Deception (24 page)

The man continued to gaze at his magazine. A minute after Suda pulled away, he took it to the front desk. Paid cash. With his stocking cap pulled down and various things blocking my view, it was hard to get a good look at his face. But just as he pointed his remote to unlock his car, he looked up. The streetlight caught his face.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“It looks like …”

We both slunk back to the car. I turned the key, but kept the lights off. “Stay low.”

After he was a hundred feet down the road, I followed. No traffic, either to fight or cover me. He went all the way down to Foster, turned left, then turned right exactly where I knew he would. Still a hundred feet back, I saw him slow down, turn into a driveway, and stop. I couldn’t see it, but I knew he was punching a code and a gate was swinging open.

We sat there, car idling.

“Was it really him?” Clarence asked.

“Yeah. If I had the slightest doubt, I don’t now because that’s his driveway he just went up, security entrance and all. I don’t know what it means, but we just found a gold nugget in the rocks and mud. Kim Suda had a clandestine meeting and a handoff at 3:15 a.m.… with Edward Lennox, chief of police!”

20

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES
,
T
HE
H
OUND OF THE
B
ASKERVILLES

W
EDNESDAY
, D
ECEMBER
4, 10:00
A.M
.

I DIED IN 2003
, when Sharon died. I went on breathing, but it was a technicality.

Since then I’ve felt alive only at key points in an investigation when the adrenaline flows, or in isolated moments with close friends, like Mulch or Jake.

These thoughts came over me at 10:00 a.m., which is late to sleep in, unless you’ve gone to bed at 5:00 a.m. I sat up in my bed, sipping French roast and feeling Mulch’s hot breath on my toes. He seemed to have a stomachache; he’d been emitting fumes reminiscent of a paper mill.

My old brownstone is a sanctuary from human beings, which is why I usually don’t answer the door and seldom answer the phone. When Sharon was around, I enjoyed people more.

She was kind, but honest. Once she told me, “You dance like a guy tilting a pinball machine. Relax.” So I learned to relax, becoming suave and debonair. At least I stopped tilting her.

We danced the jitterbug. The slow jitterbug, not the fast one. Neither of us ever wanted it to end.

But it did.

The coffee was cold now. Not much reason to get out of bed. But even less to stay there.

As I drove to downtown Portland, I phoned Officer Paul Anderson, calling in the hours he and Griffin owed me for flushing their holdup man out of his apartment. Tomorrow was Kim Suda’s day off. Could one of them follow her to lunch, to her martial arts class, to anywhere and everywhere? Maybe take pictures?

I walked into Grayson’s Fine Pens, a store for fountain pen connoisseurs. I’d never been in such a store and didn’t know they existed until seeing it on a website. The fountain pen specialist had a contemplative look on an expansive face, with cheeks so fleshy they could use support. There were two sets of shoulders, his and the suit’s. His tie had been loosened, and his white dress shirt was a mass of wrinkles.

“Rupert Bolin at your service,” he said.

When he leaned over, a ridge of white flesh emerged above his low-slung belt. I thought of taking his picture and posting it on my refrigerator as a warning. Relatively speaking, I’m still a fine specimen. Rupert was about nine hundred Krispy Kremes ahead of me.

I showed him a half dozen of the professor’s fountain pens. He looked them over, called them by name, nodded appreciatively at two of them, and dismissed the other four as pens for lowlifes. He spoke rapturously of the joy of fountain pens. Here I’d wasted my life bringing killers to justice when I could have been a pen collector.

“What do people do with fountain pens?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I’d asked, “What do people do with a porterhouse steak?”

“Humor me,” I said. “Pretend I know nothing about fountain pens.”

He sighed, looking upward. I followed his gaze. Ceiling tiles.

“Where do I begin? A fountain pen is a fine instrument in the hands of a master artist. Artisans use fountain pens for special occasions. For important documents. For poetry and love letters. And sketch art, the type you might frame.”

I nodded earnestly.

“It’s a hobby you should consider. We had our first Portland fountain pen show in 2004, at the Embassy Suites. It was a big success. You must have heard about it.”

“I’m sure I must have. Was it on ESPN?”

“It was thrilling.”

“I can only imagine. Who wants to watch the Packers play the Bears when you can go to a fountain pen show?”

“My sentiments exactly. We have a strong presence on the Internet, you know.”

“Do we?”

“There are over fifty websites of fountain pen dealers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts.”

