Triptych

Angie crossed her arms. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nah,” he insisted. No.

“Yeah,” she snapped, duplicating the fucking gesture with her own hands. “I got you, Ken. I know exactly what you’re saying and I gotta say I’m impressed you still got it, but no way in hell is it go

“You!” he yelled back, jabbing an angry finger at her. “Ma-ahl.” He made the sign again.

“Ohhhh.” She drew out the word, his meaning finally sinking in. You and Michael.

She asked, “You knew about that?”

Ken raised his eyebrows. Who doesn’t?

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I fucked him.”

“He… old… me.”

“I bet he did.” Jesus, they all knew.

“Eh,” Ken said. Hey.

She looked up. He held out his hand in an open shrug, asking her what else.

“One of my girls was killed.”

He pointed to the television. “Home.” He had obviously seen the story on the news.

“Yeah, she lived at Grady Homes,” Angie told him. “Her tongue was bitten off. She choked to death on her own blood.”

“Ma-ahl?”

For a minute, Angie thought he was asking if Michael had killed her. Then, she realized what he was asking.

“I don’t know if Aleesha was one of the girls who went with him to get out of a bust,” Angie admitted. “I stopped working the Homes about the same time he partnered up with you. My cover was blown.”

“Who?”

Angie laughed at herself. She’d never even considered the question, just assumed that there was only a certain number of times you could take a John out and not come back with him before people started realizing you were a cop.

“I guess Michael could have outted me,” she allowed. “He might have thought he was getting me in trouble, but they just moved me to a different strip. New girls. New Johns.” She thought about one John in particular. “Michael came to my new drag a few months ago,” she told Ken. “I thought he was just being an asshole, but he told us to look out for this guy who’d just been paroled, said he was a bad motherfucker.”

Ken snorted. He had obviously had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of Michael’s trash-talking.

“Yeah, I didn’t think anything about it, either,” she admitted. “Then I ran into the guy he’d warned us about. His name is John Shelley.”

Ken shrugged. Never heard of him.

“Anyway,” Angie said, knowing she was talking in circles. “The day after Aleesha Monroe died, Michael’s next-door neighbor was found dead in her backyard.”

“Huhn?”

“Yeah,” Angie agreed. She told him the things he wouldn’t have heard on the news. Angie herself would not have known the details but for Will. “The neighbor’s tongue was cut out. Monroe’s was bitten off, but still…”

Ken sat there. Angie felt bad. The old fucker was confused enough without her pouring her heart out to him.

“I shouldn’t be bugging you with this.”

“Mo.” Ken made a circling motion with his hand. He wanted to hear more.

“Michael’s neighbor was just fifteen.” Angie stopped. Hadn’t Gina Ormewood said she was fifteen when Michael met her?

She asked, “When was the Gulf War? Ninety? Ninety-one?”

Ken held up one finger.

“How old do you think Michael is? He’s forty, right? They had some kind of party for him last year. I remember there were black balloons everywhere.”

Ken nodded.

Angie sucked at math. Will would have figured all of this in his head, but she needed something to write on. She found a scrap of paper in her purse and scribbled the numbers down with her eyeliner pencil, muttering, “Michael was born in sixty-six, minus two thousand six.” She checked the numbers, making sure she had it right. Slowly, she looked up at Ken. “Gina was fifteen when she met him. She said at first he was interested in her cousin, who was a year younger.”

She held up the sheet for Ken to see. “He was twenty-five. What’s a twenty-five-year-old man doing with a fifteen-year-old girl?”

Ken made a suggestive sound, the meaning loud and clear.

“Tell me something,” she began. “You ever go fishing with Michael up in the mountains?”

The expression on his face was as clear as if he had spoken the words. Hell no.

Angie drove right past her house, her mind still trying to grasp what she had figured out while she talked to Ken. The fact that Michael Ormewood had pursued and married a teenage girl almost fifteen years ago wasn’t exactly evidence that he was involved in something now, but the coincidence was still there and Angie had been a cop too long to believe in coincidences.

She worked a scenario in her head as she made a U-turn at the end of her street, passing by her house again and heading down Piedmont. She took a left at the light, then another left onto Ponce de Leon, as she let the possibilities play out. Michael was still using the girls, pulling rank for freebies. Baby G had figured this out. Maybe Aleesha Monroe had been one of the girls Michael used and G hadn’t liked the cut in his income. He had killed Monroe, then killed Michael’s next-door neighbor as a lesson.

But why would Baby G kill Cynthia Barrett? Even if Michael did have a thing for teenage girls, that didn’t mean he was screwing his neighbor. And it wasn’t like that kind of lechery was unusual in a man of forty. All you had to do was look at a fashion magazine or go to the local cinema to find images of scantily clad girls hanging on to men who were old enough to be their fathers. Hell, you couldn’t walk through the local shopping mall without seeing a bunch of twelve-year-olds wearing T-shirts up to their nipples and jeans down to their hooches. And their mothers were usually wearing the same thing.

Angie passed City Hall East, then took a right into Poncey-Highlands. She slowed the car, checking to make sure Will’s motorcycle was out front before she parked on the street.

She got out of the car, not giving herself time to change her mind. She used her fist to knock on his door, then pushed the bell a couple of times for good measure.

He took his sweet time opening the door. She saw he had rolled down his sleeves but not buttoned the cuffs. He was still wearing his vest and that stupid little dog was scooped into his left hand like a bag of candy.

She demanded, “Why do you always take so long to answer the fucking door?”

“What’s wrong?”

She dropped her purse by the door and walked past him into the house. An audiobook was playing in the background and a pocket watch was laid out on the worktable where he had taken it apart to repair it. She looked at the tiny springs and gears he had stuck into a piece of cork, the various instruments he used to repair the winding mechanism. Angie had always been shocked by the fact that Will could figure out how a watch worked in about ten seconds but it took him half an hour to understand a page in a book.

Will put the dog on the floor. She trotted off into the kitchen. Angie heard her drinking some water.

“What’s wrong?” Will repeated, muting the stereo.

“You need to talk to Aleesha’s pimp.”

“Baby G?” Will asked. “He’s dead.”

“What?”

“He died this afternoon,” Will told her. “His cousins got sick of being pushed around.”

“Slow down,” she said, though she was the one with the racing heart. “Tell me what happened.”

He narrowed his eyes, but still told her. “The day that Michael and I talked to Baby G, there were two kids sitting on the hood of his BMW. G said they were his cousins.”

Angie sat on the couch. “Okay.”

“He chased them off with a bat. I guess they didn’t like it. They ambushed him, shot him three times.”

“Sit down,” Angie told him. She hated when he hovered over her. “Are you sure that’s what happened? The cousins shot him?”

“As sure as you can be when you’re dealing with these thugs.” Will sat beside her. “I talked to the arresting officer this afternoon. The kids will probably be tried as adults. One’s already flipped on the other. He’s got a record, a drug bust, an assault. This would be his third strike. He’s trying to talk his way out of a life sentence.”