Blackbird

  Jana had designed and built the shower herself out of Italian marble and tiles she’d glazed and fired in the kiln out back, and it was big enough to park a jeep in, with six adjustable shower heads and a seat built into one wall. I stepped into the hot water and steam behind her, took the glycerin soap from her hand and began lathering her neck, shoulders and arms. Then I worked my way down her back, massaging the muscles, then over her breasts and stiffening nipples, under her arms, across her stomach. Having finished her hair, she turned around, put her hands on my shoulders and stood with legs apart, breathing harder as I soaped her gently between her legs, then knelt to lather and wash her thighs and the rest of the way down her legs to her feet and finally her toes.

  Then it was my turn. She washed my hair with a shampoo that smelled like cut green grass, taking her time, letting her breasts brush against me as she worked. Then she lathered me all over with the glycerin soap as I had done for her, finally motioning for me to sit on the shower seat, touching the bullet wounds under my left arm and just above and to the right of my navel with her fingertips, taking a lot of time gently washing my knees, lightly tracing the knotted surgical scars with her thumbs and fingers. When she was finished she pushed my shoulders back against the tile, kissed me deeply and moved forward to hold my hips with her thighs as she let herself smoothly down onto my erection. I shifted to accommodate her, but she said, ‘Don’t move.’

  I obeyed. She remained motionless for a minute, holding my face in her hands and looking into my eyes, then began moving her hips slowly. Watching my reactions closely to pace us both, she had to remind me twice more not to move as she patiently, expertly brought us to climax together, pressing her open mouth down on my shoulder and screaming softly against my skin as she came.

  Later as I dried her off she sighed deeply and said, ‘Nothing like a hot shower at the end of a hard day.’

  Neither of us said anything more that night. We slept back to back between unbleached, organically-grown cotton sheets, and I tried to imagine waking up in this bed every morning. I had a toothbrush here, along with everything else needed for an overnight, even two at a stretch, but Jana and I had never made it to the second night. We hadn’t been able to stay clear of the issue of my job and the Flying S that long. And I knew better than to think my coming here meant anything in terms of our basic relationship. We’d become what I once heard called ‘enemies with benefits’. I wanted to believe ‘enemies’ was overstating it, but there was no denying that marriages could sometimes go up in smoke while leaving the spouses’ sex life standing, like the brick chimney of a burned-down house. And where my job was concerned, I knew nothing had changed in Jana’s heart.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jim, don’t you get it?’ she’d screamed at me the last time I was here. ‘Nobody likes cops! They’re like morticians and laxatives – you don’t want anything to do with them if you can help it. This fucking job is going to be the end of you!’

  ‘That’s overreaction, Jay.’

  ‘Oh really? You’ve already been shot twice! Who’s zoomin’ who here?’

  ‘I’m off the street now.’

  ‘Are you? What’s so terrible about running the farm, Jim? About peace and quiet and safety for a change? You’ve told me a thousand times how much that place meant to you. How can you let Dusty and Ray just sell it and go tripping off to see the world? Watch it broken up into trailer parks and salvage yards while you stay here and let a bunch of sister-fucking frecklebacks blow your brains out in the street?’ She angrily swiped at the tears on her face. ‘Where does that leave the girls and me? Can we prop that goddamn macho pride in your chair at the table when you’re dead and gone?’

  ‘Frecklebacks?’

  She’d snatched a tissue from the box beside her, honked into it, and said, ‘Don’t patronise me, dammit!’

  Now, as we worked our way through a breakfast of yogurt, melon balls and chilled guava juice, I said, ‘OZ’s always said he wants me to replace him when he retires. But Dwight Hazen’s making noises about firing me.’

  ‘Firing you?’ she said. ‘What’s that about?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘He’s talking about the Gold case and maybe some old stuff, but I’m not really sure what he’s thinking.’

  She watched my eyes for a moment. ‘So what is it, Jim? What in God’s name keeps you stuck like this to that tar baby of a job?’

