Playing Dead (11 page)

I assumed that W.A. knew nothing about this key or the contents of the safe deposit box, that it was another of Mama’s secrets, popping up like dormant locusts released from years of imposed napping. At the moment, I actually felt relieved that Ms. Billington, armed with window cleaner and her rolls of crimson tape, was an implacable fortress in the way of anyone trying to get in before I did.

I hung up and felt a little better. I did wish I hadn’t worn such a short skirt, something plucked out of Sadie’s bag, because the bellman across the street was enjoying the view. My sweaty thighs were sticking to the wooden bench like a pre-schooler’s. Sadie’s white T-shirt with a small pink sequined heart was like a second skin on me, the neckline a little too cleavage-happy. As for her short red cowboy boots … well, it was that or flip-flops and I could hear Granny nixing that from above as inappropriate going-to-the-bank attire.

I tipped up my sunglasses and checked the time on my cell phone—5:14—then slipped them back down.

“So you decided to show.”

The voice was low, rough, behind me, and I nearly fell off the seat.

I whipped around.

Jack Smith grinned and slid onto the bench, throwing his good arm lightly over my shoulders. The other was in a sling.

Surely I could take a one-armed man. My purse was on the ground by my feet. There was possibly some very old pepper
spray in one of the pockets. Daddy’s unloaded pistol was at the ranch. My .45 was in its home under the pickup seat.

Where the hell was that bellman now? The side street had emptied. Quitting time.

“Relax,” Jack said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What are you doing here?” I snapped, throwing off his arm.

“Seriously? I’m living here.” He pointed across the street nonchalantly. “Aren’t you taking me up on my invitation to talk?”

I stared in the direction of his finger.

“The message I left on your phone,” he said impatiently.

Oh, shit.

Etta’s Place. The name was barely visible from here, gold-lettered on an old-timey hanging sign over the door. I’d been too deep in my head for the past fifteen minutes to even notice the hotel. It was like Etta was pulling the strings and not necessarily for me.

“Let’s go up to my room,” he said, rising. “So we can speak privately.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Wound pretty tight, aren’t you, Tommie? I just want to help. Come clean.”

“Really?” I asked sarcastically, my eyes sliding down his jeans. No bulge at the waist. No ankle holster. Loafers. No socks. White ankles, with a low-sock tan line, like a runner or a sailor.

He leaned his face closer, providing a graphic view of bloody slits and bruises. “I’ve been lying to you, I admit it,” he said. “About the story I’m working on. I don’t really give a crap about horses.”

I stood shakily.

“Here is where we say goodbye, Jack Smith.”

I’d taken three steps in the other direction when he spoke again. His tone was overly casual, sending a chill through me.

“That’s too bad, Tommie. I could tell you a few things about your mother. Ingrid. Except that’s not her real name.”

“
What
did you say?”

He ignored me or didn’t hear, moving quickly, already at the opposite curb near the hotel entrance.

He wanted me to chase him.

OK, Jack Smith
.

I’ll chase
.

I reached the hotel about ten seconds after he disappeared inside. The bellman instantly swung the door open for me, his eyes glued to my ass.

“I’m five hundred an hour,” I snapped at him. The expression on his face was worth about that much.

Jack opened the door of the room sweetly nicknamed Etta’s Attic before my second knock. He must have leapt up the stairs two at a time to beat my ride on the elevator.

“Welcome to the honeymoon suite,” he said with a wide smile.

Etta’s Attic was on the fourth floor near a fire exit. Small kitchen. Cozy, colorful king-sized quilt on the bed. Comfortable-looking couch. An open laptop on the bed.

A Beretta M9 and a shiny silver Smith and Wesson Magnum on the antique writing table.

Jack drifted over and picked up the Beretta. Now was the time to decide this meeting was a bad idea, not worth the price of what he had to tell me. The .500 Magnum was a bastard of a hunting gun. I’d only shot one once and that was enough. Jack flipped the safety on the Beretta and set it back down.

“It’s this story I’m working on,” he said apologetically. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I usually don’t carry a gun. I just use my hands as weapons.” He thrust two short kicks in my direction
and punched the air twice with his uninjured fist. I could see the bulge of a muscle. He offered up another stupid grin.

Those moves didn’t work out so well for you yesterday, pal
.

I stayed rooted to my spot in the doorframe, a decision to make.

Walk into the room and shut the door. Or run like hell. I was pretty sure this guy was crazy. Jack didn’t fit neatly into any psychological profile. My mind ran through a list of possibilities. Schizophrenia, narcissism, bipolar disorder.

Mythomania, the art of making crap up.

“Here’s the truth,” he said. “I’m working on a profile of Anthony Marchetti tied to him getting out on parole. You know who Anthony Marchetti is?”

I barely nodded, immune to surprise, remembering the reason I followed him here. Information.

“I thought you might. Come in and close the door, will you?”

