Half Life Read online

  She said, her expression piercing, “Richard Sampson. I’m sure you remember him, seeing as how you accused him of being a murderer.”

  Richard Sampson, the developer and rich cat who is part of Vanessa’s set, was one of my suspects in the wind farm case. I had indeed accused him of being a murderer, and I had also uncovered that he was a philanderer—with other men. Vanessa had been deeply annoyed that I had made Sampson mad, thinking that it reflected badly on her and Thomas. To her credit, when I thought Sampson might be trying to kill me, she came to my defense. Still, she was pissed to have to mend fences with Sampson and his wife. I think she even started volunteering at the library, where Abby Sampson also volunteers, just to get back into their good graces. I hoped she had been successful because I wanted to talk to Sampson about the protest and get his take on Pete, but I doubted he would talk to me without some priming.

  Preparing myself for the explosion, I said, “I’d like to talk with Sampson about the protest.” I saw her mouth open, so I plunged on. “I’m wondering if Pete’s disappearance had anything to do with his work on the protest. These things can bring out the worst in people.”

  “Please don’t tell me you suspect Sampson of being the killer again.”

  Actually, I hadn’t thought about that. The guy was definitely scary. But Sampson was on Pete’s side in this case, so likely innocent. “I don’t suspect Sampson. I just want to talk to him about Pete.”

  She gave a snort. “Like he’d give you the time of day, Sam. You accused the man of murdering Cole Mintock, you lied to his wife to ferret secrets out of her, you concocted a theory that he and his male lover killed Cole . . .”

  “Sampson didn’t know about that last bit,” I said quickly, as though excluding that made the other sins against him okay.

  “Well, still, Sam, he is not going to want to talk with you.”

  “I know.” Here was the critical moment. I took a deep breath and said, “That’s why I want you to get him to talk with me.”

  It was an impressive explosion. She levitated off her seat a couple of inches, slammed her wine glass down on the table, and sputtered something awful. Lacy’s ears flew back, she let out a whimper, then the poor dog leaped away from the Cheeto-feeder and tore out of the room.

  “You are outrageous!” my sister huffed at me. “After all I did to repair my relationship with the Sampsons, do you really think I would risk it by helping you?”

  Vanessa was good at these haughty expostulations, and she could dig in big time just like the rest of us Larkins. But she also had soft spots. I would probe those now.

  “Remember, I’m doing this because of Eddie.” Soft spot number one: Vanessa is a hopeless romantic. Or stuck in Victorian times, depending on how you look at it. She believes no woman is complete without a man. Thus, she believes I should marry Eddie. I knew that this line of attack was especially lethal now, with her worried about me losing Eddie to the evil Gabriella.

  She stared at me, brown eyes suspicious. Before she could marshal counter arguments, I went on to soft spot number two. “Also, I honestly want to find out what happened to Pete. I mean, he sounds like a good guy. If something happened to him, we need to find out what it is. The sheriff’s department has hit a wall.” This was a good one. Vanessa knew Pete, they had worked together for a cause. She could be fiercely protective of people she cared about. Her deep maternal instincts drive me up the wall—my mother died and I certainly don’t need another one—but they made her very loyal.

  I could see her resolution waver, so I moved onto soft spot number three. “Besides, if someone really did kill Pete, he or she is still out there. What if this person kills again?”

  Victory! Vanessa loves Desert Rock, and she is committed to protecting it. She’s also protective of her daughters, despite her oft-spoken claim that they drive her nuts. I had probed the soft spots and won!

  She said weakly, “I can’t believe Pete is dead. He was such an inspiration. Maybe he just took off. You know people do that. They get sick of everything and just go away for a while.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “But it’s been two weeks.”

  “Two weeks is not good.”

  I didn’t really need to, but I decided I might as well probe soft spot number four. “It seems odd Pete would leave, anyway. He was right in the middle of the semester. He needed that job at the bank to pay for his schooling, and he seemed to take the job seriously. He was active in the toxic waste protest. He really seemed to care about this community. At his age, as busy as he was, he showed a lot of social conscience.”

