Foxy Roxy Part 7

6.

Arden Hyde took a US Airways flight to Pittsburgh, where the terminal was as empty as a bowling alley. She stopped in a bathroom to wash her face and check her bag. The Ambien and Xanax had worn off, leaving her feeling low. She contemplated her choices for revival. Half a caffeine pill? Just the thing.

She caught a taxi and sat in the back feeling her energy coming back. Great! The weather was fantastic! Autumn in Pennsylvania-what could be nicer? It made her think of a line from Proust, but she couldn't quite summon it up. And the view coming out of the tunnel and bursting across the bridge into Pittsburgh-breathtaking!

Arden heard herself chattering at the driver and realized maybe she needed to come down a notch, so she swallowed half an Ativan and sat back, confident she had sufficiently medicated herself to avoid too much reality but maintain the appearance of sentience. She'd put off her father's offer to pick her up at the airport, and he'd suggested they meet at the Hyde house. The cab arrived at the burned-out mansion in the late afternoon. Her first glimpse of the old house was quite a shock. All that remained was an ugly hulk. Manderley after Mrs. Danvers.

In the driveway, Arden found her way blocked by police tape and a gum-chewing security guard. And Quentin Hyde.

Daddy climbed out of his long black Mercedes, holding his cell phone to his ear. He was shouting at someone about a merger. The other half of the Ativan called to Arden from her bag.

The security guard asked Arden to respect the crime-scene tape, so she stopped at the edge of the driveway, put on her sungla.s.ses, and waited for Daddy to finish his shouting. The security guard left her alone and watched the pa.s.sing traffic, sharpening his attention when a car slowed down so the pa.s.sengers could gawk. She was back in Pittsburgh, all right, where even security guards took their work seriously.

As he bellowed into the phone, her father looked like he was holding off a heart attack by force of will. Since she'd last been home, he'd grown a little beard-carefully trimmed to give him the firm jawline that had long ago been lost to too many steak dinners at Morton's. He wore a too-tight camel-colored sport coat over a black sweater, and dark trousers that had been chosen, Arden was sure, to look slimming. His efforts were rather endearing.

Whoever was on the other end of his phone call was getting royally reamed, though.

Arden tuned him out. With her hands shoved into her pockets, she turned and stood looking at the remains of the once magnificent house. What she saw made her incredibly sad. She had no cherished childhood memories of the mansion-years of boarding school prevented that-but the idea that so many things of value had been destroyed gave her a surge of sorrow. And nausea.

Or maybe it was that last vodka on the airplane.

Quentin pocketed his phone. "Idiots."

"h.e.l.lo, Daddy."

"You should go to law school," he said without greeting. "I need to get the new headquarters built. You could run the project while I focus on the merger."

The career path he outlined might have sounded wonderful fifteen minutes ago, before the Ativan. Now it was too dreary to think about. She kissed him on the cheek anyway and patted his chest with more fondness than she expected to feel. "It's nice to see you, Daddy."

He grabbed her shoulders-half hug, half something more demanding. "Why won't you work for Hyde Communications?"

She looked up into his fierce face and couldn't help smiling. "Because I'm no good at business."

"Nonsense. You're young! What, twenty-two? Twenty-three?"

"I'll be twenty-five in the spring."

"Plenty of time to finish your education. You have more intelligence than all your brothers put together."

"I have no ambition."

"You would, once you got your teeth into things. It's glorious, Arden. It's truly glorious."

She loved seeing the fire in his blue eyes. She couldn't bring herself to say how little she thought of cold-blooded business. Not when her pa.s.sion lay in the power of the arts. "Slaying all those corporate dragons? Daddy, I'd be a total failure."

He let her go, perhaps seeing her distaste for commerce. "I won't give up, you know."

"That's rather nice to hear," she replied.

He fondled her hair. "Why are you so skinny? Don't you eat anything?"

"I want to fit in my clothes. You like?"

He seemed baffled by her wardrobe, which maybe looked a little worse for the plane ride. "Sure."

She sighed. "Tell me what's going on with the police. Have they decided how poor Uncle Julius died?"

"There was nothing poor about him." Quentin's face flushed all over again. "He was murdered. Shot and killed by a coward." He glared at the blackened house as if his keen vision might spot an important clue that the police had missed. "They tell me it was some homeless fellow who did it, but they don't say it with much conviction. The pathetic b.a.s.t.a.r.d doesn't look as if he could organize his own breakfast, let alone a killing. It's d.a.m.n frustrating not to have answers."

