Hard Rain (6 page)

“Homicide? You do family law.”

“Sometimes the two intersect.”

“At the corner of Love and Hate?”

Barbara laughed. “That's good, Jess. I should have it printed on my card.” Jessie felt Barbara's eyes on her, knew she would reach for cigarettes a moment before she did. Camels, unfiltered. Barbara had been smoking them since puberty, or maybe before. The car filled with carcinogens. Barbara opened her briefcase and took out a file. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

Jessie parked outside the red-roofed L. A bag lady in a ragged polka-dot dress and wraparound sunglasses was going by, pushing a shopping cart. Barbara, filling the margins of some document with her spiky handwriting, didn't even see her.

No BMW. Three newspapers on the stoop, kicked to the side. Jessie unlocked the door and led Barbara in. No mail on the floor. The house smelled of Asia.

They walked through the hall, into the dining room. Barbara glanced at the yachting blowup. “New filly?” she said.

“I guess.”

Barbara lit another cigarette and looked at the photograph more closely, chin up, eyes squinting through rising smoke. “Nice bod,” she said. “The schlongman looks tired, though.”

“Shut up, Barbara.” Green mold was spreading over the take-out food from King of Siam.

They went into the kitchen. Jessie bent over the answering machine and pressed the playback button. “This is what I want you to hear,” she said.

“Hi. No one's here right now, but just leave a message and we'll buzz you back. Promise.”

Barbara made a face. “Shh,” Jessie said.

But there was no need for quiet. The rest of the tape was blank.

Jessie felt a cold prickle on the back of her neck. She hit fast forward, hit play, hit rewind, hit play. “Hi. No one's here right now, but just leave a message and we'll buzz you back. Promise.” Jessie turned up the volume. The tape wound to the end, hissing softly.

“That's funny,” she said, straightening; she'd been leaning over the machine, ear cocked. “There were lots—” She stopped. Her gaze had fallen on the kitchen blackboard. The foreign words were gone. There was nothing on the blackboard but wide swirls of chalk dust.

Jessie walked slowly to the blackboard and examined it.

“What's up?” Barbara said.

The words had been erased with some kind of cloth; the job had been done imperfectly. Jessie could make out a “T” and an “o” under the swirls.

“There were words here before,” she said. “Foreign words.”

“What foreign?”

“I'm not sure.”

“What do you mean, you're not sure? You've got a B.A. in European history and literature. This is one of the few moments in your life it might be useful. Was it Spanish? French? Italian?”

“No.”

“Chinese? Arabic?”

“No. It was our alphabet.”

“German? Swedish?”

“I'm telling you I don't know.”

“All right. Don't get excited.”

“You bet.” Jessie snapped the words across the room. Barbara opened her mouth to snap back, then closed it. She went to the answering machine instead, running her fingers over the buttons.

“What was on the tape?”

“A woman. She left a short message, cut off at the end. She ran out of time. I can't remember the exact words, but it sounded like a warning of some kind. ‘Split,' she said. That was part of it.”

“Local or long-distance?”

She hadn't noticed. “I'm not sure.” Barbara's eyes narrowed. “Long-distance, maybe.”

“Maybe,” said Barbara. “Did you recognize the voice?”

“No.”

“But you think she called after he'd already gone?”

Jessie nodded. “The message before it was from Norman Wine. He—” Barbara's eyebrows rose. “You know him?”

“I acted for his wife.” Barbara's eyes glittered at the memory.

Jessie ignored her. “Norman told me he'd called after nine Saturday morning. By that time Pat was already overdue at the marina.”

“So he didn't hear the woman,” Barbara said. She gazed down at the answering machine. Jessie gazed at Barbara.

“Well?” she said at last.

Barbara looked up. “I don't think you need to worry about what was on the tape. It could have been about a hundred things.”

“But there was something in her tone. She sounded …”

Barbara waited for her to finish. Jessie wanted to add “afraid” or “scared,” but she wasn't sure whether the fear had been in the woman's speaking or in her hearing. That's why she'd wanted Barbara to listen too.

“And,” Barbara continued, when Jessie remained silent, “I wouldn't make much of the words on the blackboard either. Maybe it meant honey garlic satays in Thai. The point is someone's been in the house.”

