I nodded. He looked at me for a while longer, almost said something, but didn’t. He backed the car into the street and I watched him drive away.
I went inside and locked up and went as quietly as I could upstairs and into the bedroom. I could see Brett’s shape in the bed. I took off my clothes and pulled on my pajama bottoms and got in bed as carefully as possible. When I was positioned, Brett said, “What you been doin’?”
“Killing what’s left of my soul, baby.”
Brett rolled over and put her arm across my chest. She smelled good. “You got the old woman’s money back, didn’t you?”
“We did.”
“I figured you were gonna do that.”
“Last thing I said when I went out was I wasn’t gonna do it. I told myself that when I met up with Leonard. Told myself that when we parked out front of the house where those guys were, and I told myself that up until the moment I swung the baseball bat and took out a kneecap.”
“I knew you were gonna do it.”
“But what is it about me that made you know that? What’s wrong with me?”
“You think things ought to be fair, and they aren’t, and you try and make them fair.”
“I broke a guy’s kneecap. Leonard, he broke the other guy’s hand and maybe a rib, and we scared a young woman who was there. I don’t know how fair that was. We were so mean our mean wore a hat and tie.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Brett rubbed my chest a little, said, “Was he a good guy? Guy’s knee you broke?”
“Not in the least.”
“Did you hurt the girl that was there?”
“No reason to… No. Of course not.”
“Okay. Guy’s hand that Leonard broke. Was he a good guy?”
I knew where this was going, but I went ahead with the ritual. “He’s the guy broke the old lady’s hand, took her money.”
“There you go. If he’s the bad guy, you got to be the good guy.”
“Who says?”
“Me. I just did.”
“Yeah, well, you’re sort of on my side.”
“Big-time. A guy takes an old woman’s money and breaks her hand and she goes to Marvin for help, what are you gonna do? She deserves her money back. It’s not the first time you’ve helped someone and had to get rough. Hell, I’ve had to get rough.”
“I know that. But this wasn’t self-defense, and it wasn’t personal.”
“Anytime you can help someone get back at a bully, it’s personal enough. Baby, you got to learn how to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
“You sound like Leonard.”
“He can be wise when he sounds like me,” Brett said. We lay there for a while. Brett stroked my chest. “I got to leave tomorrow.
Early.”
“Damn. I forgot.”
“Figured you did. You been kind of preoccupied with your morality and your mortality… But it’s okay. I won’t be gone long. A week maybe.”
“That’s too long,” I said.
“Poor baby. You’re in the dumps.”
“Big-time.”
“Because you got shot a while back?”
“Well, duh, that has something to do with it,” I said.
“Would some sympathy pussy help?”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t know I’ll feel any more right about what I did, and I won’t miss you any less when you’re gone, but it certainly would improve my spirits.”
“I thought it might,” Brett said, shifting to slip off her panties.
5
I slept a short while after we made love, and then I woke up and got out of bed gently and went to the bathroom. I came back and sat in the chair by the window. I looked out at the yard where a fence rose up and another house swelled on that side slightly covered by a large tree and its shadows. The darkness from the tree made the house look like a natural formation. There was moonlight in the next-door neighbor’s backyard, which was clear of trees, and there was a kid’s swing set back there; it looked like some kind of Martian insect lurking.
I turned and watched Brett while she slept. The window was framed in such a way that it had four panes and the panes were filled with moonlight and the light lay across the bed and the thin slats that held the panes in place divided her like dark straight cuts. Her face was at peace and her mouth was open and she was snoring slightly. I could see her white teeth and the way her long red hair, which looked dark as the shadows, curled around her chin and spread out on the pillow like an oil spill.
I loved the way she looked and the way she made love and the way she made me feel. But there was nothing she did or could do that would make me feel good about what I had done. Not tonight, anyway.
I thought about going downstairs and reading, maybe listening to music with the earphones, but I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to do it. I went back to the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the light and found a magazine on the back of the toilet, picked up the pair of Wal-Mart glasses I kept in there-I kept several pairs around the house-and put them on and sighed because I needed the damn things to read close-up print. I was too tired and too old to be beating people up. A man who was old enough for reading glasses should have a job in some place air-conditioned and his most violent activity should be sliding his zipper down.
I read from the magazine, but nothing I read stayed with me. I finally gave it up and took a couple of light sleeping pills and went back to bed, and when I woke up it was late morning and Brett was gone.
6
It hadn’t been that long since I had healed up from a bullet wound, and in the process of getting that wound, I had ended up splitting some good money with Leonard, so I wasn’t sure why I was working. It wasn’t my style to do something when there was money already to be had. I preferred desperation and overdue bills as a work incentive.
I showered and got ready for work and thought about Brett and her whore of a daughter. Brett had gone off to see her before and had come back blue and not so friendly for a couple of days, and then she would see it all for what it was, come around, and be okay for months. Then some idea would strike her, or the daughter would e-mail her, or some such thing, and the blues would open up again like a deep hole in the sea, and down Brett would go. I couldn’t do a thing for her when she was that way. She had to deal with the depths and what was down there in her own manner and in her own time, same as me. She got like that, she was nothing like she was the rest of the time, and it was really best she did leave me for a while. That way they wouldn’t find my decapitated head on my pillow.
