The Prettiest Feathers (6 page)

“It’s been longer than that since we made love, but I remember every detail.”

I told him to have another cup of coffee—with Lane—then I hung up on him.

The phone rang again right away. I answered, but only because I was hoping (again) that it would be John. There was no response. Just silence, except for what sounded like someone breathing.

It was late, but I couldn’t sleep. I thought reading might help, so I pulled my copy of Rimbaud off the shelf. I noticed that it was pretty beat up; the cover was starting to separate from the spine. I hadn’t bought it new. A customer brought it in, wanting to sell it to Harry, but it was too ragged to suit him. When he turned it down, I offered the woman two dollars, and she took it.

I have a special tape that I brought home from the shop. Harry buys it in bulk. It’s wide, clear, and strong—perfect for holding a book together. I placed a strip over the spine of my Rimbaud, then I opened the front cover to see how secure the pages were—and that’s when I noticed the bookplate glued inside:
From the Library of Maxine Harris
.

M
y next encounter with Sarah was over lunch at a place called Harrington’s. It was close enough for her to walk there from the bookstore, but she had to pass from one ethnic pissing ground to another, making it unlikely that she would be seen by anyone she knew.

From the moment she arrived, she was talkative, contributing a wealth of detail to the broad outline I had already sketched of her life. All in all, it was pleasant, although I was annoyed by her attempts to discover more about John Wolf than I wished to manufacture at that moment.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Landgrove,” I said, naming an upscale suburb in Connecticut.

“That’s really out in the country.”

“Birds in the morning and all that,” I agreed. “Why do you stay in the city? I find it such a dreary place. I’m reluctant even to come in on business when I have to—all the crime, the traffic.”

She sipped her iced tea. “I’ve tried other places, but I always end up back here.”

“What other places?”

“Chicago for one. That was a strange time.”

“How so?”

“Have you ever been married?”

“Divorced,” I lied.

“Then you’ll understand.”

Sarah told me about her paranoid ex-husband, the keeper of the arsenal, the elusive Robert Sinclair—homicide detective. I marveled at my ability to pick them. She went on about Robert’s dalliance with his partner, Lane Frank.

“My doctor’s receptionist knew Lane—said she was a nice person, but with a hard edge,” Sarah said.

She seemed to drift off into private thoughts, then added, “But she’s a cop. I wouldn’t have expected her to be running around in ruffles and lace. But even if she had, Robert wouldn’t have cared. If she had walked naked into his office, carrying her badge, the badge is the thing that would have turned him on. Cops are like that. They seek each other out, stick together.”

“My ex is a psychiatrist,” I said. “She’d been involved with a colleague of hers for several months, thinking it was all some kind of intellectual thing between them. She told me about him right from the start—how much they had in common, the long talks they had. By the time she had it all straight in her head, I was seeing a psychiatrist, too, but I was paying mine a hundred bucks an hour.”

“Lane’s father was some sort of psychiatrist, I think. He’s supposed to be famous or something.”

“I went to see this guy named Street,” I said.

I was watching for a reaction, and she didn’t disappoint me. It was momentary—just a change in her eyes—but it was there.

“How did you handle things when you and Robert split up?”

“Not well, I’m afraid,” she said. “It’s crazy, really. I thought
I wanted to be alone, but once I was, I wasn’t so sure anymore.”

Alone. What about the kid?

“We didn’t have any children either,” I said. “It’s just as well, I guess.”

“Robert and I did have a child,” she said, the color in her face draining away. This business of the kid was more of a minefield than Bob the cop.

“Oh,” I said.

“We had a daughter,” she went on. “But she died.”

I think I managed to say most of the right things—sudden infant death, tragedy, loss, and all that. I’m pretty good when it comes to sounding sympathetic. With the mystery of the child solved, another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. But I still had a lot of unanswered questions, and didn’t want to waste a lot of time wailing over a dead kid.

But Sarah had her own agenda. There was a lot of unfinished business surrounding the death of her daughter that she needed to deal with. No doubt she had bent Street’s ear about it, and I had accidentally reopened that can of boring worms.

“You’d think in so short a time you couldn’t possibly become that involved with someone—an infant who’s hardly even a person yet,” she said. “But it happens. Her birthday’s on the eleventh, so she’s really on my mind. I’m thinking about going to visit her. I haven’t done that yet. Ever.”

“Maybe you should,” I said, as if I cared.

“I want to. But I also
don’t
want to.”

I managed to move the conversation forward by offering to accompany Sarah to the cemetery.

“I don’t want to intrude,” I said, “but if it would help, I’d be happy to go with you.”

“I would like that,” she said.

“What about Robert?”

“He usually goes in the morning. If you don’t want to run into him, we can wait until afternoon to go. It’ll work out.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I told her. “I was wondering how he handles it—the loss of your daughter, I mean.”

“He’s angry. Sometimes I think that’s the only feeling he knows. But I suppose he’s just protecting himself.”

“You’re probably right,” I agreed. “I don’t know much about police work, but it must be hard on a person—especially if you’re investigating murders. I can’t imagine having to look at a dead body. You couldn’t pay me enough.”

