Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  He’d scrawled filth on the walls with shoe polish, scattered clothing across the floors, and had even taken the time to write balloon captions on one high school photo of me and a girl named Pamela. The balloon over my head said, “Watch out for me, babe, I steal from my friends!” The balloon over hers said, “Such a tiny dick.”

  It was eight when I started cleaning. By ten-thirty I had the bedroom pretty much put back in place, though it would need a new carpet, dresser, and mattress. I found two sheets he’d neglected to slash and put them through Mrs. Macklin’s washing machine; he’d cut the cord on mine. In fact, he’d cut the cord on every electrical appliance in the house. Coming back from doing my laundry, I found Sonja Pederson’s official SPD business card stuck in the back door. Considering how each had evolved, it was hard to explain why our few brief meetings had endeared Sonja Pederson to me, but they had. Then in one of those strange coincidences you don’t think can be real even as it’s happening, there was a knock at the front door. “You decent?”

  Sonja Pederson stepped through the doorway. “This is bad. Somebody spent a lot of time here.”

  “Mrs. Macklin said she was only gone an hour, but I figure they were in here all afternoon, saw her leave, and then went over there.”

  “That’s how we figured it, too. I’m sorry to barge in on you. I recognized the address when it came over the radio. The neighbor said you were out of town. If you don’t mind, I thought I’d give you a hand.”

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  “Really?”

  “You are alone here, aren’t you?”

  “I’m alone.”

  “Your neighbor seems to think . . . well, she’s under the impression this might have been done by one of the scores of older women you have wild orgies with at all hours of the day and night.”

  “You hate me, don’t you?”

  “Because of Iola? Don’t be absurd. I never blamed you. Men are helpless when a woman wants something from them.”

  “Your stepmother ever do anything like this?”

  “Once she beat on a guy’s car with a tennis racket. Did quite a bit of damage, actually.”

  “What happened?”

  “My father took care of it. Then he took Iola to Hawaii to patch things up. That’s their routine. He makes her mad. She goes off with a guy. He scares the guy away. Then they patch things up.”

  “Why do they stay together?”

  “I don’t know why he stays. I assume she stays because he’ll have money when Grandpa passes on.”

  “So you came because you think she did this?”

  “She was at work. I checked. I came because I want to help. If you’ll let me.”

  “I’ll let you if you don’t put me in any thumb locks and try not to kick me in the nuts.”

  She laughed.

  She picked up a clock that had been stepped on until its innards were herniating out the sides. “So, where are we? What do you want me to do first?”

  She was wearing her uniform, shirt, badge, gun belt, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a bulletproof vest underneath. When I told her she could use the bedroom to change, she went in and removed her vest, rebuttoning her shirt and strapping her gun back on.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  We worked together for half an hour. Little was said. At eleven-twenty 230

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  a middle-aged African man showed up at the front door with a box of pizza.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Sonja said.

  “At least let me pay.”

  When he’d gone, she carried the cardboard box to what was left of the sofa and said, “I ordered the biggest one. I didn’t know how hungry you might be.”

  I wasn’t hungry at all, but I sat next to her anyway. She said, “When I was twelve my father took me to Japan on a business trip. The young people all wore these goofy T-shirts with English writing on them, only none of them made any sense. They said things like

  ‘All my life is a lovers.’ Or ‘Let’s not throw; don’t throw litters the way.’

  Every time I have pizza I think of one that said, ‘We die mango pizza for.’ ”

  She laughed. “None of them made sense.”

  “Made them sense of none.”

  She laughed again, and while I couldn’t laugh along with her, I liked it that she was trying to cheer me up by laughing at my anemic joke. Like a pair of hoboes at the city dump, we camped on the foam bleeding out the cushions and arms of my sofa. At least I felt like a hobo. With her uniform shirt and gun, she still looked very much like a Seattle cop, albeit a sexy Seattle cop.

  36. GUM APPEARS TO BE A SIMPLETON

  W LIKE ALL HUMANS, my psyche required intimacy—not mere physical intimacy, but intimacy in the realms emotional, spiritual, and moral. For me, right now, moral most of all, because I was floundering along the margins of corruption without a compass. Although I desperately wanted to talk to somebody about my problems, the particulars kept me from it. I didn’t know how to discuss my current situation without confessing to complicity, forced or otherwise, in a series of odious crimes.

