by Randy Alcorn
“Nobody tell Tommi or she’ll call Sarge,” Suda said.
“Sarge is over there,” Barrows said, pointing, “pretending he’s not watching.”
I wiped blood with the Taco Bell napkin from my trench coat pocket. “Just a flesh wound,” I said, ditching the coat.
“He’s taking off the Sam Spade coat,” Phillips said. “He means business.”
Doyle ran four steps to me and took another swing. I smelled tobacco as it whiffed by. I ducked then punched him twice, first with a left, then with a right, both in his doughy center. With another right, I plastered the pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket, sitting him on the back of his lap. But the Doughboy rose again, asking to be popped back in the oven. Doyle surprised me with one more solid crack on my chin. I saw fog and stepped backward. Then I came back with two more stomach punches. I’ve learned from Jack Bauer not to leave a mark.
“Chess players are slow movers, aren’t they?”
He lunged forward, and I swung a haymaker with my right and dropped him like a manhole cover.
I was ready to finish him with my killer head butt, but your opponent needs to be standing to head butt him right. Doyle was rolling on the floor holding his jaw, then stomach, then jaw, then stomach. I wished I’d got him somewhere lower to give him a third choice.
I stood over him and leaned down. “Checkmate, bozo.”
Suda tended to Doyle and glared up at me like I’d jumped him with a two-by-four and stolen his lunch money.
I pointed both index fingers at her and bounced on my toes: “Your grandmother’s next, Suda.”
“My grandmother has a fourth degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.”
“Dog drugger,” I said without thinking. She looked surprised.
Chris Doyle’s what Nero Wolfe calls a nincompoop. But I gained some respect for him that day. He wasn’t the pushover I expected. The Pillsbury Doyleboy showed some game.
Things aren’t always what they appear.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 12:30 P.M.
Jake and Clarence and I planned to meet again at Powell’s City of Books, where an hour’s browsing gets me through about one percent of one of the nine color coded rooms with something like seventy thousand square feet. They boast 122 major subject areas and thirty-five hundred different subsections, about a hundred of which interest me. But that hundred contain tens of thousands of books. Powell’s buys three thousand used books a day over the counter, so if you can’t find it today, you’ll have twenty thousand new titles to choose from next week.
I spent my “hour early” in the Gold Room, where aisles 313–319 are mysteries, maybe ten thousand of them. On the other side of the Gold Room I spied a man reading Green Eggs and Ham to a five-year-old Sam-I-am sitting in a tiny wooden chair beside him. I froze, wondering if I would ever have the chance to read books to grandchildren and wondering why I hadn’t taken time to read to my own kids. Was reading to my grandchildren another dream that wouldn’t come true?
Next thing I knew, the hour had flown by and I’d moved through maybe five feet of books, which at Powell’s is like a quarter lap in the Indianapolis 500.
There were too many ears in World Cup Coffee and Tea, so after some chitchat over sandwiches and fabulous Sumatra Mandheling coffee (according to the sign) and a walnut sticky bun to go, Clarence and Jake and I searched the endless nooks and crannies for the right place to talk. We settled, appropriately, near religion in the Red Room, in view of philosophy and journalism in the Purple Room.
I’d caught him staring, but when we finally settled down in our place, Jake asked for a full explanation of the bruises on my face. I walked them through the brawl with Doyle, blow by blow, like it was Frazier versus Ali.
There in the City of Books, Jake handed me one he’d brought with him: Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian.
I pointed to the philosophy stacks. “There’s twenty more of those over there. You didn’t have to bring your own.”
“It’s not mine,” Jake said. “Last time we talked about this, I accidentally took your book. I finished the final essay last night, and guess what I found on the back page.”
He opened it up to show a phone number: 555-570-6089.
“That’s the seventh number,” I said, halt in my voice.
“Something wrong?”
“It seems … vaguely familiar. Ray’ll check it out.”
“I had an interesting conversation with Raylon Berkley,” Clarence said. “He told me Lennox wants to pull you from the Palatine case.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear this secondhand, considering the source. “Why’d Berkley tell you?” I asked Clarence.
“He wanted to see how I’d take it.”
“I’m working on how I’m taking it. How did you take it?”
“I said you were smart-mouthed, opinionated, stubborn, outrageous, difficult to deal with. That you’re always stepping over the line. I didn’t mention that you confiscated from a crime scene self-incriminating evidence, lied about your alibi, and set a fire in an apartment complex.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” I said. “I also threatened a hamster, but when you tuck Brent in tonight, tell him I didn’t mean it.”
“I informed Berkley that if Lennox pulled you from the case I’d tell the public why.”
“He try to talk you out of it?”
“He told me he wouldn’t let the Trib print those kinds of accusations against Lennox. I said I thought the Trib was committed to print the truth.”
“What planet you been living on?”
“That’s the smart-mouthed part of you I mentioned. Anyway, we went toe-to-toe. I told him if the Trib wouldn’t let me write the truth, there’s an alternative paper that would. An alternative paper that’s already offered me a job twice. I told him my first article for my new employer would be about the chief’s sabotage of the Palatine investigation and Berkley and the Trib’s complicity in it.”
