by Josh Cook
“I’ll summon my knight in shining armor, even though he’s only up twelve to nine in sparring matches, to save me and my damselhood from marauders, evildoers, Republicans, highwaymen—”
“All right, I get it. And I’ll call you if anything weird happens to me. Not one fucking inch.”
“Thank you.”
“Just one more thing, Lola, before I go.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“What?”
“Your fucking Columbo thing,” Lola cursed.
“It’s not a thing. It’s just, you know, it’s just, as a detective, it is a satisfying way to end a conversation.”
“Have you actually seen Columbo? Because I have, because you do this thing, and he convinces the criminals that he is stupid so they’ll let down their guards and reveal something about the crime.”
“I’m familiar with the source material. I just like to keep things straight—”
“Zip! Yeah, see, there you go, but you, you don’t let anyone forget for a nanosecond that you’re a genius, so with you, it’s not even a reference.”
“It’s just about all those loose ends—” Trike persisted.
“You’re just going to fucking do it anyway.”
“Awfully hard to stop once it’s started.”
“Am I going to like your one more thing?”
“……………. No.”
Lola groaned. “Just tell me.”
Trike took a deep breath to break out of the format. “The coffee table is against the Western baseboard.”
“The coffee table …?” Lola started. Then a frustrated furious growl leaked from her throat as she realized she needed to unbolt and completely rearrange the pedal generator she just spent the entire fucking night arranging and bolting to make sure the coffee table didn’t catch fire when the heat turned on.
“Good night, Trike,” she grumbled and hung up before Trike could say anything else.
Trike sat in his car and had a slightly groggier version of the conversation he had with Lola with Max. Only without the whole damselhood business. He took the opportunity to warn Max about the e-mail he was going to receive soon with a list of lawyers to question and the context in which to question them. Max grumbled something about the end of his rest. Trike reminded him he was the best.
The office was undisturbed. Trike drank a tallboy, sent the e-mail, and then went home.
No tripwires. No bombs. No gases. No traps. Accounting for natural entropy, home was identical to how he left it.
He grabbed a tallboy from the fridge. Drank it over the sink.
“Something is very wrong,” he said.
He finished his beer, crumpled the can, dropped it into the sink. Slapped on a patch and went to bed.
THE OLD-TIMER AIN’T HOME
Trike brought the bag of groceries to the car. Chips. Pasta. Spaghetti sauce. Canned peaches. Microwave dinners. Instant noodles. Instant coffee. Candy bars. Orange juice. The Economist. The New Yorker. Guns and Ammo.
Lola pulled in on the driver’s-side back door so Trike could open the passenger’s-side back door. He put the bag in the backseat to avoid the tragic opera of opening and closing the trunk, setting it next to a bag from the liquor store containing whiskey, vodka, beef jerky, and a two-liter bottle of cola.
When the second bag was settled, Lola let go of the door and shifted to push up on the ceiling with her back so Trike could shut his door. Got it in one try.
They got into their appropriate front seats. After buckling his seat belt, Trike took a pipe out of his pocket and put it in his mouth.
“So,” Lola started.
“Yes.”
“Then—”
“I read the warning label on a bag of cheap pipe tobacco three years, two months, two weeks, and two days ago, in a moment when I considered converting from cigarette smoking to pipe smoking in order to reduce my chances of dying a slow painful death of lung cancer, and learned that pipe tobacco is not a safe alternative to cigarette tobacco. However, I am not, currently, attempting to alter my smoking habits so as to subject a different portion of my person to increased cancer risks, but to end the habit entirely. In service to said goal, I purchased this very cheap pipe from the liquor store to use as a prop for the gestures in my life that have, up to this point, been satisfied with a cigarette, an action that should bring a sigh of relief from the innocent of the world as each day my idle hands have inched closer and closer to tearing out some stranger’s larynx for deliberating an extra moment at the coffee shop.”
“So—”
“I did not even buy tobacco with this purchase, which, I guess, would raise the question as to whether or not this is now, or ever was, a pipe.”
“Right, but—”
“And it is true, like stone tablets found on Mount Sinai, the brandished but unsmoldering pipe is ridiculous and, when combined with my trench coat and profession, lilts gently into the realm of life as parody of parody of life, but, you, of all people, will understand why I have chosen this problem over the other; the problem of potentially looking like an explosive douche canoe, over the risk of rotting from the lungs out.”
Lola sat quietly for a minute to make sure Trike was done.
“So, I was actually going to ask why you always go see this guy.”
“It’s not obvious?”
“Every time you see him, you end up drinking yourself to sleep, even when you get home at like two in the afternoon, and I don’t see what the return is.”
Trike started the car and pulled out of the lot. He was quiet as he drove.
At the first stoplight he said, “I’m afraid I’m going to say a bunch of stuff and then end up telling you, ‘You just wouldn’t understand.’ ”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. The effort would be meaningful to me.”
The light turned green.
“The Old-Timer gives me a perspective cultivated over years of getting punched in the face, tailing slippery characters, putting up with cranky cops, and sniffing truth out of the smoke screen of evidence that can be vital, if a bit indirect, to solving a case.”
