But he’d also used hours of the drug to try to find out where Dara might have been on the night that Keigo Nakamura was killed.
He’d been out on a stakeout on Santa Fe Drive that night, down on the edge of the reconquista no-man’s-land there, sitting in the backseat of an unmarked patrol car as the two detectives up front watched the home of a local warlord who, they knew, was moving guns and drugs into the city. As a Major Crimes day-shift detective, Nick Bottom had had no business in the backseat of that particular unmarked car on that particular stakeout on that particular night, but in that first year after his promotion he’d had the stupid idea that he could do his white-collar downtown detective work while still staying fully in touch with the mean streets and their denizens, both crook and cop.
He couldn’t. It had been a stupid idea.
The two detectives sitting in the front seat that night—Cummings, the detective third grade with seven years in as a patrol officer but less than a year’s experience as detective, and Coleman, a twenty-five-year veteran in the DPD and nine years a detective first grade (the same grade as Nick)—had let him know that night that he was as useless and unwelcome as the proverbial tit on an equally proverbial boar.
Nick had been there anyway, shivering in the chill—they’d shut off the batteries to conserve power—and breathing in the well-known stakeout smell of sweat and old-car vinyl and coffee breath and the occasional silent but deadly fart from the front seat. God help him, he’d loved it the years he worked the street.
The flashback reliving of that hour had reminded Nick that he’d phoned Dara a little before midnight. He’d meant to phone earlier, but he’d been out at a corner all-night bodega getting coffee for Coleman and Cummings then. As it was, she didn’t pick up. It had surprised Nick, but it hadn’t worried him. When he was working on the street, she always left her phone on. That afternoon—he remembered this only through the flashback reliving of the hour around midnight—he’d told her he’d be working late, but he hadn’t told her that he’d be on the street. She often turned her phone off when she knew he was safe doing office work at Central Division.
That night, Nick now remembered, he’d gotten about three hours’ sleep on the couch at DPD CD and had been wakened when the call came in from the division commander, turning the Keigo murder case over to him and his partner, K. T. Lincoln. The word was that the responding detectives didn’t have boots high enough for this sort of politically charged case. Nick was still a department golden boy then; K. T. Lincoln brought some nice racial, gender, and sexual-orientation balance to the whole thing. (The commander admitted that he would have assigned a Japanese detective to the case, if they’d had a Jap with a gold shield, which they didn’t. In fact, the commander confessed, the entire Denver Police Department had only one officer of Japanese descent, and she was a rookie patrol officer taking her lumps and learning over in the Five Corners area. Nick Bottom and K. T. Lincoln would have to do.)
Nick had used a fifteen-minute vial of flashback reliving his call to Dara that morning. She’d been strangely unexcited about his news, even though closing the case could have meant a huge boost in his career. As assistant to a Denver ADA, she knew about such things. She sounded tired, even drugged. When Nick mentioned that he’d tried to call her around midnight the night before, there’d been a pause—more noticeable to the second-Nick reliving the moment via flashback than to the caffeine-jazzed real-time Nick that morning—and she’d said she’d taken a pill and turned off the phone and gone to bed early.
The three seconds’ worth of video image of Dara’s face across the street from Keigo’s apartment that night haunted Nick more than anything had since she’d died. He’d downloaded the video file into his phone and watched it a dozen times, using his wall-wide HD3D display in his cubie for the clearest image, and sometimes he was certain it was Dara; other times he was even more certain that it wasn’t—that it was a woman who didn’t even really look like Dara.
He’d also done three more fifteen-minute flashes of the phone conversation with her on the morning he’d told her about the Keigo murder, then flashed and reflashed an hour of the first time he’d seen her that next evening.
Did she seem false that evening? Did she seem to be hiding something from him?
Was he losing his mind?
Had he lost it long ago?
