Ottie Needham lived in Appleheart in a middle-class neighborhood with scaly-barked cottonwoods in the front yard. A cracked sidewalk led up to a cement front porch with iron railings around it and a lumpy loquat crowding up next to it. A hummingbird feeder hung from one of the branches of the loquat and a dusty lynx-eared cat lay under a metal lawn chair sitting in a corner of the porch. He watched with lazy-eyed indifference as Noah got out of his car and came up the sidewalk toward him. By the time he stepped up on the porch the cat had decided to ignore Noah altogether and rolled over on its back and started pawing distractedly at a tag of cloth that dangled from a cushion on the seat of the lawn chair.485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLtRo1eOgMF
The front door of the house was open, as were all the windows that Noah could see from the porch. Through the screen door he could see into the dim living room, though it was difficult to make out anything inside. The whirring of an oscillating fan came from somewhere near the middle of the room. He knocked on the wood frame of the door, loudly because he didn't want to have to do it again. As he waited, he heard nobody moving about in the house. A strong odor of stale cigarette smoke wafted through the screen. He knocked again, and heard it echo through the rooms. Still no one answered. He hooked a finger under the screen handle and pulled; it was not locked. He opened it a little more and stuck his head inside.
"Ms. Needham?" he called.
"I oughta blow your fucking head clean off," a woman's tight, straight voice said without menace, almost casually.
Noah flinched and looked toward the voice, his eyes adjusting to the shadowy room just enough to see the outline of a figure on the sofa.
"You're way out of line," the woman said. There was something thick about her voice that told Noah she was drinking. Noah saw her move her hand up to her mouth and smoke rolled away from the outline. "What the hell are you going to do? Rob me? I don't think you've got the right equipment to be a rapist."
Noah already had his shield in his hand and held up. "I'm Detective Noah Bain," he said. "Tolumura Police. Are you Ottie Needham?" Noah repeated.
"Yes, of course," Needham said wearily. "Come on in. You want a Tsingtao? I'm drinking Chinese beer; you'll love it."
"I can't drink on duty, ma'am," Noah said.
"All right. Sit down, then. Let's get this over with."
Noah sat in an armchair to the left of the door, across from Needham. The oscillating fan was on the floor between them, humming back and forth, sucking all the air toward Needham, blowing her smoke out the windows behind the sofa. Noah could now see that she was wearing only a white T-shirt and was sitting with one leg tucked up under her, the other foot flat on the sofa, the hand holding the cigarette resting on her elevated knee. She wasn't wearing panties, and she didn't try to hide what was visible between her splayed legs. From the looks of her tousled black hair and the condition of the T-shirt, Noah guessed that Ottie Needham had been like this for several days.
"What're you hear for?" Needham asked.
"To ask you some questions about Lauralee Dowey."
A brief silence.
"Would that be the 'late' Lauralee Dowey?" Needham's voice was distinctive, slightly hoarse,, though not rough or gravelly.
"Yes. How did you know she was dead?"
"I saw it in a little narrow article about four and a half lines long in the cop section of the newspaper. There wasn't very much about it at all. Hardly anything at all. Practically not there."
"You knew her?"
"Yes."
"What was your relationship with her?"
"Now there's a word for you----'relationship,'" Needham said, going for her bottle of beer again. She drained the last of the beer and reached over behind the sofa and laid the empty bottle down in the opened windowsill. Noah heard it chink against others already there. " 'Relationship' must be a tired word. People have just about used it to death." She ground out her cigarette in a deep ashtray on the end table. "Lauralee and I were friends."
"Did you see her often?"
"Actually, I hadn't seen her in over a year. We used to be friends."
" Hank LeStrange, your boss at InsuranceMates, said that Lauralee Dowey spent nearly half an hour with you at your office last Thursday, the day she was last seen alive, and that she came to see you there regularly."
"Did that silly man say that? Actually, I'm fond of Hank, and he's a good boss, so I shouldn't contradict him." Needham wasn't in the least concerned about being caught in the lie. "It seems like I remember that he's right....I did speak to her last Thursday. And I did see her regularly, come to think of it."
Noah could see now that Needham had a fine narrow nose and high cheekbones, and a seductive mouth that she had a pleasant way of holding slightly open while her tongue lightly touched her upper front teeth.
"Why did she come to your office so often?"
"She liked to talk to me." Needham had intended for this to have been as flippant as her other responses, but her voice cracked making the last few words almost a whisper. She squeezed her lips together and turned her head aside with an expression resigned to sorrow. With an elbow on her knee, she ran her fingers into the front of her hair and rested her forehead on the palm of her hand. "And she liked the way I.....the way I looked," she said, almost inaudibly.