“Can’t you get that perspective from Max?”
“I get one perspective from Max, but remember, Max has actually been a private eye less than I have. The bulk of his experience was with the Bureau. The official world. Badges, warrants, expense accounts, and the like. The Old-Timer was a PI from start to finish.”
Lola gave Trike a doubtful look. “Does it have anything to do with your father?” she offered.
“Yes. Definitely. The Old-Timer lived pretty much the same life Octavian led, only a little more on the edge. So, you’re right, I do get a surrogate connection with my dad on these visits.”
“For someone so good at telling when other people are lying, you’re a terrible liar.”
“I don’t practice much. Can generally find an effective truth. You believe any of it?”
“Knew you were lying from the first word.”
“Right. Okay. This is probably a bit shallow, in a dance-monkey way, but he is one of the great characters in my life. I mean, you and Max are the most important non-Mom people in my life, but this guy is a character. To him swearing isn’t poetry, it’s a fucking ecosystem. Seriously, his cursing has a food chain. But he also has this persistent intensity you only really see in old cops and crooks. Talking with him is like watching a tire fire. And the perspective point wasn’t a complete lie. He does give me different perspectives from which to view evidence.”
“Okay, then,” Lola said. “Particular worldview, surrogate connection, real character.”
“Well, that was disingenuous.”
“I just didn’t want you to have to say I wouldn’t understand.”
“Well.”
“Listen, I get those points, but they don’t explain your reaction. They tell me something, but nothing about the drinking.”
“I drink a lot in general.”
“It’s different.”
&n
bsp; Trike parked in front of The Old-Timer’s building.
“It is,” Trike said. “You want to come in or wait in the car?”
“Oh, choices, choices. I think I’ll risk the interior. Since I have to help you open the door anyway.”
They gathered the bags and entered the run-down rat-riven building.
“Listen, Trike, I’ve watched you drink plenty of times, but after you’ve seen this guy, it’s different. There’s almost, well, fear. Drinking to hide from something, rather than drinking for a different state of consciousness.”
“And you want to know why?”
“I do.”
“I assume, because you’re a friend and you care about me.”
“You assume correctly.”
They got to The Old-Timer’s apartment and knocked on the door. No answer. Trike waited seventy-two seconds and knocked again. Nothing. Lola gave him a nervous look. Trike knocked one more time. Nothing. He tried the door. It was locked. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“He’s just out.” Trike said. “He doesn’t lock the door when he’s home, unless he’s in a bad mood, and then he shouts at me to pick the lock. And he promised that if he ever offed himself, he’d leave the door unlocked and do it in the bathtub.”
“So what are we going to do with all of this stuff?” Lola asked.
“You are going to hold this,” Trike handed her his bag, “while I pick the lock.”
Trike picked the lock.
“Then, we’ll drop this stuff off,” he continued, “put the perishables in the fridge, and go.”
They dropped the stuff off, put the perishables in the fridge, and went.
As they walked downstairs, Lola said, “You know, I’m not letting you off the hook on this one.”
“I know.”
“But if you don’t want to keep talking about it now, we can talk about it later.”
“Would you believe me if I said I don’t know why I visit The Old-Timer?”
“Not when you say it like that.”
They didn’t bother with the decaying handrails on the stairs, even as they picked their way around rotten boards. You didn’t notice the roaches in buildings like that. They got back to the car and went through the slapstick ballet needed to open and close both front doors.
When he was settled, Trike took a deep breath. He said, “I want to believe that someone would bring me groceries if I ever end up like that.”
“Trike, you’re not going to end up like that,” Lola assured him.
“All three of his ex-wives told him the same thing.”
COMMUNICATION AT ITS FINEST
The quiet tapping of Max typing the second part of the first half of lawyer interviews. Cars in the street. The mini-fridge humming. The bass notes from the accountant two floors down who blasted death metal once everyone else left the office. Water running in one of the bathrooms.
Trike leaned back in his chair. Tried to decide what to focus his mind on. Replay the contents of the AVRAA office in case he missed something. Analyze the first part of Max’s lawyer report. Trawl for data about Lydia Kennedy he might have absorbed. View the Joyce House sitting rooms assuming they were created with a psychopath’s compulsion to leave clues. Figure out why the cops weren’t talking to them. He muttered, “We must think through several levels of implications. We must explore for what is not written. We must subject every assertion to an interrogation. We must move fact by fact, byte by byte, through the story as if an archaeological grid had been placed over it, and every square must be the focus of obsessive inspection. What arises through this critical inspection is a range of implausibilities and absurdities that we are—in the course of a typical reading—manipulated into accepting as truth.”
He decided to correlate the lawyer stuff he had with whatever he could remember about Lydia Kennedy. Maybe she wasn’t out of the family business. He split his brain. One part held the lawyer stuff. Part two searched for Lydia Kennedy.
An image of Trike descended a spiral staircase, past the floors that held frequently relevant information. Past the floors of data consciously remembered. Past the stuff everyone needed to keep in their heads. All the way down to the floor where the stuff that just stuck was collected.
