No Regrets, Coyote Read online

  Carlos said, “That’s Stavros Kanaracus. He owns the falafel place. He’s responsible for three murders that I know of.”

  “So why is he sitting there?”

  “He never pulls the trigger. He always has an alibi. He employs very expensive lawyers.”

  Stavros looked to me like a genial grandfather who’d gotten the bad idea to have his thinning hair dyed maroon and laminated to his head.

  I told Carlos about the bloody carpet in the Parkers’ house.

  “So you broke into the house?”

  “The door was open.”

  “Did you wear gloves?”

  “No.”

  “Wipe down your prints?”

  “I left in a hurry.”

  “So if there had been a crime committed, you’d be the prime suspect.” He told me that no therapist had ever solved a crime.

  I said I wasn’t trying to solve it, but I wanted him to.

  Carlos told me they found the body of the girl who went missing ten days ago, the eighteen-year-old. Kelly Kershaw.

  “Where did they find her?”

  “At the recycling plant on Mahogany. Workers found her in the waste. We figure her body was dropped in a Dumpster and then picked up by a truck. Looks like the killer had started to chop up the body, but quit trying. Big gashes here and here.” Carlos pointed to his neck and shoulder. He asked me if I’d take a look at her room with him in the morning. Rooming house over by Banyan Circle. He said, “Even a bad cop can save your life.”

  I asked Carlos if it was customary for a pair of uniformed EPD officers to oversee the transfer of merchandise in a public lot from one semitrailer to another. He said, What are you talking about? I explained what I’d seen. No, that’s not typical, he said.

  As we drove past St. Jerome’s Church, Carlos hit the brakes, squealed into the parking lot, and stopped. He pointed across the lawn. “Is that a goddamn dead mule?”

  Indeed it was. There beneath a live oak lay the bloated remains of a recently expired mule that had apparently been giving children “pony” rides at yesterday’s parish carnival.

  “What the hell?” Carlos said.

  “It would seem we’re in a Southern novel,” I said.

  Carlos called the monsignor and then animal control, and we were on our way. I waited by the squad car while Carlos fetched my keys and cleared up any misunderstandings. I got a call from Oliver telling me to get to Memorial ASAP because Venise was apparently causing quite a ruckus. There was a new bumper sticker on the back window of my car: ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

  I could hear Venise wailing as I neared the recovery room. I was met by a nurse who told me that Venise was claiming that she’d been sexually assaulted by her gastroenterologist during the colonoscopy. Just before Venise went under, she screamed that she was being digitally violated, and why wasn’t anyone doing anything to stop it. The nurse told me that Venise was still hysterical and could I please calm her down. The sedative did not seem to be working.

  I held Venise’s hand and told her everything would be fine now, and I was here to take her home. She wept and trembled and let out this halting kind of adenoidal moan, interrupted every few seconds by snorts and blubbery gasps, and I wanted to tell her to stop it because she didn’t sound human. She caught her breath and yelled, “He sexually assaulted me!”

  I said, “Venise, you know what a colonoscopy is, right?”

  When the doctor stopped by, Venise wanted me to call the police. The doctor said to her, “I’m sorry if you think I was inappropriate, dear, but I have to do certain things.” He handed me a color photograph of Venise’s now-excised polyp.

  I apologized. “Must be the medication talking.”

  He said, “She would have been dead in two years.”

  We stopped at La Sazon on the way to Venise’s, and she bought ceviche de mariscos and anticuchos de corazón. She was beyond starving, she said. We found Oliver on the La-Z-Boy, his ankles wrapped in ice bags. Venise sat at the table and ate with the plastic utensils we’d gotten at the restaurant. She drank her Diet Rite cola from the two-liter bottle. She told Oliver she’d been through hell. He asked her if she was going to report the incident. She said it wouldn’t do any good. The lawyers are all in the pockets of the doctors. Plus she was on many medications, including Zoloft, and everyone would just assume that she was demented. Plus the legal fees would drain their bank account. I said I’d have to be going. Had a rehearsal to get to. Plus she’d have to take time off from work. So long, I said. Plus it would expose her to shame in the community.

