"You sound like you sympathize with Gladden."
Wrong thing to say. I saw the anger flare in her eyes.
"You are damn right I sympathize. It doesn't mean I condone a single thing he's done or that I wouldn't drop him with a bullet if I got the chance. But he didn't invent the monster that is inside of him. It was created by someone else."
"Okay, I wasn't trying to suggest-"
The barmaid came with Rachel's beer and saved me from walking down the wrong path any further. I pulled Rachel's black and tan across the table and took a long drink, hoping we were past my misstep.
"So, aside from what he told you," I asked, "what was your take on Gladden? Did he seem to have the smarts that everyone around here is attributing to him?"
She seemed to compose her thoughts before answering.
"William Gladden knew his sexual appetite was legally, socially and culturally unacceptable. He was clearly burdened by this, I think. I believe he was at war within himself, attempting to understand his urges and desires. He wanted to tell us his story, whether it was third person or not, and I think he believed that by telling us about himself he would in some way help himself as well as maybe somebody else down the road. If you look at these dilemmas he had, I think it shows a highly intellectual being. I mean, most of these people I interviewed were like animals. Machines. They did what they did . . . almost by instinct or programming, as if they had to. And they did it without much thought. Gladden was different. So, yes, I think he is as smart as we are saying he is, maybe smarter."
"It's strange what you just said. You know, that he was burdened. Doesn't sound like the guy we're chasing now. The one we're chasing seems to have about as much of a conscience about what he is doing as Hitler had."
"You're right. But we've seen ample evidence of these types of predators changing, evolving. Without treatment, whether it was drug therapy or not, it is not without precedent that someone with William Gladden's background could evolve into someone like the Poet. Bottom line is, people change. After the interviews he was in prison another long year before winning his appeal and copping the deal that got him out. Pedophiles are treated the most harshly in prison society. Because of that they tend to band together in knots-just as in free society. That's why you have Gladden being the acquaintance of Gomble as well as other pedophiles in Raiford. I guess what I am saying is that I am not surprised that the man I interviewed so many years ago became the man we call the Poet today. I can see it happening."
A loud burst of laughter and applause broke out near one of the dartboards and distracted me. It looked like the night's champion had been crowned.
"Enough about Gladden for now," Rachel said when I looked back at her. "It's depressing as hell."
"Okay."
"What about you?"
"I'm depressed, too."
"No. I mean, what about you. You talk to your editor yet, tell him you're back inside?"
"No, not yet. I'll have to call in the morning and tell him there's no follow coming from me, but that I'm back inside."
"How will he take that?"
"Not well. He'll want to follow anyway. The story's moving like a locomotive now. The national media's on it and you've got to keep throwing stories into the fire to make the big train move. But what the hell. He's got other reporters. He can put one of them on it and see what they get. Which won't be much. Then Michael Warren will probably crack another exclusive in the L.A. Times and I'll really be in the doghouse."
"You are a cynical man."
"I'm a realist."
"Don't worry about Warren. Gor-whoever leaked to him before isn't going to do it again. It would be risking too much with Bob."
"Freudian slip there, right? Anyway, we'll see."
"How did you get so cynical, Jack? I thought only those rundown middle-aged cops were like that."
"I was born with it, I guess."
"I bet."
It seemed even colder on the walk back. I wanted to put my arm around her but I knew she wouldn't allow it. There were eyes on the street and I didn't try. As we got close to the hotel I remembered a story and told her.
"You know how when you're in high school and there's always this grapevine that passes information on about who likes whom and who's got a crush on whom? Remember?"
"Yes, I remember."
"Well, there was this girl and I had a thing, a crush on her. And I was . . . I can't remember how but the word went out on the grapevine, you know? And when that happened what you usually did was wait and see how the person responded. It was one of those things where I knew that she knew that I had this desire for her and she knew I knew she knew. Understand?"
"Yes."
"But the thing was I had no confidence and I was . . . I don't know. One day I was in the gym, sitting in the bleachers. I think I was in there early for a basketball game or something and it was filling up with people. Then she comes in, she's with a friend, and they're walking along the bleachers looking for a place to sit. It was one of those do-or-die moments and she looks right at me and waves . . . And I froze. And . . . then . . . I turned and looked behind me to see if she was waving to somebody else."
"Jack, you fool!" Rachel said, smiling and not taking the story to heart as I had done for so long. "What did she do?"
"When I turned back around she had looked away, embarrassed. See, I had embarrassed her by setting the whole thing into motion and then turning away . . . snubbing her . . . she started going out with somebody else after that. Ended up marrying him. It took me a long time to get over her."