“He thinks he’s stumbled onto a serial killer,” Sarah said. Then she laughed, but stopped, quickly, to apologize.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s not funny—but, to understand why it tickles me, you’d have to know Robert. There’s nothing he loves more than a good conspiracy. He’s collected all the books about the Kennedy assassination—quotes from them like they’re biblical. And now he thinks there’s a serial killer slinking in the shadows.”

“You mean he’s looking for a—I can’t think of his name, the guy they executed in Florida—that type of person?”

“Bundy.”

“That’s it,” I said.

“All it is, really, is a lot of unresolved missing person cases and one murder victim. The rest is in Robert’s head, except…”

Sarah stopped. She was looking at my eyes.

“Except?” I prompted.

“Maxine.”

I smiled. “I’m afraid I’m not following.”

“Last night I found a book with her name in it. Maxine Harris. She’s the one who was murdered. She was a customer of ours.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“I’ve never known anyone who was murdered. I mean, besides Maxine, and I didn’t really know her either. She came into the shop Once, and I bought the book from her—Rimbaud, in fact.”

Chaos theory—a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, a volcano erupts in the American Northwest—suggests infinite
variety, but also an essential pattern, a connectedness, that is found upon microscopic and macroscopic examination. I could say that my selection of victims has been random, and that would be true to an extent. But such a statement ignores what roils beneath the level of the conscious mind.

When I was in Maxine’s apartment, I walked around, looked at things, absorbed what the environment had to offer. She subscribed to
Harpers Magazine
and
Utne Reader.
She drank tea—English breakfast—not coffee. A half-written letter to “Ron” told me that marriage was in the cards for next summer in Minneapolis. In the yellow pages of her phone book she had circled “Emily and Others, Used Books Bought and Sold.”

A butterfly had flapped its wings.

“She was quiet,” Sarah said. “I think she said she’d moved out here from Wisconsin or Minnesota, some place like that. I should say something to Robert about the book, but it probably doesn’t mean anything, and I don’t think I can talk to him right now anyway.”

“I think you should tell him,” I said. “It might be a clue.”

She laughed. “A clue? What a quaint word. You must read a lot of mysteries.”

“I watch the British ones,” I said. “On PBS, detectives still find clues.”

“It’s like a feather blowing in the wind,” Sarah said. “They never catch killers anymore.”

The next evening was to have been a final, pleasant evening of surveillance. I stood in the shadows of an alley across the street from the bookstore, waiting for Sarah to carry the day’s receipts up the outside stairway to Harry in the massage parlor.

The blow came from behind and caught me just above my left kidney. For so large a man, my Mike Tyson lookalike was surprisingly quiet, as stealthy as a jungle cat. The movement of the pipe through the still night air was the only sound I heard. The second blow hit just below my left
shoulder, but I never felt that one. I had left my body, escaped, drifted away—knowing that what needed to be done would be done.

I heard Slouch’s voice from deeper in the shadows. He sounded almost casual. “Don’t let him get to the piece.”

When the big man—just shapes, shadows, and motion—stepped closer for the next swing of the pipe, a .38 was in my hand.

My vision blurred, but I could still make out his knees—bent like Barry Bonds’s at home plate in Candlestick Park.

I use silver tips plus P—magnum loads that fragment on impact. Typically, the exit wound is the size of a plum. To hit any joint is to render it a hash of muscle, ligament, and fragmented bone. The target always goes down.

The report of my revolver echoed in the alley. My wannabe murderer grunted, wobbled a bit, then fell.

Slouch never should have muttered, “Shit.”

I aimed into the darkness six inches below where I knew his mouth was, and fired. I heard him drop.

The big man was sitting, still clutching the pipe, when I pushed myself to my feet. His good leg was folded under him. The other extended out, bent at an awkward angle.

I was close enough to see his face, smell his cologne. He didn’t seem to mind, didn’t object, when I thumbed the hammer back and aimed at his forehead. He was in shock. When the gun exploded a third time, I watched a slab from the back of his head decorate the wall behind him.

I stumbled past Slouch’s body to the back of the alley, where I pulled myself over a wooden fence and headed for my car. I was behind the wheel before I heard the sound of sirens in the distance.

I
didn’t give Dr. Street a chance to say anything before I started in.

“Why did you let me sit here a couple of weeks ago, rambling on and on about John Wolf, without even once mentioning that he was a client of yours?”

He put on his best puzzled expression.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“What I mean is that you deceived me. You let me tell you all about someone that you already knew inside out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You. And the games shrinks play. I thought you were different from the others, but you’re just as much of a bastard as every other shrink I’ve ever known. You’re all jerks. I think it’s a prerequisite for the job.”

“Sarah, I don’t know any John Wolf.”

I felt as if a trapdoor had opened, sending me crashing to the basement. I hadn’t yet made up my mind about Dr. Street’s competency as a therapist, but I had been certain of one thing: his decency. He had been my ideal, the proof I
pointed to whenever telling myself that, yes, there really were kind and honest men in this world. But there he was, lying to me. My god, he even looked as if he believed what he was saying.

“Sarah, it isn’t a matter of confidentiality or privilege or anything else. I’m telling you that I don’t know anyone by that name.”