If Looks Could Kill (7 page)

She had it down, too. The setting, the psychology, the rank smell of futility. He was impressed. No wonder the critics liked her so much. No wonder she'd been lauded in
Newsweek
and
The Trib
as the new Chandler.

Mac pulled his cigarettes back out and lit one up. It was so late by now that the only television on was the cable shopping network. Even so, he had it on. The house he was renting from Judge Axminster was small, boxy, and uninspiring. He'd hung a couple of Chicago posters in the living room and arranged his kids' school pictures on his dresser with the shot they'd taken at Francis's diner the day the other dicks had sent him off. Even so, it wasn't any more a home than the efficiency he'd rented on the South Side after the divorce. A place to hang your hat in between shifts, same kind of living quarters as most of the cops he'd hung around with.

He rubbed the beer can against his temple, the cool easing the constant burning. Mac hated new places. He'd been born and raised in Chicago, a product of generations of Chicago cops. His father had driven for Mayor Daley and his mother had tatted altercloths for Sacred Heart's. He'd gone on his first drunk over at the old Emerald Isle and been suspended from school for cutting class to attend Cubs games. The last time he'd left home, it had been for Vietnam, and look what a success that had been.

But when you can't do the job, you don't hang around and attend your own wake. So here he was, five hundred miles away, soothing his shakes with too much beer and too little activity.

He had no business itching after the C. J. Turner puzzle. After all, it was St. Louis County's call. He hadn't been invited to dance. He knew better than to butt in, especially after getting a load of Sgt. Elise Lawson's voice on the phone. A real little ball-buster, that one. Jayne Wayne with an attitude. She'd come down on him with hobnailed boots if she thought he was even sniffing around her collar.

It didn't matter a whole lot. He was already interested. After all, it was what he'd done for ten years. He could be the police chief of Pyrite until the day they dropped him six feet under, and he'd still be a Chicago detective. It was what he'd been good at and what he'd missed when he left. And the single factor that had made the difference on his arrest and conviction record had been the fact that his curiosity was insatiable.

He finished his beer and tossed the can to join the others. The woman in Chris Jackson's book had probably had a kitchen just like this one, he thought morosely. Old and scarred and weary looking. The woman in Chris Jackson's book would have called the cops eight or nine times to get her husband off her, only to change her mind when it came time to press charges. She'd want him stopped, but not jailed. She'd be terrified of him in a rage, but even more terrified of him not there at all. Until that moment when she couldn't take any more. Maybe he'd hit on the kids, or started looking at her little sister. Maybe a friend prodded her to do something about that asshole that made life such hell for her, and he'd found out and beat her all over again, threatening to find her wherever she was and kill her if she left him. Kill her and all the kids. And she'd believe him, because it was probably true. So she'd wait until he was asleep and sneak up on him and pull the trigger, or plunge in the knife so many times he couldn't be recognized, just to make sure he couldn't still get up and hurt her. Just to pay him back for all the pain. Just to finally, finally stop him.

How had Chris Jackson known? How could somebody who lived in a converted hundred-year-old mercantile that smelled like potpourri and had porcelain teapots cluttering old sales cases and bears ringing the balcony, possibly know what it was like to be that desperate?

It was one of the things that intrigued Mac so much. He'd been hearing about Chris Jackson all night long. A sweet person, an unassuming folk hero who joined in all the town's activities. A shy celebrity who, for all that fame, was just as normal as your neighbor—well, with just a few eccentricities, but heck, she had a right to be just a little different, didn't she? In fact, the town would have been just a little disappointed if she hadn't. But, for all that, bright and open and funny. A nice, talented person with a vivid imagination.

Except that Mac didn't believe it. There was something more there, something the good people of Pyrite weren't seeing, something dark.

She'd faced it. Somewhere in the vague recesses of her past before she'd shown up on Pyrite's figurative doorstep, Chris Jackson, a.k.a. C. J. Turner, had really waded through some shit.