  I didn’t have an answer for her.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  On the way downtown from Jana’s place I convinced myself that because I had struck a blow for sound nutrition at dawn I was now entitled to do something about my hunger. I stopped for a couple of sausage-and-egg biscuits and coffee at the first drive-thru I saw.

  The stuff actually tasted pretty good, prompting me to think I might be on an upswing. I drove south, leaving the residential stretch of the Boulevard behind and cruising through the commercialised lower end, past a couple of insurance agencies, RCS equipment rentals, the big Glen Lawrence & Owen Contractors complex, Hardin Autoglass, an old Texaco station born again as a body shop. I rounded the long curve at West 30th and continued down into old Traverton where the three states came together and the layout and numbering of the streets got crazy, arriving at Tri-State a couple of minutes behind schedule.

  As I walked past her desk Bertie handed me a printout detailing the possibly case-related items found in the remains of Benjamin Frix’s house: thirty-six gold bars, almost two hundred pounds of gold and silver coins, five Colt and Springfield .45 slabsides with six cases of ball ammo, an X-Frame in .500 Smith and Wesson with a ten-and-a-half-inch barrel – a massive, unwieldy revolver of almost uncontrollable power and recoil – four MAC-10s with several cases of ammunition, half a dozen AK-47s and ammo, an M1 carbine modified for full-automatic fire along with ten thirty-round magazines, sixteen live hand grenades from different military eras, and a Claymore mine. At the bottom of the page was a notation that around a dozen rounds of pistol ammunition had cooked off unnoticed before fire-fighters arrived, but all the grenades and most of the ammo had been stored either in the insulated safe or in fire-resistant canisters.

  The first call I returned from my desk was Cass Ciganeiro’s, and as I waited for her to come on I grabbed the notepad from the top drawer, its margins filled with doodles of Ts and hammer-wielding arms.

  ‘Here’s some stuff for you,’ she said. ‘Starting back maybe twenty years ago there’ve been some protest-type groups operating in this area, holing up in the Ouachitas and Ozarks, stockpiling automatic weapons – ’ I took another look at the printout as Cass went on: ‘ – these characters are usually anti-government, anti-Semitic and white supremacist. Any one of them could be a candidate.’

  ‘Haven’t the feds slowed those guys down at all?’

  ‘You mean by shooting women, children and dogs, setting fire to religious loonies, wiretapping everybody and just generally wiping their ass with the Constitution?’

  ‘Well . . . ’

  ‘If history is any guide, it probably had the opposite effect,’ she said. ‘The only thing I can imagine these characters doing is circling the wagons a little tighter, maybe going deeper underground. They’re still pretty hooked up to the religious far right.’

  ‘That’s another thing I don’t get,’ I said. ‘The holiness connection. Whatever happened to the Prince of Peace?’

  ‘Honey, try to stay focused; around here they throw lions to the Christians. And don’t forget that guy Lummus who got the needle in Arkansas a while back. He and his buddies wanted to kill most of the rest of us and overthrow the government, bulldoze the universities, jail the press and make America a whiter and better place. Before he died he said we’d better watch out because justice was coming and it was going to be terrible swift.’

  Something in this started a tingle at the base of my brain. I said, ‘Like in “His terrible swift sword”?’

  ‘What do I know? At that point he was out of the loop on Xanax or something anyway, so no t
elling what he had in mind. But I think most of us took it as a generic threat on behalf of his brothers up there in the hills.’

  ‘The Sword of the Lord, something like that, wasn’t it?’ Another tingle.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it exactly. Ties to the Klan, Aryan Nation, Posse Comitatus and some of the clandestine militias. Usually it’s just a bunch of redneck dropouts with bad teeth playing war, but they’re serious and they’re pretty organised. The women and children sometimes tag along, and let me tell you, when you talk to them, they’re scarier than the men.’