Close by in the next room to Noah's right, there was a sudden whump! and a bottle---a beer bottle, Noah's senses told him----fell to the wooden floor followed by a rain of coins bouncing and wheeling in all directions and a blurted "Chingale!" as a man swore in Spanish. Noah flushed with adrenaline. "This fawkin'---chit, man...." Mexican. Noah's heart hammered, but he kept his right hand on the SIG in his shoulder holster.
"Oh, shut up, Tercero," Ottie Needham mumbled wearily, almost to herself. She didn't even look up, her forehead still resting on her palm. She wasn't acting like a blackmailer, and the tears that suddenly glistened on her face in the oblique light coming from the opened windows weren't the tears of an extortionist.
"He's pathetic," Needham said. Someone fell heavily onto a bed, the springs squeaking, then silence and a bovine groan of satisfaction. "Pathetic."
"Why was she bringing you the money?" Noah asked. He relaxed a little, figuring it was sweet dreams for Tercero. His tone with Needham was more curious now than accusatory. "We thought it was blackmail."
Needham nodded, keeping her forehead on her palm. "It was." She lifted the tail of her stained T-shirt and wiped her nose, revealing her naked torso and a glimpse of the bottoms of her breasts. "Blackmail, pure and simple."
"You were blackmailing her?"
"No, God no, it wasn't me," she said, lifting her head and looking at Noah. Again she raised her shirt and wiped at her nose, then jerked it down in frustration and leaned over and pulled a wad of tissues from a box almost out of reach on the sofa. "Fuck," she said, wiping the tears off her face. "I didn't know I had any more left."
Noah didn't know if Needham was referring to her tears or to the tissues. "Who was blackmailing her?"
"Oh, Stanley," she said, exasperated. "He was blackmailing both of us."
"Both of you? Your own brother was blackmailing you?"
Needham jerked herself up straight, mimicking Noah's surprise, and smiled sourly. "My 'own brother.' Yeah. Well, blood is thicker than water, but it's not thicker than sorry, and Stanley is one sorry little fuckmuncher." She looked at Noah. "You find that hard to believe, that was blackmailing me?"
"Well, yes."
"You just learned something, didn't you?"
"I suppose so."
"Lauralee brought the money to me because Stanley didn't want to see her. I added mine to it and took it to him."
"Why didn't he want to see her?"
"You know, I'm not sure I can answer that."
"You don't know, in other words."
"Right."
"How long had he been blackmailing you?"
"Let's see, how to answer that----about eight months."
"You seemed to qualify that before you answered."
"Eighteen months for money. Before that there was emotional intimidation, all kinds of shit to take from him. He was a bully. It just show you how really stupid he was that it took him all these years to think of blackmailing us for money."
"This had been going on for a while, then?"
"Years."
"How many?"
"Too many."
Noah was frustrated. How much of this could she believe? Interviewing a drunk was like to trying to pick up a drop of mercury.
"How much did the two of you pay out to him."
"$28,600," she said without hesitating. "Half of that from each of us. But I wasn't doing as well as Lauralee, so she----paid part of mine. He promised he'd stop at $30,000. We were almost there."
"What was he blackmailing you for?"
Ottie Needham snorted. "Nice try, sweet-ums." She folded her other leg down and sat with them both tucked up under her yoga-style.
"Are you going to continue paying him?"
Needham didn't answer him.
"You don't have to go on doing that, you know. You've got plenty of documentation to bring charges against him.
Needham only looked at Noah with an expression of weary intolerance. She'd already been through all the possibilities. If her brother were arrested, everything he was keeping a lid on would come out, but it was more important for her to prevent that to be free of her tormenter.
"Do you know where he lives?"
"Nope."
"Didn't you just say.....?":
"Oh, I would meet him with the cash somewhere. He didn't want Lauralee even to do that."
"When did you last see him?"
"March 22nd, last time we gave him some money. He said he was going to Mexico. Good-damned-riddance. I hope he got turista down there and died. If I don't see him again till the end of time it'll be too soon."
"He's a suspect in Lauralee's killing," Noah said.
"I'm sure he is," Needham wheezed. "You seem to be reasonably well informed, so I guess you believe you've got good reasons to suspect him."
"We know that he was arrested three times for aggravated assault and that Lauralee was the victim each time."
Needham nodded, sliding her eyes to one side.
