Blackbird (31 page)

A pair of ducks flushed ahead of us, redheads as it turned out, open-water divers; birds that, unlike mallards and other puddle ducks, tend to put their money on horizontal velocity instead of altitude when spooked. LA ran in under them, throttled back to match their speed, then reached up to point her finger like a six-gun at the drake beating frantically in the air above her head and dropped her thumb. She blew the smoke off her fingertip, made a holstering motion with her hand and throttled back up.

As we rounded the downlake end of the island LA
came back on the power bar, re-entering the main channel and falling in line a few hundred yards behind the pursuers. I thought I could pick out somebody crouching on the foredeck of the lead press boat, fumbling with what was probably a camera bag as all the vessels now continued single file up the lake at about the thirty knots the rental boats could manage,
Bufordine
now bringing up the rear of the procession. The reporter who had been digging in his bag was now peering ahead through his telephoto lens trying to spot us, but none of the reporters thought to look back.

When we reached the point north of the Yancey Creek channel LA slowed and brought us around, prospecting back along the shore for promising water. The sun was past zenith when she found a deep cut next to a raft of lily pads. She swung in and brought the throttle all the way back, and the boat wallowed down into the water as the reporters’ boats gradually lost themselves in the distance, still in search of us.

I walked forward to tip the prop of the trolling motor into the water, checked the battery connections and the foot control and used the silent little motor to position us off the lily pads. Unstowing the rods from the gunnel racks, I glanced at the fishfinder but decided to go primitive and leave it off.

‘Best fish buys dinner,’ I said.

LA shook her head as she got out of the chair and unsnapped the rear fishing seat. ‘First fish.’

Which was no surprise. Wanting to see all the action, she was going to fish topwaters, which except at dawn and dusk are slow producers but can bring in some really good fish. On the other hand, wanting immediate results, I
intended to work the bottom along the cut with a plastic worm, which is usually the quickest way to get a take.

‘Figuring out why Hazen got me canned is one thing,’ I said, handing LA the lighter of the two casting rods. ‘But I keep coming back to Gold. I mean, what the hell was it that got her out of her house that night? Going by the lab results, the party was just getting hot. What would make her bail out at that point?’

LA stuffed the headband back in her pocket and put on her cap before tying on a green floating frog and making a practice cast into open water to get the feel of the outfit. ‘Gotta figure it was the call of the coin,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what else is going to be enough of an incentive.’ She adjusted the reel’s inertial brake and cast again. Satisfied, she reeled in and turned to square off against the pads.

‘How about fear?’ I selected a six-inch grape worm and Texas-rigged it on a 1/0 hook.

‘Of what?’

‘Blackmail, let’s say. Suppose she had dark secrets? I mean darker than we already know about.’

As LA thought about this, she lightly caught one side of her lower lip between her teeth, her oldest concentration-enhancing technique, and whipped out a cast to drop the frog weightlessly onto one of the pads. She shook her head again.

‘Everybody’s got dark secrets,’ she said. ‘But if it was blackmail she’d have to be sure they had something or she wouldn’t have gone out to meet them. Considering her profile, I don’t think they could’ve bluffed her. She’d be way too suspicious – not to mention too smart – for anything like that. Plus, I doubt they’d actually have had anything on her. Look at the elaborate killing they were
about to do – who’s gonna go to the trouble of putting together a real blackmail package just to set up a murder?’ She glanced at me. ‘Anyway, do blackmailers do homicide?’

I dropped the purple worm next to a stickup and after a few seconds felt the bullet weight touch bottom. ‘I guess it could happen,’ I said. ‘But you kind of look for it to be the other way around: victim murders blackmailer.’

‘In the movies, anyway,’ she said.

There was a tentative double bump on my line. I waited a second, then set the hook. It turned out to be a smallish bass, a pound or so, and I unhooked and released it.

‘Gotcha,’ said LA.

‘Crackers and water on me,’ I said.

She ignored this, her eyes on the frog.

Trying out various scenarios in my head, I said, ‘Okay, say Gold gets a call at home – ’

‘How do we know it was at home?’

