“Two guys came to burn down the house,” she said. She said it quietly, like a scholar making the killing point.
“Goddamnit,” I said after a while. “I think they killed him.”
7
We sent the second copies of the Jaz disks off to Bobby’s friend John Smith—also a friend of mine, and an artist himself—and I spent the next two days trying to find something that made sense on the Jaz disks, and working along the edges of the bay, with watercolor. Salty water has a different quality from fresh water, a heavier, more viscous feel. The heaviness was compounded by the light, which was very green and hard. I never got it quite right.
Lane stayed at the house, getting ready for the funeral, doing a little telecommuting and some restless reading. She also spent some time poking through the Jaz disks, but neither of us found much.
Three days after the fire, the blisters on her arms were drying to unsightly splotches of itchy dead skin, while the redness under her neck had begun to fade to brown. I brought in meals during the day, and in the cool evenings we walked out to dinner at a dimly lit Italian place, where the burns wouldn’t be visible.
The funeral took place on a beautiful California morning, fifty people gathered in an old-fashioned Spanish-style stucco chapel, where an Episcopalian priest said all the right words with the right dignity. The women cried, the men shook hands and Harry Connick Jr.’s “Sunny Side of the Street” played through the sound system as Jack’s childhood friends carried his casket out the side door.
LuEllen walked in the door a few seconds after the service started. I almost didn’t recognize her in the New York black dress, hat, and wraparound sunglasses. She lifted a hand to me and slipped into a pew across the way. Lane didn’t notice—she was out of it, struggling through the worst week of her life, struggling to get her older brother into the ground.
At the end of the service, Lane went to the front door to shake hands. LuEllen drifted over to me and said, “Bummer.”
I said, “Yeah,” and then, “You’re looking nice. The black dress.”
“I was working in New York,” she said. LuEllen was something of a chameleon. In black, without lipstick, with her close-cropped frosted-blond hair, she could have been a London model, except that she was too short, and her shoulders a tad too wide. When she put on Western shirts, the kind with the arrows at the corners, and cowboy boots, you’d swear she’d come straight back from hauling hay out to a horse barn in Wyoming, a rosy-cheeked good-time country girl. In Miami, she could have been a drug dealer’s bimbo; in San Diego, a slightly used Navy wife on the lookout for a Coronado Island admiral . . .
But she was a lot more than all of that.
“Anything good?” I asked.
“Coin dealer. Let it go. Way too much protection.” She looked around with the kind of eye-drooping, stand-back attitude she tended to develop after a couple of weeks of pushing her way around Manhattan.
“Not like you need the money,” I said.
“Not yet, anyway,” she said. She nodded at Lane. “Who’s the chick? Jack wasn’t married, was he?”
“His sister. Lane Ward.”
“Oh, yeah; when you look at her close, you can see it.” She looked at Lane and then back up at me: “Too much makeup for my style,” she said.
“There’s a story behind it.” I told her about the house and the fire. “So she’s flash-burned on her neck and arms and the cops want to talk to her. We’re trying to bullshit our way through the funeral, then get her out of sight until she’s healed.”
“Gotta hurt,” she said. LuEllen was unimpressed by pain; her own or anybody else’s.
“It does. The doc said it’d take eight or ten days to heal, so we’ve got a while to go.”
“Can we talk with her around?”
“I think so; but I haven’t given her anything on you at all, except your first name, and I’ll keep it that way.”
“All right,” she said. Then: “You getting laid?”
“Not by Lane, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“By who?”
“Software lady back in the Cities. We’re building a computer together.” I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could tell they were rolling.
“Nerd love,” she said.
“Nerd love,” I agreed. “How about you?”
“Nothing right now. I’ve been working pretty hard. I did a hundred and seventy thousand in Miami a couple of months ago, scared myself brainless.”
“Come close?”
“Not to getting caught, but the people . . . bunch of peckerwood meth manufacturers. If they’d figured me out, they would’ve cut me up with a chainsaw, and I shit you not.”
