Out of the Blues (4 page)

“It's been given to me. It's my job.” Her hand rested on the shield at her waist.

“Oh, and I do know you do your job,” he said, then seemed to draw back, realizing what he said and what it might mean for him.

Salt forced herself to lean forward, close to the dirty hard plastic. “There's that,” she said, “and also that I may be able to arrest John.”

“How you gonna prove what happened ten years ago?” Stone's voice growled from his battered mouth.

“I don't know. That's why I'm here, to ask you.”

“All I know is what John tell me. He said he gave the bluesman bad junk 'cause he tried to get out of a deal. I thought it was about
singing and playing in the club.” Stone brought up his clenched, manacled fists. “Is that enough?”

“Who cut John's dope for him?”

“Back then it was Man.”

“You ever know John's last name?”

“Don't nobody have no real last name 'round The Homes.”

“Was anyone else involved in John's dealings with Anderson?”

Stone stretched back, his long body in a straight line, his bound arms above his head. “Maybe somebody the bluesman played with. I can't remember all from back then.”

Down the long hall behind Stone, at the far end, an inmate made wide swipes with a mop, accompanied by a faint but distinct tap each time the mop end hit the bottom of the wall. His rhythm was constant and steady. He faced the other direction but was backing closer and closer.

A sudden clank from the door behind Salt startled her as it began its motorized draw back into the metal wall frame. “Time's up,” said the gray-shirted officer waiting on the other side of the door. Another guard appeared behind Stone. Salt stood. “Can you give him my card?” She pulled a generic blue card, on which she'd written her mobile number, from her jacket pocket and held it out. The officer took it and unlocked a tray to the other side where his counterpart retrieved it.

Stone had stayed seated, the fingers of both his hands again touching the letters and crude drawings on the sides of the space, like a blind man reading Braille. The guard behind him gave him a tap. “Time's up.” Stone stuck out his long, thick tongue and licked the scratched steel wall.

S
alt peered into the lighted kitchen through the twelve small windowpanes of the back door. Wonder, her Border collie mix, kept his sit ten feet from the door while she turned the keys in the locks and let herself in. On the blue table beside the dog was an old amber ice tea pitcher filled with wild poppies and dogwood. The dog sat waving his tail as if he were responsible for and proud of the flowers on the table beside him. He was her dog all right. Five years since she'd found him, emaciated and flea-bitten, five years and he was still a wonder, how he'd taken to the sheep, patrolling the house and grove, and only occasionally investigating the neighbor's cows.

“Good boy.” She stroked his fur, setting him off, scurrying, bumping, and turning for his greeting scratches. “Good boy,” she repeated, smoothing his silky flanks and scratching his ears.

“Poppies for you and dogwood for Wonder. Love, Wills.” The note was written on a page torn from the small Homicide notebook he kept in his shirt pocket, its pages often damp and curling. She
lifted a poppy to her nose, inhaling the fragrance of a new spring, of green and white blossoms and leaves.

Wills was practically working twenty-four hours a day on one of the highest-profile cases the city had ever seen, the who-done-it murders of Laura Solquist, a beautiful mother and wife of a prominent up-and-coming real estate lawyer, and her two young daughters, Juliet and Megan. He caught naps at the office and stumbled in at all hours to his house in an old in-town neighborhood, close to the job, where he would have just enough time to get some sleep and walk his dogs in the nearby park. Huff had been trying to run interference for Wills with the politicians, press, and brass.

Neither she nor Wills were phone people. But he left evidence, a covered dish in the fridge or fruit fresh from the market, that he'd been to her old Victorian house in rural Cloud, a one-light town forty or so minutes south of the city. He made the drive down so his dogs could run with Wonder and so he could use her washer and dryer. His laundry capabilities were off-and-on depending on the status of the renovations on his old bungalow.

Wonder was sniffing all around, up and down her new slacks. “I have not been unfaithful with another dog, if that's what you're trying to say,” she told him, holding up his snout to her own nose. He flicked his tongue at her mouth.

“Come on, one run to the back forty for you and then bed.” She opened the door and followed the dog out. They'd penned the sheep before she'd left but still the dog ran to the enclosure, assuring himself they were grouped up. The five woolies gathered closer in the pen and gave off sleepy, halfhearted bleats. Wonder left off and took his business into the pecan grove. He'd been a stray on her old beat. She'd given him a job, herding the small flock.

The trees were still wet from another spring rain and it was beginning to mist again, drops gathering on the branches and new leaves,
reflecting light from the porch like dripping jewels, then falling. With the moon and stars behind the cloud cover, the all-black dog was invisible until he was about two yards away.

