The Midnight Road Page 8

Flynn scowled and said, “Can’t you smell it?”

  He was surprised Raidin wasn’t already rousting Harry, hammering at him. It was a misstep on his part, Flynn figured. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a chance to kill two birds with one stone. Setting Flynn up to set up Harry Arnold. He searched Raidin’s eyes and got back nothing. No, it wasn’t a mistake. This guy was slick. This guy was using the whole scene as leverage on Flynn. Raidin wanted him to pull something funky, act up, cause a scene. The more he saw, the better he could gauge Flynn.

  Flynn wanted to move and he didn’t want to move. He wanted to talk to Harry Arnold. He wanted to get Raidin off his back. He shot a glance at Grace on the floor and he thought of how happy she’d looked in the diner the last time he saw her, telling him about L.A.

  “Okay, if you won’t shake him, I will.” Flynn started across the room.

  Raidin reached out to grab Flynn’s wrist. His grip was surprisingly strong, backed with wiry muscle and stolid intent. He latched on tight. It wasn’t a cop thing. This was short-guy syndrome. It had to do with being the toughest kid in the room. Raidin didn’t like Flynn’s attitude, but he especially didn’t dig the fact that he had so little effect on him. That he couldn’t intimidate Flynn or force him back a step. It was about as schoolyard as it got. Flynn was taller but suffered the same. The longer he stood in this house, the more conscious he was of the feeling that he belonged here and everyone else didn’t.

  Flynn snapped free and walked over to Harry Arnold. He’d always suspected the guy was a borderline pedo. The man had lost a wife and a stepdaughter in the last three days. Death clung to him heavily, and so did his guilt. Harry would break down and admit he’d raped Grace a couple of weeks down the line. Flynn didn’t feel like waiting.

  He sat down across from Arnold at the dining room table and said, “Hello, Harry. Condolences.”

  Harry Arnold raised his chin. His bottom lip hung slack and his eyes were hooded. Flynn got the feeling that Harry couldn’t quite see him, so he leaned over the table and flicked Harry on the forehead.

  One of the cops made a move to grab Flynn. But Raidin was making heavy eye contact with his men. He wanted to see how this played out. The atmosphere shifted from crime scene to potential action. This was as much a test of Flynn as it was of Harry. It was rope. One of them was bound to swing soon. Maybe both of them. Flynn never questioned for an instant that he was right. He didn’t know much, but he knew predators.

  Harry Arnold’s eyes were opening wider.

  “There we go,” Flynn said. “How you doing?”

  Harry recognized him. He glanced around to see what was happening, wondering why Flynn was there, why the cops let him get away with flicking a bereaved father’s head. Something uncoiled in Flynn’s chest, warming him. He smiled. Depending on the situation, his smile could be charming or disarming or he could look a touch deranged. It came in handy. Harry quit making sobby noises. His eyes cleared and filled with suspicion and fear. He sniffed one last time and said, “You. Why are you here?”

  “I’d like to ask you a question.”

  “Go away.”

  “I wish I could, Harry, I really wish I could.” Flynn’s breath came in short sharp intakes. The edges of his vision began to blacken. He wondered if he was hyperventilating. He had a particularly crazy idea that, having survived underwater for so long, he didn’t really need to breathe anymore.

  “I don’t want you to ask me any questions.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do. But that’s why I’m here.”

  Harry’s gaze wandered over to the cops, moving from face to face, pleading. None of them responded. They were going to let Flynn run with it.

  “Why’d she do it, Harry? Why’d Grace kill herself?”

  “Her heart was broken,” he whined. “Because of her mother—”

  Flynn’s hand flashed out. He slapped Harry hard across the nose. Bad dog. A man had a lot of armor and shielding. Quickest way through was to treat him with complete disdain. It’s what Grace’s mother had done to her, breaking her apart from the inside out. Pedos and rapists were all about imposing their own will on others, abusing power. Show them they had none and they’d implode.