Sometimes LuEllen and I were in bed, sometimes not. She had a taste for slender, dark-haired Latin men with big white teeth. I’m not any of that. We hadn’t been in the sack for a while, but I expected that she’d be back. Or I would, or something. We’d probably be buried next to each other, sooner or later: funeral thoughts.
On the way out of the church, I introduced her to Lane, who smiled and nodded, and we went outside. I’d driven Lane to the church in her car, but she’d ride to the cemetery with friends. I decided to go with LuEllen, and pick up Lane’s car on the way back.
“You know what wouldn’t be a bad way to go?” LuEllen asked, on the way out to the cemetery. “You know your time has come, it’s all over. Go up in the North Woods in the wintertime, where there are wolves around. You sit down, take your coat off, and chill out. Wouldn’t hurt. You’d just go to sleep, and instead of rotting, you’d be a dinner for the wolves. Something useful—and you’d wind up as a wolf yourself, sort of.”
“Wouldn’t hurt as long as the wolves didn’t get there early,” I said.
“That’s really romantic,” she said.
“Or you’d probably wind up getting eaten by field mice. Voles.”
“Shut up, Kidd.”
Half the people at the church followed to the cemetery. Jack was buried in a smoothly curving piece of the earth framed by a dozen small redwoods; nice spot. The funeral was one of those where, after the coffin is let down into the ground, the bystanders walk by and toss a handful of dirt into the grave. We filed past, LuEllen a step ahead of me, and when I turned past the top of the grave, saw a thick-necked man in a suit and sunglasses standing a hundred yards away, half concealed behind a granite gravestone.
I’d seen him once before, I thought: outside the house in Dallas, his face silhouetted by a streetlight.
“Got a problem,” I muttered to LuEllen. “You got your cameras?”
“In the car,” she said. She looked right at me, too smart to look for trouble.
“I’m gonna turn, and if you look past my shoulder, you’ll see a guy in a gray suit and black sunglasses, about a hundred yards off. What are the chances of getting a shot?”
I turned and she turned with me, smiling, saying, “Yadda yadda yadda,” and then, “All right, I got him. He’s not a cop, unless he’s some kind of federal spook that I don’t want to know about.”
“He’s not a cop,” I said. “He could be private security. He could be a major asshole.”
The people at the funeral were starting to look around, ready to start moving as soon as the last handful of dirt was dropped in the grave. LuEllen said, “Let me give you a peck, say good-bye,” and I leaned over and she gave me a peck on the cheek and started for her car, lifting a hand to wave good-bye as she went.
She was the first to go; her car was only fifty feet down the cemetery lane. She popped the trunk with a remote key, pulled out a shoulder bag, tossed it across the front seat, started the car and drove away. I turned, casually, saw the man in the gray suit still standing there, but faced in a different direction, looking ninety degrees away from us. The last handful of dirt went in the grave, and Lane shook hands with a couple of people, and took the arm of a guy who, with his wife, had driven her to the cemetery: their oldest friends, Jack’s and Lane’s, and from what I’d seen, nice people.
As Lane started moving toward the car, the man in gray started to move, down away from the stone where he was standing. I couldn’t see a car—it was apparently behind an evergreen-covered knoll, out of sight. LuEllen had only had a couple of minutes to set up, and I wasn’t sure if she was ready yet. Nothing to do about it, and since I’d come with her, I had nothing to do but wait. The man in the gray suit came to watch? Couldn’t be that simple.
Everybody was moving now, but Lane, about to get in the backseat of her friends’ car, saw me standing, watching, and called, “Kidd? Where’s your friend?”
I strolled over and said, “Give me a hug?”
With a question on her face, she stepped over to give me a hug and I said, quietly as I could, “One of the people who burned Jack’s house is here.”
“Oh, no.” She took my arm and led me a few steps away from the car, looking up at me earnestly, as if giving comfort. What she said was, “What’s he doing? Do you see him?”
