Dance for the Dead (23 page)

She could see that around her
neck was a necklace woven from fragrant marsh grass, and she reached
up to touch it. Every few inches there was a little disk of marsh
grass covered with shell beads. She could smell the fresh, grassy
scent, and she knew that the perfume made the smoke, cooking meat,
and the twenty or thirty bodies in the ganosote easier on her
nostrils.

She heard a noise and turned to
see that behind her there was the big shape of a man on the lower
platform along the wall of the compartment, and that he was stirring,
about to wake up. She didn’t know who he was, but stored on the
platform five feet above him were her things – the extra
moccasins she would use to replace the ones on her feet now, the elm
bark gaowo tray she used to prepare corn bread, her collection of
ahdoquasa with the bowl ends polished smooth for eating soup and the
handles carved in the shapes of men and women embracing. She knew he
must be her husband, but he stayed asleep in the shadows with his
face to the wall because it was not time for her to see him yet.

She heard someone calling her
name outside, and in the logic of dreams, she knew that the voice was
the reason she was here. She stood up and walked past the fires to
the bearskin flap. A strong hand gripped her arm, and she turned. A
man whose face she did not quite see in the dim light said in Seneca,
“If you don’t want to dream about the dead, you don’t
have to. If the women sing the Ohgiwe, they’ll leave.”
She knew this voice.

“I know, Jake,” said
Jane. She lifted the corner of the bearskin and ducked out into the
light.

“Jane!” said a
voice. It was harsh and high, not quite human, like the screech of a
parrot. “Jane!”

She looked around her, and her
eye caught a flash of deep blue above her on a maple tree, and then
another flitted across the open air from an old sycamore. It flew in
spurts, a dip and a wing-flap to bring the bird up, then a dip and a
wing-flap and claws clutching the branch of the tree beside the first
one. Jane could tell they were the two scrub jays she had captured in
California.

The two birds dropped to the
lowest branch of the maple just above her. The male tilted his head
to the side and glared at her with one shiny black eye. “Jane!”

“What?” she asked.

The female jay hopped to reverse
her position on the branch, her head where her tail had been, and
leaned down. “We did what you asked,” she said. “We
took Dennis and Mona to Hawenneyugeh.”

“Thank you,” said
Jane. “But you have to go home now. You can’t survive in
this climate, and winter is coming.”

The male shifted back and forth
on the branch nervously, and she could hear its claws scratching the
bark. “We came for you.”

The jays eyed her without
moving. Jane felt a small, growing fear. “Am I going to die
too? So many people, all dying for nothing.”

The female dropped to the grass
at her feet and jerked her head from side to side to bring first one
eye and then the other to bear on Jane. “It’s not
supposed to
be for
anything,” she said. “It’s
what we are.”

“What we are?”

“Hawenneyu, the
Right-Handed Twin, creates people, birds, trees. Hanegoategeh, the
Left-Handed Twin, makes cancer, number-six birdshot, Dutch Elm
disease. For every measure, a countermeasure: Hawenneyu creates the
air, Hanegoategeh churns it into the cold wind; Hawenneyu makes fire
and houses, Hanegoategeh makes the fire burn the houses.”

“Are you here to tell me
it’s my turn to be used up?” asked Jane.

“To warn you. If you want
to be alive and breathe the air and drink the water, then look and
listen. Nothing has changed since the beginning of the world. You’re
still walking through wild country. No sight or sound is irrelevant.
Learn about your enemy.”

She studied the two birds. “Who
is my enemy?”

“Think about how he
works,” said the female jay.

“He’s been killing
people,” Jane said. “There’s nothing special about
it at all. It’s just brutal: cutting up the Deckers – ”

“Without leaving any sign
in the house that a little boy had ever lived there,” the male
reminded her.

“How about Mona and
Dennis?” she asked. “He hired some men to beat Dennis to
death and throw Mona down a stairwell.”

“He waited until you had
made your preparations for one building, and got the case moved to
another. You had to go to a new place where a dozen men were waiting
for you and court was already in session.”

