Eye of the Cricket (15 page)

DeSalle stepped up behind Don. He didn't speak till Don turned around.

"Looks like an overdose, with the bag for insurance. One of the uniforms told me there's a society recommends this route."

"Who took the call?" Don said.

"Patrolman you mean?"

"Yeah."

"Martinez. Young guy. Pretty new, I guess, taking it hard the way we all do thefirst few times."

"He out there?" Don gestured towards the front room.

"Yeah. Thought you might want to talk to him yourself."

"Anybody else around?"

DeSalle shook his head. "Have been, though. Two, three people at least living here, looks like. Maybe more."

"Note?"

DeSalle handed it to him. Sheathed in a sleeve of clear plastic with DeSalle's initials scrawled across the seal. There was
only one light in the room, a bare bulb above the sink. Don stood under it as he read the note. Then he passed the note to
me.

I handed the note back to Don. "No heading or salutation."

"Right."

"Left side's ragged. Tom out of a notebook, diary, something like that."

DeSalle looked from Don to me and back.

"Something I missed?"

"Lew's just saying the note's not addressed to anyone."

"Hell it's not."

Don stepped into the front room to speak with Martinez.

"You guys go back a way, huh?"

I told DeSalle how Don and I met. Both of us little more than kids, each with his own reason to be searching for the sniper
that killed all those people back in the sixties.

Don had been shot by the sniper. I'd come upon them in a downtown cul-de-sac and probably saved Don's life—at least he insisted
I had. Since then he'd saved mine more times than I could count.

"Not many like him on the force," DeSalle said.

"Not many like him anywhere."

"You know it. Has to be tough," looking at Danny there in the tub, "all this."

"Can't imagine anything tougher. But I think he'd been getting ready for it, something like this."

"Yeah. Lives with it every day. Has to know."

"For a long time now."

Then forensics was upon us.

Tape measures chirred, whisk brooms and tiny vacuums whispered, bits of debris tumbled into baggies. Again and again our shadows
struck huge on the walls as flashes went off.

Don stood at the edge of it all, just outside the doorway, watching.

Also there, wheezing like a bad accordion, sucking alternately at metered-dose inhalers of Atrovent or Albuterol and oxygen
from the portable compressor hung like an oversize binocular case under one arm, directing auteurlike this too-real dramatic
moment, stood Dr. Bijur.

"Your boy, I understand."

"Yeah."

She shook her head. Squeezed off two hits of Ventolin then wheezed a long exhale.

"Sure it's top of the list for you. For me it's just one more, pick a number, twelve, thirteen, in there. Wait your turn."

"I say anything?"

"You will."

Her shoulders lifted with the effort to drag more air into faltering lungs.

"Do the same myself in your position, Walsh. No way I wouldn't. King's horses couldn't stop me."

What she gave him was a fit of coughing. Sounded as though nails and planks were l>cing ripped out of her body's floor.

Don waited for her to recover.

"City lets me have half the personnel I need with twice the workload I can handle. Not a good match, Walsh."

"I know something about that myself."

"My department's response time is half that of LA., beats out New York, Boston, Baltimore, and D.C. by several wide miles.
Our reports hit your desk within twenty-four hours. Thirty-six at the outside. You ever got your head out of this city's ass
long enough to look around, you could probably work up some pride in that."

Again, coughs racked her. She cranked up the O's from 2 L/M to 4.

"You know what it'll take, right? Some young sport's gonna come in here once I'm gone. Wear a tie to work every day, have
nice letterhead, maybe an MBA. That's the new thing."

"Yeah. Yeah, we got them coming up that way through the force now too. Straight off the streets and into offices with espresso
machines."

"Reports are gonna get slower and slower. They'll also get increasingly woilhless as the M-B-Assholes worry about covering
their own butts above all, to hell with evidence, fact, inference, extrapolation."

Dr. Bijur dosed herself with Atrovent, inhaling the puff and holding it like a hit of marijuana, talking around it.

"We been. At this. A while now. Haven't we?"

"We have indeed, Sonja."

Another long exhalation.

"Bumpy road. Lots of lows. A few highs."

"Few enough."

"Truly sony about this one, Walsh."

Our shadows leapt on the walls again.

"Never had a family myself. Doesn't mean I don't know what it's like."

"Yeah."

"You're a better cop than you ever were a father."

"Being a cop's easy."

"Yeah. I guess." Words came in a rush, breathless, high in her chest, barely heard the last few. "You—"

Her mouth went on moving but no words came forth. Her face turned Jark.

"Sonja? You okay? Want me to call the paramedics?"

"No . . . no. I'm, okay. Give me. A minute."

It took more than a minute, but gradually her breathing eased, her color improved.

By then her technicians had finished and came to tell her so.

She looked at Don.