  ‘Cass, you know I read the paper front to back every day, especially your stuff – ’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘But if there’s been anything on these groups since Lummus’s execution, I don’t remember seeing it.’

  ‘There really hasn’t been much,’ she said. ‘Naturally we get hate mail all the time, every kind you can imagine, like the stuff you guys probably get. A lot of it’s just incoherent and scattered, and there’s been no connection with any reported crime that I know of.’

  ‘Or we’d have heard from you.’

  ‘Damn better believe it,’ she said. ‘So what’ve you got for me? I bent over for you on this, Jim, and I better at least get a reach-around here.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Any weapons used?’

  ‘None found.’

  ‘I said “used”.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Don’t jack with me, Bonham,’ she said. ‘Never forget – I know your nickname.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Gold wasn’t shot or stabbed. She was nailed up alive, and there were no immediately lethal wounds on the body. Also, there are no suspects yet.’

  ‘A quote, by God,’ she crowed. ‘You’re confirming death by crucifixion?’

  ‘That’s how it looks.’

  ‘Dying of crucifixion – what’s that mean exactly?’

  ‘Hanging there the way she did, she couldn’t breathe right, so along with going into shock, she asphyxiated.’

  ‘Sounds nasty. They do anything else to her?’

  ‘Yeah, they cut her tongue out while she was still alive.’

  ‘Holy shit. How the hell do you get somebody to open their mouth for that?’

  ‘The only thing I can think of is brute force and something to pry with.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not for publication.’

  ‘On background?’

  I described the mutilation and transposition of organs. There was a silence.

  Finally Cass said, ‘Jesus Christ, Jim. That’s fucking sick.’

  ‘No argument here.’

  ‘How did they grab her?’

  ‘It looks like they overpowered her at her office.’

  ‘What about the husband?’

  ‘There are no suspects.’

  ‘Has he been questioned?’

  ‘Nobody’s been questioned. Right now it’s interviews.’

  ‘So, off the record, did he have anything to do with it?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘What’s your best guess?’

  ‘I don’t see him in on it.’

  ‘What about Frix?’ she said. ‘That a murder yet?’

  ‘Awaiting the autopsy.’

  ‘You see a connection?’

  ‘There’s no evidence of one.’

  ‘What’s your best guess?’

  ‘Off the record, Ben Frix is a murder, and if I had to bet I’d put my money on there being a connection.’

  ‘I can imagine how happy that makes you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Have you talked to any of Gold’s patients?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Pursuing all avenues.’

  ‘I’m not gonna warn you again, Jim,’ she said. ‘Next time I get strict.’

  ‘Sorry, best I can do on that one,’ I said.

  ‘Did Gold have money problems?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘Was she into drugs?’

  ‘Still looking into that. There’s no known connection to her death, though.’

  ‘That sounds evasive.’

  ‘Sorry again.’

  ‘Some reports said she was raped – that true?’

  ‘No “scientific certainty”, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘Any semen found?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘So you’re not ruling out sexual assault as the motive?’

  ‘Don’t use those words to me,’ I said.

  ‘What, “sexual assault”?’

  ‘“Ruling out”.’

  ‘Anything about the cross itself or how she was affixed to it?’

  ‘It was a six-foot four-by-four lashed to a tree. She was nailed to it.’

  ‘What’s a four-by-four?’

  ‘Common lumber size, like a couple of two-by-fours stuck together, a little under four inches to the side. Used for posts, heavy framing, bracing.’

  ‘What’s the significance of the length?’

  ‘Probably nothing because it’s one of the standard lengths they come in. Six, eight, ten feet – like that.’

  ‘Any way of tracing the source?’

  ‘Ninety-nine per cent against.’

  ‘Where does the other one per cent come in?’

  ‘Always the possibility we might catch a weird break.’

  ‘What kind of break are we talking about?’

  ‘If I knew that I wouldn’t have to wait for it.’

  ‘How about the nails?’

  ‘Big.’

  ‘Geez, Jim.’

