That fucking bastard. That God damn sick bastard.
It didn’t stop with Mary Alice, though. Michael was still out there, still doing whatever the hell he wanted to do in John’s name. And he was a cop. A cop! He could jam up John anytime, was probably sitting on his ass right now thinking of yet another way to put John in the frame for his own sick crimes. The thought of last night, the tips of John’s fingers touching the folding knife, almost getting caught with a weapon in his hands, made him break out into a cold sweat. Michael could do anything. He could arrest John right now and there was nothing John could do about it.
And maybe John deserved it. Maybe after what he had done to Michael’s neighbor, he deserved to be tossed back in jail with all the other sick bastards. He had mutilated a child. He had used his own hands to defile that girl. It didn’t seem right that he should get away with such a thing.
The way things were looking, he probably wouldn’t.
The dryer stopped and John started folding the towels, piling them up in a rolling sixty-drum trashcan so they could move them around the cars as they worked. He needed to talk to Ben again. John had grown up in prison, but he thought like a prisoner, not a criminal. He needed someone to tell him what to do.
“Are you John?”
The woman in front of him was slim, about five-eight or -nine. Her black hair was in a pixie cut and she wore a close-fit cropped jacket over her tight blue jeans.
“Can I help you?” he asked, looking for the telltale bulge under her jacket. She didn’t look like a cop to him, her jacket was too nice, but John had never been good at spotting the bad guys.
“You’re John Shelley?” she asked.
He glanced over her shoulder. Ray-Ray was sucking on a lollipop, but John could see his eyes were taking in the scene.
John asked, “Do I know you?”
“You moved,” she said. “I thought you lived on Ashby Street.”
He tried to smile when what he really wanted to do was drop the towels and run. “What’s going on?”
She had her hands on her hips, and he thought about Ms. Lam. He couldn’t help himself. He looked right at the metal cap screwed onto the vacuum tank.
“I’m Kathy Keenan,” she said. “A friend of your sister’s.”
He dropped the towels. “Is Joyce—”
“She’s fine,” the woman assured him. “You just need to talk to her.”
“I…” He looked down at the pile of towels, then back up at the woman. He didn’t know who she was or why she was here, but she was crazy if she thought she could make Joyce do anything she didn’t want to do.
John knelt down to scoop up the towels. “She doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“I know she doesn’t,” Kathy said. “But she needs to.”
“Who are you?”
“I told you. I’m a friend of hers.”
“You can’t know her very well if you think this will work.”
“I’ve shared her bed for the last twelve years, John. I think I pretty much know her better than anyone on earth.”
So, Joyce was gay. John wondered what Richard thought about that. One child a convicted rapist and murderer, the other queer as a three-dollar bill. John couldn’t help but smile at the probable magnitude of Richard’s disappointment.
Kathy had asked, “Does it bother you that your sister’s a lesbian?”
“I really don’t think I have room to talk,” John had admitted, all the while thinking, God, Richard must have been livid when he found out. His perfect Joyce was batting for the other team.
Kathy drove a black Porsche, the kind of car John could only see from his hands and knees as he cleaned the trash out of it. She had driven him straight up Piedmont Road, taking a right on Sidney Marcus and ending up parked in front of a small building on Lenox Road right up from the interstate. The sign outside read Keener, Rose and Shelley in fancy gold script. The car beside them, a graphite gray BMW, was parked in the space reserved for Joyce Shelley.
Joyce worked less than two miles from the Gorilla. She might have even passed him every day on her drive in.
“She’s handling a closing right now,” Kathy said. “She won’t be long.”
John’s knees popped as he rolled himself out of the low-lying car. Time and again, he had to remind himself that he was almost forty years old. For some reason, he still felt fifteen, like Coastal had happened to another John, his mind going there while his body stayed on the outside, not aging, waiting for him to come back and claim it.
“We’ll wait in her office,” Kathy suggested, leading him through the building. The receptionist’s eyes followed John as he walked past her desk, and he imagined that but for the janitor, she wasn’t used to seeing his kind strolling through these pristine corridors.
“Back here.” Kathy had grabbed some notes from a cubbyhole with her name on it, and she read through these as they walked down the hall.
Joyce’s office was nice, exactly as John would have imagined if he let himself think about his sister and her life outside of him. The Persian carpet on the floor had deep blues and burgundies and the curtains were a thin linen that let in the sunlight. The paint on the wall was a kind of chocolate beige. The colors were masculine, but there was something really feminine to the way Joyce had used them. Or maybe a designer had done the office, some pricey chick from Buckhead who got paid to spend rich people’s money. There were a couple of Oriental-looking paintings that weren’t to John’s taste, but the pictures on the credenza under the windows made his heart hurt in his chest.
A young Joyce and John on the log ride at Six Flags. Baby John in Richard’s lap as he gave him a bottle. Ten-year-old Joyce on the beach in her two-piece bathing suit, a Popsicle in each hand. There were more recent photographs, too. Kathy and Joyce at the zoo. Kathy on a horse with a mountain view behind her. Two Labrador retrievers rolling around on the grass.
The photo that stopped him was of his mother. Emily with a scarf around her head, her eyes sunken, cheeks hollow. She was smiling, though. His mother had always had the most beautiful smile. John had gotten through so many nights thinking about that smile, the easy way she bestowed it, the genuine kindness behind it. Tears fell from his eyes at the sight of her, and he felt a physical ache knowing he would never see her again.
Kathy said, “Emily was a wonderful person.”
John made himself put the frame back where it belonged. He used the back of his hand to wipe his eyes. “You knew her?”
“Yes,” Kathy said. “She was very close to Joyce. It was hard on all of us when she got sick.”
“I don’t…” John didn’t know how to say this. “I don’t remember seeing you at the funeral.”
“I was there,” she said, and he saw tension around her eyes. “Your father isn’t very accepting of Joyce’s relationship with me.”
“No,” John said. “He wouldn’t be.” Richard had always been certain that he knew the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. Whoever crossed that line was as easily cut out of his life as the cancerous tumors he removed in the operating room.
John felt the need to say, “I’m sorry about that. He’s always loved Joyce.”