“I understand.”
“Do you, Kelly? Do you understand? I’m a cop. And you’re an attorney. We can’t let him get away with this. What kind of message would that be?”
“Our occupations are none of his business. That’s an unfair playing field for him.”
“Unfair playing field? Who are you, Dr. Phil?”
“Alex, I know you’re not as angry as you sound,” she says. “And I’m pretty sure you’re not as mad at Trevor as you are at yourself.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means. I know how your mind works, Alex. You think this means you failed him as a father.”
“No I don’t.”
She just glares at him.
“Well, I don’t,” he repeats.
“You forget that life is fucking imperfect.”
He howls in exasperation. Just one loud, protracted reflex. “I can’t even be perfect at being imperfect.”
“Stop trying. Go take a walk. Go do something. We’re not getting anywhere.”
He gets up. “Stop trying to protect him,” he says.
“You’re acting like he gets into trouble all the time, Alex.”
“If we’re not firm with him, then this will just be the start of a whole lot of trouble. Don’t you see that?”
He walks to the door. He doesn’t turn even though he can hear her voice. “I do see that,” she says. “I don’t disagree with you. But I think there’s a better way to deal with this.”
He doesn’t ask for her to elaborate. She’s astonishingly right, as usual, but he really doesn’t want to hear anymore. He walks outside and closes the door behind him.
Gus Parker shoots blanks. Real good sperm, healthy sperm, sperm-of-life, could have saved his marriage. He had married Deborah Russ when he was twenty-seven. And they had fucked like crazy. Crazy! It was no effort. They never got tired. They made love with nuclear intensity. They hadn’t planned on children for a few years, but once they were ready it was a fuckstorm. And yet the fuckstorms yielded no pregnancies.
“Something is wrong with me,” Deborah kept saying.
And he kept reassuring her that there was nothing wrong at all, that it just wasn’t the right time.
“When is the right time?” she once asked.
“When the universe is ready.”
She laughed. “All you psychics! You all talk like you have fairy dust for brains.”
They tried timing her ovulation. Sex became pragmatic (still quite good but pragmatic); they’d scream and yell and really whoop it up, but their sex mania began to sound scripted. The doctor said, “The first thing we do is check Mr. Parker’s sperm count.”
Gus said, “If I had known I would have counted it myself.”
He thought that might have made Deborah laugh, but it didn’t. When the results came back, the doctor said, “It’s not you, Deborah. It’s Gus. He can’t get you pregnant.”
Turns out Gus had the sperm count of a mermaid, which is to say none. No motility either, he remembers, or something like that. Sorry, sir, your sperm is too small for the ride; it’s bad sperm, bad, bad, bad sperm.
“So, we’ll adopt,” Gus would routinely suggest.
Routinely she dismissed that idea.
“Maybe you should try acupuncture,” she told him. “I hear it can increase sperm count.”
“Sorry, Deb, that’s where I draw the line,” he said. “No needles in my balls.”
He decided to go inside himself and get Zen about the whole thing. He reached a sort of peace with the limitation, accepted it as part of a bigger plan over which he had no control.
“That is such bullshit,” Deb told him. “That is such psychobabble, or psychicbabble, whatever you prefer to call it.”
That’s how it got.
Again he suggested adoption. Described it as virtuous.
“I want my own baby,” she said. “I want a baby with our genes, Gus. What don’t you understand about that?”
Unlike Deborah, Gus tolerated imperfections, had come to accept them as the loose threads of life. “No,” she told him. “This isn’t a marriage if we can’t have our own children.”
“But you love me,” he begged.
“Of course I love you.”
But she left him. She said she needed to go while her clock still ticked. Now he dates occasionally and unsuccessfully. There’s a radiologist who fell in love with him and offered to buy him a Lexus. But he was not in love with her, not in love with cars, not in love with watches and cologne. He dated a massage therapist for a while but broke that off when he walked in on her giving a fast and furious hand job to a client. There have been a few lovely women, funny, smart, beaming. But they didn’t like dogs. One of them, Sylvie Moses, acted jealous toward Ivy.
