She stood there looking down on Jim and Raymond, wiped a tear from her eye, and shook her head. “No. They’d reconsider what’s in evidence already, if we can come up with a new way to look at it. Otherwise, no. One of you get up and dance with me, please.”
For the next hour, Jim and Raymond hurled and were hurled by Becky around the dance floor. The crowd thinned and the floor opened up, so that the last half hour it was theirs alone, Becky dominating it and them in a frightening choreography of rage that left her comb gone, her hair in a sweat-drenched mess, her makeup running freely, and her body glistening.
When the band announced the last song, she took Jim and Raymond each by an arm and steered them toward the door. “Take me home,” she said. “We have work to do.”
The police chopper made another pass above, razed them with its beam, then banked away with a battle groan and was gone.
They sat in Becky’s living room in the dead quiet of early morning, poring over the crime-scene reports, the interviews, the lab conclusions, the coroner’s findings, the Ruff statements, the recent press clippings on Cantrell and the GROW, DON’T SLOW! organization, the PacifiCo annual report that Becky had obtained from a “friend” inside the company, the corporate profiles on PacifiCo and its holdings that her paralegal helpers had unearthed in their assault on Cheverton Sewer & Septic, even a copy of the Redevelopment Project for the peninsula — complete with artists’ conceptions of the new and improved neighborhood.
Two o’clock became three o’clock. The documents that Jim was reading began to merge in his mind into an unfocused enigma that offered up the same refrains: Ann the Deceased, Ann the Victim, Ann the Supine.
At four, Becky drank off another cup of coffee and went into the kitchen to make more.
Raymond looked up at Weir through his attorney’s spectacles and set the crime-scene report on the fireplace hearth. “Jim?”
“I’m listening.”
“Let’s kill him tonight.”
Weir considered Raymond’s deadpan expression. “I’d like to.”
“I’m serious. Use the opener, get him out of bed, take him out on one of Virginia’s skiffs, waste him and dump him out deep, tied to some dumbbells. I’ve got them at home.”
Jim could see behind Ray’s inscrutable mask a willingness that, for a moment, unsettled him. Justice of the Plains, he thought: Raymond and Francisco, chasing their stolen and beloved dreams across the rough terrains of fate, knights-errant, hell-bent on their way to the bullet marked for them. Would that bloody ending suit Raymond better than a lifetime of drinking, one bitter cup each day, the poison of knowing a truth that the system — the system he had served long and without complaint — would never allow him to prove? Maybe.
But for Jim, there was the breathing body of one Raymond Cruz: friend, brother, partner in tragedy. Life needs the living. “No. I’m not going to the chamber for Cantrell. I’m not about to let you, either. He isn’t worth it.”
“Ann was.”
“Nothing you can do will bring her back, Ray. Nothing. Ever. Least of all, that.”
The strangest of smiles crept into Raymond’s face, a smile of such soaring disregard that Weir’s scalp crawled.
“Just thinking out loud, Jim.”
“You let me know if you have any more thoughts along that line.” I
The smile changed to something more grounded. “I will.”
Becky came back with more coffee, slumped down into her sofa, and picked up the annual report for PacifiCo. “Drink more coffee,” she said. “It’s in here. Something is in here. Robbins already has something that points to Cantrell — we just haven’t found it yet. Look. Look until you go fucking blind, then look some more.”
At five o’clock, Weir placed his head back on the couch and watched the patterns in the stucco ceiling form shapes that looked like things he could identify. He and Jake and Ann had often lain on Jake’s bed and done the same thing: there’s the Indian chief, the state of Florida, the flat bicycle tire. Ann had spotted the pregnant lady first.
“Move around a minute,” said Becky. “It’ll wake you up some.”
“Think I will.”
He walked through the house, each room furnished with memories, both good and bad, of a lifetime spent on the perimeters of love for a woman. Time is running out for us, he thought. Time is running out for us to make legitimate what we’ve enjoyed so casually, so conditionally, on the sly. He wondered whether he and Becky had taken on, in the eyes of others, an aspect of the ridiculous. There was something comic in the hedging of life’s big bets.
On Becky’s nightstand was a vase with a dozen purple roses in it. He sat on the bed and beheld these lovely flowers, so tainted now for him. He closed his eyes for a moment and saw again the image from the dreams he had had so often this last week — of someone’s hand holding a purple rose up to the smiling, anticipatory face of Ann.
Against all the higher consciousness he could muster, Weir counted them.
Twelve.
Of course.
He sighed, closed his eyes again, and again saw the hand holding a purple rose up to Ann. At first, the rose was in focus and Ann was a blurred face in the background, then the rose lost specificity and Ann’s face became clear.
Weir’s head wobbled and he snapped himself up straight.
His eyes were so heavy. Just a moment to rest.
Of course, no rest. The hand holds the rose. A man’s hand. The petals are purple and full. Ann’s face becomes the place between her legs. The hand drips blood. This is unholy.
Weir stood to walk back into the living room. And when he looked again at the roses in Becky’s vase, he understood in an instant what he had only been seeing all along.
He stopped. The understanding was still there. He ran through it once, then again, then again. He reached out and took a flower from the vase. His hand was trembling as he gripped it up on the bulb, just under the petals, the thick green under leaves snug against his fingers and thumb.
He was still holding the flower when he walked back to the living room and drew the worried stares of Becky and Ray.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.
“Give me the phone and Ken Robbins’s home number. I’ve got it. I know what he has that we haven’t seen yet.”
He dialed and got Mrs. Robbins. She told him dreamily that Ken was still not sleeping well, had already left for the office. It was 5:30. Weir apologized, called the Crime Lab, and got Robbins on the second ring.
“Ken, this is Jim Weir. Get the rose from the evidence freezer. The rose he put in Ann.”
“Why?”
“We’ve got him. We had it all along, and didn’t know it. Please Ken, get the rose.”
Robbins was quiet for a moment. “You’re out, Jim. Dennison made it clear. I can’t be running evidence for you anymore. My hands are tied and you know it.”
“Listen, Ken. This isn’t new. It’s something you’ve got already, brought in by the Newport cops. The chain of custody is tight, it’s admissible, solid, and sitting in your freezer twenty yards away. It isn’t mine. I’m asking you to take another look. I’m begging you, Ken. Get the rose and put it on your light table. Get a good overhead on it and a pair of clean tweezers.”
Another pause. “Wait.”
Becky sat still on the hearth. Raymond was at the front window, looking out toward the hedge of oleander.
Two minutes later, Robbins was back. “Okay. It’s on the table, I’ve got a light on it, and a pair of tweezers in my hand. Now what in hell am I going to do with this withered-up thing that I haven’t done already?”