  ‘That’s all I’ve really got on the nails, Cass. They’re not going to help us anyway, unless we catch somebody with the rest of the boxful and match them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too generic to trace.’

  ‘Had Gold received any threats?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘How many perpetrators?’

  ‘Had to be more than one.’

  ‘Then how many?’

  ‘Consensus, more than two, less than five.’

  ‘That works out to three or four.’

  ‘So girls can learn math after all.’

  ‘Exactly how do you know she was alive when she was nailed up?’

  ‘Condition of the body.’

  ‘That’s pretty vague.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘How long did it take her to die?’

  ‘Conjecture, several hours.’

  A silence. Finally Cass said, ‘And I thought it couldn’t get any worse – ’

  I said nothing.

  Cass said, ‘Anything at the scene point you anywhere?’

  ‘Can’t comment. Sorry.’

  ‘Tight-ass.’

  ‘I would hope.’

  ‘I didn’t say virginal.’

  Bertie came back, this time carrying a car key on a ring with a little zodiac-symbol medallion, which she dropped on my desk.

  ‘Just a minute, Cass,’ I said. Then to Bertie, ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Lee Ann’s car key. She traded vehicles with you to go shopping for a desk.’

  I checked my pocket, finding my key ring with the Ford’s key still on it. ‘She’s driving the truck?’ I said. ‘How’d she know where to find the spare key?’

  Accurately diagnosing this as unworthy of a response, Bertie just gave me a pitying look and walked away.

  ‘Lee’s here?’ said Cass’s telephone voice. ‘Is she consulting? I could use some conversation with a chick as smart as me. Can I interview her?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask her,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t get my hopes up. She handles your kind with the greatest of ease.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what makes her fun. What else have you got?’

  ‘Nothing right now,’ I said. ‘I’ll have more for you, at least off the record, when all the primary interviews are in. There are two tip lines open on this, and there’s
a mountain of stuff from Crimestoppers, lead sheets, informants and so on. Anybody’s guess how good any of it’ll be, but you’ll be the first one I call, Cass.’

  She settled for that, though not gracefully.

  ‘Say hi to Lee for me,’ she said. ‘And tell her she gives me a quote or I’m unfriending the shit out of her.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I cleared out most of my day’s accumulation of dead trees by scribbling my name eleven times, returned a call from a high-school counsellor who wanted me to speak to a couple of classes – happily bucking it to Ridout – then noticed what I’d drawn on the legal pad in front of me while talking with Cass. There were several more versions of the arm and hammer logo, but it was obvious they were changing, the hammers looking less and less like hammers and more like something else, though I didn’t know what. The heads had become narrower, closer to the fist, the tops of the handle shafts now looking pointy and projecting through and past the heads. I felt another brain-tingle, but couldn’t connect it to anything. I balled up the page of doodles and tossed it at the basket. Off the wall and in. I dialled LA, and she picked up on the fifth ring.

  ‘Your truck rides like a log wagon,’ she said.

  ‘Any luck?’ I said.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But I ran into Zito and Hotfoot.’

  ‘Hotfoot?’

  ‘His sniffer dog.’

  ‘I thought his dog’s name was Diggity.’

  ‘Diggity’s retired,’ she said. ‘Bad hip.’

  ‘Where’d you find them?’

  ‘At a fire – I heard him on your scanner and drove over there. He showed me around.’

  ‘That’s Zito for you,’ I said. ‘Did he show you his trick?’

  ‘What trick?’

  ‘He can juggle three quarters with his one hand. He shows it to all the girls.’ Zito was now rich because of the faulty detonator that had cost him his right hand and forearm, but in my opinion it hadn’t improved his character.

  ‘Is that the only trick he knows?’ she enquired unmercifully.

  ‘Unfortunately, no,’ I said. ‘Gotta watch him – he’s always on the prowl.’

  ‘Does he give good prowl?’

  ‘Don’t even ask.’

  ‘I bet he does. I might prowl with him a little just to see.’