We took the last steps to the hotel door silently. I opened the door for Rachel and looked at her with a pained, embarrassed smile. The story could still do that to me all these years later.
"So that's the story," I said. "It proves I've been a cynical fool all along."
"Everybody has stories from growing up like that," she said in a voice that seemed to dismiss the whole thing.
We crossed the lobby and the night man looked up and nodded. It seemed as if his whiskers had grown even longer in the few hours since I had first seen him. At the stairs Rachel stopped and in a whispered voice designed to leave the night man out of earshot told me not to come up.
"I think we should go to our own rooms."
"I can still walk you up."
"No, that's okay."
She looked back at the front desk. The night man had his head down and was reading a gossip tabloid. Rachel turned back to me, gave me a silent kiss on the cheek and whispered good night. I watched her go up the stairs.
I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. Too many thoughts. I had made love to a beautiful woman and spent the evening falling in love with her. I wasn't sure what love was but I knew acceptance was part of it. That's what I sensed from Rachel. It was a quality that had been a rarity in my life and I found its nearness thrilling and disquieting in the same instant.
As I stepped out to the front of the hotel to smoke a cigarette the feeling of disquiet grew and then infected my mind with other thoughts. The ghost story intruded and my embarrassment and thoughts of what might have been still grabbed me so many years after that day on the bleachers. I marveled at the hold of some memories and at how well and precisely they can be relived. I hadn't told Rachel everything about the high school girl. I hadn't told her the ending, that the girl was Riley and that the boy she went out with and then married was my brother. I didn't know why I had left that part out.
I was out of cigarettes. I stepped back into the lobby to ask the night man where I could get a pack. He told me to go back to the Cat & Fiddle. I saw he had an open pack of Camels on the counter next to his stack of tabloids but he didn't offer me any and I didn't ask for one.
As I walked Sunset alone I thought about Rachel again and became preoccupied with something I had noticed during our lovemaking. Each of the three times we had been together in bed she had been fully giving of herself, yet I would say she was decidedly passive. She deferred control to m
e. I waited for the small nuances of change on the second and third times we made love, even hesitating in my own movements and choices in order to allow her to take the lead, but she never did. Even at the sacred moment when I entered her, it was my hand fumbling at the door. Three times. No woman that I had been with before on that number of occasions had done the same.
There was nothing wrong with this and it did not bother me in the least, but still I found it to be a curiosity. For her passivity in these horizontal moments was diametrically opposed to her demeanor in our vertical moments. When we were away from the bed she certainly exercised or sought to exercise her control. It was the sort of subtle contradiction that I believed made her so enthralling to me.
As I stopped to cross Sunset to the bar, my peripheral vision picked up movement to the far left as I glanced back to check traffic. My eyes followed the movement and I saw the form of a person ducking back into the shadowed doorway of a closed shop. A chill raced through me but I didn't move. I watched the spot where I had seen the movement for several seconds. The doorway was maybe twenty yards from me. I felt sure it had been a man and he was probably still there, possibly watching me from the darkness while I watched for him.
I took four quick, determined steps toward the doorway but then stopped dead. It had been a bluff but when no one ran from the doorway, I had only bluffed myself. I felt my heartbeat rising. I knew it might only be a homeless man looking for a spot to sleep. I knew there might be a hundred explanations. But just the same I was scared. Maybe it was a transient. Maybe it was the Poet. In a split second a myriad of possibilities took over my mind. I was on TV. The Poet saw TV. The Poet had made his choice. The dark doorway was on the path between me and the Wilcox Hotel. I could not go back. I quickly turned and stepped into the street to cross to the bar.
The blast of a car horn greeted me and I jumped back. I had not been in any danger. The car that sped past trailing the laughter of teenagers was two lanes away but maybe they had seen my face, seen the look, and known I was easy prey for a scare.
I ordered another black and tan at the bar along with a basket of chicken wings, and got directions to the cigarette machine. I noticed the unsteadiness of my hands as I lit the match after finally getting a cigarette into my mouth. Now what, I thought as I exhaled the stream of blue smoke toward my reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
I stayed until last call at two and then left the Cat & Fiddle with the exodus of die-hards. There was safety in numbers, I had decided. By loitering behind the crowd, I was able to identify a group of three drunks walking east toward Wilcox and fell in a few yards behind them. We passed the doorway in question from the other side of Sunset and as I looked across the four lanes I could not tell if the darkened alcove was empty. But I didn't linger. At Wilcox I broke away from my escort and trotted across Sunset and up to the hotel. I didn't breathe normally until I entered the lobby and saw the familiar, safe face of the night man.
