Sorrow's Crown (8 page)

"That won't be necessary. Please allow us to drive you to the airport."

Katie asked her, "You want to tell me how you happen to know where he's going?"

"Please." There was no query or room for discussion in the woman's tone. She simply stared, her lips not notched so much as a millimeter toward a smile or frown. Her face seemed fabricated from cloth or plastic, smoother than flesh should be. I didn't spot a single line in her skin, not around her eyes, not at the edges of her mouth, not even between her eyebrows where we all get a furrow.

To know I was leaving they had to know my schedule. I tried to placate my paranoia by accepting the possibility that
Harnes
had simply made a few inquiries about me in the past twenty-four hours after all the news broadcasts. A man of his wealth and position wouldn't find it too difficult to garner information. It made more sense than the idea that he'd been hovering over me—or perhaps
Crummler
—for weeks.

"What's your name?"

"Jocelyn."

"I'll be with you in a moment," I said, and turned my back to her. I didn't like being accosted, checked up on, and followed right to the door of my girl's place. Jocelyn hardly made a sound walking down the walk to the Mercedes limousine again, but Katie watched her leave.

"Call Lowell," she said. "Whatever is happening, you're going to need his help. I'll call him now."

"No, it's all right."

"You have to do everything alone, in your own way, don't you?"

"It'll be fine."

"You're going to get hurt." She stood quickly on her toes, threw a kiss at my lips that sort of missed, spun back inside and shut the door.

The driver was hardly more than spectral: a thin, ashen-faced man in a bad-fitting black suit who smelled like he'd gotten into Oscar
Kinion's
bathroom and used up the rest of his cologne.

Another guy with a white crew cut stood half out of the passenger seat, as if ready to come in and get me if I hadn't been persuaded to follow the woman. The etched lines of his face bent around his mouth like a poorly folded map—his sneer had been affixed to him for decades. He looked a very healthy, fit, and forceful sixty. His upper lip dipped at an improper angle, almost like a harelip. Once he'd been punched in the mouth so hard that he'd bitten out a large piece of his lip, and the sew-up job had mauled him further. The lower half of his front teeth showed through, yellow and dry. He said, "Stop looking at me."

The woman opened the rear door of the limo, and I got my first glimpse of Theodore
Harnes
.

Nondescript was the best description I could come up with. Nothing about him stuck with me, no simile or metaphor came to mind. I sat beside him with my body slightly twisted in case he wanted to shake hands. He stared straight ahead. Jocelyn got in beside me, pressing me over until I sat in the middle between her and
Harnes
. If this was a Chandler, Block, Williams or
Vachss
novel I'd have been "scrunched between the heaving shoulders of two guys named
Vincenzo
and Popgun
Rolly
." The woman felt like smoke beside me, a presence but not a pressure.
Harnes
, though we didn't touch, was the opposite. A live pressure but no sense of a living presence.

I was starting to think that getting into the car was a bad idea.

Theodore
Harnes
, who had married one of my grandmother's bridesmaids, said, "I want to thank you.”

“You do?"

"Yes."

"For what?"

"Catching the man who murdered my son."

An autopsy report wouldn't be completed for at least another day. The kid's teeth had been broken and scattered and it would take a while for him to be identified by his dental records or whatever other means they had. I wondered why, under these circumstances, a father wouldn't reach out with both hands for even the slightest hope that his child wasn't dead.

"It might not be your son. There's no real evidence yet that...”

In a tranquil, toneless voice, he said, "He did not come home."

“But there's a chance that ..."

"My son always came home."

I could see he was a man who brooked no opposition of any kind, not even by natural events. All things had to follow in the same course, at his insistence. What he expected must come to pass. His demands would be unrealistic and unobtainable. Only death proved to be an acceptable excuse for Teddy. What would having this man for a father do to a boy? To what lengths would someone forced to live in that shadow go to get away?

"I don't think
Crummler
did it," I said.

He showed no bewilderment, as if prepared for my response. "A raving lunatic covered in blood holding the murder weapon? He is guilty."

"
Crummler
wouldn't hurt anyone."

He ignored my comment and said, "I've heard of your past, helpful interests in certain investigations. The kidnapped
Degrasse
child. The sheriff's recent troubles. You found the murderer of your parents. You and your grandmother, I believe. You are a formidable pair. She sounds like a most intriguing woman."

"Oh cripes."

So, he would take the tack that he didn't know Anna, or perhaps he'd forgotten her, or only remembered her in a haze from before he had such power to wield.

"Why was Teddy at the cemetery?" I asked.

Jocelyn gazed at me, the driver glared into the rearview mirror, and the other guy kept his grin up, as if nobody ever asked
Harnes
a question, or maybe nobody ever mentioned Teddy.

"His mother is buried there,"
Harnes
said.

"Was he visiting her grave?"

"I believe so."

"Tell me about him."

"Why?"

"Why not? Who were his friends?"

"You should have murdered that madman,"
Harnes
told me, and a static charge built around him. I thought if I reached out and touched him, sparks would skitter off my fingernails. He gave me a sidelong glance, showing nothing. "Believe me, Mr. Kendrick, it would have been worth your while, if you had killed him."

He said it the way anyone else would talk about turning in their recycled cans for cash. I stared at the side of his face, trying to get a bead on him, but he moved in and out of focus from second to second.

"Is there anyone I can talk to?"

"Talk? About my son?" Barnes snapped back into himself, so unassuming that he seemed to fade in and out of existence. "No, there is no one with whom you can talk."

