“It probably would.”
“Damn right it would. She’d miss out on a few years in an orange jumpsuit and George would be spared knowing that his wife wanted him dead. And I’d be shirking my duty.”
“Which is to lock up the bad guys.”
“And girls, right. And if she’ll go so far as to hire a killer, who’s to say society is better off with her on the loose? I might be able to frighten her out of having George Otterbein killed, but would that scare some moral fiber into her?” A sigh. “So we’ll play this by the book. Eleven-thirty in the Winn-Dixie lot. She’ll be bringing a thousand dollars as earnest money, and it’d be best if you could get her to hand it to you.”
“Understood.”
“And you won’t forget to wear a wire, will you?”
“What an idea.”
“And remember you’re a Jersey boy. You wouldn’t want to slip and say something like, ‘Bergen County, maybe y’all have heard of it.’ ”
He watched the local news, the national news. Five minutes of Pardon the Interruption on ESPN, five minutes of Jeopardy. Took a shower, decided he could get by without a shave, then changed his mind and shaved anyway.
Couldn’t decide which shirt to wear. Crazy, he thought, and stupid in the bargain. He didn’t have that many shirts, and nobody was going to notice what he was wearing, and it’s not as though he was looking to make an impression.
Been a while since he’d had a good steak. No need to read more than that into it.
Five
* * *
And it was a good steak, no question about it, well-marbled and tender. The cliché about doughnuts notwithstanding, cops learned to eat well in New York, and at one time or another he’d had steak dinners at Keen’s, Smith & Wollensky, and Peter Luger. If the Cattle Baron’s rib eye wasn’t the best he’d ever had, it was certainly in the top ten.
He ordered it black and blue, not sure if they’d know what that meant, and he wasn’t reassured by the faint look of puzzlement on the face of the dishwater-blonde waitress. But she evidently passed the order on to a chef who knew what he had in mind, and his steak showed up charred on the outside and blood-rare within. It was a generous serving, accompanied by a baked potato and a side of creamed spinach, and it was almost enough to take his mind off Lisa Yarrow Otterbein.
Almost.
The fantasy, brought up to date:
He sits over a cup of coffee, watching her. She can’t see him, but his gaze is strong enough for her to feel it, even though she doesn’t know exactly what it is that she feels.
She approaches his table, asks him if everything is all right.
He says it is.
But none of their words matter. Their eyes have locked together, and something passes between them, a current as impossible to identify as it is to deny.
She says her name: “Lisa. Lisa Yarrow.”
“Doak Miller.”
“We close at eleven. That’s when I get off.”
“But we don’t have to wait until then, do we?”
“No, of course not. I’m through here. As soon as you finish your coffee—”
He puts money on the table. “I’m done with my coffee,” he says.
He gets to his feet. She takes his arm. They walk through the dining room and out of the restaurant.
She points to her car.
“We’ll take mine,” he says.
“Good,” she says. “His money bought it. I don’t want it anymore.”
He holds the door for her, walks around the car, gets behind the wheel. The car starts up right away, and he pulls out of the lot and heads north on Camp Road.
They drive for twenty minutes in silence. Eventually she asks him where they are going.
“Do you care?”
She thinks about it. “No,” she says at length. “No, not at all.”
The reality:
She comes to his table without being summoned, or even stared at. She asks him if everything was all right. He says it was.
Their eyes never meet.
The blonde waitress brings the check. He takes a credit card from his wallet, thinks better of it, puts it back. And, as in the fantasy, puts bills on the table.
Back home, he booted up his computer, checked his email, dropped in at a couple of websites. Found something to Google, and let one thing lead to another.
Running it all through his mind.
He thought about—and Googled—Karla Faye Tucker. Killed some people with a pickax during a 1983 robbery in Texas, got herself convicted and sentenced to death the following year, and executed by lethal injection in 1999. She found God in prison, which is where He evidently spends a lot of free time, and the campaign for a commutation of her sentence made much of this conversion. She was an entirely different person now, her advocates stressed; kill her and you’d be killing someone other than the woman who’d committed the murders.
The other side pointed out that, even if the conversion was genuine, it had only come about because Karla Faye had a date with the needle. Yes, she’d earned herself a place in Heaven. No, she couldn’t postpone the trip. Your bus is waitin’, Karla Faye!
What brought the case to Doak’s mind had nothing to do with arguments for and against capital punishment, an issue on which his views tended to shift anyway. But he remembered something someone had said right around the time that 60 Minutes was airing the woman’s story, and George W. Bush, still in the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, was turning down her appeal:
“If she wasn’t pretty, nobody’d give a damn.”
Well, somebody would. The die-hard opponents of capital punishment would be on board no matter who she was or what she looked like. But if she’d had a face like a pizza, there’d have been fewer signatures on those petitions, fewer feet marching, and a lot less face time on network television.
