Accustomed to the Dark Page 15

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “I’ll just shoot him on sight.”

  William smiled. “Joshua, why don’t you write up the report. And then you can take off for the day. Oh. Could I borrow the Ford? I can get it back to you tonight.”

  He had borrowed my car before. His own, a bustle-back Eldorado, was sometimes a bit too conspicuous.

  “Sure,” I said. “Do I get the Cadillac?”

  “You can take Rita’s Mercedes.” An old yellow sedan, as solid as a tank, and almost as fast.

  “Fine,” I said. I stood. “Look,” I told him. “I screwed up. I should’ve handled it differently.”

  “Water under the bridge,” he said. He smiled. “Do up the report and then take off. We’ll bring the car over to your place. After nine o’clock, I imagine. We’ll stop in and say hello.”

  “I’ll get out the pretzels and beer.” I turned to Rita. “Take care with Martinez.”

  She smiled. “Thanks, Slugger.”

  When you look back at your life, you discover, or you invent, points in time that seem to be tightly knotted nodes of possibility. Out of the seemingly endless options that present themselves in a given situation, you choose one in particular, and your life and the lives of those around you start moving relentlessly toward a particular outcome.

  One of these nodes, in my life, was the moment I decided to antagonize Ernie Martinez in front of Nancy Gomez. If I’d simply walked away, I’ve often told myself since, things would have proceeded differently.

  Another of these was the moment that I agreed, without any serious thought, to lend my car to William. If I’d stopped to consider, it might have occurred to me that Ernie Martinez would be looking for me.

  But Martinez hadn’t come back at me after the incident at Vanessie’s, and I assumed he wouldn’t come back at me now.

  I stopped for lunch in Wellington, Texas, at two o’clock. Gray chicken-fried steak, gray home fries, gray green beans. By two-thirty, I was back on the road. I was about a hundred and twenty miles from Carlton. The rain kept coming.

  At ten o’clock on that Friday night in June, six years ago, I was lying on the sofa in my living room when I heard the shots. They were loud, fired just outside. There were two of them, followed by two more.

  I was living then in the rear half of a small house on Santa Fe Avenue. The apartment was small—the bedroom closet, where I kept my pistol, wasn’t that far from the living room. But I think that at some level I already knew what had happened, knew who had been shot and why, and I didn’t run to get it. I ran, instead, to the front door and out it, and down the three wooden steps to the narrow driveway.

  I had parked Rita’s Mercedes out on the street, so William could drive my Ford into the driveway. The Ford was there now, and there were two bodies lying in the gravel on either side of it, sprawled in the light of the street lamp like dolls cast aside.

  21

  I ARRIVED IN Carlton, Texas, at a quarter to five in the afternoon. The rain was still hurtling down.

  I keep a small work duffle in the Cherokee. When I stopped at a Circle-K, I turned around, reached back over my seat. I opened the duffle and dug out a thermos bottle, an empty mason jar with a lid, and an old pair of Ziess binoculars. I set the binoculars on the passenger seat, lay the Mason jar on the floor mat. Cradling the thermos like a football, I sprinted through the downpour to the store’s entrance. The air was warm and thick, and the raindrops that spattered against my cheeks felt like blood.

  Inside the store, I filled the thermos with coffee and I bought a couple of plastic-wrapped gray sandwiches, some bottles of water, a package of Fig Newtons. I also bought a small bottle of dishwashing soap and some disposable washcloths. From the clerk, I got some paper cups and the directions to Hillside Avenue, where Thomas Thorogood lived.

  Back in the car, I took the soap and the washcloths from the paper bag. One by one, I covered the interior of the Jeep’s windows with a thin film of soap. To any shopper walking past, I was just a maniac from New Mexico who had a thing for clean windows.

  Just as I finished, the telephone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Joshua Croft?” A male voice, slow and soft and Southern.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Ted Chartoff? In Dallas?” He ended the sentences with a rising inflection, as though they were questions. “Ed Norman asked me to give you a call.”

  “Hello.”

  “Just wanted to let you know that I’m on the stick here. I put out some feelers already, on that Lucero scumbag?”

  “Thanks. I appreciate your help.”