“Pat?”

“Who else? He came back, listened to his messages and took off. Maybe he's looking for you.”

Jessie reached for the phone and called her own number, a wavelet of hope already springing up in her veins. But Kate didn't answer. The machine took the call. Jessie checked it for messages. There were none. She called the school. It had closed for the day.

Jessie put down the phone. Hope stopped flowing inside her, leaving her inert. To look up at Barbara required conscious effort, especially since she knew there was a helpless expression in her eyes, and Barbara loathed helpless women.

Barbara looked back. Over the years she had perfected the ability to shield her eyes from penetration; now Jessie saw even she could be barred.

“I've got to get back to the office,” Barbara said.

“Take the car. I'll see you later.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Look around here.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Tell me a better one.”

Barbara went outside. Jessie followed her. She tried once more. “Kate left
Jane Eyre
behind. She reads it in bed every night.”

“So?”

“And she left her Reeboks. They're practically brand-new.”

“So?”

“That obtuseness may work in court; it doesn't work on me. Those Reeboks mean as much to her as that ratty Peruvian poncho meant to you at Stanford.”

Barbara laughed. “Shit. I'd forgotten all about that.”

“Not me.”

“No, not you.” For a moment Barbara's eyes were unshielded, far away, back in the days of the Peruvian poncho, burning incense, all-nighters at the Fillmore. But she fought off memory, Jessie saw, and said, “You can't make a case of the Reeboks. And she probably got sick of
Jane Eyre
. It's pretty sickening stuff.”

“I don't think so. And she was halfway through the last chapter.”

“You're giving me a headache, Jess.” Barbara sighed. She took a last, deep drag from her cigarette. “Look, even if you could make a case out of a pair of shoes and fucking
Jane Eyre
, what case would you make?”

Jessie had no answer. Barbara squashed her cigarette butt under her heel and got in the car.

The bag lady was sitting on the sidewalk, writing hurriedly on a scrap of paper with a pencil stub. “I wish you'd heard the tape,” Jessie said through the car window. Barbara turned the key. Jessie took a deep breath. “Come on, Barbara, you know about these things. What do you really think? Has he gotten in trouble with dope dealers or something like that?”

“It happens,” Barbara said. She revved the engine. “Parental kidnapping happens too.”

“No,” Jessie said, holding onto the car. “It couldn't be that. He's never even asked for more time with Kate. Why would he kidnap her?”

“Junkies do the damnedest things.”

“He's not a junkie. Junkies are heroin addicts. Pat smokes grass and does some cocaine, but it doesn't interfere with his life.”

Barbara's voice rose. “Don't be an asshole. You've been divorced for five years, and you're still defending him. He's a loser, Jessie. When you get Kate back …”

“What?”

Barbara softened her tone. “You'd better make some changes, that's all.”

Barbara drove off. Jessie watched the car until it turned the corner. Her hands were shaking. She put them in her pockets.

The bag lady finished writing and stuck the pencil behind her ear. “Beam me the fuck out of here,” she whispered urgently. Jessie reentered the house.

She went from room to room. Was Pat a loser? She looked at the flat stomach of the laughing woman on the wall and the fast-food containers on the table; she looked at the bag of cocaine in the bedside table; she looked at the Clinique bag too, but didn't open it. She looked at
Jane Eyre
. She looked at the empty space where Jimi Hendrix's Stratocaster had hung. If Pat was a loser, what was she? They'd lost their marriage together. Maybe she should have handled things differently; maybe she should have … Jessie stopped herself. It was over. All it had left behind was a residue of regret; and from time to time she missed him, a lot.

Jessie looked at the hall table. Hadn't there been unopened mail on top of it? She went through the drawers. She found advertising circulars, receipts from clothing stores, a few unpaid bills in small amounts, a handful of pesos, guitar picks, but no unopened mail. At the back of the bottom drawer, she found a crumpled piece of carbon paper. She smoothed it out. It was the copy of a money order, signed by Pat. On March 18, he'd paid ten thousand dollars to Eggman Cookies.