Mac knew the look. He had it. The people he respected back home had it, the ones who'd earned their street degrees. The shadows left behind from all the violence they'd taken part in, the sum of the misery they'd seen. You wade through enough sewers, you're going to smell like them.

A couple of times, Mac had been forced to baby-sit a writer or an actor researching a role. They'd asked to sit in with him, to dig into his methods and memories, to cull whatever it was they'd need to give back a realistic portrayal of a cop on the mean streets. And each time Mac had looked into their eyes, he'd known they didn't have a hope in hell of getting it right. Cushioned by their safe, comfortable lives, they'd thought they could step into reality for a few days and just absorb it. Get a little dirt on their hands and show the world how well they knew the real streets. But it was bullshit. The look of their eyes had been too shallow going in, and too shallow when they'd left again. They might have picked up the language and the gestures and the lingo. They would never have the ghosts that came with the job. They would never have to wake up in the morning knowing that it really wasn't going to get any better out there. The thousand-yard stare was earned, and they'd never do it.

Chris Jackson liked to laugh. She was smart and funny and bright, just like her neighbors said. Mac would even give her points for eccentricity—even in a town with a resident ventriloquist. But what they didn't seem to see was that behind all that deliberate normality was the darkness. It was as if she'd done it backwards, stepping into their world to see if she could get that right after surviving the sewers.

She might come close, too. Close enough to fool people who didn't know better. Al MacNamara knew better. He had a feeling she wrote nights because she couldn't sleep either.

When the phone rang, he was still sitting at the table. Going on five, the world was just beginning to lighten up outside. Birds chattered out in the big oaks that ringed his porch, and down the street somebody was pulling out of his driveway to go in to work. Mac was in his kitchen, dressed in running shorts and keeping company with Miller and Camel.

"Chief?"

He didn't realize he was rubbing at his head again. "Yeah."

"This is Crystal... you know, the night dispatcher?"

Nineteen, bleached blonde and six pounds of eyeliner, hot to have a cop in her shorts. Mac knew all about Crystal. "Yeah, Crystal."

"Well, Curtis is down at the junction of Highway W with a multi-vehicle accident with fatalities."

"Can't he handle it?"

"Well, I think he's part of the accident."

Mac's head hurt worse. His first goddamn day. He'd had no sleep, ached in more than one place from the wrestling match down at the Tip a Few, and was numb in a few others from about half a case of beer. The last thing he needed now was a Chevy sandwich to investigate. "I can assume he isn't one of the fatalities?"

Crystal's high, breathy voice slowed, as if her brain had to gear down for the question. "Well, I don't think so. He's the one who called it in."

"What about sheriff and highway patrol?"

Pyrite was the Puckett County seat, which meant Mac had the added privilege of tap dancing around a county sheriffs department on the same block and the highway patrol station over the hill to the west. Back home, all he had to worry about pissing off were his superiors and, occasionally, the feds.

"One deputy headin' that way, highway patrol's over to the other side of the county. Besides, they can't work the same scene without drawin' blood. Should I tell 'em you're on the way?"

Mac tried to remember where he'd tossed his uniform when he'd walked in. "Yeah. Give me a couple of minutes. The paramedics already rolling?"

"Well, Heilerman's sent a crew. The paramedics from the community hospital are tied up."

Heilerman's, Mac thought as he climbed to his feet again. Funeral home. There was some kind of problem there, but he couldn't remember what.

"Um, you maybe want to make sure they got off quick," was all Crystal would say.

Oh, yeah. Now Mac remembered. A slow ride to the hospital was good for business. "On my way," was all he said as he hung up and headed for the sink.

Turning on the cold water, he shoved his head underneath. That and four Excedrin would get him working, anyway.

He was dressed in five minutes. In another five he was guiding his unit through the lightening streets of Pyrite on the way to the highway where he could already see the shudder of strobes. As he passed the corner of Main and Sixth, he noticed that he'd been right. Chris Jackson's lights were still all on.