  “No sweat, buddy. I never met that Mrs. Mondragón of yours, but I hear she’s a damn fine woman.”

  “She is.”

  “Don’t you worry. If the scumbag is anywhere near Dallas, I’ll be camping in his asshole by the end of the week.”

  “Save me a bunk.”

  He chuckled. “I’ll do that. And, lookit, I got some stuff on the guy you asked about, Thorogood?”

  “Yeah?”

  “His father’s a big honcho, over in Wichita Falls? Owns a big frozen food company, trucks food to restaurants from here to hell and gone. Junior’s a vice president in the company. Picture of him in one of the Texas magazines, last month. Got it here, you want it. You got a fax?”

  I already had one photograph of Thorogood. Mr. Niederman had printed out a copy of his surveillance shot. But another picture wouldn’t hurt. “Yeah. You can use the same number, after we hang up. Anything else on Thorogood?”

  “He’s a major pussy hound. Doesn’t seem to do much of anything but chase women. Hardly ever shows up at the office, even. That house in Carlton? Used to be the family place. The father signed it over to Junior a couple years ago. I figure the kid for deadwood. Daddy keeps him on the payroll, to give him an allowance? But he sticks him out in Carlton, where he won’t trip over his dick in public. But, lookit, if Junior’s hooked up with Lucero, maybe he’s using Daddy’s trucks to move some nose candy?”

  “Maybe, yeah.” Lucero had apparently used Lyle Monroe in Denver. Maybe he had used Thorogood down here.

  “Okay, lookit,” said Chartoff, “I talked to Dick Jepson, over in Miami? Ed said you were in and out, contact-wise, and he asked me to do a little liaising. Dick’s on board, too. He’s got your number. Anything turns up, he’ll give you a jingle. He can’t reach you, he’ll buzz me. How’s that by you?”

  “Fine. Thanks. After I hang up, give me a couple of minutes to set up the fax.”

  “No sweat. Hang in there, buddy.”

  “Right.”

  I moved the binoculars and the Circle-K bag to the floor mat, tugged Leroy’s briefcase from the back, arranged the computer and fax on the passenger seat. Five minutes later I had my second photograph of Thomas Thorogood.

  A man in his late thirties wearing a tux and a big silly smile, he was sitting at a cloth-covered dinner table, raising a glass of champagne toward the camera. He had dark curly hair and a dark mustache. Sitting beside him, and trying to clamber into his lap, was an attractive woman with eager eyes and long insistent arms and a hairdo that looked like it had been carefully molded from blonde cement. The caption identified her as his fiancée, Miss Lee Ann Horsley, and said she’d won the Miss Wichita Falls title in 1990. Miss Congeniality, too, probably.

  I folded the picture, slipped it into my jacket. I zipped up Leroy’s case and returned it to the back of the Jeep.

  Ten minutes later, I was on Hillside Avenue. If there was a hill anywhere nearby, I didn’t see it. Maybe the hill had been razed, decades ago, to make room for the big frame houses. These weren’t as upscale as the houses in Mr. Niederman’s development outside Denver, but they weren’t hovels either. It was a cozy, dozing neighborhood that had been here for a while, judging by the tall sycamores and magnolias that lined the paved driveways.

  Like the houses on either side of it, 340 Hillside was a large white two-story building, taller than it was wide, with a
steeply pitched roof, a covered porch, and an attached garage with what looked liked servants’ quarters over it. I drove past the place for three blocks, turned around, and drove back. There weren’t many cars parked in the street, but there were a few, and I parked on the side opposite Thorogood’s house, and one house up.

  Through the rain, I had a fairly good view across the lawn. The curtains were drawn at the large window to the left of the porch, probably the living room, and a light was on inside. Maybe someone was home. Or maybe Thorogood liked to leave his lights on.

  I turned off the wipers, turned off the engine. The film of soap on the windows would stop them from fogging over, and keep the view clear. And prevent anyone who spotted the car from wondering why someone was breathing inside it. I moved over into the passenger seat, away from the driver’s window, opened the thermos, poured myself a cup of coffee, and I sat back to wait.

