82 Desire Page 9

  His hair was thick and curly, worn short. His neck was thick as well, along with his waistline and very probably his ankles.

  His eyes were brown, matching the curly hair, and also matching a prominent mole on his left cheek.

  Skip said, “I hear you’re a good friend of Russell Fortier’s.”

  “Real good friend. Very good friend.”

  “Can you think of any reason he’d suddenly just disappear?”

  “You mean, did someone have a contract out on him?”

  She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. She shrugged.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I don’t think he’s ‘the victim of foul play’ like everybody’s saying around here.”

  “Why not?”

  Doubt flickered across an already creased forehead. This one was clearly a worrier. “I guess I just don’t want it to be true. He’s my best friend—I can’t deal with something like that.”

  He patted his pockets, looking down. Discreetly, Skip turned slightly away, thinking he was looking for a handkerchief. But apparently he didn’t find one—he looked up with too-shiny eyes.

  “Can you think of any reason why he’d want to disappear?” Skip asked.

  For a split second, she saw something new in his face, something like pleading—or so she thought for a moment.

  Apparently unable to compose himself, he only shook his head, again looking down.

  The united front presented by Favret and Seaberry was so intimidating, and this such a respite, that she had a sudden thought—if ever there was a time to go for it, it was now. Obviously something was going on here—she wasn’t ready to confront it directly, but she could shake a few trees.

  She said, “How’s business, Mr. Cavignac?”

  “Great. Why?”

  “Great for Russell? How’s he doing in the company?”

  He shrugged. “He’s a rising star. Practically Alpha Centauri.”

  “Somehow I don’t get that feeling. I think something was wrong.”

  “Uh-uh. Not with Russell. No way.”

  She left with the ardent desire to replant Talba’s bug in Edward Favret’s office. She didn’t like his style—and besides, he’d stood her up.

  In fact, she didn’t like anybody’s style at United Oil, even Beau’s. That remark about the contract was just a little too flip.

  They all mouthed the words, but they didn’t seem that worried about their good buddy Russell.

  Eight

  RUSSELL HAD AT first delighted in all the little things you have to do when you become someone else. He had dyed his hair white-blond and cut it to a length of about a quarter-inch. Then he’d gone to a department store and bought a spray can of fake tanner, so he’d look like he’d been in the sun for the last twenty years. He was so thrilled with the result he completed the look by getting one ear pierced, which to him wasn’t a gay look, it meant he’d sailed around the Horn. He hadn’t yet, but he meant to soon.

  Next, what to do about clothes? He wore khaki, but the new guy wore white, he thought.

  Dean Woolverton. The name signified nothing, he’d picked it out of the phone book before he left—Dean from one page, Woolverton from another. It had a good ring—sort of Italian and sort of something else. Hard to place; he liked that.

  The Pearson was a little too modest for the new persona—in fact, a sailboat probably wasn’t right at all. Given a choice, Dean would probably prefer a powerboat. But it was what Russell could get for the amount of cash he had (and he had to pay cash), plus it suited him to a T. It was a nice, comfortable live-aboard sailboat. What more could he want? (If he were Russell, that is—if Dean had to have a sailboat, he would probably want a Hatteras.)

  Dean had started to take shape only after Russell got the boat. He’d seen other guys around, looking way too blond for their age and way too tan for their health, and he’d suddenly realized he had to change everything. So he went right into the head and started cutting his hair. By evening he was a different person. People looked at him differently. Or, rather, different people looked at him. Flashier women.

  He hadn’t the slightest attraction to flashy women.

  He realized it would probably be difficult for men to take him seriously as well. He looked like a flake, and having no history certainly qualified him for one. Okay, then, he was going to have to be a former lawyer—someone who’d had a tragedy and taken to the sea. A tragedy that hurt him so severely he couldn’t bear to talk about it—not a dirty little secret he was deeply ashamed of.

  The second night after he left New Orleans, he was sitting in the cockpit sipping Scotch and water, most of his dreams having materialized, when he felt a nasty black hole in the bottom of his stomach.

  It was where his life used to be. Having no one to talk to and a loathing for television, he actually wrote down a few things that were troubling him:

  What will I do now? Who can I be, really? Should I have stayed?

  It was a bold—possibly very bad—thing he’d done. He could still scarcely believe it. And yet, at the moment, the fear was greater than the exhilaration.

  It’s the damn hair, he thought. I’ll go back to looking normal as soon as everything blows over.

  It was so odd how he came to be here. He could have said it was because of his dad, who had provided both a worthy antagonist and the money. Or because of Bebe—of who she’d become and what their marriage was.

  But really it was because of the five days he’d spent upside down in the hull of his offshore racing sailboat. The way he got in that predicament shocked him (as did much about his former life). He was a different person now, and not only because he was Dean Woolverton. Just two years ago, he’d been the kind of sailor—Oh, say it, Dean, he thought, the kind of adolescent—who liked to race offshore, risking seventy-knot winds, which indeed he’d caught.

