Late Rain Read online

  LATE RAIN

  A NOVEL

  LYNN KOSTOFF

  TYRUS BOOKS

  MADISON, WISCONSIN

  Published by

  TYRUS BOOKS

  1213 N. Sherman Ave., #306

  Madison, WI 53704

  www.tyrusbooks.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Lynn Kostoff

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  978-1-935562-13-9 (hardcover)

  978-1-935562-12-2 (paperback)

  This One’s For Melanie, With Love.

  IN MEMORIAM:

  Randall Kostoff; Scott Gagel; Tony Huggins. Good Men All.

  JACK CARSON had always been a man of few words. Like many men of his generation who’d been taught to speak through action, he also had a deeply-embedded respect for language, for the power of words and what they could do.

  But Jack’s words fail him when he witnesses the murder of Stanley Tedros, a local soft-drink mogul. In thelate stages of Alzheimer’s, Jack can’t give more than scattershot details to the police. Hewanders hopelessly with a voice recorder in his shirt pocket—a gift from the dead man’s nephew, a grasp atthe hope of memory and words. Stanley’s death was arranged by his nephew’s wife, an ambitious, unsatisfiedwoman named Corrine. She sees a future in the family business, but only if they sell, which Staley refusesto do. His murder, for her, becomes less a means to an end than a twisted justification for her whole life. For her husband Buddy, itwas the crushing loss of his father figure.

  Ben Decovic, a recent transplant to Magnolia Beach, South Carolina working Patrol, takes an interest in the case. Coming from his own devastating loss, it’s vital to Ben that he understand the motives behind this lurid crime.

  Dark and beautiful, Late Rain explores the fear that drives how far people are willing to go to find what they want, and the irreversible steps they’ll take to get it.

  Also by Lynn Kostoff

  A Choice of Nightmares

  The Long Fall

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  PART ONE

  ONE

  PATIENCE WAS ALWAYS A SUCKER’S GAME.

  The way Corrine Tedros saw it, the meek could take their places, dutifully line up, and patiently stand there until eternity tapped them on the shoulder and Judgment Day rolled around, but the only portion of the earth that they would ever lay claim to or ever call their own was the portion that had been, and forever would be, embedded beneaththeir fingernails.

  Corrine understood the difference between patience and waiting.

  Sunday afternoons, however, were a different story. Corrine felt as if she were trapped within a single moment, the same one opening and unfolding over and over again, fourteen months of Sunday afternoons in Magnolia Beach, South Carolina, and having to sit across the dining room table from her husband’s uncle, Stanley Tedros, Stanley wearing the same brown suit and starched white shirt buttoned all the way to the neck each week as he held court, shoveling food and talking at the same time.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight, and for that matter, neither was Stanley. A gnome, that’s what hereminded Corrine of. One of those ceramic lawn ornaments. You could stick him in somebody’s front yard, and nobody would know the difference.

  By all rights, Stanley should have been in the ground years ago. He was old, his odometer clocking eighty-five, and when Corrine had married Buddy fourteen months before, she had assumed, erroneously as it turned out, that Stanley wouldn’t be around for long.

  Stanley liked to tell everyone he was too busy to die.

  Today, Stanley was riding one of his favorite topics—the current shabby state of American culture. “My parents weren’t born here,” he said. “They were immigrants and saw the country for what it was, and they made themselves Americans. They didn’t have a lifestyle. They had a life. Nobody understands the difference anymore.”

  Corrine looked down at her plate. Nothing different there either. The same meal Stanley made a show of preparing each Sunday—pot roast and a pile of vegetables that had been boiled so long that the color had leached from them.

  And to drink, a can of Julep, of course.

  Julep was Stanley’s cash cow. Before it hit the market, Stanley had been nothing more than a third-tier bottler and distributor of a line of generic soft drinks, the anonymous six-for-a-dollar variety cluttering the lower shelves in a Piggly Wiggly or Winn Dixie. Julep changed all that, starting out with a strong regional following and then unexpectedly catching national attention when Jack Brandt, star of the hit TV series Firing Pin, closed the season with on-site filming in South Carolina and shipped thirty cases of Julep to L.A. and served it at a heavily media-covered bash he threw to celebrate the six month anniversary of his graduation from detox to sobriety.

  After that, Julep caught on big.

  Corrine looked up from her plate. Stanley was still talking and chewing. “At bottom,” Stanley said, “everything’s a question of character. Always has been.” She watched him wave a fork at Buddy.

