Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Read online

  The sun beat him like a priest. Tender rolled himself tighter in his blanket to stop the shaking.

  SWEET FOSSETTA WAS taking a bath in the fiberglass tub of her tiny bathroom. She floated, her soft curves and sweet dimples emolliated. Her skin glowed from the heat of the water. Every part of her was ready for entry.

  She rose from the water, streaming like a newly born Venus, and tracked down the hall to her room. A satin slip settled over her curves, pale pink charmeuse sprigged with nosegays, the bias cut skimming every soft swell. She brushed her impossible hair, nosed her feet into a pair of run-down moccasins and walked herself up to the Blue Moon Tap Room.

  Her entry caused a stir. She raised her hand for a Smith and Kerns and three men offered to pay for it before Beau could set it on the bar. She moved to a table in her slipshod, lackadaisical way. The eyes of twenty men followed the sweet shift of all that softness. There was a collective exhalation, a tender tone played on the harmonium of masculine lust. She took a seat and looked around with an absent smile. She was waiting. She was used to waiting.

  She wasn’t waiting for just any man.

  HE’D BEEN GONE all day, taking pictures. She was sitting in the cab, messing with his guitar. She’d retuned the thing so it sounded right, when he climbed in with all his camera cases and began to babble.

  “I have my senior thesis DONE, Raven. I’m going to graduate after all. I did a year’s worth of work in a week. A WEEK!”

  “How can you do a year’s worth of work in one week?” She felt ornery and tired and worn out, like she’d been the one out in the sun without a hat. “It seems to me that a year’s worth of work is however much work you can accomplish in three hundred and sixty-five days. And besides, is taking pictures work?”

  His mood immediately soured. “I feel like you don’t respect what I do.”

  “What you do?”

  “Photography.”

  “Well, what’s the deal? I mean, all the stuff you take pictures of is already there, right? It’s not like you make anything.”

  He’d sounded a little huffy when he replied. “I think that’s a reductive way to look at it.”

  “Whatever reductive means.”

  “There’s more to it than just recording. There’s an element of creation in photography. It imparts the photographer’s vision.”

  She shook her head. “Why look at someone else’s vision? Why not get out there and look at it for yourself?”

  “Well, what about places you can’t get to? Like Europe, or a war zone?”

  She’d thought for a minute. “Looking at a picture of it and thinking you seen it is like going to Vegas and thinking you seen Paris.”

  “You sound like Plato, dismissing the arts as mimetic.”

  She snorted. “I just bet I do.”

  He’d ignored her point and changed the subject. “I hate Las Vegas. It’s a cancer on the landscape. It should be leveled. Just wiped out.”

  She gave him one of those looks. “I took Annie to Vegas last year for a treat. We went to some shows, rode the rides. We hung out in the casinos all night. She brought me luck at cards. We spent a night camping in the canyon. I let her play the slots on the sly at a drugstore and she won three hundred dollars. She brought home a whole stack of those little cards they give away on the corners. Those cards with naked ladies on them, the ones with stars over their privates.”

  “I can’t believe you took your daughter to that cesspool.”

  “Well, I did. I know it’s not Europe. I know that. But Annie likes places like that. She doesn’t mind smoke, and she doesn’t mind drunks. And she likes the music. You know, every little lounge in Vegas has a stage the size of a tabletop, and on that stage, some fool is singing his heart out. Annie loves that. She loves any kind of live music. I’ve always taken her to hear the local bands whenever I was home. She was the only kid to go to Head Start with a hand stamp.”

  She finished this little speech and looked at him with narrowed eyes, daring him to respond.

  He sat there blinking. “Why the hell are you so pissed at me?”

  She knew the answer to that one would take up what little time they had left. She climbed out and went back to the sleeper. She wanted to be alone.

