A Curious Affair (5 page)

Being a writer, and given a slightly higher than average degree of imagination—and now a corpse on my hill—I couldn’t help but speculate if any of them might be doing something illegal for Mosconi, the bar owner and tender. Or were the patrons blackmailing him with some knowledge of an old sin even Irish Camp wouldn’t accept? Irv would have known if they were. Irv knew everything.

But would Irv have cared? Would that knowledge be enough to get him killed by one of these people? He was definitely considered to be one of their own.

I didn’t know and couldn’t guess. I had nothing in common with this strange community except our mutual acquaintance with Irv, and I didn’t know their stories in any detail, not even Irving’s. Maybe it was the tragedy of broken hearts that had led them to the bar to begin with, but it was broken livers and addiction that got them in The Mule now. There weren’t many places where jaundice looks good and is accepted as normal, but you hardly noticed it in the dim light with the orange shag carpet that had gotten a bad haircut back in the days when The Mule still had enough pretensions of class that they had music to dance to on Saturday nights. Back when they occasionally shampooed the vomit out of the rug.

I shook my head. Irv wasn’t a tidy man, but this place seemed wrong for him somehow. He liked being outside in the fresh air. Did he perhaps not come here to drink with his ex-girlfriend as he had claimed, but instead to do business? Drug business? Popular songs often insist that love that doesn’t kill you makes you crazy, and this is often so. But there are many other ways to go insane, or at least comfortably numb. Some are available to everyone, but others require a middleman. If you had a friendly doctor like I did, you could do it legally. If you didn’t, you came to a place like The Mule.

I stepped farther into the room and let my eyes finish adjusting. The clientele looked like they had all just come from a police lineup. I also spotted some large dust bunnies under a juke box that had been dead since the music died in the Easter brawl of ’97, when the owner foolishly left Tim in charge while he went to visit his daughter over the holiday. The fight started, I’m told, when one patron took exception to another’s contention that it was Jesus who hid the first Easter eggs. And to celebrate the day that the Prince of Peace rose from the dead—and maybe hid boiled eggs—the two men spent the morning trying to beat sense into one another with the furniture.

That could never happen today. Almost everybody involved was either dead or so much older and sicker that brawling held no appeal. The furniture was now bolted down tighter than in a cheap motel. And all the guns and hunting knives were locked in a metal cabinet where there was no casual grabbing. Nevertheless, a low-grade danger rode the smoky air.

I swallowed, and breathed shallowly.
Maybe
, I thought,
having cats talk to me
isn’t
so bad a fate after all
.

That reminded me again I had to pick up some cat kibble and bowls. I’d be able to hide them under the steps in the side yard for now. That would give the cats some shelter and conceal them from my neighbor,
Abby, whose house overlooks mine. She is a kind and generous soul, but she had never approved of Irv’s feline philanthropy, and I didn’t think she’d appreciate having the cats at my place either.

“Jillian!”

I turned in the direction of the surprised voice and saw Molly sitting in a shadowy corner with a half-empty glass of beer. At the sound of my name, Dell got up from his place at the bar and walked over to Molly’s table. His posture was protective.

Dell isn’t my favorite person, nor am I his. He comes from a family whose gene pool runs deep with DNA designed for violent, drug-addicted men. Aside from being a drunk, he is sly in mean ways. Such as, he has the disconcerting habit of playing with his dentures—which I am quite certain were not originally his own, since they seem too large for his jaw—popping them in and out with his tongue in a disgusting game of oral peekaboo. It makes his Adam’s apple bob up and down, and reminds me of a dog trying to lick a glob of peanut butter off the roof of his mouth. He does this on purpose, mostly to tourists, smiling meanly whenever someone looks away in discomfort.

I approached Molly anyway.

