Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

She caught Lou on his way back to work. He’d followed the Foreman crime scene with a meeting at the bank looking over safe-deposit logs. Speaking to Lou over the phone, she said, “We have to find Beth and the kids. Something terrible has happened.”

LIZ CAME THROUGH THE LAROSSAS’front door timidly, knowing she was on Lou’s turf, and feeling strange about it. Her job, her “assignment,” was to get Beth to talk. Lou had offered to drive Beth to the hospital, but all she would say was that Tony had told her to stay here.

In all their years together, Liz and Lou had never crossed over like this-Lou investigating the bank; Liz walking into one of his crime scenes. That was how it felt to her: a crime scene; not Beth and Tony’s house, where she and Lou had attended a christening reception only a few months earlier. She thought of this living room the way it had been then: loud voices, laughter, beer and the smell of cigarettes on a passing suit. Kids running around in their Sunday best. Elton John on the stereo. Beth’s tight dresses that reminded Liz of Sophia Loren in an old film-much too low at the neck, tailored at the waist to cling to her swaying hips, too retro to qualify as retro, as if she shopped the Salvation Army. But Tony wasn’t much for fashion either, so that visiting them left Liz feeling as if she’d stepped into an old black-and-white television show. The LaRossas had never left the late sixties.

Beth and Lou occupied the room’s love seat, a plush white, fuzzy carpet spongy beneath Liz’s shoes. She saw several patrolmen gathered in the kitchen. The twins were not in sight, though a distant crying pulled Liz’s attention toward the second floor. “Who’s with the twins?” Liz asked.

“They’re upstairs with Mary,” Beth said to Liz. Judging by Lou’s relieved expression, Liz had extricated the first words of significance.

“They’re both okay?” Liz asked.

“Fine,” Beth said. Dazed, she told Liz, “Tony said to stay right here.”

Beth had been run over by the events. Her reddish, shoulder-length hair, usually worn with a severe flip and needing gobs of hairspray, hung lifeless and tangled. Her large brown eyes that typically animated her speech dimmed in a squinted, gloomy sadness. Her high cheekbones looked sunken, and her plucked eyebrows, always arched too high, lay flat behind a scowl. But nothing limited the beauty of her Italian skin. It possessed an almost artificial luminescence that knocked ten years off her thirty-eight.

Liz couldn’t tell how long she’d been in her clothes-a white turtleneck and casual black pants with an elastic waist. It might have been all night. She had that weary look about her.

On a nod from Lou, Liz said, “You understand that Tony collapsed, Beth? At the bank. We’d like to get you to the hospital.”

“They said not to go anywhere. That they’d call when it was okay to leave.”

“Who?” Boldt asked.

“There were two of them,” Beth said in a tight whisper, her eyes locked in a stare as she relived events. “Stayed with us all night. Tony was supposed to do something at the bank for them. They said they were staying with us until it was done. Then, later, one of them got a call on his cell phone, and they just up and left. In a hurry. Told me not to leave the house, not to use the phone until Tony came home.”

Liz asked, “What was Tony asked to do for them, Beth?”

She shook her head back and forth, a child not supposed to reveal a secret. “They gave him a phone and a disk. That’s all I know about it.”

Boldt wrote on the pad, faster than Beth was supplying answers, and then tore the piece of notepaper loose and, leaning across toward Liz, left a laundry list of questions sitting in front of her.

Descriptions?

Timing?

Exactly what happened?

Demands?

Two cell phones?

Liz thought there might be something to the order he’d written them in. She felt privileged to be included and wanted to do this right. She and Beth could not be considered best friends, but Beth had, on several occasions, unloaded onto her about her fertility problems, talking extremely personally and graphically. Every relationship was viewed differently by those involved. Lou took her affair with David much more seriously than she ever had; Beth might believe them far closer friends than she did, so Liz proceeded, combining sympathy with a forced intimacy.

She asked Beth what “they” looked like, and when Beth stammered and began sliding back toward emotion rather than reason, Liz salvaged her by prodding with descriptions of her own: tall, fat, loud, dark?

“There were two of them,” Beth repeated, her eyes darting between Lou and Liz.

Lou said softly, “We know they told you to say nothing about it, Beth. Tony’s going to get better, and when he does, he could be in some trouble here, and no one wants to see that happen.”

“They made him do it!” Beth shouted loudly. One of the patrolmen poked his head out from the kitchen and then retreated. “They told him they’d hurt the twins if they didn’t get a call within the hour. Then, when they did get the call, I don’t think it was what they expected. They panicked and took off. They must have heard he’d collapsed.” She added cautiously: “I’m afraid to leave. They told me not to leave.”

Liz asked again if Beth could describe them.

Beth explained once again that there were two of them, both wearing nice suits. Good-looking men whom she’d initially taken to be FBI agents or cops. They’d arrived at the back door the night before, just after dinner. “Tony was careful. Wouldn’t let them into the house. But then when they mentioned the embezzlement investigation and that they’d rather talk in private, he let them in.”

Liz repeated, “Two men. Dark suits. Good-looking.”

“The man who spoke… the one on the left… didn’t have much of an accent. But the other one… once they were inside the door… I knew something was wrong.”

“What kind of accent?” Liz asked.

“Thick. I don’t know. Italian? Russian? Not French, not Spanish.”

She glanced at Lou’s list. Description and timing taken care of, she moved on, asking Beth what happened.

Beth wormed her fingers as she spoke. “They were polite at first. I had no idea… ” She was interrupted by a muted peal of joy from the upstairs. The twins were clearly enjoying themselves, oblivious to their mother’s contained terror a floor below. Beth looked up toward them, her face bunching as tears threatened.

Lou asked, “What did they say they were doing here?”

“All I remember is that all at once they were pushing Tony. The other one pulled me, turned me, and covered my mouth. It happened so quickly.” She rubbed her wrists where Liz could see thin but deep red bruises. “They had the twins then. I don’t remember how, exactly. Tony and I… we did exactly as they asked. I stayed with the children in the living room. The one who couldn’t speak so well watched us while the other one took Tony into the kitchen. There was talking but I couldn’t hear.”

“For how long?” Lou asked.

“Five minutes? Ten? Everything slows down, you know? Did you know that? Slows down to where it feels like forever. All I wanted was them gone. To leave us alone. It seemed like forever.”

Liz asked, “You don’t know what they said to Tony?” She saw immediately that this question frustrated Lou, and she resolved that before asking anything more, she would wait for a signal from him.

“The one who could speak… it was something to do with the bank. Tony came in and told me to do whatever the man asked, that all he had to do was go to the office for a few minutes. Everything was going to be okay as long as we did what they asked. They’d stay at the house until they confirmed Tony had done whatever it was they were asking him to do.”