  Of course, after a few minutes of pouting, he came back there, too. He stepped over her as he stashed his gear. He bumped his head. “Ouch.” She ignored him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that about Plato, especially to an artist.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Anyway, I think the ozone depletion is really bad, out here. I’m sun-stupid. I should have worn a hat.” He lay down beside her. They lay in silence. “I feel like you’re mad at me.” He felt panicky, saying it, panicky and needy. “Are you mad at me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Do I ever say anything I don’t mean?”

  That shut him up for a little while. But just a little while. He lay his hand so lightly on her breast. She knocked it away.

  “I think we should talk this through. I think we need to talk.”

  “I need to take a nap.”

  “No, I really think we need to talk.”

  “About what? Plato?”

  “What do you want out of life, Raven?”

  She wanted to be left alone. “I guess just to live it.”

  “Just live it? That’s enough?”

  “Well, sure.”

  And he found, that rather than exasperation, he felt envy. He thought about the hours of introspection, self-doubt, the mental tail-chasing of trying to understand himself and what he was doing. “How do you do that? How do you just live without thinking about it all the time?”

  “Hm.” She had her hat over her eyes. “I guess what I do is put it in gear and drive it down the road.”

  “Don’t you want to do something important?”

  “What’s important?”

  “Well, I think an artist with a unique vision is important.”

  “Important to who? Artists are like weeds. They’re always springing up. They don’t matter any more than any other person.”

  “I can’t believe you were an artist and you talk like that.”

  “I was never an artist. I was a performer.” She sounded so flat. “I was like the whale at Seaworld or those idiots wearing the horse and knight suits at the Excalibur casino.”

  He thought of his own private fantasies. Shows, galleries, the shine of admiring eyes on his work, sophisticated words of praise from lips poised over paper cups of dry white wine. “But you had an audience.”

  “Playing music is just like trucking, that way. Everybody loves you if you just show up on time.” And she sat up cross-legged. Her eyes were hard, remote, looking past him to a horizon he couldn’t see. “When I was on the circuit as a kid, there was only one part of it I liked besides playing my guitar. That was being on the road. Watching the miles streak by, the radio tuned to those local stations where they have a remote from the county fair, hearing about what was important in that area. Playing cards all night with the boys. Falling asleep in the bus to wake up in a new place. Being on the move. That’s what I loved. The movement and the music. That’s why I’m a trucker. I can listen to music and keep moving and I don’t have to stand up and sing about Jesus to do it.”

  “Well, I think you really weren’t making your own choices, then. I think it could be different, now, Raven. I’ve heard you. I think you have a gift.”

  She shook her head. “You think too much.”

  He lay there blinking.

  THIS, SHE REALIZED, was getting all out of hand. This whole thing was getting to be just the way she hated for anything to be. Complicated. Raven, who could not abide complicated, rose up and got the hell out of there.

  She walked alone up Sweetly Dreaming Lane. Francie June was in the air, singing about love lost to someone else who wouldn’t treat it right. Wasn’t that how it always went? People didn’t get what they wanted, and they didn�
�t want what they got. A human being was always a cat on the wrong side of the screen door. And right now, he was sitting inside hers and she wanted him out. She wondered how many times she would have to hurt that man’s feelings before he would go away.

  She passed Asa’s reader board and the huge mailbox rack where two women were busy snatching each other bald over a circular in which there was a coupon for a free pack of Lucky Strikes. She walked between the cement lions and crossed the highway and entered the parking lot for the Blue Moon.

  Melveena leaned against that boat of a Caddy, looking at the door as if she were actually considering entering it. As far as Raven knew, the woman had never set foot in the Blue Moon Tap Room. “What’re you doing here, lady?”

  “Hatching a plan and avoiding soul-crushing boredom.”

  Silver eyes met green. “You’re really going in there?”

  “If you go with me.”

  “Won’t your greatest mistake have a problem with it?”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “Oh I have to go in, now. I need to see this. Are you actually going to touch the doorknob?”

  “You touch it.”