“Molly. Dell.” They didn’t ask me to sit down, but I did anyway. This uncharacteristic action made Molly’s eyes get big and a little frightened. I cleared my throat, not sure what to say now that I was there. After a moment I fell back on training. Mother was right—good manners cost nothing. And besides, they give you a cliché for every occasion. Molly would understand the ritual. She had been a businesswoman until she gave up cooking to become a full-time alcoholic.

“Molly, have you heard about Irv?” I waited for the slow shake of her head. I hadn’t asked Dell anything, but his head wagged back and forth too. I noticed then
that he was wearing a chain, and at the end of it was a raw gold nugget that was almost hidden by his silvering chest hair. The sight surprised me. Dell wasn’t the type who adorned himself with jewelry, and I would have thought that anything valuable he came across would have ended up at the Red Hawk pawnshop.

“What…what about Irv?”

“I’m sorry.” And I
was
sorry, which made the next part easier. “Irv died last night. He…” He what? Was murdered? I was pretty sure that one shouldn’t blurt out something like that. Especially if one was trying to find out what might have happened to the victim and the people you were dealing with were highly allergic to anything that might bring them into contact with the law.

Fortunately, Molly covered for me. She began to cry. She reached for my hand under the table and clutched at it with chapped fingers. I had been hoping to avoid this contact, but couldn’t very well pull away.

“Poor Irv. It was his heart, wasn’t it?” She pulled a napkin out of the dispenser with her left hand and wiped at her eyes. Dell began patting her shoulder. Both looked upset, if not surprised. If anything, I would have said that Dell looked chagrined, maybe even annoyed.

Again, since I am not the best liar—at least not in person—I opted for a version of the truth when answering.

“I’m not sure, Molly. I think the sheriff has ordered an autopsy. Maybe they’ll find out what happened.”

“The sheriff!” As I expected, the tears stopped instantly and her hand withdrew. “Did Murphy hurt Irv?”

“No!” My reaction was immediate and strong. “No, I got the sheriff after I found Irv.”

At their continued looks of absolute incomprehension, I felt compelled to explain why I hadn’t called them instead.

“You know how my jaw is sometimes.” I waited for a
nod from Molly. Practically everyone in town knew about my jaw. “Well, it was terrible last night. I could barely move it at all. I knew I couldn’t call anyone on the phone. And I had been drinking. A lot.” That was something they would understand. “The sheriff…was closest.” This wasn’t as lame an excuse as it might appear. Molly and Dell lived deep in a ravine on the other side of town, at the end of an unpaved, unlighted road. Given the weather last night, only a madman would have been up for a slog through the dark and mud.

At last I got a nod of understanding, but no comment. This annoyed me. I was looking for answers and getting silence instead. Why couldn’t they cooperate and just let the clues come tumbling out of their mouths so I could solve this case and go home where the air was clean?

“Did Irv have any family?” I asked. It seemed a natural question. When someone died you were supposed to contact their kin. “Is there someone we should call?”

“There’s a nephew, I think,” Molly said at last, after she and Dell had exchanged a look. “Gordon or Jordon. But I’m not sure where he is. Last I heard he was living in Lodi…or maybe it was Fresno.”

Great. I finally had a lead: Gordon or Jordon, who might still be living in Lodi. Or Fresno. There would only be…what, hundreds—thousands—of names to sort through?

Or maybe I would kindly tell the sheriff about this and make him look into it. After all, he’d asked me about it the night before. And this would give me an excuse to talk to him and find out why he was keeping Irv’s death so quiet.

I found that I was looking forward to seeing the sheriff again.

Special elections were coming in June and our local political scene is surprisingly byzantine, so, bad weather or not, Mayor Nolan Vickers was out pressing flesh and kissing bundled-up babies. Our mayor is impressive in his own way. He has a weight lifter’s body, a too-pink shiny face and a lot of teeth he purchased after he sold off the family demolition, truck rental, and self-defense businesses. He always makes me think of that line from Shakespeare about how a man can smile and smile but still be a villain. Not that Nolan was a villain exactly, but he had a black belt in local politics, flexible morals, only a moderate IQ and a long memory for slights, so it didn’t do to cross him unless the cause was important. Some people liked this—many of them women who found him attractive and strong, a happenstance I have always construed as proof that God has a bent sense of humor. I think there is also probably a master plan for Nolan that holds a third divorce, hypertension and at least one heart attack.

