4th of July - James Patterson [91]
“Go on,” I said. “I’m listening to you, Carolee.”
“I found Brian living in a transient hotel in the Tenderloin,” she told me. “He was selling his body. I took him out for a good meal with lots of wine. I let myself remember how much I’d once really liked Brian, and he bought it. He believed that I was still his friend.
“I asked him nicely for an explanation. The way he told it, what he had with the boys was ‘romantic love.’ Can you believe it?”
Carolee laughed and tapped ashes into an aluminum foil tray.
“I went back to his place with him,” Carolee continued. “I’d brought his things with me: a T-shirt, a book, some other stuff.
“When he turned his back, I grabbed him. I slashed his throat with his own knife. He couldn’t believe what I’d done. He tried to scream, but I’d cut through his vocal cords, you see. Then I whipped him with my belt as he lay dying. It was good, Lindsay. The last face Brian saw was mine.
“The last voice he heard was mine.”
An image of John Doe #24 came to me, animated now into a living person by Carolee’s story. Even if he was everything she said he was, he’d still been a victim, condemned and executed without a trial.
The final coincidence, and it was a killer, was that Carolee had scrawled “Nobody Cares” on the hotel wall. It was in all the newspaper stories. Ten years later, the clippings were found in Sara Cabot’s bizarre collection of true crime stories. She and her brother had ripped off the catchphrase.
I flipped a notepad across to Carolee’s side of the desk and handed her a pen. Her hand was shaking as she started to write. She cocked her pretty head. “I’m going to put down that I did it for the children. That I did it all for them.”
“Okay, Carolee. That’s fine. It’s your story.”
“But do you understand, Lindsay? Someone had to save them. I’m the one. I’m a good mother.”
Smoke curled around us as she held my gaze.
“I can understand hating people who have done terrible things to innocent children,” I said. “But murder, no. I’ll never understand that. And I’ll never understand how you could have done this to Allison.”
Chapter 145
I WALKED ALONG THE dreary alley called Gold Street until I reached the neon sign, Bix, in huge blue letters. I entered through the brick-lined doorway and the blue-note chords of a baby grand thrilled me.
The high ceilings, the cigarette smoke hanging above the long sweep of mahogany bar, and the art deco fixtures and trappings reminded me of a Hollywood version of a 1920s speakeasy.
I stepped up to the maître d’, who told me that I was the first to arrive.
I followed him up the stairs to the second floor and took a seat in one of the richly upholstered horseshoe-shaped booths overlooking the jumping bar scene below.
I ordered a Dark & Stormy—Gosling’s Black Seal rum and ginger beer—and was sipping it when my best bud in the world came toward me.
“I know you,” Claire said, sliding into the booth, wrapping me in a huge hug. “You’re the gal who went and solved a whole buncha murders without any help from her homegirls.”
“And lived to tell the tale,” I said.
“Just barely, the way I heard it.”
“Wait,” said Cindy, scooting into the booth on my other side. “I want to hear. For the record, if you don’t mind, Lindsay. I think a little profile of our homicide ace is in order.”
I bussed her on the cheek. “You’ll have to clear it with PR,” I told her.
“You’re such a pain,” she said, kissing me, too.
Claire and Cindy each ordered one of the exotic drinks the bar was famous for as Yuki arrived, straight from the office. She was still in her prim lawyer’s suit, but she had a new sassy red streak in her glossy black hair.
The oysters and firecracker shrimp came, and the hand-cut steak tartare was dressed by a waiter at tableside. As the food and libations were served, I told the girls about the takedown at the stucco house on the hill.
“It was so freaking weird that I thought of her as a buddy,” I said of Carolee, “and I didn’t know her at all.”
“Makes you doubt your intuition,