Utterly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

  She was a bit amazed she hadn’t told Max about him. The police would be looking for Sancho, particularly after Blackstone’s three requests that she find him. The little man would prove important to all of this, she knew that somehow. But she didn’t know exactly how. And she didn’t relish meeting with the man without Blackstone around.

  Still, she couldn’t stay away either. She was too involved. If Sancho told her something pertinent, she would send him to Max. It was the least she could do.

  So after this meeting, the problems would no longer be hers. She would bill for these few hours—any attorney would, right?—and then she would get on with her life and not think about the case at all, except maybe a few phone calls to Max, and those would be an excuse to talk to him, not necessarily to find out about Blackstone. She would act as if nothing unusual happened. Not that she would succeed, of course. She knew, deep down, that this afternoon had changed her life.

  But in the spirit of pretense, she flicked on the radio to focus her mind on something else.

  Instantly a shrill female voice, filtered through a phone line, grated on her nerves. She was about to flip away when a professional radio voice broke in and clearly hung up on the caller.

  “Crackpots,” the announcer said. “We have a situation, and all we get are crank calls.”

  “Several dozen of them, though, Dave,” said a professional female voice. “Don’t you think we should pay attention to them?”

  “No,” Dave said. “To recap, there’s been an incident…”

  He started to describe the neighborhood she had just left, adding nothing to what she already knew. Fortunately he didn’t have Blackstone’s name and he didn’t seem to know about the dead woman. At that moment, the radio was reporting that no one had died. In fact, it said that no one had even been injured and that all of the residents had seen the trouble brewing and had been able to leave as the fires started.

  “…another caller from the neighborhood,” the female announcer was saying. “And this one we both happen to know. It’s Rick Ayers, our morning news announcer. Rick?”

  Traffic had slowed to a crawl. Nora had turned on Highway 99, but it seemed as if all of Tigard was at a standstill. In the westbound lanes, traffic had completely stopped as the police tried to prevent anyone from heading to Beaverton. She didn’t know what was causing the tie-ups in her eastbound lanes. She just wished it would end. She wanted to get out of here.

  “Stephanie.” Rick-the-Morning-News-Announcer’s voice crackled over the phone lines and through Nora’s radio. “Even though Dave thinks the other callers are cranks, they aren’t.”

  Nora felt a shiver run down her back. It was a warning shiver. She turned up the volume.

  “Come on, Rick,” Dave said. “Two people fighting with fire that gets out of control? A big wild fireball battle like something out of Tolkien? We’re supposed to believe that?”

  Now they really had her attention. Nora glanced at the radio as if she could gauge its truthfulness just by looking at it.

  “’Fraid so,” Rick said. “I was across the street. I got the kids out and down the block as fast as possible. There were two people involved—a man and a woman. The man had been coming out of the woman’s garage. He had a glass case shaped like a coffin in front of him, and there was something inside it. That’s what caught my attention. He wasn’t carrying the case. It was floating in front of him.”

  Glass case. Nora gripped the wheel tightly. Blackstone wanted her to talk to Sancho about the case. Not his court case. A glass case.

  “And what were you drinking this afternoon?” Dave asked. It didn’t sound like banter.

  “I wasn’t drinking anything,” Rick said.

  Behind Nora, a horn honked. She glanced in her rearview mirror and saw a red pickup and its driver waving his fist. Then she looked forward and realized the traffic had started to move again. She drove, the muscles in her shoulders so tight that it actually hurt to move the wheel.

  “The guy put this case in an orange and brown Volkswagen bus,” Rick was saying. Nora resisted the urge to close her eyes. “And then this woman comes out of her house and lobs a ball of fire at him.”

  “A ball of fire, Rick?” Dave asked.

  “The size of a basketball,” Rick said, unperturbed. “The guy deflects it, and it lands on a neighbor’s house. That’s when I got the kids and sent them down the block, knocking on doors.”

  “You sent your kids into that mess?” the woman, Stephanie, asked.

  “It was smarter than staying inside,” Rick said. “Believe me. The entire neighborhood fanned out. I think we got the place evacuated by the time the firefight started in earnest.”

  “According to the police, you did,” Stephanie said.

  “What does ‘started in earnest’ mean?” Dave asked. The man was a bulldog. Nothing could sidetrack him. Maybe he saw the morning news anchor slot opening up. He had to be thinking: If I can discredit old Rick here, I’ll be getting drive time.

  Nora was finally at full speed, heading toward downtown. She drove like a madwoman, not sure if she wanted to see Sancho now or not.

  “They were throwing fire at each other like kids throw water balloons,” Rick said, “and the fire was landing everywhere but on them. It was ugly and scary and—”

  “I hope you were hiding somewhere,” Stephanie said.

  “There was nowhere to hide,” Rick said. “Most of us had moved to the far side of the block, but the way that fire was flying, we were no safer than we had been up close.”

  Nora took her usual exit. It was dark, even here. The smoke had settled over the valley.

  “So, what?” Dave said. “Someone was passing hallucinogens through your neighborhood this afternoon, and everyone had the same bad trip?”