  I’d been about as close to obtaining emotional sustenance from Iola as a dog walking across a college campus was to obtaining a bachelor’s degree. My time with Iola had provided nothing but short bruising periods of athletic sexual congress followed by long sessions of her blathering, which included unfounded and plain wrongheaded opinions on world politics as well as not-so-veiled references to her promiscuous sexual history, followed by a half hour or so of walking around the house in the nude while she commented freely on my lack of sophistication, and then, more often than not, a second session of sex, generally angrier, more vigorous, and more resigned than the first. While these assignations had slaked my lust, they’d left me feeling emptier and more alone than I’d ever felt, like a man on a raft drinking seawater, which filled your stomach but left you thirstier than when you started. Sadly, my debauched enterprises with her stepmother had squelched any chance of romance with Sonja. I knew that. Yet it was closing in on midnight, and here she was in my house, just her and me. I had a fleeting thought that maybe she was as batty as her stepmother and that she was the one who’d trashed my house, but I dismissed it. Despite my yearning for companionship, I did not feel completely 232

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  comfortable about her motives. First, there was the possibility that she was interested in me solely because her stepmother had been interested, and that Iola, Sonja, and myself were playing out some demented Olympian psycho-sexual family drama, that I was cannon fodder in a twisted scheme I would never fully comprehend. Even though I had no facts to support such a belief, it dogged me.

  As we sat side by side on the sofa and gobbled pizza, another more likely and equally jaded vision began coursing through my brain. Sonja goes into her boss’s office, and there are FBI agents huddled around a pile of notes and fact sheets. Sizing her up, they review her brief record with the SPD and ask her where she sees herself in ten years. She admits she has ambitions. They invite her to sit down. They ask if she knows a man named Gum. She admits she does. They ask if she can get close to Gum, if she believes she might coax him into saying things he would never admit in public. She says Gum appears to be a simpleton and she believes conning him might be possible. They ask if she is willing to wear a wire. The whole idea of Sonja remaining in uniform as she bumped around my place made more sense when fitted into this whacked-out scenario. What a coup it would be in court when she testified that I’d confessed while she was in uniform—badge, gun belt, and nightstick in place. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I ate three slices of pizza, feeling my stomach grow tight, a pleasant and lusty feeling, one I didn’t have often, as I watched my diet. I set my plate aside and straightened my legs, leaning back on the sofa. Sonja did the same, our legs splayed out like a couple of drunks in front of a football game. “Too bad about all this,”r />
  she said.

  “He got everything I own except that car out there.”

  “Renter’s insurance?”

  “Thanks for the tip. I’ll sign up tomorrow.”

  “Sorry. You have any idea who might have done this?”

  “I know exactly who did it.”

  She sat upright, pulled out a small notebook and a pen, then paused.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you.”

  “No.”

  The drapes were nailed up and closed now, the front door locked, the

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  only light in the room emanating from a bare bulb I’d screwed into a lamp I’d rewired. The stark light cut across Sonja’s face, accentuating her one dimple. Faintly, I could smell perfume mixing with the aroma from the pizza. “Let’s get this cleaned up, then,” she said. “At least so you can have somewhere to sleep.”

  As we started to get off the sofa, our heads moved closer, and in one of those split-second decisions that come back to haunt you when they go wrong but seem like utter wizardry when you think of them, I clasped her shoulders and kissed her. I could tell she wasn’t surprised. She kissed me back, and despite my best intentions, all the purity of heart I’d been storing up for her vanished in a heartbeat as I began comparing her lips and body to her stepmother’s. Her stepmother had been rapacious, greedy, all tongue, a pair of huge, spongy knockers thrusting against me, greedy hands diving for my belt buckle, while Sonja may as well have been a high-schooler on her first date.

  When we parted I wanted to swim in the blue of her eyes. I wanted to tell her that, too, but it would have sounded as if I’d lifted it from the Italian movie I’d heard it in, the one my mom and I watched our last night in Winthrop.

  We went back to work, and from time to time she showed up in the doorway of the bedroom to show me a damaged utensil and ask if I wanted to keep it or pitch it. Unable to afford replacements immediately, I kept once-round pots now squashed into oblongs, forks with the tines bent, and knives doubled over like old men walking in the wind. I would re-form them later.

  It was almost two when I went into the kitchen and found her on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor with a wet rag. There had been no sound in the house, no music, just the euphony of our work: the tinkling and clinking of silverware, the splashing of water in the sinks, the scuffling vibrato as I dragged broken furniture out of the house. Except for a garbage bag full of broken dishes and a broken cabinet door, the kitchen looked almost new. I was bowled over by how much she’d accomplished.

  “I’m going to have to stop for tonight,” I said. She sat up on her heels. She’d taken off her gun belt and uniform shirt. Underneath she wore an almond-colored camisole. “You look beat.”

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  “I am.”

  She got up and walked with me into the living room, where we sat heavily on the ravaged couch in the approximate positions we’d taken up earlier. With the bare lightbulb behind her, she looked incredibly graceful, her neck long and swanlike.

  “Do you have to work in the morning?” I asked.

  “Not till noon.”

  She leaned toward me. “Maybe I should leave,” she said. I let her statement hang in the air, savoring the ambiguity. She hadn’t said, “I need to get out of here.” Nor had she said, “I’m going home now,”

  or “I can’t stay a minute longer.” She had said, “Maybe I should leave.”

  Maybe. I felt like a kid at Disneyland at the end of the day, worn to a frazzle and receiving an implied offer of one more ride. Maybe we still have time for Magic Mountain.

