Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  “Ten o’clock,” he explained.

  “In the morning?”

  “Night.”

  “Jesus Christ, what did I tell you about jet lag?”

  “I’m hungry, I wanted to see if you wanted to go out and get something to eat. Besides, it’s America, we want to get out there, see stuff, do things, you know.”

  “Yeah, but John, you’re supposed to sleep through the night, adapt to a new time zone.”

  “Were you going to sleep on the bathroom floor in your underpants all night?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, then. I’m going to get something to eat. Are you coming or not?”

  We dressed and went downstairs. The man behind the desk was watching baseball on a portable TV.

  “Is there somewhere we could get something to eat around here?” John asked.

  “White Spot Diner, three blocks south,” the man said, not looking up.

  The diner. A waitress, ashen skin, dyed blond hair, a smoker, forties, exhausted, beaten down by the day and life. We looked at the menu. There were at least a dozen things we had never heard of: sloppy joes, meat loaf, submarine sandwiches, huevos rancheros; so we plumped for cheeseburgers and french fries, which was pretty bloody American in any case. When my burger came, I’d lost my appetite but John ate his and half of mine and I had a few fries. We drank Coke and John smoked and left. A nice night. I was feeling better now.

  We walked down Broadway. The city of Denver ahead of us. The sky filled with stars and airplanes crossing the vast continent from coast to coast. Amazing to be here. Very different from living on an island as small as Ireland. You could get in your car in Ireland and the farthest you could drive from home was two hundred miles. Here, you could get in your car and drive to the top of Alaska or to the jungles of El Salvador.

  Neon lights. The warm night. Police cruisers. Sirens. Big American cars. A club letting in a line of kids. John turned to look at me.

  “No way, no way,” I said. “I’m going home and I’m going to get a good night’s sleep. No way, mate. No way.”

  The nightclub…

  Girls at the upstairs bar. A redhead in the PhD astronomy program at the University of Colorado. Brown eyes, feline, intelligent. John with an Asian girl in Daisy Dukes and sandals, John explaining that in The Wild One, Brando rode a Triumph, not a Harley. The girl feigning interest wonderfully.

  John got us a round and his big smile infected all of us. He took the brunette to the dance floor and I talked to the redhead about astronomy. I told her my dad was a maths teacher and she said that astronomy was about 80 percent maths.

  For possibly the only time in history our talk of mathematics proved mutually seductive and I found myself biting her pink, moist lower lip. She kissed me and moved from her stool to my seat so that the breasts under the R.E.M. T-shirt were touching my chest. We kissed and she tasted of beer and honey.

  She stopped to get a breath.

  “Hey, you know what day it is today?” the girl asked.

  “Apart from my lucky day, no.”

  “Ain’t lucky yet, mister.”

  “Ok, what day is it?”

  “It’s the start of the solstice. Began at sundown. You know what the solstice is?”

  “Longest day of the year.”

  “That’s right,” she said, surprised. “We’re going to a rave on the Flat Irons behind Boulder. Have you been to Boulder yet?”

  “We only got in today,” I said.

  “Denver sucks, man. Boulder’s where it’s at. Have you been to a rave before? You’ll need a sleeping bag. I can rustle one up. Do you take e? We’re going to dance all night until the sun comes up.”

  “Why?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? It’s the shortest night of the year. Midsummer night. Wait, I’ve got a flyer.”

  She rummaged in her tight jeans back pocket. Raves were impromptu illegal affairs on public land. They were organized in secret and news of them spread through word of mouth. The ecstasy/rave scene was new to America. Rave culture here was in its infancy. Still enthusiastic, unironic. You could tell. The flyer had a big lowercase e and underneath it the words “Midsummer Madness Rave. Acid House. Party Till the Sun Comes Up.”

  “Sounds like a lot of activity,” I said with a slight air of skepticism.

  “Forget it then,” she said.

  I stared at her. She was pretty and I liked her. I wanted to placate her. Words from Heine, my favorite writer about the poppy.

