Blackbird

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we’ve already got a one-armed man in the family. Another one would be way too Freudian.’

  ‘Don’t get ahead of me, Bis. Right now we’re just talking prowl.’

  The next evening, with LA and Zito out line-dancing at the Neon Hat, I finished a supper of microwaved beef stew and sesame breadsticks and decided to walk out to my workshop to start on LA’s bookends. But, for whatever reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about Zito, remembering how over the years we’d worn out the horse tracks in Hot Springs and the dog tracks in Shreveport, the casino boats at Bossier and all the waterholes in between. Something was sticking in my craw about Zito and LA seeing each other.

  Of course I knew how Max would react: he’d look at me over his little glasses and say, ‘What’s the beef? You and Zito have been friends for years.’

  ‘Maybe that’s part of the problem,’ I’d answer. ‘Zito and I crowed the sun up together too many times for me to have any illusions about him.’

  ‘I think I can put your dilemma on the half-shell for you, my friend,’ Max would then say. ‘You’re worried about LA getting involved with a guy like you.’

  A guy like me.

  The words took several odd bounces around the inside of my skull, which left me wondering how close to the truth my imaginary conversation with Max had gotten.

  I looked around the shop, trying to appreciate what I saw, everything that was supposed to be out here still in place, tools put up more or less where they belonged, the bench workably clear, the floor swept no more than a week ago. Things could be worse.

  But something felt strange, and I thought I felt a faint stirring of the hair on the back of my neck. I stood for a minute trying to figure out where the feeling was coming from. Taking another look around, I couldn’t see anything that seemed wrong, but the feeling persisted. I went back out and checked the yard around the shop. For a second I thought I caught the hint of an odd smell in the air, the same one I’d thought I smelled at Three, but it was instantly gone. Finally I put it all down to imagination and walked back inside.

  ‘Okay,’ I said aloud to my personal space. ‘Let’s do this.’

  I cleared the junk off the firebrick table, brought up the pressure on the acetylene and oxygen gauges, put on the welding apron and goggles, pulled on my gauntlets and used the striker to pop a flame on the cutting head.

  As I opened up to working pressure, checked the oxygen jet and began to rough out a couple of oblong bases from a scarred and pitted chunk of half-inch steel plate, I tried to steer my mind away from bad guys and their deeds, toward stillness and peace. Toward the place I knew Jana was in when she was working – somewhere far from the razor-edged everyday world, a zone where things flowed, came together and fit right, where she was able to become almost more spectator than artist as the clay came to life in her hands.

  But it didn’t work. My thoughts just stupidly and tiresomely kept plodding back to the separation, to seeing Casey and Jordan only a couple of times a week – admittedly more my fault than anybody else’s – to the memory of Dr Gold’s grey face beaded with icy rain, the milky lifeless eyes, made sharper somehow by being fixed and vacant, lancing into mine.

  A guy like me . . .

  Suddenly aware that anger had muscled aside everything else in my head, I realised I was no longer cutting the steel but attacking it, slashing at it with my knife of blue-white fire. I stopped working for a minute, lifted the goggles and took a couple of deep breaths, forcing myself to visualise LA’s credenza and the volumes of Eliot under the skylight. Settling the goggles back in place, I heated and bent pieces of old rod stock, welding them to the base, shaping random chunks of rail plate to add to that, responding to the shape and mass and gravitational pull of the steel, trying to avoid thinking altogether.

  And I must have succeeded somehow because two and a half hours went somewhere as flame spewed from the steel in rivers of stars that bounced brilliantly across the concrete of the shop floor, and my hands did what they did with no interference from me. Finally I stood back, raised the goggles and took a long look at the two pieces in normal light: they felt finished to me. Or not. The eye of the beholder was going to have to be the judge of that.

