Gumshoe for Two

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll go run the water.”

  She went into the bathroom. Julia was almost still, no longer making any sound. I heard water pouring into a bathtub in the other room.

  Ma came out and watched. I was still straddling Julia, keeping her pinned. She was quiet now, inert. I could see her mouth, a wide oval where she’d sucked the plastic in half an inch trying to get air.

  Murderer.

  No. I was a garbage collector with a black crust around his heart, that was all. Murderers kill innocent people. Garbage collectors get rid of trash.

  Ma watched the water level in the tub, turned it off when it was half full. We left the bag on Julia’s head another ten minutes to be certain, then I got off and unrolled her. I put the duvet back on the bed while Ma stripped Julia down to nothing. I got Julia under the arms while Ma took her feet, and we carried her into the bathroom, set her gently in the tub. Ma wrapped Julia’s fingers around the hot- and cold-water taps, ran a little more water into the tub, put her hands on the sides of the tub in a few places, then laid Julia back, closed her eyes. We backed away and looked at the scene.

  Ma said, “Good riddance,” and we turned away.

  In the bedroom, Ma put the bed back together. She laid Julia’s clothes neatly on a chair and put Julia’s shoes side by side beneath it. She took Julia’s purchase out of the bag—an expensive scarf— spread it out on the duvet as if Julia had taken a moment to admire it, then Ma and I looked around. The place looked pristine. Julia’s purse was where she’d left it, money, credit cards, everything she’d had was untouched. No one would be in here for at least twenty-four hours. By then, we would be out of France. The room didn’t look like a place where murder had been done. The truth might eventually come out, but finding the murderer or a reason for the crime might never be known. We hoped.

  “So,” Ma said. “We good here?”

  “I am.”

  “Me, too. Let’s go.”

  She opened the door to the hallway an inch, listened a moment, peered out, then left. I followed quickly. Wearing gloves, Ma put a sign on the door, French side out, Ne pas déranger—Do not disturb—then we walked away.

  Hours later, at Orly Airport, Sarah and Ma flew west toward America. I caught a different flight and went east.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  BORROLOOLA, AUSTRALIA.

  I dug holes beneath a blazing sun.

  That was what I did. I didn’t think about the past. I dug holes three feet deep in tough red dirt then used what came out to make a kind of slurry of dirt and water in a wheelbarrow, then poured it in around a nine-foot fence post centered in the hole, held up by diagonal braces clamped to the post and to stakes pounded into the ground. In two days the slurry would harden like concrete and that fence post would be there forty years later. Then I dug another hole and did it all again and the whole thing was like a kind of immortality marching across the land at a rate of forty feet a day. In a little over four months I’d dug nearly six hundred forty holes and put up the same number of fence posts. My work stretched fifty-one hundred feet the last time I’d measured it. Somewhere along the line it felt as if the fierce summer heat had burned away that black crust that had formed around my heart the day Jeri died.

  “I brought you some water, Steve,” Sally said. She was in dusty boots and a sleeveless cotton dress of some indeterminate sun-bleached color. She’d driven up in an ATV with a thermos in back. We were half a mile from the main house, a dark, low place beneath half a dozen gum trees. Sally was sixteen years old, starting to fill out. Cute kid. Another few years and she would be a knockout.

  “Thanks, kiddo.”

  “I’ve got bread baking. Ma told me to tell you.” She looked at my chest, probably at the little round scar where Winter had run her foil entirely through my body. It looked like a .22 caliber gunshot wound in my sunbaked hide.

  “Good deal,” I said.

  “You should eat more.”

  “Don’t want to get fat.”

  “You’re not fat. Ma says you’re skinny. Well, not skinny, but she thinks you’re gettin’ awful thin. She’d kill me if she knew I told you, so don’t.”

  “Told me what? Shoo.”

  Sally smiled and turned away. Ma was Kate Hardy, mother of Sally—and Matt, age twelve. Kate was a mile away in an old Ford pickup, wrangling sheep or whatever they call it when they run them around. I didn’t do sheep. I dug holes and put up fences to keep sheep in. Or out. Sheep in a flock or in pens stink. Bad. I’d rather dig holes.

