The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

  He wanted to do the right thing here. He wanted to let the two agents handle it. In the last few years, Eco-terrorism had come into its own as a bona fide criminal activity; it was no longer simply protest signs, letters-to-the-editor, publications along the line of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, or discussions on National Public Radio. Certain elements within the environmental community had jumped the line between permissible tactics and impermissible tactics. A self-righteous, radical consciousness had usurped a rational, controlled approach to the problem, and the result had been the kind of blatant activity that couldn’t be tolerated. Sabotaging logging equipment, spiking trees, burning down hunting lodges, blowing up SUVs, slashing truck tires, and all the rest—none of it could be allowed to go uninvestigated, and if Bill and his partner were onto something, he didn’t want to be an obstacle.

  He turned from the window and faced the two men again. “Here’s the deal…you keep me posted every step of the way. I want a comprehensive, detailed report on everything, from beginning to end. That includes all the contacts you’ve had with your informant. If we go to court on this, I want a solid front. I don’t want to be left out. Understand?”

  “You got it, Reggie,” Bill agreed.

  “What about you, Tom?”

  “Like I said, I’m with Bill.”

  “Okay…now get outta here, both of ya. While you guys are out there having all the fun, I got real work to do.”

  He picked up paperwork and began looking through it. The two agents got up to leave.

  “One more thing, Reggie…”

  “Make it quick, Bill.”

  “I’d like to get a wire on Rick…”

  “Put it in writing and get back to me.”

  “It’ll get done right away.”

  “Good.”

  28

  Heidi walked the three ladies into the foyer and held the door open. One of the ladies, a Mrs. Sterling Cotsman, proffered a white-gloved hand. Heidi squeezed it lightly.

  “I’ll let you know, just as soon as I get back from my trip.”

  “You won’t let us down, then?”

  “I promise.”

  The three ladies belonged to the same Presbyterian church Heidi and her husband sometimes attended. In the past, Heidi had donated some of her time to help with a yearly fund-raiser for the disadvantaged and needy, and they had come by this evening to solicit her help again. Over coffee and apple strudel served on chinaware given to her as a wedding present, Heidi had assured them that, as always, she remained committed to their concerns.

  “We’ve missed seeing you and Ed at church,” Mrs. Leonard Conroy said with an inquisitive little smile.

  “Ed works such long hours that, come Sunday morning, all he wants to do is sleep, then sit around in his pajamas and read the paper,” Heidi replied with an apologetic laugh. “I hate to deprive him.”

  “Leonard’s the same way. But, now that he’s retired, he doesn’t have that excuse anymore.”

  The women all tittered appreciatively.

  Mrs. Scot McCallister said: “Men can be so difficult about things like that. I’ve come to suspect that Scot uses his weekend fishing trips more as a reason not to come to church than because he likes to fish.”

  Again, the women all laughed knowingly.

  “I swear, it’s a disease peculiar to the male species.” Mrs. Scot McCallister opined.

  Another outburst of laughter punctuated the exchange.

  Mrs. Scot McCallister continued, “But you will at least try to come more often, won’t you, Heidi? With church membership dropping the way it has in the last few years, we need all the warm bodies we can get. I sometimes feel so sorry for poor Pastor Nicholson as he stands up there looking out over a diminished congregation.”

  “I promise I will try.”

  “Do, please.”

  “You have my word.”

  The women all said their good-byes, and Heidi closed the door.

  “What was that all about?” Ed asked, putting aside his newspaper as Heidi entered the family room.

  “The ladies from the church. They’re holding a charity and want me to donate.”

  “Do we have anything worth donating?”

  “They’re going to have an auction…it should be fun. And I’m sure I can scrape up something to give them.”

  “Maybe we can get rid of that ski equipment I’ve been hanging onto, in hopes that we might take it up again one of these days, before either of us is too old. I think of all the weekends we’ve missed.”

  “Listen, Ed, I think you should know that I’ll be gone for the next week or so. I’ve already made arrangements with Mother to have Jennifer during the day.”