He had supposedly been a friend of Cal’s when they
were on the city council. Then Cal hadn’t agreed with him about blocking construction of a skate park for kids, then about closing the county hospital, and things changed after that. Cal was suddenly labeled as a knee-jerk liberal and Nolan worked hard to get rid of him.

Nolan failed the first time. Cal had good friends who forgave him his political leanings since it was for the children.

Our town used to be staunchly Republican, but the war in Iraq poured some political Visine over the county and a few Democrats managed to get into office, where they worked uneasily. Not everyone went true blue, though. In fact, few did. At heart this town still belongs to the Grand Old Party. The county is an odd mix, though, and that’s where things get tricky. Many of the smog-eating refugees from Silicon Valley were already Green, and others outside the mainstream joined them as the evidence proving global warming mounted. Which meant we had lovely organic produce at our farmers’ markets, a growing Green Party that actually hung up posters at election time (printed on recycled biodegradable paper), and fewer liberal votes to back our few brave Democratic candidates. This meant that those who were blue and wanted to stay in office had to be fiscally responsible in our conservative town. The skate park matter was finessed by getting everything donated by local businesses and having someone give the city the land. But the battle over whether to close the county hospital had raged for a decade. It was the spendthrift Hattfields versus the heartless McCoys, and those attending the public meetings semi-joked about sending for the National Guard to keep the peace every time it came up on the agenda. People were actually searched at the door for weapons.

Admittedly, the hospital was a money pit, a black hole in the bud get, a blot on the council family fiscal
escutcheon. But, Cal argued, until there was universal health care for everyone in the county, the indigent needed somewhere to go other than the new for-profit hospital that, for a case of pneumonia or a broken leg, charged the uninsured roughly their entire yearly incomes. Cal had wrestled with this problem for months and tried for compromise and creative funding. But when push had finally come to shove and they had to vote yea or nay, he’d finally come down on the side of compassion rather than profit. Nolan didn’t agree, and set about once again blackening his name. This time he was more successful and the hospital closed. Cal was feeling truly ill by then and gave in without a great fight. He forgave Nolan. I didn’t. Cal got his treatments at the new hospital that had lots of high-tech and very little care.

It was because of this past that I kept my eyes turned away as I passed on the other side of the street. It meant bypassing the French bakery, but I had a bad feeling that if word got back to Nolan that I was insisting the town drug dealer was murdered—and maybe even got the story in the paper—that I would move to the top of his unpopular list. Of course, he’d probably find out what I thought eventually, one way or another. His brother-in-law ran a company called Good Riddance C.S. Clean Up and Septic. The tourists thought the black-and-red van parked outside the gaudy pink tin-roofed Victorian at the corner of Polk and Jackson cleaned out clogged sump pumps and the like—and Hinkley did do that, if the pump happened to be clogged with body parts. The C.S. in Good Riddance stood for
crime scene
. Hinkley was the man you called if Uncle Toby emptied a shotgun into his head and got his brain matter all over your authentic nineteenth-century paneling and fine Persian rugs. Or if you wanted to get a bloodstain from a triple homicide out of the rough
wood flooring in a cabin. And if you didn’t call him, he would call you. He was worse than an ambulance chaser. Whoever inherited Irv’s cabin would need Hinkley’s kind of help—along with a lot of contractors to get it up to code—unless Tyler was right and the city just tore it down.

Not that I was afraid of Nolan, exactly. But I was cautious. I still had to be careful around him. Anger came at odd moments and the words or rage would rush out of my mouth, hurling themselves at people—like Nolan, who hadn’t visited Cal even once when he was dying—in a most unattractive form of emotional projectile vomiting. It made me seem, well…crazy. And I wouldn’t put it past Nolan to try and have me committed if I made him angry enough. He probably wouldn’t succeed, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory if I bankrupted myself fighting this battle.

