Marcy was the only person in the office when they got back. “We’ve got everybody down at St. Patrick’s,” she said. “We got some chemistry back from the ME’s office: They think maybe she was smothered.”
“I knew it,” Lucas said. “Might have been spontaneous rather than planned . . . but if it was spontaneous, it had to be somebody who knew her well enough to get her back to her office. What was her kid’s name? James?”
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t fit the picture, but the picture could be crap,” Marshall said. “He doesn’t look like the right movie star. He looks more like Yul Brynner.”
“You think he could kill his mother?”
“The gravedigger could because he’s crazier’n hell,” Lucas said. “But we saw him over at the ME’s office and he was pretty fucked up. Marshall had to hold him.”
“I’m always pleased when strong men allow themselves to show a little tenderness,” Marcy said to Marshall.
“Fuck you, little lady,” Marshall drawled. He’d caught on to Marcy’s act. “I just patted him on the back.”
“What happened with Randy?”
“We ran into this officious little prick . . .” Lucas told her the rest of the story, while Del and Marshall found chairs.
“Gotta get back to him,” Marcy said. “He’s still got the key.”
“I know, I know. . . . Goddamnit, it looked like it was gonna be easy. Instead, it’s like counting votes in Florida.”
A lot seemed to be happening, but there didn’t seem much to do—the trouble was sweeping them along, and they couldn’t get a handle on it. “So what do we do?” Del asked Marcy.
“There’re plenty of people to talk to down at St. Pat’s.”
“Ah, shit,” Del said. “All right, I’ll do it.”
“I’m gonna go talk to Harmon,” Marshall said. “Maybe the computers will spit something out.”
“They did, this morning. Those names Ware gave us—remember those—we got two hits. One guy for dope, possession of cocaine after a traffic stop, the other guy for crim sex III, problem with his wife. I pulled the mug shots, and they do sorta look like our picture.”
Lucas shook his head. “Keep them in mind, but they’re not our guy. Not even Ware thought so. I’ll go on down to St. Pat’s with Del, and we’ll hook up with the other guys. He’s down at St. Pat’s.”
THE REST OF the afternoon was tedious. They all stopped at two o’clock to catch a cup of coffee and a sandwich, then went back—looking for professors, talking with students, pushing to find friends of Helen Qatar. At the end of the day, they’d struck out.
“I got one possible, an anthropologist who took drawing lessons so he could draw signs and statues and shit like that. He’s a little crazy and he looks sorta right, but he claims he got his Ph.D. from USC six years ago and never set foot in Minnesota before then . . . and other people in his department say that’s right,” Del said.
“Better’n me,” Swanson said. “I didn’t find anybody.”
“I got a guy who looked like a very distant possibility, but, uh . . .” Black turned away and said, “I need another sandwich.”
“But what?” Lucas asked. “What about the guy?”
“He sorta came on to me,” Black said. “He, uh, isn’t oriented toward women at all—and I got that confirmed from his department.”
“Maybe something repressed,” Swanson said. “Maybe when he’s pushing fudge, all he’s thinking about is killing women.”
They all sat chewing for a moment, then Del started to laugh, and then both Lucas and Swanson. Black, who was gay, said, “Fuck all of you bigots.”
JUST BEFORE THEY quit, Lucas said to Del, “You and Cheryl are coming for lobsters tonight, right?”
“Hell yes. Gotta keep this mass-murder shit in proportion.”
20
“IHAD NO idea that you could show this depth of emotion, even about the death of a parent,” Barstad said as they left the ME’s office. “It’s a side of you that I haven’t seen before, James. I’m encouraged and . . .”
And blah-blah-blah, Qatar thought, tuning her out. There were still tears in his eyes, crouched at the corners, but they were quickly drying.
His mother. There had been some good times: Learning to ride a bicycle. Christmases come and gone. The first drawing materials she’d bought for him, and how, when he’d wanted to learn to paint, she’d gone down in the basement, and with his father’s tools and a bunch of boards, laboriously put together a professional-quality easel. His first drawing lessons; his first life lessons; his first live naked woman, a redhead.
And some bad times.
He could remember Howard Cord, a history professor who wore red bow ties and seersucker suits, and smelled of tobacco and chalk, and how he would come over late in the evening, after he’d been sent to bed, and bang his mother’s brains loose. She must’ve known that he could hear it all, in his bedroom right above hers, all the groaning and mumbled pleas for this or that. Must have suspected that he’d lifted a floorboard and cut a hole in a heating vent so he could watch. Watch her doing all that . . .
And not just Howard Cord; there had been ten or fifteen men from the time his father left, and then died, and he went off to school. Academics, mostly, his mother passed from hand to hand through the University of St. Patrick’s and then St. Thomas; a priest or two, he thought.