  With my left hand I used the tongs to plunge the pieces one at a time into the water bucket beside the table and dried them with the torch. I purged the acetylene line, shut down the tanks, hung up goggles, apron and gauntlets, then wire-brushed the slag and scale off the metal and took down its sharp edges with the stripping wheel. I used a cold chisel and maul to cut my initials into the base of each piece, knowing LA would never let me get away with not signing them. Finally I lacquered the metal to rust-proof it and glued on and trimmed a couple of green felt bases.

  When that was done – and since I was out here – I browbeat myself into getting on the stair-stepper for fifteen minutes, now thinking about the only thing I possibly could while doing this, which was dialling out the firing of the sensory neurons in my knees. Then, having come this far, I decided to work out on the heavy bag for another few minutes, keeping the sweat coming, this time doing something that felt good, finishing with a combination hard enough to rattle the rafters and numb my wrists and forearms. Then I tossed my gloves onto the bench, double-checked valves and switches, grabbed my still-warm artefacts and went in to shower.

  I had finished the newspaper and was slouched in my chair with a Corona, watching a documentary about the mortally wounded Bismarck steaming in circles until the Fairey Swordfish got the range, when LA came in. She was decked out in tight Wranglers, red lacers and a bright yellow western shirt, with a saucer-sized silver buckle on her belt that I hadn’t seen before. She was sober as a church mouse, but happy. Zito had that effect on women.

  ‘Go to your room, young lady,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk about this in the morning.’

  She laughed, a sound that had never been much more than a theoretical possibility when we were growing up. Showing me her Cotton Eye Joe step, she said, ‘Top that if you can.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I’m a stiff on the dance floor.’

  ‘False modesty,’ she said. ‘You’ve still got a move or two left in you.’

  I reached down beside my chair to retrieve the bookends and handed them to her. She took them carefully in both hands and examined them thoroughly, turning them one way and then the other, soaking them in. Finally she looked up at me. ‘My God, these are perfect,’ she said. ‘And I know exactly what they are – it’s from “The Waste Land” – the ragged claws.’

  ‘Just tell me one thing,’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Did you make the deal because you really wanted these, or to get me busy?’

  She studied me for a couple of beats. ‘Yes,’ she said. She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. ‘And thanks, Bis.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘Just don’t forget the days you owe me.’

  ‘You’re at the top of my to-do list,’ she said, setting the claws on the mantel and tilting her new buckle up for a closer look. ‘Would you believe this has the Alamo engraved on it?’

  ‘No longhorns?’ I said. ‘No map of Texas? What the hell were they thinking?’

  ‘Minimalists, I guess,’ she said. ‘So what’s on the programme for tomorrow?’

  ‘Talking to Max about the case, for one thing,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’ll have some ideas about the inner workings of Gold’s psyche.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How easy it is to think the answer could be there, in something that doesn’t exist any more.’

  ‘In where?’

  ‘Her mind.’

  That night in my dreams:

  I am standing alone and in darkness on an empty plain, the world filled with a rhythmic booming that shakes the ground under my feet, an immense heartbeat. But then it is thunder, and I am watching as glowing human bones rise one at a time out of
the dark earth in the flashing lightning of a terrible storm spreading across the sky. The bones assemble themselves into a luminous skeleton that curtsies to me, executes a smooth glide and turn, swings weightlessly onto the back of the tall white stallion that is suddenly there between us, and rides silently away into the heart of the rumbling storm, leaving behind a vision of lightning that slowly transforms itself into a wide T with drooping arms, burning bright with unknowable meaning for long seconds before flickering, dimming and finally vanishing.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The next morning I got up a few minutes ahead of the sun, made myself put in ten minutes on the stair-stepper, then showered, shaved, got dressed and went out for the newspaper. Looking around in the horizontal dawn light, I noticed a slight dusting of frost on the grass and caught a glimpse of what I took to be a coyote disappearing between two houses a block to the north. Along this stretch of Lanshire I could see three other newspapers lying on the lawns of fellow tree murderers.