  The boat’s keel broke off at the hull. He watched it all happen, certain that death was coming in the next few minutes. When the boat started to capsize, the boom got loose and smashed a doghouse window. Water flooded the stern, but miraculously, that much weight in the stern caused the tip of the bow to flip up out of the water. In turn, the air trapped in the bow kept the boat afloat, upside down.

  Russell was able to grab some crackers and candy bars; that was all except champagne and water. With the storm still raging, he tied himself with a fishing net to a shelf in the bow. And there he lay for five days in darkness. The dark may have been what made the difference. Because he could see nothing, he had a sense, after the storm was over, of floating not only through water, but also through space. He was nothing and he was nowhere, going nowhere—probably dying.

  At first, hearing was the most important thing in his life. Every nuance of sound could mean sudden death—or maybe rescue. But after a while the boat became a habitat like a strange house, each noise at first frightening, but soon familiar, and finally, unnoticed.

  There was nothing left then but thought. He thought for a long time only of his situation. Of whether he’d be rescued and how long it would take. He tried to imagine how the search would be organized and who would come for him—a helicopter or a ship?

  He thought these thoughts again and again, obsessively going over the details—what the rescuers should do, how they should do it, what equipment they’d need. Finally, he realized, What’s the point? I can’t control this. But he couldn’t stop obsessing. He could feel every muscle tight and ready for action, though there was nothing in the world he could do except cling to his shelf. He tried tensing and relaxing, but each fiber jumped back to tense the second he relaxed. He fought sleep as if it were a dragon.

  But in the end, it won. He slept for ten minutes or ten hours, he had no idea, awakening when the roiling of the sea finally stopped. The storm was over. Now rescue was possible.

  He almost didn’t care. That is, he no longer felt it necessary to act out the rescue in his head—he had bored himself silly with it.

  For
a while, it seemed, he had no thoughts at all. So he consciously cultivated them. He thought of Bebe, of making love to her, something he rarely did these days. Oddly, he couldn’t get into it. What had happened to their sex life seemed a much more interesting subject. I’ve been too busy, he thought, and so has she. How could we have let this happen?

  He vowed to change that if he were rescued. And he realized that he had thought “if”—and that, without realizing it, he’d gotten into that thing he’d heard about, that people in extremis do. He was bargaining with God.

  He began consciously to do it, wondering first what he had to negotiate with.

  Maybe he could wiggle out of the Skinners; maybe he could even stop the others. But the weight of what he had done engulfed him like a wave.

  So much damage had been done. So many lives ruined.

  Maybe he deserved to die.

  He didn’t get far with that one, but it was an easy progression from there to I’m going to die. Might as well make peace.

  And that was what changed him. He couldn’t say how or why, but the minute he thought the word “peace,” it came over him. He slept again.

  When he awoke, he was a different man. Maybe dead, maybe alive, he was ready for either thing. It was then that he began to float through space, and oddly, he enjoyed the sensation. His previous life at United Oil seemed to tiny, so unimportant. The things he had done were preposterous. He couldn’t conceive of why he had done them.

  He had passed the bargaining stage now. If he died, he died. If he didn’t, things were going to be different, and not because he’d been a former atheist in a foxhole—because it was the way of the world as he understood it now; the only way he could live. If he lived.

  When they finally came, he had no idea it had been five days, though that didn’t seem unreasonable. It could have been two or ten just as easily—in the dark, in his floating womb, time as he knew it didn’t exist.

  At first he thought he was hallucinating. But when voices joined the engine noise of the rescue boat, his desire to live came back as strongly as if he were in the peak of condition rather than starving and cramped. He untied himself, eased into the freezing water, took a breath knowing it could be his last, dived, and swam toward the voices. He popped up two feet from the rescuers, startling them so severely that one of them screamed.

  He wondered if his metamorphosis would last, and if it would show, and if he could talk about it.

  As it happened, it did last in a sort of a way and only showed a little. He tried talking about it only once—to Bebe.

  “You don’t seem yourself,” she had said, after time had passed.

  “Something happened out there. I had a kind of revelation.”

  “Omigod. Don’t tell me you found Jesus.”

  No, he thought. I found myself. It was an unbidden and indeed surprising thought that he wouldn’t have dreamed of expressing—wasn’t even sure he believed.

  “I don’t know if that’s what you’d call it,” he said. “I just had a sense of … I don’t know, exactly. Simplicity, let’s say, for lack of a better word.”

  “Simplicity? That was your revelation?”

  “A kind of peacefulness.” He had read about it—the oneness, it was usually called, something like that. But nobody talked about it, and anyhow it was hard to remember it. It was a feeling that didn’t stick with you; and yet, he didn’t think he had to have the feeling every second to know what it meant.

  But now, on the Pearson, sipping his Scotch and water, that notion he’d had about finding himself seemed slightly preposterous. He certainly wasn’t comfortable in Dean Woolverton’s skin.

  And yet … and yet … he wasn’t the old Russell Fortier either.

  When he came off that boat, he was dazed. He went to work every day and tried not to think about what had happened. He certainly didn’t try to interfere with the Skinners. After he came back, he simply found ways to avoid participating in their operations. He no longer had ambition for the things the Skinners could buy him—more power and more money. He had plenty of both.