“It’s her or it’s me,” she demanded. “Make a choice!”
Gus did not choose Sylvie Moses.
He didn’t choose Jennifer Reilly either. She had completely fooled him. She wasn’t a tax attorney, as she had told him. She didn’t have an office in Scottsdale. Or a home in Scottsdale. Her name wasn’t even Jennifer Reilly. Her name was Donna Dotson, and she and her husband (husband!) were on the run from authorities in Des Moines where they had duped senior citizens out of their money in a not-so-sophisticated Ponzi scheme. Gus was not a good enough psychic to see through that. He still isn’t. He knows that. He can’t rely on hunches or vibes when someone is wearing a mask.
And so the love of his life, Ivy, is sleeping now on the couch, exhausted from her recess with the birds. It’s about four thirty in the afternoon, and both of them are feeling lazy. Ivy is snoring, and Gus is sitting right beside her, watching a documentary about the great wildebeest migration in Kenya. It’s a masterpiece of photography, really, but he’s only half watching, because he is so distracted by a vision. There’s a woman calling out for help. She’s crying and screaming. And Gus almost leaps out of his seat. He looks at Africa, but the migration yields no clues. It yields magnificent perspective on life and the order of nature, on the enormity of the whole and the miniscule speck of everything else. It gives him pause about where he fits in. With his power, and without. He imagines that the African bush at night is a rapturous feast of stars, the sky full of phantasma.
He hears the woman’s desperate voice again. It sounds like his mother.
There’s a knock at the door.
10
Gus Parker lives in Arcadia, that strange enclave straddling Phoenix and Scottsdale that really can’t define itself. Is it retro or metro? Urban or suburban? That kind of thing. With its eclectic mix of mansions, faux mansions, and Leave it to Beaver homes from the ’50s and ’60s, the neighborhood is considered trendy only because someone is always building, fixing, or tearing down something. The people here adore their lawns, that’s for sure, as well as the novelty of irrigation in an otherwise brown and rocky desert. Gus’s house, a modest ranch, sits on the western edge of Arcadia, known to some as “Arcadia Lite” because you don’t have to be a freaking millionaire to live there. Gus bought the home long ago, when supply was considerably larger than demand. He tells Mills he lives there because of the view of Camelback Mountain. “It’s like I’m sitting in the camel’s lap,” Gus once explained, and Mills just shook his head, not really grasping the image. Gus says he feels blessed by the camel, especially at dawn and dusk.
Mills can’t begrudge a man his blessings, he reckons.
Gus opens the door. He’s wearing drawstring pants and a T-shirt. This guy really likes his pajamas, Mills thinks, imagining Gus going from his hospital attire at work to his pj’s at home, with no serious clothes to think of. It’s a lifestyle choice, clearly, and Mills self-confesses that he might be a little jealous of the loungey aspect of Parker’s life.
“Alex?” the psychic says.
“Hope this isn’t a bad time.”
“No. You okay?”
“Define okay,” Mills says.
He sees the psychic looking
through him. The guy’s eyes peer into his own and then somehow beyond. It’s as if the guy’s a human X-ray, which might explain his full-time job.
“There’s been an arrest. . . .”
“No,” Mills tells him. “No arrest.”
“Well don’t just stand there,” the psychic says. “Come in.”
Mills has been here before. Several times. He’s always surprised how simple the place looks. He had expected, at first, lots of candles and prisms, and abstract art with mystical references. Parker mostly has photos on the wall. Beach scenes with friends. Surfing photos. Some vistas from the valley’s mountains and the red majestic images of Sedona. He still expects the smell of incense, but again he is wrong ; instead there is the smell of household cleaner and everyday canine.
“Can I get you some coffee, iced tea, something?” Gus Parker asks him.
“No. I’m fine. Can’t stay long. I forgot to give you something earlier today.”