  Flynn was aware of Grace on the floor. He knew her death was due in part to his own failure. If he’d smacked Harry around four years ago she would’ve had a better chance to put her pain behind her. Flynn hadn’t been careful enough. His arm stretched out again and he caught Harry’s nose and twisted it. Harry let out a tiny, girlish squeal. He didn’t get up from his chair, though, and didn’t fight back.

  “Tell me about it, Harry. Tell me what you did.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I went out for a pack of—”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “You’re not a cop, what are you doing here?” he whined. This was it, all it would take was a small push in the right place.

  You had to connect to them. You had to say what they’d never voice themselves. You pulled the words out of their brains and shoved them one after the other into your own. Your voice became theirs. You began their confession for them, hoping they’d pick it up and run with it.

  “Let me tell you how it was,” Flynn said. His eyes unfocused and he began to speak of watching a beautiful girl growing from a flat-chested pubescent into a sexpot beauty no man could keep his eyes off of. The anger and resentment that built up. The hatred of libido. The failure of will. The parceling of guilt and anger. The passing of lustful grudges and envy onto a bitter wife. Flynn’s voice took on a silky tone that he despised. The black nerve pulsed.

  Harry Arnold squirmed in his seat with his hands doing infantile things in the air. Small sounds began to emerge from the back of his throat. They made no sense. They weren’t words yet. It would take time.

  Soon Harry said the name with a hallowed and almost loving tone. “Grace.” He repeated it under his breath in a hymn of pain and deliverance. It rang through the house in a dull chord of confession. He was asking her forgiveness.

  It was easy to find the weakness. It was one that many men had in the depths they never ventured. Some ignored it. Some fought it. Many denied it. Subjugated, imprisoned, but never fully managed to kill the urge. Occasionally the weakness reached up into their minds and consumed them. It released a man’s evil into the act of love.

  “What’d you do to her, Harry? Tell me.”

  As if a series of locks inside him were opening one after the other, Harry Arnold slowly filled with enough real emotion to darken his face. His eyes widened, seeing something beyond himself. Flynn knew the look. Harry was meeting his own memories. He started crying. Real tears this time. He couldn’t stop saying her name. It took on a bitter timbre as Harry’s mouth filled with salt. “I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help myself.”

  Flynn had to jump-start him again. He spoke Grace’s name himself, putting an edge of finality to it. Harry Arnold admitted he sometimes acted poorly.

  “You drove her to it.”

  “I couldn’t stop myself.”

  “Say it out loud, Harry.”

  “I did some things to her when she was younger. I did them again. I made love to her. It was love. It was all the love I had.”

  “You lousy motherfucking piece of shit.”

  Flynn stood and thought that one solid punch to Harry’s nose—hearing the cartilage snap, seeing the burst of blood—would make him feel much better. But Grace was still dead on the floor, and this wasn’t about Flynn’s rage. He’d failed her. He hadn’t done enough. There was still so much to do, for so many others. He had to try harder.

  This wasn’t connected to Angela Soto. Flynn stood and glanced over at where Grace’s body had been lying, but it and the M.E. were gone. He backed away and headed for the door.

  “You enjoy using your fists,” Raidin said.

  “I didn’t use my fists. I just flicked him.”

  “And slapped him. And tweaked his nose.”

  “Still not fists.”

&nb
sp; “What would you have done if I hadn’t been here?”

  “The same thing,” Flynn told him. “He’ll admit what he did to her now, in detail.”

  “It’s still a suicide.”

  “He raped her. He’s sick, he ought to be put away.”

  Raidin grunted at that. It wasn’t a cop’s providence to worry about what ought to be done, just what could be done within the boundaries of the law. “There’s nothing for us to charge him with.”

  Getting up close, nose to nose, only three inches separating them. “You people aren’t worth a good goddamn, you know that?”

  “You play a risky game.”

  “Everybody does.”

  Raidin wasn’t about to give points. He pulled a face and said, “Are you certain you didn’t know Angela Soto?”

