“Gonna get fuckin’ straight, man, I tell you what.”
Daley wandered away, and Nick tried to find a place to sit, but could not. It was all pine seedlings and rock and humps of dirt to him. He was not about to sit down in the dirt with his party clothes on. He was headed for Main and a night with a whore. What on earth was this delay about? Why in the fuck were they in Bloomington anyway, and where in Bloomington were they? Nick stumbled around trying to put his brain into some kind of order.
Daley walked around the ghostly land with his hands in his pockets. By odd chance Nick found him, and together they stared into the dark.
“What you see?” Nick asked in a whisper, squinting around him.
“Graves.”
“Oh Jesus, doan say that, Daley. I need a drink.”
“You’ve been coming here, haven’t you, Nick?”
The question seemed to hang in the air a long time before it finally trickled into Nick’s numbed brain.
“Coming here?” He laughed hoarsely. “Only way you got me here tonight was catching me bombed outta my gourd. I doan come here.”
“You been doing it?” Daley asked, not looking at his brother.
A shaft of comprehension struck Nick’s drugged mind, and he commanded his tongue to work properly so there would be no mistake.
“I fuckin’ didn’t do nothing, Daley, nothing, you understand?”
Daley kicked a clod of dirt and it rolled into the ditch. “I think you did, Nick. I think you know you did. But I’ll never tell. I want you to know that. If the police come with questions about this, I’ll protect you.”
Nick was thoroughly confused, and he wanted to go to sleep very badly. “I didn’t hurt her,” he stammered, suddenly fearful. “Not Madra.”
“I know you didn’t, but you hurt the others. They’re out here, aren’t they?” Daley asked.
“Who? Lissen, Daley, I’m fucked up, okay? And you are not making sense to me.”
“Come on, we’ll go home.” Daley put an arm around his brother’s shoulder and took him back to the car.
Nick trembled under the force of his brother’s affection. He knew, because he had been told, that he would be protected, though from what or from whom he did not know. It was enough to know he was loved.
“Let’s get some beer,” he said, suddenly cheerful again. “Then let’s go down to Main and find us a girl.”
Again he missed Daley’s answer, and wondered if his hearing was failing or the whole conversation they had been having was nothing but a hallucination. But when they stopped at an all-night grocery in Bloomington and got a six-pack of Miller Nick figured things were all right. All the way to Houston he anticipated the cruise down South Main where he would find a pair of silky legs attached to a twenty-dollar piece of heaven.
CHAPTER 20
HELEN MCCOMBIE rolled from the bed, heaving a weary sigh.
Standing next to the bed she said, “Wel1, let’s get to it!” She glared down at the double roll of fat around her plump waist. “One, two, three, four!”
She lasted through ten toe-touches and ten deep knee bends before falling back on the bed, exhausted and huffing.
“Now the shower,” she told herself, forcing her bulk upright once more.
Her brow was slightly damp with sweat and already the backs of her legs cramped. After the long shower, she applied revitalizing cream to her face and throat, carefully smoothing it on her round, full features.
“You beautiful thing, you’ll be thin and svelte before you know it,” she said to the wall of mirrors behind the sink.
In the adjoining dressing room she slipped on a pale green caftan of pure silk. Along the bordered hem were long-necked pink flamingos that exactly matched the color of Helen’s lipstick.
Fighting and losing the battle of the bulge occupied most of Helen McCombie’s life. If she was not involved in exercise, diets, or positive thinking, she was tinkering with her roses in the heart-shaped garden or trying to make her husband of twenty years confess his disgust with overweight women, something Dr. Mark McCombie would never do. Though Helen did not realize it, she was the most fortunate of women.
Her husband was faithful, considerate, and on his way to taking his place in the Houston medical fraternity beside the famed surgical team, Cooley and DeBakey. Besides the solid marriage that had never depended on her figure for resiliency, Helen was a wealthy woman in her own right. She had a sumptuous River Oaks’ home, a loving husband, good friends, an intelligent daughter at the University of Texas, and every advantage money could buy. But she did not have a Playboy centerfold body, and throughout life it was what she had wanted most.
On the way down the marble stairway Helen did side bends from the waist. Her double chins did a hula when she halted and rolled her head around and around on her shoulders. All the way through the house to the oversized, red-tiled kitchen, she practiced facial exercises that made her look as if she were auditioning for a horror movie.
The house was empty and her footsteps clicked loudly across the polished tile. She touched a control on the wall near the light switch, and from recessed speakers the voice of Aretha Franklin bellowed. Helen smiled and danced with abandon across the width of the kitchen to the refrigerator door. While Aretha belted out “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” Helen chose one carrot stick, a celery stalk, two Tiny Tom tomatoes, and a ripe peach from the crisper. She ate the breakfast while dancing around the kitchen pretending to be a fairy princess. A very thin, beautiful fairy princess.
When she got to the peach, she was dreaming of peach pie, peach cobbler, peach tarts fried in butter, and the biggest tub of whipped cream ever manufactured.
Outside, the first day of March shone brilliantly. Helen touched the wall control, killing the music, and went to the pantry for her gardening gloves. The nursery had told her if she did not get the five new rosebushes into the ground right away, there would be no hope of them blooming this summer.
She opened the French doors leading onto the back terrace and filled her lungs with fresh air. The rosebushes waited on the bricks at her feet. She stooped and fondled the waxy stem of a rose called Midnight. It was supposed to produce a bloom so red that it was nearly black, and though Helen did not believe it, she felt a flutter of excitement at the thought of raising a rosebush with such a peculiar shade of flower. Then there was Heaven Sent. She caressed a trio of midget green leaves. This one was already trying to grow. It would give bouquets of lavender roses the size of a child’s fist. At least that’s what the nursery guaranteed.
“Lovely, little ones,” Helen purred to the potted roses.
She worked diligently in her garden while the quiet morning passed serenely. She was dirtying the silk dress and did not care. She had an entire closetful of caftans, and when she succeeded in ruining them all, she expected to be sixty pounds lighter. Then she would go on an all-day shopping trip to the Galleria for a new wardrobe.
Midnight and Heaven Sent were lovingly planted. Scattered around Helen were her tools: shovel, hoe, a box of rose food, the water hose, a hand trowel, rake, and the three remaining potted bushes. She had almost finished tamping down the earth around Sunset when she had the unpleasant sensation of being watched. Jerking her head up and wiping the perspiration from her face, she looked to the two places where someone might be: the open French doors of the house and the wooden gate leading into the yard. Her gaze stopped at the gate. Her heart pounded fiercely. What was he doing standing there, only his face showing above the gate, watching her work in the garden?
The killer recalled a childhood fantasy as he drove around Houston. He and his brother were not the products of a broken home where an inattentive and sexually active mother thought of them as nuisances.