Blackbird (21 page)

‘Not much help there,’ I said. ‘But you’re right, I think we can at least cross Feigel off our list for Gold. Now all you’ve got to do is run them all over again for Frix. And we need to find out what they knew about any kids getting involved with the group. Also, let’s go ahead and track down Pendergrass’s ex, see what she can tell us.’

‘You startin’ to like him for Gold?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘Pretend we’re beagles,’ I said. ‘No theories – we just follow the trail.’

‘Getting to be a smelly trail, Lou.’

I looked at my watch. ‘Truest thing I’ve heard all day,’ I said. I stood up and stretched. ‘Quitting time for me. I’ve got a date.’

Up went her eyebrow, the left one, which usually meant a combination of curiosity and disapproval.

‘With my wife,’ I said.

Down came the eyebrow. ‘Time you seeing to that,’ she said. ‘Good woman like her ain’t gone wait for ever.’

Driving north on Border, I visualised the three-storey A-frame – built in the sixties by a truck-stop millionaire and the biggest I’d ever been in – seeing on the low-definition screen of memory the furnishings and wall art, the girls, Jana herself. Even the cat, a semi-runty, white, notch-eared female who’d adopted them and who roamed all night, yowling and fighting like a welterweight tomcat. The girls called her White Trash, and she seemed to like me, but she always sniffed my shoes and cuffs suspiciously whenever I showed up, collecting no-telling-what intelligence about Mutt with that blunt little nose of hers.

Standing on the welcome mat at the front door of the house, fifteen yards or so behind the gallery, I took a deep breath, lifted the brass butterfly knocker and rapped twice. Thirty seconds later Jana opened the door, her glasses on her forehead and her short auburn hair sprigging untidily up like a woodpecker’s topknot. She wore red workout pants, orange flipflops and a white pullover studio smock smeared and spattered with several shades of clay and bisque. Behind her the studio end of the house was lit up and in working mode, with several pigs of clay out and the wheel wet. The girls were obviously not here, and I didn’t see any sign of White Trash either.

‘Jim,’ she said. ‘Shit, come in.’

‘Make up your mind,’ I said, stepping in onto the nubbly Berber rug.

‘Idiot. You don’t have to knock. It made me think you
were another reporter.’ As she stepped aside to let me in I caught the spicy scent of the cinnamon sticks she chewed on as she worked. ‘Did you catch those horrible people yet?’

‘Working on it,’ I said.

‘I just don’t understand who could do such a thing. People are saying it was because she was Jewish – can that be true?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Nobody knows yet.’

She looked at me closely. ‘You look tired,’ she said. ‘Want anything while I get cleaned up?’

‘I’ll get it.’

She locked the door behind me and turned off the outside lights. ‘Lee Ann took the girls down to spend the night at the farm,’ she said. She disappeared into the bedroom, and I walked into the tiled kitchen, which was green with potted herbs, chives and peppers and gleaming with copper cookware hanging from overhead racks. Beside the refrigerator was a cabinet stocked with chips, salted nuts, beef jerky and other health-destroying snacks, and in the freezer a whole shelf stacked with sirloins, T-bones, boudain, kiel-basa, bratwurst, hot links and fajita steak, all of it mine.

Opening the fridge door, I reached in past the carrot juice and tofu on the top shelf for a bottle of Corona, uncapped it and walked over to sit on the couch near the Swedish fireplace. There were several magazines on the coffee table:
American Art Review
,
Southwestern Art
,
American Artist
. I leafed through one as I sipped beer, noticing a reproduction of a Frederic Remington I remembered from the Amon Carter in Fort Worth. Farther into the journal I found an ad for a gallery in New York that was showing several Van Goghs from the Arles period. Feeling
a twinge in my ear, I flipped ahead to a full-page layout for a one-man show by John Hanna at Whistle Pik in Fredericksburg. To my innocent eye his paintings looked strong, deep and alive.