I was walking quickly but, prompted by my stomach, I paused to read the daily slate of fare on the sidewalk outside Blend It. They were offering a Sunrise smoothie (mixed citrus), Old Faithful (lemon ice), and a Prune Typhoon that I heard from previous victims could cause an actually tsunami of the bowels. Shuddering, I backed away until I reached the door of Den of Thebes, our import shop that stocks some very questionable treasures from the Middle and Far East.

Something nudged me from behind, impeding my flight from the home of blended frozen fruit. I turned, already knowing who and what it was that had me hemmed in. There was only one person in town who regularly rear-ended me.

“Hi, Pinky. Nice flowers,” I added, nodding at the bicycle basket lashed to her walker. She had decorated it herself with a mix of silk and plastic flowers recovered from trash cans and the Dumpster behind the Best of Times thrift shop. Pinky, so called because of
her love of the color, was wearing a hot pink and lime satin jogging suit with high-top sneakers that had once been white but were now rusty brown. The bright colors were a bit lurid but I had to smile anyway. Pinky’s obvious happiness demanded it. She has fairly advanced dementia, but rather than succumbing to the usual fear and anger that afflicts its victims, Pinky’s mental deterioration has left her in a state of almost perpetual joyfulness. She probably belonged in a home for the permanently befuddled, but her kids refused to confine her or curtail her wandering. In any other place this would have been dangerous, but our town had sort of made her into a mascot, and people were generally good about looking out for her.

Pinky thought—God only knows why, perhaps because she once caught me talking to a cat hidden up in a tree—that I was a friendly alien visiting from another world, and she was waiting patiently for the day when my spaceship arrived so that she could go for an intergalactic outing. I was—sort of—sorry that I didn’t have a spaceship for her. Talking to aliens was at least something people had heard of around here, where there are frequent UFO sightings. Witness the calls to the sheriff’s office the night before and Tyler’s laid-back reaction to them.

Pinky had also been a friend of Irv’s. I wondered briefly if I should tell her what had happened to him.

“The sun is out. I can see everything,” she said, beaming happily.

“The sun is out, but I’m still in the dark,” I muttered, trying to match her smile but failing. Those muscles had atrophied. I also realized how much I missed the days of emotional equilibrium when the universe made sense, when I knew exactly what could and could not be. I needed to find that again if I was ever to know peace of mind. And if that meant that cats actually could talk
to me…well then, so be it. There were more things in heaven and earth and all that. But I had to know if cats actually
were
talking to me, or if I was—well, if I was like Pinky.

“Have you seen Irv?” she asked, as though guessing the direction of my thoughts. “I haven’t talked to him in a week.” With Pinky everything was a week—last Christmas, next Memorial Day, even her fourth birthday.

“Not today,” I said, after deciding not to tell her about Irv being dead. It wasn’t my job to spread the unhappy news when clearly the sheriff preferred to keep it quiet, and I wouldn’t have volunteered anyway. I have learned firsthand that grief actually steals oxygen from the body. Little by little, it deflates those who are stricken with it, sucking the life right out of them. Pinky would probably forget the unhappy news almost immediately. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t, and I wasn’t going to be the one who ruined Pinky’s sunny day.

A pickup truck rumbled by, the tarmac shivering from both the vibration of the overpowered engine and the rap music pouring from its stereo. Blend It’s slate shuddered for a moment and then fell over in a sludge puddle. This was the downside to having a highway pass right through town.

I picked the slate up and then sighed. The sign was smudged and dripping now, but I didn’t have the time or inclination to fix it—though I wanted very much to jerk the driver out of his vehicle and dump him in the same puddle. I settled for flipping him the bird. I don’t like that the gesture comes so naturally to me. Rage was one of the reasons Cal and I decided to move. I was afraid that my middle finger was going to get stuck in an upthrust position if we stayed in the Bay Area. As it is, the muscles are still far too developed in the middle finger of my left hand.