  “What did you say?” she asked, unable to understand me.

  “Du bist wie eine Blume, you are like a flower,” I said.

  Her face reddened. She breathed in. Amazingly, it was a line unknown to her, maybe it was the German, although no one’s ever said it’s the most romantic of tongues.

  She leaned forward and we kissed again until John came back up from the dance floor with his girl.

  “You look serious, you weren’t talking about why beards are coming back, are you?” he asked me with a wink.

  “No, were you talking about the Platonic embodiment of your Triumph Bonneville?”

  “No, and by the way, that was far too long a sentence to work as sarcasm. Anyway, did you hear about the rave, are you in, man?” John asked, with a big, hopeful grin.

  “I don’t know where you get the energy from, but I think I want to go home,” I said.

  “No, no, no, the rave is in Boulder, we have to go to Boulder tomorrow, right? To go to Victoria’s office?” John said.

  “So?”

  “So it’ll save us the trip,” John said.

  I had no resistance and the girl was cute.

  “Ok,” I said….

  A small thing but, who knows, with a good night’s sleep what happened the next day might not have happened.

  An hour later. The highway to Boulder. The drive to the university. Drunk kids saying “Ssshhh,” very loud. Jeeps and SUVs up into the mountains. A long walk through a forest to the top. A clearing. The city of Boulder a few thousand feet below.

  Tents. Speakers. A DJ. About three hundred kids. Ecstasy being passed around in solemn little tablets. The DJ faking a British accent. A smiley-face poster. All of it Manchester, 1989. The generator started up. The spotlights came on. The speakers kicked in. Dutch trance music. The mountains. The city. Everybody yelled and started dancing. She passed me an ecstasy tab. But I might be unemployed, I might be a druggie, I might be in the throes of existential crisis, but I wasn’t stupid. A few hundred people die of heroin overdoses every year. There are about four thousand heroin cocktail deaths. Heroin and coke, heroin and speed, heroin and e. You don’t mess with that shit.

  I palmed the pill, fake-swallowed, kissed the girl. We danced. They played acid house and Euro dance and trip-hop and for variety the Soup Dragons and the Stone Roses and Radiohead. At two we drifted away.

  We laid out sleeping bags and we took off our T-shirts and our jeans and I stole beside her and kissed her breasts and her long legs.

  We had sex and I still didn’t know her name and in the dark she could have been anyone. And our moves were theater and our words rituals. You are beautiful. You are my little flower. You are the negation of the enemy. But a substitute. Oh yes, my dear, a substitute.

  And I ground my hips and my heart pumped and from nowhere some last residue of that wonderfully refined opium plant changed the chemistry of my brain. I smiled and the world’s pain eased. We got to our feet and we walked naked to the tent and the stars lit our way and our feet trod lightly on these subtle and unforgiving grasses of the New World.

  5: THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR

  The blue flame of the paraffin lamp was almost cobalt in the darkness of the tent. It burned clear with only a fragile light that dripped color and a little heat, taking the dark, molding it into tiny shapes and forms that were weird and spectral under the aged canvas of khaki and muck black and burnt sienna.

  The tube around the wick was hot and the green metal of the vessel bu
ckled slightly as the heat rose. I adjusted the intake valve to make it consume more oxygen. The smell of the oil was strong and rich, like some exotic opiate or sleep inducer, and I drank it in and kneeled there for a while like a devotee before his idol.

  I sighed, and leaned back, and sat, still in the moment, holding my breath and then slowly letting it out again into the cool night air.

  The heroin easing out of my body now.

  I shook myself. The lamp burned on, seeping a brittle indigo onto the cheek of the sleeping girl. I hadn’t slept at all. I climbed out of the tent. There were a few people awake waiting for the dawn. John, one of them, smoking by a fire.

  “How do, mate?” John asked, grinning at me.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “You look terrible. You shot up again, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “What about your ‘Only an addict would shoot up twice in twenty-four hours’ spiel?”

  “Jet lag. Doesn’t count,” I said.

