My shoulders drooped as I looked around at the rest of the room. Empty beer cans littered the place; two were buried in the duvet. I photographed them in situ with my cell phone, then picked them up, using a corner of a sheet to hold them. I laid them next to the pillowcase, ready to pack into a bag.
Mona clicked her teeth. “Chad never was really tidy, but when he got back from the war it all got worse. I knew he was drinking. You don’t like to think that about your child, but if I called after six or so I could tell by his voice. We tried to get him to go to a counselor, John and me both, and he did see this lady at the VA for a bit. But then he said she was just a waste of time, and he wouldn’t go back-”
“You said his phone was still here,” I cut in, “but I don’t see it.”
“Oh. Yes. It was on the kitchen counter. I’ll go get it.”
I searched through the pile of clothes spilling from Chad’s duffel bag and looked into the bag itself. I didn’t see the black object Chad had been waving under Nadia’s nose the night before she was killed.
I stuck a hand between the mattress and box springs and found two guns, a Magnum Baby Eagle and a Beretta. I smelled them. Both had been fired and not cleaned, but it was hard to say how long ago that had been. Maybe Chad had lain in bed one night, shooting at the wall, and tucked the guns back under the mattress. I laid the guns under the pillowcase so his parents wouldn’t see them and start fussing over them. I’d get the Cheviot labs to give me an idea how long it had been since they’d been fired.
A further search under the mattress turned up a copy of Fortune magazine. Tucked inside were a couple of steamy publications: Mags4Lads, from Britain, filled with giant-breasted women committing extraordinary athletic feats; the other, in Arabic, had similar pictures. Both English and Arabic readers favored blondes, with a sprinkling of redheads. Someone who read only ancient Sanskrit would have no trouble accessing the content of either.
I heard Mona’s nervous murmuring as she came back to the room and slipped the athletic blondes back into Fortune, then put the magazines into my briefcase. Chad’s mother didn’t need to see his reading material.
“I thought I saw his phone yesterday, but it’s not there now.”
“You probably just thought you saw it.” John had appeared behind her, holding a couple of black plastic bags. “You were tired and flustered, you know how you get. I’ve looked all over your living room, and it’s not there.”
“It was on the kitchen counter,” she fussed. “I saw it when I got my glass of water.”
I put all my specimens into the bags, conscientiously writing down labels on some scrap paper from Mona’s desk, and sealed them with her packing tape.
“If Chad’s phone turns up, give me a call. I’ve seen everything I need for now. It’s late, we all need some rest. If you want to talk to a criminal defense lawyer, Freeman Carter is good. He’s the person who got the court order that let you move Chad this morning. He has a new associate in his office who seems very capable to me, a woman named Deb Steppe whose fees won’t be as steep as Freeman’s.”
I wrote Freeman’s details down for them while Mona took the chicken dinner her son had left in the bedroom to the garbage. When she’d turned out the lights, she couldn’t find her keys. While she hunted through her purse, I picked them up from the chair where she’d dropped them on her way into the apartment. I had a feeling Chad’s phone was in that big shoulder bag of hers, but I was getting impatient to take off. If I couldn’t find a phone number for Tim Radke, the one friend whose name John and Mona knew, maybe I’d mug her and search her bag.
The door at the far end of the hall opened again as we waited for the elevator. If I’d actually believed in Chad’s innocence at this point, I would have talked to the watchful neighbor. The trouble was, I thought he was guilty. I was sloppy. It came back later to haunt me.
The storm had stopped when we finally got back downstairs. The building super was running a snowblower around the walks, and strewing salt, but beyond the building perimeter the snow was ankle-deep. I didn’t want to trudge through it carrying all the souvenirs I’d collected-Chad’s guns, his beer cans, his porn collection-so I waited at the curb while John and Mona went off to fetch the car.
When they dropped me at home, it was past eight. I knew I had to do something about the dogs. And now that I was away from the mess and tension in Mona’s apartment, I realized I was hungry as well. I was about to call Jake, to see if he wanted to walk up to Belmont for a snack, when my cousin phoned.
“Vic! Didn’t you get my messages?”
I’d turned my phone off when I was meeting with Mona and had forgotten to turn it back on. Petra had been trying to call all afternoon to say that Olympia was reopening the club tonight. Karen Buckley was going to do a special tribute performance in Nadia’s honor.
“I thought-I know they arrested that guy, that vet-but do you think you could come? Everyone’s so totally on edge, and Olympia is behaving strangely. It’s, like, something else is going to happen. I’d like you to be there-if you can, of course.”
I looked wistfully at my cozy living room and my dogs, who were panting hopefully in the doorway. “Petra, darling, on Friday I gave you my best advice and you ignored it. But let me repeat: You don’t have to keep working at Club Gouge.”
“Oh, Vic, I know, I know. I’m a pest. But you will come tonight, won’t you?”
Maybe I could talk to Karen Buckley. Maybe she would be more forthcoming after her performance than she had been at Nadia Guaman’s funeral this afternoon. I wasn’t too hopeful, but I told Petra I’d come down to the club after I’d run the dogs and eaten something.
“Oh, Vic, thank you, thank you. You’re the best!”
The best chump, she meant. I was more annoyed with myself than Petra. Why did I cave so easily to her demands?
I was worn out. When I finished taking care of the dogs, I lay down for almost an hour before heading back out into the cold.
13 A Show for the Dead
Despite the storm, the Club Gouge parking lot was crowded. Olympia’s marquee announced that the Body Artist was back for a special memorial performance in honor of Nadia Guaman, killed so tragically five days earlier. Olympia had put it out on Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, wherever the Millennium Gen gathers, and they’d responded in force. Oh, the dead do us so much good from the other side of the grave!
The room was almost full when I got inside. Rodney was planted in his usual spot, two-thirds of the way back from the stage. I squeezed into a spare seat at a crowded table near the back of the room where I could watch people as they came in. I didn’t see any of Chad’s Army buddies, which was a pity. I’d hoped they might show up to save me the trouble of trying to find them online.
Tonight, perhaps because of the short notice, there wasn’t a live act as a warm-up. The sound system was turned up loud, but we were listening to Enya’s Shepherd Moons, whose haunting melodies conveyed a suitable sense of mourning.
My cousin, working the far side of the room, caught sight of me. She hurried over with a glass of whisky. “Johnnie Walker Black, Vic, it’s on me. Thank you so much for coming.”
Olympia, standing next to the bar like a captain on the bridge of a ship, saw me then and swept over to my table. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought the object of a club was to invite customers, not drive them away.”