The Triggerman Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  "Hair for DNA?"

  "You can't get DNA from hair," snapped Weinstein, "only from the tissue that sticks to it. We've got hair. No skin. We've got sixteen different hair samples. A follicle won't convict like a fingerprint or DNA pattern. Old van, plenty of passengers. Two dogs, a parakeet feather and mouse crap down in the floor carpet. The van had four owners before it was stolen from a repair shop. But the repair shop didn't even notice it was gone because it was fixed, left and never paid for. It collected dust out in the yard for two months. We fired down hard on all the people who owned it, all the people who knew the people who owned it, all the people at the shop, you name it."

  Joshua Weinstein perused his beer, and forced another sip.

  "And?"

  "Something gave. I'll get back to that when I need to. Chronology isn't important here. Questions, so far?"

  "Why Susan Baum?"

  "Left-wing. A Jew. A woman. A world-class afflicter of the comfortable. A brilliant afflicter. She continues to offend a lot of people, right there on the front page of the Orange County Journal, three days a week. Businessmen, Republicans, old-fashioned patriots, churches, hunters, smokers, meat-eaters, drinkers, straights, men, all-boys' Little League teams and boy scouts without gay troop leaders. You know the litany. By some standards, she's the revolutionary. She's also an American citizen exercising her constitutional right to free speech. They tried to kill her for it, and they said as much when they engraved those casings for us."

  At this, John Menden looked down at his beer glass and tapped its bottom against the table. "You're sure they weren't after the assistant—Ms. . . uh . . . Harris?"

  "We worked that possibility," said Weinstein. "And it yielded nothing."

  In the moment of silence that followed, even Weinstein seemed to lose his focus. Dumars saw something remote pass across his expression. The memory of Rebecca, she understood, his fiancee, gliding over his mind as quietly as a cloud across the sun. John Menden's face looked mournful, too.

  It was Menden who broke the meditation. "Have you had any contact from the shooters? Anyone making a claim to it—a note or a call—anything?"

  Weinstein's attention snapped back to the present. "Eighty-six letters, twelve postcards and a hundred and fourteen calls. They surprised me. I knew Orange County was conservative, but I didn't know there was that much hatred, just under the surface. Hatred and fear. Exactly one letter seemed credible to us, the rest were unconnected—we're pretty sure. We've followed up most of them as best we can—most of them aren't signed. The one we take seriously is from some people calling themselves 'The Freedom Ring.' It was computer-generated, on a nice sheet of twenty-five percent cotton bond paper. Here's a photocopy."

  Weinstein removed a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. John Menden downed the fresh shot, then pushed his beer and shot glasses out of the way. He flattened the paper against the table.

  Rebecca was a mistake and we are sorry. Baum is the tumor we tried to remove.

  What happened to Miss Harris can happen to anyone who seeks to abridge our rights.

  We will not have the foundations of America torn down by people who prosper under our system, only to disrespect it.

  —The Freedom Ring

  Menden handed the sheet back to Joshua, who folded it into his coat pocket. "Well, Mr. Weinstein, do you have a suspect, or don't you?"

  "We do."

  Weinstein looked at Sharon Dumars as he said this, and registered with some satisfaction the astonishment on her face. She ingested the news like a bad taste, then shook back her dark wavy hair with a toss of her head and lifted the beer glass to her mouth with extreme knowingness. She is learning, he thought, but right now her galvanics would send a polygraph into fits.

  "But I can't know who it is," said Menden.

  Weinstein looked at John, then centered his beer glass before

  him.

  "No," he said. "You can't know that. . . yet."

  Menden shrugged and sat back. "Then why are you here?"

  "I'm here, Mr. Menden, because you want to listen to me."

  Menden raised his eyebrows in mock exasperation, then let them down again. "Why do I want to listen to you? With this whole world full of people with their stories to tell and their axes to grind, why do I need to hear yours?"

  His tone of voice and his eyes were so placid now that Sharon Dumars couldn't tell if Menden was cunning, innocent, or possibly, just plain stupid. The alcohol seemed to fortify his mask.

  "Because you were in love with Rebecca, you smug sonofabitch."

  Sharon Dumars emitted a tiny breath, then coughed to cover it. She couldn't take her eyes off of Weinstein. His ears—those wonderful Ichabod Crane ears of his—were a molten red now. The poor man was as tumultuous inside as a volcano. And his thirsty dark eyes fixed onto John's face and didn't let go. They seemed to be trying to locate something almost invisibly small. Yet Menden returned the long assessment with a gaze of utter calm. Weinstein was the active, Menden the passive; Weinstein the river, and Menden the rock against which it raged.

  "I," Josh continued, "was engaged to her, as you read in the papers. And while I was, you were courting her at the Journal offices, where you both worked. You talked to her, you lunched with her, and later, you entertained her in your home on Sun Valley Drive in Laguna Canyon. You felt something for her that you believed you had never felt for a woman before. You did love her, didn't you? I don't see how you couldn't. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my whole life. It was easier than breathing. I'm not wrong, am I?"