‘Her purse. Not that it necessarily tells you where she was coming from, just that she wasn’t already at her office. If she was, it would’ve been behind her desk or in a cabinet or somewhere else in her personal office.’

‘Okay, so she gets the call, some kind of hot case, big up-front fee, hearing scheduled the next day maybe, can she meet to discuss it, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘No, not to discuss it, that doesn’t work,’ I said. ‘They’d have had to do that on the phone to get her to interrupt what was going on with Frix and her other playmates and get her out of the house. It had to be to meet the callers and collect a fee, let’s say, or to look at some kind of evidence, maybe files of some kind.’

I heard the distant sound of outboards approaching from uplake.

LA twitched the frog off the edge of the lily pad, and it immediately disappeared in a swirling splash. She snapped the rod back and the fish was on. Fearing for her line, I cranked my own lure in as fast as I could and ran to get my foot on the trolling motor control. I steered us over as far into the pads as possible, hoping to get on top of the fish. It made a couple of hard runs under the heavy cover, then broke water and shook its big head. It was a good bass, deep-bellied and putting on weight for the winter, probably five pounds, maybe even six. The fish jumped twice more before LA got it alongside and I leaned down to lip it and hoist it clear of the water for LA to see, thinking now more along the lines of seven pounds.

By this time the boats carrying the reporters, some hoisting cameras onto their shoulders, had closed to hailing range.

As LA watched me twist the frog free of the bass’s lip a reporter in the first boat, a stocky young guy with a bushy black moustache, apparently holding no grudge over being ditched, yelled, ‘Hey, can I get a shot of that?’ I held the dripping green-gold fish up for the cameras, then bent down and slipped the fish back into the water and watched it swim away.

The media boats eased in as close as they could without getting in the way of our fishing and dropped anchor.

‘No way I’ll ever beat that one,’ I said. ‘I’m calling it quits.’

LA didn’t care. Already back in her casting chair, she sailed the now slightly bent frog out at about two o’clock from her first cast, this time dropping it into a narrow lane of water between the pads, then settled back to wait, her
eyes locked on the tiny bump of the frog’s back on the smooth water.

I stowed my rod and sat back in my casting chair. Neither of us said anything. With the lulling sound of waves lightly slapping the hull and the warmth of the sun, I began to drift into daydreams, remembering the strange images I’d been drawing compulsively all week. The muscular bare arm holding a hammer that was actually a sword made sense to me now; the squatty-looking T didn’t. But I’d noticed that in my mental representations it was changing too, becoming less like a letter of the alphabet and more like a gallows or a stanchion supporting a crosspiece with something hanging like fruit baskets from either end.

Then suddenly these images were replaced by an impression of LA writing her name on something somewhere, her signature – all in lower case – stringing her initials and last name together into one word,
larowe
, the way she’d signed it as long as I could remember. And near her hand on the desk or counter or whatever it was lay her key ring with its round medallion bearing an embossed emblem, an initial, some kind of logo maybe. No mental picture of what it was, just a strong sense that there was something significant there.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What’s the shape on that little medallion you have on your key ring?’

My tone roused the reporters, and LA looked at me questioningly as they began grabbing for their cameras and microphones.

‘It’s my birth sign,’ she said. ‘They had a whole book full of symbols you could choose from – the clerk asked what my birthday was, looked it up, and sold me this one.’

‘You’re a Libra, right? What’s the logo look like?’

‘Sometimes they draw it like a little igloo, but mine’s more like this.’ She drew it in the air with her finger, and I gaped at her.

‘Let me see that again,’ I said.

This time her fingertip almost seemed to leave a faint smoke trail as she traced the figure in space.

It was the drooping T I’d been drawing for days.

FORTY

I got the rest of my brainwave as we were winching
Bufordine
up onto the trailer. No fireworks, no blinding flash of epiphany, not even a bottle-rocket, just the answer. My mental representation of the scribbled
glowen
that nobody had been able to interpret merged smoothly in my mind with LA’s signature, and like a mirage, separated from it vertically Then both images slowly spaced themselves out horizontally:
l a rowe
above,
g l owen
below.