“You really said that?”
“I told him I wondered what that would do for the spiraling sales of the Trib.” Clarence looked me straight in the eyes. “You’re not the only one who cares about justice.”
“Them boys is gettin’ themselves in trouble, ain’t they?” Obadiah said. “But I has to say, I’m proud of ’em for it.”
“So am I.” He nodded thoughtfully. “So am I.”
Lack of sleep and frustration at not having my hands around the killer’s throat were bringing me to a boil. What began as a discussion among friends had degenerated into something else. Still sitting in our nook at Powell’s, I raised my hands, knocking three paperbacks out of alignment. “You want me to just blindly believe without asking questions?”
“No,” Jake said. “Ask your questions. I just think you need to listen to God’s answers. He’s in charge of the universe. His fingerprints are on everything.”
“That’s a bad analogy to use with a homicide detective, bucko. If God’s fingerprints are on everything, doesn’t that mean they’re on every weapon used to kill the innocent? Is He behind my daughter’s disappearance too? If good people aren’t rewarded and bad people aren’t punished, the universe isn’t fair. Injustice drives me nuts. If I could take it all away, I would. If He can, why doesn’t He?”
“What makes you think He doesn’t … or won’t?” Jake said. “Is justice ever done in this life? Sometimes. But those times it’s not done here and now, it will be done on the other side of death.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because God promises it in the Bible.” Clarence pointed to a long line of them forty feet away. “It says, ‘Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.’ ”
“I get tired of you quoting these verses when the fact remains that people who don’t deserve to die do. All the time. Every day. And where’s God when they die?”
“He’s right there offering love and forgiveness,” Jake said.
“Stop kidding yourself. God doesn’t give a rip.”
; “You’re drawing conclusions about God without knowing Him,” Jake said.
“I know He killed my wife!” I’d raised my voice. “And that isn’t all He did.”
“What else?” Jake asked.
“None of your business.”
“You need to give God a chance.”
“Why give him a chance? He killed Sharon.” I shouted it, jumping to my feet. “And He killed our son!”
38
“It is quite a three-pipe problem.”
SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE
I’D YELLED “He killed our son” before I knew what I was saying. Dozens of people at Powell’s turned like I’d dumped kerosene on the New Age section and torched it. The place fell stony silent.
“Your son?” Clarence whispered, standing next to me. “But … you don’t have a son.”
“Not since your God killed him.”
Jake said, “Ollie, I’m so sorry about Chad.”
“You know about Chad?”
“Sharon told Janet.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Sharon said you didn’t want us to know. I was hoping eventually you’d bring him up.”
“You had a son?” Clarence asked.
I blew out air and sat down, trying to ignore the stares.
“Chad was born three years after Kendra. When he was two years old, some bozo rear-ended us. Chad was strapped in, but it jarred him. Apparently he had some … condition. I’ve forgotten the name. They say if it wouldn’t have been the car, it would have been something else.”
Clarence’s eyes watered.
“I don’t want your pity,” I said. “But I’m never going to forgive God for taking away my son. What does He know about how we suffer? I wouldn’t take wives from their husbands and sons from their fathers. I’ll never see my son again. Trust a God who looked the other way? No, I won’t do it.”
I was down the stairs and headed to the garage before either of them could answer. I didn’t want to hear answers when there were none. In the face of what happened to Chad and Sharon, words were an insult.
I drove west on Burnside, not knowing where I was going, under the gloom of dark clouds that buried the sun. Appropriate, because when Chad died, thick clouds surrounded me, and I couldn’t see or hear or breathe. I didn’t console myself with Sharon; I consoled myself with booze. Like someone said at an AAA meeting, first I took a drink, then the drink took a drink, then the drink took me. It was ten years before I sobered up and saw the sun again. Then, when Sharon died, the stars dropped out of the sky. Since then I haven’t found much reason to stay sober.
Randomly, now deep on the west side, toward Beaverton, I drove by an abandoned graveyard, where the headstones seemed arbitrarily placed, many of them bleached, crooked, and sinking. Part of me welcomed the day when my name would be on such a stone. Part of me dreaded it, with a fear that tore up my insides so much my hands shook on the steering wheel.
“He doesn’t understand.”
“No.”
“He doesn’t realize that though he’s tortured by his memories of me, my life’s gone right on in a better place. And he doesn’t have a clue that sometimes I’m allowed to see and hear him.”
“They don’t believe the Scriptures,” Sharon said, “that there’s rejoicing here in the presence of the angels over the work God’s doing in their lives on earth. They think of this place as disinterested in what’s happening there. They don’t realize their planet is center stage in His unfolding drama of redemption. They’re on the playing field. Those in the grandstands are watching.”
“Here with my Father, I’ve gotten to know my earthly father too.”
“You know him far better than he ever knew you,” Sharon said.
“Will I be with him again?” Chad asked. “Will Elyon answer that prayer?”
