by Sara Gran
He was beat up bad. I was happy to see that. My bullet had gone through his upper right chest and out his back. My gun had cracked his handsome nose nearly in two. He’d live. So would I. So far neither of us had won. A draw. Or a stalemate.
I looked around the room until I found something useful—a clear plastic ballpoint pen. I took the pen and broke it in half. Ink spilled out in an interesting pattern on the floor, like a cloud in a blue sky. I took the jagged half of the pen and sat in the seat by Jay’s bed. I pinched the IV tube going into his arm between two fingers. Then I poked him with the jagged edge of the ballpoint pen. I scratched at his arm a little.
“Good morning,” I said.
Jay said nothing. Maybe he was unconscious or maybe he was sleeping or maybe he was pretending.
I took the jagged plastic pen and pushed it gently against his neck. Black ink smeared across his sunburned and stubbled skin.
“Why?” I said. “Was it worth dying for?”
I pricked his skin with the sharp edge of the broken pen. He started to bleed from his carotid artery. Just one drop. Then another.
“If you’re not going to tell me,” I said, “I guess we’re through,” and I started to push deeper and his eyes flew open.
But Jay surprised me by sending his hands flying up faster than I could understand and putting them on my chest and pushing me off him, hard. Blood flew out of his neck. I fell back in my chair but adrenaline forced me back up on my feet. Jay jumped up, made it to me in a few fluid strides, and in a second we were both on the floor.
I’d lost the pen. I had nothing. I got a hand free and scratched Jay’s face.
But Jay, even at close to twenty years older, was stronger. In a minute I was on the ground, and fighting to keep his hands from my neck.
“What did you do to her?” I said.
“Stop,” he said. “Give it up. You know I won’t miss again.”
I’d never heard his voice before; it was surprisingly rich, grainy, like an actor who smoked.
“You won’t have the chance,” I said.
But I wasn’t sure.
So far I was successful in keeping his hands away from my neck but he was still trying, and I felt my last bit of strength draining out of me.
“Where is she?”
He didn’t answer.
I saw now that I’d made a very, very bad mistake leaving my hospital room and coming to Jay’s.
“Why?” I said, panting, feeling myself slow down.
He got his left hand to my neck. Fuck. One hand alone wasn’t wide enough to choke me. But it was close. He squeezed tight. I tried to fight back. My hands felt like they were floating up and touching nothing. I realized my eyes were closed.
“Why?” I said again, or thought I said.
I felt myself starting to float up above the floor. I heard someone coughing. I tried to breathe, but my lungs were out of space, flattened out. It burned and then it hurt and then it stopped hurting and I started to feel light—
“What the hell is going on in here?”
“Is she OK?”
I felt big soft paws on my face and shoulders. I fell back to earth.
I pulled in air with a horrible sound. Red pain tore through my lungs.
I opened my eyes. I was lying on the floor with an assortment of cops, doctors, and undefined people in scrubs standing over me.
Jay was off me. The cop in uniform, the one I’d worked so hard to avoid in the hallway, had just saved my life. The cop had Jay in a kind of modified choke hold, an arm against Jay’s throat, pushed up against the wall.
I heard myself wheeze a few times as more pain shot through my lungs. I guessed I was breathing. I started to laugh.
One of the doctors smiled at me. He was young, and he’d looked scared a minute ago.
“I think she’s OK,” he said.
“I think I am,” I tried to say. It came out garbled. We both laughed again. Then he was joined by another man. The man was about my age and dressed like a detective. After a quick glance at me the detective went across the room to where the uniformed cop was holding Jay. Together they got Jay handcuffed. Back-up came, in the form of two young female officers in uniform. Together the three uniformed officers got Jay out of the room. I didn’t know where to.
The detective took me by the arm and led me back to my own room. He knew where it was. He knew more than I wanted him to.
We went back to my room and I crawled back into bed, exhausted. A nurse hooked me back up to my various tubes. I asked the nurse to cut out the opiate and she did. A first for me. But I needed one kind of thought more than another right now, and as the drugs faded off I was more and more sure that we were all real. For now.
“This isn’t exactly your first encounter with the law,” the detective said, once I was settled in and the nurse was gone. He sat in the armchair next to the bed.
The detective’s name was Thule. He had dark hair and looked like all the other homicide detectives—strangely attractive, sad eyes—except his suit was lighter gray and a lighter-weight fabric. It wasn’t linen and it wasn’t synthetic but I was pretty sure it wasn’t wool. Later I would find out that Thule literally wrote the book—he was just about to have his own textbook published on homicide investigations. It would come out in a few weeks and it wasn’t bad.
I did not ask what his suit was made out of. I did ask if he was in the Thule Society. Thule was not amused. He was about my age but looked a hundred years older. I guessed he did things like pay his taxes on time and go to the dentist even if he hadn’t lost a tooth. Those things take their toll on people.
