Cash City, page 12
“That’s friggin’ nuts,” he replied, incensed. “No way I was the last person to see her alive. I dropped her off at that house on the Southside. That’s who you should be talking to, the guy at that house, not me. I ain’t do nothing to that girl.”
“I thought she didn’t have any money?”
“That’s right.”
“How did she pay the fare?”
I was sure of the answer, but wanted to make him say it out loud. Maynard’s manner turned sheepish. He put his elbow on the table and leaned his face forward into his hand, covering his eyes. He stayed like that as he began to take me through the events of last Saturday night.
Maynard was about halfway to the destination, by Redding Park, when Trisha confessed that she didn’t have any money. Having yet to comprehend her meaning, Maynard explained to her that they accepted credit cards as well. She didn’t have any of those either.
Maynard jerked the car to the curb, hit the automatic lock on the doors, and told her that he could drive to the bank or to the police station, her choice. A few days before a fare had run from the car to keep from paying and he wasn’t fool enough to let that happen twice in the same week. That’s when Trisha offered to pay him in another fashion. Maynard’s face flushed crimson as he recounted what happened next.
He found a nice dark corner in the park beneath some trees and put the cab there. Trisha slipped into the front seat next to him, unzipped his pants, and sucked him off. He told her not to spit it out in the car. She didn’t spit it out at all. Just sat up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then leaned her head against the passenger window and didn’t speak for the remainder of the ride. In the driveway at Norman Hinkle’s, Maynard thanked her, handed over his business card, and told her she could call him anytime for a ride.
“Never said a word. Just fixed on me with these dead eyes and got out. Kind of freaked me out the way she looked at me, like I wasn’t even there. Like I was a ghost or something. Then she walked over and thumped on the door of that house. I waited until that guy, the guy you should be talking to, he answered the door.”
“And that was that?”
“That was that, except she called.”
“She called?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. She called a couple hours later. Wanted me to come and get her, same place I dropped her off. But I couldn’t right away because I had a fare going out there to Airport Hill. I told her I could be there in a half an hour, but she said forget it.”
Maynard’s eyes narrowed like an idea had just come and gone in his head and he was trying to get it back.
“Good thing I didn’t pick her up, huh? Guess I mighta been murdered, too.”
“Good thing. Did she mention where she wanted you to take her?”
“Didn’t get that far.”
“You didn’t go back and pick her up at the house?”
“Why would I?” Maynard scoffed. “She didn’t have no money and, you know, I was all spent with the other thing.”
Before I left, I checked the records on Maynard’s fares for Saturday night. He had three fares in the two hours between dropping Trisha Cammack at Hinkle’s and the time she phoned him at eleven p.m. to pick her up, during his fare out to Airport Hill. After that he had two short fares from eleven to one a.m., the time Trisha Cammack was discovered. Plenty of time in there to dump a body by the river. From one a.m. until four a.m., when the bars closed, he took eight fares.
Before leaving, I took a look at the floor mats in Maynard’s cab. No crusted mud from the riverbank and the mats were too dirty to have been recently cleaned. Likewise, there were no signs of involvement in the back seat or in the trunk. The tread on the tires were free of mud as well.
If Trisha tried and failed to get a cab, as Dennis Maynard claimed, that gave credence to Norman Hinkle’s assertion that she left his house on foot heading west. And if she left Hinkle’s on foot, I needed to put myself where she put herself, step where she stepped, and find out where those steps ended. Trisha Cammack may or may not have been murdered, that truth may never be found out, but somebody dragged her body to that riverbank. I was going to find out who the hell did it.
