Dead Echo

  Chapter 33: Lunch

  Skate walked into the restaurant, was seated quickly at a table, and checked her watch as soon as the hostess left. Almost twenty minutes early but there’d been no traffic. When Arnold had phoned last night (9:23 to the minute, it was funny the things that wouldn’t let go) she’d felt her heart jump and hoped it didn’t show in her voice. It was the first time he’d initiated conversation since That Day and for just a second there her racing heart had…what? She pursed her lips and looked around at the lunch crowd. He’d suggested the place and that was about right because she’d never heard of it. It sure looked like a cop hangout, seedy, like the walls had absorbed all the sordid conversations that’d taken place beneath the roof and now oozed them out like some effluvial gas from a corpse. She shook her head and tried to dispel the image because of course it wasn’t that bad. She had to remind herself she was not all that far removed from places like this anyway. When she’d been a girl, they’d seldom had any money at all, much less for restaurants, and now this old truth prodded her like a finger pointing back to where she’d come from. She tried to think back about the conversation, unconsciously unzipping her purse and pulling out the compact. She flipped it open, looked at her face for flaws, the slight edgings around her eyes and mouth, not bad yet, but a warning of things to come, the tight lines across her forehead. She wondered what he would look like now, today, and worried about the pants suit she had on.

  No, she shook her head, stuffing the compact back into the depths of her purse, trying to focus again on the conversation. Yes, that. Only that. His voice had been different, urgent. He’d mentioned the Standish woman again (Carolyn had told him she had not been back since her initial visit and his voice seemed to convey some understanding she had no grasp of) and told her he needed to meet her for lunch. Here. Of course she’d agreed (she wouldn’t be a very good psychologist if she couldn’t read her own mind) because in her subconscious she knew she’d already been waiting, hoping for a call like this for some time. Perhaps as a way to set things to rights because in her heart she knew there was no such thing as turning back the clock. And besides…

  Dammit, what are you doing? a scalding voice in her head demanded. This is business and don’t for a minute consider it to be anything else. You fucked up once and the first time’s free but don’t you ever forget this: the next time’s for keeps. She swallowed hard and tried to focus. Yes, she could hear all the clutter and tumult inside her head but it hardly amounted to much of a clamor. When she’d hung up the phone last night she’d been wet. Actually wet. She knew it was ridiculous but nonetheless that was how it was. She blushed at the thought, was shocked back to the real world with a voice off her left shoulder.

  She jerked around, a short little twig of a waitress asking her if she’d like something to drink, a cocktail maybe? She stammered, yes, a White Russian, no, Jack Daniels and coke. Looked away from the girl’s eyes so nothing showed, or so she hoped. Her heart was going fast, trip-hammering in there like some practical joke waiting to go off. And as if sensing Skate’s discomfort, the waitress backed off and left without going over anything on the menu. This was just awkward, weird. She tried to get her mind right, tried to focus on the real reason she was sitting right here, right now. The Standish woman. A patient she’d seen one time only. Skate had gone back over the notes after the phone call last night but nothing had jumped out. Definitely the woman needed help but there was nothing Skate could do to force it on her. She’d shown and made several strange statements and disappeared back to wherever it was she’d come from. There were so many like her it was near impossible to make a firm connection and in the grand scheme of things (i.e. for the court’s exhibit, witness the mess she’d made with the man who was due to meet her for lunch, momentarily), but she wasn’t really run-of-the-mill. Skate had felt it that first time, a different type of grief. She’d wanted to have another go but, again, the woman had not come back. Then there’d been the strange circumstance of the dog catcher in her neighborhood, the dead family, but really that was just ghost story fodder.

  But now there was this.

  She didn’t know what it was but James Arnold was on the way to meet her here for “something important.” The only thing he’d mentioned over the phone was her name, whetting Skate’s appetite. She had no idea how he felt about her personally, but the lack of communication spoke volumes words could not. This thought brought her around. Arnold had not called her here as a romantic sideline; she remembered the man too distinctly to figure on anything so blatant as that; he’d called her here, in reality, because he did have some information he felt she needed. When you got right down to it; that was right down to it. Anything else was fantasyland not befitting a professional in her field. And you better remember that, the voice scolded again, unwilling to hide in the back of her mind.