  The bar was full, the tables staked out, the pinball machines slamming and tilting under the full body weight of beer-bellied men. At Fossetta’s table, two chairs waited, empty. Melveena cleared her throat. “I guess we should sit with her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not proper for her to sit alone at a bar.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want Fossetta to do anything that weren’t proper.”

  “Hush, now.” They made their way over to the corner. Raven’s boots stuck slightly to a floor that needed a little more sawdust on it to mop up the spilt beer. Melveena’s strappy sandals were even more affected by the suction, but ever the lady, she pretended not to notice. She cleared her throat and smiled. “Good evening. Maybe there’s strength in numbers in a place like this?”

  Fossetta looked up with those odd eyes. She didn’t appear to understand.

  Raven translated. “Mind if we sit here?”

  Fossetta smiled. The ladies took that as a yes and joined her, and both were soon transfixed, watching the effect she had on the men in the Blue Moon Tap Room. She appeared to be broadcasting some secret signal, a high tone of sexual availability that set the men to vibrating like telegraph wires. The hats kept tipping, the drinks kept coming. The long-legged men in their creased Wranglers kept coming over to pay their compliments.

  Raven watched as Melveena slipped off her sweater, showing off her firm shoulders and arms. She let the dress ride up a little on her thighs. Fossetta sighed and leaned back, her unrestrained breasts moving liquidly under the satin. Good God, Raven thought, this is like sitting with a couple of professionals. “You two hoping to get laid tonight?”

  “Not with one of these men.” Melveena sipped her drink through a straw that any red-blooded man in the bar would have paid twenty dollars to own. “Not a do-able one in the bunch.”

  Raven nodded. “Always slim pickings at the Blue Moon.”

  “Well, you have one of those boxer-brief wearing, 180-degree-erection-having young men in your bed. I don’t know why you aren’t back at your truck wearing him out.”

  Raven barked out a laugh. Melveena could sum up a man, all right. She looked around a little. “Well, now that you’ve popped your Blue Moon cherry and trotted in here on those fancy high heels of yours, maybe you’ll come to the talent show on Saturday night.”

  “That’s all anyone around here talks about here, isn’t it?”

  “This time of year, you bet.”

  “Maybe Fossetta here will join us, too.”

  Fossetta pushed her hair out of her face and turned her head just so on that white column of a neck. Her chair creaked. Her glass was nearly empty, but four more were lined up on the table. She gave Raven the creeps. Soft and pink and yielding, a thing for a man to lie down on. Maybe she can enter herself in the talent show as a living mattress, thought Raven.

  Melveena smiled. “I suppose you all wonder why I called you here, tonight.” Raven frowned. Melveena looked irritated. “That was a joke.”

  “Jokes are supposed to be funny.”

  “Hush. I do need to talk to you ladies. Both of you.” She looked over at Fossetta. “Can I trust you?” Fossetta gazed at her, empty and complacent. “Sometimes there are things a woman has to do because only a woman can do them.”

  “Like what, give birth?”

  Melveena didn’t smile. “I don’t suppose you two know the story of Judith and Holofernes.” Raven nodded, because she did. Fossetta blinked. Something almost like intelligence animated her odd eyes. And their three heads, two dark, one light, leaned in just the slightest amount as Melveena revealed what had actually brought her to the Blue Moon Tap Room that night. Fossetta listened in that waxy way of hers, shiny, still, and stupid. Raven felt an urge to kick her just to see a reaction. But she was too busy with her own reaction to Melveena’s plan, a plan so outrageous that it gave Raven a brand new understanding of just how crazy her friend was.

  “Melveena, you’ve lost your marbles.”

  “I have not.”

  “You have. You’ve lost your damn marbles.”

  Melveena leaned back and crossed her arms. “You know he did it.”

  “He didn’t. I wish he had, and if he had I’d be happy to make sure he went to prison for it. Or the chair, if this state still fried men. But he was right up here at this bar all that night. He’s got five boys from Bone Pile who swear to it. He didn’t do it. And the main point here is that you have no idea who the hell you’re dealing with, you have NO IDEA what that man is.”