I drove through downtown toward the viaduct and the Southside. A pair of headlights skimmed across my rearview mirror, drawing my eyes. A red pickup truck was behind me, riding me tight, its lights bouncing and reflecting brightly in my mirror. Three car-lengths behind the truck was a green Lexus and some distance behind the green Lexus was the dark blue sedan.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Honeysuckle Lane
The trio of vehicles followed me under the viaduct past The Red Head and on past the high school. At Eleventh Avenue the pickup truck peeled off to the right, leaving only the Lexus between the sedan and me. I stayed straight. At the northwest corner of Redding Park a traffic light switched from green to yellow. I slowed early and stopped at the red, hoping to lure the spook in close enough to get a look at him. The Lexus flipped its turn signal to go left around the rim of the park. For the full minute we idled in the red glow of the intersection, I kept my head forward but my eyes in the mirror, focused on the silhouetted figure two cars back.
No cross-traffic came through the intersection. When the light clicked over to green I eased forward. The Lexus made its turn and the sedan, after a brief hesitation, accelerated into the slot vacated by the Lexus. Tall lamps illuminated the perimeter of Redding Park enough to give me a quick glimpse at the driver. He was a white man with a thick dark beard wearing a baseball cap that cast a shadow over his eyes and masked any other definition in his face.
Pedal to the floor the Skylark only got going to about eighty-five so there was no outrunning him. I kept her at a steady pace and thought over the best way to flip the tactical advantage. There were plenty of reasons for someone to follow me the way this spook was following me, none of them good. I led him down around the west side of the park and across a small bridge over a creek to where the road forked. To the right the road ran horizontal along the base of the southern hills. To the left the road wound up into the hills, eventually spidering off into a half dozen one-lane residential streets. I chose left.
The sedan lingered at the fork in the road, not quite coming to a stop before it pursued me up the hill. Either he was betting that I hadn’t made him yet or he didn’t give a shit. We ascended the winding road in tandem. Shining yellow critter eyes, frozen by headlights, glared out from the thicket on either side. Every hundred yards or so we passed a house. The higher we climbed, the bigger the houses. The wealth and the wildlife of Cain City resided on this hill.
Through the trees the lights of the town glittered below us. The outlines of the downtown buildings and the golden dome of the courthouse were visible against the night sky. We passed four of the five streets that branched off to our right. Ahead, beyond a bend in the road was the last chance to turn off the main road, Honeysuckle Lane, a dark one-laner that stretched out over the crest of the hill. I accelerated around the bend and, at the last second, veered onto Honeysuckle. The spook didn’t go with me. He kept cruising up the main road, which dead-ended in a quarter of a mile at the Cain City Museum of Art. To get off the hill he had to flip around and come back past Honeysuckle.
I reversed in and out of a long driveway, cut my lights and pulled my car into a black shadow beneath a tree. I killed the engine and rolled down my window to listen for the sedan approaching. Good thing, too, because four minutes later the glint of the sedan flew by and I wouldn’t have caught it if I didn’t hear it. The spook had his lights off as well. I started the car, kept the lights off and hauled ass down the hill after him.
There was no way I could catch up to him but for the way the road corkscrewed and the fact that he, too, was navigating in the dark. The descent felt like a blind slow-motion chase. I couldn’t see shit. Halfway down I nearly coasted smack into the rear of the sedan, unable to see it until I was right upon him. I don’t know if the spook couldn’t see me or if he was concentrating on the road because he maintained the same speed.
When we reached the bottom of the hill the sedan would leave me in the dust with relative ease. If I was going to make a move, now was the time. I flipped on my high beams, punched the gas and rammed the back of the car. It bucked and fishtailed to the edge of the road, teetered over the side of the hill before correcting its wheels and swerving back into control. The spook switched on his beams and went barreling down the lane. The sedan’s crunched-in back bumper scraped the pavement creating a track of sparks.
I stayed on him best I could, but his ride had more power. He opened up a little bit of space between us. At the bottom of the hill the sedan cornered sharply onto the bridge and sideswiped the stone railing. I was going too fast to make the corner and skidded past the bridge. By the time I got back to facing the right direction the sedan was blocks away and receding from view.
