The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes Page 5

  And all that driving had raised a thirst.

  Inside, there was a long bar on the left, a juke box as big as any he’d ever seen, an unattended dance floor, and a dozen or so dark wooden tables on the right, with more tables in the rear. There were a few more customers than he’d seen vehicles, but not many, and none of them paid him any real attention. A few heads turned when he walked in, noted his arrival, and turned away.

  The juke box was playing an oldie, Waylon Jennings singing about how he was crowding forty and still wearing jeans. Which summed up the crowd, as far as that went. They all looked to be over thirty and no more than fifty, and the majority of them were wearing denim, including all five of the women.

  He didn’t see a waitress, but did see another patron get a pair of longneck bottles from the bar and carry them back to a table. Doak went to the bar and asked for Pabst. That’s what the fellow had been carrying, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and that would do, as he didn’t really care what he drank.

  He paid for the bottle, carried it to an empty table. Crowding fifty, he thought, but instead of jeans he was wearing the same dark slacks he’d worn to the Winn-Dixie. Different shirt, though. Short sleeves, and sort of a windowpane check.

  Christ, was it still the same day?

  He nursed the beer, taking small sips from the bottle. He looked over at the door when it opened, and a woman with unconvincing red hair took two steps inside and asked the room if Whitney had been around. Somebody told her he hadn’t. “Well, shit!” she cried, and stormed out, leaving the door to slam behind her.

  Another five minutes, maybe ten, and the door swung open again. Heads turned, but no one spoke to the new arrival.

  She was wearing jeans, and if she wasn’t yet crowding forty she was gaining on it. She stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dim lighting, and then she found him and walked without hesitation to his table.

  She sat down, and they looked at each other. She said, “Now what?”

  Jesus, the blue of her eyes.

  Nine

  * * *

  What really happened in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie:

  Her door opened and she got out of the car. She was wearing a burnt orange top over a pair of powder-blue designer jeans. A tan leather bag rode her shoulder, and one hand pinned it to her side, as if to secure the thousand dollars.

  He leaned across the passenger seat, opened the door for her. She hesitated for a beat, and he patted the seat in invitation. She got in and drew the door shut.

  Before she could say anything, he held up his left hand like a stop sign, put his right index finger to his lips. She froze, and her eyes widened.

  He opened the top two buttons of his shirt, moved the fabric to reveal the rig he was wearing. It wasn’t recording, but she didn’t know that, so he made a show of uncoupling a connection and holding the two ends an inch apart.

  Once again, he held his finger to his lips. He picked up the yellow legal pad, the top sheet covered in his deliberate block printing. She glanced at the pad, then at him. He shook his head, pointed again at the pad, indicating that she should read it.

  The first page was an explanation. It had taken him several drafts to get it right, laying it all out, telling her that her friend Gonson had gone straight to the sheriff, that he’d been hired to get her to incriminate herself and capture the evidence on a recording. A denial wouldn’t help her right now, and the best course of action for her was not to say a word.

  NOD IF YOU UNDERSTAND.

  She raised her eyes to his, then returned them to the yellow pad. And nodded.

  THE NEXT PAGES ARE A SCRIPT. IT’S THE CONVERSATION YOU AND I ARE GOING TO HAVE. READ IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH SILENTLY. DO THAT THREE TIMES.

  She looked at him, puzzled. He nodded, and she thought a moment, and answered his nod with her own.

  After the silent reading, a single rehearsal. He had his own copy of the script, and they sat side by side, he behind the wheel, she in the passenger seat, and read their lines in turn. He stopped her once to correct her emphasis on one line, but otherwise he let her go straight through it.

  A little stiff overall, he thought, but maybe stiff was okay. It was better for her to be slightly wooden rather than overly and unconvincingly expressive.

  Another run-through wouldn’t hurt a bit, but it would take time, and they didn’t have it to spare. Time to go with what they had.

  He clipped the rig together again, pressed Play:

  “Recorded in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie supermarket on Cable Boulevard in Belle Vista, Gallatin County, Florida, this sixteenth day of April in the year two thousand fourteen. Participants are J. W. Miller and Lisa Yarrow Otterbein.”

  He hit Pause. They looked at each other, and he hit Record and cued her. She took a breath, steeled herself, and went for it.

  “I don’t know how to say this.”

  “Hey, take your time.”

  “Look, I made a big mistake. I was upset, I was angry, and I told . . . I don’t want to say his name.”

  “I know who you mean.”

  “I never thought he’d take me seriously. I certainly didn’t take it seriously myself, and when he got back to me and told me he’d made arrangements with you, I didn’t know what to think.”

  All the way through to the end of it. Turning pages carefully, trying to avoid a rustling sound that the wire might pick up.

  All the way through to:

  “Some bugs, you know, you can’t just take ’em outside. They keep coming back until someone gets rid of ’em for you.”

  (sound of a car door opening)

  “No, I’m not, I don’t, no.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I was out of my mind with anger, and I poured a couple of drinks on top of the anger, and I said something crazy and even while I was saying it I knew I wasn’t serious, I couldn’t possibly be serious. I’m going now. This is over, okay? Because I really want this to be over.”

