Pacific (9780802194800) (12 page)

ANIMAL PARTY

Shutters snapped as a crowd of photographers yelled for their attention. They treated everyone like big stars.

“To your left, Joan.”

“Right above, Joan.”

“Don't smile, Rob.”

“Down the middle, Joan.”

“He's so demanding, isn't he?”

“Full front now. Full front please.”

They went into the ballroom and found their table. After dinner there was a screening of clips from old movies before and after the film had been restored and enhanced.

An old man carried a birthday cake to his bedridden daughter six times with the colors becoming more natural with each repetition. Everyone clapped as if this were the most amazing thing ever.

Once Joan had shied away from show business gatherings, assuming she'd find herself out of place, but she had learned over time that, with the exception of caterers, most everyone felt out of place and couldn't wait to go outside and smoke.

After the program, Rob went to the checkroom to get their coats while Joan waited in the gold lobby. The green carpet was composed of sinuous vines and three-headed seed pods like eyes on stalks.

“Hello, Joan,” said the screenwriter.

His face was red and his eyes looked larger and sadder than ever.

“Gray,” said Joan. “I didn't know you were here.”

“You're looking restored and enhanced this evening.”

“You are kind,” said Joan. “And you are drunk.”

“I'm kind of drunk.”

“My husband is getting our coats.”

“I look forward to meeting him.”

“Please don't.”

“I saw you running one time,” said Gray. “Your ponytail goes back and forth like a metronome. It seems so automatic it puzzled me. Shouldn't it be more random? And then I understood. It was obvious. Once it's back, there's nowhere for it to go but forth.”

Joan turned away but he caught her hand and pulled her back.

“Or take lightning,” he said. “It strikes the highest tree, we know that, but how does it know how high the trees are? It's not like lightning can see trees. The path is the answer, which must be formed from above and below.”

“You're hurting my hand. This is getting weird and upsetting.”

Rob came back with the coats. Joan considered introducing them as if everything was normal and decent, but then she realized with sudden clarity that she could just leave.

Under the awning, she put her coat on, buttoned it, and stood waiting. Rob and Gray were talking in the lobby. Of all the discreet people she might have laid, she thought.

Rob and Joan rode home in silence, listening to the rain on the roof, the splash of the tires, the unbearably tense sound of the turn signal.

“What have you done, Joan,” said Rob. “What have you done.”

She leaned her head against the window of the car. The glass was cool and refreshing. They drove by the Paradise Motel, where the lurid purple lights slid over rain-streaked windows. The only bond Joan could not break was with Micah. She was tired of all the other men in the world.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

A
GENT BETTY
Lee called Dan at his office in the morning to say they had raided Jack Snow's warehouse and found him dead.

Dan replied that the northern quarter of the trainyard was unincorporated so they should call the sheriff's office, for which he provided the telephone number.

Dan got coffee at the Red Robin and drove to the trainyard and gave a cup to each agent. They went to look at Jack Snow. He had cuts on both arms and a gash on the side of the neck. He'd died between a sword and a shield.

“Good God Almighty,” said Dan.

“Maybe Omaha?” said Agent Anders.

“They would have taken the money.”

“What money?”

“Look at his coat pocket.”

“Oh yeah.”

“He came to my house last night,” said Dan. “When we were at the airport. Knocked Louise down. My wife. He thought I was the one after him.”

“What'd you do?”

“Nothing. I wasn't going to leave after he'd been there once.”

“You should've called the cops,” said Agent Lee. “It might have saved his life.”

“Or got some cops killed,” said Dan.

They went to the doorway and looked out at a string of open boxcars rolling down the tracks. Panels of sunlight slid over the ground. They stood drinking coffee.

“Where's his car?” said Dan.

“That's a good question.”

“I'd find that. At least there'd be someone to talk to.”

“You say it's county jurisdiction,” said Agent Anders.

“The city ends about an eighth of a mile over,” said Dan. “Unless you guys want to claim it.”

“Our instructions are to get out.”

“What about that thing he was getting? That rock.”

Then Dan remembered his conversation with Sandra Zulma at the Continental Hotel and thought maybe she was not so crazy as she seemed.

“It's not here,” said Agent Lee.

“Anyway,” said Anders, “the whole point of that was to get him to talk, which ain't happening now. This is local. This is homicide.”

“You called the sheriff's office.”

“They're on the way.”

“They've got to come up from Morrisville,” said Dan. “Ed Aiken is sheriff now. He used to deputy for me. Ed gets kind of flustered, but I bet he can find a red Mustang with a dent on the back.”

“I don't remember a dent,” said Agent Anders.

“Louise hit it with a softball bat.”

“This is the Wild fucking West you got here.”

“Well, she wasn't having somebody come into the house,” said Dan. “Don't know how I'm going to tell her about this.”

