One of Us (27 page)

Helena was different. Helena could pull it off, was good at it. She had a black-and-white job now, for better or worse. She got over the death of her parents, in time: stopped expecting it to be her mother whenever the phone rang, or thinking of things to tell her dad. But she got over it partly by becoming something her parents would never have recognized, by untethering herself from the past they'd structured, by sidestepping into a different life.

If someone asks you what your wife does, you can't exactly say "Oh, she whacks people. For money. And yours?" And if you can't tell other people, it becomes a secret, and you have to work out what you tell yourself. But in time I got used to it. She was my wife. I loved her.

I found it hard to believe the things she'd done as I watched the gentle rise and fall of her breathing as she slept there on my couch. When we're asleep we become children again, innocent and untouched. Secrets put lines on our faces, roadmaps to interior landscapes. At night the territories become uncharted once more. I tried to imagine her going out with somebody else. It wasn't hard. God knows I'd had the practice. Her telling me it had actually happened merely felt like a well-oiled lock sliding into place. She'd moved on, and that was that. Trophy girlfriend of a mob lieutenant, a fierce woman no one would really understand because they didn't know what she'd been like before. I understood, but that comprehension was of no interest to anyone but me. All that lay on the couch in front of me was a memento, like a plaster bust of a Disney character for sale outside some store in Ensenada. Subtly wrong, a copyright infringement of the way things had been.

Occasionally, usually late at night and when I'm thousands of miles away, I have a desire to go back to Cresota Beach. Half a mile out of town was an athletic field, where you were sent twice a week to burn off excess energy, to help prevent the teachers from being driven insane. There was a parking lot in front of the field, and down the end of the lot was a building where you changed for the game. Two-story, small, like some secret military bunker: two floors of hooks on which to hang your clothes, and benches to collapse onto at the end of the afternoon, drenched with sweat and glad it was all over and you could go home. It was a place where you laughed and shouted, somewhere to plan an evening of mayhem and swap stories of weekend adventures. In my last couple of years the school started using a different field, and the building was locked up and never used again. The last time I saw it, it still looked like a tomb.

I wondered then if some piece of clothing got left there by accident and lay there still, mummified in stale air and peeling paint, forgotten by the boy who abandoned it and who now has children of his own. A mute testament to a different life, the past musty but tangible.

Id like to go stand by the building alone again some night, look up at its boarded windows. I wonder, if I listened hard enough, whether I'd be able to hear voices from inside; and I wonder, if I broke in, whether I'd find my first girl and Earl and my childhood friends, sitting on the benches, wearing the same clothes, and waiting for me.

Whether I could sit cross-legged with them in darkness, and stay there forever, and nothing would have changed.

EVENTUALLY I FELL ASLEEP, and dreamed again. The predominant impression at first was of marbled green, a striated verdigris. It took a while for me to understand that this was the color of the ceiling only a few feet above me, and that I was lying on my back. I had a thundering headache, and my brain and body felt desiccated and empty, as if both had been destroyed and then reconstituted, with not quite enough water added into the mix. My lower arms itched as if spiders were walking along them; I felt cold but not afraid. I couldn't tell how long I had been there: The question didn't seem to have much meaning.

I slowly turned my head, and saw Deck. He was lying on the floor some distance away. His face was pointing straight up, and it looked as though his eyes were closed. I tried to call to him, but what came out was not even a whisper, more a fading breath. I watched him for a while, but he didn't move. By angling my head a little farther, I could see that we were in a long, low room, big enough that the walls and corners were hidden in shadow. I wondered then where the light was coming from, because I couldn't see anything that might be causing it. Then I looked back at Deck and realized that he was giving off a faint glow, like a firefly but golden.

I wondered if I was doing the same, and tried to raise my head to look at my body. I'd never appreciated how many different muscles were involved in such a simple movement. It took an awful lot of effort to lift my head only an inch off the floor, and I couldn't see anything from there. I let it fall again, which it did slowly, coming gratefully back to rest on what felt like a thin mattress. I lay still for a long time then, not so much exhausted as content to be motionless, floating in a state of benign confusion. Everything seemed to be okay.

After a while I got interested in the question of the glow again, and decided on a different tack. Leaving my head where it was, I tried to lift one of my hands instead. This was a little easier, and little by little I raised it from where it lay by my side. After a few minutes it was high enough that I could see a blurred suggestion of it at the periphery of my vision. Feeling like someone pulling off an extraordinary feat of coordination and strength, I kept it in that position and turned my head toward it.

There was indeed a golden glow coming off the hand I saw, but it wasn't my hand. It was slender, feminine, and there were stitches in the wrist below it.

It was Laura's.

When I woke to find myself sitting upright in the chair in my apartment, I had a cigarette in my hand. It was alight, but hadn't burned down to the filter. There was no cone of gray ash hanging off the end. It was smoked only halfway down, and had been tapped off neatly in the ashtray on the arm of the chair.

Helena was still out like a light on the sofa.

I hadn't been asleep. It hadn't been a dream.

It was a memory, or something like it, but it was happening now. And it was happening in a place where I, too, had been.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I spent the rest of the night standing at the window, staring unseeingly down on Griffith, trying to remember. It wouldn't come. It was going to take something else, something concrete, for me to be able to break through. Some different way of seeing.

The phone rang at five minutes past six. I grabbed it and said: "You read the message?"

"Jesus, yes." Travis sounded tired. "I just don't know whether to believe it. I met Schumann once. He seemed like a regular guy."

"They all do, Travis. You know it's true."

"So, who are they?"

''Who?"

"The names on the other pieces of paper."

"You don't need to know."

"Hap, I've been at the station three hours already. I've been through Schumann's bank records and had someone who understands these things check out the state of Schumann Holdings. It's solid. The guy had more money than you or I can even imagine, and his business was expanding like a brushfire."

