The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [86]
“Tell me the truth right now.”
It had been ten years since Reggie last looked into the barrel of a gun.
“Last chance to tell me what it all means. I want to know everything that happened that night. The truth this time. Not what you wrote in your bullshit book. Not what you told the TV reporters. Not what you told me ten years ago. Or last week. For the sake of my job. For the sake of your conscience. For the sake of our friendship. Tell me the truth. And it better be the truth, because Traden’s sitting with a guy right now who might be able to tell me if you can’t.”
Reggie raised his arm. “I don’t know what else I can tell you, Bobby.”
Kloska brought the gun down and returned it indelicately to his waistband. He blinked a few times and then held up his phone. He said, “Erica Liu’s twin brother has just been arrested for obstruction of justice.
“And fuck all if he isn’t asking for you.”
29
FRIDAY, JULY 30
THE COFFINS WERE ARRANGED at slight angles to one another, forming a flat V at one end of the Vernon Drake Funeral Home’s heavily curtained Mojave Room. Caked in makeup, their heads met at the center, and there was a small kneeler in front of each coffin, at which friends and families offered prayers and paid tearful respects.
Gentle, nostalgic laughter occasionally broke the hush, as did a spontaneous sob. In yesterday’s newspaper, Wayne had read that the Beaujons left a young daughter, but she was absent for the moment. Maybe an aunt or uncle had taken her across the street to McDonald’s. As Wayne had pulled into the parking lot, he considered how often that restaurant must be filled with tired and hungry mourners. It’s a respectable calling, he’d thought, making cheeseburgers for the bereaved.
According to the news, great violence had been done to each body, but the killer (or killers) had apparently contained the assault mostly below the chin. Wayne thought he could see some evidence of a blow around Donald Beaujon’s left eye, but all in all, the couple looked pretty good for murdered people, not that Wayne had much experience kneeling this close to days-old butchered corpses. He prayed as best as he remembered how, then stood up and backed away from Donald’s body.
The large gathering had convened in smaller groups—her friends and family segregated from his friends and family, and their mutual friends, people they had met after marriage, separated in another huddle of folding chairs. There were subsets of cousins and work friends and neighbors, as well as parents of their daughter’s friends. He didn’t spot the one person he was hoping to see, and he wondered how long he should wait. It might be less awkward to watch from across the street with a couple of those cheeseburgers.
He stood in line to look at a triptych of easels that had been set up with pictures of the Beaujons and their friends. Wayne scanned them methodically until he finally found it—a photo taken in someone’s backyard, Bea and Canada Gold with glasses of sangria in their hands and smiling Bea’s head on Nada’s bare shoulder and Nada looking off to the left into the woods or another backyard or whatever scene was there out of frame, her perfect profile revealing one half of an inscrutable smile.
He found another one, a photo clipped from Las Vegas Magazine’s coverage of a breast cancer charity event, according to the caption. She was standing next to Bea and on the other side of a smiling Nada was a grinning Amoyo, his left arm around her back, his left hand not visible. A flash grenade of jealousy exploded inside him. His face went hot. It drove him crazy not knowing where that hand was. Was it inside the waistband of her skirt? Cupped over her ass? It made him nuts to see her looking so happy with a jerk like Amoyo, made him nuts when he could imagine their life