He asked if I was hungry. I said no at first but then a minute later I realized I was and changed my answer. Thule sent another cop out to get us sandwiches and juice and coffee and dessert at the cafeteria. It was 4:00 a.m. She came back with ham and cheese sandwiches and little cups of rice pudding and orange juice. We ate it all.
I told Thule a version of the story that wasn’t very far from true. I hadn’t broken too many laws in Nevada and there was no reason to lie about most of it. Self-defense buys you a lot in most places. More in Nevada. The man had come after me with a gun in front of about two hundred people.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Thule said. “At the first scene, back in Oakland, why’d you run?”
“Because I was scared,” I said. I didn’t say that I wasn’t sure which I was scared of more: dying or losing.
Thule looked at me with an eyebrow raised.
“Yeah,” he said. “You look terrified. So why didn’t you talk to the Oakland PD?”
“What would you do?” I said to Thule. “You’d wait for a cop? Or you’d do it yourself?”
He made a face because he knew I was right. I’d broken the law by running but that was Oakland’s problem, not his, and we both knew that Oakland, with one of the highest murder rates in the country, had bigger problems to solve.
Thule asked if I knew why Jay Gleason wanted to kill me. I said I had no idea.
I was lying.
I had ideas. I couldn’t prove any of them yet, not even to myself, but I had them.
Of course I did.
I’m the best detective in the world.
CHAPTER 20
THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP
* * *
Las Vegas, 2011
After Thule left I fell asleep and woke up twenty hours later, in the morning of the next day. A doctor came in to examine me.
“Look who’s up,” she said brightly when she came in the room. She was blond and thin and looked like a dermatologist. She was a trauma surgeon and, I’d find out later, one of the best in the world, which was why, in a few months, my arm and shoulder would be fully functional again.
The bullet had skimmed the top of my left shoulder. And there were the injuries from the car crash and dehydration and minor infections and scratches on my corneas and et cetera. It wasn’t good. I could move my arm and use my hand enough to use a key or pick up
a cup of coffee, but my arm was in a sling. My left leg was badly bruised and beat up and needed some stitches but was just shy of an actual fracture. I was told to lay off it, but no cast. A swarm of butterfly bandages attached themselves to the rest of me at irregular intervals.
But for now, I was alive.
I’d won.
Jay Gleason was transferred to another hospital. No one would tell me where.
I felt the usually little self-satisfied thrill of solving a case. But this time I knew it wouldn’t even last as long as Carl’s broken arm.
I called Claude. He’d been worried, but held it together. I was impressed. I told him to get all my insurance straightened out with the hospital and then to drive out here and bring me home as soon as they said I could leave. While we were on the phone I gave Claude all the facts: everything I knew about the case so far; everything I knew about why Jay wanted me dead, or at least terrified; everything I knew about the bookmobile and the comics and the real author of the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest.
“So am I supposed to put that all together?” Claude asked. “Am I supposed to solve it?”
“No,” I said. “Because I haven’t solved it yet. Not completely. See what you can come up with.”
“Is this a test?” Claude asked.
“Yes,” I said. “If you pass, I buy dim sum on Sunday. If not, you’re paying.”
I didn’t pay Claude much, so making him pick up the bill was always hypothetical. He was keeping a running tab of his debts. We went to cheap places, and so after six years it was still at only eight hundred and forty-seven bucks, even though he rarely won.
Silette wrote: “Unsolved mysteries bring more joy than solved mysteries. Possibilities enthrall us. Seduction is entirely a process of presenting questions, never answers. Once the truth is known, all of the other possibilities are murdered, massacred. But most unpleasantly we are left alone, naked, face to face with both our own wild imaginations, and our own stupid blind spots.
“Life is always sweeter when the dice are still in the air.”
* * *
Four days later, most of it spent sleeping, they let me out. I texted Claude to drive out and meet me at Nero’s. While the hospital was doing all the things they needed to do to discharge me, Thule came to see me again.
“Jay Gleason is gone,” he said. “We had two men watching him. Now they’re both patients.”
Thule seemed embarrassed. I commiserated appropriately.
“So why did this guy try to kill you?” he asked again.
“No idea,” I lied again.
Thule looked at me. He wasn’t dumb. He knew I was lying. I could hardly blame him for not guessing the whole story. It had taken me over thirty years to piece it together.
“Right,” Thule said. “You better leave me all your information again. Just in case we find anything.”
“Sure,” I said. And I did.
* * *
My shirt had been soaked in blood, and they’d had to cut it off me to get to my shoulder, so they gave me a large mustard-colored sweatshirt that I figured a dead man had left behind to wear with my same filthy and blood-splattered jeans, which looked like they’d lived through an art project or a horror movie.
I signed some papers and was given instructions and bought some sunglasses in the gift shop and walked out of the hospital.
Outside I was surprised to see it was the middle of the day. Life goes on. Your crisis is someone else’s mediocre day. All around me millions of people were doing perfectly ordinary things, working and eating and flirting.
Across the street two women, both thin and African American, were leaning against a car in the parking lot of a convenience store. One was smoking.
I crossed the street to them.
“Sorry,” I said. “You have an extra cigarette?”