  Vanessa, one of the town’s biggest activists, following along in my mother’s footsteps, bought this one hook, line, and sinker. “He surprised me. Most people his age are just into partying and hooking up. He really cared. You know he wanted to become a lawyer so he could fight for environmental justice?”

  I smiled sweetly. “That’s why I want you to talk to Sampson for me. Just explain all this. Once he hears what I want to talk with him about, he’ll agree. Don’t you think?”

  She took a big gulp of wine, stared at me over the rim. I could tell she had not been totally buffaloed. I could also tell that she had been drawn in by the drama of it all. I knew she didn’t want to risk alienating the Sampsons, but I also knew she couldn’t help but do something to right this wrong. In that predilection we were alike. She said, “I’ll talk to him. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll talk to him.”

  .

  Once Vanessa left the house, my brave dog emerged from hiding. With the beloved Vanessa gone, Lacy lowered her standards and came sauntering up to me, all wiggly and smiling. She leaned into my leg as she always does, practically breaking it in two. I was feeling less exhausted as I basked in the glory of my victory over Vanessa, so I rubbed and scratched Lacy with abandon. She loved it. As my hands messaged her shoulders, her relaxed body lowered further and further toward the floor. Black hairs rained down from her back onto the beige tiles, shameful evidence that Vanessa had been right about my husbandry deficits. It’s just that Lacy never complained—she was an easygoing, if slightly dumb, beast.

  In an uncharacteristic moment of affection, I bent down to hug her. Unfortunately, she chose that exact moment to straighten up off the floor. Her skull and my nose connected, and I heard a squishy crack. Then pain filled my face, and blood poured from my nose onto the tiled floor.

  After a string of curses, which sent Lacy flying from the room a second time, I sat back in my chair, pain dimming my vision, staring at the blood on the floor. Why was this always happening? I am not grace personified to start with, but Lacy and I together were like planets whose orbits overlapped to ensure regular catastrophic smashups.

  The good news? The deluge of tears washed the pebble from my eye.

  7

  I sat waiting in Sampson’s office at nine o’clock the next morning, staring out his huge office window at the Mule Train Hills. I could see a few swaths of yellow where wildflowers bloomed. The meager winter rains had been sufficient for a decent bloom this spring but not an extraordinary one. I looked forward to the desert transforming into a tapestry of color, though I wasn’t so crazy about the prospect of more hay fever, especially now that my nose was busted. Sneezing now would hurt, big time.

  I sighed. If sneezing caused my nose to start bleeding again, Dr. Singh would have to pack my nostrils with gauze. Breathing was difficult enough on account of the swelling without additional obstructions. I found myself taking shallow breaths, terrified lest some rogue pollen be swept up my nasal passages and trigger an attack. On Dr. Singh’s instructions, I was icing my nose—painful!—and taking lots of Tylenol, which seemed to have little effect other than to make me nauseous. In addition to my physical miseries, I suffered profound embarrassment. While getting my nose fractured by a dog was dumb enough, it was worse to have people think I had been beaten up. Yesterday Gladys, the nurse at urgent care, had reacted with haughty disbelief to my story of how this happene
d. I could tell she thought I had been in a fight with some babe at a biker bar or beaten up by my loser boyfriend. This gave me a glimpse of how the next few weeks were going to go. With my puffy face and black eyes, more erroneous assumptions and humiliating encounters were sure to come. Great, I finally decide to work on my appearance and I wind up looking like Joe Louis.

  And sure enough, Sampson’s secretary, Mandy, had gasped when she saw me. She smiled in an embarrassed way and quickly conducted me out of public view. Once she had ensconced me in Sampson’s office, she patted my arm and asked if I needed anything. I assumed she meant a restraining order or an EMT. Damn that Lacy! I’d get rid of her if I didn’t know my mother would tsk disapprovingly from heaven.

  I sat in Sampson’s office and tried not to think about my throbbing face. I noticed the same photos on his desk as were there on my first visit eight months ago. One was of his wife, Abby, a lovely woman who adored Sampson enough to look the other way when it came to his extracurricular activities. She accepted that he had women on the side, but I knew his tastes ran more to the Y chromosome. Whether that would be a deal breaker for her, I didn’t know. As for Sampson, he believed he was 100 percent dedicated to Abby—he saw his dalliances as harmless diversions. I did believe that his real emotional energy was reserved for his family. He had been so proud of his clan last time I saw him. Another photo on his desk immortalized his son and daughter, both big as mountains like their father, but they had the auburn hair and freckles of their mother. I saw that Sampson still had photos of his beloved black and tan dachshunds as well.