  “Why even bring your gear with you to the bar? Do you carry it everywhere now?”

  “John, I was up all night and I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I would take a hit. I am exhausted beyond belief. We should have just gone back to the hotel.”

  “Yeah, blame me,” John said, his face showing a little irritation.

  “I’m not going to get into this with you again. I’m really not.”

  “Ok.”

  And what was I going to say? John, the heroin in America is not to be believed? John, I’m having serious misgivings about trying to be a cop again? But the bastard was right. I didn’t have to do heroin now. It wasn’t necessary. The fact that I had shot up this morning meant something huge.

  “Hey, at least did it go ok with the girl?” John asked.

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking now about the day ahead. We had much to do. Victoria Patawasti’s neighbors had to be interviewed, her work colleagues, the police, the supposed murderer and his attorney, and if possible the murder scene had to be examined, her movements explored, a thorough, slow, precise investigation. Haste is the enemy of the investigator. Haste makes you jump to conclusions, miss things. The ally of lies is speed. I’d solved about two dozen cases in the RUC as detective and ordinary cop. All of them broken by solid police work, a slow growth of fact and evidence until the picture had formed itself. In my experience no one cracked under questioning, no one confessed, there were no sudden lightning flashes of insight. An assembling of a jigsaw full of detail. Detail upon detail until its weight breaks through the lies and ambiguity, and truth rings out.

  That was the way to solve this case, too.

  But it wasn’t to be that way. I mean, did I want to fail? Did I want to escape from the awful injunction over me? Did I want to sabotage myself? Maybe the peeler wants to be nabbed himself, trapped, found out. Maybe he has had enough of truth.

  “You don’t buy into this summer solstice shit?” John asked, taking off his Belfast Blues Festival baseball hat, wiping his forehead, and shaking his long hair in a way he knew really annoyed me. I was determined not to let him piss me off.

  “Well, John, they say it’s the holiest day of the year. In Hinduism and Buddhism it was a propitious day to reach enlightenment.”

  “You ever been to Newgrange in County Meath?” John asked.

  “No.”

  “I went down there on the bike once, now it’s aligned with the winter solstice, not the summer, that’s more like it, that makes more sense, you’re begging the sun to come back again, see….”

  But I wasn’t listening. I was still obsessing on me and Victoria and that big word: truth—I don’t buy into the existential solipsism of fucking defense lawyers: “Everything’s relative, subjective.” I’m old school. Aristotle, who says there are five ways of finding things out: techne, which is practical technique; episteme, or scientific method; phronesis, which is sagacity; sophia, which is wisdom; and, finally, intelligence or nous. Techne is the most important for a policeman. The most important for me. And before heroin, my technique was killer: patient, focused, incremental, deep.

  Aristotle was wrong about nearly everything. Galileo disproved his physics, Darwin his biology, his pupil Alexander his politics, but he was right about technique. More important than being smart is being meticulous. We had a lot to do today and it was the longest day of the year and we could have done it if we’d been patient. But instead of techne—fuckups; instead of breaking the case—disaster.

  In fourteen hours the sun had finally gone down on this long midsummer day and we were on the run from the Denver police, the state police and any other law enforcement agency you care to mention.

  John patted me on the shoulder and we turned from the sunrise, walked back to the tents.

  * * *

  We decided on a division of the labor. I’d do Victoria’s old office in Boulder to see if the anonymous note writer was still around. I’d let John interview Victoria’s neighbors at her building in Denver. I’d have to do it again myself but it would give him something to do and there might be inconsistencies in their stories. John was a peeler, but I told him again how to interview someone. You don’t offer information and you take all they say with equanimity. You write down everything and if they’re going too fast you ask them to slow down.

  Also at some point, I’d call the lawyer representing Hector Martinez—the supposed killer. Then I’d call up the police and book a talk with the lead detective.

  The girls drove us to Boulder and we had eggs for breakfast. The girls had things to do, so we split and John caught the bus back to Denver. I was wearing a shirt and jeans, but I bought a tie to look more respectable.