Waving good-bye to a puzzled Pinky, I started back up the hill at a brisk stomp as I pretended I was smashing the truck driver’s head with my heels. One of the other main reasons Cal and I fled the Silicon Valley was noise pollution and what I can only call a new age of bad manners. The urban din was everywhere down there, the noisy masses not even realizing they offended with their painful music, poured over other commuters who were also stuck in daily gridlocked traffic that happened every morning between six and ten
A
.
M
. and every evening from four to seven. Or eight. Or nine. But they did offend, and these otherwise courteous people, who worried about using politically correct language and avoiding bad breath that might bother their co-workers, turned life into an aural arms race between stereos and car engines, horns and cursing: Rush Limbaugh turned up to drown out Britney Spears, who was in turn nudged up another notch so the vegeterian liberal with the preteen in the hybrid car didn’t have to listen to the conservative steak-eater in the urban assault vehicle. Rap topped opera until a stand-and-deliver tenor proved that he, boosted by the right electronic equipment, could outsing anyone. The air was fouled with daily commuter aggravation set to digitized syncopation.

Nor could you escape the sound by going to work on foot or bicycle, even supposing the distance to the job was not a bar, which it was in nearly every case. There were millions of people shouting into their cell phones night and day, or just shouting because it was their new “normal” volume level. Shouting at their children, their spouses, their pets, in voices too loud for the shared walls of apartments or even the new “luxury” homes built less than ten feet apart from one another where bathrooms were made of marble but you could still hear your neighbor flush.

Cal and I had done a decade in that endless din and
then opted out. The Silicon Valley was no place for two writers, two lovers of quiet, even if one wrote mainly about computers and the software that ran them. It pissed me off that the noise pollution from the outside was beginning to invade my world. I feared being forced out of it and having nowhere to go.

Being opposed to a lot of so-called progress, it probably goes without saying that I don’t have a cell phone. In fact, I keep only one phone in the house now that Cal is gone, and I usually let the answering machine take care of it. This is an act of defiance against the discourteous world that exists outside my little hill in Irish Camp, where ill-mannered but well-meaning people want me to live as an obedient hound to be found at the end of an electronic leash any time they want a last-minute article, a babysitter, or an ear to moan into. This electronic distancing of friends and loved ones is something I do, in spite of the presentiment that I will someday regret not having push-button help close by. In the back of my mind I have always thought that I would bend this rule if I were ever forced into a walker or had a heart attack. Or perhaps when my sibling’s larvae have pupated into actual human beings that don’t need to be constantly overseen by their aunt when my brother and his wife want a little ski-weekend getaway. Then again, maybe not. It’s that old dog learning new tricks thing, and I felt older than Ole Blue. More frustrated, too.

I reluctantly decided it was time to get the car out of the garage and expand my search area for clues. It would be unpleasant, since I dislike being near other cars almost as much as phones, but I had two very compelling reasons for wanting to find Irv’s murderer. One, I didn’t like the idea of sharing our mountain with a killer. It seemed, at the very least, to be imprudent. And two—which was the more important reason—I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t mad. Because believe
me, the idea had crossed my mind more than once that I might be crazier than a shithouse rat. I’ve done some research and hearing cats talk to you is not a standard neurological condition brought on by lightning strikes. It is, however, rather common in schizophrenics and serial killers like the Son of Sam.

Gritting my teeth—literally—I backed our forest-green Subaru out of the garage and up our driveway, which had a slope like the north face of the Eiger. Triumph over our driveway was never a foregone conclusion in the winter months; ice could easily defeat even the all-wheel drive. That morning, however, the god who looks after fools and people who choose to live on mountains was looking out for me. I made it out of the driveway and onto the road without hitting another car or Abby’s moss-covered retaining wall that was already short a few stones from aggressive reversing out of my driveway.