“Oh?”
Mills hands him the box containing Elizabeth Spears’s kachina doll. “I got it from the victim’s parents. I hope it helps.”
He follows the psychic to the kitchen where the psychic puts the box on the counter and pours himself a glass of iced tea; Mills is always fascinated with this guy, like is it possible for him, right there as he pours the beverage, to suddenly have a vision? Does he have visions out of the blue, say, when he’s scrubbing the toilet or folding the laundry?
“Tell me about the parents,” Parker says.
Mills describes the couple and their home, the agitated fear in their eyes that yields mostly to shell shock. “Actually they took it better than most families, which means they are either incredibly spiritual or still incredibly shocked.”
“I vote for shocked,” Gus says. “Any leads?”
“Possibly. Nothing astounding. A recent breakup, some jealous coworkers.”
The psychic looks at him, shakes his head, offers a “hmm” and nothing else.
“What?” Mills asks. “You think I missed something? I’m not done with the parents if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking.” Gus downs almost the entire glass of iced tea. “I just keep seeing an arrest. Like something in my gut tells me there’s been an arrest.”
“There hasn’t. I already told you. I mean, I just hung up from the sergeant. I think he would have said something.”
Gus shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
Mills fidgets. He looks at the floor, avoiding eye contact with the psychic because he can just sense that Gus is sensing something. Mills sees himself in the friendly line of fire. “Well, anyway,” he mutters, then points to the box. “Why don’t you open the—”
“The sergeant wants an arrest today, doesn’t he?”
Mills looks up. “Of course he does,” he says. “But he knows that’s unrealistic. Said so himself.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s under pressure, so you’re under pressure.”
“Brilliant, Gus. A real psychic revelation.”
“Dude, I’m just getting a vibe, that’s all. You’re all uptight. I saw it on your face the minute I opened the door.”
Mills nods. “Right. We found the body yesterday. The mayor wants us to find the killer today. That’s how it works in city hall.”
“My gut tells me you’ll have an arrest soon. I keep seeing an arrest. Really I do.”
Then Gus looks out the window to the backyard, a yard stuffed with bougainvillea, and he seems lost, adrift, as if he’s listening for an elusive frequency. Mills can’t imagine the noises going on inside the psychic’s brain; it must sound like a pinball machine, or an electric guitar struck by lightning. It must look like a freaking solar flare.
“It’s much quieter than that,” Gus says. “It’s more like an aria right now.”
Mills braces himself against the table. The floor seems to swirl. His mouth goes dry. “You read my mind?”
“Not really,” the psychic says. “Just an intuition. Sometimes it does sound like a pinball machine, Detective. But that’s only when I’m resisting or I’m scared. And it looks more like an electrical storm than a solar flare. But usually it looks like a blue, calm sea.”
It’s hard to breathe.
“Relax, Detective,” the psychic says.
“I’m relaxed,” Mills lies.
“Then tell me about the arrest. I know there’s been one, but I don’t know why you’re not telling me.”
Mills hesitates, lets out an angry sigh. “All right already. It’s my son.”
“Your son?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He deserved it.”
Mills tells Gus Parker about the charges Trevor is facing.
“Wow. I didn’t see that coming,” Gus says just as he downs his third glass of iced tea.
“Neither did we.”
“I mean psychically. I’m sorry I didn’t sense this more accurately. If I knew it was your son, I wouldn’t have pushed you about the arrest.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Mills tells him. “Maybe it’s an off day.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Mills shakes his head. “I have no idea. This isn’t Trevor. It’s just not him.”
“Obviously it’s bigger than him,” Gus says. “Yeah, that whole team’s in trouble.”
Mills raises an eyebrow. “You think?”
“I might be having a bad day. So take it with a grain.”
Mills asks him to open the box.
“Oh, yeah, let’s do that,” Gus says. “But let me grab a refill first.”
He tells the detective to wait for him out back at the pool.
