Rodrigues peered up before Mike Gage but there was the same thing in both faces. Larry had been pointing to Collins in the photograph of Erno’s funeral.
“Christ,” Larry said. But the columns kept adding up, just as they had all day. Faro was a travel agent and so was Collins. Size, age, race all matched. Like Collins, Faro had been represented by Jackson Aires. ‘Faro Cole’ sort of looked like ‘Collins Farwell,’ turned inside out, s.o.p. with aliases, so the doofus using it would have a clue, when he was on the spot, about what he had been calling himself. And it wouldn’t be unusual for a bad boy just out of the joint, as Collins was in 1997, to be toting phony i.d., to make sure he didn’t give the coppers—and his parole officers—a head start if he got jammed up on something. But what bothered Larry the most was what had struck him while he was sanding: Collins’s story about how Jesus had entered his life with a bullet through the back.
Rodrigues tried to console him. “You don’t need to trust a fouryear-old eyeball, even if it’s cops.”
Larry went outside to use his cell phone. The high clouds were darkening and resembled an angry stallion rearing up. Storm tonight, probably. Then he rejoined the present and fell under its weight.
This fucking case.
33
AUGUST 8, 2001
At Sea
“YOU GOT TIME to leave the office?”
Muriel had grabbed her own phone after-hours. Not even bothering with a name or hello, Larry sounded cozy and familiar. She’d been waiting days for his call, and she was immediately dashed when he added, “Some guys down here you ought to talk to.” She could not quite dampen a faint echo of embarrassment in her voice when she finally asked where the hell he was. It sounded like a tavern.
“Do we have a problem?” she said.
“Can of worms. No,” said Larry. “Snakes. Rattlesnakes. Cottonmouth.”
They had a problem.
“And, if you don’t mind,” Larry added, “bring the old file on Collins we put together when we went to see him in the jail.” He told her where it was in the current materials stored in her office.
Pushing through the old oak door at Ike’s a half hour later, Muriel could detect a current in the room. Generally speaking, there were two schools of thought about her in the Kindle County Unified Police Force: some liked her, some hated her guts. The ones in the second camp kept it to themselves when they were on the job, but off duty they owed her no such courtesy. They remembered the cases she’d nixed, the hard lines she’d drawn and sometimes enforced on police practices. Their world was far too macho to comfortably endure discipline—or ambition—from a woman. She could grant them that she was often hardheaded, even abrasive, but in her heart of hearts, she knew that the main issue for the guys staring at her came down to plumbing.
Larry was back at the bar. He was in overalls and looked like he’d been rolled in flour. His clothing and hair were pale with dust.
“Let me guess. You’re going to be a sugar doughnut for Halloween.”
He didn’t seem to get the joke until he glanced at the beveled mirror over the bar and even then wasn’t very amused. He explained that he’d been sanding all day, but he clearly had other things on his mind besides his appearance.
“Wassup?” she asked.
He told her, slowly, piece by piece. She got right next to him when he’d finished, so she didn’t shout.
“You’re telling me Erno Erdai shot his own nephew?”
“I’m saying it’s possible. Did you bring that file?”
Larry waved Mike Gage over first to look at Collins’s mug shot from 1991. Mike just gave him a look. Rodrigues said, “I take it ‘Definitely’ is not the answer you’re looking for.”
“Tell it like it is.”
“The eyes, man.” Rodrigues tapped the color photograph. “Almost orange. Village of the Damned or something.”
“Right,” Larry said.
“Let’s get out of here,” Muriel told him. This wasn’t the place for a discussion. Even the cops who liked her were uncertain allies, many of them more loyal to the reporters who kept them on their call list than they’d be to her. Outside, she offered Larry a ride up the hill. He hesitated at the door, reluctant to bring his dust into her sedan. She’d owned the Civic since 1990, and it hadn’t been tidy even when it was new.