  Back inside, I rummaged around among the cereal boxes, remembering that as a kid LA had generally favoured corn flakes. I found some instant oatmeal and four different kinds of sugar bombs in various shapes and colours that must have been abandoned by the girls, but only an old corn flakes box with a spoonful or so of cereal at the bottom that looked and smelled like it was over the hill anyway. I tossed the box and its contents in the recycle bin, mentally adding replacement flakes to the imaginary and soon-to-be-forgotten grocery list in my head. I set out shredded wheat and raisin bran along with some granola that looked to me like forest litter, and got the coffee going.

  As I was trying to make up my mind which of my cereals I disliked least, LA, wearing the almost knee-length Bigger Bang tour T-shirt she’d slept in, walked into the kitchen, yawning and scratching her head. She stopped, stared at the cereal boxes and other stuff on the table for a minute, then padded over to the counter to get coffee. On her way back she grabbed an orange from the fridge. Sitting across from me, she gave me the blank, wide-eyed morning gaze that told me she was only provisionally conscious at this point and wouldn’t be conversational for at least another couple of minutes. She sipped coffee, ignoring the orange. I dumped raisin bran into my bowl and reached for the milk, watching her. She took another sip of coffee. Mutt showed up, circled her chair and butted at her shin. She didn’t react.

  Then, as I was reaching the halfway point with my cereal, she set her cup down, glanced at Mutt and reached down to ruffle his fur. A minute later she said, ‘Tell Max you’re grinding your teeth in your sleep again.’ She set her cup down, yawned once more, looked at the orange for a while and went back to ignoring it. ‘Tell him I said you’re at seven and holding.’

  I was about to ask what she meant but, looking at her expression, recognised from long experience what a waste of time it would be.

  Then, as I was carrying the dishes to the sink, she said, ‘I finished off your apple juice last night. What was that funny smell by the back door?’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Driving to Max’s Oak Bluff office, my mind replayed what LA had told me.

  ‘It was more than one smell, something like – I don’t know – maybe a combination of pine sap, burning rope, wet paint, sweat, stuff like that, but really faint. Reminded me a little of the smell when they had crews working on the new wing of my office building. I wondered if it was something in the trash you’d just gotten rid of or something in my hair from the club. What’s the deal, Bis?’

  ‘Probably nothing. I’ll explain later.’

  I parked in the lot next to Max’s office, took the three steps up to the door and walked into his waiting room. Looking around at the familiar, comfortable furniture, big thriving jungle plants and restful art, I had a sense of time slipping silently away, leaving faint afterimages of the tangle of feelings I’d come here once a week for a year trying to sort out.

  Max came out to meet me dressed in his usual khakis and a plum-coloured twill shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and we walked back to his office, where a little stereo in the bookcase was playing The Magic Flute at low volume. From his walk it was obvious he had a bad back, but he was a good-sized man with strong arms and big, square, clever hands. His semi-grey beard was trimmed close and he had a little less hair on his head than I did, brushed casually and without any attempt at subterfuge.

  He grabbed the red mug I always used and poured coffee for me, then made himself a cup of tea at the credenza where the electric hot-water carafe stood on a green plastic cafeteria tray with sugar, creamer and other paraphernalia. He squeezed a little honey from a bear-shaped container into his tea, stirred it with an ebony letter-opener carved in the shape of a medieval sword, and sat down. I took my usual chair.

  ‘LA says to tell you I’m grinding my teeth again and I’m at seven and holding.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What does “seven and holding” mean?’

  ‘Just a little shorthand we worked out,’ he said. ‘It means you’re at seven out of ten, ten being one hundred per cent depression-free. And you’re not losing ground.’

  I grunted irritably and drank some coffee.

  ‘So, all this craziness – what’s going on? Can you enlighten me?’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking of asking you.’

  Max said, ‘Which do you want enlightenment about, the case or Gold herself?’

  ‘Let’s start with her.’

  ‘Well, as I’m sure you’ve found out by now, she was the worst kind of bitch imaginable,’ he replied.