“He left as soon as you started to. I gotta get back to your house. I’m afraid he might have been here to keep an eye on you while the other guy broke in. Are Jack’s disks . . .”
“On my desk. Both copies.”
“Shit.”
“But we sent a set to Bobby . . .”
“Yeah, but if they get the others, they’ll know that we’ve at least looked at them,” I said. “Or that you have, anyway.”
“But we don’t know anything. Not really,” she said.
“They don’t know that.”
LuEllen’s rental car whipped around the knoll, moving too fast on the narrow black-topped cemetery lane. She pulled up, popped the door and said, “Got him, and got his plate.”
“Good. We’ve gotta get back to Lane’s place. Like now.”
“Call the police,” Lane said. LuEllen and I glanced at each other. She caught it and said, “Okay. I’ll call the police. We’ll find a pay phone on the way out. The guy who was here knows we can’t get back there for half an hour. If there is another guy, maybe the police could still catch him.”
“Worth a try,” I said.
“Wait for me.”
She went back to her friends’ car, leaned in the back, said something, got her purse, and hurried back to us. “I’m riding with you,” she said.
We drove out to a gas station, spotted a drive-up coin phone. LuEllen dialed 911 and passed the phone to Lane, who said, “Look, I don’t want to get involved in this, but I think I saw a man breaking into a house. No, I don’t want to get involved . . .” She gave the address, hung up, and we were gone.
LuEllen would not have anything more to do with any cops: “I’ll drop you at the church so you can get Lane’s car, and I’ll call you from a motel.”
“Sure.”
LuEllen looked at Lane: “If the cops are there when you get there . . .”
“I’ll be surprised.”
“Tell them that you were at your brother’s funeral. Right up front. First thing.”
“Why?”
“That’ll fit you into a slot, for the cops. Dopers hit houses during funerals. The neighbors have gotten used to people coming and going, and during the funeral itself, the house is usually empty, so it’s a good time to go in. It’s like a thing.”
“Like an MO,” Lane said.
“Right, exactly,” LuEllen said. “Like television.”
The cops were there, two squads, four officers. We pulled up and one of them came trotting over. Lane got out and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Do you live here, ma’am?”
“Yes, it’s my house.”
“We think it may have been broken into. We got an anonymous nine-one-one call and when we checked, we found the front door had been forced.”
Lane’s hand went to her throat and she said, “Is the man . . .”
“We don’t think he’s inside. We talked to one of the neighbors and he said he saw a man exit the back door, and walk away down the street—that was just about the time we got the nine-one-one call. He had a fifteen-minute start on us by the time we talked to the neighbor, so he’s miles away. His car was probably right around the corner.”
“Oh, my god,” Lane said, and she started walking toward the house. I said to the cop, “We were just at her brother’s funeral.”
“You’re not her husband?” One of the cops asked, as the others started after Lane.
“No, I’m just a friend of her brother’s; I drove her car to the church.”
“We better check the house, just in case,” he said.
Inside, as the cops moved from one room to the next, Lane looked at me and shook her head, silently mouthed, “They’re gone.” Also gone: her laptop, a jewelry box with a few hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry—and a lot of memories, Lane said—a Minolta 35mm camera and three lenses, a checkbook, a couple of hundred English pounds that she kept in a bureau drawer, and a broken Rolex watch given her by her ex-husband.
“Making it look like they were here for the high-value stuff . . . laptops, cameras. Making it look like junkies,” I muttered.
“Goddamn animals.”
The cops were decent about it. They told her there wasn’t much they could do, absent any indication of who might have broken in. They apologized, as though it were their fault, told her to get better locks, and left.
Lane and I spent the next ten minutes teasing out the consequences of the burglary. There were a couple. If the people who took the disks were worried about what Jack knew, and were willing to kill him to keep his mouth shut, then the same might apply to Lane. On the other hand, they might look at the disks and conclude that nothing on them was worth killing for—that another death would just draw attention to them. Flip a coin.
LuEllen called, and I told her about the burglary: “The cops are gone, we’re gonna have a war council.”