  The waitress reappeared, set the drink down (Skate really didn’t recall what she’d ordered, and looking now was still hard-pressed to say) and Skate pulled herself away from the depths of her thoughts. “You wanna order something?” the twig of a waitress said, reaching for the notepad tucked into the waistband of her apron.

  Skate shook her head and gestured toward the empty chair across from her. “I’m waiting for someone,” she said. “He ought to be here any minute now,” and she nodded her head for emphasis. The twig nodded too, though without much confidence. There seemed to be too many such speculations in her life to believe any different. She shuffled off back to the shadows and Skate touched the glass to her lips. Whisky! She felt a momentary shock, unwilling to remember she’d asked for this, for lunch, and for just a moment she looked around for somewhere to pour it, to just leave it hidden. There was no such place and she idly wondered what Arnold would think, this psychologist drinking whiskey just after noon. But she had no more time for consideration because the door opened and from across the room she saw him come in.

  His face was set in the taut lines of determination, his thick, finely-pressed cotton pants and shirt immaculate, leaving Skate to think he looked more like a producer than a cop, though she knew not why. To her knowledge she’d never known, or for that fact, even seen one. He stopped in the doorway and scanned the room with trained eyes. She pushed the drink to the center of the table like it just might happen to belong to someone else and the instant her fingers left its cool surface his eyes found her. He came across the room in seconds, waving to a call from the corner as he went, but not slowing. He pulled back the chair across from her and sat down heavily. “Hello, Carolyn,” he said and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. She tried to smile, nodded.

  “I thought you quit,” she said pointing.

  He lit up and smiled crookedly. “I did.” He took one out and lit it, blew away the smoke in a pipe stream, and pursed his lips. His eyes ran along her face, not veering lower. She noticed and swallowed. “You’re looking…well,” he said. “Hope I didn’t throw off your plans.”

  “I didn’t have any.” There followed a moment of silence. Arnold took the cigarette out of his mouth again and placed it in the ashtray. Now he nodded.

  “Well,” he offered. “Think I got something you might be interested in.” He put his hands together on the table and leaned forward. The cigarette smoke whirled out and away from the pair, tracing ghostly patterns in the air.

  She drew toward him. “Okay,” she said and tried to smile again. Arnold’s face shaded a degree and he reached for the cigarette. Put it back in the corner of his mouth like it was holding something’s place. “This Standish woman may be involved in something a little weirder than I can figure. I got a feeling she might even be in danger.”

  Skate fumbled for the drink and took a sip, her eyes never leaving Arnold’s lips. “This is what I know,” he continued. He had no notes but Skate already knew him to possess a phenomenal memory. “Patricia Skate, currently unemployed. Widowed and childless as you’ve already heard. That much checks out. The accident, everything just like she t
old you. So,” and he fanned his hands, shrugged his shoulders. “That’s that. Plenty of pain and death to go around.” Skate nodded though Arnold took scant notice. He was seeing it now, she could practically see the shadows flitting about behind his eyes. “Of course you already know about the family dead of carbon monoxide poisoning and the SPCA guy who found em. He’s still sequestered up at the State House, mumbling like a goddamn monkey. And when he does say something understandable, it still doesn’t make any sense. At least not rationally. So, still unfortunate, but hey, the worm turns.” He drew on the cigarette deeply (Skate watched a quarter inch disintegrate almost instantaneously) and turned his head to blow out another great rail of smoke, which, while he talked continued to puff and seep like a coal fire all around his face. His eyes rocked back to hers and fixed. “This is what you don’t know. Coupla weeks back, this woulda been right after the Standish woman came to see ya, guy from Entergy out checking one of the switch boxes way out on the ass-end of the neighborhood gets fried. Whole fucking neighborhood’s electricity goes down for six hours. Not much left a the guy but leather and bone. So…” he bit his lip and nodded. “This ain’t even mentionin’ the guy who used to live in Standish’s house. Guy I tole you about, still missing. Hasn’t been seen or heard of since,” and again he sprinkled the air with his fingers as if performing magic. “Now we got something else. Mailman for the neighborhood since before there was a neighborhood…regular as a grandfather clock, he’s missing too. Mailtruck pulled right off to the side of the street, fulla mail, no sign of violence, keys still in the ignition. Gone. Fuckin’ gone,” and as if to push the point home he snubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. Shook his head. Squinted at Skate. “You haven’t checked anything out for yourself, have you?”

