Jeff Abbott - A Kiss Gone Bad

The trailer park was named Rainbow’s End. The pot of gold, however, was nowhere in sight.

He knocked on the wrong door, and a sleepy elderly woman told him Marian Duchamp made her home in trailer number six. The woman pointed over to an immaculately maintained trailer, a veritable palace among the weed-choked lots.

Whit wondered why anyone would voluntarily live on the Texas coast in a mobile home. One hurricane – one mild tropical storm – roaring ashore could move the trailer half a county inland. In small fragments.

Whit knocked once on the door. Inside, an afternoon talk show’s theme jazzily trilled. The door lurched open. A woman who should have looked younger than she did, wearing frayed cutoffs and a faded Corpus Christi Ice Rays T-shirt, tottered in the doorway.

‘Marian Duchamp?’

‘Maybe.’ She blinked against the bright afternoon light.

‘I’m Whit Mosley, the justice of the peace for Encina County. I’m conducting a death inquest, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

‘Um, okay. Um, what about?’ Lunch had apparently been of the liquid sort.

‘Corey Hubble.’

She stared.

‘A friend of yours who disappeared several years ago?’ Whit prompted.

Marian Duchamp digested this request. She was clearly drunk. A wine bottle rested against her hip: French Beaujolais, surprisingly, not your typical trailer-park fare.

Georgie, the walking she-database, had provided him with the local lore on Marian: a good-looking tomboy and jock up until the last year of junior high, when her father drowned in a boating accident. The dead father had reached from the grave to drag his daughter down; Marian Duchamp had raced into a self-destructive spiral of drugs, booze, and petty theft. Dropout from school, lived on her mother’s mercy, Georgie had said. Just a shame.

‘Corey. Yes.’ She spoke slowly.

‘Can we talk about him?’

‘Well, I’m drunk, but you know, I’m not out in public, Judge, so I don’t think that I’m in the wrong this time.’

‘I’m not here to arrest or bug you, okay? As long as you’re not planning on driving anywhere today, are you?’

‘Don’t have a car, so I guess not.’ She laughed, a rough, unpleasant guffaw, and the wine wafted on her breath. She contemplated him with a half smile. ‘I remember you. One of the Mosley boys.’

‘Yeah, the youngest.’ At once he almost regretted his words. Forever the baby of a certain notorious family. But when five older brothers had already speeded and fished and slept and drunk a path through the town’s consciousness, cutting your own distinctive way got progressively harder.

‘Yeah, I knew your brother Mark,’ she said. Her smile warmed, not quite sultry but at least friendlier. ‘Come on in.’

A sober feminine hand clearly maintained this space: gold-trimmed family photos, a small milk bottle holding fresh carnations on the dinner table, a sofa with neatly arranged pillows, embroidered with platitudes like BLOOM WHERE YOU’RE PLANTED and PRINCESS OF QUITE A BIT. Dust would not dare show its unsightly face; the home appeared as pristine as a freshly tended hotel suite. A stand of wine bottles, emptied, stood along the breakfast bar. Whit read the labels: Cakebread, La Crema, Cuvaison. Not a dollar vintage in the bunch.

‘You have a nice trailer,’ Whit said.

‘I found quality help,’ Marian smirked. ‘And you know, good help is really hard to find. I’m ever so lucky. Have a seat. You on duty? Do judges do duty? Want a glass of quality red?’ Her gaze drifted across his throat, his chest.

‘No, thank you.’ He sat on the couch, and she tumbled into the recliner. He knew she’d once been attractive in a lanky way, but now her skin looked sallow, her belly was a little wine barrel, and patchy shadow, new applied over old, caked her eyelids.

‘What’s Mark doing these days?’ she asked.

‘He’s living in Austin, still single, getting an MFA in creative writing at UT. He’s finished a novel and is working on a collection of poems.’

‘Well, la-di-da, fancy, fancy,” fancy. Po-ems.’ She paused. ‘I know some words that rhyme.’ She confessed this with a tinge of embarrassment, as though she had neglected a gift handed her by the gods.

Whit let silence sit between them for twenty seconds, and Marian fidgeted and half smiled at him. ‘I understand you knew Corey Hubble when you were kids,’ Whit said.

‘Ancient history now, like Vietnam and the Renaissance.’

‘His brother Pete died recently, and he was working on a film about Corey’s disappearance. We’re interested to know who he talked to about Corey.’

‘We being who? The police?’

‘We being me, really.’ He suspected she had no liking for the police. ‘The inquest determines if someone is responsible for the death of another. The voters are my boss. I work for the county.’

‘You don’t work for Delford Spires?’

‘He wouldn’t hire me to wipe his ass,’ Whit said. Marian, the wild teen, would have no love for a longtime police chief. ‘I’m not one of his favorite people.’

Marian abruptly got up from the recliner and refilled her glass with Beaujolais. Not the gentle arc of a pour – more of a rough slosh, spilling the wine. She licked wine from her hand, then drank half the glass down, then refilled again before she tottered back to the recliner.

‘So this is upsetting to you, or you’re just thirsty?’ Whit said.

‘There’s nothing to tell about Corey Hubble.’

‘Pete didn’t think so.’

‘Yeah, and now he’s gonna be crammed in a coffin for eternity.’ She shuddered. ‘No, thanks.’

Whit was silent, Marian Duchamp, in this state, could hardly be considered a credible witness. At least in court. But instead he got up, found a glass, poured in a small trickle, and sat again.

‘I remember Corey, you know,’ he said. ‘I knew him, but not well.’

Watching him sample the wine, she visibly relaxed. She traced the ring of the glass with a fingernail. ‘He… was jealous of you,’ she said with a soft laugh. ‘Does that surprise you?’

‘Sure does. I’m nothing special.’

‘Well, you had a mess of brothers. You always had family around. Corey didn’t have nobody after his daddy died. Pete was the pet, and his mama just wanted to go write laws and fuck around in Austin. Serving the people, my ass.’

‘Didn’t he have you as a friend?’

She laughed. ‘Friend. There’s a nice clean word. We fucked now and then.’ She watched him for a reaction to her crudity.

‘He ever hit now and then?’

She giggled. ‘Hey, I hit him back. He was a mean little shit when he got crossed.’

‘You ever hear of him roughing up other women?’

She tongued the rim of her glass. ‘I was the only one stupid enough to date him.’

‘So what do you think happened to him, Marian?’

‘I really don’t know.’ She sipped some wine, not looking at him. ‘Why should I tell you anything anyway?’

‘Well, I need your help, and you’re the only one who can help me. No one else will.’

‘That’s a lousy reason.’

‘You mentioned Delford Spires before.’

She shrugged.

‘You think Delford did a crappy job of investigating Corey’s disappearance?’

She laughed, not a funny or kind laugh. ‘That was the fox watching the freaking henhouse.’

‘Why?’

‘Corey hated Delford Spires’s guts.’

‘Didn’t every teenager in town?’ Whit cajoled, laughing, tasting a little more of his wine. ‘I was in the terrorist crew that painted his house pink. You remember that?’

She brayed laughter, recognizing the widely loved – or at least widely discussed – prank played long ago on the police chief.