  “No—”

  “It sounds more like David Copperfield came to visit,” Stephanie said and laughed.

  “Really,” Rick said. “It happened. I’m not lying to you. My neighbor Alex, he took out one of those camcorders and…”

  Nora pulled into the underground parking garage near her building and lost the radio signal, just like usual. Another thing she didn’t like about the garage.

  The fluorescents glowed as brightly as they did at night. It felt like night here, with the overcast caused by the smoke. She drove past the usual decrepit cars to her parking space. There she shut off the car and leaned her head against the steering wheel.

  The thing was, she believed this Rick, this voice on the radio who claimed he had seen two people hurling fireballs at each other. She believed him, and she knew, without a doubt, that one of those people had been Blackstone, and that somehow, Blackstone had killed his opponent after he had stolen a glass case from her, a glass case that he wanted Nora, somehow, to help Sancho with.

  What she didn’t know was whether believing all of that made her as crazy as she was afraid it did.

  She sighed and sat back up. Her eyes were swollen, her throat scratchy, and the entire car smelled of smoke. Those were the facts. That was all she could know. From there on, she would have to see what happened. No supposing, no guessing, no relying on disembodied radio voices for her information.

  Her father used to call her ability to set aside her beliefs as great a magic trick as the ones he used to perform. She still missed him, more than she wanted to admit. The Great Maestro, Portland’s best birthday entertainer, who had always wanted to be something more, who had always wanted, in his heart of hearts, for the magic to be real. That was why her mother left him; not for the lack of money or the hand-to-mouth existence, but her father’s stubborn belief that, beneath the tricks and the sleight of hand, real magic did exist.

  He also believed that he had the ability to do real magic, if only someone would teach him how.

  She still couldn’t believe how much she missed him. He’d only been dead a year, and sometimes she still felt him beside her, laughing and pointing out the beauty in the world. He was the one who taught her to
look at sunsets. He used to drive toward the end of rainbows, searching for gold. All his life, he never lost that belief, that childlike belief, that there was more to the world than most people could see.

  Oh, how she needed him now. He would have listened to her stories about this afternoon. He would have had suggestions.

  But she was on her own, with only his memory for company. Somehow that had to be enough.

  Nora opened the car door and heard a clang. She frowned, wondering if she had hit the car next to her. She looked over and saw that it wasn’t a car. It was a brown and orange VW microbus.

  Sancho, or whatever his name was, crawled from under her door. “Man, am I going to have a headache,” he said, one hand cradling the side of his face.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, wishing he hadn’t come, wishing he had taken that damn vehicle somewhere else.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said, then murmured something in a language she didn’t understand, rubbed his temple, and added, “Better.”

  The bruise that had been forming on the side of his face had completely disappeared.

  “I’m supposed to know,” she said, gathering her purse and her briefcase and pretending she hadn’t seen anything unusual. “Blackstone said I’m supposed to help you.”

  “Let’s go to your office,” Sancho said.

  She wriggled out of her car, nearly beaned Sancho again with her briefcase, and then used a hand to wave him forward. He wasn’t covered with anything. His T-shirt, the cigarettes missing, was as white as Blackstone’s had been, and his tiny jeans looked new. Only his shoes seemed out of place. When she really looked at them, she realized he was wearing cracked leather shoes that buttoned instead of tied.

  He walked through the garage, his arms swinging fiercely like he was punching imaginary (short) opponents. She kicked her door closed with one foot and followed him, feeling dirty and short of breath.

  When they got into the elevator, she concentrated on the door instead of looking at her reflection in the mirror. Even then, she saw, through the corner of her eye, that her blond hair had gone streaky brown, her normally clear skin looked like it had been finger-painted by five-year-olds, and her clothing was coated with gray ash. She tried to brush some of it off, raising a dust cloud. Sancho began coughing and only just managed to croak out an offended “Hey!” before she stopped.

  The ash was still billowing when the elevator door opened and, for the first time since she had taken the office, there were people in the corridor. They stared at her as she led Sancho down the hall, most of them shrinking back as if getting close to her would contaminate them as well—which, if she were being fair, it probably would.

  She opened her office door, and Ruthie shrieked.

  “Ms. Barr! Ms. Barr! Are you all right? When you said you knew about that mess on the west side, I didn’t know you meant you really were there. I mean, actually. You know, I—”

  “You mean literally,” Sancho said. “That’s what you mean.”

  Ruthie looked at him as if she was seeing him for the first time. “All right,” she said, her voice as cool as his. “I mean literally, whatever that means.”

  “It means—”

  “Ruthie,” Nora said, not wanting to hear any more of this discussion. “Can you get me a Coke? Would you like anything, Mr.—?”

  “Pan-za,” he said slowly, as if he were speaking to a particularly dumb child. He waited. She didn’t repeat the name. “And no, I’m not thirsty.”

  Nora rolled her very dry eyes and walked into her office. It looked as it did when she had left it, cluttered but clean. She turned. She was tracking gray dust behind her. Sancho was avoiding it as he followed her.

  She went to her desk and sat down, knowing she would have to clean the chair afterward. She didn’t touch the desk’s surface or anything else. Sancho climbed into the chair he had used before.

