Pool Of Lies Part 1

POOL OF LIES.

By J.M.Zambrano.

February.

Deidre Bayfield La.s.siter sat in a straight-backed chair, eyes closed, body rigid, her long black hair cascading over her nakedness. JJ's words were dull thuds against the wall she had constructed between her consciousness and her captor. He stood behind her, his hands resting on the ropes that bound her emaciated wrists to the chair arms, his sour breath caressing her cheek as he spoke.

"Here's the deal, Dee, when I cut you loose, you'll take the phone and talk. Make sure he gets it this time."

She had already done this once. Something had gone wrong. The desired outcome had not materialized. The events were hazy. Had it been yesterday or last week?

"Do you understand, or do we need another lesson? There's always little brother and his jumper cables." JJ prodded the nape of her neck with a thick forefinger. He was a short, stocky man, built like a Rottweiler. When standing, Deidre towered over him at five-ten. She squeezed her eyes tighter to block out the vision of him, but his image, like his lessons, had seared her brain.

She made herself nod as she whispered, "Got it," then felt JJ cut the bonds that held her wrists.

"Take it now." His voice slapped her rudely. She felt his knife in the spa.r.s.e flesh on the back of her hand--a little blood-letting, a sample of things to come if Sam screwed up again. Deidre opened her eyes to the sight of a cell phone being thrust at her face. Slowly she moved her hands, needing both to steady the phone. JJ had already punched in the number. It was ringing.

"Bayfield Enterprises, Sam Garvin speaking," a recording announced in the elderly tw.a.n.g of her trustee and family accountant. "Leave a message." No frills. Not even the promise of a return call.

JJ prodded her in the leg with the toe of his boot, his small dark eyes flashing intently.

"It's me, Sam. Deidre." It seemed a long time since she'd spoken aloud. Maybe a week. The sound hurt her more than the pin-p.r.i.c.k rush of blood back into her hands. "I need some money. Please don't call the cops this time. It didn't do any--" JJ abruptly cut the connection.

"He'll call back on your cell phone."

Deidre nodded, looking around as if for the first time. Memory oozed sluggishly. They were in the Aztec Motel on Forty-fourth where JJ had taken her after her release from the Lakewood Police. After her first call for money, Sam had called the cops, and they'd picked her up on a welfare check, s.n.a.t.c.hed her from that big boat of a Lincoln Town Car she'd just inherited. Expired plates. Vehicle possibly stolen. So said the cops as they'd focused on her, separating her from JJ. Meantime JJ had just faded into the background, distancing himself from the scene. She'd watched him from the back of the squad car, a nebulous figure in black making tracks down an alley, seemingly invisible to the cops. But her deliverance had somehow backfired, and he had her again, like she knew he would. It was true when he said the cops couldn't touch him.

"Are you hungry?" JJ asked pleasantly, in the voice he had used when first meeting her.

Deidre shook her head.

"Not even for candy?" Nose candy. Too slow. She smoked rock now. It didn't last. Nothing did. Maybe a shot--a downer to make her sleep a long time. Maybe she didn't even care if he dug her grave with that backhoe he had parked behind his machine shop on Forty-second. She closed her eyes and imagined cool, damp earth falling on her.

"You're free to go now." His voice came from across the room. She hadn't heard him move. The feel of his breath was still on her neck.

"I'm unlocking the door. Your clothes are on the bed. So is your cell phone."

She heard the door open and close, then JJ's cowboy boots deliberately loud to her ear in the tiled hallway outside the room. Yet, she didn't move.

The words you're free to go were part of her conditioning. She remembered what had happened before when she'd taken him up on that offer, surprised that the memory still triggered pain in that deep place where she thought there should be no feeling left.

Vaguely aware of someone looking at her from across the room, she opened her eyes and saw the eviscerated face of a dark-haired woman with eyes pale as ice, a woman with a lot of mileage--more than thirty-five years could account for. Flaws in the mirror made pockmarks on her face.

Deidre made one sluggish gesture toward her mirror image, then slumped back down in the chair, burrowing deep within herself. Being plowed under by a backhoe didn't seem so bad after all. Then, from the bed, her cell phone rang.

