by Dean Ing
Gary returned to Bakersfield before making his San Diego call to a group supervisor he knew slightly. It was good to hear he was ready for work again, said the GS; it wasn't every day that the DEA fell into cases that had remained open so long at Langley. And with both a skull from that hole and the mandible Gary had brought up, they had a good shot at a positive identification on those skeletal remains. Again, that sudden surge of emotion that almost blocked Gary's voice for a moment. But a different feeling this time: elation, even gooseflesh on his neck. He wondered if that whack on his head had scrambled his brains for him, after all.
Gary returned to Swede Halvorsen's place more bemused than ever. "So it's obvious that my RAC is straight-arrow, Swede," he said in summation to the old man over a beer. "I should'a known that - I feel like a dumb shit - and I'm flying back to Fresno tomorrow. They've taken two bodies out of the mine shaft."
Halvorsen sprinkled a smidgen of salt into his beer and Gary shuddered, having tried salted beer exactly once. Halvorsen sipped and smacked his lips. "They ID either one?"
"I think so. Uh, this is getting to a point where I'm not sure how much I should say to you," he said.
"Suit yourself," said Swede. "But if you ever wanta consider this a safe house again, and if you haven't already told 'em about me, you'll be smart to keep me and this place out of the loop. Janelle, too. Especially Nell," he went on. "You have any problem with that?"
"No problem." But he could see that Swede was not pleased to be treated as an outsider, now that a few partial answers were being teased from the evidence. "Okay, look, I'm just gonna review what I know, talk to my beer here, and if some old retired fart from LAPD happens to overhear me, I can't help it." They touched beer cans together, and Gary began his brief recitation.
When he had finished: "You don't mean the air base," Swede prompted. "Like in Langley, with the wind tunnels. You mean Langley, like in CIA."
Gary nodded. "Now, as it happens, I've liaised with a few of their guys, not much more than street contacts, but shit, often as not they play games against each other! You ever hear about the Howard Marks case?" The old man shook his head and threw him an interested glance. "Brit kingpin in the hashish trade; we called him Marco Polo. The sonofabitch was staying a step ahead of us for years 'cause a couple of his informants were in our loop. Fuckers had CIA connections. Anyhow, Marks finally went inside for a few years. Now I figure one of those bodies in that hole must be drug connected - not with Marks, of course, but I'm told it's closing an old Company file. Or reopening it - hell, I don't know," he shrugged. "When I find out, I'll most likely not want to pass it along."
"Don't suppose you will," Halvorsen agreed.
"It's for your own safety," Gary burst out.
"Put a lid on it, Gary. I'm satisfied," the old fellow insisted.
Gary could not know how far his guess had strayed from the facts. Sheepishly, he broached another worry to the old man; this emotional roller coaster that he found so unsettling. "It's worse than butterflies before the USC game, Swede! And very different, not like anything I've felt before. Shit. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
After a brief pause, a judicious nod. "Well, you never got took down like that before. I prob'ly wouldn't understand, if I hadn't lucked out once or twice from getting myself iced - and by pure dumb-assed luck, same as you." Almost whispering now: "It's a confidence problem." And a wry smile, followed by, "I'm not surprised that's a first, for you."
"Oh, horseshit! Me? Listen, DEA doesn't run psych profiles on candidates for nothing. The way Visconti tells it, an agent's problem is thinking he's such hot stuff the rules don't apply - which is why some agents get strung out on drugs or run games on the agency."
"But not you?"
Disgustedly: "Swede, you think I'm that stupid?"
"Not stupid at all. That's exactly why you're startin' to realize you're beatable, under the right circumstances. Problem you've got, kid, is that you realize just how lucky you were. All that macho 'I'm too good to take a fall young buck confidence has been squeezed plumb out of your ass with an enema called
'reality.' It's no fun, Gary. It's hell till you get comfortable with the idea that you got set up, just like anybody else, and the rest of your life will be borrowed time."
For a long moment, Gary sat and blinked and thought about it, searching for a denial, finding none that would ring true. At last: "Yeaaaah, but meanwhile I'm not sure I'll be worth a damn as an agent, the way - "
"Wait." Swede held his hand up to halt these doubts. "I've been paying attention, kid, and it looks to me like you can't wait for payback time. Hell, you even went back to that hole in the ground. Some guys wouldn't have gone back."