"Looks like it."

"No more time for flirting."

"Flirting. Now, there's a word I haven't heard in a while. My God, are we really that old, Sonja?"

"How'd it happen, huh? I know. I wonder myself. Things goon, years pile up. All the lists get longer."

He stood watching her go.

"Lew," Don said.

"Yeah."

"Okay if I stay with you tonight?"

"Absolutely."

Zeke poured himself a cup and sat down across from me. Sniffed at it and held on with both hands, huddling over it the way
cons do.

"I was worried about you," I told him. "Haven't seen you in a few days."

"Well, I been working on something, just steady chippin' away at it. You know how that is."

"Getting anywhere?"

Zeke shrugged. "Hard to say. We can talk about it later. Meantime, that cop draped all over your couch out there's gotta be
your friend Walsh." He'd know instantly, of course, that Don was a cop. No surprise there. "What's up?"

I told him about Danny. Zeke's eyes narrowed when I described the bathroom scene, but he said nothing.

Afterwards he shook his head and poured us each another cup.

"Guess I'd best be puttin' together some breakfast."

"Thanks, Zeke. We could probably all use it."

He carried his coffee to the counter, began pulling out eggs, bread, onions, a potato.

"Fifteen minutes," he said. "Meanwhile, you go start excavating the pharaoh. Oh, and Lewis?"

"Yeah."

Don proved a most reluctantpharaoh, starting up instantly, wild-eyed, when Ifirst approached, settling back at once into shadowy,
encumbered sleep. I poked at him, shouted, passed steaming coffee under his nose. Finally levered him up and out to the kitchen,
where Zeke had filled the table with food. Don ate, drank most of a pot of coffee and shambled back to the couch. Zeke left
to be about his business. I did dishes and sat staring at the blinking light on the phone machine.

This is one of the ways our past finds us. Dots we connect to make a shape on the white page.

First was Deborah: "Hey, big boy. Remember me?"

Two and three were from the university. Please call.

Four was Sam Delany.

Seven was Deborah again: "Guess not."

Then another from Dean Treadwell's office, someone offering me a bank card, an old client from my PI days wondering if I'd
be able to help him again, my agent saying there'd been a Hollywood nibble on one of my books and how was I these days, a
couple more junk calls.

I dialed the flower shop.

"Rumors of my death, and all that," I said when Deborah answered.

"Lew! Everything okay?"

I told her aboutfinding Shon Delany, then about Don's son.

"I'm so sony, Lew. How's Don?"

"Tough, as always."

"Sounds like you've had a couple of tough days yourself."

"I distinctlyremember easier ones."

"Don't we all. When can I see you?"

"This point, I don't have a clue what the day's likely to turn into. Not another grade-A mess like yesterday is what I hope.
Okay if I call you later?"

"Sure it is. Or just come by."

"Right."

I took the last of the coffee out back, sat on the wooden bench layered with bird droppings under the tree out there. The
bench's underside was a thicket of cnmibling leaves and spiderwebs. Been years since I last did this. LaVeme and I spent a
lot of time on that bench. Go out there late at night, take glasses of wine out while dinner simmered on the stove, coffee
first thing in the morning.

I'd sat out here like this the morning I learned of David's disappearance. Later I'd written that a toad had jumped into my
face, but the toad was becoming only history, and bearable.

Much like that questionable hero or angel, Don appeared in the doorway.

"Tell me it's still Tuesday."

"Yep. Ticking away like all the rest of them. Time goes, we stay."

"What time?"

"Around eleven, I think. I called the department, told DeSalle you wouldn't be in. He said no problem, no one expected you
to be. Wanted me to let you know he was thinking about you."

"Good man."

"You could be right about that."

Don nodded and dropped onto the bench beside me. For a long time he sat vaguely looking off at the house's back wall. The
wall was covered in green, runners and vines that had started inching up it years ago. Chameleons darted in and out among
them.

I had no idea what thoughts were turning, surfacing, sinking back down in Don's mind. When do we ever, however close we are
to someone?

"Lot of years between us," hefinallysaid.

I nodded.

"Lot of horses shot out from under us. Both of us."

"No doubt about it. But we always managed to get up again and walk on."

After a moment he said, "Maybe there were times we shouldn't have."

"Yeah. And I always said you were probably right"

"Now I'm thinking maybe that someone should be David."

We sat watching vines and runners that didn't move, chameleons that didn't stop. Inside, the phone rang again. Don's beeper
went off.

"Together, I mean. We could look for him together. I have a lot of time coming to me."

When I didn't respond, he said, "We did it before, Lew."

We had indeed. The way we met And how often in all the years since? Too many to count.

"Maybe it's time we did that again, Lew."

Maybe it was.

I nodded.

"Good," my friend said. "Good."