The name meant nothing to Jessie. She called information for Eggman Cookies and found no listing in L.A., Santa Monica, Hollywood, the beaches, the Valley. She tucked the carbon in her pocket. Ten thousand dollars was a lot to pay for cookies.

Could Eggman Cookies be the name of a band? Jessie went into the music room. Pat had hundreds of records, tapes and compact discs. He had Merle Travis, Carl Perkins, Muddy Waters, Doc Watson, Eric Clapton and everything Blind Lemon Jefferson had recorded. He had Charlie Christian, Django Reinhart, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Bucky Pizzarrelli. He had Andrés Segovia, Narciso Yepes, Julian Bream, John Williams. He had a rock collection that went from Abba to Z.Z. Topp and included Blue Cheer, the Blues Magoos, the Moody Blues, David Blue and Two Jews' Blues. But he didn't have Eggman Cookies.

Turning to go, Jessie noticed a tape inserted in one of the cassette players. Just to hear what it was, she flicked it on. Joni Mitchell. She was singing about Woodstock and the future she hoped she had seen there. Not Pat's kind of music, Jessie thought as she turned it off. Perhaps the woman with the flat stomach liked it.

“Shit,” Jessie said. She went into the kitchen and splashed cold water on her face. As she dried herself with a paper towel, her eye was drawn again to the blackboard. She turned on the overhead light and examined it closely. She could make out the “T” and the “o.” Now she saw that the third letter was “i.” “Toi.” It was French for “you,” wasn't it? And hadn't the last word been “toi” as well?

After searching unsuccessfully for a magnifying glass, Jessie unhooked the blackboard from the wall and carefully wrapped it in dry cleaners' plastic. In her workroom at home, she had the big light, a powerful magnifier and fine brushes for uncovering chalk dust, layer by layer. She called a taxi. When it arrived twenty minutes later, she picked up her package and went out.

It was late afternoon. A cool, damp wind was blowing in off the ocean. The blue oblong at the end of the street stretched to the horizon, turning gray under a graying sky. Rain was in the air.

The taxi driver looked her up and down, then got out of the car to open the trunk for her. He had to step around the bag lady, who was leaning against her shopping cart, watching the sky; reflected clouds drifted over the lenses of her sunglasses.

The taxi driver held out his hands to take the blackboard, but Jessie wanted to put it in the trunk herself. As she leaned forward, a metal wheel squeaked. Then the bag lady backed into her, knocking the package from her arms. The blackboard shattered on the pavement.

“Christ almighty,” Jessie said, turning on her.

The bag lady hunched down as though in the teeth of a storm, her gray head tucked into her thick shoulders. Then she spun around and hurried away toward the beach. The shopping cart ran over the blackboard, crunching fragments under its wheels.

“Beam me, beam me,” the bag lady whispered.

Jessie bent down and looked at the pieces. They were all there in the plastic, dozens of them.

“Mierda,” said the taxi driver.

A cold raindrop landed on Jessie's face.

7

It was just like a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces were all jagged and black. Find the four corners, find the four sides, fill it in. Under the five-hundred-watt bulb, Jessie's fingers dipped into the plastic wrapper, found the piece they wanted, stuck it in place, working quickly and surely, like a well-trained team that didn't need coaching anymore. The puzzle began to take shape on a big sheet of brown paper she'd laid on the worktable—“Night Sky with Milky Way,” or a rectangular blackboard with swirls of chalk dust. And under the chalk, Jessie could distinguish block capital letters: “T,” “o,” “i,” and now a “g” and “e” as well.

When she had fit most of the pieces together, Jessie glued them, one by one, to the brown paper. Then she swiveled her magnifier into place, adjusted the focus, took her number eight flat brush and got to work. She knew that wiping with a dry cloth dislodges loosely packed chalk particles, spreading them over the blackboard, but underneath, unless the wiping has been very thorough, the tightly packed core remains. Particle by particle, Jessie brushed a narrow border around the “T,” the “o,” the “i,” the “g”; then she found the top of the next letter, found its side, brushed away the covering layer of chalk dust: another “i.” By the time the doorbell rang she'd exposed it all: “Toi giet la toi.” It still meant nothing to her. She copied the words on a sheet of paper and went upstairs.