  “I won’t do anything for you,” she said, “until I know your real name.”

  He stared at her for a moment, his eyes an icy blue. Then he rolled to one side and pulled a swath of paper from his back jeans pocket. Until that moment, she had thought the pocket empty.

  He placed a birth certificate, a Social Security card, a passport, and a driver’s license on her blotter. She leaned forward, careful not to brush the desk, and stared at the papers. They all showed his name to be Sancho Panza, and the driver’s license and passport photos confirmed that the name belonged to him.

  She put her index finger against the edge of the blotter and shoved it toward him. “I don’t deal in fake IDs,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” he said, shoving the blotter back toward her.

  She looked at the papers again. She couldn’t tell if the birth certificate and Social Security card were real, but the driver’s license had been done on the special paper that the DMV used to discourage forgers. She picked up the passport, getting gray fingerprints all over the blue leather. It was four years old, with several stamps inside, as well as the raised stamp specially done by the State Department. If his identification was good enough for several governments, including this one, it was good enough for her.

  “I still don’t believe it,” she said, because she didn’t.

  “You don’t have to.” He settled in his chair. “Just help us.”

  “I already got a defense attorney for Blackstone.”

  “Fine,” Sancho said as if he didn’t care. “The most important thing is the glass case.”

  “Yes.” Nora was amazed at how calm she sounded. So Rick the Morning News Anchor had been right. There had been a glass case. “I understand it levitated out of someone’s garage.”

  “How he got it isn’t your concern,” Panza said. “Helping him with it is.”

  “I don’t deal in stolen property,” Nora said.

  “It’s not stolen,” Panza said and stopped as someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” Nora said.

  Ruthie entered, carrying two cans of Coke. She too avoided Nora’s gray footprints. “Want a glass?” she asked.

  Nora shook her head.

  “I suppose you want me to call the cleaning service.”

  Nora smiled. At last, Ruthie was thinking on her own. “Please.”

  “Good,” Ruthie said, “because I sure as hell don’t want to clean up this mess.” And with that, she let herself out.

  “Nice secretary you got,” Panza said.

  “You get what you pay for.” Nora grabbed a can and pulled the ringtop. “Sure you don’t want one?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Ever since they removed the cocaine, it hasn’t been the same.”

  She gave him a flat-level look. “I don’t appreciate drug jokes in my office.”

  “You don’t appreciate much, do you?” Panza said. “I thought you had more sense than that. Maybe I misjudged you.”

  “Maybe,” Nora said. She crossed her arms. “Your choice.”

  He stared at her a moment. “You’re not that ruffled by the events of this afternoon.”

  “I’m a good actress.”

  “Not that good.” He nodded. “We can proceed.”

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to. “I don’t mind if you find another attorney.”

  He grinned. The expression made him seem like a ferocious twelve-year-old. “Naw. You’re perfect.”

  “Have you checked my credentials?”

  “Enough,” he said.

  She took a long, long drink from the can of Coke. The sweetness helped bring up her blood sugar, and the liquid felt cool against her dry throat. She would eventually need water—she was probably dehydrated—but this would do for now.

  The movement gave her a chance to plan and take control of this interview.

  “Why did Blackstone destroy that neighborhood?” she asked.

  “He didn’t.”

  “Someone did.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Panza said.

  “I have to worry about it.” She ran a ha
nd over her face, felt the soot flake off. “People make jokes about lawyers having no ethics, but that’s not true. I can’t help him and stay true to myself if I know he destroyed a neighborhood.”

  “It was a diversion.”

  “Really?”

  Panza nodded.

  “Blackstone would destroy people’s homes and kill a woman just to divert attention from—what?”

  “He didn’t kill her,” Panza said.

  “She looked dead to me.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Well, she wasn’t. He just knocked her out.”

  “The EMTs thought she was dead.”

  Panza shrugged. “It’s amazing how susceptible some people are to the power of suggestion.”

  “I’m not,” Nora said. “And I am not sure I want to represent someone who performs wholesale destruction as a means to an end.”

  Panza clenched a fist, hit the arm of the chair softly, and then shook his head. “What if I told you everything would be fixed?”

  She laughed and felt its bitterness. “That can’t be fixed. Not in the way I would want.”

  “And that is?”

  “To make it seem as if today never happened. But people don’t forget. Even if everything were made better, people would remember and—”

  “Say no more.” Panza stood in the chair. She was constantly amazed at how small he was. “We can do that.”

  “Sure,” she said. “And pigs fly.”

  “Not without help,” he said, and he seemed perfectly serious. “Now. Assist us.”

  He wouldn’t go away. And no matter how ethical she got, the images wouldn’t go away. She might as well see what Panza wanted. “Tell me what you need.”

  “I need you to store the microbus,” he said.

  “You can do that.”

  He shook his head. “We can’t know where it is. Only you can know. You’ll store it for us, and then when we come and get it, everything will be safe.”

  “It doesn’t sound legal.”

  “It is. All you have to do is find a garage, rent it, and keep the microbus there. We might not come for it for years.”

  “Years?” Nora asked.