Longmont, Colorado Rae grabbed Danny's call on the third ring. Seeing his name in the caller ID box didn't do any wonders for her mood. "Rachel Esposito here," she hammered out the three words. Staccato. Didn't he know what day this was?

"Hi, Rae. It's me."

"I can see that, Danny." She snorted impatiently, reminding herself that she'd been around horses too long.

"I need your help." His tone danced a hair away from panic.

She vowed to have no mercy. "It's April fifteenth."

"I know, but something's happened. It's bad."

When did he ever call when it was something good? "Yeah, yeah. Uncle's on your tail again and you need three years' tax returns."

"You may be right. I move a lot and mail doesn't always find me. But that's not it." He paused a second. Rae could imagine him taking a drag on a Marlboro. Dumb-a.s.s kid. Didn't he know what happened to the Marlboro Man?

"My wife died," he squeezed out just as she was about to hang up on him.

"Jolene is dead?" she gasped as guilt seized her.

"Jolene and I divorced three years ago," he replied. "I remarried. My wife Deidre is dead."

"The last I heard from you was when we batch-filed three years' returns for you, to keep you out of jail," she blurted.

"I'm sorry," he said.

That was supposed to have been her line, but she remembered that he'd never fully paid that last bill. "You're always sorry," she growled. His silence finally pushed the words out of her. "I'm sorry about your wife. Now, what is it you want from me?"

"Deidre drowned in her hot tub," he replied.

That wasn't what she'd asked. Rae began nervously tapping her desk with a pencil. But now she was too curious to hang up.

"I'm the personal representative of her estate and there's a bunch of s.h.i.t going down."

s.h.i.t following Danny La.s.siter was not new. Rae kept her silence, accelerating the pencil tapping that she knew Danny couldn't help but hear.

"It's quite a large estate," he continued. "Deidre was a trust fund brat, too."

"Birds of a feather get flocked and plucked." Rae's lopsided humor sprang from her surroundings. She was the third generation on the small Longmont farm from which she ran her accounting office.

Danny's silence told her he was looking for meaning in something that had none. Rae could churn out an adage that bore little resemblance to its prototype.

"Uh, Rae? I'm dealing with a lot of hostility here."

"I thought I had it under control."

"Not you. My wife's family. She left a nineteen-year-old and a fifteen-year-old. Then there's the half-sister that makes Cinderella's look like Mother Teresa."

"Cinderella had two stepsisters," Rae corrected. She eyed the pile of client files beside her, noting that her computer screen had taken a time-out.

"Rae, gimme a break. I need you. I'm in deep s.h.i.t and I have a meeting next Monday with a very hostile lawyer. I need somebody on my side with unquestionable moral and professional integrity."

"Have you tried Arthur Anderson?"

"Excuse me?"

"Never mind. Cheap shot." She turned quiet as she perceived that she was being sucked in once again.

"I've got your retainer covered. And I'll soon be able to pay the back stuff," he continued as if reading her mind.

"Where's the meeting? Who and what's involved?" He'd sunk the hook. Almost.

"Cherry Creek. Rosencraft, Stern and Eisley on Steele Street. There's the estate tax return and really messed-up accounting to straighten out. Dee had a bunch of real estate. I can fill you in on the way. I'm in Lakewood."

"We could meet there," she said, "at Rosencraft and Whatsis."

"I thought maybe you could pick me up," he stammered.

"What about your attorney? Can't you ride with him?"

"He's already there," Danny replied. "I was hoping you could pick me up. I don't have transportation just now."

"You mean you don't have a driver's license. Why doesn't this surprise me?" Why are you doing this, she asked herself. You have other clients. Ones who pay on time and are not in perpetual crisis.

"Dee didn't leave a will," he changed the subject, was always good at that. "There's some pretty hairy stuff. Like the real estate I mentioned? Well, most of it's been turned into crack houses."

"What?" Rae stopped tapping her pencil, felt it snap between her fingers. "I thought you'd learned something in the last ten years. You told me you were clean after Josh came along. When are you going to grow up?"

