The Triggerman Dance (4 page)

Joshua Weinstein perused his beer, and forced another sip.

"And?"

"Something gave. I'll get back to that when I need to. Chronology isn't important here. Questions, so far?"

"Why Susan Baum?"

"Left-wing. A Jew. A woman. A world-class afflicter of the comfortable. A brilliant afflicter. She continues to offend a lot of people, right there on the front page of the
Orange County Journal,
three days a week. Businessmen, Republicans, old-fashioned patriots, churches, hunters, smokers, meat-eaters, drinkers, straights, men, all-boys' Little League teams and boy scouts without gay troop leaders. You know the litany. By some standards,
she's
the revolutionary. She's also an American citizen exercising her constitutional right to free speech. They tried to kill her for it, and they said as much when they engraved those casings for us."

At this, John Menden looked down at his beer glass and tapped its bottom against the table. "You're sure they weren't after the assistant—Ms. . . uh . . . Harris?"

"We worked that possibility," said Weinstein. "And it yielded nothing."

In the moment of silence that followed, even Weinstein seemed to lose his focus. Dumars saw something remote pass across his expression. The memory of Rebecca, she understood, his fiancee, gliding over his mind as quietly as a cloud across the sun. John Menden's face looked mournful, too.

It was Menden who broke the meditation. "Have you had any contact from the shooters? Anyone making a claim to
it—a
note or a call—anything?"

Weinstein's attention snapped back to the present. "Eighty-six letters, twelve postcards and a hundred and fourteen calls. They surprised me. I knew Orange County was conservative, but I didn't know there was that much hatred, just under the surface. Hatred and fear. Exactly one letter seemed credible to us, the rest were unconnected—we're pretty sure. We've followed up most of them as best we can—most of them aren't signed. The one we take seriously is from some people calling themselves 'The Freedom Ring.' It was computer-generated, on a nice sheet of twenty-five percent cotton bond paper. Here's a photocopy."

Weinstein removed a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. John Menden downed the fresh shot, then pushed his beer and shot glasses out of the way. He flattened the paper against the table.

Rebecca was a mistake and we are sorry. Baum is the tumor
we tried to remove.

What happened to Miss Harris can happen to anyone who seeks to abridge our rights.

We will not have the foundations of America torn down by people who prosper under our system, only to disrespect it.

—The Freedom Ring

Menden handed the sheet back to Joshua, who folded it into his coat pocket. "Well, Mr. Weinstein, do you have a suspect, or don't you?"

"We do."

Weinstein looked at Sharon Dumars as he said this, and registered with some satisfaction the astonishment on her face. She ingested the news like a bad taste, then shook back her dark wavy hair with a toss of her head and lifted the beer glass to her mouth with extreme knowingness. She is learning, he thought, but right now her galvanics would send a polygraph into fits.

"But I can't know who it is," said Menden.

Weinstein looked at John, then centered his beer glass before

him.

"No," he said. "You can't know that. . . yet."

Menden shrugged and sat back. "Then why are you here?"

"I'm here, Mr. Menden, because you want to listen to me."

Menden raised his eyebrows in mock exasperation, then let them down again. "Why do I want to listen to you? With this whole world full of people with their stories to tell and their axes to grind, why do I need to hear yours?"

His tone of voice and his eyes were so placid now that Sharon Dumars couldn't tell if Menden was cunning, innocent, or possibly, just plain stupid. The alcohol seemed to fortify his mask.

"Because you were in love with Rebecca, you smug sonofabitch."

Sharon Dumars emitted a tiny breath, then coughed to cover it. She couldn't take her eyes off of Weinstein. His ears—those wonderful Ichabod Crane ears of his—were a molten red now. The poor man was as tumultuous inside as a volcano. And his thirsty dark eyes fixed onto John's face and didn't let go. They seemed to be trying to locate something almost invisibly small. Yet Menden returned the long assessment with a gaze of utter calm. Weinstein was the active, Menden the passive; Weinstein the river, and Menden the rock against which it raged.

"I," Josh continued, "was
engaged
to her, as you read in the papers. And while I was, you were courting her at the
Journal
offices, where you both worked. You talked to her, you lunched with her, and later, you entertained her in your home on Sun Valley Drive in Laguna Canyon. You felt something for her that you believed you had never felt for a woman before. You did love her, didn't you? I don't see how you couldn't. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my whole life. It was easier than breathing. I'm not wrong, am I?"

When Dumars managed to look across to John Menden, his expression had not changed. She looked hard at him, but for all her training and perspicacity, for all of the reverberating context that she now understood, she could not read any reaction at all. It was almost unbelievable. Was he a sociopath? A psychotic? Was Joshua quite simply wrong?