  After a quick rehearsal spent on blocking and ironing out a few rough spots, I drove home. I saw that Red had put his name on my mailbox. He had written P. Soileau on an index card and affixed it with clear shipping tape. I asked him what the P stood for, and he told me Pableaux, and he spelled it for me. He pointed at the gray and glowing briquettes in the hibachi and asked me to join him for supper. Hot dogs. Fabulous, I said. I’ll bring the beer. And bring some diced onions if you have any, he said. I told him to give me fifteen minutes.

  At some point during the day, poor little Django slipped into the bathtub and hadn’t been able to crawl his way out. He was elated to be lifted up and kissed on his silky head. He was even happier to get at the food in his bowl. I had eight hang-up calls on my voice mail, a call from Bay wanting to meet for coffee, and a message to call Almost Home. Which I would do mañana.

  I carried lawn chairs out to Red’s campsite and apologized for not having done so already. Red told me that he’d seen a cop snooping around the house. Dude parked out front, made some phone calls, all the time looking at the door and the windows. He drove away. Came back. Sat for a while. I’m wondering what’s an Eden cop doing in Melancholy.

  “He didn’t see you?”

  “Wasn’t looking for me. By the way, this is one bad cop. Kevin Shanks.”

  “You know Shanks?”

  “Everyone on the street knows Shanks.”

  “I had a run-in with him recently.”

  “I’ve seen him tie a plastic bag over a boy’s head while he interrogated the kid on the street. I’ve seen him pummel a sleeping homeless guy with his nightstick in Heron Lake Park. He extorts money from dealers, escorts drugs through the county, steals from trucks and trains.”

  “Can you prove this?”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “You say everyone knows about him?”

  “Common knowledge.”

  “You think the cops know?”

  Red smiled and tucked the hot dogs into their rolls. He handed me my paper plate and apologized for the bright yellow mustard in the little foil packets. “I’m on a tight budget.”

  We opened our beers and sat. Red said, “The Eden cops have a well-deserved reputation for impropriety, incompetence, and mayhem.” We held up our beers and drank to those who protect and serve. He said, “This friend of yours, O’Brien, what do you know about him?”

  “Good man. A pal.”

  Red nodded and held up his hot dog. “Uncured beef. The best.”

  I Googled Temple Luxe Writer and found out that she’d published a number of stories over the years. In 1999, the earliest publication I could find, Temple’s story “Unfinished Sympathy,” which I was unable to access online, was published in something called The Little Apple in Requiem, Massachusetts. The contributors’ notes had her living in Toronto, Canada, with her cats, Gretsky and Minouche. She named Margaret Atwood and Mavis Gallant as influences. In 2003, according to the notes in Huntress, Temple was living with her husband in Providence, Rhode Island. Her publication in The Little Apple was noted, and her story here was called “Thinkers to Lovers to Chance.” It began, “For the past fifteen years, Minrose Applewhite has been living in Cranston with her boyfriend, Lonnie Monroe, a carpenter, handyman, and fiddle player with the country band Coastal Cousins. All of the carpenters in Cranston are, as it happens, also fiddle players, and all of them, the men anyway, and several of the lesbians, are ada
mantly single, but at the same time living with strong women who have an emptiness in their lives.” I tried to link to the complete story, but the link had rotted. Error 404.

  By 2009 at the latest, Temple Luxe was living in Norman, Oklahoma, with her husband and three kids, which made me think this Temple could not have been our Krysia Halliday, whom we knew from school records had been living in Everglades County since at least 2006. The story was dedicated to My sweetheart Charlie. She was certainly, however, the same Temple Luxe who had, according to the note in the Glass Mountains Review, also published stories in “Tupelo Honey, The Troubadour, Bois d’Arc Fence Post, Four-wheel Drive, and other journals.” The story here, titled “Famous Lost Words,” was also about Minrose Applewhite, now living in St. Augustine, Florida, and working as an emergency ward nurse at the community hospital. Her married boyfriend, Maverick Frye III, a personal injury attorney, who has promised and promised to leave his wife, Camille, but hasn’t yet, wants Minrose to meet him tonight for dinner at the Outback, and because it’s the Outback and not Sergio’s, let’s say, or Restaurant Tricherie, she knows this is the kiss-off, so she says, Yes, Maverick, yes, but stands him up. Trials and tribulations ensue. The weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Unhappily ever after.

