I wasn’t much in the mood for sightseeing, though. For one thing, it was cold as a gravedigger’s ass.
We tiptoed across the roof like it was a minefield. I couldn’t swear we wouldn’t hit a soft spot and fall through. Gillespie had his flashlight, and I glimpsed the rectangular shape I’d remembered, off to the east side. It was a kind of half-assed tool shed, built for who the hell knows what. A sliver of light, which I’d seen ten minutes ago from Gillespie’s car, leaked out of it.
We were walking on a bed of loose rocks and couldn’t have slipped up on a deaf man. We weren’t more than five feet from the shed when the door opened suddenly. I heard Gillespie grunt and jump.
Jordie Randolph had never been a beauty. I’ve seen pictures. Now, she couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, and her eyes were like a couple of holes somebody had burned into a silk tablecloth. She was in the same shabby bathrobe that had been her preferred garb around the Prestwould. The black wig was slightly askew. She’d tried, for some reason, to put on lipstick in the recent past, with unfortunate results. Under better circumstances, it might have been comical.
She didn’t say a word, didn’t seem even to recognize me.
I said, “Jordie—”
“Put your hands in the air! Get down on the ground! Now!” Gillespie was kneeling as he shouted. He had dropped the flashlight and held his Glock with both hands, the way he’d been taught. In the moonlight, I could see that he was shaking.
I think I said, “Gillespie, don’t,” believing I could convince him that an addled eighty-year-old woman armed with a pack of Nabs didn’t need the full monty.
Jordie looked from Gillespie to me and back again. She didn’t seem at all fazed by the Glock.
“It’s okay, Jordie,” I said, holding my palms up, approaching her an inch at a time with all the caution I would have given a wild, cornered animal. “It’s okay. We just want to help you.”
She did something peculiar then. At first I thought she was crying, but then I realized otherwise. Jordie was not prone to laugh, or even smile, but she was laughing now. When she spoke — “Mac’s dead” — she sounded as sane as I’d ever heard her. “He’s dead.” She wiped her nose and tried to quell a giggle.
I glanced at Gillespie, whose shake had subsided.
“Put your hands in the air!” he repeated.
Before I could do any more brilliant negotiating, Jordie sealed the deal. She raised both hands in the air as instructed, still holding the Nabs. Then she turned her back to us. She was two steps from the side of the building. As a cold gust of wind hit us from the north, she started moving.
Nobody said anything else.
She took three steps, spreading her upraised arms like she thought she might just float down. Before I had time to move, she was, as Gillespie had requested, on the ground. More specifically, she was splattered on top of Bert Campbell’s Cadillac DeVille in the parking lot below, a dark spot we could barely make out, with little lines trickling from it.
“You stupid son of a bitch!” I screamed at Gillespie, and for a moment thought he was going to shoot me. I’m pretty sure I took a swing at him. I must have missed.
“She might’ve been armed,” was what he kept saying, all the way down the elevator.
The next morning, I woke late from a very bad dream. I’d given Jackson his write-through for the metro, then set a personal record by eschewing Penny Lane’s alcoholic charms two nights in a row. When I picked up the paper outside my door, I saw the picture of Jordie Randolph splayed across the top of the Cadillac. It took up five columns. The headline read: KILLER’S REMORSE? They had to put the question mark on the end because at that point they could only assume.
It wouldn’t take long, though, for one of Gillespie’s sharp-eyed associates to find the gun, half-buried in the rocks on the Prestwould’s rooftop, like I figured they would.
One call to the New Horizons Adult Home the morning after Mac Constantine’s murder was all it’d taken to find out that Jordie had disappeared two days earlier. By the time they got around to calling her next-of-kin nephew, he wasn’t up to answering the phone, being dead at the time. New Horizons wasn’t much on doing follow-up calls, apparently.
What I figure is this: Jordie still had her keys to the apartment. She came back and got in through the basement door, something the building’s surveillance tape would show as soon as somebody bothered to look at it.
Maybe Constantine wasn’t there when she entered the apartment. Maybe he came home later and she hid. I’m thinking he misjudged his aunt. He probably thought that because she was seriously deranged she also was retarded. But I knew Jordie was able to use a gun. Taylor told me once that their father had taken both girls to firing ranges when they were in their teens and made sure they knew how to shoot. Taylor had kept a gun around the apartment, and one time, years ago, Jordie supposedly got hold of it and threatened to shoot herself over some imagined wrong. Taylor talked her out of it.
Everyone knew Mac Constantine carried a pistol. The one party I’d been to at his Prestwould unit, I was appalled to see that he left it sitting on the kitchen table, like it somehow showed what a tough guy he was. He was just the kind of moron to leave it loaded too.
Maybe Jordie hid in the maid’s room when she heard the door open that night. Maybe she had the gun already. Maybe, when Mac Constantine turned around and saw her, just before he ruined Taylor’s rug with his brains, he didn’t take her seriously. Maybe he laughed.
It was the Nabs that had tipped me off.
When I saw those orange crumbs on the floor and that half-eaten pack sitting on the kitchen counter, I knew Jordie had been there. It was the only thing she seemed to care about eating much of the time, and Taylor kept boxes of them around. It wasn’t like a healthy diet was Jordie Randolph’s biggest worry. And it wasn’t like Mac Constantine to be munching on Nabs. He was more of a foie gras kind of guy.
After she did it, she probably panicked and retreated to the utility room and then, later, up the ladder in the closet to the tool shed on the roof. One time, the first couple of months Kate and I lived there, she’d disappeared for two days, and that’s where they found her, living on Nabs and rainwater.
Next morning, Hanford sent word down, via Jackson, that he wanted a tick-tock piece a.s.a.p., telling everything from the history of the Randolphs to Mac Constantine’s demise, which he saw as the final chapter in another fucked-up Southern family’s spiral to oblivion. He actually used that phrase, which was pretty poetic for Hanford. I saw it as a major invasion of privacy. And the last straw. I went to the fourth floor and told Hanford this, suggesting also that he commit an act of self-gratification. He seemed happy that he didn’t have to fire me. That afternoon I walked over to police headquarters and tried to get Gillespie back walking a beat. They listened politely for a while, then not so politely showed me the door. Jordie Randolph didn’t deserve to have it end the way it did, but you don’t always get what you deserve. Gillespie sure didn’t.
Back home in the Prestwould, I called Kate for the first time since she left.
“What are you going to do?” she asked me after the requisite pregnant pause. She sounded worried. I really don’t think she hates me.