David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

“This is perverse.”

Abatangelo turned around and put his hand to Waxman’s chest, the better to get his full attention. “Just so I get this straight. What part of this story don’t you want to tell?”

Waxman swatted the hand away. “I’ve had enough of your patronizing macho bullshit. What happened between you and him? After you dragged him out of that restaurant, what happened?”

“You can’t blame me for this. Get serious.”

He rewound his film and headed downhill. His legs shook so badly he nearly fell with every step. Over his shoulder he called out, “That explosion was heard for miles. We’ll be tied up all night explaining things if we don’t leave now.”

Waxman stood rooted to his spot. He looked as if he was searching for something to say. The proper thing. The flames had reached a stack of hay bales inside the shed, the fire was burning hot and high. He turned and followed Abatangelo down the hill to the car.

“I intend to call this in as soon as possible,” he said, getting in on the passenger side. “We’ll tell them who it is up there.”

“Fine,” Abatangelo said. Sitting down behind the wheel, he became aware at last just how badly he was shaking. “I’ll stop. But I’m not stopping long. They can place where you’re calling from.”

“I’m having difficulty reconciling your concerns with mine.”

“My concerns will get us out of here.”

“Exactly my point.”

Abatangelo decided against heading back the same direction they’d come. It seemed likely sightseers would gather there soonest. He pointed the car in the opposite direction, heading for the center of the Akers’ property, not sure where the narrow mud lane came out, or even if it did. He’d drive across virgin pasture if he had to, just to put some distance between him and Frank’s body.

“One thing you need to understand,” he told Waxman. “I can’t stay back there. I stay, it’s prison. They don’t need any more reason than that I’m standing there when it happened.” He shook his head. “I won’t go. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I don’t share your confidence in that regard,” Waxman muttered. “God forgive me.”

“No, Wax. No. Damn it, listen to me. It was his bomb. He knew it was there. He set the whole thing up. You see that, right? What did we have to offer him? Three thousand dollars. Witness protection, which is living death, and we couldn’t even guarantee that. This was his only real way out. He was busted, jilted, haunted by ghosts. He’d boxed himself in, he had people who wanted to hang him on every side. You get pressed up to a cliff, sometimes that’s the best way to turn. He looked down, he liked what he saw, he jumped. End of story.”

Waxman regarded Abatangelo with an expression that suggested alarmed fascination. “You beat him into a wreck,” he said finally.

“No, Wax. No. I hit him, yes. I didn’t beat him to where- ”

“I met him first, remember? He was in bad shape, I admit. But he wasn’t to the point that being blown to pieces was his only out.”

“Yeah, right, at that point he figured he could still con you out of the money.”

“I should be grateful.”

“Wax, what is this? Weren’t you paying attention? He’s the one who set it up. He’s the one led us out here.”

Waxman sighed and looked away. “Argument of convenience.”

“No. No, Wax.”

Abatangelo began pounding the steering wheel. To the right he saw through a walnut orchard what he believed was the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Akers’ stockade. It encouraged him. They were on their way out.

“So it’s on my head, then,” he said. “I might as well have shoved him through the door. Is that what you’re going to say?”

“Say to whom?”

“To your public. To the guys in Homicide you enjoyed so much last night.”

“Is that what you think? I’m in league with those detectives?”

“You know what Tony Cohn told me? He said you’d betray me the first chance you get.” He turned to Waxman, glaring. “Well? How about it?”

“If I was going to betray you,” Waxman responded, “I would not be in this car.”

Abatangelo turned back to look out through the windshield. They entered a clearing beyond which he spotted the ranch house.

“I appreciate that,” he said finally.

“I know you do.”

As they came abreast of the outbuildings, Waxman pointed to the house and said, “Pull up at the gate. I’ll use the phone in the kitchen.”

Abatangelo’s jaw dropped. “Here?”

“Why not?” Waxman buttoned his coat in preparation for the cold outside. “Even if they trace the call we’ll be gone by the time they get a car out here. Besides, I know where the phone is.”

Waxman opened his door and got out. Abatangelo, deciding to follow, put the car in park and left it idling. They hurried toward the back porch through the growing wind and a faint mist. They ducked under the yellow crime scene ribbon draped across the stair. Abatangelo reached inside the door pane he’d shattered the night before and threw the lock.

The tape outlines of where the bodies of Rowena and her son Duval had been discovered remained from the night before. The bloodstains seemed to have aged considerably in just the few hours they’d been there. The door frames and cabinet edges and countertops all wore the coarse black dust left by the fingerprint examiner. There were pencil markings left here and there on the walls, the tabletop, the floor, with the initials of the trace specialist circled alongside. For all that, the room seemed as utterly indifferent to human concern as a raided tomb.

Waxman made his way along the wall to the phone. He lifted the receiver and dialed 911. As he waited for the operator his eyes rose to the message left in red on the wall: FRANCISCO. THE LADY WAITS. COME SEE.

The operator answered finally, a woman, and Waxman said, “I’m sure you’ve heard by now. There’s been an explosion out near the Akers’ property.”

The operator responded, “Who is this calling, please?”

“There’s a man at the scene,” Waxman continued, ignoring her. “He’s dead. His name is Frank Maas. He’s a suspect in the murder of the Briscoe twins. He was going to retrieve something. That’s what he said, at any rate. Something hidden out in an abandoned building. But when we got there he broke and ran. The door was rigged. A bomb of some sort.”

The operator broke in, “I need to have your name, sir.”

Waxman returned the receiver to its cradle. Unable to move at first, he stood in place, rereading the message above the phone, written to a dead man. Finally, taking the same path along the edge of the room as before, he joined Abatangelo at the far side as they headed together back out to the car.

Abatangelo got behind the wheel. “Frank said he thought Shel might be out at this Mexican’s hotel.” He put the car in gear. “Let’s find ourselves a place to clean up a little.”

They took a room in the first motel they found along the freeway. Waxman went to hunt up some clothes while Abatangelo stayed behind to shower. Too tired to stand, he sat in the tub, lathering himself, the shower spray pattering against his skin. As he sat there, the scene came back to him, the dash uphill, the look in Frank’s eyes- vacant, terrified, ecstatic- as he brought the rock down. The crash of pain and then Frank’s silhouette scurrying on. The sudden wash of light. The terrifying instant of pressurized silence.

The more he revisited it, the more certain he felt that Frank’s suicide was not the result of some random impulse. It was an act of atonement. He found himself envying that.

The worst of it was, the whole thing just kept shifting on him. Every fact came freighted with a counter-fact. Every insight emerged with its opposite in tow. It was maddening, like a sudden loss of gravity. And in that weightless derangement the one phrase that kept coming back to haunt him was Cohn’s: Do you have any idea how many guys come out of the joint totally fixated on doing damage to the clown who shacked up with the little woman?