“I’ve got a room at the Holiday Inn,” she said. “I’ll change clothes and come over . . . listen, you don’t have a package, do you?”
“No.”
“Maybe . . .”
“Yeah.”
LuEllen had reverted to her usual dress by the time she arrived at Lane’s: jeans and cowboy boots, and an orange silk blouse under a jean jacket. She had the figure of a gymnast to go with the jeans: she looked spectacular, if you like cowgirls. She brought along a roll of 35mm Polaroid color slide film, a compact Polaroid film-development machine, a single-slide cabin projector, and a box of empty slide holders. She popped the film out of the camera, and we sat around the kitchen table while she developed it, cut out the individual frames, and snapped the frames into the plastic slide holders.
“If she’s gonna be around here, she’s gonna need somebody looking out for her,” LuEllen said, talking to me as if Lane weren’t there.
I nodded. “You know who I’m thinking about? I’m thinking about John Smith. He’s in on this already, and he lived in Oakland. I bet he’d know somebody.”
“Who’s John Smith?” Lane asked.
“He’s a guy, an artist,” I told her. “He was a young kid in Oakland back in the early seventies when the Black Panthers were going. He’s still out there on the left, still knows a lot of hard people.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“We helped him organize a Communist revolution in the Mississippi delta,” I said.
“Unsuccessfully, I take it.”
“No, no, it worked out fine,” LuEllen said. That might have been an overstatement. Bobby had convinced us that there might be some money involved in overthrowing a little strong-arm dictatorship in a small town of the Mississippi River. By the time we finished, we’d made some money, all right, and our friends were running the place, but there was blood on the ground, and some of the dead were good people. LuEllen doesn’t always seem to remember that part of it; or she does, but finds no point in dwelling on it. She looked at me. “So we call him.” She’d finished with the film, got the little cabin projector, plugged it in, and projected a slide against the
white front of Lane’s refrigerator.
“That’s the guy,” I said. “I’d bet on it.”
Lane shivered and said, “He looks mean.”
She was right. He had that thick-necked, tight-mouthed linebacker look, with a crew cut to make the point. “I’m sure he is,” I said.
The next slide showed the same man caught as he climbed into a red Toyota Camry with California plates. I jotted down the number: “Who does Camrys?” I asked LuEllen.
“Hertz,” she said.
“Time to make some calls,” I said.
LuEllen and I drove out to the pay phone again, and I hooked up my laptop, called Bobby and gave him the tag number for the Camry: “Rental car, could be Hertz. Need to know the driver’s name and anything else you can find. Driver probably lives in Dallas area, probably flew into San Francisco in the last day or two. Dump to my cache site, I’ll pick it up later. Plan to call John Smith for some help, talk to him.”
Then we called John.
“Kidd, goddamnit, it’s been a while . . .” He pulled his mouth away from the phone long enough to yell, “You guys be quiet for a minute, okay? Daddy’s on the telephone—hey, Marvel, it’s Kidd.” Then he was back: “What’s up?”
Then Marvel picked up, and I said, “How’s the commie state senator?” and she laughed and the bullshit rolled on for a few minutes. Then LuEllen wanted to talk, and we had a long-distance old-home week. I finally took the phone back and said, “Listen, John, we’ve got a problem out here in California—we’re in Palo Alto—and I was hoping you might be able to hook me up with somebody.”
“What kind of trouble?”
I gave him a quick and slightly vague answer, and mentioned Bobby. He didn’t press for details, since he knew what we all did for a living, and finally said, “I don’t know a guy, but I know a guy who’d know a guy.”
“That’s cool. We can pay whatever.”
“Probably be at least two hundred dollars a day, don’t ask, don’t tell.” Cash, no tax.
“Fine. Let me give you the phone number . . .” I gave him Lane’s number and John said somebody would call that afternoon. “Listen,” I added, “if you need to get in touch, drop mail at Bobby’s. But don’t call that number yourself; things could get tricky.”