Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
my shoulders. “An impression.”
“Are you saying I showed up drunk?” An edge to the question. I noticed her color was returning.
“I’m saying you got pretty blitzed for a couple light-light drinks, Ava.”
“Maybe they weren’t as light as I asked for.”
Nobody does defensive better than a guilty alky. Her voice was getting stronger and her shakes were gone. “I thought it was the flu,” I said.
She’d stopped sweating. Her eyes were clearing. They flared at me. “Maybe that’s just part of it. Maybe you got me plastered. Maybe you—”
“Maybe I’m the one who planted that stash of vodka in your car.”
Her eyes went saucer-wide. “You looked in my…” Guilt and anger fought in her face and anger won. “I think you’re a bastard,” she hissed, grabbing her purse from the table. She blew by me and I saw wobble in the legs, smelled sweat and vomit and an astringent tang in her wake. The door slammed shut and seconds later came a grinding of sand as she fishtailed away.
I pretty much knew what I’d find before I went to the cabinet. I shook the vodka bottle and watched it bubble abnormally and heard a hiss as I unscrewed the cap. Watered. I checked the bathroom wastebasket and found a crumpled Dixie cup hidden at the bottom. It smelled as expected, making her morning passage easy to map: she awakened with the craving, pulled a cup from the bathroom dispenser, and tiptoed to the liquor cabinet to fill it. She replaced the removed vodka with water and returned to the bathroom to alternately drink and vomit until she absorbed enough alcohol to start the buzz. When the door opened she was already getting straight, if that’s what you’d call it—shakes leaving, eyes clearing, mind defogging. Right now she was working on the vodka under her car seat. Hair of the dog that bit you, it was humorously called. But I knew this dog. It didn’t bite; it ate you whole, and there wasn’t a damn thing funny about it. I gave Ava twenty-five minutes and phoned her home. No answer. I gave it another heart-pounding five before redialing.
“Hello?” she chirped a little too loudly, but pleasant and controlled. Juiced again, but at least she was home. I gave silent thanks to whoever pulls the levers and gently hung up.
Harry and I headed toward downtown to interview a woman who’d known Deschamps both personally and professionally. I was in a funk and lying in the backseat with my arms tight over my chest, a doleful mummy.
Harry shook his head with regret. “That pretty little doc, a drunk. Sad.”
Like me Harry didn’t use the word drunk as a pejorative; we both knew too many recovering alcoholics—AA folks, mainly—who easily referred to their drinking selves as drunks, alkys, boozehounds, or whatnot. I figured it for a badge of courage, the guts to look in the mirror and tell the truth. Then get healed if you stayed honest with your reflection.
“When she gets found out it’ll be her job,” he said. “And she’ll get found out.”
Harry was right; when Ava’s alcohol abuse was discovered she’d be sent to a rehab program and reassigned to a lesser position, like filing. Another pathologist would be hired. Ava’d eventually get eased out the door like a bulldozer eases aside a sapling. It’d be a fast track to the street—Clair wasn’t long on sympathy.
Harry spoke over his shoulder. “What you figuring on doing about it, Cars?”
“Why would I be doing something about it?”
“You got a feeling for the girl, don’t you?”
“I barely know her, Harry.”
He swung the car down a side street and jammed on the brakes. I felt the front tire bang the curb, roll up over it, fall back down. Harry parking.
“Come and sit up front, bro.”
I got out and switched seats. We were in an old neighborhood and the street was bordered by spreading oaks and tall pines thick with cones. I figured some of the trees predated the War Between the States. The antebellum houses sat distant from the pavement behind azaleas, magnolia, redtips, and myrtle, as if hiding in the past and eavesdropping on the present.
Harry said, “We got a full plate, what with the murders, Squill hijacking the PSIT. It could turn into a king-hell political mess, eat us alive. If that little lady’s got the alcohol sickness, and you got a feeling for her, you can get ate up from that side too.”
“You telling me leave it alone?”
He smiled with a touch of sadness and shook his head. “You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do. I know it, you know it, and all the angels above know it. I’m just saying to watch out for yourself.”
I stared out the window. Down the street a frail and elderly woman watered her flower garden. She looked like an ornament, she was so still.
Harry said, “You keep pretty tight inside yourself, Cars. Nothing wrong with it. But you find those old wires tightening around you, don’t go nowhere but to me, right?”
His phrasing struck a disconcerting note in my head. “What old wires? What are you talking about?”
He looked away, put the car in gear.
“Don’t get yourself tore up, that’s all I’m saying.”
Harry drove the final few blocks to the next address on our shoe-leather list. We got out in front of Les Idées, an art gallery on Mobile’s near-south side, a slender yellow New Orleans-style two-story with scrollwork iron on the balconies and plum-colored shutters. There were flower boxes. A cobblestone walk. A small trickling fountain. The place was precious. Harry eyed the coffee shop across the street; the coffee smell was thick in the air.
“Go grab a cup, bro,” I said. “I think I can handle the interview.”
Harry crossed the street, looking relieved.
Though Deschamps was primarily a commercial artist, he relaxed by painting watercolors, mainly seascapes. Françoise Abbot was the proprietor of Les Idées. She’d exhibited Deschamps’s works for several years and occasionally socialized with him in a group situation, before and during his engagement.
Abbot was a slender fiftyish woman dressed in a red velvet wrap just west of where caftan meets kimono. A smoker, she affected an ebony cigarette holder, a device I’d considered passé to the point of antique. Her black hair had one of those abbreviated anticuts that sent shaggy sprigs flailing in all directions. She led me to several Deschamps watercolors, workmanlike, but lacking the insight to spark illustration into art. I thought they’d have made decent covers for blank-page New Age journals with titles like My Daily Reflections or Notes From a Life.
Madame Abbot’s low voice matched her conspiratorial demeanor and she punctuated phrases with an elastic assortment of facial displays. I suspected someone once told her she looked cute when wrinkling her nose and she’d decided to diversify. Customers were absent and we sat at a small ornate table in a back corner. I said, “Everyone I’ve spoken with considered Mr. Deschamps next in line for beatification, lacking only in that he was Baptist. Is that your impression, Ms. Abbot?”
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” she stage-whispered with a flaring of nostrils that segued into a squint. “Surely you know what that means.” She gave me three quick expressions that bet I didn’t.
“Of the dead speak nothing but good,” I replied. “That’s inexact but sufficient.”
She dropped her jaw and wiggled it, followed by a wink and a thumbs-up. She pointed the suck end of her cigarette holder at me. “That’s excellent, Detective Ryder.”
I said, “It’s a phrase often connoting ill that might be revealed, but is left unspoken.”
Abbot winked and wrinkled her nose. “Really?”
“Perhaps Mr. Deschamps didn’t quite lead the straight-arrow life I’m being