding.”
“We’re off to Barbados,” Cassandra said.
“Much needed vacation,” her husband added.
“I hope you have a nice trip,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“It was nice seeing you again, Mr. Lansdale,” Cassandra said.
“You too—Mrs. Greynard,” I said.
“Cheerio,” she said, with intention, licking her lips. She looked at her drink, and then me.
They walked out of the bar. Cassandra turned, and smiled; it was a quick motion, something her husband didn’t notice. I smiled back.
Yes, we shared a big secret. We always would.
Her glass was half-full. I drank what was left. It tasted like a night long ago, of forbidden lust and outlandish terror.
I waved at the bartender and ordered another Wild Turkey on the rocks.