  Ed, sitting in his armchair, gave her a hard, accusatory look.

  “Is this another one of your little ‘action-adventure’ escapades? Because if it is, I think you should know, I’m considering divorce. I’ve already talked to a lawyer.”

  Heidi blanched at the pronouncement. “Isn’t that a little extreme?” she managed. “After all, we agreed in the beginning—”

  Ed got up from his chair. “I didn’t agree to this, Heidi!” he yelled. “I didn’t agree to support criminal activity! Goddammit, I’m beginning to feel like I’m harboring a fugitive!”

  “Action taken to foster environmental consciousness is hardly criminal. What’s truly criminal is the ongoing mindless disregard of the environment by a fossil-fuel-driven mentality—”

  “Don’t bother to bombard me with the usual high-sounding crapola you roll out, Heidi. I really couldn’t care less, and it’s not the issue here, anyway.”

  Thrusting his hands into his pants pockets, he turned and walked over to a set of double doors that opened onto a flagstone patio. With his back to her, he stood staring out at the slide-and-swing set they had bought for Jennifer’s last birthday.

  “So you’re not even going to try to see my point of view, is that it, Ed?”

  He looked at her. “Your point of view is all about yourself, Heidi, and I’m just fed up trying to deal with it. I don’t think I really care anymore. I want a normal life, not this—this constant tug-of-war that we seem to be involved in anymore. This isn’t what I had in mind…”

  Looking on impassively, Heidi said, “You know, Ed, I’ve tried to enlighten you. I’ve tried to open up your mind—to educate you, if you will—so that you can grasp and appreciate the enormity and the seriousness of—”

  “Oh, goddammit, just fucking stuff it! Just spare me the fucking lecture!” he said and turned away again.

  Without changing her expression, she said, “We can talk about this later.”

  “The time for ‘later’ may be over,” he replied without looking at her.

  “I’m going to check on Jennifer.” Saying nothing more, she left the room.

  “Yes, by all means, check on your daughter,” he said to himself. “By all means, look after your daughter.”

  § § § § § §

  Steve Bolder, a homicide detective with the Portland police department, was old enough to recall the milieu of an earlier time, before gentrification had transformed Portland’s Northwest neighborhood. During the hippie era, especially, certain parts of the area were blighted by cheap rooming houses, Victorian mansions in need of paint and repair, two- and three-story brick apartment houses reminiscent of certain Edward Hopper paintings, and a hodgepodge of small shops. Back then, the neighborhood had more of an ethnic feel, and its vibrancy derived from a cross-cultural mix of working-class citizens living traditional lives, and an influx of hippies, university students, small-time musicians, would-be poets, wanna-be writers, and the proverbial struggling artist. Back then, the backstreets and avenues had more of a flavor comparable to San Francisco’s Haight-Ash-bury district during its “Summer of Love” than anything characteristically strictly conventional. But time had marched on.

  Nowadays, the neighborhood’s two commercial avenues abounded with renovated, upscale shops and restaurants. Much
of the housing had been taken over by individuals more concerned with appearance, property values, and prestige; and rents throughout the area were now beyond the means of anyone hankering after the good ol’ days, when a room or a small apartment in a Victorian mansion could be had for a pittance. The generally scruffy, funky atmosphere of unkempt lawns, dirty, sandal-shod feet, smoky, bluesy coffee shops, and beat-up, sticker-plastered VW vans had all but disappeared. Seeking meaner and leaner pastures in other parts of the city, the slumlords had either sold out or cleared out, and only a few old-timers remained. Having survived the onslaught of progress, they perhaps remembered when life had been freer, easier, and decidedly more colorful.

  Still, for all the manifestation of improvement and change, one occasionally turned a corner or went down a residential side street and came upon a derelict out of the past.

  After parking behind a brown Volvo station wagon with a loose tailpipe and a cracked windshield, Detective Bolder mounted a flight of wooden steps going up to the porch of a grayish Victorian house with faded yellow trim around the windows, a couple of which had bed sheets for curtains. Cranking the doorbell once or twice, he waited for someone to answer.