“And what about Alan
Turner?” asked the female jay.

“What about him?”
Jane asked.

“We know how you got into
Turner’s house past the alarm system and out again. How did he
do it?”

“I don’t know,”
said Jane. “I suppose he rang the doorbell. Alan Turner let him
in. They must have known each other.”

“You’re not
listening,” said the female jay. “Anybody could get
in
by ringing the doorbell. How did he get
out
without
tripping the alarm after Turner was dead?”

“How?” she asked.

Jane awoke and listened to the
sounds of the cars on the freeway a few blocks away. Rush hour must
have begun, but then she remembered that the term had no meaning
around Los Angeles. There were cars clogging the roads every hour of
every day. She sat up and looked around her, then stood and walked
into the shower.

She had only needed some sleep.
She still didn’t know the man’s name, but while she slept
she had figured out something else about him. He might have gotten
into the house in Monterey without setting off the alarm because
Turner had let him in. But the only way he could have gotten out and
left the alarm on after he had killed Turner was to know the alarm
code.

Ellery
Robinson opened the apartment door and looked out past her with wary
eyes. “Come in,” she said quietly. “This isn’t
a neighborhood for standing in a lighted doorway.”

Jane stepped inside and watched
the thin, hard arms move to close the steel door and then turn the
dead bolt.

“I been waiting for you,”
said Ellery Robinson. “I knew you saw me in jail because I saw
you. How did you find me? I’m not in the phone book.”

“I went to your old
apartment and asked around until I found somebody who still knew
you…. You’re in trouble again.”

“No big thing. My parole
officer thinks I have an attitude, so he forgot to write down when I
came to see him.”

“You don’t have an
attitude?”

Ellery Robinson shrugged her
thin shoulders. “When a black woman gets past the age where
they stop thinking about her big ass, they remember they didn’t
like her very much to begin with.”

“Can you do anything about
it?”

“He turned out to be
unreliable, so his reports aren’t enough to send anybody to
jail anymore.”

“He must have been really
unreliable.”

“Yeah. While I was in jail
I heard they caught him in his office with a Mexican girl going down
on him. He’s been getting what he wanted regular like that for
years. All he had to do to get them deported was check a box on a
form, so they did a lot of favors.”

“Does he know who set him
up?”

For the first time Ellery
Robinson smiled a little, and Jane could see a resemblance to the
young woman she had met years ago. “Could be anybody. Everybody
knew.”

Jane sat in silence and stared
at her. She had aged in the past eleven years, but it seemed to have
refined and polished her. Ellery Robinson tolerated the gaze for a
time, then said, “How about you? Have you been well?”

“I can’t complain.”

“You mean you can’t
complain to me, don’t you?” said Ellery Robinson. “You’re
thinking I should have gone with you.”

“I don’t know.
Nobody can say what would have happened.”

“Don’t feel sorry
for me. I had a life, you know. My sister Clarice and I had one life.
When I was in prison I would sit in the sun in the yard and close my
eyes and follow her and the baby around all day with my mind. The
women in jail thought I’d gone crazy, that I sat there all day
in a coma, but I wasn’t there at all. I was living inside my
head.”

“You don’t regret
it?”

“I regret that I’m a
murderer. I don’t regret that he got killed. He needed it.”

Jane nodded. “You doing
okay now?”

“I’m contented. I
know what’s on your mind. It’s that woman in county jail,
isn’t it?”

“Mary Perkins?” said
Jane. “No. She’s far away now.”

“What, then?”

“I know people hear things
– in jail, the parole office, places like that.”

“Sometimes.”

“What have you heard about
Intercontinental Security?”

Ellery Robinson’s clear,
untroubled face wrinkled with distaste. “If you’re
hiring, hire somebody else. If they’re looking for you, don’t
let them find you.”

“They seem to have a lot
of business.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s a
big company. And it’s old, like Pinkerton’s or Brinks or
one of them. I think they used to guard trains and banks and things.
For all I know they still do; I’m not a stockholder.”

“Have you heard anything
about burglaries in places they’re supposed to protect –
as though they might be fooling their own alarm systems or
something?”