“Fifty? I wouldn’t have thought there’d be more than thirty-five.”

“You’ve no doubt visited the sites.”

“No doubt.” I’d visited one. “I found you on Bill’s Fountain Pen website.”

He beamed.

“Look,” I said, “I adore fountain pens, but I’m having a hard time explaining my devotion to … the uninitiated. Novices. You know what I’m saying?”

He nodded sympathetically. “In an age of e-mails and BICs—” he nearly spat the word—“and cookie-cutter mass production, fountain pens are elegant. They tie us to the past. They are handheld history. In an age of encroaching illiteracy, they make us more cultured, more refined, more literary.”

“More literary?”

“They make us better wordsmiths. They stimulate thought and reflection. They are tools of articulation and civility.”

“Okeydokey,” I said. “And … how does that all work?”

“When you put the nib of the pen in the ink, you can write perhaps eight words. Maybe a short sentence. Then you have to dip the pen again.”

“Seems inconvenient.”

He looked like I’d called his mother a name. “The best things in life take time. A love letter takes time. People are so used to keyboards and e-mails that they’ve lost the love of thoughtful language. They don’t stop to think. They just spew out words. No wonder the writing is so thoughtless, so careless, so urbane, so …”

“Quick?”

“Quick is not always good.”

I thought of a few instances when it isn’t and nodded.

He insisted that I drop my business card in the drawing for a set of three fancy fountain pens on display. The sign said the set was worth two hundred dollars, which was about $198 more than I would have paid for it. He also insisted that I sign up for his monthly fountain pen newsletter. I pulled out my BIC pen, saw his shocked stare, assured him I’d found it on the sidewalk, then took the green Paradise fountain pen he handed me and started to write the address of Clarence Abernathy. But I wasn’t sure on the house number, so I wrote my address instead.

For a change of pace, I met my cronies at Powell’s City of Books. Occupying a whole city block, with over a million new and used books, it’s a book lover’s paradise. They display a framed article from the
Washington Post
calling it “the best bookstore in the world.” Powell’s probably thinks the
Washington Post
is the best newspaper in the world, but that’s another issue. I don’t go to Powell’s for the politics.

I came an hour early to find a space at the world’s largest bookstore, with the world’s smallest parking garage. Six thousand in-store customers a day, and they have forty lousy spaces. I wedged into an imaginary space, and when an attendant scowled, I showed him my badge and he backed away so I wouldn’t smell the marijuana.

No matter what you believe, you can find a section in Powell’s to make you feel better about it and another section to make you question it or get mad at somebody. I go there when I want to feel literary and absorb wisdom. Looking at the bestseller tables near the entrance, I wonder about the wisdom part. But I love that old-book smell, and they’ve got the great detective novels buried amidst the not-so-great.

I entered at Tenth and Burnside determined to book my way to World Cup Coffee and Tea, passing by new arrivals, literature, classics, and reference works to get to sci-fi, thrillers, and mysteries. With seven thousand mysteries to sort through, there’s lots of rocks and mud but plenty of gold awaiting discovery. Everybody’s a detective at Powell’s. Right when I got to the section I wanted, I had to stop. One minute of Powell’s time is one hour of real time.

I put on imaginary blinders to beeline to Clarence and Jake at the World Cup, by the humor and audio books, where some come for free Wi-Fi and I come for the walnut sticky buns and chocolate croissants. They trust you with five books, so I’ve spent lots of time here with Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler—no relation—occasionally getting goo on their pages. That’s part of the character of used books.

Joining Clarence and Jake in the cafe, I chose a grilled chicken and Gouda cheese sandwich, while Clarence took the egg salad and Jake a corn and black bean salad with chicken tortilla soup.

Two minutes after ordering we were talking about issues raised in Russell’s
Why I Am Not a Christian
and Lewis’s
Mere Christianity
. Though I didn’t bring the books, it took Jake and Clarence only five minutes to find both on the shelves while I worked over my sandwich.

“God’s existence is wishful thinking,” I said after ten minutes of discussion. “It makes people feel better to think there’s a supreme being.”

“For me it was the opposite,” Jake said. “The last thing I wanted was to believe in God. It required changes I didn’t want to make. God has a way of interfering with your life. Big time. It was only later that I realized the changes were in my best interest.”

“So,” Clarence said, “your wishful thinking wasn’t that God existed, but that He didn’t?”