"You think I'm looking for my confidence."
Swede Halvorsen grinned at him. "I think you're looking for that old overconfidence, but good sense will keep you from finding it. I think you'll be a better cop for it. Best you can do is give it a few weeks and see."
Not completely convinced, Gary finished his beer in silence. It wasn't easy to admit your subconscious had been probing your virtues and, as Jan put it, scrubbing that big "S" off your chest. He found his spirits rising later as he ironed his trousers near the kitchen pass-through.
"God, that's an awful job you're doing," Swede commented, watching from a kitchen stool.
"You could do better?"
"Blindfolded," said Swede, "but you need the practice. My expert powers of deduction tell me I won't have to cook for you tonight." A sheepish grin from Gary validated his guess. "And I guess it's none of my business where you're going."
Gary put down the iron and placed both palms flat on the ironing board, regarding his friend with a composite of amusement and exasperation. "Mr. Halvorsen, sir, I'd like your permission to keep a dinner date tonight with your thirty-something granddaughter, since we both know she has no mind of her own. I'll make sure she drives carefully, and I believe she has the hots - wups, ''scuse me, a desire, to see a picture called Sunset Boulevard, and if it's not rated PG, maybe I can talk her out of it. And I promise to have her home by - oh, September or so. Don't wait up."
Swede Halvorsen studied his fingernails, blushing. "Aw, go fuck yourself," he muttered.
Gary could not resist it: "You wish!"
Swede needed two beats to get the implication. "That's enough, goddammit," he said, scandalized. "I can remember when I bounced her on my knee."
"Yeah, and God help anybody else who'd like to, three decades later. Right?" Swede looked away, his ears glowing, and Gary relented. "I'm sorry. I know how you feel, Swede. She's had it rough enough; I intend to let her work things out in good time, and I'll be gone tomorrow. But I'll be back if she wants me around. I thought that was agreeable to you."
"It is." Bursting out: "Shit fire and save matches, Gary, she's my responsibility!"
Gary stood on one leg, pulling on his trousers. "No she's not, Swede. That's what I'm trying to get across. You're a great cop, the best I've ever seen, but Jan doesn't want you to be her cop. Be her friend.
She may need help; hell, so did I, and I asked for it, including the better part of two hundred bucks you loaned me and some insights I'm still trying to digest. Jan just needed another kind of help. That's what friends are for, isn't it?"
Now, watching Gary zip up, the old man began to chuckle. "Somebody told me once, 'A friend who's willing to be understood is a joy, but a friend who demands understanding is a royal pain in the ass.' Was he ever right!"
"So which one am I?"
"Both. Nellie, too, and you damn well know it," Swede growled.
"Yeah, I do." And with two strides, Gary reached the old man, gave him the briefest of one-armed hugs. "Thanks - I think."
That was when Jan rang the doorbell. She brought a faint scent of orange blossoms in with her and left a light smudge of lipstick on the old man's cheek before doing a comic double take at the sight of Gary.
"Wow," she said, "I must rate, guys."
Gary took
in the tan wedgies, suede skirt, and short-sleeved yellow blouse that complemented her tan without following her contours too obviously, and allowed as how she rated, all right.
"He's been ironing," Swede said, as if conferring a vast secret.
"I smelled it," she replied, glancing at his clothing. "I always say, if you can't iron the wrinkles out, iron them in permanently. Grunge chic."
"I tried," Gary protested helplessly.
"And I'm impressed. Hey, if we want to make the movie, we'd better be going." Gary was easing his bad arm into his jacket when she called back to the old man who was still sitting, a bit morosely, on his stool. "Don't wait up, Ampa." And she wondered aloud why the two men laughed in unison.
Gary would not tell her. "Tag line to a joke," he said, and changed the subject. He was now satisfied, he said, that he could fly back to Fresno the following morning. It would be good to be back in harness, drive his own car out of the DEA lot behind the office, have a change of clothes, beeper on his belt, take the initiative again. Beeper equals backup equals more confidence. I hate to admit it, but Swede had a point, he told himself.