“Larry,” she said, “there is nothing this upholstery hasn’t seen,” and barely caught herself from laughing when she lit on a distant memory. He gave her directions as they drove.
“So, okay,” she said. “Explain.”
“I don’t think it makes any difference.”
“That’s step two,” said Muriel. “We have to know what the hell was happening first. Am I reading this right? If my mother wants to reconcile with her sister, she ought to trying shooting her in the back?”
Larry laughed for the first time tonight. “Three thousand comedians unemployed, and you’re making jokes.”
“Seriously,” she said. “Isn’t that the sequence? Erno and Collins got all lovey-dovey after that.”
“Fuck,” said Larry, “I don’t have a clue. And I don’t care. Erno’s family is as messed up as the next guy’s. So what? It’s TMI, as far as I’m concerned.” Too much information. An acronym for the times, if ever there was one.
Larry was pointing up a long driveway. The house was a Victorian, which he had once described as his specialty. San Francisco colors had been applied on all the trim, bright contrasting shades to bring out the feathering and diamonds scored on the presswood exterior. Muriel leaned over the wheel to see it all through the windshield.
“Jeez Louise, Larry. What a beauty.”
“Isn’t it? This one especially, sometimes I’m walking around inside and it bothers me that I couldn’t afford anything like it for myself when the boys were young. But that’s the story, right? You never get what you want when you need it.” He seemed to hear himself only after he’d spoken. She could see him tense up and avoid looking her way. To save him, she asked for a quick tour.
He started with the garden. The light was weakening and the bugs were on the attack, but Larry was undeterred, stepping carefully between the recently bedded plants. The legacy of color and glory he was leaving behind for whoever would buy the house was full-grown in his head and he took quite some time explaining how the various perennials—everything from crocuses to peonies to hydrangeas— would rise up and expand year by year. It was nearly dark when he quit, and that was only because she finally mentioned getting eaten alive.
Inside, he was more cursory. In order to contain the plague of dust, sheets of plastic hung over the doorways to the rooms being sanded. The challenge of a place like this, Larry said, was knowing which details to preserve in the name of character and which had to be sacrificed for the sake of the marketplace. Lighting was an example. When they were built, these rooms were dim as an outhouse, illuminated at night by gas sconces. Today’s homeowners were innate energy hogs. Over time, Larry said, he had learned strong overhead light and lots of switches were prized by buyers.
It was neat to see Larry in his other life. He amused her as he always did, but she’d had no trouble imagining Larry as an entrepreneur. Even his tenderness in the garden was something she’d gradually taken account of. The guy she knew in law school liked to pretend that the only use for the word ‘sensitive’ was on a condom wrapper. But there was somebody else there—she’d always known that—and she admired Larry for letting him out.
“Does the plumbing work yet?” she asked. Larry showed her where she was going. There was a little quarter-window across from the sink, and amid the lights below, Muriel could more or less pick out the neighborhood where she’d grown up a fourth of a mile from Fort Hill, a bungalow belt set amid rail yards and truck depots. Even today, it remained a land of endless parking lots, harshly illuminated to prevent theft, half-mile stretches where truck trailers or new Fords or rail containers waited beside the right-of-way to be loaded on trains. It was a goo
d place. People worked hard, were kind and decent, and wanted better for their kids. But as was always the case with working people, they also felt the harshness of raw happenstance that kept them from counting as much as the folks who bossed them around. Not her, she’d vowed. Not her.
She held no illusions now. It would have maddened her if she’d lived a life isolated from power. But looking down the hill, she still revered the best of the place, the centeredness, the sense that you lived your life and tried to move half a step ahead, do more good than bad, and love somebody. The desire to reconnect with all that was part of what inspired the hour she spent in church each week where her heart almost flew from her body straight to God. Those babies she’d never had were there in church, unmet strangers, like the lover you figured was waiting for you somewhere in the world when you were thirteen. The future. The life of her spirit. In prayer, she still reached toward them as lovingly as she had for years in dreams. With the tingle that arose from Larry’s presence in the quiet house she had a sudden sense of the wholeness that might have been possible in the love of a man.