“Exactly. That’s what C. S. Lewis experienced. Ultimately, he bowed to the God he desperately didn’t want to believe in. When he became a theist, before he became a Christian, he called himself the most reluctant convert in all of England. Lewis went from atheism to agnosticism to belief in God. Later he came to believe in Christ. And that’s when he really found joy.”

I’d left room for a walnut sticky bun with extra butter. (I may die a few years sooner, but I’ll die happy.)

“But what if I don’t
want
to become a Christian?”

“Isn’t that where the wishful thinking comes in?” Jake asked. “Shouldn’t you just want to believe whatever’s true? I mean, if Jesus isn’t who He claimed to be, then
don’t
believe in Him. If He is, then do. It’s not about what you want to believe, but what’s really true.”

“You don’t want to believe the murderer’s a detective,” Clarence said. “But you do believe it, right?”

“I go where the evidence leads.”

“So ask yourself where the evidence leads when it comes to Jesus,” Jake said. “It’s not about your preference, like choosing between a walnut sticky bun and a chocolate croissant.”

“Don’t mock me. It was a tough call.”

“My point is, faith shouldn’t be about what suits our tastes, but about the truth the evidence points to.”

“So if you disagree with what we believe,” Clarence said, “then try to talk us out of it—take your best shot. We don’t want to believe what’s false.”

“You guys will get talked out of your faith when hell freezes over.”

“What is it that holds you back?” Jake said. “Not only from Christ, but from the idea that there’s a God?”

“The Holocaust. Stalin. The Killing Fields. Idi Amin. Rwanda. Jeffrey Dahmer. What I saw in Vietnam. A couple hundred murder cases. How’s that for starters? People get away with murder. Where’s the justice?”

“Daddy used to say, ‘Nobody gets away wid nothin’,” Clarence said.

“How could he say that? After what those dirty cops did to him?”

“It used to bother me how Daddy would forgive people. It made me think he was weak.” Somebody with green hair, waiting for coffee, heard Clarence’s voice and stared. If I had green hair, I wouldn’t stare at anybody.

“I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Clarence continued. “He knew God would bring justice, but he was willing to wait. He said to me, ‘They still has time to repent. If they doesn’t, yo’ daddy would sooner be the mule they whip than stand in their shoes before almighty God and be burnt to ashes by the fire of His holiness.’ ”

“He really said that?”

“I’ve never forgotten it. My point is, what makes you think God will let people get away with all this stuff? The Bible teaches that He won’t. There’s going to be a judgment for everything that’s been done, good and bad. God promises that repeatedly.”

“But why wait? I’ve seen parents kill their children, children kill their parents, a teenage boy torture his little brother. Why didn’t God just throw lightning bolts and fry these lowlifes?”

“I’ve seen evil too, you know,” Jake said. “I was in Nam. I saw Finney and Doc die. They were my best friends. My Carly’s dying as we speak.”

“My sister and niece were murdered,” Clarence said. “Daddy saw a lot more evil than I ever have, probably more than you. He believed God has reasons for allowing these things that we can’t understand.”

“I don’t buy it. Sometimes I just want to go out there and save hundreds of people by performing a few executions. You know how many people die because of drug dealers?”

“So if you were in charge,” Clarence said, “there’d be no mercy, no opportunity to repent? Bad people would all die. But … maybe you deserve to die too. Maybe we’re all worse than you think. That’s what the Bible says.”

“Don’t try to put me in the same box with murderers and rapists. That’s one of the things that frosts me about you Christians,” I said, standing up. “One of the many things.”

When I returned to detective division, two attractive women were standing near my workstation. One was dressed in fashion magazine clothes. Her outfit screamed money. The other was Linda Glissan, Jack’s wife. Linda always looks nice, but she and Sharon used to shop for bargains at Nordstrom Rack. Even that can strain a detective’s salary.

“Hi, Ollie.” Linda hugged me. I don’t get hugged often. “You’ve met Sheila Phillips, Brandon’s wife, haven’t you?”

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” she said, stretching out her hand, which momentarily unnerved me, since her fingernails looked like red-polished Ginsu knives. So this was Phillips’s wife. He’d married her a year ago, eighteen months after his divorce. I’d heard about Sheila. She lived up to it.

“I brought you some of those chocolate pecan muffins you like,” Linda said, handing me a bag.

“Thanks.”

“Jack and I miss you.”

“Look, Linda, I’m sorry. I …”

“It’s okay. I miss Sharon too. She was one of my best friends.”