WHAT EVERYONE NOW CALLED Six Flags Over the Jews was just to the left of the overpass where Speer Boulevard met I-25. Across the highway on the hill to the southwest of the sprawling complex loomed the Mile High Homeland Security Detention Center.
Nick had been vaguely curious why they called the amusement-park-turned-refugee-center Six Flags, since the company that ran the other Six Flags amusement parks only owned this one for about ten years right at the beginning of the century. For more than a century before that and for some years after the brief Six Flags era, the park had been called Elitch Gardens.
There were no gardens in sight now as Nick turned into the huge, empty parking area and followed concrete blast shields toward the first of several security checkpoints.
Nick knew about the old Elitch Gardens because of his grandfather. Nick’s father, who’d died when Nick was fifteen, had been a state patrol officer. Nick’s earliest memory of his old man was of his pistol, a large Smith & Wesson revolver. Nick’s father hadn’t died in a shootout (like Nick, he’d never fired his weapon in the line of duty), but in an accident on I-25 not two miles from where Nick’s wife, Dara, and her boss, Assistant District Attorney Harvey Cohen, had died. Nick’s father had pulled over to help a stranded motorist and a drunken sixteen-year-old driver had swerved onto the shoulder and killed him.
Nick’s grandfather had been a bus driver in the city and his great-grandfather had been a motorman on the old trolleys that connected Denver and its suburbs and nearby towns before cars forced them out. From Grandpa Nicholas, Nick had heard lovely tales of the old Elitch Gardens, whose motto for decades was Not to See Elitch’s Is Not to See Denver.
First opened in 1890, the original Elitch Gardens had been miles away from the downtown to the west, out at 38th Avenue and Tennyson Street in a suburb that was more like a separate village. That first Elitch Gardens, while growing, had kept its trees, extensive flower gardens, and shaded picnic areas where guests could eat lunches they’d packed for themselves. For forty years or so it had a zoo and for a century it boasted the Theater at the Gardens, first offering summer-stock performances and then, later in the twentieth century, visiting movie and TV stars. By the 1930s, Elitch’s had added the Trocadero Ballroom for dancing and visiting jazz groups and big bands and Nick’s grandfather had mentioned listening to An Evening at the Troc weekly national radio broadcast. Sometime in the 1950s the owners had added a Kiddieland with its little open-wheel race cars, two-seat rocket planes, and real floating “motorboats,” and although big amusement parks had catered almost exclusively to adults up until then, Elitch’s Kiddieland was a huge hit.
In 1994, Elitch’s had moved to its present location near the downtown and two years later had been purchased by the corporation that operated other Six Flags parks across America. The new owners abandoned grass and gardens for cement and concrete, Kiddieland and slow sky rides for ever more inverted-high-g screaming rides, and entrance prices that required a bank loan for a family. When Six Flags sold it sometime around 2006, the new company, although restoring the name Elitch Gardens, finished the job of destroying the last vestige of gardens and enjoyment for anyone other than the seriously adrenaline-addicted.
Nick knew all this detail because his grandfather and mother both had used Elitch’s as a metaphor for America in the last part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first—abandoning shade and gardens and grace and affordable family fun for overpriced sun-glaring terror at six g’s inverted.
Well, thought Nick as he parked the car and walked toward the checkpoint across the cracked, heaving, and weed-strewn parking pavement, America had got a
ll the terror it could ever have hoped for.
THE SECURITY PEOPLE AT the entrance checkpoint were ex-DPD and remembered Nick and treated him well, and the magical black card that Nakamura had recently sent to him via Sato settled all other issues. One of the guards phoned ahead to alert Danny Oz to be ready for a visitor and even led Nick through the thick maze of hovels, tents, abandoned amusement park rides, and open-air kiosks.
“It looks like they have everything right in here,” said Nick, just to make conversation.
“Oh, yeah,” said the guard, a retired patrolman named Charlie Duquane, “the camp’s pretty self-sufficient. They have their own doctors and dentists and psychiatrists and a decent medical clinic. They’ve even got six synagogues.”