"I am clean. I got custody of Josh. We'd been living in Pagosa Springs when Deidre died. We were separated. I was trying to get her into rehab."

She heard the shudder of suppressed tears in Danny's voice, then felt a great sadness replace her anger. "Didn't your marriage to Jolene teach you anything?"

"Like the lemmings, it's hard to break the death wish."

"You don't mean that."

"I try not to. Can I give you directions to...where I'm staying?"

Rae heard a sharp rap on her office door, then glanced at her watch. Her next client was due.

"I'll have to get back to you, Danny."

"Do you want my number?"

"I've got your number," she replied crisply, just before hanging up. Let him wonder if she just meant caller ID.

It was 10:00 p.m. Rae's last client had just left. She was nearly brain-dead, bored out of her skull from rote tax preparation. With animals yet to feed, she left the first-floor office in her house and walked out the back gate toward the barns.

A lilac hedge separated her formal garden from the farm area, and she looked forward to the scent those near-bursting buds would soon bring. She hoped a spring snow wouldn't freeze the life out of her precious purple blooms.

What to do about Danny La.s.siter? The sensible thing, the CPA thing, or the Rae thing?

On the other hand, Danny never brought her dull stuff. Embezzlements. Cooked books, albeit on the small scale, the family scale. Catastrophic calamities befell him, which resulted in his failure to file his tax returns. Reasonable cause was what Rae was able to sell the IRS. These were the things Danny had brought her in the past. Juicy!

Her relish immediately filled her with self-disgust. Danny's troubles had been real. Rae wouldn't have wished them on her worst enemy. And the thief she'd helped him catch? It had been Danny's own father.

In the barn Rae found hungry mouths to feed. Horses on pasture that was still spa.r.s.e in mid-April needed their evening supplements of hay and grain. They'd come in on their own a couple of hours earlier expecting to be fed. Now they stomped impatiently and munched on their stall doors.

The three fat barn cats shoved each other aside for the privilege of rubbing against her leg.

"Go catch mice!"

A mouse ran brazenly across the barn aisle, while the cats continued rubbing her legs as she doled out feed to the horses. Spoiled. Rotten spoiled, every one of them, like Danny La.s.siter. But she knew that wasn't entirely true in Danny's case.

After finishing in the horse barn, Rae walked past the loafing shed where two graying Black Angus steers languished, to the chicken house. The cats--a brindle tabby, a tortoise sh.e.l.l and a black--tagged along.

"Off limits." She closed the henhouse door in the cats' faces, then slipped inside to secure the inner door so the local coyotes and foxes didn't dine on prime pullet that night. The cats trailed Rae back to the house where there were messages from both her kids on the answering machine, saying they hoped she'd survived the fifteenth.

Her house was an empty nest. As she cleaned the coffee pot, Rae thought of how Danny had tried to keep his brood together. She remembered Danny's first wife, Jolene. A skinny, blond street kid with chewed nails and dollar signs in her eyes, who thought she'd lucked out when she'd caught herself a rich boy. Naive, that was Danny. Who knew if Josh was even his? Rae would cut her tongue out before suggesting this to anybody.

It was too late to call her son back in Florida, but in California, it was an hour earlier. Rae punched in her daughter's number and Tori answered on the third ring.

"Hi, Mom."

Rae heard the younger of her two grandsons crying in the background. "Is this a bad time to call?"

"No. Jeff's got things under control," replied her daughter.

"Hey, Tori, you'll never guess who I heard from today. Remember Danny La.s.siter?"

"How could I forget? How's he doing? Josh is how old? Must be a teenager by now." Tori had babysat Josh back when and had adored the child.

"Turned fifteen this year."

"Wow. Well, tell them I said hi."

Rae was glad Tori didn't follow up on how's he doing.

"How're you? And my guys?"

"We're great. What I called you about was Michael starting his cla.s.ses for first communion."

Rae gasped. How could time race like that? "But he's only six."

"Seven in May. It'll take a year. Next April we want you out here. No excuses."

"I don't know..." Rae felt a tightening in her chest.