GL Owen.

Glen Lawrence & Owen, Inc, the biggest home and general construction contractor in Traverton, whose offices I drove past every day on my way to and from work. The kind of business where framing hammers and the guys who use them would be everyday sights.

I called Mouncey from the restaurant as we were waiting for our burgers and suggested setting up interviews with Owen site supervisors about their crews. Guys like we were looking for talked a lot, and not always soberly, leaving behind a trail of people who knew all about them and their politics, their sex partners, and everything else from their favourite beer to their boot sizes. Even their lost framing hammers.

‘I’d ask about rough carpenters, people with .44 Magnums, guys who move from job to job together and talk about blacks and Jews a lot. Or guys who are Aryan Nation or Klan-connected. And pay special attention to guys who work on concrete slab crews.’

‘Why we doin’ that, Lou?’

‘The nose knows,’ I said.

‘We run it down,’ she said. ‘Good to know you still out there thinkin’.’

‘I hear OZ’s holding the line for now.’

‘He okay. You know how he talk, like we in a cowboy movie. Say keep our nose in the wind, whatever that mean.’

‘Thanks, M.’

‘But what about the big man?’ said LA when I ended the call. ‘If you’re right about the GL Owen thing, that probably means construction bums, or at least not high-level planners. They didn’t think this up on their own. Gotta be an evil genius mixed up in there somewhere.’

‘I don’t know – maybe Keets could be the guy after all,’ I said. ‘If Mouncey and Ridout collar the grunts who actually did the killings, they’ll probably sweat a name out of them.’

She shook her head. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘It’s not that big a jump from knowing who the killers were to actually being the mastermind, which says Keets. But then I would’ve thought he’d dance us around about it a little more if he was involved, just to entertain himself. And Frix notches up the confusion. You didn’t find any connection between him and Keets, did you?’

‘Nope.’

‘Okay. Frix was in Gold’s sex club. Maybe he pissed off the same people she did. What if it was about kids or
short-termers in the group? Some parent or husband finds out about it, decides to make an example of them instead of going through a trial that would at least embarrass his family and might even end with an acquittal.’

‘And crucifies her? Pretty resourceful daddy,’ I said.

‘If somebody used Jordan or Casey that way, couldn’t you get something like this done, Bis? If your mind worked that way?’

The question gave me a short, unwanted inner look at what I might do if the same thing had happened to Casey or Jordan, what I’d tried to do to Jeremy Tidwell, and what I’d intended to do when I thought LA had been killed. Not a pretty picture, but whether I wanted to face it or not, it was exactly how my mind worked. The one glimmer of redemption I could see was that LA, who probably knew my mind better than anybody, including me, didn’t seem to find me scary.

A man who’s incapable of violence isn’t worth the wind he sucks . . .

The waitress refilled our glasses, asked if we needed anything else and glided away.

‘And who knows more bad guys than a cop?’ LA said. ‘Who’s got more leverage with them?’

Someone close to me
, Keets had said.
A guy like me
, Max had said. I shook my head, the faces of all the cops I knew flashing through my mind in mugshot format. ‘It just doesn’t compute for me,’ I said.

LA picked out a slice of radish between thumb and forefinger, ate it in two thoughtful bites. ‘What about Feigel?’

‘Besides his involvement with the group, he was the guy supplying coke to Gold.’

‘Not a suspect?’

‘For Gold, no.’

‘Jana said Casey was worried her friend Lena might get pulled into the Feigel thing.’

‘No need. There’s a task-force roundup scheduled next month, and it turns out they’ve already got enough to hook him up then.’

The waitress brought out the burgers, mine with bacon and cheese, LA’s a veggie with organic onion dressing, topped up our iced teas again, smiled and vanished into the kitchen.

‘So what happens next with Jana?’ LA asked.

‘I’m still going in circles about her,’ I said.

LA said, ‘No, you’re not,’ and took a sparing bite of soyburger.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you’re going in circles about yourself. Why do you think you haven’t taken the deal on the farm?’