Jan tried to be happy for him and his announcement, but it didn't play very well. Gary was perversely happy for that; she might even miss him a little. They lingered over their dinner at a steakhouse near Highway 99 with a curiously mutual shyness, like teenagers on a blind date, with here a tentative smile at nothing, there an accidental touch across the table. He wondered what she would do if, after all this genderless buddy-buddy of the past week, he tried to put a move on her. She's definitely laughing too much at my jokes, he thought; sending the wounded doughboy back to the front with fond memories, maybe even a good-night kiss. But hell, at least now they shared a relationship, of sorts. A definite improvement over the past.
She had him laughing, too, over dessert. She was full, she said, as he ordered cherry pie. "But I'll take a bite when you aren't looking." Her voice shifted as the waitress moved away, to a faint, delicately tongue-tied accent, unmistakably a Hindu intellectual. "Pie. I love pie, I am obsessed with pie. I have meditated on pi ever since I learned that pi was a transcendental number." When he looked up, startled at her bewildering turn of whimsy, she went on. "I dialed three-point-one-four-one-six, but God hung up on me. I was in rapture; everyone is hung up on God, but God's hung up on me," she finished, as Gary rocked with silent mirth.
"Where the hell did you get that?" he asked finally.
She looked down, with a negative headshake. "You don't want to know."
Through his fading grin: "Freddie," he guessed. She nodded. "Well, he must've had his moments. That's good; weird, but, good."
"That was Freddie," she agreed, her smile working around old memories. "Or rather, it was one of a hundred Fred Penroses; you never knew which one you were dealing with. Intellectual Freddie, surly Freddie, the loving or the snarling or the plain overdosed Freddie. It was all too much, finally," she sighed.
"Too many Freds," he supplied.
Another nod, and an effort to brighten her moment. "He gave me a little aquarium once, with five little neon tetras in it. Said their names were Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, and, of course, Fred. Bright little Freddies to keep me company, he said, when he was really bad company.
"And," she went on, "one night he swallowed every damned one of them on a bet, during a party. Three months later, he was vegetating - a fugue state, they call it - in a sanitarium in Pennsylvania. He's still there, some of him anyway. Sometimes they let him call when he wants to, but he's nobody I enjoy talking to very much. The Fred I loved just got lost, I guess."
Gary's cherry pie arrived, with coffee. When they were alone again, Gary asked the obvious question, fearing the answer: "And you're still waiting for that one to come back?"
"Not really. Actually, I think the Catholic in me still is, even though I know it isn't going to happen." Her gaze toward him took on a sudden quizzical air, a buried thought exhumed. "I guess I'm waiting for hope to die, Gary. It's pretty sick, but it's still hanging in there." She blew her nose on a tissue, a glorious honker of a sound. "No, don't look at me, look out the window."
He obeyed, watching headlights spear down the highway a block away. "Wonderful. Now I've got you crying."
"Nope. I was stealing my bite of pie," she said, and giggled. And he saw that it was true and laughed aloud.
By now they knew it was too late to catch the film - "I'll have plenty of evenings to see movies," she said - and they agreed that she would drive him to his Cessna the following morning.
"Ah, how'd that old line go," she said, pursing her lips in a way that Gary found wonderfully unsettling before the real bombshell: "Shall I call you in the morning, or nudge you?"
"Good God," he said, and put down his fork. "You've sure replaced my appetite for pie."
"No more cherries for you tonight," she agreed, grinning. He didn't get it until he was paying the check.
"You realize," he said as she drove eastward, "all during the meal I felt like some pimply kid, trying to figure out how to ask you if we could spend the night together."
"How were you doing with it?"
"Didn't have a clue," he admitted, laughing. "It seems I've developed a minor problem of self-confidence lately. Even so, asking you would've been easier if, uh, if it didn't mean so much to me."
Her right hand went up, limned by passing headlights. "Please. Gary, I don't want it to mean too much. I mean, okay, affection and appreciation and all good things, besides which I have always had a thing for the way your body was put together; but I'm not ready for la grande affaire. Maybe I never will be. I was trying to explain that over dinner. But I miss making love with a man I like, and I haven't seen any other candidates recently that I'd even slow-dance with, and I - like you very much. And horny as I've been, mister, I don't think you'll be disappointed." Again, that bobby-socks giggle.