Despite the lateness of the hour and the heavy beer I had filled myself with, the scare I had submitted myself to robbed me of any fatigue. I could not sleep. In my room I undressed, got into bed and turned off the light but I knew as I was doing it that it was fruitless. After ten minutes I faced the facts of my situation and turned on the light.
I needed a distraction. A trick that would allow my mind to rest easily and for me to sleep. I did what I had done on countless prior occasions of similar necessity. I pulled my computer up onto the bed. I booted it, plugged the room's phone line into the modem outlet and dialed long distance into the Rocky's net. I had no messages and wasn't really expecting any but the motions of doing it began to calm me. I scrolled the wires a little bit and came across my own story, in abbreviated form, on the AP national wire. It would hit the ground tomorrow and burst like a shell. Editors from New York to here in L.A. would know my byline. I hoped.
After signing off and shutting down the connection, I played a few hands of computer solitaire but became bored with losing. Looking for something else to distract me, I reached into the computer bag for the hotel receipts from Phoenix but couldn't find them. I checked every pocket of the bag but the folded sheaf of papers wasn't there. I quickly grabbed the pillowcase and frisked it like a suspect but there were only clothes.
"Shit," I said out loud.
I closed my eyes and tried to envision what I had done with the pages on the plane. A sense of dread came over me as I remembered at one point stuffing them into the seat pocket. But then I recalled that, after talking to Warren, I had retrieved them to make the other calls. I conjured a vision of putting the pages back into the computer bag as the plane was on final approach. I was sure I had not left them on the plane.
The alternative to this, I knew, was that someone had been in my room and taken them. I paced around a little bit, not sure what I could do. I had had what could be construed as stolen property stolen from me. Who could I complain to?
Angrily, I opened the door and walked down the hallway to the front desk. The night man was looking at a magazine called High Society which had a cover photo of a nude woman skillfully using her arms and hands to strategically cover enough of her body to allow the magazine to be sold on the newsstand.
"Hey, did you see anybody go down to my room?"
He hiked his shoulders and shook his head.
"Nobody?"
"Only ones I seen around was that lady that was with you, and you. That’s it."
I looked at him for a moment, waiting for more, but he had said his piece.
"Okay."
I went back to my room, studying the keyhole for signs of a pick before going inside. I couldn't tell. The keyhole was worn and scratched but it could have been that way for years. I wouldn't know how to identify a picked lock if my life depended on it but I looked anyway. I was mad.
I was tempted to call Rachel and tell her about the burglary of my room but my dilemma was that I couldn't tell her about what had been taken in the burglary. I didn't want her to know what I had done. The memory of that day on the bleachers and other lessons learned since went through my mind. I got undressed and got back into bed.
Sleep eventually came but not before I had visions of Thorson in my room going through my things. When it finally came, the anger had not left me.
37
I was awakened by a sharp banging on my door. I opened my eyes and saw light bleeding brightly around the curtains. The sun was already well up and I realized I should have been also. I pulled on my pants and was still buttoning a shirt as I opened the door without looking through the peephole. It wasn't Rachel.
" 'Morning, sport. Rise and shine. You're with me today and we've got to get going."
I stared blankly at him. Thorson reached over and knocked on the open door.
"Hello? Anyone home?"
"What do you mean I'm with you?"
"Just like it sounds. Your girlfriend has some things she has to do alone. Agent Backus has assigned you to be with me today."
My face must have shown my thoughts on the prospect of spending the day with Thorson.
"I'm not exactly thrilled to pieces myself," he said to me. "But I do what I'm told. Now, if you just want to stay in bed all day, that'd be no skin off my back. I'd just tell-"
"I'm getting dressed. Give me a few minutes."
"You've got five minutes. I'll meet you in the alley at the car. If you're not there you're on your own."
After he was gone I looked at my watch on the bed table. It was eight-thirty, not as late as I had thought. I took ten minutes instead of five. I held my head under the shower and thought about being with Thorson for the day, dreading every moment of it. But most of all I thought about Rachel and wondered what assignment Backus had given her and why it didn't include me.
After leaving my room I went up to her door and knocked but got no answer. I listened at the door for a few moments and heard nothing. She was gone.
Thorson was leaning on the trunk of one of the cars when I got
out to the alley.
"You're late."
"Yeah. Sorry. Where's Rachel?"
"Sorry, sport, talk to Backus. He seems to be your bureau rabbi."
"Look, Thorson, my name isn't sport, okay? If you don't want to call me by my name, just don't call me anything. I'm late because I had to call my editor and tell him there was no story coming. He wasn't happy."
I went to the passenger door and he went around to the driver's side. I had to wait for him to unlock it and it seemed like he took forever to notice I was waiting.
"I don't really give a shit how your editor was this morning," he said over the car before sliding in.