Blackbird (22 page)

‘Or we’d have heard from you.’

‘Damn better believe it,’ she said. ‘So what’ve you got for me? I bent over for you on this, Jim, and I better at least get a reach-around here.’

‘Ask away.’

‘Any weapons used?’

‘None found.’

‘I said “used”.’

‘No comment.’

‘Don’t jack with me, Bonham,’ she said. ‘Never forget – I know your nickname.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Gold wasn’t shot or stabbed. She was nailed up alive, and there were no immediately lethal wounds on the body. Also, there are no suspects yet.’

‘A quote, by God,’ she crowed. ‘You’re confirming death by crucifixion?’

‘That’s how it looks.’

‘Dying of crucifixion – what’s that mean exactly?’

‘Hanging there the way she did, she couldn’t breathe right, so along with going into shock, she asphyxiated.’

‘Sounds nasty. They do anything else to her?’

‘Yeah, they cut her tongue out while she was still alive.’

‘Holy shit. How the hell do you get somebody to open their mouth for that?’

‘The only thing I can think of is brute force and something to pry with.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Not for publication.’

‘On background?’

I described the mutilation and transposition of organs. There was a silence.

Finally Cass said, ‘Jesus Christ, Jim. That’s fucking sick.’

‘No argument here.’

‘How did they grab her?’

‘It looks like they overpowered her at her office.’

‘What about the husband?’

‘There are no suspects.’

‘Has he been questioned?’

‘Nobody’s been questioned. Right now it’s interviews.’

‘So, off the record, did he have anything to do with it?’

‘Who knows?’

‘What’s your best guess?’

‘I don’t see him in on it.’

‘What about Frix?’ she said. ‘That a murder yet?’

‘Awaiting the autopsy.’

‘You see a connection?’

‘There’s no evidence of one.’

‘What’s your best guess?’

‘Off the record, Ben Frix is a murder, and if I had to bet I’d put my money on there being a connection.’

‘I can imagine how happy that makes you.’

‘Right.’

‘Have you talked to any of Gold’s patients?’

‘No comment.’

‘Will you?’

‘Pursuing all avenues.’

‘I’m not gonna warn you again, Jim,’ she said. ‘Next time I get strict.’

‘Sorry, best I can do on that one,’ I said.

‘Did Gold have money problems?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘Was she into drugs?’

‘Still looking into that. There’s no known connection to her death, though.’

‘That sounds evasive.’

‘Sorry again.’

‘Some reports said she was raped – that true?’

‘No “scientific certainty”, but I don’t think so.’

‘Any semen found?’

‘No comment.’

‘So you’re not ruling out sexual assault as the motive?’

‘Don’t use those words to me,’ I said.

‘What, “sexual assault”?’

‘“Ruling out”.’

‘Anything about the cross itself or how she was affixed to it?’

‘It was a six-foot four-by-four lashed to a tree. She was nailed to it.’

‘What’s a four-by-four?’

‘Common lumber size, like a couple of two-by-fours stuck together, a little under four inches to the side. Used for posts, heavy framing, bracing.’

‘What’s the significance of the length?’

‘Probably nothing because it’s one of the standard lengths they come in. Six, eight, ten feet – like that.’

‘Any way of tracing the source?’

‘Ninety-nine per cent against.’

‘Where does the other one per cent come in?’

‘Always the possibility we might catch a weird break.’

‘What kind of break are we talking about?’

‘If I knew that I wouldn’t have to wait for it.’

‘How about the nails?’

‘Big.’

‘Geez, Jim.’

‘That’s all I’ve really got on the nails, Cass. They’re not going to help us anyway, unless we catch somebody with the rest of the boxful and match them.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too generic to trace.’

‘Had Gold received any threats?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘How many perpetrators?’

‘Had to be more than one.’

‘Then how many?’

‘Consensus, more than two, less than five.’

‘That works out to three or four.’

‘So girls can learn math after all.’

‘Exactly how do you know she was alive when she was nailed up?’

‘Condition of the body.’

‘That’s pretty vague.’

‘You’re right.’

‘How long did it take her to die?’

‘Conjecture, several hours.’