  Kate was a tall, good-looking woman of thirty-seven with dark brown hair and skin that had seen too much sun, calloused hands that had done too much work. She’d lost her husband three years ago. I was working for room and board, nothing else. Everything I’d known before was either a million miles away or gone forever.

  The temperature had topped out at a hundred four degrees that day—about typical for Borroloola in February. Above the waist I was getting as brown as an aborigine.

  I was down to two hundred four pounds. I’d lost twenty-six in four months, and I’d put on pounds of muscle, so I didn’t look much like the guy who’d rolled a woman in a bedspread and snuffed out her lights like someone stepping on a roach.

  My shower was outdoors. It worked off the well system. It was meant for cleaning off the worst of the crud folks around here get into, sheep stuff you didn’t want to bring into the house. There was a shower inside, but I only used the one outside. I looked askance at it when Kate said I could use it or the indoor shower. I didn’t want to make myself at home, but the outdoor shower didn’t come with a curtain of any sort. It was just a showerhead, a single valve, no hot water, and a kind of wooden platform to stand on. Water ran off into the dirt and that was that.

  “We . . . things are pretty natural around here,” she said when she saw me eyeing the house, thirty feet away.

  “You’ve got kids.”

  She shrugged that off, but the next day I put up two posts and strung a wire between them, clipped a bed sheet between the shower and the house, and called it good. Three months later I was showering, shampooing my hair, which I did on Wednesdays and Sundays. It was evening, dusk, about nine o’clock. When I was finally able to open my eyes, Sally was six feet away, watching. “Ma says she’s got apple pie in the house, if you want some.”

  “How long’ve you been there?”

  “Not very.”

  “I’ll be in soon. Now shoo.”

  She went, and that was that. Natural, I guess.

  Sunsets in Australia are as good as anywhere else. Not better, but as good. I was in a chair leaning back on two legs against the shed that had become my home in mid-October as I watched the sun burn its way down into the land in a blaze of orange and rose. It was getting toward the end of February. I’d been in Borroloola almost four and a half months. Stars would be out and bright before the temperature dropped into the eighties.

  The shed used to hold garden stuff. It was eight by ten feet. I had a bed in there now and a small chest of drawers and a tiny bookcase holding a dozen worn paperbacks. The place was sixty feet from the main house and stood beneath four gum trees. It had a wooden floor with a threadbare rug on it that Kate had given me. Good enough.

  Kate came up the path from the house. “Hi, Steve,” she said.

  “Hi, yourself.”

  “Mind if I sit awhile?”

  “Nope.”

  She pulled up a second chair and leaned back on two legs like I was doing, tucked her feet into the rungs, and watched the sky go purple and gray with me.

  “Long day,” she said after a while.

  “Aren’t they all?”

  Another minute went by, then she said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “You’d get by.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve needed that fence for years. Jase bought all those posts and was fixing to do it when . . .”

  She fell silent and the night settled around
us. An hour ago I’d eaten dinner at the house. Fish this time, a change from lamb chops, mutton stew, all the things you can do with sheep. Sally’s bread was good. Better than good.

  Kate rapped the side of the shed. “This . . . it doesn’t seem like enough room to stay in. I mean, for anyone.” Her voice was soft in the dark. “If you want, I’m sure we could make some sort of a, well, an arrangement . . . in the house.”

  “Out here suits me, Kate.”

  Maybe not what she wanted to hear. This was about as close as she’d come to what might be an invitation to . . . what? Stay? Come over to the main house and share a bed? I looked out at the scorched flat earth as it gave up heat and felt Jeri, watching over me. Or maybe just watching, waiting, trying to tell me something.

  “The kids really like you,” Kate said.

  “They’re great. Really good kids.”

  “Sally’s gettin’ older.”

  “You’re gonna have your hands full in another year or two.”

  After a while she looked over at me. “Why are you here?”