“What’s the resident count?”
“Around twenty-six thousand,” said Charlie. “Give or take a couple a hundred.”
The resident count six years ago had been a little over thirty-two thousand. Nick knew that many of the Israeli refugees were older and cancer was rampant in all the camps. Almost none were released into the general population.
He met with the poet in an otherwise empty mess tent under the rusting steel coils and pillars of some upside-down high-speed scream ride.
The hand behind the handshake was listless, clammy, bony, and weak. Nick had just seen Danny Oz in his flashback preparation and in the 3D crime-scene re-creation back at Keigo Nakamura’s LoDo apartment complex and there was no doubt that the man had aged horribly in the past six years. Oz had been thin and graying and vaguely tubercular-looking six years ago in a properly poetic way, his hair already turned mostly gray in his early fifties, but there had been a coiled-spring energy to the thin figure then and the eyes had been as animated as the poet’s conversation. Now he was an animated corpse: skin and eyes a jaundiced yellow; gray hair as yellowed as the teeth of the heavy smoker; laugh lines and somewhat attractive scholarly wrinkles transformed to grooves and furrows in skin pulled far too tight over an eagerly emerging skull.
Nick knew that Danny Oz had come out of what the Jews called the Second Holocaust with some sort of radiation-induced cancer (all eleven of the bombs had been made very dirty indeed by the True Believers who’d built them), but he couldn’t remember what kind of cancer it was.
It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was slowly killing the poet.
“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Detective Bottom. Did you ever catch young Mr. Nakamura’s killer?”
“No ‘Detective’ before my name any longer, Mr. Oz,” said Nick. “They fired me from the force more than five and a half years ago. And no, they’re no closer to getting Keigo Nakamura’s killer than they were six years ago.”
Danny Oz drew deeply from his cigarette—Nick belatedly realized that it was cannabis, possibly for the cancer pain—and squinted through exhaled smoke. “If you’re not with the police any longer, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Mr. Bottom?”
Nick explained that he’d been hired by the victim’s father while he noticed that, even allowing for the joint and the possibility that they’d wakened Oz for this visit, the poet’s eyes were too unfocused, set in a stare above and beyond Nick’s right shoulder. Nick recognized that kind of thousand-yard stare from those mornings when he decided to shave. Danny Oz was using a lot more flashback than he’d been on six years ago.
“So do we go through the same questions as six years ago or come up with new ones?” asked Danny Oz.
“Have you thought of anything else that might be of help, Mr. Oz?”
“Danny. And no, I haven’t. You and your fellow investigators are still going on the assumption that it was something that came up during his video interviews that got Keigo Nakamura killed?”
“There aren’t any ‘fellow investigators,’ ” said Nick with a ghost of a smile. “And I don’t have anything as elegant or advanced as a theory. Just going over old ground, I’m afraid.”
“Well, it’s still a pleasure to talk to a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Oz. “And I’ve often thought of what you told me.”
“What’s that?”
“That you didn’t know that you were a character in Shakespeare’s play until your wife told you.”
Nick did grin now. “You have a damned good memory, Mr… Danny.” Unless you flashed on our last meeting, too. But why would you waste money and drug for that? To keep your story straight? “But Dara wasn’t my wife yet when she broke the news of the other Nick Bottom to me. We were dating… sort of. She was an undergraduate and I was already a cop, going back to school to get hours toward my master’s degree.”
“How did you take the news? Of your ears and possible sexual intimacy with the Queen of the Fairies, I mean.”
“I dealt with it,” said Nick. “It was the other Nick Bottom’s vision—or what he said was a dream-vision he’d awakened from—that Dara was interested in. She thought that I had just such a joyous awakening… an epiphany, she called it… in my future. That first night on our date, she recited almost the entire passage from the play from memory. I was very impressed.”