Arden found herself saying, "What must he have thought when it happened? Was Uncle Julius frightened? I hate to think he was frightened, Daddy."

Quentin gritted his teeth. Maybe to hold back grief. "He wasn't."

"No?"

But her father didn't argue his opinion. Funny how he could flatly deny a fact if he didn't like hearing it. Perhaps that was the quality that had made him most successful in life.

Briskly, he changed the subject. "I want to know what things are missing from the house. The insurance b.a.s.t.a.r.ds don't want to pay for anything because that d.a.m.n Monica set fire to everything. Maybe we'll have to prove she was temporarily insane, but we'll plan a strategy for that soon enough. I want to know if anything was removed from the house before the fire. A list is our first step. There used to be a weird painting in the upstairs hall. Remember? All squares and squiggles. Ugly as sin. Surely it was valuable. But I noticed it disappeared last May."

"I think it was a Braque print, that's all, Daddy. A tourist thing. Monica probably gave it away when she redecorated the bedrooms. It was hardly worth getting upset about."

"She had no right to give anything away! The house and contents belong to Dodo. But Monica's been throwing family a.s.sets at any museum that will shovel it up. All to curry favor with people Julius alienated when he had his midlife crisis. What a waste."

"Maybe some things are better off where they are now."

"What do you mean?"

"Important art belongs in a museum where it's safe and everyone can be uplifted by it."

"Are you crazy? She had no right! And worse yet, I saw her with that sneaky lawyer of your grandmother's."

"Henry?" His name startled Arden more than the involuntary way it popped out of her mouth.

"That snake, Paxton," Quentin confirmed. "He's been up to something, too, since the fire. Julius mentioned they were at odds over Dodo's trust, but I never got the full story. We'll have to sort it out. But first we should know exactly what was lost in the fire. You can help with that?"

The thought of seeing Henry Paxton again gave Arden a pang. He was an unfortunate chapter perhaps best forgotten. How had they left things? If she could think straight, she might remember. "I could try," she said faintly.

"Good. I have some paperwork in my office. Some lists and notes. It's all Greek to me. You can take a look."

"Can it wait?" Arden felt herself crumbling inside. "I-I can't think, Daddy, while I'm looking like this."

"Like what?"

"This." She pulled at her hair, tugged at her clothing. "I'm a mess. I need to drop in at the salon and see if I can't get a haircut, maybe a facial."

"You look fine."

"I need to relax, too. I've got jet lag or something." Now that she'd made the decision to cut and run, she said with more conviction, "Really, I'll be much more useful if I could just have a couple of hours to pull myself together."

Quentin looked impatient for an instant, but he mustered some kindness. Maybe they disagreed about a lot of things, but he'd always had a soft spot for Arden. "All right, I'll drop you wherever you want to go." He took her elbow rather gently. "Come on. Get into the car."

Arden did as she was told, and after he'd closed the car door and was walking around to the driver's side, she put her palms together and gripped her shaking hands between her knees. Trying to distract herself from all the c.r.a.p that was suddenly raining down around her, she sat looking at the grounds of the house. What had been lost in the fire?

One thing she'd spotted already, of course. In the little glen near the swimming pool, the sculpture of Achilles should have been keeping watch. But he was gone.

When Quentin climbed into the car, she nearly asked him. Had someone moved Achilles after the fire? Or had Monica made off with him before all that? Had she sold him? Or given him to a museum?

Instead, she said, "Is Mummy coming home? For the funeral?"

"No. She needs to work on her treatment."

"Of course."

Drug addiction, Arden knew, was hard work. At least, that's the way it was with her mother. Which was why Arden kept good track of her own medications. She didn't plan on ending up like Mummy, living all the time in a spa with a locked gate and a lot of awful people.

Quentin started the car. "Where to, honey?"

Arden gave him the address of the salon in Oakland where she knew people. If her father talked about anything on the drive, she could muster only humming noises of agreement. The hum seemed very loud in her head. But ten minutes later, she gratefully walked through the door of the nearly deserted salon. A college student was getting a noisy blowout at one station. Another student sat waiting, leafing through a limp magazine as tufts of hair blew along the floor. Things hadn't changed much.

Jody was doing her own nails at the counter. She looked up, unsurprised to see Arden after a year. "Hey."

"Hi." Arden put her slouchy bag on the counter and leaned on it. "Busy?"

Jody blew on the wet nails of her left hand. "Need something?"

"You still in business?"