But they were only bad times. In analyzing his own craziness, which did not come without psychological penalty, he really couldn’t blame his mother’s galloping sexuality for his problems. They went much further back. He remembered still the intense pleasure of burning ants with a magnifying glass when he was not yet in grade school; remembered even the acrid scent of the little puffs of smoke. He drowned gerbils in grade school, put them in the aquarium during recess, while Mrs. Bennett was out in the schoolyard; and he still remembered the quiet of the schoolroom, and the distant shouts of the other children, barely audible through the windows, and the frantic paddling of the gerbils. They looked like they might last a little too long, so he pushed them under, both of them, one at a time, and watched their slowly diminishing struggles through the glass walls. . . .
He’d already known enough to hide himself and his impulses. He’d slipped out of the room in time to have a few words with the teacher on the playground, to establish his presence there.
And when the gerbils had been found, he’d happily helped plan the funeral.
His personal craziness had been there all along, the cross he must bear. Bear it he did. His mother was not to blame.
“. . . Blah-blah-blah?” she asked.
He hadn’t heard any of it. He had, in fact, brought her along as a prop. His woman, should any of the cops think there might be something odd about him. They had been all over campus. “What?”
“What now? There’s not much to do until you know when . . . she’ll be released,” Barstad said.
“I don’t think I can deal with it right now,” he said. “I’ll call the funeral home this afternoon. Let them handle it. We weren’t religious, so there won’t be any church services.” The tears were gone now. “Why don’t we—I don’t know—should I take you home?”
“We could walk around for a while.”
“I haven’t eaten. I don’t know if I could eat,” Qatar said “Maybe a little something.”
They walked to the Pillsbury Building, went up the escalator and through the warren of shops in the skyway. “It’s really like a Middle Eastern bazaar,” Barstad said. They were in the back of a coffee shop, eating baklava and drinking strong coffee. “You could get exactly what we’re eating and drinking anywhere between Istanbul and Cairo, in the same circumstances, except the people are polite there and the coffee isn’t as good.”
“Never been there, the Middle East,” Qatar said vaguely. Then: “Have you ever noticed that men with a certain shape of skull don’t look good with high collars? They need flat collars?”
“What?”
“Would I look right in a turtleneck, do you think? Or would it come so far up my neck that my face would look like . . . that I’d look like, like a Renaissance burgher?” He crossed his hands, thumbs under his chin as though he were strangling himself, to show her the line of the sweater. “It frames the face, you see, but it also isolates it.”
“I see,” she said. “Well, if the person were tanned or sunburned, I think there’s a possibility that the head would look wooden. You’d look like a wood carving on a pedestal.”
“Hmm,” he said. Actually, that sounded interesting. “Let’s walk some more,” he said.
In fact, he had the money in his pocket from his mother’s house; and Saks and Neiman Marcus were right around the corner. On the way to the mall, he stopped and looked in the window of a jewelry store, where they were featuring small men’s rings set with star sapphires. He’d never considered a ring, but they had a certain look.
“In here,” he said. “Just on a lark.”
He paid two thousand dollars for a gold ring that perfectly fit his right pinkie. “My mother’s favorite color was blue,” he told her. He teared up again, wiped them away, and they mushed on to Saks.
The men’s store was on the first level. He led her down to the first level—and there they found the most marvelous thigh-length leather jacket, smooth-finished with kangaroo-hide details, on sale, $1,120.
He looked at it and said, “Oh my God, forty-long.” Her eyes were on him, and he said, reverently, “It’s exactly my size.”
“Oh my God,” she said.
21
WEATHER SAID IT was no big deal, just friends getting together for a beer and a little seafood, but she got to Lucas’s place early and spent three hours dusting and vacuuming, and made it smell like nobody lived there but forest elves and evergreens. She was also wearing the engagement ring.
“Sort of stinky right now,” she said, “but when you cook up the wild rice and mushrooms the spices’ll make this place smell like . . .” She couldn’t think of anything. “Good,” she said. “You don’t have enough beer, by the way, and when you’re at the store, get a couple bottles of pinot noir—everybody drinks that, right? Something nice and buttery.”
“Buttery,” he said.
“Yes. Ask the clerk. Maybe three bottles. You better get some paper towels, and some regular napkins—you’re all out of those.”
“Never had any,” he said.
“What’d you use?”
“Toilet paper,” he said.
She put her fists on her hips. “I’m not exactly, precisely, in the right mood for humor, with the house being the wreck that it is. You wanna go to the store?”
SLOAN HAD TRADED his usual brown suit and wing tips for khakis and a brown sweater with oxblood loafers. Del did his best to look neat, in jeans that had been ironed, brothel-creeper boots, and a blue fleece pullover. Their wives looked like cops’ wives: carefully dressed in sweaters and slacks, a little too chunky, with skeptical eyes.
