Blackbird (8 page)

‘What about the husband?’

‘He’s younger than her, runs a computer and data-service company that’s doing okay financially. Can you profile something like this?’

‘Not like you see on TV,’ she said. ‘Even when you can, all you usually end up with is “white male, twenty-five to thirty-five, not good with relationships”, yakkity-yak. Try getting a warrant with that.’

‘Well, with you on the case we’re takin’ our game up a notch, right?’

She was silent for a few seconds, which I spent looking at the pictures above the mantel. Then she said, ‘I’m coming to see you.’

‘Hey, great,’ I said. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘Nothing. I’m signed up for a conference in Miami, and I’m taking a week off before that.’

‘To do what?’

‘Pay you a visit, what else?’ she said. ‘Horn-in on your cases – car chases, explosions, trading quips while you cuff the perps.’

‘Where’s all that coming from?’

‘Prime time,’ she said. ‘Think you’re the only one who’s got a TV?’

‘What if I signed you on as a consultant?’ I said.

‘Well . . . ’ she said, like somebody looking a used car over, which told me two things: one, she was not going to need any more persuading, and two, she would now name her real price. ‘Okay, here’s the deal,’ she said. ‘I’ll make it a week if you’ll weld some bookends for my office – that credenza behind my desk.’

‘Weld?’

‘Yeah, with your blowtorch. Like that stuff you used to make with the ragged edges.’

‘Acetylene torch,’ I said.

‘Okay, acetylene,’ she said. ‘If that’s what flips your fritters.’

On a farm or ranch the number-two rule – number one being: never trust the weather – is that everything breaks, meaning that to be useful around the Flying S as a kid I had to learn basic cutting and welding. I still kept an oxyacetylene rig and an old Lincoln buzz-box in my backyard workshop where I sometimes roughed out odds and ends like makeshift trivets, doorstops, paperweights – even a pair of candleholders that from a certain angle looked a little like the Grand Tetons – out of scrap metal as a way of clearing my head. Jana liked them and used them for bookends, garden sculpture or just general decoration.

‘Your soul and your hands understand line and mass
better than you do,’ she’d said with that quirky little smile of hers.

I visualised LA’s office and the oak credenza, directly under a skylight, where she kept the leather-bound TS Eliots Gram had left her, held up by a few other volumes stacked as bookends. Rough-cut steel wouldn’t look bad there.

‘Done,’ I said. ‘But how about saying a few psychological words, just to convince me I’m not making a mistake here.’

She snorted. ‘I’ll see what I can do with your dead psychologist, Sherlock,’ she said. ‘But meantime, how about emailing me the stuff you’ve got so far – give me a chance to look it all over before I come calling.’

When we’d said our goodbyes I thumbed the phone off and dropped it in my shirt pocket, feeling like the guy who’d just closed on Manhattan for a sack of beads.

I grabbed a can of Dos Equis from the fridge, still gloating but a little bothered by a sense that I was forgetting something. But nothing came to me, so I sat back down to think some more about Deborah Gold. I wondered if she’d felt safe in the world. My theory was that only people who were definitely good-hearted or completely evil really did – you either expected the universe to abide by the Golden Rule in its dealings with you because that’s what you’d do in its place, or, if you were bad enough, you didn’t worry about it because you just didn’t believe in consequences and expected fate to be as untrustworthy as you anyway. On the other hand, people of the middle ground, the best I could give myself credit for, were apparently doomed to a life of apprehension and doubt.

But it seemed to me Dr Gold’s exit from the mortal stage had another dimension. It was like a scenario fast-forwarded
through the bloody centuries from the ironically named Holy Land, the long arm of Caesar reaching across time to punish some unknown treason –

This stopped me.

Reaching across time –

The words repeated themselves in my mind, something in them buzzing with danger, somehow bringing back the stark image of Bragg Field at the centre of an infinitely cold darkness spreading away in every direction and to the ends of the earth.

If you believe the books, a criminal always leaves something at the scene of the crime and always takes something away. In this case the trade was a Roman coin for a tongue, but I couldn’t put together any plausible explanation for either the coin’s presence or the tongue’s absence, much less figure out what the two had to do with each other.