  “You just lie around and look at the ceiling,” Bebe hollered one day. “What do you want, Russell? Anything?”

  “I think,” he had said, “a farm in Tuscany.”

  Bebe had physically drawn back. “What?”

  “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t want anything.”

  “That’s the problem,” she said.

  He didn’t even want her. Or rather, he did want her. He wanted her to himself. He wanted the old Bebe, the romantic Bebe, who had time for him. Bebe the councilwoman had time for everyone but him. He didn’t want a farm in Tuscany—he wanted two weeks with his wife in Tuscany.

  He wanted to be absolved of his sins.

  He wanted Eugenie home again (their daughter from boarding school).

  There were things he wanted, all right. He just didn’t know how to get them—even how to begin to get them, to broach the subject of getting them.

  And then he saw Bebe kissing Ernest LaBarre.

  Two weeks after that, he met Cindy Lou Wootten, who was two kinds of forbidden fruit, which, given his state of mind, made her irresistible. He proceeded to make an ass of himself.

  And after that, he couldn’t climb out of his depression.

  So when crazy Ray Boudreaux came along with all his crazy talk, that was the end of the line. He had actually phoned Bebe to say he wasn’t coming home that night and driven out to Veterans Highway, where he had checked into a cheap motel and plopped down on the bed with his fingers laced under his head and stared up at the cottage cheese on the ceiling until morning.

  He never again managed the feeling he had on the boat. But it became abundantly clear to him what he wanted, which was out.

  He wanted to be off sailing, the wind in his hair, the spray on his face, land nowhere in sight.

  His father had made it all possible.

  ***

  “Mama,” Talba said, “what’d you think? What’d you think of your baby?”

  Her mama said, “Why you embarrass me like that? Don’t nobody need to know about that name thing.”

  “Mama, it’s the central event of my life.”

  “Yo’ life! It ain’ my life, too? You think you can just do what you want with ya life?”

  Lamar said, “I didn’t sell a damn thing. Didn’t get but one inquiry.”

  As usual, Talba’s attention went directly to him. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. They loved it, though. They just didn’t have any money. The poetry crowd’s not the gallery crowd.”

  “I don’t know why the hell I let you talk me into it.”

  Talba’s mama sniffed. “She didn’t talk you into nothin’. It was your idea from the git-go.”

  Talba saw him start to flare and braced herself. But Miz Clara just got up and flopped into the kitchen, wearing her ancient slippers. Talba absolutely couldn’t understand why her mama was so mean to Lamar.

  Blessedly, the phone rang.

  A voice said, “This is the client.”

  “What?”

  “I’m Gene Allred’s client. The one you worked for.”

  Talba’s heart started to pound. “What’s your name?”

  “Uh-uh. That’s not for you to know. You did a damn good job, Ms. Wallis. Mr. Allred was real impressed with you.”

  His voice was familiar, but she didn’t know why.

  “He told me so on the phone. He said he had the file I needed, and I could pick it up the next morning.”

  Talba waited, but he seemed to be at a stopping place. Finally, she said, “Yeah?”

  “Friday morning. You remember where you were Friday morning?”

  She’d been at Allred’s office.

  “Meeting me,” the man said. “The guy in the ski mask.”

  “The guy who’s not Detective Skip Langdon.”

  “That’s the guy. Listen, you want to work for me again?”

  “You gotta be crazy.”

  “Hey, e
verybody says that. But I pay well, and the work’s real easy.”

  Not wanting to contribute to her own delinquency, Talba didn’t answer. She knew she should hang up, but he’d just said five or six magic words.

  The man kept talking. “In fact, I’ve already paid you half. Why don’t you check under your doormat? Go ahead. I’ll wait for you.”

  She put the phone down on the table.

  Lamar asked, “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got to go see something.”

  The cashier’s check was for $750. She gave it to Lamar and picked up the phone again.

  The client said, “Fifteen hundred dollars for one week’s work—a day’s, really. But you need to finish out the week so they don’t get suspicious. Now, I know what Allred paid you: He let you keep your paycheck from United. Where else you gonna make this kind of money?”

  He had a point. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was sure more than she could get any other way, and it would buy her more time to get her career going.

  “What do I have to do?” she said.

  “Just what you did before. That’s all there is to it. Get that file again.”

  Talba exhaled. If he wanted the file, he probably wasn’t the murderer. “Are you saying you never got the file from Allred?”

  “Girlfriend, he was dead when I got there. What does it take to get you to believe that?”

  “Don’t ‘girlfriend’ me, asshole. You don’t have a real good record of telling the truth where I’m concerned. Besides, you roughed me up.”

  “I didn’t kill Allred, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Who did?”

  “Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I just want the damn file.” He hung up.

  She turned to Lamar, whose nose was already wrinkled in disapproval. “Who the hell was that?” he asked.

  “The guy in the ski mask. He just offered me a job.”

  When she had outlined it for him, he said, “Uh-uh. No way. You’re not doing it.”

  That irritated her. She said, “Oh, shut up, Lamar. I don’t know who you think you are.”

  “Talba, Allred was killed for the damn file. Did you ever think about that?”