Yours, Mine, and Ours (12 page)

“Thanks for the update,” he said, and Emma Jan laughed from the backseat.

“So I’m clearly the only one worried.”

“It’s okay, Cadence. The truce is on.”

“Truce?” I propped my arm on the headrest so I could turn around and make eye contact while I fretted. “What truce?”

“Between me. And her. The woman in the mirror.”

“And…?”

“So I won’t engage this time. It’s the solution my doctor came up with after years of trying other stuff. I’ll try not to look. And if I do look, I won’t engage. We had a hypnosis session first thing this morning; it should hold.”

Hmmm. Hypnosis. As a subject of that same therapy, I had great respect for it. Hypnosis had been the only way I unlocked memories I’d repressed for decades. It made sense that it could help someone with their delusion.

“It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“No?” I asked.

“After all,” she said bitterly, looking out the window (I wasn’t sure why; the only thing to see was Highway 35), “it’s not like I’ll never see her again.”

I didn’t say anything. More miraculous, neither did George. I won’t deny I thought the whole Mirrored-self Misidentification thing to be pretty weird. But a delusion was a delusion was a delusion. There were BOFFO employees who thought aliens were beaming commands through the internet. And ones who thought the late bin Laden had been the reincarnation of porn industry actor John Holmes. Was that any nuttier?

I decided this was a good time to bring up someone who’d been on my mind, strictly in a professional capacity, so I told them about Dr. Gallo.

“No shit,” George said, eyes widening and then narrowing with interest. “Here to help out the family? Huh.”

“I know what ‘huh’ means.”

“Enlighten the gal in the backseat, then,” the gal in the backseat called.

“He’s wondering—and now he’s got me wondering—if Dr. Gallo might make a good suspect.” And I had to admit, on short acquaintance the good doctor gave off that vibe. Not the murder vibe, the I-can-handle-anything-even-felony-assault vibe. “I’ll go back and talk to him, officially this time.” I was thrilled at the thought. Because it would help the investigation. Not because I wondered what his long black hair felt like. Or how he smiled when he was truly happy.

“But what about the blackout?”

“It’s for the media, not family members,” I pointed out. “He’s too good a resource to waste by keeping him in the dark about what I’m doing. It’s worth the risk.”

She shrugged. “It’s your risk.”

It certainly is my risk, missy, and I’ll thank you to let me be the one to worry about it.

We pulled into the trailer court, and thank goodness. Not one of us had said a word the rest of the way, and the time draaaaaagged. Long silences were something that I, as George Pinkman’s partner, wasn’t at all used to.

chapter thirty-two

Joseph Behrman opened
the door and didn’t look at all happy to see us. This cheered me up; guilty people usually weren’t happy to see us, either.

“I thought you were gonna call before you came. Like you did last time.”

“Yep, well, that’s the thing about the FBI, sometimes we can be rude like that.” George was leaning on the house, well back from the door. “You gonna let us in, or are we gonna have this chat on your sidewalk?”

Behrman pointed. Ick. His nails were filthy. “And
she’s
back.”

Emma Jan shrugged and smiled. “Sorry. A minor overreaction.”

“Overreaction,” he repeated, dumbfounded. “That’s what you’d call that?”

“It’s not
my
fault the woman living in your mirror wants to kill me. Where’s your dog?”

“Inside,” he said shortly, then stepped back to let us in.

It made me wonder, would Emma Jan think the dog’s reflection was the pet of the woman who lived in the mirror? Or did the delusion only affect her reflection? I tried to imagine poor Emma Jan in a fun-house mirror … terrifying. No wonder George was smiling; he loved any kind of excitement or trouble. Exciting trouble was his favorite.

“You’re in deep shit, Sylvester,” he said cheerfully. It was a line from Stephen King’s
The Stand
he liked to trot out when busting someone’s story. “Oh, now, you’ve got company. Who’s this?”

There was another man in the living room, slowly climbing to his feet. He looked like a truck driver who’d played lots of football: big, thick shoulders and arms, sturdy legs, a small-ish beer belly that would probably give him trouble as he got older and didn’t decrease his beer consumption. Black hair pulled back into a ponytail, blue eyes. A face that was more strong than handsome … broad forehead, big nose, big chin. Not handsome, but far from unattractive.

He greeted us with, “Got a warrant?”

“Ooooh, rookie mistake. You hate to see it,” George said, miming sorrow as only a dedicated sociopath could. “We don’t need one to chat. Besides, your boyfriend let us in.”

“We’re not faggots,” Behrman snapped. Then, pointing to Emma Jan: “We gonna have trouble with her again?”

“What ‘we’? My partner fixed everything while you hid behind the couch.”

“That’s a fuckin’ lie!”

“Oh, there’s no shame in it,” Emma Jan piped up. “The whole thing was scary and dangerous and surreal.”

Yes: those three words summed up my life.

“We didn’t get your name, big guy,” George said.

“Philip Loun.”

“L-O-O-N?”

“No, like ‘loud’ without the D. After you’ve added an N. Me and Behrman go to the same AA meetings.”

“You do know that lying to cops isn’t one of the twelve steps, right?”

“Nobody’s lying.” Behrman reluctantly shut the door and went to sit in the chair opposite Loun.

“Wrong yet again, Mr. Behrman.
You
were lying. Which sucks for you, because now we’re at least ten times more interested in you than we were yesterday.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The movie, Mr. Behrman. The one you didn’t go to.”

“Don’t look at the mirror,” I whispered to Emma Jan, who’d been staring, wide-eyed, at the living room.

“I don’t know where I
can
look.”

I understood, sure. A small Confederate flag had been tacked up over the television. And posters were all over exhorting how swell the Third Reich was.