I stopped the Skylark in the middle of the bridge and got out. The sedan’s exterior had been pretty well ripped up. Jagged pieces of taillight were scattered over the pavement. Dark blue paint streaked the bridge’s white railing. Just what I needed, some unknown stalker nipping at my ass. Whoever the fucker was, he knew I was onto him now. Tailing me wouldn’t be so easy from here on out. Part of me wished the guy had gone ahead and taken a high-flying aerial off the hill so I wouldn’t have to mess with it.
I assessed the Skylark. The front bumper was dented and scratched and the two vehicles had traded some paint, but that was the extent of the damage. I got back behind the wheel and continued to the Hinkles’.
Their neighborhood was dark and peaceful. I parked at the curb in front of the home. Windows were lit in both the second and third floors. A figure moved past the window on the second floor and the light coming from there extinguished. I got out, leaned against the hood and looked toward the West End. The night was cold and the temperature was still diving. I hugged my jacket around my body, tugged my cap tighter over my head.
Where did Trisha Cammack walk to on that last fateful night of her life? When she left here did she have a destination in mind or did she set out aimlessly? The way the city was laid out, like a grid, made for an infinite amount of possibilities. Whether she kept going west or reversed course to the east, at any point she could have veered right, left, or doubled back. She could have been picked up on the street by someone she knew or by a total stranger. She may have gone anywhere, with anyone. A girl in her condition, pumped full of a lethal quantity of drugs, could not have gotten too far on her own. I needed to find out if she had any friends or flames that lived nearby.
I climbed back into the Skylark and, with the Hinkle house as a starting point, drove different routes in an attempt to find anything that made one route more plausible than another. One pass I followed the best-lit streets from the Southside into the West End. The next pass I went straight down the avenue west, which eventually merged with the avenue running along the creek. Next I turned right and drove north until the street came to an end at the train tracks. Then I alternated turns: right, left, right, left.
I kept this up for a couple of hours, roaming every street and tracing every possible route within a mile radius of Hinkle’s, hoping for some piece of luck to jump out at me. Nothing did. It was all fruitless.
A crummy little bar called Rummies stood on the First Street divide between the Southside and the West End. I went in and flashed the picture of Trisha around the place. The bartender, a skinny gray woman missing her two middle teeth on the bottom recognized Trisha, claimed she had not patronized the bar for months and was most definitely not in there the previous Saturday. “I’d remember that face in here,” she said.
That left me out of plays for the night. My skull throbbed; my eyes throbbed. I was starved for a drink and six more after that one.
“You got Maker’s?” I said to the woman.
“Nope, got Old Crow.”
“Give it to me.”
I sat down at the bar and she served one up. As I lifted the glass to my lips, a wild idea came to me that was so clear and simple that I cursed myself aloud for not having thought of it before I’d wasted the last two hours of my life burning gasoline and paying for the shitty drink in front of me. I left the drink and drove back to the Hinkle home. From there I drove the most direct route into the West End and to the Cammack house. The distance between the two dwellings was six blocks; two blocks north and four blocks west. She would have only had to make one turn. Six short blocks. It was the type of epiphany that was so simple it would surprise me if it didn’t turn out to be true.
Trisha Cammack had walked home.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Fat Chance
The Red Head, for a Monday night, had a few more customers than usual milling about. A dollar beer special was on. I found a slot at the bar.
Tadpole fixed me a drink and performed his latest joke.
“This blonde is flying from New York to Houston and she plops down in a first class seat, even though her ticket is for coach. So the flight attendant informs her she’s in the wrong seat. The blonde replies, ‘I’m blonde, I’m beautiful, I’m sitting right here and I’m flying to Houston.’ The flight attendant asks her very sweetly to please move, but the blonde gives her the exact same response, ‘I’m blonde, I’m beautiful, I’m sitting right here and I’m flying to Houston.’ The flight attendant is at a loss now, so she notifies the pilot of the situation. The pilot says, ‘Let me talk to her. My ex is a blonde. I speak the language.’ So he saunters back there and asks if he may see her ticket. The blonde hands it over. The pilot takes a look at it, sees that it’s for coach, and tells her she is in the wrong seat. To which the blonde responds, ‘I’m blonde, I’m beautiful, I’m sitting right here and I’m flying to Houston.’ So the pilot, unfazed, leans over and whispers something in her ear. Immediately the blonde jumps up like her ass is on fire and zips right back to coach. Can’t get there fast enough. The flight attendant is awestruck, understandably. She has to know what the pilot said to her. The pilot shrugs, ‘I told her she was sitting in first class, and first class isn’t flying to Houston.’”