  A curtain to his left parted, and he saw the face of an elderly woman peering out at him from a darkened room. He took out his wallet and let the flap drop down, revealing his badge.

  The face regarded him a moment longer; then the curtain fell back in place. He heard an inside door open, followed by sharp footsteps coming down a linoleum hallway.

  When the outside door opened, he saw the same person he had seen in the window glaring up at him with a mixture of rancor and suspicion. A woman in her late sixties or early seventies, her gray hair was pulled back in a tight bun that gave her lined and oval face a stark, mask-like effect. The eyes, two slits in her face, were as black as olive pits coated with a sheen of bilge oil. The nun-black dress she wore covered her pear-shaped body from the knees up and ended in a buttoned-up collar at the neck; only her forearms and calves were left uncovered. Her black shoes had straps across the insteps and thick, square heels.

  “Whatta ya want?” she asked with no pretense of friendliness.

  “I’m here to see Dalton Crocker’s room. I was told he lived here.”

  “Who told ya that?”

  “That’s the address we have for him.”

  “What’re ya lookin’ for?”

  “It’s police business…part of an investigation.”

  “Does he know yer lookin’?”

  “He’s not gonna care. He’s dead.”

  “Dead? What’s that mean?”

  “Ah…as in, he was alive one day and dead the next. You know, static, not kinetic, or not living anymore.”

  The news had no discernible effect on the woman’s expression. She merely took it in and let it register in an inscrutable way, as though deciding whether or not, and to what extent, it might have a bearing on her personally. Calculating that it didn’t concern her, she said, “Ya gotta have a warrant, anyway, dontcha?”

  “I can get one if I need to. But all I want to do is locate anyone who might have known him. We don’t even have a next of kin. If you’ll help me out, we can bypass the formalities?”

  “I can let you see the room. But I don’t know nothin’ about him or any of his friends. He just rented from me.”

  “What about an application? Isn’t there a place on it for an emergency contact?”

  “I’d hafta dig it out. People move in and out so much, I don’t even bother with that anymore.”

  “Well, would you mind looking to see if you still have it? It would save me a lot of time and trouble, and I could be out of your hair that much sooner.”

  “Maybe. Maybe if I look, I can find it.”

  She started to turn when a man’s voice coming down the hallway interrupted them.

  “Who ya got there, Lucille?”

  “This man here is a police officer, Chuck, and he wants to look at Dalt’s room.”

  Protectively, Chuck came up to the door and stood by Lucille. Along with the air of a man who, belligerent by nature, tends to view other men through the prism of his own belligerence, seeing challenges to his masculinity where there are none, his naked, muscular arms were covered with elongated, sinuous tattoos of dragons and nude women.

  “Yeah, well, Dalt’s not here right now,” he said, “and if you ain’t got a warrant, we couldn’t let you into his room without his permission. We’d be derelict in our duty if we did that, and we could be sued.”

  He tried to put a smile on the refusal, but a smoldering quality in his slightly jaundiced eyes belied the effort.

  “Are you the landlord?”

  “I ain’t the landlord. But I help Lucille run the place. I do the upkeep.”

  Detective Bolder looked around. The porch was littered with a bed spring and mattress, a large carton of old shoes and clothing, two oversize hot-rod tires, a broken kitchen chair, a stack of newspapers, a box of paperback books, and several cases of empty beer bottles.

  “I can see that someone does the upkeep,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what, I can get a search warrant if I need it. I might also charge you with obstructing a police investigation into a possible homicide. So…”

  “Whatta ya mean ‘homicide’?”

  “Your boy’s dead. That’s why I’m here. Can ya dig it?”

  Chuck looked at Lucille. “That right, Lucille?”

  “That’s what he says. That’s what he told me. But jus’ let him see the room, Chuck. We don‘t need no trouble.”

  Chuck continued to stand there, stone-faced and defiant. Only after he felt he had registered some vague and amorphous point of masculine honor did he concede.