  There were several Luxe Temples online and a Temple Luxe interior design firm, a Temple Luxe yacht builder, an Irish Thoroughbred named Temple Luxe who had eleven races, one third-place finish, and zero pounds earned, one Sir Ulick Temple Luxe, sixteenth Baronet of Menlough, who died in 1963, and one Temple Luxe living in the United States, but whose age and location eliminated her from having once been our Krysia.

  So what did I know and what did I think? Krysia Halliday may once have been named Temple Luxe; Krysia wrote stories, as did the peripatetic author named Temple Luxe, who may have lived in Toronto and Rhode Island and Oklahoma or may have just said she had. I also knew that I knew not a thing about Krysia Halliday except what Carlos, the neighbors, and Geraldine had told me. Nothing about her online. I was reasonably sure that Krysia had been Temple, and that she had some reason to abandon her identity and her self and to begin again. But I did not know why or how. And her past, perhaps, had come calling on Christmas Eve.

  10

  I sat with Bay at a sidewalk table at Lovin’ Spoonful on the Boardwalk. The beach was crowded with University of Texas fans here for the big bowl game. A man in a burnt-orange Speedo and a straw cowboy hat walked by with a python around his neck. Bay told me he was moving Marlena into one of the new condos at Dixie and Eden. They’d so overbuilt down here that he got the sublet for a song. I once asked Bay if he ever used his magic talents at the poker table. He told me, Why play a game if you don’t play by the rules? What would be the point?

  I said, “How did you do last night?”

  “I was down four hundred till the last hand. I’m against this donkey across from me who’s wearing a photographer’s vest with no shirt and these Carol Channing sunglasses. I bet small, trying to suck him in. He shoved, representing a straight. He chewed on his finger and then leaned away from the table. I was sure he was bluffing. I called. We showed. He wasn’t bluffing. He had the straight, but I paired on the river to make a full house. I finished up two thousand.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I made the most common mistake you can make at the table. I underestimated my opponent.”

  “And got away with it.”

  “I won’t the next time.”

  I told him about my continued misgivings concerning the Halliday killings and about the blood on the carpet in the Parkers’ house. I told him about my run-ins with Shanks. He told me to back up to Halliday. Bay said, “You never saw dead bodies at that house.”

  “I saw photographs. I saw blood, I saw an officer collecting forensic evidence. I saw enough to know that there had been violence committed in that house.”

  “Maybe there were five bodies. But maybe they were not the Hallidays. You don’t know the Hallidays.”

  “I spoke with the neighbors and the kids’ teachers.”

  “Chafin Halliday’s face was obliterated, right?”

  “You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”

  “Consider it a thought experiment. Try to imagine all the people and conditions and events that might account for what you saw in that house.”

  I told him when I went to police headquarters to file a complaint against Shanks, they told me they didn’t have citizen compliment/complaint forms. I told them which drawer they were in, and I pointed past the cop’s shoulder. He asked for my driver’s license, and when I reached into my pocket, he yelled that I was going for a weapon. I froze. And then he laughed, said I could get dead that way. I finally got the form and slid it under the glass, and the cop, clacking away on a typewriter, said to me, “I’ll file this.” I said, “I’m sure you will, Officer Toney,” and I took the tape recorder out of my pocket and played back a bit of our conversation.

  Bay reached over and squeezed my forearm. “I’m going to tell you a story, and I need you to listen.”

  “Listening.”

  “You’re sitting at home with your buddy the librarian. Maybe you’ve got Mahler on the CD player, and you’re talking about movies. How much you like Truffaut and Fellini. It’s a warm, breezy day in March. You’ve got a dependable, juicy Malbec on the table and a plate of savory Brie with those black olive crackers. In two hours you’re going to meet your pal Bay for dinner and drinks at La Playa. Suddenly your door is busted open, and ten SWAT-team cops come blasting into your house with rifles aimed at your faces and screaming for the two of you motherfuckers to get on the floor.

