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“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll go tell Anderson.” And because I can play the game, too, I added, “And he will fuck it up, and a killer will get away because you’re too busy having a hissy fit to do anything about it.”
I was very glad to be ten feet away from her, because judging by the look on her face, if I had been close enough, she would have committed a felonious assault on my person, possibly resulting in serious injury. Even from ten feet away I could hear her teeth grinding together.
“Spill it,” she said at last, her teeth still locked tight.
I told her about the phone, and about the computer, and how that meant the same person killed both Jackie and Kathy, and she listened. She didn’t suddenly burst into bright smiles and embrace me, but she listened. When I finished, she looked at me for a moment, and then said, “Okay. So who did it?”
“Renny Boudreaux,” I said. “He had some kind of altercation with Kathy, and she yelled that she would tell everybody next time.”
Deborah looked at me, and then she sneered. I mean, really, an actual sneer, the kind you give somebody pathetic who is beneath your contempt but for whom you feel contempt anyway. “Renny Boudreaux is in New York,” she said. “Doing the morning shows to promote his special. He left yesterday.”
“What?” I said, and I admit I was at least partially stunned.
“New York,” she said. “Everybody on set knows it, and you’d know it, too, if you had read the production schedule instead of spending all your time humping Jackie.”
It seemed like a very low blow, but she wasn’t finished with me yet. “And in the meantime,” she said, moving effortlessly from the sneer back to a very good snarl, “while you dick around and waste my time with stupid bullshit, you still haven’t found Astor.”
I did not actually reel in shock, but her body shots definitely left me a bit wobbly and uncertain. “Well,” I said feebly, “but—”
“Find your girl, asshole,” she said. “Leave this alone. You’ve done enough damage.” And she turned away and stalked toward the far end of the trailer. I stood and watched her, but she paced by me without a glance, as if I was some kind of common and rather dull plant life. I didn’t want to leave this alone. I wanted to grab Deborah by the shoulders and shake her, and tell her it wasn’t my fault; Patrick was dead, and somebody else had killed Jackie and ruined the only shot I’d ever had to climb out of the ooze and into the genuine gold-plated sunshine. And then I wanted to find Jackie’s killer and tape him snugly under my knife and give him a very long time to reflect on what he had done. And I would; I would not leave this alone, forgotten and fumbled away by Anderson’s stone-brained incompetence and Deborah’s bureaucratic indifference.
But as much as it nettled to admit it, Deborah was right about one thing: I did have to find Astor, and that was a more immediate problem than my revenge.
All right: Where should I start? Robert’s trailer was the obvious place, but I had already looked there. Still, that had been almost an hour ago. It was at least possible that they had returned, and if only to carry out my due diligence, I should check it again.
Deborah stalked by one more time without looking at me, and while she was still at the far end of her neurotic sentry march, I crossed over her path and headed toward Robert’s trailer.
THIRTY-THREE
ROBERT’S TRAILER WAS STILL UNLOCKED, AND AS I PUSHED the door open I saw that it was still dim inside, too. Once again I paused just outside and peered both ways, and once again I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. I stepped through the door and looked around; still nobody home. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed. I looked in all the corners and closets anyway, because thoroughness is a virtue every bit as important as neatness, and I found exactly the same amount of Nothing as I’d found earlier.
And now what? Astor was still missing, Deborah was still not speaking to me, and Jackie was still dead. The world was not at all the happy place it had seemed to be so recently, and for just a moment there no longer seemed any point to pretending. All the purpose, all the anger and resolve and need to Do Something drained out of me, and I collapsed onto the edge of the couch in Robert’s living area. It had all looked so bright and beautiful this morning, and now the world had snapped back into its true form, gray and pointless and mean-spirited, and even though that was certainly a better fit for Dismal Dexter, I didn’t like it. I wanted things back the way they were. Like a little boy trapped in a dark and dreary adventure, I wanted to go home.
But I was not a little boy, and even worse, I was home. This was it, this dismal, painful, senseless trudging through sludge. This was where I lived; back in ugly old reality again. And there was nothing I could do about it, nothing at all, except to find Astor and drag her back home and start up the same old shadow show.
Home: back to dirty socks on the floor and screeching at all hours and Rita’s endless, pointless, disjointed monologues. Rita: the one person still talking to me, and I didn’t really want to talk to her and couldn’t understand what she said. And thinking of Rita, I remembered that my phone had bleated at me while I was being grilled by Anderson. It had to be her; nobody else was left.
And so with a heavy sigh and a sense of returning to painful duty, I dragged out my phone and looked at the screen. Yup: Rita. She’d left a message, naturally—why pass up an opportunity to blather? I went to voice mail and listened.
“Dexter,” she said. “I know you must be looking for her. For Astor? Because it’s been a long time now and you didn’t— And anyway, I thought of something, and I was going to— I know you said she might come home, and I thought, that’s right, she might, but maybe not—and so anyway, I’ll just be gone for twenty minutes. Oh. And I’ll call you when I get back, in case.” I heard her take a breath, as if she was going to go on, but instead she disconnected.
I glanced at the time. The call had come in fifty-eight minutes ago. I had been to college, so I knew that fifty-eight minutes was more than twenty minutes, but she hadn’t called back.
I called her number, but it rang and rang until it went to voice mail. I disconnected. I couldn’t believe Rita had left the house, and it was even harder to believe she’d gone somewhere without her phone. But apparently she had, and I would just have to wait until she got back.
In the meantime, Astor was not in any danger; she was with Robert, and she was quite probabl
y someplace nearby, learning makeup tips. She would not want to be found, which would make things harder, but Robert would be much easier to locate. If he wasn’t hovering nearby at the edge of the excitement, somebody would know where he was—Victor, the director, would be a great place to start.
I found Victor in his trailer, just two doors away. I could tell he was in there because as I started to walk past, Martha, the assistant director, came rushing out of the trailer as if she was pursued by killer bees. Before I could even frame a question to her, she sprinted past me, muttering, “Shit shit shit shit shit,” and then vanished around the end of Trailer Row.
I went up the steps and knocked. There was no answer, but I could hear a voice inside, raised in passionate agony, so I pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Victor sat at the table, white-knuckled hand pressing his phone against his face. A large glass of water stood in front of him. He was listening to someone on the other end, shaking his head and whining, “No. No. No, impossible, fuck, no,” and as I stood there watching he picked up the glass and drained the water.
And then he reached behind him for a large blue bottle, which I recognized as a popular brand of vodka, refilled the glass, and took another healthy drink. I didn’t think he had filled the vodka bottle with water. He looked up at me without seeing me, and suddenly exploded in rage at whomever he was talking to on the phone.
“Well, goddamn it, what would you do? We got half a pilot in the can and a dead star, and the network is all over my fucking ass to fucking do something, and I can’t do shit without her and I can’t fucking raise the fucking dead!” He listened briefly—very briefly—and then snarled into the phone, “Well, then, call me back when you do know something.” He slapped the phone to disconnect and then slammed it onto the table.
