Chapter Twenty-Seven
Carmel asked, 'Are you wearing a wire?' They were still standing in the living room, by the open door to the hallway.
'No. Should I be?' Lucas stepped over to the door and pushed it shut.
'When I think about it, I don't really care,' Carmel said. 'I'm gonna get you for this, Davenport, I swear to God. I'm gonna dedicate my life to it.'
'Gonna take a lot of dedication, if you're out at the women's prison for thirty years,' Lucas said.
She flushed, and he could see her eye-teeth, bared, as she spoke: 'There's not gonna be any prison. Not for me. Could be for you, when we're done with you.
You've got nothing.'
Lucas shook his head and said, 'They're arguing about that over at the courthouse. Some of the guys think we've got enough, some of them don't. Gonna be close.' He drifted across the living room as he talked, poked his head into the guestroom, then continued to her bedroom, Carmel following him down the hall. 'What do you want in here?' she demanded.
'I'm just closing the place down, making sure nobody left anything behind,' he said. The shell was between two shoes in the open part of the closet. 'I'll tell you something, Carmel. Just between you and me – and I don't care if you're wearing a wire. I know you were involved in these killings. I know it. I know you were involved in the first one, Barbara
Allen, and I think you did it because you wanted Hale. You were screwing him before the body was in the ground.'
'You don't know that.'
'I do know that. Hale told me that.'
'Hale?' Her hand went to her throat.
'Yeah. We had a long talk about you. I know all about you, about your sexual preferences, about what you like to talk about in bed. And you know what? You scared the shit out of Hale. He didn't have the courage to stop you, but he did have the courage to come in and talk to me, and I taped it. Hale telling me about how you hated Barbara, about how she was holding him back, about how he was lucky to be rid of her.' Lucas was adding that last bit on, but he bet it was true.
'That sonofabitch,' she said.
'Naw. He was just a dummy. Worked hard, liked women, not too much upstairs. Not a lot of guts, either – but he was just trying to get through life. He felt guilty about Louise Clark, but a lot of guys who love their wives have affairs.
And Louise was something else in bed. He couldn't stop talking about her. He said she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch: that's the way he put it. He said that compared to
Clark, you were like the Roman Army, just grinding him down.'
'He never said that,' Carmel shouted. But there were tears streaking her face now, and she hated it, and screamed louder, 'Hale never said that.'
'Yeah, he did, and I think you know it, because it rings right,' Lucas said. He felt odd, standing in the cool, professionally-feminine bedroom, alone with this tear-streaked woman, hands in his pants pocket, almost abashed: he felt cruel.
He pushed on. 'He said you were like some kind of machine, marching all over him. But he was afraid to dump you, because he was… afraid. Because he thought you may have killed his wife.'
'Louise Clark killed her… and him.'
'Oh, please,' Lucas said, sounding in his own ears like a character in a New
York TV comedy. 'Louise Clark had him. He was going to marry her, as soon as he could get rid of you. And Louise Clark, to tell you the truth, was a good match for him. Smart enough, but not exactly the wizard of the western world. But a nice woman. And good in bed. And as far as we can tell from talking to all of her friends, Louise Clark had never fired a gun in her life, right up to the day when we found her in the middle of that phony suicide tableau in her bedroom.'
'Fuck you, Davenport,' Carmel said, crossing her arms over her chest. 'Get out of my house.'
Lucas said, 'Yeah, I'm going: I'll scout the…' It seemed a little faked, he didn't do it quite right, the frown, the near double-take, but Carmel was tired, stretched out of shape. 'What is that?'
'What?' Carmel was confused.
'Here,' Lucas said. He brushed past her, pushed the sliding door back so he could get a better look at the shoe. 'Goddamnit.'
He stood up, took Carmel by the arm and said, 'Come out here,' tugging her toward the living room.
'Let go of me…' She tried to pull away.
'I just want you out in the living room with me…' And in the living room he shouted, 'Hello? Hey, anybody here? Goddamnit…'
Carmel took a step back toward the bedroom and Lucas said, 'No.' And he said it with bite, and she stopped. He looked around, stepped into the kitchen, got a roll of SaranWrap from the kitchen counter and carried it back toward the bedroom. She followed behind him and he knelt by the closet door and pushed the shoe away and, wrapping his thumb and forefinger with Saran Wrap, picked up the cartridge.
'A. 22,' he said. He looked at her. 'A fuckin'. 22.'
'You put that there,' she said.
'Bullshit. You know I didn't put it there. And I'll tell you what – I bet it's got your fingerprints on it. I bet it'll check out when they do the metallurgy, won't it? What'd you do, drop a box of. 22s in the closet? Shuck out a clip or something? How'd the cartridge get into your closet, Carmel?'
Davenport seemed to recede from her. He loomed over her in real space, but the pressure on her was so great that he seemed to squeeze down, until he looked like a little man seen through the glass peephole on an apartment door. Carmel's brain stopped: she couldn't bear this. She said something to him, but she didn't know what, and walked stiff-legged out of the bedroom. He was talking to her, at her, reached out to her, but she batted his arm away.
She was screaming back at him, but a broken, isolated part of her brain seemed to be in control, now. She walked straight across the living room, picked up a fistful of car keys from the entry table, and went out the door, leaving the door open, Davenport staring after her, saying something incomprehensible at her back…
Out the door, down the hall, into the elevator, pushing blindly at the buttons, out the door at Five, into the parking ramp, down the ramp to the blue Volvo, into the trunk, into the gym bag, out with the gun.
Because this is where she'd put the gun she got from Rinker: the car, with her mother's registration under her mother's new married name, nobody to know, nobody even to look at such an out-of-character non-Carmel-like motor vehicle.
She marched back through the door, propelled by the rage, got the elevator where it waited, the gun solid in her hand.
Lucas watched her go out the bedroom door, thought,
'Whoa.' He followed after her, holding the shell. He had to tell her that he was taking the shell with him: she had to see the shell go in his pocket. But something about the way she was walking, robotlike, across the front room. And suddenly he feared she'd had some kind of a stroke, and he said, 'Carmel?
Carmel? Are you all right?'
Then she was gone down the hall. He stood uncertainly in the bedroom door for a moment, expecting her to come back, then flipped out his cell phone, punched a speed dial button and said, when Sherrill answered, 'This is me. I think something's happened to Carmel. She just went out of here, acting weird.'
'Want us to come back up?'
'No. I'll… Well, maybe. Yeah. Come on back. Think of some reason to come back, I'm gonna check on her.'
Lucas walked across the living room, out into the hall – and she was gone.
Either through the door into the stairway, or the elevators. Lucas walked down to the elevators and pushed the button. He bounced on his toes for a moment, thought about going down to look at the stairway door, then thought about the apartment door and hurried back, checked that it wasn't locked and started to pull it shut. At that precise moment, an elevator dinged, and Lucas stepped toward it. 'Carmel?'
She stepped out of the elevator: Lucas didn't see it as it was coming up, didn't instantly recognize it in the context, but then…
Carmel fired at him as the sights crossed the line of his face and saw the surprise and the gun jumped and Davenport was moving sideways and down and she felt the rush of a kill and tracked him with the barrel and fired again and again and then…