There were also quite a few old mug shots that had been printed out, framed, and hung for some reason. All the subjects, except for one, were black males … the stereotypical Bad Guy pic showing a brooding African American male with features exaggerated to make him look meaner, wearing the hey-look-at-me-in-standard-prison-issue striped shirt.

The exception was a white female, wearing a long dark skirt and nice blouse, buttoned to her chin. She looked like she’d come straight from Central Casting for Stereotypical School Marm.

I wasn’t close enough to read any of the names, but the pictures were old, early-to-mid twentieth century old.

Finally, Behrman’s big gurgling aquarium—it was half as long as the entire living room wall—was so green, I could barely make out the fish that were in it … and they didn’t look like fish. Turtles? Body parts?

“You can see ’em when they swim close to the glass,” Behrman offered.

“Hey, don’t worry about a thing, Officer,” Loun told Emma Jan. “You’ve got nothing to worry about from The Good Citizens.”

“It’s ‘agent,’ actually. And I don’t?”

I wanted to ask, but had low interest in displaying my ignorance. Fortunately, George knew I was clueless, and could never resist a chance to show off. “
The Good Citizen
was a monthly ‘yay, facism!’ rag that quit printing around 1933.”

“Well, there was other stuff going in on 1933,” Emma Jan offered. “Their to-do lists probably got hard to manage after a while. ‘Hmm, shall we stop earning money to pay the mortgage, or should we stop our malicious hate-mongering which we’re hoping will spread to the next generation?’ You see how it is.”

“We took that name for our militia,” Loun confirmed.

Outstanding. Serial murder and white supremacists. It was shaping into a lovely week.

“You said I shouldn’t worry, but now I’m extremely worried,” Emma Jan said. “You recall Waco, right? Didn’t work out so good for you guys. Right?”

“The Good Citizens follow the teachings of Edith Overman. We’re all about women’s equality.”

“All women?” she asked. “Or just white women?”

Both men shrugged.

“I see. Can’t win them all, I suppose.”

“Edith Overman?” I asked. Because of two bad things, I had to ask. Bad thing one, Edith Overman was obviously a mover and shaker in the booming business of bigotry and racism and I should’ve known who she was. Bad thing two, there are so
many
of them, so many zealots and racists and warlords-in-training, no matter how much I read I can
never
keep up with them. And they always found someone—or someone found them. For every JFK, there was an Adolf Hitler. For every Gandhi, there was a Jim Jones.

“Bad boys. Very bad boys.” George shook his finger in mock-scold. I think it was mock-scold. “You left a few things out. You’re also all about anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-immigrant.

“Here’s the hilarious part, guys: Overman hated immigrants, and yet she was
not
Native American.” He swung on Emma Jan, throwing up his hands in mock-despair. Or real despair. “This,
this
is why I can’t ever get on board with these dumb shits. Can you imagine going through your whole life teaching your kids and your neighbors how to hate immigrants while being so dumb you don’t know you were descended from illegal immigrants?”

“That’s the only thing holding you back from the Bigotry Bandwagon?” I asked, and Emma Jan laughed.

“It’s not our fault if the Indians couldn’t hold on to their country,” Behrman said. Instead of sounding defensive or mad, he sounded proud. “That’s how we justified throwing England out of our business during the Revolutionary War, and nobody’s running around saying we committed genocide all over the most powerful country in the world at that time. We claimed our territory and we defended it. ’Zactly the same thing.”

“Hmmmm.” George was trying to pace. Tough work in this tiny living room. “Let’s see. Let’s take a look at that. Patriots chafing under a tyrant’s rule rising up to take control of their destiny. And then there’s deciding that blacks and Jews are inferior and they should all be dropped into the deep end of the ocean. Oh, sure. Exactly the same thing. The whole thing just smacks of patriotism. Yep.”

I watched carefully, but he was under control (for now). George had a thing about skinheads and gay bashers. No one knew why.

“So, do you want your friend to hear why your alibi sucked? Or should he leave?”

“You don’t tell anyone to leave in my own house,” Behrman warned.

“Trailer.”

“What?”

“Your own trailer. We don’t tell anyone to leave in your own trailer … yeah, you’re right. Doesn’t have the right ring to it. House it is.”

Behrman glared. “Anything you say to me you can say in front of Loun.”

“Oh, goody. Mr. Behrman, the movie theater you claimed as your alibi didn’t show that matinee … they had technical difficulties. That whole theater was shut down for the rest of the day.” George shook his head, then wagged his finger in front of him like a spinster scolding a school boy. “You’ve been baaaad.”

“Maybe I told you the wrong movie. Maybe I meant—”

“That’s a terrible idea, changing your story like that. It’s making all the red flags in my brain pop.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” I said to the men. “You don’t want to pop his flags.”

Loun and Behrman exchanged glances. “Maybe I should call a lawyer.”

“Awesome, Mr. Behrman! You’ve got no idea, man. That makes our day. Yaaaaay!”

“He’s right,” I said while George literally jumped up and down, clapping his hands together and yelling “yay, yay, yaaaay!” He looked and sounded like a demented cheerleader. One that would stick a knife in your ribs if his team lost. “It does.”

“Innocent people never want to talk to a lawyer. Yaaaaay!”

Emma Jan and I looked at each other and shrugged. We knew it was true. It had happened again and again in our careers.

Loun sighed and looked greatly put-upon. “Just tell ’em, Behrman. The Good Citizens weren’t doing anything against the law. We have the right to lawful assembly.”

Oh, fudge cakes. He was about to confess, but not to the JBJ murders. He was about to tell us he’d been at a white supremacist meeting. It explained his lie while being boring and sad at the same time.

“I had a meeting with my white brothers. Morale’s been low. We needed to be reminded not just howwcome we were there that night, but howwcome The Good Citizens got started in the first place. So we got together to talk about it, brother-to-brother.”