Eden (8 page)

I
found Adam White at the Courthouse Hotel out the back of Newtown, right at sunset, a position his landlady at the end of the street told me was his standard for the hour and the day. The hotel was on a corner two streets back from the hip wonderland of King Street, a catwalk already being strutted by office workers on the way home to their damp Ikea-furnished pads above the bookshops and online daters searching for each other in the light rain, phones out like guns.

The main hall of the hotel was wallpapered with newspapers from twenty years ago and hung with Christmas lights. It was dark, the air thick with expired beer. I glanced around the U-shaped bar. White was hunched on a stool at the outdoor bar under an umbrella, nursing a beer. I walked up and tapped White on the shoulder. I gave him a second to turn, then punched him square in the face.

It’s never good form to punch a man from behind. It’s not right, either, to insult him with a glancing blow. I smacked him hard and felt the impact ripple up my arm, crack my knuckles for me. The sound was wet, unexpected, accompanied by a little breathy yowl. It was good. I hoped it was as good for him.

White stumbled off the stool but didn’t go down like I had. His glass danced off the counter and spread out on the bricks at our feet. The bartender dropped the tray he was holding on the rubber mat.

“Whoa!”

“It’s all right.” I held up a hand. White recovered, wiping at the bloodless scrape on his left cheekbone with the back of his hand. I brushed his skin off my knuckles. He took me in for a few slow seconds. The cut on my face and the bruising seemed to get his bearings back. Then he began to laugh.

“What took ya so long?”

I kicked the base of his shattered glass against the wall of the bar and signaled the bartender to pour White another.

The young man behind the bar didn’t look like the violent type. Tattoos and piercings and oddly shaved hair, something that decades ago might have meant he was dangerous, were diluted by a backpack full of books under the bottles behind the counter. University type. They thought violence was the language of the weak and tattoos were soul writing on skin. I probably agreed about the violence, to a certain degree, but I also knew that when a man gives you a good thump you do him the courtesy of matching his gesture.

I ordered a scotch on ice and the bartender put the glasses up. When I’d paid he just about ran inside to tell his manager. There were a couple of other patrons in the garden, barely interested now that White had failed to swing back. He laughed again as he took his drink and nodded toward a picnic table set in the back corner under another umbrella.

“Damn,” he said as he sat down across from me. “Got you good, didn’t I?”

“Not classy, using a tool,” I said.

“Hey, you brought it with you, bro.”

He laughed and held the beer glass against his eye. It was swelling shut. He was as I imagined him from what I’d heard and felt in the dark—tall, lithe, smooth, a weird boyishness to his smile contradicting the graying in his short dark curls. The clothes had the same odd effect of juvenility and age, an oversized denim jacket with intentional fraying on the cuffs over a pair of navy trousers that hung too low in the crotch and were pulled up too high at the waist with a cracked leather belt.

“Adam White. Congratulations. You’ve been discovered, which is obviously what you intended all along.” I made a little half-bow. “My job is to tell Hades Archer who you are and what the hell you want. Now I feel like I’ll have earned my money if I can tell him what your fucking problem is. What you do after I leave here is up to you.”

“I’m not running off just because the old man knows my name, and I don’t have to tell you shit, boy. My fucking problem is with the old man.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game if you want my opinion, mate. Best you straighten up and spit out your grievances before I lose my patience.”

“I really don’t want your opinion, and I really don’t care about your patience, aye.” White laughed.

I sipped my drink.

“Just tell me what you want. You might even get it.”

“What I want is a conclusion,” White said. Left a lingering poetic silence. I folded my arms. “You know about conclusions, right? Being a cop and all? Things happen, meaningful things, and they have to happen for the world to keep turning. People lie and cheat and steal from each other. People murder each other. But you, you know, you understand, right? These things need to be equalized. The scales need to be balanced. You know what I mean, don’t you, bro?”

“I didn’t come here for a philosophy lecture.”

“I know. You came here for an explanation. I’m providing it, bro.”

He put his palms out. He was well spoken for someone so badly dressed, someone who peppered his conversations with “bro” and “aye.” I made a “get on with it” gesture.

“Ask Hades what he knows about a girl named Sunday,” White said. He rested his forearms on the table and clasped his hands. “Ask him how she died.”

“Sunday?” I asked. “Sunday who?”

“Her surname was White. Sharon Elizabeth White. But everybody called her Sunday.”

“So you reckon Hades knocked your sister off?”

“My aunt.”

“And when was this?”

“Around about 1979.”

I laughed. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Oh dear. Oh God, that’s funny.”

“Laugh it up, bro.”

“Are you serious?” I squinted through tears.

“I’m deadly serious.”

“You’re on some vigilante mission to avenge your aunt’s death?” I snickered. “Who are you? Batman?”

He sipped his beer.

“Look, mate,” I said. “You’re kidding yourself. I mean, I get it. Hades Archer is a bad, bad man. I can’t imagine some of the things he’s done over the years. If he did knock your aunt off, chances are he doesn’t even remember doing it. And even if he does, even if I rattle it out of his ancient, decaying mind with a bit of new-age hypno-past-regressive therapy, and the old crocodile happily tells me,
yeah, sure, I remember that bitch, I put her black ass in a oil drum and dumped her in a creek
, I can’t imagine what you think you’re going to do about it. You threaten Hades hard enough and he’ll come after you. And he doesn’t look to me like the kind of guy who negotiates.”