  No, Corrine thought, keeping her expression neutral. At bottom, it was an older story. Luck and timing. That’s what mattered. You kept your eyes open and your hands free. When you saw what you wanted, you grabbed. She had learned that lesson by the time she turned eight.

  Stanley set down his fork and got u
p from the table. “Time for Side B,” he said, before disappearing into the living room.

  That was another element in the Sunday afternoon ritual that Corrine had to endure—Stanley’s taste in music. He alternated every other week with his favorite albums.

  This afternoon it was the Broadway version of Zorba The Greek.

  Last Christmas, in an admittedly transparent conciliatory gesture that she hoped would cut some of the tension that existed between Stanley and her, Corrine had bought a state-of-the-art sound system and the CDs of Zorba and Savina Yannatou, Haris Alexiou, Angela Dimitriou, Stella Konitopoulou; a hit parade of names she had no idea how to pronounce. Stanley, however, characteristically went on and undercut the gesture, making a show of thanking Corrine, but then saying he would stick with the ancient turntable and albums, maintaining they best captured the “authentic” qualities of the music.

  From the living room came the opening strains of “Only Love.”

  Corrine looked over at her husband. Buddy shifted slightly in his seat and still wore the all-purpose smile, easygoing and deferential, that substituted for sustained thought and a backbone when he was around his uncle.

  “When?” Corrine asked.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “I’m just waiting for the right opportunity.”

  “Now, Buddy,” Corrine said.

  He nodded, his gaze grazing hers, and when Stanley returned from the living room, Buddy cleared his throat and finally got around to the subjects of the buyouts, asking Stanley if he didn’t think it might be a good idea to meet with the reps again and reconsider what they were offering.

  “You know,” Buddy said, “just listen, that’s all. Keep an open mind. It can’t hurt.”

  “Hyenas,” Stanley said around a mouthful of pot roast. “Nothing else but. All of them.”

  Stanley chewed and looked over at Corrine. He had the mien of a prosecuting attorney who’d just finished his closing statement to a jury he knew he had in his pocket. Despite herself, Corrine felt the hairs on her arms rise.

  Buddy cleared his throat again and gamely went on. “I mean, James Restan, just as an example. He’s put together a very attractive package. You sell, you’ll be doing all right.”

  “How about Anita Duford?” Stanley asked.

  “Who?” Buddy quickly glanced over at Corrine and then back to his uncle.

  “Anita Duford,” Stanley said. “You think she’ll be doing all right if we take Restan’s offer? Restan’s or either of the other two nosing around?”

  “I don’t know any Anita Duford,” Buddy said.

  “That’s because you don’t pay attention. I introduced you.” Stanley leaned forward in his seat. “Anita’s forty-two, five kids, and a grandmother three times over. Quit school in the eighth grade. A couple of husbands along the way, never stuck around. Sings in the choir at Ironwood Baptist. Makes a nice pecan pie. Has worked on the line, first shift, for sixteen years. Missed three days of work in the last five years.”

  Stanley speared two stalks of asparagus, folded them around his fork, and jammed them into his mouth and continued. “What do you think is going to happen to Anita when Restan takes over and starts restructuring?”

  “He said there would be minimal cuts,” Buddy said quickly. “He stressed that.”

  “You want to be the one to explain that to Anita, Buddy? Or to Lora Hilburne, Hank Owen, or Brenda White? Or any of the others you forgot the name of that’ll be shown the door if we sign over Stanco Beverages to James Restan?”

  Stanley picked up his knife, carved another slab of pot roast, and dropped it on his plate. “Stanco’s mine,” he said. “And it will stay that way. I’ve got my own plans for distribution.”

  Corrine imagined Stanley choking on a piece of food.

  A chunk of boiled potato, say, or a nice rare wad of pot roast, Stanley’s face going as red as her nails, Corrine sitting back and enjoying the show. Her husband Buddy would be of no help, as clueless as ever when it came to acting decisively, and Stanley Tedros would gasp and thrash his way to a slow and painful death.

  Corrine snapped back to the afternoon as Stanley said, “God gave man two heads, Buddy, but just enough blood to make one of them work.” He pointed his fork and, around a mouthful of food, delivered a follow-up that Corrine almost missed.

  The air left the room. Corrine dropped her silverware and pushed back her plate.