  That was a huge leap forward. She’d asked me something like that when I’d first arrived in Borroloola, asked around, and was told Kate Hardy could probably use some help at her place, and I’d walked over, two miles south of town, asked, and she told me she couldn’t pay anyone to work on the place, and I told her I didn’t want pay, just a place to stay and hard work to do. She hadn’t mentioned it since.

  “Gotta be someplace,” I said.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Only one I’ve got.”

  Still not what she wanted to hear. A few minutes later, she let out a little sigh and stood up. “Well, good night, Steve.”

  “Night.”

  She left.

  I sat there another hour until the world was black and silent, then went inside and fell asleep so I could get up in the morning and dig more holes in the sun.

  Six hundred forty holes. I chipped them out a fraction of an inch at a time with an iron bar that weighed sixteen pounds. One day I counted the number of times I lifted that bar and slammed it back down as I busted my way down three feet. I came up with four hundred twenty. So I’d lifted about 4.3 million pounds up two, two and a half feet, and drove it down into that hard red sonofabitchin’ earth. I’d wanted hard work and I’d gotten it.

  The day after Kate’s visit I was on my third hole and it was a hundred two degrees in the shade when a Ford Explorer boiled up from the south, lifting a rooster tail of rust-red dust as it rolled past the driveway to the house and went north into Borroloola. Half an hour later, it came back and turned into the yard in front of the house. I’d never seen it before. Maybe it was special mail delivery, maybe a package, maybe Australian National Police with a warrant and I was about to take a ride, end up in France or back in the States.

  I was pounding stakes into the ground, using a level to get the fence post vertical, when I looked up and saw her, a hundred yards off, walking toward me. She was blond and tall and slender and her stride was purposeful. She had an unconscious undulating sway to her hips. She wore running shoes, white shorts, a yellow sleeveless blouse that hugged her waist and accentuated her curves. A bolt of pain shot through me, as if someone had punched a hole in my chest with a railroad spike.

  She stopped ten feet away and looked at me. “Hi, Mort.”

  “Hi, Sarah.” I could barely speak.

  “I turned twenty-five in January. I’m old now.”

  “Old, hell. You barely look twenty-one.”

  “The girl back there at the house said you were out here. She called you Steve, though.”

  “She would. It’s on my passport.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Building a fence.”

  “I see that. What’re you doing here?”

  “Don’t have a good answer to that.”

  “It took Ma nearly four months to track you down. She knew you were in Australia because of your passport, but she didn’t find you here in this place until the middle of this month.”

  “She’s good. This’d be a hard place to find anyone.”

  “She needs you. I need you. It’s time for you to come home.”

  “I’ve got another hundred twenty feet of fence to put up.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “It’ll take three or four days. Probably four.”

  “I’ve waited a lot longer than that. There’s a pub in town. I got myself a room there. When you’re done, I’ll be there. I won’t leave this place without you.” She looked at me a moment longer, then said, “I have missed you so much. We both have, but I’m just goin’ crazy.”

  Like I thought, the fence took another four days, during which time February slid into March. I didn’t go into Borroloola, didn’t see Sarah. I dug holes and put up fencing.

  The second day, Sally came out. “She’s gonna steal you away, isn’t she? Miss super sexy?”

  “She’s not stealing.”

  “I hate her.”

  The morning of the fifth day I put my clothes in a plastic bag and left. Kate knew I was going. I’d said good-bye the night before. I saw her watching, half a mile away. She was standing in the back of the pickup, shading her eyes, watching. She didn’t wave. I was glad I couldn’t see her face up close.

  I was almost to the main road, fifty yards from the house, when Sally ran up behind me. I heard her footsteps and turned.

  “You’re leaving?” she said. “Really?”

  “Yup. Fence is done. I gotta go.”

  Tears formed in her eyes. “Ma’s been crying. Mostly at night. Bet she’s crying right now.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “You shouldn’t leave.”

  “Got to, kiddo. Be good. Take care of her.” I turned and headed toward town.

  “Two minutes,” she called out.

  I stopped and turned. “Huh?”

  “You had shampoo in your eyes. I watched you for two whole minutes that night.” Then she turned and ran back to the house.

  Kids.

