With Child (5 page)

She poured herself a glass of wine, ignoring the clock, and trudged up the stairs. At the top, not meaning to, she found herself in Lee's study, standing at Lee's desk, opening its right-hand drawer, and taking out the letter from Lee's mad aunt that had begun all this:

And to think, Kate reflected, that my first reaction was to laugh in delight at its absurdity. The memory made her feel ill, because in reality Lee's aunt had spoken, and Lee had answered, and now Kate was alone in the big house. She put the letter away and went into the hallway, where she gathered the shed clothes from the night before and took them not into their bedroom, but down to the small guest room at the end of the upstairs hall. She hung the denim jacket in the closet, stripped off her tank top and shorts and threw them along with the other dirty clothes into the guest hamper, and walked nude up the carpeted hall to get her work clothes out of the big bedroom. At the mirrored closet, she paused and eyed her reflection sourly. She wouldn't be surprised to find two more pounds on the scale: Long drives and comfort eating were killers. She looked pale, restless; her hair was nearly in her eyes. Even her fingernails were dirty and overlong.

"Christ, you're a mess," she said to her reflected self, and went to take a long shower with a great deal of soap.

She did not consult the scales; she did cut her fingernails.

Going back downstairs, she checked a second time, but the answering machine was still obstinately free of messages, not a red light to be seen. She even pushed the playback button, rationalizing that the light could be broken, but it merely clunked and beeped at her and was silent. She decided to go in to work after all, although she was only on call.

After the brooding quiet of the house, the gritty chaos of the Department of Justice was almost a balm to Kate's spirit. She had been away for little more than a week, but it might have been a few minutes. Kitagawa nodded as he passed her, deep in conversation with a man in the garish uniform of a doorman. Tom Boyle raised a finger in greeting but did not take the phone from his ear. She went to her desk, stowed her gun and a thermos of coffee in the bottom drawer, and sat in her chair: home again.

Dellamonica had a new tie. April Robinette had spilled something on her skirt. Gomes came through cursing furiously and carrying a massive electronic typewriter under his arm. There was another new plant on Al Hawkin's desk, already looking resigned to a lingering death. The top of Kate's desk was covered with scribbled messages that would take most of the day to decipher and deal with. Among them she found a flyer with the grainy photograph of a young girl with short hair, and she did not need to read the description of the missing girl to know that the police in Washington - no, she corrected herself, this one was from Oregon - were afraid that the so-called Snoqualmie Strangler had claimed a sixth victim. It had been several days since Kate had heard or read any news, but Jules was no doubt more up to date: This was the maniac who worried Jules, although there was no boy among his victims. Kate thought briefly of the girl's apprehension - no, her fear - that the telephone call had caused, and then her own phone rang.

Despite what she had told Jules, people did die in San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon. In this case it was a drive-by shooting, in broad daylight, in the Castro district, with three dozen eager and contradictory witnesses to sort out; she would not have much opportunity to doze off over her files that night.

Dropping the flyer into her wastebasket, Kate retrieved her gun and her thermos, and went out to do her job.

With September began the phone calls from Jules. In the first week, the girl called twice, to check on the search for Dio. They were brief calls, depressing for both of them. Kate was, in fact, looking for him, even after Al Hawkin had returned, because although Al had told Kate to concentrate on her own work, not sweat over some kid Jules shouldn't have been talking to in the first place, Kate could hear the pride and the loneliness in Jules's voice, and she remembered what it was like to feel abandoned by the adults you loved. Jules was going through a bad patch, and Kate could justify only just so many hours at work, so anything that filled the hours at home was all right with her - even talking to an angry twelve-year-old.

The tone of these telephone conversations evolved rapidly under the pressures from both sides. After the brief, uncomfortable calls of the first week, Kate half-expected that Jules would not try again; instead, the calls began hesitantly to take on a life of their own. Under the impetus of her summer experience, Jules's inevitable back-to-school essay of "What I Did During Vacation" evolved into a major project on homelessness, with Kate as her primary resource.