The guy in the front seat turned to grin at me some more with that scarred mouth. He had the air of a man who knew a secret and wanted everyone else to know that he knew it. Whatever he wanted to tell me, he'd eventually get around to it. I smiled pleasantly at him, showing off my nice upper lip. I wasn't getting anywhere with
Harnes
anyway. "What's your name, Sparky?"

He opened his mouth slowly and I saw that part of his tongue was missing as well, leaving it slightly forked. He said, "It sure as hell ain't Sparky," just as we pulled up to the airport. Jocelyn got out and I followed.

Harnes
said nothing, and didn't even glance toward us. Jocelyn slipped back into the Mercedes, slammed the door, and they left me there.

I realized that
Harnes
hadn't given me a lift in his nice limousine to thank me for finding his son's killer, not at all. He hadn't even seen me, really. He'd been looking right through me and staring at Anna.

~ * ~

I called my grandmother from the airport but got my own voice on her answering machine. I said, "If
Harnes
comes around call Lowell immediately." Then I called Lowell and told him that I thought Theodore
Harnes
was going to be great misfortune in one form or another.

He laughed and said, "You giving me a bulletin, Jonny? Guy's got kids in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nicaragua, all the places you can't even point to on a map—"

"I think I could get Nicaragua."

"—they do nothing but work on the line making shoes for sixteen hours a day that are sold on Rodeo Drive for six hundred bucks a pair. He has a house full of Burmese servants who probably get paid off in table scraps and half the minimum wage. He makes the old men in the sawmills and out on the road camps thank their stars they've at least got shooters and beer to slump into in their dirty trailers at night. Thanks for the advice, I can't express in words how much I appreciate it. Why don't you go shelve some more books out there in the big bad city, Jonny Kendrick? What's that noise, you dropping change into a pay phone? What, you didn't get your cell phone yet?"

For the next two days I sat in the store fulfilling orders I'd received from the Internet. More and more of my business was actually done through the mail and over the Internet, now that I'd hooked up with several online bookseller databases. I'd list most rarities and first editions, and within a couple of weeks I'd generate orders and I'd send the books off. It was much easier to reach collectors who knew what they were after and were willing to pay, rather than relying on the chance that someone would come in off the street who was probably only interested in finding a cheap paperback copy of a recent bestseller. I had three locked glass cases filled with books over a century old, and it felt nearly that long since anyone had browsed and asked me to unlock the cabinets.

My assistant Debi
Kiko
Mashima
finally realized that the way to fame and success was not to work in a Greenwich Village bookstore, but to quit NYU and marry one of the leading software writers on the face of the earth. His name was Bobby Li and he liked to rollerblade and always wore hockey jerseys. They'd met at a computer expo at the Jacob
Javits
Center. Despite the fact that he, too, was of Japanese descent, he'd lived in the San Francisco area all his life and now owned a large portion of it. He was Debi's age, twenty-one, and worth roughly half a billion dollars. They'd had five dates before he proposed and she accepted. I did not consider her leaving my employ to be a great betrayal.

If I moved the store to Felicity Grove and went in partners with the flower shop, I could still make a living, but I'd have to get a door with bells on it that chimed or jangled or rang or tinkled whenever anybody came in. Maybe I just had a low distraction threshold, but the idea of having a clanging noise interrupt my thoughts and work every few minutes didn't appeal to me. A door opening and somebody entering made more than enough clamor to alert you to the presence of a potential customer. And every once in a while somebody came in hoping to sell me a few rain-soaked paperbacks they'd nabbed out of the trash.

Or so I thought, until I turned in my seat and saw a guy standing there only two feet away, staring intently at me.

He'd entered without a sound.

No way to judge how tall he might be, crimped as he was, low to the ground like an animal tensed and coiled. He wore remnants of a dark three-piece suit, ripped and patched with different pieces of fabric, a frayed black overcoat hanging open so that he looked like an Old West gunslinger waiting to draw. He had the hard, confident, but wary edge the street imbued those whose brains hadn't been turned to tapioca by drugs, self-pity, sexual abuse, or the unending loneliness of the outcast. His eyes had a black, shrewd, and discerning energy to them, but I might have just been mistaking malicious aptitude. He had a poorly trimmed beard, thick in spots and showing cuts in other places, as if he'd used a pair of broken scissors to slice off hanks.

He took his time sizing me up, shifting now until he stood in front of the counter, glancing down at my fists filled with invoices and mailing labels.

Despite his silent entrance, I should have noticed the reek. The stink of rotting fruit and vegetables followed him in. His torn, gaping pockets were stuffed with lettuce leaves and a few bruised apples and old legumes. I smelled no alcohol. He looked fifty, but might have been a decade younger or older. A sharp look of feral intelligence lit his face, and I thought he must be one of the rare breed who had chosen the street instead of the street choosing them. He could have been a cop taken down low.

"You're Kendrick," he said.

"Yes."

A bell over the door might not be such a bad thing after all
, I thought. One that jangled and rang up such a storm that nobody who looked like they wanted to yank a Colt strapped to his thigh could walk in while I worried about how distracting bells over the door would be.

Even if I'd wanted to wallop first and ask questions later, he stood just out of arm's reach. Keeping a fair distance, yet staying close enough so that if I had a weapon handy he could whirl over the counter and leap into my chest before I could do anything about it.

"I'm Nicodemus
Crummler
," he said. "Nick. I know you're my brother
Zeb's
friend. I need your help."

"Who's Maggie?" I asked.

His eyes lost their protective black shale aspect, the dead sheen lifting for a second. That seemed to be about as close to a flinch as he was capable of after living so long in the refuse. He chose to ignore the question for the moment.