  “It’s upstairs, first door on your right.”

  “Will I need a key?”

  “Does he need a key, Lucille?”

  “I’ll gitcha one. Wait here.”

  The key, an old-fashioned latchkey, fitted imprecisely into the keyhole, and Detective Bolder had to jiggle it three or four times before the door finally unlocked.

  Inside, the contents of the room spelled the kind of disaster that resulted from habitual, compulsive sloppiness or perhaps delayed adolescent rebellion against parental control. Paperback books lay about in various stages of disorganization—with some scattered on the floor, others stacked higgledy-piggledy on each of three window ledges, and the rest tightly stuffed together on the shelves of a bookcase. A flimsy typewriter table supported the weight of an antiquated Underwood. And, on the floor, a mattress had a jumble of sheets and blankets on it; both pillows were piss-yellow with dried sweat.

  Further observation did not improve the impression of gross, perhaps pathological, disorganization. Along with a couple of bath towels and a washcloth, clothes had been pitched onto the seat of a leather recliner and hung over the back of a wooden kitchen chair. A greasy, cast-iron skillet sat on one burner of a double-burner hotplate, and a stand-alone kitchen cabinet, its shelves lined with oilcloth, contained a miscellanea of chipped plates, cups, and saucers. A small hand-sink had standing water in it, and a dead goldfish floated in a fishbowl on the floor.

  Taking it all in with an insouciance born of ten years in homicide, the detective turned on an overhead light and walked over to a heavy oaken table that did double service as a desk and dining table. Amid the clutter of a half-eaten plate of beans, a messy array of notebook paper covered with pinched handwriting, three or four pencils, an empty water glass, and an ashtray filled with stubbed-out filter cigarettes was an alphabetized address book. He picked it up and looked through it.

  Most of the entries had been hastily penciled in and consisted only of a first name and a telephone number. But two of the entries had been completely filled out, the first for Heidi and the other for Rick. Noting that Heidi’s address was the closer of the two, he decided to see her first.

  Dropping the address book into his pocket, he went over to the windows and looked through some o
f the book titles. At a glance, he saw that most of them fell into a literary category—Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Melville, Cervantes, a few Frenchmen, and an Englishman or two. They were standard fare for an English major or perhaps a fledgling writer and, without giving them a second thought, he started to turn away when he noticed a bound pamphlet propped against one of the windowsills. Curious, he picked it up.

  Printed on recycled paper, it had been stitched together crudely, as though by hand, and in size and thickness resembled a driver’s manual put out by the DMV. Inside, most of the pages had been substantially annotated on the margins and across the top, and in the same cramped handwriting as that of the notebook papers. As a finished product, it had the stamp of an amateur effort and caused him to wonder why anyone would make such an effort in the first place, in light of Kinko’s and others. But the title itself gave even more pause: Guerrilla Warfare in an Age of Perilous Threats to the Environment; Or How to Combat Corporate and Industrial Violators.

  As far as Detective Bolder was concerned, the implication could not be otherwise—the fellow had been involved with a domestic terror group, and what had happened at the construction site amounted to more than a simple act of vandalism gone awry. Contrary to an earlier assumption, evidently Dalt had been part of a group motivated by more than hormonal, juvenile thrills and kicks. He slipped the manual into his jacket pocket and left the room.

  Once downstairs, he knocked on Lucille’s door.

  “Did you find what you were lookin’ for?”

  “I’m going to keep this key,” he said authoritatively. “And I want you to keep everyone out of that room. Don’t do anything to disturb it. For the time being, it’s off-limits; not exactly a crime scene, but just about. I’ll put some tape up. And in case there’s anyone around here who can’t read, you tell them what it says. Do you understand?”

  Lucille nodded dumbly.

  “Good.”

  29

  Later that same day Leroy wheeled his Harley alongside the curb in front of Rick’s house and dropped the kickstand. Dismounting, he removed his gloves and folded them into the pockets of his leather jacket. With his helmet under his arm, he walked up the driveway and into the garage.