  “Your librarian friend has a big mouth and asks what the hell is going on. He gets knocked on the back of his head with the butt of an MP5. You drop to the floor. Your buddy holds his bleeding head in his hands. Someone slaps him in the face and then punches him in the jaw. Then his legs are swept out from under him, and he falls, maybe smacks his head against the kitchen table. Maybe passes out. Then he gets a kick to the stomach. He probably needs medical attention, but he’s not going to get any.

  “You can feel the muzzle of a Glock against your temple. All you can think of is that you must be dreaming. You try to wake up. You hear yourself say, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ ‘No joke, pussy.’ Someone kicks you in the back of your head. Maybe someone else Tasers you for resisting arrest. Maybe they set the dogs on you. The two of you are under arrest for drug trafficking. You’re the worst kind of scum—preying on kids in the neighborhood. A cop walks into your bedroom and walks out a minute later holding two bricks of cocaine. He tells his unit, ‘Looks like we struck pay dirt.’

  “You’re booked, you’re jailed, your faces are plastered all over the news. You lose your clients; your buddy’s suspended from the library; your careers are over, and you didn’t do a damn thing. You hire a very expensive attorney until you realize you can’t afford her. You hire an affordable attorney. You bail out. No one looks you in the eye. The guy you rent your office from lets you know that he’s doubling the rent. Your friends treat you kindly, but they seem distant, don’t they? They’re wondering—because they know that innocent people in America have nothing to worry about. The cops have enough to do without framing a couple of middle-class, middle-aged white guys. The cops are offering you a plea bargain: plead guilty to lesser charges, and you’ll only serve ten years. And your affordable lawyer is urging you to take the deal. They found the shit in your closet, man! The very best you can hope for now is to spend your life savings and hope that you walk—you’ll never live down the suspicion even if you’re exonerated. Once you’re accused, you’ll always be guilty.”

  I said, “That’s a pretty unlikely scenario.”

  “I’m just saying: don’t underestimate your opponent.”

  “Carlos has my back.”

  “Does he? What time is it?”

  I checked my wrist. The watch was gone. I looked at Bay. He held it up for me. So today’s theme was, In
search of lost time. “When did you do that?”

  He said, “The key to the con is not that the con man has your trust; the key is that he convinces you that he trusts you.”

  Carlos told me I should not have filed my official complaint about Shanks. “Nothing good can come of this, Coyote. You should have spoken to me.”

  “I did.”

  The motor scooter parked outside Kelly’s rooming house had dozens of variously colored plastic dinosaurs glued to its frame. The rooming house, Carlos told me, had been a ten-room hotel, the Alhambra, back in the thirties and forties. The building had relinquished its barrel-tiled roof in favor of shingles, but did retain its Spanish flavor, although the stucco had been painted lavender a long time ago. One handwritten sign in the old lobby read NO SPITTING! and another, LET US KNOW ABOUT BED BUGS!I saw black mold growing high on the wall where the ceiling had leaked. I heard TV noises from Room #1: an exaggerated burp and then canned laughter. We walked upstairs to the second of three floors and to Kelly’s room, #6, at the back of the building. Carlos undid the police tape, and we stepped inside.

  Carlos hit the light, stepped around the plastic laundry basket, walked over to the window, and opened it. I sneezed. The twin-sized mattress and box spring were on the floor and pushed back against a dingy white wall. The bedspread was a red and green floral pattern on quilted polyester and was just the kind of egregiously unnerving monstrosity you would strip from your bed at the No-Tell Motel, stuff into a closet, and never touch or look at again. I inhaled some Nasonex.

  The ceiling light fixture was a bowl of frosted glass with three identical bow-tie-wearing kittens smiling down at you. One of the two bulbs was burned out. There was no chair, no stepstool in the room to stand on to replace the bulb. There was no bathroom door, just a wooden beaded curtain with a strand of beads missing. Someone walked across the floor upstairs and then dragged a piece of furniture from one end of the room to the other. We heard the muffled sounds of talk radio from the adjoining room. Carlos told me the guy next door, Nellie Kemp, was hooked up to oxygen and didn’t get out much anymore. Had all his meals delivered. The room was pretty much his world. Sat and listened to the radio. I thought about Kelly, on her bed in the middle of the night, listening to the whispers of these muffled voices.