  SEVEN

  The reporter from Newsday, Jessie Gray, phoned and said, “You’re becoming quite the story.”

  “Through no fault of my own.”

  “I was hoping we could have that follow-up interview soon.”

  “Man, you weren’t kidding. You really are compulsive. Still checking up on me to see if I’ve had any epiphanies or revelations? Or regrets?” Flynn felt a thick tether of anger tightening inside him and yanking through his gut, pulling him forward. He leaned farther into the phone.

  “That, and if you have any thoughts on who murdered that prostitute. After all, the hitter wrote you a note.”

  She had good sources. And she respected them. The note was a piece of information left clear of the police reports as a way to weed out the admission addicts who’d be calling the hotlines falsely confessing to the crime. She’d left it out of her latest article too. But she knew about it.

  He could just see her grinning there on the other side of the line, thinking up more things to hit him with. Her voice, with a lilt of humor because she was doing what she did best. “The police think you know more than you’re telling them.”

  “They’re just trying to comb through a major mess,” he told her. “It makes sense they’d latch on to me.”

  “It doesn’t make you upset?” she asked. “That you’re a suspect?”

  “I’m not a real suspect. I’m just a character of questionable repute.”

  “Does that salve you in any fashion?”

  “More accurate anyway.”

  A subtle scratching drifted over the line. He heard her writing, pen on paper. It sounded like doodling, the pen point circling and circling, digging through the sheets. If it was a sign of frustration, he couldn’t hear any in her voice. “You use that word quite a bit. Accurate.”

  “Do I? I hadn’t noticed.” Actually, he had.

  “Yes. As if you fear distortions and bias.”

  “I have respect for precision.”

  “Let’s discuss it more. Say tonight? Dinner on me?”

  The noir conventions drew him in. He imagined her wafting through a high-class nightclub toward his table. The poise and confidence and clean, moderate good looks catching some attention but not enough to give her date a jealous twinge. Him sitting there in a tux, friends with the owner. Cops at the door, he and Jessie escaping out the back past a blonde in silver sequins about to take the stage. The killer only a shadow in the blizzard, turns out to be his best friend. Except he didn’t have any friends.

  “Mr. Flynn?”

  He still liked the way she talked, but he wasn’t in the mood for the whip-crack aggression tonight, and he knew she’d come at him strong, cutting into his soft spots. “That might not be such a good idea.”

  “I’ve got a feeling about you.”

  “Yeah, what kind?”

  “A bad feeling, which is good for me.”

  He hung up on her.

  He went back to work on the Charger, refitting the headers. The cops watching him were out on the street, their exhaust pipe the only one smoking because they were running the heat. The windows were cracked to keep from steaming up inside. Flynn figured they’d keep an eye on him another two or three days and then call the surveillance quits. Raidin would probably brace him one more time just to squeeze out what last few drops he could.

  Flynn had been at it over an hour when he saw the long, straight blond hair coming at him from across the lot. She was walking that same way as the last time he’d seen her in the hospital. With a forceful intent, as if heading toward an important goal. She had a natural grace. The heavy purse swung wildly, like David’s slingshot picking up speed to take down a behemoth. He didn’t like the intimations she’d made on the phone. He had the feeling she’d throw him under a train if it gave her a punch ending to her latest article. He tried to remember that she’d quoted him accurately when everyone else in the papers was making innuendos and implications designed to put him in the bull’s-eye. He wondered if he could trust her.

  The fact that he was maybe fifteen years older than her began to unsettle him. He was only forty but he recognized the dirty-old-man syndrome in himself. In some ways, she reminded him of Grace Brooks. In others, he saw Marianne. He watched her coming toward him, toward the car, the way he’d watched Danny’s lovers swaying their hips thirty years ago. He couldn’t shake the drift. He began to smooth his white patch of hair.

  She hit a pose in front of him. Her dark eyes weren’t all that dark at all; they were the color of nickel. That glimmer of bemusement was gone, which made him realize he’d been right to hang up on her. She knew she couldn’t run roughshod over him. She couldn’t cover him the way she could cover a school vote on healthier lunches. Now she’d have to try for a new way in. Whatever it was, he knew it was going to hurt.