But she was never like me. She was always able to find some truth in herself. Me, I wasn’t sure I knew which way was up, let alone which way was true.
As I finished getting ready, I thought too about how I had come by the money I now had in reserve. Vanilla Ride, the beautiful assassin who had been hired to kill me, gave it to me and Leonard as a gift. It had worked out strangely, with me and her and Leonard in a cabin in Arkansas. Nothing as kinky as that sounds. The three of us bonded together for a moment to have a shootout with Clete Jimson’s Dixie Mafia goons. The goons didn’t do well. I came out with a wound that a good veterinarian took care of. But, most important, we had parted from Vanilla with a truce intact and a pile of dough that had belonged to some unsavory characters who I liked to believe would just spend it on unsavory things. It was still hard for me to grasp the insanity of it, or to understand how someone like Vanilla could be so deadly, and yet, in her own way, honorable.
It was also hard to believe that the very man who had wanted us killed, Clete Jimson, we had also formed a truce with, primarily because we had made it not worth his while, and there was in the background the threat of Vanilla Ride, and Jimson hadn’t wanted any part of that. No one in their right mind would.
I was ready just before noon and sat at the table drinking decaffeinated coffee, waiting for Leonard to pick me up. Our friend Marvin Hanson had started a private detective agen
cy. His plan was to hire us as grunts from time to time, which was best, because as detectives we made very good grunts.
Today we were supposed to meet him at the office to talk about a real job, not getting some old lady’s money back. Then we were supposed to go to lunch and put a game plan together. What I wanted to do was go back to bed and read, or watch some TV, or just lie around on the couch. But if fish could fly they’d live in trees.
About eleven-twenty, Leonard showed up and drove us over to Marvin’s office. The car had a smattering of bird crap across the windshield, and Leonard tried to clean it by turning on the windshield wipers, which made a slick whitish smear across the glass. Leonard cursed at it and hit the wipers again and made it worse than before.
I made a note to self. Do not try and clean bird shit off a windshield by using the wipers. It doesn’t work. Cursing does not clean it either.
7
Marvin’s office was in a nice area off the main drag, down a house-lined street. We parked in front of a huge, broad oak and got out. A space of dirt had been left in a rare example of city planning. Someone, perhaps leaving it as a kind of sacrifice to the forest gods, had placed a used rubber and a potato chip bag by the tree trunk, and it smelled like someone had taken a piss, but otherwise it looked natural and lovely and gave off a bony kind of shade.
As we sniffed the urine on the fall air, brown oak leaves were dropping and tumbling across the lot with a crackling noise, like someone stepping on paper sacks, or like someone breaking a big guy’s knee with a baseball bat.
Across the way, a sweet gum tree had shed messy gum balls onto the concrete in a way that made me fear for its future with the city council.
Marvin’s office was in a two-story building next to a one-story comic shop with a big blue blow-up gorilla on the roof. Some days it was a giant red ant, and on other days it was a big silver alien. One day there was a great brown bear wearing Bermuda shorts with a fish in its air-filled teeth and a fishing rod in its paw.
The bottom part of the building Marvin was in was a bike shop. The building had been painted a bright yellow. A young blonde woman, who from the shape of her legs looked like she rode a lot of bikes herself, was out front, defying the cool, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops. She was unlocking the bike shop door when we came up. She turned and flicked her long blonde hair and smiled. She had a smile that would make a family-values Republican stab a hole in the Holy Bible with a buck knife.
The stairs were metal and a little slick from the rain that had come and gone. We went up. On the door was a sign, black letters on a green plaque. It read HANSON INVESTIGATIONS.
Inside Marvin was behind his new desk and a middle-aged woman was sitting in the client chair. She turned and looked at us as we entered. She was good-looking in a church lady, next-door-neighbor kind of way. She was dressed well, but not fancy, and her hair was a little too red and so were her cheeks. She looked as if she had been crying. She had a tissue balled up in her fist, a piece of it escaping between her fingers as if the stuffing was coming out of her. I assumed this was the client he had asked us to meet.
There was a young man with her. He was pouring coffee into a Styrofoam cup. He was tall with shaggy black hair and looked fit and had an air about him that made you think he might be tough and know it. At the same time, he looked like something for the girls. He stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon, came over, and sat in another of the client chairs. That was the end of the client chairs. That meant Leonard and I had to stand. I decided I didn’t want to do that, so I went around and shoved my butt onto the edge of Marvin’s desk and rested there. This put me so I was right in front of the guy. Leonard leaned against the wall, near the door, not too far from the lady. He put his hands in his pants pockets.
Marvin, who no longer needed his cane as of a month back, got up from behind his desk and limped over to the water cooler and put some water in a paper cup and brought it to the lady.