I shut the door, knowing that this is how young women disappear. The braided rug on the floor didn’t look large enough to roll me up in without my feet sticking out. A plus.

I watched as he walked from window to window, pulling down the shades.

“Keeps it cooler in here,” he said nonchalantly. “Texas sun is a bitch.”

Jack sat on the edge of the bed still close enough to reach the Magnum.

“I’m here because Marchetti threw out a few bribes to get transferred from Illinois to a Texas prison right before his parole. Odd, don’t you think? He clammed up when I tried to interview him a few months ago. But I’m a pretty diligent investigator. I stumbled across a few things he didn’t want me to know about. Like your mother. I’m pretty sure he sent those guys in the garage to suggest I drop the story.”

“There’s been a mistake.” My voice sounded more vulnerable than I would have liked, especially in front of this man, this
Jack
, who had busted his way into my life. What an idiotic, ubiquitous name. Jack Ryan. Jack Bauer. Jack Ruby. Jack the Ripper. Jackass.

“None of this has anything to do with me or my family.” I realized that a very small part of me still believed that.

He studied me. “Just what do you know about Marchetti?”

“Practically nothing.”

“I don’t think that’s the truth.” His voice was suddenly taut. “I have a source who tells me that Marchetti’s wife has contacted you. Rosalina. You know
that
name, don’t you?”

Jack was bearing down on me now. Soft. Cruel. He was the frat boy who used to take pledges out for beers and then force them to their knees with a paddle, I thought. The one with the big smile on his face and a piece inside missing.

“OK, don’t answer,” he said. “But I’ve checked you out and found a few strange details.” He angrily pushed himself off the bed with the arm not encumbered by a sling.

“Like what?” I stuttered.

“For starters, your Social Security number belongs to a dead girl.”

My mother’s first name was Ingrid. I learned later that wasn’t the truth. That it was the name she chose for herself.

When I was sick, my mother wiped my face with a damp washcloth and told me a family legend, a fairly morbid one, looking back on it.

Her great-grandmother was also an Ingrid—Ingrid Margaret Ankrim, who crossed the unforgiving Atlantic from Germany as a teenager in the late 1800s. By the time the ship docked in New York harbor, battered and carrying a lighter human load than it
started with, her sixteen-year-old hair had turned completely gray. Stress, they told her. Ingrid wanted to die herself when the captain buried three of her brothers and a sister at sea, wrapped in sheets and tossed like dolls into the ocean.

My mother’s voice always dropped to a whisper at this point in the story. She said Ingrid watched her own mother grow silent and still on the voyage, imagining her babies lying in pitch-black, freezing waters with God knows what brushing by them.

She told me that we both inherited Ingrid’s eyes—a bottomless green. My mother also inherited the other Ingrid legacy—she turned gray early. Her gray hair first appeared at twenty, a single stylish streak. One afternoon, as she colored it away in a monthly ritual in our kitchen sink, she told Sadie and me that strangers used to stop and ask “where she’d gotten it done.” It never occurred to us to ask why she made it disappear.

Maybe every little girl thinks her mother is beautiful. Mine really was. You could tell by the way men acted around her, even happily married ones, with a charming awkwardness that made you embarrassed for them. Her soft blond hair, when she let it loose, fell, as Granny said, “right to her rear.” The needle pointed to exactly 110 pounds whenever she stepped on a scale. She fit snugly into 27 × 27 Wrangler jeans, one of those rare women who could walk into a western store, pull her size off the shelf, and leave.

She hated violence—even spiders that wandered into our house got a free ride out on a magazine.

She never got used to the terrible storms that kicked up every spring in Texas. When the black wall clouds appeared on the northwest horizon, she’d orchestrate us in a dance of panic. We’d run from one window to the next, opening and shutting them to achieve the perfect air flow that a scientist she’d heard on National Public Radio said would keep the house from blowing away.

She was a terrible cook and a formidable chess player.

She was sad.

Sadie and I would wake up in the middle of the night to the mournful notes of her piano floating up the stairs. Sometimes we peeked over the landing to watch her play dressed in a black silk nightgown, her body moving like a sensual snake, to an audience of one cowboy, our father. We didn’t understand the depths of her talent until much later. We just knew she was the best church pianist Ponder, Texas, had ever seen because everybody said so.

But these are not the things I told Jack Smith while I wondered whether every sentence falling out of his mouth was a lie.

“You look like you might faint. Sit down.” He patted the side of the bed. “I’ll stand over here if it will make you feel better.”

Soft again. I wouldn’t fall for it.

“What’s my mother’s name?” I fought the desire to put my head between my knees.

“Genoveve Roth.”

Genoveve
.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, struggling for control. “You don’t know her. She wasn’t the kind of woman … she wouldn’t have anything to do with the mob. Or a killer. It’s ridiculous.”

“You tell me what you know about your mother, then I can fill in details.”

Jack’s hand was poised with a pen over a hotel scratch pad, ready to take down my words.