"What was their problem?" Noah asked.
"It was a sorry affair, that's all. It was sick."
"Sick?"
"Well, wouldn't you call it sick to live with a guy year after year to regularly beat the piss out of you? Honey, he did that all the time. She just called the cops three times. And you know he was sick. The whole thing...." She stopped and shook her head.
"You think he did it?"
Needham began shaking her head, slowly and warily. "It was the first thing I thought of when I heard about it," she said. "But, really, I just don't know what to think. The silly bastard could've done it, but.....I just can't believe he really did."
" 'Heard' about it?"
"What?"
"You just said you 'heard' about Lauralee's death. earlier you'd said you'd read about it in the paper."
Needham was unconcerned. "Figure of speech, that's all."
"Do you have any idea at all where we might find him?"
"Hell-fuckin'-no. He told me Mexico. But I didn't believe him. That'd put him too far away from his sugar titties."
"You think he's still in Tolumora?
Needham shrugged. She didn't seem to care one way or another.
"Were you and Lauralee Dowey very close?"
Needham let her eyes settle on Noah and she grew somber, her thoughts far away from either of them. The oscillating fan periodically lifted little wisps of dyed, black hair on either side of her face as it passed to and fro in front of her.
"Close, but not very close," she said. "I've known Lauralee since before she and Stanely started dating in college. I knew her first." Unexpectedly, she smiled.
"Then maybe you know some of the men she's dated in the last year or so."
"Not hardly."
"Why 'not hardly'?"
" 'Cause I wasn't interested."
"How long had she been into S&M?"
Needham sat perfectly still. "I didn't know she was." She didn't seem surprised, and she didn't seem curious.
"Was your brother involved in S&M as well?"
Needham shook her head and looked at Noah as if she couldn't believe she had asked her such a question. "Well, now I just really couldn't tell you about that. S&M and his Social Security number are two things he just refused to discuss with me."
"If your brother didn't kill Lauralee, who do you think might have?"
"Jesus H. T. Christ!" Needham arched her neck and scowled. "What the hell kinda question is that? You think I kept company with a whole lot of people who are killers? Something like that? What the held kinda question is that? You wanna go arrest good ol' Tercero in there? Shit, he's all passed out, go cuff him. He's good-looking, too, make a good killer.....in the papers. He might have done it, in fact, he probably did. Yeah...."
Needham reached over and grabbed her cigarettes, but the package was empty and she wadded it up and threw it back handed away from her.
"It was a particularly brutal murder," Noah persisted. He wanted to touch what he sensed were the tender ends of Ottie Needham's nerves. "She was strangled and mutilated.....in a certain way. We're having a tough time getting any leads. Any help, anything at all, that you could do for us would be appreciated."485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdz6rsBgH37
Needham looked a Noah, her head bobbing a little like the unsteady head of an old woman.485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAA6BLotPWR
"In what particular way?"485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwgyE8VI8nL
"I can't tell you that."485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvDBaKiSXTK
"Why not? What if I recognize something from it?"485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYHvdRN7cNv
"What would you recognize from it?"485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAgSRuZYHEO
"I don't know. How do I know." Her voice was wheezy. She started crying. "Jesus, dear Jesus. Lauralee." She put her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook as she cried.485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyGlPPYwMaB
Noah thought of Nolie Burr, how hard she'd cried and how much San Felipe's death seemed to have affected her.485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjxjTGFrYvF
"I'm going to leave you a card," he said, putting his card on a corner table near her chair. "I've put my home telephone number on the back. I would appreciate your help. If your brother gets in touch with you again, please let me know."485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrGplfnZYZS
Noah got up and went to the door and stepped outside.485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmTp1v7Tp2N
"Wait," Needham said from her sofa, and Noah heard her getting up. She appeared on the other side of the screen, her hair disheveled, her eyes puffy. "What about----her----the funeral? What's being done....?"485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlUM70NjIuQ
"I think some of her family are coming to get her from South Carolina."485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2rOwLrvci3
"Oh. Really? That's good," Needham said, going from surprised to satisfied. She put her hand on the screen between them. "I don't know, really, which is the best way," she continued. "If I knew the details I might think about them, dream about them, or have them pop into my mind when I didn't want them to. But if I don't know the details maybe it'll drive me crazy wondering about it. You know, what did she go through? What the hell was it? I suppose it's a toss-up. I don't know how you deal with it, but for me it's been bloody hell. I don't know how to leave it alone. They never should happen, things like this----should never, never happen."485Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡc82pwHP7PN