"Don't answer," said Weinstein. "What you answer doesn't matter to me, because I know what happened and I know the truth. The truth, Mr. John Menden, is that Rebecca was in love with you, too. Surprised? Then certainly it's a pleasant surprise. Remember the picture they ran, of Rebecca in the rain by the planter? Of course you do. You were in it, though you weren't recognizable. Didn't you wonder why her left hand was naked, why the ring she'd worn for eight months was suddenly gone? I'll tell you. She took it off that morning and gave it back to me. She said she couldn't, there was someone else. She cried. She didn't just cry, she raged. She stormed. That night, the night after she died, I went to her apartment and found two letters she'd written. Here's yours."

Weinstein produced a smallish envelope, pink with a faint floral pattern, and set it on the table. It was sealed. On top of the envelope, he set something small that shined warmly even in the dim light of Olie's Saloon.

Joshua Weinstein's voice had taken on a profound bitterness. "Take the ring, too. Touch it. Smell it. Think of the perfect finger that used to wear it. Think of the times you spent together. Return it to me when you're finished. It's mine. It cost me a lot, and I'm not talking about money."

Again, Dumars's attention went to Menden. He looked for a long moment at the envelope and ring. He blinked twice, glanced at his empty shot glass, then lifted his eyes to Joshua Weinstein. They were just a fraction brighter than before.

Around the edges showed a moisture that had not been there just a second or two ago. And his ruddy face was even darker now, more deeply lined around the mouth and eyes.
There it is,
she thought,
his confession!

Then, Josh stood. "Rebecca loved you," he said. "They shot out her heart and she died alone in a fucking parking lot in the rain. That's why you want to listen to me. Thanks for your time."

He tossed a few bills on the table and was already through the saloon door by the time Dumars slung her purse over her shoulder, took one look into the pained gray eyes of John Menden, and followed Weinstein out.

In the fall of 1971, John's father and mother bought an airplane. John was nine and he sat with his parents in the Martin Aviation office at Orange County Airport while his father signed the papers. The salesman was a slender, tanned, soft-spoken gentleman who John felt was welcoming his father and mother, even himself, to an elite club of aviators. The office had pictures of the salesman in various airplanes, some featuring a celebrity with him. From outside, the roar of passenger jets rattled the picture frames against the wall, and the buzzing tenors of the private planes cut through the air as they took off and landed. The salesman gave John a styrofoam glider with a weighted nose and short, sharp futuristic wings, which sat on his lap as he listened.

John understood that it was a small plane, a rather old one, but in superb condition and reasonably priced—the perfect starter craft for a middle-aged aerospace engineer bitten by the fly bug early in life and now able to assume the debt of curing what some people called "the disease."

"The only good disease a man can get," said the salesman, glancing at John's mother. "Or a woman. This little craft will open up a world to you that you only suspected was there. Every minute in the air is like dreaming for an hour."

"Well put," agreed his father, rapidly signing away at the purchase agreement. "I wonder if we could dream our way into another six months of service?"

"I'll ask Herb, Mr. Menden."

"Appreciated, Lew."

His mother just laughed in the way that John had come to understand meant that she was humoring someone. In private moments, she had confided to John that her husband needed the airplane far worse than she did. John liked it when she laughed, the way her big teeth suddenly appeared and her rather stern face brightened up like the sun. His father was handsome, tall and exuded a majestic ego made charming by his cheerful good manners. Men always deferred to him, and John's schoolmates instinctively feared him. John liked the way his father and mother looked together.

He stood in the shade of the Martin building and watched his father taxi to the runway. The little Piper was painted bright yellow with red trim, and John's mother had opted for a tastefully theatrical costume—red silk scarf, aviator shades and a leather bomber's jacket—in which to make their maiden, craft-owning flight. John wondered why they couldn't have gotten a three-seater instead of a two, but he was used to the fact that his parents admitted him into their presence as a kind of formal offering. It was a warm formality, and John often sensed love in it. But it was never the kind of thing you just barged into.

His mother waved after she settled into the cockpit, and Lew helped them latch down. The propellor was a yellow, red-tipped blur. Accelerating down the runway, the little Piper emitted a determined, rising moan. It finally wobbled off the ground, looking to John as if it was lifting all the weight of the world.

For the hour they were gone, John threw his glider out on the tarmac, wondering if with just the right conditions it could rise high, ease into the slipstream of the Piper, and follow it wherever it might go. He decided the idea was dumb. It was hard enough just to get the foam ailerons to stay adjusted from one flight to the next.

So he sat on a bench and waited for the plane to return. He saw it when it was just a bright speck in the western sky, tilting its way down. After it landed he positioned himself on the tarmac and waved it in with the curt, martial motions of the ground-crews he much admired. His father smiled at him through the little side window, radio set still clamped to his head. The Piper rolled to a stop.

His mother climbed out, helped by Lew, and gave John a hug. Her face was warm against his and the silk scarf puffedlightly against his cheek. She smelled as always like her perfume—Chanel No. 5—and the leather of her jacket. She stood back as Lew helped John into the cockpit, where his father was assiduously making flight notes in a small book. His father extended his hand and John shook it.