  He stopped the tape, nodded to indicate his satisfaction with her performance. Then he switched it on again to record his wrap-up: “Recorded at the Winn-Dixie lot, morning of April sixteenth, year is twenty-fourteen. Participants are J. W. Miller and Lisa Yarrow Otterbein. Over and out.”

  Then one last page for her to read over in silence, explaining that this would cover her, but that she could never again try to find anybody to kill her husband or anybody else, that the two of them could never be seen together in public, that they could never talk on the phone or communicate by text or email, that all of those forms of communication left an ineradicable trail that could put them both behind bars.

  When she finished he took the pad from her, printed rapidly in the usual block caps:

  I NEED TO SEE YOU TONIGHT. WHEN DO YOU GET OFF WORK?

  She took the pen, wrote: I COULD CALL IN SICK.

  He shook his head. AFTER WORK IS BETTER.

  11:15. TOO LATE?

  11:15 OK. WHERE? GOT TO BE WHERE NOBODY EITHER OF US KNOWS WILL SHOW UP, NOT IN OR NEAR GALLATIN COUNTY.

  She had to give it some thought.

  SOMEPLACE YOU KNOW BUT NEVER GO TO, he added.

  And then she came up with Kimberley’s Kove, and wrote down the name and location and how to get there.

  MIDNIGHT?

  MIDNIGHT.

  Midnight would work. Midnight was fine.

  Ten

  * * *

  He asked her what she’d like from the bar. She looked at his Pabst longneck, shook her head. “Not beer,” she said. “And this is no place to get fancy. You wouldn’t want to ask them to make you a mixed drink.”

  “ ‘Shucks, ma’am, we’s just plain country folks here.’ ”

  “I wonder what the wine’s like.”

  “Red or white?”

  “That’d be the two choices. Oh, white, I guess.”

  He went to the bar and came back with four ounces of white wine in a small water tumbler. She raised the glass and he touched it with his beer b
ottle.

  “Well, it could be worse,” she said, after a small sip. “Although it doesn’t taste much like wine.”

  She offered him the glass. He noted the trace of her lipstick on the rim, and allowed himself to drink from the same spot.

  “I see what you mean,” he said. “Maybe it’s not.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “Sour grape juice, watered down some and spiked with grain alcohol.”

  “People do that? Why would anyone—”

  “Same reason they’d make any kind of bootleg,” he said. “It’s cheaper.”

  “You’d think jug wine would be cheap enough.” She took another experimental sip, then said, “Oh, and consider yourself kissed.”

  “Huh?”

  “We both drank from the same spot on the same glass. ‘Consider yourself kissed’ is what you say when that happens. You never heard that before?”

  “No.”

  “I guess we know different things. You know how to make bad wine and I know what passed for sophisticated wit at Foxcroft.”

  “Is that where you went to school?”

  “Not exactly. Jacob Tendler High, on Goodrich two blocks off Hennepin.”

  “Hennepin.”

  “That ring a bell?”

  “It’s a main drag somewhere, isn’t it? Minnesota?

  “Minneapolis. What did you do, read it somewhere?”

  “Read it or heard it on the news, and evidently it got stuck in my mind. That’s where you’re from? Minneapolis?”

  “A few different places, and Minneapolis was one of them. My mother kept hooking up with men who felt a need to relocate. Then they’d do it again, only this time they wouldn’t tell her, and she’d have to go and hook up with somebody else, some other shifty-eyed loser with an urge for going. I got the same urge myself one day, hopped on a bus and left the driving to Greyhound.”

  “And the Foxcroft lingo?”

  “Lingo,” she said. “I like that. At Foxcroft we’d say patois. Or maybe we wouldn’t, maybe I’m misusing the word. ‘Consider yourself kissed.’ I read it in a book, and it stuck in my mind the way Hennepin did in yours. Don’t ask me which book because I read so many of them, all about these preppy girls. Oh, isn’t that Emmy Lou? What’s the matter?”

  “I thought there wouldn’t be anybody here that you know.”

  “Well, I know her, but she wouldn’t know me from Eve. On the jukebox, Emmy Lou Harris.”

  “Oh.”

  She lifted her glass, set it down untasted. “I’ve never been here before,” she said, “and I don’t know any of these people except the ones on the jukebox, and I can’t say I want to. I picked this place because I remembered seeing it from the road and thinking how perfectly lowdown it looked, but aside from that I don’t know anything more about it than I do about Foxcroft or Miss Porter’s. I don’t even know your name.”

  “It’s Doak.”

  “And mine’s Lisa, but you know that. You know a whole lot more about me than I know about you.”

  “I guess I do. But there’s a lot I don’t know.”

  “All I know about you is you like your rib eye cooked black and blue. That was a new one on Cindy, and she was impressed.”

  “Cindy? Oh, the blonde.”

  “I guess you must have been in the mood for a steak, but that’s not why you came, is it? You wanted a look at me.”

  “I did.”

  “Oh, there’s another old friend of mine. His name’s Waylon.”

