The Juliet (14 page)

“Then he said his father was the County Man.”

Rigg said, “Bullshit.”

“I thought so at first. I thought he was trying to make himself out as a serious dude, with the lineage to back it up.”

Baron asked, “Who’s the County Man?”

“It’s a made-up story,” said Rigg. “Something for the campfire. County Man was supposed to be a guy that roamed the national parks, grabbing women out of tents and doing away with them. He drove around in a government truck.”

Nene said, “I know the Gardener was trying to frighten me, but the way he talked about it, traveling with his father, camping out and hiding, never going to school. I began to believe him. I began to feel sorry for him.”

Rigg said, “Well, who doesn’t think his dad is either a hero or a demon. Dads are mysterious mother fuckers.”

“It’s not just that. I sensed that the Gardener was depressed, believing that he was the next in line for infamy, but no one seemed to appreciate that. He was obsessed with bad men, and he wanted to be one.” Nene shrugged. Some fantasies were meant to be taken seriously. “After his confession, we hopped back into the van and he drove like crazy, tearing off to Ballarat. It’s a spiritual place for bad boys. There was nothing there except a few sagging shacks and markers where certain buildings used to stand. Looked like a campground for alcoholic drifters.”

“The Gardener took us over to a beat-up old truck he said belonged to Manson. There were stars painted on the inside,” continued Nene. “Then we dropped acid. I remember what happened after, but I can’t testify as to the order of events. Memories came to me in chapters as I tried to find my way out of the desert, using the gold watch to flash signals. I was in the hospital for two days after I was picked up. Once I reached the highway, a half a dozen trucks just rushed by me, not even slowing down. Then this Dutch fellow, an artist, he finally stopped for me. He was the one who saved me. He didn’t know any better, I suppose.”

“Sounds like your Gardener wanted you to die out there.”

“Killing me was discussed. He was irked by the lack of respect shown to him at the party, thank
you
very much. And he reckoned he had plenty of connections already, pathetic souls like that bass player you rescued. He didn’t need me anymore. Hence, I would be sacrificed in some vivid fashion.”

Nene’s attempt to sound cool wasn’t working. “As you can imagine, I begged and pleaded, became a kind of Scheherazade. I remember the guitar, some beat thing we stole from one of the tents in Ballarat. I remember there was an old bum snoring inside, surrounded by empty bottles of Wild Irish Rose. That guitar was probably the only thing he owned. We took it, and I played songs, anything I could think of, and Mickey caught a coyote with his bare hands, somehow.”

Baron was visibly upset. His loafer tapped a nervous, silent rhythm in the air.

Nene continued, “I just kept strumming, making up songs while they played at being savages. Oh Baron, if it matters the animal was sick and old, dead in an instant. They wanted blood, not suffering, which speaks volumes. The Gardener was a child.” Nene allowed herself to go deep in the memory. “They wanted my lavender suit. I was glad to give it to them.”

She paused then and took a moment to situate her fearful past as something very distant. There were experiences she was not willing to describe. The gaps in the story.

Rigg would have to respect those gaps.

“The next thing I remember is walking the desert and
remembering.
Isn’t that insane? I don’t remember the events, but I remember remembering. I was humming a song, something that the Gardener said he loved, a song I made up about one of his stories. I was walking, my feet split and burned, and the Dutchman was hours from finding me. So I was humming a song to keep me happy.”

Rigg said, “
The Mystery House
.”

“Yes. It was one of the Gardener’s tales. He claimed he’d actually seen The Juliet. Not only that, he said he helped hide it in Centenary. Of course, it was taken again, by a caretaker who lived in a shack.
This
shack, where he protected the world from the curse. Ridiculous stuff like that. I think the song may have saved my life, to be honest.”

“Ego will out,” Rigg said. He stood and retrieved a little white bag from the kitchen. “Bet you haven’t partied in a long while.”

Baron said, “We don’t—”

Nene cut her husband off. “What’s that?”

Rigg opened the bag and examined its contents, giving it a little shake. He looked confused. “I guess this is some sort of variety selection. And rubbers, how thoughtful.” He extracted a tiny cellophane package of marijuana. “Oh hey now, just the thing. I recognize this, don’t you?”