Across time
– why that? I had no idea, but all of it carried an irresistible feeling of meaning and connectedness. Vaguely remembering something I’d come across somewhere about Carl Jung and synchronicity, and putting that together with bits and pieces I’d heard about quantum indeterminacy, I wondered if it was actually possible, maybe down at the level of quarks and bosons, for causality to work differently in different situations or at different times.

Watching Mutt continue his grooming at the kitchen entry, I suddenly remembered what I’d been forgetting. Jonas. Checking the time, I decided it wasn’t too late. Mutt strolled over to make a couple of figure-eight passes against my leg as I reached for the phone and punched in numbers. He was a cruiserweight of the housecat world but he jumped to my lap as weightlessly as Tinker Bell and gave me his chronically amazed expression. I stroked his thick black fur
absent-mindedly, hearing and feeling the resultant rumbling purr as I waited for Jonas to pick up.

‘McCashion,’ said Jonas’ voice.

We traded greetings, with no questions from him about Jana and the girls, then he said, ‘Got a new one for you: student of mine’s named Giles Selig.’ Jonas spelled it for me. ‘Middle name’s got three letters – what is it?’

I thought about it for a minute, listening to the busy clicking of his keyboard as he worked on something, probably lecture notes.

‘Asa,’ I said.

‘You son of a bitch!’ he yelped. ‘How the hell do you do that?’

‘Nothing else came to mind but Bob and Gig. They didn’t seem to fit.’

‘Damn,’ he sighed. ‘So what’s up, JB?’

‘I want a consult. Can I buy you a drink?’

‘Just me, or do I bring Abby?’

‘Just you,’ I said. ‘This is business.’

‘When?’

‘Now.’

‘Okay, let’s make it John Boy’s, but you’ve got to sell it to her. We were gonna watch
To Kill a Mockingbird
tonight.’

I heard him call his wife to the phone.

‘Hey, crime fighter,’ she said. I pictured dark intelligent eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, her glossy chestnut hair and crooked smile. At this time of day I was sure she’d be wearing her old sweats and carrying a cup of apple tea around with her.

‘Atticus gets the guy off,’ I said.

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, they all ended happy in those days, that’s what I like about old movies. What’s happening?’

‘I want your husband.’

‘You want him? Jim, this man is my only stuff. I need him. Where would I find a replacement at my age?’

‘I’ll cook the Special for you this weekend,’ I said, meaning charcoal-grilled salmon fillets with caper and raisin sauce, one of the three real-meal recipes Rachel had taught me years ago based on her belief that a man had to be able to put at least that many different credible meals on the table if necessary. ‘On the grill outside if the weather’s good, otherwise I’ll broil it in the kitchen.’

There was a silent pause, which told me I had her.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But I want him returned in good condition.’

‘No worries,’ I said. ‘It’s only his mind I’m interested in.’

‘His what?’

Beginning to feel that a little momentum might be building, I looked at the mantel again, the other end this time, where the watercolour caricature Jana had had done for me by a friend of hers a few birthdays ago leaned against the bricks: two charging tigers wearing jerseys numbered 39 and 22, the numbers Johnny Trammel and I had worn the year Bragg won State.

‘Growl a little growl for me, baby,’ she’d said as she handed it to me. ‘And I’ll show you what real tigers do in the dark.’

I’d brought it in here from the workshop last week in hopes of reawakening some sense of life in the place, but it hadn’t done that, managing only to bring back the smell of the Bragg Field locker rooms vividly enough to send me on a reconnaissance tour of the house in search of missed laundry or forgotten cat food.

I decided on one more call before I left to meet Jonas, this one to Johnny over in Burnsville at the western end of the county, to see if I could get him and Li signed on for the cookout too. Not that you had to come up with anything special for him – he’d never been famous for turning down anything that came on a plate. He was still easy because in recent years he’d always seemed too preoccupied even to notice what he was eating, which I took to be a hazard of the legal profession. Some of the guys he represented would be hard on anybody’s appetite.