  She cocked her head. Looked at him aslant. “Where?”

  “The neighborhood,” he said and thumbed over his shoulder. Laughed. Said, “the neighborhood.”

  She tried to laugh too but couldn’t find it. “No. Why would I?” She didn’t like the look in his eyes but as soon as it appeared it was gone.

  “Wondering,” he said. “Just wondering,” and paused, his hand wanting to go to the cigarettes but something unspoken dissuading him. “Because I have.”

  For the second time today she found herself leaning forward, “Okay…?”

  He pinched his lower lip with his top teeth, leaned in a little closer over the table. They weren’t very far apart now. She could smell him, through the cigarettes, and for one flash her mind wandered back to the couch. She fought hard to bring herself back because he, on the other hand, went on like nothing. “Oh I don’t really know. Just a whim, probably, some vague notion I got. See, some asshole shot his neighbor’s car fulla holes in Tangletree, a little subdivision not far from there, fucking felon, so I had to spread myself around, checking up, and I remembered you bringing up the name last time.” Arnold ducked his chin in her direction, acknowledging her presence. “Leszno’s Farm,” he said reaching for the pack as his will snapped. “Nothing exciting. Middle class place. Handful a streets and a big pond, fuckin’ lake, toward the highway. I drove through, once again, checking, sniffing around. That’s it.” He lit the second and squinted through the smoke at her. “But something ain’t right…” he finished and dug in his left ear with his forefinger, looking off toward the door.

  The memory of the couch had escaped her when mention of the subdivision came up and her trained, analytical mind moved forward automatically, leaving her hormones somewhere back in the darkness of confusion. She didn’t like the way he looked. “What is it?” she asked, hopefully in just the right modulation, designed to put someone at ease, another innocuous, but many times productive, trick in the baring of souls. He looked at her again and tapped the cigarette into the ashtray.

  “You ever get feelings?” he said bluntly.

  For a split second Skate felt sure he was firing across her prow, looking for the trigger to the wounds he must already see. Then she looked again and knew he wasn’t, though she still couldn’t fathom his meaning or intention.

  “About what?”

  He inhaled again, blew out. “Anything.”

  She made a sign with her eyes that meant just as much, but he was already moving forward again, seemingly changing the subject. “Never will forget this one time,” he said and smiled grimly. “Could’na been on the force more than five, six months.” He took another dramatic pull, coughed blackly into his fist. “Domestic call. Nothing outta the ordinary. Some woman, got the address from dispatch. Remember it was a Wednesday, not even the weekend…” and he glanced down at the table and she looked too, realizing he’d pinched a roll of the tablecloth into a hard knot with both hands. Let it go but didn’t look up. “Nice neighborhood, big expensive fucking houses. Had a Benz in the driveway parked right beside a Jaguar. No broken glass or screaming drunks. No frying pans getting tossed. Just quiet, nice.”

  “But something didn’t feel right then, either.

  “I went up to the door and a woman answered. Figured it was the one called. She wasn’t beat up, didn’t look like she’d been crying. Clothes all right. Just looked kinda tired. I told her why I was there and she shook her head like she had no idea, you know? Smiled at me like a kid hiding something and said I must be mistaken. Well, I read off the address and she nodded, yeah, right address all right. Kinda stood there looking at me, so I held up my hands and told her someone at this address had called the police. Reported a domestic disturbance, and she just smiled that sad smile again. Shook her head. A man’s voice came from somewhere back in that big, dark house and she called over her shoulder. Said, ‘Honey, it’s nothing, be there in a second.’ If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget it. Like a kite falling out of the sky. But different somehow, and it threw me off a little. No sooner had I looked down at the pad in my hand like there may have been something written there that I’d missed, than the door slammed in my face and I heard, muffled, running feet, shoes on the stone floor I’d just noticed. My hand was on the doorknob when the shots were fired. Two, one right after the other, and then a pause. Then one more. When I got the door open she was dead and bleeding on the floor, the guy with the voice, her husband it turned out, slumped against the wall, one eye blinking real weird and blood running out his ear. Sonofabitch never made it to the hospital. And neither did she.”

  He stopped and looked hard at Skate. “That look, the little smile she gave me right before slamming the door. It’s the same fucking feeling I got driving through that goddamn neighborhood…”