  “Are you going to let him get away with that?” she asked. She brushed Buddy’s hand off her arm. “Are you?” she repeated. Buddy adjusted the tiny collar on his dark blue polo shirt. “Just calm down, ok?”

  “He called me a hooker.”

  Buddy frowned. “He did? You sure?”

  “You’re going to just sit there?”

  Buddy lifted, then dropped his hand.

  Stanley tapped the side of his glass with a fork. “Ok, there. Enough.” He paused and probed his upper plate, using his index finger to adjust the fit of his dentures. His eyes never left Corrine’s.

  “I was explaining a basic truth to Buddy,” he said finally. “About God giving man two heads.”

  “I heard that,” Corrine interrupted. “And I heard what you said afterwards. You said, ‘And that’s what you get for marrying a hooker, Buddy.’”

  “Looker. I said that’s what you got, Buddy, a looker.”

  “You’re lying, Stanley. I heard what I heard.”

  “Corrine,” Buddy began, but she told him to shut up. Her hands had begun to tremble, and Corrine dropped them into her lap, balled them into fists. Something lurched in her stomach.

  Stanley went back to cutting his meat.

  Corrine knew she should drop the whole thing, but she couldn’t shake Stanley’s mocking smile or the way his eyes had zeroed in on hers when she challenged him. Her anger pushed her on, and she leaned forward and said, “You couldn’t pay a hooker enough to fuck you, Stanley.”

  He barked out a short laugh, then winked. “You might be surprised, Corrine.” He paused and shrugged. “And then again, maybe not.”

  Corrine turned to Buddy. “I want to go home. Now.”

  Stanley waved off her words. “A little misunderstanding,” he said. “That’s all it was. You need to be more forgiving, Corrine. You’re too high-strung.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Hey, what are we talking about here? Words. That’s all. Sticks and stones and all that.” He paused and ran a napkin across his mouth. “Just words, Corrine. Besides, if you think about it, can’t a looker be a hooker or a hooker a looker? It’s like the song says, ‘You say Poe-tay-toe, I say, Poe-tat-toe.’ Any way you slice it, in the end, you’re still looking at French fries.”

  “I’m leaving, Buddy. I’ll wait for you in the living room.”

  “Hey, what about dessert?” Stanley said, not bothering to get up when Corrine walked past.

  The living room bore the stamp of Stanley’s origins. It was dreary and oppressive and cluttered, and despite Stanley’s net worth, relentlessly blue-collar in its furnishings and décor. He was living in the same North Shore neighborhood and the same house he’d bought when he moved to Magnolia Beach. Nobody upon entering it would find any sign of what Stanley was actually worth.

  Buddy’s voice carried from the dining room as he tried to placate Stanley.

  Corrine walked over to the turntable as Side B of Zorba The Greek finished. She watched the arm lift and return to rest. Then she opened her purse.

  It took her a while to find her nail file.

  TWO

  MID-SHIFT WAS THE USUAL PLATTER. Ben Decovic worked his patrol sector, North Shore to the border of the downtown district and west to I-17. He responded to calls involving a stolen ATV, a lost German Shepard named Brigadier, two fender benders, a noise complaint involving a cadre of college students pilot-testing a couple twelve-packs and attempting to break the sound barrier with a new entertainment system. He took his dinner break at a Denny’s, pushing an undercooked omelet around on hi
s plate and drinking two cups of watery coffee. The rest of the time, he ran the routine, driving in repeated loops through his sector, as swallows darted and the light drained from the sky.

  He stayed on the move, fell into a rhythm that ran like an alternating current. He anticipated. He reacted. He drove and he watched. He monitored the radio.

  After he’d resigned from the Ryland Ohio Homicide Division, Ben had drifted south and eventually taken the first available opening on the Magnolia Beach Police Force and had seen it as a sign of sorts that it had been in Patrol. That had been fine with him. He told himself he could live with the step down in salary and status. He’d been on the job for ten months since then. Working Patrol carried its own kind of sense.

  Homicide required a different set of eyes, and Ben Decovic had come to distrust his.

  So he returned to Patrol, a part of him welcoming the reassurance of its rhythm and routines, and another part, one that was tied to his past and everything he once believed he was and knew, saw each shift as an unruly hybrid of penance and test.

  He was waiting for a day that did not hold a reminder of the need for each.

  At a little after nine, he swung down Pine Street and parked curb-side opposite a small white house with green shutters. The front porch light was on, a high-watt bulb throwing a wide semicircle of light almost halfway down the slope of the lawn.