Even after the paper had been turned in to the astonished but pleased teacher, the phone calls continued, always beginning with the ritual "Anything about Dio?" before wandering off into twenty, even thirty minutes of discussion about homelessness; the ethics of capitalism; the lack of good teachers in the universe; her word for the day
(meniscus, braggadocio
, and
haruspex
were among the sesquipedalian ones, but the shorter
mensch, spirit
, and
vagrant
interested her, as well); the difficulties of getting a good education when surrounded by fools who were obsessed with clothing, hair, and boys; the psychological need for a peer group; the homeless again, and what they did for companionship; the friends Jules had made in her new home; the difference between a boyfriend and a boy friend; clothing, hair, and boys; the politics of clothing, hair, and boys; the pros and cons of short versus long hair; a boy friend called Josh; Kate's work; life in general; life in particular. To her surprise, Kate found herself patient with these adolescent maunderings, and, more than that, positively missing them when three or four days passed without a phone call.

The truth was, the house on Russian Hill was too damn big and too damn quiet. One night, she came home and found a message on the answering machine: Jon was thinking of hopping over to London, since Lee was not there to need his assistance; he would ring when he got back to Boston. "Cheerio, ducks." He did not explain how he knew that Lee was still away. Pride kept Kate from calling him back on the number he had left, but the inevitable conclusion that Lee and Jon had been in communication made the house ring with silence. She tried leaving the radio on, to defuse that first awful minute of coming home to rooms that had not breathed since she left, but the ruse did not work.

One day in mid-September, unpacking the bags after a desultory trip through the aisles of the supermarket, Kate discovered a box of cat kibbles in a bag between the packages of dried pasta and a jug of red wine. She held it up, a totally unfamiliar box she could have sworn she'd never touched before. The orange cat on the front of it grinned at her.

"My subconscious wants me to get a cat," she said aloud in disgust. She took the kibbles to the back door, poured half of them onto the brick patio for the birds, and left the box next to the door. No damn cat.

The next night, late, she was getting into bed when she heard a strange slapping noise down on the patio. Cautiously, she looked over the upstairs balcony and into the face of an obese and disgusted raccoon, who all but shook the empty box at her and tapped its foot. On her way home from work the following day, she stopped at the local corner store and bought five boxes of bone-shaped dog biscuits. The Vietnamese man who ran the cash register looked at her in surprise.

"You have dog now, Miss?"

"No, it's a payoff to the neighborhood protection racket, so they won't turn over my garbage cans."

The man smiled his polite incomprehension and gingerly held out her change.

In one of her long letters north, she told Lee about the raccoon, whom she called Gideon ("Rocky's friend," she wrote in explanation). She also told Lee about work, the neighbors' building project that filled the street with pickup trucks, Dumpsters, and lumber deliveries, the new owners of the exercise club, a rumor that the restaurant at the base of the hill was about to reopen, a phone call from a client of Lee's who had wanted to tell her that his HIV test was blessedly negative, about Al and Jani and Jules and a few mutual friends. She received a handful of brief notes in return.

She did not tell Lee everything - not how she hated opening the door when she came home, nor how she'd taken to sleeping in the guest room or on the sofa. She did not write Lee about her fruitless search for Dio through the shelters and the streets, the hot lines and church soup kitchens and crack houses, the continual rounds of her informants. She did not write Lee about the brief, bloody spasm of gang killings in late September, set off by a theft from a high school locker, that left three kids dead and four bleeding in the space of a few days. She did not write to Lee about these shootings because they proved to be the shock needed to begin the process of corning out of the drifting malaise she had been subject to since driving Lee north in August.