Lucas had set up the charcoal grill in the back, heaped it with charcoal and a half-pint of starter fluid, stood back, and touched it off; he and Del and Sloan all smiled at the foom the fluid made when it ignited, and the resulting fireball. When the charcoal was going, he put the iron pot on top and poured in enough water to cover the lobsters.
“Teach the little fuckers to come back to life as lobsters,” Lucas said.
“The only problem is, he’s too chicken to put them in. I’ve got to do that,” Weather said.
“Damn things bite,” Lucas said. “Did we get some crackers?”
“Those little round ones?” Del asked hopefully.
THEY TALKED ABOUT cases, but not the gravedigger case. They talked about medicine, but not Randy. Weather talked about a skull reconstruction that she was working toward, and how image-manipulation technology allowed her to image a skull three-dimensionally, work out the reconstruction to the millimeter, and fit all the bones together at the end. “Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way, and there’s some fudging, but it’s light-years past five years ago. . . .”
Del’s wife had a story about another plastic surgeon who got into an instrument-throwing fit. “He’s usually a nice guy—must be something going on.”
Weather knew him and pitched in. “He was talking about quitting surgery and going into investment banking—he got really deep in investments. I think it was pretty risky. He told me if I wanted to kick in a quarter-mil, he could make it a mil in a year. I told him I couldn’t afford it, but what I really think was, the risk must have been terrific. Maybe he took a hit.”
They batted it all around for a while, and finally Cheryl, Del’s wife, watching her husband crack a lobster claw and dip it in butter, asked, “I wonder if lobster has as much cholesterol as shrimp?”
“Both are sorta like bugs,” Lucas said. He got up and said, “More beer?”
Cheryl looked at the other two women. “Is Del the only one with high cholesterol?”
“Ah, shut up,” Del said.
“No, really.”
“Sloan’s is so low that it’s like a race with his blood pressure, to see which one can hit bottom first. I’m sorta borderline,” Sloan’s wife said.
“I’m okay. Lucas has to think about it, but he’s basically okay, if he’d just cut out the doughnuts,” Weather said.
“Del’s ought to be better with this Lapovorin stuff.” Cheryl poked her husband with her elbow. “That doesn’t mean you can eat everything in sight. Go back on those terrible pig rinds.”
“Shut up. You gonna eat those claws?”
She pushed her plate toward him. “Mr. Sophisticated has been worrying about what that guy told you in the bar,” she said to Lucas.
Lucas had to think a minute: the Cobra. “Oh, yeah. Lapovorin makes you come backwards.”
“What?”Sloan was interested.
“Ah, Jesus,” Del said.
“This guy told us that this woman who got killed by the gravedigger, that the only thing that she said about him—she was laughing about it—was that he was taking Lapovorin and was afraid that he was gonna be screwed up sexually.”
“Like he isn’t,” Weather said.
“Yeah, but this is some kind of real physical thing,” Lucas said. “Some kind of ejaculation thing happens, and . . .”
He hesitated to say it, but Del didn’t. “You come backwards. Nothing comes out.”
They were all mildly amused, and Weather said, “Del, that’s nonsense. I know a little about Lapovorin, and there are no side effects like that at all. You’ve got to have your liver function checked every once in a while, a blood test—”
“Really?” he said, brightening. “I got the blood test.”
“You mean the guy was talking through his ass?” Lucas asked. “I was planning to pimp Del with this for the next ten years.”
“Not Lapovorin. What he was talking about is a situation that you see in a certain percentage of men who use that baldness drug,” Weather said.
“What?” Del asked.
“You know. It’s on television all the time,” Weather said. “It’s got enough weird hormones in it that they recommend that women never handle it. Not even get dust on them.”
THE THREE COPS did the dishes while the women talked in the living room. They filled Sloan in on the gravedigger case, and talked a bit about Terry Marshall.
“Tough guy,” Del said. “You get that way, I think, when you’re one of those country guys. Around here it’s all lawyers and shit, but out in the country, a lot of times it’s just you, and you got to fix it.”
“Know what you mean,” Lucas said. “But he’s got this soul-brother thing going with Anderson.”
“Anderson.”
They spent the rest of the evening gossiping about friends and acquaintances. Cheryl Capslock asked Weather if they’d made any decision about children, and when they were going to get married, if they were. “We haven’t figured out a wedding date,” Weather said
. “We’re still working on that. We’re working on a kid at the same time.”
“Good luck,” Sloan said. “Let’s see, Lucas, you’ll be about, mmm, ninety-four when the kid graduates from high school. . . .”
WITH ALL THE talk, nothing tripped with Lucas until the next morning. Weather had already gone, and he was in the shower.
Weather, he thought, might have been slightly irritated with Sloan’s crack about Lucas’s age, especially since Weather wasn’t that much younger. The thought of aging, and the thought of the whole group getting gray, and that they were worrying about cholesterol and reverse ejaculation . . .
He was grinning into the shower head, thinking about the coming-backwards discussion, when it struck him.
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