  Melveena leaned back, her eyes narrowed in disbelief. “Why Raven LaCour, if I didn’t know for a fact that you’re not afraid of anything, I’d think you were afraid of Gator Rollins.”

  “Don’t you go anywhere NEAR him.”

  “For heaven’s sake. It will only take a second, Raven.” Melveena turned to Fossetta and opened her purse to offer just the tiniest glint of cubic zirconia. “We just have to get these in the right place.” Fossetta stared back at her. And blinked.

  Raven shuddered. “I’m not even asking how you got those.” She stared at Melveena. “Or why you want to pin this on someone who didn’t do it.”

  “Good, because I don’t plan to tell you. But I have them, and I need to get rid of them, and I think I might as well put them to use while I do. I want to make this work.”

  “Wouldn’t it just be easier to kill him, too?”

  “Raven, for your information, I don’t have these rings because I killed the Reverend.”

  “Hey, it’s fine with me if you did, Melveena. He was a dirty old skunk. But I ain’t going anywhere near Gator Rollins, and I don’t want in on your plan. No woman in this world should ever be alone with him.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sakes, Raven, he’s a Mormon. How bad could he be?”

  Fossetta stood and headed in the direction of the ladies room. Melveena rose as well, following the traditional rule that ladies accompany one another to the restroom. And all the masculine eyes watched the twin glory of Miz Melveena Strange and Fossetta Sweet from behind, walking side by side to the restroom. It was enough to make a man howl at the moon. A few did. Another poured a glass of ice water over his head. Two others stood up and began to savagely punch the be-Jesus out of each other without so much as a word.

  Raven felt like the top of her head was going to blow off, and no drink in the world would cure that. How stupid did Melveena have to be, walking around with a purse full of a dead man’s rings? She’d gone off the deep end, that’s what had happened, television rotted the brain and she’d spent too many nights staring at Clyde as he stared at the TV, she’d soaked up the plots of one too many Rockford Files, and she was just insane from it, now.

  But was she insane enough to kill? Melveena had to have killed the Reverend. She had no idea how, or why, but why else would she have
those rings? Why else would she be so dead set on framing Gator Rollins?

  Good God, had Melveena really committed this murder?

  She stood up so fast her chair fell down behind her. “I’m out of this,” she muttered, righting the old ladderback. “I’m shooting some pool. And getting drunk. Real drunk.”

  She strode over to the pool tables where Quentin Romaine argued with a pair of Mexican men. He pointed to some silver coins on the edge of the pool table. “These are good, honest AMERICAN quarters, not PESOS, you wet-backed, job-stealing grease balls, and I want to play the winner of this last match!” Raven sincerely hoped that one of the dark-eyed, smiling men would bash him with a pool cue, right in the nose, so the male blood flowed red and thick. That would be an antidote to all this female fussing and plotting.

  She needed to calm down. She went to the jukebox and plugged in some dollar bills. Beau had the best jukebox in California. She read and punched and sang along, tapping a boot along with Joe Ely song about a dog, thinking of her skinny-legged daughter jumping around to this nonsensical song.

  Annie Leigh loved that song. Beau was there with a drink, the first bought for her that evening.

  “Who sent this over?”

  “Me. You look kinda shook up, Raven.”

  “Just tired.”

  “You going to do the talent show?”

  “Nope.”

  “What would it take to get you up there?”

  “Maybe the word of God.”

  “God doesn’t speak much in this bar, Raven.”

  There was one of those subtle shifts in the atmosphere that let her know that trouble was on the way. The door of the bar opened. “God might not have much to say in here, Beau, but the Devil does.” He moved toward her with his usual smooth propulsion, as if he were powered by something oilier and smoother than human feet. She felt every hair on her head rise and prickle, and her heart slowed to a deep, empty thud.