  When I came rushing down the steps of the house on Santa Fe Avenue, I heard the squeal of tires as a car roared off. I was too busy at the time to check it out.

  Rita was lying facedown, unconscious but still breathing. She had been shot once, low in the back, just to the right of her spine. William had been shot twice, once in the stomach and once in the face. He lay on his back and there was a puddle beneath his head, shiny in the lamplight. He wasn’t breathing.

  Later, the cops worked out the way it must have happened. Back then, my name and address were listed in the phone book. Anyone could have learned where I lived. The people who rented the front of the house weren’t at home that night. If it were Martinez who pulled the trigger—and I’d known, since the moment I heard the shots, that it was Martinez who pulled the trigger—he had seen the darkened front, had seen that my car wasn’t in the driveway, and assumed I wasn’t there.

  He had waited in a car at the curb, probably parked just behind Rita’s Mercedes. He had seen my Ford pull up and he had assumed that I was driving. As it turned into the driveway, he had left his own car to stalk up behind it. William was the same height as I was, and from the back he could easily have been mistaken for me. When he and Rita stepped out of the Ford, Martinez had fired.

  Because Rita had been shot in the back, the police were fairly certain that she had been shot first. William had turned at the sound of the gunshots, and he had been facing his killer when he died.

  No one ever knew why Martinez fired first at Rita. He never said. Maybe her presence surprised him. Maybe he simply wanted to hurt any woman he believed to be with me.

  I had heard four shots. The police found the fourth slug in the wall of the house next door.

  When I discovered that Rita was still alive, I raced back up the driveway and back into the house. I dialed 911.

  From then on, things went very much as they were to go six years later. There were cops and paramedics, police cars and ambulances, there were questions and answers. But that time, the ambulance carried Rita away without me beside her.

  After a while Hector was there. We went into my apartment. As manic lights twirled blue and red against the window, I told him about Ernie Martinez.

  I spent four hours outside the house of Thomas Thorogood before anything happened. At nine o’clock, a light went on in an upstairs window.

  The rain had stopped about an hour before. The night was dark, the moon a dull gray blur behind the clouds.

  By that time I had emptied the thermos of coffee, eaten one of the sandwiches and half of the Fig Newtons, and used the Mason jar once.

  A shadow moved in that upstairs room. Through the binoculars, all I could see was the paper on the far wall. It was printed in a floral pattern. A bedroom? Thomas was getting ready to hit the sack?

  No, the lights were still on downstairs.

  He and Lee Ann were together up there?

  After fifteen minutes, the upstairs light went out. Two minutes later, the downstairs light went out. A minute after that, the garage door slowly swung up. The Lincoln backed out. As it came down the driveway, the white wooden door swung slowly shut. A remote.

  The Lincoln backed into a turn, then headed toward me. I ducked below the dashboard before the headlights swept through the car.

  Thorogood was alone. Maybe Lee Ann was back in Wichita Falls, doing her hair.

  So. Follow Thomas or check out the house?

  Follow Thomas. If it looks like he’ll be busy for a while, come back to the house.

  I started the Cherokee, pulled it into a U-turn. I could see, about seventy-five yards ahead, the bright red taillights of the Towncar. I kept my headlights off for a couple of blocks, and turned them on when he made a turn.

  I followed him for about two miles through Clayton. Just at the outskirts of town, where the prairie began to stretch out into the endless empty night, he turned off the highway and pulled into the unpaved parking lot of a roadhouse. It was a long, low, cement block building, its flat roof topped with a huge red and yellow neon sign that said “Wrasslin’ Randy’s” in gaudy script. Standing beside that was a huge blue and yellow neon cowboy, complete with hat, hunkered down into a crouch as though about to leap forward and wreak some havoc.

  The parking lot was only half full, so I drove past it, but slowly. The Towncar was parked by itself at one end of the lot, beside the pole of a solitary light, and Thomas Thorogood was getting out of it.

  He was wearing a black shirt, black jeans, a pair of tan boots, and a pinto cowboy hat that curled upward along the sides of the brim.

  I drove on for a quarter of a mile, made another U-turn, and drove back. I parked the Cherokee at the other end of the lot, concealing it behind the rest of the cars, and I climbed out and walked to the building.