  When Dumars managed to look across to John Menden, his expression had not changed. She looked hard at him, but for all her training and perspicacity, for all of the reverberating context that she now understood, she could not read any reaction at all. It was almost unbelievable. Was he a sociopath? A psychotic? Was Joshua quite simply wrong?

  "Don't answer," said Weinstein. "What you answer doesn't matter to me, because I know what happened and I know the truth. The truth, Mr. John Menden, is that Rebecca was in love with you, too. Surprised? Then certainly it's a pleasant surprise. Remember the picture they ran, of Rebecca in the rain by the planter? Of course you do. You were in it, though you weren't recognizable. Didn't you wonder why her left hand was naked, why the ring she'd worn for eight months was suddenly gone? I'll tell you. She took it off that morning and gave it back to me. She said she couldn't, there was someone else. She cried. She didn't just cry, she raged. She stormed. That night, the night after she died, I went to her apartment and found two letters she'd written. Here's yours."

  Weinstein produced a smallish envelope, pink with a faint floral pattern, and set it on the table. It was sealed. On top of the envelope, he set something small that shined warmly even in the dim light of Olie's Saloon.

  Joshua Weinstein's voice had taken on a profound bitterness. "Take the ring, too. Touch it. Smell it. Think of the perfect finger that used to wear it. Think of the times you spent together. Return it to me when you're finished. It's mine. It cost me a lot, and I'm not talking about money."

  Again, Dumars's attention went to Menden. He looked for a long moment at the envelope and ring. He blinked twice, glanced at his empty shot glass, then lifted his eyes to Joshua Weinstein. They were just a fraction brighter than before.

  Around the edges showed a moisture that had not been there just a second or two ago. And his ruddy face was even darker now, more deeply lined around the mouth and eyes. There it is, she thought, his confession!

  Then, Josh stood. "Rebecca loved you," he said. "They shot out her heart and she died alone in a fucking parking lot in the rain. That's why you want to listen to me. Thanks for your time."

  He tossed a few bills on the table and was already through the saloon door by the time Dumars slung her purse over her shoulder, took one look into the pained gray eyes of John Menden, and followed Weinstein out.

  CHAPTER 4

  In the fall of 1971, John's father and mother bought an airplane.
John was nine and he sat with his parents in the Martin Aviation office at Orange County Airport while his father signed the papers. The salesman was a slender, tanned, soft-spoken gentleman who John felt was welcoming his father and mother, even himself, to an elite club of aviators. The office had pictures of the salesman in various airplanes, some featuring a celebrity with him. From outside, the roar of passenger jets rattled the picture frames against the wall, and the buzzing tenors of the private planes cut through the air as they took off and landed. The salesman gave John a styrofoam glider with a weighted nose and short, sharp futuristic wings, which sat on his lap as he listened.

  John understood that it was a small plane, a rather old one, but in superb condition and reasonably priced—the perfect starter craft for a middle-aged aerospace engineer bitten by the fly bug early in life and now able to assume the debt of curing what some people called "the disease."

  "The only good disease a man can get," said the salesman, glancing at John's mother. "Or a woman. This little craft will open up a world to you that you only suspected was there. Every minute in the air is like dreaming for an hour."

  "Well put," agreed his father, rapidly signing away at the purchase agreement. "I wonder if we could dream our way into another six months of service?"

  "I'll ask Herb, Mr. Menden."

  "Appreciated, Lew."

  His mother just laughed in the way that John had come to understand meant that she was humoring someone. In private moments, she had confided to John that her husband needed the airplane far worse than she did. John liked it when she laughed, the way her big teeth suddenly appeared and her rather stern face brightened up like the sun. His father was handsome, tall and exuded a majestic ego made charming by his cheerful good manners. Men always deferred to him, and John's schoolmates instinctively feared him. John liked the way his father and mother looked together.

  He stood in the shade of the Martin building and watched his father taxi to the runway. The little Piper was painted bright yellow with red trim, and John's mother had opted for a tastefully theatrical costume—red silk scarf, aviator shades and a leather bomber's jacket—in which to make their maiden, craft-owning flight. John wondered why they couldn't have gotten a three-seater instead of a two, but he was used to the fact that his parents admitted him into their presence as a kind of formal offering. It was a warm formality, and John often sensed love in it. But it was never the kind of thing you just barged into.

  His mother waved after she settled into the cockpit, and Lew helped them latch down. The propellor was a yellow, red-tipped blur. Accelerating down the runway, the little Piper emitted a determined, rising moan. It finally wobbled off the ground, looking to John as if it was lifting all the weight of the world.

  For the hour they were gone, John threw his glider out on the tarmac, wondering if with just the right conditions it could rise high, ease into the slipstream of the Piper, and follow it wherever it might go. He decided the idea was dumb. It was hard enough just to get the foam ailerons to stay adjusted from one flight to the next.