“He says we must wait and see. But we don’t need to wait to know that He’s always good. Your father doesn’t understand Elyon’s purposes. What’s now clear to us makes no sense to him. Yet even we don’t understand it all, do we?”
“His ways are above our ways, and His thoughts above our thoughts,” Chad said smiling. “But to me, that’s beautiful. Whatever we don’t yet grasp leaves us more to learn about Him.”
Chad grasped his mother’s hand. “I hope to walk beside my earthly father again—this time on an earth no longer cursed.”
“His relationships with us, though interrupted, need never end. But he must come to trust the One he blames—and that will not be easy.”
“Let’s pray for him again, Mother.”
Arms around each other, mother and son talked to Elyon about a man driving aimlessly on back roads, a man so far away he had no idea they were there, yet so close they could almost reach out and touch him.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 6:30 P.M.
A night-after-Christmas party had been scheduled at Chief Lennox’s house. I’d never been in the chief’s house, only by it. Most recently in the middle of the night, when we’d followed him from the 7-Eleven where he met Kim Suda.
This time the gate was open, and an officer was letting people pass because he recognized them or they showed ID. Turned out the mailbox was in a different zip code than the house.
I’d heard a lot about that house. What I’d heard didn’t do it justice.
I’ll probably never marry again, because if I did, my wife would want to buy this house, and if I took my retirement savings and held up a couple of banks, I still wouldn’t be able to afford the down payment, and then she’d dream about it and show me pictures of it, and then she’d cry and I’d feel like a loser for letting her down, and my daughter would end up siding with her, and pretty soon our formerly romantic evenings of blackberry shakes at Burgerville and bowling at Mt. Hood Lanes would have a cloud cast over them. So it’s better all around for me never to marry again.
About forty people showed up, but only three other homicide detectives—Suda, Chris Doyle, and Brandon Phillips, without his wife. There were fancy hors d’oeuvres. I searched for Cheez Whiz and cocktail wienies on a toothpick but finally settled for what was there, though I couldn’t tell what it was. I wrapped up items in a napkin and stuffed them in my trench coat pocket for Mulch. When he smells it on me and I don’t come through with the goods, he sulks.
The chief’s wife was the perfect hostess. Thirty minutes into the party I told her, red-faced, that I was having some … personal problems and I needed to be in the bathroom for a while, but I didn’t want to keep anybody out of the main bathroom.
She looked at me sympathetically. “Go all the way to the end of the hall and turn left. There’s a bathroom on your right just past Ed’s office.”
“I’m embarrassed,” I said.
“Happens to all of us. I won’t say anything.”
I thanked her profusely, then followed her directions. I came to the chief’s office, looked both ways, and disappeared inside.
Twelve minutes later, I reappeared, looking for something to drink to calm my shakes and hoping the wienies and Cheez Whiz appetizers had shown up.
No such luck.
39
“The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish.”
SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2:15 P.M.
“THE OPEN HOUSE was a big hit,” Mona said.
“I expected more men would attend,” Chief Lennox said.
He sounded like he was sulking. I couldn’t see him, since he and his secretary were in his home office and I was in mine, sipping A&W root beer. The remote unit was picking up a clear signal, thanks to Ray’s high-tech booster.
“I was surprised to see Chandler here,” she said.
“Maybe he’s seen the light and realizes he needs to get on my good side.”
I’d just swallowed some root beer, and suddenly it was spurting out my nose.
“Did you hear something?” the chief asked.
I grabbed a paper towel to clean up. Though I was in the far corner of my office, I’d been heard. I’d turned my monitor low so their voices wouldn’t be picked up by their own bug. But I’d assumed my office audio was being recorded and monitored at the precinct, not in the chief’s home office. With bugs going both directions, I’d need to be careful.
Great thing about that bug on the chief’s phone, one of the two spares Suda planted at my house, was that it not only picked up calls but also any voice within five feet.
“Chandler’s at home today?”
“Our friend in detective detail says he’s working at home today. I’ve heard him off and on,” Mona said. “It’s all recorded, but most of it’s wasted. Thirty minutes ago I checked, and he was singing to his dog. Something about bacon and eggs and cats.”
“Pathetic,” the chief said.
“You’d think we’d hear something interesting. Occasionally he’s on the phone, but he never says anything significant. He calls out on his cell phone from another room, for better reception I think, but then I can’t hear him. We’ve had a week of voice-activated recording, but it hasn’t amounted to much. And the bugs in the other parts of the house still aren’t working.”
“Maybe I should send Suda back. If he’d just talk with Abernathy or that PI in his office, we’d know what’s going on. And maybe be able to head him off.”
“You could get in trouble for this, Ed.” I heard Mona’s voice tremble. “Is it worth it?”
“If we’re caught, I’ll say it’s because I had substantial reason to suspect him of murder. Including that gum wrapper he stole from the scene.”
How’d he know about that?
“We need to find out what he’s up to. Maybe we should bug that Ray Eagle character too.”
“Could you justify that?”
“You know how I feel about this, Mona. That’s one reason we need to have these conversations away from the precinct. As chief I have to make difficult judgment calls. I feel more freedom here in my home office.”