Danny Oz smiled, drew deeply from the joint, and stubbed it out in a coffee can lid he was using as an ashtray. He lit another cigarette—a regular one this time, which seemed to please him more—and squinted through the smoke as he recited:
“When my cue comes, call me and I will answer. My next is ‘Most fair Pyramus.’ Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout, the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life! Stolen hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, or his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.”
Nick felt something like a hot electric shock run through his system. He’d never heard those words spoken aloud by anyone but Dara. “As I said, you’ve got one hell of a memory, Mr. Oz,” he said.
The older man shrugged and drew deeply on his cigarette, as if the smoke were holding back his pain. “Poets. We remember things. That’s part of what makes us poets.”
“My wife had one of your books,” said Nick and was immediately and painfully sorry he’d brought it up. “One of your books of poetry, I mean. In English. She showed it to me after I interviewed you six years ago.”
Less than three months before she died.
Danny Oz smiled slightly, waiting.
Realizing that he had to say something about the poems, Nick said, “I don’t really understand modern poems.”
Now Oz’s smile was real, showing the large, nicotine-stained teeth. “I’m afraid my verse never attained modernity, Detective… I mean, Mr. Bottom. I wrote in the epic form, old in Homer’s day.”
Nick showed his palms in surrender.
“Did you and your wife,” began Oz, “on your first date, I mean, get into what Shakespeare’s Bottom was talking about in that passage?”
The Santa Fe knife wounds deep in Nick Bottom’s deeper belly muscles were hurting as if they were new, shooting threads of fire deeper into him. Why the goddamn hell had he brought up Dara and that fucking passage from the play? Oz wouldn’t even know that Dara was dead. Nick’s belly clenched in anticipation of what the dying poet might say next. He hurried to fill the silence before Oz could speak.
“Yeah, sort of. My wife was the English major. We both thought it was weird that Bottom waking from his dream had his senses all mixed up. You know—the eye hath not heard, the ear hath not seen, the hand is not able to taste
—all that stuff. We decided Bottom’s dream had messed up his senses, like that real disease of the nerves… whatchamacallit.”
“Synesthesia,” said Danny Oz, tipping ashes into the coffee can lid. Another brief flick of what could have been a wry, self-mocking smile. “I only know the word because it’s the same one used in writing where a metaphor uses terms from one kind of sense impression to describe another, like… oh… a ‘loud color.’ Yes, that was very strange and Shakespeare uses synesthesia again later in the play when the actors in the play-within-a-play ask Theseus, the Duke of Athens, whether he’d prefer to ‘hear’ a bergamask dance or ‘see’ an epilogue.”
“I don’t really understand any of that literary stuff,” said Nick. He wondered if he should just abort the interview and stand up and walk away.
Oz persisted. His pain-filled eyes seemed to catch a new gleam of interest as he squinted through the smoke. “But it is very queer, to use an old word that’s coming back into proper usage. Bottom says at the end of his dream-epiphany speech that after his friend Peter Quince turns the revelation in his, Bottom’s, dream into a ballad, ‘I shall sing it at her death.’ But whose death? Who is the ‘she’ who will be dying?”
The knife twisted in Nick Bottom’s bowels. He spoke through gritted teeth. “Whatshername. The character who dies in the play the Bottom guy is putting on in front of the Duke.”
Danny Oz shook his head. “Thisbe? No, I think not. Nor is he speaking of the death of Titania, the fairy queen that Bottom may have slept with. The woman at whose death he’ll be singing this all-important ballad is a total mystery… something above or outside the play. It’s like a clue to a Shakespearean mystery that no one has noticed.”
Ask me if I give a fucking shit, Nick thought fiercely. Surely the older man could see Nick’s pain even through his own smugness and smoke. But the thousand-yard stare seemed more focused on Nick and at ease than at any time before. Nick was very aware of the 9mm semiautomatic pistol on his hip. If he shot Danny Oz in the head today, both he and the poet would feel better.