On that floor, the image of Trike walked four years into the past. On this floor, dates were correlated with intentionally remembered events, events that acted as moorings for whatever else Trike observed. He went to “Lola and I try that new pizza place.” Starting from that event, he reconstructed the rest of his day, sifting the effort to prioritize news media. Every day took him about thirty-one seconds to reconstruct. “Lola and I fight about Sherlock Holmes.” “Flat tire outside the office.” “First sparring match: Win.” “Took Lola to the museum.”
A brick smashed through the office window.
Trike spun out of his chair, dragged it into the middle of the room, and hurled it out the window. The chair landed on the roof of a car, shattering into clattering kindling and splinters. A string of scared curses was hurled back. Car doors slammed. Tires squealed. The brick throwers sped away.
Max poked his head into Trike’s office. “Why is it always the chair?”
“Imagine, if you will, Max,” Trike said, “what goes through their heads. Dusting off their hands, another brick well thrown, when suddenly they hear the sound of more glass breaking above them. The sound connects with their preconceived notions of projectiles and windows, and their minds see the brick coming back before their eyes can see the brick coming back. But it is not a brick. For an instant, gravity has been turned inside out. Everything they know about their world, everything they believe forms the base of their world dissolves. The turtle we rest on stirs. It breaks their brains, and then,” Trike waved his hand as though he were coaxing the aroma of freshly baked apple pie to his nose, “the particular tenor of their curses.” He sighed like the office was filled with fresh mountain air.
“That’s worth the cost of a chair?” Max asked.
“Replacing the window is the expensive part. After that, ten bucks for a pawnshop chair is negligible.”
Trike picked up the brick and extracted the affixed note.
“What’s Joyce say?” Max asked.
“Huh,” Trike said, after reading the note.
“I hate it when you say that.”
“It’s not from Joyce.”
“It’s not from Joyce?”
Trike popped a piece of nicotine gum. “Nope.”
“What’s it say?”
“Horatio Bottomley never forgets.”
“Bottomley? Glad to see … he can afford bricks.”
“See, this is what threats are supposed to be like. It’s direct, simple, causes me consternation, imparts a clear message. The maximum effect for a minimum effort. A whole pig, still bleeding, with a hand-stitched note, is a lot of effort to convey a message.
“And unheeded threats are supposed to escalate. If you start with a pig, you follow up with a dog. Not a shoot-yourself-in-the-face-beautiful grad student. Of course, escalation can be replaced with persistence and achieve the same effect. A pig a day would be a real downer. And threats should be realistic.”
“Like Bottomley’s bricks.”
“Exactly. Bottomley is rotting in prison and will be for at least five more years. Any threats of tangible action would be meaningless because that action is impossible. He’s just staying in my consciousness until he can threaten action.”
“Simple. Elegant. Expressive.”
“This is communication at its finest,” Trike said, waving the brick. “Joyce has created a system of information exchange that is the opposite of communication.”
“All data … no meaning.”
“Exactly. I mean, he’s not even sending deviously coded taunts as a way to flaunt his superior yet villainous intellect. Even if he knows the capacity of my intellect, or perhaps, because he knows the capacity of my intellect, he should feel an inexorable drive to create hidden clues.”
“He should.”
“Makes me pine for a brick from Joyce. One wonders how one could induce such a throwing of masonry.”
Trike tossed the brick to the floor by his desk. Went to the threats drawer in the filing cabinet and added the latest entry. “Care to join me on a trip to the pawnshop?” he said after the filing.
“In your affront to automotive engineering? I’ve got to finish the lawyers.”
“Did you really need to insult my car?”
“It’s that bad … I feel a duty to bring it up.”
“Well, don’t pull an all-nighter. You’ve got another round of interviews tomorrow, and, if the lawyers follow the same pattern as everything else, it’ll be all canned heat and cackle bladders.”
“Right.”
“And once you’re done with this particular avenue, I think it might be time for a home visit.”
“A home visit?”
“Not sure what it will lead to,” Trike said, putting on his trench coat, “but it might be worth our while to stir the ashes in Lydia Kennedy’s fireplace.”
Max gave a terse nod. “Good luck finding a chair, boss.”
FIELD AND GRAY
The waiting room at Field and Gray was carpeted in burnt-umber shag. It had four lime-green plastic chairs and a matching small rectangular coffee table stacked with old magazines. Stained-wood walls. Framed images someone must have called art. The receptionist’s desk was gray and metal. The kind assigned to football coaches at junior colleges. It created a narrow hallway between the room and the lawyers’ offices. The room was so small Max could have slapped a person sitting across from him. If someone sat there. If they deserved it. A water cooler and a fake ficus added a final claustrophobic dose of client repellent.
Max sat with his hands folded in his lap. He wore his formal detecting outfit: gray slacks, white shirt, navy tie, gray tweed sport coat, and matching fedora. He’d been talking to lawyers for two days, in person and over the phone. Since he didn’t have a subpoena or a bribe, the only thing he’d gotten for his troubles was a ruined shoeshine. He was looking forward to visiting Lydia Kennedy.