  Boulder had an interesting vibe, it was what happened when Grateful Dead fans became rich, yuppie, and comfortable. Every third store sold crystals and Tibetan prayer flags. The parking lot outside the yoga center was stuffed with brand-new Volvos and Range Rovers. The L.L. Bean-clad citizens were white, thin, smelling of soy and vitamins—the sort of smug baby-boom wankers so caught up in their path toward self-actualization that they really didn’t see the scores of homeless people begging on the pedestrian mall.

  I found a phone booth that contained a potpourri basket to mitigate the stench of urine. I dialed my first number. Before I got through, I hung up. I had to rethink my story. I wanted to be very low-key at first. I know as a cop I hated private detectives with a passion. So instead, I decided I’d be a newspaperman.

  I dialed the Denver police department.

  “Detective Miller, please, my name is Jones, I work for the Irish Times, I’m looking into the Victoria Pat—”

  “Detective Miller is out of town for a few days,” a woman said.

  “Oh. Uh, well, can I speak to any other detectives on the Victoria Patawasti case?”

  “Detective Hopkins is on leave.”

  “Ok, is there a supervisor?”

  “Detective Redhorse hasn’t come in yet.”

  Dead air on the line.

  “Ok, I’ll call back,” I said and hung up.

  Damn. Better luck with the next call. The phone book was still attached to the booth. I looked it up and found Enrique Monroe, public defender, attorney-at-law, who was representing the accused. I dialed his number. Got a secretary, told her I was a reporter from Ireland looking into the Victoria Patawasti murder.

  “Hello,” the lawyer said in a friendly manner.

  “Hello, Mr. Monroe, my name is, uh, Simon Jones, I’m a reporter from Ireland. I’m investigating the Victoria Patawasti case and I’d very much like to speak to you.”

  “I’ll give you all the help I can. I would be delighted to talk to you. Are you in town soon?”

  “Yes, I’ll be in Denver very soon, I—”

  “Well, let me tell you something, the police have got the wrong man, Mr. Jones. You can tell your readers that my client has an alibi for the night of the murder, if only I can persuade his friends to speak up for him.”

  “What’s
the problem?” I asked.

  “Well, to be frank, they’re all illegal immigrants and they’re worried about their status. I think, though, that I’ll be able to turn them around, the police have no physical evidence at all. Nothing, this is an outrageous case. What newspaper did you say you worked for?”

  “Uh, the Irish Times.”

  “Listen, I know the people of Ireland want justice, I want justice, but my client is innocent. I’ve checked his alibi, it’s watertight. I’m working on his friends. Working on them. And with an alibi the DA will have to drop the charges.”

  “That sounds interesting. Mr. Monroe, could we talk later in the week?”

  “Impossible. I always want to talk to gentlemen of the press, but this week is impossible. I have to go to Pueblo then juve court. Look, how about Monday, next Monday? Nine o’clock.”

  “What’s your address?”

  “Evans and Downing. The Calendar Building, Suite Eleven, Denver, easy to find, I promise you. Well, look, I have to fly—”

  “Let me ask you something. What did your client do for a living?” I asked.

  “Hector’s a mover. He works for Grant Moving.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “Oh, he works all over the city, the whole metro area.”

  “Boulder?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Let me guess, he’d done some moving work at the CAW headquarters in Boulder, right? They were moving from Boulder to Denver, isn’t that right?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Monroe said, sounding a little embarrassed.

  “Don’t you think that’s where he could have dropped his driver’s license?” I suggested.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t really looked at that in much detail. I’ve been trying so hard to get the alibi witnesses on board, I haven’t been working on anything else. I had just thought that the victim somehow found Hector’s license, put it in her purse, and was going to turn it in to the police. But yes, that’s possible. That license is the only piece of physical evidence linking my client to the murder. If I can dismiss that or if I can get the alibi to work I honestly think we’re home free.”

  “No fingerprints, no hand prints or powder residue on your client?”