  So he sat on a bench and waited for the plane to return. He saw it when it was just a bright speck in the western sky, tilting its way down. After it landed he positioned himself on the tarmac and waved it in with the curt, martial motions of the ground-crews he much admired. His father smiled at him through the little side window, radio set still clamped to his head. The Piper rolled to a stop.

  His mother climbed out, helped by Lew, and gave John a hug. Her face was warm against his and the silk scarf puffedlightly against his cheek. She smelled as always like her perfume—Chanel No. 5—and the leather of her jacket. She stood back as Lew helped John into the cockpit, where his father was assiduously making flight notes in a small book. His father extended his hand and John shook it.

  "Off we go, son."

  "Into the wild blue yonder."

  "Get that shoulder strap nice and tight. Don't want my copilot falling out."

  The radio burped non-stop static which his father, amazingly, seemed to understand.

  Five minutes later they were lifting up into the sky. John was surprised how the airplane moved not only up and down and went left and right, but kind of twisted, too, as if pivoting on its belly. The engine worked hard, he thought, and the view was not as good as it could be because the windows were a little high up.

  Looking down on Orange County, John noted that all of the tracts and lots and groves seemed a lot more organized than they did from the ground. From above, they were all part of a grand design. He saw a kidney-shaped swimming pool and wondered if you jumped and managed to land in the deep end of the pool— feet first, body stiff, arms to the side—would you live or not.

  His father guided the plane out over the Pacific. John was sure that if you jumped and did all the right things you could land in that and live. He looked down and saw the two jetties at Balboa, and the Wedge, where he had spent hours watching the bodysurfers ride the neck-snapping waves that build and lurch off the jetty rocks.

  For a few moments he studied nothing but his father's forearms—one of John's favorite parts—and admired once again the stout arm emerging from the rolled-up shirt sleeve, the abundant hair that grew all the way down to where the wrist began, then reappeared behind the first knuckle of each of his father's fingers. Did it grow under the skin for a ways? He watched the wrist tendons flex when his father adjusted their course back around to the east. He casually ran a hand over his own wrist, assessing the wispy golden fuzz.

  "What do you think, Johnny?"

  "It's fine. Would you live if you landed in one of those swimming pools, but feet first and stayed real stiff?"

  "I wouldn't want to try."

  "The wind would blow you onto a roof or something, probably."

  "Probably. Look down on that county, son. It's yours. That's a nice thought, isn't it?"

  "It's not really mine, dad."

  "No. It is. It belongs to whoever puts down his roots there. Your mother and I have. You will. When you look down on it from up here, you see that it's not really such a big place at all. It's like a back yard. It's yours to play in and live on and take care of. Look at that ocean. Look at the mountains. It's a good place, John—you're lucky to grow up here."

  "I'll bet you could live if you landed in the ocean."

  "Maybe you could. Just maybe."

  John sat back, felt the drone of the engine and looked out at the sky. He listened to his father talking with ground control on the radio. He felt good being up here with his father, sitting beside him, a part of his world. A father was someone who controls things, he thought: a plane, a county, the sky.

  John looked down at his thin dark legs, his feet, his shorts. Then he looked at his dad. He saw all the changes he would have to go through to become like his father, but he couldn't imagine them taking place soon enough. Everything grew so slowly, just a few inches a year. He tried to imagine himself as big as his father, with all the hair and the rough chin and the way air opens up easier around you when you're bigger. For a while he pretended he was his father's age, his father's brother, in fact. He relaxed into the seat with one knee lifted and his arm draped casually over that knee.

  "Yeah," he said. "This county is mine."

  "Take your foot off the seat, John."

  On the way back to the airport, John convinced himself that they were going to land for just a few minutes to pick up his mother, then the three of them would fly away together for a long vacation in a dangerous place, but a place that had baseball. He loved this reverie and it was believable until he looked back and realized that the plane had only two small seats. He thought, that was really dumb of dad to get a plane that doesn't have enough room for all of us. And he wondered if maybe his father did it on purpose.

  CHAPTER 5

  Two days after the meeting in Olie's, Weinstein and Dumars were waiting for John outside his trailer when he got home. It was just after six, and the generous September daylight bloomed from a
red sun in a blue sky.

  John saw the helicopter resting on a flat piece of desert not far from the trailer, heat waves wavering up from the engine compartment.

  The two agents, dressed in suits, stood in the shade of the trailer awning, trying to be comfortable and inconspicuous here at the High Desert Rod &c Gun Club, which they certainly were not. John glanced up the dirt road toward the club house, where the property caretaker, Tim, was sweeping off the steps as an excuse to look down on the visitors and their gleaming chopper.

  "The secret agents," he said with a small smile.

  "The city editor," said Weinstein without one.

  Boomer smelled shoes as John unstacked three plastic lawn chairs he'd bought to entertain guests, but never used. Bonnie watched from beneath the trailer, with black Belle already asleep beside her. John dusted off the seats with his hand, and offered them to Weinstein and Dumars. He opened up the trailer windows and returned to the deck with beers.