But she was a pretty woman, maybe even beautiful. That got her more attention, got her special treatment.
So he was thinking about the woman he was going to meet tomorrow. Lisa Yarrow Otterbein, who was better looking than Karla Faye Tucker, and who, as far as he knew, had never even laid hands on a pickax.
The Wikipedia page showed a photo of Karla Faye Tucker, and he pulled up Lisa’s photo on his phone and held it alongside of Karla Faye’s for comparison.
No comparison, really.
Radburn’s photo was a good one, he noted. Except that it was static, a single moment frozen in time, and she had one of those faces that kept changing, looking slightly different from every different angle, changing too as whatever was going through her mind played itself out on her face.
A man could spend a lifetime looking at a face like that.
Jesus, he thought.
He opened MS Word, clicked to open a new document. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, and then he changed his mind, just as he’d changed his mind about the credit card. He closed Word, then shut down his computer altogether.
Found a tablet. The old-fashioned kind, a yellow legal pad, ruled sheets of paper 8-1/2 by 11 inches. Uncapped a Bic ballpoint, began printing in block capitals.
He was at his desk for the better part of an hour. There were plenty of pauses, a lot of gazing off into the middle distance, chasing the thoughts that flitted across the surface of his consciousness. And from time to time he’d pick up his phone and find his way to her photograph.
A good photo, but there was so much it couldn’t show. Including the color of her eyes.
They were blue.
He set the alarm for eight and woke at seven-thirty as if from a dream. But there were no dream memories, no clue to the dream’s theme or subject.
He showered, dressed. He’d laid out clothes before he went to bed, and they were on the chair waiting for him—boxer shorts, dark trousers, a long-sleeved shirt with a tropical print. A parrot, a palm tree, just the sort of thing a snowbird would buy the day after he got off the plane.
He’d bought it himself in a strip mall halfway between Ta
mpa and Perry. Hardly ever wore it since.
Along with the clothes, the chair held the recording device the sheriff had reminded him not to forget. He fastened the rig around his chest, clicked it on and off and on again, said “Testing, one two three,” which was what everyone said under the circumstances, probably because it was easier than thinking of something else to say. He played it back, heard the words in his own voice.
It always surprised him, hearing his own voice. It was never the way he thought he sounded.
The shirt covered the wire. Nothing showed. He slipped his hand between two shirt buttons, switched the thing on, played the test again, then erased it. He said, “Recorded in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie supermarket on Cable Boulevard in Belle Vista, Gallatin County, Florida, this sixteenth day of April in the year two thousand fourteen. Participants are J. W. Miller and Lisa Yarrow Otterbein.”
Stopped it, played it back. He’d spoken in his everyday voice, but how much of that was New York and how much had turned Floridian was hard for him to tell. He’d speak differently as Frankie from Bergen County, and he wouldn’t have to think about the accent. All he had to do was get the attitude right and the accent would follow.
He checked his wristwatch for the tenth or twentieth time. The time raced or crawled, it was hard to say which. He didn’t want to do this, and at the same time he wanted to do it and be done with it.
He circled the Winn-Dixie lot a few minutes before eleven, looked for a silver-gray Lexus, looked for any car parked off by itself.
Nothing. He drove a few blocks away and parked on the street. Checked the wire, made sure it was still working. Picked up the yellow pad, looked it over, shook his head at what he’d written.
Took out his phone, checked to see if anyone had called. He’d switched it from Ring to Vibrate before he left the house, because he didn’t want to get a phone call while he was busy being Frankie from Jersey.
No calls.
He summoned up her photo. Surprising, really, that you couldn’t determine the color of her eyes. They were such a vivid blue you’d think the camera couldn’t help picking it up.
He put the phone away. Checked his watch again, and returned to the Winn-Dixie. The parking spot he picked was at the rear of the lot and over to the left. There were no other cars within thirty yards of it.
He was ten minutes early, which was about right. He should be here first. Let her come to him.
If she did.
He hadn’t really entertained the possibility that she’d fail to show, but now it seemed highly probable. It was, after all, one thing to broach the subject to someone you knew, even as superficially as she knew Gonson. It was another thing to meet with a complete stranger and pay him a down payment on a contract killing.
She’d skip the meeting, he decided. She’d stay home and give it some more thought, and then she’d tell Richard Lyle Gonson that she’d changed her mind. Or she’d make up a story explaining why she’d been unable to get to the Winn-Dixie lot at the appointed hour, and looking to reschedule. And there’d be more phone calls all around, and tomorrow morning or the day after he’d be sitting where he was sitting now, only this time she’d show up, because she wouldn’t pull the same crap twice. And—
And there she was. A silver sedan, but was it a Lexus? Cars tended to look alike these days—although nothing out there looked much like his Monte Carlo. But this was indeed a Lexus, he recognized the hood emblem, and it was skirting the several rows of cars huddled around the store entrance and heading instead for the rear of the lot.