"I can't believe we're having this conversation," Gary said in awed amusement. "Reminds me of a couple of pals before a golf date, working out handicap details."
"Aren't we? If we weren't, I couldn't possibly have just, just - "
"Propositioned me for a one-night stand," he finished for her.
"That - is - out - rageous," she said, in mock indignation. "It's also disgustingly accurate, only, um, I hope you don't expect to play nine holes."
Now that they had reached this level of playful comfort with one another, each vied to top the other's innuendo until the little Datsun turned off from the arterial east of town. "Don't expect too much from my nest," she cautioned, realizing that he'd never seen it. "Thank God it's dark; you can't see how I've botched my garden."
"I'll come back and help with it - if you still want me to after, uh - "
Suddenly she was no longer playful. "Gary: whatever happens tonight, no matter how incompetently we fumble, we're friends. You can depend on that."
"So long as I don't eat your tropical fish," he said, and she laughed.
Before she doused her Datsun's lights he saw that they had pulled into a carport attached to a dowdy, medium-sized Homette mobile home, not in the usual sort of trailer park but with fifty yards separating her from another similar place. "Almost half an acre. Ampa found it and fixed it up for me," she said, indicating the carport roof. "He spent a week crawling around beneath, replacing rotted bathroom flooring and stuff.
You wouldn't believe how cheap it was."
Privately, Gary thought she might never know how cheap it wasn't because, if he knew Swede Halvorsen, the old man would have absorbed a lot of expenses himself. The front-door lock was a good one, sturdier than the flimsy door it secured; probably more of Swede's work, he thought.
She showed him the layout; living room at one end and her bedroom at the other, her living room cozy but surprisingly large adjoining the dining nook next to the kitchen which, in turn, was next to the bath, a bowl of nuts invitingly on the dinner table. The furniture was half built-ins, half Salvation Army, but it all had a nice, clean J
an smell. While she selected a tape cassette, he tossed his jacket on a shelf and used the bathroom, pausing to steal a tiny gob of Crest, using his forefinger for a toothbrush before rinsing his mouth.
When he returned, she was nodding to music, shoes kicked off, feet tucked beneath her on the couch.
"I'm really glad you got rid of that Frito Bandito mustache," she said, grinning. "Makes you look like a different person - I mean, the one I used to know." She patted the cushion next to her and, as he sat down, she leaned toward him, sniffing appreciatively. "Aww, Gary, mint flavor, for me?"
"For both of us," he said, and their first real kiss was an artless gentle thing. "Nice," he said, his lips an inch from hers. "Rhapsody on what's-his-name, isn't it?"
"A Theme of Paganini," she supplied. "A cop with culture; I like it." And this time the kiss lingered, her mouth softening, accepting his tongue joyously. They sat back then, relaxing, heads so near he could not focus on those frank eyes of hers. Their fingers entwined until she looked down in sudden concern. "I forgot your arm," she said.
"So did I," he said. "A kiss can be a great anesthetic."
"You're a pleasant surprise. For some reason, I always thought you'd come on like Tarzan of the Octopi."
"So did I. Usually I do - Jesus, how to explain it? You make me feel like a first-timer, and I don't care, and I don't even wanta think about it while I'm under anesthesia," he said.
She smiled, and anesthetized him again. Eyes closed, murmuring it: "Amazing, Gary. Have you ever noticed how, when you take up serious kissing with someone, it takes awhile to, you know, get accustomed?
Like dance moves."
"Not with you."
"Exactly. I'd never thought about it either, until now. It was just something I took for granted. But it's as if you and I had been practicing for each other."
In a near whisper: "You are really, really something," he said, and began to scale the ramparts of a kiss that soared above them, now ardent, now softly sensuous as peach skin, each sharing the other's breathing until they became dizzy with it. Now his fingers found a long-held ambition; learning the delicious convexities of her breasts. She pressed against those fingers with a faint sound that said yes, without the word.