Tadpole slapped the countertop with his bar rag. Normally, no one got a bigger kick out of Tadpole’s jokes than Tadpole, but somebody next to me was gut-laughing, so much so that Tadpole stopped his laughing. He seemed insulted by the amount of gusto the guy was putting into it, like he was mocking him or something. I glanced at the offender. It was the same silly drunk who talked me dull the night before. His laughter wound down and he shook a finger at Tadpole. “You know how to tell them.” He sighed audibly, elbowed my arm like he wanted me to validate this assessment. I nodded along, a mistake, because then the lush honed in on me with his riff about the ills of technology and all the same shit he always yapped about.
Tadpole fixed me another drink and as soon as I got it in my hand I walked away from the chittering dimwit in the middle of one of his sentences.
“Where you going?” he slurred.
“To get away from you ear-raping me.”
That hurt his feelings. He muttered that he was on the verge of making his point.
I found an open booth in the back corner of the place and sat there. My phone buzzed—Willis Hively. I let it go to voice mail. From the booth I could see the whole bar and everybody who came and went. In she came. She was no longer dressed in the plain grocery uniform. She wore a loose pair of jeans slung low on her hips. A thin white t-shirt clung softly to her figure and stopped short of her waist, revealing a sliver of skin when she moved. Her hair was down. A black purse was strapped across her chest. She stood just inside the doorway, eyes roving over the place. A man and woman entered behind her and she stepped aside to let them through.
She scanned across everyone sitting at the bar and playing shuffleboard and then she looked at the people sitting in booths until finally her eyes landed on me and she stopped looking. She walked over to me.
“What are you having?”
“Maker’s Mark.”
“Straight?”
“Straight.”
Karla went to the bar and ordered up two bourbons, came back, put one of the drinks in front of me and slid into the opposite side of the booth. Before anybody said anything she started laughing.
“Where’s the comedy?”
“It’s nothing.” Her laugh dwindled out and she lifted her glass. “Cheers.”
I hoisted mine up and we drank.
“Whew!” she exulted, her eyes going red and filling up with water. “Oh my God, that’ll clear your senses. Tastes like fire.”
“At first.”
She tilted her head to indicate the bar and everyone in it.
“So this is where you bring thirteen year old boys to get them liquored up?”
“Only the fun ones.”
“Ah, I see.”
“You come here to apologize?”
“Ha, fat chance. I’m just trying to gauge how big of a lush you are.”
“Sizable. I prefer to think of it as marking time.”
“Until what? Time runs out?”
“Something like that. Besides that it helps me sleep.”
“Right.”
The hair on the right side of her face fell loose and she tucked it back behind that ear. Her demeanor became stern.
“I want to get one thing clear with you before anything else happens. I’m a good mother.”
“Okay.”
“No, don’t just nod along and brush it off like it’s some trivial statement. Like it’s something I say to fool myself. I need you to hear me when I say that to you.”
“I hear you.”
“Do you have kids?”
I shook my head no.
“Well, if you ever do then you will see. It’s not so simple. Everybody has a plan for how they are gonna raise their kids and have them grow up to be all perfect. They’re gonna read to them and not stick them in front of the TV, and teach them to play a musical instrument, speak a foreign language. And then they have a kid and all that shit they were gonna do to make their kids better than everybody else’s goes right out the window. You know what I’m saying?”