They heard a siren coming from the south.

The Mustang was at that moment parked behind the house of Sandra's cousin Terry. Sandra had come in the night when he was asleep.

She'd walked in the back door and washed the sword in the kitchen sink. Then she dried it off and treated it with 3
IN
1 from the cupboard and sat at the table working the oil into the blade with a cotton rag.

It was not much of a sword, but she would not likely run into somebody with a better one.

She scrubbed the sink with Comet and turned on the water, the blood and the scraps from Terry's plates running down the drain.

She yawned and took the sword into the living room, where she fell asleep on the davenport.

Terry made pancakes for breakfast, and they ate from china plates in the living room. He wore a blue sweatshirt with the hood up around his face.

“See you got some wheels.”

“I'll be leaving shortly.”

“Did you find Jack?”

“I did.”

“What happened?”

“He's dead.”

“He is not.”

Sandra took the sword by the grip and stuck the point in the carpet.

“His chariot stands empty, Cousin.”

Terry ate some pancakes and laid the fork on the plate.

“He is not. Sandy.”

Sandra kept eating.

“It was fair combat,” she said.

“I can't be part of this.”

“I said I was leaving.”

“I didn't see you. I didn't talk to you.”

“You don't even know who I am.”

Sandra Zulma wrapped some pancakes in aluminum foil and took them and the sword out to the car and drove down to the highway. She would never see Terry's house again. She'd not gone ten miles before a sheriff's car pulled out of a high and treeless intersection on Route 41 and fell in behind the Mustang.

Deputies Sheila Geer and Earl Kellogg followed the red car. Sheila and Earl did not trust each other, and Earl was not trusted generally, but they'd made an accommodation, part of which was that Sheila drove when they rode together. She'd been to racing school in Milwaukee and was the best driver of all the police in the county.

Earl could not deny her talent behind the wheel. In seminars he'd been forced to attend, he'd learned that women are as good as men in all ways, save upper-body strength, and that even this was an open question.

When they got close enough to the Mustang to see the bent spoiler, Sheila hit the siren and lightbar.

“Let's find out what she'll do,” she said.

Sandra geared the Mustang back, the tach needle jumped, and the cruiser fell away in the mirror for a while before coming up fast.

Cresting a hill, she saw in the lane ahead a small gray pickup with a rust-stained refrigerator strapped upright in the bed. The pickup was meandering along and might as well have been backing up. The gap between the pickup and the Mustang closed at a sickening rate.

Sandra veered into the oncoming lane to pass and there encountered another truck, a serious one, a stone hauler with a high and dust-caked windshield and a mangled vertical grill like the teeth of a monster.

The drivers of these trucks are known throughout the county as the bat-out-of-hell drivers, for they brake for no one.

Nose to nose with the gravel truck, Sandra did the only thing she could, sliding the Mustang down into the ditch on the wrong side of the road.

The ditch was steep and flat at the bottom, and with amazement she found herself and the Mustang unbroken and hurtling down the frozen trough with the highway lost to sight.

She screamed then, full-throated, venting endless months of tension and boredom and alienation in the search for Jack Snow and the Lia Fáil. With tears streaming from eyes to ears, she felt her heart opening like a red-hot flower.

Then the Mustang hit the inclined berm of a dirt lane crossing the ditch and flew into the sky.

Sandra let off the gas. The engine sound died away. She couldn't hear anything at all. The car climbed above the land, and in the windshield she saw only blue.

She had hoped that the car would behave as flying cars do in movies—leveling off, landing, going on—but no, that's not what this car did. It maintained its upward attitude all the while, and, when it came down, the back end hit first, acting as a fulcrum with which
to slam the rest of the car savagely into the bottom of the ditch.

The nose pierced the ice and the dirt beneath and the car flew again, end over end, chassis to the sky, coming down on its roof and sliding for quite some distance before bumping a culvert and turning slowly sideways in the ditch, smoking and ruined.

Dan Norman met Louise for lunch at the Lifetime Restaurant, where he hoped the fussing of the waitresses would give him time to figure how to tell her what happened to Jack Snow.

He took her coat from her shoulders and hung it on a hook and they slid into the booth and looked at laminated menus.

“We don't do this enough,” said Louise.

“Hi, folks,” said the waitress, a barbwire tattoo encircling her wrist. “Do you know what you want?”

“Go ahead, Dan,” said Louise. “I'm still thinking.”

“I'll have the BLT.”

“Toast, babe?” said the waitress.

“Yeah. Wheat.”

“What about you, angel?”

“Can I get the chowder?”

When the waitress had gone, Louise said, “She seems awfully fond of us.”

“Listen,” said Dan. “I have something to tell you. It's about the guy who came to the house last night.”

“Did they arrest him?”