  Sarah and I drove to Cairns on Australia’s east coast, nearly fourteen hundred kilometers away, eight hundred seventy miles on National Route One, which was mostly hard-packed rust-red earth crossed by little rivers without bridges. Sometimes the Explorer was up to the floorboards in water as we eased through. The land was flat and hot and harsh—gum trees as far as the eye could see. A typical sign would read: Next Gas 341 Kilometers. A mound of earth four hundred feet high was cause to stop and take photographs.

  Borroloola to Burketown was 492 kilometers of slow going. We stayed at The Burketown Pub. Printed on the side of the pale yellow two-story building were the words: “Australia’s Greatest Outback Hotel.”

  “Outback, huh?” Sarah said. “I never would’ve guessed.” The Explorer was theoretically blue, but it was rust-red from all the dust. I didn’t know how vehicles survived more than one season out here.

  The sun was low. The next decent-sized town was Croydon, three hundred seventy kilometers away. We ate at the pub and stayed the night in a room with a bed that wasn’t a queen.

  “Looks like we got us a double bed,” I said, staring at it.

  “It’s a full.”

  “Looks double to me.”

  “Trust me, it’s a full.”

  “Are we talking terminology or size?”

  “Who cares?” She did her thing—sat on the bed and bounced a few times. All of her. Then she did her other thing—slowly took off her clothes and invited me into the shower.

  I took her up on it. It wasn’t sex, but it was damn nice anyway, and the view, as always, was something else. Spectacular, actually.

  “Mort?”

  “Yup.”

  “You asleep?”

  “Yup. I talk in my sleep a lot.”

  “And make sense, too. That’s amazing.”

  “Uh-huh. It’s a knack.”

  She snuggled against me. “How’re you doing? I mean,
without Jeri?”

  “Not great, but better than I was five months ago.”

  “Me, too. But it’s still . . . really lousy.”

  “It is that.”

  She was quiet for a while. Finally, she said, “There was that gifting thing, back then.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I guess it’s not necessary now . . . is it?”

  “Guess not.”

  “I was wondering if we could do that again. When we get back to Reno. Sort of on a regular basis, like Tuesdays?”

  I tightened an arm around her. “I have been inside myself for a long time, Holiday. It’s been a quiet place, not always good, so the answer is yes. Any time.”

  She kissed me. “Thank you.” She tucked herself in closer. “These past months . . . I’ve been so . . . so empty.”

  “Whenever you want.”

  She kissed my shoulder. “One other little thing?” “What’s that?”

  “It’s March already. We’ve got a bicycle ride coming up.”

  “Aw, jeez. You gotta be kidding.”

  “Nope. Just thought you oughta know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE OFFICIAL COUNT that year was one thousand seven hundred thirty-two riders. About half of them were women so you might say it was a unisex sport, not that it looked unisex to me.

  The World Naked Bike Ride was about to begin. Everyone had crowded into a wide area to one side of a sidewalk, facing the bay, northwest of the Ferry Building, between a Farmer’s Market and a Starbucks. The water was less than thirty feet away. Traffic slowed on the Embarcadero as it went by hundreds of naked people. Half an hour ago the word had been passed that there were enough of us in the group to strip down as far as we wanted, “as bare as you dare.” The police didn’t have any way to arrest that many. If no one strayed from the group, the police were okay with naked people protesting whatever.

  Holiday and I were crowded against a four-foot concrete wall that kept us from being bumped into the water. Nude and seminude people milled about, talking, laughing. Bicycles lying all over made it difficult to walk around. I could turn my head and see a hundred dicks, a hundred pairs of breasts. Not everyone was naked, but most were. Holiday and I were in a warm patch of sunshine. She had a pot of red body paint and a brush and was kneeling on the grass in front of me, about to paint the stuff I didn’t want the entire world to get a good look at, for all the good a little paint would do. She was gloriously naked, not a stitch on, still sporting a three-quarter Brazilian. But the ride was supposed to be a protest or some sort of celebration, so she had “4 Jeri” written on her back in red paint, as did I. It wasn’t a protest, but it was enough to stay within the spirit of the event and keep the police happy.