Rough Trade

to know that it’s better if he doesn’t live. Darius isn’t coming back, not the Darius we used to know. I hope God sees fit to take him. How is Mr. Rendell?”
    “The bullets did a lot of damage. Right now we can only wait and see.” I actually suspected that the surgeons, with their experience with hundreds of patients who’d been as seriously wounded as Jeff, probably had a good idea of what the outcome was going to be. However, their job was sewing people up, not making predictions. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” I continued, “but do you have any idea what your brother was doing at Beau Rendell’s house?”
    “The detective I talked to says they think he broke in to rob the place. They say he was after all of the sports memorabilia that Beau Rendell kept there. I told them they were crazy. Darius had more trophies and signed footballs than he knew what to do with. What would he want with more?”
    “Perhaps he intended to sell them,” I offered gently. “Was he strapped for cash?”
    “Darius was always strapped for cash, even when he was playing in the NFL. He ran through money like water. Listen, I’m not saying that Darius is perfect. He has his problems, but stealing has never been one of them.”
    “So what do you think he was doing at Beau Rendell’s house?” I asked.
    “I think Jeff Rendell set it up.”
    “What for?”
    “I got a call from Darius yesterday. He was all excited. He told me that he had this secret, something big.”
    “Do you know what it was?”
    “Oh, yeah, Darius never could keep anything from me, especially when he was happy.”
    “He was happy?”
    “Of course, he was happy. He was going back to play for the Monarchs.”
     
    It was four o’clock in the morning when Jeffrey Rendell died. The reporters had long ago gone home. Chrissy was with him at the end, sitting in the molded plastic chair at his bedside, when the monitors bleated out their flat alarms. She was shoved out of the way when the crash team sprang into action and went through their heroic but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to resuscitate him.
    I dozed through all of it in an armchair just outside the double doors. What finally woke me was the screaming, the shrill sounds of the nurses crying out for security, and the sounds of crashing as medical equipment was knocked to the floor.
    I stumbled to my feet, propelled by instinct as much as anything else and followed the sounds of shouting. Under the harsh fluorescent lights I got there just in time to see Chrissy Rendell, in her Prada pants and designer sweater, being pulled off the body of Darius Fredericks. In the few seconds that she’d had she’d pulled out every tube and line she could get her hands on, so that sounds of her curses mingled not only with the horrified voices of the nurses, but the sound of the various alarms of the devices that had been monitoring Fredericks’s vital systems.
    By the time I reached her, Chrissy’s hair was disheveled, her eyes wild, and the perfect alabaster of her skin was speckled with the blood of the man that she believed had murdered her husband.
     

CHAPTER 23
     
     
    We act out what we can’t put into words. Perhaps that is the real explanation of madness, at least the kind that had taken hold of Chrissy. Certainly it was something that Renee Fredericks seemed to understand. Perhaps it was having seen the violence that spilled out of her brother or maybe it was just plain kindness, but in the end it was Darius’s sister who convinced them not to call the cops. No harm, she pointed out, had been done and her status as a nurse in the same hospital also carried considerable weight. For the time being the incident was allowed to go unreported, at least until one of the half a dozen or so witnesses discovered that there was money to be made from selling the story.
    I honestly don’t think Chrissy cared what happened to herself. Her rage spent, she now seemed hollowed out and near shock. I put my arm around her thin shoulders and half lifted her out of the chair in order to propel her toward the door.
    As we left Renee Fredericks alone with the rasping of the ventilators I said a silent prayer that her wish would be granted and her brother would be taken.
    We walked through the deserted parking lot to the car unmolested. The hospital had promised to give us a half an hour head start before releasing the news of Jeff’s death. However, pulling into Chrissy’s drive I noticed a car parked