They looked at me oddly. I was limping and squinting, and although I’d given myself a kind of sponge-bath wipe-down with the chemical cleaning foam in the hospital, I hadn’t taken a shower, and my hair was slicked back with sweat and dirt and bodily fluids and, maybe, some of the viscera of the man who’d tried to kill me.
Without saying anything one of the women shook a cigarette out of her pack and held it out to me.
“Thank you,” I said, and took it without touching her. She handed me a book of matches.
“You can keep that,” she said, the unspoken coda being please go away now.
So I did.
* * *
Back at Nero’s Inferno I threw out my clothes again and took a shower and scrubbed myself with a washcloth and soap and washed my hair twice and put on my last clean new outfit. Then I ate a bowl of noodles with pork and seaweed at an expensive noodle place off the casino floor. When I was done with that I got a very large eleven-dollar cappuccino with almond milk and an extra shot of espresso. I’d been texting with Claude all day but I was still surprised when I got back to my room and there was Claude, waiting by the door.
I knew that someday Claude would hate me. That was inevitable. For now, he was my best friend.
We sat in my room and I smoked the joint Claude had brought me, unasked. It seemed like a miracle right now that any two people could know each other so well and still enjoy each other’s company.
I lay on the bed. Claude sat at the desk chair and spun back and forth. I knew he liked fancy office chairs. I decided to buy him one for his bonus that year.
“So,” I said to Claude. “Did you figure it out?”
He made an equivocal face and spun. Claude rarely smoked, but he put out his hand. I handed him the joint and he had a tiny hit and gave it back.
Then he looked at me.
“So,” Claude said. “Is she alive?”
* * *
In 1973, Belle Silette was stolen from her parents. As far as I knew, none of us had ever found a hint, not a clue, not a whisper. She was just gone.
I was wrong. Jay Gleason found something: a clue, or a hint, or a whisper; I didn’t know what it was, but he’d found something. Something to make him believe Belle was not only alive, but had been stolen, and placed with a family in a small, unattractive corner of Brooklyn.
Maybe he always knew it was Tracy. Maybe he just knew it was one of us.
But I believed it was Tracy. Who else? Who else was perfect enough, brave enough, smart enough? Not me. Not Kelly or anyone else.
Had Jay known all along? Had he been watching us? Had he studied us, like fruit flies in a jar? Maybe. I didn’t know. I did know this: Jay had somehow left the copy of Détection in my parents’ attic. He’d arranged for the bookmobile to show up on our corner. And he’d written the Cynthia Silverton books, and written them just for us. And he’d done it with the goal of finding Belle, and getting her to respond to that ad. Tracy had answered the ad. I’d seen the reply in her mail.
Either Jay found Tracy and killed her and tried to kill me so no one would find out.
Or, Jay had found Tracy, not killed her, taken her away and given her a decent life, and then tried to kill me so no one would find out.
So either she was alive, or she was dead. When you put it like that, I didn’t know much more than I did last week. But somehow, everything was different.
* * *
Before I could answer there was a knock on the door and then someone came in without waiting for an answer. It was a man in a suit. I figured he was hotel security.
“Hotel security,” the man said. “This is a no smoking room. And we have a no-drug policy. But that’s not why I’m here.”
Claude and I looked at him like we’d been caught smoking in the bathroom.
“Markson sent me,” the man said. “He’s left town for a few days. He said to tell you that your tenure here is no longer, um . . .”
“Allowed?” I suggested.
“Welcome?” Claude guessed.
“Tolerated,” the security man clarified, with a pleased look at his vocabulary skills. He’d earned it. “Your checkout time is midnig
ht tonight. He said to tell you that after that police will be involved.”
He looked at us, we nodded, and he left. It was time to go home.
CHAPTER 21
THE MYSTERY OF THE CBSIS
* * *
Los Angeles, 1999
I left the Richter office and drove back to San Francisco, my knuckles bloody and bruised. My old hotel room was free and I checked back in. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I figured I’d have to move. There was nowhere in particular I wanted to go, but I couldn’t work here anymore. I figured I’d get in my car and drive and see what happened. I’d done it plenty of times before. It wasn’t so bad.
I just didn’t think I’d be doing it again.
I didn’t have anyone in San Francisco to tell I was back except Nick Chang, who didn’t really care. Not yet. We would become close with time, but that time was in the future. The only person happy about my return was Flea, the cat.
Two nights later I was lying on the bed with Flea smoking a cigarette when there was a knock on the door. It was the guy who ran the hotel, Billy Zheng. Billy was a thief, as I’d found out when I caught him looking for something to steal in my room one night—there was nothing—and a good guy, as I found out when, after the cops knocked me around, he went out and got me a big bowl of congee and a box of Yunnan Paiyao capsules. He’d been taking care of Flea while I was gone.
“Hey,” I said.
“Letter,” Billy said. “Letter came for you. Messenger delivered last night.”
He put an envelope in my hand and stood there in the doorway as I opened it.
“Looked important,” Billy said.