The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
“White folks like white stuff,” Bea had explained in the wee morning hours before he surrendered himself. They were in the bedroom of their new Woodland Hills bungalow, and Bea was standing behind him on her tiptoes and pressing her breasts against his back as they faced the dresser mirror. “They like white houses, white picket fences, white bread, and white shirts,” she added grimly, peeking over his shoulder to admire her husband and herself in the mirror.
They both looked so sad; so pitiful and wronged, Bea thought. And all because of that shit-for-brains Pemberton. Fat Tommy thought so, too. Recalling those poignant scenes on that morning, he remembered that they’d both cried a little bit, standing there perusing their innocent, sad, sexy selves in the mirror. Little Bea had slipped from view a moment as she helped Tommy struggle out of his nightshirt and unfastened for the final time the nine golden ropes of braid that festooned his massive neck, and then his diamond ear stud. Bea tearfully placed them in a shopping bag of things they would have to hock. She slid the voluminous dress-shirt sleeves over his backswept arms. Then her beautiful, manicured hands appeared, fluttering along his shoulders, smoothing out the wrinkles in his new shirt.
When Bea was satisfied with her effort, she slipped around in front of him and unloosed his lucky nose ring, letting him view her voluptuous little self in the lace teddy he’d bought her for Mother’s Day, but which she had seldom worn. Then, while he was distracted ogling her melons, she had seized his right pinkie finger, whose stylish claw he had allowed to flourish there as a scoop for sampling virgin powder on the fly and which he had rakishly polished jet black, and before he could stop her, she deftly clipped it off. Fat Tommy shrieked like a waif.
“It’s better this way, Tommy,” Bea assured him. She carefully placed the shorn talon in a plastic baggie. It resembled a shiny black roach; but for Fat Tommy, it was like witnessing the burial of a child.
“I’m keeping this for good luck, Tommy,” she told him, and stowed it in the change purse of her Gucci bag.
She patted his lumpy belly, which protruded out of the break in the shirt like a fifty-pound sack of muffins. She buttoned up the shirt and put on the new hand-painted Martin Luther King Jr. tie she had especially made for him by a Cuban chick she had met in rehab. She cupped his big pumpkin head in her hands. She had paid her little sister, Karesha, fifteen bucks to touch up his jheri curl, and the handsome, thick, mane of oily black locks cascaded sensuously, if greasily, down his forehead and neck.
“Try to stay where it’s cool, so the jheri curl juice don’t drip on your brand-new shirt, baby,” Bea said in a sweetly admonishing tone.
“This new ProSoft Sport Curl Gel don’t drip like that cheap shit, baby,” Fat Tommy explained. “It’s deluxe. I gave your sister two more dollars so she would use the top-drawer shit. I want to make a good impression.”
“I know you do, baby. But you’re gonna have a hard time keeping it up in the joint... I don’t think you—”
Her husband had stopped listening and Bea stared once more into Fat Tommy’s eyes. He was such a big baby. Standing there he had reminded her of a holy card she had cherished the two years she went to Catholic school before she met him. St. Sebastian, sad and pitiful, mortally wounded, innocent and wronged, pierced with arrows. She kissed him lightly on his shirt front and pushed him backward onto the edge of the bed.
“Pull yourself together, Tommy. I’ve got to go drop off the kids,” she said.
Fat Tommy was still crying, sitting dejectedly on the side of the bed, long after she had dressed and gone out to drop their boys at her sister’s new hideout in Topanga Canyon.
2.
It was still dark when Bea went out. The sun soon poked up. She hardly even noticed. She sped along the freeways, and the awakening valley skies unfurled before her in desolate pink banners of light. She raced over the back roads, hurtling through space along the crests of the canyons. Again and again she skidded in a cloud of dust against the shoulders of the abyss. Again and again she slowed down a moment then, thinking better of it, sped back up. She couldn’t stop looking at her boys, couldn’t stop cursing Pemberton under her breath and sadly reflecting on how that asshole had put them all up to their eyeballs in shit. The boys woke up during the forty-minute drive over to Karesha’s, with Bea the whole time vainly scanning the radio for news of Pemberton’s arrest.
Bea’s mother was standing at the window when she drove up. Her mother would drive the boys up to Santa Barbara and they would take a cross-country bus to Texas that night. The three women and the two infant boys cried until Bea’s mother drove off in Karesha’s pink Lexus, fleeing in plain sight, with Little Tommy and baby Kobe waving bye-bye from their car seats.
After their mother and the boys were safely away, Karesha, a cold, deadly customer in most circumstances, confided to Bea that she was a little nervous about the possibility of her own capture or of the jailing — and inevitable execution — of her notorious former squeeze, Cut Pemberton, and what it could all mean for her Hollywood plans, and for her high-toned, social-climbing crew.
“You heard from him?” Bea had asked, as she backed out of the dirt driveway in Karesha’s rented, brush-covered hideaway.
“I hear the Columbian’s got him,” Karesha said quietly. “The cops don’t know much about him yet. I’m sure he wants to keep it that way. Anyway, I trashed the cell phone.” They were quiet for a moment, then Karesha said, “But if that sick motherfucker come ‘round here I’m gonna send him to Jesus.” She lifted her T-shirt and showed Bea the pearl-handled .22 Pemberton had bought her as an engagement gift. It was stuffed in the waistband of her jeans.
When Bea arrived back home, the neighbors were out, watering their lawns, pretending they didn’t know Fat Tommy was a prime suspect in a vicious murder.
“How do, Miss O’Rourke?” Pearl Stenis, the boldest of her nosy neighbors greeted her.
“I’m blessed, Mrs. Stenis,” Bea said flatly.
She pulled into the garage and closed the door. She gathered herself a moment before she got out. She turned on all the lights in the garage and found a flashlight, and took a good twenty minutes making sure the Mercedes was clean of diapers and weapons and works and blow and any incriminating evidence. When she was done, she poked her head into the house and called out, “We’re late, Tommy. We’re supposed to be there at eight o’clock sharp — it’s already eight forty. I’ll be in the car. Come on, baby. We got to be on time this time.” She waited in the car and honked the horn a half-dozen times but had to come back inside and get Fat Tommy. She found him back in bed, fully dressed, sobbing, with the covers pulled over his head.
“Where the hell you been, baby?” Fat Tommy said. “I thought Cut got you.”
“That niggah better be layin’ low,” Bea said. “These Hollywood cops would love to catch a fuck-up like that and Rodney King his ass to death for the savage shit he done.”
“It just ain’t fair,” Fat Tommy complained.
“Listen here, Tommy,” Bea said sternly. “You don’t deserve this beef. You don’t know nothin’. You didn’t see nothin’. You got a wife and family to protect. It was that goddamn Cut that fount Simpson. You didn’t even know he was a cop. It was all Cut’s idea. We wouldn’t be mixed up in none of this if Cut hadn’t...”