A couple of pages later I learned the Charles River Plein Air Society was sponsoring a week-long retrospective in Boston. Still lifes, pastorals, seascapes, harbour scenes. I felt a chill and looked around for any source of a draught but saw nothing. I flipped a few more pages and was looking at a painting of a Polynesian girl in a topless outfit with red flowers in her hair when I heard the faint sound of the shower off the master bedroom coming on. Instantly a vision of Jana under the hot spray replaced the island girl. After thinking about it for few seconds, I got up and went back to cover the exposed clay and flip the switches that shut down the studio, then walked into the bedroom, kicking off my shoes and shedding my clothes as I went. In the huge orchid and cream bathroom I saw Jana’s naked shape through the frosted glass door of the shower as she washed her hair. She said, ‘Come in.’

Jana had designed and built the shower herself out of Italian marble and tiles she’d glazed and fired in the kiln out back, and it was big enough to park a jeep in, with six adjustable shower heads and a seat built into one wall. I stepped into the hot water and steam behind her, took the glycerin soap from her hand and began lathering her neck, shoulders and arms. Then I worked my way down her back, massaging the muscles, then over her breasts and stiffening nipples, under her arms, across her stomach. Having finished her hair, she turned around, put her hands on my shoulders and stood with legs apart, breathing harder as I soaped her gently between her legs, then knelt to lather and
wash her thighs and the rest of the way down her legs to her feet and finally her toes.

Then it was my turn. She washed my hair with a shampoo that smelled like cut green grass, taking her time, letting her breasts brush against me as she worked. Then she lathered me all over with the glycerin soap as I had done for her, finally motioning for me to sit on the shower seat, touching the bullet wounds under my left arm and just above and to the right of my navel with her fingertips, taking a lot of time gently washing my knees, lightly tracing the knotted surgical scars with her thumbs and fingers. When she was finished she pushed my shoulders back against the tile, kissed me deeply and moved forward to hold my hips with her thighs as she let herself smoothly down onto my erection. I shifted to accommodate her, but she said, ‘Don’t move.’

I obeyed. She remained motionless for a minute, holding my face in her hands and looking into my eyes, then began moving her hips slowly. Watching my reactions closely to pace us both, she had to remind me twice more not to move as she patiently, expertly brought us to climax together, pressing her open mouth down on my shoulder and screaming softly against my skin as she came.

Later as I dried her off she sighed deeply and said, ‘Nothing like a hot shower at the end of a hard day.’

Neither of us said anything more that night. We slept back to back between unbleached, organically-grown cotton sheets, and I tried to imagine waking up in this bed every morning. I had a toothbrush here, along with everything else needed for an overnight, even two at a stretch, but Jana and I had never made it to the second night. We hadn’t been able to stay clear of the issue of my job and the Flying S
that long. And I knew better than to think my coming here meant anything in terms of our basic relationship. We’d become what I once heard called ‘enemies with benefits’. I wanted to believe ‘enemies’ was overstating it, but there was no denying that marriages could sometimes go up in smoke while leaving the spouses’ sex life standing, like the brick chimney of a burned-down house. And where my job was concerned, I knew nothing had changed in Jana’s heart.

‘For God’s sake, Jim, don’t you get it?’ she’d screamed at me the last time I was here. ‘Nobody likes cops! They’re like morticians and laxatives – you don’t want anything to do with them if you can help it. This fucking job is going to be the end of you!’

‘That’s overreaction, Jay.’

‘Oh really? You’ve already been shot twice! Who’s zoomin’ who here?’

‘I’m off the street now.’

‘Are you? What’s so terrible about running the farm, Jim? About peace and quiet and safety for a change? You’ve told me a thousand times how much that place meant to you. How can you let Dusty and Ray just sell it and go tripping off to see the world? Watch it broken up into trailer parks and salvage yards while you stay here and let a bunch of sister-fucking frecklebacks blow your brains out in the street?’ She angrily swiped at the tears on her face. ‘Where does that leave the girls and me? Can we prop that goddamn macho pride in your chair at the table when you’re dead and gone?’

‘Frecklebacks?’

She’d snatched a tissue from the box beside her, honked into it, and said, ‘Don’t patronise me, dammit!’

Now, as we worked our way through a breakfast of yogurt, melon balls and chilled guava juice, I said, ‘OZ’s always said he wants me to replace him when he retires. But Dwight Hazen’s making noises about firing me.’

‘Firing you?’ she said. ‘What’s
that
about?’

I took a deep breath. ‘He’s talking about the Gold case and maybe some old stuff, but I’m not really sure what he’s thinking.’