Gus pulls out the object from the box. He unwraps a small, soft cloth and finds a kachina doll resting in his hands. The first thing Gus intuits is that this little icon has a boisterous personality. There’s an energy that bounces. There’s clamor. Gus can hear percussion. The doll has something to say. He’s happy about this because he knows this is the first step. It’s just the way the wooden doll appears to him, like an innocent surprise with significance. Gus lifts the kachina, holds it at arm’s length. He inspects it, admires its colors, its posture. He turns it over and reads its name. “Warrior Dancer.”
The detective, who’s been sitting at poolside dipping his feet, mockingly rolls his eyes. “Not very original.”
And then Gus feels a tiny vibration and senses the hum of the doll. “No,” he tells Alex, “this is an original. This was made by a tribal artist on the Hopi reservation. Made by a woman, an older woman.”
“Is the doll telling you that?”
“I think so.”
Alex gives a bemused look and says, “Well I’m not so much interested in its history. . . .”
Gus infers the condescension and shakes his head. “I know what you’re interested in,” he tells the detective.
“Sorry. Of course you do.”
“Context?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. It was a doll Elizabeth purchased in Sedona. Something she treasured.”
“She had left it with her parents.”
Alex shrugs. “Yeah.”
“Because she treasured them.”
The detective nods. “I guess.”
“Why don’t you leave this with me until tomorrow?” Gus asks, placing the doll back into the box.
“You’ll call if something happens?”
“Immediately, of course.”
Alex gets up, rubs his feet against the deck to dry them off. The men shake hands and head around the side of the house toward the front. It’s just after six o’clock, and the sky is slowly losing light. But it’s still on the white side of dusk, and Gus can feel the warmth on his skin. He closes his eyes for a moment and lets the whiteness seep inward. And then a flash. A pierce of light. And Gus opens his eyes and sees a body falling to the ground. Blood pooling around the head. There’s a Medusa splay of hair. A flash. A knife. Another puncture. A di
zzying flash. Chisel. Chisel. Chisel. Metal against rock. “Wait!” he calls to Alex Mills.
The box falls from Gus’s hand.
“Someone is dying right now,” he tells the detective.
Alex stops in his tracks. “Come on, Gus. Don’t fuck around.”
“Huh? I’m not fucking around.”
“You’re messing with me.”
Gus crouches to retrieve the kachina. “Messing with you? About this? Never. I’m seeing this. I’m seeing this now.”
Alex grabs him by the shoulder. “Where? Tell me where.”
“I don’t know,” Gus says. “I’ve been all over the map literally. I was just studying the mountains around Phoenix, and what I’m seeing makes no sense.”
The detective shakes his head as if he doesn’t understand. His eyes are imploring.
Gus begins to sweat. He feels it trickle down his back. His forehead is moist. He’s on to something. His hands are clammy. He sees himself reach for the detective’s wrists, doesn’t know why, maybe to stabilize himself as he gets to his feet, maybe to affirm a connection, maybe to exchange some kind of power, knowledge, empathy in either direction.
“What are you doing?” Alex asks, recoiling.
Chisel. Chisel. Blood as paint. Blood dripping in rivers.
“A woman is dying right now,” Gus says tonelessly.
“Parker, I fucking need something solid. We could catch this guy in the act.”
“We could,” Gus says. “But we won’t. He’s almost finished with the artwork. He’d be gone before you got there.”
Pooling blood, a soaked floor below her. She sees her death like a photograph. A still picture with borders.
“This is not entertaining, Gus,” the detective says. “I gotta go.”
Then Gus hears himself say, “Call that woman.”
And he hears Alex ask, “What woman?”
“That woman from the press conference. The one I was getting vibes about.”
“Bridget?” Alex goes white and wide-eyed. “Jesus. You think it’s her.” It’s not a question. The detective fumbles nervously for his phone.
“I didn’t say I thought it was her,” Gus says calmly. “But call her. Call her now.”
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