  The entrance door was metal. When I opened it I ran into a dense warm wall of sound. Garth Brooks.

  The place was a large open rectangle with a low panelled ceiling. Apparently, there hadn’t been much decorating money left after the neon sign had gone onto the roof. The bare block walls were painted a flat black. The floor was painted a flat burgundy, and the enamel was chipped here and there, showing gray cement.

  In the center of the room was a small, scuffed wooden dance floor that held a few enthusiastic couples. You could tell that the men were genuine cowboys, because they wore hats, and they touched them often. The women had lots of hair and they all looked like Loretta Lynn. Except for one of them, who looked like Buck Owens. More couples sat at wooden tables in the corners.

  I saw the pinto hat on the bar before I saw Thomas Thorogood. There were people scattered at stools along the length of the bar, but he was sitting at the far left end, alone.

  I walked to the other end of the bar and slid onto a stool. The bar was curved at this end, so I had a good view of Thorogood. Which also meant that he had a good view of me. But I would’ve been still more conspicuous if I’d sat alone at one of the tables.

  He was drinking something out of a rocks glass. Separating us along the bar were an older couple drinking Lone Star beer, two construction workers drinking Lone Star beer, a very old man drinking Lone Star beer, and a pair of women drinking Lone Star beer.

  Unlike the rest, the women were drinking their beer from glasses. Both were blondes in their forties, very well preserved, who at some point had evidently taken styling tips from Lee Ann Horsley. Both were dressed hopefully in tight jeans and brightly colored Western shirts, embroidered at the yoke. So far, no one was circling. But the night was young.

  The bartender waddled over to me. “What kin I getcha?”

  Prematurely balding, he was an immensely fat young man in a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, its sleeves rolled back above pale forearms the size of Virginia hams. The sweatshirt was a necessity, because he was sweating. It was probably always a necessity.

  “A Lone Star,” I told him. When in Rome.

  He waddled to the cooler, bent down with visible effort, opened it, plucked out the long-necked bottle, waddled back. He cracked the bottle open with a church key, set it down on the bar. No glass. Glass
es were for sissy boys.

  “Two dollars,” he said.

  I put a five on the bar and he took it, wiped his forehead with the bunched-up sleeve of the sweatshirt, and then waddled away to make change.

  I sipped at my beer and glanced at Thorogood. He held a cigarette in his right hand. He was staring down at his drink, using his left hand to revolve it slowly, aimlessly, in its place on the bar top.

  The bartender brought me my change and waddled away again.

  “Howdy!”

  I turned to my right. Another cowboy, another hat, sliding onto the stool next to mine. A pressed white cotton shirt, Western-style, and a pair of brown knit pants. He was in his fifties, as lean and weathered as a strip of jerky, and almost as dark. His teeth seemed very white and very plentiful, and he was showing them in a broad grin.

  “Billy Fetterman,” he said, and held out a gnarled brown hand.

  I took it. “Jim Collins.”

  “Pleasure, Jim.” He released the hand from a death grip and hollered to the bartender, “Randy?”

  Randy lumbered over. Fetterman said, “Gimme a Heineken, you don’t mind, and give old Jim here ’nother bottle of that horse piss.”

  Randy lumbered away. Fetterman turned to me. With a stiff index finger he poked up the brim of his hat, the cowboy equivalent of taking it off. A widow’s peak of wiry hair, black and white, showed just beneath the brim. “Where you from, Jim?”

  “Phoenix,” I said.

  “Been there,” he nodded. “Great little town. I’m outta Wichita Falls myself. Been there?”

  “Not yet.” I glanced at Thorogood. He was blowing smoke from his nostrils as he eyed the two women. He stroked his black mustache.

  “Helluva town, Jim.” Grinning, he shook his head. “Helluva town. Weather like you never witnessed in all your born days. I been through heat waves, ice storms, blizzards, and a coupla hellacious tornados. Course, Tuesday was a mite better.”

  I smiled.

  The bartender set down the beers. “I do thank you, Randy,” said Fetterman. Without asking the cowboy for money, Randy waddled off.