Dan shook his head. “He was murdered.”

“He what?”

“Somebody stabbed him at his warehouse in Stone City. They don't know who. They're looking.”

Louise began picking up crumbs from the table by pressing them with her index finger and brushing them off against her palm.

“I feel guilty,” she said. “I didn't want him to die. Maybe for a minute I did.”

“You have nothing to do with him dying.”

“I was the last person he saw.”

“There was at least one more.”

“This is true,” said Louise. “But, now, he's dead?”

“Yeah.”

The waitress brought their food. She did not call them “baby” or “honey,” “love” or “lamb.” Maybe she sensed the bad news. They ate quietly. Louise said she didn't feel like she should be hungry but she was.

“Will the police want to talk to me?”

“I don't know. They might.”

Leaving the restaurant, they ran into Britt, the chef whose mother had sold Louise the swing clock.

He unbuttoned his overcoat and unwrapped a red scarf from his throat. He asked about the clock and Louise told him it was in their bedroom.

“This is my restaurant,” he said. “Come back at night. The dinner menu is better. Oh, and when you leave? I wouldn't go west. They've got the highway closed off for something.”

Louise went east, Dan west. A cruiser blocked the road, and Earl Kellogg was setting out a line of orange pylons. Dan rolled the window down.

“It's the car,” said Earl.

“Can you let me through?”

“Don't tell Ed I did.”

Dan drove up and parked well back of the fire engines and cruisers and ambulances. The EMTs had cut the Mustang open and were bringing Sandra Zulma up from the ditch on a gurney. When they got her to the highway they let the wheels down and set the gurney on the pavement.

Dan crossed the highway. Her eyes were open.

“I found him,” she said.

There was blood on her face, in her hair, on her boots.

“Don't talk,” said Dan.

They rolled the gurney away and lifted it into the back of the ambulance and closed the doors.

Sheila Geer stood on the shoulder of the highway taking pictures of the car.

“What happened?” said Dan.

She lowered the camera. “Love to tell you but Ed said we weren't supposed to answer to you because you're not the sheriff.”

“Well, Ed's right, really. I respect that. Seems a little defensive, but his call.”

“She damned near got herself killed is what happened. Missed a head-on gravel truck by I am not kidding you Dan it couldn't have been more than arm's length.”

“You saw it?”

“Fuck yeah! We were right behind her. How this chick is alive I don't know. She shouldn't be.”

Dan walked down the highway with his hands in his pockets, bending low to look at the crushed Mustang. Fire crews blasted it with water. Few would have come out of that car talking, it was true.

Ed Aiken struggled to climb out of the ditch with a piece of folded metal. Dan gave him a hand and pulled him up.

“I believe this is what we call the murder weapon,” said Ed.

“Like as not.”

“It has blood on it.”

“Could be hers, I suppose.”

“I realize that. Found this, too. Looks like we might have drugs involved.”

He held a tightly wrapped cylinder of aluminum foil. Dan took it from him and tore the foil open at one end.

“Pancakes,” he said.

The next morning Hans Cook stopped by Louise's mother's house as he usually did. Hans was Mary's gentleman friend of twenty-five years. He brought her newspaper in, made coffee, ran the curtains open for the light. And though it was cold he cracked a couple windows, for he would not have the place smelling like an old lady's house.

Mary was up and dressed in a blue corduroy smock, listening to a radio program of popular songs from forty or fifty years ago. The announcer had the unnaturally smooth voice of someone trying to soothe a dog.

“That was Susan Raye with L.A. International Airport, where the big jet engines do indeed roar. That is a busy, busy airport, one of the busiest in the nation if I'm not mistaken. Coming up we've got the Statler Brothers, checking in on the Class of '57.”

“How do you listen to this?” said Hans.

“I like to have something on.”

He turned the radio off and waved the newspaper in his hand.

“How about I read to you?”

“You do that.”

He brought a dining chair in and sat beside her in the living room.

“Big headline today,” he said, turning the front page for her to see. “Slay Suspect Nabbed, Getaway Car Flips, Sword and Driver in Custody.”

“
‘Slay suspect?
'
”

“That's what they call them. Say, guess who's a contributing reporter. Albert Robeshaw.”

“Claude's boy? He's mixed up in this?”

“He's just reporting on it.”

“I listened to this on TV last night,” said Mary. “A gruesome thing. Where were you?”

“Swimming.”

“I find that hard to picture.”

“At the Y in Morrisville. I used to swim a fair amount. Set a record one time for treading water.”

“How long?”

“Oh, I forget. Five, six hours.”

“Impressive. Well, go ahead.”

And so Hans read her the story:

Sandra Catherine Zulma, 29, of Mayall, Minnesota, was apprehended yesterday after a high-speed pursuit that rerouted traffic on Highway 41 east of Romyla.