  He nodded. “Somebody played the song earlier, right after I got here.”

  “I like that the jukebox is all oldies. I don’t think they planned it that way. I think they just can’t be bothered to buy any new records. Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Who the hell are you? Some kind of a cop, but what kind? And why would you wait for me to take the bait and then let me off the hook?”

  He was considering his response when she added, “Or maybe I’m not off the hook yet.”

  “I don’t really know much about fishing,” he said. “The house I bought has a dock you could hitch a boat to, except that I don’t own a boat and don’t want one. But you can just fish right off the dock, and I bought a rod and reel, your basic beginner’s outfit, and I gave it a try, and it didn’t take me long to figure out it wasn’t likely to turn into a lifelong passion.”

  “You never went fishing before?”

  “Years ago, with a friend who kept a boat at City Island. Four of us out on the water for three hours, drinking beer and eating pizza, and nobody caught a thing.”

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “City Island? It’s up in the Bronx.”

  “New York.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s what I thought in the car, from the accent. But it was stronger then.”

  “Part of the act.”

  “Oh.”

  “The sheriff says my accent’s slipping, that I’m starting to sound Southern. I don’t know if he’s right.”

  “Florida, this part of it, is all different accents. You’ve got people in Belle Vista who moved here from all over the country, and you’ve got others who’re still living on roads that were named for their great-grandfathers.”

  “That’d be me, if my grandpa’s name was Osprey.”

  “That’s where you live? Osprey Drive? I know where that is.”

  “So do I, but then I’d have to or I’d never find my way home. Is your accent Minnesota? There was that movie, Fargo, but you don’t sound like that.”

  “We moved too much for me to have an accent. Or if I do, it’s just a blend. Standard American, I think they call it. Doak.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I was just saying your name. We’ve got to talk and we can’t, can we?”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “No, there’s a conversation we need to have and we’re just dancing around it. When I first noticed this place, Kimberley’s Kove, and the tattooed dude behind the bar can’t be Kimberley, can he?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Maybe Kimberley got sent home because she failed her spelling exam. K-O-V-E is just so fucking K-Y-O-O-T, you know?”

  “When you first noticed the place . . .”

  “Right. I also noticed, maybe half a mile south of here, a place called Tourist Court. Oddly enough, they spelled Court with a C.”

  “On the left,” he remembered.

  “A twelve-unit strip motel, plus four cabins. It’s about what you’d expect for twenty dollars a night, but the linen’s clean.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Half an hour ago,” she said. “That’s why I was late. I took one of the cabins, and I checked it just to make sure there wasn’t a porcupine sitting on the bed. There could have been, but there wasn’t.”

  A lot of things went through his mind. He picked one of them and said, “You didn’t use a credit card.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.”

  His hand was on the table, next to the unfinished bottle of beer, and her hand settled on top of his.

  “Afterwards,” she said, “we’ll be able to talk.”

  Eleven

  * * *

  He was sprawled out on his back, feeling like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes were closed, and he had the sense that he could just float away, like a leaf on a stream.

  She lay her hand on him, brushed her fingertips across the hair on his chest. She said, “We worked up a sweat, didn’t we? I could put the air on.”

  “I’m comfortable.”

  “Well, I’m dripping, but that’s your doing. You don’t suppose we just got me pregnant, do you?”

  “I never even thought.”

  “Now wouldn’t that win the prize for ironic,” she said, “after what George and I went through.”

  “He wanted a child?”

  “Desperately, and if you
ever met his kids, you’d have to wonder why. Two girls and a boy, and the older girl’s the same age as I am.”

  “I know.”

  “The girls are bitches who hated me before they even met me, and Alden wouldn’t know which to do first, fuck me or kill me. Both, if possible, and I don’t think he’d much care about the order. You know about his kids?”

  “Just that there are three of them, and the one girl’s your age.”

  “You know a whole lot about me, don’t you?” She moved her hand lower, curled her fingers around his penis. “It’s so soft and small and harmless now,” she said. “Just to lull a girl into feeling safe. Who are you, Doak?”

  “A New York cop who figured his pension would go further in the Sunshine State.”

  “And it didn’t go as far as you hoped, so you got sworn in as a deputy sheriff?”

  He shook his head. “Got a private investigator’s license, got to know the sheriff, and when he needed somebody with no local ties to play a part and wear a wire, I got the job.”

  “And that was when, a couple of days ago?”

  “There was a job before that,” he said, and started to tell her about the auto dealer. She remembered him, how he’d tried to get his partner killed and wound up going away for it, but hadn’t known about the way the evidence was gathered to lock down the case.

  “And that was you? Same as this morning, he got in the car with you and you got him to talk?”

  “But he got to make up his own lines,” he said. “They weren’t all written down for him on a legal pad.”

  “Then you turned in the recording and collected your fee and he went off to prison. Was it a substantial fee?”

  “Not especially.”

  “How about for me? Will they pay you even though I didn’t say anything useful?”

  “They’d pay for my time. I told them not to bother, that I was happy to do a favor for Gallatin County.”