A silence. Finally Cass said, ‘And I thought it couldn’t get any worse – ’

I said nothing.

Cass said, ‘Anything at the scene point you anywhere?’

‘Can’t comment. Sorry.’

‘Tight-ass.’

‘I would hope.’

‘I didn’t say virginal.’

Bertie came back, this time carrying a car key on a ring with a little zodiac-symbol medallion, which she dropped on my desk.

‘Just a minute, Cass,’ I said. Then to Bertie, ‘What’s this?’

‘Lee Ann’s car key. She traded vehicles with you to go shopping for a desk.’

I checked my pocket, finding my key ring with the Ford’s key still on it. ‘She’s driving the truck?’ I said. ‘How’d she know where to find the spare key?’

Accurately diagnosing this as unworthy of a response, Bertie just gave me a pitying look and walked away.

‘Lee’s here?’ said Cass’s telephone voice. ‘Is she consulting? I could use some conversation with a chick as smart as me. Can I interview her?’

‘You’ll have to ask her,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t get my hopes up. She handles your kind with the greatest of ease.’

‘Yeah, that’s what makes her fun. What else have you got?’

‘Nothing right now,’ I said. ‘I’ll have more for you, at least off the record, when all the primary interviews are in. There are two tip lines open on this, and there’s a mountain of stuff from Crimestoppers, lead sheets, informants and so on. Anybody’s guess how good any of it’ll be, but you’ll be the first one I call, Cass.’

She settled for that, though not gracefully.

‘Say hi to Lee for me,’ she said. ‘And tell her she gives me a quote or I’m unfriending the shit out of her.’

TWENTY-FIVE

I cleared out most of my day’s accumulation of dead trees by scribbling my name eleven times, returned a call from a high-school counsellor who wanted me to speak to a couple of classes – happily bucking it to Ridout – then noticed what I’d drawn on the legal pad in front of me while talking with Cass. There were several more versions of the arm and hammer logo, but it was obvious they were changing, the hammers looking less and less like hammers and more like something else, though I didn’t know what. The heads had become narrower, closer to the fist, the tops of the handle shafts now looking pointy and projecting through and past the heads. I felt another brain-tingle, but couldn’t connect it to anything. I balled up the page of doodles and tossed it at the basket. Off the wall and in. I dialled LA, and she picked up on the fifth ring.

‘Your truck rides like a log wagon,’ she said.

‘Any luck?’ I said.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But I ran into Zito and Hotfoot.’

‘Hotfoot?’

‘His sniffer dog.’

‘I thought his dog’s name was Diggity.’

‘Diggity’s retired,’ she said. ‘Bad hip.’

‘Where’d you find them?’

‘At a fire – I heard him on your scanner and drove over there. He showed me around.’

‘That’s Zito for you,’ I said. ‘Did he show you his trick?’

‘What trick?’

‘He can juggle three quarters with his one hand. He shows it to all the girls.’ Zito was now rich because of the faulty detonator that had cost him his right hand and forearm, but in my opinion it hadn’t improved his character.

‘Is that the only trick he knows?’ she enquired unmercifully.

‘Unfortunately, no,’ I said. ‘Gotta watch him – he’s always on the prowl.’

‘Does he give good prowl?’

‘Don’t even ask.’

‘I bet he does. I might prowl with him a little just to see.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we’ve already got a one-armed man in the family. Another one would be way too Freudian.’

‘Don’t get ahead of me, Bis. Right now we’re just talking prowl.’

The next evening, with LA and Zito out line-dancing at the Neon Hat, I finished a supper of microwaved beef stew and sesame breadsticks and decided to walk out to my workshop to start on LA’s bookends. But, for whatever reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about Zito, remembering how over the years we’d worn out the horse tracks in Hot Springs and the dog tracks in Shreveport, the casino boats at Bossier and all the waterholes in between. Something was sticking in my craw about Zito and LA seeing each other.

Of course I knew how Max would react: he’d look at me
over his little glasses and say, ‘What’s the beef? You and Zito have been friends for years.’

‘Maybe that’s part of the problem,’ I’d answer. ‘Zito and I crowed the sun up together too many times for me to have any illusions about him.’