"So what?"

"So Schumann committed suicide after Hammond was murdered, and the 'financial difficulties' line is just bullshit. Something else made him kill himself, and I don't believe it was sudden guilt. You see what I'm saying?"

I did. "You think someone else has taken up the reins. Schumann figured the blackmail ended when Hammond died. Then he gets a call and finds out it's only getting worse, and kills himself."

"I already have five guys pulling Hammond's study apart. I need to know who the other victims are. They might be able to give us something on the new bosses."

"I'm not sure they're new," I said. "I talked to one of the other victims last night. This person said that toward the end Hammond was getting real strung out, like he was being forced to do something against his will. I think there was always someone in the background."

"I disagree. It's the guys in the suits. They whacked Hammond, took over his racket. Either that, or they just decided they didn't need him anymore. You've met them: They're not exactly polite. If anyone refuses to pay them, I'm going to have a famous dead person on my hands, and that I can truly do without."

"They'll pay," I said, "and no way will they have anything useful on the bad guys. You don't leave a contact number when you're shaking someone down. Plus it would be very stupid to kill someone you're blackmailing—all that does is cut off the income stream for good."

"The names. Hap. Or I haul you down here so fast, they'll hear the sonic boom in Nevada."

I told him two—but not Jack Jamison's.

There was a pause while he scribbled them down. "Okay," Travis said. "I want to see you here, at the station, at exactly eleven p.m. tomorrow. You see the suits in the meantime, you call. You do not fuck around with my investigation in any other way, and you do not contact any of the victims. Email me the code, and then we're done."

Quietly: "And the other deal?"

"Helena walks—you've got my word on that. While we're on the subject: One of my officers got a fresh bruise on his head this morning, and he had to take the bus into work because someone ripped off his car."

"I told you to come alone, Travis."

"I did. Romer overheard the conversation and followed me on his own initiative."

"His car's outside Applebaum's. Tell him it really needs a washing."

"His memory of events is a little vague, but he seems to believe that he got knocked out right after he arrived in Venice. At around about the same time you were sitting talking to me. Kindof odd, huh?"

"Time," I said, "is a strange and confusing thing."

"Yeah, right. Just make sure you don't get confused. Tomorrow. Eleven p.m." He hung up.

I turned to see Helena sitting on the sofa, watching me. She wakes the same way she falls asleep, changing states like the flip of a switch. Her hair wasn't even mussed.

"What deal?" she asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"You asked Travis about some other deal."

"I told you," I said. "Getting some time to find Deck and Laura."

She shook her head. "Bullshit. That's the first deal. What's the other deal?"

"I got him to lose a couple of minor outstanding warrants against Deck," I said, avoiding her eyes. "You want some coffee?"

"No," she said, glaring at me suspiciously.

"Trust me, you do. And then you want a shower, and you'd better take it quickly."

"Why?"

"Because," I said, "I'm going to Florida, and I'd like you to come with me."

WE GOT INTO Jacksonville midafternroon and rented a car at the airport. I steered us straight through town and out the other side, then took us down AlA to Cresota. It looked the same as it always did. It's pretty much the land that time forgot down there: When a store changes hands, it makes the local paper. Forty years ago they figured out how to be a tourist town, what combination of characterful eateries, well-stocked grocery stores, and sleepy streets worked best at attracting and keeping tourist trade. Craft fairs in the summer months; restaurants with decks stretching out into the marshes; little leaflets with directions to the nearest outlet malls. A lot of people have a downer on Florida: In my view they can just fuck off. I had to move away to see it, but I suspect now that if God ever decides to retire. He could do a lot worse than a beach house somewhere down AlA. Watch the waves, eat some crab, maybe play a little tennis—though from what I can gather, you'd be advised to let Him win.

I pulled into the lot of Tradewinds, and chose from a wide range of parking spaces. The only car I could see was my parents'. Most of the people who use Tradewinds are old friends from Gainesville: alligator-hide old people and second-generation dentists. Nice folks, as it happens. They're either there en masse or not at all, and the motel is too small and old to attract much other trade.

"You can stay here if you want," I said. There were still a couple of hours before I could do what I wanted to do. It made sense to visit my folks first, show them I was still alive, maybe try to hint at the fact it might be the last visit for a while.

Helena looked out the window. She'd been to Cresota five or six times, and got along with my family well enough, but someone else's hometown is always alien territory. You wonder if there are any strange rites you don't know about, and about past good times you weren't invited to.

"What do they know about us?"

"Just that we aren't married anymore. I spared them the details." I had, but they'd probably come to their own conclusions. They knew how much I'd loved Helena. They must have figured out that it would have taken something pretty catastrophic to break us up.

"What are we doing here. Hap?"

"I'll tell you later," I said, opening my door. The alarm dinged placidly in the heat, marking time. "Are you coming or not?"

We walked across the hot tarmac, climbed up the steps to the office. Helena hung back as I swung the door open, slipped to one side to hide out of sight. Doesn't matter how old you are, what you do, or what you've done. Mothers are mothers, and they can bite.

Ma was standing inside, behind the desk, humming and sorting through envelopes. If there's anything my mother likes to do more than sort other people's mail into neat piles, I don't know what it might be. The walls of the office held a few seascapes of varying talent, complete with prices. I shudder to think how many very bad artists eked out a career through paintings sold to Tradewinds guests. My mother knew just as well as I did how talent-free most of them were, but for her that wasn't the point.

She looked up and her face melted into that look of uncomplicated pleasure that you only ever see in one face, that of a person recognizing someone who started life as a part of her own body. She'd gotten grayer and a little thinner in the last six months, but I still felt what I always had. It's not you who's changing, Mother—the world gets younger but you stay the same.