She watched my eyes for a moment. ‘So what is it, Jim? What in God’s name keeps you stuck like this to that tar baby of a job?’

I didn’t have an answer for her.

TWENTY-FOUR

On the way downtown from Jana’s place I convinced myself that because I had struck a blow for sound nutrition at dawn I was now entitled to do something about my hunger. I stopped for a couple of sausage-and-egg biscuits and coffee at the first drive-thru I saw.

The stuff actually tasted pretty good, prompting me to think I might be on an upswing. I drove south, leaving the residential stretch of the Boulevard behind and cruising through the commercialised lower end, past a couple of insurance agencies, RCS equipment rentals, the big Glen Lawrence & Owen Contractors complex, Hardin Autoglass, an old Texaco station born again as a body shop. I rounded the long curve at West 30th and continued down into old Traverton where the three states came together and the layout and numbering of the streets got crazy, arriving at Tri-State a couple of minutes behind schedule.

As I walked past her desk Bertie handed me a printout detailing the possibly case-related items found in the remains of Benjamin Frix’s house: thirty-six gold bars, almost two hundred pounds of gold and silver coins, five Colt and Springfield .45 slabsides with six cases of ball ammo, an X-Frame in .500 Smith and Wesson with a ten-and-a-half-inch
barrel – a massive, unwieldy revolver of almost uncontrollable power and recoil – four MAC-10s with several cases of ammunition, half a dozen AK-47s and ammo, an M1 carbine modified for full-automatic fire along with ten thirty-round magazines, sixteen live hand grenades from different military eras, and a Claymore mine. At the bottom of the page was a notation that around a dozen rounds of pistol ammunition had cooked off unnoticed before fire-fighters arrived, but all the grenades and most of the ammo had been stored either in the insulated safe or in fire-resistant canisters.

The first call I returned from my desk was Cass Ciganeiro’s, and as I waited for her to come on I grabbed the notepad from the top drawer, its margins filled with doodles of Ts and hammer-wielding arms.

‘Here’s some stuff for you,’ she said. ‘Starting back maybe twenty years ago there’ve been some protest-type groups operating in this area, holing up in the Ouachitas and Ozarks, stockpiling automatic weapons – ’ I took another look at the printout as Cass went on: ‘ – these characters are usually anti-government, anti-Semitic and white supremacist. Any one of them could be a candidate.’

‘Haven’t the feds slowed those guys down at all?’

‘You mean by shooting women, children and dogs, setting fire to religious loonies, wiretapping everybody and just generally wiping their ass with the Constitution?’

‘Well . . . ’

‘If history is any guide, it probably had the opposite effect,’ she said. ‘The only thing I can imagine these characters doing is circling the wagons a little tighter, maybe going deeper underground. They’re still pretty hooked up to the religious far right.’

‘That’s another thing I don’t get,’ I said. ‘The holiness connection. Whatever happened to the Prince of Peace?’

‘Honey, try to stay focused; around here they throw lions to the Christians. And don’t forget that guy Lummus who got the needle in Arkansas a while back. He and his buddies wanted to kill most of the rest of us and overthrow the government, bulldoze the universities, jail the press and make America a whiter and better place. Before he died he said we’d better watch out because justice was coming and it was going to be terrible swift.’

Something in this started a tingle at the base of my brain. I said, ‘Like in “His terrible swift sword”?’

‘What do I know? At that point he was out of the loop on Xanax or something anyway, so no telling what he had in mind. But I think most of us took it as a generic threat on behalf of his brothers up there in the hills.’

‘The Sword of the Lord, something like that, wasn’t it?’ Another tingle.

‘Yeah, that’s it exactly. Ties to the Klan, Aryan Nation, Posse Comitatus and some of the clandestine militias. Usually it’s just a bunch of redneck dropouts with bad teeth playing war, but they’re serious and they’re pretty organised. The women and children sometimes tag along, and let me tell you, when you talk to them, they’re scarier than the men.’

‘Cass, you know I read the paper front to back every day, especially your stuff – ’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘But if there’s been anything on these groups since Lummus’s execution, I don’t remember seeing it.’

‘There really hasn’t been much,’ she said. ‘Naturally we get hate mail all the time, every kind you can imagine, like
the stuff you guys probably get. A lot of it’s just incoherent and scattered, and there’s been no connection with any reported crime that I know of.’