The youngest of the three students to be killed was a slight thirteen-year-old girl with a plait of long black hair that curved down her thin backbone and across the rucked-up remains of what had been a white blouse. When Kate arrived on the scene and pulled back the blood-soaked flowered bedsheet that someone had covered her with, her heart thudded painfully for two fast beats: Her eyes had seen the body as that of Jules Cameron, lying in a pool of crimson agony on the weed-choked sidewalk.

She went on with her job; she took her statements and began her paperwork for the case, forgetting that moment of shock in the familiar routine. She went home and had her dinner and put out the dog biscuits for the raccoon; she ran a hasty vacuum cleaner over the floor and bathed and went to bed half-drunk, and toward morning she dreamed. It was not a particularly nasty dream, just wistful, and in it she was talking to the kid sister who had been killed by an automobile when Kate was in college many years before. They talked about a book and a baseball game, and when the conversation ended and Kate was beginning to wake, she saw that the person she had been talking to was actually Jules.

She came fully awake with a wry smile on her face. For some people, messages from the unconscious mind needed to be pretty blatant. Kate got the point.

When the sun was a bit farther up, she phoned Jules. Jani answered, a lovely, low voice with a lilt of accent.

"Good morning, Kate. Are you looking for Al?"

"Er, well, no, actually. I was hoping to catch Jules before she left for school."

"She is still here. Just one moment." Kate heard the muffling distortions of receiver against hand as Jani called, "Jules!" and then, again to Kate, "She will be here in a moment. How are you, Kate?"

"Fine. Just fine."

"And Lee, how is she progressing?"

"Lee's fine."

"Will you come to dinner soon? Both of you?"

"Well, that might be difficult."

"I understand," she sympathized, not understanding in the least. "But as soon as it is possible. Here is Jules."

"Kate?"

"Hey, J. How're you doing?"

"Did you find him?"

"Find... Oh, Dio. No, I'm sorry, nothing's come in. I was calling to see if you'd like to go and do something this weekend. I'm supposed to be off, unless something comes up, and I thought you might like to spend Saturday in riotous living. If it's okay with your mother," she added, belatedly aware that she sounded like an acned teenage boy with sweating palms, asking for a date.

"What would we do?"

"Whatever you like. Movie, the beach. Shopping," she suggested desperately. What do girls like Jules do in their spare time, anyway? Go to the library? Maybe this wasn't such a great idea.

"I'd like that. Let me ask Mom." Again the muffled sounds, the occasional mutter and word of a brief conversation. "Kate? She says fine, what time, and do you want to come back here for dinner?"

"Ten too early for you? And if you want, we could stay out, have a hamburger or some Chinese. Cruise the bars, look for some action?"

That raised a giggle, unexpected from that particular set of vocal cords.

"Ten is fine. Thank you."

Twenty minutes later, the telephone pulled Kate out of the shower, where she'd been berating herself for such a dumb commitment, picturing herself locked up in the car with Jules, driving up and down mumbling, So, what do you wanna do? and Jules answering, I dunno, what do you wanna do?

"Hello?"

"Kate? It's Jules," the girl said, sounding oddly furtive. "There's something I would like to do on Saturday, if it's okay with you."

"Is it legal?" Kate asked warily.

"I think so. If it isn't, don't worry - it was just an idea."

"What is it?" Kate wiped a dribble of shampoo away from her eye with the edge of the towel.

"I'd like to try shooting a gun somewhere."

Probably the very last thing Kate had expected.

"Sure. What kind of gun?"

"What do you mean?"

"Pistol? Rifle? Machine gun? Grenade launcher?"

"Just the pistol, I guess."

"Fine, if your mom doesn't object." Silence. "You think she would?"

"Probably," she said darkly.

"I really couldn't take you if she didn't approve. Ask Al to convince her."

"She doesn't like guns."

"I'm not crazy about them myself. They make a lot of work for me," she said darkly, Lee and the murdered Jules-like girl very much on her mind. "Ask Al."

"Okay."

Kate returned to her shower in a better frame of mind.