  Last time I was in his office I had snooped around for clues that Sampson was a cold-blooded killer. Plus I had drilled him about his business practices and basically suggested that he was a fraud. Several days later I had interrogated his wife in the local library and managed to squeeze information out of her, such as the fact that he was unfaithful. It was hard to figure why Sampson had gotten so mad at me. That anger, in addition to the fact that he had once gone to trial for killing a man, was why I was sitting there sweating, mouth dry, heart ready to blow a gasket.

  By the time Sampson entered his office, panic had pressurized my head to such a degree I worried my nose might spout a geyser. I lived in fear of Dr. Singh stuffing my nostrils with cigar-sized gauze logs. I found myself holding my breath to forestall the calamitous nose bleed, but I quickly became woozy and decided it was better to risk a bleed out than to pass out.

  When Sampson walked over to where I sat, I felt eclipsed, the man was that big. He made Raul look like a scrawny grade school kid. Sampson looked much as he had eight months ago, giant bald head, gray-brown eyes, muscles everywhere. He wore crisp khaki slacks and a short-sleeved navy blue shirt, exposing buff arms. Last time I was here, I felt choked by his pungent aftershave, but whether he still wore it I couldn’t tell, what with my nose swollen shut and all.

  I stood, and we shook hands.

  “Ms. Larkin.”

  “Mr. Sampson.” I sounded like I was talking through a quilt. My mouth breathing made me sound sinister or horny, I couldn’t figure out which. Hopefully, Sampson would go with the former.

  He kept his fierce eyes focused on mine, but for a moment I saw them wander down to my nose. I swear I saw a tickle of a smile on his lips, and his eyes lost their ferocity for a second.

  He sat. I sat.

  “Tangle with a killer?” he asked.

  “Close encounter with my dog.”

  His eyes moved to the photos of his dachshunds. “Ah, yes, a rottie isn’t it?”

  During our last meeting—in an effort to bond with him—I had dished out some BS about how the coloring of his dogs was so much like the coloring of my beloved rottweiler. The sentiment had been a gross misrepresentation of my feelings for Lacy then. I was only taking care of her because I didn’t want the ghost of my mother, who loved the dumb dog, to come down and haunt me. While lately my feelings had warmed toward the critter, I was not feeling particularly enamored of her now that she had shattered my nose. Go figure.

  “You have a good memory,” I said to Sampson. “I hate to say it, but the rottweiler and I have these sorts of problems quite a bit.”

  He actually had to purse his lips to keep his amusement under wraps. I found this highly annoying. On the other hand, if it kept him from killing me, why complain?

  He sat back in his chair, his butt squeaking on the leather seat. “So, what can I do for you? Your sister said it was important.”

  “Listen, Mr. Sampson . . .” I started, my voice apologetic.

  He put up his hand. “Look. You were trying to do good. You did do good, you found Cole’s killer. I think I made it clear to you then where my limits are, and I have no doubt you will respect them in the future. So, let’s move on. What do you need my help with?”

  I had misjudged him. During the wind farm case, I had seen him as an animal, I guess, a big angry crocodile or pissed-off rhino. I still harbored no doubt he could obliterate me if he wanted to. But I saw now that he had just been protective of his family, his business, and his reputation, in that order. I felt myself warm to him.

  Feeling myself relax, I explained. “I’m looking into the disappearance of Pete Castillo. I know that he was working with you on the toxic waste protest, and I thought maybe you could tell me about it.”

  “Still moonlighting as a PI, I see.”

  I nodded humbly. “I’m doing this as a favor for a friend.”

  “Lucky friend. You’re tenacious, Ms. Larkin, and driven by an admirable desire to right wrongs. And you clearly have a knack for investigations.”

  “Let’s just say I managed to find Cole’s killer despite making some big mistakes.”