* * *

Chris was in disguise when she dropped Shelly off at school that morning. It wasn't that she was afraid of running into the judge. She was testing out another book situation. Shelly considered it great fun, especially when nobody recognized the graying, slightly bent, frail woman with glasses and a complete avocado polyester wardrobe with matching net scarf as the town's favorite author. Shelly introduced Chris as her aunt in from over Potosi way, and everyone nodded.

Chris shuffled the streets in her outfit, amazed at how easily people took to her persona. She'd used no more than the kind of bad, cheap wig older women tend to wear to cover their thinning hair, loose clothes and bad pancake makeup along with her concave posture to effect the change, and everybody bought it without consideration.

She crossed the street three times just to see what would happen, and found herself escorted by Pete Chitwell who ran the gas station, Thelma Potter, and the new chief himself, who was obviously so distracted by the very lovely Miss Shawntell Malone in her new Lycra skirt that he didn't look twice at Chris, even when she gave him a kiss on the cheek as a thank you for his help.

She didn't get more than a passing glance from Weird Allen Robertson, which was just as well. Allen had a nasty habit of staring, which, coming from those oily, petulant features, sent chills crawling up Chris's back. At thirty-five, he still lived with his mother, didn't drive, and worked as a stockboy at the ShopMart. The town simply put down his unwashed, overweight appearance to being Weird Allen. Chris suspected that lately he'd been standing outside her back window at night. At first she'd meant to report him. Then she'd begun to see him as the prototype for a villain in her next book.

Today, he barely noticed her. After all, she was just a disagreeable old woman. She gave more than passing thought to dressing up more often, just to get a chance to watch him unobserved.

The crowd at the Kozy Kitchen was much more perceptive. It took Luella Travers all of three minutes to demand an explanation.

"How'd you know?" Chris demanded, finally able to pull off the scratchy wig and ditch the glasses.

Luella pointed with the coffeepot that always seemed to be in her hand. "Your purse. Nobody else has one like it."

Hefting the offending article onto the counter, Chris had to agree. The rest of her life might be orderly and organized. Her purse took care of all overflow. Crammed with everything from airline tickets to screwdrivers, it was the size of a Voltzwagen and twice as heavy. Useful for survival in airports and defense on dark streets.

"Well, congratulations," she admitted, pulling off the scarf and stuffing it in with the revision notes she had to take to a phone and the other outfit she was going to change into at the store, "you have better eyesight than half the town."

Luella just snorted. "Half the town don't pay attention. The rest pay too much."

"One of my victims this morning was the new chief," Chris announced slyly, knowing perfectly well that her statement would lead the group onto the subject she wanted.

It did.

"Well, I'm not sure," Luella said as she imparted another dose of caffeine with the information Chris had casually requested, "but what I hear is that he was in a gunfight with a drug ring up in Chicago. Almost died. Can't hardly be surprised, considerin' the size of that scar."

"Weren't no drug dealer," Paulie Twill protested from the next stool over. "Gang fight. Chief stopped it single-handed after his partner was killed."

"Well, Eldon told me," Pete Chitwell said, resetting his feed cap on thinning red hair and nodding his head decisively, "and he should know, bein' as how he's the sheriff, that it was a Mafia guy. Had a hit out on the chief for him testifyin' at a trial. That's why it ain't safe for him to be in Chicago no more."

Luella snorted. "If the Mafia can find him in Chicago, what's to say they can't find him in Pyrite?"

Pete swung his fork in Chris's direction. "Nobody's found C. J. Turner yet, have they?"

"Yeah, but she's usin' a different name. He isn't."

Which left Chris with the realization that she should have known better than to go to the town grapevine for accurate information. A serial killer was after her, and the new police chief was running from the Godfather. If life were really that interesting, she wouldn't have to write books.