“Come on.” Salt patted her leg.

It felt like she and Wonder were beginning to occupy the house rather than it occupying her. Fifteen or so years ago the big nine-room Victorian had been left in her care when her mother had remarried and she and her new husband, along with Salt's brother, went to live in North Carolina. Getting shot last year had dredged up all sorts of ghosts, a few of whom had resided in the old home.

After Stone's assault, Wills and other friends had plastered and painted over bullet holes in the walls and ceiling. And she was in other ways trying to make it feel like a safe home again. She slept in the downstairs bedroom. Upstairs she'd ripped out the wall between her parents' old bedroom and another bedroom to build a dojo, a place of serenity and combat, where she practiced aikido, the martial art that emphasized peaceseeking.

Pepper would be in early the next day for their workout. It would be a comfort to see him. They'd been academy mates and worked the same precinct on adjoining beats for all their uniform time. Both had put in for and made detective the year before, Pepper drawing an assignment in Narcotics. She missed his hundred-watt smile, framed on the left side of his face by a long scar that ran from his forehead to his lower jaw. Over the years they'd tell each other's stories. Even though he had been the star of the Salt and Pepper Show, he was more Sancho Panza than Don Quixote, comic relief for their adventures. And he'd been the one who'd noticed her name as it appeared on her first uniform name tag, “S.Alt.” Wesley Greer had given her the street name “Salt” and himself the street name “Pepper,” bantering with their friends on the shift about his “hotness” as a law enforcement hero and male.

She shed her dirty, torn clothes and showered, finding little more
damage on her body than from a workout. In front of the bathroom mirror she dabbed witch hazel on the abrasions on her face, then padded back to the kitchen.

From the window Salt watched the wind pick up, whirling tree limbs in the old orchard. A white poppy dropped from Wills' bouquet on the table. She picked up the bloom and stripped a stamen from the throat of the flower, drops of milky liquid clinging to the delicate stem. Like she did with honeysuckle when she was a kid, she touched her tongue to the sweet fluid.

The dog waited by the bedroom door. Her status as a new detective lay heavy. No Pepper partner; no credibility, again; no other woman on her shift; and assigned an old, cold case.
“Hellhound on my trail.”
Some old piece of the song was earworming her. At the bed she knelt down. While she was neither a believer nor a nonbeliever, she prayed to the mysterious, to the force blowing outside, that Wills would be safe, that she'd do some good, that she'd speak for the dead. In bed Wonder circled around on the quilt, then curled against her leg.

—

S
HE
LIFTED
a rusted iron latch on a gray board door and stepped across the threshold into the dim interior of a one-room shanty. The only light in the room came from the daylight she'd just let in. The room was bare except for a brown medium-sized dog sitting on top of an old cast-iron stove that spilled cold ashes onto a dirt floor.

The dog talked without moving his mouth, “mouf” he called it. He had an old Southern street way of talking. He rolled his eyes, twitched his ears, and moved his head around while he stayed absolutely in place, never moving the rest of his body at all, staying in the same sit.

She got very close to the dog's face and looked into his yellow eyes.

—

W
ONDER
WAS
standing over her, watching, when she opened her eyes. As soon as she did, he bowed with his front legs and jumped off the bed, his nails clicking on the floor toward the kitchen. Trying to hold on to threads of the dream, Salt moved slowly, sitting up and lowering her legs over the side of the bed, but the dog's words were lost.

She made strong Cuban coffee and took her heavy, white diner cup outside to let Wonder gently herd the sheep to graze at the back of the pecan orchard. Afterward, she showered and dressed in a clean white gi and went into the dojo, sitting a few feet from a small shelf that was close to the floor and on which there were a sprig of the poppy in a small green glass vase, a burning red candle in a votive bowl, and the photograph of the sensei.

Although she knew they'd arrived, having heard Pepper's car coming up the gravel drive from the blacktop to the house, she widened her eyes pretending to be startled and reared back when the kids slid to their knees beside her on the mat. Pepper's boys, Theo and Miles, seven and nine years old, liked to sneak up the stairs of the old house to try to catch her by surprise. But of course not only had she heard the car, but she'd heard the creaks of certain boards beneath their small, bare toes. Pepper joined them, bowing to the room, then going to his knees and touching the mat in front of the altar with his forehead, the place where the knife-wound scar began in his smooth, otherwise flawless skin. There was just a hint of East India in his African-heritage features and six-foot-two athletic build. He stood, adjusted his gi, and bowed to his sons and Salt. “Namaste,” they replied, their hands in prayer pose, nodding in unison.