“No. What I hear most
about them now is they hunt for people.”

“What sort of people?”

“The usual. Skip-trace,
open warrants, wanted for questioning, runaways. Somebody jumps bail,
the bail bondsman is on the hook. Some clerk takes a little money out
of the till and runs. The police don’t look very hard, so the
company hires Intercontinental.”

“What’s different?”

“The ones they bring in
seem to fall down a lot. Maybe a broken arm, maybe a leg. Maybe their
face doesn’t look too good.”

“It’s an old
company. Did they always have that reputation?”

Ellery Robinson shrugged. “I
didn’t always know people who got chased. Then I was away for a
few years. It’s since I got back that I’ve been hearing
things.”

“Who have you been hearing
them from? Can you help me get to one of them?”

The little woman leaned back on
her worn couch and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. She seemed
to be searching for names and addresses up there, but Jane could tell
that she was rejecting some of them for reasons that she would not
reveal.

The young man stood beside a car
in the darkness. He was tall and heavy, with a jacket that was too
thick for this weather and baggy blue pants. Jane could see that
there was a streetlight directly above him, but the lamp was a jagged
rim of broken glass.

Ellery Robinson followed the
angle of Jane’s eyes. “The street dealers shoot them out
at night, and the city replaces them in the day. Everybody gets
paid.” She stopped walking and held Jane’s arm. The young
man looked up the block for three or four seconds, then down the
block. When he was satisfied, he came away from the car and walked
across the sidewalk onto the lawn.

Ellery Robinson looked up and
said to him, “This is the woman.” Then she turned to
Jane. “He won’t hurt you.” Then she turned and
walked away across the packed dirt of the big gray project toward her
room.

Jane turned to the young man.
“Thank you for coming.”

The young man started walking,
and she stepped off with him. “Got to keep moving or everybody
starts to notice you’re not going about your business.”

“All right.”

“She said you want to know
about Intercontinental.”

“Yes,” said Jane.
She waited for the logical question, but it did not come. He didn’t
consider it his business why she wanted to know, just as Ellery
Robinson had not taken it on herself to tell either of them the
other’s name.

He said, “I worked for
them.”

“How long?”

“About two weeks.”
He anticipated the next question. “In October. They put out ads
in this part of town. They wanted store security for two big malls in
time for Christmas. You know, they didn’t want a couple of
white kids in uniforms in front of a store on Crenshaw. They’d
just get hurt.”

“What happened?”

“They made me a trainee.
That means they don’t have to pay regular wages. They put me
through a lie detector test, a couple of days in a classroom, and
turned me out. I worked the malls for a week and a half.”

“Why did they fire you?”

The young man’s eyes shot
to hers and then ahead again. “Security check turned up my
priors. Couldn’t get bonded.”

“What did you find out
before you left?”

“Now you’re not
going to believe me, right?” he asked. “I got priors, and
I’m a ‘disgruntled former employee.’”

Jane looked up at the sky, then
sighted along the wall of the complex. “It’s a cold,
clammy night for L.A. It’ll probably rain soon, from the way it
feels. And you may not believe it, but I hardly ever find myself in
this part of town after midnight in any weather.”

“I can believe that,”
he said.

“If I thought you were
going to lie to me, I’d be pretty stupid to be here, wouldn’t
I?”

“Yeah.”

“Then tell me what it was
like.”

“They’re looking for
young men with strong motivation and they’ll give them the
skills to succeed. Like the army. They got this guy who comes in and
tells you how to be a thief in a big store so that you know what to
look for.”

“Did he get it right?”

“There were plenty of
people in that room who could tell you for sure, but I wasn’t
one of them. I think it was pretty close, though, because they were
all listening. Probably got some new ideas for the off-season.”

“The skills to succeed.
Can you tell me anything about this guy? Who was he?”

“His name was Farrell.
Sort of an old guy with gray hair that’s all bristly like a
brush and spit-shined shoes. They called him the training officer.
After he told us how to spot thieves, he told us what to do about
them.”