Jody twisted her lips. "I wouldn't be sitting here if I wasn't. What do you want?"

Arden paid with traveler's checks and took her first b.u.mp in the salon lavatory. Just a little. Oh, it had been too, too long. The drug felt like stardust in her system. She tucked the rest of the cocaine in her bag-enough to survive a week with her family.

7.

On Sunday people in Pittsburgh went to church and then watched football. No murder case could supplant the city's obsession with the Steelers, not even a billionaire who got himself shot. Roxy watched the game with some musician friends at a bar. They drank beer, ate hot wings, and held a sloppy rehearsal afterward.

Early on Monday morning, she walked a couple of blocks over to the Rite Aid store for a package of Lorna Doone cookies and a pocketful of Slim Jims. Then she stopped at the corner coffee shop.

Unfortunately, the coffee shop had changed hands again, and this time it was two nice Russian ladies running the place, and they didn't sell coffee. Or speak English. After some chattering and a lot of hand gestures, they made her a cup of tea, though, and Roxy bought a newspaper, too. She walked back to her house reading the headlines about Julius Hyde.

His photo made him look n.o.ble. Quotes from his friends made him sound like a saint. Well, that's the way things worked in his tax bracket.

The paper made his pyromaniac wife out to be Lady Macbeth and Annie Oakley rolled into one.

Roxy's current neighborhood was a section of the city called the Mexican War Streets for reasons she still hadn't figured out. The narrow two-story houses-jammed together with no s.p.a.ce between for lawns or even clotheslines-were in various states of repair, ranging from a palatial renovation recently completed by a couple of gay lawyers, to a crack house on the corner. A few months back, Roxy had purchased three dilapidated houses with the idea of flipping them. But she'd run out of money. So she had moved into one place herself and put a couple of tenants in the others to prevent less law-abiding neighbors from dealing drugs in them.

On one side of her house lived Dolores, who made her living by prost.i.tution and needed a place to hide from her bullying s.h.i.thead of a boyfriend. Roxy rented the house on the other side to Adasha Washington, an ER doc who worked at the nearby hospital.

Roxy finished her breakfast, put on her sneakers, and ran once around the park. She found Adasha stretching her hamstrings on a park bench. Adasha was still wearing her hospital ID on a lanyard around her neck over a scrub shirt and a pair of shorts that showed off legs that had surely caused attention deficits in her anatomy cla.s.s.

"How was the night shift?"

Adasha stood up and tried to mash her hair into a ponytail. "Two gunshot wounds, a baby delivery because the father fainted in the parking lot, and a.s.sorted cases of viral infections, common colds, sprains, and a broken leg sustained by a robbery suspect whom the police officers refused to unchain even while we set the leg. Oh, and an infestation of lice that would make an ant farm look deserted."

"Delightful. You ready to burn off some of that resentment?"

"Let's go."

They took off jogging at an easy pace, but as soon as they were warmed up Adasha quickly accelerated. She'd been a track star back in high school, a state champion distance runner, and Roxy only hoped she could keep up for the first couple of miles. After that, there was no use trying.

When they reached the river, running smoothly in the same rhythm, and started on the path upstream toward the old Heinz food plant, Adasha said, "I had a patient last night who could use your special brand of TLC."

"Oh, yeah?"

"A girl whose live-in boyfriend beats her up. She needs a fresh start. A place to live for a while, maybe some help getting a new job."

"Why didn't you call Social Services? Sounds like a case right up their alley."

"Her boyfriend's another doc. He could snoop the records and find out her whereabouts. I think he's liable to go after her again. The present situation is toxic, and normal channels just don't cut it. So I thought maybe you could find her an apartment-a place she could hide until she gets her s.h.i.t together."

"How much time do I have?"

"Five days is my best guess. Plenty of time, right? She'll be in ICU for two, on a step-down floor for three or four days after that. Maybe longer if we find previous injuries that require care."

"Jesus. What did he beat her with?"

"A crockpot to the head, then a meat tenderizer to the bones of her face."

Roxy quelled the emotion that roiled inside her. It was the kind of story she should be used to by now. "He in jail?"

"h.e.l.l, no, he's some kind of hero in orthopedics. Rescues professional athletes from career-ending injuries. We wouldn't want a Superman like that to spoil his reputation, now would we? His girlfriend, on the other hand, is expendable as far as the bosses can see."

"I think I know a place she could crash for a while. And one of the neighbors is a nurse. Meanwhile, somebody needs to end his career."