She seemed to hesitate, settling at length on a spot one row in front of him and four spaces off to the left. She shut off the ignition, stayed behind the wheel.
Did she want a sign? All right, he could give her one. He flicked his headlights on and off, then on and off again. Was that entrapment? He decided it wasn’t, not unless she was a moth.
Her door opened and she got out of the car. She was wearing a burnt orange top over a pair of powder-blue designer jeans. A tan leather bag rode her shoulder, and one hand pinned it to her side, as if to secure the thousand dollars.
He leaned across the passenger seat, opened the door for her. She hesitated for a beat, and he patted the seat in invitation. She got in and drew the door shut.
Six
* * *
“Right on schedule,” the sheriff said. “But I don’t see the look of accomplishment that lit up your face the last time you wore a wire.”
“No.”
“I’d guess you got stood up, but you could have told me as much over the phone.”
“No, she showed up,” he said. “Simplest thing is to play it for you.”
“Recorded in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie supermarket on Cable Boulevard in Belle Vista, Gallatin County, Florida, this sixteenth day of April in the year two thousand fourteen. Participants are J. W. Miller and Lisa Yarrow Otterbein.”
(beat)
“I don’t know how to say this.”
“Hey, take your time.”
“Look, I made a big mistake. I was upset, I was angry, and I told . . . I don’t want to say his name.”
“I know who you mean.”
“I never thought he’d take me seriously. I certainly didn’t take it seriously myself, and when he got back to me and told me he’d made arrangements with you, I didn’t know what to think.”
“Maybe you need some time to think it over.”
“No, all I need is for this whole incident to be as if it never happened. I’m not, not the sort of person who does this sort of thing.”
“Whatever you say.”
“My God, I don’t even kill bugs!”
“My wife’s the same way. She makes me kill ’em for her.
Which, when you stop an’ think about it—”
“I take them outside and let them go.”
“Okay.”
“I told Mr. . . . I told that man I never meant it, that it was a complete mistake, that he should get in touch with you and call it off. If you’re sure, he said, then just don’t show up. He’ll get the idea. He doesn’t even know your name, he’s not going to turn up on your doorstep.”
“You coulda done that.”
“And maybe I should have, but I don’t like loose ends. And why should you be stuck here waiting?”
“Very considerate.”
“This way it’s all perfectly clear. I’m not at all interested in . . . what we talked about, and we can both go our separate ways and think no more about it.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“You’ve had to make a trip for nothing, and I apologize for that. If you feel you ought to be reimbursed for your time—”
“Hey, I got more time than I know what to do with. And it’s very decent of you to show up on time and not leave me high and dry. But I get the feeling there’s more to it than just tying off loose ends.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe there’s a part of you wants to go through with it. I just now made a bet with myself, and you know what I bet? I bet you got an envelope in that purse and the envelope’s got a thousand dollars in it. Do I win my bet?”
(beat)
“I thought there was a chance you would want to be reimbursed for your time and—”
“And you were also giving yourself a chance to change your mind and go through with it.”
“No.”
“And you still got the option, you know. It’s still your call. You want to call me off now, once and for all, fine. That’s it and I’m gone. But if you want to change your mind back again, now’s the time to do it.”
“I don’t—”
“Some bugs, you know, you can’t just take ’em outside. They keep coming back until someone gets rid of ’em for you.”
(sound of a car door opening)
“No, I’m not, I don’t, no.”
“Whatever you say.”
“I was out of my mind with anger, and I poured a couple of drinks on top
of the anger, and I said something crazy and even while I was saying it I knew I wasn’t serious, I couldn’t possibly be serious. I’m going now. This is over, okay? Because I really want this to be over.”
(beat)
“Recorded at the Winn-Dixie lot, morning of April sixteenth, year is twenty-fourteen. Participants are J. W. Miller and Lisa Yarrow Otterbein. Over and out.”
“ ‘Over and out.’ You were a lot more formal at the beginning.”
He nodded. “By the time she got out of the car,” he said, “what I said and how I said it didn’t seem all that important. You and I are the only people who’ll ever have to listen to it.”
“Which is just as well, seeing as you came perilously close to entrapment toward the end there. All about those bugs that keep coming back inside, unless you let Frankie Boy hang a patch on your screen door.”
“I know. But it was all slipping away. She was calling it off, and I figured I’d give her one last chance to call it back on again.”
“I’m not blaming you. If she changed her mind once she could change it again, but once she’s out of the car it’s game over. Some of what she said was crap, you know.”
“I had the feeling.”
“I don’t believe she had that second conversation with Rich, where she tries to get him to call it off and he says handle it yourself. He never mentioned any second conversation, never said a thing to indicate she was having second thoughts.”
“Would he?”