“I don’t care what he does or what he says. I’m going to haunt that man until he tells me what he did to Sunday. I want to know.”

“What the hell do you care what he did to your aunt? You couldn’t have even known her. How old are you?”

“My mother loved her.” The man leaned over the table so that I could smell the beer on him. “You understand that? My mother loved her.”

He was out of breath as though he had run around the block. He’d done well to keep the rage down while I laughed at him. It wasn’t something I saw often as a cop. A bit of self-control. I was beginning to think Adam White was a good match for Hades.

“My mother spent her whole fucking life looking for Sunday White,” Adam said. “It was her purpose. It was her calling. She’d never had a moment of happiness until she found that woman. Imagine a kid raised in the wilderness. In the desert. Imagine what it’s like to grow up without love, because that’s what it was like, bro, growing up with the reformers. When she’s an adult wandering in this kind of crazy loveless wasteland of a city she finds her own sister, her own blood, and suddenly she knows what love is. Hades Archer took Sunday away from my mother and she never got that trust back again. Not even when she had her own kids. When she had me. It was never the same. Something was taken from her and I had to watch that eat up everything she ever was.”

“This is all very deep and I’m sure very moving.” I cleared my throat.

“I think you understand better than you know, bro,” he smiled. “You’re a cop, which means your dad was a fucking prick.”

I chewed my lip, shook it off.

“Let’s just cut the sermon and be straight with each other, Adam. You’re going to get yourself killed for some nothing justice mission.” I leaned forward, looked in his eyes. “They’re never even going to find your bones.”

“Here’s the thing, bro.” White opened his hands again. “My family might have been happy to accept what happened to Sunday last generation, when they were too timid and sick and powerless to do anything about it. My uncle drank himself to death in the early eighties. My mother was raised in homes. Institutions. She wasn’t the kind of person to answer back, to question things, to seek satisfaction. And when she died, she didn’t even have the words to write out what she really felt, what she’d really needed all along. She just blew her brains out. Bang. And you know what? I feel good that she’s at peace. But she left me here, and I’ve got to be selfish. I’ve got to feel right about it all. I’m not happy to let the old dog lie. I demand satisfaction, always. Always, bro.”

“You talk a lot.” I drained my drink. “I don’t have a notepad, so I’ll just sum this up as I’ll present it to the old man. What you’re saying is you blame your mother’s shitty life and your own on an aunt getting tangled up with the wrong crowd decades ago. You’re going to piss the old man off until he admits what he did and says he’s sorry, like some fucking girly schoolyard catfight. You know what, bro? Your mother should have sought some fucking counseling. And you know what else? I think you’re bored. The motivation behind your vendetta is really thin, mate. If you can’t figure out what to do with your life, go get a hobby. Take up dance classes.”

“I have a hobby, bro. It’s setting things right. Making people accountable.”

“You’re not Batman. This is not Gotham City. You will not be satisfied by this. You’re going to end up a missing person and they’re going to put your file at the bottom of the pile like they did with your fucking aunt.”

He sniggered over his drink.

“I’m trying to help you, boy. You hang around that dump long enough and you’ll become a permanent fixture, I guarantee it.”

“Oh, please.” White smiled, made begging gestures with his hands. “Please tell him to come after me. I film everything I do out there. Handicam. Wireless feed. I’d love for that old man to get fed up one night and come down the hill and shoot me. I’d just love it.”

“You’re filming? Oh, this is just priceless.”

“Everything. Everything, bro. Who goes in. Who comes out. The old man reading his newspaper hour after hour, night after night. He needs a hobby, you ask me.”

“They got a name for what you’re doing, Adam.”

“So tell him to charge me. Make me hand over the tapes.”

I scratched the back of my neck. My face hurt. White’s left eye was barely a slit now and it was weeping. He dabbed at it with the back of his slender hand. I thought for a while, turning my glass on the tabletop. There was no telling what was on those tapes. Or who. I didn’t think they’d lead to any direct legal danger for Hades—he had connections high up in the police force and the tapes would go from the front desk to the incinerator before anyone even knew they were there. But if they ended up on a journalist’s desk . . . or on the Internet.

None of this would reflect badly on me, of course. I had no stake in keeping Hades out of jail. Except that his going to jail would be cataclysmic for Eden, making her dangerously unpredictable about what she would do to punish those responsible. Which would include me. I wondered if White knew what he was seeing out there, knew how very valuable those tapes were. I could only hope he was doing it as an insurance policy in case anything did happen. At the least he had to be aware that Hades was being visited by unsavory characters.

“What would be a satisfying conclusion to you? Huh? What would settle accounts with the Justice League?”

“Knowing what happened. Being able to bury my aunt with respect and dignity.”

“That seems simple enough.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Why not?”

“Because he says he didn’t do it.”

I rubbed my eyes. They were heavy. Aching.

“When was this?”

“A month ago. To my mother. Just before she shot herself. She had one last stab at the truth and the old man denied her. Didn’t even offer her a place to sit down. She’d driven six hours.”

“And what?” I said. “Hades is supposed to believe that if he admits to what he’s done and gives up her remains you’ll just toddle off, all fair and square?”

“He’d better hope.”

I got up, swung my leg over the bench.

“Stop going out there, Adam.”

“Why would I, now that I have company?”

I walked away, heard his laughter as I reached the door of the pub.