He was waiting for her in an add-on family room at the back of the house. Originally, it had been done cheaply, and Larry said he’d tried to dress it up with nice carpeting. Almost to rebuff the strength of what she’d just been feeling, she returned to business.
“Larry, it’s time to throw all this stuff about Erno and Collins on the table. I’m going to write Arthur a letter tomorrow.”
He asked what she knew he would: “Why?”
“Because they’re clearly desperate to find Faro. And it’s a capital case, Larry, and I shouldn’t hide stuff when I know it’s material to them.”
“Material?”
“Larry, I’m clueless about exactly what all this means and so are you. But bottom line, Collins was stealing tickets with Luisa, right? Don’t you think that has something to do with why he knew enough to dime out Gandolph?”
“Muriel, sure as you’re standing here, Arthur’ll be in court trying to open everything up again. You know that. He’ll be screaming about giving Collins immunity.”
“That’s his job, Larry. That doesn’t mean he gets his way. The Court of Appeals will never force me to grant immunity. But I want to lay it all out for Arthur—Collins being Faro, and the shooting. And what Collins told you in Atlanta, too. I should have disclosed that a while ago, but I can act like it just dawned on me.”
Larry stood still with his eyes closed, simmering a little in the stupidity of the law.
“We don’t even know 100 percent that Collins is Faro,” he finally said.
“Come on, Larry.”
“Seriously. Let me get back to Dickerman, see if he gets a fingerprint off the gun. Then maybe we’ll know it’s Collins for sure.”
“Call Dickerman. Tell him it’s back on and we need fast answers. But I can’t wait to tell Arthur. The longer we hesitate, the louder he’ll moan about me withholding favorable evidence. Arthur has a few more days to file one last motion for reconsideration in the Court of Appeals, and I want to be able to say we got him this information in a timely way, as soon as we saw any relationship to the events surrounding the murders. That way he gets a clean final shot and the Court then can tell him they’ve considered everything, and it’s over.”
“Christ, Muriel.”
“It’s just the last hurdle, Larry.”
“Oh,” he said, “how many times do we have to win this fucking case? Sometimes I want to go down to Rudyard and shoot Rommy myself, just to put an end to all of this crap.”
“Maybe that’s our fault. Maybe something’s keeping us from putting an end to it.” She, of course, knew what ‘something’ was and so did he, but that, apparently, was part of the crap he wanted over and done with. Stepping closer, she lifted her hand to his shoulder. “Larry, trust me on this. It’ll come out okay.”
That was just proving his point, though. The Point. The case never was about the victim, or the defendant, or even what happened. Not really. For the cop and the lawyer and the judge you could never keep it from being about you. And in this case, them. Averted from her, Larry was taut in frustration.
“Really, Larry,” she said. “If you didn’t want to do anything about this, why go down to Ike’s? Why bother calling me?”
He cast his gaze down, but finally reached up and clapped the back of her hand as a mode of assent. Even contact so brief swept her into the tide between them. She peered up at him with a brimming look, one that recognized damage and time. Then she squeezed his shoulder again and, with whatever reluctance, let go. She giggled an instant later when she saw her hand.
“What?” Larry asked.
She lifted her palm toward him, whitened all the way across by a layer of plaster dust.
“You left your mark, Larry.”
“Did I?”
“Pillar of salt,” she said.
His blue eyes shifted for a second, as he went after the reference.
“What was it that gal did wrong?”
“Looked backwards,” Muriel answered with a wrinkled smile.
“Yeah.”