The spring we graduated he’d tossed a half-dozen scholarship offers in the trash and started visiting recruiters, eventually ending up in Delta Force and being awarded two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for his actions in places where hatreds a thousand years old ran like underground rivers, places whose names he would, along with what he’d done there, take with him to the grave. I shouldn’t have known, but did, that his last mission was a so-called black op, a HALO – high altitude, low opening – jump from a C-130 in friendly airspace, he and his squad free-falling thirty thousand feet on a moonless night, five dark silences slanting like raptors down through the stars, nothing to be seen but the soft blue dots of the altimeters on their wrists as they vectored cross-country over a mountain range and a hostile border to pop their chutes a thousand feet above the last ground four of them would ever touch. Johnny made it out alone nine weeks later with a permanent limp and a never-explained tendency to gag at the sight of beets.

I took the best scholarship offer I got, the one from TCU, where I blew out both knees against Kansas State my second year and had no choice but to become an actual
student, while Johnny eventually earned his law degree at Baylor and hung out his shingle in Burnsville, the county seat. He married a blonde former cheerleader named Alicia Meador and settled down to practise country law and watch his cows get fat on the little farm he and Li signed the mortgage on after he brought in his first big settlement. His medals were still gathering dust on his office wall along with his Chamber of Commerce and Rotary certificates and the team picture from our championship season, all of us standing forever shoulder to shoulder in sunlight that somehow seemed historical and heatless in the old print. Johnny himself looked like a dangerous but dapper Prohibition rum-runner or a tragic Irish poet, brick-coloured hair brushed casually to the side and face turned toward me with a small smile, as if I’d just cracked some dumb joke.

‘Hi, Jim,’ said Li’s telephone voice.

I told her what I had in mind.

She said, ‘Whatcha cooking?’

‘The Special.’

‘With that weird sauce?’

‘It’s the only one I know how to make.’

‘Count us in. I know Johnny’ll want to hear all about your hot case.’

I heard Johnny’s voice in the background: ‘Ask him what’s going on with that. He got any suspects yet?’

‘Tell him when I catch somebody I’ll give them his number,’ I said. ‘If they’re rich enough to afford a big-time lawyer.’

Hanging up the phone, I sipped beer, thinking about what Li had said. It resonated weirdly in my mind because, although the coin had felt warm to me, the case itself didn’t
at all. It felt cool, like old mausoleum air or the dank and unfresh stirring of the breeze off a swamp at night.

I put Mutt on the arm of the chair and stood up, thinking about what I wanted to ask Jonas and about the way things ought to be. ‘Your watch, boy,’ I said to the cat. ‘Don’t let any rats get by you.’

He just stared at me, looking mystified.

SIX

I took Border Avenue south, with Arkansas and its liquor stores on my left, Texas with its car dealerships and Baptist bookstores to the right, and a mile ahead, the Louisiana Quarter, which some said existed only to show the world just how much political corruption and fine cooking it was possible to cram into one medium-sized town.

Catching the light, I downshifted the F-250 around the corner onto Eastern and listened to the exhaust grumble and roar, a sound Jana called the ‘Serengeti baritone’. It was probably more of an indication of my thinking than I understood at the time, but a few years ago when Jana and the girls were still with me, I realised I was tired of our number-two car, the Acura I’d been driving to work for the last six years. The first vehicle I’d ever been able to call my own had been a pickup, and after my time on the Flying S working for Dusty, nothing felt as natural under my feet as a truck. Which is probably why this one, parked under a huge oak beside the highway with a For Sale sign wedged behind one windshield wiper, had caught my eye. After a ten-minute test drive I bought it from the alcoholic mechanic who’d reworked it, a committed Jehovah’s Witness until he came down with depression, started mixing his medications
with vodka and fell from grace. He wasn’t definite about exactly how it happened, but I got the impression it involved several counts of interrupting services at the Kingdom Hall to offer his opinions in favour of wholegrains and anal intercourse. Losing business, he decided to cash in some of his assets, starting with the big four-wheel-drive Ford. It had a heavy brush-buster and winch, oversized knobby tyres and a ceramic eyeball the size of a peach for a shift knob.

‘Throw a hook down the well, you could turn the world inside out with this hoss,’ the Witness said, his breath a weapon of mass destruction as he patted the brush-buster affectionately.