Nothing came up to keep Kate from her appointment with Jules, and on a gorgeous crisp autumnal morning, she drove down the peninsula and parked outside the apartment building. She was buzzed in, took the elevator up, and Al opened the door, unshaven and in a dressing gown and slippers. He nodded Kate in. She looked everywhere but at the partner who was in fact her superior officer. He did not seem to notice.

"Coffee?" he asked, holding out his own cup.

"Not if you made it, thanks."

"I think Jules did." She followed him to the kitchen and they examined the glass carafe. The coffee was still more brown than green. "Not too old."

"Yes, then I will have a cup."

"Taking her to the range, then?"

"If it's all right with Jani."

"Jani connects guns with some unpleasant things in her past, but she agrees that Jules has the right to an education."

"I don't want to create a problem here."

"You're not creating it. Ah, here's the Juice now."

"The name is Jules, Alhambra," she growled in the mock disgust of a long-standing joke, and in an aside added, "Good morning, Kate."

Today's T-shirt read, in delicate gold writing: WHEN GOD CREATED MAN, SHE WAS ONLY JOKING. Kate grinned.

"Hey, J, like the shirt. Ready to go? Oh, hi, Jani."

Jani came into the room, dressed more casually than Kate had ever seen her (though rumor had it that when Al Hawkin had first met her, she'd been wearing nothing but a towel, no doubt an exaggeration) - in yellow-orange cotton shorts and a loose white blouse, both crisply ironed. There were also sandals on her feet, two pencils through the heavy bun she wore her gorgeous black hair in, and a pair of reading glasses in one hand. When she entered the room, her daughter immediately stiffened and looked out of the window.

"Hello, Kate. Have you been offered anything to drink?"

"I've got coffee, thanks."

"And you, Jules, did you eat breakfast?"

"I'm not hungry, Mother."

Ah, said Kate to herself, so that's how it is.

What a world lay in those four words, a minor salvo in the bitter civil war between mother and daughter, a family of two turned in on itself in dependency, infuriated at itself. The four words brought with them a flood of memories, of battles and uneasy peace treaties made all the more terrible by the love that lay beneath. Kate drained her coffee cup, still standing, and held it out to her partner with a smile that felt pasted on.

"Thanks, Al, that was great." He handed it to Jules.

"Put it in the sink, would you, Jujube?"

"Anything you say, Altercation."

When the child had left the room, Jani spoke quietly, with surface nonchalance. "Before I forget, Kate, Rosa Hidalgo would appreciate it if you could stop by before you leave today. Nothing terribly urgent, merely a question that arose concerning one of her young clients."

"But what --" Kate stopped, surprised at the stillness in Jani's posture, the urgency in her eyes. "Sure, be glad to," she said easily, and Jani relaxed and held Kate's eyes for a split instant longer, in warning, before nodding her head in an informal leave-taking and disappearing back into her study. Jules stood in the doorway and watched her mother's retreating back, glowering with suspicion.

"Shall we go?" Kate suggested.

"Have a good time, Emerald," Al said. Jules roused herself.

"I'll try, Allegheny."

"Be home by midnight, Pearl." He stifled a yawn.

"Or you'll turn into a pumpkin, right, Alcatraz? And by the way," she said as a parting shot, "I don't think pearls qualify as jewels."

He laughed and closed the apartment door behind them. On the stairs, Jules dropped the joking attitude as if it had never been and turned to Kate.

"What did she want?"

"Who, your mother? Oh, at the end there. She didn't want anything," Kate said easily. "Had a message from Rosa downstairs, probably about a case she asked me about a while back. Why?"

"She's always talking about me to people."

"That's hardly surprising; you're an important part of her life. It would be a bit strange never to mention you, don't you think?" Kate knew that her face gave away nothing - there were too many hours of interrogation behind her to let her thoughts be read by a twelve-year-old. Even this twelve-year-old.