Much as she’d promised herself in Atlanta not to be the first across the boundary line, she knew she wasn’t going to stop. It didn’t matter if it was auld lang syne or stardust or libido—she wanted Larry. Whatever bell he’d sounded had never been rung by anyone else. A decade ago, she hadn’t seen it, but their relationship was, in large part, an altar to her, an appreciation of her power. It was unique in that way. Larry knew the strongest in her and, unlike Rod or Talmadge, didn’t cherish it for his own use. He just wanted peace on their own terms, a full-blooded companionship, hard-nosed but not hardhearted, two for the world. She had forsaken an enormous opportunity years ago, and knowing that, she needed to be sure there was no chance today. She held up her palm.
“Is this God’s way of telling me to keep my hands to myself, Larry?”
“I don’t know about that, Muriel. I don’t get much direct communication.”
“But that’s how you want it, right? Bygones as bygones?”
He took a long time.
“I don’t know what I want, Muriel, to tell you the truth. I know one thing. I don’t care to go back on the suicide watch.”
“So where does that put you? You’re saying no?”
He smiled faintly. “Guys aren’t supposed to say no.”
“It’s just a word, Larry.” She looked again at her palm. The pale dust clung on the high points, leaving the creases distinct. The loveline and the lifeline that the fortune-tellers read were marked as clearly as rivers on a map. Then she reached up and found the very spot on his shoulder where a vague positive image of her hand had been left behind.
THE THOUGHT that he could resist passed through Larry’s mind as nothing more than an abstraction. The essence of Muriel was having her way. And as always, she had the jump on him. Why call her, she’d asked, if he wanted her to do nothing? He’d brought her here. And now she was making it as easy as possible. Little and fearless, she rose to her toes and placed one hand on his shoulder, bringing the other tenderly to his cheek, drawing him near.
After that, it had the desperation and speed of a caged bird hoping to fly. All that useless beating of wings, the smashing about. In the heat, there was a salty taste to her flesh, a smell, eventually, of blood that he was slow to identify. His heart pounded along in frightened spurts and it was, as a result, far briefer than he might have liked. And unexpectedly messy. She was just at the start or end of her period and had been urgent about having him inside her, as if she suspected he might think again.
She had ended up on top and clung to him afterwards as though he were a rock. The feeling of her resting there was far more satisfying than anything else. He searched her form with both hands and felt a desperate pang at how near it had remained in memory, the defined knobs in her spine, the ribs prominent as the black piano keys, the ripe turn of her behind, which he had always found the most becoming part of
her anatomy. In the time since they’d split, he had wept only once, when his grandfather, the immigrant wheelwright, had died near the age of one hundred. Larry had been overwhelmed by how much harder life would have been for the old man’s twenty-three children and grandchildren were it not for the blessing of his bravery in making the journey here. The example of a heroism that spread itself over so many lives bolstered Larry against any tearful mourning for his own sake now. But the safest harbor was humor.
“How am I going to explain to my guys why we have to clean a brand-new rug?”
“Go ahead,” she said, “complain.” Her small face perked up in front of him. At her collar, she’d worn a pin that, in their haste, had remained fastened, so that her dress, otherwise unbuttoned, flowed around her like a cloak. Her shoulders were sheathed with the filmy black polka-dot fabric, while her bare arms were crossed now under his throat.
“Are you sorry about this?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. I may be.”
“Don’t be.”
“You’re tougher than I am, Muriel.”
“Not anymore.”
“Yes, you are. At least, you know how to keep moving forward. When it comes to you, Muriel, I guess I can’t.”
“Larry. Don’t you think I’ve missed you?”
“Consciously?”
“Come on, Larry.”
“I mean it. You don’t let yourself look back and see stuff. It’s only hitting you now.”
“What’s that?”
“You should have married me.”
Her blackish eyes were still; her small nose, decorated with tiny summer freckles, flared as she inhaled. They stared at one another, their faces only inches apart, until he could feel the strength of his conviction begin to wear her down. He could see then that she knew it already. But how do you walk back through the door at home, once you’ve said that out loud? And even so, he sensed the vaguest acknowledgment, a gesture with her eyes, before she again laid her head down on his chest.