‘I think I can put your dilemma on the half-shell for you, my friend,’ Max would then say. ‘You’re worried about LA getting involved with a guy like you.’

A guy like me
.

The words took several odd bounces around the inside of my skull, which left me wondering how close to the truth my imaginary conversation with Max had gotten.

I looked around the shop, trying to appreciate what I saw, everything that was supposed to be out here still in place, tools put up more or less where they belonged, the bench workably clear, the floor swept no more than a week ago. Things could be worse.

But something felt strange, and I thought I felt a faint stirring of the hair on the back of my neck. I stood for a minute trying to figure out where the feeling was coming from. Taking another look around, I couldn’t see anything that seemed wrong, but the feeling persisted. I went back out and checked the yard around the shop. For a second I thought I caught the hint of an odd smell in the air, the same one I’d thought I smelled at Three, but it was instantly gone. Finally I put it all down to imagination and walked back inside.

‘Okay,’ I said aloud to my personal space. ‘Let’s do this.’

I cleared the junk off the firebrick table, brought up the pressure on the acetylene and oxygen gauges, put on the welding apron and goggles, pulled on my gauntlets and used the striker to pop a flame on the cutting head.

As I opened up to working pressure, checked the oxygen jet and began to rough out a couple of oblong bases from a scarred and pitted chunk of half-inch steel plate, I tried to steer my mind away from bad guys and their deeds, toward stillness and peace. Toward the place I knew Jana was in when she was working – somewhere far from the razor-edged everyday world, a zone where things flowed, came together and fit right, where she was able to become almost more spectator than artist as the clay came to life in her hands.

But it didn’t work. My thoughts just stupidly and tiresomely kept plodding back to the separation, to seeing Casey and Jordan only a couple of times a week – admittedly more my fault than anybody else’s – to the memory of Dr Gold’s grey face beaded with icy rain, the milky lifeless eyes, made sharper somehow by being fixed and vacant, lancing into mine.

A guy like me
. . .

Suddenly aware that anger had muscled aside everything else in my head, I realised I was no longer cutting the steel but attacking it, slashing at it with my knife of blue-white fire. I stopped working for a minute, lifted the goggles and took a couple of deep breaths, forcing myself to visualise LA’s credenza and the volumes of Eliot under the skylight. Settling the goggles back in place, I heated and bent pieces of old rod stock, welding them to the base, shaping random chunks of rail plate to add to that, responding to the shape and mass and gravitational pull of the steel, trying to avoid thinking altogether.

And I must have succeeded somehow because two and a half hours went somewhere as flame spewed from the steel in rivers of stars that bounced brilliantly across the
concrete of the shop floor, and my hands did what they did with no interference from me. Finally I stood back, raised the goggles and took a long look at the two pieces in normal light: they felt finished to me. Or not. The eye of the beholder was going to have to be the judge of that.

With my left hand I used the tongs to plunge the pieces one at a time into the water bucket beside the table and dried them with the torch. I purged the acetylene line, shut down the tanks, hung up goggles, apron and gauntlets, then wire-brushed the slag and scale off the metal and took down its sharp edges with the stripping wheel. I used a cold chisel and maul to cut my initials into the base of each piece, knowing LA would never let me get away with not signing them. Finally I lacquered the metal to rust-proof it and glued on and trimmed a couple of green felt bases.

When that was done – and since I was out here – I browbeat myself into getting on the stair-stepper for fifteen minutes, now thinking about the only thing I possibly could while doing this, which was dialling out the firing of the sensory neurons in my knees. Then, having come this far, I decided to work out on the heavy bag for another few minutes, keeping the sweat coming, this time doing something that felt good, finishing with a combination hard enough to rattle the rafters and numb my wrists and forearms. Then I tossed my gloves onto the bench, double-checked valves and switches, grabbed my still-warm artefacts and went in to shower.

I had finished the newspaper and was slouched in my chair with a Corona, watching a documentary about the mortally wounded
Bismarck
steaming in circles until the Fairey Swordfish got the range, when LA came in. She was
decked out in tight Wranglers, red lacers and a bright yellow western shirt, with a saucer-sized silver buckle on her belt that I hadn’t seen before. She was sober as a church mouse, but happy. Zito had that effect on women.