Baron did not approve, but Nene’s eyes misted over. Rigg put the bag down and found some papers and a box of matches in a kitchen drawer.

Nene was grateful for the diversion. “Missouri is my purgatory,” she said.

“Mine too,” said Baron, obviously pissed at the turn the evening had taken. He refused his go on the joint but nodded towards the bag on the coffee table. “May I?”

Rigg said, “Be my guest.”

Baron began to lay out the contents of the bag on the table. There were pills, powders, and syringes, all separated into plastic snack baggies. A package of neon-colored condoms—glow in the dark, the box promised. He opened up the pills and read the letters and numbers marked on them. The powders he ignored.

“Baron was a pediatric nurse when I met him.” Nene nodded to the drugs. “Is that a party or what?”

“Of a particular kind,” said her partner.

Rigg asked Nene, “So, who was the meat in the purple suit?”

“I always assumed it was the poor coyote. It could have been that old drunk in the tent. Regardless, it wasn’t anyone the world cared about, seeing as there was no investigation, really. Just rumors in the press.”

Baron held up a syringe to the light and frowned. It was prefilled, capped off.

Rigg said, “And you just stopped being Kimber Logue.”

“It wasn’t so hard to do back then. Getting off the grid is easy when there’s no grid to speak of.” Nene could tell Rigg was warming to his old nemesis. “I still had connections in music, so I made a demo of
The Mystery House
, sent it to some friends in the biz.”

She watched as Baron palmed one of the syringes.

Rigg didn’t notice. He was too busy piecing together the past. “And they liked the song, but they liked the story just as much, right?”

“That’s exactly right. They paid me a lump sum for the song and my silence, and all of a sudden Kimber Logue was a star. Presumed posthumous, of course. I don’t recall precisely, but I believe I made some deal with the Gardener as well, out there in the desert. A promise to vanish in exchange for my life.”

Baron said, “Sounds like you.”

Nene gestured in the green-hued room. “The mystery of The Mystery House, if you will. I was the first one to call it that you know, and now people think that was always its name.”

Rigg nodded. “Hogg’s House.”

Nene knew all about that. “You’re lucky it’s still standing. You hear stories about these places being picked clean by bottle collectors.”

“I can’t guarantee it’s all original, but yeah. I’m a lucky guy and you’re one lucky lady. Here we are, all these years later. What the hell does Kimber Logue do in Missouri?”

“Nene Glatter,” Nene said. “Of course the money didn’t hold out. I went into sales and ended up running a medical waste disposal operation. We were one of the first to offer cradle to grave tracking. They all do that now.”

“Not very glamorous, the world of work.”

“No it is not, but that’s how I met Baron. I’m retired now.”

“Me too, but we’re still having adventures.” Rigg passed Nene the joint he’d just rolled. “This is a bit stronger than the stuff that you remember.”

Baron Glatter stood and moved towards the kitchen.

Rigg said, “Sorry man, you do not have free run of the house, given the circumstances.”

Baron ignored him and opened the refrigerator. “You only have one beer left.” It was the same label-peeled bottle from when they’d encountered Dexon earlier.

Rigg laughed. “You wouldn’t take the last bottle, would you?”

Nene and Baron had no idea why that was supposed to be funny. Baron helped himself to some bottled water and leveled a concerned gaze at the cowboy actor. “Mr. Dexon. Do you have The Juliet?”

“No, sir. I surely do not.”

Baron took a long pull from the water bottle and placed it on the counter. He then turned and walked directly towards the actor. Rigg leaned back as Baron came on, understanding too late that the man meant trouble. The gun was out of reach.

“What the hell,” the actor muttered, slurring the words.

Baron closed the distance between them with sudden and unexpected grace. He swatted him in the neck, and suddenly Rigg seized. His spine went straight and his chin stretched up, pointing to the ceiling. Then it was as if the elastic inside him snapped, and he fell to the rug in front of the sofa.

* * *

Rigg was unable to move, and his vision was limited to what he could see under the furniture: darkness, a quick moving shoe, a network of cobwebs. He gathered it was a needle. He’d never felt anything like it before. Absolute immobility. The Glatters were talking to each other, at first just making turkey noises under water, but then some of it started to come through.