  He nodded, accepting the implied apology.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Did you realize Pete had gone missing?”

  Sampson nodded. “He stopped coming to our meetings, and a couple of the things he had promised to do didn’t get done. At first I just thought, he’s a young man with a lot going on, he probably just got too busy. But then Deputy Wise came here asking questions, saying Pete had been reported missing.”

  “Trent told me that Pete got into a scuffle with someone from the other side of the protest, a guy by the name of Matthew Thornton.”

  “First name basis with the deputy?”

  “We went to high school together.”

  “Ah,” he said, running a big paw over his bald head. “Yeah, things got a little heated between Pete and Thornton.”

  Sampson’s eyes kind of glazed over for a minute, as if his thoughts were far away. He grimaced and then cracked his knuckles. He ran his hand over his head again. “Don’t like Thornton. Or, more accurately, I don’t like his handler, Bernard Cornwell.”

  I remembered Trent explaining that Cornwell was working for the mayor and Thornton was working for Cornwell. I said, “I can see where you wouldn’t like those guys. They want to build a radioactive waste dump here and you don’t want that to happen.”

  He sat back in his chair, his bum squeaking again on the leather. Steepling his hands, he gazed out the window at the wildflowers. It was odd seeing Sampson look pensive, like watching a grizzly bear contemplate the heavens. “Yes,” he said flatly. “That’s true.”

  I couldn’t figure out why he was acting so weird. He was not a man to hold back his feelings. I had expected him to launch into a tirade about the mayor’s plan and how he despised those who supported it. This reticence was not part of his behavioral repertoire. I tried to get at what was at the core of it. “It must be hard for a civic-minded person like you to go up against the mayor . . .”

  “Mayor Tyler needs to be recalled, as everybody knows,” he cut in impatiently.

  “Right,” I said, trying to regroup. “So, well, the idea of bringing this highly dangerous stuff into our community . . .”

  “Look,” he said, “you’re right about all of that, which is why I’m working to prevent it instead of spending time with my fam
ily, which is what I really want to do. But what really pisses me off is Bernard Cornwell. Do you know what he is?”

  Now I was really lost. I shrugged.

  Sampson leaned forward, his intense eyes drilling into mine. “Then let me fill you in. Bernard Cornwell bills himself as a psychotherapist. What he really is is an immoral quack.”

  Whoa, I wouldn’t want to be Bernard Cornwell. “He’s a bad therapist?” I guessed.

  “Ha!” he spat. “He’s worse than bad. He’s a fraud. Have you ever heard of ‘reparative therapy’?”

  I felt a shiver of disgust, my memory jogged. “Yes, I wrote a book on homosexuality and devoted a chapter to it. Reparative therapy is an attempt to heal gay people. Turn them straight so to speak. Don’t tell me Cornwell is one of those.”

  Sampson’s huge face turned red. “That’s exactly what he is. That damn Matthew Thornton, the guy Pete was involved with, is one of his ‘patients.’”

  Ah, so Matthew Thornton was an “ex-gay.” I wondered if Pete knew that. If Sampson knew it, Pete probably did, too. I thought of the photograph of Pete and Thornton fighting, which I had seen in Pete’s apartment. I had assumed they had clashed over the waste proposal. But what if they were fighting about Matthew’s claim to be “cured”? As strongly as Pete felt about the nuclear waste dump, I thought he would be more disturbed by the idea of reparative therapy. The dump was still just an idea on the horizon, abstract and potentially avoidable, but Pete lived the reality of homosexuality every day. His brother Raul, and probably lots of other people, had made sure that that reality wasn’t an easy one. And I doubted Thornton had been quiet about his “conversion”—ex-gays want to spread the news to encourage others to go into therapy. Cornwell, certainly, would have wanted Thornton to advertise it in order to promote his business.

  “So,” I said, “Matthew Thornton claims he’s gone straight, does he?”

  “Yeah, he even got married. What a load of horse shit—sorry for the language. That hocus pocus can’t work, people are just what they are. But, I know for a fact that it failed in this case. Despite being married to this poor Faith woman, everyone knows Thornton still sleeps with men.”