Page 80 of Hanging and Burning

“Which one?”

This question cast a dour shade across her countenance. For some reason it made me feel as if I’d scored the first point.

“There are at least two,” I added.

“There’s only one,” she corrected, a touch of steel in her tone. “Mama Mara.”

“What did Miss Mara have to say?”

“That I should hear you out.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else.” And then, as if happening upon the thought, she said, “She is the only mother I have.”

“What about Connie? Where does she fit in your parental universe?”

I wasn’t being kind. After all, this woman had me drugged and maybe set up for worse.

She winced the way some people do when they don’t want to cry.

“She was a good woman,” Twyla said. “Everybody said that she was a saint and that my granddad was lucky to have such a wonderful wife.”

“What was lucky for him?”

“They said he was a bastard.”

“So are you,” I said, “in a technical sense.”

“Fuck you.”

“Now we’re gettin’ somewhere.”

The lady fashion plate’s nostrils flared, and I wondered once again about being shot.

“I guess I deserve that,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “I mean, you didn’t try to hurt me, and I had Jocko roofie you. But you have to understand, people have been wanting to get me, to hurt me. I need to be careful.”

“All right,” I said. “Yeah. You’re in trouble. You got to protect yourself. But you have to understand that the only thing I was hired for was to find you and tell you that Arman’s looking to talk to you before he dies. He also wanted me to say that Mara is not your blood, but that he is.”

“He didn’t want to know about the trouble I’m in?”

“I don’t think he knew about it.”

“If that’s so, why do you accept it with no question?”

Aja’s computer monitor is on a swivel stalk so that she can turn it around to show what she’s seeing when looking up things for me. I turned the screen to Twyla. I didn’t have to ask her to read the article about her dead boyfriend.

She leaned forward, studying the words like some ninth-century Benedictine monk examining a sacred text, mumbling prayers as they were read, experiencing the agony and dark ecstasy of the final truth. At one point she reached out to hold on to the right edge of the screen.

I watched closely as she scrutinized the soft-pedaled description of the last moments of her longtime friend’s torture and death. That morning, she had put on an orange dress and black hat the size of a wartime drone, the barest makeup and maybe a slender pistol in that lemon-yellow purse. I was pretty sure that she had planned to overwhelm me, maybe to divert me to her side, whatever that was. But now…

“David’s dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“It could have been about what you wanted to tell Paulie Jr.,” I speculated. “Or maybe it had to do with old Malto.”