Rigg wanted to say,
You ask the wrong questions.

Nene knelt over the cowboy actor, clearly impressed that Baron had taken action.

“Bar’, what the hell? I’ve never seen a drug act so fast.”

“Your friend there is a sick man.”

“He is
now
.” Nene grunted as she stood. “I can hardly feel his pulse.”

“The syringe was labeled succinylcholine. It’s a paralytic, designed to be used on the vocal cords for intubation. It’s not a party drug. Not a very social party, anyway.”

“And the rest of it?”

Baron’s explanation was labored, punctuated by sounds of destruction. “Half of it knocks you out, the other half gets you up. It’s a pharmaceutical rape kit as far as I can tell. Please tell me you didn’t smoke much of that joint. I can’t imagine what it’s laced with.”

“I guess he has some rough friends.”

“Then let’s work fast and get out of here.”

A lump of plaster spun across Rigg’s narrow field of vision, followed by more. They were tearing the house apart. They should have asked a different question.

Rigg prayed for sleep.

More plaster pieces fell to the floor. At this rate, there’d be nothing left for Willie Judy.

* * *

Nene had dreamed the answer on the road. They were camped in Durango, Colorado, just one night away from Death Valley. Up until then, they’d had no plan other than to find The Mystery House and descend upon it like a pair of teen detectives. It was a tough night, one of many trying to get comfortable with Baron and the dog all huddled on the plastic mattress in the back of the RV. Nene’d drunk half a bottle of brandy, just like in the old days, and then she dreamed about that bottle, the way it caught the light from the grill coals. That dream swam into a dream of The Juliet. The emerald was inside the brandy bottle, and then it was inside other bottles, until there was a heap of bottles to work through.

By morning she was convinced that The Juliet was hidden in a bottle in the wall of The Mystery House.

Now Baron ran his palm along one wall of the living room, trying to detect any inconsistency in the finish. He clamped a felt tip marker between his teeth and talked around it. He marked five Xs on the wall where he decided the plaster seemed too smooth or too rough. He handed Nene a rock hammer, the kind that amateur gem hunters use to pry specimens out of the walls of abandoned quarries. Baron had his own as well.

She accepted the tool and used the slender pick end to strike at one of Baron’s Xs. The plaster was tough, a homemade concoction, but she expected that. Already she could hear the underlying glass sing and crumble with each blow.

She tried not to think about Rigg Dexon, dying underfoot.

They tried different methods to chip away the plaster. Baron made them wear surgical masks and plastic glasses, but it was still a terrible mess. Using the hammer made Nene’s bursitis flare up, and somehow Baron still managed to aspirate plaster dust. He was incapacitated by several coughing fits.

Nene pushed safety glasses up on her forehead and tore off the paper mask in disgust. As she caught her breath, she stared down at the motionless cowboy actor. It was too horrible to imagine. The man couldn’t move. If he was conscious, he could hear, see, and feel everything.

“Just like getting old,” she said. She nudged him with her tennis shoe. Nothing. She stepped on his hand, slow.

“Stop that.” Baron sounded as if he didn’t really care.

“He’s going to die.”

“If he’s lucky.” Baron stared at the wreck they’d made of the green wall so far.

Nene joined her husband in his consideration. “It’s too much work,” she said.

“No one said this would be easy.”

“No, I mean perhaps I was wrong.”

Baron started to cough again. “Jesus, what if there’s asbestos in this shit?” He retrieved his water from the counter and drank it down before going back to the refrigerator to grab another. He left the door open. That’s what they were now, savages who assaulted old men and left refrigerators wide open.

“I’ll take that beer now,” Nene said. “He won’t be needing it.”

Baron made a face.

“Sorry, I couldn’t resist saying it.”

Baron grabbed the label-less bottle from the door and frowned. He held it out so Nene would notice.

“What.”

“It’s empty,” he said. He gave the bottle a shake, then turned it over. “And it’s plastic, I think.” With a twist, the thick bottom came off. “Clever. It’s a little trick bottle. Like a movie prop. I suppose it enhances the tough guy image, carrying this around in the morning like he did.”

Nene looked defeated. She stepped over Dexon’s back and dropped heavily onto the sofa. “It’s a safe, Baron. For hiding jewelry.”