  ‘Don’t pull your punches.’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘You’re saying she had enemies?’

  Max’s eyebrows went up. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘Show me her friends.’ He shook his head. ‘It almost seemed necessary to her to be insufferable. I can’t think of anyone who didn’t dislike her.’

  ‘Personal or professional?’

  ‘Both. It pains me that she was a psychologist; she was an embarrassment to us all.’

  ‘You think the killer could have been another psychologist?’

  ‘Most of us don’t deal with our anger that directly or violently, but I suppose anything’s possible. What about the husband?’

  ‘Out of town,’ I said. ‘Always the possibility he contracted it out, but nothing pointing that way so far. Ever hear of her being into SM, bondage, that kind of stuff?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘With whom?’

  ‘Ben Frix, for one,’ I said.

  ‘Wasn’t that the insurance broker – died in a fire at his house?’

  I nodded as I picked up my coffee. ‘You know of any connection between Frix and Gold?’

  ‘None at all. But in your place, given the circumstances and timing, I’d certainly be wondering about that.’

  I gave him the basics of what I knew, ending with the anatomical shuffle the killers had performed.

  ‘Good God,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the psychology of something like this?’

  Max scratched his chin, thinking it over. ‘Well, there’s all the obvious stuff like the assumption of rage against women, sexual sadism, revenge, that kind of thing. But the savagery of it doesn’t seem to fit with the implied level of calculation. I’d say there’s a confounding of purposes here.’

  ‘Multiple killers with different motivations?’

  ‘As strange as it sounds, I think you have to consider the possibility. Any suspects at this point?’

  ‘It looks like it’s between the skinheads, her fellow psychologists, her former playmates and pretty much everybody else in the world. Just about the only people we can definitely rule out are the ones in the cemetery, and I’m not so sure about them any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I told him about the rumours of cult involvement, the talk of freshly-thawed heads in Argentina, the hints of supernatural legions warped forward in time and marching in the night. ‘And you can imagine how much Frix’s death adds to the fun.
’

  He smiled slightly. ‘What would life avail us without mystery?’

  I shrugged. ‘So, what am I missing here?’

  ‘Well, let’s think about it,’ he said. He sipped tea. ‘Take the skinheads, meaning everybody from the neo-Nazi, KKK and Aryan Nation characters to the radical tax resisters, ultra-right survivalists, abortion clinic bombers and what-have-you – what you’ve got are mostly frustrated, marginal characters, Christian extremists in a lot of cases, obsessed with weaponry and so forth, looking for phallic potency and the unconditional love their mother was supposed to give them but didn’t. Take it all together, you could get a pretty unholy stew of sexual frustration, misogynistic rage and violent religiosity. That might be enough to explain a murder like this.’ He set his cup aside.

  ‘What would you say if I told you the crucifixion was done by the numbers, the way they did it two thousand years ago?’

  ‘How so?’ he said.

  I summarised for him what I’d found out about old-time crucifixion so far. ‘Then there’s the Roman coin we found at the bottom of the tree they nailed her to.’

  Max shook his head. ‘Truly bizarre,’ he said. ‘But it just doesn’t sound much like our friends with shaved heads. Religious extremism and atheism are the natural habitat of lower-level and mediocre intellects, so if the motive wasn’t specifically religious in some way, and assuming the skin-heads were involved, you’d almost be forced to think in terms of some intelligent manipulator behind it all. And if the killing was a racial or ethnic gesture, wouldn’t you expect some sort of accompanying manifesto? Some thumbing of the killers’ noses? A note, a Star of David, a swastika in spray paint, a letter to the editor, something like that?’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘So, since the killing makes no sense as a plain murder, a religious statement or a terrorist gesture, and unless ancient Romans actually were involved, I think you’re after someone who’s very clever, someone Dr Gold injured or threatened in some profound way. An individual who has the ability to recruit and control the worst kind of thugs imaginable.’