  “That was rather rude of you,” she said.

  “I’m a rather rude person on occasion.”

  “So am I. I should’ve been more sympathetic. That wasn’t kind of me.”

  It wasn’t an apology, but he figured it was about as close as she ever came. She must really be thrilled about his story’s potential to be making such an effort. “So this is the famous Charger. Danny Flynn’s muscle car.”

  So there it was.

  The needle. The rise.

  She’d intoned Danny’s name with just the right emphasis. She’d wanted to find a way into him, and now she had.

  You had to give her credit. She’d done a little digging. Thirty years—she’d have had to put some time in at the paper’s morgue. She wasn’t just sitting on a computer letting others do the deep work. She’d gotten dusty.

  He stared up from the engine and said, “It’s mine.”

  “You think you can get it running again?”

  “I will.”

  “Some of the tabloids have picked up on the piece, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Covering it from a different angle. They’re running ‘Curse of the Deadly Car’ stories. ‘Murder on the Road,’ that sort of thing. They’ve got photos so they’re lurking about.”

  “I know,” Flynn said, “I’ve seen them.”

  “Your bad guy might be posing as one.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It doesn’t worry you much, does it?” she asked. She liked angling her jaw to the right. He wondered if she thought it was her best side. He liked them both.

  “It worries me,” he said.

  “You handle it well.” She hugged herself and stomped her feet against the ice. “Look, maybe you don’t like me much, but I would like to talk with you further and I’m starting to freeze here, my nose hairs are starting to stick together. I hate that feeling. Can we go inside?”

  “I didn’t think ladies ever talked about things like nose hairs.”

  “We don’t under normal circumstances, but if the situation calls for it, we can manage pretty well.”

  He threw his tools back in the box and slammed the Charger’s hood. For an instant he thought he saw Danny behind the wheel, but he often saw that. It was his own reflection in the windshield.

  Small clouds of her breath broke around the back of his neck as
he led her up to his second-floor apartment. She was, he guessed, the first person to enter the place besides himself in maybe a year.

  He had no furniture in the living room except for a couch, a coffee table and a decent home-entertainment system. The apartment was small but because it was so empty it felt like you could do ballroom dancing in it.

  She stared at all his film noir posters, gazing back at Bogie and Bacall, Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, Tyrone Power trying to find his way back from Nightmare Alley, John Garfield and Lana Turner in a half embrace having just bumped off her husband in The Postman Always Rings Twice. A framed press book for The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers hung parallel to a lobby card showing Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte about to end each other in Odds Against Tomorrow.

  She noticed the seams and creases. “And I thought I was obsessive. These are originals?”

  “You are obsessive, and yes, they’re originals.”

  “You must’ve spent a fortune.”

  “Yeah, but they’ve only gotten more rare. I could sell them for twice what I paid. They’re about the only things I ever really cared about. I let my ex have everything else.”

  “Don’t you think at your age you should care about more than movies and fast cars?”

  “It’s only one fast car, and I’m predisposed to noir.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “My old man got me hooked when I was six or seven. I was imprinted with a passion for them. I watch lots of DVDs but I prefer seeing them on the big screen. The Paradigm and a couple other theaters in Greenwich Village have revivals all the time.”

  “I’d love to go with you sometime,” she said, as if responding to a question he’d never asked.

  “Sure.”

  She moved off and looked out the window facing the parking lot. “And that imprinting, your predisposition, your passion…it’s the same thing for your brother Danny’s car.”

  He never wanted to see it that way, but it might be true. “I suppose so.”

  “You sound almost resentful.”

  “Do I?”

  They sat on the couch together. He had nothing to offer. He kept no liquor in the apartment, and he didn’t think he even had any soda. Asking if she wanted a drink of water was just too damn silly. It only served to remind him that he’d never been social and had only gotten worse with age.