He looked at us, said, “This is Mrs. Christopher, and this is a family friend, Cason Statler. He works for the newspaper over in Camp Rapture. Folks, this is Hap Collins and this is Leonard Pine. If they say something embarrassing, understand they’re friends of mine and I have to put up with it.”
“Nice introduction,” I said.
Mrs. Christopher smiled a little, sipped at her water.
Marvin said to us, “They’re clients. They want us to check into something.”
From the way the woman acted, I figured she had some romantic problems, a husband straying, or perhaps her husband had died and something was unresolved and we were supposed to resolve it. Whatever, I figured it would be simple and pretty near honest work.
“So, you’ll look into it?” the lady asked.
“I will,” Marvin said. “I’ll put these two right on it.”
“They look tough,” she said.
“They are,” Marvin said.
“What I mean to ask is,” she said, “are they detectives?”
“They are operatives,” Marvin said.
I thought: Yeah, baby. Operatives. That’s us. We’re so operative, our operative wears a hat and tie.
I glanced down at the desk and saw a check there in front of Marvin. It had Juanita Christopher’s name signed on it. Better yet, it had a juicy figure written on it. I wondered how much of that was mine and Leonard’s.
“Satisfaction guaranteed, or we give you half your money back,” Marvin said. “By the way, how’d you find out about us?”
“I saw your add in Cason’s newspaper.”
“Just curious,” Marvin said, “so I have some understanding of how my advertising works. What drew you to the ad?”
“Your last name. My maiden name was Hanson, but since you’re black and I’m white, maybe there’s no connection.”
I thought to myself there might be a lot of connection. In this part of the country the richer branch of the Hanson family had been slave owners, so it wouldn’t have surprised me to discover there were some woodshed relatives.
“Oh,” Mrs. Christopher said, “I didn’t mean that to sound the way it came out.”
“It didn’t sound any kind of way,” Marvin said. “Don’t worry about it.”
She stood up from behind the desk and stuck her hand across at Marvin and he shook it.
She didn’t sit back down, and she didn’t shake our hands. “I think I’ve explained everything, Mr. Hanson. I’ll let you fill your men in.”
Hanson nodded, and she started for the door. Statler stood and spoke to her. “Do you mind if I meet you in the car, dear? I want a word with the gentlemen. You can handle the stairs fine, can’t you? And watch how slick it is.”
“I’m not an invalid,” she said. “I’m just sad.”
“Of course,” Cason said, turning on a smile that if it had been an inch wider and a smidgen brighter, might have knocked out the local electric grid.
After she went out, Cason waited a moment, picked up the check she had written from the desk, and returned to his seat and rested the check on one knee with his hand on top of it. We all watched the check like buzzards discovering what was thought to be dead might still have some life in it, and just might get away.
Cason said, “I know what she told you seems like an impossible job, because of the time factor. It’s a cold case. But I want to say, she’s serious. I brought her over here because she’s a friend of my mom’s and because I know a little about her subject. I’m a newspaper reporter. I’ve looked into this case, there’s something to it.”
“So,” Leonard said, “what you’re saying is don’t just cash her check and hang out here drinking coffee?”
“Something like that,” Cason said.
Marvin said, “I not only resent that, I resent it enough to come out from behind this desk and slap the shit out of you. Even if one of these boys has to hold me up to do it.”
“It might take more doing than you think,” Cason said.
“My goodness,” Leonard said
, “you must have had an extra bowl of oatmeal this morning.”
“You want to be first?” Cason said.
“Hey, Cason,” I said. “You look like a guy might be tough, but you mess with Leonard, when they’re cutting you open and putting your ruptured liver in a jar, your ghost will still be trying to figure out what truck hit you and when.”
Cason looked at Leonard for a long moment. Leonard said, “What he said.”
Cason smiled, studied Leonard. “You two are buddies. That is so sweet.”
“Yeah,” I said, “we’re tough, and when times are rough we can sew our own clothes and grow a garden.”
“Really?” Cason said.
“No,” I said. “But we’re tough.”
Cason smiled. “All right,” he said. “We’re all tough guys. It’s just that Mrs. Christopher is a friend of the family. Was my third-grade teacher. Her family has money, though she doesn’t look like it or act like it. Her dead husband was in oil, and he was in a lot of it. She came to me for help because I used to work for a paper in Houston doing investigative reporting. Now I’m over in Camp Rapture, writing a bullshit column. I decided she needed help that could be on it twenty-four seven, and that wasn’t me. Camp Rapture doesn’t have a private investigator, but she saw your ad. I was a little reluctant, but I didn’t know what else to do for her.”
“Good to know we’re deeply wanted and widely respected,” Leonard said.
“I put those ads in every paper in a fifty-mile radius,” Marvin said. “Your paper got me the only response.”
“Try the online ads,” Cason said. “More people read those these days. I’m lucky I got a job, way newspapers are changing. But, the thing is, I knew a lot of investigators when I worked for the paper in Houston, and I didn’t think much of them. They mostly took up time and took up money. So I wanted to make sure you really would look into things.”
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