  Without thinking, I leaned into her and we kissed for so long I lost track of time, our bodies molded against each other. And then she leaned back and began pushing up her camisole, and I was on top of her and she was kicking her shoes off and we were against each other, our bodies hot from the work and the electricity that had been humming between us all night.

  It didn’t take long to figure out nothing was going to happen. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I can’t do this. Not tonight.”

  “I don’t mind that you and Iola . . . it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t.”

  “It’s not that.”

  It was that, but there was more, of course. There was the possibility I would turn myself in tomorrow, as I’d been contemplating all week, that I would be in a cell by tomorrow night. I wasn’t in a position to give Sonja more than one night, and I didn’t want to cheat her.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve been burned by guys before. I’ve had guys tell me I was too skinny. My nose was too big. I was too aggressive. If you want to head all that off at the pass, that’s fine with me.” She started to get up.

  “No. You don’t understand. I like you. I think I like you more than any woman I’ve ever . . . I really do. I just . . . this doesn’t have anything to do

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  with you. I know this sounds strange, but would you stay here tonight?

  Nothing else. Just stay with me?”

  “Sure.”

  Five minutes later she crawled between the sheets I’d laundered next door and slid into my arms, her limbs cool, her stomach tight, her nose cold. Too tired to bother with a T-shirt, I wore only boxer shorts. Virtually all of my clothing had been shredded, so all I had left was what I had brought back from Winthrop and my uniforms in my locker at work. Sonja gave me a tender kiss and settled in against me, her head under my chin. She giggled and said something, but I missed it, because I was already half asleep and kidnapped by a dream. It was one of those nights when the moon could crash into the earth and it wouldn’t wake me up. As I slept I was aware of a sense of well-being I hadn’t enjoyed in weeks. At one point I shifted positions and felt a warm, lithe, half-naked body curl up against my backside, Sonja’s hot breath on my bare shoulder.

  Firefighters need to wake up quickly, but there are times when it is better for lovers to wake up slowly, and that is how it happened with us. I had a sense we were moving, that I was tangled in a web of limbs, and that I was embracing a naked woman—hard of tissue and muscle mass, leaner than any woman I’d ever pressed up against. I didn’t fully awaken until I heard the slap of our bodies and realized she was as eager and libidinous as her stepmother.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I just had a thought.”

  “Don’t think.” She kissed me, and we began picking up the tempo, as she urged me on with her hands on my back. The bed was squeaking, and I wanted to stop because it was the same squeaking I’d heard all those weeks with her stepmother. I tried to put it out of my mind, but the more I tried the more it intruded, until I was pumping on both of them at once, this sinewy, athletic cop and her luxurious, big-titted stepmother, the two of them fused in my mind. And the more confounded I got, the more excited I became, until it was as if I were two people engaged in two sex acts at once.

  After we were both spent and satisfied, I lay inside the firm meat of 236

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  her thighs, my head draped over her left shoulder, feeling myself slowly shrink. I had a feeling she’d been thinking about her stepmother, as had I, thinking what a frightfully twisted act we were engaged in.

  “What time do you have to leave for work?” she whispered.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “I don’t want you to. But what time?”

  Reaching out, I located my watch on the floor beside the bed. “In just under an hour. I’ll shower at work.” When she pulled me back onto her, I added, “If I tell you something, can you keep it confidential?”

  “You’re going to tell me who broke in and why?”

  “Yes, but it has to stay between you and me. You have to swear.”

  “Have you thought about an attorney?”

  “What I would like,” I said, deadly serious, “is to be able to
talk to you freely and for you to keep my confidence.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  It was hard to know which was more foolhardy, her pledge or my confession.

  37. HE WAS RIDING ME LIKE A MULE

  W “IF A FRIEND of yours steals something and gives it to you to hold, have you committed a crime? I mean, if you were holding it with the intent of giving it back to the original owner? If that was your intention all along?”

  “You knew it was stolen?”

  “Yes.”

  “This friend broke in? You had something he stole, and he came look ing for it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to tell me his name?”

  “I don’t want you going after him.”

  “Not unless you give the word.”

  “Theodore Tronstad. Until this, I didn’t think he was a bad guy, really.”

  “He’s the one you hit with the hose the other day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you give it back to him? Whatever he stole?”

  “It’s not his.”

  “Then give it to the rightful owner.”

  “That’s where it gets complicated. The night my lieutenant died, Tronstad filmed me and the lieutenant. He has a video clip of us in the water that makes it look as if it was my fault Sears drowned—as if I pushed him under on purpose.”

  I could feel her tense up in my arms the way a cat tenses up when it knows you’re about to throw it out of bed. A couple of firefighters engaged in theft and personal squabbles was one thing, but a fire-ground death was something else.

  “So he doctored the tape?”

  “No. I did push him under. Sears didn’t know how to swim and he 238