The dojo room was an extravagant and sensuous joy. The floors had
been reinforced and raised to allow the surface to bend and give. A large single piece of white matting covered the floor, wall to wall. The walls were finished in old wood and bamboo, the windows shortened and raised to shoulder height. Mirrored walls on either side of the door reflected the room's earth shades: Pepper's and the boys' brown skin, the white gis, the dried-grass colors of the bamboo, and the weathered gray wood. Pepper began to lead them in stretches, rolls, falls, and then designating uke and nage, the routines of their aikido practice.

The altar was positioned parallel to the place in the middle of the room where she'd cradled her father's head, wiping thickening blood from his eyes, as he was dying.

Pepper effected a hip throw, connecting and levering her into a roll. Without speaking, he led the boys in some elbow-control moves. The only sounds in the room were the whipping of Pepper's hakama, the air as it whooshed from their chests, and their bodies as they tumbled, fell, and rolled to the mat. After an hour Pepper sat down in front of the altar. Sweat ran down their faces as they joined in bowing their thanks.

—

“
I
T
'
S
ALL
OVER
the department—Baby Jesus, the chief. You certainly started your new assignment in style.” Pepper high-fived her. They sat next to each other drinking ice tea on the back porch steps. Wonder sat at the paddock gate watching the boys trot around after the sheep.

“Yeah, well, I'm just lucky no one made a big deal out of my not having a radio with me,” Salt said.

Dust clouds hung around the boys' knees as they stirred the sheep, running after them and patting their dirty wool.

“Ever heard of Mike Anderson?” she asked.

“The bluesman? Don't tell me they got you workin' that old thing?
I thought it was an overdose.” Pepper pinched some mint leaves from beside the steps. “Already hazing you.” He shook his head. “Those homicide guys are the worst. Who did they partner you with?” He handed her some mint.

“According to Sergeant Huff—‘don't call him Sarge'—my reputation has preceded me and therefore, at least for this old cold case, I don't need a partner.” She crushed the leaves against her tea glass.

“What?” Pepper turned to her, scowling.

“Also, I went and saw Stone.”

“What?”

“He made a statement for the record that Anderson was intentionally given a hot pop.”

“Un-fucking-believable. He wants his sentence reduced. What does Wills say about all this?”

“He's all tied up in the Solquist case. I haven't had a chance to talk to him about it. I don't think he knows.”

“God, he must be getting killed with pressure from that one.”

The boys had the sheep running the perimeter of the paddock. Wonder fairly vibrated watching the activity.

“What about you, Pep? This has been your first week, too. How is Narcotics?”

“Well, Ann hates it. She's worried to death and really that's the worst. I know when shit's getting hairy, but she's holding her breath the whole time I'm at work.” Pepper stood and called to the boys to tell them they could throw the Frisbee for Wonder but that they had to go in a few minutes. “I don't like it that you're working alone again, Salt.” His scar lengthened as he clenched his jaw.

“Narcotics as hinky scary as I've heard? Does Ann have reason to worry?”

He stretched his back, bending out from his waist, and grinned as he put on an affected street patois. “What? Now I've got two womens
worryin' 'bout my black ass?” His parents being middle-class and teachers, he'd grown up in a home where standard grammar was mandatory. “Actually, my folks used to go to the same church as Mike Anderson's parents, long time ago. That church got to be huge and they didn't really know the Andersons well. I just remember them saying something about his death before they left that mega scam. You know that church, Midas Prince's church. They left there and never looked back.

“Come on, Theo, Miles. Time to get this show on the road.” He stood and strode off toward his sons, giving her the “come-back smile” that worked like a magnet and made people want to hang with him. Salt resisted an unfamiliar urge to run and hug him good-bye. They didn't hug.

—

T
HERE
WAS
little furniture left after her mother and brother moved out, just enough to do: a bed in the downstairs bedroom, a dresser, the kitchen table, an old sofa and chair in the living room. The library was empty except for a worn wine-colored Oriental rug and the books. The cassette tapes were in a battered, brownish pasteboard suitcase the size that a man might have carried on an overnight business trip in the '60s. Salt slid the case from the shelf, sat down beside it on the carpet, and pried the tarnished latches open, releasing a faint muddy odor as she lifted the top.

There were a hundred or more tapes in hard plastic cases. Some had factory labels on the spines and others were hand-labeled, her father's long, loopy writing sliding off the edges. “I can't read my own writing,” he'd say. “Blind Will” read the label on one tape. Other tapes were blank on the spines, and Salt slid them out in order to see what was written on the tape face. Like the rest of the library, the
tapes seemed to be in no particular order, unless, like the library, it was a system peculiar to her father.